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 “functions metonymically” for the imperial curriculum and for the larger history of empire (801-
802). But if Wordsworth, in postcolonial writing, is a metonym for the absurdity and violence of colonial education, for Lucy the daffodils are the manifestation of aesthetic 4 violence: they assault her senses, and they infiltrate her mechanisms of perception, her ways of perceiving and responding to the world that she yearns to be her own.1 Kincaid's fiction, to me, is animated less by its oppositional relationship towards the English canon than by its interest in the socio-cultural ways in which sensory and sentimental life comes to be infected by otherness, by presences and standards of judgement that open the autonomy of the self onto a compromising and fraught heteronomy.
This scene in Lucy has an autobiographical purchase. Kincaid has written of her dislike of daffodils and explained it as a legacy of imperial education: “The reason I do not like daffodils is not at all aesthetic but much more serious than that: having been forced to memorize a poem about daffodils, when none were to be found in the place I grew up” (“Plant Parenthood” 46, quot. in Smith 802). But Kincaid's claim that her dislike is “not at all aesthetic” assumes a restricted definition of the aesthetic. Kincaid is implying that there is nothing proper to the form of the daffodils that inspires her dislike, but her dislike remains fundamentally aesthetic if we understand the aesthetic to be bound up with the educative, the production of the subject, and the relations among text and sensibility and history. As Marc Redfield explains, “[to] reflect on the aesthetic is necessarily . . . to reflect on language, history, and the subject; . . . it is to pause over the uncertain mutual imbrications of textuality and psychic and political life” (“Reading the
Aesthetic” 1). Given the novel's embedded reflection on the aesthetic understood thus, it may seem especially appropriate that it is a Wordsworth poem that generates Lucy's
1 Wordsworth's poem has circulated in postcolonial writing as a powerful emblem of imperial education, especially in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic contexts. See, for instance, Grace Nichols's poem “Spring” from The Fat Black Woman's Poems, in which the speaker steps outdoors after a winter of influenza “only to have that daffodil baby / kick me in the eye” (34), and Andrea Levy's Small Island, in which Hortense attempts to teach her grandmother the poem. Lorna Goodison has written in similar terms to Kincaid of her resentment of the poem (291). 5 troubled and absolutely aesthetic response. This is in part because the poem that Lucy is forced to memorize is about aesthetic encounter: it communicates an aesthetic – that is, a sensory and affective – response, and models such a response for its reader. The poem, in this sense, is already a pedagogical technology, comprehensible within the context of
Wordsworth's concern with reforming public taste. The scene in Kincaid, however, also gestures towards the larger significance of what Redfield calls “the skewed, double character of the aesthetic and its privileged period-metaphor, 'Romanticism.'” For
Redfield, the aesthetic “fulfils itself in turning against itself; it succeeds through failure; it ruins even as it reproduces the monumental artwork, the monumentalized artist, and the space of pedagogical and political formation within which modern subjects come to pass.” Redfield is speaking in de Manian terms about the instability of the aesthetic and its power to frustrate reading and instrumentalism, but his description also bears witness to the complex, enabling failures of the aesthetic in postcolonial representation. The migratory power of Wordsworth's poem – a power connected to but not fully coextensive with the power of colonial education – is also the guarantee of its estranged destiny within histories and life-worlds that at once sustain it and empty it out. Lucy remembers the daffodils, and so carries Wordsworth's poem into the future, but resists the mode of attention it attempts to call into being (instead of pleasure and tranquillity, Lucy feels anger and an urge to destroy).
The scene in Lucy marks a point of crossing between the aesthetic and what I will call the phenomenal, where the aesthetic denotes the response shaped by an acculturated sensibility, and the phenomenal implies a more intuitive, natural, or otherwise unburdened kind of sensory and affective response. In my study, the phenomenal is to be 6 distinguished from the aesthetic by its commitment to the possibility of perception operating beyond or before the shaping power of culture or taste. The word “aesthetics” has this possibility inscribed within its etymology, since aisthesis simply means “sense perception,” but aesthetics also implies the historicity of perception; it refers to the embeddedness of sensibility within an institutional, political, and textual history, as much as mere sensation. The word “phenomenal” suggests a kinship with phenomenology: while phenomenology is properly a method in the Husserlian tradition, it can be described as a method oriented by a desire, which we might call Romantic, for direct apprehension or “unmediated vision,” in Geoffrey Hartman's phrase.2
As much as a point of crossing between the aesthetic and the phenomenal characterized in this way, Lucy's encounter with the daffodils marks the troubling indeterminacy of the relationship between these two modes of response. To Lucy, the daffodils appear “simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea,” a description that seems to imply the pointlessness of Wordsworth's poem in the light of the physical appearance of the daffodils – but Wordsworth's poem, functioning as the incubator of an aesthetic ideal, also erases the possibility of a simple aesthetic relation with the daffodils as they present themselves to the senses, generating a response that even to Lucy is unexpectedly violent. This is also to say that the antagonistic posture
Kincaid's text adopts towards Wordsworth simultaneously reflects a proximity to the concerns of Romanticism, since Romanticism, borrowing Redfield's formulation, is a
“period-metaphor” that coordinates a relationship between aesthetics and phenomenology defined in these terms. To keep to the poem in hand, Wordsworth comes upon the
2 I elaborate my discussion of phenomenology in reference to Jean-Luc Marion and Hartman's reading of Wordsworth in the following chapter. 7 daffodils: their spectacle is not anticipated by the poet and their power is not predicted by culture; the poet is therefore aestheticizing, turning into a model of taste, a spectacle that is initially only minimally aesthetic, registered by authentic sensation and affect rather than by acculturated response. Wordsworth's poetry offers a powerful language of the phenomenal or intuitive response, even while bespeaking the burdens of history, fashion, or taste. The same might well be said of Kincaid, even though her work expresses a more radical resistance to the propriety of the aesthetic. In Autobiography of My Mother, therefore, the resistance to heteronomy, even to hetero-affection, can be seen in Xuela's obsession with self-touching to the exclusion of others, and especially with the smells and emanations of her own body. Xuela yearns, impossibly perhaps, for a radical kind of auto-affection that would involve no foreign bodies of any sort, including the foreign bodies of the aesthetic tradition.
Even in the case of Kincaid's fiction, however, with its description of
Wordsworth's placement in a “scene of conquered and conquests,” it isn't quite right to say that it “writes back” to the traditions of English and European aesthetics. Her work explores the interweaving of aesthetic, sensorial, and psychic life, and such entanglements make a simple oppositional relationship to aesthetic history difficult to assert. Wordsworth as a proper name may be a metonym for the imperial curriculum, but the words and images of Wordsworth's poetry have an afterlife, for better or for worse, that exceeds this context. David Dabydeen's long poem Turner similarly takes an interest in a specific Romantic scene, in this instance Turner's 1840 painting, “Slavers Throwing
Overboard the Dead and Dying,” more often referred to by the (slightly) more antiseptic title, “The Slave Ship.” Dabydeen focuses on the submerged, barely discernible bodies of 8 the drowning slaves in the painting, in an imaginative project that protests against
Turner's representation of them “as exotic and sublime victims.” And yet, in Dabydeen's poem, they cannot escape Turner's representation of them or describe themselves anew, but are “indelibly stained by Turner's language and imagery” (8). The poem departs from a sense of outrage at the aesthetic instrumentalization of suffering and dying bodies in the production of art and at the racist representational regimes that make such instrumentalization possible. The implication of Dabydeen's critique is that the painting's consecration within art history, its status as English art par excellence, reproduces an aesthetic regime in which the history of slavery is marginalized. For Dabydeen, this marginalization is especially apparent in John Ruskin's discussion of the painting, in which Ruskin describes it as the guarantee of Turner's immortality while registering the fact of slavery only as an afterthought, like “something tossed overboard” (7).
Dabydeen's poem therefore makes Turner the name of the captain of the slave ship. It aims to show Turner privately “savouring” the sadism he publicly denounced, and to give a new meaning “to Turner's love of children and extreme prudence with money.” The poem appropriates the name of Turner as a kind of author-function, rewriting its associations and seizing hold of its metonymic power, its power, that is, to stand in for an elevated aesthetic tradition.
Implicit, here, is the idea of what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” the idea that cultural texts make possible certain kinds of identification – of thought, feeling, and action – and make other kinds impossible. But in the end Dabydeen is less interested in Romantic aesthetics themselves than in the aesthetic composition of colonial and racial ideologies. Dabydeen's Turner expresses no sense of indebtedness to 9 the aesthetic it indicts. Indeed, any such debt would be the marker of a capture within a colonial tradition that has “indelibly stained” black bodies. In this respect, Dabydeen's poem seems to fit neatly within the explanatory paradigm of “writing back” that gained ascendency in postcolonial literary studies in the 1990s.3 This critical conversation has been primarily concerned with representation. But as my discussion of Kincaid suggests, to engage with the aesthetic is at the same time to engage with what we can call, in
Kantian language, presentation, to engage with the complexity of thinking and feeling and sensing, as well as of writing. For Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his classic text
Decolonising the Mind, the languages of “imperialist imposition” persist as colonizing forces in postcolonial Africa, but in Kincaid's exploration of postcolonial subjectivities it is not only language but phenomenal life itself that must be the arena for emancipation.
The very affective responses of the subject – which might be thought to belong to the domain of the singular, the non-historical, the pure – are conditioned by a tradition that marks the historicity of the subject's aesthetic life and its indebtedness to political power.
And yet the idea that aesthetic life can be sustained apart from such debts might itself reasonably be described as Romantic. In a curious sense, Lucy's horror at the daffodils is not anti-Romantic but expressive of a Romantic desire: a desire to see the daffodils not as the daffodils of poetry, but as what they are according to Lucy's own singular perspective, to see them as “wild and natural growths” (21), in V. S. Naipaul's phrase from The
Enigma of Arrival, mediated by no technology other than the subject's senses.4
3 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back and Judie Newman's The Ballistic Bard are probably the two most obvious examples of this approach. 4 I am suggesting that Kincaid's Romanticism consists in a hostility to aesthetico-cultural entanglements. The full radicalness of this position is most clear in Autobiography, in which it is ultimately blankness, the “blankness of the sea and sky, so vast and without thought,” with which Xuela wants to commune. The negative sublimity of the sea and sky corresponds with the negative phenomenology of the subject, if we can talk of a subject when what is at stake is 10
In this study, I consider how postcolonial writing elaborates the positive concerns of Romantic aesthetics. In my view, the notion of a paedophile Turner or a “ballistic bard,” in the title of Judie Newman's study, according to which the name of Turner or the corpus of Shakespeare can be the recipient of a symbolic, retaliatory violence, understates the alternative resonance of debt with liquidity: without language there is no thought, without history no subject, and without aesthetics no sense, no sensibility. An aesthetic debt is an ambivalent and potentially enabling inheritance, and the texts that I read in the chapters that follow exemplify this fact. The rubric of empire writing back neglects the heterogeneity of postcolonial literary production, a heterogeneity that consists in the internal diversity of postcolonial histories, traditions, political affiliations, and styles, as well as in the heterogeneous quality of literary language itself. In the readings that follow, therefore, I do not seek a stable postcolonial attitude of literary resistance, which would only be the inverted image of homage to a stable tradition. Romanticism, or the English canon, is not an ossified corpus, nothing more than a technology of colonial ideology or a legacy of colonial oppression. Or more accurately, perhaps, Romanticism is at once this and more than this: it may appear as a marker of colonial history or colonized subjectivity, as an object of rejection or of disputed cultural capital, but what interests me in this study is how postcolonial writers also open up, intervene in, and redeploy the textual strategies and aesthetic concerns associated with Romanticism as a body of literature, rather than simply citing Romanticism as part of a flattened colonial corpus
the reduction of the historically saturated subject to something that can stand alone, free of determinants. 11 without depth or textuality.
Romanticism is not simply a body of literature, however, but always names a certain cut into its own heterogeneity. Romanticism is a corpus of aesthetics and an object of desire, a “period metaphor,” as Redfield describes it, rather than a period as such.5 In
English literary studies, the word “Romanticism” tells us, perhaps, that something happened at the end of the eighteenth century, but whether this “something” is embedded in Romantic-period texts or a projection of more recent critical imaginations is uncertain.
Cynthia Chase approaches this problem in her characterization of “a specular or mirroring relation between Romanticism and the present that one cannot be sure of controlling through its conversion into a genetic narrative or history.” While Chase considers the possibility that the historical changes of the Romantic period still determine basic conditions of our lives (with the invention of democracy, the invention of revolution, the emergence of a reading public and, as Timothy Brennan has claimed, the invention of nationalism), and that many of our assumptions about literature derive from
Romantic texts – such as “the idea of 'organic form' and the inseparability of form and content, and the conception of good poetry as the fusion of thought and feeling” – Chase emphasizes the possibility “that we project onto the Romantics concepts and attitudes that are central in our interpretation but superficial or tangential in their texts” (1). My study can hardly claim to avoid this problem. I inevitably make a certain cut into Romantic
5 Periodizing vocabulary is inevitably metaphorical, I would argue, in the sense that it expresses in temporal form something that is not in fact temporal: to select a period is to turn a block of heterogeneous time into a body that would aspire to have some historical coherence. “Romanticism” does nevertheless seem to display in a particularly heightened way the metaphorical investments in period: where the Renaissance, for example, is now usually referred to as the Early Modern period, the designation “Romantic period” still inscribes Romanticism at its centre – and even efforts to bypass such terminology altogether, by referring to literature from 1789-1832, for instance, ironically further entrench the sense that the period must be held apart, even if its content must remain sublimely nameless. 12 texts, and into their heterogeneous contexts, in observing any reappearance or migration of Romantic modes or obsessions. But at the same time, the postcolonial writers I consider are often themselves readers of Romanticism, and as much as is possible I privilege their readings, which may, of course, be strategic misreadings (as all readings of
Romanticism as a body of work probably are).
Romantic studies has proven to be a fertile site for the elaboration of the new historicist project. Indeed, if Romanticism has historically been a special object of desire in literary studies – a corpus that literary scholars have actively romanticized, producing, in Clifford Siskin's words, “Romantic literary histories rather than literary histories of
Romanticism” (18) – then since the 1980s there has been a powerful movement of critical divestment, based in a recognition of the heterogeneity of Romantic-period writing, and in an awareness of the ideological mechanisms at work in the production of a specific
Romantic canon and in the concomitant consecration of a high Romantic aesthetic. In turn, the defining significance of the six major poets of the period has been questioned
(Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron), and far more attention has been paid to women writers, “minor” texts, non-poetic literary and extra-literary genres, and continuities between eighteenth-century, Romantic-period, and Victorian writing.
Increasingly, Romantic scholarship has paid attention to the importance of imperial contexts to an understanding of the period and its literature. Edward Said's reading of
Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism, which interrogates the significance of Sir
Thomas's interests in Antigua to the maintenance of the Bertrams' domestic life, remains a key intervention in our understanding of Jane Austen's work, and scholarship on these contexts continues to proliferate, in reference to the full scope of writing in the Romantic 13 period. Important studies in this area include Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson's edited collection Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 (1998),
Srinivas Aravamudan's Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999),
Alan Bewell's Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999), Debbie Lee's Slavery and the
Romantic Imagination (2002), Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic (2005), and Dan
White's From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early
British India, 1793-1835 (2013).
The stakes of these reassessments continue to be high, at least if they are to be measured by the rhetoric that sometimes accompanies them. Critiques of the institution of
Romanticism have often assumed languages of moral outrage. Jerome McGann's The
Romantic Ideology provides an early model for this rhetorical posture, which reflects the study's status in 1983 as an intervention in the dominant trends of Romantic scholarship, but as recently as 2013 Paul Youngquist has declared, against those who read
Romanticism with a “happy face,” that “[h]istories of Romanticism should be written in blood” (1).6 On this point, the materialist and formalist traditions of reading Romanticism converge: as Paul de Man suggested in 1967, “whenever romantic attitudes are implicitly or explicitly under discussion, a certain heightening of tone takes place, an increase of polemical tension develops, as if something of immediate concern to all were at stake”
(Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism 3). Part of the point, here, is that
Romanticism has afterlives that cannot be dissolved by a simple posture of moral outrage or ideological purity, and these afterlives are embedded in institutions of aesthetics that
6 This group of readers includes a diverse range of scholars, such as Stuart Curran, Alan Liu, Susan Wolfson, and Jeffrey Robinson, among the more predictable villains of Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, and Harold Bloom. 14 include the university and literary scholarship – institutions that themselves have a strong colonial history, as Gauri Viswanathan's work on the origins of English studies in nineteenth-century colonial India explains. I also want to suggest, however, that these afterlives have a reach that cannot be fully accounted for by their institutional embeddedness, and that this is especially true of the works that might be considered most central to the institution of Romantic ideology. These works live on through the canon, but the canon frames something – which we might call textuality, or simply literature – that transgresses this framing operation. The canon may aspire to hold apart great works, but it is also a technology of dissemination, with the ambivalence that this word implies in deconstructive thought. Canonization may guarantee a text's afterlife, but such afterlives are always manifested in the unpredictability of a text's reception. The canon is therefore always opened, fragmented, or broken. It is an enclosure, produced by strategies of inclusion and exclusion and policed by standards of taste. But it is also a site of innumerable, incalculable openings onto a “literariness,” in de Man's sense, that works against the canon's disciplinary, stabilizing power, including its power to produce acculturated subjects of legitimate sensibility.7
While this study does not engage substantially with historicist scholarship on
Romanticism, this is not to say that it reproduces, or that postcolonial writing reproduces, the predictable itinerary of a Romantic ideology. Ankhi Mukherjee has recently returned to the question of canonicity in relation to the negotiations between postcolonial writing and European literary history, claiming that “the canon, and the dominant modalities in which it is received, afford a site of historical emergence through which contemporary
7 For de Man, literariness is a name for the appearance of the “autonomous potential of language” (Resistance to Theory 10). 15
English and Anglophone literature and literary criticism can fruitfully rethink their cultural identity and politics.” In thinking about the circulation of the canon of classics, by which it “renews and transforms [sic], achieves novel combinations, and fights obsolescence,” Mukherjee complicates static understandings of the canon, but the language of “fruitful” engagement with a “site” for “historical emergence” maintains the basic Bloomian outline of the writer struggling with what went before, with the assumptions of embattled authorial agency that inform it. In contrast, Homi Bhabha has famously written of the “time lag” of enunciation, which produces “the space between the lexical and the grammatical, between enunciation and enounced, in-between the anchoring of signifiers” (267). For Bhabha, the movement of an enunciation from one space to another – from the imperial centre to the colonized periphery, for example – produces an inevitable estrangement of meaning and subversion of authority. Hybridity is an effect of the repetition of speech or language under such conditions, but, as the quotation above suggests, hybridity also seems to be an inherent possibility in the use of all language for Bhabha, regardless of context. The instability Bhabha cites could in fact be considered to be highly programmatic: according to Bhabha's theory, any migration of
Romanticism into the postcolonial text would inherently “hybridize” it and undo its authority. But the relationship between Romanticism and postcolonial writing is more complex than this in my reading, lying somewhere in between the intentionalist model of postcolonial writing renovating classic texts for its purposes, and Bhabha's fatalist postcolonial deconstruction. It involves subversion and appropriation, but also falsification. It involves the de-authorization of a colonial canon as much as it involves a powerful reinscription of its aura. It involves the deconstructive instability of language 16 just as it involves projects of linguistic discipline, efforts to police the autonomous power of language that de Man saw as central to the literary. I favour the metaphor of an afterlife because it carries within it these different possibilities for reading the relationship between postcolonial writing and Romanticism: an afterlife may describe a renewal or rearticulation, a prosthetic extension, a zombified living-on, a ruined remnant or remainder, or the end to which something has always tended, its eschatological destiny.
The idea of an afterlife, with its spectral resonance, also implies that these different possibilities cannot be hygienically separated from one another: an afterlife always has an undecidable status and therefore requires a tentative approach.
In an effort to articulate the sometimes surprising circuitry of postcolonial entanglements with the Romantic, I keep a distance from genealogical models and instead shuttle between postcolonial and Romantic writing. Romanticism appears in this project as an aesthetic archive retroactively composed by postcolonial texts, but my readings, at the same time, open up vantages within Romanticism that can speak back to, and potentially subvert, the uses made of it. Each chapter orbits intertextual contact zones opened up by specific allusions in postcolonial writing, and pays attention to the kinds of readings these zones make possible. I consider three postcolonial engagements with
Romanticism that exploit it as a compositional resource: the poetry of Derek Walcott, V.
S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, and the poetry of Stephen Watson. In counterpoint to these engagements, I position what I call “countervoices,” focusing on George
Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain, and J. M.
Coetzee's Disgrace, respectively. These countervoices speak back to the uses made of
Romanticism by each dominant voice: this is not to say that Lamming, Desai, and 17
Coetzee are necessarily more faithful readers of Romanticism, but that they develop a different and more critical understanding of the aesthetic that Romanticism, in my main chapters, generates or authenticates. I say “authenticates,” because as I move through each chapter the picture of Romanticism changes. Whereas Walcott's Another Life, for example, vitally re-describes the story of Wordsworth's poetic emergence in The Prelude,
Watson's poetry recapitulates a Romantic aesthetic that is more static and predictable than the Romantic texts whose charisma it borrows. While Lamming's and Desai's novels suggest a productive tension between the Romantic and the postcolonial, my juxtaposition of Watson and Coetzee is especially concerned with amplifying the counter- vocal agency of Romantic textuality itself. I argue, thus, that Coetzee's exploration of the trials of aesthetics in post-apartheid South Africa indicates its own intimacy with the self- consciously vexed aesthetic project of Romanticism. This is not quite to say that
Romanticism carries a postcolonial charge, but it is to complicate the antagonistic symmetry of Romanticism against postcolonialism, to recognize that Romanticism has a de-compositional and self-estranging power that may return to haunt its Romanticist instrumentalization, especially within the poetry of settlement. My discussion of South
African writing reconfigures the idea of writing back: Coetzee's subversive positioning of
Wordsworth does not “write back” to Romanticism understood as the embodiment of colonial ideology, but to the specific appropriations of Romanticism that populate white
South African writing, especially in English.
My concluding excursus elaborates this suggestion of a potential intimacy between the Romantic and the postcolonial. Here, I consider the relationship between postcolonial theory and the singular, as illuminated by the Wordsworthian idea of “spots 18 of time.” Through a reading of Gayatri Spivak's work, I argue that the language of spots of time has an intriguing afterlife in what I characterize as postcolonial theory's orientation towards the singular. In suggesting a kinship between the Romantic interest in alternative space-times and Spivak's subaltern – as well as Bhabha's hybrid space-time, and Chakrabarty's temporality of history 2 – I am not suggesting a seamless empirical genealogy, but approaching the problem of the afterlife in its rich ambiguity. The spectral quality of the afterlife involves the complex dynamics of recognition. Do we see, for example, the living persistence of Wordsworth's aesthetics in Spivak's representation of subalternity, or is this an apparition, a haunting? And if it is either of these things, what are the consequences for literary and theoretical interpretation? To explore the provenance of these modes in Romanticism, then, is not to tie them to a genetic parent, nor, clearly, is it to diagnose the strength or weakness of postcolonial writers within a
Bloomian model of the anxiety of influence. As Foucault writes in his essay on
Nietzsche's genealogy,
[the] search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it
disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was
thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent
with itself. (82)
And this disturbance, I would add, ripples in both directions: it disrupts the consistency of
Romanticism, as well as any imagined consistency within the postcolonial.
Such an understanding should make impossible the idea that “postcolonial writers who employ the traditions of romanticism make use of its hybrid oppositional potential while speaking from the subject position of the subaltern” (4), as Roy Kamada claims 19 within the only book-length study published on this topic. The writers with whom
Kamada engages – Garrett Hongo, Jamaica Kincaid, and above all Derek Walcott – do not speak from an automatically subaltern subject position, nor can their engagements with Romanticism be considered, in turn, automatic activations of its “oppositional potential.” But the idea that Romanticism has something to say to contemporary thought has been widely expressed. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre's book, Romanticism
Against the Tide of Modernity, aims to uncover the “unity” that lies beneath multiple
Romanticisms from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Their study is so wide in scope that it stretches the valency of the term beyond breaking point: Romanticism, for
Löwy and Sayre, exists as any cultural manifestation of an opposition to the progress of modernity. Saree Makdisi's Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of
Modernity is more specific and also more powerful in its analysis, elaborating upon
“spots of time” as a metaphor for the oppositional relationship to modernity articulated by Romantic-period writers, including Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley and
Blake. For Makdisi, we might say, spots of time already have afterlives within the
Romantic period, insofar as the significance of the spatio-temporal orientation they suggest has a wider circulation than Wordsworth's poetry. Ian Baucom's Specters of the
Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History finds in the languages of sympathy that circulated in the eighteenth century and in the Romantic period a counter-discourse to the “theoretical realism” that underpinned the financial imagination of insurance, with its key role in the slave trade (as exemplified by the case of the slave ship Zong). Baucom talks of a “cosmopolitan interestedness” as an aspect of “melancholy romanticism” that provides an alternative kind of geopolitical knowledge (218-19). 20
Baucom places his work in the context of recent thinkers who align “the core affect and method of postmodern historical thought with the affective investments and methodological conceits of late eighteenth-century sympathy discourse,” including James
Chandler, Walter Benn Michaels, Alan Liu, and David Simpson (261). Some of these figures are contributors to the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue, “Afterlives of
Romanticism,” edited by Baucom. The picture of Romanticism's enigmatic persistence that emerges from these essays also informs my study, as the shared title suggests.
For my argument, to engage with the migratory power of Romanticism is not just, and not even primarily, to engage with questions about the anxiety of influence or the genealogy of particular representational modes. Nor is it to engage with the ongoing history of a manifold project of opposition to modernity, one that appears in such a range of guises that the word Romantic can seem extraneous to the issues at hand.8 It is instead to engage with the persistence of the question of the aesthetic in all of its complexity. The
Romanticism that appears in postcolonial texts does not consist in any united political or historical attitude but in the centrality of its concern with the aesthetic, the aesthetic understood as discourses of Bildung, as standards of taste, as institutions of feeling, and above all as the domain of the sensorial, including sensibility and bodily sensation, whether within or beyond these institutions and standards.9 Romanticism, in this sense, is a metaphor, if no longer just a period metaphor, for an interconnected set of critical 8 In addition to Löwy and Sayre's study, Justin Clemens's The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory aims to organise Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Alain Badiou under this label. 9 Clifford Siskin has argued that Romanticism inaugurated the idea of literature as an institution of feeling. 21 concerns, concerns that are also articulated by the Romantic-period texts to which my writers point. In other words, the intertextual contact zones through which I navigate happen to connect Romantic-period texts with the postcolonial, but together they elaborate common concerns that, if we follow Redfield, can be considered constitutively
Romantic.
More specifically, I suggest that a Romantic conception of the aesthetic asserts a break within aesthetics, which informs my distinction between the aesthetic, defined as the space of interwoven social, institutional, psychic, and affective concerns, and the phenomenal, defined as the space of the sensory, separated, however tenuously, from this sphere of entanglements. The conventional characterization of the Romantic concern with the relationship between mind and nature can be better understood as a tension within the idea of the aesthetic, and such an understanding allows us to perceive the elaboration of the same concerns in contexts in which terms such as “mind” and “nature” are not in circulation or of primary interest. The following moment from Wordsworth's The
Prelude, which is alluded to in Coetzee's Disgrace, can be read in these terms:
From a bare ridge we also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be. (VI.451-455)
The “living thought” may be identified with the mind or with ideation, which nature – the summit of Mont Blanc – trespasses upon. The disappointing failure of the image of nature to measure up to the living thought of the mind marks a particular moment in the 22 development of the poet's sensibility, which aims towards the reconciliation of mind and nature, the supersensible and the sensible in Kantian terms, or consciousness and natural consciousness in Hegel's terms. Romanticism, for postcolonial writing, provides a resource for dwelling in and upon such disappointment, but this is also, as my readings will show, to dwell upon the disappointing historicity of perception. The unit of ideation, the “living thought,” is not merely the poet's subjective ideal, an invention of the autonomous mind, but is composed by an aesthetic discourse with a history. In this case, the expectations that the poet carries with him are bound up with the emerging cultural discourse of the Alpine landscape in the Romantic period, which led Percy Shelley, in the preface to his and Mary Shelley's History of a Six Weeks' Tour, to write that the Alps “are now so familiar to our countrymen, that few facts relating to them can be expected to have escaped the many more experienced and exact observers, who have sent their journals to the press.”10 Wordsworth is writing from an earlier moment than Shelley, but the scene still presents a fracture between aesthetic schemas with a cultural-institutional history and aesthetics as aisthesis, as the capacity to sense in some more intuitive, natural mode. Romanticism, thus, is an aesthetic and a meta-aesthetic discourse: it is a meta-
Romanticism, in Paul Hamilton's phrase, as much as a Romanticism, carrying within itself the capacity to comment upon the dissemination, or migration, of its own most valued tropes. The real Mont Blanc presents itself to Wordsworth's eyes as a faint, underwhelming afterlife of the aesthetic ideal, just as the “breathing worlds” of post- apartheid South Africa, to appropriate Byron's phrase from “Lara” to which Disgrace also
10 The Shelleys' History, upon its publication in 1816, included Percy Shelley's “Mont Blanc,” which itself seems to reflect obliquely upon the cultural saturation of Alpine discourse in its description of the “many-coloured, many-voiced vale.” 23 alludes, appear to the white liberal subjectivity of David Lurie, the novel's protagonist, as some externality to which his accultured sensibility cannot measure up. Disgrace, as I will argue, explores how perception can expose a rift within itself that is also a rift within the sensibility of a historical subject positioned at the end of a colonial history that has sustained, and can no longer sustain, a particular aesthetics or regime of the sensible.
The three terms that provide the central theoretical vocabulary for this project cannot be rigorously separated: Romanticism implies the domain of textuality, of specific images or ideals associated with a canon or a corpus; aesthetics implies the domain of acculturation and techniques thereof, of taste and pedagogy; and phenomenology implies the domain of sensory response. But from the vantage of postcolonial representation, the terms overlap: textuality does not exist outside of its dissemination; aesthetics implies the
(political) distribution of a corpus and the cultivation of taste – of responses that are affective, emotional, sensory; and phenomenology, in the Husserlian line, implies a method of reduction where socio-cultural determinants of response are suspended, but also implies the potential impossibility of such a reduction – even Coleridge would accept this last point, since for him “intuition” in no way points to the a priori but is ultimately embedded in the structure of language (McKusick 134). To call Romanticism a meta-Romanticism is to imply that Romanticism expresses a recognition of the inseparability of these spheres, even as it may hope to hold the aesthetic and the phenomenal apart, or, perhaps more accurately, to seamlessly enfold sensibility, sense, and text into a single organic vision that transcends history and the historicity of the sensible – at least in the case of Wordsworth, the primary figure for Romanticism in this study. I have gestured towards my reading of Disgrace, but this recognition can arrive in 24 different languages, attended by different moods, within narrative or poetic movements that complicate and/or resolve these tensions in different ways.
The selective history of Romanticism in postcolonial writing that I offer begins with a reading of Walcott's Another Life as a position-taking in the field of literary history, as an engagement with Wordsworthian and other narratives of poetic emergence, and as an elaboration of a “sense of history” that in some ways is continuous with and in other ways departs from that analyzed by Alan Liu in his reading of Wordsworth's historical consciousness. I ultimately suggest that Walcott privileges a lyrical conception of history, and I then offer a reading of George Lamming's more ambivalent positioning of lyric modes and moments, with their interest in the singularity of space and time, in relation to an epic, communal, and actively politicized sense of history in In the Castle of
My Skin. My second chapter reads Naipaul's engagement with the landscapes of the literary tradition around his Wiltshire cottage, considering the expression in The Enigma of Arrival of Romantic spectacles and the novel's absorption of Romantic modes of perception: the novel initially suggests an antagonism between aesthetic ideals and the landscapes of post-imperial destitution the novelist-figure encounters, but it also develops a story of reconciliation through its deployment of the narrative resources of Romantic lyricism. Desai's Fire on the Mountain, in counterpoint, aborts this reconciliatory trajectory, exposing a violent rupture between Romantic sensibility and the postcolonial world that cannot be repaired within the space of the literary text. Here, I develop the idea of aesthetic enclosure, to designate the production and protection of separated worlds – protected by fences, by particular ways of narrating space and time, by the technology of the lyric poem – in which specific kinds of aesthetic life can be cultivated. These 25 enclosures may be constituted by acts of literary and imaginative composition, especially those that deploy the resources of Romantic lyricism, but they may equally, as the term's socio-political resonance implies, be sustained by material relations of property. I appropriate Jean-Luc Nancy's term “dis-enclosure” to indicate the processes by which these enclosures are opened, sometimes traumatically, onto larger worlds that include the traumas of postcolonial history. As I indicate throughout, “enclosure” and “dis-enclosure” cannot be mapped onto an opposition between Romanticism and postcolonialism, but are movements that can be discerned within both Romanticism and postcolonial writing. I carry this language forward into my consideration of Stephen Watson's poetry. I read
Watson's work as fundamentally invested in aesthetic enclosure, in ways that demand a recognition of apartheid as, in part, an aesthetic regime that worked through the imaginative production of separated spaces for specific kinds of aesthetic life, as well as through material distributions of land, space and racist power. Coetzee's Disgrace, reconsidered through this lens, returns us to the dis-enclosive power of Romanticism that
Watson's work overwrites. My excursus considers a different dimension of the relationship between Romanticism and postcolonialism: I suggest that postcolonial theory adheres to an aesthetics of the singular that can be traced within Romantic representations, especially the discourse of spots of time. As an excursus, this section departs from the dominant trajectory of the study. My main focus is on Gayatri Spivak, whose own intellectual career shows a persistent interest in Romantic texts, and I am concerned to explore what it might mean to talk of a Romantic disposition in her work, and the implications of such a disposition, embedded in a concern with the singular, for rethinking some of the key ideas of postcolonial theory. The turn to the subaltern, to 26 history 2, or to hybridity may be read as a radicalized kind of lyric turn that makes legible a surprising postcolonial/Romantic affinity. 27
2. Derek Walcott: the Sense of History, the Sense of the World
This chapter considers the relationship between Derek Walcott's poetry and
Romanticism, particularly as it pertains to the “sense of history” to which I allude in my title and a phrase that I borrow from Alan Liu's famous study of Wordsworth. But the sense of history is itself a richly ambiguous formulation, referring simultaneously to the idea of a particular, critical conception of what history is, and to the idea of history as something sensed, as something bound up with the sensory worlds of the subject and, in turn, with the lyrical resources of poetry. The “sense of history” seems to suggest an appropriate frame through which to consider postcolonial engagements with Romantic schemas, therefore, if we consider the postcolonial text to be invested in a heightened, critical historical consciousness, and if we consider Romanticism via the idea of an aesthetic (that is, sensory) and/or lyric “turn.”11
Liu's study of Wordsworth can be considered a kind of exploration of
Wordsworth's anxiety about what “the world” actually is and how one is to sense and make sense of it. Liu interrogates Wordsworth's denial of history as a positive phenomenon: while nature may appear in Wordsworth as the ultimate goal, it is often in
11 The idea of the “lyric turn” was developed by Clifford Siskin in his critical historicization of the genres of Romantic writing in The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. Siskin does not engage with Romanticism through a linear history of genre but by considering the increasing visibility of the lyric in a hierarchical relation with other genres – what he describes as a lyricized hierarchy of genres (11). “Tintern Abbey,” for example, is for Siskin less a greater Romantic lyric than it is a “lyricized” ode (28-9). Siskin's study aims to be critical of this turn in poetry and in criticism: the lyric turn is a turning away from genre and history (36). Siskin's argument ultimately implies that the lyric is not really a coherent genre at all, but a process of de-historicization or transcendence. 28 fact a denial of history and even a kind of supplement. Liu defines the Wordsworthian sense of history as “a sense … that the completion of the present depends perpetually upon something beyond – whether that force of beyond will ultimately be thought of as
Hegelian Geist … or the later Wordsworthian 'realities' of people, nation, and church
(rooted in the past)” (5). History is in the end more necessary than nature for
Wordsworth's poetry, Liu contends. But it is the phenomenological implications of his title with which I am just as concerned in my reading of Walcott, because in Walcott's work the idea of encountering history via sense degrades any conception of history as some separate, separable domain. We might just as well talk of the sense of “the world” as the sense of history, therefore, since his poetry encounters the world in the fullness of a materiality that absorbs and exceeds what is implied by “history” in Liu's usage, as some kind of larger story or presence that completes or threatens the world or landscape as it gives itself to perception. “The world” displays the immanence of history to place: history is not what Walcott's work wants to escape, nor what Walcott's work wants to produce. Instead, it is already there, as the conditions that make possible and place limits upon speech, writing, and feeling.
My point of departure for this discussion is a reading of Walcott's 1973 long poem
Another Life, by far Walcott's most Wordsworthian poem. I am interested in exploring the poem's intertextual relation with The Prelude as well as in retrieving from this intertextual encounter a rationale for thinking more broadly about what we might call
Walcott's postcolonial Romanticism. First of all, I consider how Another Life develops a narrative of poetic emergence that places it within the Wordsworthian tradition of verse autobiography, in which the imagination must emancipate itself from culture and achieve 29 what Geoffrey Hartman calls the “unmediated vision.” The Romantic teleology, here, would demand the poet's entrance into the true world (the plane of “Nature,” in
Wordsworth) via the transcendence of the given world (the physical stuff of nature, or the compromising traces of history); by rewriting a particular scene from The Prelude, however, Walcott suggests an alternative awakening of the senses in and to the world, a world that is impersonally given and for which, in his essay “The Muse of History,” he gives a “strange thanks.” The promise of the “unmediated” orients Walcott's Romanticism in and beyond this particular poem, but the “sense of the world” is what emerges in the ambivalent space left as this promise falls away. Walcott's poetry confronts the saturated historicity of the world as it presents itself to the senses, and against the ideal of unmediated vision we have a world of mediations, of which the language of Romanticism is also, paradoxically, a part. These mediations define sense and vision and open up the world while disallowing any kind of “pure” relation with it. In my countervoice, I approach the question of aesthetic mediation through a reading of George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin. Lamming's novel offers a way of thinking critically about the aesthetic orientations of Walcott's work from the perspective of the politics of aesthetics, in the specific historical context of Caribbean decolonization.
First, though, I consider the role of Romanticism in the project of poetic self- positioning and self-fashioning at work in Another Life, the significance of the poem's rewriting of certain moments and tropes from Wordsworth, and what it might mean to talk of the poem as a “Caribbean Prelude.” To approach Walcott's Romanticism, I contend, is not purely to approach the question of intertextuality, however. My strategy, then, is to begin with the intertextual, in order to illuminate the specificity of Walcott's 30 engagement with Wordsworth, but also to tell a larger story of the “Romantic” disposition of many of Walcott's texts, even those that do not exist in a clear intertextual contact zone. While these poems – “Air,” “Ruins of a Great House,” “Homecoming: Anse La
Raye,” and “The Light of the World” – betray little interest in reading Romanticism itself, they continue to develop Walcott's sense of the world in relation to a cluster of postcolonial-Romantic concerns broached via Wordsworth in Another Life, including the concern with the genius loci, the ambiguous relationship between place and the poet, and the associated tension between lyrical and communal fidelities. In this context I also turn to the gendered nature of Walcott's lyricism, to show how erotic desire functions to reconnect the metropolitan poet with his home, or (in the equally fitting Romantic vocabulary) the estranged lyric subject with his native world. My approach does not attempt to offer a totalizing frame for reading Walcott's work, but to pull upon a particular thread within it, a particular (and important) aspect of Walcott's poetic disposition.
Another Life has been read as a poem that marks Walcott's emergence as a poet of literary-historical stature, and as a poem that makes more explicit than any other his poetic debts, especially his debts to Romanticism and to Wordsworth in particular.
Kenneth Ramchand describes the poem as “Walcott's and the West Indian's The Prelude,” in a strategic comparison that suggests at once Walcott's placement within an English canon of great texts and the authenticity of his genius: Another Life is not a version or an imitation of The Prelude but is a new Prelude, a West Indian Prelude; and Walcott, perhaps, a Caribbean Wordsworth (Nichols 173). The paradox of drawing upon an 31 established precedent within the English canon to suggest the authenticity or newness of
Walcott's voice is clear but it is not fortuitous, since it draws on a particular conception of
Romanticism as a native poetics of natural expression. To write a new Prelude is not so much to write an adaptation of The Prelude as it is to write a poem that describes, in fitting style, the relationship between the poet's emergence and the spirit of his place. (To describe Walcott as the Caribbean Ezra Pound or Boris Pasternak would hardly seem as appropriate, even though Another Life alludes almost as much to these writers as it does to The Prelude). And yet the relationship is also a self-conscious one: the poem is explicitly engaged with The Prelude, among a host of other literary texts and paintings.
How is Romanticism, I want to ask, positioned within the text in relation to other literary and artistic forebears? How do these relationships enhance our understanding of Another
Life as what Pierre Bourdieu would call a “position-taking” within the field of literary history?12 And to what extent do the intertextual contact zones between Another Life and
The Prelude establish the poem as a Caribbean Prelude?
Simply to write an autobiography in English verse about the growth of a poet's mind is to enter into some kind of minimal relation with The Prelude, but the aspects of
Another Life that recall The Prelude include more specifically the following: the theme of the divided child and of the reconciliation of the mature poet's poetic language with his
12 Pierre Bourdieu develops the idea of a “position-taking” in his work on cultural production. For Bourdieu, the “field of cultural production” is defined by the positions that actors in the field can hold and the strategies that they can develop in order to lay claim to these positions. According to such an analysis, an aesthetic strategy can also be understood as a position- taking that is shaped by a struggle for symbolic/cultural capital. In the context of postcolonial literary production, the shaping forces of such a field would include colonial education and its sanctification of canonical texts and aesthetic practices, but they might just as often include the elevation of “decolonial” aesthetic practices, to borrow Walter Mignolo's term, that gain their cultural capital from their resistance to the ordained forms of the English tradition. Walcott's suggestion that Naipaul's aesthetics are part of a self-canonizing gesture should be understood in the light of this complexity (see next chapter). 32 native world; the importance of a homosocial artistic kinship (The Prelude, of course, was Wordsworth's “Poem to Coleridge,” and Another Life is centrally concerned with the relationship between Walcott and his friend, the painter Dunstan St Omer (Gregorias, in the poem), and their mentor Harry Simmons); the importance of the spirit of one's native place, and of the relationship between the subject and exteriority (nature, history, world); and the interest in formative aesthetic experiences. Broader Romantic aspects of the poem include its representation of the child as a figure of futurity or possibility (the conclusion of Another Life, in this way, can be usefully compared with Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight”), its functionalization of women either as muses or as witnesses to the poet's life and inspiration (Anna in Another Life thus bears a comparable role to Dorothy in poems such as “Tintern Abbey”), and its interest in connecting intoxication with creativity. Perhaps most significantly, the poem narrates the progress of a freedom from the inherited constraints of culture or society, a freedom, oriented by the Wordsworthian prospect of the “unmediated vision,” that would be the condition, or rather the ideal manifestation, of the poet's authentic emergence.
For all of these shared thematic obsessions and representational tropes, Another
Life is not a text that avows its own Romanticism, even if it is a poem that displays, explicitly at times, its relationship with Romantic poetry. Walcott himself, as Paul Breslin notes, claims that he had never read The Prelude; he had only read “bits of it,” and had certainly not had the intention to write “another Prelude” (158). Breslin is one of a number of critics, therefore, who foreground the poem's modernist sensibility. But such authorial declarations should not be read so naively: Walcott had never read the poem, he claims, or had only read “bits of it” (hardly the same thing, especially when talking of 33 such an episodic poem), and yet The Prelude is explicitly present in the language of
Another Life. Walcott's denial of knowledge of The Prelude might be considered a modest expression of the anxiety of influence, or of his desire for a new-world aesthetic free from the burdens of cultural inheritance.13 The important point, here, is that while the poem is a narrative of poetic emergence – one that might, following the autobiographical conventions established by Wordsworth in verse, offer a faithful transcription of the poet's memories – it is simultaneously a highly self-conscious work of poetic self- positioning. If, as Bourdieu has argued, cultural production takes place in a value-laden
“field,” then literary history might itself be considered such a field, in which modernist aesthetics might carry a greater cultural or “avant-garde” value than Wordsworthian autobiographical practice. Any sophisticated reading of Another Life needs to consider critically the poem's self-conscious and historically burdened negotiation with the literary-historical field. The poem alludes to and appropriates both modernist and
Romantic voices, but the significance of the poem's relation with these contrasting modes is not immediately clear.
What, then, are the text's modernist, even anti-Romantic, aspects? They would seem to include the use of fragmentation and a bricolage aesthetic; the manipulation and de-centring of poetic voice; the presentation of fragments of culture, sometimes deracinated from their explanatory context; the employment of dense allusion; 14 the use
13 Such a desire, as I indicate below, might in itself be considered Romantic. 14 Any text that self-consciously alludes to Romanticism alienates itself from Romanticism at the moment of allusion, in the sense that allusion declares distance even as it suggests kinship. Walcott's “Caribbean Prelude” must inevitably be strange and estranged, therefore. But this is also true because of the sense in which Wordsworthian Romanticism aspires to a natural rather than cultured, allusive, historically saturated speech. We can see this in the preface to Lyrical Ballads with its interest in a “real language of men,” and also in certain postcolonial afterlives of Wordsworth. See my discussion of Stephen Watson's poetry in the context of South African Romanticism below: in Watson's poetry, Romantic modes are held to be natural even after 34 of dialogue and stylized vernacular speech; and the inclusion of passages in multiple languages. All of these elements lend the poem a difficult heterogeneity that makes its
Romanticism appear strange and warped. And yet this heterogeneity bespeaks the difficulty of the “unmediated vision” that is, I claim, the poem's object of desire: it constitutes a kind of stylistic noise against which the lyric subject, and its stylistic vehicles, struggle to exert themselves. Ultimately, I want to argue, the poem remains recognisably Romantic because of its move to subordinate these heterogeneous elements to a teleology of poetic emergence that resuscitates and privileges the lyrical voice and lyrical subjectivity. I will return to the idea of the “lyrical” in Walcott, but for now I want to observe that there is a kind of effortful sublation of the heterogeneity of the literary tradition at work in the text, a labour of creative overcoming and emergence that constitutes a form of post-modernist, postcolonial Romanticism.15
Parts of Another Life seem to recall, in their style, Pound's Cantos:
Dragonfly, dragonfly
over that gilded river
like teatime afternoons with the Old Masters,
in those long pastoral twilights after the war,
dragonfly, your angry vans of gauze
caught in “the light that Samuel Palmer engraved,”
burn black in the lamp of Giorgione,
dragonfly, in our ears
sang Baudelaire's exhortation to stay drunk,
their cultural and historical migration. 15 I mean “post-modernist” here simply in the sense of “after modernism.” 35
sang Gauguin's style, awarded Vincent's ear. (ll. 1821-1834)
The line structure, the presence of repetition, the multivalent and ambiguous symbolism of the dragonfly, the densely allusive textual fabric, and the sense of an accumulative, paratactical relation among references (lamp of Giorgione, Baudelaire's exhortation, and so on), clearly draw upon the representational practices associated with Pound's modernism.16 But these elements are layered upon a deeper textual structure, and a narrative, that sits uneasily with such a fragmented and culturally saturated – and in this sense emphatically old-world – aesthetic. The sustaining subject of the poem is the poetic subject himself, a lyrical “I” that has a privileged status in the poem because it contains the poem's formal heterogeneity. The modernism of Another Life vitalizes it, but nevertheless seems to display the burdens upon the poet's creativity or imagination, the real (Romantic) subjects of the poem.
In one of his early poems, Epitaph for the Young, the poet talks of carrying the weight of “an armful of traditions in my fumble / For a voice” (27); and in Another Life too, the speaker describes how he “had entered the house of literature as a houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole, as the young slave appropriated / those heirlooms temptingly left” (1835-6). These lines suggest that this heavy load of cultural belongings, these “filched” materials, do not organically infuse the poet's voice but overburden it. The allusion to the slave in particular implies the anxiety of the poem's intertextuality, the worry of a paradoxically slavish appropriation. If the poem, as the editors of the annotated edition convincingly suggest, narrates the overcoming of the burden of
16 There are other explicit references to Pound in the poem. See 19, 74. The annotated edition of Another Life offers useful discussion of the poem's references, in occasionally over- determined fashion. 36 tradition, then it is unsurprising that Romanticism has a special place in it since this narrative is in part a Romantic one. The decentred personae of Pound's verse, it seems, provide a finally unsuitable vehicle for the enunciation of Walcott's emergence as a postcolonial writer, an emergence, in the story of the poem, that has so much to do with repairing the fragmented, self-alienated shards of the divided colonial subject.17
The most significant moments in unfolding the poet's development are cast in a recognisably Romantic mode that makes more sense of the comparison with The Prelude:
About the August of my fourteenth year
I lost myself somewhere above a valley
owned by a spinster-farmer, my dead father's friend.
At the hill's edge there was a scarp
with bushes and boulders stuck in its side.
Afternoon light ripened the valley,
rifling smoke climbed from small labourers' houses,
and I dissolved into a trance.
... uncontrollably I began to weep,
inwardly, without tears, with a serene extinction
of all sense; I felt compelled to kneel,
I wept for nothing and for everything (ll. 995-1010)
17 I discuss the connection between this reparative work and Romanticism in more depth in my next chapter, when I consider how Naipaul adapts the reconciliatory movement internal to Romantic lyricism. 37
In this important passage, coming in the final chapter of the first of the four books of the poem, 'The Divided Child,' Walcott is adapting the following scene from the Two-Part
Prelude, as the reference to his “fourteenth year” makes unmistakable:
… And there I said,
That beauteous sight before me, there I said
… that dying I would think on you,
My soul would send a longing look to you:
Even as that setting sun while all the vale
Could nowhere catch one faint memorial gleam
Yet with the last remains of his last light
Still lingered, and a farewell lustre threw
On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose.
'Twas then my fourteenth summer, and these words
Were uttered in a casual access
Of sentiment, a momentary trance
That far outran the habit of my mind. (2.162-179)18
Both passages describe a formative if momentary negation of cognitive habit and even, in the Walcott passage, of the self. “I lost myself somewhere,” the poet recalls, in a phrase that suggests that the self – the naïve childhood self – has never been rediscovered. The young Walcott, apparently but not explicitly in response to the spectacle of the ripening afternoon light, “dissolve[s]” uncontrollably into a trance accompanied by a silent, 18 Stephen Gill explains that this passage was modified by Wordsworth and included in contemporary editions of his published work as “Extract: From the Conclusion of a Poem, Composed Upon Leaving School” (Wordsworth's Revisitings). “Leaving School” is the allusive title of Walcott's 1965 autobiographical essay, published in the London Magazine, which was a precursor to Another Life. 38 inward weeping that is also a “serene extinction” of “all sense,” “sense” here seeming to signify less sensory perception, given the heightened aesthetic interest of the passage, than the child's sensibility, his schemas for regulating the relation between self and world,
“I” and exteriority. The Wordsworth passage relays a similar memory that is not only a spot of time but seems to suggest the incipient formulation of the very idea of the spot of time: the child vows to remember the “beauteous sight” even on his deathbed. But it is the dramatization of ecstasy as a rupture with the child's inherited ways of seeing that is most important in comparing these passages; Walcott is drawing upon the idea of a
“momentary trance” that far outruns the “habit” of the mind, of an “access / Of sentiment” that serenely extinguishes customary sense.
Such moments of ecstasy, trance, transport, or negativity – different inflections of what is usually called the sublime – abound in Walcott's work and are here given an implicitly Wordsworthian provenance. But what exactly is their significance, in this poem at least? Geoffrey Hartman, in The Unmediated Vision, talks of how Wordsworth, and other “modern” poets, rejected the mediations of received religion or literary tradition in aiming “to find and represent things immediately significant, aesthetic things, signs of the creative nature of perception” (original emphasis, 163-4). The “unmediated vision,” for
Hartman, does not suggest the abolition of any and all mediation of experience, but rather the desire – not always realized – for a particular kind of aesthetic mediation operating through the “direct sensuous intuition of reality” (156), or as Cynthia Chase glosses it, for
“the immediate or intuitive conveying, through forms and images, of the fact of mediation, of self-reflexive subjectivity or consciousness” (Chase 43). Hartman's reading of Wordsworth's poetry sheds light upon how these moments of negativity are also 39 positioned as productive moments, moments that are central in the reproduction of the poet's mature consciousness, defined by its awareness of and interest in the refractive power of subjectivity or, to use more Romantic vocabulary, “imagination.” To put it in slightly different terms, the creative nature of perception relies upon the negation of
“customary sense,” of pre-existing conventions of mediation. Walcott's adaptation of this passage from the Two-Part Prelude develops this idea: the young poet loses himself in the necessary first step of finding himself, according to the protocol of the “negative way” that defines Wordsworthian Bildung.19
Before returning to this important intertextual moment, I want to consider how the interest Walcott's poem takes in the possibility of negating or transcending the obstructive mediations of literature and culture, as well as of religion and the menacing spectre of contemporary history, is reflected in the poem's depiction of Gregorias as a kind of icon for the creative and culturally negating force of imaginative perception. The speaker, comparing Gregorias's work to his own failed attempts at painting, describes how,
while Gregorias would draw
with the linear elation of an eel
one muscle in one thought,
my hand was crabbed by that style,
this epoch, that school
or the next... (ll. 1357-62)
Gregorias “abandoned apprenticeship / to the errors of his own soul”; it was “classic
19 Hartman, elsewhere, talks of how Wordsworth's poetry desires to move beyond nature through nature: via naturaliter negativa (Wordsworth's Poetry 33-69). I am suggesting something similar about Another Life: in this poem, Walcott tells a story of moving beyond literary tradition through an assertion of the negativity within it. 40 versus romantic / perhaps,” and while his work “was grotesque” it broke from
“servitude”:
it was his, he possessed
aboriginal force and it came
as the carver comes out of the wood.
Now, every landscape we entered
was already signed with his name. (ll. 1380-84)
What is emphasized about Gregorias is not the final effect of his paintings, “grotesque” and “bad” as they often were. Instead, it is his “romantic” motivation, his abandonment of the history of painting for the wayward visions of his soul.
This description might suggest a radically expressionistic quality to Gregorias's paintings, but the expressionism is linked to place, such that the violence of his vision is an “aboriginal force,” witnessing the prior connection between his “soul” and St. Lucia: every landscape they enter, even before it has been painted, is claimed by Gregorias, mediated and “signed” by his imagination.20 Gregorias is a counterpoint to the Walcott figure in the poem precisely because of this “aboriginal force,” this elemental access to place that transcends and violates conventions of artistic representation. The poet's failure as a painter is linked, in contrast, to his toil, to his laboured apprenticeship to the history of style: “I have toiled all of life for this failure,” the poet recognizes, but “[b]eyond this frame, deceptive, indifferent, / nature returns to its work … another life, real, indifferent, resumes” (ll. 1334-8). The poet's “disciplined, humble” naturalism, with which he
20 The word “signed” here might seem to imply that there is no landscape outside of textuality: it is brought to life by some process of inscription, even if only imaginative. Even in approaching the authentic power of Gregorias's art, the poet's description registers its fatal representationality. 41
“rendered / the visible world that [he] saw / exactly” hindered him, because of its failure to pierce the visible surface and offer something more than a picture. The mimetic imperative informing the Walcott figure's painting is exactly what renders it false because it apprehends nature only as scene, as landscape, and not as something that has its own life “other” to the conventions of artistic representation. Over the painter's shoulder, the
St. Lucian landscape “frowns at its image” (l. 1255), exerting a presence that decomposes the resemblance between picture and world during the very process of painterly composition.
As we might expect in a poem engaged with The Prelude, the speaker is mourning the artistic outcome of his apprenticeship to nature, as evidenced in the supposed mediocrity of his naturalist paintings that are in fact all too stylistic (that is, conventional).21 The poet imagines that, in Gregorias's work, art and nature are fused: his art is “aboriginal,” a product of his natural soul. For the poet, though, art and nature can at best be reconciled, and at worst may be incommensurate with one another. Another
Life and The Prelude seem to share this interest in reconciliation, but they also may be said to share an anxiety about achieving such reconciliation – about moving beyond the mediations that are always inscribed within the promise of the “unmediated.” The
Walcott figure turns away from painting, finding that he “lived in a different gift, / its element metaphor” (ll. 1355-6). If the “element” of Walcott's gift is metaphor then his poetry will always be something other than a natural Romanticism or a language of direct sensory intuition, even though he confesses his yearning, elsewhere, to arrive at a “style
21 The scene therefore offers a version of the opening to the Two-Part Prelude: “Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song...” – where the “this” in this repeated question refers to the disappointing outcome of Wordsworth's compositional efforts. 42 past metaphor,” to write “simple, shining lines, in pages stretched / plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a gutter- / ing rainspout” (“Nearing Forty,” Selected Poems 56) – lines that in fact reinscribe the metaphorical imperative and the irreducible embeddedness of language in world (the “plainness” for which the poet yearns can only be conceived in a metaphor that carries over the ideal thing into everyday materiality). There is a similar moment in “Islands”:
I seek,
As climate seeks its style, to write
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,
Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
As a tumbler of island water. (Collected Poems 52)
The simple clarity and ordinariness of these similes does not overcome their status as a feature of “style,” however fitting to the climate of Walcott's poetry.
I want to suggest, though, that it is not just language, or at least just language's irreducibly figurative nature, that thwarts the unmediated vision; it is also the worldliness and historicity of language, reflected in the obviously “cultured” presentation of the idea of the unmediated vision itself (since culture, unlike the purity of vision, is irreducibly of the world). The fact that the moment of aesthetic bafflement and subjective negation in the “fourteenth year” passage is explicitly articulated through Wordsworthian language cannot but curtail its negative power, its power to interrupt received technologies of mediation. The promise of the “unmediated vision” for Walcott's poet is the promise of imaginative freedom, but a freedom compromised by the history of poetry that incubates the very promise. The scene establishes a tense paradox: it draws on The Prelude to 43 suggest its kinship with Wordsworth's particular version of artistic autobiography, but through that allusive gesture actively indicates its own more difficult apprenticeship to literary history and its more difficult passage towards the “unmediated vision.” If the poem is attempting a project comparable to Wordsworth's Prelude, then it must do so within a poetic language far more saturated with literary history than Wordsworth's, and saturated simultaneously with the history of the dissemination of English literature in the colonial context. And so the scene suggests that Walcott's poetry cannot be “romantic” in the way that Gregorias's paintings are romantic, or even in the way that Wordsworth is
Romantic, by offering at once a language of poetic emergence and postcolonial belatedness which problematizes the poem's relation to Wordsworth even as it displays it.
This problem, though, can be considered as much a part of Walcott's own
“Romanticism” as a qualification of his affiliation with Romantic poetry: the very anxieties on display about the poem's relation to Romanticism themselves reflect the
Romantic concern with separating the self understood as a product of sociocultural habitus from a more free, more autocausal manifestation of the “true” self. I am describing a desired emancipation of sense from history; but sense is irreducibly embedded in history, and so the poet's “imagination” – a word that refers in my usage to the idea of an emancipated creative/perceptive faculty – is under pressure. The language of Wordsworth provides part of this pressure since it is part of aesthetic history, but the centrality of the trope of the “imagination under pressure” should suggest to us that the poem is telling a more broadly Romantic story of poetic emergence, even if this might paradoxically imply a transcendence of any specific indebtedness to identifiable 44
Romantic forebears.22
The struggle to achieve the “unmediated vision” can be named “Romantic” wherever it takes place, perhaps, but the language of freedom and emancipation I am using has obvious postcolonial resonances. And what I describe as the embeddedness of sense in history – what we can call the “aesthetics” of aisthesis – is certainly a concern of many postcolonial engagements with Romanticism, which point up the anxiety of inheriting ways of seeing at the same time as they expose the historicity of a world that
Romantic modes might want to see as natural. It is unsurprising, then, that the prospect of achieving such a freedom is far more uncertain in Walcott even than in Wordsworth
(there is no passage in Another Life equivalent to the conclusion of The Prelude, in which the imagination finally achieves its ascendency). In fact, it is in its relation to the “anti- natural” force of history that Walcott's version of the “fourteenth summer” passage announces its departure from Wordsworth and actively rewrites the Romantic concept of nature. If Wordsworth wants to separate the autocausal or organic self from the mechanical, unfree self, then he equally wants to separate “Nature,” understood as something spiritual or essential, from nature, understood as the brute facts of the given world (these two operations in The Prelude are inextricably linked). But in Walcott's version of this recalled epiphany or “spot of time,” the poet weeps “for nothing and for everything,” “for the grass, the pebbles, for the cooking smoke / above the labourers' houses like a cry.” As the description of the cooking smoke and the labourers' houses alongside the grass and the pebbles suggests, the poet's weeping is not solely linked to the ineffability of his response to the natural world, but also to the historical world, such that
22 I borrow the phrase “imagination under pressure” from John Whale's study of Romantic prose, Imagination Under Pressure. 45 the verse paragraph concludes with the recognition that “something still fastens us forever to the poor.” This “something” is akin to “the gravitation and the filial bond / Of nature” in The Prelude, which connect the “infant babe,” and all beings in their natural state, with the world (2.263-4); in fact, this lesson is similarly positioned as the philosophical outcome of the experience of the sublime. But the passage marks not an awakening into Wordsworthian “Nature” (nor simply an awakening into history) but a kind of realization of the non-innocence of nature, of the historical saturation of the given world at its most aesthetically transporting. I want to suggest that this constitutes something that can be described in two ways, firstly as a postcolonial reformation of the category of nature, and secondly as the beginning of an opening onto what we might call simply “world.” This opening has significance for Walcott's refraction of St. Lucia insofar as this non-metropolitan, non-European, extra-literary world, in the poem's own mythos, has to be seen and recognized – apprehended by “sense” – for the first time. The poet painfully awakens into a nature that is neither historically transcendent nor wholly disenchanted: Walcott describes the opening of the given world – natural, historical, cultural – as it presents itself to consciousness in all of its phenomenological strangeness and difficulty, forming the ineluctable conditions of the poet's consciousness and voice.
Part of the point here is that Walcott rarely historicizes nature or landscape in a way that would abolish its aura and disenchant the world – that would privilege history over sense – but instead keeps in touch historical consciousness and aesthetic response.
Nature remains as what Emerson calls the “not I,” possessing an alterity that often arrives as an aesthetic breach or psychic wound in the mind of the poet, in Another Life and elsewhere: “Something inside is laid wide like a wound,” the poet writes in “Laventille,” 46
“some open passage that has cleft the brain, / some deep, amnesiac blow” (Selected
Poems 30). In Another Life, the deep, paradoxically “amnesiac” history with which
“Laventille” is concerned – the haunting legacies of slavery and of the Middle Passage as evident in the spectacle of poverty presented by this neighbourhood in Port of Spain – enters the landscape first of all through the supplement of figurative language: the poet remembers “drown[ing]” in “labouring breakers of bright cloud” (my emphases); the cooking smoke rises from the houses “like a cry.” The final lines of the stanza clinch the metaphor:
the taste of water is still shared everywhere,
but in that ship of night, locked in together,
through which, like chains, a little light might leak,
something still fastens us forever to the poor. (ll. 1019-1022)
These lines enunciate a shared bond, but that word has a doubleness absent in
Wordsworth. These are the filial bonds of community, but they are also historical bonds – chains – that are both a legacy and a literal image of slavery. If this is historical perception, though, it is registered in the language of nature, presented aesthetically over a specular distance. And just as the poor are a part of the landscape, as the smoke from their houses interfuses with the cloud, so that final sentiment refines history into nature once more: the poet is fastened “forever” to the poor in a universal, timeless posture.
Their representation recalls Frantz Fanon's description of the poor in the colonial situation, “crouched forever in the same old dream” (14). In contrast stands the articulate poet, living with, or for, his silent people in an involuntary filial enchainment. I return to
Walcott's representation of the relationship between poet and community below. 47
I keep this presentation of the world as given in proximity to the Romantic concept of nature firstly because the term “nature” implies the infection of the world with the given tropes of Romanticism: part of the phenomenological “strangeness and difficulty” that I describe relates to the mediating presence of Wordsworthian aesthetics, an important complication within the desire for the Edenic that Walcott's verse sometimes expresses. But the term “nature” also reflects the fact that the location of history is a literary-aesthetic and an aesthetic one: that is, history is registered within the aesthetic schemas embedded in literary texts, and registered via the sensorial experiences of the presenting subject (which may or may not conform to the “literary-aesthetic”). The
“creative nature of perception” that Hartman places within the phenomenology of the
“unmediated vision” is therefore both manifested and compromised. Perception “creates” something in the landscape that isn't merely its nature – that isn't immanent to it (as seen in the figurative language of labour, drowning and enchainment above) – but this
“something” works against the desire of the poet to see freely (purely, even). We can call this “something” history, but when nature and history meet in this way we may also invoke a new term that blurs the distinction between the two (and with which
Romanticism is fundamentally concerned): the given.
History in Walcott exists in Another Life in two forms, I have been arguing: firstly, as aesthetic history, and secondly, as the political and social history of St. Lucia within colonial modernity. Both are history in Liu's sense because they place pressure on the self-sufficiency of “what appears.” But this is not only to say that history is something external to the poet's modes of perception and to the St. Lucian landscape as it appears to the poet. To shift from nature to history might imply that the recognition of the 48 externality of history destroys the possibility of relating to landscape as natural by showing such nature to be an aesthetic delusion, but what is interesting about Walcott's work is its ambivalence in this respect. It does not seem quite right to say that Walcott historicizes landscape or that doing so is his primary interest, for instance, but nor does the Caribbean appear in some Romantic purity in his verse. I use the term “world” in competition with “history” to register this ambivalence, ambiguity, or openness. “World” is a word that negotiates between nature and history, the Romantic and the postcolonial – and “the given,” I want to suggest, is what Walcott's sense of the world approaches.
To talk of “the given,” then, is to suggest a conceptual shift from the “sense of history” to the “sense of the world,” because the given is the world that one encounters, through sense, in its resistance to categorization (where “history” would be a category of critical analysis). Here, I want to turn to the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, which develops a vocabulary of givenness and offers a language for elaborating upon the idea of the unmediated.23 For Marion, phenomenology is to be understood as a non-metaphysical mode of philosophy because it is engaged in the question of showing, not of proving, and
“to show” implies “letting appearances appear in such a way that they accomplish their own apparition, so as to be received exactly as they give themselves” (7). In this endeavour, phenomenology must refuse to privilege any of the particular senses (by merely substituting touch for vision, for instance), having legitimacy only insofar as it
23 It is important to recognise that Marion does not use the term “unmediated.” “The given,” for Marion, can never be accessed purely in itself. Instead, it shows itself, and this fact implies that we only have the given in its appearance, not in its essence outside of the capacity to see it (“see,” here, is a verb that isn't quite adequate – Marion's interest is not in sight per se). In order to approach things as they show themselves, it is necessary to recognise the fact of mediation and to be vigilant about its violences, including the violences of theoretical abstraction. Clearly, “the given” risks appearing as just such an abstraction in Marion's effort “to see things as they come … to bear their unpredictable landing” (4). 49 attempts “to reach the apparition in appearance, therefore to transgress every perceived impression by means of the intentionality of the thing itself” (7-8). Marion is talking about the importance of manifestation and self-manifestation, against the privilege of perception and subjectivity (8). The phenomenological method has to do with the idea of
“reduction,” of putting to one side all metaphysical abstractions and theoretical suppositions, including categories such as nature and history, in order to approach what is left: phenomena themselves, in their “givenness.”
In poetic discourse, this phenomenological interest can surely be located within the language of Romanticism in its more radical modes of sublimity or subjective withdrawal – as the phrase “unmediated vision,” if not Hartman's reading of it, begins to suggest. The sublime and what I call “subjective withdrawal,” here, are two sides of the same coin: the sublime marks the encounter with a phenomenon that exceeds the presentational capacities of the mind (or the representational capacities of literature); and by subjective withdrawal, I mean to describe those moments at which the effort at
“presentation” is abandoned in the face of something that gives itself in its own terms. 24
One of my recurring interests in this study is the way that postcolonial writing sometimes has this (de-subjectifying) passage towards letting phenomena self-manifest as a surprising object of desire. But to clarify once more, sense cannot be pure, thus Walcott retrieves from Wordsworth a language of nature that accesses, in the postcolonial text, not
“Nature” but the conditions of or limits on the poet's creative freedom, and these are the realities that pressurize imagination or vision (and, in my key paradox, include
24 Such a moment in Romantic poetry would include Wordsworth's encounter with the disappointing peak of Mont Blanc in The Prelude – a scene to which I have gestured in my introduction and which I will read in my chapter on Coetzee. 50
Wordsworthian language itself). If, as Roy Kamada claims, postcolonial Romanticism reflects the “subjectivity of the postcolonial,” then the interest postcolonial writers take in
Romanticism surely also suggests an agonistic awareness of the historico-cultural or non- subjective forms by which such subjectivity may be expressed. But subjectivity remains important here, and Walcott's poetry, interested as it may be in the unmediated vision, is also far from reflecting the phenomenology of a philosopher such as Marion, in whose vocabulary of “givenness” I take interest, nevertheless. Walcott's poetry, not uniquely, displays the historically burdened nature of any purifying passage towards “what is,” even its impossibility within lyrical modes that can neither escape their minimal conventionality nor their reliance upon the trope of the perceiving subject – and I signal this fact by using the word “nature” alongside the perhaps more neutral, philosophically inoculated idea of “the given.”25 Givenness is what would appear if “unmediated vision” were really possible, but nature, we know very well, never “shows itself” in any simple way outside of its cultural troping. To say that Walcott approaches the given is to read him phenomenologically; to say that Walcott historicizes nature is to read him through a critical postcolonial lens; to say that Walcott naturalizes history is to read him as
Romantic. I want to keep all of these possibilities open, as they all touch on certain features – ambiguities, perhaps – of his poetic practice.
We can see this imaginative pressure upon pure givenness – nature – even in poems that are not engaged in reading Romanticism and that, while they seem attached to the prospect of direct sensuous relation, are relatively unconcerned with the literary
25 In many ways, such an access can only be a fantasy in the postcolonial text. I pick up this thread in my chapter on Naipaul. My discussion of Coetzee attests to his more radical consideration of what “self-manifestation” might mean: the sensory death of the subject. 51
“infection” of phenomenological life. These poems can still be understood, however, within the larger rubric of postcolonial Romanticism that I am developing. In “Air” from
The Gulf (1969), for instance, the poet meditates upon the apparent nothingness of nature, that which promises to short-circuit poetic framing or mediation. “Air” fails to be a meditation upon the self-manifestation of nature, however – upon merely air in its self- apparition – because of the presence of the poet as a sort of historical corpus whose knowledge contaminates and radically re-mediates the scene. The Guyanese rainforest declares nature's indifference to history and suffering: the “omnivorous jaws” of the forest never rest, “grinding their disavowal / of human pain.” The poem uses as its epigraph Froude's notorious disavowal of people in the “true sense of the word” in the
Caribbean, which Walcott rewrites as the disavowal of nature: the forest stands unmoved through the genocide of “two minor yellow races, and / half of a black,” devouring in its undiscriminating stomach the Carib and the Arawak. The sound of the sea which enters the forest, described in intricate metaphor as “ocean's surpliced choirs / entering its nave, to a censer / of swung mist,” is not the “rustling of prayer / but nothing.” Into this nothing is absorbed the traumatic history of the island and poetry itself, it seems, as the metaphor in this stanza breaks down, the rhythm of the poem interrupted by caesura: “but nothing; milling air.” The final full stanza of the poem is an incomplete sentence, seeming to describe what the Arawak, “who leaves not the lightest fern-trace / of his fossil,” does leave behind:
but only the rusting cries
of a rainbird, like a hoarse
warrior summoning his race 52
from vaporous air
between this mountain ridge
and the vague sea
where the lost exodus
of corials sunk without trace –
The stanza ends here, displacing the imagined “trace” of the rainbird's cries with a recognition of the “without trace” that leads onto silence. The rainbird cannot fulfil the poetic function the poet seems to create for it, as something that might magically embody the continued haunting presence of the pre-colonial peoples of the Caribbean. We encounter another interruption, therefore, before the poem's concluding suggestion of nature's negative sublimity: “there is too much nothing here.” By the poem's end, the “too much nothing” that is “here” has come to inscribe negatively the history of genocide in the Caribbean: the “milling air” is an anti-memorial archive, but an archive all the same, of the obliterated histories that continue, even in their overabundant absence, to burden imagination.
“Ruins of a Great House” (pub. 1962) might similarly be read as a poem that unfolds the frustration of the unmediated vision and the opening of a more ambivalent and troubling sense of the world: the ruined house, bequeathed to the poet by time and literary tradition, promises to be a picturesque object made for direct sensory relation, but the spectre of the slave “rotting” in the “manorial lake” makes such aesthetic relation difficult and illegitimate. The poem is energized by a tension between a desire to face the violence of colonialism and slavery that constitutes the poet's inheritance, a desire to stand in belated opposition to the “abuse / Of ignorance by Bible and by sword,” and an 53 affective movement that disarms the poet in his oppositional stance. The poet thinks that
“where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees” a digging spade would “ring the bone / Of some dead animal or human thing / Fallen from evil days, from evil times,” perceiving the traces of historical violence, where this “thing” might include the bones of a slave.
But this recognition is balanced by a more mournful, even elegiac sense that “Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone.” The river flows “obliterating” hurt, in an ambiguous phrase which suggests the irresistibility of reconciliation with a scene of ruination that becomes the object of the poetic gaze. The ambiguous inheritance that the house embodies, reflected in the broken fragments of poetry scattered within the poem, with allusions to Thomas Browne, Blake, Milton and Donne, is suggested as the poet glimpses a strange kinship, as he sees that “Albion too was once / A colony like ours.” The “coal” of the poet's “compassion” fights against his identification with the rotting slave and rejection of the poetic tradition, causing the poem to end “So differently from what the heart arranged: / 'as well as if a manor of thy friend's...'.” It is unclear whether the speaker is persuaded by Donne's “ashen prose,” in which “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” This early poem suggests that creativity and recreation – poetic and affective – might be in tension with an absorption in the cruelty and injustice of the past.
The poem's resolution in “compassion,” though, is highly precarious, poised upon a mid- sentence break of a quotation from Donne. The poem dramatizes, ambivalently perhaps, the emergence of a sense of history as an element of the impersonal conditions that open and constrain life and creativity.
“History” is a weight in these poems, a weight that lies both inside and outside of the poet's subjectivity: in both poems, a kind of affective or interpretive recognition 54 within the consciousness of the speaker transforms the landscape, but there is equally a sense in which this recognition menaces the vision of the ideal poet-subject, the poet that would see the house as a picturesque object or the sea as a sublime blankness. When Alan
Liu talks of the “sense of history” in Wordsworth, he quotes the following moment from
The Prelude:
Great God!
That aught external to the living mind
Should have such mighty sway! yet so it was
A weight of Ages did at once descend
Upon my heart; (8.700-705, original emphasis)
The “living mind” of the poet, from one perspective, is threatened by the descent of a
“weight of Ages” in these poems, and in this regard they recapitulate what Liu and others have seen as a distinctly Wordsworthian anxiety. But these poems find their life or their opening precisely in this difficulty, as their sense of the world is a sense of the world saturated, just as the sea, in Walcott, for all its unending nothingness, is history (“The Sea is History” (Selected Poems 137)). When Marion talks of “saturated phenomena,” he means phenomena that exceed what can be said of them in, for instance, the discourses of natural science, and that thus are linked to the divine. I mean more modestly the saturation of the world with any elements that are difficult for poetry and that prompt an unanticipated transformation of the phenomena the poet thinks that he is seeing/sensing
(in the case of Wordsworthian modes, for instance, this element might indeed be history).
As I say above, though, it makes no sense to talk of self-materializing phenomena in relation to lyric poetry, given the prior embeddedness of such poetry in sense, and of 55 sense in the world: it is the subject's sense that re-mediates the otherwise “natural” scene, that introduces the history of genocide or slavery, quite possibly against the idealizing desire of the poet's ego.
Walcott does not naturalize history, nor does he historicize nature. It would be better to say that the world, in his poetry, opens through the “descendence” of history into nature, a kind of settling of an enigmatically communal Caribbean experience upon the visible landscape and its distinctive features.26 The sense of history or the sense of the world, then, is also a sense of community, a sense of some shared, intergenerational experience or trauma. This is clear in the scene from Another Life: the poet is fastened
“forever” to the poor in a way that qualifies the self-difference that the poem's narrative of emergence must posit, dramatizing a tension between the lyrical and the communal vocations of the postcolonial poet. I now want to approach this tension, because it provides another way of considering how Walcott's poetry relates to the world and of considering his relationship with Romanticism. This tension can also be understood as a postcolonial iteration of the Wordsworthian concern with the genius loci. The genius loci is the native or natal ground of Wordsworthian poetry, but as Romantic critics since the
1980s have shown, the “spirit” of place is resolutely non-identical with the historical manifestation of place at the supposed moments of poetic composition (hence the sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that permeates many of Wordsworth's poems, such as 26 The term “descendence” alludes to the weight of ages that “descends” upon the heart in the Wordsworth passage quoted by Liu, and provides a useful counterpoint to the idea of transcendence. Jean Wahl uses the term “transdescendence,” in contrast to transcendence, to denote a falling back or relapsing into immanence. See Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 178. 56
“Michael” and “The Ruined Cottage,” both of which have been read in the context of the devastating effects of enclosure upon the rural poor). Nature, in this context, can be read as a kind of consolation within the Wordsworthian mode, but as I have suggested, the consoling power of nature as a trans-personal or trans-historical presence does not operate in Walcott, nor can it work in a Caribbean setting in which the ecology itself is a historical creation and a legacy of colonialism and plantation slavery. The most native or
“aboriginal” aspects of the ecology are also those that most threaten the codeability of landscape: the mangrove swamp hums “Home, come home” at the highway's edges, its
“[f]earful, original sinuosities” appearing as “[o]utlandish phalloi,” despite the fact that the mangroves radically pre-date the highway and the colonial and postcolonial development of the island that it marks (“The Swamp,” Collected Poems 58). The swamp is “like death, / Too rich in its decrescence, too close of breath.”27 Rot, decay, ruin, empty shells, flies, foam: these are key to the genius loci of the Caribbean as Walcott presents it, or rather they threaten the possibility of a nurturing native ground at all.
But the genius loci does exist in a different form in Walcott as the legitimizing ground of poetry insofar as it is connected with community, even though the poet's connection with the spirit of community, or with the “genius socii,” is an object of frustrated desire. Walcott's enchainment to the poor suggests the constitutive relation between the Caribbean poet and his people, but even here, there is a simultaneous effect of aesthetic estrangement, emerging from a mode of lyrical relation – meditative and
27 Naipaul's narrator in The Enigma of Arrival struggles with the historicity of Trinidad's landscape. He has to look past almost everything in “the vegetation [he] had been trained to see as tropical and local … since all those plants and trees had been imported later with the settlement and the plantations” (160). One of the elements of the landscape the narrator focuses upon in his search for the “pre-Columbus island” are the mangrove swamps, similarly troped as aboriginal. 57 sensory and also literary – that obstructs communion and a poetry of collective experience. The poet is different, shaped by the promises of imagination, and this is part of the sense of the scene's melancholic recognition of the “chains” of the native. The poet's realization of his own vocation asserts a break between his story and the daily working life of his people, and this break threatens the legitimacy of the postcolonial poet.
This is a persistent concern of Walcott's work, especially in what Patricia Ismond calls the “Caribbean phase.” In “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” (1969), we see a similar yearning to identify with community at work. The poet meditates upon his return to this village in St. Lucia, but the poem is dominated by a sense of isolation and detachment.
The beach he walks along is “fish-gut-reeking,” the sea-grape leaves are “rotted,” and the
“sugar-headed” children, identifying the poet as a tourist, “swarm like flies” around his
“heart's sore.” The speaker, addressing himself in the second-person, recalls how “once, like them, / you wanted no career / but this sheer light, this clear, / infinite, boring, paradisal sea” – but the meaning of this tentative identification is just as questionable as what he imagined declaring before he knew that there are “homecomings without home”:
I am your poet, yours
The poem mourns the communal disconnection it dramatizes and enunciates grammatically, with the second-person address, in contrast to this generous, direct “I,” indicating the poet's self-estrangement at this moment of homecoming. The speaker describes his response to the children:
You give them nothing.
Their curses melt in air. 58
The black cliffs scowl,
the ocean sucks its teeth,
like that dugout canoe
a drifting petal fallen in a cup,
with nothing but its image,
you sway, reflecting nothing.
The “nothing” that the dazed poet gives the children, signifying on the primary level money, emphasizes the “nothing” that he offers them as a poet, associated with the
“nothing” of the image of his own reflection and clashing utterly with the unarticulated statement of poetic dedication. And so the poet trudges back to the village, “dazed” by the sun, passing “dead” fisherman playing draughts under the palms (ghosts? hallucinations?), one of whom nods with a politician's smile. This ending gestures towards a sentiment of political disappointment and only sharpens the sense of poetry's lyrical nothingness.
Much later in his career, in his acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize
(“Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”), Walcott negotiates this same tension in a quite different, initially non-melancholic mode, describing what might be called “spots of time” according to Saree Makdisi's broadened definition. For Makdisi, spots of time are
“self-enclosed and self-referential enclaves of the anti-modern, each defined by its own unique structures of feeling and its own distinct temporality”; these are pictures of
“antimodern otherness,” “differential loci of time and space” (12-13). This definition would certainly seem to include the “cherishable places” of which Walcott speaks with the “simplicity of rebeginnings” they harbour, the “little valleys that do not echo with 59 ideas … not yet corrupted by the dangers of change.” For Walcott, these are not nostalgic sights but “occluded sanctities as common and simple as their sunlight” (What the
Twilight Says 82). Walcott describes an old stone church near Soufrière: he does not want to “corrupt” the church “into significance” through his prose, he writes; insisting that the
Caribbean is not an idyll, he argues all the same that this is “where a real fresco should be painted, one without importance, but one with real faith, mapless, Historyless.” The essay concludes with its own sigh of history: “How quickly it could all disappear!” (83). This desire for a “Historyless” “occluded sanctity,” for a sacred place that would resist the tide of development and tourism, is crucial for Walcott and, I would argue, a crucial
Wordsworthian inheritance – or instance, perhaps more accurately, of poetic
“simultaneity” between the two. But while the church at Soufrière is a place of life – people come and go, it is at the centre of the life of the community – Walcott imagines the painting of a fresco, something that would statically refract and crystallize the spirit of community.28 This essay is more explicitly concerned with the genius loci of the
Caribbean than perhaps any other Walcott text, and yet it moves away from its initial interest in the kinetic, in the movement of life and culture and communal celebration that makes the “sigh of history” dissolve and that dissipates the poet's juvenile melancholia.
And it ends by returning to the desire – elegiac and melancholic once more – for an arrested image of time and place. These two modes of native identification are in tension with one another: on the one hand, the poet identifies with his people, but on the other
28 This essay thus returns us to the distinction between painting and writing that informs Another Life. Interestingly, though, here the painting is deferred: a real fresco “should be painted” but has not been, whereas Gregorias's genius was to “sign” the landscapes of St. Lucia even before painting them. If Gregorias's paintings activate and are activated by the spirit of place, this fresco remains inessential, an expression of a forlorn desire to bear witness to something that quickly “could all disappear.” 60
Walcott is motivated to articulate his art as a non-narrative or a-temporal poetry of place, a poetry of instants caught in time, especially through the faculty of vision, rather than processes unfolding through time. The lyrical attention to the singular is powerfully displayed in this essay – but so is the suspension of the singular from the temporality of life and community, its abstraction from historical and peopled experience. The singular may be paramount, but it relies upon the mediation of the aesthetically attuned “I.”
If “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” and “Antilles,” at different junctures in
Walcott's career, trace what might tentatively be called a romantic melancholy or disappointment in their divergent investments between what I'm calling lyrical and communal experience, I now want to turn to one of the ways in which Walcott's poetry bridges the sense of its lyrical vocation with its pained fidelity to the spirit of home: through the troping of erotic desire and women's bodies. “The Light of the World,” from
The Arkansas Testament (1987), like “Antilles” operates through a contrast between kinesis and stasis. The poet is on a “transport” between Castries and Gros Islet in St.
Lucia, on the way back to his hotel after the Market's closing on a Saturday night; Marley is “going” on the stereo (l. 91), with other passengers absorbed in the song's rhythm; and the poet himself is one of the many “transients” that fill the hotel lounge (l. 113).
“Trans-” is a crucial prefix in this poem, with figures and vocabularies of transport, transience, translation, and transcendence in circulation. But the poem offers a countervailing depiction of the static that gives these movements their figurative energy and possibly their attraction for the poet: a passenger appeals to the driver, “'Pas quittez moi à terre,'” which the poet translates as a manifold appeal to the “Heavenly transport”:
“'Don't leave me stranded,' / which is, in her history and that of her people: / 'Don't leave 61 me on earth,' or, by a shift of stress: / 'Don't leave me the earth' [for an inheritance]; …
Don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it'” (ll. 58-63). The poet thinks, in turn, that he had left his people on earth, “left them their earth.” But the static emerges above all, as in “Antilles,” via the poet's process of aesthetic mediation, here directed towards a woman, “the beauty,” sitting by the window:
I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait
you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights
silkened her black skin; I'd have put in an earring,
something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
wore no jewelry. I imagined a powerful and sweet
odour coming from her, as from a still panther,
and the head was nothing else but heraldic.
The woman looks at the speaker, but then looks away, and “it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix's / Liberty Leading the People, the gently bulging / whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth, / the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's...” – she looks, but she does not disturb the visual sovereignty of the male gaze in its inventorizing of her body. Of course, the poem here is thematizing the objectification it is performing, with the allusion to portraiture and to Delacroix (although this hardly makes the objectification more palatable). I want to suggest that the representation of “the beauty” should be read exactly in the light of Walcott's yearning for a “fresco” to be painted to capture the spirit of St. Lucia in “Antilles,” but here this yearning appears as a highly gendered desire for an access to the spirit of place of which the woman is an embodiment and/or metonym. 62
In other words, the poet's erotic desire, in this poem and also in the Anna sections of Another Life, is simultaneously a political desire in a limited sense: that is, it is a desire for an access to the community (polity) for which she stands. The poet claims that he
“was deeply in love with the woman by the window”; he imagines her wearing a nightie that would “pour like water / over the black rocks of her breasts,” reinscribing both her representation as an art-object, as sculpture, as well as her association with waterfalls and the landscape. The associations develop: “her hair was like a hill forest at night … a trickle of rivers was in her armpits” (ll. 80-85). She is also linked to the possibility of a mutual giving between poet and people, the kind of giving disallowed in “Homecoming”: he thinks, “O Beauty, you are the light of the world!,” suggesting (given the poem's title), that the poem and “the beauty” share a redemptive, illuminating function. As witness to this “light” (a recurrent concern in Walcott's poetry, especially in and after The Fortunate
Traveller (1981)), the poet gives his own refraction of such beauty: at the conclusion of the poem, the poet acknowledges that “[t]here was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them / but this thing I have called 'The Light of the World.'”29 The poet has moved from thinking that he gives his people “nothing” (as in “Homecoming: Anse La Raye”) to something – the poem is just a thing, but something all the same. We can see the lyrical imperative in the poem's focus on the intensity of the speaker's affective and sensorial responses in a moment of time, but the poem's interest from a postcolonial perspective also resides in the ways in which the objects that generate such response are metonymic of the wider community and its history – and so implicate the poet, returning from a
29 The phrase “light of the world” appears repeatedly in the Gospels; perhaps most pertinently, in John 9:5, Jesus claims that “When I am in the world, I am the Light of the World.” The implication, perhaps, is that the poet's participation in the world gives the poem its “light.” It is also the title of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Holman Hunt. 63 privileged first-world position, in a narrative of abandonment. The lyric speaker's erotic desire reconnects the lyric speaker to his community, but this reconnection attends upon the troping of “the beauty” as an icon for St. Lucia.30
In this poem, Walcott's representation of “the beauty” appears not merely to be a misogynist “side effect,” but to be central to his poetry's ongoing negotiation between lyrical and communal imperatives. It is also clear that this negotiation absorbs two traditions: the gendered bodies we see in Walcott's verse belong equally to the long history of lyrical poetic modes that channel affective response through the gaze of the male poet, and to postcolonial-nationalist tropings of women as metaphors for the spirit of the national community.31 The poet himself, in turn, is a normatively gendered figure, whose heterosexual desire paradoxically qualifies him as a privileged and neutral mediator of the spirit of place, via which, in the phenomenological model, the object of perception can be recognized in its self-manifesting appearance. Here, the ideas of aesthetic autonomy, unmediated vision, or the world “being given” must be placed under critical stress, since the supposed purity, faithfulness, or freedom of response – its autonomy from culture – is anxiously dependent upon familiar gendered tropes.32 It is in
30 This move is visible in other Walcott poems, probably most obviously in the role of Helen in Omeros: St. Lucia was known as the “Helen of the West Indies”; Plunkett wants to write the history of St. Lucia to give Helen a history; and in accordance with the organismic metaphor for the nation, Helen is pregnant at the poem's conclusion (a detailed reading of Omeros is beyond the scope of this chapter). 31 See Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationality for a discussion of the gendered imagery of postcolonial literatures of liberation. Cheah shows how women become figurative supports for the organismic metaphor of the nation, according to which the nation's spirit is associated with women and the technical apparatuses of the state associated with male control. See also Jocelyn Fenton Stitt's “Gendered Legacies of Romantic Nationalism” for a reading of how this imagery operates in Michelle Cliff's fiction. 32 I mean “autonomy of the aesthetic” in a non-Adornian sense simply to imply the autonomy of sensory perception. Such an autonomy is always already impossible if we consider the multivalency of the term “aesthetic” (especially its implication of cultural ideas of sensibility). 64 this sense, too, that Walcott's figuration of erotic desire should be read within the context of his postcolonial Romanticism, in proximity to the idea of an ambivalence between direct sensory relation and overdetermined cultural-historical mediation, between singular response and literary trope.
By casting his connection with the world through tropes of desire, as in “The
Light of the World” and the Anna sections of Another Life (which offer a less interesting recital of the thematics of “Light”) Walcott inevitably suggests the opening of a distance and a communicative inadequacy for which poetry is a limited compensation. In Another
Life, it is only the figure of the child who can achieve a mysterious immediacy of sensory relation with the world, the community, and its history, in a way that would dispose of this anxiety. The child possesses neither an unmediated vision nor an overburdened faculty of sense but a kind of intuition of reality that operates between the two. The child is described in the penultimate chapter of the poem's final section, 'The Estranging Sea,'
“my son first, then two daughters,” setting afloat upon the “brown creek that is
Rampanalgas River … towards the roar of waters, / towards the Atlantic with a dead almond leaf for a sail.” The child is described in the singular, but there are three of them who follow the same trajectory in turn, and it is the male child who leads the way
(Walcott had three children, and his son was the oldest, but the gender remains convenient for casting the child as at once singular and a neutral exemplar of a special, innocent perception). This child, the poet writes, was, like his father, “a child without history, without knowledge of its pre-world, / only the knowledge of water runnelling rocks / and the desperate whelk that grips the rock's outcrop like a man whom the waves can never wash overboard”: 65
that child who puts the shell's howl to his ear,
hears nothing, hears everything
that the historian cannot hear, the howls
of all the races that crossed the water,
the howls of grandfathers drowned
in that intricately swivelled Babel... (ll. 3386-91)
Nature and history are coextensive, here. The child hears a “nothing” in the shell's howl that is also “everything,” the “everything” that the historian cannot hear. Against the history “machined through fact” that is the poet's “cheap alcohol” (ll. 3446-7), the child hears a different history, a history that resists or exceeds the historian's arrangement of facts and consists in an altogether different kind of “knowledge,” a knowledge that mysteriously inheres in the world, at least for those who are capable of apprehending it.
In the phenomena of the sea, in its howl as mediated by the shell and the ear, the child hears the “howls” of the victims of the Middle Passage and a cacophony of ancestral voices (ll. 3392ff) – a howl that logically defies the poet's citation of what it contains.
“Howl” has a doubled linguistic signification in this context, of course, as a sound and a scream, but this is not what is being suggested: the poet is suggesting that even without knowledge, without access, as it were, to the archives that enable metaphor or figurative speech, the child can sense and actually hear the world's historical, peopled, experiential saturation. On the one hand, it might appear that through imagination the poet can perceive history in nature (Walcott imagines the howl of the whelk to be the howls of suffering bodies through imaginative projection), but on the other, the child is being held up as a figure of innocence, a figure who truly hears more than the brute sound of the 66 whelk but through a kind of non-verbal, sensory intuition, not through a naming, historical operation. The child does not litanize his “pre-world” as the poet does. In fact, he has no knowledge of it, but he hears it in its irreducible immanence, in the fullness and the nothingness of nature's “howl.”
The poem's troping of the child, here, cannot but recall Wordsworth, but it is important that the child is not the poet earlier in life, but the poet's offspring, suggesting a greater distance from the child's mysterious intuition. The scene suggests a highly
Romantic connection with the world, the presence of filial bonds and buried generational memories that the mature poet in Walcott's verse, in his alienation from his home, has perhaps lost. The poem's depiction of the child is unusual, though, because the child's connection with the world is not above or beyond history; it is not divine or transcendent, but a relation to history as a cacophony that can be heard. Most interestingly, the child's sense of the world absolutely dissolves the separation between what we might consider a
Romantic mode of aesthetic relation with nature and a postcolonial reading of landscape in the light of colonial history. Another Life elevates this sense of the world, and I would argue that poems such as “Air,” “The Sea is History,” even, more obliquely, “The Light of the World,” reiterate this desire for it, for an “access of sentiment” that exceeds customary sense and that would therefore exceed language. This version of the sense of the world suggests a desire to recognize the injustices and catastrophes of history – that which is “locked up” in the “grey vault” of the sea (“The Sea is History”) – as well as to become reconciled with the world even in the light of this history. In “The Muse of
History,” Walcott gives a “strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks” (64) for those conditions that have brought the poet to the point of speech. Walcott's gratitude brings us 67 back to the phenomenal, because it is a gratitude for the world as a gift outside of the economies of giving and taking, for the world, that is, as simply given, beyond responsibility, justice, or politics. Walcott is not denying the violence of the histories of the Caribbean, but it seems that these histories can be momentarily affirmed outside of an economy of morality or politics, through attention to the world as it is, without which poetry, and the poet's singular life, could not be. This surely does reflect a drift towards a
Romantic reconciliation with “what is”: specific worldly realities may have no legitimacy according to political languages that allow a critical purchase on them, such as the languages of anticolonial nationalism, but the world with all its violence, Walcott registers, is at least right for poetry.
The subject who receives the world in this way is “the gifted.” The gifted, for
Marion, is what comes after the subject:
the determination of the phenomenon as given, if it can and must dispense
with every giver, nonetheless always comes to a givee. “Who comes after the
subject?” – I call him “the gifted,” with no other subjectum besides his
capacity to receive and to receive himself from what he receives. (4)
I began this chapter by considering Walcott's indebtedness to the literary tradition, but the economy of gift stands in contrast to the economy of debt. Gifts, as Derrida's work has shown, are often conditional; they imply a kind of indeterminate indebtedness, whereas debt implies that indebtedness can be quantified. For Marion, though, the given implies giftedness without any giver. We can read Another Life as a poem that charts a movement away from an idea of debt towards a phenomenology of giftedness – without any giver.
Instead of inhabiting an arena of poetic creation that burdens the poet with a sense of 68 having “filched” his material, the child is gifted beyond any anxiety about inheritance.
And yet, for Walcott, such a conception of the subject as “gifted” has to be figured through a kind of fantasy of the child and of the child's magical, non-traumatic involvement with the world and its history. The “gifted” is perhaps not after the subject in
Another Life, then, but before the subject, before the histories and languages that shape subjects in the world: the child embodies a mode of receptivity without judgement –
“strange and bitter and yet ennobling” – that the compromised, alienated mature subject inevitably struggles to approach. 69
Countervoice I: George Lamming
In this petrified zone, not a ripple on the surface, the palm trees sway against the clouds, the waves of the sea lap against the shore, the raw materials come and go, legitimating the colonist’s presence, while more dead than alive the colonised subject crouches for ever in the same old dream. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
An' all 'cause they know they's sensible people with they head on straight, an' they know an Ace for an Ace an' a Jack for a Jack. They ain't know no sort of thing goin' pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop in they head. Nothin'll ever change in the village. - George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin
Something startles where I thought I was safest. - Walt Whitman
In Derek Walcott's poetry, the sense of history and the sense of the world are in the end the same thing. Walcott's poetry problematizes any critical operation by which
“history” would be separated from the field of exteriority: from nature, the “not I,” or the given. My discussion of Walcott suggests that his work registers the frustration of moving towards the “unmediated vision,” while sustaining a desire for a relation with “what is” that would transcend the historical, conventional constraints on speech and perception.
This is the “access of sentiment” that the child of Another Life is imagined to possess – a sense of the world that achieves what the poet can never achieve, by transcending the problem of mediation itself. While Walcott's poet struggles with the weight of literary convention in his attempt to speak and see, the child needs only a whelk lying in the sand to hear the voices of history.
If Walcott has a Romantic sensibility, it consists in his ambivalent attitude towards 70 trope or metaphor, towards the constitutive, enabling features of poetic language that also incapacitate it. Walcott yearns to develop a “style past metaphor” in order to capture phenomena past representation – to touch the mysterious “what is.” In addition, Walcott wants to connect with the world past history and historical categories, as he suggests in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he claims that the fate of poetry is “to fall in love with the world, in spite of History” (What the Twilight Says 79). From Walcott's vantage, all is by no means well in the world, but poverty, violence, and injustice are recuperable insofar as they form the basis for an occasion to speak. Walcott thus refuses the voices of “recrimination and despair” that he perceives in other kinds of engagements with Caribbean histories and life-worlds – voices that disallow a more desirable orientation of love beyond politics, beyond what he calls in “The Muse of History” the
“rage for identity” (37).
In this respect, Walcott's work is at a dramatic remove from any and all languages of collective solidarity and macropolitical emancipation: the freedom of poetry, in
Walcott's work, must consist in a freedom from any extra-aesthetic obligation. To build a poetics in response to conditions of political oppression or the history of slavery would precisely be to fall into a relation of servitude to the Muse of History, and to disavow poetry's vocation of autonomous creativity. For Walcott, there is a falsity to constructed categories of racial identity in particular. It is not that Walcott sees history as some extra superficiality underneath which lies timeless essence, but that he considers certain kinds of historical consciousness to falsify the human experience of history by overstating the relevance of categories of identity, or by overstating the significance of the past in relation to the texture of the everyday. Walcott's position might be described as a radical 71 lyricism, if we define lyric via its relation to a process of subtraction and singularization.
In a lyric poem, the quality of the poetic utterance is produced by a suspension or diminution of the context of speech. Lyric poems do not require biography, setting, or significant narrative, but exist in a kind of supernumerary relation to such contexts. They dwell on the accidental, found, fragmentary, or epiphanic, and pay attention to the singularity of experience or appearance, to that which is neglected within synthetic, historical accounts of time and place. According to this restricted definition of the lyrical,
Walcott's sense of the world involves a lyricization of history; his poetry refracts history through the perspective of the singular.33
George Lamming's 1953 novel of decolonization, In the Castle of My Skin, appears to narrate a movement from a sense of the world to a sense of history. If in
Walcott, history is part of the larger field of exteriority with which the poet must constantly negotiate, then Lamming's novel, in contrast, associates a process of Bildung with a recognition of the historicity of things, and in turn of the possible transformability of the world understood and inhabited in socio-political terms. Lamming is interested in the growth of the mind of a maturing political subject, on the individual and collective level. For the novel's emergent anticolonial subject, it would seem, history is the world into which one must awake: the world of In the Castle, thus, is not given, self-present and plenitudinous – as it might be in the “same old dream” of the colonial subject, or in the grateful posture of Walcott's New World poet – but fractured, contingent, without any
33 In the poems I discuss above, such as “Air,” “Ruins of a Great House,” and “The Light of the World,” history exists not as a completed synthetic account of time and place, but as something that comes to the subject in unpredictable ways in instants of heterogeneous time, each time singular. What Clifford Siskin calls the “lyricization” of the hierarchy of genres in the Romantic period can be extended to talk of a “lyricization” of historical discourse in lyrical postcolonial writing concerned with the experiential dimensions of the legacies of colonial history. 72 special claim on poetic love, and therefore conditioned by the possibility of political transformation.
In a recent appraisal of the significance of Lamming's achievement, Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o writes of how In the Castle reflects the “centrality of people in history.” The
“community of ordinary men and women and children is the principal actor,” Ngũgĩ asserts, whose “awakening” from a people in to a people for themselves intersects with the global narrative of black struggle, even though the novel is grounded in Barbados in particular (164-5). For Ngũgĩ, Lamming's novel dramatizes the “possibility of people being organized and taking back their sovereignty,” a sovereignty that “cannot be represented” and “cannot be alienated” (166). If Lamming's novel is the product of a
“cultural worker” fully committed to the project of anticolonial Bildung understood in relation to the self-actualization of the people, and if Walcott's poetry, as I have suggested in my reading of Another Life, is concerned with the development of the imagination conceptualized in singular terms, then the contrast between the two would seem to mark a conflict between a commitment to the political against the aesthetic, or to the collective against the singular. In this respect, the distance between Lamming's and Walcott's depictions of self- and world-realization might also be the distance between two visions that reflect characteristically postcolonial and Romantic dispositions respectively, insofar as the “postcolonial” denotes a heightened interest in conditions of coloniality and a commitment to political justice, and insofar as the “Romantic” denotes a more lyrical orientation and, in turn, a less healthy or engaged politics.
According to this reading, the counter-vocal relation between Lamming and
Walcott would be clear. If many of Walcott's poems end in an aesthetico-affective 73 reconciliation with the given, this mode of relation is the point of departure for
Lamming's protagonist. The natal bonds of community must be broken for both writers.
The opening chapters of Lamming's novel explore the vagueness of the community's historical consciousness: there is “a kind of pressure or presence of which everyone is a part” – seemingly akin to the Wordsworthian “weight of ages” cited by Alan Liu – but the schoolchildren who feel this weight cannot begin to fathom the fantastical idea of slavery, or the significance of the workings of the forms of colonial power that shape their everyday. The political subject can only appear through a breach with this vague sense of the world, but as far as such a breach must occur in Another Life, it is in order for the speaker to arrive at a poetics that can put the world back together again, that can glue together those broken histories in a gesture of love “stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole,” even if the restored artefact still “shows its white scars” (What the Twilight Says 69). Artistic vision for Lamming can never justly reintegrate all of the world's elements, however: the material world itself must be recomposed through political struggle in a proper response to the disastrous legacies of the colonial.
I suggest that Lamming's novel, however, is not simply a refutation of the evasions of Romantic lyricism, but a text that displays an internal “dissensus” between its explicit anticolonial commitments and an ongoing orientation towards the singular. It is true that, in Walcott's work, history is registered phenomenologically, by the sense of the poet, whereas in Lamming the sense of history emerges as an understanding that the world is an arena for action or agency, that the world makes demands on the subject as a historical and communal actor. And yet I will show that Lamming's novel gestures 74 towards the irreducibility of aesthetic and singular experience in a way that complicates the teleology of Ngũgĩ's reading and suggests a somewhat more ambivalent understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In Lamming, as in
Walcott, there is a tension between the singular and the collective that is simultaneously a tension between lyrical modes – attentive to spots of time and aesthetic intensities – and epic or mythic modes, those narrative modes put to work within the teleology of Bildung
(most obviously, within the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman). The sense in which Lamming provides a countervoice to Walcott is thus more subtle than the simple opposition between the political and the aesthetic I sketch above. Lamming's novel refuses to absorb history within a general aesthetics of the world and instead takes us to the uncertain point at which a decision with political-historical consequences must be made: history is what you make and not just part of the given arena in which you feel.
But the ambivalence of Lamming appears within his novel's ambiguous entreaty to register the pressures of history upon the would-be political actor, and to keep politics open to the self-difference it manages, a self-difference or singularity presented as aesthetic experience.
In the Castle of My Skin was published in 1953, thirteen years prior to Barbados's achievement of formal independence. The novel reflects the post-war sense of global historical upheaval and transformation, with the achievement of independence in the new nations of the Indian subcontinent, the emergence of powerful African, Latin American and Caribbean anticolonial movements, as well as the civil rights movement in the US. In
Barbados, the years preceding formal independence saw wildcat strikes and workers' protests and a reformist trend that benefited some (with the lowering of the income-bar 75 for voting and the partial enfranchisement of women, for example). All of this leads
Ngũgĩ to stress the importance of understanding Lamming's work as a dramatization of
“the forcible entry of the masses into history” (164). The novel begins in the 1930s, on the ninth birthday of its primary protagonist, G. (who is absent, all the same, from large stretches of the novel). G. inhabits a colonial Barbados depicted as seemingly benign and stable, a “Little England” inhabiting its own temporality firmly outside of the global currents of historical instability. And it ends nine years later on the cusp of G.'s departure to Trinidad. In the intervening years, G.'s village has witnessed a dangerous upheaval in the apparently static colonial order: what began as rumours and thoughts of possible alternative socio-political orders turns into strikes and violent protests that spread across the island and engulf the village, precipitating the departure of the paternalistic white landlord, Mr. Creighton. Far from liberating the villagers, however, these events only make their lives more precarious, as the original leader of the strike, Mr. Slime, uses communal funds to buy land “for” the villagers, but gives plots to investors in a scheme that would sell the rest of the land to villagers, at prices they could not afford and with high interest rates on mortgages. The novel, thus, is just as interested in the departure of the colonial order as it is in the retrenchment of capitalist power, wielded by a new nationalist bourgeoisie that only seeks its own prosperity.
It is against this sense of danger and possibility that the novel posits the static, immobile temporality of the colonial situation prior to the event of anticolonialism. The history of the village is described as a flow “undisturbed by any difference,” exhibiting an
“evenness” of life, a “pattern which remained constant” (16). People are simply numerical iterations in this scenario, entirely identical with their specified social function: 76
another three, four, fourteen. But there was no change in the increase … Men.
Women. Children. The men at cricket. The children at hide and seek. The
women laying out their starched clothes to dry. The sun let its light flow down
on them as life let itself flow through them. Three. Thirteen. Thirty. Three
hundred. (16-17)
Lamming, at certain moments in these sections, employs a highly conventional peasant aesthetic, as if to mimic on the level of style the idea that “nothin'll ever change” in the village: “the hardy poor like their stalled beloved in the distant cemetery slept peacefully beneath the flying spray” (7). Lamming's depiction of the village caught in the empty time of colonialism bears comparison with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, in which the colonized subject “crouches for ever in the same old dream.” For Fanon, this
“old dream” of pure time – a time apparently outside of politics and immune to events – is suddenly revealed as historically contingent through an act of decision on the part of the colonized: the immobility to which the situation condemns the colonized “can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonisation and the history of despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization” (15). For Fanon, this moment of decision itself blows the colonial world to smithereens, because the colonial world is sustained by a perception of its immutability. The decolonizing subject therefore “break[s] the lull introduced by colonialism” and “make[s] History” (30) simply through an act of the will. In the worldview of the colonial village, as Lamming represents it, transformative events similarly seem impossible, but the novel's distance from this worldview is less decisive.
For Fanon, decolonization presents a radical and revolutionary truth that seizes the 77 historical actor, but for Lamming the decolonization of individual and collective consciousness involves a more difficult process of estrangement, self-alienation, and apprenticeship to political language.
In this regard, In the Castle maintains an orbit around the problem of mediation that I see as a general feature of postcolonial engagements with Romanticism. The novel does not describe G. shedding a false language of mediation and achieving a less mediated and more authentic relation with the world – arriving at the true, politicized vision from which the decolonizing subject can “never be alienated,” or at the historically unencumbered phenomenal relation with “what is” – but instead explores the inherently alienating process by which languages of mediation, including languages of political emancipation, become visible as such, as languages of mediation that produce divergent senses of the world that make different kinds of thought and agency possible. If there is an event in the text, such an event cannot be read in Badiouvian or Fanonian terms as the initiation of a “truth procedure” that entirely seizes the subject from an incontestable vantage, but instead appears as a radical disruption of the apparent plenitude of the world as it presents itself to the senses, as a disruption of what appears that leaves everything uncertain.
When Trumper, G.'s childhood friend, returns from the United States at the end of the novel equipped with a new awareness of the global arena of black struggle,
Lamming's interest in the constitutively alienating passage towards political consciousness becomes most clear. The narrative commentary on Trumper's insistence that he belongs to his “people” focalizes the ambivalence of G. – arguably a stand-in for
George Lamming himself: 78
'Who are your people?' I asked him. It seemed a kind of huge joke.
'The Negro race,' said Trumper. The smile had left his face, and his manner
had turned grave once again … At first I thought he meant the village. This
allegiance was something bigger. I wanted to understand it.' (287)
G. knows what white racism is but he also thinks about black corruption and prejudice, prejudice between “whites and blacks, and blacks and blacks.” “Henceforth,” G. thinks,
“[Trumper's] life would be straight, even, uncomplicated. He knew the race and he knew his people and he knew what that knowledge meant” (290). But G. finds it hard to attain to Trumper's certainty of belonging: “This was something vast like sea and sky all wrapped up in one. To be a different kind of creature. This was beyond my experience …
To be a part of something which you didn't know and which if Trumper was right it was my duty to discover” (290-91). G. is on the verge of departing from Barbados to teach in
Trinidad, and after he and Trumper walk away in different directions, he is struck (again) by the feeling that “you had seen the last of something”: “The earth where I walked was a marvel of blackness and I knew in a sense more deep than simple departure I had said farewell, farewell to the land” (295). If Lamming is concerned with a project of Bildung as Ngũgĩ suggests, we have to take account of this moving and also deeply ambiguous conclusion, in which the protagonist of the novel is observing Trumper, the real protagonist of a narrative of Bildung, from a position of uncertainty and bewilderment. G. cannot “ferret…out” the meaning of belonging to a collectivity that extends beyond the borders of his habitual community on the island, cannot grasp the idea that you were a
“different kind of creature.” The novel is not suggesting that such a narrative of racial solidarity and emancipation is alien to the historical experience of Barbados, forged in the 79
US and exported abroad. Instead, the novel seems to be interested in the phenomenological texture of a political awakening that arrives as an alienation of sense, while making uncertain demands on G. as a political subject.
The most enigmatic aspect of this conclusion, though, is G.'s entreaty to Trumper to remember the feeling they shared on the beach, “a big bad feeling in the pit of the stomach” which made them giddy – and which Trumper dismisses, claiming that “'[a] man who know his people won't ever feel like that'” (293). G. is alluding to a childhood episode narrated as an extended scene in the middle of the novel, in which the four boys –
G., Trumper, Bob and Boy Blue – talk and think. Trumper, in this scene, talks of the way you “get the feelin', you know, that everything's all right” (112), of how there are certain things that “got to be” (122). But Boy Blue, in contrast, talks of how things go “pop” in your head, “an' you's a different man,” “there can't be any other you,” and you feel
“different from everybody else” (135). Trumper claims that in the village, nothing goes
“pop” in people's heads: the village is a stable community, people make plans for the future, they're “sensible people with they head on straight … They ain't know no sort of thing goin' pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop in they head. Nothin'll ever change in the village” (136-7). But the boys get the feeling that “something was always happening … something bigger appeared like the sea and sand, it brought with it a big, big feeling”
(145). If you can make language “you didn't have to feel at all,” G. thinks, which is why
“everybody wanted to be educated … Nothing would ever go pop, pop, pop in your head” (146). The tempo of this scene is slow, languid. It opens a space within the text that is both dialogic – as the boys talk and never quite resolve their feelings – and dilatory: the scene is an opening within the text's dominant narrative that doesn't correspond to its 80 narrative logic, but instead disrupts and defers narrative end-directedness. The scene is itself a kind of “pop” or semantic hole in the Bildungsroman, without any obvious lesson.34
Its apparent resistance to the pedagogical, however, may suggest its significance for G.. This “pop” seems to promise a radical break with the stasis or stability of the situation, arriving as a psychic event that cannot be harnessed by language and that would be controlled and tamed, to some degree violated, by such a linguistic harnessing. In this sense, the boys' feelings articulate an innocent revolutionary energy, in what seems to be an anti-pedagogical vision of rupture, renewal and dangerous transformation – associated with the “bigness” of the sea and sand, with the extra-personal, the extra-human, and also the extra-political. It is this feeling that G. asks Trumper to remember and that Trumper insists he has left behind. In the novel's vision, however, this feeling is not left behind; instead, it is actively recalled in direct counterposition to Trumper's historical certainty.
The precedence accorded to this scene seems to undermine a straightforward reading of the novel as an anticolonial Bildungsroman. Even though this “pop” may be linked to a political coming-to-consciousness (Trumper remembers how his experiences in America left him “giddy with a kind o' big confusion” (284)), it is not clear that this expansive bewilderment is just a stage in the emergence of political maturity. The “pop” gives a sense of the “bigger” that must remain inexpressible, seeming to cast doubt on the viability of any macropolitical language to totalize a people's collective spirit.
34 It is of course debatable whether a Bildungsroman can ever achieve such discipline of form and narrative to exclude all non-instrumental elements. In this sense, the Bildungsroman may be a “phantom genre,” an idealized form to which literary texts seldom, if ever, fully correspond (Redfield, Phantom Formations xi). I'm also echoing Bakhtin and Barthes, whose respective concepts of the dialogic and the dilatory both express a principle of heterogeneity internal to the novel (see The Dialogical Imagination, and S/Z 75-77). 81
The novel gestures towards experiences that lie beyond Trumper's language of the collective, but this is not to say that the novel, through G., opts out of the project of political struggle. There may be an alternative understanding of politics, in fact, carried by G.'s interest in the feeling on the beach, an understanding that speaks back to
Trumper's knowledge of what really constitutes the world. Here, I want to invoke Jacques
Rancière's distinction between “politics” and “the police.” Politics, for Rancière, operates according to what might be called a principle of heterogeneity. Politics is always that which breaks up the “distribution of the sensible,” that which ruptures it, interrupts it, creating a breach within the dominant aesthetic regime and its determination of what can be “said, thought, made, or done.” The police, in contrast, is defined as that which wants to exclude politics understood thus, that which wants to sustain the distribution of the sensible as it currently operates and exclude different possibilities of seeing, acting, thinking, or of inhabiting time itself. The police is all about maintaining homogeneity via the solidification of a block, whereas politics is about finding spaces or intervals within this block for the insertion of heterogeneity.35 According to this distinction, does Trumper inhabit the perspective of the police, or of politics? Is Trumper presenting a breach of politics within G.'s sensible universe, or is Trumper asserting a new homogenous block that would reinscribe necessity within the appearance of possibility, by demanding G.'s fidelity to a narrative of emancipation that excludes other worlds, other temporalities, other stories and sensibilities?
G.'s politics, read via Rancière, would be a politics of the aesthetic, the singular, in some sense the extra-political, the paradoxical politics that appears as a persistent
35 This is my own gloss of these terms as they operate in Rancière's work. For an excellent glossary of Rancière's lexicon, see The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill, 80-93. 82 contestation of the totalizing claims of any single political discourse. And Lamming's novel refuses to reconcile G.'s uncertainty with Trumper's conviction. The novel remains concerned with that which “startles” within the domain of aesthetic safety, with what I will call “dis-enclosive” moments of sense or sensation that take the subject outside of her customary aesthetic terrain. Such dis-enclosure – to which I will turn at length in my discussion of V. S. Naipaul and Anita Desai – has an importance for Lamming insofar as it is linked with possibility. While Lamming's text seems to stage an indecision between aesthetic and political commitments, therefore, it also suggests that politics and aesthetics reside in intimate proximity with one another.
The novel deliberately seems to defer any kind of closure of these questions.
There is a sense deeper than “simple departure” that G. has said “farewell to the land,” and Trumper's conviction is central to the collapse of G.'s childhood temporality. G.'s memory of the “pop” on the beach decentres Trumper's story of historical progress, but
Trumper also speaks back to the Romantic obsession with presentation and mediation, with the startling singularity of aesthetic experience. Trumper has a language, and this language makes possible a material socio-political agency, promising nothing less than the recreation of the world – not merely its compensatory refraction through a mature poetic sensibility. If Trumper provides the locus of my countervoice in this chapter, the novel itself holds open a dialogic space: it isn't quite a Bildungsroman or a fully coherent text of postcolonial freedom.
Perhaps surprisingly, In the Castle of My Skin brings mid-century narratives of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial freedom into contact with questions about mediation and the phenomenal that are central to Romantic aesthetic discourse. Read as a 83 narrative of political emergence, it might seem to have little in common with a text like
Another Life, concerned with the troubled negotiation with history by which an autonomous poetic voice may begin to emerge. But the contrast, here, is not between a focus on the interior (that is, on renovating the aesthetic schemas the subject carries in order to come to terms with the given world), and a focus on the exterior (bringing the world into line with the utopian ideals of the subject), but a contrast between a vision of aesthetics that grants it little political significance, and a vision of aesthetics that places it at the centre of what politics means, if politics always begins as the entrance of possibility into the way the subject perceives the world. If Walcott lyricizes history,
Lamming brings lyrical history and collective history into the same textual space, staging a dissensus that points to the pressurized imagination of the postcolonial. I want to suggest that the very ambivalence of Lamming's text grants aesthetics a greater significance than either Walcott or Ngũgĩ: aesthetics names a concern with forms of startlement – “pop pop pop pop pop” – that mark the affective reverberation of possibility itself. 84
3. Landscapes of Dis-enclosure in V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival
This chapter attends to the investment of V. S. Naipaul's 1987 novel The Enigma of Arrival in Romantic ways of seeing and feeling. The novel traces a relation of mutual dependency between particular versions of landscape and particular modes of subjective life, a dependency, in other words, between aesthetics, or the aestheticized versions of time and space internal to conventions of landscape writing, and ethics, ways of living. 36
Romantic landscapes have an insistent presence in the novel and seem to underwrite, for its narrator, the possibility of solitude and seclusion, of a “safe,” non-traumatic mode of
(non-)relation with the historical world. The novel also charts the contamination of these landscapes with the traces of the historical worlds that, as aesthetic enclosures, they seek to exclude. In my argument, the way that this novel holds aesthetics and history in tension defines its postcolonial Romanticism.
A central imperative we can begin to see in postcolonial appropriations of
Romanticism, as we shall see in this and in my following chapter, is to create or to imagine a world of aesthetic enclosure, a world protected provisionally, or impossibly, from the materiality of postcolonial historical life. In exploring this imperative, however,
I do not mean to imply that such writers inevitably recapitulate a “Romantic ideology.”
Even though Naipaul's novel mobilizes Romantic languages of withdrawal, dejection,
36 Such an “ethics” need not necessarily be “ethical” in the conventional sense (denoting, for instance, a relation to a transcendent ethical call). 85 and solitude, it also inherits – self-consciously, I argue – a constitutive Romantic tension between the desire for aesthetic enclosure and an interest in the promise or the threat of what I will call, adapting Jean-Luc Nancy's vocabulary, “dis-enclosed” communication, defined as the possibility of a “touching” between the fields of aesthetics and historical life. The ethical viability of such communication, however, which I see as a central interest of the Romantic corpus from which Naipaul draws, is never determined in advance. I thus position Anita Desai's novel Fire on the Mountain as the countervoice to my reading of Naipaul, since “dis-enclosure,” a concern of both texts, could hardly be marked more differently in them: Naipaul's novel finds in Romanticism the possibility of a movement of reconciliation between the inner and the outer, subject and history, the protocols of the aesthetic and the field of reality, and reenacts this nominally organic teleology in its own form and structure. Desai's novel, on the other hand, seems to point to a brittleness, frailty and fakery internal to aesthetic ideals (whether ordained by
Romanticism or another enclosive ideal), even as it dramatizes the strange persistence of a Romantic ethos in the life of Nanda Kaul, the novel's protagonist, if we can call her that. The novels, read together, make possible contrasting readings of the relationship between Romanticism and postcolonial strategies of representation: we have, on the one hand, Naipaul's apparently conservative mimicry of Romanticism, strikingly indebted to
M. H. Abrams's idealization of the structure of the “Greater Romantic Lyric” in his famous essay on this theme, and, on the other, Desai's indication of a fragmentary aesthetic, which seems to struggle or to fail to add up to a redemptive whole.
Romanticism, even in advance of the shocking conclusion of Desai's novel, is already vulnerable and impure, de-naturalized, as it were, by the repeatability of its landscapes. 86
I use the term “enclosure” in this chapter to denote the interest of Romanticism, wherever it takes place, in separated spaces, in spaces held somehow apart from the space-time of contemporary historical life. In my use of this term I have in mind, first of all, Saree Makdisi's imaginative reading of Wordsworthian “spots of time.” In Makdisi's argument, to which I refer above, spots of time are at the centre of Romanticism's oppositional relationship with modernity because they articulate a desire to preserve
“sites of difference and otherness,” offering “temporary shelters” from the apparently irresistible forces of “modernization” (13). The presence of “spots of time” in the postcolonial text, understood thus, might therefore appear as a utopian gesture, a gesture that refuses, however vainly, the claims to representation of the fallen historical world.
But I also want to invoke the history of relations of property and land in my usage, given the long and ongoing history of enclosure and its irreducible connection to postcolonial history and to landscape aesthetics. The act of enclosure is simply the act of “turning open, communal land into private property” (Marzec 8), bringing “commons,” land for common inhabitation or common grazing, into a capitalist system of ownership and cartography, and usually creating, in turn, wealthy landlords, dependent tenants, and a new class of dispossessed “vagrants,” to use the dominant Romantic-period term. What I call “aesthetic enclosures” have a doubleness, therefore, since they might simultaneously be implicated in a utopian gesture, the gesture of resistance to modernization of which
Makdisi writes, and in a relation of division and appropriation that keeps different spaces, different parts of otherwise common land, apart from one another. Aesthetic enclosures are analogous with these worldly, capitalist enclosures in the way that they present space: they exclude or transmute toxic elements that might contaminate, for example, the 87 picturesque scene; they separate and enclose aesthetic space from the open ground of inhabited history.
The Enigma of Arrival traces the withdrawal of its narrator into a space of safety and seclusion, a place of retirement from “the world” – from professional and personal obligations, failures and disappointments, from the burden of others and even from the burden of history – into the landscape of rural Wiltshire, as the novelist figure rents a cottage within the grounds of an old manor house in search of “healing,” or of what he also calls a “second life” (172). The narrator, resembling Naipaul as an Oxford-educated novelist of Indian descent from Trinidad, relays his impressions of the landscape, his affective responses to it, and the stories of those who live (and die) in the surroundings of his cottage. Interpolated within this narrative are stories of his earlier experiences migrating from Trinidad to London, and of his development as a writer. The narrator finds, in and around his cottage, what he describes as an “unchanging world” (32), a
“picturesque” landscape amenable to the literary and painterly eye, a landscape for which his reading – Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – has made him “ready” (27), so that he can encounter this place in a way that makes it seem as though, “in that little spot around the farm buildings and Jack's cottage, time had stood still, and things were as they had been, for a little while” (13). He sees, here, visions of “man fitting the landscape” (15), visions, even, on certain stretches of his daily walks, “of the world before men” (45). As far as such visions lie at the centre of the 88 novel, they might seem to indicate the operation of a powerful, and powerfully problematic, postcolonial Romanticism, in which the novelist, turning away from the historical and socio-political concerns of his earlier fiction, consoles his subjectivity and renews his aesthetic through immersion in a rural idyll.
To approach the relation of Enigma to the literature of the English canon is inevitably to approach its “Romanticism” in two senses, then: first, it is to consider the privileged place of allusions to Romanticism within the text and of specific stylistic elements and thematic concerns associated with Romantic poetry; and second, it is to take account of the apparent operation, in Jerome McGann's terms, of “Romantic ideology” in the text, an ideology embedded in its interest in a rural English literary tradition interested not so much, in Derek Walcott's words, in “setting out to see the world as [in] turning one's back on it, [in] privacy, not adventure” (122). Such is the substance, in fact, of many of the critical appraisals of this text. Salman Rushdie, anticipating subsequent readings of the novel, critiques the author for having chosen “to inhabit a pastoral
England, an England of manor and stream,” and so for having failed or refused to bear witness to his experience as a dislocated, immigrant postcolonial subject.37 The novel has been variously critiqued in vocabularies that implicitly take issue with its privileging of the aesthetic over the historical: Dennis Walder has considered the novel as an example of
“postcolonial nostalgia”; Ian Baucom has asserted that it represents an instantiation of a
“post-imperial picturesque”; Stuart Murray has observed that, for many, this novel takes
Naipaul's corpus beyond the rubric of the postcolonial.38 The terms of such critiques seem 37 Many readers of the novel, including Rushdie, identify the novel's narrator as “Naipaul” and read the text as a memoir. The novel calls itself a novel, however, and I insist upon reading it as a fiction and its novelist-narrator as a fictional character, or at the very least as a minimally fictionalized persona. 38 See Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias, Ian Baucom, in his chapter on Naipaul in Out of 89 to indicate, in Harold Bloom's somewhat problematic terms, a kind of weak or passive relation to English literary history, even one that manifests itself in the novel's recapitulation of a dehistoricizing ideology.
Romantic ideology, as McGann explains in his famous study, habitually ignores, elides or transcends the materiality of contemporary historical and social life, especially through its representation of landscape. In my argument, Naipaul's engagement with the
English literary tradition, in particular his novel's adaptation of Romanticism and its landscape aesthetics, has a manifold significance, but cannot easily be reduced to
“Romantic ideology.” The adaptation of Romanticism that Enigma enacts – a conservative adaptation, perhaps, but an adaptation all the same – may have to do with a gesture of literary affiliation, even, as Derek Walcott puts it, with a “self-canonizing” gesture, one that positions Naipaul's work in a self-consciously non-adversarial relation to the English canon. And this Romanticism may also have to do with the presence, but not the simple assertion, of Romantic ideology in the text. But the significance of the relationship does not end there, because in this novel's mediation of Romantic ideas of self and world and of the relation between them, there resides a complexity that tells us something about Romanticism itself, and about why Romanticism is a resource for the postcolonial writer, or at least for this postcolonial writer. The novel draws on
Romanticism not as an alibi for its evasion of history, but to animate a dialectical tension between what I call the space of “enclosure,” populated by consoling picturesque images, and the contingency and instability of history. Romanticism, as a linguistic and imaginative resource, is neither discarded nor somehow neutralized by the text, but
Place (Baucom credits Rob Nixon for the formulation “post-imperial picturesque”), and Stuart Murray, “Naipaul Among the Critics.” 90 instead finds its significance for the novel precisely in its relation to the experiences of aesthetic disappointment that it charts. At stake in this negotiation is the status of literature itself: the relationship, that is, between literature and history, and the capacity of literature, and of the writer's subjectivity, to survive in a world of violence, destitution and contingency. For Naipaul, in other words, what is at stake in his appropriation of
Romanticism is the very possibility of a postcolonial aesthetics, of a form of postcolonial writing, with the historical sensibility this denotation implies, attendant to lived experience in its broadest sense.
The entry points for a discussion of Romanticism in the novel are many, such is the deep embeddedness of Romantic aesthetic practices within the text, not only its saturation with allusions to Romanticism but also its thorough and seemingly untroubled engagement of a Wordsworthian mode of self- and world-articulation. The novel's
Romantic elements include its interest in a particularized, local landscape and in the subject's relation to the landscape, expressed in the idea of landscape as something that
“partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories” (335), by our “ways of seeing”; its language of melancholia, its vistas of ruin, and its interest in the possibility of a healing, recuperative encounter with “nature”; its interest in the untold stories of “ordinary” people, especially those of the poor; and its integration of “two consciousnesses” within the narrative structure, with the consciousness of the older, more mature writer, reflecting back upon and framing the untutored perspectives of his younger self. This Wordsworthian Romanticism reflects far more than a programme of displacement, idealization and false consciousness (three of McGann's key terms). The text's fully realized Romantic imperatives, in fact, themselves arise out of complications 91 within a movement towards aesthetic enclosure: they provide ways of negotiating with anaesthetic intrusions that trouble the narrator's initial desire to withdraw into the picturesque scene provided by the surroundings of his Wiltshire cottage, that trouble, in a sense, his own prior constitution as a subject of Romantic ideology, fostered less by beauty and by fear than by the delusory promises of the English tradition of literature and painting.39 He arrives in England “ready” for what he sees, pulling into the station in
Salisbury equipped with the pictures of Constable gleaned from his “third-standard reader” (7), and feeling himself, at last, to have finally arrived at the centre of his own imaginative world. But if this is so much Romantic ideology, so much a marker of the narrator's idealizing subjectivity (as well as his submission to the ideals of colonial education), then it is important to recognize that the landscape produces an estrangement of his literary ideals, an estrangement that is simultaneously an estrangement of the novelist's desire for aesthetic enclosure, for a shelter from the space-time of postcolonial modernity.
The first sentences of the novel indicate this estrangement, alluding to the imbrication of blindness and sight in a way that anticipates one of the novel's guiding themes: the instability of visual perception. The narrator recalls how on his first morning in the cottage he “could hardly see where [he] was,” before he began to see, as the rain cleared, fields and, “depending on the light, glints of a little river” (5). In the story of the narrator's walk that makes up the first part of 'Jack's Garden,' the first section of the
39 I use the word anaesthetic, rather than the more straightforward non-aesthetic, in order to register the fact that these intrusions not only come from outside of the idealized aesthetic enclosure, but also (for this reason) challenge the capacity of the narrator to cultivate his sensibility. They thus present a threat akin to numbness: they stall the forms of sensory and emotional life that Romanticism, as an institution of feeling, promises. I elaborate my discussion of an anaesthetic “stupidity” in my reading of Disgrace. 92 novel, the narrator builds up a kind of picture of the surrounding landscape, but a picture that is repeatedly destabilized, as he recalls seeing “young woods that falsely suggested deep country,” or seeing what he saw “very clearly” without knowing what he was looking at (7). The route of his walk includes a viewing point for Stonehenge, from which the ruins are visible, albeit “far away, small, not easy to see” (9), but as the narrator, on his first walk that afternoon, aims to reach Stonehenge itself he loses his way:
“From the viewing point at the top, it had seemed clear. But from that point down had risen against down, slope against slope … and at the bottom, where mud and long puddles made walking difficult … and there appeared to be many paths, some leading off the wide valley way, I was confused” (9). If the idea of the painter, and the possible
“glimpse of the painter's view,” as the narrator later thinks, makes the scene, past or present, “like something one could stretch and reach,” something “physically before one, like something one could walk in” (187), then the embodied experience of walking in the landscape belies this painterly illusion. In the narrator's “first walk,” as the novel clearly intervenes in the Romantic literature of pedestrianism, he is forced to ask the way, an
“absurd” inquiry, he thinks, that further emphasized “the strangeness of the walk, my own strangeness” (10).40
40 Included in this large body of writing would be many of Wordsworth's poems, some of Coleridge's and John Clare's, and Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker. See Robin Jarvis for a study of this writing: he attends to how “intellectual processes and textual effects are grounded in the material practice of walking” (33). Late inheritors of this tradition, aside from Naipaul, would include W. G. Sebald's work, especially The Rings of Saturn, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (notwithstanding the presence of the car in this book). A recent intriguing example is Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. As in Naipaul's novel, walking, in these texts, seems to be associated with solitude and withdrawal, but also with communication: there is always a companion, even if it is only the implied auditor or imagined future reader. Shehadeh's text, a memoir of his experiences walking in the hills surrounding Ramallah over many years, offers an especially sharp meditation on the division between past memories and present realities of landscape, as it charts the encroachment of Israeli settlements and roads on the Palestinian hills, which destroy 93
Such blindness or sensory estrangement always attends the clarity of aesthetic or simply literary perception in the book: Stonehenge can hardly be seen, but the “luminous red or orange targets of the army firing ranges” are all too visible, encroaching upon the vista and precipitating a kind of aesthetic disappointment. Only by excluding or ignoring or somehow not seeing all that can, literally, be seen, can the narrator take pleasure and comfort from the place that he inhabits. Larkhill is the name of the army artillery school, but only by being blind to the highways and army barracks can the narrator see the larks, larks that “behaved like the larks of poetry.” Tennyson's poem was true, the narrator remembers, or at least remembers thinking, as “the birds rose and rose, in almost vertical flight,” appearing as “another unexpected gift” of his solitude. And with these “ideas of literature” enveloping the world, the narrator sees “the wild roses and hawthorn” on his walk, but he doesn't “see the windbreak that grew beside as a sign of the landowners who had left their mark on the solitude, had preserved it.” “I didn't think of the landowners,” the narrator recalls: “My mood was purer: I thought of these single-petaled roses and sweet-smelling blossoms at the side of the road as wild and natural growths” (21). It is clear that Naipaul's novel is interested in spots of time that are simultaneously menaced enclosures, in spaces that seem, at first (selective) glance, ideal and yet are profoundly of- the-world, extended in the contingent fields of space, time and history. The narrator walks in a space he has only previously considered as a landscape suspended in time, and the experience of physical movement and corporeal inhabitation renders the landscape uncanny, the place of an unexpected alienation and loss of sight.
It is in the retrospective recomposition of his early walks that the narrator can
their beauty and make them increasingly impassable – at least for Palestinians. 94 rearticulate this loss of sight as the emergence of a new, more mature, and more powerfully synthetic way of seeing, as I will show below. Even this recomposition, however, cannot entirely overcome the sense of loss registered here. The phrasing carefully establishes a distance between subject and phenomena: the narrator does not experience or encounter “wild and natural growths” but “thinks of them” as such. The
“wild and natural growths” are not the flowers as they present themselves to the senses, but are a trope at one remove from the flowers, reproduced by a cognitive operation. And yet, the narrator remembers, it was in his “purer” mood that he perceived them thus. This purity is ambiguous: does it imply that the idea of pure perception is itself part of the trope, or does it imply, in a richer paradox, that there is a kind of purity to the capacity to inhabit tropes innocently? This moment complicates the commonsense phenomenological opposition between trope and pure phenomena, the latter arrived at through the
Husserlian “reduction” of tropes. When the tropes fall away, after all, what emerges is not a purer perception, but a frightening impurity, as the narrator encounters the world in its ugliness and alienating otherness. I will call this falling away of tropes, which is also an opening onto the anaesthetic, “dis-enclosure.”41
The narrator's interest in the enigmatic figure of the landlord suggests the novel's concern with precarious aesthetic enclosures. The landlord is a figure of fascination and desire for the narrator, a fact that is especially clear in his obsession with the view that he imagines the landlord to be looking out upon from the window of his manor house:
He would have looked out on something like perfection: the lawn with the
41 We see this in Disgrace, too: the passage from Wordsworth to which the novel alludes is about the falling away of the trope and the displacement of a pure mood and living thought with grief and disappointment. 95
great tree in the foreground, the forest or wood to one side, the beaten-down
water meadow beyond this lawn, with all the growth of willow and reeds and
bamboo clumps and dogwood and the shrubs that loved water; the river with
its river growths, the water meadows beyond, the willows, the channels, the
drowned fields catching the morning light and, at a sufficient distance, the
evening light; and then the bare downs again. (203-4)
This view, as the narrator imagines it, presents a kind of spot of time, a vista of precarious, accidental painterly perfection; only thanks to a series of unlikely accidents does this patch persist, having remained, the narrator thinks, “almost unchanged since
Constable’s day.” The landscape and its ideal aesthetic is available for the immediate apprehension of the viewing subject, presenting a perfection uncompromised by shifting weather, or historical intrusion, or even, in this description, the mediating consciousness of the landlord. And yet this prospect is mediated not only by the frame of the landlord's window but also by the conditional tense, tentatively compromising the possibility of the view the description frames. Even the capacity of the landlord to see what the narrator imagines him seeing is questioned by the narrator’s exaggerated concern with his optical faculties: “What did he see?,” the narrator wonders: “Whatever he saw would have been different from what I saw.” “What did he see,” he asks again, “sitting there in his canvas- backed chair,” on one of only two occasions on which the narrator physically sees the landlord (214). On neither occasion, interestingly, does he see the landlord’s eyes: the narrator first catches a confused glimpse of the landlord in the car (188), but Mr Phillips informs him that he would have been wearing dark glasses (189), and on this second occasion he only sees his back before he retreats, “shocked” and again suddenly feeling 96
“like an intruder” (214). It isn’t even clear to what extent the landlord is able to see at all, since we later learn, in a crucial detail, of the landlord’s operation to “partially restore” his sight (254).
The landlord's vista of picturesque natural ruin appears anomalously free of signs of historical ruination: the landlord can see the ivy and the forest debris – the
“superadded … ornaments of time,” in William Gilpin's description of the picturesque
(Observations 50) – but not the hedges made up of nineteenth-century household rubbish by which the labourers established their claim to the land, asserting their ancient squatters’ rights (202), an important history of workers' resistance given the sociopolitical reality of Britain in the 1970s (when most of the events of the novel take place), and calling up the deeply saturated historicity of the place, as of all places. The landlord's landscape is an object of desire for the narrator – “all this just a few miles from the famous old towns of Salisbury and Wilton, the modern urban clusters of Southampton and Andover,” he thinks – but he learns that this landscape, perfect and complete, is not a natural accident but an active creation. The ivy is allowed to grow on the grumpy insistence of the landlord, and those most appealing images of the immediately surrounding landscape are also the most artificial, such as the “rough old farmhouse,” which was in fact a squash court, built only fifty years before in a way “to suit the setting” (and which is initially described in language recalling the Anglo-Saxon fragment,
“The Ruin”), or the church, with its medievalist architecture, which was “as artificial as the farmhouse,” a creation of its Victorian-Edwardian restorers (48-9). The landlord's world really is an enclosure, erected through work, through fences and walls, and a product of, rather than a refuge from, the material conditions of history. It is also the 97 product of a project of a historically localized nostalgic desire: the grand, idealized
History of the manor grounds is a simulacrum, and this simulacrum is history, the contemporary history of post-imperial nostalgia in which the narrator is implicated. In time, then, the narrator is forced to shed his language of natural ruination, the idea that the landlord's view reflects the consoling spectacle of nature reclaiming human culture, as he confronts, again and again, the historicity of things.
The narrator feels a sympathy for the landlord's retirement from the world, but in his retrospective meditation comes to think of the desire for such a space of retirement as a marker of a sickness of the soul, of the narrator’s own melancholia and of the landlord’s malaise, a malaise of which the narrator has “no precise knowledge, but interpret[s] as something like acedia, the monk’s torpor or disease of the Middle Ages” (53). That perfected image of landscape – also an image of history and time, or of history transmuted into a kind of timeless time – which the narrator imagines to be framed by the landlord’s window and upon which the narrator, in part because of his racial self- consciousness, is anxious not to intrude, is also an image which “contained its own corruption”:
There was nothing in that view (of ivy and forest debris and choked water
meadow) which would irritate or encourage doubt; there was nothing in that
view which would encourage action in a man already spiritually weakened by
personal flaws, disappointments and, above all, his knowledge of his own
great security. The view – so complete, so simple – seemed to say or could
appear to say: ‘This is the world. Why worry? Why interfere?' (205).
The lesson that this picturesque landscape teaches, in the narrator's reading of it, is 98
Romantic Ideology at its purest, but this commentary makes clear that the novel is about aesthetics, even, in an oblique way, about the politics of aesthetics, about the relation between art and the world, sense and history.
In the narrator’s meditation on the figure of the landlord, on his “acedia” and spiritual corruption, resides a commentary on the novel’s own interest in a withdrawn aesthetics of history, on its own proximity, perhaps, to the impasse of the Romantic ideology underpinning the landlord’s desire for his reassuring view. But the novelist figure is denied, again and again, the reassuring view that he seeks, as the possibility of finding a picturesque vista is continually undermined. If the effect of the picturesque depends upon a stability of visual perspective and a seamless pictorial integration of every element of the landscape, then the novel denies such integration in its proliferation of “views,” emerging from but also challenging what the narrator calls his “ways of seeing.” Those settled moments in the novel are always provisional, immediately unsettled again as picturesque images of time and place refuse to stand still, leading to confusion, or to melancholia, or even to a quasi-physical pain. After Jack's death, the awareness of which permeates the story of the novelist’s life in the cottage and inflects his retroactive depiction of the landscape that includes Jack’s garden, the earth appears to be “stripped finally of its sanctity,” although, the narrator thinks, “that might only have been my way of looking … I carried that earlier picture” (59). The narrator is forced to fight “the distress I felt at everything – a death, a fence, a departure – that undid or altered the perfection I had found” (52). If these images mark the book as an example of a post- imperial picturesque, then what is clear is that the picturesque is operating under pressure or even erasure, situated within an idea of landscape scarcely capable of being “illustrated 99 by painting,” to quote Gilpin once more (41). The novel is developing, it seems, an auto- critical nostalgia, perhaps for an imperial image of England, as some critics of the book have claimed, but as much for a proper site for a particular kind of literary creation, for lyrical enunciation – the enunciation of the self, rather than the collective – in a book concerned with the difficult emergence of a particular kind of postcolonial writer.
The eighteenth-century and Romantic-period history of the picturesque itself registers this pressure upon it. Gilpin's reading of the picturesque marks its constructedness: its particular qualities, in contrast to those of the beautiful, require “the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps” (6). The beautiful, for Gilpin, appears elegant and formally pleasing in nature, but when introduced into a picture “ceases to please.” To achieve the effect of the picturesque, the “smoothness” of beauty must become “roughness” or “ruggedness”:
Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks instead of
flowering shrubs: break the edges of the walk: give it the rudeness of a road; mark
it with wheel-tracks; and scatter around a few stones, and brushwood (8)
This is not to say that the picturesque is akin to the sublime for Gilpin, however. Unlike the sublime, the picturesque must have “some degree of beauty” (43). The picturesque thus emerges from a careful, cultivated roughness, a curated, ordered sense of the rugged.
Gilpin's theorization of the picturesque, in its emphasis upon the discipline required to produce and to frame it, inevitably also implies its instability: to move through a picturesque landscape would precisely be to risk stumbling upon objects and prospects that would not conform to the picturesque aesthetic. We can see this possibility in Jane 100
Austen's Mansfield Park, in the scenes in which the characters “take a survey” of the grounds of Sotherton, since the “situation of the house excluded the possibility of much prospect from any of the rooms.” As the question of surveying the grounds, of arranging
“the who and the how … by what junction of carriages and horses most could be done,” the “young people” observe “an outward door, temptingly open on a flight of steps which led immediately to turf and shrubs, and all the sweets of pleasure-grounds,” and “as by one impulse, one wish for air and liberty, all walked out” (84). The door, however, only leads onto an excessively artificial and disappointingly tame prospect:
The lawn, bounded on each side by a high wall, contained beyond the first
planted area, a bowling-green, and beyond the bowling-green a long terrace
walk, backed by iron palisades, and commanding a view over them into the
tops of the trees of the wilderness immediately adjoining. (85)
The area is a “good spot for fault-finding,” evidently in need of the “improvements” that dominate the conversation. But there is another door, which Miss Crawford assumes must be locked since “the gardeners are the only people who can go where they like,” but the door is in fact open and leads the group into the “wilderness” which, though still “laid out with too much regularity,” brings “refreshment” (85-6). The passageway the group takes onto the wilderness violates the disciplined ordering of different spaces and prospects, reflecting the larger failure of the artifice of the grounds of Sotherton: just as the gardener's route is accessible to the visitors, so the gardener's labour is all too visible in the excessive regularity of the cultivated wilderness. When the group arrives at the ha-ha, the entrenched wall which marks the boundary of the property without being visible from the house and grounds, the constitutive artificiality of landscape is exposed. And it is 101 walking that makes this exposure inevitable: bodies are motivated to move in space in ways that transgress the limits the picturesque must place on them, as becomes clear when, to Fanny's disquiet, Miss Bertram and Mr Crawford jump the ha-ha in order to continue their walk (93). This scene also therefore illustrates what I mean by dis- enclosure: the ha-ha displays the wilderness as an enclosure, and marks the delineation that also opens it, that puts it in touch with its outside.
Given this representational history of the picturesque, it is unsurprising that the viability of the perfection the narrator in Naipaul's novel thinks he had found is questioned by his own presence, his presence as a body inhabiting the landscape rather than as a disembodied, sovereign eye. The viability of the picturesque depends upon a kind of spectatorial discipline, a controlling or simple absence of bodily movement, as well as a concealment of the history of its production. In the novel, however, the narrator threatens to infect the landscape with his own “strangeness.” This strangeness, significantly, is not the strangeness of any body but includes, in particular, his racialized presence and the post-imperial history of supposed “decline” that it marks. If the narrator's retreat to Wiltshire is informed by a nostalgic desire for a dehistoricized past, or for a time without history, then this desire is haunted by his own untimeliness, his status as an anachronistic wanderer among the ruins – as a contemporary body, and a raced body, “stranded” in the landscape of the past.42 Indeed, the novelist's own presence in the landscape calls up a different idea of ruin, not ruin as part of an aesthetic of antiquity, paradoxically integral to an aesthetic of “perfection,” but ruin as a feeling of the decline
42 I'm playing, here, with the title of Peter Fritzsche's study of the literature of ruin, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004). 102 of the present, of the decline of the landscape and the nation and empire which it metonymically calls up: “That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present.”
The narrator feels that his presence in “that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country” (15). The narrator returns to this theme, thinking back to what might have been the “perfection of the house,” arrived at “forty or fifty years before, when the Edwardian house was still fairly new, its family life fuller, when the ancillary buildings had a function and the garden was looked after.” As the narrator observes, however, “in that perfection, occurring at a time of empire,” there would have been “no room” for him: “The builder of the house and the designer of the garden could not have imagined, with their world view, that at a later time someone like me would have been in the grounds, and that I would feel I was having the place – the cottage, the empty picturesque houses around the lawn, the grounds, the wild gardens – at its peak, living in a beauty that hadn’t been planned for” (52). There is a sense of trespass here again, a sense, even, of being looked upon by the picturesque gaze, as the spectres of the past even now persist and continue to make his presence, fifty years later, “a little unlikely.” But the narrator's presence, simultaneously, effects an opening of the landscape onto its own historicity, onto its placement within the post-imperial, postcolonial history of Britain and the world.
We gain, then, a sense of a setting saturated with different landscapes, intruding upon and ruining one another. The narrator, on his walks, sees the deposits of geological 103 time, premodern ruins, the remnants of preindustrial farming, the aesthetic scars of mechanized agriculture, relics of empire and markers of post-imperial decline, images of false pastoral alongside the waste of rural decay and socio-economic destitution. And the landscape, too, partakes of the narrator's own memories and histories, shaped by his reading but also, more subtly, by his awareness of his colonial descendence, such that the manor garden inevitably invokes as its counterpoint, as Rob Nixon suggests, the
Trinidadian sugar plantation on which his grandparents worked (a history discussed in the second and fifth parts of the novel, Slow Violence 246). If the landscape of the cottage and manor from the picturesque vantage must appear as a history-less landscape, ornamented with but not disrupted by ruin, then such an aesthetic enclosure is opened onto its outside in the book, onto historical landscapes that do not exist as “emanations of literature.” And if the Wiltshire landscape is metonymic of a colonial image of England, and thus represents a consecrated space of “pure” history in the narrator's earlier consciousness, then this myth is displaced within the book by the emergence of a different idea of history: history, the narrator learns, is not that for which literature has prepared one, that which takes place only in the canonized spaces of the literary tradition, but that which intrudes upon images or ideas – “pictures” – of spatial and even temporal ossification, which are themselves culture-bound (the predictable temporality, for example, of the seasons, as canonized in all manner of Romantic and post-Romantic lyrics). In this sense, “history” may be that which breaches the frame of literary idealization, that which violates those picturesque or pastoral pictures of time and space incubated within and disseminated by the English canon. And so an alternative idea of
“dis-enclosed” history and of literature, of a literature open to history and of a history 104 open to the contingent, the unexpected, or the abject, emerges in place of the idea that history exists only in spaces consecrated by literature, in places, to allude to Froude, where there are people in the “true” sense of the word.
The novel's distinctive aesthetic seems to be linked to this movement of “dis- enclosure,” as it traces the opening of these separated spaces, consecrated by literary language, onto their outside.43 I appropriate the word “dis-enclosure” from Jean-Luc
Nancy's Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. “Dis-enclosure” is a translation of the French title, La déclosion: déclosion is a neological adaptation of
éclosion (hatching, forming, opening) that designates “the reversal of a prior closing”
(ix). It implies something more than merely “disclosure,” although dis-enclosure does certainly disclose. In Nancy's work, the word dis-enclosure seems to belong to a web of related if not quite interchangeable terms, such as exposure, touch, spacing, community, and singularity. These words all imply a kind of border: touch, for example, is a coming together and a distancing, a simultaneous meeting and separation, just as community
“takes place” as an exposure of what is common – that is, separation, linked to singularity, to the spacing between all bodies, and to death. Nancy's idea of “uncanny landscape,” developed in The Ground of the Image, places these ideas in a context relevant to my argument. In the following passage, for instance, Nancy elaborates the idea of the garden, placed in an unstable distinction from the “country”:
A garden, a plot, an enclosure, not, however, one that is first closed, in the
sense of enclosed in itself, but disclosed: opened to a capacity that belongs to
43 This outside is not the novel's outside, of course. There is nothing extrinsic about “history” in relation to the textuality of the novel, but only in relation to the younger novelist's untutored desire for enclosure. 105
it but that does not preexist it so long as it is not made available within its
closure. With this closure, it is not simply closed: it is also opened, and the
opening as such lays out the edges, the demarcations that it needs. (52)
The enclosure is not “enclosed in itself” but “disclosed”; to enclose is at once to open, just as to build a wall would be to separate and to touch. Touching, disclosure, community, spacing – for Nancy, these things always take place: we are always separated and always in touch. Every closure is opened, and every opening “lays out edges,”
“demarcations.”
I want to observe primarily that we can look for specific features in landscape or landscape writing that disclose the relation Nancy describes and so “dis-enclose” the scene, but it is possible to challenge some of the assumptions of this essay from a postcolonial vantage. Of particular interest here would be Nancy's description of a landscape that “contains no presence.” For Nancy, landscape properly does not contain presence because “it is itself the entire presence”; it is a representation of the land as “the possibility of a taking place of sense” (58). And for this to be the case, it is necessary that there is an “absenting of all presence that would possess any authority or any capacity for sense.” For Nancy, it is clear that there can be no Romantic subject authorizing, or being authorized by, the landscape, if the landscape is to be truly manifest. In postcolonial
Romanticism, does landscape appear as a “sacred space cut out,” something that “cuts out a place for the withdrawal of presence” – somewhere from which “the gods have departed” and also, I might add, from which the authorizing power of literary history has absented itself? I would argue generally not: what cannot be withdrawn is landscape itself as minimally conventional representation with an inescapable historicity, shaped by 106 languages, such as the languages of the imperial gaze or Romantic aesthetics, that inflect its representation. We see throughout this study that postcolonial landscapes have histories – cultural and material – that undermine their innocence, or their aspiration to
“withdraw … presence.”
In Enigma, a dis-enclosive passageway is opened up between what Sarah Casteels calls “idealization and historicization,” or to what might equally be called, in the novel's own terms, ideas of “perfection” and “ruination,” once opposed to one another. The novelist's journey, as described by the novel, begins in a place in which the tumult of history has become too much to bear. But the novel deliberately and explicitly marks this melancholic pathology and indicates its unsustainability. And yet, if such historical melancholia marks the novel as a postcolonial inheritor of Romanticism, of its “poetics of disappointment,” in Laura Quinney's phrase, then Romanticism also exists as a resource for this melancholia's resolution, as we shall see.
All of this implies the presence of a more interestingly Romantic version of landscape within the text, one that is to be distinguished from a separated, de-historicized vision of space associated with the picturesque, and that has much more to do with an aesthetic of dis-enclosure, in which spatial or temporal sanctuaries persist in a compromised relation to the world that they border. If there is a kind of “reality principle” at work in the novelist's recollections, though, this does not imply any abandonment of the aesthetic but rather a realignment of his aesthetic expectations. 44 The poetic forms of
44 As Anne-Lise François observes, the project of “'re-forming' desire to make it compatible with 107
Romanticism find their significance for Naipaul's novel because they permit such realignment. Romanticism provides schemas for seeing with the “literary eye” (18), evident at such moments as when the narrator encounters the “Wordsworthian figure” of
Jack's father, “exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude” (16) (he later think that he belongs in a poem
Wordsworth might have called “The Fuel-Gatherer” (23)), or when he sees Jack's garden, concreted over after Jack's death, and thinks that surely “some seed, some root, would survive,” some “memory of Jack, preserved in some shrub or flower or vine” (91), a passage that especially recalls “Michael” and the “straggling heap of unhewn stones” that carries the trace of the shepherd's story. But Romantic lyricism also offers expressive languages for seeing more than once, for responding to aesthetic anomalies or disappointments and tracing the emergence of another way of seeing.
In part, for Naipaul's novel, this allows the inclusion of extra-aesthetic materials within the canonical aesthetic of Romanticism. Just as Wordsworth's speaker in “Tintern
Abbey” notes the hedgerows that he remembers from five years before, that are in fact, he thinks, as he checks himself, “hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild” (ll. 16-17), so the novelist figure in Enigma habitually looks and looks again, in a way that makes clear the genealogy of landscape perception upon which the text is drawing. What is especially striking about these repeated acts of looking, though, is the extent to which the second, or third, moment of perception does not so much modify as radically undermine the initial picture, and, in turn, threaten to undermine the narrator's available object choices” is always “an essentially 'aesthetic' project, whatever its guise as a tough-minded, disenchanted 'return to reality'.” The novel remains a novel interested in rendering the sensory and sensible apprehensions of the lyric subject. Notwithstanding this point, in reading the conclusion of Desai's novel we encounter an altogether different deformation of the aesthetic. 108 precarious aesthetic equilibrium. In “Tintern Abbey,” the poet's muffled recognition of the presence of impoverished workers and vagrants in the landscape has proved a point of critical contention, because their lives, as many have argued, are transmuted into an aestheticized trace – only the “wreathes of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees” offer the “uncertain notice” of the rural poor that would in fact have been quite visible at the scene. (I would suggest that the narrator's consideration of the landlord's view, with all of the historical presences that it excludes or transmutes, inserts the novel into this discussion.) But from the narrator's perspective, threateningly anaesthetic images cannot be transmuted so easily. This process, if anything, is reversed, as aesthetic images are undone, and the narrator's aesthetic sequester is contaminated by the painful images that it seeks to exclude. The cows around his cottage at first seem to him “like the cows in the drawing on the label of the condensed milk-tins I knew in Trinidad as a child” and as a result persuade him that he is “at the very heart of romance,” inhabiting “a child's fantasy of the beautiful other place” (84); but this colonial myth of the space of England over time breaks down, as he learns to see what he doesn't first see, what is “harder to imagine” and “unreal,” oddly: the absence of calves, “except very sick ones,” which seem like “fluid sacks of black and white or brown and white on straw”; the numbers scored into their rumps; and reminders of assisted insemination and gestation “[gone] wrong,” the “oddly made cattle … with that extra bit of flesh and hair” isolated from the other animals (84-5). And so the cows on the milk tins, or the cows of Gray's “Elegy” or
Goldsmith's “Deserted Village,” are imagistically parasitized by these pictures of real, suffering cattle, inhabiting not the space of aesthetics but the history of industrialized meat and dairy farming and the capitalist exploitation, to use another Romantic word, of 109
“nature.” Almost every aspect of the Wiltshire scene that greets the novelist is undermined or overturned in his retroactive recomposition of the landscape, as the second of the two Wordsworthian consciousnesses significantly rewrites his earlier untutored fantasies. Some of these moments are cast in Naipaul's overly familiar mode of repugnance, in which ugly scenes or ugly faces become objects of gratuitous obsession: when at last he sees Pitton, the gardener of the manor grounds, close up, he describes his noticeable “lack of beauty,” his bad chin, bad teeth, and marked skin (68), all of which clash with his image of Pitton as a picturesque part of the scenery going about his daily tasks. And involved with this, the intrusion of time itself, or of the unseasonable temporality of historical change, is painful for the narrator, as repeated changes in the scene undermine its “differential” status – its status as a spot of time – and expose the narrator to the ruins of history, or to the lesson that to experience time is to experience one's own implication in a process of ruination.
The novelist figure's own Romantic solitude, in this book, touches its outside, by communicating, however reluctantly, with the otherness of history. Such elements of the text do not, however, push it beyond the interests of Romanticism but instead explain why Romanticism has such a privileged place among its intertextual references. Not only are such shifts, changes and disappointments communicated in a lyrically Romantic voice
– a voice that marks itself as a voice of the subject in solitude, meditating upon the evolution of his “ways of seeing” – but the larger structure of the novel is itself reflective of the teleology of Romantic lyricism, at least as such a teleology has been understood in the work of M. H. Abrams. Abrams's description of the movement of the Romantic lyric is worth quoting in full, given how remarkably faithful Naipaul's novel appears to be to 110 this version of the lyric form:
[These poems] present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a
localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent
vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy,
sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a
silent human auditor, present or absent. The speaker begins with a description
of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a
varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling
which remains closely intervolved [sic] with the outer scene. In the course of
this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss,
comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem
rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an
altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the
intervening meditation. (77)
The poems that yield this paradigm belong to the subgenre that Abrams calls the “greater romantic lyric,” a lyric form that includes Coleridge's conversation poems, Wordsworth's
“Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” and his “Elegiac Stanzas,” and some of Shelley's and Keats's odes, particularly Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale.” While
Abrams's account of the form can hardly be considered a neutral or transparently faithful reading of the poems he considers – in particular, his investment in delineating a teleological movement within all of his examples, as the speaker inevitably “achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem,” would seem untenable after the work of Paul de Man – I am interested in the 111 extent to which Naipaul's novel enacts a similar movement, and what this tells us about its particular investment in and disposal of Romanticism.45
The novel's fluent, conversational diction, attaining to a transparency of speech which, all the same, “rises” at moments of intensified meditation “to a more formal speech”; the presence of an implied auditor, identified with the reader, in this case; the novel's beginnings in a description of a landscape which prompts an “integral process” of memory, thought, and feeling; and the end-point within Abrams's description – the insight, recognition of loss, and moral decision – are unequivocal markers of the text's adaptation, or mimicry, of lyrical modes associated with Romanticism. The novel begins in a place of seclusion, a place of possible healing, a place of separation from the disappointments of the world – characteristics bound to the culturally conditioned
“naturalness” of the place. The narrator, at first, does not know what he is seeing, sees only what he wants to see, what his reading has prepared him for, but before long things begin to change – a death, a fence, a departure – leading to an insight that is also a loss, as he is forced to recognize that the space he inhabits is not static, immutable, eternal, aesthetic, but in fact historical, and as such a place of flux, conditioned by extra-personal and extra-literary forces: “I had hardly begun to look, the land and its life had hardly begun to shape itself about me, when things began to change” (51-2). The ramifications of this insight permeate the text and the narrator's shifting perception of the landscape: his first impulse is to see decay, before, looking more deeply at his surroundings, he comes to shed the idea of decay – implying some ideal in the past – and to embrace the
45 By “disposal,” I mean to compose in a particular way, to arrange a disposition, which also has the connotation of controlling or doing away with: in this case, what is done away with is the heterogeneity or messiness of Romanticism, including the “literariness” of a language that may resist the production of any particular disposition. 112 idea of change, of flux, in a way that not accidentally recalls parts of Rousseau's famous reverie on his fifth walk.46 Coming to terms with change, the narrator learns to move beyond his melancholia, to “shed this easy cause of so much human grief,” to reconcile himself with the fact that “everything was ageing; everything was being renewed or discarded” (32). Ultimately, having travelled back to Trinidad for the funeral of his sister, he comes to the most significant “moral decision” of his story: to write the book itself, the book that we are reading. This decision is marked as an explicit response to the thoughts of death that have been afflicting him (343): faced with “a real death … I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden”
(354). At this point, too, the book completes its Romantic itinerary in exemplary fashion, returning us to the novel's beginning and so asserting its organic wholeness – the synthesis of beginnings and endings.
Out of the ruins of the picturesque image, I want to suggest, the novelist figure weaves a compensatory aesthetic embodied in the form of the novel itself.47 Ian Baucom writes of a “confusion regarding the relations of decay and perfection” in the novel, supporting his reading with the following tissue of quotations, taken from different moments in Naipaul's novel:
I lived with the idea of decay. (I had always lived with this idea. It was like
my curse: the idea which I had had even as a child in Trinidad, that I had
come into a world past its peak.) … Decay implied an idea, a perfection in the
46 See the passage beginning “Everything is in constant flux on this earth...” (88). 47 This compensatory aesthetic is to be distinguished from the modernist idea of aesthetic autonomy, whether articulated in terms of Wimsatt's “verbal icon” or more radically by Adorno's “aesthetic autonomy,” precisely by the importance of consolation: the work of subjective composition/consolation the novel undertakes (according to its own theory of itself) degrades its modernist autonomy. 113
past … I liked the decay … while it lasted it was perfection. … I lived not
with the idea of decay. (23, 52, 210, as quoted in Baucom, Out of Place 181)
I have already attempted to bear witness to the self-cancelling, self-revising nature of many of the novelist's recollections in this text. And indeed it can be difficult to know whether, and at what points, we are reading what Gérard Genette calls a repeating narrative or what he calls an iterative narrative, a narrative in which what happened once is narrated more than once, or in which what happened more than once is narrated only once. The novel is full of strange and deliberate repetitions, such as when the narrator parenthetically observes the “overspecified” old wooden gate, “pulled out of true … by its own sturdiness and weight” (270), before describing, a few paragraphs on, the gate’s heavy timber frame, and how, again, it “had been pulled out of true by its own weight and sturdiness” (272). Descriptions, observations and turns of phrase proliferate in the text, on one level reflecting a sense of order and routine, as the narrator sees similar things on his daily walks, while also generating a sense of temporal and experiential accumulation that threatens to add up to confusion. But in these meta-subjective reflections, the novel's teleology – precisely a Romantic teleology of self-revision and self-realization – becomes clear. By de-contextualizing his quotations, Baucom obscures the process of maturation that these reflections in fact articulate, as they describe the explicit shedding of a particular idea of decay and the development of an alternative, less elegiac, idea of flux, as this reintegrated quotation suggests:
I lived not with the idea of decay – that idea I quickly shed – so much as with
the idea of change. I lived with the idea of change, of flux, and learned,
profoundly, not to grieve for it. I learned to dismiss this easy cause of so much 114
human grief. Decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past. But would I
have cared to be in my cottage while the sixteen gardeners worked? (210)
The novel, in fact, resolves the dialectic of perfection and ruination that it develops: the narrator initially seeks sanctuary in the Wiltshire countryside because it provides images of perfection or completion, images that reflect an identity between ideality and materiality, literature and world. These are the images for which the narrator has been waiting, apparent “emanations” of literature (21), and they promise to reintegrate his splintered subjectivity, put “out of true” by his experiences as a racialized, postcolonial subject and their incompatibility with his literary ideals. The ruins of such images – the old dilapidated house, the faded grandeur of the manor, the landlord's malaise, or the overgrown ivy – can be reintegrated into such “perfection” precisely through the work of the aesthetic of the picturesque (in which they are marked as consoling images of nature reclaiming culture), but other images, specifically images of modernity, are more threatening: the abject cattle, the highways, Jack's garden after having been concreted over, the unsightly fences. These anaesthetic images “ruin” the aestheticized ruins that fill the landscape, failing to function as what Gilpin calls “superadded” ornamentation and intruding upon their aura of antiquity. These ruins demand an alternative response and it is at this point in the movement of the dialectic that the landscape becomes properly secondary, as what emerges is a narrative of subjective growth, specifically of writerly emergence, whereby a novelist-figure emerges who has learnt how to live in the historical world and who has learnt how to write a book that apprehends and, in a sense, tames all that it contains, asserting its own compensatory completion and perfection.48
48 The Mimic Men exhibits a similar narrative structure: the narrator is writing his memoirs of his experiences as a politician on a fictional Caribbean island from a space of withdrawal (a bland 115
For Derek Walcott, Naipaul's unapologetic relation to the English canon is the symptom of a deeply problematic self-canonizing ambition that must ultimately be read as a submissive form of postcolonial mimicry. But in the novel's own terms, the novel's
Romanticism defines its “authenticity,” clearly distinguished, within the text, from the metropolitan modernism to which the narrator was attached in his youth (in his Atlantic passage the narrator attempts to fit his on-board experiences into a failed short story entitled “Gala Nights” that would prove his worldliness and sophistication). In drawing on Wordsworthian languages of self-development and self-realization, the novel is able to chart the reintegration of “man and writer” (a phrase it obsessively uses), and the novel itself is positioned as the product of this reintegration. In this sense, the novel articulates the formation of an aesthetic and an ethic, a way of writing and a (gendered) way of living. Where the novel departs from its Romantic progenitors, or even, in a sense, completes their ambitions, is in the force of its resolution, the apparent stability and serenity of the reconciliation it achieves. It seems that, for Naipaul, the form of the novel enables an enlargement and amplification of this reconciliatory movement: an enlargement of its meditative duration, of its scope, in terms of the materials that can be included within the “meditation,” and a heightening, above all, of the reconciliatory discipline of writerly composition. If Romantic lyrics generally present themselves as acts of speech, as lyric enunciations rather than artefacts, and therefore end in ways that can always be considered a suspension as much as a completion of speech, then Naipaul's novel, and the work of composition that it foregrounds and separates from the contingent perspectives of the “determinate speaker,” is able to enact with greater force a completion
suburban hotel in England). 116 and aesthetic “perfection.” In this sense, an idealized Romanticism is enacted by the trajectory of the novel, and through this idealization the novel is able to do its work: to mediate in a non-traumatic form the traumatic materials of history. 49
We can see that the Romanticism of Enigma is integrally, if obliquely, bound to its postcoloniality. It resolves the fractured subjectivity of the postcolonial subject of colonial education, and it enables a mediated, non-traumatic “touching” between the fields of literature and history, even if this touching takes place in this novel primarily in the landscape of post-imperial England, although not exclusively: the second and fifth parts of the book describe the narrator's childhood in Trinidad and subsequent returns, and in these sections, too, the narrator is concerned with his capacity or inability to look
“selectively,” or to see with the gaze of “romance.” Primarily, to call Naipaul's novel an example of postcolonial Romanticism is to suggest that the space of literature, in the book, is a space in which healing becomes possible, in which a reconciliation with death and with history, with the writer's own historical finitude, his own composition by forces beyond his control, can be achieved. Even if Romanticism possesses an aura within
Enigma by virtue of its canonical status, its status, at least for the younger novelist, as part of “English Literature,” in the end it becomes more than this, more than part of an ossified or overburdened corpus. In sharp contrast to the work of Jamaica Kincaid, for example, within which Wordsworth's poetry or Brontë's fiction is forever bound to a scene of “conquered and conquests” (Lucy 30), Naipaul's novel accesses Romanticism as
49 Following Paul de Man, it ought to be impossible to idealize Romanticism, since the nature of literary language prevents such idealization. It is perhaps for this reason that Naipaul describes his own prose as attaining to a transparency of style: “I wish my prose to be transparent – I don’t want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I’m saying to what I’m describing” (The Paris Review). This is very far from the deconstructive conception of language – and itself echoes the views of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. 117
“text” rather than “work,” retroactively making of Romanticism something that bequeaths active strategies of representation to the postcolonial writer.
In an essay on Naipaul's “late style,” Timothy Bewes argues the following about
Naipaul's late work and this novel in particular:
Naipaul's 'late work' shares the characteristics that Deleuze attributes to the
'new kind of image' in post-war cinema: the replacement of a unified, organic
situation with a 'dispersive' one; the irruption of incommensurability, or
'ellipsis,' into the substance of the tale, rather than remaining a mode of the
telling; the introduction of an open stroll/voyage narrative form in place of the
closed quest/search form; a strong, irresolvable consciousness of cliches; and
the expansion of this consciousness to such a level that all possibilities of a
meaningful whole become suspect. (185)
I do not find Bewes's reading of Enigma persuasive, for all of the reasons I have elaborated. Far from a Deleuzian aesthetic, Naipaul's novel inhabits an intimate relation with Romantic schemas of self and world, as Wordsworthian aesthetics achieve a seemingly effortless migration from the canon of English Romanticism into the text of the postcolonial künstlerroman. Even so, the novel remains at a little distance from
McGann's characterization of the ideology of Romanticism, in which “a record of pure consciousness” replaces the “particulars” of history, “biographical and sociohistorical alike” (90). Naipaul's novel accommodates history and articulates the historicity of its own voice, even as it also charts a passage towards an artistic freedom from this history, paradoxically enough given the central place of English Romanticism in articulating this passage. And the novel, it must be recognized, is shot through with those same moments 118 of negativity that a number of critics, after McGann, have seen in Wordsworth, moments that persist in haunting the composure of Romantic reconciliation. As clear as the teleology of Enigma might be – even clearer than the teleology of Wordsworth's lyrics, I would claim – it remains an open question as to whether the force of the novel's composure fully absorbs the moments in which the narrator confesses to his inordinate fear of bodily pain, or to his repeated dream of his head exploding, or to his grief upon returning to Trinidad, in the novel's coda, and seeing, once again, its destitution.50 How we read the novel ultimately depends upon how we read the status of writing within the novel. The narrator “la[ys] aside his drafts and hesitations” before he begins to write about Jack and his garden, but the force of that gesture of “laying aside” is questionable, just as questionable as Wordsworth's famous, critically qualified, lines about the redemptions of poetry in “Tintern Abbey”: “other gifts / have followed,” the poet writes,
“for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompence” (my emphasis).51 In
Wordsworth's poems or Naipaul's novel, we are always in the domain of the dialectic:
Abrams's moment of “moral decision” can never be separated from its conditions of possibility, the “drafts and hesitations” from which it wants to assert a cut.
50 This is to leave aside the other deletions and excisions that readers of the book as memoir have seen; for Rushdie, the word most notably absent from the text is “love” (151). 51 In his denunciation of the Romantic Ideology of this poem, McGann quotes these lines but omits the crucial “I would believe.” As Susan Wolfson explains, “to phrase a spiritual economy … with a tentative auxiliary … is to deplete the store of recompense” (quoted in Simonsen). 119
Countervoice II: Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain
I now want to turn to a novel reflective of a quite different sensibility: Anita
Desai's Fire on the Mountain. My comparison of Naipaul's and Desai's novels juxtaposes two different visions of the relationship between literary aesthetics and postcolonial history, between the enclosures of art and the “open” of historical life. Both texts trace processes of “dis-enclosure,” but if there is a reconciliatory, compensatory movement embedded in Naipaul's novel, one that rearticulates the power of aesthetics and recapitulates Romantic schemas of self and world, then Desai's novel strips Romanticism down by mediating its tropes with a bitter ironic distance. Rather than making some kind of judgement as to the “legitimacy” of Naipaul's Romanticism, I want to allow Desai's novel to offer a countervoice to Naipaul's text, as it seems to present similar concerns from a different critical vantage. This is not to say that Fire on the Mountain offers a more or a less faithful reading of the Romantic: my concern here is instead to place pressure on the aesthetic orientation of Naipaul's novel as I have read it.
Desai's novel, like Naipaul's, exhibits an interest in landscape and in schemas of landscape-perception, in the desire for solitude and withdrawal, in the thematics of melancholia, and in sites of postcolonial/post-imperial ruin. In addition to these concerns,
Desai's novel presents an interest in the figure of the child, dramatized in the text through the presence of Nanda Kaul's great-granddaughter, Raka, whose name, not insignificantly, means “moon.” But while Desai's novel, like Naipaul's, may be said to shed light on the persistence of a Romantic aesthetics and an ethics in the life of its 120 protagonist, the text ultimately hollows out this aesthetic orientation, tracing the persistence of a kind of zombified Romantic afterlife that incubates a radically inappropriate mode for relating to postcolonial history. This aesthetic mode is itself associated with death and aesthetic deadness: Nanda Kaul seeks to escape from the traumas of history and the burdens of social life by pursuing a state of aesthetic deadness, but such deadness, or numbness, cannot ultimately offer protection from the violence of the world against which Nanda asserts her aesthetic enclosure. While Fire inhabits a very different historical and regional context to Enigma, the novels share certain features. In
Fire as in Enigma, the text's protagonist is haunted by a sense of belatedness, as she inhabits an old colonial house and an imperial landscape – the landscape of the Simla hills, the former summer retreat of colonial bureaucrats – spoiled by the markers of the postcolonial immiseration of the rural poor. The movement of Desai's novel, however, opposes the movement of Naipaul's, and brings the teleology of Romantic reconciliation to crisis. Instead of reconciliation, with the return to a prior state of composure that the word implies, Desai's novel dramatizes a different movement of “dis-enclosure,” a more violent and traumatic process of communication between the subject, inhabiting a precarious solitude, and the surrounding material and historical world. Indeed, in Desai's novel no such opposition can really obtain; the very title of the text, Fire on the
Mountain, bespeaks the entrance of historical life into Nanda Kaul's sequester, even if the traces of the burning villages only persist as this abstracted, aesthetic image.
Fire is a strange and disturbing book and, notwithstanding the lyricism of its title, it could hardly be more brutally anti-romantic in its narrative trajectory. Nevertheless, I 121 contend that the novel can be read in the light of the recognisably Romantic schemas of perception it explores, even as its third-person narrative voice generates an irreducible ironic distance from them. I am not suggesting that the novel should be considered a deliberate reading of Romanticism as a body of writing, but that it offers a vantage point for critically considering the persistence (and alienation) of Romantic aesthetics within postcolonial space. Desai's own commentary about the novel's composition itself echoes
Romantic languages of memory, landscape and imagination. The novel, Desai claims, emerged out of her own memories of Kasauli as an eight-year-old child, prompted by her returns to Kasauli on holiday later in life; she writes of how she would “sometimes stop by the fence to look down the steep hillside at a small village below, its haystacks and cattle and stony paths, its small population of labourers going about with their backs bent under sheaves of grass, sickles tucked in at their waist.” Living in Bombay, Desai “felt the need to recapture that landscape which seemed essential to [her] survival,” to be put
“in touch with a different landscape, sunburnt and stark,” a landscape that might rescue her “from the onslaught of a great and abrasive city, its unrelieved ugliness, squalor, and noise.” If the opposition Desai mobilizes, in this description, between the death-dealing realities of the modern city and the sustaining memories of the natural world may seem a
Romantic one, though, this opposition does not in fact equip us to interpret the novel.
Desai describes how, in her imagination, she sent “her eight-year-old self into the hills again” in an effort to recreate “the sounds and smells and sights” of Kasauli. The child and the child's solitude, the solitude of “that summer and those hills,” became the novel's
“natural theme,” Desai writes (“A Fire Had to Be Lit” 97-101). It seems clear, though, that even if the novel in Desai's account was written from an apparently Romantic 122 vantage – based upon the imaginative reawakening of childhood memories of a specific rural landscape – the text ultimately stands as a testament not to the saving powers of the solitary imagination, but to the imagination's irresistible non-transcendence, to its descent into the historical world of violence and “ugliness.”
The novel is primarily set in Carignano, an old colonial house above the village of
Kasauli in India's Simla hills. The landscape reminded its former colonial inhabitants of
“English country towns of memory” (9), and makes Nanda Kaul want to invite an
“English water-colourist of the nineteenth-century to come and paint the view from her garden,” with its “soft blues and violets in the distance” (27-8). But this landscape is not simply a healing place, for Nanda; it is also a numbing place, a place attractive, above all, for its bareness. The landscape, Nanda thinks, might be too insubstantial even for a water- colourist. Kasauli “had rocks, it had pines. It had light and air. In every direction there was a sweeping view – to the north, of the mountains, to the south, of the plains.
Occasionally an eagle swam through this clear unobstructed mass of light and air”; crucially, though, “that was all” (4). The vista that Carignano offers is not unlike the landlord's in Enigma: Nanda tries “to divert her mind from these [uncomfortable] thoughts and concentrate on this well known and perpetually soothing scene”; all Nanda wanted “was to be alone, to have Carignano to herself, in this period of her life when stillness and calm were all that she wished to entertain” (16-17). The withdrawal the novel traces is not a withdrawal into a place in which a “second childhood” and writerly reemergence become possible. Instead, it is a withdrawal of a figure “[f]lying from something that he dreads,” in Wordsworth's lines, rather than as one “[who seeks] the thing he love[s],” in a novel that orbits silence and emptiness and is permeated with a 123
Keatsian half-love of easeful death.
The association of landscape with the promise of withdrawal and solitude, then, is as clear in this novel as it is in Naipaul's. The novel is all about framing, the framing of the sublime vistas visible from the house, positioned on a ridge above the village, and the concomitant framing of time, place and experience. The house's open windows look north
“onto the blue waves of the Himalayas flowing out and up to the line of ice and snow sketched up to the sky,” while the south-facing windows “looked down the plunging cliff to the plain stretching out, flat and sere, to the blurred horizon” (4). The description emphasizes the visual and the pictorial, here (note the word “sketched”), but the novel is interested in the sensory in all its forms, describing Nanda's absorption in “the sound of the cicadas and the pines, the sight of this gorge plunging, blood-red, down to the silver plain” (19), and in touch, as Nanda walks, “feeling the feel of each stone in the paving with bare feet” (31). The text simultaneously insists, though, upon Nanda's fraught labour of sensory exclusion, her need to reject sensory data that might trouble the peace she has found, the quietness she has cultivated in her aesthetic enclosure, in the house that
“satisfied her heart completely” (5). The novel's very first sentence dramatizes precisely the threat of aesthetic intrusion: “Nanda Kaul paused under the pine trees to take in their scented sibilance and listen to the cicadas fiddling invisibly under the mesh of pine needles when she saw the postman slowly winding his way along the Upper Mall” (3).
These opening words suggest a heightened synaesthetic perception, an attunement to the natural world, but the imminent arrival of the postman – when Nanda “did not want him to stop … had no wish for letters” – introduces “a fat ball of irritation into the cool cave of her day, blocking it stupidly.” The novel begins with the threat, averted for now, of 124 aesthetic intrusion and aesthetic blockage, the danger of an unwanted communication that would interrupt Nanda's solitude, her yearning to be left alone with the pine trees and cicadas, even to “merge with the pine trees and be mistaken for one” (4).
The narrative's precipitous movement operates by presenting a series of punctures in Nanda's desperately guarded solitude: phonecalls, letters, the arrival of Raka, the arrival of Ila Das, and, in the shocking denouement, the news of the rape and murder of
Ila Das. This narrative unfolding is also a progressive unravelling of the aesthetic situation presented in the first of the novel's three sections, entitled “Nanda Kaul at
Carignano.” Nanda's ways of seeing do not indicate simply an appreciation for nature or for beauty, but specifically a need for a highly active kind of aesthetic mediation, filtration and transmutation. In this sense, they are continuous with Naipaul's interest in the relation, or possible non-relation, between sense and world. Operating at their most powerful, Nanda's aesthetic schemas latch onto the kind of imagery that gives the book its title. These “fires on the mountain” are not only the “single lamps here and there in
Kasauli, pinpricks of light for Sanawar, little pools of blurred light for Sabathu and
Dagshai and, far away in the distance, the pale fairy shimmer that was Simla,” but also the forest fires, with all of the destruction they wreak on the local villages, appearing from the house again like “little pin-pricks of light,” like “fire[s] in a dream.” These fires appear at such a distance that Nanda and Raka, who initially mistakes the light for the glare of the full moon, “could neither smell the burning pine trees nor hear the crackling and hissing” (74). “'Whole villages may burn in a fire that big,'” Nanda tells her great- granddaughter, but Raka stands looking “through the window at what looked like a display of fireworks in the distance. Its soundlessness was eerie” (75). In the morning the 125 hills are “blotted out by smoke” (76), and the novel repeatedly describes smoke rising into visibility even where its source may be invisible: forest fires, burning houses, or the
Pasteur institute, sending its “writhing snakes of smoke into the sky” (73). It is with the image of smoke, too, that the novel concludes:
Down in the ravine, the flames spat and crackled around the dry wood and
through the dry grass, and black smoke spiralled up over the mountain. (146)
The smoke and the fire, here, are not described in causal relation to one another, but are suspended in momentary aesthetic balance. The “and” that syntactically connects the fire and smoke also bridges two divergent visual prospects: the narrator's knowledge of the fire in the ravine – here, unusually in the novel, departing from Nanda's focalization – and the view from the house of the smoke and the mountains.52
The novel's relationship with Romanticism is less explicit than that of Enigma.
The novel's landscapes often accord with tropes that can loosely be called Romantic – the prospect from the top of Nanda's garden, for instance, is the place “where the wind was keenest and the view widest” (4), as the description rehearses the superlatives of the sublime – but these descriptions do not seem to imply specific zones of the intertextual.
The novel's dialogue with the broad concerns of Romanticism can be seen most of all in its interest in the co-dependent relation between subjective life and a non-objective landscape that “partakes of what we breathe into it” (Naipaul, Enigma 335). Nanda's need for retreat, thus, informs her perception of the sanctity of the space that she has
52 The novel's interest in smoke as an ambiguous indicator of something unseen invites comparison with the smoke of the unseen vagrant dwellers in “Tintern Abbey,” similarly tracing, in aestheticized abstraction, the presence of historical life. To draw such a connection is admittedly, in this instance, to approach an enigmatic echo rather than an explicit allusion, but the interpretive implications make the connection intriguing all the same, since images of smoke provide a way of patterning the landscape with proximate social realities that are not directly addressed by the text. 126 cultivated, as well as her anxiety about its vulnerability. She has “done enough” and “had enough,” she thinks to herself, and wants “no more,” wants “nothing,” nothing that will remind her of “all those years she had survived and borne,” cluttered with children and grandchildren, servants and guests, “all restlessly surging, clamouring about her” (17).
Immediately before the revelation of Ila Das's fate, Nanda thinks:
Could she not be left alone? After this dreadful, tangled afternoon with Ila Das
screaming and braying into her ear by the hour, could she not be given a quiet
hour in which to recover, to take in the pine-tinged evening air and recover?
(144)
The connection between spiritual recovery and a cultivated “taking in” of landscape is at the centre of the novel's depiction of Nanda's character. And it is central, too, to the novel's critique of the Romantic ethos it suggests: such a “recovery,” the novel registers, may only be available in private spaces protected by wealth and privilege.
Into this enclosure, though, enters Raka. Far from demanding Nanda's reversion to a motherly role, Raka is herself solitary, anti-social, reminding Nanda of herself –
“You are exactly like me,” she asserts, to Raka's discomfiture. And yet, just as Raka rejects Nanda's self-identification, she also rejects the allure of Nanda's fantasy world, drawn to an alternative relation with time and space, to its “reality,” an attraction Nanda cannot understand (73). Raka feels stifled, bored within the “old lady's fantasy world when the reality outside appealed so strongly” (100), and she is particularly fascinated by those elements of the landscape that Nanda cannot contemplate, by the “shoals of rusted tin, bundles of stained newspaper, peels, rags and bones,” the “occasional tin rooftops, glinting” (41), or by the air around the Pasteur institute, on which Raka “smelt cinders, 127 smelt serum boiling, smelt chloroform and spirit, smelt the smell of dogs' brains boiled in vats, of guinea pigs' guts, of rabbits secreting fear in cages packed with coiled snakes, watched by doctors in white” (49). The emphasis on the overbearing sensory insistence of elements of place that, from the perspective of Romantic landscape aesthetics, might threaten to annihilate aesthetic perception, suggests an alternative ethic of relation to place and to history.
Interestingly, though, Raka also represents a refiguring of the Romantic child. In
Romanticism, the child often appears as a figure of potentiality. In Coleridge's “Frost at
Midnight,” it is the child who will fulfil the poet's dream of an apprenticeship to nature beyond the strictures of convention and dogma, who will not be “pent 'mid cloisters dim,” just as the infant babe for Wordsworth has a “filial” connection to the universe that conventional thought and religious dogma threaten to stifle. What is interesting about these figurations, though, is their production of the child as an object of desirable potentiality and as an object of discipline: the child's autonomy is glorified only if it conforms to the mature poet's spiritual programme. Appropriately, then, Raka is a frustrating embodiment of a child who does not conform to Nanda's expectations of what a child should be. If Raka's attraction to the natural world around Carignano expresses the child's freedom from the “cloisters” of convention, then “nature” undergoes a revision here: it is not pure, originary, or redemptive, but permeated with historical presence, marked by the effects of human settlement, social violence and oppression, and its own ecological precariousness. Raka inhabits the landscape bodily, slipping down into the ravine outside of Nanda's line of sight, taking untrodden paths, passing “under the railing that kept pedestrians and horses from plunging off the road and down the precipice, and 128 disappear[ing] down paths that were barely marked” (63). Her paths suggest a transgression of the meditative distancing effects associated with pedestrianist writing in the Romantic tradition. Raka wants to pierce the aesthetic containment of Carignano. She is drawn and even “inspired” by the counterpoint to Carignano at the top of the hill, “the charred shell of a small stone cottage”: there was “something about it – illegitimate, uncompromising, and lawless – that made her tingle.” This scene of “devastation and failure,” rather than the carefully managed aesthetic seclusion of Carignano, satisfies what the villagers see as her “craziness” (90-1).
Raka, in line with the figure of the child in Romantic poetry, represents for Nanda a redemptive possibility, a figure who, in her innocence, can “see into the life of things” and even inhabit and interpenetrate that life, symbolically cutting herself on the agave on her first foray down the ridge which, from Nanda's perspective, is only part of the pictorial scene. But Raka responds to a drive towards “lawlessness,” a desire to reside not in a conventional nature but in the exposed, ruined world. Raka's name means “moon” but Nanda thinks that it is a misnomer: “this child was not round-faced, calm or radiant”
(39). In fact, if the novel has its own symbology, as well as its ineluctably ambiguous imagery, then Raka comes to be associated with fire. She initially mistakes the light from the forest fires for the glow of the full moon (74), and later, as the moon rises, “a great copper-red moon that swelled like a bubble out of the dusk and shone lavishly upon the undulating hills,” Raka turns away “disappointed: she had hoped it was another forest fire” (100). In contrast to the symbolism of the moon, with its gothic connotations, clearly and almost parodically indicated by the description of the pack of jackals
“howl[ing] lugubriously at the moon and each other,” and its implication of the ghostly, 129 the spectral, the haunted – of the immateriality of place – Raka chooses fire, consumption rather than reflection, material danger and destruction rather than distance and ethereal calm. If there is a sense in which Nanda embodies a certain exhausted, vulnerable aesthetic orientation, then there is also a sense in which Raka – fire, not moon – embodies the novel's own narrative drive, its drive to burn up the aestheticized veiling of “reality,” to transgress and consume the borders of aesthetic enclosure, and to bear witness, to dis(en)close.
Such a reading has Desai's tentative authority behind it. Desai describes her own spontaneous response to a question about the “meaning” of the book from a puzzled reader: “Everyone in that book is living an illusion – their lives are built on illusions. To be rid of them, a fire had to be lit and only the child was pure enough to light it.
Everything had to be burnt away in order to reduce it to ash and reveal the truth” (“A Fire
Had to be Lit” 102). Desai acknowledges in her essay that she was herself surprised by her own response, and that she yet felt that this explanation “fitted.” But if Raka embodies a “purity,” hers is an unconventional purity, aligned with lawlessness and transgression, with a freedom from even the moral law. And the novel's representation of her final act of lighting the fire remains ambiguous. Is this a purifying fire, a fire that burns everything away and reveals the “truth,” as Desai implies? Or does Raka's concluding gesture come to be associated with, or even symbolic of, the violence of aesthetics, a violence in which we, as readers, are implicated in the novel's final sentences?
I ask this because aesthetics persists in that final image, or rather returns under radically altered conditions. The novel's penultimate chapter describes Ila Das's arrival in 130 her village at the end of her humiliating walk home from Carignano. She sees from the final fold of the hill the hamlet below her, “perched above a long skirt of terraced fields in which the ripe, ready wheat stood blond and brittle and potato vines spread themselves over the loamy earth,” and she sees “the cows coming down the upper path, their bells lugubriously tolling, their sweet smell of warm, chewed straw carrying over to her,” experiencing these soothing pictures and sensations “with pleasure, with relief” (142).
Suddenly, “[j]ust then,” a “black shape” detaches itself from the rock – the shape is Preet
Singh, one of the villagers who bears her a grudge for her social work – and assaults her, strangling and raping her: “Crushed back, crushed down into the earth, she lay raped, broken, still and finished. Now it was dark” (143). The relation that the novel seems to mobilize between landscape and ground, the vista one sees and the earth upon which one walks, is here inverted, as Ila Das is pinned down “into the dust and the goat droppings,” her body crushed into the ground, as she achieves, in a pitiless textual echo, the kind of communion about which Nanda initially fantasizes in her desire to be a tree, to merge with her physical environment. In the final chapter, we return to Nanda's perspective, to her appreciation that it “was still so lovely here,” and, once more, to her yearning not to be disturbed, to her fear of the ringing telephone. The telephone does ring, bringing news of Ila's death, and as Nanda hangs her head, wanting to cry but unable to make a sound,
Raka interrupts: “'Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire,'” Nanda continues to sit on the stool “with her head hanging, the black telephone hanging, the long wire dangling” – dead? distraught? – and the novel offers its final paired image: “Down in the ravine, the flames spat and crackled around the dry wood and through the dry grass, and black smoke spiralled up over the mountain” (146). 131
It seems difficult to accede to Desai's own reading of this final moment as suggestive of some kind of Romantic redemption. The image persists here, but its focalization is uncertain. We do not seem to be perceiving the fire from Nanda's perspective, nor even from Raka's. In a cinematic gesture, the narration redirects the reader's gaze, turning it away from the spectacle of Nanda's disintegration and Raka's entreaty, to look outside of the house and the window and away from the site of Nanda's trauma. Desai suggests that the image of the fire becomes symbolic of some kind of renewal at this juncture, but it can equally be read as a marker of an aesthetic living-on, an afterlife of an image, repeated throughout the novel, that suggests displacement, here, as it earlier suggests transmutation. And Nanda is not even looking; she is not appreciating the spectacle that Raka has created for her. This moment in the novel appears as an aesthetics without aesthesis: the spectacle is granted, but Nanda is incapable of perceiving it. It is only we, as readers, who see, and we see without any apparent focalization. The third-person narrative's free indirect style mediates the perspectives of the novel's characters throughout, but here there is a spectacle without someone to see – it is presented only for us to read. Aesthetics, in this sense, are recovered in this conclusion, but under new conditions that render this recovery bitterly ironic.
The novel is registering its own aesthetic imperative at this moment, it seems – its need to describe the “black smoke spirall[ing] up over the mountain” – and even implicating its readers as consumers of the novel's bitter aesthetic satisfaction. The novel self-consciously reproduces an aesthetic imperative that overrides the documentary and socio-political demands of realism, charting a strange persistence of aesthetics, of 132 writing, and of the Romantic: the black smoke spiralling up the mountain is the enigmatic mediation, the aesthetic trace, of the rape of Ila Das. This is also a retreat into the suspended temporality of the image, which is all that the novel gives us, as it concludes in such a foreshortened way that its own narrative agency seems stunted. The novel brings to crisis the aesthetic imperative precisely by registering it at this point – but simultaneously this conclusion enacts the novel's negative possibility, its power to situate an aesthetic in such a way as to shockingly empty it out.
In contrast to Naipaul's novel of writerly emergence and to the associated
Romantic interest in the aesthetic cultivation of the self, the aesthetic situation, in Desai's novel, only fulfils itself by taking us to an anaesthetic place, a place of image without feeling, without the subjective mediation of Nanda or Raka. Nanda's aesthetic enclosure is not transcended. On the contrary, it is fractured and ironized, persisting in a language of radical estrangement. There is no reconciliation between aesthetics and history; the image is simply given, given for what it is from a vantage incapable of sense. The idea of dis-enclosure in this novel must also be revised, then: dis-enclosure is not a reconciliation, nor a simple phenomenological quality, but a term for the fracturing of aesthetic traditions (including, in this case, the Romantic concern with aesthetic perception itself) as they are brought into proximity with realities that they cannot mediate.
What does the contrast between the trajectories of Fire and Enigma tell us about the relationship between postcolonial writing and Romanticism, more than the heterogeneity and ambiguity of that relationship? First, it seems clear that if Naipaul's 133 novel takes us to a point at which solitude can become communication, in which writing and meditative reconciliation can enable a non-traumatic opening onto the outside in a safe process of “dis-enclosure,” then Desai's novel makes clear the force and violence of the aesthetic transmutations it charts, and subsequently opens up decisive fractures within them. If the aesthetic of Naipaul's novel is dependent upon the viability of Romanticism's migration into the postcolonial text, then the inevitability of a shockingly anaesthetic disclosure in Desai's novel is also a marker of the vulnerability or plain fakery of the aesthetic schemas by which Nanda wants to perceive the world. Writing or literature, thus, also takes on an alternative valency: where Naipaul's novel negotiates with its literary predecessors and finds an authentically postcolonial voice, at least in its own terms, through this negotiation, Desai's novel seems to ask a question about how aesthetics can survive in the world of patriarchal, misogynist violence, poverty, and ecological collapse, a world that it does not so much document as “touch.”
This contrast implies, simultaneously, two alternative readings of Romanticism and of the kinds of possibilities and problems it presents to the postcolonial writer. The loss and dejection that always inform the Romantic poetics of withdrawal lend themselves to these novelists precisely because they write from the vantage of postcolonial disappointment or melancholia. Such melancholia is connected to a discrepancy between art and history, literature and life, “man” and “world” (at least in the terms of Naipaul's novel). The question remains about the capacity of Romantic representational modes, its various stagings of a negotiation between sense and world – the negotiation I call dis-enclosure – to reintegrate the terms of this opposition in a higher organic unity. In my reading, Naipaul's novel announces its own success in this 134 endeavour, which is also the proof of the possibility of the survival of a form of writing that is at once postcolonial and “Romantic,” at once attuned to history and to the demands of art in its own remaking of the world – although, as I suggest above, the finality of Enigma's moment of “moral decision” might itself be critically ambivalent, and whether Naipaul's other novels reflect this survival is a question beyond the scope of this chapter. Desai's novel, in contrast, is interested in the bad faith of a Romantic aesthetic, while seeming to stage, enigmatically, its own disturbing implication in an ideology of the aesthetic under conditions of terrible violence.53 Both novels enact dis- enclosure by inhabiting the border zone, tracing the dividing line, and in this way both novels bear a kind of witness, even if it is a negative witness, to the historical conditions under which writing must labour and aesthetics must operate.
53 It seems to me that the fire on the mountain in this novel bears comparison with moments of aesthetic separation in other Desai novels, including In Custody, in which Deven, the novel's frustrated protagonist, looks up from a park in Old Delhi to see the dome of the Jama Masjid, “absolutely still, very serene,”; gradually, “the sky disappeared, the sun and the light and the glare, and the shape became clearer and sharper till it was all there was – cool, high-minded and remote” – a passage that explicitly invokes Shelley's “Mont Blanc.” 135
4. Romantic Aisthesis and the Poetry of Stephen Watson
Implicit in this study so far has been an idea of the politics of aesthetics. In Derek
Walcott's Another Life, prior literary and cultural precedents, as well as the past and present of colonial history, represent a burden on the poet's creativity which he must move beyond if he is to fulfil his poetic vocation. In V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of
Arrival, the English canon again has a political inflection, functioning as a metonym for an imperial historical grandeur that is as desirable for the narrator as it is untenable and ultimately false. Insofar as Walcott and Naipaul achieve a textual ground for successfully negotiating with the aesthetic institution of Romanticism, they may also be said to achieve aesthetic reconciliations with the histories of imperialist cultural power.
Lamming's and Desai's more ambivalent conceptions of the relationship between aesthetics on the one hand, and historically and locally specified senses of the world on the other, for this reason provide countervoices, offering vantage points for a critical reflection upon the afterlives of Romanticism in postcolonial texts.
I now turn to a historical site in which the concerns I have been exploring play out in particularly intense and problematic ways: apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.
Romanticism has so far appeared in this study as an aesthetics with a political history, because its postcolonial survival itself reflects the ongoing transnational power of a
EuroWestern cultural formation. In white South African writing, Romanticism appears even more troublingly as part of a specific aesthetic regime. Here, I focus on the work of 136 two contemporary South African writers: Stephen Watson and, in my countervoice – longer, in this case, than the dominant Romantic articulation – J. M. Coetzee.
“Aesthetics,” in this chapter, I understand in its proper relation to bodily sensation; derived from the Greek aistheton, simply meaning sense perception, “aesthetics” denotes the domain of sensibility in the broadest sense, including the registers of sensorial, sentimental and affective experience, as well as the languages by which such sensible experiences are articulated in the literary text. If Romanticism can be understood to describe a moment in cultural history at which “aesthetics,” in this sense, becomes a privileged concern of poetry and art, then why does it reappear, in precisely this guise, in the work of these very different South African writers? And how do we read the aesthetics of Romanticism in these texts in concert with, or counterpoint to, the realities of apartheid, given that apartheid itself can be considered an aesthetic regime – a regime of white aesthetic enclosure – as much as a regime of the racist organization of space and political life?
I begin by discussing what I term the “naïve” or “completed” Romantic aesthetics of Stephen Watson's poetry, and its role in serving a range of complementary functions: the production of a spirit of home through a repeated sensory “communication” and reconciliation with non-human landscapes; the mediation and facilitation of particular forms of affective response to the poet's spatial and temporal surroundings; the generation and authentication of aesthetic autonomy, of the freedom of the eyes and the senses; and the concomitant separation of “history” and “poetry.” Watson draws on Romanticism as a dehistoricized poetic mode that can repair and replenish the aesthetic worlds of the poetic subject. Romanticism, for Watson, sustains the possibility of an aesthetic regime, of what 137
Jacques Rancière would call a “distribution of the sensible” exclusive to the heightened, dehistoricized perception of the (white) Romantic subject. Romanticism, in Watson's work, becomes a representational resource for keeping aesthetics alive within the violent political dispensation of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. J. M. Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace intervenes in this Romantic discourse – David Lurie embodies the forms of Romantic subjectivity that Watson's poetry seeks to resuscitate – while rearticulating
Romanticism as something that inscribes and anticipates its own failure, and in this way becomes useful once more. The novel gestures towards the possibility of a new
“distribution of the sensible” that isn't grounded in the sovereignty of the perceiving subject – a possibility inscribed at the unstable heart of Romantic discourses of the subject.
My methodology in this section can be articulated in three ways, although these approaches operate alongside one another in my discussion. Most simply, I consider these texts as performances or appropriations of Romantic representational practices. This is my primary approach with Watson's poetry, whose work explicitly recapitulates Romantic tropes without marking its transformation of them. Second, I consider Watson's poetry and Coetzee's novel as two contrasting readings of Romanticism, the first, in my argument, positing Romantic aesthetics not as the cultural source but as the ahistorical guarantee of the persistence of a form of aesthetics, of consistent, authentic and unchanging sensible relation, with the world around. Coetzee's novel, on the other hand, reads Romanticism as a discourse about aesthetics that circles around the possibility or threat of sensible alienation and even annihilation. Romanticism, understood thus, becomes the locus of a critique that can then reread the work of Watson and the plight of 138
David Lurie, among other protagonists of Coetzee's novels, against the grain of the interpretive schemas of both of these “Romanticists”: Watson, or at least the autobiographical speaker of his poems, and Lurie, a teacher of Romantic poetry and
“disciple” of Wordsworth in particular. In my discussion, a “disciplined” language of
Romanticism that promises aesthetic plenitude for the perceiving subject confronts a counter-discourse of Romantic aesthetics that threatens such self-replenishing
“distributions of the sensible.” Romanticism is internally infected by aesthetic disappointment and ethical failure, and only for this reason, it would seem, offers an appropriate language for enunciating the belatedness of white subjectivity in South
Africa, and for fracturing the “naturalness” of white presence on the land.
There is a repeated moment in Stephen Watson's poetry that seems to reveal the imaginative centre of his art. The poet is standing, or sitting, in contemplation of the sky, when a change in the natural scene suddenly becomes apparent. In “In the Beginning,” for example, the first of his Selected Poems (2000), the poet recalls “that moment then / when suddenly in a blue whose inmost blue gradually infused the sky, / the evening star – mother of stars, a planet – would show through, / and he knew he could not move” (ll.
14-17). Or in a later poem, the “Overture” to his Kromrivier Sequence, the speaker recalls
“lift[ing] his head: / again, it's here, in the clear nowhere, / the single star that, each night, climbs / the long descending line, the western flank / of that stone peak the sunset has left clear” (ll. 24-28). Similarly, in “Afternoon Light in April,” or “The Sea Close By,” or
“The Mountain Light at Kromrivier,” a predictable change in the visual or sensory quality 139 of the poetic tableau – the shifting blue of the April sky, or the subtle coolness of the newly apparent season – brings with it an equally predictable sense of epiphany: the
“moment when everything goes clear” (“Mountain Light,” l. 32). Clarity, transparency and stillness generally distinguish these aesthetic and temporal intensities, forming part of a language of astonishment, in which the poet, as adult or child, is habitually “silenced before the size of weather / the presence of the Earth” (“This Late Place,” ll. 19-20). Such astonishment, though, quickly comes to initiate the pedagogical programme of the poems: the star of “Overture” will disappear as dusk turns into night, “[but] not before it's clear once more / why he should be standing here, this far / down the valley floor, this late” (ll. 36-8). The substantial explanation of what is “clear once more” is necessarily unspoken, since the irresistible meaning of the poet's presence is enacted by his sensuous participation in the nightly transformation of the light of the Cape – the poet “should be standing here” because, in his rewriting of the visible scene, his own experience is every bit as constitutive of the natural sense-scape as the rocks or the sky, the heat or the coolness. The poem nearly exactly repeats the lesson of “In the Beginning,” a poem that itself bears witness to the indefinite iteration of this same revelatory moment: “Already then, with this beginning, this being his first world, / he knew that at the very end he would still be there, that child, / while night turned blue, infused, pine-trees tented in the silence” (ll. 29-31). The adult speaker recalls his realization as a child that his future would be punctuated by these same moments of revelation. Each epiphany is thus layered upon a prior epiphany: the poet's memory becomes an archive of his own settled presence, calibrated with the immortal temporalities of “nature.”
These poems establish a myth of continuity even as they function through the 140 momentary cessation of temporal movement. The epiphany of “In the Beginning” occurs as the voices of the adults fade, as the garden darkens, and as the remaining day's warmth is “exhaled” by the watered lawn. The child looks up, averting his gaze from the “forest boundary,” on those evenings “when no sound came / across the grass to call him in” (ll.
13-14). These are stolen moments of freedom, delimited and differentiated from the socialized world whose retreat the poem points up. As he sees the evening star and the outlines of the mountains against the sky, he knows “only / this was his world, there was no other – no other could be home” (ll. 24-5). This knowledge of belonging is immanent to the separated, suspended temporality of the child's apprehension of the beauty of the scene: this other world, in which the poet is in relation with nature, a world autonomous of the house, the garden and the family, is the poet's true home. And this immanent knowledge, the child knows, will be revealed again and again: “in the evening garden, at the end, he would be whispering still / against the other voices, grown angry … to himself, against them all: 'pine, dark mountain, star...'.” The poem departs, at this concluding moment, from the sensory immediacy of what appear to be singular moments suspended from ordinary social time in order to project those moments into a personal future. The possibility of this repetition is sustained by the doubled temporality of the epiphany: the “spot of time,” of memory, at which everything goes clear, is mapped onto the transpersonal, transhuman temporalities of “nature,” which include the time of natural cycle (the star that emerges at every dusk), the geological time of the rocks that form the scene with the sky, and the cosmic time of the movement of the planets themselves, all anchored in and yet transcendent of the poet's personal memory. The poem establishes an inviolable, non-contingent relationship between the poet's mortal, feeling body and the 141 immortality of nature, and, by so doing, bestows a certain grace upon the speaker's time of stillness and meditation, a grace that comes from somewhere “out there,” somewhere other, somewhere beyond.
It is difficult to imagine a more disciplined recapitulation of Romantic discourses of time and nature than that which we see at such exemplary moments in Watson's poetry.
In positing moments of memory as sources of a feeling of continuity, community and even a certain kind of immortality, his work most obviously appropriates the language of the “spot of time,” which I have already discussed in relation to Makdisi's elaboration of it. The concept of “spots of time” was first formulated, of course, in Wordsworth's The
Prelude, and it is worth returning to Wordsworth's characterization of it for the light it sheds on Watson's poetry:
There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress'd
By false opinion and contentious thought …
our minds
Are nourish'd and invisibly repair'd (XI.258-265)
The spot of time is a heightened moment of sensibility, an intensity whose significance is unhinged from its temporal origin, retaining, in the depths of our minds, a healing and nourishing virtue. This nourishment “enables us to mount / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen,” persuading us that the mind is “lord and master” and that
“outward sense” is the servant of “her will” (ll. 267-273). The mortal bodiliness of sensuous perception is transcended by the mastery of the mind which, in turn, grants 142 supersensible access to the “one great mind” of nature (II.272). The spot of time is a kind of portal onto a plane of transcendence, accessing a unity that leaves behind historical contingency. A spatialized time – limited, finite, touchable – gives way onto pure time: unlimited, metaphysical, eschatological. Something similar happens in Watson's poetry, although what is important, here, is that the speaker's “spirit” comes back again: the poet transcends the particular, only to return to the particular site in the Cape that granted the transcendence in the first place. If Wordsworth's poetry asserts the instrumental value of the spot of time (insofar as it grants access to something beyond the singular moment), in
Watson the transcendence of the singular is not the end but the means to reasserting the particular value of these spots of space and time in the Cape. This distinction carries great importance, because it casts the spot of time as a key figure within Watson's project of imaginative territorialization. The spot of time is not simply a memory, here, but is a reconstruction of a particular “space-time,” associated with a moment of memory but more importantly with a specific natural site. The spot of time, in Watson's reception of it, becomes a mechanism that enables an autobiographical scripting upon a particular topography, performing a kind of sensory or aesthetic “settlement” of the landscape of the
Western Cape.
The centrality of English Romanticism as a resource for Watson's work is clearer than anywhere in A Kromrivier Sequence, a sequence of seventeen poems that charts the poet's excursion into the Cederberg mountains, a few hundred kilometres north of Cape
Town. The poems work together as a rewriting of Wordsworth's journey into the Alps from The Prelude, as well as of other Romantic readings of alpine landscapes. The first poem, “Overture,” echoes certain aspects of Percy Shelley's “Mont Blanc.” The poet 143 surveys the scene, the meniscus “that this river forms / from water flowing, thickened, clear,” the “lip of stone, soapstone- / smooth,” the “cold floors of mountain pools.” The visual details of the tableau are intricately rendered but, as in the Shelley poem, each of the descriptive passages is interrupted as the poet looks up: “He lifts his head: the peaks are there,” just as Shelley's speaker repeatedly looks “on high” to see the “gleam[ing]” mountain “[f]ar, far above.” Watson's poet casts himself as an exemplary and even stereotypical Romantic subject, as a man “alone before the sky” (l. 22) or, in the second poem of the sequence, “On an Ancient Theme,” as a figure who is suddenly reminded by the rain that roars over the peaks of “daybreaks in the Alps almost exactly like this / when
I climbed there, through the Austrian Tirol … twenty years ago.” This memory takes the poet further back, though, since the present scene reminds the speaker not only of “what it was, years past, / that first led one to poetry,” but also of
what it must have been,
in times that seem more ancient still,
that once led others
to stop, to pray.
The experiences of the poet's excursion, which are ultimately all aesthetic experiences, impressions of light, colour, sound, and temperature, are therefore experiences, in their heightened intensity for the speaker, that bespeak his place within a larger community of feeling, populated by poets and artists of a Romantic sensibility. The sequence ends with a poem, “Postscript: The Spring above Rif Farm,” that seems to rewrite Wordsworth's
“Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew Tree.” Both poems inhabit the genre of the inscription poem, in particular what Geoffrey Hartman calls the “nature-inscription,” a subgeneric 144 form of the lyric, connected to the epitaph, by which the poet inscribes his presence upon the scene. Such inscription poems, according to Hartman, incorporate not simply the scene itself but also “the very process of inscribing or interpreting it,” such that the setting includes the writer in the act of writing, the poet “in the grip of what he feels and sees, primitively inspired to carve it into the living rock” (40). As in Wordsworth's
“Lines,” the inaugural inscription poem proper for Hartman, Watson's speaker addresses future travellers and mountaineers coming upon the cedar grove from which the poet speaks, while physically layering, in his act of poetry, the traces of his own sensory experience upon the scene. In fact, all of the poems in A Kromrivier Sequence should be considered as forms of the inscription poem, since they all function as aesthetic recompositions of the mountain-scape, as acts of simultaneous appreciation and creation that refract the landscape through the poet's sensibility.
Watson's engagement of Romantic modes is not merely a neutral reception of them, however. I call his Romanticism disciplined because it puts Romantic modes to work within a teleology of imaginative territorialization, one that has an obvious resonance in the political context of South Africa. What is interesting from an intertextual perspective, here, is the fact that the poems upon which Watson draws do not always themselves sanction the teleology his work seeks to develop, even if these same
Romantic poems are seemingly invoked to guarantee the authenticity of such a teleological movement. Despite the apparent echoes of Shelley's “Mont Blanc” in
“Overture,” for example, the conceptual movements of the poems are entirely different:
Shelley's is a poem of uncertainty, of negative sublimity, in which the radical alterity of the mountain provides an insurmountable challenge to the poet's powers of description, 145 repeatedly puncturing the metaphysical lessons the poet seems to want to draw. Both poets look up, but what they see is quite different: Mont Blanc, “far, far above,” stands in a mute, inhuman indifference; its “power,” with which the poet wants to communicate,
“dwells apart in its tranquillity / Remote, serene, and inaccessible,” presenting an alienating physical “nakedness,” the “naked countenance of earth.” The physical summit of the mountain only emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between the poet's contemplation and the mountain itself, and it is only this distance, in the end, that teaches the mountain's lesson. The South African mountains, on the other hand, are utterly familiar to Watson's speaker: “Murraysberg, Winterbach, Apollo – he names / them one by one – each one is there / and as before, its stone a scaffold of stone...” If Shelley's
“Mont Blanc” can be read as a poem that problematizes the emergent cultural discourse surrounding the Alpine landscape, as the mountain that ought to promise a transcendent communion instead stands, in the end, sublimely and banally “there,” then Watson turns this lesson on its head. Despite the cultural apparatus he carries – the conventions of the scene's representation as well as the names of the mountains – the poet speaks as though he stands at the origin of his poetic discourse: he “names” the mountains, “one by one,” each one predictably there “as before,” each one confirming the validity of the speaker's knowledge of what he sees. As an overture to the speaker's journey, the poem anticipates the itinerary of the sequence as a whole: the mountains are emptied of any alterity and so serve to confirm, faultlessly, “why he should be standing here.”
Why is it that Watson should draw upon Romanticism in such explicit ways? It is clear that Watson's deployment of Romantic tropes is also a reading of the Romantic archive, one that is naïve and also perhaps strategically naïve. But is it possible to read 146
Watson's work as naïvely as his work reads Romanticism? It is important to note that the discourse of landscape has its own historicity. As Steven Bourassa argues, the very concept of landscape only emerged alongside capitalist modes of land tenure: “As the intimate tie between land and its users was severed with the development of capitalism, the idea of landscape arose ... it became possible to distance oneself from the land so that it could be viewed as landscape” (3-4). But what about the history of the discourse of landscape in South Africa? Watson's poetry is profoundly concerned with the topography of the Western Cape, but it never speaks of South Africa and seems to refuse to be read as a poetry of nation or national community. There is some sense in which Watson's poetry isolates itself from discourses, be they nationalist or liberal or resistant, of South Africa, even interrupting the appropriation of the landscape of the Cape under the proper name of the nation. Watson's poetry never translates an affective belonging with the landscape into a language of political belonging in South Africa, and in this sense is to be distinguished from discourses of South African landscape that rely upon such a translation. In fact,
Romanticism itself becomes a resource by which Watson's work is able to lay claim to an alternative genealogy of aesthetic inheritance that has little to do with the history of South
Africa. And yet this alternative genealogy is itself internal to the mythology of space in
South Africa, which operates in part through a prior absorption and transformation of
Romantic schemas of nature and human/nature relation. Jeremy Foster writes that, in the twentieth century, the preoccupation with “finding some kind of psychic accommodation with 'the land' became a defining feature of white South African nationhood, an ever- present topic in art and literature, and a recurring anchor of identity both in the minds of those who controlled the land and those dispossessed and exiled from it” (2-3). The 147 discourse of landscape was one mode through which such “psychic accommodation” was produced, but this form of accommodation was and is racially specific and class-bound, dependant, in South Africa as in Europe, upon a leisurely distance from the land as an object of physical labour, as well as a physical and economic mobility.
The role of the tourist industry in apartheid South Africa in reproducing such images reveals their demographic focus. In an intriguing essay on apartheid postcards,
Jeanne van Eeden considers the role of the “Romantic tourist gaze” in privileging “the solitary consumption of nature, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze.” One of van Eeden's examples unmistakably draws upon the
Romantic pictorial conventions exemplified by Caspar David Friedrich's “Wanderer
Above the Sea of Fog” (fig. 1). Such images unambiguously naturalize and dehistoricize white presence in the landscape, while constituting a form of subjectivity that would seek community not with other members of the polity – black bodies must never be visible in such a scene – but with an unpeopled landscape instead. The meteorological, geological or cosmic time-frames which Watson's poems seek to inhabit are transcendent of the human community: the city, the nation, or the species. But, as Foster and many others have made abundantly clear, the access to such transcendence is automatically coded as the preserve of those that authentically “belong” to the political community: white, wealthy, and usually male. 148
Figure 1. South African Railways Publicity and Travel Department photograph of Chapman’s Peak Drive, Cape Town, ca. 1940s. (Copyright: Transnet Heritage Library). From van Eaden 603.
And so, in his obsession with articulating a spirit of home and belonging through a relation with landscape, Watson surely owes something to the problematic traditions of
South African landscape representation that he declines to acknowledge, since what
Foster calls the “cultural use of the subcontinent's terrain” (3), in South African literature and art, has had such political and historical significance. Even if, in his version, such belonging is unapologetically personal, verging on the solipsistic, this personalized aesthetic is itself part of a territorializing tradition of South African discourses of landscape, including white South African poetry in English. This is the tradition that J. M.
Coetzee describes as “white writing,” a writing that is white “only insofar as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African” (White Writing
11). Coetzee suggests that much of this writing has the fundamentally provincial aim of
“play[ing] out themes from the English tradition against an African backdrop” and, being 149 the mode of a “traveller's imperialism” (174), began to wane after the 1960s, under the pressures of Afrikaner nationalism and the intensification of the post-1947 apartheid dispensation. White writing, for Coetzee, is then specifically the writing of an interregnum, a literature of dislocation, anxiety, and unhomeliness, that found, in the
English traditions of landscape writing, representational mechanisms for turning the unfamiliar South African scene into a transferable visual or poetic unit. Watson's poetry appears as a belated, and “unalienated,” incarnation of this tradition: his earliest collection was published in 1977 and he was writing until his death in 2010. His work is permeated by the language, motifs, and philosophical obsessions of English
Romanticism, especially the poetry of Wordsworth. Coetzee suggests that the white writing of the picturesque and the sublime bespeaks an alienation from the African continent. And yet this late in the Romantic tradition the poet aspires to connect European representational precedents and the South African scene in a way that would appear entirely seamless and unproblematic.54
The irony, here, is that the most interesting examples of “white writing” in South
Africa from the period Coetzee discusses seem to draw on Romantic aesthetics precisely insofar as they dramatize an encounter with the alien. Sydney Clouts, for example, mobilizes the discourse of the sublime not simply because it carries within it a set of visual criteria that could produce familiar images of “home” or the “exotic,” as Coetzee generally argues. The sublime also registers an uncontainable otherness that threatens the representational capacities of poetry itself. In “Cape Point,” Clouts writes in a Shelleyan
54 To speak of the “lateness” of Watson's Romanticism is partly to speak of its belatedness, rather than a connection with “late Romanticism” as it is usually understood. But it is also to imply that Romanticism did not finish in the Romantic period, and that one may speak of a Romantic tradition with a longer durée and broader migratory scope. 150 mode of “this mastery of mingling forms / which shall elude me.” Or in “After the
Poem,” the coastline disputes its possession in poetry, “slop[ing] into the sea / such force in it that every line was broken // and the sea came by / the breaking sea came by.” The breaking of the sea upon the shore is also the breaking of the cohesion of the metrical structure of the poem, the breaking apart of the poet's meditative lines. The Romantic sublime, in these poems, paradoxically provides a language for describing an unmediated
“natural” encounter that takes place “after the poem,” in the wake of the breakdown, or representational failure, of poetic form. This version of the sublime never enters Watson's poetry. His use of the conventions of landscape writing seems instead to guarantee a productive, instructive affective response.
We might venture to say that this late in the Romantic tradition, all vestiges of a nature resistant to its aesthetic instrumentalization have been obliterated, even if such cultural images are more counter-historical than ever: two centuries of Romantic nature discourse make the translation of the rocky Western Cape into a unit of sense all too easy, such that Watson is more Wordsworthian than Wordsworth could ever have been. But the particular history of apartheid South Africa, with its investment in divisions of space and sense, should make us want to historicize Watson's work, work that, like the “best”
Romantic writing, resists, however self-consciously, its own historicization. The absence of the destabilizing core of the sublime in Watson's work should give us pause, since this aspect of the sublime offers the possibility of registering, within representation itself, something that lies outside of the poem and, therefore, in the lyric modes of the Romantic poem, outside of the enunciated sensorium of the speaker. The sublime, in other words, can initiate a commentary on the relationship between sense and world, and its absence 151 from Watson's aesthetics of landscape indicates the aspiration to autonomy expressed by his poems and by his corpus as a whole.
In this sense, Watson's work combines what Jay Appleton describes as the two dominant desires informing landscape representation: the desire for prospect and the desire for refuge. On the one hand, the vistas that his poems open up satisfy the yearning for an “unimpeded opportunity to see” (73) and, as I have emphasized, to feel in all its modes. At the same time, by arresting these prospective moments his poems constitute domains of aesthetic refuge. The hazard, for Appleton, is that from which prospect and refuge take their meaning, and in this reading the hazard is anything that menaces the isolated purity of the Romantic prospect, precisely those elements of space that are absent from the scene and that render the poem, and the aesthetic it reproduces, a refuge from the “anti-poetic” materials that might threaten to intrude. The absence of a sense of what lies outside, or what returns “after,” the poem, is what promises to make Watson's poetry a poetry of freedom from “what is,” because the continuous temporalities of memory, natural cycle, geology, and cosmology, which in the poet's imagination flow through, suffuse, and vitalize one another, escape the contingent historical ground of their enunciation altogether. The poet creates an imaginative structure that closes itself off from anything that might question or compromise the poet's transcendence. Its openings onto the immortal, non-relational planes of nature are thus enclosed openings – enclosed within the poem, and often within the borders of the poet's private property. The fact of this enclosure, at the same time, marks the unfreedom of Watson's verse: it symptomizes a desperate need for poetic hygiene that hampers and stunts his poetry's power.
Watson's poetry aims to effect a reconciliation between Romantic practices of 152 seeing and feeling and the historical South Africa which provides the site of reconciliation. The poems articulate differential temporalities that circulate in separated locales – bracketed off from the traumatic “real” of South African social and political history – and as such develop their own versions of the Wordsworthian “spot of time,” recalling moments residing in the poet's memory that serve to repair his relation with the world around. To put it in slightly different terms, his poetry is interested in erecting aesthetic enclosures. I use this phrase here to describe not only the tendency of Watson's poems to constitute an autonomous field of art, but also to create protected spaces of sensibility. If aisthesis simply means “capable of sense perception,” then it is this capability that Watson's Romanticism aims to keep alive. But as Jacques Rancière's work on aesthetics makes clear, once we understand aesthetics as a regime of the sensory we must also begin to recognize the irreducible “politics of aesthetics.” For Rancière,
“[what] is common is 'sensation.”” “Human beings,” or at least those that inhabit the
“human” community, “are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together” (Emancipated Spectator 56).
The distribution or partition of the sensible (“le partage du sensible”), for Rancière constitutes community, and it also constitutes the conditions for community's perpetuation: the “distribution of the sensible” refers to the sociopolitical rules that determine what can be “apprehended by the senses,” the procedures of inclusion and exclusion that separate the visible from the invisible, the audible from the inaudible, and as such regulate what can be “said, thought, made, or done” (Politics of Aesthetics 85).
Watson's aesthetics must therefore be read in conjunction with South African, and apartheid, aesthetics, especially since apartheid itself can be characterized as an aesthetic 153 regime, as a regime that created and enforced different possibilities of sensory life for its different racial and economic groups. What sensory worlds are created by these aesthetic regimes? What can be said, thought, made or done according to the representational rules that operate in Watson's poetry, and how do these rules relate to the rules of inclusion and exclusion that circulate in apartheid discourse and emanate from its material powers and institutions?
Watson's own implicit response to these questions is to mobilize an opposition between poetry and the world. Watson's poetry is aware of its antagonistic relation with the fields of social and historical reality. In “The Other City,” a poem written in memory of Zbigniew Herbert, the moment of typical “clarity,” at “the hour the lights come on,” illuminates “the antinomies of a city bitter-sweet at best,” a city of “fine sunsets and assassinations.” The poet thinks of Herbert and the life he lived in Poland and what he must have seen: Warsaw besieged and destroyed, and hope defeated. A feeling of kinship with Herbert begins to emerge, whose career teaches that one “might live, might / learn to go on living” – and writing – having witnessed such historical disaster. Herbert becomes proof of the possibility of a “higher life”; he was a “master ironist,” the poet observes,
“but still...held, uniquely, beauty was no illusion: / like love, at times, it could redeem our lives.” Herbert, in his poetry, built a city “without / streets, street-corners, without sunsets or assassins.” This “other city” will remain through Herbert's poetry, preserved in its
“holy speech,” “though all else be ruined / stained by contingency, all the malignancies of chance.” So the speaker can now, even when the lights come on, see something other than
this beautiful filthy city, bitter-sweet, always besieged.
I see the other city, which you now inhabit, wholly; 154
and why it is that we, the living, can find ourselves, //
On certain nights, speaking to the dead as if to a god.
The true vocation of poetry, according to this poem, is to unveil this “other city,” this differential, even eschatological, sensory domain that “hangs” upon the visible scene, layered upon the field of historical time. Poetry, and the other city of which it speaks, enables a transfiguration of what is there before the eye, wiping clean the stains of contingency and chance.
Watson is a witness to Herbert's poetry here, but at the same time Herbert becomes an alibi for Watson's own work. The poets share a fidelity to the “other city” of the imagination, and yet, rather than shifting between different registers of reality, as
Herbert's work is presented as doing, Watson's work brackets off anything that would threaten the poet's freedom to see and to feel, while hiding that bracketing operation.
Those few poems that have a social content are rarely successful, usually presenting the poor, black and marginalized within a picturesque visual aesthetic or sentimental narrative. “A Way of Weeping,” for example, offers a kind of social vision but sentimentalizes poverty and domestic violence, as the husband's “beating” of his wife becomes, in the unfortunate move of the poem's conclusion, a way of “weeping.”
Nothing troubles the stability of Watson's aesthetic: the poems never question the status or presence of the poet as a viewing subject, never complicate his own specular authority, his own power to look or not to look, to feel or to ignore. Watson's work relies upon, indeed, in “The Other City,” actively constitutes, an opposition between “poetry” and
“history” in a way that demands interrogation. At stake in this opposition is nothing other than the attempt to legitimize the creation of a separated space of aesthetics. In a 1985 155 essay that represents a defence of a non-politicized poetry, Watson bemoans the process by which “politics becomes primary, fundamental, all-consuming … totalitarian, invading every sphere of human activity.” For Watson, art should interrupt the “mindlessness” of politics. In Watson's work, however the autonomy of art serves less to indicate a place that would interrupt the totalizing claims of political discourse than to enable the reproduction of a Romantic regime of the sensory and a “settled” subjectivity.
In “In the Beginning,” the poet stands in his garden; in “The Sugarloaf,” he sits at his desk in his study. These are bounded spaces, spaces with borders, and it is only in such spaces that Watson's aesthetics can freely circulate. Crucially, these spaces are in a contiguous relation with other spaces, a relation that demands to be read historically. The separated space of the “evening garden” should be read in its worldly significance, as a marker of property and, therefore, of the historicity of property relations in Cape Town, even if it is presented as a kind of personal Eden. Coetzee, in a comment that adorns the dust jacket of Watson's Selected Poems, claims that Watson is “a better poet than his time
(the expiring end of the twentieth century) and his place (squalid, beautiful Cape Town) deserve.” Coetzee's praise, however, is perhaps more enigmatic than it seems, because it hints at an incommensurate relation between Watson's poetry and the historical world that is its condition of possibility. Watson writes a poetry of time and place – above all, of apartheid and post-apartheid Cape Town – but these historical markers are absent from his poetry of sensibility. And yet such alternative sites of the sensible are created and sustained not only by the technology of the Romantic poem but also by the racial distribution of property, underpinned by the repressive state apparatuses of the apartheid regime. Watson's poetry appropriates Romantic modes in moving towards a reconciliation 156 with the time and space which the poet inhabits, or even a conciliation, since the alien or the other rarely enters the poem in the first place to disturb his settled presence. Watson's poetry of home and belonging therefore writes out the forms of legal, economic and political violence that guaranteed, in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the sanctity of the (white) home, produced its separation from “history,” and enabled the possibility of a certain white sensorium. It is not enough to describe Watson's poetry as apolitical or antisocial, therefore – it is actively mythical, offering an alternative, self- originating history and meta-history of the self. The birth of Watson's textual persona is not a cultural-historical phenomenon; “in the beginning” the poet-child enters into a relation with the transcendent. Watson's poetry asserts an imaginative freedom and aesthetic autonomy that writes out its own historical contingency.55 In its commitment to the “other city” of poetry it too easily forgets that Cape Town is yet another city, a city of violence, dispossession, and white privilege.
55 For Adorno, “aesthetic autonomy” has a very different, politically resistant, resonance. My use of the phrase describes the desire to erect an aesthetic enclosure, even if this enclosure is truly non-autonomous insofar as it is bound up with cultural languages and, in this case, the divisions of apartheid aesthetics. 157
Countervoice III: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
It seems that the role of Romanticism in Watson's poetry is paradoxical.
Romanticism offers Watson's poetry a language for describing unmediated forms of sensory relation with the topos of the Western Cape – forms of relation that bypass the historical and social realities without which such poetry could not be. Romanticism itself becomes something singular and appropriable through Watson's appropriation: that is, his poetry flattens out the texture and variousness internal to the corpus upon which he draws. Romanticism appears as ahistorical and non-contingent in this reincarnation, seeming to incubate a poetics that makes the “one great mind” of the universe immediately available in moments of immanent truth or sensory clarity. Watson's work, as I have suggested, can be read as a kind of perfected or consummated Romanticism, a
Romanticism, I would add, that can only thrive unhinged from any specific field of socio- historical tension and even unhinged from meteorological chance (the unseasonably wet or cloudy April day). Since Romanticism itself is “natural” in this mode, Watson's poetry posits that the origin of its own discourse resides in an unmediated, “innocent” intuition of the child's relation to the landscape of the Cape (“In the Beginning”), just as much as in a prior cultural discourse of landscape, home and community. In a sense, if we follow
Watson's history and meta-history of the self, he is less drawing on Romanticism as a strategy for producing and reproducing a particular aesthetic regime in an apartheid South
Africa that might threaten the viability of such sensory versions of time and space, than 158 pointing up his own absorption within a dehistoricized tradition of literary Romanticism which is defined by its freedom from both culture and history. Romanticism, in this strategically naïve reading, is truly a natural language for expressing natural feelings – to quote Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads, a “real language of men.”
The irony, here, as I have indicated, is that many of the texts we call “Romantic,” including the poetry of Wordsworth, themselves foreground the role of imaginative mediation in approaching the essential objects of Romantic desire. Shelley's “Mont
Blanc,” for example, can be read as an effort to articulate a seamless continuity between the worlds of “thought” and “things,” to render, in the language of poetry, the process of
“unremitting interchange,” the workings of a consciousness that “passively / Now renders and receives fast influencings” (ll. 37-9). But the poem, by no means uniquely, points to a disappointment and even a failure inscribed within this ambition, as the mountain teaches an “awful doubt” that alienates, I would argue, the speaker from the nature he surveys.56
We should note that it is a similar moment in The Prelude that forms the subject of David
Lurie's first lecture on Romantic poetry in Disgrace:
'From a bare ridge,' he reads aloud,
we also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
56 For a powerful discussion of the “poetics of disappointment” in Romantic and post-Romantic lyric and meditative poetry, see Quinney. Quinney observes that disappointment has to do with the idea of losing one's place, of being “cast out,” of “ceasing to be 'à point,' in the right place at the right moment, and thus implie[s] a breakdown in one's relation to time, a falling out and away from a recogizable order” (1). This reading of disappointment resonates in Lurie's story, as we shall see. Romantic disappointment for Quinney is not recuperated within the sublime or within a movement of lyrical reconciliation (in contrast with M. H. Abrams's famous reading of the greater Romantic lyric). 159
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be. (21)
The speaker, at this moment in the poem, is alluding to the relationship between images and thoughts, between sensory data and internal ideational schemas. The summit of Mont
Blanc – culturally conditioned, metaphysically overdetermined, probably the exemplary
Romantic figure of a transcendent nature – is “unveiled” in two senses: revealed by the dissipation of the clouds, and stripped bare by the “usurpation” of the visual image upon the preexisting ideal of the mountain. The moment dramatizes a kind of collapse of the discourse of the Romantic sublime, pointing to a discontinuity between the planes of the sensible and the ideal.
What is this lesson doing in a novel like Disgrace, a novel that engages with the traumatic histories of corporeal life in post-apartheid South Africa? On one level, the moment anticipates a destabilizing, disappointing encounter between ideation and sensation. On another level, this encounter is between two aesthetic worlds, marking an incommensurability between Romantic discourses of the sensory and the “real” world of things with which such an aesthetics must relate. This lesson might suggest that Watson's transposition of Romantic aesthetic schemas on to the South African landscape is all too seamless, even within the terms inaugurated by Romantic texts themselves. It is not only that South Africa has a different geological and historical landscape to England or
Europe, but that the attempt to develop a transcendent relation to space is itself threatened in advance by the alterity of “nature,” by a “thereness” that is at once the portal onto transcendence and, in its empirical autonomy, a barrier to it. The aesthetics of belonging or transcendence (the two, as I hope to have established, are intimately linked), in which 160 a certain cluster of interdependent affects and sensations arise from “nature” apprehended as a sensory spectacle, comes into contact with an aesthetics in which the otherness of the world alienates the subject and obstructs the movement towards transcendence and aesthetic plenitude. A more complex version of Romanticism emerges, here, in which
Romanticism becomes a discourse of aesthetics, wherein its self-replenishing project is threatened, in advance, by failure.
Dejection, melancholy and disappointment are some of the names given to this countervailing movement of Romantic sensibility, but it is important to note that the seeds of this movement are present from the start. In the famous boat-stealing episode in
Book I of The Prelude, for example, the poet recalls a foundational encounter with the traumatic autonomy of nature. As the child rows out into the lake, he imagines himself at the centre of his universe, in mastery of the boat and of his perceptual horizons: “I fix'd a steady view / Upon the top of that same craggy ridge, / The bound of the horizon, far behind / Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.” The child is filled with an imaginary plenitude; his boat is an “elfin pinnace,” heaving through the water “like a Swan.” At this moment, however, something unforeseen encroaches upon the child's visual horizon, as
“a huge Cliff, / As if with voluntary power instinct, / Uprear[s] its head”: “the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still, / With measur'd motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn'd” (ll. 405-412). With “grave / And serious thoughts” the poet-child returns home, his brain working with “a dim and undetermin'd sense / Of unknown modes of being” (419-20). The gap between this and the next verse- paragraph marks the distance between the child's “dim” intuition and the mature poet's apprehension of the “purifying” and “sanctifying” power of the “Wisdom and Spirit” of 161 the universe. The threatening alterity and sentience of the cliff is redefined as part of a benevolent nature that, in a moment of grace, opens out the poet-child onto an enriching otherness. The moment is exemplary, in dramatizing the poetic negotiation of a moment of aesthetic exposure, pointed up by the child's “trembling hands,” within a project of spiritual and poetic sublation. The question, though, one of the key questions of The
Prelude, is whether this dialectical process can ever be completed.57
The passage upon which Lurie lingers is short. The next day the poet's disappointment vanishes with the fog, and he gazes into the vale of Chamonix, whose
“dumb cataracts and streams of ice” made “rich amends / And reconcil'd us to realities”
(VI.456-61). Divorced from this reconciliation, though, the moment seems to point to a fracture in the discourse of Romantic aesthetics in one of its most powerful cultural sources, indicating a potential affective “stupor” that haunts the subjective priority of sense perception. The image of the mountain is mere sense without sensation, an impersonal, non-recursive, and poetically “useless” piece of visual data. According to
Lurie, Wordsworth is aiming towards the poetic mediation of these two worlds, “feeling his way toward a balance”: “The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?” (22). With this balance or coexistence, the keys to our experience – our codes of feeling, our expectations of what matters and what does not – and the sensory data that makes up our experience, can feed off one another, mutually supporting and enriching one another. This mutual constitution enables, in turn, our freedom from
57 As Jean-Luc Nancy argues, sublation always reveals the exposure upon which it is founded: the being “that has become through a dialectical process is perhaps destined to be exposed” (“Shattered Love” 89). This is an observation that can equally be applied to the story of David Lurie, who constantly sublates his own experience within a powerful humanist metaphysics. 162 the mortal, death-dealing, temporally and historically corrupted world of mere sensation, as well as our freedom from a cocooned, isolated, non-workable world of ideal forms and immutable, pure ideals. And yet it is instructive that Lurie, in the novel, cannot complete his lesson – appropriately enough, given the formal incompletion of The Prelude. Lurie's students fail to respond to his aesthetic pedagogy, and his attempts to explain the reconciliation towards which Wordsworth is working are met with silence and incomprehension. Lurie fails to communicate his point, dismisses his class, “sick of the sound of his own voice.”
Just as the mountain is incomprehensible to the poet, so the poem – or at least
Lurie's reading of it – is incomprehensible to the students in the classroom. His questions are met with silence, his explications with “blank incomprehension,” and “[t]he very air into which he speaks hangs listless as a sheet.” The words that describe the students' responses in the class – silence, blankness, incomprehension – bespeak affective and aesthetic deprivation and alienation, a migration of Wordsworthian disappointment into the space of aesthetic Bildung. If Lurie's pedagogy has a specific goal – to teach his students about the reconciliation between inner and outer, sense and sensation, captured in the idea of the “sense-image,” and, as such, is an aesthetic lesson, an effort to cultivate specific modes of feeling within the space of the classroom – then it is telling that what is in the end passed on is precisely this estrangement of the sensory. If Wordsworth has anything to teach these students, it is the inevitable disjunction between cultural codes of transcendence and empirical reality. Lurie attempts to describe the significance of the poem for his students: “'Wordsworth is writing about the Alps,' he says. 'We don't have
Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, 163 which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory,
Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about'” (23). Lurie is asserting the possibility of a seamless transposition of European aesthetic schemas onto South African terrain, a transposition we see in Watson's poetry. But this is “just talk,” Lurie concedes, a claim barely sustainable even within the “aesthetic enclosure” of the university classroom. It seems that the novel, in this scene, is drawing on Romanticism, even if Lurie does not know it, not only to point to the estrangement of European aesthetics within post- apartheid South African life, but also to point to its internal inscription of its prior impossibility, to show how this powerful discourse of aesthetics inscribes a fracture within its own regime of sense in its foundational articulations.
If Watson's poetry announces the unlikely triumph of the aesthetic project of
Romanticism, then Disgrace articulates an inevitable response by showing such an aesthetic project “in action,” functioning as a radically inappropriate model for Lurie's own aesthetic education within the novel. The passage from The Prelude suggests that ideas of sense perception are at the centre of the novel. At the same time, the passage, suspended from The Prelude's own teleology, becomes a commentary on Lurie's own aesthetic sensibility within the novel, on his own desire to stand at the centre of his sensible universe. Lurie tries to live “protected from the onslaughts of reality,” but the novel obeys the novelistic imperative to convey its protagonist living in a social world, not simply inhabiting moments of rapture or transcendence. At this belated moment of the
Romantic imagination, the novel takes us back to its point of departure, aborting the
“completion” of its itinerary that we see in Watson's work. Whether or not the novel can be considered an explicit engagement with Watson's work – with which Coetzee is 164 certainly familiar – it should nevertheless be read as a critique of the historical appropriation of Romanticism by South African writers and artists, of which Watson is only one striking, and strikingly contemporary, example. Most interestingly, the novel makes clear that this critique of Romantic aesthetics is also Romanticism's autocritique, a constitutive part of its own meta-aesthetic discourse. Romanticism – not its abstracted tropes but its actual textuality – makes available this critique in a way that is also historically significant. Disgrace is a novel of the “new” South Africa, or at least a novel that continues to express the anxieties of the transitional phase. If Romantic aesthetics are, as I have argued, absorbed within white ideologies of South African space that underpinned the imaginary of apartheid South Africa, then it seems that the novel dramatizes the dying breaths of this Romanticism, in the life of an age-obsessed, horribly belated teacher of Romantic poetry.58
The opening chapters of the novel establish Lurie's investment in the sensory availability of his world. Cape Town, for Lurie, is a city “prodigal of beauty, of beauties,” a space of aesthetic appreciation for the (male) subject. Lurie enjoys the “brisk winter air, the damp, gleaming streets” (11), the clear sky, the shining stars (16); he “has always been a man of the city, at home amid a flux of bodies where eros stalks and glances flash like arrows” (6). When Lurie first sees Melanie in the street, the narrator's meticulous description of her appearance establishes Lurie's visual sovereignty over her body: “She is small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes ... she wears a maroon miniskirt with a mustard-coloured sweater and black
58 The title of Lurie's study of Wordsworth also suggests the theme of belatedness: Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past. As Laurence Wright observes, the title alludes to Walter Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970), possibly suggesting Lurie's belatedness as a literary scholar too. 165 tights; the gold baubles on her belt match the gold balls of her earrings” (11). Lurie
“stares, frankly ravished,” while Melanie “lowers her eyes,” a gesture Lurie reads as
“coquettish” (12). Cape Town, these pages suggest, offers Lurie a “banquet of the senses,” and Lurie is speaking quite seriously when he argues that “a woman's beauty” is
“part of the bounty she brings into the world” (16). The body of Melanie itself becomes a kind of “sense-image” in this terrain, an object of aesthetics, of seeing and touching. In a farcical displacement of the language of the spot of time, Lurie, remembering the final time he has sex with Melanie, thinks that “[o]ne moment stands out in recollection,” a clause that, even in its loose pentameter, echoes the cadences of The Prelude, but the memory consists of Melanie “hook[ing] a leg behind his buttocks to draw him in closer”
(29). Such moments simultaneously mark the absurdity of Lurie's aesthetics, satirizing the solipsistic stupidity of his attempts to read, or at least to recuperate, his experience within a Romantic language of aesthetic appreciation.
If anything, the novel inverts the teleology of reconciliation that Lurie seeks to map out in his lecture: Lurie considers himself a “disciple” of Wordsworth, within whom the “harmonies” of The Prelude have echoed for as long as he can remember – although this phrase itself seems to imply a certain affective emptiness (13). Lurie, like Watson, wants to inherit a completed, reconciled, in some sense “disciplined” Romantic aesthetic, the “harmonies” of The Prelude, and not its disturbances, as Ortwin de Graef observes
(329).59 The opening pages of the novel establish Lurie's own sense of his aesthetic equilibrium: he lives “within his temperament, within his emotional means,” even living a kind of “moderate” or “moderated” bliss (6), as though the inner and the outer,
59 “Disciple” and “discipline” are etymologically connected, both from discipere: lit., “to take hold of, apart (from)” (OED). 166
“sensibility” and “sensation,” function in perfect relation. His world is regulated, non- traumatic; his sense of the world and the world as a world of sense are in happy alignment. The passage from which Lurie reads in his lecture, though, should be read in its context within the novel as an oblique critique of Lurie's disposal of Romanticism, one that points, instead, to affective bewilderment as an ironic model for Lurie's own relation to the other in the novel. Despite Lurie's claim that Wordsworth is “feeling his way toward a balance,” the poet's bemusement in front of the real peak of Mont Blanc, subtracted from its endless reproduction in artistic representation, reflects Lurie's own reaction to the real other in the novel. The scene ends, tellingly, with the “breathing presence” of Melanie disappearing in the crowd, marking the immediate incommensurability of Lurie's hybridized discourse of courtly love and Romantic sympathy – where one should “throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep [the beloved] alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form” (23) – with a world populated by others with the agency or desire to escape the universe of the self.
Rather than evoking Lurie's full access to the world he inhabits, the novel makes clear his reliance upon cultural technologies of aesthetic mediation. Throughout the novel, Lurie mobilizes a formidably extensive humanist apparatus, of which the language of Romanticism forms only one part. These humanist languages are part of an aesthetic project, since they are about apprehending the world as landscape in the broadest sense – as space amenable to aesthetic appreciation and appropriation. Watson's poetry may create images of unpeopled landscapes, but the bodies that Lurie sees are themselves aesthetic objects, just as much a part of a sense-scape as the mountains of the Cape.
Lurie, as a Romantic subject, is engaged in a similar project to the autobiographical 167 speakers of Watson's poetry, insofar as his aesthetics are also a way of establishing, through his aesthetic sensibility, an inviolable relation with the world around. Lurie's subjectivity is constituted by the capacity of his sensory vocabularies to process the alterity of the “breathing world,” to turn the aftermath of Lurie's first sexual encounter with Melanie into something “straight out of George Grosz” (19), or to perceive Lucy's life, at the novel's end, as a scene out of a Sargent or a Bonnard:
The wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish
prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in
a field of flowers; and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig
Weibliche, lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. (218)
Coming at this point in the novel, after the traumas of the Eastern Cape, this moment asks to be read as a moment of reconciliation, at which Lurie becomes able, once more, to frame aesthetically the sensible world. Lurie, at this moment of “utter stillness” in which the wind drops and the idyll of the farm is arrested in time, becomes “reconcil'd to realities,” at least for the durée of the “spell” that his aesthetic perception casts, a spell broken as he clears his throat and calls Lucy's name. The leisureliness of this picture, and the distance it establishes from the labour and the work and the painfulness of Lucy's life, seem to mark the dogged persistence of Lurie's Romantic sensibility, its ability to survive scandal, failure, and the rape of his own daughter.
And yet there is another way of reading this scene in particular, because immediately the authenticity of the moment is questioned, as Lurie admits that he “never had much of an eye for rural life,” despite his reading in Wordsworth. The distance that this explicitly pictorial moment expresses, then, is also an aesthetic and affective 168 distance, as though Lurie is unable to summon the emotional response that the scene demands. Lurie is not inhabiting the scene; in fact, he is excluded from it. In exemplary
Romantic fashion, he is a visitor – “visitation” is his new footing, as he observes – but he is also a kind of ghost, observing a scene to which he is alien and a future in which he will have no part or sensory investment, as he imagines “a line of existences in which his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may as well be forgotten” (217).
This earth “does not feel like his earth” (my emphasis); like the eponymous hero of
Byron's “Lara,” which Lurie also teaches, he is a “stranger” in this “breathing world,” and this, I would argue, is why the pictorial emerges so strongly here, at this terminal moment of Romantic aesthetics in their full extensibility. Lurie cannot inhabit the scene, the reconciliation he frames is false, and the melancholia of the prospect seems to trace a kind of disengagement from the life of Lucy and the future of the South African soil.60
This scene represents a final, diminished moment of Romantic perception that, in the end, cannot be sustained for more than a few moments. This diminishment is no
60 It is here that we can begin to see the intertextual significance of Wordsworth's Lucy poems to the novel, a connection observed by Michael Marais and Jerome McGann without being given its full significance. The Lucy poems, read together as an iteration of a single work of mourning, trace an aesthetic disengagement from the world, a moving from grief, through stupor, to a kind of numbness that mimics Lucy's own death, the death of one who “neither hears nor sees,” who cannot “feel / The touch of earthly years” (my emphasis). The movement of the last and most celebrated of the poems is curtailed; it suggests a minimal kind of healing but one that is connected with sleep and the absence of feeling: “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the poet recalls, with the passive construction emphasizing the diminution of self-autonomy. The speaker, earlier in the sequence, sleeps in a “sweet dream,” and here he has “no human fears”; the psychic wound of the loss of Lucy is not transcended by the speaker's access to nature that the two, dead and alive, might share, but “sealed” by a “slumber” that envelops the speaker, cocooning his spirit from the sensuous richness of the world. There seems to be a melancholic consolation, here (perhaps the consolation of elegy), as the poet comes to acknowledge the absorption of Lucy's body within the inhuman time of planetary cycles (versus the “touch” of “earthly years”): she is “roll'd round in earth's diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees”; and the rhythm of these lines further suggests the poet's own entranced absorption within this scarcely human temporality. Coetzee's character names are rarely arbitrary and, given the Wordsworthian presences in this novel, it seems appropriate to observe that these poems too are about “giving … up” one's aesthetic investment in the world. 169 surprise in a novel in which Lurie is forced to deal with the remainders of white South
African subjectivity, with abject, historical bodies that the Romantic imagination, in its history in South Africa, has attempted to “solve” or “dissolve” – to “sublimate,” as Lurie puts it in translating the word, lösung, that best describes the work that he and Bev undertake, a work that would, ideally, leave “no residue, no aftertaste” (142).
Symbolically, Lurie is forced to move from the urban university classroom to the “poor soil” of his daughter's smallholding in the “back of beyond.” This movement from city to country, or from affluence to poverty, even from “culture” to “nature,” is equally a movement from the vistas of Cape Town – Hout Bay, near Table Mountain, where he takes Melanie for lunch, or Signal Hill, in Green Point, with its panoramic prospect of the city and ocean, where he takes the sex worker after Melanie's play – to the Eastern Cape, coded as a distinctly non-Romantic landscape, with its exhausted soil and “red hills dotted with sparse, bleached grass” (64).61 Appropriately enough, it is this version of
South African space that provides the site for Lurie's encounter with the “real” of South
African history: Lucy's rape, but also the plight of the sick or unwanted dogs. If the novel is concerned with Romantic schemas of perception, then it is equally interested in what such schemas exclude or transmute, in lives and worlds about which the Romantic imagination has, it seems, little to say. Lurie, in his lecture on Wordsworth, talks of keeping “the beloved” alive somewhere between reality and ideality, by throwing a “veil over the gaze.” It is precisely this movement of aesthetic veiling that becomes untenable in a novel that, at key moments, seems to be interested in what Giorgio Agamben, reading
Heidegger, calls the “simply living being” (The Open 50). Agamben's figure of “bare” or
61 For an interesting discussion of the connection between the history of the Eastern Cape and the Byron sub-plot in the novel, see Easton. 170
“animal” life is the figure that inhabits a zone of political non-recognizability, but we might elaborate this to develop an idea of aesthetic non-recognizability, to denote those bodies that are excluded from the sensory order and cannot be apprehended by the senses, bodies that do not inhabit our sensible landscape, that leave Lurie, as Lucy cries on his shoulder, feeling listless, indifferent, even weightless (156).
These bodies (dis)appear to Lurie in moments of aesthetic collapse. If there are
“spots of time” in the novel, moments of apparent intensity or revelation or heightened experience, then these are in proximity with moments in which sense and sensation collapse, in which reason, imagination, and feeling momentarily cease to function. In threatening proximity to aesthetics resides the possibility of the extinction of sense, as
Lurie is himself aware when he talks of the last leap of the flame of the senses at their moment of expiry. “Mak[ing] love” to Melanie, as the narrator describes it, Lurie feels such pleasure that he “tumbles into blank oblivion” (19). Approaching Katy the bulldog, he spontaneously lies beside her, his “limbs relax,” in a phrase that echoes the
“crumpling” limbs of Melanie and the “buckling” legs of the euthanized animals, and falls asleep (78). Sitting beside Petrus, watching the football, again he “nods off” (75).
Elleke Boehmer argues that the novel establishes a discourse of “spontaneous sympathy for others,” and yet these moments, all of which are literally moments of sympathy – of being-with another – announce a spontaneous collapse of feeling-with. These are spots of empty time; each time Lurie awakes confused, unsure of how much time has elapsed, apparently unsure of how he fell asleep in the first place. These aesthetic lacunae – by no means confined to this Coetzee novel alone – are always associated with proximity to other bodies, leading Sam Durrant to consider the emergence of a kind of “dreamy or 171 somnambulistic attentiveness to other lives” (121).62 And yet it seems to be “attention” itself that evaporates at these moments. These are properly anaesthetic moments, associated with the terminal palliation of the pain of animals, with the final extinction of sense that accompanies death. These are moments of sensory death, as well as epistemological emptiness. These are non-recoverable moments, moments that resist the sovereignty of the all-feeling, all-knowing subject. To put it in slightly different terms, these are moments of “experience” that remain paradoxically inaccessible to the imagination.
These moments of aesthetic expiry seem to be linked to the “expiration” of
Romantic regimes of the sensible, to the worn-out belatedness of a project that would specify the proper objects of aesthetic meditation and determine the proper subjective responses to those objects. It should be noted, here, that this would also be the expiration of a project of the sympathetic imagination, of an “ethical” aesthetics that functions in the same way.63 While Disgrace is often read through the lens of the sympathetic imagination, we should note that the novel announces the collapse of Lurie's aesthetics, his incapacity to feel, and only in this way indicates the possibility of him learning of a world that exists outside of his perception. The “disappointment” of the senses in the face of “unveiled” reality, to which Lurie's reading of Wordsworth points, itself comes to be imbued with an ethical value. In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello asserts that our knowledge of “what it is like to be a corpse” is proof of our capacity to imagine the lives of others; at such moments, we know “what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that
62 See especially Life and Times of Michael K, in which Michael K repeatedly falls asleep. 63 I foreground this question in an essay that considers some of the themes of this chapter from a slightly different vantage (“Feeling, affect, exposure”). 172 it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore.” This capacity is therefore a negative capacity, a capacity to know what it is like to know nothing, and even, in those moments of mortal panic, to know nothing, to be “dead and alive at the same time” (32).
This is a curious point of departure for developing an idea of the sympathetic imagination, since the threat inscribed within this capacity is again the threat of the annihilation of sense, the danger of feeling (with) nothing at all. This is a strange kind of transcendence, which seems to have more to do with a Keatsian “negative capability” than a sovereign capacity to imagine other lives. The ethics at stake, here, should be connected with the stupefaction of knowledge, or, in slightly different terms, with insensible moments of the anaesthetic that stall the processes of sensible distribution. We see these moments of “stupidity” repeatedly in Coetzee's work, arriving upon his protagonists unawares, with the temporality of grace, of the divine, but with an apparently “contentless” affect that might, to someone like Lurie, threaten disgrace: the shame of feeling in front of the body, or the corpse, of the other.
If such moments of stupor, as Durrant argues, do indeed generate an ethical charge in Coetzee's novels, then they should be opposed to Lurie's more conventional, and nakedly problematic, invocations of the sympathetic imagination. Lurie, for example, is astonished when Bev Shaw insists that he wasn't “there” when Lucy was raped:
You weren't there. You don't know what happened. He is baffled. Where,
according to Bev Shaw, according to Lucy, was he not? Do they think he does
not know what rape is? Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter?
What more could he have witnessed than he is capable of imagining? (140)
Any responsible reading of the novel would question Lurie's conviction that he “know[s] 173 what rape is.” Consider, however, how the terms of the question change: where was he not, he asks? He was “there,” present in the house if not the room. But Lurie's bodily proximity becomes irrelevant in his next move, as he conflates “imagination” – the idea that he was there, in mind, in spirit, in sympathy – and “witness,” being there, physically seeing and “taking (a) part” in Lucy's suffering. Lurie believes that because he feels he was there, then, in effect, he was there: to imagine, is to feel, is to know, even though
Lurie, tellingly, may even have been unconscious, knocked out by a blow to the head and locked in the bathroom, in a state of quite literal “stupor.” At its most powerful, though, the sympathetic imagination transcends the non-knowledge of the subject and obliterates such blankness or opacity, including the opacity of the other. After returning to the city,
Lurie attends the play in which Melanie is acting, when all of a sudden, “without warning,” a “memory comes back from years ago” of a German woman with whom he once slept. His reverie continues:
In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream,
a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two
continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them … A
fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his
breath, willing the vision to continue.
What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there
moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into
the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant
she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and
spent the night with her? (191-2) 174
The other, here, becomes available in a fully immediate, fully virtual relationality, in a bizarre solipsistic communion that imagines, against all probability, that the “German girl” might at this moment also be thinking of him. It is in counterposition to such subjective intimations of a fully accessible universe that the novel presents moments of empty time, moments in which Lurie is, often quite literally, “stupid before the other”
(Ronell 60).64 If Romantic aesthetics has a teleology that drives towards this full accessibility, then such an aesthetics here reaches its ethical crisis, its productive failure or breakdown.
One might equally allude here to what Schelling, in “The Stupor of Reason,” calls the “merely existing,” that which is left when “the concept” falls away, or when “reason” is “placed outside itself, is absolutely ecstatic,” and, at the same time, is “as if petrified, as if astonished.” The sensible does not disappear, here, but the mechanisms by which it is controlled and disciplined and recuperated do. These are the moments in which rational or aesthetic mediation falls away, and are thus associated with a movement of unveiling, anticipated by Wordsworth's disappointment in the face of the naked mountain. The novel opposes Lurie's desires for clarity and revelation – such as when he wishes that Melanie's clothes would “burn off her body in a cold, private flame and she were to stand before him,” naked and perfect, “in a revelation secret to him alone” (91) – with visions of nakedness and vulnerability that move Lurie in unexpected ways. Lurie intervenes to
“save the honour of corpses” when he sees the dead dogs, stiffened by rigor mortis, emerge from the furnace, “blackened and grinning, smelling of singed fur, [their] plastic
64 For Avital Ronell, stupidity is a central phenomenon in the experience and process of thought: it is not an impediment to knowledge that must be overcome, but might be considered instead as the “absence of a relation to knowing” (5), and as such has something to tell us about thought and about ethics. 175 covering burnt away” (144, my emphasis). Or when Lucy's sash slips loose and her breasts are uncovered, “a stillness falls” – stillness, again – and Lurie and the boy, one of the gang of rapists, stare “unashamedly” (207). At the risk of reading these moments innocently, since they do threaten to reinstitute the priority of the perceiving subject, I want to suggest that they compete with the discourse of aesthetic or sympathetic plenitude, bringing Lurie close to an encounter with what Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Sense of the World, calls the “nudity of existing” (128). Lurie seems to encounter an otherness that is, like the summit of Mont Blanc, simply there, refusing to fortify or enrich his subjectivity.
What does this have to with post-apartheid South Africa? One answer is simply that Lurie is learning to live in the given world. If Romanticism completes its itinerary in
South Africa, particularly in the discourse of landscape, then it does so in a way that provides an aesthetic refuge from the thick historicity of South African life and reconstitutes white subjectivity. If Coetzee's novel implicitly intervenes, via
Romanticism, in this completed itinerary, then it does so by indicating an aesthetic dejection that is the condition for the emergence of a new sensibility in Lurie's life. The novel takes us back to the moments of disappointment that the Romantic imagination aims to sublate, but this disappointment itself becomes a marker of the ethical, of the possible beginning of a new aesthetic orientation. Lurie admits to himself that “[t]his is not what he came for – to be stuck in the back of beyond, warding off demons, nursing his daughter.” On the farm, Lurie feels, “he is losing himself day by day” (121). A sense of imaginative failure and disappointment is one of The Prelude's points of departure, as the speaker finds “so much wanting” in his poetic accomplishments (I.266), but such 176 failure and disappointment appears as a destination for many of Coetzee's protagonists.
The Magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians ends the novel thinking that “this is not the scene [he] dreamed of,” finding himself feeling “stupid,” pressing on along a “road that may lead nowhere” (152). Coetzee's Dostoevsky ends The Master of Petersburg with an
“empty heart,” feeling a “dull absence of torment,” recognizing “nothing of himself”
(250). Lurie, similarly, loses himself in an aimless enterprise, writing an opera that no one will see, that “does not come from the heart” (181), the kind of work “a sleepwalker might write” (214). And yet this failure seems to be part of a collapse of Romantic subjectivity that carries ethical and ethico-political significance. Lurie loses the capacity to “discipline” his aesthetic world – in this sense, to be a “disciple” of Wordsworth, rather than an inheritor of his anxieties – and yet this incapacity seems to be associated with a new kind of “stupefying” affective response, especially to those most abject remainders of the Romantic imagination: damaged, suffering, and even dead bodies. Driving home after a round of “killings,” “[Lurie] has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake. He does not understand what is happening to him” (143). The moment is mysterious, involuntary, unanticipated and unpredictable. The shaking of Lurie's hands points to a kind of aesthetic response but one that violates aesthetic programming, that falls outside of his regime of the heart. Animals do not matter to Lurie: he had never considered himself particularly concerned with their plight, being by nature, he thinks, “neither cruel nor kind.” His flowing tears and shaking hands bemuse him, running against his own conception of the world and his place in it.
As he says to Lucy at another point in the novel, animals and humans are of “a different order of creation”: “by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective” 177
(74). Kindness towards animals should be seen as simple generosity, Lurie argues; and yet this model of sovereign benevolence, sustained by the stability of humanist
“perspective,” becomes untenable here, just as the lot of the sheep, due to be slaughtered for Petrus's gathering, “suddenly and without reason” becomes important to him (126). It is in the context of the breakdown of Romantic and post-Romantic discourses of aesthetics and of sympathy that these disturbing, destabilizing moments of ethical self- loss and self-estrangement become possible, and the possibility of this breakdown is carried within Romanticism itself.
Boehmer contends that it is only by giving up the “Byronic voice” that Lurie can learn to speak and to respond from the heart (346). It might be tempting to suggest that
Lurie must learn to follow the lesson of Elizabeth Costello, for whom the heart is the seat of the faculty of sympathy (34) and whose ethical principle, although she is reluctant to call it that, is to “open your heart and listen to what your heart says” (37) (Costello also suffers a breakdown and sense of self-estrangement at the conclusion of “The Lives of
Animals,” also in a car). In this reading, it is only by abdicating his Byronic individualism and opening his heart that Lurie can become a full ethical subject. But
Lurie seems to lose the capacity to open or to close his heart. There seems to be a significance to the figural wounding of Lurie's heart, the heart itself being a marker of aesthetic and ethical capability, as his lecture on the “mad heart” of Byron's Lara makes clear (32-4). After the traumas of the Eastern Cape, Lurie “has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused – perhaps even his heart” (107); he talks of the
“eroded shell” of his heart (156), has a vision of a surgeon poking at his heart, wondering what it is (171). It is in this context that Lurie does something unselfish, something that 178 does not fortify his heart. Lurie's stupid attention to the dead and dying dogs, rather than bearing witness to his heart's fullness and generosity, reflects its weakness, its emptiness, the fact that he is becoming “stupid, daft, wrongheaded.” The eroded and incapacitated organ of ethical relation seems to mark the traumatic kernel of the ethical, in the novel.
Similarly, the emptiness of the heart paradoxically accompanies “what [Lurie] no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (219). This is not a full, Romantic love that permeates and suffuses the universe of the sympathetic imagination, but a love that
Nancy would call “shattered,” a love that is a “blade thrust in me,” a love that “cuts across and that disconnects the elements of the subject-proper” (96-7). This love takes apart the subject as we know it.
And yet this “taking apart” is internal to Romanticism. Paul Hamilton argues that
Romanticism is always “metaromanticism,” that it always generates an interrogation of its own project. Another way of putting this would be to say that Romanticism, even if it makes certain aesthetic promises, always carries within itself the seeds of its own aesthetic counter-discourse. If we see a productive failure of Romantic regimes of the sensible in Disgrace, then that failure, and so Romanticism's usefulness for the novel, is
“built in.” Romantic aesthetics, as the novel invites us to recognize, are built upon the possibility of exposure before the other, of an unanticipated encounter that momentarily stalls the integrative, mediating ambitions of the imagination. If we were to invoke the language of the sublime to characterize this aspect of Romanticism, we would point out the especial importance of the first, sensible moment of Kant's process, prior to the supersensible disposal and appropriation of the “abyss” in which the mind is afraid to lose itself. If the programmatic response to this abyss is to surmount it once more, in 179 proof of the supersensible vocation of the mind's faculties – the language of the spot of time has to do with this mounting, surmounting, transcendent movement – then we should also recognize that Romanticism makes available another response, the response of ethical or subjective “suspension.” This interruption of the movement towards aesthetic reconciliation is what we see in the passage from which Lurie quotes in The
Prelude, pointing to a momentary disjuncture between sense and world. We see such moments throughout Coetzee's fiction, even if it is only in Disgrace that they have an implied Romantic provenance.
If Romanticism, in its twentieth-century reappearance in South Africa, begins as a cultural technology for articulating space as a source of aesthetic plenitude and homeliness, for producing a white sensorium that played a role in the imaginative creation of the world of apartheid South Africa, then Disgrace both intervenes in this discourse, pointing to its belatedness and its estrangement within post-apartheid South
African life, while taking us somewhere quite different, uncovering an alternative ethical current within Romanticism, from which Lurie, ironically enough, has been unable to learn. I have established that Wordsworth's sensory alienation in the face of the summit of
Mont Blanc anticipates the moments of sensible estrangement that punctuate Lurie's narrative, and I have suggested that these moments promise to teach Lurie of a world in which his is not the privileged subjectivity, hinting, one might add, of other possible novels in which Lurie himself might be a “minor character” who appears only to disappear once more. This, I think, is the substance of Lurie's realization that he will gradually recede from Lucy's life, until he may as well be forgotten (217). Lucy's story becomes a line of flight out of the novel and out of Lurie's subjectivity, as he finds her 180 decision to stay on at the farm utterly incomprehensible. The painful lesson that Watson's speakers cannot learn and that Lurie, perhaps, can begin to learn, is the necessity of living in the given world, in a historical South Africa that may demand the abdication of the privileges of white subjectivity, the “rights” of Romantic “desire,” the demand to become
“reconcil'd” to a reality that includes others and otherness. 181
5. Excursus: Postcolonialism, Romanticism, and the Singular
In exploring postcolonial engagements with Romanticism, I have been exploring questions of the aesthetic, questions about aesthetic modes and the representation of aesthetic life. In so doing, though, I have implicitly been engaging with the interest postcolonial writers take in the singular, where the singular is defined as something that presents itself to the senses outside of the terms anticipated by culture and by history.
Walcott's poetry, for example, appears in its most radically lyrical guise in its attachment to the singular vision that can only emerge through an emancipation of sense from the burdens of culture and history. Walcott's phenomenological interest is coextensive with an anxiety about the force of aesthetic convention and the force of history; his poetic emergence, as dramatized in Another Life, involves the emergence of a capacity to capture the singularity of sensory or affective response in a relatively unburdened poetic language. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival exhibits an attention to what is consecrated as singular by the Romantic, lyrical tradition, to those “wild and natural growths” that appear as spontaneous and authentic gifts to the sensibility of the diasporic subject.
Ultimately, the novel shows such natural spectacles to be the product of the writer's fantasies; this does not mean that the narrator leaves behind this interest in the singular, but that the authentically singular relationship with the landscape around his cottage can only appear when these aesthetic fictions fall away. What I call the novel's dis-enclosive movement is not a movement beyond the Romantic, but the faithful exemplification of a lyric teleology that preserves the singularity of aesthetic perception as its dominant 182 concern. In Watson's poetry, the singular is again what is outside of history, linked to aesthetic experiences that take place in domains separated from the disasters of apartheid.
Naipaul and Watson especially seem to offer conservative readings or configurations of the singular: as far as the singular is paramount, so is the perspective of the “I,” whose aesthetic enfranchisement is undergirded by material forces that are disguised or naturalized. This recognition is at stake in my use of the word “enclosure,” which indicates the imbrication of landscape aesthetics with relations of property that rely upon ongoing histories of violence. And in each case, these productions of the singular are connected to readings of Romanticism, underpinned by the authority of this aesthetic tradition.
The singular might then be read as a function of representational practices that are inherently Romantic, insofar as the singular can only exist in an enclosure or spot of time, in a domain separated from historical contexts that would assert the non-singularity of phenomena, their merely particular manifestations of attributes made possible by historical conditions. The engagement with the singular in postcolonial writing can therefore be read as the playing out of an aspect of the English tradition in alternative locales, a phenomenon most notable in phases of Anglophone postcolonial literary emergence: such writing is negotiating with the literary tradition, or potentially just recapitulating its tropes, including the trope of a neutral subject “passively … render[ing] and receiv[ing] fast influencings,” in Shelley's words, that are then composed and recreated in the literary text. This might be surprising given the implication of the personae of Walcott and Naipaul's texts in histories of colonial and racial oppression: the novelist figure in Enigma first imagines his presence in his Wiltshire cottage as the 183 manifestation of his destiny, as finally those aesthetic expectations he carries and the world around him seem to cohere (he believes he is at the “heart of romance”), but the neutral and transparent spectatorial position this fantasy depends upon breaks down, as he realizes the strangeness of his own racialized presence in a setting that must exclude
“foreign” elements that are not proper to the aesthetic of this landscape. But the trope of the neutral spectator is also a gendered trope, inscribing the supposed neutrality of the male poetic subject, nurtured by the Romantic fiction – or at least ideal – of a spontaneous or intuitive relation with “what is.”
In this sense, I have offered a selective literary history, in which particular zones of intertextual contact, tethered together, tell the story of different constitutions of a postcolonial literary sensibility. But the fidelity to the singular can also suggest a kind of utopianism, an attachment to fragments of a potentially different world that expresses a melancholic disaffection with history. The power of texts like Desai's Fire on the
Mountain or Coetzee's Disgrace reside in their capacity to dramatize this disaffection and disappointment – a movement I have called “dis-enclosure,” because it entails an opening of the aesthetic enclosure onto history and always discloses forgotten, occluded presences. And it is important to recognize that “dis-enclosure” is also a Romantic imperative: Watson's reading of Romanticism is in this sense inadequate because dis- enclosure does not take place within his poems – although we might say that it always takes place in their critical reception, since a recognition of their historicity and placement within apartheid South Africa seems inevitable.
By pairing each of my texts with another text engaging with similar questions from a different critical angle, then, I have attempted to broaden the scope of my analysis 184 in order to consider what might be at stake in these engagements from the perspective of a critical theory about aesthetics, phenomenology, and history. In what follows, I want to amplify this work by attending to the importance of the singular in postcolonial theory. I have suggested that postcolonial engagements with Romanticism often articulate an interest in or fidelity to the singular, but this attention to the singular can also be discerned in a postcolonial theory that one might expect to be resolutely anti-Romantic in its orientation. While my countervoices in this study have pointed to a discordant or productively incoherent relationship between postcolonialism and Romanticism, in this excursus I want to attempt to align the Romantic and the postcolonial through a consideration of the singular in postcolonial theory, focusing on the work of Gayatri
Spivak. I do not mean to suggest that Spivak is drawing upon Romanticism in developing the main tenets of her theory, but I do mean to explore how the postcolonial attention to the singular might provide a new vantage from which to consider the postcolonial mediations of Romantic aesthetics that I have examined. In the reading that follows, I invoke the idea of “spots of time” as a kind of ghostly counterpart to Spivak's figurations of the subaltern. I do so not to imply Spivak's historical indebtedness to this idea, although I do consider Spivak's expressed relation to Romanticism, but in order to bring the Romantic and postcolonial orientations towards the singular into the same analytic space.
In the third chapter of her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 'History,' Gayatri
Spivak offers what she calls an “unscholarly account” of a research trip to Sirmaur in 185
Himachal Pradesh. She describes the trip in an uncharacteristically affective and confessional mode, infused with “narrative pathos.” Her route is one “of an un-knowing,
[of] a progressive différance”: the subject of her research is the story of the nineteenth- century Rani of Sirmur, but as she looks out from the window of the Rani's Palace she experiences how she “could not know” the subject of her research (241). Spivak implicitly connects this experience of epistemological “fadeout” (239) with a relationship to the landscape, expressed in a moment of loco-description displayed under critical erasure:
On the south, past the open terrace and directly below it, stretched the peaks
and waves of the foothills of the Himalayas as far as the eye could see. I was
halted by the discourse of the European sublime and, percolated through it,
Kalidāsa, the fifth-century Sanskrit court-poet beloved of Goethe, both out of
the Rani's reach. To the East, the less lofty two-storied Mughal wing of the
women's quarters, with the stucco jalousies, now permanently locked,
undoubtedly the Rani's habitation … In between a Kali temple totally
embraced by a giant ashwathva tree. (241)
Spivak is describing the landscape, but more than this she is inventorizing the traces of her own subjective formation and the distance it effects from the landscape before her and from the texture of the Rani's world, “out of reach” from Spivak's belated vantage. It is her reading of European Romanticism and Kalidāsa and, she goes on to say, her ideological formation as “a child of a Kali-worshipping sect” that “halts” her in the very process of apprehending the scene visible from the room, of looking south and then east and then seeing the Kali temple in between. The mediation of the scene is made utterly 186 explicit: her eyes look in three directions before she can seam together a panorama, and what she sees is discursively layered and overdetermined. It is not the grandeur of the
Himalayan prospect that generates Spivak's response, for example. In fact, the empirical scene seems to disappear at the precise moment of its perception, such that her encounter is with the discourse of the European sublime, a discourse that displaces the physical scene and alienates the capacity of the perceiving subject to render or even to perceive the scene in its local particularity, its singularity. The formulaic phrasing – “as far as the eye could see” – also seems to register this failure of loco-description and its informing sensibility.
Spivak is touching upon a phenomenological disappointment that symptomizes her concern with the singular: she is halted by the discourse of the European sublime, and yet the sublime is itself a discourse of halting, in which the subject is arrested before a spectacle of unanticipated and singular power, one that by definition transgresses available schemas of mediation. It is as though that more monumentalizing, aesthetically consecrated “halting” internal to the sublime (amazement or astonishment) is blocked by its obvious discursive history, so that Spivak cannot really inhabit the affective modes the sublime promises. Spivak's critical reflexivity is therefore on display as a power that alienates the subject from singular and self-manifesting phenomena, and prevents the perception of things in their own “terms.”65 There is a sense in which the scene provides another version of the scene of Wordsworthian disappointment I elaborate in my discussion of Coetzee's Disgrace. Once again, the subject's recognition of the discursive 65 Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology, as I explain in my discussion of Walcott, talks of the importance of letting things manifest themselves in their own terms, but my use of the word “terms” in the sentence above hints at the compromised nature of such a project and the associated difficulty of approaching the singular: how can terms be essential, non-historical, purely properties of a singular phenomenon? 187 over-determination of the phenomenon presented to the senses prevents the proper operation of her sensibility: just as the bare physicality of Mont Blanc usurps upon the living thought of the mountain, splitting the real and the ideal, so Spivak's relation to her
“thought” of the mountainous vista – explicitly identified as the discourse of the
European sublime – cancels in advance any immediate aesthetic relation. In her description, the phenomenal what is is displaced by the obviousness of phenomenological mediation, as Spivak confronts the limitations of what can be perceived according to the subject's cultural-historical languages, according to her aesthetic capacities and the histories always embedded within them.
Spivak's concern with the Rani gives the landscape's phenomenological “fadeout” greater significance. The scene is haunted by the Rani's prior perception of it because
Spivak aspires to approach this perception – to see the mountains as the Rani saw them – but that mode of perception is lost. Spivak cannot see as the Rani saw and cannot see as herself. It seems that this moment casts in a phenomenological key Spivak's entire project of epistemological critique: her work could be defined by its radical hostility to the idea that things show themselves in their own terms, that the landscape appears, or that the subaltern speaks and our knowledge of her history simply depends upon some neutral act of transcription. While this moment may seem marginal in the context of Spivak's larger project, then, in fact it displays a surprising convergence between the Romantic phenomenology of the unmediated vision and the postcolonial epistemology of the subaltern, both of which orbit the singular as an object of desire and/or anxiety. The blockage intrinsic to Spivak's meta-aesthetic relation with the landscape is analogous to the blockage she experiences in following the trail of the Rani, and this analogy seems to 188 be significant. Spivak delicately points to her position as a sovereign subject of physical and economic mobility equipped with aesthetic and epistemological power, even while rendering this position critically impossible, since her capacity to see the landscape or to encounter the Rani's world is radically problematized. This failure of vision, sense and knowledge, as presented in this digression, connects Spivak's theory with the whole problematic of postcolonial Romanticism as I have been developing it. At this moment in
Spivak's study, she alludes to “narrative pathos,” as if to bespeak a desire for some more natural, less hyper-actively critical relation to place and people, but her right as a sovereign subject to see the spectacle or derive the knowledge she anticipated is thwarted: the world does not conform to the languages we have prepared for it, and in this sense Spivak is reiterating a disappointment that is as Romantic as it is postcolonial – even though this disappointment is not just the end-point but also, and more importantly, the critical beginning for an ethical figuration of the perspective of the subaltern.
Spivak approaches the site of an aesthetic disappointment in this passage, and this disappointment is connected to the subaltern's status as a marker of recessive otherness or singularity. In counterpoint to the globalized reason of finance capital or the globalizing ambition of postcolonial theory, Spivak's work cites the subaltern as the locus of an ineluctable difference, one that always eludes the violence of theoretical or imaginative inscription. As if to emphasize the discursive over-determination of the scene she sees from the Rani's palace in Sirmaur, Spivak soon turns her aesthetic gaze upon the women she encountered when first looking for the palace, in another loco-descriptive “reaching and un-grasping” that ambiguously connects the conventions of the picturesque with the orientation of the postcolonial critic: “I had walked about in the hills where buses did not 189 go. Shy hardy women gathered leaves and vegetation from the hillside to feed their goats ... They were the rural subaltern, the real constituency of feminism, accepting their lot as the norm” (242). These women, in Spivak's description of them, serve a counter- discursive function: Spivak is suggesting that their lives and desires may well fail to correspond to the critical desires of the postcolonial theorist.
This scene from Critique echoes a moment in Spivak's 1981 essay, “French
Feminism in an International Frame.” In this essay, she similarly seeks to locate the
“constituency” of an international feminism (In Other Worlds 185), and in a qualified way she finds it – in what she calls a “certain Calcutta,” gleaned from childhood memory:
I am walking alone in my grandfather's estate on the Bihar-Bengal border one
winter afternoon in 1949. Two ancient washerwomen are washing clothes in
the river, beating the clothes on the stones. One accuses the other of poaching
on her part of the river. I can still hear the cracked derisive voice of the one
accused: “You fool! Is this your river? The river belongs to the Company!” –
the East India Company (186)
This description has more life and historical texture than the description of the hill women in Critique. One of the women speaks, for one thing, and her anachronistic reference to the East India Company gives a locally specified sense of the complexities of historical consciousness. The rhetorical function of the description is also under a level of erasure, as Spivak writes that she “should not consequently patronize and romanticize these women, nor yet entertain a nostalgia for being as they are.” The description operates as a theoretical counterpoint to Julia Kristeva's reading of the “peasants at
Huxian” in About Chinese Women, which according to Spivak involves crude 190 summations of Chinese history and culture that “[do] not allow for irony” (189). But if, as Spivak suggests, Kristeva's orientalist objectifications have far more to do with her own position than with the women of Huxian square (188), then the same might still be said of Spivak's rehearsed memory of the ancient washerwomen: the washerwomen are not objectified in the same way as the Huxian peasants are in Kristeva's text, but they do become a trope, a stand-in for the idea of an unbridgeable, “so great” distance between the informant's “sense of the world … and that of the non-specialist feminist” (187).
In the passage from A Critique, Spivak's relation to the landscape expresses disappointment, but her relation to the hill women expresses the paradoxical fulfilment of disappointment: disappointment and critical failure have been transformed into the ends of Spivak's meditation because they exemplify the point she has been aiming towards, just as the ancient washerwomen function as Spivak's alibi in her critique of Kristeva.
These hill women stand outside of the knowledge circuits of the postcolonial critic and the currents of global history, inhabiting an alternative temporality, a world of plenitude rather than critical possibility.66 They do not just disappoint the postcolonial critic, though, but are also some kind of positive negativity: they pose something that transgresses our constructions of them, and this is why Spivak alludes to them at this moment, but this positive agency comes under pressure in Spivak's depiction of it. The women suffer what Spivak would herself describe as the violence of figuration in this overly conventional picture. They become a trope, one that awkwardly grounds, or is a projection of, the larger claim of Spivak's critique.
66 I use the word “plenitude” to indicate the self-sufficiency of the world they inhabit, according to Spivak (“accepting their lot as the norm”): their lot is the norm, they inhabit the “same old dream” of worldly permanence that Fanon describes in Wretched (and which I consider in my Lamming countervoice). Plenitude and possibility are in this sense opposed. 191
Interestingly, then, Spivak's description displays a problem inherent to her conception of the subaltern as singular. Spivak gives us the picture – an image of rural life whose distance from the bus routes is a trope for its authenticity – and then the theoretical reading of the picture. These are in fact two mutually supportive projections: the idea that these are “shy hardy women” appears simply as a verbalization of picturesque representations of the rural poor, and the idea that they accept “their lot as the norm” evokes an equally “picturesque” attitude, even though it is supposed to function as a critical qualification of the claims of first-world feminism. The irony of this moment is inescapable. I do not mean to suggest that the speaker's posture is itself ironic at this moment in the text (indeed, there is no particular indication that Spivak is aware of the absurdity of this passage). Instead, I mean to suggest the presence of irony as an irreducible textual effect generated by the possibility of a gap between two (or more) modes of signification; this gap is created in this instance by the incongruity of this seemingly naïve picture with the hyper-self-reflexive voice that otherwise dominates the text.67 But the scene also displays the difficulty of dramatizing the negative power of the subaltern in the postcolonial text. While Spivak insists that the subaltern is always that which recedes or withdraws from representation, persisting in an abyssal relation with all knowledge of her, it seems that the subaltern is also a theoretical function, and thus the
“hill women” are singular just as much as they are exemplary of all other singularities.
Their representation points to the fact that they are already absorbed within some larger argument, some terms that are not their own.
If the subaltern is the crucial figure of Spivak's theoretical project, at least at this
67 Arguably the irony here becomes a marker of the recession of the subaltern again; the subaltern is manifested as a semantic undecidability, as a question or gap. 192 stage of her work, it is also a figure that allows us to approach the resonances of a certain
Romantic orientation for postcolonial theory. These passages exhibit a form of attention that is not confined to Spivak's work, and that may be considered as distinctively postcolonial as it is Romantic: an attention to the singular that bears witness to its power to disrupt globalizing representations of flattened, translatable space and homogeneous, progressivist time; a fidelity to that which is difficult, heterogeneous, disruptive, differential. But Spivak's attempts to narrate the experiences of a worldly encounter with her key theoretical figure of the subaltern fail, and this failure seems to display a problem: how can one describe the subaltern without romanticizing her? How can the
“wholly other” and “singular” (Critique 172) avoid being made an object of impossible theoretical desire? Does the subaltern become a kernel of unrepresentability around which the critic orbits incessantly – or a trope for unrepresentability that defeats the critical point?
It seems that Spivak's shy, hardy hill women, or her ancient washerwomen, inhabit for postcolonial theory what can be described as spots of time. I have so far considered “spots of time” in postcolonial representations in relation to the idea of aesthetic enclosure: spots of time have their own temporality – different and separated from dominant social and historical time – and offer the perceiving subject a different and separated arena of aesthetic possibility. While some of the writers I have considered are more explicit than others in drawing on the Wordsworthian language of spots of time, I have been using the phrase in an analogical as much as a genealogical way, in order to make legible the Romantic dispositions embedded within the postcolonial interest in aesthetic enclosures. In so doing, I have been following the lead of Saree Makdisi, who 193 amplifies the significance of Wordsworth's original formulation by reading spots of time as productions of space that “register opposition to a homogenizing system by upholding certain sites as differential loci of space and time” (13). Literature, Makdisi claims, emerged in the Romantic period as a privileged site for presenting such “alternatives” to
“modernization”: Byron's Orient, Scott's Highlands, and Wordsworth's Nature are his major examples. Spivak's description of the shy, hardy women points to her conception of the “differential enclave” inhabited by the subaltern, which presents the same kind of resistance that Makdisi describes, even though the resistance here is not to
“modernization” per se or to the disastrous impacts of the “financialization of the globe,” but to the theoretical agency of the first-world critic. The idea of “spots of time” is useful here because spots of time are not just singular, as the plural implies: a singular spot of time derives its importance from its status as one among many possible spots of time, which together name the paradoxically disruptive, subversive power of the singular. The idea of “spots of time,” in fact, encodes a tension between the singular and the exemplary, a tension constitutive to Romantic accounts of subjectivity and history, and equally central to postcolonial theory, perhaps most obviously in critical debates about the relationship between the local and the global.68
68 Another notable site in postcolonial theory in which this tension can be seen is in the work of Homi Bhabha. The disruptive power of the singular has little to do with placing a limit on the claims of theory in Bhabha's work, however, and more to do with the persistent possibility of resistance to and subversion of political, colonial power. Bhabha's work exhibits little interest in spatial enclaves but it is concerned with the operation of different temporalities in spaces that might be fully penetrated by colonial power. In Bhabha's work, political possibility, if not politics itself, resides in “moments or processes” produced “in the articulation of cultural differences” (2). Bhabha finds resistance in the synchronous and the simultaneous, rejecting the idea of a linear progress from past to present to future in order to bear witness to historical moments suffused by the time of the now. Bhabha aims to present “sites” of hybridity or locations of culture where “other, incommensurable cultural temporalities” operate (3). While Bhabha has no investment in such Romantic constructions as nature or the rural, his ideas of hybridity and cultural difference reflect one important Romantic characteristic: a commitment 194
In her critical reading of Wordsworth in In Other Worlds, Spivak asks whether
“poetry can get away a posteriori with a narrative of political investigation when it never in fact 'irreducibly intends' anything but its own 'constitution'” (92). Whether we accept
Spivak's reading of Wordsworth, her suggestion of the self-constituting ambition of his poetic discourse bears relation to what some have seen as the self-constituting ambition of Spivak's theoretical discourse. Peter Hallward, thus, has interrogated the role of the two polarized concepts of the subaltern and the critic in Spivak's work. If the subaltern stands in for the “sheer heterogeneity of colonised space” (a quotation from Spivak onto which Hallward latches (Spivak, Critique 310)), Hallward argues that it is then the
“theoretically untouchable” (original emphasis), an impossible ethical singularity (30).
The critic, in turn, is always subject to self-doubt and self-cancellation because “she enters no relation with the (unpresentable) subaltern object,” and so “the critic's self- reflexive discourse 'about' the subaltern obtains effectively unlimited prescriptive power”
(32). The non-relational character of the subaltern, in other words, licences a non- relational, singular, self-producing critical discourse (the singular, in Hallward's usage, is something non-relational and de-territorialized, akin to the Deleuzian plane of
to uncovering “contramodern” temporalities in which resistance to the homogenizing power of postcolonial modernity and its post-Enlightenment discourses is to be found. In a sense, though, Bhabha insists that there are always spots of resistant time if we can only develop the right theoretical language with which to articulate them. Bhabha alludes, in different essays in The Location of Culture, to specific “spots” of historical space-time in which enunciative agency can be located, such as the jeering of the servants at Vellore in 1806 at the soldiers' “Christianised” dress (301), or the appearance of the Bible “under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817” (145-74). But if resistance inevitably takes place for Bhabha in any site of cultural articulation then any reference to a specific site of resistance becomes supplementary proof of a phenomenon already guaranteed to be in place. For this reason, critics such as Peter Hallward have found Bhabha's work problematic: in Hallward's argument, Bhabha's is a non- relational, de-territorialized, a-specific discourse, in which engagement is released from the grounds of nation, community, ethnicity or class into “something like thin air” (18). 195 immanence; it is the opposite of “the specific”). What Hallward's reading neglects, though, is the importance of the figure of the native informant, and it seems that Spivak's particular elaboration of the subaltern in connection with the native informant bespeaks a more complex and qualified conception of the singular. Her conception of the singular takes her beyond the Romantic as she reads it, as an aesthetic discourse that only “uses” the subaltern in pursuit of questions about the mind or the faculty of the imagination (An
Aesthetic Education 113). Notwithstanding the revealingly problematic representations of the “shy hardy women” or “ancient washerwomen,” Spivak's work maintains an orbit around the spot of time, the singular, and the subaltern as problems for representation.
An analogous example of a contramodern form of time in Spivak, and the closest thing to a Romantic genealogy for such a temporality, comes in her reading of Hegel, especially in her development of an operative distinction in Hegel's reading of the Gitā between “timing” and “Time.” “Timing,” in Spivak's argument, names the temporality of lived, phenomenological worlds, whereas “Time” is the transcendence of timing, and radically teleological. Spivak's critique aims to undo the apparently benign
“subordination of 'timing' (the lived) into 'Time' (the graph of the Law)” (67), performed both by Hegel and by the Gitā, which in fact inhabit a relation of “strategic complicity.”
“Timing,” as the gerund suggests, for Spivak represents a less disciplined, more process- ive, and more habitual, routine, and “fleshed out” temporality (38), against the master temporality of Time, with the geopolitical interests this latter construction serves.
“Timing” is also the name for a kind of remainder in the work of Hegel and in the Gitā, because it points to a world that does not correspond to the ends of these texts (that is, the articulation of the progress of a world spirit in Hegel, and the articulation of the castes in 196 the Gitā). It is what Spivak would call a “deconstructive lever” for her reading, providing a vantage point from which a critical reconstellation of Hegel and of the Gitā becomes possible.
Spivak's retrieval of “timing” from Hegel is about elaborating a logic of difference, but it is important to recognize the work that Spivak emphasizes is involved in her critical reconstellations. There is nothing automatically subversive about “timing” in
Hegel, let alone any agency that inherently undoes the power of the caste system.69 The vantage point required for this work is the vantage point of the “native informant,”
Spivak's key term for expressing the difficult (even impossible) work of the postcolonial critic – a work that is only ever a beginning and never a fait accompli. The figure of the native informant stands between the subaltern and the critic, the product of an active
“figuration” on the critic's part that requires that she do her “homework” (50). The native informant is not the subaltern, because the native informant informs: its perspective is not radically inaccessible, but nor is it purely imaginary or a critical fantasy. While Spivak does describe the native informant as an impossible figure, because its perspective is really lost, really non-amenable to the language of theory, in another sense the native informant appears through the work of making legible or audible the voice of the subaltern, making present what is otherwise only a lack or silence. The figure of the native informant is therefore central to developing a nuanced understanding of Spivak's project. It can sometimes appear that the subaltern is the locus of a power of difference
69 In this sense, there is an important distinction to be drawn between Spivak and Bhabha, sometimes grouped together as examples of a postcolonial theory insufficiently committed to political struggle (in addition to Hallward, see E. San Juan's Beyond Postcolonial Theory). Bhabha's assertion that “the rest is History” in the final move of “By Bread Alone,” for instance, seems precisely to declare that the temporality of hybridity has an irresistibly subversive power. 197 that destabilizes every claim, every episteme; subalternity does to theory, in a sense, what
Bhabha's hybridity does to colonial discourse. A critique of Spivak might therefore argue that by positing the radically “differential” and untranslatable world of the subaltern,
Spivak paradoxically enables a critical discourse that becomes progressively distanced from the problems which inform it. If every claim is under erasure, then every claim is in turn the occasion for a hyperinflationary theoretical creativity that only feeds upon itself.
This is the substance of Hallward's critique of Spivak as well. Spivak does make clear, however, that even if every figuration of the native informant does violence to the subaltern, the “homework” of the critic involves minimizing this violence, and the minimal violence that persists is not only necessary, but “absolutely to be desired” (310)
– a product, she intriguingly claims, of “moral love.”
While Spivak's work brings a new theoretical range and intensity to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, in this respect her work is continuous with theirs: she aims to bring dominant discourses – not only historical, but also philosophical, economic, literary, and anthropological – into contact with the perspectives they foreclose. The subaltern is not really the theoretically untouchable, as Hallward argues, and so comparable to the Romantic child or the wild landscape or the spot of time (in a more normative reading), but something that theory must touch, must figure, and not just as untouchable. In making the claim that the violence of a figuration of subaltern lifeworlds is “absolutely to be desired,” Spivak anticipates (and also influences) Dipesh
Chakrabarty's idea of “History 2.” History 2, Chakrabarty claims, is a history registered in Marx that does not conform to the framework of History 1. History 2s “interrupt the totalizing thrusts of History 1”; they cohabit with History 1, rather than existing in some 198 separated and inaccessible location or temporality. Even though History 1 – the calendar of the factory, for example, but also the progressivist Marxist history of emancipation from capitalism – seeks to subordinate History 2 to its own programme, History 2 in fact can never be fully subordinated. The persistence of History 2 or Histories 2 undermines the story of the Marxist or Hegelian dialectic, and crucially these histories cannot be fully written: “They are partly embodied in the person's bodily habits, in unselfconscious collective practices, in his or her reflexes about what it means to relate to objects in the world as a human being, and together with other human beings in his given environment”
(66). History 2 is always only partly embodied, in fact. It can only appear in a fragmentary manifestation that thwarts any totalization of it. History 2 calls the theorist,
“beckon[ing]” us to “more affective narratives” (71).
History 2 is never properly a history, I would contend. Instead, it implies, in
Chakrabarty's words, that “historical time is not integral, that it is out of joint with itself”
(16). And in denoting the non-integrity of historical time, History 2 also names worlds that cannot be fully historicized, that cannot be fully described in historical discourse and can never be read as coterminous with the historical conditions that must, according to a historicist paradigm, enable and explain them. History 2 does not fixate upon a privileged singularity, but names the field of heterogeneity in which singularities circulate. In a way, postcolonial theory is always interested in the 2s: History 2, Anthropology 2, Literature 2, and even Freedom 2. The numerical scenario here suggests neither a dialectical nor a binary relation between the dominant and marginal manifestations of these concerns.
Instead, the 2s are supplemental in the Derridean sense: they decompose the totality or self-sufficiency of the 1s. 2s are not radical singularities, but appear as fragments or 199
“spots” of worlds that heterogenize the world that each of these discourses creates:
History 2 compromises the coherence of the world of history, the idea that history can tell the story of the world, and I would suggest that Freedom 2 indicates the possibility of other, unforeseen arenas for the manifestation of freedom, just as Anthropology 2 indicates the irreducibility of cultural experience to any finite account of it. Literature 2, here, would be something analogous, the indication within a literary text of a world that cannot be fully described by the world-representation of the text or within the established protocols of literary representation. Following Spivak's literary analysis in A Critique,
Literature 2 might be said to appear in the character of Friday in J. M. Coetzee's Foe, the
“unemphatic agent of withholding in the text” (190), or in proximity to the voice of
Christophine in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a figure whom the text cannot contain and through which the novel indicates its own limitations as a novel.70
The “moral love” to which Spivak alludes, then, is not about a total absorption of the other within some better representation, but nor, as the idea of History 2 suggests, is it about merely letting the singular be: History 2 implies the work of bearing witness or of critical figuration, just as it implies the inadequacy of all totalizing story-forms. “Moral love,” here, seems to describe something that motivates and undoes the imagination, defined by Spivak as the power “to think what is not there” (In Other Worlds ix). Her interest in “this unmanageable thing, the imagination,” and its capacities as an “ethical instrument,” is what connects, in her own estimation, her early work on Coleridge and
Wordsworth and her later development of postcolonial critique. In A Critique, Spivak cites “moral love” as a principle of the philosophy of Bimal Krishna Matilal, but she
70 For Spivak, Christophine's assertion of the extra-literary domain of her knowledge is crucial in this respect: “Read and write I don't know. Other things I know” (quot. Spivak 131). 200 returns to the idea of moral love in her recent book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of
Globalization, via a reading of Shelley's “A Defence of Poetry” in the context of pedagogical practice (111-116). For Shelley, “[t]he great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.” Goodness requires that one “imagine intensely and comprehensively … put[ting] [one]self in the place of another and of many others”: “the great instrument of moral good is the imagination” (682). Shelley's
“identification” or act of comprehensive imagination, however, is clearly at a distance from Spivak's idea of the necessary violence of provisional figuration. Shelley is interested in the specific property of the beautiful that might exist in the place “of another and of many others,” suggesting an indifference to the singular per se. The idea that the critical imagination might be a vehicle of moral love, however, does involve the question of the singular, insofar as love might be defined as that which is indifferent to the properties of the singular, that which values the singular only for what it is, for whatever it is. This understanding of the singular is at stake in Giorgio Agamben's claim in The
Coming Community that “[w]hatever [sic] is the thing with all its properties” (original emphasis). “Whatever” is a noun here, and while it names the thing “with all its properties,” none of these properties are decisive: “[i]n-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singularities, makes them lovable” (18).
“Whatever singularity” is the lovable, the object of love. Here, the singular and any privileged notion of it, such as that embedded within the language of the spot of time, diverge, because the object of love – the singular – according to Agamben can only exist by being whatever it is, apart from any decisive properties. Agamben's discussion of the 201 example is important here, since the example for him intervenes within the antinomy between the particular and the universal: “[n]either particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity” (9, original emphasis). Love, in Agamben, seems to describe a relation of non-appropriation, an orientation towards the singular in its self-manifesting quality.
The idea of an object that “shows its singularity,” however, brings us back to the problem of critical mediation that animates Spivak's work, just as the problem of phenomenological mediation animates postcolonial literary engagements with
Romanticism. “Whatever is” does not just show itself, and Spivak's love must surely stand somewhere between Agamben's orientation towards whatever singularity and
Shelley's comprehensive and self-constituting identification with the beautiful properties of the object. The specific character of the relationship between postcolonial theory and the singular begins to come into focus, here. The singular can only come into being as the product of an active figuration, Spivak argues. In other words, it appears as the native informant, in a way that implicates the postcolonial critic in circuits of epistemic violence. But the singular is never totalized by that figuration: the native informant appears in between the critic and the subaltern, such that the subaltern necessarily recedes in order for the native informant to come into view. We can see this in Spivak's encounter with the “shy hardy women,” who become “informants” – the “real constituency of feminism, accepting their lot as the norm” – exactly as they cease to be whatever they are outside of the universe of the theorist. The singularity named by the word “subaltern” can only achieve currency through its instrumentalization, and the idea of “moral love” bespeaks the necessity of making some kind of function of the subaltern, but one that is 202 grounded in an awareness that the subaltern as such has no function. The moral love underpinning the imagination that produces the always provisional constellation of the native informant's perspective is also the moral love that recognizes this constellation as violence, as a violation of the singular.
Many of Spivak's readers have found her work problematically Romantic, without necessarily using the word. Hallward includes Spivak in his diagnosis of a postcolonial theory obsessed with producing tropes, such as the figure of the subaltern, that at once enable its theoretical productivity and take it away from the material concerns that supposedly inform it. Hallward's critique of the critical mechanisms at work in Spivak is in fact similar to Spivak's critique of the kinds of representations developed in
Romanticism. This is true in her early essay on Wordsworth (included in In Other
Worlds), in which she argues that The Prelude substitutes its narrative of “political investigation” for a trajectory of discursive self-constitution. Spivak is interested in uncovering the “trace structure” of the text, in working against the text's effort to cover this structure up, to sublate its concerns with the French Revolution in the production of a poetic whole: “Many passages in the later books bring the French Revolution under control by declaring it to be a felix culpa, a necessary means towards Wordsworth's growth as a poet” (71).71 In An Aesthetic Education, also, Spivak critiques a similar
71 Spivak, even in this essay, is aware that the trace-structure she is concerned to expose “disrupts the unified and self-contained description of things” (64) and that by offering a coherent critical argument about Wordsworth she takes something for granted, something inconsistent with the logic of the trace-structure (this is an anxiety, it seems to me, that looks forward to A Critique). As I have suggested, Hallward's critique of Spivak identifies exactly what she identifies in Wordsworth; Hallward would claim that the non-representation of the subaltern is a kind of felix culpa for the development of Spivak's critical discourse, underpinning the exorbitant power of her discourse. It is interesting, in this light, that the “solution” in A Critique to the problem Spivak hints at here is to undermine, through corrective footnotes and digressions, the coherence and immediacy of her discourse, to insist upon its own trace structures, in a sense. Here we also see the complexity of origins: Spivak's 203 critical mechanism, suggesting that the British Romantics “had not cared about the subaltern” but “merely used them [sic]” (113). Victor Li's reading of some of the troubling implications of certain postcolonial representations of the subaltern is especially suggestive of a Romantic afterlife embedded within this concept. For Li, the subaltern is often caught up within a sacrificial logic, according to which the ideal subaltern is always the dead subaltern, even, in the case of the character of Fokir from Amitav Ghosh's The
Hungry Tide, an “instinctive genius loci” (291). The “necroidealism” Li describes recalls some of Wordsworth's poems, such as “Michael” and “The Ruined Cottage.” In these poems, the poet's storytelling power compensates for, or is underpinned by, the absence or death of the people whose histories he recounts. The stories of these voiceless, subaltern figures – victims of enclosure and other forms of contemporary social violence
– are activated by the poet's imaginative power, his power to think “what is not there,” in
Spivak's words. These poems make audible the presences that haunt the empty, depopulated spaces of each poem, and in this sense have a political power. The ruined cottage, or the straggling heap of unhewn stones, are spots of time in Makdisi's sense, or at least spots of spots of time, fragments or traces of lives that do not conform to the progressivist temporality of modernization: they are shards of History 2. But it is only through the poet's agency that these spaces can be activated as anti-modern, resistant sites, and the question of the priority between story and subaltern – of whether the story bears witness to the singularity of the subaltern, to her recessive secrecy, or whether the subaltern becomes a subordinate figure within a larger construct – is uncertain. early work about Romanticism anticipates her later work, but the methods and rhetoric of this early work are clearly indebted to her teacher, Paul de Man. Is Spivak's essay really about Wordsworth, or is Wordsworth merely the site for a rhetorical reading practice that could operate in any context? The latter possibility makes it difficult to confidently draw a seamless connection between The Prelude itself, say, and Spivak's configuration of the subaltern. 204
This is all to say that Spivak's work, and the ramification of Spivak's work in postcolonial theory, inherit a problem that can be discerned in Romanticism, while allowing us to see another very different way in which the Romantic attention to the singular has a postcolonial afterlife. The subaltern, or the site of hybridity, or the locus of a History 2, are attractive to a theoretical enterprise seeking to integrate and unfold alternative vantage points within a globalized world, and especially within a globalized epistemology that is a legacy of colonial structures of thought and the ongoing condition for the material elaboration of neo-imperialist teleologies in our world. This does not necessarily make postcolonial theory “Romantic,” but by suggesting a connection between Wordsworthian spots of time and these postcolonial configurations of the singular, I have at once been suggesting a postcolonial resonance to this aspect of
Romantic aesthetics, and suggesting the problematic intimacy between a fidelity to the singular as such – as something that defeats cultural tropes and withdraws from historical discourses – and fidelity precisely to a mobile and migratory representational trope or theoretical abstraction. While the celebratory language that informs a text such as
Bhabha's The Location of Culture makes it appear as symptomatic of its time – as an inverted image of Francis Fukuyama's “end of history” thesis that disposes of the material difficulties of history and historical struggle – Spivak's critical awareness of the problems the subaltern poses for theory marks an important distinction, without de-legitimizing projects of imaginative othering that would provide ways of thinking politics and history anew. Indeed, the non-representable singularity of the subaltern does not so much guarantee the failure of such projects, as determine that they must necessarily be incomplete and therefore always be ongoing. 205
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