RADICALISM at SEA: Literary Pirates in Emmanuel Appadocca to the Scar

RADICALISM AT SEA: Literary Pirates in Emmanuel Appadocca to The Scar By Elizabeth Kelly A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida October 2008 Copyright by Elizabeth Kelly 2008 ii ABSTRACT RADICALISM AT SEA: Literary Pirates in Emmanuel Appadocca and The Scar By Elizabeth Kelly This thesis explores radicalism at work in M. Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca (1854) and China Mieville’s The Scar (2002). These novels highlight piracy as a means of rejecting systems of power and social order. Through speculative fiction, each author finds the means to resist the hegemonic power of genre, race, empire, and knowledge that pervade each author’s social and historical milieu. This work examines the historical and literary context of piracy as a metaphor for radicalism, the project of legitimization and resistance to generic categorization of both texts. Emmanuel Appadocca resists racial stereotypes, and both texts exhibit clear resistance to colonial expansion. This resistance is made possible by each author’s use of the sea as the site of insurgency and challenging boundaries of knowledge. Thus both novels lend themselves to interpretation as works of postcolonial fiction. iv DEDICATION This manuscript is dedicated to my unflinching advisor, Dr. Carol McGuirk, my father who wisely advised me to write one page at a time, my mother whose research is a constant inspiration, my patient committee of readers, and to the friends and partner who have so steadfastly supported me throughout my journey. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: What the Sea Allows: Piracy as a Trope for Radicalism ...................................3 Chapter 2: Context, Legitimization and Genre ..................................................................10 Chapter 3: The Possibility of Parody in Emmanuel Appadocca ........................................18 Chapter 4: Attacks on Colonial Power..............................................................................22 Chapter 5: Spatial Speculation as a Site of Resistance ......................................................31 Chapter 6: The Boundaries of Knowledge in The Scar…………….……………………38 Chapter 7: The Struggle Between Marxism and Multiplicity in The Scar……..………..43 Conclusion: The Redefinition of Radicalism in Pirate Fiction…….....…….……………49 Appendix I: The Plot of Emmanuel Appadocca…………………………...…………….51 Appendix II: The Plot of The Scar….……………………………………………………54 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….………..57 vi From Philip to Miéville: The Changing Face of Literary Piracy Michel Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca: Or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854) and China Miéville’s The Scar (2002) both radically reimagine our world through the eyes of pirates. The novels’ plots are distinctive and complex, and are explicated in Appendices I and II. Piracy has long been a source of literary fascination and for these two authors offers a site of historical and literary resistance to social norms and normative systems of belief. Throughout human history, as empires have formed and spread, the sea has become the primary route to colonial power. During the colonization of the Americas, the sea became a political and economic resource; as such, it also became a resource for those who resisted such power. In literature, emphases on the lawlessness, relative freedom and rejection of society in piracy allow for a space of speculation that can help to reimagine the world we live in. The Scar and Emmanuel Appadocca are very different texts; yet the first resistance they exhibit is to generic categorization, as I will address in Chapter 2. Both novels also use the unregulated space of the sea to resist normative assumptions surrounding race, class, empire and essentialism. In Emmanuel Appadocca, the ultimate resistance that sheds all ties with colonial power is left unrealized; Appadocca kills himself because he cannot imagine a future beyond the revenge he seeks. He catches a fleeting glimpse that speculates about an alternative to his present social condition, but his project of resistance fails, at least within the text. 1 As a metanarrative Emmanuel Appadocca imagines the sea as a space of freedom and autonomy. The first chapter of this thesis will outline the historical and literary connection between piracy and radicalism, and the reification of this linkage in Emmanuel Appadocca and The Scar. Chapter 2 outlines the challenges of legitimization and generic categorization in both texts. Chapter 3 focuses on the possibility of categorizing the depiction of race in Emmanuel Appadocca as a parody of sorts, and Chapter 4 explores each novel’s explicit rejection of colonial expansion. The Scar also posits speculation and resistance that appear to lead to a rejection of social systems of belief and government, and ultimately a rejection of consensus reality. This is clear in the following aspects of the novel upon which Chapters 5 through 7 focus: spatial speculation as a site of resistance, Miéville’s questioning the limits of the knowable, and finally the development of the postmodern novel as a result of the rejection of colonial power and the failure of Marxist revolution. In some ways, Miéville's project of resistance is more complete than Philip's; Miéville, however, must simulate a reality within his novel that is outside of the reader’s reality in order to fully stage this project. It is only the rejection of reality (or our ability to define it) that makes revolution possible within The Scar. The subtle grace of Miéville is that neither the rejection of a fixed reality nor the workers' rejection of hegemonic power in the novel provides a utopic ending: in Bas-Lag, the novel ends with a whimper, and with going home. 2 Chapter 1: What the Sea Allows: Piracy as a Trope for Radicalism “The whole of the civilized world turns, exists and grows enormous on the licensed system of robbing and thieving” (Philip 113) As piracy is a central theme in Emmanuel Appadocca and The Scar, its representation in each deserves close examination. M. Maxwell Philip refers in his preface to the “known history of the boucaneers” (xv). In The Pirate Wars, Peter Earle points out that the pirates of popular imagination, the rovers who rove in novels and films, are more often to be found in American or West Indian waters [….and] were indeed the virtually the only pirates to exhibit those characteristics we expect “real” pirates to have. (89) Earle also points out that in some senses the piracy common in the West Indies “was then just another example of that piratical imperialism which we have seen as the motor of the expansion of English trade and settlement in other parts of the world” (93). Earle notes that historically the boucaneer ships had “very cosmopolitan crews… [including] …representatives of the non-white population of the Caribbean – Negroes, Indians ad mulattoes” (100). In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker explore the idea of hydrarchy, a term coined by Richard Braithwaite as the “designa[tion of] two related developments of the late seventeenth century: the organization of the maritime state from above, and the self-organization of sailors from below” (144). These authors argue that this hydrarchy was a necessary factor in supporting “the military, commercial and financial foundations for capitalism and imperialism” (145). As Peter Earle also 3 notes in The Pirate Wars, piracy before the 1700s had a dubious history of supporting the imperial agenda. Maritime labor, which was fundamental to establishing imperial power on the seas, was also in a unique position to disrupt this power. Linebaugh and Rediker trace the history of maritime labor as a site of radical engagement with early labor movements, arguing that “the struggles waged by sailors of the revolutionary era for subsistence wages and rights and against impressments and violent discipline first took autonomous shape among the buccaneers in America” (157). Clear parallels exist between Philip’s political agenda and that of maritime labor movements, demonstrating the logic behind his focus on piracy in Emmanuel Appadocca. In this vein, the validity of “the known history of the Boucaneers” (Philip 6) can be traced as the basis for some of the more radical aspects of Emmanuel Appadocca. Linebaugh and Rediker extend their argument historically by tracing the development of anti-imperial piracy after the middle of the eighteenth century, stating that “Atlantic piracy had long served the needs of the maritime state and the merchant community in England. But there was a long-term tendency for the control of piracy to devolve from the top of society to the bottom” (156). It is this time period to which Philip refers; his protagonist falls neither in the top or the bottom of society, occupying a more complex space. While Appadocca is educated among society’s elite, he is unable to use his education for social, political, or personal gain because his status as an illegitimate child bars him from the financial support his inheritance would otherwise allow. At the core of his illegitimacy is the issue of race; under colonial Trinidad’s strict social codes, Appadocca’s wealthy white father cannot legitimize his union with his mulatto mother. 4 Appadocca’s

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