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Afterlives of Romanticism in Postcolonial Writing

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Afterlives of Romanticism in Postcolonial Writing LIVING THOUGHTS, BREATHING WORLDS: AFTERLIVES OF ROMANTICISM IN POSTCOLONIAL WRITING by Philip John Dickinson A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © by Philip John Dickinson 2015 Living Thoughts, Breathing Worlds: Afterlives of Romanticism in Postcolonial Writing Philip John Dickinson Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between postcolonial writing and Romanticism. It understands Romanticism as an institution of aesthetics with a colonial history, as a collection of texts disseminated within but not exhausted by that history, and as a period metaphor for an aesthetic orientation developed, transformed, and contested within postcolonial representation. My study pairs readings of texts that exploit Romanticism as a compositional resource with what I call countervoices, which speak back to the uses made of Romanticism by each dominant voice. My first chapter reads Derek Walcott’s “sense of history” in the light of the relationship that his Another Life establishes with Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In my countervoice to Walcott, I argue that George Lamming’s In the Castle of Skin stages a critical response to the politics embedded in Walcott’s aesthetic orientation in the context of Caribbean decolonization. My second chapter shows how the mobilization of Romantic languages of withdrawal, dejection and solitude undergirds an aesthetic of “enclosure” in V. ii S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. In counterpoint, I position Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain as a text that brings enclosure to crisis and favours a “dis-enclosed” relationship between aesthetics and historical life. My third chapter considers the work of South African poet Stephen Watson in juxtaposition with J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. I interrogate the implication of Watson’s strategically naive engagement of Romantic tropes in Apartheid regimes of the sensible, before showing how Coetzee’s novel activates the counter-vocal agency of Romantic textuality itself, its anticipation of the productive failure of idealizing aesthetic schemas. My concluding excursus turns to Gayatri Spivak’s work as representative of a postcolonial theory that inherits the Romantic interest in the singular. I claim that the turn to subalternity, to hybridity, or to History 2 may be read as a radicalized kind of lyric turn that makes visible the potentially aestheticizing nature of postcolonial theory. This study develops a selective, transnational literary history of an under-explored presence in postcolonial writing, and shows how postcolonial engagements with Romanticism invoke the aesthetic in its full complexity, involving literary corpuses, discourses of Bildung, standards of taste, institutions of feeling, and the domain of the sensorial, including sensibility and bodily sensation itself. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Ato Qsuayson, and the members of my supervisory committee, Victor Li and Sara Salih, for their sustained and transformative engagement with the ideas in this thesis. I acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario and the University of Toronto for helping to fund this work. Thanks to my friends and colleagues on and beyond the graduate program in the Department of English at Toronto for support intellectual, personal, social, and the rest. Special thanks to Mum, Dad, Catherine, Louise, Carys and Henry for supporting me in my endeavours from afar, and special thanks as well to Nama and Bob, for providing a home from home in which to recharge, and for more besides. Thank you, most of all, to Sundhya, to whom I owe an immeasurable debt for her love and support, and for her presence in my life. I lost my brother, Andrew, in the weeks before submitting this thesis, and it is dedicated to him. iv Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Derek Walcott: the Sense of History, the Sense of the World 27 Countervoice I: George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin 69 3. Landscapes of Dis-enclosure in V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival 84 Countervoice II: Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain 119 4. Romantic Aisthesis and the Poetry of Stephen Watson 135 Countervoice III: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace 157 Excursus: Postcolonialism, Romanticism, and the Singular 181 Bibliography 205 v 1 1. Introduction I begin with a famous scene from Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, in which the eponymous protagonist is brought to the “favourite place” of her American employer and guardian, Mariah. Mariah covers Lucy's eyes with a handkerchief, before revealing the spectacle and entreating Lucy to look: I looked. It was a big area with lots of thick-trunked, tall trees along winding paths. Along the paths and underneath the trees were many, many yellow flowers the size and shape of play teacups, or fairy skirts. They looked like something to eat and something to wear at the same time; they looked beautiful; they looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea. I did not know what these flowers were, and so it was a mystery to me why I wanted to kill them. Just like that. I wanted to kill them. I wished that I had an enormous scythe; I would just walk down the path, dragging it alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down at the place where they emerged from the ground. (28-9) The flowers, of course, are daffodils, and we can infer that Lucy's hostility towards them is connected to her memory of being forced to recite Wordsworth's “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” as a child at school in Antigua. At the time, she made “a vow to erase from [her] mind, line by line, every word of that poem”; and yet the night after reciting the poem, she dreamt that she was “being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that [she] had vowed to forget” (18). The daffodils, in 2 this dream, appear as agents of violence, and this explains Lucy's reaction to the subsequent experience of being confronted with the daffodils directly. Mariah mistakes her reaction for joy, and Lucy struggles to explain that the flowers, for her, belong to a scene “of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes masquerading as angels and angels masquerading as brutes” (30). What is crucial, though, is that the daffodils, as Lucy's dream suggests, are not simply an emblem of the violence of colonial education, but are themselves manifestations of a specifically aesthetic violence: they are an aesthetic ideal that interposes between Lucy and the world that she inhabits, blocking or warping her sense of the world. Both scenes – the initial recital of the poem, and the subsequent introduction to a real patch of daffodils – are pedagogical, scenes of aesthetic education: Lucy is praised by her teachers for “how nicely [she] had pronounced every word,” and Mariah only wants Lucy to share her appreciation for the spectacle. But Lucy's reaction shows that this aesthetic education is not only about a neutral acculturation: while the recital of poetry might seem to aim towards the development of faculties of taste and appreciation, it appears here as a particular kind of violence, linked to an infection of Lucy's interiority with words and sights that are not her own, that represent imperialist impositions within her psyche and within her faculties of sense themselves (the daffodils look “beautiful,” “simple,” but she cannot relate to them thus). It is for this reason, it seems, that she wants to erase from her mind every word of the poem and to “kill” the daffodils that she sees. Kincaid's fiction brilliantly illuminates the violence upon which aesthetic education is founded, a violence that may be compensated for and concealed by the pleasures of aesthetic response, and by the apparently benign and productive outcomes of 3 such an education. If the Bildungsroman conventionally charts the growth of its protagonist into an operative socialized subject, properly integrated into the aesthetic fabric of her or his society, then Kincaid's novels stand in an antagonistic relationship to the Bildungsroman and its theme of aesthetic education. Far from tracing the integration of the aesthetic schemas of their protagonists into a coherent sensibility, shared and sustained among members of a community, her novels are interested in phenomenological dis-integration, in moments of response that announce the alienation of the aesthetic life of the subject. Kincaid invites us to read such alienation as a legacy of the educational apparatuses of colonial rule, as the name of Lucy's school, the Queen Victoria Girls' School, makes unambiguous. The material violence of empire ramifies as aesthetic violence: Lucy thinks of how she had been forced to learn this poem at the age of ten, and yet she does not see the subject of the poem until she is nineteen and living in the United States. Wordsworth's poem thus represents a splinter within Lucy's subjectivity that she cannot integrate or appropriate; and her later encounter with the daffodils only further emphasizes this self-alienation. Lucy's reaction in these passages does not respond to any particular quality of daffodils, nor to any aesthetic features specific to Wordsworth's poem. The feeling Lucy has about the daffodils “wasn't exactly [about] daffodils,” but “they would do as well as anything else” (29). The image of the daffodils, in this sense, stands in for any cultural image disseminated more or less violently. As Ian Smith suggests, Wordsworth
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