Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination

C. Patell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780312233877
• eBook ISBN: 9781137107770
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Through contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and analyses of literary texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lilith's Brood, and Moby-Dick, this book explores the cosmopolitan impulses behind the literary imagination. Patell argues that cosmopolitanism regards human difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved.

Chapter 1

Crossing Boundaries of Culture and Thought

The Home and the World

In her essay “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Martha Nussbaum analyzes Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World as a dramatization of what can be wrong with the idea of patriotism. The novel shifts among three third-person-limited narratives, which belong to Nikhil, a wealthy Hindu landowner; his wife, Bimala; and his school friend Sandip, a fervent Hindu nationalist who promotes the cause of Swadeshi (Hindi for “self-sufficiency”), an independence movement during the early decades of the twentieth century. The goal of Swadeshi was to use economic pressure to promote Indian independence from Britain through the boycotting of foreign (non-Indian) products in favor of domestically produced goods. One problem with this strategy is that foreign goods are cheaper and better produced than Indian goods, so Sandip’s demand that Nikhil’s tenants refuse to deal with foreign goods threatens to deprive them of their livelihood.

For Sandip, the ruin of these tenants—most of whom happen to be Muslims—is an acceptable price to pay for “Indian” independence, which turns out (in his hands) to be about what’s best for Hindus (and what’s best for Sandip). For Nikhil, a cosmopolitan who feels multiple obligations—not just to India’s Hindus but also to all its ethnic groups and to humanity as whole—the cost is too high. Bimala, encouraged by her husband to leave behind the traditional purdah (domestic cloistering) practiced by women of her class, is drawn to Sandip’s patriotic fervor with tragic results. Only too late does she realize the virtue of her husband’s seeming lack of passion: in believing “the home” and “the world” to be an opposition mirrored in the opposition between Nikhil’s and Sandip’s principles, Bimala fails to see that “the world” that Sandip represents is as narrow a place as “the home” she thinks she is escaping. Only too late does she come to value her husband’s version of worldliness, with its cosmopolitan appreciation for difference and individual choice.

Cosmopolitanism fails to prevail in Tagore’s novel, and Nussbaum points out that Tagore’s own cosmopolitan venture failed as well: “If one goes today to Santiniketan, a town several hours by train from Calcutta where Tagore founded his cosmopolitan university, Vishvabharati (which means ‘all the world’), one feels the tragedy once more.” The university never achieved the influence within Indian life that Tagore had hoped and is, as Nussbaum puts it, “increasingly under siege from militant forces of ethnocentric particularism and Hindu-fundamentalist nationalism.” It is precisely, however, “in the decline of Tagore’s ideal” that “the observer sees its worth.”1 In the parallel between Nikhil’s failed cosmopolitanism and the failed cosmopolitan project of Tagore’s university, we can see the real threat that fundamentalism poses to cosmopolitan ideals.

The texts that I investigate in this chapter come from three different genres—personal narrative, drama, and the novel—and, like The Home and the World, they depict the promise, the limits, and the failures of cosmopolitanism, even as they dramatize the necessity of pursuing cosmopolitan ideals. As I discussed in the last chapter, failure is built into contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism through the idea of fallibilism, the idea that we must accept our error-prone natures as human beings and therefore constantly be on the lookout for better accounts of the truth than those we possess. This idea means not only that cosmopolitans must engage in productive conversations with people who do not share their views but also that they must regard cosmopolitanism itself as a process rather than a result. Being open to other accounts of the truth and other ways of being in the world is not an easy thing to do, as the novels in the following sections dramatize. Sometimes, as in the case of Wilfred Thesiger, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Conrad’s Marlow, would-be cosmopolitans will fail to transcend the limits of their ideological contexts. In reading about their attempts to cross boundaries of culture and thought, we can cultivate the empathy and ability to judge that a cosmopolitan reading practice requires.

Arabian Sands

Wilfred Thesiger seems like a good candidate for the title of “cosmopolitan.” He was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He joined the Sudan Political Service in 1935 and later served in Abyssinia, Syria, and with the Special Air Service in the Western Desert during the Second World War. After the war, he became famous for his two crossings of the Arabian Peninsula’s “Empty Quarter”—the longest continuous sand desert in the world—between 1946 and 1950. The 250,000 square miles of desert that he traversed and retraversed are now part of modern-day Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, and Yemen. In 1959, he published Arabian Sands, an account of the journeys that also includes discussions of his experiences in Ethiopia and the Sudan. The book documents a kind life that, as Thesiger puts it in the preface to a subsequent edition, “disappeared forever” with the discovery of oil in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. “Here, as elsewhere in Arabia,” Thesiger continues, “the changes which occurred in the space of a decade were as great as those which occurred in Britain between the early middle Ages and the present day.”2 For Thesiger, the changes are not cause for celebration because what drew him to the region in the 1940s was not its geography but the Bedu way of life that existed there.

Arabian Sands chronicles the transformation of “Wilfred Thesiger” into the man revered in the UAE as “Mubarak bin London” (“Blessed One from London”) and called “Umbarak” by his Bedu traveling companions. Born abroad but educated in England, Thesiger discovered that he did not feel at home in English society. He longed not only to leave behind English and European civilization but also to go to whatever “unexplored” places might be left on earth. In the first chapter of Arabian Sands, Thesiger describes standing on a ridge in the Aussa Sultanate in Ethiopia: “It was strange to think that even fifty years earlier a great part of Africa had been unexplored. But since then travellers, missionaries, traders, and administrators had penetrated nearly everywhere. This was one of the last corners that remained unknown.”3 Preparing for his second journey in the Empty Quarter, Thesiger contemplates his motives: “To return to the Empty Quarter would be to answer a challenge, and to remain there for long would be to test myself to the limit. Much of it was unexplored. It was one of the very few places left where I could satisfy an urge to go where others had not been.”4 Thesiger casts himself in the role of adventurer and rugged individualist, and he subjects himself to physical hardship and real danger. To become “Mubarak bin London” means casting off the Christian appearance that might get him killed. He grows a beard, lets his complexion become darkened by the sun, wears Bedu robes, and goes barefoot. Later, after his first trip in the Empty Quarter, Thesiger returns to his companions having shaved and put on Western clothes, and they do not recognize him: “Suddenly bin Kabina said, ‘By God, it is Umbarak!’ and seized me by the shoulders with playful violence. I had not realized I looked so different. I said, ‘How would you like me to travel with you dressed like this?’ and they said, ‘No one would go with you like that. You look like a Christian.’”5 Thesiger dreads his return to Europe and soon returns for a second foray into the Quarter.

Thesiger goes to the desert for some of the same reasons that Thoreau goes to live in the woods near Walden Pond. Thoreau writes,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.6

The desert inspires similarly rhapsodic moments in Thesiger:

In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.

Unlike Thoreau, however, what Thesiger craves is not an Emersonian self-reliance but the kind of “comradeship” that he identifies with Bedu masculinity:

The Empty Quarter offered me the chance to win distinction as a traveller; but I believed that it could give me more than this, that in those empty wastes I could find the peace that comes with solitude, and, among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world. Many who venture into dangerous places have found this comradeship among members of their own race; a few find it more easily among people from other lands, the very differences which separate them binding them ever more closely. I found it among the Bedu. Without it these journeys would have been a meaningless penance.7

Other travelers, in other words, find comradeship only among those with whom they feel the ties of sameness; Thesiger, in contrast, practices the cosmopolitan’s embrace of difference.

The Bedu, however, come across, at least at first, as the antithesis of cosmopolitan, because they lack worldliness: “While I was with them they had no thought of a world other than their own. They were not ignorant savages; on the contrary, they were the lineal heirs of a very ancient civilization, who found within the framework of their society the personal freedom and self-discipline for which they craved.” Thesiger discovers that their conception of personal freedom is different from his own because it is not predicated on privacy, and he has difficulty adjusting to it:

At first I found living with the Bedu very trying, and during the years that I was with them I always found the mental strain greater than the physical. It was as difficult for me to adapt myself to their way of life, and especially to their outlook, as it was for them to accept what they regarded as my eccentricities. I had been used to privacy, and here I had none. If I wanted to talk privately to someone it was difficult. Even if we went a little apart, others would be intrigued and immediately come to find out what we were talking about and join in the conversation. Every word I said was overheard, and every move I made was watched. At first I felt very isolated among them.8

Thesiger encounters many Bedu who display a xenophobic fear of or disdain for Europeans, but those with whom he travels turn out to have a cosmopolitan affinity for conversation that forges bonds between Thesiger and them. Through conversation, Thesiger manages to achieve a cosmopolitan appreciation for the Bedu’s difference, which leads him ostensibly to rethink his Western assumptions.

Or does it? As someone who felt himself, from his childhood, to be outside typical Western assumptions, Thesiger may actually have embraced difference before he encountered it. Although his account almost necessarily records the customs of his Bedu companions, Thesiger isn’t much interested in ethnography per se. Rory Stewart notes that Charles Doughty—the author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), a book that had inspired Thesiger’s hero T. E. Lawrence—“had lived in the midst of Bedouin communities and experienced the slow progress of the Bedu herds, wives and children to and from the oases, their cuisine, their trading and the formal majlis (or administration) of the sheikhs in their tents.” Thesiger, in contrast, “paid men from a very small and isolated tribe to accompany him on highly unnatural ventures into the very harshest parts of the desert. They left their families behind, they followed a route where there was no pasture or trading opportunity, and where they were under imminent threat from hostile tribes.” As a result, Stewart argues, Thesiger “had almost no exposure to the normal migrations of Arabic families, he saw very few women and almost no children, and his experience was of the most extreme aspects of life and landscape. He had little contact with vulnerable groups, who might have benefited most from historical change.”9

In fact, despite his many cosmopolitan qualities, Thesiger ultimately embraces an uncosmopolitan interest in cultural purity—not the purity of his own culture but rather the purity of the Bedu’s. Thesiger is like one of the visitors to Ghana that Kwame Anthony Appiah describes with amusement in a New York Times article called “The Case for Contamination”: “What are we to make of this? On Kumasi’s Wednesday festival day, I’ve seen visitors from England and the United States wince at what they regard as the intrusion of modernity on timeless, traditional rituals—more evidence, they think, of a pressure in the modern world toward uniformity. They react like the assistant on the film set who’s supposed to check that the extras in a sword-and-sandals movie aren’t wearing wristwatches.”10 In his preface, Thesiger writes that he “went to Southern Arabia only ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Crossing Boundaries of Culture and Thought
• 2. Religious Belief
• 3. Historical Fiction
• 4. Speculative Fiction
• 5. Animal Studies
• Conclusion: Why to Read and How
• Notes
• Bibliography