Colonialist Discourse In The Tempest And A Passage To India

Discourse is an elusive word. Definitions often fall short, retreating into abstract prolixity because the idea encapsulates our politics, our history, our art, our identity and most importantly of all, our language. It is, in essence, the socio-political backdrop created by those in power, which pervades the language and relations which constitute any sense of a stable, autonomous identity. The idea can be further elucidated in the context of its inception in the work of Foulcault. In Discursive Struggles Within Social Welfare: Restaging Teen Motherhood, Iara Lessa summarizes Foucault`s definition of discourse as 'systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak' . In other words, the term 'discourse' may refer to any socio-political context which, according to Foulcauldian thought, constitutes the very fabric of our world; its language, its people and its relations between them, particularly as depicted in literature. It is with this panoramic perspective in mind that this essay will focus in on the discourse of colonialism which, it has been suggested, constitutes the identity of the characters within The Tempest, A Passage to India and Burmese Days as participants of the colonialist paradigm.

In this context, colonialist discourse may refer to a system of values and codes of denigrating behaviour built upon the distinction between the 'civilised' and the 'savage' along racial lines. This is closely linked to similar terminology of the colonialist 'narrative'; the alleged justification of colonialist exploits in the archetypal story of the European settler coming across the primitive 'native' who he proceeds to try and 'civilise'. The identities of Prospero, Turton and Ellis and their respective counterparts; Caliban, Aziz and Veriswamy will be shown to be caught up to some extent in the narrative of colonialist discourse, trapped in the roles as designated by those in power of the 'savage' and 'civilised'. At this extreme end of the argument, recent critical assertions that The Tempest is an anticipation and an encouragement of the slave trade, that Burmese Days slips into the racist conventions equivalent to Kipling's colonialist fiction and that the characters of A Passage to India similarly deteriorate into colonial caricature will be evaluated. However, these arguments will be qualified with the evident exposure of the coloniser's psychological immaturity in these three texts which provokes the distinction between the savage and the civilised. Through examining these texts in the light of the colonialist psychology of Octave Mannoni, Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, the savage/civilised dichotomy will be shown to be exposed in all three texts as a form of 'naive Freudianism' on the part of the settler, who externalises his own Id to be embodied in the 'native' in a process of alienation referred to as 'othering'. However, the implications of the deconstruction of identity within a colonialist discourse have the potential to undermine identity per se in these three texts, as will be explored.

The fascination and appeal of this identity crisis is what led me to embark on this project. Having always loved The Tempest in particular, and knowing that I would study Shakespeare during my time at university, I wished to further explore what the Italian poet Cesare Pavese remarked of the playwright, that 'Shakespeare was conscious of a double or treble reality fused together in a single line or word' . This is precisely the genius of the line 'this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine', Prospero's ambiguous anagnorisis which provoked this entire project. With the advantage of retrospective colonial history, the entire development of colonialist psychology in the 20th century, the ideas of Foulcault and post-modernist philosophy, Freudian psychology, the Jungian approach to symbols, and of course, recent works of post-colonial fiction as exemplified in the works of E.M Forster and George Orwell, the statement of Ahmed Kathrada, a fellow prisoner of Nelson Mandela that 'somehow, Shakespeare always has something to say to us' has never been truer. The aim of this essay is not so much what Keats would call an 'irritable reaching after fact and reason' but an evaluation of these three deeply introspective works and their relationship to the outside world, through the lens of recent criticism. History, as Bakhtin says, is 'a theatre without footlights' . Society and particularly its literature are caught up in the evolution of language, politics and their world, the power-knowledge of the prevailing discourse. However, literature plays with the idea that this world is, as Shakespeare's Macbeth and melancholy Jacques explicitly remark, 'a stage' and has the potential to open an ambivalence towards socio-political identity which is has been either overlooked or underplayed by critics and will be explored in this essay.

Identity With the political context of colonialism in mind, this essay attempts to elucidate the symbiotic relationship between identity and colonialist discourse in literature. Identity here will refer not to mere existence, but to an awareness of that existence through the perception of others, and therefore through their language and social categories of gender, race and sexuality. This modern conception of identity in literary theory owes to the deconstruction of identity in post-structuralist philosophy, through which identity is shown to be composed of both the self (the 'same') and the 'other'. The term 'other' derives from the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a great influence on the young Jacques Derrida and his post-structuralist philosophy, and denotes any social class, race or group of people against which the ruling class define themselves and their collective identity, in a process known as 'othering'. To illustrate this idea, Derrida takes the example of North and South: 'the South and the North are not territories but abstract places that appear only to relate to each other in terms of each other' . The two are interdependent. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has summarised the idea of the Other and its relation to the formation of identity in his book Oneself as Another saying that 'the Other enters into the composition of the same' . The application of this idea in a colonialist context, when the 'civilised' settler creates his identity in opposition to the 'savage' native, is expressed eloquently in Peter Childs' influential book Colonialist Theory and English Literature when he writes that 'in India the English stop being unconsciously English and become consciously English' The identity of the colonizer and the colonized becomes tied up with the 'colonialist narrative' which defines colonialist discourse. As Madan Sarup has lucidly explained in his introduction to Post-modernism and Post-structuralism, 'when considering someone's identity, there is necessarily a process of selection, emphasis and consideration to the effect of social dynamics such as class, nation, race, gender and religion. I think we link these dynamics and organise them into a narrative: if you ask someone about there identity, a story soon appears' . Sarup eloquently elucidates the connection between socio-political background (or discourse), identity as it is meant here, and the narrative which combines the two. Humans naturally understand things through stories, even if they are illusory. Recent historians such as Hayden White, who will be examined later, have gone as far as to argue that History, like literature, requires a story and thus a certain amount of fabrication and reduction for it to be comprehensible. This is the essential reason for the approach to colonialist discourse and psychology through these works of literature in this essay. Literature is the most direct entrance into the collective psyche of a society at a certain time. The story for the settler is the story of civilising and ordering. Suffice it to take some remarks from Joseph-Ernest Renan's popular essay of 1871 to indicate this narrative; 'nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity, and almost no sense of honour; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race' . The story for the colonised becomes one of exploitation and bitter subjection. In both of these narratives, identity is bound up with the colonialist discourse. Any possible escape from this through colonialist fiction will be examined in this essay. Colonialist Discourse Finally, it is necessary to trace the critical debate concerning colonialist discourse in these texts. The conflict at the heart of colonialism consumes the identity of its characters through the language of the coloniser, whether it is Prospero's narration of the play and its characters or that of the colonisers in Forster and Orwell's novels. A number of critics have even suggested that the writers themselves are limited by the narrative of colonialism. The most extreme form of this view has been proposed in Matthew DeCoursey's argument that 'the play is indeed involved with colonialism, and its support of the notion of baseness does tend towards the future of the British slave trade' . He argues, like Kermode, on the basis of historical context, that 'the play bears upon the Scottish/English division of King James, and upon the English national identity, in the modes of contempt for foreigners' . However, even if this piece of historical context is directly relevant, as with Kermode, this argument does not provide the whole story. Joseph Khoury has argued, pace DeCoursey, that if that were the case, Shakespeare would never have made Caliban such a 'complex, poetic, intelligent and resistant creature' . In support of Khoury, it will suffice to refer to Caliban's beautiful and famous speech in Act 3: 'be not afeard, the isle is full of noises...' which shows Caliban to be more than a prototype of future slaves. A more convincing form of the argument that Shakespeare is limited by context, however, is that it is an involuntary and not a voluntary limitation. Paul Brown has recently contended that, although The Tempest 'seeks...to transcend contradictions and to mystify the political conditions which demand colonialist discourse', it ultimately 'fails to deliver that containment and instead foregrounds precisely those problems which it works to efface or overcome' . Forster himself recognised the limitations of his setting in a letter of 1922, which confessed that his initial intention of 'building a little bridge of sympathy between East and West' failed because 'most Indians, like most English people, are shits' . Forster's alleged failure to 'build a bridge' has been supported in a wealth of commentary. Meenakshi Mukherjee highlights 'the failure to communicate across cultures' throughout the novel, Diane Johnson remarks upon 'a lack of understanding between people from different cultures' and Nihal Singh has suggested that the novel primarily depicts 'how the British in India despise and ostracise Indians, while on their part, the Indians mistrust and misjudge the British' . Similarly, the setting of Orwell's Burmese Days in 1930, against the murky backdrop of the Saya San rebellion contextualises Maung Htin Aung's argument that the novel 'recorded vividly the tensions that prevailed in Burma, and the mutual suspicion, despair and disgust that crept into Anglo-Burmese relations as the direct result of the Government of India Act leaving out Burma from the course of its reforms' . This claim to an involuntary limitation of colonialist discourse in the text is what will be evaluated in this essay. The despairing pessimism of Paul Brown, a host of Forster's critics and Hting Aung is to some extent justified, as will be shown. However, the colonialist narrative is only a partial representation of the role of identity in these texts, which has more optimistic undertones.