The Event of Postcolonial Shame [Course Book ed.] 9781400836499

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One. The Form of Shame
Part Two. The Time of Shame
Part Three. The Event of Shame
Notes
Index

Citation preview

The Event of Postcolonial Shame

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 1

8/13/2010 2:04:22 PM

A list of titles in the series appears at the back of the book

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 2

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

The Event of Postcolonial Shame Timothy Bewes

princeton university press princeton and oxford

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 3

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bewes, Timothy. The event of postcolonial shame / Timothy Bewes. p.  cm. — (Translation/transnation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14165-7 (alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-691-14166-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.  Commonwealth literature (English)—History and criticism. 2.  Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. PR9080.B49  2011 820.9'3581—dc22   2010012692 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 4

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

In memory of Dicle Koğacıoğlu

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 5

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 6

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue

1

Part One: The Form of Shame

9

Chapter One Shame as Form   Form and Disjunction: A Recent History   Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved   Three Preliminary Theses   Postcolonial Shame and the Novel

11 15 20 23 41

Chapter Two Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché:   Caryl Phillips   Precipitation of Shame   The Materiality of Postcolonial Shame   Cambridge and Crossing the River   The Poetics of Impossibility

49 53 56 61 66

Part Two: The Time of Shame

73

Chapter Three The Shame of Belatedness: Late Style in V. S. Naipaul   Being and Belatedness   Late Style in Adorno   Liber solemnis: The Enigma of Arrival   Crystal of Shame: The Mimic Men

75 78 82 87 94

Chapter Four Shame and Revolutionary Betrayal: Joseph Conrad,   Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Zoë Wicomb   Hegel: Text as Antitext   Joseph Conrad: Form as the Evacuation of Form

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 7

100 103 108

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

viii

contents

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: The Imminence of Betrayal   Zoë Wicomb: The Difference of the Same   Alain Badiou: Subtraction versus Realization

Part Three: The Event of Shame

115 123 128 135

Chapter Five The Event of Shame in J. M. Coetzee   The Problem of “Agency”   Two Shames in Coetzee   Diary of a Bad Year   The New Direction   Positively White: Slow Man and Corporeal Shame

137 138 142 146 150 153

Chapter Six Shame and Subtraction: Towards Postcolonial Writing   The Origins of This Book: Michel Leiris   Deleuze and Sartre   Subtraction   Louis Malle’s L’Inde fantôme   Towards Postcolonial Writing

164 167 169 173 178 187

Notes

193

Index

219

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 8

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

acknowledgments

The arguments and readings in this book have been tried out at several public and institutional forums, and I would like to express my appreciation to the following for invitations to speak: to Frances Restuccia and the members of the Psychoanalytic Practices seminar at Harvard University; to Thom Dancer and the graduate students and faculty of the English Department at University of Wisconsin–Madison; to the faculty and graduate students of the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, especially Maurizia Boscagli, Enda Duffy, and Carl Gutiérrez-Jones. I presented a version of chapter 5 at the Modern Languages Association conference in San Francisco in 2008 under the auspices of the Division for Twentieth Century Literature, and I would like to thank Rebecca Walkowitz and my fellow presenters Rita Barnard and Lucy Graham for the experience of that forum. The project was initiated during a postdoctoral fellowship held at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University in 2003–4, and I am hugely grateful to the leaders of and participants in the seminar, especially Dicle Koğacıoğlu, David Konstan, Judith Surkis, and Elizabeth Weed. A semester’s fellowship at the Cogut Center for the Humanities in 2007, also at Brown, enabled me to make headway at a crucial stage, and I thank Srinivas Aravamudan, Bernard Reginster, Zachary Sng, and Michael Steinberg for provocative conversations, questions, and insights. Earlier versions of chapters 2, 3, and 6 were published respectively in Cultural Critique and in two edited collections: Adorno and Literature, edited by David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (Continuum, 2006), and Deleuze and the Postcolonial, edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and I am grateful to the editors and the presses concerned for the opportunity to publish with them and for permission to rework some of that material here. Other friends and colleagues have read drafts and commented in numerous more or less formal conversations. Their responses have helped me to develop my argument in ways that are impossible to enumerate; but I would like to acknowledge the help of Stuart Burrows, Rey Chow, Michelle Clayton, Jacques Khalip, Neil Lazarus, Rolland Murray, John Plotz, Thangam Ravindranathan, Denise Riley, and Ellen Rooney. I owe an enormous debt to Nancy Armstrong and to Len Tennenhouse, who have been curious, engaged, and inspirational interlocutors during the planning and writing

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 9

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

x

acknowledgments

of this book. I would like, finally, to express thanks to my editors Hanne Winarsky and Emily Apter, to three challenging and insightful anonymous reviewers of the proposal and manuscript, to my vigilant copyeditor Bonnie Goldsmith, and to everyone at Princeton University Press for their help at every stage in the book’s production. I spoke to Dicle about this project at regular intervals, from its conception to its completion. The book is dedicated to her memory.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 10

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

The Event of Postcolonial Shame

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 11

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 12

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

Prologue

I have just reached the age of forty, life’s midpoint. Physically I am of average height and build. I have a growing paunch and an incipient stoop, the effect of many hours spent each day at a desk, reading literature or working on a computer. My hair is reddish brown, its color faded from the rich auburn of my childhood, and its quality has grown thin and wispy. My nose is long and narrow, inherited from my father, and my features in general rather pointed, denoting, I am sure, an underlying selfishness and belligerence in my character. My eyes are slightly sunken and my skin increasingly pasty as I get older. These signs of physical deterioration have been expedited by my single-minded pursuit of an academic career and by my resentment of physical exercise, which I undertake periodically in an attitude of furious self-improvement. I have small, rather feminine hands; a barely noticeable deformity interrupts the join of my middle finger with the palm of my right hand, an indication, perhaps, of the presence of other amphibious qualities in my constitution. I often berate myself for having a coldblooded approach to human relationships and for a morbid, facetious sense of humor. I suspect that, by nature, I am not really “cut out” for academic work; indeed, I have gone against all the career advice I received as a youth, which uniformly recommended that I take up a practical vocation, preferably one pursued outdoors. This lack of suitability for intellectual work has the effect of aggravating my sense of lifelessness and isolation the more of it I undertake, a state of misery that is sometimes apparent to others as an air of superiority. What better reason to write, asks Gilles Deleuze, than the shame of being a man? What better reason, one might add, than the shame of being born a European, of having been raised at the chilly hearth of an empire in decline by a family whose ancestry includes, within living memory, a history of Christian mission in the “Third World”? What better reason to write than the shame of living and working within the bounds of the largest political, economic, and military power in the world? This book examines shame as an event of writing, a complex, in which the tension between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature is brought into sensuous existence, made manifest in all its irreconcilability. Shame, I will argue, is the material embodiment of that tension, a moment at which the formal possibilities open to the work are incommensurable with, or simply inadequate to, its ethical responsibilities. For obvious reasons, shame has frequently been a motif of biographical literary

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 1

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

2

Prologue

criticism; insofar as we detect the presence of shame in a literary text, we attribute an autobiographical quality to it. As numerous commentators in the fields of social psychology and sociology have noted, when we are ashamed it is not merely for something we have done, but for who or what we are. “His heart is old, it is dark and hard, a heart of stone. That is his contemptible secret,” we read in a late twentieth-century text so suffused with shame that the autobiographical “I” is transposed to the third person, apparently in order to make the shame writable.1 Even narrative fiction, the principal concern of this study, is inserted into an economy of revelation and confession, symptom and pathology, interpretation and symbolism, once our reading becomes organized by the category of authorship. Shame functions, within such an organization, as an index of the text’s origins: of the writer and the writer’s life that doubtless inform and explain every word. The argument put forward in these pages, however, will seek to interrupt this economy. Shame will be considered here as an experience so closely connected to the activity of writing that writing is all but disabled from saying anything about it. This argument, in other words, will involve the nature of shame itself as a form; or, more accurately, it will be an argument constructed on the ruins of the categorical distinction between literature’s formal and representational qualities, ruins that the event of shame leaves behind. Shame is not containable within either of two supposedly discrete domains of the writer’s experience, domains separated most starkly in the genre of narrative fiction: on one hand, that which precedes writing, which informs it, the sphere of life that provides the writer with the material for writing; on the other, the imaginative realm that is represented, presented for our engagement, within the writing itself. Furthermore, among what are called the emotions or affects, shame is distinctive in this regard. Insofar as it appears in the text, shame is a gap, an absence, an experience that is incongruous with its own acknowledgment. As a phenomenon of life, meanwhile, what shame signals, more than anything, is condemnation to, or imprisonment within, the inadequacy of forms. The attempt to comprehend shame, to find a conceptualization adequate to it, is inevitably to grapple with specters, illusions. Insofar as such explanations or conceptualizations fail to convince, they can also emerge as further sources of shame. Joseph Conrad understood this structure well: shame is the experience of a prolonged incommensurability between a form and a substance, erupting, retrospectively, into shame as the manifestation of a great bewilderment. For the betrayed husband in an early story, “The Return,” what is truly shameful in a wife’s betrayal is less the betrayal itself than its unfathomability, the abyss it lays bare.2 The passionate act of the wife— “a shameless and forlorn thing that tramples on the smiling promises,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 2

8/13/2010 2:04:23 PM

Prologue

3

that tears off the placid mask, that strips the body of life” (16)—is incommensurable with every social form: the respectability of marriage, the tragic pathos of an early death, or even the brutal commonplace of an abusive husband. What is so shameful is not that the husband has lived in a delusion exposed by the betrayal, but that he has been thrust, thereby, into a world of desolate unintelligibility. “If she had only died! Certain words would have been said to him in a sad tone, and he, with proper fortitude, would have made appropriate answers” (14). So excruciating is the experience that the idea of disseminating a rumor that “he had been in the habit of beating his wife” appears to him, momentarily, as a means of regaining some lost dignity (17–18). Shame does not have an object that may be isolated from the subject—and shame is not an orientation of the subject towards an object. It would be more accurate to say that, in shame, subject and object coincide—but even this formulation is not quite adequate. Shame is an event of incommensurability:  a profound disorientation of the subject by the confrontation with an object it cannot comprehend, an object that renders incoherent every form available to the subject. This book sets out, then, from an acknowledgment of the impossibility of any literary-critical study of shame as such. No study of shame can deal easily with the paradox that to make shame comprehensible would be to dissolve the feeling, and hence our possibility of grasping it, altogether—and yet shame appears to survive all such attempts at comprehension. This structure of impossibility is constitutive of the object of study: shame resists interpretation, since to speak of it boldly, adequately, is to counteract it, to produce its opposite—or itself as its own opposite (shame as absence of shame).3 When it comes to literature, a practice that, in the modern period, involves the transfiguration of individual experience into an aesthetic form, the very presence of shame raises questions concerning the ethical, political, or representational adequacy of the text—questions that remain, therefore, unanswerable. In literary works, shame does not exist in some buried state, to be unearthed by the penetrating critic; rather, shame appears overtly, as the text’s experience of its own inadequacy. The body of theory that is most easily identified with the problem of incommensurability is that which has solidified under the name of “postcolonial studies.” In its most influential incarnation at least, postcolonial theory is founded on the unanswerability of questions such as the following: Is there any position from which to write that is not itself implicated in the history of colonial inequality? One of the lines of inquiry to be pursued in this book concerns the reasons why, in the aftermath of the enterprise known as colonization, and from every perspective upon that enterprise, the literary representation of individual and collective expe-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 3

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

4

Prologue

rience repeatedly comes up against a sense of shame as a limit. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Black Orpheus, the preface to Léopold Sen­ ghor’s 1948 anthology of “new Negro and Malagasy poetry,” that reading the work of black poets makes “us”—he and the “white men” to whom he addresses himself—feel shame, what he is describing is not a communicable emotion but, on the contrary, a mark of something not communicable: “If . . . these poems give us shame, it is not with that conscious purpose; they have not been written for us. All those, colonist and accomplice, who open this book, will have the sensation of reading[,] as though over another’s shoulder, words that were not intended for them.”4 In the postcolonial world, a designation that needs to be further defined and delimited, literature has often functioned as the locus of an incommensurability: between form and substance, expression and appearance, addressee and reader. A block, a residue of unprocessable material accumulates, which is experienced as shame. In another preface, his 1961 introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre returns to the image of a book whose actual readers are not those it was intended for. Arguably, the Fanon preface is composed in a different register from Black Orpheus. In this later text Sartre apparently sets out to shame his European readers precisely by addressing them as the readers of a book that is not meant for them: Europeans, open this book, look inside. After taking a short walk in the night you will see strangers gathered around a fire. … They might see you, but they will go on talking among themselves without even lowering their voices. Their indifference strikes home: their fathers, creatures living in the shadows, your creatures, were dead souls; you afforded them light, you were their sole interlocutor, you did not take the trouble to answer the zombies. The sons ignore you. The fire that warms and enlightens them is not yours. You, standing at a respectful distance, you now feel eclipsed, nocturnal, and numbed. It’s your turn now. In the darkness that will dawn into another day, you have turned into the zombie.5

The experience of reading Fanon’s book, says Sartre, “will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling” (xlix). Sartre is not theorizing Europe’s shame here, nor is he interested in dissolving (or resolving) it. On the contrary, he is attempting, in a highly charged political situation, to produce a sense of shame: to shame his readers. The register of injunction (indeed, of interpellation) is central to the aims of Sartre’s text: there is nothing more shame-inducing than the invasive address to the other qua other, as Sartre, the author of Being and Nothingness, knew better than anyone. In this light, some of the most fascinating implications of Sartre’s Fanon preface are literary ones. By framing The Wretched of the Earth

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 4

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

Prologue

5

as a book in permanent discontinuity with its readership, Sartre seems to be imagining the possibility of a work predicated upon the absence or the disappearance of the subject, a literature that would escape the shame of interpellation—the individuating gaze of a subject upon an object—by escaping altogether the organizing apparatus of self and other. This literature would have no manifest or nameable readership, no “you,” only the virtual, undifferentiated community of “them,” an unproducible, uninstantiable group “gathered around a fire.” Such a literature would by definition be free of colonial relations of perception—of the structure of looking and being looked at, of subject and object. Clearly Sartre himself is in no position to produce it, or even to conceptualize it directly. And yet, it is in the name of that imagined literature, that imagined relationship between reader and text, that he shames the real readers of Fanon’s text. He names Fanon’s “intended” readership, but the name is entirely abstract: Fanon’s “brothers” (xlviii). The abstraction is heightened by the fact that Sartre does not himself address that virtual readership, only the real, no less imagined one that he situates in the shadows of the text, in metropolitan Europe. There are, I suggest, two shames operating in this text of Sartre’s: a named, instantiated form that he is attempting to offload on his readers (which has very little to do with the object of his philosophical investigation in Being and Nothingness), and an unnamed and unnameable shame, an event that speaks as much to the materiality of Sartre’s own work as to the ethical implication of his supposed readership vis-à-vis the colonial enterprise. This second shame is not encompassable by its concept. Shame, unnamed, is an occasion of the suspension, even annihilation of the self in the aftermath of colonialism—a project founded upon the inherent legitimacy of naming, perception, and self-assertion. “For us,” says Sartre, “a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation” (lviii). The event of shame in Sartre’s preface is enacted not in the mode of injunction, the mode in which everything is speakable, seeable, and nameable, but as an unspoken, embodied relation to its own actuality as a piece of writing. That relation is apparent in the ways in which Sartre imagines Fanon’s text as against his own, and vice versa. If Fanon’s work is disembodied, subjectless, and lacking an organic reader, Sartre’s text is embodied: marked irreducibly by the color and even the frame of its audience. The first stage in the decolonization of Europe, says Sartre, is “the strip-tease of our humanism,” an operation that makes visible what was once invisible: that which never previously had to endure “the look,” that which, in the colonial period, only administered it.6 Accordingly, Sartre imagines Europe as a fat, white body: “This pale, bloated continent ended up by lapsing into what Fanon rightly calls ‘narcissism’” (lviii).

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 5

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

6

Prologue

The mortification of the white body is a frequent motif in the literature of postcolonial shame. It should not be understood in merely subjective or expressive terms, for the explanation for such bodily shame lies not in the body’s appearance, but in the mere fact of its coming into visibility in the period of decolonization. European colonialism was predicated upon the invisibility of the white body and the visibility of the dark one. The discrepancy in this relation has nothing to do with pigmentation, and everything to do with what Jacques Rancière has characterized as “the distribution of the sensible”: “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”7 The colonial world is the site of a politics “revolv[ing] around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” Colonial power is materialized in the asymmetry of perception itself: in the transparency of the (white) body as the bearer of “universal” values, and the opacity of the (black) body as a surface for the projection of such values, or an obstacle to their dissemination. When that asymmetry is dislodged or inverted, the temporal discrepancy between the two regimes of perception is manifest as shame. Sartre’s reference to Karl Marx is to Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge, written in 1843 from a barge in Holland, five years before the composition of the Communist Manifesto. What Marx says about shame is more nuanced than Sartre’s paraphrase has it. For Marx, the persistence of German militarism and despotism is shaming, in contrast with the political progress made in France and Holland since the French Revolution— but the shame is more than a mere feeling: “Shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.”8 Marx, writing in a theoretical mode, names the event of shame as such. For Marx too, shame is an event of incommensurability: the simultaneous impossibility of identifying and disidentifying with one’s own country. To say that it is a revolution “in itself” is to say precisely that it has no need of theorization, that it is resistant to appropriation and incompatible with its invocation. Such sensuous, “revolutionary” shame does not coincide with its named or instantiated version. Indeed, the public instantiation of shame often functions to resolve, conveniently and prematurely, the incommensurability of the shame event. In order to become alert to the revolutionary potentiality of shame, it is necessary to attend to the radical distance between shame as a form and as an event. To remain with the first is to conceive of shame as a psychological phenomenon, adjacent to guilt, and arising primarily in relation to some shameful action or association

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 6

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

Prologue

7

outside—but attributable to—the self. The second is an entity that has no positive existence, no actuality; it registers, rather, a profound disparity. To talk about one’s shame, to make shame the subject of one’s writing, is to confuse these two dimensions, to pass off one for the other. “Taste,” writes Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia, “is the most accurate seismograph of historical experience. Unlike almost all other faculties, it is ever able to register its own behaviour. Reacting against itself, it recognizes its own lack of taste.”9 Almost exactly the same can be said of shame, which registers its own shamefulness the moment it is invoked. Shame, like taste, does not survive its instantiation, meaning that there is no form adequate to the event of shame. The relation between shame and form may be delimited still further; for shame, even as a form, is an experience of the violence and inadequacy of forms. The intention of this book is, in part, to reframe the problematic of postcolonial studies in this light: as a field defined not positively, by the presence of certain cultural motifs, identity formations, historical struggles, or emancipatory goals, but negatively, by an incommensurability that is materialized whenever such presences are produced or named as the object or the subject of a work (as they cannot fail to be in works of literature). In the writers discussed in this book—Joseph Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Zoë Wicomb—that incommensurability is frequently apparent as a chronic anxiety toward writing itself. Thus, the simultaneous impossibility of identifying and disidentifying with one’s own country in Marx is transformed into the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of writing, a situation in which the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical claims of literature is experienced subjectively. That tension or discrepancy is obscured by every attempt to instantiate, as the truth of the work, any merely formal manifestation within it. The critical and theoretical attention to the event of shame in this book seeks to liberate works of literature from categories of thought that they are otherwise compelled to reproduce, simply on account of their writtenness. What the presence of shame in so many postcolonial works alerts us to, in the first instance, is less the shamefulness of the colonial enterprise than that of the literary one. However, as this book will argue, those two enterprises cannot be separated ontologically; for the novel, the dominant form of the postcolonial as well as of the colonial period, emerges from the same disparity between subject and object as colonialism itself. The same might be said, of course, of literary criticism, particularly in the mode of exegesis and interpretation. The further ambition of this work, then, is to point towards a mode of reading that would be faithful to the discrepancy between subject and object at the heart of the critical enterprise. The aim here is not any merely subjective escape from the shame

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 7

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

8

Prologue

of the critic, but the evolution of a method that will avoid projecting the shame onto the object of study. The approach of the chapters that follow, accordingly, is the search for critical concepts, specific to the works in question, with which they can be said to move beyond “colonial” relations of perception to become truly postcolonial. Central to this procedure is the removal of the literary text from the ignominious position in which scholarship has tended to place it, between the conceptualization of freedom and its realization.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 8

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

part one

The Form of Shame

Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence. —Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 9

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 10

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

Chapter One Shame as Form

In a global conjuncture in which the very expression of ethical solidarity displays and enacts unprecedented disparities of power, writers of literature are in an ethical and aesthetic quandary: How to write without thereby contributing to the material inscription of inequality? Even to pose such a question can appear as romanticizing, or worse, of the position of the “subaltern” or “Third World” subject, who seems thereby reduced to the status of an object that is merely written about. This quandary is inextricable from literary criticism and from the production of literature whenever the problematic of those formations is articulated in ethical terms. Neil Lazarus has written of Gayatri Spivak’s work—too often emblematized, perhaps, by the title of her most famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—as implicated in “an austere construction of the subaltern as a discursive figure that is by definition incapable of selfrepresentation.”1 In a certain strain of postcolonial scholarship informed by Spivak’s conceptualization of the subaltern—and one can imagine the same charge being leveled at the notion of a constitutive and unresolvable shame underlying the practice of postcolonial literature—the real histories of national liberation in Third World countries disappear into an abyss of epistemological méconnaissance, while political interventions in the West on behalf of such struggles are discountable as so many attempts to ventriloquize the other. For Spivak, in Lazarus’s words, “the actual contents of the social practice of ‘the people’ are always, indeed definitionally, inaccessible to members of the elite classes” (114), a formulation that, for Lazarus, also implies its obverse: a permanently disempowered and silenced subaltern class. Spivak’s conceptualization of the subaltern itself, Lazarus suggests further, comes close to “fetishizing difference under the rubric of incommensurability” (115). Nicholas Brown has referred in the same vein to “the paradoxically Eurocentric refusal of Eurocentrism.”2 This phrase, describing a perceived tendency among metropolitan postcolonial critics to disparage the movements towards liberation in Africa on the grounds of their residual empiricism, exhibits the problem at hand. According to Brown and Lazarus, for Western writers and critics to reject narratives of selfdetermination and nationalism on the grounds of their Western origin, or

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 11

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

12

chapter 1

to turn the relations between West and non-West into a gulf of mutual incomprehensibility, is to remain tied to a “Manichean” division between East and West that has lost any explanatory power it may once have had (Brown 6–7). For both thinkers, the problem seems to be that such critics confuse dialectical relations of struggle with ontological—and dualistic— relations of selfhood and otherness. For Brown, whose work analyzes the formative “rift” between British modernism in the interwar period and African writing during the struggles for independence, any simple equation between capitalist modernity and the West risks introducing a moral viewpoint to a situation that is “essentially systemic” (7): risks, that is, allowing sentiments (such as shame) to take the place of a more robust political understanding. The complexity of that “systemic” situation means that questions predicated upon the cultural origins of non-Western literary texts need to be replaced by a more reflective set of questions about the terms we are using and the specific contexts in which we are expecting those terms to function. Not “Can the subaltern speak?” but What does it mean to “speak” in a literary form such as fiction? What ethical and aesthetic assumptions are involved in talking about the possibility or the impossibility of literature as such? What would a literature adequate to the ethical entanglements of modernity look like, in an age in which language has come to be thought of as constitutively untrustworthy? What ethical expectations can be attached to a form such as the novel, once it has been defined, as in Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel, by “absolute sinfulness,” or in Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” as a form that the reader turns to in “the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about”?3 Is there, perhaps, a sense in which only a subaltern could speak in such a form? Nicholas Brown has his own list of such questions: Is “non-Western literature” a contradiction in terms? What do we mean when we use words such as “literature” and “West”? What agendas do such words conceal? (Utopian Generations 6) My contention is that an uncertainty as to how to ask such questions, let alone how to address them, is a complex arising out of the inherent shamefulness not only of the colonial enterprise, but also, and inseparably, of the literary one. The question that seems most clearly invited, indeed suggested, by the work of Lazarus and of Brown is one that neither addresses explicitly, nor, in fact, has the question yet been posed in the context of postcolonial literature: To what extent is the very acknowledgment of shame at the history of colonialism a shameful act, destined further to expand the circuit of shame? And if shame itself is ensnared in implication, what possibilities exist for a literary form that might be adequate to the ethical complexity of the postcolonial world?

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 12

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

shame as form

13

In an interview in 1990, the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, one of the most challenging explorers of these questions, made the following “entirely parenthetical” remark, a confession of a feeling of ethical inadequacy regarding the literary works he had produced: “Let me add … that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.”4 The statement is of a kind that is rare in Coetzee’s work, not only because it addresses the question of the motivations and intentions behind his own writing—something Coetzee has almost always avoided talking about when invited to do so—but also because it is a self-evidently auto­ biographical utterance, spoken in the first person, although framed (“I, as a person, as a personality”) in such a way as to make plain Coetzee’s doubts about any privileged status accorded to that discourse. Such auto­ biographical sentiments relating to the creation of the work, it would seem, have for Coetzee only an incidental bearing upon the significance of the work itself. By implication, the same must be true of attempts to paraphrase or explain the work from outside—for example, in a literarycritical register. In the same interview, Coetzee describes the limitations of criticism and theory as having to do precisely with a normative referential quality that they retain, however much they may strive for precision and specificity: “When I write criticism … I am always aware of a responsibility toward a goal that has been set for me not only by the argument, not only by the whole philosophical tradition … but also by the rather tight discourse of criticism itself” (246). This normative or ethical quality, he implies (although these are not Coetzee’s terms), is absent from works of fiction; or at least, if such works feel a responsibility, it is “toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road.” Indeed, Coetzee’s recent work, which includes several unconventional volumes of autobiography, has been characterized by the use of fictional form to reframe—and thereby liberate into “irresponsibility”—what might otherwise appear to be an atypically tendentious, directly referential mode of writing.5 How would it be possible to write about shame, this affective structure that seems to be located in the very interstice between experience and representation? Coetzee’s fictional works deal frequently and explicitly with feelings of shame, but the question should be asked: To what extent can such works really be said to be about an experience identifiable as “shame,” the precise contours of which we can feel confident about? Furthermore, in a writer such as Coetzee (and I shall consider him in more detail in chapter 5), is it truly possible to speak of a shame that precedes

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 13

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

14

chapter 1

the work, a shame that the work takes for its subject, a shame that the work seems to be attempting to process? Is it not the case that shame—if it exists—is incommensurable with its conceptualization as such? In another interview, Coetzee, commenting on the influence of Franz Kafka on his work, suggests that Kafka’s distinction is that he “hints that it is possible, for snatches, however brief, to think outside one’s own language, perhaps to report back on what it is like to think outside language itself” (Doubling the Point 198). Kafka is another writer in whom shame is frequently held to be a dominant, self-identical feeling, attributable in the first instance to the individual who precedes, and is responsible for, the work. According to Milan Kundera (in an analysis that is antithetical to my own understanding), it is perfectly possible to separate Kafka’s shame, an “elementary” emotion that is both comprehensible and selfevident, from his activity as a writer.6 The personal shame that made Kafka request of Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, that his letters and papers be destroyed after his death, for example, is for Kundera “not that of a writer but that of an ordinary individual,” the shame “of being turned into an object” (263). In Kundera’s account, this feeling has nothing to do with writing, and everything to do with the public exposure of what is intimate and interior. Thus Brod, in going against Kafka’s wishes, is guilty of “betraying” his friend, of acting “against the sense of shame he knew in the man” (264).7 For Walter Benjamin, far more interestingly, shame is Kafka’s “strongest gesture,” an “intimate human reaction” that, at the same time—and paradoxically—is “no more personal than the life and thought which govern it.”8 This is what is meant by the last words of The Trial, following the final utterance of Josef K, “Like a dog!”: “it was as if the shame would outlive him.”9 In the works of such writers, shame seems to be a placeholder for a quality or a modality of thought that cannot adequately be accounted for by language, or reduced to what is expressible in language. What we are ashamed of is the fact of there being such a modality of thought. Shame, then, survives even our experience of it. Criticism of works of literature that have to do with shame, which is also to say, criticism that organizes itself around the thematic of shame, runs the risk of installing a limit or reference point that interrupts what sociologists have called the “shame spiral”10 —thus, of providing an explanation that does not explain. How can shame in literature be made comprehensible without thereby removing it entirely from our comprehension? More than his fictional works, perhaps, Coetzee’s nonfictional writings (if we can designate his texts Boyhood and Youth as such) are repeatedly caught in such spirals of shame, which threaten to open up interminably and become abyssal: “He would rather be bad than boring, has no respect for a person who would rather be bad than boring, and no

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 14

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

shame as form

15

respect either for the cleverness of being able to put his dilemma neatly into words.”11 Of the narrator’s justification of his own youthful actions in terms of a notion of artistic experience, he writes: It … does not for a moment convince him. It is sophistry, that is all, contemptible sophistry. And … the sophistry will only become more contemptible. There is nothing to be said for it; nor, to be ruthlessly honest, is there anything to be said for its having nothing to be said for it. As for ruthless honesty, ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn. On the contrary, it is the easiest thing in the world. (164)

In dealing with shame in literature, criticism will have to develop formal strategies for getting at the paradox of shame: that the notion of shame is inadequate to the experience, which itself is one of inadequacy, or incommensurability. Criticism must find a way of interpreting without interpreting; a way of acknowledging its own shameful deficiency, without seeking to absolve itself. Shame is an event of writing, which means that it is never contained or exhausted by interpretation, nor even by its representation in the work. One of the hopes of the present study is to take a first step towards such a criticism. Form and Disjunction: A Recent History “The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write?”12 Implicit in Deleuze’s question, although by no means obviously so, is the emblematic status of “man” as the species, and the gender, that writes. Man, writes Deleuze in the same essay, “presents himself as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all matter, whereas woman, animal, or molecule always has a component of flight that escapes its own formalization” (1, my emphasis). This idea, one of the more contentious in Deleuze’s work, is associated with the notion that writing is always engaged in becoming: “In writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible.” Given this real and symbolic link between man and writing, it seems possible to rephrase Deleuze’s initial question to reveal its tautological quality: The shame of being able to write—is there any better reason to write? And yet, the question with which I would like to begin is an inversion of Deleuze’s original question, an articulation that repeats Deleuze’s tautology and that, in doing so, frames both the problem this book will attempt to address and, in a sense, its solution: The ability to write—is there any better reason to feel ashamed? One of the propositions to be put forward here is that, in the twentieth century, a new occasion for the production of writing emerges into

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 15

8/13/2010 2:04:24 PM

16

chapter 1

consciousness: its own lack of ethical substance. This proposition is a historical one, and it suggests a new inseparability of shame and writing, or rather—to be faithful to the way the thesis of this book will unfold—of shame and form. To give the temporal and geographical dimensions of this thesis as much precision as possible, we can say that this consciousness of the inseparability of shame and form appears in the first or second decade of the century in Europe, but it becomes the object of a more generalized awareness in the years after the Second World War and takes on further nuances at different moments, and in different locations, through the rest of the century. The historical factors that contribute to this awareness might be said to include, in roughly chronological order, the crisis in national consciousness that affected Europeans around the time of the First World War; the spectacular quality of the ideological posturing that took place on an international scale between the wars (in particular, between Germany and the Soviet Union); the revelations, after the Second World War and later, of the inhumane obscenities that had occurred in the name of those ideologies; the movements towards decolonization of the formerly colonized countries, particularly in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa; the mass migrations across continents in the wake of those movements and the forced intimacy between different “cultures” that developed as a result; the increasing domination of images over the thought processes of men and women with the spread of a commodity culture; and the polarization that took place between “entertainment” and “art” as a result. Anyone familiar with Gilles Deleuze’s works on cinema will notice that these events are among those named by Deleuze as informing the transition from a cinema dominated by tight image/narrative configurations (what he calls, after Henri Bergson, the “sensory-motor schema”), in which movement and temporality are closely regulated by plot considerations, to one in which pure “optical” and “sound situations” effect a rupture in those configurations.13 And indeed, the thesis I am advancing here, of a literature that begins to constitute itself formally out of a sense of its own inadequacy, owes something to Deleuze’s account of a rupture between time and movement (which is also a rupture between form and narrative) in postwar cinema. However, in ways that will be crucial for the argument of this book, literature experiences this discrepancy rather differently from cinema. Towards the end of this chapter I will suggest that cinema contains an explanation for, and an answer to, the problem of shame and form—or the shame of form—that has been a defining preoccupation of European literature in the twentieth century. A number of questions arise. What is meant here by “form”? Why, given that the material under consideration is predominantly literary, emphasize its quality as form rather than as, say, language or writing? One answer would be to see literature’s discomfort with its own formal qual-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 16

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

shame as form

17

ity as emblematic of a general disintegration of form, or forms, including ideas of national and cultural identity, territorial borders, ideological doctrines (which look increasingly fallible and fragile), and notions of “civilization” and “civility” (which, in the light of certain social developments and shifts during the twentieth century, begin to seem like alibis of imperialism, class privilege, and racism). To emphasize the historical dimensions of this disintegration is not (pace Fredric Jameson)14 to insist upon its “necessity”; nor is the proposition dependent on an epistemic break in the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. “History” implies simply that the discomfort with form is not a merely theoretical proposition—although, of course, literary and cultural theory is one field in which that discomfort appears, and in which it is responded to. When, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a robustly empiricist work, Hannah Arendt talks about the 1914–18 war in Europe as an event that “is almost impossible to describe,”15 she is both narrating and participating in this discomfort with form. Even her own image of an “explosion” to describe the epochal shift that took place over the period of the outbreak of war and its aftermath is, she writes, a figure of speech that is “as inaccurate as are all the others”: The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done. Inflation destroyed the whole class of small property owners beyond hope for recovery or new formation, something which no monetary crisis had ever done so radically before. Unemployment … reached fabulous proportions, was no longer restricted to the working class but seized with insignificant exceptions whole nations. Civil wars … were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere…. The explosion of 1914 and its severe consequences of instability … sufficiently shattered the façade of Europe’s political system to lay bare its hidden frame. Such visible exposures were the sufferings of more and more groups of people to whom suddenly the rules of the world around them had ceased to apply. It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule, and which filled with equal cynicism victims and observers of an apparently unjust and abnormal fate. Both mistook this cynicism for growing wisdom in the ways of the world, while actually they were more baffled and therefore became more stupid than they ever had been before. (267–28)

For Arendt, the repercussions of the war are so immense as to exceed even the image of “catastrophe,”  because “the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass” (267). Rather, she writes, the events of the summer of 1914 (which began with the as-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 17

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

18

chapter 1

sassination of the Archduke Ferdinand on June 28 and continued with the Austrian-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia and subsequent declarations of war by Germany on France and Belgium, and by Britain on Germany), “[seem] to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop.” In her preface to the book (dated “Summer, 1950”), Arendt describes a widespread anxiety regarding the imminent dissolution of the forms of human existence: “On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point” (vii). Her understanding of totalitarianism, indeed, is as a systematic destruction of belief in the forms of civilization, a “cynical ‘realism’” which draws upon and reiterates a “spurious” doctrine of historical inevitability. The obligation of thought, for Arendt, is to discover the “hidden mechanics” whereby the “traditional elements of our political and spiritual world” were dissolved into “a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose” (vii–viii). One of the effects of the 1914 “explosion” was to make way for the emergence of this totalitarian realism, in which any distinction between the actuality of events and their significance is erased: “Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality” (267). Events, in other words, become detached from the apparatus of meaning and appear in their immediacy: formless, self-evident, and entirely exhausted merely by their having taken place. The discomfort with form, then, is a historical proposition. However, its temporal parameters may not be so precise as Arendt’s compelling, pessimistic narrative would suggest. It is certain, for example, that elements of this discomfort appeared well before the turn of the twentieth century. It is even possible that—to quote Jacques Derrida in another context— the progressive disenchantment with form is “a process that is … as old as man, as old as what he calls his world, his knowledge, his history and his technology.”16 Something like a notion of inadequacy, successively attaching to the forms of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, prose, and eventually (presumably) philosophy, is what drives the movement of Hegel’s “spirit” through a linear history characterized by different stages of complexity: symbolic, ideal, romantic, abstract, imaginative, intelligible, and conceptual. For Hegel, poetry, for example, appears at the point at which the very conflict between the pure exteriority of the visual arts and the pure interiority of music requires a concrete shape that can unite the two extremes—when spirit has outgrown those earlier forms—and it undergoes a transformation in turn when the demand for

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 18

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

shame as form

19

“literal accuracy” of the mundane, practical consciousness sets off the prosaic world from the figurative, metaphorical one.17 But the notion of inadequacy does not need a linear or cyclical narrative of obsolescence and innovation to sustain it. As far back as Dante, we find poets appealing to the divine to grant them the power to render in words that which by definition exceeds the verbal; thus, aesthetic or ethical failure has long been a hazard of literary creativity.18 One might say further that the category of art in the modern age is founded on the tension between failure and success—and on its irresolvability. Aesthetic beauty, according to Kant, requires a mode of judgment that, by definition, cannot be objectively verified. Kant’s formulation for the judgment of beauty, “subjective universal validity,” designates a mode of evaluation that ascribes or imputes a quality of aesthetic value to the object, but is unable to demonstrate or prove it.19 That the work might be failing, even as we read or contemplate it, is in the Kantian schema a condition of possibility for its success. In the modern world, that is to say, the measure of success of an artwork may at any moment, or with nothing more than a slight shift in perspective, become precisely the measure of its failure, or vice versa. Even more explicitly, Kant’s notion of the sublime is an experience ­(both pleasurable and painful) of the “inadequacy” of the imagination in grasping an order of natural might, or magnitude. The “agitation” it produces is a kind of “vibration,” a rapid fluctuation between attraction and repulsion, caused by the fact that the thing in question is “excessive for the imagination,” an “abyss” in which “the imagination is afraid to lose itself” (114–15, §27). However, in the twentieth century it becomes possible to see the worthlessness or inadequacy of writing no longer as an interruption of, or a detraction from, literary creativity, nor as a potentially reversible matter of aesthetic judgment, but as precisely constitutive of its worth. Inadequacy itself, we might say, develops a certain truth value; it becomes a quality that it is almost possible to assess positively, rather than being, as for Hegel, simply the mark of a historically decadent form. When JeanFrançois Lyotard elaborates Kant’s sublime as a “postmodern” mode, the inadequacy of the faculty of “presenting” with respect to the faculty of “conceiving” becomes the very occasion of the work: a making visible of the fact “that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.”20 Failure is in some sense a measure of the work’s success; or rather, the aesthetic tension between failure and success at the level of the perceiving subject is destroyed by a catastrophic and decisive irruption of the ethical. Not the ethical as a new content for literature, however, or a replacement of aesthetic concerns with ethical ones; rather, in the twentieth century, the ethical appears as a permanent rendering inadequate of form.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 19

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

20

chapter 1

Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved The historical event that is most often held to signal this irruption is the one designated—inadequately—by the single word “Auschwitz”; that is, the project of the Nazis systematically to eradicate the Jewish people. Indeed, the writers that we generally think of in connection with an aesthetic of failure, or of silence, are also those associated with the impossible project of a post-Auschwitz literature: Marguerite Duras, Paul Celan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett. Theodor Adorno’s reflection on the “barbarity” of writing poetry after Auschwitz is a common theoretical reference point for this aesthetic—or anti-aesthetic—project;21 yet, as Adorno was aware, “Auschwitz” is itself an image, a thoughtform, and as such, an attempt to preserve exactly the kind of historical knowledge that Auschwitz itself signals the crisis of. “After Auschwitz,” writes Adorno in Negative Dialectics, “our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate.”22 One of the most illuminating texts on the relation between shame and literary form is found not in the body of literature that explores the theoretical paradox of a post-Auschwitz aesthetic, but in the final work of a writer who survived the experience of imprisonment in Auschwitz and wrote about it, in all its difficulty. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi looks back on the books he had already published about his time in the camp (such as Se questo è un uomo and La Tregua, translated into English as If This Is a Man and The Truce respectively)23 as well as on the experience itself. For Levi, in a chapter entitled “Shame,” the figure of the Auschwitz survivor dramatizes the absolute disconnection of form and content—or we might also say, the rupture between ethics and aesthetics—in the twentieth century. The survivor of Auschwitz is caught in a paradox: either he has suffered, in which case his suffering has stripped him of the tools for speaking—that is, he survives in the condition of the Muselmänner, a figure the immensity of whose experience has wrecked his ability to talk about it—or he retains the ability to speak, in which case his very eloquence testifies to the fact that he has not experienced the full horror. Levi recalls having observed the public execution in Auschwitz of a man who had resisted, who had taken part in a successful plan to blow up one of the crematoria, and of being tormented afterwards by the thought: “You too could have, you certainly should have.”24 After such an experience, one’s very survival is testament to the fact that there was more that one could have done to resist; a person’s life, his

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 20

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

shame as form

21

or her very existence, is a cause of shame. Returning to their hut after watching the hanging, Levi and his friend Alberto divide up their food: “we satisfied the daily ragings of hunger,” he writes in If This Is a Man (1958), “and now we are oppressed by shame” (156). After Auschwitz, then (but this situation is not unique to Auschwitz, nor is Auschwitz a cause of it), writing is defined by its inadequacy; that is to say, by its profound ethical complicity. Levi feels his very eloquence to be shameful: an emblem of the suffering he did not experience, and of the inaction that ensured his survival, as against the action of the worthier man who died—worthier, in some sense, for Levi, because he died. For Adorno, however, the real corrosiveness of Auschwitz, as a category of thought at least, is not in its having made poetry or testimony impossible, or shameful, but rather in its status as a positive, that is to say, ethical explanation for the rupture between aesthetic form and content, the situation that I have been describing as the constitutive inadequacy of writing in the twentieth century. Auschwitz thus comes to stand in for a situation of which it is only the most recognizable example. Auschwitz becomes, perversely, a way of orienting ourselves—consoling ourselves, no less— in relation to an extremely disorienting event: a break in the viability of such connections as those between form and content, experience and expression, ethics and aesthetics, metaphysics and actuality. “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed,” writes Adorno in Negative Dialectics, “because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience” (362). The implication of Adorno’s critique of the thought-form “Auschwitz” is that as soon as it enters the economy of ideas, it begins to act as an inhibition upon a real understanding of the impossibility of poetry. The very idea that it is Auschwitz that should have made poetry impossible—on the basis, say, of its unprecedented moral extremity—is itself an effect of the impoverishment of thought after Auschwitz. Levi himself acknowledges that the shame of which he speaks has a wider, even universal dimension. The “shadow of a suspicion” that takes hold of the survivor, he writes, and that constitutes his shame, is that “each man is his brother’s Cain”; that “each one of us”—us, he says, considered in “a much vaster, indeed, universal sense”—“has usurped his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead” (Drowned 81–82). And yet it is in the very nature of shame that it leaves in ruins any such conceptual polarity as that of universal versus individual. Shame has a paradoxical structure born of the fact that, while it is intensely focused on the self, it is experienced, as Jean-Paul Sartre noted, before the “Other.”25 This most personal and solitary of emotions cements us into a social world, even as its experience is intensely isolating.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 21

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

22

chapter 1

The paradoxical structure is replicated across a series of conceptual oppositions, some of which have been analyzed, with much sensitivity and insight, by the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins, whose own work on shame has had a significant impact in literary studies since its rediscovery and republication by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank.26 Shame takes place in the mind, but it is communicated in and by the body; indeed, shame can only be said to exist once it makes a physiological appearance. The casual, everyday use of the adjective “shameless” demonstrates the truth of this: “shamelessness” refers not to anything interior, but to something exterior that is deemed to be absent. The paradoxes of shame are further demonstrated in Tomkins’s analysis. Shame seeks to hide itself, and yet it is nothing if it does not become manifest. Thus, writes Tomkins, “the very act whose aim is to reduce facial communication is in some measure self-defeating” (137). Shame is an experience simultaneously of exclusion and of inclusion; it marks us as both inside and outside the community. Whenever we experience what Tomkins calls “vicarious shame”—when, to give a couple of Tomkins’s own examples, he sees a “Southern Negro” swallowing his anger when confronted by a “Southern white,” or when my child “feels forced to inhibit the expression of negative affect toward me” (161)—our subjective investment in civilization is consolidated, even as it is put under strain. Vicarious shame is “at once a measure of civilization and a condition of civilization” (162); that is, it is only insofar as we are subjectively implicated in civilization that we can be ashamed by the ways in which it falls short. In contrast to that of all other affects, the object of shame coincides with the experiencing subject; shame, writes Tomkins, “is an experience of the self by the self,” meaning that “the phenomenological distinction between the subject and object … is lost” (136). Among the implications of these paradoxical relations, and of that last in particular, is that shame radically complicates the ontology of emotion and its expression. Shame is neither symptom nor pathology, or it is one only insofar as it is the other. As Tomkins points out, when one is ashamed, “one is as ashamed of being ashamed as of anything else” (137). The point to emphasize is that, as an affect, shame is peculiarly resistant to the logic of symptomatology: of cause and effect. If we translate this resistance into the register of literary interpretation, the relation that is left radically complicated by the notion of the shameful work is that of form and content. A work that affects us with shame is a work that cannot be contained in a mere reading; something else, some event is taking place that is not reducible to the personality writing, nor to the personality reading, nor to the historical circumstances in which the text was composed, nor to the events it depicts, nor to any combination of these.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 22

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

shame as form

23

Three Preliminary Theses Here I would like to make three closely connected propositions, intended to illustrate why shame is so suggestive for talking about literature and literary form. All three are notions that I hope to substantiate in the chapters that follow. I shall state them here in the strongest terms possible, for purposes of clarity, and in the hope that some allowance will be made for their provisionally generalizing quality. Shame Is Not a “Subjective” Emotion Shame is not a subjective emotion, one that, for example, would precede its objectivation. Rather, shame is an entity that comes into being on the basis of a discrepancy, such as the gap between subject and object, or between available forms and the drive to expression. Shame has no positive existence or provenance; it is not expressible, nor does writing resolve or enable us to “work through” our shame. In short, shame does not preexist writing, nor is it ever encoded in the text, awaiting our interpretation to tease it out. Shame and writing are coterminous. If one is a writer, it is insofar as one writes that one experiences shame—shame, that is, at the inadequacy of writing. I am here taking issue with certain treatments of shame that insist upon its subjective quality, for example, in the work of writers such as Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Lévinas, for whom we are ashamed primarily for what or who we are. Lévinas writes in On Escape: “What appears in shame is … the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself. … It is therefore our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful. It reveals not our nothingness but rather the totality of our existence.”27 On the contrary: shame appears when the obligation to inhabit a subject position coexists with the void, the lack, of subjectivity itself. Shame is a figure not of the intimacy of the self to itself—or at least, if that is so, it is the very discontinuity of the self, its otherness to itself, that is emblematized in that relation. Shame, far from being a figure of self-identity, is a figure of incommensurability; or at least, it results from situations of incommensurability. It is experienced when we are treated as something or someone—a foreigner, a personality type, an ethical person, a generous spirit, a human being, an animal, an alien—that is incommensurable with our own experience. Tomkins cites the instance of a child whose “boisterous laughter” meets with parental displeasure,  one of numerous occasions, according to Tomkins, when the interaction of parent and child results in shame: “Any barrier the parent may place before the passionate wish of the child to identify with and to act like the parents, whether

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 23

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

24

chapter 1

it be because of concern for the child’s safety, indifference, hostility, or self-hatred by the parents, is a major source of shame” (Shame 153–54). In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes the shame of a young woman in adolescence, a sensation “which sometimes becomes pride but which is originally shame,” and that results from her being gazed upon as a woman when she does not yet experience herself as one: The young girl feels that her body is getting away from her, it is no longer the straightforward expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and at the same time she becomes for others a thing: on the street men follow her with their eyes and comment on her anatomy. She would like to be invisible; it frightens her to become flesh and to show her flesh.28

Shame, in other words, results from an experience of incommensurability, between the I as experienced by the self and the self as it appears to and is reflected in the eyes of the other. This point is central to the present argument and to the analyses of literary works that will be undertaken in later chapters. Yet, one might reasonably ask, what about those occasions when something called “shame” is represented in the text as pure content, entirely removed from the form of the work as such? Surely cases exist—Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, for example, or more recently V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (discussed in a later chapter)—in which the defining claim of Lévinas, that “shame is, in the last analysis, an existence that seeks excuses,” is pertinent (On Escape 65). Is it really the case that all shame arises out of incommensurability? In an article entitled “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” the South African novelist and critic Zoë Wicomb writes of several kinds of shame appearing in works that deal with relations between the “coloured” and “black” communities in South Africa, by such writers as Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Don Mattera, and Nadine Gordimer: “the shame of having had our bodies stared at”; “the shame invested in those (females) who have mated with the colonizer.”29 Wicomb’s concern, in part, is with an originary shame, of which the “problem[s] of representation” presented by the coloured community are merely symptomatic, and which she characterizes as follows: “shame for our origins of slavery, shame for the miscegenation, and shame, as colonial racism became institutionalized, for being black” (100). For Wicomb here, shame seems to have a positive existence, an identifiable origin, and a corresponding literary register: silence, or ellipsis (104). This is most apparent in her discussion of Nadine Gordimer’s novel My Son’s Story, a work in which the history of a coloured antiapartheid activist, the father signaled in Gordimer’s title, is narrated alternately in the first person by his son Will and by a third-person narrator. In the last few paragraphs of the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 24

8/13/2010 2:04:25 PM

shame as form

25

novel we learn that the “My” of the title is a fiction; that the text, including the third-person narration, much of it from the father’s perspective, is a literary production of the son, whose exclusion from a life of liberation politics is what has made possible his becoming a writer: this evolution is thereby revealed as the real story of the book. The final sentence of the novel (“I am a writer and this is my first book—that I can never publish”)30 leads Wicomb to conclude that the shame of the book is the father’s story of miscegenation and “concupiscence” which, should it become public, would threaten his effectiveness as a political agent: “In the space between writing and making public lies an unacknowledged shame steeped in its originary interracial sex” (104). Wicomb is right to see a representational barrier within Gordimer’s work separating the ethic of the writer from the world of politics and activism. As in Milan Kundera’s reading of Kafka, Gordimer’s thinking is structured by this divide. In the book’s narrative architecture, the author goes to great lengths to preserve the space of Will’s writing from any material or ideological implication in the struggle that defines his parents’ world. Thus, the word processor with which he is writing the book was purchased, we are told, “with money saved from part-time jobs he found himself” (266). His “specialness” is established long before the revelation that the book we are reading is Will’s first literary work. “Why must I be the one excepted, the one left behind?” he asks his mother Aila, furious at her refusal to let him testify in court in her defense against terrorism charges. “What’s so special about me? So I’m your stake in something, I’m to be something you and he don’t really want to give up? Not even for the revolution?” (254, 255). The unpublishable fact of Will’s manuscript is the logical conclusion of this separation. Its effect is to claim an exceptional status for the figure of the writer, and for literature in general, an effect heightened by the periodic quotations from William Shakespeare that, towards the end of the book, serve increasingly to frame and authorize this later Will’s own reflections. The formula of literary possibility posited in Gordimer’s work is structurally similar to that of Levi’s Muselmänner: either one acts or one writes. Yet a crucial difference between Levi and Gordimer becomes apparent as soon as one considers the location of shame in each text. In My Son’s Story, writing is by definition exempt from shame. If there is incommensurability, it is located not in writing at all, but solely in the realm of the political. Wicomb’s suggestion that behind the shame of coloured complicity with the apartheid policies of the National Party lies the story of the father’s concupiscence, and of the community’s origins in miscegenation, inadvertently colludes with Gordimer’s logic of exception by maintaining the topography and ontology of shame as essentially private, personal, and uncommunicable. From the beginning of Gordimer’s

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 25

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

26

chapter 1

narrative, Sonny, as the father is called, has been pursuing an adulterous relationship with a white antiapartheid sympathizer named Hannah. The passage in which he reflects on his shame makes clear that the shame arises not simply from his adultery, nor from miscegenation, but from an incommensurability, an irresolvable tension at the heart of the revolutionary struggle, and which is its very condition. The poles of this incommensurability are Sonny’s two “obsessions,” Hannah and the struggle; its dramatized form is his realization that the affair has irreversibly damaged his credibility in the eyes of the movement and his place in its hierarchy. “There is no place for a second obsession in the life of a revolutionary,” he reflects. He found himself thinking—insanely—that if the law had still forbidden him Hannah, if that Nazi law for the ‘purity’ of the white race that disgustingly conceived it had still been in force, he would never have risked himself. For Hannah. Could not have. Because needing Hannah, taking the risk of going to prison for that white woman would have put at risk his only freedom, the only freedom of his kind, the freedom to go to prison again and again, if need be, for the struggle… . That filthy law would have saved him. (263–64)

The ethical, political, and conceptual violence described in this passage is limited by the conceit of the novel entirely to Gordimer’s content and subject matter. The logic of exception prevents the novel from engaging in any reflection on the question of the ethics of literary representation, a question in which one might assume that the novel is desperately implicated. Gordimer, after all, is a white South African presuming to represent a particular minority experience. The representational barrier that My Son’s Story erects, intradiegetically, between the worlds of Sonny and Aila, on one hand, and of Will, the future writer, on the other is thus replicated extradiegetically: between the story and the circumstances of the story’s production. The existence of this barrier is not acknowledged at any moment by the text itself. A reading of My Son’s Story in the light of Levi’s parable of the Muselmänner would suggest the presence of a quite different shame, one that is not narrated in the book, but that we might nevertheless locate at its center. This is not the shame of the father’s concupiscence, nor even of his colouredness, but that of Will’s development as a writer. What is “originary” in Gordimer’s narrative of shame would be not the interracial sex that lies behind it, nor even the “space between writing and making public” identified by Wicomb, but a more fundamental gap: between the obligation to write and the impossibility of doing so, a gap that would be felt as an event of the text, a shortfall of possibility materialized by it, and

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 26

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

shame as form

27

in which Gordimer’s own writing would be fully implicated. This other story is one that the text as we have it forecloses by means of its elaborate framing device. In this other story, unnarrated and uninstantiated, we might locate the real shame of Gordimer’s book. Interestingly, Wicomb’s own fiction demonstrates a more complex enactment of the materiality of shame than either her own critical essay or Gordimer’s novel. A story in her book You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town entitled “When the Train Comes” opens as follows: “I am not the kind of girl whom boys look at. I have known this for a long time, but I still lower my head in public and peep through my lashes.”31 This is the prelude to a gradual realization that this girl’s shame is one that cannot be spoken as such. Indeed, the only mention of shame in this text is an allusion to its unfathomability. In Wicomb’s fiction, to be “coloured,” or even to be “fat,” is to be caught in a situation of incommensurability, in which language use is utterly implicated: “I hope that Pa will not speak to me loudly in English. I will avoid calling him Father for [the African boys watching] will surely snigger. … They must know that this is no ordinary day. But we all remain silent and I am inexplicably ashamed” (25). On the day in question, the girl and her father are waiting for a train that will take her to St. Mary’s School, which has just been obliged to open its doors to nonwhite students. Such aspirations themselves are shameful, speaking as they do to a presumption of entitlement in its absence, to an incommensurability between a new world and the old; between, for example, the new “imitation leather suitcases” that the school seems to require of her, shining conspicuously across the station platform, and her missed “old scuffed bag” (27). Her “fatness” is shameful only when a tentative gesture of flirtation encounters an imperviousness that is incommensurable with it and exposes it as presumption. “Sarie’s hand automatically flutters to her throat to button up her orlon cardigan when boys talk to her. I have tried that, have fumbled with buttons and suffered their perplexed looks or reddened at the question, ‘Are you cold?’ ” (21).32 In a later story entitled “Disgrace,” a female servant, on an impulse, steals a silk scarf from a houseguest of her employer. The shame she feels afterwards, rising “like hot hives in her neck,” is experienced not as the “unalterably binding presence of the I to itself,” but as an encounter with someone quite other than herself: “She is still awake at midnight, amazed by the woman who has taken a silk scarf that does not belong to her.33 The shame is dramatically heightened when she learns that the guest, whom she has suspected of meanness, has left her a very large tip. Shame is a negative affect. We are not ashamed of what we are; rather, shame emerges in the space between positivist rhetorics that speak with corrosive eloquence of what we are not.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 27

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

28

chapter 1

Shame Is Not an “Ethical” Response Shame should not be talked about alongside guilt, in the way that, for example, anthropologists have talked about “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures.” The difference between guilt and shame is a difference between the narrative viability of the individual as an ethical category, including the possibility of its expression and/or redemption, and the apparent dissolution or unsustainability of those terms. Shame, as Primo Levi was aware, has nothing to do with guilt. In Levi’s experience, as he writes in The Drowned and the Saved, it was rare for a survivor of Auschwitz to feel guilty about having, say, robbed or beaten a companion while in the camp. Shame, an almost universal feeling among survivors, is a feeling of not having acted, of, for example, “having omitted to offer help,” and it is of no help whatsoever in judging the ethical worth of the person who suffers it (78). For Deleuze, too, shame has almost no relation to guilt; in fact, the usefulness of the concept can be measured precisely by its distance from guilt.34 “The shame of being a man,” a phrase Deleuze associates with Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (although it doesn’t actually appear there), is a condition not of being “responsible” for the depths to which man has shown himself capable of sinking—for Nazism, say—but of having been “sullied” by them.35 Whereas responsibility or guilt would presuppose an ontology of the subject, shame is an experience of the subject’s dissolution, of the fundamental complicity that, in the modern world, constitutes living. As in Primo Levi, we subsist only on the basis of perpetual compromises with “the values, ideals and opinions of our time.”36 For Deleuze, what is shameful is not just the world in which we happen to find ourselves, but the very regime of what exists, the logic of ontology and of everything that attends it: expression, identity, subjectivity, volition. This logic or set of logics is the substrate of fascism, and it amounts to an “ignominy of the possibilities of life” (108) which, however, we cannot help but be intimately familiar with: it is the very condition of existence.37 The “shame of being a man” is also, then, the shame of being. Shame in Deleuze is shame for what exists, for the “shameful compromises” with “our time” that we undergo (What Is Philosophy? 108), and for the absence of any “sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves” (Negotiations 172–73). Shame, writes Deleuze, is “one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs” (What Is Philosophy? 108), the basis for a kind of writing and thought that could take place in the name of the powerless. The powerless, however, are those for whom no names exist, for whom ontology has not cleared a space. To speak for the powerless, then—for the subaltern, the illiter-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 28

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

shame as form

29

ate, the mute—is not to speak on their behalf, or in their place, but to speak, to be responsible, before them (109). Shame is not an ethics predicated upon the obligation of the “self” towards the “other”; it is an occasion, rather, in which the ontological entity of the self may begin to be vacated entirely. The most sustained reflection on shame in Deleuze’s work is his essay on T. E. Lawrence, entitled “The Shame and the Glory.” During the period covered by the narrative of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence was participating in what might be regarded, and not only from our “postcolonial” perspective, as a profoundly shameful enterprise: the attempt by the British military during the First World War to foment a nationalist Arab revolt against the Turks, so as to distract Turkey, a German ally, from the war in Europe. The events narrated in the book led directly to the foundation of the state of Iraq, initially as a mandate under the administrative control of the British, a situation that lasted until Iraq’s independence in 1932. Perhaps Lawrence’s role in this enterprise was particularly liable to cause shame in a man dominated by, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “disgust with the world as well as with himself” (Origins 218). “I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger,” Lawrence writes, “charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England in her war.”38 Shame of one sort or another is acknowledged and indeed advertised on almost every page of Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “I assured [the Arabs] that England kept her word in letter and spirit. In this comfort they performed their fine things: but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed” (276). For Arendt, Lawrence  and what happened to him are indices of the shifts that took place during the century or so that preceded the outbreak of the First World War, changes that, according to Arendt, ultimately ushered in the age of totalitarianism, but which had their provenance in the “Great Game” of imperialism and the difficulty faced by the European colonial nations in governing other peoples. These involved primarily the discovery of two apparatuses of colonial rule: race and bureaucracy. Arendt attributes the former discovery—race—to the Boers, who, in South Africa, on encountering a form of humanity that “ashamed and frightened” them, unleashed one of “the most terrible massacres in recent history”: the near-extermination of the “Hottentot” (Khoikhoi) peoples (Origins 207, 185). The latter discovery, bureaucracy, was the solution arrived at by the British in India and Egypt, as well as by the French in Algeria; and, of course, race-thinking is also intrinsic to it. Its ethical basis was a sense of the ruled people as “hopelessly inferior” and in need of “special protection” (Origins 207, 209): a complex of ideas known, ever since Rudyard

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 29

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

30

chapter 1

Kipling’s famous poem, as “the white man’s burden.” In order to operate successfully, writes Arendt, bureaucracy demanded a class of administrators whose sense of loyalty and patriotism were so unquestioning as to have no element of “personal ambition or vanity”; who would even be willing to renounce “the human aspiration of having their names connected with their achievements.” Their greatest passion, she adds, would be “for secrecy … for a role behind the scenes; their greatest contempt would be directed at publicity and people who love it” (213). Theorists of this “imperialist character” among Britain’s colonial administrators included Rudyard Kipling, Lord Cromer (British Consul General in Egypt from 1883 to 1907), who “possessed all these qualities to a very high degree” (213), and even the great expansionist businessman, politician, and megalomaniacal personality Cecil Rhodes, active in South and Southern Africa from the 1870s until his death in 1902. In the thinking of these figures, notions of “integrity,” “disinterestedness,” and “self-sacrifice”—avatars, Arendt points out, of earlier myths of English noblesse such as “chivalry, nobility, and bravery”—operate in the service of a “higher purpose” (212), and with a consequent sense of unworldliness. As Arendt puts it, in the loyal devotion of the colonial administrator, the tradition of the “dragon-slayer” and gallant “protector of the weak” is transformed into an apparatus of power, the dominant affect of which, she writes, is “aloofness.” For Arendt, this aloofness, the “new attitude” of Britain’s colonial administrations, was perhaps the most monstrous aspect of colonial rule in India,  more “dangerous” than earlier forms of oppressive government such as “Asiatic” despotism, because in it, the world of the ruler is removed more absolutely from that of the subject population. “In comparison,” writes Arendt, “exploitation, oppression, or corruption look like safeguards of human dignity, because exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, corruptor and corrupted still live in the same world, still share the same goals, fight each other for the possession of the same things; and it is this tertium comparationis which aloofness destroyed” (212). With this shift, observes Arendt further, colonialism turns into imperialism. Lawrence of Arabia was an exemplar of this class: “the best man who ever turned from an adventurer … into a secret agent” (218). Yet Lawrence was “destroyed” by the very forces (of imperialism, of the transformation of “boyhood noblesse” into bureaucratic secrecy) that he served so completely. His “integrity” was such that any pretence of working with the Arabs on their behalf was succeeded by a full immersion in their cause and their world. It becomes almost impossible, therefore, to say to what extent his devotion to the Arab cause was in the service of his devotion to the British, or vice versa. For Deleuze, indeed, Lawrence’s “betrayal” is universal and metaphysical; his “secrecy” is not circumscriptive, indi-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 30

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

shame as form

31

cating a withheld truth, but “infinite,” a refusal of ontology (and thus of loyalty, which presupposes ontology). Betrayal is elevated to the level of a subjective principle, at which point it comes as close as possible to a vacating of subjectivity as such: “Every mine he plants also explodes within himself,” writes Deleuze, “he is himself the bomb he detonates.”39  In Lawrence, this is to say, aloofness is adopted with respect to everything concrete, including himself. One of the attractions that Lawrence saw in the Arabs was their proclivity for abstraction, another form of aloofness: “They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed” (Seven Pillars 42). Arendt quotes from a letter Lawrence wrote in 1918, in which he describes the appeal of the Arab world and the Arab mind: “It is the old, old civilisation, which has refined itself clear of household gods, and half the trappings which ours hastens to assume. The gospel of bareness in materials is a good one, and it involves apparently a sort of moral bareness too.”40 Arendt’s account of colonial aloofness provides a rationale for understanding how pride and shame might be regarded as versions of the same affect; or at least, how each may function as the other’s precondition. Lawrence’s “decency,” his “integrity,” are found in the quality of his aloofness, which gives him an almost otherworldly character; but we might say the same about the quality of his shame, in which his aloofness simply takes himself for its object. In Lawrence, then, these two affects coincide; his internalization of the chivalric ideal of self-sacrifice and service is so complete that he experiences it as shame—or, perhaps, shame is its basis and condition of possibility. In chapter 100 of Seven Pillars, the chapter that prompts Deleuze to call Seven Pillars of Wisdom “an almost mad book” (121), Lawrence begins an assault upon his own motivations and those of the British in Arabia that will end in the kind of spiraling shame we have seen in Coetzee. Of the notion that support for the Arab revolt was motivated by the benign goal of “redemption” for that race, he writes: “To endure for another in simplicity gave a sense of greatness. There was nothing loftier than a cross, from which to contemplate the world. The pride and exhilaration of it were beyond conceit” (551). Half a page later, after lamenting the corruption of “honest redemption” by the liberator’s own “thought-riddled” nature, the shameful consciousness of “the under-motives and the after-glory of his act,” Lawrence concludes: “There seemed no straight walking for us leaders in this crooked lane of conduct, ring within ring of unknown, shamefaced motives cancelling or double-charging their precedents” (551–52). The point is close to Arendt’s: the dragon-slayer is eo ipso the conqueror of the people he “liberates,” who are thereby enmeshed in a vicarious relationship to their own freedom. “Expiation” leaves the “expiated” (Lawrence’s terms)

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 31

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

32

chapter 1

nothing but the possibility of imitating their savior. As Lawrence puts it, “Each cross, occupied, robbed the late-comers of all but the poor part of copying” (551). What this reading brings to our understanding of the colonial relation, the imitative structure of which has been analyzed with considerable subtlety by Homi Bhabha,41 is an awareness of its affective aspects and of the continuity between colonial aloofness, or pride, and shame. Even more important, however, is the shattering possibility that shame is precisely the place from which colonial pride arises. Shame, then, would be not an ethical response to the excesses of colonialism, but the condition of possibility of those excesses. According to this logic, shame and pride, taken together, may be seen to underpin the imperial character; both inhabit an intense discomfort with the regime of what exists. Both acknowledge the other as, in Sartre’s words, “the subject through whom my being gets its object-state” (Being and Nothingness 290); yet both shame and pride, at least in the form of Arendt’s “aloofness,” refuse any accommodation with that “object-state” as the definition or the limit of the self. Of course, the refusal is differently coded or conceptualized in each case. In shame, the incommensurability between the subject and its reification as an object is felt directly as affect. In the case of aloofness, that same incommensurability is temporarily resolved by disavowing it—and disavowing, along with it, the indispensability of the other for the very possibility of a self that might stand aloof in such a fashion. As Sartre points out, this disavowal, an “affirmation of my freedom confronting the Other-as-object,” is unsustainable. Its “internal development” must cause it to disintegrate (290, 291). In the meantime, however, aloofness is capable of great injustice, under the pretence that it acts out of the noblest impulses. As Lawrence puts it, “in reality we had borne the vicarious for our own sakes, or at least because it was pointed for our benefit: and could escape from this knowledge only by a make-belief in sense as well as in motive” (Seven Pillars 550). Sartre’s analysis is invaluable for the insight that shame and pride resemble each other far more than, say, shame and guilt. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw in 1922, Lawrence writes that his “disgust” with his own book “is so great that I no longer believe it worth trying to improve,” and that Seven Pillars of Wisdom is “long-winded, and pretentious, and dull to the point where I can no longer bear to look at it myself.” In such passages, both shame and pride are present, and inseparably. Indeed, the purpose of the letter to Shaw, whom he had only met casually once, was to ask if he would read the manuscript (Letters 357). Shame for Sartre, as for Primo Levi and Deleuze, has no inherent relation to guilt; its primary animus is towards ontological thinking, which it contemplates—by which it contemplates itself contemplated—with the greatest discomfort.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 32

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

shame as form

33

“Pure shame,” Sartre writes, “is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed and dependent being which I am for the Other” (Being and Nothingness 288–89). Autobiographical writing, then, is almost inevitably a shameful exercise, since in undertaking it we cast the ontologizing gaze of the other upon ourselves. The autobiographical gaze is an aloofness inhabited by the self in respect of the self; the shame is attributable to the discrepancy embedded in this relation, rather than to anything directly present in the content.42 When Deleuze, in a late interview with Toni Negri, extends his interpretation of the “shame at being a man” into “utterly trivial situations” and speaks of shame “in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of ‘bon vivants’ gossiping” (Negotiations 172), “aloofness” seems just as valid a descriptor of the consciousness that Deleuze has in mind as “shame.” For Arendt, it should be emphasized, the significance of Lawrence is overwhelmingly historical: Lawrence was a man of his time whose very integrity, as embodied in his refusal, even after the fact, to profit personally from his role in the imperial adventure, was in reality, and without losing any of its authenticity, an intrinsic ideological element of the colonial enterprise. Lawrence, she writes, “clung fast to a morality which, however, had already lost all objective bases and consisted only of a kind of private and necessarily quixotic attitude of chivalry” (Origins 218). Colonialism itself is for Arendt a project that trades in anachronism.43 Lawrence was a purely decent man who, caught in a fold of history, managed to preserve his decency only at the cost of his own contentment and psychic survival,  and yet that attachment to decency, in Lawrence and a few others, is precisely what made the activities of the British in the Middle East possible. For Deleuze, by contrast, Lawrence’s shame is not a personal or psychological disposition; nor is it merely the subjective dimension of a modality of decency or integrity that is ideologically and historically implicated; nor is it an idiosyncratic extension of the self-effacement demanded of its bureaucrats by the British establishment; or if it is any of these things, it also travels far beyond them. Shame in Lawrence emerges as a multiple entity, a form that, in its various dimensions, is directed against being and towards becoming. Lawrence’s shame has at least three principal aspects, according to Deleuze: the shame of betraying the Arabs (for Lawrence “never stops guaranteeing English promises that he knows perfectly well will not be kept”); the shame of command (“How is it possible to command without shame? To command is to steal souls in order to deliver them over to suffering”); and shame of the body (“the mind is ashamed of the body in a very special manner; in fact, it is ashamed for

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 33

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

34

chapter 1

the body”).44 In each case, shame is the shame of being. Against identity, Lawrence dons his “mantle of fraud” (Seven Pillars 503), what Deleuze conceives as a “universal betrayal.” Against the “comfortable imitative obedience” of the regular army, he posits the vitality and individuality of the partisan, the guerrilla (339–40). And against the unity and organicity of the body, he posits “the molecular sludge of matter” and the “disbodied” exhilaration of vehicular movement (468).45 The point of departure of Deleuze’s discussion is Lawrence’s extraordinarily vivid landscapes and portraiture, in which Lawrence displays an intensity of perception that renders his descriptions closer to “becomings” than representations. The light, the “solar haze” of the desert, is the height of the abstraction for which this consciousness strives; for Deleuze the “pure transparency” of unperceived light is as close to freedom from conceptualization (form) and being (ontology) as one can imagine (115). Such an ideal is unattainable, of course; and yet, in its very unattainability is found its essence. Its counterpoint is the materiality of the corporeal. Shame for the body is shame for the ways in which bodily weakness imprisons one in the contingent, the here and now. “When … we did see our bodies, it was with some hostility, with a contemptuous sense that they reached their highest purpose, not as vehicles of the spirit, but when, dissolved, their elements served to manure a field” (Seven Pillars 468). For Deleuze there is nothing egoistic or self-mythologizing about Lawrence’s writing: quite the opposite. Instead there is a “projection machine,” a desire “to project—into things, into reality, into the future, and even into the sky—an image of himself and others so intense that it has a life of its own” (117–18). Shame—the shame of form, of being—is behind this enterprise of projection: “At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars,” we read in the first paragraph of Seven Pillars (29). The propensity of Lawrence’s writing is towards what Deleuze elsewhere calls the “ill-formed or the incomplete.”46 The goal of the person writing is not to become a writer, but to escape from writing. What fascinates Deleuze is the intensity with which Lawrence positions himself “neither in relation to the real or action, nor in relation to the imaginary or dreams, but solely in relation to the force through which he projects images into the real” (118). Lawrence himself conceives of Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a history of that which, in the Arab movement, will likely be omitted from any official historiography, a historiography written by those who orchestrated and benefited from it: “Here are no lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock peoples,” he writes in his introductory chapter. “It is filled with trivial things, partly that no one mistake for history the bones from which some day a man may make history” (24). Lawrence explicitly refuses the role of ventriloquist or spokesperson for the Arab cause. What attracts

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 34

8/13/2010 2:04:26 PM

shame as form

35

him about the Arabs (“the bravest, simplest and merriest of men,” 549), about the revolt, and about the desert—and his own enterprise of writing is inseparable from these—is an immunity to mediation of all kinds: to venality, calculation, representation, and substitution. “To have bought men would have put our movement on the base of interest; whereas our followers must be ready to go all the way without other mixture in their motives than human frailty” (548). The promise is of a world that can dissolve the mediation of forms. “The morning freshness of the worldto-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for” (24). Shame, then, operates in Lawrence as a principle of simultaneous negation of every positive perception, notion, or theory that might be attributed to the text. Lawrence feels shame when he finds himself (as he does perpetually) representing that which cannot be represented, which includes shame. He transcends his shame—which is also the shame of writing—by, precisely, writing. Thus, as well as being the sensation from which he tries to escape by writing, shame is the sensation that he produces in his writing. By means of an elaboration of shame, Lawrence enlarges both himself and his shame, turning shame into an affect: an entity that bears very little relation to the purely personal feeling, and which, for that reason, is able to free him from the “hatred and eternal questioning” of the self (548). This is what Deleuze means when he says that in Lawrence’s writing shame becomes something “glorious.” The process is like the elaboration of disappointment into an “affect” in Jane Austen, or the elaboration of the sun setting into the trees into a “percept” in Flannery O’Connor;47 or, to take examples from Deleuze and Guattari, the elaboration (Deleuze and Guattari use Bergson’s term “fabulation”) of the town and the moor into a “percept” in Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy.48 In one of Deleuze’s few autobiographical texts, from 1973, he writes: It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. … What one says comes from the depths of one’s ignorance, the depths of one’s own underdevelopment. One becomes a set of liberated singularities, words, names, fingernails, things, animals, little events. (“Letter to a Harsh Critic” 6–7)

Not only is shame the impetus behind Lawrence’s “exercise in depersonalization”; shame is also occasioned by it and the means by which his writing attains the quality of aesthetic thickness that Deleuze calls speak-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 35

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

36

chapter 1

ing “in your own name.” It would be tempting to say that there are two shames in Lawrence, except that the first has no manifest actuality—for shame cannot be peddled as an artistic motif without undergoing huge violence—and the second is simply indistinguishable from its formal existence. That is to say, the shame that Lawrence writes about perpetually, and obsessively, seems motivated as much by the process of writing as anything else. In neither case is it possible to isolate a distinct entity that we can confidently call “shame.” When Lawrence thematizes shame, the poverty or inadequacy of his writing is frequently presented as a cause of it; yet such passages are some of his most elegant. They include sequences in which he mercilessly disparages the book we are reading: “My brain was sudden and silent as a wild cat … so meshed in nerves and hesitation, it could not be a thing to be afraid of; yet it was a real beast, and this book its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at” (Seven Pillars 564). Is shame, then, the cause of his book, or its effect? Lawrence’s shame is driven by the impossibility of writing as much as by the impossibility of not writing; it is in shame, precisely, that these impossibilities coincide. In the final sentence of “The Shame and the Glory,” Deleuze writes that Seven Pillars incarnates “the impossibility of identifying with the Arab (Palestinian) cause; the shame of not being able to do so; the deeper shame that comes from elsewhere, cosubstantial with being” (125). Deleuze’s formulation identifies a trajectory in Lawrence’s writing away from positivism of all kinds (including a positive notion of shame), and towards nothingness, abstraction, or imperceptibility. This trajectory is in place as early as the first chapter of Seven Pillars: The effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other … with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. (31–32)

This passage recalls the abyssal shame that we have seen in Coetzee. It is difficult not to think also of Kafka, who in a letter to Max Brod describes his own situation as a young Jewish writer in Prague, caught between three impossibilities: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently.”49 Arendt’s notion of aloofness, with its intimations of an otherworldly contempt for existence, implicates Lawrence’s shame-ridden consciousness with ideological and historical specificity. Like pride for Sartre, shame is under-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 36

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

shame as form

37

stood as compensatory: a kind of ethical bad conscience that is oblivious, ultimately, to the degree to which it too has facilitated injustice. But the notion of an “enlarged” or multiple shame, an event inseparable from the moment of its writing, functions rather differently than this: as a negation of every possible affirmation. In Deleuze’s reading of Lawrence we encounter a shame that is discontinuous with itself, an entity resistant to all historical or ideological circumscription, including that which would permit the retention of shame as an ethical response. In recent years, the term “shame” has frequently been mobilized in the context of liberal sentiment over, for example, America’s war in Iraq, or the events at Abu Ghraib prison that became public in the spring of 2004; or, in the European context, the history of colonial outrages in Africa and India; or the injustices suffered by the indigenous peoples of Australia during the period of that continent’s colonization and since. It may be that, following Arendt’s analysis, we should see such invoked shame not as an ethical response to such events, but as their precondition, part of the apparatus of power that makes them possible. In an article entitled “The Shame of Abu Ghraib,” John Limon has argued along these lines that the conduct of American soldiers at the Baghdad prison during 2003 and 2004 was “shameful” not merely in an ethical sense, but in a literal or “ontological” one also. Far from exploiting the “shame culture” of the Arabs, America reveals itself, by its activities in Iraq, to be a “sophisticated shame culture”: America is engaged in the dispensation of shame, which requires at least an intuition of what it means for the United States, not only Iraq, to be a shame culture…. The shamelessness of the administration is part of the strategy, and the shame that thousands of Americans feel, even if it is not welcomed by the administration, is built into it.50

For Limon, shame and shamelessness are not opposites, but bound together, part of a shame system, the dimensions of which are global. Limon attributes the idea of the inseparability of shame from shamelessness to Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. What Limon finds especially compelling is the structure proposed by Rushdie according to which the “unfelt shame of the world”—the shame “that should have been felt, but [was] not”—is siphoned off by “the misfortunate few, janitors of the unseen”; that is to say, the powerless, who in Rushdie’s fabular tale are concentrated into the character of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder: “the very perfection of lowliness,” says Limon (568).51 Rushdie’s novel offers not only a theory of shame but a theory of power, one that owes much to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Shame, says Limon, begins with the shamelessness, that is to say, “with lying … with presidential misrepresentations and treacheries and secrets and cover-ups” (557). He who is able to disavow

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 37

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

38

chapter 1

his shame will wield power over he who is unable to do so. “Shamelessness is power, [and] power is shamelessness,” summarizes Limon. “More fully: power enables the throwing off of shame as shamelessness; the throwing off of shame as shamelessness enables power” (568). Thus, the lack of shame in American official discourse, as in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, is indicative not of its absence but of its disavowal—and this disavowal always takes place vertically, in a downward direction, devolving onto those below. Shame for Limon has no ethical content; shame and shamelessness are simply a linked concept immanent to power and which, in its dual form, dramatizes its dialectic. In Rushdie, Limon writes, we learn “how to find shame not in weakness, where it is traditionally sought, but in the shamelessness of power,” or in other words, precisely where shame is not. Shame and shamelessness coincide, such that “the United States is a shame society of which shamelessness is the sign” (548). A corresponding argument is found in the work of the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, for whom shame has become part of the “post­ ideological” regime of late capitalist societies, functioning to preserve a sense of the “good intentions” of the present population in the face of its history of—and basis in—brutality. In such a regime, the confession of having been wrong, and of one’s present “shame” in having been wrong, establishes a temporal logic of exception predicated upon the narrative of a progressive emergence from colonialism and ideology into a “‘post­ ideological’ (post)colonial” moment.52 “The articulate pain of the other,” writes Povinelli, “simultaneously allows the liberal subject to feel herself or himself to have been unintentionally causing wrong and to be constantly moving to rectify that wrong” (162). Her study is concerned with the recent emergence of a rhetoric of shame in Australian national debates over injustices committed against native populations during colonization, and in the context of legal claims for restitution, in the form of native title and land rights, by indigenous groups based upon their own assertions of cultural distinctiveness. “By referring to the shame of ‘our’ law and ‘our’ nation and the good of recognizing ‘their’ laws, ‘their’ culture, and ‘their’ traditions, the court is able to cite and entrench an understanding of the nation as confronting its own discriminatory practices and facing up to and eliminating a dark stain on its history even as it reproduces the nation as Anglo-Celtic and ‘ours’ ” (171). What Povinelli does not show is how one might refer to one’s own brutal history as shaming without that reference amounting to a substitution of one’s own good intentions for that history. The object of Povinelli’s critique, therefore, is implicitly the order of reference as much as that of shame. It is a central claim of the present work that these orders are inseparable. The lesson of Povinelli’s and Limon’s interventions—and, more than the interventions them-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 38

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

shame as form

39

selves, the mere possibility of their articulation, as well as that of Hannah Arendt’s reading of Lawrence—is that there is no ethical basis whatsoever in an instantiated or invoked shame. Shame Is Ontologically Inseparable from the Forms in Which It Appears Shame cannot be studied as such, either theoretically, empirically, clinically, or sociologically; shame, rather, is a dynamic that helps us to rethink a number of conceptual relations—most notably, for the purposes of this book, the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical claims of the modern novel. When shame is communicated, what is communicated has no positive referent; the substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility. Shame is not located primarily in the content of the work. It is, rather, a materialization of the discrepancy between content and form, of the inadequacy of form with respect to content. To invert one of Tomkins’s formulations—the idea that shame cannot help but violate its own desire for self-erasure—we might say that the project of saying anything about shame as such is inherently self-defeating. What is communicated in shame is precisely its uncommunicability. Insofar as it has any value for interpreting artistic or literary works, shame functions as a negative principle, alerting us to a lack, rather than to a presence. Some of these qualities are visible in the work of the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, a figure best known, perhaps, for the five volumes of autobiography that he wrote between 1939 and 1976, beginning with the shame-ridden L’Age d’homme (translated into English as Manhood). The relation to the self apparent in Leiris’s autobiographical writings is more intense, more annihilating, perhaps, than that of almost any other figure in twentieth-century literature; and yet, precisely for that reason, his attention to himself takes on an almost ethnographic quality. The structure is an exemplary Tomkinsian one: the occasion for Leiris’s shame is impossible to differentiate from the occasion of Leiris’s writing itself. Ethical content, substance, is present in Leiris only in—and precisely as—its absence. I have written in more detail elsewhere about the complex, paradoxical place of shame in Leiris’s autobiographical works.53 I would like here briefly to examine a statement that appears in an afterword to Manhood, written in 1946 for the book’s second edition, in which Leiris reassesses his own work in the light of the horrors that had taken place since its publication, specifically, the Second World War. The afterword was written in Le Havre, amid the ruination of the city, a scene of devastation which, Leiris points out, offers a dramatic setting for the sense of bathos that afflicts his project: “On this scale, the personal problems with which

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 39

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

40

chapter 1

Manhood is concerned are obviously insignificant: whatever might have been, in the best of cases, its strength and its sincerity, the poet’s inner agony, weighed against the horrors of war, counts for no more than a toothache over which it would be graceless to groan; what is the use, in the world’s excruciating uproar, of this faint moan over such narrowly limited and individual problems?”54 To understand the absent ethical substance of Leiris’s book, we might consider Primo Levi’s Muselmänner as a figure intimately connected to Leiris as his inversion and counteractualization—this despite the fact that L’Age d’homme was completed in 1935, a decade before the revelations of the full horror of the camps. In the case of the Muselmänner, experience so far exceeds form as to annihilate it completely; for Leiris, form surpasses experience in the same proportion. Leiris has nothing of substance to say, but an almost total command over the tools for saying it. He himself outlines the paradox, as encapsulated in the relation between his own literary talent and the silence that is its necessary inversion: “Always beneath or above concrete events, I remain a prisoner of this alternative: the world as a real object which dominates and devours me … in suffering and in fear, or else the world as a pure fantasy which dissolves in my hands, which I destroy … without ever succeeding in possessing it” (141). If for Primo Levi the mode of “bearing witness” is forever barred from the extent of the horror, for Michel Leiris the lack of anything to bear witness to is the occasion for an extraordinary literary eloquence, tormented by the fact of its substancelessness, by the fact that it risks nothing. Primo Levi’s assessment—“The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own death” (Drowned 84) —must then be supplemented by its inversion, from Leiris’s Manhood: “With a bitterness I used not to suspect, I have come to realize that only a certain fervour could save me, but that this world has nothing in it for which I am capable of dying” (141). Silence, inarticulacy, is the condition of possibility of its opposite: eloquence, articulation. The truth of each is found alongside its contrary. In an essay entitled “Shame, or the Subject,”  in part a discussion of Primo Levi’s works on Auschwitz (in Remnants of Auschwitz), Giorgio Agamben ventriloquizes what he calls the “phenomenology of testimony” in a passage that describes quite concisely the relation in which Leiris and the Muselmänner present each other’s counteractualization: “To speak, to bear witness, is … to enter into a vertiginous movement in which something sinks to the bottom, wholly desubjectified and silenced, and something subjectified speaks without truly having anything to say of its own.”55 The primary historical reference point of the present work is not Auschwitz, however, but the similarly devastating event of colonialism.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 40

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

shame as form

41

By colonialism, I am referring to the encounter that takes place between so-called Western and non-Western societies, not only in the moment at which the latter are colonized by the former, but also in the further encounter that constitutes the moment of “decolonization”—as Leiris says, writing in 1981, “ce qu’on a nommé présomptueusement la ‘décolonisation’” (that which we have presumptuously named ‘decolonization’).56 As in Adorno’s writing about Auschwitz, the transition between the colonial and the postcolonial worlds should not be seen as a historical development, neatly confined to a few decades in the twentieth century; nor should postcolonial be separated from other temporal and historical categories, such as modernity or postmodernity. In the present work, the word “postcolonial” will be used to designate the specifically modern situation in which the question of the ethics of the literary arises as a perpetually problematic one. Postcolonial Shame and the Novel In the postcolonial world, theories and narratives of shame—particularly those that emphasize its quality of intersubjectivity—have a particular resonance. The most useful account of shame in this regard is Jean-Paul Sartre’s. It occurs in the course of the famous parable in Being and Nothingness of a man becoming aware of himself being looked at, as, “moved by a fit of jealousy, curiosity, or vice,” he looks through a keyhole. “All of a sudden,” says Sartre, “I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other” (260). “Shame,” writes Sartre after this analysis, “is a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: ‘I am ashamed of myself before the Other.’ If any one of these dimensions disappears, the shame disappears as well” (289–90). Insofar as writing is one of the major ways in which we place ourselves before the “Other,” the implication of Sartre’s account is that shame is not an affect that may be communicated by writing, nor an emotion that is covered up by writing, but a complex that arises precisely with the writing itself. Shame arises from an incommensurability between my own experience and myself as reflected back to me in the eyes of an other—an incommensurability that is materialized precisely in my writing. The great theorizations of the literary work in the twentieth century, of course, have often attempted to describe this radical rupture in the self that is put in place by writing, without necessarily conceptualizing its effects in terms of shame. “The writer never reads his work,” says Blanchot:

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 41

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

42

chapter 1

It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence. It is a secret because he is separated from it. However, his inability to read the work is not a purely negative phenomenon. It is, rather, the writer’s only real relation to what we call the work.57

This separation, to repeat a point made earlier, has nothing to do with the moment of the work’s publication; it is constitutive of the work as soon as it is conceived, as soon as it begins the process of formation. And from that moment on, the writer is also implicated in the work, even as he is removed from its orbit of intimacy: Every writer, every artist is acquainted with the moment at which he is cast out and apparently excluded by the work in progress. The work holds him off, the circle in which he no longer has access to himself has closed, yet he is enclosed therein because the work, unfinished, will not let him go. … This is not a moment of sterility or fatigue, unless, as may well be the case, fatigue itself is simply the form this exclusion takes. (53–54)

Sartre’s perspective, however, would seem to establish this relationship to the work as one not of “fatigue” but of shame. “I am unable to bring about any relation between what I am in the intimacy of the For-Itself … and this unjustifiable being-in-itself which I am for the Other,” he writes (Being and Nothingness 222). Shame is “only the original feeling of having my being outside, engaged in another being and as such without any defense, illuminated by the absolute light which emanates from a pure subject” (288). The question that arises with Lawrence, whether his shame precipitates or ensues from his writing, is no longer askable. It is the writing itself—the ethical and aesthetic presumption involved, the awareness of the presumption, the impossibility of proceeding other than presumptuously—rather than anything revealed in the writing, or anything deducible on the basis of it, that is shameful. Writing after colonialism, which is to say, writing that comes into existence always already aware of its reflection in the eyes of the other, is formed by this paradox. An obligation to write coexists with the impossibility of doing so innocently; neither one thing nor the other, neither the obligation nor the impossibility, is shameful, but the conjunction— historical and subjective at the same time—is intensely so. Blanchot, like Sartre and Fanon (and this list will be extended in the course of this work), is as much a postcolonial figure as a post-Auschwitz one. Shame appears in the gap between the impossibility of speaking and the impossibility of not speaking. When it comes to the question of postcolonial shame, in other words, the status of postcolonial writing as writing is as important as, and inseparable from, its historical situatedness in the aftermath of the colonial project. The shame that proliferates in the work

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 42

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

shame as form

43

of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, V. S. Naipaul, and Zoë Wicomb (all of whom are discussed in this book) has a structural and historical explanation that is not reducible to any merely individual or biographical factor. Shame in these writers is the experience of a situation in which the ethical (or aesthetic) obligation to write and the aesthetic (or ethical) impossibility of writing are equally irrefutable. When Coetzee, then, describes his own works as “paltry, [transparently] ludicrous defenses against” the feeling of being overwhelmed by “suffering in the world,” that description could—and should—be read as a rationalization of and apologia for a certain historical condition that twentieth-century writing has had to deal with, just as much as it is a statement of artistic failure stemming from the author’s personal implication in the colonial enterprise. Coetzee’s preoccupation with shame is not adequately explained in terms of a struggle of a member of the white minority in South Africa to come to terms with his ethical implication in the history of black oppression. The same could be said of such different texts within the postcolonial canon as Naipaul’s Mimic Men or The Enigma of Arrival; Ngũgĩ’s The River Between or A Grain of Wheat; Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story; or those of writers who have emerged more recently, such as Caryl Phillips or Zoë Wicomb. Shame in these works is about a historical transformation in the conditions of possibility of the literary work, a transformation in which the event of colonialism is just as implicated as that of Auschwitz, but which does not originate with either. In his early work The Theory of the Novel, written in 1914–15, Georg Lukács writes: “Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence” (62). By “fundamental dissonance,” what Lukács is referring to is the situation that I described at the beginning of this chapter as “incommensurability”—between aesthetics and ethics, selfhood and otherness, form and content—and that becomes manifest as a certain constitutive failure, a rendering inadequate of form by the irruption of the ethical; or, in other words, the shame of form as such. This incommensurability, I have suggested, lies behind other ethical reflections on aesthetic problems, such as the possibility of art after Auschwitz or after colonialism, or the question of whether the subaltern can speak. The meaning of “incommensurability” in this context may be stated quite simply: it is a historical transformation in which ontology itself is replaced by the incredulity toward ontology. For Lukács in The Theory of the Novel the situation of incommensurability is that of the novel as such. The novel, according to Lukács, is defined by an inadequacy of form that is compensated for by the first appearance of the ethical—the separation of ethics from aesthetics—in literature. It is this insight that informs Lukács’s understanding of the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 43

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

44

chapter 1

novel as the form of the age of “absolute sinfulness” (18, 152). What Lukács means is that the novel is a form defined by its failure: by the yearning for a world of completeness, a completeness that he ascribes to the world of the epic, and that the novel is constitutionally removed from. However, this “failure” is caught up with the changing status of world-historical reality itself, and cannot, any more than capitalism itself, be unthought. What those who yearn for the world that existed prior to that of the novel are trying to escape from is “their own depth and greatness” (31). When Lukács later looked back critically at his own early work, he seemed to forget this important injunction. The Theory of the Novel becomes exemplary of the romantic attachment to the epic that the book itself provides such a robust argument against. “The problems of the novel form,” he writes in a preface for the 1962 French edition, are treated in The Theory of the Novel as “the mirror image of a world gone out of joint.” Reality, he continues, “no longer constitutes a favorable soil for art; that is why the central problem of the novel is the fact that art … has nothing more to do with any world of forms that is immanently complete in itself. And this is not for artistic but for historico-philosophical reasons” (17). In the book itself, however, Lukács insists that “immanence” applies as much to the broken world of the novel as to the epic: the novel is “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality” (56). The Theory of the Novel is thus a founding text for the new intimacy of shame and form in the twentieth century—this despite the fact that the word “shame” does not appear once in Lukács’s text. The novel is constituted out of the very incommensurability—of form and content, of idea and reality, of vehicle and tenor, of ethics and aesthetics, of subject and object—that, I am arguing, is behind every experience of shame. In the novel, writes Lukács, we are condemned to abstraction, a kind of metaphysical aloofness. “Totality can be systematized only in abstract terms,” he writes. What becomes visible in “the created reality of the novel” is nothing but “the distance separating the systematization from concrete life” (70). In Lukács’s statement “Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence,” the word “dissonance” refers to a certain breakage in the constitution of the modern work; a certain duality, made up of, on one hand, that which is spoken in the work, and on the other, that which cannot be spoken. The novel form, then, is an embodiment of the respective counteractualization that I sought to establish earlier in the relation between Michel Leiris and the Muselmänner of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. To use Agamben’s formulation (originally put forward in relation to Levi), the novel is comprised of that which “speaks without truly having anything to say of its own,” together with that which

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 44

8/13/2010 2:04:27 PM

shame as form

45

“sinks to the bottom, wholly desubjectified and silenced” (Remnants 120). Absolute sinfulness (or we might substitute the word “shame”) is the form in which that structure becomes apparent; it is thereby as shame that the dissonance finds a resolution. Shame is the resolution. But I would like briefly to mention two other conceptions of this double quality of the artwork. Both make explicit the intensely political dimension of the questions of form that have been addressed here. For what else is Walter Benjamin’s seventh Thesis on the philosophy of history but the theory of a division, a rupture, at the heart of every “cultural treasure”? For Benjamin, the lesson of historical materialism is that artworks have an origin that is not immediately apparent, consisting of the fate of those forgotten figures, casualties of history, who suffer and in fact are destroyed in the process of the work’s production and in its transmission “from one owner to another.” For Benjamin, this lost origin determines not only the duality of the modern artwork, but that of the historical event itself. He writes: Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures [Kulturgüter], and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Illuminations 256)58

A second formulation is provided by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. For Fanon too, no innocent, shame-free cultural production is possible after colonialism, not even after decolonization. Absolute sinfulness, what Fanon calls the “lie” of the colonial system, infects every available mode of expression: No colonialism draws its justification from the fact that the territories it occupies are culturally nonexistent. Colonialism will never be put to shame by exhibiting unknown cultural treasures [trésors culturels] under its nose. The colonized intellectual, at the very moment when he undertakes a work of art, fails to realize he is using techniques and a language borrowed from the occupier. He is content to cloak these instruments in a style that is meant to be national but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism.59

Every post-Auschwitz work, every postcolonial work—but also, as Lukács tells us, every novel tout court—has then a double quality. The doubleness, however, is not divisible; it is not possible to make Benjamin’s “anonymous toilers” known, just as it is impossible for the “colonized

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 45

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

46

chapter 1

intellectual” to produce an authentic cultural statement. This doubleness applies to every historical event, as inextricable from its formal dimensions as any artwork. To conceive of the true nature of the work or the event as underlying the false, or discoverable beneath it, is to fail to appreciate how irrevocable is the loss of innocence, for Benjamin, as well as for Fanon, as well as for Lukács. As I have been arguing, the shame of a work is not a symptom—an emotion felt by someone writing, or by an imaginary character in the work—but part of the event of the work: something coextensive with it, testifying to the work’s non-identity with itself. Shame is a quality of writing; it cannot exist outside writing or, more accurately, outside the relations of incommensurability that writing emblematizes; nor can shame be adequately encoded or conveyed within a literary apparatus. There is no shame without form; moreover, in a world of “absolute sinfulness” there is no form without shame. Form materializes shame by its inadequacy. Form, let us be clear, is not limited to literary form but includes ideas, habits of thought, clichés, acts of violence, and concepts in general: “fatness,” “terrorism,” basic racial categories such as black and white, as well as gender categories. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the most dangerous aspect of the concept of “anti-Semitism” is that it “would absolve Jew-haters of crimes greater than anybody had ever believed possible” (8). The point should be extended to less obviously charged concepts that organize and determine our everyday thinking: “domestic violence,” for example, or “hate crimes.”60 Examples from Conrad’s The Return include the respectability of marriage, the tragic pathos of an early death, and the notion of an “abusive husband.”61 Such ideas are forms, thought forms,62 into which the shame of the husband’s experience—an experience of utter bewilderment, of the inadequacy of form—can be dissipated or dissolved. Forms are also generators of shame, when their inadequacy and violence are felt as such. Shame, then, is an experience of the dissolution of the consolation of forms. Shame itself, of course, is also a form. However, what is distinctive about shame is its radical discomfort with itself as such; thus, the analysis of shame can help us understand the ways in which we are dependent on form, or forms, even as those forms restrict and limit our thought. Shame is the form in which we most directly encounter the necessity—indeed, the ethical necessity—to think in the absence of forms, which is also to think the absence of form. In the work of certain twentieth-century writers, of whom Kafka is perhaps the most prominent example, shame has been a way to explore the unreliability or the tyranny of form. What we have in shame, potentially, is an approach to reading that understands that the truth of the text cannot be present in it as a positive entity. The text is read, then, not as a vehicle—of thought, of atonement, of eth-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 46

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

shame as form

47

ics—but as an event, neither privileged over nor lessened in significance alongside other events. The aim of this book is to show how postcolonial literature is particularly suited to a reading of this kind; that postcolonial literature has, since its inception, been engaged in a thinking and materialization of the relation between shame and form; that the postcolonial situation is a world in which aesthetic forms are defined, as well as justified, by their representational and ethical inadequacy. What would it mean, in the postcolonial world, to suggest that a literary form might come into being without shame? What would it mean to suggest that a work might fulfill our highest ethical expectations of literature? Lukács frames a version of this question in the final pages of The Theory of the Novel. In the works of Dostoevsky, he says, we find the depiction of a new world “remote from any struggle against what actually exists”: a world “drawn for the first time simply as a seen reality” (152). Even if we disregard Lukács’s instantiation of Dostoevsky (as Lukács does himself in the 1962 preface), we are still left with the implication that a work, or a form, free of the “inadequacy” of form might one day be found. The suggestion goes against one of the most fundamental and essential principles of Lukács’s own book: the inseparability of literary form from history, and thus the inextricability of the work from the world. The lessons of Lukács’s own thought would seem to be that no depiction of a new world “remote from any struggle against what actually exists” could take place without thereby foreclosing the possibility of its emergence. In order for any such “new world” to emerge, a form—or, better, an understanding of form—is needed that could do justice to the dual nature of the event; an understanding, perhaps, in which the concept of depiction or of representation would play no part at all. For a provisional sense of what such a form would look like, we might consider the following statement made by Jean-Luc Godard in 1958, writing as a film critic in Cahiers du Cinéma: To say … “It is the most beautiful of films” is to say everything. Why? Because it just is. Only the cinema can permit this sort of childish reasoning without any pretence of modesty [fausse honte]. Why? Because it is the cinema. And because the cinema is sufficient unto itself…. In short, to assert its own existence as its justification, and by the same token to draw its aesthetic from its ethic, is for the cinema by no means the least of its privileges.63

The passage is from an article on Ingmar Bergman entitled “Bergmanorama.” In the opening sentences of the piece, Godard invokes several films (F. W. Murnau’s Tabu, Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach, to which he will add Bergman’s Summer Interlude) that render the task of the critic superfluous. The utterance “It is the most beautiful of films” is all that is necessary to say of

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 47

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

48

chapter 1

such works and is the highest possible praise: “Truth is their truth. They secrete it deep within themselves, and yet with each shot the screen is rent to scatter it to the winds” (Godard on Godard 75). Cinema is incapable of false modesty (fausse honte, literally “false shame”) because it functions outside the economy of form and content, image and reality, virtual and actual.64 Cinema’s justification, says Godard, is nothing other than its own existence; that is to say, its aesthetic is drawn directly from its ethic. The translation of this sentiment to forms other than cinema is for Godard unimaginable: one cannot meaningfully say of a Faulkner novel, “It’s literature,” or of a canvas by Paul Klee, “It’s painting.” The shame of such forms is the futility with which they might claim to be anything other than representational or mimetic; their ethical significance must be sought in the content of the work, in a portion that is conceptually separate from its formal, visible, or aesthetic dimension. In this discrepancy, indeed, is found what Lukács calls the “problematic” character of the novel, its “normative incompleteness” (73). The novel itself is thereby subject to the shame that we see represented in Rousseau’s Confessions or Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, and which is described by Lévinas as “an existence that seeks excuses.” Godard’s sentiment, it will be apparent, attributes to cinema the realization of Lukács’s aspiration for the novel: to present a new world “remote from any struggle against what actually exists” (156). And yet the very articulation of this sentiment can take place only against the fulcrum provided by the novel as it currently exists, the form, says Lukács, of “the age of absolute sinfulness.” I will return to cinema as the index of a possible solution to the problem of postcolonial shame in the last chapter of this book. The hopes of this work, however, will not ultimately be invested in the cinematic image; rather, the intention in the following chapters is that we might begin to find Lukács’s “new world” taking shape in the very inadequacy of the modern novel. Further, by reframing the ethical quandaries of the postcolonial world in terms of the purely formal dissonance of Lukács’s theory of the novel, it may be possible to find what Lukács referred to as “[our] own depth and greatness,” precisely in the shame (or incommensurability) of the postcolonial novel.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 48

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

Chapter Two Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché: Caryl Phillips True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Wisdom can be expressed through the act of form-giving: it can conceal itself behind the forms and does not necessarily have to surmount itself, as irony, in the work. —Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

The British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips has received a great deal of critical attention from readers and scholars interested in the theme of the black “diaspora” in contemporary literature and the closely associated concept of the “black Atlantic,” deriving from the work of the cultural critic and theoretician Paul Gilroy. In his influential book The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy proposes the Atlantic Ocean as a “single, complex unit of analysis” and the basis for a reoriented literary criticism, away from “nationalist and ethnically absolute approaches” and towards “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”1 The “Atlantic,” for Gilroy, names a principle of critical attentiveness to the structural presence of the African diaspora within the Western hemisphere, a principle demanding that we relinquish the tendency to orient ourselves critically in relation to certain territorial and imaginary sites in favor of the transitions and transactions that took place between those sites. Correspondingly, for Gilroy, the slave ship should be counterposed as an image of modernity to the modern nation state (4). Ships, he writes, “were the living means by which the points within [the] Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected” (16). As such, ships emblematize the possibility of a nonidentitarian relation to identity, a complex that in turn suggests a critical hermeneutic oriented not around nationalism but around transplantation and movement. The political implications of the “black Atlantic” model for the practice of literary criticism are for Gilroy far-reaching. He identifies two kinds of political projects: those predicated upon normative “fulfilment,” the demand “that bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhet-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 49

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

50

chapter 2

oric,” and those of utopian “transfiguration,” focused upon possibilities that are “beyond the grasp of the merely linguistic, textual and discursive” (37). The first leaves in place the existing structures of political ambition, demanding only that they deliver on their promises. Its attention is therefore always upon “normative content.” Among the assumptions with which it has not yet lost faith is the inherent adequacy of language. As Gilroy writes, “The politics of fulfilment … creates a medium in which demands for goals like non-racialized justice and rational organization of the productive processes can be expressed,” this despite numerous historical instances when the possibility of making such demands has been ignored and the potentiality of language abused. The second approach, “transfiguration,” is directed towards possibilities that are “beyond the grasp of the merely linguistic, textual and discursive.” The politics of this formation, therefore, have nothing to do with representation—a speaking on behalf of. Rather, an opacity is cultivated that will enable the politics of transfiguration to function “under the very nose of the overseers” (37). Transfiguration presupposes the emergence of “qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association [both] within the racial community … and between that group and its erstwhile oppressors.” Gilroy designates this latter orientation “the slave sublime,” a term that indicates the unspeakableness both of the catastrophe with which it originates and of the political “claims to truth” it extends on that basis (37). The figure of Caryl Phillips seems an eminently suitable object for such a critical project. Phillips was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, traveled to England with his parents while still an infant, was brought up in Leeds, and moved to New York in 1990, where he currently resides. Even more promisingly, Phillips has commented that he would like his ashes to be scattered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at a point equidistant from Britain, North America and the Caribbean, and the West Coast of Africa—three locations with which he claims the paradoxical relation of both feeling at home and knowing he doesn’t belong, of being both “of, and not of.”2 His best known and most frequently studied works, Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), are historical novels of slavery, dealing with transactions between those points during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For all the conceptual richness of Gilroy’s model, however, one of my contentions in this chapter is that its implications for critical practice have not been fully comprehended, particularly by critics who have enthusiastically incorporated Gilroy’s terms into their readings. Furthermore, important characteristics of Phillips’s work have been missed by the critical literature; this is due in part to the very way terms such as “diaspora,” the “black Atlantic,” and even “postcoloniality” have been brought and applied to it. Such  approaches, to be sure, are invited by

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 50

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

Caryl Phillips

51

the work, but—perhaps for that reason—they have been limited in their insightfulness. “Diasporan” readings of Phillips have focused on the historical setting and narrative content of the works, precisely the elements that solicit such readings, and have neglected their significance as contemporary literary productions with their own historicity. If diaspora, migrancy, and homelessness are present in Phillips’s work, I will argue, they do not appear primarily as contextual or thematic elements, but as material or substantive ones. The implications of this statement will be outlined in the following pages, but they include the proposition that such qualities, while they clearly apply to Phillips’s characters, and to Phillips himself, are also, in a more enigmatic sense, inhabited by the texts. Such conditions are part of the works’ production and ought properly to inform their critical reception also. In order to do justice to them, it will be necessary to treat them not as objects to be sealed up in a historical, biographical, political, or symbolic reading, but as the opposite: events in their own right. The circumstances of Phillips’s writing are as much a subject matter of his works as the situations of his characters; his novels are concerned primarily with the politics of literary representation, which is to say, the politics of their own production. When, for example, in Phillips’s 2005 novel Dancing in the Dark, the black New York–based stage performer Bert Williams contemplates his own reflection after applying blackface makeup for the first time, the character’s profound misgivings cannot fail to implicate the process of literary representation that the work itself is undertaking: The first time he looked at himself in the mirror the predicament was clear, but just who was this new man, and what was his name? Was this actually a man, with his soon-to-be-shuffling feet, and his slurred half speech, and his childish gestures, and his infantile reactions? Who was this fellow? Sambo? Coon? Nigger? However, the audience never failed to recognize this creature. That’s him! That’s the nigger! He looks like that. And that’s just how he talks. And he walks just like that. I know him! I know him!3

Every scene of reflection on the politics of representation in Phillips’s work has what will, later in this book, be described as a “crystalline” quality (and one might extend this situation to works of literature in general). At such moments, the stories he tells abscond from their historical settings. How can Phillips’s own work avoid being implicated in the following passage, told this time in the voice of the character Williams himself? The dressing room is where I dress, but it is also the place where I can set my true self to one side and put on the clothes and mind of another. A man I think I know. … The audience expects to see this man, and each night in

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 51

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

52

chapter 2

my dressing room I have to find him, breathe life into him, make him walk, and talk, and grin. A wistful, sad, helpless man, but there is no doubt that the audience recognizes him. I slide one finger into the jar and work up a countenance that suggests the triumph of black velvet over my own light ebony. In my dressing room night will triumph over day. I watch my skin become black. But this is not me. Surely the audience understands this. This is simply a person that I have discovered, a person whom the audience claims to recognize. (122–23)

If we were to substitute the phrase “The desk is where I write” at the beginning of this passage and the word “reader” for “audience,” and so on, we would have, in the body of Phillips’s work, an eloquent statement of the quandaries involved in Phillips’s own situation as a writer. In such a reading, the work is reconfigured not in terms of the politics of “fulfillment” (an assessment in which Bert Williams would be situated purely historically within a linear evolution of race relations in the United States, and from the superior perspective of a more evolved present), but in terms of “transfiguration”—a mode in which the work refuses or is unable to exempt itself from the quandaries that it is diagnosing. The politics of transfiguration, writes Gilroy, “exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams which still index the conspicuous power of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth” (37). The wider argument of this chapter and this book, then, involves habits of critical reading that seem to have become entrenched in the literary academy, habits that presuppose a stable relation between what is present in the text and what is extrapolated from it: that is to say, between the aesthetic and the ethical (or political) dimensions of literature. These habits of reading are illustrated by the reception given to Phillips’s work by postcolonial critics; in particular, by the failure to account for certain material characteristics of his writing. Materiality describes the formal elements of a literary text, but it should not be understood as a cipher for an aesthetic formalism in which specifically literary qualities are abstracted from history. On the contrary, materiality attempts to refocus critical attention on the contemporaneity of the text—on the historical event of the work itself. In What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari compare a writer’s words and syntax to the oils and pastels of a painter as his or her “materials.” “The writer uses words,” they write, “but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation and that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the ‘tone,’ the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 52

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

Caryl Phillips

53

summons forth a people to come.”4 For Deleuze and Guattari, words and syntax are a writer’s means not, primarily, of conveying truths or opinions, but for creating “compounds of sensations that [the work’s] characters either themselves experience or make felt in their becomings and their visions” (188). It is this process, existing in tension with writing’s function of communication, that has frequently been ignored by Phillips’s academic readers, who have tended to evade it as a distraction from the work’s positive content.5 By contrast, critics and reviewers in the press have talked about the “irritations” and “frustrations” of Phillips’s writing, or his “flat,” “lifelessly prosaic” style, responses that at least have the virtue of paying attention to its actuality.6 Thus, it is the difficulties and infelicities in the work of Caryl Phillips that will become the subject of discussion here. It is insufficient to brush over the imperfections of his writing, reading him positivistically by focusing on content, on what might be saved from the infelicitous envelope of the text. Nor is it acceptable, on the other hand, to dismiss his work as a failure, another kind of transcendental reading positing a scale of aesthetic value or a body of historical content separate from the text as such. Phillips provides an almost pure example of the pathos of literary failure; thus, the work could be read in almost functionalist terms. Rather than corrective narratives of history, telling a previously untold or mistold story about the past, these are works caught up in a drama of literary possibility that is riveted to their contemporaneity. This drama, as I hope to show in what follows, is far more than merely a question of aesthetics, of choices made—or not made—by the writer. Herein lies the importance of shame in Phillips’s writing, a quality that, in ways I shall explore, renders permeable the boundaries (between form and content, ethics and aesthetics, writer and narrator, effect and intention, historical setting and the work’s own contemporaneity) that are generally presupposed in the very structure of fictional works. In this regard, the most important aspect of shame in the literary text is its radical unattributability,  not only to any particular individual, but also to any specific origin. In the work of certain writers of modern fiction— V. S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee, for example, besides Phillips—shame is inextricable from the materiality of the writing; it thereby attains materiality itself. Precipitation of Shame Once one notices the frequency of references to shame in Caryl Phillips’s works, every sentence seems to be dripping with it, even when the word itself is not mentioned. The silences and omissions in his fiction, and the number of characters who are literally or figuratively unable to speak yet

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 53

8/13/2010 2:04:28 PM

54

chapter 2

whose unnarrated experiences lie behind everything on the page, make his works difficult to read, but they are also responsible for their unusual, often deferred impact. The most enigmatic presence in Cambridge (1991)—a novel set for the most part on a nineteenth-century slave plantation in the West Indies—is Christiania, the wife of the eponymous Cambridge. Christiania never speaks and remains inaccessible to us throughout the text, except through Cambridge’s account. She has been a victim of abuse by men since the age of ten, most recently by the white plantation manager, and towards the end of the novel she loses her sanity, as a disproportionate number of women do in Phillips’s novels. The first section of Crossing the River (1993) opens with the correspondence of a freed slave named Nash to his former master Edward, punctuated by the contributions of a thirdperson narrator who seems to share Nash’s imprisonment in a strangulated nineteenth-century literary discourse. Shameful silences surround Edward’s repressed sexual desire for his former slave, the suicide of his wife Amelia, and his family’s history of slave ownership. In later sections of the book, as in other texts by Phillips, verbal and physical brutality of men against women is another occasion for silence and shame.7 The Nature of Blood (1997) is about the analogies between the Jewish and the Negro experiences of persecution and the shame that takes form afterwards, in the minds of survivors, as the question of “what else I might have done.”8 The ethical concerns of the book are animated by a number of fictional characters from different literary and historical contexts, most centrally Eva Stern, the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and her uncle Stephan, who left Germany during the 1930s for Palestine, then a British mandate, to fight for an independent Jewish state. After the war Stephan and Eva never meet again, nor are they aware of each other’s whereabouts. The book ends with Eva’s nervous collapse when she discovers that the British soldier she met among her liberators in 1945, and in whom she had placed her hopes, is already married. In the final pages of the book she “abandons” words altogether (196); meanwhile, Stephan, in Israel, contemplates the diasporic complexities of his new country from the hotel bed that he has just shared with a recent African immigrant (210). What is startling about The Nature of Blood is the boldness with which Phillips enters territory that supposedly more qualified writers have balked at. “To write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible,” says the German writer W. G. Sebald in a radio interview in November 2001. “The only way one can approach these things … is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.”9 Over a seven-page section of The Nature of Blood, Phillips offers a stream-of-consciousness rendition of Eva’s radical mental deterioration during her time in the camp: “People’s mouths move,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 54

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

Caryl Phillips

55

their faces ablaze with indignation. They shout orders. (No words reach me. Inwardly I remain calm. I simply stare. Suspended. A young womanfoetus. Slowly turning.)” (171). Questions of “success” or “failure” in respect of such a piece of writing are invidious. It is tempting to surmise that Phillips has sought out the very subject matter that was guaranteed to produce a shamed sense of the ethical deficit of literature; that the real subject of Phillips’s work is the inadequacy of his own writing; that the greater the dissonance between words and experience, the sharper the sense of shame, and the more closely the form of the work approaches its ethical substance. A Distant Shore (2003) is set in contemporary Britain, but, like Cambridge, tells the story of an uneasy, chaste friendship between an African man, Solomon, and an English woman named Dorothy, a relationship that is inhibited by social pressures within the community, in particular, by the violent racism of the villagers towards Solomon—one of many causes of Dorothy’s shame—which ends with his murder. We also encounter Solomon’s intense shame at the acts of violence and betrayal he committed in order to escape from his war-ravaged country.10 Dancing in the Dark (2005), as already noted, tells the story of Bert Williams, who was active in the United States between 1893 and 1922, initially as half of the Williams and Walker duo, and then, after George Walker’s death, as a solo performer. In Phillips’s telling, Williams finds, to his shame and humiliation, that his greatest success as a black performer comes only when he betrays the informal compact he made with Walker, that in their act “there will be no blackface makeup” (30). Shame in Phillips’s work, then, is embedded in situations, narratives, and characters. Each of the works mentioned presents a story of shame in which a certain causality is implied: a subject, a shaming episode or situation, and a position of readership, or of authorship, from which the shame can be contemplated and pitied. However, the very ubiquity of shame in Phillips’s writing gives it a transcendent status. Shame is an abstraction, and as such is all too easily extractable from the work, leaving a hole, an absence in its place. It is precisely in this extracted state—as a discrepancy, a gap—that shame may be discerned in its status as an event, freed from and bearing only incidental relationship to its instantiation in the work. In the published works of Caryl Phillips, this double existence of shame is most immediately apparent as a lack of formal integrity, of the capacity to “delight.” In order to comprehend this double existence in its essence, it is necessary that we detach ourselves from the regime of aesthetic gratification that comprehends the reception of works in terms of their failure or success. The first effect of that separation will be the emergence of shame not as an affect but as a principle of reading, one profoundly at odds with its own concept.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 55

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

56

chapter 2

The Materiality of Postcolonial Shame Let’s revisit the short text, entitled “Literature and Life,” in which Deleuze introduces the connection between shame and writing. The relevant passage, already referred to in chapter 1, reads as follows: Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becomingimperceptible. … The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write? Even when it is a woman who is becoming, she has to becomewoman, and this becoming has nothing to do with a state she could claim as her own.11

“The shame of being a man” is how Primo Levi describes the quality of shame in Kafka’s The Trial. In Kafka, shame is an untranslatable event, neither bounded by the person of Josef K., who has done nothing identifiably wrong, nor theologically expansive, describing the answerability of man in general before God. Josef K., writes Levi, “is ashamed of many contradictory things, because he is incoherent, and his essence (like that of almost all of us) consists of being incoherent, not equal to himself during the course of time, unstable, erratic, or even divided at the same instant, split in two or more personalities that do not jibe.”12 In The Drowned and the Saved, in the chapter entitled “Shame,” Levi forges an equation between the experience of shame and the capacity to write that has become famous in the literature of Holocaust survival. “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses,” he writes. “We are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute…. We speak in their stead, by proxy.”13 Levi’s shame is the shame of being able to speak, of having the tools to bear witness and, by that same fact, nothing to bear witness to. It is precisely because one has been spared the horror that one is able to speak of it. Shame is not only the shame of having nothing to write about, but the materialization of that deficit in the facility of writing: a “composite” feeling, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear (What Is Philosophy? 225n). After Auschwitz, literature is debarred from testimony precisely by its eloquence. Not only is writing not suited to the representation of experience; writing,  along with painting, music, and every other art form, is inimical to representation. This, indeed, is the definition of literary writing in the modern period, a period defined not only by its knowledge of the atrocities people are capable of, but by the sense of a universal and irrevocable implication in those events—merely by the fact of hav-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 56

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

Caryl Phillips

57

ing survived them. Adorno, reviewing his famous statement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, says that in order to live after Auschwitz one must adopt the “coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity” that made Auschwitz possible in the first place; this is what is meant by the “drastic guilt” (drastische Schuld) of the survivor.14 Literature is constrained to avoid even that version of sanctimoniousness that construes its own “impossibility” from the experience of Auschwitz, drawing out an ethical positivism from meaninglessness itself. The affirmative counterpart to Adorno’s negation is found in Deleuze: “literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say ‘I’” (“Literature and Life” 3). Shame, an experience of incommensurability according to our reading of Primo Levi, shares this quality, then, with literature itself; this is what Georg Lukács means in The Theory of the Novel when he talks about the “absolute sinfulness” of the novel, the definitive literary form of modernity. The Theory of the Novel was written during the years prior to the outbreak of the First World War. In his later reflections on the book, published as a preface to the French edition of 1963 and subsequently to the 1971 English edition, Lukács talked about the “mood of permanent despair over the state of the world” out of which the book emerged (12). “Absolute sinfulness” is a dry run for Lukács’s theory of reification, developed in History and Class Consciousness after his conversion to Bolshevism,15 and it should be understood in those terms: as the unavailability of a form that is uncompromised by everything it wants to escape. The novel is a form created out of impossibility, an unbridgeable disjunction between form and world. The realist narrative makes up for the “absolute sinfulness” of the world (the disappearance of God) by creating a false unity out of the interiority of the fictional protagonist (60–61). The almost synonymous phrases with which Lukács theorizes the novel form (“absolute sinfulness,” “transcendental homelessness,” “a world abandoned by God”) sound a pessimistic note, as Lukács later acknowledged (18). “Absolute sinfulness” is a situation in which innocence is not an operative category—but this is not the same as saying that innocence has disappeared. Cooptation and complicity here should be referred not to the ethical situation of ontological, historical subjects, but to the objective conditions of the novel itself. The difference between guilt and shame is not a difference between cultures, as sociologists have imagined;16 it is a difference between the viability of the individual as an ethical category, holding good irrespective of the forms in which he or she chooses to speak, and the invasion of that category by a world in which nothing is certain, least of all those boundaries that organize the domain of the self: that divide guilt from innocence, confession from rhetoric, egoism from altruism, virtue from corruption, identity from ambition.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 57

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

58

chapter 2

Lukács’s idea of the novel as the form of “the age of absolute sinfulness,” then, has a specific historical context. Yet, given the similarity of the terms of this diagnosis to Primo Levi’s thoughts about the intimacy between shame and writing, to Adorno’s diagnosis of the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, and to Deleuze’s framing of literature with the phrase “the shame of being a man,” that historical context is no more limitable or localizable than to the modern period itself. In the context of Phillips’s work, this inventory of analogies might be extended to include the aporia of impossibility with which Gayatri Spivak, with her question “Can the subaltern speak?” characterizes the situation of the postcolonial writer, critic, and theoretician. For Spivak, not being able to “speak” is not a description, but the definition of the subaltern state. Subalternity is not an identity, and the concept has no correlation with ethnicity, or race, or even gender. Spivak talks of “an epistemic fracture” dividing the subaltern from the speaking subject, and of the subaltern as “the being on the other side of difference.”17 What she intends in such statements is a division which, she says, cannot be “bridged” without beginning the subaltern on the “long road to hegemony” (310). In her extended discussion of the sati-suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in 1926, the question becomes how to speak an experience that, by being spoken, is wrested out of its singularity. The subaltern cannot speak without commencing a journey that will strip him or her of the substance, the testimonial content of speech, the condition of subalternity itself—but this is the journey embarked upon by every subject of modernity. In the light of the similarities between this structure of impossibility and those analyzed in Levi, Lukács, and Deleuze, it is difficult to conceive of Spivak’s figure of the “subaltern woman” as an identity position that could be elaborated or defended in opposition to the “incoherence” of modern subjectivity. Subalternity, rather, is simply what is lost (perhaps we should say discarded, transcended) in the transition to “speech”; but Spivak’s question, in particular its unanswerability, alerts us to the profoundly ambiguous character of that loss. Subalternity appears as such only in the moment of its disappearance. The ethical question “Can the subaltern speak?” only makes sense in a context in which the relation between ethics and aesthetics has become problematic, and as the expression of that problematization. Its articulation, that is to say, presupposes a disjunction between ethics and aesthetics that is established with the appearance of the novel form; it is this same disjunction that, for Deleuze (after Levi), underlies the shamefulness, the presumption, of writing. Appearing in the gap between the aesthetic impossibility of speaking and the ethical impossibility of not speaking, shame is an index of the inadequacy or the impossibility of writing.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 58

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

Caryl Phillips

59

The concept of shame dramatizes the division within contemporary literary studies mentioned earlier. How should we read the overt appearance of shame in literature: as an affect that is alternatively communicated or obscured by the writing, that precedes, survives, or is neutralized by its expression in the text; or as a complex that arises inseparably with the writing itself? As an emotion that, external to the text, prevents one from speaking; or as a measure, within the text, of the text’s failure to communicate? Here I differ from writers on shame such as Emmanuel Lévinas and Giorgio Agamben, who emphasize shame’s self-identical, “ontological” quality. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben describes an archetypal scene of shame, derived from Robert Antelme’s memoir The Human Race, in which an Italian student conscript from Bologna is pulled out of line by an SS officer to be shot. Face to face with his executioner, the student blushes to his roots. For Agamben, the lesson of Antelme’s story is that “the intimacy that one experiences before one’s own unknown murderer is the most extreme intimacy, an intimacy that can as such provoke shame.” The student is ashamed, he continues, “for having to die, for having been haphazardly chosen—he and no one else— to be killed.”18 The ontological emphasis that Agamben gives to the episode derives in part from his prior reading of Heidegger and Lévinas. In his 1942–43 lecture course on Parmenides, Heidegger elaborates shame, aidos, as a disposition that leads directly to aletheia, “the unconcealed in its unconcealedness”—the state in which “the whole essence of man stands together with all human faculties.”19 Lévinas talks about shame in very similar terms, as an affect that “is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up.”20 Contrary to this Heideggerian notion, however, the case of the conscript from Bologna better exemplifies the incommensurability of shame than its ontological character, its quality of opening us up to “the face of Being” (Remnants 106). The shame of Antelme’s student is caused by the discrepancy between the metaphysical singularity of death and its randomness: their incommensurability. To be wrenched out of a column of prisoners to face death is to be exposed (brought into positivity, or plenitude) in a state of nothingness. If shame originates, as Agamben claims, “in our own intimacy,” in “what is most intimate in us” (105), such intimacy has no positive or ontological significance. Lévinas claims that what appears in shame is “precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself,” “the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself” (On Escape 64). On the contrary: it is the very discontinuity of the self, its otherness to itself, that is emblematized in the experience of shame—which, incidentally, has no primary or originary status. Shame is itself a form; it does not present

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 59

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

60

chapter 2

itself in any form other than itself. In fact, shame is the embodiment of the self in a form that it does not feel entirely comfortable with. “I can be ashamed,” writes Sartre in Being and Nothingness, “only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object” (261). At certain moments in his own text Agamben is clearly aware of this: “It is as if,” he writes, “our consciousness collapsed and, seeking to flee in all directions, were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its own defacement, at the expropriation of what is most its own” (106); yet such moments seem at odds with his Heideggerian and Lévinasian commitments. The intimacy of shame does not derive, as Lévinas says, from being “riveted to oneself,” from “the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself” (64). Shame is not an experience of the individual qua individual—the shame of the subaltern, say, or indeed of the colonizer. On the contrary, shame is a material entity; it characterizes the attempt to speak our experience, the impossibility of doing so, and is unknowable outside any such attempt. Shame is a quality of writing, of speaking, and it signals the relations of incommensurability that writing emblematizes. In his lengthy discussion of shame in Being and Nothingness, Sartre says: “I am ashamed of myself before the Other. If any one of these dimensions disappears, the shame disappears as well” (289–90). Writing is one of the major ways in which we place ourselves before the other, or (which amounts to the same thing) represent others to ourselves—or, indeed, ourselves to ourselves. When Frantz Fanon hears himself noticed on a train in Paris with the words “Look, a Negro!” the “shame” and “self-contempt” he experiences is due to the “vicious circle” of misrecognition in which he is locked, always both preceded and pursued by his skin color.21 The shame of the rape victim, or the victim of indiscriminate violence, attests to the forcible conjunction of physical intimacy and emotional estrangement, a disequilibrium analogous to that of the singularity and contingency of death that underlies the shame of the student conscript from Bologna. Shame is, in short, an event of incommensurability that, coexisting with the text, is not explained by the text, nor does it, on the contrary, explain the text. To read the text by reference to the shame that is operative in it and around it—that is, in terms of its failure to communicate, its awareness of its failure, its strategies of materializing failure or of compensating for it—means reading the text in terms of the event, the text as the event. The unavoidable implication of this perspective on shame is that, for all the explicit presence of shame in Phillips’s books, the shame-event of his work is most apparent when it is unnamed as such. In his letter to Max Brod in June 1921, already mentioned in chapter 1, Franz Kafka describes the situation of the young German-Jewish writer in Prague, who finds himself caught between three impossibilities: “the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 60

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

Caryl Phillips

61

impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently.”22 Reading this letter in relation to thirdworld cinema, Deleuze adds that it is through this “state of crisis” that the minority writer has to pass. The task of the minority writer or filmmaker is—in the first instance at least—“the acknowledgment of a people who are missing.”23 In the work of Caryl Phillips, “the acknowledgement of a people who are missing” does not take place in anything the text actually says but rather in the materiality of the writing, the element in which it most clearly speaks its contemporaneity. Shame is a material entity; not, primarily, in the ubiquity of its appearance in the texts, but in two closely related, apparently superficial elements which proliferate inseparably from them: ventriloquy and cliché. Cambridge and Crossing the River Phillips himself is an extremely enigmatic presence in his fictional works. The most striking characteristic of his writing, particularly marked in the novels dealing with slavery, is an almost complete absence of authorial commentary and third-person narration. Not only do his stories tend to be told entirely through the words and reflections of his characters; those characters are themselves, for reasons that are never specified, incapable of speaking authentically on their own account or in their own voices. As a result, these works have a curiously disembodied quality, despite the fact that, in the most literal sense, every word and idea is embodied in the verbalizations or thoughts of the characters. Cambridge is made up of two lengthy narratives. The first is a series of journal entries by Emily Cartwright, the thirty-year-old unmarried daughter of an English colonial landowner. The second is an autobiographical narrative by a black African born in Guinea with the name “Olumide,” who is abducted into slavery before the age of fifteen and renamed “Thomas.” He attains a new name, “David Henderson,” a new religion, Christianity, and eventually his freedom in England; but the story ends with his death on Emily’s father’s plantation in the West Indies after he is sold into slavery once again, a circumstance that bestowed upon him yet another name, “Cambridge.” Both narratives are “unreliable” in different ways—although the use of the word “unreliable” to describe Phillips’s narrations raises certain questions that I will discuss below. Emily’s journal is saturated with colonialist attitudes, not only politically, in the racism she displays towards the slaves on her father’s plantation, but also aesthetically. Emily is an aspiring writer and lecturer; she intends to give a lecture tour in England on her return and to write a pamphlet in reply to those abolitionists who “would seek to have us believe that slavery is nothing more than an

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 61

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

62

chapter 2

abominable evil” (86). But what we read in her journal are the outpourings of a stilted, derivative, and ideologically unreflective writer, inhabiting the literary discourse of a hegemonic, culturally dominant Europe. The level of overstatement in her narrative is so spectacular that many of her passages, especially those dealing with the physical appearance of the Africans, read more like a satire of colonial speech than an attempt to achieve authenticity of voice, the quality for which Phillips’s work has often been praised. Consider the following passage, a model of contrived racial and stylistic offensiveness: I was pleased to see the loyal Stella hover over me with concern writ large across her sooty face. … Although sadly lacking the natural advantages of my former companion, and incapable of mastering even the most elementary intellectual science of the alphabet, my sable companion has virtue still. Her smiling ebon face and broadly grinning lips, which display to good advantage her two rows of ivory, offer a greeting that has helped make tolerable my sojourn on this small island in the Americas. (78)

As in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, narrated by Magda, the daughter of an Afrikaner farmer who has taken a black woman servant as his lover, Emily’s relationship to the nineteenth-century language of colonization and of the literary tradition is an imitative one, as imitative as that of any colonial subject. “What purgatory to live in this insentient universe where everything but me is merely itself!” writes lonely Magda in her journal. “Such is my sole risible venture into the psychology of our debacle.”24 While Magda’s prose suffers from literary inventiveness taken to excess, Emily’s narrative suffers from a kind of innovation-deficiency. Literary clichés proliferate: the boat on which she sails to the Caribbean is subject to “Neptune’s whims” (10), her deceased servant Isabella is sent to a “watery tomb” (17), the slaves exert themselves in “Sisyphean labours” (87), an ebullient plantation worker is referred to as a “son of Ham” (77). An enduring tension is created in Cambridge and in Phillips’s work as a whole by the fact that at no point does Phillips himself, or a third-person narrator, step in to throw into relief these formally disconcerting aspects of the text. One reason why Phillips can be an upsetting writer (the words “irritating” and “infuriating” recur in press reviews of his work, even favorable ones)25 is the endless pages of derivative prose penned by his characters, sometimes (as in Cambridge) for the length of an entire book, and the perpetual absence of clues as to what the payoff or rationale might be. It is difficult to convey in summary the effect of Phillips’s style, which is cumulative, and arises in part precisely from this refusal of the author to signpost his intentions or to offer moral or political judgments, even im-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 62

8/13/2010 2:04:29 PM

Caryl Phillips

63

plicit ones, on his characters. Throughout the first half of Cambridge, the cliché-ridden narrative of Emily’s journal is inseparable from the clichéridden text itself: the two are precisely simultaneous. Bénédicte Ledent, the author of a book-length study of Phillips’s work, attempts to prize Phillips away from his characters by introducing a succession of secondary sources between his and their texts. Thus, observations from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth are imported to explain Emily’s use of zoological adjectives and collective nouns (“teeming,” “livestock,” “a brace of her blacks”) in relation to the slaves.26 Yet the point Ledent draws out has no reference to Phillips’s text as such; her interest, rather, is in the process of “othering,” what she calls “the very essence of colonialism”—a process she sees simply represented, without residue, in Phillips’s work, as if this text and this author had no history of their own (Ledent 86–87). Likewise, she parachutes in Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “autoethnography” (denoting the ideological cooptation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial subjects in what Pratt calls the “contact zone”) to throw light on Cambridge’s self-alienated discourse in the second part of the novel (97). Peter Hulme’s discussion of the prevalence of “Mediterranean” metaphors in nineteenth-century representations of the Caribbean colonial world is brandished in order to, says Ledent, “debunk” Emily’s claims to an objective vocabulary (84–85, 89).27 Yet, by pressing these historiographical and social-scientific concepts into service in a work of literary criticism, the materiality of the literary text is negated: Ledent treats Phillips’s novel as a transparent “fictionalization” (25) of a series of autonomous historical events. As a result, her critical leverage is diminished, since it is only the author-characters internal to Phillips’s text, not Phillips’s text itself, that are subjected to expository scrutiny. This obfuscation of the historical and material specificity of Phillips’s text—as, first, a contemporary work, and second, a novel—is the most obvious difficulty with the existing criticism. The questions failing to be asked of Phillips’s works include not only, Who speaks? Is anybody speaking? but also, Do these texts have any realist aspirations at all? The narrative of Cambridge himself, a confessional text purportedly delivered shortly before his execution for murdering the manager of the plantation, is no less unreliable than Emily’s. We never learn the circumstances of its composition, nor to whom it is addressed, factors that contribute to its disembodied, timeless quality. Many critics have noted Phillips’s ability to “ventriloquize” his characters, a technique which, it is sometimes suggested, enables a proliferation of voices, particularly in the works of “diasporic” or “black Atlantic” writers whose country of origin might be said to be multiple or diffuse.28 Yet it is far from clear that the voices Phillips gives to his characters are really intended to belong to them; that his characters meaningfully own the discourses they

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 63

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

64

chapter 2

make use of; or that, as an author, Phillips is remotely engaged in an attempt to capture authenticity of voice—all this, notwithstanding his own statements on the matter.29 Nor does “ventriloquism” in Phillips have an obvious representational dimension, in the pejorative sense in which Gayatri Spivak uses the term: to denote a kind of patronage towards the subaltern classes on the part of an intellectual elite. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, strengthening her criticism of what (in the original version of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) she calls the “representationalist realism” of French intellectuals, Spivak adds the following comment: “The ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern is the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade” (255). Phillips is not interested in constructing a people or speaking on behalf of anyone. The purpose of what has been called ventriloquism in Phillips’s texts is, rather, the systematic evacuation of every discursive position that might claim freedom from implication in colonialism, beginning with that of the third-person narrator. The authorial voice “disappears into the characters and becomes them,” as Jenny Sharpe has said of Phillips’s work.30 There is no “voice” as such in Phillips. What we get instead is the ubiquity of ventriloquy—voice precisely as ventriloquy. In his essay “A New World Order,” Phillips describes the world he is writing in and for: The old static order in which one people speaks down to another, lesser, people is dead. The colonial, or postcolonial, model has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none. In this new world order nobody will feel fully at home. (5)

“With limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none”; a world in which “nobody will feel fully at home”: what else is this but Lukács’s world of the novel as such, a world of “transcendental homelessness,” a world abandoned by God? (41, 88). In a condition of absolute sinfulness, ventriloquy is the condition of all discourse. Phillips’s characters ventriloquize themselves; this is as true of Emily as it is of Cambridge, as true of Joyce in Crossing the River as it is of Nash. “Unreliability” is not a narrative technique in Cambridge, but a condition of every utterance in a world in which shame is the dominant ethical category. If irony is for Lukács “the normative mentality of the novel” (84), unreliable narration is merely the condition in which the novel maintains its faithfulness to the demands of late twentieth-century experience. The same might be said of the proliferation of clichés. The key to loving the work of Caryl Phillips is to learn to love the cliché. Deleuze’s observations about clichés in relation to cinema are instructive here. Deleuze’s narrative of the history of cinema posits a break between what

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 64

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

Caryl Phillips

65

he calls the “movement-image” and the “time-image” after the Second World War, a break that approximates the historical breaks mentioned earlier in the work of Lukács, Spivak, and Primo Levi. Deleuze writes: We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it—no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially. The most “healthy” illusions fall. The first things to be compromised everywhere are the linkages of situation-action, action-reaction, excitation-response, in short, the sensory-motor links which produced the action-image.31

The same could be said of the linkages of sin-guilt, guilt-atonement, expiation-redemption. After this point—after Auschwitz, say—it is no longer clear who is guilty and who isn’t; who is entitled to speak of his or her experience and who is not; who needs to seek atonement, and who doesn’t. Shame becomes an experience that is completely unharnessed from the theology of guilt. “What maintains a set in this world without totality or linkage?” asks Deleuze at the end of Cinema 1, and continues: “The answer is simple: what forms the set are clichés, and nothing else. Nothing but clichés, clichés everywhere” (208). Cambridge is a book in which, with the proliferation of clichés, eloquence and inarticulacy coincide. The novel form collapses into its impossibility; identity becomes unmoored from its language of expression. What Emily calls the “lunatic precision” of Cambridge’s use of English—“as though the black imagined himself to be a part of our white race,” she says to the plantation manager (120)—applies identically to her own use and to that of the novel as a whole; to Phillips’s use, to my own in the present work; to literary and critical language as such. In Cambridge, the shame of being able to write and the shame of being unable to write become indiscernible; both Emily’s and Cambridge’s narratives are choked into inconsequence by their earnest, pitiful claims to literary eloquence—and the same may be said, for the most part, of the narratives we encounter in Phillips’s 1993 novel Crossing the River. Crossing the River is a more complex book than Cambridge. It shares many of the same characteristics—so-called ventriloquized narration, the absence of authorial judgment, a conscious and relentless inhabiting of dead discourses—but it is even more suffused with a sense of shame regarding the eighteenth-century slave trade between Africa and America. Indeed, shame so pervades the four sections of Crossing the River, each of which has a different narrator and tells a different story, that, like colonial guilt and innocence, the shame becomes almost unlocalizable. Crossing the River is hardly a polemical text. As in all of Phillips’s work, there are no unambiguously guilty parties and no innocent ones, a fact that is central to the currency of shame in his work. It has been

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 65

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

66

chapter 2

frequently observed that Phillips’s work humanizes even the characters who seem most fully implicated in the slave trade (most controversially, James Hamilton, the slave ship captain whose journal entries and letters home constitute the third section of Crossing the River).32 Indeed, the phrase “a shameful intercourse,” a refrain which, in the opening and closing fragments of the novel, designates the initial exchange between an African father and the slave trader in 1753, seems to function to remove any notion of asymmetrical guilt from the colonial project—that is to say, any clear differentiation between perpetrator and victim of colonialism.33 Phillips’s four narratives in Crossing the River are framed by the internal monologue of the father who, when his crops fail, sells his three children, Nash, Martha, and Travis, to Hamilton. In neither the opening nor the closing sequence, however, is there any pretense at realism; the voice— described in the book, inaccurately, as a “many-tongued chorus”34 —is disembodied, ventriloquized, a fact which further contributes to the sense that shame in this novel is nothing more, or less, localizable than Deleuze’s “the shame of being a man” or Lukács’s “absolute sinfulness” of the novel form. Phillips has spoken in interviews of the sense of “guilt and discomfort” he experienced on the site of a slave fortress in West Africa, and claimed that it was this that prompted him to write Crossing the River.35 But Phillips cannot (and does not really try to) give voice to the marginalized or subaltern other. Crossing the River offers a structure in which, seemingly, each of the children sold into slavery in the opening pages will successively speak his or her experience; but, in fact, none of them does. Nash tells his story in a discourse of pure imitation (of nineteenth-century British literary English); Martha’s story is told in a combination of thirdperson narration and free indirect speech; while Travis’s is told entirely through the narration of his onetime lover, a Yorkshirewoman named Joyce. In Crossing the River, Phillips’s characters play out a majoritarian scenario of colonial mimicry, steeped in shame, while the narrative voice of Phillips himself proceeds in the opposite direction: towards what Deleuze calls a becoming-imperceptible. The Poetics of Impossibility In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács says there are two options for art and literature when the sensuous totality disappears from the world: they must either narrow down and volatilize whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object and the inner nul-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 66

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

Caryl Phillips

67

lity of their own means. And in this case they carry the fragmentary nature of the world’s structure into the world of forms. (38–39)

“Either form succeeds through a denial of the world,” says J. M. Bernstein, paraphrasing this passage, “or form fails through a respect for the demands of experience.”36 In either case, says Lukács (in effect), the novel is the form in which the inability of the subaltern to speak speaks; in which he or she who is unable to speak, or who is unable to be spoken, has that condition of unspeakability put into circulation. Furthermore, the novel has always been the form in which the subaltern speaks. The “volatilization” solution is that of, say, Fielding, Dickens, and Dreiser, and it is taken as far as it can go, perhaps, in James Joyce. The “impossibility” solution is what we find in Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, and W. G. Sebald. From Lukács’s perspective, what writers such as Beckett, Pynchon, Sebald, Kafka, Nabokov, and Coetzee are doing is emphatically not writing “novels.” Whatever it might think it’s doing, Phillips’s work too—suffused, like Coetzee’s, by shame—is engaged in a “polemical” demonstration of the impossibility of speaking. No one speaks in his works; or rather, what is spoken is the unspeakableness of the unspeakable. The “failure” of Phillips’s work is precisely what is so interesting about it. Indeed, Phillips has articulated his own problems with the novel form in terms similar to those of Lukács in The Theory of the Novel: “I am not the first writer of fiction to find that the tension between myself and my environment is so urgently felt that the fictional mould seems too delicate a vessel to hold it.”37 There is no realism, nor even representation in Phillips’s narratives. Furthermore, and contrary to the observation most often made about his work, the number of discourses he actually presents is extremely limited. The attempts of Phillips’s academic readers to rationalize the failure in Phillips’s novels verges on desperation. Bénédicte Ledent invokes a concept of “Caribbeanness” to explain the disjointedness of Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood (nothing in which is set in the Caribbean); she speaks of a “Babel of voices” in his writing and quotes Phillips’s own description of the Caribbean as “the quintessentially postmodern, multiracial, multicultural model” that Europe is having to grapple with.38 In such sentiments, however, she is reproducing a notion whose most notorious antecedence is found in Michel Leiris’s dazzled response to Josephine Baker in the jazz halls of 1920s Paris: an expression of sincere regret “that we [Europeans] are so painfully incapable of this sort of simple and beautiful expression … that we are so mediocre, … so dull and ugly compared to these creatures, who are as touching as trees.”39 In her discussion of Crossing the River, Ledent even talks about the novel’s use of “syncopation” and of its evocation of jazz, “whose vibrant sounds

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 67

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

68

chapter 2

resonate,” she says, “among other musical forms with African roots, in the novel’s closing pages, and which attests to the black diaspora’s unorthodox inventiveness” (Caryl Phillips 114–15). In this context we could do worse than reread Toni Morrison’s nuanced introduction to her book Playing in the Dark, where she coolly mocks the description of a nervous breakdown at a Louis Armstrong concert in an autobiographical text by Marie Cardinal: “What on earth was Louie playing that night?” Morrison asks drolly, before making her more forceful point: “Neither blackness nor ‘people of color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language.”40 Not only is the black diaspora’s “unorthodox inventiveness” completely absent from Phillips’s work; so too are the other supposedly “diasporan” or “postcolonial” traits that Ledent finds there: “the quiet faith in man’s ability to survive” (167); the “refusal to promote ideas at the expense of characters” (168); and the “genuine and profound engagement with the concrete human person taken as (s)he is” (169). These notions appear, platitudinously, in place of critical attention to the material actuality of Phillips’s work, which is about nothing so much as the dialectic of possibility and impossibility, a dialectic that describes and defines the postcolonial situation as it does every other context for the novel form—as Lukács reminds us, the form of the totality of reification, in which the possibility of speaking is produced only by faithfulness to its impossibility. Where does Ledent get her concept of “Caribbeanness”? From a variety of sources, perhaps, but possibly not from the Caribbean. Stuart Hall offers a similar characterization of “Caribbeanness” in his influential 1990 essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” where he treats the term alongside “diaspora,” an “imaginary” and “metaphorical” category associated, for Hall, with “heterogeneity and diversity” and, in opposition to the idea of a “single shared culture,” marked by “ruptures and discontinuities.”41 My unease with the juxtaposition of these terms refers not to this essentially theoretical elaboration, but to the reluctance of literary critics to draw the only possible conclusion from it: that the notion of cultural identity can have nothing but incidental relevance for our engagement with the actuality of the literary text. There is no reason why diaspora,  or even “Caribbeanness,” should not function as a counter-identitarian, negative-dialectical trope, in the same way that “queer” and “négritude” have done in certain contexts. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argues for the necessity of understanding “diaspora” as a complex that is inseparable from the terrors of modernity, terrors that, he says, “exhaust the resources of language amidst the debris of a catastrophe [such as slavery] which prohibits the existence of [literature]

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 68

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

Caryl Phillips

69

at the same time as demanding its continuance” (218). Diaspora, that is to say, comprehends precisely the difficulty of uniting aesthetic impossibility and ethical obligation in a discrete aesthetic form. The “transcultural, international” formation that Gilroy calls “the black Atlantic” is thus, strictly speaking, incompatible with the idea of a “diaspora aesthetic” invoked by Hall (after Dick Hebdige), as well as by Gilroy himself—even one claiming the “subversive” force of “hybridization” (Black Atlantic 76, 199). The same might be said of Brent Hayes Edwards’s “anti-abstractionist” elaboration of diaspora as décalage, a term he derives from Léopold Senghor’s conception of the difference between black Africans and African Americans: “un simple décalage—dans le temps et dans l’espace.”42 Edwards declines to translate the term, although he paraphrases it as follows: “the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water” (14). The meaning of décalage, then, is precisely “incommensurability.” For Edwards, décalage signals “disarticulation” as the repressed other of “articulation,” implying, in part, a refocus of attention onto “the points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation” (14)—the very moments of difficulty and infelicity that I have been emphasizing in my reading of Phillips. Furthermore, following Stuart Hall, Edwards proposes a reorientation of the word “articulation” away from its sense of “expression” and towards that of “anatomy” and “functionality,” a reorientation in line with his suggestion that habits of evaluative reading, assessing the “efficacy” of a particular cultural representation, should be succeeded by a reading practice that is attentive to any number of possible constitutive “effects” (14). This, too, might be read as analogous to the displacement of voice in Caryl Phillips’s work by a concept of ventriloquy that has been argued for here. Yet even Edwards’s promising model of diaspora, if mobilized as a principle of critical reading to be brought to the text, is liable to reproduce the very problem of identitarian abstraction that it is intended to avoid. Décalage, writes Edwards, “indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity; it alludes to the taking away of something that was added in the first place, something artificial, a stone or a piece of wood that served to fill some gap or to rectify some imbalance” (14). The risk of producing a re-reified notion of identity and, correspondingly, of limiting the textual object of study within the polarity of a failing or successful articulation of that identity, cannot be eliminated by substituting one negative abstraction (décalage) for another (diaspora). The tendency towards abstraction is inherent in any project that presupposes a positive cultural representation in and by the literary text; positivism can just as easily take a negative form as a positive one. No matter how

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 69

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

70

chapter 2

dense the qualifiers which surround it; no matter how loudly one sings its imaginary “constructedness,” or insists upon the difference between cultural “essence” and cultural “positioning”; no matter how earnestly one invokes the “profound discontinuity” which characterizes it (Hall 395), or how ingenious one’s strategies for fending off abstraction (Edwards 12)—the principle of cultural identity as an interpretive category of art, literature, or cinema restates the most basic and immediate utterance of the work. As a critical approach, identity, even in the form of nonidentity, in itself brings nothing to the work; the likelihood exists, rather, of its merely re-embedding the work in tautology and cliché. In an essay entitled “Hating Tradition Properly,” Neil Lazarus puts forward the thesis that the “burden” and, indeed, the possibility of speaking in the name of “humanity at large” has passed from such “Eurocentrically limited” figures as Adorno (or, for that matter, Lukács) to those capable of grasping the ontological intimacy of West and non-West.43 He mentions novelists, political theorists, and cultural critics from the post-imperial world, one of whom being Edward Said, who describes this situation himself in Culture and Imperialism. The “new integrative or contrapuntal orientation in history,” says Said, is one “that sees Western and non-Western experiences as belonging together because they are connected with imperialism.”44 The division between “Western and non-Western experiences,” like the division between (to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s terms) the real universality and the false universality, or between form and content, ethics and aesthetics, guilt and innocence, literature and experience—in each case the division itself has become capable of speech at just the moment that the polarities have become inarticulate. The new dispensation announced by Lazarus, therefore, implies a coincidence of speaking and not speaking. As Adorno observes in numerous places, “the division itself is the truth.”45 In Phillips, the awareness of this is implicit only. Nevertheless, one of the most fascinating aspects of his texts is their refusal or their inability (which amounts to the same thing) to strive for some technical means of speaking, of reducing the text from the status of an event—one that is thoroughly implicated in every impossible exchange that it narrates—to the category of the literary. Phillips’s work, this is to say, like Coetzee’s or Naipaul’s in different ways, inhabits exactly the same pathos that it describes. It is true, as Bénédicte Ledent observes, that Phillips’s character Cambridge is “at once observer and observed, missionary and convert, both at the producing and receiving end of travel writing and colonization” (Caryl Phillips 96). To that extent, Phillips fits the postcolonial narrative of a theorist such as Homi Bhabha, just as he does (almost unbearably neatly) the “black Atlantic” narrative of Paul Gilroy. “The observer becomes the observed,” writes Bhabha, “and ‘partial’ representation

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 70

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

Caryl Phillips

71

rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence” (The Location of Culture 89). The difficulty comes with Ledent’s extrapolation, drawing a line of identitarian exchangeability between Cambridge and the author: “To me,” she says, “this dual position … metaphorizes that of the postcolonial artist living in the West, who can address with equal ease the society he left behind and the one he now lives in” (Caryl Phillips 97). Not “ease,” however, but unease, dis-ease, is the mode of the writer after colonialism. Phillips’s “dual” position emblematizes, rather, the ethical paradoxes that attach to the problem of address in late twentieth-century society: the moment, after all, of the actualization of Phillips’s text. For all their resonance with the person and work of Caryl Phillips, “diaspora,” the “black Atlantic,” and “postcoloniality” are limited in their critical efficacy as long as they are conceived in positive terms: that is to say, as long as “diaspora identities” are imbued with an ontology (even a negative one); as long as “postcoloniality” is differentiated, ethically and socio-historically, from “postmodernism”;46 as long as “positionality” is conceived as a limit upon the work, rather than as its banal, purely empirical point of departure. Many difficult but important characteristics of the work of Caryl Phillips have been missed in such approaches. Those I have discussed here include the displacement of the ethics of guilt and innocence by a materiality of shame, a complex that is uncontainable within the ideological structure of the fictional work; the almost complete absence of authorial narration; the restriction of voices, under the sign of ventriloquy, rather than their proliferation; and a poetics of failure, inarticulacy, and cliché. Lukács’s theory of the novel emerges out of the great insight that the task of the novel is to find a way of reconciling the aesthetic impossibility of speaking with the ethical impossibility of not speaking. In the works of Caryl Phillips, particularly those dealing with the horror of slavery, that paradox finds a “voice” that is faithful to these two impossibilities as such. All this might be phrased altogether differently, as follows: Diaspora and homelessness are not merely contextual or thematic elements of Phillips’s work; they are present in the immediacy and the materiality of his texts—in the actuality of ventriloquy and cliché—which, after all, is nothing other than the material embodiment of a condition of permanent exile from the intimacy of language. What Gilroy talks about as the “wilfully damaged signs” of the slave sublime (The Black Atlantic 37), Lukács calls “transcendental homelessness,” and it is for him the condition of the novel form per se. Lukács’s account of the novel, which he understands in the restricted context of nineteenth-century realism, is presented in defeatist terms; he himself later referred to its “ethically-tinged pessimism” (The Theory of the Novel 18). To realize its true possibilities, his account

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 71

8/13/2010 2:04:30 PM

72

chapter 2

needs to be supplemented by Deleuze’s insistence on something better even than the rage against cliché. What Deleuze says about painting, in his book on Francis Bacon, is here equally applicable to writing: The greatest transformation of the cliché will not be an act of painting, it will not produce the slightest pictorial deformation. It would be much better to abandon oneself to clichés, to collect them, accumulate them, multiply them, as so many prepictorial givens: “the will to lose the will” comes first. Only when one leaves them behind, through rejection, can the work begin.47

This refusal to “transform” the cliché is what we find in Phillips: the “will to lose the will,” the will to cliché, the will to inhabit the cliché. Most of what Phillips puts down on the page was there already, before he began writing. It remains to be seen how he will continue to negotiate the predicament of necessary failure and ventriloquy to which Lukács consigns the novel as such; whether, as Deleuze says, he will be able to move beyond the shuffling of probabilities in order to get off the page completely.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 72

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

part two

The Time of Shame

Just as the empirical person who thinks lags behind the power and objectivity of the idea he thinks whenever the idea is an idea, an idea’s claim to truth does not lie in its adequacy as an illustration of the thinker, in the paltry repetition of what he is anyway. —Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 73

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 74

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

Chapter Three The Shame of Belatedness: Late Style in V. S. Naipaul Artworks are archaic in the age in which they are falling silent. But when they no longer speak, their muteness itself speaks. —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

V. S. Naipaul invokes shame constantly, both on the page and off it, and in quite varied situations, many of which seem to have nothing to do with the postcolonial situation. In the opening pages of his authorized biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, Patrick French recalls getting into a friend’s car in Delhi to find Naipaul next to him in the back seat. “We were talking about the funeral of Princess Diana,” Naipaul says to French. “What were your thoughts about it?” French, sensing that he is being baited, decides to “be honest”: “I found it moving. I liked seeing the British express their emotion in public.” Naipaul, obviously disappointed with this reply, describes his own fervent response: “It filled me with shame—shame and disgust. The sort of disgust one feels after visiting a prostitute, if you know what I mean. They had a man, Mr. [Elton] John, doing the singing.”1

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 75

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

76

chapter 3

Another story is told by Naipaul himself and it dates from 1951, when he was a freshman at Oxford University. In a paper on Paradise Lost that was read by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, Naipaul had produced a striking phrase: “Prayer, the incense for the incenséd God.” Speaking to French in 2002, Naipaul explains: “Now I knew exactly what I was doing. ‘In­ censéd’ meaning angry, it’s the same word. And Tolkien said to me, ‘it’s good, did you intend it?’ And I was ashamed and I said no. And so I lost points in Tolkien’s mind, I suppose, and the witticism yet was my own. I was too well prepared for Oxford, I suppose” (79). What is the meaning of this willingness to invoke his own shame, given the argument I have been making in these pages about the incommensurability of shame, its incompatibility with its own instantiation? It is tempting to refer the Princess Diana story to comments made by Gilles Deleuze about feeling “the shame of being a man” in “utterly trivial situations”: “in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of ‘bons vivants’ gossiping.”2 Naipaul and Deleuze apparently share an aversion to mass culture and its forms of collective expression. Yet such feelings are deeply ambiguous. Insofar as they may be characterized as “shame,” they speak precisely to our psychic investment in the communities and societies to which we belong and which are capable of shaming us just as we can shame them. “Shame enlarges the spectrum of objects outside of himself which can engage man and concern him,” writes Silvan Tomkins. “How much shame can be felt at remediable conditions is one critical measure of the stage of development of any civilization.”3 In Naipaul, however, there is another tendency of deliberate provocation that, taken at face value, encourages us to dismiss his references to shame in this context. “There were Negroes at the shrines, weeping, openly. Why were they weeping? Why? Why were they weeping?” (The World, xiv). In the light of this (self-consciously) objectionable comment, it is easy to conclude that the force of the instantiation of shame is in inverse relation to its strength: that neither Naipaul nor (perhaps) Deleuze is truly ashamed. Shame, then, would be a mask for something closer to contempt or disgust, a purely rhetorical mode intended to sharpen the force of the sentiment, which remains denunciatory rather than empathetic. In fact, the paradox of shame is more subtle than this and is dramatized by the very existence of French’s book. Naipaul approached French to write his biography; he fully cooperated with it, and on its completion he requested no changes (xiii), despite the fact that French is sometimes searingly critical of his subject. “Of all the people I spoke to for this book,” French writes, Naipaul himself was “outwardly the frankest. . . . His willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility” (xvi). Leaving aside the interesting ambiguity of focalization in that last sentence (the question of

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 76

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

V. S. Naipaul

77

whether the words should be taken as free indirect speech), the paradox of shame is not that it cannot be instantiated, but that it disappears at the moment of its instantiation. Shame—to adapt and invert the opening lines of A Bend in the River that provide the title of French’s biography—is not what it is.4 Naipaul’s shame is not disingenuous; shame is an experience of discontinuity, of the incommensurability that is the self, in situations where that incommensurability is being suppressed or counteracted. I am ashamed not of myself, but insofar as I am enjoined to step forward as a self, to assume the formula of self-identity. The “utterly trivial situations” mentioned by Deleuze are shaming, then, not simply because of something that is ethically or aesthetically offensive to the self, but because of the force with which that thing instantiates, delimits, or interpellates the self as a subject (that is to say, an object). Large groups of public mourners, or Elton John’s contributions to the funeral, are shaming to Naipaul insofar as they presuppose or address a mourning subject. Of course, Naipaul is complicit with this general instantiation; after all, his remarks are made in the context of his collaboration with a sanctioned biographer. The puerile references to “Negroes” are a form in which Naipaul expresses a “shameful” sentiment, precisely in the service of a subjective crystallization; but as such, they must also be read as part of a machine or apparatus (assemblage) of literary production that enables another trajectory to be taken, one of desubjectification. Naipaul’s shame is both the occasion of his inability to think outside the subject and his very means of doing so. Another way of stating this is to say that shame is experienced as an existence out of joint, as a condemnation to a permanent chronological discrepancy; shame is a state of simultaneous prematurity and belatedness. This temporal hypothesis is one way of framing the close relation between shame and form described in chapter 1. For Theodor Adorno, writing in Minima Moralia, every artwork contains a residue of irreducible shame on account of the element of form, of “made-ness” that is inherent to it. The contradiction between what is and what is made is the vital element of art and circumscribes its law of development, but it is also art’s shame: by following, however indirectly, the existing pattern of material production and ‘making’ its objects, art as akin to production cannot escape the question ‘what for?’ which it aims to negate.5

Correspondingly, what is shaming in the “utterly trivial situations” spoken about by Deleuze is the feeling of having been oneself reduced to a form, an object: of having been anticipated, catered to—which is to say, placed in the past tense. Naipaul does not explain the shame he feels about Princess Diana’s funeral, but perhaps it too is of this kind: the shame of being collectively addressed, interpellated as a consumer, a participant

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 77

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

78

chapter 3

in an emotional or commercial exchange (“the sort of disgust one feels after visiting a prostitute”); the shame of being reduced to an object with desires that can be met, an existence that can be comprehended. Being and Belatedness Here we approach the temporal dimensions of shame. If shame is an effect of the discrepancy between, in Adorno’s phrase, “what is and what is made,” we might equally represent this as a contradiction between the is and the was, the present and the past. I experience myself in the present tense; this is the condition of my subjectivity and my perception; but reflected in your eyes I see myself in the past, as perceived. This, of course, is nothing other than a reframing in temporal terms of the phenomenological encounter described by Sartre.6 The shortcomings of the phenomenological model are also apparent here, for the reality is that even as “I” experience “myself,” the experience has already taken place, the “self” is already constituted. As Deleuze says beautifully in his book on Henri Bergson, past and present are not consecutive but simultaneous: “two elements which coexist.”7 The distinction is not a quantitative one (a division between stronger and weaker states of sensation) but qualitative. “Past” distinguishes not that which is no longer but that which is, that which will be “eternally, for all time.” When we believe that “the past is no longer, that it has ceased to be,” we confuse Being with being-present. The past, writes Deleuze, is the “in-itself of being,” “the form under which being is preserved in itself” (Bergsonism 55). Insofar as we perceive the present, it is already past. What is truly present is that infinitely small element in what exists that has not been subjected to the objectifying force of chronology. This temporal dimension of shame—a tension arising from an apparently chronological distinction between the unmade and the made, the unseen and the seen—may also explain the complexity of Naipaul’s feelings when he was asked by Tolkien, “It’s good, did you intend it?” The occasion of Naipaul’s shame is Tolkien’s question, not the creative facility in Naipaul that prompted it. How could a man who has thought of himself as a writer since the age of ten or eleven,8 who has come to study at one of the world’s oldest, most prestigious centers of learning, and who consequently has reason to think of himself in a certain light—how could Naipaul possibly answer such a question, the premise of which is that a man such as he, from the periphery, might only accidentally have happened upon such a felicitous conjunction of words? That the guiding presence of a mentor such as Tolkien might be necessary in order to awaken him to that felicity? How to answer, other than by a refusal of its terms? And how to refuse those terms, radiating centrifugal patronage,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 78

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

V. S. Naipaul

79

except by outright denial? How to avoid the submission that would be signaled by a “yes” but with a “no”? Tolkien’s question treats Naipaul as a latecomer, which is to say, in Deleuze’s terms, an object, an is. This structure also explains some of Naipaul’s most notorious comments, many of which are the result of questions that require him to act in some sense as an emblem, a readymade. In 1979 Naipaul was interviewed by Elizabeth Hardwick for the New York Times Book Review. Prompted by the publication of Naipaul’s book India: A Wounded Civilization two years earlier, Hardwick asks him a facile question: What does the “coloured dot” (the bindi) on the foreheads of Indian women “actually mean”? Naipaul replies fatuously: “The dot means: My head is empty,” a reply that was bound, and was no doubt intended, to cause outrage.9 But the premises of the question are the greater outrage: an objectifying presumption, according to which the cultural practices of Hindu women might be taken as a topic of anthropological curiosity (“What is … ?”) in a conversation between a metropolitan journalist and a Trinidadian novelist. Here, of course, the rage in Naipaul’s answer expends itself, complicitously, upon Indian womanhood. However, following René Girard’s exemplary analysis in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, rage can be just as “mediated” as desire. The true focus of Naipaul’s rage, perhaps, is a metaphysical structure (in Girard’s terms) according to which he is condemned to lateness—by his race, by his colonial origins, and by the condition of modern subjectivity itself. Girard’s understanding of this structure is religious; in the work of novelists like Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust, modern man is thrown with such abruptness upon his own resources that the vacant place of God, by which he once oriented himself, is replaced by “substitute gods” in the form of his fellows, “mediators” for his real desire, which in fact is “metaphysical.”10 The modern emotions—named by Stendhal as “envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred” (ibid. 14, 65)—are all “triangular” in structure; they locate an object en deçà, on earth, onto which the thirst for the absent au delà, the universalizability of experience by reference to a transcendent third term, is projected, but in a negative cathexis. The counterpart of these feelings is shame, without which they are incomprehensible. Thus, Proustian “snobbism,” characterized by a “sterile oscillation between pride and shame,” is understood as the attempt of the snob to escape his own subjective feeling of contemptibility by assuming the new being which he supposedly procures through snobbism. The snob thinks he is always on the point of securing this being and behaves as if he has already done so. Thus he acts with intolerable arrogance. Snobbism is an inextricable mixture of pride and meanness, and it is this very mixture which defines metaphysical desire. (67)

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 79

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

80

chapter 3

In the postcolonial situation, however, there is no need for Girard’s religious framing. The triangular structure applies to a writer such as Naipaul because of the effectively transcendent status of the former colonial power, which, like the third term in Girard’s analysis, has retreated from its former visibility. “Transcendental homelessness,” Georg Lukács’s term for the situation of the modern novelist described by Girard, is also—in a sense that is no less metaphysical than that of Girard’s writers—the condition of every postcolonial writer from the periphery. The presence of shame throughout Naipaul’s work resembles that “sterile oscillation” that Girard finds in “all the novelists” (71), and it suggests that there are numerous, varying “mediations” in operation; as in Girard, the identity of the “mediator” shifts perpetually. In 1983, Bernard Levin began an interview with Naipaul by asking him, “You were born in Trinidad?” (93). To feel outraged by Naipaul’s response—“I was born there, yes. I thought it was a great mistake”—as, for example, Caryl Phillips has done,11 is to forget that Naipaul’s provocations are directed principally against the determining is, that is to say, the pastness, the transcendent category by which he has cast upon him the status of the self-identical. “Trinidad” is anathema to Naipaul not in its specificity, its singularity, but in its universality, as a logic, an origin: the locus of an attempt by the colonial power to conceive of Naipaul as a man destined to remain forever in the past tense. In all of these instances, the true object of Naipaul’s rage, and shame, is the condition of belatedness itself. Perverse as it may seem, there may well be covert solidarity with Indian women in the apparent contempt of Naipaul’s answer to Hardwick. •  •  • No writer has described the “belatedness” of the situation of the colonial subject who is transposed to the metropole with more eloquence, or pathos, than Frantz Fanon: “I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself. Those in front of me look at me, spy on me, wait for me. A black bellhop is going to appear. My aching heart makes my head spin.”12 But the category of “lateness” also applies to the postcolonial world in a quite different sense. Lateness—what Nietzsche called “the epigonal superstition”13 —implies a development narrative, much like the one that emerges out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, according to Chinua Achebe’s famous reading of it.14 The European novel, moribund, sepulchral, is counterposed to the vibrancy of “new literatures,” the most prominent means by which the literary academy persistently revivifies itself. In this narrative, a writer such as Naipaul must work hard if he is to avoid appearing in a different, no less emblematic light: as a figure of youth or renewal, another form of belatedness.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 80

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

V. S. Naipaul

81

Early in his career, in a review of Patrick White’s short stories, Naipaul disparaged the search for “new forms” in literature, seeing them as deriving from a modern “uncertainty about the function of the novel, and a conviction that the novel as we know it has done all that it can do and that new forms must be found.”15 Naipaul himself is not generally thought of as a formally experimental writer. French observes that Naipaul “never went through a process of linguistic experimentation,” that he “circumnavigate[d] Modernism, even as he absorbed its implications” (The World 45). Naipaul said as recently as 2006 that writing “should never draw attention to itself” (ibid. 115), a view that seems in line with his remarkable claim forty years earlier that the “display of overt technique” in writers such as Patrick White is “an embarrassment” that derives precisely from “uncertainty” of form. Pascale Casanova has written of Naipaul’s literary “conformity” in pejorative terms that forcefully reproduce the developmentalist model. “Naipaul has invented nothing novel in his novels,” she writes, “he merely shrewdly reproduces the narrative models of 19th century writers.” He is a writer “a century and a half behind the times”; his “conventional style is to literature what his conservative public pronouncements are to politics.”16 The subjectivism of such judgments is startling—as if Naipaul’s “style,” had he wanted it to, could possibly have been maintained in some anachronistic, idiosyncratic form irrespective of historical developments. My argument, on the contrary, is that Naipaul’s work is intimately formed by historical circumstances; that his style, far from being anachronistic or “behind the times,” is generated by (or as) a “lateness” that is both personal and historical, but that cannot be understood merely chronologically. Naipaul’s lateness, or belatedness, will be considered here in relation to Adorno’s theory of “late style,” a theoretical account of those circumstances, personal and historical, in which a formal “belatedness” might arise not out of a deficiency in the historical sense but from a particular historical attentiveness. Adorno’s theory, particularly the ambiguities and reversals with which he frames its chronological aspects, has resonances with more recent currents in aesthetics, such as Gilles Deleuze’s similarly ambiguous historical narrative of the development of modern cinema as an irruption of formal incommensurability into the filmic text. Both hypotheses, I shall argue, have as much significance for developments in literature as they do for the specific artistic forms they describe. Both are elaborated in ways that complicate any attempt to read them in purely developmentalist, Eurocentric terms. And, although the colonial and postcolonial situations are not central to either Adorno’s or Deleuze’s elaboration, both are for this reason directly applicable to the postcolonial belatedness experienced variously by Naipaul and Fanon.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 81

8/13/2010 2:04:31 PM

82

chapter 3

Late Style in Adorno Adorno’s theory of late style was developed not in relation to literature, but to musical composition; indeed, apart from a short essay on the final scene of Goethe’s Faust, almost all his references to “late style” refer to Beethoven, whose so-called “Third Period,” lasting from 1816 to his death in 1827, saw the production of works characterized by a lack of formal consistency so glaring that their only unifying principle appears to be the simple fact of their origination with the same composer. As a consequence, says Adorno, Beethoven’s late works have been received more as biographical “documents” than as works of art. Late works are typically “furrowed, even ravaged,” Adorno writes; they resist “mere delectation” and lack “the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art.”17 In the most usual understanding of this phenomenon, the subjectivity or “personality” of the artist haunted by death finally “breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated.” Such is the explanation for the difficulty and “bitterness” of such works offered by biographical criticism, the tendency that, according to Adorno, enjoys an almost total monopoly on the commentary on Beethoven’s late compositions. “It is as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality” (ibid.). Adorno’s emphasis in “Late Style in Beethoven,” the short, suggestive text in which these remarks appear, is completely away from such biographical or psychological interpretations, approaches that, for Adorno, are only possible by ignoring the actuality of the works under discussion: the proliferation of conventions qua conventions, the relative absence of expressive elements, and the apparently perpetual withholding of signification. For Adorno, what distinguishes late from middle-period Beethoven is principally that the composer’s attempt at a subjective and artistic “transformation” of the traditional formal and thematic elements “according to his intention” is abandoned. Rather, conventions appear “in a form that is bald, undisguised, untransformed,” achieving expression, finally, as “the naked representation of themselves” (565, 566). The psychological critical approach, conceiving of the work as a vehicle for subjective expression, misses entirely the fact that death is not an actuality that may be read through the work of art, no matter how “brittle” the work in question may seem. The idea of death that is present in late works is not the impending expiration of the individual writing, but the altogether other death that Blanchot writes about as always present: “the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 82

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

V. S. Naipaul

83

limit of your self-possession.”18 Death is an emblem of that which cannot appear in the work at all except in a highly “refracted” mode. The great force of late works derives from the thought of death, certainly, but purely negatively, as the confrontation of art with its own impossibility. The psychologistic interpretation reduces impossibility to merely biographical or egoistic significance, and death to the positive image of death we foster in life. The “thought of death” that is present in late works tells us nothing whatever about death; it speaks eloquently, instead, of the necessary failure of art itself. To read late works as “documents” through which the subjectivity of the artist is finally visible violates the principle insisted upon by Adorno, that “the content of art always consists in mere appearance” (566).19 The necessity of art’s failure apparent in late works, therefore, amounts to the removal of art from the binary logic of aesthetic success and failure, communication and its breakdown, altogether. Adorno develops the point in the following, fascinating passage: The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work. (566)

The astonishing import of these sentences is that late works are characterized by the disappearance of the work from the work as such; by the dematerialization of the work, its liberation from the inadequacy of its material form. Not only that, but that this eventuality represents the highest fulfillment of the work itself. The exhaustion of artistic forms is here not an active historical process at all; exhaustion rather refers—in a purely nominal, abstract sense—to the condition of possibility of all art in the modern period. In modernity, the disappearance of meaning from art, what Adorno calls its “enigmaticalness” (Aesthetic Theory 120), is dramatized by the corresponding fetishization of meaning at the expense of form. Lateness, difficulty, is the character of all artistic activity in modernity, which thus begins its irreversible trajectory towards volatilization, abstraction. The idea has its origins in Hegel’s philosophy of history, as the following passage from Aesthetic Theory makes clear: So long as the existence and function of artworks in society was self-evident and a sort of consensus ruled between the self-certainty of society and the place of artworks in it, no question of aesthetic meaningfulness arose: Its

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 83

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

84

chapter 3

meaningfulness was a foregone conclusion. Aesthetic categories are first subjected to philosophical reflection when art, in Hegel’s language, is no longer substantial, no longer immediately present and obvious. (296)

It is undeniable that Adorno’s lateness is in some sense a temporal hypothesis. After all, late works are a distinct form, characteristic of a particular historical situation, and subject to certain formal laws that may be interrogated and understood. Yet Hegel’s philosophy of history, as Adorno’s book on him makes clear,20 is not one of decline, and the same should be said of the lateness motif in Adorno. Edward Said makes the following observation, discussing Adorno’s “late style” essay: “It is the Zeitgeist that Adorno really loathed and that all his writing struggles mightily to insult.”21 Yet (contrary to Said’s implication) it is not any particular Zeitgeist, but the category of the Zeitgeist, contemporaneity itself, that antagonizes Adorno’s aesthetics. Said appears to forget—perhaps on account of the “obvious personal reasons” by which he tactfully frames his own interest in the theme, months before his death (6)—that Adorno’s conception of lateness was developed in fierce opposition to biographical criticism. Said imbues late style, or the late stylist, with a “prerogative” that is difficult to dissociate from the dignity accorded the dying: “to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them” (148). However, “Late Style in Beethoven” was produced not when Adorno himself was facing death but early on in his career, in 1934—a full ten years before the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Horkheimer.22 Adorno later claimed that most of his ideas about music originated in his youth, long before he developed them in his writing.23 The detail is worth noting, given Adorno’s own understanding of the temporal dimension of late works and the nature of the death or exhaustion by which they are haunted; given also the degree to which the fragment on “Late Style” prefigures the development of Adorno’s aesthetic thought in the truly late, indeed posthumous, Aesthetic Theory. In this regard, the bleak insinuation given to Adorno’s thought by the wide dissemination of his best-known statement about art—that to write literature after Auschwitz is barbaric—is thoroughly misleading. Its context is an essay on precisely the complacencies of a cultural criticism devoted to the denunciation of civilization. Entitled “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno’s essay is a critique of that form of reification which idealizes both “culture” and “the present,” which takes one or the other as an object of criticism as such. The essay is also, therefore, a critique of the ideology of lateness conceived in temporalizing, idealizing terms, that is to say, the ideology of cultural decline. “What appears to be the decline of culture is its coming to pure self-consciousness. Only when neutral-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 84

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

V. S. Naipaul

85

ized and reified, does Culture allow itself to be idolized. . . . Cultural criticism rejects the progressive integration of all aspects of consciousness within the apparatus of material production. But because it fails to see through the apparatus, it turns towards the past, lured by the promise of immediacy.”24 “Neutralization of culture” is one of many synonyms for reification in Adorno’s work around this period. It refers to the reduction of artworks to objects stripped of any “vital relationship” with the observer, as in art museums or—another of Adorno’s withering examples—performances of Mozart “by candlelight,” which constitute a doomed attempt to undo the process of neutralization by supplementing the work with period details.25 Neutralization is not a tendency to be lamented, but an objective situation that demands and generates new artistic forms. This is precisely what is so powerful for Adorno about Beethoven’s late works for Adorno. His assessment of the Missa Solemnis, a work composed over five difficult years and performed only twice before Beethoven died, begins with the statement that “every now and then” a work appears “in which the neutralization of culture has expressed itself most strikingly.”26 The Missa “offers no justification for the admiration accorded it”; it is this enigmatic incomprehensibility at the level of content, combined with its “uncontested place within the repertoire,” that speak of the release of the work from the limits of form itself—a release achieved in its insistently “archaic” character, its constitution by “sections imitative in themselves,” and its “peculiar character of quotation” (574, 575). The sentences which immediately precede and follow the famous statement about Auschwitz, but which are rarely quoted alongside it, provide the logical apparatus for conceiving of the Missa as in some sense a postAuschwitz work: The more total society becomes [Je totaler die Gesellschaft], the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. (“Cultural Criticism” 34, emphasis added)

“Auschwitz” names and marks the condition of modernity itself as one of incommensurability between the ethical obligation to speak and the availability of aesthetic forms which can do justice to that obligation; yet for Adorno the conception that Auschwitz inaugurates the break is a further symptom of an inability to grasp the full implications of this incommensurability. “Auschwitz,” seen as the catastrophe that makes mean-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 85

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

86

chapter 3

ing meaningless, emblematizes the tendency to cling to ideology critique, or cultural criticism, long after both have become obsolete. Dialectics, he says—by which he means “immanent” as opposed to “transcendent” critique, Hegelian phenomenology rather than the Kantian division into categories—amounts to an “intransigence towards all reification” (31), including all vehicles of the expressivist delusion, such as Edward Said’s “prerogative” accorded to the dying artist, Casanova’s denunciation of Naipaul’s “conformity,” or (Adorno’s example) the phrase “mere ideology” (32). In late capitalism, the ideologies of decline, deterioration, lateness itself, even meaninglessness, are as much vectors of reification as those of freedom, culture, and national identity, or (Adorno’s words) “mind, life and the individual” (“Cultural Criticism” 23); indeed, the definition of the late period, for Adorno, is that in it, lateness is revealed to be no longer a viable chronological hypothesis. Lateness, then, is a self-rescinding concept: a periodizing hypothesis which is abolished as such by the forms in which it is expressed, along with the categories of cultural decline, subjective expression, death as calamity, and linear temporality itself. Late works are the “catastrophes” in the history of art, says Adorno (“Late Style” 567). And chief among their casualties is the notion of catastrophe as the end of anything. In Negative Dialectics, rethinking his own earlier statement about Auschwitz, Adorno writes: “After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (361). The impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is—paradoxically—susceptible to a positivist reading that betrays its refusal of the thesis in the form of its wholehearted adoption. The sentimentalization of meaninglessness, an eventuality which must once have seemed unlikely in the extreme, is the most effective means of dissipating its actuality altogether. In Naipaul’s work, several apparently distinct aspects of lateness combine, nowhere more so than in The Enigma of Arrival, the work that most clearly invites the appellation “late.” Yet the question of the applicability of the concept of lateness to the novel form is complicated, to say the least. If lateness is a theme that Adorno inherits from Hegel, one of the primary transmitters of the inheritance is Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel, a work that, Adorno once declared, “set a standard for philosophical aesthetics which has been retained ever since.”27 For Lukács, the novel is a form that, tout court, expresses and incubates lateness. The novel emerges in a world in which the “natural unity of the metaphysical spheres,” a unity expressed in the pure, sensuous immediacy of the epic, has disappeared forever. An ethical rupture at the heart of the novel separates content from form, meaning that ethics in the novel is always a matter of reflection rather than of sensation, materiality. “A totality that

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 86

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

V. S. Naipaul

87

can be simply accepted is no longer given to the forms of art,” writes Lukács, in a passage quoted earlier; “therefore they must either narrow down and volatilize whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object and the inner nullity of their own means. And in this case they carry the fragmentary nature of the world’s structure into the worldof forms.”28 Lukács’s Theory of the Novel looks here like an instance of the idealizing, periodizing hypothesis that Adorno’s work seeks to dismantle; both options—“volatilization” and “polemical impossibility”—are, in a chronological sense, late forms. Only the second, however, describes what Adorno conceives of as the late work. Indeed, the late work actually abolishes the category of the late as a mode of exhaustion or historical obsolescence; it is this latter which, by the process of “volatilization” (that is, self-deception), is able to maintain the values of “classicist aesthetic” (“Late Style” 564) harmony. In either case, the work is constituted by failure, although in the case of “polemical impossibility” failure is precisely its “measure of success” (“Alienated Masterpiece” 581). Furthermore, late style as such is actually abolished—aufgehoben, we should say—in the development of Adorno’s own Aesthetic Theory, where it is absorbed as a constitutive element of aesthetics itself: “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form,” writes Adorno in the opening chapter of that work, echoing Lukács’s second (“polemical”) solution to the loss of totality: form as an index of impossibility. “The moment a limit is posited,” Adorno continues, “it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed” (6). It is at this stage that Adorno’s thought becomes, in Edward Said’s phrase, “lateness itself” (On Late Style 14). Liber solemnis: The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival as a novel, then, is condemned to lateness. For Lukács, the novel cannot not be a meditation on lateness, on failure, on death—events which, in the “contingent” (that is, inorganic) world of the novel, become inflected through what Lukács calls the central category of the “problematic individual.” For Lukács, the novel appears at a moment when the outside world and the ideas of the individual become incommensurable, leading to the elaboration of the ideas into “subjective facts—ideals—in his soul” (Theory 78). Enigma is certainly a novel in this sense, organized as it is around the mysteries of the writing life and the intense shame that has accompanied the narrator-protagonist’s pursuit of it and which now infuses his recollections: “So the past for me—as

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 87

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

88

chapter 3

colonial and writer—was full of shame and mortifications. Yet as a writer I could train myself to face them. Indeed, they became my subjects.”29 The narrative of the book, then, concerns his loss of faith in the possibility of literary creativity and his subsequent attempt at a reformulation of what that activity entails: no longer the recording or the projection of an “inward development” (146), but an openness to the world and its volatility, an openness which requires that he suspend even the apparent certainty of subjective perception. The incommensurability talked of by Lukács and named “transcendental homelessness” (Theory 41) has here been radicalized to the point at which the sense of disconnection between the world and the self becomes the very substance of their relation. Shame, subtraction of the self, replaces egoistic projection as the operative principle of the writing subject. The work is present only as an absence, as the book’s very substance becomes an index to the question of its own possibility. Not only is lateness explicitly thematized; The Enigma of Arrival also meditates at length on the inseparability of this condition of lateness from the situation of the novel as such, and that of the novel writer. As in so many of Naipaul’s books, the writer at the center of the text is intensely aware of the peculiar compulsions and frustrations of the literary enterprise. At the beginning of the book, Naipaul’s author-narrator has recently moved to a cottage in Wiltshire, near Stonehenge—the ancient origins of England—where he seems weighed down by a morbid sense of destiny past, of “glory dead” (53). England, the country of arrival, is a post-Imperial world, still coming to terms with its economic decline and loss of cultural influence, both of which find a kind of symptomatic, consolatory expression in the idea of cultural and artistic exhaustion, an idea that Naipaul’s narrator is seduced by, even as he sees through its attractions. At almost every moment, The Enigma of Arrival manifests an awareness of the obsolescence of temporality as linear progression (that is to say, the obsolescence of obsolescence). The temporality of the novel is never simply that of the time narrated but is always allied to the time of the narration itself. Consider the following pair of sentences from the introduction to “Jack’s Garden,” the novel’s first section: “Jack lived among ruins, among superseded things. But that way of looking came to me later, has come to me with greater force now, with the writing” (15). Lateness, then, has the distinct quality of “belatedness,” in the sense intended by Frantz Fanon when he ventriloquizes the racist temporality of the relation between white Europeans and people of color in Black Skin White Masks: “You have come too late, much too late. There will always be a world—a white world—between you and us” (101). In Naipaul, this awakening to belatedness is paralleled by the trajectory of his transposition from Trinidad to England (via Puerto Rico and New York), from

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 88

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

V. S. Naipaul

89

the status of a colonial whose relation to history is purely “abstract” (143) to that of latecomer (or, in other words, novelist). For Naipaul, it seems, lateness is not primarily a temporal category. It is a geographical, existential, and world-historical category as much as it is a temporal one. The immigrant is always belated, for Naipaul—not only “culturally” but, as a racially distinctive figure, in respect of his or her own first impression. Late at night on the boat from New York to Southampton, a black passenger from tourist class is introduced into the superior cabin that Naipaul’s narrator, through “a wonderful piece of luck,” occupies alone: “I was . . . ashamed that they had brought the Negro to my cabin. I was ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me—so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself” (125, 126). Shame is an experience of time as aberrant, out of joint; the temporal dimension of shame is precisely belatedness. Sartre writes: “Shame is the consciousness of being irremediably what I always was: ‘in suspense’—that is, in the mode of the ‘not yet’ or of the ‘already-no-longer.’ Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other” (Being and Nothingness 288). This misrecognition is an experience of temporal disjunction that cannot not result in shame, since one’s every conceivable expression and utterance is thereby condemned to anachronism. Adorno finds a similar quality in Beethoven’s Missa, where we see the impotence “not merely of the mightiest composer but of an historical position of the intellect [des Geistes] which, of whatever it dares write here, can speak no longer or not yet” (580, my emphasis). This impotence is not a product of Beethoven’s “insight” or “psychology,” but rather of “a pressure in the thing itself,” speaking of a mistrust “of the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the roundness of symphonic successes, the totality emerging from the movement of all the parts” (580). This mistrust should be located not in the composer but in the consciousness, the “spirit” (Geist) that is coterminous with the work. As work becomes late, writes Shierry Weber Nicholsen, it becomes “increasingly inorganic,”30 meaning that subject and object have no hope of mediation or realignment—quite the opposite. “Objective is the fractured landscape,” writes Adorno, “subjective the light in which—alone—it glows into life. [Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal” (“Late Style” 567). If the “disengaged” subjectivity of the work speaks of its belatedness, however, the same work is premature as well; Beethoven’s Missa, inasmuch as it is a post-Auschwitz work, is also (the logic of Adorno’s essay would suggest) presciently postcolonial.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 89

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

90

chapter 3

Belatedness, perhaps—paradoxically—is what provides The Enigma of Arrival’s most convincing claim to modernity. The sense of belatedness of Naipaul’s narrator is expressed as a deep ambivalence towards the age of empire, a period in which the model of art as the organic imposition of the artist’s “vision,” a model he himself cherished in Trinidad, was still intact (187). As always in this text, the apparent nostalgia exists alongside an awareness that the organic vision, as enjoyed by artists such as John Constable and E. H. Shepard, no longer affords anything other than “a modern picturesque” (187); furthermore, that in that world of organic immediacy, “occurring at a time of empire,” there would have been no place for a man like Naipaul (52). Not only is The Enigma of Arrival a meditation on lateness; it is a meditation on the unreliable consolations offered by, precisely, the meditation on lateness: “I had always lived with [the] idea, … even as a child in Trinidad, that I had come into a world past its peak.… Already I lived with the idea of death, the idea, impossible for a young person to possess, to hold in his heart, that one’s time on earth, one’s life, was a short thing” (23). The great innovation of Beethoven’s Missa is to renounce the obligation to innovate, to wrest any scrap of subjective affirmation out of subjective defeat. Liturgy, says Adorno, is left in its conventional, archaic form, undeveloped; the classical is exposed “as classicizing” (“Alienated Masterpiece” 580). In Naipaul, the refusal of affirmation has a similar effect, cutting loose the subjective element from the objective forms that are available to it in the text itself. “The noblest impulse of all,” he writes, “the wish to be a writer, the wish that ruled my life—was the impulse that was the most imprisoning, the most insidious, and in some ways the most corrupting.… To be what I wanted to be, I had to cease to be or to grow out of what I was” (245). In these passages, it seems, the propensity of the text is towards liberating subjective expression from the objective arena of the artwork, which includes all categories of “narrator,” “authorial voice,” “meaning,” “interpretation,” and so on. Nevertheless, late works, for all the reasons spelled out in Adorno’s essay, are particularly liable to be read in the confessional mode. On the manuscript of the Missa, above the “Kyrie,” Beethoven wrote the words “Von Herzen—möge es zu Herzen gehen” (From the heart—may it go to hearts), “a confession,” writes Adorno, “the like of which one may search for in vain in all the other printed editions of Beethoven’s works” (“Alienated Masterpiece” 571). Yet, as Rose Subotnik has observed, Beethoven’s very recourse to these words amounts to “an admission of their futility.”31 In Adorno’s reading, the work itself—particularly its use of repetition in the most sacred and personal section of the mass, the Credo—effectively undermines any suggestion of either subjective piety or the opposite, a kind of abstract “Unitarian” religiosity, stripped of its doctrinal

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 90

8/13/2010 2:04:32 PM

V. S. Naipaul

91

elements and made universal. With its insistent, jarring incantation of the word “Credo,” for Adorno it is “as if the isolated man had to assure himself and others of his actual belief” (577). For the secular humanist Beethoven, the real question is not located on the subjective level—belief or atheism—at all. “Expressed in more modern terms, it is a matter for Beethoven of whether ontology, the objective intellectual organization of existence, is still possible.” The Enigma of Arrival too appears to solicit (and has in any case been frequently subjected to) such “confessional” readings. Parts of the book are intimately self-exposing: “For years . . . I had dreamed of coming to England. But my life in England had been savorless, and much of it mean. I had taken to England all the rawness of my colonial’s nerves, and those nerves had more or less remained, nerves which in the beginning were in a good part also the nerves of youth and inexperience, physical and sexual inadequacy, and of undeveloped talent” (101–2). It is these passages that have led the most prominent critics of the book to subject it to the kind of biographical interpretation that Adorno’s interlocutors imposed upon Beethoven’s late works. Indeed, the same qualities of “irascibility” and “bitterness” feature among the epithets hurled by these critics in Naipaul’s direction. Salman Rushdie, in a disparaging review, writes that the “bitter taste” of Naipaul’s middle period fiction has in Enigma been replaced not only by “sadness,” but by the author’s secession from the demands of art: “when the strength for fiction fails the writer, what remains is autobiography.”32 Rushdie introduces a distinction between technical and spiritual accomplishment as he describes the “delicate, precise” and yet “bloodless” prose of the novel—testament, says Rushdie (somewhat presumptuously), to “a life without love” (151). Caryl Phillips modifies this distinction into one between writerly virtuosity and “likeability.”33 Incessantly invoking the “lateness” theme, he writes that “[Naipaul’s] subject is himself. But his theme is a tender and delicate one: it is death. Naipaul is engaged in rumination of the most superior kind as he waits for the inevitable” (199). In the late work, Naipaul seems to have come full circle. No longer the imaginative leaps of the middle period, as demonstrated in such novels as Guerrillas, In a Free State and A Bend in the River. The “autumnal” novels, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, are once more written in the shadow of his own life. . . . With [these novels] he has cleared the way for a fuller reconciliation with his past and with himself. (198, 200)

Even Edward Said, a critic intimately familiar with Adorno’s writings on Beethoven, writes of “an increasingly bitter and obsessive strain in Naipaul’s writing” since the early 1970s.34 A common theme in both Said’s and Phillips’s readings is the absence of “tenderness,” “affection,”

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 91

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

92

chapter 3

or “compassion” in Naipaul’s treatment of the postcolonial world (Said 100; Phillips 209, 208). All three writers acknowledge Naipaul’s technical “brilliance” (Rushdie 150; Phillips 195); Naipaul, says Said, is “in the end too remarkable and gifted a writer to be dismissed” (103), a verdict that establishes and presupposes a radical separation between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature. It is difficult not to read this inexplicable reference to Naipaul’s undismissibility as a moment of critical defeat in Said’s essay: the moment when he encounters the unthinkable actuality of Naipaul’s text in respect of those categories of ethics and aesthetics, or of “success” and “failure.” Faced with the late work, Said acknowledges there is something he is not comprehending; as such, it is perhaps the most productive moment in his essay. The critical embarrassment evinced in these readings is the inverse of that which Adorno detected in the reception of late Beethoven, yet it is identical in its effects. Naipaul’s critics are reduced not to uncomprehending “pronouncements of awe about an immortal chef d’oeuvre” (“Alienated Masterpiece” 570), but to an equally idealizing outpouring of ululation over the withering of a “gifted” talent. Certainly, The Enigma of Arrival has none of the literary flamboyance that we find elsewhere in Naipaul: in A House for Mr. Biswas, for example, or The Mimic Men. Yet, contra Phillips, this is precisely what establishes Enigma in continuity with the earlier writings; taken together, Naipaul’s work can be seen to have implemented a gradual distantiation from the confectionary appeal of the literary phrase, at least since The Mimic Men. In Guerrillas, for example, everything strains to escape the merely verbal; passages of pure visual description contrast with the emotional and intellectual dependence of each of the characters on totemic phrases, most obviously the writer-character Jimmy Ahmed, hopelessly aware that the failure of his writing is apparent in its inertness (“words alone”), its refusal to leave the page.35 Another example is the character Peter Roche, a South African political activist turned corporate consultant, who reflects repeatedly, “I’ve built my whole life on sand” (87, 97), while his lover, Jane, mediates her erotic encounters with phrases ranging from “I’ve been playing with fire” (77, 78) to “Love, love” (74, 233). Even this “middle period” work of Naipaul’s, therefore, invites comparison with Beethoven’s late sonatas, where, according to Adorno, the “mere phrase” becomes “a monument to what has been, marking a subjectivity turned to stone” (“Late Style” 567). In a reading that takes issue with Said’s condemnation of Naipaul for presenting a “cliché-ridden” third world, Sara Suleri proposes that Naipaul’s subject is not the “actualities” of the third world, but the “anxiety of empire,” that is to say, in part, the perpetual complicity of the literary itself in the colonial project: “his fascination with the cliché and the readily available colonial myth may be his only

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 92

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

V. S. Naipaul

93

means to arrive at an idiom in which to address his perception of himself as a postcolonial cliché.”36 Among Enigma’s claims to originality, indeed, is the way it concertedly sets about dismantling the category of literary originality. As in Beethoven, Naipaul’s late reformulation of the idea of artistic activity involves replacing the artist’s “sensibility” and the subjective transformation of one’s “material,” “ideas bred essentially out of empire, wealth and imperial security” (146), with “the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in” (147). If the Missa, as Adorno says, is a work that aims at the elimination of the subjective intention, the same is true of the abandonment of literary originality in The Enigma of Arrival. In a passage that could almost, mutatis mutandis, have been lifted from Adorno’s essay on late style, Suleri anatomizes the characteristics of Naipaul’s later work, many of which appear also in Adorno’s assessment of late Beethoven: the arrival of incomprehensibility as legitimate subject matter; the retreat from, and castigation of, ethical commentary; the interest in cliché as a dramatization of the limits of discourse; the collapse of faith of the text in its own viability. For Suleri, the “problems” in Naipaul’s work speak to the fact that it inhabits and embodies the very pathos that it describes: Naipaul’s mature writing no longer conceives of the literary as a recourse from the political, but instead internalizes the imperial tradition represented by both modes into a dazzling idiom that no longer needs to indicate the referents of its discourse. As a consequence of this condensation, such a language will never clearly identify the object of its indictment. Its burden is, of course, to demonstrate the objectlessness of postcolonial indignation, as that discourse seeks to establish the parameters of its suffering. (155)

This shift in perspective in Naipaul’s work is inseparable from his awareness of “that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century” (Enigma 141), the significance of which he failed to notice when he was directly caught up in it, but which left in tatters the stability of identity and perception on which the possibility of the writer’s subjective transfiguration of his “material” depends. “The flotsam of Europe not long after the end of the terrible war, in a London house that was now too big for the people it sheltered—that was the true material of the boardinghouse. But I didn’t see it” (141). Among the ideas which become untenable in the wake of this movement is that of the organic work, emanating out of a stable, identifiable, historical world-context, and in ultimate justification of the “literary” approach to experience: what Naipaul painstakingly discredits and dismantles in the course of The Enigma of Arrival with terms such as the “literary eye” (18), “sensibility” (146, 256), “inward development” (146, 147), and the “writer’s personality” (288).37

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 93

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

94

chapter 3

The transition narrated over the course of The Enigma of Arrival is thus from one idea of lateness to the other: from a chronologically driven sense of decline and decay (“the idea, which I had had even as a child in Trinidad, that I had come into a world past its peak,” 23) to something closer to Adorno’s idea of the late work (“I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things . . . it was only out of this new awareness of death that I began at last to write,” 343–44); from one idea of writing (the subjective transformation of one’s material) to another (“the writer defined by his writer’s discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures” 343–44). Naipaul writes himself—in the course of his writing career and in the course of this book—out of the logic of imitation and mimicry and towards a logic of becoming, of immanence. Crystal of Shame: The Mimic Men Homi Bhabha has written that colonial discourse is defined by a “splitting” into two regimes, two “attitudes towards external reality”: one that “takes reality into consideration,” and another that “disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates ‘reality’ as mimicry.”38 The upshot of Bhabha’s essay is a reversal in the meaning of mimicry itself. The mere fact of mimicry as a disciplinary technology in the colonial world, registered in “the difference between being English and being Anglicized” (89–90), exposes its contradictions; mimicry operates subtly in the apparatus of colonial power to undermine the very “monumentality” on which its authority depends—and the same might be said of the deliberate archaism and “peculiar character of quotation” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (“Alienated Masterpiece” 576, 575). Identity and meaning—reality itself—are rendered unstable by their imitability. The idea offers one explanation for the gradual appearance in Naipaul’s work of a fascination with cliché and the corrosive appeal of the totemic phrase, and his relentless interrogation and implication of the literary register, not only in The Enigma of Arrival but in middle period works such as The Mimic Men, an important point of reference for Bhabha’s essay. Bhabha’s discursive “splitting” may be mapped approximately onto Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between two “regimes of the image” in cinema: an “organic” regime and a “crystalline” regime, characterized as “kinetic” and “chronic” respectively. The first is representational; kinetic, insofar as images always relate to movement, to action, and organic since it concerns “a description which assumes the independence of its object.”39 The second refers to a description which “stands for its object,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 94

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

V. S. Naipaul

95

replaces it, both creates and erases it” (ibid.), and which is chronic in the sense that time is liberated from its subordination to movement and becomes perceivable in itself. Deleuze describes a shift from one to the other regime in cinema after the end of the Second World War. In the work of directors such as Ozu (who anticipates the shift), Rossellini, Antonioni, and Godard, “a cinematographic mutation occurs when aberrations of movement take on their independence; that is, when the moving bodies and movements lose their invariants,” the points of stability which orient and organize them. There then occurs a reversal where movement ceases to demand the true and where time ceases to be subordinate to movement: both at once. Movement which is fundamentally decentred becomes false movement, and time which is fundamentally liberated becomes power of the false which is now brought into effect in false movement. (Cinema 2, 143; emphasis in original)

While its logic requires that it play out similarly across different aesthetic forms, the “crystalline” regime is most easily understood in relation to cinema, where its clearest manifestation is the appearance of “purely optical and sound situations detached from their motor extension” (126); that is to say, images (or sounds) whose impact vastly exceeds their narrative significance. At such moments, the linear temporality of the plotdriven narrative is suspended; the focus upon a moment of pure sensory (visual or sonorous) perception creates “crystals” of time that cut across the representational, narrative boundaries of the filmic utterance. No longer simply a neutral flow in which events have their being, time becomes “crystalline,” attains a sensory actuality, and actually replaces the narrated event as the object of the image. Thus, in a famous scene in Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962), the spectacle of frenetic trading in the Rome stock exchange is interrupted by a minute’s silence to honor a deceased colleague. As the audience experiences that minute in real time, during which the only movement on the screen is a revolving ceiling fan, a young broker whispers: “A minute here is worth a million lire.”40 The object of contemplation during this sequence is inevitably the financial relations in which cinema itself is caught up, as much as it is the economic abstractions of the stock market. The suspension of narrative events prevents the dispersal, the “expenditure,” of time. In a medium in which every minute really does cost a million lire (at least), a minute in which nothing happens is the accumulation of a crystal of pure time, a material and sensory perforation of what Adorno calls “the envelope of form” (“Late Style” 564). Not only is the “cinematographic mutation” not restricted to cinematic texts; the majority of postwar films do not begin to explore its full possibilities. In fact, insists Deleuze, the mutation is metaphysical and histori-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 95

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

96

chapter 3

cal as much as it is cinematographic (Cinema 2 142); the category that remains fundamentally untenable, or at least radically altered, is ontology itself. If, for Naipaul, the transition ­from one idea of writing to another is explicable in terms of his own geographical and historical transposition from the periphery to the center, from Trinidad to London, those same historical reasons—summed up in Naipaul’s phrase “the flotsam of Europe”—feature among those that Deleuze puts forward to explain the appearance of the time-image: “We might mention, in no particular order, the war and its consequences, the unsteadiness of the “American Dream” in all its aspects, the new consciousness of minorities, the rise and inflation of images both in the external world and in people’s minds, the influence on the cinema of the new modes of narrative with which literature had experimented, the crisis of Hollywood and its old genres” (Cinema 1 206). Deleuze’s discussion, in particular this simultaneity of the historical and the metaphysical, offers a way of conceiving the loss of the organic connection between work and world (Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness”) in positive rather than negative terms; indeed, one might consider the centrality of cinema to Deleuze’s analysis as another version of the almost systematic discrediting of the “literary approach” to experience that we find in Naipaul (288). The distinction between organic and crystalline narration is immensely illuminating both of the formal complexity of Naipaul’s fiction and, therefore, of the “chronic” (nonchronological) aspect of Adorno’s category of the late work. The Mimic Men, published in 1967, is narrated by Ralph Singh, a former colonial politician in exile in London, writing his memoirs, which comprise the text of the novel. Thus there are two books in The Mimic Men: Naipaul’s work of fiction, which we hold in our hands, and Singh’s memoir, heterogeneous to the text we are reading yet whose boundaries coincide with it. The two books are indistinguishable, yet nonidentical. At certain moments in the text, the incommensurability defining their relation attains a substantial, crystalline quality. As in Deleuze’s discussion of cinema, these moments have a “chronic” dimension, where time is manifest “in itself.” In several sequences, Singh, in the present, remembers himself imagining himself seen through a camera lens located in the sky—imagining himself, that is to say, viewed from a future perspective represented in the present-day narration of the book we are reading: “I saw the scene as though I had already been removed from it and it was occurring in memory, in a book.”41 Singh is “marked” by this experience: marked not only for survival, but for a meaningful life in exile (114, 134); he sees such episodes as having guaranteed him a future away from the “disorder” of the Caribbean island of his birth (141)—but only retrospectively, from the point of view of having already attained that future: in London, in the present, and in the pages of the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 96

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

V. S. Naipaul

97

book we hold in our hands. As in The Enigma of Arrival, belatedness and prematurity coincide; time is presented “in itself,” abstracted from the linearity of past-present-future. The psychopathology so often ascribed to Naipaul, most recently and explicitly by Pascale Casanova, but implicitly in Said’s, Rushdie’s, and Phillips’s readings also, is “assimilationism.”42 Naipaul is, in Casanova’s understanding, exemplary of the “lowest level of literary revolt”; his is “the obligatory itinerary of every apprentice writer from an impoverished region having no literary resources of its own” (207). This charge presupposes a linear narrative of history, bounded at either end by precocity and belatedness, innocence and decadence. Naipaul is fixed in his belatedness, condemned to it. Casanova attributes to Naipaul that same “possessive, intolerant kind of love” for the metropole that Adorno, in a famous fragment in Minima Moralia, attributes to all “latecomers and newcomers”: “Those whom repressive culture has held at a distance,” writes Adorno, “can easily enough become its most diehard defenders.”43 Naipaul, writes Casanova, is an outstanding example of a writer who wholly embraced the dominant values of his linguistic region. . . . The traditional character of his stories and novels is the direct consequence of [his] pathetic search for identity. Ultimately, to write like an Englishman means having to conform to the canons of England. (209, 212)

Yet Casanova’s account, like those mentioned earlier, has failed to notice the “crystalline” elements in Naipaul’s work, including its relation to time; has neglected Naipaul’s formal, as opposed to historical, lateness; has succumbed to the delusion that the “brittleness” of the work renders it permeable and decodable; that the writer’s weakness, vulnerability, and shame are perceivable through (or despite) the work. Casanova has, finally, imposed an ideological and conceptual stability upon the work— an ontology of failure, rather than an opening to potentiality. The political denunciation of Naipaul reenacts the privilege of the center, the gesture contained in Tolkien’s question “Did you intend it?” but from the other side: not as patronizing approval, but as liberal condemnation. The shame that permeates Naipaul’s texts is read as a symptom that underlies and explains his writing, rather than as an affect that appears alongside it, inseparable from and simultaneous with it. Like the reversibility of recollection and premonition, shame in Naipaul is a crystalline motif: an affect produced in and by the very moment of “confession,” and in which the text we are reading is entirely implicated. Shame itself, in other words, is a pure time-image: an element in the text that cuts across the time of the narration and the time narrated, that can be reduced neither to the fiction nor to the fictionalization.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 97

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

98

chapter 3

Near the beginning of The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh recalls first conceiving of his memoir as a work that would be undertaken “in the evening of my days,” and that would “give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder” of the movements of decolonization across three continents. “But this work will not now be written by me,” he says. “I am too much a victim of that restlessness which was to have been my subject” (38). The passage is exemplary of the kind taken by critics of Naipaul as simple truth statements: moments in which the writer’s shame at the failure of his own work thrusts through the brittleness of form. Yet the question of attribution of the failure and the shame—whether to Naipaul’s book or to Singh’s—is here radically indeterminate. Sara Suleri refers to the “striking parallels between the nature of colonial shame and that of literary mortification” in Naipaul’s work. Both, she writes, “become instances in a failure in language,”44 a statement that suggests that Naipaul’s real subject is neither shame, nor colonialism, nor even writing, but the incommensurability that defines the relation between these things. This episode, then, is another of those in which shame—or in other words, belatedness, incommensurability—attains substantiality. Shame cannot be contained within either Naipaul’s fiction or Singh’s reality. This, in fact, is the distinctive quality of shame: to be neither fakable, on one hand, nor dissemblable on the other. In The Enigma of Arrival, the structural complexity of the work is even more elusive, since the incommensurable elements are formally unmarked as such in the text. The books that Naipaul’s narrator has written in the past, for example, are indistinguishable from those Naipaul himself has written. As in The Mimic Men, references to the process of writing “the present book” are difficult to separate, even conceptually, from the book we are reading;45 and yet, as Adorno’s “theory of art” insists (“Late Style” 564), we are obliged to register the separation, even in its indiscernibility. In all these instances, Naipaul’s late work shares the characteristics that Deleuze attributes to the “new kind of image” in postwar cinema: the replacement of a unified, “organic” situation with a “dispersive” one; the irruption of incommensurability, or ellipsis, into the substance of the tale, rather than remaining a mode of the telling; the introduction of an open “stroll/voyage” narrative form in place of the closed quest/search form; a strong, irresolvable consciousness of clichés; and the expansion of this consciousness to such a level that all possibilities of a meaningful whole become suspect.46 It is in the sense given to the cinematic by these associations that, at the end of The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul’s own imagination of his writing seems more cinematic than literary, following a trajectory away from literariness that is revealed to have been in place at least since The Mimic Men.47

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 98

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

V. S. Naipaul

99

Naipaul’s project in The Enigma of Arrival is not entirely successful, even as a work that hopes to transcend the logic of artistic success and failure. The author’s own peculiar prejudices and biases are present, particularly in the final pages, where he lapses into the denunciatory register and the work does indeed take on a brittle, friable quality.48 And yet to imagine that the novel could be successful is to subject the text to a conception of aesthetic harmony that would be immediately self-defeating. For all the dissatisfactory qualities of the text—in fact, both because and irrespective of these problems—The Enigma of Arrival overcomes the notions of crisis, decline, success, and failure—all concepts embedded in a Cartesian organicism—and approaches a practice of writing as “event,” a writing capable of giving form to the simultaneity of belief and unbelief, success and failure, experience and recollection, lateness and infancy, nostalgia and prolepsis,49 past and present. Enigma, that is to say, undertakes the same interrogation of ontology that Adorno locates in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Naipaul’s most lucid statement on the results of that interrogation is offered near the beginning of the text: “I liked the decay, such as it was. It gave me no wish to prune or weed or set right or remake. It couldn’t last, clearly. But while it lasted, it was perfection. To see the possibility, the certainty of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament” (52). As in Beethoven, what we see in Naipaul is not the fragile envelope of form broken apart by the bald assertion of a subjectivity in its encounter with death, but a materialization of the negative dialectic of form itself. Lateness converges with the immediacy of perception that Lukács ascribes to man’s pre-novelistic “infancy,” in a direct presentation not of the “decline” but of the “coming to pure selfconsciousness” of the novel form as such.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 99

8/13/2010 2:04:33 PM

Chapter Four Shame and Revolutionary Betrayal: Joseph Conrad, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Zoë Wicomb In a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrowminded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. … The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Don’t think that Judas is not ashamed from the start; from well before that money is mentioned, before he has even agreed to the act of betrayal, he suffers the shame of knowing his own weakness. —Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story

If Theodor Adorno’s readings are capable of revealing Beethoven to have been a postcolonial thinker avant la lettre, the same claim will, in the course of this chapter, be made about G.W.F. Hegel, the philosopher for whom the greatest obstacle to freedom is the project of its realization. This paradox, which reproduces the modern anxiety toward form as a specifically political complex, is central to Adorno’s reading and reappraisal of Hegel as a thinker in whom a refusal to positivize his own thinking is discernible even in his most positivist, nominalistic moments. Adorno refers to the paradox as “the fiber of Hegel’s philosophy,” and he paraphrases it as follows: “the consciousness that everything that exists both negates itself in coming into its own and perishes.”1 Read in a certain light, including that of the recent history of decolonization, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, the paradox seems to express the full pathos of the postcolonial condition. For what are the “pitfalls of national consciousness” anatomized by Frantz Fanon but the result of an attempt to make concrete a notion of freedom conceived from the outset in abstract terms—the same error that for Hegel resulted in the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 100

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

101

French Revolutionary Terror? “Postcolonial,” in the framing of Hegel as a postcolonial thinker, will not of course refer to the thinker’s historical situation; it will designate rather the project of thinking the postcolonial hypothesis, of addressing the possibility of postcoloniality (that is to say, freedom) in circumstances in which it has not yet been achieved. Some might find the suggestion that we read Hegel in this way counterintuitive and unhistorical, given the place that Hegel famously assigns to Africa, and, in particular, the figure of the “Negro,” in world history (that is, none). For Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Africa is “an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own.” There, the awareness of freedom has not even entered consciousness; man “consequently sinks to the level of a mere object or worthless article.”2 Hegel’s thinking here is easily discredited. Far from being a thinker of the postcolonial situation, the Hegel of these passages is most obviously read as a colonial thinker—as providing a philosophical basis for, precisely, colonialism, not least in his subjugation of the globe to a spatialized, linear history leading from Asia (“the region of origination”) westward (104). Yet, as Adorno has observed, even in such “subjectively formed” moments (111), Hegel’s philosophy is concerned with “something that has no place within a pregiven order of ideas and objects” (101), something that his own thinking is incapable of naming or conceptualizing directly, other than in terms that are inadequate to it.3 This is what Adorno means by a “suspended quality” in Hegel’s philosophy (91). Hegel’s thought is characterized by the presence of finite formulations that must be read in the light of the totality that they are unable to access individually. This is certainly not to excuse Hegel’s disparagement (if it is that) of Africa, but simply to suggest that world history itself is disparaged in Hegel with respect to the utopia that is present in his thought, even when all that is manifest is the precise opposite.4 In this sense, Fanon’s “postcolonialism” is precisely as speculative a mode as Hegel’s, for Fanon’s thoughts about decolonization—formulated even as real, historical progress towards decolonization was being made around him—are always as something still to be attained. The questions opened up by Hegel’s reflections on the Terror in the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as by Fanon’s analysis of the “pitfalls” involved in the transition to independence, include: Can the revolution be instantiated? Can the revolution take place without a betrayal of it? Isn’t the most irrevocable betrayal of the revolution that which happens precisely in its coming to pass? Gilles Deleuze, speaking of the events of May 1968 in a late interview with Toni Negri, makes the following remark: “They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming.”5 Despite the general antipathy that

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 101

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

102

chapter 4

Deleuze feels for Hegel, this radical heterogeneity between freedom and its historical and conceptual forms is already present in Hegel’s thinking. In the same interview with Negri, Deleuze makes explicit the degree to which the limitations implied in any historical or conceptual form have repercussions that are felt as shame: “Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable” (171). Shame results from the confrontation of becoming with the stolidity of being, from the propensity of becoming to realize itself and, in so doing, find itself confronted with its own negligible, dispensable image. The main purpose of this chapter will be to discuss the work of two African writers of fiction, each of whom has dealt with a shame that arises with the realization of the aims of the struggle—that is, with the moment at which the aims of the struggle are betrayed by, or in the course of, their realization. A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1967) is set during the days of Kenya’s transition to independence in December 1963; the narrative of Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (1999) takes place in South Africa in 1991, soon after the liberation of Nelson Mandela, as the apartheid regime is at the point of collapse. Much of the shame explored in these works is focused, retrospectively, on the violence of the struggle and on the many betrayals of the principles of the revolution that are involved in bringing it about. Both novels deal with the compromises involved in taking power after years of struggle. But the theme of betrayal, in the context of the transition to national self-determination, is more complex than this, if we take into account the difficult, Hegelian proposition that taking power is a de facto betrayal of the ideals of the struggle. Neither Ngũgĩ nor Wicomb shrinks from the necessity of coming to terms with this betrayal. However, both, in slightly different ways, suggest that a complete or full decolonization must involve an end to a certain metaphysics of fidelity and betrayal, a metaphysics that, by implication, should be associated with the ideology of colonialism, rather than with the anti-colonial struggle. Everything depends on how one answers the questions phrased above. Can the revolution (that is, truth) be instantiated? Can any relaxation of the spirit of revolt be permitted once the battle has been won? And if not, how is one to prevent that revolutionary spirit from simply consuming everything one has fought for, including oneself? It will come as no surprise that the answer to these questions put forward by Ngũgĩ’s and Wicomb’s works will also involve an answer to the question of whether, or how, a work of literature can have political effects that are not limited to what is instantiable in it. In order to approach these questions, I will look first at Joseph Conrad’s prerevolutionary novel Under Western Eyes, a work that holds consistently, I will argue, to the Hegelian principle of the uninstantiability of

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 102

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

103

the revolution. This principle, maintained by Conrad’s work in its formal quality, exposes the novel to being read as the very opposite of a revolutionary work. Yet such a reading is by definition oblivious to the question of the instantiability of the revolution. The reading that I will offer, by contrast, will seek to show how Conrad rehearses, in a prerevolutionary context, the question of instantiation that is later taken up by Ngũgĩ and Wicomb from the perspective of liberation itself, a question that could be said to have its first articulation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel: Text as Antitext Hegel’s analysis of absolute freedom in the Phenomenology of Spirit is notable for the boldness, and matter-of-factness, with which he assumes the possibility of a thought that would take place outside form, that is to say, a thinking of form as such. It is this audacity that makes him, despite certain significant differences, a potential ally of Deleuze. For Hegel, the catastrophe that is the “Terror” begins with the initial differentiation of freedom into two unmediated and abstract principles: on one hand, a “universal substance” of freedom—an “object and a permanent being”6—and on the other, the modes of “articulation” of that freedom, the division into “groupings” (Massen) concerned with administration: for example, the separate legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government. Hegel reserves a disparaging term for these latter: “thoughtthings” (Gedankendinge). The Jacobin error, according to Hegel, was to direct the hopes of the first, universal freedom, through the “deeds” and “individual operations” of the second, and ultimately to carry this logic forward in the establishment of a regime with an “individual SelfConsciousness at the pinnacle” (136, §589). In so doing, the Revolution under Robespierre attempts to pass off one freedom, the freedom of a particular grouping, as the other. The two abstractions of particularity and universality are maintained as their “completely unmediated, pure negation” (138, §590)—as two incompatible particularities. The “General Will,” a concept that includes the “will of each and every individual as individual” (131, §584), is thereby foreclosed: As a willing and an accomplishing that proceeds from one point, the government at the same time wills and accomplishes a determinate order and procedure. With this determination it on the one hand excludes the ordinary individual from its deed; on the other hand, by means of this exclusion it establishes itself as the sort of government that is a determinate will and thereby opposed to the General Will. Hence it absolutely cannot exhibit itself as anything but a faction! The victorious faction is just called “govern-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 103

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

104

chapter 4

ment”; and it is precisely and immediately because of this factional character of the government that its downfall is inevitable. Vice versa, the fact that it is “government” makes it automatically into faction—and hence guilty [from the perspective of the General Will]. (138, §591)

In the conclusion to this section of the Phenomenology, entitled “Absolute Liberty and the ‘Terror,’” it becomes apparent that for Hegel every instance of the embodiment of freedom in a social or political form must fall prey to the pitfalls stemming from the prior differentiation of freedom into theory and practice, the concept and its realization. The problems originate, therefore, not with the project of the realization of freedom, but earlier, with the conceptualization of freedom as a project to be realized. That conceptualization is the mark of its unrealizability, for to conceive of absolute liberty as realizable is, paradoxically, to preclude its realization by separating it from itself. Robespierre’s Terror is a result of this internal differentiation of freedom, which establishes the principle of unrealizability at the heart of the concept; absolute liberty becomes in that moment “an object for itself.” At that point, writes Hegel, “SelfConsciousness experiences what absolute liberty is”—meaning, is not. Is not, that is to say, insofar as it “is” (139, §592). The further trajectory is one that Hegel will outline in the rest of the Phenomenology: absolute freedom will come into being “neither as revolutionary government, nor as anarchy striving to ‘establish’ anarchy; [nor as] centered in such-and-such a faction or in the faction opposed to it,” but rather in its “essence,” which is “nothing but pure knowing” (141, §594). “Knowledge” is the “form” in which the opposition between the General Will and the individual will—a real opposition, constitutive of the new era of “knowledge”—becomes “transparent” to itself, that is to say, attains the “essence” precisely as the awareness of its own merely formal quality. The essence can be known, in other words, only in the form of knowledge, and that form must involve the awareness of itself as a form. Even the individual self of Self-Consciousness is at this stage “known by SelfConsciousness as form” (142, §594). “Objective reality,” writes Hegel, “since it would be the unknown, is an absolutely self-less form for SelfConsciousness; but this knowing [Self-Consciousness] knows knowledge as its essence” (ibid.). In these sentences, Hegel is outlining the inevitable trajectory of “absolute freedom” out of the “self-destructive reality” of revolutionary action into “another land of Self-Conscious Spirit” (142, §595). This land is of course Germany; but it is also the “land” of philosophy, as opposed to French revolutionary politics. More specifically still, Hegel is referring to that version of German idealist philosophy that is best represented in

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 104

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

105

Hegel’s own thought, capable like no other of thinking its own disappearance. What is implicit here, and brought out with great lucidity in Adorno’s study, is that even knowledge is a form, embedded in history. To that extent, historical, conceptual knowledge is not a positive but a negative term—negative, at least, from the (uninhabitable) perspective of absolute knowledge. Objections to Hegel’s thought that begin from a positivist relation to his concepts have ignored the “radicalism” (Adorno’s word) of its solution to the problem of transmission: the accommodation towards “nominalistic features” and an aversion to “ornate” formulations.  Excessive attention to literary style, for Adorno’s Hegel, is the sign of a subjectivist logic of exception: the mark, says Adorno, of a “linguistic self-reflection that would distance itself all too much from mediocre complicity” (117– 18). Hegel’s “ideal of presentation” is the opposite of the literary one: it is “the negation of presentation” (119). Hegel’s texts are “antitexts,” says Adorno; “often they are mere reverberations” (119). In a still more fascinating image, Adorno implies that Hegel’s thought is predicated upon a casting-off of language, a casting-off that has already taken place in his thought, even as it continues to adhere to language: “Hegel’s publications are more like films of thought than texts. The untutored eye can never capture the details of a film the way it can those of a still image, and so it is with Hegel’s writings” (121). Hegel’s concepts, says Adorno, “point beyond themselves and even in terms of their own idea are no more capable of fulfillment in isolation than are the components of extraphilosophical language, which are not aware that this is true of them” (108). For Hegel, the possibility of thinking absolute freedom in itself—not freedom in respect of anything, or freedom to do anything, but freedom as such—informs both the revolutionary moment and its subsequent failure, the descent into terror. Underlying it is the speculative proposition of a thought to which all forms of thought, including language, would be inadequate. Subjective experience itself, for Hegel, is “only the outer shell of philosophical experience, which develops beneath it and then throws it off” (138). Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the perilous moment of transition to independence of formerly colonized countries owes a great deal to Hegel’s account of the French Revolutionary Terror. There is an important rhetorical difference: Fanon does not give up on the language of revolutionary politics, nor on the goal of a political realization of freedom; he merely despairs at its betrayal at the hands of the national bourgeoisie. For Fanon, the vehicle of liberation is not philosophy but violence: “At a descriptive level,” he writes—meaning, if the terms liberation and decolonization are taken purely referentially—“any decolonization is

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 105

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

106

chapter 4

a success.”7 Nevertheless, in the chapter of The Wretched of the Earth devoted to “the pitfalls of national consciousness,” it is apparent that Fanon’s awareness of the tragic discrepancy between the categories in the name of which the struggle was undertaken and their manifestation in the forms of an established independent government is as profound as Hegel’s. Most notable among these thought-forms, or thing-thoughts, is “African unity”—“a vague term” says Fanon, “but nevertheless one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached and whose operative function was to put incredible pressure on colonialism.” After independence, he writes, African unity “reveals its true face and crumbles into regionalisms within the same national reality.”8 For Fanon, this development announces not merely the passage from theory into practice, but a “regression” of the longed-for national consciousness into a form of tribal or ethnic consciousness. The displacement of collective or national freedom by the particularity of territorial interests follows the same logic as the betrayal of the Revolution in Hegel’s account. Thus, national consciousness, “instead of being the coordinated crystallization of the people’s innermost aspirations, instead of being the most tangible, immediate product of popular mobilization,” is revealed in the transition to independence—through a combination of “unpreparedness,” the lack of “practical ties” between the elite and the masses, as well as “apathy” and “cowardice at the crucial moment”—to be “nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell [forme]” (97). Fanon is clear about the causes of this betrayal, as well as its affective implications: The so-called national party operates on a tribal basis. It is a veritable ethnic group which has transformed itself into a party. This party which readily proclaims itself national, which claims to speak in the name of the people as a whole, secretly and sometimes openly sets up a genuine ethnic dictatorship. We are no longer witness to a bourgeois dictatorship but to a tribal one. … Faced with this stupidity, this imposture and this intellectual and spiritual poverty, we are left with a feeling of shame rather than anger. These heads of government are the true traitors of Africa, for they sell their continent to the worst of its enemies: stupidity. (126)

It would be easy to understand the implications of this conjunction of Hegel, Adorno, and Fanon in transcendentalizing terms: politics is by definition betrayal; real, historical decolonization is an impossibility; the “pitfalls of national consciousness” are a consequence not just of a failed or premature transition to independence, but of the transition tout court. Recall Hegel’s words: “The victorious faction is just called ‘government’; and it is precisely and immediately because of this factional character of the government that its downfall is inevitable” (138). Or Adorno’s: “As

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 106

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

107

soon as the existential moment asserts itself to be the basis of a truth, it becomes a lie” (50). Or Fanon’s: “The Third World must start over a new history of man” (238). Yet to present the problems involved in thinking the transition to liberation in such terms—to conceive of transcendence and reality, or fidelity and betrayal, as static, oppositional categories, easily locatable with respect to the goals of the revolution—would be to remain caught within a prerevolutionary logic; to ensure, in other words, that real change remain permanently outside the realm of possibility. From a prerevolutionary perspective, “thought” and “violence” seem to be as radically different approaches to liberation as one can imagine. To treat them alongside each other may appear to negate the historical specificities of the struggles undertaken by Hegel and Fanon respectively, or indeed to ignore the fact that Fanon’s intervention was frequently expressed as a rejection of Hegel.9 In both cases, however, the vehicle of liberation—thought, violence—is the occasion of a conceptualization, albeit one that aspires to the opposite: de-conceptualization. Hegel’s “thought” is incommensurable with any existing thought-form; Fanon’s “violence” is a conceptual violence that, in unseating the concrete symbols and institutions of power, would destroy the immaterial ones also, including the very thought-form “violence.” In Fanon, that is to say, violence is “unifying” and “totalizing,” a “cleansing force” (51). Neither Hegel nor Fanon offers any positive content to these central concepts; in their work, “thought” and “violence” are unequal to themselves, nonidentical. Both thinkers are embedded in an agonistic relation to existing forms, to being. This agonism will in principle be overcome at the moment of revolution; however, to conceptualize the revolutionary event in such temporal terms is to foreclose its eventuality. Is it possible to keep faith with the revolution without one’s faith becoming a betrayal of it? Works of literature that have attempted to deal directly with the ethical complexities of revolutionary situations, I will argue, can provide an answer to this question. However, that answer lies not in the depiction of a revolutionary event, nor in the work’s ability to suggest general lessons to be drawn from a specific (historical or imaginary) episode. The answer is to be found, rather, in the work’s formal reflection on the nature of a work, and on its own status as one. Any work concerned with the painful transformation of an idea into political reality cannot fail to undertake such a reflection, whether explicitly thematized (as in Wicomb) or not (as in Conrad and Ngũgĩ). In the literary works to be discussed in this chapter, we will see the category of shame operating across these two dimensions of the text, connecting and separating them: on one level, a shame narrated in the work; on the other, a shame constituted by it.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 107

8/13/2010 2:04:34 PM

108

chapter 4

Joseph Conrad: Form as the Evacuation of Form The great dilemma faced by modern literature is how to write without one’s writing being discredited by the mere fact of its being written. Hegel and Fanon are as ensnared in this dilemma as any novelist. It is tempting, in the light, for example, of Joseph Conrad’s works and their critical reception, to locate the theme of the unsayable in the space of a cultural, geographical, and temporal other; to find the quandary of modern writing thereby exemplified, indeed emblematized, in the novel of colonial relations; and, correspondingly, to consider determinate absences or elisions in such works to be a form in which colonial relations are perpetuated. After all, Conrad’s phrase “the heart of an impenetrable darkness” refers not only to the land or the continent on which Conrad’s story is set, but to a conceptual region that is inaccessible to Marlow, the internal narrator of Heart of Darkness. If we look at the passage in which that phrase appears, however, it is apparent that the issue for Marlow is not simply perception, but expression. Although this has been largely obscured by the emphasis upon “impressionism” in the critical literature on Conrad, the object of Marlow’s anxiety is not primarily the “savages,” conceived as objects of the Western gaze, but the expressive “gifts” of his compatriot, Kurtz: I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. … The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.10

Kurtz, we learn at the end of the novel, is, or was before his arrival in Africa, a “universal genius,” a figure whose talents in painting, rhetoric, and music are equally unsurpassable (115). He is a demonic (“devilish”) figure, but this is not an ethical judgment; or rather, the ethical anxiety towards Kurtz coexists with an ontological one. The real melancholy of Heart of Darkness is not the inability of the narrator to penetrate the heart of darkness, but his inability to speak about it, as compared, for example, with the “unbounded power of eloquence” of Kurtz himself.11 Conrad’s narratives, writes Edward Said insightfully, “invariably [assume] the currency of a rival version.”12 In Heart of Darkness this “rival version” appears in the form of Kurtz’s report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, a work that Marlow reads, transcribes a few phrases of, and finally, on returning to London, gives to a former colleague of Kurtz

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 108

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

109

(after removing the “luminous and terrifying” postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!”). The importance of Kurtz’s manuscript is less a matter of its content than of its quality as a piece of writing. Kurtz’s report, says Marlow, “gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. … There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases” (87). Beside this “rival version,” the three inseparable texts that make up Heart of Darkness—Marlow’s narration, the unnamed third-person narrator’s transcription of Marlow’s narration, and the text bound between the covers of the published novel—are all defined by their degree of removal or mediation. Kurtz’s absent manuscript figures in Heart of Darkness in the same way as does Razumov’s unwritten narrative of the history of Russia in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, a history whose “inconceivable” quality could be done justice to only in the form of a “monstrous blank page.”13 Both works are blissfully untroubled by any burden that might be incurred with their realization. Both figure as an emblem of that which the narrative we are reading is not; indeed, they help to frame the narrative as one whose shameful deficiency is acknowledged and permitted. Said links the shame in Conrad’s narratives to what is unnameable by them: Much of the time [Conrad’s] obscurity … is a function of secret shame. Paradoxically, however, the secret is all too easily prone to the wrong kind of exposure, which Conrad’s notoriously circumspect methods of narrative attempt to forestall. The reflective narrator is always a narrator preventing the wrong sort of interpretation. (“Conrad” 95)

For all the usefulness of this observation, Conrad’s shame is not a “secret” underlying the obscurity, but the opposite: a function of manifestation. Conrad’s shame is not secret but overt; he is a writer for whom writing cannot not be shameful, since writing wrenches into form that which is inimical to it, formless. His narrator is always a narrator reconciled to the inevitability of “the wrong sort of interpretation”; not one actively working to prevent it, but working rather to frame the “wrong sort of interpretation” as such, hoping thereby to diffuse the shame. Consider the opening sentences of Conrad’s prerevolutionary novel Under Western Eyes: To begin with, I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself … Kirylo Sidorovitch—Razumov. If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words. (5)

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 109

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

110

chapter 4

To name Conrad as a Hegelian novelist is to speak not primarily of a linear trajectory of history, but of a commitment to the indescribable, the non-iterable, the unconceptualizable: that is to say, the indescribable precisely in its indescribability; the non-iterable in its non-iterability; the unconceptualizable in its unconceptualizability. Conrad’s commitment is not to “the supremacy of the visible,” as Said has it (95), but to the deficit of writing.14 Adorno’s description of the paradoxical task of Hegel’s philosophy— “to say clearly something that is unclear, that has no firm outline, that does not accommodate to reification; to say it in such a way … that the moments that elude the eye’s fixating gaze, or that are not accessible at all, are indicated with the utmost distinctness” (Hegel 100)—is at least as applicable to Conrad as to Hegel. As Marlow tells his listeners in Lord Jim, “The last word is not said—probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?”15 Both Conrad and Hegel sidle their way into the business of writing. Writing is at no point admitted into the register of potentially truthful or enlightening activities, and yet its exclusion from that register takes place in the medium of writing. In Conrad, shame is therefore constitutive as much as it is instantiated. If there is a “revolutionary” quality to Conrad’s style, it is found in its persistent, sustained evacuation of the domain of form itself. There is almost no writer who moves more deliberately or determinedly towards what Deleuze calls “the ill-formed or the incomplete” (“Literature and Life” 1). In Under Western Eyes, the greatest contempt of the protagonist, Razumov, is reserved for the character who believes most completely in the political efficacy of writing. Julius Laspara, an anarchist pamphleteer living in Geneva, urges Razumov himself to “write something for us,” under the misapprehension that he is a political sympathizer and fellow believer: He could not understand how anyone could refrain from writing on anything, social, economic, historical—anything. Any subject could be treated in the right spirit, and for the end of social revolution. And, as it happened, a friend of his in London had got in touch with a review of advanced ideas. “We must educate, educate everybody—develop the great thought of absolute liberty and of revolutionary justice.” (237)

The sentiments of the book’s narrator, an unnamed “teacher of languages,” are in the opposite direction: “Words, as is well-known, are the great foes of reality. … To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot” (5). And yet, for the teacher of languages, it is this very recognition that enables him to write.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 110

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

111

Under Western Eyes is a novel of shame and betrayal; but it is impossible to separate these themes from the book’s status as a novel, nor from its intense fascination with, and refusal of, all political creeds. Taken as a whole, the novel incarnates a Hegelian antagonism towards all forms of being. These include those of “revolutionary,” “reactionary,” “patriot,” “anarchist,” “betrayer” and “betrayed,” but also that of “writer,” as well as of such affective states as “conviction,” “remorse,” and even “shame.” If a revolution is possible, it is so only by denying at every moment that one is fomenting a revolution; similarly, if writing is possible, it is only by denying at every moment that one is a writer. “A grain of talent excuses many mistakes,” says the teacher of languages, resuming his narration at the beginning of Part Two of Under Western Eyes: But this is not a work of imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for this undertaking lies not in its art, but in its artlessness. Aware of my limitations and strong in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try (were I able) to invent anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent a transition. (85)

The lines are part of a conceit, of course; we read them in the knowledge that we are reading the work of a master of writing. But in Conrad, that mastery is simultaneously disparaged, its legitimacy thrown into doubt. A conversation halfway through the novel between the narrator (who has entered the story as a character) and Razumov, on the occasion of their first encounter, takes on the intriguing quality of a dialogue between the writer and the subject of his writing. More fascinatingly still, we can read the episode as a dialogue between the two competing forces of Conrad’s writing, as described by Martin Ray: the desire to “extinguish” language in the act of successful communication and the desire to “uphold” it by, paradoxically, interrupting or denouncing its communicatory function.16 The former position is inhabited by the teacher of languages, the latter by Razumov. The two have been left together by their mutual acquaintance Miss Haldin, whom the teacher of languages has no compunction in characterizing to Razumov as an “extremely charming and essentially admirable young girl.” Surely, he says, Razumov has understood that her final words before parting were a reference to her own feelings? Razumov’s response excoriates every term in the teacher’s lexicon: “Must understand this! Not expected to understand that! I may have other things to do. And the girl is charming and admirable. Well—and if she is! I suppose I can see that for myself” (152). The teacher’s reference to his suspicions of Peter Ivanovitch, a famous revolutionary and feminist, prompts the following response: “Suspect to you! Peter Ivanovitch suspect to you! To you!” (153). The teacher attempts another characterization of Miss Haldin, generating an explosive retort from Razumov in which the liter-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 111

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

112

chapter 4

ary qualities of the teacher’s observations, the categories of “character” and “opinion,” and by implication the very presumptions involved in looking at another person and characterizing them, are subjected to further abuse: “Upon my word, … what is it to me whether women are fools or lunatics? I really don’t care what you think of them. I—I am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a novel” (153–54). This last exclamation expresses the profound pain of Razumov’s situation, condemned by the teacher’s gaze, and in his very existence, to the finality of form. It is also, then, a moment in which the work expresses its own anxiety and dissatisfaction at the condition of being a work. How intolerable to be—like Haldin, Necator, Peter Ivanovitch, Natalia Haldin, Julius Laspara, even the teacher of languages, even of course Razumov himself—a character in a novel. How intolerable to be a novel!17 The plot of Under Western Eyes is precipitated by Razumov’s betrayal of Victor Haldin, a fellow student and political assassin, to the Russian authorities, an action that condemns Haldin to death and commits Razumov to a short-lived career of deception as an agent of the Tsarist regime. Why does Razumov betray Haldin? Certainly not out of any political conviction or feeling of patriotism towards the Russian state. The only patriotic feeling Razumov finds in himself appears in the course of his betrayal of Haldin; patriotism is not a cause of his betrayal, but an effect of it. The first part of the book presents Razumov as a character who has no idea what he thinks, who exists in a state of ambivalence towards his own formlessness. For Razumov, the betrayal of Haldin represents the simultaneously enticing and horrible prospect of an entry into form, into being. “What is betrayal?” he asks himself, as he prepares to give Haldin up. “There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience. And how is my conscience engaged here; by what bond of common faith, of common conviction, am I obliged to let that fanatical idiot drag me down with him?” (34) The betrayal itself plunges him into a crisis of being, a state of anxiety over his changing relation to Russia, to the Russian authorities, to the revolutionaries, and to himself, a crisis that is manifest as shame: “The eye of the social revolution was on him, and Razumov … felt an unnamed and despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation. Was it possible that he no longer belonged to himself? This was damnable” (250). The shame is reignited by every naming he is subjected to through the rest of the narrative, including the naming of his shame as such. Many weeks later, after Razumov has arrived in Geneva, a long conversation with the revolutionary Sophia Antonovna ends in her naming (accurately) the depth of his antipathy towards being: “You are not an enthusiast, but there is an immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I set my eyes on you. … You are full of bitter revolt”

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 112

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

113

(216). In response Razumov makes “a slight bow,” “the irony of which,” we read, “was concealed by an almost sinister immobility of feature.” Razumov thus ironizes the very sentiment in which he is acclaimed for the intensity of his “revolt”; the “force of revolt” in Razumov is so complete as to require his revolt even from any instantiation of it. Sophia’s diagnosis confirms the view of Razumov (as if we did not believe it already) that has earlier been offered by Miss Haldin: “His mind goes forward, far ahead of the struggle. … I am convinced … that this extraordinary man is meditating some vast plan, some great undertaking; he is possessed by it—he suffers from it—and from being alone in the world” (168). In all these assessments of Razumov it is impossible not to think also of Conrad himself, similarly riven on the demands of form during the writing of Under Western Eyes, similarly engaged on “some great undertaking” that, he imagines, must only be destroyed by its coming into realization.18 In another heady conversation, Razumov, on the brink of confessing to Natalia his role in the death of her brother, questions her on the substance of such terms as efficacy of remorse, duty of revenge, and man of the people—all phrases mobilized by the revolutionaries towards a rational explanation of the circumstances of Haldin’s capture and execution. Implicit in all of these phrases is the opposition between fidelity and betrayal. The teacher of languages, lurking within earshot, reports the conversation to his readers. Natalia, apparently intuiting Razumov’s desperate need for some external comprehension of his turmoil, reiterates the provisional nature of such categories, telling him: “I believe that the future shall be merciful to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that there can be no union and no love” (291). The immediate effect of the exchange, however, is catastrophic and consequential: he confesses, and she collapses. The teacher of languages, enraged, turns on Razumov and orders him away: “If there’s any sense of shame in you” (292). At this moment—one of only two occasions in the book when Razumov’s shame is named to his face—Razumov snarls at him in fury: “How did this old man come here?” (292).19 Under Western Eyes is not an obvious text to read in postcolonial terms. Indeed, the book is unusual among Conrad’s works for the absence of any reference to colonialism. However, just as Hegel writes about the French Revolution in the light of a future freedom that is as yet indescribable, indeed unthinkable; just as Hegel’s commitment to this freedom is apparent in the formal quality of his prose, rather than in any positive, instantiated content—so too the distinctly postcolonial dimensions of Conrad’s work will be found not in its subject matter or content, but in the consistency with which he supposes a world other than the one

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 113

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

114

chapter 4

that his characters and narrators are able to imagine. This supposition is apparent, paradoxically, only in the consistency with which he forecloses its instantiation, a foreclosure that is frequently interpreted as Conrad’s pessimism. Conrad cannot envisage any route from the colonial to a postcolonial world. In this respect, the sentiments of Razumov, spoken to himself during the conversation with Sophia Antonovna discussed above, are also Conrad’s: “In this world of men nothing can be changed—neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives—a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers” (216). The political pessimism of this statement might be taken at face value were it not for the simple fact that its articulation takes place in the very form that is everywhere discredited by the text itself. No writer is more convulsed by a Hegelian mistrust of form in general, and the written word in particular, than Conrad; although to use such terms (“convulsed,” “mistrust”) is to give a misleadingly subjective inflection to what is properly seen as a logic, maintained scrupulously and consistently through the course of the work. It is a mistake, then, to see Razumov’s utterances, or anything else in Under Western Eyes, as an expression of the work’s political substance. That substance is found, rather, in the book’s faithfulness to its own limits and to the limits of written works. In an important intervention in the field of postcolonial theory, Peter Hallward writes: However complementary their effects may be in certain situations, as a matter of principle political commitment and literary production should be treated as thoroughly distinct processes. … There is no universally valid yardstick by which we can measure the quality of literature written in embattled circumstances. Every encounter with a literary text is precisely that—an encounter—and should be treated as such.20

Following Hallward’s thinking, Razumov’s “pessimistic” sentiment is countered, I would argue, precisely by the existence of Under Western Eyes as a finished work. Change, Razumov says, is impossible; even the less worthy objective of “displacing” circumstances is impossible without shame: “corrupted consciences.” And yet everything that Conrad hopes for is situated in that “impossible.” His fidelity, and indeed his optimism, are found in his rigorous adherence to its impossibility. Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, then, announces a commitment to a freedom to which no explicit commitment may be made without betraying it. The immensely difficult question it poses is the following: What are the conditions of writing in advance of the revolution? And what lessons does such prerevolutionary writing hold for the project of the revolution itself, or the project of writing in the aftermath of the revolution? Six years after Under Western Eyes was published, Russia underwent the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 114

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

115

revolution that everything in the book anticipates. A decade later, Russia did indeed have that “great autocrat of the future” whom Razumov believed the “logic of history” made unavoidable (32). The terrible irony, not just of Under Western Eyes but of the history of revolution into the twentieth century, is that the “man—strong and one” whom Razumov evokes in opposition to “the conflicting aspirations of the people” (30) emerged not from the attempt of the old regime to crush the revolutionary spirit, but from the “betrayal” of that spirit, a betrayal that is scarcely distinguishable from its realization. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: The Imminence of Betrayal If Under Western Eyes deals with the question of what a prerevolutionary novel looks like, the question posed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat and by Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story might be expressed as the opposite: What does a postrevolutionary novel look like?21 A more complex formulation of this question might be: Does the possibility of producing a postrevolutionary novel hang on the success of the revolution, or on its failure? A Grain of Wheat is set on the eve of Kenyan independence, but it was published four years later, in 1967. David’s Story is set shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1991, and thus several years before the African National Congress victory in the South African elections of 1994; the book was published in 2000. Both novels look back at the struggle for freedom, then, from the perspective of its nominal attainment; both deal with the conflict between aspiration and reality, between an idea—“Uhuru,” say, or “the New South Africa”—and its formal embodiment. Both deal explicitly with the shame that arises in the aftermath of liberation over the extremes of duplicity and violence that the struggle involved. In both works, the formal question of the postrevolutionary novel quickly becomes inseparable from the ontological question of freedom itself. In the opening pages of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes: Decolonization … is an historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification [substantification] secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation. (2)22

Fanon’s model of thinking here is Hegelian: “decolonization” is the historical form in which the opposition between colonizer and colonized becomes “self coherent” (translucide à elle-même)—just as, for Hegel,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 115

8/13/2010 2:04:35 PM

116

chapter 4

“knowledge” is the form in which the opposition between the General Will and the individual will becomes “transparent” to itself (Phenomenology §595, p. 142). In both cases, the “history-making movement” is the process of realization, and it is predicated upon a prior conceptualization of freedom (“decolonization,” “knowledge”) as something to be realized, something that, in its essence, has a “historical” trajectory. How can decolonization—an undertaking, as Fanon notes, of reified formal entities, and incapable of taking place without a deepening and hypostatization of them—not be as thoroughly steeped in shame as colonialism itself? Both A Grain of Wheat and David’s Story are aware of their own implication as works of literature in this economy of “aspiration” and “realization.” In Wicomb’s novel this sense of implication is an explicit motif, while in Ngũgĩ’s work its thematic existence is less overt. In both cases, I will argue, the presence of shame functions to focus attention on the “embattled circumstances” (Absolutely Postcolonial 45) in which the works were produced—or, to use Lukács’s phrase, the “fundamental dissonance” that informs and underpins them. That is to say, attentiveness to shame as a principle or a logic is an operation that must suspend all consideration of the authors’ motivations and intentions, all notions of a transferable truth or message in the text, as well as questions of aesthetic success and failure. Such notions, whether applied to the political revolution or the literary work, are irrepressibly subjective; they separate the work, the event, from itself, from its actuality as an “encounter,” substituting a formal coherence for the “fundamental dissonance” at its essence. My hope in what follows, then, is that we might treat Ngũgĩ’s and Wicomb’s works, first, as an occasion for removing the subjective frame from our reading; and second, as a resource for thinking the possibility of freedom other than through the logic of realization. Ngũgĩ’s A Grain of Wheat is in part a rewriting and recontextualization of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Mugo, a Kikuyu farmer and former British detainee, lives alone in a village on the fictional ridge of Thabai. One evening, shortly before Uhuru day, December 12, 1963, the day of Kenya’s independence from British colonial rule, Mugo is visited in his hut by elders of the village, who invite him to address the community at the Uhuru celebrations. The celebrations are to take place near the site of the execution by the British of Kihika, a hero of the resistance movement, who, after assassinating a local District Officer, took shelter one night in Mugo’s hut before being betrayed by an unknown member of the community, captured, and hanged. At the beginning of A Grain of Wheat, Mugo seems to suffer from a shame that is associated with his relation to the community; he feels alienated from slogans of liberation such as Uhuru and Uhuru na Kazi

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 116

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

117

(“Freedom and Work”),  and from the planned Independence celebrations. Thus, for much of the novel it is possible to imagine Mugo as a modern, existential hero. He is in a similar situation to Razumov at the beginning of Under Western Eyes: introspective and singular, without political or family commitments, and constitutionally ashamed at the prospect of participating in any formal public celebration or political speech act. As he considers the invitation of the village elders, Mugo thinks back to the one impromptu speech he has given, at a public meeting organized by the Movement shortly after he was released from detention. Under pressure from other former prisoners, Mugo spoke to the village of his experiences in the camp in a “colourless, rusty” voice that startled him by its unrecognizability. His eloquence gave way almost immediately to a revulsion from his own rhetoric that seemed to be caused by a shamed estrangement from it, and he broke off. At first Mugo enjoyed the distance he had established between himself and the voice. But soon the voice disgusted him. He wanted to shout: that is not it at all; I did not want to come back; I did not long to join my mother, or wife, or child because I did not have any. Tell me, then, whom could I have loved?23

Afterwards, a legend spreads around Mugo’s speech of a man who “was so moved he could not speak any more” (66). The episode has the effect, within the novel, of helping to establish the idea of Mugo as a complex, solitary individual, whose shame has a Kierkegaardian, interior quality. Ngũgĩ is playing with us, however; for as the novel builds towards its climax we learn that Mugo’s shame is not merely “existential” but directly attributable to his own actions. In a sequence that recalls Razumov’s confession to Miss Haldin in Under Western Eyes, Mugo finally reveals to Mumbi, Kihika’s sister, that it was he who betrayed Kihika. Ngũgĩ’s rewrite of Under Western Eyes thus appears to involve a redefinition of shame not as a negative but as a positive affect, one with a definite etiology. The structure of A Grain of Wheat, in which Mugo is revealed as the betrayer only at the end of the work, encourages such a reading. G. D. Killam emphasizes this logic of revelation as it pertains to A Grain of Wheat: “Because of his sympathy for his characters and because he enjoins our own sympathy, Ngũgĩ reveals the sources of guilt gradually over the course of the novel. So by the novel’s close, the characters stand fully exposed to themselves and to us.”24 For Killam, betrayal is “one of the fundamental themes of the novel,” and the “need of the betrayer to expiate the sense of guilt that results” (55) is its dominant message. Killam’s interpretation seems further confirmed by the fate of Mugo, who, after making a spectacular public confession at the Uhuru day celebrations, is tried by a kangaroo court and (presumably) executed.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 117

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

118

chapter 4

However, things are considerably more complex than this reading suggests, for Mugo’s violent, unnarrated death, as Simon Gikandi has observed, “casts a long moral shadow on Independence Day and thus the nationalist struggle.”25 Mugo’s punishment, including the participation of senior figures within the independence movement in it, “diminish[es] the meaning of Uhuru” (126), ending the novel on a bathetic note at the very moment that the community is entering upon the era of liberation. The dominant mood at the end of the novel is not celebration, nor even “understanding,” as Killam has it, but shame. After the hearing, Wambui, who has acted as Mugo’s judge, and Warui, a veteran of the struggle, sit in their hut conversing “as if they did not know what the other was talking about, as if they were both ashamed of certain subjects in one another’s presence” (Grain of Wheat 240). In the final chapter, Gikonyo, another former detainee and the husband of Mumbi, convalesces in the hospital after breaking his arm in a running race. He thinks of the courage it must have taken for Mugo to confess to the community “and lose everything,” and he reflects on the shameful steps that he too trod to the interrogation room while in detention in order to secure his release. “What difference was there between him and Karanja or Mugo or those who had openly betrayed people and worked with the whiteman to save themselves?” (245). Is shame any closer to the message of the novel than “the expiation of guilt”? Well, yes, except that shame is not a message, nor does it have any positive ontology or truth content. Shame is a logic running through the work, a logic that touches almost every character within it (with the notable exception of Kihika); but (as in Conrad) shame has what Alain Badiou has called a “subtractive” effect. Shame in A Grain of Wheat erodes “every density, every claim to substantiality, and every assertion of reality.”26 Margery Thompson, the wife of a colonial administrator, is ashamed of her attraction to Karanja, an African employee of her husband (37). John Thompson, the administrator, is ashamed of his reluctance to contemplate the newspaper image of the British Prime Minister in the days leading up to the departure of the British from Kenya (40). Dr Lynd, a scientist in a plant laboratory, is profoundly shamed by a violent incident during the Mau Mau Emergency when her “houseboy” returned to her house one night with two others and hacked her dog to pieces in front of her (44–45). Her relaying of this story to Thompson leaves them both “ashamed” at the intimacy it seemed to inaugurate (45). Margery Thompson feels shame at the ebbing intimacy between herself and her husband (49). Gikonyo, in the camp, is ashamed of having spoken of his desire to see Mumbi again to a fellow inmate (110). Mumbi is ashamed at having accepted food from Karanja, a man whom she suspects of having betrayed her brother—food that saved her life (146). When Mumbi

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 118

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

119

finally allows him to make love to her, Karanja feels “utter isolation and humiliation” immediately afterwards (209–10). When Gikonyo is released from detention, he is ashamed to tell Mugo of Mumbi’s infidelity while he was in prison (122–23). Mumbi, meanwhile, is ashamed at Gikonyo’s refusal to share his troubles with her (167). One evening shortly before Uhuru day, Gikonyo tells Mugo of his admiration for Mugo’s courage when they were in prison together. Referring to Mugo’s famous speech, he alludes to his own shame that he was unable fully to inhabit such sentiments: “Many of us talked like that because we wanted to deceive ourselves. It lessens your shame. We talked of loyalty to the movement and the love of our country. You know a time came when I did not care about Uhuru for the country any more. I just wanted to come home. And I would have sold Kenya to the whiteman to buy my own freedom” (67–68). Mugo’s betrayal of Kihika, we read, is preceded by an episode of “shame and humiliation” when he is taunted by two policemen outside the District Office, an episode from which he feels grateful to the white man (and also, implicitly, to his own act of betrayal) for having “rescued” him (198). Like Razumov, who confesses his betrayal of Haldin to the revolutionaries only once he hears of the suicide in St. Petersburg of the one person who might have exposed him (312), Mugo is entirely safe when he confesses before the village; indeed, what finally impels him to speak seems to be the shaming experience of hearing villagers outside his hut singing his praises as a hero of Uhuru (235). The point is that the colonial system itself is shaming: by its modes of address, by the ways in which it objectifies every individual caught up in it, and by the absence of any possibility of freedom that is foreseeable from within it, any freedom that does not further deepen and consolidate the regime of identity. In the colonial situation, love, desire, patriotism, friendship, employment relations, domestic life, sex, sustenance, national feeling, and the promise of decolonization are all profoundly affected by shame. Mugo’s confession of betrayal is fueled by shame, but confession offers him no relief from it. The great psychological insight of Ngũgĩ’s work is in part its awareness that Mugo’s shame is only intensified by the gesture of confession, that his confession is just as ego-driven as the betrayal was. In Mugo, modern, existential shame is not separable from the shame of betrayal: in fact, they are the same thing. Mugo is ashamed long before he betrays Kihika. In colonial societies, the betrayal has always already taken place, but this is a universal betrayal, the betrayal of every soul by his or her place within the system; the betrayal of experience by naming, by conceptualization, by the narrative of chronological development; the betrayal of life by the separation into spheres of existence; the betrayal of freedom by its “realization” or embodiment in a form that will amount to its neutralization.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 119

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

120

chapter 4

Why is Kihika immune from shame? In his exemplary reading of the novel, Simon Gikandi observes that Kihika is “the non-problematic figure around which communal desires—and the narratives that sustain them— can be organized” (114). The logic here is the same as that of the “rival version” that Edward Said finds in Joseph Conrad’s texts: the “nonproblematic” status of Kihika functions to throw into relief the “problematic” status of everyone else in the book. Kihika is a character from another kind of work than the one we are reading. He is a man for whom, as he explains to his uncomprehending lover Wambuku, politics is “life,” not something separable from it; a man for whom the question of land has nothing to do with ownership; a man whose speeches in the forest leave his listeners feeling “whole, renewed” (97–99). Kihika is, in other words, a hero of an epic, the genre which, according to Lukács, “gives form to the extensive totality of life, [and] drama to the intensive totality of essence” (The Theory of the Novel 46). Mugo, meanwhile, is a young man in a novel. Early in the story, Mugo listens to Kihika speak in public and is repelled by his language of sacrifice and deliverance. “He could not clap for words that did not touch him. What right had such a boy, probably younger than Mugo, to talk like that? What arrogance. Kihika had spoken of blood as easily as if he was talking of drawing water in a river, Mugo reflected, a revulsion starting in his stomach at the sight and smell of blood. I hate him, he heard himself say” (15). Mugo’s betrayal of Kihika is nothing less than the betrayal of the epic that is constituted by the world of the novel. In Decolonising the Mind, the essay from 1986 in which he famously bids “farewell” to English as the medium of his writing,27 Ngũgĩ describes the tension in his own relationship to the novel form as it emerged during the writing of his four fictional works in English, a tension that for Ngũgĩ has a shameful quality: “The African novel was … impoverished by the very means of its possible liberation: exposure of its would-be practitioners to the secular tradition of the critical and socialist realism of the European novel.” “I was part and parcel of that process,” he adds, “or rather one of its products” (70). And Ngũgĩ considers the work of fellow African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Kofi Awoonor to be precisely as implicated in this relation as his own. He describes the structure of his first two novels, Weep Not, Child and The River Between,28 as instances of the form at its most conventional: One action leads to the next along the normal sequence and divisions of time—seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. Event leads to event in a relay in a field of continuous time. It is the biographical approach where the character/narrator follows the hero in time and space from his/her

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 120

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

121

point of entry to that of exit, let’s say from birth to death. The point of view is largely that of the central character. The one narrative voice is that of the omniscient narrator/author. (75)

The implication of this description is that the form of the novel has to be overcome if the structures of colonial, bourgeois society are also to be abolished. In the works in which he breaks with English, beginning with Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ (Devil on the Cross),29 Ngũgĩ sought to move away from the “Afro-European novel” to engage directly with the Gĩkũyũ oral tradition. Ngũgĩ’s objective in all his works, writes Gikandi—the novels written in English as well as the later Gĩkũyũ texts—has been “to capture the totality of a culture that is no longer organic, a culture in which the essential forces of society and even nature are immanently at odds with each other and the relation between subjects and their world is defined by radical dissonance” (148–49). Gikandi’s insight derives in part from his reading of Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel and to the definition of the novel offered in Lukács’s third chapter, which I quoted earlier: “The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”30 The question of whether Ngũgĩ has been able to escape the problem of immanence in his experiments with the Gĩkũyũ oral tradition is outside the scope of this discussion, except to say that the answer cannot be a simple yes. The act of deciding to write in the epic rather than the novel tradition—indeed, the desire to escape any problem whatsoever—is novelistic, predicated upon the isolation of the individual from the outside world and the transcendent nature of his or her desires. “The ‘should be’ kills life,” writes Lukács, “and an epic hero constructed out of what ‘should be’ will always be but a shadow of the living epic man of historical reality, his shadow but never his original image” (48). Ngũgĩ, observes Gikandi acutely, “is both a good and a bad student of Lukács: he recognizes that the world of his novel has lost its organic unity, but he seeks to represent its desire for totality in concrete rather than abstract terms” (151). In seeking to recover the “concrete” immanence of the epic, Ngũgĩ risks falling prey to the nostalgia that Lukács attributes to the adherents of the cult of Greece in his own period. The world of the epic can no more be recovered than can the precolonial world; and the same goes for the world that preceded the modern situation anatomized by Hegel, the situation in which the realization of freedom comes to mean giving up, in the first instance, the status of freedom as an object to be realized. Gikandi follows Ngũgĩ himself in seeing Petals of Blood (1977), his fourth and final novel written in English, as the place in which “the emerging disjuncture between the author’s ideological commitment and

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 121

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

122

chapter 4

the tradition of the novel he had inherited through a colonial education” becomes most starkly apparent.31 In between Ngũgĩ’s first two novels and this last, however, comes A Grain of Wheat, a more conventionally structured novel than Petals of Blood, but one in which every novelistic feature (narrative temporality and plot development, realist characterization, the concern with motivations and ethical dilemmas, the themes of love/rejection/infidelity/betrayal, the representation of hierarchical social structures) is attended by shame. This shame extends to the transcendent moment of liberation upon which every action and dream of the novel converges. As General R., a veteran of the struggle, stands before the village preparing to speak at the Uhuru day celebrations, his mind fills with images of the violent events that have led to independence, such as the Movement’s killing and dismemberment of Reverend Jackson, a Kikuyu Christian who preached against Mau Mau. At this moment of culmination, the General recognizes that the soldiers taking power in Nairobi are not the soldiers of the Land and Freedom Army (the Movement), but the King’s African Rifles, “the very colonial forces who had been doing on the battlefield what Jackson was doing in churches” (220). Looking around at the crowd, General R. contemplates the fragility of the revolution in a passage that replays the logic of the Terror as captured by Hegel in the Phenomenology: “The sensation of imminent betrayal was so strong that General R. trembled in his moment of triumph” (221). When he finally addresses the people, he is only able to muster a reiteration of that logic, a statement that ends with his call for the still unknown betrayer of Kihika to reveal himself: “The Party must never betray the Movement. The Party must never betray Uhuru. It must never sell Kenya back to the Enemy!” (221) As we know, from our reapplication of Hegel to the colonial situation and from Adorno’s and Badiou’s startling rereadings of Hegel, and as the work of fiction we have been reading will confirm, this is a logic that must end unhappily. What conclusions should we draw from Ngũgĩ’s inability, in A Grain of Wheat, to depict the transition to freedom in positive terms or to indicate a likely trajectory out of the situation of terror and self-consuming suspicion that developed within the struggle? Is it the case that real liberation, immanence, the sensuous integration of life and politics sought and embodied by Kihika himself, is unrealizable? Not at all; merely that the lack of any foreseeable path towards national liberation should be considered part of the “embattled circumstances” of Ngũgĩ’s work. The cost of attempting to think “in terms of totality” in an age, or a social and political system, or a literary form in which “the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem,” is shame. When the impossibility of instantiating the revolution, of verifying the postcolonial hypothesis, is revealed

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 122

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

123

in a form such as the novel, a form organized according to certain conventional features, that shortfall of possibility is met with shame, which surges on the site of every one of those conventions: the expectations of its characters; the categories with which they orient themselves ethically (“betrayal,” “fidelity,” “madness,” “collaboration,” “sacrifice”); the unified narrative perspective; the linear chronological framing. Is there any way of thinking the disjunction, the shortfall of possibility, without shame? Is there, in fact, any need for shame? This is where Adorno’s reading of Hegel can help us, for shame is no part of Hegel’s thinking and yet he renders the disjunction sensuous, tangible. For Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the highest stage of self-consciousness, and the threshold of real freedom, is the moment at which consciousness sees “its own pure simple reality vanish immediately and pass over into empty nothingness.” In this development consciousness becomes “pure knowing and willing”—knowing and willing, that is to say, without an instantiated content, or indeed an instantiated subject (141, §594). In Hegel, in other words, the forms of knowledge are revealed for what they are: mere forms. Knowledge is simultaneous with its own negation. In its association of every novelistic convention and every positive instantiation with shame, A Grain of Wheat likewise gestures towards a liberation from form; this is not a liberation that can take place, but one that is dependent, rather, on its not taking place. Ngũgĩ teaches us to think the disjunction not as failure but as the very condition of the novel and to reconfigure immanence as predicated not upon wholeness or completion, but on incompletion and subtraction. The novel is a guide to nothing other than its own terms of existence. In Ngũgĩ’s writing, the postcolonial novel is not a lesson in the achievement of freedom, a status that would necessarily imply its own inadequacy with regard to that freedom. Rather, the work is the achievement. The freedom that it aspires to is fulfilled precisely in its “failure”; its knowledge is the absence of knowledge. The task enjoined by such works is that of finding what Lukács calls “[our] own depth and greatness” in the fleeting, unsustainable quality of the dream of freedom they instantiate. Zoë Wicomb: The Difference of the Same In his essay on Joseph Conrad, mentioned earlier, Martin Ray identifies two conflicting forces or relations to language that are consistently detectable within Conrad’s writing: the desire to “extinguish” language and the desire to “uphold” it.32 For Ray this distinction is dramatized in Heart of Darkness, in the conflict between “Marlow’s oral narrative and the written narration which contains it” (51). As already discussed, a similar

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 123

8/13/2010 2:04:36 PM

124

chapter 4

conflict defines the relationship between the narrator of Under Western Eyes (the teacher of languages) and the protagonist Razumov. Indeed, one is tempted to use the same distinction to describe the aesthetic quandaries that have dominated the activity of artists and writers in the twentieth century. What else is the polarity between “volatilization” and “polemical impossibility” with which Lukács frames the world of the novel, for example, but another version of the distinction between the desire to “extinguish” and to “uphold” language?33 It is indicative, perhaps, of the shifts that have taken place in the relationship of literature to words and language over the course of that century that in Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story the location of the two desires is inverted. In David’s Story, it is the unnamed narrator who desires to “uphold” language (that is, to insist on the status of language as an event, that language retain its perceptibility), while the protagonist holds the more pragmatic view: “There is no need to fret about writing, about our choice of words in the New South Africa.” 34 Like many of Conrad’s works, Wicomb’s novel makes use of an elaborate narrative conceit: David Dirkse, a former African National Congress (ANC) militant, has commissioned the narrator—selected on the grounds that she is “someone literate and broadly sympathetic to the liberation movement”—to write his story (2). She, like David, is a Coloured South African from the Griqua community of the Western Cape. The result of the commission is the highly fragmentary work we are reading, in which the conflicts between David’s and the narrator’s different relations to language are played out on the surface. Language, then, is a character in the work, and the struggle over language one of the principal events depicted in it. The novel is comprised of a number of different texts and registers, including reflections by the narrator on the impossibility of her task, and on the discrepancies between her and David’s hopes for the book; fantasy sequences in which she compensates for David’s refusal or inability to provide what he calls novelistic “detail” (134); passages narrating David’s investigations into his Griqua past, as reported to (or imagined by) his amanuensis; and examples of David’s own attempts at writing. As in Conrad, Wicomb’s text is overshadowed by several “rival versions”: works that do not bear the burden of having been written, but which raise a standard that shames the text we have in our possession, or the world in which that text was all that could be produced. These rival versions include the narrative that David would like to be writing—a work from which what he calls the narrator’s “absurd exercise(s) in style” would be absent (198)—but also the more purely “literary” work that the narrator would have written if left to her own devices. In her preface we read that she has “revised considerably” passages David had already approved; thus, the work as we have it is far removed from what David

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 124

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

125

had imagined. On the other hand, the work that the narrator might have produced on her own is also discredited by her various interactions with David: My prattling, as he called it, about meaning in the margin, or absence as an aspect of writing, had nothing to do with his project, and as for understanding, he had no expectations of me. … For my part it is comforting to know that my occasional flights of fancy, my attempts at artistry, would not be detected by him: proponents of plain writing are notoriously vague in their definitions of that category.

Wicomb’s novel also contains a Kihika character, another “rival version,” in the form of Dulcie Olifant, a militant comrade of David’s. Like Kihika, Dulcie is a brilliant public speaker; she and David first met when, as a representative of the United Democratic Front (UDF), an organization allied with the ANC, she addressed his own Griqua community to try to start a new branch in the area. Historically, the Griquas were a people who had taken no part in the struggle against apartheid. The mood in the hall is skeptical, and yet in a sincere, rational, tactful performance she wins over the meeting (124–33). Dulcie uses words rhetorically and is untroubled by their ambiguity or instability; she is thus even further than David along the road from “upholding” language to “extinguishing” it. “Remember, Razumov,” says Sophia Antonovna in Under Western Eyes, “women, children, and revolutionaries hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action” (231). “That brood leaves no posterity,” says the Russian autocrat to whom Razumov betrays Haldin, characterizing all such revolutionaries (44). Dulcie has no need of writing, no use for irony, and no interest in posterity; as a result, her presence in David’s Story is shaming of all attempts at writing, whether by the narrator or by David. She is herself unencompassable by writing since, according to David, she is “not like anyone else; one could never, for instance, say that she’s young or old or middle-aged” (134). Dulcie is present in the text only in highly mediated forms—in David’s elliptical reports and in imaginative sequences in which the narrator attempts to give her fictional depth. Dulcie is not a novelistic character: “she is not pretty, you know, not feminine, not like a woman at all” (80). Towards the end of the novel, David tells the narrator that she once attended a party at which Dulcie was also present. The narrator remembers a “large woman of indifferent looks” wearing a “hideous” printed top and laughing “uproariously” (199). Dulcie, as a revolutionary actor, is emblematic of that in the work which does not represent but is represented. The paradox is that this emblematic status is dependent upon her absence; for she cannot become present in the text without herself beginning to represent, thereby losing her emblematic

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 125

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

126

chapter 4

role as that which does not. “That’s why you’ll never understand about Dulcie,” says David; “hers is another world altogether” (196). Wicomb’s novel is thus structured around an incommensurability between the militant struggle and the task of representing it; between, as the narrator puts it, “the necessary secrecy and a need to tell” (2); between politics and literature, or between the revolutionary and the writer. This gap between subject and object is not resolved by the text; indeed, the narrator herself alludes to the “gaps” and “ready-made absences” that make up her story. This is a work, in short, in which the shamed version finds its voice; in which, to quote Lukács, “the fragmentary nature of the world’s structure” is finally carried into “the world of forms” (The Theory of the Novel 39). Shame is perpetually present, even when it is unnamed; it sometimes appears explicitly in order to regulate the writing away from the two rival versions (one literary, the other biographical), both of which, for different reasons, threaten the integrity of the struggle. Why, the narrator asks David, given his lack of interest in writing, does he want his story written? “He cannot explain,” she tells us. “He is in a sense ashamed of appearing to be vain, of thinking of himself as special. It is not that he wants to be remembered; rather, it is about putting things down on paper so that you can see what there is, shuffle the pages around, if necessary, until they make sense” (140). Writing is for David nothing but an aide-mémoire, or an aide-pensée; indeed, the sense in which writing is “extinguishable” for David is illustrated literally by his practice of writing down his thoughts in advance of a meeting—an activity that is forbidden by the Movement (Umkhonto we sizwe or MK, the military wing of the ANC)—and eating his notes once he arrives at conclusions (107). For David, the project of telling his story risks plunging him into the “bourgeois” mentality that he attributes to his amanuensis; hence his refusal to gratify the narrator’s thirst for details that he considers “irrelevant” (78), that is to say, to betray the principles of the revolution. But shame is operative even, and especially, when it is unnamed. The narrator’s literary inclinations are similarly held in check by shame; indeed, the presence of David in Wicomb’s narrative is explicable in these terms. David’s conviction that the narrator is unable to understand the struggle—on account of her class, her education, and her occupation— gives voice, within the story, to the anxiety that must attend any work that aspires to having a political effect beyond its own limits. “People who tend their gardens and polish their sensibilities in the morality of art have no idea about the business of survival out there in the bush with no resources,” says David, expressing a view that is repeated variously throughout the novel (196). It is crucial to remember (and curiously easy to forget) that this view is being expressed precisely in a work of literature. Zoë Wicomb’s novel here opens up the question of its own politi-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 126

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

127

cal substance in what I have been calling (after Deleuze) a “crystalline” form: for, in such a context, David’s sentiment is neither acceptable nor disputable. Could one imagine such a view being articulated by a character in a “prerevolutionary” work, for example, a novel written in South Africa during the struggle against the apartheid regime? This question goes to the heart of the complexities that are addressed by David’s Story. As I have argued earlier with reference to Nadine Gordimer’s novel My Son’s Story (1990), the natural tendency of the prerevolutionary work is to insist on the opposite: on the meaningful, truth-telling capacity of literature and the exceptional status of the writer. The radicalism of Conrad, by contrast, is that he inhabits a postrevolutionary mode in a prerevolutionary period: no privilege or truth status is accorded to literature, no exception is claimed for the writer, and no instantiation of the revolution is countenanced within the body of the work. The revolutionary status of Wicomb’s novel is a more complicated question than in Conrad or Gordimer. As in Ngũgĩ’s A Grain of Wheat, the historical “realization” of freedom has destroyed the writer’s aspirant relation to the category; both Wicomb and Ngũgĩ dwell in a Hegelian, postrevolutionary world in which the category of freedom no longer exists as an abstraction. One way that Wicomb deals with this is by confronting the narrator’s abstract, prerevolutionary conception of freedom with David’s brutal unsentimentality about what is involved in its realization. David is without any illusions about the ethical toll that the struggle exacts on its participants and about the inevitability of that toll. One of the revelations of the novel is that both he and Dulcie were detained and tortured by the ANC in 1984, at the prison camp in Angola known as Quatro.35 David defines his own attitude to such events in opposition to the sentimentality of the amanuensis; to him, she is an example of those “who believe in keeping your hands clean at all costs, who reach for lace handkerchiefs at the thought of bloodshed, and choose not to notice that that fine thing, freedom, is rudely shoved through by rough guys in khaki” (79). If such sentimentality exists in the narrator, the naming of her temperament as such removes it from her, and from the work. Indeed, such is in general the remarkable consequence of naming in David’s Story. Even David’s unsentimentality is left somehow sentimentalized by its naming: “No point,” he insists, “in reading about freedom when we should be playing active roles towards attaining it” (140). The “scorn” with which he utters this remark is a sign of its overdetermined quality. David’s conception of the struggle is free of the abstraction that would remove from it all violence and all coercion: “Brilliant, isn’t it, how your arty lot just love these lies about irrepressible human nature and the spirit of freedom bubbling in the veins of the youth” (80). However, as

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 127

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

128

chapter 4

soon as this “anti-abstractionist” position is articulated, it too becomes an abstraction. David’s “conflictual model of the world”—the idea that “it is natural for power struggles to erupt in oppositional social units” —sounds to the narrator like a “textbook,” a “lecture” (177). The gap between these two abstractions is the gap between the prerevolutionary and the postrevolutionary consciousness. The gap is bridged by the revolution itself; but it is maintained, in the postrevolutionary moment, by shame. David is a transitional figure; his shame is almost wholly due to the incommensurability between the prerevolutionary and the postrevolutionary consciousness; between the abstraction of the struggle, on one hand, and its uninstantiability on the other. The tension between the two modes is apparent as early as his first encounter with Dulcie, whose use of a cliché to describe the mood at the meeting (“the atmosphere in the school hall was electric”) leaves him discomfited: “That was not a word that David would have chosen. But he was at a loss; things were no longer the same, as if, like some city slicker, he was viewing the world through sunglasses, its meanings tinted beyond recognition. The old familiar, upright words leaned promiscuously in any old direction, attaching themselves to glossy new contexts” (125–26). What he finds disturbing is not simply the ease with which Dulcie uses such words, but the lack of other, better words to describe what was happening in the hall. In the revolutionary situation, the clichéd expression seems as good as any other, such that Dulcie’s words later come out of his own mouth, seeming “to perch on the things he had known all his life, the painted enamel pots and jugs with the sores of chipped old age” (126). The incommensurability dramatized by the revolutionary situation is that of two relations to language; it explains not only David’s shame, and the narrator’s, but the unnamed shame with which the work regards its own status as a work. Naming in David’s Story is a means of “upholding” language by inventing a new, negative relationship between the substance of words and of things. Alain Badiou: Subtraction versus Realization How should we understand the historical trajectory that seems to bind the work of three very different writers of literature in a complex relation towards form itself? And how does this relation connect to the shifting fortunes of revolutionary struggle during the course of the twentieth century, particularly in the colonial world? Alain Badiou has offered a compelling conceptualization of this period, one in which works of art and literature are treated with as much significance as political and military events. For Badiou, artistic and literary works constitute “privileged documents” insofar as they evoke “the meaning that the century

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 128

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

129

held for its own actors.”36 His book The Century is a work comprised of thirteen individually dated texts that attempt collectively to arrive at an understanding of the “subjectivity” of the twentieth century through the question of its “thought” (5, 3). Badiou proposes that what dominated the imagination of the century was a certain “project,” inaugurated in the “blessed” period before the First World War that he calls the century’s “prologue”: the creation of a “new man.” Over the course of the century, this project had several political incarnations, each one “so radical,” says Badiou, that “in the course of its realization the singularity of human life is not taken into account” (7–8). Most notorious, of course, are the terrible European experiments in fascism and communism. Rather than denounce the worst of these episodes with “theological” verdicts such as “Evil” or “unthinkable,” the challenge of the century, says Badiou, is to “think” these instantiations of the project, for example, to try to think through “what the Nazis themselves thought” (3–4). Badiou does not say much in this context about anticolonial struggles or their aftermaths; yet, given that the century is for Badiou a logic, rather than a simple historiographical frame, the century’s many struggles for liberation from colonialism must be thinkable within the same terms. Only by “thinking” the century—the task he sets himself in The Century—can we sustain what was “great” in the project while avoiding a repetition of its horrors. Badiou, then, does not want to give up on the project; indeed, he sees the lack of any such project in the current conjuncture as amounting to “a second Restoration,” an abandonment of any relation with the real (26). What is most “blind and objective” in politics, he writes, has taken “revenge” on what is most “subjective and voluntary” by renouncing all possibility of the new, that is to say, all thought, in favor of the safety and predictability of “opinions” (9). “The famous ‘end of ideologies,’ which supposedly defines our present modesty, our humanitarian compassion, represents nothing less than the forsaking of any novelty that could be ascribed to man” (32). Like Hegel and Adorno, Badiou sees the task at hand as one of saving the “dream” and “promise” of the new man from the catastrophic insistence on its realization. “The nineteenth century announced, dreamed, and promised; the twentieth century declared it would make man, here and now” (32). For Badiou, our best guide to understanding and thinking this task is Hegel’s analysis of the Terror in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where the distinction between the “consciousness” of freedom and its “realization” is established as a philosophical possibility. This dimension of Hegel’s text provides the key to understanding the temperament of the twentieth century. Badiou calls this temperament “the passion for the real,” where “real” designates that which is opposed to “semblance,” “mask,” “disguise,” “ideology.” Again, as in Hegel, the passion for the real is not simply a historical or political

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 129

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

130

chapter 4

phenomenon. It also defines the principal intellectual currents of the century—the Marxian critique of ideology and the psychoanalytic motif of the unconscious—as well as the most significant and influential developments in art. Even to make this distinction, however, is to speak in terms that Badiou wants to resist. Badiou needs for the distinction between art and politics not to be a categorical one, for rhetorical reasons that will become apparent in this discussion. It is necessary, says Badiou, if one is not to succumb to the temptation of denunciation, to distinguish two “orientations” within “the passion for the real”; he names these respectively “destruction” and “subtraction.” The first is obsessed with identity and authenticity: with the compulsion “to grasp real identity, to unmask its copies, to discredit fakes. … Herein lies its strength—after all, many things deserve to be destroyed. But this is also its limit, because purification is a process doomed to incompletion, a figure of the bad infinite” (56). The logic of destruction is the logic of Terror; for the real, says Badiou, “conceived in its contingent absoluteness, is never real enough not to be suspected of semblance” (52). “The correlation between a category and its referent,” he goes on to say, “must always be publicly purged, purified” (53).37 Exemplary for Badiou are the purges that took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin during the 1930s and 1940s, which followed precisely the narrative that Hegel maps out. The second orientation, subtraction, is “a differential and differentiating passion” which “attempts to hold onto the passion for the real without falling for the paroxysmal charms of terror” (56, 65). Badiou describes its impulses as follows: “to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate it at its surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the vanishing term that constitutes it.” For Badiou, the latter, subtractive path offers a way through the quandary opened up between the search for a “new man” and the jarring, twentieth-century awareness of the destructive, spiraling violence that the search entails when it is put into effect. Subtraction allows for a preservation of the revolution without its realization. And it is in order to have a substrate for this path, one that does not itself lapse into realization, that Badiou needs art. For Badiou, one of the inaugural moments of “minuscule” or “minimal difference” is Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting Suprematist Composition: White on White, in which a white square appears at an angle within the white square of the canvas. Malevich’s painting is “the epitome of purification,” says Badiou, in which “the abstract difference of ground and form, and above all, the null difference between white and white, the difference of the Same” are exhibited precisely as the “minimal difference” (55). White on White should not be taken as a symbol of the destruction

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 130

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

131

of painting but as “the staging of a minimal, albeit absolute, difference” (56), the difference of the same; that is to say, a demonstration of the possibility that the difference even between something so apparently unitary as the color white and any other color may, in its actuality, be no greater than the differences internal to it. The possibility opened up by Male­ vich’s painting is that of subtracting an event of thought from the false unity that is attributed to it by the differentiation between the real and semblance; or, we might say, an event of freedom from the false unity that it accumulates in its realization. In Malevich, the gap itself is shown to be real, and vice versa; the task of subtraction, as manifested in White on White, is “to invent content at the very place of the minimal difference, where there is almost nothing” (57). The literary works I have discussed in this chapter have dealt with certain political incarnations of the project of the “new man,” in a fictional mode. The relations that these texts have to the aims of the struggle are quite distinct, insofar as each is situated in a chronologically different relation to the revolution. Under Western Eyes is a work that exists entirely in the mode of anticipation: there is nothing, no achieved revolution, putative or otherwise, to engage with, only a number of discernible political orientations towards it, all of which are equally presumptive. The subtractive mode that the novel inhabits towards those orientations is therefore contained and personalized; Razumov himself bears the full burden of it, and the work is easily (and has been most frequently) read as an existentialist one—as the study of a singular, although representative “modern” character. A Grain of Wheat is set at a moment in which the promise of freedom is being formally delivered upon. The mood of the novel at the end is pensive, even ominous; the “shame” that is the medium of the work’s critical, indeed subtractive relation to the personal, political, and ethical categories of the colonial world and of the anticolonial struggle is left intact; shame itself is exempt from the critique. Where Malevich, in a poem written around the time of the composition of White on White (and quoted by Badiou), celebrates “a new day in the desert”—another image of the “invent[ion of] content at the very place of the minimal difference” (The Century 57)—Ngũgĩ’s subtractive mode is anything but celebratory. The betrayal is “universal”; Gikonyo, the new holders of power in Nairobi, even General R., are all implicated in it; but at the point at which the narrative ends, betrayal falls short of implicating the metaphysics of betrayal itself. David’s Story is the work that comes closest of the three texts to the spirit and measure of Badiou’s subtraction. The first words of the novel are: “This is and is not David’s story” (1). Everything takes place in the gap between the is and the is not. Wicomb invents content in the place of that “minimal difference,” such that the event of the work is not David’s

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 131

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

132

chapter 4

story of the struggle, nor the work of literary fiction that the narrator’s inclinations would have led her to create, but the impossibility of either. This impossibility does not exist outside the text—as a condition or set of conditions by which the text finds itself determined—but is produced by it. The story has no positive content. “Every density, every claim to substantiality, and every assertion of reality,” in Badiou’s words, is erased immediately upon being posited.38 This is especially noticeable in the context of the narrator’s attempts to render Dulcie realistically, by, say, providing imagined details from her childhood, such as the story of a “Miss Polly” doll made out of a nylon stocking. The narrator works up this tale into a symbolic precursor of the stockings that Dulcie would later wear over her head: first, as a teenager, to flatten her hair, and later as a guerrilla (81–82). David reads these experimental fragments as they are being written and rejects them for their literariness. The effect of these moments is to subtract from the very category of writing, to invent the work of the writer in the place of the “minimal difference” within writing itself. The relation of this work, then, to the figure of the writer is exactly contrary to that of Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. Wicomb’s novel abandons writing even as it engages in it. The narrator’s own writing is persistently evacuated, not only by the novel’s framing conceit—the sense of attentiveness to style as nothing more than a foible, “occasional flights of fancy,” “attempts at artistry”—but also in these corrosive exchanges with David. The same should be said of the novel’s treatment of the categories that reside at the heart of the struggle: freedom and betrayal. Again, the historical “realization” of these categories exposes the disjunction that is internal to them. “Ugh, the things that pass for freedom these days,” says David’s wife Sally, another former guerrilla, when she hears of David’s impending trip to Kokstad to investigate his Griqua roots. For Sally, the obsession with origins is one of the ways in which the struggle is already being betrayed in the new South Africa. Sally is mobilizing David’s own unsentimentality against him, as is clear from David’s interactions with the narrator discussed earlier. “And now I suppose we’ll be getting ourselves up in Khoisan karossies, strum our ramkies, and stomp around being traditional hunters and gatherers. Nice and phoney, hey, which is why the leaders who preach this nonsense sit buttoned up in their fourpiece suits” (28). Sally’s outrage anticipates the story told later of the Griqua leader Andrew Abraham Stockenstrom Le Fleur, whose desire for a homeland for the Griqua people led him in 1907 to abandon his claims for restitution for earlier land violations by the Boers, along with the objective of “African freedom,” in order to reach an accommodation with Louis Botha’s new Union of South Africa government that would give the Griquas their

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 132

8/13/2010 2:04:37 PM

Conrad, Ngũgĩ, Wicomb

133

own territory—land, Wicomb has him saying, “in which we as a people can live and develop separately” (161). In this moment, the people, the subject of the struggle, are transformed into what Hegel called a “faction.” Le Fleur’s actions took place under a lofty banner: the Griquas were, in his phrase, “God’s stepchildren.” And yet, these actions aided in the establishment of the apartheid state, the first step of which was the Natives’ Land Act, passed by Botha in 1913. For David, Le Fleur is a “sellout” (150). However, David looks upon the excesses of his own political movement, of which he was also a victim, with an indulgence that might almost be called sentimental, were it not for the fact that it too is presented under a somewhat lofty banner, that of David’s realism, his unsentimentality: “Every movement produces its crackpots, its power-mongers who cross over into a corrupted version of the freedom they set out to defend,” he tells the narrator. “Stick to the real world and you’ll find the buzz of bluebottles deafening” (196). Unsentimentality is precisely as inconsistent, as reversible, as constituted by “minimal difference,” as freedom, fidelity, or betrayal. What about shame? In David’s Story shame, too, is subtracted from its own “claim to substantiality,” its own “assertion of reality.” In her essay “Shame and Identity,” already referred to in chapter 1, Wicomb proposes that the shame of Coloured South Africans is the shame of the history of concupiscence. “[The] failure or inability to represent our history in popular forms and consequently the total erasure of slavery from the folk memory presumably has its roots in shame: shame for our origins of slavery, shame for the miscegenation, and shame, as colonial racism became institutionalized, for being black.”39 Shame, in Wicomb’s essay, is treated as both substantial and secondary; both determining (of the erasure of slavery from collective memory) and determined (by miscegenation, by color). In David’s Story, however, Wicomb incorporates into the body of the work a robust refusal of this view of the substantiality of shame. As Wicomb’s Le Fleur attempts to sell the compact with Botha and the new territory in Namaqualand to the Griquas, he invokes the shame of concupiscence in his support: Let us leave the Union to the Europeans as a white man’s country; they, too, must learn to stand on their own feet and do without our labour, make their own arrangements with the kaffirs. Since they cannot look upon their shame, since they must discriminate against their own flesh, we whose very faces are branded with their shame will remove ourselves from their sight. Here good people, is the solution for God’s stepchildren: absolute separation. From white and from black. (161)

Le Fleur’s rhetoric of shame is most immediately offensive to his wife, Rachael, who recoils from his use of the term: “She thought bitterly of

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 133

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

134

chapter 4

woman’s labour, of the joy of birth that could never be shameful—never a problem, yet there was Andrew, spreading the infection of shame” (162). Rachael, who is an invention of Wicomb’s, refuses the concept of shame at the moment of its assertion; the effect is to expose the disjunction, the gap, that is constitutive of shame itself. Rachael, unable or unwilling to function any longer as Le Fleur’s secretary and amanuensis, ends her story in silence and mental collapse. In Under Western Eyes and A Grain of Wheat, but most directly in David’s Story, two shames come into view: one that is articulated, visible, and invoked, but that cannot survive its invocation; and another that is present only in its absence, an event of shame that is felt most directly and intimately in its uninstantiability.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 134

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

part three

The Event of Shame

The weaknesses of a book are often the counterparts of empty intentions that one did not know how to implement. In this sense, a declaration of intent is evidence of real modesty in relation to the ideal book. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 135

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 136

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

Chapter Five The Event of Shame in J. M. Coetzee Vietnam, like everything else, is inside me, and in Vietnam, with a little diligence, a little patience, all truths about human nature. —J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands Perhaps I was not born to be a writer. —J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands

The works of few contemporary novelists can be said to be as consistently riven by shame as those of J. M. Coetzee. As a first hypothesis, we can say that for Coetzee, as much as for Primo Levi and T. E. Lawrence, shame is inseparable from the activity of literary production. Coetzee’s books offer perhaps the clearest illustration of the formula introduced at the beginning of this book, the inversion of another proposition by Gilles Deleuze: The ability to write—is there any better reason to feel ashamed? Coetzee, of course, is well known as a South African writer. The historical context of his early fiction is the period in which the apartheid system was entering a phase of brutal consolidation: the two decades preceding the elevation to power of President F. W. De Klerk in 1989, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, the extension of voting rights to Africans in 1991, and the dismantling of the apartheid regime with the landslide election victory of the African National Congress in 1994. There is every reason why the work of a writer producing under such conditions, living with all the privileges enjoyed by the ruling white minority, might be suffused with a sense of personal shame. And yet I will argue that the substance of Coetzee’s shame is not primarily ethical or political, at least not in the usual sense of these terms. Coetzee’s shame is not a response to the moral obscenity of the apartheid system; one might more easily read the presence of shame in his work as a manifestation of the impossibility, even the obscenity, of a literary response to apartheid. As in the readings of Caryl Phillips and V. S. Naipaul in previous chapters, then, shame is not a preexisting subject matter of the writing; rather, shame is so intimately bound up with writing that it is impossible to separate them. This is not to say that Coetzee’s shame does not arise from his experience of and implication in the apartheid system. In a writer like Coetzee, these events are inseparable. Apartheid is the occasion of Coet-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 137

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

138

chapter 5

zee’s writing and its condition of possibility; this is precisely the meaning of Walter Benjamin’s famous statement in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”1 Coetzee’s works are consistently framed as “documents of civilization” in Benjamin’s terms. Shame, like apartheid, is not extractable from Coetzee’s writing; rather, Coetzee’s writing is his shame, and vice versa, to the extent that should a character in one of his books manage to transcend his or her shame, should the narrative of shame be rejected in the body of the writing itself, still, shame is the materiality and substance of that rejection. Shame, as we have seen, has a spiral or abyssal structure, meaning not only that there is nothing more shameful than shame, but that shame is resistant to genealogical or etiological structures of comprehension. The spiral structure militates against both the ethical instantiation of shame—the claim of an individual to be shamed by his own or another’s actions—and its overcoming. In a situation of ethical or moral complexity, such as the exercise of writing within and about apartheid, shame may be neither invoked nor transcended without incurring more of it. Shame is a marker of privilege. There is nothing more shameful than the ability to feel shame, to write about shame—unless it is the facility of overcoming it. For Adorno, one of the signs of the impoverishment of thought after Auschwitz is precisely the ability to transcend it: the idea that Auschwitz is a historical event whose effects must be limited in time. Another is its apparent opposite: the tendency to invoke the situation as an unquestionable ontological fact, in a form such as “the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz.”2 Similarly, in Coetzee, the reverberations of shame include not only the impossibility of overcoming it, but the impossibility of instantiating it. Shame, as many writers including John Limon have observed, is incompatible with its own acknowledgment.3 Once such acknowledgment takes place, it can become a new source of shame. The Problem of “Agency” One way of framing the issue raised by the presence of shame in Coetzee’s work is in terms of agency; that is to say, the question of the politics of writing and of the “positionality” of the writer. “Agency” implies a certain positive relation between human activity and its effects in the world, an understanding of human activity as, by definition, purposeful and meaningful. South Africa, as David Attwell has observed, is a particularly dramatic setting for the staging of these concerns, since, in such a “fragmented national context” the locatedness of the writer is always starkly visible. Certain questions become unavoidable: “Who is the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 138

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

J. M. Coetzee

139

self-of-writing? What is his or her power, representativeness, legitimacy, and authority?”4 No writer, suggests Attwell, has examined the problem of agency as “rigorously” as Coetzee. He goes on to offer a compelling chronological account of the relation towards agency as it has developed in Coetzee’s work, from Dusklands, Coetzee’s first novel, until Age of Iron, the most recent at the time Attwell was writing: The movement of agency in Coetzee can be traced schematically: beginning with intervention and subversion (Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country), agency passes through a moment of displacement in the realization of its association with colonialism (Waiting for the Barbarians); it then finds a limited freedom in the moment-by-moment enunciations of textuality (Life and Times of Michael K), before ending in abnegation (Foe). In Age of Iron … there is a certain recovery of agency, but it is qualified in particularly somber terms. (3–4)

In the following pages I will seek to extend this characterization, but also to reexamine it in the light of the works that have appeared since Attwell’s study, as well as the presence of shame in Coetzee’s writing, a subject about which surprisingly little has been written.5 The quandary that most consistently troubles and defines Coetzee’s body of work— which comprises to date eleven volumes of fiction and three of semifictional autobiography—is something like the following: How is it possible to write conscientiously while also acknowledging the complicity of one’s writing in the conditions one hopes to bring to an end? How does one write in the knowledge of injustice without positing one’s writing as an indictment, that is, without implicitly claiming one’s own writing and one’s being as a writer as exempt from the injustice? How can I justify the supreme presumptuousness of writing? Coetzee’s trajectory may be read as a painful, halting negotiation of a route through the quandaries addressed by such questions. One of the characteristics of that negotiation has been a succession of strategies with regard to the question of historical context and specificity. A criticism made repeatedly of Coetzee’s early fiction, in particular by critics within South Africa, is that, in Attwell’s words, Coetzee failed to offer a clear picture of “the play of historical forces” (1) or to establish any ethical orientation towards colonialism or apartheid. Nadine Gordimer’s 1984 review of The Life and Times of Michael K in the New York Review of Books is an exemplary document.6 Gordimer disparages Coetzee for his failure in earlier works to deal with the South African situation “historically,” a failure of which she exonerates Michael K, primarily on account of the book’s identifiable setting in contemporary South Africa. Coetzee, she writes, has in this work “won (or lost?) his inner struggle and now writes, from among the smell of weary flesh, a work of the closest and

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 139

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

140

chapter 5

deepest engagement with the victimized people of Michael K’s life and times.” Nevertheless, Gordimer criticizes even this work for failing to envisage a solution. Her use of the term “shock” to describe the novel’s impact is reminiscent of Georg Lukács’s critical writings on modernism. “Ought angst to be taken as an absolute, or ought it to be overcome?” asks Lukács in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. “Should it be considered one reaction among others, or should it become the determinant of the condition humaine?”7 As if in direct answer to Lukács—indeed, she cites him momentarily—Gordimer writes that Michael K “denies the energy of the will to resist evil.” On the evidence of this book, Coetzee … does not believe in the possibility of blacks establishing a new regime that will do much better. … The organicism that Georg Lukács defines as the integral relation between private and social destiny is distorted here more than is allowed for by the subjectivity that is in every writer. The exclusion is a central one that may eat out the heart of the work’s unity of art and life.

In the light of the discussion in the previous chapter, it will be apparent that what Coetzee “does not believe in” may be less “the possibility of blacks establishing a new regime” than the possibility of representing or articulating such a regime in a work; or the possibility that any representable freedom would be substantive, the representability of freedom itself.8 Much as Gordimer surmises, if there are lessons to be learned from Coetzee’s shame, they are not lessons communicated directly in the texts; for Coetzee’s protagonists and author-surrogates are, without exception, spokespersons primarily for the partiality and unreliability of their own speaking positions. Sam Durrant describes the effect of Coetzee’s works in an elegant formulation. Implicitly defending them from comments by critics, including Gordimer, for whom Coetzee’s “allegories” amount to the “dehistoricization” of apartheid, Durrant writes: “Instead of banishing or exorcising history, Coetzee’s novels are themselves banished.”9 The “state of shock” that Gordimer accuses the novels of reproducing is for Durrant a form of “self-diagnosis” (25): a refusal not of historical understanding so much as of a literary practice that would conceive of understanding as its own privilege and possibility. In a 2002 lecture organized by the international writer’s association PEN, a version of which was published as a newspaper article, Gordimer spoke in a personal mode of “the sacred charge of the writer,” and of the writer’s “integrity to the Word”: “Because I was a writer—for it’s an early state of being, before a word has been written, and not an attribute of being published—I became witness to the unspoken in my society.”10 In Coetzee, such sentiments are unimaginable. The substance (and mystique) attached to Gordimer’s notion of “being a

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 140

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

J. M. Coetzee

141

writer” amount to an implicit plea of exception, of exculpation, as does the ethical and political agency that she claims for it. At stake in the respective aesthetic strategies of these two writers is a distinction between two radically different conceptions of agency: one that presupposes the basis of ethics in human perception, and the correctability or improvability of perception as an ethical project, and another that does not allow any sovereignty or privilege to perception—not even, or least of all, when filtered through the being of the gifted, exceptional writer. “I realized,” says Gordimer, “that instead of restricting, inhibiting and coarsely despoiling aesthetic liberty, the existential condition of witness was enlarging, inspiring aesthetic liberty, breaching the previous limitations of my sense of form and use of language through necessity: to create form and use it anew.” For Coetzee, the condition of the white writer in South Africa is one of enforced displacement from such ideas of exception, and from the consolation they provide.11 This displacement, as I hope to demonstrate, is not ethical in motivation but ontological. Without exception, Coetzee’s works participate in an ethical discourse—how could they not? —but for Coetzee this participation is a measure not of their significance but of their failing, not of their contribution but of their inadequacy. It is not necessary to consult Coetzee’s reflections on his own work to confirm this assessment. However, such reflections are of interest, as much for their failures of perception as for their perception. Speaking with Attwell in 1990, shortly before the publication of Age of Iron,12 Coetzee characterizes that work not as a statement of any sort, but as a “contest” of possible solutions to the primary ethical question of the novel: From where does the authority come to speak of the suffering of those who cannot speak? The contest takes place within the novel, and within the soul of the narrator and protagonist, Mrs. Curren, a former classics professor who is dying of cancer. (Coetzee refers to her in the interview as “Elizabeth,” although the book gives only her first initial.) The antagonists in this contest, according to Coetzee, are “the authority of the dying” and “the authority of the classics”; yet neither is upheld by the novel as a solution. The novel declines to provide an answer; indeed, Mrs. Curren’s struggle to speak conscientiously, in the absence of any authority to do so, is the story of the novel. “What matters,” says Coetzee in the interview with Attwell, “is that the contest is staged, that the dead have their say, even those who speak from a totally untenable historical position.” He goes on to finesse this statement: “What is of importance in what I have just said is the phrasing: the phrases is staged, is heard; not should be staged, should be heard. There is no ethical imperative that I claim access to. Elizabeth is the one who believes in should, who believes in believes in. As for me, the book is written, it will be published, nothing can stop it” (Doubling the Point 250).

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 141

8/13/2010 2:04:38 PM

142

chapter 5

This statement is disingenuous. It disavows the ethical register—“There is no ethical imperative that I claim access to”—but in doing so succumbs to the same structural contradiction as Age of Iron itself. David Attwell sums up the paradoxes of the novel in a rhetorical question: “What kind of authority is it that rests on the assertion of its own irrelevance?” If Age of Iron may be described as a work of “ethical reconstruction,” or the “recovery of agency,” as Attwell says, that objective is effected only negatively, by “disclaiming the authority of the narrator” (J. M. Coetzee 122). But “disclaiming” is itself an authoritative gesture. No resolution of this contradiction is achieved within Age of Iron. The result, in accordance with the formula that has been outlined in earlier chapters of this book, is shame, which dominates the mood of the novel and occupies a central place in the narrative. Shame appears in the gap between the gesture of ethical “disavowal” and the authority that is presupposed and demonstrated in the very capacity to make such a gesture. Coetzee’s disclaimer, then, obscures the presence of shame, which is rooted precisely in the fact of the struggle and in its lack of resolution. If all that mattered were that “the contest is staged, that the dead have their say,” there would be no need to stage either the contest or the withholding of a solution—for the work of the novel is the staging, not the saying. Works that lack such self-interrogation, after all, are easily found, works in which people with varying degrees of cultural and economic power “have their say”; but they tend not to involve the participation of figures with scruples such as Coetzee’s.13 Nonetheless, Coetzee’s characterization of Age of Iron is instructive precisely because of its articulation of a desire to escape from the discourse of ethics, which is also to say, from a shame that is limited by its attachment to a shamed being or character. Two Shames in Coetzee Like Michael K, Age of Iron is set in South Africa. The protagonist, Mrs. Curren, is writing a letter that will only be read after her death; the letter is the text of the novel. It is addressed to her daughter, an émigré in America; and yet, as she tells Vercueil, the homeless man she invites into her house, and to whom it will fall to post the letter on her demise, it is not her daughter but she herself who is the exile (76). Mrs Curren’s “exile,” then, has everything to do with writing. What she is exiled from, as a writer, are the mythologies of understanding and self-expression, the notion of writing as a vocation, and the idea that writing could be a vehicle of personal or social expiation. To Vercueil she rails against the comfortable register of white South African liberalism: “the same bleat-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 142

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

J. M. Coetzee

143

ing call in a thousand different directions: ‘I!’ ‘I!’ ‘I!’” (80). Yet the trouble she has taken to control the circumstances in which her text will be read ensures that her exile is really a form of self-exile; hence, it too is irreducibly steeped in the ethical. Shame is as good a term as any to describe the effect of speaking under such conditions; for Mrs. Curren, no less than the whites she chastises, is condemned (by the epistolary form) to using the first person singular. “Perhaps shame is nothing more than the name for the way I feel all the time,” she says. “The name for the way in which people live who would prefer to be dead” (86). Yet, as she is aware, shame does not survive its expression; it loses its ethical legitimacy, its consistency, simply by being spoken. “There is a shame … so warm, so intimate, so comforting that it brings more shame flooding with it,” she reflects (119). This moment is a first intimation of the formal quandary that will preoccupy the works Coetzee will produce over the next two decades: The Master of Petersburg (1994), Boyhood (1997), Disgrace (1999), Youth (2002), Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). How to preserve the subject matter of the fiction from being destroyed by its treatment in the work? How to safeguard the truth of a work against the erosion that is effected by its appearance in the work? This quandary is dramatized by shame, for shame is a consistent thematic in all these works, an entity operating at the level of content which is named and conceptualized accordingly. However, there is also a less readily framed entity that the text is unable to name without doing irreversible violence to it. This second shame is inseparable from the work: from the circumstances of its composition and reception, from its “form” and “content”—inseparable from, but also irreducible to them. Shame in Coetzee, then, is far more extensive than the concept of shame is able to comprehend. The concept limits shame to the dimensions of a person or a group of people who are ashamed. In order to be grasped fully, Coetzee’s shame needs to be thought outside those principles of representation and expression that seek to reduce and contain it, outside the person of Coetzee himself: his biography, his political beliefs, his historical situation, his artistic intentions. This is not to say that shame in Coetzee’s works is not rooted in ethical horror at, say, the political system in which he grew up; nor that the psychodynamics of a personal or family history don’t supply a viable narrative of shame to place alongside this political or ethical one. It is to say rather that the logic of shame, considered as an affect that volatilizes its linguistic and conceptual forms, requires that we give up categories predicated upon the centrality and sovereignty of the human, in all their explanatory power. Shame is a revulsion from that sovereignty. Its “spi-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 143

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

144

chapter 5

ral” or “crystalline” structure is evident in the further revulsion from a version of sovereignty that installs itself within that revulsion and goes under the name of shame. Age of Iron, then, inaugurates a new orientation in Coetzee’s work, towards a moment at which shame will no longer be an object of the writing, a feeling to be represented, but will be simultaneous with it. At such a moment—one that is aspired to, never achieved—the shame constituted by the work will no longer have anything to do with the shame that is spoken in it. In The Master of Petersburg, we see this crystalline structure in the process of formation.14 Aside from Disgrace, The Master of Petersburg is perhaps Coetzee’s most conventional work of fiction. A man grief-stricken over the loss of his son Pavel in an accident visits St. Petersburg, the scene of Pavel’s recent life and death. He moves into his son’s lodgings. We learn in the course of the first few chapters that the man is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the year is 1869, The Devils has yet to be written, and Pavel is his stepson, his wife’s son from an earlier marriage. Early on in the novel he is sitting in his son’s room, in an intense sorrow of bereavement, when the landlady’s young daughter brings him some tea. He does not speak to her; in fact “he waits for her to say something”: He wants her to speak. It is an outrageous demand to make on a child, but he makes the demand nevertheless. He raises his eyes to her. Nothing is veiled. He stares at her with what can only be nakedness.   For a moment she meets his gaze. Then she averts her eyes, steps back uncertainly, makes a strange, awkward kind of curtsy, and flees the room.   He is aware, even as it unfolds, that this is a passage he will not forget and may even one day rework into his writing. A certain shame passes over him, but it is superficial and transitory. First in his writing and now in his life, shame seems to have lost its power, its place taken by a blank and amoral passivity that shrinks from no extreme. It is as if, out of the corner of an eye, he can see clouds advancing on him with terrific speed, stormclouds. Whatever stands in their path will be swept away. With dread, but with excitement too, he waits for the storm to break (23–24).

What are these “stormclouds,” so impervious to the “superficial” shame that announces their arrival? A few pages later, during a conversation about Pavel with the landlady, Anna Sergeyevna, Fyodor Mikhailovich is taken over by a physical “trembling”: “Something is on its way, something whose name he is trying to avoid. … I am behaving like a character in a book, he thinks” (27). What is on its way, first of all, is his epilepsy; Dostoevsky’s epileptic fits are “the burden he carries with him in the world” (69). What is on its way is also his next work of literature. Everything that happens to Fyodor in The Master of Petersburg is an an-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 144

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

J. M. Coetzee

145

ticipation of The Devils, the novel in which he will rework the bedroom encounter with the girl, for example, into the episode (suppressed from the published version of Dostoevsky’s novel) of Stavrogin’s molestation of fourteen-year-old Matryosha.15 There is nothing mystical about this anticipation; it refers simply to the work’s projected existence in the mind of the author, affecting his perception before any artistic transfiguration has taken place. Fyodor, as he intuits, is already living in a novel at the moment of the conversation with Anna: not just the novel we are reading, by J. M. Coetzee, but the novel by Dostoevsky that has its gestation in the encounter with Matryona. Finally, what is on its way is an irresistible, indescribable, and unnameable shame, a shame that bears no relationship to the named, “transitory” shame that, he feels, has “lost its power.” Both epilepsy and writing are associated with shame. Before “the shame of the fit” descends upon him, Fyodor must find a place of utmost privacy “where he can manage the episode as best he can” (68). The same might be said of the intensely private shame of the writer: the shame of living always with an eye on the next work; the searing awareness that no means of escaping the shameful, corrosive effect of writing may be found in writing; the knowledge that every attempt to construct justifications for writing within the writing itself will always be dragged down, “perverted” (235) by their appearance in the work; that no ethical reflection on the relationship between writing and shame, no instantiation of shame can erase the shame: quite the opposite. The following self-strafing reflection is not spoken aloud, but it takes place in Anna’s presence: I pay and I sell: that is my life. Sell my life, sell the lives of those around me. Sell everyone. A Yakovlev [the name of Anna’s employer, a shopkeeper] trading in lives. … A Judas, not a Jesus. Sell you, sell your daughter, sell all those I love. Sold Pavel alive and will now sell the Pavel inside me, if I can find a way…. A life without honour; treachery without limit; confession without end. (222)

“If I can find a way”: what is meant is a way, or a form, that will not levy too much shame; that will enable the fact of the “selling” to be hidden from the seller, if only momentarily, and from the buyer. What better means of sublimation than the claim to write ethically, for the improvement of the world or in order to draw attention to inequality and injustice? And if that claim becomes corroded by too overt an appearance in the work, how about the claim to be writing the very lack of ethical substance, the shame of writing, into writing? Each time the shame returns, greater than before. Is there any truth to writing? The truth that Coetzee’s Fyodor imagines in his darkest moments is the truth of the body, the truth of the epileptic fits, but that truth has no positive content;

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 145

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

146

chapter 5

it is, in its negativity, like the truth of writing and of shame: “They are not visitations. Far from it: they are nothing—mouthfuls of his life sucked out of him as if by a whirlwind that leaves behind not even a memory of darkness” (69). Diary of a Bad Year How is it possible to talk, or to write critically, about a shame that is indescribable, unconceptualizable, and unnameable? Paradoxically, one place in which such a shame may be discerned is a text in which Coetzee writes about shame more directly and explicitly than anywhere else, and in a register that closely resembles direct, authorial commentary. The narrator of Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is an unnamed male writer whom we know only by the initials that he shares with Coetzee, JC. Like Coetzee himself, JC has recently moved from his native South Africa to Australia; he is, we read, responsible for a novel entitled Waiting for the Barbarians and “a collection of essays on censorship” (Coetzee’s Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship was published in 1996);16 and his work has recently effected a turn away from the novelistic to an essayistic mode (Diary 54). One is tempted to include this change in literary orientation among the ways in which JC is indistinguishable from Coetzee; except that the tendency of Coetzee’s recent fictions to utilize the essayistic register demonstrates something more interesting: the ability of the artwork to narrow the distance separating it from other genres to an almost infinite degree, without conceding anything of its artistic status. To use Alain Badiou’s terms once again, in Diary of a Bad Year we are in the realm of the “minimal difference”: the distinction—barely detectable but absolute— between “the place and what takes place”; between, in other words, the instantiation and the event.17 JC (or “Señor C,” as his occasional Filipina secretary, Anya, refers to him) was born in 1934, six years earlier than Coetzee, the disjunction seeming to serve as an arbitrary point of differentiation from the author, a red flag for readers who might be tempted to take JC for Coetzee. Just as the near identity of Coetzee and JC functions to dramatize their radical difference—or more accurately, the difference within the real itself—so the explicit thematization of shame in Diary of a Bad Year functions to detach the event of shame from the “unity” that it attains in its essayistic representation: the instantiation of shame from “the vanishing term that constitutes it” (Badiou 65). Diary of a Bad Year is made up primarily of essays, contributions by JC to a fictional volume entitled “Strong Opinions” that will also feature five other “éminences grises” (22). In a second level of text below the essays runs a paratextual commentary by JC about his interactions with Anya

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 146

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

J. M. Coetzee

147

and her boyfriend, Alan. Anya herself, who is responsible for transcribing JC’s essays, supplies a third level of personal narration along the bottom of each page, in which we read about her friendship with Senõr C, the growing tensions between herself and Alan, and her increasingly critical opinions of Senõr C’s “Opinions.” One of JC’s essays is entitled “On national shame,” the theme of which is the “shamelessness” of the United States regime that JC holds responsible for violations of the Geneva Convention by American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. The point of departure for the essay is an article in the New Yorker that “makes it as plain as day” that the United States administration under George W. Bush sanctioned the abuse of prisoners and the systematic evasion and violation of international “laws and conventions proscribing torture” (39).18 JC paraphrases the philosophy of the administration by reference to the category of shame: “In the new dispensation we have created, they implicitly say, the old powers of shame have been abolished. Whatever abhorrence you may feel counts for nothing. You cannot touch us, we are too powerful.” In such a situation, the absent shame devolves upon “Americans of conscience” and “individual Westerners in general” (41). The logic of shame elaborated here is similar to that in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame (1983), where the shamelessness of the military regime of Raza Hyder (modeled on General Zia-ul-Haq, ruler of Pakistan from 1977 until 1988) creates an incarnation of displaced shame in the monstrous character of Sufiya Zinobia.19 “Dishonour is no respecter of fine distinctions,” writes JC. “Dishonour descends upon one’s shoulders, and once it has descended no amount of clever pleading will dispel it” (40). He describes the postapartheid shame of white South Africans in similar terms: “The generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name” (44). In an attempt to understand the apparently indiscriminate character of shame—its tendency to settle upon the shoulders of those not directly responsible for shameful acts—he evokes its opposite, the “large, swelling” (and equally indiscriminate) emotion that one might have felt listening to, say, the first performance of a symphony by Sibelius: “one would have felt proud,” he writes, “proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff.” Pride and shame, according to JC, refer us respectively, but in similar ways, to the best and worst of human achievement: “Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other” (45). Both shame and pride lift us out of a state of individual responsibility, bind us into a sensuous awareness of the larger human world of which we are a part.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 147

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

148

chapter 5

Many pages later, in the second level of the text, this essay is the occasion of a disagreement between JC and Anya. She reacts to his claim that “dishonour descends upon one’s shoulders” with skepticism, even hostility. Anya connects his “political” shame—a shame that, for all the subtleties of his exposition, is ethically removed from his own person—with a more elusive and substantial shame that JC has said nothing to her about, but which she attributes to the sexual prurience that she has detected in his attitude towards her. If JC is ashamed, she implies (and JC reports), it is for reasons that implicate his own person more directly than he realizes. To illustrate her point, Anya tells him a story from her own life: a few years earlier, she and a girlfriend were raped by “three American college boys” on a boat on the Yucatan. Despite the reticence of the local police captain, who tried to persuade her not to press charges for the sake of her “honour,” she refused to feel ashamed. “In the twentieth century, when a man rapes a woman it is the man’s dishonour,” she tells JC. “You have got it wrong, Mister C… . Abuse, rape, torture, it doesn’t matter what: the news is, as long as it is not our fault, as long as you are not responsible, the dishonour doesn’t stick to you. So you have been making yourself miserable over nothing” (101, 104–5). JC initially rejects her argument: “Dishonour won’t be washed away. Won’t be wished away. … Your three American boys—I have never laid eyes on them, but they dishonour me nevertheless. And I would be very surprised if in your inmost depths they did not continue to dishonour you” (109, 111). Eventually, however, in the relative privacy of the novel’s second layer, he wonders whether she may be right, and that what he called “dishonour, the disgrace of being alive in these times” is really “something punier and more manageable”: depression, perhaps, or just gloom (141). It is difficult to avoid the implications this proposition might have for Coetzee’s own body of work, not least Disgrace, the 1999 novel in which we are invited to connect the invidious personal circumstances of the protagonist, Professor David Lurie, who is accused of sexual impropriety towards a student, with the larger shame of being a white citizen of “the new South Africa”—or, larger still, with the “shame of being a man.” Has this distinguished literary career, which has included two Booker Prize– winning novels and in 2003 the Nobel Prize, been anything other than a thirty-five-year indulgence of marketable spleen?20 In giving such views to Anya, Diary of a Bad Year addresses the possibility that shame is a self-serving myth, an alibi that white males erect in order to leave intact the inequality of their relations with others. One of the effects of such a myth would be the relegation of women and other identity formations to the status of things about which one is ashamed, and whose subordinate status is perpetuated by the earnest avowal of shame. When JC gives his shame dimensions that border on the metaphysical—the shame of being

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 148

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

J. M. Coetzee

149

human or, as he says, the shame of living “in shameful times” (96)—what is it, we might ask, that differentiates his formulation from, say, the final utterance of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, who told his interviewer Gitta Sereny, “My guilt … my guilt … is that I am still here”?21 What prevents shame from being yet another register of exculpation, to be placed alongside the myth of the writer’s agency and exceptionality? In Shame, Rushdie narrates a story similar to Anya’s, one of many digressive moments in Rushdie’s novel that are intended, apparently, to underpin its heavily allegorical treatment of shame. The story concerns a girl—unnamed, uncontextualized—who is “set upon in a late-night underground train by a group of teenage boys” in London (Shame 119). Rushdie’s girl is “Asian,” the boys “predictably white.” “Afterwards,” he writes, “remembering her beating, she feels not angry but ashamed. She does not want to talk about what happened, she makes no official complaint, she hopes the story won’t get out” (119). Rushdie’s narrator comments: “It is a typical reaction, and the girl is not one girl but many.” The story differs from Coetzee’s insofar as Rushdie provides an interpretive frame, organized around the category of cultural difference, that is not detachable from the story. Rushdie’s narrator thinks in schematic cultural categories; the girl’s experience, he tells us, is a generic one, in relation to which he too is clearly situated: “We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride” (117–18). In both stories, Coetzee’s and Rushdie’s, what is uncomfortably apparent is that the girl in question is the invention of a male novelist, or, if not the invention, an object selected for attention.22 For both writers, the question of women’s sexual shame is an overdetermined one. In Diary of a Bad Year, the woman’s account differs dramatically from those of the men in her life; the novel thereby seeks to right the wrong that is done to the woman (or to women) by the very motif of shame: “Don’t you tell me how I feel!” says Anya to JC, giving him a look of “pure cold rage” (115). And yet, even in that look of rage, what we have, indisputably and irreducibly, is a male novelist ventriloquizing a female character. Where in this text do we situate Coetzee? To put this question is also to ask: What is the predicative substance of the text? Is there an utterance that may be attributed to it? Would it be possible to offer a paraphrase of this text in the register, say, of ethical prescription or political opinion? The most obvious answer is that, as in Coetzee’s description of the “contest” in Age of Iron, the truth of the text is produced not in the statements either of JC or Anya, but in the discrepancy between them, or in their

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 149

8/13/2010 2:04:39 PM

150

chapter 5

conjunction. The discursive substance of this novel would be locatable, then, in the interaction between its eloquent writer-protagonist and the figure who lacks access to the apparatus of writing other than as the writer’s amanuensis. As such, Anya occupies the same place as the characters who throughout Coetzee’s fiction (Friday in Foe, Vercueil in Age of Iron, the blind girl in Waiting for the Barbarians, Petrus in Disgrace, Marijana in Slow Man) have provoked in his writer-protagonists feelings of shame. However, this answer does not take full account of the formal strategies of Coetzee’s later fictions. With the publication of Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee’s work has undertaken a radical reflection on the nature of fiction and on its ontological implications. One of the features of this enterprise, as I have begun to argue, is the continuing transformation of shame from an experience rendered in his writing into a principle that affects—indeed, completely reinflects—every element and utterance within it. Of course, Coetzee’s work has always attempted to acknowledge and do justice to the implication of literature in relations of power and inequality. The same implication informs the sense of paralysis and inarticulacy in earlier works such as Dusklands or Foe, where ventriloquy seems to be the very condition of speech. But the three novels mentioned above, culminating in Diary of a Bad Year, reveal the extent to which even shame—the acknowledgment of shame, the thematic of shame—is thoroughly implicated in those relations. It invites us to consider whether this most consistent presence in Coetzee’s fiction taken as a whole might not be the very means by which his own writing practice has held onto its privileged relationship to the apparatus of literary production. In Coetzee, finally, shame and the repudiation of shame are revealed to be similarly impossible: this, perhaps, is the meaning of JC’s claim in Diary of a Bad Year—a claim that is therefore entirely compatible with Anya’s hostility towards it—that once the shame has descended upon one’s shoulders, “no amount of clever pleading will dispel it.” Shame in Coetzee is double: both obligatory and reprehensible, impossible and inevitable. The New Direction If Coetzee’s early fiction was said to neglect “the play of historical forces,” his late works repay this deficit with a level of personal and historical detail that is almost as scandalous as was the earlier reticence. Much of the critical fascination and exasperation aroused by these works arises from the suspicion that they are not really novels. Of the two lectures that Coetzee delivered at Princeton University, initially published together as The Lives of Animals but which later became chapters of Elizabeth

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 150

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

J. M. Coetzee

151

Costello, Marjorie Garber casually used the terms “metafiction” and “academic novel,” generic categories that, as she acknowledged, have the effect of rendering these discomfiting texts recognizable, pleasurable, and familiar. Garber’s response, published alongside the two “lectures,” is full of comparisons to other works and writers, further evidence of the texts’ disconcerting quality.23 Other adjectives appended to these works include “evasive,”24 “essayistic,”25 and “religious.”26 James Wood described Elizabeth Costello as “less a novel than a collection of linked sketches.”27 One indication of how Coetzee himself might see the project represented by these books is a line spoken by Paul Rayment, the protagonist of Slow Man, to Elizabeth Costello, the fictional Australian novelist introduced in the work that bears her name, who reappears a third of the way through Slow Man, apparently as the author of Paul’s own story. “In my earlier life,” Paul tells her, “I did not speak as freely about myself as I do today. … Decency held me back, decency or shame. … Since my accident I have begun to let some of that reticence slip. If you don’t speak now, I say to myself, when will you speak?”28 If we take Paul Rayment to be a spokesperson for Coetzee, we will be tempted to conclude that the direction of Coetzee’s work since Elizabeth Costello betokens something like a new transparency and a new impatience on Coetzee’s part with the demands of fictional form. When asked why he no longer writes novels, JC, the even less disguised surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year, replies: “A novel? No. I don’t have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today” (54). Could shame, as Paul intimates, be the explanation for the opacity of Coetzee’s early works, and something like an overcoming or a confrontation of shame explain the new transparency? A closer examination will reveal, rather, that the new mode of transparency in Coetzee functions to heighten rather than diminish the enigmatic quality of his work. Far from opening up a new order of directness, Coetzee’s latest work is better described as a new opacity (and thus, I will argue, as the embodiment of a “new shame”). A paragraph or so after Paul’s statement to Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man, we read the following: “What he has said about discarding reticence, about speaking his heart, is not, strictly speaking, true. Even to Marijana he has not really opened his heart” (157). Is there any way to understand such apparently conflicting speech acts without deciding between them—without, in other words, subscribing to the narrative of the “new transparency”? Might we see these successive interactions rather as a single discursive entity, characterized not by vacillation or a progressive self-awareness but by a discrepancy that is internal to it? One model of such an internal discrepancy is found in the French linguistic distinction

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 151

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

152

chapter 5

between the “statement” (énoncé) and the “enunciation” (énonciation). According to Émile Benveniste, this distinction entails the constitution of two inseparable but mutually irreducible subjects, even within a single utterance: we might call these the “spoken subject” and the “speaking subject” respectively.29 Thus, at the level of the statement (the “I,” or the instantiation), Paul’s first utterance to Elizabeth, quoted above, extends the promise of openness, while, at the level of the “enunciation” (the discursive occasion), the same speech act serves to reestablish his opacity. In the second passage, Paul is describing his own earlier disingenuousness, thereby demonstrating, at the level of the statement, his current ingenuousness. However, the chronic unreliability of Paul as an informant even of his own motives is simultaneously signaled and cemented, establishing a second opacity at the level of the enunciation. As so often in Coetzee, the author reveals with one hand and withholds with the other.30 This is not quite a shame spiral, more like a candor spiral, one that is destined never to level out into simple revelation or confession, since every moment of revelation is attended by its occluding counterpart. Such conjoined moments are for Paul the very substance of writing. “Isn’t the whole of writing a matter of second thoughts—second thoughts and third thoughts and further thoughts?” he says to Elizabeth Costello (228). The degree to which this dynamic of “transparency” and “opacity” will have implications for the story of Coetzee’s engagement with colonialism and apartheid is illustrated by a fascinating exchange in Coetzee’s shameridden fictional memoir Youth, set in London in the 1960s but published in 2002. Coetzee’s protagonist, a young South African, is asked an apparently innocent question by a Londoner: “Things are pretty bad there are they?” (meaning, South Africa), to which he replies, “Yes.” “Even for whites?” Coetzee projects his hero’s thoughts as follows: “How does one respond to a question like that? If you don’t want to perish of shame? If you want to escape the cataclysm to come?”31 One of the dominant qualities of Coetzee’s early work was a sense of the impossibility of addressing the situation of apartheid “transparently” in writing, and the shame of attempting to do so. In a situation of ethical complexity—and what situation worth writing about is not ethically complex?—writing is possible only as betrayal of that complexity. This sense (or sensation) of impossibility, represented vividly (and retrospectively) in Youth, is brought to a head in Disgrace. “More and more,” we read of David Lurie, “he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa” (117). Disgrace, we cannot fail to notice, is a novel written in English and set in South Africa. The “disgrace” of the title refers, then, not simply to events narrated in the work, but to the very fact of the work. This double (or crystalline) quality is what will define the relation to shame in the new direction announced by the publication of Elizabeth Costello.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 152

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

J. M. Coetzee

153

For Attwell, in 1993, the text on which the “movement of agency” in Coetzee’s work seemed to hinge was Waiting for the Barbarians (1980): a work in which agency itself is “displaced,” pending the “realization of its association with colonialism.” Shame, says the Magistrate in that text, means “indifference to annihilation” (21). The Magistrate’s fantasy of disappearance is egoistic; it remains unresolved at the end of the text, with the world still indecipherable, the self unabsolvable, the town unmemorializable, the past unrecoverable, the girl unfathomable, the shame intact. From our (later) perspective, the hinge text seems to be Disgrace: a work in which shame ceases to be merely an exchangeable or analyzable term in a literary system and instead takes on a crystalline presence, existing both within and without the system as the principle of its—rather than the subject’s—annihilation. Positively White: Slow Man and Corporeal Shame In Coetzee’s work, then, the event of shame is discontinuous with the instantiation of shame. All the affect lies, to adopt Badiou’s formulation, in the sometimes barely perceptible difference between the “place” of shame (that is, the instantiation) and the “taking-place” (Century 65). In the latter (the event), shame ceases to have a discursive presence; or rather, its discursive presence is purely incidental to it. The shame event is neither ethical, nor discursive, nor conceptual, but sensuous, corporeal. Coetzee, then, has been conducting his struggle on behalf of shame in opposition to the propensity of writing towards conceptualization, naming, and disembodiment. What is most shaming about writing is its ability to abstract from the body, to sublimate sensation into ethical prescription. This is so even, and especially, when it comes to experiences (such as shame) that are, in their essence, inimical to writing, for it is they that provide the substance of writing. To what extent is Coetzee’s struggle on behalf of shame also a struggle on behalf of the colonized? In order to answer this question, it will be necessary to revisit the corporeal dimension of shame and the degree to which this dimension takes on an especially dramatic significance in the colonial situation. Shame, of any kind, is an intensity that is both felt on the body and psychically oriented around it. The experience of being looked at, of coming under the regard of another, is, as Sartre notes, that of acquiring an outside, a “nature”—in other words, a body.32 Sartre’s metaphors are themselves appropriately somatic: the moment at which I become an “object” for the Other is my entry into a world that “flows toward the Other” (261). He speaks of this flowing as an “internal hemorrhage,” a

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 153

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

154

chapter 5

“bleeding” towards the Other in which, so far as I am concerned, every drop is lost: “the world flows out of the world and I flow outside myself.” The things by which I am surrounded, and of which I am one, “turn toward the Other a face which on principle escapes me.” Thus, in the eyes of the Other, “I am seated as this inkwell is on the table; for the Other, I am leaning over the keyhole as this tree is bent by the wind” (262). This process of being “stripped” of one’s own transcendence is that of being “internalized” in the look of another, of becoming “a purely established transcendence, a given-transcendence,” which is to say, an object, a body. What is shameful in this experience, according to Sartre, is not being revealed “as one is,” but becoming “a given object” (261); having a “nature,” a quality of being foisted upon one. Shame arises out of a discrepancy between the in-itself and the for-itself, yet this discrepancy is not a “distortion” or a “refraction” imposed on me by the categories of the Other, but an effect merely of the Other’s existence (262–63). The incommensurability or distortion is not a violation of my being but internal to it. Insofar as I am, I am ensnared in shame. The presence or absence of clothes, of course, is inconsequential to this dynamic. Nevertheless, Sartre mentions nakedness as emblematic of the sense in which the body signifies vulnerability before the other and clothing subjectivity towards the other. “To put on clothes is to hide one’s object-state,” he writes; “it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is, to be pure subject” (289). Again, the issue is not that of being exposed in one’s being, but of attaining being, of becoming what one is. Thus, donning clothes—taking on the mantle of being—is a means of avoiding shame, but, as such, to wear clothes is also a manifestation of shame. In this way, pride and shame are simply different expressions of a single social-psychological structure. In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon offers a devastating critique of Sartre’s analysis, a critique that amounts to a retheorization of shame in the colonial situation. Fanon inherits much of Sartre’s conceptualization, but he refashions it; most notably, he disputes Sartre’s narrative of shame as a universally applicable one. The great absence from Sartre’s account is racial difference: in the colonial world, the “hemorrhage” of shame flows in one direction only. “The black man,” says Fanon, “suffers in his body quite differently from the white man.”33 Fanon’s “other” is the white man—le Blanc—“who ha[s] woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (91), and there is no symmetry in this relation. “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (90); in other words, the very source of the difficulties encountered by the black man “in elaborating his bodily schema” is the white man. The equation does not work in reverse. “Between the white man and me there is irremediably a relationship of transcendence” (117).

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 154

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

J. M. Coetzee

155

Fanon is quite as capable as Sartre of vivid bodily imagery. The fifth chapter of Black Skin White Masks opens with the famous episode on a train when Fanon overhears the words “Look, a Negro!” apparently referring to himself. “I transported myself on that particular day,” writes Fanon, “far, very far, from my self, and gave myself up as an object. What did this mean to me? Peeling [décollement], stripping my skin [arrachement], causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body” (92 [Peau noir 91]). In Fanon, then, the “bleeding” metaphor does not denote an ebbing of the self in the direction of the other. Rather, blood, “black blood,” signifies an accumulation and coagulation of being in an irreducibly visible form, a squeezing out of all agency and potentiality (the “for-itself,” in Sartre’s terminology) by the irremediability of “what one is” (the “in-itself”). Sartre’s own analysis of shame is implicated in this asymmetry. In Orphée noir he offers a sympathetic account of the place of negritude in the historical “realization” of the “society without racism”; in doing so, however, he reduces black consciousness to “the weak stage of a dialectical progression”—as a moment to be overcome, a pure “means” (Black Orpheus 59–60).34 Thus, says Fanon, reading this passage, in discovering my negritude “I did not create a meaning for myself; the meaning was already there, waiting. It is not as the wretched nigger, it is not with my nigger’s teeth, it is not as the hungry nigger that I fashion a torch to set the world alight; the torch was already there, waiting for this historic chance” (Black Skin 113). In Sartre’s dialectic then, negritude is simultaneously positivized and negated. Black consciousness is attributed an “absolute density,” a givenness, and thereby stripped of its freedom. “At the very moment when I endeavored to grasp my being, Sartre, who remains ‘the Other,’ by naming me shattered my last illusion” (116). At this moment, Sartre himself becomes one of the agents of category-thinking, architects of the “vicious circle” in which the black man is caught as soon as color appears on the horizon (96). In opposition to this “relativizing” account of negritude, Fanon asserts the self-sufficiency of his blackness: “My black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with itself” (114). Blackness, then, is neither a lack nor a plenitude; it is not a category at all. Its “being” is asserted in opposition not to nonbeing, but to the opposition between being and nonbeing; that is to say, in opposition to the regime of exchangeability and equivalence. Blackness is not a term in a dialectic, and it does not have a “value,” mathematical or otherwise. In the final pages of Black Skin White Masks, Fanon expands this assertion with an explicit rejection of all “predetermined forms,” the rigidifying categories of “bourgeois society” (199). The strongest statement of that rejection is found in a justly famous pair of sentences in the last paragraphs of the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 155

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

156

chapter 5

book: “The black man is not. No more than the white man” (206). On the face of it, these sentences appear to contradict the earlier affirmation: “My black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is.” However, these statements do not need to be seen as opposed. Being, in the sense of Hegel’s “absolute freedom” or Sartre’s “being for-itself,” is only insofar as it is not. Sartre says it is like “a hole of being at the heart of Being” (617). As a universal, applicable to all, being cannot be instantiated; it can only be articulated in subtractive terms, as a contestation of every subjective assertion of being. This asymmetry in the corporeal experience of dominant and marginal positionalities has been analyzed in a quite different social and historical context by Michael Warner, in an essay entitled “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” Warner’s essay makes no mention of Sartre and Fanon, nor of colonialism, nor shame, nor J. M. Coetzee. He is not attempting to imagine the conditions for sustaining a revolutionary consciousness, but mounting a critique of the ideological assumptions of liberalism. Nevertheless, his article introduces a compelling explanation for the prevalence of a bodily shame in Coetzee’s work. Its theme is the discursive construction of the public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe and its continuing operation as a political ideal in modern society. What is particularly useful in his article, in the context of this discussion, is its deceptively simple recasting of the logic of universality and rationality in terms of the body. Warner’s primary thesis is that the discourse of universal reason is one of “disincorporation.” The category of the public “has no empirical existence and cannot be objectified”—which means, of course, that it has no identifiable body.35 Any text addressed to the public concerns a purely abstract entity, which is not to say that its addressee has no material existence, simply that it cannot be produced or depicted. As a result, what is said “in public” carries force “not because of who you are but despite who you are.” Implicit in the principle of the public sphere, says Warner, is a utopian universality that would allow people to transcend the given realities of their bodies and their status. But … the ability to abstract oneself in public discussion has always been an unequally available resource. Individuals have to have specific rhetorics of disincorporation; they are not simply rendered bodiless by exercising reason. (165)

For Warner, the promise of the public sphere has never been delivered on. Its emergence as a universal discourse has been dependent on a “logic of abstraction,” whereby privileged identities (white, male, middle-class, heterosexual) construct for themselves an “unmarked” or invisible status (167). One effect of this logic is that bodily departures from this unmarked identity appear as an indissoluble “residue,” an excess that has no hope of being absorbed into the public sphere (168). References to “difference” (of race, gender, sexuality, or class), even as something to be disregarded,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 156

8/13/2010 2:04:40 PM

J. M. Coetzee

157

are thus negating and exclusionary; Fanon similarly refers to the “image of one’s body” as “solely negating” (Black Skin 90). However, in the logic of the public sphere, according to Warner, this negation is enunciated as “mere positivity” (as against its own neutrality and invisibility); bodily difference is presented as an “ineluctable limit” to universality—something that must be ignored or transcended in order for universal reason to operate. Such positivity, says Warner, “cannot translate or neutralize itself prosthetically without ceasing to exist.” Furthermore, its existence is intrinsic to the rhetoric of universality, since it provides exactly that element of bodily particularity that must be excluded or abstracted from in the moment of utopian disincorporation (167–68).36 At the end of Black Skin White Masks, Fanon puts forward an apparently simple vision: that the conception of bodily difference in terms of superiority and inferiority might be succeeded by the simple attempt to “touch the other, feel the other, discover each other” (206). The realization of this dream would involve no longer framing the body in mathematical (positive or negative) terms. Warner expresses a similar aspiration: that the era of “toleration” towards difference be succeeded by the possibility that one might “make reference to one’s marked particularities without being specified thereby as less than public” (167). For Warner, this vision is not attainable in the public sphere as it is currently conceived. The logic of “liberal toleration” is such that its bounds cannot be extended without merely modifying, and thereby “resecuring,” the structure of “asymmetrical privilege.”37 In the light of Fanon’s and Warner’s hopes that we might one day dispense with the aura of positivity and negativity attaching to difference, what should we make of the work of a writer who, from the “invisible,” privileged end of the public discourse, seems to have been engaged in reinvesting the white male body with what Warner calls “positivity”? How, in other words, should we read the theme of the mortification of the body in the novels of J. M. Coetzee? Ever since the publication of his first novel, Dusklands, in 1974, the visibility of the white body has been a consistent motif in Coetzee’s work, almost as consistent as the circumstance that the protagonists of his books are writers. The first voice that we encounter in Coetzee’s oeuvre is that of Eugene Dawn, the technical writer who narrates Part One of Dusklands, entitled “The Vietnam Project.”38 Eugene’s writing takes place under the supervision of a “hearty,” steak-eating, coffee-drinking man named Coetzee, who has asked him to revise his introduction to a report on the use of psychological warfare during the Vietnam War. Early on in his narration, Eugene describes the effect of his research on his body: Hemmed in with walls of books, I should be in paradise. But my body betrays me. I read, my face starts to lose its life, a stabbing begins in my head, then, as I beat through gales of yawns to fix my weeping eyes on the page,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 157

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

158

chapter 5

my back begins to petrify in the scholar’s hook. The ropes of muscle that spread from the spine curl in suckers around my neck, over my clavicles, under my armpits, across my chest. Tendrils creep down legs and arms. Clamped round my body this parasite starfish dies in rictus. Its tentacles grow brittle. I straighten my back and hear bands creak. Behind my temples too, behind my cheekbones, behind my lips the glacier creeps inward toward its epicenter behind my eyes. My eyeballs ache, my mouth constricts. If this inner face of mine, this vizor of muscle, had features, they would be the monstrous troglodyte features of a man who bunches his sleeping eyes and mouth as a totally unacceptable dream forces itself into him. From head to foot I am the subject of a revolting body. Only the organs of my abdomen keep their blind freedom: the liver, the pancreas, the gut, and of course the heart, squelching against one another like unborn octuplets. (7)

The narrator of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is a Magistrate in a provincial outpost of a despotic, colonial Empire. He is engaged in an unconventional sexual liaison with a girl from the nomadic communities outside the town—unconventional because he does not penetrate her but engages rather in an elaborate ritual of washing and anointing her body, after which he falls blissfully asleep. The girl is blind, a result of tortures inflicted on her by Colonel Joll, the Magistrate’s less benevolent metropolitan counterpart. “Under her blind gaze,” says the Magistrate, “in the close warmth of the room, I can undress without embarrassment, baring my thin shanks, my slack genitals, my paunch, my flabby old man’s breasts, the turkey-skin of my throat.”39 In the absence of the girl’s gaze, the Magistrate is apparently free of “embarrassment”; nonetheless, the body is rendered “positive” in her presence. “My hand,” he writes, “caressing her belly, seems as awkward as a lobster” (33); the prospect of “lodging my dry old man’s member in that blood-hot sheath makes me think of acid in milk, ashes in honey, chalk in bread” (34). Later, hearing the girl with her young lover, he experiences a “tide of shame”: “It seems more obscene than ever that this heavy slack foul-smelling old body … should ever have held her in its arms” (97). In Age of Iron, Mrs. Curren is dying of cancer. Prior to the onset of this final stage of the disease, her treatment has involved an amputation: “Do you know that I have had a breast removed?” she tells Mr. Vercueil. “I regret it now, of course. Regret that I am marked. … People don’t like marked objects” (166–67). Like Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron produces the white body as a visible entity; but it does so by means of a comparatively objective conceit: disease. Unlike the Magistrate’s bodily self-disgust in Waiting for the Barbarians, there is nothing psychological about the “mortification of the body” in Age of Iron—at least, not at the level of the diegesis. If cancer is an allegory

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 158

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

J. M. Coetzee

159

of colonial shame—and the link is made explicit in one darkly ironic explanation of her illness offered by Mrs. Curren40—that image suggests that the significance of shame in this text is less ethical than ontological. This is despite the fact that in Coetzee’s writing such mortifications frequently take place in the presence of racially defined “others,” including the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians; Friday in Foe; Petrus in Disgrace; and, in Age of Iron, Mrs. Curren’s housekeeper Florence, Florence’s son Bheki, Bheki’s friend John, and Vercueil, a man whose racial identity is dealt with enigmatically.41 As Fanon observes, shame in the colonial context flows in one direction only: for “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (90). Coetzee’s shame is not, then, a shame that emerges belatedly, in ethical revulsion at the colonial past. The shame that is liberated in Coetzee’s works, but which they are unable to name, is the shame that was responsible for colonialism in the first place, a shame that is ontologically connected with both colonialism and writing. In these three examples—Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron—the “mortification” of the body invites symbolic interpretation, indeed solicits it. All three texts feature writer-protagonists; and in each case the character’s writing, which is also the work we are reading, is profoundly implicated in the socially and politically abhorrent situation in which it takes place. But that implication is merely invoked, a matter in each case of the work’s conceit. Both Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians construct a writing situation of inexorable complicity—but the complicity, and the shame that accompanies it, depend upon their instantiation in the text. The Magistrate, he tells us himself, is merely the more acceptable face of the Colonel’s brutality. “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two side of imperial rule, no more, no less” (135). But this story, including its shame, belongs to the Magistrate; the work’s larger apparatus of meaning remains (pace Attridge) allegorical.42 In Age of Iron, the imbrication of writing, shame, and the marked body is more ingenious, but it remains a conceit. The letter that Mrs. Curren is writing in Age of Iron is addressed to a daughter who has left South Africa in protest at the apartheid regime. Apartheid is thus a condition of possibility of the text we are reading, as is the failure of the mother to follow the daughter into exile. The novel is a letter from the land of shameful acquiescence to the land of principled refusal. Mrs. Curren’s illness is a further condition of possibility of this work, since the letter is a posthumous one; her cancer is thus inseparably tied, by the existence of the letter, to the shame of having remained behind. In Disgrace, the positivization of the body takes a more brutal form than anywhere else in Coetzee’s writing: in the physical and sexual as-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 159

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

160

chapter 5

sault on David and his daughter Lucy by three African men. Here, a symbolic reading is more difficult to sustain, since the metaphorical apparatus of tenor and vehicle is far more difficult to disentangle; indeed, this fact contributes to the violence of the episode. If the novel is read as the story of David Lurie’s imperfect accommodation with the “new South Africa,” the physical assault on David and Lucy cannot be integrated with any ease into that narrative. David’s beating and Lucy’s rape are another “mortification,” a rendering positive of the white body; Lucy’s characterization of what happened leaves us in no doubt of this: “They have marked me,” she says (158). The immediate sense is that she has been singled out, targeted; as long as she stays, she will be at risk of another attack. However, the reappearance of the words that Mrs. Curren used to describe her mastectomy is unignorable (“I am marked”). The extremity of the episode seems to have been designed precisely to foreclose any redemptive or instrumental reading. As in Conrad, no instantiation of the revolution is possible for Coetzee. The novel ends with David apparently coming to a painful recognition of Lucy’s startling proposition that humiliation may be “a good point to start from again.” “No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity,” she says, forcing her point (205). “Like a dog,” replies David, quoting Kafka. The more shocking version of this proposition is stated earlier by Lucy: that rape may be “the price one has to pay for staying on” after the end of apartheid (158). It is impossible to interpret this reference to rape metaphorically; and it seems equally impossible to extract from it any larger ethical or allegorical significance. Coetzee himself, as is well known, has not “stayed on” in South Africa. Slow Man (2005), which was written in Australia, contains scarcely any mention of racial difference, nor of colonial relations. Nevertheless, the novel’s central and most enigmatic narrative feature may also be considered part of the series of mortifications of the white body. Following a bicycle accident narrated in the opening pages of the book, Paul Rayment’s leg is amputated; he refuses to consider a prosthesis on the grounds, as he explains to his nurse, that “he doesn’t want to look natural, he wants to feel natural” (59). But feeling natural, he thinks afterwards, is to have no idea that one “feels natural”; it is to be entirely unaware of the body. If Slow Man were a self-standing work, there would be no reason to attach any significance whatsoever to the amputated leg. The leg would become transparent (which is to say, opaque), without the symbolic resonance of Mrs. Curren’s cancer and untroubled by any of the ethical and expositional difficulties raised by the attack on David Lurie and his daughter. Elizabeth Costello, the supposed author of Paul’s story, offers her own explanation for Paul’s situation towards the end of the book: “Your missing leg is just a sign or symbol or symptom, I can never re-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 160

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

J. M. Coetzee

161

member which, of growing old, old and uninteresting” (229). Considered as part of the series, however, it is impossible not to read the “humiliation” engendered by Paul’s predicament in the light of the conversation between Lucy and David at the end of Disgrace. “He has entered the zone of humiliation,” we read of Paul as he begins his physical rehabilitation; “it is his new home; he will never leave it; best to shut up, best to accept” (61). In the final lines of his essay, Warner writes the following: “An assertion of the full equality of minoritized statuses would require abandoning the structure of self-abstraction in publicity.” He adds that any such outcome “seems unlikely in the near future” (186). Such an “assertion” would no doubt be among the ethical or political objectives of Coetzee’s writing, were he able to formulate it without perpetuating the “disincorporation” of reason—without thereby enacting the privilege enjoyed by the white bourgeois writer to articulate political solutions from the “disinterested” positionality of an unmarked body. Warner’s formulation of the problem leaves writers such as Coetzee in an apparently impossible situation, caught between “disincorporation” and the economy of racial positivity and negativity. How is it possible for “late representatives” of the colonial enterprise, as Coetzee has described himself,43 to vacate the structure of self-abstraction and invisibility implied in the values of “civilization” and “reason” without pitching into the world of marked, and marketed, identities? How has it been possible for this writer, in whose work David Attwell has noted a consistent “revulsion for racialized discourse,”44 to hold true to that “revulsion” without perpetuating his privileged positionality? In fact, the relevance of Warner’s argument for Coetzee’s work becomes most clearly apparent when Warner writes about the implications of the logic of disincorporation for the privileged subjects of public discourse. “To acknowledge their positivity would be to surrender their privilege,” he writes, “as, for example, to acknowledge the objectivity of the male body would be to feminize it” (168). Following Warner’s reasoning, the theme of corporeal shame in Coetzee, from Dusklands onwards, appears as a vehicle for producing the bourgeois body as a “positive” entity, thereby “surrendering” its privilege. Eugene Dawn’s racked reading body, Mrs. Curren’s cancerous writing body, Lucy’s raped body, Paul Rayment’s amputated body, and the aging and deteriorating bodies in Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, and Diary of a Bad Year render visible, “marked,” the white bourgeois body, reversing the process of selfabstraction and disincorporation that Warner imagines as the construction of the public sphere. “You claim to be a butterfly,” Elizabeth Costello tells Paul, “you want to be a butterfly; but then one day you have a fall, a calamitous fall, you come crashing down to earth; and when you pick

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 161

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

162

chapter 5

yourself up you find you can no longer fly like an ethereal being, you cannot even walk, you are nothing but a lump of all too solid flesh” (198). The “you” in this sentence is not simply Paul, but the logic that goes under the name of “man,” or “universal,” or “reason.” It is only in this sense—as a positivization or reincorporation of dominant universalizing discourses—that we should understand there to be an ethics of shame in Coetzee’s work. As we see from the preceding discussion, the trajectory of the series has been away from the psychological, interior, or expressive pole of mortification, and towards an objective, accidental, or machinic one. Thus, in Slow Man, a work that permits barely any reference within the text to matters of race or colonial relations, the vehicle of positivity becomes precisely that, a “vehicle”: a (two-wheeled) machine with no subjective component whatsoever. There is certainly shame in Slow Man, and its fullest expression comes at the end of the book. Soon after an outraged Paul has arrived at the home of his nurse Marijana after the disappearance of some valuable photographs from his house, Marijana’s husband and son present him with the gift of a new “recumbent” bicycle, designed to accommodate his amputation: “He can feel a blush creeping over him, a blush of shame, starting at his ears and creeping forward over his face. He has no wish to stop it. It is what he deserves” (254). In this scene, the “vehicle” and shame are reunited. However, this second bicycle is no longer a vehicle of positivity but of self-abstraction, a prosthesis; indeed, this is the very reason that Paul “instinctively” dislikes it (255). With these two bicycles framing the text, the separation of the two shames, the event and the instantiation, is laid bare. Slow Man reveals clearly that the expressive (or locutionary) dimension of Coetzee’s shame is of far less importance than the corporeal (or perlocutionary) one—that which effects the relinquishing of a bodily invisibility. In his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre refers to “the strip-tease of our humanism” as a precondition for decolonization. “We, too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonized: meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation.”45 We see something like this taking place in the consistent mortification of the body in Coetzee’s writing. The expressive dimension of this operation, which is in fact the everyday notion of shame, is nothing other than a preliminary mode in which the positivity of the body is registered by a subject who had become accustomed to his or her own invisibility. Insofar as shame is a logic to counterpose to the disincorporating, selfabstracting logic of “man,” or “universal reason,” or the “public sphere,” it is a logic not of clarity, or transparency, but of opacity. If Coetzee has sought in his writing to render positive—opaque—the white body, the works of the “new direction” extend this project to the modality of fic-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 162

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

J. M. Coetzee

163

tion, which is as thoroughly implicated in the logic of abstraction as the public sphere. Fiction itself becomes opaque, corporeal; this is what is meant by the redoubled or “crystalline” quality of the novels that Coetzee has published since Disgrace. These late works refuse the logic of transmissibility; they inhabit shame, not as an ethical mode, but as the interruption or opacity of the ethical. As an ethics, shame is not instantiable; or rather, once it is instantiated it loses its integrity. Lucy in Disgrace understands this better than her father. When David proposes that her reluctance to report the rape to the police is a way of “expiating” the colonial crimes of the past, Lucy firmly corrects him: “Guilt and salvation are abstractions,” she says. “I don’t act in terms of abstractions” (112). What does she act in terms of? She never specifies; but that fact alone suggests that the principle of her action may be shame; for shame is by definition unnameable, uninstantiable. To invoke it as a principle of one’s action, as informing an ethics, would be to turn it too into an abstraction, to remove its corporeal quality, to make it fungible. For the same reason, David throughout Disgrace refuses to apologize or express any remorse over his affair with the student; but this intransigence, this shamelessness, speaks not of his lack of shame, but of its fullness, its opacity. Shame, then, is a double presence in Coetzee’s writing: named and unnameable, locutionary and perlocutionary, thematic and crystalline. In Slow Man, Paul’s lost leg is his shame; but, like Elizabeth Costello’s presence in the text, it functions across the boundary that separates Paul’s story from the story of its “enunciation.” The reason Paul refuses to accept a prosthetic leg is simply that a prosthesis would neutralize the positivity of the white, male body produced by the amputation—but that explanation exists at the level of the enunciation, not the level of the statement (or story). The lost leg should therefore be regarded as a “crystalline” element: an aspect of the text that, within the diegesis, remains enigmatic, opaque, but becomes legible the moment the text is considered not in the light of its capacity for transmission, but as an interruption of transmissibility. Coetzee’s late work, situated on the boundary between transparency and opacity, does not represent an overcoming of shame; on the contrary, by transforming shame from a named into an unnameable principle, from a thematic into an event, he shows us how to do justice to the shame, preserving it in all its opacity and integrity.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 163

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

Chapter Six Shame and Subtraction: Towards Postcolonial Writing Coetzee has asked me to revise my essay. It sticks in his craw: he wants it blander, otherwise he wants it eliminated. —J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands

The remarkable achievement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of shame in Being and Nothingness was its interruption of what he would later refer to as the “subjective illusion”: the notion that any explanation for shame should be sought primarily in the ethical or reflective sphere, in the individual’s thoughts or behavior.1 For Sartre, shame occurs with the experience, even the possibility, of being looked at. “By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.”2 Shame, according to Sartre, does not hang on the nature of the self, but simply on its production as a self; the relation of shame to guilt is purely incidental, an association produced by the newly individuated subject out of the structures of social, psychological, and ethical interpellation. “Shame,” says Sartre, “is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have ‘fallen’ into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am” (Being and Nothingness 288–89). Sartre’s account, then, is the first step in the dismantling of an “ethical,” psychologistic conception of shame. However, Sartre leaves us with a huge question: If shame is embedded in perception, what hope is there for lifting ourselves out of a shamed existence? How is it possible to discard what seem to be the very conditions of perception, indeed, of human social being: the apparatus of self and other? The question is far from academic, for once we see shame in these structural rather than ethical terms, shame begins to seem not like a response to all that is evil in the world, but as its origin. It is no longer possible to assume, for example, that the shame of the postcolonial present arises from the colonial past, and that the shame will disappear once colonial structures of power have been eradicated. One would have more justification in arguing the op-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 164

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

Shame and Subtraction

165

posite: that a primary or fundamental shame, rooted in our definition as embodied, intersubjective beings, is at the origin of the history of colonial domination. “Shame and immodesty,” writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, take their place in a dialectic of the self and the other which is that of master and slave: insofar as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person, and no longer count as a person for him, or else I may become his master and, in my turn, look at him. … Saying that I have a body is thus a way of saying that I can be seen as an object and that I try to be seen as a subject, that another can be my master or my slave, so that shame and shamelessness express the dialectic of the plurality of consciousness, and have a metaphysical significance.3

J. M. Coetzee has depicted the colonial encounter in such terms. In the second part of Dusklands (1974), a fiction entitled “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the Hottentot “savage” appears to Coetzee’s eighteenth-century settler as a representative of “that out there which my eye once enfolded and ingested and which now promises to enfold, ingest, and project me through itself as a speck on a field which we may call annihilation or alternatively history. He threatens to have a history in which I shall be a term. Such is the material basis of the malady of the master’s soul.”4 In such passages, shame—“the malady of the master’s soul”—is implicated so directly in the colonial enterprise as to be ontologically continuous with it. Colonialism is shameful not primarily in an ethical sense—as an event that demands or elicits our shame—but in an ontological one. Shame and colonialism share a certain organizing assumption: the conceptual opposition of identity and difference. This structure is apparent in the formulation with which Sartre defines shame: “a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: ‘I am ashamed of myself before the Other’” (289). If shame is an effect of the very conditions of human perception—the supposedly universal categories of I, myself, and Other—a theory of shame that sets out on the basis of those same conditions cannot go beyond them. Sartre’s theory of shame is unable to solve the problem of shame, since the very categories held to be responsible for it are presupposed in its theorization. The theory that will be adequate to the formation of “postcolonial shame” will be one that is able to give up the attachment to an ontology, or affect, of shame. Such a theory will seek neither to reiterate nor to correct existing modes of perception, but must instead grasp the inseparability of shame from perception in order to decenter, even vacate both. To free ourselves of this most intimate residue of the colonial enterprise, it is necessary to overcome the very models of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As a first step towards such a theory, a few methodological principles, emanating in part from discussions in previous chapters, can be proposed.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 165

8/13/2010 2:04:41 PM

166

chapter 6

First, we need to resist the temptation to extract ourselves, ethically or methodologically, from the situation of a postcolonial shame, or to approach shame as a theorizable concept, for in the postcolonial situation it is impossible to guarantee that such a project of theorization would itself be free of implication in shame. Second, understanding shame in structural rather than ethical terms will involve suspending the inclination to see shame as a problem requiring a solution, or as implicated in a relation of cause and effect. Third, shame will be considered not as an entity that might be removed from the present, but one from which the present—including the very questions that we might direct towards the present—is inseparable. What these principles amount to is an approach to shame not as an object of enquiry, but as an entity that is immanent to any critical project undertaken in the aftermath of the enterprise known as colonialism, especially one that positions itself in a scholarly or interrogative position with regard to that enterprise. Such work can proceed only on the basis of the structures of analysis, perception, and documentation that are intrinsic to colonialism itself. Shame infuses any such project, but in a form that must render impossible any acknowledgement or invocation of it, for the acknowledgement of shame is all too easily reversed into a narrative of exculpation or exception from it. Ultimately, the critical position that must be surrendered in order to overcome colonial structures that are both shamed and shaming is the “ethnographic” relation, a relation that is not, of course, limited to ethnography, but that defines all scholarly activity as long as the opposition of identity and difference is retained at its foundation. The work of Gilles Deleuze, I will argue, offers a promising theoretical beginning for such an approach. However, and in accordance with the methodological principles sketched above, the most crucial insights do not appear in Deleuze’s scattered remarks on shame, invaluable and fascinating as these are. Ian Buchanan has suggested that if there is an ethical dimension to Deleuze’s thought, it “stems from a conviction that man is shameful.”5 His principal point of reference is the rhetorical question that Deleuze poses at the beginning of Essays Critical and Clinical, and which has also been a point of departure in the present work: “The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write?”6 Yet the shamefulness of “man” is an immensely complex proposition. “Man” in Deleuze is associated with a certain logic, rather than a particular identity formation. Man, we read in A Thousand Plateaus, is “majoritarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian”; man constitutes “a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority.”7 It is not accurate, then, to say that for Deleuze “man is shameful.” What is shameful is not “man,” but the logic of the “is,” the “standard,”

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 166

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

Shame and Subtraction

167

which is inseparable from “man” but not attributable to any particular man or men. For Deleuze, any subject of a becoming is necessarily, by definition, “man.” As such, it is ensnared in a shame that is simultaneously achieved and evacuated. “What’s so shameful is that we’ve no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves.”8 Shame itself is never elaborated as a concept in Deleuze’s work (and certainly not as an ethics), for the simple reason that shame is the substance and materiality of his philosophy. Shame has no positive ontology and can be subject to no process of theorization. Insofar as it appears, shame is an interruption of its own becoming, the emblem of a longing to escape the logic of subjectivation that, itself framed in subjective terms, remains forever trapped within that logic. All of this, of course, could equally be said of Sartre. However, shame is not only a manifest presence in Deleuze’s work; it also has a hidden, unnamed existence operating below the surface of everything that Deleuze writes, and as the principle, or event, of its own untheorizability. This second shame is as central to Deleuze’s thought as, say, desire or difference; and it may be found almost anywhere in Deleuze’s writing, especially in those places where no mention of the word is made. In the course of the present chapter, this “event” of shame will be pursued in Deleuze’s two books on cinema—this despite the fact that Deleuze does not use the word there. These works are the site of Deleuze’s most direct and lucid critique of the phenomenological account of perception. That critique, I hope to show, can point us towards a postcolonial literature able, in the words of Frantz Fanon, “to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other.”9 For this to happen, the lessons of cinema will need to be reapplied to the quite different formal context of literature, as well as to the structure of looking presupposed in the ethical relation, and to the apparatus of subject and object implicit in the very practice of criticism. The Origins of This Book: Michel Leiris The structural continuity between shame, perception, and the colonial project may be clearly seen in the work of the French ethnologist and autobiographer Michel Leiris. Any reader familiar with Leiris’s writing will be aware of the significance of Leiris to the present work, for the opening sentences of this book, framed in a personal register, are modeled on the first pages of Leiris’s autobiographical text L’Âge d’homme (Manhood), published in 1939, which begins by anatomizing the author’s physical and spiritual defects on reaching the age of thirty-four. Leiris’s work is highly revealing of the structure of shame. First of all, Leiris’s shame can hardly be said to survive its transcription. The literary

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 167

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

168

chapter 6

quality of Manhood transforms its narrative of misery and failure into its success, its profound self-disparagement into a vessel of self-regard, and its claim to autobiographical truth into its most ostentatiously staged dimension. There is, perhaps, not a single moment of shame in the book that is untouched by vanity. Second, Leiris’s apparent antipathy towards himself is inseparable from his relation to the “other,” a relation exemplified in his professional career as an ethnographer. Leiris was permanent secretary and head of the Africa department at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris for most of his professional life, until he retired in 1971. From 1931 to 1933 he held the position of secretary-archivist during the ethnographic Dakar-Djibouti mission. Leiris’s journal of the expedition was published in 1934 as L’Afrique fantôme. The motivation for Leiris’s involvement in this enterprise, and for the text that resulted from it, was a fascination with the exotic, a fascination that is obscurely manifest as a quest for moral salvation at the hands of the African “other.” Leiris’s fascination with Africa is, from the beginning, inseparable from his disgust with himself, and from a sense of cultural exhaustion and insipid “politeness” that he associates with bourgeois Paris life.10 L’Afrique fantôme documents Leiris’s complex and shifting relation to Africa: in particular, his growing disillusion with the possibility of travel in Africa as a means of personal exculpation. Over the two years that he spends in Africa, however, it is increasingly difficult for him to keep his exoticism and his self-disgust apart. In Gondar, Ethiopia, well over a year into the expedition, he develops a physical infatuation with a zârine, Emawayish, a daughter of the leader of a group of possession cult initiates. He writes of the intense emotion he feels towards her, “more intimate than any carnal link,”11 when he witnesses her in a state of possession, drinking from a porcelain cup the hot blood of a white ram she has just killed. But as his experience of such séances continues he becomes suspicious of their authenticity, feeling that they are the means of a corresponding exploitation of the ethnographers by the Africans.12 On July 23, 1932, he begins an entry with the following words: “Intense work, to which I give myself with a certain assiduousness, but without an ounce of passion. I would rather be possessed than study possessed people, would rather have carnal knowledge of a ‘zarine’ than scientific knowledge of her ins and outs [ses tenants et aboutissants]” (560). A month later, attesting his growing frustration with the mission and with the premises of ethnographic work in general, he begins another entry as follows: “Bitterness. Resentment against ethnography which makes you take so inhuman a position as that of an observer, in circumstances where it would be better to let go [s’abandonner]” (599). The problem of shame revealed by this text is the problem of mediatedness. The impression given by Leiris’s work is that of a man progressively

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 168

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

Shame and Subtraction

169

and irrevocably removed from the world by the very gesture with which he looks upon it. Leiris is triply condemned to this state of removal by his profession (ethnography), his origins (Europe), and his medium (writing). Ethnography is shameful because it participates in a structure of perception that implies a certain logic of self-authorization. Ethnography presupposes a centered or, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, “anchored” consciousness (Phenomenology 78) that situates the self in relation to the world and to its objects of study. Ethnography shares this presupposition with colonialism, but also with writing. How can we (or he) distinguish between the mediation that causes Leiris’s shame, relegating him to the position of observer rather than participant, and the mediation that enables him to tell us about it, or to conceptualize it? How do we separate his Parisian “intellectualism” (L’Afrique fantôme 270), the tormenting actuality of which drove him to Africa in the first place, from the fact that it is only as an intellectual that he is able to formulate it as a problem? Leiris’s real mission is not ethnographic at all, but a mission of what Deleuze calls “depersonalization,”13 a quest to destroy or escape from the self which is rarely if ever successful, for, even as a literary project, it takes place on ethnographic premises that stem from its “anchoring” in a perceiving subject upon whom all responsibility for such a disposing of the self would devolve. Leiris’s project of becoming-other, becoming-Dogon, runs up perpetually against his inability “to let myself go” (m’abandonner), a result of factors, he says, that include “questions of race, of civilization, of language” (616). In the rest of Leiris’s oeuvre, continuing through another five decades and another five volumes of autobiography, no escape will ever be possible except paradoxically, by way of a thorough immersion in language and in his own interiority. Deleuze and Sartre I do not want to dwell on Leiris’s case here, other than as a dramatization of the connection between ethnography, perception, and shame.14 What Leiris feels he is unable to escape from—although a persistent question is whether any such escape should be seen in terms of a goal to be achieved—is the basic, phenomenological relation between that which shames and he who is ashamed. This, of course, is simply Sartre’s distinction between perceiving (or perceived) other and perceived (or perceiving) self. As is apparent from Leiris’s work, the model it provides for the reading and practice of literature is just as implacable as the logical foundation it provides for ethnography and colonialism. This model is clearly on view in Sartre’s own writings on literature around the time of Being and Nothingness. Its most glaring incarnation,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 169

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

170

chapter 6

perhaps, is found in Sartre’s discussion of the African American author Richard Wright in What Is Literature? (1948), the collection of essays that Sartre published soon after Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s discussion is preceded by a consideration of the question: For whom is Richard Wright writing? Sartre’s answer is, in every sense, categorical: not “the white racialists of Virginia or South Carolina”; nor “the black peasants of the bayous who cannot read”; nor again the liberal “European public,” whose indignation at the wrongs suffered by the African American is “ineffectual and hypocritical.” Wright, concludes Sartre, is addressing himself to “the cultivated negroes of the North and the white Americans of goodwill (intellectuals, democrats of the left, radicals, C.I.O. [trade union] workers).”15 Of course, as Sartre acknowledges, the audience that Wright is addressing does not correspond to his actual public. Nevertheless, that actual public is itself constructed around theoretical categories that are just as abstract as those that Sartre has brought to the question of the intended readership. For Wright, says Sartre, “negro readers represent the subjective. The same childhood, the same difficulties, the same complexes: a mere hint is enough for them; they understand with their hearts” (60). When it comes to Wright’s white readers, the role is entirely different, for “they represent the Other”: “It is only from without that he conceives their proud security and that tranquil certainty, common to all white Aryans, that the world is white and that they own it. … When he speaks to them … it is a matter of implicating them and making them take stock of their responsibilities. He must make them indignant and ashamed” (ibid.). This, then, is the Sartre whom Fanon will hold responsible for replicating a certain phenomenological (and racial) structure that ensnares him—Fanon—in corporeal shame; the Sartre who attributes an “absolute density” to black consciousness, reducing it to “a phase in the dialectic.”16 This is so even when, as in his discussion of Wright, Sartre inverts the racial coordinates of the dialectic. The privileged category of Sartre’s analysis remains consciousness and its fundamental distinction from its object. Implicit in that distinction is the idealized position of the writer as he who sees, he who thereby “shames”: If society sees itself, and, in particular, sees itself as seen, there is, by virtue of this very fact, a contesting of the established values of the régime. The writer presents it with its image; he calls upon it to assume it or to change itself. At any rate, it changes; it loses the equilibrium which its ignorance had given it; it wavers between shame and cynicism; it practises dishonesty; thus, the writer gives society a guilty conscience; he is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism towards the conservative forces which are maintaining the balance he tends to upset. (What Is Literature? 61)

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 170

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

Shame and Subtraction

171

This conception of society as shameable and of the writer as society’s “guilty conscience” is as far from Deleuze’s view as can be imagined. In his “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” one of very few texts in which he refers to himself in the first person, Deleuze remarks: “The idea of feeling guilty is, for me, just as repugnant as being someone else’s guilty conscience.” “Repugnance” is a strong word; the French text has dégoûte, disgust, which is perhaps just as strong.17 In Deleuze: La clameur de l’Être, Alain Badiou describes Deleuze’s refusal of the phenomenological problematic using the word répugne;18 both moments (dégoûte, répugne) describe (albeit in subjective terms) the antithesis between Deleuze’s thinking and a Sartrean metaphysics (and ethics) founded on alterity. For Deleuze, “thought” can have no aspect of the categorical, nor can it have the beneficent character that Sartre implicitly attributes to it. Thus, equally foreign to Deleuze is the notion of the sovereignty of thought, or that of the “sacred charge of the writer” (as Nadine Gordimer has called it).19 Any such idea is inimical to thought, first because it constructs, before any thought has taken place, what Deleuze calls “that philia which predetermines at once both the image of thought and the concept of philosophy.”20 Thought is thereby determined, indeed foreclosed, by an already existing image of its “nature” or “character.” Second, the sovereignty of thought shares the presumption, common to phenomenology and the analytic tradition, that thought and reality are separate entities, that the former consists in an internalization or prehension of the latter. Naturally, this description does correspond to a form of willed cogitation; but for Deleuze no true thought is voluntary. The mind needs to be jolted out of its tendency to remain in its “natural stupor” (139), its willingness to be satisfied with the limited possibilities extended to it by the conceptual world. Deleuze’s thought, observes Badiou, “is never of the order of an internalized relation, representation, or consciousness-of” (Clamor 21). Thought does not begin with perception at all, but with incomprehension, thus, with a necessarily violent “encounter” that escapes any attempt to frame it using existing concepts. In Difference and Repetition, in the indispensable chapter entitled “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze provocatively replaces the term philosophy with “misosophy,” suggesting that violence, trespass, enmity, and necessity are all elements of thought. The “primary characteristic” of what forces us to think is that “it can only be sensed,” not comprehended (139). The aim of all subsequent conceptualization or application of thought is to resist the “reterritorialization” of the encounter; to prevent the betrayal of thought into the inertia of the historical. One way to do this is to remove any presumption that thinking originates in the mind, as opposed to the body. Another is to preserve as far as possible the quality of thought as experimentation.21

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 171

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

172

chapter 6

One of the most forceful statements of Deleuze’s rejection of the phenomenological problematic is found in his writings on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze rejects phenomenology for “setting up as a norm ‘natural perception’ and its conditions” (57), for perpetuating the idea that seeing clearly involves simply removing the social and ideological debris that interrupts or clouds our vision. As I have already observed, Sartre’s theorization of the intersubjective encounter was a formative moment in the general assault on the “subjective illusion” in French thought during the twentieth century; and yet perception is preserved in that moment as the “natural” basis underlying the illusions of consciousness. Sartre’s shame is predicated upon static categories of thought (self and other, “us” and “them,” soul and body, individual and society, colonizer and colonized, percipere and percipi), categories that enmesh us in the actual world and situate the subject in a finite and unhappy place with regard to the Other.22 Shame (in Sartre’s understanding) holds these oppositions in place, whereas thought (in Deleuze’s understanding) takes place on the basis of their suspension. And yet in Deleuze’s writing there is another, more profound shame, a shame that is inimical to all such categories, and which he signals in several places using Primo Levi’s phrase the “shame of being a man.”23 This is a shame redoubled upon itself, taken to the power of itself; a shame so encompassing that it includes within its circuit the very category of shame; a shame that subjects itself to its own power. This “profound” shame is not at all a shame that can be referred to a subject; on the contrary, shame is for Deleuze precisely a shame of the subject and of everything that emerges from it; it is a shame that annihilates the subject—annihilates, that is to say, the principle of a shame that relates solely to the subject. In Deleuze, shame implies the suspension of the subjective principle, even as the thematic instantiation of shame (as in, say, Coetzee’s writings, or T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom) frequently takes the form of a subjective assault on the self.24 This “more profound” shame is not an affect in any straightforward sense; it is not a concept either, since it is not treated to the degree of elaboration that, say, “deterritorialization” and “becoming” are accorded in Deleuze’s writing. Rather, Deleuze’s shame is an event—inexpressible and unnameable, a shame that is discontinuous with its naming and conceptualization. It is difficult to grasp this “event” of shame as long as we remain with those texts of Deleuze that make explicit use of the term. Dominic Smith comments on Deleuze’s shame as follows: “To feel shame at being a man is to feel the limitations of identity and judgement—to feel oneself identified in terms of man as a ‘majoritarian fact’ and judged complicit in the shameful things that men do.”25 Those “limitations of identity and judgement” include the very terms with which, since Sartre, we have learned

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 172

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

Shame and Subtraction

173

to conceptualize the notion of shame. Deleuze’s shame is the shame of actualization: the shame of what is producible or instantiable by writing, the order of referentiality to which writing condemns us, but from which it can also extract us. For Deleuze’s most profound engagement with shame, then—the shame that, as he says at the end of his essay on T. E. Lawrence, is “cosubstantial with being” (Essays Critical and Clinical 125)—we need to turn to moments in Deleuze’s work in which the shame is not repeated, or annulled, by the circumstance of being named as such. Subtraction In the fourth chapter of Cinema 1, Deleuze poses the following question: “How can we rid ourselves [nous défaire] of ourselves, and demolish [défaire] ourselves?”26 The question is irresolvable, as Deleuze realizes, for how is it possible to demolish oneself, or even disparage oneself, without thereby positing, asserting oneself? The question makes less sense as an aesthetic or ethical project, therefore, than as a principle of thought. However, to name or conceive of this principle as “shame” would interrupt the operation by subjectivizing it; consequently, in his works on cinema Deleuze does not use the word at all. Instead, his question opens up a discussion framed not subjectively, but in terms that attempt to do justice to its technical rather than moral, or affective, dimension. Such terms may be found in the work of Henri Bergson, Deleuze’s most important resource for the challenge to the phenomenological model of consciousness. Deleuze describes Bergson’s theory of perception as follows: “In perception … there is never anything else or anything more than there is in the thing: on the contrary, there is ‘less.’ We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs. … The first material moment of subjectivity … is subtractive. It subtracts from the thing whatever does not interest it” (63). The great audacity of Bergson’s theory of consciousness, as outlined in the first chapter of Matter and Memory, is to take as the basis of his enquiry not real, concrete, human perception but what he calls a “pure” perception: “a perception which exists in theory rather than in fact and would be possessed by a being placed where I am, living as I live, but absorbed in the present and capable, by giving up every form of memory, of obtaining a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous.”27 This hypothesis of a “pure perception” is Bergson’s attempt to take into account the fact that our body—which is to say, our brain—is also an image; even the fact of our having perception is an image, present to us alongside the images in the world that we perceive directly: “this image occupies the centre; by it all the others are conditioned” (Key Writings 91). Thus, Bergson removes

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 173

8/13/2010 2:04:42 PM

174

chapter 6

from consideration questions such as whether the universe exists only inside or outside our thoughts; for Bergson, insofar as the universe becomes a matter for enquiry at all, it is “in terms of images, and of images alone” (ibid.). Pure perception is not subject to such questions; it is not merely outside human perception, but of an entirely different order from it. “In one sense,” writes Bergson, “we might say that the perception of any unconscious material point whatever, in its instantaneousness, is infinitely greater and more complete than ours, since this point gathers and transmits the influences of all the points of the material universe, whereas our consciousness only attains to certain parts and to certain aspects of those parts” (99)—parts and aspects that are limited by our interests. Against this pure perception, our merely subjective consciousness is an interruption, a blockage, or a subtraction. Deleuze writes: “As for our consciousness … it will merely be the opacity without which light, ‘pass[ing] on unopposed, would never have been revealed’” (61).28 For Deleuze, this account of perception impacts upon everything: not only the presupposition, associated with phenomenology, that consciousness is fundamentally a positive entity which “is directed towards the thing and gains significance in the world,”29 but also the tradition of European philosophy “which placed light on the side of spirit and made consciousness a beam of light which drew things out of their native darkness” (Cinema 1 60). More radically still, Bergson’s theory of consciousness dismantles any idea of a positive quality to human activity and its effects. The subject is not a center of “determination”—that is to say, of action or perception—but rather of “indetermination”: the interruption of action and the blockage of perception. Thus, from the perspective of pure perception, insofar as we speak, write, act, or paint, insofar as we express ourselves in any form whatsoever, we do not add to knowledge of the world but detract from it. Shame would be a quality of any speech or writing in which an intimation of this fact—in however tentative a form, and whether acknowledged or not—is expressed in subjective terms. The thematic presence of shame in the work of a writer like Coetzee would be understood in this light as an intimation that there is no positive dimension to writing, nor to intellectual activity in general, nor to any such index of the presence of man. Even as such, shame is a departure from the immediacy and instantaneity of pure perception. Shame instantiated is simply another image, an example of a kind that “surges” in the center of indetermination (the subject) “between a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action” (Cinema 1 65). Deleuze refers to these as “affectionimages”; they represent the way that the subject appears to itself, “from the inside.” Affection (and shame is here merely an example—the same might be said of “joy” or “frustration”) measures and bridges the distance

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 174

8/13/2010 2:04:43 PM

Shame and Subtraction

175

between perception and the “delayed reaction” that constitutes the activity of a center of indetermination (64). Affection is situated entirely on the side of the “subtractive” consciousness and is indistinguishable from it; it is the form in which consciousness is present to itself as an image. In shame, therefore, as in all affections, subject and object coincide. Affection “re-establishes the relation” between perception and action; it thus serves to obscure their incommensurability (66). Affection, the self-image of the subject, therefore sits alongside perception and action as “a third absolutely necessary given” of the “system” of subjectivity—what Deleuze calls the “perception-action system” (65). “Subtraction,” then, is the name of the principle according to which we can develop a non-subjective understanding of shame, a notion of shame that is not susceptible to what Sartre called the “subjective illusion.” The principle of subtraction divides shame against itself: into a nameable shame on one hand, which refers to a center of indetermination (a subject), and an unnamed, profound or redoubled shame that cannot be referred to the subject, a shame from which all merely subjective qualities have been removed. The theory of subtraction, then, is the best answer that one might offer to the question, “How can we rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves?”30 Deleuze’s posing of this question is preliminary to an account of Samuel Beckett’s Film, a work written as a screenplay in 1963 and subsequently filmed by Alan Schneider under Beckett’s supervision, and first shown at the New York Film Festival in 1965. In this work, Beckett, by the ingenious conceit of a camera lens (E) pursuing from behind a figure in a “long dark overcoat” (O), finally shows the most shaming and irreducible alterity to be not the perceiving (and perceived) presence of another person, but the contemplation of the self by the self. O, played by Buster Keaton, is oblivious of E—which is to say, he is unaware that he is perceived—as long as the angle at which the camera regards him does not exceed forty-five degrees. The moment it does so, O “experiences anguish of perceivedness,” says Beckett’s published script, and E “hastily reduces angle.”31 In the film’s third scene, O, entering a room, sets about extinguishing all the sources of percipi: he draws a curtain over the window, covers a mirror, destroys a picture of the face of God on the wall, ejects or covers up various animal presences (a dog, a cat, a parrot, a goldfish), and finally rips up seven photographs that he has been carrying in a briefcase of himself from different stages of his life. The film concludes with a sequence in which E and O regard each other, E having advanced beyond the “angle of immunity” under cover of O’s sleep. O’s face, perceiving E on waking, wears an agonized expression; E’s face, which we see for the first time, is identical to O’s, except that it has an expression of “acute intentness” (329).

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 175

8/13/2010 2:04:43 PM

176

chapter 6

Seen in the light of Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work, it is obvious that Beckett’s film is about shame—in Merleau-Ponty’s words, the experience of being “reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person.”32 The final shot makes clear, however, that the essential element of shame is not the presence of a perceiving other. Rather, the more tenacious and irreducible site of alterity is the self. No erasure of the self, no dissolution of shame is possible by merely closing one’s eyes or isolating oneself from the gaze of others. The solution explored in Beckett’s film to the problem posed by Deleuze—how to rid ourselves of ourselves, how to demolish ourselves—is at best provisional. “Immobility,” says Deleuze, “death, the loss of personal movement and of vertical stature, when one is lying in a rocking chair which does not even rock any more, are only a subjective finality” (Cinema 1 68). Film offers merely a “reverse proof” of Deleuze’s subtractive hypothesis, because its use of cinema remains instrumental, tied to the film’s philosophical conceit: the lens as analogue, or vehicle, of the affection-image. The full possibilities of cinema, then— the liberation of perception from the “center of indetermination”—are not realized in Beckett’s Film; Beckett treats cinema as a representational medium, rather than an event that alters forever the conditions and the possibilities of thought. Beckett’s solution, this is to say, is incomplete, because he remains within the phenomenological problematic. Any escape from the shameful, subtractive fact of consciousness is impossible in the terms of that problematic. The real question of subtraction, says Deleuze, is that of “attaining once more the world before man, before our own dawn, the position where movement was … under the regime of universal variation, and where light, always propagating itself, had no need to be revealed” (68). The argument put forward in Deleuze’s cinema books, to which the discussion of Beckett is merely preliminary, is that cinema, by virtue of its material actuality, brings into effect a historical dismantling of the regime of category thinking, of immobile sections of thought, of the ontology of subject and object, of “us” and “them.” The essence of cinema is an “eye” free of the factors that interrupt pure perception: not simply ideology, but (in Peter Hallward’s enumeration) “personality, identity, subjectivity, consciousness, signification.”33 As André Bazin notes of photography, “All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.”34 Deleuze extends this observation to cinema, the form in which the idealist separation of consciousness and thing, subject and object, is overcome—in “fact,” not simply in “theory.” Cinema expounds a world in which, for the first time, image = movement (Cinema 1 58). The movement that is actualized in cinema, says Deleuze in Cinema 2, “no longer depends on a moving body or an object [that is to say, a brain] which realizes it, nor on a spirit which reconstitutes it. It is

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 176

8/13/2010 2:04:43 PM

Shame and Subtraction

177

the image which itself moves in itself” (156). The cinematographic image “makes” movement, thereby “mak[ing] what the other arts are restricted to demanding (or to saying).” In so doing, cinema “converts into potential what was only possibility” (ibid.). To invoke a term from elsewhere in Deleuze’s work, we might say that cinema manifests an “event” of movement, whereas the other arts are restricted to representing, instantiating, pontificating about, enjoining, or working towards any such event. This is where cinema has such importance for the subtractive theory of consciousness. Like Beckett, Bergson used cinema to illustrate the partial, subtractive quality of human consciousness. For Deleuze, however, the significance of cinema is infinitely greater than either recognized, for cinema provides a model of perception that is not subject to the limitations of human perception. Cinema no longer needs to be framed by human perception, held in subordination to it, but may be regarded in its specificity as the realization of the “pure perception” spoken of in a hypothetical mode by Bergson. “The model cannot be natural perception,” says Deleuze. “The model would be rather a state of things which would constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable” (Cinema 1 57). Cinema, pace Bergson, “lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon” (58). Cinema offers us, not occasionally but perpetually, by its mere existence, what Bergson is only able to conceptualize: a perception that is “absorbed in the present,” “a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous”; and it does so irrespective of what we, with our conscious, subtractive perception, might think it is offering us. In cinema “the eye is in things, in luminous images in themselves,” writes Deleuze (60). There is nothing mystical about this proposition; its difficulty is simply the difficulty of Bergson’s initial premise of a “pure” perception of the universe by the universe itself, a universal perception, incessant and unobstructed by consciousness. And yet, as Bergson states, the truth of this is self-evident, agreed upon by “all philosophers” (he names Faraday and Leibniz), and the basis of investigations in both “metaphysics” and “physics” (Key Writings 99). Its contrary is an understanding of perception as a “photographic view of things,” predicated on an “anchored” consciousness. Bergson poses a provocative rhetorical question from the perspective (if we can call it that) of pure perception: “Is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all points of space?” (ibid.) This pure photograph would be one that is unburdened by the circumstance of needing to be produced or developed. It is tempting to draw an analogy here with Hegel’s conception of a revolution that could not (or would not need to) be realized. Adorno, remember, conceived of Hegel’s published works as being like “films of thought” (Hegel 121). Bergson continues:

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 177

8/13/2010 2:04:43 PM

178

chapter 6

When we consider any other given place in the universe, we can regard the action of all matter as passing through it without resistance and without loss, and the photograph of the whole as translucent: here there is wanting behind the plate the black screen on which the image could be shown. Our ‘zones of indetermination’ play in some sort the part of the screen. They add nothing to what is there; they effect merely this: that the real action passes through, the virtual action remains. (Key Writings 99)

What is lacking in this “translucent” photograph is the brain—the black screen—that interrupts it and produces an image out of it, an image that is “virtual” with respect to the real action or perception that “passes through” it. For Deleuze, however, that translucent photograph is available to us: in cinema. To return to Jean-Luc Godard’s claim referred to at the end of chapter 1, cinema is “sufficient unto itself.”35 Cinema’s essence, which is to say its existence, is entirely without shame, false or otherwise. From the perspective of pure perception (which is to say, from the perspective of cinema), all shame is false shame—unless it is that pure shame that neither requires nor survives its instantiation. Louis Malle’s L’Inde fantôme Thirty-five years after the publication of Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme, the French film director Louis Malle made L’Inde fantôme, the record of a journey through India undertaken over a period of several months and broadcast on French television in seven 52-minute episodes. Towards the end of the first episode, during a sequence showing fishermen hauling in their catch on a beach on the Madras coast, Malle offers the following commentary: Tuesday February 27. I awoke very early. The light is still undecided, very soft and sad, as it often is in the tropics. I’m suddenly projected 15 years into the past, to early mornings in the Seychelles, on beaches like this. I was 20, shooting my first film. The tropics enchanted me, the entire world one big promise of happiness [promesse de bonheur]. Suddenly, the fishermen in front of me are replaced by others. Once again memory fills the foreground. Once again, I’m incapable of living in the present, of feeling it, of touching it. Even in the Seychelles, reality escaped me, that elusive harmony between men, light and landscape. I had to reinvent it, modify it, project onto it my dreams and memories. I had to destroy it. Westerner, filmmaker, time’s tamer, time’s slave.36

This sentiment expresses a disenchantment with film and with the speaker’s own origins that is comparable to Leiris’s “bitterness” and “resentment” towards ethnography and Europe. The passage is an eloquent

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 178

8/13/2010 2:04:43 PM

Shame and Subtraction

179

Fig. 6.1.  Episode I, “The Impossible Camera,” L’Inde fantôme, dir. Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1969.

statement of the subtractive hypothesis, a statement whose eloquence is only sharpened by the contrast with the images of the fishermen on screen, existing in all the “immedia[cy] and instantane[ity]” (Bergson 97) that Malle claims eludes him. Malle’s voiceover registers a discrepancy that exists throughout the film between words and images, a discrepancy that is alluded to so frequently that, even when it is not thematized explicitly, it is part of the fabric of the film. Words, of course, are the only means of noting such a discrepancy. One of the principal uses that Malle makes of words through all seven episodes is to inform us of their inadequacy. The scene on the beach at Madras ends with a quarrel between the fishermen and a trader who, arriving on a bicycle, offers them a pitiful sum for the fish they have caught. “This is my film,” says Malle, concluding the episode: “On one hand, an entirely subjective reflection on my interior world, but on the other, just the opposite: the economic realities that won’t let me escape into dreams. An incessant back-andforth between myself and the things before me. Almost always, reality gains the upper hand” (I). In the shift from words to images constituted by L’Inde fantôme, and, more importantly perhaps, in the discrepancy between words and images that is opened up within the work, Malle on his own account will find a way of achieving what Leiris found impossible: a sensuous connection with the “other.” The first episode opens with a montage of highly educated, Englishspeaking Indians addressing Malle behind the camera. Only two percent of Indians speak English, Malle tells us, but that minority talks a great

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 179

8/13/2010 2:04:43 PM

180

chapter 6

Fig. 6.2.  Episode I, “The Impossible Camera,” L’Inde fantôme, dir. Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1969.

deal, in the name of the rest. “I immediately sensed that the real questions were not being addressed.” L’Inde fantôme promises to tell—in “images gathered without a script, or preconceived concept”—a story that is truer than any that could be told in the former colonial language. It will be “a film of our chance encounters.” When Malle films a father and son performing a “Tiger dance” in Mysore during the Muslim festival of Muhurram, he comments: “Words are useless between us. The image is our only connection. They dance and I film them. That’s all.” Over the image of several brickmakers at work, who, we are told, earn one rupee for every 150 bricks, Malle says: “We film them as they are, the hypnotic repetition of their movements. There’s some sort of truth to be found there at least. To tell how they work 10–12 hours a day, live in huts, come from neighboring villages, have no land—would all that add anything to what the images already reveal?” (I). This investment in images opens up an important question related to the people who are subject to the attention of Malle’s camera. The many shots in L’Inde fantôme of peasant women picking crops, for example, might be thought to invite a critical analysis in terms of the Western, scopophilic “male gaze.” Despite his consistent appeal to the discrepancy between words and images, Malle is aware of problems posed to his project by the presence of the camera; in the first episode he describes himself and his crew as “Westerners with a camera; Westerners twice over.” On the first day of shooting (January 18, 1968), they come across two women picking clumps of grass from a barren piece of land outside Delhi. As

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 180

8/13/2010 2:04:44 PM

Shame and Subtraction

181

Fig. 6.3.  Episode I, “The Impossible Camera,” L’Inde fantôme, dir. Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1969.

soon as they arrive, one of the women gets up and leaves, cursing them. “She doesn’t want to be filmed. It’s evil, a spell we cast upon her. Being filmed will steal from her everything she is.” Malle’s use of free indirect discourse conveys his sympathy, even as he continues to film the woman who remains: “The camera’s fundamental brazenness is something I’ve constantly experienced, even in Paris, even with actors, even on film sets. Here, it’s worse. These women have absolutely nothing. They spend the morning on their knees to glean a handful of fodder and I steal a bit more from them. To them … our camera is a weapon, and they’re afraid of us.” In another scene featuring a line of evidently exploited laborers, Malle refers implicitly to the subtractive quality of the images, the responsibility for which he shares with the camera: “In this scene, rich ground for political analysis, I notice the camera’s chosen only one aspect. It keeps returning to this young woman, because we’re drawn to her beauty, her graceful modesty, her laugh. Because she dazzles us. Because that’s what it was like that morning.” Malle, it seems, needs words in order to highlight, to instantiate the radical potentiality of the images in his project, as well as to acknowledge the ethical implications and aspirations of the project itself. This journey, he says, will be one “guided” by the camera, rather than the other way round. “We’re not filming to defend an idea, or demonstrate one” (I). The tension between words and images is never resolved in Malle’s film. The quest for immediacy—for “that elusive harmony between men, light and landscape”—remains an aspiration. Indeed, how could it be

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 181

8/13/2010 2:04:44 PM

182

chapter 6

realized as long as it is articulated in such abstract terms—as long as it is separated from itself by the insertion of a subjective relation to it? Yet the discrepancy is also a necessary element in the film, insofar as it dramatizes the more fundamental distinction between human perception and the pure perception that Bergson ascribes to the hypothetical sphere, the sphere of “theory” (97) a perception that would be conditional upon the transcendence of all merely human perception, all memory, all consciousness in general. When Malle offers his commentary alongside the images of the fishermen on the beach, a distance is established between his own perception—subtractive by definition, haunted by memory and by his own subjectivity—and that of the camera. This distance will become a principle of the work; indeed, it is on those same grounds, pertaining to cinema in general, that the hypothesis of the camera’s “male gaze” is rejected by Deleuze. Like phenomenology, the male gaze hypothesis analogizes cinema to natural perception, albeit in a critique of that perception. “Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object,” writes Laura Mulvey, “thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.”37 The “conscious aim” of conventional narrative cinema, she says, is “always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience” (844). For Mulvey, resisting or disrupting these codes and conventions is a critical procedure, one that is already being taken up by “radical filmmakers”: “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions … is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment” (ibid.). For Deleuze, however, cinema is precisely the form in which the male gaze, or the “Western” gaze, is deposed; this is not a matter of the filmmaker’s intentionality or volition, and it is not a “critical” or “political” project. Cinema—“the in-itself of the image,” Deleuze calls it (Cinema 1 81)—is not analogizable to a human eye, because the camera is not an immobile center; or it is so only if regarded “from the point of view of the human eye” (ibid.). Deleuze reminds us of the Bergsonian formulation: in subjective (subtractive) perception, “the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image” (the brain), while an objective perception is one where “all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts” (Cinema 1 76). As soon as we have the principle of montage, we have a camera that is separate from the privileged center, a camera capable of giving us “the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things” (81). Thus, if there is a resolution to the discrepancy between words and images in Malle’s film, it is found in the presence of the camera, which elevates the discrepancy into a formal principle. However, that formal

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 182

8/13/2010 2:04:44 PM

Shame and Subtraction

183

Fig. 6.4.  Episode I, “The Impossible Camera,” L’Inde fantôme, dir. Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1969.

principle is by definition not instantiable nor mobilizable as an ethical or political justification for the project; any such mobilization would destroy it. Malle himself, for example, is not necessarily aware of it as such. Since the voiceover constitutes one term in the discrepancy, we should not look for the truth of the film there. Nor are the images alone sufficient; attention should be paid, rather, to this uninstantiable discrepancy. Three exemplary moments from L’Inde fantôme will illustrate the way in which this discrepancy functions as a principle of the work, establishing a center of consciousness that is outside the human subject. One could almost speak of a “camera consciousness,” except that Deleuze’s work scrupulously avoids any suggestion of a spatially locatable center to this consciousness; he refers instead to a “spiritual automaton” (Cinema 2 156) and to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s idea of a “free indirect subjectivity” (148).38 One of the most striking and defining sequences comes near the beginning of the first episode, as Malle and his crew notice that the people they are filming are staring back at the camera. With his frame filled with faces, Malle comments: “We came to see them, but they’re the ones looking at us. So we preferred to film them that way, their sea of enormous eyes turned on us, on the camera’s single eye. We decided to film all these looks, to make them the leitmotif of our journey.” Immediately afterwards, the crew comes upon a wedding celebration; again they find themselves the object of scrutiny as all activity at the wedding temporar-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 183

8/13/2010 2:04:45 PM

184

chapter 6

ily halts. “The roles are reversed. We’ve become the show, and they’re the audience.” Slowly, however, the participants in the wedding “seem to forget about us. The ceremony continues with its precise ritual, unchanged for centuries. This eternity erases us, like an unimportant spot in the crowd” (I). The moment is remarkable for its apparent negotiation of the archetypical shame encounter, as narrated in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. First of all, the look: “Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure—modifications which I can apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito” (Being and Nothingness 260). However, there is no shame apparent in Malle’s narration, perhaps because, as Fanon notes, “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (Black Skin 90). And yet there is no shame apparent among the Indians either: the faces assembled in Malle’s frame are, rather, inquisitive, suspicious, or indifferent. When the wedding ceremony continues, Malle’s extraordinary sense of being “erased” is not one of being shamed, but the opposite. Similarly, it is as if the “ontological resistance” of his own gaze is embargoed, even while the filming continues. Malle’s explanation for the erasure invokes the “eternity” of the ritual, an explanation that projects a kind of absolute alterity onto the people, onto the “culture” being filmed. Yet perhaps the eternity that erases the filmmakers is not the eternity of the ritual but a quite different eternity that is brought into manifestation by the presence of the camera. Pure (nonhuman) perception, pure (nonhuman) memory, implies also pure (nonhuman) temporality—what, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin calls “objectivity in time.” “Now, for the first time,” he writes, “the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.”39 Deleuze takes this insight of Bazin’s a step further when he talks of the “de-actualization” of the present effected by cinema. At certain exemplary moments, cinema offers direct images of time—most frequently in the form of what Deleuze calls pure optical or sound situations during which the onscreen present is “separated from its own actual quality.” The event, says Deleuze, “is no longer confused with the space which serves as its place, nor with the actual present which is passing” (Cinema 2 100). Time becomes crystalline, no longer containable within the diegesis, but directly and sensuously present in itself. In such moments of pure duration, the “peak” of the present is brought into continuity with the “present of the past” and the “present of the future” (that is to say, the fact that perception is always infused with both recollection and the anticipation of a future recollection of the present); all three are “rolled up in the event” in a “simultaneity of … three implicated

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 184

8/13/2010 2:04:45 PM

Shame and Subtraction

185

Fig. 6.5.  Episode IV, “Dream and Reality,” L’Inde fantôme, dir. Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1969.

presents” (ibid.). It is this quality of duration in L’Inde fantôme that deposes the sense of self of the filmmakers, not the culturally framed eternity of an ethnographic encounter. A quality of temporality is achieved in L’Inde fantôme that is incommensurable with the human propensity to divide time into sections of successive presents, or to remove eternity to a temporal or cultural sphere outside the here and now. This effect is even clearer in a scene from the beginning of the fourth episode of L’Inde fantôme. Over the image of a caravan slowly moving towards the camera, Malle apostrophizes the figures on the carts and on the road, as follows: “You peasants, met at dawn on a remote road in southern India. Your life flows imperceptibly, to a rhythm different from ours, from the minutes and seconds we consider so valuable. At this point in our journey we’ve almost found your rhythm” (IV). Just as it seems impossible to distinguish Leiris’s shame from the fact of his writing, so it seems impossible to distinguish the absence of shame in Malle’s film, exemplified in such apparently euphoric moments, from its actuality as a film. Malle, we learn from a 1990 interview, spent an intense year “in the cutting room” after returning to Paris from India. “It was as if I was still in India. It was the continuation of my trip. Just looking at my images and remembering what happened, I discovered certain contradictions that I had not even noticed. … I was deepening my experience of India by just watching what I had shot, and trying to make sense of it.”40 Malle is not merely experiencing India as if it were a film. In the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 185

8/13/2010 2:04:45 PM

186

chapter 6

voiceover, it seems to be the cinematic quality of the experience that he is encountering, perhaps for the first time. The movement, the temporality he is lyricising belong not to the peasants but to the image. The “rhythm” he has found, or “almost” found, is sensuously present as a crystal of pure time; it is reducible neither to the moment of the filming, nor to that of the editing, nor to that of the viewing. The crystal displaces the object; and not only the object, but the very situation of the object’s contemplation by a subject. In fact, the entirety of Malle’s film follows the principle of the time-image. Every shot is a pure optical situation—whether what we are seeing is a hundred vultures dismantling the carcass of a buffalo, innumerable bats hanging from the trees at twilight in Trivandrum, laundry workers at a river outside Madras, or a prostitute sticking out her tongue at the camera from a window in Bombay.41 Every image is detached from its “motor extension,” from any direct narrative purpose (Deleuze, Cinema 2 126). “When I was shooting I was never thinking, ‘Well where is it going to come, how does it relate to something I did yesterday?’ No, we were just shooting at random” (Malle on Malle 71). Yet Malle’s commentary, in all its subtractive limitation, is as necessary as the images to the production of the crystal, for the commentary brings together those several “presents” (filming, editing, viewing) that, in their respective incommensurability, constitute the fabric of the film, its plane of consistency. Consider a third scene from the same episode, in which we see two pure optical situations in immediate succession: a man plowing a field with a hoe and another spreading grain over a mat with his feet. “Nothing shocked me anymore,” says Malle, for I’d accepted another perspective on the world. It’s not about explaining or dominating the world, but being a part of it, fitting into it. Watching them perform simple gestures as if they were rituals, strange ideas come to mind. If happiness is defined as a sense of balance and bliss, being in harmony with one’s surroundings, interior peace, then these Indian peasants are happier than us, who’ve destroyed nature, and do battle with time in the absurd pursuit of material well-being, in the end sharing only our loneliness. (IV)

What is the other perspective talked of by Malle? Does it belong to India, or to Indians? What is the “world” that Malle feels himself becoming “a part of,” “fitting into”? Is it that of Indian society? Not really. The other perspective discovered in L’Inde fantôme is one that is given substance by the cinematic apparatus. The world of immediacy and intimacy that beckons to Malle is that of the cinema, the plane of immanence in which the shameful condition of being stapled to a fixed point of consciousness, what Deleuze, after Bergson, calls a “center of indetermination,” is overcome. Where is the “happiness” that Malle finds so appealing and so

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 186

8/13/2010 2:04:45 PM

Shame and Subtraction

187

Fig. 6.6.  Episode IV, “Dream and Reality,” L’Inde fantôme, dir. Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1969.

moving? Is it really located in the peasants, the objects of his “Western” gaze? How could it be? The “vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous” that has been his quest all along is discovered not in India but in the cinematic image. What Bazin called “the impassive lens” is the means by which Malle escapes (although it is not exactly he who escapes) the Western gaze. Is his “loneliness” that of the Western consciousness? No again, except insofar as “the West” names a structure of domination predicated upon the separation of identity and difference, the principle of self-expression, and a regime of organic description that assumes the independence of the object from its perception. The freedom from shame achieved by Malle in L’Inde fantôme does not belong to him any more than it is attributable to the presence of the Indians in his film. If the film, or filming, enables him to transcend his (“our”) loneliness, what is transcended is not so much loneliness as it is the logic of his, their, our. Towards Postcolonial Writing This discussion of L’Inde fantôme was not intended to offer any final estimation of the film’s success in negotiating a shame that persists in the works of the writers dealt with in this book. And, in spite of any impression given by Deleuze’s cinema books, it is not the case that the possibilities for escaping the shameful conditions of “anchored” human

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 187

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

188

chapter 6

perception are necessarily greater in cinema than in literature. As Deleuze says in Cinema 2, cinema gives rise to concepts that are not limited to cinema, but are “themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices” (280). Those concepts are no less the result of a “practice” than is cinema itself. In other words, the possibilities that Deleuze extracts from cinema are the result not merely of a theorization of cinema, but of an exercise of conceptualization, albeit one that develops through and alongside cinema. Every possibility remains, therefore, of developing concepts specific to literary works that will free them from the economy of identity and difference, of self and other, that has seemed to define them in an intimate relation to shame. Indeed, the failure to produce such concepts should be regarded not as a deficit of the work, but of the practice of reading. L’Inde fantôme is relevant to the present discussion because of its dramatic staging of the distinction between an ethnographic project organized around the shame-ridden perception of an immobile center and an ethnography liberated from those perceptual limits by the presence of the camera: a machinic apparatus that, by definition, lacks a “centre of anchorage and of horizon” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 58). This distinction is manifest in the internal architecture of the film—the discrepancy between Malle’s personal voiceover and the images onscreen—but also in the contrast between L’Inde fantôme and Leiris’s earlier L’Afrique fantôme, a work continuously and unhappily riveted to the perceptual limitations of an immobile “centre of indetermination” (that is, Leiris’s own ego). We have encountered versions of this distinction throughout the present study. Its most important formulation is the difference between what I have called an “instantiated” shame and an “event” of shame. On one hand, there is a shame predicated on the category of the ego, a shame that preserves its own substance, its self-exemption, precisely to the degree that it is able to instantiate itself; on the other hand, there is an illimitable shame that includes itself among the categories by which it is ashamed. The singularity of this second shame is measured precisely by its inability to instantiate itself. Thus, in the works of J. M. Coetzee, the named form of shame is attended by a second shame that diverges from it—a shame from which every subjective component is progressively erased, such that, in the late novel Slow Man, there is nothing present that is recognizable as shame at all. This is the explanation offered in the previous chapter for the bicycle accident and amputation that open the story of Paul Rayment, a story of the mortification and positivization of the body from which the psychological component has been completely expunged. (The instantiated shame at the end of Slow Man, when Paul is willingly, deservedly shamed by the gift of a recumbent bicycle, is necessary to this dynamic for the same reason that Malle’s voiceover is neces-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 188

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

Shame and Subtraction

189

sary to L’Inde fantôme: to throw into relief the discrepancy between the two modes.) L’Inde fantôme and Slow Man, then, make use of a machinic apparatus (a camera, a bicycle accident) to put into suspension the anchored consciousness of the Western ethical subject. In doing so, both works suggest the possibility of an engagement that does not involve reducing the “other” to the object of an ethnographic observation. If it is possible to, as Fanon says, “touch the other, feel the other, discover each other,” a first stipulation must be that we dispense with the abstract terms in which such an aspiration is framed, along with the very structure of anchored perception that it seems to presuppose. The concepts that L’Inde fantôme brings into being—in particular, the distinction between the centered perception of the filmmaker and the decentered (or free indirect) consciousness of the filmic apparatus—may be similarly related to concepts that have emerged from the discussions of other writers in this book. Such concepts have frequently been at odds with the expressed objectives of the writers concerned. Thus, the poetics of ventriloquy and cliché in the work of Caryl Phillips is a mechanism by which the writer escapes from the pretensions of “voice,” and rigorously rejects the sovereignty of the writer’s “perspective.” These propositions are irreconcilable with Phillips’s own accounts of his work (“I have to hear the voice”). Phillips, this is to say, invents a solution to the problem of postcolonial shame not as a matter of will or determination, but in “the claws of absolute necessity”—because it was impossible to write otherwise. Like any situation of writing, the postcolonial world imposes what Deleuze calls “an original violence inflicted upon thought.”42 Only under such circumstances of compulsion does thought, which is to say writing, take place. The works of V. S. Naipaul come into existence similarly in the claws of necessity. Naipaul is working with an “imported” literary form, the “metropolitan novel,” that, as Naipaul was aware, is incapable of rendering the “terrible essence” of the colonial world.43 The writer of the colonial world is always belated. By the time he or she begins writing, the inherited cultural form is played out, exhausted. As in Malle’s film, words appear consistently in Naipaul’s work as failing, as unreliable and falsifying. Writing, when it takes place in his works, is an empty exercise; words and formulaic phrases are consoling to his characters, but they appear to the reader, and sometimes to the characters themselves, in the same condition as Jimmy Ahmed’s writing appears to him, in Guerrillas, after any interruption: as lifeless, false, “words alone.”44 In a relatively insignificant episode of Guerrillas, Peter Roche visits the home of Mrs. Stephens, the mother of a charismatic rebel leader who himself never appears in the novel. On the wall of the living room, Peter

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 189

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

190

chapter 6

notices a framed photograph of another of Mrs. Stephens’s children: “It was like a photograph in a photographer’s window in London, with the photographer’s satire hidden from the sitter, who saw only the flattery” (103). This fascinating sentence, bearing little relation to what surrounds it in the text, describes Naipaul’s own relationship to writing and to the challenge facing the writer to escape the tendency of writing  to flatter us, to reflect our own vanities back to us. The passage appropriates the figure of the machinic apparatus as the vehicle of the stark, unflattering reality. The distinction achieved in L’Inde fantôme between centered and decentered perception is hereby transformed in Naipaul into a distinction between two writings: one that is instantiated in the work and practised ineffectually by the characters, and another that is born out of the failure of the first—a “belated” writing in which, in Adorno’s phrase, the “muteness itself speaks.”45 As in Coetzee, the relation between these two writings is not stable but crystalline. If Naipaul writes, it is only by relentlessly implicating his own writing in the instantiated form. Jimmy Ahmed is writing a novel based on his encounters with Jane, another character in Guerrillas. The presence of Jimmy’s writing, so close in its themes, approach, and characters to the novel we are reading, functions as a counteractualization of Guerrillas itself, a kind of black hole that threatens Naipaul’s writing with the void of mere consolation, “words alone.” When Roy, Jimmy’s British correspondent, tells him (in a letter that Peter interprets as a “brush-off”) that Jimmy’s “powerful and hardhitting” novel will “certainly give a much needed fillip to the form” (160), the satire (and the shame) spiral outwards, bearing upon the ambitions of Naipaul’s own work and on the terrible, shameful presumption of undertaking any writing whatsoever. In the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Zoë Wicomb, we see the distinction between centered and decentered perception dramatized in and by the revolutionary situation. In A Grain of Wheat, the distinction is apparent in the clash between two literary forms: novelistic, third-person narration, and the epic collective narration of the community. The first tells the story of Mugo: his unhappy childhood, the anxiety characterizing his relations with the village, his feelings of envy towards the hero Kihika, the shame he experiences after he gives his famous speech (a shame that results from an egoistic interpretation of his own words), and finally the disgrace of his betrayal of Kihika. The epic, meanwhile, is a mode in which, like Malle’s camera, “the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 76). It is present in the novel only occasionally, in the form of a shift into a first-person plural narration—the same mode, incidentally, in which Mugo gives his speech. An exemplary instance tells of the sight of Mugo walking home in the rain, a few days before Uhuru day:

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 190

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

Shame and Subtraction

191

Most of us from Thabai first saw him at the New Rung’ei Market the day the heavy rain fell. You remember the Wednesday, just before Independence? … We saw the man walk in the rain. An old dirty basket filled with vegetables and potatoes was slung on his back. … The fact that he was the only man in the rain soon attracted the attention of people along the pavements and shop verandahs. Some even forced their way to the front to see him.   “What is he doing, fooling in the rain?”   “It is a dumb and deaf man he is.”   “Showing off, if you ask me.”   “Maybe he has a long way to walk, and he fears the night will catch him.”   “Or maybe he has something heavy in his heart.”46

This mode is never sustained for long in A Grain of Wheat; it comes into relief only against the conventional third-person narration that dominates the novel. Yet the mere presence of this epic mode is sufficient to cast the novelistic, shame-ridden narrative in subtractive terms—as incapable, by definition, of framing satisfactory solutions to the problems and tensions that drive it. This quality of subtraction extends to the instantiation of the revolution and to the perception even of those honest, well-intentioned individuals committed to the project of articulating and defending it. As Lukács says in The Theory of the Novel, “totality of being is possible only where everything is already homogeneous before it has been contained by forms”—meaning that form is only ever present as a problem, a “constraint.”47 Liberation, as Fanon was aware, can only be sustained by a revolution if it “betray[s] the vocation to which it is destined”—betrays, that is to say, the historical logic of its emergence into form, into realization (Wretched 99). In David’s Story, the organizing consciousness is that of an anchored individual, an unnamed female narrator, whose perception is dismissed as liberal and bourgeois by the novel’s subject, the former militant David Dirkse. Nevertheless, the writing that is produced from the collaboration of these two consciousnesses, in Wicomb’s conceit, is not one that claims any authority, any substance; hence the narrator’s opening claim that “this is and is not David’s story.” David’s story, as he would have it told, is not the story of David but of the struggle: “it’s not a personal history as such that I’m after.”48 If it becomes a story of individuals—truly David’s story, or Dulcie’s—it will cease to be a story that David would put his name to. In Wicomb, the writing that is produced is the ineffectual writing of a subtractive presence, or two subtractive presences. However, in this regard it manages, paradoxically, to be a story without a center: the product of something like a free indirect consciousness. It is as if Jimmy Ahmed’s black hole had completely subsumed the writing that cannot be instantiated—the writing that can take place only by refusing

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 191

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

192

chapter 6

to admit that it is writing—thereby turning the whole text into a document, the machinic trace of a failed collaboration. In Deleuze’s notion of crystalline description, “the description itself … constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object” (Cinema 2 126). The effect of Wicomb’s conceit is to produce a “crystal” in which the subtractive perception of the immobile center is reconceived as that of a decentered apparatus: “I no longer know which story I am trying to write,” the narrator tells us. “Who could keep going in a straight line with so many stories, like feral siblings, separated and each running wild, chasing each other’s tales?” (David’s Story 201). The material strategies and conceits of these novels constitute real solutions to the otherwise impossible questions implicit in every attempt to address the postcolonial hypothesis: What would it mean to imagine a literature in which every residue of the colonial relation has been overcome? How might one give adequate literary form to the shame of postcolonial existence? Is freedom from the colonial relation possible in a literary work? If for Sartre the purest embodiment of the free consciousness is the writer, for Deleuze the free consciousness is found not in the writer at all, but in the machine, the camera. If a truly postcolonial writing is to evolve, a writing unburdened by the shame of its partiality and inadequacy, the lessons of Malle’s L’Inde fantôme and of Deleuze’s works on cinema are that it will take the form of a machinic writing, a form that is already in development. Such a writing is crystallized whenever an instance or a detail of the work cannot be explained in terms of the apprehension of an object by a perceiving, writing subject; or whenever the opacity of an anchored consciousness is felt, within the work, as the condition of its truth. At such moments, the postcolonial writing to come is already visible, sensible: a writing freed from the shaming, subtractive consciousness of a being who writes.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 192

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

Notes

Prologue 1.  J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), p. 123. Publication details of all references will be provided in a note on first appearance in the book; thereafter, page numbers will appear in parentheses in the text, with abbreviated titles where necessary. 2.  Joseph Conrad, The Return (London: Hesperus, 2004). 3.  Evidence from clinical studies of patients who suffer from intense “shame reactions” seems to confirm this proposition in the therapeutic context. Discussing a transcribed conversation with a young college student with nervous tics, Helen Block Lewis writes: “Although her shame feeling is acute, the patient does not explicitly identify her own feeling as shame, but rather as ‘embarrassment,’ a shame variant.” The “slight laugh,” Lewis notes further, that accompanies the patient’s expression of negative feelings about what she calls her “nervous habits,” “is also a corrective or release for the feeling of shame. When the patient can laugh about it, she is free of shame. When she cannot, it is a ‘very, very, very sensitive sore spot’” (Shame and Guilt in Neurosis [New York: International Universities Press, 1971], pp. 202, 203). Another treatment of this structure, in a somewhat different context, appears in a song entitled “The Gimp (Sometimes),” produced by the British group Coil, where the lyrics—variations on the phrases “Sometimes I hurt myself,” “Sometimes I hate myself,” and “Sometimes I just help myself”—are rendered barely intelligible by sonic manipulation. The shame of “hating” oneself, or “hurting” oneself, is here acknowledged to be incompatible with its utterance (Coil, Black Antlers, Threshold House, 2006). In a study of shame in the writings of T. E. Lawrence, Gilles Deleuze observes the same paradoxical structure at work, but from the other side: shame is radically transformed (although the verbs generated, or abolished, might equally be used—this is the heart of the problem) when it is written. In Lawrence’s writing, according to Deleuze (and as discussed more fully in chapter 1), shame is no longer bound by referential limits: by the ego of the writer, for example. Rather, shame becomes a kind of multiple “entity,” inseparable from the “glory” or “pride” that is usually understood to be its antithesis. Indeed, shame in Lawrence is a machine for thinking the multiplicity and extensibility of concepts in general. Of chapter 103—the most self-annihilating—of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Deleuze writes: “Never before has shame been sung like this, in so proud and haughty a manner” (“The Shame and the Glory: T. E. Lawrence,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco [London: Verso, 1997], p. 120). What is so fascinating and indispensable in Deleuze’s writing about shame is the degree to which he rejects anything like a positive ontology of shame. In this short essay on Lawrence, not only is shame conceived outside ontology, it is counterposed to the logic of ontology itself: ontology, that is, understood in terms of

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 193

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

194

notes to pages 4–13

being. (There is an alternative ontology in Deleuze’s thought which might be described as an ontology of becoming, or difference. Constantin Boundas summarizes this usefully as follows: “Deleuze’s ontology is a rigorous attempt to think of process and metamorphosis—becoming—not as a transition or transformation from one substance to another or a movement from one point to another, but rather as an attempt to think of the real as a process.” As such, Deleuze’s thought is perhaps the best chance of preserving ontology itself in the face of what, in chapter 1, I diagnose as the modern “incredulity” towards it. See Constantin V. Boundas, “Ontology,” The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005], pp. 191–92.) 4.  Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 11. 5.  Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), p. xlviii. 6.  The great analyst of this dissymmetrical relation is of course Fanon, in his earlier Black Skin White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008); see especially chapter 5, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” pp. 89–119. 7.  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 13. 8.  Karl Marx, “Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 199–200. 9.  Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 145. Chapter One. Shame as Form 1.  Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 109; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313. 2.  Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of TwentiethCentury Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 5. 3.  Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 18, 152; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 101. 4.  J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 248. At the time Coetzee made this remark, his most recently completed (although not yet published) work was Age of Iron (New York: Penguin, 1998; orig. 1990). 5.  See, for example, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Boyhood (1997); Youth (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002); Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003); Coetzee’s Nobel lecture, “He and His Man,” published as The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003 (London: Penguin,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 194

8/13/2010 2:04:46 PM

notes to pages 13–20

195

2004); Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007); and Summertime (London: Harvill Secker, 2009). 6.  Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 259. 7.  For a critique of Kundera’s reading of Kafka and of his differentiation of the biography and the work, see Rolf Tiedemann, “Kafka Studies, the Culture Industry, and the Concept of Shame: Improper Remarks between Moral Philosophy and Philosophy of History,” Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005), pp. 245–58. 8.  Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 129–30. 9.  Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Idris Parry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 178. 10.  See Thomas Scheff, “The Shame-Rage Spiral: A Case Study of an Interminable Quarrel,” The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation, ed. Helen Block Lewis (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987), pp. 109–49. 11.  Coetzee, Youth, p. 165. 12.  Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. 13.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), p. 206. 14.  See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), especially pp. 101–2. 15.  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), p. 267. 16.  Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002), p. 393. 17.  G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 959–60, 1005. 18.  See Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy III: Paradiso, XXXIII, lines 55–75. 19.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 60, 145–7 (§§8, 32–3). 20.  Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 78. (NB: The rest of the book was translated by others.) 21.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 34. 22.  Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 361 (my emphasis). 23.  Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Wolf (London: Sphere, 1987). The American editions of these translations were titled, respectively, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier, 1961) and The Reawakening: A Liberated Prisoner’s Long March Home through East Europe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). Page references are to the British combined single edition. 24.  Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 77.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 195

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

196

notes to pages 21–28

25.  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 222. 26.  Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 27.  Emmanuel Lévinas, On Escape—De l’évasion, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2003), pp. 64, 65. 28.  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage 1952), pp. 344–47. 29.  Zoë Wicomb, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91–92. 30.  Nadine Gordimer, My Son’s Story (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990), p. 277. 31.  Zoë Wicomb, “When the Train Comes,” You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (New York: Feminist Press, 2000), pp. 21–35. 32.  The perspective put forward here may be contrasted with the more usual emphasis of practitioners and writers in the fields of clinical and social psychology. See, for example, Lisa R. Silberstein, Ruth H. Striegel-Moore, and Judith Rodin, who, preliminary to an investigation of the role of perceptions of “fatness” in women’s shame, write the following: “In a state of shame, the entire self is the object of denigration; the ashamed person understands herself to be bad” (“Feeling Fat: A Woman’s Shame,” The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation, ed. Helen Block Lewis [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987], pp. 89–108: 91). For Silberstein et al., “women’s shame about their bodies stems from their feeling too big and wanting to be smaller” (ibid.); “comparing self to ideal, most women fail to match up—and shame ensues” (93). One way of addressing the feelings of such women, for these writers, is thus to “work on changing their body ideal in order to reduce the self-ideal discrepancy” (104). What Wicomb’s fiction writing emphasizes, by contrast, is the event rather than the ontology of shame, and for Wicomb, this event is always also the event of writing. (I will discuss Wicomb’s novel David’s Story in chapter 4.) 33.  Zoë Wicomb, “Disgrace,” The One That Got Away: Short Stories (New York: New Press, 2009), pp. 23–36. 34.  See Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 5–6. 35.  Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” Negotiations, p. 172. 36.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 107. 37.  When, in his extraordinary preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane [London: Athlone, 1984]), Michel Foucault describes the book as “an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life” (xiii), what he is alluding to, among other things, is its practical and theoretical challenge to identity-thinking. His summary of the political program of the work

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 196

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

notes to pages 28–34

197

includes the following injunctions: “Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization…. Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth…. Do not demand of politics that it restore the rights of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations” (xiii–xiv). Fascism is for Foucault not just the “historical” fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (xiii). 38.  T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York: Anchor, 1991), p. 30. 39.  Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory,” Essays, p. 117. 40.  Letter to V. W. Richards, dated July 15, 1918, The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (New York: Doubleday, 1939), pp. 243–46. See Arendt, Origins, p. 218. 41.  Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 121–31. 42.  In his essay “Excuses,” on Rousseau’s Confessions, Paul de Man analyses this same discrepancy in Rousseau’s text as a functional one: between the cognitive function of guilt and the performative function of the excuse. The “predicament” of Rousseau’s text, concludes de Man, in an analogy with the present argument, is “linguistic” rather than “ontological or hermeneutic.” Paul de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 299–300. 43.  “Only those who had never been able to outgrow their boyhood ideals and therefore had enlisted in the colonial services were fit for the task,” writes Arendt. “Imperialism to them was nothing but an accidental opportunity to escape a society in which a man had to forget his youth if he wanted to grow up. English society was only too glad to see them depart to faraway countries, a circumstance which permitted the toleration and even the furtherance of boyhood ideals in the public school system. … Strange and curious lands attracted the best of England’s youth since the end of the nineteenth century, deprived her society of the most honest and the most dangerous elements, and guaranteed . . . a certain conservation, or perhaps petrification, of boyhood noblesse which preserved and infantilized Western moral standards.” The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 211. 44.  Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory,” Essays, pp. 120, 121, 123. 45.  In a study of the importance of travel in Deleuze’s work, Mary Bryden elaborates on Lawrence’s attraction to speed as another solution to the shame of the body: “The rare occasions on which the shame-producing cohabitation between spirit and body could be evaded and even forgotten included episodes of travelling at high velocity, which Lawrence found exhilarating, whether by camel, motorbike, or when collaborating to improve the speed of flying boats in the RAF. On such occasions, the body was in a sense demoted by being borne along at a speed far greater than it could ever achieve through its own capacities.” Mary Bryden, Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 20–21.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 197

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

198

notes to pages 34–46

46.  Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” Essays, p. 1. 47.  See my “What Is a Literary Landscape? Immanence and the Ethics of Form,” differences 16, no. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 63–102. 48.  See Deleuze and Guattari, “Percept, Affect and Concept,” What Is Philosophy? pp. 163–99. 49.  Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 289. 50.  John Limon, “The Shame of Abu Ghraib,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007), p. 546. Following an article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, Limon cites Raphael Patai’s book The Arab Mind, first published in 1973, which has since become, according to one of Hersh’s academic informants, “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” To Patai’s book is owed the “insight” that “the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation” (544–45). See also Seymour Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004. 51.  See Salman Rushdie, Shame (New York: Picador USA, 1983), pp. 124–25. 52.  Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 183. 53.  See my “From the Shameful Order of Virility: Autobiography after Colonialism,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 37, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2004), pp. 461–82. 54.  Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood to the Fierce Order of Virility, trans. Richard Howard (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), p. 155. 55.  Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), p. 120. 56.  Michel Leiris, “Préambule à L’Afrique fantôme” (1981), Miroir de l’Afrique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 87–88. Leiris speaks further in the same text of “des peuples qui, depuis mon voyage d’autrefois, ont commencé à se libérer, très incertainement et, dans l’ensemble, sur un mode assez Charybde en Scylla pour que soit tristement justifié l’emploi du terme ‘néocolonialisme’” (peoples that, since my earlier journey, have begun to liberate themselves, very uncertainly and altogether in a fashion sufficiently between Scylla and Charybdis as sadly to justify the use of the term “neocolonialism”), p. 89. 57.  Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 23. 58.  See Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften Bd. I. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 696. 59.  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), pp. 159–60; Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), p. 212. 60.  In The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (trans. Kristin Ross [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991]), Jacques Rancière painstakingly uses the story of the nineteenth-century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot to dismantle the concept of “intelligence” on similar grounds; see especially the second chapter, entitled “The Ignorant One’s Lesson.” 61.  Conrad, The Return. See my discussion in the prologue. 62.  In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel coined the term “thought-things” (Gedankendinge) to designate the tendency of thought to objectify itself in the

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 198

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

notes to pages 46–53

199

form of terms, concepts, and vehicles for its practical realization; see G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit: Selections, trans. Howard P. Kainz (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 135 (§588). 63.  Jean-Luc Godard, “Bergmanorama,” Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile-Cahiers du Cinema, 1985), p. 128; Godard on Godard, trans. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1986), pp. 75–76 (translation altered). 64.  The enormous influence of André Bazin’s thought about cinema is apparent throughout Godard’s essay; see, in particular, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967]), where Bazin writes famously: “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model” (14). Chapter Two. Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché: Caryl Phillips 1.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 15. 2.  Caryl Phillips, A New World Order: Essays (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 304, 1–4. 3.  Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 57–58. 4.  Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 176. 5.  Bénédicte Ledent’s 2002 monograph on Phillips is perhaps the most prominent illustration of this tendency. However, a short passage from an essay on Phillips’s novel Cambridge (New York: Vintage, 1993) by another critic illustrates the ease with which a potentially disastrous set of slippages can take place between a work’s contemporaneity and its historical setting, in the guise of a supposedly “historicizing” reading: “While [the character] Cambridge’s naivety can be critiqued for its assimilationist rhetoric and ideals, his account of his failure to gain acceptance as an equal, his capture and subsequent re-enslavement ironizes and destabilizes the declared … tenets of European civilization.… In our own time, the legacy of Cambridge’s particular dilemma can be seen in the problems facing citizenship and belonging in the modern civil state” (Gail Low, “‘A Chorus of Common Memory’: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River,” Research in African Literatures 29, no. 4 [Winter 1998], p. 126, my emphases). A corrective reformulation of these observations would emphasize Cambridge’s naivety as itself a critique (certainly no ironization), Cambridge’s time as precisely our own, and the author’s own fabulation of Cambridge as a material instance of the legacy of slavery, rather than a historical window onto its contradictions. 6.  See Rand Richards Cooper, “‘A Distant Shore’: There’s No Place That’s Home” (review of A Distant Shore), New York Times, October 19, 2003, late ed.,

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 199

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

200

notes to pages 53–62

sec. 7; James Shapiro, “Diasporas and Desperations” (review of The Nature of Blood), New York Times, May 25, 1997, late ed., sec. 7; J. M. Coetzee, “What We Like to Forget” (review of The Nature of Blood), New York Review of Books 44, no. 17 (November 6, 1997), p. 40. 7.  Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (New York: Vintage, 1995). 8.  Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood (New York: Vintage, 1998), pp. 11, 24. 9.  Michael Silverbatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories, 2007), p. 80. 10.  Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2003. 11.  Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” Essays, p. 1. 12.  Primo Levi, “Translating Kafka,” The Mirror Maker, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken, 1989), pp. 109, 108. 13.  Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 83–4; see also Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp.106–7, 225n. 14.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 362–63. 15.  Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1971), pp. 83–222. 16.  See, for example, Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1967. 17.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 309. 18.  Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 103–4. See also Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro: Marlboro Press, 1992), pp. 231–32. 19.  Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 74. Although Agamben makes no mention of the fact, the crucial slippage may be explained in part by the fact that Heidegger apparently understands aidos in Parmenides to mean not Scham (shame), but Scheu (awe, or reverence). 20.  Lévinas, On Escape, p. 64. 21.  Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, pp. 93, 96. 22.  Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p. 289. 23.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989), p. 217. 24.  J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 73, 6. 25.  See, for example, page 12 of Rand Richards Cooper’s review of A Distant Shore in the New York Times (October 19, 2003): “Especially irritating is his habit of leapfrogging over present-tense events only to turn around and recount them retrospectively.” Cooper concludes: “Some writers are more interesting away from the page than on it.” This statement has some resonance for the present argument that the trajectory of Phillips’s work, from Cambridge on, has been towards the progressive disembodiment and abstraction of the narrative, a liberation from the words that actually comprise it, and thus a materialization of the impossibility of writing in the body of writing itself.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 200

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

notes to pages 63–67

201

26.  See Phillips, Cambridge, pp. 38–40, 110–11; Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 86; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 7–8. 27.  See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). 28.  The writer and critic Pico Iyer designates such figures “Global Souls,” a category in which he includes himself. “In the classic works of multicultural beings,” he writes, “Global Souls are seen as belonging to a kind of migratory tribe, able to see things more clearly than those imprisoned in local concerns can, yet losing their identity often as they fall between the cracks. A Global Soul is a ventriloquist, an impersonator, or an undercover agent. The question that most haunts him is ‘Who are you today?’” The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Alfred A. Knof, 2004), p. 140. 29.  See, for example, Lars Eckstein, “The Insistence of Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 32, no. 2 (April 2001), pp. 37–38. “I have to hear the voice,” says Phillips, asked about the importance of character in his writing. “I have to hear the voice of the person very clearly and that takes a long time. . . . Unless I hear her speak, I don’t have a novel. I don’t have a character because it will be my voice in her body.” 30.  Jenny Sharpe, “Of This Time, Of That Place: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” Transition 5, no. 4 (Winter 1995), p. 159. 31.  Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 206. 32.  See, for example, Coetzee’s insightful review of Phillips’s sixth novel, The Nature of Blood. J. M. Coetzee, “What We Like to Forget,” New York Review of Books 44, no. 17 (November 6 1997), pp. 38-41; republished as “Caryl Phillips,” in Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (London: Vintage, 2002), pp. 189–99. 33.  For a robust critique of Phillips’s novel on these grounds, see Yogita Goyal, “Theorizing Africa in Black Diaspora Studies: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River,” Diaspora 12, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 5–38. 34.  Phillips, Crossing the River, p. 237. 35.  Sharpe, “Of This Time,” p. 158. 36.  J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 76. 37.  Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. ix. 38.  Bénédicte Ledent, “A Fictional and Cultural Labyrinth: Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 32, no. 1 (January 2001), pp. 193–94. In her book on Phillips, Ledent defines her own use of “Caribbeanness” in relation to Cambridge as follows: “By its ‘Caribbeanness’ I mean its deep understanding of the complex processes—e.g. the appropriation of power and the (self)deception necessary to its maintenance—that have characterized Caribbean society since Columbus’s arrival in the New World” (Caryl Phillips 80). See also Ledent’s article, “Caryl Phillips and the Caribbean as Multicultural Paradigm” (Moving Worlds 7, no. 1 [2007], pp. 74–84) for a reiteration of her sense of the importance of the Caribbean to Phillips’s fictions. (The piece includes several brief remarks in response to my criticisms of her use of the term “Caribbeanness” in an earlier version of this chapter entitled “Shame, Ventrilo-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 201

8/13/2010 2:04:47 PM

202

notes to pages 67–76

quy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips,” Cultural Critique 63 [Spring 2006], pp. 33–60.) 39.  Michel Leiris, Brisées: Broken Branches, trans. Lydia Davis (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), p. 22. 40.  Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. x. 41.  Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 394. 42.  Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 13. 43.  Neil Lazarus, “Hating Tradition Properly,” New Formations 38 (Summer 1999), pp. 14–15. 44.  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 279. 45.  See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1986), p. 135; see also Adorno’s famous letter to Benjamin, March 18, 1936, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), pp. 129–30. In both of these instances, the “division” referred to is between “serious” and “light” art. One of the impressive achievements of Lazarus’s work, which has also informed the work of Nicholas Brown (Utopian Generations), is the transferability of this insight to the relation between the metropolitan (Western) and the non-metropolitan (colonial) subject. See, for example, Neil Lazarus, “Cricket, Modernism, National Culture: The Case of C.L.R. James,” in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 144–95. 46.  Ledent contrasts postcolonialism to postmodernism as a literature that will tend “to enter into a dialogue with the past” to one “content with reporting the void and meaningless of a fin de siècle”—this in the context of a comparison of Phillips’s treatment of the Holocaust in The Nature of Blood with Martin Amis’s in Time’s Arrow (New York: Vintage International, 1992): “The sense of an ending that informs post-modernism in its most negative forms,” she writes, “is thus turned into the sense of a beginning in postcolonialism” (Caryl Phillips 167). 47.  Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 75–76. Chapter Three. The Shame of Belatedness: Late Style in V. S. Naipaul 1.  Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (London: Picador, 2008), p. xiv. 2.  Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 172 (translation altered); see also Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers, 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 233. The well-meaning rendition of “la honte d’être un homme” as “the shame of being human” in some

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 202

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

notes to pages 76–84

203

English translations of Deleuze’s books is misleading; “man” is present in Deleuze’s formulation not as the universal, but as the majority. See the discussion in the opening pages of chapter 6. 3.  Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, p. 162. 4.  V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002), p. 3. 5.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 226. 6.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pt. 3, chap. 1: “The Existence of Others.” 7.  Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 59. 8.  Bernard Levin, “V. S. Naipaul: A Perpetual Voyager,” Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 94 (originally published in The Listener, June 23, 1983). 9.  Elizabeth Hardwick, “Meeting V. S. Naipaul,” in Jussawalla, Conversations, p. 48 (originally published in the New York Times Book Review, May 13, 1979). 10.  René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 65, 67. 11.  Phillips, “V. S. Naipaul,” A New World Order, p. 217. “Snobbism,” writes Girard, “excites tremendous indignation. This is the one offense which our avantgarde, despite its passion for justice, has not thought to ‘rehabilitate’” (Deceit 67)—a passage that describes very well the peculiarly moralizing critical response to Naipaul’s most extreme statements, particularly from postcolonialist critics. 12.  Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 119. 13.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 94. 14.  Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–87 (London: Heinemann, 1988). 15.  V. S. Naipaul, “Australia Deserta,” Spectator 213 (October 16, 1964), p. 513; see Paul Theroux’s discussion of this article in his V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), p. 133. 16.  Pascale Casanova, “Not Worth The Prize: Naipaul in Denial,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2001 (English edition), http://mondediplo.com/2001/ 12/13naipaul, accessed March 3, 2009. 17.  Adorno, Theodor W., “Late Style in Beethoven,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 564. 18.  Blanchot, “Death as Possibility,” The Space of Literature, p. 91. 19.  Artworks, writes Adorno, clarifying this point in Aesthetic Theory, “participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them. They are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5. 20.  See Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), especially the second essay, “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” pp. 53–88.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 203

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

204

notes to pages 84–97

21.  Edward W. Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 23. 22.  “Spätstil Beethovens” was written in 1934 but not published in the journal Der Auftakt until 1937 (vol. 17, no. 5/6). 23.  Theodor W. Adorno, Musikalische Schriften IV: Moments musicaux—Impromptus, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 9. 24.  Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, p. 24. 25.  Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” ibid., pp. 175–76. 26.  Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” trans. Richard Leppert, Essays on Music, p. 569. 27.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Reconciliation under Duress,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, Aesthetics and Politics, by Ernst Bloch et al. (London: NLB, 1977), p. 151. 28.  Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 37, 38–39. 29.  V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 245. 30.  Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 8. 31.  Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 29, no. 2 (Summer 1976), p. 265. 32.  Salman Rushdie, “V. S. Naipaul,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 150. 33.  Caryl Phillips, “V. S. Naipaul,” A New World Order: Essays (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 204. 34.  Edward Said, “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World,” Reflections on Exile (London: Granta, 2000), p. 99. On the critical use of the term “obsessive” in relation to Naipaul, see Joan Didion, “Without Regret or Hope,” New York Review of Books 27, no. 10 (June 12, 1980); also at http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/7366, accessed February 14, 2004. 35.  V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 35. 36.  Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 158. 37.  This demolition of the “literary imagination” in The Enigma of Arrival is most complete in the portrayal of Alan, a “literary friend” whose “literary approach to experience” is as much a cause of falsification as was the narrator’s own as a young man (288–90). Naipaul’s discussion of his landlord, another aspiring writer to whom the narrator is linked—although from opposite ends— by empire, further makes the case for the anachronism of the literary paradigm. 38.  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” p. 91. 39.  Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 126. 40.  L’eclisse, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1962. 41.  V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (New York: Vintage International, 2001), p. 209. 42.  Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 207. 43.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 52–53. For a subtly counterintuitive reading of this fragment, which offers a way of recuperating its apparent “Eurocentrism,” see Neil Lazarus, “Hating Tradition Properly,” pp. 9–30.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 204

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

notes to pages 98–101

205

44.  Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” p. 158. 45.  Among numerous instances of such references in The Enigma of Arrival, noteworthy examples occur on pp. 97, 343–44, and 354. 46.  These five characteristics are summarized in Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 207–10. 47.  To read Adorno, the philosopher of negation, in alliance with Deleuze, the philosopher of affirmation, might seem perverse; the style and tone of these two writers could not be more different. However, in order to grasp the reversibility of terms and concepts implied in Adorno’s concept of lateness, it is necessary that we think also about the identity or simultaneity of opposites. The terms “positive” and “negative,” this is to say, need themselves to be stripped of their positivism, as do the terms “lateness” and “infancy.” Both Adorno and Deleuze reject the “positivism” of the merely existing, suggesting that Adorno’s “permanent negation” is not only compatible with, but reversible into, Deleuze’s notion of a “pure affirmation.” Furthermore, the comparison with Deleuze’s “time-image” clarifies the atemporal, “crystalline” quality of Adorno’s “late style,” a quality that becomes more apparent in Adorno’s own thought once he suppresses the category of “late work” in Aesthetic Theory. “Every artwork is an instant,” he writes there; “every successful work is a cessation, a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye” (6). Deleuze’s cinematic time-image offers a material instance of how late style operates not only in abstraction from a narrative of cultural decline, but as its antithesis. 48.  See, for example, pp. 277–78, 288, 325. 49.  Ian Baucom has called Naipaul’s nostalgia a “proleptic nostalgia” which “does not see wholeness in the ruin, but the promise of ruin in the whole.” Ian Baucom, “Mournful Histories: Narratives of Postimperial Melancholy,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 2 (1996), p. 280. Chapter Four. Shame and Revolutionary Betrayal: Joseph Conrad, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Zoë Wicomb 1.  Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 82. 2.  G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 190, 183. 3.  See Adorno’s essay “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel”; in particular, the pages devoted to the relative insignificance of Hegel’s subjective intentions with respect to the “totality” (Hegel 109–13). “There is probably no one,” writes Adorno, “for whom the philological norm—problematic in any case—of teasing out the author’s subjectively intended meaning is less appropriate than Hegel” (110). 4.  In Adorno’s book, one can find striking descriptions of this paradox on almost every page. The following sentence contains the logic of the whole study: “Hegel’s apologetics and his resignation are the bourgeois mask that utopia has put on to avoid being immediately recognized and apprehended; to avoid remaining impotent” (47).

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 205

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

206

notes to pages 101–108

5.  Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” (conversation with Toni Negri), Negotiations, p. 171. 6.  G.W.F. Hegel, “Absolute Liberty and ‘The Terror,’” Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 135 (§588). 7.  Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 2. 8.  Ibid., p. 106. The chapter best known by the title “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (“Mésaventures de la conscience nationale”) is translated by Richard Philcox as “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness.” 9.  This “rejection” is principally on the grounds that, in the colonial situation, the dialectic of master and slave is driven not by the mutual need for “recognition,” but by the master’s need for “work.” Thus, the colonial master is not Hegel’s master, and the colonial subject is not Hegel’s slave. See Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 195n. 10.  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 83. The theme of Conrad’s “impressionism,” in which Conrad’s enterprise is implicitly framed by the phenomenological distinction between subject and object, was inaugurated by Ford Maddox Ford in his 1913 essay “On Impressionism,” and by a later essay, “Joseph Conrad,” from 1924 (both included in Ford Maddox Ford, Critical Writings, ed. Frank McShane [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964], pp. 33–55, 72–88). It has since become a critical commonplace, largely on the basis of Conrad’s well-known preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in which he declares: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (The Portable Conrad, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel [New York: Penguin, 1976], p. 708). This theme leads directly to the postcolonial-critical rejection of Conrad on the grounds of Conrad’s general depreciation of Africa as the “seen.” In Culture and Imperialism, in a less nuanced reading than his earlier engagements with Conrad, Edward Said writes the following of Heart of Darkness: “Marlow’s narrative takes the African experience as further acknowledgement of Europe’s world significance; Africa recedes in integral meaning, as if with Kurtz’s passing it had once again become the blankness his imperial will had sought to overcome” (199–200). This observation is superficially correct. However, as in Hegel, the “world significance” of Europe is itself further relativized in respect of the world that is unseeable and unconceptualizable. As Nicholas Brown makes clear, Conrad’s impressionism has no positive quality or content at all—in fact, quite the opposite: “What Conrad’s impressionist language registers is not a truth prior to interpretation but the purely negative refusal of a prior, implicit claim to truth made by the preexisting universal that is named by ‘village,’ ‘street-scene,’ and so on. If any content at all is to be reconstructed from impressionist language, it can only be delivered by the concept that was to be avoided” (Utopian Generations, pp. 86–87). The real polarity at work in Conrad is not the distinction between the West and its others, but between the world that is accessible to writing and the world that is not. These distinctions do not map onto each other. (The classic account of this theme in Conrad, which includes a reflection on Conrad’s own skepticism towards the term “impressionism,” is in Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], pp. 169–80.)

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 206

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

notes to pages 108–109

207

11.  In his essay “Language and Silence in the Novels of Joseph Conrad,” Martin Ray captures the essence of this structure: The dilemma of Heart of Darkness is Marlow’s conflict between a wish to communicate to his audience . . . and a knowledge that successful communication entails the annihilation of that language by which he seeks to support or re-establish a stable vision of reality. He must maintain language while acknowledging that communication demands its extinction. Words must not remain merely words but must give way to the things they denote. The very act of narration, therefore, may be a kind of self-immolation, committing oneself to a medium which one knows will expire. A further distinction to be made here is between Marlow’s oral narrative and Conrad’s written narrative which contains it. The structure of the story thus enacts the paradoxical desire both to uphold language (via the written, substantive narrative) and to extinguish it (via the oral, temporal narrative which is followed by a return to silence). Only the written narrative can survive as a defence against the engulfing silence, but only the oral narrative can disappear and thereby communicate successfully. (Martin Ray, “Language and Silence in the Novels of Joseph Conrad,” Critical Essays on Joseph Conrad, ed. Ted Billy [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987], pp. 50–51.) 12.  Edward Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 95. 13.  Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 30. In a fascinating discussion in his earlier (1974) essay, Said proposes that the circles drawn on a sheet of paper by Stevie near the beginning of The Secret Agent might exist similarly as a “rival version”: “Circles do not speak, they tell only of the inconceivable … and they enclose blankness even as they seem partly to be excluding it. Moreover, Stevie’s circles are page-bound; they tie him to a blank white space and they exist no place else. I think it entirely likely [continues Said] that Conrad imagined Stevie as a kind of writer viewed in extremis who, in being taken for a sort of pointless idiot, is limited terribly to two poles: inscribing a page endlessly or blown to bits without human identity” (“Conrad” 97). Said reads Conrad’s use of a “deranged boy” as the vehicle of this conceit as a moment of ironic “self-commenting” (96), and as marking a stage in Conrad’s increasing distance from the impressionist suspicion toward language in his earlier works. Under Western Eyes, published later still (1911), is for Said a work in which this commitment to “words” is explicitly staked: “Order is associated with the careful study and use of language (both the teacher and Razumov are students of the word), whereas disorder, transcendence, and a kind of political aestheticism are linked to Haldin’s revolutionary wish directly to see, to change, to embrace” (98). However, and pace Said, once we see that Conrad’s relation to language follows a shame structure (as I argue in this chapter), it is apparent that the distrust of language cannot be sustained as a predicate of language; that the logical conclusion of the distrust of language is the refusal of any articulated position identifiable as a mistrust of language. Similarly, in Under Western Eyes, no endorsement of Haldin’s revolutionary beliefs could possibly be entertained within the body of Conrad’s own narrative without that endorsement simultaneously undermining

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 207

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

208

notes to pages 109–113

it. Haldin and Razumov, rather than “poles” in an opposition, represent alternative responses to the same problem. Each is closer to Conrad’s own sympathies than Said acknowledges. 14.  Said acknowledges the complexity of the relation between words and vision in Conrad, whose “faith in the supremacy of the visible,” he says, is yoked to a “radical doubt that language could imitate what the eye saw” (“Conrad” 95–96). However, Said too readily accepts Conrad’s own account (in the Narcissus preface, for example) of what he is up to, with the result that he frames the objectives of Conrad’s writing, as well as its limits, in positive terms: “Conrad’s goal is to make us see, or otherwise transcend the absence of everything but words, so that we may pass into a realm of vision beyond the words. . . . For Conrad the meaning produced by writing was a kind of visual outline, which written language would approach only from the outside and from a distance that seemed to remain constant” (95). Martin Ray’s 1984 essay “Language and Silence in the Novels of Joseph Conrad” achieves a more convincing balance between these objectives and limits (see note 11, this chapter). 15.  Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 208. 16.  See note 11, this chapter. Martin Ray’s distinction is made on the basis of Paul Valéry’s conception of words as “simply disposable aids,” according to which communication “depends on the ability of language to cease being merely language and become instead, in the mind of the hearer, those very objects or thoughts which it conveys” (50). The deep unhappiness of noncommunication that is involved in the former position is for Valéry compensated for, says Ray, by the writer’s search for a world in which language has no proper part, the only appropriate subject for such a “fallacious and distorting medium.” In short, says, Ray, “language must be made to express the silence of the universe, a realm uncorrupted by words” (51). 17.  This whole episode might be read alongside an equally fascinating conversation in chapter 4 of The Secret Agent (1907) between Ossipon, a conventional anarchist, and the Professor, a specialist in explosives, whose thoroughgoing revolutionary instincts require the destruction even of such categories as “revolution” and “legality.” As the Professor observes, “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket” (Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent [New York: Modern Library, 1998], p. 59), a view that Ossipon gravely criticizes as “transcendental” (58, 61). The most representative exchange of the passage turns on Ossipon’s casual use of the word “criminal.” “Criminal!” the Professor replies. “What is that? What is crime? What can be the meaning of such an assertion?” Ossipon replies with some exasperation, in the spirit exemplified by the teacher of languages in Under Western Eyes: “How am I to express myself? One must use the current words” (60). 18.  See the extraordinary opening chapter of part 4 of Under Western Eyes, in which Razumov attempts to return to his writing while awaiting further instructions from Councillor Mikulin. Razumov paces the floor and is haunted by the memory of Haldin’s fateful visit to his room. “‘At this very hour,’ was his thought, ‘the fellow stole unseen into this room while I was out. And there he sat quiet as a mouse—perhaps in this very chair’ ” (249). As the evening progresses, with Razumov still unable to write, the hour at which he went out in the falling snow

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 208

8/13/2010 2:04:48 PM

notes to pages 113–115

209

passes by, and then the hour of his return, and later the hour of Haldin’s departure. Finally Razumov takes up his pen, only to find the specter of Haldin still on the bed: “It’s you, crazy fanatic, who stands in the way!” (250). The sequence is remarkable for the fact that every detail of Razumov’s consciousness seems to refer to the composition of the book we are reading, as much as to Razumov’s situation. Razumov’s revisiting of the night of Haldin’s first appearance is also Conrad’s. Razumov’s inability and uncertainty about how to proceed is Conrad’s. And Razumov’s haunting by the phantoms of his imagination is also shared by Conrad. The details that prevent Razumov’s writing are the very substance of Conrad’s. Such “crystalline” moments (in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image) interrupt the fictional narrative (the story of Razumov’s departure for Geneva) by rendering materially inseparable Razumov’s political and ideological uncertainty from Conrad’s artistic uncertainty. 19.  The other occasion is Sophia’s reference to the shame that accompanies the loss of a revolutionary comrade, assuming Razumov to be suffering the loss of Haldin in this way: “One’s ashamed of being left,” she says, adding, “[But] what is death? At any rate, it is not a shameful thing like some kinds of life,” a remark that provokes “a sort of feeble and unpleasant tremor” in Razumov’s breast (215). Life, Sophia goes on to say, “not to be vile must be a revolt—a pitiless protest—all the time,” a comment that accurately describes (but again, to a degree she does not fully appreciate) the radical antipathy towards form of Razumov’s own revolutionary spirit. 20.  Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 44–45. 21.  Both writers have had occasion to reflect explicitly on this question, in all its complexity. In an article in Transition in 1993, Wicomb writes: “Writers are often asked what [the] writing [of the New South Africa] will be like. In a sense the answer is already inscribed in a description of writing from the old South Africa, to which the exciting new writing would be diametrically opposed. There will be no protest writing, no stereotypes of idle madams lounging at swimming pools and attended by flagging servants, no missionary English, no patronizing publishers or critics waxing lyrical about our least attempts, and much experimentation with new forms. But I fear that we will be disappointed. What my list does not make explicit is that it speaks of black writing. It cannot speak of an interracial culture; the New South Africa is too much like the old and is therefore necessarily a racial affair” (Zoë Wicomb, “Culture Beyond Color? A South African Dilemma,” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007], p. 178). In 1997, Ngũgĩ wrote: “I … can remember writing in 1962 how I looked forward to the day when all the preoccupation of African writers with colonial problems and politics would be over and we would all sit back and poke sophisticated irony at one another and laugh at ourselves, whatever that was supposed to mean: we would then indulge in the luxury of comedies of social manners (what a philistine hollow bourgeois ideal!) or explore the anguished world of lonely individuals abstracted from time and actual circumstances” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Writers in Politics: The Power of Words and the Words of Power,” African Literature, p. 480).

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 209

8/13/2010 2:04:49 PM

210

notes to pages 115–139

22.  See Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), p. 40; The Wretched of the Earth, p. 2. 23.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, rev. ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986), p. 66. 24.  G. D. Killam, An Introduction to the Writings of Ngũgĩ (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 55. 25.  Simon Gikandi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 26. 26.  Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 64. (I will return to this proposition of Badiou’s in my discussion of Zoë Wicomb.) 27.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), p. xiv. 28.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988), orig. 1964; The River Between (London: Penguin, 2002), orig. 1965. 29.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (Oxford: Heinemann, 1987), orig. 1982. 30.  Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 56; see my discussion in chapter 1. 31.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood (New York: Penguin, 1991), orig. 1977; Gikandi, p. 143. See also Ngũgĩ’s remarks in Decolonising the Mind, p. 77. 32.  See note 11, this chapter. 33.  Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 38–9; see my discussion in chapter 3. 34.  Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story (New York: The Feminist Press, 2000), p. 3. 35.  For information about the Quatro camp, see Todd Cleveland, “‘We Still Want the Truth’: The ANC’s Angolan Detention Camps and Postapartheid Memory,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 25, no. 1 (2005), pp. 63–77. 36.  Badiou, The Century, p. 6. 37.  Badiou’s term corrélation means in this instance something closer to “discrepancy.” See Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p. 82. 38.  Badiou, The Century, p. 64. 39.  Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” p. 100. Chapter Five. The Event of Shame in J. M. Coetzee 1.  Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, p. 256. 2.  See the discussion in chapter 1. 3.  Limon, “The Shame of Abu Ghraib,” p. 548. 4.  David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 3. 5.  Derek Attridge occasionally refers to shame in his comprehensive study J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). However, for the most part he restricts himself to glossing Coetzee’s own references to shame in his essay on confession (“Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” Doubling the Point, pp. 251–93). Attridge takes note of Mrs. Curren’s sense of the “inad-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 210

8/13/2010 2:04:49 PM

notes to pages 139–142

211

equacy” of the concept in Age of Iron (J. M. Coetzee 109), but he neither problematizes the category nor substantially interrogates Coetzee’s representation of it (141–47). 6.  Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening,” New York Review of Books 31, no. 1 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5958, accessed June 16, 2008); originally published February 2, 1984, pp. 3, 6. 7.  Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963), p. 80. 8.  In an interview with David Attwell, Coetzee remarks: “I am not a herald of community, or anything else. . . . I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations—which are shadows themselves—of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light. I do not imagine freedom, freedom an sich; I do not represent it. Freedom is another name for the unimaginable, says Kant, and he is right.” Coetzee, Doubling the Point, p. 341. 9.  Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 50. 10.  Nadine Gordimer, “Testament of the Word,” Guardian, June 15, 2002 (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,737403,00 .html, accessed December 28, 2007). 11.  On occasion, Coetzee has made explicit his view of the differences between his own and Gordimer’s approaches to these issues. In the interview with Attwell in Doubling the Point quoted earlier, when asked about his “affinities” with other South African writers, he distinguishes between Gordimer and Breyten Breytenbach (whom he feels “closer to”) on the grounds that “Breytenbach accepts more easily than Gordimer that stories finally have to tell themselves, that the hand that holds the pen is only the conduit of a signifying process” (341). See also Coetzee’s characterization of Gordimer’s work in a 2003 review, originally published in the New York Review of Books: “The stories and novels Gordimer wrote in the [three decades following the 1950s] are populated with characters, mainly white South Africans, living in Sartrean bad faith, pretending to themselves that they do not know what it is all about; her self-ordained task was to bring to bear on them the evidence of the real in order to crack their lie.” Coetzee goes on to say that the works Gordimer has produced since the end of apartheid show by contrast “a welcome readiness to pursue new avenues and a new sense of the world.” (J. M. Coetzee, “Nadine Gordimer,” Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005 [London: Harvill Secker, 2007], pp. 255, 256). 12.  J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (New York: Penguin, 1998). 13.  We might think, for example, of the video for Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us,” made by the film director Spike Lee and set in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. The spirit of Jackson’s song appears to be directly contrary to the temperament found in Coetzee’s work: a shameless usurpation of the role of powerless victim by one of the world’s most powerful cultural figures. And yet, difficult as it is to imagine Coetzee surrounded by Brazilian slum dwellers, and singing, “All I want to say is that: They don’t really care about us,” Coetzee and Jackson are closer than they appear. Jackson was certainly not devoid of

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 211

8/13/2010 2:04:49 PM

212

notes to pages 142–149

shame. The plastic surgeries that he is widely believed to have undergone might be read as a displacement of the same kind of shame that underlies Coetzee’s work. There is, in other words, an “event” of shame in the Jackson story; as in Coetzee, it resides in the discrepancy between the ethical obligation to speak out on behalf of the underprivileged and excluded, allied with a deep sense of the lack of authority to do so. This discrepancy is starker, of course, the more commercially successful Jackson becomes. In Jackson the event of shame is displaced onto the body; thus, his troubled “body image” is an alibi for the real shame, which is thereby transformed into a representable and resolvable entity, freeing Jackson to speak in the least reflective, least troubled, and most abstract terms about suffering in the world. (Michael Jackson, “They Don’t Care About Us” [Brazil Version], 1996, dir. Spike Lee, http://www.michaeljackson.com/us/videos, accessed July 23, 2009.) There is a corporeal dimension to Coetzee’s shame also, but it works very differently; I will say more about this later in the chapter. 14.  J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994). 15.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 681–714. (“Demons” is a more faithful translation of the title of the work better known to English readers as The Devils, or The Possessed.) There is some ambiguity in Dostoevsky’s text over whether the girl was ten or fourteen at the time of the episode: see pp. 691, 703. 16.  Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, pp. 171, 22; J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 17.  Badiou, The Century, p. 56. 18.  Coetzee may have in mind an article by Jane Mayer entitled “The Hidden Power,” which details various manipulations of U.S. and international law that were involved in the prosecution of the U.S. “War on Terror.” See Jane Mayer, “Letter from Washington: The Hidden Power,” New Yorker, July 3, 2006, pp. 44–55. 19.  Salman Rushdie, Shame (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 20.  In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate asks himself the same question: “Is my indignation at the course that Empire takes anything more than the peevishness of an old man who does not want the ease of his last years on the frontier to be disturbed?” J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 52. 21.  Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 364. The passage is quoted at length by Giorgio Agamben in his chapter dealing with shame in Remnants of Auschwitz. Agamben comments, along the lines suggested here, that Stangl’s utterance represents not (as Sereny thinks) “something like a glimmer of ethical conscience,” but rather “the definitive ruin of his capacity to bear witness” (pp. 98–99). 22.  The apparently biographical source of Rushdie’s story doesn’t alter its generic quality or the somewhat petrifying logic that it seems to exemplify in the novel. In an interview with Victoria Glendinning conducted during the writing of Shame, Rushdie revealed that his sister was beaten up in a London Underground train during the Brixton Riots of April 1981 by a group of white youths.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 212

8/13/2010 2:04:49 PM

notes to pages 149–152

213

In Glendinning’s account, “The police at Brixton station declined to take any action; an overwhelming feeling of shame made her unwilling to press her case.” This interpretation invites some questions. What caused the girl to feel shame: her cultural diet? Or, what seems more likely, the no doubt racist, sexist obduracy of the police in the face of her experience? (Victoria Glendinning, “A Novelist in the Country of the Mind,” Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001], p. 5; originally published in the Sunday Times, October 25, 1981.) 23.  Marjorie Garber in Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, pp. 76, 79. The other respondents in the volume are Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts. 24.  James Wood, paraphrasing Peter Singer’s response to The Lives of Animals, in his review of Elizabeth Costello entitled “A Frog’s Life,” London Review of Books 25, no. 20 (October 23, 2003) (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n20/ wood02_.html, accessed November 27, 2008); see Peter Singer in Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, pp. 85–91. 25.  Ray Robins, “Alter Ego,” New Statesman, September 15, 2003 (http:// www.newstatesman.com/200309150045, accessed November 27, 2008). 26.  Wood, “A Frog’s Life.” 27.  Letters, London Review of Books 25, no. 23 (December 4, 2003) (http:// www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n23/letters.html#5, accessed December 4, 2003). 28.  J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005), p. 156. 29. Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 223–30. In her lucid discussion of Benveniste in The Subject of Semiotics ([New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], pp. 43–53, 195–99), Kaja Silverman notes the more conventional English translations of the terms le sujet de l’énonciation and le sujet de l’énoncé, “subject of speech” and “speaking subject” respectively. However, she introduces the term “spoken subject” to take account of what she sees as the complication of the “conversational model” introduced by cinema—a complication that, I would add, also pertains to literature. I have here co-opted her third term as an improved translation of le sujet de l’énonciation and in lieu of a more detailed consideration of the “literary” complication of Benveniste’s model. 30.  In thinking about this distinction in relation to Coetzee’s work, I have also been influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that Franz Kafka, in the letters to Felice, makes “perverse or diabolical use” of the distinction between the “subject of the enunciation” (“the form of expression that writes the letter”) and the “subject of the statement” (“the form of content that the letter is speaking about”). The apparent immobility of the former functions, in Kafka’s letters, as a cover for the unconstrained expression of a desire to visit Felice by the latter. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the desire expressed in the letters “transfers movement onto the subject of the statement” and “spares the subject of enunciation all need for a real movement” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], pp. 30–31). Returning, momentarily, to the case of Michael Jackson discussed in note 13, we might see the same distinction between the “subject of the statement” and the “subject of the enunciation” as part of the enabling ap-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 213

8/13/2010 2:04:49 PM

214

notes to pages 152–159

paratus of Jackson’s rhetoric of global compassion. The shame that would be felt by the subject of the enunciation is projected onto the body of the subject of the statement, allowing an unconstrained expression of empathy and philanthropy by the subject of the enunciation. 31.  Coetzee, Youth, p. 124. 32.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 262–63. 33.  Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 117. I have also made use of the French edition of Fanon’s text (Peau noir masques blancs [Paris: Seuil, 1952]). Page numbers to this edition follow the reference provided to the English translation, where relevant. 34.  In this moment, at least, Sartre’s reading of Hegel seems as far from Adorno’s as can be imagined; see the discussion in the previous chapter. 35.  Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002), p. 161. 36.  Warner’s use of the term “disincorporation” is derived from the work of Claude Lefort, specifically from an essay entitled “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” where Lefort uses the term to describe the emergence of bourgeois democracy in the wake of the “decapitation” (sometimes literal) of the despotic system that preceded it, and thus the dissolution of the “corporeality” of the social. See Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 303. 37.  Warner does not address the Hegelian problematic, discussed in the previous chapter, of whether the problem lies in the conceptualization of the public sphere or in the expectation that it should be delivered upon. Instead, and fascinatingly, he turns towards the sphere of consumption as a site wherein positivized identities can attain public currency without being relegated to invisibility. For Warner, commodification is an alibi for the construction of an alternative form of “publicity,” in which “marked bodies” enter into dialogue, mediated by a “common discourse of the subject’s relation to the nation and its markets” (170). Across a range of popular forms, including television and cinema, tabloid media, sports, music, and advertising, bodies are presented visually and “for a range of purposes: admiration, identification, appropriation, scandal, and so on” (169). The expansion of consumerism is inseparable from what Warner calls “a massive shift to the politics of identity” in public life (185). “It is at the very moment of recognizing ourselves as the mass subject . . . that we also recognize ourselves as minority subjects” (171). Such a solution is not one that Coetzee would be likely to entertain; indeed, arguably, his problem, being that of “invisibility” rather than “positivity,” could not be satisfactorily resolved in the realm of consumption. 38.  J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands (London: Vintage, 2004). 39.  Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 30–31. 40.  “I have cancer from the accumulation of shame I have endured in my life,” Mrs. Curren tells John, the teenage friend of her housekeeper’s son Bheki. “That is how cancer comes about: from self-loathing the body turns malignant and begins to eat away at itself” (145). 41.  Derek Attridge observes that Vercueil’s “alterity” is so pronounced as to extract him even from “the grid of racial classification on which apartheid rests” (J. M. Coetzee 95). However, from certain details in Coetzee’s text, most partic-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 214

8/13/2010 2:04:49 PM

notes to pages 159–171

215

ularly an episode in which some black boys castigate Vercueil for his drinking, Attridge surmises that he is identified as “probably coloured” (ibid.). 42.  See Derek Attridge, “Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians and The Life & Times of Michael K,” in J. M. Coetzee, pp. 32–64. 43.  David Attwell, “An Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee,” Dagens Nyheter, December 8, 2003 (http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1058 &a=212382, accessed May 23, 2008). 44.  David Attwell, “Race in Disgrace,” Interventions 4, no. 3 (2002), p. 332. 45.  Sartre, “Preface,” Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. lvii. Chapter Six. Shame and Subtraction: Towards Postcolonial Writing 1.  Sartre, “Preface,” Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. xlix. 2.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 222. 3.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 193. 4.  Coetzee, Dusklands, p. 81. 5.  Ian Buchanan, Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 196. 6.  Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. 7.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 291. (“Analytically” is opposed here to “quantitatively.”) 8.  Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 173. 9.  Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 206. 10.  Leiris, “Civilization,” Brisées, p. 20. 11.  Leiris, Manhood, p. 140. 12.  Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, Miroir de l’Afrique, pp. 625–27. 13.  Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” Negotiations, pp. 6–7. 14.  See James Clifford’s immensely insightful discussion of Leiris and L’Afrique fantôme in “Tell about Your Trip: Michel Leiris,” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 165–74. See also Clifford’s guest-edited issue of Sulfur, devoted in part to translations of Leiris, including two excerpts from L’Afrique fantôme translated by Clifford. Sulfur 15 (1986), pp. 30–34, 42–45. 15.  Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 59. 16.  Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, pp. 113, 111. 17.  Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 4–5; Pourparlers, p. xx. 18.  Alain Badiou, Deleuze: La clameur de l’Être (Paris: Hachette, 1997), p. 34; Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 21. 19.  Gordimer, “Testament of the Word,” Guardian, June 15, 2002. 20.  Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 139. 21.  Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 111.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 215

8/13/2010 2:04:50 PM

216

notes to pages 172–175

22.  In a recent study, Elspeth Probyn describes a personal episode of shame on the occasion of her first direct experience of “the awesome power of Uluru,” the geological formation also known as Ayers Rock, located in the central Australian desert and associated with the Aboriginal Anangu people. Shame, she writes, “is the feeling the body registers in social and cultural contexts when it doesn’t belong. . . . The body is a repository for the social and cultural rules that, consciously or not, we take on. Our bodies can also tell us when we have stumbled into other people’s history, culture and beliefs of which we are ignorant” (Blush: Faces of Shame [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005], p. xvi). “Belonging,” “other people’s history, culture and beliefs,” not to mention the “body,” exert a powerful reterritorializing force in this passage. The shame Probyn talks about is generated, no doubt, as much by the sense of belonging to one’s own culture as by the sense of not belonging to someone else’s. Such an experience holds little interest for a Deleuzian thought predicated upon the nullity of such categories, or (which amounts to the same thing) the “univocity of being” (Difference and Repetition 37). In this regard, at least, Deleuze’s project is close to that of Alain Badiou, who is especially forthright about the irrelevance of such observations for thought: “Since differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant. No light is shed on any concrete situation by the notion of the ‘recognition of the other.’” Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), p. 27. 23.  Deleuze, Essays, p. 1; Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, p. 107; Levi, “Translating Kafka,” The Mirror Maker, p. 109. 24.  See Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory,” in Essays, pp. 115–25. 25.  Dominic Smith, “Deleuze’s Ethics of Reading: Deleuze, Badiou, and Primo Levi,” Angelaki 12, no. 3 (December 2007), p. 47. 26.  Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 66. 27.  Henri Bergson, Key Writings, eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 97. 28.  Translation altered; see Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983), p. 90. Deleuze is here quoting Bergson, from the first chapter of Matter and Memory, in Key Writings, p. 98. 29.  Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 108. 30.  In light of the discussion of subtraction in chapter 4, some brief commentary is necessary here concerning the differences between Deleuze’s and Badiou’s use of the term. The difference is explained in part by a different understanding of being. Peter Hallward outlines this difference concisely: “Deleuze equates being with a positive or vital intensity, [whereas] Badiou is perfectly happy to accept that being itself is sterile rather than creative (precisely so as to clear the way for a still more emphatic and disruptive notion of creation or ‘truth’, reserved for sequences that begin with something other than being).” Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), p. 81. It might seem as if there could be no more fundamental disagreement than this. For Badiou, being and event (or for that matter truth) are irreconcilable terms. The basis of Badiou’s project is the salvation or rehabilitation of philosophy as the vehicle of what he calls a “truth procedure”—the word procedure serv-

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 216

8/13/2010 2:04:50 PM

notes to pages 175–182

217

ing, of course, to distinguish Badiou’s truth from a state of being. If for Jean-Paul Sartre and Nadine Gordimer the sovereign consciousness is that of the writer, for Badiou sovereignty is by implication reserved for the philosopher. Subtraction is for Badiou a critical injunction, denoting the practice of every revolutionary philosopher or artist with respect to any utterance or predicate that asserts its own substantiality or unity. For Deleuze, on the other hand, subtraction is not a mode that can be enjoined upon anybody; subtraction is the very condition of subjectivity, according to which we cannot not subtract. Its opposing term, the entity from which it subtracts, is the hypothetical notion of a “pure perception” that Deleuze inherits from Bergson. On the basis of Deleuze’s interest in “imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality” as modes of escaping from subjectivity, Hallward names Deleuze’s philosophy as “subtractive” (81). Hallward, however, is not using the term in Deleuze’s sense but in Badiou’s. In Deleuze’s sense, of course, neither Badiou’s nor Deleuze’s own philosophy, nor, indeed, anybody else’s, can be anything other than subtractive. Badiou’s subtraction remains a positive term, a procedure wherein continuing possibilities of critical subjectivity and political agency may be located, whereas Deleuzian subtraction implies a radical rejection of both critique and agency. Hallward proposes treating subtraction in Deleuze and Badiou “comparably,” for the simple reason that both thinkers are interested in extracting an “event”—whether “indefinite” and “virtual” (Deleuze), or “revolutionary” and “truthful” (Badiou)—from “any actual or positively presented situation” (ibid.). I agree, broadly, with this proposal. However, it is worth registering what seems to be an irreducible and consequential difference, which is that Deleuze’s theory of subtraction enacts what Badiou’s merely enjoins. In Deleuze’s theory of subtraction, this is to say, the rejected category (the subject) is negated; in Badiou’s theory, we are still in the realm of an instantiation of the negation. 31.  Samuel Beckett, Film, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 323–24. 32.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 193. See also the chapter entitled “Space” (pp. 283–347) for a series of remarkable resonances with Beckett’s Film. 33.  Hallward, Out of This World, p. 91. 34.  Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1, p. 13. 35.  Godard, Godard on Godard, pp. 75–6. 36.  L’Inde fantôme: Reflexions sur un voyage, dir. Louis Malle, France, 1969, Episode I. All quotations from Malle’s voiceover are translated by Lynn Massey and taken from the English subtitles provided on the 2007 Criterion DVD release of L’Inde fantôme, part of the DVD box set The Documentaries of Louis Malle. The seven episodes of L’Inde fantôme are separately titled as follows: I. “The Impossible Camera”; II. “Things Seen in Madras”; III. “The Indians and the Sacred”; IV. “Dream and Reality”; V. “A Look at Castes”; VI. “On the Fringes of Indian Society”; VII. “Bombay.” Henceforth, the relevant episode (I–VII) will be indicated in parentheses within the text. 37.  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Film Theory And Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 843.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 217

8/13/2010 2:04:50 PM

218

notes to pages 183–191

38.  The origin of the term “free indirect subjectivity” may be traced to Pasolini’s essay “Le Cinéma de poésie,” first published in French in Cahiers du Cinéma in October 1965, where Pasolini talks about moments in the work of directors such as Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Godard, when the camera lingers for longer than is diegetically necessary, or when the combination of shots from different angles exceeds any narrative purpose, and the subjectivity associated with the camera becomes “mystified by a method of false objectivism, the result of a pretextual ‘free indirect subjective’” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” Cahiers du Cinéma in English, no. 6 [December 1966], p. 42). A revised version of the essay was included in Pasolini’s book Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1972), the English translation of which renders the phrase “soggettiva libera indiretta” (p. 181) infelicitously as “free indirect point-of-view shot” (Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], p. 176). In Pasolini’s thinking, the notion of “free indirect subjectivity” is linked to a relatively conventional artistic presence, that of the “author” who “transcends his film in an abnormal freedom and . . . constantly threatens to abandon it, detoured by a sudden inspiration” (Heretical Empiricism 180). The more inspired and radical idea in the essay, the one that clearly fascinates Deleuze, comes several paragraphs later when, in an almost Bergsonian extension, Pasolini proposes that such films have a “double nature”: beneath the “free indirect point-of-view shot” runs another film, the one that the director “would have made without the pretext of the visual mimesis of his protagonist” (182). The existence of this “unrealized, subterranean” film is betrayed by an “obsessiveness” of camera movement and editing which “contradicts . . . the norm of the common film language” and its “internal organization,” according to conventional perceptual categories. 39.  Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1, pp. 14–15. 40.  Louis Malle, Malle on Malle, ed. Philip French (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 74. 41.  These images are from episodes I (“The Impossible Camera”), IV (“Dream and Reality”), V (“A Look at Castes”), and VII (“Bombay”), respectively, of L’Inde fantôme. 42.  Both “the claws of absolute necessity” and “an original violence inflicted upon thought” are from Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 139. 43.  V. S. Naipaul, “Reading and Writing: A Personal Account,” Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 20, 27. 44.  Naipaul, Guerrillas, pp. 35, 159. 45.  Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 286. 46.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, pp. 178–79. 47.  Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 34. 48.  Wicomb, David’s Story, p. 135.

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 218

8/13/2010 2:04:50 PM

index

“absolute sinfulness” 12, 44–46, 48, 57–58, 64, 66 Abu Ghraib, 37, 38, 147 Achebe, Chinua, 80, 121 adequacy, and inadequacy, 3, 15, 18–19, 21, 23, 43, 46, 47, 55, 83, 141; of language, 50, 105, 179 Adorno, Theodor, 20, 57, 70, 78, 100, 122, 129, 138, 190, 205n47; Aesthetic Theory, 75, 83, 84, 203n19; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 84; Hegel: Three Studies, 73, 84, 100–101, 105, 110, 123, 177, 205n3, 205n4; Minima Moralia, 7, 49, 77, 97; Negative Dialectics, 20–21, 40, 86; and theory of late style, 81–87, 95 aesthetics, 17, 48, 53, 55, 58, 71, 81; and literature, 1, 7, 20, 39, 43, 92 Africa, 37, 100; in Conrad, 108; Fanon on, 106; Hegel on, 101, 206n10; Leiris on, 168 African National Congress (ANC), 115, 124–27, 137 Agamben, Giorgio, 23, 39, 44–45, 59–60, 200n19 agency, 138–39, 141, 153 aidos, 59 aletheia, 59 Algeria, 29 aloofness, 30–33, 36, 44 Antelme, Robert, 59 anti-colonial struggle, 102 anti-Semitism, concept of, 46 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 95, 218n38 apartheid, 25, 125, 127, 133, 137–38, 147, 152, 159 Arendt, Hannah, 17, 29–31, 33, 39, 46, 197n43 artworks, 77, 83, 85, 90, 130–31, 146, 203n19 Armstrong, Louis, 58 Attridge, Derek, 210n5, 214n41 Attwell, David, 138–39, 141, 153, 161 Auschwitz, 20–21, 28, 39–40, 42, 43, 56–57, 65, 84, 85–86, 89, 138 Austen, Jane, 34

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 219

Australia, 37, 38 autobiography, 13, 33, 39, 91, 169 Awoonor, Kofi, 120 Bacon, Francis, 72 Badiou, Alain, 122, 128–32, 146; The Century, 129–31, 153; Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 171; on subtraction, 118, 130–31 Baker, Josephine, 67 Baucom, Ian, 205n49 Bazin, André, 176, 184, 199n64 Beauvoir, Simone de, 24 Beckett, Samuel, 20, 67, 177; Film, 175–76 becoming, 15, 28, 34, 56, 66, 94, 167, 169, 172; revolutionary, 102 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 82, 85, 89–91, 92–93, 99, 100 being, 154, 155–56 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 4–5, 32–33, 41–42, 60, 89, 153–54, 164, 184 belatedness, 78, 80–81, 88–90, 98, 189, 190. See also lateness Benedict, Ruth, 200n16 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 14, 45–46; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 45, 138 Benveniste, Émile, 151–52, 213n29 Bergman, Ingmar, 47 Bergson, Henri, 16, 78, 173–74, 177, 186 Bernstein, J. M., 67 betrayal, 2–3, 30–31, 33–34, 55, 101–2, 111–13, 117, 120, 123, 132–33; and colonial society, 119; of freedom, 114; in Ngũgĩ’s A Grain of Wheat, 115–19; of the revolution, 106, 115, 126, 191; and shame, 119; and writing, 152 Bhabha, Homi, 32, 70–71, 94 Bhaduri, Bhubaneswari, 58 black Atlantic, 49–50, 63, 69, 71 Black Orpheus (Sartre), 4, 155 blackness, 155–56 Blanchot, Maurice, 41–42 body: bodily shame, 6, 153–63, 197n45, 211n13; mortification of, 6, 157– 59, 188

8/13/2010 2:04:50 PM

220

index

Bolshevism, 57 Botha, Louis, 132–33 Boundas, Constantin, 193–94n3 Brod, Max, 14, 36, 60 Brown, Nicholas, 11–12, 206n10 Bryden, Mary, 197n45 Buchanan, Ian, 166 bureaucracy, 29–30 Bush, George W., 147 cancer: as allegory of colonial shame, 158–59 Cardinal, Marie, 68 Caribbeanness, 67, 68, 201n38 Casanova, Pascale, 81, 86, 97 Celan, Paul, 20 cinema, 16, 47–48, 64–65, 80, 81, 94–96, 98, 175–76, 218n38; as an event, 176; and Hegel’s writing, 105, 177; and subtraction, 177 civilization, 17, 22, 76 cliché, 61, 62, 63, 64–65, 70, 71–72, 92–93, 94, 98, 128, 189 Clifford, James, 215n14 Coetzee, J. M., 2, 7, 13–14, 36, 43, 53, 67, 70, 137–63, 172, 188, 190; Age of Iron, 139, 141–44, 145, 158–60, 161; Boyhood, 14, 143; Diary of a Bad Year, 143, 146–50, 161; Disgrace, 143, 144, 148, 150, 152, 153, 159–60, 161, 163; Dusklands, 137, 139, 157–59, 161, 164, 165; Elizabeth Costello, 143, 150–51, 152; Foe, 139, 150, 159; on freedom, 211n8; on Gordimer, 211n11; In the Heart of the Country, 62, 139; Life and Times of Michael K, 139–40, 142; The Lives of Animals, 150–51; Master of Petersburg, 143, 144–46; Slow Man, 143, 150, 151, 160–63, 188–89; Waiting for the Barbarians, 75, 139, 146, 150, 153, 158, 159; Youth, 14, 143, 152 Coil, 193n3 colonialism, 5, 6, 7, 12, 30, 39–40, 42, 45, 71, 101, 113, 152, 159, 161, 164–65, 169 colonization, 3, 37, 38 confession, 2, 57, 90–91, 97, 113, 117, 118–19, 152 Conrad, Joseph, 7, 107, 123–24; Heart of Darkness, 80, 108–9, 123, 206n10, 207n11; impressionism in, 206n10; Lord Jim, 110; pessimism in, 114; The

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 220

Return, 2–3, 46; The Secret Agent, 207n13, 208n17; Under Western Eyes, 102–3, 109–15, 117, 124, 125, 131, 134, 207n13, 208n17, 209n19 208n18 Constable, John, 90 Cooper, Rand Richards, 200n25 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of, 30 crystalline image, 51, 77, 95, 96–97, 152, 190 crystalline narration, 94, 96, 97, 127, 163, 192. See also organic narration crystals: of shame, 97, 143–44, 153, 163; of time, 95, 96–97, 184, 186, 192 Dakar-Djibouti mission, 168 Dante Alighieri, 19 death, 82–83, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 99, 141, 176 décalage, 69 decolonization, 16, 40, 45, 98, 100; Fanon on, 101, 105–6, 115; in Kenya, 117–18 De Klerk, F. W., 137 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 28, 32, 52–53, 61, 77, 101–2, 110, 137, 166, 205n47; Bergsonism, 78; on cinema, 16, 65, 81, 94–96, 98, 167, 172, 173–78, 182, 184, 186–88, 192; Difference and Repetition, 135, 171; on the event, 177; on guilt, 170; and Hegel, 101–2, 103; and critique of phenomenology, 167, 171–72, 173–74; “The Shame and the Glory” 29, 30–31, 33–34, 35–37, 193n3; on the shame of being a man, 1, 15, 56, 58, 66, 76, 166, 172; on thought, 171, 216n22; A Thousand Plateaus, 166, What Is Philosophy? 52–53, 56 De Man, Paul, 197n42 depersonalization, 35, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 18 Diana, Princess of Wales, 75, 76, 77 diaspora, 49–51, 63, 68–69, 71 Dickens, Charles, 67 disincorporation, 156–57, 161, 162–63 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 47, 79, 144–45 Dreiser, Theodore, 67 Duras, Marguerite, 20 Durrant, Sam, 140 L’eclisse (Antonioni), 95 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 69, 70 Egypt, 29

8/13/2010 2:04:50 PM

index enunciation (énonciation), 151–52, 213n29, 213n30. See also statement epic, 120, 121, 1991 ethics, 17, 39, 48, 53, 71, 108, 165; ethical dimensions of literature, 1, 7, 19, 20, 39–40, 43, 55, 58, 92, 152; and Coetzee, 141–42, 162; and perception, 141 ethnography, 166, 168–69, 178, 188 Eurocentrism, 11, 70, 81 Europe, 4, 16, 29, 62, 67, 96, 169, 178; imagined as a fat white body, 5 event, 46–47, 60, 146; Deleuze on, 177; of freedom, 131; of language, 124; double nature of, 47; revolutionary, 107; of shame, 5, 6, 7, 46, 134, 146, 153, 163, 167, 172, 188, 196n32; of writing, 99; failure, aesthetic and/or ethical, 19, 43–44, 53, 55, 67, 71–72, 83, 87, 92, 97–99, 116, 123, 167–68; in Coetzee, 141; of revolution, 115 Fanon, Frantz, 4–5, 42, 80, 81, 101, 167, 189; Black Skin White Masks, 60, 88, 154–56, 157, 184, 194n6; and Hegel, 107; critique of Sartre, 154–55, 170; Wretched of the Earth, 4–5, 45–46, 63, 105–6, 115, 191 Faraday, Michael, 177 fascism, 28, 129, 196–97n37 fatness, 27, 196n32 Faulkner, William, 48 fiction, 150, 151 Fielding, Henry, 67 First World War, 16, 17–18, 29, 57, 129 Flaubert, Gustave, 79 form, 2, 7, 16–17, 45, 46, 67; in Conrad, 108–15; and content, 22, 24, 39, 43, 48, 53, 86, 143; discomfort with, 18, 46, 100; and event, 6; knowledge as, 104–5, 115–16, 123 formlessness, 112 Foucault, Michel, 196–97n37 Frank, Adam, 22 French, Patrick, 75–77, 81 freedom, 8, 113, 132–33; absolute, 105, 156; betrayal of, 114; representability of, 140, 211n8; tension with its realization, 100–101, 104, 116, 119, 121, 129; and Terror, 103–4 French Revolution, 6, 100–101, 103–7, 113

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 221

221

Gikandi, Simon, 118, 120, 121 Gilroy, Paul, 49–50, 68, 70 Girard, René, 79–80 Godard, Jean-Luc, 47–48, 95, 178, 218n38 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82 Gordimer, Nadine, 7, 24, 171, 216–17n30; on Coetzee, 139–40; My Son’s Story, 24–27, 43, 48, 127, 132; “Testament of the Word,” 140–41, 171 Guattari, Félix, 52–53 guilt, 28, 65, 117, 149, 163, 164 Hall, Stuart, 68, 69, 70 Hallward, Peter, 114, 116, 176, 216n30 Hardy, Thomas, 34 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 79, 80 Hebdige, Dick, 69 Hegel, G.W.F., 18, 19, 83–84, 86, 100–107, 110, 129–30, 133, 156, 177; on Africa, 101; on the French Revolution, 103–7, 129; master-slave dialectic, 37, 206n9; Phenomenology of Spirit, 101, 103–5, 122, 123, 129, 198n62; as postcolonial thinker, 100–101 Heidegger, Martin, 59, 60, 200n19 Hersh, Seymour, 198n50 homelessness, 51; transcendental, 57, 64, 71, 80, 88, 96 honor, 148, 149 Horkheimer, Max, 70, 84 Hulme, Peter, 63 identity and difference relation, 165, 166, 187 identity politics, 214n37 immanence, 44, 86, 94, 121, 122, 123, 186 imperialism, 29–30 incommensurability, 7, 26, 32, 43, 69, 85, 87, 96, 98, 126, 128, 154, 175, 186; between form and substance, 2; of shame, 6, 23–24, 25, 57; in postcolonial studies, 11 India, 29, 30, 37, 178–87 instantiation, 123, 146, 152; of the revolution, 102–3, 122–23, 127, 191; of shame, 6, 7, 39, 55, 76–77, 110, 138, 145, 153, 163, 188 interpellation, 4, 5 Iraq: foundation of, 29; America’s war with, 37, 147 Israel, 54 Iyer, Pico, 201n28

8/13/2010 2:04:51 PM

222

index

Jackson, Michael, 211–12n13, 213– 14n30 Jameson, Fredric, 17 jazz, 67–68 John, Elton, 75, 77 Joyce, James, 67 Kafka, Franz, 14, 25, 36, 46, 56, 60–61, 67, 160, 213n30 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 86 Keaton, Buster, 175 Kenya, 115, 116, 119, 122 Kierkegaard, Søren, 117 Killam, G. D., 117 Kipling, Rudyard, 29–30 Klee, Paul, 48 Kundera, Milan, 14, 25 Lawrence, T. E., 7, 29–37, 42, 137, 172–73, 193n3, 197n45 lateness, 79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88–89, 94; and the novel, 86–87. See also belatedness late style, 81–87, 205n47 Lazarus, Neil, 11–12, 70, 202n45 Ledent, Bénédicte, 63, 67, 68, 70–71, 199n5, 201n38, 202n46 Lee, Spike, 211n13 Le Fleur, Abraham Stockenstrom, 132–33 Lefort, Claude, 214n36 Leibniz, Gottfried, 177 Leiris, Michel, 39–40, 44, 67, 167–69; L’Afrique fantôme, 168–69, 178, 185, 188, 198n56 Levi, Primo, 20–21, 25, 28, 32, 39, 44, 56–58, 65, 137, 172 Levin, Bernard, 80 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 23, 24, 48, 59, 60 Lewis, Helen Block, 193n3 Limon, John, 37–38, 138, 198n50 literature, 16, 23, 81, 187–88, 204n37 literary criticism, 3, 7, 11, 13, 14–15, 49–50, 53, 167 literary interpretation, 3, 7 Lukács, Georg, 45–46, 48, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 116, 124; History and Class Consciousness, 57; Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 140; Theory of the Novel, 9, 12, 43–44, 47, 49, 57–58, 66–67, 71, 86–88, 120, 121, 126, 191 Lyotard, Jean-François, 19

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 222

male gaze, 180, 182 Malevich, Kazimir, 130–31 Malle, Louis: L’Inde fantôme, 178–90, 192 Mandela, Nelson, 102, 115, 137 Marx, Karl, 4, 6, 7 materiality, 52, 53, 61, 86; of shame, 71, 138, 167 Mau Mau, 118, 122 Matshoba, Mtutuzeli, 24 Mattera, Don, 24 Mayer, Jane, 212n18 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 165, 169, 176 migration, 16, 93 mimicry, 94 miscegenation, 24, 133 Missa Solemnis (Beethoven), 85, 89–91, 93, 94, 99 modernism, 12, 81, 140 Morrison, Toni, 68 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 85 Mulvey, Laura, 182 Murnau, F. W., 47 Muselmänner, 20, 25, 26, 39, 44 Nabokov, Vladimir, 67 Naipaul, V. S., 7, 43, 53, 70, 75–99, 137, 189–90; A Bend in the River, 77; Enigma of Arrival, 24, 43, 86, 87–94, 98; Guerrillas, 92, 189–90; A House for Mr Biswas, 92; India: A Wounded Civilization, 79; Mimic Men, 43, 92, 94, 96–98 naming, 5, 112–13, 119, 127, 172–73 nationalism, 6 Nazism, 28, 129 Negri, Antonio, 33, 101–2 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 7, 43, 102–3, 107; Decolonising the Mind, 120, 209n21; Devil on the Cross, 121; A Grain of Wheat, 43, 102, 115–23, 127, 134, 190–91; Petals of Blood, 121–22; The River Between, 43, 120; Weep Not, Child, 120 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber, 89 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 80 novel, 120, 121, 122–23, 124; Ngũgĩ on, 120–21, 151 O’Connor, Flannery, 34 ontology, 28, 31–32, 34, 37, 43, 59, 71, 91, 96, 97, 99, 108, 141, 176, 184; as opposed to ethics, 165; of fiction, 150; of

8/13/2010 2:04:51 PM

index freedom, 115; and race, 154; and shame, 118, 159, 165, 167, 193–94n3 organic narration, 94, 96, 187. See also crystalline narration Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 17, 29–31, 33, 46, 197n43 Ozu, Yasujiro, 95 painting, 72, 130–31 Paradise Lost (Milton), 76 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 183, 218n38 Patai, Raphael, 198n45 perception, 5, 8, 34–35, 78, 88, 93, 95, 99, 164–67, 169, 172, 182, 187–88, 190; Bergson’s theory of, 173–74; and colonialism, 165, 166; and ethics, 141; in Conrad, 108; pure perception, 173–74, 176–77, 182, 184 phenomenology, 78, 167, 169, 171–72, 173–74, 176, 182 Phillips, Caryl, 7, 43, 49–72, 80, 91–92, 97, 137, 189; Cambridge, 50, 54, 55, 61–65, 199n5; Crossing the River, 50, 54, 64–66; Dancing in the Dark, 51–52, 55; A Distant Shore, 55, 200n25; The Nature of Blood, 54–55, 67 photography, 176–78, 189–90 postcolonial studies, 3, 7, 11, 52 postcolonial theory, 3, 114 postcolonial world, 4, 12, 40, 47, 48, 68, 80, 92, 100, 113–14, 189 postcolonial writing, 42, 47, 123 postmodernity, 19, 71, 202n46 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 38 Pratt, Mary Louise, 63 Proust, Marcel, 79 public sphere, 156–57, 162–63 Pynchon, Thomas, 67 Quatro (African National Congress detention camp), 127 race, 29, 154–55, 161, 162 Rancière, Jacques, 6; “Distribution of the Sensible”, 6; Ignorant Schoolmaster, 198n60 rape, 60, 148, 160, 163 Ray, Martin, 111, 123–24, 207n11, 208n14 realization: of freedom, 8, 100–101, 104, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122, 127; and writing, 113; of revolution, 130, 191

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 223

223

reification, 57, 68, 84–85, 86, 116 Renoir, Jean, 47 reversibility, 205n47 Rhodes, Cecil, 30 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 20 Robespierre, Maximilien, 103, 104 Rossellini, Roberto, 47, 95 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 48, 197n42 Ruge, Arnold 6 Rushdie, Salman, 37–38, 91–92, 97, 212n22; Shame, 37, 147, 149 Said, Edward, 70, 84, 86, 91–92, 97; on Conrad, 108–109, 110, 120, 206n10, 207n13, 208n14 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4–5, 6, 21, 42, 78, 167, 172, 176, 216–17n30; Being and Nothingness, 4–5, 32–33, 41–42, 60, 89, 153–54, 164, 184; Black Orpheus, 4, 155; Fanon preface, 4–5, 162; on Richard Wright, 170; What Is Literature? 169–70 Schneider, Alan, 175 Sebald, W. G., 54, 67 Second World War, 16, 39, 65, 93, 95 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 22 self and other relation, 5, 29, 42, 164–65, 169, 172 Senghor, Léopold, 4, 69 Sereny, Gitta, 149 Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), 29, 31–36, 172, 193n3 Shakespeare, William, 25 Shame (Rushdie), 37, 147, 149 shame: as affection-image, 174; and artworks, 77; and autobiography, 1–2; and becoming, 102; of being a man, 15, 28, 33, 148, 166, 172, 202n2; of betrayal, 119; of the body, 33–34, 153–63, 211n13; and civilization, 22; colonial, 98, 119, 154, 158–59; question of communicability, 13–14, 25, 39, 41, 59, 143; and its concept, 143, 167; as crystalline, 97, 143–44; and disgust, 75, 76; as double, 55, 150, 152, 163; as not an ethical response, 28–39, 137, 153, 166–67; as event, 2 , 7, 15, 55, 56, 60, 134, 172, 188; and form, 7, 15, 16, 34, 43–44, 46–47, 77, 143; as a form, 2, 7, 46, 59–60; as gendered, 148–49; and guilt, 6, 28, 57, 71, 149, 164; and incommensurability, 15, 23–4, 25, 41, 44, 46,

8/13/2010 2:04:51 PM

224

index

shame (cont.) 57, 59–60, 77, 128, 154; instantiation of, 6, 7, 39, 55, 76–77, 110, 138, 143, 145, 163, 172, 188; and intersubjectivity, 41; and language, 14; of literature, 7; as a logic, 118, 143; and nationalism, 119; negativity of, 27, 39; 118; inseparable from its appearance, 39–41; ontological, 159; and perception, 165; political, 148; and pride, 31, 32, 36, 147, 149, 154; as revolutionary feeling, 4; of shame, 138, 172; shamelessness, 22, 37–38, 147; spiral structure, 14–15, 138, 143–46, 152; not a subjective emotion, 23–27; subtraction and, 118; temporal dimension, 77–81, 89; not theorizable, 166, 167; two shames, 5, 6–7, 35, 107, 134, 142–46, 150, 162, 163, 167, 188, 211n13; and writing, 2, 15, 23, 25, 34–35, 41–42, 46, 55, 58, 87–88, 97, 125, 137, 144–45, 153, 159 Sharpe, Jenny, 4 Shaw, George Bernard, 32 Shephard, E. H., 90 Sibelius, Jean, 147 slavery, 50, 54, 61–62, 65, 71 slave ships, 49 “slave sublime” (Gilroy), 50, 71 snobbism, 79, 203n11 South Africa, 29, 30, 102, 115, 124, 127, 132, 137–39, 141–42, 146–48, 159–60 Soyinka, Wole, 120 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 11, 65; “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 11, 58, 64; Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 64 Stalin, Joseph, 130 Stangl, Franz, 149, 212n21 statement (énoncé), 151–52, 213n29, 213n30. See also enunciation Stendhal, 79 subject-object relation, 3, 5, 7, 23, 32, 90, 126, 154, 167, 176 Subotnik, Rose, 90 subtraction, 88, 123, 173–77, 179, 216– 17n30; in Badiou, 130–31, 216–17n30; and being, 156; and cinema, 177, 181; in David’s Story (Wicomb), 131–32, 191– 92; in Deleuze, 173–75, 216–17n30; in A Grain of Wheat (Ngũgĩ), 131, 191; in L’Inde fantôme (Malle), 181–82, 186; and shame, 118, 133; in Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 131 Suleri, Sara, 92–93, 98

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 224

temporality, 77, 78, 88, 184–85 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 45, 138 Theory of the Novel (Lukács), 9, 12, 43–44, 47, 49, 57–58, 66–67, 71, 86–88, 120, 121, 126, 191 thought: betrayal of, 171; in Deleuze, 171; as experimentation, 171; in Hegel, 105, 107, 198n62; and violence, 107, 189; violence of, 171 Tiedemann, Rolf, 195n7 time-image, 96, 97 Tolkien, J.R.R., 76, 78–79, 97 Tomkins, Silvan, 22, 23, 39, 76 totalitarianism, 18, 29 totality, 44, 65, 87, 101, 120–21, 122, 191 Treblinka, 149 Trinidad, 80, 90, 94, 96 United Democratic Front (UDF), 125 Valéry, Paul, 208n16 ventriloquy, 11, 34, 61, 63–66, 71–72, 149, 150, 189 Walker, George, 55 Warner, Michael, 156–57, 161 Western gaze, 182, 187 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari), 52–53, 56 White, Patrick, 81 Wicomb, Zoë, 7, 43, 103, 107, 190, 196n32, 209n21; David’s Story, 102, 115, 116, 124–28, 131–34, 191–92; “Shame and Identity,” 24–25, 133; You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 27 Williams, Bert, 51–52, 55 Wood, James, 151 Woolf, Virginia, 34 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 4–5, 45–46, 63, 105–6, 115, 191 Wright, Richard, 170 writing, 42, 46, 51–52, 56, 94; as betrayal, 152; in Coetzee, 142–43, 152; in Conrad, 108–11, 113, 208n18; as event, 46–47, 60, 72, 99; exceptionality of, 141; and exile, 142–43; and form, 109; in Naipaul, 190; Nadine Gordimer and, 140–41; postrevolutionary, 114, 127; prerevolutionary, 114, 127; and realization, 109, 113; presumption of, 139, 190; two writings, 190, 191–92; in Wicomb, 124–25, 132, 209n21

8/13/2010 2:04:51 PM

Writing Outside the Nation b y

Azade Seyhan

The Literary Channel:The Inter-National Invention of the Novel e d i t e d b y M a r g a r e t C o h e n a n d C a r o ly n D e v e r

Ambassadors of Culture:The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing b y K i r s t e n S i l v a G r u e s z Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb by R é d a What Is World Literature? b y

B e n sma ï a

Da v i d Dam r o sc h

The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress b y Isa b e l H o f m e y r

We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship b y É t i e n n e Ba l i b a r

Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation e d i t e d b y S a n d r a B e r ma n n a n d M i c h a e l W o o d

Utopian Generations:The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature b y N i c h o l as B r o w n

Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language b y S r i n i v as A r a v am u d a n

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes b y M a rt i n P u c h n e r

The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature b y

Em i l y A p t e r

In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination by Gil Z. Hochberg

The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present e d i t e d b y Da v i d Dam r o sc h , Na t a l i e M e l as , a n d M b o n g i s e n i B u t h e l e z i

The Spread of Novels:Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century b y M a ry H e l e n M c M u r r a n

The Event of Postcolonial Shame b y

Bewes_The-Event-of-Postcolonial.indb 225

T i m ot h y B e w e s

8/13/2010 2:04:51 PM