The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature

L. Loh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230298903
• eBook ISBN: 9781137314611
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial globalisation on postcolonial rural spaces.

Part I

Legacies of Empire in the English Countryside

1

The Politics of Postimperial Melancholia and Rural Heritage in the 1980s: W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Like bees the country English gathered honey from the flowers of their history. The combs in which they stored it were the manifold institutions in which they expressed their social life.

(Arthur Bryant, Spirit of England, 1982)

In the opening of The Rings of Saturn, the British-based German writer, W.G. Sebald, reveals that in 1992, following a period of intense work, he is left wracked with fatigue and shattered nerves; to recover his spirits, he sets off on an extended walk across the East Anglian countryside. Amidst the manor homes, country cottages and local ruins he visits, he gathers together a range of obscure historical facts and lore while further assiduous research he undertakes reveals that the material histories of rural Norfolk and Suffolk betray broad links to colonialism. Drawing on this collective experience, Sebald assembles a retrospective narrative tracing his journey and a host of digressive histories that intersect with the history of East Anglia, leading to the eventual publication of Die Ringe Saturnis in 1995. An English version, admirably translated by Michael Hulse and titled The Rings of Saturn followed three years later and was the second of four books Sebald published before his tragic death in December 2001 from a car accident.¹ A beguiling mosaic of fiction, history, travelogue, biography, autobiography, myth and memoir, The Rings of Saturn was much lauded by literary critics such as Robert McCrum, James Wood and Susan Sontag, continuing the wide-spread critical acclaim Sebald gained upon publication of The Emigrants, his first ‘prose-fiction’ text published in English in 1996 (McCrum, 1998; Wood, 1998; Sontag, 2000). This first book, a wide-ranging historical narrative predominantly exploring the memories of displaced European Jews as they reconstruct their past and their stories – from the perspective of narrators who are at once Sebald and not – established the tone of melancholic rumination and the elusive narrative voice so definitive across Sebald’s oeuvre. Indeed, an overwhelming sense of desolation freighted with the burden of historical consciousness pervades all of Sebald’s texts, a sensibility deeply rooted in a responsibility to evince the unspoken legacies of historical violence consistent across time and space.

The current chapter explores the historical consciousness Sebald brings to mind through descriptions of the Suffolk country landscape and some of its treasured architectural sites. While critics have attempted to link Sebald’s historical musings with the pervasive tone of melancholy in The Rings of Saturn, they nonetheless treat Sebald’s melancholia as lacking any degree of disingenuousness.² Instead, I argue that Sebald affects this malaise for political effect. Furthermore, this affective performance depends on the book’s inherently ironic structure. The purported expressions of loss, particularly in terms of recollecting British civilisation and its imperial endeavours, become increasingly ironic as a parallel narrative of the brutal material histories that supported European imperialism unfolds over the course of the book. By melding melancholic poeticism with nostalgic recollections of Britain’s past imperial glories, Sebald appears to enact the psychic wound of imperial decline that has been consistently identified in postwar British culture; but the book’s ironic structuring principle, organised in particular around the central importance of chapter V, simultaneously compromises and undercuts this emotive staging of loss. This formalist reading of Sebald’s book, I further suggest, subtly subverts the Conservative politics around rural heritage that dominated the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Considerations of the book’s literary aesthetics, then, are not distinct from the material conditions under which it was produced. According to David Lowenthal, modern preoccupation with heritage dates back to the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon that occurred simultaneously in Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s Britain and Pompidou’s France (Lowenthal, 1998, 4). During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher supported the rise of a heritage industry that attempted to address a national malaise over the loss of empire by turning colonial nostalgia into a revivifying experience. Indeed, Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (1987) popularised the link between the commercialisation of heritage as an industry and Britain’s postwar decline. Through the establishment of English Heritage, formed as part of the 1983 National Heritage Act, the importance of ‘national’ history within British culture was radically revived by offering public access to the spectacles of rural heritage, backed by hopes that this would reinvigorate the nation, infuse a sense of renewed pride in the erstwhile empire as exemplified by the nation’s great estates, and in turn inspire hope in a more glorious national future.

The wider heritage movement to restore pride in the past was not merely championed by the government, but concomitantly articulated across a range of cultural forms by some of the nation’s most spirited and respected historians and cultural critics. In the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, much of this heritage drive was resurrected in popular books that also contributed to the heritage discourse of the time, many of which celebrated national heritage not only in terms of a glorious past, but also in terms of a heritage that necessarily demanded rescuing and preservation. Marcus Binney, the Chairman of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, which Binney founded in 1975, championed his cause through publications such as The Destruction of the Country House co-authored with Roy Strong (Strong, 1974); Change and Decay: The Future of Our Churches (Binney and Physick, 1977); Our Vanishing Heritage (Binney, 1984) and a co-edited book with David Lowenthal, Our Past Before Us: Why Do We Save It? (Lowenthal and Binney, 1981). Other studies that echoed Binney’s heritage battle included Patrick Cormack’s Heritage in Danger (Cormack, 1976) and J. H. Plumb’s Royal Heritage: The Story of Britain’s Royal Builders and Collectors (Plumb and Wheldon, 1977), published in association with BBC television programmes. For a more pastoralist inflection of heritage writing in the 1980s, one could turn to Jan Marsh’s Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (Marsh, 1982), while nostalgia for an idealised agrarian past is captured in Arthur Bryant’s Spirit of England (Bryant, 1982). These publications invigorated a government-backed spirit of national revival inspired by a return to Victorian values and a faith in those cornerstones of British civilisation that once underpinned Britain’s imperial ambitions. Much of this literature on heritage focused on the precarious state of England’s manor homes. In his essay, ‘The Stately Homes of England’, David Cannadine, however, is highly critical of these nostalgic, elegiac works. He regards Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (Girouard, 1978), James Lees-Milne’s The Country Houses (Lees-Milne, 1982) and Clive Aslet’s The Last Country Houses (Aslet, 1982) as representative of the sensibilities of a nation as a whole where ‘the plague of country-house nostalgia rages with ferocious, uncritical and seemingly inscrutable vigour’ (Cannadine, 1989, 100). These works, among others, draw on a long-standing pastoral tradition within English literature, art and philosophy and serve as strong evidence that the English countryside continues to resonate within the conservative national consciousness as the privileged locus for the merger of history and landscape in the form of England’s national heritage and as living testament to a cherished past.

The Rings of Saturn can be seen to be a critical response to this politically inflected discourse operating at the nexus of postimperial loss and efforts to buttress an imperilled rural heritage. Poised within both a sense of foregone glory located in rural England and a simultaneous condemnation of the material histories upon which that sensibility continues to depend, The Rings of Saturn’s structural irony creates an understanding of the colonial violence and brutality belied by the cultural and national ideologies of the heritage industry. More generally, the book can be read as a retroactive re-writing and critique of the broad conservative spirit of the 1980s from a liberal perspective.

An effective consideration of The Rings of Saturn as a literary response to a range of contemporary political, cultural and social discourses linked to the heritage industry depends on reading the text as a form of non-fiction and not as a novel as John Domini, Rebecca Walkowitz and Margaret Bruzelius have deemed the text (Domini, 2005; Walkowitz, 2006, 153; Bruzelius, 2007). Yet termed variously a ‘travelogue’, ‘memoir’, and ‘fiction-literature’,³ classification of Sebald’s writing within genre conventions continually eludes critics who hold widely differing views about whether to consider Sebald’s work as either fiction or non-fiction, or, even whether to call The Rings of Saturn a novel. Like Roberta Silman, however, I read the book as ‘a hybrid’ text (Silman, 1998, np), one which draws on elements of fiction and non-fiction, and indeed, Sebald himself, borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss, calls his own writing method ‘bricolage’, where ‘random findings’ come together in a loosely structured form.⁴

The text’s formal and stylistic concerns have likewise confounded critics. Its disjunctive nature and highly digressive mode cause Richard T. Gray to think of Sebald’s style as reflecting ‘narrative contingency’, located throughout what Gray terms ‘discrete narratives’ (Gray, 2009, 29), while Mark McCulloh and Silke Horstkotte both focus on the topographical elements of the text. Horstkotte points out that in The Rings of Saturn, ‘[t]he narrator’s journey does not adhere to the structural model of a sequence of events in time, but is shaped as a topography of places visited [ ... ]’ (Horstkotte, 2005, 37). The narrative subtends a ‘topography of memory which is physically present in the Suffolk landscape’ (Horstkotte, 2005, 31). Similarly, McCulloh believes Sebald represents a ‘landscape that itself is cast as a kind of character, with its own idiosyncratic presence and history’ (McCulloh, 2003, 62). If this chapter similarly privileges the implications of the historic landscapes described in the text, then this is partially because the landscape formed such an important element of the debates surrounding the perceived crisis of national heritage in the 1980s: ‘[l]andscape-as-heritage stresses time-honored verities at risk’ (Lowenthal, 1998, 7).

While critics have accurately observed that the theme of European imperialism haunts Sebald’s description of the Suffolk countryside, to what ends Sebald employs this strategy has been largely unexamined. McCulloh, in his important critical companion to Sebald’s works, merely mentions that ‘[t]he irony of civilized men wreaking so much havoc is always present’ (McCulloh, 2003, 71). Other critics, notably those who have written reviews rather than academic studies about Sebald, have discussed Sebald’s desire to unsettle any assumptions about a bucolic rural England. McCrum, in his review for The Observer believes the book to be ‘a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay’ (McCrum, 1998, 15). Gray argues that ‘The Rings of Saturn is not simply geographical in nature: it is also a temporal pilgrimage through the modern history of Europe and its colonial conquests from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, with special emphasis placed on the nineteenth century as the age of industrial modernism and advanced colonialism’ (Gray, 2009, 30). Boyd Tonkin’s signal review of the book, however, does point to the important confluence of English Heritage and imperialism that remains at the centre of this chapter. With considerable acumen, he argues that ‘[b]ehind Suffolk’s bucolic façades, he [Sebald] uncovers tales of imperial cruelty and natural calamity that explode the soft-focus delusions of our Heritage History’ (Tonkin, 1998, 96). Tonkin’s passing insight deserves considerable elaboration. He rightly identifies that Sebald peels away the superficial ‘bucolic facades’ of ‘Heritage History’ in order to reveal the collective national amnesias shrouding histories of ‘imperial cruelty’, elided precisely because these facades are viewed with ‘soft-focus delusions’. However, if Sebald aims to expose the facts of imperial cruelty in order to undermine the illusions propped up by the heritage industry, then this does not quite fully explain the resonant tone of loss that structures the entire narrative.

This chapter thus aims to further Amelia Scurry’s assertion that ‘consideration of melancholy as a key thematic concern of Sebald’s work, and of his third prose work Rings of Saturn in particular, have not been extended to equally salient discussions of melancholy’s structural, temporal and rhetorical aspects’ (Scurry, 2010, 14). Scurry argues that The Rings of Saturn is marked by a reorientation of narrative structure, a new and intense focus on historical and geographical topographies, and a greater investment in linguistic and mnemonic digression that can be understood as part of an introjection of melancholy in the text. She insightfully concludes that melancholy is invested in the text’s serialisation, substitution, elaborate metonymy and metaphor, symbolism and linguistic play (Scurry, 2010, 14–15). Yet, prescient as they are, Scurry’s insights fail to accord adequate weight to the combined effects of the text’s melancholy, its setting in rural England, its structuring motif of a country walk and its dominant historical theme of imperialism. Scurry reads the text solely on a formal level, neglecting the wider material, cultural and political contexts pertinent to Sebald’s focus on rural England and imperial histories.

Sebald’s implied critique of the heritage industry’s attempts to rectify postimperial melancholia is situated within the text’s ironic structure and would simultaneously address all of these formal and thematic concerns. The unrelenting register of lamentation and loss, with constant references to death, decomposition and destruction that figure on almost every page of Sebald’s book certainly appears to mimic postimperial melancholia. This emotive staging might be said to be the prerogative of Erich Auerbach’s understanding of mimeticism as entailing a degree of performance: the literary correlate to re-enactment of the real (Auerbach and Trask, 2003). Sebald’s bleak experience of Suffolk as he documents the demise of a county, while recollecting that its key towns and countryside once boasted the triumphs of English civilisation in almost every conceivable social, cultural and political sphere, thus perform both postimperial loss and a critique of that loss.

A sense of Sebald’s overall project to destabalise any cohesive myth of the past that might be defended by the grand narratives of heritage are signalled in the opening sentences of The Rings of Saturn. Sebald reveals that he became incapacitated after his walk through the countryside, during which he visits the coastal towns and villages of Lowestoft, Southwold, Dunwich, Orford and Ilketshall St Margaret. Reflecting upon his walk at this early point in the narrative, Sebald avers that he became preoccupied not only with the ‘freedom’ he experienced, ‘but also with the paralyzing horror’ that had overcome him when ‘confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past’. The psychic wounds wrought by the past literally debilitate Sebald, who informs us that, precisely and rather uncannily, a year to the day after he set off on his walk, he is taken to hospital in Norwich in a state of ‘almost total immobility’ (3). Lying prone in bed, his sole view of the outside world is framed by a colourless patch of sky seen through the window and he ‘became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses [he] had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot’ (4). The juxtaposition of the expansive landscape that lies outside of Sebald’s room with Sebald’s limited view is significant within the aesthetics and politics of the book. Sebald suggests that vast histories and topographies may be telescoped only to reveal a specific part reflective of a particular element, vision and interpretation necessarily unrepresentative of the overall whole and Sebald wishes us to avoid such narrow viewpoints.

I describe this scene at length because the opening of The Rings of Saturn frames the formal structures and thematic motifs that inform the text’s points of political intervention. Contrary to the redemptive and recuperative experience a bracing country walk should provide, Sebald is instead physically incapacitated by the horrors he discovers upon mining the Suffolk countryside’s transnational histories. The exaggerated psychosomatic response to the past contributes to the dark, sardonic humour underlying the melancholy that Sebald almost ubiquitously associates with everyone and everything he considers in the book. James Wood suggests Sebald ‘exaggerates the elegiac’, but also believes Sebald is unique among English elegists in his deep unease with the elegy (Wood, 1998, 40–41). Indeed, Sebald is highly self-reflexive and even ironic about his own melancholic voice.

In this opening scene, a moment of self-parody is reflected in Sebald’s comparison of his incapacitated self to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), but the more specific analogy here concerns Samsa’s transformed vision of the world from his newly endowed, compound insect eyes. Throughout the text, Sebald encourages his readers to revisit familiar spaces and to review them through multiple perspectives and at a radical tangent to normative perceptions. Thus, the political task Sebald undertakes in The Rings of Saturn involves offering alternative, arguably subversive, national and international views of the Suffolk countryside, views which may well contradict those celebrated by such distinguished social institutions as the National Trust or English Heritage who are convinced that ‘[t]he British national legacy now embraces the entire countryside’ (Lowenthal, 1998, 66). Lowenthal argues that the nation’s great estates, its landscapes, lakes and palaces were naively perceived in terms of collective national ownership, as ‘ “our inheritance”, that they belong to us and they represent our creative powers’ (Lowenthal, 1998, 66). Over the course of the narrative, however, Sebald unsettles any passive absorption of, and pride in, the seemingly placid landscape of the Suffolk countryside as he unveils the historical palimpsest of imperial violence and the horrors buried within.

Performing postimperial melancholia

In After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Paul Gilroy has identified what he calls ‘cultures of melancholia and the pathology of greatness’ as a postwar sensibility unique to Britain. In Gilroy’s argument, ‘the life of the nation has been dominated by an inability even to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of the Empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige’ (Gilroy, 2004, 98). Peter Hulme argues that Sebald ‘does offer, in the most indirect fashion imaginable, a portrait of post...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Foreign Fields that are Forever England
• Part I: Legacies of Empire in the English Countryside
• Part II: Legacies of Empire in the Postcolonial Rural
• Conclusion: Local Futures, Global Fissures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index