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    37 views12 pages

    Parry-Reading Signs of The Empire

    Uploaded by

    Fathia Rahma Dewi

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 12
    7 Reading the signs of empire in metropolitan fiction Whether by direct influence or osmosis the work of postcolonial studies has prompted the wider community of literary critics to recognize that signs of overseas empire, 2088 the body of oth the canonical and popular British literature! This is an area more extensive than ‘the fictions of empire’, a sub- genre for long regarded as the sole repository of colonialism's imprint on the metzo- politan novel. In the aftermath of decolonization these writings attracted a singular form of criticism offering retrospects on empire that were sometimes infected by apolo- getics and often permeated by nostalgia. Notably lacking in scepticism about represen tation, and in large indifferent co stylistic considerations, the studies assumed the fictions to be a form of apprehending and reproducing already existing realities. ‘The move from a misconceived quest for the fictions’ truths to consideration of their invention, reiteration or estrangement of colonialist perceptions and misconceptions has since enabled the discussion of these writings as culturally constrained and ideologically inflected fabrications that were overwhelmingly received in the imperial homeland as authentic renderings of both distant geographical locations and social formas, and of the colonizer's deportment However, to understand the imperial imaginary of British Kterature, enquiry must ‘extend beyond the manifest representation of empire to those novels where it impinges in eryptc of oblique or encoded ways, and which hitherto had been read as narratives ‘of an English condition sealed from and largely indiflerent to the external world, Stu of British history have for long acknowledged that the making of the mainland ‘economy; society and state was inseparable from its colonial ventures” Despite this, there was a delay in examining its centrality to the consciousness and culture of the imperial homeland, As far back asthe 1980s Edward Said had noted that British empire figured in English cultura life ‘asa fact and a source or subject of knowledge’, and he ‘went on to question ‘why so few “great” novelists deal directly with the major social and ‘economic ouside facts of ther existence ~ colonialism and imperialism ~ and why, 100, critics of the novel have continued to honour this remarkable silence’. Since then and Said’s subsequent writings about the determinant effects of empire on a range of metropolitan cultural forms,” citics have come to hear this ‘lence’ as resonating with sounds and echoes of © intercept and interpret cadences that changed in timbre over time i a matter of controversy. Here a caveat about terminology is necessary: within Iterary and cultural studies colonialism’ andl imperialism’ are used interchangeably to cover the many centuries of ‘conspicuous or ghostly, were written to some considerable extent in the wake of ie — how to 108 Signs of empire in metropolitan fton Europe's overseas ventures ~ from mercantile and plantation colonial, to territorial conquest and authoritarian rule by a metropolitan nation-state, to the subsequent industriabmilitary-cconomic interventions implemented by the expansionist social orders of the imperial powers” Despite the entrenched disposal ofthe terms, I wall be retaining the word ‘imperialism’ to designate the radically altered forms to capitalism’ accelerated penetration ofthe non-capitalist zones, a process that gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, consolidated the interdependence between metropole and colony and issued in the creation of a world economic system. Ido so because a cavalier stance towards the diferent historicities of empire overlooks the ways in which percep tions of the imperial project changed, and impedes study of how the inaperial imaginary moved from the margins to the centre of literary consciousness.” The effect of imperal- iim on novelisic practice is a matter to which I will etarn when suggesting an intensii- cation of cognition and affect. This is not to overlook that news and rumour about empire were in wide circulation throughout the nineteenth century, and that main- stream literature had for long had been haunted by topes associated with the slave trade, slave plantations indentured labour, colonialist invasions and colonial rue, while diverse textual and iconic celebrations of a magnificent Raj and the beginnings of a Darkest Aftica mythology were alzeady expanding the horizons of British literature. “This metaphoric imprint of overseas ventures is now increasingly addressed in cxiti- cism. Hence images of death-laden ship and disease in The Rine ofthe Ancint Mariner have been traced to the debates on the slave trade with which Coleridge as an active abolitionist was acquainted, and the poem has been read as an indictment of British maritime expansion’ Concerning nineteenth-century fictions, commentary has observed that the colonial worlds served as symptoms of mystery and exoticsm, dis- turbance, fear and corruption: in Dickens's Tie Mystery of Edwin Drood an opium den managed by a renegade Englishwoman and frequented by @ Chinese man and a Lascar can be seen as marking a degraded space within the imperial homeland: the lethal Indian serpent ("The Speckled Band’) and a jewel stolen fron India (The Sig of Fou} in Conan Doyle's stores are situated as figures of malevolent visitations from faraway imperial possessions; a gem rifled from an Indian holy place is read as invading and despoiling the serenity of a country house in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, and the opium habit of a character, Blake, is taken to represent ‘the global penetration and ontological contamination of a modern imperial economy’ anxieties about colonial infection in Dracula are understood to be displaced into intrusions of evil from a terrible locale beyond Europe; in the scence fiction of H. G. Wells a preoccupation with time- twavel and exploring extea-terrestril space is interpreted as transcribing Rhodes's imperial dream of annexing the planets ‘Although these observations — some flimsy, others more substantial ~ are not, as Laura Chrisman has warned, a warrant for anguing that ‘the true psyche ofthe west can, only be mapped, and identified, in its colonial operations’ this does not invalidate the proposition that if the imperial experience of the nineteenth century had a truly profound impact on English culture, “the domestic novel” ought to carry some traces of sts cultural imprint’ "' Notwithstanding the questions asked of the assertion that it ‘would be impossible for cultre ne to register its connections with the empite, however eviously’ the case for uncovering the signs of empire in British writing, whether as fact, fallacy or phantom, can be sustained dedactively It has moreover been empirically demonstrated in work that is productively attentive to the farther reaches of fictions’ ‘Signs of empire in mtrepaitan fiction 109 fields of vision, but risks producing reductive analysis neglectfl ofthe texts’ perceptual constraints and conceptwal limitations. Ifwe think of literature assaying ‘what a period thinks about itsell™ this requires a theoretical model of art as permeated by prevailing lssdent and emergent cognitive mores." So we can expect thatthe critic interested in {identifying empire’ fingerprints on waiting will look for political and ideological inflee- tions in the codes of literary signification. But what we find instead is a plethora of

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