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Commonwealth Essays and Studies

33.1 | 2010HorizonsClaire Omhovère (dir.)

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/8262DOI: 10.4000/ces.8262ISSN: 2534-6695

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Printed versionDate of publication: 1 September 2010ISSN: 2270-0633

Electronic referenceClaire Omhovère (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 33.1 | 2010, “Horizons” [Online], Online since11 December 2021, connection on 20 January 2022. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/8262;DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.8262

Cover descriptionCover picture: Slave Ship (Slavers rowing Overboard the Dead and Tying, Typhoon Coming On) 1840, oil oncanvas, J. M. William Turner, Museum of Fine Arts, BostonCover creditsPhotograph: © [2010] Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Commonwealth

essays and Studies

horizons

Vol. 33, n°1, autumn 2010

horizons

marta DVoRaKForeword ......................................................................................................... 5

Claire omhoVèReIntroduction .................................................................................................... 7

Kerry-Jane wallaRtLines and Circles: Geometrical Horizons in David Dabydeen’s Turner .......... 11

myriam moïSeGrasping the Ungraspable in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetry ............................ 23

anne le GUelleCSubversion of the Colonial Linear Perspective in Kim Scott’s Benang ............ 35

Pascal ZInCKEyeless in Guantanamo: Vanishing Horizons in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows ............................................................... 45

Fiona mCCannBroadening and Narrowing Horizons in Zoë Wicomb’s The One That Got Away ..................................................... 55

Claire omhoVèReBeyond Horizon: Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness and the Prairie Novel Tradition...................................................................... 67

elsa SaCKSICKThe Horizon in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: A Poetics of Lines .......................................................................................... 81

anne-Sophie leteSSIeRCircumscribing the Horizon in Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter ................. 93

myriam BellehIGUeEveryday Horizons in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address ...... 105

ReVIewS

elleke BoehmeR Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race and National Desire in South Africa. By Pallavi Rastogi ........................................................................................ 117

Geoffrey V. DaVIS J.M.Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ed. Jane Poyner .............. 119

Christiane FIoUPoU Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka. By Mpalive-Hangson Msiska ............. 121

Contributors ............................................................................................... 123

Foreword

The renowned painting by Turner on our front cover (courtesy The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) admirably configures the phenomenological, aesthetic, historical, and socio-political issues which this issue’s theme, Horizons, addresses. The storm-tossed slaveship in the background and the drowning slaves in the foreground re-present a historical, referential reality which has taken on mythical resonances, calling up to contemporary viewers Derek Walcott’s assertion that the sea is history. Rooted in Edmund Burke’s sensualist concept of the sublime, the seascape engineers awe and terror in viewers, and articulates the required negotiation between identification (the figures arousing our common dread of death and mortality) and distance (coterminous with the safety of the spectator confronted with a spectacle rather than reality, the inside/outside parameter in turn overlapping with the free/enslaved binary). The horizon and its vanishing point in Turner’s seascape transform what certain postcolonial theorists may see as a potentially simplistic figuration of the politically charged and now mythical Middle Passage. The multiple forms of crossing addressed by the painter intersect with a number of this issue’s articles, either in a frontal or displaced fashion. The discussions and resulting cross-talk call to mind Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, in which the foundations of individual and national identity-construction reside in our relations with the other and the world. The contributors to this issue engage with the questions of subjectivity and perception, rupture and continuation, the monolithic and the multiple, which roil under the surfaces. Turner’s representation and the contributors’ multifaceted investigations can evoke Kamau Brathwaite’s consideration that in the face of the immense diversity of multiform cultures, the unity is submarine.

Marta Dvorak

Introduction

For explorers and artists alike, the imaginary line of the horizon marks the receding distance separating the eye from planned and dreamed destinations. Because the topos of the journey is so intricately linked

with the dynamics of creation, with its departures from well-trodden paths, its rough crossings and unnerving lulls, the horizon presents itself as a heuristic trope. Figurative horizons are invoked the evolution of literary genres, the formation of aesthetic currents, and the production of the individual work of art, along with the accomplishments they strive towards and, sometimes, the unsurpassable limit they have reached. In their explorations of the imagination, writers plot positions and trajectories reaching into the unknown.

Starting from Husserl’s “structure of horizon,” Michel Collot stresses the ambivalence of a concept which encapsulates contrary notions of containment and concealment (Collot 257). The horizon line circumscribes space within the scope of the visual field, but it also delineates the hazy fringe where perception dissolves, and space spills into infinite, occasionally overwhelming, possibilities. The horizon then coincides with the limit on which perception abuts when the visible vanishes, and the presence of the other is called upon to retrieve a vision out of unfathomable distances. Clearly a liminal operator, the term has a remarkable affinity not only with the sublime, but also with all aesthetic confrontations with the ineffable. In his analysis of ancient texts accounting for the transition from Chaos to Cosmos, Edward Casey calls attention to “the world-creating character of horizon,” (Casey 11) as earth and sky become distinct from their original confusion. This inaugural separation is reasserted in the foundational gesture which, from time immemorial, has traced the precincts of sacred sites, setting the temple (fanum) apart from its profane surroundings. Contrary to the boundary line, however, the mobile horizon suggests that renewal need not arise out of a rupture, but that differentiation may also operate within forms of continuity. The essays collected in this issue all demonstrate that the horizon line allows us to think of alteration in terms of constancy as well as change. Finally, what makes the horizon so unique as an organizing principle is the way it articulates space and time together into the variables of expanse and distance. Infinitely receding into the future of the round planet, the horizon line speaks to our humanity, because it intimates that man’s finitude is tempered by the fresh possibilities that arise with each new dawn.

The two essays opening the volume explore the notions of differentiation and continuity which the horizon implies by looking respectively at Turner by David Dabydeen and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. The two book-length poems readdress the Zong massacre of 1781, the infamous episode of the British slave

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trade which inspired J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) in 1840. Kerry Jane Wallart shows how Dabydeen’s poem relates in complex ways to the “blocked horizon” of a tradition it refutes and subtly renews. The poem questions what the perspectival construction of the painting reveals and conceals – Britain’s imperial sway and a cargo of drowning bodies. By abstracting the conventions of figurative art into a set of geometrical lines, Dabydeen engages with the aesthetic of the sublime in unexpected yet remarkable ways, suggesting that postcolonial writers in their writing back to the Western tradition also contribute to its ongoing transformation. A similar point is made by Myriam Moïse in her reading of Marlene NourbeSe Philip formal strategies in Zong! The collection experiments with a poetics of rupture, saturating the white page with black script, fragmenting words and languages. Because it diffracts the single perspective on the historical event, Zong! turns into song, weaving together the myriad voices of the victims of the tragedy. The notion of linear perspective is once again central to the third essay, Anne Le Guellec’s analysis of Kim Scott’s Benang. Intrigued by the novel’s conflation of genealogical and perspectival linearity, Le Guellec observes the narratorial strategies through which Scott re-introduces a decentered, Aboriginal perspective debunking the devastating illusion of a racially pure Australia. This questions the ideal of sameness which has long seemed to be the only desirable goal on the horizon of Australia’s national construction.

The next three contributions are concerned with the shifting horizons of diasporic or exilic writing. In his essay on Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, Pascal Zinck shows how the horizon has become a locus of fracture, trauma and division in a novel which interrogates in unprecedented ways the historical ruptures of the twentieth century, from the Holocaust and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the global war on terror. Fiona McCann approaches the notion of horizon in terms of generic evolution in her study of The One That Got Away by Zoe Wicomb. Her analysis of Wicomb’s ongoing experimentation with the constraints of genre focuses on the distinctively post-modern techniques of the short story cycle, the unexpected shifts in focalisation and the mises en abyme that foreground the representation process by reinforcing on a formal level the aborted or confused communication between the South-African and the Scottish characters. My essay on A Complicated Kindness by Canadian writer Miriam Toews also deals with the horizon from a generic and a stylistic point of view. Having presented how Toews inserts her version of a Mennonite childhood into the Prairie horizontal tradition, the essay moves on to consider the narratorial strategies of incongruous literalization through which Toews’s narrator challenges the verticality of Mennonite authority, and includes the reader within a community of sentiment.

Elsa Sacksick takes a fresh approach on the question of borders in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Although the horizon is literally absent from

Introduction 9

the claustrophobic space and futureless time described in the novel, the narrative recreates scope and depth on the figurative level through idiosyncratic experimentations with the vertical, paradigmatic proliferation of language on the page. The two essays which conclude the volume share a similar interest in phenomenology and the structuring effect the horizon has on our perception. In her discussion of Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter, Anne-Sophie Letessier shows that the pictorial motif of the horizon plays a fundamental role in the way Urquhart’s ekphrastic novel interrogates the modalities of visual perception. Inspired by Michel Collot’s enlightening remarks on the horizon structure, Letessier demonstrates to what extent Urquhart grapples in her writing with the rendering of “the invisible inscribed in the very texture of the visible.” Myriam Bellehigue similarly analyses the strategies used by Amit Chaudhuri in his début novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, to delineate the “perceptual, intersubjective and linguistic horizons” of a young boy’s summer holiday in Calcutta. In Chaudhuri’s novel, perception is “an act of exploration, and writing becomes a way of probing into all these zones of invisibility – not so much to make them visible as to enhance their elusive qualities.” It is no wonder then if Bellehigue steers away from exoticist readings of Indian literature in English, and firmly replaces the novel within the long literary tradition that has sought to disclose to the reader’s eye the extraordinariness of the most mundane.

Claire OMHOVèREGuest Editor

Works Cited

Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical Survey. Berkeley, CA : U of California P, 1997.

Collot, Michel. La poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon. Paris: PUF, 1989.

lines and Circles: Geometrical horizons in David Dabydeen’s Turner

In his long narrative poem Turner, Guyanese author David Dabydeen attempts stylistically to undercut the problematic emotion carried by a painting by Turner. Perspective dissolves in favour of geometry, science is pitted against art, abstraction against figuration, the dominant horizon eventually replaced by circles of suffering and oppression. Yet the text does derive from the image in complex ways, and the aesthetics of the sublime is interpreted in modernist terms. The poem thus adopts the shifting viewpoints of modernism in order to displace Turner’s horizon without losing sight of his painting. This paper shows how a poem which has consistently been read as a protestation might rather be a reflection upon the act of creation and the continuity which it implies.

J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)1 is swathed in the same warring yellow and blue which his contemporary, John Constable, had admiringly called

“saffron and indigo,” with respect to the equally famous The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl (Beckett, 124). Turner’s Slave Ship

depicts an actual scene from the archives of the British slave trade: the case of the Zong of 1781, a slave ship whose cargo was so badly affected by an epidemic that Captain Collingwood used the opportunity of an on-coming storm to throw 122 sick men and women into the sea. The reasoning for this was a financial calculation: he could claim insurance for Africans lost at sea, but not for those dying of disease. (Döring 1997, 3)

A major scandal even at the time, the event has inspired numerous artistic representations from a vast array of vantage points. Among them, Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s Turner examines the painting’s very construction of per-spective. Aflame, the romantic horizon occupies centre-stage in Turner’s paint-ing while, hardly noticeable in the foreground, the shackled foot of a drowning slave thrown overboard merely hints at the drama which is really unfolding. In his preface to his long narrative poem, David Dabydeen discusses John Ruskin’s critical response to the famous painting.2 After long, lyrical comments on the

1 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter particularly renowned for his brilliantly coloured seascapes.2 Ruskin was fond enough of the painting to have actually bought it, thus becoming its first owner; the description of the painting is to be read in Ruskin 159-60. The painting (see front cover) now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. The paginations for all subsequent quotations from Turner and Dabydeen’s preface will be given directly between parentheses in the body of the text.

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sea, the treatment of the sky, the use of colours, Ruskin ends up offhandedly tackling the actual subject, “the shackling and drowning of Africans” in a foot-note which, in Dabydeen’s words, “reads like an afterthought, something tossed overboard.” (ix) Here is a quote from Ruskin’s commentary: “Every square inch is a perfect composition (Ruskin 160). As is usually the case, the commentary betrays its author more than the artist who is being analysed. Indeed, Turner’s painting is so ambiguous as to have elicited both the opinion that he was prov-ing a consummate upholder of slavery, and that he was actually denouncing the trade (see for example Smiles 63-64). On his part, Ruskin takes the figure of the slave for granted, neglecting to interpret its presence. He was sensitive, after all, to the composition of a painting which does focus on sea and sky while obscuring the bodies of the slaves. Similarly, in more than one nineteenth-century novel, colonial exactions hardly deserve a mention, and often are relegated to the back-ground. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), for example, does not dwell on the fact that the property and money of Sir Thomas Bertram are obviously sustained by his sugar plantations and presumably the slaves who worked them in Antigua. For Ruskin and others, colonial domination was not the topic simply because they saw no reason to discuss its validity (although Ruskin did rather explicitly enjoin his compatriots to “Reign or Die” in his Inaugural Lecture at the Univer-sity of Oxford, in 1870).

In the preface, David Dabydeen goes on to write that his own text “focuses on the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting.” (x) He returns to what cannot be seen on the horizon, to what hides in the foreground, submerged. He chooses to re-organize the composition. Turner’s organisation of space is thrown to the four winds in the long narrative poem, which recounts the ordeal of a young African boy at the hands of his slave master. In Dabydeen’s Turner, the sublime circumference of the sea – the “perfect composition” that had so impressed Ruskin – recedes in favour of an indistinct mesh of lineatures, of lines and circles, of “strokes, and dots” (27) which defy perspective. The horizon is made an impossible vision through the dissemination of subjectivities, starting with that of the artist. Turner becomes in turn, as it were, a pervert and a greedy slave master, a writer, the dying Christ or else a still-born African who has just lost its mother to the Middle Passage, in a text which merges innumerable identities from both Africa and Britain. In such a confusion of voices, the poem delineates nothing but a dark hole around that foot, a “thing drawn yet / Struggling to break free.” (30) My intention in this paper is to link Dabydeen’s poetic choice to Homi Bhabha’s reflections on time in his essay “DissemiNation.” Its first section, “The time of the nation,” highlights how national identity goes along with a certain visualization of time. Space is not treated per se by Bhabha, but alluded to in sev-eral passages, such as the following: “The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression.” (295) In Turner, the deconstruction of perspec-

Geometrical Horizons in David Dabydeen’s Turner 13

tive challenges such elaborations, and can therefore be read as an attempt to evade political concerns altogether.3

While criticism has mostly questioned J. M. W Turner’s political and aes-thetic intentions,4 and Dabydeen’s postcolonial reactions,5 this paper proposes to read the poem’s response to the painting in formal terms. Turner has imposed a perspective that humiliates the drowning slave further, and Dabydeen sets about to organize space in the (apparently) most abstract way possible. Neither a flam-boyant writing back nor a self-conscious and equally angry failure to redeem an original voice (both readings having been made of Turner), the poem is centered around the image of a circle. As a metaphor for creation, the circle is deployed to undercut the straight line of grand narratives and master paintings. Because the body of the poem constantly plays with its iconographic source, this paper proposes to read Turner as a reflection on the notion of geometry, another visual discipline which Dabydeen opposes to the romantic “sublime” and the unity of perspective. Space is reorganised along the shapes of circles, spirals, orbs, vortexes, spheres and arabesques. This circularity is, I shall argue, a writing back to colonial visions without sentimentalism, and which is intended to remain distinct from any ideology. Abstract configurations of shape and meaning in Turner contribute to abolishing the horizon in favour of a plane, a line and a circle which function as invitations and constraints, an end and a beginning, a desire and a reality, what is and can be, what is seen and not seen. However, the very title of the poem intimates proximity with the romantic painter, as the name Turner can be taken either for an ironical homage or an accusation. The last section of this essay will address the ways in which Dabydeen arguably follows in Turner’s footsteps rather than turns away from them.

Turner presents us with two protagonists, the slave who has been drowning for centuries and whose consciousness we overhear, and a stillborn baby drifting towards him or her, as its gender characterization becomes more and more indis-tinct the further we read on. Both a monologue from beyond the grave and a tale of births and adoptions, the poem recounts the relationship between one slave and his/her master, Turner, as well as the one between the two dead slaves drifting

3 Fulford writes about Döring’s analysis, “Döring’s essay recognizes, as we have, that aesthetics are bound to politics, in this case to the ideologies of colonialism, which allow the death of slaves to be depicted in a sublime style as they are transformed into the occluded and incomprehensible “other,” inspiring terror in the eyes of the beholder. In this sense, any notion of a decolonized aesthetic is doomed since our very notion of what constitutes the sublime has been forged within a context whereby imperialism imaginatively obscures and distances otherness or alterity.” (2) 4 As a matter of fact, and even though his nationalism is no longer to be proven, Turner was a very close friend of Walter Fawkes, a reformist who staunchly supported abolition. However, his consistent silence concerning his political views makes such a debate a moot point altogether. 5 See for example Döring, Fulford and McIntyre.

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in an unnamed and ever more ghostly sea. “Neither can escape Turner’s repre-sentation of them as exotic and sublime victims. Neither can describe themselves anew but are indelibly stained by Turner’s language and imagery.” (x) The preface questions, once again, the possibility for postcolonial authors to start writing in front of a blocked horizon. Any type of representation, be it African or Guyanese, has already had its fate sealed by previous colonial or even colonialist narratives and – as in the instance of the painting – images. The idea is given shape through the reiteration of the word “seal,” in both senses of the word: “sealed lips”; “Like an old seal’s mouth”; “Until a slave arose from the dead, / Cracking the seal of his mouth, waking / The buried with forbidden words.” (16, 18, 29 respectively) The mouth of the enslaved is irredeemably stopped, and language forbidden. This is evidently where postcolonialism joins postmodernism – in the aware-ness that it is too late to write anything new.6 Some type of foreclosure is clearly on the cards, “stopping [the poet’s] mouth” (39). A figure of oppression (but not only), Turner becomes the slave master and even at times all slave masters, and all the blond and blue-eyed Englishmen before and after him. “Turner are [sic] the ones with golden hair […] All the fair men are Turner.” (8) Dabydeen’s protagonist is also a lecher and a pederast, taking his slave boys to bed, silencing them in shocking and graphic ways. More than anything, he represents order and temporality, rationality and science: “since Turner’s days I have learnt to count, / Weigh, measure, abstract, rationalise.” (2) The line of discourse is necessarily that of rationality, it becomes a furrow, a groove endlessly trapping the voices of the decolonized world. The poetics deployed in Turner does not, however, reject the above-mentioned rationality. In an interview, Dabydeen adds that Europeans have been imposing their vision of things and their genres, and that

there is something very voyeuristic about Turner’s response to all that blood and mayhem, in the same way that slavery provided the horror that fed into the Gothic novel at the turn of the 18th century: all that horror and Neo-Gothicism partly fed on the descriptions of slavery, the shark, the broken nigger, the blood. (qtd in Döring 1997, 14)

In the course of the nineteenth century, the horror of slavery was turned into thrills by a jaded British audience.7 Turner’s perspective and saturated mimesis have locked the fate of Middle Passage victims into lurid emotions.8 “[I]n search of another image of himself,” (40) the slave offers a description of the disaster which is full of restraint, spurning the sensational realm of passions and instinc-

6 The relation between postmodernism and postcolonialism is complex, not the least since neither term is easily or straightforwardly defined. For further reading on the idea that both share a strong awareness of their belatedness, see Adam and Tiffin. 7 Colonial horror tales form a distinct genre by themselves, and a singular vein of gothic novels. For further reading on the “imperial gothic,” see Brantlinger 227-53.8 One might mention here that Turner’s chair at the Royal Academy was that of “Perspective.”


tual drives. Indeed, Turner’s painting garnered immense attention also because it did speak to the senses.9 Its horizon is meant to mirror tempests in the souls. Conversely, Dabydeen confronts perspective, and refuses to adopt a single point of view. He thus often uses the interstice between two types of representation to diffract the singularity of horizon, the unity of vantage point. A passage betrays such play, and appeals to reason rather than to emotion: “People spew off the edges, clutching roots / Like they do now at each other, as one ship sinks.” (6) Reproduced on the page facing these lines is a detail from another painting by Turner, A Fire at Sea (c. 1835, Tate Gallery). The adverb “now” refers to the very page on which the word is printed, and intimates that the poetic voice is actually producing a running commentary of Turner’s artwork, adopting the objectivity of criticism. In the latter quotation, echoes from The Waste Land are also to be heard (“What are the roots that clutch,” [“The Burial of the Dead” 61]), and they lead readers further down to read Turner in modernist terms as well as in the light of Lyotard’s reflections on the question of the sublime. Elsewhere, rationality and science appear under the guise of geometry, an important concern in the poem. In Turner, circles and lines are not meant to send us back to figurative art; they elaborate a more abstract horizon.10

Opting for abstraction goes hand in hand with a dissemination of vantage points. The voice is evasive. The voice of the drowned slave alternates with that of Turner, himself a Protean figure. The expression of emotions and opinions is carefully avoided, and, even when feeling is evoked, its recipient is obliterated: “Swoosh, the sound still haunts.” (2) Passive forms are piled upon one another (“nigger made impotent, / Hurt by different hands in different ages,” 30, e.g.). More often even, the self is relegated to the position of object – grammatical and otherwise: “my breath held / In shock until the waters quell me,” “the sun, which blinds me as I look up […] The sun has reaped my eyes,” “The water will not see me.” (21, 22, 23) The theme of the deadly and the ghostly also recurs, further abolishing the possibility of a stable perspective and of the horizon that would go therewith. In Turner, the narrative voice is clearly rising from the dead: “[N]either ghost / Nor portent of a past or future life / Such as I am now.” (20) With lines such as “she might be dead,” (20) the poem goes on suspending exist-ence sine die. The absence of any sensibility is made clearer even by the still-born child, yet another “Turner,” a being which can claim no human experience, an

9 Frédéric Ogée thus argues that, influenced by the poetry of Thomson and Akenside, Turner was convinced that an empirical approach to the world was most apt, and that he conceived images no less as a sensual than as an intellectual experience of the truth of things, as a form of poetic moment (see Ogée 167).10 It seems that such a preoccupation has led to further literary developments in A Harlot’s Progress (1999), a novel which clearly derives from Turner. For more on this parallel, see Yelin. Her article reads Dabydeen’s Harlot’s Progress and Turner in the light of Adorno’s writings on the possibility of post-traumatic art, placing these texts once more in an “ethical and political” (344) perspective.

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anti-lyrical possibility. After the modernists, Dabydeen creates a world in which the lines of the poem lead to mere dashes, “strokes, and dots,” (27), replacing the last remnants of a human presence still to be remembered, but certainly partly vanished (such is the narrative voice in The Harlot’s Progress, a sequel of sorts to Turner, which presents Mungo lying on his deathbed). Eradicating emotional perspectives which were too tainted with Victorian sensationalism, and which also failed to render the horror of it all, has led the poet to do away with human presence in his text. Interestingly, Dabydeen had published Disappearance (1993) only one year before Turner, and the themes of both texts are to some extent intertwined. The novel tells the story of a Guyanese engineer come to Hastings in order to literally prevent England from disappearing. The erosion provoked by the sea is strong enough to have washed out several villages perched on the soft chalk cliff, and threatens to go on doing so. The narrative gives voice to the perspective of the colonized, and subverts traditional relationships between the motherland and its colonies. It falls to a Guyanese to redeem Kent, but the engi-neer’s alienation is such that the irony is lost on him. The recorded disappearances are also human, starting with that of the husband of the narrator’s landlady, Mrs. Rutherford, a ghostly character reappearing throughout the novel. Such narrative strategies are deployed, I argue, because the notion of perspective – either textual or graphic – has been delegitimized by the colonial period.

The erasure of the self may also be related to Dabydeen’s interpretation and distortion of the sublime. Turner calls into question the aesthetics of the sublime, as the double and uncertain etymology of the word (sub, under + limis, oblique or limen, the threshold) contains the very idea of a line, or limit. In the poem, the sublime is associated with the alienation of repetition, orienting the perspective toward the slave boys:

And we repeated in a trance the words That shuddered from him: blessed, angelic Sublime; words that seemed to flow endlessly From him, filling our mouths and belliesEndlessly. (38)

Run-on-lines, the repetition of “endlessly” framing the penultimate line, and the final figure of aposiopesis (a rhetorical interruption designed to betray an emotion) – all these devices suggest that the horizon of language is infinitely blocked by what has already been said and written. But the same passage abounds with images of the circle. The linearity of the syntagm is held in check by repetitions that curb the line, the evocation of the round shapes of mouths and bellies, the ebb and flow of the poem’s rhythm. Dots, lines and circles intersperse the poem. Geometry is lurking.

Dabydeen understands the sublime as a geometrical poetics. Such a position may not be as distant from Turner’s as one might think and the last section of my paper will show how the poem derives from the painting in more ways than it


first seems. One of the possible definitions of the sublime is an attempt to mini-mize the topic so as to create the distance which, according to Burke, is necessary to arouse our sense of the sublime. Typhoons and drowning in tempestuous seas were a privileged topic, along with all sorts of natural disasters – shipwrecks, snow storms and drifts, floods and fires, with humans crushed under, cast overboard or thrown aside. Yet the sublime only worked if the spectator knew herself or himself to be safe. According to Edmund Burke, the sublime rests upon the feel-ing of “negative pleasure,” stemming from the distance between the viewer and the view, a necessarily awful and painful one. The sublime makes us guess what can hardly be beheld. The object of the sublime is described as “dark, uncertain and confused.” (Burke 1, 7) Distance is always needed, which suggests that, as an aesthetic category, the sublime has to do with horizons, but also with the disen-gagement of the self. “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful.” (Burke 24, 2) The very association of pain and what Burke calls “delight” was subsequently resur-rected and transformed by Kant in his rational rather than sensualistic sublime, an emotion which, however, may not be inspired by a work of art but need be associated with the spectacle of nature. Lyotard scrutinized the Kantian sublime in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, which defines the concept of the sublime as the source of the entire modernist movement. Indeed, modernism questioned the very existence of subjectivity and led thought to its limit. “It is the limit itself that understanding cannot conceive of as its object. The limit is not an object for understanding. It is its method” (Lyotard 59). Writing about modernist poetry, Lyotard points out that the

sublime feeling is analyzed as double defiance. Imagination at the limits of what it can present does violence to itself in order to present that which it can no longer present. Reason, for its part, seeks, unreasonably, to violate the interdict it imposes on itself and which is strictly critical, the interdict that prohibits it from finding objects corresponding to its concepts in sensible intuition. In these two aspects, thinking defies its own finitude, as if fascinated by its own excessiveness. (Lyotard 55)

A “method” avoiding “sensible intuition,” such is the – modernist-inspired – sublime which is thus to be found in Dabydeen’s Turner. The poem uses geom-etry as a guideline, but it also responds to the painting as an artwork rather than merely criticizing the painter’s cultural perspective – at odds with the poet’s contemporary perspective. As a matter of fact, Turner’s art was already veering towards abstraction, thus introducing a distinct and shocking rupture in the tradition of nature painting the English school had founded. Creating a vortex where the subject vanishes, Turner’s art questions the very possibility of represen-tation, and painting often becomes its own topic, a trait which largely caused his work to be ignored in the Victorian age. Dabydeen’s poem throws into relief the

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difficulty of making pronouncements about Turner’s art, perhaps as much as it deplores the erasure of that drowning slave.

As in modernist poetry, mimetic representation in Turner is threatened because value is lost, and because of the axiological uncertainty, signalled by the Eliot intertext, “Would it have been worth while, after all.”11 In this respect, the poem forcefully reminds us that value was a moral scandal during the slave trade, indicting the capitalist excesses of the eighteenth century in Great Britain. If the poem’s horizon is blocked, it is also because no worth can ever guarantee lan-guage again – language being traditionally guaranteed by common beliefs, as is easily seen in the case of oaths for example. The motifs of boat and coin are often merged, possibly recalling Moby Dick, but surely suggesting that all that mankind gone awry had to do with no more than greed.

[…] rub salt Into the stripes of her wounds in slow ecstaticRitual trance, each grain caressed and secretedInto her ripped skin like a trader placing eachCounted coin back into his purse. (37)

The lines weave body and money together. The imagination of the poet teeters between the linear (stripes, ripped) and the circular (grain, placing back, purse) which subsequently turns into a baroque-like fold: “Her flesh is open / Like the folds of a purse, she receives / His munificence of salt” (37) The rationale for refusing to write might be for other reasons than the lock-up of perspective on the part of the British. Such memories might be worthless, devalued by an economy gone fast and loose. Elsewhere, arithmetic appears as uncongenial (Turner counts and “sketches endless numbers” 17), with geometry its counterpart and possible solution.

Like Derek Walcott, David Dabydeen foregrounds the sea to suggest the temptation of dismooring and drifting, a solution to “loosen the greed anchored / In men’s hearts.” (10) Here, value and suffering are strongly linked, and an escape might be suggested by the verb “loosen,” which is often understood in the poem as the opposite of to enslave. The same term is used by Dabydeen to encapsulate the birth of his vocation:

“I dropped out in the second year and went back to Guyana for six months to loosen my tongue. When I came back to Cambridge, I felt more confident.” He felt confident enough, indeed, to submit those Creole poems to an English prize and win it, thus launching his career as a poet. (Guardian interview)

One remembers the “thing drawn yet / Struggling to break free.” (30) Loose-ness also stands for the poetic voice, one which needs to forsake lament. This dis-

11 A few lines following this quotation from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (14), Lazarus, risen from the dead, appears, another intimation that Eliot lurks behind the entire text of Turner.


placement, which is also a dislocation and a welcome leap, allows the landscape to stop rendering an emotion, as was the case in Turner’s painting. Variations on the word “loose” recur in the poem: “Blown and flapping loose,” “Blown loose, I baptise Tanje after the strumpet / Of our village,” “Now I am loosed / Into the sea, I no longer call, / I have even forgotten the words.” (1, 14, 18) So much “looseness” directs us towards a horizon which does not exist, but will always be projected by the poetic imagination.

It has bleached me too of colour,Painted me gaudy, dabs of ebony, An arabesque of blues and vermilions,Sea-quats cling to my body like gorgeous Ornaments. (14)

The arabesque is a curvilinear form reconciling the circle and the line. It is also an interesting feature from a postcolonial vantage point, as it sees the East meet the West: it is the name given by the Arabs and seen through the prism of the Italian language with the adjective arabesco. The term also testifies to the polysemy of the signified, as it can designate a type of writing, a dance position, and a musical subgenre altogether. The circle is everywhere in the poem, and it often loops into an arabesque, often representing resilience: “Almost a circle with-out snapping, yet strong.” (2) The arabesque is also phonetic, braiding together similar sonorities such as “rope,” “reap,” “ripe,” “rape”. Elsewhere, it assumes the shape of the imperfect circles of intertextuality with, for example, echoes of Trin-culo’s words in The Tempest (“most scurvy monster,” II, 2, 1241): “It plopped into the water from a passing ship / Like a lime-seed spat from the scurvied mouth / Of a sailor.” (6) Like Prospero, Turner is carrying his books around, an object of fascination for the young slaves. The image of a circle is also embedded in the first syllable of the name Turner, returning again and again in Dabydeen’s text. Finally, I contend that, more than anything else, the various figures of the circle function in the manner of a poetic gesture, one which cannot quite tell of the Middle Passage, but keeps circling around its dark hole. The aporia of perspective is replaced by a circular horizon – the very Greek etymology of the word: a belt, a circle – which mimics the return of the word, again and again, on the scene of traumatic memories.

The entire text is set under the sign of incessant repetitions. As a result, the figure of the circle imposes itself, and supersedes the line of perspective, remind-ing one that when modernist art destroyed perspective and its illusion, one of its first moves was to repeat a nose, an eye. Like the cubists before him, Dabydeen plays with circles as well as with cubes. His circles are also, prominently, stylistic, notably with the Homeric practice common to oral literatures, of using and reus-ing the same half-verse – “It plopped into the water and soon swelled” (2) / “It plopped into the water from a passing ship” (6); “Shall I call to it in the forgot-ten” (30) / “Shall I call to it even as the dead” (31); “The first of my sisters, stout,

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extravagant” (35) / “The first of my sisters I have named Rita” (37); “‘Nigger,’ it cries, naming me from some hoard” (28) / “‘Nigger,’ it cries, loosening from the hook” (39).

Lastly, a pre-lapsarian form of circle is also evoked through the language Dabydeen confesses in his preface to having invented: “Most of the names of birds, animals and fruit are made up.” (ix) Turner teems with neologisms (brum-plak, pakreet, hemlik, chaktee, panoose, straplee, abara, barak, siddam, ocho, sarabell, shada, jenti, harch, sea-quats, chintoo, dozi, babla, daedal), all of which suggest that expressing the Middle Passage is first and foremost a linguistic ven-ture. The voyage is announced on the first page of the poem in a highly metatex-tual passage:

What was deemed mere food for sharks will becomeMy fable. I named it TurnerAs I have given fresh names to birds and fishAnd humankind, all things living but unknown,Dimly recalled, or dead. (1)

In this respect, Turner stands out in Dabydeen’s poetic production. All his other works to date have been written in a mixture of Creole and English, a com-bination with remarkable historical antecedents, as he explains in the introduc-tion to Slave Song:

Another feature of the language is its brokenness, no doubt reflecting the brokenness and suffering of its original users – African slaves and East Indian indentured labourers. Its potential as a naturally tragic language is there, there in its brokenness and rawness which is like the rawness of a wound. If one has learnt and used Queen’s English for some years, the return to Creole is painful, almost nauseous. (13-14)

The surface of the poem is comparable to a geometrical plane where both Standard English and an imaginary tongue intersect. With Turner, Dabydeen has created an intellectual abstraction in which things cannot go wrong, eschew-ing the constraints of both reality and realism. It is important to note that there has always been something unrealistic about Turner’s art, since he obtained the almost unbearable light which made his style famous and unmistakeable, partly thanks to the undercoat of white paint he slathered onto the canvas beforehand, lending the paintings their distinct luminosity. Turner’s school thus gained the derogatory nickname of “white school”. This was how the blindingly white sun in the middle of Slave Ship was fashioned in the first place. In a way, Dabydeen pays tribute with Turner to some aspects of the painting that have been neglected by such interpretations as that of Ruskin. He envisages Slave Ship from a differ-ent point of view that displaces the horizon, and engages with figuration the way cubist and modernist works of art do when they require the beholder to change perspectives incessantly.

Dabydeen’s Turner attempts line after line to express the unacceptable in a circular way, in order to keep trying to voice what cannot be said. Geometry


is used to counter emotion and sensationalism. In his own way, the poet ques-tions the very possibility of a limit, of a perspective, of a position from which to behold a single horizon. The latter is redefined as a circle associated with death, but also with motherhood and creation. Only a few sea monsters are left for us to contemplate with awe, and they are certainly reminiscent of another painting by Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters (c. 1845). In section XIV, the poet evokes glimpses of “The dregs of creatures without names / Which roamed these waters before human birth.” (21) Like the surface of the sea, the horizon is where the invisible starts and the imagination takes over.

In the epilogue of Feeding the Ghosts, another text which originates in the Zong disaster, Guyanese novelist, Fred D’Aguiar, concludes in strikingly similar terms:

Accustomed to rehearsal, to repeats and returns, [the sea] did not care about the abomination happening in its name. We could not stop even if we tried. That ship was in that sea and we were in it and that would be for an eternity in a voyage without beginning or end. […] Where death has begun but remains unfinished because it recurs. (229-230)

In common with Turner, Feeding the Ghosts stages a circle that has come to replace the line. It is there to mark the end of humanity, of progress and of hope, irreparably. The very idea of a preface, in Dabydeen’s case, and of a prologue in D’Aguiar’s, points to the inanity of clear ends. As Bhabha remarks in the intro-duction of The Location of Culture, “beginnings and endings may be the sustain-ing myths of the middle years,” (1) but our times are witnessing the loosening up of such categories. In their stead, we find strange pronouncements, shifting per-spectives, new horizons and a language which, like Turner’s, circles in the round.

Kerry Jane WALLARTUniversité Paris 4 – Sorbonne

works Cited

Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Beckett, Ronald Brymer. Constable and the Fishers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952.

Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London, New York: Routledge, 1990. 291-322.

—. The Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1988.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909-1914.

D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco P, 1997.

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Dabydeen, David. Slave Song. Sydney: Dungaroo P, 1984.

—. Hogarth’s Blacks, Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987.

—. “On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today.” The State of Language. Ed. Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels. London: Faber, 1990. 3-14.

—. Turner. London: Cape, 1994.

—. Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain. London: Hansib Publishing Limited, 1997.

—. A Harlot’s Progress. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999.

“David Dabydeen: The Loose-Tongued Ambassador.” The Guardian. 1 April 2008.

Döring, Tobias. “Chains of Memory: English-Caribbean Cross-Currents in Marina Warner’s Indigo and David Dabydeen’s Turner.” Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English. Ed. Wolfgang Klooss. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 191-204.

—. “Turning the Colonial Gaze: Re-Visions of Terror in Dabydeen’s Turner.” Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 38 (Spring 1997): 3-14.

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1936.

Fulford, Sarah. “David Dabydeen and Turner’s Sublime Aesthetic.” Anthurium, Caribbean Studies Journal, 3.1 (Spring 2005). http://scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium/volume_3/issue_1/fulford-daviddabydeen.htm

Lindsay, Jack. Turner: The Man and his Art. London: Granada, 1985.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic and the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

McIntyre, Karen. “Necrophilia or Stillbirth? David Dabydeen’s Turner as the Embodiment of Postcolonial Creative Decolonisation.” The Art of David Dabydeen. Ed. Kevin Grant. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1997. 141-158.

Ogée, Frédéric. J. M .W. Turner. Les Paysages absolus. Paris : Hazan, 2010.

Ruskin, John. “Of Water as Painted by Turner.” Modern Painters. Ed. David Barrie. 1843. London: Deutsch, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1610.London: Abrams, 2010.

Smiles, Sam. J. M. W. Turner. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000.

Walcott, Derek. Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.

Wilton, Andrew. Turner and the Sublime. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Yelin, Louise. “‘Our Broken Word’: Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and the Slave Ship Zong.” Revisiting Slave Narratives. Ed. Judith Misrahi-Barak. Les Cahiers du CERPAC 2. Montpellier: PUM, 2005. 349-363.

Grasping the Ungraspable in m. nourbeSe Philip’s Poetry

This article investigates M. NourbeSe Philip’s recent collection of poetry, Zong! (2008) in which the poetess attempts to reconstruct history and extend the limits of memory. The book recounts the 1781 story of the slave ship Zong, whose captain threw 132 African slaves overboard for the insurance money. The traumatic story is told through fragments of voices and memories through which Philip unsettles the forms of canonical English poetry and exploits the limits of the page. Her writing encourages the reader to share her African spiritual quest and her triangular journey from the Caribbean to Canada and back to West Africa. Philip’s poetry demonstrates how boundless diasporic spaces can be, as the Diaspora displaces home and away, here and elsewhere, thus constantly redefining the limits of its own horizon.

The sea is slavery… Sea receives a body as if that body has come to rest on a cushion, one that gives way to the body’s weight and folds round it like an envelope. Over three days 131 such bodies, no, 132, are flung at this sea. Each lands with a sound that the sea absorbs and silences… Those bodies have their lives written on salt water. The sea current turns pages of memory. One hundred and thirty one souls roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the wind is heard, it is their breath,

their speech. The sea is therefore home. (D’Aguiar 1997, 1)

So begins Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts, a novel which recounts the 1781 massacre of one hundred and thirty-two African slaves. It all started when the Zong captain Luke Collingwood

became aware that his inexperience had led his ship off course, that his water and food supplies had run out and that his “cargo” would perish before reaching his final destination. He then decided that the only way to collect the insurance money, and to guarantee his own profit and that of the Liverpool vessel’s owners’ was to have the sickly slaves drowned. D’Aguiar’s neo-slave narrative forces us to reconsider

[…] the question of value as a problem of naming and seeing: of knowing how to name what we see and how to value what we name when we view this event from a distance of two hundred years, or indeed from whatever distance separates the viewing of such an atrocity from this atrocious scene. (Baucom 61)

In her latest poetry collection Zong!,1 Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip raises the question of point of view, and challenges the reader to reconsider the established order, to see beyond imposed limits, as she deliberately seeks to reconstruct history, to voice the unspeakable and to extend the limits of memory.

1 I am grateful to Marlene NourbeSe Philip for kindly giving me permission to quote extensively from this work.

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Philip’s own version of the Zong massacre is told through fragments of voices, memories, and silences. The poetess tells a story that cannot be told but must still be told by not telling. Her attempt to make silence speak and to express the inexpressible seems to answer diasporic Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s lyrical appeal in “Mother, the Great Stones Got to Move.” Goodison addresses the untold history of slavery in Jamaica and the necessity for Caribbean peoples to fill the gaps of their own history:

Mother, one stone is wedged across the hole in our historyAnd sealed with blood wax. […]It is the half that has never been told, some of usMust tell it. (Goodison 4)

In order to voice “the half that has never been told” and to give her side of the story, NourbeSe Philip exploits the silent archival material. As she states in A Genealogy of Resistance, her aim is to make the black hole (w)hole (Philip 1997, 101). Unsettling the forms and testing the limits of the page, she forces her readers to experience her African spiritual quest. To some extent, the poet re-engages her readers, inciting them to re-build their history and to re-connect their past with their present. She author(ize)s her story to cross the frontiers of the “unspeakable” and of the unspoken to reach the status of the “unspeakable things spoken at last” (Morrison 214). This article will observe how the diasporic Caribbean writer transcends her traumatic past and overcomes silence to (re)map new horizons.

In a recent interview about her work, NourbeSe Philip interrogates meaning and value and defines her Zong! poetry collection as an attempt to come to terms with meaninglessness:

We discern flashes of meaning, or we construct meaning from the apparent meaninglessness of the page. How do you/we make meaning of the apparently meaningless? How do you make meaning of the deliberate massacre of 150 people to collect insurance monies? How do we make meaning of 400 years of peoples being uprooted, kidnapped and taken half way around the world? To what end? I think we are hardwired as humans to try to make meaning. Zong! is an attempt to write, to come to terms with the meaninglessness of so much that passes for life. (Philip 2010)

Making sense out of the meaningless, grasping the ungraspable, and voicing the unspeakable: from her earliest writings, Philip has been expressing the complexities of working against silence and fragmentation. In the original letter covering the manuscript of She Tries her Tongue, she underlines the difficulties to write poetry when faced with the dual realities of her race and gender:

How does one write poetryHow does one – Poetry from the twin realitiesBlack and femaleOne doesn’t. The realities aren’t twin. Or even same.

Grasping the Ungraspable 25

Admitting the complex realities of her black female identity, the author further emphasises her anxiety about using the English language, a medium fraught with ambiguity, as it was once complicit with slavery and subjugation:

How does one write poetryfrom the perspective of “mastery” of a mothertongue a foreign languagean anguishOne doesn’t. One fashions a tongueSplit two times two times twointo poly&multi&semi vocalities. (Philip 1997, 120-121)

The multiplicity of languages, identities and voices, the same twin realities, both Caribbean and Canadian, the impossibility to grasp the ungraspable and to work against fragmentation… all these issues are magnified throughout her formal experiments in Zong! The book engages with a poetry of rupture whose nature and meaning Philip exploits to reach an eventual wholeness. Its very structure embodies both fragmentation and wholeness. It consists of six different sections which, at times, are divided into a series of numbered poems in a variety of lengths, shapes and rhythms, and, at other times, are left as a whole. Zong! was born out of fragmentation, since the poet actually makes use of the fragments of the archival legal material from the Zong trial to reconstruct a different text in which the previously ignored African voices are imaginatively acknowledged. The last poem in the first section entitled “Os” illustrates the poet’s reflections on how such a tragedy could have possibly occurred:

was the cause was the remedy was the record was the argument was the delay was the evidence was overboard was the not was the cause was the was the need was the case was the perils was the want was the particular circumstance was the seas was the costs was the could was the would was the policy was the loss was the vessel was the rains was the order was the that was the this was the necessity was the mistake was the captain was the crew was the result was justified was the

voyage (45)

Beginning and ending with “was the cause,” this poem concludes the first section of the book. It conveys a feeling of suffocation and confusion while focussing on what could have accounted for the event. In Zong!, words such as “justify,” “authorize,” “cause” and “could” are used extensively, relaying the author’s physical initiatory quest for explanation and evidence. The arrangement of the words on the page also demonstrates Philip’s wish to intertwine the voice of the master and the voices of the slaves. Words such as “captain,” “maps” and “declaration” belong to the vocabulary of authority and command. As such, they can be associated with the master, whereas other words – for instance “water,” “winds,” “weeks,”

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“rains,” “destroyed,” “uncommon” and “apprehension” – evoke the plight of the slaves. The presence of the slave is given prominence through the poetic voice, and it is certainly an authorial strategy to focus on the slave personae, since the original legal text did not consider the Zong episode as a human tragedy. Other words such as “remedy” retain some ambiguity, as it could both refer to the remedy that would allow the African slaves to survive (water and food), and to the drowning the captain eventually opted for to ensure his financial survival. Water and drowning are in fact omnipresent in this excerpt and in the whole poem through the use of recurrent alliterations in [w] as well as through the suffocation suggested by the visual compactness and semantic opacity of the poem.

The opening poem, however, is less opaque and more airy, as its composition exploits the splitting of words to its fullest. The dominance of alliterations in [w] and [d] echoes the tragic descent into the water. The words “water,” “awa” or “agua” recur insistently in reference to the powerful sea water which swallowed the African bodies. The names of slaves listed at the very bottom of the page magnify their descent into the water, and the footnote line may symbolize the ungraspable horizon, the unreachable surface of the water. Their names also epitomize their spiritual survival despite their physical murder, reminding us of the importance of ancestry in African culture. Fred d’Aguiar and Derek Walcott both agree when they respectively write “The Sea is Slavery” (D’Aguiar 1997, 1) and “The Sea is History” (Walcott 30-32). NourbeSe Philip concurs with them in the afterword to Zong!:

Our entrance to the past is through memory – either oral or written. And water. In this case, salt water. Sea water. And, as the ocean appears to be the same yet is constantly in motion, affected by tidal movements, so too this memory appears stationary yet is shifting always. Repetition drives the event and the memory simultaneously, becoming a haunting, becoming spectral in its nature. (201)

Memory is thus haunting and, in order to express the inexpressible story of the Zong, NourbeSe Philip names her African ancestors and deploys fragments of words from European and African languages to convey meaning. The names of African deities – for instance, Osun and Awa, both of whom are water goddesses (Murphy and Sanford 237) – recur as frequently in the poem as words such as “deo” and “deus” meaning “God” in Latin. In an interview, the writer insists on the fact that “the slave ship was a globalised world, a multilingual globalised prison on the sea that was a part of the first globalisation – the globalisation grounded on black skin and bills of exchange that fuelled and initiated speculative financing.” She adds that “when Columbus set sail in 1492, the Spanish Crown began the thrust to reduce the many languages of Spain to one.” (Philip 2010) The history of Spain is in fact linked with the Spanish Crown’s imposition of the Castilian language and their consequent efforts to use linguistic domination to spread Castilian nationalist values across the peninsula. In her poetry, NourbeSe Philip challenges the Eurocentric movement from fragmentation to wholeness


as she plays on the multiplicity of languages and voices. Thus acknowledging the African multi-vocal culture, NourbeSe Philip constructed Zong! as a lyrical mix of English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Patois, Latin and African languages, predominantly Yoruba and Shona. This innovative linguistic combination echoes Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos’s vision of the necessity for Third World women writers to construct a new language of their own:

We have to create another language, we have to find another starting point, search for the pearl within each shell, the pit beneath the peel, because the shell holds still another treasure, the peel another substance. Word is the incarnation of the truth, because language has meaning. (Castellanos 76)

The poem allows the story to tell itself through a poetics of fragmentation and word splitting. The penultimate section entitled “Ferrum” is one of the most disjointed sections in the collection. It stands out as a single unit, a 46 page-long poem; its pages are often densely covered in print, which contrasts with the sparse lay-out of the opening section. “Ferrum” means “iron” in Latin. The sonorities of the word strongly echo Aimé Césaire’s poetry collection Ferrements, a coinage which evokes the noun enfermement (i.e. “imprisonment”) and puns on French words for iron, chains, and keys, all of which operate in the poem as synecdoches for the slave trade. Fragmentation could therefore be linked to the breaking of chains, and thus to freedom of movement. In “Ferrum,” the repleteness of the page creates an impression of saturation, recalling the black bodies of the drowned slaves floating on the surface of the ocean. The circular arrangement of the words on certain pages may also serve to stress that Philip writes against linearity and hierarchy. As explained by the poet herself, her governing rule is that no word should come directly below another word. Words are to seek the space above within which to position themselves:

In “Ferrum,” I felt that the fragmenting of the words – primarily English words – but the fragmenting of language, allowed for another language to emerge. It felt, at times, as if I were writing a code and did feel I was having my revenge on the English language in a very deep sense – this foreign anguish that had choked and stifled us at the level of speech and thought – at last I could breathe; the fracturing allowed me to breathe. In English. For the first time. (Philip 2010)

Indeed, not only does NourbeSe Philip retrace the Atlantic journey onboard the Zong, but she also redefines the English language with regard to African culture. Put differently, she reconstructs it so that it may suit the demands of recounting such a tragedy. For instance, her extensive use of an animal lexical field serves to evoke the treatment of slaves as animals and also the Darwinian theory of the “Survival of the Fittest.” In fact, the “seriation” (Dupriez 414) created by the juxtaposition of coordinated elements conveys an implicit message:

that rat it ate the cat or is

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it the cat that ate the rat halvethe ration of (127)

This excerpt emphasises the poet’s obsession with quantity, as the tragedy of the Zong is about numbers – the number of slaves drowned because of money, and the number of clauses on the ship’s insurance contract. The importance of quantity also lies in the rationing of water and food. The reversal between the cat and the rat in the survival game also denotes some ambiguity, perhaps a reflection on the initial role of African chiefs in the slave trade. This reversal may also echo the fate of the European sailor who eventually commits suicide, throwing himself overboard, linking his fate to that of the 132 slaves. In fact, as Philip explains in the afterword:

One of the strongest voices in the Zong! text is that of someone who appears to be white, male, and European. […] we are at least one and the Other. And the Other. And the Other. That in this postmodern world we are, indeed, multiple and many-voiced. (204)

The Babelian chorus of voices thus comprises the voices of the captain, the European crew and the slaves. The introduction of words from other European and African languages allows a new tongue to be tried, new tunes to be heard, but it also serves to destabilize the reader’s established construction of meaning: “what the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a ‘true’ translation, a transparent and adequate inter-expression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct.” (Derrida 218) In fact, Philip’s play on words extends to different languages and further deconstructs meaning, as the recurrent use of “bones” or “os” conveys the poet’s obsession with the only thing remaining after death.

In Zong!, the letters composing the French word “os” [bone(s)] are used to materialise the drowning on the page, as the poet recreates the slaves’ S.O.S, (“Save Our Souls”), their distress call while trying to survive. The scattered letters are reminiscent of the bubbles produced by the last lungful of air, symbolizing distress and the descent into the deep. Numerous alliterations in [s] (“save,” “salve” and “soul”) create a dynamic pattern imposing the notion that besides the bones, the souls remain and are to be saved. The poet’s insistence on bones also denotes the importance she places on identities, since the skeletal record is the only material evidence which endures after the slaves disappear from sight, after their individual identities have been fragmented and displaced through the continuum of the Middle Passage. Identity and being are two important concerns in Zong! In the section entitled “Os”, and especially in poem # 21, Philip plays on notions of being and not being, thereby questioning definitions of humanity, which leads to the implicit indictment of slavery as a crime against humanity. Absence of being is linked to the oppressive presence of the blank on the page, a visual effect which arguably represents the historical voicelessness of African Caribbean women. As a matter of fact, silence is fundamental for the diasporic


woman writer, the Third World writer, the woman of colour and more generally the subaltern female subject who engages with silence in her creative work:

Sometimes our work is talking. Sometimes our work is simply being, experiencing feelings and thoughts we’ve put so far away we have no words for them. Then the silence and our breathing allow these feelings to find shapes and sounds of the words we need. (Ntozake Shange 179)

In the afterword to her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison also speaks of the way her story was, first and foremost, an effort to “shape a silence” while “breaking it” at the same time (Morrison 216). Likewise, silence is depicted as ambivalent by Japanese Canadian poet and activist Joy Kogawa, who distinguishes a silence that speaks from “a silence that cannot speak,” “a silence that will not speak”:

Beneath the grass of speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence.

But I fail the task. The word is stone. (Kogawa 1)

For these women writers, silence is first an obstacle to overcome as they aspire to speak against it through their testimonies and their own interpretation of history, justice and society. Yet, while Kogawa expresses her failure to embrace silence on the page, one may wonder whether NourbeSe Philip manages to voice silence and to allow her trans-cultural speech to emerge. From her earliest work onward, Philip has made several attempts to deal with voicelessness. She considers that the English language is contaminated and therefore needs to be purified: “the word only comes alive in the silence.” (Philip 2010) Silence is often sacred in Zong! because the poet aims to “defend the dead” (200). The blank on the page may thus reflect the lack of defence and the slaves’ absent voices in history. By recreating the sacred voices of the slaves and allowing silence to be voiced in the poetic space, not only does Philip free the spirit of her ancestors, but she also endorses the role of the lawyer, her past profession, picturing the Law as drowned in her poetry. An absurd law, an insurance contract, the thirst for money, financial necessity… all the justifications that could have accounted for the tragedy are silenced:

There is no evidence in the against of windsthe consequence of currents or the apprehension of rainsthe certain of value or the value of certainagainst the rest in preservationthe save in residue (34)

The antimetabole playing on the words “value” and “certain” in reverse order foregrounds the ambiguity of the notion of value. The names of the slaves which are always present below the bottom line constantly remind the reader of their enduring spiritual presence. Moreover, the voices of the slaves are often perceived as being linked to the sacred. They are heard praying and invoking the names

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of Yoruba deities such as Ogun, the god of iron, and African divine names such as “Esu” “Ifa” or “Efun.” All of them are recurrently mentioned in the book, underlining the continuing prayers of the dying slaves but also the sacred aspect of language for Philip. To some degree, Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite also regards as sacred what he calls “Nation Language.” Brathwaite actually argues that Nation Language stems from African oral tradition, and that, in poetry, it produces musical rhythms which differ from English canonical iambic rhythms (Brathwaite 1984, 13-14). In a fashion analogous to Brathwaite’s, Philip’s Zong! appears to distinguish itself from traditional English speech rhythms as it enhances African Caribbean rhythms which are closer to calypso and reggae. For NourbeSe Philip, Zong! is like a sacred song. While writing the book-length poem, her fingers would often hit the “S” key instead of the expected “Z,” transforming the name “Zong” into the word “Song.” As for the question pertaining to the function of the exclamation mark after Zong! she replies in her afterword to the book:

Zong! is chant! shout! And ululation! Zong is moan! Mutter! Howl! And shriek! Zong! is pure utterance. Zong! is Song! And Song is what has kept the soul of the African intact when they wanted water… sustenance… preservation. Zong! is the Song of the untold story; it cannot be told yet must be told, but only through its un-telling. (207)

In fact, Zong! is a multi-vocal song, one in which history, culture and religion are seen from multiple perspectives, as both Christian references and African religious symbols are enhanced. While NourbeSe Philip gives an important place to African spirituality in her work, perhaps to challenge what she perceives as demonization of African–based religions in modern societies, she also acknowledges the crucial part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the survival of African peoples in the New World. In fact, Zong! weaves together both biblical references and African religious symbols. The final scene in the book has a strong biblical resonance, as a sailor transcribes a letter from Wale the slave to his wife Sade. Wale then eats the letter before falling overboard, and he is followed by the sailor who wrote the letter for him. This swallowing of the “word” is reminiscent of the beginning of the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, in which the prophet is forced to swallow the divine word which “was written within and without and there was written therein lamentations and mourning and woe.” (Ezek. 2:10b) Like the sailor in the final scene, Ezekiel is forced to dictate and enact “the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated.” (Hartman 3) The correlation between the Book of Ezekiel and Zong! also has diasporic resonances, as the Prophet Ezekiel was forced to announce the unavoidable destruction of Jerusalem and the consequent exile of the Jewish people, now considered the most ancient Diaspora.

The poet therefore acts as a detective who goes beyond the silent archive, interpreting it against presupposed “historical truth,” transcending linguistic boundaries and bondage. As she explains in the afterword to the collection:


Within the boundaries established by the words and their meanings there are silences; within each silence is the poem, which is revealed only when the text is fragmented and mutilated, mirroring the fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans, their customs and ways of life. (195)

The recurrence of the African divination system “Ifà” and the mention of the “Oba,” the African ruler who sobs at the end, convey the impossibility for the Oba to express fully what happened aboard the Zong. Consequently, the narrative Wale swallowed expresses the unalterable reality of a part of mankind being thrown overboard. It may also reflect the poet’s invitation to ingest the narrative. NourbeSe Philip demonstrates that even where the archive is silent, words are still pregnant with meaning:

The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed. (Hatman 3)

Silence can also be exploited by the reader who becomes a co-producer of the text, interpreting silences and gaps, elucidating Philip’s puns in different languages and the “secret order / among syllables.” (Philip 1993, 37). The reader has to participate in meaning-making while reading the text, dealing with the lacunae that sustain silence. Besides, the poetess is in a position to control the vision of her readers, as she forces them to enlarge their perspective, so as to be able to remap new spaces and reconstruct a fragmented past, a forgotten or unknown history: “the not-telling of this particular story is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the text, forcing the eye to track across the page in an attempt to wrest meaning from words gone astray.” (198)

M. NourbeSe Philip’s work appears to be a trans-spatial and trans-temporal text, insofar as her poetry strives to transcend the boundaries of space and time. Her writing intimates how unlimited and unbound diasporic spaces are, as the Diaspora constantly displaces home and away, here and elsewhere, defining the limits of its own horizon, whether it be imagined, metaphysical or material. The problematic fragmentation and gaps in language have shaped Philip’s poetry, and she has often tackled the issue of writing in a foreign language, languish, anguish, “this language of grunt and groan, of moan and stutter – this language of pure sound fragmented and broken by history.” (205) In Zong!, Philip addresses the gaps in the medium for expression, the underlying fragmentation beneath Caribbean polyvocality. In 1974, Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s declaration that “the unity is submarine” summarized the complex overlapping realities and the cross-cultural roots of the Caribbean (Brathwaite 1974, 64). The sea between the Caribbean diasporic female subject and her past, the same sea that NourbeSe Philip crossed in order to visit Ghana, is symbolised through the crossing of spatial and temporal gaps. Philip’s journey to West Africa as well as her various forms of research in trying to locate the fragments of her traumatic past are important, because they embody the several dimensions of her diasporic

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experience. The poet participates in the tradition of neo-slave narratives which is more recent for African Caribbean women writers than for their African American counterparts. By relating the Zong tragedy, Philip re-creates the horizons the African slaves could never reach, re-imagines and re-interprets their drowning, and “the past is laid to rest when it is told” (D’Aguiar 1997, 230). This past drowning is now linked to a possible resurrection, and re-writing slavery allows the poet to come to terms with her traumatic history. As Fred D’Aguiar argues in “The Last Essay about Slavery,” it is essential to try to imagine “a last poem, a last play, a last novel, a last song about slavery that would ‘kill slavery off’ as some ‘final acts of creativity’ that would somehow disqualify any future need to return to it.” (D’Aguiar 1996, 125). It is then necessary to return to the past in order to move on. In some recent diasporic Caribbean women’s neo-slave narratives, moving on has been allegorised through the resurrection which actually occurs in the story. In her novel Humus, Martinican author Fabienne Kanor author(ize)s one of her African female enslaved protagonists to survive after she threw herself overboard. Through her survival and consequent freedom, the re-born African woman has the possibility to re-claim her African ancestry, to assert her identity as well as to express her own desires. Phlilip’s experimental writing in Zong! also allows her to resurrect her African history, re-connect with it, and create new horizons accordingly. In this sense, “The African, transformed into a thing by the law, is re-transformed, miraculously, back into human.” (199) The transcending voices that resonate in the collection Zong!, their limitless and multi-horizoned space and time are foreshadowed in Mutabaruka’s dub poem:

Dis poem shall speak of the wretched sea that washed ships to these shoresOf mothers cryin for their Young swallowed up by the seadis poem shall say nothin newdis poem shall speak of timetime unlimited time undefined […] dis poem is to be continued in your mind. (462)

Myriam MOïSE Université de Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle

Université des Antilles et de la Guyane


works Cited

Baucom, Ian. “Specters of the Atlantic.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2002): 61-82.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon. 1984.

—. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona: Savacou Publications. 1974.

Castellanos, Rosario. “Language as an Instrument of Domination.” Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean. Ed. J. Browdy De Hernandez. Cambridge: South End P, 2003. 73-78.

Césaire, Aimé. Ferrements. Paris: Seuil, 1960.

D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. London: Chatto and Windus. 1997.

—. “The Last Essay about Slavery.” The Age of Anxiety. Ed. Sarah Durant and Roy Porter. London: Virago. 1996. 125-147.

Derrida, Jacques. “Des tours de Babel.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 209-248.

Dupriez, Bernard. A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z. Trans. A.W. Halsall. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991.

Goodison, Lorna. “Mother, the Great Stones Got to Move.” To Us All Flowers Are Roses. Champaign: U of Illinois P. 1995. 4-5.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1-14.

Kanor, Fabienne. Humus. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume,1970.

Murphy J. M., and Sanford M. M. Osun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.

Mutabaruka. “Dis Poem.” The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. A. Donnell and S. L. Welsh. London: Routledge, 1996. 462-463.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays. Toronto: Mercury P, 1997.

—. Personal Interview. Port of Spain, February 2010

—. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed P, 1989.

—. Zong! Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008.

Shange, Ntozake. Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter. New York: St. Martin’s P,1994.

Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is History.” The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979.

Unsettling the Colonial linear Perspective in Kim Scott’s Benang

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, social Darwinism in Australia gave scientific legitimacy to the colonial representation of the Aborigines as the “dying race.” The “half-caste” himself was described as a mere “passing phase” in the history of white conquest. This paper will focus on how Kim Scott undertakes in his novel Benang (1999) to subvert the simplistic, destructive and ultimately self-defeating doctrine of progress championed by colonists whose eugenicist policies aimed at “breeding out” the Aboriginal heritage. Scott shows how pioneering megalomania drove those white visionaries of the future Australian race to aspire to being their own beginning and their own end. To counter this colonial narrative which maps out progress as a process of purification, and posits sameness as the only desirable goal on the national horizon, he deploys a circuitous and ultimately circular exploration of time and space. This narrative is informed both by the memories of his narrator’s Aboriginal relatives and by the narrator’s imaginative empathy with his ancestors, which eventually enables him to substitute a pattern of return and permanence for the narcissistic and misguided abstraction of linear

progress.

With the age of the great explorations and discoveries in the natural sciences, the horizon ceased to be perceived by the Western consciousness as a boundary hemming in the known world, and

became, rather, an invitation to explore and to conquer. Significantly, the horizon, as signifying limitless yet dynamic space, would later also be used as a metaphor for modern historical time, freed from the circularity of tradition and religion, and confident in linear progress. As Erwin Panofsky has shown in his famous essay Perspective as Symbolic Form, the invention of the linear perspective in the first half of the 15th century led to a new relationship between the subject and the world. Although the point of view from which perspective is constructed remains subjective, its projections are transcribed mathematically, and thus rationalized. According to Panofsky, the “objectification of the subjective” which the new “symbolic form” brought about, concomitantly placed man at a distance from the world, and gave him absolute control over the organisation of this newly conquered externality (Panofsky 66-72). It can be argued that this objectification of subjectivity, in the context of 19th century imperialism, has cut off Western man from his own humanity within the world, and served to give rational legitimacy to his desires and greed. As this paper will attempt to show, this is the negative view of the Western perspective that the Australian writer of Aboriginal descent Kim Scott takes in his second novel, Benang (1999). The story, which is based very closely on Scott’s research into his own genealogy, presents itself as a family

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history, researched and written by the narrator, Harley Scat, after he discovers that although white, he is of Aboriginal descent, and as such, has been mapped by his Scottish grandfather as the “first-white-man-born,” a kind of racial vanishing point on the horizon of the New Australian Man. The narrator’s initial aim in this family history, therefore, is to denounce the eugenicist policies in Australia, from the 1930s to 1950s, to exhibit himself as a kind of dead end, and thus to prove himself his grandfather’s greatest failure. However, his quest into the past also enables him to discover narratives that contradict the archives, and other horizons of experience which enrich his own “narrative identity” (Ricœur 1990). Paul Ricœur opposes the notion of “narrative identity” to the substantialist definition of identity as sameness. He argues that personal identity is a narrative construct – a “concordant-discordant synthesis” (147) – integrating otherness into the configuration of the self. Narrative identity is a very useful analytical tool for the study of this novel which, ultimately, leads to a more meaningful definition of becoming than the one afforded by the colonial perspective of linear progress.

Scott’s critical approach of Australian historiography through this piece of fiction is particularly relevant in the context of an ongoing national reconciliation, since most non-Aboriginal Australians were until quite recently unaware of the true nature of the colonisation of the continent. The resistance of Indigenous Australians was downplayed in history textbooks, and the myth of the “dying race” made it possible to gloss over the massacres, the deportations and the dispossessions in order to focus on the hardships suffered by the settlers. But in the 1930s, the growing number of so-called “half-castes” became of some concern to the authorities, particularly in Western Australia, where Scott’s novel is set. A. O. Neville – who between 1915 and 1940 was the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, then the Commissioner for Native Affairs – championed the alleged scientific theories according to which Aboriginal blood and colour could be absorbed and diluted into the white population by reasoned breeding, much like “a small stream of dirty water entering a larger clear stream.” Neville denounced the dreadful conditions in the half-caste camps in which “human life spawns and increases like an unhealthy fungal growth,” and called for the institutional and genetic assimilation that would, within a few generations, “[raise] the social and moral outlook of the coloured people generally – [instil] into them a sense of usefulness and desire to create homes in accordance with white standards.” It was particularly important that half-caste children should be taken early from their parents lest these potential partners for whites “develop into weedy, undernourished semi-morons with the grave sexual appetites which characterise them.” (Neville, 133, 182, 174 respectively) For the eugenicists, the fact that miscegenation between whites and Aborigines produced no sign of black atavism was proof that “the white race strongly asserts itself. The white colour overpowers the black.” (Anderson, 229) In other words, these policies of absorption stood for what Warwick Anderson in The Cultivation of Whiteness calls a “reproductive frontier” which narcissistically served to confirm the superiority

Unsettling the Colonial Linear Perspective 37

of the white man, while legitimating the predatory desires which Australia’s hygienist society both repressed and exacerbated, thus conveniently conjuring up a vision of purified, triumphant whiteness on the horizon of the nation’s future.

In the novel, the narrator’s grandfather Ernest Solomon Scat as a young man, newly arrived from Scotland, and obsessed by his first sexual encounters with black women in the camps, is eager to apply the theories of Auber Neville who happens to be a distant relative of his. Having discovered these theories from Neville himself, and having seen how underfunded and understaffed the Chief Protector’s department is, Scat sees these theories as a challenge: “It was as if he – a little too late to be a pioneer, and not really cut out to tame the land – could still play a role in taming a people into submission.” (32) By marrying successively two half-caste women, Ern Scat is thus able to cultivate his image as a progressive, tolerant man, while giving free rein to his sexual urges by abusing his wives, his successive maids, as well as the young girls and boys (among whom his son and grandson) he takes out of their orphanages and boarding schools for the holidays. Harley, the narrator, is unaware of the rational scientific “legitimisations” of his grandfather’s desires, until, at the age of sixteen, he chances upon his own picture among Ern’s notes, diagrams and photographs, and discovers that he is the result of his grandfather’s experiments:

Captions to the photographs; full-blood, half-caste (first cross), quadroon, octoroon. There was a page of various fractions, possible permutations growing more and more convoluted. Of course, in the language of such mathematics it is simple; from the whole to the partial and back again. This much was clear; I was a fraction of what I might have been. […] I saw my image inserted into sequences of three or four in which I was always at the end of the line (even now, I wince at such a phrase). (26)

The description calls to mind a photograph from Neville’s book, Australia’s Col-oured Minority: Its Place in the Community (1947), which is not mentioned in the novel but was given some publicity after its appearance in Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit Proof Fence (2002). When Harley discovers the pictures and notes, he is convalescing after a car-crash for which he was responsible, and in which he him-self was castrated and his father died. His abusive grandfather has started calling him “Son,” and has told him he should think of his father’s death merely as “an unfortunate necessity.” (24) This is when Harley discovers that Ern has planned him, long before he was even born, as a living proof of the annihilation of a whole side of his family, a whole people, and a whole culture: “It appeared that in the little family history my grandfather had bequeathed me options had disappeared. It seemed an inexorable process, this one of we becoming I. This reduction of a rich and variously shared place to one fragile, impoverished consciousness.” (31) So his guilty self-hate turns into rebellion against his visionary creator, and he starts on a rival family history destined to show how all his grandfather’s efforts have resulted in a pathetic failure, himself. As Lisa Slater writes in her article

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“Kim Scott’s Benang: An Ethics of Uncertainty,” Harley’s position as an unhealthy post-colonial subject can be deployed as a weapon against colonial history and mythology (150).

Devised to denounce, contradict and derail the fiction of abstract progress, of a methodical, orderly process of absorption of the Indigenous population, Harley’s version of his family history is disjointed, even chaotic to reveal mimetically the violence implied in the assimilationist reduction of Otherness to an idealized white identity-as-sameness. Just as the narrator wreaks havoc in his grandfather’s study, throwing books, files and papers about, causing the old man to have an invalidating stroke; just as he carves “END, CRASH, FINISH” (445) into Ern’s skin, out of frustration and anger at his place in his grandfather’s story, the narrative sets out to bewilder and shock the reader. Victor Oost in his article “Benang and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being” questions this aggressive narrative strategy, and highlights the white reader’s uncomfortable feeling that this aggressiveness is aimed particularly at him/her: “[D]oes the technique need to be as experimental, and the narrative voice as uncertain, in order to destabilise white readers?” (114)

Certainly, the narrative is structurally confusing, as the chronological order of events and generations that the reader would expect even in a fictitious family history is completely subverted. Although the narrator does begin with his grandfather’s arrival and his “seminal” meeting with Neville, he soon introduces many other characters whose lives intersect his grandfather’s, tracing back, little by little, his family line, or rather arborescence, up to his great-great-grand parents’ generation, on the Aboriginal side. The storyline moves backwards and forwards in time with very few specific dates, sometimes resurrecting deceased characters at a different, significant moment in their lives. Moreover, Harley’s history introduces repetition as a meaningful structural principle, thus contradicting the concept of linear progress: some events are represented several times either from different points of view to undermine an “official” perspective, or as a leitmotiv. For instance, the stench emanating from the corpse of a young Aboriginal boy left by the roadside, which is mentioned in the very first pages of the book (8) and again at the very end (481), is identified with “the smell of anxiety, of anger and betrayal” which recurs throughout the family history, and constitutes its dominant theme. As a framing motif to the novel, the black boy’s reeking corpse offends both smell and sight by spoiling the view on the horizon of a white Australia.

Spatially, the colonial conquest of the land as represented by the confident railway lines vanishing into the secured distance is also contradicted by the constant, largely erratic circulation of Indigenous characters. They move from place to place, either because they are forcibly removed to native settlements, or because they have to flee from settler persecution, or else to try to find food and work, but sometimes also in order to try to re-establish contact with members of the family who were abducted, arrested or deported, or to try to recover meaningful connections with a now depleted and damaged land. Contrary to


mainstream Australian novels, like Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, that focus on white characters and give only occasional glimpses of Aboriginal characters drifting more and more meaninglessly about in the background, Harley’s disjointed narrative chronicles the endurance of a spoliated people who still try to survive on their ancestral lands. Benang is also very different from Indigenous novels such as Sam Watson’s fantasy The Kadaitcha Sung, or even Bruce Pascoe’s historical novel Earth, insofar as it does not present the Indigenous populations as resistance fighters relying on a network of informers to counter a foreign invasion. Nevertheless, the narrator underscores the white administration’s actual lack of control over the Aboriginal population, if only because Aborigines were not consistently registered until the 1967 census, and because the very definition of Aboriginality changed according to successive acts and amendments. Consequently, Aboriginal characters’ names and identities tend to fluctuate in the narrative, due to the obtuse, contemptuously generic way they are referred to in official reports. For instance, Harley quotes from a series of letters and reports from different localities referring to sightings of a woman identified as Fanny Benang even though she is much younger than the Fanny Benang he has earlier identified as his seventy-year-old great-great-grandmother:

Fanny? It was really a no-name, a mean-nothing name. Not a name used to distinguish between people. We cannot depend on such names put down on paper. I think it was Dinah who had accepted what her mother bequeathed her and now had a baby in arms and a young girl walking at her side like a sister. But it may have been Fanny herself, rejuvenated by her escape […]. Or perhaps, even, that the two of them had come together so close to their home to make yet another effort to keep the spirit they represented alive in the face of continuing betrayal. (103)

Even racial categories fluctuate and their ambiguity serves to subvert even more the doctrine of linear progress in which Ern Scat placed so much faith. For instance, in the very last pages of the book, the narrator’s blond great-great-grandfather, who had always been identified as a white man, is revealed to have had an Aboriginal grandmother. Five generations before Harley, therefore, there had already been a “first-white-man-born-in-the-family-line” so that Ern’s founding experiment turns out to have been wholly irrelevant, even by his own standards:

How necessary, then, is it to acknowledge, let alone discuss, some very-first-white-man? Well, to be fair, even if it took some time to arrive at me, there must have been some first-white-man involved. However, my grandfather was not first-anything, whatever he may have liked to think. He merely attempted to hasten things to their conclusion. The persistence, perhaps, of what he would have called the “spirit of empire.”A first white man is not the beginning of anything much. (456)

Harley criticises the colonial obsession with founding events that fix the his-tory of a cultural group into an immutable identity, and that then legitimate the

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suppression of all other groups that might threaten this identity. He also writes against the empowering epistemological distance which is traditionally estab-lished between the historian and his material or, as in the citation below, between the police constable and his report, and helps sustain the fiction of objectified subjectivity:

Constable Hall… he would write.This strange third person, always present with any writer and reader.Whatever the intricacies of the writing and reading situation (Where and who were all these people when he re-read his own work?), it never failed to give him a particular joy to write Everything Correct and in Order. […] These were lovely words. At such times it was a lovely world. (193)

Scott’s narrator debunks such writing conventions by occasionally switching abruptly between first and third-person narration, as in the following passage where the prudishly euphemistic third-person is counted upon to do away conveniently with physical and psychological suffering:

I began, I believe, with how I found the seed of myself (but never, alas, my seed) in Grandfather’s study. He had fallen ill. He fell. I did not push.Ernest Solomon Scat fell seriously ill. He was not pushed. His grandson was staying with him, and was himself in convalescence, recovering from a serious accident in which…Well, it was not a happy time. His injuries were what, depending on your priorities, you might call superficial. That is to say, the damaged and missing parts were not at all large. (31)

Contrary to these distancing strategies, Harley’s narrative is explicitly grounded in his own desperate need to write his family story, as an attempt to reconstruct his own depleted identity. Since, therefore, he begins his enquiry into the past with himself as the supposedly positive outcome of the eugenicist “plot,” he is writing back against the end-orientated conception of time of post-Enlighten-ment historiography.

The reader’s expectations are disappointed when instead of a clearly defined account of a family’s history, he is faced with the narrator’s obsessive quest for his own identity. At the beginning of his narrative, Harley literally exhibits himself as “this fuck-me-white and first one born. This drifting lightweight who so wanted to be his grandfather’s failure. This (let me do away with all vanity) faceless, empty-scrotumed, limp-dicked first man born.” (31) By presenting himself at the outset in this grotesque, obscene way, inscribing the suffering of his Aboriginal ancestors on the maimed and sterile body his family history has bequeathed him, Harley flies in the face of the eugenicists’ obsession with purity. He blocks the perspective, and forbids access to the historian’s rational, orderly, and disembodied account of the “larger picture.” Throughout the novel, the carnivalesque body thus repeatedly asserts itself to subvert the language of power which resorts to metaphorical euphemisms to refer to its policies of assimilation. For instance, parodying the assimilationist metaphor stating that white civilisation would


uplift and elevate Aborigines, Harley starts floating grotesquely about: “I closed my eyes, and when the crown of my head gently nudged the ceiling I must have looked like some elaborate light shade. Perhaps that was what my grandfather meant when he said I was brightest and most useful in an uplifted state.” (13) He then proceeds to stage himself as the atavistically incompetent writer of this history, constantly calling the reader’s attention to his failings as a narrator, thanking him for remaining with his “shifty, snaking narrative.” (22) By placing himself so persistently in the foreground, the narrator blocks any possibility of taking the long, detached view expected of historiography. Thus, when writing about his father, and what he had to suffer at Ern’s hands, the narrator ends up writing about the way in which his father’s experience was interwoven in his own, and comments ironically: “But again, I digress and confuse all of us, one with the other. As if we were not all individuals, as if there were no such thing as progress or development, as if this history were just variations on the one motif.” (367)

This kind of remark underlines the confrontational dimension of Scott’s novel. The narrator’s standpoint is made particularly clear when he pretends to fall for the fiction of the official view on the settlement of Western Australia, for instance when he ironically calls upon the reader to celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of the landowners who claimed rations disproportionately from the Aborigines department and used them as wages:

I would like you to consider the initiative we see demonstrated here, in these letters of the forefathers; the pioneering, entrepreneurial and opportunistic spirit which soars when there is money to be gained. The initial lease cost them nothing, and the purchase and exchange of rations provides a necessary stimulant to the economy they are creating. (207)

Here the reader is directly asked to reconsider the basis of colonial liberalism, and must therefore relinquish the comfortable, passive position assigned him by the traditional reader’s pact equally valid within the frameworks of both the novel and the historical text. But if the implicit reader is brought out of his reserve by the narrator’s summons, the question arises as to how he, the reader, is constructed. Is he black, or white; is he to be identified with the victims or the perpetrators of colonialism? However, if the novel were indeed raising such questions, it would mean Scott was resuscitating the racist discourse in reverse, which would clearly be counterproductive. Besides, on what moral grounds of ethnic authenticity would the narrator be entitled to position himself as the representative of Indig-enous people? As the other protagonists keep telling Harley, he looks very much like his grandfather who remains “family” in spite of everything, and they insist that he cannot simply dispense with him, as Ern has tried to do with the Aborigi-nal members of the family. The narrator’s very hybridity, therefore, is a means to avoid the pitfalls associated with a less ambiguous definition of his identity. The fact that he descends both from white and Aboriginal ancestors gives a new mean-ing to the concept of “family” and to the sense of betrayal which is so dominant in

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the novel. Betrayal implies a former understanding, a trust however tacit between members of a group. Indeed, the body of the young boy left by the wayside that accompanies the narrator’s ancestors into the story at the beginning of the novel is identified at the end as “the returned body of Johnny Forrest, namesake of the Premier. Grandchild of the Premier who had promised much, but forsaken his family.” (481) Rape or neglect are therefore no longer presented as anonymous, random acts of aggression which force individual Indigenous women and chil-dren into the position of the victimised Other, but as a global refusal of the white community (as represented by Sir John Forrest (1847-1918) who was an Austral-ian explorer, and later became the first Premier of Western Australia and a cabinet minister in Australia’s first Federal Parliament) to assume responsibility for, and to extend true protection to fellow Australians. In an effort to redeem this ethical failure, the narrator acknowledges how impossible it is to dissociate the betrayed “we” from the betraying “them”:

Searching across the archives I have come across photographs of ancestors which have been withdrawn from collections, presumably because evidence of a too-dark baby has embarrassed some descendent or other.My family, my people, we have done such things. Shown such shame and self-hatred. It is hard to think what I share with them, how we have conspired in our own eradication. (97-98)

This does not mean that the victims of the past should be confused with their persecutors, but that their descendents should be aware that their own identity is made up of different, sometimes conflicting narratives. Trying to identify himself in the mirror, the narrator is assailed by all the clichéd identities projected upon Aborigines by white narratives:

Hovering before a mirror, I saw a stranger. […] The image shifted, and changed shape [and] it was terrible to see the shapes, the selves I took.I stood motionless against a setting sun; posture perfect, brow noble, features fine.Saw myself slumped, grinning, furrow-browed, with a bottle in my hand.Was Tonto to my grandfather’s Lone Ranger. Guran to some Phantom.There appeared a footballer, boxer, country and western singer.A tiny figure, sprawled on the ground in some desert landscape, dying. (12)

All these narratives, which Harley has integrated along with a “white” education, are supposed to have “uplifted” and elevated him, as we saw before (13), by cutting him off effectively from his ancestors’ Aboriginal narratives. But with a touch of magic-realism, Neville’s metaphor is literalised and Harley finds that his tendency to float about in the air also enables him to discover new vertical perspectives as opposed to merely horizontal ones:

I rose and fell on currents of air like a balloon, like a wind-borne seed. The horizon moved away so that the islands no longer rested on its line, but stood within


the sea, and it seemed that the pulsing white at the island’s tip was not a mere transformation induced by collision, but was a blossoming and wilting at some fissure where sea met land. (163-64)

Ironically, the cultural near-death and the rootlessness which the eugenicist lie has inflicted on him also brings out in him a capacity for levitation that gives him an aerial perspective characteristic of Aboriginal spiritual vision. This is how he becomes capable of discovering a dynamic unity and continuity beyond the apparent conflict. As an educated, “bleached” black man who has access to the archives but also to the narratives of some of his surviving Aboriginal relatives, Harley is able to imagine or remember the narratives of his ancestors, and finally to acknowledge the underlying presence of the many stories, even his grandfa-ther’s, within what one might call, to borrow from Paul Ricœur, his own “narra-tive identity” (Ricoeur 147).

The indeterminate position of the narrator changes the nature of the address to the reader: it is no longer a question of confirming a similarity or a difference of views, but of establishing the kind of dialogue Lisa Slater refers to as the ethical moment: “The exposure to the other reveals the radical social construction of our self; indeed, that we are reliant on the other for our self. Hence, the ethical moment ruptures the self from self-understanding and causes anguish.” (Slater 148)

Certainly, in Benang, this dialogue between the narrator and the reader is not a comfortable one. With the incipit of the novel, entitled “from the heart,” the reader is forewarned that s/he must be prepared to give up ideological and cultural assumptions to listen to Harley’s disturbing narrative: “I know I make people uncomfortable, and embarrass even those who come to hear me sing.” (7) In the very last pages of the novel, the narrator again addresses his readers, leaving open the interpretations of the final personal pronoun:

I acknowledge that there are many stories here, in the ashes below my feet – even my grandfather’s. […] I offer these words, especially to those of you I embarrass, and who turn away from the shame of seeing me; or perhaps it is because your eyes smart as the wind blows the smoke a little toward you, and you hear something like a million million many-sized hearts beating, and the whispering of waves, leaves, grasses…We are still here, Benang. (495)

“Benang” is Harley’s Aboriginal family name and has been translated in the novel as “tomorrow.” This “tomorrow” can be read as a threat if the reader chooses to understand “we” as referring only to Aborigines, and thus remains trapped in the paranoid fear of a fantasy Other. Or it can be interpreted as a promise, if he accepts being included in the enlightened discourse resulting from the paradig-matic layering of narratives which the novel has tried to establish. Whatever the reader’s decision may be, in this novel Scott clearly resists the notion that modern Australia should just forget about the past, and “move on” towards the future. For Scott as for other Indigenous writers, access to a valid future can only be gained after having resuscitated the past, and for him, fiction is a means to re-establish a

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dialogue in order to pave the way towards wider and more encompassing social and cultural horizons, and a more ethical definition of Australian identity.

Anne LE GUELLEC Université de Brest

works Cited

Anderson, Warwick. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Grenville, Kate. The Secret River. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006.

Neville, A. O. Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community. Sydney: Cur-rawong, 1947.

Noyce, Philip, dir. The Rabbit-Proof Fence. Miramax Films, 2002.

Oost, Victor. “Benang and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Kim Scott’s Family Nar-rative and Prospects for Reconciliation.” Cultures of the Commonwealth 14 (Winter 2007-8): 107-19.

Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Trans. Christopher Wood. New York: Zone, 1997.

Pascoe, Bruce. Earth. Broome: Magabala, 2001.

Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Scott, Kim. Benang: From the Heart. Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Center, 1999.

Slater, Lisa. “Kim Scott’s Benang: An Ethics of Uncertainty.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 4 (2005): 147-158.

Watson, Sam. The Kadaitcha Sung. Ringwood: Penguin Australia, 1990.

eyeless in Guantanamo: Vanishing horizons in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows

Any call to the horizon implies setting out from one’s home, territory or country to embark on a journey towards the unknown. Such a trajectory which informs narratives of migration and exile is a defining trait of diasporic studies. The perception of this trajectory has changed over the years with the contestation of Christian teleology, imperialism and global capitalism. After two World Wars, the horrific events of the Shoah and the nuclear holocaust, after the dislocation of traditional societies and mass-migrations of newly-indentured labour, the horizon has become a locus of fracture, trauma and division. Focusing on the politically charged horizons of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, from Nagasaki to pre and post-Partition India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, the present paper examines fragmentation and the problem of identity in the context of the narrator’s fugitive condition.

Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) reflects the tensions and ambiguities of all diasporic fictional discourse as narratives of dislocation and relocation, erasure, deferment and nostalgia (Nelson

1992). The end of the Cold War has coincided with the rise of US hegemony – a combination of unilateralism and cultural imperialism (Tomlinson 1991). Influenced by Gramsci, theorists like Edward Said, Immanuel Wallerstein, Noam Chomsky, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri have launched a critique against globalisation and the Americanisation of culture.1 This process of homogenisation which arguably undermines local and minority cultures can produce acculturation (Robertson 1995), resistance – from theoretical (the “Writing Back” paradigm expounded by Spivak, Rushdie and Ashcroft amongst others) to outright military confrontation.2 Shamsie examines these tensions, along with the central questions of homeland and identity that have come into sharper focus in the context of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” rhetoric. Like Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, Burnt Shadows offers an insight into Islamic terrorism, not perceived as merely a response to Islamophobia, but as a reaction to and a by-product of cultural globalisation. While Hamid uses fictional as well as holographic techniques to deconstruct and reconstruct the figure of the terrorist, Shamsie deterritorialises terror by decentering the 9/11 attacks and placing them in a broader historical perspective.

Framed by two major, albeit disproportionate, collisions – the WWII nuclear holocaust and 9/11, the novel chronicles the tribulations and traumas of two

1 See Said 1993, Wallerstein 2001, Chomsky 2003, Hardt and Negri 2001. 2 See Spivak 1985 and 1994, Rushdie 1982 and 1991, Ashcroft et al. 2002.

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families, the Tanaka-Ashrafs and the Weiss-Burtons over three generations. It consists of a series of four interlinked sections spanning a period of sixty years, all of which are marked by rupture, mourning and the loss of home or the homeland. In the opening section entitled “The Yet Unknowing World: Nagasaki, 9 August 1945,” the main protagonist, Hiroko Tanaka, survives the inferno, unlike Konrad Weiss, her German fiancé trapped in “the Valley of Death,” the Conradian equivalent to “the heart of darkness” (BS 27, 76-77).3 Hiroko mourns Konrad by escaping to India to join his sister Elizabeth (née Ilse Weiss) and her husband James Burton. It is highly significant that all subsequent migrations should relate to this initial horizon shift. Hiroko, for one, has imprinted on her seared flesh the kimono cranes which symbolize both her hibakusha condition and flight.4 The second section entitled “Veiled Birds: Delhi, 1947” introduces the second family, the Burtons, as their marriage disintegrates in the twilight of the British Raj. They leave “Bungle-Oh,” their colonial enclave in Delhi, for the mist-shrouded Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie where they contemplate their separate postcolonial future. Their son, Henry Burton (later Harry) is despatched to a boarding school in England where he will grow into a Kipling-like figure mourning a lost Indian childhood. Conversely, Hiroko is drawn to Sajjad Ali Ashraf, an Indian Muslim and legal apprentice of James Burton.5 In a scene reminiscent of A Passage to India, Saijad is evicted for allegedly sexually abusing the young Japanese refugee. Eventually, the couple marries despite the Burtons’ initial misgivings. Because of the Partition riots, Hiroko and Sajjad honeymoon in a decrepit Turkish yali. On their return, they are denied entry to their own country and are compelled to relocate in Pakistan.

The third section called “Part-Angel Warriors: Pakistan, 1982-3” unfolds in Karachi, or more precisely, in the Muhajir sprawl of Nazimabad where the Ashrafs have resettled and raised a son, Raza Konrad Ashraf.6 Raza who cannot understand his mother’s sense of being “at home in the idea of foreignness,” (141) is torn between his fascination for American icons and Afghan mujahedeen. Caught between the growing pressures of consumerism and Islamic fundamentalism, the

3 The paginations for all subsequent quotations from Burnt Shadows will be given directly between parentheses in the body of the text.4 Hibakusha is the Japanese term designating the victims of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is often used to mark them as pariahs as in Ame Kuroi. Hiroko attributes her miscarriage to the A-bomb radiation poisoning.5 Sajjad – whose main occupation is to alleviate his colonial master’s ennui, and serve as a foil to his matrimonial breakdown – is a pitiful avatar of the Maharajahs reduced to humouring their victors. The Burtons are blissfully unaware of the young man’s pedigree as both his name Ashraf and first name Shajjad – Shah (Lord) and zad (son) – denote aristocratic parentage. 6 The term Muhajir or Mohajir refers to the Urdu speaking Muslim people who migrated to Pakistan from India in the aftermath of partition. The overwhelming majority settled in Karachi and faced overt discrimination.

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novel alternates between Karachi and its Afghan slums of mud, jute and sackcloth in Sohrab Goth, as well as the vanishing lines on the Afghan/Pakistan border. The other divisive border space of Kashmir Point is briefly mentioned (BS 148). For all his linguistic prowess, Raza Konrad Ashraf suffers from confusion and alienation. His self-perception as a “bombed-marked mongrel” (191 e.g.) duplicates his academic failure (his Islamic studies paper) and prompts him to reinvent himself under the camouflage of Raza Hazara, the Afghan mujahid. As the web of deceit is exposed, his father is mistakenly shot dead as an undercover ISI agent. The title of the fourth and final section, “The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss: New York, Afghanistan, 2001-2,” is borrowed from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and resonates with the spy fiction of John Le Carré.7 The sanctuary that Ilse Weiss offers Hiroko, and Hiroko in turn offers Ilse’s granddaughter Kim8 is short-lived as planes crash into the WTC Twin Towers. Their two sons, Harry Burton and Raza Ashraf, find themselves embroiled in America’s “proxy wars” as private mercenaries for the CIA in Afghanistan. An operation goes quite wrong, and Harry is killed by a Taliban double agent. Accused of helping the insurgents, Raza goes to ground, and plans to be smuggled back to the US.

The common denominator to all the novel’s horizon shifts is the collision between the aspirations of human agency and the homogenisation of culture imposed by geopolitics. A closer inspection of the way these ruptures are interrelated provides a clue to Shamsie’s critique of US-centred globalisation. It is highly significant that these shifts should occur in Nagasaki, Karachi and New York, three ports epitomising tolerance and multiculturalism. These windows to the world are shattered as a result of US imperialism. It is no small coincidence either that the Bosporus should provide a safe haven during the riots glossed over by the former colonial masters as the “Partition nonsense” (BS 122), as the strait physically marks the boundary between the East and the West. Nagasaki, first described as “a world of enchantment,” a cosmopolitan city with “Europeans and Japanese mixing uncomplicatedly” has been distorted into a functional form (6). Hiroko who, as a language translator, provides the keys to the novel’s ciphers, is watched by the military police for anti-state activity, and is shunned by the Neighbourhood Association – her father is branded an artist traitor. She mistakenly believes that the new nuclear bomb will spare the predominantly Christian city. Contrary to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Etsuko Sheringham, who accepts her defeats with resignation and amnesia (Ishiguro 1982), Shamsie’s narrator refuses to be defined or marginalised as a hibakusha victim. Sajjad equally pines for the

7 Hana envies Kirpal Singh’s ability to move “at a speed that allowed him to replace loss.” (Ondaatje 272) There are further parallels between the two novels, particularly the young Indian’s sudden decision to turn his back on the battlefields of Europe towards the end of WWII, as he hears about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 8 The novel acknowledges the postcolonial reference to Kipling (BS 185).

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loss of pre-Partition hybridity, “the essential Dilliness” of his moholla, even if it means idealising ethnic and religious harmony in colonial India:

“They said I chose to leave.” He said the words slowly, carefully, as though they were a foreign language whose meaning he was trying to grasp. “They said I’m one of the Muslims who chose to leave India. It can’t be unchosen. [T]hey said I can’t go back to Dilli. I can’t go back home.” (BS 125, see also 134, 161)

Sajjad’s grief echoes Mirza Ghalib’s ghazals and the nostalgia for “Rupnagar” mourned in Intizar Husain’s nostalgic Basti. His “wilderness of loss” is all the more inconsolable as he had earlier challenged the British coloniser’s unwillingness to acculturate:

Why have the English remained so English? Throughout India’s history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them – Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian – have become Indian. If – when this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi and Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, they will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they’ll be going home. (BS 82)

In Delhi, Hiroko had insisted on learning Urdu to build her resilience to trauma. Thus she was better able to cope in the post-Partition refugee camps. She rapidly embraced Karachi as a vibrant hub and a multicultural mosaic: “People here are from every nation within Pakistan. Baloch, Pathan, Sindhi, Hindu, Sikh even. Everyone.” (160) Further evidence of her multicultural self can be found in her (cross) dressing as well as in her participation in the Japanese cultural soirées at Jimmy’s Coffee Shop. Shamsie examines the underpinnings of cultural acculturation in England, as opposed to more recent nation-states, including the United States, with their mass migrations. On leaving India, Henry Burton finds himself ostracised like Christopher Banks (Ishiguro 2000). He becomes a scapegoat under the nickname “Maharaja Fritz,” until he can redeem himself through his cricketing skills (170). In New York, by contrast, the perception of his foreignness is short-lived, as he realises that the mystique of caste no longer operates. With money becoming the prevailing social determiner, Henry Burton can reinvent himself as Harry and proselytise: “In America, everyone can be American. That’s the beauty of the place” (185, see also 170).9 Shamsie’s protagonist can enjoy the luxury of belonging, precisely because he is not perceived as a Third World subaltern. One feels tempted to level the same kind of charge against Shamsie as Benita Parry does against Homi K. Bhabha’s arguably reductive cosmopolitan and bourgeois representations of migrations:

Those infatuated by the liberatory effects of dispersion do not address the material and existential conditions of the relocated communities which include economic migrants, undocumented immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and victims of

9 Belying his mantra, Harry later dangles before Raza the talisman of an entry to an American college, only to cancel the magic spell, thus driving the disillusioned young Pakistani into the clutches of the mujahedeen.


ethnic cleansing, and whose mobility, far from being an elective ethical practice, is coerced. (Parry 100)

Yet the criticism of privileging an elite transnational migrant class is deflated with the introduction of a Pakistani-born yellow cab driver. Admittedly, cabbie Omar of Gujranwala may sound over-articulate when displaying his newly acquired American citizenship, and profusely welcoming Hiroko “home” (288). However, his working class solidarity with fellow Indian cab drivers for better work conditions is no more contrived than the vitriolic anti-Semitic ranting of the Muslim cabbie in Fury (Rushdie 65). Hiroko may equally lay herself open to the critique of elitism as she tunes in to conversations in Urdu, English, Japanese and German, and as she embraces the fluidity and mobility of Manhattan in Mary Poppins-like fashion: “she felt she had been waiting all her life to arrive here” (289). Yet her hibakusha womanhood, independence of mind, and multicultural ethics lead her to reach out to those who do not have the privilege “to be Ellis Islanded” (Rushdie 51). As a result, Hiroko responds uniquely to 9/11 and the ubiquitous climate of fear. She first volunteers to donate her blood, but as she confronts the sudden manifestations of patriotism, she is reminded of similar justifications for the dropping of nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. For her, the flattening of the Urakami cathedral and the World Trade Centre are two inexcusable tragedies caused by American hubris.

Both Kim Burton and Hiroko witness the fires smouldering at Ground Zero. Yet, both respond quite differently to the “War on Terror” rhetoric and its attendant Islamophobia. Unlike multicultural Hiroko, Kim develops a paranoid sense of patriotism together with a deep mistrust of anything un-American. She eyes an Italian removal man suspiciously, and confronts him as a Muslim. Long erased is her sense of wonderment at an armadillo-like mosque on the outskirts of Islamabad. A similar anti-Islamic propaganda was deployed in Shamsie’s earlier novel, Broken Verses:

“And then?”“And then the Towers fell.”“And you stopped being an individual and started being an entire religion.” (Shamsie 2005, 45)

Hiroko, on the other hand, has no hesitation in befriending an Afghan illegal immigrant, first at the American Library, where the two expatriates muse over sepia photographs of Kandahar orchards, then at her home, to Kim’s dismay (BS 311-4). Contrary to Omar, the cab driver, the acculturation paradigm does not work for Abdullah Durrani, Raza’s former boyhood friend and mujahid copycat. The young Afghan who has left behind a wife and son, also named Raza, for the American Eldorado, is on the run from the FBI. Aware of the implications of the Patriot Act and of the prevailing paranoia against Muslims, Raza orchestrates his former friend’s repatriation back to Afghanistan from Canada. Hiroko readily offers her assistance as a mother, a refugee and a witness of the lethal power of the

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border spaces (Magris 76). At the same time, her support can also be interpreted as a kind of atonement or compensation. Indeed, when growing up in Pakistan, her son’s perception of his foreignness and linguistic proficiency further exacerbated his sense of disconnection and feelings of unbelonging to such an extent that he either saw himself as a hibakusha “mongrel” or “UnPakistani” (189 e.g.).

Unbeknown to Hiroko, Abdullah’s clandestine return to Afghanistan depends on the success of another covert operation – the smuggling of Raza back to the US via Canada. This inverted journey emphasises the similarities between the two friends, while highlighting the interconnectedness of the geopolitical situation, and the ensuing Islamophobia and demonisation of the US. As a result of his involvement with the CIA, under the dubious tutelage of Harry (aka Warbucks), the theme of dislocation and the issues of terrorism and asylum are given an ironic twist. Accused of being complicit in Harry Burton’s killing by Taliban infiltrators, Raza Ashraf must ditch his US green card and ID. He must also renounce his lifestyle as a high flier to embrace the plight of Third World trafficking victims lured to America’s Eldorado. This “initiatic” odyssey – a variation on “the slave route” prophetically evoked (160) – takes him to Kandahar under the disguise of a burqa, across the Desert of Death, the Afghan border with Iran, in a ramshackle pickup where he is smothered by cabbages, across the Gulf of Oman to Muscat under the planks of a coffin-like boat (335-6). The chaotic journey has Celinean undertones, as Raza conjures up visions of mass graves in Kosovo. Finally, the last leg of his journey to Montreal has Raza travelling in a gorilla suit in the company of exotic or endangered species supplied for the well-being of Saudi expatriates. The irony of the prospective exchange between Raza and Abdullah should be noted: it seems far easier to be smuggled into the US than to attempt to exit clandestinely. The novel’s greater irony is that Raza can only escape the battlefield under the guise of “the subalterns,” on whose behalf the war is being waged.

Shamsie’s comparison of the victims of ethnic warfare and Third World economic slaves draws from Spivak’s theory of the subaltern and Mbembe’s concept of “disposable bodies” available for the West to consume (Mbembe 11-40) – the term “expendable” is indeed used by Hiroko (BS 362). The increasing US reliance on mercenaries and TCNs to fight its controversial war further illustrates Mbembe’s concepts of “necropolitics” and “necropower.” One CIA commander dismisses Raza as “one of the grunts who know their positions can be filled by a million other desperate rats.” (304) In its global war on terror – GWOT – the US uses free market ideology to privatise war, generate profits through unscrupulous labour practices, commit atrocities by proxy, and outsource death to foreign others, mostly Third World paupers. Thus, the hiring of foreign have-nots renders many of the deaths required for the war effort in Afghanistan invisible (Singer 2003, Avant 2005).

More significantly, the reason for the failure of the exchange between the two illegals should be analysed. Kim’s demonisation of Muslims leads her to construe the Afghan refugee as a potential terrorist, an oversimplification to which


Abdullah takes offence. As Abdullah says in exasperation, “everyone just wants to tell you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than you do, what do you know, you’ve just been a Muslim all your life.” (352) Kim’s sudden aversion for Muslims resonates with her father’s conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma bombings and a jihadi connection. For all his hybridisation and war camouflage as Lala Buksh, Harry Burton sees the world in Manichean Cold War terms, and is, in the end, as much an epitome of America’s predatory greed as Max Ophuls (Rushdie 2005).10 The reader is reminded of a similar stigmatisation operating in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist or in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing. As a result, Kim foils the smuggling operation by tipping off the Canadian police. Hiroko’s son is extradited and deported to Guantanamo. The young American’s contribution to the crusade against terror resonates with McCarthyism:

We are the land of liberty, but today we hear voices – in the government, in the press, in the population at large – that we have accorded too much liberty, especially to non-citizens, and that “terrorists” have taken advantage of our liberty. Therefore it is said the privileges of liberty must give way to procedures that meet our requirements for security. (Wallerstein 1991)

Shamsie’s use of the spy genre and her reworking of the Great Game (BS 185) allow her to engage in a critique of American imperialism masquerading as human rights ethics. Raza sees through Harry Burton’s camouflage: “How long ago was it that you decided to justify your life by transforming responsibility into a disease.” (286) Harry himself is aware of Uncle Sam’s double standards, and the false assumptions they make that the end can ever justify any collateral damage:

“What would you do if it was effective?” Harry said thoughtfully.“Almost nothing. Children are out of bounds, rape is out of bounds, but otherwise…what works, works. When I’m dead, Raza, and my daughter asks what kind of man her father really was, don’t tell her I said that.” (BS 284)

The novel draws on Chomsky’s and Badiou’s critique of US hegemony. The father of modern linguistics denounces America’s post cold war unilateralism and manipulation of terror for propaganda purposes (Chomsky 2003). According to Alain Badiou, the “axis of evil” rhetoric serves as a smokescreen for geopolitical gains: “the colossal American army exerts terrorist blackmail on a global scale.” (Badiou 2001/02) Chomsky and Badiou also argue that the US administration operates double standards. It champions the cause of human rights, liberating women from the yoke of a fundamentalist patriarchy in Afghanistan while entrusting its war to mercenaries as well as minimising its responsibility in creating the Taliban after instrumentalising the mujahedeen against the Soviets.

10 In the same way, Raza becomes suspect and he is subsequently detained after he is seen praying outside his humvee. Raza is a victim of racial stereotyping just as his father, Saijad, had been at the hands of the Burtons.

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Why are five thousand American deaths considered a cause for war, while five hundred thousand dead in Rwanda and a projected ten million dead from AIDS in Africa do not, in our opinion, merit outrage? Why is the bombardment of civilians in the US Evil, while the bombardment of Baghdad or Belgrade today, or that of Hanoi or Panama in the past, is Good? (Badiou 2001/2002)

Like them, Shamsie exposes the fallacy of “liberation” and “democratisation” as well as the self-delusion that America’s “Others are less free than we are. The Statue of Liberty stretches out its hand to all those huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” (Wallerstein 2001) Burnt Shadows also raises the issue of “Jihad versus MacWorld” (Barber 1996). The novel partly correlates Raza’s estrangement and his Afghan odyssey to Pakistan’s growth and conversion to a mass market economy, in response to the rise of materialism associated with the US or the Gulf Emirates. Conversely, as Wallerstein notes, “the image of the less-ness of the rest of the world is profoundly ingrained in the American psyche.” (Wallerstein, 2001) American consumerism and propaganda is so effective that even recent immigrants like the Pakistani taxi driver espouse this stereotype.

The US military might provide a further source of resentment. Abdullah’s older brother, Ismail declares that by opting for a military escalation, firing drones indiscriminately, propping up feudal overlords, and turning a blind eye to the extortion of their private militias, the US has destabilised Afghanistan and driven its helpless farmers turned refugees to the fold of the Taliban:

I told you. I’m a farmer. I want to plant crops and harvest them. Do you understand? I need peace for this. I need security. In exchange for that, there is much that I’ll give up. […] To watch my sons measure hand-span against a pomegranate, not a grenade. But the Taliban – they don’t know Sufis or orchards. They grew up in refugee camps, with no memory of this land, no attachment to anything except the idea of fighting infidels and heretics. So when they came, they brought laws different to the laws I grew up with. So what? (BS 320)

The farmer’s passive acceptance of the Taliban echoes the deterritorialisation and deprivation of the Afghan refugees in the slums of Karachi (195-199). Hence the children’s fascination for the AK-47s and their elder siblings’ readiness to embrace radical Wahabism.

Initially, this essay juxtaposed two traumatic world events, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and 9/11. Indeed the flattening of Urakami cathedral heralds the collapse of the twin towers. However, the novel unsettles this chronological order by opening with a scene based on Guantanamo. The purpose of the prologue is twofold. First, the reader has to deconstruct the events and fathom the reasons why Raza “comes home” to Guantanamo almost literally, and by way of a complex exfiltration process. Secondly, by flagging Guantanamo as her starting point, Kamila Shamsie challenges Pax Americana, symbolised by the figure of liberty draped in red, white, and blue, which superseded the British Imperial order and advanced US hegemony in the twilight of the Cold War. The same


Realpolitik accounts for Hiroshima/Nagasaki and 9/11, the “Green” peril being a continuation of the “Yellow” peril – Islamikaze emulating WWII kamikaze – or the anti-communist paranoia. Contrary to earlier diasporic fiction celebrating resilience, resourcefulness, acculturation or hybridity (Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Edwin O’Connor, John O’Hara, John Fante, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee…), more recent diasporic works focus on the failure of relocation and the need to return to one’s homeland (Anita Rau Badami, Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Uzma Aslam Khan…). Clearly with its indictment of the post 9/11 discourse which frames Muslims, migrants and asylum seekers as agents of global terror, Burnt Shadows belongs to the latter category. Yet, by making Hiroko Tanaka-Ashraf the novel’s interpreter of personal and collective losses, of stories of estrangement and reconnections, betrayal and atonement, Shamsie transcends the narrow confines of ethnicity and religion responsible for the worst excesses of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her plea for universalism is a far cry from the homogenisation of global culture.

Pascal ZINCKUniversité de Lille 3

works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge 2002.

Avant, Deborah. The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso, 2001.

—. “On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” Cabinet 5 (Winter 2001/02). Available online <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php>

Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival. America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003.

Forster, Edward Morgan. A Passage to India. 1924. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007.

Hardt, Michael, and Toni Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Husain, Intizar. Basti. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2007.

Khan, Uzma Aslam. Trespassing. London: Picador, 2005.

Ibuse, Masuji. Ame Kuroi. Shinchōsha: Tokyo, 1970.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

—. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

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Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Magris, Claudio. Microcosmi. Milan: Garzanti, 1997.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. New Yok: Vintage Books, 1993.

Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. New York: Greenwood P, 1992.

Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge, 2004.

Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” Global Modernities. Ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson. London: Sage Publications, 1995. 25-44.

Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times, 3 July 1982, 8.

—. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticsm, 1981-1991. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

—. Fury. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.

—. Shalimar the Clown. New York: Vintage, 2005.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House, 1993.

Shamsie, Kamila. Broken Verses. New York: Harcourt, 2005.

—. Burnt Shadows. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Singer, Peter W. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell UP, 2003.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculating on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (Winter-Spring 1985): 120-130.

—. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1994. 66-111.

Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Wallerstein, Imanuel. “America and the World: The Twin Towers as Metaphor.” Understanding September 11. Eds. Craig Calhoun et al. New York: New York P, 2001. 345-360. Available online http://www.iwallerstein.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/America-and-the%20World-The-Twin-Towers-as-Metaphor.pdf.

—. Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: New P, 2003.

—. “Globalization or The Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World-System,” Available online http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwtrajws.htm.

Broadening and narrowing horizons in Zoë wicomb’s The One That Got Away

In her most recent work of fiction, The One That Got Away (2008), a short story cycle of both place and character, Wicomb continues her exploration of the limits of the short story genre. This article shows how, as characters slip in and out of stories, and as the topographical, cultural and lexical signifiers of one place are blended with or usurp those of the other city, Wicomb gradually interrogates the potentially enriching yet often limited cultural exchanges between Capetonian and Glaswegian characters. A study of her formal reflection of the aborted or confused communication between characters will lead to an analysis of her interrogation of the writing process.

With the publication in 1987 of the short story collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Zoë Wicomb immediately received positive critical attention. The work was quickly dubbed “the first

book-length work of fiction set in South Africa by a coloured woman writer,” (Sicherman 187) an appraisal which, although a bit of a mouthful, places Wicomb in the lineage of Bessie Head, who, if one is to continue dealing in superlatives, was the first coloured South African woman writer to publish a work of fiction. Unsurprisingly perhaps, when one considers that Head was exiled from her native South Africa and lived in Botswana, the politics of place are significant in her work.1 Wicomb, who has chosen to live in Scotland, is also concerned with place and “the construction of home as problematic space,” thereby “call[ing] into question the notion of stable, continuous identities.” (Boyce Davies 65) Wicomb’s interrogation of stable identities extends beyond a mere thematic concern: her first work of fiction already experiments with some of the generic codes of the short story, blurring the boundaries between the novel and the short story cycle. In addition, her first novel, David’s Story (2000), playfully foregrounds the illusion of history as a grand narrative, rendering the frontier between fact and fiction porous. Although less overtly playful in its approach, her second novel, Playing in the Light (2006), also focuses on fluctuating identity politics, particularly in relation to coloured communities. It therefore comes as no surprise that her most recent publication, the short story cycle The One That Got Away (2008), should continue to delve into the question of identity, giving it prominence as a central theme, and also experimenting with the malleability of the genre.

The One that Got Away, however, marks a new departure in Wicomb’s fiction as, although her past works have focused on elements of cross-cultural exchanges,

1 Desirée Lewis, for example, has highlighted ‘the primary symbolic meanings of exile and geographical relocaton’ in Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather. (Lewis 129)

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their context has almost exclusively been South African.2 This latest collection is a short story cycle of both place and character (Lynch 20), but the setting oscillates between Cape Town and Glasgow. In her constant straddling of two countries in these stories, Wicomb explores once again the notions of identity and métissage with a view to highlighting how enmeshed identities are, both locally and globally, at this period in time when, as Édouard Glissant has suggested, wandering is the very thing that enables us to settle (Glissant 63). 3

This paper purports to show how, as characters slip in and out of stories, and as the topographical and lexical signifiers of one place are blended with or usurp those of the other city, Wicomb gradually questions both the potential and the limits of cultural exchanges between Capetonian and Glaswegian characters. A study of Wicomb’s rapid shifts in focalisation and mises en abyme will demonstrate how these devices reinforce on a formal level the aborted or confused communication between characters, while an analysis of her playful postmodern techniques will show how she foregrounds the act of representation. This will ultimately lead to a consideration of this collection as a significant contribution to the creation of new horizons within the short story genre, the boundaries of which can perhaps endlessly be stretched.

To Gerald Lynch’s assertion that the short story cycle in the Canadian context is “a form that allows for a new kind of unity in disunity, reflecting a fragmented temporal sense,” (18) one could add that this sub-genre also lends itself to the representation of spatial continuity and discontinuity. Although Lynch is concerned with “the short story cycle [as] a distinctly Canadian genre,” (xv) he implicitly points towards the attraction of the short story cycle for writers from other postcolonial countries formed amidst tensions between several cultural allegiances. Indeed, in today’s global village, one might consider the short story as particularly apt for explorations of national and transnational cultural collisions, highlighting simultaneously “the one and the many” and offering “a kind of geo-political fictional linkage of abiding bonds and creative gaps.” (Lynch 190) Perhaps the most striking element in Zoë Wicomb’s cycle is the inclusion of and interaction between characters from two different continents, the communication between whom is fraught with confusion and misunderstanding. By loosely linking these characters together and by varying their points of view, both within and between stories, Wicomb accentuates the complexity of communication not just between characters from different ethnic, linguistic, cultural and socio-

2 For instance, the years that Frieda Shenton, the protagonist of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, spends in England are elided. Wicomb has herself commented on her desire to highlight “the negative semantic space that is [her] protagonist’s life in England.” (Meyer & Olver 185) The main character of Playing in the Light travels to Scotland, but there is no real possibility of cultural exchange due to this character’s limitations and the overall setting of the novel is predominantly South African.3 The original reads as follows : “L’errance, c’est cela même qui nous permet de nous fixer.”

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economic backgrounds, but also between different generations within the same family. Although the geographical scope remains modest, South Africa and Scotland being the main settings, the result is a mosaic of entangled identities spawned from colonial and postcolonial encounters.

The story entitled “Nothing Like the Wind,” placed fourth from the end of the collection of twelve stories, is the first story not to adhere to the principle of characters moving from one story to another.4 This obvious change highlights the absence of familiarity, which has gradually built up in the preceding stories. It also reflects the alienation of the protagonist, Elsie, whose point of view is privileged throughout. A teenage girl, Elsie has recently come from South Africa to live in Scotland after the demise of apartheid and the death of her paternal grandmother, a change so profound that it upsets all members of the family in different ways. Instead of finding a solution for their cold house, her father begins to obsessively collect brass objects; her brother starts to rape her on a regular basis. Elsie herself, faced with the difficulties of immigration, dreams of an elusive freedom from the gender, class and geographical prison she finds herself in.

Although this story is set in Glasgow, Elsie’s meandering thoughts often create a superimposition of the Karoo (where she lived prior to her move) onto her new environment. The first sentence of the story, “The sound of traffic is nothing like the wind” (135) appears to refute any similarities between the two places, and yet the intermingling of the two will recur throughout the story, emphasising the fluctuating notion of home. Elsie, used to her own vernacular in which words like “bedondered” (135) flourish, has trouble incorporating new lexical elements into her vocabulary: “she must remember to say traffic lights” and not “robots”; “Not gnats. In Scotland they are called midges,” (137, 142). These lexical differences (in relation to the Glaswegian norm) contribute to her alienation upon her arrival. Interestingly, however, Elsie does not have the adequate words to recount experiences which are new to her since her arrival in Scotland. The word “rape” is never used in the description of her brother’s routine violation of her: “Bothered by his thing grown stiff and sticky, he creeps at night out of his windowless cupboard that accommodates nothing other than a bed. […] He creeps into her room, and bothers her with his thing. Which is mildly interesting, repellent.” (142) The repetitive use of the same verbs “creep” and “bother” and the unspecific noun “thing” highlight the reduced vocabulary with which she tries to make sense of this new experience. The use of the verb “bother” is particularly striking, as it seems more appropriate for dealing with mild pestering than sexual violence. That Elsie does not have the words to deal with her experience is underlined by the almost paradoxical association of “interesting” and “repellent,” separated only

4 This story, first published in 1990, is one of five to have been published independently of the collection. Four of these stories are placed at the end of the collection, but one of them, “Boy in a Jute-Sack Hood,” placed at the beginning of the book, has been incorporated into the cycle, through the main character.

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by a comma and qualified by the incongruous use of “mildly.” This is reinforced at the end of the paragraph through the assertion: “Elsie hates him,” (142) the categorical and forceful nature of which is in opposition with the equivocation previously expressed.

The family’s difficulty in adapting to their new life is not limited to lexical complexity. Although the story is essentially one of a double tragedy (the private sexual abuse to which Elsie is subjected and the very public sexual assault and murder of Freddie, Elsie’s brother-rapist), one of the most significant elements of the story is the discrepancy between claiming oneself as Scottish (or of Scottish descent) in Apartheid South Africa, and claiming oneself as Scottish in Scotland when one has just arrived from South Africa, the nuances of social class taking on a whole new dimension. Elsie’s father initially employs a charwoman (until he realises they cannot actually afford this), and when he presents his brass collection to her to be cleaned, her puzzled look and humorously dismissive response, “No chance wee man,” (138) highlight the father’s failure to grasp the intricacies of social hierarchy in this new environment. Likewise, Elsie’s inability to comprehend the shift in her father’s self-identification as first English and then Scottish (“at home they had always been English, and here, she soon came to understand, […] that was quite different” 143) highlights the complex levels at work in identity politics within the colonial centre, levels which are melded together into a homogenous oneness in the collective imaginary of those who have settled in the erstwhile colonies. In a similar way, the main character of the story “In the Botanic Gardens,” Dorothy, who has come to Glasgow following the mysterious disappearance and presumed death of her son, who was studying there on a scholarship, has trouble deciphering a handwritten message on a Clydesdale banknote: across a stereotypical colonial representation, the following sentence is scrawled, “if dat bastard Geldof don’t git ‘ere soon I goes eat dat camel.” (168) Dorothy takes the text literally as an encoded message addressed to her, remembering that Biblical parables “meant something other than what the actual words said.” (168) She erroneously interprets (Bob) Geldof as a substitute for her son’s name, associating it with money (“geld meaning money”), and taking the expletive as a comment on her son’s illegitimacy. This superimposition of the metaphorical onto the literal, aside from being comical, highlights the intricacies of communication in different cultural contexts and the ever shifting horizons of language(s).

The narrative choice consisting of privileging the naive adolescent Elsie’s point of view in “Nothing Like the Wind,” and that of the naive Dorothy in “In the Botanic Gardens,” enables Wicomb to pinpoint not only the variability of semantics in different contexts, but also to focus on a reversal of narrow-minded socio-cultural expectations. Elsie’s father, it is implied, leaves South Africa after his mother’s death because of the demise of apartheid and the impending end of the privileges of being white. He holds the political changes responsible for his mother’s death and “pack[s] in this whole thing and start[s] again in another


place, somewhere more civilised.” (140) The use of the dismissive euphemism “this whole thing” barely masks his latent racism and homophobia, and Glasgow becomes the “civilised” place to fall back on. However, the violence with which the family has never been in contact in South Africa erupts in Glasgow, when Freddie, who sexually assaults his sister, is in turn sexually abused and strangled by a man with “flaming red hair,” (143) Wicomb thus interrogating the fallacy of so-called European “civilisation” versus the “savage” African ex-colonies. The recourse to stereotype in the depiction of the murderer further complicates the question of the representation of the Other. Elsie is brought to “understand that the hair stood for uncontrollable passions,” (143) the suggestion here being that her father believes the killer is somehow to be exonerated because of a Celtic appearance which stands for a specific temperament, so bound up is he in racial stereotypes and predetermination.

Ultimately, the potential for growth in this new environment is thwarted by Elsie herself. Her repetitive checking that the windows and doors are tightly shut and bolted highlights her self-imprisonment, and stands in opposition with the vast expanses of the Karoo, which she consistently refers to as “home.” Indeed, Elsie’s recurrent, sometimes almost imperceptible mental shifts from Glasgow to the Karoo highlight the discrepancy between the prison in which she physically finds herself and the freedom which her old life in the Karoo represents: “Elsie checks that the door is safely barred against the wind, Granny’s kitchen door.” (139) Her refusal to open the door to the boy who has asked her to the end-of-year dance, and her decision to crawl into bed instead, poignantly invite us to interpret the story’s final image of “an ark, light as a paper boat, drift[ing] down the Great Western Road with the sail of Granny Reid’s green shawl flapping in the distance” (145) as a metaphor for Elsie’s inability, or lack of desire, to grasp the (albeit limited) possibilities offered to her in this new environment. The “Great Western” world is perceived as restrictive by Elsie, and through the protagonist’s constant superimposition of landmarks of her life in the Karoo onto this new life in Glasgow, Wicomb is clearly undermining the “Greatness” of the Centre.

The strange and the familiar are also blended together in “In the Botanic Gardens” with a view to calling attention to the confirmation or reversal of cultural expectations. Inside the Botanic Gardens, Dorothy’s feelings of confusion are initially dissipated by her encounter with flowers which she recognises, the very localised personification of which (“made up like platteland girls in Town, sitting pertly behind glass, if you please,” 69) highlights her familiarity in these unfamiliar surroundings. The amalgamation of the strange and the familiar continues when a young child mistakes Dorothy, resting in front of the Papua New Guinea hut, for “a Papoo person,” (170) allowing Wicomb to emphasise and gently mock the narrow cultural horizons between people of different cultures and the tendency to homogenise people according to skin colour. At the same time, since the implication is that the disappearance of Arthur, Dorothy’s son, is linked to his involvement in politics, the suggestion very clearly is that although Dorothy’s

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involvement with Glaswegians is fraught with difficulty and misunderstanding, the pro-Apartheid South African state has had no difficulty locally negotiating Arthur’s death,5 a fact which renders Dorothy’s quest for her lost son all the more poignant.

The confused or aborted communication experienced by both Elsie and Dorothy in strange new environments is not extended into the narrative pattern itself, the privileging of both characters’ points of view through free indirect discourse creating humour and pathos. Other stories in this collection, however, contain shifting points of view, which reflects on a formal level the potentially constructive, yet often limited exchanges between characters from different geographical, class and linguistic horizons. The remainder of this article will focus on two of these stories in particular, “Neighbours” and “Trompe l’œil,” demonstrating not only how Wicomb’s narrative choices mirror the difficulties inherent in negotiating the differences both between characters from different cultures and between characters from the same culture, but also how her recourse to a postmodern foregrounding of the writing process contributes to her overall interrogation of these questions.

These two stories are linked through the character of Ben, a black South African woman who was an MK militant6 in the past and who moves in next door to Jeff’n’Marie, the eponymous “neighbours” of the first story. She is also the mother of Roddy, a character in “Trompe l’œil” whose own fictional narrative is embedded within that story. Although “Neighbours” is set in Glasgow, “Trompe l’œil” is set in both Italy and South Africa, and the narrative style of both stories bears the traces of the cultural collisions which result from these encounters. The conversational tone and the colloquial expressions present from the opening of “Neighbours” immediately alert the reader to the viewpoint through which the story is narrated: that of Jeff’n’Marie, the spelling and yoking together of their names simultaneously reflecting their view of themselves as inseparable and mocking them as some sort of comic double act. Jeff’n’Marie’s self-satisfied, regular and ultimately, as the story reveals, vacuous lifestyle is upset by the arrival next door of Ben and her son, upon whom the Scottish couple bestows a number of unpleasant stereotypes, purely on the basis of what they see: Ben’s son is “no doubt sponging off his mother,” “that idle yob”; Ben herself is “a single parent” and “no spring chicken” whose saving grace “is that she does speak nicely, not your common type.” (82, 88, 82, 87 respectively) The abundance of clichés, both here and throughout the story, emphasises Jeff’n’Marie’s limited horizons,

5 This story was first published in 1991 and appears to be set before the beginning of the end of Apartheid in 1990.6 Umkhonto we Siswe (MK), which was the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), carried out numerous attacks within the borders of South Africa and fought alongside allies against the oppressive regimes of neighbouring countries between the early 1960s and 1990.


culturally and linguistically, and this is made all the more apparent by occasional sophisticated interventions by the narrator. Taking great pride in their own garden, Jeff’n’Marie are concerned at the lack of interest their new neighbour takes in her overgrown garden: “having scrimped and saved, they do not deserve this; […] The woman’s views themselves are like weeds that will multiply wantonly and invade the artful order of herbaceous borders.” (84) Here, the clichéd language of the first sentence (“scrimped and saved”) is obviously at odds with the extended metaphor which unfurls in the second sentence. The resulting dissonance highlights “the intentional dimensions, that is, the denotative and expressive dimensions of the ‘shared’ language’s stratification” (Bakhtin 289). With it, Wicomb subtly draws attention to the non unitary nature of language in order to uncover the limited horizons of the characters Jeff’n’Marie. These characters’ over-reliance on idiomatic expression, their tendency to let their sentences trail off, unfinished, both reveal the emptiness of their lives so poignantly shown at the end of the story through Jeff’s dementia and question: “But what do we do in our home?” (98) This heteroglossia and the substantial gap between the two utterances, heightened by the overly-sophisticated lexical elements of the second sentence, also enable Wicomb to draw attention to the distance her narrator creates with these characters, mocking their limited and parochial viewpoint.

Abrupt shifts in point of view in this story also amplify the multiplicity of identities converging within a specific space, and point to the endurance of what Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant have called the “identity wall.” Once useful in order to reconstruct groups which were victims of domination and violence, but now a pretext behind which one can hide in order to avoid contact with the Other, the identity wall no longer protects, and rather tends to lead to regression, an insidious asphyxia of the mind, and the loss of self (Chamoiseau & Glissant 11).7 When Jeff’s dementia manifests itself at the end of the story, the sudden juxtaposition of Marie’s and Ben’s points of view highlights the incommensurability of their lives despite the momentary convergence of their paths: “Marie looks at him blankly. Tears well up in her eyes, tears of self-pity and incomprehension. Surely she does not deserve this. She would rather he spoke of Saturday afternoon activity after all, than this doolally behaviour.” (98) Once again, the shift from the narrator’s critical distance to free indirect discourse emphasises Marie’s emotional limitations reflected in the familiar register and childish euphemism used. Ironically, what she refers to colloquially as “doolally behaviour” is, in fact, Jeff’s lucid realisation that their lives amount to nothing. Marie’s self-pity is in stark contrast with Ben’s reflections concerning her situation:

They’re not her sort of people; they’re only neighbours, for God’s sake. But just as she decides that she has no choice but to deal with the man, Ben’s own head

7 The original reads as follows: “[Le mur identitaire] ne protège plus, n’ouvre à rien sinon à l’involution des régressions, à l’asphyxie insidieuse de l’esprit, à la perte de soi.”

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floods with confusing images – of police with dogs, of crouching in the bush with AK-47s and the acrid smell of fear, of Rueben as a baby crying day and night, and Roddy packing his bags, having had enough, whose words pound in her ears: Your world is not mine. I can’t live with your past. Yes there are many worlds, and to return to this one Ben has to scale a high wall, but she slips back, repeatedly, until, after a superhuman effort she reaches the top, back to Bilsland Road where she dredges from her memory a scene from the bedroom window. (99)

The breadth of experience which the memories Ben is overwhelmed by testify to are markedly different and rather more complex than the poverty of Marie’s existence. The unexpected associations of motherhood and guerrilla warfare and the range of emotions called up by these episodes of her life, highlighted through free indirect discourse, point towards the multi-dimensional layers of Ben’s life as opposed to the one-dimensional aspect of Marie’s life. Interestingly, however, it is Ben who attempts to establish contact with these neighbours with whom she feels no affinity, suggesting that it is the wide scope of her experience which enables her to do so. The sudden intrusion of her son’s words is particularly significant in terms of positing the multifarious divergent worlds which constantly collide – not always happily – even within families. His refusal to engage with his mother’s politically committed life is at odds with her attempt, in spite of herself, to interact with these neighbours who are “not her sort of people.” The striking imagery, the elaborate nature of which signals once again a subtle shift from free indirect discourse to an intervention by the narrator, clearly underlines the difficulties of cultural interaction, and the Sisyphean conceit, along with the hyperbole and the constant rupture reflected in the punctuation, all contribute to stressing the laboriousness of communication and the heteroglossic dimension of all inter- and intracultural encounters. Ben, the migrant figure, succeeds in scaling the (identity) wall, while Jeff’n’Marie’s inability to do so results in an insidious asphyxia of the mind, and the loss of self, reflected in Jeff’s disorientation at the end of the story.

As the very title of the story suggests, “Trompe l’œil” contains multiple diegetic layers, a narrative choice which enables Wicomb to simultaneously foreground the writing process and present conflicting cross-cultural communication. The story oscillates between the points of view of Gavin, an arrogant white South African university professor and his timid, self-effacing wife, Bev, and focuses on their stay at an Italian Foundation for artists, writers and scholars. During this stay, they meet Roddy (a young Scottish writer of fiction and the son of Ben in the story “Neighbours”), parts of whose short story are embedded within the narrative in italics. As the story progresses, Gavin and the reader gradually discover Roddy’s fictional representation of his interaction with the couple in Italy, a representation which is interspersed by analepses (often from Bev’s point of view) relating the stay at the study centre in Liguria.

The interplay of layers – diegetic (the main story), extradiegetic (the narrator’s framing of that story) and metadiegetic (the story within the story), to take up Genette’s terminology (Genette 237) – provides alternative versions of the


relationships established between the main characters. While the story as a whole broadens the horizons of “a single story,” the dangers of which Chimamanda Adichie has guarded against (Adichie 2009), it paradoxically highlights the narrow horizons of individual characters. The story opens with an excerpt from Roddy’s short story, and the italicisation of this text, followed by Gavin’s dismissive response to what he (and the reader) is reading, renders it immediately clear that this “embedded text that presents a story which […] resembles the primary fabula,” although seemingly disconnected from it, will come to function as a “sign of the primary fabula.” (Bal 56) Wicomb’s use of a “mirror-text” as Bal terms mise en abyme (Bal 58) does not, however, serve either of the purposes the latter identifies in her analysis: it is neither exclusively predictive, nor retrospective, but both, simultaneously. If the significance of the extract from Roddy’s short story is veiled at the beginning, it quickly becomes obvious that it “serves as directions for use” [and] “contains a suggestion how the text should be read.” (Bal 59)

In this short story, Wicomb furthers her exploration of the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, as it gradually dawns on Gavin, himself a fictional character, that he is in fact a character in Roddy’s story, which presents him in a very unflattering light. The traits in Gavin’s character, which are emphasised in the story he is reading thanks to the constant focalisation of the young man in denim, a fictionalised version of Roddy himself, are already present in the primary fabula. The privileging of Gavin’s point of view quickly reveals his arrogance, snobbery and racism: writers of fiction cannot compare with historians and the thinking required for their research. Positive discrimination, imported from Britain by “colonial mimic” (132) has led to “shoddy scholarship” and South African universities “no longer [being] the places of learning that they once were.” (120) Certain idiosyncratic locutions, such as the repetition of “No, no, no” or “Of course” at the beginning of sentences also point to the overlap between “the blazered man” in Roddy’s story and Gavin. If the extracts from Roddy’s story do not therefore initially enlighten the reader of “Trompe l’œil,” they do alert Gavin to “the pathetic characterisations, the heinous misrepresentation” of himself (132).

Rather than serving a specifically predictive or retrospective purpose, the inclusion of Roddy’s embedded narrative raises questions about representation and the representation of representation. The trompe l’œil of the title at first appears to relate to the architectural specificity of Luguria. Yet Wicomb, who often resorts to ekphrasis (particularly in David’s Story8 and in the stories in this collection),

8 See for example the lengthy description of the painting in the People’s Palace in Glasgow in which David professes to have seen the face of a black slave which has since been painted over, or that of the “painted men of power” which Le Fleur admires to the extent that he visualises himself “boldly supplant[ing] Cecil John Rhodes himself.” (David’s Story, 191-93 and 149 respectively.) See also in this collection the detailed and vivid description of the Doulton Fountain in Glasgow which forms the backbone of the story “There’s the Bird that Never Flew.” (65-79)

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barely evokes it here, except for a brief description of a trompe l’œil window, used to stress Bev’s secret desire to write and create her own “momentary deception of the eye.” (128) The trompe l’œil then emerges in Roddy’s story, which reveals the masquerade of Gavin and Bev’s happy marriage as well as Gavin’s cruelty towards his wife. The strong imagery with which the narrator describes Gavin’s reaction to this part of Roddy’s story (“Gavin sits bolt upright in his chair as the monstrous thing claws its way out of the print, and hisses,” 130) underscores the power of representation, and the reference to the monster is particularly significant in terms of its etymological implications (from the Latin monstrum or monstrare, meaning to teach and to show respectively). Here the roles are reversed, and Gavin, the academic who has revelled in dishing out lessons to Roddy, is no longer the professor but the pupil. Yet the intrusion of the narrator in the midst of a paragraph full of rhetorical questions posed by Gavin to state that “[t]he thing slithers under Bev’s chair where it hides” (131) playfully hints at a third trompe l’œil. After a break in the text, a question opens the final part of the story: “Why did Bev give the offensive story to Gavin?” (131), yet it is impossible to determine categorically to whom this question should be attributed. The use of the adjective “offensive,” and the fact that the previous paragraph is narrated from Gavin’s point of view might indicate that this question should be attributed to Gavin. The fact that the following paragraph, which provides a partial response to this question, is narrated from Bev’s point of view may, on the other hand, indicate that it is Bev’s. One might also consider that the narrator intrudes to ask a rhetorical question which the reader has necessarily been musing over. The previously clear-cut narrative levels and points of view blur at this point, and culminate in the final paragraph of the story which is typographically separated from the paragraph preceding it and the margin inset, in the manner of the excerpts from Roddy’s story, but which is not italicised as the excerpts have been. The paragraph lyrically describes from a male point of view a woman lifting a glass paper-weight, and throwing it against the french windows which shatter, revealing “a full trompe l’œil moon.” (133) One is therefore left to consider the implications of this inserted text. Either one reads it as the final paragraph of Roddy’s story, which Gavin is preparing to read in the preceding paragraph, in which case the absence of italics might signal the move from the embedded narrator’s representation of “something real,” (131) to a “fictional” or imagined ending. One may alternatively consider that the elaborate description of this moment of rebellion on the part of the mild-mannered Bev is her own composition finally come to fruition, or perhaps even an element of the central diegesis, inserted by the narrator who maintains ultimate control of all the narrative layers of this story. Ultimately, however, these questions remain unanswered, and are fruitless in any case, since what is significant is the opening up of perspectives in this short story, in which narrative levels become so intertwined as to become inextricable, thus undermining the totalising nature of the single story. Furthermore, aside from exploring the question of representation, this story also highlights the emergence


of significant counter-discourses which, through fiction, have the potential to unsettle colonial (or even postcolonial) dominant discourses. By opening up and rendering ambivalent the ending of this particular short story, which so overtly interrogates the aftermath of Apartheid and the gulf which continues to separate individuals, Wicomb undermines Rainbow Nation rhetoric, while privileging the necessity of giving voice to a multiplicity of narratives.

Zoë Wicomb is certainly not the first short story writer to incorporate a postmodern interrogation of the totalising nature of narrative into her stories, but what perhaps makes this collection so innovative is the marriage of this postmodern technique with the short story cycle. Although Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris have expressed concern at the use of the term “short story cycle,” claiming that “the term [...] is doubly problematic: it not only implies inferior status in the generic hierarchy, but also prescribes or at least suggests generic limitation,” (Dunn & Morris 5) I would contend firstly that dismissing the short story as having an “inferior status” in relation to the novel only entrenches “generic hierarchy.” But more importantly, far from creating generic limitations, the short story cycle actually contributes to opening up the genre, and, as Lynch has pointed out, “subvert[ing] the impression of completion, of closure and totality.” (Lynch 18) The fact that the stories in Wicomb’s collection are only loosely connected, both through place and character, further enhances the disunity in the unity. Her calling attention to the fictional nature of her characters has the same effect when, at the end of the title story “The One that Got Away,” a first person narrator suddenly emerges and recounts a conversation she has with one of the characters in the story, asking him what he thinks of the story she has made up about him. This is all the more interesting as the title of the story is a well-known cliché which alludes to something which one cannot pin down. By inserting this conversation at the end of the story, Wicomb undermines the cliché, and emphasises the “Chinese boxes” (50) effect. The “real” (but still fictional) Drew’s query about “where [it will] all end” (50) suggests that the answer is that there is no end, only “the perspective of infinite regress.” (Bal 58) There will always be “the one that got away,” that cannot be pinned down through language, and the horizons of the short story are therefore posited by Wicomb as perpetually receding, offering potentially endless possibilities of representation and interpretation.

Fiona McCANNUniversité de Lille 3

works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngosi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TedTalks. Available online http://www.ted.com/talks/ chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.htm. Consulted Nov 12 2009.

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Bakhtin, Mikael. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. 1981. Austin : U of Texas P, 2004.

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine Van Boheemen. 1985. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York, London: Routledge, 1994.

Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Édouard Glissant, Quand les murs tombent: l’identité nationale hors-la-loi? Paris: Éditions Galaade, 2007.

Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1995.

Genette, Gérard. Discours du récit. 1972. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2007.

Glissant, Édouard. Traité du Tout Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Lewis, Desirée. Living on a Horizon: Bessie Head and the Politics of Imagining. Trenton, NJ & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World P, 2007.

Lynch, Gerald. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.

Meyer, Stephan, and Thomas Olver. “Zoë Wicomb interviewed on Writing and Nation.” Journal of Literary Studies 18. 2 (2002): 182-219.

Sicherman, Carole. “Afterword.” You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. By Zoë Wicomb. New York: The Feminist P, 2000.

Wicomb, Zoë, The One That Got Away. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2008.

—. Playing in the Light. New York: The New P, 2006.

—. David’s Story. New York: The Feminist P, 2001.

—. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. 1987. New York: The Feminist P, 2000.

Beyond horizon: miriam toews’s A Complicated Kindness

and the Prairie novel tradition

Although Miriam Toews’s novels have garnered plaudits from prize committees all over North America, very little scholarly attention so far has been paid to the aesthetic dimension of her writing. Her novels, however, engage in thought-provoking ways with the Prairie novelistic tradition and the various strategies her predecessors have elaborated to turn indifferent space into inhabitable place. Aiming her narrator’s wry humor at the “unique apartness” of the Mennonite community, Toews uses the incongruous as a discursive weapon to instill a sense of solidarity with the displaced and the marginal. In this respect, her writing is fully resonant with the anxieties of a national culture that endeavors to conjugate within the same space the claims of its minorities with the ethical aspirations of an increasingly diverse majority.

Here on the prairies we are always trying to name or generalize about an incomplete or fractured text. Facing the riddle of self, and community and horizon; we carefully mumble our answers. (Kroetsch “Defining” 211)

Implicit in the very analogy the first European explorers perceived between the ocean they had just crossed and the Great Plains they were entering (Kreisel 258), the horizon line has been recurring in Prairie writing as the

constitutive trait of a landscape defined by its minimalism: “Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply of land and sky – Saskatchewan prairie.” (Mitchell 3) A genealogy of Prairie horizontality, and of the significations literature has vested in it, can thus be retraced from its inception in the early narratives of the British explorers to its constitution into a topos in the Prairie realism of the twentieth century. In Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House (1941), Horizon designates a generic small town in the dusty Prairies of the Great Depression. Although the name still evokes the direction followed by the explorer’s gaze and the desire to give shape to the new land, these significations only point to aspirations the characters fail to fulfill. Horizon has settled into a toponym with ironic connotations that do not intimate the diversity but the invariability of what lies ahead, the identical Main Streets and false-fronted buildings that await the minister and his wife on the Prairies’ Bible belt (Ross 99-100). As their prospects narrow into myriad forms of imprisonment, the Bentleys’ future slips behind them and becomes obliterated by an unsurpassable present:

I turned once and looked back at Horizon, the huddled little clutter of houses and stores, the five grain elevators, aloof and imperturbable, like ancient obelisks, and behind the dust clouds, lapping at the sky.

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It was like one of Philip’s drawings. There was the same tension, the same vivid immobility, and behind it all somewhere the same sense of transience. I walked on, remembering how I used to think that only a great artist could ever paint the prairie, the vacancy and stillness of it, the bare essentials of a landscape, sky and earth [.] (Ross 59, my emphasis)

The analogy with the sea is subdued but still active in the evocation of billowing dust clouds. Less formulaic is the far-fetched parallel between the town’s grain elevators and “ancient obelisks.” Mrs. Bentley’s exacting eye detects a stark elegance in their verticality which projects an exotic monumentality onto the sparse setting. More than her thwarted intellectual ambitions, the narrator’s reference to Ancient Egypt bespeaks Mrs. Bentley’s inner contradictions. Her impatience with Horizon is mitigated with a sense of place which tentatively borrows its images from other climes in its search for an adequate idiom. Topophilia1 asserts itself in much more local terms three decades later with Wallace Stegner’s influential memoir Wolf Willow (1962):

On that monotonous surface with its occasional ship-like farm, its atolls of shelter-belt trees, its level ring of horizon, there is little to interrupt the eye. Roads run straight between parallel lines of fence until they intersect the circle of the horizon. It is a landscape of circles, radii, perspective exercises – a country of geometry (6-7).

Viewed from above, the ubiquitous curve circumscribes the Prairies’ seemingly infinite expanse and the adjustment of the correction lines necessary to force the rotundity of the earth to fit the square abstraction of the Dominion Land Survey. Put differently, the horizon embeds the gaze within the phenomenological world. It guides and stabilizes human perception in a space where, because few landmarks rise to oppose the propositions of the intellect, the eye may rove as far as the mind can see: “[T]he world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark. It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones.” (Stegner 8) In Stegner’s rhapsodic prose, a specific landscape acquires its contours from the opposition between Prairie horizontality and the verticality of human constructs – the prosaic barns and hedges but also the verbal and metaphysical creations Man opposes to the leveling forces of the Prairies’ extreme geography. Stegner is a central reference in both Laurie Ricou’s Vertical Man/Horizontal World (1973) and Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (1977), the first critical studies devoted to the formation of a regional literary tradition. References to Stegner’s seminal influence continued to occur over the following decades in

1 The term was borrowed from Bachelard’s poetic of space by cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan who defines it as “all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment” (93).

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theoretical writings concerned with the definition of a Prairie canon, particularly those of Robert Kroetsch.2 The postmodern avant-garde of the 1980s proposed their own reflections as regards the conundrum of place, the expression of a local pride, and the fostering of a sense of belonging.3 Writers as diverse as George Bowering, Rudy Wiebe or Aritha van Herk heralded a new age in Canadian writing with their robust irreverence towards the master-narratives inherited from old Europe, and their ear for local, vernacular cadences. It is therefore quite striking to see such preoccupations reassert themselves with some vehemence in recent fiction, as evinced by Miriam Toews’s award-winning A Complicated Kindness.4

The Prairie town Miriam Toews writes about lies in the rural Manitoba of the 1970s. Like so many other fictitious and real toponyms on the Prairies, Toews’s “East Village” does not merely designate a place, but rather an attitude to place, an uneasiness in dwelling already perceptible in Ross’s Horizon but also in Sharon Butala’s “Ordeal,” David Bergen’s “Lesser,” and even the authentic “Climax” rising like a fist against the flatness of the Saskatchewan grasslands. In Toews’s novel, East Village lies sufficiently out west for its name to sound like a misnomer, or perhaps an error in translation. Indeed, the appellation indexes various forms of displacement including the nostalgia of its population, a community of Russian Mennonites forced into emigration by Stalin’s persecutions. The younger generation, however, does not look east but south of the border. Nomi Nickel associates East Village somewhat subversively with its homonym in New York City, the hotbed of the 1960s counterculture which the young narrator embraces enthusiastically as an antidote against Mennonite disregard for the present. The opening chapter introduces the contradictions the sixteen-year-old has to face to come of age within a community suspicious of the worldly concerns that may divert its members from preparing for the advent of death, when the true believers will be taken home to Heaven to be reunited with their Maker (CK 4-5) In her determination to resist the entrapment of Mennonite doctrine and “escap[e] into the real world” (5), Nomi Nickel has to make sense of behaviours specific to the rigorous sub-sect her family belongs to, the most radical being the excommunication and ostracizing – the ritual shunning – to which the town’s Elders subject free-thinkers. In the novel’s incipit we therefore learn that Tash, the narrator’s elder sister, and their mother Trudie preferred to leave East Village to spare their loved ones the sorrow of having to choose between their kin and their faith. As the novel unfolds, Nomi gradually pieces together the reasons why

2 See, in particular, “The Cow in the Quicksand and How I(t) Got Out: Responding to Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow,” in which Kroetsch explains that Stegner’s memoir was one of the early texts that had enabled him to write. (Likely 66)3 “The human response to this landscape is so new and ill-defined and complex that our writers come back, uneasily but compulsively, to landscape writing.” (Kroetsch Lovely 5)4 The paginations for all subsequent quotations from the novel will be given directly between parentheses in the body of the text.

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her sister and, later, her mother decided to leave East Village after each of them incurred the wrath of the community leader, aka The Mouth, on account of his partiality for Biblical bombast.

Ethnicity plays a decisive role in the novel, insofar as it adds considerable piquant to Nomi’s story by raising the stakes of transgression. The confrontation of female derision with patriarchal sternness is redoubled in the burlesque treatment of Mennonite fundamentalism. In this context, however, the wielding of humour is not without pitfalls:

I have realized that my personal yearning to be in New York City, wandering around with Lou Reed in Greenwich Village, or whatever, is for me a painful, serious, all-consuming kind of thing and is for the rest of the world a joke. When you’re a Mennonite you can’t even yearn properly for the world because the world turns that yearning into comedy. It’s a funny premise for a movie, that’s all. Mennonite girl in New York City. Amish family goes to Soho. It’s terribly depressing to realize that your inner most desires are being tested in Hollywood for laughs per minute. (CK 135)

What distinguishes A Complicated Kindness from the productions of the entertainment industry5 is its serious investigation of the relationship between mainstream culture and minority subculture. Toews addresses this aspect in two distinct ways: first by carefully inserting her version of a Mennonite childhood into the Prairie horizontal tradition, and second through a systematic use of humour which deflates the pathos of victimhood and includes the marginal within a community of sentiment.

Nomi’s yearning for the world owes much of its ironical trenchant to the fact that its voicing originates from within a group renowned for the literal understanding and strict application of the religious principles its members abide by. Literal-mindedness, more than any other trait, is the implicit target of many Canadian jokes deriding Mennonite sternness. The point is made by Nomi when she recalls her sister exclaiming: “We’re a national joke, she’d say. Seriously, she’d say, we’re the joke town in the joke province in the joke country.” (71) Underlining that Canadians do not fare much better in the eyes of their self-confident American neighbours than Manitobans in regard to Ontarians, and Mennonites in respect to everyone else, Tash’s remark ironically relates her own uncertainties about communal allegiance to wider anxieties about national and regional status. In fact, some of the ethnic peculiarities presented in Toews’s novel often seem like paroxystic, exaggerated versions of regional or national traits. Even if the archaic custom of shunning is presented as the Mennonite response to dissent, exclusion is by no means a strictly Mennonite practice. Prairie

5 Although it is not a comedy, the lasting fame of Peter Weir’s Witness (1985) confirms the fascination of audiences with the quaint ways of the Anabaptists and the transgressive potential of any contact between their pacific ideal of virtue and the lewd violence of modernity.

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literature abounds with examples of characters ostracized for having questioned the principles of religious fundamentalism, or rebelled against the rules imposed by a community whose presence is perceived as both comforting and intrusive. In this sense, the complicated kindness Toews’s characters display towards one another finds its analogue in many other Prairie novels. The Nickel women come up against a self-righteousness which is not essentially different from the criticism some of the characters need to fight off in Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind. But whereas a Miss Thompson ultimately prevails and stays on, Tash and Trudie Nickel have to abide by the collective decision and leave. The way the community leader interferes with Trudie Nickel’s privacy is not without similitude with the control exerted by the Ladies Auxiliary in Who Has Seen the Wind (Mitchell 46-48) or the Ladies Aid, their equivalent in As for Me and my House (Ross 132). The shopkeeper that watches over Nomi and keeps the count of her visits to church finds her match in the vigilance surrounding the child in van Herk’s Places Far from Ellesmere (1990) where absolute visibility in Edberg’s open landscape is resented as a form of vulnerability (van Herk 14). Exposure to public scrutiny explains the importance of the back door in Prairie collective life, an aspect the fictitious Rita Kleinhart investigates in her poetry, much to the resentment of her own neighbours (Kroetsch Poetics 12-13).

Yet Prairie horizontality does not allow the same lines of flight in A Complicated Kindness as it does in other Prairie works. In Ross’s novel, Mrs. Bentley could indeed seek relief from Horizon’s scrutiny – and boredom – during a brief excursion to the open range. Half a century later, van Herk sets off with all her characters on a radical northern journey to Ellesmere Island. As for Rita Kleinhart, like so many of Kroetsch’s characters slipping over the horizon into new lives, she flies to Europe and disappears in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. Nomi’s prospects suffer in comparison. A Complicated Kindness looks back on the 1970s, a period when movement became increasingly disengaged from any actual physical displacement. Nomi and her friends trip on weed, magic mushrooms, or any other substance available at “the pits.” In mock-Bunyan fashion, the allegorical name designates the pond where the local youth courts eternal damnation, fighting off the despondency caused by lack of perspective:

Saturday nights you’d have a hundred or more kids down there drinking, dropping, smoking, swearing, screwing, fighting, swimming, home-made tattooing, passing out and throwing up right up until an hour or so before church the next morning when everyone would be back in the pew with Mom and Dad wearing nice (ugly) dresses and buttoned-up shirts flipping through Deuteronomy and harmonizing to ‘The Old Rugged Cross’” (CK 34)

The parallel lists of present participles underline that the pits and the church are the obverse and the reverse of the same excess, although the rhythm of the period slows down dramatically as Saturday frenzy rearranges itself into Sunday piety.

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As for the city, it still exists but only as a remote possibility whose gleaming lights Nomi contemplates as they pop up on the evening horizon. In fact, the information age has brought urban temptations, and sins, into the heart of the country. Broadcast on the radio and the television, smuggled into books and LPs, the waves of pop culture crash over East Village, shaking the foundations of Mennonite “unique apartness.” (CK 148) In reaction to the outside world, the small town opposes its economic self-sufficiency. Most of the population finds employment in the local shops and services, at the Museum village where they impersonate their ancestors’ past occupations in period costume, or at the chicken slaughterhouse, the Elders’ only concession to modernity: “The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. [...]. There are no bars or visible exits.” (53) Punning on the double entendre of the plural “bars,” the last sentence draws attention to the paradox of a topography which is simultaneously open and closed because it refuses the distractions of the present and, along with them, the very possibility of change. By denying the world its interest, by reinvesting it in the Kingdom to come, Mennonite doctrine short-circuits the dynamics of disappearance and re-invention so central to Prairie writing, from the novels of F. P. Grove to Robert Kroetsch’s fiction and poetry.

In A Complicated Kindness, departure is not the solution but the problem, the initial complication which sets the narrative into motion. Indeed, for the characters, the difficulty does not lie in leaving and reinventing a life for themselves, but rather in staying and living together, preferably in the same place:

I live with my father, Ray Nickel, in that low brick bungalow out on highway number twelve. Blue shutters, brown door, one shattered window. Nothing great. The furniture keeps disappearing though. That keeps things interesting.Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing. (1)

The book opens like a crime novel recording a mysterious disappearance. Yet the sensational parallel between dilapidated house and mutilated family is somewhat undercut by the boredom oozing from the description. The subsequent chapters continue to toy with the conventions of the detective story, but the central mystery – What happened to Tash? Where did Trudie end up? – becomes peripheral to the unfolding of narrative. As Nomi puts together the circumstances that led to her sister’s and her mother’s exclusions, her reconstruction does not point to a vanishing point. Neither does it identify an ultimate destination. Tash’s whereabouts will remain unknown, and no one will ever discover whether Trudie opted for suicide or exile. The same holds for Ray Nickel when he finally departs from his by then empty home, and leaves his younger daughter poised on the threshold of adulthood, ready to leave her deserted home but still hesitating. For each character, the possibilities of re-invention remain as open as the blank pages on Trudie’s passport, a leitmotiv confirming the narrator’s claim that she has no

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talent for devising endings. And indeed, we are not offered a climactic revelation but something different – the anatomy of a decomposition.

Although the appeal of distant horizons survives in Nomi’s New York fantasies, the characters’ departures are less often deliberate than imposed on them. Leaving becomes clearly secondary to the difficulty of staying together and remaining part of a community threatened with dissolution. In the novel’s allegorical topography, two places call for attention as landmarks in the formation and disintegration of the Nickel family. There is the sewage lagoon where Nomi’s father allegedly proposed to her mother (156), and the local dump Ray Nickel visits on a regular basis, especially since Trudie has vacated the family home. Yet, none of these sites is imbued with the chaotic fertility, the creative messiness often associated with waste in North American literature, whether in the valley of ashes of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) or in Wallace Stevens’s “Man on the Dump” (1938), as well as in the garbage heaps which attract the outcast and the eccentric in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1964) and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). “The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cemetery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together.” (CK 159) It is not the living forces of decomposition which add a grotesque dimension to the scene, but rather the mock heroic elevation transforming dumping ground into sacred ground, and the stubborn refusal to let a life go down the drain and chaos prevail. Ray Nickel insists: “I organize the garbage in a way I feel makes sense.” (158) The remark has a metafictional ring suggesting that Ray’s insistence on cohesion and meaning-making may well be relevant to the stylistic strategies the novel deploys to address such issues as the cohesion of the community and its tolerance for difference.

Nomi’s erratic bike-rides constitute a convenient – because flexible enough – narrative thread to string together the sketches and memories that constitute the novel. These involve the neglected child next door, the former teenage rebel returned to the fold of shopkeeping, the widow mourning the early loss of her son, the old lady of the infected leg and broken English, etc. With their amused attention to local foibles and quirks but also their graphic account of genuine loss and pain, these portraits recall the ironic benevolence W. O. Mitchell shows for his characters in Who has Seen the Wind,6 and Kroetsch’s grotesque humour in What the Crow Said (1978), much more than Rudy Wiebe’s sentimental evocation of another Prairie childhood in Sweeter than All the World. Closer to Brian O’Connal than to the young Adam Wiebe on their way to discover the world, Nomi learns from her fellow human beings the difficulty of leading a responsible life, and the

6 The narrator responds to the Prairie wind in lyrical terms that clearly allude to W.O. Mitchell’s great classic: “I could smell the wind coming through the open window behind her and it was like a present or a compliment or something.” (CK 59)

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value of sympathy. Toews, however, does not preach, and pathos – although the book does contain some – is held in check by the wry humour of the narrator:

Main Street is as dead as ever. There’s a blinding white light at the water tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he’s saying how the hell would I know? I’m just a carpenter. He looks like George Harrison in his Eastern religion period working for Ringling Brothers. Whatever amateur made the sign put a red circle on each of his cheeks to make him look healthy, I guess, but healthily ridiculous. On the other end is another giant billboard that says Satan is real. Choose now.Main Street is bookended by two fields of dirt that never grow a crop. They lie in perpetual fallow, my dad told me. Those words haunt me still. I can sense that Americans who come here think it’s strange. Main Streets should lead somewhere other than to eternal damnation. They should be connected to something earthly, like roads. (CK 47, my emphasis)

When an exasperated Mrs. Bentley derides Horizon’s fundamentalism in Sinclair Ross’s novel, she appeals to reason to discriminate between fact and figure of speech. Her pragmatic remarks on the absurd weight of Noah’s alleged cargo place her in the position of a seventeenth-century libertine who, although unable to disprove the existence of God, still claimed the right to have rational doubts about it (Ross 111). Nomi, on the contrary, does not confront fundamentalism head on with the arguments of an outsider. Hers is the insider’s strategy, also known as sabotage. Because she is fully aware of the impact of monological discourse, the persuasiveness of the statement which says what it says, Nomi extends the Elders’ literal interpretation of the Scriptures to the description of the world around her ad absurdum. Accordingly a statue of Jesus is Jesus just as Satan is real. The literal register, as a result, encroaches upon the figurative, bringing an additional, concrete signification to the images the narrator uses. The burlesque analogy between Jesus and George Harrison, once it has been posited, will subsequently be used literally, obliterating the initial referent: “I said goodbye to everyone I passed and trudged towards the outstretched arms of George Harrison.” (60) Following the same logic, stating that “East Village is dead” no longer sounds like a trite, because dead, metaphor. In fact, the adjective strikes the reader as more than apt to describe the population’s life-long waiting for the Last Judgment. Nomi’s use of the figurative register systematically involves a literal doubling which grounds the spiritual in her prosaic surroundings. Main Street is “bookended” in more than one sense, the most immediate referring to the Holy Bible which encompasses all aspects of the inhabitants’ existence. Sticking to the premise that there is no essential difference between the image and what it serves to represent, Nomi causes the logic of the literal to inflate and reach absurd extremities, as in the punch line which reroutes the metaphysical, bringing eternal damnation level with the surrounding horizon.

An identical effect is achieved through collage. On one of her aimless bike rides, Nomi takes a mental note of the sign outside the church, and one paragraph

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further, passes along the local store’s advertising banner. The juxtaposition of the two messages reads as follows:

AND THEY SHALL GO FORTH, AND LOOK UPON THE CARCASSES OF THE MEN THAT HAVE TRANSGRESSED AGAINST ME : FOR THEIR WORM SHALL NOT DIE, NEITHER SHALL THEIR FIRE BE QUENCHED ; AND THEY SHALL BE AN ABHORRING UNTO ALL FLESH. [...] COME ON IN AND CHECK OUT OUR NEW MEAT DEPARTMENT. (CK 154)

Because the capital letters stand out on the page, the two excerpts tend to read like a single syntagm whose second half would be the consequence of the first one, in a logical consequence of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.7 The juxtaposition conveys the infernal vision of human bodies neatly wrapped up in cellophane, ready for purchase and consumption. The suggestion is not as preposterous as it sounds, as it is perfectly integrated in a cluster of images describing The Mouth and, by extension, the small town as ravenous ogres.8 Here, Nomi’s literalisation of the meaning of the Scriptures operates on two distinct levels. The symbolic and somewhat cryptic signification of Isaiah 66 : 24 has its field of reference displaced from damnation into the kitchen, which produces a ludicrous conflation between sinner and Sunday roast. In true Swiftian fashion, this grotesque proposal contains a more modest yet much more outrageous suggestion. By placing church and store on the same plane, Nomi indicts a form of religious marketing which derives its profit from the commodification of fear and guilt wrapped up in liberal quantities of hypocrisy:

[The Mouth]’s in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using. He’s not a fire-and-brimstone guy. That’s not really our speed. Too animated. Too much like dancing. (CK 49)

The punch line is a variation upon the well-known Mennonite joke – why do Mennonites object to having sex standing up? The similitude posited between preaching, dancing and sex (for those aware of the joke’s antecedents) is characteristic of Nomi’s rhetorical deviousness, which subverts the literal register by reintroducing ambivalence and semiotic slippage in reference to beliefs and

7 “As Roland Barthes argues in “Introduction à l’analyse des récits,” the groundwork of narrating is the confusion between consecutiveness and consequence. We inevitably tend in any sequence to interpret what come after as having been caused by. ” (Dvorak 66)8 As, for instance, in the following: “[The Mouth] had so many large grey teeth. Some were jagged, some pointy, like a mountain range”; “the seriously ugly little buildings lining Main Street like a mouthful of rotten teeth”; “the kind of kid[s] a town like this chews up and spits out every day like happy hour”(83, 222, 245 respectively). This, of course, ties in with the ominous prospect of the poultry abattoir, a graphic threat to all feather-brained young ladies.

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principles of conduct which tolerate no such play, as any doubling, ambiguity or imitation is considered to be fraught with the duplicity of the devil.

Although Nomi has a wicked sense of humour, her portrait of East Village and Mennonite ways does not rankle into a bitter denunciation of the wrongs perpetrated in the name of virtue. The debunking of religious hypocrisy is a prominent aspect of the novel, yet serious satire is not made to prevail over comic irreverence.9 This is mainly due to the narrator’s use of the burlesque which debases the sacred and substitutes for its vertical hierarchy the horizontal plane of the mundane world where all things co-exist and can be envisaged through their interrelations instead of in terms of superiority or inferiority.10 This horizontal leveling is essential for two reasons. First, it participates in the comic effects which, in this novel, have a reconciling rather than a chastising function, impressing upon readers that Toews’s characters are guided by the same motivations as the rest of mankind. This leveling consequently undermines the separateness Mennonites claim for themselves, a “unique apartness” (CK 148) premised on a strict observance of rules: “[In East Village] there’s no room for in between. You’re in or you’re out. You’re good or you’re bad. Actually very good or very bad. Or very good at being very bad without being detected.” (10)11 The syntactic reshuffling of contraries causes exclusory categories to blur, thus introducing a form of convergence, or in-betweenness, where the orthodoxy posits absolute distinctions.

Incongruous comparisons are another means for Nomi to question the separation between good and evil, the sacred and the profane, the local and the exotic, Mennonites and the rest of the world. The popular successes of the seventies, for instance, suggest to Nomi a wealth of similes to comment on the particularity of her people. There is no better evocation of the Mennonites’ plight, she parenthetically notes, than the Rolling Stones’ Exiles on Main Street (CK 137). Later, she borrows from Bob Dylan a famous refrain to illustrate the relation between Mennonites and Hutterites: “They are another sub-sect of our larger clan, except they live in colonies. Kibbutz-style. We are all, though, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. The same door.” (133) The kibbutz reference has comic potential because, beyond the allusion to Dylan’s origins, the Hebrew word introduces some ecumenical confusion between two religions which, in their own special way, are both wary of polluting contacts with the exterior. A similar dynamic can

9 Nomi alludes to the frequency of domestic violence (39), and denounces the economic advantages of being a conscientious objector in times of war (68).10 This substitution is in keeping with Bakhtin’s analysis of grotesque realism in popular culture and the transfer of top to bottom that constitutes the human body into the relative center of the cosmos (Bakhtin 364).11 The repetition and transgressive permutations are reminiscent of van Herk’s rearrangement of the list of forbiddances and allowances in the autobiographical Places Far from Ellesmere (22-23).

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be observed in Nomi’s recurrent choice of exotic similes to describe local curiosities: “Everything in this town, the school, the church, the museum, the chicken plant, is connected to everything else, like the sewers of Paris”; “The administration passed her round for beatings like a hookah pipe at a Turkish wedding”, and the open sore on Mrs. Klippenstein’s leg, “ooz[ing] night and day, like Vesuvius” (183, 152, 163). The narrative thus abounds in unexpected combinations connecting elements that belong to distinct spaces, different genres or incompatible registers: “what constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).” (Winterson 45)

The surprise caused by the incongruous is a source of transgressive pleasure because it tests the plasticity of English syntax and its capacity for combinations that challenge norms and the expectancies they construct. As Winterson’s mischievous permutations illustrate, the incongruous calls attention to the horizon of common understanding against which signification detaches itself, statements making sense in relation to a standard usage and a specific context. In this sense, toying with the incongruous without lapsing into nonsense is a faculty which can only be enjoyed by those at home in the language:

[Mrs. Klippenstein’s] English wasn’t very good. One time I told her she was lucky she didn’t have to go to school (we’d been discussing my assignments) and she grabbed my arm and said I’ll eat your heart out. She said things like slice me open a bun and throw me down the stairs a face cloth. Trudie and I would try not to laugh. (163)

Laughing, however, is what the implied reader is encouraged to do in solidarity with characters who delight in the polysemy of the English language – the puns that combine several meanings within one signifier,12 but also the creative misunderstandings that attest to the vagaries of the interpretation and the plurality of meaning it leads to.

Although Toews’s narrator introduces herself as “Nomi from Nowhere” (56), the small town portrayed in A Complicated Kindness has been carefully mapped by her literary predecessors, who have conjoined the investigation of self with the investigation of place. In this sense, Toews’s novel does come from somewhere, a literary tradition which links together the biographical with the geographical: How do you grow a poet? How do you grow a Prairie town? The questions first formulated in Kroetsch’s poem “Seed Catalogue,” later recurring in his theoretical essay “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues” root the creative voice in a specific rural milieu the constitutive lacks and absences of which allow

12 The book abounds in examples that would have delighted Lewis Carroll as, for instance, when Nomi’s parents comment on the depth of the adverb “well” (43).

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the poet to speak the world anew. In different yet complementary ways, Rudy Wiebe and Aritha van Herk have eloquently written of the endless expanse of Prairie space, its immensity calling for voices powerful and plural enough to make its vacancy resonate with possibilities. As for Toews, she places the emphasis less upon Horizon and the limitations of the local than upon the horizontal relations through which individuals bond into communities. Her strategies of incongruous literalization challenge the verticality of patriarchal hierarchy and spiritual authority. Miriam Toews uses humour to sabotage Mennonite seriousness but also to instil a sense of solidarity with the displaced and the marginal. In this respect, her writing is fully resonant with the anxieties of a national culture that endeavours to conjugate within the same space the claims of its minorities with the ethical aspirations of an increasingly diverse majority.

Claire OMHOVèREUniversité Montpellier 3

works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Helen Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984.

Bergen, David. A Year of Lesser. New York: Haper, 1996.

Butala, Sharon. The Fourth Archangel. Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Dvorak, Marta. Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001.

Fitzgerald, F.S. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Oxford, New York: OUP, 1998.

Harrison, Dick. Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction. Edmonton: U. of Alberta P, 1977.

Kreisel, Henry, “The Prairie: A State of Mind.” Contexts of Canadian Criticism: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Eli Mandel. 1968. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. 254-266.

Kroetsch, Robert. What the Crow Said. Toronto: PaperJacks, General Publishing, 1979.

—. Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989.

—. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto, New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

—. A Likely Story: The Writing Life. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1995.

—. The Hornbooks of Rita K. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2001.

—. “Don’t Give Me No More of Your Lip; or, The Prairie Horizon as Allowed Mouth.” Toward Defining the Prairie. Region, Culture and History. Ed. Robert Wardhaugh. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2001. 209-215.

Beyond Horizon 79

Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. 1964. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Mitchell, W.O. Who Has seen the Wind. 1947. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1960.

Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Ricou, Laurie. Vertical Man/Horizontal World. Vancouver: UBC P, 1973.

Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House. 1941. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957.

Stegner, Wallace. Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

Toews, Miriam. A Complicated Kindness. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia, A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Van Herk, Aritha. Places Far from Ellesmere. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1990.

Wiebe, Rudy. Sweeter than All the World. Toronto: Knopf, 2001.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit. London: Pandora P, 1985.

The horizon in The God of Small Things by arundhati Roy: a Poetics of lines

The question of borders, and how they are constantly blurred, lies at the heart of The God of Small Things, not only as regards the identity of the main characters and the social boundaries of castes, but also with respect to the novel’s narrative pattern and Roy’s creative experimentations with the English language. In The God of Small Things, the horizon can be apprehended as a boundary, a line separating the land and the sea from the sky, but also joining them, since it is the place where they seemingly meet. The horizon will thus be analysed as a geometrical line in its relation to both horizontality and verticality, and also as a boundary. Although the horizon is literally absent from the novel, it becomes re-inscribed on the figurative level, and subsequently becomes a place for transgression and creation, inscribing a Deleuzean line of flight for language to follow and reinvent itself.

The horizon conjures up paradoxical notions. Being the ultimate visible element in the landscape, it refers literally to what limits the sight but also, metaphorically, to the opposite idea: the notion of unlimited

open space, the promise of something new. The very notion of horizon rests upon a dialectic between the visible and the invisible that lies just behind it, between here and beyond, but also between space (it is a line in space) and time, as the horizon always goes on a par with the idea of the future. Maybe the most significant paradox underlying the notion is that the horizon separates the sky from the earth (or from the sea), yet it also coincides with the line where they meet. In other words, the horizon is a boundary, both a dividing and a meeting line, a place of friction. This aspect is particularly significant in a novel written in India where the border, or the partition line, has become a haunting issue. In her article “‘Step Across this Line’: Edges and Borders in Contemporary Indian Literature,” Vanessa Guignery has thoroughly analysed the impact of the dividing line in contemporary Indian literature, and its relation to postcolonial discourses. She relies on several contemporary novels, among which The God of Small Things features prominently, to highlight how the political and social questions of the line are constantly at stake, whether to set up strict delimitations, or to delineate shifting spaces of transgression.

The horizon is surprisingly absent from The God of Small Things. This is dramatically true on the literal level, but also from the point of view of narrative, even if, as we shall see, the horizon subsequently becomes re-inscribed on another, figurative level. In terms of setting, the landscape is often reduced to close and enclosed spaces; no vast stretch of land opens on a far away horizon.

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The first description in the incipit sets the tone, as the depth of field is blurred by the monsoon rain. Each description of the landscape re-enacts the same lack of depth. Whenever the horizon is mentioned, it is immediately blocked by the rain or concealed by night. It is interesting to note that the sky is only present indirectly, through comparisons or reflections on other surfaces. Apart from the painted sky in the church and the omnipresent “sky-blue” colour, the sky is repeatedly glimpsed in its reflection on water or comically reflected in a dog’s testicles: “As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And once a bird that flew across.” (5) On the rare occasions when the word “horizon” occurs, it is used as a metaphor expressing the imposition of limits.

Significantly, the characters rarely watch the horizon. Instead their eyes are focused on “Small Things” – minute details such as the life of insects – so that they are rarely seen to look forward or far away. The narrative abounds in examples showing striking elaborations on the tiny visual details to which the children are attentive. Estha, while retching, is staring at a basin: “The basin had steel taps and rust stains. A brownwebbed mesh of hairline cracks, like the roadmap of some great intricate city. Thoughts hovered over the . . . Basin City. But the basin men and basin women went on about their usual basin business. Basin cars, and basin buses . . . basin life went on.” (108) Although the scope is limited to a small basin in a public toilet, the character’s imagination broadens the perspective, so that the idea of the horizon is to be found on a symbolic rather than on a literal level. In The God of Small Things, descriptions rarely embrace a vast horizontal expanse, but jump from one tiny detail to another. The incipit already discloses this preference for discontinuous details and for vertical lines over horizontal ones through the image of the pouring rain: “slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth,” a syntagm in which alliterations in [l] re-enact the same verticality on the micro level of the letter. As a result, the opening description follows a visual, vertical trajectory, leading the eye from the sky to the earth – down the electric poles –, and from the roof of the house down the walls to the “undergrowth” of the garden.1

The prevalence of verticality over horizontality intervenes as another manifestation of the absence of horizon, a feature which will have remarkable structural consequences. Indeed, verticality turns out to affect the narrative as much as the syntax. Just like the characters, who are deprived of any hope and therefore of any symbolic horizon, the narrative offers no perspective and no horizontal development either. The narrator describes the twins as drifting through life, without a horizon or a landmark to hold on to: “she left them spinning in the dark with no mooring.” (191-192) The spinning metaphor, which becomes recurrent, is directly opposed to horizontality. The children’s lives do not unfold along a horizontal line projecting into the future, but are tied

1 The same visual verticality prevails in chapter 18, 303-305.

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to the past, continually looping backwards. The same is true of the narrative which offers no foray into the future, since the narrator never mentions what will happen after the three days in 1993. Roy even murders any idea of the future at the end. Although “tomorrow” is the very last word of the novel, its meaning is emptied of all substance: the reader already knows that Velutha, to whom the word is addressed, will die on the next day. The future branches into the past for the characters, and for the reader, too, since the circumstances of Velutha’s death have already been disclosed. This example also reveals that definitive conclusions cannot hold in a novel entirely based on ambiguity and the whetting of the process of interpretation. No matter how dramatic this ending may be, it provides no proper closure, for it ends the narrative with the middle of the story, that is, the beginning of the love affair between Ammu and Velutha. It could also be interpreted as introducing a happy note in a tragic story, launching the novel afresh by inviting its reader to start the narrative from this point once again.2

As a result, a spinning dynamics replaces the possibility of a horizontal, chronological development of the narrative. The novel positions 1993 as its starting point, but it returns incessantly to a diegetic past beyond the beginning. The ending of the story is revealed from the first pages, and narrative progress subsequently deconstructs any teleological linearity, as it moves through the detours of the past (1969) and ends just before the tragedy in the middle of the plot – Ammu’s love affair with an Untouchable in 1969. Instead of following a linear progression, the narrative actually folds upon itself into an endocentric spiral, reminding us of the spiral guiding the twins’ lives. Roy herself refers to “the broody, introspective, circular quality of the narrative” (Interview 89), an image totally opposed to that of the open horizon, and she makes a recurrent use of the root metaphor of the spiral. In other words, the absence of horizon for the characters is transferred onto the narrative through the absence of horizontality. In addition, even the time pattern challenges horizontality through the constant use of flashbacks, which superimpose a vertical paradigm of repetitions upon the syntagmatic unfolding of narrative, thus echoing the vertical lines drawn in visual descriptions. The complex system of flashbacks and flash-forwards further contributes to the disruption of any chronological linearity, and readers themselves are disorientated, as their reading is deprived of any narrative horizon. The flashbacks reorganise the narrative according to the random meandering of memory. Because every detail in the present – a notebook, Ammu’s bedroom, a spider – conjures up the past, the narrative does not progress in a chronological order but rather by associations of ideas, through substitution rather than through contiguity. It therefore obeys what Jakobson would call a paradigmatic, i.e. vertical dynamics rather than a syntagmatic, i.e. horizontal one. Like the twins, the narrative is trapped in traumatic memories, in a “Frozen Time” (160), and nothing really happens in the present. It seems to be trapped in what Deleuze and Guattari call “a dead time”:

2 For an analysis of the ambiguous closure of the novel, see Madhu Benoit’s article.

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It is there where nothing takes place, an infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past, awaiting and reserve. This dead time does not come after what happens; it coexists with the instant or time of the accident, but as the immensity of the empty time in which we see it as still to come and as having already happened, in the strange indifference of an intellectual intuition. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 158)

Such an apprehension of time stresses the paradigmatic notion of concomitance or simultaneity which prevails over that of chronology. The obsessive work of leitmotifs also contributes to undermining horizontality insofar as repetition breaks linearity into a circle. The narrative bristles with repeated sounds, words, sentences, even scenes which start to trace a vertical line on which the repetitions – or paradigms – pile up. Phrases such as “a cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts,” or “Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze,” are repeated throughout the novel, and only become meaningful at the end of the narrative. Peter Brook underlines the cohesive power of repetition, which he associates with the dynamics of the paradigm rather than with the syntagm: “Repetition in all its literary manifestations may in fact work as a ‘binding,’ a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form, usable ‘bundles’ within the economy of the narrative [...] that allows us to bind one textual moment to another in terms of similarity or substitution rather than contiguity.” (Brook 124)

Even the sentence seems to free itself from horizontality. The preference for a paradigmatic composition also operates in the syntax, which is made to resist the syntagmatic rule of contiguity. Punctuation signs proliferate in the sentence and disrupt the linear unfolding of the syntax. Words are no longer contiguous but drift apart:

He thought Two Thoughts, and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can Happen to Anyone And(b) It’s best to be prepared. (194, 267, 328)

In similar instances, sentences are cropped short like the depth of the landscape, none of which has a horizon. In parallel, the proliferation of inversion devices, such as anacoluthon, hyperbaton, palindrome and chiasmus contributes to replacing the syntagmatic rule of linear succession by a backward movement, as in the following dislocation: “all day they slept, the bats.” (307) In the following example of antimetabole: “Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered,” (19) the sentence obeys an oscillating rhythm and turns into a circle; it leads nowhere, and once more becomes horizon-less.

Finally, the sentence, horizontal par excellence, is literally reorganised along a vertical axis on the page in examples close to calligrams:

Nothing. On Rahel’s heart Pappachi’s moth snapped its sombre wings.


Out. In. And lifted its legs.Up. Down. (293)3

The vertical structure can take the form of an acrostic, as in the following single acrostic the initial letters of which spell POLICE:

PolitenessobedienceloyaltyIntelligenceCourtesyefficiency (304 )

As a result, any “horizon structure” (as a continuous open horizontal line) is systematically undermined and replaced by verticality. This is true of the narrative and the syntax, both of which are highly discontinuous and tend to become reorganized along a paradigmatic axis, but also of time, which is circular.

Although the economy of the novel is ruled by a denial of horizontality, although its landscape and characters are similarly deprived of any perspective, the horizon is re-inscribed in the novel figuratively through the metaphor of the boundary. The image of horizon, the in-between line dividing the earth from the sky, and, at the same time, the “blurry end” where they seemingly meet, is strikingly relevant in a novel hinging on liminal spaces and states. In The God of Small Things, dividing lines are constantly traced to separate categories, yet the same lines are constantly crossed and tampered with, to the effect that, as first announced in the incipit, “boundaries blur.” (1) Because all borders are transgressed, categories seem to leak into one another as in the seminal image of the family jam: “neither jam nor jelly, an ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency.” (30) The whole novel abides by this definition, poised in an in-between, along a blurred line, shaped by the friction of opposites and mutually exclusive categories. Classification problems curse the Ipe family as evinced in the labelling of jam,4 or the naming of the grandfather’s moth: “[T]his difficulty that their family had with classifications ran much deeper than the jam jelly question. They all tampered with the laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, jelly jelly.” (31) This aspect is also showcased through the recurrent use of binary structures that draw a blurry line between the opposites in which the twins are entrapped: “not old, not young, a

3 See the discussion of hyperparatactic word sentences and single-sentence paragraphs in Marta Dvorak’s article.4 Also see Florence Cabaret’s investigation of the taxonomical dynamics of the novel and of the banana jam’s synecdochic function, as well as Sacksick’s observations in “The Aesthetics of Interlacing in The God of Small Things.”

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viable-diable age” (e.g. 3); “not death, just the end of living” (164); “somewhere between indifference and despair” (19); and “poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace.” (19) As a result, the blurring of the dividing line runs throughout the novel, and operates in conjunction with the writing itself.

Not only does the line between the past and the present blur, but so does the line separating reality from the imaginary, a distinction the children do not make. They reinterpret reality with an animistic and poetic vision which brings the novel to flirt with magic realism. In addition, the social line delimiting castes is transgressed because of the love affair between their mother, a Syrian Christian, and an Untouchable man. Finally, the line separating the twins is also blurred on a symbolic level as they are depicted as “physically separate but with joint identities.” (2) After their incestuous reunion, the moral line separating sisters from brothers is similarly erased. Rahel rightly remarks: “perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors [...] they all broke the laws of who should be loved and how. They all crossed into forbidden territory.” (31) The horizon is thus omnipresent on a figurative level if it is apprehended as both a “Blurry End” and a blurring line.

Because the twins in particular keep stepping (and stumbling) across the line, they seem to inhabit that borderline space. They are described in terms that emphasize their in-betweenness – “penumbral shadows between two worlds,” (44) standing “forlornly at the edge of the driveway, at the periphery of the Play,” (184) as if they embodied these “short creatures patrolling the blurry end.” (3) It is as if they were denied the right to occupy a physical place: they have “no locus stand I,” and finally they experience “not death, just the end of living.” (45) The horizon, an immaterial place having no geographical location, becomes in a way the only place they are allowed to stalk or to haunt. If the horizon is not visible in this novel, it might be precisely because they stand on it. In this respect, Estha conjures up the image of Walking Man, the gaunt sculptures by Giacometti which have the strange characteristic that they seem to remain far away even when one of them approaches, as if they were walking on the horizon. Estha, who “started his walking. He walked for hours on end” (12), who remains unreachable, is subjected to the same whittling process as the sculptures, as he always seems to be on the verge of disappearing: “he had acquired the ability to blend into the background [...] to appear almost invisible to the unstrained eye [...] Estha occupied very little space in the world.” (10) Like the sculptures by Giacometti, Estha seems to stalk the horizon.

But it is first and foremost as regards language that the line is blurred, and becomes a fertile meeting point. The line between English and Malayalam is made to grow thinner and thinner, as the twins wander in the interstice between the two languages.5 For instance, they transfer the agglutination device of Malayalam into English to create innumerable compound words such as “Ammu’s trying-not-to-

5 On this matter see Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Guillaume Cingal in Gallix.


cry mouth,” (300) “child-sized coffin. Satin-lined. Brass-handle shined [...] Made-in-England go-go bag,” (4) or “there was a short, Sad-about-Joe Silence.” (173) The hyphen is ubiquitous in the novel, and it could then be apprehended as a visual metaphor of the horizon, both separating and joining two words. Other examples of proper agglutination are recurrent as in the following: “lemontoolemon,” “echoing stationsounds [...] stationlights,” or “CocaColaFantaicecreamrosemilk” (105, 300, 301 respectively). The frontier separating grammatical categories is made porous. Categories meet and mix to give birth to new words. Nouns are turned into verbs, an effect which counterbalances the systematic suppression of verbs in the novel: “the yellow wasp wasping,” (201) “Ammu moonwalked him to the toilets,” (108) “a thin ribbon of thick water that lapped . . . at the banks on either side sequinned with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish” (124, my emphasis). Likewise, adjectives or nouns blur into adverbs: “a redly dead,” “a sadly swirl,” or “roos moved cemently.” (31, 194, 139)

The same dynamics operates at the level of sound. The oral boundary between words is erased in the poem, originally by Walter Scott, proudly recited by Comrade Pillai’s son:

O young Lochin varhas scum out of the vestThrough wall the vide border his teed was the bes;Tand savissgood broadsod heweapon sadnun,Nhe rod all unarmed, and he rode all lalone. (271)

In this comic recitation and re-interpretation of “Lochinvar” by a Malayalam-speaking child, words are phonically fused into a line that runs on the horizon of the English language.6 Seen from a distance, segments aggregate into new units so that new words and meanings emerge. The word “scum” is suddenly made salient, or the word “sad nun” which could refer to Baby Kochamma. The twins keep exploring the oral chain as a blurred line. Doing so, they make language proliferate through fusions and frictions like “Ousa the Bar Nowl” (from the Barn owl). Similar instances abound as “‘He’s a filmactor she explained’ [...] making Adoor Basi sound like a Mactor who did occasionally Fil.” (144) As a place of friction between distinct identities, the horizon embodies a place of transgression but also of creation.

Although the novel allows no horizon, and therefore no possibility of escape for its characters, a flight line can be discerned at another level, specifically in the way Roy handles language and its constraints. The concept of the line of flight is

6 See M. Dvorak’s discussion of intensification through syntactic violation, derivation, syllabification, and dislocation, in which she notably identifies this sequence as “a sub-category of arbitrary substitution that Paul Valéry dubbed ‘parrot,’ consisting in a discourse suffused with tension between new material and material familiar to the receptor’s unconscious, and the tacit invitation that the listener work out the ‘trick’” (53).

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crucial in Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy7 where the ligne de fuite is not to be understood as a running away from but rather as a bursting out of, much in the same way as a pipe leaks:

To flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a flight [...] It is also to put to flight [...] to put something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube [...] Anglo-American literature constantly shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight.

(Deleuze 1987, 27)

The proliferation of metaphors characteristic of Roy’s novel may be viewed as another manifestation of the flight line since metaphor displaces meaning which it literally carries over onto another word. Through a semantic transfer, the trope causes an opening in, or a “bursting out of” ordinary language. For instance, descriptions of Rahel in her new dress broaden the perspective on the little girl, and cause meaning to proliferate: “A mosquito on a leash. A Refugee Stick Insect in Bata sandals. An Airport Fairy.” (300, 172) Roy’s use of the English language is that of the writer who, to quote Deleuze again, “will make language shoot along, and will make us this stranger in our language.” (1987, 59) Her distinctive style has been said to stretch the rules of syntax, and to place language on the horizon of grammaticality. As an Indian novelist writing in English, Roy can be considered to have opened new horizons for language.8 Her manipulation of English also evokes Deleuze’s comment on British and American writers who “make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate.” (1997, 109) Roy also places language on a witch’s line to expand the possibilities of language. She explores the other side of the horizon of language which Lacan calls “le reste,” i.e. the remainder that exceeds rationalizing discourse. Jean-Jacques Lecercle further elaborates on this notion which he defines in his turn as the operations of grammar pushed to its extreme limits (Lecercle 67). He further explains that with the remainder, language seems to have a life of its own. It speaks, follows its own rhythm, its own partial coherence, and proliferates in a seemingly chaotic and sometimes violent way.9 The remainder surfaces in the twins’ distinctive use of the English language, which they reinvent by following

7 See Catherine Lanone for further discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s line of flight as an exegetical aid to Roy’s novel (130-131). 8 One can note, however, that criticism addressing transnational and intracultural dialogism has identified certain aspects of echo and derivation in Roy’s novel with respect to Salman Rushdie, whose novel Midnight’s Children was a watershed for Indian literary writing. See the discussion in Dvorak. 9 The original text I have paraphrased reads as follows : “le reste c’est la langue qui parle: elle suit son propre rythme, sa propre cohérence partielle, elle prolifère de façon apparemment chaotique et parfois violente.” (Lecercle 6)


the very logic of the morphology of English: “Margaret told her to stoppit. So she Stoppitted” (141, 300); and an egg that is “quarter-boiled.” (104)

Roy seems to write from the horizon, a metaphoric place recalling the existence of the remainder which, as Lecercle argues, is closely linked to borders and could be best described as a no man’s land outside the law.10 The horizon abides by the same definition. It is indeed a no man’s land that cannot be reached, it is an ever-shifting line that cannot be fixed and mapped, since it is endlessly redefined as one approaches it. Because it is subjected to processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the horizon can be envisaged from a Deleuzean perspective. As an elusive migrant line, it also shares the liminal characteristics of the nomadic space: “A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 380)11 The horizon bears evidence to the in-between as a zone energized with tensions, a place for becoming. “The middle is not an average,” Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, “it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle. One can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both.” (2004, 323)

It is precisely because it coincides with an in-between rather than with a beyond that the horizon is such a seminal notion in The God of Small Things. The horizon underlies in several crucial ways the aesthetics and poeisis of a novel in which there is no beyond, because time and place have become constricted. The characters are trapped in a series of interstices from which language is made to proliferate, an image connoted with hope: “small cracks appeared which would grow and grow.” (140) Language itself is not beyond grammaticality, but it explores the malleability of the English language from its inside cracks. The image of the horizon helps us understand that the other side of language is not beyond language but within language. In the novel, the horizon intervenes as a fertile in-between, when it is considered as a flight line causing a bursting out of linguistic conventions or a proliferation of language, but also when it throws into relief the remainder, the “blurry end” from which language is endlessly reinventing itself. The structural function of the horizon in Roy’s novel is likely to evoke for many Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space.” This conjunction brings me to conclude that the horizon could very well be apprehended as a natural metaphor for the postcolonial field. First,

10 “Le reste [...] concerne les frontières; son lieu de prédilection est le terrain vague: l’unique territoire qui échappe vraiment à toute règle est un no man’s land.” (Lecercle 106)11 The horizon shares a number of its characteristics with Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic space, also a smooth, open space, only marked by lines that vanish and move along with any trajectory (1980, 472). It is also convergent with their definition of the line of becoming which “has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination [...] it is a no man’s land.” (2004, 323)

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because it is precisely the line that runs between the East and the West, but also because it evokes that very “post space,” as Bhabha understands it, that is “neither a new horizon nor a leaving behind of the past” (1-2), much less a beyond than an in-between.

It is interesting to remark that the incipit of The Satanic Verses by Rushdie confirms this intuition of the horizon as a postcolonial place of becoming and of creations. Indeed, it is precisely when Saladin and Gibreel are floating between the sky and the earth (after the initial explosion of the plane) that mutations occur, and not only linguistic ones. In the amorphous in-between place (earth/sky, India/England) the two characters experience the physical blurring of frontiers: they blend into one another; one is turned into a goat, and this will lead to the birth of a new identity. Rushdie analyses the frontier as a horizon, a shifting line to be explored: “this new permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times [...] This is the dance of history in our age: slow slow, quick quick, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines.” (2002, 425) He places it at the heart of the postmodern and postcolonial identity but also at the heart of the literary process:

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures [...] that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality then [...] our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. (1991, 15)

The horizon represents the fertile territory of mixing and overlapping, and is precisely an “imaginary homeland”: it is a chimera that arouses the imagination. As a place of friction, the horizon is also, ultimately, the place of fiction.

Elsa SACKSICKUniversité de Paris 8

works Cited

Baneth-Nouailhetas, Emilienne. The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy. Paris: Armand Colin / CNED, 2002.

—. “Cet obscur objet du désir: la transgression dans The God of Small Things.” Etudes anglaises 55.4 (2002): 435-443.

Benoit, Madhu. “Narrative Techniques.” Arundhati Roy: l’hybridité célébrée. Ed. F. Gallix. Reims: Mallard, 2002. 96-108.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Brook, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984.

Cabaret, Florence. “Classification in The God of Small Things.” Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Ed. Carole & Jean-Pierre Durix. Dijon: EU de Dijon, 2002. 75-90.


Cingal, Guillaume. “Bubbles, Babblers and the Tower of Babel.” Arundhati Roy: l’hybridité célébrée. Ed. F. Gallix. Reims: Mallard, 2002. 88-95.

Deleuze, Gilles. Dialogues II. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London: Athlone P, 1987.

—. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. D.W Smith, M.A. Greco. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles, et Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980.

—. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

—. What is Philosophy ? Trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP,1994.

D’souza, Florence. “Breaking the Rules.” Arundhati Roy: l’hybridité célébrée. Ed. F. Gallix. Reims: Mallard, 2002. 151-68.

Dvorak, Marta. “Translating the Foreign into the Familiar: Arundhati Roy’s Postmodern Sleight of Hand.” Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Ed. Carole & Jean-Pierre Durix. Dijon: EU de Dijon, 2002. 41-61.

Guignery, Vanessa. “’Step Across this Line’: Edges and borders in Contemporary Indian Literature.” Etudes Anglaises 62.3 (2009): 305-316.

Lanone, Catherine. “Seeing the World through Red-Coloured Glasses: Desire and Death in The God of Small Things.” Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Ed. Carole & Jean-Pierre Durix. Dijon: EU de Dijon, 2002. 125-143.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. La violence du langage. Paris: PUF, 1996.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo, 1997.

—, and Taisha Abraham. “Interview with Arundhati Roy.” Ariel 29.1 (1998): 89-92.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1991.

—. Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.

Sacksick, Elsa. “The Aesthetics of Interlacing in The God of Small Things.” Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Ed. Carole & Jean-Pierre Durix. Dijon: EU de Dijon, 2002. 63-73.

Circumscribing the horizon in Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter

This paper discusses the ongoing preoccupation of Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart with the influence of the visual arts on sensitivity, and, more specifically, the anxiety regarding the primacy of vision that permeates The Underpainter (1997). In this ekphrastic novel, Urquhart’s treatment of the pictorial motif of the horizon engages the reader in a reflection on the very foundations of representation, in turn raising questions about the politics of the gaze underlying a painter’s work.

Canadian author Jane Urquhart has never ceased to reflect upon the endurance and seductive power of the cultural prisms that mediate the perception of space and its representations. It is thus unsurprising

that The Underpainter, her fourth novel, should feature a painter “fascinated by the actuality of the north,” and whose early work is quite reminiscent of the paintings of the Group of Seven (40). Urquhart, however, refuses to give her readers an elaborate description of the rugged landscapes of stark beauty they might be expecting. Her narrator only casually mentions the group of painters who became emblems of an emerging national consciousness in the 1920s on account of their vocal disrespect for the academic conventions of European painting, and their desire to render the uniqueness of the Canadian landscape. Urquhart’s attention, however, slightly strays from the negotiation of cultural heritage, and its adjustment to a new geography. By creating a character who is a landscape painter, she probes into the foundational ambivalence of landscape. Etymologically, the term designated first the pictorial representation of a tract of land before it came to refer to its perception, namely “a portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a single view.” (Webster’s Dictionary) The aesthetic value attached to the word highlights that “our apprehension of space in a composition we identify as landscape conjoins what is seen with a way of seeing it.” (Omhovère 2007, 56) The perception of landscape indeed requires the mediation of an educated eye responding to latent aesthetic and cultural models, a process which Alain Roger calls the artialisation in visu (Roger 17).

The Underpainter is informed by an implicit identity between narrating I and perceiving eye (Urquhart 1997, 179). The novel’s narrator, Austin Fraser, accordingly fulfils the part of the paradigmatic “personnage porte-regard” (literally the “gaze-bearer”)1 so crucial to the descriptive economy of the realistic novel. At

1 Philippe Hamon coined this expression to refer to the perceptual focalizer which is produced by description and traditionally naturalizes its insertion in the realist novel (172).

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plot level, the painter is defined by his extraordinary “visual memory, [his] eidetic malediction” (55) through which he reminisces the events that marked his quest towards originality. In the course of the story, he turns these events into paintings, the descriptions of which punctuate the text. Formally, the series of analepses, or resurfacing memories, create a multi-layered narration which mirrors “the line, form and composition” of the underpainting faintly visible through the superimposed layers of paint (181).

The Underpainter occupies a special place in Urquhart’s reflection on the influence of the visual arts on sensitivity. More than any of her works of fiction, this ekphrastic novel explores a certain anxiety regarding the power and prevalence of sight in Western culture. Coinciding with the line at which the sky and earth appear to meet, the horizon exemplifies the issues that the primacy of vision raises. As a limit from which the invisible beyond “begins its presencing” (Heidegger 154), the horizon suggests that representation is always local, bounded in space and in time. As such, the horizon partakes of an interrogation on the very foundations of representation. But the horizon is also a line that defines the scope of the gaze. Determined by the viewpoint of an observer separated from the scenery s/he contemplates, the horizon supposes a politics of the gaze. In the novel, Austin Fraser has no desire to puncture the horizon and see beyond its limitations. On the contrary, his early visual experiments try to circumscribe and to possess it. Of course, they are doomed to fail, and eventually lead to an artistic crisis. Austin only becomes an original artist when his painting undermines the truism according to which a painter not only paints with the eyes, but also paints for the eyes. The title of his most famous achievement The Erasures draws attention to what the painting withholds from vision, and thus bespeaks a pictorial project which can be read as a paradoxical attempt to “mute or tamper with the aura of the image.” (Omhovère 2010, 13)

Looking back on his early career, Austin concludes that “what [he] wanted from life was just a good view […] a perfectly composed view, and, now and then, a perfect figure in a perfect landscape,” (141) like the two canvases he made of “Sara standing by windows, looking out towards the frantic lake, the hectic sky.” (167) The motif of the window, although unobtrusive in the novel, is central in Austin’s art. During the fifteen summers he spends in Silver Islet, he ceaselessly paints the views of “the lake, the landscape and the sky” from Sara’s cabin (318). The ideal of harmonious composition he strives to reach is closely linked to the notion of prospect, this “ordered vision from afar” (Omhovère 2007, 68) created by perspective, and enhanced in the composition of pictorial space by the motif of the window. Its frame has indeed a twofold function: it transforms space into a tableau, creating thus an effect of mise en abyme, and it also contributes to the creation of the pictorial illusion, namely the illusion of depth and three-dimensionality.2

2 The image of the painting as window is central in Leon Battista’s definition of linear perspective: the picture plane is thought of as a transparent window through which the viewer can see the pictorial world. (Omhovère 2007, 23-24)

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Despite his love for “long views and […] aerial perspective,” (130) Austin enigmatically declares that he “painted the horizon in a crisp possessive way, as if, having chosen to render it, [he] felt [he] must bring it up close for inspection.” (130) This statement sharpens the meaning of a previous reference to the horizon: “I never painted the horizon, wanted only to capture the effect of it.” (100) Beyond the contradiction – Austin is not an entirely reliable narrator – both passages are to be interpreted, on the most obvious level, in terms of experiments with pictorial composition. The position of the line of horizon being determined by the construction of pictorial space, its “effect” can be construed as meaning both the dynamic interaction between the object and the space around it, and certain effects of light and texture. These pictorial experiments also evince a desire for mastery, a will to control experience through rational understanding. Austin regards his sketches and studies as “theoretical exercises in intimacy.” (101) The unexpected association of words draws the reader’s attention to the shift of meaning at work in the artist’s use of the word “intimacy.” The intimacy he explores is both a summation and a totalisation since it cannot be dissociated from the “crazy inventory” he makes of his lover’s house (164). Year after year, Austin paints the same views, the same woman, the same objects until his memory is saturated with images which, forty years later, he can conjure up to create a new episode in his narrative (15). His paintings do not merely try to circumscribe Sara’s world. In his studies, Austin endlessly records possible visual impressions that constitute the multiple facets of his subject of which he has only a limited perception at a time.3 In this respect, it is unsurprising that he should become interested in cubism later on in his career. Even though cubism departs from pictorial illusionism, it still plays, to a certain extent, with the viewer’s perception of two and three-dimensional space. With the multiplication of viewpoints, the object is depicted on the picture plane as if all its facets were visible at the same time. As a result, the painter’s “stylized mountain[s]” (268) further his early visual experiments with methods of representing forms in space.

What underpins Austin’s exploration of the structure of perception (Pitavy 158) is an “intellectualisation of vision.” (Matos Dias 101) Indeed, for the painter, sight is an intellectual sense concerned with identification and objectification, both of which he believes he can manipulate. A “master of selectivity,” he revels in the fact that he “[is] able to discard frivolous stimuli at will.” (82) He adopts a strategy of containment: “That which [is] not in [his] line of vision at any one point d[oes] not interest [him] for the simple reason that [he is] not looking at it.” (130) His refusal to acknowledge what exceeds his necessarily limited perception partakes of an illusion that the world can be held whole by the viewer – if he chooses to

3 The object contains more than is ever given at one time and from one point of view. It presents only one facet to the viewer, the others being “appresented” on the horizon of the visual field. All these facets constitute what Husserl calls “the internal horizon” or “horizon of the object.” (Collot 16)

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– because of its transparency and univocality. In a sense, Frazer misinterprets the coincidence between the “eye” and the “I” so dear to his mentor Robert Henri. Vision ceases to be a response to the world, and becomes detached from it, a projection of the mind, which encourages narcissistic withdrawal. The narrator states dispassionately: “In the end, we painted ourselves over and over.” (178)

On the picture plane, this intellectualisation of vision is related to a rationalisation of sight. Whether it be in his figurative pieces or in his abstract canvas, the painter’s (intellectual) space is mathematical, as pictorial composition determined by perspective orders his various and random visual sensations. Significantly, when explaining his art, Austin uses the architectural metaphor of the fortified village, an image that emphasizes once again he idea of containment since the painter insists on “the village, the walls and gates – the structure, the method.” (180) He advocates the primacy of disegno – drawing and design, that is, the artist’s conceptualization – over colour: “One may venture out into the valley, out into colour and texture, but the truth is, the fortified village is where one really lives.” (180) What the painter fears, what the “invading armies” stand for, the text does not say. But an earlier episode sheds light on the opposition between colour and design. The narrator explains how he would experiment with “visual intimacy [by] moving the object closer and closer until proximity obliterated meaning as [he] always suspected it would.” (54) We find in this passage the same intriguing use of the notion of “intimacy” relating to visual experiments. The visual effect created by extreme close-up belies identification, the object losing shape to become a blur of colour. Colour perception alone thus precludes objectification, which is the first step in an intellectualisation process. Whenever the narrator recalls his portraits of Sara, the description focuses on postures, lines and shapes rather than on colour. The painter’s eye dissects the structure of his subject, and reduces his lover to “a series of forms on a flat surface, her body a composition adapting to a rectangle.” (96) It is quite literally her anatomy, the structural makeup of her body that fascinates him the first time he meets her: “a strong slim back, her shoulder blade shifting as she moved the broom,” (14) a gesture the young Austin immediately tries to capture in a sketch. Dehumanized as she is, Sara seems to disappear behind an excess of visibility. The episode relating Austin and his friend and mentor Rockwell Kent’s4 falling out (253-262) underscores that the young artist’s paintings remain lifeless because his creative process denies his lover’s flesh; despite his technical proficiency, only “coldness” (261) and “emptiness” (307) emanate from Sara’s portraits.

4 American painters Robert Henri (1865-1929), Abbott Thayer (1849-1921) and Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) are historical but fictionalised characters, as Jane Urquhart points out in her Acknowledgements. Robert Henri is certainly the most well-known, since he was the leading figure of the realist artistic movement called the Ashcan School and a prominent member of the group known as The Eight (Castria Marchetti 144-148).


Obsessed with distance, driven by the thrill of just looking at “flagrant acts of exposure,” (69) the young Austin is both a tourist and a voyeur, two traits that are, the narrator confesses, “a vital part of [his] personality.” (69-70)5 He is no different from the American “tourists who wan[t] the view from Lake Superior’s north shore” (13) or who stare from their cars at the huge peninsula of rock called Sleeping Giant (2). Significantly, after the falling out with Rockwell Kent over his paintings of Sara, he is overwhelmed by the impression that the landscape of Silver Islet “look[s] used and cheap.” (264) Consuming sightseeing as a form of recreation, tourists collect views – snapshots, postcards – which are infinitely reproducible, since they are taken from prescribed viewpoints. As a matter of fact, the painter himself has capitalized on this fascination for “the glamour of the north,” (45) and transformed its visual enjoyment into a commodity: “Wealthy New Yorkers, it turned out, loved wilderness landscapes. They wanted rocks and water, twisted trees and muskeg on their smooth plastered walls.” (96) For the modern reader, the passage tends to read as a pictorial template. Minimal as it is, the description features all the staples of the Group of Seven, and Lawren Harris’s paintings of stark lakesides immediately come to mind.6 Less obvious is the contrast between the allusion to the rugged beauty of the landscape and the reference to the materiality of the walls, which highlights that, just like the tourists in their cars, Austin’s patrons want to enjoy a carefully managed view, one that is already framed and therefore safely contained.

The pictorial template also underscores that the images of the wilderness and the north – the two cannot be dissociated – are indeed tropes. They at once derive from, and mediate the perception of landscape, the viewer looking for familiar configurations that will allow him/her to construct landscape out of indiscriminate space. By extension, those terms are descriptive (to a certain point) but, more importantly, they embody political, economic, imaginative assumptions and expectations that are evidenced in the descriptions of the Sleeping Giant. Terms like “obdurate, unyielding,” “unconscious,” (2) “rigid and unchanging” (333) emphasize the permanence of the overwhelming natural phenomenon, and reinforce the European convention that identifies nature as “a separate space” (New 28) to be kept under human control. Like the Canadian Shield in earlier texts, the Sleeping Giant comes to symbolize “Canada’s ‘limitless’ size and ‘untapped’ resources, its indeterminate dimensions and echoing solitude.” (New 170)

During the only summer he spends in Silver Islet, Austin’s father asks the young art student to draw a view of the silver mine in which he has invested. The scene alludes to, and plays on the double meaning of the eighteenth-century landscape

5 Austin begins the story of his life by pointing out that Rochester, his birth-town, is famous as the home of the Kodak Brownie camera (17). Because the camera allows the viewer to distance him/herself from the scene by looking through a lens, it is the object par excellence of both the tourist and the voyeur.6 See, in particular, Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (1924).

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word “prospect” which refers to both an extensive view and “a place showing signs of containing a mineral deposit.” (Webster’s Dictionary) What is more, in the Ojibway legend, the creation of the Sleeping Giant is the result of the colonial plundering of natural resources (172). Ironically, it is only when he acknowledges his own disinterest in the supernatural history of the site that the narrator can confess: “My father and I both exploited the landscape – differently, it’s true – but we had exploited it nevertheless.” (327) The parallel between the artist and the prospector entices the reader to reconsider Robert Henri’s unexpected analogy between art and mining. He repeatedly uses the conventional image of depth in his disquisitions on the artist’s relation to the world. Austin’s mentor indeed promotes a de-cryptive art that strives to reveal what remains hidden, the artist painting because he sees what others cannot see. He enjoins his students to look beyond the surface of ordinary life into “the deeper current” of existence (83). Austin, however, is obsessed with the surface of things, the how of appearing. In the narrator’s interpretation of the image, there is a shift in the relational identity that links the two units: the point of comparison becomes the ruthless exploitation “at the expense of nature and humanity,” “the greed.” (84) The violence conveyed by the words used to describe Austin’s father’s activities – his investments “t[earing] open the wilderness, penetrat[ing] the earth” (84) – can be explained by the fact that WWI serves as the historical backdrop of the novel.7 But the violence of the war also finds a disquieting echo in the images the narrator chooses when he explains his own creative process: “Jealously hoarding my own experiences, the intimacy I courted became an invasion, almost a form of rape.” (180, see also 107, 33) He is a “visual bandit” (156) who mines Sara’s memories of her father and her stories about their landscape, just as he mined Augusta’s childhood anecdotes. His exploring the narratives of both women is akin to an act of despoilment insofar as, through the act of creation and re-presentation, they are “unhinged from their original site of meaning,” (Gordon 64) the painter re-constructing them to serve his own conceptualization and intention. With Augusta, however, he can no longer pretend that “the act of making art filled the space around [him] so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the impressions [he] controlled,” (170) hence his disappointment in Night in the China Hall, a painting related to what the young woman told him. As the narrator explains, “Augusta’s character – what [he] was to know of it – would not permit obviation.” (151) Using only what he thinks will improve his paintings, he resents his model’s actuality, because he considers that it interferes with his creative process. Nowhere is this more striking than in his reaction to Sara’s surprise visit to New York: “She belonged in a light-filled room in the north, a room with a view of landscapes I

7 See Marta Dvorak’s recently published discussion of how Austin’s canvasses are not only deliberate de-constructions characteristic of the epistemological crisis coterminous with modernism, but also on how they become “political metonyms of the collateral damage of war – the destruction of western culture and the alleged impossibility (after the Great War) of meaningful representation ever arising again” (93).


could frame and sell, her body frozen into poses I could also frame and sell.” (98) Her visit is “unacceptable,” intolerable because by stepping out of the frame the painter has imposed on her, she ceases to be an object offered to the gaze that he can endlessly manipulate on the picture plane.

The nude in a landscape is a construct marked by gendered and power associations reminiscent of the patriarchal discourse that feminizes the land and constructs it as the territorial prerogative of the hero / explorer / adventurer (New 110). The “fortuitous combination of landscape, class and gender” (143) that first attracted the painter’s interest draws upon an established system of authority that confirms his position of power. It would not be far-fetched to say that this is the very reason for his early success. His paintings represent what is seen by someone who sees Sara, “a miner’s daughter in a northern setting” (143) as the marginal, a position with which his wealthy patrons can identify because it reinforces their own ideological framework. Urquhart, however, reverses the topos of the feminized landscape. As his death approaches, the painter painfully recollects his emotional failures in a narrative which eventually leads him to identify, paradoxically, with the landscape his younger self exploited:8 “I will paint myself with the love I could not accept coming towards me, despite my cloak of fear, the implacable rock man, the miles and miles of ice.” (340, my emphasis)

The text constantly oscillates between pathos and bathos as the narrator repeatedly mocks the presumptuousness of his younger self in order to stave off despair. The young Austin appears as a “pontificator” (83) adopting poses he thinks are “suitable for a person of artistic temperament,” (45) mimicking his teachers, and lecturing others about “real art.” (51, 73) As an old man, he wonders if his “creative activity at the time was nothing more than a recital by rote of appropriate learned response” (252, my emphasis), a phrase which underlines the problematic prescriptive nature of cultural and aesthetic models. Taught to value sublime sceneries by his mother, the narrator explains, in a tongue-in-cheek comment, that it is “no surprise to [him] given the abysses in the surrounding geography, that men famous for mail chutes and elevators should have flourished in [his] native city.” (23) The same burlesque scaling-down with its insistence on the mundane operates in his mother’s description of the landscape that fascinates her, as when she exclaims, staring from a bridge: “Down you’d go, just like a love letter in a Cutler chute.” (23) The obvious gap between the codes of the sublime experience – the edge of the precipice9 – and the practical concerns of

8 When I interviewed her in May 2008 at the SAES conference held in Orléans at which she was the key speaker, Jane Urquhart explained: “In a book about someone who is unconscious of his own actions, someone who is ignoring the effects those actions have on others, perhaps someone who is dreaming, a landscape feature such as that becomes a gift, particularly because I chose to set the novel on that peninsula for a narrative, rather than a symbolic reason.”9 With Romanticism, and its search for “delightful horrors,” caves come to be associated with the sublime experience: “To be profound was to plumb the depths. So it would be

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everyday life – the mailing of a letter – is a locus of creation for Austin’s mother. The unlikely combination of images allows her to devise a language that expresses her own sense of place. Her son, however, “search[es], unsuccessfully, for signs of chasms and falling water” in summer pastures overlooking the lake (52). The irony underlying the passage draws the reader’s attention to the tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it. The aesthetic patterns Austin tries to identify and the aesthetic response to space he tries to emulate impinge on his perception and eventually screen actual space which “reced[es] infinitely through the successive framing.” (Omhovère and Lanone 9) The motif “Ontario Lake Scenery” may be taken as a paradigmatic account of this cultural mise en abyme. Upon seeing it for the first time, on the last piece of George’s broken china collection, Austin notes the obvious discordance between the representation and its setting, the elegant ladies, ruined castles, and East Indian tents, and the actual Great Lake Ontario. This leads him to ponder on his own art:

But how much different is this from the complicated preconceptions I have carried with me? Had the potter visited Ontario, would he have been able to see past the fog of his fantasy straight through the reality of swamp and muskeg, blackflies and bad weather?[…]Or would the elegant ladies, the romantic ruin, the non-existent mountains have persisted, blocking his view, keeping him distant from his own life? (336)

For the Staffordshire potter who had never been to Upper Canada except in his imagination, the “theatrical mirage” (336) with the juxtaposition of European looking ruins and aboriginal tepees is another cliché functioning as a substitute in the representation of what the eye cannot see (Pitavy 165). In the novel, china painting is presented as an alternative to the canon of high art, embodied by Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent and Austin himself. With its disregard for the laws of composition, it departs from pictorial illusionism, and the narrator repeatedly underlines how laughable he found its “improbable bridges” (77) and its “improbable, cerulean landscape.” (123) Urquhart, however, seems fascinated by the way china painting suggests rather than represents landscapes, notably through highly stylized and sometimes codified elements and the non-figurative use of the colour white.

Although Austin, somewhat belatedly, admits his part in George’s and Augusta’s suicide,10 the comforting paradigm of the Künstlerroman his narration

in shadow and darkness […], in caves and chasms, at the edge of the precipice […], in the fissures of the earth, that [Edmund Burke] insisted in his Inquiry, the sublime would be discovered.” (Schama 450)10 Austin decides on a whim to reunite George with his long-lost love. His playing at directing other people’s lives will lead to his friend’s suicide. Recalling the tragic denouement, the narrator draws a parallel between the scene his younger self involuntarily staged and the composition of a painting: “George believed that I had never understood, that I was


follows suggests that the tragedy, as well as the betrayal of Sara, was necessary to the accomplishment of what was latent in him: the emergence of the original painter. The two events are indeed presented as the catalyst that provokes Austin’s dramatic stylistic change. In an effort to detach himself from the “perfectly composed view[s]” (141) and from the deadly consequences of the will to control they express (215), the painter develops the concept of “formal ambiguity” created by the application of several layers of paint over an original canvas.

The American painter Abbott Thayer, who published a treaty on protective colouration in nature, first introduces Austin to the idea of concealment (243-250). With his obsession with the War Department, his acute paranoia, and his fascination with angels and winged beings, the character is rather ridiculous, but his idea of disguise leaves its imprint on Austin’s mind. If his series The Erasures represents “the entirety of [his] life,” the narrative he wanted to offer Sara (331) but could only share with his art, it could be argued that the superimposed layers of paint erasing the underlying image is another way for the painter to distance himself from his subject, while satisfying his obsession with control. After all, the novel alludes to the influence of Thayer’s treaty on the use of military camouflage during WWI. The text, however, warns the reader against misinterpretations, and the risk of dissociating the underpainting from the overpainting, the act of erasure from the carefully rendered image. Austin adds in a tongue-in-cheek comment, “there is nothing […] like an obscured subject to give the critics something to talk about.” (183) He insists on his art as a form of “exorcising” (216) of the past, and presents his paintings as receptacles of “grief ” and remorse, “rectangle[s] of sorrow.” (184) The spectres that continue to haunt the painter, what he calls his “eidetic malediction,” (55) would thus be represented on the canvas by “pentimenti: those ghosts of formerly rendered shapes that the artist had intended to paint out forever.” (181) The recurring references to painting as a cathartic act make the interpretation of the paintings seemingly obvious, all the more as the word pentimenti derives from the Italian pentirsi, meaning “to repent.” Furthermore, the technique itself seems very much linked to the denouement of the tragedy Austin provoked. The whiteness of the overpainting is indeed quite reminiscent of the view of the snow-covered ice on Lake Superior that the painter discovers from his window in the hotel of Port Arthur. Having called Sara in the hope of finding a form of atonement in her presence, he waits for her to come into view in the winter landscape, “a black dot on that vast white sheet” (330) sometimes vanishing into white. But unable to come to terms with his own desire for “exposure” (331), he leaves without even talking to her. This scene evokes the image of a receding figure on a horizon which is also characteristic of The Erasures, and can also be related to the narrator’s intense sense of guilt.

responsible, that the scene that greeted me in this boyhood room had been created by me as surely as if it were a painting I had completed with my own hand.” (312)


Yet The Erasures series insistently seems to mean more. What is at stake in this series is a defamiliarisation of the object. Austin’s pictorial technique strays from the optical illusion of depth created by pictorial composition, and works on the materiality of the hard surface, the superimposed layers of paint. The pentimenti have thus a twofold effect: by altering perception, that is, the way the object is visualised in painting, the painter leads the viewer to the edge of visibility, and entices his/her gaze to become interrogation. In a sense, Austin explores with this technique the intuition that marked the beginning of his artistic crisis:

The problem as I began to see it towards the end of my attachment to realism was that I had lost sight of the necessary interval on the picture plane, the visual pause that had happened quite naturally when I still worked with landscape, still worked with the spatial interrelation of rendered form. There was always a break in details of rocks, say, or foliage, an unencumbered space that pushed forward from distance, something large and immeasurable, like sky or water. (221)

The impression of openness the narrator alludes to is produced by pictorial composition, namely the representation of a horizon. But the horizon is both a principle of opening and a sign of the limits of seeing. Indeed, it opens a perspective toward the infinite of the world itself whose presence always exceeds perception as its vanishing point ceaselessly recedes beyond the gaze (Collot 24). When trying to explain his stylistic change, Austin comes to the conclusion that The Erasures are “‘about’ both revelation and obscuration,” (181) a sentence which calls to mind the phenomenological analysis of the indivisible link between donation and withdrawal which shapes all manifestations of the world. As Michel Collot explains, the object can only reveal itself by hiding one of its facets, and thus retains an invisible, enigmatic dimension. Just as it offers itself to the beholder, there is something in it that eludes the senses and signification (Collot 16-18). Perspective exemplifies this relationship between obscuration and withdrawal because it is defined by a gaze which is incarnate and therefore limited in space and time (Collot 23).

The same presence / absence paradox structures the perception of time and The Erasures, which, because of their emphasis on resurgence, explore the horizon of the past.11 At first, Austin seems to revel in his “overdeveloped powers of recollection,” (107) a leitmotiv in the novel. Soon enough his egotism gives way to an acute sense of dereliction. The narrator can only exclaim: “how crowded and how unfocused this looking back is.” (217) The explicit reference to photography is significant since photography suspends time, and creates “fixed images.” (17) Because of its illusory transparency, it seems to preserve images of the past as pure antecedents. On the contrary, the phenomenon of retention that underlies remembrance entails their constant modification, which is both the source and

11 The concluding section of the article is based on Michel Collot’s seminal essay La poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon, and more precisely the chapter entitled “Extases du temps, temps de l’extase.”


the consequence of the indeterminability that haunts the painter: “Slicing into the lives of others, I have walked away with only disparate pieces; walked away with both permanent and fugitive colours, distinguishable and vague shapes.” (107) Retrospection cannot give a fixed and comprehensive view of the past, all the more as the narrator cannot distinguish between his own images and those he took from others. He ceaselessly paints this “uncertainty” that is his “true inheritance.” (217) On the picture plane, the multiplicity of unexplored associations onto which remembrance opens is represented by the “premonition of pentimenti” (181) which are all “potentially capable of affecting the surface above,” and, therefore, of altering the painting when they rise to the surface through the layers of white pigments.

Whether it be the inexhaustible depth of the past onto which retrospection opens, or the inexhaustible depth of landscape of which the line of horizon is a manifestation, the emphasis is laid on what is hidden, and therefore belies determination and objectification. The Erasures mark a dramatic rupture with Austin’s earlier visual experiments insofar as it testifies to an interest in the enigma of the visible which becomes for the painter a creative space. The pentimenti could thus be construed as an attempt to represent the invisible inscribed in the very texture of the visible.

As a Künstlerroman, The Underpainter dramatizes the education of a landscape painter’s gaze. Interestingly, Alain Roger relates the invention of the window to the emergence of the Western notion of landscape. Artialisation in visu requires the distance created by the window for culture to endow space with an aesthetic appeal, a process which Roger sums up in his portmanteau word “recul-ture” yoking together the French words recul (or distance) and culture (Roger 17). In Urquhart’s novel, however, Austin, who effectively distances himself from his subject, regards it as the mere means of serving economic and aesthetic needs. The framing of landscape, the artialisation process this implies are indeed fraught with power relations which the novel ceaselessly probes. It is only when his “eidetic cinema” (80) fails him that Austin can appease his ghosts. This moment of “clouded vision” (Urquhart 1990, 173) finally allows him to go beyond the window glass and to answer the call that emanates from the horizon:

Tonight I will begin The Underpainter, the last canvas of the series, a portrait of myself. […] It will be full of beautiful dark shorelines, this painting, full of all the possibilities we believe exist in alternative landscapes, alternative homelands. Hills

and trees, gold-leaf birches, skies and lakes and distances. (339-340)

Anne-Sophie LETESSIERUniversité Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3


works Cited

Castria Marchetti, Francesca, and Ida Giordano. La Peinture américaine. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.

Collot, Michel. La poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon. 1989. Paris: PUF, 2005.

Dvorak, Marta. “When the Underpainting Shows Through : Jane Urquhart’s Resurgent Transmutations.” Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre. Ed. Héliane Daziron-Ventura and Marta Dvorak. Bruxelles, New York : Peter Lang, 2010. 91-107.

Gordon, Neta. “The Artist and the Witness: Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 28.2 (2003): 59-73

Hamon, Philipe. Du descriptif. Paris: Hachette, 1997.

Harris, Lawren. Maligne Lake, Jasper Park. 1924. Oil on canvas. 122.8 x 152.8 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstader. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 143-62.

Lanone, Catherine, and Claire Omhovère. “Mourning / Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic Aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31.1 (2008): 8-21

Letessier, Anne-Sophie. Personal Interview with Jane Urquhart. Orléans, 16 May 2008.

Matos Dias, Isabel. Merleau-Ponty: Une poïétique du sensible. Trans. Renaud Barbaras. Toulouse: PUM, 2001.

New, W. H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

Omhovère, Claire. Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Writing. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007.

__. “The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool.” Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Ed. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvorak. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming.

Pitavy, Danièle. “Territoires en miroir: écriture et peinture chez Jane Urquhart.” Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 47 (1999): 155-166.

Roger, Alain. Court traité du paysage. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins, 1995.

Urquhart, Jane. The Whirlpool. 1986. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990.

__. Changing Heaven. 1990. Boston: David R. Godine,1993.

__. The Underpainter. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997.

everyday horizons in amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address

Amit Chaudhuri’s elliptical and fragmentary prose, far from revealing the familiar as a graspable and reassuring reality, manifests its elusive aspects. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, seems to illustrate how chronicling the everyday through a young boy’s screened perspective can be a way of disclosing the strangeness of ordinary life. The sublime referred to in the title could be related to the unexpectedness concealed within the intimate and to its indefinable nature, but also to the constantly renewed wonder it arouses. This article traces the various strategies used by the novelist in order to highlight and explore these perceptual, intersubjective and linguistic horizons in a novel whose very structure and plot remain evasive.

Amit Chaudhuri, a contemporary Indian writer, musician and scholar, is the acclaimed author of five novels, a collection of short stories, and poetry. He also edited an anthology of modern Indian literature,

and published in 2008 a series of essays entitled Clearing a Space: Reflections On India, Literature and Culture in which he tries to define the literary lineage he belongs to. He is often considered to have departed from the magic realism and national allegory that have become the main features associated with the post-Rushdie novel – deviating from “the avenue in Indian writing in English that Midnight’s Children opened up, along with an obsession with the monumental.” (Chaudhuri 2008, 234) Chaudhuri seems to have followed another kind of path, focusing on “the raw material” of life, refuting the “spectacular” in favour of “the mundane, the everyday and the transfiguration of the mundane,” (Chaudhuri 2008, 93) and he associates this tradition with Arun Kolatkar, a Bombay poet who was the first Indian poet writing in English to “devote himself utterly to the transformation and the defamiliarization of the commonplace.” (Chaudhuri 2008, 94) It is significant that Chaudhuri should draw a parallel with a poet, for the notion of horizon as a structural concept often informing contemporary poetry may help us better understand his own approach to estrangement in his first novel A Strange and Sublime Address.

In his study entitled La poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon, Michel Collot refers to phenomenology philosophers (primarily Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) and defines the horizon as that which structures the experience of perception (perception of things, time, and others). He shows that perceiving the world always comes down to experiencing separation and loss. Because of the limitations of our body, our perceptions are de facto partial; we cannot see all the facets of an object; this limitation is what Husserl calls the “internal horizon” of the thing. Moreover, objects are always perceived in a context, which means they can be


seen only in relation to other objects; this wider perspective on the object is its “external horizon.” Our perception of time is similarly structured by horizons: as a transitional moment between past and future, the present is haunted by other temporalities. The past cannot be defined as a stable stock of memories, but rather as a landscape that keeps evolving as time passes. The past is thus constantly reconfigured: it is never viewed from exactly the same perspective, and it contains blank areas that may never be recaptured. The future, too, is a vast field open to endless possibilities. What of our perception of others? They, too, have their own, partial perception of the world, a perception to which the subject has no access, but which enables him or her to be aware of countless modes of virtuality, thereby giving depth to the perceiving subject’s world. So, for phenomenology, horizons delineate zones of invisibility that prevent us from grasping the whole of the world, from achieving some sort of fullness or communion with it. Yet horizons are not merely obstacles: they open onto those countless possibilities. Bearing in mind this definition of the horizon, I would like to show how, for Chaudhuri, perception is an act of exploration, and writing becomes a way of probing into all these zones of invisibility – not so much to make them visible as to enhance their elusive qualities.

A Strange and Sublime Address consists of a short novel followed by nine short stories. The eponymous text is about a boy’s summer holiday in Calcutta. The boy lives in Bombay, where his father works, but he regularly goes back to his uncle’s house, rediscovering the Bengali family’s abode and the city at large. The most striking feature is the lack of a conventional plot. The novel is an accumulation of moments or “vignettes” that focus upon the tiny events of everyday routine: morning baths, meal preparations, afternoon naps, children’s games, the uncle’s noisy departures for his office in a car that just will not start, the occasional visits to (or of ) relatives, walks in the neighbourhood, and so on. The book records the “untidy but regular activity of the house and pavement” (20) in its own untidy but regular way. One characteristic all these fragments have in common is the writer’s unflinching attention to the real. In an interview, Chaudhuri describes the real as a field of perception, and writing, he argues, can “renovate our perception of the physical world” (Ghosh 162). He thus inscribes himself in a long, vast literary tradition. I mentioned Kolatkar in my introduction, Joyce and his transfiguration of the ordinary may come to mind, just as we may associate this stance with still other writers and other times. Wonderment is, for instance, an essential characteristic of American literature, from the era of the Transcendentalists to the modernism of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (Tanner). Emerson and Thoreau1 both advocated the need to look at the world with the innocent perspective of a child. Because he has no preconceptions, the child is open to reality’s unexpected and surprising elements. Thoreau praised the “sauntering

1 Walden is a book that appears in one of the short stories that follow A Strange and Sublime Address.

Everyday Horizons in Amit Chaudhuri 107

eye,” able to see through the dust that “for the common eye has settled upon the universe,” (Tanner 52) and sauntering is definitely one of Chaudhuri’s aesthetic principles. His ten-year-old protagonist, Sandeep, is the incarnation of the writer as a young boy – Chaudhuri has acknowledged the autobiographical dimension of his maiden novel. The retrospective narration is structured around two figures, the child and the main narrator (a mature, half-ironic voice that occasionally steps forward commenting retrospectively on the development of Calcutta or giving us some cultural explanations). But more often, it is difficult to tell one perspective from the other. The adult narrator adopts the child’s vision, not so much because he is interested in some kind of autobiographical investigation but because he wants to explore the child’s ability to sense the world in a fresh way. Moreover, Chaudhuri’s protagonist is an exiled character who needs to re-adjust his senses to the uncle’s house every time he goes back. Because he is a child and a stranger, he doubly experiences the tension between the familiar and the strange, the known and the not known. This tension is heightened in the case of Sandeep, but what Chaudhuri shows is how it is inseparable from any one’s perception: everyone is an outsider to reality. However, even if Chaudhuri seems to believe in the power of naïve vision to achieve a sense of wonder, there are few epiphanies in the sense of enlightening revelations. Instead, the child’s perception of the familiar as “strange and sublime” only serves to increase and emphasize the ungraspable nature of reality, to reveal what in the familiar remains unknowable, in other words to rediscover the horizons that support our world and our relationship to it.

The novel opens, literally, on a threshold:

He saw the lane. Small houses, unlovely and unremarkable, stood face to face with each other. Chhotomama’s house had a pomelo tree in its tiny courtyard and madhavi creepers by its windows. A boy stood clinging to the rusting iron gate, while another boy pushed it backward and forward. As he did so, the first boy travelled in a small arc through space. When the taxi stopped in front of the house, they stared at it with great dignity for a few moments, then ran off in terror, leaving the gate swinging mildly and illegally. A window opened above (it was so silent for a second that Sandeep could hear someone unlocking it) and Babla’s face appeared behind the mullions. (1)

We discover the Calcutta house through the protagonist’s eyes; he is not named yet – which helps the reader identify with him – and we witness the meeting of two different worlds with limits and lines that have to be crossed: the gate, the symbolic arc drawn in the air by the swinging gate, the window and its mullions. This emphasis upon liminality implicitly points to the invisible. The second paragraph corroborates this idea of a transitional moment and space:

Chhotomama and Saraswati, the maidservant, came down and helped them with their bags. Sandeep ran up the stairs with his cousins, not looking back. There was a thrilled impatience about his movements, as if he either wanted to finish or


begin something quickly. His aunt, by contrast, stood at the head of the stairs, in a place that was half-sunlit and half shadowy, with immaculate serenity, seemingly not having moved from where she had said goodbye to him about a year ago. (1)

Here, other symbolic frontiers are drawn: between inside and outside, end and beginning, light and shadow, now and a year ago. And when the characters finally move into the house, they are associated with yet another form of invisibility: “They went up in a procession, […] as if they were going up to a shrine on pilgrimage” (2). The family is symbolically moving towards the sacred, that is to say the utter Absent. Moreover, among the presents brought by Sandeep and his mother from Bombay, we find saris, folds of cloth that “broke out into a galaxy of hand-woven stars, a cosmos of streaking comets and symbolic blue horizons.” (2) As the metatextual threshold of the novel, the incipit can be read as an invitation to share “symbolic horizons,” to unfold (along with Sandeep) a world made of an infinity of strata.

The title of the novel is made explicit in chapter 10:

In some of Abhi’s books, Sandeep found the following written on the first page:Abhijit Das,17 Vivekananda Road,Calcutta (South),West Bengal,India,Asia,Earth,The Solar System,The Universe.It was a strange and sublime address. (85)

The address written in the form of a short poem suggests a widening perspective, each new step opening onto an even larger sphere and provoking a vertiginous effect. It also evokes a kind of Russian doll structure in reverse. This is precisely the metaphor that keeps recurring in Collot’s approach of the horizon as structure, and it is the metaphor that maybe best defines the spatial configuration developed in the book. Chaudhuri explained that even if the novel was centred on Sandeep, he was not particularly interested in the individual but more in a community of beings and in their relationship to the outside (Ghosh 164) – the outside that the narrator defines as “a bottomless being,” “another blind existence,”2 that is to say a horizon, constantly interacting with the enclosed space

2 “Outside, rickshawallas sang tunelessly and clapped their hands in the cold, with a small wood fire before them. Their tuneless song and their clapping hands were also a part of this other existence, this bottomless being. In the city, the winter smoke hung its giant cobwebs between the houses, or stood between each house and the darkness like a lovely, protective mosquito-net. It kept the houses warm and healed the fractures in their walls and kept out the bad dreams of the night and the memories of the day. It too was a


of the house. The Calcutta house is repeatedly contrasted with the twenty-third floor Bombay apartment Sandeep lives in the rest of the year and in which “he was like Adam in charge of paradise, given dominion over the birds and fishes; he was too much in the foreground; he wanted a housefly’s anonymity.” (28) The position of visual mastery is what the child dislikes so much about the place. A year and a half later, when he is living in a bigger apartment, even higher up, he can see almost all of Bombay but “no sounds, no smells, only a pure, perpetually moving picture.” (97) Seen from far above, horizons recede so much that they almost disappear. The world they delineate is reduced to a two-dimensional representation, a surface whose flatness is unsettling. When Sandeep’s great-aunt remembers her childhood in Sylhet, she evokes a village similarly disconnected from the outer world:

When we were young, the world was made of small islands of consciousness. Miles separated one village, sometimes one house, from another. Letter-writing was the only means of communication – there were no telephones. A mountain or a river formed the border to our world. Our world was small, and things loomed large and astonishing for us: you wouldn’t understand. (64)

In this reversed configuration, it is the absence of a background that becomes threatening. The great aunt describes life on an island without the presence of others, which may recall Robinson Crusoe’s situation before the arrival of Friday. In a well-known analysis of Michel Tournier’s version Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Gilles Deleuze shows how the absence of others turns Crusoe’s world into a “harsh and black world” in which “the category of the possible has collapsed.” Because Crusoe has only his own perspective on the world, things lose their relief, objects “rise threateningly,” (Deleuze 345) and the world is deprived of its reassuring texture. The anonymity Sandeep longs for corresponds to this need for the horizons that other individuals provide. The parallel with Crusoe is made explicit in chapter 9:

For a few days, the rains fell heavily – continuous white screens blotted out landscapes and landmarks: the main road with its tramlines, its lampposts, its old medicine shop, and then the park; these melted before Sandeep’s eyes, while he watched, a little amazed that he too did not melt away. […] Saraswati returned from market with a shopping bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island. (75)

To avoid the shrinking of the world to mere screens, a constant porosity between the house and its surroundings has to be maintained. Chaudhuri is a great lover of verandahs and balconies, these in-between spaces where his characters often place themselves to see life unfolding before them and to “return

part of that other blind existence that happened around the small, painful lives of human beings.” (114, my italics)


the stare of the world,” (15) since balconies also frame the family themselves as they are watched by neighbours. In Chaudhuri’s world, this fertile contact with the outside is not simply visual: as an accomplished musician himself, the writer pays great attention to the soundtrack of his novel. Music, songs, domestic activities, city bustle and natural sounds form a sensory halo which is yet another manifestation of the invisible and corroborates its protective dimension: for example, hearing the shrill cries of young birds behind the frosted glass of the toilet, one feels “surrounded and safe.” (5) Similarly, the radio plays an important part in this structure of endless contiguities. It is what connects the household to other spheres: it links the family members to the “great fantasy world of politics and government,” “soothing their minds” after they have converged towards the stifling atmosphere of the hospital waiting room after the uncle’s heart attack (112); or it introduces the unexpected Australian accent of a presenter commenting on an India vs. Australia cricket match taking place on “another unwieldy mass of land floating on an ocean.” (73) The invisible is also made perceptible through smells: Sandeep is aware of the existence of the basti or slum “across the railway lines” because “whiffs of excrement rose on windy days.” (9) The beginning of the monsoon is announced through a rainy wind blowing in from far-off villages, groves and fields: “They sensed a presence, powerful and dangerous, though they could see nothing and no one. The nervous, toy-like city was set against the dignified advance of the clouds, as if two worlds were colliding.” (72, my italics) Another line, another horizon…

The Russian doll design is found in the architectural layout of the house itself: the bedrooms face either the street or the backyard. Through windows, they open onto other houses and other bedrooms, but the interior configuration of these rooms displays a similar mise en abyme:

At one end there was a mirror and a dressing-table; the mirror imaged the room and gave it extra space. Next to it, there was a wooden clothes-horse with several horizontal bars running parallel to, and on top of, each other. One would have expected to find it in a gymnasium, but here it was – it was called an alna, and all kinds of clothes and garments hung from its ribs. A lizard lived behind it. (34)

As for the other room, it contains “another room, hidden away in the corner; three steps rose to it; it was a world within a world; a world, in fact, more richly inhabited than the sparse outer husk in which it was enclosed. […] It was the prayer-room.” (35) The children’s realm is a succession of worlds that fit into each other, placed contiguously through real or symbolic lines (Venitian shutters, the bars of the alna). No wonder this playground enables them to embark on “imaginary expeditions and adventures” and “voyage daily into nowhere.” (34)

The layers of invisibility that structure the children’s world and give it its depth are also what accounts for the obdurate resistance the children have to face. Because of its ever changing configurations, Sandeep’s world conceals as much as it reveals, and its multiple borders are not easy to cross. The others’ bodies


are often described as unknown territories, wrapped in folds of cloth that make them impossible to literally dis-cover/uncover.3 The children can only wrestle in order to explore one another’s intimacy, and the metaphor of the fight implies a form of violence and a potential defeat: what Sandeep learns is that he cannot be at one with others. Others retain their opacity, their body and consciousness belonging to an inviolable sphere. The anecdote of the insect that flies into Babla’s ear is quite telling in that respect: “Babla could not bear the thought of a living creature wandering inside another living creature, himself. He lived alone inside his body; he did not want to share it with an insect.” (82) Even if Sandeep wants to believe in a form of communion with his cousins, he achieves only “an illusion of togetherness.” (86) As soon as they go back to school and he has to spend his days alone in the house, he is confronted with the fact that he is excluded from their lives, and realizes this impossible fusion with them was precisely what fed the vividness of his own existence:

Their faces glowed with sweat and the radiance of another excitement. It gave Sandeep a sense of the other world to which they belonged and in which he played no part; it made his afternoon games with them seem small and temporary. He felt the shadowy, secret life of the holidays, the vivid underground existence during those long afternoons in the house while their parents slept calmly, slip out of his grasp. (86)

Other terrae incognitae are introduced through various metaphors. Having siblings is seen as some intangible state, out of reach too:

Sandeep, an only child, felt the shared background of brother and brother, and brother and sister, throw upon him a shade as that of the cool, expansive branches of a rooted banyan tree. He wandered in the shade, forgetting it was temporary. (3)

The remoteness of the adults’ conversations is related to water imagery, to that which cannot be grasped: “Their conversation was a transparent stream that occasionally trickled into desert patches of silence.” (7) Sleep is also associated with liquid elements: the uncle’s “face and arms drow[n] in the black and white ocean of the newspaper, surfacing momentarily” (7); the aunt is lying on her stomach in a crab-like posture, “her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake”; the “children sle[ep] like primeval creatures huddled on the island of the bed, close to the horizon, outwaiting the dawn.” (74) In all these examples, the surface world of slumber verges on an obscure and immense depth that absorbs all sleeping consciousnesses – the land of dreams and of the unconscious. This kind of invisibility echoes the mysterious and “inconceivable” land of death that is evoked when the uncle suffers a heart-attack: “a nothingness through an invisible point.” (115)

3 “[The aunt’s] legs, like two romantic, indefinite paths on a mountainside, were lost in her sari’s vast landscape.” (21)


What increases distance with others is the fact that the children do not share the same language. When Abhi is transferred from a Bengali-medium school to an English-medium one, he has trouble with this new language, perceived as “difficult and unapproachable.” (100) Even the tutor’s “natural eloquence” sounds threatened when he switches from Bengali to the “rocky terrain” of English and has to struggle against the “savage bombardment of those foreign words.” (102) As for Sandeep, he is presented as “one of the innumerable language-orphans of modern India,” (81) but an orphan for whom language contains other fruitful horizons. When his uncle sings old Bengali compositions, he has to ask him for the meaning of some words:

Chothomama, what does godhuli mean?Lost in the general well-being of cleansing himself, his uncle replied patiently: ‘The word go means cow, and the word dhuli means dust. In the villages, evening’s the time the cowherds bring the cattle home. The herd returns, raising clouds of dust from the road. Godhuli is that hour of cow-dust. So it means dusk or evening. (53)

Through his explanations, the uncle conjures up a mental picture that Sandeep views like “a film shown from a projector.” (53) Thanks to this brief moment of familiarity with the language of the other, the young boy is given access to the other’s perspective on reality and discovers a new world: “It was strange how one word could contain a world within it.” (54)

Sandeep feels greatly attracted to these mysterious Bengali letters which he starts interpreting as the drawings of literal characters, seeing in one of them “a fat man standing straight with his belly sticking out” and in another, the same man “scratching his back.” (81) The boy faces these riddles playfully, feeling that the indecipherable language speaks to him. Sandeep’s inventive interaction with Bengali exemplifies how this perpetual confrontation with invisibility rarely leaves him at a loss. Paradoxically, it is when horizons disappear that Sandeep’s world shrinks to nothingness. Horizons work as spurs to his imagination, because that which cannot be fully grasped is invented. Horizons ensure what Collot calls “the fabulous dimension” of the world (Collot 1988). Note that Sandeep in Hindi means “bringer of light”: he is the one who throws a different light upon reality and makes us see it differently. His perception of reality corresponds to the invention of a grotesque, baroque universe in constant metamorphosis in which the usual categories are blurred: boys are compared to “rumpled pillows,” (3) testicles hang like “small, unplucked fruit,” (4) babies look like “little koi fish caught from the Hooghly river,” (5) a pipe reminds him of “the neck of a tired giraffe,” (5) saris are wrought into “long, exhausted pythons of cloth,” (6) a man suffering a heart attack is perceived like “an acrobat doing a bizarre act to impress the children,” (108) with electro-cardiogram tubes growing from his hands and feet “like thin tuberous plants.” (109) Chaya, the sweeper from the slum, holds a broom whose “long tail […] reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless,


exotic bird” (9); when she swishes a rag, sitting on her haunches, her right arm moves “like a fin” and she suddenly acquires “an amphibian quality, half human and half of another world.” (10) When Chandrina performs her dance on the balcony, her hands look like “now an absurd bird, and now like a doe’s head, and now like barely visible wings” (20) Saraswati, the maid, undergoes similar transformations during a power cut:

Wavering shadows from the candle flame falling and shifting on her face gave her ordinary features a preternatural fluidity. Her cheekbones and jaw seemed to flow and change with the changing light, as if she were shedding her old face for a new one. (56)

Here, the new kind of light and the analogy might refer to Chaudhuri’s recurrent technique consisting of multiplying similes and metaphors in order to produce a kind of stereoscopic effect. These stylistic figures bring together two images that, seized simultaneously, produce a three-dimensional perspective. The initial mystery of the object under scrutiny is not erased; it is replaced by other borders, with writing adding new horizons to pre-existing ones. Figures invest things and beings with another life or another identity, temporarily disclosing some of the world’s multiple and hidden facets (Collot 1989, 229-249). One episode perfectly encapsulates this experience of dissolution of limits leading to the other side of reality:

[The children] roamed in a silent, self-created web of sounds, smells and colours. Once, Sandeep had woken late in the night to find Chhotomama standing at the window near the bed smoking a cigarette. The moonlight dimmed outlines and made tangible things seem intangible, and Chhotomama and the furniture in the room appeared like figures on the wrong side of a tapestry; everything seemed to be dissolving in the smoke. (102)

Since writing consists in experiencing and re-enacting fertile confrontations with horizons, it becomes a never-ending process. One of Sandeep’s favourite activities is “sauntering,” going for a drive in the streets of Calcutta, taking the best seat “by the open window” and feeling as if he were floating (14). He revels in looking at the facades of innumerable houses and dreaming about what they hide: “Why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them?” (57) The passage refers to the infinity that lies beyond the horizon line, an infinity whose existence is known to us, whether our senses perceive it or not. It is the bottomless well where the boy keeps quenching his thirst for sensations and illusions, where the would-be writer finds sources of inspiration (the short stories that follow the novel can be read as some of these potential stories). The text goes on:

And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story – till the reader


would shout “Come to the point!” and there would be no point, except the girls memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist. (58)

These lines obviously reflect the very structure of Chaudhuri’s own work, which either multiplies digressions, or concentrates upon the same motifs from diverse and shifting angles. One striking feature of the novel is the confusion between two temporalities. Memories of one specific summer soon become blurred with memories of various vacations, the past turning into a vastness whose exploration is based on repeated and endless reconfiguration. Moreover, the chapters of the book follow the natural cycles of daily routine. These cyclical activities punctuate the novel’s circular progression, so that the main impression is that Chaudhuri tries to recapture a tempo. Many motifs function as metatextual references to this pulsation: alternation between light and shade, heat and cool, Saraswati beating clothes on the terrace, the children playing hide-and-seek, the grown-ups “talking, falling silent, talking, falling silent, like the advance and retreat of a tide” (106). Even the breaks that first seem to interrupt this regular, repetitive flux only serve to explore other variations upon already known motifs. The end of chapter 10, which marks the end of Sandeep’s summer vacation, is a perfect reversal of the incipit: at 4 o’clock each day, with his face pressed against the mullions, Sandeep watches his cousins come back from school and welcomes them back to the “shadowy world of the holidays.” (85) After a temporal ellipsis, Sandeep comes back to Calcutta a year and a half later; the city is rediscovered, in winter this time, which allows for a few changes in atmosphere, but the daily rituals are the same. With the uncle’s unexpected heart attack, the children experience a new kind of grief. Yet Chhotomama’s accident is clearly described as an opportunity for rebirth: after his close encounter with death, Chhotomama renews his acquaintance with friends and relatives. He “rediscovers their quirks and oddities he had known for a lifetime,” (117) seeing things “he had never taken the trouble to notice before.” (120) He seems to acquire the same freshness of perception as Sandeep. He starts all over again, just as the book seems to have arrived at its starting point. And the novel closes upon another motif of elusiveness:

But [the kokil] must have sensed their presence, because it interrupted its strange meal and flew off – not flew off, really, but melted, disappeared, from the material world. As they watched, a delicate shyness seemed to envelop it, and draw a veil over their eyes. (128)

As the bird withdraws, dematerializes, the children’s vision is once again limited. If Chaudhuri’s writing is motivated by the world’s constant elusiveness, it never seems to compensate for it. Through its rhythmic play on repetitions and variations, this prose reiterates distance. In the Calcutta house, the sacred is always intimately meshed with the ordinary. Human beings and gods bear the same


names, pictures of gods are mixed with glossy posters of film-stars or cricketers, several human episodes are seen as re-enactment of scenes from the Ramayana, and very trivial acts such as the uncle’s shaving or the shaking of guavas turn into holy ceremonies. When the narrator remembers the prayer room, he evokes “the smell of sandalwood incense, the low hum of his aunt’s voice, the bell ringing at the end of the ceremony, the white batashas, clean as washed pebbles, [...] the cool taste of the offerings that were distributed after the prayer.” (36) This accumulation of sensory perceptions shows how sensuous the family’s relationship to the divine is, the invisible thus acquiring an almost tangible quality. Beyond its cultural signification, the relationship to the sacred becomes a symbolic reminder of the horizons which inform our relationship to the world.4

Finally, another kind of horizon seems pervasive in the novel. In an essay entitled “Stories of Domicile,” Chaudhuri confesses that his childhood memories of Calcutta are full of a deep “nostalgia” for the past (Clearing, 189). Calcutta’s dense sensory texture, for which Sandeep feels homesick, also comes to represent a time when there was no separation between the child and his origins, a time when he existed in complete continuity with his mother’s body and with his mother tongue from which he is now exiled. His exploration of perceptual horizons necessarily leads him to probe into his own personal horizons, which momentarily resurface through, for instance, episodes of involuntary memory:

A sharp aura of mustard-oil flowered, giving Sandeep’s nostrils a faraway sentient pleasure – it wasn’t a sweet smell, but there was a harsh unexpectedness about it he liked. It reminded him of sunlight. In Bengal, both tamarind and babies are soaked in mustard-oil, and then left upon a mat on the terrace to absorb the morning sun. (4)

Chhotomama is similarly reminded of his childhood every time he comes home and has “a small simple meal of yogurt and khoi and slices of banana, mixed together with sugar,” a mixture he had first had “from his mother’s fingers.” (103) After his heart-attack, when he seems to have become a child again, seeing things anew, he asks himself:

If a child could remember and record its first impressions after being born, the initial sense of colours and smells and faces as person after person leaned towards its cot and peered at it, scrutinised it, if it could retell its story of its first day in the world, would it be something like this? (121)

The two characters experience a longing for a time when, in the “safe obscurity of a womb” (114) or pressed against their mother’s body, they were not aware yet of the various horizons structuring their being-in-the-world. It was a time of “pure elemental feeling” (41) that has become itself a horizon. Apart from a fleeting moment when Sandeep catches his image in the mirror and sees himself

4 “The act of seeing or recognizing the real becomes a secular act full of spiritual urgency.” (Chaudhuri 2008, 93)


as a motionless self, with “jokes and rhymes in his mother-tongue upon his lips,” (87) in other words as a whole self that cannot be retrieved, origins are definitely another blind spot that haunts the narrator as it does the writer. It is part of the “shadowy” raw material that Chaudhuri’s first novel grapples with and celebrates.

Myriam BELLEHIGUE Université de Paris 4 – Sorbonne

works Cited

Chaudhuri, Amit. A Strange and Sublime Address. 1991. London: Minerva, 1992.

—. Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Witney: Peter Lang, 2008.

Collot, Michel. L’horizon fabuleux. Paris: Corti, 1988.

—. La poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon. Paris: PUF, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Michel Tournier and the World without Others.” The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. London: Continuum, 2004. 341-359.

Ghosh, Sumana R. “Aalap: in Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri.” The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri: An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. Eds. Sheobhushan Shukla, and Anu Shukla. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2004.

Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965.

Tournier, Michel. Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. 1969. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race and National Desire in South Africa. By Pallavi Rastogi. Columbus: Ohio UP, 2008. 290 pp. ISBN 13 978-0-8142-0319-4

Reviewed by elleke Boehmer

An articulate study of the South African Indian fiction that grew up during and after apartheid, Afrindian Fictions makes a welcome addition to at least two critical fields, South African literary criticism and the far-flung discourses of the South Asian diaspora. As Rastogi justly writes in her Introduction, the South African Indian community, and hence also its literature, forged in the crucible of the apartheid struggle, has tended to define itself as strongly according to its national affiliations to South Africa as to the transnational genealogies connecting back to India which tend to be more prominent in other Indian migrant communities. In South Africa, the east-west patterns of contact that inform South Asian diaspora studies are more accurately described as east-south, going against prevailing interpretative trends. The result is a body of writing that legitimately invites the new coinage: Afrindian.

Paradoxically, despite the militant identity assertions of 1970s Black Consciousness, the Indian community’s nationalist gestures of belonging to South Africa have not tended to translate into ready social or critical acceptance by other black communities within the country. So, as Rastogi explores in her six-chapter discussion, first of Afrindian short story writers, then of Ahmed Essop, Achmat Dangor, Farida Karodia, Praba Moodley and Imraan Coovadia, South African Indian fiction still makes up an isolated and neglected constituency. Yet it is one that amply repays closer study, interrogating as it does two dominant dichotomizing trends: the black-versus-white divisions of apartheid and anti-apartheid discourse; and the east-west, sometimes us-them, binary by which South Asian migration is generally understood. Against this polarization, Rastogi’s efforts are two-pronged: she seeks to track an ‘Africanization of Indian selfhood’ in the writers’ work, and to observe thereby the ‘Indianization of South Africa.’ At both levels, she is interested in mixings between Indian and African communities and in the hybridizing effects of these processes – a hybridity that is in many ways more entrenched and knotted than that enshrined in postcolonial theory. While references to key postcolonial commentators on the nation pepper the discussion throughout (with subaltern names, however, notable by their omission), her overarching aim is to challenge dominant meta-narratives in postcolonial studies, including, implicitly, the biculturalism that has organised discourses of migration, and of race and racial oppression. A “value-added” aspect to the book is the six appended interviews with prominent South African Indian cultural commentators, including some of the book’s subjects.

Rastogi’s attention to a lively literary area woefully neglected in many standard South African literary histories (Chapman, Sheckels) undoubtedly makes for


a welcome addition to postcolonial migration studies, at a time when exciting research ventures are emerging in the fluid cultural economies of the African-Indian Ocean (Isabel Hofmeyr, Stephen Muecke, Stephanie Jones, and others). With its close readings of post-1980 writing, Afrindian Fictions traces the literary-historical trajectory of an important minority player on the South African national cultural stage, though the absence of any discussion of Achmat Dangor’s disillusioned yet hopeful Bitter Fruit (2003) exploring the TRC aftermath, militant Islam, and the complex dimensions of cross-racial desire, is puzzling, as is the neglect of cultural landscapes other than those of Durban (dear as these are to this writer).

Of course, it is a widely acknowledged if ironic truth that studies which investigate gaps in a field of knowledge also highlight by force of contrast their moments of inattention to adjacent gaps-of-field. Considering how revealing Rastogi is on the subject of post-apartheid racial tensions between Indians and Africans, it would have been interesting to see her develop the difficult question of brown-on-black, and black-on-brown racism, one which has placed under pressure the cross-racial solidarity that mobilized radical groups during apartheid. Where Africanization is increasingly defined in essentialist terms, the class differences separating middle-class brown and poorer black may now provide the new laager behind which minority communities like South African Indians retreat, as Rastogi is aware. Durban-born President of Greenpeace Kumi Naidoo’s ideal of Indians indigenizing to Africa without sacrificing their historical heritage may, regrettably, become a thing of the past. In this situation, Indians’ much-praised tendency to privilege national over transnational ties could come to look like a neglect of cross-border affiliations not only back to India, but also within the East African littoral – affiliations that could potentially provide alternative modes of belonging. It is a neglect which this study of the South African Indian community alone provocatively reproduces.

Reviews 119

J.M.Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Edited by Jane Poyner. Athens: Ohio UP, 2006. ISBN: 13-978-0-8214-1687-7.

Reviewed by Geoffrey V. Davis

Some years ago I attended a conference at which the keynote address was given by J.M. Coetzee. His topic was “What is a Classic?” Like myself, not many of his listeners would have been expecting the writer to illustrate his argument primarily by reference to the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The following day at a highly theoretical session devoted to Coetzee’s own work, a North American scholar was explicating the phallic symbolism he claimed to have detected in Foe, when a somewhat bemused Eastern European, who was attending a conference in the West for the first time, leaned across to me and whispered “Is this the same Coetzee who spoke yesterday?” At the time I was much amused, but in retrospect his innocent question seems entirely justified. For surely like many of Coetzee’s readers he was merely expressing the degree of unsettlement, indeed mystification, he felt when confronted both by the enormous range of the author’s scholarly interests and by the considerable intellectual challenges his work poses. Reading J.M. Coetzee one wonders whether some of the critics do not occasionally find themselves in the same position. Perhaps that is why the contributors to this volume seem to pose more questions than they can reasonably answer.

The volume brings together stimulating contributions by a distinguished group of critics, most of whom have previous work on Coetzee to their credit. It is particularly noteworthy for its focus on later post-apartheid works such as The Lives of Animals (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), in which the author experiments with forms of literary discourse that resist traditional genre categorisation. Included in the book is a typically evasive interview with the author in which he declines to comment either on academic criticism (which he says he does not read much) or on contemporary South African literature (which he claims not to know well enough) and confirms that moving to Australia has “opened up new possibilities” for his writing, while failing to indicate what these might be.

The editor identifies “the ethics of intellectual practice” as Coetzee’s major concern, and assures the reader that it will take account of the impact he has had both on South African literature and on postcolonial and cultural studies – but not apparently on South African society. This omission seems odd in view of the implication in the book’s title that Coetzee may be considered a “public intellectual.” But, as David Attwell states: “Coetzee is not a public intellectual in the most widely accepted sense of the term.” He may be a South African and he may have spent most of his career living and working under apartheid, but he never spoke or wrote directly on South African affairs even at the height of the state of emergency of the 1980s. Indeed, he himself seems sceptical of the usefulness of the term, whose currency he deprecatingly ascribes to “people


in the humanities […] trying to carve out a niche for themselves in the body politic.” While hardly a “public intellectual” in the sense that Nadine Gordimer is, he is indubitably much concerned with the ethics of the intellectual, and in the figure of Elizabeth Costello he “fictionalizes the writer-as-public-intellectual.” Some critics wonder why the author has chosen to express himself through the persona of an elderly, radical female academic, while others question the extent to which Costello’s outspoken views on such matters as human beings’ treatment of and relationship to animals may be identified with Coetzee’s own. The novel which has recently generated most contentious discussion in Coetzee’s oeuvre is, of course, Disgrace, the work whose reception apparently triggered the author’s departure for Australia. Rosemary Jolly convincingly reads Lucy’s reaction to her rape not as an “acceptance of punishment for the historical burden of apartheid” but rather as a comment on “the epidemic of violence against women in South Africa.” Similarly, Elleke Boehmer is worried by the implication that “the ground on which a new society is brought into being” and reconciliation achieved appears to be the continued silent suffering of woman, “as ever, barefoot and pregnant, and biting her lip.”

This noteworthy addition to the ever-growing number of studies devoted to the writing of J.M. Coetzee profits greatly from its double focus on the author’s concern with the ethics of intellectual practice and of his own writing. As such, it provides a rewarding challenge for the reader.

Reviews 121

Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka. By mpalive-hangson msiska. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures 93, 2007. xxxvii + 176 pages. ISBN 978-90-420-2258-4. Price: € 44 / US $ 59.

Reviewed by Christiane Fioupou

In this study, Mpalive-Hangson Msiska demonstrates that “What Soyinka enacts in all his works is a postcolonial dialectic.” (164). The introduction provides the reader with biographical and literary information about Soyinka and the critical reception of his works. The five ensuing chapters explore postcolonial issues in the light of his major plays, novels, or poems published in the 1960s and 1970s and, more briefly, through some later plays, biographies and essays. The chapter, “Myth, History and Postcolonial Modernity” focuses on two plays (A Dance of the Forests and The Bacchae) and the poem Idanre; the relationship between “Tradition and Modernity” is examined through The Lion and the Jewel, Death and the King’s Horseman, and The Swamp Dwellers; “The Banality of Postcolonial Power” analyses the Jero Plays, Kongi’s Harvest, Opera Wonyosi, and, more cursorily, A Play of Giants, all satirical plays dealing with power and politics. “The Abyss of Postcolonial Formation” considers two important plays (The Road and Madmen and Specialists) and the poems A Shuttle in the Crypt and Mandela’s Earth. The final chapter, “Resources for Redemption,” deals with a radio play (Camwood on the Leaves), a play (The Strong Breed), and a novel (Season of Anomy). As Msiska’s study is clearly aimed at those interested in Soyinka, postcolonial issues and African literature, an index would have been most helpful.

Although much of the field has already been covered by earlier Soyinka criticism, this book will no doubt appeal to students looking for a general introduction to Soyinka’s works and to those interested in “theory” and who believe, like Msiska, that Soyinka is a true disciple of postcolonial studies, despite his well-known disclaimer. In his Preface, Msiska acknowledges the importance of Biodun Jeyifo’s “magisterial” Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, [and] Postcolonialism (2003), which has “moved the discussion of the author’s work into the poststructuralist and post-Marxist space” (x), only to later dismiss Jeyifo as a critic who has relinquished ideology in favour of “aporetic troping” (xi). One might beg to differ. Ironically, in the general bibliography, Biodun Jeyifo’s “magisterial” book appears under the name of well-known critic Abdul JanMohamed (172). A true case of mistaken (postcolonial?) identity. Other inaccuracies need to be noted: for instance, in A Play of Giants, the playwright’s gallery of grisly tyrants is modelled on four well-known dictators, not three – Bokassa-cum-Boky is forgotten (80, 33), and Macias Nguema – not Marcus (33, 80) – was the President of Equatorial Guinea, not Gabon (80).

Soyinka scholars are likely to remain dissatisfied by Msiska’s determination to wedge the Nigerian writer into a postcolonial framework, since this excludes foundational elements of Soyinka’s originality. Each play under study is notably


summed up in a straightforward, linear way, whereas the play’s strength lies precisely in its complex non-linear dramatic construction – an aspect which is consistently ignored. No mention is made of specific theatrical strategies and idioms; for instance, the use of flashbacks and visions, the unsettling presence of the Girl’s effigy in The Strong Breed (155), the mendicants’ disquieting role-playing and chanting in Madmen and Specialists (127) or the function of flashbacks and possession dance in The Road (112-113). Also, in spite of general statements about “the “discursive hybridisation that Soyinka produces in his work” (28), Msiska misquotes the poet’s notes to Idanre, replacing Soyinka’s definition of the Möbius strip as a “mathe-magical ring” (Idanre 87) by the very orthodox “mathematical ring” (27). It seems more than a simple typo, as it misses the felicitous oxymoron that perfectly encapsulates Soyinka’s ability to re-appropriate an already complex paradoxical figure, a graphic example of hybridisation with its “evolutionary ‘kink’,” “only an illusion, but a poetic one” (Idanre 87).

The front cover with Soyinka’s duplicated photo blurred and warped in a manner which could be seen as disrespectful, perhaps reflects the distorted lens through which his works are viewed when shoehorned into rigid theoretical frameworks. Unfortunately, such an approach fails to do credit to the richness and complexity of Soyinka’s texts, their humour and poetry, and to his theatre in performance, another aspect of Soyinka’s work that is regretfully absent from Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka.

ContRIBUtoRS

myriam BellehIGUe, a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-St Cloud, is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris 4 – Sorbonne. She is the author of a PhD thesis and several articles on Elizabeth Bishop; she has also published a monograph (Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, Paris: Armand Colin, 2002). She has worked on poetry and short fiction (Flannery O’Connor, Amit Chaudhuri, Louise Erdrich), focusing on the thematics and aesthetics of exile.

elleke BoehmeR is internationally known for her research in international writing and postcolonial theory. She is the author of the world best-seller Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), the monographs Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002) and Stories of Women (2005), and of the creative biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She has also published four novels, Screens again the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize, 1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (short-listed Sanlam Prize, 2000), and Nile Baby (2008), as well as short stories and memoir sketches. She has produced the edition of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004), and the OUP collection, Empire Writing (1998). Her co-edited J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory and Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), and The Indian Postcolonial (co-edited with Rosinka Chaudhuri, 2010) alongside her first collection of short stories, Sharmilla and Other Portraits. Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.

Geoffrey V. DaVIS has recently retired from his chair at the University of Aachen, Germany. He read Modern Languages at Oxford, wrote his PhD on the German writer Arnold Zweig and his post-doctoral dissertation on Voices of Justice and Reason: Apartheid and Beyond in South African Literature. He has taught at various Universities in Europe and has held visiting research fellowships at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Curtin University (Perth, Australia) and the University of Texas at Austin. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes: Indigeneity: Representation and Interpretation (New Delhi, 2009) and Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice (Brussels, 2006). He is co-editor of the series Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English (Rodopi) and of the African studies series Matatu (Rodopi). He is the current international chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS).

Christiane FIoUPoU is a Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France. She specialises in African studies, particularly Nigerian and Ghanaian literature. She taught English and African Literature at the University


of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) for twelve years. She has published a monograph on Soyinka, La route: réalité et représentation dans l’œuvre de Wole Soyinka (Rodopi: 1994), and translated two of his plays into French, The Road (La route, Hatier, 1988) and King Baabu (Baabou roi, Actes Sud Papiers, 2005). Her other publications include the French translation of Niyi Osundare’s volume of poems, Waiting Laughters /Rires en attente (Présence Africaine: 2004).

anne le GUelleC teaches at the University of Bretagne Occidentale (Brest, France). Since completing a doctoral dissertation on the epic in Patrick White’s fiction, she has published several articles on the representations of national identity in Australian literature. Her current research interests include Australian and Aboriginal studies, and more generally postcolonial studies and theory.

anne-Sophie leteSSIeR has a Master’s Degree from the University of Nantes, France and is now enrolled as a second-year doctoral candidate at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3. She is completing a PhD thesis on the memory of landscape in Jane Urquhart’s œuvre.

Fiona mcCann is a lecturer in gender studies and literature at the University of Lille 3. Her PhD thesis dealt with the interplay between history and fiction in the writings of Yvonne Vera and Zoë Wicomb. She has published articles on both these authors, and has more recently turned her attention to contemporary Irish literature. She is currently conducting research on gender and violence in 20th and 21st -century Irish prose.

myriam moïSe is a doctoral candidate at the University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (co-supervision). Her PhD research project consists of a comparative literary analysis on women writers of the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, Canada and the USA.

elsa SaCKSICK is a lecturer at the University of Paris 8. After completing a PhD on the subject of textual hybridization in the works of S. Rushdie, A. Roy and J. Winterson, she has published several articles on these three authors. She is now working on the notions of hybridity, animality, and the body in contemporary literature.

Claire omhoVèRe is a professor at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3. She has published articles in European and Canadian journals, and contributed book chapters on contemporary Canadian literature (notably in Tropes and Territories, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007; Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, Peter Lang, 2010). She is the author of Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007).

Kerry-Jane wallaRt is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris 4 – Sorbonne. She has published articles on Caribbean literature (Derek Walcott, Claude McKay, Fred D’Aguiar, Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville, E. K. Brathwaite), as well as on

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such “postcolonial” authors as Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie. Her research now focuses on postcolonial drama.

Pascal ZInCK is an Associate Professor of English at the Universities of Lille 3 and Paris 10-Nanterre. He specialises in postmodernism as well as postcolonial and multicultural critical theory with an emphasis on South Asian and Japanese diasporic fiction, memory and trauma studies. He has published widely on Kazuo Ishiguro (Peter Lang and Cambridge Scholars). His current research focuses on terror, war, ethnicity and memory in South Asian literatures.

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