The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape@
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The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape Hermann Wittenberg This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor Litterarum in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. Supervisor: Professor A.N. Parr May 2004 Keywords The Sublime Aesthetics Race Landscape Immanuel Kant Postcolonial theory H.M. Stanley John Buchan Alan Paton Rwenzori / Ruwenzori ii Abstract AThe Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape@ Hermann Wittenberg D.Litt. dissertation, Department of English, University of the Western Cape Classical theories of the sublime, articulated primarily in the philosophical work of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, have increasingly attracted attention from contemporary thinkers and cultural theorists. In postcolonial theory, however, virtually no attention has been given to the colonial manifestations of the sublime. In this dissertation I have argued for a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Kant=s and Burke=s classic theories. The complex and contradictory idea of the sublime, I propose, is one of the ways in which an alien, remote and incomprehensible social and natural landscape could be imaginatively mapped, visualised, and brought under the ambit of colonial reason. The belated emergence of sublime loco-descriptive discourses in late imperial romances and travel writing shows that the sublime not only functioned with references to gender and class, as in metropolitan centres, but that it was energised by the threatening facts of racial difference on the colonial frontier. The thesis uses this understanding of the sublime as a lens for an analysis of the cultural politics of landscape in a range of late imperial and early modern texts about Africa. A re-reading of Henry Morton Stanley=s central African exploration narratives, John Buchan=s African fiction and political writing, and later texts such as Alan Paton=s fiction, autobiographies and travel writing, together with an analysis of colonial mountaineering discourse, suggest that non-metropolitan discourses of the sublime, far from being an outmoded rhetoric, could manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested colonial landscapes. iii Declaration I declare that “The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape” is my own work, that it has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other university, and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged as complete references. Hermann Wittenberg May 2004 Signed: iv Acknowledgements The debts incurred in such a dissertation are many, but I would like to single out a few people without whose support and inspiration this work would not have been possible. Firstly, I want to thank my supervisor, Prof. A.N. Parr, whose interest, calm guidance and meticulous feedback gave me the confidence to bring this project to a final conclusion. Looking further back, Prof. David Bunn introduced me to the field of landscape theory in the graduate seminar ALandscape and Memory@ at the University of the Western Cape. I have also been privileged to work with colleagues such as Peter Merrington, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Cape Victorian and Edwardian culture, and Peter Kohler, who knows Alan Paton=s work better than anyone else. I also need to thank many other colleagues, both at UWC and elsewhere, for their feedback and suggestions at several staff seminars and conferences where I tested some of my initial ideas. Some of the earlier research was carried out during post-conference visits to the excellent libraries of Yale and Emory Universities, and I thank Profs Paul Landau and Sheila Tefft respectively for helping to arrange these informal research fellowships. I am also grateful for the hospitality and help given to me by Jewel Koopman and Estelle Barkhuizen at the Alan Paton Centre in Pietermaritzburg. The research trips to KwaZulu Natal have been funded by a generous grant by the Research Committee of the University of the Western Cape. Most importantly, without the two half year periods of sabbatical leave in 2003 and 2004, I would not have had the time to complete the research and the writing, and I am very grateful to the Faculty of Arts and the Andrew Mellon Foundation for this support. Finally, I would like to thank my entire family, especially my wife Zannie, for giving me the space and time to complete the project. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) towards this research is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily attributed to the NRF. v Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Theories of the Sublime 15 Chapter 2 African Mountains and the Sublime 64 Chapter 3 Ideology and Topography in John Buchan’s African Writing 115 Chapter 4 Paton’s Sublime: Race, Landscape and the transcendence of the Liberal Imagination 176 Conclusion 227 Bibliography 231 vi Introduction In what is by now regarded as a classic study of the politics and poetics of the South African landscape, J.M.Coetzee investigates the complex question “as to why the sublime did not flourish in nineteenth-century South Africa” (1988:55) and how the picturesque rather than the sublime became a more dominant mode in colonial “white writing.” In this thesis I want to take up and develop this argument and show that the sublime did indeed become an important though not wide-spread mode in colonial writing towards the end of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century. An investigation into discourses of the sublime in colonial culture and letters about the African interior will help us to gain an understanding of imperial aesthetics, and in particular of how concerns about race and masculinity were articulated and represented. This dissertation will then attempt to develop a postcolonial theory of the sublime in order to re-read a number of late colonial and early modern South African texts. Classical theories of the sublime, articulated primarily in the philosophical work of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, have increasingly attracted attention from contemporary thinkers and cultural theorists. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theoretical work, for instance, is a sustained engagement with Kant’s Critique of Judgement, leading him to declare that the “sublime is perhaps the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterise the modern” (1993:247). Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic is a major contribution to a field of study that was long regarded as reactionary. Similarly, Jacques Derrida’s concept of parergonality, developed in Truth in Painting, deconstructs the Kantian sublime from the margins.1 While theories of the sublime have been fruitfully used to examine a range of areas ranging from postmodernity to masochism, and tourism2 to hypermedia,3 virtually no attention has been given to the sublime in postcolonial theory and criticism. My thesis is an attempt to develop such a postcolonial theory of the sublime by rereading the classical Burkean and Kantian theories through the lens of racial difference. In developing a theory about the ideological function of the sublime in imperial aesthetics, my thesis will look afresh at the classic philosophical writings (Burke and Kant), as well as draw on structuralist (Weiskel4) and poststructuralist readings (De Bolla, Lyotard) and 1 The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape more recent feminist critiques (Freeman, Labbe). In these latter studies, the sublime is not read as a purely aesthetic category nor merely as a rhetorical style, but as a mode of domination in which a male subject asserts his rational supremacy over an excessive and unrepresentable experience, leading to a triumphantly enhanced sense of identity. As Barbara Freeman, in The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction puts it, the sublime involves a sexually coded dominance of “male spectatorship” over “objects of rapture” (1995: 3). Similarly for Jacqueline Labbe, in her book Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism, the sublime involves the masculine "power of the eye and a proprietary relationship to the landscape" (1998: 37). The above cited studies concern themselves with the sublime as a mode of representing landscapes revealing a gendered structure of power. This concern with the structures of power inherent in aesthetic representations is congruent with a large body of work in landscape theory that has emerged in the last thirty years. These theories show how the forces of capital and property accumulation are reflected in landscapes, and treat them as ideological-spatial formations. As Raymond Williams (and a whole school of landscape theorists in his wake) has shown with regard to Britain, picturesque landscapes (both in art and literature) were in a sense an invention of the industrialised cities, through which the degrading effects of capitalism and the presence of rural labour could be suppressed. As John Urry puts it, the spatial politics of the country house and aristocratic estate shows that “class conflicts are in fact caused by, or are displaced onto, spatial conflicts” (1995:14). Urry’s point about the imbrication of the social and the spatial has been amplified by a number of influential studies in social geography and postmodern theory, exemplified by the work of Edmund Soja, David Harvey5