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Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing
E. M. Forster's Legacy
Alberto Fernández Carbajal
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eBook - ePub
Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing
E. M. Forster's Legacy
Alberto Fernández Carbajal
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About This Book
Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing offers a new critical approach to E. M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers.
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1
‘He is one of your hollow men’: Homosexuality and Sublimation in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust
In a critical survey of English literature of the 1960s, Patricia Waugh offers one of the most succinct joint dismissals of Paul Scott’s and J. G. Farrell’s fiction:
The novels of Scott and Farrell, though innovatory, remained broadly within the Eurocentric paradigm, challenging but remaining situated within the consciousness of the British characters. This tendency of earlier fictions of empire was questioned in the 1980s by the literary attention given to the problems and existence of post-colonial peoples whose histories had been subsumed by and identities forcibly generated in relation to former colonial powers.
(1995, p. 202)
Waugh’s lukewarm statement constitutes the totality of her study’s engagement with these two Booker Prize-winning authors. Whereas the charge of remaining situated within British consciousness is valid to an extent, the implication that only Indian perspectives can fruitfully undermine imperialism not only forecloses any potential counter-hegemony implicit or explicit in Scott’s and Farrell’s texts, but also obviates the distinctness of their literary projects, for their interrogation of the role of the British in India could not be more different. On the one hand, Scott’s fiction investigates the ideology of imperialism, its motives and attitudes, with a keen focus on sexuality and class dilemmas; on the other, Farrell is invested in a more irreverent deconstruction of the myth of the Raj and in considering the epistemic and metaphysical fragmentation of the British in India in a manner that is textually playful and satirical. The distinctness of such projects requires a careful critical approach which does not conjoin them with holistic impetus merely on the grounds of their Britishness or of their shared focus on colonial India.
Both writers engage, in effect, with different aspects of Forster’s legacies, for Scott is interested in the ethics and personal motivation involved in colonial violence, whilst Farrell is more focused on previous representations of the Raj and on the ironic incongruities of the Empire’s despairing agents. It is the proliferation in the 1980s of popular film and television depictions of India, I suspect, that has relegated Scott’s and Farrell’s writings to the realm of imperial nostalgia. Randall Stevenson offers an illustration of the critical bias against books because of the populist appeal of their visual adaptations:
recent media successes – and to some extent the novels on which they are based – can […] be seen to owe their popularity to nostalgia for vanished Empire and uneasiness with Britain’s diminished world role. […] This [regret] also figured in the television series The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet (1966–75). A certain nostalgia is apparent in these novels even at the level of form, in Scott’s distinctive reliance on retrospection. […] Rather like Scott, [Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] relies on retrospection [in Heat and Dust], showing a girl trying to discover the historical truth about a distant relative’s romance, years before, while partly re-enacting its circumstances in her own life.
(1993, pp. 128–9)
Stevenson is finally divorcing Scott from Farrell and aligning him with Jhabvala, not for the sake of pointing out any useful commonalities in their critical approaches to colonial or postcolonial histories, but in order to underline their pandering to British readers’ and viewers’ thirst for representations of the lost Empire. He is conflating here, however, the onset in the late 1960s and 1970s of a revisionary approach to the Empire triggered by a wave of political independence from Britain with the peak of Thatcherism in the 1980s and its troubling implications for British morale. I would agree with Stevenson on the nostalgia of the TV dramatization of Scott’s work, and would extend his point to include Jhabvala’s later self-penned adaptation of Heat and Dust, directed by James Ivory in 1982: their production at a time when Britain had started questioning its political prowess seems to offer a diversion away from the contemporary political climate to times when Britain’s global role was more prominent and seemingly glamorous.
It must also be stated, however, that Stevenson is too eager to equate popularity with normativity, and retrospection with nostalgia: the TV series and films, as well as the novels on which they are based, may have been popular, but being favoured by their readership or their audience should not occlude the distantiation from imperial ideologies of the original literary narratives of The Raj Quartet and Heat and Dust. Furthermore, retrospection can only be construed as nostalgia when the past is merely mourned or glorified, whereas Scott and Jhabvala pose important questions about British sexualities and ideologies which continue the dialogue started by dissenting colonial writers such as Forster. Forster’s death in 1970 took place while Scott was in the midst of writing The Raj Quartet and before the publication of Heat and Dust, and hence these narratives could be interpreted as being affected by the revulsive of Forster’s posthumous ‘coming out’ in 1971 with the publication of Maurice. There is a growing and gradually more explicit examination of the experiences of British homosexuals in India in Scott’s work, and Jhabvala’s subtler depiction of homosociality adds to her more manifest inheritance of Forster’s exploration of female self-expression in his fiction. Although both Scott and Jhabvala also use a form of sexual sublimation akin to Forster’s in their exploration of femininity and heterosexuality in their novels, their respective emergent and opaque representations of homosexuality demand an interpretive approach that remains sensitive to the compulsory covering of homosexuals and their relationships during the colonial period.
In Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (1993), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick acknowledges that before the onset of gay and lesbian social activism in the 1960s and the critical inception of queer theory in the 1980s, there had existed a good and steady tradition of gay writing whose compulsory subtlety since the nineteenth-century backlash against homosexuals necessarily relied on cunning decoding by its knowing readers. Sedgwick’s book purposefully celebrates the ‘inveterate, gorgeous generativity, the speculative generosity, the daring, the permeability, and the activism that have long been lodged in the multiple histories of queer reading’ (p. x; original italics). In this chapter, I undertake queer readings of The Raj Quartet and Heat and Dust that demonstrate the ways in which postcolonial re-imaginings of the Raj contribute to this tradition of queer reading, not only through the spectral emulation of Forster’s texts, but also in their own encouragement of queer interpretation. I will do so by examining how these texts welcome the debate on heterosexual relations and burgeoning or embattled femininity which are the manifest legacy of Forster’s novels about India and Italy, as well as the more spectral elements of Forster’s purposefully encoded homosexual subtexts and his posthumously published homosexual writings, all of which add ideological and moral complexity to Scott’s and Jhabvala’s representations of colonial India.
Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet
Commencing an appraisal of Forster’s legacy in postcolonial writing by examining the work of Paul Scott could be regarded as critically outdated and purposefully polemical: outdated on account of the comparisons frequently drawn between Scott’s and Forster’s writing due to their shared interest in probing British attitudes in colonial India; polemical with regard to the counter-hegemonic but arguably postcolonial status of Scott’s work. In a manner similar to previous appraisals of Forster’s writing, critical discussions of Scott’s representation of the Raj have been divided between those that try to look beyond India and see some intimations of universalism and those who suspect it of being far too indebted to colonial tropes. Francine S. Weinbaum (1992), for instance, paints a highly positive image of Scott, whilst her emphasis on the universal qualities of his writing clouds the historicity and British inception of his work. M. M. Mahood (1983) offers a more lukewarm reaction to Scott, and although encouraging close readings of his work in order to spell out its complex ideological stance, she finds his symbolism overwhelmingly trite. I argue here that Scott’s deployment of Indian religious symbolism in relation to marginal female characters is one of the most prominent legacies of Forster’s writing, which, albeit more emphatically articulated than the religious symbolism of Passage, constitutes Scott’s own sublimated strategy of cultural syncretism, whereby British characters attempt to merge with the cultural landscape of India in a fatal manner symptomatic of the crumbling of the Raj. I also propose that Scott does not undertake a mere imitation of Forster’s characters and their metaphysical quandaries, but rather that he enacts a troubled critique of British homosexuality in India that reverberates with Forster’s spectral legacies; it is in this latter aspect of Scott’s work that The Raj Quartet starts outgrowing Forster’s lengthy shadow and treads new revisionist ground, unravelling a form of spectral cultural inheritance that, as I show in Chapter 3, will reach as far as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.
If Weinbaum and Mahood offer praiseful and moderate approaches to Scott’s literary efforts, then on the other side of the spectrum we have Salman Rushdie’s total undermining of Scott’s work. In the essay ‘Outside the Whale’ from Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie describes Scott’s fiction as ‘pure lead’ because of its unashamed act of ‘borrowing’ from Forster’s writing (1992, p. 89), a claim that seems slightly overblown considering the highly cross-referential nature of Rushdie’s own fiction. Rushdie accuses Scott of using repetitive character types, although recurrent types of characters, as we will see, have a purpose in Scott’s fiction. These qualms notwithstanding, and in keeping with Stevenson’s later claim, Rushdie regards The Raj Quartet as having a key role in what he calls a ‘Raj revival’, a period of renewed interest in the Raj which is symptomatic of the crisis in British morale brought about during the economic recession of the 1970s and 1980s. Rushdie’s cursory dismissal of Scott’s work as a second-rate and clichéd patchwork of literary references is carried out in an essay which, like Stevenson’s commentary, is concerned not so much with literary representations of the Empire as with the cultural impact of popular film and television. Rushdie’s critique is driven by his anxiety about grand visual recreations of the Raj, especially given the quick succession of the TV adaptation of Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, and big-budget films such as Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and The Far Pavilions, and David Lean’s A Passage to India. Rushdie’s damning of Scott belies a more pressing irritation with these visual representations; in fact, he does not interrogate the transposition of The Raj Quartet from the page to the screen with the same urgency as he reacts to David Lean’s conscious changes to the plot and purport of Forster’s Passage, which I will consider in more detail in my examination of Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh in Chapter 4.
Postcolonial critiques of Scott have tended to mirror those levied at Forster himself, particularly regarding the allegedly ambivalent political stance of his work and his choice of specific character types to represent both British and Indian positions. For example, Benita Parry (1975) states close to the publication of the tetralogy’s last volume that Scott was right in investing in colonial ‘taboos’, such as the illicit relationship between the Indian Hari Kumar and the young British lady Daphne Manners, whose ill-fated affair constitutes the gravity centre of the whole Raj Quartet; but, also according to Parry, although willing to challenge colonial attitudes, Scott also remains too ambivalent about his characters’ particular agendas, his apparently neutral juxtaposition of individual perspectives denoting a lack of commitment to a strong critique of imperialism. More recently, Peter Morey (2000) concurs with Parry and praises Scott’s multiplicity of viewpoints, which destabilize the totalizing character of British official knowledges of India, whilst remaining critical of Scott’s apparent perpetuation of colonial literary conventions in favouring the perspective of seemingly apolitical Indian characters such as the westernized Hari Kumar and Ahmed Kasim. Leaving aside the contentious issue of why choosing westernized Indian subject positions should fail to convince readers – a point which ignores the fact that prominent Indian writers and politicians, such as Rushdie himself, Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi, had Western educations – it would appear we need to look deeper into the personal ethics and cultural politics of Scott’s characters in order to appreciate how his novel cycle may be providing an intermediate epistemic bridge between colonial and postcolonial writing that transcends strict political lines.
The lack of clear political endorsement, however, has perturbed a number of Scott’s critics looking for a strong political stance in The Raj Quartet. Jacqueline Banerjee (2009) has noted in particular the mixed critical reception given to Scott on account of his depiction of the school missionary Edwina Crane, whose location within two political currents epitomizes Scott’s – and Forster’s – preference for moderate stances. Miss Crane’s equal disenchantment with Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ campaign and with Queen Victoria’s staunch imperialism forces her to take off the wall her portrait of Gandhi and the titular engraving, The Jewel in the Crown, featuring the former Empress of India. Banerjee exclaims: ‘No wonder Scott’s work has angered Indian nationalists and British conservatives alike!’(2009, p. 74). Scott’s position as a moderate commentator on the fall of the Raj renders him an author of the interstices not dissimilar to Forster; his liberalism, which engages with the legacies of Forster’s ideological position, is the informant of his reluctance to endorse any particular political faction. Scott relies instead on the multiple and sometimes conflicted perspectives on the Raj of his troubled characters to make a case for its political downfall and its moral fragmentation, to the chagrin of those postcolonial critics trying to find in fiction a literary springboard for political lobbying.
Beginning to understand Scott’s reluctant and yet demonstrable indebtedness to Forster’s work is one of my main aims here. I propose that, however diffidently, Scott articulates the manifest legacies of Forster’s representation of British women in India as an initial sublimation of the progressively more explicit exploration of queer sexualities provided by the character of Ronald Merrick and his associates. Although I suggest that Scott also re-inscribes the ideological limitations of Forster’s approach due to his obsessive focus on colonial trauma,1 I also propose that the candid exploration of homosexuality constitutes a spectrally indebted deployment of those issues Forster could not formally explore in his own fiction. It will become apparent that Scott’s representation of the demise of his disaffected female characters and his critique of the contradictions of imperial ideologies enable his dissenting position. Although Scott himself became somewhat irritated by constant critical comparisons with Forster, The Raj Quartet engages in both explicit and implicit ways with the legacies of Forster’s Indian novel and non-fictional Indian writings. Forster’s legacies seem to imbue Scott’s writing with the closest thing to an ‘anxiety of influence’ in this study, since Forster’s Passage provides Scott with one of the most prominent prior British explorations of intercultural syncretism and latent queer sexualities.
Scott’s narrative cycle is inspired by his activities with the British Army in India between 1943 and 1946. Almost all of Scott’s earlier novels were already set in the Indian subcontinent: Johnnie Sahib, The Alien Sky, A Male Child, The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise are all infused with Scott’s impressions of the place during the Second World War. After finishing The Birds of Paradise, Scott’s biographer Hilary Spurling observes that ‘[Scott] himself said he knew […] that he could never write another book about India without revisiting the subcontinent’ (1991, pp. 243–4). His passages to India between the 1940s and the 1960s had taken place, crucially, through books by authors such as Forster. A second visit in 1964 and a third one in 1969 were the research trips that Scott undertook to write The Raj Quartet. The four books that constitute Scott’s mature work are The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils.2 Scott also wrote a ‘gentle afterthought’ (Weinbaum, 1992, p. 192) to The Raj Quartet entitled Staying On, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978.3 The historical span covered by the quartet ranges from the ‘Quit India’ campaign of 1942 to the events surrounding Partition in 1947. The narrative elucidates a set of episodes in the lives and motivations of a more or less recurrent cast of characters by offering revealing and non-chronologically arranged insights into their particular situations. The novels are highly interested in the colonial history of India, especially the Sepoy War of 18574 and the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, two events whose echoes we also find in Passage and which reveal Scott’s fascination with the period indexed by Forster.
The sheer length of Scott’s literary cycle, nourished by its minuteness of detail and its wide range of character and situation, can be slightly misleading. Without attempting to undermine the work’s complexities, I would argue that the thematic core of The Raj Quartet comprises two events that take place in its first instalment and which retain imaginative momentum throughout the rest of the tetralogy: firstly, there is the rape of Daphne Manners by a gang of Indian men in the Bibighar Gardens, reported in the very first page of Jewel and wrongly imputed to Daphne’s Indian lover Hari Kumar, who had made love to her in the Bibighar before being surprised by their faceless assaulters; secondly, taking place before Daphne’s rape, there is the attack on the school missionary Edwina Crane by a crowd of Indians during a nationalist uprising. Her Indian colleague Mr Chaudhuri tries to save her life but loses his own at the hands of the insurgent Indians. This incident leads Miss Crane into mental and metaphysical disturbance, resulting in her suicide by fire. These two events echo throughout the four novels, the latter being restaged by other comparable disturbed female characters who, as we will see, are also marginal agents of the Empire.
It is mostly in Scott’s deployment of troubled British characters that we can appreciate his articulation of Forster’s manifest legacies. Their prominence is perhaps the reason for Rushdie’s critique of Scott’s preference for British perspectives, for a handful of well-intentioned British female figures and one particularly vicious British male, complemented by some salient Indian characters, are give...