Validation through Spivak

Sometimes when I'm called upon to read a great deal of work by the same author in a short amount of time, I go through a series of stages: Diligent and objective attention to the text, frustrating noncomprehension of the text, irritable criticism of the author's obtuseness, breakthrough in understanding, appreciation of the text's argument, reflection on the excellence of the argument embedded in the obtuseness. That's often the experience I have with reading the work of poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and in this case Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I've arrived at the last stage in this series with last night's reading of "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism"; not there yet with "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

I actually don't buy a lot of what Spivak is arguing--I think there are big big holes in her argument here--but there is still so much that is thought-provoking and useful and relevant about this article. It's very satisfying as a fledging literary scholar and theorist to get to the point in your reading where you "get it" and you remember how it all fits together, and you can conceive of how the discourse that precedes you is produces and how you can converse with it from your own position of knowledge and understanding. I actually found reading this article to be very inspiring and motivating to me as a scholar. So that's cool. Here's the summary I wrote for Dr. Raval's class:

“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” by Gayatri Spivak, 1985

Summary:

In this essay Spivak examines three works by women, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, as a way of demonstrating (among other things) that literature written in an imperialist framework does not subvert imperialism simply because it is written by women. Spivak reminds us that imperialism was England’s “social mission” and “a crucial part of the cultural representation” of England to itself, particularly during the nineteenth century. Because this is a “fact,” it ought not be disregarded in the consideration of nineteenth century literature, and to ignore it amounts to furthering the “imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms” (896). Her primary concern in this article is to expose the imperialist “worlding” at work in Jane Eyre, to examine Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre’s “reinscription,” “…and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction” of Jane Eyre’s worlding (896).

Spivak first identifies “what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism” as “childbearing and soul-making” (897). In other words, the woman in imperialist society is tasked with creating humanity/humans--through sexual reproduction and also through imperialism’s “social mission”: to civilize the Other. Spivak does not take a position of blaming women for their complicity in imperialism but instead explicates their place in the patriarchal imperialist hegemony by way of drawing an analogy from Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s “Caliban.” “Caliban” subverts the colonizer/colonized binary, by positing that Caliban and Ariel, despite their disparate natures, are nonetheless equally in the control of Prospero, the “foreign magician.” In this triangular relationship, Caliban is constructed as the uncivilized native Other, Ariel is the “intellectual” native Other, and Prospero is patriarch and colonizer. Spivak suggests that the construction of English women in imperialism overlaps and bleeds into the construction of the “intellectual Other”—both are “not quite/not male” (897).

Spivak points out Jane Eyre’s “self-marginalized uniqueness” within the “family/counter family dyad” around which Bronte’s novel is structured. Spivak contends that Jane’s progress from being of the “counter family” (Other) to being of the “family” (Self) mirrors and reproduces “the active ideology of imperialism” (899). Spivak argues that this process is imperialist because it is constructed through imperialist ideology, made apparent in a number of dichotomies she calls attention to that underpin the novel—legal/illegal, human/animal, madness/reason, England/not-England, etc. Jane must displace Rochester’s mad, animalistic, foreign wife Bertha Mason in order to take her place in the family—that is, asserting her personhood--in imperialist terms. The discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea as a reinscription of Jane Eyre, in which Rhys attempts to reimagine Bertha/Antoinette as intelligent (Ariel) rather than without reason (Caliban), serves to clarify and focus Spivak’s observations about the imperialist framework within which Jane Eyre operates. Her analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea dwells on the role that language, voice, and text (signifiers) have in both aiding and impeding one’s project of individualizing. She suggests that a woman/Other cannot arrive at a sense of self without reproducing imperialist constructions. She writes, “No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self” (904).

Spivak concludes her article with a discussion of Frankenstein as a counterpoint to the imperialism embedded in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. She calls Frankenstein “a text of nascent feminism…[that] does not speak the language of feminist individualism” which relies on “the axiomatics of imperialism” (905). Though present, imperialism, she argues, is merely incidental in Frankenstein. Spivak contends that the novel avoids imperialist ideology by subverting the binaries which “world” Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. She writes that the novel “is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and female) and social-subject production (race and male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory” (905-6). Another main point of her dissection of Frankenstein is to make not of the fact that, here, neither Frankenstein’s creature nor women fit into the Caliban/Ariel/Prospero schematic that governs the previously discussed novels. In Spivak’s words, “the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text” (909). Thus we can see yet again that the function of woman and Other overlap and intertwine in imperialist discourse.

Important terms:

Binary opposition

Feminism

Imperialism

Individualism

Other

Self

Signifier/signified

Social mission

Soul making

Subject/subjectivity

Worlding

Revolution

I have been preoccupied in the past week with following the news of the popular uprising in Egypt--where, I should mention, I lived for three months in 2009--to oust Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime. Amid scanning my various social networking outlets for news of friends in Alexandria and Cairo, I made a half-hearted attempt to reacquaint myself with Edward Said's Orientalism. When I faced going to Postcolonialism today having only (re)read about 30 pages, I justified my negligence to myself with the reasoning that, were Edward Said still alive, he would approve of my choosing engagement with radical changes taking place on the ground in Egypt today over reading some thirty-year-old book for a class. Well, I hope he would, anyway. Really, though, there is no excuse for neglecting Said. Orientalism continues to be a remarkable book, and it should be required reading for everybody. So.

But sometimes things happen that shake our views of the world to their foundations. Things that will forever change our lives, if only in subtle ways. Things that remind us that this shit we read about in books is real. Isn't that the reason we study it in the first place? Anyway, when these things happen, I think it's not only acceptable but imperative that we climb down from the tower and try to get a sense of how things look from the ground. So, I took a break from some work this week to do that.

Revolution in Egypt aside, I wouldn't have been called upon to demonstrate my knowledge of Said's work anyway, because (as I expected) Dr. Raval lectured for the full two and a half hours of class once again. His lecture--which I think he began drafting twenty years ago and to which he probably makes only minor revisions now and again--was hugely informative, however, and probably deserving of a post unto itself. But I did want to record some of his highlights regarding required reading for scholars of Said, or of theory in general.

He recommended:

Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci

Lenin and Philosophy by Louis Althusser

Mimesis by Erich Auerbach

In Theory by Aijaz Ahmad

That's all for now. I'll revisit Said again soon.

Kipling and Singularity

Well, I haven't had the time or inclination to write for a few days. I had hoped to write something Tuesday night after the first meeting of my eighteenth-century novel class, but it happened to be the night of the State of the Union Address, which I had to watch attentively since I required my students to watch it. So I suppose I should do a brief recap of what passed in my Tuesday seminars.

In postcolonial lit, Dr. Raval spoke more or less extemporaneously on Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and the genesis of postcolonial discourse for the entire two and a half hours. What he had to say was interesting and informative, but I found the experience strangely exhausting. I haven't had a class where the professor just lectured for an entire period since I took a Shakespeare seminar from Dr. Loren Reser about eight years ago. But that was in an auditorium-style classroom with upholstered folding seats with armrests and dim, soothing lighting. Once I figured out Dr. Reser was just going to talk the whole time, I started bringing knitting along to class with me. But in a cramped, chilly classroom with glaring fluorescent lights, listening to a professor with a sometimes indecipherable Indian accent talk non-stop for two and a half hours is a more mentally and psychologically challenging task. Especially when you know you're going to have to go straight from that class to another two and a half hour long seminar--not even time for a smoke break in between!

Black Skin, White Masks, incidentally, is a very compelling book, for the writing style as much as for Fanon's insights into the psychology of the black man in the sphere of French colonialism. The heavy reliance on Freudian/Lacanian psychology causes the book to feel dated at times, and some of the psychoanalytic arguments seem forced. But the overarching assessment of the black man's internalized loathing and feelings of alienation from the self and others in a colonial context is sound. I'll try to get to it in more detail in another post this weekend.

In other news, Dr. Robinson's class was the complete opposite of Raval's. Robinson is intensely energetic, and encourages a discussion-driven class. As I noted in a previous post, the topic of discussion was: what makes or does not make Robinson Crusoe a novel? Going about answering this question (no answer was ever reached, by the way, and I don't think we were intended to produce and answer) required first describing what the book has got going on. The dominant idea that emerged from this line of discussion was that Crusoe is rife with Christian (especially Puritan) allegory, and that the first person narration is somehow significant. My argument for what makes Crusoe like a novel rather than just an extended allegory was that because a first person narrator is always somewhat unreliable, there exists more room for different interpretations of the series of "providential" events that befall Crusoe to emerge. The reader understands that Crusoe has had a religious conversion and chooses to paint his recollection of his time on the island in a religious light. But because the reader is not required to accept Crusoe's interpretation of events in order to have access to the plot of the story, one can read the book without acknowledging the religious tone and still arrive at the same basic understanding of the Crusoe's history.

I stand by that; I think it's as good an argument as any.

And to wrap up, I submitted my abstract for U of A's New Directions Conference today. I've been kicking around this idea about Kiplingand singularity that first occurred to me while reading James (Jan) Morris's Pax Brittanica, in which there is a reference to Kipling's poem, "The Deep-Sea Cables":

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar --
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world -- here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat --
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth --
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

This poem is in praise of the network of under-sea telegraph cables--but couldn't it almost be about the internet? I'm fascinated by the idea of Kipling as a modern man, in awe of technology. This is not the light in which we are usually inclined to see him. Well, more on that later, though. I think it's about time for me to sign off and get to reading before I get to bed.

Apparently there's an article entitled "Kipling and Technology" that appeared in KJ (I'm assuming that's shorthand for Kipling Journal) 241 from 1987. I shall have to look that up.

Light Bulb Moment: Robinson Crusoe and Imperialism

I've been seeing this quote from James Joyce all over the internetz (retrieved, in this case, from this interesting page created by a professor at CUNY Brooklyn):

The true symbol of British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who, cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knife grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.

OK, so Joyce and many, many other thinkers have talked about Crusoe as an allegory of imperialism. But I'm curious to know to what extent Crusoe provided a model for imperialism. I wonder if a case could be made there...I don't know. Something to think about.

Part One: Is Crusoe a Novel?

I thought I should write a few things about Robinson Crusoe before I proceed much farther into it, so I might keep my early reactions in order. Robinson Crusoe is the first novel assigned for the cumbersomely-titled class "Sex, Death, Politics, God, and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century" taught by Dr. David Robinson. The class hasn't met yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Dr. Robinson, whom I estimate to be in his mid forties, and who, in addition to specializing in eighteenth century lit, works in gay and lesbian studies, is a relative bright young thing on the English Department faculty, and I'm anxious to see how that plays at UA. The academic culture at NAU was younger and queerer, for sure, and I have to say it was a little jarring to get to UA and discover the extent to which the department is dominated by old, very traditional white guys. Anyway. Robinson Crusoe.


So, in preparation for our first meeting on Tuesday, Dr. Robinson has asked us to:

Come prepared to discuss what does or doesn't make [Crusoe] a novel, as you understand the term and the genre. Feel free to consult any source(s) you like that might inform such a discussion. Of course, you should also do your best to get a handle on what the book seems to be concerned with (explicitly, implicitly, overtly, covertly). But use the question of its "novel-ness" (and possibly novelty) as the focal point of your reading.

All right, so, the novel. "What is a novel?" is not really a question I'd thought much about until last semester, when Dr. William Epstein pointed out in our seminar on British satirical novels that, although we recognize a novel like Vanity Fair to be a novel, Thackeray, et al. in the mid-nineteenth century were still figuring it out (An indication of this is the kind of odd position the narrator of that novel occupies. Perhaps that's something to get into more later). But what is a novel? By the early twentieth century the modernists seemed to have an idea of what the novel had been and why it wasn't working for them anymore. I was trying to remember Virginia Woolf's comment objecting to the style you get in the nineteenth century realist tradition--I think this was it:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Through the magic of the internet, I was able to find the source of that quote, which (shame on me for not knowing) is Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction," contained in the 1925 book of essays The Common Reader. Incidentally, this book also contains on essay on "Defoe." I should really just add this book to my Amazon wishlist right now. Anyway.

So, because I don't have a good answer to the question "What is a novel?" at this point, I guess the best I can do is to record some of the things that are going on in Crusoe stylistically, that seem kind of odd in light of our modern understanding of what a novel looks like (although, these day, seems like anything goes).

• Cataloguing: There are a lot of lists of things in this novel, so that it reads kind of like what I expect a ship's inventory would read like. Crusoe the narrator gives a painstakingly detailed account of the provisions he has salvaged.
• Journalistic elements: As we all know, Defoe drew inspiration from the (pretty darn remarkable) true story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survived four years as a castaway on an island off the coast of Chile. Certain parts of Crusoe's account of his shipwreck and survival resemble journalistic accounts.
• Memoir: Though it's really not pertinent to the central plot at all, there's an astonishing amount of backstory Crusoe provides. I believe this has come to be called an "information dump."
• A philosophical reflection on faith: Defoe was a Puritan, and it's apparent that he's not writing in a Church of England framework here. There's a lot of stuff about God, about Providence, about good and evil, and you could almost say the book is an extended allegory illustrating Puritan virtues, like industriousness, etc.
• Epistolary novel: Although the book is mostly an extended memory, long passages of it are given in the form of journal entries.
• Adventure story: Crusoe is clearly a forerunner of the adventure genre, and there are parts that are action packed, with vivid descriptions of storms at sea, hunting wild animals, encountering potentially dangerous natives, etc.

Anyway, that's what I've got for now. I don't like to spend too much time on these entries, and I'm hoping that as I get the hang of it I'll be able to write more substantive and useful content in less time.

*****

Fancy Terms:

• Robinsonade: A term derived from Robinson Crusoe coined by Johann Gottfried Schnabel in 1731 to describe an emerging subgenre of survival or "desert island" stories.

Tackling Fanon

This has not proved to be the most productive weekend for reading thus far, but I have managed to read the introduction and first chapter, "The Black Man and Language," of Black Skin, White Masks. Before I get into it, I should say that I thought I had read some Fanon in the postcolonial lit class I took from Dr. Irene Matthews back at NAU--and it's quite possible that I did--but I don't remember it at all, and looking at it now I feel like I would have remembered Fanon's voice.

BSWM is intensely readable, for something that falls in the theory category. But I suppose Fanon didn't consider himself to be writing "theory." Which raises the question (for me, anyway, who doesn't know much about it as of yet): What did Fanon think he was writing? Who was he writing for? He poses the question himself in the introduction:

"Why am I writing this book? Nobody asked me to.
Especially not those for whom it is intended."

I get a sense from this that Fanon was writing to an ideal audience, whose real counterparts he did not expect would actually read it. I suppose his ideal audience would be black Antillean men, excluding highly educated men like himself. If that's the case, I would say the book is an extended political essay. It has a manifesto-like quality that I find very appealing. By "manifesto-like quality" I suppose I refer to what Dr. Raval characterized as Fanon's tendency to write from a place of anger. That anger is apparent, but well regulated. Fanon writes, "...it's time some things were said. Things I'm going to say, not shout. I've long given up shouting." Puts me in mind of a discussion that took place in a feminist theory class I took from Dr. Doreen Martinez, about Xicana feminist Ana Castillo and her "anger." In a nutshell, that conversation went something like--

Classmate: "I find Castillo's writing really unapproachable because she directs so much anger at white people."
Dr. Martinez: "Why can't she be angry?"

The point I took away from that was that we white folks have a hard time acknowledging the legitimacy of the anger of people of color, and from our position of white guilt we tend to go on the defensive. Seems obvious enough to me, now. No shit, Fanon was angry. Wouldn't you be if you had to rely on the language and cultural attitudes of your historical oppressor to formulate your understanding of yourself? (That's subject formation. See? it's only the second post and we're already applying those fancy Foucauldian terms.)

Anyway. Enough about tone. I want to wrap this up, so I'll just say that the thing that struck me as most intriguing about Fanon's argument is that it's almost as much about masculinity as it is about race...and I'm honestly not sure he was conscious of that. In later chapters he addresses relations between men and women of different races, but I'm going to make a prediction and say that his points are going to be androcentric. It doesn't seem to me at this point that he's particularly interested in the subject formation (there it is again!) of the Antillean woman--how her position as gendered "Other" (when we use the word "gender" in these contexts, we're really just speaking euphemistically about women. Man represents the norm and is therefore genderless) complicates her relationship to race in ways that differ from men's relationship to race, etc. All of which is actually fine with me, because looking at the intersection of race anxiety and gender anxiety as it applies to men is a broad and interesting topic in itself, worthy of an isolated exploration. Fanon writes, "the black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man." This book was written in 1952, well before feminist theory as we know it took off, and yet here is Fanon making an observation about gender that I would not have expected to see predating feminist theory, when those questions become central. I suppose that one needs to go poking around into existentialism and Sartre to find the origin of that comment--and of course, Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of contemporary feminist theory, owed much to Sartre and existentialism.

Just to play some philosophical connect-the-dots, Fanon refers to Sartre, Nietzsche, Mannoni, Aime Cesaire, Andre Breton, and others. So the dominant influences in play here are existentialism and other contemporaneous French thought, Freudian psychology, negritude, and an undercurrent of Marxism. This is just for personal reference; I'll get into figuring out what that all means later.

*****

Fancy Terms:

• Negritude: A movement emerging out of African diasporic francophone communities, beginning in the 1930's, dedicated to resisting the institutionalized racism of French colonial heritage and asserting a common black identity through literature, art, and political action.

First Day of Class

Spring semester got underway today. "Colonial and Postcolonial Criticism and Theory," taught by Dr. Suresh Raval, convened, and I have to say I'm excited about it. The class is small, the group is congenial, and we are tackling a hefty load of reading, beginning with Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. We've also selected which recent critical books to present on, and for good or ill I chose Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel by Inderpal Grewal. The subject is interesting to me; whether the book proves to be I guess we will find out, though I have to say the introduction is not encouraging.

Grewal is applying a postcolonial lens, with a transnational feminist inflection (refraction? When we use "lens" as a metaphor, how do we avoid mixing it?) and undertones of Marxist criticism, to the "Euroimperial" culture of travel emerging out of the nineteenth century. As a lot of scholars of feminism and/or cultural studies tend to do, Grewal eats up a lot of her introduction talking not about her subject and how she is approaching it, but informing us of what she is not talking about--the various problematic dichotomies and binarisms she is avoiding that reinforce and reproduce hegemonic (and the hegemony she is referring to is Victorian England) notions about race, class, and gender. The book was published in 1996; I wonder what progress more recent critics have made, if any, in circumventing the endless exposition and justification that characterizes much of the prose operating in these theoretical frameworks. I was discussing things along these lines with my friend--let's call him "Max"--today, re: poststructuralism in general, but that's a subject I don't have the time to tackle right now.

*****
Fancy terms:

• Epistemology: A philosophical term meaning the study of knowledge
• Ontology: According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ontology is "a philosophical term which denotes the study of being." Wikipedia says that ontology is a major branch of metaphysics (I love Wikipedia. Can you tell?). According to Grewal, the Euroimperial discourse of travel reflects ontological questions arising between the Self and the "Other".
• Subject formation: I suspected this term had something to do with Foucault, and turns out I was right. I can't really explain it briefly, but it's kind of a structuralist thing, having to do with how a subject doesn't simply exist but is a construct limited by our linguistic and cultural parameters (I guess?). I expect the significance of the concept in context has to do with how the Other's formation of self is constrained by the dominant discourse.

*****

Actively Reading: Black Skin, White Masks by Fanon; Home and Harem by Grewal; Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Casually Reading: Pax Britannica by James (Jan) Morris; The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk; Desert Queen (a biography of Gertrude Bell) by Janet Wallach