Mimetic Shame: Fictions of the Self in Postcolonial Literature

Gillian Bright

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Gillian Bright

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2018 Abstract This study considers how shame is rendered within postcolonial literature. Moving away from trauma-centered approaches that typically read shame as “unrepresentable,” the central idea driving my analysis is that shame’s multiple significance in the “real world” can be traced through parallel literary iterations. The synthesis reached by the multiple correspondences between social, psychological, physiological, and textual domains suggests a mode of representation that I call “mimetic shame.”

I argue that literature about shame achieves mimesis on three registers, each connecting lived experiences of shame with a specific textual counterpart. The first of these registers indexes shame’s corporeal symptoms—how shame announces itself through uncomfortable physical responses. Novels frequently signify embodied symptoms via single literary devices, such as metaphors or prosodies. The second register encapsulates the historical events that prompt shame, whereas mimetic shame’s third register correlates to the social dynamics of shame, conveying the inflections of ashamed intra- and inter-subjective relationships via overarching textual elements such as narration, focalization, intertextuality, and genre. Together, these three registers archive what lies between representation and “original” experience.

After developing my theory and laying out a “typology” for my approach, I examine mimetic shame in three novels: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying,

ii and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. These works portray certain bleak characterizations of colonial and postcolonial subjectivity—the mimic, the zealot, and the scourge—but the techniques structuring these figurations also expose shame as a repressive apparatus within the colonial project. Thus, because of the dialogic nature of novelistic writing, mimesis both captures real experiences of shame and disperses new meanings about shame, inviting readers to imaginatively reframe the affective futures of postcolonial subjectivity.

Despite the urgency underscoring Frantz Fanon’s desperate appeal to all subjects to cast off the shame formed by the alienating histories of colonization, shame as a topic of serious consideration continues to evade analysis within postcolonial studies. My dissertation attempts to remedy this oversight, turning especially to Jacques Lacan’s theory of split subjectivity and

Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s argument about a vision-centered system of identification to argue about the productive interfaces between social worlds, intersubjectivity, and textuality.

iii

Acknowledgments

For the years it took to write this dissertation, I thought a lot about shame—rarely a happy obsession. Though not without exhilarating beauty, the novels I read were often bleak, reflecting trauma, oppression, and marginalization. Added to this intellectual gloom, my years as a graduate student were not always easy: I had small children, faced difficult losses, and struggled to stay ahead of poverty. Yet, looking back, I am filled with gratitude—awe, even—that I was held through these years so carefully by so many people. I have been lucky beyond measure, and I resurface from this enterprise with many people to thank. First and foremost, my thanks go to Professor Marlene Goldman. I could not have asked for a more admirable mentor; her feedback was thoughtful and generous, even as she never let me off the hook for a lazy argument or an awkward phrase. Marlene also showed limitless compassion through those moments when private life meddled with productivity. From sending chocolate boxes at the births of babies to insisting that she sleep on the tiny trundle bed in our hotel room at a conference, Marlene’s benevolence provided a measure of instruction on how to be a wonderful human that could only be matched by her guidance with my scholarship. I was equally fortunate in my committee members, Professors Uzoma Esonwanne and Ato Quayson. Their feedback on each chapter demonstrated a degree of attention to my ideas that I had not anticipated. Thank you so much, Uzo and Ato. To my delight, the additional members of my Final Oral Exam ensured that the magnitude of the event was divested of dread. Thanks to Professor Cannon Schmitt for feedback on my abstract, and wonderful questions during the exam; to Professor Neil ten Kortenaar for such astonishing engagement with my ideas, and providing me with the satisfaction of pinning down a solution that had long evaded me; to Dr. Laura Moss for travelling from UBC, writing me a generous and challenging report, and conversing with my arguments with the full weight of her expertise; and to Professor Jeff Reynolds for chairing the exam so expertly, and offering such warm congratulations at the final hour. This dissertation was supported with the assistance of two Ontario Graduate Scholarships, a SSHRC-CGS, and a University of Toronto Fellowship. I also benefitted from receiving two Department of English Travel Conference Grants. During my time at the Department of English, I received wonderful guidance from Sangeeta Panjwani, Tanuja Persaud, Gillian Northgrave, and Professors Will Robbins, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Paul Stevens, John O’Connor, Alexandra Peat, Nick Mount, Victor Li, Daniel Heath-Justice, and Alice Maurice. Thank you, as well, to Marguerite Perry for conducting me so cheerfully through the last months, and for the shrewd advice to take a banana with me to my defense. Thanks to my colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University for their support and wise- cracking advice over the last stages of dissertating, and particularly to Drs. Heather Cyr and Kelly Doyle for their sneaky gifts. At various stages of writing, I was ridiculously lucky to find friends and colleagues willing to edit drafts. For their comments and encouragement, thanks to Laurel Ryan, Esther de Bruijn, Joanne Leow, Jay Rajiva, Talia Regan Palmer, Jennifer McDermott, Julia Grandison, Aparna Halpe, Alex Peat, Kailin Wright, and Lara Okihiro. To my relatives who smiled and applauded each time they talked to me about my project, no matter the roadblocks I met: I, Dr. Gilly-Willy, am immensely grateful.

To my in-laws, Anna, Michele, Sandra, Felix, and Diego: thank you for your patience, love, and encouragement, and for never making me feel sorry for taking on such an enormous burden despite its heavy costs. To my siblings, Bronwyn and Owen, and their dear families: your love and ridiculous laughter helped me continue to wade through the muddy waters. To my incredible parents, Mary Liz and Howard Bright: thank you for brewing and stirring my passion for literature and ideas, and for supporting me through every moment— dreary and dazzling. To their parents, as well: Nana and Grampa Frank, Granny (who gave multiple modes of support), and Grampy: I love you, ha-ha. To the friends I don’t deserve, but who deeply enrich my life—Katrina and Jay Forsyth, Jonathan Service, Amy Stewart and Jay Thorburn, Nicole Stocker, Hanako Masutani, Filippo Campo and Maria Barrios, and my beloved Jiminy Cricket (Catherine Egan)—thinking of each of you, I crumple beneath the gratitude. Thanks for your shoulders (to catch my tears), laughter, wine, gift baskets, cheer-squads, advice, solidarity, and love. To my children, Lucia and Phineas, for surviving me. And so much more: for understanding, even at your age, why I had to keep doing this work, for making me want to do this work, and for growing the way you grow: wise, hilarious, and determined. From the tip of the top to the bop of the bop, I love you bigger than the biggest thing. Finally, to my Tony. This project is possible, in the end, because of how we love each other. Thank you for the place we arrived at once we got through it all.

Table of Contents

Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction: A Phenomenology of Postcolonial Literary Shame 1 Shame and Postcolonial Literature 1 The Subject of Shame 11 Mimetic Shame: The Aesthetics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature 24 Chapter 1: A Typology of Mimetic Shame 36 Mimetic Shame: Theoretical Origins 37 Conventions of Reading Shame in Literature 48 A. Shame as a Therapeutic Vehicle 53 B. Shame as an Ethical Guide 56 C. Shame as a Social Critique 57 The Dimensions of Mimetic Shame 59 Models of Reading Mimetic Shame 66 A. Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) 68 B. Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979) 72 C. J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood (1998) 77 Chapter 2: “The Face Behind the Pillar”: Shame and Narcissism in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men 88 From Shameful Origins to Narcissistic Fictions: The Mimic Men’s Contextual Register 92 Excessive Imagery and Abjection: The Mimic Men’s Symptomatic Register 105 The Ironies of Autobiographical Form: The Mimic Men’s Structural Register 117 Chapter 3: “The Screams and the Shouts and the Laughter”: Shame and Shamelessness in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying 124 Against Transcendence: Comedy, Shame, and Mourning 136 A Parade of Shame: Tragedy, Shamelessness, and Melancholia 154 Chapter 4: On Being the “Same Type”: Albert Camus and the Paradox of Immigrant Shame in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach 175 The Three Registers of Mimetic Shame in Cockroach 175 Shame and Migration in Canada 178 Aesthetic Relations: Albert Camus 183 Shame in the Works of Albert Camus 192 Rawi Hage’s Cockroach 195 The Politics of Absurdity 208 Conclusion: Writing Out Shame 211 Works Consulted 222

Introduction: A Phenomenology of Postcolonial Literary Shame

“Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.”

- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

- Jacques Lacan, Ecrits

“Racial practice is ultimately an aesthetic practice, and must be understood above all as a regime of looking.”

- Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness

Shame and Postcolonial Literature

Explaining his interest in making Africa his literary subject, Chinua Achebe recalls a conversation with a student, who “said the other boys would call him a bushman if he did such a thing” as write about harmattan rather than winter.1 “Now,” Achebe continues, “you wouldn’t have thought, would you, that there was something shameful in your weather? But apparently we do. How can this great blasphemy be purged? I think it is part of my business as a writer to teach that boy that there is nothing disgraceful about African weather, that the palm tree is a fit subject for poetry” (“Novelist” 44). Achebe’s anger against “our acceptance—for whatever reasons—of racial inferiority” (43) and his determination to support the creation and study of literature by and for Africans indicates, to a degree, two of the fundamental projects undertaken by postcolonial theory, particularly as this theory has been practiced within English literature departments. The first project, to resist dominant Western paradigms of symbolization or the

1 The conversation is recollected in Achebe’s 1965 essay “The Novelist as Teacher.”

1 2 production of meaning, has entailed the second: to investigate identity formation and the historical, cultural, and political forces that have restricted the possibilities of self-formulation, and of articulating identity and subjectivity in terms that originate in the local Nigerian’s (or

Kenyan’s or Trinidadian’s) specific frame of reference: her history, her culture, her ecosystem.

As Achebe’s comments partially anticipate, resistance and identity have indeed been the central focuses of postcolonial studies, with Achebe’s own writing enacting some of the work (and attracting some of the productive interpretative strategies) of the “regeneration that must be done” after decolonization (Achebe, “Novelist” 45).

Though it prompts such anger from Achebe, the “shamefulness” his student attached to the harmattan does not find an equivalent degree of attention in postcolonial theory. While his essay entreats African readers “to look back and try and find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us” (43), the shame to which he implicitly and explicitly refers has received almost no critical attention from postcolonial literary theorists—an oversight made more puzzling given that some of the genre’s most commemorated writers, Salman Rushdie and

J.M. Coetzee, have written novels entitled Shame and Disgrace, and that shame (along with its suspicious inverse, pride) is the affect dominating much of the work of V.S. Naipaul. The absence of shame in critical conversations about postcoloniality is all the more surprising since shame seems to be the single most forceful (and certainly most agonizing) affect expressed by

Frantz Fanon in one of the field’s founding texts, Black Skin, White Masks. There, as in Achebe’s essay, Fanon wrestles with the psychological ruptures—neuroses partnered by crises of subject formation—produced by the shame attached to “racial inferiority.” In fact, the impetus behind

Fanon’s “psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem” (10) is the analyst’s desire “to persuade [his] brother, whether black or white, to tear off with all his strength the shameful livery put together by centuries of incomprehension” (12, my emphasis).

Even as Robert J.C. Young declares a continued relevance and an ongoing urgency to the study of postcolonial literature and theory, reminding his academic readership of the goal “to locate the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach, of what remains invisible, unseen, silent, or unspoken” (21), shame as a topic of serious consideration continues to evade analysis within the postcolonial discipline. With the singular exception of Timothy Bewes’s The Event of

Postcolonial Shame (2010), the field of postcolonial literary theory has not seen a book-length publication that deals explicitly with shame.2 Whereas other writers and scholars emphasize shameful feelings associated with gender and sexual orientations, or in relation to national literatures,⁠ 3 my study is among the first to explore postcolonial shame. Even Rushdie’s Shame and Coetzee’s Disgrace have not inspired conversations that engage more broadly with philosophical or psychoanalytic discourses about shame; critics tend to consider (not inappropriately) the particular socio-political situations engendering each novel’s characterization of shame ⁠ without positioning their observations within a wider dialectic of postcoloniality.

By contrast, my readings of postcolonial literature have identified shame as a central theme and this discovery, along with the fact that shame has remained largely unexplored in postcolonial and transnational critical discourse, leads me to postulate that there is something

2 While there has only been one book-length publication on shame in postcolonial literature, a handful of journal articles deal with the issue, usually in relation to analyses of single texts. See, for instance, the chapter entitled “Insidious Humiliation, Invidious Shame” in Amal Treacher Kabesh’s Postcolonial Masculinities, as well as Rebecca Ashworth’s “Reading through Shame: Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” and essays on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Salman Rushdie’s Shame, such as those by Kossew, Bezan, and Ayalet. 3 For examples of theories about national shame, see Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Rosamund Dalziell’s Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture, and Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: Faces of Shame. For criticism of gendered shame, see J. Brooks Bouson’s Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings and Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran’s edited collection The Female Face of Shame. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling provides an excellent analysis of the relationship between shame and sexual orientation. Finally, the recent publication of Luna Dolezal’s The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body offers useful arguments about “body shame,” the understanding of which “can shed light on how the social is embodied; that is, how the body—experienced in its phenomenological primacy—becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands” (159).

4 inherently shameful about the kinds of intra- and intersubjective relationships that concern postcolonial writers. How could this not be so, since race, power, and identity are such fundamental issues to postcoloniality? If shame emerges within a context of uneven power dynamics or due to a consciousness of oneself as a socially inscribed body, then it seems only reasonable that much postcolonial writing will be haunted (to return to Robert J.C. Young’s pressing term for what remains crucial to postcolonial theory) by shame.

Yet, what does it mean to “read” shame? This dissertation builds upon the premise that each experience of shame documents an implicit story, a tale that emerges out of the cultural, political, historical, and economic forces determining the specific significance of any shameful encounter. This “story” of shame has the potential to expand our understanding of anyone who suffers from embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, or self-loathing—all transmutations of shameful feelings. In other words, locating the sources of a person’s shame can expose the complicated socio-economic forces determining that individual’s subjectivity. In this dissertation, I develop a praxis for reading postcolonial fiction about shame, arguing that this literature mirrors the shame of an individual subject and it does so by highlighting the social factors that engender shame to begin with. Literature traverses the same patterns and pathways across which shame travels when it finds root in an individual whose subjectivity is determined by specific and shamefully laden social vectors. Furthermore, literary texts convey the socio- historical nature of shame through the intersections of such creative devices as metaphor, imagery, focalization, dissonance, repetition, motif, and chronological sequencing. It is the work of these devices to mimic the psychological and social articulations of shame experienced by the postcolonial subject; however, literary shame instantiates itself in much more complex ways than any individual device can account for.

My theory of postcolonial literary shame takes a phenomenological approach, which is to say that it is interested equally in both the structure of experience and the structure of literature. I understand shame as an affect apparent at three different levels—contextual, corporeal, and intra- or intersubjective—each of which comes into play during any single experience of feeling ashamed, and each of which takes mutually resonant shape in both literary and social manifestations of shame. Literary manifestations of shame, located in narrative devices, plot, and textual structure, resonate and accrue meaning through their mimetic relationship with social manifestations of shame, located in the body, in the event, and in social affiliations (that is, the intra- and intersubjective relationships that constitute an individual as a social entity). I approach postcolonial novels with this tripartite understanding, pulling apart the three levels as they appear through narrative measures, assessing them on their own before returning them to their rightful entanglement in the text—an assemblage that constitutes the poetics of literary shame. I categorize the three levels of shame I identify under the headings the “trigger,” the “symptom,” and the “structure.” I characterize these labels in detail below but, in brief, the “trigger” refers to the socio-political context that causes an individual to experience a shameful feeling—the events or external factors that become absorbed into an individual subject’s affective experience. The category of the “symptom” relates to the bodily symptoms of shame—the blushes and cringes that document the agony of shameful feelings. Finally, the “structure” of shame indexes shame’s psycho-social nature—the quality shame has of flourishing through an intersubjective exchange.

The gaze is the most obvious symbol of shame’s relational aspect, but the “structure” of shame also delineates the feelings of shame that do not emerge in isolation, but as a result of complicated relationships with others, to which conscious and unconscious feelings of judgment and value are inevitably bound.

These three categories trace the contextual, corporeal, and intersubjective dimensions of shame in an individual, and they can also be traced within each of the postcolonial texts I examine in this dissertation. The levels of shame I identify in a real-world encounter have textual counterparts, the interpretation of which can offer new insights into how shame operates within postcolonial contexts. It is as though the novel holds a mirror to the world, but the aestheticized reflection that a reader “sees” potentially enables a new reading of the world itself. Thus, rather than finding divisions between form and content, I argue that shame can and must be read as traversing, binding, and opening out to one another, linking the fields of the literary and the social. With respect to form, literary style—characterization, metaphor, genre, imagery, and focalization (to name some elements)—is indeed often characterized by shame, but it also characterizes shame. As a textual element, shame is inscribed through any manner of stylistic device, from motif and metaphor to narrative voice and imagery; from here—from the words and arrangements composed in the postcolonial novel—shame reaches beyond a text into the social world, following the same “heteroglossic” potentialities Bakhtin ascribed to all novelistic writing, wherein:

The internal social dialogism of novelistic discourse requires the concrete social context

of discourse to be exposed, to be revealed as the force that determines its entire stylistic

structure, its ‘form’ and its ‘content,’ determining it not from without, but from within;

for indeed, social dialogue reverberates in all aspects of discourse, in those relating to

‘content’ as well as the ‘formal’ aspects themselves. (Bakhtin 300)

Bakhtin rightly insists that there is no conceptual division between form and content (nor, by extension, between aesthetics and ethics) because the social world both encompasses and is encompassed by the novel. The shame a text references, characterizes, and produces is identified on a textual register, all the more so when readers conceive of its embeddedness in broader

7 systems of production. In this regard, my argument follows previous methodologies of reading texts within and across broader fields of signification, such as the “structure of interacting thresholds and domains” read by Quayson’s “calibrations” or the “social, contradictory historical becoming of language” to which Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossic dialogism offers an interpretative tool (Quayson xvi; Bakhtin 330).

The novels this dissertation examines represent a range of mimetic expressions of postcolonial shame. Each explores metaphors of embodiment alongside particular socio- historical moments that resonate shamefully for the postcolonial writer. The formal structures of each of the novels also mimic in some way the intersubjective and socially inflected experience of shame. Thus, each text corresponds through an aesthetic register with the three levels of shame that I identify; they each braid together the triggering context, the corporeal symptoms, and the intersubjective structure of shameful experience. My analyses work to tease apart these braided elements of shame to understand their significance textually and as mimetic devices that situate my readings within a broader social context. Together, my readings articulate an argument for reading shame in postcolonial literature as a mimetic project, both textually reflecting postcolonial subjective experience and refracting new meaning across social domains.

In chapter one, I lay out a typology of mimetic shame, demonstrating through brief close readings of three novels how this dissertation approaches shame in postcolonial literature. I begin by positioning my approach to literary shame as one that acknowledges shame’s implicit social characteristics. In contrast to theories that see shame as essentially cut off from the social world,

I argue that shame is deeply entangled with social relationships; the fact that those relationships are frequently thrown into crisis because of shame ultimately marks the social formulation of the subject, and her dependence on investments in the Other—investments affirmed by such outwardly directed impulses as desire, recognition, or imitation. In fact, because shame is so

8 constitutive of the social subject, it also becomes fundamental to discursive articulations, which makes literary analysis of shame so fruitful. The goal of my first chapter entails revealing the multidimensional textuality of shame and demonstrating how mimetic shame illuminates the structural relationships that emerge between the literary text and the social world. The brief close readings that I lay out at the end of the chapter together establish the formal conventions the rest of my project interrogates.

In the subsequent chapters of my dissertation, I push further into the aesthetic territory of shame. For instance, in chapter two, my reading of mimetic shame in The Mimic Men (1967) argues that V.S. Naipaul undermines the autobiographical tradition of self-articulation in three important ways. First, through imagery of shameful embodiment, the confidence of Ralph Singh, the fictional autobiographer, becomes overwhelmed by feelings of doubt and abasement. Second, through an anachronistic narrative structure and repeated references to an omniscient camera in the sky (representing the gaze of the Other), the narrator’s authorship becomes inferior to and determined by the central source of imperial power so that a split identity troubles his goal of autobiographical coherence. Finally, through the novel’s suggestive ending, in which Ralph implies his own erasure or death, the form of the autobiography transforms ominously into a book-length suicide note. Together, these distortions of the traditional autobiography mimic the disorienting structure of postcolonial shame, in which the self so identifies with the shaming other (that is, the other whose authoritative gaze triggers shame in the colonial subject) that possibilities for self-articulation are altogether lost. Despite the narrator’s narcissistic fantasy of

“pure” origins and subjective wholeness, the novel’s excessive imagery forestalls that fantasy by exposing the narrator’s core feelings of shame, just as surely as the novel’s strategic imitation of the autobiographical genre tragically satirizes the autograph’s quest for cohesion. The Mimic

Men thus typifies how mimetic shame uses literary devices and generic forms to characterize the

9 social and historical significance of shame; in this case, narcissism and shame are placed in a dialectical configuration that quantifies their entanglement: Ralph narcissistically invests in unitary fantasies of his own wholeness and when these fantasies collapse, he is left with the shame of seeing himself as a colonial mimic.4

Whereas chapter two’s focus on The Mimic Men is concerned with the Caribbean’s historical and psychological legacies of indentured labour and the movement to decolonize— events which burden Naipaul’s characters with intense feelings of shame, and which Naipaul himself problematizes through an autobiographical structure that mimics aspects of shame— chapter three, on Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), turns to the internecine conflicts that coincided with South Africa’s transition from an apartheid state to a democratic government.

Typically read as a comedy by its critics, Ways of Dying also draws on tragic conventions that trouble its comic voice. I argue that Mda interrupts his novel’s comic resolution by integrating corporeal monstrosity and excessive images of violence as unsettling motifs that contradict South

Africa’s post-apartheid zeitgeist of national pride. Through its communal narration, the novel seems to articulate cohesion and hope, but it simultaneously transforms the idea of nation building into a narrative project that obscures the shameful history of vigilante violence.

Furthermore, because the novel’s instantiations of violence are repeatedly subsumed beneath a comic communal voice, the novel’s structure is suggestive of the melancholic repressions that

4 Yet, there are texts where the relationship between shame and narcissism do not possess the same dialectical inflections as in The Mimic Men. For instance, in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, the play begins strongly emphasizing narcissism, with Elesin Oba unquestioningly absorbing the praise singer’s acclaim. Once Elesin Oba does not commit ritual suicide, as dictated by custom upon the death of the king, shame begins to overwhelm him. Although narcissism continues to blind him to the significance of his tragic refusal to engage his customary responsibility and honour, it is not until he is faced with his son’s dead body that the shame of his failure propels him toward self-erasure, and he commits suicide. As with Naipaul’s and Soyinka’s works, Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, and Ngugi wa Thiongo’o’s A Grain of Wheat all use strategies of mimetic shame to characterize the shifting compensations that emerge between shame and narcissism in (post)colonial situations. (I am grateful to Ato Quayson for pointing out the different valences of shame and narcissism in Death and the King’s Horseman.)

Freud suggests can accompany shame over a lost ideal. The novel traces these repressions through mimetic shame: the novel’s structure contrasts the recuperations of “wholesome” and unashamed subjectivity played out in the private world of the protagonists with the shamelessness of the broader community’s denials about its own violence.

Chapter four’s analysis of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008) argues that the novel itself employs mimesis as a narrative strategy, writing “back,” as it were, to the complicated and contradictory ideological legacy established in part by the writer Albert Camus. Using intertextual references (to Camus’s L’Etranger and La Peste) and the cockroach as a metaphor for the plague-like immigrant, Hage’s narrator adopts shame as a kind of mantle that he both suffers beneath and, ironically, rejects by brandishing its symptoms so defiantly. The novel personifies the corporeal aspect of shame while also narrating the social circumstances that overdetermine that characterization and playing with the political benefits privileged Canadian citizens receive through the act of shaming non-Canadian others. By mimicking Camus’s aesthetic representation and philosophical beliefs of the Arab “Other,” Hage draws attention to the structural relationship between race and shame, a relationship codified by the colonial or settler gaze. Through the novel’s engagement with the three levels of shame (context, symptom, and structure), it inverts—or passes back—the idea of shame as it was formed through the stereotyping of “colonials” that Camus helped to produce.

What makes all literary shame interesting as an object of analysis lies in what it reveals about the relationship between aesthetics, history, affect, and embodiment. However, because postcolonial literature and theory are fundamentally related to issues of power and authority, identity and identification—attributes also central to shame—a study of shame in postcolonial literature promises to unearth mutually productive understandings. Chapters two, three, and four therefore read mimetic shame as an aesthetic vehicle for interrupting social narratives that

11 ascribe shame to certain forms of subjectivity. In doing so, these novels characterize the dynamics of postcolonial shame and underscore the ways shame functions as an element of social control.

The Subject of Shame

Race and narration are central to this dissertation about shame in postcolonial literature.

Through analyses of selected fiction, I look from different angles at the question prompted by my brief return to two of postcolonial theory’s “urtexts”: how does literature contend with shameful experience? Achebe’s attention to the literary work that might “purge” the “great blasphemy”

(44) of ashamed postcolonial identity, as well as Fanon’s commitment to psychoanalysis as a means of combatting shame (“I hope by analyzing it to destroy it,” he explains [12]), direct my interest in exploring this element of postcolonial literature. Especially in their assessment of an historical production of a shame-laden colonized identity, both writers inform my analysis of the connections between shame, embodiment, and the possibilities of or limitations to self- formulation.

Indeed, this dissertation returns in part to the affective surge that animated Fanon’s identity crisis5 and his recognition of the bodily shamefulness that coheres from a semiotics of race. In his essay “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon describes the experience of “discover[ing] my blackness” (111), a process which, by virtue of competing identifications with black ancestors and white authority, activated several splits in his understanding of himself. Fanon analogizes this horrific realization of estranged selfhood through a scene of being looked at by a white child,

5 My references to Fanon do not refer directly to the author himself, but to the persona he articulates in his writing. I use the name “Fanon” to refer to the speaker in his writing who invokes rage and shame, condemnation and hope, but I take it for granted that he is often speaking on behalf of a wider population, and that his voice is itself a kind of critical performance.

12 who shouts out his varying responses of fascination with and horror of blackness. Fanon indicates his own identification with the white child’s objectifying gaze: “On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” (112) The despair of Fanon’s statement comes in part from his agonizing realization about the impossibility of self-formulation: separated from himself as a subject, the racialized figure—the black Antillean, the colonized man, Fanon himself—looks upon his body as if from the eyes of the white, colonizing Other, and the fissure of such an imaginative repositioning enacts a violence—“a hemorrhage”—that the de-subjectified self regards from a helpless distance.

Fanon’s statement offers evidence of all three levels of shame I identify as contributing to a shameful experience: the trigger, the bodily symptom, and the structure of shame. His encounter with the white person’s gaze—both literal and symbolic—holds within it the entire significance behind his response to being looked at. Fanon reacts to his position of powerlessness, the sensation of being “imprisoned” within an identifiable, assigned social position. His social context has been determined by the history of colonisation, slavery, and racism, and the knowledge of that context is distilled within his awareness of being looked at by another. In other words, the trigger for Fanon’s shame is the entire history of France’s colonial power in the Antilles; that history’s legacy shows up as synecdoche in the author’s sympathetic alignment with the white child’s (or “master’s”) gaze.

The second level of shame—shame’s corporeality or its symptomatization—finds expression in Fanon’s reference to his body being “spattered… with black blood.” With this reference to “black blood,” Fanon suggests first that he is marked by the blood of black people,

13 as though he is violently aligned with a race that has historically been the target of violence. On the other hand, Fanon’s reference to “black blood” also suggests that in the social imaginary, his very blood—not only his skin—is magically transmuted into a non-existence substance: black blood. In this way, he is not merely superficially, but essentially transformed into an Other—a monster.6 At the centre of Fanon’s metaphor for the brutal(ized) image of de-subjectification, then, the body stands in its emphatically not-white skin, a skin whose semiotic force violently propels the colonized subject away, while still magnetically drawing the gaze back to the body’s inescapable and overdetermined signification. This body, the symbol at the heart of Black Skin,

White Masks, projects meaning while also destroying the possibility of creating new meaning. A distance between Fanon’s interior and exterior self fractures any possibility of full self- confidence, and he looks at his own body with cringing horror. Ironically, Fanon’s view of his own body-as-object is a view imaginatively shared with the white gaze, but he also recoils from that vision of his socially determined embodiment; as a symptom, then, Fanon’s shame resonates as both physically violent and psychically alienating.

Such a bifurcated stance also characterizes the third level of shame—its structure, which charts the anguished relationship between self and other that produces the sense of the self as a shameful object. In other words, the process of objectification that Fanon describes bears an unmistakable similarity to the structural experience of shame, whereby a person regards herself from the perspective of a judging other, whose gaze overwhelms the subject to the degree that she feels unbearably aware of her body while also anchored to the perspective of the judging

Other. Indeed, it is this dispossession of his own subjective articulation that propels Fanon’s narrative, and determines his project to destroy shame through analysis. Such a project is, for

6 I am grateful to Marlene Goldman for offering this observation about the violent duplicity in Fanon’s reference to “black blood.”

14 him, maddeningly futile precisely because he comes into being, like all subjectivities, through the alienating acquisition of language. I would argue that the process of becoming a subject bears remarkable similarity to the structure of shame and the intersubjective nature of shameful self- awareness, especially as such a process is described by Jacques Lacan.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language” (18). Fanon makes the point here that the colonist’s power accrues from his mastery of “the language of the civilizing nation”

(ibid). He understands language as the vessel not only of the (in this case) French linguistic forms that dominate Antillean tongues, but as “the culture of the mother country” (ibid). These powerfully linked mechanisms—language and culture—assert authority over “colonized man” not only by virtue of the laws and values they embody but by their power to alienate subjects for whom expression may remain limited or uncomfortable. Yet, as Fanon also acknowledges, the colonized subject’s mastery of the French language also always results in an internal psychological alienation: “Every dialect is a way of thinking, Damourette and Pichon said. And the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a separation” (14).

Fanon’s association between language and alienation echoes Lacan’s model of the human subject, which incorporates alienation as the key determining condition: without alienation, an individual never becomes a subject. According to Lacan, a “split subject” emerges through the acquisition of language. Language forces the unspeaking (and therefore inchoate) infant to articulate herself through signs and terms developed over centuries. Words, gestures, and cultural stories all delineate possibilities of articulation—indeed, of thought itself—and through these symbolic vehicles flows discourse. Lacan repeats throughout his seminars that the self is the

Other, by which he means that by acquiring language, the subject can only think and express in a

15 discourse that both predates and predetermines the very thoughts to which one has access. Bruce

Fink, one of Lacan’s most prominent translators and explicators, explains that

…the Other is that foreign language we must learn to speak which is euphemistically

referred to as our ‘native tongue,’ but which would be much better termed our ‘mOther

tongue’: it is the discourse and desires of others around us insofar as the former are

internalized. By ‘internalized’ I do not mean to suggest that they become our own; rather,

albeit internalized, they remain foreign bodies in a sense. (Fink 11)

This incorporation of otherness, so definitive of the Lacanian subject, means that the self is always split, doomed to alienation since the “whole” being could never exist outside the “Real,” that zone of pre-consciousness that characterizes the infant’s fantasies of an unbroken world.

Lacan’s theory of the alienated subject might suggest that a figure like Fanon suffers from shame because his cultural integration has ensured the loss of his primordial or imagined wholeness. But it is not that Fanon inherently feels shame because he is an Other by virtue of being a speaking subject, which according to Lacan is the condition shared by all individuals once they have moved out of the stages of the Real and the Imaginary and into the Symbolic.

While Lacan ascribes a great deal of emotional pain to the alienating process of language acquisition and subject formation, he does not suggest that the “splitting” of the subject is necessarily shameful, although his description of the affective burden that comes with constantly failing to live up to the “ideal I” certainly approaches the kind of paucity of self-regard so attributable to shame. Rather, the Fanonian subject inherits shame as a discursive birthright; while, like all subjects, he is made “Other” through language, the discourse (that is, not just any given systems of signs and signifiers, but the vast interwoven chains of meaning implied by all aspects of language and knowledge) into which he is born assigns to him a secondary or doubled

Otherness. This second alienation, I would suggest, occurs when discourse—language, tradition,

16 culture—already determines the Fanonian subject as ontologically Other or, to recall Fanon’s monstrous metaphor, “spattered . . . with black blood.” Within the wide field of social signification, he becomes like another Other to Lacan’s “self-as-other” dyad. That is, Fanon’s embodied figuration operates as a particularly differentiated kind of signifier within the “master discourse” of colonialism (and colonialism’s discursive siblings: capitalism, imperialism, apartheid, slavery, and orientalism, for instance). In other words, the whole social domain ascribes to the colonized individual, an already split subject, a further semiotics of difference. In this way, Fanon’s split self is split again into a doubled and duplicitous bind—what he calls an

“infernal circle” (116). He is therefore further distanced from the possibility of reacquiring the whole self. Within racist systems, there is, as Fanon despairs, no hope: all is shame. For if, as

Lacan argues, the subject embarks on an unending quest to resolve the break between himself

(and the Lacanian subject is certainly male and white) and his “mOther,” the Fanonian subject

(or the colonial subject) finds him- or herself at an even further remove from the ideal of wholeness. In his essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic

Experience,” Lacan describes an infant who, sometime between the ages of six and eighteen months, views his or her image in a mirror and begins to recognize the cohesive reflection. This recognition marks one of the first turns away from the “Real,” as it invites the Other to occupy a dominant position within the universe of self-identification. After all, the reflection is not actually the self, but a representation—an Other. And, according to Lacan, this first misrecognition links to further identificatory errors and consequential splits. The symbiotic extension uniting the infant self and the mother, for instance, eventually gets interrupted by distance and the betrayal marked by the mother’s other interests. She becomes “mOther.” And it is from this “mOther” that the subject seeks validation; but (and here lies the rub), thanks to language, the mother is herself constituted through otherness. Thus, in this Lacanian schema, the

17 subject’s search for recognition and approval extends across an ever-widening social domain, always redoubling the alienation that lies at the bottom of subjective experience. In this schema,

Fanon’s despair accrues special weight, attending not just to the alienation of all speaking subjects, but also to the doubly impossible access to validation within a (post)colonial social domain.

In Lacanian terms, the “mOther” from whom each of us seeks approval and validation gradually expands beyond any actual mother figure to a whole range of discursive figurations.

For Fanon, as well, the “Other” that both enchants the subject as an ideal for identification and condemns the same subject for failing to achieve the ideal is not, of course, a specific person, although the figure of the white colonialist suggests the most appropriate symbol for the ideal

Other. Indeed, several postcolonial novelists, from Dionne Brand to Toni Morrison and Jamaica

Kincaid, characterize the internalization of the racism entrenched by colonial authority, indicating the psychological consequences that bear out the legacy of shame via the violence of colonization and slavery. Therefore, rather than occupying a single position, the “Other” is dispersed across an entire social domain, woven into the discursive structures that determine an individual’s and a collective’s experience, and incorporated as well into the very core of a subject’s own structure of self.

This “other-as-discursivity” governs my understanding and critical interpretation of experiences of shame portrayed in postcolonial fiction. Shame emerges through situations in which an individual (or a collective) feels negatively regarded by an esteemed Other. Shame does not only mark, as Benjamin Kilborne puts it, “a failure to conform to an ideal” (35); it also attests to the awareness of that failure before a judging Other (as Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “shame is shame of oneself before the Other” [303]), even if that Other is internalized or fantasized. On the level of feeling, shame demarcates a low self-regard, as though it gathered around a secret,

18 rotting kernel hidden from the rest of the world, but sickeningly known to one’s private self.

However, this feeling becomes activated through shame’s structural operations. The precarious

“secrecy” of that hidden kernel betrays one’s awareness of the possibility of exposure, indicating that shame operates as an internalization of broader webs of identification. Lurking behind the knowledge of a flawed self is one’s anxiety that this knowledge will be revealed to others. The way one looks at oneself, therefore, is weighted down by one’s fear of how one might look to others. As such, on a structural level (if it can imagined that shame has some sort of architecture) shame gives shape to the fact that self-image is produced through an imaginative detour through another person’s (or group’s or society’s) eyes. Indeed, since that Other is less a powerful individual and more a permeation of belief across entire discursive systems, the shame a subject experiences is marked by a complex interplay of historical, social, visual, and individual discourses. Shame may mark an individual’s (or a collective’s) imagined worthlessness before a judging Other, but it may also mark a failure to meet an impossible ideal, the struggle of being haunted by a traumatic past, or the despair that arises from having identified with an Other that strays so far away from one’s own social, historical position.

In general, shame theory as explained by a significant amount of psychoanalytic and literary/philosophical scholarship characterizes shame as an affect whose isolating properties highlight its capacity to bring the full force of judgment to bear on the ashamed subject. Silvan

Tomkins, a psychologist who worked influentially on affect theory (and extensively on shame theory) in the 1960s and 1970s, regarded affects like shame as grounded “in an evolutionary biological base that provides the foundations for a model of the human being at a general psychological level, which is in turn embedded in a historical, sociocultural, and civilizational matrix” (Exploring 312). Tomkins’s ideas were invested in the social elaboration of affect, in the subject’s entangled relations with the world and with past experience, and in Tomkins’s

19 development of script theory, which posits that shame responses are based on imaginative, perhaps unconscious, collections of similar past experiences, or “scenes.” Tomkins assigns biology a primary role in his affect theory; the body is where emotions originate, where they find their root, as well as where they articulate themselves. As a result, he describes affective experience as based on “discriminable distinct sets of facial, vocal, respiratory, skin, and muscle responses” (Exploring 58). However, even for Tomkins, biology alone does not determine affect or its expression past the first hours of human life. Affect, including shame, is from a very early time caught up in scenes, conditioned and informed by networks of experiences and relationships. Tomkins describes shame in particular as “the negative affect linked with love and identification” (Affect 140), arguing that identifications with others condition the experiences of both shame and guilt, so that one may feel equally judged by or inferior to a literal other, or in response to an internalized other.7 But, even more significant, for Tomkins, the biological origins of affect are crucially informed or transformed by relationships and experiences, which again give shape and significance back to the bodily sensation of affect. The identifications an individual has with other people, with society, or with political systems are not separate from his or her own sense of identity. According to Tomkins, the interruptions of such identifications are, in fact, the stimulus for guilt or shame feelings, but identifications can equally be subsumed into one’s own sense of self:

[T]he ashamed look of the other may be internalized and act as an endopsychic source of

shame to which the rest of self responds with shame. Just as I may hang my head in shame

because you say that you are ashamed of me, so I may hang my head in shame because the

internalized you hangs his head in shame at the rest of myself. In this event the self is

7 In chapter one, I take up the distinctions between shame and guilt more explicitly, returning to Tomkins’s theories in order to underscore the social significance of both affects.

experienced as two-headed, both hung in shame. When next the other hangs his head in

shame and there is also an internalized head, the individual then finds himself at the

intersect of three heads, all ashamed. (Affect 403)

Here, Tomkins indicates how the shame-inspired withdrawal of engagement with others may work to isolate an individual from the social world, just as shame may help erect internal barriers, dividing one aspect of the self from another aspect of the self. This type of division is not only characterized by, for example, the “triple person” Fanon feels himself to be when he occupies his own bodily space, the gaze of the ideal Other regarding his own body, and a zone of disappearance, where existence beyond objectification slips away, “evanescent” and impossible

(Fanon 111). The internal divisions wrought by shame, demonstrated by both Tomkins and

Fanon, are also illustrated by literary characters. For instance, Dionne Brand’s Bola, in At the

Full and Change of the Moon, symbolically splinters through her descendants, resurrected in unrecognizable and often dreamlike figurations that detail the inherited trauma and shame of enslavement. Similarly, in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh so yearns to identify with the metropolitan centre that by the end of his life record, he slips out of his own sight, no longer recognizable. Such “splintering” also occurs within Toni Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove who, in The Bluest Eye, absorbs so much vitriol from her community that she goes mad, lost in a fantasy of identification with the ideal (white) Other.

Sara Ahmed affirms shame’s ironic qualities: despite (and because of) shame’s social, identificatory nature, it is also endowed with the power to divide and alienate parts of the subject.

Underscoring the turn from the social to the self that shame seems to mobilize, Ahmed remarks that shame

feels like an exposure—another sees what I have done and that is bad and hence

shameful—but it also involves an attempt to hide, a hiding that requires the subject turn

away from the other and towards itself. . . . To be witnessed in one’s failure is to be

ashamed: to have one’s shame witnessed is even more shaming. The bind of shame is that

it is intensified by being seen by others as shame. (Ahmed 103)

Tomkins and Ahmed are only two dominant voices in the wide field of shame theory, but their basic conceptualization of the role of the judging other—the witness—as the powerful force that compels a subject to “turn away” remains consistent through most scholarly conversations about shame. However, although agreement prevails that the “judge” figure is just as often an internalized other as a literal, external witness, this notion of the internal/external judge does little to account for the degree to which otherness is always-already a fundamental component of subjectivity. Recalling Lacan’s notion of the subject as constituted through the discourse of the

Other earlier helped to clarify the affective complexities of Fanon’s articulation of the identificatory impasse many colonized people have faced. For, as suggested, Fanon’s “infernal circle” encloses the horrific entanglement of the originally “whole” psyche repeatedly split—not only by entering the linguistic world, but also by entering a social world in which discourse denigrates racialized subjects via “a galaxy of erosive stereotypes” (Fanon 99).

Here, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s groundbreaking work on race provides valuable insight into how to understand the relationship between race and shame, making explicit Fanon’s central frustrations over the “inferiority complex” (9) of some colonized people. Fanon mentions Lacan only parenthetically; neither Lacan nor Seshadri-Crooks overtly postulate about shame. Yet,

Seshadri-Crooks’s thinking about race offers ways to bring together Lacan’s notion of the subject with Fanon’s articulation of shameful subjectivity; her suggestion that discourse about race is bound to a “regime of visibility” (20) indicates the degree to which racism and shame may travel along the same vectors, contained by the gaze of the dominant subject.

In Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Seshadri-Crooks argues that in most western cultures, recognition of difference depends on visual signifiers attached to race (as opposed to cultures that rely on signifiers attached to other categories of identity markers, as in

India, where differences are discernible “by economic status, but even more by one’s last name and regional and linguistic affiliations” [1]). Seshadri-Crooks accounts for the cultural weight of race signifiers by positioning her argument with a Lacanian framework, whereby “master discourses” condition individuals’ experiences of desire and lack—those two emblems determining the lifelong, doomed quest for psychic wholeness. According to Seshadri-Crooks, because we live within a “regime of visibility” (she notes that we “feel we must necessarily insist on the evidence of our eyes” [4]), we determine a structure of relations amongst others according to visible markers of difference, the most pervasive of which are sex and race. She argues that

“the inaugural signifier of race, which I term Whiteness, implicates us all equally in a logic of difference” (3). Borrowing from Lacan the idea that lack conditions an eternal desire to retain something perceived as part of the ideal Other—something endowed yet elusive—the impossibility of which leads to a sense of incompletion within the subject, Seshadri-Crooks argues that race plays a similar identifying role within the “regime of the look” as does sex within Lacan’s signifying chain:

[T]he structure of racial difference is founded on a master signifier—Whiteness—that

produces a logic of differential relations. Each term in the structure establishes its

reference by referring back to the original signifier. The system of race as differences

among black, brown, red, yellow, and white makes sense only in its unconscious

reference to Whiteness, which subtends the binary opposition between ‘people of color’

and ‘white.’ This inherently asymmetrical and hierarchical opposition remains

unacknowledged due to the effect of difference engendered by this master signifier,

which itself remains outside the play of signification even as it enables the system. (20)

Seshadri-Crooks’s analysis of Whiteness as a master signifier and her conceptualization of a

“regime of looking” (19) provide an understanding of how shame could potentially underscore any given encounter with difference within a colonial framework. If the subject determines her identity according to lack—if all subjects consciously or unconsciously desire “Whiteness”8— and if those formulations of the self take place within a regime of visibility, then it is imaginable that the very same apparatus demarcating difference also demarcates shame: the gaze. The gaze of the subject upon the Other (and back again) marks the relational boundaries between desire and lack, belonging and difference, self and other; the gaze also operates as the fundamental symbol by which an individual registers shame. I do not argue that any encounter with an Other

(neither the Other that is the ideal or authoritative object of desire, nor the Other whose exclusion and oppression ensures the subject’s authority) necessarily involves shame. I also do not suggest that all experiences with race within the regime of visibility necessarily engender shame.

However, when race and difference are formulated within a system of social, political, or economic oppression—as it is in colonized and postcolonial nations and as it often is in modern/imperial diasporas—shame is frequently a byproduct, emerging along the same self/other structural exchange whose axis determines shame as a product of identification with an actual and imaginary, internalized judging witness of the self. In other words, shame is in some ways an inevitable consequence to a system of visible differentiation in which Whiteness is cast as a master signifier.

8 Importantly, desiring Whiteness is not “a desire to become Caucasian” (21); the master signifier “Whiteness” impinges upon all subjects, regardless of race.

Mimetic Shame: The Aesthetics of Shame in Postcolonial

Literature

While this dissertation explores the discursive domains that produce shameful identities, it also examines literary methods that represent shame as a kind of discursivity—a discourse that bears specific historical, corporeal, and aesthetic significance. My explication of Lacan, Fanon, and Seshadri-Crooks demonstrates, I hope, that shame might be understood not only as an affective experience (the cringing experience of feeling embarrassed before a witness), but as a kind of social apparatus—part and parcel of the judgments that weave into discourse itself. By considering shame not as that which marks an historical or personal exchange (a significant moment that emblematizes a psychological experience), but as the feeling that indexes a permeating socio-cultural belief, reading literature about shame can potentially function as an exploration of and, potentially, an intervention in dominant discursive patterns that assign value to subject positions.

My argument therefore significantly departs from that posed by Timothy Bewes in the (as yet) only other book-length analysis of shame in postcolonial literature. There, Bewes argues that shame demarcates a kind of narrative vacuum, a point instantiating the impossibility of aesthetic expression. “In the postcolonial world,” he writes, “literature has often functioned as the locus of an incommensurability: between form and substance, expression and appearance, addressee and reader. A block, a residue of unprocessable material accumulates, which is experienced as shame” (4). According to Bewes, the condition of postcoloniality is always marked by disjuncture and postcolonial writing is therefore always stuck in a mode of traumatic self- alienation, of being haunted by the limits of expressibility. Curiously, Bewes does not look to psychoanalytic theory, but much of his analysis of shame accords with earlier literary theories of

25 trauma (such as those adopted by Cathy Caruth), which trace silence as the textual evidence of inexpressible traumatic events. The consequence of such a view of literature is that writing becomes a testament to ethical compromise, with a remainder that can neither be expressed nor understood. In this view, the subjects of trauma or of the shame produced by colonization remain muzzled by limits within literary writing, whose silence marks a reified calcification of endless suffering or permanent shame.

In some ways, it may indeed seem productive to read the historical ruptures inserted by colonization and the ensuing disorder of colonial life how many literary critics have measured textual “silences” according to psychoanalysis’s trauma theory. Cathy Caruth, for instance, describes trauma as involving an “inherent forgetting” (8) that can only be witnessed through the

“impossible saying” (10) of textually inscribed silences. Indeed, my contextual focus on shameful histories or origins might seem on the face of it to parallel this kind of trauma theory, which advocates a narrative “working through” of a traumatic event—a process of mourning or healing that works toward a discovery of wholeness or an integrated subject position.

Overcoming shame—reframing the triggering event so that it is emptied of its shameful significance—certainly seems a logical step toward some sort of subjective recuperation.

Although this dissertation does not concentrate on strategies for prescriptive healing, it also takes the position that shame itself ought not to be considered as parallel to trauma (especially not the form of “unspeakable” trauma Caruth describes and Bewes gestures toward), even if shame may sometimes be considered traumatizing (an important distinction). While shame shares some characteristics with trauma (it is difficult to address or express, it operates as a stage upon which potentially damaging behaviours are built), it is, unlike trauma, foundational in the development of every subject. Moreover, while trauma can be understood as historical, shame is often fundamentally fictional (or, ironically, historical and fictional at once). As Hilary Clark and

Joseph Adamson (following Jonathan Kilborne) note: “it is not just how we appear to the other but how we imagine we appear to the other that is involved in shame” (8). Shame is produced in the crisis of a misrecognition, of falseness, of mistaken identity, as when one recoils from imagining oneself through the eyes of another—a vision as indebted to fantasy as to any misgivings about the self.

Questioning the assumption that shame (or trauma) is in some way unspeakable, I approach postcolonial shame from much the opposite direction of Bewes, arguing instead that the aesthetics of literary shame mimic the very complicated, importantly excessive, but never mute discursivity of shame as it is experienced in social encounters and by virtue of being bound to the language of the Other. After all, Fanon himself assigned consciousness to shameful feelings, arguing that since

the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to “make it

unconscious” … The Negro’s inferiority or superiority complex or his feeling of equality

is conscious. These feelings forever chill him. They make his drama. In him there is none

of the affective amnesia characteristic of the typical neurotic. (Black Skin, White Masks

116)

Rather than seeing shame as so bound to the unconscious that it is “incommensurable” and inexpressible, I regard certain aspects of literature both as textual manifestations of corporeal experiences of shame and as microcosms of a broader discourse about postcolonial existence. In this sense, my conception of the literature I analyze is that it connotes a mimetic relationship with the so-called “real” world it represents. Rather than suggesting an incomplete, restrained, and partially unaware representation of shame experiences, these texts fully replicate shame through their textual devices, contextual content (plot and setting), and formal structures. My

“mimetic” approach to literary shame strives to account for “real life” shame as an affect that

27 encapsulates its intersubjective nature, while also acknowledging that any intersubjective exchange will be inflected by the socio-historical specificities conditioning any given relationship. Thus, shame always occurs as a multi-dimensional reality: it feels exquisitely private and excruciatingly painful—the body trapped by the hot blush. At the same time, the embodied subject of shame desires escape or obscurity, but remains trapped by her body and how she imagines it in another’s eyes. In this way, shame is always both isolating and entangling; without a body suffering, without a social context engendering, shame is not possible.

However, the literature I consider in this dissertation does not merely function as strict narrative records of the historical or social conditions causing shame, nor do the works only describe what it feels like for the body to be ashamed. The mimesis at play in these novels is not the sort that “reflects the world as it is, that . . . copies a material reality outside the work”, as some literary theorists have conceived mimetic representation (Potolsky 3). Rather, what I call

“mimetic shame” relates to the literary techniques authors employ to convey the social and embodied conditions of shameful experience; that is, the novels I examine mimetically transform shame into a textuality that parallels “real-world” experience and, in doing so, illuminate the discursive systems that generate shame to begin with. To release the “real-world” from the scare quotes I attach to them, I first need to acknowledge that my argument implicitly acknowledges textuality as capable of representing an objective, non-textual world. Unlike those theorists

(sometimes structuralists, sometimes deconstructionists) who remove a referential object from the signifying chain of meaning-making, I trust that there is an external world demanding reference—not just mountains, trees, or glasses of water, but events, emotions, and relationships.

As Robert Scholes puts it, arguing against linguistic philosophers like Ferdinand de Saussure,

Jonathan Culler, and Jacques Derrida, “things are there, soliciting our attention . . . the signifiers

28 may be arbitrary but the signifieds are motivated by reference, which flows not only from the word to the thing but from the thing to the word” (Scholes 97). Shame is one of those “things” that is “there,” demanding attention and articulation and, of course, what gets written about shame also flows back into how we might understand it. Yet, even while writing and objective experience (in the real world) might be said to be transactional, there is a primacy to the way shame is experienced in the world, to how it characterizes an individual’s sense of herself within a social situation, and this primacy helps to determine shame’s articulation within literary texts.

Therefore, when I write about something called “mimetic shame,” I invite an inspection of how textuality regards shame as it is experienced in the real world—how it encodes that experience through certain literary techniques that help to give shape—in a replicated fashion—to those facets of shame that so trouble postcolonial subjectivity. Because of the dialogic nature of novelistic writing, mimesis both captures through representation the experience of shame in the real world, bringing in through language and connotation the sedimentations of meaning that characterize shame; however, mimesis also disperses new meanings about shame, reflecting through interpretative work how readers might approach shame’s relation to postcolonial subjectivity in new ways. Despite the paradoxes suggested by my term, mimetic shame is therefore not merely imitative but representational (shame in the real world transposed to the text) and refractional (the text reshaping readers’ understanding of shame in the real world). In other words, the work of mimesis in novels about shame is to bring into convergence the textual and the actual, allowing each to bear upon the other in mutually productive ways.

As previously suggested, literature about shame achieves this mimesis on three important registers, each of which connects with a different sense of what can be understood as “textual.”

The first of the three registers relates to the corporeal symptomaticity of shame—the way shame makes itself known through the “visceral feeling” (Probyn 1) of an uncomfortable physical

29 response. The way shame is experienced—what it feels like—is remarkably universal; despite the specificities attached to the moment of its arousal, shame’s symptoms are most likely recognizable to everyone. Shame earns its infamy through its power to produce a horrible blush or cringe, or to magnify the body’s presence at the very moment one wishes to disappear.

Charles Darwin noted that “Under a keen sense of shame there is a strong desire for concealment

. . . An ashamed person can hardly endure to meet the gaze of those present, so that he almost invariably casts down his eyes or looks askant” (320-21). Like Fanon, he also describes shame’s physiological dimensions in tellingly violent terms: shame marks the face as if it were “gorged with blood” (309).9

The embodied symptoms of shame (such as blushing, cringing, or hanging the head) referred to in this first register of mimetic shame are conveyed by what, for the purposes of distinguishing between different notions of “the textual,” I understand as local literary devices.

By “local,” I mean those tools that can be identified from single textual instances (even if they are repeated), such as metaphors, images, or prosodies (like as rhyming, alliteration, or dissonance). The symbol of the cockroach in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, for instance, crystallizes in one metaphor shame’s capacity to render the body transformed into something seemingly grotesque. Hage’s metaphor is only one example of countless localized literary devices that convey the symptomatic experience of shame. For instance, the electrical field that so intensifies the gaze of others in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field magnifies the symptoms of Asako

9 It must be noted, however, that the blush is itself an emblem of shame bound to an understanding of privileged subjectivity. As Ahmed points out, reading shame only through the telltale blush would require reading only the shame of white people: “If we were to assume that we could all see shame in the redness of the blushing skin, we would of course be assuming that only white bodies feel shame. While I experience shame in the burning of my skin, I do not blush. I take some comfort in that others, who might look for the blush as a sign of shame, might overlook my shame, and allow me to pass and move away. At other times, the invisibility of shame experiences in the unavailability of the blush can lead to some people being seen as shameless, and hence as being unaffected by bad deeds (‘Have you no shame!’)” (120, note 3).

Saito, who imagines her skin as “weathered, welted” (76) by the shameful memories of staying in one of Canada’s World War II Japanese internment camps. In J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the

Barbarians, Colonel Joll’s sunglasses reflect back the Magistrate’s own image, symbolizing the shameful identifications with colonial authority against which the Magistrate struggles, even as the glasses also shamelessly obscure access to a sense of conscience within the colonial regime.

Mugo’s dreams of disembodiment in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat symbolize the desire for numbness that might provide an antidote for the shame he feels over betraying his

Kenyan comrades. Sonny Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body draws on repeated onomatopoeia and the aural dissonance of the bestial world to heighten the characterization of the novel’s South Asian/Caribbean indentured labourers as simultaneously grotesque in their embodiment and ashamed by their politically precarious positions. In each of these cases, the corporeal symptoms of shame find their way into a novel’s local register as more than mere physical characteristics of protagonists; these manifestations of shame are not descriptions of shame per se; rather, they instantiate shame by typifying its symbolic significance.

The second of the three registers, characterized by the “trigger,” encapsulates the social, historical, and/or political situations that prompt shame to begin with. These are the contexts for shame, and they are diverse as experience itself. Triggers operate in texts most commonly as plot and setting, and they narrate—as in the novels explored by this dissertation—shameful colonial histories. The story (or plot) of a novel can be understood as a constituent literary device, which links the fictional world to the historical events the fiction represents.10 In mimetic shame, the

10 I take the term “constituent” from H. Porter Abbott’s introduction to narrative; here, Abbott draws on Roland Barthes’s distinction between “nuclei” and “catalyzers” to clarify his own contrast between “constituent” and “supplementary” events. As Abbot puts it, “constituent events are events that are necessary for the story, driving it forward. Supplementary events are events that do not drive the story forward and without which the story would remain intact” (Abbott 21). The term is useful for my purposes because of the equivalencies between the “trigger”

31 most intimate relationship between literary and social domains frequently occurs at this constituent register, with the literary trigger for shame bearing close resemblance to the historical contexts for the production of shame. In other words, the constituent event driving the novel’s story is often the same as the social or historical event that produces shame among subjects in the real world. For instance, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying is politically concerned with the shame of internecine violence during South Africa’s antiapartheid movement, which is also central to the constituent events that push the novel’s story forward. However, even for those novels where the story only obliquely references the historical events about which the text or characters are ostensibly ashamed, there is a close bond between the shameful trigger in the text and in the “real world”—in most cases, what the novel is ashamed about is the same thing as what is shameful within the postcolonial situation (for instance, Naipaul’s The Mimic Men only references the

Caribbean’s history of indentured labour a few times, yet it is central to the protagonist’s experience of shame).

Finally, the third register of mimetic shame adopts the phenomenology of “real” shame experiences and transposes them via formal narrative structures reminiscent of shame’s subjective configurations. These intra- and intersubjective dynamics of shame are conveyed on more “global” registers of narrative structure (versus the “local” manifestations of embodied shame apparent in such instances as metaphor or image). That is, overarching textual elements such as narration, focalization, intertextuality, and genre often parallel shame’s structural qualities. For example, the generic conventions of autobiography in novels such as Naipaul’s The

Mimic Men or J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime work mimetically to chart

for shame in the real world and the novel’s story; in each case, the event that gives rise to shame is constitutive of the role shame plays as setting forth a chain of reactions.

32 shame’s social qualities within a text: when a narrator shifts from first- to third-person, readers are reminded of how shame forces a subject outside of herself (even as the text’s symptomatic or

“local” register enacts how shame excruciatingly isolates a subject within her body). Likewise, when the protagonist of a novel moves outside the frame of focalization (as in Naipaul’s The

Mimic Men or Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter), the identificatory problems that emerge as a result of shame are called attention to. Structurally, each of these texts incorporates elements of the shame experience into its formal dimensions. In combination with their local and constituent manifestations of shame, these novels’ global narrative structures mimetically represent shameful experiences.

The central principle orienting my argument about the relationship between shame and literature is that the distance between the context of shame (the trigger or situation that produces a shameful reaction) and the experience of shame (its physiological and psycho-structural dimensions) is a space filled with stories. Fanon describes the judging Other as someone who yanks the subject away from herself toward a new position from which she sees herself as a

(shameful) object. I imagine this shameful encounter as a paradigmatic model that encompasses a deep chronicle of the historical and social inscriptions impacting the subjective fracture Fanon describes—that is, a model of desubjectification that in each instance tells a unique and specific story. The flight from the self that shame propels may (even temporarily) shut down possibilities of self-expression, but such a flight also strangely points the direction to the substantial conditions of shame, and the very articulable ideas and events these conditions evince. The textual representation of these conditions constitutes what I refer to as mimetic shame, wherein the “real” physiological and social experiences of shame are transcribed through literary devices, which render interpretation and understanding possible.

By identifying mimetic shame as an aesthetic mode, I examine the textual practices that authors writing in a postcolonial tradition use to engage with the cultural, political, and historical discourses within which shame operates. Because shame relies largely on fields of vision (with the gaze both marking the negative judgement of another and instigating a desire to escape being seen), literary shame often relies on tropes of sight and exposure, as well as on the emphatically visual elements of embodiment: monstrosity, grotesqueness, decay, and/or sexual arousal— transgressions of the body that resist concealment. This aspect of mimetic shame relies on metaphor to both reflect and refract the contradictory values assigned to particular postcolonial bodies.

However, as I explain above, my conception of mimetic shame relies on more than identifying one dominant literary device or trope which literature embraces to represent the experience of shame. Mimetic shame is shame that on a textual register mimics shame as it is experienced on historical, corporeal, and structural levels. Of course, because it reflects the social and the physiological elements of shameful experience within a literary field of representation, mimetic shame refers also to the specific techniques or devices authors employ to represent shame; that is, what I identify as mimetic shame arises from the textual distillation of shameful feelings and the socio-historical conditions that prompt them. Implicitly and explicitly, my model of mimetic shame archives what lies between representation (textually inscribed shame) and “original” experience (“real world” shame). These permutations of shame are clearly not one and the same, not only because the novels I examine are fictional. The novels’ mimetic elements may at times function, map-like, as parallels to the structure of “real world” shame, but distance will always lie between shame and its representation. My conception of mimetic shame does not pretend otherwise. But where some critics might identify such a distance between representation and world (or history) as a space of incommensurability, I see mimetic shame as

34 that which beckons readers toward the meaning that accrues through the palimpsest of literary structure, device, and context—a site of saturation, perhaps, but not of silence.

Although the phrase may appear to be paradoxical, my understanding of the meaning to be read in the space between the world and the text resembles George Steiner’s “hermeneutic motion,” his claim that readers “venture a leap: we grant ab initio that there is ‘something there’ to be understood, that the transfer will not be void” (193). Between textual representations of shame and the worlds or experiences to which the text refers lies the space that engenders meaning—not a reified space where shame and its referents become impossible to instantiate (or, in contrast, a crystallization of an essential truth), but a space of interpretation, of excessive meaning and possibility. This is a space activated by literature.

I do not mean here to exemplify shame as a positive tool through which literature seeks to reveal and relieve injustice—in this case, measuring positive or negative ethical valences to shame entirely misses the point. Rather, I mean that the shame which textual mimesis performs takes its shape and energy only through an interpretive engagement with the rich intersections between the aesthetic and social. This is not a paralyzing gap but, instead, an interface that offers potential for a new, non-shaming significations. By reading mimetic shame, literary bodies give shape to counter-narratives; they interrupt the vision or the gaze that produces shame as a seemingly natural emotion attached to particular acts, histories, memories, or people. By pointing out the power structures and the discursive systems that enable shame to oppress colonized (or postcolonial) bodies, the mechanics of the gaze begin to fall apart, and the dominant framework through which specific histories have typically held sway start to shift. In other words, the assumptions that allowed Achebe’s student to deem the harmattan shameful are exposed as products of ideological discourse—of discursive mechanisms of power. Thus, in regarding literary shame as aesthetic manifestations of embodied, historical experience, understanding

35 shame can potentially open up and begin to account for the nuanced socio-historical conditions from which it becomes formed.

Chapter 1 A Typology of Mimetic Shame

In the introduction to this dissertation, I argued that Lacan’s theory of the alienated subject helps elucidate the role shame can play in the process of postcolonial subject formation, and particularly as this process is articulated in the shame-inflected identity crisis repeatedly analogized in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Moving from this theoretical consideration of shame, I asked how postcolonial novelists write about shame and how shame might be instantiated—consciously or not—as an aesthetic feature of postcolonial narratives. My answer to these questions involved conceptualizing shame in postcolonial literature as both reflective and refractive—textually representing experiences of shame while also casting new significance upon those experiences beyond the text. Mimetic shame—the term I give to literature that encodes shameful experience through specific literary techniques—operates on three levels: symptomatic, contextual, and structural. Each of these levels uses literary technique to convey something about the “real world”: (1) the physiological and psychological feelings of shame, (2) the socio-historical triggers for shame, and (3) the intra- and intersubjective relationships engendering shame. In this chapter, I demonstrate how my concept of mimetic shame differs from the way shame has typically been read by literary critics. I then offer a typology for how mimetic shame might be put to interpretive use. First, however, I reflect upon how the shifts in my thinking about affect and trauma led me to reconsider the entangled relationships between representation and experience, or between aesthetics and history.

36 37

Mimetic Shame: Theoretical Origins

The story of my own interest in literary shame emerged from an earlier interest in representations of trauma. My partial departure from that field of interest (partial because shame frequently intersects with trauma) was accomplished via three shifts in my critical thinking about emotion and violence in literature. The first of these steps occurred when I read Ruth Leys’s groundbreaking intervention in trauma studies, Trauma: A Genealogy. Here, Leys contends that the hitherto familiar conception of literary trauma—most famously speculated by Cathy

Caruth—relied on an assumption that there is something innately unspeakable about trauma— something that the victim of a trauma “cannot fully know” (Caruth 3). This supposition, Leys declares, rests on a misunderstanding of Freud’s characterization of trauma as a “delayed effect”

(qt. in Leys Trauma 277), a misunderstanding that “decisively alters the terms of Freud’s analysis” (279) by imagining that the return of the repressed occurs as a literal return of an original traumatic event, one which cannot be absorbed because it was never fully experienced when it first occurred. Caruth’s extrapolation of this scenario of trauma’s latent return is precisely its unspeakability or unrepresentability. However, whereas Caruth reifies trauma in literature by arguing that its belated return marks the impossibility of it being fully experienced as an original event, Leys insightfully points out that Caruth’s dispersal of trauma from an original event to something that spreads to everyone (victim, witness, and even perpetrator), projecting woundedness equally everywhere, depends upon an idea of inarticulation that dislodges experience from event with a disturbing reverence for the concept of the unrepresentable.

From Leys’s valuable intervention in the field of literary trauma and her caution against the trend of exalting notions of the unspeakable (what Leys calls “the pathos of the literal”), I took away the idea that pain cannot be—should not be—hallowed by literary theory. Despite

Elaine Scarry’s compelling, convincing claim that physical pain as it is experienced in the real world is “usually private and incommunicable” (Scarry 27), literary pain “speaks” in diverse and specific ways and through diverse and specific strategies.11 Aided as well by theories such as dialogism and calibrations—formulated respectively by Mikhail Bakhtin and Ato Quayson and briefly explored in the introduction to this dissertation—I adopted the perspective that literary pain “speaks” (or signifies) on multiple levels, and that even apparent silences can render meaning. However, to avoid the problematic dispersals Caruth attaches to literary trauma, such meaning must be rooted to its specific contextual registers so that shame is not rendered equally potent and infectious to every subject; instead shame takes special meaning depending on its unique history. Indeed, as I explain in greater detail later in this chapter, context functions as the bedrock supporting the other two levels of mimetic shame: symptom and structure.

My second step away from trauma studies and towards my interest in shame also arose from an encounter with Leys’s research—this time with From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and

After (2007). In this later publication, Leys again works to correct critical misappropriations of affect theory by literary theorists, drawing upon much of the same theoretical armature she deploys in Trauma.12 In effect, her argument about guilt as the product of melancholic

11 Scarry writes about physical pain, but her incredible opus on the “body in pain” speaking with a voice that extends the self “beyond the boundaries of the body” (33) potentially led other critics to misread emotional pain—trauma— along the unrooted terms she suggested. In fact, her work on the voice of the tortured body relates to the symbolic power of pain to instantiate the crimes of the state, which is quite distinct from the notion of an inexpressible experience in trauma, even if the trauma itself has a physical dimension. 12 Leys categorizes critical/psychoanalytic responses to trauma according to two theoretical paradigms: mimetic and antimimetic. She writes: The first, or mimetic theory, holds that trauma, or the experience of the traumatized subject, can be understood as involving a kind of hypnotic imitation of or regressive identification with the original traumatogenic person, scene, or event, with the result that the subject is fated to act it out or in other ways imitate it. Trauma is understood as an experience of violence that immerses the victim in the scene so profoundly that it precludes the kind of specular distance necessary for cognitive knowledge of what has happened. (From Guilt To Shame 8) On the other hand, Leys argues, the “antimimetic theory is compatible with, and often gives way to, the idea that trauma is a purely external event that befalls a fully constituted if passive subject” (9). Most theories of trauma, Leys argues, oscillate along this mimetic/antimimetic pole, and victims of trauma are consequentially identified as either

39 identifications with aggressors (she focuses mostly on Holocaust survivors) encouraged me to consider—despite her categorical distinctions between guilt and shame—the role of the Other in the production of the ashamed subject, as well. In contrast to her point that shame denotes only ontological questions pertaining to identity, I wanted to know how the constitution of identity is itself contingent upon social dynamics.13 In a web of familial and social relationships, where is the ashamed subject located? How do colonial authorities figure into the subject’s identification with various communities and individuals within the (post)colony, and how do those identifications give shape to the subject’s sense of identity? The novels under consideration in my dissertation, which emerge within colonial and postcolonial contexts, raise a specific set of questions: If shame and guilt are usefully understood in structural terms, mapping out the uneven relationships that inspire feelings of paranoid exposure, self-loathing, compensational narcissism, or suicidal impulses, then how are those psychological tendencies inflected by the specific power imbalances systematized by colonial relations? Furthermore, on a narrative level, where do these inter- and intrasubjective shapes of (post)colonial shame find articulation? Answering these questions helps to clarify the important ways that the social contexts for and the social structures

entirely enthralled to their traumatized victimhood or remaining aloof to a traumatizing event. Leys’s logic follows that theories of trauma are built up around ideas of specular or imagined distance (or lack of distance) from an originally traumatizing scene. Leys uses this same mimetic/antimimetic model and its related emphasis on the degree of distancing between the witness and the scene in her critique of shame theory. Yet, there are some important incompatibilities between trauma and shame as forces that equally evoke the event/witness scenario. In particular, it becomes difficult to link concepts of immersion and distance to experiences of shame and guilt simply because these affects relate more crucially to internal phenomena than to external events per se (whereas trauma can more easily be ascribed to an event, even if it later becomes incorporated within an individual’s psycho-emotional universe). 13 Actually, Leys’s rejection of shame as a category that could encompass guilt rests on her reading of how other shame theorists understand shame, her argument being that because these theories see shame as related only to identity (rather than identification), they cannot account for action and, by extension, ethical responsibility (From Guilt to Shame 131). This, I think, is an intriguing and valid rejoinder; yet, several of these theorists do not restrict their theories of shame to identity-based considerations alone. Silvan Tomkins (and his followers, such as Donald Nathanson) especially formulates identity in rather Lacanian terms, extrapolated from a more primary experience of identification (even if this is frequently a broken identification).

40 of shame alter critical conversations, which so often reduce shame to symptomatic responses and their impoverishing consequences upon an isolated ego. Indeed, these are the aspects of shame with which Leys is most concerned, so that her reading of Silvan Tomkins’s work reframes a debate about shame’s characteristics and theorization as a debate about shame as distinct from guilt. Yet, her arguments about identity and identification help elucidate the structure of relationships that may converge around an ashamed individual; considering how shame relates to both identification and identity helps clarify my own understanding of shame’s structure, which is one of the three levels of mimetic shame scrutinized within this dissertation.

Leys’s argument begins with a genealogy of diagnostic trends of survivor guilt and shame by post-World War II psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, and it ends with Leys rejecting both the validity of recent shame theory and the concept of shame itself as a suitable category for the analysis of the psyche’s conflicted relationship with traumatic experience or, indeed, with the external world itself. Leys points out that since the 1980s, the two categories of guilt and shame have lost their individual distinctiveness, often collapsing into one another; to Leys, guilt and shame should never have become interchangeable. She therefore disentangles them by defining each affect in terms of its social role: she deems guilt as “identificatory” in nature, while shame she centrally relates to identity—a “shift of focus to the self” (12) that neglects the impact the

Other has on psychological wellness. Leys suggests that the consequence of affect theorists largely abandoning ideas of “identificatory” guilt—an emotion emerging from socially inflected relationships—for a theory of shame that privileges “the primacy of personal identity or difference” is that this narrower category casts aside questions of “agency, intention, and meaning,” which she ascribes only to interpersonal attachments. In other words, she claims that in conceiving of guilt as transmitted along webs of social bonds, theories about guilt contend with the ethics of personal action toward and psychological investments in others, while shame

41 theory merely takes an interest in “who you are,’” abandoning social relations by isolating the self. Leys therefore argues that the historical replacement of guilt theory with shame theory

“means giving up disagreement about intention and meaning in favor of an interest in simply what an individual person experiences or feels, that is, in favor of questions of personal identity”

(13). In other words, Leys claims that whereas guilt was once imagined to reflect a bond with a loved or hated Other, shame abandons the Other altogether, retreating into a bubble of solipsistic identity concerns. Because she maintains the distinct primacy of guilt, shame is left without its social inflections.

For Leys, then, there is something fundamentally antisocial and boxed in about shame as conceived by late twentieth century shame theorists. She suggests that to these theorists, shame is merely a physiological indicator of an emotion. Paying particular attention to Silvan Tomkins, she notes the centrality of interruption to his work on shame, remarking that the consequence of conceiving of interruption as a trigger for shame is that the subject is left in a detached state, consumed only with the self, with shame recognizable only via specific symptomatic tendencies.

Indeed, in Tomkins’s argument, shame is partly triggered by a blockage (an “interruption”) in the road to anticipated pleasure; he suggests:

The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy. Such a barrier

might arise because one is suddenly looked at by another who is strange; or because one

wishes to look at, or commune with, another person but suddenly cannot because s/he is

strange; or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar; or one

started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger. It might also arise as a

consequence of discouragement after having tried and failed, and then lowered one’s head

in apparent ‘defeat.’ (Tomkins 399)14

Central to Tomkins’s theory of shame, then, is that it erupts at the very moment when presumed social relations are revealed to be false or misunderstood. Although Tomkins regards a certain universality in the physiological experience of shame—the familiar symptoms of a heated face or an inward cringing away from intimacy—the Other remains crucial to Tomkins’s hypothesis, cast in the central, shame-triggering role. And while his Other is presumed “strange,” it does not necessarily follow that the Other is unknown—only that a barrier obstructs the self’s sense of affinity with the object of attention or desire. Tomkins’s hypothesis about interruption offers useful possibilities for apprehending postcolonial experiences of shame; he would almost certainly have been unaware of Fanon’s work, but it is not hard to accord Tomkins’s theory with

Fanon’s sense of shame as emerging from encounters with the colonizing Other; Fanon characterized such encounters by their sense of estrangement, wherein the pleasure the self anticipates in identifying with the Other is interrupted by the realization that not only is the colonizing Other a stranger, but the imagined identification has been so complete that the colonized self is just as foreign. In this sense, Fanon’s rendering of shamed postcolonial subjectivity may just as well be read as an “uncanny” subjectivity; where Freud theorized the uncanny as the frightful sensations of unfamiliarity or dislocation in response to situations initially presumed familiar, Fanon demonstrates the condition of uncanny estrangement as fundamental to colonialism. This sense of the uncanny not only implicitly acknowledges the rupture at the basis of colonization, but the degree to which colonial relationships necessitated a

14 See “Shame and Its Magnification” from Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S Tomkins.

43 repression of the knowledge about the innate violence of that rupture. Uncanny estrangement thus lies at the forefront of shame experiences in both Tomkins’s and Fanon’s accounts.

Yet, when Leys responds to Tomkins’s argument about the role of interruption in the production of shame, she understates the primacy he gives to the idea of a broken relationship— of a rupture. Quoting from a different publication—an article he wrote with Carroll E. Izard— she focuses instead on the physiological indicators Tomkins attached to shame, and does not consider the dependency of his catalogue of physiological sensations upon their social production. The quotation Leys uses begins identically to the statement quoted above, which is extracted from a more ubiquitous version of Tomkins’s argument, published in his collected and selected works, and most frequently cited by Tomkins scholars, such as Donald Nathanson and

Melvin Lansky. However, after the first sentence, this quotation continues with significant differences:

The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy. Hence, any

barrier to further exploration which partially reduces interest or the smile of enjoyment will

activate the lowering of the head and eyes in shame and reduce further exploration or self-

exposure (“AB,” 118). (Leys 130)

By using this version as the basis for her argument about Tomkins’s work on shame, Leys shifts the focus from social interaction to solitude—a curtailment of his theory of the subject as located within a matrix of social relations and marked by a range of social scripts to a subject consumed with a kind of existential navel-gazing. With her emphasis on an earlier co-publication, Leys overlooks the social dimension Tomkins uses to underpin his ideas about interruption, and she isolates his notion of “triggering” away from its context, leading her to claim that “for Tomkins the relation of the affects to their triggering source is purely contingent” (184).

While I do not intend to idealize Tomkins’s theories about shame, I do want to problematize Leys’s use of his theories as evidence for an ideological and historical shift from guilt to shame as categories. Leys relies on distinctions between “identificatory” and “identity” logic to re-insert a division between these two categories, but if the theories she criticizes do not substantiate readings of either category in these exclusionary terms, her argument begs reconsideration. Such a reexamination becomes all the more necessary within a postcolonial context because a shamed postcolonial subject may indeed have no action to feel guilty about and is yet constructed according to guilt, with presumed indebtedness to colonial authority helping to bind feelings of social responsibility, morality, and ontological crises as parts of the same mechanisms that play into subject formation. In this sense, the different associations Leys attaches to guilt and shame combine and intermingle as parts of the same experience, which suggests both ethical and existential implications. Yet, because Leys frames her analysis within the singular paradigm of the carceral aggression instigated by concentration camps or American military prisons, she overlooks the degree to which the sustained racism and oppression underpinning colonial aggression contributes to subject formation and social bonds—in other words, to identity and identification at one and the same time.

Most theorists acknowledge a division between guilt and shame—guilt is usually associated with action while shame is usually linked to identity. But these theorists, from Sartre to Tomkins, also acknowledge the degree of entanglement between these emotional states. Most importantly, however, even when guilt often responds to an action (something a person regrets, perhaps) and shame often responds to feelings of insecurity (something innate to identity, perhaps), the two are rarely pure or isolated, and guilt often folds into a broader experience of shame. A person may commit an action she feels guilty about, but even once reparations have been made or justice has been restored, she may shamefully wonder about that quality in herself

45 that allowed the injustice to occur in the first place; recalling her transgressive act may produce feelings of shame long after the initial guilt has found relief. Moreover, even for the variety of shame placed upon a subject through oppressive mechanisms such as racism or colonialism— shame inscribed as part of an “essential” identity—action can quickly and confusingly become interlaced with that essentialized sense of self, as illustrated when Fanon questions every physical gesture he makes as conveying something integral to his self.

Any theoretical shift that resulted in a privileging of shame theory over guilt theory can also be explained by a broader shift in philosophies of identity. When the development of subjectivity is so intrinsically bound to, woven into, and constructed out of otherness, guilt is not a large enough category to explain the complicated emotional and intersubjective experiences that grow out of reduced self-regard. Modern understandings of shame parallel evolving understandings of identity; guilt is no longer useful as a separate category because we recognize that action is always contingent upon awareness of others, just as shame manifests through a sense of broken identification and a longing for reconnection. Jacques Lacan edited Tomkins’s very first publication, and the influence of each thinker on the other is remarkable; the notion of the shamed subject being produced as a result of his or her indebtedness to the “discourse of the other” as theorized by Lacan suggests just how entangled identity and identification are to begin with. Furthermore, in an age where the possibility of exposure and the prospect of spectators abound, it becomes impossible to disentangle the notion of the self from a wide theatre of publicity—but this was true even before the digital era of Youtube and Reddit, as demonstrated in 1967 by V.S. Naipaul’s Ralph Singh, whose persistent fantasy of a camera in the sky signified that spectatorial logic is always a possibility, even in the most solitary moments.

Ultimately, by separating guilt from shame and by denying shame its social properties,

Leys invited me to consider the degree to which shame engages with the world beyond the

46 subject. If, on the most basic level, shame denotes a lowered self-regard, a withdrawal from others, and a concern with “who you are . . . as a person” (Leys, From Guilt 11), how does it also function—as I think it does—as a measure of relationships? Tomkins’s focus on an interruption of pleasurable and familiar investment in the Other offers a broad paradigm for thinking through shame in a variety of contexts, and enables a reflection on the diverse forms shame takes—not only as a topic of interest in theoretical discussions, but also as a real experience in the world. In both ways, shame often seems entirely contingent upon its unique situation; the only uniformity to shame lies in those physiological elements identified by Tomkins: the blush, the cringe, and those other “discriminable distinct sets of facial, vocal, respiratory, skin, and muscle responses”

(Exploring Affect 58). Beyond its symptomatology, however, the reasons for shame’s emergence may be as unique as its shame-ridden subjects; distinctive, too, are the relationships shame disturbs. When Sartre describes shame’s etiology, he describes the scene of a subject being caught staring through a keyhole onto a forbidden sight; exposure and interruption are both integral to Sartre’s understanding of shame, but so is the notion that the “red-handed” nature of the moment indicates something internal rather than criminal—something suggestive rather than material (Being and Nothingness). Sartre’s etiology is illustrative of the inter- and intrasubjective transformations that occur in the moment of exposure; nevertheless, these transformations grow out of already existing relations. It is as if that “keyhole” moment exposes some undeniable feeling about something detestable that was always there in the subject, but which could only crystallize because of the particular nature of the relationship between the keyhole voyeur and the person who witnesses the transgression. Importantly, as with Tomkins’s description of

“interruption,” since Sartre’s scene is merely a metaphor for shame, it can be transposed into a multitude of different scenes, each of which suggests something unique about the reason exposure, secrets, witnessing, and relationships inflect a subject with shameful feelings.

Here, moving from Leys to Tomkins and Sartre, is where I locate my third and final step toward mimetic shame in literature. In recognizing shame as fundamentally intrasubjective and intersubjective—based in identity and identification—my conceptualization of shame as a subjective experience (rather than purely as a physiological symptom) accrued a certain figurative shape, a structure that traces the social, solitary, and contextually specific natures of shame. Since it partially depends on a real or imagined feeling of exposure, shame travels along a gaze from the (possibly imagined) witness to the ashamed subject. In this sense, the gaze charts the relationship between the subject and the ideal Other whose position of power enables shame’s emergence. Thus, certain relationships orient around a structure of shame; shame travels along the gaze, across the relationship, so that by mapping its itinerary, critics can chart something about the nature of the relationship itself: its power dynamics, and its historical, political, and social inflections. Part of what is mapped is also the structure of the subject and the subject’s relationship with both herself and the figure that inflames or regards her shame. In other words, the structural armature of shame gathers its shape from several diverse pieces: the path of shame provided by the gaze, the intersubjective relationship charted by such a path, and the intrasubjective changes brought to bear by the awareness of the shaming gaze.

Once I recognized that shame insinuates a particular structural shape, it became easier to understand the significance of the shame I was reading in several postcolonial narratives where shame prevails. In many of these novels, a clear “mirroring” function emerges between textual form and the psychological and social structures of shame. This mirroring potentially occurs in multiple ways. For instance, shifts in narrative voice (from first to third person, for instance) often exactly replicate how shame distances or diminishes the self through identification with an idealized Other. Generic experimentations with autobiographical form also often simulate the fractured nature of shameful self-knowledge. Novels do more than merely represent shame on a

48 tropological level; the idea of the gaze frequently informs the very structure of narration. In other words, conceiving of inter- and intrasubjective shame as a structure enables new readings of literary form in novels that centrally engage with shameful experience. The structure of novels about shame and the structure of shame itself reflect back to one another. Furthermore, the textual form that replicates shame’s structural nature interacts dialogically with many novels’ thematic and symbolic representations of shame, shedding significant light on the shameful contexts explored by these novels’ plots. In other words, shame operates on multiple textual levels and its textual structure acts as an underpinning framework for the interpretation of all of a novel’s overlapping elements, which together constitute mimetic shame.

Conventions of Reading Shame in Literature

What I offer in this dissertation is a method for reading shame in postcolonial literature by accounting for the entangled ways literature articulates shame on several levels, which are predominantly underscored first by the specific contextual content informing shameful experiences, and then by a structural form that replicates the inter- and intrasubjective shapes shame conjures. This critical foregrounding of the mimetic function of literary structure is not, however, typical of how shame has predominantly been read by literary critics. Over the past decade, interrogations of literary shame have matched the surge of attention given to shame and other emotions in the increasingly interdisciplinary fields of affect studies and cultural studies.

Scholars have turned to all literary periods to read (or re-read) shame, from the Greek tragedies to Shakespeare to the Victorians and the Modernists. Yet, despite the historical range covered by critiques of literary shame, these investigations frequently share several critical impulses, both in how shame is treated in relation to its textual figuration and in how shame is theorized beyond its literary milieu. That is, there are several commonalities among critics’ exegetical and

49 hermeneutical approaches to shame in literature. In contrast to my “mimetic” approach, whereby

I consider the literary instantiation of shame on symptomatic, contextual, and structural levels, these alternative readings tend to approach shame as a less stratified narrative element. Below, I identify some of these approaches.

Exegetically speaking—by which I refer to the interpretations critics mark purely on the level of narrative—scholars frequently address literary shame along one of three analytical avenues: character, plot, and—less commonly, at least in any singular way—theme. This final avenue is least common, it would seem, because readings of plot or character already take as a given the thematic presence of shame. However, there are times when critiques push theme to the foreground, contending with the philosophical questions implied about shame via textual discourse. Ayelet Ben-Yishai, for instance, responds to Salman Rushdie’s thematic treatment of shame in his 1983 novel Shame as a “dialectic of representation” (195). She takes up the philosophical problems Rushdie’s narrator poses, reading their answers through the authorial asides that disrupt the novel’s plot; in these moments, Ben-Yishai suggests, the novel’s interest in shame achieves rich thematic resonance, whereby the “juxtaposition of two opposites”— shame and shamelessness—produces excessive meaning that ultimately dissolves the opposition

(207). Ben-Yishai’s compelling analysis therefore takes philosophical questions and contends with their significance via a critique of the narrative’s thematic treatment of shame.

For the most part, however, exegetical approaches to literary shame revolve, with some overlapping, around either plot or character. As will become evident, each of these focuses also link to specific tendencies among critics’ hermeneutical treatment of literary shame—that is, the broader significance literary shame is seen to convey once the exegetical work has excavated the text’s local meaning. In predominantly plot-based analyses, critiques tend to privilege the events described by a literary text, indicating the ways in which specific crisis moments—revelations,

50 betrayals, or violations, for instance—reveal a novel’s preoccupation with shame. David

Callahan’s reading of several Australian novels and shorts stories set during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor provides one example of a plot-focused analysis of shame. Here,

Callahan assesses the extent to which Australian fiction engages with “East Timorese realities,” noting how “personal drama” may be “quickened by the dramatic events and the culturally and biologically exotic location” (405). The relationship between “personal memories” and “larger historical stories” (406), tested precisely by Callahan’s method of plot evaluation, produces a degree of shame relative to the text’s willingness to represent historical events within its

“processing of . . . experiences” (411). Callahan’s strategy reveals a critical interest in plot as a measure of historical reckoning—of a text’s capacity to deal in fiction with the atrocities of the past. Although Callahan is somewhat unique in his more exclusive focus on plot, his emphasis on fictional event is echoed to some degree in most critiques of fiction whose plot springs from specific historical circumstances.15

Overwhelmingly, criticism of shame in literature relies on character analysis, especially analyses of characters situated within their specific cultural contexts. Jessica Murray’s feminist readings of South African literature exemplify the critical approach to shame via character analysis. In her work, she considers “the layered shaming to which female characters are subjected in these texts and . . . the extent to which such shame becomes lodged in the bodies of women” (“It Left” 217). Through interpretations of characters’ emotional or psychological responses to crucial experiences, Murray identifies “how the gendered dynamics of shame play out on the psyches and bodies of female characters” (“Manifestations” 21). By reading the significance of a character’s “manoeuvres along her life path” (19), Murray points out the

15 Readings of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace come most obviously to mind; Martin Swales’s “Sex, Shame, and Guilt: Reflections on Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” offers a good instance of just such a plot-based assessment of an authors’ responses to history.

51 important contingencies between social experience, identity, and shame, linking these connections through detailed consideration of characters’ development and their investments in their families and communities.

Most likely because of the obvious service psychoanalysis lends to shame, Murray shares her approach to literary shame with a majority of critics. From Ewan Fernie’s exploration of shame in Shakespearean tragedies to studies of shame in Victorian social novels16 to analyses of shame in contemporary American fiction,17 character frequently provides the richest point of access to literary shame, though in the best cases—such as Fernie’s—character readings are situated within a broader cultural study of emotion. Yet it is always the case—or so it appears in my review of critical responses to literary shame—that literary characters and their feelings function as synecdoches for the social construction of identity. Understanding the nuances underpinning one character’s psyche produces fertile commentary about how a narrative contends with the distress of social constraints and expectations, or the anguish of social injustice and violence.

Such substantial focus on character is not, of course, surprising. After all, the way shame is experienced—what it feels like—is remarkably universal. Despite the specificities attached to the moment of its arousal, shame’s “visceral feeling” (Probyn 1) is most likely recognizable to everyone. Shame earns its infamy through its power to produce a horrible blush or cringe, to magnify the body’s presence at the very moment one wishes to disappear. Thus, characters are the very locus of shame; they denote shame as an experience, inviting critical regard.

Shakespeare’s Lucrece, for example, agonizes over the paradox at the heart of shame’s invisible

16 See, for example, Gordon Hirsch’s interpretation of the significance of characters’ emotions in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 17 David Tenenbaum’s work on Phillip Roth’s novels offers one such example of criticism of American literary shame.

52 physiognomy, crying, “O unseen shame! invisible disgrace! / O unfelt sore! crest-wounding, private scar!” (Rape of Lucrece 878). Likewise, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne endures “peculiar torture” beneath “the gaze of a new eye” (79). Less imploring but similarly freighted by the tortuous sight of the self in the eyes of esteemed others, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock gives a modernist articulation of shame’s notorious symptoms; knowing as well as most the discomfort of being peered at by “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase” and finding himself “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (lines 56, 58), he is beset by the tormenting knowledge of the impossibility of his self-formulation—a realization that eradicates his self-esteem and reduces him to shame. These characters focalize and narrate the painful experience of feeling shame’s symptoms. They are but a few examples from a vast archive of writing about shame as an experience during which the body flares in response to an encounter with others, and they provide expansive and rich terrain for literary analysis of character.

Although poets and novelists may bring certain uniformity to shame’s physiological and psychological experience, their works attest to the fact that shame is produced by an enormous range of triggers and within a variety of contexts. What makes Prufrock’s shame different from, say, Othello’s is not its affective dimensions—not the fundamental feeling he endures. Rather, the conditions provoking the response link each character’s shame to unique historical circumstances, which are both personal and, in a metonymic sense, social. Prufrock’s shame tells the story of a (or “the”) modernist identity crisis—of faltering self-formulation within a culture of eroded virtues—and it surfaces within an entirely different context than the agony Othello utters over his own “formulation,” when he, too, has been made “A fixed figure for the time of scorn / To point his slow unmoving finger at” (IV.ii.56-57). The context for Othello’s shame extends beyond the psychological discomfort of “wriggling” beneath the other’s judging gaze— it accrues meaning distinct from Prufrock’s similar symptomatic expression of shame because of

53 the two characters’ different contextual circumstances. As a result, readings of character are most fruitful when they reveal something about the specific socio-historical circumstances—or the

“politics of shame” (Murray “Manifestations” 19)—that call shame forth.

So far, I have documented critical tendencies in exegetical approaches to literary shame, noting theme, plot, and character as the most frequent focal points for analysis, with character providing the richest material and, consequently, determining the most ubiquitous scholarly approach to shame. But this cursory review only accounts for how exegesis engages with fictions’ narrative representations of shame. It does not account for the hermeneutical understandings critics assign to literary shame. In other words, even knowing the frequent exegetical junctures of shame, it remains necessary to consider the hermeneutic function literary critics most commonly assign to their readings of theme, plot, or character in fictional shame.

Shame articulated through these junctures, after all, seems to demand further address: to what end do novels represent shame via theme, plot, or character? Readings of these literary elements therefore dovetail with arguments about shame performing some kind of emissarial task between the text and the reader or the social world beyond the text. I have identified three such hermeneutic functions: shame interpreted as a therapeutic vehicle, shame interpreted as an ethical guide, and shame interpreted as a social critique. To some degree, each of these assignations overlaps with one another; below, I consider each in isolation.

A. Shame as a Therapeutic Vehicle

The notion that there is a relationship between literature and empathy has long been taken for granted by poets and novelists; indeed this relationship inspires the most common rebuttal to policies that would cut funding to universities’ English departments: we need literature, the aphorism goes, because “it teaches us how to be human” (Gilbert para. 1). After September 11,

2001, literature’s potential to develop empathy in readers and even to heal their emotional wounds was put to a very literal test: victims of 9/11 grieving the loss of their spouses participated in group counselling sessions in which reading literature about grief and shame functioned as the central therapeutic model. These “psychoeducational support groups,” designed in part by Maureen M. Underwood and Laura Winters, incorporated literature and films about loss and shame to activate victims’ grief and trauma with the hopes of helping them work through their pain (157). “Elusive emotions like shame and guilt come alive in film and poetry,”

Underwood and Winters argue. “The thoughtful viewer or reader can glimpse not just the visceral manifestation of this complicated emotion but also a way to make the human, therapeutic connection that is the foundation of healing” (167). Literature portraying shameful experiences, they argue, can potentially ignite recovery within those dealing with their own intense feelings of shame and guilt.

Although these authors put the healing power they ascribe to literature to the test in an actual treatment setting, some literary scholars also attribute a more general therapeutic function to a literary text’s representation of shame. Jessica Murray’s work on shame in literature follows this hermeneutic model—literary shame as therapy—but so do analyses by J. Brooks Bouson,

Rebecca Ashworth, and Rebecca Romdhani, among others. For example, Murray claims that her article on South African short stories by Colleen Higgs and Liesl Jobson “seeks to listen to [the] voices” of “female bodies [that] speak . . . shame” (“It Left” 228) because speaking about (and, she implies, listening to) “shame could potentially play a crucial role in relieving the isolation that is typically experienced by women in abusive relationships” (220). With her critical response that “listens” to literary shame as a means of understanding and working through the shame produced by particular female experiences, Murray adds to a broader trend wherein literature participates in the cultural work of resisting or recovering from shame as a mechanism

55 of oppression. Rebecca Romdhani puts forth a similar claim about Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, arguing that the novel reveals “ways to emotionally heal” the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade “for the African-Caribbean diaspora” (73). In her contributions to studies of Toni Morrison’s fiction, J. Brooks Bouson helps to articulate the therapeutic function of literary shame. In her reading of The Bluest Eye, Bouson argues that Morrison’s narrative acts

“out a countershaming strategy” (209), and that the novel “uses narrative structure and aesthetic design not only to fascinate and impress readers—and thus to counteract shame—but also to partially defend against the horrors it is assigned to uncover” (213).

At their foundations, what these critics propose is a version of catharsis, although the purging of emotions familiar to the Aristotelian concept both narrows in its particular attention to shame and broadens in its ameliorative possibilities for society as a whole. However, the problems that arise when critics subordinate textuality in favour of reader response are only partially attended to by those critics who read therapeutic potential in fiction. Bouson implicitly acknowledges the slipperiness of a therapeutically-oriented novel when she notes that The Bluest

Eye

not only has provoked feelings of shame or by-stander’s guilt in readers, but it also has

induced critic after critic to enact the trauma-specific and antishaming roles of advocate

or rescuer, or to become unwitting participants in the shame drama of blaming and

attacking the other in their critical responses to the novel. (212)

Because she positions the novel within a therapeutic framework, Bouson must also contend with the vexed, complicated, and sometimes inappropriate responses from readers faced with the emotional work Bouson suggests Morrison demands.

B. Shame as an Ethical Guide

Attesting to its significant overlap with the emotional state of guilt, shame is often said to mark a realization about a need for change. Faced with the unpleasantness of shameful feelings, most individuals avoid public behavior that could lead to shaming consequences. Furthermore, once shame does sink its teeth into the shriveling subject, it functions to expose fault, weakness, or insufficiency. At least, this is a conceptualization of shame that fits well within a universe wherein the precondition of the subject hinges on his or her relative social freedom. As soon as we begin to consider shame as something thrust upon a subject as a mechanism of power, this

“exposing” element of shame becomes more fraught and problematic; it is hardly accurate to suggest that Fanon’s shameful feelings expose any “true” kernel of his identity—if anything, his shame exposes the mechanisms within the colonial regime that produce shame so powerfully.

Yet notwithstanding this socially inscribed element of shame within unjust systems, there remains a strong consensus among many theorists that shame’s power to expose marks an opportunity for ethical engagement with others. In his analysis of shame in Shakespeare, Ewan

Fernie explains the ethical implications shame potentially introduces: “Shame purifies our bad consciousness, offering salvation from the tyranny and prison of the self. It opens a door, pointing the way to spiritual health and realization of the world beyond egoism” (8). Fernie shares some of the impulses behind the therapeutic model for reading literary shame previously described; he argues, for instance, that a “transforming moment” in a Shakespearean tragedy may send “ripples of more or less vicarious shame through the theatre and thereby perhaps

[have] a more positive ethical and political effect outside it” (74). Fernie’s argument, however, has more to do with what Shakespearean characters’ shameful feelings reveal about ethics than about the plays’ potentially cathartic capacities. Thus, even though “[t]heatrical shame unites the

57 audience in a collective and (as it seems) cruelly pain-inflicting act of beholding the shamed figure before them” (76), what Shakespearean shame is really all “about,” according to Fernie,

“is the pain of not being one’s ideal self” (225). Therefore, for Fernie—and for other critics who identify ethical guidance in literary shame—a character’s encounter with shameful feelings functions to remind him or her (and, via metonymic associations, to remind society at large) about ideal goodness. By recognizing the inferiority of the self, a character learns through shame the moral depths to which he or she has descended (for many of Shakespeare’s characters, these realizations come tragically too late). Lear, for instance, can die while renewing his relationship with Cordelia only because he has “acknowledged the shame of his mistreatment” of her (226).

Such recognitions of shame within literature serve other ethical insights, as well. Gordon

Hirsch reads in George Eliot’s Middlemarch a model of manners in which Dorothea’s character operates in moral opposition to the other villagers. Her sympathy functions in the novel, claims

Hirsch, “as a means of defending against shame” (96). Where some characters, such as Lydgate or Rosamond, despair beneath the burden of shame, Dorothea stands as an ethical guide, offering compassion as an alternative strategy to coping with threatening situations. However, in both of these critiques, shame instructs; by revealing indecency or moral corruption, shame points the way toward proper action. Aided by attenuating literary symbolism—Lear’s torn robes or

Lydgate’s debt, for instance—characters’ realizations operate as transitions from shame to purity, even if that purity is only implied through a text’s instructive potential.

C. Shame as a Social Critique

Shame as a social critique shares much with the previous hermeneutic function that critics have associated with literary shame. Dramatizing a character’s ethical failures is often part and parcel of the task of pointing out the flaws of a whole society, either because the character is

58 symptomatic of a wider malaise or because the society enables or conditions the character’s corruption. However, there are also plenty of fictional works where shame does not emerge as an ethical failure—when a narrative dramatizes an individual’s or community’s shame even when the moral failings cannot be clearly anchored to their actions. In either case—whether shame articulates one character’s moral failings or whether it congeals around a character as a result of violence or repression—critics frequently read shame as identifying social or political wrongdoings. As a social critique, shame is read as a dreadful wound inflicted by unjust exercises of systemic cruelty or Foucauldian discipline. For instance, David Tenenbaum’s analysis of Phillip Roth’s male protagonist suggests that “Roth portrays characters who attempt to escape the emasculating shame of their Jewish identity” (35), but Tenenbaum links his character analysis to his claim that characters’ desires to “purify” themselves “embody the . . . critique of the American witch-hunt that pervades” some of Roth’s works about political correctness and racism, such as The Human Stain (49). Similarly, David Callahan’s readings of

Australian fiction about East Timor argue that various characters’ failures to respond adequately to unjust political events function as “moral disruptions” (404) that “[point] the finger at the political class principally, but at Australian society in general, for having ignored what was happening in East Timor so comprehensively” (408). In these studies, then, characters’ shameful situations actually reveal “not so much a personal shame as a national one” (Tenenbaum 412).

These critics take up the strategy—and this is a strategy that I employ, too—of reading literary shame as a measure of the systemic violence at the heart of the social construction of identity. It is this kind of critical perspective that allows modernist scholar Patricia Moran to argue that certain characters’ shameful feelings or shameful predicaments are “situated, in other words, informed by particular material and historical factors” (728). By analyzing the events and character development recounted in literary fiction about shame, these critics gesture toward the

59 sociopolitical discursive mechanisms that produce shame; via critique, scholars read these texts as offering possible new models of articulating subjectivity or of navigating public and political crises.

The Dimensions of Mimetic Shame

The methods considered above represent the main significance critics ascribe to literary shame: shame helps a reader or culture work through shameful or traumatic histories, it teaches readers or societies about “right” behavior, or it points out failures within the reader’s social world. Sometimes, novels are read as using shame to accomplish all three of these tasks at once.

What interests me, however, is the relationship critics identify (or disregard) between a literary work’s aesthetic and social schemata. How frequently do scholars elucidate the interplay between aesthetics and the social, or between exegetical and hermeneutical critical stances?

What is lost during interpretation when, for example, a character analysis only operates as an opportunity for healing? With this exclusive focus, what other textual elements go unexamined?

This is not to suggest that it is possible—or even fruitful—for a critic to mine every possible literary maneuver a novel achieves or to explain every possible meaning such maneuvers might express. But I propose that mimetic shame—wherein a literary text replicates on a textual level the symptomatic, contextual, and structural experiences of shameful feelings—can provide some accounting for the various ways “real-life” shame gets “textualized,” both allowing for a better understanding of shame’s disciplinary and coercive function and yielding a better sense of literature’s meaningful recalibration of shame’s import and impact.

I would suggest that one of the best places to begin a critical approach to literary shame is in the realm of context: what exactly is the event or situation the novel is ashamed about? Rather than bringing to the literary text a preconceived notion of what shame is, using the text first to

60 understand why shame exists enables an interpretation of shame itself to be governed by its specific contextual factors. As the fulcrum that supports interpretive questions about the aesthetic and phenomenological dimensions of a literary work, context sustains the important distinctions that emerge between Othello’s and Prufrock’s shame, to recall an example suggested earlier in this chapter. Of course, many of the contexts considered in the following chapters relate to the specific ways colonial and postcolonial situations engender shame. In the chapters that follow, I ask questions about how individual novels textualize the shame produced, for instance, by the conditions of indentured labour in Trinidad, or the memory of internecine violence within South

Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, or the impact of Orientalist representations of Middle Eastern people upon Arab migrants to western nations. Each of these unique contexts requires the specificity of a novel’s story to anchor its aesthetic treatment, but a novel’s story underpins the entirety of narrative discourse. Narratologist Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan points out that “whereas

‘story’ is a succession of events, ‘text’ is a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their telling” (3). In other words, the stories (or plots) of novels, which may be “abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order” (3), buttress all the other textual elements, such as focalization, imagery, symbolism, and repetition, which together narrate a significance to shame that cannot be expressed by story or context alone.

But what, then, do novels “speak” about shame, and how can shame’s discursive instantiations be rendered meaningful? The only major book-length study of postcolonial literary shame, Timothy Bewes’s The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2010), regards shame from much the opposite direction as I regard it. As I noted in the introduction to this dissertation, Bewes argues that literary shame attests to the idea that shame is neither speakable nor signifiable. Bearing remarkable similarity to Caruth’s arguments about literary trauma’s ineluctable silences, Bewes reads literary shame as operating as “a principle of simultaneous negation of every positive

61 perception, notion, or theory that might be attributed to the text” (35). For Bewes, postcolonial writing inevitably produces shame, even while it cannot signify shame; from his perspective, shame marks “the very condition of existence” (28), permeating all subjects who in seeking to escape shame end up conveying shame as a pervasive textual “sensation” (35). Yet for Bewes, this “sensation” is only evocative, never articulate. Because he regards shame as nullifying textual expression of “every possible perception, notion, or theory,” his argument both limits and endlessly opens what can be understood as literary expression. On one hand, Bewes’s focus on

“perception, notion, or theory” circumscribes the possibilities of textual meaning because it presumes a prescriptive attitude to reading, by which a reader looks to the text as affirmation of his or her own principles or interests. On the other hand, Bewes’s focus broadens the horizon of textual meaning to immeasurable distances whereby shame, the condition of all human existence, is so innate that it defies full knowledge. By simultaneously reifying shame’s ontological nature and reducing literature’s signifying potential, Bewes ignores the capacity of several other elements of representation, such as imagery, metaphor, dialogue, and connotation, each of which can interact with one another in productive and meaningful ways. In fact, paying particular attention to motif, Bewes suggests that the tropological mechanisms of literature debase or deform the true nature of shame, asserting: “Shame cannot be peddled as an artistic motif without undergoing huge violence” (36).18 By this, Bewes means that because shame is “an event that cannot be separable from the moment of its writing” (37), shame cannot withstand the manipulations and artistry that the tools of narration, such as motif, impose, as if the literary apparatus requires a form of authorial solicitude that cannot brook style, structure, or even full consciousness. In characterizing shame as “irreducible,” Bewes denies the excessive potential

18 With his reverence for an “essential” shame, Bewes’s work enacts what Ruth Leys cautions against: “the pathos of the literal” (Trauma).

62 meaning that may be expressed—consciously or not—between textual elements, and between the text and its reader. Because Bewes, following Georg Lukacs, construes dissonance between a novel’s form and its content, there will always be an “incommensurability” to shame, which he regards as essential to writing yet impossible to signify.

In contrast to Bewes, I am concerned with the consonance between a novel’s form and content. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that “form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (259).

Like Bakhtin, I hold to the idea that the compatibility or eventual unity of a literary text is a consequence of the social (or, in Lacanian terms, the symbolic) nature of discourse and representation. As such, the shame a novel represents is encapsulated within each and across all literary devices; even a novel’s caesuras, which Bewes reads as traces of the impossibility of shame’s representation—invite interpretation and deliver possibilities for understanding attributes of shame within specific contexts and as the result of specific social forces. Each element of textuality, including motif, image, metaphor, repetition, and ellipsis, works together to elaborate shame’s impact on the social world and on intra- and intersubjective relationships.

Because my emphasis on textual “reflection” corresponds with my phenomenological approach, my conceptualization of mimetic shame in the literary text does not only regard textual devices suggestive of shameful feelings as “mirrors” to real world shame. This understanding stops short of the possibilities and properties of which mimesis is capable. A metaphor may indeed capture some elements of the nature of humiliation; for instance, Rawi Hage’s cockroach immigrant and Zakes Mda’s stinking mourner both draw on metaphors to characterize the contexts that shame specific subject formations. These metaphors—and other imagistic literary devices—usefully convey the bodily conflicts that beleaguer the victims of shame, “mirroring”

63 the internal strife that most people familiar with shameful feelings will easily recognize.

However, the mimetic shame I chart in this dissertation reflects the relationship between the text and the world as multidimensional rather than merely illustrative or analogic.

The multidimensionality my theorization of shame elucidates structures itself through the narrative, subjective, and social layers of shame a text articulates, and can only be read with the aid of psychoanalysis, which Bewes excludes from his argument. One way to consider this shift in understanding—a shift from analogic shame to dialogic and mimetic shame—is to visualize the distinction between a mirror image and the entire scene in which an individual regards a mirror image. In the first instance, the mirror image is a two-dimensional reflection, just as a metaphor is the textual device whose imagery conveys to the reader a portrait of a shameful feeling. Notwithstanding the potent meaning this portrait can signify, the broader scene of an encounter with a mirror encapsulates not only the image itself, but the entire situation of looking: the self regarding her image and the complicated relations at play in the recognition of one’s shame. Also included in the scene is the cognizance of the scene as a scene—the third figure

(perhaps a reader, an interlocutor, an omniscient gaze implied by a master discourse—or perhaps several different witness figures) who regards the subject regarding her mirror image. The refractions could continue interminably; mimetic shame constructs on a textual level the multiple ways in which shame crystallizes not only as a bodily affect but as a register of an impoverished ego as it exists within a matrix of social relations. (That is, the ego feels impoverished as a result of the lack that it registers in contrast with the seeming wholeness of the rest of the world.) The scene of the mirror does include the metaphor (or the other analogic textual devices by which imagery conjures meaning) but, as with the entire scene enclosed within the diorama of a witness watching the subject regard her mirror image, mimetic shame also suggests the contextual situation triggering shame as well as the structure of the literary text itself: its shifts in narrative

64 voice, its play with generic conventions, its use of caesura or repetition or dissonance—all of those elements of literary form that can enunciate the fissures or fusions within the ashamed individual or social psyche.

Earlier in this chapter, I focused on the reading strategies that dominate critical conversations about shame in literature, most of which isolate one manifestation of shame and consider that element within a single hermeneutic framework; however, some scholarly interventions demonstrate this multidimensional approach that I suggest produces the richest understandings of the work literary shame undertakes. One such model is Sam McKegney’s article about the impact of Canada’s residential schools on indigenous communities. Although

McKegney does not employ the term “mimetic shame,” his argument about how literary shame textually reproduces the experiences of real-world shame helps to clarify the methodology elaborated in the following chapters of this dissertation. Concentrating on how shame has been used to control and destroy indigenous populations, McKegney remarks on evidence drawn from

2011 Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies before turning to a range of indigenous literary texts that react to the memory and legacy of residential schools. McKegney begins his engagement with this literature via a character analysis of Gwich’in novelist Robert Arthur

Alexie’s Porcupine and China Dolls in order to understand the corrosive effects of shame on individuals and culture, noting:

Public displays of violence and humiliation were used in residential schools not only to

produce a docile and obedient student population, but also, more insidiously, to damage

empathy. The experience by which the young boy is ‘haunted’ in Alexie’s novel indeed

begins as empathy—the vicarious torment of hearing his sister suffer. Yet shame becomes

the cost of that empathy and ultimately works to condition its suppression. The initial pain at

another’s agony becomes contaminated by guilt and is thereby repositioned within the

onlooker. (n.p.)

However, the psychological evidence of shame in the novel’s characters only provides

McKegney’s first incursion to literary shame. Ultimately, understanding the psychological impact of shame on indigenous communities allows McKegney to develop a structural figuration of shame that takes place in both textual and social domains, with specific devices providing a mirroring function between these two spaces.

For example, in his analysis of Cree poet Louise Bernice Hälfe’s poem “Nitotem,” which portrays a victim of sexual abuse at residential school growing up to become a victimizer within his indigenous community, McKegney observes how the poem’s alliteration works to convey an experience of “assault on [the victim’s] ears” (n.p.). This connection between form and experience develops further when McKegney anchors his argument about shame to three symbols inserted between the poem’s last two stanzas; these symbols “represent a temporal shift that emphasizes the intergenerational legacies of residential school abuse, as the sexual violence endured by the young boy spills out into the community” (n.p.). However, McKegney remarks that the symbols fulfill a further purpose; not only do they indicate the passage of time and transformation of character, they also “hint at the three amputations” that McKegney argues

were enacted at residential school to subdue empathy in the service of Indigenous

deterritorialization—firstly, the severing of mind from body (and the concomitant

derogation of the body); secondly, the severing of male from female (and the concomitant

derogation of the feminine); and thirdly, the severing of the individual from communal and

territorial roles and responsibilities (and the concomitant derogation of kinship and the land).

(n.p.)

The analytical terrain McKegney covers here is multifold; growing out of the specific context of residential schools, his argument moves from an analysis of the psychological impact of systemic, manufactured shame, which was used as a tool of “colonial dispossession,” to an attention to how literary form imitates the “chronic” legacy of shame’s infectious transmission from body to society. In other words, he binds his argument about shame equally to narrative, subjective, and social experience, demonstrating how the text replicates the physiological symptoms, the contextual triggers, and the intra/intersubjective structures of shame. These three registers of shame, demonstrated as part of the narrative form of the literary works he examines, correlate to the embodied, historical, and social significance of shame in the real experiences of indigenous people in Canada. Consequently, his analysis demonstrates the rich potential mimetic shame can offer as a means of bringing the literary text into a dialogic exchange with the social world. As with the symbols McKegney reads as reflections of shame’s amputating impact on indigenous subjectivity, all literary elements carry the potential to signify shame—its symptoms, its contexts, and its psycho-social structure. Literary shame is, then, fundamentally mimetic.

Models of Reading Mimetic Shame

Reading mimetic shame requires a consideration of a novel’s representation of shame from three different perspectives, with an eye to bodily symptom, contextual trigger, and narrative structure. If a postcolonial novel is fundamentally concerned with shame, then, with respect to the bodily facets of shame, where are its physiological iterations? Are the embodied symptoms of shame manifested as particular metaphors or symbols—putrescent odors, characters’ fantasies of invisibility, shattered mirrors, or physical metamorphoses, for instance?

In view of shame’s connection to historical events, within what narrative contexts are such representations of symptoms situated? How do literary renderings of historical episodes

67 configure shameful memories? How are characters’ symptomatic struggles impacted by their relationship to a shameful context? How do shameful memories contest political narratives that shape national futures, in spite of the shameful secrets such narratives might obscure? How do historical contexts relate to a novel’s time sequencing? Does a plot unfold with a linear chronology or is it disordered, told in fractures or fragments? How does a plot’s “fictional

‘reality’” (Rimmon-Kenan 6) relate to the “real world” it represents, and to what degree are fictional or historical events reliably portrayed? Is a novel’s narrator untrustworthy, and what does this unreliability suggest about the way shame itself alters or mutates one’s understanding of an event? Finally, in light of shame’s contingency upon intra- and intersubjective relations, how do a literary text’s formal elements correspond to the structural nature of shame? What, for instance, does a fictional autobiography suggest about the role narcissism plays in covering up shameful relationships? How do intertextual references or motifs shore up, complicate, or resist the shameful discourses structuring postcolonial relations? At what points do dissonant shifts in narrative voice or focalization indicate the shameful interruptions that rupture desire and investments in relationships with others? In other words, how does textual structure correlate with the phenomenological structure of shame? Despite the entangled nature of literary form and signification, these questions tease apart the literary registers at which shameful symptom, trigger, and structure might become apparent, where they might best be understood to reflect the social domain where shame is most corrosive. In the following pages, I offer brief readings of mimetic shame in three postcolonial novels; each suggests the ways the texts’ symptomatic, contextual, and structural registers signify shame.

A. Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983)

Told at a “slight angle to reality” (22), Rushdie’s Shame parodies and indicts the power struggle in the late 1970s between Pakistan’s presidents Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq— only barely disguised in the novel as Iskander Harrappa and Raza Hyder. But Shame is more generally an allegory of the relationship between shame and violence, a relationship that is metaphorically distilled through the character of Sufiya Zinobia, daughter to Raza Hyder. On the symptomatic register (to employ the term I assign to one of the three levels of mimetic shame),

Rushdie portrays Sufiya Zinobia from the start as entirely determined by shameful affect: she is born blushing. This “slow burning” (126) benignly foreshadows the gradual transformation of a body that, by the age of twelve, sizzles “with pus bursting from her sores, dribbling, incontinent”

(145), and, by the end of her life, bears “like battle scars the lacerations of bushes, animals, her own itch-scratching nails” (269-70). Sufiya’s status as an unwanted daughter precipitates her metamorphosis, but it is the abuse she endures at the hands of her mother, Bilquìs Hyder, that causes her to fall ill with “brain fever”—a disease whose lasting damage establishes in her the

“[o]pposing elements of a fairy-tale combined in a single character” (144). As the fantastical hybridization of both the Beauty and the Beast, Sufiya Zinobia is split between the “purity” implied by her “mental disability” (123) and the shame that, unfelt by those who commit shamefully violent acts (particularly the acts of corrupt politicians), she magically absorbs “like a sponge” (123). She eventually succumbs to the “suicidal rebellion of the janissaries of the human body against the castle itself” (148);19 the “beauty” in Sufiya Zinobia transmogrifies into a gruesome animal “coated in mud and blood and shit” (304). Escaping from a sedated state in the attic of her parents’ and husband’s house (simultaneously a sleeping beauty and a madwoman in

19 Here, Rushdie’s language (“janissaries” refers to members of the royal Turkish infantry who rebelled against the sultan) is suggestive of the ways in which the shame/Sufiya trope is shot through with militant violence.

69 the attic—a typically Rushdie-esque fusion), Sufiya Zinobia, “shame’s avatar” (231), stalks the wilderness for years before finally murdering her husband and disappearing from the novel in an amplification of the way she appears: her atomic explosion—“the fireball of her burning”

(304)—is, of course, the most suicidal of blushes.

In binding violence and shame in an unending cycle of crime and punishment, Rushdie does more than merely wag his finger at world leaders and the covert malevolent acts that sustain their power. By writing Sufiya as the vessel of violence and shame, and by portraying this vessel as the embodiment of the grotesque20 (at the end of her life, her part-beast, part-human body radiates “the stink of ordure and death” [270]), Rushdie calls attention to the ways in which shame, like violence, functions at the corporeal level. It is Sufiya’s body that suffers—violently, repulsively—from shame. However, with shame as the conquering force on the metaphorical battlefield of Sufiya’s body, a part of Sufiya herself disappears. Her husband, Omar Khayyam

Shakil, notices that “the edges of Sufiya Zinobia’s body were beginning to become uncertain, as if there were two beings occupying that air-space, competing for it, two entities of identical shape but of tragically opposed natures” (248). Here, Rushdie dramatizes the idea of blushing as a “psychosomatic event” (126; original italics), but the control of “mind over matter” is severed and the sovereignty of Sufiya’s mind, that “castle” invaded by the “janissaries of [her] body”

(148), is displaced by her transformation into the Beast of Shame. Matter over mind: Sufiya’s body is possessed by shame as she corporealizes the violence she both telepathically witnesses and enacts in a somnambulant trance. Thus, the hazy boundaries of Sufiya Zinobia’s body

20 Following such critics as Aijaz Ahmad’s and Andrew Teverson’s use of the term “grotesque” to refer to Rushdie’s novel, I use the word cautiously, aware of its association in art with the Italian grottesco and in literature with the Gothic period. However, considering that Sufiya Zinobia’s characterization echoes the traditional fantastical combination of human and animal figures in both artistic and literary forms, I hope the term respects the tradition within which Rushdie works.

70 demarcate her simultaneous monstrous embodiment and, strangely, her spectrality. She is there and not-there at once.

Sufiya Zinobia’s spectral and monstrous contradictions stress the conflicts that arise when her body encounters pressures—physically uncomfortable as well as visually remarkable— that are both privately mortifying and publicly enacted. It is as though she undergoes a kind of

“disembodiment” that mimics the imaginative separating off of the self from the body as a result of the shame that is, as Rushdie so fantastically demonstrates, inextricably connected to state violence. The opposition in Sufiya between mind and body and between spectrality and corporeality expresses the literary manifestations of shame carried out by the novel’s symptomatic register. Thanks to the symptoms of shame, Sufiya feels most trapped by her body at the very moment she wishes to escape herself; indeed, Rushdie dramatizes that paradoxical conflict when Sufiya succumbs entirely to her affective identity: in becoming shame, those parts of her that desired release from shame are ultimately pressed out of existence.21

Rushdie’s thematic and analogic focus on violence and shame combine with his contextual focus on state power in the plot of his novel, reminding us of how intrinsically shame links political power, physical experience, and social relationships—or, to recall my three levels of shame, to link trigger to symptom and structure. As well, Rushdie’s allegorical representation of the shame he attaches to twentieth century politics in Pakistan underscores the interconnections among these three levels of shame: Sufiya’s physiological responses cannot be extricated from their political or historical significance, or again from their intersubjective production (the de-subjectification that caused Fanon to imagine his body as “a hemorrhage that

21 Rushdie’s positioning of Sufiya Zinobia’s body as both hazily ethereal and gruesomely corporeal underscores the conflict I identify in other literary representations of violent or post-violent states—a conflict between subjects’ desires to imagine themselves as bodiless (or, in cases like Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, as transmogrified) and the way in which their bodies also serve as the horrifying reminders of the violent past and of the impossibility of such disembodiment.

71 spattered my whole body with black blood” (112) bears remarkable similarity to the violent literal desubjectification Sufiya suffers as a result of her status as a shameful object).

Most importantly, however, Rushdie’s commentary on shameful symptoms and the shameful contexts that produce them—notably, political corruption in Pakistan—also functions in the novel as a commentary on the psychological position of the novelist himself, and the degree to which he is also afflicted with shame. As Brendon Nicholls notes in his analysis of

Shame, the novel “is as much a contemplation of the migrant artist as it is an engagement with the problems of narrating Pakistan” (109). With the narrator’s frequent disruptive interjections,

Rushdie constructs an affinity between the shame(lessness) the novel fictionalizes and the crisis of belonging that causes the narrator to regard his story as shameful by virtue of the fact that it is he who tells it. He imagines his Pakistani readers responding to his novel in this way: “We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked language, what can you tell but lies?” (Rushdie 22). Here,

Rushdie suggests the degree to which some of his readership might conflate narration with lies; that he poses this conflation at the outset of a story about shame, in which shame itself is borne from lies and mutations, suggests the degree to which the novel’s analogic form—the “not

Pakistan, or not quite” (22)—allegorizes not only the shameful political history of twentieth century Pakistan, but also the shameful migrations that take Rushdie out of the story, so to speak, and allow him to live without the immediate threat of violence in London (he wrote Shame, of course, before the fatwa was issued against him in 1989). Just as the contours of Sufiya Zinobia’s body grow uncertain, gradually transforming into misshapen monstrosity, so does the migrant novelist undergo a transfiguration, losing a part of himself that he once recognized. This loss is both driven by and productive of shame, and they are signified by the narrative intrusions

72 sprinkled throughout Shame, so that the novelist-narrator, too, takes on a spectral, ashamed narrative presence.

B. Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979)

In Burger’s Daughter, a novel about a woman resisting both the expectations of ideal whiteness held by South Africa’s apartheid regime and the expectations of sacrifice held by the anti-apartheid movement, Nadine Gordimer locates embodied shame at the heart of ethical subjectivity. In what initially seems a typical bildungsroman quest for independence, Rosa

Burger struggles to assert herself outside the identifications constructed by either apartheid ideologies or her parents’ anti-apartheid politics; this struggle prompts a journey toward shameful self-recognition. Rosa’s process of repositioning herself mirrors a literal journey from inside the imperial centre (Johannesburg), to outside (Europe), and back again. However, on a formal level, Gordimer’s aesthetics operate through her manipulation of narrative perspective, with a third person voice that constantly interrupts a first-person voice, as though peering in on

Rosa from above. At times, this third-person voice sounds like her biographer, at others like her family’s activist comrades judging her from afar; in this way Gordimer problematizes through vocal shifts the possibilities of the bildungsroman trajectory toward individual triumph. Within apartheid South Africa, such a trajectory would require repression or denial—departures from shameful self-awareness.

These formal manipulations of perspective, which indicate the structural register of the novel’s mimetic shame, reflect Rosa’s intrasubjective experience of shame as a white South

African woman. Even her name is both socially and textually inscribed; she is a white (but, with

“Rosa,” blushing) woman cast as a regular citizen (or “burgher”) in a country in which the very logic of citizenship has been made contemptible. The novel opens on a scene that, told from

73 different perspectives, underscores these conflicting formulations of Rosa’s identity. In the scene, an adolescent Rosa queues outside a prison to deliver a message to her mother, who awaits trial. In this scene, it is Rosa’s painfully menstruating body that testifies to the limits of knowing, and to the line between private and public. Unaware of her bodily pain, the public, third person voice wonders what kind of person Rosa might be: “Imagine, a schoolgirl: she must have somebody inside” (9). The reader learns later that she is consumed only by her own physical suffering from menstruation: “outside the prison the internal landscape of my mysterious body turns me inside out, so that in that public place on that public occasion . . . I am within that monthly crisis of destruction, the purging, tearing, draining of my own structure” (15-

16). In identifying her body as a “structure” of suffering that enfolds a “landscape,” Rosa draws a parallel between her body, South Africa, and imprisonment, and so suggests that the three are intimately bound up with each other, mutually determining the experience of subjectivity, which is itself always encoded through suffering and systemic violence. Indeed, in recalling the mass violence of 1960s demonstrations against apartheid policies, when Rosa was twelve, she notes that “what happened at Sharpeville was as immediate to me as what was happening in my own body” (115).

The metaphor of menstruation appears again in the novel, after Rosa’s father has died in prison and she has isolated herself away from his cause and his comrades, determined to find freedom and self-determination. An old friend of the Burger family, Clare Terblanche, visits

Rosa in the hopes of enlisting her back into the anti-apartheid movement. While Rosa shows

Clare an empty flat in her apartment building, the two women argue about the purpose of political commitment. When Rosa scorns the anti-apartheid movement’s predictable tactics and undying commitment to the future, her shoulders lift “against shameful laughter” (127), just as

Clare’s “face slowly thickened and concentrated before me the way the faces of patients at the

74 hospital would register an injection releasing the sensation of some substance into the bloodstream” (125). As their political argument unfolds through images of embodiment, shame, and victimization, Rosa opens a cupboard door to discover “a sanitary towel dried stiff to the shape in which it had been worn” (123). Shutting the cupboard, Rosa denies the evidence of the kind of pained embodiment that, as in the novel’s opening scene, is at once ordinary and encumbered by political meanings. It is Clare who finally discards the bloody napkin; Rosa notes that Clare “burie[s] her burden . . . as if she had successfully disposed of a body” (129). With

Rosa turning away from her political responsibilities (significantly, she has also abandoned her career as a physiotherapist, which had signified her investment in the body), Clare is the only one of the two women capable of engaging with the facts of embodiment, of responding to physical suffering—but her act of “burial” carries for Rosa a sense of “burden” as well as repulsion, as though she sees the “crude parcel” as a corpse.

Gordimer thus twice references the ordinary suffering that attends menstruation and both times implicates this particular variety of pain within a wider political framework. No physical suffering, Gordimer suggests, not even menstrual bleeding, can be disengaged from the mechanisms of apartheid, which overwhelms and estranges all other measures of pain, just as it overlays all aspects of embodiment with its racist and violent tactics of oppression.

Rosa, however, desires freedom from the political demands made of her; she wishes to

“defect” (264) from her father’s life and this desire requires a turning away from an embodied sense of subjectivity, one lived fully within the context of physical suffering. In a frequently discussed scene, Gordimer emphasizes the alienation from self that such a denial of body necessitates: Rosa encounters a black man brutally beating a donkey, but despite her horror at the animal’s agony, feels unable to stop the man because to do so she would have to occupy the role of white master determined by apartheid’s racist power structures: “I drove on because the

75 horrible drunk was black, poor and brutalized” (210). Abandoning the animal to its pain has its consequences: Rosa cannot bear to live in a land in which politically determined suffering turns possibilities of compassion upside down, a land in which one ethical decision constitutes another ethical transgression. “I let him beat the donkey. The man was a black. So a kind of vanity counted for more than feeling; I couldn’t bear to see myself—her—Rosa Burger—as one of those whites who can care more for animals than people” (210). In moving past the beating scene, Rosa feels she must leave South Africa, but both abandonments constitute a shift outside of herself, a crucial denial: she moves from “myself” to “her” to “Rosa Burger.” Here, Gordimer enacts a narrative move that appropriately parallels the affective experience of shame, in which one regards oneself from the position of a judging other. It is a shift toward self-alienation that arises out of ashamed white embodiment.

Indeed, the triple-step away from the cohesive self, marked by “myself—her—Rosa

Burger,” corresponds with the focalization employed within each of the three sections of

Gordimer’s novel. The first section, most closely aligned with the first-person self-discovery that characterizes Rosa’s early life, gives way to the second section, which signifies an intermediate stage of Rosa’s life when, in Europe, she abandons life and politics. This middle section of the novel, when Rosa lives in France with her father’s first wife, details the private luxuries of a woman who believes herself free of a society whose injustices determine the significance of embodiment. At the end of this middle section, however, Rosa attends a party in London, where she encounters Vlulindlela, who was once called Baasie when he was taken in by Rosa’s parents and raised as part of the family, but whose real name, significantly, means “Suffering Land.”

Having long ago lost track of Vlulindlela’s location, Rosa is pleased to see him in London. But

Vlulindlela is furious with the encounter; afterwards, he telephones to confront her, accusing

Rosa for her family’s privileged position within the anti-apartheid struggle. Rosa shouts back at

Vlulindlela, shocking herself by the strength of her own vitriol.

Abdul JanMohammed reviews Rosa’s encounter with Vlulindlela, noting that “Rosa’s immediate reaction to this quarrel is emotional . . . Rosa now weeps for the apparent end of her personal ties with Africans” (124). In fact, Rosa’s first reaction is not to weep. When Vlulindlela rejects Rosa’s entreaties to pick up the traces of affection they shared as children, when she responds to him with an anger laced with racist suppositions she didn’t know herself capable of holding, she runs to her toilet and vomits—uncontrollably and excessively. This is, as

JanMohammed notes, an emotional response, but it is also importantly a physical response—an expunging of feeling so strong that it involves the rejection of a part of herself, a turning inside out of sorts. It is a moment that recalls Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, which suggests that in the relationship between the Self and the Other there lies the jettisoned abject, a repository for the entwined feelings of shame and desire, which constantly threaten to destabilize a subject through sickening sensations of horror. It is a moment that constitutes, in a sense, a death and a rebirth; indeed, Rosa notes that Vlulindlela’s attack “disposed of her whining to go back to bed and bury them both” (322, emphasis added). As Kristeva notes of scenes of abject vomiting: “I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself . . . it is thus that they see that ‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death.

During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (231). The symbolic death of the European incarnation of Rosa’s identity makes way for her rebirth as a comrade fighting against apartheid in South Africa.

Rosa’s body’s sickly expulsion therefore parallels the kind of shift in perspective from first- to third-person narration that is so suggestive of the novel’s structural engagement with the idea of ethical articulations of shamed subjectivity, and which is encapsulated by Rosa’s

77 shameful regard of herself during the scene of the brutalized donkey, when Rosa moves from seeing “myself—her—Rosa Burger.” Her moment of vomiting is also a moment of shame—of seeing herself from the eyes of the Other and rejecting, physically and forcefully, that which shames her. Her retching marks a crisis point, wherein the repressed aspects of herself pour forth, and the shame of her chosen ignorance is finally purged. She dies and is reborn, in a sense, as a person who embodies a sense of otherness within her own identity. Once she has vomited,

Rosa’s only choice is to return to South Africa, to take up her part in the anti-apartheid struggle.

She returns to her career as a physiotherapist; as a healer, she incorporates pain and embodiment into her everyday life. Through her political activities, she finally ends up in prison and, with this final positioning, becomes peripheral to the novel’s narration, as if the reader loses sight of her; the final section is narrated entirely in third-person. This movement away from the reader into a kind of shamed otherness occurs at the expense of the self; it is a self-sacrifice that is perhaps the only ethical position for Rosa to occupy in apartheid South Africa. The othering of the self— accomplished through narrative techniques of perspective—therefore works in Burger’s

Daughter to assert a politically resistant mode of writing, using the force of shame to obstruct the triumph promised by the novel’s bildungsroman structure. By suggesting a collapse of the subject under the gaze of the self-as-other, and by constructing Rosa as signifying embodiment and disembodiment in conflicting ways, Burger’s Daughter relies on an ethics of personal affect—a discourse of shame—that, over the course of narration, becomes political.

C. J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood (1998)

In Youth, the second of J.M. Coetzee’s semi-fictional autobiographies, John (the name stands for Coetzee’s young self) moves from South Africa to England, hoping that “all memory of the family and the country he left behind [would be] extinguished” (98). Like Rosa in

Burger’s Daughter, John doggedly pursues the rebirth of his identity, struggling with the weight of his shameful origins, and lamenting that “South Africa is like an albatross around his neck. He wants it removed, he does not care how, so that he can begin to breathe” (101). The heritage given John by his parents and his homeland also distresses John in his childhood, the subject of

Coetzee’s first autobiography, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. Boyhood focuses on

John’s childhood between the ages of about six and thirteen—a time when John lives in a small town whose predominantly white, Afrikaner population places John’s own uncertain identity as part Afrikaner, part English into anxious relief. John repeatedly expresses his sense that he

“comes from an unnatural and shameful family” (6), and he wryly remarks that “South

Africanness is faintly embarrassing” (18). This sense of the shame he inherits from his country and parents stands as a defining aspect of the identity he so desperately seeks to escape later in his life.

However, although the reference to Coleridge’s albatross positions the disclosure of shame as central to the project of Coetzee’s autobiographies, the relief from anguish rewarded to the narrator of a “ghastly tale” (Coleridge, line 584) is neither pursued nor, in the end, entirely relevant. Instead, revealing shameful memories serves to extend Coetzee’s autobiographical mode beyond the generically traditional act of “writing the self into being,” positioning the fundamentally shameful self in a difficult encounter with wider political concerns—namely those of a white writer’s relationship with apartheid South Africa.

The problem is that Boyhood is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. It is written in the third person: the protagonist’s name is “John.” Furthermore, while the events related certainly seem to line up with the events of what is known about Coetzee’s childhood, there is no claim in the book to any “authenticity”—nothing resembling what Philippe Lejeune refers to as

“the autobiographical pact’: the author’s “intention to honour his/her signature” (14). Coetzee’s

79 technique of writing about himself in the third person inspired Margaret Lenta to coin the term

“autrebiography,” which recognizes a “separation of author/narrator from protagonist” (168) and allows the autobiographical writer “not to appear his own advocate” (159). Coetzee himself acknowledges the problematic allegiances to the self that unsettle any autobiographical project, posing this troubling question in a 1985 essay about confession: “Why should I be interested in the truth about myself when the truth may not be in my interest?” (Doubling 395). The distance measured between first and third person in his autrebiographical style enables Coetzee to bring

“into full focus” the shameful secrets that a self-interested subject position, a position Coetzee sees as bound to the first person voice, wills into silence.

In other words, the “autrebiographical” devices Coetzee uses to narrate his life story run alongside a larger, ethical imperative to disclose shameful events of his childhood. In an interview with David Attwell, Coetzee notes the need to forgive the child self, but he also insists that remembrance entails a responsibility to “look at the past with a cruel enough eye to see what made . . . joy and innocence possible” (Doubling 29). So while Coetzee once questioned the possibility of truth-telling precisely because of the urge to censor shameful memory and present oneself as more or less infallible, the later autograph turns a critical—or “cruel”—eye toward shameful memory in order to situate a responsible portrait of a white South African whose childhood converges with the Afrikaner nationalism that saw the institutionalization of apartheid in 1948. Coetzee’s insistence on retrospective cruelty allows him to use shameful memory as a kind of locus of self and nation, an interface that, for a white child in apartheid South Africa, partly exposes the shameful conditions and consequences of institutional violence.

If, according to Coetzee, there is something shameful in white South African identity, this shame has ontological properties: it attaches to something seemingly essential—the body—yet is ensured by virtue of something non-essential, namely, race. In one way, shame connotes a

80 private relationship with the self, but Coetzee bleeds the public into the private, entangling social identity with a more interior mortification—inter- and intrasubjectivity uncomfortably pushing against one another. This connection between public and private shame is more explicitly represented in Youth, Coetzee’s second autobiography. When asked, for example, if the situation in South Africa is “pretty bad . . . even for whites,” John wonders, “How does one respond to a question like that? If you don’t want to perish of shame?” (Youth 124). As a child, however, John cannot “engage with his situation at a philosophical level” (Doubling 392), and the shame that can later be partly connected with belonging to the caste of the oppressor is instead experienced as a sense of alienation, of difference or marginality—an experience of cringing at the prospect of public exposure. John worries in the abstract, imagining the disgrace he would encounter if

“the ugly, black, crying, babyish core of him were to emerge for all to see and laugh at”

(Boyhood 112).

In John’s fear of exposure, a central claim of shame theory is recognized: the importance of the gaze of another.22 However, this element of specular witnessing, whereby the gaze of a third party is circularly the stimulus of and witness to shame, provides an inadequate account of both private experience and of shame. Rosamund Dalziell approaches a more nuanced account of solitary shame, arguing that the “condemnatory gaze may be internalized, so that shame may be experienced when a person is alone” (233). As Boyhood demonstrates, one can be one’s own witness and judge. The gaze of others is absorbed into John’s own perception of self, so that he simultaneously embodies self and other, or more appropriately, self and self-as-other.

What, then, are the sources of John’s shame? Coetzee elaborates the relationship between narrative and shame through three shameful memories, each of which John claims is his “earliest

22 Jacqueline Rose writes, “Shame requires an audience . . . [S]hame only arises when someone knows, or fears, they have been seen” (1).

81 memory.” Together, these foundational moments deal with questions of artifice and exposure, and with how shame struggles to be told as a story, yet articulates itself in the very struggle for narration. The earliest image John claims to remember is of his mother’s “white breasts,” which he “suspects he must have hurt . . . when he was a baby” because she now “den[ies] them to him so pointedly” (35). Though there is a certain Oedipal quality at play behind John’s shameful desire for his mother’s breast, his association between her inaccessible body and an imagined injury to her breasts emphasizes a more general shame he carries regarding his position in his family, which he understands to be unnaturally tyrannical. He says that “[a]t home he is an irascible despot” (38), and it is this despotism that, in relation to the “whiteness” of his mother’s breast, reveals John’s sense that his identity relies upon a history of colonial violence. Indeed, the language John uses to describe his relationship with his mother’s breast and his domestic role as tyrant reflects both the political arrangement of South African apartheid and John’s sense of the shamefulness in that arrangement. This is an example of the subtlety with which Coetzee weaves the connections between private shame about selfhood and public shame regarding the unethical foundations of South African politics. Coetzee extends the connection between a shameful self and a shameful state when he makes a link between John’s mother and South Africa first by suggesting that “[e]verything that is complicated in his love for his mother is uncomplicated in his love for” (79) Voëlfontein, the farm where he spends his summers. This link between mother and country soon becomes explicit: “He has two mothers. Twice-born: born from the woman and born from the farm” (96). John’s heritage spreads between family and country—and here

“country” is pastoral South Africa, a landscape for which John longs, but which he knows fundamentally is not his—a conflict between desire and reality that arises through a growing awareness of apartheid policies.

It is John’s second earliest memory, “the secret one” (31) he “would never repeat” for fear that it would be “trumpet[ed] . . . around the school and turn him into a laughing-stock” (3), that allows him to propose a tenuous relationship between the South African landscape and his own essential identity. In this memory, John drops a sweet-wrapper out the window of a bus.

The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the

pass, ringed with cold mountain-peaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of

the paper, still bravely flying. ‘What will happen to it?’ he asks his mother; but she does

not comprehend. . . . He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper. (31)

The scrap of paper John abandons in the rural South African landscape becomes “alone in all that vastness” (31). If John is incapable of truly belonging to Voëlfontein, by associating himself with the scrap of paper, he achieves a kind of romantic vision of his successful escape to the wilderness. The memory reveals a self divided by place and “unbelonging.” It is no coincidence that the lost object in John’s imaginative wilderness is a scrap of paper: Coetzee likens self to text, to a space for the imprinting of the story of the self, and the loss of that text marks a loss of part of the self. A critic of Coetzee’s autobiography, Tony Simoes Da Silva, states that “Boyhood offers a particularly rich example of some of the ways in which White South Africans strive to dispose (of) the past” (472). However, Coetzee’s portrayal of John’s thwarted desire to belong, exemplified by the memory of a scrap of paper as the emblem of self divided by and lost in that landscape, works as a precursor to his later, more overt articulations of South African shame in his second autobiography, where John remarks that “the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with the shouts of anger” (17). Place and shame are inseparable in John’s sense of original identity; his “secret” second memory articulates the conflict of longing that underscores the shame of his selfhood.

The third of John’s “earliest” memories involves John watching a dog get run over by a car before “drag[ging] itself away, squealing with pain” (30). This is a memory in which John stands on the outside looking in on a moment of horror. Although he characterizes the event as a

“magnificent memory” for its spectacular value, it also represents a moment of identification; his own gaze witnesses the weakness and pain of another. Public infliction of pain is John’s own worst fear—he mentions earlier that “the very thought of being beaten makes him squirm with shame” (6)—but the inverse of this situation, with John in the position of witness and the dog in the position of exposed victim, suggests not only a sympathetic identification between John and the dog, but an identification between John and the aggressor. Such an identification is underscored when we realize that John is not even sure that the memory happened this way, not sure that the dog was ever hit at all. Thus, in an imaginative sense, he is the one who inflicts the pain upon the animal and, through his memory of the event, he confesses his oblique role as aggressor in its shamefulness. However, the confession of this memory also works internally to mirror the narrative itself, in which Coetzee portrays his self as other, in which he—as author— gazes upon another aspect of his own self. The way in which Coetzee tells the story of his selfhood, and the way in which John tells the story of the injured dog, enfolds the structure of shame—so suggestive of the presence of victim and witness—entirely into the spectrum of the individual self. In other words, Boyhood’s peculiar third-person autobiographical form converges with and emphasizes the text’s investment in the trope of shame as a mortifying encounter with the self-as-other.

Each of John’s “earliest” memories intimates both a process of identification with another and the othering of the self; this othering mirrors the structure of shameful self-witnessing. Yet, in disclosing these memories, Coetzee emphatically does not, to use Judith Butler’s and Theodor

Adorno’s terms, “claim a right against . . . injury.” As Butler explains, Adorno regards self- preservation as immoral:

One of the problems with insisting on self-preservation as the basis of ethics is that it

becomes a pure ethics of the self, if not a form of moral narcissism. Persisting in the

vacillation between wanting to claim a right against injury and resisting that claim, one

“becomes human.” (103)

Adorno “situates morality on the side of restraint, of ‘not joining in’” (104). By bringing together in a shame-like structure memories that both fuse and delineate connections between aggressor, victim, and passive witness, Coetzee calls attention to those processes of dehumanization so brutally characterized by apartheid, just as he qualifies self-restraint as “a way to survive the . . . organization of ‘human’ society” (Butler 105), even if the consequence of self-restraint is an overwhelming sense of shame. This very shame, as Boyhood demonstrates, acts as a measure of the kind of ethical “inhuman” humanity that Adorno and Butler advocate.

Each of the three memories John claims as his “first” revolves around a sense of story- telling as the fabrication of self: his mother’s white breast seems to be an entirely invented memory; the lost scrap of paper is a carefully guarded secret but also connected to his own sense of himself as an inventor of South African texts; his memory of the dog is faulty—either invented or altered. Dependent on the secrecy with which lying obscures shame, John worries that “if all the stories that have been built up around him, built by himself, built by years of normal behaviour, at least in public, were to collapse, . . . would there be any way in which he could go on living?” (112). However, the exposure of his “ugly, black, crying babyish core”—

John’s essential shame—is precisely Coetzee’s project in his autobiographies. With his concern for the memories that position the self in relation to a shameful sense of cultural identity,

Coetzee uses shame to claim a responsibility for a past that would be more comfortable left

85 concealed by lies. Here, Coetzee’s ethical position in narrative, his refusal to represent himself without shame and his refusal to defend himself or preserve his dignity, answers his own question about why he “should be interested in telling the truth about” himself. It is this very exposure of a shameful kind of truth that gets at the ethical heart of Boyhood—it is an ethics that, in positioning selfhood in relation to apartheid South Africa, is implicitly political. Moreover, it is an ethics articulated via mimesis; the structural register of Boyhood, captured by the autobiographical form and the series of uncertain memories repeatedly supplanting one another, never fully conceal the hidden abscesses of white South African subjectivity.

What these readings of mimetic shame make crucially important is that a novel’s shameful registers do not merely render the plot or setting of a novel; they reflect, precisely, the social object itself—or at least an element of a social situation which, as Ato Quayson puts it, “is to be grasped primarily as a problem or an enigma whose purpose is not (solely) the disclosure of an authentic cultural life but rather the embedded thematic of change, process, and contradiction”

(xxxi). The embodied or symptomatic aspect of shame does not merely indicate how a character responds to a trigger (or social situation). More importantly, the symptomatic dimension of shame laces into all levels of a novel’s structure. These dimensions can be found in multiple narrative devices and formal characteristics, from metaphors of grotesque embodiment and symbols of abject corporeality (to recall Rushdie’s monsters or Gordimer’s blood and vomit, for example) to repetition (such as John’s memories), to motif (Coetzee’s landscapes, for instance, or Gordimer’s use of names), to narration (as with Gordimer’s shifts in narrative voice), and to genre (as with Rushdie’s allegorical overtones and Coetzee’s “autrebiography”). In this way, shame traverses in its various dimensions the content and form of a novel. Thus, on one pole of a continuum that sees a range of interplay between the literary and the social, lies the domain of

86 ethics, manifested as the social object—or the context of shame—while, at the other (but, paradoxically, not opposing) pole lies the domain of aesthetics, manifested as the literary expression of shame’s experience. Since plot, where social context is most obviously suggested, is itself a literary device and therefore subject to the symptomatic and structural inflections of shameful expression, these poles constantly bend towards and intertwine with each other, no less because the experience of shame can also be an element of what is contextually represented, as when the feeling of shame is itself the object of shame. Readers may extract the fields of content and experience, the social and the literary, ethics and aesthetics, in their interpretive practices, but only to move these domains into clearer light, to let them illuminate one another before apprehending them once again in their dynamic, bound forms.

In the following chapters, I consider these textual manifestations of shame. By lifting out the symptomatic, contextual, and structural elements of both narrative form and shameful experience, I consider the techniques by which postcolonial texts use shame to measure the inadequacies, discord, or violence inflecting relationships that converge around postcolonial subjects. As with Rushdie’s Shame, all three of the novels considered at length in this dissertation allow readers to understand the body as a battleground between self and other. In

V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh’s narcissistic efforts to compensate for deeply shameful feelings about his colonial status in the Caribbean ultimately render his body numb and impotent. In Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Toloki’s body registers shame about his outsider status by vacillating anxiously between ecstatic impulses toward sacredness and profane manifestations of corporeality. In Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, the narrator physically transforms into a pestilent insect beneath the Western gaze and discursive tradition that deem his body shameful. Like

Burger’s Daughter and Boyhood, however, all three of these novels also position the triggers and metaphorical symptoms of the shamefully conflicted subject within textual structures that

87 emphasize the degree to which shame typifies a social crisis. For instance, Naipaul’s generic mimicry of autobiographical structure collapses at the novel’s end when the autograph himself disappears as a textual object. In this way, Naipaul uses form to characterize the colonized subject as so ashamed as to fundamentally cease to exist outside of the colonial paradigm. Mda’s fluctuations between comic and tragic narrative modes parallel on one hand the optimistic narratives of unity asserted by post-apartheid South African discourses and, on the other hand, the melancholic shame attached to buried memories of internecine violence committed within the antiapartheid movement. These memories, bound to the novel’s excessive imagery, threaten to destabilize South Africa’s political future. Finally, Hage’s intertextual references to the politics and poetics established by Albert Camus’s philosophy of absurdism ironically indicate the legacy of shame ensconced by Camus’s Orientalist portrayals of Arab subjects. Each of these novels therefore does more than merely illustrate shame as an ego-destroying affect. They also signify shame as at once deeply personal and fundamentally social. In other words, these novels formally engage shame as a persistent legacy of colonial authority—a revenant that continues to haunt postcolonial discourse and subject formation.

Chapter 2 “The Face Behind the Pillar”: Shame and Narcissism in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

“I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitators.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“Wherever some autobiographical play is being enacted there has to be a psyche, a mirror that reflects me naked from head to toe. The same question then becomes whether I should show myself but in the process see myself naked (that is reflect my image in a mirror) when, concerning me, looking at me, is this living creature, this cat that can find itself caught in the same mirror? Is there animal narcissism? But cannot this cat also be, deep within her eyes, my primary mirror?” - Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”

In an interview granted to the New Republic in late 2012, V.S. Naipaul discloses most not about his writing, the discussion of which provokes a defensiveness typical of the famously acerbic writer, but about his deceased cat. “It is too painful,” he admits. “I think of Augustus. He was the sum of my experiences. He had taken on my outlook, my way of living” (qtd. in

Chotiner). I mention the New Republic interview not to poke fun at Naipaul’s grandiloquent mourning, but to point out the strangeness of the cat. Both his name and his valued position as the feline ossuary of Naipaul’s total character endow Augustus with the sort of heavily-saturated potential for signification and conflicted interpretation that characterize Naipaul’s literary works as well as the public figure himself. For while Naipaul’s varied and voluminous public utterances make him no stranger to controversy, his novels equally stir passionate defences of the psychological drives behind those utterances. Augustus, like his master’s literary and social contributions, focalizes precisely the circular ironies inherent in Naipaul’s lasting interest in his purportedly “shameful” origins and in his persistent characterization of himself as distinctly distinguished—his narcissistic celebration of his incredible artistic success.

Augustus the cat is, presumably, named after the founder of the Roman Empire. But his name also recalls a tradition Naipaul seemingly scorns in his 1967 novel The Mimic Men. When as an adolescent the novel’s protagonist Ralph Singh visits his friend Browne, he takes “care to ask whether ‘Ethelbert’ was at home. It embarrass[es] me to use the name. I never had before and as I [speak] it, I remem[ber] what Browne himself had told me: that slaves were frequently given the names of Anglo-Saxon kings or Roman generals” (177). Ralph comes away from his visit to Browne’s house feeling as if he has witnessed a black family’s “postures of indignity”

(179). Browne’s father, named “Caesar,” is “past pride,” wearing a vest “grimy with little rolls of dirt” (178). Browne’s sister and her boyfriend resemble “cartoon characters, exaggerating their roles” (181). Given that the visit with Browne’s family evokes Ralph’s pitying repulsion, and especially given the ironic contrast Ralph perceives between the bombastic names granted to those whom he clearly believes still enact a form of willing but oblivious enslavement, Augustus the cat’s name takes on a peculiar quality, as though it echoes the once scorned grandiosity of

The Mimic Men’s black characters while also parodying the impulse to be grandiose. Does

Naipaul unconsciously mimic the tradition his novel satirizes? Or, rather, does he recast the perceived significance—the sense of misplaced pride, the pitiable affectations of people who

“pretended to be real” (175)—of the tradition, endowing it with a new nobility, legitimized by the “true, pure world” in which Naipaul has gained such profound recognition?

Naipaul acknowledges the status he has achieved as an acclaimed author in the west; in his autobiographical work The Enigma of Arrival, he relates his experience of becoming acquainted with his Wiltshire manor, the home he cannot return to because it reminds him of his cat. Considering the historical lineage of his estate, a wry Naipaul notes that had he—a

Trinidadian of Indian descent—settled there forty or fifty years earlier “at a time of empire, there would have been no room for” him (52). Unlike Trinidad, to which Naipaul’s “impoverished

Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century” (52) and which, elsewhere, he scorns as “unimportant, uncreative, cynical” (The Middle Passage 41), the English countryside holds all the desired signs of “a clear historical line” (Enigma 52). In this setting, Naipaul gradually ceases to feel a “stranger . . . with the nerves of a stranger” (18). Looking about him “with the literary eye” (18), Naipaul reconstructs a fantasy of historical continuity and, as he becomes “in tune with the landscape” (21), he resolves his feelings of being out-of-place and, instead, becomes the lord of the manor, as it were—the master of an estate that signifies “the apotheosis” of Britain’s imperial relationship with India and the Caribbean (52).

If Naipaul imagines the beloved cat of his Wiltshire home as the mirror of himself, what do we understand of the Roman name, a name reminiscent not only of historical greatness but of primacy, exceptionalism, and conquest? The cat’s name seems to exceed its reference, begging uncertainty regarding the inspiration for its christening. In naming his cat Augustus and in identifying Augustus as an extension of himself, Naipaul articulates his own strange kind of imperial ascension, but the name still bears the ironic traces of The Mimic Men’s racist satire.

How do we square the peculiar reference of the cat’s name with Naipaul’s assertion that

Augustus “was the sum of my experiences,” or that Augustus had assumed Naipaul’s “outlook,” his “way of living”? It is as though Naipaul envisions, to use Lacan’s terminology, an ego ideal—a loved and idealized version of himself—that he then projects onto his cat, who operates as both extension and reflection of this imagined ideal. Naipaul’s grief in some ways, then, enacts a wholly intimate (though publicly staged) projection of self-love. This is why, in occupying the doubled role of idealized grief object and idealized (but ironic) affirmation of selfhood, Augustus the cat operates as a useful synecdoche for my reading of The Mimic Men.

Suggestive of narcissistic self-esteem as well, perhaps, as unconscious self-parody or, remembering the significance of Browne’s given name, even as a mask of a deeper, possibly less

91 examined shame, Naipaul’s characterization of his cat in terms so consistent with a pattern that runs throughout his work directs this chapter’s focus on the intersecting themes of narcissism and shame in The Mimic Men.

Traversing the literary and the socio-historical, this chapter has three objectives. First, it seeks to investigate the Janus-faced narration of The Mimic Men, which, structured as a fictional autobiography, looks backward and forward in a simultaneous (and therefore ironic) posture of hope and desolation. With its divided vision, The Mimic Men both frames historical events and searches for possible departures from history. Writing in the confessional mode, Ralph Singh focuses upon himself; the conflicting shame and narcissism that characterize his fantasies of escaping history thus suggest how the novel enacts another kind of Janusian double vision, whereby from another angle, Ralph’s utterances of self-love reveal intense feelings of shame.

The second, related objective of this chapter is thus to tease apart the conflicted responses Ralph has toward history and to understand the pathology behind his attempts to defy the limitations he imagines history imposes. Much of my focus here will be on the overlapping expressions shame and narcissism take in the novel and on the production of a third, ironic articulation of selfhood: abjection. Put another way, I examine how the novel’s contextual register of shame—Trinidad’s history of Indian indentured labour and the politics of decolonization—feeds into the novel’s symptomatic and structural registers of shame. As outlined in the introduction to this dissertation, mimetic shame is traceable via these three registers, which represent and refract

(taking from and sending out) real world experiences of shame. A novel’s contextual register comprises the “trigger” for shameful feelings—it indexes the historical and narrative events that motivate shame’s emergence; in The Mimic Men, the trigger for shame rests, broadly speaking, in the history of indentured labour in the Caribbean. Ralph directly references this history only a few times, yet it underscores all of his shameful responses to other triggers, which can be

92 understood as secondary triggers, derivative of the foundational shames of colonization and indenture. On the novel’s local register, where shameful symptoms are textualized primarily through metaphors, imagery suggestive of intense shame belies Ralph’s narcissistic desire, transforming the physical conditions of shame that are felt as a gut-wrenching sickness—the sensation of being turned inside-out—into a literary equivalent: the abject image.

Finally, in a way that may be typical of shame (the agony of acknowledging shame ensures an endlessly averted gaze), the historical context of shame in The Mimic Men fractures the novel’s structural register—the narrative’s global configuration of shame’s intra- and intersubjective phenomenology—and produces with abjection a third manifestation of impossible subjectivity. In abjection, Ralph embraces a fantasy of a disembodied self; following the trajectory established by fashioning the self both according to and in revolt from historical circumstances, he embraces a vision of himself that is successful only by virtue of the degree to which he forfeits his own existence, symbolically sacrificing the dominant totem of his identity: his historically inscribed body. In this way, The Mimic Men uses the generic expectations of autobiography to articulate a death-wish, haunted along the way by the tragic ironies of self-love.

From Shameful Origins to Narcissistic Fictions: The Mimic Men’s

Contextual Register

Although The Mimic Men makes only a few direct references to the history of Indian indentured labour in Trinidad, it is one of the novel’s major focuses for the context of shame— that is, what the novel takes as its shameful subject. For Ralph, the history of indentured labour stands as both a real historical event that cannot be fully comprehended and as a symbol of the similarly irretrievable losses of his symbolic infancy, an imagined state of pre-colonial existence.

Before turning to this second, more metaphorical aspect of Indian indenture below when I also consider in more depth the genesis of shame in the construction of selfhood, in what follows, I briefly consider the history of Indian indentured labour as it is documented in public record, as it is regarded by Naipaul in his public statements, and as it is referenced historically in The Mimic

Men.

Moving backward and forward among chronological events, the novel’s plot spans the life of its narrator until his early forties, when Ralph writes his autobiography from a hotel room in suburban London. Although Ralph implies that his father grows up on a plantation when he imagines his father “standing in a group in front of a thatched wooden hut; the background was simple bush” (105), he never describes the circumstances that lead to either his mother’s or his father’s family attaining freedom and a life in urban Isabella, the fictional island that loosely stands in for Trinidad, Naipaul’s own island birthplace. Still, Ralph claims that both he and his father feel “shipwrecked” (32, 118, 141) on Isabella, a “locality where accident had placed” him

(142). Implemented after the end of the slave trade, indenture brought nearly 150,000 people from India to Trinidad between 1845 and 1917, when indenture was abolished. Through the indenture system, Indians could enlist for ten years of labour in the Caribbean, after which they could return to India. Most labourers never went back to India, though, unable to earn enough money from the low plantation wages and often offered incentives to forfeit their return tickets.23

As Vijay Mishra points out, the trauma of crossing the “middle passage,” during which “the horror, menacing presence, and pervasiveness of death . . . and disease” (198) along with the overwhelming violence that characterized life on the barracks, colluded with a “break from a homogenous village life with its obligatory kinship patterns” (199) to produce an irreversible

23 See Mishra for a more detailed account of Indian indenture history in Trinidad.

94 historical rupture for those who settled in Trinidad. Thus, while the “accident” to which Ralph refers is, of course, the history of Indian indentured labour in Trinidad, Ralph’s notion of being

“shipwrecked” also indicates the degree to which “the extraordinary violence of that ancestral exile” (Nixon 19) erected a barrier between the present and an accessible, knowable history.

In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul describes his habit of viewing the present through the lens of a history contingent upon violence and instability:

To see the possibility, the certainty of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my

temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family

circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our

general uncertainty. Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper and was an ancestral

inheritance, something that came with the history that made me: not only India, with its

ideas of a world outside men’s control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of

Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been transported in the last

century. (52)

Cut-off from a sense of ancestral continuity, Naipaul regards Trinidad as lacking a history and therefore as unimportant. His public claims that, for example, Trinidadians “could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was . . . only a dot on the map of the world” (The Middle Passage 42) have understandably provoked outrage.24 But such claims also suggest the impact of Naipaul’s family’s history of indenture upon Naipaul’s sense of his place in the world, and his search for a history that might fill a perceived void or, perhaps, compensate for a partly forgotten, partly unacknowledged historical trauma. As he admits later in his life, he “wanted to escape Trinidad”; he “would have killed” himself if he had had to stay

24 In a poem read to the audience of the 2008 Calabash International Literary Festival, Derek Walcott calls Naipaul “a mongoose [who] takes its orders from the Raj” (qtd. in Trilling).

(qtd. in Rosen). But it isn’t only “the pettiness of colonial life” (Rosen) that Naipaul finds so frightening.25 The discrediting of Trinidad based on its “lack” of history underpins the sense of shame elicited by the particular history of Indians in the country.

In Ralph, who also tries to “withdraw” (The Mimic Men 173) from the colony by moving to Britain, Naipaul conceives of a character whose view of Indian indenture history operates around a kind of caesura—an historical moment that as an event in itself resists examination, but which chronologically divides the history of Ralph’s family and community into a prelapsarian

“before” (the desired origins of an imagined India) and an historically indifferent “after” (the settlement in Trinidad that resists historicization because of its contingency upon a break with the past and because of its sublimation into the privileged historical time of imperial rule, the centre of which is, shamefully, elsewhere). In his vision of a prelapsarian “before,” Ralph conjures an ancestry imbued with nobility and purity, a vision of a “homeland of the Asiatic and

Persian Aryans . . . nomads on horseback . . . [who] looked for their leader” (118). Imagining himself as that “true leader,” Ralph juxtaposes the fantasy of his imagined origins with a perception of Trinidad that makes him feel “endangered”: “the ditches thick and black, people everywhere semi-naked, working barefooted in the mud which discoloured their bodies and faces and their working rags” (118). Acknowledging “the paradox of [his] fantasy” (118), Ralph suffers over the discrepancies between his imagined origins and the geography of his upbringing; the loss of an historical legacy is felt as a loss that bestows upon him the vulnerable, threatening condition of contamination and chaos: “To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New

25 In The Middle Passage, Naipaul’s first book of non-fiction and the last to be written before the publication of The Mimic Men, Naipaul explains that until he returned to Trinidad with a writer’s eye (after years living in Britain) he had been frightened of considering the country in any depth: “I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it” (41). Indeed, he obliquely characterizes his feelings about departure on the final pages of his first fictional work, Miguel Street, when the narrator notes: “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac” (222).

World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder” (141). Here,

Ralph exposes the degree to which he has internalized the Manichean, racist, and wholly fictive dichotomy between “civilized” Europe and “barbarous” colony.

Contributing to his sense of the disorder of Caribbean life, Isabellan anti-colonial politics exacerbate the mood of panic and humiliation that push Ralph toward a metropolitan life of exile. While the fantasy of his Aryan origins belie the shame of indenture history, the

“inevitable” failure of Isabella’s struggle for political and economic self-determination is demonstrated by Ralph’s ultimately disgraced role in Isabella’s opposition party, whose fervour and “sense of outrage” (249) fails to stir Ralph from his almost mechanical political engagement, from his feeling that, whatever he might wish for Isabella’s independence, there is already a

“path that had been chosen for” him (247). Ralph’s apathetic participation reflects Naipaul’s own opinions about anti- and post-colonial political and cultural life in the Caribbean. He, too, claims to always having felt “marked” and that he belonged not in Trinidad but in “the larger world”

(qtd. in Rosen). Naipaul also regards Caribbean politics with, as Robert M. Greenberg puts it,

“sympathy freighted with hopelessness” (226). Elaborating that sense of hopelessness, Rob

Nixon notes that, in contrast with other Caribbean writers (Walcott, Lamming, and Brathwaite, to name a few), Naipaul characterizes “fragile Third World societies as witlessly derivative and given to grandiloquent, self-delusory, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies” (Nixon 132).

Naipaul’s diagnosis of Caribbean politics supports the notion that his writing and opinions “give focus to the psychological legacy that has travelled with V.S.—as inspiration and as wound” (Nixon 9). His diagnosis also clarifies anti-colonial politics as The Mimic Men’s second subject of shame. Once he occupies a senior position in his party, Ralph articulates the horror of his role:

The colonial politician is an easy object of satire. I wish to avoid satire . . . Not that I wish

to present him as grander or less flawed than he is. It is that his situation satirizes itself,

turns satire inside out, takes satire to a point where it touches pathos if not tragedy. (250)

The belief that “emancipation is not possible” (250) arises, then, out of Ralph’s sense that a people can “achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors” (38). Because its culture (as well as its economics and its material life) is integrated into a colonial framework that determines the local as foreign, Isabella is determined by marginality. For Naipaul and for Ralph, this marginality dooms the anti-colonial struggle and is therefore, next to indenture history, the novel’s second social context of, or trigger for, shame.

Trapped as he is within an entangled politics of representation, destined always, it seems, to struggle to produce an image of himself in terms that deny his own history and geography,

Ralph contends with the idea of the colonized “other,” whose fiction has gained such influential purchase in the West. Edward Said’s seminal text, Orientalism, explains the West’s production of an image of the “other,” through which the West comes to stabilize its own image (though

Said generally limits his discussion to the western production of the “Orient”). Indeed, the boundaries delimiting the western world from the non-western world, according to Said, ultimately serve the purpose of defining foreignness so that “we” know who “we” are, in opposition to “them.” His term “imaginative geography” (49) refers to the border erected between inside (the West) and outside, a border that serves the purpose of identifying and containing the western Self; importantly for Said, “imaginative geography of the ‘our land— barbarian land’ variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction” (54).

Despite the fact that Said carefully avoids a discussion of the varying degrees to which the non-western world might participate in (or, more positively, resist) the production of a

98 privileged image of the West, significant contributors to the field of postcolonial studies have noted some of the aspects that problematize what we might call ‘identity politics’ in formerly colonized nations. In the mid-1990s, Homi Bhabha, for example, famously took the western

Orientalist gaze described by Said and reflected it back toward the centre—from the outside to the inside, as it were. In doing so, he made a claim for the inherent instability of Orientalist discourse, suggesting that the effect of imagining the “barbarian” as “almost the same, but not quite” (86) is the unexpected anxiety about Western authority and identity. Mimicry, Bhabha argues, operates as

the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline,

which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the

inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant

strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent

threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers. (86)

Bhabha’s “ambivalence” describes a productive and positive resistance to colonial authority, but it does not reflect the inherently destabilizing effect of mimicry on the colonial subject him/herself. While Bhabha’s theory of mimicry ultimately denotes an effective slippage that is the unavoidable result of the Western production of the Other, it is a theory which fundamentally speaks to the effects of mimesis on the privileged centre. The effect of mimesis on the colonial subject may in fact be a great deal less positive than its disruptive effects on authority. For, in order for disruption to occur, there must also first be a kind of cooperation (willing or not) on the part of the colonized subject with the colonizing authority, so that the ambivalent slippages of mimicry will have very different significance for the two sides of the mimetic gaze. In his essay on The Mimic Men, Vivek Dhareshwar acknowledges such implications of colonial subjects’ participation in colonial structures: “The colonial habitus . . . generates the symbolic structure

99 that subjects the colonized to an internalization of the asymmetries, both material and ideological, between metropolis and colony” (85). In a colonial setting, desires flow in two directions, between oppositional but endlessly entangled positions. Thus, mimicry potentially overlays the colonial subject’s idea of Self with the desire to become, through performance or experience, Other. The desire for otherness functions as an inherently alienating desire; when the

“suppositions, associations, and fictions” (Said 54) imagined on the other side of the self/other border are so idealized that they are internalized in the project of identification, the self might become—ironically and tragically—foreign.

Much has been made in critical responses to Naipaul’s work, and on The Mimic Men in particular, of the role and consequences of mimicry. Bhabha, of course, draws on The Mimic

Men as a primary example in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” while Michael Gorra, discussing the colonial subject who fashions himself in the image of the metropolitan centre, notes: “That kind of mimicry fills Naipaul with despair, for it provides not only a reminder of the violation of imperialism but an acceptance of it, of one’s subordinate role and inferior culture, of the terms in which the imperial power has seen one” (87). Indeed, recalling his Isabellan school days, Ralph writes, “[A]t Isabella Imperial, we were natural impersonators” (160). Of course, more than impersonation, mimicry involves an internalized belief in the superiority of the one impersonated over the impersonator, who is denigrated in the performance of privileging metropolitan otherness. For Ralph, mimicry is so complete that it retrospectively transforms his very memories; Vivek Dhareshwar notes the “editing” at play when an apple replaces an orange in one of Ralph’s schooldays memories (Dhareshwar 75). The conditions of imperial education cause Ralph to privilege Europe over the Caribbean, identifying with “elsewhere” to such a degree that his own familiar landscape becomes foreign.

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Yet, here emerges a distinction in the novel’s narrator and its narrative voice, for in

Ralph’s mimicry of the metropolitan centre, there is only abhorrence of his local origins—and nothing of the struggle against colonial power that Bhabha ascribes to mimicry. However, the novel itself—via its mimetic structuration—may nevertheless perform an anti-colonialist stance.

Elleke Boehmer reminds postcolonial readers that “at least in the medium of language and literary form, assimilation, or subversion by imitation, has remained for nationalists and other anti-colonials an important mode of resistance . . . [D]uring the initial stages of anti-colonial mobilization, where culturally hybrid writers produced variation out of what looked like accurate copying, this too was oppositional” (165). As I argue further along in this chapter, Naipaul casts imitation as a central consequence of Ralph’s shame, but this formulation links to the novel’s symptomatic and contextual registers, articulated through metaphors of abjection and triggers related to evidence of his family’s history of indentured labour. On the more global or structural register, Naipaul’s “copying” of the autobiographical form introduces the kind of “variation” that

Boehmer suggests can potentially draw attention to—and thereby protest against—the shameful underpinnings of colonial identifications.

As I suggest above, in the quest to inhabit the foreign, Ralph’s community’s own indenture history operates predominantly as disjuncture, as a caesura. As I indicate in my introduction, however, the ruptures produced by colonization should not necessarily instantiate narrative silence as a measure of something unknowable and inexpressible.26 Instead, Ralph’s imaginative investments in the rifts colonization and indenture inserted between the idealized past and its foreclosed future reminds readers that shame is equally (or even more) contingent upon fiction or fantasy as it is upon an actual historical event and, as such, can generate textual

26 See the discussion of Cathy Caruth and Timothy Bewes in the introduction to this dissertation.

101 meaning that coheres around multiple levels of signification, each of which betokens the role of the imagination in the production of shame. Although Ralph must contend with the material realities determined by his community’s history, the strategies by which he manages those realities rest upon a range of competing ideas of who he is and where he is (con)figured in his social and political milieu. Ralph’s vision of himself as a subject of history is therefore centrally indebted to fantasy.

Indeed, the ontology of shame intersects on many fronts with the ego as Lacan envisions it. For Lacan, the development of the ego arises through the partitioning off from one another unconscious desires and conscious engagements with social realities. As Ellie Ragland describes,

Lacan sees the ego as “divided between ego ideals (others) and an ideal ego (moi). Because the ego is formed from the outside world, individuals depend on one another for ‘self’ validation throughout life” (Ragland 19). The development of any ego, then, presupposes an integration of a fiction into the idea of ‘self’; not only does the ego generate in the image of another, but the very image or idea of the self—the ideal ego—rests only upon a tenuous fabrication, a fantastic dream of desired wholeness. Simmering beneath that fantasy of the discrete, ideal self is what

Lacan calls the “Real,” an inexpressible, horrifying field of unbearable truth, a “psychotic language” of “primordial hallucinations”: “this language of privation and loss ‘speaks’ the body at the edge of anxiety in words of isolation, destitution, helplessness, despair, insult, and blasphemy” (24).27 Unbearable traumatic events, for example, belong to the field of the Lacanian

Real. So do, I would argue, those figurations of the self that threaten the formation of the ideal ego. Here, trauma and shame share the qualities of disruptive horror, foundational but inassimilable knowledges of history or identity. As Ragland explains: “Encounters with the

27 I refer to the Lacanian Real with a capital “R” to distinguish it from the real world (that is, the material world) as it is referenced in the novel.

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Real—be it the loss of a beloved, of a cherished myth, or of the place in which one lives—bring one face to face with the void, shattering, or at least, shaking, illusions of unity and oneness in one’s ego universe” (31). Unlike the traumatic event, shame is a necessary by-product (or, more accurately, it is what prefigures the ideal ego, which could be understood as a by-product of shame, necessary for survival, for sanity) of every ego formation. The ideal ego and the ego ideal paper over, as it were, those foundational anxieties Lacan ascribes to the mirror stage—anxieties that arise when one’s image horrifically fails to accurately represent one’s previous

(prelinguistic) notion of self. Indeed, the greatest accomplishment Lacan ascribes to the mirror state is the simultaneous splitting of the subject and the anxious repression of any knowledge of that split—a fundamentally alienating repression:

[T]he mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from

insufficiency to anticipation—and for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial

identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to

what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an

alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.

(Lacan, Ecrits 98).

In thinking through the relationship between the mirror stage’s split subject and shame, Joseph

Adamson and Hilary Clark suggest that the Lacanian subject locates himself via shame within a matrix of social relations. They write that Lacan “sees shame as the negative affect central to that defining experience of objective self-awareness, involving the alienation of self through a paralyzing self-consciousness in relation to the other” (Adamson and Clark 8). Indeed, the discrepancy between image and idea is shame, and so shame—at once the token of a failure of self-representation and the fiction that arises from the urgency of denial—straddles the

103 fundamental and the spectral, as though what prefigures the self and what is rejected from the self cast identical shadows of self-loathing.

For all its spectrality, shame might be said to push up against the boundaries of the self, threatening to destabilize the cohesive fiction of identity. Correspondingly, narcissism might be said to offer a strategy for resisting shame. After all, self-love embraces the ideal ego, believing in an image of the self that sustains that ideal. Narcissism “is the love of self learned via other persons via means of identification” (Ragland 41). That is, narcissism affords a filtered lens of oneself—filtered by how we imagine our loved ones see us, or how we imagine we resemble those we admire. It can therefore mark the love of the self in the image of another—as if the self were another.28 However, while Lacan de-pathologizes the idea of narcissism, seeing it “as the irreducible, atemporal cornerstone of the ego” (42), narcissism as it is characterized in literature—certainly in Naipaul’s fictional work—draws out the mytho-tragic dimension of loving oneself in the image of another. Mimicry, of course, speaks to that fundamentally nihilistic revision of the self that arises through the privileging of the other (and here, postcolonial politics drives a transition from the generic “another” to the privileged “the Other”) and it implies that alienation is the inevitable consequence of fashioning this impossible fiction of the self. However, also inherent to mimicry is a distillation of shame and narcissism; one— shame—crystallizes in the repudiation of the self, while the other—narcissism—flourishes as a defense against the repressed Real. Narcissism therefore marks a paradox: born out of shame and love at once and, from both genealogies, entirely dependent on fantasy and fiction for its sustenance.

28 Elizabeth Grosz’s explanation further clarifies Lacan’s theory of narcissism; she points out that the “narcissistic model of the ego implies that the ego can take itself, its own image, parts if its own body as an ‘object,’ and invest them as if they were external or ‘other.’ It is constituted as an ego only through alienation, through the creation of a necessary rift between lived immediacy of perception/sensation, and mediated reflection or self-distance. Its identity is bound to relations with others. It is a sedimentation, a locus, of images of others which form its self-image” (30).

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Though springing out of and anxiously freighted with the histories of indentured labour and anticolonial politics, The Mimic Men understands these social issues as relating predominantly to the shame of marginalization—shame born out of the imagined orientalist view of the colonized, marginal Other. With marginalization in mind, the novel characterizes the ways in which colonial mimesis affects (or, more appropriately, infects) a colonial subject’s understanding of selfhood. Always troubled by his relationship with the spaces he occupies,

Ralph is at once located and dislocated; his various homes are uncanny: simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Thus, the self-alienation Ralph experiences always conflicts with a desire for belonging, for a secure sense of self that can be rooted in and spring out of a genealogy not infected by the destabilizing European ideal but also, emphatically, not bound to the history of indenture and colonization. Moreover, the shameful “silence” that emerges from the caesura in

Ralph’s historical thinking is less a traumatic shame that either he or Naipaul needs to open up through narrative exploration than a narrative device—a transformation of social content into literary form, a narrative manoeuvre that mimetically instigates the novel’s own formal self- consciousness.

In what follows, I read the intersecting poles of shame and narcissism in The Mimic Men and, more particularly, the novel’s aestheticization—its literary uses—of its socio-historical shameful subjects (indenture, colonization, marginalization, and Caribbean politics). The novel’s contextual register of its shameful subjects combines with symptomatic imagery that gives voice to the (traumatic) Lacanian Real, ultimately suggesting a materiality to shame that links the literary with the socio-historical. Central to this discussion is also an identification of the ways

Naipaul represents dimensions of the psyche as physical space; such metaphorical representations suggest the concatenation of literary, socio-historical, and ontological figurations.

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Excessive Imagery and Abjection: The Mimic Men’s Symptomatic

Like many of the physical structures described in The Mimic Men, the bedroom Ralph occupies during his student days in London, where his memoir begins, serves as a disturbing objective correlative of his psyche—a materialization of the concerns that structure his subjectivity. Ralph describes the room as a “multi-mirrored, book-shaped room with a coffin-like wardrobe” (7), revealing much about how he regards his place in the world. For if the mirrors suggest the embeddedness of mimicry in his psyche, then the room’s book-like structure recalls the association of imperialism with the kind of knowledge Ralph has learned to privilege. And, while the mirrors symbolize mimicry, they also indicate the shameful value Ralph assigns to his reflection when “always at the end of the evening,” he sits “towards the light or towards the mirror” (33). As though in opposition to his window, his reflection casts a darkness, the shape of the persistent failure of his ideals as well as, we shall see, a pull toward an abyssal nonentity.

Binding everything, the book shape of the room encloses Ralph, metaphorically transforming his body and experience—the ideals he tries to reflect in his mirror—into a fiction, a narcissistic plight; the “book” becomes his mode of self-enclosure as much as it is his mode of self- disclosure. Indeed, by the end of his memoir, we have learned a great deal about the fictiveness of his self. Perhaps most tellingly, however, Ralph’s “coffin-like wardrobe” hides (or so we can assume) the various “costumes” that determine the roles he plays (student, dandy, politician, sports day athlete), all of which are overshadowed by something deathly, suffocating. Add to this the fact that the bedroom is itself positioned somewhere between the basement and attic—a decidedly liminal space—and the subject positions Ralph attempts to neutralize and manage through the exercise of writing his memoir become fully expressed from the start of the novel.

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But Ralph’s London boarding-house is not the only spatial manifestation of the conflicting shameful and narcissistic impulses troubling his articulations of selfhood. If history tells the story of self in place, Ralph attempts to reframe the signs of his historically determined identity through the spaces he occupies. As in Naipaul’s other novels, The Mimic Men is replete with physical structures operating as metaphorical extensions of Ralph’s psyche, working to establish the symptomatic register of the novel’s mimetic shame.29 As a child, Ralph worries about the instability of his family’s home, as if the social space of his Indian community (but also of the Isabellan within the political imaginary of the metropolitan world) is constantly threatened by the possibility of annihilation; the weakness of the house, however, turns out to be a misrecognition of Ralph’s own body: “As soon as [he] lay down on [his] bed [his] heart beat faster, and [he] mistook its throbbing for the shaking of the house. At times [his] head swam; ceiling and walls seemed about to cave in on [him]” (175).30 Later, when Ralph returns to

Isabella to embark on a life in politics, he anxiously struggles to manage his childhood fears of deathly impermanence; after his failure “in colonizing” (84) the house he and his English wife rent, he constructs what he calls his “Roman house,” in which he reads Latin “in order to create the picture of a man who, whatever else might be said about recent events in his private life, had achieved a certain poise” (224). Note the ironic echo of the black Isabellan community’s custom of christening children with the names of Anglo-Saxon kings and Roman generals, a custom

29 In A House for Mr Biswas, for example, Mr Biswas’s lifelong triumph, his own house, has “a solid, respectable, modern front” (10), but its awkward, “uneven” staircase hangs “precariously at the back of the house” (9), where it is “masked by heavy red curtains” (11), paralleling their owner’s lifelong vacillations between pride (his “front”) and his humiliation (his secret, interior self). 30 Ralph’s description of precarity is one of the many autobiographical points in the novel, mirroring the “half- ruined or broken-down houses” and the “general uncertainty” Naipaul remembers of his childhood in the Indian community of Trinidad (Enigma 52). Later, I discuss how The Mimic Men works, through its form of fictional autobiography, as what Linda Hutcheon calls a “narcissistic narrative,” but it is useful to note here, too, that with these autobiographical traces, the novel also points outward, beyond the “self-conscious” internal structures of the work, to Naipaul’s own life, enacting a kind of “meta-narcissism” that gives the novel its peculiar extra-textual and excessive referentiality: layers of meaning that forever fail to add up.

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Ralph scorns; note, too, the ironies which echo beyond the novel, as years later the Naipaul of

The Enigma of Arrival superimposes scenes of Ancient Rome when he surveys his estate in

Wiltshire, home of Augustus the cat. Nested between his youthful visions of structural instability and the construction of an adult home that denotes imperial exaltation as well as inevitable destruction (the home is, after all, inspired by “a picture book about Pompeii and Herculaneum”

[84]), Ralph entertains a fantasy of an alternative space, one which stages a destiny different from his own and which signifies the degree to which both the frailty of his childhood home’s architecture and the pomposity of his adult home’s design bespeak the shameful Real of both his colonial origins and the marginality of his anticolonial political position. The alternative space

Ralph fantasizes is a cocoa plantation over which he dreams of living out his old age as estate master, his alter-ego. Ralph sees the space as idyllic and pastoral despite the fact that the plantation is a dominant signifier of the violence of slave and indentured labour in the Caribbean:

There is no finer house than the old estate house of the islands . . . I would have gone

riding in the early morning. The labourers would have been at their undemanding tasks;

cutting down the pods with gullets, hand-shaped knives which are like the weapons of

medieval knights; or sitting in the shade, arcadian figures, before a multicoloured heap of

pods, which they were splitting open. . . . Labourers of the olden time! Not yet ‘the

people.’ (40)

“Medieval”; “arcadian”: Ralph yearns simultaneously for the past and the future—a fantasy of an ancestry that is not his, but which rests stably upon what he perceives as noble historical origins, and a fantasy of an impossible future, the destiny of an ideal untouched by anticolonial forces as by the material realities of colonial history.

What Ralph’s fantasy fails to extinguish are those intrasubjective crises that emerge from the conflict between the shameful Real (his community’s traumatic history, his marginal colonial

108 position) and the narcissism produced by his urge to repress shame. Ralph remembers his childhood as “a period of incompetence, bewilderment, solitude and shameful secrets,” each of which relates to those elements of the Real he works (and fails) to deny. In a classroom game of

“opposites,” for example, Ralph is “mortified” to utter the word “wife” aloud; to him, the term is grotesquely unspeakable, parallel to the colonized subject in opposition to colonial power. It is not the feminine that Ralph finds so humiliating but the inferiority the term implies, as though the shame elicited by the Manichean binary that sees him as inferior extends to all oppositionality, polluting the term “wife.” “More than thirty years later,” Ralph writes, “the man agrees with the child: it is a terrible word” (109). Similarly, Ralph rejects the perceived inferiority of the full Hindi form of his name—Ranjit Kripalsingh—because it reminds him too strongly of the shame implicit in his family’s origins (his father, “for purposes of official identification, necessary in that new world he adorned with his aboriginal costume, ran [the] names together to give himself the surname of Kripalsingh . . . [Ralph] broke Kripalsingh into two, correctly reviving an ancient fracture” [112-13]). Indeed, even his father, “only an embittered school-teacher” (114), is a shameful secret Ralph guards from his classmates. These secrets—the word “wife,” his real name, his father’s inferior position—operate as fairly straightforward metaphors that together cohere the novel’s characterization of the shame of marginalization.

To Ralph, these secrets first suggest inferiority, betokening the fiction of his ideal ego.

But the secrets, along with the motif of spatial structures, also emphasize the theme of a precarious division between interiority and exteriority that the novel explores (or between private and public, though these terms fail to relate as precisely to Ralph’s experience of embodiment).

To manage the intrusions of his shameful secrets into the fantasy of a discrete self, Ralph

109 develops an overarching fiction that works to subdue those metaphorical expressions of the Real

(his “secrets”):

I felt, to give my own symptoms, that I was in some way protected; a celestial camera

recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I

was of interest; I would survive. This knowledge gave me strength at difficult moments,

but it remained my most shameful secret. (114)

Ralph’s celestial camera implies an interested audience as much as it emphasizes Ralph’s exterior self—the image he projects in opposition to the secrets he protects. On the penultimate page of the novel, Ralph describes the moment when, abandoned and unnoticed on a British railway platform, he realizes that his “celestial camera” is a fiction, that he occupies “the limit of desolation” (300); lacking witness or audience, he is unimportant, unmarked. Note here the inverted ironies implied by the camera that watches “without judgement or pity.” Whereas shame typically connotes the scene of a subject before a judging witness (even if the witness is internalized), Ralph’s shame surfaces because he holds onto the idea of being special and, most agonizingly, because he finally understands that he lacks a witness—that, as a subject, he has never been regarded at all. In his own psychological universe, he is unmarked—a non-subject— by virtue of his ultimate unremarkability; his shame redoubles because he occupies a shameful scene without so much as a witness. But that the dominating fiction of being “marked” supports him until his final crisis of collapse suggests two things about the relationship between shame and narcissism as it emerges in the novel. First, the belief that he is unique among the marginalized sustains his incorporation of the ego ideal and allows him to love himself in the image of the other. Second, the narcissistic belief of being marked—“his most shameful secret”—fundamentally depends upon shame for its formulation. In other words, Ralph’s

110 narcissism is born out of shame; narcissism obscures the shameful “Real,” but is ultimately incapable of eradicating it because, in the end, narcissism depends upon shame.

Perhaps because they unsettle his fantasy of being “marked” but also because they threaten the sanctity of his interior (secret and shameful) self, the connections Ralph has with the people of Isabella feel like shameful infections. “In every relationship,” he admits, “I would be aware of taint” (186). Physical encounters disturb Ralph’s self-fiction: “Intimacy,” he writes.

“The word holds the horror” (30). The only sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship

Ralph experiences is with his Aunt Sally, with whom he simply comes “together; nothing again was to equal that sudden understanding, that shared feeling of self-violation, which was for me security and purity” (186). Being with Sally is almost like being alone—their relationship is an exercise in self-love, possible only because of the seeming absence of otherness. Indeed, while the word “wife,” for instance, connotes the shameful secrecy of inferiority, Ralph’s relationship with Sally allows him to escape the polluting danger that comes with the anxiety of determining his own position in relation to another. With Sally, Ralph experiences the safe fulfilment of self- love, an admittedly incestuous “relationship based on perfect knowledge, in which body of one flesh joined to the body of the same flesh, and all external threat was diminished . . . There would be nothing again like this mutual acceptance, without words or declarations, without posturings or deceptions; and no flesh was to be as sweet as this, almost my own” (186). Like the dream Ralph has as a youth, when he fantasizes “that [he] was a baby again and at [his] mother’s breast. What joy! . . . What pain then, what shame to awaken!” (138-39), Ralph desires to withdraw from the social framework of a world that determines the semiotics of his identity, finding safety instead in isolation, in the fantasy of a self that is “all” self, empty of humiliating admirations and imitations of others. The pre-Oedipal, dyadic fantasies informing his relationship with Sally (who is his mother’s sister, after all) and his dreams of infancy

111 imaginatively transport Ralph to a time prior to the emergence of the Lacanian Real, when the horrifying rupture produced by the realization of the fiction of discrete selfhood first emerged. In the primordial state of the Lacanian Imaginary (note the absence of “words or declarations” when he is with Sally), before the mirror-phase or the acquisition of alienating language (the discourse of the Other), he embraces an idea of himself that, like the Aryan horsemen who never suffered indenture and estrangement, remains whole, uninfected by the Self-Other identifications that so splinter his subjectivity and disfigure his self-image.

While the desire for infancy and the pleasures of autoeroticism at times work to keep the horror of contamination at bay, the kind of wholeness Ralph finds in the fantasy of the Imaginary is unsustainable. The shameful image, the secret, constantly unsettles Ralph’s narcissistic fantasy. The entwined forces of shame and narcissism are, perhaps ironically, bound in a crisis of oppositionality, an irresolvable encounter that produces a third mode of othering the self: abjection. That is, if in mimicry, the shame of the repressed Real is replaced by the fictitiously inspired love of “self,” who is really the idealized other, the self that is rejected in favour of the other is, to some degree, a self that haunts the false ego. Julia Kristeva would have it that the experience of abjection results from any kind of crisis of subjectivity:

[T]he heterogeneous flow, which portions the abject and sends back abjection, already

dwells in a human animal that has been highly altered. I experience abjection only if an

Other has settled in place and stead of what will be “me.” Not at all an other with whom I

identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such

possession causes me to be. A possession previous to my advent: a being-there of the

symbolic that a father might or might not embody. (Powers of Horror 10)

In the case of The Mimic Men, Kristeva’s remarks need qualification. First, if there is a symbolic

“being-there” that possesses the self before the self has a chance to emerge, it is emphatically not

112 embodied by Ralph’s father but, of course, by the signifiers of the dominant colonial metropole.

Second, this Other is the object which is identified and incorporated just as it is also that which precedes Ralph’s formulation of self. That conflict overwhelms: possession is, for Ralph (and because, of course, he is a literary entity, rather than a true subject of psychoanalysis), excruciatingly self-conscious, pointing backward to the shame of possession and forward to the fiction of narcissistic self-love (that is, the knowledge that the self Ralph loves is the image of the possessing Other). Thus, for Ralph, abjection emerges because of the particular idiosyncrasies of his colonial conditions. The shame that arises from every preconscious confrontation with the seemingly intact image in the mirror converges with the metaphorically equivalent but historically specific conditions of a confrontation with the desired but threatening image of the metropolitan Other. One shame carries the political weight of the other.

Faced with the authority of the European Other, Ralph becomes complexly and agonizingly “heterogeneous”; the boundaries demarcating his self from the Other are both minimized—to allow a malleability of the self—and emphasized—because the “original,”

“inferior” self has been partitioned away, silenced from expression. “Moving out of ourselves,”

Ralph says, “we look for extensions of ourselves” (22). Ralph builds a convoluted subjectivity that becomes, as he senses in London, “spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid” (61). The purity of his imagined “Aryan” origins becomes disrupted by the conflict between shame and narcissism, as though they invite an excruciating examination of the schisms erected between his private life (his shameful secrets) and his public life, composed so carefully through the elaborate narcissistic mirage.

Importantly, the conflicts that produce abject feelings in Ralph are always located in scenes or images that emphasize a breakdown of the border between interior and exterior spaces.

When, for example, his father abandons his family to garner fame as “Gurudeva,” a religious and

113 political figure fighting for the rights of the colonized, Ralph feels “wearied and nauseated. . . . If

I try to describe my reaction to what had overtaken our family . . . I would say that the episode gave me a sensation of rawness and violation. It was as though I was chewing rubbery raw flesh and being made to swallow tainted oil” (158). The horror of Ralph’s reaction is very much aligned with his old desire to keep his private life secret and—as indicated by the repetition of the term “violation”—recalls his associations between shameful femininity (“wife”), inferiority, and coloniality. Furthermore, the nauseating sense of shame is what he has feared ever since witnessing his friend Hok humiliated by the exposure of his private life: “I felt I had been given an unfair glimpse of another person’s deepest secrets” (117). With his father’s public persona,

Ralph feels vulnerable to exposure, as if he knows the careful construction of his self-image will collapse beneath the weight of so many gazes. However, his father’s fame is also bound up with an attempt to reinvigorate the Indian community with the same kind of nobility or purity that

Ralph builds into his fantasy of the Aryan horsemen, a fantasy that links to self-love as much as to shame.

“Rubbery raw flesh” and “tainted oil”—expressions of abjection, to be sure—used again when the racehorse, Tamango, is found murdered (presumably by Ralph’s father’s followers) in a style imitating “Asvamedha,” the ritual sacrifice of horses in Aryan India. Tamango’s body is strangely mutilated: “Heart and entrails had been torn out; but there were flowers on the animal’s mane, flowers woven into its tail; and the coat had been brushed as though by proud grooms. . . .

Asvamedha: to myself alone I spoke the word. It filled me with unexpected awe and horror”

(167). The symbol of the dead and mangled horse becomes, for Ralph, an open display and grotesque parody of his private fantasies of pure origins. “An ancient sacrifice, in my imagination a thing of beauty, speaking . . . of untrodden forests and unsullied streams, of horses and warrior-youths in morning light: now rendered obscene” (167). As though the secret

114 significance of his imagined ancestry are made visible to all, the gore that sprawls forth from the horse’s stomach parallels the sickening instability of the borders between his own interior and exterior life. If the Tamango incident “chilled and sickened [Ralph] and gave [him] more than ever the sensation of rawness and violation: rubbery raw flesh, tainted holy oil” (167), it is because of the boundaries that have been destroyed: the inside becomes visible, to the destruction of the outside. The secrets are exposed, to the destruction of the image. It is as though any notion of a discrete Self and Other is obliterated along with the destruction of the boundary between clean and unclean—the groomed body of the horse contrasted with its exposed stomach.

Of corpses, Kristeva writes,

In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no

longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of

a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse . . . is the utmost of

abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. (Powers of Horror 4)

The horror provoked by Tamango’s corpse becomes all the more extreme with the knowledge that, politically, it marks Isabella’s most famous articulation of colonial resistance. Thus, not only does Tamango’s death embody the grotesque breakdown of borders (a breakdown that works to reveal to Ralph the artificiality of his own constructed identity), but the horse’s corpse also parodies the incommensurability of a “pure Self” and a “European Self”: “Tainted oil, raw flesh. Chieftaincy among the mountains and snow had been my innermost fantasy. Now, deeply,

I felt betrayed and ridiculed” (169-70).

In Tamango’s corpse, Naipaul instantiates the most concentrated aspect of the novel’s symptomatization of shame. Whereas the spatial structures—the worrisome foundation of

Ralph’s childhood home, the fantasy of the cocoa estate, the Roman house, the London bedsit— constitute a motif that expresses through repeated metaphor the affliction of Ralph’s shamefully

115 imitative selfhood, the corpse is an image that seems to burst through the mise en scène (the cinematic term emphasizes the visuality of the image) that the novel’s spatial motif helps to develop. The image of Tamango’s corpse accrues a meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts. In one sense, Naipaul’s use of excessive imagery coalesces the symptomatic register of shame and the socio-historical context of shame, indicating in fundamentally aesthetic terms the dialogic meanings that reverberate beyond the limits of the aesthetic object. That is, the range of associations Tamango’s corpse produces—humiliation, parody, purity of origins, protest, racist subjugation, privacy, and ritual—exceeds its immediate referent. The effect of that excess is an emphasis on something the novel otherwise seems not to address; in Ralph’s efforts to live up to the image of either the “picturesque Asiatic” (247, 248) of noble origins or of the metropolitan

Londoner, the materiality of his body is almost entirely negated. This negation, of course, gives rise to that feeling of his being “spectral” or “fluid,” but it also has real consequences for Ralph’s sentient experience. This is where race—the semiotics of race, that is—collides with skin and bone. It is where the immaterial psychic space of shame and narcissism congeal in the material, physical space of the abject body. However, the image of Tamango’s corpse also exemplifies the novel’s transposition of “real world” symptoms—how a body might feel shame as a corporeal experience—into literary shame. In language reminiscent of Tamango’s brutalized body,

Jacqueline Rose describes shame as an experience that “brings the body too close to the surface, inner organs and liquids bursting through the dams of the mind.” The “visceral quality” (1) Rose ascribes to shame transforms, through the literary image, into textual shame, whereby the aesthetic and the material converge, producing an image that seems to exceed language, just as it conjures excruciating embodiment—embodiment that, for Ralph, is inscribed by a shameful history.

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The abject body surfaces as an excessive sign first with Tamango’s corpse. It returns when, pushed away from Isabella by the horror of Tamango’s image, Ralph visits the home of

Lord Stockwell, who as actual plantation estate master functions as Ralph’s alter-ego, the

“father” Kristeva locates in the Symbolic of language and history. In Lord Stockwell’s home hangs “a Kalighat painting. . . . Krishna, the blue god, upright, left leg crossed in front of right, flute at his lips, wooing a white milkmaid” (269). The painting not only symbolizes the

Orientalist containment or objectification of the “Other,” but, recalling that Ralph’s real father first meets Ralph’s mother while she sells milk, it romantically binds Ralph’s family’s origins into the narrative of colonial conquest. Stockwell tells Ralph about his father, whom he has twice met: “The second time I saw him he was just wearing a yellow dhoti. His chest was bare. His skin had a shine” (274). Ralph’s revulsion at Stockwell’s description arises in part from the insult of having his father described in such intimate, intrusive terms. But the focus on Gurudeva’s skin recalls the disgust Ralph feels in his own previous encounters with skin (in his London bedsit,

Ralph recoils from intimacy precisely because “there was the skin, there was the smell of skin”

[30]). Ralph’s response to Stockwell’s description also echoes the “rubbery raw flesh” he imagines when faced with the image of Tamango. Skin, the literal border between the inside and outside of the body, also marks the symbolic division between privacy and exposure, as well, of course, as the visual marker of race. Stockwell’s description causes Ralph to convulse; he thinks he is “going to be sick” (274). The abjection signified by Tamango’s exposed organs and the naked, shiny skin of Gurudeva thus relates first to Ralph’s own desire to maintain a border between his interior (secret) and exterior (self-consciously represented) self, and second to the materiality of the colonial body as it is positioned in the social world.

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The Ironies of Autobiographical Form: The Mimic Men’s Structural

When Ralph leaves Isabella for London, expecting to enter a life of substance, where he believes the memories of mimicry and abjection can be left behind, he feels instead a sensation of being a “character” or being “two-dimensional” (17), in contrast with the “too-solid three- dimensional city” (61) of the metropole. After the failure of his Isabellan political life, his sense of alienation upon his return to London increases. With the realization that his colonial background prevents him from ever being a true member of the metropolitan centre, Ralph suffers from a debilitating sense of dislocation. He cannot feel sexually excited—his attempts at eroticism with the English “Lady Stella” and with a European prostitute fail dismally. At home neither in Isabella nor in London, he finds a sense of satisfaction in alienation, as though released from the prison of relationships, which always entail violation. If in Isabella Ralph desires a return to the Imaginary in order to obliterate the shame that attends his heterogeneous colonial subjectivity, in London Ralph desires a wish that is similar but decidedly more destructive: a wish for self-erasure, a death-wish.31 Early on in the novel, Ralph admits that at the time of

31 In his argument about the mirror stage, which he defines as primarily narcissistic, Lacan suggests that identification with the ideal image must involve aggression, as if there is some degree of consciousness that identification of the other is based on a misidentification of the self (or ego). He writes: “The notion of aggressiveness as a tension correlated with narcissistic structure in the subject’s becoming allows us to encompass in a very simply formulated function all sorts of accidents and atypicalities in that becoming” (Ecrits 116). Philippe Julien clarifies the subjective problem that occurs during the mirror stage: “Narcissism, in which the image of one’s own body is sustained by the image of the other, in fact introduces a tension: the other in his image both attracts and rejects me. I am indeed nothing but the other, yet at the same time, he remains alienus, a stranger. This other who is myself is other than myself” (34). In other words, an unstable undercurrent always threatens to throw the confidence and unicity hopefully achieved by narcissism into crisis; this underlying anxiety portends that the pleasures of narcissistic identification could yield the most disastrous and painful collapse, folding back into a primary shame that gapes at the evidence of lack. Thus, Lacan writes about “the suicidal aggression of narcissism” (Ecrits 174), indicating the very precariousness of narcissism’s contingency upon shame, and how self-love of the variety attempted by Ralph Singh, which so compensates for a repressed sense of his own shameful insignificance and his (non)status as lack, finally activates a switch in his libidinal investments: from the pleasure principle to the death drive.

118 writing his memoir, his “urge is, in the inaction imposed on me, to secure the final emptiness”

(13). Indeed, in cold contrast with Tamango’s dismembered body and Gurudeva’s skin, images that exceed their textual significations, is the Luger, the gun with which Ralph’s half-brother

(“Gurudeva’s” shameful offspring) nearly kills Ralph and which ultimately kills Ralph’s father.

Throughout Ralph’s autobiography, he recalls being able to restrain the panic that arises when confronted with the irruptions of the shameful Real only by consoling himself “consciously with thoughts of extinction, as a vague and general fate, as once . . . [he] could get to sleep only with the thought of the Luger at [his] head” (86). In its dull materiality, the Luger stands as the tragic consequence of the abjection of the novel’s imagistic signs: a Narcissistic death-wish that finds its structural equivalent in the form and arc of the narrative itself. For if the Luger promises instant annihilation, the memoir itself articulates a parallel kind of death-wish. Ralph’s narrative, in many senses, articulates a book-length suicide note.

Ralph undertakes the project of writing about his life in part to forge order out of the disorder he ascribes to his community’s historical displacement. Here, it is necessary to distinguish between the memoir as Ralph writes it and Naipaul’s novel, which though textually identical is a distinct critical object. For example, in the conflict between Ralph’s Aryan fantasy and the shift his writing project takes from a written history of Isabellan anti-colonial politics to a memoir, certain ironies emerge. Ralph’s desire to achieve “order, sequence, regularity” (293) through writing is undermined by various failures, not least of which is his failure to recognize that the “chieftaincy” he seeks, though imaginatively produced through the “order” his writing imposes upon his past, necessitates his absolute withdrawal from his historical, social, and political contexts, a withdrawal that effectively constitutes abdication—a rewriting of a past that can only open out toward a blank future. By controlling a “vision of disorder” (97), Ralph’s memoir attempts to reclaim a moment that his Aryan fantasy constructs, the unwritten future that

119 was lost through the historical ruptures of the colonial period. Imagining a world restored to order, Ralph writes: “I have visions of Central Asian horsemen, among whom I am one, riding below a sky threatening snow to the very end of an empty world” (98). The blankness of Ralph’s desired future (or past/future, since it is a future he wishes were his past) actually expresses the death-wish that Naipaul’s novel articulates; it is the tragic vision of a character who, in forging a fantasy of a de-historicized life, actually enacts the obliteration of the self, instantiating the tragic disembodiment that the novel extends beyond the limits of Ralph’s autobiographical perspective.

In Tales of Love, Kristeva suggests that the “one in love with his fleeting image is in fact someone deprived of his own proper space. He loves nothing because he is nothing” (174). The

Mimic Men constitutes a character study of a man who suffers precisely from this narcissism.

Over the course of his short life, Ralph progresses from a desire to retrieve the lost, primordial

(pre-colonial) Self, to a desire to become the European Other, to a desire for nothingness, for a retreat to the “darkness” that stands as the narcissistic figure that is entirely his pre-conscious

Self and, of course, his own death. What Ralph ultimately wants is to return to a state of his

“previous nonentity” (12), to be enfolded (as with the Freudian death instinct) into a non- sensation of non-being, prior to the shame of abjection produced through the colonial experience of mimicry and narcissism. Thus, in the final moments of the novel, Ralph becomes disembodied, hiding his “face behind the pillar” (301) of his hotel dining-room. This is a permanent self-erasure that goes beyond disfigurement; it is the only way Ralph can see of resolving his narcissistic desire to be wholly his own Self (a Self who rejects the Other entirely).

But while Ralph has no need at the end of the novel for the Other to recognize him (by hiding behind the pillar, he effectively pre-empts that need), this final action, symbolizing his desire for nothingness and the imagined end to the relationship with the Other, is still predicated on his tragic disillusionment with the possibility of any kind of self-meaning outside the structure of

120 colonial relationships. Although Ralph declares that “the writing of this book has been . . . an attempt to discover . . . [a final] truth” (226), one senses that he has never left his room at the

Kensington boarding-house. He has enclosed himself in his own fiction. The coffin-like wardrobe is still a standing metaphor, and the death wish is granted in the very act of stepping behind the pillar.

A question remains, however, about the viability of my interpretation of The Mimic Men as an articulation of a death wish—a metaphorical suicide note. There are certainly those who would disagree. Robert M. Greenberg, for example, reads Ralph’s memoir as a therapeutic

“working through” of his painful past:

The Mimic Men seems to be saying that just as Singh is able to revisit painful experiences

of youth with new confidence as an adult politician, so the postcolonial writer or

intellectual must go backward into the burden of colonial self-division before he or she

can go forward into the political sphere. (229)

Greenberg’s analysis suggests that the novel enacts an exposure of shame so as to nullify it.

Naipaul himself poses a similar idea when, in an interview with the Paris Review, he claims to have “healed the wounds” inflicted by the oppressiveness of his childhood in colonial Trinidad because he has “thought about it so much” (qtd. in Rosen)—as though examination leads to expiation. Yet such claims of closure are destabilized by Phillip Langran’s insight that “Naipaul often asserts that the only way forward is through the continuing destruction of old reverences and the embracing of Western concepts” (139). Langran’s argument here emphasizes the irony that arises from any interpretation that finds in The Mimic Men the psychoanalytic equivalent of the talking cure. On one hand, Naipaul is regularly viewed as “wounded.”32 As a public figure,

32 See, for instance, Wood, Nixon, and Langram.

121 he bears the signs of his continuing scorn for postcolonial cultures as well as (and, often, in conflict with) the meaningful disruptions of that scorn constituted by his literary work. In my view, the structural register of mimetic shame suggests the tragic conclusion to The Mimic Men through the narrative equivalent of Narcissus who, in hell, suffers the anguish of eternal rejection, the anguish of an imperfection born from the desire for perfection, a desire that reverberates through death.

Linda Hutcheon uses the term “narcissistic narrative” to describe “textual self-awareness”

(1), the condition of a work’s “internal validity” (19), whereby its structure reflects its own themes or plot. The Mimic Men is a “narcissistic narrative” insofar as Ralph’s memoir enacts structurally the novel’s thematic concerns: narcissistic evaluation and shameful exposure.

However, as an aesthetic object, perhaps, the novel might instantiate a curious tragicomic utterance, emerging from a final satirical twist. As Ralph sits in his hotel’s dining-room, safely shadowed by his pillar, he watches with fascination the hands of a man whose full view is also obstructed by a pillar. “They are long, middle-aged, educated hands: and their primary concern appears to be to convert a plate of meat and vegetables into a plate of acceptable garbage” (294-

95). The order the hidden man imposes on his plate of food parallels the order Ralph imagines his memoir gives to the “greater disorder” (214) of his various historical exiles. But the orderly divisions of the masticator, whom Ralph names “Garbage,” connote violence rather than stability. Garbage “slaughters” his cheese; Ralph “almost expect[s] to see blood” (295). In the final moments of his memoir, when Ralph pulls his “face behind the pillar” (301), he witnesses

Garbage plod on with his brutal sorting of his food. Northrop Frye writes that tragedy “is a

‘mimesis of sacrifice,’ in which the audience participates as communicants, sharing symbolically the sacred body” (Brooks 1). If narcissistic narratives implicate, as Hutcheon insists, the reader as “part of the action” (Hutcheon 5), what can we make of Ralph’s final image of violent

122 consumption? The “twist” of Garbage emerges from its enigmatic meaning: Is the semi-obscured

Garbage merely Ralph’s own image in the mirror? Where is the reader positioned in this satirical rendering of an endlessly refracted mise-en-abyme? A young Ralph ingests the pages of his book about Aryan horsemen, as though to incorporate the fantasy of a lost history. Does the reader participate on some level in Ralph’s figurative death, his disembodied withdrawal at the novel’s end? Does the implied reader of the European metropole “eat” Ralph? Here lies Naipaul’s brutal castigation of the subject position Ralph tries (but fails) to occupy. Though he enlists the confessional form of the memoir—a repetition of Rousseau’s “enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitators”—he also points an accusing finger at the metropolitan, Enlightenment notion of originality. For if Rousseau meant only that the singularity of his autobiography emerges from the particularities of his unique experiences and perception, Naipaul despairs over the impossibility of ever escaping the shameful otherness of the colonial subject’s narcissism.

Although this chapter begins with a rather unrelenting reading of the conflicted and comical ironies that emerge from Naipaul’s characterization of Augustus the cat, in the end,

Augustus, too, becomes a somewhat tragicomic figure, marking at once the loss of a beloved and the disappearance of a body into the imagination of the colonizing other—an imagination that

Naipaul adopts, redistributes, and problematizes through his strange, narcissistic feline identification. The irresolvable tension between Naipaul’s shame and his self-love—a tension symbolized by his eulogy for Augustus—permeates the narrative structure of The Mimic Men.

Ralph’s drive to tell his story is persistently interrupted—first by the spatial metaphors and excessive imagery that insert the novel’s symptomatization of shameful feelings, and second by the gradual transmutation of the autobiographical genre itself; for if Georges Gusdorf once

123 imagined autobiography as a mode of self-making—of “look[ing] to an essence beyond existence, and in manifesting it . . . [serving] to create it” (47)—then The Mimic Men upends that tradition, finally writing the subject out of existence.33 The mimetic qualities of the novel’s shame, then, gather their significance from the novel’s combined registers, whereby the constituent events that provide the triggers for Ralph’s shame—colonial authority and the history of indentured labour in Isabella—provoke the metaphors for embodied shame, which themselves underscore the novel’s problematization of colonial subject formation. Here is an example of the sort of “subversion by imitation” Elleke Boehmer ascribes to resistant writing (165): by weaving into its generic aesthetic formation the very structuration of how narcissism works to mask shame, The Mimic Men exposes the anguishing, pathetic feeling of lack that ultimately de- subjectifies its protagonist.

It may be, remembering the Wiltshire Naipaul of this chapter’s opening, that when Ralph disappears, all we are left with is the artifice of the artist represented by Naipaul himself—

Naipaul as a public figure. This figure suggests a man whose psychological desire for the west has cordoned off the space of the colonial outpost to such a degree that Chinua Achebe could one day quite justifiably accuse him of being a “modern Conrad,” a “new purveyor of the old comforting myths” whose racism dehumanizes Africans as a means of “yield[ing] . . . psychological . . . comfort to Europe” (“Impediments” 28, 23). Yet again, remembering Ralph’s anguished disappearance, his failed narcissism, and his self-defeating shame, this rendering of

Naipaul offers an equally tragic portrayal of postcolonial shame.

33 Similarly, Leigh Gilmore describes autobiography as, historically speaking, “a Western mode of self-production, a discourse that is both a corollary to the Enlightenment and its legacy, and which features a rational and representative ‘I’ at its center” (2).

Chapter 3 “The Screams and the Shouts and the Laughter”: Shame and Shamelessness in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

“Everybody waited for something to happen. This ‘waiting’ and the uncertainty that went with it—like a woman torn between fear and joy during birth-motions—was a taut cord beneath the screams and the shouts and the laughter.” - Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat

In this chapter, I examine the interpretive impasse that arises when a novel’s structural register of shame—the formal conventions a narrative uses to convey intra- and intersubjective shameful experience—seems to be at odds with its other two registers: the contextual register that dramatizes shame’s activation and the symptomatic register that documents shame’s corporeal impact. More specifically, this chapter interrogates the tensions that arise when what a novel seems to be “ashamed about” is elaborated by a voice that seems not to be ashamed. As its title suggests, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying is replete with deaths; tale by tale, stories of murder—

“deaths of the gun, and the knife, and torture and gore” (157)—pile across its pages. Through this representation of mounting carnage, Ways of Dying operates in part as an elegy to South

Africa’s victims of violence during the apartheid regime but, strikingly, it also centres on the image of a child killed by his anti-apartheid activist community. This crucial fact of the story— the death of a child set on fire by other children—operates as the constituent event that instigates the novel’s story; it is the incident that the novel is ostensibly ashamed about, but it also manifests a broader situation of intracommunal betrayals—shameful “secrets” that go largely unacknowledged by the resistance movement. Indeed, almost every death referenced in the narrative results from brutality within the anti-apartheid community. With this unambiguous focus on internecine violence, Ways of Dying departs from the kind of fictional writing most

124 125 commonly produced in South Africa before democracy: representations of state inflicted brutality—by far the most ubiquitous form of violence in the country until 1994. However, while the novel is remarkable for its condemnation of the betrayals vigilantism enacted, on a formal level it also reads as a comedy about the healing properties of laughter, and the novel’s litany of death scenes is strangely buried beneath its comic tone and structure. An irony therefore emerges between the novel’s shameful subject on one hand and, on the other hand, its emphatically unashamed narrative voice and its drive toward a happy ending. Although it begins with the funeral of the child, Vutha, the narrative focuses on the mourning that guides his mother, Noria, and the novel’s protagonist, Toloki, a professional mourner, on a journey towards recovery and wholeness. The novel thus begins in pain and travels in the direction of regeneration and joy.

Yet, not everyone benefits from spiritual renewal; the chorus-like communal narrator and several other representatives of the broader activist community remain unaware of their own shameful transgressions, never achieving the recognitions that enable Toloki’s and Noria’s comic rejuvenation. As a result, the novel tilts toward comedy while always retaining troubling tragic undertones. Later in this chapter, I argue that these tragic features gain their force from shame, a symptom of the melancholic denials about internecine violence. Melancholic shame, I claim, bursts forth in starkly violent and unassimilable imagery, refusing on the narrative’s symptomatic register the repressions achieved elsewhere: in the story of the community trying to claim the comic resolution that belongs privately to Toloki and Noria. In this way, mimetic shame in Ways of Dying traces the discord between competing narratives during South Africa’s democratic transition.

The novel’s uneven approach to genre becomes all the more peculiar considering the work’s literary forebears. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s

A Grain of Wheat (1967), for instance, also emerge during the historical transition from colonial

126 to postcolonial states, but these texts are incontrovertibly tragedies. They conform to the “rules and characteristics” that designate tragedy “a literary genre” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 23) that coheres around the idea of a heroic figure whose conflict with the (usually public) world incites

“an expression of torn consciousness, an awareness of the contradictions that divide a man against himself” (25). Achebe’s Okonkwo, the warrior-hero of Umuofia, faces his tragic crisis during the transition between precolonial Igboland and colonial Nigeria; written at the other end of the colonial period as Nigeria transitioned to postcolonial independence, the action of the novel takes place during a “moment of deep uncertainty and ambivalence” (ten Kortenaar 88).

As Neil ten Kortenaar points out, the novel’s tragedy therefore mediates “on political questions, in particular on justice and identity” (88), but an important part of what makes it a tragedy is its interrogation of the tension that exists between competing historical narratives, including those precolonial narratives that imagined a different future than the paths laid out by colonial chronologies. At the heart of this understanding of tragedy—and this is also apparent in Ngugi’s

A Grain of Wheat—is not only the downfall of an idealized hero (the symbol for one way of being in the world) as a result of a tragic flaw but, in addition to this Aristotelian concept of tragedy,34 Achebe and Ngugi place the tragic figure at odds with communal voices that, not unlike the classical Greek chorus, represent a competing worldview, or a commitment to a different or transforming ideal. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet argue that what ancient Greek tragedy

depicts is one dikē in conflict with another, a law that is not fixed, shifting and changing into

its opposite. To be sure, tragedy is something quite different from a legal debate. It takes as

34 When Aristotle defines tragedy, he notes that reversals in fortune flow from a weakness in the central character: “a man who is neither outstanding in virtue and righteousness, nor is it through wickedness and vice that he falls into misfortune, but through some flaw. He should also be famous or prosperous, like Oedipus, Thyestes, and the noted men of such noble families” (Aristotle 24).

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its subject the man actually living out this debate, forced to make a decisive choice, to orient

his activity in a universe of ambiguous values where nothing is ever stable or unequivocal.

(26)

The unease that emerges in the chasm between universal moral instability and individual moral crisis marks the point at which conflict becomes tragic. Ten Kortenaar extends that classical framework for tragic drama to modern African tragedy by observing that on the eve of Nigerian independence, the

would-be citizens of the new state needed a narrative that would account for the future in

terms of the past. But they knew two pasts, the precolonial and the colonial, pointing to

different futures. . . . The possibility of two narratives creates tremendous ambivalence: not

just a conflict between rival goods . . . but a contest between rival narratives. (88)

As celebrated community leaders, Achebe’s and Ngugi’s protagonists embody collective hopes for the future, yet their individual flaws characterize the competing possibilities for which future will ultimately prevail; their inability to negotiate that struggle endows their crises with their tragic qualities.35

Ways of Dying, however, is not constructed according to the precise conventions—those

“rules and characteristics”—that qualify novels like Things Fall Apart and A Grain of Wheat as absolute tragedies. For one thing, a major trajectory of its plot leads to happy resolution; for another, it is frequently funny. Yet again, Ways of Dying is not entirely comic—its violent core negates such a classification; but it is also not a tragicomedy, a genre that has historically been

“exceptionally difficult to define” (Foster 9), and so has often been used to classify texts that mix

“in a variety of combinations” (10) elements of “high” and “low” drama, or the happy/humorous

35 The “fall” of both Okonkwo and Mugo is propelled by the shame that accompanies their tragic awareness—this is also the case in shame-filled suicides concluding other tragedies, such as Soyinka’s Death of a King’s Horseman. Later in this chapter, I discuss in some detail the role shame plays in A Grain of Wheat.

128 with the sad/serious. But Ways of Dying is not formally uncertain in the way that tragicomedy often is. To be clear, I do not claim that Ways of Dying is tragic because parts of it are sad;36 my reading of the novel engages with tragedy as a formal convention; even as I acknowledge that

Ways of Dying occasionally breaks those conventions, such departures ultimately underscore the novel’s commentary on discourses of heroism—a topic traditionally probed by tragic conflict— within the context of morally compromised social collectives (specifically, the anti-apartheid movement). It is not only its tragic tone nor the tragic events it relates with such surprising nonchalance that qualify the novel’s structure as tragic. Instead, the novel’s chorus represents a collective voice that fails to understand its crimes and, through this hubristic failure, portends the limitations of the post-apartheid state—limitations that, as the novel suggests, are borne from a failure to contend with the shame of its own violent betrayals. Importantly, the novel’s tragedy runs against the threads of its comedy, inextricably binding the tragic level of the narrative to the extra-textual public, political domain, even while its comic form seems to assert a new, celebratory field of privacy. As a result, the novel’s tragedy is less burdened by despair than

Mda’s predecessors in the “transition” genre (such as Achebe or Ngugi), but proper attention to the tragic level of Ways of Dying sheds light on an almost entirely overlooked element of the novel. By tracing the disparate formations of comedy and tragedy on the novel’s structural register, I examine Mda’s rendering of violence and social transformation during South Africa’s

36 As a rather overused adjective, the “tragic” typically summons notions of the kind of sad story told by the field journalist, who reports to the world scenes of violence (but, as George Steiner reminds us, the tragic is often used idiomatically to respond to such mundanities as “the cake has burned in the oven” [Steiner 1]). Though referencing catastrophic (or trivial) events, this type of narration is not “tragedy” in the generic sense. As a matter of fact, Ways of Dying does incorporate into its narrative exactly the type of reportage that is often called “tragic,” but which on a generic level cannot necessarily ensure a work’s classification as tragedy. For instance, Ways of Dying gathers its source material from actual obituaries; the deaths it relates really happened. It is necessary, therefore, to isolate the journalistic “tragic” from the novel’s engagement with the classical form of tragedy. The tragic structure of Ways of Dying takes up the shame and despair of the classical genre and sublimates these affects into a melancholic denial of responsibility for violence, forestalling the kind of agony that arises the moment when a character like Sophocles’ Creon, for instance, realizes the consequences of his violent transgressions.

129 interregnum years, asking how the work’s complex generic dimensions instantiate a commentary on the role of shame during the country’s socio-political transition. Two questions remain central to my analysis: What does the novel’s generic duality suggest about shame, a feeling constantly referenced by the novel’s characters but rarely endowed with serious affective weight?

Moreover, how do we read shamelessness within a context that hopes for a future freed from the weight of the past? Considering these questions will draw attention to how shamelessness or, more properly, disavowed and repressed shame, relates to the melancholic national voice implied by the novel’s underlying invocations of tragedy.

Reading a novel according to its tone presents the critic with an uncertain task. In her work on negative affect, Sianne Ngai offers a useful definition for the idea of “tone,” by which she means

a literary or cultural artifact’s feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general

disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world . . . I mean the formal aspect

of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as, say, ‘euphoric’ or

‘melancholic,’ and, what is much more important, the category that makes these affective

values meaningful with regard to how one understands the text as a totality within an

equally holistic matrix of social relations. (28)

With its contrasting horror and hilarity, Ways of Dying manages to convey a tone that is equally—sometimes even simultaneously—euphoric and melancholic. Perhaps it is this curious bipolarity of tone that accounts for the lack of critical attention to the tragic sub-structure of

Ways of Dying. For, despite its unsubtle melancholic undertones, the bulk of critical reactions to

Mda’s novel take up the implications of its euphoria, either congratulating or reproaching the

130 novelist for the hopefulness that corresponds to the comedic tone and structure.37 The critical diagnosis of optimism results in part from following Ways of Dying along a trajectory from grief and alienation to resolution and hope. The optimism therefore arises by reading the novel according to its plot and by linking the plot chiefly to its comedy—its ribald humour, its predominantly happy union between the novel’s protagonists, and its suggestion of celebration across the community. The changes the protagonists experience regarding their feelings about their pasts and the possibilities of their futures support the dominant interpretation. Even Mda, in an interview with the Oxford English Press, remarks upon the novel’s ultimately hopeful spirit.

As a transitional novel, Ways of Dying looks beyond the violence of apartheid South Africa to a future extricated from a political nightmare, paying tribute to the national hope for a future beyond the shadows of political oppression. I suspect, therefore, that the neglect by critics of the novel’s tragic sub-structure results from, at least in part, a critical consensus to account for the shift in the literary trends that accompanied South Africa’s tremendous political transformation.

Attending to Mda’s optimism and humour is both reasonable (after all, the novel’s comic elements nearly eclipse its tragedy) and, perhaps, part of a broader celebration about democracy;

Margaret Mervis, for one, announces that Ways of Dying proclaims the “future in the spirit of optimism” (55).

However, the exegetical impulse to read the work according to its comic plotline ignores important aspects of the novel’s crucial formal configurations, and overlooks how the novel engages with the uncertainty and violence that was fomenting during South Africa’s transitional period and within the anti-apartheid movement itself. Ultimately, an analysis of the aporetic

37 Rita Barnard, for instance, celebrates Ways of Dying as “essentially an optimistic work” (279), due in part to its representation of impoverished South Africans “as fertile and imaginative producers” (298). Margaret Mervis congratulates Mda’s novel for departing from the realist and somber tone that characterized much apartheid-era literature. Grant Farred, on the other hand, blasts Mda for producing a work with an “entangled and uncertain tenor of an historic(al) era” (184), about which expressions of hope are merely symptoms of political simplicity.

131 dissonance that emerges through the novel’s contrasting iterations of comic hope and tragic despair will indicate the novel’s participation in and struggle against the narratives that were generated through the socio-historical moment to which it responds—the interregnum years and the particular forms of vigilante violence which the novel’s contextual register portrays. Most crucially, the fault lines that emerge from the discord between the novel’s tragic and comic elements direct a consideration of form that can account for more than ambivalence—to name the term frequently attached to the novel’s formal and socio-historical perspectives. Instead, the novel’s social commentary needs tracing in contradictory directions. Mapped through uneven terrain and charting the symptomatic emblems of shame in the novel’s imagery, metaphors, and repetition, the novel’s mimetic shame articulates an anguished (and possibly less welcome) response to South African anti-apartheid politics and the future of South African democracy.

As affects, shame and shamelessness bear crucial significance to the genre of tragedy. In his reflections on the affective quality that drives all tragedy—classical and modern—George

Steiner decides that tragic despair arises in one way or another through a character’s realization of original sin (which Steiner glosses as any permutation of the Edenic fall—secular, metaphorical, or otherwise). He writes: “Because of that fall or ‘dis-grace,’ in the emphatic and etymological sense, the human condition is tragic. It is ontologically tragic, which is to say in essence” (2). Thus, a character or a text becomes tragic through that acknowledgement of inherent isolation and degradation, a condition that arises due to the stain of shame, a quality that is simultaneously innate (by virtue of being a human and therefore flawed), and instantiated

(through the series of violent events that demonstrate those innate flaws). Ill-fated characters enact violent transgressions, which ultimate reveal (to the audience/reader as well as to the character herself) the desperate shame of being human, the shame of, as Ewan Fernie puts it,

“recognis[ing] that we fall short” (20). Hence, Sophocles’ Oedipus finally understands the chasm

132 between who he is and what he has done, gouging his own eyes in an attempt to un-see his shame; Lear spends his senescence struggling against the dreadful truth lurking behind his pride, and dies upon realizing that he is merely “the thing itself . . . a poor, bare, forked animal” [King

Lear III.iv.104-06]; Soyinka’s Elesin Oba, unable to bear the shame that erupts when he realizes his desire to contravene Yoruba customs, throws his chains around his neck. What each of these moments share—indeed, what many tragic moments of recognition share—is a transition from shamelessness to shame. Anagnorisis marks this turn, a transformation of the character’s or community’s or audience’s knowledge of its own failures, flaws, or degradation—its witness of itself as degraded. However, the shamelessness of a character’s pre-epiphanic state is rarely characterized merely by innocence or ignorance. That is, shamelessness connotes not an absence but a denial of shame; thus, anagnorisis dramatizes the movement from repressed to manifest shame (depending on the specific tragedy in question, anagnorisis might reveal the shame of the tragic hero, as with Oedipus; or of the political community, as with the chorus that obeys Creon’s edicts against Antigone; or of both, as when Okonkwo’s shame-driven death also marks his Igbo community’s tragic awareness of the implications of colonization).

My reading of shame and shamelessness in Ways of Dying therefore relies on the distinction I map out between the comic and the tragic genres, which also dramatize, respectively, the distinctions between how shame and grief are addressed within the domains of the personal and the public. The novel’s equivocal formation expresses a critical distinction between shame and shamelessness, binding the experience of shame to the fruitful productivity of recognition and mourning, while shamelessness links to the repressive and stultifying experience of collective melancholia, a public condition that curtails future health in the postcolonial society by virtue of its refusal to acknowledge shame.

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Since my interpretation of the novel relies on dividing it into its comic and tragic structural modes, and considering the contextual and symptomatic registers of shame as they are elaborated within each of those modes, this chapter is divided into two main sections. First, I argue that the novel’s comedy provides a literary space for mourning, where contemplative and embodied grief work towards healing the past and repositioning individual subjects as potentially sovereign agents in a new and hopeful democratic future. This argument draws on the positions well developed by critics such as Nouri Gana and Sam Durrant (Durrant responds in particular to

Ways of Dying), who contend that literature participates in broader cultural mourning practices, enabling—as Gana puts it—“the passage from suffering to signifying loss” (Gana 13). Mda portrays the dramatic loss of a child, and represents the mourning practices that move his mother out of grief toward recovery. Although mourning in the novel addresses histories of traumatic loss, it does so in a way that accounts for recognition and unity, each of which are typical of comic form. My argument differs from established readings of mourning in Ways of Dying to consider how mourning attends not only to grief but to shame, an affect that the novel uses analogously with grief, as though loss is not only an experience of being bereft, but also an experience that entails an extreme devaluation of selfhood. Therefore, alongside the recuperation of interpersonal connections through mourning, the comic structure of the novel centres on the process of healing from shame, which, like grief, is characterized in corporeal terms. Shamed embodiment refers equally to the alienation experienced by the novel’s central characters and to the broader experience of embodiment as it is structured through the violence and racism of

South African apartheid—a situation that also provides the context for grief. Shameful corporeality thus merges with the novel’s creative vision of mourning practices; embodied mourning becomes the means by which bodies and communities may be resignified—beyond grief and thus beyond shame.

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Second, I turn to the novel’s tragic level, where I locate a much different encounter with shame than is registered on the comic level. I argue that shame over vigilante violence turns into the shamelessness of forgetting those actions that failed to conform to the heroism celebrated within the anti-apartheid movement. The public’s shamelessness is articulated in the novel from several positions: the chorus-like narrator, the politicians who visit Noria’s settlement area, and the population of funeral-goers. Each of these public bodies refuses to acknowledge the latent shame that attaches to its criminal and moral transgressions—an acknowledgement that would require a sacrifice of the community’s ideal self-image. Here, the novel underscores the idea that shamelessness does not signify an absence but a denial of shame. Such shamelessness, the novel suggests, instantiates a melancholic rupture on the unconscious level—a repression of a lost ideal that promises to haunt the democratic future. With the consideration of theories of collective melancholia, such as those proposed by Anne Anlin Cheng and Jane Flax, I argue that the novel’s representation of the community’s failure to condemn internecine violence works in pointed contrast to the successful mourning achieved in the private sphere. As a result, shame is never expiated, and remains hidden within the collective political unconscious. Through images of dying bodies, the repeated narration of the death of the same ill-fated child and, in particular, the final image of a burning tire, the novel interrupts its own comic voice, drawing a stark line between private mourning and public melancholia. Removed from sight at the end of the novel, the happy, restored couple nestles together in mournful optimism while the rollicking crowd of party-goers, refusing to recognize the betrayal of an overarching commitment to the community, blindly and shamelessly faces a future burdened by denial and repetition.

Before turning to the main sections of this chapter, it is useful to contextualize the violence Mda’s novel portrays, and to indicate the exact nature of the concern that the tragic aspects of Ways of Dying attempt to characterize. Though published in 1995, a year after South

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Africa’s first democratic elections brought an official end to the apartheid regime, Ways of Dying was written in the three months between the end of 1991 and the beginning of 1992. Mda set his novel at the time of its composition;38 it opens with one of the many funerals that characterized

South Africa’s violent transition to democratic rule. South Africa’s interregnum years—the period between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and his election as president in

1994—were some of the bloodiest in South Africa’s history.39 From 1948, when the system of apartheid was officially sanctioned, the National Party routinely committed human rights atrocities in order to suppress opposition to its policies of white rule. In an effort to prevent organized uprisings, resistance parties such as the African National Congress (ANC) were banned. But with Mandela’s release came the repeal of apartheid laws, and the path to transition was officially paved. The terms of the transition were by no means certain, however, and efforts made by the Congress for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) to draft a new constitution were repeatedly derailed. Under the leadership of F. W. de Klerk, the National Party struggled to negotiate with Mandela and the ANC; the National Party demanded a place within South

Africa’s democratic future, and it required assurances of amnesty for those of its members who, through violence and subterfuge, had enforced apartheid law. Ultimately, these concessions led to the legal agreements entailed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), held in

38 In one interview (with Rebecca L. Weber for The Africana), Mda recalls his writing period as beginning on December 25, 1992. However, in other interviews (with the Oxford University Press and with Venu Naidoo in Alternation [5]), Mda relates beginning on Christmas Day, 1991. Taking particular references from the novel itself (for example, the reference to New Years Eve falling on a Tuesday) suggests that the novel is set in late 1991 and early 1992. The dating of the novel’s composition as well as its setting is important for two reasons: (1) The deaths Mda relates in his novel are based on real deaths that he read in contemporary newspapers, and they therefore illuminate the particular violence of South Africa’s transitional period; (2) Grant Farred’s article “Mourning the Postapartheid State Already? The Poetics of Loss in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying”, which is critical of Mda’s narrative, mistakes the setting of the novel for a post-apartheid chronology, a misinterpretation that raises some key issues around the political expectations about what kinds of post-apartheid or national narratives needed to be articulated and at what time. 39 See Taylor and Shaw: “[I]n the transition period the violence claimed far more lives than did the fight against apartheid itself” (13).

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1997. The TRC promised amnesty to perpetrators whose acts were deemed to have been politically motivated—a contentious compromise that limited for many the success of the TRC as a platform for national healing.

During the interregnum years, agreeing to the terms of compromise proved an arduous, uncertain process and the anger and fears raised by the struggles between the parties fueled a level of street violence that dwarfed even that experienced during the height of the anti-apartheid resistance movement. Taylor and Shaw describe the ubiquity of interregnum violence as taking

“myriad forms; with people, overwhelmingly those whom apartheid designated ‘black’, being killed day and night in their homes, in trains and taxis, at work, on the street, during attendance at political rallies or funeral vigils, or whilst drinking in beer halls” (8). Some of the deaths that occurred during this period are represented in Ways of Dying. However, overwhelmingly, the deaths portrayed in the novel are not direct encounters between apartheid forces and the resistance, and the novel rarely characterizes the agents or laws of the white government.

Instead, the deaths portrayed in the novel, while consequentially linked to the injustices framed by the apartheid state, are for the most part the result of strife between competing anti-apartheid parties or the retributive violence of vigilantism against individuals believed to have collaborated with the state. As noted, it is this vigilantism that forms the context for the novel’s tragic level; its comedy is contextualized by the commitment to hope that led to the incredible election day of

1994.

Against Transcendence: Comedy, Shame, and Mourning

If, as Northrop Frye avers, the “theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it” (43), then Ways of Dying, which follows Toloki and Noria from alienation to fellowship, is a comic novel. In fact, the

137 relationship Toloki and Noria form with each other and with a few other members—women and children—of Noria’s street committee serve as the model for the kind of community that has a chance of finding happiness in the soon-to-emerge South African democracy. Ways of Dying unfolds along a comic arc, with laughter both the product and the purpose of its plot trajectory.

Through humour, the novel evinces laughter—as with the top hat and cape that ridiculously frame Toloki’s stinking body—but it also draws on the “laughter as medicine” trope; laughter, the narrator reminds us, “is known to heal even the deepest of wounds” (95). Furthermore, as

Rita Barnard points out, the novel’s conclusion offers “a version of the grotesque in which laughter retains something of its ancient liberating power” (Barnard 297). Ways of Dying looks to both laughter and the grotesque as symbolic points of transition from death to life. Drawing out Mda’s indebtedness to Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, Barnard demonstrates that laughter in the novel functions as a rejoinder to mourning, swallowing grief in a transformative gesture of regeneration. Adopting this position, Barnard reasons that Toloki’s grotesque body serves as an extension of a double gesture toward the mortal experiences of life and death:

The grotesque image, as Bakhtin repeatedly asserts, is one that emphasizes the

incompletion of the human body—its openness to the world. For all its gross materiality,

the grotesque body is therefore also figurative . . . it serves as a sign of particular

temporality—of the moment when the old is making way for the new . . . At stake in this

ambivalence is thus a vision of the profound and regenerative connection between life

and death, of the world of the living and the earthly netherworld. (284)

According to Barnard, the novel’s potential for funereal gravitas is supplanted through both grotesque imagery and a purposeful turn to mirth; the two devices, in fact, link through their shared anticipation of comic resolution. Funeral attendees burst into laughter when they overhear

“a naughty joke” at the grave of an overcrowded cemetery (163). One of the earliest deaths

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Toloki remembers is of a little girl who dies laughing (44). By the novel’s end, the grotesque figurines carved by Toloki’s misanthropic father are no longer souvenirs of Toloki’s rejection and ugliness, but trophies signifying the potential for joy and a new view of the world, in which they can bring “laughter to the children” (211). In Ways of Dying, Barnard suggests, mourning is laughter; the grotesque body is not only a gateway to laughter but also a metaphor for the move from death to life that laughter enables.

While Barnard’s analysis pivots around scenes of laughter-qua-mourning, I would like to consider more closely the grotesque embodiment that she folds into the more general “peculiar and productive ambivalence” (284) of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. After all, the symptomatic level of the text’s mimetic shame most powerfully conveys the experience of corporeality, although the vulgarity of Toloki’s body does feed the laughter that dries the novel’s comic vision, but it also symbolizes the transmutable threshold between life and death. As Toloki intones: “Death becomes me . . . I cannot live without death” (115). The trope of Toloki’s grotesque liminality does more than position him as a kind of metonymic device, shouldering the woes of the world and exemplifying a process of recovery. Working within the Bakhtinian paradigm, Barnard’s argument recuperates Toloki’s vulgarity and the laughter it inspires as metaphors for regenerative transition without considering the shameful connotations that accompany nearly every textual reference to his grotesque embodiment. The profanity of

Toloki’s body—its leaking crevices, its odor, its irrepressible lust—signifies a shamefulness that underpins Toloki’s early understanding of his relations with the world. Certainly, this is a shame that, in true comic form, is addressed and relieved through his eventual intimacy with Noria.

However, alongside the amelioration of shame through intimacy and laughter, Toloki’s body directs us to a broader consideration of the role of shameful embodiment during South Africa’s transition from its violent past. Such a consideration emphasizes the novel’s symptomatic

139 register, pointing out the imagery and metaphors that ultimately trouble the novel’s comic structuration.

To understand the shamefulness of Toloki’s body, it is important to consider why Toloki feels ashamed and how his shame “takes shape,” for these are distinct processes; in particular, their seemingly simple origins belie a complex entanglement with the mechanics of power during apartheid. At first, Toloki’s shame is simply—though painfully—bound to the abuse he suffers during his childhood at the hands of his violent father and the general contempt from the villagers, who mock him as the “ugly child of Jwara” (50). Toloki “is quite short,” with a nose that “dwarfs his small child-like mouth” (11); his small stature is described in terms antithetical to the abusive Jwara, who stands as “a towering handsome giant” (29). Yet, while his father repeatedly calls Toloki a “stupid, ugly boy” (33), Jwara favours Noria, who is not his daughter, but who is invited into his private workplace to sing for him while Toloki remains shut outside, resentful. Toloki tries to gain approval by drawing pictures—his father crafts metal figurines— but Jwara merely scorns his work. Perhaps as a result of this rejection, Toloki is unable to draw human figures; he only ever draws shapes of animals. In his childhood, then, Toloki’s shame emerges through his consciousness Jwara’s regard. Toloki’s ugliness, his exclusion from the inner sanctum of his father’s sphere, and his artistic identification with animals rather than humans all suggest that Toloki adopts a shamed identity—a subjectivity borne from an internalization of his ill-regard.

But after a brutal attack convinces him to flee his father, Toloki’s character takes on a particularly archetypal quality, wherein despite his exile—or perhaps because of it—his shame represents a broader experience of indignity. This transition from privately endowed shame, where Toloki’s shame is instigated by the psychological impact of the patriarch’s rejection of his son, to a more politically-inflected shame, where Toloki’s shame analogizes a general experience

140 of degradation, is less strained than might be expected. After all, Mda’s theatrical work produced during the time of writing Ways of Dying reveals a sustained interest in the comparisons between an emerging political elite and the departing colonial or apartheid state figureheads. Mda’s satirical play The Mother of All Eating (1992), for instance, characterizes Lesotho’s new government’s nepotism as demonstrating compliance with a longstanding tradition of “eating” the poor. With this in mind, Jwara’s role is more clearly illustrative of the regime itself, in the sense that he stands for both father and state as well as in the sense that he oppresses his

“subject.” Along these same lines, Toloki’s shame links more obviously to a Fanonian psychology, in which racialized embodiment is socially (and politically) constructed as inferior—animalesque and excluded. Such a construction is made literal through Jwara’s creation of grotesque art pieces, figurines fashioned by the hands of the patriarch/regime—the same hands that beat the son. Through shame, then, Toloki’s characterization in his early life allegorizes the political oppression enacted under apartheid, and that allegory accrues meaning as, in exile, he begins to travel through the South African countryside.

Toloki’s shamed embodiment is particularly pronounced through the valences of Toloki’s overwhelming stench, which distinctly operates on the novel’s symptomatic register. Referring to this trait in his novel, Mda notes in an interview the influence of Coetzee’s use of smell in Age of Iron on the inception of Ways of Dying:

In Age of Iron I was drawn to a character named Verceuil. I found nothing remarkable

about him except for the fact that he had quite a rich odor. Just the fact of the smell

fascinated me. I said to myself: “If Coetzee can create such a stinking character, so can

I.” And I did. But mine had to stink for different reasons. (“Justify the Enemy”)

Toloki’s formation emerges from the idea of a bad smell, the unpleasant, immaterial evidence of a body spread beyond its corporeal limits. The “different reasons” for Toloki’s smell find their

141 main explanation in his career as a Professional Mourner, which in true fashion of the Bakhtinian grotesque unites Toloki, who “smells like death” (57), with the corpses he mourns. However, the olfactory symbolism of Toloki’s body accrues further significance when, on his journey from childhood and his home village to maturity in the city, Toloki passes through towns that “reeked of discrimination against people of [Toloki’s] colour” (59). Linked at first through Jwara’s abuse and later through references to bad smells, Toloki becomes the figurative extension of the violence directed at racialized bodies under apartheid, wherein the violence of oppression lifts away from the hands of the aggressors, to be relocated on the skin and in the minds of the victims. From that singular reference to towns that “reeked of discrimination,” the novel underscores the intimate relationship between shame and death, between bodies and power.

Villages “enshrouded by the smell of burning flesh” stand as deathly spaces populated by people who “walk in a daze” (66). The South Africa Toloki wanders on his “odyssey” (59) from country to city is at once overwhelmingly embodied—the smell of violated and burned bodies haunting both land and imagination—and dreadfully immaterial: deathly odors hang as intangible threats, the invisible but irrefutable evidence of the racist and violent terms of power in apartheid South

Africa.

Toloki “smells like death,” while death itself issues “the sickly stench of roasting human flesh” (212). Through the motif of smell, embodiment in the novel wavers along an unsteady axis of deathly presence and haunting absence. Barnard’s analysis, noted above, reads Toloki’s grotesque embodiment as an extension of the Bakhtinian grotesque, linking vulgar bodies to laughter and laughter to the overlapping spaces of life and death. However, having established that the novel’s embodied portrayal of state violence feeds into the shame of Toloki’s metonymic configuration, the novel’s use of the grotesque relates more closely to political theorist Achille

Mbembe’s reading of Bakhtin than to Barnard’s. In On the Postcolony (2001), an analysis of the

142 postcolonial African state, Mbembe takes up Foucault’s notion of biopower, transforming

Foucault’s thesis in two major ways. First, Mbembe shifts Foucault’s attention to sex in The

History of Sexuality (1984) into a focus on the sexual body—with a macabre twist. Foucault argues that, rather than indicating sexual repression, modern society’s obsession with sex has actually ensconced sexual discourse within wider regimes of population control and “normative” identity construction. Both extending and departing from Foucault’s argument, Mbembe suggests that the “bio” of biopower relates distinctly to the bestially sexual and obscenely scatological representation of the sovereign’s body (or the body of the “potentate,” in Mbembe’s vocabulary) in popular culture and, in part, by the very celebrations erected (pun intended) through the state’s obscene performances of its supposedly incontrovertible power. Through an explication of this

“aesthetics of vulgarity,” Mbembe complicates and challenges Bakhtin’s analysis of the medieval carnivalesque that was, as Bakhtin argued, capable of articulating a counter-culture—a resistance of official governance through bawdy parody. In the postcolony, Mbembe contends,

“obscenity and the grotesque” (103), organized around idioms of “the mouth, the belly, and the phallus” (107), do find their expression in ordinary citizens’ ridiculing of state leaders, but such parodies do not, as Bakhtin asserts, subvert official order; rather, they are offset by the participation of state leaders in the projection of themselves as sumptuous consumers of its citizens’ wealth and women’s sexuality. Much like the “eating” that satirizes state nepotism in

Mda’s The Mother of All Eating, Mbembe’s formulation sees such regimes as the apartheid state as feeding off the deaths of its people. With an aesthetic of bestial corruption emanating from both state authorities and the people who purportedly resist those authorities, the validity or certainty of power remains under constant threat, leading—ominously, tragically—to the potentate’s need to assert his control. While for Foucault, the excesses of sex indicate power’s successful concatenation of private bodies and public and normative social life, for Mbembe,

143 excessive bodies themselves insist upon a violent and consumptive mode of relations between the ruling elite and the ruled. Thus, a strange line unites figures who occupy vastly different positions of power, with powerless characters like Toloki linked through grotesque embodiment to his father (endowed with the power to create the grotesque), to corpses, and to the bodiless regime, which, lurking obliquely just outside the frame of direct representation, establishes the very conditions and tropes determining grotesque embodiment to begin with.

The second, related way that Mbembe transforms Foucault’s thesis is in his return, in part, to the idea of a ruler who maintains power through the threat of death. Mbembe develops this idea in his article “Necropolitics” (2003), which states even more resolutely that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11). Thus, while Foucault locates the vitality of

(bio)power in the state’s goal of sustaining life, Mbembe claims that power validates itself (in the postcolonial context) through “a right to kill” (Postcolony 13).

These two biopolitical strands—of vulgar excess and of lethal sovereign violence— importantly come together for Mbembe when he explains that the mutually produced category of the obscene introduces an anxiety about powerlessness—an anxiety that, in the potentate and other state figures (police, soldiers, administrators), necessitates brutal and seemingly arbitrary acts of violence:

[O]bscenity—regarded as more than a moral category—constitutes one modality of power

in the postcolony. But it is also one of the arenas in which subordinates reaffirm or subvert

that power. Bakhtin’s error was to attribute these practices to the dominated. But the

production of burlesque is not specific to this group. The real inversion takes place when,

in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves

in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology, and when power, in its own

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violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence. It

is here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny in Africa must be

studied. Such research must . . . examine . . . how the practice of those who command and

those who are assumed to obey are so entangled as to render both powerless. For it is

precisely the situations of powerlessness that are the situations of violence par excellence.

(133)

In other words, although state leaders may participate in obscene rituals, encouraging symbolic

“consumption” of their bodies through staged and excessive parodies of their potency and wealth, this dialectic between obscene vigour and carnivalesque desire produces a paradoxical anxiety, an uncertainty among state leaders about the nature of the common people’s investment in the obscene drama of authority. Such uncertainty inevitably prompts action: violent assertions of power to reaffirm the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Here, Mbembe echoes

Hannah Arendt’s claim that violence “appears where power is in jeopardy” (56), but his focus on the aesthetics of vulgarity suggests that it is the body itself—as a sign or a symbol, but also as a material reality—that ensures the eternal crisis of uncertainty behind the state power he discusses. Through his travels, Toloki witnesses some of the violence that mimics on a micro- scale the vampiric sustenance of the state: workers are set alight, for instance, by “masters play[ing] . . . funless games with their servants” (65). Similarly, Nefolovhodwe, an old friend of

Jwara, establishes a business building and selling coffins, literally growing fat off the deaths of his people: he “had attained all his wealth through death. Death was therefore profitable” (133).

Amidst a landscape haunted by the odors of bodies and death, Toloki wanders in a trance similar to the “dazed” villagers he witnesses during his travels. In this necropolitical time and place, Toloki and his fellow citizenry seem to shut down; unable to fully contend with the significance of the odors around them, they become “numbed” by their own roles in the never-

145 ending spectacles of violence and retribution. This numbness emerges precisely in relation to their shame over their own violent acts, but Toloki himself replicates that dazedness with his denials of embodiment, fashioning his profession around a fantasy of bodilessness—or, at least, around the fantasy of a body without desires or earthly needs, seeking veneration through the repression of corporeal limitations, signs, and desires. Aspiring to asceticism, Toloki creates for himself a career as “a Professional Mourner who mourn[s] for the nation” (166). In a vocation demanding “sacrifice, self-denial and spiritual flagellation” (119), Toloki designs himself after the “monks of eastern religions,” or the “aghori sadhu,” who, he imagines, “spends his sparse existence on the cremation ground, cooks his food on the fires of a funeral pyre, and feeds on human waste and corpses. He drinks his own urine to quench his thirst” (15). To some extent,

Toloki imaginatively embodies death, taking upon himself “all the woes of bereavement” (11).

Metaphorically, he also feeds on death; like Nefolovhodwe, his livelihood is sustained through the deaths he mourns, and though he insists on honourable mourning, he prospers when others die.

A question arises here about whether or not Toloki himself functions as an extension of the state—while he bears witness to the violence enacted all around him, his body also bears the signs of necropolitical vulgarity. Does Toloki’s stinking body, perched atop grave mounds, mimic the regime itself, “feed[ing] on human waste and corpses” for its nourishment? Toloki’s experience of shame helps make sense of this conundrum. For if Toloki represented the regime, he would be, like Jwara, a shameless figure, as unbothered by the personal history that determines his rejection as by the political history that determines his devaluation. Since Toloki is deeply ashamed by both of these influences on his marginalization, the deathly mimicry that

Toloki’s body enacts merely summons the metaphor; Toloki’s response to his shameful deathliness, however, signals the work that he must undertake to expiate his shame (work that, as

146 the following section demonstrates, the community fails to undertake). Toloki’s shame over the scatological vulgarity of his body indicates his need to extricate himself from the necropolitical power structure, which tautologically determines his own shameful vulgarity.

Two juxtaposed scenes demonstrate Toloki’s shame about his embodiment. The scenes suggest that he sees the austerity of his profession as a means of transcending his body, but they also indicate that his body itself demands attention to the conditions that produce his shame, thus directing Toloki, and by extension the reader, toward a form of healing that may allow the violated and shamed subject to access a future in which hope is a possibility. The first occurs soon after he has reunited with Noria, the “homegirl” from his village. As noted, as a child,

Noria was the daughter-figure Jwara admired; muse-like, she sang to him while he carved his grotesque figurines. To Toloki, Noria had always been “that stuck-up bitch” (29) responsible for stealing his father’s affection, but when he meets her again in the city, he finds himself drawn to her even as she continues to remind him of his inadequacies:

He is visited by strange dreams that look very much like the figurines that his father used

to create. But these are made of glass . . . Noria, also made of crystal clear and sparkling

glass, appears . . . Molten glass drips from her fingers, and some of the creatures lap it.

Toloki sees himself, made embarrassingly of flesh and blood, looking longingly at the

scene. He wants to join Noria and her creatures. He walks toward them. But Noria rides

on a glass horse that suddenly grows glass wings. It flies away with her. “Please, Noria!”

he screams, “Don’t leave me! Wait for me, Noria!” (116)

Revealing much about Toloki’s self-regard and his continued internalization of his father’s scorn for and violence toward his body (in contrast with Jwara’s acceptance of Noria), his dream figures him as shamefully bound to his body while Noria is able to transcend her own physical limitations. Noria and the glass creatures, translucent, stripped of their bodily substance, belong

147 in Toloki’s symbolic understanding to a realm of transcendence unavailable to him, whose ugly flesh marks him as a grotesque outsider, bound to the earth, and shamefully trapped in his own skin and desire. In a sense, then, Toloki designs his profession as an anathema to his shameful embodiment, allowing him to entertain a fantasy of transcendence, through which he imagines that the ascetic life allows him to access a higher spiritual plane.

However, as much as Toloki tries to deny his body its urges and rise above them through mournful spirituality, his body keeps asserting its presence as though to make literal the psychological and symptomatic experiences of shame, described by Jacqueline Rose as a sensation that “brings the body too close to the surface, inner organs and liquids bursting through the dams of the mind” (1). Unable to sustain the veneration to which he aspires, Toloki struggles against his body’s desires. After moving in with Noria, Toloki tries to suppress his desire, but finds himself “ashamed of a dirty dream that had visited him in the night, leaving his perforated green underpants all wet” (155). Mda stresses the corporeality of this shame, positioning

Toloki’s ejaculation within a wider dialectic of shameful bodily excess; after his dream, Toloki

“pull[s] his pants down to his ankles, and washe[s] his shame away” (155). Still later, however,

Toloki’s shameful dream revisits him during a funeral at precisely the moment when he most wants to achieve the figurative disembodiment of transcendent mourning:

The dream haunts Toloki as he sits on the mound, . . . seasoning his oration with goatly

laments. It makes something rise in the region of his groin. It is violently kicking inside

his pants. Toloki bends forward as if responding to the rhythms of oration and mourning.

But what he is really doing is hiding his shame. People must not see that he has disgraced

his asceticism by having dirty thoughts running through his mind, and playing havoc with

his venerable body. (156)

Here, Toloki’s body stymies his efforts to reach transcendence, calling him from sacred duties

148 with its insistent profanity.40

While Toloki ultimately learns to address and even expiate his shameful feelings (thereby transforming the significance of his childhood) through his developing relationship with Noria, the latter’s own experience of embodiment reinforces through juxtaposition Mda’s characterization of shame and violence within a necropolitical state. Noria re-encounters her

“homeboy,” Toloki, at the funeral of her five-year-old son Vutha, but she maintains that this is the second death of her child—that Vutha has died twice. She believes that “Vutha the Second”

(this is the Vutha whose death marks the occasion of the novel’s opening funeral scene) is the literal reincarnation of her first son, whose death she experiences as a deeply traumatic loss.

Kidnapped by his father, the first incarnation of Vutha is left chained to the foot of a bridge.

Though alive at the time of his abandonment by his father, when Vutha the First’s body is discovered, it has been half-eaten by “scavenging dogs . . . fighting over his corpse” (138)—it is unclear whether Vutha starved to death or whether he was eaten alive. The disturbing violence of

Vutha the First’s death (and we cannot overlook the repeated “eating” trope—Vutha’s father

“serves” up his son for the dogs) as well as the unwitnessed fact of his loss induce in Noria a desire to isolate herself from physical contact with others—a kind of practical disembodiment that closes her off in her grief. She loses “all interest in men, and her body [has not since] . . . touched that of a man. The cruelty of the world kill[s] not only her uplifting laughter, but all human desires of the flesh” (149). In this state of grief, Noria conceives Vutha for the second time without intercourse, magically regenerating “Vutha the Second,” whom she claims is “the original Vutha who had come back to his mother” (150), reincarnated through her abstinent

40 Toloki’s sense of his own profanity does not only stem from his body’s sexuality. He notices that his saliva—the sign of his hunger for the Professional Mourner’s costume hanging in a shop window—disgusts nearby restaurant patrons. He registers the stares of beach-goers as he showers on the public beach. He cringes with embarrassment whenever he urinates.

149 measures of self-denial.

Noria’s grief and Vutha’s rebirth enact on a literal level the patterns of melancholia as described by Freud in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” According to Freud, there are two possible responses to loss. Mourning recognizes the loss for what it is, with the consequence that the loss can be “overcome after a certain lapse of time” (244); the loss is eventually integrated into a new understanding of the self and its orientation to the future.

Melancholia, however, arises when the person suffering a loss cannot engage with its attendant grief. In this case, denial of loss reconfigures the otherness of the lost object, which is

“withdrawn into the ego . . . to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object.

Thus the shadow of the object [falls] upon the ego” (8). Extending Freud’s formulation, psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok use the term “incorporation” to define what happens when “healthy” mourning becomes impossible: “Incorporation is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost” (127).41 In Abraham and

Torok’s terms, then, Vutha’s rebirth occurs as a result of Noria’s inability to mourn.

Melancholically, she incorporates him into her own ego. Such an incorporation is literalized on an embodied level when her second pregnancy performs a melancholic regeneration of the lost object. In other words, Noria’s loss is not digested but spit out whole again in the form of Vutha the Second.

Although Noria suffers overwhelmingly from melancholic grief and Toloki suffers from shame, the two introduce one another to alternative ways of addressing the needs of their bodies.

41 The terminology here can be confusing, for “incorporation” is Freud’s term for what occurs in the process of normal mourning, whereby the lost object is incorporated into the ego. Abraham and Torok reassign the term “introjection” to the Freudian paradigm of mourning, using “incorporation” to identify the “fantasy” central to the act of denying loss, an act which necessarily involves cordoning the lost object into an inaccessible but dominating psychic crypt.

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Ultimately, Noria’s private healing only becomes possible when she is able to move from melancholia to mourning. In recent years, several discussions bringing together literature and psychoanalysis have argued that melancholia is a stage of grief within a wider process of mourning. To move from the seemingly interminable melancholic sickness of denial and pain (an affective contradiction which I take up in the next section) toward the recovery of an ego with healthy identification with other love-objects, a person in grief must “work through” the pain of loss. The process of recovery, however, is not without its problems; Jacques Derrida, in particular, took issue with the idea of mourning as a curative process. For Derrida, and for literary critics like Sam Durrant, a mourning process that strives to “work through” grief toward the recovery of a whole ego transgresses an imperative to remember. To let go of loss, Derrida suggests, is to turn away from history, a negligence that is both unfaithful to the dead and politically unethical. Gana interprets Derrida’s problematic of mourning by answering the question “[W]hat is worse than death is the possibility of successfully accomplishing the task of mourning—the possibility of forgetting, or burying, the name of the dead once and for all”

(Gana, “Work” 154). As I argue in the next section of this chapter, Ways of Dying contends with the problematic of forgetting by demonstrating the violence borne from denial; however, on its comic level, the novel portrays the possibility of moving beyond that historical violence through its representation of mourning as the kind of “working through” that Freud made so familiar: the process of the “talking cure” and the reinvestment of desire onto a new love object. Working through her loss, Noria brings an end to her long-held silence on the subject of Vutha’s two deaths. Speech and laughter interrupt Noria’s “compulsion to repeat,” for what assurance is there that Vutha will not be born a third time except the implicit understanding that Noria’s mourning resolves her melancholic preoccupation with the past? Noria’s losses take on a historical dimension, belonging properly in the past; in Freudian terms, the losses have been incorporated

151 into her ego.

Similarly, while Toloki’s grotesque excesses repeatedly indicate the shame with which he regards his own carnality, Noria helps him to relocate the significance of his bodily experience, expiating his feelings of shame through a strategy of recognition, purification, and compassion— a strategy that is not unlike mourning itself. Indeed, through this paired consideration of shame and grief, the novel prescribes mourning as an ameliorative process capable of moving the body beyond the significations ascribed by the regime, which denotes bodies as deathly and vulgar, and which draws them into an unending cycle of violence. It is here, of course, where the novel draws a line to mark its generic rupture; mourning enables the main comic structure to cohere on the private level of Toloki and Noria’s shared process of recovery. Ironically, Toloki himself is only partly aware of the healing potential of mourning. Although he tells Noria that his “body needs to mourn” (150), he fails to recognize the link between shame and grief that the novel otherwise characterizes. In his essay “On the Primacy of Shame,” Jeffrey Kauffman writes that the “experience of grief cannot be understood without taking an account of the shame that is so covert, yet so diverse and powerful a grief force” (5); in the necropolitical context of Ways of

Dying, in which loss and violence characterize daily experience, shame and grief collide through the same painful awareness of embodiment and the omnipresence of death. Kauffman explains:

Disconnections of the self with itself in grief, dissociated fragments of self, and grief are

shame phenomena that are particularly noteworthy in traumatic stress anxiety. [T]raumatic

stress anxiety in grief is characterized, in part, by its disconnective, disintegrative force.

Fragmentation of self is often not so much like a smashed vessel as it is, rather, a self-

relational disconnect, a deep shame state. (8)

Ways of Dying parses Toloki’s shameful embodiment with a larger experience of violence and grief, but in fact the two affects—shame and grief—follow in trauma the same patterns of split

152 subjectivity. Freud himself acknowledges the role shame plays in grief when he writes that one of the “distinguishing mental features of melancholia” is “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 244).

If the body in Ways of Dying simultaneously bears the traces of shame and inspires the trances that dissociate mourners from their grief, then mourning at the level of the body becomes the novel’s articulation of hope for personal recovery. Once Toloki and Noria have shared their stories of loss with one another, they wash each other’s bodies with “aloed water” in a hypnotic state that eventually reverses the “daze” arising from dissociation:

They dazedly rub each other’s backs, and slowly move down to other parts of their

bodies. It is as though they are responding to rhythms that are silent for the rest of the

world, and can only be heard or felt by them. They take turns to stand in the basin, and

splash water on each other’s bodies. All this they do in absolute silence, and their

movements are slow and deliberate. They are in a dream-like state, their thoughts

concentrated only on what they are doing to each other. Nothing else matters. Nothing

else exists. (192)

The morning after their ritualistic purifications, Toloki wakes to find that he “is no longer afraid to feast his eyes on the contours of [Noria’s] body” (193).42 Here, Ways of Dying characterizes the inverse of what Mbembe, following Hegel, suggests marks the metaphysical movement toward subjectivity:

[T]he human truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle

and the work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of

42 Note that with the word “feast,” Toloki also indicates that their bodies have been extricated from the “aesthetics of vulgarity” that weave bodies into a state dialectic of excess and violence. He notes that his looking no longer feels like “rape, since last night she allowed him to look, and to touch” (193).

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negativity). It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the

incessant movement of history. Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work

of death. (Mbembe 14)

While Mbembe views subjectivity through the lens of sovereignty—that supreme enabler of control or power—Toloki’s “becoming subject” follows a path from the deathliness he initially embodies to an engagement with life. Although life and death are entangled—Toloki tells Noria that “our ways of living are our ways of dying” (98)—the comic optimism enunciated by the ablutions performed by the united couple at the end of the novel suggests that, provided the terror of the necropolitical state is suspended, subjectivity may occur in a domain beyond the field of violence and power. Indeed, after washing with Noria, Toloki feels “so proud of himself

. . . Throughout the night he had slept peacefully, and had not been bothered by crude dreams”

(193, emphasis added). The ritual cleaning endows Toloki’s relationship with his body with new significance so that he no longer feels ashamed. The novel’s positive attention to the body here offers an alternative to the spectacle of the grotesque (and stinking) body in pain that sustains the necropolitical field of violence, and thus a point from which to move forward from grief through mourning to recovery. Power, pain, shame, and grief circulate through the body; embodied mourning suggests an opportunity to heal through the very location where pain is realized.

Toloki comes to recognize this need for a physically rooted experience of mourning when he tells Noria, “My body needs to mourn” (150, emphasis added).

Through this arc of recovery, Ways of Dying offers a narrative of a transition to freedom that designates embodied mourning as the basis for optimism. As Sam Durrant points out in his insightful consideration of literary South Africa’s emerging opus of seemingly apolitical work:

“Mda’s novel moves towards the reintegration of community and the mourning of both personal and collective loss” (“Invention” 445). Despite the regime of death from which the plot gathers

154 its momentum, the conclusion rests less upon a cathartic release than upon comic resolution.

With some important exceptions (which I take up below), the novel’s laughter and grotesque imagery restrain the full force of the violent tragedies to which it responds and the message at the end appears to be, as most critics argue, optimistic. Mourning takes on the ameliorative potential to heal private grief and shame, and a vision of subjectivity in which embodiment is free from the deathly traces of power, free from pain and shame, emerges as an ideal position—achieved by Toloki and Noria—from which to recognize history while facing the future. The trouble, of course, is that while Mda’s comic structure points the direction toward “the mourning of both personal and collective loss,” the novel extends recognition only to Toloki and Noria. Only on the comic level does anyone does anyone learn to address grief or shame. I therefore turn now to the novel’s tragic undercurrent, where images of horror and acts of violence cannot be subsumed by laughter, and where the community’s failure to recognize its shame cuts across the private wholeness achieved by Toloki’s and Noria’s comic resolution.

A Parade of Shame: Tragedy, Shamelessness, and Melancholia

As suggested, the comic vision that emerges through the resolution of the central plot in

Ways of Dying expresses optimism about the possibilities of individual subjectivity, of intimacy, and of shared creativity beyond the limits of apartheid strictures on self-expression and identity.

Although Toloki and Noria’s move from shame and grief to self-respect serves as a template for the nation during its transitional moment, it takes place mostly in private, outside the framework of political systems and public discourse. Just as the marriages in Shakespearean or Greek comedies metaphorically parallel “a movement from one kind of society to another” (Frye 163), so too does the happy union at the end of Ways of Dying gesture toward a new socio-political future. In this way, the novel participates in a formal comic tradition, offering for one of the first

155 times in South Africa an alternative literary articulation of contemporary events—a narration whose comedy departs from the realist tragedies or satires most typical of South African literature before the end of apartheid, including Mda’s own previous dramatic works. I do not want to suggest, however, that the comic resolution of the novel’s plot operates wholly without a critical functionality. Indeed, Toloki and Noria’s mourning necessarily operates within the private sphere precisely because there is no room for it in public; the pair turns inward, gaining from intimacy what has been denied through public meetings, where their grief, like Toloki’s inarticulate graveside cries and groans, rings wordlessly amidst a grander narrative of resistance heroism. The private sphere remains a utopian space for Toloki and Noria alone; it is a space where “Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists” (292).

The novel’s public sphere, however, is dominated by political leaders who redirect grief into anger and uncritical commitment to revolutionary violence, rewriting the significance of

Noria’s bereavement to ensure the strength of the emerging democratic nation. Thus, the tragic domain of the communal narrator forestalls the recognitions that allow Toloki and Noria to disentangle themselves from the “regime of death” and to resignify their bodies—no longer benumbed or grotesque—within a private dialectic. Operating outside the novel’s main plot, the novel’s tragic elements configure as disruptive moments that strain against the hopeful pleasures of comedy. These disruptions arise first by the rendering of a series of anecdotes—the string of terrible events Mda lifts from contemporary newspaper articles—that refuse to be subsumed by comedy. In addition, the repetition of Vutha’s deaths, distilled through intensely horrific imagery, exceed and disturb the comic vision. The imagery of Vutha’s deaths recalibrate the novel’s relationship with the socio-political context to which it responds. In this way, tragedy in the novel bears out Olga Taxidou’s assertion that “tragedy has always been about democracy”

(7), emerging “as a radical form of critique” (2) rather than, as Aristotle famously saw tragedy, a

156 purely aesthetic experience “offering an antidote to suffering and pain” (2).

Earlier in this chapter, I outlined some of tragedy’s formal conventions. Additionally, my understanding of the tragic follows Simon Goldhill and George Steiner, who depart from the long tradition of reading tragedy according to an interpretive formula of plot devices or affective impacts (a tradition that runs from Aristotle to Frye). Instead, as Goldhill writes, tragedy expresses “an attitude of pain, broadly conceived” (53). In its formal expression, tragedy portrays the realization of humankind’s position in the world (Fernie underscores the essentially shameful nature of this position), and the realization is cause for despair. Steiner describes the tragic condition in even starker terms, claiming that in tragedy lies “a performative statement of man’s unhousedness in the world (apolis), of an elemental, non-negotiable enmity between being and existence. Here is an exposition of the belief that it is best not to be born” (11). In other words, for Steiner, tragedy articulates the interminable hopelessness that accompanies the realization that there is no divine justice, no recompense for the pain endured for being human beneath the auspices of pitiless gods. However, despite the existential spirit driving the tragic despair Steiner describes, tragedy has the capacity to distill general existential despair and reformulate it in political terms. This is partly what Taxidou means when she underscores tragedy’s potential for

“radical critique.” Thus, for instance, the universal despair of Sophocles’ Antigone is reformulated in Athol Fugard’s The Island (1974) as the despair of living under apartheid. While the tragedy attains its meaning through the drama of Antigone’s (or John and Winston’s) fate, it gathers its force by its ability to comment upon that fate in a way that speaks to the audience’s own social crises.

If Ways of Dying operates on its tragic register as a radical critique, the primary target of this critique is the culture of vigilantism that responded to perceived acts of betrayal during the anti-apartheid movement of the interregnum years. As punishment for collaboration with the

157 apartheid police force or with the government, many perceived traitors—known as “impipi”— became victims of necklacing. Bound by rubber tires doused with gasoline and set alight, the bodies of the accused (but never tried) traitors were burned to death. The shocking violence of necklacing garnered international attention, and despite the ANC’s official condemnation of the practice, threatened the anti-apartheid movement’s reputation and support abroad. The movement’s decades-long struggle for independence necessarily involved acts of war and violence, sanctioned by the ANC and other parties fighting against apartheid, as well as their supporters. Indeed, the state-organized violence that entailed apartheid demanded resistance on its own terms. Nelson Mandela recognized the stakes of resistance in his famous 1962 defense statement: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society . . . it is an ideal for which

I am prepared to die” (qtd. in Edelstein 73). The armed wing of the ANC, the Umkhonto we

Sizwe [MK] (the “Spear of the Nation”), organized the tactical elements of the resistance struggle, but the struggle took shape throughout South Africa and beyond the ambit of the ANC in organized and impromptu riots, strikes, and boycotts. From a post-apartheid perspective, it would be a mistake to suggest that the violence enacted through the anti-apartheid resistance had any moral equivalence to the implicit and explicit violence of the apartheid state. Njabulo S.

Ndebele is correct to insist that such “an equation . . . has given our white compatriots a right they previously and still do not have: the right to judge our struggle” (155).

When Mda focuses his critique upon internecine violence in general and vigilante necklacing in particular, he risks denouncing the struggle itself. An awareness of this risk is apparent from the first page of the novel, which juxtaposes the idea of community with the precarious act of testimony:

There are many ways of dying! . . . This our brother’s way is a way that has left us

without words in our mouths. This little brother was our own child, and his death is more

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painful because it is of our own creation. It is not the first time that we bury little

children. We bury them every day. But they are killed by the enemy . . . those we are

fighting against. This our little brother was killed by those who are fighting to free us! (7)

The person attempting to disclose the events of the deceased’s murder is the Nurse, Mda’s designation for the person who, by virtue of being the witness of the dead person’s final moments, reports the cause of death to funeral crowds—a kind of eulogy as well as, in many cases, a rallying call to arms. Vutha, Noria’s son and the novel’s first victim, has been killed by necklacing at the age of five by a group of youths from his settlement who believed he had been collaborating with the enemy. The funeral scene contains no less than nine references to the familial/communal relation of Vutha to the crowd in attendance; Vutha is “our own child,” “this our little brother,” “our brother,” “our own creation,” or “this little brother” (7-9). Through repetition, Mda emphasizes the ethos of the community, redoubling its weight through a communal narrator that speaks much like the chorus of classical drama:

We know everything about everybody. . . . We are the all-seeing eye of the village

gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened .

. . ’, we are the ‘they.’ No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the

story, and it can tell it the way it deems fit. (12)

Underscoring the voice of the community here is both an ethos of unity and a menacing articulation of surveillance, through which individual ownership of any event is both witnessed and (re-)possessed by the community to which the individual belongs.

Stressing how violence destabilizes the comic and regenerative approach to death and mourning, the Nurse is prevented by the funeral crowds—the same “we” as the communal narrator—from telling the story of Vutha’s death the way he “deems fit.” This insistence on silence arises as a result of the community’s angry response to the Nurse’s oration, which at first

159 leave the crowd “without words in [its] mouths,” but which eventually causes “muttering about the Nurse’s indiscretion . . . so loud that it [begins] to swallow his words of anger” (7). Mda stresses the stakes of the Nurse’s testimony plainly: listening to his oration, many members of the community “feel that there is no way the Nurse can explain to the funeral crowd how we killed the little brother without parading our shame to the world” (7, emphasis added). Here, the relationship between shame and shamelessness begins to emerge: so intense is the shame surrounding the violence of Vutha’s death that the shame is denied, and the denial transmutes the dominating affect that determines the public attitude toward vigilante violence. Animated by both grief and denial, the funeral crowd moves from shame to a rejection of shame— shamelessness. The shame of vigilante violence is stifled at the funeral for fear that the story would provide newspaper reporters with “blazing headlines” (9). Afraid that “parading our shame” would detract from the cohesive image of the community—its honour and reputation in the world beyond—the story of Vutha’s death remains largely untold.

And yet, despite the crowd’s condemnation, “parading shame” is precisely what Ways of

Dying sets out to do with its portrayal of death after death caused by the kind of retributive violence within the resistance community—the “battle of brother against brother”—that Mandela referred to in several speeches to communities like Soweto and Natal, where he pleaded with youths to “take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea. Close down the death factories. End this war now” (Mandela). Crucially, the idea of a “shameful parade” of violence signals the nature of the risk Mda takes, treading a fine line between criticizing the anti-apartheid struggle (in which he and his family took part), isolating particular disavowed elements of the struggle, and indicating the degree to which the disavowals themselves threaten the post-apartheid future. Taken from contemporary South African newspapers, story after story discloses deaths that the crowd at Vutha’s funeral would deem

160 shameful. This defiant repetition of violent anecdotes, juxtaposed with the force of the repeated reference to community, demonstrates via mimetic shame Mda’s underlying investigation of the idea of public shamelessness that structures his novel’s concern with collective melancholia.

Previously, I described Noria’s melancholic response to loss as a denial so strong that she literally reproduces Vutha from her body. Obviously, this regeneration dramatizes a private loss, but in his consideration of melancholia, Freud gestures toward a more collective experience of

“pathological” mourning by suggesting that loss may relate not only to the death or absence of a person, but to “some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). Several recent theorists have taken up Freud’s reference to the loss of an ideal. Jane Flax, for instance, extends a psychoanalytic reading of melancholic subject formation from the individual to the group, arguing that the American national “subject” is melancholic to the extent that in its psychological response to the history of slavery it is “gripped by sometimes paralyzing wishes to magically erase the living past rather than engage in the arduous processes of realistically facing its effects and constructing practices to ameliorate them”

(Flax 3). Denial, she suggests, constitutes the symptom and effect of melancholia; rather than integrate past losses into a non-idealized national discourse, they are disavowed and repressed, feeding the unconscious self with the poison of unacknowledged truth, regenerating a system of

(self-)hatred and injustice. Responding to the same context of American history and nationalist narratives, Anne Anlin Cheng asserts: “It is at those moments when America is most shamefaced and traumatized by its betrayal of its own democratic ideology (the genocide of Native

Americans, slavery, segregation, immigration discrimination) that it most virulently—and melancholically—espouses human value and brotherhood” (11). Cheng’s point here is that these values are espoused alongside acts of injustice that mime the original crimes and betrayals, as though the unconscious sense that the past is not fully past provokes fervent utterances of the

161 idealized ideology. Flax and Cheng agree that it is the loss of a cherished ideal that impoverishes a nation’s self-evaluation but, ultimately, that impoverishment is quickly papered over, repressed through a process of melancholic denial—one that promises eruptions of violence and repetitions of historical wrongdoings. Here, an idea of a collective melancholia extends to the community

Freud’s original suspicion that “melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (245).

Melancholia therefore relates to shamelessness by virtue of their shared experience of denial, refusal, or unconsciousness of shame; in the case of Mda’s novel, both melancholia and shamelessness arise out of the shocking fact that the ideal of heroism and united commitment to the struggle (the “pillar of unity” that Mandela refers to in his rallying calls for justice) has been betrayed, lost in the frenzy of retributive violence. The connections between melancholia and shamelessness become all the more apparent when we remember that, according to Freud, the only important characteristic distinguishing melancholia from mourning is a “disturbance of self- regard” or “a delusional expectation of punishment” (244). To be able to function in melancholia, then, requires a commitment to a fiction—the fiction, perhaps—of honour; only through an ennobled lie can shame be repressed. Only through a refusal to see the shameful fact of the lost ideal can the collective maintain its narrative of heroism. Thus, the horror and grief traumatic loss entails can, through a melancholic response, trigger a denial borne of shame and, furthermore, entrench shamelessness as the affect orienting collective melancholia.

In Ways of Dying, melancholia and shamelessness operate in tandem. When the community rejects the Nurse’s “parade of shame”—the narration of Vutha the Second’s death- by-necklacing—it repudiates the shameful aspect of vigilante violence that was taking place regularly enough in the interregnum years to warrant several fierce public debates about its

162 status, and about whether it should be condemned or condoned. When Mda contrasts that initial denial with a nearly relentless repetition of brutal deaths, many denoting the same “shameful” circumstances that led to Vutha the Second’s murder, he insists upon the necessity of acknowledging and taking responsibility for an excess of violence during the transitional period.

In this way, the novel’s symptomatic register relies on imagery as a means of “acting out” (as opposed to “working through”) the shame that melancholically unsettles national unity. In other words, by contrasting Toloki and Noria’s mourning with the public’s melancholic negation of shame—and by portraying Noria’s melancholic regeneration of her lost object to focalize the public’s pattern of violent repetition—Mda suggests doubts about the future of democratic South

Africa that are not matched by the plot’s comic resolution. From the beginning, then, when the crowd refuses to listen to the cause of Vutha the Second’s death, the novel represents the morphology of public shamelessness. The symbolism of Vutha’s melancholic function as a repeated object of repressed loss first plays out privately, in relation to his mother. But this private experience is mirrored in the public sphere, through the collective refusal to tell the story of Vutha the Second’s necklacing.

If the prescriptive “working through” of loss that Noria enacts in her conversations about the Vutha’s fails to register with the community, its shame flourishes not as a byproduct of the moral guilt over necklacing but as an irruption of awareness—an undesired awareness of the inconsistency between an idealized notion of the community and the facts of internecine violence that disable the ideal. This is why the funeral crowd insists that the Nurse cease the “parade of shame” constituted by the report of the Vutha the Second’s death: it is not that the crowd cannot bear the guilt of the crime committed against Vutha, but that it refuses to relinquish a narrative that vilifies betrayal for a narrative that integrates a more complicated and less valorized idea of multiple and conflicting subjectivities, of uncertainty and imbalance—the idea of a population

163 composed of members whose interactions with the apartheid state have not always operated on the moral high ground.

Mda’s criticism here echoes that conveyed by Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s seminal novel about collaboration and the double-edged ironies of betrayal. Written on the cusp of Kenyan independence, A Grain of Wheat narrates a nation’s hopes about the future as it emerges from the violence of a colonial past. As Simon Gikandi puts it, the novel articulates anxieties about “the compromised nature of independence” (116); its protagonist, Mugo, betrays the independence movement’s leader, Kihika, but nearly every character hides his or her own past act of complicity with the colonial oppressor. Concerned as it is with the theme of political betrayal, the novel takes up the formal conventions of tragedy to map out a psychological drama of shame and repression, confession and punishment. Mugo’s violation of the independence movement’s code of heroic fidelity—and the incapacitating shame he experiences as a result—coalesces the novel’s concern with the intricate politics of betrayal: the traitor exposes the structural and psychological violence of colonization, wherein power radiates through the colonized subject’s body, transmitting doubt and anger to the independence movement.

But the traitor figure also strains against the imagination of the future, problematizing any cohesive vision of nation-building. When Mugo confesses his crime to his community on the very day that Kenyan independence is officially achieved, he feels expiated, cleansed of the shame that had numbed his body for much of the novel’s duration. But the leaders of the independence movement had long sought retribution against the traitor, thought to be someone else, and despite their recognition of Mugo’s contrition, they seek to cleanse the community of the stain of betrayal. In secret, they coordinate a private trial and hastily sentence Mugo to death, executing him on the night of his confession. This act of retribution underscores the tragedy of

Ngugi’s work: only when it is too late do Mugo’s judges realize that his shame has become

164 theirs. After Mugo’s execution, Wambui, Mugo’s informal “judge,” and others in the Thabai community “conversed, as if they did not know what the other was talking about, as if they were

. . . ashamed of certain subjects in one another’s presence” (240). Doubting her response to

Mugo’s confessions, Wambui turns to the future troubled by the shame of the past—not by

Mugo’s infidelity to the cause, but by her tragic recognition that she has betrayed a more overarching virtue than that espoused by the movement’s code of heroism, and that she now faces independence burdened by the unbearable weight of the shame that threatens constantly to haunt the future form of memory.

With Wambui’s belated recognition, and the transfer to her of the physical numbness that earlier characterized Mugo’s experience of shame, Ngugi’s portrayal of the “birth” of postcolonial Kenya is generally consistent with the formal conventions of tragedy, although the

Aristotelian tragic “reversal” ironically occurs after the apparent climax of Mugo’s cathartic confession (this is because, as in Ways of Dying, the broader tragedy occurs in the public or national domain). Furthermore, Ngugi represents the historical subjects of betrayal and colonial shame mimetically: these subjects are rendered on an aesthetic level through a thematization of shame as a moral and psychological burden as well as through repeated references, as in Ways of

Dying, to the corporeal numbness and disorientation that shame and the repression of shame are often thought to cause. In this way, A Grain of Wheat offers a similar evaluation of the historical and psychological operation of shame as that described by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. At the end of this work, Fanon denounces the shameful shackles of the past: “I am not a prisoner of history,” he insists. “I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny” (229). For Fanon, shame is a weapon transmitted by the colonizer to the colonized; it is a psychological remnant of colonization that must be disavowed by privileging the potential of the future over the dictates of history. But because it comes at the end of a deeply convincing exploration of the extent to

165 which Fanon’s own psychology is marked by colonization, this final and urgent call to the future implicitly arises out of tragic uncertainty. In A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi’s turn to the future carries a similar sentiment of doubt; the hopes and promises of independence are burdened by the shameful betrayals of the past, and those betrayals, he suggests, are not only—not even predominantly—the publicly acknowledged treachery of cooperating with the colonial authorities. Instead, as in Ways of Dying, they are the repressed betrayals that occur within the community—the secondary violence of retribution that both ensured and belied the public narrative of solidarity and success.

Ways of Dying engages with the theme of shame and the irony of a misconstrued interpretation of betrayal established by A Grain of Wheat, participating in the tradition of a postcolonial “transition” novel, and expressing some of the doubts raised in the earlier work. But

Mda isolates the public and private spheres far more cleanly than Ngugi, whose novel suggests a greater psychological entanglement between the two fields. In Ways of Dying, the private sphere holds the potential for recovery and growth, for reconfiguring the significance of past shames, which is why the private world provides the context in which the conventions of comedy can be enacted. In public, renegotiations of historical narratives remain conflicted, potentially impossible. When Noria attends a committee meeting in her settlement, the visiting party leaders deprive her of a public acknowledgement of the brutality of Vutha the Second’s murder. Instead of condemning his death before the gathering or through the newspapers, the leaders remain silent about the event, pulling Noria aside to offer their condolences while also intoning that

Vutha himself was “not completely blameless,” as though the very suggesting of a five-year-old collaborating with the settlement’s enemies was enough to justify violent retribution. The party validates the murder and endorses the will to “intimidate [Noria] . . . to keep [her] quiet . . . or to silence [her] forever.” Noria realizes:

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The kind of silence that everyone is demanding from her is that she should not condemn

the perpetrators in any public forum, as this would give ammunition to the enemy. Now

she sees that what they really want is that she, like the rest of the community, should

accept her child’s guilt, and take it that he received what he deserved. If she keeps quiet,

the whole scandal will quietly die, and no one will point fingers and say, “You see, they

say they are fighting for freedom, yet . . . [t]hey commit atrocities as well.” (178)

Shocked at their denial, Noria retreats from public engagement, finding solace alone with Toloki, whose conversations help to disrupt the melancholic repetition of her painful losses.

Through Vutha the Second’s emphatic youthfulness, as well as the extreme youth of his killers (a five-year-old friend is handed the fatal match), Mda underscores the brutality of the crime as well as the sense that children are the instruments not only of a culture of violence but of a culture of retribution that has been internalized across many South African communities.

With the uncomfortable portrayal of leaders who assign blame to a five-year-old, Mda points an unsubtle finger at leaders who condoned or even encouraged vigilante violence. Winnie

Mandela, for instance, famously announced in 1986 that “[W]ith our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country” (qtd. in Beresford). While her statement was controversial and not representative of the ANC’s official position, its sentiments were shared by several of the anti-apartheid movement’s leaders. ANC Spokespeople Alosi Moloi and Tim

Ngubane stressed the importance of eliminating collaborators in ways that would terrorize the public imagination: “Among us we have people who have openly collaborated with the enemy.

You have to eliminate one to save hundreds of others. We want to make the death of a collaborator so grotesque that people will never think of it” (qtd. in Moosage 144). Indicating the conflicted response of anti-apartheid leaders to necklacing, one commentator notes:

[T]he ANC and UDF [United Democratic Front] were caught in a double bind in that they

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could not explicitly condemn the practice and risk losing their mass support base, or

explicitly condone the practice and risk losing the support of important internal and

international constituencies. Consequently, both organisations struggled to formulate a

position without giving the state the upper hand in a discursive war on the moral and

political legitimacy of using violence. (Moosage 139)

Prominent ANC figures such as Chris Hani endorsed the tactics of the so-called “People’s War” by reflecting that necklacing was “a weapon of the masses themselves to cleanse the townships from the very disruptive and even lethal activities of the puppets and collaborators” (qtd. in

Moosage 148). Similarly, a leader of the UDF gave voice to the ideal of solidarity in terms that reveal the extent to which collaboration stood as a singular betrayal of allegiance: “Either you join the struggle or you join the police. There is no such thing as the politics of neutrality” (qtd. in Moosage 140).

Mda recognizes the discomfort with which people might regard vigilantism or necklacing in the history of the struggle against the apartheid state. As the reference to the “parade of shame” suggests, to criticize that element of the struggle risks redirecting an important narrative about the structure and terms of violence as they were established by the apartheid system itself, and employing necklacing as a kind of “red herring” issue whose main purpose is to redirect blame and equalize the sources of political villainy. Yet, that risk is entirely Mda’s point: when acts of brutality are refashioned or maneuvered to reflect a broader discourse of resistance or necessity, they take on a significance that is both much greater than and much less than the initial act of violence. That is, by taking hold of necklacing as a necessary means of consolidating victory against a violent state, the history of the anti-apartheid struggle makes the act less than the raw force of violence it embodies—it is nominally forgiven and absorbed into a broader narrative. However, by denying that raw force, by refusing to acknowledge the various

168 consequences of the violence (the losses it invoked, the ideals that were compromised), the significance of the violence grows beneath the muzzle of repression—the denial (a latent threat) returns to haunt, undermining the future and preventing growth. Indeed, South African novels published well after the end of apartheid, such as Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

(2001) and K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents (2001), portray the violent realization of the latent threat Ways of Dying forebodes; both novels characterize the extreme and unexamined violence of urban South Africa (tellingly, one of the characters of Mpe’s novel keeps a copy of Ways of

Dying).

In Ways of Dying, the structural and symptomatic registers of mimetic shame cohere around the images of Vutha’s deaths. That threatening latency is focalized through imagery because it is through imagery that the reader—but, emphatically, not the community— recognizes the significance of the violence that resists absorption into the comedy that dominates the novel. Mda’s use of imagery suggests that the relationship between aesthetic representation and socio-political realities is complicated by a melancholic impulse to misinterpret. At the end of the novel, the communal narrator “burst[s] into a cacophony” (211) of celebration as the New

Year begins. Separated by asterisks from the focused resolution of Toloki and Noria’s grief, the final two paragraphs seem at first to extend the peaceful optimism of the happy couple. But as the residents of the settlement stagger past Noria’s shack, they look toward darkness, noting that

“[n]o light can be seen through the cracks of the door” (212). Cut off from Toloki and Noria and the community children, they observe that “Tyres are still burning. Tyres can burn for a very long time. The smell of burning rubber fills the air. But this time it is not mingled with the sickly smell of roasting human flesh. Just pure wholesome rubber” (212). It is a curiously paraleptic note with which to end a comic novel. The optimism that lingers from the previous page, when

Toloki and Noria retreat to the privacy of their shack, slides subtly into a kind of misunderstood

169 anxiety. This anxiety belies the rubber’s ostensibly “wholesome” quality, indicating the community’s need to repress unsavory fragments of its own history. Of course, the absence of the body of a necklaced victim suggests for the community a future extricated from the bonds of death and violence. But the reference to “the sickly stench of roasting human flesh” actually enacts not deathliness but a space and time that are saturated by their relation to deathliness. In language, as in memory, the necklaced corpse lingers and if the community fails to recognize its haunting threat, the novel does not.

The tragedy of the text is therefore delayed—represented as a promise yet to be realized by the last page. The novel begins with Vutha the Second’s unseen corpse; at the end, Mda mirrors that suggestion of undisclosed, unexposed brutality. “At every street corner,” the novel reminds us, “tyres are burning” (211), and if their “wholesome rubber” heralds the archetypical

“new dawn” to the merrymakers, readers will remember that the novel unfolds over the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, a period whose cyclical nature is emphasized as “an orgy of drinking, raping, and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns” one day, followed by the next, when “the whole orgy has started all over again” (25). Like the reincarnation of Vutha, the new year “is born with its new problems” (194); the future is burdened by the memory of the unseen corpse, and the weapon of vigilante violence insistently reminds the emerging nation of the almost (but never completely) forgotten victims of the necklace. Thus, the final image offers up a stridently ironic critique of the communal optimism that wants to have a share in the “glow” (212) from Toloki and Noria’s private example of mournful hope about their future. But the community is drunk; it has not done the “work of mourning” described by Derrida, Durrant, or Gana. Blinded by melancholic denial, it does not know itself, and cannot recognize its losses and the damage done to its ideals. Thus, while Toloki and Noria decide to keep one of Jwara’s grotesque figurines (emblems of their shamed, pained

170 signification within the regime of death) “to remind themselves of where they came from” (211), the figurines remain misunderstood by the community at large, which regard the disturbing pieces with “such paroxysms of laughter that they roll around on the ground” (210). To the community, the figurines “[shimmer] like fool’s gold” (212). The pain that they ought to signify remains sealed off; the regime of death still holds the collective under its sway of melancholic blindness.

In terms of mimetic shame, the images of Vutha’s absent body and Jwara’s “monsters”

(212) also indicate that the line between aesthetic representation and social critique itself travels a perilous path. It suggests that in a culture of melancholic denial, art and event are equally open to misuse. Just as the Nurse’s oration of Vutha the Second’s death is cut short, just as the smell of burning rubber is foolishly taken by the communal narrator to promise a non-violent future, so does Mda’s novel itself express an awareness of its own vulnerability before critics and readers whose political affiliations or agendas will inspire a failure to parse the significance of the ironic contrast between the novel’s comic and tragic bifocality. Grant Farred’s response to the novel, for example, enlists a remarkably angry tone, shaming Mda for what Farred perceives as a distancing “from the political atrocities and the (anti-apartheid) radicalism of the past,” and accusing Mda of holding “anti-apartheid opposition” to be “untenable” (184). Reading Toloki’s political indifference as Mda’s, Farred argues that the novel “largely give[s] up social intervention, repeatedly demonstrating a reluctance to account for the several deaths that mark settlement life” (186). In misreading the communal narrator’s will to silence as Mda’s, Farred overlooks the melancholic shamelessness of the novel’s tragic level.43 Critical of Mda for not

43 I would argue that there is a fascinating melancholia attending Farred’s own interpretation, as though he himself gives voice to the instinct to censure, embodied so critically in the party leaders who “warn Noria very strongly that she must not speak to anyone about [the way Vutha died], especially the newspaper people, because this would take the struggle for freedom a step backwards” (Mda 173).

171 taking up South Africa’s “praise poetry” tradition that incorporated political resistance into rallies and funeral orations alike, Farred prefers art to articulate politics in a straightforward way, missing the critiques that emerge through the novel’s mimetically dissonant structure.

Ways of Dying is a self-aware transitional novel, set on the cusp of a new political system, in the dying days of apartheid. It therefore looks to the past and the future at once; it is set in a moment heavy with grief and mourning, but with an eye on the possibilities of a new tomorrow. Its look to the future, however, is a hesitant one, wary of how the demise of apartheid and the end to the anti-apartheid struggle usher in an idealized narrative of triumphant resistance.

The novel seems to understand the melancholic possibilities at stake: the inability to address a particular kind of loss—the loss of the ideal of suffering and unity, which Mda unsettles through his portrayal of vigilantism, wherein unity is problematized through a diffuse causality of suffering. The dominant image of the tire (and the suggested remains of the unseen corpse) betokens the irony of a hopeful future: it is a future without a corpse, but shame remains on the margins, at the beginning and ending of nation and narration. At the same time, however, perhaps Farred’s angry response to the novel also indicates the precariousness of Mda’s brand of formal dissonance—its divergent engagements with comedy and tragedy. As discussed in the first two chapters of this dissertation, Timothy Bewes argues that all postcolonial literature is inherently burdened by shame because of its inability to bridge an “incommensurable” gap between the social world and its representation: a gap that reflects “the obligation to write and the impossibility of doing so, a gap that would be felt as an event of the text, a shortfall of possibility materialized by it” (26). Bewes uses the term “incommensurable” to relate equally to an insurmountable distance “between aesthetics and ethics, selfhood and otherness, form and content—and that [incommensurability] becomes manifest as a certain constitutive failure, a rendering inadequate of form by the irruption of the ethical” (43). The space Bewes identifies as

172 incommensurable—a kind of no-man’s-land where everything from ethics to signification itself remains impossible—emerges in Ways of Dying as a melancholic space. As such, it is not an empty space at all, but the crypt-like tomb where signification and affect are lost, but not eternally, not irretrievably; it is, instead, a space dense with unexplored meaning. And, as the final page of Mda’s novel intones, it is a space made accessible by the image of the burning tire.

Bewes suggests that the cinematic image is the one possible aesthetic form capable of engaging with the world directly, without shame, because—as he sees it—the cinematic image instantiates an understanding of the world in which “the concept of depiction or of representation [plays] no part at all” (47). While I disagree that representation plays no part in the cinematic image, I find

Bewes’s suggestion that imagery provides an accessible link between aesthetics and shame interesting. Extending Bewes’s understanding of the cinematic image to textual imagery, I would suggest that literary images equally engage the socio-political context they represent and the aesthetic, symptomatic register through which the literary and the affective realms collide.

Ironically, Bewes’s compelling argument about imagery controverts his claims about the

“impossible” circularity of shame by offering a blueprint for how shame may be encountered, represented, and responded to in literature through imagery and the aporias that emerge between a reader’s interpretation of an image and the proliferation of meanings that gather around it. The final image of the empty tire in Ways of Dying, unevenly echoing the crowd’s disavowal of vigilante violence in the opening scene, exemplifies that notion of aesthetic and social engagement, and suggests that it is on the level of (mis)interpretation (epitomized in the uncomprehending communal voice that misreads the significance of the burning tires) that shame and, indeed, melancholia can destabilize the political potential of the literary form.

The final image of Ways of Dying operates through the idea of a latent threat, suggesting through both representation and formal contradictions the melancholic position of the transitional

173 period. The final image necessarily leaves itself open to misinterpretation, an element central to melancholia itself. When Farred’s attack on the novel mobilizes shame—the article shames Mda for a perceived failure to engage with political South Africa—an implicit question about the role of shame in writing is raised. Shame does not emerge from literature because of a rift between form and content, as Bewes sees it. Shame emerges because of the social world itself; the novel’s mimetic shame draws attention to the need for the social world to contend with the unaccounted violence of its past.

Alternatively, perhaps shame surfaces because a literary work does not contend with the weight of the social, when the social and political haunt a novel without being spoken, not necessarily because writing ignores the context that governs its meaning but because the context itself is so vexed, so uncertain, that the very fact of it is invited to press against the literary work.

The repressed history of internecine violence therefore operates in Mda’s novel as an oblique form of “historical inquiry,” which Ernst Renan famously warned could “pose a threat to nationality.”44 The forgetting at play in the building of the post-apartheid nation therefore gets

“remembered” through the novel’s symbolization, indicating that when a social context is inflected with melancholic denial, it laces into the aesthetic not as a spiraling vacuum of incommensurable impossibility, but as a consciously excessive domain of signification. The tragedy of Ways of Dying resignifies the comedy and strains toward a reconfiguration of the history of the struggle against apartheid. It is impossible for the tires of the final scene not to symbolize necklacing at the time in which the novel was published. If the tires fail to symbolize necklacing—and the communal narrator stubbornly resists this signification—then the novel asks whether there will ever be a time when the image is purified, when the tire can possibly refer to

44 In “What Is a Nation?”, Renan argues: “Forgetting . . . is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationalist. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation” (para. 8).

174 something beyond its function as a weapon. It is a decisively melancholic image, opening up a space for history and memory, while also calling into question the problems of history and memory when signification is too laden with shame to be incorporated into national time.

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Chapter 4 On Being the “Same Type”: Albert Camus and the Paradox of Immigrant Shame in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“He thought about murders, about how all nations are built in the image of a murder.” - Rawi Hage, Cockroach

The Three Registers of Mimetic Shame in Cockroach

Rawi Hage’s 2008 novel Cockroach emphatically characterizes shameful feelings. Like

Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and Mda’s Ways of Dying, Cockroach relies on a specific aesthetic device to characterize the symptomatic conditions of shame. However, whereas Naipaul’s and

Mda’s manipulations of the conventions of autobiography or tragedy and comedy expose the sediments of shame that promise to continue upsetting the hopes of decolonization, Hage’s apparently simple device—the metaphor by which insect metamorphosis duplicates the symptoms of shame—plays into more complex historical and literary contexts of shame.

Mimetic shame in Cockroach operates most obviously on the level where shame is felt as a physical symptom: the novel’s protagonist takes on the “repuls[ive]” (3) form of the cockroach.

Here, of course, the indications of shame—the excruciatingly self-aware blush that leads its victim to feel grotesque—are textually transcribed as the metamorphosis into a mutant figure: the abject made literal. However, two separate but related triggers determine the narrative’s contextual stimuli. The first, fairly straightforward context for Cockroach’s portrayal of shame is the discourse around migration to Canada: how immigrants and refugees are expected to respond

176 to their inclusion in the Canadian nation and the burden of shame felt because of the challenges involved in articulating unique identities—that is, identities that fall outside the narrow scope of the migrant “types” deemed acceptable.

Below, I explore this first context to which Hage responds—the context faced by migrants to Canada. For now, it is important to appreciate that this more straightforward context is situated within a larger Western tradition of representing the Arab Other, a tradition that began with European colonial writing and continues in more contemporary representations of Middle

Eastern people as members of global population shifts. On contextual, aesthetic, and philosophical levels, the writer with whom Hage engages most purposefully in Cockroach is

Albert Camus, the pied-noir—or Algerian-born descendant of migrants from France—whose novels frequently used Algeria as the stage upon which the European intellectual acted out his own moral and philosophical crises. With a sharply ironic twist, Hage’s unnamed narrator responds, of course, to the near absence of named Arab characters in Camus’s works, but Hage’s rejoinder to this neglect does not merely cast blame for Camus’s failure of representation. Hage’s appreciation for Camus’s profound contributions to philosophy and literature extends beyond the retributive impulse to “write back to” or “strike back at” the colonialist canon. Instead, Hage takes up Camus’s own theme—namely, absurdism—to investigate the psychological consequences of Camus’s exclusionary and Orientalist mode of representation. In other words,

Hage engages Camus’s own philosophy and style to interrogate Camus’s shameful—and shame- producing—racism in regards to Arab figures. At the heart of Hage’s engagement with Camus’s work lies the notion of looking at (which also always involves a failure to look accurately at) the

Arab Other, and how Western discourse constructs the Arab as the object of this gaze. Hage suggests that this gaze is informed by the tradition of representation to which Camus’s writing

177 contributed so influentially, but the gaze itself takes on its own structural experience within

Canada’s discourse around migration.

This chapter argues that Cockroach traces the shame of migrancy by positioning that shame within a longer tradition of discourse about Arab “Others.” Although Camus was certainly not the only—nor even the most culpable—forbearer of the colonial vernacular about Arab populations, his interest in the absurd as a crisis of contradiction places his colonial attitude in an especially paradoxical blind spot. In the third section of this chapter, I consider in closer detail how Camus imagined absurdism, and how his ideas of the absurd ironically failed to illuminate the untenability of his position in Algeria. For now, suffice it to say that Hage’s engagement with

Camus’s style functions to elucidate his commentary on the Orientalist gaze Camus’s work shored up. In Cockroach, the protagonist struggles with the idea of being the object of the western gaze, of being seen as a certain “type” of migrant. Rather than rejecting the “type,” he occupies it fully, embracing the shame it inscribes on his body and using that shame to pose a threat to the system that constructs his identity as “insignificant” (32) in the first place.

To elaborate my argument, this chapter begins by considering discourses around migration in Canada in order to understand how Hage characterizes the shame that discourse places onto migrant figures. Next, I explore Camus’s philosophy of absurdism against the absurd absence of Arab characters in his art. Finally, I trace Hage’s integration of Camusian style and philosophy, linking his portrait of shame to his antecedent’s works. This connection, I hope, will not only develop an understanding of Cockroach in light of the aesthetics of mimetic shame; it will also shed new light on how colonization (and its modern equivalent in the power dynamics propelling global migrations) functioned as the ultimate “absurd” in several of Camus’s works.

His failure to recognize this underlying absurdism leaves traces of shame in Camus’s own work, as well.

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Shame and Migration in Canada

In a May 2017 interview with Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC Radio One’s The Current,

University of Waterloo scholar Vinh Nguyen reminds listeners of Canadian Prime Minister

Justin Trudeau’s response to American President Donald Trump’s executive order 13769

(popularly called the “Muslim travel ban,”), which had recently attempted to block entry to the

United States of citizens from seven Middle Eastern and North African countries. Obliquely condemning the order by reminding the public of Canada’s contrasting attitude to foreign visitors, Trudeau tweets, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you” (@JustinTrudeau). Public utterances of compassion towards refugees, like that expressed in

Trudeau’s tweet, portray the Canadian nation as a space of inclusion and acceptance. However, as Nguyen explains to Tremonti, implicit in such sentiments is the belief that Canada’s ostensible openness ought to be matched by refugees’ feelings of gratitude for being welcomed to Canada.

For instance, a Canadian volunteer ponders the satisfying emotional experience that came with participating in Canada’s 2016 resettlement plan for Syrian refugees: “How often in our lives do we get a free ticket into the lives of strangers who respond to the tiniest gesture of kindness with the deepest gratitude? The first word I learned in Arabic was shukran (thank-you), and it has been said to me more times than I care to count” (Wadden). Incredibly, this volunteer was thanked by “her” refugee family with a most demonstrative gesture: they named their Canadian- born baby after her; the writer likes “to think Marie Al Salloum is named after all the Canadians who have opened their hearts to refugees” (Wadden). This narrative about welcome, in which

Canadian heroism “teaches” both Canadians and migrants to feel grateful for Canadian openness, is echoed in numerous accounts of refugee experience submitted to various Canadian news outlets. Another example comes from Solomon Hailemariam, who moved to Toronto from

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Ethiopia. Hailemariam writes a letter to The Globe and Mail describing an experience among settler-Canadians that made him “a living witness to warm hearts” (Hailemariam). With sincerity, Hailemariam contributes to Canada’s image of itself as welcoming, writing: “Such a penchant for kindness must be hereditary as Canadians have helped generations of refugees. This is, I presume, what distinguishes Canada from the rest of the world.”

In the aforementioned episode of The Current, however, two immigrant activists express frustration; Iranian refugee Dina Nayer calls the pressure to represent success and give thanks the consequence of the West’s “toxic . . . expectation of gratitude.” Golsa Golestaneh also struggles with the “heaviness” of needing to demonstrate a “very grateful” attitude to Canadians who ask questions about her refugee experience, which they use to shore up their own identity as

“savior[s].” But, Golestaneh counters, “There are a lot of stigmas around being a refugee in

Canada and it’s not really the heaven that a lot of people think. I experience racism every day— every time I have difficulties understanding one sentence in English or like I just need it to be repeated. I get eye rolls. Whenever I’m on the train and I feel scared because of my skin colour to be attacked; that is not the safety I claimed for. That is not what I fled my country for.”

The traumatic histories consumed by the West validate the West’s conception of itself as

“saviour.” Yet, the criticisms Golestaneh, Nayeri, and Nguyen lodge at Canada’s self-perception as heroically welcoming rest on the problematic of a double expectation, both of which are implicitly captured by Trudeau’s tweet: the refugee is first required to project the image of a traumatized victim, and then to express gratitude to the nation that provided salvation from that trauma. Trudeau’s list of horrors—“persecution, terror and war”—yields tales of suffering that stir (pleasurable) pity and compassion only if they are told within the specific narrative framing of gratitude for the chance—provided by Canada—to escape. Indeed, Nguyen, Tremonti’s guest, elsewhere describes the “model refugee” as one whose successful surmounting of traumatic

180 experiences in their country-of-origin hinges on opportunities for growth and personal reinvention within Canada’s liberal democracy (Nguyen 17). Such a narrative, however, often requires a migrant (refugee or immigrant) to rely on her body to convey the signs of past suffering, just as it requires a migrant to articulate utterances of suffering and to provide evidence of success—after a time—within Canada; such utterances are her pathways to acceptance. For instance, the western gaze may read sartorial codes in ways that do not account for the codes’ diverse signifying origins. As Amitava Kumar notes, “the figure of the veiled woman” is often held by the “dominating gaze . . . as a fixed sign of oppression” (205).

Unveiling migrant (and, for that matter, Canadian) Muslim women has therefore often taken on in western nations the quality of a campaign against “brutal” eastern regimes, and migrants’ desire to keep their veils have frequently been met with non-Muslim Canadians’ responses of mystification or rejection, understanding veils as signs of refusal to participate in the narrative of rescue and gratitude.45

It is this notion of the migrant’s body as an image signaling specific meaning to the

Western gaze that Kumar takes up in his book Passport Photos, an examination of the chasm that spreads between the immigrant body and its Western “reader”—a chasm characterized by misinterpretation, a failure to understand intimately or even adequately the bodily signs that have such specific meaning for the migrant attempting to gain access to Western spaces. (Veils are unstable and mutable extensions of bodily signification; scars, for example, are far more specific but equally mysterious emblems of personal or cultural experience. Further along, I consider the ultimate corporeal sign that factors into the settler/migrant binary exchange: race.) Beginning

45 Sheila McDonough suggests that Quebec’s repeated injunctions against women wearing the hijāb is framed by discourses that assert “the principle of equality of men and women,” (145-25), an equality that the hijab threatens, according to Quebec’s juridical system. In this way, a portion of Quebec citizens perceives the veil as “a symbol of hostility to Canadian society” (129). However, as McDonough concludes, prohibitions against veils actually rely on Orientalist assumptions about Muslim gender relations (128).

181 with the paradigmatic “scene at the customs desk” (10), in which the immigration officer reads both the migrant’s passport and the bodily signs which may or may not overtly support the claims suggested by formal documentation, Kumar understands the wide space between the official’s limited knowledge about the applicant and the applicant’s thorough self-knowledge as a space filled with shame. The hopeful immigrant knows that her body and passport operate as textual objects; how those objects are read determines whether entry is granted. The shame of having the depth of personal history bound to such unreliable (and politically determined) signs as the body and the passport—and the powerlessness to escape that signifying moment—is, according to Kumar, emblematic of the “historical process” of “decolonization and the presence, through migration, of formerly colonized populations in the metropolitan centers of the West”

(4). To be “read” and judged within an exchange so infused with the historical legacy of imperial power is to experience objectification; the Western gaze relies on a predetermined mode of looking at the signs of colonized and migrant bodies. Of course, the most dominant sign determining the migrant body’s symbolization is race (and here it becomes clear that the objectification of which I speak does not necessarily impact equally upon all migrants—at least not those whose whiteness releases them from obvious differentiation46). In her analysis of the psychology of race, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks identifies whiteness as the “inaugural signifier of race” (3), which configures itself within “a regime of looking” (2). Invoking Lacan’s theories of subject-formation, by which language or the “discourse of the Other” (24) constructs the subject,

Seshadri-Crooks points out the degree to which western culture “reproduce[s] the visibility of race as our daily common sense, the means by which we ‘tell people apart,’ a logic that is best

46 Along the same lines, settler Canadians are not, of course, exclusively white. Canada is famously acclaimed as “a nation of immigrants,” a phrase so commonly repeated it is impossible to locate its origin. But even those whose families have been in Canada for multiple generations are often mistaken—if they are not white—for recent migrants, and are seen to pose threats based on their seeming “foreignness” (see Dhamoon and Abu-Laban).

182 enshrined in the Canadian phrase ‘visible minorities’” (19). However, this quotidian mode of categorization actually rests upon a fundamental anxiety—another instantiation of what Lacan understands as lack (usually anxiety over sexuality). As a master signifier, whiteness is the sign all bodies unconsciously desire, and the lack of whiteness (which is not the same as “Caucasian”) perpetuates an interminable desire for whiteness (21). Although Seshadri-Crooks does not explicitly embed her analysis of race within the psychology of shame, the fact that she considers race as bound up in a system of visibility, or “a regime of looking,” suggests that “seeing” race might very well hinge upon the same psycho-structural dynamics that characterize the shaming- gaze. Given the weight of signification that bears on the raced body’s lack of whiteness, the connection between race and shame, I would argue, always coexists; seeing race within a structure of hierarchical signs—the uneven binary of white/nonwhite—presupposes values and judgments, which the gaze interprets as cultural or natural attributes.47 In other words, what the gaze sees in the “regime of looking” that characterizes all subject formations depends on an unconscious recognition of lack; that idea of lack immediately binds itself to race. Thus, what we do see (lack, race) obscures what we do not see (individuality); what emerges here is a paradox of profound visibility masking profound invisibility. In this sense, the raced subject—or for our purposes, the raced migrant body—becomes meaningful not just as a symbol of differentiation but, within Canadian narratives about migration and welcome, as signs that encode white

Canadian identity.

At the heart of this problematic “seeing” of the migrant Other, then, lies the impossibility of escaping the psychology of race and the regime of the look. Coeval with this system is the

47 To be clear, Seshadri-Crooks squarely places her analysis of race within a Western context—particularly North America—that relies on visible signs of identity differentiation. Other cultures rely less on visibility and race than on, for example, sartorial markers of class to indicate social identity or rank, as in India. My argument about the coexistence of shame and race relates only to those contexts in which the “regime of the look” or systems of visibility assign value to race.

183 difficulty for the raced migrant body to signify anything besides trauma and victimization on one hand and success and gratitude on the other. These “types” or “characters” develop as associated signifiers within the entrenched narrative of benevolent white Canadian identity. The “seeing” of various migrant types—the victim and the success story or, when these types fail to emerge, the ingrate and the criminal—ensures the anonymity of individual, complicated, and divergent identities. The consequence of the obscurity ensured by such scopic misinterpretation, Kumar suggests, is shame. The migrant figure—as the object of the unreliable Western gaze—is a figure of shame. Identifying shame as a central affective element of Seshadri-Crooks’s regime of looking is not to suggest, of course, that all exchanges between migrant and settler-Canadians are doomed to racist assumptions and exclusions; in other words, not all migrants experience the shame assigned by the gaze. Canada is composed of a multitude of bodies and minds. Indeed, it is precisely the possibility of diverse intersubjective relationships outside of the shaming/ashamed gaze that makes it possible to theorize the gaze or shame at all, and to render colonialist aesthetics and philosophy as potentially—though not absolutely—archaic. As

Seshadri-Crooks points out, however, awareness of race as a visual mechanism of categorization does not necessarily provide access to dismantling racism (159). It is to this tension that arises between the desire for (extra-racial) justice, identification, or love and the pervasiveness of the

“look” that I now turn.

Aesthetic Relations: Albert Camus

The shameful migrant is in many ways the political descendant of the shameful colonial, that subaltern figure eclipsed by imperial discourses. Fanon’s impotent rage and suffocating shame, explored in the introduction to this dissertation, arises precisely because of how his body is expected to represent constructed “types” of black identity. His drive to cast off the “shameful

184 livery” of racist signifiers resembles subsequent attitudes expressed by such writers as Kumar, as well as many of the central theorists of modern diasporas, including Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and

Gloria Anzaldúa. Like Kumar, these writers argue that migrants, especially those from regions formerly colonized by European empires, inherit the legacy of typecast identity. In other words, the figuration of migrant shame discussed previously finds its origins in the representational models of colonial discourse; Hage’s Cockroach responds to both of these linked histories.

In Albert Camus’s fictional and nonfictional writing, the colonized Arab man (and, occasionally, woman) hovers in the margins, discreetly present but rarely acknowledged, a ghost haunting the writer’s imagination, particularly his knowledge of himself as someone who embraces his family’s chosen exile from France. As frequently noted by other commentators, when Algerians are represented in Camus’s works, it is usually as criminals or victims, as with the Arab criminal whom Daru, a pied-noir, allows to decide his own fate in the short story

“L’Hôte,” or the Arab man of L’Etranger, whose shooting death propels the moral crisis of his pied-noir killer, Meursault. Indeed, Kamel Daoud takes up the inconsequentiality of Meursault’s victim in his novel The Meursault Investigation, which begins with the brother of Meursault’s victim explaining that Meursault, “the original guy,” was so good at telling stories that “he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate God created apparently for the sole purpose of taking a bullet and returning to dust—an anonymous person who didn’t even have the time to be given a name” (1). Indeed, the project of Daoud’s narrative is partly to contend with the problem that in Camus’s writing, Arab characters are never named; aside from their roles as necessary plot devices, the Algerian character is referenced as a means for the writer’s own self-reflection, such as when Camus remarks that in local cafes, he can identify his “age in faces [he] recognized without being able to name them” (“Return to

Tipasa” 195). For Camus, Algerian Arabs are “barbarians” whose beauty signifies the purity of

185 nature and the childlike simplicity of a time that is eternally present or a-historical: Algerian

Arabs are, to him, a “race devoid of spirituality” (“Summer in Algiers” 149). Their consequential vacuity functions to reflect the internal emotional and philosophical inquiries the author makes about the European intellectual. In contrast with the natural simplicity of the Algerian Arab,

Camus wrestles with the tragic fall of his own type, the philosopher-poet: in our (Western) time, he bemoans, “We turn our backs on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink” (“Helen’s Exile” 189). To Camus, the history of thought, which belongs to Europe, results in the painful loss of the simple beauty of barbarian life.

As a writer, Camus is celebrated for his contributions to art and philosophy, rather than for his politics, the consideration of which inevitably unsettles an otherwise unified chorus of admiration. In his essay, “Narrative, Geography and Interpretation,” Edward Said works to correct such exclusive praise. He expresses frustration with Conor Cruise O’Brien, Camus’s biographer, who claims that “No other writer, not even Conrad, is more representative of the

Western consciousness and conscience in relation to the non-Western world” (qtd. in Said 85).

Said insists that such a view allows Algeria as it appears in Camus’s writing to operate as “a receptacle emptied of all but its capacity for sentience and reflection” (86). Seeing Camus as “a moral man in an immoral situation” (87), as O’Brien understands Camus, ultimately gets Camus off the hook from the responsibility either of representing Algerian Arabs as real characters or of taking a fully ethical response to France’s colonial presence in Algeria.

Born in Algeria to an extremely poor pied-noir family, Camus famously resisted Algerian independence from France, which had colonized Algeria in 1830. Fervent in his love for his birth country, Camus worried about the violence that would necessarily accompany decolonization but, just as crucially, he also feared that Algerian independence “would lead to the expulsion of

186 people, cultures and values deemed foreign but . . . intrinsic to the diverse fabric of Algeria”

(Just 896-97). A long-time advocate of economic justice and equality amongst all inhabitants of

Algeria, Camus pushed in his journalistic writing for such reforms as desegregated education and citizenship for Arabs under French rule.48 Despite his unwavering commitment to these social justices, Camus felt that Algerian independence would result in forced removal from Algeria of thousands of European descendants who considered the country their home with exactly the same conviction and attachment as the indigenous population. Consequently, Camus’s response to the Algerian independence movement, which turned violent in the mid-1950s, was “excoriated by his contemporaries on all sides” (Messud), including Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and

Albert Memmi. Nevertheless, Camus’s longing for peaceful, colonial coexistence in Algeria persisted well beyond the point in time when such a structure could ever have become a possibility. At the height of violence between the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and

French forces, Camus mourned that, as a result of bloodshed and because of the goal of decolonization, “there will be no real winners in this war” (qtd. in Messud). It is hard, from twenty-first century and postcolonial perspectives, to understand how a figure like Camus, so committed to issues of justice and equality, could have resisted decolonization. As Claire

Messud reflects, however, Camus did not consider himself a member of the French colonial class; his origins were among the severely impoverished, and “it was France itself that lifted the most humble from their poverty and afforded them every opportunity” (Messud). French education delivered Camus from what almost certainly would have been a lifetime of hardship, like that experienced by his own parents and grandparents in Algeria. Camus’s love for his home country was therefore matched by his gratitude to French culture; what he failed to fully

48 See, for instance, Camus’s appeals for administrative reform in Kabylia, one of Algeria’s poorest regions (“The Misery of Kabylia”).

187 accept—perhaps because of an idealism about the possibilities of French fraternalism to Algerian

Arabs—was that his escape from destitution was only possible because of his European origins.

A blind spot, then, prevented Camus from committing to the necessity of Algerian independence. Where writer-activists like Memmi and Fanon could recognize that “political self- determination is antithetical to colonial authority” (Giovannuci 59), Camus held fast to the belief that Algeria and France needed one another and could thrive from a loving union—and he was, of course, largely ignored for this belief.49 I would suggest, however, that Camus’s political blind spot in regards to Algerian independence operates as a kind of unarticulated—or obliquely articulated—feeling of shame in his literary and philosophical writings. In other words, there is a level on which Camus may have known the untenability of his political position in Algeria.

However, his desire to avoid confronting the consequences of this untenability required him to subordinate appeals to specific, local, and political justice beneath appeals to general, universal, and humanist justice; the contradiction between these two visions of justice erupts as a confrontation that marks the very essence of his own theory of absurdism as well as the irony and shame that, because they are repressed, unsettle the moral questions articulated in his writing.

To recognize the profound irony of Camus’s blind spot in regards to colonial Algeria, it is important to understand Camus’s central philosophical idea, absurdism. Camus arrived at the philosophy of the absurd via an inquiry into the logic of suicide. Suicide, he claimed, is in many ways the natural decision arrived at by the person who understands that life has no innate purpose. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’s thesis on the absurd, he writes, “Dying voluntarily

49 Among public intellectuals, Camus was quite alone in his commitment to pacifist solidarity within a colonial situation. Far more emblematic of the critical response to France’s position in Algeria were statements like Fanon’s: “colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence” (Wretched 23).

188 implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [of living], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering” (5-6). The “stranger” whom a man becomes in “a universe . . . divested of illusions and lights” (6) is an individual who encounters in a fundamental way the feeling of absurdity, a feeling encapsulated by the paradoxical questions: “[H]ow far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die voluntarily or hope in spite of everything?” (16) Despite the implication that suicide offers a solution to the “divorce between man and his life” (6)—that is, knowing as true the essential meaninglessness of living—Camus ultimately rejects suicide.

Indeed, it is neither living nor suicide that stands for absurdity, but the rejection of suicide, even while accepting that the option is reasonable. Occupying that paradox with awareness is, for

Camus, the very condition of absurd ethics; life, Camus decides, “will be lived all the better if it has no meaning” (53).

Camus’s theorizing about suicide offers a way for him to think through the underlying problem of other irresolvable contradictions. Suicide functions as the most fundamental example of a more general crisis, which might be broadly described as the desire to find sense in the insensible. Camus describes the dizzying “nausea” (15) of feeling the experience of absurdity but, incredibly, what Camus really defines as absurd are those experiences where injustice stems from a crisis in logic. He explains:

If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider his

act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and

the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the

aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the

verdict the facts apparently dictated. . . . In all these cases, from the simplest to the most

complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the

189

two terms of my comparison. . . . I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity .

. . bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action

and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the

elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. (29-30)

With this description, Camus tells us that absurdity emerges within the nonsensical space between an idea and the impossibility of that idea’s realization. For instance, we might be struck by the absurdity of a chicken trying to fly to great heights; the animal’s desire contradicts the reality that deems its desire insatiable. Similarly, we might say a trial ends absurdly when its verdict seems in every way at odds with both the law and the details of the case which, under the law, ought to have assured the opposite outcome; we might recall the witch hunts of King

James’s England to visualize the absurdity contained within the dictum that a woman innocent of witchcraft would find absolution as she sank to her watery death. What these situations—from the chicken to the trial—share is what Camus understands as an irreconcilable confrontation between two or more realities. Especially in his later philosophical work L’Homme Révolté (The

Rebel), Camus repeatedly imagines these confrontations colliding over issues of justice, arising from the experience of knowing that ethical appeals are frequently at odds with the conditions that necessitate appeals to ethics. As Camus puts it, “the absurd is sin without God” (Myth 40). In other words, there can be no particular logic within a framework that lacks sense. However, the absence of reason (or the senselessness of trying to find reason in a reason-less universe) that lies at the core of the absurd does not for Camus equate with an absence of ethics (or the senselessness of trying to find morality in an amoral universe).

Although Camus could identify the absurd in, for example, the plight of the oppressed against the might of the oppressor (victims of Hitler’s Germany, for instance), he failed to read the contradictions of the colonial situation, or in his own position as a French Algerian desiring

190 peaceful coexistence. The irony of such a failure is all the more distinct given Camus’s furious despair in L’Homme Révolté, where he condemns the murderous brutality of fascism, Nazism, and communism. These systems, he claims, seek utopian futures through the sacrifice of the present; violence inevitably attends these nihilistic pursuits for the future, but it is always in the name of a faulty logic, of using a belief in the possibility of future meaning to justify violence in the present. To Camus, this requires an unethical rejection of the absurd, which must embrace present values and the protection of immediate life (to do otherwise would require believing that life has a meaning that the future might deliver). Arguing that murder contradicts the essence of solidarity-in-revolt, Camus stood vehemently against violence. Thus, his literary works articulate an ethics of fraternity; Meursault of L’Etranger is condemned for valuing his individuality and for living an unexamined life of solitude, for using murder to break his contract with a brotherhood of men.

However, the ethics of fraternity expounded in L’Homme Révolté and characterized in

L’Etranger and much of the rest of Camus’s fiction is ultimately universalist. These texts function to remind Europeans that a necessary allegiance to absurdism requires a rejection of violence—of suicide and murder—even in the name of revolution. But it is exactly this general rejection of violent rebellion and general support for fraternity that allows Camus to sidestep the brutal systemic violence of colonialism and its real, local consequences.50 In this way, Camus’s own literary works enact the very type of confrontation that causes us to recognize absurdity, according to his philosophy. In pursuit of awareness about the injustices signaled by contradictory realities, he claims in The Myth of Sisyphus that “there is no sun without shadow,

50 As noted above, Camus was horrified by the physical violence perpetrated against local Algerian Arab populations, but he believed the brutality could be amended by administrative reform rather than decolonization. He was unable, it seems, to believe that the violence of colonialism was systemic and irrepressible; as Sartre put it, “[colonialism] is our shame; it mocks our laws or caricatures them. It infects us with its racism” (“Colonialism Is a System” 140).

191 and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing” (123). Yet Camus cannot bear, in the end, to “know” the “night” cast by the “light” of French Algeria. Driven by a horror of the violence of murder that characterized the atrocities of the wars in Europe, he incongruously overlooked the innate violence of the colony.51

Writing novels as allegories for the violent confrontations of his time, Camus’s appeal to an ethics of solidarity and pacifism overlooked the local contradictions of French imperialism.

For instance, the rats of Oran become, in La Peste, the metaphorical creatures of the insanity and violence of Nazism and communism, which are overcome by Rieux and his compatriots, whose dogged commitment to present life eventually triumph; even while the cemeteries are presumably crowded with Algerian Arabs, Camus’s narrator never directly mentions the indigenous population. Ultimately, it is an abstract solidarity and pacifism his characters seek; accordingly, the violence of Clamence’s monologic narration in La Chute gives way to the fraternal dialogism of represented by his interlocutor’s doubtful interjections. With a similar gesture to fraternity, Meursault’s experiment with murder resolves in L’Etranger through a consciousness of his moral obligations and an acceptance of the absurd life, which he had negated through arbitrary violence. Yet, despite these novels’ rejections of violence and despite their attention to the need for a kind of group consciousness, brotherhood is always imagined among Europeans. The Arab character is absent except as a device. Because of this notable

51 For Camus, the value of “Europe”—as the symbol of culture, and the heart of meaningful existence—illuminates the cultural shortcomings of the colonial outpost, and lifts the Algerian artist out of his local milieu. In contrast, writers like J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer put “Europe” to much different purposes. Like Camus, these writers find themselves at the periphery of empire, embroiled in ethical crises by virtue of their genealogical relation to Europe. Unlike Camus, however, they do not use Europe to proscribe the local. Instead, Europe functions as a master signifier that ultimately cannot stand up to scrutiny. For Coetzee, European values are obliquely challenged via allegory (as in Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, and The Life and Times of Michael K.). For Gordimer, Europe functions more directly as an unsustainable escape from conscience—the sign of metropolitan excess made possibly only through willful blindness (as in Burger’s Daughter). In response to Coetzee’s oeuvre, critic Jarad Zimbler points out that “if Coetzee’s material necessarily incorporates the products of centuries of literary labour in several European languages, his field is South African” (14). (My thanks to Uzoma Esonwanne for pointing out the contrasting characteristics of Camus’s and Coetzee’s metropolitan affinities.)

192 absence and because of Camus’s understanding of the absurd as a confrontation between contradicting realities, Camus’s literary works enact an element of the absurd that the author himself did not recognize. How else can we understand his commitment to justice, his vehemence against revolution, and his portrait of solidarity-in-the-present (both despite and because of universal meaninglessness) against the historical context of France’s colonization of

Algeria? The Algerian Arab is the peripheral—but therefore all the more central—presence documenting this absurd contradiction. Finally, the peripheral nature of indigenous characters in

Camus’s works suggests that shame is at work—perhaps shame over the knowledge, repressed or disregarded, about the unethical position he occupied.

Shame in the Works of Albert Camus

In his article, “From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature’s Ethical Response to

Politics,” Daniel Just argues that Camus uses shame in his fictional works “as an ethical and political concept that promotes coexistence” (904). Considering the ways in which Camus’s central characters ultimately reject solitude for a fraternal consensus about the need for pacifism,

Just maintains that “In a situation when acts can be neither political nor ethical and yet are never without political and ethical motivations and consequences, shame . . . can serve as a guiding principle of action” (907). Just believes that Camus’s investment in forms of community relies on shame as a means by which individuals become aware, via “the shaming gaze” (908) of their necessary implication in one another’s lives. Indeed, it is precisely Meursault’s humiliated recognition of the courtroom audience’s regard for him during his trial that drives him toward his moral insights at the novel’s end. However, the kind of shame Just identifies in Camus’s work— shame as an ethical guide, by which debased self-awareness directs the ashamed subject towards others and towards social obligation—implies a similar inclination to universalism as developed

193 by Camus’s own poetics and politics. That is, Camus’s shame, according to Just, operates as a moral shame, a conception of shame that shares more with guilt and existentialism than with the kind of fundamental, identity-based shame that Fanon, for one, gives such agonizing voice to.

Understanding shame in Just’s terms, as an affect that “affirms” ethical intersubjectivity (911), neglects the local shame produced as a consequence of the specific cultural and political contexts of colonization. The colony engenders a special kind of gaze and a particular object of that gaze, and this form of shame cannot be subsumed within appeals for moral brotherhood. In other words, there is a different shameful presence in Camus’s works, and it does not have a moral nature—at least, not in the way Just elaborates. Instead, this other kind of shame emerges beyond

Camus’s immediate allegorical lessons, and it emerges as a result of stereotyping and objectifying the Algerian Arab, and as a result of neglecting the urgency of indigenous appeals for independence.

Consider, for instance, the murder scene in L’Etranger. When Meursault approaches the

“Arab”—as he calls him—in a “drunken haze” produced by the “dazzling red glare” of the sun

(58), the Arab is lying partly in the shade. He exhibits no defining features or characteristics. The

Arab’s still passivity recalls an earlier scene, when Meursault and his friend Raymond find themselves across the road from “a group of Arabs” (including Meursault’s eventual victim) who, Meursault notices, “were looking at us in silence, but in their own special way, as if we were nothing more than blocks of stone or dead trees” (50). When he approaches the solitary

Arab later on the beach, Meursault detects a similar indecipherability in the man’s expression, which he again imagines as wholly related to Meursault himself: “Perhaps because of the shadows on his face, he seemed to be laughing” (59). The unlikeliness of such a reaction from a man whose peace has just been fractured by the approach of a French man who had, in the last hour, engaged him in a violent altercation, does not occur to Meursault, who feels vaguely

194 threatened by the man’s regard, understanding his movements as irresolvable judgments beneath the overwhelming pressure of heat and sunshine. The calm of Meursault’s life—unexamined until the moment after his crime is committed—fractures beneath the sky, which he imagines as

“splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame” (60). Meursault murders because the Arab—blank and unreadable (though clearly, from the reader’s perspective, intensely aware of Meursault’s prospective violence)—is there at a moment at which Meursault’s own internal crisis reaches its apex. The Arab acts as a foil for Meursault’s moral dilemma, his own failure to understand the ethics of fraternity. Importantly, however, the Arab does not represent in any political sense the colonial subject who requires recognition as an individual; he does not function metonymically as a figure of dispossession. In fact, if he operates as a metonym at all, it is only as a figure of Meursault’s estrangement from the world. In terms of characterization, then, the Arab is a blank; his body is a screen that reflects Meursault’s own uncertainty and isolation. Although he does not obviously project prescribed traits assigned by racist symbolization, neither does he project any traits at all—except obscurity. For the poetics of

Meursault’s crisis and Camus’s philosophy, the Arab could be anybody. Except, of course, that the drama of L’Etranger could not pivot around just any body. The crisis must be reached via an

Algerian Arab’s body because only that body could matter little enough that Meursault’s choice to kill could be turned into a parable about the European subject.

Camus’s Arab man, then, is a blank, an absence. What could be more shaming than for one’s “group” identity to serve entirely the identity of the one who looks upon one? Camus’s

Arab therefore serves as a model example for Seshadri-Crooks’s “regime of looking,” by which a visual terrain signifying both lack and layered social meanings together “constitute the logic of domination” (Seshadri-Crooks 7). This is what I refer to above as the “visible” obscuring the

“invisible”—the private or personal buried beneath the terms established by the master signifier.

195

If the most notable aspect of the colonial Arab’s figuration is the inscrutability of his threatening gaze (and these two assignations—the inscrutable and the threat—are deeply entangled), then even the potential power and autonomy of looking back serves the “master” class’s own self- image. The political (im)potency of this gaze, I will argue, is a structure of shameful intersubjectivity that Hage’s novel centrally explores.

Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

Fittingly, it is Rawi Hage, a Lebanese-Canadian novelist-cum-photographer, who brings the psychological impact an immigrant may experience as the object of the Western gaze most strikingly into Canadian fiction. Recognized for photos that deal with “immigration, war and racism,” Hage develops exhibits that he hopes are “unsuited to hurried consumption or sensationalist use” (“Lands Within”). Keenly aware of how immigrants are seen and interpreted by the Western gaze, Hage strives both in his visual art and his literary work to resist the very

“types” of migrancy that Trudeau and many other Canadians celebrate and Kumar, Nguyen,

Golestaneh, and others reject. In his 2008 novel, Cockroach, Hage stages the encounter between the West and the migrant figure as one permeated by the act of looking-but-not-seeing—a shameful encounter between established and new Canadians that compels the object of the gaze to seek strategies of projecting more authentic, less prescribed images onto the Canadian imaginative landscape. Furthermore, Hage understands such structures as the western gaze and discourse about migrants as causally related to imperial discourses; his narrator characterizes the diaspora to which he belongs as directly impacted by colonialism, sneering that the “Quebecois, with their extremely low birth rate, think they can increase their own breed by attracting the

Parisians, or at least for a while balance the number of their own kind against the herd of brownies and darkies coming from every old French colony, on the run from dictators and

196 crumbling cities” (27-28). Understanding the political inequities at play in migrant experiences means, for Hage, recognizing the degree to which diaspora extends out of colonial situations.

Therefore, although his novel directly confronts the marginalization of immigrants, it is as if

Hage writes his novel in the space of the gaze shared between Meursault and his Arab victim. In other words, Cockroach investigates the political, philosophical, and psychological crises that emerge in Camus’s confrontational look, and in his absurd allegiance to a fraternity that neglects the individual identities of those bodies he only represents in obscurity.

In Cockroach, an unnamed narrator from an unidentified Middle Eastern country struggles to keep afloat in Montreal after a suicide attempt. Forced by the state to attend sessions with a therapist, the narrator recounts (often falsely) his history of abuse and crime in his country of origin where his beloved sister was murdered by her husband; the novel eventually reveals that this is a loss for which the narrator feels responsible. Between therapy sessions, he scrapes together a living as a restaurant cleaner while interacting with a range of fellow immigrants, most of whom tell him their own private tales of suffering.52 Throughout the novel, the narrator either imaginatively or literally (the novel never makes the distinction clear) transforms into a cockroach; this avatar identity seems to have begun in his childhood, when he and his sister would hide under blankets “and turn the world into an insect’s play” (11). In Montreal, however, the narrator identifies with cockroaches for their vermin qualities, claiming to share their “slimy feelings of cunning and need” (3). At opportune moments, he transforms into his insect-self, sneaking into the apartments of various adversaries: his therapist, a wealthy industrialist, an arms

52 In her response to Hage’s novel, Maude Lapierre points out that the narrator consumes such tales as hungrily as the Canadian women who listen to the musician Reza’s “sad stories,” offering meals in exchange (Hage 69). Indeed, the similarity between the therapist’s desire for the narrator’s tales and the narrator’s desire to know his fellow migrants’ tales suggests, to recall the language of Cockroach’s epigraph, the shared “degeneration” of the human “species” by virtue of its parasitic interest in (or “appropriation of,” as Lapierre writes [561]) others’ suffering.

197 dealer working for the Canadian government, an impoverished Algerian writer, and a couple who stares at him from a restaurant window.

With the narrator’s criminal acts, chiefly his home invasions, Hage caricatures the belief espoused by anti-immigration rhetoric that migrants pose a threat to Canadian security; in many ways, the narrator’s behavior seems to justify such concerns.53 Hage redoubles the caricature with the narrator’s transformation, wherein the immigrant embodies the plague-like threat of the cockroach, the pestilent figure who takes over the clean space of a settler. With the insect metamorphosis, Hage writes back not to Franz Kafka, as some readers presume54, but to Albert

Camus, whose own chronicle of a plague (spread by rats rather than cockroaches) operates—like

Hage’s novel—as an examination of the moral connections binding humans to one another.

However, whereas Camus’s novel celebrates the heroism of individual men who navigate moral decay through dogged commitment to goodness in a universe lacking moral certainty, Hage’s novel condemns such a congratulatory assessment of human nature. Camus’s Oran, where Arab people are shockingly absent, inverts in Hage’s Montreal, where the Arab immigrant represents the pestilence itself—but a pestilence born of racist discourse around migrancy in Canada. In

Cockroach, the migrant embodies the threat that unsettles the Canadian imagination; rather than a welcome opportunity to demonstrate Canada’s benevolence, the migrant becomes an uncooperative, unstable challenge to the body politic. Ultimately, however, Hage’s figuration of this unsavory Other operates not to demonize the immigrant, but to point out the moral decay of all humans and to disturb Canada’s own image of itself as welcoming and tolerant. The

53 Attitudes regarding migrants as security risks to the social body have been on the rise in Canada since the 1980s, according to Maggie Ibrahim. It is not only that migrants are (wrongly) believed by a substantial portion of the Canadian public “to pose a threat by supporting insurgency movements” (Ibrahim 172); migrants also become associated—through racism rather than substantiated experience—with “health risks, increased criminality, and the potential collapse of the welfare state” (173). See also Dhamoon and Abu-Laban. 54 In the 2014 “Canada Reads” contest held by CBC, Cockroach’s celebrity advocate, Samantha Bee, discusses the seeming connection between Hage and Kafka.

198 narrator’s metamorphosis results from his ownership of how his image is inscribed within the

“regime of the look” (to recall Seshadri-Crooks’s invaluable term); that is, the migrant’s cockroach body absorbs and reflects the settler’s shameful and shaming gaze and the discursive systems that condition that gaze.

However, as with the other novels explored in this dissertation, shame does not emerge within Cockroach merely as a feeling experienced by certain characters. My theory of “mimetic shame” delineates “real world” shame as a three-dimensional experience—shame as a physical and emotional symptom, shame as a product of socio-political events (or contexts), and shame as an intersubjective experience—that takes aesthetic shape through three corresponding textual configurations. Only one of these three levels involves a more-or-less straightforward transposition: the context that evokes shame in the “real world” becomes the setting or plot’s constituent event that triggers characters’ experiences of shame. The other two levels—the symptomatic and the intersubjective—more frequently undergo more extensive transformation under the novelist’s pen, emerging in many cases as metaphor and imagery (in the case of the symptomatic level) and as narrative form or structure (in the case of the intersubjective level). To read Hage’s work through the perspective of mimetic shame therefore means acknowledging how shame is encoded on these three different literary levels; the cockroach-shaped metaphor for shameful feelings is suggestive of the novel’s symptomatic register. However, what really surfaces in Cockroach as mimetic shame—that is, shame that on a textual level mimics shame as it is experienced in real life on corporeal, contextual, and intersubjective levels—is the crystallization of an interplay among the cockroach metaphor, Camusian form, and a narrative response to the legacy of colonization, which is so entangled in contemporary Canadian discourses around migration and middle-Eastern “otherness.” In various ways, these elements of

Hage’s novel enact the symptomatic, contextual, and intersubjective levels of shame theorized in

199 the first two chapters of this dissertation. Where the embodiment of the cockroach character transposes the symptoms of shame—the blush or the cringe, and the sense of exposed grotesqueness—into repulsive insect corporeality, the novel also addresses, of course, the contextual “triggers” for shame: both the typology of immigrant identity within Canadian national discourses—that is, the ways of looking at migrant bodies and the visual semiotics of diasporic identity—and the broader colonial modes of looking and representing from which such discourses extend. Nevertheless, it is on the structural register that Hage’s mimetic shame most pointedly mobilizes a critique. By anchoring a Camusian aesthetics to the motifs of looking and being looked at, Hage binds his protagonist’s crisis to the shameful, shaming structure of the western gaze itself. Hage’s writing therefore integrates the different registers of shame, but he ultimately suggests that operating within a specular domain of intersubjectivity that accrues its power from colonial and immigration discourses disallows the possibility of rejecting or escaping the burden of shame. Within a “regime of the look,” shame infects all—both sides of the shaming gaze: the object of the western gaze and the western subject, who is forced to contend with shame’s violent return. In effect, Cockroach operates as a parable for the return of the shameful repressed, whether that repressed finds its (non)figuration in the writings of Camus, or whether it emerges from the implied expectations for immigrant identity in contemporary national discourse in Canada and other western nations.

Cockroach asserts its relationship to Camus’s work early on; as noted above, the narrator is forced to attend sessions with a therapist (a French-Canadian woman named Genevieve) because of his failed suicide, an attempt on his own life that he says he was pushed toward by

“the bright light that came in [his] window and landed on [his] bed and [his] face.” The narrator suffers beneath “the ray of light,” realizing “how insignificant [he] was in its presence, how oblivious it was to [his] existence” (32). Like Meursault, who wants “to escape from the sun”

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(L’Etranger 58), Hage’s narrator once sought reprieve from the blinding idea of the meaninglessness of his life, becoming “obsessed with escaping the sun” (Cockroach 33).

However, Hage’s narrator lacks the freedom that comes with Meursault’s understanding of himself as merely one of “thousands of millions of other privileged people who . . . called themselves [Meursault’s] brothers,” all of whom—thanks to the equality of the absurd—“would be condemned one day” (L’Etranger 115-16). This is not to suggest that Meursault does not himself experience shame; in fact, during his trial, he is subject to the shame-inducing gaze of the courtroom audience; indeed, it is the awareness of himself through the regard of others that ultimately conjures Meursault’s sense of equality and fraternity, which is why critics like Daniel

Just can read Camusian shame as an ethical awakening, guiding characters to social awareness and engagement. In contrast, Hage’s narrator never enjoys the comfort of universal freedom suggested by Meursault’s final position because although on a philosophical level Hage’s narrator reiterates Meursault, he is also always positioned as Meursault’s victim, the inscrutable

“Arab” whose shadowed face remains forever configured by Meursault’s (and, by extension, the west’s) act of looking—an act so dehumanizing in L’Etranger that it becomes deadly. Indeed, throughout Cockroach, the narrator fixates on how others see him; he recalls, for instance, the

French-Canadian waiter who “looked at [him] with fixed, glittering eyes, and said: . . . Le soleil t’a brule ta face un peu trop (the sun has burned your face a bit too much)” (29). Likewise, he notices a couple watching him from a restaurant, “as if from behind a screen, as if it were live news. Now [he] was just a part of their TV dinner” (87). Thus, although the narrator shares

Meursault’s philosophical crisis about universal meaning, he also animates the subject position determined by Camus’s Arab—a figure observed and, as a consequence, overwritten or nullified by imperial discourse.

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Hage’s narrator is fundamentally aware of how the western “look” constructs him as, for instance, the “fuckable, exotic, dangerous foreigner” (199) or, alternatively, as a traumatized exile; he notes the way Genevieve’s pen makes “its way inside her lips” (102) as he reveals more about his violent, painful past in his country of origin. Ultimately, the narrator’s awareness of how he is perceived as an immigrant in Canada emphasizes his sense that he does not belong, and this discord carries a particularly shameful feeling. “Look at the snow, Farhoud,” he appeals to a friend, another immigrant. “It falls without shame. How did we end up here?” (107). Yet, the shame that arises from not fitting naturally into Canadian society and from being so easily identified as “Other,” is not, in the end, an affect the narrator rejects. Rather, perhaps because of pre-existing feelings of self-loathing and regret over the violence that made him leave his home country, the narrator embraces his shameful feelings, inviting a metamorphosis of his already objectified body into the very figuration of repulsiveness. Transforming himself into a cockroach provides the narrator—or so he imagines—his only opportunity to “rule the earth” (7), to avoid his shamed position at “the bottom of the scale” (122) by fully and triumphantly embodying the ashamed subject—but an ashamed subject who thrives on violence. Thus, the metaphor of the cockroach makes literal the narrator’s shame over occupying the position determined by the western gaze, but he uses shame as a challenge to that gaze. “Yes,” he admits. “I am poor, I am vermin, a bug . . . But I still exist. I look society in the face and say: I am here, I exist” (122). In other words, the narrator’s transformation enacts an incarnation of shame, but only to mirror the violence of the oppressive gaze itself. In this way, the narrator’s feelings of shame never connect only to his subject position; they also attach to the western subject position. Shame travels along the gaze in both directions.

The narrator imagines his cockroach-infused power as the power to “look society in the face”—to return the gaze that oppresses him—and he makes a hobby of walking past “fancy

202 stores and restaurants [to] watch the people behind thick glass” (86). This early spectator sport, however, grows more emphatic with intrusions into Canadians’ homes—a metaphorical return of the gaze that reverses the power disparity at play in his own experience of being looked at.

Nonetheless, for the narrator, “looking society in the face” is never met with mutual regard; in fact, one attempt to return the gaze leads to his apprehension by the police, who tell him it is

“unlawful to stare at people inside commercial places” (87). The powerlessness of his returned look, then, compels his decision to employ a different sort of “looking” by accessing the hidden, domestic spheres of those Montrealers he considers his adversaries; the narrator’s home invasions therefore take on the specular significance of looking upon an object of power.

Because the distance between the Westerner and the migrant is too great, too saturated with imperial and diasporic histories, the narrator wants to look without being looked upon, to gain power over dominant subjects by knowing them, by literally intruding into their privacy in the same way that he feels their gazes as—quite literally, given the law that enforces the gaze—a mode of control over his body.

When, for instance, the narrator is ushered away by police from the man and woman he had regarded as they ate their restaurant meal, he transforms into his cockroach self, then scurries into the couple’s car: “I was the insect beneath them” (89), he explains triumphantly. After listening, unseen, to the couple’s racist complaints about “all kinds of people” making Montreal

“too noisy and crowded” (88), the narrator smuggles himself “under the door” to their house, where he watches their evening rituals before crawling “up the bedroom wall” to watch them sleeping “from above” (89). Not content with merely looking down on them (literally and figuratively), he puts himself “inside [their] dreams,” helping himself to the shrimp cocktails and whiskies of their dream-party, surveilling the contents of their sleeping minds with the pleasurable anonymity of a fellow guest (90). Finally, after exiting the couple’s dreams and

203 stealing some of their belongings, he crawls away, part insect and part skunk, “swaying from side to side and urinating on car wheels” (91), overwhelmed by the rage and repulsiveness he attaches to not belonging to Canada’s “dreadful suburbs” (90), the safe spaces where Euro-

Canadians retreat to avoid the “filth” (159) of “all kinds of people.”

Here, the narrator’s transformation and infiltration arise out of his frustrated acceptance of his object-status, and he makes monstrous the stigmatized signs of his body as the western gaze regards it. In his own reading of Cockroach, Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar arrives at a similar conclusion; Hage’s narrator, Abdul-Jabbar argues, is literally “dehumanized” as a result of “the city’s xenophobic attitude” (175). Yet, while Abdul-Jabbar is correct, I think, to suggest that the narrator’s cockroach self is a “product of introjection” that “serves as a dramatization of the narrator’s subaltern agency” (169), the narrator’s gestures of returning the gaze—of “looking society in the face” or infiltrating their spaces—lack the empowerment associated with expressions of agency. In fact, when the narrator takes on his cockroach form and crosses into spaces he understands as western, he experiences the transgression as a form of estrangement that ironically functions to annihilate his individual subjectivity just at the moment when he is so invested in asserting his own powerful gaze.

For instance, in the novel’s most crucial scene of intrusion, when the narrator crawls up a pipe and into his therapist’s unoccupied apartment, the narrator shifts from first-person to third- person narration, referring to himself as “the stranger” (81). This explicit reference to Camus’s novel, of course, places Hage’s character again in the split role of both Meursault and his Arab victim. Hage draws further attention to the space between these figures and the inflections of power that characterize Meursault’s gaze by furnishing Genevieve’s apartment with a coffee- table book of prints by the American photographer Weegee, whose 1940s-era images captured

New York City’s destitute immigrants and criminals, especially as they are observed by the

204 police and elite onlookers.55 Weegee’s photos serve to remind the narrator that, despite the

Meursault/Arab doubling of his role, he is alienated, uncertain about his place in a world where his attempt to control the power of the gaze only turns him back into “the stranger,” incapable of escaping the knowledge that his body will always be identified as the Other, the body that

Meursault murders. He longingly scrutinizes a photo of his therapist “hugging a handsome man with blond hair and good teeth, both of them smiling back at the intruder in the living room, not seeming to mind his presence, heads leaning in towards each other. In the background there was a blue beach glittering with pools of sunrays, which explained the need for the sunglasses that crowned the lovers’ foreheads” (83). Unlike the narrator, Genevieve and her lover are comfortable in the sun, having no need to escape its “flashing and exposing” (32) brilliance; meanwhile, the narrator only feels “at home” (83) in her apartment only because his presence goes unnoticed. His cockroach figure—the figure of the “stranger”—comfortably disfigures his identity, so that he belongs, paradoxically, by virtue of not belonging, of being unwelcome, of vengefully adopting the form of the intruder.

While Weegee’s images and the photo of Genevieve with her lover reinforce the narrator’s sense of estrangement via the western gaze, these symbols also draw the reader’s attention to the very structuration of the “regime of the look.” With these specular objects, which accrue significance because of the emphatic attention they draw to the idea of bodies as signs whose meanings shift depending on the source of the gaze, the novel introduces another variable, a tertiary gaze, by which the reader—as intermediary—could potentially disrupt the binary structure of western looking. In other words, by drawing attention to the regime of the look, the

55 The narrator describes several of Weegee’s photos, and is fascinated by one captioned “Their first murder”: “The image showed a crowd of kids and adults, a close-up of their faces. The photographer must have been very close to the crowd, thought the stranger. Some of the kids were even laughing and playing and stretching their heads towards the lens, and in the background a woman, surrounded by the crowd of kids, was crying” (82). Weegee, like the narrator, seems to have been fascinated by the idea of the anonymity of individuals within crowds.

205 novel’s scenes of intrusion suggest that there may be multiple ways of looking, or of responding to the look.

However, the narrator remains blind to the possibility of diverse gazes or different models of intersubjective relations. His cockroach figuration suggests not only the degree to which the narrator is estranged from other Montrealers or Canadians, but also from his own humanity. In fact, the “stranger” whom the narrator becomes actually instantiates his loss of self; his estrangement suggests a metaphorical or spiritual suicide that achieves what his first attempt at dying could not. Indeed, the novel suggests the narrator’s long project at self-annihilation; where it begins with suicide (the moral question at the heart of The Myth of Sisyphus), it ends with murder (the moral question propelling both L’Etranger and L’Homme Révolté)—an act that announces a different kind of end to his life. Learning of the long-ago rape of his lover, Shohreh, in an Iranian jail, the narrator finds an opportunity to enact revenge against her rapist, who repeatedly dines at the restaurant where he works. But while the narrator’s vengeance purportedly seeks justice for Shohreh, it also satisfies his longing for two other gestures of retribution. First, he imaginatively compensates for his failure to defend his sister from the abusive husband who killed her. In this way, the narrator seeks to put an end to the trauma, guilt, and regret he continues to experience over his pre-migration losses. However, the narrator’s second gesture of revenge aims at the very model of a society that would turn him into a cockroach; that is, he rebels against the conditions of racism whose discourse and specular authority ensure that his body signifies Otherness, all the more so because he resists integration.

Wandering alone through the excruciatingly cold Montreal streets, the narrator considers his arrival in Canada: “I wondered how I had ended up here. How absurd. How absurd. The question is, Where to end? All those who leave immigrate to better their lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matters, not the life” (160). He kills Shohreh’s

206 torturer in part because he wants his own death to matter, but the novel’s final scene does not describe the narrator’s literal death. Instead, when he murders for Shohreh, he finally becomes fully cockroach, no longer human. At last, he belongs entirely “down in the underground” (203), where his allegiance is to a “project to change this world” (202). By the end of the novel, the narrator’s cockroach transformation is complete; he moves toward the restaurant’s kitchen drain,

“and when I saw a leaf carried along by the stream of soap and water as if it were a gondola in

Venice, I climbed onto it and shook like a dancing gypsy, and I steered it with my glittering wings towards the underground” (305). The narrator escapes the sun, at last, and retreats from society, into the stream of the unidentifiable—the undocumented bodies whose potential violence haunts the Western imagination.

It is important to note, however, that when the narrator disappears as a cockroach into the sewers beneath Montreal, he does not merely become invisible. Hage does not simply invert the binary of the seen versus the unseen, nor does he suggest through dramatic emphasis that the neglected inhabitants of Canada will always be relegated to the swamps of social injustice. The shadows to which Hage’s protagonist retreats reinforce the potential power of the invisible, just as his invasion into his therapist’s home and his ironic observation of the Weegee photos reinforce the latent threat of the object regarded by the powerful photographic eye. The sewer into which the cockroach sails now marks the location of what the mainstream, settled population of Canadians fears most: the dark space harbouring, somewhere, unseen, the creatures that horrify—not grateful, after all. Thus, in the end, Hage’s protagonist both embodies and denies the shame projected onto the nation’s Other: he embraces the assignation, turns it into something fearful, then disappears into the murky imagination, unseen but threatening always to creep out of the underworld.

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Ultimately, Hage gives the Arab figure a voice (but not a name); he characterizes that figure, but not to free him, not to rescue him or to ennoble him. The voice he gives his narrator expresses the vendetta of the shamed. Simultaneously, Hage gives life to the characters who, in

Camus’s works, are only a part of the landscape. Hage animates the unnoticed figure, the Middle

Eastern man that both stimulates western fantasy and haunts western imagination, and in doing so not only makes the figure articulate but also entrenches him within that timeless consciousness that so characterizes his predicament. The narrator of Cockroach expresses the individuality that Camus could not see, but also the conditions of shame and anger that Camus helped to create. However, perhaps most tragically, the narrator falls into the trap of believing there actually is something essential to his identity; he may “return the gaze,” as it were, but he returns it only from the object position to which he is assigned by the regime of the look. This is a regime from which the narrator never escapes. Here, a clear distinction between the narrator’s voice and the narrative itself emerges; because the narrator is held in the sway of the western gaze, he fails to move outside of it, or to notice other, nuanced possibilities, such as the idea that just as migrant identity is not monolithic, neither is settler-Canadian identity. These are ideas several other of the novel’s characters hint at, but the narrator brushes off Genevieve’s frustrated reminders that, for example, “Not everyone who grew up here has a job or a house. There are many poor people who grew up here” (99), just as he sweeps aside Farhoud’s angry rejection of the narrator’s desire to “settle a score” with his oppressors (112). Here, then, Hage focalizes the true violence underlying the gaze: the obliterating power of shame flourishes in the moment that the object of the look accepts the look as a valid measure of identity—the moment when the

Other becomes, as it were, a cockroach.

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The Politics of Absurdity

In exploring the political and psychological structures of shame, Hage redefines the idea of the absurd. He is concerned with similar kinds of moral dilemmas as was Camus, but his answer back to Camus is that it is precisely the injustice of Western imperial consciousness that establishes the conditions of the absurd, characterizing what Camus himself would call a

“divorce” between intention and reality. Recalling that Camus defines the absurd as that which emerges between the “distance between the two terms” of a comparison, Cockroach dramatizes the distance between the immigrant and the settler Canadian. Hage understands the fundamental dilemma of an individual living in a world in which death is inevitable—this is Camus’s essential definition for the condition of absurdity. But Hage replaces that fundamental dilemma within a further disorienting context—that of the Other exiled in the West (another way to think of this context is that of the repressed and nameless living a life among those with documented stories). By telling this story, the novel underscores the privileged position Camus occupied, laying absurdity upon absurdity: the absurd life of inevitable death lived within an absurd context in which the reality, depth, and individuality of migrant life is not only denied but written across with lies, with expectations for gratitude, or with assumptions of a narrow range of “types.”

Finally, Hage’s novel identifies shame as the device that permits the gaze its deathly authority, transforming the body upon which the gaze looks into a reified object. Hage’s project thus falls in line with Said’s appeal for a defiant investigation of the underlying bias informing Camus’s works: The “interrelationship between geography and the political context pitting French colonialism against Algerian natives,” Said argues, “has to be reanimated exactly where, in the novels, Camus covers it with a superstructure celebrated by Sartre as providing ‘a climate of the absurd’” (“Narrative” 92). Hage fulfills Said’s entreaty by adding atop Camus’s absurdly

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“cosmic indifference” (Said 97) the additional cruelty of local indifference—the indifference of those with privilege towards those with none.

If the look is the apparatus that prompts awareness of oneself among others, in

Cockroach it is characterized as a device of colonial/settler inscription. Although the narrator knows he is “marked” by the look, he manipulates it, knowing it is something that ensures a kind of ironic blindness in the one who judges/regards the immigrant Other. He transforms himself into the object (the cockroach), promising a vengeance that is ordained by the structure of the look itself. Of course, the transformation is also the narrator’s own tragedy—even if he will obliterate the “oppressor,” he is also obliterated in his transformation and his final, irreversible turn to the underground. Herein lies the absurd tragedy of the narrator’s choice: nameless, he finally also becomes voiceless and faceless. There is nothing left to look at; all that remains is the specter itself: the Other. Hage reverses the shame of being subjected to the look, casting it back at the one whose gaze holds such discursive power. “Shame on you,” is the sentiment of

Cockroach, a castigation lodged at those who inherit, unquestioningly, the philosophical tradition established by Camus. Yet, within this specular model of intersubjectivity, pointing the shame back at the source of the gaze does not recuperate the other from his object status.

Hage’s novel expresses, on one hand, a loving tribute to Camus and the humanist crisis of uncertainty that he drew upon with such beautiful, poetic precision. On the other hand,

Cockroach revolts against the imperial premises whose injustice Camus accepted as necessary, and implicitly accuses Camus and the legacy of his oeuvre for participating in the kind of world- making that helped solidify a cruel image of the Middle Eastern Other in the Western imagination. Moreover, what Cockroach offers in response to Camus’s Orientalist representations operates as a mode of turning the structure of shaming upside down, reorienting the monstrous underbelly as a murky, barely-repressed presence constantly threatening

210 accession. Although the novel suggests that such an outcome—the migrant as the ashamed product of the western gaze—may often be inevitable, it does suggest other possibilities, underscored by Weegee’s photos, which call attention to the regime of the look, by Genevieve’s occasional interjections into the narrator’s monolithic interpretation of Canadian identity, and by

Farhoud’s alternative approach to self-articulation in Canada. Of course, the narrator, determined to “win” the struggle against the west within the terms set by the colonial victors, refuses to consider these other possibilities. Thus, the novel rings a warning bell, as if to say: imperialism contradicted the conditions of absurd ethics and, in doing so, created a different kind of absurdity—a structure in which violence is inevitable.

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Conclusion Writing Out Shame

“Fanon reveals to his comrades—especially those who remain a little too Westernized—the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents. Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

“Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation. . . . It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world. Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

When I was five, my family moved across the country from a small village in southern

Ontario to a slightly larger town in northern British Columbia. The journey—by suburban van towing a massive, hand built wooden trailer—took a couple of weeks, several campsites, and many, many stories, told by my long-haired, peace-loving parents, who took it in turn to distract their three small children from the flies, the heat, and the unending vista of the TransCanada highway. By far, my favourite of these stories was about a child named Epaminondas, a boy whose utter failure to follow directions led him to melt butter on his own head, drown puppies in rivers, and step in each of his mother’s hot pies. Epaminondas’s stupidity was the punch line of the story and, crowing with laughter and disbelief from the backseat, I would beg my mother to tell the story again and again. She did. The story of Epaminondas travelled with me across the country, cushioning the loss of my old friends, my grandparents, and my home. His errors grew more incredible the more they were repeated; with each telling, I gaped at the wonderful, ridiculous fact that Epaminondas still had not learned his lesson.

After we reached our destination, we set to work making the north home. My parents took up their teaching posts. I started school, made friends, marvelled at snow falling in August, and

212 forgot all about Epaminondas. Not until several years later—I was perhaps twelve—did he come to mind again; I do not know why. “Remember Epaminondas?” I asked my mother, shaking my head and smiling as I recalled his blundering foolishness. I expected Mum to laugh with me, to enjoy the treat of unearthing an old memory. Instead, she looked askance, shrugging off my solicitation. I could not understand it. “Oh, I don’t like that story,” she told me. “I should never have told it to you.” I was speechless. “It’s racist,” she said, as if I knew, as if I shared her belated opinion. “He’s black.” I could not believe it. I had had no idea that the child in the story she had told me was black—to me, he was a beloved, hilarious fool—a child who could do no right, despite all of his best intentions. I doubt he even had a face to me, except as a vague amalgamation of every boy I had ever known—when I was five, all of those boys were white.

All I could think when I heard my mother’s admission, and when I thought back to the story I had assumed she invented, was “Why does Epaminondas have to be black?” I had no idea when I was five, and only a small glimmering when I was twelve, of the dreadful history of racism in

North America—but I sensed my mother’s shame, the shame of having participated in a racist tradition, and I understood that Epaminondas’s story would always be off-limits, disgraceful, that even though I had had no idea of his race, I had every reason to feel ashamed. My very ignorance about his race, my ignorance of the history informing his narrative formation was shameful. My mother and I never spoke of the story again.

I still feel shame when I think of it—shame over the ignorance and racism in my own origins and shame that I unconsciously endowed the stories I loved with whiteness even as they carried with them histories of colonial cruelty and shaming. I recalled these feelings of shame when, years later, I encountered the works of J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. Despite the different, South African context of their fictions, I recognized the ethical and shame-filled crises induced by the signs of their whiteness in a place where politics put them on the wrong side of

213 history, within a discourse—both political and literary—that construed otherness via racialized categories of identity. Novelists from different colonial outposts grapple with similar experiences of settler guilt and shame: John Steffler, Sheila Watson, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, and Patrick

White, among others. In many of the fictional works produced by these writers, shame figures as a palpable burden produced by and placed on settler existence. Shame impoverishes their relationship with themselves and alienates them from or is projected upon those around them.

Even as it sometimes seems to give them access to opportunities for redemption (the mantle of shame indicating to others the idea that one is the “right” kind of settler—the regretful, ashamed kind), shame bursts forth again for having been claimed as a virtue. In this sense, shame conflicts settler identity to such a degree that Rosa Burger, for instance, has no choice at the end of

Gordimer’s novel but to become peripheral to the story of the anti-apartheid resistance movement.

Equally important, though, is that there is something about shame that infects; whereas shame properly “belongs” to those who inflicted the violence—colonists, merchants, slave- traders, explorers—it passes so easily to the targets of their violence. Kamau Brathwaite acknowledges this transference of shame—from colonizer to colonized—in “New World A-

Comin,” which characterizes the history of slavery as a shame shared by both slaver and slave.

The poem begins with a horrifying first encounter in Africa:

Helpless like this

leader-

less like this,

heroless,

we met you: lover,

warrior, hater,

214

coming through the files

of the forest

to soft soil of silence . . . (1-10).

Later, the shameful significance of this initial encounter, which immediately turns to the violent capture of the “helpless,” is relocated onto the slave figure:

How long

how long

O Lord

O devil

O fire

O flame

have we walked

have we journeyed

to this place

to this meeting

this shock

and shame

in the soiled

silence. (24-27)

Through the repeated, alliterative “soil” and “silence,” the shame of the slaver’s historical violence becomes the shame of the slave who lost the fight for freedom; the shame of that original confrontation and the dreadful significance of the loss it entailed seeps into the land itself, and across an ocean, and down generations. This is the shame that becomes Sethe’s inheritance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved—a shame that, although ignited by the plantation owner

215 and the whole system of slavery, takes root in the very body of the slave. Sethe has to cope with the shame—a “hot thing” (255)—that comes with the knowledge that “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you.

Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up” (295). The shame Brathwaite and Morrison summon is at once a foundational shame (marking an original rupture in history and in the subject), a transmitted shame (marking the transactional moment when the guilt of the oppressor becomes the shame of the oppressed), and a (dis)embodying shame (marking the racialized boundaries of the body while also transforming—or “dirtying”—the subject so that she is no longer recognizable to herself).

This dissertation developed out of a desire to understand the role shame plays in the formation of some postcolonial subjectivities, specifically as those formations are conveyed in literary representations of shameful historical events. I wanted to think about how postcolonial novelists coped with the real experiences of feeling ashamed about the particular forms of physical and psychological violence introduced by colonization (as well as decolonization and neo-colonialism): the way discourse constructed certain bodies as Other so effectively that they felt alienated from themselves, or the way values dichotomously assigned to the “west” and the

“rest” produced the so-called colonial “cringe” over one’s own cultural and social histories, or the way aesthetic representations of colonial space were constructed as “place[s] of negation”

(Achebe, “An Image” 3), leaving the subjects of that place as non-entities, ashamed by their position as the object of so dehumanizing a gaze. Furthermore, considering the central position embodiment plays in registering and communicating shame, I wanted to develop a better understanding of how literary representations of ashamed bodies reverberate through other aesthetic registers, as well—that is, how a shameful feeling is configured not just as a character’s

216 feeling but as a kind of textuality. Considering that, as I note in the introduction, each experience of shame documents a story that emerges out of the cultural, political, historical, and economic forces determining subject formation, it should hardly be surprising that there is something fundamentally fictional about the way shame operates, even when it has profoundly real consequences on one’s psychology and relationships. After all, what an ashamed subject believes about herself does not reflect reality so much as a long series of lies, as effective as the guns that ensured subjection. How these lies—these fictions—that determine shamed identity transfer into the fictions of literary narration thus became the focus of my study. In reading postcolonial novels that deal centrally with experiences of shame, I explored the parallels between their aesthetic dimensions and the objective world to which those dimensions ostensibly correspond.

Where synthesis was suggested on multiple levels, and where “real world” shame corresponded with a novel’s formal and contextual devices, mimetic shame seemed to be at play.

Proceeding from my theorization of shame in postcolonial literature as a tripartite textual instantiation of (1) the corporeal symptoms, (2) the contextual triggers, and (3) the intra- and intersubjective relations characterizing shame, I set out a typology for reading what I called

“mimetic shame.” In chapter one, I compared my model with other approaches to interpreting shame in literature, and I provided some examples of the types of literary readings I would practice in later chapters. Chapters two, three, and four looked to three postcolonial novels responding to specific historical contexts that hold deeply shameful significance for the novels’ characters. While on their symptomatic registers each of these novels—Naipaul’s The Mimic

Men, Mda’s Ways of Dying, and Hage’s Cockroach—invests in grotesque symbols of shamed embodiment, their engagement with the historical contexts and intersubjective experiences of shame exposes a degree of diversity in how a shame-laden postcolonial subject may invest in

217 relationships within their immediate social worlds. In each case, however, the formal structure the novel takes is fundamental to its articulation of shame’s significance.

My consideration of The Mimic Men in chapter two focused on how Naipaul’s manipulation of the autobiographical genre emphasizes an affective crisis in its narrator, Ralph

Singh, whose narcissistic writing project anxiously papers over (pun intended) feelings of shame about his colonial origins, particularly the contextual shame of his family’s history as indentured labourers. Ultimately, however, the genre of “writing the self into being” is incapable of restraining Ralph’s shame from bursting through in excessive, symptomatic images of abjection, signifying the dissolution of boundaries between wholeness and contamination, self and other.

Faced with the impossibility of remaining whole while held under the sway of two conflicting fantasies of meaningful identity (the western, metropolitan artist and the pre-colonial Aryan horseman), Ralph removes himself from the final pages of his memoir, ironically writing the self out of being.

While the formal qualities of Naipaul’s novel collide structure and symptom into an antagonistic impossibility (the symptom destroys the structure, as it were), Mda uses form in

Ways of Dying (the focus of chapter three) to distinguish between two different iterations of shame, using the opposition between the formal expectations of comedy and tragedy to demonstrate the degree to which post-apartheid South Africa must deal with a rupture it refuses to acknowledge in its national narratives about heroic resistance. For the novel’s protagonists,

Toloki and Noria, mourning at the level of the body enables each character to resolve debilitating feelings of grief and shame so that they are finally able to extricate themselves from a cycle of grotesque afflictions and to achieve the kind of affinity and wholeness commonly performed by the resolutions to conventional comedies. In contrast, the novel’s communal narrator, speaking on behalf of the leaders of the anti-apartheid activist community, will not take responsibility for

218 or grieve the deaths of those killed as perceived traitors to the cause. As a consequence of the repression of their shame (that is, as a consequence of their shamelessness), they remain unable to interpret the significance of certain signs. These signs are conveyed by the novel’s symptomatic imagery: everyday objects that suggest the violence committed against the forgotten bodies who, because they remain unacknowledged, promise to haunt the future of

South African democracy. The tragedy played out by the novel’s public shamelessness—its failure to reach the anagnorisis that conventionally enables cathartic resolution for the rest of the social world—thus asserts the bipolarity of the novel and the degree to which structural dissonance mimetically reflects the unarticulated crisis between shame over historical violence and hope for postcolonial unity.

Finally, in chapter four, I argued that Cockroach’s mimetic shame emerges on one hand through its indebtedness to Albert Camus’s absurdist philosophy and, on the other hand, to

Camus’s politics and poetics, particularly in his refusal to support Algerian independence and in his representation of Algerian Arabs in his literary works. Cockroach contends with the shame that it establishes as the legacy of Camus’s Orientalist discourse and how that discourse feeds into settler-Canadians’ attitudes toward migrants. On the symptomatic register, the metaphor of the cockroach embodies a vengeful return of disavowed shame—the monstrous Other made literal—while the novel’s motifs of looking and intrusion return the negative gaze of the murdered Arab in Camus’s L’Etranger. The consequence of mimetic shame in the novel is that

Camus’s philosophy of absurdism is both called into question and reframed as the most fundamental condition of colonial existence, in which universal meaninglessness becomes endowed with the added insult of local disempowerment. For the novel’s narrator, shame becomes an affect shared between colonizer and colonized, or between settler and migrant; it

219 ultimately collapses the tenability of Canadian discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance, even if the object of the racist gaze must be destroyed in the process.

Despite their different contexts and narrative strategies, each of the novels explored in this dissertation indicates how, at the crossroads of text, history, and identity, shame casts its shadow in all directions. This shadow—the symptom of embodiment and immateriality at once, and a suggestion of the other the self projects—cannot be dislocated from its position at the centre of these domains. Yet, the mimetic shame enacted by the novels I have examined shifts the angles at which the shadows might lean. In other words, in taking as their subjects the various shames produced by colonial histories, these novels reflect new meaning for the subjects of those histories. This, ultimately, is the hermeneutic potential of mimetic shame. In keeping with my criticisms of the therapeutic model for reading literary shame (discussed in chapter one),

I remain suspicious of the impulse to make shame mean something beyond the text. Given the powerful violence implicit to postcolonial shame, why should it be recuperated as something that might direct readers towards hope or optimism in the world? Because I am not convinced that such a recuperation is ethical—it suggests, for instance, that the shame these novels deploy connotes some kind of reified material value—I can only leave that question with incomplete answers. Ways of Dying uses form to address the shame that attends the conflicts underlying hopefulness about postcolonial futures, but Cockroach and The Mimic Men also use shame to divest the future of its potential for unashamed subjectivity. Shame in these novels exposes the politics of certain bleak formations of (post)colonial subjectivity—the mimic, the zealot, the scourge—but the techniques structuring these aesthetic formations also expose shame and the role it plays as part of the colonial project.

Therefore, while I find it difficult to assign a therapeutic value to shame itself—doing so suggests a tautological benefit to shame, and provides the same cold comfort as the dictum

220

“everything happens for a reason”—I have less trouble finding value in literature about shame.

At the end of his seminal work on literary theory, Robert Scholes reminds critics that “We care about texts for many reasons, not least of which is that they bring us news that alters our way of interpreting things. . . . Textual power is ultimately power to change the world” (165). Deeply invested in interrogating the systemic structures of political and social regimes of power, postcolonial literature about shame offers a lens for understanding. In this sense, shame does (or can, potentially) textually embody the possibility for transformation. Whereas Ralph Singh, the raucous New Years carousers, and the cockroach remain restricted by shame’s alienating, disfiguring effects, the literary structures that enfold these shame-bound characters implicitly suggest that the affective and discursive effects of historical shame are open to change. The interlocutor—the reader, the critic—does not encounter in these novels silence or muzzled, inexpressible feeling. Mimetic shame uses the palimpsest of literary form to offer a dynamic mode of expression, altering, however slightly, the significance of social relationships for those who may have been historically subject to shame’s repressive power. Thus, while the messages any individual text convey may ultimately resist therapeutic impulses or interpretations that recast shameful history in new, less ashamed light, the possibilities that emerge through the reflective and refractive powers of mimetic shame suggest that the text itself is the space in which new meanings might direct a passage to new futures. This is, perhaps, what Derek Walcott was most interested in discovering when, faced with the “laceration of our shame” begotten by the idea that “[o]ur own ancestors shared that complicity” (Twilight 10) for an ancestry of enslavement, he set out to craft a new poetic syntax. In this syntax, he strives to bring together two worlds, two tongues, and to see the lines between them blur in the “twilight.” Despite its evanescence, Walcott finds in art the possibility for a future divested from the pain of the past, forged from the souls of self-determined identities. “When twenty years ago,” he writes, “we

221 imagined cities devoted neither to power nor to money but to art, one had the true vision.

Everything else has been the sweated blurring of a mirror in which the people might have found their true reflection” (34-35). Encapsulated in Walcott’s mournful hybridization of eulogy and promise, the past and the future reflect one another, but art inserts the prospect of creating new meaning.

222

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