The Tempest has little of action or progressive movement; the union of Ferdinand and Miranda is settled at their first interview, and Prospero merely throws apparent obstacles in their way; the shipwrecked band go leisurely about the island; the attempts of Sebastian and Antonio on the life of the king of Naples, and the plot of Caliban and the drunken sailors against Prospero are nothing but a feint, for we foresee that they will be completely frustrated by the magical skill of the latter; nothing remains, therefore, but the punishment of the guilty by dreadful sights which harrow up their consciences, and then the discovery and final reconciliation.
Yet this want of movement is so admirably concealed by the most varied display of the fascinations of poetry, and the exhilaration of mirth, the details of the execution are so very attractive, that it requires no small degree of attention to perceive that the denoument is, in some degree, anticipated in the exposition. The history of the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, developed in a few short scenes, is enchantingly beautiful; an affecting union of chivalrous magnanimity on the one part, and on the other of the virgin openness of a heart which, brought up far from the world on an uninhabited island, has never learned to disguise its innocent movements. The wisdom of the princely hermit, Prospero, has a magical and mysterious air; the disagreeable impression left by the black falsehood of the two usurpers is softened by the honest gossiping of the old and faithful Gonzalo; Trinculo and Stephano, two good-for-nothing drunkards, find a worthy associate in Caliban; and Ariel hovers sweetly over the whole as the personified genius of the wonderful fable.
Caliban has become a by-word as the strange creation of a poetical imagination. A mixture of gnome and savage, half demon, half brute, in his behavior we perceive at once the traces of his native disposition, and the influence of Prospero's education. The latter could only unfold his understanding, without, in the slightest degree, taming his rooted malignity. It is as if the use of reason and human speech were communicated to an ape. In inclination Caliban is malicious, cowardly, false and base; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar knaves of a civilized world, as portrayed occasionally by Shakespeare. He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is, in his way, a poetical being; he always speaks in verse. He has picked up everthing dissonant and thorny in language to compose out of it a vocabulary of his own; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive and deformed have alone been impressed on his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has assembled on the island, casts merely a faint reflection into his mind, as a ray of light which falls into a dark cave, incapable of communicating to it either heat or illumination, serves merely to set in motion the poisonous vapors. The delineation of this monster is throughout consistent and profound, and, notwithstanding its hatefulness, by no means hurtful to our feelings, as the honor of human nature is left untouched.
In the zephyr-like Ariel the image of air is not to be mistaken, his name even bears an allusion to it; as, on the other hand, Caliban signifies the heavy element of earth. Yet they are neither of them simple, allegorical personifications, but beings individually determined. In general we find in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Tempest, in the magical part of Macbeth, and wherever Shakespeare avails himself of the popular belief in the invisible presence of spirits, and the possibility of coming in contact with them, a profound view of the inward life of nature and her mysterious springs, which, it is true, can never be altogether unknown to the genuine poet, as poetry is altogether incompatible with mechanical physics, but which few have possessed in an equal degree with Dante and himself.
The principal characters in The Tempest are drawn with remarkable strength. In Prospero we have a delineation of peculiar profundity. He was, once, not altogether just a prince, not thoroughly a just man; but he had the disposition to be both. His soul thirsted after knowledge; his mind sincere in itself, after love; and his fancy, after the secrets of nature; but he forgot what a prince should least of all forget, that, upon this moving earth, superior acquirements, in order to stand firmly, must be exercised carefully; that the world is full of enemies who can only be subdued by a watchful power and prudence, and that in certain situations the armor ought never to be put off. Thus it became easy for his nearest relation, his brother, with the help of a powerful neighboring king who could not resist the offered advantage, to depose him from his dukedom. But as the pure morals of the prince, although they were perhaps but lazily exercised in behalf of his subjects, had nevertheless acquired their love, and the usurper did not dare to make an attack on the lives of the fallen, Prospero saved himself, his daughter, and a part of his magical books, upon a desert island. Here he became what, in its highest sense, he had not yet been, a father and a prince. His knowledge extends. Nature listens to him, perhaps because he learned to know and love her more inwardly. Zephyr-like spirits, full of a tender, frolicsome humor, and rude, earth-born gnomes, are compelled to serve him. The whole island is full of wonders, but only such as the fancy willingly receives, of sounds and songs, of merry helpers and comical tormenters; and Prospero shows his great human wisdom particularly in the manner with which he, as the spiritual centre, knows how to conduct his intercourse with friends and foes. First, with his daughter. Miranda is his highest, his one, his all; nevertheless there is visible a certain elevation, a solemnity, in his behavior toward her--peculiarities which, even with the deepest love, the severely tried and aged man early assumes. Indeed, much as the pure sense of his daughter must have long cheered him, he deems it good to relate to her now for the first time the history of his earlier sufferings, now that he has mastery over, and the power to punish, his adversaries. The external miracles of Nature scarcely affect her upon an island where Nature herself has become a wonder, and the wonders become Nature. But for her, even on that account, there are only so many greater wonders in the heart and life of man.
Caliban is a character of the most powerful poetic fancy; and the more the character is investigated the more is our attention rewarded. He is the son of a witch, Sycorax, who, though long since dead, continues to work even from the grave. In her offspring there is a curious mixture of devil, man and beast, descending even to the fish species. He desires evil, not for the sake of evil or from mere wickedness, but because it is piquant, and because he feels himself opressed. He is convinced that gross injustice has been done him, and thus he does not rightly feel that what he desire may be wicked. He knows perfectly well how powerful Prospero is, whose art may perhaps even subdue his maternal god Setebos, and that he himself is nothing but a slave. Nevertheless, he cannot cease to curse, and he curses with the gusto of a virtuoso in this more than liberal art. Whatever he can find most base and disgusting he surrounds almost artistically with the most inharmonious and hissing words, and then wishes them to fall upon Prospero and his lovely daughter. He knows very well that all this will help him nothing, but that at night he will have "cramps" and "side-stitches," and be "pinched by urchins;" but still he continues to pour out new curses. He has acquired one fixed idea--that the island belonged to his mother, and, consequently, now to himself, the crown prince. The greatest horrors are pleasant to him, for he feels them only as jests which break the monotony of his slavery. He laments that he had been prevented from completing a frightful sin, and the thought of murder gives him a real enjoyment, perhaps chiefly on account of the noise and confusion that it would produce.
An eminent critic has aptly remarked: "We find him only laughably horrible, and as a marvelous, though at bottom a feeble monster, highly interesting; for we foresee from the first that none of his threats will be fulfilled. Opposed to him stands Ariel, by no means an ethereal, featureless angel, but a real airy and frolicsome spirit, agreeable and open, but also capricious, roguish, and, with his other qualities, somewhat mischievous." When we hear Prospero recite his too modest epilogue, after laying down his enchanted wand, we feel that the magic we have experienced was too charming and mighty not to be enduring.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
King Lear A critical analysis
As in Macbeth terror reaches its utmost height, in King Lear the sense of compassion is exhausted. The principal characters here are not those who act, but those who suffer. We have not in this, as in most tragedies, the picture of a calamity in which the sudden blows of fate seem still to honor the head which they strike, and where the loss is always accompanied by some flattering consolation in the memory of the former possession; but a fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages, and given up a prey to naked helplessness.
The threefold dignity of a king, an old man, and a father, is dishonored by the cruel ingratitude of his unnatural daughters; the old king, who out of a foolish tenderness has given away everything, is driven out into the world a homeless beggar; the childish imbecility to which he was fast advancing changes into the wildest insanity, and when he is rescued from the destitution to which he was abandoned, it is too late. The kind consolations of filial care and attention and of true friendship are now lost on him; his bodily and mental powers are destroyed beyond hope of recovery, and all that now remains to him of life is the capability of loving and suffering beyond measure. What a picture we have in the meeting of Lear and Edgar in a tempestuous night and in a wretched hovel! The youthful Edgar has, by the wicked arts of his brother, and through his father's blindness, fallen, as did Lear, from the rank to which his birth entitled him; and, as the only means of escaping further persecution, is reduced to the disguise of a beggar tormented by evil spirits. The king's fool, notwithstanding the voluntary degradation which is implied in his condition, is, after Kent, Lear's most faithful associate, the wisest counsellor. This good-hearted fool clothes reason with the livery of his motley garb; the high-born beggar acts the part of insanity; and both, were they even in reality what they seem, would still be enviable in comparison with the king, who feels that the violence of his grief threatens to overpower his reason. The meeting of Edgar with the blinded Gloucester is equally pathetic; nothing could be more affecting than to see the ejected son become the father's guide, and the good angel, who, under the disguise of insanity, saves him by an ingenius and pious fraud from the horror and despair of self-murder.
The story of Lear and his daughers was left by Shakespeare as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristic of the simplicity of old times. But in that tradition there is not the slightest trace of the story of Gloucester and his sons, which was derived by Shakespeare from another source. The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue of the dénoument must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloucester for the fate of Lear becomes the means whereby his son Edmund effects his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the savior of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril, and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. The laws of the drama have therefore been sufficiently complied with, and it is the very combination which constitutes the beauty of the work.
The two cases resemble each other in the main; an infatuated father is blind toward his well-disposed child, and the unnatural children, whom he prefers, requite him by the ruin of his happiness. But all the circumstances are so different that the stories, while they each make a correspondent impression on the heart, for a complete contrast for the imagination. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world; the picture becomes gigantic and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall from their orbits. To save in some degree the honor of human nature, Shakespeare never wishes his spectators to forget that the story takes place in a dreary and barbarous age; he lays particular stress on the circumstance that the Britons of that day were still heathens, although he has not made all the remaining circumstances to coincide learnedly with the time which he has chosen.
From this point of view we must judge of many coarsenesses in expression and manners; for instance, the immodest manner in which Gloucester acknowledged his bastard, Kent's quarrel with the steward, and more especially the cruelty personally inflicted on Gloucester by the duke of Cornwall. Even the virtue of the honest Kent bears the stamp of an iron age, in which the good and the bad display the same uncontrollable energy. Great qualities have not been superfluously assigned to the king; the poet could command our sympathy for his situation, without concealing what he had done to bring himself into it. Lear is choleric, overbearing and almost childish from age, when he drives out his youngest daughter because she will not join in the hypocritical exaggerations of her sisters. But he has a warm and affectionate heart, which is susceptible of the most fervent gratitude; and even rays of a high and kingly disposition burst forth from the eclipse of his understanding. Cordelia, with her heavenly beauty of soul, reminds us of Antigone. In the entire play little more than a hundred lines are assigned to her; yet, throughout the five acts, we can never forget her, and at the close she lingers in our recollection as if we had seen some being more beautiful and purer than a thing of earth.
After surviving so many sufferings, Lear can only die, and what more truly tragic end for him than to die from grief for the death of Cordelia? According to Shakespeare's plan, the guilty, it is true, are all punished, for wickedness destroys itself; but the virtues that would bring help and succor are either too late or are overmatched by the cunning activity of malice.
The legend of Lear had unquestionably been dramatized before Shakespeare produced his tragedy. "The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordelia, as it hath been divers and sundry times lately acted," was printed, probably for the first time, in 1605; but there can be no doubt that it belongs to a period some ten or perhaps twenty years earlier. In 1594 an entry was made at Stationer's hall, of "The moste famous Chronicle Hystorie of Leire King of England, and his Three Daughters." Shakespeare's story of Lear is taken from Holinshed's account of the legend, one dated back to the time when Joas reigned over Judah, or, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's, to the days of Isaiah and Hosea. A garbled version of the play as written by the poet was prepared by one Nahum Tate, who, not understanding the art of Shakespeare and having no dramatic art himself, thought to adopt the original to the popular taste. For over a century this abortion helf possession of the stage, until Macready restored to us the work of the great master, since cleansed from its remaining impurities by able commentators.
In tragical pathos, in dramatic force, in grandeur of sentiment and diction, Lear has no superior in all the wide range of the world's drama. The language often rises to or exceeds, of possible, the sublimity of Aeschylus, and the tragedy has the further advantage of dealing with human beings, human passions, and human frailties, and not with the affairs of gods and demigods. The modern play-goer does not greatly concern himself with the deeds and thoughts of the powers supernal, and if he can see human beings set forth on the stage, with their virtues
The threefold dignity of a king, an old man, and a father, is dishonored by the cruel ingratitude of his unnatural daughters; the old king, who out of a foolish tenderness has given away everything, is driven out into the world a homeless beggar; the childish imbecility to which he was fast advancing changes into the wildest insanity, and when he is rescued from the destitution to which he was abandoned, it is too late. The kind consolations of filial care and attention and of true friendship are now lost on him; his bodily and mental powers are destroyed beyond hope of recovery, and all that now remains to him of life is the capability of loving and suffering beyond measure. What a picture we have in the meeting of Lear and Edgar in a tempestuous night and in a wretched hovel! The youthful Edgar has, by the wicked arts of his brother, and through his father's blindness, fallen, as did Lear, from the rank to which his birth entitled him; and, as the only means of escaping further persecution, is reduced to the disguise of a beggar tormented by evil spirits. The king's fool, notwithstanding the voluntary degradation which is implied in his condition, is, after Kent, Lear's most faithful associate, the wisest counsellor. This good-hearted fool clothes reason with the livery of his motley garb; the high-born beggar acts the part of insanity; and both, were they even in reality what they seem, would still be enviable in comparison with the king, who feels that the violence of his grief threatens to overpower his reason. The meeting of Edgar with the blinded Gloucester is equally pathetic; nothing could be more affecting than to see the ejected son become the father's guide, and the good angel, who, under the disguise of insanity, saves him by an ingenius and pious fraud from the horror and despair of self-murder.
The story of Lear and his daughers was left by Shakespeare as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristic of the simplicity of old times. But in that tradition there is not the slightest trace of the story of Gloucester and his sons, which was derived by Shakespeare from another source. The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue of the dénoument must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloucester for the fate of Lear becomes the means whereby his son Edmund effects his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the savior of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril, and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. The laws of the drama have therefore been sufficiently complied with, and it is the very combination which constitutes the beauty of the work.
The two cases resemble each other in the main; an infatuated father is blind toward his well-disposed child, and the unnatural children, whom he prefers, requite him by the ruin of his happiness. But all the circumstances are so different that the stories, while they each make a correspondent impression on the heart, for a complete contrast for the imagination. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world; the picture becomes gigantic and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall from their orbits. To save in some degree the honor of human nature, Shakespeare never wishes his spectators to forget that the story takes place in a dreary and barbarous age; he lays particular stress on the circumstance that the Britons of that day were still heathens, although he has not made all the remaining circumstances to coincide learnedly with the time which he has chosen.
From this point of view we must judge of many coarsenesses in expression and manners; for instance, the immodest manner in which Gloucester acknowledged his bastard, Kent's quarrel with the steward, and more especially the cruelty personally inflicted on Gloucester by the duke of Cornwall. Even the virtue of the honest Kent bears the stamp of an iron age, in which the good and the bad display the same uncontrollable energy. Great qualities have not been superfluously assigned to the king; the poet could command our sympathy for his situation, without concealing what he had done to bring himself into it. Lear is choleric, overbearing and almost childish from age, when he drives out his youngest daughter because she will not join in the hypocritical exaggerations of her sisters. But he has a warm and affectionate heart, which is susceptible of the most fervent gratitude; and even rays of a high and kingly disposition burst forth from the eclipse of his understanding. Cordelia, with her heavenly beauty of soul, reminds us of Antigone. In the entire play little more than a hundred lines are assigned to her; yet, throughout the five acts, we can never forget her, and at the close she lingers in our recollection as if we had seen some being more beautiful and purer than a thing of earth.
After surviving so many sufferings, Lear can only die, and what more truly tragic end for him than to die from grief for the death of Cordelia? According to Shakespeare's plan, the guilty, it is true, are all punished, for wickedness destroys itself; but the virtues that would bring help and succor are either too late or are overmatched by the cunning activity of malice.
The legend of Lear had unquestionably been dramatized before Shakespeare produced his tragedy. "The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordelia, as it hath been divers and sundry times lately acted," was printed, probably for the first time, in 1605; but there can be no doubt that it belongs to a period some ten or perhaps twenty years earlier. In 1594 an entry was made at Stationer's hall, of "The moste famous Chronicle Hystorie of Leire King of England, and his Three Daughters." Shakespeare's story of Lear is taken from Holinshed's account of the legend, one dated back to the time when Joas reigned over Judah, or, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's, to the days of Isaiah and Hosea. A garbled version of the play as written by the poet was prepared by one Nahum Tate, who, not understanding the art of Shakespeare and having no dramatic art himself, thought to adopt the original to the popular taste. For over a century this abortion helf possession of the stage, until Macready restored to us the work of the great master, since cleansed from its remaining impurities by able commentators.
In tragical pathos, in dramatic force, in grandeur of sentiment and diction, Lear has no superior in all the wide range of the world's drama. The language often rises to or exceeds, of possible, the sublimity of Aeschylus, and the tragedy has the further advantage of dealing with human beings, human passions, and human frailties, and not with the affairs of gods and demigods. The modern play-goer does not greatly concern himself with the deeds and thoughts of the powers supernal, and if he can see human beings set forth on the stage, with their virtues
A Critical Analysis of Hamlet
Why is Shakespeare considered to be one of the greatest playwrights of his time? Shakespeare lived in the Elizabethan era and had to write for an Elizabethan audience and theater. By today's standards, this was no picnic in the park. Under those circumstances, he wrote some of the greatest works in history. These works, still popular today, prove him to be a consummate dramatist.
Shakespeare knew how to craft dramatic scenes full of external and internal conflict and emotion, something the Elizabethan audience delighted in; he also intertwined superstitions of this era and pageantry, which the Elizabethans also loved.
Shakespeare creates external conflict between opposing characters to build tension onstage. When Hamlet and King Claudius interact in the second scene of Act I, tension builds: "But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son- A little more than kin, and less than kind. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Not so, my lord, I am too much I'th'sun." (1.2.65-68).
While Queen Gertrude and Hamlet are heatedly discussing the "unlawful" marriage to Claudius, more tension builds between Hamlet and his mother: "Have you forgot me? No, by the rood, not so. You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife, And, would it were not so, you are my mother." (3.4.15-18). Shakespeare also creates internal conflict within Hamlet himself, using revenge, a common theme of that time. It was expected of playwrights of the Elizabethan era to write plays containing the motive revenge. He struggled with the decision to write Hamlet as a revenge play, and it is evident in the story in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy which parallels Shakespeare's ambivalence about the theme of the play: "To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer….The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered." (3.1.63-78) Hamlet wants revenge when he thinks of his mother and her incestuous marriage to Claudius: "Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to revenge." (1.5.33-35).
Hamlet doesn't want revenge when he sees King Claudius vulnerable while praying: "Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying. And now I'll do it. And so he goes to heaven; And so I am revenged. That would be scanned: A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge." (3.3.76-83).
Shakespeare whips up the emotion onstage by incorporating the conflict and tension between Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, his mother, and King Claudius, his unclestepfather. Kinship and inheritance are very strong themes in Hamlet. "Hamlet's excessive emotion is focused on Gertrude's sexual relations with Claudius"…. Because their marriage is "unlawful" according to the era and it deprives Hamlet of his rightful succession (Jardine 39).
According to the table of affinity, "unlawful" marriages that would conflict with possible inheritance would be, a man's marriage to his father's wife, his uncle's wife, his father's wife's daughter (his sister), his brother's wife (i.e. Claudius and Gertrude), or his wife's sister ( Jardine 40). Although none of these are blood ties, each creates questions over inheritance. In Hamlet's case, his uncle Claudius' marriage to his mother threatens his claim to inheritance. Hamlet, when talking alone with his mother, exclaims: "Nay but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty!" (3.4.100-104).
Hamlet, in a soliloquy, says to himself: "…. Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O most wicked speed! To post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!" (1.2.155-159).
Shakespeare uses beliefs and superstitions of the era to entertain and relate to his audience. Realizing the rift between Catholics and Protestants in his day, Shakespeare requests his audience to a belief in ghosts as a major necessity to understanding the play. Catholics, at the time, believed that ghosts came from purgatory and were the souls of the departed (Bloom 24), while "Protestants believed that ghosts came from hell….and were the devil….who had assumed the shape and appearance of the dead" (Bloom 24).
While Marcellus, Horatio, and Barnardo are on guard duty, they spot King Hamlet's ghost: "But soft, behold. Lo, where it comes again. I'll cross it though it blast me. Stay illusion: ….For which, they say, you spirits off walk in death…." (1.1.139-140; 152).
When a scene like the previous, occurred onstage, Shakespeare let his audience know the ghost from everyone else by having the ghost's costume be in a "ghostly" fashion. Ghosts were trained to speak in a slow, high-pitched, portentous tone (Charney 25); whether or not the ghost was wailing while moving onstage is unknown (Muir and Schoenbaum 35).
Pageantry and military content is something else Elizabethans expected to appear in their plays. Elizabethans loved blood and gore. This gave Shakespeare a good basis to incorporate this theme into Hamlet: The play begins on guard; Denmark is a warlike state; in Act III, scene iv in the event in which Hamlet kills Polonius displays a bloody and grotesque picture.
Staging and scenery were very important concepts for Shakespeare when writing a play. In early years of Shakespeare's time, plays were performed for audiences in courtyards of city inns and for upper class, in the great halls of institutions (Lamb 12). This concept didn't apply to Shakespeare when writing Hamlet; public theaters were built and being used. They play's staging actions and written text are a combination of courtyards, halls, and public theater stages (Lamb 12).
"The conventions of soliloquy allow characters to address the audience directly, outside of the dialogue form" (Charney 39). The construction of Shakespeare's apron stage helped to give soliloquy its complete efficiency. On this large stage that extended all the way into the middle of the "pit", an actor could come downstage to address the spectators in a tone of confidence (Charney 39).
Due to limitations in lighting in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used certain theatrical conventions to accommodate these circumstances so that his audience would know what time of day or night it was; torches were brought onstage; candles were lit; poetry was used to describe the time and setting. Barnardo, arriving to guard the tower, says to Francisco: "'Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco." (1.1.7). Barnardo says to Horatio and Marcellus of when the ghost left at daybreak: "It was about to speak when the cock crew." (1.1.164).
In Shakespearean theater, a scene does not necessarily take place in a certain geographical place. It is described by the words of the actors. "Very little was done to create the illusion of a place. Painted, movable scenery was not in general use until the end of the seventeenth century, so that the understanding of a 'scene' as a location does not hold for Elizabethan drama" (Charney 95). To overcome this obstacle, Shakespeare lets his audience know the setting by the words of his characters. He defines the setting, Denmark, in the words of the men on guard in the opening scene of Act I.
Without the requirements of located places, Shakespeare's scenes can move easily into each other in an uninterrupted sequence. There isn't any need for changing scenes; any needed props were thrust onto the stage. Shakespeare's plays maintain a quick pace, unimaginable in a modern production (i.e. Hamlet was completed in two hours). The advantage to having such a short play is that the dramatic effect can be intensified and the audience is able to feel the full effect of the climax.
Players in the Elizabethan era were of vast importance to the outcome of the play. Shakespeare displays this importance in Hamlet with references to the players of that time. The entire scene ii of Act III is based on the players and the play that Hamlet has rewritten to be performed for the King. Also in this scene is mention of Shakespeare's rivalry, The Lord Admiral's Men. Shakespeare mentions, too, the children players of the Black friar theater; they were harsh competition then. Rosencrantz says to Hamlet while discussing players and the theater: "….there is, sir, and eyrie of children…." (2.2.336).
When Shakespeare sat down to write his plays, he knew the limitations that he was faced with, limitations that modern-day authors would have a hard time accepting; yet, he leaps over these walls and presents us with masterpieces of art.
Due to scenery and staging complications, there weren't any breaks between scenes, as there are in today's productions. To Shakespeare, these types of scenes made no difference, they were just numbers of different groupings of "….people carrying on the actions of the play" (Lamb 13).
The exact origins of Hamlet are unknown, but it is believed that Shakespeare "cut, pasted, and edited" tales before his time that resembled Hamlet. One story can be traced back to the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus (thirteenth century). This account was printed in Latin in 1514 (Lamb 14-15). Another version of Hamlet is Belleforest's Historie Tragiques of 1582; this version is based on Saxo with a few minor changes. It was translated into English in 1608 as The Historie of Hamlet (Lamb 15).
It is believed that Shakespeare was familiar with both Saxo and Bellforest's tale of Hamlet; his only son was christened Hamnet in 1585 (Hamnet is one spelling of Hamlet) (Lamb 15). Another origin of the name Hamlet is believed to be from a young girl, Katherine Hamlett, who drowned near Stratford when Shakespeare was sixteen. Her drowning occurred under circumstances very similar to those of Ophelia (Bloom 96).
Similarities between the Earl of Essex (Shakespeare's supposed "lover") and Hamlet have also been commonly pointed out (Bloom 96).
Shakespeare, as a consummate dramatist, uses many different literature elements in his plays. The story of Hamlet came out in the seventh century, but in Shakespeare's version, Hamlet attends Wittenberg, a university founded in 1502 (Lamb 18-19). Shakespeare uses irony and dramatic irony: In scene iii of Act III, Hamlet thinks Claudius is kneeling to make his peace with God, but actually, Claudius is realizing that he can't repent and evil is the only path for him. The King says to Laertes: "….That we are made of stuff so flat and dull." (4.3.33).
Although faced with the many great challenges that playwrights faced in the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare proves himself worthy of the Elizabethan audience and also shows that he is a consummate dramatist in that his works are still being read and performed today.
Shakespeare knew how to craft dramatic scenes full of external and internal conflict and emotion, something the Elizabethan audience delighted in; he also intertwined superstitions of this era and pageantry, which the Elizabethans also loved.
Shakespeare creates external conflict between opposing characters to build tension onstage. When Hamlet and King Claudius interact in the second scene of Act I, tension builds: "But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son- A little more than kin, and less than kind. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Not so, my lord, I am too much I'th'sun." (1.2.65-68).
While Queen Gertrude and Hamlet are heatedly discussing the "unlawful" marriage to Claudius, more tension builds between Hamlet and his mother: "Have you forgot me? No, by the rood, not so. You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife, And, would it were not so, you are my mother." (3.4.15-18). Shakespeare also creates internal conflict within Hamlet himself, using revenge, a common theme of that time. It was expected of playwrights of the Elizabethan era to write plays containing the motive revenge. He struggled with the decision to write Hamlet as a revenge play, and it is evident in the story in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy which parallels Shakespeare's ambivalence about the theme of the play: "To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer….The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered." (3.1.63-78) Hamlet wants revenge when he thinks of his mother and her incestuous marriage to Claudius: "Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to revenge." (1.5.33-35).
Hamlet doesn't want revenge when he sees King Claudius vulnerable while praying: "Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying. And now I'll do it. And so he goes to heaven; And so I am revenged. That would be scanned: A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge." (3.3.76-83).
Shakespeare whips up the emotion onstage by incorporating the conflict and tension between Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, his mother, and King Claudius, his unclestepfather. Kinship and inheritance are very strong themes in Hamlet. "Hamlet's excessive emotion is focused on Gertrude's sexual relations with Claudius"…. Because their marriage is "unlawful" according to the era and it deprives Hamlet of his rightful succession (Jardine 39).
According to the table of affinity, "unlawful" marriages that would conflict with possible inheritance would be, a man's marriage to his father's wife, his uncle's wife, his father's wife's daughter (his sister), his brother's wife (i.e. Claudius and Gertrude), or his wife's sister ( Jardine 40). Although none of these are blood ties, each creates questions over inheritance. In Hamlet's case, his uncle Claudius' marriage to his mother threatens his claim to inheritance. Hamlet, when talking alone with his mother, exclaims: "Nay but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty!" (3.4.100-104).
Hamlet, in a soliloquy, says to himself: "…. Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O most wicked speed! To post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!" (1.2.155-159).
Shakespeare uses beliefs and superstitions of the era to entertain and relate to his audience. Realizing the rift between Catholics and Protestants in his day, Shakespeare requests his audience to a belief in ghosts as a major necessity to understanding the play. Catholics, at the time, believed that ghosts came from purgatory and were the souls of the departed (Bloom 24), while "Protestants believed that ghosts came from hell….and were the devil….who had assumed the shape and appearance of the dead" (Bloom 24).
While Marcellus, Horatio, and Barnardo are on guard duty, they spot King Hamlet's ghost: "But soft, behold. Lo, where it comes again. I'll cross it though it blast me. Stay illusion: ….For which, they say, you spirits off walk in death…." (1.1.139-140; 152).
When a scene like the previous, occurred onstage, Shakespeare let his audience know the ghost from everyone else by having the ghost's costume be in a "ghostly" fashion. Ghosts were trained to speak in a slow, high-pitched, portentous tone (Charney 25); whether or not the ghost was wailing while moving onstage is unknown (Muir and Schoenbaum 35).
Pageantry and military content is something else Elizabethans expected to appear in their plays. Elizabethans loved blood and gore. This gave Shakespeare a good basis to incorporate this theme into Hamlet: The play begins on guard; Denmark is a warlike state; in Act III, scene iv in the event in which Hamlet kills Polonius displays a bloody and grotesque picture.
Staging and scenery were very important concepts for Shakespeare when writing a play. In early years of Shakespeare's time, plays were performed for audiences in courtyards of city inns and for upper class, in the great halls of institutions (Lamb 12). This concept didn't apply to Shakespeare when writing Hamlet; public theaters were built and being used. They play's staging actions and written text are a combination of courtyards, halls, and public theater stages (Lamb 12).
"The conventions of soliloquy allow characters to address the audience directly, outside of the dialogue form" (Charney 39). The construction of Shakespeare's apron stage helped to give soliloquy its complete efficiency. On this large stage that extended all the way into the middle of the "pit", an actor could come downstage to address the spectators in a tone of confidence (Charney 39).
Due to limitations in lighting in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used certain theatrical conventions to accommodate these circumstances so that his audience would know what time of day or night it was; torches were brought onstage; candles were lit; poetry was used to describe the time and setting. Barnardo, arriving to guard the tower, says to Francisco: "'Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco." (1.1.7). Barnardo says to Horatio and Marcellus of when the ghost left at daybreak: "It was about to speak when the cock crew." (1.1.164).
In Shakespearean theater, a scene does not necessarily take place in a certain geographical place. It is described by the words of the actors. "Very little was done to create the illusion of a place. Painted, movable scenery was not in general use until the end of the seventeenth century, so that the understanding of a 'scene' as a location does not hold for Elizabethan drama" (Charney 95). To overcome this obstacle, Shakespeare lets his audience know the setting by the words of his characters. He defines the setting, Denmark, in the words of the men on guard in the opening scene of Act I.
Without the requirements of located places, Shakespeare's scenes can move easily into each other in an uninterrupted sequence. There isn't any need for changing scenes; any needed props were thrust onto the stage. Shakespeare's plays maintain a quick pace, unimaginable in a modern production (i.e. Hamlet was completed in two hours). The advantage to having such a short play is that the dramatic effect can be intensified and the audience is able to feel the full effect of the climax.
Players in the Elizabethan era were of vast importance to the outcome of the play. Shakespeare displays this importance in Hamlet with references to the players of that time. The entire scene ii of Act III is based on the players and the play that Hamlet has rewritten to be performed for the King. Also in this scene is mention of Shakespeare's rivalry, The Lord Admiral's Men. Shakespeare mentions, too, the children players of the Black friar theater; they were harsh competition then. Rosencrantz says to Hamlet while discussing players and the theater: "….there is, sir, and eyrie of children…." (2.2.336).
When Shakespeare sat down to write his plays, he knew the limitations that he was faced with, limitations that modern-day authors would have a hard time accepting; yet, he leaps over these walls and presents us with masterpieces of art.
Due to scenery and staging complications, there weren't any breaks between scenes, as there are in today's productions. To Shakespeare, these types of scenes made no difference, they were just numbers of different groupings of "….people carrying on the actions of the play" (Lamb 13).
The exact origins of Hamlet are unknown, but it is believed that Shakespeare "cut, pasted, and edited" tales before his time that resembled Hamlet. One story can be traced back to the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus (thirteenth century). This account was printed in Latin in 1514 (Lamb 14-15). Another version of Hamlet is Belleforest's Historie Tragiques of 1582; this version is based on Saxo with a few minor changes. It was translated into English in 1608 as The Historie of Hamlet (Lamb 15).
It is believed that Shakespeare was familiar with both Saxo and Bellforest's tale of Hamlet; his only son was christened Hamnet in 1585 (Hamnet is one spelling of Hamlet) (Lamb 15). Another origin of the name Hamlet is believed to be from a young girl, Katherine Hamlett, who drowned near Stratford when Shakespeare was sixteen. Her drowning occurred under circumstances very similar to those of Ophelia (Bloom 96).
Similarities between the Earl of Essex (Shakespeare's supposed "lover") and Hamlet have also been commonly pointed out (Bloom 96).
Shakespeare, as a consummate dramatist, uses many different literature elements in his plays. The story of Hamlet came out in the seventh century, but in Shakespeare's version, Hamlet attends Wittenberg, a university founded in 1502 (Lamb 18-19). Shakespeare uses irony and dramatic irony: In scene iii of Act III, Hamlet thinks Claudius is kneeling to make his peace with God, but actually, Claudius is realizing that he can't repent and evil is the only path for him. The King says to Laertes: "….That we are made of stuff so flat and dull." (4.3.33).
Although faced with the many great challenges that playwrights faced in the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare proves himself worthy of the Elizabethan audience and also shows that he is a consummate dramatist in that his works are still being read and performed today.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Review on The Shadow lines by Amitav Gosh
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Gosh paints a landscape of symbolism and realism that spans both time and space. The concepts of distance and time are uniquely portrayed in both the physical borders that divide countries and the imaginary borders that divide human beings. From the image-conscious character of the grandmother to the riots that explode in the streets, Ghosh takes the reader on a fascinating journey of exploration, dissecting the characters of the story while simultaneously dissecting the human race.
The title of the novel is perhaps the most philosophical statement Ghosh makes, asserting that 'The Shadow Lines', or the lines that not only define our human shape but our inner struggles to choose between darkness and light, are an intricate part of all human existence. Shadows, like time, are both tangible and intangible at any given moment or realm of perspective. They are a fleeting, generically depicted, generally distorted representations of ourselves, and they can only be viewed in the proper light. Ghosh uses shadow lines as a way of telling us that the way we view ourselves is not always the way that others view us, and until we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves we will remain in the shadows of our own enlightenment.
Ghosh manages to speak excessively of shadows, darkness and light, weaving them subtly into the context of what he is trying to convey. He uses the terms both realistically and metaphorically to show that the shadow we cast, the one other people can see, is not always an accurate reflection of who we really are. Nick was not the hero he seemed to be and when May reveals this to the boy, they are in the process of moving from light to dark, both in physical environment and knowledge of the truth. In a way, a shadow is like a "fair weather friend" in that it appears to us only when the sun is directly overhead. While every human being casts a unique shadow, a common theme can be seen in them all, namely that they are just as much a part of us as they are detached from us. This is another realm in which Ghosh metaphorically uses the elements of shadow lines to tell his story.
Throughout literature's long history, shadows have been used as metaphors for secrets. Things hidden in the shadows, things which we cannot see though we can vaguely make out their outlines...these are the traditional metaphors which Ghosh cannot avoid. Ghosh demonstrates that when secrets come out from behind the shadows and are exposed to the stark, revealing brilliance of daylight, they do not immediately evaporate. Secrets tend to linger long after they've been exposed because the fact that they were hidden in the first place casts strong shadows of doubt upon the person keeping the secret. The revelation of these secrets can have severe consequences, such as being kicked out of school or being labeled a liar. Though the grandmother's "letter from the grave" is eventually dismissed, it's mere existence taught the boy some valuable lessons.
While he is astonished by his grandmother's ability to see past the shadows and into the light, he is equally annoyed by it. It seems to him that a person ought to be able to keep some secrets hidden, like his "visits to the women", but at the same time he respects his grandmother's insight. While her first revelation caused him great embarrassment, her second was a truth he wished he could have faced himself long ago. He is both praising and admonishing his late Grandmother in a single breath.
The narrator's secret love for his cousin Ila was forced to remain in the shadows because the feeling itself, was dark in nature. Anything that is considered taboo, such as sexual relations between members of the same family, automatically quivers in the shadows of its own dark truths. Both of the major truths that the grandmother exposed were laden with sexual taboos, which raises the question, should they ever have been exposed at all? In light of the pain they caused, one would think not, but in a world in which truth is the foundation of evolution into maturity, how can one claim that any truth should remain unilluminated?
On the one hand, Ila's enlightenment to her cousin's feelings for her was good in that it marked a promise of change in her behavior towards him which she hoped would help to dissipate his obsession. On the other hand, from the narrator's viewpoint, this revelation and his cousin's subsequent rejection caused him a great deal of emotional distress. Should his feelings have remained in the shadows, he may not have endured this sharp, heart-stabbing pain, yet he may have been subjected a long, slow torture instead. The answer to whether this truth should have been revealed lies in which kind of pain the narrator finds less troubling.
While the title'The Shadow Lines' can be read a thousand different ways, and the significance of shadows throughout the novel can be interpreted with vast distinctions, one thing remains clear. The shadows that all human beings reflect are as unique to the individual as each written word is to a talented author like Amitav Ghosh.
The title of the novel is perhaps the most philosophical statement Ghosh makes, asserting that 'The Shadow Lines', or the lines that not only define our human shape but our inner struggles to choose between darkness and light, are an intricate part of all human existence. Shadows, like time, are both tangible and intangible at any given moment or realm of perspective. They are a fleeting, generically depicted, generally distorted representations of ourselves, and they can only be viewed in the proper light. Ghosh uses shadow lines as a way of telling us that the way we view ourselves is not always the way that others view us, and until we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves we will remain in the shadows of our own enlightenment.
Ghosh manages to speak excessively of shadows, darkness and light, weaving them subtly into the context of what he is trying to convey. He uses the terms both realistically and metaphorically to show that the shadow we cast, the one other people can see, is not always an accurate reflection of who we really are. Nick was not the hero he seemed to be and when May reveals this to the boy, they are in the process of moving from light to dark, both in physical environment and knowledge of the truth. In a way, a shadow is like a "fair weather friend" in that it appears to us only when the sun is directly overhead. While every human being casts a unique shadow, a common theme can be seen in them all, namely that they are just as much a part of us as they are detached from us. This is another realm in which Ghosh metaphorically uses the elements of shadow lines to tell his story.
Throughout literature's long history, shadows have been used as metaphors for secrets. Things hidden in the shadows, things which we cannot see though we can vaguely make out their outlines...these are the traditional metaphors which Ghosh cannot avoid. Ghosh demonstrates that when secrets come out from behind the shadows and are exposed to the stark, revealing brilliance of daylight, they do not immediately evaporate. Secrets tend to linger long after they've been exposed because the fact that they were hidden in the first place casts strong shadows of doubt upon the person keeping the secret. The revelation of these secrets can have severe consequences, such as being kicked out of school or being labeled a liar. Though the grandmother's "letter from the grave" is eventually dismissed, it's mere existence taught the boy some valuable lessons.
While he is astonished by his grandmother's ability to see past the shadows and into the light, he is equally annoyed by it. It seems to him that a person ought to be able to keep some secrets hidden, like his "visits to the women", but at the same time he respects his grandmother's insight. While her first revelation caused him great embarrassment, her second was a truth he wished he could have faced himself long ago. He is both praising and admonishing his late Grandmother in a single breath.
The narrator's secret love for his cousin Ila was forced to remain in the shadows because the feeling itself, was dark in nature. Anything that is considered taboo, such as sexual relations between members of the same family, automatically quivers in the shadows of its own dark truths. Both of the major truths that the grandmother exposed were laden with sexual taboos, which raises the question, should they ever have been exposed at all? In light of the pain they caused, one would think not, but in a world in which truth is the foundation of evolution into maturity, how can one claim that any truth should remain unilluminated?
On the one hand, Ila's enlightenment to her cousin's feelings for her was good in that it marked a promise of change in her behavior towards him which she hoped would help to dissipate his obsession. On the other hand, from the narrator's viewpoint, this revelation and his cousin's subsequent rejection caused him a great deal of emotional distress. Should his feelings have remained in the shadows, he may not have endured this sharp, heart-stabbing pain, yet he may have been subjected a long, slow torture instead. The answer to whether this truth should have been revealed lies in which kind of pain the narrator finds less troubling.
While the title'The Shadow Lines' can be read a thousand different ways, and the significance of shadows throughout the novel can be interpreted with vast distinctions, one thing remains clear. The shadows that all human beings reflect are as unique to the individual as each written word is to a talented author like Amitav Ghosh.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Readers Response on Lord Jim
Recent Forum Posts on Lord Jim
Can anyone help?
I admit that at my first attempt to read this book, I was completly confused by it, and had the most difficult time figuring out what the heck was going on and what was suppose to be happening, I think I only got to maybe the 3rd chapter before I was just like forget it and stopped reading, but I have been considering trying again. Though sometimes I wonder if I will regeret that choice. But well the things that had the most difficulty with initially, was first, tracking the story, as it seemed to be jumping all over the place, and I could not figure out what was happening now, what already happerend, and just what was going on. And this kept bugging me, but is Lord Jim suppose to be African American, or White? I could never figure that one out and kept going back and forth between the two.
Posted By Dark Muse at Thu 31 Jan 2008, 3:15 PM in Lord Jim 10 Replies
Lord Jim
I read this book in my A.P. English class. We as a class felt that Conrad used way too much imagery and the detail went on and on. Jim is beyond flawed. Many of us felt he should have used the revolver on himself instead of the assassins. Jim just kept running from his fate, but in reality, Jim was running from himself. The readers know that he can not run from himself because he goes too.
Posted By Scott at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 1 Reply
Lord Jim
What was the name of the east asian island which differed by only one letter from the name of the boat that the hero deserts in a storm?
Posted By Helen at Thu 19 Dec 2002, 1:00 AM in Lord Jim 2 Replies
Victory?
I wonder whether this book is really to be read in as optimistic a light as that in which some of your contributors appear to have understood it? It seems to me that Conrad's novel is tragic in form, and that Jim is a flawed character, of the type which Aristotle famously defined as requisite to true tragedy. What is interesting about Jim is that the flaw, in his case, lies in his romantic idealism. He is, as the older, and more world-weary narrator emphasises, deeply romantic, highly imaginative, and extremely idealistic.The reader is given to understand that the narrator, at least, regards these qualities, on which so much store is sometimes set, as being of at least doubtful value. However natural they are to youth, they are, in themselves, not only an obstacle to a true understanding of the world, but treacherous to the exercise of practical virtue. Jim is inarticulate, self-obsessed, easily duped, and ultimately destroyed by his tendency to refer everything around him to the way in which he perceives himself. There is a tension in the book between the codes by which ordinary and unsung men live their lives of duty and self-sacrifice, and the ambitions of those who, in their own view at least, transcend the rules because they are born to a higher destiny. It seems to me that Conrad is sensitive to the strengths and limitations of both value systems, and that the current of the book takes the form of a debate in which the one is not necessarily preferred to the other.It seems to me too that those who want to see Jim's ultimate fate as a vindication of his honour need to think about the price that more than one other person in the book ends up having to pay for it.The moral may well be that romantic idealists are dangerous to themselves, and to those around them - a view that those raised on the virtues propounded by the Hollywood school of heroism may find hard to accept, but which those who have lived life in dangerous trades - and CXIX sea-faring was such a trade - may well regard as all but self-evident. A bit of decency, humility and respect for others is perhaps the best we can really hope for in life - the tragedy is that the practice of these virtues is very much more difficult than at first appears.
Posted By John Clay at Wed 23 Jun 2004, 1:00 AM in Lord Jim 2 Replies
No Subject
I like the character of Lord Jim because he is brave, idealist and a romantic. He dies for his ideals.
Posted By abdul at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
Lord Jim
I've been listening to Lord Jim on tape--quite a challenge. I agree that the book does start out strange and frustrating but grows more tractable and even memorable as it develops. Sometimes doing other things while listening to it distracts from significant details and profound insights. I am sorry for this but, nevertheless, glad for what I am gleaning from the book: thought-provoking glimpses into the contradictory realities of human nature.
Posted By Laura at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
No Subject
I have tried to read this books several times when I was younger, but I could not finished it. The subject of the book, about a man that has loose his honnor by an accident, is something that atract young people, because at this age all of us want to prove that we are a hero and not a coward. But the fact that sometimes the net of fate could come and destroy all of our dreams is something really scary. I have to face some shipwrecks on my life to turn my attention to this book again, but I had to begin with Heart of Darkness and Amy Foster. The first one is smaller in the number of pages (not in substance), and the follow is for a best start point. Both inspired good movies what could bring the subject more atractive. Well, Lord Jim is my lasting temptation, and I am trying to read it now. Although it has a good movie version, with Peter O Toole, that is for me one of his best acting, it is very difficult to find it on VCR format. I wish to watch it again to remind my first impression, that influence all my life. I promise that when I get the end of this word-by-word well-written book, I will come back again and will show you all my view.
Posted By Luis Cesar Nunes at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
Where is Patusan
Is Patusan even a real place? Was it ever a real place? I know sometimes Conrad changes names for the story's sake. Is this one of those times? I can not find it in Encarta Virtual Globe, which will list almost any little island, town, or provice that exists.if you can help, please email me.thanks
Posted By colmac at Sat 13 Sep 2003, 1:00 AM in Lord Jim 6 Replies
patna+ us. general...
i ve read some comments, and noticed that some said the island patusan differed from the name of the ship, the Patna, only by 2 letters.and have you also noticed that these letters form the word "us"?surely a reference to Jim, who is described by Marlow, the narrator, as "one of us".can we suppose it s to make the reader think that even if jim goes far away in a remote island, he s still one of the seamen? (or one of the Men, simply?)and this would contradict the verdict in court, which deprives jim from his seaman certificate.i d like to have some discussions about the book. don t hesitate to email me!!greetings from france!
Posted By jose, france at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
the complications
Two of the most difficult aspects of this novel are Conrad's use of narrations within narrations and his refusal to tell the story in a linear fashion. Reading the first third of the book, it is difficult to understand who is telling the story, and what part of the story is being told at the time - to the point that it seems more like a random conglomeration of unrelated events than a story. (especially if one misses subtle cues like Marlow speaking to the dinner guests and lighting his cigar, or the nest of quotation marks that are found around 99.96% of the paragraphs.)It is my belief that this is deliberate, and serves the purpose of taking the emphasis of the book off of the plot and events in Jim's life, and focusing attention on the roundness and complexity of Jim as a human character. Furthermore, by making use of well characterized narrators with whom we can relate to, Conrad causes readers to accept the judgements made about Jim by certain narrators as the readers' own judgements. This is especially evident in the case of Marlow, the principal narrator, who offers all of his thoughts and feelings about Jim to his audience alongside the facts of Jim's life. In effect, the reader is made to view Jim through the lens of Marlow's personal frame of mind.This is the argument I will make in the term paper I need to write between today and tomorrow.Does anyone have thoughts or comments they would care to share with me? I have provided my email address, and I would appreciate it if you would try to contact me with any of your insights, since I will probably not have time to come back to this forum until after my term paper is graded. (But, I check my email every day.); )
Posted By Vid at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
Can anyone help?
I admit that at my first attempt to read this book, I was completly confused by it, and had the most difficult time figuring out what the heck was going on and what was suppose to be happening, I think I only got to maybe the 3rd chapter before I was just like forget it and stopped reading, but I have been considering trying again. Though sometimes I wonder if I will regeret that choice. But well the things that had the most difficulty with initially, was first, tracking the story, as it seemed to be jumping all over the place, and I could not figure out what was happening now, what already happerend, and just what was going on. And this kept bugging me, but is Lord Jim suppose to be African American, or White? I could never figure that one out and kept going back and forth between the two.
Posted By Dark Muse at Thu 31 Jan 2008, 3:15 PM in Lord Jim 10 Replies
Lord Jim
I read this book in my A.P. English class. We as a class felt that Conrad used way too much imagery and the detail went on and on. Jim is beyond flawed. Many of us felt he should have used the revolver on himself instead of the assassins. Jim just kept running from his fate, but in reality, Jim was running from himself. The readers know that he can not run from himself because he goes too.
Posted By Scott at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 1 Reply
Lord Jim
What was the name of the east asian island which differed by only one letter from the name of the boat that the hero deserts in a storm?
Posted By Helen at Thu 19 Dec 2002, 1:00 AM in Lord Jim 2 Replies
Victory?
I wonder whether this book is really to be read in as optimistic a light as that in which some of your contributors appear to have understood it? It seems to me that Conrad's novel is tragic in form, and that Jim is a flawed character, of the type which Aristotle famously defined as requisite to true tragedy. What is interesting about Jim is that the flaw, in his case, lies in his romantic idealism. He is, as the older, and more world-weary narrator emphasises, deeply romantic, highly imaginative, and extremely idealistic.The reader is given to understand that the narrator, at least, regards these qualities, on which so much store is sometimes set, as being of at least doubtful value. However natural they are to youth, they are, in themselves, not only an obstacle to a true understanding of the world, but treacherous to the exercise of practical virtue. Jim is inarticulate, self-obsessed, easily duped, and ultimately destroyed by his tendency to refer everything around him to the way in which he perceives himself. There is a tension in the book between the codes by which ordinary and unsung men live their lives of duty and self-sacrifice, and the ambitions of those who, in their own view at least, transcend the rules because they are born to a higher destiny. It seems to me that Conrad is sensitive to the strengths and limitations of both value systems, and that the current of the book takes the form of a debate in which the one is not necessarily preferred to the other.It seems to me too that those who want to see Jim's ultimate fate as a vindication of his honour need to think about the price that more than one other person in the book ends up having to pay for it.The moral may well be that romantic idealists are dangerous to themselves, and to those around them - a view that those raised on the virtues propounded by the Hollywood school of heroism may find hard to accept, but which those who have lived life in dangerous trades - and CXIX sea-faring was such a trade - may well regard as all but self-evident. A bit of decency, humility and respect for others is perhaps the best we can really hope for in life - the tragedy is that the practice of these virtues is very much more difficult than at first appears.
Posted By John Clay at Wed 23 Jun 2004, 1:00 AM in Lord Jim 2 Replies
No Subject
I like the character of Lord Jim because he is brave, idealist and a romantic. He dies for his ideals.
Posted By abdul at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
Lord Jim
I've been listening to Lord Jim on tape--quite a challenge. I agree that the book does start out strange and frustrating but grows more tractable and even memorable as it develops. Sometimes doing other things while listening to it distracts from significant details and profound insights. I am sorry for this but, nevertheless, glad for what I am gleaning from the book: thought-provoking glimpses into the contradictory realities of human nature.
Posted By Laura at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
No Subject
I have tried to read this books several times when I was younger, but I could not finished it. The subject of the book, about a man that has loose his honnor by an accident, is something that atract young people, because at this age all of us want to prove that we are a hero and not a coward. But the fact that sometimes the net of fate could come and destroy all of our dreams is something really scary. I have to face some shipwrecks on my life to turn my attention to this book again, but I had to begin with Heart of Darkness and Amy Foster. The first one is smaller in the number of pages (not in substance), and the follow is for a best start point. Both inspired good movies what could bring the subject more atractive. Well, Lord Jim is my lasting temptation, and I am trying to read it now. Although it has a good movie version, with Peter O Toole, that is for me one of his best acting, it is very difficult to find it on VCR format. I wish to watch it again to remind my first impression, that influence all my life. I promise that when I get the end of this word-by-word well-written book, I will come back again and will show you all my view.
Posted By Luis Cesar Nunes at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
Where is Patusan
Is Patusan even a real place? Was it ever a real place? I know sometimes Conrad changes names for the story's sake. Is this one of those times? I can not find it in Encarta Virtual Globe, which will list almost any little island, town, or provice that exists.if you can help, please email me.thanks
Posted By colmac at Sat 13 Sep 2003, 1:00 AM in Lord Jim 6 Replies
patna+ us. general...
i ve read some comments, and noticed that some said the island patusan differed from the name of the ship, the Patna, only by 2 letters.and have you also noticed that these letters form the word "us"?surely a reference to Jim, who is described by Marlow, the narrator, as "one of us".can we suppose it s to make the reader think that even if jim goes far away in a remote island, he s still one of the seamen? (or one of the Men, simply?)and this would contradict the verdict in court, which deprives jim from his seaman certificate.i d like to have some discussions about the book. don t hesitate to email me!!greetings from france!
Posted By jose, france at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
the complications
Two of the most difficult aspects of this novel are Conrad's use of narrations within narrations and his refusal to tell the story in a linear fashion. Reading the first third of the book, it is difficult to understand who is telling the story, and what part of the story is being told at the time - to the point that it seems more like a random conglomeration of unrelated events than a story. (especially if one misses subtle cues like Marlow speaking to the dinner guests and lighting his cigar, or the nest of quotation marks that are found around 99.96% of the paragraphs.)It is my belief that this is deliberate, and serves the purpose of taking the emphasis of the book off of the plot and events in Jim's life, and focusing attention on the roundness and complexity of Jim as a human character. Furthermore, by making use of well characterized narrators with whom we can relate to, Conrad causes readers to accept the judgements made about Jim by certain narrators as the readers' own judgements. This is especially evident in the case of Marlow, the principal narrator, who offers all of his thoughts and feelings about Jim to his audience alongside the facts of Jim's life. In effect, the reader is made to view Jim through the lens of Marlow's personal frame of mind.This is the argument I will make in the term paper I need to write between today and tomorrow.Does anyone have thoughts or comments they would care to share with me? I have provided my email address, and I would appreciate it if you would try to contact me with any of your insights, since I will probably not have time to come back to this forum until after my term paper is graded. (But, I check my email every day.); )
Posted By Vid at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Lord Jim 0 Replies
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Can the subaltern speak.....Spivak
Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"--originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)--perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is "post-colonialism" a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that "postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss" (Ashcroft. et al 28). In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that doesn't account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Self/ other..........Fanon
Self / Other
Fanon, Frantz. "The Negro and Recognition." chapter 7 from Black Skin White Masks. Trans.
"I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.
In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation.
The Negro wants to be like the master.
Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.
In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.
Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object."
Fanon, footnote: 220-21
I would like to take issue with Fanon's application of Hegel's master / bondsman relationship and his conclusion that it is non-representational of the master / slave relationship found in the United States in the mid- to late 1800s and early to mid- 1900s.
Fanon's first statement in deriving his conclusion is the quotation above, "For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work." Hegel's philosophy and ideas of "differentiated spirit" and "undifferentiated spirit" would suggest that for Hegel, reciprocity is not necessarily what one self (i.e., the master) gives another self (the slave); it is, rather, that the consciousness (say, of the slave, who Hegel seems to maintain would be more likely to recognize and fulfill her own self-consciousness) recognizes itself (also the slave-self) in the other (the master), and having recognized this consciousness of self in other, it must then destroy self (as slave) in order to have real self-consciousness or to experience objective truth.
Hegel seems not to identify the self with the body or with consciousness as Fanon does. Indeed, neither body nor mind, self nor consciousness seem to be exactly equal to life for Hegel, which he reminds us here, is the existent object, inasmuch as this discussion holds. Continuing this line of reasoning, I would state that, if life is object, consciousness must be subject, and self-consciousness may be viewed as one subject position (the most aware one attainable--one that sees itself in every other).
It may be helpful to examine Fanon's next points in turn: "In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation." The slave has a greater risk of losing life (the object), Hegel says, and is therefore, by necessity, more concerned with it. The slave begins to identify the totality of self with life, thereby reducing consciousness to the mere fact of day-to-day survival. It is by deconstructing the self that the slave may then begin to construct, through recognition, the other and the negation of the other within himself (or the death of self in self) that precedes self-consciousness.
"The Negro wants to be like the master." There is no substantiation for this claim. I would maintain that the opposite is true, except perhaps in the sense that all life "aspires" to be at the top of the food / production chain. Again, there is self and other in every self; of course, there is a part of the slave who wants "to be like the master." I believe that Hegel would assert that there is also a part of the slave with which the master identifies: it is the fear of seeing this self in the other that necessitates sublimation, especially as it affects the ability of the master to see objective truth. It is, however, the recognition of this other in self that prompts the slave to become self-conscious in a way that the master may not. "Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave." Again, the slave cannot become independent without recognizing self in the master. The slave of the early United States was no more or less independent that Hegel's bondsman.
"In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object." Again, Fanon is confusing what Hegel seems to define as the existent object in this discussion: life. I would argue that, given this definition for object rather than the one of the fetters or work that Fanon appears to be using, he would agree that the early American slaves certainly turned toward life: the objective truth for a slave is her life and her freedom to live it outside of chains. If slaves had abandoned the object as Fanon contends, there would have been a genocide by suicide or an unconditional acceptance of slavery and the agreed belief that self did not deserve to be recognized. Nowhere in our brief American history has this proven to be the case, especially with the slaves of African descent about whom Fanon is writing.
Fanon also makes a jump that the entire chain of master / slave dialectic is in the past: a dangerous assumption for anyone attempting to understand the condition of the African-American in the United States only a few over a hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The dialectic must be seen as ongoing until its resolution is complete: the recognition of self in other and the reciprocal recognition that may eventually flower into an awareness of consciousness that exceeds the boundaries of life or self.
Fanon, Frantz. "The Negro and Recognition." chapter 7 from Black Skin White Masks. Trans.
"I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.
In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation.
The Negro wants to be like the master.
Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.
In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.
Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object."
Fanon, footnote: 220-21
I would like to take issue with Fanon's application of Hegel's master / bondsman relationship and his conclusion that it is non-representational of the master / slave relationship found in the United States in the mid- to late 1800s and early to mid- 1900s.
Fanon's first statement in deriving his conclusion is the quotation above, "For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work." Hegel's philosophy and ideas of "differentiated spirit" and "undifferentiated spirit" would suggest that for Hegel, reciprocity is not necessarily what one self (i.e., the master) gives another self (the slave); it is, rather, that the consciousness (say, of the slave, who Hegel seems to maintain would be more likely to recognize and fulfill her own self-consciousness) recognizes itself (also the slave-self) in the other (the master), and having recognized this consciousness of self in other, it must then destroy self (as slave) in order to have real self-consciousness or to experience objective truth.
Hegel seems not to identify the self with the body or with consciousness as Fanon does. Indeed, neither body nor mind, self nor consciousness seem to be exactly equal to life for Hegel, which he reminds us here, is the existent object, inasmuch as this discussion holds. Continuing this line of reasoning, I would state that, if life is object, consciousness must be subject, and self-consciousness may be viewed as one subject position (the most aware one attainable--one that sees itself in every other).
It may be helpful to examine Fanon's next points in turn: "In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation." The slave has a greater risk of losing life (the object), Hegel says, and is therefore, by necessity, more concerned with it. The slave begins to identify the totality of self with life, thereby reducing consciousness to the mere fact of day-to-day survival. It is by deconstructing the self that the slave may then begin to construct, through recognition, the other and the negation of the other within himself (or the death of self in self) that precedes self-consciousness.
"The Negro wants to be like the master." There is no substantiation for this claim. I would maintain that the opposite is true, except perhaps in the sense that all life "aspires" to be at the top of the food / production chain. Again, there is self and other in every self; of course, there is a part of the slave who wants "to be like the master." I believe that Hegel would assert that there is also a part of the slave with which the master identifies: it is the fear of seeing this self in the other that necessitates sublimation, especially as it affects the ability of the master to see objective truth. It is, however, the recognition of this other in self that prompts the slave to become self-conscious in a way that the master may not. "Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave." Again, the slave cannot become independent without recognizing self in the master. The slave of the early United States was no more or less independent that Hegel's bondsman.
"In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object." Again, Fanon is confusing what Hegel seems to define as the existent object in this discussion: life. I would argue that, given this definition for object rather than the one of the fetters or work that Fanon appears to be using, he would agree that the early American slaves certainly turned toward life: the objective truth for a slave is her life and her freedom to live it outside of chains. If slaves had abandoned the object as Fanon contends, there would have been a genocide by suicide or an unconditional acceptance of slavery and the agreed belief that self did not deserve to be recognized. Nowhere in our brief American history has this proven to be the case, especially with the slaves of African descent about whom Fanon is writing.
Fanon also makes a jump that the entire chain of master / slave dialectic is in the past: a dangerous assumption for anyone attempting to understand the condition of the African-American in the United States only a few over a hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The dialectic must be seen as ongoing until its resolution is complete: the recognition of self in other and the reciprocal recognition that may eventually flower into an awareness of consciousness that exceeds the boundaries of life or self.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity......Franz Fanon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Robinson Crusoe set foot on the island and declared it his own, a new page was inscribed in the history of colonialism. The shipwreck becomes a historical moment in this history. Defoe is able to create a textual plantation with the undaunted Robinson at its center, involved in a double (d) divine action of invention and original self-invention. The footprint, however, will unsettle his undisturbed tranquility, and fear enters the stage. Neither the bible nor his guns will bring him peace. Crusoe will undergo the painful experience of recurrent traumatic nightmares before the event. The silence is broken. The Other has already inhabited the Self prior to the uncanny encounter: anxiety invades the body and mind of the stranded hero. The "textual empire" is shaken by the unknown: "The island is full of noises." The captured absent/present utterances are therefore unbounded; authority is de-authorized (is it?), and writing hybridized.
What is hybridization?, Bakhtin asks:
It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consiousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. (358)
When on a certain Friday, the encounter actually happens, Crusoe will demonstrate to the highest degree of perfection the noble qualities of an English tradesman-Gentleman: those of making and self-making, prowess and determination. Driven by an instinctive sense of a charitable concern for the meek, he rescues a young criolos cannibal from being devoured by other cannibals. Faithful to the already-established Spanish tradition, he names him Friday, teaches him English, the words of God, and above all, the basics of humanity; in other words, he has driven him out of utter darkness to an overwhelming whitening light.
Under these conditions, however, Crusoe paradoxically is more isolated than ever since the words he hears are his words --the very words he wanted Friday to say, to repeat. Crusoe is blinded by his narcissism. He seems, Brantlinger states, "almost to will his isolation, and to cling to it even when it is being invaded" (Brantlinger 3). Friday does not exist. Friday is a lie, an illusion created by a mad masterly imagination. He is an ever incomplete, insubstantial image, a mere inorganic shadow, a dark spot on the ground, an image. Friday is filling an empty space cynically prepared and strategically organized by the colonizer as a speaking subject. The mirror-image that Friday is striving to see reflected will be a distorted one, a neither-nor : one that is ambivalent, doubled. "It was one of the tragedies of slavery and of the conditions under which creolization had to take place," Kamau Brathwaite states,
that it should have produced this kind of mimicry; should have procduced such "mimic-men." But in the circumstances this was the only kind of white imitation that would have been accepted, given the terms in which the slaves were seen .
Nevertheless, some postcolonial critics argue that it is precisely this kind of mimicry that disrupts the colonial discourse by doubling it. For them, the simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity. Hence, today, the term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent conceptual leitmotivs in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer's ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized Other.
Along with Tom Nairn, Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are
the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book.They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differnces which emerge in the colonial discource as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.
His analysis, which is largely based on the Lacanian conceptualization of mimicry as camouflage focuses on colonial ambivalence. On the one hand, he sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge " (Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance; that, while it is aware of its ephemerality, it is also anxious to create the means that guarantee its economic, political and cultural endurance, through the conception, in Macaulay's words in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835),"of a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect"--that is through the reformation of that category of people referred to by Frantz Fanon in the phrase, "black skin/white masks," or as "mimic men" by V.S.Naipaul.
On the other hand, Bhabha immediately diverts his pertinent analysis by shifting the superlative certainty of the colonizer and the strategic effectiveness of his political intentions into an alarming uncertainty. Macaulay's Indian interpreters along with Naipaul's mimic men, he asserts, by the very fact that they are authorized versions of otherness, "part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire, end up emerging as inappropriate colonial subjects...[who], by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence (88), de-stabilize the colonial subjectivity, unsettle its authoritative centrality, and corrupt its discursive purity. Actually, he adds, mimicry repeats rather than re-presents....(author's emphases ), and in that very act of repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centred. What is left, according to Bhabha, is the trace, the impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the slippages in colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself more in the form of a "menace " than "resemblance"; more in the form of a rupture than consolidation.
Hybridity, Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the very entry of the formerly-excluded subjects into the mainstream discourse. The dominant culture is contaminated by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self. Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabha's interpretation, as a counter-narrative, a critique of the canon and its exclusion of other narratives. In other words, the hybridity-acclaimers want to suggest first, that the colonialist discourse's ambivalence is a conspicuous illustration of its uncertainty; and second, that the migration of yesterday's "savages" from their peripheral spaces to the homes of their "masters" underlies a blessing invasion that, by "Third-Worlding"the center, creates "fissures" within the very structures that sustain it
When Robinson Crusoe set foot on the island and declared it his own, a new page was inscribed in the history of colonialism. The shipwreck becomes a historical moment in this history. Defoe is able to create a textual plantation with the undaunted Robinson at its center, involved in a double (d) divine action of invention and original self-invention. The footprint, however, will unsettle his undisturbed tranquility, and fear enters the stage. Neither the bible nor his guns will bring him peace. Crusoe will undergo the painful experience of recurrent traumatic nightmares before the event. The silence is broken. The Other has already inhabited the Self prior to the uncanny encounter: anxiety invades the body and mind of the stranded hero. The "textual empire" is shaken by the unknown: "The island is full of noises." The captured absent/present utterances are therefore unbounded; authority is de-authorized (is it?), and writing hybridized.
What is hybridization?, Bakhtin asks:
It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consiousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. (358)
When on a certain Friday, the encounter actually happens, Crusoe will demonstrate to the highest degree of perfection the noble qualities of an English tradesman-Gentleman: those of making and self-making, prowess and determination. Driven by an instinctive sense of a charitable concern for the meek, he rescues a young criolos cannibal from being devoured by other cannibals. Faithful to the already-established Spanish tradition, he names him Friday, teaches him English, the words of God, and above all, the basics of humanity; in other words, he has driven him out of utter darkness to an overwhelming whitening light.
Under these conditions, however, Crusoe paradoxically is more isolated than ever since the words he hears are his words --the very words he wanted Friday to say, to repeat. Crusoe is blinded by his narcissism. He seems, Brantlinger states, "almost to will his isolation, and to cling to it even when it is being invaded" (Brantlinger 3). Friday does not exist. Friday is a lie, an illusion created by a mad masterly imagination. He is an ever incomplete, insubstantial image, a mere inorganic shadow, a dark spot on the ground, an image. Friday is filling an empty space cynically prepared and strategically organized by the colonizer as a speaking subject. The mirror-image that Friday is striving to see reflected will be a distorted one, a neither-nor : one that is ambivalent, doubled. "It was one of the tragedies of slavery and of the conditions under which creolization had to take place," Kamau Brathwaite states,
that it should have produced this kind of mimicry; should have procduced such "mimic-men." But in the circumstances this was the only kind of white imitation that would have been accepted, given the terms in which the slaves were seen .
Nevertheless, some postcolonial critics argue that it is precisely this kind of mimicry that disrupts the colonial discourse by doubling it. For them, the simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity. Hence, today, the term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent conceptual leitmotivs in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer's ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized Other.
Along with Tom Nairn, Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are
the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book.They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differnces which emerge in the colonial discource as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.
His analysis, which is largely based on the Lacanian conceptualization of mimicry as camouflage focuses on colonial ambivalence. On the one hand, he sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge " (Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance; that, while it is aware of its ephemerality, it is also anxious to create the means that guarantee its economic, political and cultural endurance, through the conception, in Macaulay's words in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835),"of a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect"--that is through the reformation of that category of people referred to by Frantz Fanon in the phrase, "black skin/white masks," or as "mimic men" by V.S.Naipaul.
On the other hand, Bhabha immediately diverts his pertinent analysis by shifting the superlative certainty of the colonizer and the strategic effectiveness of his political intentions into an alarming uncertainty. Macaulay's Indian interpreters along with Naipaul's mimic men, he asserts, by the very fact that they are authorized versions of otherness, "part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire, end up emerging as inappropriate colonial subjects...[who], by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence (88), de-stabilize the colonial subjectivity, unsettle its authoritative centrality, and corrupt its discursive purity. Actually, he adds, mimicry repeats rather than re-presents....(author's emphases ), and in that very act of repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centred. What is left, according to Bhabha, is the trace, the impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the slippages in colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself more in the form of a "menace " than "resemblance"; more in the form of a rupture than consolidation.
Hybridity, Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the very entry of the formerly-excluded subjects into the mainstream discourse. The dominant culture is contaminated by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self. Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabha's interpretation, as a counter-narrative, a critique of the canon and its exclusion of other narratives. In other words, the hybridity-acclaimers want to suggest first, that the colonialist discourse's ambivalence is a conspicuous illustration of its uncertainty; and second, that the migration of yesterday's "savages" from their peripheral spaces to the homes of their "masters" underlies a blessing invasion that, by "Third-Worlding"the center, creates "fissures" within the very structures that sustain it
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Robinson Crusoe set foot on the island and declared it his own, a new page was inscribed in the history of colonialism. The shipwreck becomes a historical moment in this history. Defoe is able to create a textual plantation with the undaunted Robinson at its center, involved in a double (d) divine action of invention and original self-invention. The footprint, however, will unsettle his undisturbed tranquility, and fear enters the stage. Neither the bible nor his guns will bring him peace. Crusoe will undergo the painful experience of recurrent traumatic nightmares before the event. The silence is broken. The Other has already inhabited the Self prior to the uncanny encounter: anxiety invades the body and mind of the stranded hero. The "textual empire" is shaken by the unknown: "The island is full of noises." The captured absent/present utterances are therefore unbounded; authority is de-authorized (is it?), and writing hybridized.
What is hybridization?, Bakhtin asks:
It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consiousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. (358)
When on a certain Friday, the encounter actually happens, Crusoe will demonstrate to the highest degree of perfection the noble qualities of an English tradesman-Gentleman: those of making and self-making, prowess and determination. Driven by an instinctive sense of a charitable concern for the meek, he rescues a young criolos cannibal from being devoured by other cannibals. Faithful to the already-established Spanish tradition, he names him Friday, teaches him English, the words of God, and above all, the basics of humanity; in other words, he has driven him out of utter darkness to an overwhelming whitening light.
Under these conditions, however, Crusoe paradoxically is more isolated than ever since the words he hears are his words --the very words he wanted Friday to say, to repeat. Crusoe is blinded by his narcissism. He seems, Brantlinger states, "almost to will his isolation, and to cling to it even when it is being invaded" (Brantlinger 3). Friday does not exist. Friday is a lie, an illusion created by a mad masterly imagination. He is an ever incomplete, insubstantial image, a mere inorganic shadow, a dark spot on the ground, an image. Friday is filling an empty space cynically prepared and strategically organized by the colonizer as a speaking subject. The mirror-image that Friday is striving to see reflected will be a distorted one, a neither-nor : one that is ambivalent, doubled. "It was one of the tragedies of slavery and of the conditions under which creolization had to take place," Kamau Brathwaite states,
that it should have produced this kind of mimicry; should have procduced such "mimic-men." But in the circumstances this was the only kind of white imitation that would have been accepted, given the terms in which the slaves were seen .
Nevertheless, some postcolonial critics argue that it is precisely this kind of mimicry that disrupts the colonial discourse by doubling it. For them, the simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity. Hence, today, the term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent conceptual leitmotivs in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer's ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized Other.
Along with Tom Nairn, Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are
the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book.They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differnces which emerge in the colonial discource as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.
His analysis, which is largely based on the Lacanian conceptualization of mimicry as camouflage focuses on colonial ambivalence. On the one hand, he sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge " (Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance; that, while it is aware of its ephemerality, it is also anxious to create the means that guarantee its economic, political and cultural endurance, through the conception, in Macaulay's words in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835),"of a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect"--that is through the reformation of that category of people referred to by Frantz Fanon in the phrase, "black skin/white masks," or as "mimic men" by V.S.Naipaul.
On the other hand, Bhabha immediately diverts his pertinent analysis by shifting the superlative certainty of the colonizer and the strategic effectiveness of his political intentions into an alarming uncertainty. Macaulay's Indian interpreters along with Naipaul's mimic men, he asserts, by the very fact that they are authorized versions of otherness, "part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire, end up emerging as inappropriate colonial subjects...[who], by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence (88), de-stabilize the colonial subjectivity, unsettle its authoritative centrality, and corrupt its discursive purity. Actually, he adds, mimicry repeats rather than re-presents....(author's emphases ), and in that very act of repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centred. What is left, according to Bhabha, is the trace, the impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the slippages in colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself more in the form of a "menace " than "resemblance"; more in the form of a rupture than consolidation.
Hybridity, Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the very entry of the formerly-excluded subjects into the mainstream discourse. The dominant culture is contaminated by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self. Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabha's interpretation, as a counter-narrative, a critique of the canon and its exclusion of other narratives. In other words, the hybridity-acclaimers want to suggest first, that the colonialist discourse's ambivalence is a conspicuous illustration of its uncertainty; and second, that the migration of yesterday's "savages" from their peripheral spaces to the homes of their "masters" underlies a blessing invasion that, by "Third-Worlding"the center, creates "fissures" within the very structures that sustain it
When Robinson Crusoe set foot on the island and declared it his own, a new page was inscribed in the history of colonialism. The shipwreck becomes a historical moment in this history. Defoe is able to create a textual plantation with the undaunted Robinson at its center, involved in a double (d) divine action of invention and original self-invention. The footprint, however, will unsettle his undisturbed tranquility, and fear enters the stage. Neither the bible nor his guns will bring him peace. Crusoe will undergo the painful experience of recurrent traumatic nightmares before the event. The silence is broken. The Other has already inhabited the Self prior to the uncanny encounter: anxiety invades the body and mind of the stranded hero. The "textual empire" is shaken by the unknown: "The island is full of noises." The captured absent/present utterances are therefore unbounded; authority is de-authorized (is it?), and writing hybridized.
What is hybridization?, Bakhtin asks:
It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consiousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. (358)
When on a certain Friday, the encounter actually happens, Crusoe will demonstrate to the highest degree of perfection the noble qualities of an English tradesman-Gentleman: those of making and self-making, prowess and determination. Driven by an instinctive sense of a charitable concern for the meek, he rescues a young criolos cannibal from being devoured by other cannibals. Faithful to the already-established Spanish tradition, he names him Friday, teaches him English, the words of God, and above all, the basics of humanity; in other words, he has driven him out of utter darkness to an overwhelming whitening light.
Under these conditions, however, Crusoe paradoxically is more isolated than ever since the words he hears are his words --the very words he wanted Friday to say, to repeat. Crusoe is blinded by his narcissism. He seems, Brantlinger states, "almost to will his isolation, and to cling to it even when it is being invaded" (Brantlinger 3). Friday does not exist. Friday is a lie, an illusion created by a mad masterly imagination. He is an ever incomplete, insubstantial image, a mere inorganic shadow, a dark spot on the ground, an image. Friday is filling an empty space cynically prepared and strategically organized by the colonizer as a speaking subject. The mirror-image that Friday is striving to see reflected will be a distorted one, a neither-nor : one that is ambivalent, doubled. "It was one of the tragedies of slavery and of the conditions under which creolization had to take place," Kamau Brathwaite states,
that it should have produced this kind of mimicry; should have procduced such "mimic-men." But in the circumstances this was the only kind of white imitation that would have been accepted, given the terms in which the slaves were seen .
Nevertheless, some postcolonial critics argue that it is precisely this kind of mimicry that disrupts the colonial discourse by doubling it. For them, the simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity. Hence, today, the term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent conceptual leitmotivs in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer's ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized Other.
Along with Tom Nairn, Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are
the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book.They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differnces which emerge in the colonial discource as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.
His analysis, which is largely based on the Lacanian conceptualization of mimicry as camouflage focuses on colonial ambivalence. On the one hand, he sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge " (Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance; that, while it is aware of its ephemerality, it is also anxious to create the means that guarantee its economic, political and cultural endurance, through the conception, in Macaulay's words in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835),"of a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect"--that is through the reformation of that category of people referred to by Frantz Fanon in the phrase, "black skin/white masks," or as "mimic men" by V.S.Naipaul.
On the other hand, Bhabha immediately diverts his pertinent analysis by shifting the superlative certainty of the colonizer and the strategic effectiveness of his political intentions into an alarming uncertainty. Macaulay's Indian interpreters along with Naipaul's mimic men, he asserts, by the very fact that they are authorized versions of otherness, "part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire, end up emerging as inappropriate colonial subjects...[who], by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence (88), de-stabilize the colonial subjectivity, unsettle its authoritative centrality, and corrupt its discursive purity. Actually, he adds, mimicry repeats rather than re-presents....(author's emphases ), and in that very act of repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centred. What is left, according to Bhabha, is the trace, the impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the slippages in colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself more in the form of a "menace " than "resemblance"; more in the form of a rupture than consolidation.
Hybridity, Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the very entry of the formerly-excluded subjects into the mainstream discourse. The dominant culture is contaminated by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self. Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabha's interpretation, as a counter-narrative, a critique of the canon and its exclusion of other narratives. In other words, the hybridity-acclaimers want to suggest first, that the colonialist discourse's ambivalence is a conspicuous illustration of its uncertainty; and second, that the migration of yesterday's "savages" from their peripheral spaces to the homes of their "masters" underlies a blessing invasion that, by "Third-Worlding"the center, creates "fissures" within the very structures that sustain it
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Remembering Fanon by Homi Bhaba
Reviews of The Location of CultureBalachandra RajanModern Philology v.95, n4 (May, 1998):490-500. COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Chicago
Among postcolonial critics, Bhabha is the most articulate in showing how resistance develops within the interstices of a structure in which power should have erased the possibility of resistance. Hegemony is a desirable assumption for Bhabha because of the way in which it exposes itself. If the imperial poem writes itself fully, or is obliged to do so, it can only continue itself by being unwritten. Said can be imagined as bequeathing to us the author's triumph in a work of ironclad closure where the other's voice is predestined, even, in its protest. Bhabha can be seen as responding with tactics of ironic prying open, offering us not the death of the author but the confusion of authorship by agency. Others theorize resistance, but Bhabha's accomplishment is to have theorized it successfully under conditions designed to program even resistance.
Bhabha's subversive formulations--mimicry, sly civility, colonial nonsense, and above all, hybridity--have passed into the currency of postcolonial debate. These formulations find their location in the space that is left for theorizing between a Foucault assimilated to the gaze of the imperial panopticon and a Derrida given to the sly colonial retort. It would be idle to pretend that Bhabha's work does not participate in such retaliatory satisfactions. They are prominent in his appeal to the Asian reader. Nevertheless, Bhabha's formulations may succeed in surviving others because they are historically based as well as theoretically plausible.
Bhabha seems closer to suggesting that hybridity is the permanent subversion, that there will always be hybridity because there will always be a program, always an excess of the actual over the programmed, and always an indeterminate area of spillage and proliferation arising from the program and the excess. Hybridity is normal because resistance is unavoidable.
The self-and-other relationship, despite challenges to its analytical capability and finesse, remains the main instrument for anatomizing the imperial program. The program is now seen as elegantly self-undermining, as generating hybridity through its impassioned pursuit of purity. Because the other is the site of desire as well as of repudiation--as shown revealingly in the opening pages of Hegel's chapter on India in The Philosophy of History--a self and a nonself hermetically sealed off from each other belong to the aspirations of the imperial agenda rather than to the obduracies of its implementation. The weight of analysis can fall on that obduracy, on how it is to be contained and how it resists containment. For an imperial power, the practical problem is organizing the spillage and admitting only the agenda's minimal complication. In the diplomacy of the self-other relationship, negotiations can be envisaged in which the other is granted limited recognition, and a consular office is established on its psychological site.
Bhabha's view of hybridity undermines any such minimal complication. The leakages and reabsorptions he detects can combine in a double process of imitative resistance--the other's resistance as mimicry, and the self's resistance to its own act of polarization via the trace of the other which it cannot erase from itself. Indeterminacy is in the wings here. It can be argued that indeterminacy has been a problem insistently canvassed in literature, as imperialism turned the poetics of the long poem into politics. The long poem's passion for totalization and the resistance it generates to its own desire, its commitment to the whole and the separatist energy of its parts, the relation of agency to the admission of indeterminancy, the will to closure, and the space of deferral required in order for the will to write itself, are strikingly close to the list of contemporary theoretical issues that Bhabha offers in The Location of Culture.* Bhabha sees these issues as anticipated avant la lettre by "the encounters and meanings of differential meanings and values within 'colonial' textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices" (p. 173). To point out how the anticipation has been anticipated is not to diminish the force of Bhabha's argument; it is simply to draw attention to the strength and duration of the convergence between literary and political problematics.
*These characterizations are discussed at length in Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
Amrohini J. SahayCollege Literature v.23, n.1 (Feb, 1996):227-232.COPYRIGHT 1996 West Chester University
In defense of his supplementary readings of various texts of the colonial and (post)colonial however, Bhabha reminds us that such a theoretical model of (post)coloniality, which maintains a focus on the hybridization of discourse, locates a space of "empowerment" (40) and "resistance" for the "other" in allowing for "cultural difference" to emerge. Yet, his notion of empowerment and resistance, based on a politics of enunciation, substitutes an ethical empowerment -- the dominating is seen to be reciprocally dependent on (in "dialogue" with) the dominated and particularized resistances: the "spontaneous" and "immanent" resistances of "misreading" and "misappropriation" of the signs of the dominant -- for a political and economic empowerment through the praxis of collective resistance. In fact, such a radical understanding of empowerment and resistance is thoroughly occluded by the localized anti- global understanding of the dialectic between dominating and dominated which he supports. On the scene of this localized dialectic the materialist axis of the (social) difference-between the two opposed terms (not a pure" but a relational difference) is dissolved and, under the guise of textual self-reflexivity, is replaced by a (semiotic) difference- within. This deconstruction and making indeterminate of the difference- between dominating and dominated has the effect of rendering the exploitative practices of the dominant as themselves "undecidable" and thus unavailable as a theoretical "ground" for any "decided" collective resistance. The only option' under these "withinist" terms is to follow Bhabha and acknowledge that such decided resistance -- necessary for the revolutionary praxis of social transformation (not only subversion) of the dominant social relations -- should be abandoned in favor of a more "subtle" "meditative" approach which "reflects" upon the self-un-mastering of the discourses of the dominant class, race, gender, sexuality.
[...] Whereas [Judith] Butler arrives at this "agentless" (a-causal) "agency" through a re- reading of the discourses of feminism, Bhabha takes a different route by way of the ludic writings of Roland Barthes to derive his version, which is elaborated through the concept of the "time lag" (180-187). "Time-lag," for Bhabha, signals "a contingent moment in the signification of closure" (183) -- a moment of delay, between the signifier and the signified which effects a space of relative autonomy for the cognitive maneuvers of the activist subject. This "indeterminate" moment in the process of signification, understood as "returning, the subject to the "present" of the symbolic in a new state of "control" and individual (private) "resignifying" agency, in turn mobilizes a politics, of the "contingent." The politics of the contingent, which reappears in the texts of Laclau, Mouffe, and other post-marxists, is a pretext for the move toward the abandonment of a determinate class politics and a theoretically principled practice and the shift to "cross-class" alliances / recognition of politics as a re-ordering of the symbolic and single issue "coalitions," which are claimed as the only "effective" mode of intervention.
Tim WoodsBritish Journal of Aesthetics v.35, n.3 (July, 1995):292-293.COPYRIGHT Oxford University Press (UK) 1995
This is in every respect a significant book which will have a profound impact upon the manner in which cultural practices are conceived. In a book which must rate as one of the principal texts of recent post- colonial theory, Homi Bhabha establishes the intellectual coherency and conceptual necessity for such a project. Always entertaining, witty and astute, Bhabha brings together a series of seminal and luminous essays in skilful and effortless explorations of a diverse variety of writers and issues. He provides interesting analyses of novelists such as Morrison, Gordimer, Walcott, Rushdie and Conrad, as well as analyses of documents and archives from the Indian Mutiny, discussions of nineteenth-century colonial history, Third World cinema, and post-modern space; all the while demonstrating an uncanny ease with the mobilization of a vast intellectual array of ideas and theorists such as Jameson, Fanon, Derrida and Lacan, in a sophisticated and sustained exploration of nationhood, national identity and social agency.
Bhabha's central preoccupation is the manner in which the European practice of cultural analysis hitherto has glossed over the ambivalence of the location of culture. His efforts are aimed at exploring how to articulate (indeed, whether one can articulate) this liminal space of marginality in cultural production. Constantly resorting to a rhetoric of repetition and superfluity, Bhabha aptly encapsulates in this style of linguistic 'hesitation' in finding the exact single word and expression, his sense of the multi-positionality and the multi-spatiality of cultural location. Bhabha argues for a theoretical position which escapes the polarities of East and West, Self and Other, Master and Slave, a position 'which overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics' (25). Bhabha demonstrates the cultural and social necessity of striving for a discursive difference in politics -- a negotiation not a negation -- which opens up the possibility of articulating the antagonistic and contradictory elements of hybrid sites, rather than having them destroyed by 'practical-political reason'.
This book rightly situates race and national identity in the foreground of contemporary debate. The lexicon which Bhabha cumulatively constructs -- subaltern, diaspora, hybridity, liminality, mimicry -- insistently returns the reader to the crucial issues of how one can speak about another culture, how one can speak of the outside from the inside: 'How is historical agency enacted in the slenderness of narrative? How do we historicize the event of the dehistoricized? If, as they say, the past is a foreign country, then what does it mean to encounter a past that is your own country reterritorialized, even terrorized by another?' (198). Never simplifying or compromising the complexity of the problems which it tackles, this work aims to resituate the analyst of cultural production, opening up a new space and a new time of critical enunciation: 'The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization. . . . producing other spaces of subaltern signification' (162). It is from this position of in-betweenness that Bhabha suggests the most interrogative forms of culture are produced, situated as they are at the disjunctions, cleavages and fissures of class, race, gender, nation, and location. Bhabha encourages one to perceive and hold this irresolvable, borderline, interstitial culture organized within this temporal and spatial dislocation, which is at once 'the time of cultural displacement, and the space of the "untranslatable"' (225). From this perspective, Bhabha urges the re-evaluation of the whole of western modernity and (post)-modernity, as constructions of a culture blind to the very power structures located within its mechanisms of cultural hegemony.
Bhabha's book divulges incisive thought, provocative ideas and exciting illumination on every page. It establishes him as one of the preeminent post-colonial theorists; and it takes cultural criticism into crucially new and important areas of exploration and debate.
Marjorie PerloffCultural Liminality / Aesthetic Closure?: The "Interstitial Perspective" of Homi Bhabha
Lawrence A. PhillipsLost in space: siting/citing the in-between of Homi K Bhabha's The location of culture
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Overviews
Nigel Gibson. "Thoughts about doing Fanonism in the 1990s." College Literature v.26, n.2 (Spring, 1999):96-97. COPYRIGHT 1999 West Chester University
[...]
III
There is no doubt that Homi Bhabha's intervention into postcolonialism and invention of a new Fanon have re-vamped the status of Frantz Fanon in the academy and opened up whole new areas of study. Bhabha's reading of Fanon was exciting, suggestive, even brilliant. However, while few have extended his Lacanian insights, most have been quite willing to rehash them. The result has been clever readings which privilege psychoanalytic moves and points of ambivalence, but which have in the main produced a very one-sided Fanon.
[...]
XI
In Bhabha's reading, the new man and new woman, fashioned in and from the revolutionary situation, are lost, forgotten, or mocked as utopian and uninteresting conceptions. All references to humanism, to revolution, to Hegel, to Marx, and to Sartre -- to Fanon's "yearning" for total transformation of society -- are lumped together as "banal." Despite Bhabha's own intention, as a critic within the left -- at least in the "state of emergence/emergency" of the Britain mired in urban revolts of the early 1980s -- to weave a new understanding of politics and agency, his privileging of the politics of subversion as being more revolutionary than the politics of revolution has resulted in a domesticated Fanon. A Fanon of "ambivalence," not "trying to transcend or sublate," proclaims Hall (1996, 27). Quite the opposite of Fanon's haunting demand for liberation "from an alienation which for centuries has made it the great absentee of History" (Fanon 1959, 89; quoted in Sekyi-Otu 1996, 39).
Bhabha's answer to "Why Fanon today" centers on a rhetorical analysis of "Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness" in The Wretched. Bhabha rightly notes how "the emergence of the (insurgent everyday) . . . [is] associated with political subjects who are somehow outside the 'official' discourses of the nationalist struggle" (1996, 188). Such an unofficial lived experience of the "day to day" is central to what Bhabha calls Fanon's most "fundamental" statement on ethics, namely, that "the thing which has been colonized becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself." Though Bhabha insists that we "need to grasp the dialectic in 'rapid transience' as it is forming in the process of historical becoming itself" (1996, 190), he provides no insight into such historical becoming. Instead, he asserts that we must "begin at the other end," that is, with today's post-colonial and post-cold war "interethnic unrest" (1996, 190-91). This move to the "other end" nearly elides the process of historical becoming that colored the anti-colonial movements. I do not mean to dismiss the problematic of today's "inter-ethnic unrest," but rather to situate it in the context of the failure of the historical becoming of African liberation. By placing the "other end" on top of the revolutionary day to day, Bhabha almost makes "inter-ethnic unrest" inevitable. Moreover, he doesn't follow upon the disjunction introduced between the native's historical becoming, of the native "living inside of history," and the native as an object of ethnic cleansing. Instead, he shifts gears into a more highly theoretical discussion of Derrida's "new internationalism -- in the age of migration, minorities, the diasporic, displaced 'national' populations, refugees" (Bhabha 1996, 191) -- which leaves virtually no trace of Fanon: the mass of displaced suffering refugee humanity takes the place of the mass movement.
Bhabha celebrates spontaneity without ever engaging Fanon's critique of its weaknesses. Such an engagement at least might have led Bhabha to a critique of the manichean ethnic politics embedded within spontaneity. Such historical contextualization brings Bhabha's overly psychologized analysis into immediate relief, or more precisely, what he calls the "psychic anxiety at the heart of national-cultural identification" (1996, 191). The "other end" therefore is grounded in what Freud called the "narcissism of minor differences" that almost inevitably leads to a pessimistic politics. But the basis for this anxiety has more to do with post-colonial socioeconomic and political realities -- informed by the World Bank, IMF, international aid communities -than with a "space informed by the unconscious" (Bhabha 1996, 192). [...]
XIII
One perhaps unintended consequence of Homi Bhabha's re-membering Fanon is, in my mind, a dismemberment that results in a Fanon rooted in Lacan against Hegel; in a post-modernist fragmentation against Marxism; in a self-limiting revolution against "revolution in permanence." Rather than "grasping the dialectic in 'rapid transience': as it is forming in the process of historical becoming itself," as Bhabha puts it, such an unchained dialectic of historical becoming is finally elided by the Critical Fanonists as the psychoanalytic becomes the master narrative. The challenge of Fanon -- that "each generation must . . . discover its mission, or betray it" (1968, 206) -- becomes a giddy angst about the subject position of the intellectual. "Fanon" has no resonance, no echo, and no affect. In the end, cultural analyses, however nuanced, take place against Fanon's announced political project of Black Skin and The Wretched. At best Critical Fanonism becomes ideological critique. The power of ideas that Fanon found so terribly important is quite simply replaced by analysis of the power of ruling ideology. Critical Fanonism's methodology is already intimated by Fanon:
The culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of particularisms. . . . He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion. (Fanon 1968, 223-24; my emphasis)WORKS CITED
Bhabha, Homi. 1986. Remembering Fanon. Introduction to the English edition of Black skin white mask. London: Pluto Press.
-----. 1996. Day by day . . . with Frantz Fanon. In The fact of blackness, ed. Alan Read, 186-205. Seattle: Bay Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The wretched of the earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove.
Benjamin GravesHomi K. Bhabha: an OverviewA brief set of introductions and comments on Bhabha's work by Brown University student Benjamin Graves.
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Interviews
Rethinking experience of countries with colonial past from The University of Chicago Chronicle
Translator translated: W.J.T. Mitchell interviews Homi Bhabha from Artforum
Steve Rhodes: "And now a few words on behalf of the worst writer in Chicago" from Chicago Magazine
Among postcolonial critics, Bhabha is the most articulate in showing how resistance develops within the interstices of a structure in which power should have erased the possibility of resistance. Hegemony is a desirable assumption for Bhabha because of the way in which it exposes itself. If the imperial poem writes itself fully, or is obliged to do so, it can only continue itself by being unwritten. Said can be imagined as bequeathing to us the author's triumph in a work of ironclad closure where the other's voice is predestined, even, in its protest. Bhabha can be seen as responding with tactics of ironic prying open, offering us not the death of the author but the confusion of authorship by agency. Others theorize resistance, but Bhabha's accomplishment is to have theorized it successfully under conditions designed to program even resistance.
Bhabha's subversive formulations--mimicry, sly civility, colonial nonsense, and above all, hybridity--have passed into the currency of postcolonial debate. These formulations find their location in the space that is left for theorizing between a Foucault assimilated to the gaze of the imperial panopticon and a Derrida given to the sly colonial retort. It would be idle to pretend that Bhabha's work does not participate in such retaliatory satisfactions. They are prominent in his appeal to the Asian reader. Nevertheless, Bhabha's formulations may succeed in surviving others because they are historically based as well as theoretically plausible.
Bhabha seems closer to suggesting that hybridity is the permanent subversion, that there will always be hybridity because there will always be a program, always an excess of the actual over the programmed, and always an indeterminate area of spillage and proliferation arising from the program and the excess. Hybridity is normal because resistance is unavoidable.
The self-and-other relationship, despite challenges to its analytical capability and finesse, remains the main instrument for anatomizing the imperial program. The program is now seen as elegantly self-undermining, as generating hybridity through its impassioned pursuit of purity. Because the other is the site of desire as well as of repudiation--as shown revealingly in the opening pages of Hegel's chapter on India in The Philosophy of History--a self and a nonself hermetically sealed off from each other belong to the aspirations of the imperial agenda rather than to the obduracies of its implementation. The weight of analysis can fall on that obduracy, on how it is to be contained and how it resists containment. For an imperial power, the practical problem is organizing the spillage and admitting only the agenda's minimal complication. In the diplomacy of the self-other relationship, negotiations can be envisaged in which the other is granted limited recognition, and a consular office is established on its psychological site.
Bhabha's view of hybridity undermines any such minimal complication. The leakages and reabsorptions he detects can combine in a double process of imitative resistance--the other's resistance as mimicry, and the self's resistance to its own act of polarization via the trace of the other which it cannot erase from itself. Indeterminacy is in the wings here. It can be argued that indeterminacy has been a problem insistently canvassed in literature, as imperialism turned the poetics of the long poem into politics. The long poem's passion for totalization and the resistance it generates to its own desire, its commitment to the whole and the separatist energy of its parts, the relation of agency to the admission of indeterminancy, the will to closure, and the space of deferral required in order for the will to write itself, are strikingly close to the list of contemporary theoretical issues that Bhabha offers in The Location of Culture.* Bhabha sees these issues as anticipated avant la lettre by "the encounters and meanings of differential meanings and values within 'colonial' textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices" (p. 173). To point out how the anticipation has been anticipated is not to diminish the force of Bhabha's argument; it is simply to draw attention to the strength and duration of the convergence between literary and political problematics.
*These characterizations are discussed at length in Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
Amrohini J. SahayCollege Literature v.23, n.1 (Feb, 1996):227-232.COPYRIGHT 1996 West Chester University
In defense of his supplementary readings of various texts of the colonial and (post)colonial however, Bhabha reminds us that such a theoretical model of (post)coloniality, which maintains a focus on the hybridization of discourse, locates a space of "empowerment" (40) and "resistance" for the "other" in allowing for "cultural difference" to emerge. Yet, his notion of empowerment and resistance, based on a politics of enunciation, substitutes an ethical empowerment -- the dominating is seen to be reciprocally dependent on (in "dialogue" with) the dominated and particularized resistances: the "spontaneous" and "immanent" resistances of "misreading" and "misappropriation" of the signs of the dominant -- for a political and economic empowerment through the praxis of collective resistance. In fact, such a radical understanding of empowerment and resistance is thoroughly occluded by the localized anti- global understanding of the dialectic between dominating and dominated which he supports. On the scene of this localized dialectic the materialist axis of the (social) difference-between the two opposed terms (not a pure" but a relational difference) is dissolved and, under the guise of textual self-reflexivity, is replaced by a (semiotic) difference- within. This deconstruction and making indeterminate of the difference- between dominating and dominated has the effect of rendering the exploitative practices of the dominant as themselves "undecidable" and thus unavailable as a theoretical "ground" for any "decided" collective resistance. The only option' under these "withinist" terms is to follow Bhabha and acknowledge that such decided resistance -- necessary for the revolutionary praxis of social transformation (not only subversion) of the dominant social relations -- should be abandoned in favor of a more "subtle" "meditative" approach which "reflects" upon the self-un-mastering of the discourses of the dominant class, race, gender, sexuality.
[...] Whereas [Judith] Butler arrives at this "agentless" (a-causal) "agency" through a re- reading of the discourses of feminism, Bhabha takes a different route by way of the ludic writings of Roland Barthes to derive his version, which is elaborated through the concept of the "time lag" (180-187). "Time-lag," for Bhabha, signals "a contingent moment in the signification of closure" (183) -- a moment of delay, between the signifier and the signified which effects a space of relative autonomy for the cognitive maneuvers of the activist subject. This "indeterminate" moment in the process of signification, understood as "returning, the subject to the "present" of the symbolic in a new state of "control" and individual (private) "resignifying" agency, in turn mobilizes a politics, of the "contingent." The politics of the contingent, which reappears in the texts of Laclau, Mouffe, and other post-marxists, is a pretext for the move toward the abandonment of a determinate class politics and a theoretically principled practice and the shift to "cross-class" alliances / recognition of politics as a re-ordering of the symbolic and single issue "coalitions," which are claimed as the only "effective" mode of intervention.
Tim WoodsBritish Journal of Aesthetics v.35, n.3 (July, 1995):292-293.COPYRIGHT Oxford University Press (UK) 1995
This is in every respect a significant book which will have a profound impact upon the manner in which cultural practices are conceived. In a book which must rate as one of the principal texts of recent post- colonial theory, Homi Bhabha establishes the intellectual coherency and conceptual necessity for such a project. Always entertaining, witty and astute, Bhabha brings together a series of seminal and luminous essays in skilful and effortless explorations of a diverse variety of writers and issues. He provides interesting analyses of novelists such as Morrison, Gordimer, Walcott, Rushdie and Conrad, as well as analyses of documents and archives from the Indian Mutiny, discussions of nineteenth-century colonial history, Third World cinema, and post-modern space; all the while demonstrating an uncanny ease with the mobilization of a vast intellectual array of ideas and theorists such as Jameson, Fanon, Derrida and Lacan, in a sophisticated and sustained exploration of nationhood, national identity and social agency.
Bhabha's central preoccupation is the manner in which the European practice of cultural analysis hitherto has glossed over the ambivalence of the location of culture. His efforts are aimed at exploring how to articulate (indeed, whether one can articulate) this liminal space of marginality in cultural production. Constantly resorting to a rhetoric of repetition and superfluity, Bhabha aptly encapsulates in this style of linguistic 'hesitation' in finding the exact single word and expression, his sense of the multi-positionality and the multi-spatiality of cultural location. Bhabha argues for a theoretical position which escapes the polarities of East and West, Self and Other, Master and Slave, a position 'which overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics' (25). Bhabha demonstrates the cultural and social necessity of striving for a discursive difference in politics -- a negotiation not a negation -- which opens up the possibility of articulating the antagonistic and contradictory elements of hybrid sites, rather than having them destroyed by 'practical-political reason'.
This book rightly situates race and national identity in the foreground of contemporary debate. The lexicon which Bhabha cumulatively constructs -- subaltern, diaspora, hybridity, liminality, mimicry -- insistently returns the reader to the crucial issues of how one can speak about another culture, how one can speak of the outside from the inside: 'How is historical agency enacted in the slenderness of narrative? How do we historicize the event of the dehistoricized? If, as they say, the past is a foreign country, then what does it mean to encounter a past that is your own country reterritorialized, even terrorized by another?' (198). Never simplifying or compromising the complexity of the problems which it tackles, this work aims to resituate the analyst of cultural production, opening up a new space and a new time of critical enunciation: 'The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization. . . . producing other spaces of subaltern signification' (162). It is from this position of in-betweenness that Bhabha suggests the most interrogative forms of culture are produced, situated as they are at the disjunctions, cleavages and fissures of class, race, gender, nation, and location. Bhabha encourages one to perceive and hold this irresolvable, borderline, interstitial culture organized within this temporal and spatial dislocation, which is at once 'the time of cultural displacement, and the space of the "untranslatable"' (225). From this perspective, Bhabha urges the re-evaluation of the whole of western modernity and (post)-modernity, as constructions of a culture blind to the very power structures located within its mechanisms of cultural hegemony.
Bhabha's book divulges incisive thought, provocative ideas and exciting illumination on every page. It establishes him as one of the preeminent post-colonial theorists; and it takes cultural criticism into crucially new and important areas of exploration and debate.
Marjorie PerloffCultural Liminality / Aesthetic Closure?: The "Interstitial Perspective" of Homi Bhabha
Lawrence A. PhillipsLost in space: siting/citing the in-between of Homi K Bhabha's The location of culture
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Overviews
Nigel Gibson. "Thoughts about doing Fanonism in the 1990s." College Literature v.26, n.2 (Spring, 1999):96-97. COPYRIGHT 1999 West Chester University
[...]
III
There is no doubt that Homi Bhabha's intervention into postcolonialism and invention of a new Fanon have re-vamped the status of Frantz Fanon in the academy and opened up whole new areas of study. Bhabha's reading of Fanon was exciting, suggestive, even brilliant. However, while few have extended his Lacanian insights, most have been quite willing to rehash them. The result has been clever readings which privilege psychoanalytic moves and points of ambivalence, but which have in the main produced a very one-sided Fanon.
[...]
XI
In Bhabha's reading, the new man and new woman, fashioned in and from the revolutionary situation, are lost, forgotten, or mocked as utopian and uninteresting conceptions. All references to humanism, to revolution, to Hegel, to Marx, and to Sartre -- to Fanon's "yearning" for total transformation of society -- are lumped together as "banal." Despite Bhabha's own intention, as a critic within the left -- at least in the "state of emergence/emergency" of the Britain mired in urban revolts of the early 1980s -- to weave a new understanding of politics and agency, his privileging of the politics of subversion as being more revolutionary than the politics of revolution has resulted in a domesticated Fanon. A Fanon of "ambivalence," not "trying to transcend or sublate," proclaims Hall (1996, 27). Quite the opposite of Fanon's haunting demand for liberation "from an alienation which for centuries has made it the great absentee of History" (Fanon 1959, 89; quoted in Sekyi-Otu 1996, 39).
Bhabha's answer to "Why Fanon today" centers on a rhetorical analysis of "Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness" in The Wretched. Bhabha rightly notes how "the emergence of the (insurgent everyday) . . . [is] associated with political subjects who are somehow outside the 'official' discourses of the nationalist struggle" (1996, 188). Such an unofficial lived experience of the "day to day" is central to what Bhabha calls Fanon's most "fundamental" statement on ethics, namely, that "the thing which has been colonized becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself." Though Bhabha insists that we "need to grasp the dialectic in 'rapid transience' as it is forming in the process of historical becoming itself" (1996, 190), he provides no insight into such historical becoming. Instead, he asserts that we must "begin at the other end," that is, with today's post-colonial and post-cold war "interethnic unrest" (1996, 190-91). This move to the "other end" nearly elides the process of historical becoming that colored the anti-colonial movements. I do not mean to dismiss the problematic of today's "inter-ethnic unrest," but rather to situate it in the context of the failure of the historical becoming of African liberation. By placing the "other end" on top of the revolutionary day to day, Bhabha almost makes "inter-ethnic unrest" inevitable. Moreover, he doesn't follow upon the disjunction introduced between the native's historical becoming, of the native "living inside of history," and the native as an object of ethnic cleansing. Instead, he shifts gears into a more highly theoretical discussion of Derrida's "new internationalism -- in the age of migration, minorities, the diasporic, displaced 'national' populations, refugees" (Bhabha 1996, 191) -- which leaves virtually no trace of Fanon: the mass of displaced suffering refugee humanity takes the place of the mass movement.
Bhabha celebrates spontaneity without ever engaging Fanon's critique of its weaknesses. Such an engagement at least might have led Bhabha to a critique of the manichean ethnic politics embedded within spontaneity. Such historical contextualization brings Bhabha's overly psychologized analysis into immediate relief, or more precisely, what he calls the "psychic anxiety at the heart of national-cultural identification" (1996, 191). The "other end" therefore is grounded in what Freud called the "narcissism of minor differences" that almost inevitably leads to a pessimistic politics. But the basis for this anxiety has more to do with post-colonial socioeconomic and political realities -- informed by the World Bank, IMF, international aid communities -than with a "space informed by the unconscious" (Bhabha 1996, 192). [...]
XIII
One perhaps unintended consequence of Homi Bhabha's re-membering Fanon is, in my mind, a dismemberment that results in a Fanon rooted in Lacan against Hegel; in a post-modernist fragmentation against Marxism; in a self-limiting revolution against "revolution in permanence." Rather than "grasping the dialectic in 'rapid transience': as it is forming in the process of historical becoming itself," as Bhabha puts it, such an unchained dialectic of historical becoming is finally elided by the Critical Fanonists as the psychoanalytic becomes the master narrative. The challenge of Fanon -- that "each generation must . . . discover its mission, or betray it" (1968, 206) -- becomes a giddy angst about the subject position of the intellectual. "Fanon" has no resonance, no echo, and no affect. In the end, cultural analyses, however nuanced, take place against Fanon's announced political project of Black Skin and The Wretched. At best Critical Fanonism becomes ideological critique. The power of ideas that Fanon found so terribly important is quite simply replaced by analysis of the power of ruling ideology. Critical Fanonism's methodology is already intimated by Fanon:
The culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of particularisms. . . . He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion. (Fanon 1968, 223-24; my emphasis)WORKS CITED
Bhabha, Homi. 1986. Remembering Fanon. Introduction to the English edition of Black skin white mask. London: Pluto Press.
-----. 1996. Day by day . . . with Frantz Fanon. In The fact of blackness, ed. Alan Read, 186-205. Seattle: Bay Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The wretched of the earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove.
Benjamin GravesHomi K. Bhabha: an OverviewA brief set of introductions and comments on Bhabha's work by Brown University student Benjamin Graves.
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Interviews
Rethinking experience of countries with colonial past from The University of Chicago Chronicle
Translator translated: W.J.T. Mitchell interviews Homi Bhabha from Artforum
Steve Rhodes: "And now a few words on behalf of the worst writer in Chicago" from Chicago Magazine
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
"Orientalism," the evolution of a concept
In his much visited web site devoted to the Asian financial panic, economist Paul Krugman has said, "Anyone who claims to fully understand the economic disaster that has overtaken Asia proves, by that very certainty, that he does not know what he is talking about." And he adds the warning, "Nobody really knows what comes next."
Even if it is too early to be certain about the causes and the course of these momentous events, it is time enough to reconsider some of the things that were being said about the Asian economies when they were still flourishing. More particularly, it is already profitable to reconsider things that were being said, in the light of Asia's booming prosperity before July 1997, about Western economies, politics, values, and sciences. It is not just that so many people extrapolated adventurously and predicted that Asia, led by China or Japan, would soon eclipse the economies of America and Europe; people extrapolate wildly all the time. It is that so many drew the conclusions that Asia's prosperity disproved economic science, impugned Western democracy, cast doubt on rational policy-making and even on reason itself, and turned probity into a quaint curio.
These bold conclusions might have been drawn less readily if the ground had not been prepared by the academic doctrine, taught in all our universities for twenty years, that the West has always been wrong about Asia anyway. Its supposed knowledge of Asia, this doctrine maintained, was trumpery called "Orientalism", which was not, as it pretended, a body of objective learning but (in the words of Edward Said) "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient . . . a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. . . . European culture was able to manage - and even produce - the Orient."
Naturally, if our knowledge of Asia was really only a partisan delusion, a way of demeaning Asians' affairs to the level of a Chu Chin Chow pantomime, then we must fail to understand what was happening in their economies. If Asians were prospering mightily using methods all of their own devising, while Westerners wallowed in smug superiority, then it was inevitable that our students of Asia would find much to criticize at home. Even if they held no brief for Asian values, they were bound to take a swipe at Western values. They laid on with a will, as a few select quotations will illustrate.
Thus James Fallows in Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (1994) drew from the study of Asia the moral, "Western societies should concentrate on whether and how to remake themselves." They should start by remaking economic science:
The powers of 'quantitative analysis', as used by modern economists and managers, are enormous but nonetheless limited. . . . The economists of the 1990s cannot honestly fit the rise of Japan, Korea and Taiwan into their models of how economies should grow. . . . Economics gives us clear logical 'models' that are supposed to explain dealings among nations. History gives us different, more complicated lessons, which are more useful for understanding what is going on in Asia now.
What would replace Western economics was "a new paradigm", said John Naisbitt in Megatrends Asia: The Eight Asian Megatrends that are Reshaping Our World (1996). It consisted of the network of networks set up by the overseas Chinese, which constituted "the third largest economy in the world." Speaking of the businessmen who were later driven into exile from Indonesia after their homes were burned down, their wives and daughters raped, and their supermarkets looted, Naisbitt said a knowledge of their methods would be more useful than economic theory. Sterling Seagrove emphatically agreed in his Lords of the Rim: The Invisible Empire of the Overseas Chinese (1995). It was "the Chinese, their management savvy and their international connections" that explained how the armed forces of Thailand and Indonesia had become "fabulously rich."
Such arrangements, which were baptized "network capitalism", were not peculiarly Chinese. R. Taggart Murphy, in The Weight of the Yen (1996), said they were also the basis of the Japanese economy: "What really matters for a Japanese company are the strength and credibility of its network. Its 'capital' consists less of yen than the number and quality of its relationships." Jim Rohwer's Asia Rising: How History's Biggest Middle Class Will Change the World (1996) averred that Asia's economies would dominate the world, but it was one of the few books that had reservations about Asia's "failure to move beyond the informal and the personal in its way of doing business." That was a discreet reference to what is nowadays openly deplored as the nepotism and crony capitalism that characterize the "networks."
Having dumped economic science for the study of the networks, many Asian specialists went on to express doubts about Western political systems. Eamonn Fingleton in Blindside: Why Japan is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by 2000 (1995) found the source of America's supposed inferiority in Congress and the U.S. bureaucracy, along with excessive American individualism. "In truth, the United States is, unbeknownst to itself, in the throes of a constitutional crisis", he said. He had only praise for Japanese institutions that are, for their part, now in the throes of prosecutions, forced resignations, and suicides.
Warren Reed and Reg Little had already, in The Confucian Renaissance (1989), given the credit for East Asian prosperity to a set of Asian values that included "rule by men, or virtue, rather than by law", "institutional pragmatism and rule by officials", and "rejection of Western individualism as spiritual pollution." They thought these values would eventually prevail worldwide and they backed the Nihon Keizai Shimbun's prediction that globalization would in effect mean Confucianization. They returned to the attack, with infelicitous timing, in The Tyranny of Fortune (1997), in which they derided Westerners' "misplaced scientific faith." They asked rhetorically,
Is it possible that the triumph of rationality has been revealed as flawed and limited? Is it possible that rationality will not finally conquer traditional forms of life which Weber thought were doomed? Is it possible that Eastern right-brain, associative, holistic and intuitive ways of thinking are pointing to weaknesses in aggressive Western left-brain, linear, mechanistic and rational thinking? As the rational ideals of liberal democracy and market economics have been taken to extremes, have they left Western societies in danger of fragmentation and disintegration, vulnerable to the more coherent, more traditional and, in at least one sense of the word, more humane economies of East Asia?
They were not alone in making the bold leap from Asian economic expansion to a rejection of Western rationality. John Gray's Enlightenment's Wake (1995) cited the success of the Asian tigers in achieving economic growth while ignoring Western free-market policy prescriptions as one reason among others for renouncing Enlightenment values. Gray dismissed the scientific worldview as "merely one of the many superstitions of Enlightenment culture." Asia was above such superstition. As John Ralston Saul said in Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), "The Chinese looked into formal logic well before we became obsessed with it and found it less important than other things."
Said's Impact
There was, then, a fairly widespread inclination to find in Asian export statistics and GDP growth a justification for deriding economics, democracy, and reason as the baubles of the backward West. Such an inclination might seem merely venal, as placing a higher value on commercial performance than on principle, but it was prepared by an intellectual effort of some vigor and ingenuity. The denunciation of Western arrogance and hedonism in books such as Shintaro Ishihara's The Voice of Asia (1995) was probably no more influential in this than the similar rantings of certain Southeast Asian politicians. The argument required academic respectability, and this it acquired from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and the considerable amount of work that that book has directly inspired. The common project here was to establish that all formal Western knowledge of Asia was vitiated by the unstated assumption that the Westerner is "rational, virtuous, mature, normal", whereas the Oriental is "irrational, aberrant, underdeveloped, inferior." In seeking to undo that contrast, even to reverse it perhaps, the fact of prodigious, independent economic achievement in Asia would be highly relevant. As Hung-chao Tai said in Confucianism and Economic Development: An Oriental Alternative? (1989),
For precisely the reasons noted in Said's Orientalism . . . the West has failed to recognize the significance of the difference between the West and Japan. . . . Though Said dealt only with Western studies on the Middle East, his criticism of Western scholarship is considered equally applicable to Western studies on Asia as a whole.
Actually, when Said's book appeared critics said just the opposite. Bernard Lewis, for example, said in a piece reproduced in Islam and the West (1993) that Said's attempt to pass off the Middle East (and at that a Middle East without Turkey, Persia, and, of course, Israel) as "the Orient" was grotesque. That was something that Said's numerous acolytes set out to repair. V.Y. Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa (1988) and then in The Idea of Africa (1994) applied Said's anti-Orientalist arguments "to interrogate Western images of Africa [by] analyzing the power of anthropologists, missionaries and ideologists." The conclusion was that knowledge was everywhere corrupted by power. Imperialism and cultural dominance generated bogus "colonial sciences" and a false conception of Africa, which was then forced upon Africans themselves.
Rana Kabbani in Europe's Myth of Empire (1985) found that identical considerations applied to all Western knowledge of the Third World. What Said had discovered in scholarship about the Middle East was true of Western pseudo-knowledge about all Asian peoples. By 1995 James G. Carrier could say in Occidentalism: Images of the West that "Said's work is so influential that 'Orientalism' has become a generic term for a particular suspect type of anthropological thought" (meaning thought about other cultures). A major effort went into extending the reach of Said's destructive argument to India, that is, to Indology and all Western study of the subcontinent's history, culture, and economy. Ronald Inden's Imagining India (1990), Jared Majeed's Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's History of British India and Orientalism (1992), and Kate Teltscher's India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India (1995) - in addition to a copious literature in the journals - all sought to show that the West's purported knowledge of things Indian was polluted by the power the West wielded over Asian societies. Inden said it was not "a question of prejudice or bias, of the like or dislike of the peoples or cultures of Asia, or of a lack either of objectivity or empathy"; rather it was a question of "the relationship of dominance embedded [in] the structure of ideas that constitutes orientalism." That meant that, since all Westerners were, willy nilly, implicated in that dominance, no matter how they might try they could not escape the corruption of their knowledge of Asia by falsehood. Inden proceeded to dismiss as worthless almost everything ever written in the West about Hinduism, the caste system, and the economics of Indian village life.
Majeed agreed with Said that "the Orient was in a very real sense the creation of a whole apparatus of intellectual practices which were a part of . . . the epistemological ventures which were integral to European imperialism." While criticizing Said's "rather monolithic and ahistorical" view of Orientalism, Majeed nevertheless argued that even Hinduism was a European construct. "In some ways the [British] Asiatic Society initiated the integration of the vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals, and laws into a coherent religion, and shaped an amorphous heritage into the faith now known as Hinduism."
Teltscher began her study of "discourses" about India by saying, "My methods are deeply indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism, the founding work in the study of colonial discourse. I share Said's basic contention that knowledge of the Orient is linked to the exercise of colonial power." Yet she also announced that she would exclude from these "discourses" all unpublished material (i.e., what historians call documents), and she would ignore "the vast body of statistical and economic research" produced from the time of the East India Company. In that she was following Foucault and Said who dismiss all such social research as the manic impulse to classify man and nature into types. By concentrating rather on such books as Kipling's Kim, one could easily show that Europeans had little that was objective to say about India.
The campaign to discredit Western scholarship about Asia as mere Orientalism went so far that some Asian scholars became alarmed. The anthropologist Akbar Ahmed said,
It has led to a cul-de-sac. 'Orientalism' itself has become a cliche, and third world literature is now replete with accusations and labels of Orientalism being hurled by critics and at one another at the slightest excuse. This has had a stultifying effect on the dispassionate evaluation of scholarship.(1)
The Egyptian philosopher Fuad Zakaria joined other Arab scholars in denouncing Said as "unscientific and arbitrary", questioned whether he was serious, and accused him of denigrating all that was secularist and modernizing in Arab culture.
Obviously, any Arab who allowed that there might be some point in this or that Western criticism could be accused of falling into the delusions of Orientalism.(2) B.S. Sayyid has confirmed that Said's book is used by Islamist reactionaries to discredit all forms of Western enquiry, from journalism to human rights campaigns. Said's "recklessness has opened doors to obscurantism and tyranny", Sayyid says.(3) The venerable International Congress of Orientalists took flight and changed its name to the International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa. Orientalism was coming to mean Western pseudo-knowledge that was imperialist, racist, ethnocentric, and "profoundly anti-empirical." In postmodernist jargon, it was "the stereotyping disempowerment of the exoticized Other."
German Scholarship and Asian "Decadence"
It is quite likely that some such description fits some of the sixty thousand books on Asian subjects published in the West between 1800 and 1950. (Anything about la mission civilisatrice de l'Europe would be suspect, for example.) But most were either fairly arid, technical research studies on Asian languages, literatures, and religions, or the application of one of the social sciences to what came to be called "area studies." There is, however, one strand of speculative scholarship about Asia that has enjoyed some credit in the West but was generally resented in the East because it implied Asia's unfitness for economic progress otherwise than under the domination of Western capitalism. It is a specifically German line of thought that runs from Hegel to Marx and Weber.
It begins not with the Other but with the Same; that is, with the German obsession with the myth of the Aryan race, which has played so fateful a role in Germany's history. At a time when Germany had no colonies (so that what Foucault and Said call the power/knowledge nexus would be completely irrelevant), German scholars began the search for the oldest forms of religion and of language, in the belief that they would be found among the Aryans, from whom both Indians and Germans had sprung. Sir William Jones' suggestion that Sanskrit and the classical European tongues had a common origin in an Indo-Germanic language was enthusiastically received, and a score of chairs of Indology sprang up across nineteenth-century Germany at a time when Britain, which ruled India, had only three. To this day there are chairs in Germany that combine Indology and Indo-Germanic languages Germanic languages, subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records..
The belief in the ancient spiritual glories of India posed the question of India's later "decadence" - and German Romanticism provided the answer. According to Jurgen Luth,
Once a people has unfolded its spirit to its fullest expression - thus the Romantic notion runs - it has fulfilled its role in history and only repetition ('revivals'), stagnation and decay can follow. 'Stagnation' became a key-word characterizing Indian civilization after Sankara. It found its way into the general writings of philosophers like Hegel, Marx and Spengler.(4)
With Hegel this became the dogma that India, indeed all Asia, "had no history", at least no more history, their sun having set. In his Lessons on the Philosophy of History, Hegel said that the history of the Oriental states "is for the most part really unhistorical, for it is only the repetition of the same majestic ruin." Karl Marx largely accepted this and volunteered to provide the explanation: Oriental despotism, and the Asiatic Mode of Production. He and Engels argued that Asia had no revolutionary force to propel its "stagnant" or "reactionary and regressive" society into capitalism because the state's monopoly of land-holding reduced all to "general slavery." With no private property in land, there were no social classes, and hence no class conflict-which was the motor of all history to date. Hence there could be no revolution, no progress, no history. In Capital we can see Marx using tainted sources - British colonial officers (often admirers of Edmund Burke, determined to find sturdy peasants and paternalist chiefs wherever they looked) - to build up a largely mythical vision of Indian village life. But the theory that only a violent exogenous force, capitalist imperialism, could bring "progress" to stagnant Asia and never mind the suffering was Marx and Engels at their dogmatic historicist worst. Their undisguised contempt for Asian societies probably exacerbated the Soviet Union's brutal condescension toward its Asian components.(5)
Max Weber, in his sociology of Asian religions, sought to answer the same question as Marx: why did capitalism not arise in Asia? He gave many of the same answers - no private property, no middle class, no cities - and his "patrimonial domination" sounded very like Marx's Asiatic Mode of Production. He made subtle comparisons between Calvinism Calvinism, term used in several different senses. It may indicate the teachings expressed by John Calvin himself; it may be extended to include all that developed from his doctrine and practice in Protestant countries in social, political, and ethical, as well as theological, aspects of life and thought; or it may be employed as the name of that system of doctrine accepted by the Reformed churches (see Presbyterianism), i.e. and Oriental religions but his main theme was the contrast between the rational systematic character of the Occidental mind, particularly in law, science, and industry, and the arbitrary and unstable mentality of Asia.(6) But Weber was careful to add (e.g., at page 248 of The Religion of China) that Asia could adopt capitalism. The conditions in which industrialism was invented might be different from the conditions in which it could be reproduced. That would allow Confucian or other Asian values to do the work Calvinism did in the West. This is a breach into which Asian critics have leapt.(7)
Until the Asian tigers gave it the lie, the German story about eternally unchanging Asia had naturally been resented and derided by critics of Orientalism. Said declared dramatically that the Orient refused "to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all time in the gaze of Western percipients."(8) Arabs in particular rejected the static image imposed on their societies as though they were as repetitive and unchanging as the desert itself.(9) It was of course no consolation for Asians that their supposed unfitness for capitalism and industry was seized upon by Western Romantics, utopians, libertines, and vegetarians in quest of the simple life and the fuller self. To be sure, the likes of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Annie Besant for a time found an Oriental echo in Gandhi, Vivekananda Vivekananda (vē'vəkənŭn`də), 1863–1902, Hindu mystic, major exponent of Vedanta philosophy. He was born of a well-to-do family in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and his given name was Narendra Nath Datta. As a young man he met Ramakrishna and thereafter devoted himself completely to his teachings., Sri Aurobindo, and Ananda Coomaraswami, but in today's industrialized (and nuclear-armed) Asia, Gandhi's khaddar and ahimsa ahimsa (əhĭm`sä) [Sanskrit,=noninjury], ethical principle of noninjury to both men and animals, common to Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. Ahimsa became influential in India after 600 B.C., contributing to the spread of vegetarianism. (homespun and non-violence) are as dead as the dodo.
The Real Debate
Far from accepting the assertion that power pollutes knowledge, it was the responsibilities that Britons took over from the faltering Moghul Empire at the close of the eighteenth century that protected them from the sort of philosophy of Asian history that the Germans cultivated. Not that comparable myth-making was unknown among the British; we have seen Marx being taken in by some of it. And the India that Burke conjured up at the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-95) was a lurid Chu Chin Chow brand of exoticism - theatrical, literary, and Romantic. But these were aberrations in the course of a great political and cultural contest between two parties of practical and well-intentioned men who called each other the Orientalists and the utilitarians or Anglicists. They were the forerunners of today's exponents of Asian values, and of the IMF.
It is a contest worth recalling today when a fabulous period of Asian expansion has crashed to a stop and been called before the court of Western economic rationalism. If we do not recall it, many Asians will, because at such critical moments the intellectual baggage that Asians arrive with is very different from the prepossessions of Westerners. That was the point Sebastian Mallaby made about the significance of Takamori Saigo's story for contemporary Japanese (The National Interest, Summer 1998). Dramatic events of a century and a half ago, the armed challenge to the modernizing Meiji Restoration, can color perceptions of today's economic crisis. The liveliness of recollections of the Orientalist/utilitarian debate has been demonstrated lately by S.N. Mukherjee.(10)
The contest that raged from 1790 to 1830 set the Orientalist party of Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones ("Oriental Jones") against the utilitarians led by Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and Lord Macaulay. At that time (and for about two centuries after), Orientalism meant something very different from Said's travesty. It was an ideology, a movement, and a set of social institutions that defended Asian values and languages from the inroads of utilitarianism utilitarianism (y'tĭlĭtr`ēənĭzəm, y, evangelicalism, and English. Politicians in Britain and Company officials in India could be found on both sides, as could Indian intellectuals in Calcutta and Bombay.
Philip Francis, Hastings' principal accuser, believed in "imposing Enlightenment and European principles of political economy on India", whereas Hastings, as governor of Bengal, followed Clive's method of working through Indian agents and institutions, and abiding by Indian law. This was not simply a tactic "to manipulate as best he could the residual machinery of the Moghul Empire",(11) for it had a solid philosophical foundation. Hastings knew Persian, Urdu, and Bengali and he was sympathetic to Asian cultures. He resisted (as Burke did later) having British law override Hindu and Islamic legal traditions. He got Oriental Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court, to apply his extraordinary linguistic abilities to the translation and codification of those native laws. He defended a system of taxation that was anathema to the utilitarians. His opponents said he had caught some of the Oriental despot's indifference to corruption.
Among the Sanskrit and Persian classics Hastings had translated was the Bhagvat Gita, and in a preface written for it he said something many Asians today would sign with both hands: European values, he said,
are by no means applicable to the language, sentiments, manners or morality appertaining to a system of society with which we have been for ages unconnected, and of an antiquity preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own quarter of the globe.
There was nothing Romantic or impractical in these attitudes. Hastings wanted Bengal to prosper, and the Company (and its officers!) to make money. At his trial he showed himself, in contrast to Burke's showmanship, to be pragmatic, technical, analytical, and philological. He let India speak for itself, and cited Islamic law in his defense. Oriental Jones, as Mukherjee has shown, was no Romantic either, for all that he wrote poetry. He had no more time for Indian spirituality and irrationality than he had for Burke and Rousseau, whom he found "wonderfully absurd." The Orientalists thought that India would prosper best under "the true ancient Hindu constitution" and under a personal rather than an impersonal form of government. Burke, as a romantic conservative, was by instinct on their side but he was shocked by the corruption and summary justice of British rule in India, and he blamed (unfairly) the Orientalists for it.
Their more serious opponents were the apostles of philosophical radicalism, utilitarianism, universalism, Anglicism, and evangelicalism. Save on that last score, their leader was Jeremy Bentham, who aspired to be India's lawgiver, with James Mill as his prophet and his agent within the East India Company; Mill in turn got Macaulay his job on the Supreme Council of India. Their aim was a culturally and linguistically homogeneous British India dedicated to progress and modernization. Their bete noire was Burke, and when he and others accused them of meddling in Indian affairs as a way of getting at their opponents in England, they replied disarmingly, well of course.
And why not? Did they not have in utilitarianism a universal policy that could be applied as well in one country as in another? Economic policy would come from Ricardo, Malthus, and Mill, and there was no need of local knowledge or sympathy. This attitude is carried to absurd extremes in our day, in the application to Asian cultures of rational choice theory, i.e., the reduction of all social and political action to a simplified economic psychology. (See Chalmers Johnson and E.B. Keehn, "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies", The National Interest, Summer 1994). In similar vein, there is a passage in Mill's History of British India that could have come from a back room at the IMF: "As soon as everything of importance is expressed in writing,
a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India."
To which Oriental Jones replied, "No man ever became an historian in his closet." But the utilitarians accused Jones of suffering from "a susceptible imagination" that made him giddy with delusions of vast Indian riches, material and cultural; and they accused his supporters of being "Hindooised." Their pet horror was the "corruption" of Indian society; they had Indians dismissed from all senior positions in administration. The use of Persian as the official language was stopped, and all education was to be in English. Macaulay wrote a Benthamite legal code of civil and criminal procedures to replace the haphazard amalgam of Hindu, Islamic, and English law administered by the courts. In 1835 he wrote a famous Minute on education that still smells of sulfur in Indian nostrils: Britain should aim, he said, at creating "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and intellect."
The Anglicists won some notable outright victories, such as the outlawing of suttee suttee (sŭ'tē`, sŭ`tē') [Skt. sati=faithful wife], former Indian funeral practice in which the widow immolated herself on her husband's funeral pyre. (widow burning) in 1829, and they prevailed in many other areas, from taxation to education. But two things about their preponderance become especially relevant whenever the conflict of Asian values and Western rationalism breaks out, as it has again in our time.
The first point is that the Anglicists' victories were never final, and the Orientalists never left the field of battle. Clive Dewey has shown that both "assimilators" (Anglicists and evangelicals) and "preservationists" (Orientalists) became entrenched in the Indian Civil Service, and the pendulum swung between them throughout the two hundred years of British rule.(12) "The veered between these two poles, between assimilation and preservation. There were always Westernizers Westernizers, in Russian history: see Slavophiles and Westernizers., who wanted to change India, and Orientalists who loved it as it was. What varied was their relative strength." Thus, after decades of free-trade liberalism, the preservation of traditional institutions - joint family, caste, ancient estate - again became the aim of government policy. What the disciples of Ricardo and Mill saw as obstacles to private enterprise, the disciples of Sir Henry Maine and T.H. Green saw as the support of the social fabric.
The second point is how it came about that the Westernizers could gain the upper hand as often as they did. This is where Said's analysis is so deficient that it has been repudiated even by his acolytes, for he argues that the West forced its ideology on the Asians, who suffered passively the crushing imprint of imperialism. In reality, imperial power in Asia was always unsteady and often tenuous. "There was always a revolt somewhere in the subcontinent", wrote C.A. Bayly in Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1988). Its ideas and policies won ground only when influential sectors of local opinion - power elites and traditional authorities - were persuaded of them. When they were, what ensued was never a passive acquiescence in Western rationalism or English education but a rough-hewn compromise, some balance or reconciliation between modern and traditional, foreign and local, Asian and Western ideas.
If the past is any guide, the latest collision of Asian and Western values will have the usual inconclusive upshot. There will likely be no irreversible defeat of Asian values and no outright acceptance of Western policies. There was no call to see in Asia's prosperity some defiance of Western rationality, science, or democracy. And there is no call to see in the inevitable failure of competing export-led growth strategies the imminent victory of globalization and universal Westernization. Asians will no doubt continue - and each Asian nation in its own way - to find their own balance between traditional values and utilitarian advantage
Even if it is too early to be certain about the causes and the course of these momentous events, it is time enough to reconsider some of the things that were being said about the Asian economies when they were still flourishing. More particularly, it is already profitable to reconsider things that were being said, in the light of Asia's booming prosperity before July 1997, about Western economies, politics, values, and sciences. It is not just that so many people extrapolated adventurously and predicted that Asia, led by China or Japan, would soon eclipse the economies of America and Europe; people extrapolate wildly all the time. It is that so many drew the conclusions that Asia's prosperity disproved economic science, impugned Western democracy, cast doubt on rational policy-making and even on reason itself, and turned probity into a quaint curio.
These bold conclusions might have been drawn less readily if the ground had not been prepared by the academic doctrine, taught in all our universities for twenty years, that the West has always been wrong about Asia anyway. Its supposed knowledge of Asia, this doctrine maintained, was trumpery called "Orientalism", which was not, as it pretended, a body of objective learning but (in the words of Edward Said) "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient . . . a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. . . . European culture was able to manage - and even produce - the Orient."
Naturally, if our knowledge of Asia was really only a partisan delusion, a way of demeaning Asians' affairs to the level of a Chu Chin Chow pantomime, then we must fail to understand what was happening in their economies. If Asians were prospering mightily using methods all of their own devising, while Westerners wallowed in smug superiority, then it was inevitable that our students of Asia would find much to criticize at home. Even if they held no brief for Asian values, they were bound to take a swipe at Western values. They laid on with a will, as a few select quotations will illustrate.
Thus James Fallows in Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (1994) drew from the study of Asia the moral, "Western societies should concentrate on whether and how to remake themselves." They should start by remaking economic science:
The powers of 'quantitative analysis', as used by modern economists and managers, are enormous but nonetheless limited. . . . The economists of the 1990s cannot honestly fit the rise of Japan, Korea and Taiwan into their models of how economies should grow. . . . Economics gives us clear logical 'models' that are supposed to explain dealings among nations. History gives us different, more complicated lessons, which are more useful for understanding what is going on in Asia now.
What would replace Western economics was "a new paradigm", said John Naisbitt in Megatrends Asia: The Eight Asian Megatrends that are Reshaping Our World (1996). It consisted of the network of networks set up by the overseas Chinese, which constituted "the third largest economy in the world." Speaking of the businessmen who were later driven into exile from Indonesia after their homes were burned down, their wives and daughters raped, and their supermarkets looted, Naisbitt said a knowledge of their methods would be more useful than economic theory. Sterling Seagrove emphatically agreed in his Lords of the Rim: The Invisible Empire of the Overseas Chinese (1995). It was "the Chinese, their management savvy and their international connections" that explained how the armed forces of Thailand and Indonesia had become "fabulously rich."
Such arrangements, which were baptized "network capitalism", were not peculiarly Chinese. R. Taggart Murphy, in The Weight of the Yen (1996), said they were also the basis of the Japanese economy: "What really matters for a Japanese company are the strength and credibility of its network. Its 'capital' consists less of yen than the number and quality of its relationships." Jim Rohwer's Asia Rising: How History's Biggest Middle Class Will Change the World (1996) averred that Asia's economies would dominate the world, but it was one of the few books that had reservations about Asia's "failure to move beyond the informal and the personal in its way of doing business." That was a discreet reference to what is nowadays openly deplored as the nepotism and crony capitalism that characterize the "networks."
Having dumped economic science for the study of the networks, many Asian specialists went on to express doubts about Western political systems. Eamonn Fingleton in Blindside: Why Japan is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by 2000 (1995) found the source of America's supposed inferiority in Congress and the U.S. bureaucracy, along with excessive American individualism. "In truth, the United States is, unbeknownst to itself, in the throes of a constitutional crisis", he said. He had only praise for Japanese institutions that are, for their part, now in the throes of prosecutions, forced resignations, and suicides.
Warren Reed and Reg Little had already, in The Confucian Renaissance (1989), given the credit for East Asian prosperity to a set of Asian values that included "rule by men, or virtue, rather than by law", "institutional pragmatism and rule by officials", and "rejection of Western individualism as spiritual pollution." They thought these values would eventually prevail worldwide and they backed the Nihon Keizai Shimbun's prediction that globalization would in effect mean Confucianization. They returned to the attack, with infelicitous timing, in The Tyranny of Fortune (1997), in which they derided Westerners' "misplaced scientific faith." They asked rhetorically,
Is it possible that the triumph of rationality has been revealed as flawed and limited? Is it possible that rationality will not finally conquer traditional forms of life which Weber thought were doomed? Is it possible that Eastern right-brain, associative, holistic and intuitive ways of thinking are pointing to weaknesses in aggressive Western left-brain, linear, mechanistic and rational thinking? As the rational ideals of liberal democracy and market economics have been taken to extremes, have they left Western societies in danger of fragmentation and disintegration, vulnerable to the more coherent, more traditional and, in at least one sense of the word, more humane economies of East Asia?
They were not alone in making the bold leap from Asian economic expansion to a rejection of Western rationality. John Gray's Enlightenment's Wake (1995) cited the success of the Asian tigers in achieving economic growth while ignoring Western free-market policy prescriptions as one reason among others for renouncing Enlightenment values. Gray dismissed the scientific worldview as "merely one of the many superstitions of Enlightenment culture." Asia was above such superstition. As John Ralston Saul said in Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), "The Chinese looked into formal logic well before we became obsessed with it and found it less important than other things."
Said's Impact
There was, then, a fairly widespread inclination to find in Asian export statistics and GDP growth a justification for deriding economics, democracy, and reason as the baubles of the backward West. Such an inclination might seem merely venal, as placing a higher value on commercial performance than on principle, but it was prepared by an intellectual effort of some vigor and ingenuity. The denunciation of Western arrogance and hedonism in books such as Shintaro Ishihara's The Voice of Asia (1995) was probably no more influential in this than the similar rantings of certain Southeast Asian politicians. The argument required academic respectability, and this it acquired from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and the considerable amount of work that that book has directly inspired. The common project here was to establish that all formal Western knowledge of Asia was vitiated by the unstated assumption that the Westerner is "rational, virtuous, mature, normal", whereas the Oriental is "irrational, aberrant, underdeveloped, inferior." In seeking to undo that contrast, even to reverse it perhaps, the fact of prodigious, independent economic achievement in Asia would be highly relevant. As Hung-chao Tai said in Confucianism and Economic Development: An Oriental Alternative? (1989),
For precisely the reasons noted in Said's Orientalism . . . the West has failed to recognize the significance of the difference between the West and Japan. . . . Though Said dealt only with Western studies on the Middle East, his criticism of Western scholarship is considered equally applicable to Western studies on Asia as a whole.
Actually, when Said's book appeared critics said just the opposite. Bernard Lewis, for example, said in a piece reproduced in Islam and the West (1993) that Said's attempt to pass off the Middle East (and at that a Middle East without Turkey, Persia, and, of course, Israel) as "the Orient" was grotesque. That was something that Said's numerous acolytes set out to repair. V.Y. Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa (1988) and then in The Idea of Africa (1994) applied Said's anti-Orientalist arguments "to interrogate Western images of Africa [by] analyzing the power of anthropologists, missionaries and ideologists." The conclusion was that knowledge was everywhere corrupted by power. Imperialism and cultural dominance generated bogus "colonial sciences" and a false conception of Africa, which was then forced upon Africans themselves.
Rana Kabbani in Europe's Myth of Empire (1985) found that identical considerations applied to all Western knowledge of the Third World. What Said had discovered in scholarship about the Middle East was true of Western pseudo-knowledge about all Asian peoples. By 1995 James G. Carrier could say in Occidentalism: Images of the West that "Said's work is so influential that 'Orientalism' has become a generic term for a particular suspect type of anthropological thought" (meaning thought about other cultures). A major effort went into extending the reach of Said's destructive argument to India, that is, to Indology and all Western study of the subcontinent's history, culture, and economy. Ronald Inden's Imagining India (1990), Jared Majeed's Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's History of British India and Orientalism (1992), and Kate Teltscher's India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India (1995) - in addition to a copious literature in the journals - all sought to show that the West's purported knowledge of things Indian was polluted by the power the West wielded over Asian societies. Inden said it was not "a question of prejudice or bias, of the like or dislike of the peoples or cultures of Asia, or of a lack either of objectivity or empathy"; rather it was a question of "the relationship of dominance embedded [in] the structure of ideas that constitutes orientalism." That meant that, since all Westerners were, willy nilly, implicated in that dominance, no matter how they might try they could not escape the corruption of their knowledge of Asia by falsehood. Inden proceeded to dismiss as worthless almost everything ever written in the West about Hinduism, the caste system, and the economics of Indian village life.
Majeed agreed with Said that "the Orient was in a very real sense the creation of a whole apparatus of intellectual practices which were a part of . . . the epistemological ventures which were integral to European imperialism." While criticizing Said's "rather monolithic and ahistorical" view of Orientalism, Majeed nevertheless argued that even Hinduism was a European construct. "In some ways the [British] Asiatic Society initiated the integration of the vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals, and laws into a coherent religion, and shaped an amorphous heritage into the faith now known as Hinduism."
Teltscher began her study of "discourses" about India by saying, "My methods are deeply indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism, the founding work in the study of colonial discourse. I share Said's basic contention that knowledge of the Orient is linked to the exercise of colonial power." Yet she also announced that she would exclude from these "discourses" all unpublished material (i.e., what historians call documents), and she would ignore "the vast body of statistical and economic research" produced from the time of the East India Company. In that she was following Foucault and Said who dismiss all such social research as the manic impulse to classify man and nature into types. By concentrating rather on such books as Kipling's Kim, one could easily show that Europeans had little that was objective to say about India.
The campaign to discredit Western scholarship about Asia as mere Orientalism went so far that some Asian scholars became alarmed. The anthropologist Akbar Ahmed said,
It has led to a cul-de-sac. 'Orientalism' itself has become a cliche, and third world literature is now replete with accusations and labels of Orientalism being hurled by critics and at one another at the slightest excuse. This has had a stultifying effect on the dispassionate evaluation of scholarship.(1)
The Egyptian philosopher Fuad Zakaria joined other Arab scholars in denouncing Said as "unscientific and arbitrary", questioned whether he was serious, and accused him of denigrating all that was secularist and modernizing in Arab culture.
Obviously, any Arab who allowed that there might be some point in this or that Western criticism could be accused of falling into the delusions of Orientalism.(2) B.S. Sayyid has confirmed that Said's book is used by Islamist reactionaries to discredit all forms of Western enquiry, from journalism to human rights campaigns. Said's "recklessness has opened doors to obscurantism and tyranny", Sayyid says.(3) The venerable International Congress of Orientalists took flight and changed its name to the International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa. Orientalism was coming to mean Western pseudo-knowledge that was imperialist, racist, ethnocentric, and "profoundly anti-empirical." In postmodernist jargon, it was "the stereotyping disempowerment of the exoticized Other."
German Scholarship and Asian "Decadence"
It is quite likely that some such description fits some of the sixty thousand books on Asian subjects published in the West between 1800 and 1950. (Anything about la mission civilisatrice de l'Europe would be suspect, for example.) But most were either fairly arid, technical research studies on Asian languages, literatures, and religions, or the application of one of the social sciences to what came to be called "area studies." There is, however, one strand of speculative scholarship about Asia that has enjoyed some credit in the West but was generally resented in the East because it implied Asia's unfitness for economic progress otherwise than under the domination of Western capitalism. It is a specifically German line of thought that runs from Hegel to Marx and Weber.
It begins not with the Other but with the Same; that is, with the German obsession with the myth of the Aryan race, which has played so fateful a role in Germany's history. At a time when Germany had no colonies (so that what Foucault and Said call the power/knowledge nexus would be completely irrelevant), German scholars began the search for the oldest forms of religion and of language, in the belief that they would be found among the Aryans, from whom both Indians and Germans had sprung. Sir William Jones' suggestion that Sanskrit and the classical European tongues had a common origin in an Indo-Germanic language was enthusiastically received, and a score of chairs of Indology sprang up across nineteenth-century Germany at a time when Britain, which ruled India, had only three. To this day there are chairs in Germany that combine Indology and Indo-Germanic languages Germanic languages, subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records..
The belief in the ancient spiritual glories of India posed the question of India's later "decadence" - and German Romanticism provided the answer. According to Jurgen Luth,
Once a people has unfolded its spirit to its fullest expression - thus the Romantic notion runs - it has fulfilled its role in history and only repetition ('revivals'), stagnation and decay can follow. 'Stagnation' became a key-word characterizing Indian civilization after Sankara. It found its way into the general writings of philosophers like Hegel, Marx and Spengler.(4)
With Hegel this became the dogma that India, indeed all Asia, "had no history", at least no more history, their sun having set. In his Lessons on the Philosophy of History, Hegel said that the history of the Oriental states "is for the most part really unhistorical, for it is only the repetition of the same majestic ruin." Karl Marx largely accepted this and volunteered to provide the explanation: Oriental despotism, and the Asiatic Mode of Production. He and Engels argued that Asia had no revolutionary force to propel its "stagnant" or "reactionary and regressive" society into capitalism because the state's monopoly of land-holding reduced all to "general slavery." With no private property in land, there were no social classes, and hence no class conflict-which was the motor of all history to date. Hence there could be no revolution, no progress, no history. In Capital we can see Marx using tainted sources - British colonial officers (often admirers of Edmund Burke, determined to find sturdy peasants and paternalist chiefs wherever they looked) - to build up a largely mythical vision of Indian village life. But the theory that only a violent exogenous force, capitalist imperialism, could bring "progress" to stagnant Asia and never mind the suffering was Marx and Engels at their dogmatic historicist worst. Their undisguised contempt for Asian societies probably exacerbated the Soviet Union's brutal condescension toward its Asian components.(5)
Max Weber, in his sociology of Asian religions, sought to answer the same question as Marx: why did capitalism not arise in Asia? He gave many of the same answers - no private property, no middle class, no cities - and his "patrimonial domination" sounded very like Marx's Asiatic Mode of Production. He made subtle comparisons between Calvinism Calvinism, term used in several different senses. It may indicate the teachings expressed by John Calvin himself; it may be extended to include all that developed from his doctrine and practice in Protestant countries in social, political, and ethical, as well as theological, aspects of life and thought; or it may be employed as the name of that system of doctrine accepted by the Reformed churches (see Presbyterianism), i.e. and Oriental religions but his main theme was the contrast between the rational systematic character of the Occidental mind, particularly in law, science, and industry, and the arbitrary and unstable mentality of Asia.(6) But Weber was careful to add (e.g., at page 248 of The Religion of China) that Asia could adopt capitalism. The conditions in which industrialism was invented might be different from the conditions in which it could be reproduced. That would allow Confucian or other Asian values to do the work Calvinism did in the West. This is a breach into which Asian critics have leapt.(7)
Until the Asian tigers gave it the lie, the German story about eternally unchanging Asia had naturally been resented and derided by critics of Orientalism. Said declared dramatically that the Orient refused "to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all time in the gaze of Western percipients."(8) Arabs in particular rejected the static image imposed on their societies as though they were as repetitive and unchanging as the desert itself.(9) It was of course no consolation for Asians that their supposed unfitness for capitalism and industry was seized upon by Western Romantics, utopians, libertines, and vegetarians in quest of the simple life and the fuller self. To be sure, the likes of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Annie Besant for a time found an Oriental echo in Gandhi, Vivekananda Vivekananda (vē'vəkənŭn`də), 1863–1902, Hindu mystic, major exponent of Vedanta philosophy. He was born of a well-to-do family in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and his given name was Narendra Nath Datta. As a young man he met Ramakrishna and thereafter devoted himself completely to his teachings., Sri Aurobindo, and Ananda Coomaraswami, but in today's industrialized (and nuclear-armed) Asia, Gandhi's khaddar and ahimsa ahimsa (əhĭm`sä) [Sanskrit,=noninjury], ethical principle of noninjury to both men and animals, common to Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. Ahimsa became influential in India after 600 B.C., contributing to the spread of vegetarianism. (homespun and non-violence) are as dead as the dodo.
The Real Debate
Far from accepting the assertion that power pollutes knowledge, it was the responsibilities that Britons took over from the faltering Moghul Empire at the close of the eighteenth century that protected them from the sort of philosophy of Asian history that the Germans cultivated. Not that comparable myth-making was unknown among the British; we have seen Marx being taken in by some of it. And the India that Burke conjured up at the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-95) was a lurid Chu Chin Chow brand of exoticism - theatrical, literary, and Romantic. But these were aberrations in the course of a great political and cultural contest between two parties of practical and well-intentioned men who called each other the Orientalists and the utilitarians or Anglicists. They were the forerunners of today's exponents of Asian values, and of the IMF.
It is a contest worth recalling today when a fabulous period of Asian expansion has crashed to a stop and been called before the court of Western economic rationalism. If we do not recall it, many Asians will, because at such critical moments the intellectual baggage that Asians arrive with is very different from the prepossessions of Westerners. That was the point Sebastian Mallaby made about the significance of Takamori Saigo's story for contemporary Japanese (The National Interest, Summer 1998). Dramatic events of a century and a half ago, the armed challenge to the modernizing Meiji Restoration, can color perceptions of today's economic crisis. The liveliness of recollections of the Orientalist/utilitarian debate has been demonstrated lately by S.N. Mukherjee.(10)
The contest that raged from 1790 to 1830 set the Orientalist party of Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones ("Oriental Jones") against the utilitarians led by Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and Lord Macaulay. At that time (and for about two centuries after), Orientalism meant something very different from Said's travesty. It was an ideology, a movement, and a set of social institutions that defended Asian values and languages from the inroads of utilitarianism utilitarianism (y'tĭlĭtr`ēənĭzəm, y, evangelicalism, and English. Politicians in Britain and Company officials in India could be found on both sides, as could Indian intellectuals in Calcutta and Bombay.
Philip Francis, Hastings' principal accuser, believed in "imposing Enlightenment and European principles of political economy on India", whereas Hastings, as governor of Bengal, followed Clive's method of working through Indian agents and institutions, and abiding by Indian law. This was not simply a tactic "to manipulate as best he could the residual machinery of the Moghul Empire",(11) for it had a solid philosophical foundation. Hastings knew Persian, Urdu, and Bengali and he was sympathetic to Asian cultures. He resisted (as Burke did later) having British law override Hindu and Islamic legal traditions. He got Oriental Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court, to apply his extraordinary linguistic abilities to the translation and codification of those native laws. He defended a system of taxation that was anathema to the utilitarians. His opponents said he had caught some of the Oriental despot's indifference to corruption.
Among the Sanskrit and Persian classics Hastings had translated was the Bhagvat Gita, and in a preface written for it he said something many Asians today would sign with both hands: European values, he said,
are by no means applicable to the language, sentiments, manners or morality appertaining to a system of society with which we have been for ages unconnected, and of an antiquity preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own quarter of the globe.
There was nothing Romantic or impractical in these attitudes. Hastings wanted Bengal to prosper, and the Company (and its officers!) to make money. At his trial he showed himself, in contrast to Burke's showmanship, to be pragmatic, technical, analytical, and philological. He let India speak for itself, and cited Islamic law in his defense. Oriental Jones, as Mukherjee has shown, was no Romantic either, for all that he wrote poetry. He had no more time for Indian spirituality and irrationality than he had for Burke and Rousseau, whom he found "wonderfully absurd." The Orientalists thought that India would prosper best under "the true ancient Hindu constitution" and under a personal rather than an impersonal form of government. Burke, as a romantic conservative, was by instinct on their side but he was shocked by the corruption and summary justice of British rule in India, and he blamed (unfairly) the Orientalists for it.
Their more serious opponents were the apostles of philosophical radicalism, utilitarianism, universalism, Anglicism, and evangelicalism. Save on that last score, their leader was Jeremy Bentham, who aspired to be India's lawgiver, with James Mill as his prophet and his agent within the East India Company; Mill in turn got Macaulay his job on the Supreme Council of India. Their aim was a culturally and linguistically homogeneous British India dedicated to progress and modernization. Their bete noire was Burke, and when he and others accused them of meddling in Indian affairs as a way of getting at their opponents in England, they replied disarmingly, well of course.
And why not? Did they not have in utilitarianism a universal policy that could be applied as well in one country as in another? Economic policy would come from Ricardo, Malthus, and Mill, and there was no need of local knowledge or sympathy. This attitude is carried to absurd extremes in our day, in the application to Asian cultures of rational choice theory, i.e., the reduction of all social and political action to a simplified economic psychology. (See Chalmers Johnson and E.B. Keehn, "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies", The National Interest, Summer 1994). In similar vein, there is a passage in Mill's History of British India that could have come from a back room at the IMF: "As soon as everything of importance is expressed in writing,
a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India."
To which Oriental Jones replied, "No man ever became an historian in his closet." But the utilitarians accused Jones of suffering from "a susceptible imagination" that made him giddy with delusions of vast Indian riches, material and cultural; and they accused his supporters of being "Hindooised." Their pet horror was the "corruption" of Indian society; they had Indians dismissed from all senior positions in administration. The use of Persian as the official language was stopped, and all education was to be in English. Macaulay wrote a Benthamite legal code of civil and criminal procedures to replace the haphazard amalgam of Hindu, Islamic, and English law administered by the courts. In 1835 he wrote a famous Minute on education that still smells of sulfur in Indian nostrils: Britain should aim, he said, at creating "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and intellect."
The Anglicists won some notable outright victories, such as the outlawing of suttee suttee (sŭ'tē`, sŭ`tē') [Skt. sati=faithful wife], former Indian funeral practice in which the widow immolated herself on her husband's funeral pyre. (widow burning) in 1829, and they prevailed in many other areas, from taxation to education. But two things about their preponderance become especially relevant whenever the conflict of Asian values and Western rationalism breaks out, as it has again in our time.
The first point is that the Anglicists' victories were never final, and the Orientalists never left the field of battle. Clive Dewey has shown that both "assimilators" (Anglicists and evangelicals) and "preservationists" (Orientalists) became entrenched in the Indian Civil Service, and the pendulum swung between them throughout the two hundred years of British rule.(12) "The veered between these two poles, between assimilation and preservation. There were always Westernizers Westernizers, in Russian history: see Slavophiles and Westernizers., who wanted to change India, and Orientalists who loved it as it was. What varied was their relative strength." Thus, after decades of free-trade liberalism, the preservation of traditional institutions - joint family, caste, ancient estate - again became the aim of government policy. What the disciples of Ricardo and Mill saw as obstacles to private enterprise, the disciples of Sir Henry Maine and T.H. Green saw as the support of the social fabric.
The second point is how it came about that the Westernizers could gain the upper hand as often as they did. This is where Said's analysis is so deficient that it has been repudiated even by his acolytes, for he argues that the West forced its ideology on the Asians, who suffered passively the crushing imprint of imperialism. In reality, imperial power in Asia was always unsteady and often tenuous. "There was always a revolt somewhere in the subcontinent", wrote C.A. Bayly in Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1988). Its ideas and policies won ground only when influential sectors of local opinion - power elites and traditional authorities - were persuaded of them. When they were, what ensued was never a passive acquiescence in Western rationalism or English education but a rough-hewn compromise, some balance or reconciliation between modern and traditional, foreign and local, Asian and Western ideas.
If the past is any guide, the latest collision of Asian and Western values will have the usual inconclusive upshot. There will likely be no irreversible defeat of Asian values and no outright acceptance of Western policies. There was no call to see in Asia's prosperity some defiance of Western rationality, science, or democracy. And there is no call to see in the inevitable failure of competing export-led growth strategies the imminent victory of globalization and universal Westernization. Asians will no doubt continue - and each Asian nation in its own way - to find their own balance between traditional values and utilitarian advantage
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