Comedy Fantasy and Colonialism

Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism

Graeme Harper, Editor

Continuum

Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism

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COMEDY, FANTASY AND COLONIALISM Edited by

Graeme Harper

Ai continuum • W W L O N D O N

•

NEW YORK

CONTINUUM The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 © Graeme Harper and the contributors 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2002 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-4866-6 (hardback) 0-8264-4919-0 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Comedy, fantasy and colonialism / edited by Graeme Harper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-4866-6 (hb) — ISBN 0-8264-4919-0 (pbk.) 1. Wit and humor—History and criticism. 2. Fantasy literature—History and criticism. 3. Imperialism in literature. I. Harper, Graeme. PN6147 .C57 2002 809'.917—dc21

2001047581

Typeset by CentraServe Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

Contents

List of illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

VII

ix xiii

Introduction

1

Displacement, dualism and belief: exploring colonial comedy and fantasy Graeme Harper

9

Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture Mark L. Lilleleht

23

The game is up: British women's comic novels of the end of Empire Phyllis Lassner

39

CHAPTER FOUR

James Morier and the oriental picaresque James Watt

CHAPTER FIVE

Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities

58

73

Jill Lane

CHAPTER six

Fairies on the veld: foreign and indigenous elements in South African children's stories Elwyn Jenkins

CHAPTER SEVEN

Magic realism: humour across cultures Mary Ellen Hartje

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mr Punch's crinoline anxiety: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress Terri A. Hasseler

89 104

117

CHAPTER NINE Cape-to-Cairo: Africa in Masonic fantasy 140 Peter Merrington

vi CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CONTENTS Laughing matters: the comic timing of Irish joking Laura Salisbury Two hundred years of colonial laughter in Malta: Carnival and Pantomime in Malta under British rule Vicki Ann Cremona and Toni Sant Trickster-outlaws and the comedy of survival Jonna Mackin

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Capturing the antipodes: an imaginary voyage to Terra Australis Paul Longley Arthur CHAPTER FOURTEEN Conclusion Graeme Harper

158

175 189

205 218

Selected bibliography

221

Index

233

List of illustrations

Figure 1 'The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger', Punch, 22 August 1857

121

Figure 2 'Willing Hands for India', Punch, 29 August 1857

122

Figure 3 The Clemency of Canning', Punch, 24 October 1857

123

Figure 4 Too "Civil" by Half, Punch, 7 November 1857

124

Figure 5 'Preface', Punch, 25 December 1858

136

Figure 6 Glyph designed by Herbert Baker showing 'Symbols of Rhodes' Way from Cape to Cairo'

149

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Contributors

Paul Longley Arthur is based in the Department of English at the University of Western Australia. His publications on European historical, cultural and literary representations of Australia and the Antipodes draw upon doctoral research carried out in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He has held a number of visiting scholarships to the Australian National University, at the Humanities Research Centre (1999), the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research (1998), and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (1997). He won the University of Western Australia's Graduates Association Travel Award for research in 1996. Outside university life he is a violinist, and has performed around Australia and internationally with classical musicians and popular groups, including the Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi. Vicki Ann Cremona is Senior Lecturer and Academic Coordinator of the Theatre Studies Programme at the University of Malta. Her main research areas are ritual, carnivals and festas. Recent publications include Costume in Malta, a book co-edited with Nicholas de Piro (Patrimonju Publishing Ltd, 1998), and the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (1998), which she edited under the general title Ancient Theatrical/Ritual Spaces: Action and Communication. She has published articles in international journals, and a chapter on 'Spectacles and "Civil Liturgies" in Malta during the times of the Knights of St John' in The Renaissance Theatre: Texts, Performance, Design, Volume 2 (Ashgate, 1999) edited by Christopher Cairns. She also does practical work in drama therapy. Graeme Harper is Director of the Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Wales, Bangor. His publications include Black Cat, Green Field (Transworld), Swallowing Film (Q) Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration (Continuum), and a range of work in various journals, anthologies and books, including Ariel, Dalhousie Review, Sight and Sound, CineAction, Southerly and Outrider, as well as original works of fiction and film. He holds doctorates from the University of Technology, Sydney, and from the University of East Anglia. His awards include the Australian National Book Council Award for New Writing, the Premier's Award for Writing, a Commonwealth Universities' scholarship and a European Union fellowship.

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Ellen Hartje is an Associate Professor of English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where she teaches literature and composition. Her academic background in English Romanticism led her to an interest in magic realism via various aspects of Romantic theory that correlate with magic realist literature. She began her work in magic realism in 1994; since that time she has made numerous academic presentations on magic realism, served as thesis director for magic realism study, and designed and taught magic realist fiction courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. Terri A. Hasseler is an Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Bryant College. Her research is on Third World feminism and Western women in India. She currently serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the United States Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Elwyn Jenkins was born in Natal and educated in South Africa, Namibia and the UK. He has taught English in schools, colleges of education and universities, and is an Emeritus Professor of English of Vista University and a Research Fellow of the Children's Literature Research Unit at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Jill Lane is Assistant Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. She is presently writing a book on race, nationalism and blackface performance in Cuba during the anticolonial wars. She is co-editor, with Peggy Phelan, of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998). Phyllis Lassner teaches gender studies, writing and holocaust studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of two books on Elizabeth Bowen, several articles on modern women writers and, most recently, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (Macmillan). She has also written the introduction to the reprint of the 1910 feminist novel by the Danish writer Karin Michaelis, The Dangerous Age, and collaborated on new introductions to reprints of two novels by Phyllis Bottome: Old Wine and The Mortal Storm (all published by Northwestern University Press). Mark L. Lilleleht is currently completing his dissertation in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of WisconsinMadison. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Studies (Nigeria). Jonna Mackin is a former Fulbright scholar at Friedrich-Wilhelm Universita't in Bonn, Germany, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH. She has published on T. S.

CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Eliot and music hall comedy ('Raising Life to a Kind of Art' in T. S. Eliot's Orchestra, Garland Publishing, 2000). She is currently writing a book on comedy and ethnicity in twentieth-century American novels. Peter Merrington teaches nineteenth-century literature, modernism and creative writing in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His research interests concern the relation between literature and public history from circa 1880 to 1930 in South Africa, and parallel activities in Britain and the other British 'dominions'. He has published on the late-Victorian concept of 'heritage', on the performance genre of the 'new pageantry', and on the relationship between fiction and 'nation-building' in the early twentieth century. Laura Salisbury is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, on comedy and ethics in the work of Samuel Beckett. She has published on Beckett's comedy and is a co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies. Toni Sant has worked since 1985 as a theatre director, musician and broadcaster in Malta, England, Germany and the USA. He was trained in broadcast production by the BBC in London and Belfast, read theatre studies at the University of Malta, and holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, where he is presently finishing his PhD dissertation on performance and the Internet. Since 1998 he has been a visiting lecturer at the Centre for Communication Technology and the Mediterranean Institute Theatre Programme at the University of Malta. He currently teaches at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. James Watt is a lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict 1764-1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and is currently researching a book on the oriental tale and its offshoots, c.1700 - c.1850.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jon Cook, Director of the Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia and Dean of the School of English and American Studies. Jon supervised the development of both my creative and critical writing during that period in which I was studying for my second doctorate. It was at that time, while working to 'unearth' the 'creative secrets' of the comic and the fantastic, that the idea of a book on comedy and fantasy in colonial societies first emerged. I thank Jon for his encouraging, erudite responses to my writing - responses which have continued, generously and openly, ever since. Likewise, thanks to Janet Joyce for supporting the project, and to Valerie Hall for her notable logistical prowess. Things have been in safe and friendly hands with the crew at Continuum. Linda Jones, our departmental Research Administrator, has ensured that drafts have been chased up, ordered and organized (a task which has sometimes been more considerable than logic would suggest it should be). Without her support and energy this book could not have been completed. My sincere thanks to her. Warmest thanks to the Department of English at the University of Wales, Bangor, for granting me a period of study leave in the 1999/2000 academic year in order to complete the majority of the editorial work on this book. Thanks also to Louise, Myles and Tyler, who have lived with my interest in comedy and fantasy and colonialism longer than anyone. Both Myles and Tyler have grown to understand that their father will not always 'Be serious for a minute!' or restrict himself to living within the boundaries of reality. An occasional burden for any family. Finally, my warm appreciation goes to the contributors. It is the aim of this book to bring together a range of writers and a variety of approaches; to show that, both within different contexts and in a number of significant ways, comedy, fantasy and colonialism have actively and distinctively intersected. My thanks to all the writers for their lively commitment to this work.

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For my father Arthur William Harper (1936-2002) who introduced his children so well to the joys of comedy and fantasy

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Introduction

Isn't the colonial condition a contradictory one? The imposition of one cultural perspective on top of another, or the promotion of a point of imperial law over an indigenous one, or the engagement of a set of exploitative economic possibilities over and above an established set of communal ones, is surely paradoxical, even in some way a 'challenge to the literal'. A challenge because it places in strange disequilibrium the surely natural state of equitableness between humans. Or not? Unfortunately, in the study of colonial situations, playing the ingenue in this way seems a rhetorical act lost in the distant past. Postcolonial 'Studies', colonialism and the colonized have all become part of a well-oiled intellectual machine running on shared and established understandings, and travelling steadily along a recognized academic path suitably decorated with relatively certain moral positions and agreed ethical displays. Yet the engines of neither comedy nor fantasy move easily along this kind of path. Not least because they depend upon highlighting the inconsistencies in our world views. That colonialism likewise raises questions of inconsistency goes without saying. Indeed, the moral positions of both imperialists and the colonized (sometimes based on economic principles or religious ones, sometimes founded on the vagaries of exploration and discovery or on the fortunes of invasion or war) have challenged both the participants, and- the intellectuals who have considered them, to find terms to describe the inconsistent outcomes of these engagements - terms like 'abrogation' and 'appropriation', like 'dislocation' and 'displacement' - all of which have relevance also to the discussion of both comedy and fantasy. The statement that comedy and fantasy must be grounded in cultural circumstance (regardless of whether they are the products of a colonial or imperial situation or not) is commonsensical enough, yet far from easy to expand upon. For example, take the study published in 1988 entitled National Styles of Humour,1 which tried to ground humour in a discussion of national types and national preoccupations: at worst an essentialist notion, at best a brave attempt to find out how humour relates to historical and social circumstance. That study's unfortunate failure to approach the full extent to which humour emerges out of cultural context and individual reaction is merely evidence of how difficult it is to speak generally

2

INTRODUCTION

about the forces that define and structure the comic. The same can be said of any discussion of fantasy. What, after all, determines where we draw the line between fantasy and reality? To a great extent that line is deemed socially appropriate and is generally agreed. And yet, even within a stable cultural context (which, of course, the colonial situation frequently is not), individuals incorporate their own 'levels' of agreement with reality and their own points of departure from it. It would be naive to suggest that this can be compounded into some kind of national or racial grid, or plotted out in a version of metaphysics founded on one global set of principles. What flourishes as fantasy or emerges as comedy determines, and is determined by, who and what we are. It was Sigmund Freud who, in 'Jokes and the Comic', set out one half of the 'comic equation'. He wrote: Mankind have not been content to enjoy the comic where they have come upon it in their experience; they have also sought to bring it about intentionally, and we can learn more about the nature of the comic if we study the means which serve to make things comic.2 Freud can hardly be regarded as an eclectic cultural commentator, focusing overly on an individualist interpretation of the world to the disadvantage of any discussion of the social whole. A discussion of both comedy and fantasy in colonial cultures needs to be grounded in both the social and the personal. It requires reference to the ways in which individuals have effected, and been affected by, colonialism, to both indigenous and imported comedy and fantasy, and to the wider cultural context of these things, whether drawn from the pre-colonial past or from the imperialized present. Giving substance to those references is the aim of Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism. Before the battle a French soldier tells his comrade: There's nothing to worry about; we're sure to win. I heard the priest ask God to be on our side.' 'But the German priest did the same thing/ his friend replies. 'Really, now! Since when does God understand German?'3 A question of language! Beginning with a discussion of the critical language surrounding fantasy and the fantastic, Mark Lilleleht, in 'Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture', looks at the relationship between African traditions and definitions of fantasy in Western literary critical texts. Using a specific case study, Lilleleht shows how some Western definitions run counter to actual practice in indigenous African fantasy. Of particular importance here are contrasting forms of narrative and the role of the storyteller. The analysis of the telling, and publication, of the Ukcombekcantsini story says much about the interaction between Zulu and English narrative forms, as well as about the differing views of the audiences consuming these narratives. Undoubtedly, the relationship

INTRODUCTION

3

between 'who tells' and 'who listens' is a fundamental starting point for a discussion of comedy, fantasy and colonialism. Phyllis Lassner approaches this relationship from 'the other side'; considering the role of British women colonial writers at the close of Empire. As Edward Said has noted, referring to the same phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century: The sense for Europeans of a tremendous and disorienting change in perspective in the West-non-West relationship was entirely new, experienced neither in the European Renaissance nor in the 'discovery' of the Orient three centuries later.4

Lassner, concentrating on the works of Rumer Godden and Olivia Manning, notes the colonial anxieties that such a change in perspective produced. She also makes plain that these anxieties can be identified, in tandem, with a broadly cultural angst and a set of gendered roles. Novels of imperial incline, told by 'settlers' or even 'conquerors', offer some insight into the psychology of those in the colonizing position when faced with this position's undermining. In this case, fantasy and mimicry assist the representation of violence and decline. Importantly, however, Lassner also shows that these are women writers, individuals (regardless of their colonial or anti-colonial stance), who take risks with their writing, drawing on the open cultural tension around them to consider the clash of consciousness beneath. While Lassner's analysis considers fantasy and gender, James Watt, in 'James Morier and the oriental picaresque', focuses on national types and comedy. Watt uses his analysis of Morier's works to consider how such texts can 'stage' the contacts between imperialists and the colonized. In this case Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828) survey Persian society, defined from a Eurocentric point of view, the Persian character, and contribute to a popular European mode of engagement with the 'oriental'. Morier's picaro travels in suitably meandering style through Persia's comically 'corrupt' society, shimmying between delusion and delight and observing the differences between English and Persian culture. Thus, in this fictional typifying of the colonized, a 'factual' journey is borne, albeit a journey whose knowledge is more conjecture than truth. The master of fantastic cartography', writes Jill Lane, 'was, without question, the political satirist Raimundo Cabrera, who sent his imagined Cubans not to Africa but to the moon in his 1888 play, Del parque a la luna (From the Park to the Moon).' The popular theatre genre teatro bufo, is the subject of Lane's chapter, 'Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities'. As Persia was an imagined cultural geography given 'factual' identity through readers' engagement with Morier's works, so the teatro bufo provided a site of imagined release from Spanish imperialists in Cuba. But the genre did not promote an egalitarian Cuba. Importantly, it was a

4

INTRODUCTION

platform for the expression of class superiority, and for the promotion of an idealized version of Cuban independence. This idealized version allowed 'white' Cubans to incorporate 'blackness' or 'Africanness' into a sense of independent national identity. Racial impersonation thus became idealized nationalist sentiment; part of what Lane concludes is a significant anti-colonial fantasy. Idealization also plays a role in Elwyn Jenkins's chapter on foreign and indigenous elements in South African children's stories. 'Writing for children', notes John Stephens in his study of the language and ideology in children's fiction, is usually purposeful, its intention being to foster in the child reader a positive apperception of some socio-cultural values which, it is assumed, are shared by author and audience.5

In Jenkins's work, the dominant relationships engendered in this premise find their way into writers' depictions of talking animals, forgotten fairies and animal biographies. The melding and re-configuring of imported elements within indigenous terrain and under local conditions forms one half of a reconstruction of national identity. The other half involves the appropriation of indigenous folktales. As Jenkins writes, 'on the whole the variety of plots and characters borrowed from indigenous folktales is limited'. Decisively, however, it has been those elements borrowed from the indigenous that appear to have outlived the 'foreign' fantasies. Whether magic realism, one of the best known of 'fantasy' modes often identified with colonial literature, is 'foreign' or indigenous is a point of debate. Mary Ellen Hartje, in 'Magic realism: humour across cultures', suggests that this mode actually crosses cultures. Therefore, to locate it in one cultural situation is to ignore its ability to transfer between one location and another. Hartje's introduction to the mode traces its links to German Post-Expressionism and to Absurdist literature, considers the role of humour in magic realist texts, and discusses a number of Latin American writers who employ this mode. As Gerald Martin has observed in his work on Latin American fiction in the twentieth century, the influence of external forces and essentially colonial elements on Latin American literature has been such that this literature can, in effect, be considered 'a branch of Western literature'.6 And yet, it is the same colonial influence which imbues the more rebellious side of magic realism, and makes it a mode often identified with indigenous challenges to 'imposed' or colonizing versions of reality. In that way, this rebelliousness is as much in the larger realms of metaphysics as it is in the more structurally specific realms of plot or narrative. Hartje suggests that it is the objectified voice of magic realism that is at the core of this rebellion. Rebellion is also the theme of Terri Hasseler's chapter 'Mr Punch's crinoline anxiety: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress'. Hasseler considers the use of the image of British women clad in crinolines in

INTRODUCTION

5

the British periodical Punch during the period of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-59. While Myra Macdonald has suggested, referring to the late twentieth century, that 'fashion and bodily adornment are now at least languages over which the media have lost full control',7 in the case Hasseler makes it would seem that the use of a female fashion image was very actively controlled to stir imperial as well as male sentiment; thus the mid-nineteenth-century media merged the rhetoric of colonial protection with that of femininity. That the representation of the crinoline was comic does not merely displace a serious colonial anxiety; rather, it makes plain that popular humour can be used with considerable and serious political intensity. Comedy, notes Hasseler, becomes a way of 'negotiating . . . anxieties'; in this case both the anxiety over a colonial 'possession' and the anxiety British men felt about the control of the personal, domestic space. Peter Merrington's analysis focuses not so much on 'space' as on a journey through it. In 'Cape-to-Cairo: Africa in Masonic fantasy' he follows the history of what he calls a 'staggered orientalism' swinging from an 'east-west to a south-north axis' and, through this swing, producing in South Africa certain assumptions about identity and geography. Such geographic fantasy has an enduring colonial history elsewhere too. Indeed, the cultural links between white Australia and the one-time 'home country', Great Britain, could be said to have relied considerably on fantasizing away the distance between the two countries. Certainly the hermetic maintenance of a 'European' identity in a fundamentally Asia-Pacific region was for a long time an act of active imagination. Merrington also considers the role of some very distinctive elements in colonialist mythology in these geographic fantasies, specifically, the ritual and history of Freemasonry in unifying the fantasies of European identity and imperial African possession. The Cape-to-Cairo idea turns out, ultimately, to be a 'set of ideas and images', a composite colonial fantasy. Not so much composite as conversational, the role of the joke in relations between the Irish and the English is explored by Laura Salisbury in 'Laughing matters: the comic timing of Irish joking'. Delia Chiaro, in her study of the language of jokes, notes that 'the frame of put-down Irish joke serves as a front to express deeper feelings going on'.8 She relates this joke as indicative: There was a Scotsman, an Italian and an Irishman. They wanted to watch the Olympic Games but they didn't have tickets, so they decided to go as athletes. The Scotsman pulled a bollard out of the ground, put it over his left shoulder, and went to the ticket office and said: Tock McTavish, Scotland, Caber Tossing.' And in he went. The Italian found an empty plate, put it under his left arm, went to the ticket office and said: 'Giovanni Bianchi, Italy, Discus Throwing.' And in he went. The Irishman scratched his head and thought. Then he put some barbed

6

INTRODUCTION

wire under his left arm, went to the ticket office and said: Taddy Murphy, Ireland, Fencing.'9 Salisbury's work suggests that parody plays a role in the Irish-English 'joking' relationship and that it is a far more dialogic relationship than at first imagined. While undoubtedly English stereotyping of the Irish has an oppressive role to play, the notion that this exchange is entirely controlled on the surface of the joke is naive. Knowingness in Irish comedy suggests that quite the opposite reading might be possible. The employment of imported or imposed literary forms for indigenous purposes is confirmed by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in their seminal The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, when they write that 'in some sense all post-colonial literatures are cross cultural because they negotiate a gap between "worlds" '.10 Whether there is such a thing as posf-colonial literature is far too large a question to be explored at this point; however, certainly in colonial literature the negotiation of these world gaps is prevalent. Of course, we should not think of these negotiations as restricted solely to literature. In fact, Vicki Cremona and Toni Sant explore very similar negotiations through an analysis of Pantomime and Carnival in colonial Malta. Cremona and Sant's work centres on a consideration of indigenous Carnival as well as on the importation of the British Panto and its acquisition as a political and social tool. That both these forms, at some point, masqueraded as innocuous fun seems less notable than that they were so readily identified as simultaneously subversive and conservative cultural vehicles. That this analysis potentially confirms some of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas regarding ritual spectacle, comic verbal compositions and the genres of billingsgate is natural.11 Bakhtin's statement below, however, would seem fundamentally disproved by Cremona and Sant's analysis: During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's renewal, in which all take part.12 In Malta 'all' did not necessarily 'take part', nor were the laws only those of Carnival, nor was anything renewed; rather, social hierarchies were confirmed and the status quo was maintained. How, therefore, do we configure and compare the roles of Carnival and Pantomime in Malta? This is the subject of Cremona and Sant's analysis. Jonna Mackin does not begin with a question; she begins with a statement. That statement is that humour acts as a political unconscious in fiction, in this instance in the fiction of Native American writers. Mackin, primarily considering the writing of Anishinabe (Chippewa) novelists Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor, examines how humour assists in 'realigning . . . individual and collective identifications'; how it employs, for example, the figure of the trickster, who is 'outside and

INTRODUCTION

7

above social and behavioural systems'; and how it often employs fantasy in these instances to rearrange 'pyschosymbolic' material. Speaking generally, James Wilson has said, in his work on Native American history, that 'Native Americans were unconcerned if their neighbours' myths differed from their own'.13 However, in the instances Mackin considers the 'neighbours' are frequently European Americans and the use of indigenous myths, and the trickster figure bound up in the Native American world view (frequently invoking both humour and fantasy), helps to reconfirm the national and social identities of writer and reader. These instances, and the celebration of the power of the trickster, are part and parcel of a long-held cultural determination for both Native American and settler American. While Mackin examines the methods by which an indigenous culture re-confirms its sacred beliefs, Paul Longley Arthur, in 'Capturing the antipodes: an imaginary voyage to Terra Australis', examines the role of the European imagination in confirming and contextualizing the colonization of the antipodes. That many of the accounts of voyages to the antipodes had a less than complete relationship with facts was fundamental to how they were used by European imperialists for the moralizing of their antipodean mission. The genre of the 'fabulous voyage', Arthur notes, became a political and social tool applied to the popular imagination, and functioned as a 'forum for registering and negotiating' Europe's changing ideas about its own role in the antipodes. Physical distance was, undoubtedly, one restriction on European exploration of the Pacific; however, psychological or aesthetic distance must also be understood as a barrier to such colonization and the exploitation of antipodean resources. The genre of the imaginary or fabulous voyage was one way in which Europeans crossed that barrier, albeit making plain that imperialism and its hold on reality had a decidedly 'flexible' relationship. Of primary importance to the study of comedy and fantasy is the role played by these two modes of communication in establishing world views. In the first instance, these modes make it clear that what we see in front of us is not always what actually is there. Considered within the tenets of colonialism, modes such as those of comedy and fantasy take on an even greater cultural importance as they become, more so, sites for challenging or confirming identity, of recognizing or attempting to negate cultural hegemony, of appropriating imposed forms of social or artistic engagement, and of exploring the cultural and political changes brought about by a colonial regime. Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism examines a number of instances of both modes in operation, sometimes seeing that one contains or employs the other, but most notably establishing that a close examination of the function of these modes gives insight into the ways in which world views within the colonial environment are formed, confirmed and re-formed.

8

INTRODUCTION

Notes 1. Avner Ziv, National Styles of Humour (Westport, Greenwood, 1988). 2. Sigmund Freud, 'Jokes and the comic' in Robert W. Corrigan (ed.), Comedy: Meaning and Form (Scranton, Chandler Publishing Company, 1965), p. 255. 3. Avner Ziv, Personality and Sense of Humour (New York, Springer, 1984), p. 54. 4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 237. 5. John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (London, Longman, 1992), p. 3. 6. Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London, Verso, 1989), p. 4. 7. Myra Macdonald, Representing Women (London, Arnold, 1995), p. 221. 8. Delia Chiaro, The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 48. 9. Ibid., p. 49. 10. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London, Routledge, 1989), p. 39. 11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Boston, MIT Press, 1968). 12. Ibid., p. 7. 13. James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (London, Picador, 1998), p. 9.

CHAPTER ONE

Displacement, dualism and belief: exploring colonial comedy and fantasy GRAEME HARPER

The powers of disbelief

'Man', wrote William Hazlitt, 'is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.'1 A behaviourist sentiment, of course, which at the time must have peeled out to the frontiers of British imperial influence. Indeed, some years later a naturalized English writer Joseph Conrad gave this same sentiment flesh in Heart of Darkness2 through the enduring, split persona of Mr Kurtz. Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers was first published in 1818, the year of Karl Marx's birth, and the year in which the dominions of the Holkar of Indore, the Rajput States and Poona came under British control. Hazlitt himself was born forty years before, aligning his birthdate with Captain James Cook's discovery of Hawaii and, even more significantly, with the year in which Congress prohibited the import of slaves into the USA. Many of us are drawn by a natural curiosity to such 'coincidences' of history; they suggest 'patterns' in behaviour, possible connections between the independence of the 'individual' and the co-dependence that creates a 'society'. The latter is what Christopher Lloyd refers to in Explanation in Social History when he says: 'Without a tacit belief that society is an ordered and historical entity there would be no point in making an enquiry into its nature, its relationship to action, or the causes of its actions.'3 The former is what he recognizes when he notes: 'a basic requirement is a model of humans as agential and social beings, who structure the world through intentional action and have their action structured by the social world.'4 Comedy and fantasy, so co-dependent on this interaction between the individual and society, play a significant role in colonial cultures, indeed a heightened role. Heightened because they appear to be, both in practice and in their provision of textual evidence, often simultaneously protective of a 'pre-colonial' ideal and supportive of a 'postcolonial' mentality. But this needs further examination - and a denial. Is the 'pre-colonial' that culture which precedes imperial invasion and

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bears the marks solely of an indigenous cultural outlook? If so, then it is associated with the use of those most common of words, 'native', 'original' and 'traditional'. That all three of these words carry dubious purist connotations would, in this case, be both true and unhelpful. Certainly a discussion of colonialism assumes preceding conditions and, by inference, initiates a search for pre-colonial social and textual characteristics. This reflects on colonial comedy and fantasy by locating those characteristics in that important 'traditional' ideal. For example, both Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts5 and Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys6 deal with clashes between African rites and imperializing Christian beliefs. In Tutuola's story the protagonist is transformed into various things, including a cow, a horse, a camel and a ju-ju stick in the neck of a large pot. In Nzekwu's story the clash is represented in a more 'realistic' fashion. The story's protagonist chooses to become a Catholic priest rather than to take up his traditional tribal position, and is openly questioned by his family for doing so. While undoubtedly a definition of fantasy must be culture specific, it seems reasonable to suggest that, in a general way, Tutuola's story employs fantastic tropes and types drawn from a pre-colonial world, while Nzekwu's story draws likewise, but relies on no such fantasy. Following this scheme, the 'postcolonial' would be something different. The postcolonial would represent the aftermath of a set of discursive practices which would include the abrogation of aspects of imperial culture and the appropriation of others. It would include a reconstructed language, bearing elements of both of these actions, and an element of cross-cultural communication distinctive to the after-effects of a defined imperial invasion. Thus we might include in this category texts such as Unna You Fullas,7 a book for older children written by indigenous Australian Glenyse Ward, or Midnight's Children,8 Salman Rushdie's 'birth in/on Independence' novel. In Unna You Fullas the differences between 'native' and 'imported' languages are related directly and the author includes a glossary of Nyungar (that is, indigenous) words and 'special words', including the Nyungar word mumaries, meaning spirits, and wadjela, meaning white person. The novel largely reveals the hybridity of these languages, rather than the battle between them, and the fact that, in a novel fundamentally about language, the author relates the high degree of language hybridity at play, giving some sense of the ways in which Unna You Fullas might be labelled postcolonial. Ward's book contains comedy; it is located on the surface level of its post-invasion discourse, the literal level - as in this exchange between a class of Aboriginal Australian school children and the German nuns of the 'native' mission: 'Who does zhis note belong to?' She read it out, 'B.R. loves G.S., in a heart!' Everyone clicked straight away and started shouting and yahooing, which made me real shame [sic].

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'Be quiet everybody. Glenysen Sprattsen oontz Billy Rice stand up.' Billy gave me a cheeky grin. I felt sick in my stomach and turned the other way. Everyone around thought it was a big joke.9

Rushdie's novel, alternatively, includes both comedy and fantasy. Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have fallen out anyway .. . My special blends: I've been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-size pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon .. .10

Here, then, in Rushdie's work, is a sense of a 'coming together' of an imported and an indigenous world view (from the consumption of CocaCola to the indigenous symbolic value of pickling). And yet, based on the examples above, does the idea of a pre-colonial/postcolonial divide really hold much water? Like the term postmodernism, the descriptions 'pre-colonial' and 'postcolonial' seem well placed to give a sense of history, of chronology. In a similar way to postmodernism, however, any possible support for them seems to derive from the entirely a-temporal. Indeed, the empirical evidence available does not easily bear out a simple, evolutionist separation. For example, in Paul Stoller's study of colonialism, spirit possession and Hauka in West Africa, it is notable that the primary phase of indigenous mimicry of white invaders occurred during the 'golden age' of colonialism, and that the plastic art impressions of that time incorporated indigenous myths as much as figures recreated from actual, contemporary sightings of whites. The comic, likewise, played a role here. The white man, in these mbari house creations, was presented as 'humorous caricature'.11 While mbari represents a reaction to colonialism, fitting well with postcolonial abrogation/appropriation theory, it does not appear to be a post colonial use of humour in that the foundations of it lie in immediate mimesis rather than, as the title of Stoller's book might suggest, in memory. Any interpretation of these artefacts therefore is decidedly posthoc. The 'representation' and the 'chronology' do not effectively support one another. One remains displaced from the other. In a similar vein, Edward Said points out that: we have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and culture experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more 'foreign' elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.12

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Said's point is poignant. We must deal with comedy and fantasy in colonial situations as notable elements of a negotiation, not of a settlement. We must acknowledge that this practice of negotiation began prior to any Western invasion of the non-West, or European invasion of the nonEuropean (for example), because it is the product of both the negotiations of an individual with his or her surrounding society, and of the negotiation between societies. That historical points can, for reference, be marked on this in a linear, evolutionist fashion does not diminish the importance of dealing with these occurrences as points of contact between the idea of society/the individual as a static entity and of society/the individual as a dynamic entity. This idea is not associated with the 'clocktime' of any evolutionist analysis, but with the 'durational time' relevant to a consideration of different kinds of representation and to how these kinds of representation negotiate realms of power and control, and of the meanings attached to them. Comedy and fantasy are particularly strong 'negotiating techniques' because they overtly highlight our powers of belief and disbelief. They make plain what is popularly accepted as 'untrue' and, for their wider dissemination, conversely rely on points of personal agreement between members of one or more social or cultural groups. They are not limited to any particular textual form; however, they are strongly performative and, in their performance at the 'site of truth-telling', dramatically exemplify the often unspoken elements of cultural stasis or cultural dynamism. Defining colonial comic texts

Critically we have come to accept something of a synonymy between the adjectives 'comic' and 'comedic'. There initially appears little reason to question this; 'comedic', after all, does not immediately appear to offer any advantages over 'comic', and is therefore used comparatively less often, and could be considered to have been replaced by comic in most critical discussions. But what if, in approaching the work of such 'colonial' writers as Salman Rushdie, Glenyse Ward, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, we were to examine closely whether their texts should be seen as primarily descendants of a preliterate, non-Western, mythopoeic tradition (the legacy of oral storytellers), or whether their formal origins lie perhaps in the influence of other written texts, the literate influences of both the indigenous and the imported? Of course, I am thinking initially of the influence of James Joyce and Ulysses on modern Latin American fiction,13 particularly linking to Gerald Martin's suggestion that 'the development of Latin America has been circumscribed by external forces and essentially colonial throughout its development (making Latin American literature, inescapably, a branch of Western literature)'.14 Etymologically, the word 'comedy' is tied closely to verbal display.15

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We know that comedy was originally a village song; it referred to village merry-makings (in which songs still take a conspicuous place). To be more specific, Greek comedy can be traced to village revels and elements of the festivities connected with the worship of Dionysus. The chorus in Greek comedy might best be thought of as deriving from the practice of Attic revellers masquerading as birds or frogs or fishes, or similar. So the original, historical meaning of 'comedic' (at least as it is understood in the West) has always been associated with nonchalance, playful relaxation and indulgence. The word 'comic', however, does not tie itself so closely to the chorus; and thus not to song. In order to use the word 'comic' in the critical analysis of the written texts of colonialism we need to address it first by dealing with its written not its colloquial verbal identity. It is primarily for this reason that it is, in truth, the comedic with which Mikhail Bakhtin deals in Rabelais and His World.16 It is not the comic. This is not to deny the importance to studies of cultural change of what is now over thirty years of discussion of Bakhtin's analysis of 'comic' popular culture. But it is to say that a misrepresentation has been, and is being, generated, by Bakhtin (if not merely in the translation into English of Rabelais), and by ourselves when we equate the Bakhtinian argument on 'comic verbal works' with a discussion of modes of comedy. The problem lies in a Western privileging of the verbal that narrows the discussion of types and methods of the comic. Through this phonocentric overvaluing we dilute the possibility of determining specifically the stylistic and philosophical make up of the colonial comic in written texts. The three principal theories universally employed in the field of 'comedy studies' also fail to make any useful distinctions of type. The Superiority Theory broadly aligns itself to the notion that laughter involves an element of scorn; it is a theory of laughter, then, rather than a consideration of the comic mode. It is with this theory that we most often associate the work of Aristotle, Plato and Thomas Hobbes. The Incongruity Theory speaks, generally, of amusement. Amusement, the Incongruity Theory postulates, arises from a clash between thoughts and perception and a particular set of circumstances. Under the tenets of this theory can be included Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,17 as well as contributions by S0ren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. Finally, the Psychic Release Theory takes a physiological approach. Laughter, in this paradigm of psychic release, is a venting of excess energy. Freudian analysis naturally takes precedence here, whilst other notable, contemporary contributions include Daniel Berlyne's 'Arousal Jag Theory of Laughter'.18

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Defining colonial fantasy writing While the three primary theories applied in 'comedy studies' fail to be specific enough about the modes of comedy/the comic to give a good sense of the forces at play in colonial texts, primary discussions in a consideration of fantasy are considerable and pointed. To name a few of the well documented: Tzvetan Todorov's often quoted The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre19 dissects the form and functions of the fantastic genre using specific extended textual examples, and is also frequently cited as a primary contribution to the critical consideration of genre in its entirety. Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics,20 too, is an extensive comparative study, which uses an analysis of the works of Dostoevsky and others to consider the origins of plurality and polophony in the novel, making much of the link to menippean satire and provides, as Simon Dentith notes, 'the strongest statement of the historic carnival, and carnivalised forms of writing, with the growth of the novel'.21 Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion,22 picks up on both the work of Todorov and of Bakhtin, including fantasy's links to the menippea, and neatly adds Freudian theory to 'complete the treble', including a typology to conclude, and an afterword on the nature of the 'unseen' and the 'hidden'. In essence, all three works are laudable yet none of them deals greatly with the difference between fantasy in one culture and that in another, and certainly there is no mention of colonial fantasy. Of Freud's work, which is the basis for Jackson's additions to Todorov's analysis and which has long formed the crux of much discussion of fantasy in general,23 Hanna Segal has made the telling comment that 'unlike his theory of dreams, Freud never worked out in full a theory of unconscious phantasy . . . one could say generally for Freud that phantasy was pretty close to day-dreaming',24 while Richard Webster, in Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, has added that 'Freud's own view was that well-adjusted individuals never indulge in day-dreams'.25 Where, then, does this leave colonial fantasy? Despite questions about the intention and terminology of Freud's consideration of fantasy, undoubtedly psychoanalytic analysis, together with structural analysis, has something to offer. However, given that modern imperialism and both these theoretical approaches involve the imposition of European ideas on non-European situations, it looks awfully like a Eurocentric problematizing to suggest colonial fantasy is some version of a maladjusted day-dream. In this sense, Slavoj Zizek is much closer to the mark than Freud when he states that: the relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at

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the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its 'repressed' point of reference.26

Indeed, that the experience of colonialism generally (in all its guises) makes more plain displacement activities such as this, which reinforce a division between the world of the mind and the world of the body, is supported by a broad range of empirical evidence; for example, in clashes between indigenous tradition and imperial ideals, or between settler economies and native ones or, in the age of European imperial explorations, between Western and non-Western aesthetics. Colonialism thus heightens a fundamental human dualistic displacement, that of the mindbody - which has led many critics to favour evolutionist models solely, or equally dubious conflictivist ones. Neither approach on its own is adequate. The primary point is that colonial fantasy locates itself at the point of displacement. This displacement is multifaceted, and is social as well as psychological and physical. A typological examination of displacement brings us closer to both the origins and forms of colonial fantasy and of colonial comedy. A typology of displacement

In psychoanalysis 'displacement', of course, infers the shifting of effect from one item to another to which it doesn't really belong. This is particularly so in a dream. The implication of this meaning is of more 'purposeful' displacement, as when feelings of aggression are aroused by a powerful figure and expressed toward one less powerful in order to avoid retaliation - however unconscious the displacement may be. To quote Freud: Omission, modification, fresh grouping of material - these, then, are the activities of the dream-censorship and the instruments of dream-distortion . . . We are in the habit of combining the concepts of modification and rearrangement under the term 'displacement'.27 The remarkable thing about the procedure of the dream-work lies in what follows. The material offered to the dream-work consists of thoughts - a few of which may be objectionable and unacceptable, but which are correctly constructed and expressed. The dream-work puts these thoughts into another form, and it is a strange and incomprehensible fact that in making this translation (this rendering, as it were, into another script or language) these methods of merging or combining are brought into use.28

It is the function to the wishes in dreamer. It thus the dream as it

of the dream to preserve sleep by permitting expression such a form as not to shock the ego and so awaken the happens that the manifest content of the dream (that is, is recalled upon waking) differs considerably from its

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latent content (that is, its unconscious significance). For the psychoanalyst, latent content can be revealed by the process of free association, in spite of the fact that it has been carefully disguised by the processes of 'displacement', 'condensation', 'plastic representation' and 'fixed symbolism'. Psychoanalysis, however, is not the only field in which 'displacement' activities are significant. In the general discussion of visual representation the word 'displacement' is applied to eidetic reduction; that is, the distortion of a visual image by inversion, or confusion of right and left, or up and down. The term is used for a type of vivid imagery that is projected into the external world and not merely 'in one's head'; thus a half-way house to hallucination. It is also a term applied to the ability or disposition to project these images. Eidetic reduction is the second of six reductions in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology - reductions carried out in an effort to purify the apperception of a mental phenomenon. The first is the 'psychological reduction', which eliminates the idiosyncrasies of the perceiver or analyst himself. The second is the 'eidetic reduction', which sets up the phenomenon as a perceived essence. Later 'reductions' ensure there is nothing left but 'pure transcendental ego' whose apperceptions, just because they have been refined through so many sieves of subjectivity, are now purely objective. By bracketing the entire world of historical and empirical reality (the noted phenomenological bracket: epoche), Husserl believed that acts of intentionality could be directed solely towards the 'essence' of the bracketed phenomenon in question. He sought direct access to 'essential' content; content which he saw as being complete and objective. In the field of ethology, too, 'displacement' is related significantly to a certain type of 'bracketing' action. It is the elicitation of an instinctive response by an inappropriate object or event or animal. The term is applied to animals' movements which, to someone who knows their primary function and causation, appear entirely out of context. Thus the cat stalking the rubber mouse, the caged bird responding with sexual display to its owner who has managed (consciously or unconsciously) to imitate the appropriate sounds of courtship, and the Pavlovian dogs ('sound' in this case producing effects in the absence of the real stimulus). Displacement activities seem to occur most frequently either when two wholly or partly incompatible behaviour systems are simultaneously elicited or, alternatively, when a behaviour system is elicited but is prevented from running its full course by the absence of stimuli. Human instances of displacement activities include, in specific circumstances, scratching, lighting a cigarette, yawning, pacing up and down, and even impulsive talking. There are various theories concerning the causation of ethological displacement. For example, the 'Disinhibition Theory' is based on the observation that when one behaviour system is strongly brought forth it suppresses other systems. It therefore posits that when two such systems

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are brought forth simultaneously they suppress each other, including the suppressing effect that each normally exerts on third systems. Another theory, discussed in terms of rest-and-sleep systems, argues that the central nervous system reacts to the hyper-excitation caused by conflicting motivations by activating the sleep system with all its secondary movements. There is also the popular application of the term to human activities which are 'out of context' merely in the sense that they are undertaken as an escape (conscious or otherwise) from some more urgently needed activity. Putting to one side definitions of 'displacement' meaning 'the weight or volume of fluid displaced by a floating object' (specifically the weight of water displaced by a ship), and the 'volume displaced by a piston', in contemporary literary theory, the word 'displacement' has been applied to a discourse of alternative worlds. In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale refers to a 'spatial displacement of words', 'transworld identities', 'worlds within worlds': Critics have often described postmodernist writing as discontinuous, but have not always recognised the connection between the semantic and narrative discontinuity and its physical 'objective correlative', the spacing of the text. Postmodernist texts are typically spaced-out, literally as well as figuratively.29

According to McHale, postmodernist fiction, with its recursive structure, proffers changes in ontological level, 'changes of world', and emphasizes techniques of embedding and nesting. This is said to be distinct from the structures and formal notions of modernist fiction. It is the game plan of such postmodernist fiction to emphasize and even exploit movement between displaced structural and thematic elements, in this way accentuating contrast, parallelism and interaction between different diegetic levels. Some critical writing about postcolonial literature also makes much of this. In postcolonial writing 'there are two broad categories', writes D. E. S. Maxwell: In the first, the writer brings his own language - English - to an alien environment and a fresh set of experiences: Australia, Canada, New Zealand. In the other, the writer brings an alien language - English - to his own social and cultural inheritance: India, West Africa. Yet the categories have a fundamental kinship . . . [The] intolerable wrestle with words and meaning has as its aim to subdue the experience to the language, the exotic life to the imported tongue.30

Similarly, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back argue that a sense of self is eroded by dislocation and cultural denigration, and so 'the dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature of postcolonial societies' (my italics).31 What seems missing in both Maxwell's analysis and that undertaken by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin is the sense that the mode of the struggle

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here is a heightened sense of an already existing mind-body opposition (which I am loathe to call Cartesian because that suggests a simplified biological causal interaction, and this is far from that) and to a great number of discursive instances in which displacement activities form part of all our reactions to the world. Because comedy and fantasy work at the coalface of displacement, the way they are used alerts us very effectively to the struggles endemic in the colonial condition. In summary, a typology of displacement reveals its primary components to be the shifting of effects from one situation to another; distortion; a distillation or reduction of elements to their 'essence'; instinctive but 'incompatible' responses; contrasts and parallelisms; and the promotion of a dialectic.

A case study Here is a specific instance in which the displacement activities of comedy and fantasy meet in a colonial text. Magic realist or fabulist writing requires an elliptic narrative of relatively constant and expeditious rhythm. In order to transgress, if not entirely destroy the ontological boundaries of realism, such narratives demand a highly refined diegetic structure. These are narratives which have an organic perception of the novel not dissimilar to that understood in the paradigms of modernism, particularly in the Joycean model (quite directly in the case of Latin American fiction); the novel as physical body, structuring, multifaceted and alive; the novel as equally spatial and temporal. We can see some of this in the following colonial examples. The first is from Peter Carey's Australian historical picaresque lllywhacker. I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar. I say that early to set things straight. Caveat ernptor. My age is the one fact you can rely on, and not because I say so, but because it has been publicly authenticated. Independent experts have poked me and prodded me and scraped around my foul-smelling mouth. They have measured my ankles and looked at my legs. It is a relief to not worry about my legs any more. When they photographed me I did not care that my dick looked as scabby and scaly as a horse's, even though there was a time when I was a vain man and would not have permitted the type of photographs they chose to take. Apart from this (and it is all there, neatly printed on a chart not three feet from where I lie) I have also been written up in the papers. Don't imagine this is any novelty for me - being written up has been one of my weaknesses and I don't mention it now so that I may impress you, but rather to make the point that I am not lying about my age.32 The second is from Ben Okri's Booker Prize novel of Nigerian independence, The Famished Road.

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And then, to crown our amazement, the news reached us that Madame Koto had bought herself a car. We couldn't believe it. No one along our street and practically no one in the area owned such a thing as a car. People owned bicycles and were proud of them. One or two men owned scooters and were accorded the respect reserved only for elders and chieftains. But it most certainly was news for a woman in the area to own a car. We clung to our disbelief till we saw the bright blue little car, with the affectionate face of an enlarged metallic tortoise. It was parked in front of her bar. We still clung to our disbelief even when we saw her hopeless attempts at driving it, which resulted in her running over an old woman's stall. She promptly had the stall rebuilt and gave the woman more money than she had possessed in the first place. We watched her learning to drive the car. She was much too massive for such a small vehicle and at the steering wheel she looked as if the car was her shell and she merely the third eye of the tortoise. The fact that the car was too small for her was the only consolation that people had. But we were still amazed.33 And the third is from Salman Rushdie's transmogrified account of Indian independence, Midnight's Children. I have entitled this episode somewhat oddly. 'Alpha and Omega' stares back at me from the page, demanding to be explained - a curious heading for what will be my story's half-way point, one that reeks of beginnings and ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles; but unrepentantly, I have no intention of changing it, although there are many alternative titles, for instance 'From Monkey to Rhesus', or 'Finger Redux', or - in a more allusive style - 'The Gander', a reference, obviously, to the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight. But 'Alpha and Omega' it is; 'Alpha and Omega' it remains. Because there are beginnings here, and all manner of ends; but you'll soon see what I mean.34 In these three extracts displacement of narrative, voice, belief, intention, expectation, relevance and reasoning produces a series of epistemological and ontological dislocations and ejects a set of lexical and syntactic forms. The mode of displacement here (both comic and fantastic) involves the shifting between one world and another, between a structured field of knowledge and another, far more fluid, structuring field. As indicative examples from 'colonial novels' these could easily suggest the movement between the ontological givens of a pre-colonial world and the free but not yet fully formed world of the postcolonial. However, it is almost certainly wrong to suggest that epistemological and ontological dislocation is solely the 'privilege' of the colonized. The mode here is more distinctive than that. Rather, it is like Rushdie's gander, the 'symbol of the ability to live in two worlds' at once:

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the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight.35

It is this movement, particularly in the position of the narrator, between a kind of flight and an inherent terrestriality, that gives both the narrative, and the comic mode within it, its distinctive shape. This mode represents, significantly, a re-configuration of a cognitive system bound up in an ability to 'ride' the displaced state of mind-body dualism. 'I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar', Carey's irreverent narrator, Herbert Badgery, tells us. 'I say that early to set things straight.' But nothing in these three texts can be set straight. Despite the organic, even teleological aspects of re-configuring truth claims, to continue to live in two worlds, one physical and one psychological or spiritual (as does Okri's spirit child, Azaro), is effectively to exist truthfully in neither. We longed for an early homecoming, to play by the river, in the grasslands, and in the magic caves. We longed to meditate on sunlight and precious stones, and to be joyful in the eternal dew of the spirit. To be born is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. So it is with m e . . . How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay.36

While it is dubious to separate the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial into distinct hermetic periods, it can be seen how the examination of the experience of colonialism generally makes a sense of displacement between the world of the mind and the world of the body more prominent and that this has naturally brought about a degree of critical 'compartmentalizing'. Regardless of such critical over-simplification, it is important to recognize that colonial magic realist and fabulist writers produce works (used here as primary examples of 'colonial texts') which transgress such imposed 'clock time', and highlight the inherent paradoxes in their condition by creating physical, narrative (i.e., time-based) evidence of the interspersed, spatial operations of the colonial mind. Conclusion

To suggest that a displacement theory of colonial comedy and fantasy explains its entire function and form would rightly draw accusations of reductionism. However, as can be seen in the multiple ways in which displacement activities form part of our world views (wherever we are, under whatever political, social or economic system), in recognizing our

DISPLACEMENT, DUALISM AND BELIEF 21

mind-body dualism we are already caught between two formal ways of engaging in what is around us. That the mind extends the physical realm into the metaphysical is a truism. That the sensation of the physical is, in part, a formulation of the mind is so well debated as to be a correlative to this (debates which range from the divine occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche to the emphasis on sensations in the work of John Stuart Mill). That the impact of imperialism occurs in both realms is indubitable. In dealing with two forms which locate themselves so actively at the nexus of this dualism, it seems obvious that an overarching sense of how we should consider them is useful. A multifaceted understanding of displacement offers us this, identifying the ways in which colonial comedy and fantasy overtly, not subversively (in the sense Rosemary Jackson suggests fantasy as 'subversive'), makes its case. These two forms do not necessarily transform imperial/colonial relationships, but they empower both the producer and the audience to fit those relationships into the intricate grid of an existing human sense of opposition. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, J. Templeman, 1841), p. 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, Dent, 1902). Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986), p. 1. Ibid., p. 10. Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (London, Faber, 1954). Onuora Nzekwu, Blade among the Boys (London, Faber, 1963). Glenyse Ward, Unna You Fullas (Broome, Magabala, 1991). Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London, Picador, 1983). Ward, Unna, p. 142. Rushdie, Midnight's Children, p. 439. Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and Hauka in West Africa (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 88. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 15. Noted, not least, in the publication of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in 1963 but could hardly be said to be absent in such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1968) or Carlos Fuentes's Christopher Unborn (1992). Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London, Verso, 1989), p. 4. Comedy: (O) F comedie. L. comoedia. GR. komoidia. komos: revel, plus aeidein: to sing. Comic: L. comicus. GR. komikos. komos: revel. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Boston, MIT Press, 1968). Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London, Macmillan, 1911). D. E. Berlyne, 'Laughter, play and humor', in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology Vol. 3 (New York, Random House, 1969). Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1973). Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Carl Emerson (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984).

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21. Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 51-5. 22. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, Methuen, 1981). 23. For example, Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford, Clarendon, 1998). 24. Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London, Routledge, 1991), p. 16. 25. Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London, HarperCollins, 1995), p. 271. 26. Slavoj 2izek, 'Fantasy as a political category: a Lacanian approach', in Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright (eds), The tizek Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), p. 92. 27. Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychoanalytical Works (London, Cassell, 1966), p. 140. 28. Ibid., p. 172. 29. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London, Routledge, 1987), p. 182. 30. D. E. S. Maxwell, 'Landscape and theme', in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London, Routledge, 1989), p. 25. 31. Ashcroft et al, The Empire Writes Back, p. 9. 32. Peter Carey, Illy whacker (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1985), p. 11. 33. Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London, Vintage, 1992), p. 379. 34. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London, Picador, 1983), p. 223.

35. Ibid. 36. Okri, Famished Road, p. 5.

CHAPTER TWO

Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture MARK L. LILLELEHT

Fantasy and the fantastic

The critical literature of the 'fantastic' and 'fantasy', while in many cases useful in analysing particular works and particular genres of written literature emerging from the European tradition, seems of limited value when considering works outside an often narrowly defined range. Despite claims of generating a nearly universal definition of fantasy and the fantastic in narrative, most definitions are generically and culturally limited. This is not to dismiss their usefulness as analytical tools, but, as with so much literary critical work, a definition posited as the definition often turns out to be only a definition. Transcribed oral narratives from one of the numerous African traditions offer us an opportunity to challenge and refine our understanding of how the fantastic operates in a narrative and engages an audience. By analysing the Zulu narrative 'Ukcombekcantsini',1 and attempting to derive a definition of the fantastic from the operation and imagery of the narrative, without wholly setting aside the concerns raised by European and American literary critics, a definition which is much more wide-ranging and useful as an analytical tool will be sought. It may seem odd then to begin with a discussion of the definition of the fantastic. Yet the fact is that we all operate with a certain, often personalized, understanding of what is meant by the terms 'fantasy' and 'fantastic'. An analysis that fails to define its terms at the beginning becomes more a puzzle for the reader than a useful piece of analysis. What is more, an analysis which promises to define itself through concepts within a text which are not immediately recognizable can easily become either incomprehensible or laboriously tautological at best. No definition suggests itself whole cloth from a single text. The definition presented below is one rooted in a Western critical tradition, but also attempts to account for the peculiarities of a specific Zulu oral narrative.

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Background: theory and culture One is not lacking in attempts to define fantasy and the fantastic in Western literary critical texts. Perhaps the most straightforward is offered by C. S. Lewis: 'As a literary term a fantasy means any narrative that deals with impossibles and preternaturals/2 A broad definition that fits nicely with most people's conception of fantasy, it does, however, little to help the reader analyse and better understand any particular text. It is of much greater use to the scholar engaged in the quest for a structured typological or generic classification. But Lewis's two signposts, 'impossibles and preternaturals', are taken up by most critics as useful indicators that a story is utilizing the fantastic as a narrative device. In his seminal work, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov asserts that the fantastic is manifest in the hesitation one feels in deciding whether an event presented in the narrative is an illusion or something outside our world. He writes, 'At the story's end [if not before], the reader makes a decision'3 as to whether the event portrayed is illusion, and thus imaginary, or not of this world, and thus 'uncanny' or 'marvellous'. Once that decision is made, and Todorov believes that the decision is always made, the fantastic dissolves and disappears. Todorov's fantastic exists in that moment of hesitation and uncertainty alone. What he fails to recognize is that one might very well take a narrative and the elements of which it is composed as 'story'. This is Anne Wilson's point when she writes: Audiences will enjoy a fantasy and perhaps laugh at it afterwards, but they will not find it puzzling unless they are asked to explain it; it does not normally occur to anyone to ask for an explanation in depth and, far from being confused, audiences clearly find it deeply meaningful.4 Each particular story creates a secondary world of sorts, 'a world with a design and therefore a meaning that has no existence outside the work of art and the tradition that fostered it'.5 And precisely because narrative, or 'story', is constructed, it can accommodate varying degrees of 'fantastic' intrusion - even requires it in some cases. Simply put, the 'fantastic' are those narrative elements, feats or forms, characters or images, which exist as a trace of some other world or reality, but within a narrative reality that otherwise mimics our own. The world presented in a fantastic narrative is created in the sense that all narratives are, but it is grounded in the primary world of our everyday existence, a mirror image of our world, albeit cracked in places. Whereas a fantasy world is a fully realized, internally consistent world made up in part of Lewis's 'impossibles and preternaturals', the fantastic narrative is characterized by an expectation of normality continually upset by the uncertainties and problems attendant upon a confrontation with the seemingly

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impossible - the fantastic. For the fantastic is precisely that which can be doubted. Not disbelieved, but doubted. In the narrative, the injection of the fantastic brings about an instability - in plot, in characters' perceptions of events and of the world in which they live - which needs to be redressed and restabilized within the story. In a story of the fantastic, it is the instability of the fantastic, which is inherently rooted in its ambiguity and the doubt and uncertainty that surrounds it, that propels the narrative and the characters forward. The fantastic is narratively subversive in that there is often an uneasy peace established between the realistic characters and the fantastic, a peace of temporary reconciliation though not an acceptance of its permanence or immutability. This seems to run counter to how the Xhosa storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani frames her use of the fantastic (a concept which, like many commentators, she alternately refers to as fantasy and fantastic): [I]t is the task of the storyteller . . . to forge the fantasy images into masks of the realistic images of the present. These fantastic images establish and sustain inner cores; they are placed into a context of contemporary and therefore unstable images, enabling the performer to join present and past . . . [through which flows] a collection of ideas that have the illusion of antiquity and ancestral sanction.6

Her conflation of the contemporary with instability seemingly contradicts the notion that it is the fantastic which brings about the narrative instability. But look closely at how the argument is framed. Fantastic images are to be shaped into masks of the present. In the most mundane sense, this might be taken to mean that the fantastic are to take shape in images with which we are all familiar. Talking animals, monstrous births and supernatural, secret visitations, all of which appear in 'Ukcombekcantsini', the story discussed below, are given form through images with which the characters and audience are well familiar. We know what a pigeon is, but allow that pigeon to speak and this otherwise mundane creature radically destabilizes what is assumed to be known. This contemporary, familiar image has become something quite different though its physicality, and thus the mental picture we hold of it, remains largely unchanged. This is not to assert that every fantastic image must be on the surface a realistic representation with a worldly counterpart. However, within the world of the fantastic, as opposed to fantasy, the most compelling images are those which we feel we know and are familiar with, and yet somehow escape our quick characterization and classification. The use of the fantastic by a storyteller creates an anticipation and tension, keeping the audience engaged, seeking and expecting resolution. Resolution, not explanation; the fantastic introduces forms and situations that need to be buttressed and redressed through positive action rather than merely explained away. The use of the fantastic also serves at least two other purposes in the narration of a story: it allows for

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certain characteristics and/or states of individual characters to be externalized and emphasized within the narrative, and it allows for the presentation of social norms free from the potentially coercive weight of societal sanction, thus presenting them as timeless and universally applicable. As regards the externalization of personal, internal divisions, the use of fantastic imagery and forms often allows the narrator effectively to break off individual personality traits or thoughts in order to emphasize doubt, resolve, vindictiveness, or a whole host of other emotions. Such characterization through the fantastic need not be limited to individuals alone, but can also be used to suggest the state of society or a particular locality as well. In many respects, this externalizing of interior divisions and uncertainties is a way of universalizing what might otherwise be taken to be an individually or temporally specific situation. Something peculiar to an individual, wholly within one's head, might be of questionable value or significance. Bringing such states into engaged, narrative play is a means by which this subjectivity is circumvented. Similarly, and somewhat paradoxically, the use of the fantastic is a means by which societal norms or expectations might be presented free of the onus of the immediate expectations of contemporary society. The use of the fantastic places the narrative somewhat outside the everyday, explanatory realm. By situating the narrative somewhere between the everyday and pure fantasy, the teller is signalling that the resolution is to be found neither in our world nor through some otherworldly intervention. Rather, resolution will often come in the form of a harking back to what are presented as timeless values. Through the use of the fantastic 'the performers can communicate elemental social ideals and affirm community standards'7 without seeming to preach. While the fantastic operates somewhere between the realms of mimetic and marvellous representations, 'without their assumptions of confidence or presentations of authoritative "truths" ',8 it is the unstable nature of the fantastic which allows for the emergence of these truths as the narrator chooses to present them. If, on the other hand, we present the fantastic as made from stuff that merely 'compensates for deficient causality'9 and that operates to 'exempt the text from the action of the law',10 we risk diminishing the value and power of the fantastic and effectively limit the functional breadth of the fantastic. We risk also draining the fantastic of its purposefully mysterious character. This is especially notable in considering texts from the past or from other literary and oral traditions. In our rush to explain we too often view the fantastic as a cultural artefact and fail to note its deeper, functional and meaningful significance. What might be accepted, revelled in and enjoyed may appear as nothing more than mere curios to the reader. 'Some texts seem easy to read, but lack any trace of the "otherness" one feels should be imprinted by the various cultures and languages.'11 This quest for a sense of 'otherness' too often blinds us to

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the real work of the fantastic and greatly reduces the scope of our analysis. The story to be analysed, 'Ukcombekcantsini', was told to the Rev. Canon Henry Callaway by Lydia Umkasetemba some time during the 1860s, and is part of an astounding collection of Zulu tales rather patronizingly entitled Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus. Callaway was collecting material in Zululand about fifty years after the great wars and centralization of the Zulu state under Shaka. Zululand's rulers, following Shaka's consolidation and expansion of the kingdom, found themselves in an increasingly precarious situation at the time Callaway worked within the region. The Natal, to the south of the Zulu kingdom, had been declared a British colony in 1843 and the colonial government subsequently initiated a programme of removals of the African population to locations'. The Zulu kingdom was also under constant pressure from both Boer and British colonial settlers and their governmental patrons. The Zulu have traditionally lived in dispersed homesteads, termed kraals, consisting of two or three generations of a family. A man can take multiple wives, each of whom has a household within the kraal. Each household, headed by a female, provides for itself, any dependent children and contributes a share to the kraal. One's descent is traced through the father's line and individuals are required to marry outside of the lineage, traced back effectively through five or six generations. The Zulu also practise a form of bridewealth termed lobola, wherein the groom's family gives over or promises a certain number of cattle to the bride's father. When married, the woman goes to live with the man's family. Practising a mixed farming and livestock raising economy, the women perform mainly the agricultural and household tasks while the men tend the cattle and sheep herds. Children are incorporated into appropriate gender roles early on and are typically organized into age sets.12

Background: Callaway and the collection The Reverend Canon, later Bishop, Henry Callaway was an odd mixture of a man. Born in England in 1817, he arrived in Natal in 1854 as an Anglican minister and a trained doctor. He began collecting oral tales as a way of learning the language: 'At a very early period I began to write at the dictation of Zulu natives, as one means of gaining an accurate knowledge of words and idioms.'13 Callaway published many of these tales in the local newspapers and in small, manuscript volumes throughout the 1860s. His goals for this project slowly changed as he began to collect more and more material. Not only did he come to view this collection as an opportunity to discover 'what was the character of the mind of the people with whom we are brought into contact',14 he also envisioned both student and popular editions of his work, presenting the

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Zulu original and his English translations for European audiences and as a way of encouraging Zulu youth to read: We want to teach the young Kafirs to read. We must, then, give them some inducement to read; and where can we find a greater than by giving them the traditionary tales of their forefathers, in the same words as they have heard around the hut-fires?15

Offensive characterizations aside, it is astounding to read such encouragement from a European missionary, a missionary who also writes that '[i]t would be a great mistake to teach an English child to read solely from the Bible' as missionaries had been doing with Zulu children in their charge.16 To read his reflections on the tales and translations today, one is struck, if not surprised, by the seeming open-mindedness of the man, only to read on and discover the often virulently racist and patronizing view he had of Africans. In part this seems to spring from his desire to make everything rationally understandable - 'every thing human is valuable'17 - without letting go of his core conviction that 'there is nothing in common between the two races'.18 The introductory notes to his published collection strike a universalist note: 'man has every where thought alike, because every where, in every country and clime, under every tint of skin, under every varying social and intellectual condition, he is still man'.19 But while such a sentiment 'suggests itself to a man of warm affections and tender instincts',20 it stands against all reason, as Callaway understood it. The artefact, the collected tale, had a value not possessed by the people from whom it was collected. He writes: the Zulu are a degenerated people; . . . they are not now in the condition intellectually or physically in which they were during 'the legend-producing period' of their existence; [they] have sunk from a higher state.21

While such remarks and characterizations can be understood as part of the general anthropological theories of nineteenth-century European thought to which he was greatly indebted, they are strangely disconcerting when placed next to some of Callaway's other, more 'enlightened' assertions. For instance, he writes of 'Umpengula, my native teacher'22 without a hint of irony. In the introduction to his work, Callaway explains briefly how he went about collecting these tales, but says little about the environment or setting of the collection process. He writes: A native is requested to tell a tale; and to tell it exactly as he would tell it to a child or a friend; and what he says is faithfully written down. We have thus placed before us the language as nearly as possible such as it is spoken by the natives in their intercourse with each other. And, further, what has been thus written can be read to the native who dictated it; corrections be made; explanations be obtained; doubtful points be submitted to other natives; and it can be subjected to any amount of analysis the writer may think fit to make.23

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As a linguistic exercise, which was Callaway's initial purpose, there seems much to recommend this course of action. Yet it also illustrates the myriad difficulties in attempting to render an oral tale into a written text and how a collection of tales differs from the original performance and presentation of those tales. For his part, Callaway was aware of the difficulties this transition presented, writing that 'much is concealed that can only be uncovered by living among the people'.24 He writes that after he published shortened, preliminary versions of the collection at hand, 'several [Zulu] came and offered themselves as being capable of telling me something better than I had printed'.25 Among these 'voluntarily tendered' stories is Lydia Umkasetemba's 'Ukcombekcantsini'.

The story: a summary

The story itself is simple yet strangely unsettling. Readers are encouraged to visit Callaway's version, for what follows is only a cursory summary, eliding much of the rhythm and sense of the story evident even in the translation of the Zulu original. It goes something like this. There is a kraal where the king's many wives give birth to nothing but crows. One of the king's wives, however, is barren and is mocked and jeered relentlessly by the other women. One day when working in the fields two pigeons come to the barren queen and scarify her, collect the clotted blood, and tell her to place it in a large covered vessel for two months. Two children - real children - a girl (Ukcombekcantsini) and a boy emerge after those two months. Fearful of the jealousy of the other women of the community, the queen keeps the children hidden and commands them to keep to their house. Keeping their mother's counsel, they grow to young adulthood. One day Ukcombekcantsini suggests that they fetch water for their mother. By the river they encounter travellers from a distant settlement who are struck by Ukcombekcantsini's beauty. Time passes uneventfully until one day a young man by the name of Ukakaka, the son of the king of this other settlement, returns with a large retinue and herds of cattle as lobola to ask for Ukcombekcantsini's hand in marriage. The village women, who are still unaware of Ukcombekcantsini's existence, are derisive yet hopeful, while the king and his counsellors are shocked and somewhat annoyed (for they fear they are being mocked) that anyone would waste so much time and so many resources on crows. It is finally revealed by Ukcombekcantsini's mother that the king does, in fact, have a son and a daughter. After much feasting, Ukcombekcantsini is betrothed to Ukakaka and the two set off for his home kraal, though with a warning from Ukcombekcantsini's mother that when the party reaches the high land between the two settlements, they ought not to pursue the green animal they will encounter. Not surprisingly, the proscription is violated and while Ukakaka and

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his men are off pursuing the beast, Ukcombekcantsini is coaxed off her mount by an imbulu, a 'tree iguana or monitor/26 who takes Ukcombekcantsini's place on her ox as she and her attendants flutter away into the trees as finches. On returning, Ukakaka notices that something is amiss his bride no longer shines. This is not my bride, he says, but they press on, only to be greeted further on by the finches chirping away, 'Ukakaka the king's child gone off with an animal! Out upon him, he is running off with an Imbulu!' On arriving home Ukakaka's father, the king, is none too pleased with the ugliness of the bride. Swearing that his bride was a beautiful maiden, Ukakaka refuses to call her his wife, though the matter is left otherwise unresolved for the time being. One day when all of Ukakaka's village is out in the fields, Ukcombekcantsini and her attendants come as finches to the only member of the village who remains behind: an old, crippled woman by the name of Uthlese. Taking on human form, they clean, gather firewood and water and brew beer for the entire village, pledging Uthlese to secrecy. For her part, because of the pledge, and much to the delight of the other villagers, the immobile Uthlese claims the work as her own. Only on the third day does Uthlese confess to Ukakaka, who doubts her claims, that it is, in fact, Ukcombekcantsini and her handmaidens who are doing the work. Ukakaka then returns to the kraal early the next day to confront Ukcombekcantsini. The two are reconciled, the king informed, and a trap laid for the imbulu - who is finished off by the entire village - and finally the marriage of Ukakaka and Ukcombekcantsini is sanctified. The fantastic at work The most striking elements of the Ukcombekcantsini story are, not surprisingly, the fantastic ones that Umkasetemba weaves through the tale: the village of crow children, the speaking pigeons, the birth and growth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother, the imbulu and the transformation of Ukcombekcantsini and the maidens into finches. The importance of the fantastic as it operates in this story is not so much in the elements themselves but in the relationships which exist between such elements and 'normal' (even normative) behaviour patterns. Although Ukcombekcantsini is the central figure of the story, the narrative lacks a single, omnipresent character. Rather, the story is divided into two narrative halves, bridged partly by an ensemble of characters (some of whom we meet in only one half or the other) and partly also by the continuity of the fantastic. It reflects something of the paradox of the fantastic to speak of continuity and the fantastic in the same clause. Inherent in the fantastic is its unstable nature, which is rooted in the ambiguity cultivated by the use of 'impossibles and preternaturals'. The tensions and problems introduced by the use of the fantastic are what bind the narrative together. The

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dynamic element is introduced when balance is momentarily upset, then restored once again. This pulsating symmetrical/asymmetrical exchange is central to the oral performer's art.'27 The lingering asymmetries are what keeps the story moving and the audience engaged. The episode on the high lands and the introduction of the imbulu neatly divides the narrative into two halves and serves as both a further complication and a means of binding the two halves together. The story could end at the point at which Ukcombekcantsini and her brother are introduced to their rather. In fact, Callaway includes one story in his collection, 'Amavukutu',28 which repeats the same basic story, though in much less detail, and ends with the introduction of the child to the father, neatly tying up the narrative concerns. Also, we must be careful when it comes to decoding the fantastic images as solely and singularly reflective of specific elements of the culture from which it springs. We can understand the crows as a way by which the storyteller deprecates the other women of the kraal29 or as indicative of some deeper problem. Todorov warns against treating narrative elements as a 'symptom' of culture.30 Scheub also warns that the 'analyst must . .. not mistake the cultural elements found in such narratives for reflections of the culture itself'.31 It is important to look beyond merely what the fantastic stands in place of, and concentrate on what it stands in relation to. One critic, writing on this same tale, comes to the conclusion that, In Zulu folktales bizarre monsters are introduced at various points, but these are probably too fantastical and remote from everyday life to be really frightening. Real life relationships within the family, on the other hand, are immediate and can be disconcertingly problematic, and these, it is suggested, are subliminally handled in those tales that contain the 'mythic' content referred to.32

If we look at the fantastic merely as a place-holder or as symbolic of something else, usually conceptualized as something deep in a people's cultural memory, we deprive the fantastic of what may be its most productive and evocative sense. The story opens not on the normal world but on a world already radically destabilized by the fact that all the children of the kraal are crows. It would be tempting therefore to frame the entire narrative as a fantasy rather than as a narrative that utilizes fantastic elements. Yet there is no indication at any point in the story that the fantastic events and characters are ever accepted as natural or as anything but out of the ordinary. They are wondered at, cause amazement and consternation, and even in the case of the kraal of crows, are made peace with. But they are never fully embraced as part of the nature of things. The non-rational phenomena of [the fantastic] simply do not fall within human experience nor do they reach accord with the natural laws of the universe.'33 The women of the kraal taunt Ukcombekcantsini's mother with the words: 'We

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indeed do give birth only to crows; but you give birth to nothing.'34 Similarly, Ukcombekcantsini's mother laments her ill-treatment: 'This is done to me because I do not give birth even to these crows.'35 The generalized standard, having given birth, is emphasized by the women of the kraal, not what they have given birth to. The fantastic nature of their own births is shunted to the side. There is implicit in the women's statements, a recognition of the inadequacy of these crow children, but also a degree of resignation. When Ukakaka's people come with the cattle to fetch the still unknown Ukcombekcantsini there is universal disbelief that anyone would waste so much wealth on mere crows, but a rather facetious hope springs eternal: the women crying '[W]hich is the damsel among all these of ours? That mother will be glad whose daughter shall be selected with so many cattle as these.'36 The abnormal nature of the birth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother is not just established through their mother's barrenness but also through the birth of the other 'children' of the kraal. The ethnographic literature is rife with references to the horror of not having children: To a woman .. . childlessness is the greatest of all misfortunes, for not only will she be taunted and gibed at by her more fortunate sisters, but she may even be divorced on that account.'37 Likewise, The chief wife's position in any village is ... so important that if she fails in her duties [one of which is to produce an heir] she can no longer hold office . . . She will simply be given a hut near the gate or at the side of the kraal, and left with only the necessities of existence, while a new virgin wife is sought to take her place.38

This is clearly what has become of Ukcombekcantsini's mother, the displaced queen, when the story opens. But the fantastic nature of the other women's children makes their own positions precarious. If parents are the link to the ancestral past, then a generation of crows, of nonhumans, threatens not only to disrupt the present but also to explode the people's connection to both their past and future. When Ukakaka comes to the kraal and the women take up the taunting of Ukcombekcantsini's mother, the king and other men of the kraal upbraid the women. The women's taunts are made not on the basis of their children but on the fact of their birth. In a society where a normal birth results in fantastic children, the way to break this cycle is by an inversion of this dynamic, whereby a fantastic birth results in normal (read: human) children. Another striking aspect of the conception and birth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother is the nature of the assistance given to their mother by the pigeons. As the Zulu traditionally understood conception, '[mjenstrual blood in a woman is regarded as an unformed child. When a man's sperm is introduced, it causes the blood to form into a clot which develops ultimately into a human being.'39 The pigeons do not impregnate Ukcombekcantsini's mother, but rather remove from her the clot that becomes Ukcombekcantsini and her brother. This woman, forced back

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onto her own resources because of her barrenness, has wholly within herself the fruits of her fertility; the king's sperm gives crows, not human children. Just as the birth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother does not correct the instability of the kraal but only serves to add another dimension to the narrative, so too does the introduction of the imbulu as the wedding party treks to Ukakaka's home add a layer of narrative instability that needs to be resolved before the story can be concluded. The imbulu is a frequently occurring character in Zulu tales. Callaway glosses it as 'a large land lizard, living mostly in forests. It is a stupid harmless animal.'*0 In Zulu folklore the imbulu takes on a more insidious quality: 'It is a creature full of deceit',41 'obsessed by a desire to transcend its animalism.'42 Such definitions go a way towards explaining why the imbulu does what it does within the story, but do little to help explain why it is included within the story in the first place. Structurally, the time on the high lands serves as the narrative mirror of the story: the green creature's flight and the hunters' pursuit in effect trigger the imbulu's pursuit of Ukcombekcantsini and her party's flight (in the form of finches). The narrative turns back on itself to roughly replay the events of the first half of the story. One of the disconcerting things for the reader is that some of the characters to whom we are introduced in the first part fail to reappear in the second. Ukcombekcantsini's mother, father and brother are all left behind. At one level, this is not wholly unexpected. The marriage of a woman constitutes a break with her own people and an integration into her husband's lineage. The word used by the Zulu to mean marriage, enda, literally translates as 'to go on a long journey'.43 Much more important to the story is what this narrative 'leaving behind' signifies in terms of the characters' identity. A person's identity is completed externally, through one's relationship with others, just as the fantastic is resolved through the intervention and mediation of a third party. Ukcombekcantsini's mother is 'completed' through the birth of her children. Her husband, 'who no longer regards me as a human being, because I have no child',44 now marvels at her 'great courage'.45 The son, Ukcombekcantsini's brother, who refuses to be named by his mother, likewise becomes fully a man when his father throws himself on him in joy. The father too becomes fully a king when he learns of his children, especially his son. There are no more loose ends for these three characters: they have assumed their proper roles and the storyteller can move on. On the other hand, Ukakaka's refusal to call the imbulu-asUkcombekcantsini his wife effectively leaves Ukcombekcantsini incomplete, unresolved. One of the most effective ways in which fantastic elements are introduced into a narrative is through marginal communities and objects. Narrative play at the margins and periphery of society certainly is not limited to fantastic elements, but the very fact that the fantastic, which is predicated on both doubt and believability, is so often introduced into

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secondary communities and through marginally acceptable objects allows for effective cultivation of these two emotions. Our core understanding of these marginal areas is so uncertain to begin with that the fantastic, while to be wondered at, cannot be dismissed out of hand as a priori impossible. The tale provides numerous examples of this interplay between the marginal and the fantastic. Both Ukcombekcantsini's mother and Uthlese reside at the edges of their respective communities - both are marginalized by the community and are physically 'lacking' (the mother, fertility; Uthlese is without legs) - and both serve as the means by which the fantastic is introduced into their kraals. The case of Ukcombekcantsini's mother is self-evident. Uthlese, although she does not play a direct role in summoning Ukcombekcantsini into the kraal of Ukakaka's father, does serve as the link between Ukakaka and Ukcombekcantsini. Uthlese is able to put off the people of the village with her explanations, but is unable to deceive Ukakaka. Ukakaka, who doubted his bride on the high land - 'it seems to me that this is not my bride'46 - also doubts his own mind and is therefore unable to provide a complete explanation of the fantastic transformation of his bride, and proves unable to take a positive step to rectify the imbalance. Yet this same man is not fooled by Uthlese's claims, nor is there any indication that he should be. Uthlese's limitations are obvious and she possesses no fantastic abilities or characteristics that might effectively mask her shortcomings (as in the case of the imbulu). The fantastic not only can be doubted but sows doubt within those \vho come into contact with it. The hunters who accompany the bridal party are quick to dismiss the odd appearance of Ukakaka's 'bride' and the derisive, warning words of the finches as 'the manner of birds of the thorn country'.47 Ukakaka's own mind conjures doubt and confusion, but the men, perhaps an extension of Ukakaka's own sense of things, merely shrug off the talking birds that sing their chastisement and provide excuses for the imbulu's appearance. Almost the same words are used by Ukcombekcantsini: first, as one of the finches sowing doubt in Ukakaka's mind - 'Out upon him, he is running off with an Imbulu';48 and subsequently in human form to make clear what it is he has done to her - 'Out upon Ukakaka! Was it not you who took me from my father's kraal and left me on the high lands, and went away with an Imbulu?'49 With these words, Ukcombekcantsini (and Umkasetemba) neatly frame the second half of the story and illustrate how frequently the fantastic holds within itself the stuff of its own resolution. The pigeons come to Ukcombekcantsini's mother after a day of digging, as she sits weeping over her fate; the castor-oil seeds that the pigeons request as payment for their assistance are not considered a food at all; the clot which becomes Ukcombekcantsini and her brother is caught in an umpanda, 'an earthen pot which is cracked, and no longer of any use but for holding seed, &c'.50 Ukcombekcantsini is tired and thirsty when the imbulu comes to her; Ukakaka mutters, '[m]y body is weak',51 when he

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first notices the change in his bride; and coming home from a long day in the fields, the people of Ukakaka's village readily accept Uthlese's explanations for all the work that's been done in their absence. However, the introduction of the fantastic at the margins and in times of weakness does not mean that it remains at the margins. Rather, the resolution of the instability and uncertainties introduced by the fantastic and other narrative elements requires that the fantastic be brought into the social centre. The most effective way by which this is accomplished is through the issuing by one character of a prohibition that is immediately transgressed by another. It is through the transgression of these prohibitions that narrative tension is heightened and a certain degree of danger is introduced. It also sets the stage for the resolution of the instability thus generated. In the first half of the story, Ukcombekcantsini's mother explicitly prohibits her children from leaving the house for fear that the crows (and their mothers) will discover and kill them. Within two paragraphs Ukcombekcantsini and her brother are marching to the river to fetch water for their mother and are discovered by Ukakaka's scouting party, the abahhwebu. The abahhwebu themselves are a marginalized people who bridge the two halves of the story: 'not of the same race'52 as their king, they bring news of Ukcombekcantsini's great beauty back to Ukakaka and his father in the first half, and then are threatened with death when the bride's beauty proves not what was promised in the second. Ukcombekcantsini's brother disavows the transgression and there is a palpable sense of worry and fear, subtly but effectively introduced after the children's explanation: 'They were then silent. They remained for many days.'53 While the fear is real, it is only through breaking the transgression and becoming known to people outside their kraal that the first half of the story can begin to move towards its partial resolution: they have made themselves known to a wider world which will, heedless (because ignorant) of the potential dangers, call them out before the community. The second half of the story sees a similar dynamic. Uthlese, who becomes something of both a mother-in-law and grandmother figure, gives Ukcombekcantsini and the maidens her word that she will not reveal their secret, only to tell Ukakaka all when he comes to her, certain that she is not being truthful. The people of the village, satisfied and happy with the work Uthlese seems to be doing for them, are not about to question her. In fact, they give up questioning her after the third day. It is precisely in this moment of acceptance, of not questioning the source of the marvellous event (be it good or ill fortune), that significant events occur. So satisfied with having 'an old woman who will work for us',54 the people of the kraal do not question; just as the women of Ukcombekcantsini's mother's kraal, so sure of her barrenness, taunt and mock her when Ukakaka arrives with the lobola cattle. Whereas these women are thoroughly surprised by the revelation of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother, there is an indication that the women of Ukakaka's kraal recognize

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that '[t]here is something wonderful which is about to happen here at home'.55 Conclusion

Here we see the real power of the fantastic at work, beyond standing in symbolically for something else or indicative of some other world or higher power. For here the fantastic operates in the narrative and in the audience to create space, an opening. The fantastic generates doubt, within the narrative, of the type that asks 'what happens next', rather than doubt as to the truthfulness or possibility of the reality presented. The fantastic at work in the story indicates something is not quite right here, rather than 'this can't be'. Such clumsy explanations of some of the underlying narrative structures simply cannot do justice to the elegance of Umkasetemba's story. Umkasetemba also wonderfully nurses the tension generated by the events of the story before launching into a rocket-like resolution, which first pitches us into another new cycle of dramatic tension and then finally resolves matters without resorting to a sugary sweet ending. As should be clear by this point, the fantastic is not the sole narrative element at work in Umkasetemba's story. But it is a fundamental part of the narrative, both in what the fantastic elements suggest as to the meaning of the story and in how they work to keep the narrative moving towards an effective, meaningful resolution. Similarly, it allows the storyteller more flexibility and superficial neutrality in presenting a mirror to the instability that wracked the Zulu nation in the nineteenth century. If we make the mistake of trying to decode the fantastic piece by piece as they appear in the narrative, rather than looking at how they are woven into the everyday, we risk missing some of the more deft and quite marvellous aspects of this artfully crafted work. Notes 1. Rev. Canon Henry Callaway, Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (London, Triibner and Co., 1868), pp. 105-30. 2. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 50. 3. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 41. 4. Anne Wilson, Magical Thought in Creative Writing: The Distinctive Roles of Fantasy and Imagination in Fiction (Stroud, The Thimble Press, 1983), p. 9. 5. Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, ed. Harold Scheub (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 82. 6. Ibid., p. 19. Emphasis added. 7. Harold Scheub, 'Fixed and nonfixed symbols in Xhosa and Zulu oral narrative traditions', Journal of American Folklore, vol. 85 (1976), p. 270.

ZULU NARRATIVES AND COLONIAL CULTURE 8. 9. 10. 11.

37

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, Methuen, 1981), p. 35. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 110. Ibid., p. 159. Denise A. Godwin, 'Discovering the African folk-tale in translation', South African Journal of African Languages, vol. 11 (1991), p. 109. 12. The cultural practices outlined here are more traditional and hold better for the Zulu at the time of Callaway's collection of the tales. Needless to say, social and cultural developments of the past hundred years and more have reshaped such practices. 13. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 1. 14. Ibid., p. ii. 15. Ibid., p. 1. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', second page. 18. Marian S. Benham, Henry Callaway, M.D., D.D., First Bishop ofKaffraria: His Life-History and Work: A Memoir (London, Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1896), p. 57. 19. Callaway, Nursery Tales, unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', second and third pages. 20. Benham, Henry Callaway, p. 132. 21. Callaway, Nursery Tales, unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', third page. 22. Ibid., p. 130. 23. Ibid., p. i. 24. Benham, Henry Callaway, pp. 252-3. 25. Callaway, Nursery Tales, unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', first page. 26. C. M. Doke, Zulu-English Dictionary (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1958), p. 173. 27. Harold Scheub, The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 157. 28. Callaway, Nursery Tales, pp. 72-3. 29. Ibid., p. 105. See footnote 36. 30. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 151. 31. Harold Scheub, 'Body and image in oral narrative performance', New Literary History, vol. 8 (1976-77), p. 345. 32. W. D. Hammond-Tooke, 'The "mythic" content of Zulu folktales', African Studies, vol. 47, no. 2 (1988), p. 99. 33. Vernon Hyles, 'The poetry of the fantastic', in Patrick D. Murphy and Vernon Hyles (eds), The Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre (New York, Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 8. 34. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 106. Emphasis added. 35. Ibid., p. 110. Emphasis added. 36. Ibid., p. 113. 37. Eileen Jensen Krige, The Social System of the Zulus (Pietermaritzburg, Shuter and Shooter, 1957), p. 61. 38. Ibid., p. 40. 39. Absolom Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations: A Study of the Dynamics of Social Change (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1962), p. 56. 40. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 118. See footnote 50. Emphasis added. 41. Krige, The Social System of the Zulus, p. 352. 42. Scheub, 'Fixed and nonfixed symbols', p. 270. 43. Harriet Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (London, Academic Press, 1977), p. 66. See also Doke, Zulu-English Dictionary, p. 56. 44. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 110. 45. Ibid., p. 116.

38 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

MARK L. LILLELEHT Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 107. See footnote 42. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 126.

CHAPTER THREE

The game is up: British women's comic novels of the end of Empire PHYLLIS LASSNER

Postcolonial theory and British women colonial writers

Many postcolonial theorists have argued that despite the power wielded by the British Empire, anxiety prevailed as the political psychology of its overseers.1 Even with all the trimmings of upward mobility and authority that the heights of Empire afforded, British colonial agents suffered dislocation in conflicted cultural climates that could never become a home away from home. Their Liberty-decorated bungalows and gated tennis clubs could only camouflage the tensions created by colonialism's incompatible exclusionary and missionary policies.2 Goals and principles the British considered progressive were undermined on two fronts: by ancient and polysemous civilizations which resisted transformation into unified but alienating national entities, and by British claims to superiority, the logic of which was not supported by their inability to understand, much less appreciate the traditions of those they colonized.3 The paucity of happy colonized faces reflecting the Raj's good intentions served as a constant reminder of colonial insecurity and instability. In Homi Bhabha's terms, as constituted by 'colonial power and knowledge', the colonized other is a figure of mimicry 'that is almost the same, but not quite' (Bhabha's italics), and therefore represents 'a process of disavowal' and a 'sign of the inappropriate'.4 The effect of this conflicted 'resemblance and menace' is that the mimicry of British manners calls the imperial self into doubt, and whether intended as compliment or mockery, being mirrored in the manners of the inferior ensures the 'strategic failure' of 'colonial appropriation' and 'disrupts its authority'.5 Compounding this affront, as the British Empire ended, history denied the colonizers any laurels that might have made withdrawal less vainglorious. And so, as many memoirs, fictions and reports attest, leaving the Empire behind was fraught with ambivalence about cultural and social identity, sense of purpose and moral righteousness.6 As the official imperial relationship drew to a close, British women writers like Olivia Manning, who lived in Palestine and Egypt in the 1940s, and Rumer Godden, who was raised in India, translated their

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experiences and responses into fictions that dramatized women's internalized colonial anxieties.7 Such writers represent an 'imperial femininity', according to Simon Gikandi, recording 'the female subject's ambivalent interpolation by the ideologies of empire'.8 Understanding full well the colonizing import of representing the orientalized other as a menacing if spellbinding mystery, Manning and Godden satirize the consciousness that projected fears of imminent and embodied dangerous thrills from both sides of the imperial divide. At those moments when the colonial was becoming postcolonial, these writers delineate the process through which the female colonial agent is made to recognize her anachronistic and untenable position. She discovers her own otherness at a site which has already rejected any possibility that the colonial project will not contaminate itself.9 In turn, those who are labelled the colonized resist the term's oppressive designation by becoming agents of their own distinct moral visions and political fates.10 This imaginative and complex representation effects a political and historical critique through another transformation: that of genre. Both Godden and Manning reject the outcome of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, with its wistful, romanticized understanding and even acceptance of the politically fated impossibility of intimacy or even friendship between colonizer and colonized, and their reified opposition.11 Instead, Godden's 1953 novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, and Manning's 1974 novel, The Rain Forest, use satire and parody to show how the disorder and instability represented by colonized sites and peoples become catalysts for resistance and insurrection against the Empire's civilizing and romanticizing impulses.12 Through multifarious tragic-comic colonial encounters and events, these novels argue against writing the fiction of imperial history 'as a romantic . . . compensation for its tragic acts and consequences'.13 These fictions show how the lingering effects of colonialism can be understood by reflecting back on the deferred pace that characterized the protracted denouement of the Empire. In representing that longeur as a defining moment instead of an anti-climax, Godden's and Manning's novels show how the intensity of feeling on both sides of the colonial divide could produce its own violence, even as the British were leaving for good and the colonized declared their independence. It may very well be that such violence could be translated into comedy precisely because the game of Empire was finally up. But as these novels show, comedy also serves the trenchant purpose of analysing the self-delusions that produced the agonies of Britons coming to terms with their ill-fated attempts to forge their identities and sense of purpose on the backs of the colonized.14

Rumer Godden's cross-cultural satire

Kingfishers Catch Fire was inspired by an incident that drove Godden out of India, which had been her home since the age of six months. The

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incident, in which a servant poisoned her, is fictionalized as an analysis of the self-deluded thinking that, even after two hundred years of rule, the British could enlist the respect and support of the colonized.15 Using archly critical voices, which in dissonant harmony mock and deflate her characters' best intentions, Godden unmasks the complex social and cultural infrastructures that seemed to make coherent sense of Britain's imperial presence in India. By the end of her colonial plotting, these bases of knowledge produce not wistful understanding, but the destructive expression of fierce mutual desire that cannot be explained as romantic. Evoking an anachronistic British presence at the moment of Indian Independence, Godden portrays the young widow of a colonial officer who decides to stay in India and embark on her own adventure of selfdiscovery and independence. With two children in tow, Sophie believes it is possible to prove her self-sufficiency by integrating Western habits into what she construes as the natural ecology of Kashmir; she will learn the crafts by which its various peoples subsist off the land's scant bounty. Her destabilizing passage through this experience positions her in what Judy Little has described as 'the liminal stage . . . a borderline area or condition', in which individuals 'have neither their old selves and old positions in society nor their new ones'.16 Certainly Sophie's quest places her 'betwixt and between .. . socially and psychologically'.17 The comedy in Kingfishers Catch Fire derives from the correspondence between liminality and the 'patterns of quest comedy', but in Godden's rendering, the very instability of liminality leads to violent consequences.18 Violence breaks out as Sophie reaps the consequences of ignoring how her presence subtends the fragile rapprochement between the communities that comprise Kashmiri society. In her exploitation of their economic interdependence, Sophie believes she is creating a harmonious social order. But its distortions only mirror her own vexed role in the social politics of both romance plotting and colonial agendas at the end of Empire. This microcosmic debunking of the missionary spirit of British colonialism is shaped as a comedy of misguided manners.19 Sophie's renovation of Dhilkusha, her rented cottage in the Himalayan foothills, to pristine simplicity, takes on an imperious outlook. She has used local resources in the service of self-interest while claiming to bring progress to those below. Even as the poisoned love potion concocted by a desperate servant impairs Sophie's already blurred vision, and her enclave disintegrates into violent resistance, she allows herself to be seduced by claiming a new understanding of 'those people'.20 While Sophie is made to develop a sense of responsibility for her intervention in the fate of the Kashmiris, a multivocal narrative also clarifies why neither Sophie nor her colonial compatriots are willing to relinquish their fantasied relation to India: the subcontinent's 'beauty in people and things' is a kind of love potion in itself, an elixir whose life-enhancing qualities make the Britons believe they can be even better colonizers.21 The comedy that exposes this fantasy as a poisonous self-delusion

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derives much of its effect from what Bakhtin has theorized as a discourse of tension, which is made up of dialogized voices competing with one another from different perspectives. In turn, this tension is translated into comedy through the technique of parody, which can 'expose to destroy' the expressed point of view of another through implied mockery.22 In terms of dramatizing the external power struggles between colonized and colonizer and their internalized tensions, Judy Little's analysis of women's comic writing exposes a subversive element in dialogic discourse, by showing how the language of power can be deployed to mock that of control: When these writers humor the sentence, they make it unsay, or partly unsay, what it seems to say. In so doing, these women expose the ambivalent structures of language and its implied worldview. Power is revealed as a linguistic posture . . . while gender categories unravel in the linguistic stripping.23

In Kingfishers Catch Fire, the gender categories established by literary romance conventions and by colonial relations 'unravel' through a tense and mocking dialogic discourse. As power is invested in the imperial project, in the resistance of the colonized subject and in the female colonist, internalized tensions explode in the exposure of their ambivalent, indeed love-hate, relations with each other. Dialogic tension sets the tone of the novel in a prologue which deploys and mocks the conventions of romance writing. And while romance in so many colonial novels is now condemned as 'nostalgia for the Raj', in Kingfishers Catch Fire romance conventions are used to show how they support ambivalence about the end of Empire in serious colonial discourses.24 Resonating with the fairy-tale incantation, 'Once Upon a Time', the prologue's opening words are 'Long Afterwards', a rhetorical move which establishes the narrator's resistance to romantic fantasies about Britain's relations with India. What Godden is objecting to is not only the structural expectation in fairy tales of imminent and supernatural danger - the terror of unfathomable monstrousness - but the defence against it embedded in a ritually expected 'Happily Ever After'. For Godden the danger in fairy-tale plotting is its Manichean duality that plots innocence and evil as distinct, unrelated and inhuman forces, devoid of human responsibility. In self-conscious and critical opposition to the antihistorical safety net of fairy tales, the novel's 'Long Afterwards' marks the beginning of a narrative set in an historical time and place, which will dramatize how the evocation of timeless and mysterious, indeed magical, danger is itself dangerous. This is because when applied to a story of India, its fairytale suggestion of a timeless, mysterious Orient already condemns the subcontinent and its people as inherently threatening, but, in their resistance to Western ways of knowing, also ineffectual. In historical effect, the shadowboxing which issues from this standoff with the inscrutable other prevents a confrontation with the all-too-human responsibility for the

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tensions that will erupt in violence. As the main narrative takes a long look backwards at the interlocking behaviours and events that lead up to the prologue's English setting, it plays out the prolonged but particular time of ending Britain's presence and complicated relationship with India. The consequences of this revision can be imagined as threatening the life of the romance convention itself, especially as readers' expectations of 'Happily Ever After' are mocked and therefore resisted by the dialogue which follows 'Long Afterwards'. Sophie and Toby, her would-be knight errant, defy the idea that narrative resolution means domestic harmony as they contest each other's interpretations of narrative time and thus draw attention to its gendered politics: ' "Not so long," said Toby, "it's only two years"; "Ages afterwards," said Sophie—', echoing and therefore invoking the narrator's support.25 Toby, whose exacting sense of time marks him as prototypically pragmatic and grounded in realist conventions of male authority, is mocked as a romantic in disguise by Sophie's recognition, beginning with this prologue and by her resistance, to the end, to his 'always rescuing me'.26 To accept Toby's romantic paternalism, which tempts her 'to run into his arms like a child', means that Sophie would abandon her 'tender' vision of Kashmir's 'beauty in people and things' to his 'savagely' protective denunciation of its people as 'rabble, ugly and menacing'.27 In its offer of sanctuary, Toby's green and gentle England would also tame the wayward woman who has chosen to live 'far from her own kind' and so, in effect, it harbours her greatest fear.28 English sanctuary denies her autonomy from England's vision of her. Unlike the predetermined resolution of romance, Sophie's odyssey of self-determination is suspended throughout the novel as a risk. As we shall see, no matter how we interpret the prologue's domestic scene, it is destabilized by the end of the novel and, in combination, prologue and conclusion produce a multivalent critical awareness involving interlocking relationships between colonial and domestic politics. Sophie's 'homesick' longing for Kashmir in the prologue, and the chaos her presence later instigates, become directly implicated in the colonizing domestic order Toby offers her.29 At the end of the novel, convinced she has recognized her 'mistakes' and learned to 'respect' the Kashmiri's 'own truth', Sophie takes off with her children to start anew once again, this time in Lebanon.30 Yet even if this concluding adventure is self-mocking, especially in relation to the domesticated prologue, it does leave Toby behind and asleep, suggesting that he embodies an idea as moribund as Britain's twohundred-year conviction that it was rescuing India from itself. Godden's trope of narrative time is particularly resonant here. For despite its decline over the course of the twentieth century, just as the Raj clung to the social codes and cultural attitudes celebrated by Queen Victoria's Jubilee, so Godden's modern setting paradoxically evokes the manners and morals of an earlier age. Sophie's temptation to find stability and safety in Toby's arms recalls the nineteenth-century 'ideology of the "lady"' which, according to Gail Finney, implies not only 'the passivity

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and desire for male approval associated with ladylikeness', but is 'antithetical to the creation of humor'.31 But as Godden's reversal of Once Upon a Time suggests, modernity, in the form of a woman's struggle against stability and safety, will also 'necessitate . . . [the] aggressiveness, satire, and ridicule, not niceness' that defines comedy.32 Sophie's aggressive quest for self-determination becomes the target of satire not because the novel judges her escape from a prescribed dependency as ridiculous, but because she thinks she's shedding the 'ideology of the "lady"' without noticing that it's attached to her position high above the Kashmiri villagers. The assumption of individuation and autonomy on which Sophie's self-determination is based still makes her the memsahib, obscuring those others on whom her quest depends for support and who are exploited without regard to their own subjectivity. Because the novel assumes that the social and cognitive spheres of colonial authority are self-enclosed and cannot critique Sophie's responses, Godden represents wisdom, as so often in her fiction, in a child.33 Of Sophie's two children - Moo, a small boy, and 8-year-old Teresa - it is the girl who activates dialogic tension with her mother. While Sophie chooses the 'helter-skelter' of India instead of 'forsak[ing] her life and end[ing] in Toby's Finstead', Teresa shapes her fate by raising insoucient questions and commenting archly on her mother's plans.34 'We shan't be poor whites/ she [Sophie] announced to Teresa. 'We shall be peasants.' The thought that they were not peasants did come into Sophie's mind, but she pushed it down. 'How shall we be peasants?' asked Teresa fearfully.35

While there is always humour, as Judy Little reminds us, in 'the inversion of the usual authority so that clowns mock kings'36 or children mock their elders and betters, the use of mockery also exposes the rhetorical structures of authority. Moreover, mockery only works as humour if its technique of parody captures the precise diction and tone of the powerful. Teresa's question is funny because inverting Sophie's definitive declaration into a question exposes the absurdity of their being either 'poor whites' or 'peasants' when, unlike the peasants of Kashmir, they have the option to return to genteel comfort. Teresa's question points out that not only can't they become peasants, but even to try performs a farce that will further mock the power invested in their political ability to choose roles. That such a choice is supported by their colonizing position is also linked by Teresa's question to another source of Sophie's power. It is as though Sophie's self-centred search for a new kind of woman's authority has blinded her to the power invested in her by her maternal role: one which the child must resist to locate her own sense of self. With the narrator's guidance, which supports the child's wisdom, the reader is invited to share the rebellious satire in Teresa's anxious question about the unforseen relationship between her mother's quest for independence

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and the condition of otherness. In its narrative pattern, Teresa's responses serve as an epistemological strategy. It deromanticizes the exotic mystery of otherness by identifying it as the construction of a colonizing project. What assuage the reader's anxieties, if not Teresa's, are the hints that selfdetermination for self and other is inconceivable so long as to 'Sophie [India's] strangeness was romance'.37 While the narrator's support of Teresa's suspicious questions guides the reader, the plot leaves the child to fend for herself. The radical isolation to which she is subjected is not merely the function of motherchild alienation, however, but of the political psychology of colonial relations. Just as Sophie cannot tolerate the child's challenge because it asserts an authority that reverses their roles, so she clings to her maternal imperative in relation to the Kashmiris; she constructs them as children who can't possibly know what's best for themselves. This maternalism is exposed as part of Sophie's self-delusion, in aligning her with those she accuses of colonial manipulation - the missionaries, who, for 'all their love and zeal. .. wanted to bend' the people they worked for.38 The comic irony of Sophie's anticolonial critique boomerangs when, instead of colonizing either Teresa or the Kashmiris, Sophie's maternal discourse becomes the identifiable enemy against which the unknowable other can wage a definitive rebellion. The Kashmiris mock Sophie's intentions to improve their lot by refusing to assimilate to her 'horrified' view of them and by connecting her vision to Toby's: 'They were mystified as to why she should worry' about their 'dirty habits'; 'This altruism made them uneasy.'39 Sophie's 'determinfation]' to teach the Kashmiris the ideology of selfless and mutual help implies a form of coercion that also recalls Toby's rescuing mission in the seductive power of its 'strange protective tenderness'.40 But just as Teresa's question undermines the governing power of Sophie's self-righteous rhetoric, so the Kashmiris find 'something corrupting in Sophie's new ideas': 'But - if everyone helps themselves, who will need all this help?' they ask of her.41 Parody as cultural critique

The interpretive effect of this question aligns Teresa with the Kashmiris and creates 'two texts within one: the parody itself and the parodied or target text: both present within the new text in a dialogical relationship'.42 While the 'target text' is Sophie's wilful naivete, the novel takes the risk that the instrument of parody may deflate itself. The developmental appropriateness of Teresa's naivete, that which marks her and her questions as cute, might also target the Kashmiris as cute natives, branding them as backward. However, Godden's depiction of the Kashmiris (whose sense of difference and blossoming anger resist the colonizer) parodies Sophie's assumption that she can know them and hence enfold them into her English domestic order, just as Toby would embrace her. Parallel to

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this parodic relationship, Teresa, like the Kashmiris, will struggle to free herself from the strings attached to maternal self-sacrifice; rather than affirm the conservative self-replication of maternal ideology and follow her mother's lessons, she destabilizes it by showing the absurdity of a woman searching for her own autonomy and oppressing another's subjectivity.43 Teresa chafes against Sophie's maternal pedagogy by noting, through a series of mocking questions, that her mother's choice of primer, The Wise Teacher, is too 'full of ideas'; teaching 'arithmetic in a new way, by clapping and hopping' drives the student-daughter to ask, 'Can't we learn it the old way by writing it in sums?'44 By mocking Sophie's authoritative voice, Teresa's old-fashioned preference exposes Sophie's progressivism as an oppressive form of control that in its reflection of colonial relations, is, in the novel's historical context, an anachronism. Supported by the intervention of the post-colonial moment, Teresa's nostalgia creates a critical space in which her own subjectivity can thrive. In contrast to Teresa's method, the servants learn to mimic Sophie's methods as a way of earning her approval and absorbing her power. Despite their differences, however, as child and servants appropriate maternal colonial power, they also use 'the one voice to subvert the other, [and] such parodic dialogizing functions as an emancipatory strategy'.45 This opposition of Teresa and the servants creates a different kind of risk for the novel's critique of colonialism in the way it addresses two questions central to postcolonial theory: 'can the subaltern speak?', or what kind of agency is possible in situations of extreme social inequality?46 The novel dramatizes this risk by mocking the Englishwoman's assumption that it is possible for her and the villagers to get to know and understand each other.47 Within the historical-political context of its 1953 publication, the success of this satire is based on the trust that, because the colonial discourse supporting Sophie's assumption is already discredited, she is an appropriate satiric target - no harm done now that the Empire is over. In turn, however, this trust suggests a critical perspective on the postcolonial question which not only assumes but demands integrity and authenticity for the speaking colonized subject. But nowhere in the postcolonial question is there to be found its cognate: integrity and authenticity for the speaking colonizing subject. If the cognate were present, it would then beg the question of how readers should respond to the possibility that the colonizing postcolonial subject is being caricatured, and in effect is a one-dimensional construction that in its essentialism mirrors that which is so disturbing when the subject is the colonized. The novel shapes our response through its conflicted relationship between Sophie and her Kashmiri servants. Sophie's conflation of a Victorian-sounding 'Servant troubles!' belies an indigenous, multicultural tension reflecting Kashmir's rule by a Hindu rajah over a largely Muslim population, a polity complicated by the internalized vision and presence of colonial power even after its departure.48 Nabir Dar, Dhilkusha's long

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time Muslim caretaker, and Sultan Sheikh, Sophie's Hindu servant, are not merely individual competitors for her affirmation, but scions of 'two chief village families whose 'bitter rivalry' formed the 'etiquette' of the political structure of the village long before a British presence.49 Despite its ubiquitous power, however, for Sophie, the rivalry is 'for so pitifully little . . . some of it was almost funny', that is, until the political balance is upset by Sophie's failure to recognize how situating herself as arbiter of the well-being of the village poisons it instead.50 Blaming Nabir for the cycle of petty crimes her arrogance has inspired leads to humiliating and driving him away, the effect of which shows the debilitating consequences of colonial ambivalence about its indirect rule. Failing to trust the local ethical and political ecology, which she had claimed to understand and even assimilate, Sophie creates a vulnerability the village had previously withstood. Without the presence of Nabir's meliorating effect, his rival Sultan is left with no mediator between his ambitions and Sophie's. Appropriating her illusory power and knowledge, Sultan sabotages her desire to make These people . . . my people', and in so doing, highlights the novel's mockery of Sophie, implying, in effect, the absurdity of colonial maternalism authenticating the integrity of the colonized.51 In his efforts to gain her sympathy, Sultan effects a parody of her 'alchemy'.52 That is, with the desperate logic of a colonized subject, he catalyses the dubious science of Sophie's herbal workshop and concocts a love potion out of a mix of her English recipe and his impoverished substitution of ground glass for the required pearls. In its mockery of the expropriating power of English knowledge and imperial trading practices, the potion turns out to be poisoned not just with Sultan's rage for affirmation. It is also poisoned by Sophie's attempt to impose British empirical rationality and the imperial order of its economic exploitation of the complicated commerce of village healing practices. The horrific and comic effect generated by this alternative medicine coalesces as the critical guide to the novel's anti-colonial politics. Sultan's love potion incites mood swings and erotic longing in Sophie, but the only sexual intimacy that results demonstrates how the power of her colonial maternalism feminizes the postcolonial manservant. Both Nabir, who is constructed along the lines of the stereotypical manly Muslim, and Sultan, as the effeminate Hindu, are rendered ineffectually passive-aggressive agents by Sophie's rule.53 And yet it is from within this frame of colonizing reference that these men assert their most effective threat and speak for themselves in a subversive discourse of their own. As the shock of their insurrection opens Sophie's eyes, she is forced to see how her power has turned them into a parodic reflection of herself and that she 'had turned into some sort of monster', in effect, as though she had poisoned herself.54 At the end of the novel, the indigenous beauty of Kashmir answers the postcolonial question by violating the postcolonizer's greatest fear. As Kashmir pronounces its irrevocable separateness

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and wholeness from Sophie's peripheral vision of it, the only authentic healing the postcolonial Englishwoman can represent is to leave.55 Olivia Manning's satire of imperial adventure

Olivia Manning's 1974 novel, The Rain Forest, depicts a very late departure of the British from an imaginary island colony off the coast of east Africa. Recalling, if not invoking E. M. Forster as the iconic British anti-colonial novelist, Manning's protagonists are the Fosters, an English couple who experience the emotional costs of their own irreconcilable relationship as they participate in the social and political dissolution of the British colonial service. The political underpinnings and consequences of these damaged relationships are woven into an intricate tapestry of tensions among the various communities inhabiting the island. Al-Bustan, once a key site of the Arab slave trade, now festers from political rivalries as the remaining Arab community, descendants of the African slaves, and formerly indentured Indians chafe against each other as well as the British who, in turn, are forced to realize that they are as alienated from their subjects as they are from modern Britain. Like Godden, Manning uses the tension created by cross-cultural dialogue to provide satiric glosses on the fate of the Empire and its constituents. Instead of focusing on individual character development, however, The Rain Forest depicts the foreclosed development of those who have come to Al-Bustan to find themselves as well as of those communities stunted by a sustained history of being colonized.56 Each individual and community offers a critically mocking commentary on the others' real, remembered and mythic pasts, as well as on the irreconcilable relationship to the colonial present and their ambitions for an independent future. The island's cyclical history of conquest and exploitation is so interwoven that it questions any definition and distinctiveness of indigenous, colonizing and settler peoples. Caught in this interweave are not only its longstanding Arab, Indian and African communities, but its shifting tide of colonial administrators, its South African, English and oil state speculators, and its drugged drop-outs from the West. The dynamic vibrancy that this mixture might represent is questioned, however, by Al-Bustan's 'mixed breeds' who 'suffer the abject humility of belonging to no tribe or race', yet who 'manage the plantations and [are] the government's most loyal supporters'.57 Instead of representing political heterogeneity or dynamism, this genetically multicultural profile has mutated into a political and economic standoff monitored impotently by a British colonial administration. These tensions are both complicated and sorted out in Manning's satire of each community's political ambitions as the imperatives of each are shown to be self-deluded and self-cancelling. Instead of representing viable, self-determining and progressive alternatives to British imperialism, none of these communities bodes well for any improvement over

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past or present oppressors. Taking no sides or prisoners, the novel assigns political responsibility for its ensuing violence to each community, and in so doing, destabilizes prevailing models of analysis that constitute colonizer and colonized as oppositional. Manning, who travelled and lived in Central Europe, the Balkans, and in Palestine and Egypt during the Second World War and afterwards, showed her keen powers of using satire to analyse social politics in the Balkan and Levant trilogies. Her work illustrates Gail Finney's 'ironic conclusion: for women to be humorous in a way that achieved large-scale recognition, they had to become involved with serious things'.58 Where Godden disguises her comedy through the perspective of the wise child who seeks the power of political knowledge, Manning's comedy derives from the perspective of adults' sustained ignorance. In turn, this ignorance serves as a defence against their complicity with the power of dominant political knowledge. Her protagonists, 'lost children', are in fact an English couple whose marriage had 'begun in love', but 'was breaking up in rivalry and discontent'.59 Like the inner workings of the colonial project, and like the contested relations it encourages, the tension between Hugh and Kristy Foster reflects an organic disorder that may be irreversible and insoluble. In its narrative cycle of bitterly disappointed hopefulness, this tension mocks the self-perceptions of both the colonized and latter-day colonial settlers, who are all portrayed as 'displaced persons' in an inconsequential colony of a latter-day and disintegrating Empire.60 For Hugh, Al-Bustan, which can mean a personal garden refuge in Arabic, offers 'sanctuary', but in a world where 'corruption was everywhere', it also provides a last chance to accommodate himself to success.61 Kristy is a writer whose candid observations won her cache in London but pariah status among the colonial wives, whose 'refrigeration of the will' represents a society that 'without service conventions . . . wouldn't know how to behave'.62 The Daisy, the cramped gilt and red embossed pension of lowerlevel British functionaries, mocks the exclusive design of a colonial enclave, especially as its strict enforcement of social hierarchies only highlights its clientele's hollow mimicry of authority and power. However ceremoniously they guard their imperial protocols, the group is lorded over by a Cockney proprietor and Akbar, her 'henchman', a 'pure-bred Nubian, directly descended from the blacks pictured in Queen Hatshepsu's tomb. On Al-Bustan, where blood is so mixed, he has the authority of pure breeding.'63 The novel underscores its mockery of both cultural supremacy and natural order by constructing the island as constantly shivering in its political and geological instability. Its persistent 'small earthquakes' reflect 'why, in this unreliable world, the English held to their conventions as their only certainties'.64 In her narration of the powerless and graceless end of Empire, Manning provides a mocking answer to Simon Gikandi's question: 'Why does the English nation, which derives its imperial authority from a certain claim to the universality of its values, nevertheless thrive on narratives that celebrate its exclusiveness?'63

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If the colonial settlement is represented as childish in its fierce and deluded attention to rules of engagement, the novel also satirizes the selfrighteous imperial perception of its subject peoples as children who have no capacity to understand the superior rules of Western logic and decorum. In another self-mocking setting in another community, the only shop in Al-Bustan's Medina with a 'western-style' plate glass window but no display, Kristy meets a disparate group of Muslim and Christian Arab young men, deeply engaged in unpacking the hidden agendas of imperial politics.66 In their ironic juxtaposition to each other and to the structures of colonialism, they also express passion for the kind of commercial development that represents the disastrous ecological consequences of colonialism. The object of their desire is anything 'high rise', an intended affront to the British policy of keeping them 'close to the ground' and therefore 'primitive'.67 This symbol of economic power and cultural prestige is not only a pun on the meaning of uprising as rebellion, but a parody of phallic power. In effect, the comic doubling exposes Manning's mockery of Western ideas about progress in the young men's mimicry of Western ideas about progress.68 Even with the most symmetrical satiric tapestry, this appropriation of a tacky Western construction could easily be seen as mocking the Arabs themselves. We see this happening, for example, in Evelyn Waugh's 1932 novel, Black Mischief, where even its cut-throat mockery of the British and French legations and the self-serving sympathy of British adventurer Basil Seal cannot ameliorate the viciously gross representation of its African island's Blacks. The rhetorical effect of Waugh's satire, 'rooted in rituals designed to reaffirm the continuity and stability of nature and/or society', is 'marked by a "deeply conservative ability to absorb and defuse emotions that threaten" . . . its reinscription of fixed, traditional gender roles and hierarchies of power'.69 Manning, by contrast, subverts colonial values by clarifying her critical stance through the analytical empathy of a discontented Englishwoman. Isolating her quest for regeneration from both her husband and the colonial enclave enables Kristy's observations to begin, like Sophie, with her 'liminal' position, where their 'annulled identity . . . expresses sometimes their freedom from the usual norms of behaviour':70 Their [the Arabs'] excitement, Kristy thought, was childish, yet they were not children. Their plans were daydreams but what else had they on this small island, stagnating, they felt, under British rule.'71 The critical corrective of this statement invites the reader to share the process of Kristy's understanding and to use it as a guide by which to reject the absolute certainty of the bureaucratic stereotyping of the colonial office. In contrast to its exclusionary policies and practices, Kristy ventures into building a critical community that includes the intervention of Dr Gopal, an Indian Hindu antique dealer (whose name recalls Forster's Dr Godpole). Speaking from a continuously shifting marginal position in the history of colonial relations, Gopal analyses the imperial policy that claims to be about the 'self-rule' of subject peoples, but precludes it by infantiliz-

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ing them: The British want power for the Africans? They say: "The Arabs are dead, the Africans not yet born." The British, who put down slavery, see the Africans as their children and so they have a pro-African policy/72 The novel's satire of colonial paternalism takes a bitter turn when it attacks the colonial regard of itself as a vigorous and vital progenitor of progressive civilization. After eleven years of marital decay, but 'roused' by their first night in the colonial enclave, the Fosters have brutal and angry sex, and as a result, Kristy becomes pregnant.73 Instead of relishing her fertility as a sign of new possibility, 'She felt resentful, believing that the foetus inside her was drawing the life from her.'74 The enervating signs and symptoms of Kristy's pregnancy ironically awaken her to the relationship between women's biological determination and their condition as colonial agents. Inspired by her own sense of depletion, she is at first 'enchanted' but then dismayed by a mother bird's 'assiduous devotion to the greedy beaks above', an instinct which, she realizes, has developed so that 'However you dress it up, we are tricked.'75 The narrative symbiosis here between biological and colonial drives for generation and continuity highlights the reliance of both on the same foundational principles. Like the traditional beliefs that perpetuate women's care-giving imperatives, colonial survival leads not only to exploitation but, in its relentless need for self-justification in a climate of contestation, colonialism depends on a rhetoric of maternal selflessness. The biological language of maternal instinct camouflages the self-sacrificing subjugation of both the fertile woman and the colonized subject by dressing them both up as indispensable. In Manning's construction of this project as a 'trick', the nature of the colonial mission of selflessness turns out to be selfeliminating. And so it is no surprise when Kristy miscarries her unborn child in a place that embodies the dead end of Empire. All of the novel's social, cultural and political hierarchies and divisions are shown to be equally self-perpetuating and self-defeating. As individual character development is enfolded into questioning the objectifying meanings of colonized and colonizer, the novel exposes a history of continuous destabilization, where claims for an authentic indigenous people who belong to the land and to whom the land belongs are also questioned. As Lorna Sage notes in her review of the novel, 'No one belongs: the Arabs came as traders, the Africans as slaves, the Indians as shopkeepers'.76 Each community, as though constructing indigenous legitimacy, exploits and demonizes the others, asserting an exclusivity that blinds it to the others' competing self-interested plans for dominance. That the only authenticity may lie in these rivalries is suggested by the island's topographical split. Towering twin peaks separate the populated side of Al-Bustan from the 'primeval' wilderness beyond, referred to as 'a place of ill-omen', as it was originally intended to frighten runaway slaves but is still felt to be a place of unknowable and unconquerable danger.77 Like the novel's depiction of the colonial project in relation to local conflicts, the peaks are parodic, self-cancelling images of phallic domina-

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tion. They recall E. M. Forster's 'abruptly, insanely' rising rocks of the Marabar Hills, but only to mock their suggestion of a 'violent male principle'.78 When Manning's peaks aren't disappearing into 'mist', they are overwhelmed by their own doubleness, suggesting an all-too-powerful maternal nurture - phallic breasts.79 The geological equivalent of the omnipresent past, with an aweinspiring presence that is all too easily reified as myth, the peaks cast shadows on both civilization and wilderness, as well as on independent plans for the future and narratives of origin and freedom. As a formidable deterrence to exploration, they also ensure that locating and identifying the idea and nature of the indigenous may be dangerous. To cross over to the other side, as did runaway slaves, could not ensure that they would discover either who they were or freedom - whether from their most recent oppression or from being imprisoned by and in fear of themselves and the outside world: 'Having escaped one set of tyrants, they would at once fit themselves out with another'.80 It is as though in their pact with each other, nature and culture have each been given the role of devil, and so the island's menacing topography can only mirror the selfdestructiveness of all who would construct a colonial landscape. This interpretation is offered by Simon Hobhouse, a doctor who opts out of treating colonial disorders but who is besotted with the rain forest's mysterious if dangerous order. As though his diagnosis foretells the island's fate, the novel climaxes with an explosion by Arab insurrectionists that destroys the government headquarters and most of its British officers. Hobhouse rescues Hugh from these colonial aftershocks but then subjects him to their mirror image in the rain forest. Their trek ends in disaster and ambiguity when the doctor succumbs to nature's deadly defence - an insect bite - and Hugh must find his own way back to the equally threatening anti-colonial offence. The end of the novel merges its satiric strands to show the folly of elevating the imperial adventure to science and anti-imperial violence to political romance. Imperialism and the rage for exploration are satirized as conjoined self-destructive efforts to impose British empiricism and political pragmatism on a system of island cultures that defies extant taxonomies of natural order and civilization and cultural and racial identity. From the beginning of British occupation through to its end, the definitions of moral and scientific principle and law that form its political infrastructure fail to make sense or order out of the complicated political history and living circumstances of Al-Bustan's people. In its own tensely dialogic constructions of competing island communities, Al-Bustan defies the Union Jack that is the hallmark of the British as an island of incontestable intellectual and political superiority. Moreover, it defies the inscription of mythic heroism in narratives of violent resistance and rebellion, as the disorder inherent in insurrectionist bloodletting betrays another kind of dead end.

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Conclusion

If Godden's paeon to E. M. Forster's ending finds ominous humour in colonial dissonance, the ending of The Rain Forest locates hope in the menacing comedy of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.8* Manning's conclusion is clearly inspired by Waugh's, where the Englishman is trapped by a white man deranged by the illusion that he represents a civilizing mission. Irrevocably estranged from his wife, and mourning the death of his young son, Tony Last is lost, with no hope of rescue, in a rain forest, reading Dickens aloud to a mad scientist. With his mad scientistguide dead, Hugh Foster must find his way out of the rain forest and discover if, in the wake of Kristy's miscarriage and the end of Empire, there is an alternative narrative. In leaving their resolutions open to question and completion, but handicapped by cyclical waves of colonizing impulses, Godden and Manning rely on comedy not only to relieve the bleak possibility that even alternative narratives may be so afflicted, but as a regenerative force in itself. The self-mocking strategies of their colonial comedies place critical pressure on any sense of narrative inevitability and predisposition for the return of repressed imperialism in either domestic or political modernity. It is thus no accident that the postcolonial setting of Kingfishers Catch Fire is compromised but questioned by the relationship between the novel's representation of domestic colonization in the prologue and its gesture towards a liberatory ending, and that Manning's fictive Empire hangs on, even without a life-support system, until 1974, when in reality, East Africa had been celebrating its independence from Britain for eleven years. For these writers, if the transition to independence is possible, then, like the positions of their female protagonists, it too must be seen as liminal. Not only 'betwixt and between', these women are irresistibly torn between desiring the protective security of an order that becomes paradoxically liberatory, by supplying the terms and limits of knowledge and movement, and the urge to discover one's own limits and dangers. By extension, both novels suggest that the discursive opposition between colonizer and colonized is its own form of repression in denying the complicated and often collaborative relationship between colonial subjects. The danger in this repression is expressed in the plots that can only take place in a liminal space. Here, as Manning shows, Hugh may be set free from the imperial adventure but he will run headlong into the possibility that the newly liberated may, in their heady moment of power, repress their own shifting history of oppression and assume the identity of their oppressors. In this sense, the 'mimic man' also takes on new resonances. Just as Sultan and Sophie in Kingfishers Catch Fire almost lose themselves in their efforts to mimic the other, so the struggle against imperialism is fraught with the danger that the liberated will disappear into the violence that also identifies the oppressor. Even as violence may be conceived as

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the only means of liberation, as Godden and Manning show, what is ominously comic is that such mimicry will lead to a self-destructive end. Rather than imagining a self-perpetuating violence as the dead end of the burgeoning political consciousness of the colonial woman and colonized man, Godden and Manning use their devices of mimicry or doubling to create two subjects with open endings. Both novels gesture towards an alternative in the unsteady state of the colonized, and in Sophie's and Kristy's ultimately suspended positions. While it has been the postcolonial habit to criticize anti-colonial writers for either not representing or misrepresenting the colonized, Godden and Manning refuse to expropriate the fate of these subjects and instead leave them to take up their own story, to 'control their own Orient' as the colonizers depart.82 Their creative risk takes them in another direction. They invest critical political questions in female characters who as a result take responsibility not only for their own fates but for their participation in ending the Empire. Whether we read Godden's prologue as the end of Sophie's quest or the end of the novel as another beginning, whether Kristy will accept Hugh when he returns or remain isolated if he does not, the narrative insistence on these possibilities represents the hopefulness that issues from imagining that there must be alternatives to the dead ends of seemingly endless cycles of colonizing oppression and violence. Notes 1. Jenny Sharpe asserts that the anxiety of the colonizer appears as the 'threat of the dark rapist' and is a sign of 'a crisis in British authority [that] is managed through the circulation of the violated bodies of English women': Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 3, 4. Such a thesis does not, however, allow for stories of power contests that are not related to rape fantasies. 2. Ruth Roach Pierson, 'Introduction', in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 1-20. She sees 'European bourgeoisie with its gender ideology of separate spheres' and its 'cult of domesticity' as interdependent with colonialism, p. 5. 3. Kenneth Ballhatchet notes that once Indians with Western education could 'compete successfully . . . The British could no longer assert their right to power on grounds of superior knowledge or intellect: instead they turned to arguments of racial superiority.' Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 7. 4. Homi Bhabha, 'Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse', in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Staler (eds), Tensions of Empire (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998), pp. 153, 154. 5. Ibid., pp. 154, 155. Rosemary Marangoly George complicates the dynamic of mimicry in her assertion that colonizer and colonized collaborate in their shared history of colonialism; The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4. 6. See Paul Scott's novel Staying On (London, Heinemann, 1977). Simon Gikandi notes that 'the value' that is 'nullified' with 'the collapse of the empire' is the racism inherent in the imperial history that constitutes English identity; Maps of Englishness (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 70. While the term 'postcolonial' has spawned a growth industry of narratives and cultural criticism about empire coming home and writing back, little attention is paid to colonials who didn't necessarily choose to

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become postcolonial, and especially those in the unsettling space of being anti-imperial and calling a colony home. 7. In an interview with Kay Dick, Manning claimed that 'I haven't got a lot of imagination like Iris Murdoch: I write out of experience. I have no fantasy. I don't think anything I've experienced has ever been wasted.' Kay Dick, Friends and Friendship: Conversations and Reflections (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1974), p. 31. 8. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 146. 9. In her review of feminist approaches to the roles of white colonial women ('Gendering colonialism or colonising gender', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 13, no. 1/2 (1990), pp. 105-15), Jane Haggis calls for studying the 'net of interaction' between white women and those 'of other social groups' in order 'to restore conflict, ambiguity and tragedy to the centre of historical process', pp. 114,115. Cooper and Stoler's interdisciplinary approach shows that 'the notion of the civilizing mission gave way after World War II to the notion of development, embodying in a subtler way the hierarchy that civilizing entailed', Tensions of Empire, p. 35. 10. George questions contested uses of 'colonial subject': 'Can one be subject to someone else and tied to one's own identity at the same time?', The Politics of Home, p. 25. Margaret Strobel sympathizes with 'those European women who tried to make a positive contribution in the colonies and . . . move beyond the ethnocentrism and sexism of their culture and period', European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991), p. ix. 11. Benita Parry, 'Materiality and mystification in A Passage to India', Novel, vol. 31, no. 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 174-94, argues that 'the perplexity with which [Forster's] novel reconfigures the distant, alien complex of cultures . . . signals an anxiety about the impasse of representation', p. 176. Her contrast of Forster's indirect 'aversion to empire' with even less critical 'contemporaneous' novels of 'manners' does not consider novels like Godden's, which though mild-mannered in its parody, depicts insurrection, not as a transcendent gesture, but as violently real. 12. Where Bhabha identifies 'figures of farce', and a self-reflexive 'comic turn' in subjecting colonial power to 'mimicry', Godden and Manning show colonizer and colonized mimicking each other in a 'farce' of respective self-deception and misappropriation; Bhabha, 'Of mimicry and man', p. 153. 13. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 103. 14. Gikandi raises the 'interpretive problem' of 'how to read the grand narrative of imperialism when it has lost its authority and legitimation?', Ibid., p. 32. 15. See Anne Chisholm, Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life (London, Macmillan, 1998); Jon and Rumer Godden, Two under the Indian Sun (London, Macmillan, 1966); Rumer Godden, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (New York, William Morrow, 1987); Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms (New York, William Morrow, 1989). 16. Judy Little, Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woo//, Spark, and Feminism (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 3. 17. Ibid., pp. 3, 4. 18. Ibid., p. 4. Gikandi shows a conceptual connection between women's comedy and colonial fictions: 'because of their liminality in the culture of empire . . . women writers came to read colonialism as ... a threat because it was a patriarchal affair in which women were excluded in the name of a stifling domestic ideology; it was an opportunity because it destabilized the very categories in which this ideology was formulated'; Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 121. 19. Ballhatchet notes that 'Like Eurasians, missionaries also occupied an ambiguous position on the margins of the social distance between the ruling race and the peoples of India'; Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj, p. 111. 20. Rumer Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire (Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 1994). 21. Ibid., Prologue. 22. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 364. 23. Judy Little, 'Humoring the sentence: women's dialogic comedy', in June Sochen (ed.), Women's Comic Visions (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 31.

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24. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (New York, Verso, 1992), argues that despite the popularity and 'high' female 'profile' of such 1980s films as Jewel in the Crown and Out of Africa, there 'has been little feminist cultural criticism', perhaps because it is assumed that British-made depictions of colonial society make them 'racist', p. 230. It may also be because their female characters challenge postcolonial assumptions that they are either solely victims or complicit with imperialist ideologies. 25. Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Prologue. 26. Ibid., p. 8. 27. Ibid., p. 215, Prologue, p. 225. 28. Ibid., p. 2. 29. George analyses how 'homesickness', the 'search for the location in which the self is at home is one of the primary projects of twentieth-century fiction in English'; George, The Politics of Home, p. 3. 30. Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 229. Until it became a French mandate after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, Lebanon was part of the Ottoman's province of greater Syria; as a national entity, its borders were established in 1923 by European powers at a conference in San Remo. 31. Gail Finney, 'Introduction: unity in difference?', in Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (Langhorne PA, Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 2. 32. Ibid. 33. See, for example, Breakfast with the Nikolides (Boston, Little, Brown, 1942), The Greengage Summer (London, Macmillan, 1958), The River (Boston, Little, Brown, 1946), The Peacock Spring (London, Macmillan, 1975). 34. Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire, pp. 226, 30, 226. 35. Ibid., p. 31. 36. Little, Comedy, p. 2. 37. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 31. Sophie's romantic scripting of the colonized supports Suleri's contention that 'an anxious impulse' rendered 'colonized peoples . . . interpretable within the language of the colonizer' (Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992)), but the same cannot be claimed for all colonial women writers, as Godden's satire shows, p. 7. 38. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 229. 39. Ibid., p. 83. 40. Ibid., p. 111. 41. Ibid. 42. Lizabeth Paravisini and Carlos Yorio, 'Is it or isn't it? The duality of parodic detective fiction', in Earl F. Bargainnier (ed.), Comic Crime (Bowling Green, Ohio, Popular Press, 1987), p. 182. 43. Finney, 'Introduction', p. 11. 44. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 79. 45. Finney, 'Introduction', p. 8. 46. Gayatri C. Spivak, 'Can the subaltern speak?', in Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988). Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 140. 47. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 81. 48. Ibid., pp. 75, 9. 49. Ibid., pp. 37, 72, 127. 50. Ibid., p. 72. 51. Ibid., p. 42. 52. Ibid., p. 121. 53. Mrinalini Sinha, 'Giving masculinity a history', Gender and History, vol. 11, no. 3 (November 1999), pp. 445-60, notes how 'imperialist thinking' divides 'the so-called "manly" peoples of the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Provinces [from] the

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

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"effeminate" peoples of Bengal and the more "settled" regions of British India, or between virile Muslims and effeminate Hindus', p. 447. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 208. Sophie fits most of Ware's description of 'the Foolhardy' female British character in India - 'feminist inclinations . .. part of her unwillingness to conform', finding India fascinating, and bringing 'disastrous consequences both for herself and for her racial community', p. 232. But Sophie also defies the idea that India's 'exotic mysteries . . . repel her' with her honest if self-deluded desire to understand and work with the Kashmiris, p. 232. Manning also examines the enervating effects of colonialism on the character of British colonizers in her novels School for Love (London, Heinemann, 1951), set in wartime Jerusalem, and Artist among the Missing (London, Heinemann, 1949), set in Cairo. Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest (London, Heinemann, 1974), p. 24. Finney, 'Introduction', p. 3. The Rain Forest, pp. 6, 4. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 14,17. Ibid., pp. 11, 94. Ibid., p. 139. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 50. The Rain Forest, p. 145. Ibid., pp. 148-9. Ibid. David McWhirter, 'Feminism/gender/comedy: Meredith, Woolf, and the reconfiguration of comic distance', in Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (Langhorne PA, Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 190. Little, Comedy, p. 3. The Rain Forest, p. 149. Ibid., pp. 148, 147. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., pp. 144-5. Lorna Sage, 'A nasty piece of work', London Observer (31 March 1974), p. 38. The Rain Forest, pp. 44, 50. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 137; Parry, 'Materiality and mystification', p. 179. The Rain Forest, p. 50. Ibid., p. 274. Norman Shrapnel sees The Rain Forest as 'a comedy without laughs, an elaborate practical joke ending in cries of pain'; 'Fashions of guilt and virtue', Manchester Guardian Weekly (4 May 1974), p. 21. Parry, 'Materiality and mystification', p. 185.

CHAPTER FOUR

James Morier and the oriental picaresque JAMES WATT

James Morier In 1895, three years before he became Viceroy of India, George Nathaniel Curzon contributed an introduction to the new Macmillan and Co. edition of James Morier's novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, first published in 1824. Morier's work was presented by Curzon as an enduring comedy, which depicted a likeable rogue or scoundrel - 'one part good fellow, and three parts knave' - struggling to prosper in a 'general atmosphere of cheerful rascality and fraud'.1 Curzon also made much larger claims about the continuing relevance of Hajji Baba, however, describing Morier as a 'professional satirist' who had depicted 'a Persian of the Persians', and thereby captured the essence of the country and its population.2 The demand for a reprint of Morier's novel, according to Curzon, was proof both of 'the intrinsic merit of the book as a contemporary portrait of Persian manners and life', and of 'the fidelity with which it continues to reflect the salient and unchanging characteristics of a singularly unchanging Oriental people'.3 Curzon underwrote this assessment of Hajji Baba with reference to his own experience: 'No one who has not sojourned in Persia', he wrote, 'can form any idea of the extent to which Hajji Baba is a picture of actual personages, and a record of veritable facts. It is no frolic of imaginative satire only; it is a historical document.'4 James Morier was born in Smyrna around 1780, the son of a Swiss merchant who worked as Consul for the Levant Company in Constantinople. Morier became a diplomatic envoy of the British government during his mid-twenties, and travelled extensively in the Near East. He is best known, though, for the novels that he wrote later in his life, such as Hajji Baba, Zohrab the Hostage (1832), and Ayesha, the Maid of Kars (1834). This chapter will focus primarily on Hajji Baba, along with its sequel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828), and it will examine the way that Morier employed the device of the wandering hero or picaro, already popularized in the period by Byron, as a means of surveying modern Persian society, and staging the contact between Persians and Europeans. Early nineteenth-century novels such as Thomas Hope's Anas-

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tasius, or, Memoirs of a Greek (1819), William Browne Hockley's Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo (1826), and James Bailie Fraser's The Kuzzilbash: A Tale of Khorasan (1828) also dealt with the adventures of roguish heroes in the Levant, India, or the Middle East. Morier's Hajji Baba, however, was regarded by contemporary reviewers as a particularly memorable work, affording, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, an 'easy and humorous introduction' to the 'manners and customs . . . peculiar to the Persians'.5 Throughout the nineteenth century, and beyond, indeed, numerous readers described Hajji Baba as an authoritative depiction of Persia and its people, endorsing the claim of the racial theorist Count Gobineau that it was 'le livre le meilleur qui ait ete ecrit sur le temperament d'une nation asiatique'.6 Any account of the reception of Morier's work has to recognize, of course, that the 'knowledge' provided by Hajji Baba did not simply translate into imperial mastery. Hajji Baba nonetheless proved to be a remarkably enduring novel that was repeatedly seized upon as evidence of an essential and unchanging Persian character, and privileged as a source of information about the East in general.

Representations of Persia Awareness of Persia in eighteenth-century Britain was due partly at least to the long history of European travel in the region, and the growing commercial interests of the East India Company. Persia was also known to readers as a result of works of pseudo-travel such as Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721), and of 'oriental tales' such as John Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet (1761) or Frances Sheridan's The History of Nourjahad (1767). Montesquieu's work was arguably less interested in Persia than in Louis XIV's France, however, while 'Persia' in other eighteenth-century tales or romances served largely as a congenial setting for works that dealt in terms of abstract morality and the universal human condition. In other words, works of fiction in this period that were mainly or partly set in Persia paid little attention to accuracy or detail, and resorted instead to a register of exoticism - sultans, viziers, harem wives and eunuchs familiar from the many translations of the Arabian Nights, or collections such as Petis de la Croix's Persian and Turkish Tales. Towards the end of the century a more scholarly interest in the cultures of the East began to develop in tandem with the consolidation of East India Company rule in India, as writers such as Sir William Jones sought to make Eastern languages, literature and mythology more accessible to European readers. Knowledge of Persian for example, Jones claimed in 1771, would open up to readers 'a number of admirable works . . . by historians, philosophers, and poets'.7 Jones nonetheless tended to focus primarily on ancient or early medieval history, and interest in the present condition of Persia only began to compete for attention with its renowned cultural heritage after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798.

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The growing geopolitical importance of the Near and Middle East, allied to the sharp backlash against the scholarly enthusiasm for Eastern cultures, represented most famously by James Mill's The History of British India (1817), heightened the demand for more 'realistic' coverage of the region as a whole. As far as Persia is concerned, this imperative was reflected especially in the reception of Thomas Moore's poem Lalla Rookh; an Oriental Romance (1817). After noting that 'of late years the circumstances of the times have brought us into such familiarity with the Eastern continent', the British Review's critic, for example, registered his impatience with the way that Moore's apparent absorption in romance exoticism made him oblivious to the mundane realities of the East. Where 'groves and baths and fountains, and fruits and flowers, and sexual blandishments' provide 'the only or principal bliss or ambition or business of a people', the review claimed, 'there dirt and every disgusting impurity is sure to prevail, and there man tramples upon man'.8 Although the fashion for literary exoticism survived throughout the nineteenth century, many travellers to the region aligned themselves with this increasingly influential 'anti-romance' position, and sought to return the attention of the reader to what they represented as a more prosaic actuality. As James Bailie Eraser stated in the preface to his Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan (1825), 'the extreme degree of poverty, depravity, and weakness which characterize the country, are by no means understood'.9 'The Eastern tales that delighted our youth, describing scenes of wonder, voluptuousness, and inexhaustible riches', according to Eraser, had served 'to throw over the quarter of the globe an illusion of magic and magnificence'; so compelling is this aura, he claimed, that it can 'hardly fail to envelope [the East] for ever, unless dispelled by cold and accurate realities'.10 This distinction between romance and reality, past and present, informs all of Morier's writing. Like Eraser, Morier was involved with British diplomatic missions to Persia in the early nineteenth century. Whereas Eraser served the East India Company, Morier served the Crown, travelling with the embassies of Sir Harford Jones in 1807 and Sir Gore Ouseley in 1810, which sought to negotiate a treaty that would safeguard Britain's interests in the region, and in particular the overland route to India. Morier's first two published works, accounts of the travels he undertook while serving under Jones and Ouseley, intermittently refer to the state of the negotiations between Britain and the Shah, but are dominated by a casual and digressive commentary on the people of modern Persia and their customs and manners. While an influential Company servant such as Sir John Malcolm sometimes acknowledged the curbs on despotic rule, Morier's first Journey straightforwardly dismissed the recent political history of Persia as 'little else than a catalogue of the names of tyrants and usurpers, and a succession of murders, treacheries, and scenes of misery'.11 Taking this backdrop for granted, Morier's travelogues focus much more on the character of 'the Persian' under such an arbitrary government:

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the habitual despotism which the people are born to witness, familiarises them so much to every act of violence which may be inflicted on themselves or on others, that they view all events with equal indifference, and go in and out of prison, are bastinadoed, fined, and exposed to every ignominy, with an apathy which nothing but custom and fatalism could produce.12

In comparison with contemporaries such as Malcolm, Sir William Ouseley, or Sir Robert Ker Porter, Morier had relatively little to say about the ruins of Persepolis or the poetry of Firdawsi, Hafiz and Saadi. Instead, he frequently complained of 'a state of exile' in a country that supplied 'nothing to attach the heart'.13 'I am sick of Persia & every thing belonging to it', Morier wrote to his mother in 1812, 'and I don't think I shall ever have a wish to write again about it/14 The Adventures of HajjT Baba

Morier's two Journeys had already caused offence in Persia by the time that Hajji Baba was published, to the extent that the British Foreign Secretary George Canning was apparently warned in 1822 that Morier would not be welcome back in the country.15 Despite the claim of the letter cited above, however, Morier's first work of fiction returned (if indirectly) to the same ground of his experiences as a junior diplomat in Persia, and in particular to Sir Harford Jones's mission of 1807. Following the example set by Scott's Waverley novels, Hajji Baba begins with an Introductory Epistle, from the authorial surrogate 'Peregrine Persic' to the Swedish antiquary and orientalist 'the Rev Dr Fundgruben', a figure in the mould of Scott's Dryasdust. Persic recalls the excitement he felt on being 'appointed to fill an official situation in the suite of an ambassador' bound for Persia: 'that imaginary seat of Oriental splendour! that land of poets and roses! that cradle of mankind! that uncontaminated source of Eastern manners lay before me'. From the vantage point of experience, however, Persic explains that 'perhaps no country in the world less comes up to one's expectation than Persia, whether in the beauties of nature, or the riches and magnificence of its inhabitants'.16 After accentuating the distance between the romance and reality of Persia, Morier's editorial persona goes on to recount his chance encounter with the government agent Mirza Hajji Baba, recently returned from Britain. Hajji meets Persic's demand for a representative or typical figure: 'a pure Asiatic', 'a native Oriental', willing 'to write a full and detailed history of his own life'.17 Morier's novel offers itself as the first-person narrative of Hajji Baba, albeit supplemented with several embedded tales, and divested of 'the numerous repetitions, and the tone of exaggeration and hyperbole which pervade the compositions of the Easterns'.18 Beginning with an account of his modest origins as the son of a barber, Hajji goes on to reinvent himself in a wide range of roles, assuming at different times (among many other

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guises) the identity of a scribe, a water-carrier, a tobacco-seller, a pupil of the Shah's physician, an assistant to the chief executioner, a dervish, a merchant, and (finally) a member of a diplomatic mission to Britain. Though Hajji experiences what Morier's editorial persona describes as 'the vicissitudes which are sure to attend every Persian',19 there is no change or reform in his essential character. Hajji's narrative seems so aimless and meandering to the reader, as Patrick Brantlinger has claimed, since it all but tells the same story over and over again.20 All of Hajji's actions are informed by his determination to seize upon any chance of 'advancing myself in life',21 to the extent that early in the novel - after he has been taken prisoner by a Turcoman' tribe - he even helps to lead a raid on his native city of Ispahan. During his brief spell as an executioner, Hajji claims in mitigation to be the victim of a larger system of despotism, 'an atmosphere of violence and cruelty', that overpowers the will of the individual: 'I heard of nothing but of slitting noses, cutting off ears, putting out eyes, blowing up in mortars, chopping men in two, and baking them in ovens.' Immediately after attributing his conduct to 'the example of others', however, Hajji clearly accommodates himself to 'all the importance' of his new role: ' "In short, I am somebody now", said I to myself; "formerly I was one of the beaten, now I am one of the beaters".'22 The other Persian characters who figure in Hajji's narrative are similarly preoccupied with their personal advancement, to the exclusion of any larger concerns. As Curzon put it in his 1895 introduction, Morier's work is faithful to a society in which 'a despotic sovereign is the apex of a halfcivilised community of jealous and struggling slaves', and 'where the scullion of one day may be the grandee of the next'.23 Morier's novel depicts a situation where people submit to, and cringe before, the authority of the Shah - styled throughout as 'the Centre of the Universe' or 'the King of Kings' - but compete against each other to progress within the system that he heads. The Dervish Sefer, for example, avowedly exploits human 'weakness and credulity', relying upon his 'impudence' rather than his 'learning': By impudence I have been a prophet, by impudence I have wrought miracles, by impudence I have restored the dying to health - by impudence, in short, I lead a life of great ease, and am feared and respected by those who, like you, do not know what dervishes are.24

Later in the novel the Shah's physician refers to smallpox as 'a comfortable source of revenue', and therefore attempts to counter the efforts of a 'Frank', or European, doctor to promote vaccination: 'We cannot allow him to take the bread out of our mouths.'25 The absence of any alternative set of values is underlined by the fact that Hajji's mother even tries to deny him his inheritance, after the death of his father. Islam fails to provide a moral centre, meanwhile, since so many of the characters depicted fail to understand what their religion is meant to consist of, and

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only perform 'the mummery of five washings and prayings per day'26 for reasons of expediency. Hajji is unrivalled in his mimicry of devotion, to the extent that he is recognized as the 'model of a true believer'.27 Despite this reputation, though, Hajji at one point confesses 'an ignorance so profound, that I could scarcely give an account of what were the first principles of the Mohamedan faith';28 he admits at an early stage that he does not even merit the 'Hajji' prefix, since he has not made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Other characters, such as the merchant Osman Aga, privately consume alcohol even though they 'denounced eternal perdition to those who openly indulged in it';29 like the lawyer Mollah Nadan ('knows nothing'), the self-professed 'living Koran',30 many figures in Morier's work talk about fasting and penance even though their own bodies are 'portly and well-fed'.31 Persian society is characterized in Morier's novel, then, by an allpervasive, albeit frequently comic, corruption. Even as Hajji is made to expose this corruption from the inside, however, Morier's work also tells the story of his ultimate triumph within the system. Towards the end of the novel, Hajji makes exaggerated claims about his wealth and the standing of his family, in order to win the hand of 'Shekerleb, or Sugarlips',32 the widow of a Turkish Emir: alluding to his father's trade as a barber, for example, Hajji represents him as 'a man of great power', who 'took more men with impunity by the beard, than even the chief of the Wahabi himself'.33 This deception is inevitably exposed, and Hajji loses his wife, but in attempting to gain redress he makes contact with the influential figure of the Persian ambassador in Turkey, Mirza Firouz. The ambassador is not only 'wonderfully interested' and 'much amused'34 on hearing of Hajji's adventures, but he also recognizes Hajji as 'one who has seen the world and its business',35 and decides to employ him as an agent to gain information about the intentions of 'the rival dogs',36 Britain and France, competing for influence in early nineteenth-century Persia. Hajji is rewarded by Mirza Firouz, therefore, and Morier's work in effect celebrates the status of its hero as a rogue or scoundrel - or as 'one part good fellow, and three parts knave', to recall Curzon's phrase. Importantly, though, this conclusion also enables Morier to introduce Europeans into his work, and to offer a more authoritative outside perspective on Persian society. The Introductory Epistle written by 'Peregrine Persic' initially presents the opposition between 'the nations that wear the hat and those who wear the beard' as a primarily 'amusing' contrast.37 This contrast is sometimes developed at the level of appearance, as the members of the 'English' (not British) embassy in Persia are described as being 'disagreeably obstinate in their resolution of keeping to their own mode of attire',38 and unwilling to adapt to ceremonial custom. More commonly, though, 'the boundless difference' between the Persians and the English is described in terms of 'manners and sentiments'.39 In the course of Hajji's research into the character of the different national embassies in Persia, he comes to recognize that 'a certain tribe of

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infidels called Ingliz' are 'the most unaccountable people on earth'.40 Hajji is able to compare the French with his fellow Persians, stating that Napoleon is 'one whom we need not be ashamed to class with the Persian Nadir',41 and claiming in general 'to discern many points of similitude between them and ourselves'.42 (According to the Eclectic's review of Hajji Baba, indeed, the people of Persia were 'aptly termed the Frenchmen of Asia'.)43 The English, by contrast, are all but untranslatable since, as the Shah's grand vizier explains, 'they know not what a bribe means',44 and '[t]hey pretend to be actuated by no other principle than the good of their country . .. words without meaning to us'.45 Not only are the English said to be motivated by the alien notion of serving their own country, as the grand vizier states, but they also display what Hajji refers to as an 'extreme desire to do us good against our inclination'. Recounting the initial impact of the English towards the end of his narrative, Hajji claims that they put themselves to infinite trouble, and even did not refrain from expenses to secure their ends. They felt a great deal more for us than we did for ourselves; and what they could discover in us worthy of our love, we, who did not cease to revile them as unclean infidels, and as creatures doomed to eternal fires, we were quite at a loss to discover.46

Morier's retrospect on the British involvement in Persia in the early 1800s is, of course, a highly partial one. The British government recognized the strategic importance of Persia and, after the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, sought to forge a relationship with the Qajars that would guarantee the Persian defence of British interests in the region; in the words of Edward Ingram, the British 'expected . . . to defend the Indian Empire to the last Persian'.47 Whereas the apparent French ambition 'to conquer India from the English'48 is depicted in its most naked form, the nature of the English interest in Persia is represented in far more altruistic terms. Towards the end of the work, for example, an 'infidel doctor'49 insists that the 'blessing' of smallpox vaccination be spread to Persia, regardless of the cost, while the English ambassador proposes to offer the gift of 'a certain produce of the earth', the potato, that would similarly be 'of incalculable benefit to the people of Persia'.50 Not only does Morier's novel cast the English as benign and disinterested improvers, but it also makes little mention of any specific Persian agenda or negotiating position. The Qajars actively courted both the British and the French in this period, in an attempt to secure the military support to combat Russian incursions in the Caucasus. Yet according to the Shah's grand vizier in Morier's work, 'not one individual throughout the whole empire' understands the concept of 'the good of the country', 'much less would he work for it'.51 Instead of crediting the Persians with the capacity to consider their own interests, Morier represents them shamelessly exploiting the good will of the English ambassador and his party, studying only 'how to turn them to account'.52

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Hajji Baba in England This refusal to conceive of Persia as an equal negotiating partner is just as apparent in Hajjt Baba in England. Continuing where Hajji Baba left off, Morier's sequel is based upon Hajji's account of his role in Mirza Firouz's mission to Britain; the character of Mirza Firouz is modelled on Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, who travelled to Britain in 1809, seeking to secure the ratification of the Preliminary Treaty of Tehran. Abul Hassan's own journal frequently betrays his impatience with the speed of negotiations, and what he takes to be the British reluctance to commit to an agreement: 'spending my time sight-seeing in London only increased my discontent. I urged them to make every effort to repulse the Russians . . . and to expedite my return'.53 Rather than describe Mirza Firouz as the representative of Persian interests, however, Morier's work infantilizes him as a comic figure; Hajji Baba in England reintroduces Mirza Firouz to the reader as the author of a letter complaining about Morier's previous novel, in which he had briefly figured: I am offended with you, and not without reason. What for you write Hajji Baba, sir? King very angry, sir. I swear him you never write lies; but he say, yes - write. All people very angry with you, sir. That very bad book, sir. All lies, sir. Who tell you all these lies, sir? What for you not speak to me? Very bad business, sir.54

Morier cited this letter as an encouragement to write a sequel to Hajji Baba: a further corrective satire 'by which they [the Persians] may be led to reflect upon themselves as a nation'.55 Unlike earlier works of 'pseudotravel', such as Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World (1762), or picaresque narratives such as Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Hajji Baba in England shows very little interest in cultural comparison or dialogue. As the Oriental Herald's reviewer stated, Hajji simply lacks the authority or even intelligence to provide any criticism of English society: 'he is so very unattractive a mixture of knave, fool, and coward, that we have conceived an unmingled contempt towards him; and have no desire whatever to hear anything he may have to say'; the 'habits and institutions' of England 'must have been entirely beyond the scope of his comprehension'.56 In Morier's terms, the contact between Britons and Persians yields a benefit only to the latter: Touch but their vanity, and you attack their most vulnerable part. Let them see that they can be laughed at, you will make them angry. Reflection will succeed anger; and with reflection, who knows what changes may not be effected?'57 Hajji Baba is shown to relish his new status as chief secretary to Mirza Firouz: 'if any of my readers know what we Persians are, they will readily ascertain the reasons of exultation'.58 His confidence is quickly shaken, however, as the ignorance of the Persian party is repeatedly exposed. Hajji is sceptical when told that the world is round, for example, and the

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members of the embassy are shown to have little consciousness of what is beyond the borders of their own country: 'who amongst us knew where England was? Not a soul. All that we saw of sea and sky might be the country of the infidels, for aught we knew.'59 On arrival in England, Hajji is immediately consumed by awe and wonder, marvelling at everything from his experience of travel in a horse-drawn carriage to the fact that 'every body seemed to be on an equality in this strange country'.60 Company rule in India constitutes 'a miracle in government', but as Hajji concedes, 'we were in the country of miracles', where 'not a day - no, not an hour passed without our hearing or seeing something which all the grandfathers Persia ever had, or might have, had never even seen in a dream!'61 Though Hajji sometimes complains about 'the extraordinary ignorance of the English with respect to us and our religion',62 he plays throughout the role of a naive rather than a critical traveller. If Hajji is surprised to find out that there is no slavery in Britain, or that the rule of law prevails over Persian-style despotism, his English hosts nonetheless clearly understand Hajji and his fellow Persians, and humour the members of the embassy as if they were children. Mirza Firouz is told, for example, that the British have outgrown ceremony and 'etiquette', but that 'in consideration of your being Persians, and knowing no better, we do not hesitate in giving you as much of it as you please'.63 Only towards the end of the work do any of the Persians begin to acquire a 'mature' recognition of their national inferiority, as Mirza Firouz censures Mohammed Beg for his continuing faith in astrology: 'You have read only your own books, but see, these people have read both ours and theirs!'64 Crossing Turkey on a 'jaded mule',65 en route to Persia, Hajji is unable to avoid contrasting 'our present rate and mode of travelling to the extraordinary things which we had seen in England!';66 when asked by the Shah about how 'Frangistan' ranks with Persia, Hajji carefully replies that 'there can be no comparison'.67 Reception and influence

At the close of Hajji Baba in England, Mirza Firouz and Hajji Baba are shown finally coming to terms with what 'England' has to offer Persia. Morier sometimes signalled the potential for change in Persia by blaming the government for its betrayal of the people. 'In talent and natural capacity, the Persians are equal to any nation in the world', Morier stated in the introduction to Hajji Baba in England, and 'in good feeling and honesty, and in the higher qualities of man, they would be equally so, were their education and their government favourable to their growth'.68 After referring to this passage in his review of Hajji Baba in England, Sir Walter Scott argued that Morier was primarily concerned to bring about 'the illumination of Persia', by fixing 'the attention of the leading men of the nation on the leading faults of the national character'.69 Scott, like his

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friend Sir John Malcolm, accepted that the government of Persia was despotic, but - in line with the stadial theory of the Scottish Enlightenment - attributed this to the fact that Persia remained in the kind of feudal state that most European nations had left behind. Such a claim about the backwardness of Persia could still be made to underwrite assertions of an essential Western superiority, of course, but this incorporation of Persia into the universally applicable narrative of stadial development nonetheless meant that the Persians themselves were, in theory at least, credited with the ability to consider their own interests, and govern their own country. If Morier sometimes addressed the malign role of 'government', however, many readers appealed to his works as evidence that Persians were inherently unable to transform their own circumstances, and claimed that the 'faults of the national character' identified by Scott were all but permanent. For the Quarterly Review, for example, Hajji was not only an archetypal Persian but also a figure depicted against the static and timeless backdrop of 'every day eastern life', where 'the form of society continues changeless and imperishable, amidst the revolution of ages and the ruin of empires'.70 Similarly, according to the Eclectic Review, Morier presented an accurate picture of the 'unrelieved deformity' exhibited by 'a nation of slaves', a people so degraded that even 'their best apologist' concedes them to be 'thievish, selfish, venal, and incapable of any act of spontaneous generosity'.71 Although these readers of Morier's work showed little interest in physiological classification, the concept of 'national character' that they employed was clearly continuous with emergent ideas of race. Scott claimed that Persian national character was a unitary and knowable entity in his discussion of Hajji Baba, but the other reviewers cited above went further, and implied that this 'essence' was more or less immutable or permanent.72 James Bailie Eraser, whose cynical and embittered travel writing has already been quoted, listed the 'prominent features' of 'the Persian character' as 'falsehood and treachery in all their shapes, cunning and versatility, selfishness, avarice, and cowardice'. For Eraser, this analysis of national character was clearly more authoritative than a focus on institutions or forms of government as a means of explaining the state of modern Persia: 'let the facts and anecdotes recorded by Herbert, Chardin, Hanway, and others be examined, and the records of the reigns of Nadir Shah, Aga Mohamed Khan, and their successors; and then let it be judged whether the picture be just or otherwise'.73 Along with Morier and Eraser, many other writers of fiction in the period employed this language of typification. Identified by one reviewer as 'a palpable copy of Hajji Baba', William Browne Hockley's novel Pandumng Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo (1826), for example, participated in the large-scale reaction against 'eulogizers' of Hinduism by asserting that 'the Hindoo', 'from the rajah to the ryot', is 'ungrateful, insidious, cowardly, unfaithful, and revengeful'.74 Sir Henry Bartle Frere, in his 1873 preface to a reprint of Hockley's novel, recalled his gratitude to a friend

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who had recommended it to him, along with Morier's Hajji Baba and Eraser's The Kuzzilbash, as 'the only books he could find which gave any idea of what would now be called the inner life of orientals'.75 Frere used the evidence provided by Pandurang Hart as a means of gauging how far India had come under British rule, in 'recovering from a state of debasement which would shock any educated native at the present moment'.76 Whereas Hockley's novel was only of interest to Frere because of its 'substantially correct representations of the state of things in those provinces . .. two generations ago',77 writers on Persia in the late nineteenth century apparently continued to find Morier's work of more lasting relevance. Hajji Baba remained such a useful guide to the national character, as Curzon emphasized, since Persia ('of the East, most Eastern') seemed to have changed so little.78 Persia became, in effect, a 'semicolony' towards the end of the nineteenth century, but nonetheless avoided being completely absorbed into a British or Russian imperial system; if Persia was still a piece 'on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world', in Curzon's terms, the Persians themselves were 'as yet unawakened to the summons that is beating at their doors'.79 Other writers in the 1890s, besides Curzon, returned to Morier's novel as a reliable source of information on Persia and its peoples. According to Major-General Sir Frederic Goldsmid, who supervised the construction of telegraph lines across Persia in the 1870s, Hajji Baba was too realistic to be a satire, since 'there is nothing in it with which [the Persian reader] would be dissatisfied, or in which he would detect a moral lesson'.80 First-hand experience (the 'feel') of Persia, Goldsmid claimed, only served to confirm the accuracy of Morier's work: 'the more we understand of Persia and the Persians, the more keenly do we recognize the truthfulness and humour of this conception of the national character'.81 During the First World War, Hajji Baba seems to have provided another British General, L. C. Dunsterville (Kipling's Stalky), with his main resource for assessing the 'possible hostility of Persians' to a clandestine operation against German forces in the region. Though 'the inhabitants were well armed and strongly resented our intrusion', Dunsterville claimed, 'a study of Persian character in the world-famous book of "Haji Baba of Ispahan" led one to discount the dangers of this hostility'.82 Conclusion

The evidence considered above suggests that, in Edward Said's influential terms, Hajji Baba is a prime example of an 'orientalist' text, which produces the reality that it claims simply to describe, and grants an essentialized character to a people whose voices it refuses to credit. Even if Morier's novel seems remarkably confident in its judgement of Persia, any assessment of the cultural 'work' that it performed still needs to be complicated. Readers engaged with Hajji Baba in different ways, and sometimes

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appealed to their personal experience in order to dispute the authority that Morier's work had assumed. According to Sir Harford Jones, therefore, it would be wrong 'to estimate the national character of the Persians from the adventures of that fictitious persona [Hajji Baba]', since (as Morier occasionally acknowledged) 'the greater part of [the Persians'] vices originate in the vices of their Government'.83 In a recent study of intelligence gathering in British India, C. A. Bayly has argued that what we now think of as 'orientalist stereotypes' were often a reflection of how little was known about particular Eastern societies, functioning less as 'tools of epistemological conquest' than as 'conceptual fig-leaves to conceal desperate ignorance'.84 Rather than simply offering its readers the means to 'master' Persia, therefore, it should be recognized that the evidence provided by Hajji Baba ultimately led a figure such as Dunsterville to overlook the strength of feeling against the British in Persia, and to underestimate the indigenous forces of nationalism in the region.85 Even if we cannot take for granted here the conjunction of knowledge and power, the continuing influence of Hajji Baba nonetheless remains a phenomenon to be reckoned with.86 Hajji Baba clearly contributed to, and helped to popularize a fund of received ideas about the explanatory force of national types and essences. Equally important, Hajji Baba was often elevated above other available authorities - usurping their academic capital in the process - as a source of information about Persia, and sometimes the East in general. As Curzon claimed in his 1895 introduction, Morier's novel was a 'historical document', and its 'delineation of national customs' constituted 'an invaluable contribution to sociology'; despite its status as 'imaginative satire', Morier's work was even 'more truthful' than 'the more serious volumes of statesmen, travellers, and men of affairs'.87 Notes I am very grateful to Nigel Leask and Joanna de Groot for reading the first draft of this chapter. 1. James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, introd. George Curzon (London, Macmillan and Co., 1895), pp. x-xi, xii. 2. Ibid., pp. xiii, x. 3. Ibid., p. ix. 4. Ibid., p. xiv. 5. Sir Walter Scott, 'Review of The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England and The Kuzzilbash: A Tale ofKhomsan, Quarterly Review, 1829' (pp. 354-78) in loan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 357. 6. Cited in Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, 'Orientals in picaresque: a chapter in the history of the Oriental tale in England', Cairo Studies in English 1961/62 (Cairo, 1962), p. 166. 7. Sir William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771), p. i. Persian remained the medium of official correspondence in British India until 1834. 8. Review of Lalla Rookh, The British Review, vol. 10 (1817) (pp. 30-54), pp. 31-2. Javed

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Majeed discusses the reception of Lalla Rookh, and emphasizes the anti-imperialist coordinates of Moore's poem, in Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (London, Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 93-107. 9. James Bailie Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, in the Years 1821 and 1822. Including some Account of the Countries to the north-east of Persia; with Remarks upon the National Character, Government, and Resources of that Kingdom (London, 1825), p. v. According to William Thackeray's traveller 'M. A. Titmarsh', 'The much-maligned Orient... has not been maligned near enough', Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by Way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople, and Jerusalem: Performed in the Steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company (London, 1846), p. 264. 10. Fraser, Narrative, p. 158. 11. See, for example, Sir John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia, from the Journals of a Traveller in the East, 2 vols (London, 1827), I, pp. 131-2; James Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, in the Years 1808 and 1809; in which is included, some Account of the Proceedings of His Majesty's Mission, under Sir Harford Jones, Bart. K. C. to the Court of Persia (London, 1812), p. xi. 12. Morier, Journey through Persia, p. 26. 13. James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, between the Years 1810 and 1816. With a Journal of the Voyage by the Brazils and Bombay to the Persian Gulf. Together with an Account of the Proceedings of his Majesty's Embassy under His Excellency Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart. K. L. S. (London, 1818), p. 390. 14. See Henry McKenzie Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys: James Morier, Creator of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, and His Brothers (London, British Academic Press, 1998), p. 179. 15. Ibid., p. 200. 16. James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, introd. C. W. Stewart (London, Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 5. Unspecified references are to this edition. 17. Ibid., p. 3. 18. Ibid., p. 13. 19. Ibid., p. 8. 20. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 144. 21. Hajji Baba, p. 87. 22. Ibid., p. 177. 23. Hajji Baba, introd. Curzon, p. xi. Gary Kelly offers an interesting reading of Hajji Baba as an attack on the effects of court culture and despotism in general; English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (London, Longman, 1989), pp. 214-20. 24. Hajji Baba, pp. 58-9. 25. Ibid., p. 98. 26. Ibid., p. 285. 27. Ibid., p. 260. 28. Ibid., p. 280. 29. Ibid., p. 18. 30. Ibid., p. 322. 31. Ibid., p. 321. 32. Ibid., p. 389. 33. Ibid., p. 393. 34. Ibid., p. 416. 35. Ibid., p. 419. 36. Ibid., p. 421. 37. Ibid., p. 13. 38. Ibid., p. 436. 39. Ibid., p. 437. 40. Ibid., p. 425.

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41. Ibid., p. 426. 42. Ibid., p. 433. 43. Review of The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan, Eclectic Review, vol. 21, April 1824 (pp. 341-55), p. 342. 44. Hajji Baba, p. 440. 45. Ibid., p. 441. 46. Ibid., p. 442. 47. Edward Ingram, Britain's Persian Connection 1798-1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 2. 48. Hajji Baba, p. 431. 49. Ibid., p. 443. 50. Ibid., p. 444. 51. Ibid., p. 441. 52. /bid., p. 442. 53. Abul Hassan Khan, A Persian at the Court of King George 1809-10: The Journal ofMirza Abul Hassan Khan, trans, and ed. Margaret Morris Cloake, introd. Denis Wright (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), p. 64. It is sometimes claimed that Morier based Hajji Baba, rather than Mirza Firouz, on Abul Hassan. Probably the most famous Persian to visit Britain in this period was Abu Talib Ibn Muhammad Khan Isfahani, whose Travels, sometimes critical of British society, were translated from Persian into English by Charles Stewart in 1810. 54. James Morier, The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England, 2 vols (London, 1828), I, p. xvii. Future references are to this edition. Marziah Gail has claimed that this letter was modelled on one that Morier received from the historical figure of Mirza Abul Hassan; Persia and the Victorians (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1951), p. 75. 55. Hajji Baba in England, I, p. xxii. 56. Review of The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England, Oriental Herald (1828) (pp. 451-66), p. 465. 57. Hajji Baba in England, I, p. xxii. 58. Ibid., I, p. 4. 59. Ibid., I, p. 106. 60. Ibid., I, p. 202. 61. Ibid., I, p. 268. 62. Ibid., II, p. 315. 63. Ibid., I, p. 246. 64. Ibid., II, p. 128. 65. Ibid., II, p. 330. 66. Ibid., II, p. 331. 67. Ibid., II, p. 340. 68. Ibid., 1, p. xxiii. 69. Sir Walter Scott, 'Review of Hajji Baba in England' in loan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 361. 70. Review of Hajji Baba, Quarterly Review, vol. 30, Oct. 1823 (pp. 199-216), p. 201. 71. Review of Hajji Baba, Eclectic Review, vol. 21, April 1824, p. 342. 72. My discussion of the intertwined concepts of race, culture and national character owes a great deal to Nicholas Thomas's Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994), especially chapter three: 'From past to present: colonial epochs, agents, and locations', pp. 66-104. For a brief, 'exceptionalist' account of the British character, see Morier's first journey through Persia (1812): Morier represents himself explaining to the 'First Minister' of Tabriz that British naval superiority over the French 'consisted not in the ships, but, by the blessing of God, in the men that were in them', p. 283. 73. Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, pp. 174-5. Eraser's assessment of modern Persia seems, in part at least, to have been conditioned by his disillusionment with the

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75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

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JAMES WATT Persian reaction to British overtures: 'they do not appear sensible of the high importance of British influence to their most vital interests', p. 232. Review of William Browne Hockley, The Zenana; or a Nuwab's Leisure Hours, Monthly Review, April 1827 (pp. 166-72), p. 166. William Browne Hockley, Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo, 3 vols (London, 1826), I, p. xiv. Morier's contemporaries are briefly discussed in Frances Mannsaker's interesting essay, 'Elegancy and wildness: reflections of the East in the eighteenth-century imagination', in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 175-95. William Browne Hockley, Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo, introd. Sir Henry Bartle E. Frere, 2 vols (London, Henry S. King & Co., 1873), I, p. v. Ibid., I, pp. vii-viii. Ibid., I, p. vii. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), p. 12. For the 'semicolony' status of Persia, see Nikki Keddie and Mehrdad Amanat, 'Iran under the later Qajars, 1848-1922', in Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) (pp. 174-212), p. 181. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, pp. 3-4, 12. Curzon's account of a changeless Persia can be read, like Eraser's (quoted above), as a symptom of frustration at the British failure to exert a decisive influence over the region. James Morier, The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan, introd. Major-General Sir Frederic Goldsmid (London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1897), p. xx. Ibid., p. xxiii. Major-General L. C. Dunsterville, The Adventures of Dunsterforce (London, Edward Arnold, 1920), p. 13. Cited in Gail, Persia and the Victorians, p. 63. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in British India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 52. Modernizers in late nineteenth-century Persia even made use of a reworked version of Hajjt Baba, translated into Farsi. According to Peter Avery, reformists accepted Morier's novel as 'a political satire' - 'at least until it became known that it was not the invention of a compatriot but originated from what they regarded as an English author's skit on their ways'; 'Printing, the Press and literature in modern Persia', The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7 (pp. 815-69), p. 863. In the foreword to Henry McKenzie Johnston's 1998 biography of Morier, a former British Ambassador to Iran, Sir Denis Wright, endorses Curzon's verdict on Hajjl Baba's status as 'a penetrating study of Persian character and manners'; Ottoman and Persian Odysseys, p. xiii. Hajji Baba, introd. Curzon, p. xiv.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities JILL LANE

iNo hay libertad en la tierra! iVan a buscarla en el cielo! Raimundo Cabrera, Del parque a la luna

Blackface Cuba There is no liberty on earth! They search for it in the sky!' says a character from the Cuban writer Raimundo Cabrera's hit play, From the Park to the Moon.1 This biting political satire, staged for popular audiences in Cuba in 1888, suggests that during the years of struggle for independence from Spain, Cubans would be more likely to find social and civic freedom on the moon than under the heavy hand of Spanish colonial bureaucratic authority - promises for reform simply not withstanding. The play forms part of a popular, revue-style theatre genre known as the teatro bufo, which combined short comic plays, original popular music and participatory social dance. The genre's popularity coincided with the island's protracted struggle for independence from Spain in the years marked by the beginning of the first war in 1868 to the end of the last in 1898. As will be argued in this chapter, the teatro bufo provided an important social space in which to imagine and articulate the as-yet-unrealized nation of Cuba for the predominantly white and pro-independence criollo (Cuban-born) class that, over time, developed such anti-colonial and nationalist identifications.2 Put another way, the teatro bufo provided the space for a class aspiring toward dominant power to practise, again and again, their imagination of possible and desired Cuban futures. Racial impersonation proved to be an important trope within that developing imagination. The bufos not only made constant recourse to blackface in representing black or African stage characters, but the teatro

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bufo as a whole showed a persistent, near obsessive concern with the place and meaning of 'Africanness' and 'blackness' in Cuba's evolving public culture. The teatro bufo became famous for developing a range of dance and music forms which combined, appropriated and reinvented Spanish and African musical styles, rhythm, choreography and instrumentation in increasingly complex and innovative mixtures; the lively guaracha and later, the erotic danzon, were signatures of the genre. Through its wealth of original short plays, the teatro bufo similarly developed a repertoire of well-known stock 'black' characters, the comic negrito or 'little black' being by far the most prevalent. The negrito took on many forms over the years, beginning as doltish African-born slave or bozal in popular writing and performance as early as the 1840s. The figure was later reincarnated into a wide range of free urban black figures, including the negro catedrdtico or black 'professor', the black aristocrat, the black professional and the black citizen, as well as a range of black urban criminal 'street' types, such as the negro cheche, the negro de manglar, the ndnigo, and so on.3 After the first war of independence, the negrito was joined by the mulata, an equally contrived stage figure that engaged a growing fascination with miscegenation, and ultimately came to embody the special erotics of Cuban racial and cultural mixing, or mestizo.)'e. What each of these elements shared in common is a pleasurable indulgence by white actors and audiences in racial (and frequently racist) impersonation: dancing 'African' rhythms, singing ostensibly 'black' street songs, or enacting 'black' characters in blackface was, apparently, an especially pleasurable and - somehow - a specially productive experience for the predominantly white criollo audiences who patronized this theatre. However, these elements claimed to share in common something well beyond the exotic or erotic charge of cross-racial contact. Publicity, press reviews and other published remarks, along with meta-commentary in the plays themselves, repeatedly characterized the teatro bufo as a specially 'Cuban' genre, whose varied 'black' and mulatto features offered special and unique insight into 'Cuban' - not black, not African - life, customs and sensibility. Each of these elements staged an appeal to recognizably 'Cuban' forms and images, at a time when the status of 'Cuba' as a viable national or cultural entity was the source of acute civil tension and, in 1868 and again in 1895, the grounds for war. Throughout the period, the teatro bufo thus took on a special and frequently dangerous burden of producing a palpable and persuasive sense of cubania (Cubanness), usually in opposition to the 'Spanish' or 'peninsular', with frequent anti-colonial and proto-nationalist investments. In its particular use of blackface, the teatro bufo became a primary site for the imagination of cubania as a racialized national identity. The question that this genre raises is not why blackness or Africanness ultimately became an integral part of the Cuban national imagination given the demographic weight of Africans in Cuban society and the overwhelming wealth of African cultural values and social practices, it is

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no surprise at all that African culture commands a privileged place in Cuban culture. Rather, taking into account the deeply vexed political and social reality of slavery (existing until 1886), racial inequality and white racial panic throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the question is, rather, why did white Cubans, who were otherwise beneficiaries of slavery, segregation and other racial privileges, take such an active part in cultivating a sense of 'blackness' and 'Africanness' in the process of developing their own anti-colonial sentiment and national identity - an identity which, in the minds of many white patriots, did not initially include black citizens at all? Attention to why and how racial impersonation came to serve as a crucial mode for the imagination of a newly emerging national community will guide the discussion that follows. Cartographic fantasy, or bufos in Africa

In 1882, the teatro bufo's prolific author, Ignacio Saragacha, wrote a remarkable little play - arguably one of the most significant in the entire bufo repertoire - entitled Bufos en Africa (Bufos in Africa). The play is a meta-theatrical reflection on the teatro bufo itself, featuring all of the major bufo actors of the day, at that time all forming part of the company known as the 'Bufos de Salas' or the bufo company run by director/actor Miguel Salas. Miguel Mellado, Saturnino Valverde, Isabel Velazco, Carmen del Valle, Lolita and Ventura Rosello, Joaquin Robreno, along with Miguel Salas are all cast as themselves in the piece. The opening finds the company rehearsing another play, El ultimo mono (The Last Monkey) at the Teatro Albisu, one of the primary venues for bufo performance in Havana and where, indeed, the play Bufos en Africa may have premiered.4 Miguel Salas arrives late to the rehearsal with the news that a major theatre impresario in Madrid, Miguel Arderius, has invited the company to perform in the Spanish capital. This particular invitation is notable, since Arderius was the producer of an earlier Spanish company, the Bufos Madrilenos, who toured Havana in 1866, and proved to be one source of inspiration for the first Cuban bufo company, the Bufos Habaneros, back in 1868. When Saragacha imagines that Arderius would invite the Bufos de Salas back to Madrid, it is in part an anti-colonial fantasy of the colonial 'copy' meeting, challenging and surpassing its peninsular 'original'. Thus the actors set out to take their blackface act 'back' to Spain the seat of colonial power - where they will have the opportunity to demonstrate their singularity, difference, and perhaps superior talent in relation to the metropole. However, Saragacha does not allow the bufos to fulfil this anti-colonial fantasy: in Act Two of this transatlantic misadventure, the actors are instead shipwrecked on the shores of a remote and decidedly savage Africa. The teatro bufo company is thus sent 'back' to the other 'source' of

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its own blackface performance, falling captive to the very Africans whom they otherwise impersonate, mock and abuse. As it turns out, the bufos are captured in blackface, since they had been performing on deck for the ship's crew when the storm rose. While Saturnino Valverde's costume cross-dressed and blacked up as a comic black woman - seduces the Africans into thinking he is a real woman, the rest of the bufos' use of blackface only further provokes the ire of the Africans. Identifying them as Cuban, the head of the tribe (now played by Mellado) sees an opportunity for revenge: his own father was captured and now lives as a slave in Cuba. The Africans thus hold the actors responsible for the mistreatment and abuse of their fellow Africans in Cuba, both in and out of the theatre. As punishment, the avenging Africans throw all the blackface actors in a pot for that evening's dinner. What, we might ask, are these bufos doing in (and with) Africa - not only in this play, but throughout the period of anti-colonial struggle with which the bufo genre coincides? In such plays, the teatro bufo proposed and then energetically rehearsed and revised - a complex imagined geography, one which mapped the literal, cultural and social terrain between Africa, Cuba and Spain in an ongoing effort to articulate, celebrate and direct a developing sense of national belonging. Bufos en Africa illuminates a key strategy of this theatre to which I will lend particular attention here: a trope I call cartographic fantasy, in which plays make recourse to unreal, imagined geographies in order to better delineate and re-imagine a 'real' space or locale. Reference to geographic places outside Cuba enters the teatro bufo after the first war of independence, and was increasingly used as a plot scenario thereafter. Francisco Fernandez's 1879 play, La fundacion de un periodico o Los negros periodistas (The Founding of a Newspaper, or The Black Reporters), for example, responds to Fernandez's own experience of exile during the war. The comedy is set in New York, a favoured destination for Cuban exiles, but in the place of an exiled revolutionary we find a Cuban slave who has won the lottery and decides to establish a black newspaper in the northern city; the play finds its humour (and its racism) in the constant failures of the ex-slave to perform his new role as journalist 'properly'. By the 1890s, recourse to imagined travel, particularly to Africa and the African Caribbean diaspora, became a persistent plot device, represented by such plays as Cacia's Los Africanitos (The Little Africans, 1895), which focused on political corruption in the 'African' town of 'Magarabomba', Alfredo Piloto's Un Matrimonio en Haiti (A Wedding in Haiti, 1893) and Del infierno a la gloria, viaje fantdstico-comico-lirico (Fro Hell to Glory, a Fantastic-Comic-Lyric Voyage, 1897), Vincente Pardo y Suarez's Los principes del Congo (The Princes of the Congo, 1897), as well as his very popular 1896 play El Sultan de Mayan o El mono tiene rabia (The Sultan of Mayari or The Monkey has Rabies). The cartographic fantasies in these plays map and re-map the coordinates of national belonging in deceptively literal ways: as we shall

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see, the trope is fascinating not because it refers to 'actual' places, but because it devotes so much energy to marking out the ideological space which itself allows one to imagine or re-imagine 'real' places, like Africa and especially Cuba, to begin with. Central to the teatro bufo's representational economy was its practice of defining Cuba in the terms of its 'others' - both its internal others (Africans, slaves, black Cubans) and its external other (Spain as a colonizing power). Fantastic cartography takes this tendency and gives it a location, providing geographic correlatives to the social, racial and national co-ordinates of Cuban life. Edward Soja reminds us that 'representations of space in social thought cannot be understood as projections of modes of thinking hypothetically independent of socio-material conditions'.5 The engagement with geography necessitates an engagement with history: to send Cubans 'back' to Africa or Spain rewrites the historic circum-Atlantic movement of Spanish and African peoples to Cuba in the first place. Fantastic cartographies allow for new, unexpected ways of mapping the relation of these 'others' to Cuba that speak to the complex struggle for power facing white criollos in their social life. Communities, imagined and fantasized

In an important remembrance of the teatro bufo from 1946, the Cuban essayist and playwright Federico Villoch illustrates the complexity of this developing national imagination. He recalls the era of the Bufos de Salas, when he himself was an eager young patriot and aspiring playwright, as one in which 'el alma criolla se expansionaba . . . hasta lo indecible oyendo sus guarachas y sus canciones, y riendose hasta perder el aliento con sus dicharachos y chistes de sus tipos populares' (the criollo soul expanded beyond description hearing its own guarachas and its songs, and laughing until out of breath with its own word-plays and jokes from its popular characters). For the first time in social memory, he notes, Havana was home to 'un teatro lleno todas las noches de bote en bote meses y meses' (a theatre chock-full every night, month after month). For Villoch, the teatro bufo evokes deep affection precisely because it evoked a feeling of national community. He recalls: la honda emocion que estremecia al publico apenas se hacia en escena la mas ligera alusion al ideal de independencia; los estruendosos aplausos que se le tributaba apenas aparecia un tribune popular en el teatro; el regocijo que se experimentaba viendo en escena un bohio, una carreta cargada de cana. the deep emotion that shook the public at the slightest allusion on stage to the ideal of independence; the thundering applause bestowed upon popular orators at their mere appearance in the theatre; the joy one experienced seeing a bohio [a rural palm hut] on stage, or an oxcart filled with sugarcane.

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In a remarkable formulation, Villoch says that his generation remembers the teatro bufo 'con mas fijeza y carino siendo como un adelanto a cuenta de Cuba Libre. ..' (with more clarity and affection as an advance credit on Free Cuba, emphasis mine). To forget the teatro bufo 'seria olvidarse de ellos mismos' (would be tantamount to forgetting themselves).6 Here the teatro bufo's imaginative re-combination of topical jokes, fictional sugar plantations and real political figures, along with intoxicating music and dance, creates a palpable experience of national community and national identity - but one that is nonetheless decidedly virtual, not yet real, a veritable 'credit' against the Free Cuba yet to come. Villoch suggests that there is a fundamental relationship between the fantastic imaginings of this theatre and Cuba's developing 'imagined community'. Indeed, he later claims that in these critical years between the wars of independence - which saw the emergence of what Nancy Fraser would call a 'counter-public sphere'7 in Cuba, marked by increasing anti-colonial activism on legal, political and military fronts - 'los bufos hicieron tanto por el ideal cubano, como los mas elocuentes oradores y habiles politicos de aquella epoca' (the bufos did as much for the ideal of Cuba as the most eloquent orators or able politicians of the day).8 But how is it, exactly, that blackface Cubans in a pot in Africa inspire the affection and deep 'national longing' (in Timothy Brennan's phrase)9 that Villoch describes? That racist jokes interpellate Villoch into the field of the nation-in-formation? Villoch's essay suggests an implicit relation between imaginary geographies and the making of 'real' national space. Put another way, these performances illuminate the relation between a theatrical imagination and recent invocations of the social imagination, so prevalent in the aftermath of Benedict Anderson's seminal work on 'imagined communities' as the fundamental structure of national identification.10 Writing after Anderson, Arjun Appadurai finds the practices of the imagination central to the formation of any social imaginary, which he defines as 'the landscape of collective aspirations'.11 Fantastic travel away from Cuba in Bufos en Africa and similar plays evoked precisely this landscape of collective aspiration. Audiences did not so much learn the intellectual contours of patriotism, or feel an explicitly politicized need for independence, but rather, the plays, music and dance allowed them to grasp and begin to shape a fundamental desire for national belonging itself. To borrow a formulation out of context from Slavoj Zizek, fantasy's primary accomplishment goes much further than conjuring an image or a hallucinatory fulfilment of desire; 'fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates, that is, it literally "teaches us how to desire" '.12 It maps the very place and logic of the desiring imagination. Through fantastic cartographies, criollos like Villoch studiously imagined fantastic alternatives to their racially segregated and still-colonial society. Existing social geographies of nation, class and race were temporarily suspended, rearranged and replaced with fantastic alternatives: in

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the teatro bufo it might be possible for Cuban actors to be featured in the great theatres of the colonial metropole; it might be possible for 'savage' Africans to judge the moral conduct of white Cubans. Fantasy becomes a staging ground for social change, but - we should beware - it is not because the fantasies harbour an explicit social critique, as though each carried a secret, serious message for its chosen audience. These fantasies do not hide political allegories or cloak images of more desirable social futures from a colonial censor or political authority. Rather, it is precisely the indulgence in what was otherwise seen to be patently ludicrous that began to open the imagination to other possibilities. These fantasies may function as what Zizek calls an 'empty gesture': an offer 'which is meant to be rejected', a necessary, but false opportunity to choose the impossible. In this view, the avenging African is the empty gesture towards the fantasy of racial and social justice in mid-century Cuba; the system allows us to imagine the possibility that an African could judge his captors or abusers, but only so that the African's ludicrous persona can itself more forcefully re-instantiate the existing ideological rule that Africans not only do not have recourse to such justice, but that it is really not merited in the first place. To maintain what Zizek calls 'the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order', the ideological system must allow for choices 'which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rule is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system'.13 But this operation is also what makes an ideological system vulnerable. The lesson of the 'empty gesture' is that sometimes the subversive course of action is, again in Zizek's terms, not to 'disregard the explicit letter of the Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick this letter against the fantasy which sustains it'14 (emphasis original). A figure like the blackface African offers the chance to take the fantasy seriously, to find in its ludicrousness something compelling and worth retaining. In blackface comedies, what is retained is not, finally, recourse to racial justice or even an overt commitment to black Cuba; rather, what is retained is the otherwise elusive sense of 'Cubanness' that is evoked and given shape through these theatrical forms. By indulging anti-colonial fantasies too long and too often, proto-national Cubans begin to accept the symbolic empty gesture and thereby begin to upset, however subtly, the symbolic order that demanded the gesture's refusal. Here we begin to glimpse what Zizek calls the 'radical ambiguity of fantasy within an ideological space'. It maintains a false opening which actually limits the range of available social choices, at the same time that the presence of that false choice evokes the alternate social choices that have thereby been repressed. In its vivid engagement with issues of nation, race and anti-colonial sentiment, the teatro bufo thus became a prime site for the production of ideological space itself. As such, it offers a keen example of what Arjun Appadurai calls the imagination as social practice, with emphasis on the

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multiple nuances of the word 'practice'.15 As a primary site for the formation of national community and Cuban public sphere, the teatro bufo engages the dialectical relation between practice as rehearsal and practice as realization. Between the rehearsal and the realization, we find the infinitely complex process whereby the social is imagined and becomes real. It is the process by which, as Michael Taussig puts it, the real is 'really made up'.16 This intersection between rehearsal and realization also happens to be the crucial and difficult conjuncture between performance and performativity itself: between the really made up and the made up real. Illuminating just a fraction of this process, in the teatro bufo we find an imagination of Cuba that is, as it were, making its bid for the real. Along the way, the history of the teatro bufo may illuminate how notions of race and racism organize not simply the shape of national communities, but one's embodied sense of the real itself. Cubans on the moon: travestied imagination

The master of fantastic cartography was, without question, the political satirist Raimundo Cabrera, who sent his imagined Cubans not to Africa but to the moon in his 1888 play Del parque a la luna (From the Park to the Moon). The play is one of the finest in the teatro bufo repertoire, and launched Cabrera to well-deserved fame as a playwright. Del parque a la luna follows the interspatial exploits of a host of disgruntled Cubans whose unhappy life in the Cuban colony prompts them to take advantage of the latest electrical technology, and escape to the moon. Through this fanciful premise, Cabrera stages a comprehensive review of the Cuban citizenry, as each new character enters the stage and tells his or her story. In the process, the opening scenes illuminate the dire effects of colonial economic exploitation on the Cuban social body. Among the desperate citizens, we find workers, teachers and recent immigrants to the city, all driven to hunger, poverty and the streets by the economic crisis of the late 1880s. We also find Rosa, a tragic mulata at her sentimental wits' end with the racial conflict in Cuba: 'El Sol de mi patria brillante y hermoso / no ofrece a mis ansias la luz ideal' (the Sun of my shining and beautiful nation, does not shed ideal light on my anxieties)17 she sings, as part of the lyrics of 'La Cubana', her farewell serenade to the Cuba that betrayed her. We also find a progressive journalist, whose oppositional writings have inflamed the colonial authorities; despite the ostensibly free press, he finds himself with fourteen citations for his arrest thanks to the abuse of the law by colonial officials. Finally, we meet a Cuban proprietor who has lost his entire fortune to the Spanish tax collector; the diligent collector, in turn, chases him all the way to the moon and back, and charges him extra for the travel and food. As the Cuban astronauts are electrically vaporized and reconstituted moments later on the lunar landscape, in a great flourish of theatrical

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lighting effects, two men - a liberal and a conservative - watch the lunar launch. The conservative asks, '
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the moon, or blackface actors in the clutches of African cannibals certainly resonates with this sense of absurd, distorted, and indeed 'travestied' imagination. Indeed, a 'travestied social imagination' evokes something akin to what J. L. Austin describes when he speaks of 'unhappy' performatives:23 if a 'happy' performative enacts what it enunciates, then unhappy performatives are acts that attempt, but fail to create what they conjure. Hence travel to the moon ostensibly sends Cubans to a desired (noncolonial) Utopian future, where the frustrated citizens may find freedom and a better life. But this expedition to the moon is, on one level, nothing more than a reiteration of Cuba's own historic colonization. To begin, the moon is presented as an idyllic island, and a decidedly tropical one at that: it is described as 'un platanal', a banana plantation, a tropical paradise. For their part, the Cubans immediately betray their own divided loyalties and begin fighting for possession of the newly 'discovered' moon. Whatever common cause brought the Cubans to the moon is forgotten in the haste to claim ownership of the newly 'discovered' land. Carlos announces, 'he tornado posesion el primero; es nuestra, amigo' (I have taken possession first; it is ours, friend), to which Mr Floripan, the spaceship operator, objects loudly: Terdone usted, yo le digo que es nuestra, de mi nacion' (Pardon me, sir, I tell you that it is ours, of my nation).24 Carlos, presumably speaking for colonial Spain (although he later shows himself to be a liberal reformist), insists on the contrary: 'Desde este instante la luna / sera provincia espanola' (From this moment forward, the moon / shall be a province of Spain), while the infuriated Floripan shouts, 'iNo senor, no lo tolero / aunque se opongo Dios mismo!' (No sir, I will not tolerate it / even if God himself is opposed!). Carlos rehearses the same rationales used by the Spanish conquistadors centuries before to bolster his claim: Territorio abandonado / es del primer que llega' (Abandoned territory / belongs to the first to arrive),25 positioning the moon as 'abandoned' well before he has had a chance to find out if there even is an indigenous population. The ensuing melee between the men is calmed only when the progressive journalist admonishes: 'Que no suceda en la luna / lo que en las islas de Espana' (Don't let happen on the moon / what happened on the islands of Spain).26 Underscoring the degree to which this cartographic fantasy is also baldly male, libidinal fantasy, the arrival of the Cubans on the moon also replays the much-glossed scene of first contact in which Columbus meets America, so frequently represented in allegory as a languishing, nude female graciously awaiting her male conqueror. Cabrera's moon is populated by none other than an all-female tribe of beautiful moon-nymphs, led by the gorgeous and scantily clad Leonora, reclined under a moontree (which bears remarkable resemblance to a palm tree). Understandably, after centuries alone, the moon-nymphs are quite delirious at the news that there are finally real men on the moon: 'iHombres! iHombres en la luna! . . . iQue inmensa felicidad! . . . Pero, lay Dios!, que nos

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sorprenden en neglige .. . sin peinar' (Men! Men on the moon! . . . What immense happiness! . .. But, oh God, they've surprised us in our negliges, with our hair uncombed).27 This fantasy reduces natives and native culture to nothing more (but also nothing less) than a harem of beautiful women, voyeuristically caught lounging in lingerie in their open-air boudoir. As soon as the men and moon-nymphs meet, Leonora becomes a newage Malinche to her conquistador, Carlos, acting as his translator and erotic partner. In a lengthy monologue, she recounts the highlights of moon culture and history, which have transcended war and death by long ago banishing money and men, the two related causes of all social destruction on the moon. Despite the prohibition, she and the other nymphs are thoroughly seduced by the Cuban danzon, and thus cannot resist the men's presence. And, in any case, Floripan concludes that 'las damas / en la tierra o en el cielo / no pueden vivir tranquilas / sin companero' (whether on earth or in space / women cannot live peacefully / without male companionship).28 Immensely pleased with their 'discovery', the Cubans decide to settle on the moon at once. The problem with the story so far, of course, is that this fantasy is all too familiar. We have heard it all before. Or, in Zizek's terms, this does not 'teach' a different structure for our desire. While the names of the characters have changed, the fundamental narrative structure of the fantasy has not. We know in advance how this story will end: the male colonizer courts or coerces the feminized colony to conform to his needs. So even as the Cubans explicitly resist repeating on the moon the history of their own colonization in Cuba, the key terms of gender and power in this colonial fantasy have not changed at all. Only now the Cubans imagine themselves as the authors rather than subjects of the fantasy, and have cast themselves as the powerful male conqueror, rather than the feminized, violated colonized subject. While the plot proceeds with tongue firmly in cheek, it is in this respect deeply pessimistic: it tells us that what is at stake in this anti-colonial drama is not just the failing economy, unfair taxes, or unequal access to political power, but the social imagination itself. And, the play suggests, that imagination may already be colonized beyond repair: even on the moon the Cubans cannot imagine themselves outside existing relations of power and abuse to which they themselves have been subject. As Carlos says to the journalist, 'Ni en el cielo sera libre / el pensamiento' (Not even in the sky / will our thoughts be free).29 In a similar operation, the travel 'back' to Africa in Bufos en Africa ostensibly imagines an impossible place in which Africans would have the power to police their own representation in Cuba, to punish those who abuse it, and to take meaningful vengeance against those who have wronged them. But, in order to stage this fantasy, Africa itself must be presented through the very suspect terms for which the teatro bufo (and the racism of Cuban culture at large) might otherwise be faulted and punished: the Africans in this play are figured as, precisely, illiterate,

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incoherent, angry cannibals, presented by white people in comic blackface. The play thus invokes and seals the same racist tropes it ostensibly calls into question through its fantastic plot; that cartographic fantasy is thus offered up as yet another 'empty gesture' which offers the fantasy of representational power to 'Africans' even as its own terms make the fulfilment of that fantasy impossible. This, then, is the travesty of the teatro bufo's social imagination: fantastic travel to the moon or back to Africa redoubles, rather than opens, the limiting representational economy through which the teatro bufo practises alternate notions of race and colony in its imagination of Cuba's future. Performative fantasy

The very end of the play Del parque a la luna offers a different perspective on the work of cartographic fantasy, illuminating the moment at which that travestied imagination may ultimately produce what Negt and Kluge call 'authentic experience' for subaltern subjects. It is that small but decisive moment when theatrical imagination makes a break for the real, finds a fissure in colonial discourse and borrows against its desired Cuban future. Or, put another way, it is the moment when the performative aspiration of this theatre becomes, as it were, happy. After seducing Leonora with a danzon, Carlos proposes to introduce her to 'the people of Havana', all of whom, it appears, are poor examples of Havana's finest citizens. They include a greedy Chinese labourer, an anti-Cuban Yankeeeducated young man who whiles away his days roller-skating, a debt collector and, in a moment of self-referential irony, a troupe of bufo actors whom Carlos accuses of profiting at the expense of good morals. Leonora's position as a 'neutral' observer enables the play to underscore anything that is seemingly 'unnatural' or 'un-Cuban' in the scene through her surprised reactions. For example, she reviles against the Chinese labourer, insisting that he may not stay on the moon. Likewise she adores the music of the bufo actors' guaracha, but detests the bozal lyrics, which recount the exploits of a rough black street criminal. The round of introductions suddenly comes to a halt when the Cubans discover - to their horror - that no bananas will grow in the lunar ground. They decide to leave at once: a miserable, colonial Cuba with bananas is apparently better than any lunar paradise without them. The closing of the play charts travel from the moon back to the park, mirroring the plot structure that originally brought the Cubans from the park to the moon. Leonora decides to join Carlos on earth, giving him the opportunity to resume in greater detail his introduction to life in Cuba. But having returned from the moon, Carlos now presents a very different vision of what Cuba is. This introduction includes none of the images of Cuba's poverty, hunger, or urban strife that had dominated the opening of the play, and includes none of the moralizing editorials about Cuba's

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poorly behaved citizens. Instead, in the lengthy concluding sequence, he takes her to Havana's Campo de Almendares, filled with storefronts, roving orchestras and street vendors. Rather than provide a portrait of rough urban life, it illuminates a grand fiesta, a carnival-style display of Cuba's ethnic types through 'typical' songs and dances, in a festive celebration of Cuba's mestizo identity. The procession includes different Spanish immigrant groups and Chinese labourers, but specially features African nanigos and other black or African/Afrocuban groups. Each group enters in full 'typical' costume and regalia, crossing the stage singing and dancing. In the closing lines of the play, Carlos yells emotionally, over the rising din of African drumming, to Leonora: Oye esos cantos, Leonora, aqui el pueblo se divierte; no se acuerda de su suerte, iaplaude, grita, y no llora! Listen to those songs, Leonora, here the people have fun, they forget their lot; applaud, scream, and do not cry!30

Thus, the same African (and Chinese) elements that were, moments before, presented as 'problematic' elements in the Cuban social landscape, are now figured (or, better, re-mapped) as central participants in a gorgeous display of the diversity of Cuban culture. Diversity in music and performance is simultaneously a refuge from the harsh realities of social life in Cuba (a place to forget one's lot) and at the same time, the reflection of what Cuba 'truly' is - that place where 'the people' can let go and be themselves. The true fantasy in this play - that is, the fantasy that might produce 'authentic experience', the fantasy that teaches a new structure for our desire - lies here. Travel to Cuba from the moon is ostensibly a return to the real from the fantastic. But this return is just an illusion, revealing that Cuba itself is the true subject of the cartographic fantasy. This vision of a Cuba that peacefully and animatedly celebrates its racial and ethnic diversity, its mestizaje, in cross-racial unity, dancing and singing together in the streets to the beat of an African drum - this image, in 1888, is as fantastic as any trip to the moon. Nothing could be farther from the reality of racial segregation and extraordinary racist panic permeating white Cuban culture in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. If Carlos (or rather, Cabrera) invokes this image, it is not because it describes a Cuba he knows (or even one that he wishes to actually see), but because it outlines the contours of an emerging Cuba yet to come; the image provides, as Raymond Williams would say, an embryonic 'structure of feeling' for the Cubanness he lives but cannot name.31 Juxtaposing this

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image next to images of the moon only serves strategically to disguise the true work of cartographic fantasy: mestizaje is a founding myth of an emergent Cuban nationalism, and blackface itself is the primary vehicle for its embodiment. Blackface performance is the anti-colonial fantasy that teaches its subjects how to desire their own national belonging: it is this blackface lesson that Villoch has in mind when he says that to forget it would be to forget himself. Conclusion

In answer to the initial question on why blackface performance held such nationalist appeal, we might answer that in Cuba's anti-colonial era, the theatre offered an especially vital site for the elaboration of Cuban nationalist sentiment (and for its subsequent study today), because the logic of Cuban nationalism was itself structured on a theatrical model specifically, on the one offered by blackface performance. Many white, pro-independence criollos elaborated their national sentiment itself as a form of racial impersonation. Adopting an ideology of racial diversity, mestizaje, as a defining feature of 'Cuban' culture, they strategically cast their social body as mestizo even when the actual bodies making up the dominant social community were predominantly white. Here blackface performance can be seen specially to embody and articulate this nationalist trope. Yet the reverse is also true, and worth greater pause: here nationalism presents itself as a form of blackface. As an accident of history, we will never learn what happened to those blackface bufos in Africa, stewing in the pot. If precedent serves, perhaps the actors managed to assuage the angry cannibals with the seductions of a new danzon, a lyrical guaracha, or with the heat of a rumba; or perhaps the cross-dressed, blacked-up Saturnino Valverde softened them with his performance of Cuban mulata charm. But we will never know: there is no record of the usual Cuban deus ex machina that saved them. The final pages of this little play are lost; all that remains is one handwritten copy, which stops short at the moment the head of the African tribe condemns them to the pot. Yet, this is as it should be. The frozen image of those actors struggling to leave the fantastic Africa of their own invention, lost in a cartographic fantasy, using blackface as a refuge, resource and camouflage, itself provides a vivid allegory of Cuban colonial alienation throughout the period of the anti-colonial wars. At the same time it illustrates the complex workings of proto-national consciousness, as white actors use and abuse travesties of Africa and Africans in the theatre in order to practise, rehearse and realize an emergent national imaginary in the anti-colonial era.

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Notes 1. Raimundo Cabrera, Del parque a la luna, Zarzuela comico-lirica sobre asuntos cubanos en un acto y en verso (1888), in Rine Leal (ed.), Teatro bufo, siglo XIX, tomo 2 (Havana, Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975), pp. 125-83. The play was first performed at the Teatro Cervantes in Havana, Cuba, on 3 February 1888, and was first published that year in Havana by Imprenta El Retire. Throughout the essay, all translations from the Spanish are mine. 2. I use the Spanish term criollo, in reference to people born in Cuba, rather than its English equivalent, 'Creole', to underscore the specificity of the Cuban criollo experience, and temporarily set aside the Anglophone and French Caribbean associations with the term 'Creole'. 3. On the figures of the bozal and catedratico in relation to anti-colonial sentiment, see my 'Blackface nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868', Theatre Journal, vol. 50 (1998), pp. 21-38. 4. Ignacio Saragacha, Bufos en Africa (1882), handwritten manuscript at the Coleccion Cubana at the National Library in Havana, Cuba, n. p. 5. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York, Verso, 1993), p. 126. 6. Federico Villoch, 'Los Bufos de Salas', Carteles, vol. 27, no. 1 (29 September 1946), p. 23. Villoch's memory is not to be trusted entirely: from my understanding, he remembers several seasons of the teatro bufo from the early 1880s as the 'one unforgettable season of 1883'. That he nonetheless claims that the events are perfectly emblazoned in his memory only redoubles his point: what was compelling was not any one performance or theatre season but the full, propitious sense of the future that their combination evoked. 7. Nancy Fraser, 'Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy', in Bruce Robbins (ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1993), pp. 1-32. 8. Villoch, 'Los Bufos de Salas', p. 23. 9. Timothy Brennan, The national longing for form', in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 44-70. 10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London, Verso, 1991). 11. Arjun Appadurai, 'Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy', in Bruce Robbins (ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 273. 12. Slavoj 2izek, The Plague of Fantasies (London, Verso, 1997), p. 7. 13. Ibid., p. 28. 14. Ibid.,-p. 29. 15. Appadurai, 'Disjuncture and difference', p. 273. 16. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 366-70; see also 'A report to the Academy' in his Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, Routledge, 1993), pp. xiii-xix. 17. Cabrera, in Leal (ed.), Teatro bufo, p. 145. 18. Ibid., p. 149. 19. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, 'The Public Sphere and Experience: Selections', trans. Peter Labanyi, October, vol. 46 (Fall, 1988), pp. 60-82. 20. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann Educational Books, 1986), p. 17. 21. Negt and Kluge, 'Selections', pp. 76-7. 22. Ibid., p. 78. 23. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 14-15. His primary term for this condition is 'infelicitous': 'we call the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong the doctrine of Infelicities' (p. 14).

88 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

JILL LANE Cabrera, in Leal (ed.), Teatro bufo, p. 153. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 153-5. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 167. JWd., p. 139. Ibid., p. 177. Raymond Williams, 'Structures of feeling', Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 128.

CHAPTER SIX

Fairies on the veld: foreign and indigenous elements in South African children's stories ELWYN JENKINS

English-speaking South Africans and their children's literature

The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of South African children's literature in English and Afrikaans written by local authors and published in the country. Very little had been published locally until after the Anglo-Boer War ended in 1902. The English-speakers had arrived in two waves of organized immigration, in 1820 and 1848-51, and towards the end of the nineteenth century many more immigrants arrived to work in the diamond and gold mines. Until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, they still considered themselves British rather than colonials with a separate culture; but a new sense of national identity among whites came with Union, and white English-speakers proceeded to develop a kind of literature for young white readers that drew on their European heritage but was set in their own country. During the next fifty years, successive political, legislative and constitutional steps marked the increasing independence of the nation, accompanied by the growth of white political power at the expense of a disempowered black underclass. During this period the English-speakers exercised an influence that was disproportionate to their numbers. In 1910 they numbered 506,000, which doubled by 1951; but they were always largely outnumbered by Afrikaans-speaking whites, and together with them constituted a small minority of the total population. Yet they were still supremely comfortable that this was primarily their land - they controlled business and the civil service - and they opposed attempts to speed up independence from Britain, though the increasing influence of Afrikaners could be observed. The Second World Wai saw the climax of the development of the new white nation. It focused English-speakers on national pride in their armed forces, and though a faction of Afrikaners would have nothing to do with the war, many others combined with their countrymen to form the fighting forces, while blacks served only in non-combatant roles. When

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the ex-servicemen returned home, the colonial era was at an end: the cities became the melting-pot for white culture, and the National Party took power in 1948, setting course for the declaration of the independent Republic of South Africa in 1961. Of all the imaginative literature produced by English-speakers in South Africa in the period up to 1950, fantasy literature for young children provides revealing insights into the way their society experienced the tensions between metropolitan and colonial cultures. It consists of fairy and talking-animal stories, verse and plays that combine elements from other parts of the world with a South African setting, and other local elements. They feature European fairies of all sorts, as well as talking animals from both Europe and Africa, animate toys, magic ornaments and crockery, and white and black South African children. Their bipolar titles suggest the juxtaposing and superpositioning of these disparate elements: Fairy Tales from the Sunny South, The Pixies of the South, Picaninnies: South African Fairy Tales and so on. A parallel development took place in Australia, though on a much smaller scale. An analysis of the South African works provides a remarkable case study of how white colonials naturalized the oral and written literary traditions of their countries of origin. These children's fantasies are a window into the homes of ordinary white South Africans: their festivals, holidays and games, their domestic servants, and the magazines, newspapers, books, stories and rhymes shared by fathers, mothers and children. In their South African content they are close to the other reading matter and local radio content of middlebrow English South African culture. They were published by South African publishers, and many of them were reprinted from newspapers and popular magazines. Two or three enjoyed reprints and became bestsellers. The most prolific publishers in the field, Maskew Miller and Juta, were also the publishers of school readers in English and Afrikaans, ensuring that leisure reading resembled officially sanctioned school reading. Like the authors of popular adult non-fiction, the children's writers were mostly not intellectuals, but teachers, housewives and women working for charities such as the war effort and Girl Guides, while the men were often outdoor types. For such humble little books, the range of illustrators is surprisingly renowned, including names synonymous with national pride - some of them distinguished artists whose sculptures and murals adorn key public places, while others were landscape, botanical and wildlife artists and book illustrators. Unknown illustrators also imitated the work of prominent artists. This link with artists of the country's history, scenery, flora and fauna typifies the stories and is in harmony with the popular adult literature and other genres of children's literature of the period. Though mainly urban people, the English-speakers had a wistful relationship with their natural environment. They had never had the same mystical bond with

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the land that the predominantly rural Afrikaners had, but they loved reading about their country's history, particularly its colourful pioneers and quaint characters, and its wild life. A peculiar category of their nonfiction comprised wry stories of failed attempts at farming - telltale evidence of their wish to live out of town while realizing deep down that it was a pipe dream. Their fiction between the wars consisted of romance, adventure and comedy set in the countryside, and critics have labelled the poetry Veld and vlei' verse, this being a disparaging term denoting its rural concerns.1 The countryside was a place where children went on holiday to have their adventures. Verse and fiction for older children were therefore also set there, particularly on farms, while Afrikaans children's fiction of the time featured children living in small villages, or stories of hunting and wildlife adventures. Historical fiction in both languages inevitably also had a rural setting. Three other genres of English-language children's literature have a bearing on the genres of the mixed South African fairy tales and talkinganimal stories. Two of these were relatively minor. One took the form of chatty nature notes of an educational nature, which merged into fantasy when some authors anthropomorphized the animals and insects, giving them personal names and even personalities and the power of speech. Secondly, some true and semi-fictional animal biographies appeared; but, apart from the classic Jock of the Bushveld by Percy Fitzpatrick, they never reached the status of a major genre, as they did in Canada and the USA. These stories differ from talking-animal fantasies in that the animals are not endowed with powers of speech or humanlike thought. Throughout the years that South Africans were writing fairy stories, beginning at about the same time at the turn of the century, another major genre of South African fantasy was produced in parallel with them, consisting of English translations for children of the indigenous folktales of the Khoisan, African and Cape Malay (formerly enslaved) people. Almost two-thirds as many books of this kind were published as books of fairy stories, and many more were also published in Afrikaans. Considering that in the period up to 1950 the English versions totalled some fifty books, compared to hardly half-a-dozen each from Canada and Australia, and that the output has continued at an increased rate to the present, this can be seen as an extraordinary inter-cultural phenomenon. It goes some way to indicating that the imaginative relationship between white colonial and indigenous peoples in South Africa has always been different to that in the other two dominions, reflecting the fact that white colonials formed a small minority of the South African population. But the difficulty of any attempt to explain why white South Africans should have given their children such exposure to indigenous folktales is compounded when one considers that the parallel production of European-type fairy stories was much more prolific, and apparently conducted largely in ignorance of local traditional stories.

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Imported elements Early visitors to South Africa typically used metaphors drawn from their home countries in their attempts to describe and understand the new country, its physical features, its inhabitants and its flora and fauna. In the 1840s, when Mrs Harriet Ward (author of one of the first children's novels set in the country) visited a cave containing rock paintings, she summoned up an image of fairies to express her imaginative sympathy with the San artists, sarcastically referring to the opinion of other whites that they were savages: This lovely spot was more like the dwelling place of fairies than of the hideous aborigines.'2 Subsequently, colonial-born writers took over the conceit of seeing fairies in the land, and it persisted for another hundred years. In 1909 a Natal writer, Nendick Paul, opened a children's novel with a scene in which a little South African girl, driving between the towering kranses of a wild gorge, exclaims: 'Mother, it looks like Fairyland!' She was lost in thought, picturing the fairies and elves who lived in the nooks and crannies of those rocky heights.3 A similar conceit is to be found in a children's novel published in 1968, written by Victor Pohl, whose books about the veld and its creatures were widely read by children and prescribed in schools. He had this to say about the range of mountains called by the colonists the Drakensberg, meaning 'Dragon Mountain', which includes a peak called Giant's Castle: 'One forgets the giants and castles and is reminded instead of Lilliputians, fairies, gnomes and elflike creatures.'4 Anyone who knows the South African mountains will appreciate the perversity of imagining them peopled by European fairies. Yet these are the thoughts of an Afrikaner who, as a young farm boy, had been captured and held prisoner-of-war by the British during the Anglo-Boer War, and had subsequently led a rugged life out of doors. Pohl wasn't the only rugged man who fancied seeing fairies on the veld. The book of stories that launched the genre of talking-animal and talking-flower books, Fact and Fancy from the Veld: Stories for the Children, published in 1909, was written by a man who signed himself F. D. Interspersed among the mawkish stories, which end with the death of little Peter, an invalid who lies on his cot in the garden conversing with My Lady Barberton Daisy and other flowers, are anecdotes of how the author travelled by mule wagon to remote parts. He was apparently Frank Dawson, a pioneer involved in the building of railway lines. Perhaps he was too embarrassed to put his full name to his little stories. But the manly men who succeeded him in the genre showed no such reluctance, even when their life-styles contrasted incongruously with the titles of their books: Major E. G. Ridley, MC, author of Tales of the Veld Folk for the Kiddies; Cecil J. Shirley, author of Little Veld Folk, whose

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photograph at the front shows him, armless and legless, dressed in khaki and pith helmet, seated at his easel in the veld; Sir Henry Juta, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly and later Judge President of the Cape, who wrote stories with titles such as The Water Baby' and 'Cloud Babies'; Herbert Leviseur, who wrote the stories of Desert Magic 'for my daughter Shirley Ann' while a soldier in the North African desert campaign, and dedicated them To my brother officers, who used to insist on reading them before they were posted'.5 In Edwardian times the war hero whom South Africa had made famous, Robert Baden-Powell, set the tone for these writers with his passionate admiration for the whimsy of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. With the coming of the twentieth century, South Africa's wildernesses, like Barrie's Never-Never Land, were tamed, the wild animals safely penned in reserves, the savages domesticated. The fairylands that writers set in South Africa were a fantasy that replaced earlier frontier adventures, just as Baden-Powell shared Barrie's vision of Sioux braves and buffaloes harmlessly skulking in Kensington Gardens. He turned the frontier into a game for boys, and recommended to his scoutmasters that they should read about the make-believe world of childhood in Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age. Baden-Powell adopted both genres of fantasy, the fairy tale and the talking-animal story, as founding myths for sections of his youth movement: the brownies of Juliana Ewing's book The Brownies and Other Tales for the junior section of the Girl Guides, and the Mowgli stories from Kipling's Jungle Books for the Wolf Cub section of the Boy Scouts. One South African writer, Norah Perkins, set a fantasy in a real-life place on the Cape coast called The Wilderness, and peopled it with brownies like Juliana Ewing's, who sometimes even wear Brownie uniforms. This imitation, like Pohl's allusion to Gulliver's Travels and Juta's use of the title The Water Baby', indicates how much South African writers drew on overseas literary models for their fantasies. Their sources were not only European: Juta no doubt had Charles Kingsley's The WaterBabies in mind, but the proliferation of similar titles for his stories such as 'Jam Babies' and 'Wood Babies' suggests that he may well also have been aware of one of the best-known Australian children's fantasies of the time - the 'Gumnut Babies' series by May Gibbs, featuring Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Often intertextuality is established by direct reference or blatant borrowing. Characters from classic works are simply transposed to South African settings, such as Mother Carey, from The Water-Babies, who looks after the sea-fairies of the Cape Pensinsula; Wendy and Peter Pan, who appear in a new story; a rabbit (in itself not a South African species) called Cottontail after Beatrix Potter's character. Major Ridley's stories feature a spring hare who, like his English cousin in Alice in Wonderland, exclaims, 'Oh dear, oh dear!' and a turtle that weeps, while another author features a walrus. Other familiar names are a meercat (mongoose) called Rikki,

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after Kipling's Rikki-tikki-tavi of the Jungle Books; Titania and Puck (and also Merlin for good measure), in a fairy scene; and a dog called Jock, to gain mileage out of South Africa's favourite dog story, Jock of the Bushveld. While many stories simply imitate the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Harris, one author goes further and calls a character Brer Rabbit. Many other references of diverse origin are made in passing, and specific foreign stories are sometimes recounted as a story-within-a-story: Columbine, Pan, the Queen of Sheba (twice - presumably because of the African connection), the Seal Woman of Orkney, Norse stories, and The Flitting'. The Arabian Nights inspired Herbert Leviseur, who encountered the Arabic world during his sojourn in Egypt and Libya during the war. 'The Birthday Ostrich' by Enid Ablett tells how these foreign influences reach South Africa. When the Birthday Ostrich travels 'northwards to Toyland' to bring back presents for 'the Children of the Sunny South', he returns with gifts including 'picture books about the children in the great lands in the North'.6 (The author seems to have had no confidence that her own and other South African books would be chosen as gifts.) Children read the books, then fall asleep and dream about them: Billy reads a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson about 'the pleasant land of counterpane', and sees a fairy battle raging on his bed; Felicity Joan is 'spirited off by Slumbertime Elf. Even when no specific cross-reference appears, the models for most of the stories are usually obvious. Many are inspired by European fairy tales, as the range of fantasy beings indicates: fairies (often of specific kinds, such as flower fairies, snow fairies and mist fairies), gnomes, goblins, pixies, elves, sprites, imps, brownies, mermaids, ogres, giants and dragons. Traditional motifs of the northern hemisphere recur, such as 'midsummer revels' and Christmas time, when toys and Christmas trees come alive and Father Christmas visits. Poetry imitates, among others, Mother Goose nursery rhymes, William Blake and A. A. Milne. Phyllis Juby, for example, explicitly set out to write what she called South African Versions of Popular Nursery Rhymes, such as this: Wee Picaninny runs through the kraal, Here, there and everywhere south of the Vaal; Tapping at the window, beating at the wall, 'Are all the children fast asleep, or Tikolosh will call.'7 Very common are animal trickster stories which the authors derived from two sources - the American Uncle Remus stories and African folktales, which were, after all, the source of the African-American stories that Joel Harris recorded. Some stories however, which take the form of simple animal fables that teach a moral, resemble Aesop's fables rather than any local African stories. In considering the influence of European and American traditions, the complex relationship between South African children's books in English and in Afrikaans cannot be ignored. Many were translated from one

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language to the other, thus sharing the two predominant streams of the English/American tradition used as a model by English-speakers, and the Germanic tradition favoured by Afrikaners. This can be seen particularly in the earliest versions of indigenous folktales. Modern talking-animal and animate-toy books are often echoed: in addition to Beatrix Potter, favourites from England are The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A. A. Milne, Alison Uttley's 'Little Grey Rabbit' books, and Enid Blyton, while Walt Disney and the Doctor Doolittle books of Hugh Lofting continued the influence from the USA. The predilection that South African authors show for small talking animals - even a 'Mrs Mouse of Kruger Park', which is hardly one of the mammals that visitors would associate with the game reserve - indicates their loyalty to their overseas models. Sometimes the model is apparent from the illustrations, such as the pictures for The Story of the Little Moo Cow by Madeleine Masson, which the critic Jay Heale points out look like Disney's Clarabelle,8 and the distinctive art deco style of the Babar picture books by the Frenchman Jean de Brunhoff, which, by featuring an elephant, made a particular impression on several South African illustrators. Pictures of animals dressed as policemen inevitably show them looking like Enid Blyton's Mr Plod, in an English bobby's uniform rather than the local khaki outfit. Not surprisingly, illustrations imitating those of E. H. Shepard for A. A. Milne's verses accompany the copy-cat Wideawake Rhymes for Little People by Margot le Strange, which have verses such as T went to a party all dressed up / I wore my best hat too', and Washing things I like to dip my arms in deep And feel about below, For in the froth the queerest things, Hob-goblins, Pixies, Gnomes and things Go swimming to and fro.9

It is not only pixies and gnomes that are incongruously transplanted to South African settings, where they mix with local creatures and plants, but English flowers, trees and animals are also mixed up with local species and can be spotted in the illustrations. Appropriate alien terminology accompanies them, favourites being 'wood', 'woodland', 'jungle' and 'folk'. It is difficult to understand why South African writers should have fancied the word 'jungle', since there is little vegetation in the country that could be thus described. When it crops up alongside 'aasvogels' (vultures) and 'kopje', which is typically a little hill rising from the open plains of the interior, it is clearly a product of the imagination. Possibly its prevalence, especially in the popular collocation 'jungle lore', is due to the influence of Kipling. 'Folk' is typically found in the collocations 'jungle folk', Tittle folk' and 'veld folk'. The latter illustrates a feature of South African English; many words are cognate with Afrikaans words which,

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by having different meanings or connotations, give the local English words unique nuances. In this case, Veld folk', to describe small creatures, parallels the Afrikaans alliterative term 'veldvolk' in stories about talking animals. Another instance of Afrikaans influence is the use of hypocoristic language, especially the prevalence of diminutives. Though English has its share - bunny, froggy, chicky-wicks, kiddies, hidie-holes - Afrikaans is able to turn almost any noun into a diminutive by adding a suffix, and its children's literature is littered with them. Thus it is able to outdo English in producing phrases such as Trinsessies van die Veld' ('Little Princesses of the Veld'). In one of the earliest collections of indigenous folktales translated into English by a South African for children, the author reports that his narrator, an old Khokhoi man who is Afrikaans-speaking, would prefer to tell his stories in Afrikaans because 'English was not fond enough, nor had diminutives enough, for a kitchen tale as a house Kaffir loves to tell it'.10 Some English-speaking authors get around this by using Afrikaans diminutive names for characters, such as Catotjie, Jantje and Sannie, or for flowers. 'A Child of the Veld' by Ellen van der Spuy, a story intended to teach children to accept the birth of a new sibling, begins in as 'fond' a style as she can make it in English: Over the veld a voice, sweet as an Aeolian harp, softly floated in a low, low whisper . . . Why was nature so happy? I shall tell you. It was because an Angel had whispered in the skies that they were bringing to earth a little child, who would love the 'flowers and the birds and the sunshine', and always live with them.

But the story, which is specifically set in the Hottentots Holland Mountains, switches to Afrikaans when the flowers are named - all of them in diminutive form: suring blommetjies, bobbejaantjies, kalkoentjies.11 The co-existence of these different kinds of language here epitomizes the tension in the stories between European and local elements. The opening paragraph of the story quoted above illustrates how those authors who conceived of fairy and talking-animal stories as whimsical or twee, adopted what they felt to be appropriate diction, especially when their subject matter was rainbows and cottonwool land, or the painting of flowers, fertilizing of trees, and the other tasks that fairies perform. A few stories are told in an egregiously childish style, like this: So Little Moo Cow ran to the tearoom, and she was hungry and thirsty, and she did sit down and say, 'Bring me a glass of milk and a big bun.' And they did bring it to her and she did eat and eat her bun to the last crumb.12

Other writers echoed the high and archaic style of traditional fairy tales: 'And strange to say, the great winds of the veld had come to keep tryst'.13 This, incidentally, was the preferred style for many of the translations of indigenous folktales that were appearing at the same time. Another model

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for diction was the notional rural America of Uncle Remus. In general, however, the writers showed no flair for language at all, churning out their stories in mundane, even cumbersome, language. African elements

Even though most English-speaking white South Africans lived in towns and cities, identification with the countryside and its wildlife was crucial to their identity. In the developing children's fantasy literature can be seen the formalizing of certain key places and symbols of their South Africanness. Some writers were more at home with the local elements than others, but usually they were determined to set their fairies in a recognizable local setting, or give the power of speech to creatures that were peculiar to their country. The imaginative elements of the fantasies, unfettered by the social realism and scientific facts of both fiction and non-fiction, offered an opportunity to make contact with the intangible spirit of the country in a way that only the great South African writer Olive Schreiner, author of the classic novel The Story of an African Farm (1883), had done before, in her allegories Dreams (1890) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893). Her fantasies had been very popular and were possibly the inspiration for some of the twentieth-century writers. The prologue to one of Annette Joelson's books takes us as near to the physical and spiritual centre of the country as it is possible to get: In the very heart of the Cape Karoo, which again is the very heart of South Africa, where the sunshine is ever bright and warm, and skies are always blue, there lived a little girl in a very big farm-house, on a very, very big farm.14

The Karoo, consisting of the arid, semi-desert regions of the interior, had by now become the spiritual embodiment of South Africanness in both adult and children's literature. Another widely recurrent term was the Veld', which could apply to any open country and symbolized the country's unique landscape. The fantasies were unusual in South African literature in also featuring as a favourite setting the Cape Peninsula with its forests, Vleis' (lakes and wetlands) and seashore, and even its own fairies such as the Protea Pixies. An exception was the enterprising story of a little girl, one of the descendants of indentured Indian labourers who live in tropical KwaZulu-Natal, who finds a Banana Elf in a plantation. However, the 'bushveld', comprising the more fertile northern and northeastern regions, also had its mystique, which grew in significance as wild animals continued to roam there after they had been hunted out of the Karoo. At the heart of the bushveld was the Kruger National Park, established in 1926, which was becoming better known and more accessible to visitors; by the 1940s it had supplanted the Karoo in the psyche of English-speaking South Africans. Many talking-animal stories and other children's books came to be set there. Though a few stories are set in

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towns, the only urban feature to assume iconic status in the fantasies is the mine dumps of Johannesburg. Always the sun shines, bringing with it heat and drought and veld fires, so bad that Drought is actually personified as a character in a play called Breath of the Veld. In other stories, a pixie comes to the rescue and shows a little girl where to drill for water, and the Cloud Fairies bring rain. The contrast with the North is not forgotten: angels come and ask the Brown Babies if they may take some warmth to the North; Phyllis Juby's South African nursery rhyme declaims, 'Hot December brings the ringing / Of Christmas bells and native singing/15 On the farms the features that recur frequently as symbols of South Africanness are windmills, mealies (maize) and pumpkins. Naughty fairies, children who chatter in school and the Man in the Moon have to eat 'mealie pap' (porridge); titles announce the adventures of 'Betty and the Mealie Goblins' and 'The Fairies in the Mealie Patch'; and a story opens, 'Gnomes and fairies, elves and pixies and all kinds of strange, quaint creatures dwelt in Oupa's wide mealie patch.'16 Ironically, the frequent un-South African collocation of 'mealie' with 'patch' and 'plantation' suggests American models such as Brer Rabbit's brier-patch: South African English would have 'mealie field' or 'mealie lands' (borrowed from the Afrikaans mielielande). Among many stories featuring pumpkins, the animals of the Kruger National Park consume pumpkin fritters, another story has a Pumpkin Goblin, and a Prince jumps out of a Smiling Pumpkin to announce that John has broken the spell of the Wicked Witch. In actual fact, neither mealies nor pumpkins are native to South Africa. The writers were on much safer ground with the range of animals, birds, insects and wild plants that fill their stories. Fairies could have adventures with unusual creatures such as a rinkhals (venomous snake) and a scorpion, and there was a multitude of extraordinary creatures such as the secretary bird that could give a completely new flavour to talkinganimal stories. The creatures run the full gamut from the purely animal to those that are almost human. Some authors betray their urban perspective by making crass mistakes about animal species, or by padding out their limited repertoire with alien flora and fauna (such as placing a cock pheasant in the mealie lands) but generally the natural history is what gives these stories their unique flavour and charm. Those stories that feature animals only, without whimsical interaction with fairies or children, have not dated: a selection could be made that would be comparable to the South African children's stories of the turn of the twenty-first century. In addition to places, symbols and natural history, the use of indigenous languages was another potent way of suggesting South Africanness. In particular, characters were given proper names in these languages, of which the commonest form was an African or Afrikaans generic name, such as Nunku (Zulu nungu) the porcupine, a Mist Fairy called Moya (Zulu for 'wind'), and Fodder (Afrikaans padda) for a frog. Other words

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and expressions in these languages that were commonly used by Englishspeakers were incorporated in passing. This has become an entrenched feature of South African children's literature, continuing to the present. By contrast, translations of folktales for children usually have a glossary, reinforcing the more anthropological concerns of those publications. Fairly often the authors made language mistakes, especially with Afrikaans spelling. English-speaking writers educated before Afrikaans became an official language with a standardized orthography in 1925, were taught a smattering of High Dutch, and few of them could be bothered to learn to speak Afrikaans, since they kept aloof from Afrikaners. Even in the 1940s their treatment of Afrikaans spelling was cavalier. The life-style of white English-speakers, particularly children, is depicted in passing in a mundane sort of way. Two unusual books portray instead a comedy of manners of adults living on farms, with illustrations showing animals strongly resembling adult humans. They hold tennis parties and gossip: 'All their clothes come from Johannesburg, I am told.'17 A couple of characters resemble Toad of Toad Hall: 'Peter Pig glanced at himself in a puddle and arranged his speckled bow tie, before starting off in his Ford car',18 while another crashes a motorboat and has other rash adventures. Field Mouse Stories by Annette Joelson is exceptional for its satirical viewpoint: Mrs Field Mouse was a shy little thing, very much afraid of her loud-voiced, fierce-whiskered husband and always ready to agree with everything he said, which was exactly as he wanted it to be ... Oh yes, they were the happiest couple in the whole of the Great Open Veld for he was very proud to be the Voice of the Family, while she was merely a very weak and very shrill Echo.19

As for the knowledge that the average urban English-speaker had of Africans and African languages, the stories make it abundantly obvious that in many cases they knew Africans only as servants, and their languages only in a 'kitchen' pidgin form known as Fanakalo, a term which means '[Do it] like this'. Africans usually appear in the stories as 'fat, jolly' nannies and grinning domestic or farm workers with names such as July and Sixpence, or as romantically imagined country children happily playing or carrying out traditional chores. They are often shown speaking Fanakalo, but there are also cases in which the writers, perhaps under the influence of Uncle Remus, revert to the practice of expatriate adventure writers of the nineteenth century, who put in the mouths of Africans a literary version of African-American speech, with all its degrading connotations of the comic negro. A particularly grotesque feature of these colonial fantasies is the occasional linking of indigenous people with imported elements. A family of white children have a nanny called Nana, which is short for Annabelle, but after reading Peter Pan they call her Tinker Bell. 'The Magic Shoes' tells the story of a boy who lives 'far away in a sunny village in Africa . . . His skin was as black as pitch, his hair was as curly and wiggly as you

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can imagine, his eyes shone like two bright stars. He wore but scanty clothes [the illustration shows him naked], and the whole day long he played and ran about.' He meets a 'white fairy man' who sells him a pair of shoes in exchange for the goats he is minding, but the shoes pinch. 'He took the lesson very much to heart and was never, in the future, heard to ask that he should wear shoes like the great people of the towns.'20 In a couple of bizarre cases, a story is framed by putting it in the mouth of an indigenous narrator, and he or she tells of European characters. One author introduces the German trickster Eulenspiegel by saying, 'Of course, like all South African children, Klara and Jan had heard a great many strange stories about the elusive Uilspiel [a misspelling of the Afrikaans form of the name] from the native servants/21 Similarly, a children's nanny tells them a story of elves and a fairy prince and princess. These are exceptions; usually white writers have their African narrators tell stories resembling indigenous folktales. They either feature the traditional trickster called the Tokoloshe or Tikolosh, who appears as a little man (though in one illustration he is depicted as a European imp), or are aetiological stories, such as one explaining how some spiders became trap-door spiders. On the whole the variety of plots and characters borrowed from indigenous folktales is limited, showing the authors' ignorance of the traditional local tales with which their white contemporaries such as Ethel McPherson (in Native Fairy Tales of South Africa (1919) and Wonder Tales of South Africa (1941)) were filling their collections of translated stories. Some authors created instead their own imaginary African fantasy beings. For example, in one case a 'black picanniny' opens his tale: You know that the black children have their own fairy tales, and this is the one they love best: it's all about the bogey man, and as Queen Titania notices that the white children are all afraid of our favourite, the Bogey Man, so here am I come to tell you all about him.22

It turns out that this Bogey Man is a friend of Santa Claus and lives in a chimney (which is not a feature to be found in African homesteads). Growing nationalism

In the 1920s a couple of authors betrayed unease at importing overseas elements to South Africa: Are there fairies ...? A little girl from England Came to visit us today; She doesn't like this country, And hopes to go away. She thinks there are no fairies

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And no witches and no elves Because there are no foxgloves Where they may hide themselves .. . But in the great proteas, In the silver-trees and pypies, In the disas and the ixias, The gousblom and the vygies, The loveliest little fairies Flit to and fro all day. I'll show her where to find them Then I'm sure she'll want to stay.23

At the beginning of a story about the European squirrels that were introduced in Cape Town, a local animal derides them as 'foreign adventurers' and 'Uitlanders' (the name given to foreigners in the Transvaal Republic, to whom Kruger denied political rights, thus precipitating the Anglo-Boer War). However, the father squirrel instructs his children, 'You are of this land, though your mother and I were brought across the seas from another country. But you are of South Africa, bone of its bone, blood of its blood, and all feather and fur of its forests is your brother.'24 His son befriends everyone, affirming his father's injunction. The affectionate recital of the indigenous flower names and the rejection of the Uitlander label were part of the growing patriotism which peaked during the Second World War, when talking-animal books were presented as affirmations of nationalism. Titles often stipulated that the stories were for 'young South Africans'. Mrs Isie Smuts, wife of the prime minister, who was the inspiring leader of support for 'the war effort', supplied forewords stressing how 'our magnificent fauna, which is one of the greatest assets of South Africa' needs to be conserved,25 and dust-jacket notes proclaimed that the stories would 'help to make young South Africans more appreciative of the wonders of their own land'.26 The end of foreign fantasy

Satire and a cutting sense of humour marked the end of fairy stories in the 1940s, particularly with the appearance of Juliet Konig, who went on to become an important children's author, poet and broadcaster. In her early stories, fairies reached the end of their life span. One of her stories, about a Sealyham puppy and a pixie, ends, 'Phyllis never saw the Pixies because they have a rooted objection against being seen by little girls.'27 Maudlin hypocorism has no place in her stories: Only Elaine could see the fairies because she was thirteen months old. She sat in her play-pen and the father-fairy, wrapped in a pumpkin leaf which he was using as a blanket, perched on the edge and blinked the whites of his little

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eyes. 'There!' said Elaine, holding out a squashy banana for which she had no further use.28

About the same time, another author prefaced his talking-animal stories by remarking, 'I had always thought that fairy tales made the strongest appeal to children, but I discovered long ago that most children - as well as many adults - prefer jungle stories.'29 The place of foreign fairies in a multiracial and multicultural country was questioned. One author has this encounter between a white girl and an elf: 'Are you a Tokoloshe then?' she asked. 'No, I'm not. I'm an elf. You can see me because you are a white child, but only black children can see the Tokoloshe.' 'But why?' Mary asked. She was very sorry because her nanny, Selina, had told her many stories about the Tokoloshe and she wanted so much to see him. 'I don't know,' answered the elf crossly. 'But you are very lucky because if you were a grown-up you would not be able to see anything. As it is, you can see all the people of the white fairy world.'30

Konig took the fairies-in-Africa notion to its logical conclusion. The fairy that thirteen-month-old Elaine sees is African, of course, and Konig states emphatically, 'African fairies are black'.31 This was inconceivable in a country on the brink of formalized apartheid, and was never repeated. Conclusion

South African writers tried for half a century to create a genre of literature for young English-speaking children. No doubt it entertained, and even offered possibilities for amusing fantasy which indigenous folktales did not offer. The talking animals introduced children to the natural history of their country and some became popular at the time, but the foreign fairies did not stick and are forgotten today. On the other hand, children's versions of the folktales of the indigenous inhabitants of the country did not disappear along with the other fantasies, but burgeoned, some of them being still in print, and they continue to inspire original works of fiction and picture books. The authors' own emphasis on the South Africanness of their readers is what eventually lasted - the recognition in the 1940s that they were patriotically, politically and spiritually South Africans. Notes 1. M. van Wyk Smith, Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African English Literature (Cape Town, Juta, 1990), p. 42. 2. Harriet Ward, Five Years in Kaffirland, 2 vols (London, Henry Colburn, 1848), II, p. 303.

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3. Nendick Paul, A Child in the Midst: A South African Story (Pietermaritzburg, P. Davis & Sons, 1909), p. 2. 4. Victor Pohl, farewell the Little People (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1968), n. p. 5. Herbert Leviseur, Desert Magic: Stories from a Soldier in the Western Desert to His Little Daughter (Cape Town, Central News Agency, 1943), p. 3. 6. Enid Ablett, Fairy Tales from the Sunny South (Johannesburg, Voortrekkerpers, 1939), p. 17. 7. Phyllis Juby, Picaninny: South African Versions of Popular Nursery Rhymes (Cape Town, Primavera Press, n.d.), n. p. 8. Jay Heale, From the Bushveld to Biko: The Growth of South African Children's Literature in English from 1907 to 1992 Traced through 110 Notable Books (Grabouw, Bookchat, 1996), p. 15. 9. Margot le Strange, Wideawake Rhymes for Little People: Stories and Verses (Krugersdorp, National Council of Women, 1942), p. 14. 10. A. O. Vaughan, Old Hendrik's Tales (London, Longman, 1904), p. 5. 11. Ellen van der Spuy, A Book of Children's Stories (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1931), p. 8. 12. Madeleine Masson, The Story of the Little Moo Cow (Johannesburg, Simba Toys, n.d.), n.p. 13. Corinne Key, Tales of the Veld (Pretoria, Van Schaik, 1926), p. 9. 14. Annette Joelson, How the Ostrich Got His Name and Other South African Stories (Cape Town, Juta, 1926), p. 5. 15. Juby, Piccaninny, n. p. 16. G. M. Rogers, The Fairies in the Mealie-Patch (Cape Town, Juta, n.d.), p. 2. 17. Jac and Mac, Minnie Moocow and Her Friends on the Veld (Wynberg, Specialty Press of South Africa, 1932), p. 10. 18. Ibid., p. 7. 19. Annette Joelson, Field Mouse Stories (Cape Town, Juta, n.d.), p. 9. 20. Sadie Merber, Glimpses of Fairyland (Cape Town, Juta, 1930), pp. 45, 50. 21. Joelson, How the Ostrich Got His Name, p. 19. 22. Carrie Rothkugel, The Gift Book of the Fatherless Children of the SA Soldiers and Sailors (Cape Town, Argus, 1917), p. 45. 23. Mabel G. Waugh, Verses for Tiny South Africans (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1923), p. 15. 24. Dorothea Fairbridge, Skiddle (Cape Town, Maskew Miller; London, Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 5. 25. C. S. Stokes, We're Telling You (Cape Town, Sanctuary Shillings, 1943), p. 4. 26. May Henderson, The Cock-Oily Book (Durban, Knox, 1941), dust-jacket. 27. Juliet Konig, The Little Elephant and Other Stories (Cape Town, Central News Agency, 1944), p. 67. 28. Ibid., p. 92. 29. B. Northling Swemmer, Jungle Lore and Other Tales (Cape Town, Nasionale Pers, 1949), n.p. 30. Margaret Herd, Tok-Tok: Stories for Very Young S. Africans (Durban, Knox, 1943), p. 10. 31. Konig, Little Elephant, p. 92.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Magic realism: humour across cultures MARY ELLEN HARTJE

The magic realist mode Like all writers of fiction, the magic realist creates the illusion of actual experience. Unlike writers of realism or naturalism, however, the magic realist creates a world of experience that moves beyond the boundaries of time and space, guiding the reader into the realms of the supernatural. And, unlike the writers of fantasy, the magic realist incorporates various supernatural experiences into the context of a very real, natural world. Out of these contradictions evolves the oxymoron 'magic realism'. The elements of magic realism have long been present in fiction, but the identification of these elements as a particular mode in literature occurred only in the second half of the twentieth century. The term 'magic realism' was initially introduced by the German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 in order to define the style of certain German Post-Expressionist artists. Roh defined the term as 'magic insight into an artistically produced unemphatic clarified piece of "reality"'.1 The term found its way into literary criticism in 1955, when Angel Flores applied it to authors who adopted certain themes and techniques into their writing which seemed to parallel Roh's description of the same phenomenon in pictorial art.2 Magic realism's association with Latin American writers stems from Flores's original use of the term to describe a 'trend' in the fiction of Latin American novelists and short-story writers. Flores expresses the inadequacy of such traditional classifications as 'Romantic', 'Realistic', 'Naturalistic' and 'Existentialist' to describe a large portion of contemporary fiction; he proceeds to describe the work of various Spanish American contemporary writers, beginning with Jorge Luis Borges's 1935 collection, A Universal History of Infamy. This association between magic realism and Latin American writers was enhanced when Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Garcia Marquez's popularity, coupled with his extensive use of magic realism, played a major role in bringing recognition to the study of magic realism as a concept of criticism. Despite its association with Latin American writers, however, the term was inevitably examined in a more encompassing manner. Seymour Menton, in his annotated chronology of the critical term, outlined the increasing use of

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magic realism applied to American, European, Asian and African writers who share similar themes and similar stylistic devices in their writing.3 In 1984, David Young and Keith Hollaman published an anthology entitled Magical Realist Fiction, which included works representing eighteen countries and a variety of cultures - American, Latin American, South American, and Eastern and Western European.4 It is indeed appropriate that the idea of magic realism, which by its nature connotes a breaking down of barriers of time and space, should not be defined or limited by natural borders or cultural confines. In literary terms, magic realism is defined as narrative 'in which the recognizable realistic mingles with the unexpected and inexplicable'.5 Although critics have been unable to agree on specific definitive elements of magic realism, Amaryll Chanady, in a 1985 study, provides a helpful listing of the traits which are commonly associated with the term: (1) an occurrence of the supernatural, or anything that is contrary to our conventional view of reality;6 (2) a resolution of logical antinomy in the description of events and situations;7 and (3) an absence of obvious judgements about the veracity of the events and the authenticity of the world view expressed by characters in the text.8 These characteristics enable us to identify magic realism in various works, but they do not constitute an agreed definition. The term, named by an oxymoron, is characteristically dual, and that duality leads to a complexity which seems to defy ultimate definition. Humour in a cultural context

The duality inherent in magic realism also leads to humour in many magic realist works. Humour is not a criterion for the creation of magic realism; however, it does evolve as one of its more predominant characteristics. Humour and magic realism contain similar ingredients: the required duality in magic realism is an effective structure for 'incongruous' situations or points of view; for example, the amalgamation of the central dualities of the natural and supernatural can be, by logic, 'absurd'. Stephen Slemon, in his essay 'Magic realism as postcolonial discourse', explains that Tn the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place.'9 This 'battle' creates a discourse where neither of the two discursive systems manages to subordinate or contain the other.10 It is in this locked state of juxtaposed discourse that the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant humour of magic realism occurs. Often, humour is created within a cultural context, and a full appreciation of the humour requires knowledge of, or at least recognition of, the particular elements of the given cultural context. Some magic realist writers/critics, such as Alejo Carpentier, even insist upon categorizing the mode as being 'American'. Carpentier creates his own term, lo real

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maravilloso americano, to describe what he argues is a uniquely American form of magic realism.11 As Zamora and Paris explain: In Latin America, Carpentier argues, the fantastic is not to be discovered by subverting or transcending reality with abstract forms and manufactured combinations of images. Rather, the fantastic inheres in the natural and human realities of time and place, where improbable juxtapositions and marvelous mixtures exist by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography, and politics - not by manifesto.12

In fact, works reflecting the mode's characteristics evolve out of various cultures, and the humour is often derived directly from specific cultural contexts. An illustration can be found in the writing of Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, essayist, editor, diplomat and fiction writer, when he satirizes the senseless, authoritarian bureaucracy of his own country in his short story 'My Life With the Wave'. When the narrator decides to take an ocean wave home with him, his first hesitation is not concerning how to do such a deed, but whether he can get past the police and 'regulations' regarding such an act - the satire directed toward a bureaucracy whose narrow vision is preoccupied with absurd, harmless actions: 'It's true the rules say nothing in respect to the transport of waves on the railroad, but this very reserve was an indication of the severity with which our act would be judged.'13 The satire intensifies when the narrator, who has put his wave into the tank of a drinking fountain, is accused of the 'crime'. The conductor calls the Inspector, who calls the police, who calls the captain, who calls three agents who take him to jail. After a year in jail, the narrator's case is tried and he is released. Paz's comment upon the inefficient Mexican bureaucracy is clearly communicated through his satirical representation of the narrator's 'grave case'.14 Another example of 'cultural' humour in magic realist fiction can be found in the American short story 'The Enormous Radio', by John Cheever, 'a master of lyrical fiction that described the lives of affluent, middle-class Americans'.15 There is a subtle humour present in Cheever's description of Jim and Irene Westcott that demands a familiarity with American culture and its insistence upon conformity to the social norm: 'They were the parents of two young children, they had been married for nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester.' Jim Westcott was 'dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naive'.16 Cheever's satirical description is obviously more effective for the reader who can identify with American cultural norms and the need to meet superficial social requirements, which drives many Americans.

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Humour through incongruity

Fundamental to both magic realism and its culturally based humour is incongruity. Both Paz's and Cheever's stories convey a fundamental incongruity between cultural standards and common sense. However, incongruity can be - and is - conveyed in numerous contexts other than cultural ones. In the introduction to their collection of magic realist fiction, Young and Hollaman write: 'the most distinctive aspects of magic realism lie at the point where two different realities intersect, perhaps to collide, perhaps to merge. Familiar oppositions - life and death, waking and sleeping, child and adult, civilized and "savage" - are much at home in this genre, though not necessarily with their differences resolved'.17 They go on to say that the incongruity inherent in magic realism makes the reader hesitate between possibilities and, further, to 'value that hesitation'.18 Often, a part of this value is the humour provided to the reader who 'hesitates' in order to appreciate the incongruities that magic realists generate in various manners. Incongruity in magic realist fiction is always manifest in the narrative's dramatic situation. In Paz's story, a man develops a relationship with a wave; in Cheever's story, a radio emits the neighbours' conversations. Since the premise of magic realism lies in the amalgamation of the natural and the supernatural, a basic dramatic incongruity will always exist. For example, in Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's story The Nose', Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes up one morning to discover that his nose has disappeared. Eventually, he 'finds' his nose: Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks by the entrance to a house; an indescribable event had occurred in front of his eyes. A carriage had stopped at the entrance, its doors opened, a gentleman in uniform jumped out holding his head low and ran up the steps. What horror and, at the same time amazement, seized Kovalyov when he realized that it was his very own nose!19

Kovalyov's nose is wearing 'a gold-embroidered uniform, suede breeches, and a sword. Judging by his plumed hat, he held the rank of a state councilor.'20 The writer presents a view that is radically askew from the rational, but he neither censors nor shows surprise.21 The reader accepts the irrational elements within the narrative which are presented simultaneously with, and in the same manner as, the rational or natural elements. The incongruity produces humour through the lack of rational explanation. Rawdon Wilson says that in magic realism, space (which would include incongruity) is 'hybrid': The narrative voice bridges the gap between ordinary and bizarre, smoothing the discrepancies, making everything seem normal... In this hybrid space, eruptions occur normally and sudden folds crease the seemingly predictable, the illusive extratextual, surface.'22 Magic realist writers demonstrate incongruity primarily

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within this hybrid space. However, there are various other ways that the magic realist effects incongruity. The objective tone

In 1983 Seymour Menton, writing a retrospective study of Franz Roh's ideas, described the original manner of magic realism by designating four characteristics of the mode. These elements of the artist's presentation are easily paralleled in the literary presentation of magic realism: 1. Reality is portrayed so overwhelmingly realistically that it is rendered illusive; 2. Ordinary material things are instilled with seemingly magical powers, yet remain easily identifiable; 3. Objective perspective becomes the basic point of view; 4. 'Coldness' is a major component; that is, the works lack passion; they appeal intellectually, not emotionally.23 The magic realist writer, then, presents an encompassing reality, the ordinary world made marvellous, from an objective point of view and through a detached style. This combination of matter and manner is explained by Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he notes that he discovered the 'tone' for his writing through his recollection of the way that his grandmother used to tell her stories. 'She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness.'24 The detached style provides the 'straight man' to contrast with magic realism's humorous incongruities. Objectivity in the midst of incongruent discourse leads the reader to respond to juxtaposition. Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel's objective style in her novel Like Water for Chocolate serves as an example. The following passage comes at the end of the novel, when Tita and Pedro are finally free to be together, and the crowd of family and friends have just enjoyed the wedding feast in honour of Alex and Esperanza. Everyone has enjoyed Tita's magical cuisine, especially the chiles in walnut sauce that cause a passionate reaction in all the guests. The subject matter is humorous, and it is the objective style of the description which largely serves to produce the effect: Before Tita and Pedro knew it, along with John and Chencha, they were the only ones left on the ranch. Everyone else, including the ranch hands, was making mad passionate love, wherever they had happened to end up ... Any spot would do: in the river, on the stairs, under the counter in the drugstore, in the clothes closet, on a treetop. Necessity is the mother of invention, and of every position. That day it led to some of the greatest creativity in the history of the human race.25

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The narrator's voice is so overtly objective that such an occurrence of massive love-making in any and all locales seems not impossible, but actual. Similarly, in Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's 'Journey to the Seed', the protagonist, Don Marcial, experiences his life in reverse time. Carpentier uses various tools within the narrative to achieve the desired effect, but his use of diction creates the strongest element of humour. Straightforward assertions in single sentences reverse time: 'Whilst the doctor shook his head with professional condolence, the sick man felt better';26 'The palm trees lost some rings. The climbing plants let go of the first cornice';27 to effect Marcial's physical body reversing itself, 'The furniture grew';28 and to effect his mental reversal, 'One morning, whilst reading a licentious book, Marcial suddenly felt like playing with the lead soldiers which lay in their wooden boxes.'29 The incongruity in these simple sentences is in large part, in their diction. Accepted juxtaposition

In close association with magic realism's objective style is the synthesis of the natural and the supernatural into a single reality, employing what Coleridge described in Book IV of Biographia Literaria as 'that willing suspension of disbelief. The writer, Coleridge explains: diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) 'fuses', each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put into action by the will and understanding . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.30

These 'discordant qualities' in magic realism are unified realities. The combination of the two worlds is achieved through what Chanady calls authorial reticence: 'the absence of obvious intrusions and manipulation on the part of the author'.31 This requirement upon the writer correlates with the Keatsian term 'negative capability': that state when one is 'capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'.32 An example of this 'reticence' can be found in the German writer, Thomas Mann's story, 'The Wardrobe'. In this story Albrecht van der Qualen has found a room to rent; he leaves for dinner and later returns to his room. He begins to undress, and the narrator describes the scene: The room, with its four white walls, from which the three pink chairs stood out like strawberries from whipped cream, lay in the unstable light of the candle. But the wardrobe over there was open and it was not empty. Somebody was standing in it, a creature so lovely that Albrecht van der Qualen's heart stood still a moment and then in long, deep, quiet throbs resumed its beating. She was quite nude and one of her slender arms reached up to crook a forefinger

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round one of the hooks in the ceiling of the wardrobe.... 'What -' said he ... 'won't you come in - or how should I put it - out? Have a little glass of cognac? Half a glass?' But he expected no answer to this and he got none.33

The author is not compelled to explain how the woman got into the wardrobe or why she is there. Such explanations, intrusions into the narrative, would destroy the magic of the imagined reality. Furthermore, the objective style is paralleled by Albrecht's unemotional response to this wonder. In the Mann story, if readers cannot accept the woman's unexplained presence, they essentially cannot objectify the situation. Chanady explains that the reader of magic realism 'simply enjoys the narrative without distancing himself from the events and pondering the validity of the fictitious world . . . Instead of being manifestly disturbed by the supernatural, he considers it as normal/34 Chanady uses the word 'enjoy' to describe the desired reader response to magic realism. Enjoyment allows for a number of pleasurable effects, including humour. Using Mann's story, again, the reader does not demand any rationale for the nude woman's existence; such a demand would destroy both the magic and the humour of the situation. When both the writer and the reader employ Coleridge's 'willing suspension of disbelief, the possibilities for appreciation, apprehension and enjoyment of the fictional experience are vastly broadened. This 'agreement', made by both the writer and the reader, is heightened in magic realism. Humour through irony

Magic realists frequently highlight humorous incongruities through their use of irony, which depends, again, upon an 'agreement' involving both writer and reader. Gabriel Garcia Marquez succinctly embeds this irony in a single line or phrase: '... they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men';35 'On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood-angel was held captive in Pelayo's house';36 'It's good to be with someone when you're so alone.'37 More often than not, an ironic thread runs throughout an entire Garcia Marquez story. In The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World', there are only two lines of dialogue in the narrative; the story, told from the third person omniscient point of view, traces the responses of the villagers to the appearance of a drowned man who washes ashore and whose 'presence' changes their lives. The central irony lies in the villagers' perception of the dead man as being a living presence. Garcia Marquez's ironic descriptions simultaneously create the humour and the magic realism in his narrative: '... the hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt';38 'he was the most destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth';39 There was so much truth in his manner.'40 The contrast between the reality of the human

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form being a dead body and the villagers' perception of him in living terms is rich and evocative. Humour through absurdity

Absurdity in magic realist fiction, like incongruity, is a frequent dramatic element; the absurd is a necessary ingredient to the mode. Various situations taken from preceding examples illustrate such basic humorous absurdities: a nude woman who appears in a wardrobe ('The Wardrobe'); a man whose nose becomes a state councillor ('The Nose'). These absurd situations are described within the definition of the word itself - ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable.41 However, in terms of literary criticism, degrees of magic realism are often present in works of absurdist fiction, that particular genre of contemporary literature which expresses 'the sense that human beings, cut off from their roots, live in meaningless isolation in an alien universe'.42 Dick Penner, in his critical anthology Fiction of the Absurd, provides the theoretical background for the operation of the absurd in fiction. His explanations rely, in part, on the works of three major absurdist critics: Martin Esslin, Arnold Hinchliffe and John Killinger.43 He discusses four characteristics of absurdist fiction which seem to parallel various elements of magic realism. Each of these comparative characteristics can be demonstrated in the magic realism of Garcia Marquez's story 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings'. The first characteristic is 'a "going away from" a norm. In certain instances there is a violation of some natural physical norm'.44 This characteristic is absolutely basic to both modes. In Garcia Marquez's story, the physical appearance of the old man obliterates 'the norm', and he is first 'explained' as being an 'angel', a combined presence of the physical and spiritual realms, a condition which obviously places him outside 'the natural physical norm'. The second characteristic is 'a questioning of the validity of human reason itself, from which our perceptions of natural laws arise'.45 Magic realism is literally constructed upon a fictional premise that alters our 'perceptions of natural laws', thus calling into question human reason. As Chanady explains, 'the simultaneous presence of the natural and the supernatural . . . is the essential characteristic of a harmonious and coherent world in magical realism'.46 In 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', the reader readily responds to the comic attempt by Pelayo and Elisenda, their neighbour, the townspeople and Father Gonzaga to 'explain' the phenomenon of their winged visitor. A 'wise' neighbour, 'who knew everything about life and death', proclaims the visitor an angel. Accordingly, the townspeople conjecture about his future. Some believe that he should be named 'mayor of the world'; others think that he should be made a five-star general in order to win all the wars; and

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some hope that he can be put to stud in order to 'implant on earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe'.47 These ludicrous explanations and conjectures about the old man's existence highlight our own narrow perceptions, which are defined by natural laws, and the inherent contrast creates humour. Penner's third characteristic is 'the Absurd hero's sense of isolation: from God, from humanity, and from love'.48 Although this characteristic may not be completely common to magic realism, it does find a place in a number of works, since the supernaturalism involved in most of the dramatic situations alienates characters from their own surroundings. The old man, the hero of Garcia Marquez's story, is alienated from God when Father Gonzaga suspects him of being an imposter, 'when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet his ministers'.49 He is alienated from humanity when he is locked up in a wire chicken coop with the hens; and, finally, he is alienated from love throughout the story, to the end, when he flies away, and Elisenda 'let out a sigh of relief, because 'he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea'.50 The fourth characteristic, a 'pervasive element of Absurdity' and a common element in magic realist fiction, is 'the gross coincidence, or prank of fate'.51 Since the magic realist writer presents the fiction from an objective point of view, there must be no explanation of the magic as reality, no authorial intrusion upon the imagined reality. As a result, the dramatic situation is always a result of 'coincidence'. The old man literally falls into Pelayo and Elisenda's lives. The peasant couple, struggling with floods, their baby's dire illness and poverty, randomly stumble upon the old man in their courtyard, Tying face down in the mud, [and] who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings'.52 Nothing more than 'coincidence' determines the entire dramatic situation, and, again, the irony of the situation creates the humour. Even though the old man's presence literally reverses Pelayo and Elisenda's lives for the better, he remains an 'annoyance' to them. Penner's four characteristics of absurdist fiction serve as a tool for clarifying the various ways that absurdity is manifested in magic realism. He points out, too, that although absurdist fiction is essentially a twentieth-century literary phenomenon, its appearance in literature can be traced back to the Bible.53 Likewise, magic realism served various writers as a vehicle for imaginative expression long before criticism provided its categorization. What makes us laugh?

Key characteristics of magic realism - incongruity, the objective/subjective juxtaposition, irony, absurdity - are also key components of comedy. The predominance of humour in magic realism, be it blatant or subtle, derives

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from the primary components of the mode. Thus one way to investigate the mode is through an examination of the philosophy of humour: what makes us laugh? In his classic essay, Le Rire, Henri Bergson examines the philosophical basis of human laughter. His first contention is that the comic element exists completely in the realm of the human.54 In other words, all humour derives from the human perspective. This particular factor would incorporate all fiction; the human element exists in fiction as writers create the illusion of our own reality. But Bergson goes on to explain that laughter requires an absence of feeling.55 Initially, this premise seems flawed, since laughter would appear to be the response to a feeling. Bergson argues that 'Indifference is its [laughter's] natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.'56 He demonstrates this truth by inviting us to experiment, through supposing for a moment that we are interested in everything that is being said and done: in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy... To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.57 This particular aspect of humour perfectly parallels two of Menton's four characteristics of magic realism (derived from Roh's definition of the term in relation to art): that the objective perspective becomes the basic point of view, and that 'coldness' is a major component; that is, the works lack passion; they appeal intellectually, not emotionally.58 In Gogol's story 'The Nose', the narrative opens: 'An unusually odd event took place in St Petersburg on March twenty-fifth.'59 The 'odd event' is that the barber Ivan Yakovlevich finds a nose in his loaf of bread; Gogol's use of understatement sets the tone for the entire story. Gogol never allows for any emotional empathy as Collegiate Assessor Kavalyov valiantly searches for his missing nose. The narrative's humour derives directly from the writer's tendency to objectify the experience. Another theoretical explanation for comedy comes from what Bergson calls a 'mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being'.60 One of his examples of this premise is a man, running along the street, who stumbles and falls; the people who see him fall burst out laughing. Bergson explains that they laugh because the man's action is involuntary. The man could have altered his movements to avoid the fall, but 'through lack of elasticity . . . as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else'.61 Bergson contends that this 'inelasticity' is the reason for both the fall and the laughter which follows. In magic realist fiction, characters inevitably 'stumble' into unexpected

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circumstances which assault the norm of their existence. Their 'inelasticity' at this moment often creates the humour in the story. An interesting example of this situation is found in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial.62 The protagonist, K., literally stumbles into the absurd reality of his 'arrest' by a group of strangers. For the duration of the novel, he is unable to alter his own involvement in the absurd situation leading to his trial. In addition, his 'inelasticity', his inability to recognize the absurdity of his plight, makes him a laughable figure to the reader. Conclusion

The common component in these various characteristics of magic realism is the presence of the unexpected. As we watch the characters of magic realist fiction encounter the unexpected, very often our response is laughter. A man, leaving the beach, must deal with a very friendly wave: 'In spite of the shouts of the others who grabbed her by her floating skirts, she clutched my arm and went leaping off with me.'63 Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov awakens one morning to find 'to his enormous surprise' that he no longer has a nose on his face.64 Albrecht van der Qualen returns to his rented room to find a beautiful woman standing in the wardrobe; his response is to offer her a drink. The fictional characters and the reader both experience the effects of confronting the unexpected. Incongruity, irony and absurdity almost inevitably result. Even though magic realism and humour are born out of these common elements, magic realist fiction is not always humorous. The mode can engender a sense of the tragic. For example, the absurd, which is a key element here, might present human beings as living in meaningless isolation in an alien universe.65 Readers sense little, if any, humour in magic realist stories like Carlos Fuentes's 'Aura', Maria Luisa Bombal's 'New Islands', William Faulkner's 'The Old People',66 or in novels like Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits. These fictions employ classic magic realist tropes, but their narratives transcend boundaries of time, space and identity without evoking the humour that often accompanies the incongruities inherent in such transcendence. It is not simply the elements of incongruity, irony and absurdity that create the humour and/or magic realism, but rather the artistic engineering, the juxtaposition, of these components toward the desired reader response. Through their own particular objective manner of presentation, magic realist writers take the reader to a certain place in the imagination where 'magic' and 'reality' exist simultaneously. Depending upon the writers' purposes and their artistic manipulation of language and narrative, the reader responds with serious reflection, with laughter, or with both. Even though these works sometimes depend upon a specific cultural context for the comic effect, they all ultimately depend upon common

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components, common to both magic realism and to humour: incongruity in its various manifestations, delivered in an objective style. The universality of the humour of magic realism is demonstrated through the examples used in this study. Arbitrary national boundaries are critically unproductive when discussing the magic realism genre. The mode exists as a distinctive one, transgressing cultural boundaries. Notes 1. Seymour Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981 (Philadelphia, Art Alliance Press, 1983), p. 19. 2. Angel Flores, 'Magical realism in Spanish American fiction', in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Paris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1995), p. 109. 3. Seymour Menton, 'Magic realism: an annotated international chronology of the term', in Kirsten F. Nigro and Sandra M. Cypress (eds), Essays in Honor of Frank Dauster (Newark, DE, Juan de la Cuesta, 1955), pp. 125-53. 4. David Young and Keith Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction (New York, Longman, 1984). 5. Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 606. 6. Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved and Unresolved Antinomy (New York, Garland, 1985), p. 19. 7. Ibid., p. 26. 8. Ibid., p. 30. 9. Stephen Slemon, 'Magic realism as postcolonial discourse', in Zamora and Paris (eds), Magical Realism, p. 409. 10. Ibid., p. 410. 11. Zamora and Paris, Magical Realism, p. 75. 12. Ibid. 13. Octavio Paz, 'My Life With the Wave', in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction, p. 305. 14. Ibid., p. 306. 15. Young and Hollaman, Magical Realist Fiction, p. 311. 16. John Cheever, The Enormous Radio', in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction, p. 313. 17. Young and Hollaman, Magical Realist Fiction, p. 2. 18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. Nikolai Gogol, 'The Nose', in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction, p. 15. 20. Ibid. 21. Chanady, Magic Realism and the Fantastic, p. 30. 22. Rawdon Wilson, 'The metamorphoses of fictional space: magic realism', in Zamora and Paris (eds), Magical Realism, p. 220. 23. Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, pp. 20-3. 24. Peter Stone, 'Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez', in Writers at Work, 6th series (New York, Viking, 1984). 25. Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate, trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen (New York, Doubleday, 1992), p. 242. 26. Alejo Carpentier, 'Journey to the Seed', in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction, p. 373. 27. Ibid., p. 374. 28. Ibid., p. 377.

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29. Ibid. 30. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biogmphia Literaria, vol. II (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1907), p. 12. 31. Chanady, Magic Realism and the Fantastic, p. 121. 32. Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats, vol. I (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 193. 33. Thomas Mann, 'The Wardrobe', in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction, pp. 45-6. 34. Chanady, Magic Realism and the Fantastic, p. 11. 35. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World', in Collected Stories (New York, Harper & Row, 1984), p. 230. 36. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction, p. 458. 37. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 'Death Constant Beyond Love', in Collected Stories, p. 245. 38. Garcia Marquez, 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World', p. 219. 39. Ibid., p. 220. 40. Ibid., p. 221. 41. American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd edn (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993). 42. William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman (eds), A Handbook to Literature, 7th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 2. 43. The three works include: Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Woodstock, NY, Overlook, 1973); Arnold P. Hinchliffe, The Absurd (London, Methuen, 1969); and John Killinger, World in Collapse: The Vision of Absurd Drama (New York, Dell, 1971). 44. Dick Penner (ed.), Fiction of the Absurd (New York, New American Library, 1980), p. 5. 45. Ibid. 46. Chanady, Magic Realism and the Fantastic, p. 101. 47. Garcia Marquez, 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', p. 458. 48. Penner, Fiction of the Absurd, p. 6. 49. Garcia Marquez, 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', p. 459. 50. Ibid., p. 462. 51. Penner, Fiction of the Absurd, p. 6. 52. Garcia Marquez, 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', p. 457. 53. Penner, Fiction of the Absurd, p. 8. 54. Henri Bergson, Laughter (Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, 1956), p. 62. 55. Ibid., p. 63. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., pp. 63-4. 58. Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, pp. 20-3. 59. Gogol, 'The Nose', p. 11. 60. Bergson, Laughter, p. 67. 61. Ibid., p. 66. 62. Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York, Knopf, 1957). 63. Paz, 'My Life with the Wave', p. 305. 64. Gogol, 'The Nose', p. 14. 65. Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature, p. 66. 66. All three short stories can be found in Young and Hollaman (eds), Magical Realist Fiction.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mr Punch's crinoline anxiety: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress TERRI A. HASSELER

Punch

In 1857, the British periodical Punch took a satiric stand on the problem posed by the crinoline in Victorian social circles. Punch depicts the crinoline as an absurd part of an Englishwoman's dress, consuming a ridiculous amount of space, displaying women's vanity, and injuring the unsuspecting and innocent ankles of British men. The emphasis on excess (in terms of cost, cloth and circumference) results in representations of women who are so thoroughly encased in their dress that they are likened to soldiers in armour. The encased woman, of course, is frustrating to the young man whose main desire is to get closer to the woman's body, not to be forced further away by a petticoat. Concurrent with the satiric social commentary on crinoline is Punch's treatment of the more serious problem of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Punch, like many newspapers and periodicals of the time, employs images of British women being raped and murdered by Indian mutineers. A particularly common image manipulated by Punch is of a barely clothed woman flung underneath the body of a Bengal tiger - representative of rebellious Indian soldiers and justifying British male revenge. This image is in response to the death (and possible rape) of British women at Cawnpore in July of 1857 (Figure I).1 Furthermore, in a later Punch representation, the image of the violated British woman is placed on a flag waved by men going off to Empire to fight the rebels (Figure 2).2 Indeed, during the year of 1857, Punch returns consistently to these two rather contradictory images: Womanas-impenetrable, encased in monstrous attire; and Woman-as-all-toopenetrable, nearly naked, raped and murdered. The fact that these two images frequently recur is interesting enough, but what is more fascinating are the ways in which the satiric rhetoric of feminine dress becomes merged with the inflammatory rhetoric surrounding the Indian Rebellion. In the same edition which pictures the violated woman, Punch depicts British women, fully armoured in 'half a ton at

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least of Crinoline', ready to protect England from invading forces.3 The irony of this image is evident when one notes that England would not need British women to defend England if all the British men did not have to be in India protecting, of course, British women. More noteworthy is the fact that these women are more often seen as armouring themselves against British men rather than against invading forces. Connected to this national anxiety over who is protecting England, are later representations that portray the feminine icon of Britannia handing to a feminine representation of India a crinoline hoop, suggesting that crinoline will 'civilize' India.4 Anxiety about gender made manifest in the crinoline debate strikingly surfaces at moments of national insecurity. Certainly, Punch consistently turned to fashion to comment comically on gender differences. Christina Walkley states that, 'To warrant inclusion in Punch, then, a garment or mode had to be potentially funny as well as just fashionable . . . In the early years of Punch the very idea of fashion seemed inexpressibly funny: this was because it was both feminine and foreign.'5 Katherine S. Van Eerde notes, 'Fine feathers, fine furs, bustles, women's hats: all these produced an unquenchable fountain of ridicule from artists.'6 However, the pairing of Punch's very serious response to the Indian Rebellion with its comic commenting upon women's fashion results in a troubling displacing of the imperial anxiety of the Indian Rebellion onto the domestic space of women. Why would Punch engage in this process of conflating imperial fears with domestic satire? In its manipulation of images and issues during the summer of 1857, Punch is attempting to negotiate its imperial fears about rebellion. At the same time, it is attempting to manage its domestic anxieties about women invading public spaces, made evident in the 1857 debates on the divorce and marriage laws. What results, then, when these two issues are conflated - the social anxiety over the impenetrable British woman in her crinoline hoops and the national anxiety over the penetrated British woman in her rags? The resultant questions concern British male anxieties over the accessibility of British female bodies. Why is the British female fully accessible to Indian men through mutiny and rape narratives, but completely inaccessible to British men? Who controls the British female body at home when women's connections to economics and sexual purity surface in the divorce debates? And why is the massive attire of crinoline, which separates the British male from his love and his pocketbook, so infuriating? Moreover, when imperial iconography, like 'Britannia' and battle flags, is manipulated, these women's bodies (naked and raped or encased and inviolable) clearly reflect national anxieties about the security of the British nation and empire. Thus, the caricatures of crinoline merged with imperial fears of rebellion reveal British anxieties over the defence of sexual, domestic, social and imperial space.

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The Indian Rebellion

With its illustrations responding to the incidents at Cawnpore, Punch entered a national debate on the Indian Rebellion. Issues of space and who has access to the sexual space of the female body and the imperial space of India are evident in Punch's fascination with the massacre and possible rape of white British women by Indian men during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In recent years, the Indian Rebellion 'rape script', a phrase coined by Nancy Paxton, has received a great deal of literary critical attention.7 The incident at Cawnpore has been of special interest to critics, starting with Patrick Brantlinger and including Jenny Sharpe.8 Though focused on the transformation of the raped and defiled British woman into a symbolic emblem of Empire, these analyses often fail to note the subtle manner in which the British woman is contradictorily positioned as whorish, and therefore in need of punishment, with the perceived rape oddly functioning as such punishment. Responses contemporary to the incident at Cawnpore establish the British woman as both a victim and a 'whore', and this construction sets a cultural context for Punch's domestic discussion of the Indian Rebellion and accompanying fascination with women's fashion and crinoline. In this context, the possible rape of innocent British women serves as a propaganda ploy used to justify the massacre of the Indian sepoys, but it also equipped the British with the means to control vicariously the sexuality of their women. This control is essential in a climate of great imperial and domestic uncertainty. Although many incidents of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 roused the British people to hatred and fear of the Indians, the incident at Cawnpore was a central rallying point. On 17 July, fearful of the approaching British troops, the execution of a group of British women and children was ordered. Who ordered this execution is a question of dispute for historians, some suggesting that Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last hereditary ruler of the Marathas, was the perpetrator. Over 200 women and children were hacked to pieces and thrown into a well. When the British were told of the mutilated bodies, rumours of rape and defilement sprang up alongside the call for revenge. Although many women and children were brutally murdered, many historians believe they were not raped. Yet some, who were contemporaries of the event, chose to cling to that possibility and to turn it into popular 'fact'. Essential to the credibility of the rape rumour were the fabricated eyewitness accounts of Brigadier General Neill's soldiers. Neill's troops were the first to discover the room where the women had been held and murdered. Inscriptions appeared on the walls shortly after the soldiers arrived - many of these inscriptions hinting at sexual defilement and the murders of children. As almost a rite of passage, soldiers who arrived later were led through the room and showed the bloody walls, the remnants of hair and clothes, and the forged

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inscriptions.9 Most of the writings added to the wall were similar to the following: 'Your wives and families are here in misery, and at the disposal of savages who have ravished both young and old and then killed, oh! oh! my child, my child. Countrymen avenge it!'10 However, eyewitness accounts of Captain Mowbray Thomson and W. J. Shepherd, and historical treatises by George Dangerfield, state that the messages were not on the walls when the troops first arrived after the massacre.11 The most extensive contemporary historical treatment of the Indian Rebellion (written 1858-59) is Charles Ball's massive two-volume History of the Indian Mutiny. Ball employs the rumour of rape in several of his endless, gruesome case studies of the incident at Cawnpore: 'At length the fearful truth was realized: A huge well in the rear of the building had been used by the murderers as a fitting receptacle in which to hide their martyred victims from human eyes; and here, yet reeking with blood, stripped of clothing, dishonoured, mutilated, and massacred, lay the bodies of 208 females and children of all ages.'12 With sickening repetitiveness, Ball recounts the murders from a variety of perspectives. One 'eyewitness' states, 'By all accounts, the women were so ill-treated, that death - even such a death - must have been welcome to them. I will not enter into more details',13 thus implying a secret, sexual crime. Punch enters this context with its famous illustrations of the incidents at Cawnpore. In the issue of 22 August 1857 (Figure 1), a political cartoon depicts the British reaction to the Rebellion. A giant tiger, representing India, hovers over a semi-nude woman and a child. The British forces, pictured as a ferocious lion, arrive to avenge the woman. The implications of this piece of propaganda are all too obvious. Outwardly, the cartoon professes the 'justified' revenge the British seek for the murder and rape of their women and children. This image is considered to be the most famous of Tenniel's Cawnpore cartoons. Arthur Prager notes that, 'Its appearance in Punch aroused strong emotions in the British public and helped to thwart Lord Canning's appeals for humane treatment for the Sepoy rebels. It also doubled Punch's circulation.'14 We can see this same theme manipulated in other images, including an image of GovernorGeneral Canning giving clemency to the vicious sepoy covered in blood (Figure 3)15 or in the image of Canning granting clemency to the sepoy lying over the murdered bodies of children (Figure 4).16 In these two images, however, political satire is manipulated to comment on Canning's perceived failure to apply a sufficient enough revenge on the Indians for the lives of the murdered and possibly raped women. Satire and humour are entirely absent in the image of the woman. One week after the 22 August drawing of the semi-nude woman appeared in Punch, the magazine ran the same picture again (Figure 2). However, in the 29 August issue of Punch, the woman and the child become barely discernible figures on a flag that is waved by a group of patriotic men who are, as the caption states, 'Willing Hands for India'. As the woman and child become an abstract representation, the constructed

Figure 1 The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger', Punch, 22 August 1857

Figure 2 'Willing Hands for India', Punch, 29 August 1857

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THE CLEMENCY OF CANNING. GOVEENOB-GESERAL. "WELL, THEN, THEY SHAN'T BLOW HIM FROM NASTY GUNS; BUT HE MUST PROMISE TO BE A GOOD LITTLE SEPOL"

Figure 3 The Clemency of Canning', Punch, 24 October 1857

rapes are rendered peripheral to the central battle between men for colonial control, a battle that is racialized and fraught with questions of power. Thus, the actual woman becomes peripheral to a debate that has been transformed into a homosocial competition between men over the geographical landscape of India. However, the body of the white woman

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TOO "CIVIL" BY HALF. The Governor-General Defending the POOR Sepoy. Figure 4 Too "Civil" by Half, Punch, 7 November 1857

is equated with colonial control; an imperial flag is unnecessary, for the white woman has taken that role. At the same time that the British woman is painted as a victimized space, she is also transformed into a disembodied emblem, representing the Brit-

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ish Empire and its moral right to rule India. Access to her body becomes not the physical act of rape, but the spiritual violation of empire. Sharpe carefully critiques the connections among the rapes of white women's bodies, colonial violence and imperial fragility, stating that, 'During the course of the nineteenth century the "English Lady" came to be invested increasingly with the self-sacrifice of colonialism, its ideological mission that was silently underpinned by apparatuses of force.'17 As Deirdre David notes, women serve as 'emblems of correct colonial governance'.18 The experience of the 'insurrection' intensified the emblematic importance of the British woman in India. Her degraded body began to serve as a 'metonym for a government that sees itself as the violated object of rebellion'.19 More specifically, however, the body of the Western woman loses its physical importance as it becomes a symbol on the imperial flag - a disembodied emblem that stands for empire and also for nation and race. However, not only is the figure on the flag a woman, she is also quite clearly a mother murdered in the act of protecting her child. Jane Mackay and Pat Thane argue that, The role of females . . . was to contribute to the preservation, perpetuation and enhancement of the race, both physically and spiritually; the male role was to defend and preserve the nation.'20 Both of these roles are evident in the Punch cartoon as farm labourers and a military man unite under the banner of the mutilated mother. The use of domestic hands only strengthens the connection to protecting race and nation. Similarly, the mother's role as moral and spiritual guide was important to the defence of the entire British Empire.21 'Because it [rape] represents the destruction of the sacred foundation of the family, rape can thus be seen as an attack not only on the family but also the nation.'22 Thus, as the British woman is transformed from mutilated body into disembodied emblem, she begins to take on the broader figuration of empire, nation and race. Access to that disembodied figure is no longer a violation of the sexual space of a woman, but a violation of imperial space and imperial control. Access to the bodies of Indian women has long been considered an ideological battleground in postcolonial studies. White men may gain access to Indian women's bodies through erotic photographic representations paraded as ethnographic research - concubinage, rape or the eroticized nautch.23 However, the white man in India often saw himself as the preserver of the life and sanctity of the Indian woman from the hands of the Indian man, especially in the light of female infanticide and sati, the practice of the widow throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Access to the white woman's body, however, is strictly reserved for white men. Margaret MacMillan highlights the 'concern in official and unofficial circles over pornography that involved European women'.24 The British greatly feared Indian men's encounters with white women's bodies, not because of the threat of possible rape or defilement of any one woman, but because it was feared that access would lower the esteem of the empire in the eyes of the Indians.

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Concurrent with this debate on the purity of Englishwomen is the problem of what to do with the question of sexuality in the rape motif. Paxton argues that 'colonizers' racial superiority required the valorization of the asexual "purity" of Englishwomen'.25 Thus, Englishwomen's 'moral purity', as Sharpe concludes, 'is established for the sole purpose of being negated' by the raping Indian native, whose one touch 'desecrates all of English womanhood'.26 Therefore, one might argue that the only sexualized players in the 'rape script' are the Indian males. Indeed, the construction of the enemy as a lust-filled rapist is an effective and common propaganda tool. Numerous poems and short pieces in Punch portray the Indians as lecherous: 'The beast we had petted and thought we had tamed / Was fouling his maw on the flesh he had shamed / Our fairest, our feeblest, were tortured to sate / His merciless lust and more merciful hate.'27 Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan state that the perceived lack of sexual restraint on the part of the Indians signified 'for the AngloReformer the otherness of the Oriental male and confirmed his naturally lower position on the evolutionary scale, less civilized and controlled and therefore more effeminate than his manly British counterpart'.28 Constructing the Indian as rapist also serves to justify the British brutal treatment of the Indians, which occurred after the rebellion. Fixing the other is essential to the propagandist thinker. However, as Abdul JanMohamed notes, this construction frequently turns on the constructor: 'Such literature is essentially specular: instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him as a mirror that reflects the colonialist's self-image.'29 Similarly, Sara Suleri concludes that the encounter with the other is only 'self-reflexive', for the British tell the story of the rape in order to know themselves.30 Thus, in the face of the rapist Indian, the British individual can readily see his own desire for control over his own women. Bram Dijkstra suggests that the European male felt an affinity with the stereotypical, Oriental, raping barbarian, commenting that it 'had still been customary to dream of a return to barbaric times and fantasize about being a ruthless, all-powerful warlord with an ample supply of helpless women always at your beck and call, so that if you felt the urge to have a woman you simply chose one from among your loot'.31 Thus, images of scantily clad women, attempting to elude the hands of the barbarians, were numerous later in the century and during the fin de siecle. In most of the Rebellion discourses, white women are quite explicitly described as victims in need of avenging. But what is most interesting about these narratives is the manner in which the term 'victim' is subtly separated from its defining feature of 'innocence', revealing a misogynistic desire to participate in the controlling of the British woman, especially when the British male perceives that he is not the preferred object of desire. White women are positioned as whorish, flirtatious, irrational, sensual and sexual. Sir George Trevelyan in his 'epic' Cawnpore, originally published in 1865, comments on the flirtatiousness of the women (hinting

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at that possibility that women ask for being raped). In commenting on white women's interest in Azimoolah, a person closely connected with Nana Sahib, Trevelyan writes, The ladies voted him charming . . . On the first day of the great vengeance, when Havelock's forlorn hope came to Bithoor, grim and eager, straight from the brink of the fatal well, our soldiers discovered amongst the possessions of this scoundrel letters from more than one titled lady couched in terms of the most courteous friendship.'32 For Trevelyan, this interest in Indian men reveals the white woman's complicity in instigating her own 'rape' and murder. Thus, as the Englishwoman becomes sexualized in the text, losing her association with moral and imperial purity, she becomes oddly conflated with her Indian male counterparts. One particular work of the Indian Rebellion that attempts to hide the desire to participate in the control of British women behind the mask of the 'good' English soldier, is James Grant's First Love and Last Love. Jack Harrower, the hero of the tale, is a man who loves Lena Weston. Lena, the heroine, is not a perfect woman, but because she is appropriately penitent for her earlier ill treatment of Harrower, Lena and Jack eventually marry. Thus, Lena is forgiven for her misconduct. Carefully juxtaposed against Lena is her younger sister, Polly. Polly is frequently described as a flirt. This proves dangerous for Polly, for she serves as the model for what happens to young girls who do not behave properly. The 'panting' Indians who wish to fill their zenanas actively pursue Polly.33 She is captured and held prisoner by the Prince Mirza Abubeker, who is described as 'an effete, soft, sleepy, and sensual looking man, with small cunning eyes, and thick, full, red lips .. . [with an] overfed and greasy aspect about his yellow skin that made Polly shudder'.34 At her capture, the narrator editorializes on Polly's position: 'Was this the Polly who seemed born only to laugh, to flirt so artlessly, and be always happy?'35 The reader can easily follow the logic of this line, which might conclude with, 'and here she is brought so low'. Trevelyan asks a similar question of the women entrenched at Cawnpore: 'Where were now the tact, the cultivation, and all the indefinable graces of refined womanhood?'36 Unlike the masculine, heroic characterization of British men under siege, women are defined by their lack of feminine virtues. Where are they now? Trevelyan, like the narrator of First Love and Last Love, uses a scornful tone to illustrate the transformation of the women. Interspersed throughout Grant's First Love and Last Love are stories of rape. In several scenes, the narrator describes Polly's clothes being ripped off her body by Indians: 'As she was about to elude his hand, he grasped her rudely by the shoulder, tearing all her muslin dress, and rending her bodice, and then the lovely English girl stood palpitating before them in all the ivory whiteness of her skin, bare almost to the slender waist.'37 Her defilement, however, is subtly sanctioned by the text, which suggests that she asked for it. The myth of the 'therapeutic rape' is prevalent in these texts written in response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Dijkstra defines

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the 'mythology of the therapeutic rape' as the argument that women love and need to be dominated by an aggressive masculine figure.38 In addition, there are countless references to the women of Cawnpore and various other victims of the Rebellion who suffered great indignities at the hands of the rebels. Their supposed defilement is carefully detailed by the narrator: 'The women were always stripped of their clothing, treated with every indignity, and then slowly tortured to death, or hacked at once to pieces, according to the fancy of their captors/39 These passages reveal a disturbing pleasure in seeing delicate, refined, or, in other words, inaccessible women, made brutally accessible. In the end, Polly refuses to succumb to the Prince, and she is martyred for this one pure act. Harrower finds her body: There, against the palace wall, which was shattered by cannon shot and thickly starred by rifle bullets, was the body of a girl, snowy white, sorely emaciated, and nailed by her hands and feet against the masonry.'40 In reading this image, Paxton argues that, 'Grant insists that heroic Englishwomen were too pure to suffer rape and survive. In short, by valorizing Polly's ultimate sacrifice, Grant's novel indicates that the glory of the empire resides in the involuntary sacrifices of fair, golden-haired Englishwomen who preserve their innocence at all costs and are violently reduced to silence/41 Though significant, this reading does not fully address the pornographic voyeurism of the image: the body of a young woman, nailed to a wall, which is riddled with the phallic, sexual ejaculation of the guns and cannons. Nor does it address the manner in which Grant subtly sanctions Polly's death as a legitimate end to a flirtatious young woman. Polly, however, is not the only victim who suffers such indignities. After describing the quashing of the rebellion, Grant's narrator gives a detailed description of the executions of the rebellious troops. Their sentence was to be strapped to the front of the cannon and blown to pieces as the weapon fired: Tt was a falling rain of human fragments - of arms, legs, heads, and portions of the mortal frames, the veritable rags and fritters of Hindoos and Mohammedans, all mingled together/42 When reading this passage, the reader is reminded of another scene - for only a few pages earlier, British women are tied to the cannons and blown to pieces. In the Rebellion texts, the British vicariously rape, murder and dismember their own women, placing the murder weapon in the hands of the Indians, and then have just cause to murder and dismember the Indians in turn. Interestingly enough, it is only the indigenous men and women and the white women who suffer the indignities that Grant relates. When a British soldier dies, he leaves his world gallantly. Even a figure in First Love and Last Love like Dicky Rivers, who is less than an admirable creature, makes his exit by heroically spitting in the face of no one less than the Nana Sahib. Trevelyan equates the British men with epic heroes such as Ulysses. In fact, he compares the Valiant' death of British soldiers to the deaths of heroic, Trojan warriors. Although the main purpose of historical accounts of the rape and

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Rebellion, including Ball's The History of the Indian Mutiny and Trevelyan's Cawnpore, was propagandistic, these works also introduced a misogynistic treatment of the victims. For instance, Grant's First Love and Last Love exhibits the extent to which the fabricated rape had become an accepted historical 'fact', and had been transformed from propaganda to violent pornography. Thus Punch's image of the bare-shouldered, cleavagerevealing woman underneath the Bengal tiger appears within a developing context of horror and fascination with images of raped British women. The constructed 'rape', besides serving as a propaganda ploy used to justify the massacre of the Indians, also equipped the British with the means to toy with their own anxieties about the sexuality and purity of Englishwomen. In other words, anxieties about access to Englishwomen's bodies and about questions of control over the geographical and ideological space of India all become obscured by the emphasis on the Englishmen's virtuous wielding of imperial revenge, power and control.

The rhetoric of dress

Turning away from India and towards London during the summer of 1857, two particular issues seemed to be weighing on Punch's mind: crinoline and the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. For the first, crinoline functioned as a comic commentary on women; for the second, the divorce debate, when merged with crinoline, raises similar issues to Indian Rebellion discourses on access to women's bodies and questions of domestic and imperial control of space. While insurrection raged in India, British males felt an insurrection of sorts was fomenting in women's unwavering affection for the invasive apparel of crinoline. Crinoline entered Punch's social commentary in 1856 with the emergence of the cage crinoline. Christina Walkley and Vanda Foster state that, Throughout the early fifties, skirts grew wider, and the layers of petticoats increased until they reached a point where the very weight of the petticoats, one on top of the other, [sometimes as many as six or seven] prevented them from filling out the skirt any further.'43 Walkley states that 'the result was extremely hot and uncomfortable'.44 Thus, 'It was with great relief then, that, after 1856, women discarded these layers and adopted the cage. The cage was a straightforward linen or cotton petticoat, inserted with hoops of whalebone, and it soon adopted the name, as well as the function, of its horsehair predecessor.'45 Crinolines were often extremely dangerous, catching fire and severely injuring their wearers; they were cumbersome and made getting in and out of doorways and carriages difficult, sitting down became a laborious process, knocking objects off shelves was a natural course of events, and bending over was often indecent.46 Despite these serious flaws, many women saw the crinoline hoop as a means of freeing up the movement of their legs because it made, as one Victorian woman argued, 'walking so

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light and easy'.47 In addition, the adoption of the cage crinoline led to loosened and shortened corsets, because the breadth of the skirts made all women's waists appear small.48 Paradoxically, for women the cage crinoline was physically comfortable for the body but dreadfully uncomfortable in many social settings. In Punch, however, crinoline is depicted as excessively uncomfortable for the British male. Indeed, Punch's treatment of crinoline borders on a form of hysteria. Comments, diatribes and cartoons attacking crinoline are pervasive in the journal, to the point where one must ask why writers of Punch and their readers found crinoline so hilarious and, more importantly, why they found it necessary to tell the same joke over and over again, with relatively little variation. As Walkley notes, 'constantly in the pages of Punch, the essential humour is not a question of the clothes themselves, but of usage and social context'.49 What is immediately evident in Punch's treatment of crinoline is its emphasis on the deeply valued commodity of space. The 31 October 1857 segment entitled 'Crinoline for Gentlemen' begs for the indulgence of the readers to allow him a bit of space to make his argument: 'If you fear their exhibition will offend your lady-readers, allow me a few inches of your valuable space (Space is always "valuable").'50 Whether it is the space of an article or the space of one's time, space is considered sacred, spoken of, even when facetiously, in the language of order, rationality and politeness. Anne McClintock argues that, The middle-class determination to identify happiness with rational order and the clear demarcation of boundaries manifested itself in precise rules not only for assembling the public sphere but also for assembling domestic space . . . Domestic space was mapped as a hierarchy of specialized and distinct boundaries that needed constant and scrupulous policing.'51 This obsession with a clearly ordered domestic and public space is evident in Punch's fascination with the ways in which crinoline serves as a daunting boundary to the physical, sexual space of the female body, and serves as a danger to the ordered life of the domestic space of the home through a direct attack on the British male's pocketbook. Moreover, crinoline also serves as a monstrous breach of social or public space, by restricting men's freedom of movement in public spheres. Thus, Punch's argument revolves around considerations of feminine relationship to space: who has access to these places, who controls them, and who is viewed as a threat to these spaces. The cage crinoline was very frustrating for men because it severely constricted their access to the female body. Image upon image caricatures women made so immense by their crinoline that a man cannot lend his arm for a walk, he cannot reach her under the mistletoe, or he cannot properly take her in to dinner.52 'Whether as a waltzer or as husband, a man likes a woman he can take to his arms: and how is this possible when she is entrenched in an impregnable hoop petticoat, which when he approaches, he breaks his shin against.'53 Her 'impregnability' further emphasizes another recurring image of the crinoline-clad woman -

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likened to an impenetrable fortress or stronghold, incapable of being stormed even by force. Another article, entitled 'Beauty in Armour', states, 'Ladies are now . . . encasing themselves in armour - wearing Crinoline of mail, or, if we may be pardoned the expression, of femail.'54 The key anxiety here is that the British male feels he should have unlimited access to the sexualized space of the female body. And yet, he finds that she is an impenetrable fortress. Any attempt to storm her results in his own physical injury - broken shins and bruised ankles. Paradoxically, instead of the woman defending herself from the male aggressor, men must mount a defence to protect themselves: 'Now ladies, we are not of a malignant disposition; but when we find it stated that, in spite of our efforts, there is no abatement in the Crinoline contagion, we are in selfdefence disposed to prescribe a harsher treatment than we have as yet ventured to propose.'55 In addition to limiting men's access to the sexualized space of the female body and revealing their lack of control over its construction, women's crinoline is seen as monopolizing the pocketbook of British males burdened with fashionable wives and daughters. This direct invasion into the ordered space of Victorian domesticity is considered one of the most offending features of crinoline, and this is another foreign invasion of sorts. Crinoline's foreign origins in France made it a special subject of ridicule for its excessiveness, expensiveness and invasiveness. Despite the fact that crinoline was one of the first fashions to be 'universally adopted by all ages and classes, for it could be cheaply produced',56 men found the subject of the cost of women's crinoline both humorous and maddening. Numerous articles sympathize with men who are left bereft of their capital because their wives have spent the family fortune on dressmakers' bills. In 'Marriage and Its Difficulties', Punch writes, 'How is it possible that, taking one with the other, women can afford to wear the gowns they do? But their fathers and their husbands can't afford it; and we know nothing of the pinching, and the misery, and too often the total destruction that, I'm sure of it, comes of this peacock love of show with all the eyes of the world upon it.'57 Or, even more strikingly, women are said to choose crinoline over children, in an article entitled 'Crinoline Viewed as a Depopulating Influence': Among the causes which are cited to account for the decreasing rate of the French population, it is thought that the spread of the Crinoline contagion is proving most injurious in its effects upon the census. The mode now prevailing is one of such extravagance that it is continually demanding fresh sacrifices, and ladies have to choose between a fine dress and a family, for no income but a Rothchild's can provide for both.58

Mariana Valverde argues that fascination with finery, especially for the working class, was linked to the loss of virtue, which ultimately resulted in the economic ruin of the husband and the family.59 In addition to disrupting the domestic space of the home, the pages of

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Punch view crinoline as a form of invasion into the public sphere. There are frequent articles suggesting that women's skirts are pushing men off the streets, or that the breadth of their skirts forces men to 'ride on the box' rather than within the carriage. One writer states, 'What with the Bath-chairs, the ladies' dresses, and the children's perambulators, it amounts almost to an impossibility now-a-days to walk on the pavement. The gentlemen are driven into the road, whilst the ladies monopolise the trottoir.'60 What is interesting to note is the manner in which the aged and infirm, women and children are all grouped as inconveniences for men's movement on public streets, but, in particular, women are seen to be 'monopolising' or controlling a thoroughfare that should, as the article suggests, be more rightly controlled by their male counterparts. Each argument against crinoline ultimately results in connecting women's dress with a diseased abnormality; taking up too much space is viewed as 'bad morality - if not [a] downright vice'.61 Crinoline is used as a clear example of women's feeble control of their wits: 'For be sure that your dresses, the wider they get, / The more narrow your mind is disclose'.62 Or as the article 'Fashions in Paris' intimates, 'The bonnet gets smaller and smaller as the dress looms bigger and bigger.'63 Women chose crinoline over husband and family, thus destroying the ordered domestic space of the home. Wearing crinoline is pathologized: it is made a disease or deformity that warrants a cure; it is equated with alcoholism; it is seen as a contagious mental illness called 'Crinolineomania'.64 With the pathologizing of crinoline, Punch reveals its own heightened anxiety about threats to men's access to the sexualized space of the female body, a space they must now defend themselves against, and their anxieties about control over domestic and public space, spaces that are disrupted and they are being thrust out of. Nowhere are these issues more evident than in relation to the debates on divorce. As early as 1856, Punch linked divorce with crinoline: And it is in this respect that the disease [Crinlineomania] is so destructive to domestic comfort; for when a married lady is afflicted by the malady, her husband is compelled to keep at arm's length from her. Whether, as the mania thus leads to a virtual separation, it might not be regarded as sufficient grounds for a divorce, is a point for the consideration of Doctors' Commons perhaps more fitly than of Dr. Punch.65

Dorothy M. Stetson argues that the major results of the Divorce Act were, first, it removed divorce from the ecclesiastical courts and Parliament and placed it in civil court and, second, 'it provided the first property rights for married women, a crack in the common law doctrine of coverture'.66 Though providing property rights, the law was based on an unequal distribution of moral standards: Since the wife was expected to be morally pure and sexually innocent, a single act of extramarital sex constituted a violation of marriage duties so severe that

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the marriage could be dissolved. However, a husband's adultery was considered less serious due to his lesser moral responsibilities. His extramarital sex had to be aggravated by other offenses before it was serious enough to justify divorce.67

A husband's adultery needed to be combined with cruelty, incest, bigamy or bestiality.68 Anxiety is again focused on women's purity of personhood and the importance of establishing the Englishwoman as morally pure such that only one act of impurity would lead to her demise and to the demise of the family; similarly in the rape scenarios of the Rebellion narratives, one act of sexual transgression, even if rape, should lead to the woman's death. Paxton notes the popular belief emerging from Rebellion narratives that 'the Victorian notion that a grown woman could not be "raped against her will" insinuated itself into the history of the Mutiny . . . a true Englishwoman because a "pure" woman would have died to protect her honor or committed suicide afterwards'.69 Debaters of the divorce law, however, argued that a man's adultery 'did not make a marriage intolerable'.70 As Stetson argues, 'The growing and wealthy middle class, meanwhile, was busy elaborating a code of "respectability" that linked lifetime monogamy with economic prosperity . . . Setting forth the ideal family as a goal implied that a man had the right to end the marriage to a wife who violated her marriage vows and the ideals of respectability.'71 The bill, after a summer of unending debate, passed on 28 August 1857, at the height of the discussion of responses to the incident at Cawnpore and at the same time when the illustrations of British women raped and defiled were circulating in Punch. Barbara Leckie argues that the divorce debates made sexuality, through discussions of adultery, visible, and adultery became a 'domestic detective story', for 'How can one know that one's spouse has been unfaithful?'72 These uncertainties parallel similar uncertainties about women in the imperial setting. How is female purity measured? Can one know whether the women were raped or not? Are there any reliable witnesses? As Paxton would argue, those women who survived the rape would never admit to it, and Indians were considered untrustworthy witnesses.73 Similarly, adultery placed women's bodies under extreme surveillance since questions remain about who was gaining access to her at home, and she is an unreliable witness to her own experience: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 is an excellent example of a law that relaxed the regulation relating to divorce and, at the same time, subjected marital sexuality to an exacting surveillance in preparation for the law courts themselves, and in the divorce court journalism/74 Male indiscretions, though considered dangerous to the sanctity of marriage, were subject to different standards, and female purity was the most important issue, for loss of purity resulted in loss of social station.75 Most importantly, as Lawrence Stone argues, divorce (like, ironically, crinoline) threatened the separate-spheres ideology: 'the one the warm, domestic

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world of women, represented by the wife at the fireside, and the other the harsh outside world of men, struggling daily in the market place under the banners of economic competition and possessive individualism'.76 Several issues come together in these debates: women's purity is under surveillance; this purity remains a question of who is or is not getting access to her body; and what results is a never-ending uncertainty and secrecy surrounding that. Though Punch commented upon the inequality of the distribution of justice between men and women, it still used humour surrounding crinoline to voice its discomfort with changing relationships between men and women. In one essay, 'How About the Hoops?', a figure reminiscent of Henry VIII, and calling to mind the historical roots of divorce in England, chastises his wife for her attachment to crinoline: 'We therefore think a husband should be by law protected from the chance of being swamped by an overwhelming petticoat: and that when he finds his wife's flounces narrowing his income, he should be entitled to obtain a divorce ab immensa - that is, speaking English, from the immense one.'77 In The Divorce-Bill Dissected', Punch states, 'What the law calls "excuse" must remain to be seen, / It may be much Nagging, or much Crinoline'.78 Space was being invaded - both public space with women's large skirts, and the space of the home with the invasion of the male pocketbook due to large prices. Her impenetrable attire makes access to her impossible, destroys the marriage, becomes cause for divorce, puts her purity in question, and flouts the middle-class ideology of separate private and public spheres. An enormous amount of male anxiety surfaces in these comic representations and commentaries on crinoline and crinoline's relationship with divorce. The conflation: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress

The impenetrable, crinoline-clad woman reveals British male anxieties about their lack of control over the female body, the home and the thoroughfare - anxieties that similarly surfaced in divorce law debates during the summer of 1857. In contrast, the penetrated woman in her rags reveals British male anxieties over imperial control. When the rhetoric of dress becomes conflated with images of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, it becomes clear that Punch engages in narrative attempts to work out its domestic anxieties in imperial settings and to work out its imperial anxieties in the domestic, using humour as a means to relieve such anxiety by displacing it onto its 'opposing' geographical and ideological landscape. Mr Punch's anxiety about crinoline becomes strikingly assuaged in the image of the penetrated woman in her rags: she is not an unassailable fortress; she does need to be defended. Thus, the anxiety of failing control over the sexual and social space of British women, made evident in the anxiety of the crinoline and divorce debates, is allayed in the realm of

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the imperial. In contrast, imperial fears of the fragility of empire and the nation and its susceptibility to enemy attacks, made evident in that same image of the raped British woman, is allayed in the comic realm of the domestic, crinoline debate. Mr Punch works out his imperial anxieties by making those anxieties appear ludicrous. In the same edition of Punch that gives us the image of the mutilated woman under the paws of the tiger, Punch includes an article entitled 'Our National Defences': The drafting of some thirty thousand troops for India has, of course, revived the cry about our national defencelessness, and nervous members have been nightly getting on their legs to ask what measures have been taken for the safety of the country, and to impress upon Lord Palmerston the policy of its assurance from the danger of invasion/79 As noted earlier, the irony of this image is evident when one notes that England would not need British women to defend England if British men did not have to be in India protecting, of course, British women. Furthermore, the article suggests that women wearing crinoline can protect the country because their large skirts will foil the invaders. Mr. Punch would suggest that when its men-of-war are gone, England should be protected from its enemies by the women. Encased as they are now in whalebone and in steel, they are thoroughly well armed to act on the defensive, and surrounded by their wide circumference of petticoat, it is clear that they are quite secure from close attack. The sharpest bayonet would fail to pierce through their stiff skirts, and except at a long range it would be impossible to open fire upon their ranks, even granting the enemy were ungallant enough to do so.80

A second article entitled 'Our National Defences', appearing 24 October 1857, similarly argues, 'for it [her dress] is such an enormous size now, that it is morally and physically impossible for any one, friend or enemy, to come near her!'81 Imperial anxieties are relieved because they are portrayed as ridiculous, in the laughable image of the crinoline-clad warriors protecting England from invasion. These images palliate British male fears of a threat to national security and threat to the strength of empire, for as the article concludes, 'At any rate, whatever its defects may be, we feel persuaded that the scheme we have proposed is in no way more absurd than the fears which have suggested it.'82 Similarly, an 1858 image (Figure 5) exhibits the feminine icon of Britannia handing to a feminine representation of India a crinoline hoop.83 The accompanying article states, Then I saw in my vision, that to the sweet maiden, INDIA, as she stood in her soft beauty, there came a fairer sister, fairer than she, and her look was as that of a woman who is not afraid to look upon the face of a man, or to smack the same if need be, or none. Upon her head was a helmet, and behold her skirts stuck out like unto the hoops of old, and as she came, men stood aside to make a wide path for her, and some, stricken by the hem of her garments,

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Figure 5 'Preface', Punch, 25 December 1858 rubbed their ankles, as in pain. Nevertheless all admired her, for she was comely, and the robe gave her a goodly Presence.84

India dresses herself in the crinoline and responds to Britannia with, 'Lo, now am I too, civilised'. Thus, through humour and strange juxtaposition, imperial fears are alleviated. The anxieties about social space and the access to the female body are positioned secondary to the more important need to ease anxieties of empire. Britannia takes on her important iconographic role of civilizing the empire - an image that Anne McClintock discusses, where Britannia is used to sell commodities (such as soap and polish) that stand for civilization and, oddly enough, in this case, crinoline. The frequency with which articles on crinoline are positioned next to articles on the Rebellion is striking, and the articles and images of crinoline's actual conflation with the Rebellion are astounding. It is clear that in these images, Punch is attempting to negotiate its anxieties about a variety of spaces, both domestic (in all the senses of that term) and imperial. Moreover, images that are anxiety-laden in one geographical and ideological setting help to assuage the fears of another. Conclusion

Comedy becomes a means of negotiating these anxieties. Punch takes the imperial fear of rebellion and positions that fear against the comic image

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of crinoline-clad women protecting the borders of England from imperial revolt, assuaging through ridiculous contrast, an imperial fear in a domestic context. At the same time Punch is palliating the imperial fear of rebellion, it is also attempting to negotiate domestic anxieties. Punch often pictured women in crinoline as aggressive; because of the magnitude of the crinoline hoop, women were seen to be pushing men off pavements. In this way, women were threatening the very access men had to public spaces. In reducing women to crinoline-clad warriors ridiculously engaged in protecting England from invasion, women's invasion of the public sphere and India's invasion of England are rendered uncertainly comic due to the layering of the domestic anxiety upon the imperial anxiety. Punch, then, is attempting to negotiate its feelings about a variety of domestic and imperial spaces through comedy. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

'The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger', Punch (22 August 1857). 'Willing Hands for India', Punch (29 August 1857). 'Our National Defences', Punch (22 August 1857), p. 79. 'Preface', Punch (25 December 1858), pp. iii-iv. Christina Walkley, The Way to Wear 'Em: 150 Years of Punch on Fashion (London, Peter Owen, 1985), pp. 16-17. Katherine S. Van Eerde, 'Punch without Judy or, an Index Variorium of Victorian life', Victorian Institute Journal, vol. 20 (1992), p. 206. Nancy L. Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1999), p. 5. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 199-224, and Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 57-82. Sharpe notes that, 'British soldiers cut locks of hair from the dead women's heads as mementos that were passed from hand to hand as fetish objects of a pornographic nightmare'; Allegories of Empire, p. 65. Michael Edwardes, Red Year: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 (London, Hamilton, 1973), p. 88. Captain Mowbray Thomson, The Story ofCawnpore (London, Richard Bentley, 1859); W. J. Shepherd, A Personal Narrative of the Outbreak and Massacre at Cawnpore (New Delhi, Academic Books Corporation, 1980); George Dangerfield, Bengal Mutiny: The Story of the Sepoy Rebellion (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1933). Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. 1 (London, London Printing and Publishing Company, Ltd, 1859), p. 377. Ibid., p. 380. Arthur Prager, The Mahogany Tree: An Informal History of Punch (New York, Hawthorn Books, 1979), p. 18. The Clemency of Canning', Punch (24 October 1857). 'Too "Civil" by Half, Punch (7 November 1857). Jenny Sharpe, 'The unspeakable limits of rape: colonial violence and counterinsurgency', Genders, vol. 10 (Spring 1991), p. 37. Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 5. Anne McClintock similarly argues that, 'Women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct

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relation to national agency', in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 354. 19. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, p. 7. 20. Jane Mackay and Pat Thane, "The Englishwoman', in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920 (London, Croom Helm, 1986), p. 192. 21. Ibid. 22. Paxton, Writing under the Raj, p. 118. 23. A 'nautch' is a dance performed by professional dancing girls. 24. Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York, Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 53. 25. Paxton, Writing under the Raj, p. 34. 26. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, p. 66. 27. 'Verbum Sapienti', Punch (3 October 1857), p. 135. 28. Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan, The construction of woman in three popular texts of Empire: towards a critique of materialist feminism', Textual Practice, vol. 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989), p. 349. 29. Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The economy of Manichean allegory: the function of racial difference in colonialist literature', in Henry Louis Gates (ed.), 'Race', Writing, and Difference (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1985), p. 84. 30. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 2. 31. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siecle Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 110. 32. Sir George Trevelyan, Cawnpore (London, Macmillan and Company, 1907), p. 45. 33. James Grant, First Love and Last Love: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny (London, T. Nelson and Sons, 1869), p. 115. 34. Ibid., p. 284. 35. Ibid., p. 280. 36. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p. 193. 37. Grant, First Love and Last Love, p. 280. 38. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 111. 39. Grant, First Love and Last Love, p. 227. 40. Ibid., p. 568. 41. Paxton, Writing under the Raj, p. 121. 42. Grant, First Love and Last Love, p. 548. 43. Christina Walkley and Vanda Foster, Crinolines and Crimping Irons, Victorian Clothes: How They Were Cleaned and Cared For (London, Peter Owen, 1978), p. 20. 44. Ibid., p. 42. 45. Ibid. 46. Janet Murray, Strong Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from 19th Century England (New York, Pantheon, 1982), p. 65. 47. Walkley and Foster, Crinolines and Crimping Irons, p. 21. 48. Ibid., pp. 21-2. 49. Walkley, The Way to Wear 'Em, p. 12. 50. 'Crinoline for Gentlemen', Punch (31 October 1857), p. 183. 51. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 168. 52. 'Under the Mistletoe', Punch (3 January 1857), p. 10. 53. 'How about the Hoops?', Punch (29 August 1857), p. 94. 54. 'Beauty in Armour', Punch (18 July 1857), n.p. 55. 'How about the Hoops?', Punch (29 August 1857), p. 94. 56. Walkley, The Way to Wear 'Em, pp. 35-6. 57. 'Marriage and Its Difficulties', Punch (16 May 1857), p. 194. 58. Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinoline (New York, Theatre Arts Books, 1970), pp. 135-6.

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59. Mariana Valverde, The love of finery: fashion and the fallen woman in nineteenthcentury social discourse', Victorian Studies (Winter 1989), pp. 169-70. 60. 'Our Overcrowded Thoroughfares', Punch (6 September 1856), p. 93. 61. 'How about the Hoops?', Punch (29 August 1857), p. 94. 62. 'To a Lady', Punch (17 October 1857), p. 157. 63. 'Fashions in Paris', Punch (19 July 1856), p. 27. 64. 'Crinolineomania', Punch (27 December 1856), p. 253. 65. Ibid. 66. Dorothy M. Stetson, A Woman's Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 18. 67. Ibid., p. 20. 68. Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York, Garland Publishing, 1988), p. 224. 69. Nancy L. Paxton, 'Mobilizing chivalry: rape in British novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857', Victorian Studies, vol. 36 (Fall 1992), p. 8. 70. Stetson, A Woman's Issue, p. 30. 71. Ibid., pp. 20-1. 72. Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 62. 73. Paxton, Writing under the Raj, pp. 8, 11. 74. Leckie, Culture and Adultery, p. 67. 75. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 370. 76. Ibid., p. 375. 77. 'How about the Hoops?', Punch (29 August 1857), p. 94. 78. 'The Divorce-Bill Dissected', Punch (5 September 1857), p. 103. 79. 'Our National Defences', Punch (22 August 1857), p. 79. 80. Ibid. 81. 'Our National Defences', Punch (24 October 1857), p. 167. 82. 'Our National Defences', Punch (22 August 1857), p. 79. 83. 'Preface', Punch (25 December 1858), pp. iii-iv. 84. Ibid.

CHAPTER NINE

Cape-to-Cairo: Africa in Masonic fantasy PETER MERRINGTON

A staggered orientalism

The Jerusalemgangers, a pious band of Dutch trekkers in the mid-nineteenth century, heading up towards Pietersburg in the northern Transvaal, came across a river with a pyramid-shaped koppie. They concluded that they had reached Egypt, and they called this the river Nyl, or Nile. Their settlement of Nylstroom (Nile stream) has since developed into a large regional centre. Later in the nineteenth century the banks of the Orange or Gariep River, which runs from east to west along South Africa's northern border with Botswana and Namibia, became a flourishing, irrigated agricultural zone in the midst of the Kalahari desert. Again the parallel with the Nile was noted, and the first electrical transformer station in the region was built, in 1914, in the town of Kakamas, to resemble an Egyptian pylon temple. As with the Mississippi River in the United States, topography encourages fanciful comparisons. (The Mississippi basin includes a Memphis, a Cairo and - less convincingly - an Athens.) While the Cape-to-Cairo concept has been discussed in terms of the 'scramble for Africa' and Cecil Rhodes's colossal ambitions, and international politics in the 'age of empire', or in terms of the endeavours of heroic automobilists, this argument contends that the idea of a Cape-toCairo axis was sustained in the public imagination by a miscellany of less formal or less visible cultural practices, beliefs, whimsy and fantasy, such as these topological comparisons.1 These have in actual fact wielded a surprisingly enduring influence on assumptions about national and regional landscape and identity in colonial South Africa, in particular as far as the evolution of a concept of 'whiteness' is concerned. This chapter gathers together a variety of such material from the age of empire roughly 1870 to 1930 - which is offered as a form of explanation for the enduring popularity of the grand concept of the Cape-to-Cairo continental traverse. The miscellany of material runs from the sublime to the bathetic. At one extreme we find Stanley in his 1890 journal comparing the 'hoary' peaks of the 'Mountains of the Moon' to 'an Egyptian pyramid and sphinx'.2 At the other extreme we encounter in Cape Town between circa 1910 and 1930, 'C-to-C cigarettes, a brand of petrol called 'Sphinx Motor

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Spirit', and (a little later) the 'C-T-C Building', which houses a popular department store. The Empire Review (September 1938) published a piece entitled 'Cape to Cairo with an Ascot Hat'. In 1947 the aviator and author Cecil Lewis flew single-handed from England to Johannesburg, via Cairo and Nairobi, in order to establish a colony of Gurdjieff disciples as the intended survivors of a projected world cataclysm.3 The topic, as Robin Hallett wryly comments, 'was an extravagant and in practical terms totally fatuous concept but . . . well calculated to appeal to Rhodes's perfervid imagination'.4 Where a great deal of Western fantasy concerning the 'other' deals with aspects of the Middle and Far East and the subcontinent of India, the Cape-to-Cairo idea swings this fantasy southwards, in what may be termed a kind of 'staggered orientalism'. Perhaps the clearest statement of this swing from an east-west to a south-north axis is made by John Buchan. The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction is based on Buchan's experiences as a young administrator in South Africa immediately after the South African War of 1899-1902. In this book he discusses the 'great north road', by which nineteenth-century missionaries, hunters and traders journeyed up from the Northern Cape to Bechuanaland (Botswana), to the old Transvaal, and to the territories that were to become Rhodesia (Zimbabwe); and he projects from this route an imaginary highway stretching further north all the way up to Egypt: The romance which is inseparable from all roads belongs especially to those great arteries of the world which traverse countries and continents . . . And it is a peculiarity of the world's roads that this breath of romance blows most strongly on the paths which point to the Pole-star. The Aemilian Way, up which the Roman legions clanked to the battlefields of Gaul and Britain, or that great track which leads through India to the mountains of the north and thence to the steppes of Turkestan, captures the fancy more completely than any lateral traverse of the globe . . . Of all north roads I suppose the greatest to be that which runs from the Cape to Egypt . . . above all, for the fact that it is a traverse of the extreme length of a vast and mysterious continent.5 Buchan has a strategist's eye for terrain, for politics and for history, but his emphasis on 'northernness' opens a range of issues which go beyond commonsense government. At the time that Buchan was writing, these concern an emerging ideological set which identifies the North Pole and a mystical idea of northernness as a source of racial and spiritual superiority. Again, the references to the Aemilian Way and to the Great North Road of the Indian subcontinent bring to colonial Africa two dominant models of imperialism, one from ancient Rome, the other from the British Raj. Buchan's passage concludes: With a profound respect for the road, I am constrained to admit that it makes bad going . . . and that it is apt to cease suddenly and leave the traveller to his own devices. But for the eye of Faith, that wonderful possession of raw

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youth and wise old age, it is as broad and solid as the Appian Way; the wheels of empire and commerce pass over it, and cities, fairer than a mirage, seem to rise along its shadowy course.6 This mixture of Taith' and commerce is typical of the fin de siecle art nouveau imagination. The Cape-to-Cairo idea is both a prospect that is cast across a visionary landscape, and a prospectus for commercial schemes. Real estate and railways have always been closely linked, but in the idealist spirit of the turn of the century these are blended with a genially extravagant imagination. The greatest of these commercial and railway prospectuses, as far as the Cape-to-Cairo idea is concerned, is a massive compendium published in the 1920s by a London-based South African journalist, Leo Weinthal, who was something of a specialist on Egypt. His Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route, in five volumes, was deliberately intended to keep the topic alive in the public imagination long after Cecil Rhodes's day, largely for his own benefit as proprietor and editor of a weekly paper, the Africa News and Cape-to-Cairo Bulletin. He rounded up a respectable number of survivors from the earlier days of African exploration and colonization, whom he commissioned to write articles for his huge prospectus. Among these was the remarkable Victorian explorer and administrator, Sir Harry Johnston, who writes as follows on the origins of the Cape-to-Cairo concept: [It was] Stanley's letters home from Uganda to the Daily Telegraph in 1876 that first gave some definite impulse to British minds to establish an uninterrupted British control over South, Central, East, and North Africa which might link up with Egypt in a series of peaceful, prosperous, well-governed states. The interpreters of the idea were (Sir) Edwin Arnold, principal leader-writer to the Daily Telegraph, and Colonel J. A. Grant, the veteran explorer, who had been Speke's companion in the journey to the sources of the Nile. Edwin Arnold adumbrated the 'Cape-to-Cairo' idea in a pamphlet published in 1876. From this pamphlet, and still more from Arnold's conversation, the writer of this chapter derived the idea and the phrase The Cape to Cairo', and perhaps conveyed it to the mind of the Foreign Office, and especially to the imagination of the late Lord Salisbury, who, at any rate, allowed it to be used without disapproval in articles which I contributed to monthly reviews and the daily press in 1888 and 18897 This is matched by the following gem penned by W. T. Stead, in the Windsor Magazine of September 1899: The outer and visible reasons why the Cape to Cairo line is coming into being are simple and obvious enough. The first and dominating cause is the fact that the idea has fascinated the imagination of Mr Rhodes, and the second and hardly less potent reason is the fact that the Cape and Cairo both begin with the letter C. Possibly this second reason ought to have precedence over the first, for who knows how much of the fascination which has caught Mr Rhodes's fancy was due to 'apt alliteration's artful aid'?8

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There are other possible reasons why the idea 'caught on', and this chapter explores two of these: one concerning the representation of the Cape Colony as 'Mediterranean', and the other to do with the Egyptological aspects of colonial Freemasonry and the extraordinary fad which was known as the British Israelite Truth. The 'Mediterranean' Cape Colony

The Western Cape region of South Africa is, in technical parlance, geographically and climatically a 'Mediterranean' zone, even though it is some 6000 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. There is a deep stratum of cultural interpretation that lies beneath this geographical term. This stratum of cultural interpretation of the Cape, which is largely typical of Western cultural discourses from the late nineteenth century, is offered as a metaphorical seedbed in which the 'Cape-to-Cairo' concept was able to flourish. First, it is necessary to reconstruct, with extreme brevity, a school of philosophical idealism which prevailed among the thinkers who directed the affairs of the empire and early commonwealth, and which matched in general terms a popular discourse of social-evolutionary idealism during the Edwardian period. This broad school of thought (and the popular discourse in which it was propagated in the media) is the Oxford neoHegelian idealism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. John Buchan, and almost all of his young Oxford-educated colleagues in colonial administration, were profoundly influenced by this school of thought, as was Viscount Milner, the British High Commissioner for South Africa at the turn of the century, who was as familiar with administration in Egypt as in London or Cape Town. For these neo-Hegelians Egypt evinced the only respectably established sense of 'civilization' on the continent of Africa. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel writes of the evolution of civilizations over history and across the globe, an evolution which he claims to take place from east to west, a trajectory of the dawning of 'consciousness' which imitates the diurnal course of the sun. For Hegel, Africa had no history. The dawning of civilization (which for him is the grand narrative of 'history') does not reach southwards into the African continent. Africa was but 'on the threshold' of History. He makes an exception, however, for two sites on the Mediterranean seaboard of Africa - Phoenician Carthage, and Egypt. 'Africa', says Hegel, 'is no historical part of the World': It has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it that is in its northern part - belong to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it

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does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly mean by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History.9

The challenge for these neoHegelian administrators in South Africa in the years that led up to the formation of Union in 1910, as they understood it, was to engineer a 'dawning of consciousness', to thrust the new nation over just such a 'threshold' and onto the platform of the 'World's History' as a new dominion in the emerging British Commonwealth. In this philosophical context, Buchan would have been very conscious of the implications of linking the Cape to Egypt and shifting, as we have seen, from an east-west global traverse to a south-north axis. It may be argued that the discussion of a broad discourse from the late Victorian and the Edwardian periods, in which the Cape is made out to be 'Mediterranean', was underpinned by this neo-Hegelian understanding of world geography and world history. European upper-middle-class travellers and tourists in the nineteenth century were accustomed to visit the countries on the Mediterranean littoral, in particular Italy, Greece and Egypt, for a host of reasons running from amateur archaeology to health. Visitors to the Cape Colony (later the Cape Province) from the same social class applied their Mediterranean frame of reference to the southern tip of Africa, encouraged in this by cultural and material similarities. They noted that there was a long-established Islamic community at the Cape, that the painterly aesthetics of light, colour and shade resembled those of the antique world, and that the hot springs and dry air of the Cape interior were good for the health. The Greco-Roman antiquity of the Mediterranean region, its Etruscan and Minoan 'primitivism', and the practice of Egyptology, offered Western Europeans an accessible array of images of the exotic and archaic Other. This array of images is drawn upon by writers, connoisseurs, performers, tourists and travellers in the forging of an orientalist dimension to the cultural idea of Edwardian South Africa.10 Further, the ancient Mediterranean empires are a model for British imperial sentiment; and, in particular, the idea that Phoenicians first rounded the Cape in ancient times offers a distinct precedent for the modern colonial presence. The topic of an early Phoenician presence at the Cape was for two centuries the focus of recurrent speculation concerning a find of carbonized timber on the Cape Flats. At different times various figures advanced the possibility that this was the remains of one of Pharaoh Necho's Phoenician galleys; and the debate was sustained by archaeologists as recently as 1990.11 The most common form of expression of the Cape as 'Mediterranean' concerns the climate and landscape, and the interpretation of Cape landscape as picturesque. In his memoirs, the architect Sir Herbert Baker (Cecil

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Rhodes's protege, and the designer of the Union Buildings in Pretoria) makes this point: The view from the Grotto, as it was called [a cottage on the Groote Schuur estate on the slopes of Table Mountain], was of great beauty; it was a narrow vignette of that seen from the garden above Groote Schuur, the firwoods of the Flats and the distant blue-grey mountains being framed and thrown back in perspective by the dark velvet-green stone-pines, as was Turner's use of the pine tree in the foregrounds of his Italian landscapes.12

In the same text Baker speaks of 'the air on the top of [Table Mountain], as pellucid as that on Hymettus', and The calm sea [of False Bay], like a Venetian lagoon, [that] reflected the mountain peaks coloured by the low morning sun'. The tourist authorities in Edwardian Cape Town advertised their city as the 'Venice of the South Atlantic' and the 'Naples of the South'. In his memoirs John Buchan describes the Cape landscape as follows: Tn the Cape Peninsula you have the classic graces of Italy, stony, sun-baked hills rising from orchards and vineyards and water-meadows'; and 'If you seek the true classical landscape outside Italy and Greece you will find it rather in the Cape Peninsula, in places like the Paarl and Stellenbosch.'13 Lord Randolph Churchill is quoted as saying how 'the lofty granite mass of Table Mountain, the distant ranges of hills stretching over half the horizon and the calm waters of Table Bay brought into the mind successively Gibraltar, the Riviera, and the Bay of Palermo.'14 These habits of projection are perhaps commonplace behaviour in lateVictorian and Edwardian landscape writing, deriving from the enormous influence of Ruskin, and influenced by travel guides such as Murray and Baedeker. The first tourist handbook to be published by the Corporation of Cape Town in 1911 adjures the traveller to 'bring your volumes of Ruskin when starting "Southward Ho!"' The editor of the guidebook quotes at length from The Stones of Venice to indicate how apposite this text is to the Cape. The history of Western tourism is very much the history of travel in Italy, Greece and Egypt, as Piers Brendon, the chronicler of Thomas Cook and Son, has demonstrated.15 It is understandable that the experience of these regions should be transposed into writings about the Cape. A seasoned travel writer and editor of a travel-related nineteenth-century English literary magazine, The Argosy, writes as follows to a friend about his new-found pleasure in the Cape coastal landscape: Point after point stretching out into a succession of lovely bays, and the sea today rolled over the white sand with a soothing, sleepy murmur: the most wonderfully green, transparent water imaginable. Not more lovely the waters of the Mediterranean which you have watched beating against the classic shores of Alexandria: not more lovely the waters which flow upwards to the mouth of your beloved Golden Horn.16

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Finding a blue lotus flower in a pool on the road to the country town of Stellenbosch, this traveller waxes nostalgic for the Orient: Visions of a flashing sunlit Nile; of moonlit Pyramids steeped in the solemn silence of midnight, the solitude of endless plains; of wonderful mosques; of the tombs of the Caliphs, where we spent those magic hours under the moonbeams . . . We would have plucked and carried away this wonderful solitary lotus flower, but it was out of reach, and we had to leave it to blossom in its earthly paradise.17

There are material reasons why this orientalist frame of reference should have been so prevalent. The Islamic connection is one. Another was the perception in the mid-nineteenth century that the climate at the Cape was beneficial for sufferers of consumption. Yet another was the habit of Anglo-Indians to spend their furlough at the Cape, thereby ensuring that they did not fall onto half-pay. This gave rise to an interpretation of the Cape as a place for leisured activities, on the existing model of popular continental and Mediterranean resorts. A report, in the Egyptian Gazette of 5 July 1898, of a conversazione given by the British Balneological and Climatological Society, commends the health facilities in Egypt and South Africa as superior to those to be found on the continent: Continental health resorts are often unsuited - stressful, costly, unhygienic, and bad . . . This must of necessity lead to the opening up of the unrivalled health resorts of the British colonies. Egypt and South Africa have already begun to reap the benefits, and Australia, New Zealand and Canada will no doubt soon do so.

Perhaps the most celebrated Victorian consumptive at the Cape was Lucie Duff Gordon. This climate', she writes about the Cape, 'is evidently a styptic of great power. I shall write a few lines to the Lancet about Caledon and its hot baths/ Her Letters from the Cape (1861) were followed by the publication of Letters from Egypt (1865).18 After a year at the Cape Lucie Duff Gordon sought drier conditions in Egypt, and she became a celebrity on the banks of the Nile, living in a house built on top of the temple of Philae at Luxor. She was a leading figure in London literary society, a friend of George Meredith and of Kinglake, the author of the orientalist classic Eothen. Colonialist ethnographic speculations

The Cape author Dorothea Fairbridge's novel Piet of Italy (1913) dramatizes the Islamic and the Mediterranean connections.19 In this narrative a child is washed up at Kalk Bay harbour and rescued by a Moslem family who live in Cape Town's 'Malay Quarter' of Schotsche Kloof. They believe the child to be their son Piet, restored to them by Allah after being drowned. He is raised as a faithful Moslem, trained in the Koran and

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speaking the Tad. He demonstrates an aptitude for drawing and sculpture, which gains him an apprenticeship with a Cape Town builder and stonemason. In his late teens he meets with an accident, and as he emerges from a prolonged coma he recovers a long-lost identity in which he is Pietro Casanera, the Catholic scion of a noble Florentine family who had been drowned in a shipwreck off the Cape coast. The accident arises from a necessary coincidence. Relatives of Pietro's lost family shipped an Egyptian obelisk from Italy to the Cape, intending it to be erected to the memory of the Casaneras. On the base of the obelisk are two inscriptions, one ancient and one new: one that reads 'Neter mut, Bareniket' or 'Divine Mother, Berenice', and one that runs as follows: Pietro, Elena e Pietro Casanera. Nessum maggior dolore Che recordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria

Piet (or Pietro) stumbles and hits his head against this obelisk while he is assisting in its erection; and so this Freemasonic mnemonic device becomes the means by which he recovers his memory of a lost identity, heritage, culture, language and religion. Alongside the topic of the 'Cape Malays' we encounter a recurring attempt to link the Cape 'Bushmen' with Mr-people from northern Africa or southern Europe, such as the Hyksos or the Etruscans. As early as 1859, one Frederick Maskew, writing in Cape Town, published The History of Joseph, with an 'appendix on the analogy between the subjugation of the Egyptians to the Hyksos, and the Kafirs to the British'. Carl Peters, the German romancer of the Zimbabwe Ruins, attempts to draw links between the 'Hottentots' and the Egyptians.20 In a novel, The Uninvited, which is set in England and in Egypt, Dorothea Fairbridge has the first-person narrator speculate in a similar fashion, as follows: Leaving out the revelation of the boy's soul, we could have traced the proportion of European influence as compared with that of the aboriginal Hottentot, together with the considerations of surroundings and their influence on the mother, as distinguished from heredity. Then, taking the Hottentot as a starting point, we would have pursued our investigations into the history of that curious race, debating whether the theory which links them (through the Bushmen) to the Cave Dwellers of ancient Spain, is tenable, and whether there is anything to be said in favour of those who assert that the Hyksos Kings of Egypt were in reality Hottentots, and that the so-called Egyptian type may be traced throughout Africa from north to south.21

This kind of speculation finds its place in the primitivist debates of the early twentieth century, and in particular in the aesthetic primitivism of modern artistic and literary movements, as typified by D. H. Lawrence in his 'savage pilgrimage' to Italy and to Ceylon, Australia and New Mexico. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia was illustrated by the South African artist Jan

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Juta, son of the speaker of the Cape House of Assembly. Juta travelled in Mediterranean Europe with Lawrence, and his later writings (including speculative meditations on the provenance of the Zimbabwe Ruins) are deeply influenced by Lawrence's themes and idiom.22 Primitivism is further expressed during the 1920s, in the interest in the Kalahari bushmen, and typically in Laurens Van der Post's Jungian understanding of these people.23 The Mr-people discourse runs from Benin bronzes to Lawrentian primitivism, to modernist ethnographic speculations and to Jungian theory. Jan Juta's sister, Rene, lived in the south of France where she wrote two travel books in the Lawrentian dithyrambic style, illustrated by her brother. In her book Cannes and the Hills (dedicated to Rudyard Kipling), she makes the following statement, which is typical of this romantic primitivism: But gone are the old songs and dances, the dances of Provence wherein lay a literature of the people. In the late seventeenth century, the dance called 'Rigaudin' was forbidden on pain of a beating, and later, on pain of death; it being regarded as a public disgrace, so curious were the gestures and figures of the dance. I suspect the Rigaudin of being the remains of a pagan, sacrificial, ritualistic dance, less bacchanalian, more like the curious obscene dances of the Hottentots of Africa, who so oddly resemble the small mountain race which lived in the caves above Nice.24

Perhaps the most striking of contemporary manifestations of the preoccupation with the Mediterranean were, however, architectural. Freemasonry, with its complex rituals and self-invented genealogies lent, during the period of the New Imperialism, a powerful symbolism to the idea of the built environment. This was of course by no means the only set of meanings accruing to architecture at the time. Other contemporary discourses around building derived from Ruskin and his ideas concerning the historicity of architecture; and from the related revival, at the turn of the century, of vernacular architectural styles. At the same time, Herbert Baker recognized the value of the grand style, of classical simplicity, for the design of public spaces and buildings in South Africa, a country (says Baker in an early essay) that 'the Arch-Architect has designed so essentially in the "grand manner"'. 'It would be easy to imagine', he continues, 'a Pergamos or Halicarnassus growing out of any semi-circle of the cliffs that stretch from Muizenberg to Simon's Town, or rising from any of the encircling hills of Pretoria or Bloemfontein'.25 In the same essay Baker clearly states the link between climate and architectural style: It is the South African architect's privilege, and one much envied by his fellow craftsmen in northern Europe, to have always at hand the most valuable of all materials for his craft (which the Greeks and Romans also had), warm sunbathed wall surfaces contrasted with deep, cool shadows.26

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SYMBOLS OF RHODES' WAY FROM CAPE TO CAIRO

The Southern Cross Pilots stars to the Navigators of the Cape of Storms

The Stone Birds of Zimbabwe Gleams in Darkest Africa of Northern Lights

The Mountains of the Moon and the

Source of the Nile Figure 6 Glyph designed by Herbert Baker showing 'Symbols of Rhodes' Way from Cape to Cairo'

In 1900 Cecil Rhodes sent Baker 'to visit the old countries of the Mediterranean'. Says Baker in his autobiography: 'He wished me particularly to see "Rome, Paestum, Agrigentum, Thebes, and Athens", and to study other such great masterpieces of architecture and sculpture.'27 Baker subsequently travelled in Egypt, Greece, Italy and Sicily, and established an architectural scholarship at the British School at Rome for South African students, in order to give them 'the opportunity of studying the great architectural and artistic traditions of classical art in the Mediterranean countries which have a similar range of climatic conditions to those which prevail in South Africa'.28 As is well known, his own career saw him designing public buildings (other than in England) in Salisbury (Harare), Nairobi, Cairo, Khartoum, and - with Sir Edwin Lutyens - the vast project of New Delhi in India.29 Freemasons, British Israelites, and the Zimbabwe Ruins

The glyph designed by Herbert Baker (Figure 6) is a symbolic statement of the Cape-to-Cairo axis, including the Southern Cross, the Zimbabwe Birds, the Mountains of the Moon, the source of the Nile, and the crescent

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moon of Islam.30 The Zimbabwe Birds were alleged to have been the relics of a foreign (Semitic or Phoenician) culture that was supposed to have built the Great Zimbabwe (the elaborate and vast complex of dry-stone walls, dating back to roughly AD 800 in the fertile Mutirikwi Valley of Zimbabwe). For the imperialists, built environments were indices not of indigenous African culture but of lost 'white' or 'European' or 'Semitic' civilizations in Africa.31 As in the idea of an early Phoenician presence at the Cape, this particular fantasy has its motivation as the identifying of traces of settler precedents in Africa. It also reflects a racialist desire to diminish the cultural achievements of indigenous African peoples. The significant point for the purpose of this chapter is that, again, links are made between southern Africa and the Middle East. History, geography, topography, ethnography and fiction coincide in a broad attempt to narrate Africa as occupying a lowly place in the late nineteenth-century social evolutionary fantasy of progress or the 'march of man'. Any developments in Africa were made out by these discourses to reflect either long-lost exogenous civilizations, or the contemporaneous dawning of a quasi-Hegelian new historical consciousness (the kind of propaganda which was mooted with the formation of the South African Union in 1910). The most apparent examples of this fantasy are the African novels of Henry Rider Haggard, in which lost cities, lost civilizations and lost peoples are described, with gestures at a composite Mediterranean (especially Near Eastern) origin. In Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), the narrator fantasizes about exogenous monuments in East Africa: 'Ay/ said Evans, 'but I will tell you a queerer thing than that;' and he went on to tell me how he had found in the far interior a ruined city, which he believed to be the Ophir of the Bible, and, by the way, other more learned men have said the same long since poor Evans's time . . . [T]his story of an ancient civilisation and of the treasure which those old Jewish or Phoenician adventurers used to extract from a country long since lapsed into the darkest barbarism took a great hold on my imagination.32

Twenty years later R. N. Hall, in his book on Great Zimbabwe (the Zimbabwe Ruins in what was then Rhodesia), speculates as follows: As one strays through the Sacred Enclosure, thoughts come: - ... was Rhodesia the Havilah of Genesis; did it provide the Solomonic gold; of the close kinship of these successful ancient gold-seekers from Yemen or Tyre and Sidon to the Hebrews of Palestine; and of their intimate connection in origin, language, and neighbourhood which Holy Writ abundantly declares existed from the ninth chapter of Genesis until Paul preached in Phoenicia?33

Theodore Bent, who had worked on ancient archaeological sites in Greece, brought to the Zimbabwe Ruins in 1891 an epistemological framework which came directly from his background in 'Indo-Aryan' archaeological reconstruction. He found correspondences between the layout of features of the ruins and features of ancient Greek temples. A. H. Keane, who

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worked on the Zimbabwe Ruins with R. N. Hall, is adamant that these were Semitic in origin, and he refers directly to the 'unlettered Jews and Phoenicians of the time of David, Solomon and Hiram' as having been involved in the making of the site and the mining of gold from the region. He romanticizes as follows: After that [Solomonic] epoch the intercourse with South Africa was interrupted, because 'Jehoshaphat made ships of Tharshish to go to Ophir for gold; but they went not; for the ships were broken at Ezion-geber' (I Kings xxii. 48). And then the star of Jacob waned, and the scattering of the Ten Tribes of Israel was presently followed by the dire calamities that fell upon Judah, and put an end for ever to all further quest of treasure in the Austral seas.34

These late nineteenth-century interpretations of the Zimbabwe Ruins were debunked a long time ago, but what remains of interest are the mindsets which lie behind them. Bent exhibits a mainstream late nineteenth-century archaeological interest which focuses on the quest for 'Indo-Aryan' roots; Keane appears to indicate that two very popular contemporaneous fads (often linked to the Indo-Aryan speculations of the time) have directed his interpretation. One is Freemasonry, which draws on I Kings (chapter 7) for its originary myth, and lays emphasis on the figures of Solomon and Hiram. The other is the extraordinary fad which was known as the British Israelite Truth, and which claimed that after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel and the dispersal of the Ten Tribes (and the remaining two tribes with the end of the Kingdom of Judah), two sub-tribes belonging to the sons of Joseph (born in Egypt), namely the tribes of Ephraim and Mannaseh, migrated to Britain and became the British. According to British Israelite Truth, the British (and their cousins the Anglo-Saxon Americans) thereby inherit the throne of David and are destined to rule the world. British Israelite Truth indulges in a hodge-podge of quasiarchaeological evidence and etymological fantasy to substantiate its claims, including an interpretation of the structure of the Great Pyramid of Cheops by the Royal Astronomer for Scotland, Sir Charles PiazziSmyth, as an architectural time-line that reveals the destiny of the British.35 (Piazzi-Smyth, incidentally, served under Herschel as an astronomer at the Observatory in Cape Town in the early nineteenth century.) The 'Egyptian Rites' and Rider Haggard

Studying Freemasonic lore, it becomes evident that the development of a colonialist mythology surrounding south-east Africa and the Great Zimbabwe depends on the widespread practice of Freemasonry in the British empire. The eighteenth-century social adventurer Cagliostro introduced the 'Egyptian Rites' into continental and British Freemasonry, establishing the myth that Freemasonry has its roots in Egypt. Masonry is centred on metaphors of architecture and building, and during the age of empire this

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practice came to be closely associated with the idea of the social fabric of civil society. The foundation stones of public buildings were customarily laid with Freemasonic ritual, and Masonic metaphors of 'cornerstones' and 'keystones' and 'arches' were frequently employed to describe progress in the moral and political unity of colonial societies. There are two buildings in the Western Cape dating from the early and mid-nineteenth century that are deliberately Egyptian in form and ornamentation, and which bear evidence of Freemasonic symbolism. One, in Cape Town itself, is the 'Egyptian Building' of the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), which resembles a columned Egyptian temple. Another, in the town of Paarl, is a prestigious Afrikaans boys' school, the Paarl Gymnasium, which imitates a pylon temple and is decorated with stucco uraei and other Egyptological devices. Both of these buildings reflect the enormous influence of Freemasonry in nineteenthcentury Cape colonial culture. The 'Egyptian Building' is near the oldest and most elegant Freemason Lodge in South Africa, the Lodge de Goede Hoop (designed in Palladian style in the eighteenth century by two expatriate continental Masons), which served for two decades as the lower house of the old Cape Parliament. The Paarl Gymnasium is adjacent to a Freemason Lodge of Dutch lineage. Masonic lore holds that the 'wisdom' of the 'Craft' originated in Egypt and came to repose with a craftsman, Hiram 'the Son of the Widow of the Tribe of Naphtali', whom King Hiram of Tyre sent to Solomon for the construction of his temple. Hiram the 'Son of the Widow' (a standard encryption for Freemasons) was murdered by jealous apprentices, and his body hidden and subsequently resurrected - a parallel with the story of Christ, and the Egyptian myth of Osiris. For Rudyard Kipling (an avid Freemason) Queen Victoria was the 'Widow', and her 'sons' were the soldiers in her imperial regiments.36 The figure of Isis, the sinister consort of Osiris, enters variously into the fiction of Kipling's friend Haggard as 'She', as 'Gagool', or as the dark queen Sorais in Alan Quatermain (1887). These figures are kin to the 'Queen of the Night' in Mozart's masonic opera The Magic Flute. The two pillars to Solomon's temple, mentioned in Chronicles, are named in Hebrew Jachin and Boaz, meaning 'strength' and 'beauty', a common Masonic pairing that seems to be personified by the rebarbative Horace Holly and his Apollonian companion Leo Vincey in Haggard's She (1886) and Ayesha (1905). Many of Haggard's descriptions in his African yarns of symbolic landscape, and of buildings and monumental masonry, are either explicitly linked with ancient Egypt or Phoenicia, or bear a striking resemblance to eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Western Egyptological fantasies, such as the early stage-sets for Mozart's opera. The three colonial adventurers in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines encounter, in a lost African country, three stone figures that guard the entrance to a treasure chamber. One of these figures is a female form with a crescent moon on her head. The adventurers reckon that these figures

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must represent 'Ashtoreth [Astarte] the Goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon', names, the narrator recollects, which were the names of the 'strange gods' that Solomon pursued in I Kings 5-7.37 Inside the treasure chamber is yet another colossus guarding the trove, a figure in a setting which coincides precisely with grotto stage settings for The Magic Flute designed for productions in the early nineteenth century.38 Again, the city of the sun in Alan Quatermain may be linked to representations of the Egyptian Heliopolis. Martin Bernal cites Frances Yates's references to the Renaissance writer Tommaso Campanella's Utopian Citta del Sole as an 'architectural memory system'. Campanella's city, says Bernal, is 'populated by white-robed, pure and religious Solarians who are transparently Egyptian, and its buildings form an ideal model for the universe or a heliocentric system of planets'. Bernal adds, 'Here it should be remembered that Masonic ideology was built around the notion of sacred buildings symbolizing the universe.'39 These are distinct features of Haggard's East African city of the 'Zu-Vendi' in Alan Quatermain. On the subject of the 'city of the sun', in 1905 a new suburb of Cairo was built by private speculators, as housing for colonial and expatriate administrators and merchants, and named 'Heliopolis'. This was designed according to Sir Ebenezer Howard's novel Garden City concept (his Garden City Association, formed in 1899, introduced to urban planning the idea of green belts and satellite towns), with thematic ('Andalusian' and 'Moroccan') architecture and roads radiating in spoked-wheel clusters. At the centre of this garden city the entrepreneur behind the scheme, Baron Edouard Empain (who designed the Paris Metro system), built for himself a fantasy palace that resembles a mixture of Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Mogul temples. This reminds us of the contemporary trend (held as a central tenet by Freemasonry) away from orthodox Christianity and towards a composite faith, which would embrace Christian, Hebrew, Moslem and other beliefs - an imperial and cross-cultural development.40 Heliopolis itself enters into this Freemasonic creed as follows: its ancient Egyptian name was On, and this is included in the Freemasonic word for the 'Supreme Being' or 'Grand Architect of the Universe', whom they term 'Jabulon', this being a composite of the Judeo-Christian 'Yahweh', the Carthaginian and Phoenician 'Baal', and the Egyptian 'On'. Masonry's 'Grand Architect of the Universe' is intended to embrace all religions. To this degree it is an ideal creed system for an empire as diverse as was that of Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and this inclusive aspect of the Craft seems to reflect a syncretic imperial idealism such as we encounter in the work of Haggard's literary friend and confidante, Rudyard Kipling. As far as literal Masonic connections between South Africa and Egypt are concerned, at the turn of the century we find evidence of numerous civilian and regimental Masonic lodges in both countries, as was the case also in India. In Egypt we find Freemasonry headed by such influential

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figures as Kitchener, and it is more than obvious that this imperial creed system afforded a means of propagating not only hierarchical social networks, but also a set of imperial genealogies similar to those adopted by the popular fad that was known as the British Israelite Truth.41 This, and Freemasonry, lay claim to the virtues of oriental antiquity in the name of imperial Britain. Conclusion

The Cape-to-Cairo idea accrues a new dimension when fantasies of Solomonic wisdom and protestant teleology are layered onto imperial ambition, and these are garnished with speculations concerning the Great Pyramid, Egyptian hieratic mysteries and the priesthood of Heliopolis. This might explain why such an impracticable geographical fantasy should have endured for so long, sustained by a complex ramification of racial and cultural speculations. It continues in unexpected forms long after the passing of the age of empire, for instance in the fictions of the South African popular novelist Wilbur Smith, and in the artificial heritage which is invented for South African pleasure-domes such as the Sun City casino complex near Rustenburg in the North-West Province, or the Ratanga Junction amusement park near Cape Town which is modelled on Indiana Jones mythology.42 In conclusion, the general point offered is that the Cape-to-Cairo set of ideas and images is a composite fantasy which derives from a variety of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century popular Western and colonialist social habits, myths and fictions. The following poem, published in 1909, celebrates this composite fantasy. The imagery turns railway engineering into a titanic heroism, where the compelling entities of 'steeds of steel' and 'thunderwheels' appear to seek a natural destiny, even as they celebrate the landscape through which they beat. Modern prowess and power are naturalized and yoked with antiquity in a triumphant synthesis which 'binds a continent': From the Cape to Cairo From Cape Town's mountain-minster, from Durban's lake of sleep The steeds of steel are hasting, their inland tryst to keep; From Inyak and Algoa, from rock-barr'd Buffalo For whereso'er the white men fare, those steeds of steel must go. Across the tawny desert that slender thread is flung, O'er arch'd and column'd granite the bridge of bronze is hung; Beneath the Rainbow Forest 'tis washed with torrent spray, And thru' the sand, one burning band, sparkles the living way. By silent Tanganyika the thunder-wheel shall beat, By all the land-bound waters shall press those flaming feet -

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Shall pierce the central forests for many an endless mile, Burst with their freight through Egypt's gate, and race beside the Nile. The oldest of the cities shall see earth's newest things; The oldest of the rivers shall feel their rushing wings. Oh, messengers of magic, not vainly are ye spent; The word ye give makes nations live, and binds a continent!43 Notes 1. It is difficult to trace any literature on the topic of the 'Cape-to-Cairo' idea that is not strictly first-hand travel narrative (of which there are many), for instance Anthony Smith's High Street Africa (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1961), or synoptic histories of the period that deal with the transcontinental idea in terms of the 'scramble for Africa' and exploration, such as Mark Strage's Cape to Cairo: Rape of a Continent (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1973). The standard work on the period is Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London, Macmillan, 1981). Lois A. C. Raphael's The Cape to Cairo Dream: A Study in British Imperialism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1936), deals with political and diplomatic history. There is a fair number of very early commentaries on the idea, in such period journals as the Fortnightly Review, the Empire Review, the Contemporary Review, United Empire, and The Nineteenth Century. The fivevolume opus published by the enthusiast Leo Weinthal, The Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route from 1887 to 1922 (London, The Pioneer Publishing Co., 1923), remains a work to be excavated for primary material. The present writer has published an extended article, 'A staggered orientalism: the Cape-to-Cairo idea', Poetics Today, vol. 22, no. 2 (2001). 2. I am grateful to my colleague Hermann Wittenberg for pointing this out, in his paper on the 1906 Abruzzi expedition to the Ruwenzori mountains; 'Ruwenzori: imperialism and desire in African alpinism', Proceedings of the South African Society for General Literary Studies (March 1998), pp. 235-44. 3. The Russian Theodore Gurdjieff was a kind of Svengali-figure who practised alternative and Eastern forms of psychic wholeness and spirituality in the early decades of the twentieth century, attracting a large following of converts. 4. Robin Hallett, Africa since 1875 (London, Heinemann, 1975), p. 496. 5. John Buchan, The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction (Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1903), p. 146. 6. Ibid., p. 148. 7. In Leo Weinthal (ed.), Cape to Cairo Railway, vol. 1, p. 65. 8. Quoted by William Plomer, Cecil Rhodes (Cape Town, David Philip, 1984; first published 1933), p. 142. 9. G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London, Bell and Deldy, 1872), p. 103. 10. It is noteworthy that, in 1910, the year of SA Union, Diaghilev's Ballet Russe produced Sheherazade at the Paris Opera, with the orientalist choreography, libretto, and stagesetting of Fokine and Bakst. Cleopatra was produced in the preceding year, and the Hindu-styled Le Dieu Bleu in 1912. 11. See Bernard O'Sullivan, 'A report on drilling and trenching on the Woltemade Flats, Cape Town, in 1988 and 1989', South African Journal of Science, vol. 86 (1990), pp. 487-8. 12. Sir Herbert Baker, Architecture and Personalities (London, Country Life, 1944), p. 32. 13. John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), pp. 35, 117. 14. Lord Randolph Churchill, in The Cape of Good Hope: Being the Official Handbook of the City of Cape Town (Cape Town, Corporation of the City, 1911), p. 2.

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15. Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, Seeker and Warburg, 1991). See also John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987) for an excellent discussion of the significance of the Mediterranean in the history of modern tourism. 16. Charles W. Wood, letter published in The Argosy (1894), p. 144. 17. Ibid., p. 230. 18. Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 1863-65 (London, Macmillan, 1865); Letters from the Cape, annotated by Dorothea Fairbridge (London, Humphrey Milford, 1927). For an excellent account of Duff Gordon, see Katherine Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994). 19. Dorothea Fairbridge, Piet of Italy (Cape Town, J. C. Juta, 1913). For a study of Fairbridge's work see P. J. Merrington, 'Pageantry and primitivism: Dorothea Fairbridge and the "Aesthetics of Union'", Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (1995), pp. 643-56. 20. Carl Peters, The Eldorado of the Ancients (Bulawayo, Rhodesiana Reprint Library, 1977; first published 1902), pp. 387-91. 21. Dorothea Fairbridge, The Uninvited (London, Edward Arnold, 1926), p. 128. 22. Jan Juta, Background in Sunshine: Memories of South Africa (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), pp. 182-93. 23. See Van der Post's syncretic comments on Jung and the 'Bushmen' in his Jung and the Story of Our Time (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983), pp. 48-56; and his A Walk with a White Bushman (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), p. 33 and passim. 24. Rene Juta, Cannes and the Hills (London, Martin Seeker, 1924), p. 94. 25. Sir Herbert Baker, 'The architectural needs of South Africa', The State (May 1909), p. 517. 26. Ibid., pp. 512-24; see p. 522. 27. Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 35. 28. Ibid., p. 36. 29. Lutyens and Baker were commissioned by the British government to design a parliamentary building, senate house, government buildings, Viceregal palace, and residential garden city for the Indian government on a site outside Delhi, known as New Delhi. For a first-rate account of this massive project, which ran for nearly two decades, see Robert Grant Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi (London, Yale University Press, 1981). 30. From the title page of Baker's biography of Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes, by His Architect (London, Oxford University Press, 1934). The same glyph appears with variations in stucco on the walls of Baker's London House and South Africa House in London, and Rhodes House in Oxford, all built in the same decade. 31. See Peter Garlake, Great Zimbabwe Described and Explained (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1982), and Wilfrid Mallows, The Mystery of the Great Zimbabwe (London, Hale, 1985), for treatment of the history of the reception of the ruins by colonial authors. 32. Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (Johannesburg, Ad Donker, 1885), p. 21. 33. R. N. Hall, Great Zimbabwe (London, Methuen, 1905), p. 15. 34. A. H. Keane in Hall, Great Zimbabwe, pp. xl-xli. 35. Sir Charles Piazzi-Smyth, Our Heritage in the Great Pyramid (London, 1864). 36. Rudyard Kipling, "The Widow at Windsor', Barrack-Room Ballads (London, 1892). 37. Haggard, King Solomon's Mines, p. 198. 38. See, for instance, the illustrations of stage settings in James Stevens Curl, The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry (London, Batsford, 1991), pp. 154-5. 39. Martin Bernal, Black Athena, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 176. 40. This trend is evident at the close of the nineteenth century in the popular fascination with spiritism (pursued with keen interest by Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), and the emergence of new cults such as Mary Baker Eddie's Christian Science,

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or Annie Besant's Hare Krishna movement (with which the imperial architect and colleague of Herbert Baker, Sir Edwin Lutyens, became involved via his wife's theosophical interests), Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Movement, the rise of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, and the cult that developed around the person of Theodore Gurdjieff. See also Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1840-1935 (Wellingborough, Aquarian Press, 1985), for links between occultism and freemasonry in Austria-Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 41. The British Israelite Truth enjoyed its heyday as a cult movement in the years of the new imperialism, roughly 1870 to 1930. The cult held that the 'Anglo-Saxon race' was one of the lost tribes of Israel, the British being the senior branch of this tribe, and the Americans their cousins. The British empire would then, as a global organization, become the underpinning of the Kingdom of God. The British Israelite Truth published books such as Mary Hazell Gayer's The Heritage of the Anglo-Saxon Race (1928), Henry William John Senior's The British Israelites or Evidences of Our Hebrew Origin Gathered from History, Genealogy, Philology, etc. (1885), and F. Wallace Connon's World Government: The Drama of the Ages (1946). 42. For a lively discussion of the contemporary commercial replication of Rider Haggard myths in southern Africa, see Martin Hall, 'The Legend of the Lost City: or, The Man with the Golden Balls', Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 21, no. 2 (1996), pp. 179-99. 43. From Lance Fallaw, An Ampler Sky (London, Macmillan, 1909).

CHAPTER TEN

Laughing matters: the comic timing of Irish joking LAURA SALISBURY

Who's laughing?

It would be difficult to imagine a scene less amusing than the following encounter: 'Look, a Negro!' The circle was drawing a bit tighter . . . I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity . . . I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships . . . My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.1

Clearly, for Frantz Fanon and for the postcolonial critics who have followed him, colonial violence is simply not a laughing matter. And yet, laughter is not wholly absent from the colonial scene; rather, the absence of humour within postcolonial analyses would seem more like an inversion of what is a striking and weary recurrence of comedy within the discourse of colonialism. Indeed, although one might expect Irish history to stifle humour, seared as it has been by what Brendan Bradshaw describes as 'successive waves of conquest and colonization, by bloody wars and uprisings, by traumatic dislocation, by lethal racial antagonisms, and, indeed, by its own nineteenth-century version of a holocaust',2 it is impossible to consider stereotypical representations of Irish identity without noticing the ways in which they have been determined and delimited by comedy. A buffoon and a comic foil, the stereotype and its theatrical analogue, the stage-Irishman, is risibly dim-witted, subservient and linguistically incapable - a figure whose 'paddy-whackery' is coded as other to the rational subject.3 But then, perhaps it is not so strange that laughter and colonial violence might have converse with one another, for the fond ideal that the Irishman is an intellectually primitive but loyal subject is never too far from a more threatening form of irrationality that might require containment. As Declan Kiberd reminds us, the stage Irishman is 'on the one hand, the threatening, vainglorious soldier, and, on the other,

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the feckless but cheerily reassuring servant'.4 If the stereotype of the stupid, 'good-natured Gael' is refused by the colonized, it is replaced by the fantasy that the Irishman must be an aggressive barbarian, a body divested of reasoning humanity who might return laughter only to smile as he murders his master.5 According to Fanon, laughter does, and perhaps always will, return. The black man, whose laughter has been stifled as he is located within a position of helpless and distended corporeality, is able to laugh as he returns the objectifying gaze, resists the helpless silence of being a fantasized object and exclaims: '"Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, madame!" ... I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh.'6 Fanon thus seems to offer a way for laughter to be reintegrated into the postcolonial project; he offers the possibility that laughing at could be transmuted into laughing back, that telling a joke might offer resistance to those who would simply wish to see you as one. Although the traditional Irish joke can be read as the paradigmatic instance of (ex)colonizers laughing with assumed superiority at their own representation of an (ex)colonized people, there might be a possibility that Irish comedy could function as an example of a culture asserting its own incongruity under a colonizing gaze and, in effect, laughing back at the centralized culture which would seek to portray such knowingness as the stupidity of the unaware. But in exploring the relationship between comedy and representations of the Irish, the distinctions between laughing at and laughing back seem both particularly important and remarkably unclear. Although the English have persisted in coding their near neighbours as risibly stupid, or more particularly as inept speakers, equally, there is a long and culturally specific tradition of Irish comedy which has profoundly informed instances of Irish self-representation.7 Irish comedy can indeed be knowing, as James Joyce suggests when he marks out Oscar Wilde as a 'court jester to the English'.8 The jester is a servant, a slave to his master's whims who is the butt of laughter issuing from perceived superiority; but he is also one who can criticize the prevailing order, whose wit indicates skilful manipulation rather than blundering foolishness. Although Kiberd remarks critically upon the 'fatal [English] propensity to turn any Irish artist into a mere entertainer',9 Terry Eagleton puts into the mouth of Oscar Wilde a genuinely funny claim for the guerrilla potential of the threatening proximity that such an entertainer is allowed to the structures of power: 'You cannot bite the hand that does not feed you/10 Of course, to be the object of the colonizers' regard is to be dangerously subject to their tendency to code you as an object whose unselfconscious stupidity is an inverted reflection of their own self-aware good sense, but such proximity might also offer the possibility of distorting that reflection. Where comic stupidity becomes self-conscious, it might disrupt and disturb the placid and seemingly unchallenged direction of colonial power.

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In separating out the entangled prepositions of laughing at and laughing back, it becomes important to ask a number of questions. Is the insistent conflation of representations of Irishness with humorousness merely an oppressive English stereotype with no relationship to Irish 'reality'? Is humour an unconsciously blundering or an actively political Irish response to a particular set of cultural and historical circumstances? Is it the sly use of a tool which might mock and confuse the examining eye of English good sense whilst colluding with a proverbial notion of inept Irishness? Does it simply perpetuate relationships of power by placing the Irish where the colonizer would wish them to remain? The answers to these questions are suitably paradoxical, replaying the anxiously interstitial quality of the Irish scene that appears to be caught contradictorily between reality and representation. Certainly it is possible to see the representation of the humorous Irishman as little more than that - a stereotype that, as Kiberd asserts, 'tells far more about English fears than Irish realities'.11 But reality is formed and constructed by representation, as much as representation transcribes a pre-existing reality, and it must not be forgotten that the propensity to code the Irish as humorous can be observed on both sides of the colonizer/colonized binarism. Representation is not the sole prerogative of the colonizer, just as harsh reality is not the only position the colonized may occupy. Pregnant bulls

The following could be described as a traditional 'Irish' joke: How do you confuse an Irishman? Give him two shovels and tell him to take his pick.12

In its most common incarnation, the Irish joke is concerned with linguistic incongruities and malapropisms that, by breaking received rules of language use, effect humorous collocations. Because the joke, as told or 'reported' by the English, assumes that these Irish linguistic aberrations are inadvertent, the jokers assert their capacity to mark breaks in the 'proper' use of language. As Susan Purdie reveals, such jokers thus assert an ability to think and speak rationally, whilst the butt of the humour, who is represented as irrationally or unconsciously producing improper language, is denied both the ability to 'mean' effectively and the wider social power enabled by such discursive agency.13 Christie Davies's transcultural analysis of 'ethnic' humour reveals that jokes concerning the stupidity of a particular social group (a stupidity which is usually a linguistic inferiority) are 'told about peoples whose identity relative to the joke-tellers is ambiguous . .. people whom the joke-tellers can regard not as mysterious foreigners but as a kind of inferior (i.e., stupid) version of themselves'.14 The butts of these jokes are thus not absolute others; rather, they are near neighbours who speak what is perceived to be an

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inferior version or dialect of the standard or received language of the joke-tellers. If this form of joke works as an assertion of superiority and marks a boundary of difference between troublingly proximate social groups, it is no longer surprising that the Irish joke should remain so tirelessly recurrent within Ango-Irish relations. Unmarked by the epidermis of racial difference that inaugurates assertions of difference within Fanon's colonial encounter, the Irish maintain a threatening geographical and cultural proximity to their colonial neighbours and, in so doing, disturb the possibility of assertions of racial superiority based solely upon visual distinctions. Witness Charles Kingsley's horror as he asserts that the difference between the English and Irish is complete, although it is never quite complete enough: 'to see white Chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours'.15 Too similar, visually, to allow a black/white binarism, the Hiberno-English 'brogue' functions as a site of audible distinction: language becomes a site upon which the frenzied assertions of difference and superiority can be effectively and tenaciously played.16 A collection of Irish jokes told during the First World War illustrates the point: '"Come on boys! The fighting spirit is strong within us" encouraged the Sergeant. "The divil it is" muttered Pat. "They dropped the jug bringing the rations over."/17 Where the English sergeant is represented as rational, heroic, authoritative, the Irish Tat' is an inept speaker who misunderstands and literalizes figurative language. For the argument that will be advanced later, it is important to note that, although the Kelly in Khaki collection depressingly repeats the stereotype of Irish inept speech, if the joke is minimally shifted, it is perfectly possible to read the officer as stiffly inert, vulnerable to the knowing desublimation effected by the only apparently inept Tat'. Here, though, it would seem that the Irishman is shown, by his inability to use language, to be subservient, intemperate, and emotionally incontinent. Of course, the Easter Rising of 1916 might have given the English a material reason to wish to code their near neighbours as cowardly, more interested in drinking than in fighting, but it is important to note how the binarisms of heroism/cowardice, rationality/irrationality, capability/incapability are inaugurated and enabled by the initial assertion of linguistic inferiority. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much between the English and Irish was different, but the joke was the same.18 Published in 1802, a year after the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland took effect, the political agenda of Richard and Maria Edgeworths' Essay on Irish Bulls is clear, but so is the basis of the English assertions of superiority over the Irish: Whatever might have been the policy of the English nation towards Ireland, whilst she was a separate kingdom, since the union it can no longer be her wish to depreciate the talents, or ridicule the language of Hibernians.19

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The Edgeworths sought to defend the Irish from the accusation of habitual blundering and bulling, understanding that if Hiberno-English continued to be viewed as beyond the pale, as inhabiting a barbarous realm in which there was no culture at all, a true psychological union between England and Ireland would remain impossible. However, the Edgeworths' defence seemed to have little discernible effect on the persistence of the stereotype; indeed, this traditional representation maintains a resilient history, appearing whenever it becomes politically expedient for difference and superiority to be asserted. Maureen Waters describes how the nineteenthcentury English theatrical stereotype of the comic Irishman was also, without fail, characterized as discursively inept: 'a person with a "brogue" sounded as if he had a shoe in his mouth; his speech was regarded as clumsy and unclear . . . English was a second language, imperfectly understood'.20 The political purposes and consequences of such representations become clear when Kiberd reminds us that the bungling ineptitude of these 'brainless but loyal fictional characters' was regarded with affection by Victorian audiences. They were tame, easily inferior and certainly not as threatening as either the 'sinister, simianized Fenian agitator[s]' who filled the newspapers, or the Irish labourers whose desperation for work in Britain's cities had led to rioting with English workers.21 More recently, in the 1970s and 1980s, when English cities were targeted in IRA bombing campaigns, it was common to hear 'Irish' jokes based on inept language use. Question, 'What happened to the terrorist who tried to blow up a car?'; Answer, 'He burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.' Yet, when reading Davies's article of 1988 concerning trans-cultural humorous representations of social groups as degraded others, one is reminded of how such humour is never far from a well-worn groove of material oppression. His table of the countries where jokes about stupidity are told includes the names of Yugoslavia and Iraq, and the people about whom the jokes are told are Bosnians and Albanians, and Kurds, respectively.22 However, to imply that instances of self-contradiction or 'bulls' within the Irish scene are simply projections would be to efface the long history suggested by Kiberd of Irish artists using humour 'as an attempt to compensate for colonial oppression and material failure';23 it would be to fix the colonizers' fantasy, citing their self-identical rationality as originary, whilst the comic Irish are reduced to the position of obedient representations. The English definition of a bull reveals just this complacency: the bull is defined as a 'self-contradictory proposition; in modern use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker. Now often with the epithet Irish.'24 In this definition, the bull is a figure whose incommensurability has been thoroughly worked through; indeed, if the contradiction is 'unperceived by the speaker', it must be the listeners who are able to detect its illogical self-contradiction. But, as Christopher Ricks suggests, such a self-contradiction may only appear to the English as 'unperceived': 'whether the comic or satiric energy of the Irish bull is "inadvertent",

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"unperceived by the speaker", is the nub, and here the definers are manifesting complacency as to their own inadvertencies, as to what may go unperceived by lordly them'.25 As he goes on to state: '[a]n oxymoron (Greek "pointedly foolish", sharp + dull) ought at least to prick us into wondering which way the sharpness may be pointing'.26 Might the bull, then, frustrate the machinations of the colonizer's definitive reason sufficiently to open a space that is momentarily liberated from its examining eye? If, as John Pentland Mahaffy suggests, the 'Irish bull is ... always pregnant',27 the English might be so busy laughing at the joke that they might not notice the gestation of a profoundly self-conscious humour - a humour that would mark the sly evasion of their own objectifying power. When Richard Steele was asked why the Irish made so many linguistic slip-ups, he replied with a bull: 'It is the effect of the climate, sir; if an Englishman were born in Ireland, he would make so many.'28 Out of context, it is difficult to know how knowing this reply is. It seems like mere stupidity, for an Englishman born in Ireland would be an Irishman; but then of course that does makes sense, after its own excessive fashion. Cloaked under the stereotype of blundering non-logic, this joke might be making the serious point that Irish linguistic 'misuse' might be one effect of being forced to speak a colonizer's language, but it also seems to reveal something of the Irish capacity to manipulate and misuse this language for their own purposes. It is precisely these uncertainties which seem to complicate any easy assertion of where the laughter produced by the use of so-called 'inept speech' is coming from, or, indeed, at what it is aimed, as they entangle us explicitly on the horns of the directional dilemma that any postcolonial analysis of the bull should seek to work through.29 Despite the political potentialities of mimicry,30 it is clear that the bull never fully escapes the terms of the dialogue with the colonizer nor the climate of the stereotype. Suggestively, even the Edgeworths' Essay on Irish Bulls seems to be caught within an aporia, utilizing many of the arguments through which Irish artists have vigorously defended themselves against English laughter, whilst retaining an ambivalence that could instructively warn against prematurely claiming the comic as a clearly transgressive space. For example, although the Edgeworths note that Irish bulls might be an effect of a generous and emotionally open sensibility in which the expression of feeling is raised above logical coherence, for all their humane talk of the Irish as an 'ingenious generous people' whose 'heart[s] expand at the approach of wit and humour [as] the poorest labourer forgets his poverty and toil in the pleasure of enjoying a joke', these Irish peasants remain figures of otherness - sentimental representations of quick-witted insouciance.31 And, of course, there is little that is ultimately liberatory about being coded as other to the reality, rationality and overly refined sentiment of the English. As Eagleton notes, although, in the Edgeworths' terms, Hiberno-English is a 'tongue marked by wit, eloquence and metaphorical richness . .. this figurative force is never far

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from blarney, wheedling and making the poor mouth'.32 He reminds us that the old woman who complains about her impounded cow, whose rhetoric is at first admired, is then gently criticized when her claim is shown to be unfounded. As Brian Hollingworth points out, the Edgeworths' celebration of the Irish vernacular's use of 'continual metaphor' also retains a profound ambivalence, considering eighteenth-century linguistic orthodoxies that affirm the inherent superiority of the 'rational' aspects of language over the metaphorical or figurative.33 Equally, in their comparison of Irish speech patterns with other vernaculars, the Edgeworths' assertion that, unlike the Cockney dialect, '[t]he Irish brogue is a great and shameful defect... [but] it does not render the English language absolutely unintelligible',34 ensures that, despite their argument for the possibility of an intelligent, moral speaker of dialect, they laud the Irish vernacular from a position that tacitly accepts linguistic hierarchies defined by metropolitan English norms.35 If, as Eagleton suggests, Ireland is consistently figured as 'the monstrous unconscious of the metropolitan society, the secret history of endemically idealist England',36 Nature to England's Culture, then, due to the psychoanalytic logic of the fetish, this projection will also become an object of desire: 'if Ireland is raw, turbulent, destructive, it is also a locus of play, pleasure, a blessed relief from the tyranny of the English reality principle'.37 Such a representation offers the English an image of themselves wrested from the tyranny of logic and adulthood; it fetishizes the colonized nation and, in turn, restates colonial paternalism as the comic Irish peasant or artist becomes the colonizer's disavowed but desired underside. The bull is 'at once pregnant and abortive', then, in its political suggestiveness and suicidal linguistic self-cancellations that play so rashly with a deadly stereotype.38 Neither an example simply of racist domination nor a fully liberating political possibility, the Irish bull cements the English and the Irish together in a complex nexus of fantasy and fear, reality and representation, as colonizer and colonized are forced into a dialogue that is both desired and radically unwanted. Significantly, this ambivalence can be seen in the Edgeworths' assertion of their objectivity concerning the Irish question: 'As we were neither born nor bred in Ireland . . . we profess to be attached to the country only for its merits' (my italics).39 Although their assertion is literally true, the threshold between English and Irish identity begins to appear rather porous as one remembers that the Edgeworths were deeply involved in the complex politics of late eighteenth-century Ireland as important figures in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.40 Eagleton has shown that the ambivalent position inhabited by the Anglo-Irish replays a more general instability as to whether the relationship between colonizer and colonized is familial or hostile, whether 'the Irish are their [Britain's] antithesis or mirror image, partner or parasite, abortive offspring or sympathetic sibling'.41 In his description of the paradoxical slippage of genealogical metaphors that have been used

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to represent the relationship between England and Ireland, Eagleton notes that although the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland has been consistently figured as a sexual coupling, the dizzying interchangeability of these positions leads to an inevitable Oedipal aggression as '[the] partner turns out to be [the] parent in thin disguise'.42 As terms reflect, distort and mutate in relationship to one another, this bulling and bizarre negotiation of identity and difference inexorably binds the English and Irish within a quarrelling yet repeatedly unresolved dialectic that finds its description in the traditional aphorism of British/Irish politics: "The British can never solve the Irish question because the Irish keep changing the question.'43 Bound to the time of the question, the Irish bull becomes, then, a sign, symptom and demand for a radically ambivalent dialogue. Comic dialogue

If English and Irish identities are formed and contained within dialogue, it becomes significant that the figure of comedy should repeat itself so insistently within the Irish colonial and postcolonial scene. Mikhail Bakhtin has productively shown that comedy and the dialogical might be thought together by reading comic parody as an 'internally dialogized' form that represents a polyglossic multiplicity of voices and ideological positions, which never submit to an ultimate synthesis under a totalizing authorial discourse. Bakhtin asserts that in parody one must recognize and duplicate the discursive form that is to be imperfectly repeated, its ideologies and ways of seeing, before submitting it to a dialogue with another discourse which might render it laughable (it should be remembered that such comedy does not ultimately strip the parodied discourse of its power, because its incongruities must be constructed as real and effective for humour to occur). In parody, two languages 'are crossed with each other' - the language being parodied and the language that parodies44 - and, as such, 'every parody is an intentional dialogized hybrid'.45 Because, Bakhtin suggests, 'one cannot understand parody without reference to the parodied material, that is, without exceeding the boundaries of a given context',46 this comic form offers resistance to a model of linguistic and social authority which is based upon the unchallenged power of a dominant discourse, unitary in its enunciation. In contradistinction to this dominant 'monologic' discourse of authority, the creation of parody requires a form of discourse which is doubled and split; it offers a new way of seeing, of looking 'at language from the outside, with another's eyes'.47 Suggestively, there is a way in which the Irish joke based around a bull could be represented as a form of dialogical parody. Because Irish discourse does appear within the joke, its contradictions are mimed and mouthed by the English joker, and the joke becomes 'internally dialogized'. The parodied language appears as real and effective, even

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though it is a discourse that, for Bakhtin, 'differ[s] sharply from the official side'.48 Take this joke about the Irish builder and the English foreman. The foreman decides to test the Irishman's understanding of building work: '"Tell me, Paddy, what is the difference between a joist and a girder?" "It's too easy," says the Irishman. "Twas the former wrote Ulysses, whilst the latter wrote Faust."'49 The parodied Irish discourse is powerfully asymmetrical in relation to the flat good sense of the foreman's discourse, but the Irishman's illogical return is not devoid of effect or capability, for 'Paddy's' irrationality indicates a degree of cultural knowledge that the foreman is implicitly denied. As Davies notes, within a traditional Irish joke 'the Irish often emerge as "winners" through the employment of shrewd misunderstanding and witty irrationality'.50 Of course, the Irishman's discourse is coded as other to the good sense of the dominant discourse; indeed, there is a resilient English stereotype that when the Irish are learned, that learning is excessive - at odds with the material realities of good common sense. The breach of authoritative monologic English discourse is real, however, even if it is coded as a debased and irrational form. Yet although the parodying discourse is revealed to be fundamentally uncreative, fixated upon the blandly material, this revelation falls short of a victory for the colonized world view for exactly the same reasons that the Edgeworths' valorization of the figurative tendencies in Hiberno-English does. There is no victory of one discourse over the other because parody, as Bakhtin reminds us, is 'a dialogue between points of view, each with its own concrete language that cannot be translated into the other'.51 What the joke does subvert is the ideological myth of the unquestioned power of a 'unitary language' which attempts The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over others . . . the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems.'52 Unitary language is held in agonistic and embattled tension with the 'living heteroglossia' of diverse world views, dialects, social and historical contexts and ideological positions.53 More significantly, though, if the discourse that parodies is forced into a dialogue, representing Irish discourse rather than any Irish 'reality' which might pre-exist it, a worrying possibility secretes itself within the colonizer's joke: the object, the original Irish utterance being parodied might be only a representation, even a parody, which mimics the operation of colonial othering but inverts the positions of consciousness and unconsciousness. However, it is important to remember that such Irish mimicry is also a moment of exchange, a recognition of the colonizer's terms it might be parodying, in what becomes a dizzying regress. All language, Bakhtin asserts, is dialogical; each discourse interacts with a 'tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements and accents' with which it may 'merge', 'recoil' or intersect, according to specific sociohistorical circumstances.54 If language is 'populated - overpopulated with the intentions of others',55 utterances will always appear in relation

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to previous speech acts and will be formed in the expectation of a future returned response. Always directed towards a listener, a specific conceptual horizon, neither parodying nor parodied discourse (whichever side of the colonizer/colonized binarism these discursive positions may fall) will achieve an ultimate victory over its other. So, although dialogism might demand the mutual illumination of quarrelling yet dependent discourses, such dialogue never submits to a synthesis. As such, neither laughing at nor laughing back achieves victory; the joke is never finalized, never worked through to the violence of a punch line that enables complete degradation. That joking becomes so insistent in Anglo-Irish relations is thus not surprising; ambivalence is woven into the fabric of the joke from the start and misrecognition, as Eagleton has shown, is the recurrent figure from the Irish cultural scene. And, although it is other English people to whom Irish jokes are told, following Bakhtin, the partner in the exchange is not simply the English; it is the Irish who must be engaged within dialogue for the linguistic othering to take place. Within this engagement, this dialogue, the possibility that the colonized really do matter to the colonizer, and vice versa, asserts itself. Comic timing

Understood as complex dialogues rather than simple accounts of domination or dissident laughing replies, this renewed conception of the comic interacts suggestively with an old axiom. Comedy, it is said, is all in the timing - the correct placement of words, images, movements, and the sharing of a joke in an appropriate context. But comic timing might not just be a case of timing things right, making elements fit; it might be a case of the placement of misplacement - a way of getting the timing right that is getting it rightly wrong. That Irish jokes might be thought of as anachronistic is not a way of saying that it is no longer acceptable to laugh at cultural difference, nor that the English and Irish are not so locked in frenzied exchange as they were, although this might be so; it is to say that there are various ways in which joking as a dialogical occasion becomes untimely, as competing and mutually dependent discourses vibrate against one another, are held apart and are forced together. Jokes rely on incongruity or the unexpected. Take, for example, the Edgeworths' joke about the suppliant who says: 'Please your worship, he sent me to the devil and I came straight to your honour.'56 This standard joke is characterized by two discontinuous temporalities - the predictable temporality of the content that would keep the judge and the devil apart, and the unexpected trajectory of the form that would, illogically, seek to conflate them. Laughter occurs, however, as these two temporal arrhythmias are synchronized, constructed as logical or 'rightly wrong' in a

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marked representation of stupidity and inept speech. Because joking, as Freud suggests, is based upon this marking, this binding together of incongruous elements, it could be asserted that what makes a comic instant funny rather than illogical, paradoxical or even troubling, is the fact that its transgressions are understood.57 Constructed as working towards resolution, the understanding which precipitates laughter in the joke is a moment in which diachronic time is puckered, folded back, gathered in comprehension and representation. As Freud reminds us, a necessary element in the construction of a joke is always 'brevity': 'A joke says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in too few words.'58 This condensation and the ensuing economy of expenditure of psychical energy, produces the laughing instant by collapsing temporal diachrony ('syntagmatic incongruity') into synchrony (its marking in the light of comprehension). Suggestively, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said have noted that the violence wielded by colonial discourse similarly demands the imposition of a synchronous representation: The tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength . . . For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula z's.'59 As a tool of colonial discourse, the joke becomes a potentially violating representation as incongruity is flattened out, bound together in the synchronous violence of a punch line. Because such jokes are end-oriented, teleological even, and describe what could be thought of as a certain race for understanding, the butt, the person who does not 'get' the joke, or the one who 'gets' it too late, is not only denied the mastery that representation proffers, they are profoundly reduced to this representation. The last one to get the joke becomes it. As Michel Serres suggests, the Hegelian temporality to which the joke as a race for a punch line adheres - thesis, antithesis, synthesis - 'isn't time, but a simple competition . . . The first to arrive, the winner of the battle, obtains as his prize the right to reinvent history to his own advantage.'60 If the joke is a race, the bulling Irish are represented as the losers of colonial history; they are defined as linguistically, socially and culturally backward, where the history is delimited by the colonizer's developmental model of progression and speed. But surely, following Bakhtin, joking is more than simply a race for the point of synchronization. As a dialogical construction, the joke requires the submission to a representation of agonistic discourses, a diachronic temporal unfolding that interrupts expectation with another time and trajectory, but which, in turn, never achieves an ultimate victory over that original discourse, or original time. Indeed, he reminds us that the utterance that announces its heteroglossia 'also senses itself on the border of time: it is extraordinarily sensitive to time in language, it senses time's shifts, the aging and renewing of language, the past and the future.'61 As such, the joke becomes a figure that must be traced through time rather than synchronized; it must advertise its interruptions, recursions and incongruities if it is to function dialogically. The Irish joke is anachronistic,

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then, in that it races towards the violent synchrony of a punch line, despite demanding that such synchronization will remain imperfectly effected because of the dialogically competing discourses that enable the diachronic incongruity of the joke to appear. The joke becomes a location where competing experiences of temporality might be held together without their submission to ossification, to being a simple victory for colonizer or colonized. Within this dialogically interruptive time of joking, unexpected reversals, recursions and interruptions occur as the time of the self (whether colonizer or colonized) meets the time of the other, which is both its other, and another other who remains radically unknowable. This manifests itself materially as the profound ambivalence that can be seen within 'Samuel Smilewell's' Art of Joking from circa 1780. 'Smilewell' speaks familiarly of the way in which reason and careful speech degenerates into blundering contradiction in the mouths of the Irish, but, perhaps more interestingly, he marks the comic scene as a space in which Irish and English enter into a contradictory dialogue: The vulgar ear Hibernia's jests delights, Who turns to blunder all her merry flights; She knew incongruous jests would please the croud, So gave her sanction, and those bulls allow'd. Behold her sons perpetually mistake, And one idea for another take . . . Imported bulls the grinning rabble please, Hibernian lawyers blunder for their fees; Hibernian actors blunder on the stage, And, while derided, look immensely sage. The English, proud what's bad to imitate, In Irish accent British blunders prate; Against Hibernia's sons her weapons turn, And at the mighty blunder-masters spurn; So where a master-painter shews his skill, Vile daubers copy, and expression kill.62

Although Hibernia does produce jests and bulls, it is the Vulgar7, English ear that 'turns to blunder' these 'merry flights' of the Irish; it is the 'British blunder [ing]' parody of Irish 'incongruous jests' that is risible. There is also the suggestion that the Irish know that such bulls will please the 'grinning rabble', be rendered simply as entertainment; they might, as such, be enticing the English to mimic and parody them. English 'sense' is thus forced into a dialogue with the terms it would seek to decry, forced to represent a representation which might itself be a knowing parody. The power of English laughter thus evacuates the scene: 'So where a masterpainter shews his skill, / Vile daubers copy, and expression kill.' The 'mighty blunder-masters', by mimicking the stereotype, evade the weapon of English laughter by demanding the reciprocity of dialogue. This

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reciprocity threatens because it unravels the monologic power of a unitary discourse; it also threatens because dialogue includes and is, in a profound sense, dependent upon the possibility of misrecognition. The English might not recognize that they are being lured into a parody which demonstrates their own obliviousness as to who has 'allow'd' this bull to appear, who has demanded the dialogue. But equally, due to the possibility of misrecognition, there is no assurance that the English will recognize the Irish as 'mighty blunder-masters' or skilful linguistic manipulators either, nor that they will recognize their own position as Vile daubers'. The English may be 'proud what's bad to imitate' (my italics), but, as such, still remain the originators of the terms of value which define the critique. It is only because the dialogue takes place in time that these positions work themselves through - appearing, distorting and fading from view - in an insoluble paradox that the joke both produces and mimes. The diachrony of the joke as a dialogical form submits colonizer and colonized to each other's times, which cannot be finally synchronized and reinvented as their own history. As these competing but mutually dependent discourses vibrate against each other due to their menacing contiguity, one begins to get the sense of the reason why the Irish joke never shuts up, never reaches a stable end in the fullness of time. And the Irish joke is so remarkably repetitious, with the jokes from Teagueland Jests or Bogg Witticisms of 1690 bearing striking similarities to the Irish jokes that might be told today.63 It is as if the competing temporal possibilities within the joke itself ensure that the English and Irish discourses, whilst sharing the same discursive space, do not share the same time. But then, the Irish and the English have always been represented as inhabiting radically incommensurable temporalities, which is perhaps why the project of colonialism and its attempts to bring the Irish within the English narrative of history have always been so imperfectly effected. Never spatially distant enough, the Irish have, instead, been characterized by a temporal remoteness from the colonizer. As a Unionist historian from the beginning of the last century asserts: 'Historical Continuity has been lost in the endless civil distraction of the island, and tradition itself speaks in confused and scarce intelligible accents.'64 And, as Luke Gibbons has pointed out, Ireland did not have to wait for modernity to experience fragmentation: 'history did not run in a straight line from the Milesians to the Celtic revival, but was closer to an alluvial deposit, secreting an unstable, porous version of Irish identity.'65 Not marked by a freedom from the colonizer's imposition of 'historicity', in Fanon's terms, Irish history is marked by intense and wearily uniform recurrences: 'the three mighty abiding motifs of land, religion and colonialism . . . stamp apparently far-flung topics (culture, education, sexuality) with their own inexorable impress.'66 If, historically, Irish time has been represented as marked by atavistic recursions and the seeming impossibility of progress, whilst, as Bhabha reminds us, the discourse of colonial authority 'demand[s] that the space it occupies be unbounded, its

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reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse non-dialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference',67 then the time of the Irish, with whom the English are caught in an inescapable dialogue, will become profoundly troubling, just as the colonizer's time will menace the Irish by threatening to subsume it as the disavowed term which can be sublated within its dialectical schema of history as linear succession. The return of the joke mimes the disturbance of teleological history, as the act of sublation is always rendered incomplete, requiring repetition. Conclusion

The temporal arrhythmia of synchrony and diachrony that appears within the dialogical form of the Irish joke, and the interruptive return of that joke within English and Irish histories describes an uncanny and interruptive collocation of repression and transgression, laughing at and laughing back, in which each term is held in an agonistic dialogue with its other. Strangely, then, despite the oppressive laughter of superiority where one discourse is held over another and incongruities are synthesized and synchronized, the joke would also seem to hold out an unexpected ethical possibility within its dialogical and diachronic form. But if an ethical possibility appears in diachrony, it appears only to fade in the face of the synchronous thrust of the joke that races towards a punch line. Irish jokes thus seem to refuse the ultimate victory of either the oppressive or the ethical; rather, they represent a dialogue between two temporalities synchrony and diachrony. As quarrelling temporalities present themselves within and between Irish jokes, these irreducible dialogues replay a relationship between self and other which is both tyrannical and ethical, unjust and just, an attempt at laughing superiority and an experience of and movement towards the other and their time. Manifestly over-determined and soaked in questions of cultural belonging, the Irish joke bears witness to the mechanics of cultural debasement and the assertion of colonial authority, although through its dialogical form, it also mimes and describes a dissonance in that authority, both within the joke itself and its frenzied and repetitious return. Neither an example of absolute degradation, nor an easily fashioned liberatory moment of carnivalesque transgression that might inaugurate the possibility of laughing back at colonial authority, the Irish joke recalls us instead to the tendency to wish to assert our subjectivity, our present time, over and against those who we would wish to other; but it also reminds us of the impossibility of that fully present moment, as it calls our time, our discourse, our history, into a communication with another time, the other's time, the other as time.

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Notes 1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London, Pluto, 1986), pp. 112-13. 2. Brendan Bradshaw, 'Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland', Irish Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 104 (November 1989), p. 338. 3. Throughout this study, I will refer to the joking representations of the Irish man. Bronwen Walter has noted that in the nineteenth century, 'depictions of Irish people in both Ireland and England were almost exclusively male images', with this trend continuing well into the late twentieth century. Walter also asserts: 'Anti-Irish jokes rarely refer to Irish women. They name Irish-men and involve male activities . . . Irish men are made to stand in for the population of Irish people in Britain in verbal as well as visual public representations. "Paddies" and "Micks" subsume both genders, but are overtly male in stereotype.' She concludes, in relation to the stereotype: 'Irish men carry the weight of ridicule and contempt, both for their aggressive masculinity and their feminized weakness.' Bronwen Walter, 'Gendered Irishness in Britain: changing constructions', in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999), pp. 78, 84-5, 94. 4. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London, Jonathan Cape, 1995) p. 12. 5. On the stereotype of the 'good-natured Gael' see Terry Eagleton, 'The good-natured Gael', Crazy John and the Bishop, and Other Essays in Irish Culture (Cork, Cork University Press, 1998), pp. 68-139. 6. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 114. 7. Vivian Mercier attempts to show how the humour that is to be found in Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Yeats and Beckett, amongst others, forms part of an unbroken comic tradition in Irish literature that can be traced from the ninth century to the present day. Mercier's argument is problematic in that it posits an ultimately untenable unbroken intellectual heritage that suggests that the comic is an essential, indeed even a racial characteristic, as opposed to a cultural response to particular changing historical conditions. But it is significant that humour could have been seen as playing such a central role in Irish literature, and that the theoretical project to reintegrate Irish literature into its cultural context should have begun with a consideration of the comic. Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (London, Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. vii, 248. 8. James Joyce, 'Oscar Wilde: the Poet of "Salome"', in Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellman (eds), James Joyce: The Critical Writings (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 202. 9. Declan Kiberd, note, Ulysses: Annotated Student's Edition, by James Joyce (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1992), p. 952. 10. Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar, and Other Plays (Oxford, Blackwell, 1997), p. 31. 11. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 35. 12. Christie Davies, 'The Irish joke as a social phenomenon', in John Durant and Jonathan Miller (eds), Laughing Matters: A Serious Look at Humour (Harlow, Longman, 1988), p. 49. 13. Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 14. Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 41. 15. Cited by Luke Gibbons, 'Race against time: racial discourse and Irish history', Oxford Literary Review: Neocolonialism, no. 13 (1991), p. 96. 16. Although, as Bronwen Walter has noted, the Victorian racialization of the Irish involved measuring 'nigressence' and 'facial angle index' to prove their status as 'white Negro[s]', the more historically tenacious marker of difference has been the Irish accent. Walter cites a remark made in a recent ethnographic survey of young Irish middle-class migrants in London: 'The thing about being Irish in England, Martin told me, reporting

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a joke he had enjoyed, is that they don't realize you're black until you open your mouth'; 'Gendered Irishness in Britain: changing constructions', pp. 78, 85. 17. IKEY, Kelly in Khaki - A Collection of Khaki-clad Irish Jokes (Toronto, n. p., 1920), p. 9. 18. As Davies remarks, in Joe Miller's Jests or the WITS Vademecum of 1739, there are more jokes about Irish blunders than about any other ethnic group; Ethnic Humor, p. 139. 19. Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls (London, J. Johnson, 1802), p. 315. 20. Maureen Waters, The Comic Irishman (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 1. 21. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 497. See also Jim Mac Laughlin,' "Pestilence on their backs and famine in their stomachs": the racial construction of Irishness and the Irish in Victorian Britain', in Graham and Kirkland, Ireland and Cultural Theory, pp. 50-76. 22. Davies, The Irish joke as a social phenomenon', p. 45. 23. Kiberd, note, Ulysses, p. 952. 24. Christopher Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 153. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 154. 27. Quoted by Davies, Ethnic Humor, p. 141. 28. Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, p. 236. 29. When Daniel Corkery spoke of post-independence Ireland, he suggested that 'Everywhere in the mentality of the Irish people are flux and uncertainty. Our national consciousness may be described, in a native phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing. It is not English, nor Irish, nor Anglo-Irish.' Quoted by Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 555. 30. See Homi Bhabha, 'Of mimicry and man' and 'Signs taken for wonders', The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994). Bhabha's work has demonstrated how such mimicking repetition, when displaced into a hybrid colonial scene, is never absolute replication; rather, it returns as difference to menace any simple directional metaphors of power. 31. Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, pp. 308, 309. 32. Terry Eagleton, Heathdiff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London, Verso/ New Left Books, 1995), p. 171. 33. In 1787, Monboddo asserts the superiority of the rational aspects of language: 'In this figurative style the barbarous languages abound exceedingly more from want of proper words than for the sake of ornament.' Quoted in Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth's Irish Writing (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997), p. 12. These views held by Monboddo, Condillac and others are cited approvingly in the Edgeworths' essay on Practical Education and elsewhere, see Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth, pp. 7-25. 34. Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, pp. 199-200. See also Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth, pp. 59-61. 35. Hollingworth renders their argument thus: The Irish vernacular is purer because its origin is in the language of the Tudor and Stuart settlers and because "they have not had intercourse with those counties in England, which have made for themselves a jargon, unlike to any language under Heaven." Whether or not this argument has any historical validity, its weakness surely lies in the assumption that there is an hierarchy of language, and that a courtly language, a "pure well English undefiled", flowing from the past is by definition superior to more polluted tongues.' Maria Edgeworth, p. 60. 36. Eagleton, Heathdiff, p. 7. 37. Ibid., p. 9. 38. Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words, p. 158. 39. Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, p. 313. 40. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were, of course, caught within a profoundly ambivalent position, being neither fully English nor fully Irish. That such a doubled and split subject position might have converse with the Irish bull is demonstrated by the fact that Sir Samuel Ferguson, at once an Irish protestant, nationalistic yet loyal, and a later member of what might be described as the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia, was also not above

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a bull. Ferguson ended his speech to the Protestant Repeal association in 1848 with: 'Rule Britannia!' and 'We are not a colony of Great Britain'. See Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 71. 41. Ibid., p. 127. 42. Ibid., p. 125. 43. Ibid., p. 124. 44. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'From the prehistory of novelistic discourse', The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 76. 45. Ibid. 46. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Forms of time and chronotope in the novel', Dialogic Imagination, p. 237. 47. Bakhtin, 'From the prehistory of novelistic discourse', p. 60. 48. Bakhtin, 'Forms of time and chronotope in the novel', p. 238. 49. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 71. 50. Davies, Ethnic Humor, p. 147. 51. Bakhtin, 'From the prehistory of novelistic discourse', p. 76. 52. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the novel', Dialogic Imagination, p. 271. 53. The fact that the comic returns so insistently within the Irish scene could also, following Bakhtin, be explained by the fact that parodic forms are both necessitated by and flourish under conditions of 'polyglossia' - where creative bilingual or even trilingual consciousnesses can free a subject from 'the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language'. Bakhtin, 'From the prehistory of novelistic discourse', p. 48. 54. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the novel', p. 276. 55. Ibid., p. 294. 56. Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, p. 34. So as not to overly complicate the argument at this point, it will be assumed that this is not an occasion of mimicry, but an incidence of inept language use which is marked as such by being reported as a joke. That such a simplification seems absurdly violent and arbitrary affirms the point made earlier about the ambivalent over-determination of positions within the Irish joke. 57. Freud cites Jean Paul to make the point that a joke 'is the disguised priest that weds every couple'. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976), p. 41. 58. Theodor Lipps, quoted in Freud, Jokes, p. 44. 59. Homi Bhabha, The other question: stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism', Location of Culture, p. 71. 60. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press, 1995), p. 49. 61. Bakhtin, 'From the prehistory of novelistic discourse', p. 67. 62. 'Samuel Smilewell', The Art of Joking: or an Essay on Witticism; In the Manner of Mr Pope's Essay on Criticism: With Proper Examples to the Risible Rules (London, Joseph Deveulle, c. 1780), p. 51. 63. An Irish soldier in the British army is wearing his scarlet stockings inside out. When told of his error he replies: 'I did it on purpose for dat dere wash a hole on de oder side.' Teagueland Jests or Bogg Witticisms (London, 1690), p. 92. 64. C. Litton Faulkner, 'Youghal', in F. E. Ball (ed.), Essays Relating to Ireland: Biographical, Historical, and Topographical (London, Longmans, 1909), p. 165. 65. Gibbons, 'Race against time', p. 105. 66. Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 175. 67. Bhabha, 'Signs taken for wonders', p. 115.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Two hundred years of colonial laughter in Malta: Carnival and Pantomime in Malta under British rule VICKI ANN CREMONA AND TONI SANT

Situating the two events When in 1800 the British government took over Malta,1 theatre and theatrical manifestations such as Carnival were already deeply entrenched in Maltese culture. Carnival in Malta dates back to before the coming of the Knights of the Order of St John and had been one of the most popular events in the Maltese festive calendar. When Malta became a British colony, the Carnival spirit did not cease; rather, it progressively came to depict Maltese attitudes vis-a-vis the British, their way of life, their policies, and their political allies. The story of Carnival in colonial times is the story of a nation with a burgeoning autonomous identity. At the same time, the daring commentary on politics and Maltese life throughout most of the twentieth century is represented in the Anglo-Maltese Pantomime. The Panto, which is in itself a carnivalesque form, was brought to Malta by the British forces and was initially intended to provide Christmastide entertainment for the British in Malta. After independence in 1964, and the eventual withdrawal of all British military operations from Malta, the production of Panto performances was taken over by the Maltese upper-middle class and became linked strictly to local politics. Panto has come to offer aspects of the carnivalesque which Carnival was restricted from exploring freely due to laws and regulations enacted both before and after independence. Carnival in Malta after 1800 Since newspapers in Malta only started around 1830, there is practically no recorded information regarding Carnival in the first fifty years of British rule. At that time Malta was seen mainly as a 'fortress colony'2 of strategic importance, and the British governors ruling over the islands were of military rank. This military predominance can be seen in the

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various rules and prohibitions which were eventually issued for Carnival. That is, it became more and more difficult to poke fun at any military persons, and it was prohibited to wear military costumes as Carnival costumes. The lack of a sense of fun may be seen in the first clamorous incident involving a military governor and Carnival. In 1846, the Governor, Lt. Gen. Sir Patrick Stuart, a strict Sabbatarian, issued a notice prohibiting all persons from wearing any mask or disguise on Carnival Sunday (22 February 1846), and curtailing Carnival festivities to one day instead of four.3 The official notices, which were posted everywhere, became the targets of a political tug-of-war. People would either tear them down or spatter them with filth, so that they had to be put up again and again and eventually guarded. Meanwhile, various claims were made against the illegal nature of these notices, since it was argued that their enforcement required a legislative act. Undoubtedly, the flexible nature of Carnival, with the space it allows for improvisation, provided the right framework for civil disobedience. On Carnival Sunday, people opposed to the Governor's policies thronged the streets of the capital city, Valletta, wearing masks, beards and moustaches. The latter items seem to have become fashionable after the arrival of the British, and an 1842 article in the Italian-language Maltese newspaper Democrito poked fun at those who followed this fashion.4 On that particular day, some protesters went to the extent of dressing up as protestant pastors who, in a fervently Catholic country such as Malta, could only be identified with the colonizers. Things came to a head at sunset, when the 42nd Royal Highlanders Battalion marched into the main square - as was their custom - to beat the tattoo. The appearance of British soldiers in such a charged atmosphere was seen as a tangible sign of the will to dominate, rather than as an habitual military ceremony to mark the closure of the day. As Michel Foucault points out, discipline . .. must master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organised multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of a counterpower that springs from them and which forms a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organisations, coalitions - anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.5

The military embodied this idea of discipline, of an ordered state vis-a-vis the disordered mass or, in this case, not a mass but an 'organised multiplicity' who were determined to retain the order they had adhered to for centuries. In this context, the presence of the military parade was taken as an oppressive counterforce aiming to neutralize the collective will. The tension it created almost led to violence, and thirty-five people were arrested and kept in custody until the next day. Three of them were arraigned in court and ordered to pay a nominal fine. Public protests were sent to Mr Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Carnival reverted to its proper length the next year.

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Reference to this incident was made the following year in a Malteselanguage newspaper called Giahan. The writer's apologetic tones seemed to imply a positive attitude towards the British, and contrasted sharply with the virulent, aggressive style used in later anti-British newspapers. The writer stated that due to their good behaviour during that year's Carnival the Maltese had proved how patriotic they were, and had shown how much they loved Queen Victoria. The Maltese, the newspaper article claimed, had nothing to complain of about the British, but about the 'bad administration, or rather, the disastrous government that we are ruled by'.6 The article pleaded with the British government to concede 'those things which are more important to us than Carnival, which is the Popular Council'.7 The Maltese had been clamouring for this council ever since the arrival of the British, but the British Royal Commissioners who had visited the island in 1812 had felt 'persuaded of the mischievous effects that would result from entrusting any portion of political power to a people so singularly unfitted to enjoy it'.8 Interestingly, in an article condemning the tradition of Carnival as one which can only be appreciated by fools, an English-language newspaper published in Malta in 1840 stated the following: 'We assure the Maltese, that there's no hope of a Consiglio Popolare, whilst the Carnival flourishes in Malta/9 The social dimension of Carnival balls

Carnival disguises, in the majority, represented people of various nationalities. Since Malta was a very busy seaport, people would certainly have seen foreigners in the streets every day, and probably reproduced them with a little bit of fantasy. Yet it is not only the variety, but also the quality of the disguises which must be taken into account. Quality (or the lack of it) related to social status, since only the rich could afford elaborate clothing for Carnival. The clothes on the street, appropriately carnivalesque and seemingly fitting for the occasion, become incongruous particularly when contrasted to those worn to private balls. In fact, costume seems to be one of the marks of distinction between outside and inside, the streets and the balls. The people who attended the balls were certainly the elite of Malta. In 1840, The Clown, an English-language newspaper published in Malta, poked fun at the balls by stating that The balls are all the rage - everybody is giving a ball . . . To such an extent is ball-going carried, that the only way to become gentile and aristocratic is never to go to a ball.'10 The three main balls were those at the Borsa (the Stock Exchange), the Civil Service Club and the Governor's palace, where the pro-British elite would gather in their hundreds. Besides these, private balls were organized in the houses of the rich or in clubs such as the Circolo Studenti. These revellers did not really participate in the street carnivals; their passage in the streets was one of

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ostentation - it provoked awe and admiration, and through this, underlined social difference. The people in the street became the public for this form of spectacle. As one Italian-language newspaper chidingly remarked, indicating the theatrical nature of the situation: 'you content yourself with taking the role of spectator, and from the humble position you occupy you joyously clap your hands to the people in high places . . . forgetting your misery, you applaud the waste of thousands of pounds, of which you will only get a small part!'11 Later on in the article the author describes the people going to the ball as 'well-dressed ladies and gentlemen'.12 One pro-British newspaper, The Malta Chronicle, even published an annual list of the guests in alphabetical order, along with a list of the costumes they wore to the Palace Ball. We learn, for example, that on one occasion, Mrs Pilleau is dressed 'as a Huguenot lady, Mrs Gifford as Martha Washington, Miss M. Leach as White China, Miss Sammut as the Malta Flag, Mrs Walker as Palmistry, Miss Walker as the Queen of Hearts'.13 On another occasion we are informed that: 'Lady Van Straubenzee [the governor's wife] paid a compliment to the native inhabitants by appearing in the ancient costume of a Maltese Lady.'14 The wives of certain Governors used the balls either to set themselves to the best advantage, or to introduce some new fad or fashion. It was at a Carnival ball that Lady Dingli, British wife of the Maltese Crown Advocate Sir Adriano Dingli, introduced a dance that became immensely popular. The dance is known to this day as il-Maltija. Notably, Lady Dingli's version of this folk dance, which was supposedly danced by the common peasantry, is on a much grander scale. As a discursive practice the dance is shared by different groups - both the peasantry and the elite - but rather than harmonizing different levels of society, both costume and milieu excluded the popular dancers and included the upper classes who were adapting a practice to fit within their codes, again reinforcing social distinction. In 1891 we are told that 'All the young ladies in the Maltese country dance were excellently costumed. So were the young men.'15 It is only with economic progress in the twentieth century that more people could attend the public balls (or veljuni) that were held in the theatres and, since many of the participants wore disguises which made them completely unrecognizable, it was easier for social classes to mix.16 Carnival in the streets of British Malta

One of the most awaited street attractions of Carnival was the parade of satirical floats, which emblematized the way people perceived what Edward Said calls the 'dominant relation of power'.17 These floats, which at the beginning of British rule simply illustrated a general disgruntlement, became far more specific in their attacks towards the end of the nineteenth century, when political issues, politicians and statesmen were all represented.

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Besides attending the balls, the social elite would watch the Carnival celebrations in the streets from their balconies, or would join the procession of floats in their carriages. Contact between persons in the street and those on balconies or in carriages was established in various ways, often through teasing; one essential method was through the tossing of sugarcoated almonds, known as confetti. In 1898 these cost one shilling and eight pence per box of four rotolos,18 and were the subject of much controversy as some wanted to keep them while others wanted them banned. Besides being both a Carnival delicacy and a street weapon, they were also a means of class distinction: the richer folk buying and throwing them, the poorer folk eating them. This is clearly recorded in one newspaper report of the late nineteenth century, which states that the 'people from the country .. . throw themselves at the feet of the crowd and the hooves of horses to grab confetti [and do themselves much harm by eating] those quantities of confetti as if they were a delicious thing, while it is well known that those confetti are only poison'.19 Pelting with confetti could prove painful, to the extent that a police order forbade the throwing of large confetti, and reports of confiscation of as much as two tons of large confetti were noted.20 It was also forbidden to throw them at clerics or the military. In 1903, in spite of this police order, the Hon. P. Samut, a member of parliament, was hit on the cheek by a large perlina (as the Maltese call confetti) and suffered a visible swelling. In another instance, the crowd and ladies on the palace balconies engaged in enjoyable warfare that lasted over an hour, with the 'ladies dispensing their favours in the shape of "comfits" with unsparing hands, and the "comfit" compliments .. . liberally returned by the populace below . . . the ladies, owing to the tremendous pelting, having to seek shelter and protect their faces with upraised arms as best they could'. One of the ladies was none other than the Duchess of Edinburgh who would 'return to the charge undaunted, with basin ever replenished'.21 Another form of pelting also took place in the street. This was against a figure of fun who would dress up as either a notary or a doctor, and would stand in street corners or ride in a cart or carriage pretending to make a speech, getting heavily pelted with talcum powder, fruit, eggs, confetti and all sorts of food items. This tradition was one way of making fun of the most important professions in society, who also made up the rich middle-class intelligentsia and the bulk of the political body. One such individual who lived in the early 1900s was known as il-Konslu. A somewhat suspicious figure on ordinary days, selling fish which he carried in a basket above his head, the Konslu's importance grew considerably during Carnival. He would ride in a cart holding a huge open register, and pretend to make a speech about the cost of living. However, every time he opened his mouth, people would pelt him mercilessly.22 Carnival represented a prime moment to express political views publicly, particularly after 1897 - the year when public political meetings in

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the port cities of Malta were forbidden. Virulent articles did, of course, appear regularly in the papers, but many people at the time were illiterate. The Carnival satires, therefore, were an effective means of transmitting the message directly. Young people would often accompany the floats distributing satirical tracts or poems in keeping with the theme. Some of these were commissioned by the political parties. As already noted, these floats, which simply illustrated a general disgruntlement at the beginning of British rule, became far more specific in their attacks towards the end of the nineteenth century. A newspaper report of the Carnival of 1878 shows local concern for both European and local issues: The representation of the Tug of war - the Plenipotentiaries of Russia, Turkey, Austria, Germany and Bulgaria, to the Peace conference - the Sanitary Commission - and the large numbers of civilians metamorphosed for the nonce into warriors, Naval and Military, were very suggestive to reflective minds.23

The description provided of the satirical float dealing with European politics, specifically the Eastern question, shows local interest in a question that had financial repercussions in Malta.24 during the period leading up to the Berlin Conference,25 which began on 13 June of that year. The three words, 'the Sanitary Commission', relate to another float dealing with an important local issue, this time concerning a 'massive scheme for reforming the drainage system of Valletta'.26 Likewise, it is important to note the presence of military and naval disguises in this 1878 Carnival. By 1900, it was forbidden to wear military, naval or civil uniforms.27 On 24 February 1900 it was precisely military matters that marked the beginnings of the eventual banning of satirical floats altogether. A proBritish newspaper, The Daily Malta Chronicle, reported that 'no caricature or disrespectful representations regarding Ecclesiastical and Military matters will be allowed during the forthcoming four days of Carnival'.28 The newspaper Malta, organ of the main anti-British party that was in favour of preserving the Italian culture that had characterized the Maltese upper and intellectual classes for centuries, denounced this measure. Its argument shows an identification with other colonies undergoing British oppression; in this particular case, the Boer cause in South Africa.29 It states that there is no law forbidding the caricature of military matters, and accuses the other newspaper of having caught wind of a satirical float about the Transvaal War and trying to impede its appearance in public. Interestingly, by 1907, the newspaper complained that, contrary to previous years, it had not seen a single satirical float in the streets.30 Although most written accounts of Carnival focus on Valletta, street celebrations also took place in the three cities around the Grand Harbour, as well as in various villages in Malta and the neighbouring island, Gozo. These were on a completely different scale and were more spontaneous in nature.31 Indeed, across the islands there were individuals who wore all sorts of disguises, including those involving 'cross-dressing'. Disguised

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members of philharmonic societies - a very important feature of the social fabric of the islands - would rove round the streets in groups. These societies were found in practically every village, and produced the bands that accompanied the procession of the statue of the village's patron saint, on the saint's feast day. More importantly, they provided a focal point for many of the village men, a club or kazin where the men could go to chat and relax over a drink. When political parties were formed in Malta they adopted the model of the kazini, as it was one to which everybody could relate and which had contributed to the rise of the parties themselves. During Carnival, then as nowadays, these bands would march round Valletta playing popular music, often from operas or operettas, prime sources of theatrical entertainment at the time. In addition to these bands, groups of friends would agree to form a company and dress according to a theme, and either walk the streets together or ride on a Carnival float wearing masks and playing tambourines. All this was simply done for fun; it was not until 1893 that the first appeal to award prizes to the best disguises appears.32 In 1897 not only was this appeal renewed, but it was suggested that a Carnival Committee should be formed, and that the money for the prizes could be raised from the takings of bingo games.33 The following year it was pointed out that Carnival could serve as an attraction for tourists, thus creating ulterior sources of revenue. However, this suggestion was certainly not taken up very quickly, given it was still being made in 1907.34 Carnival often provided a pretext for direct local criticism of the colonial government. In 1898, the newspaper of the anti-British party, Malta, stated that 'our very paternal Government, instead of showing such apathy for anything concerning us, should not allow our particular customs to die out for ever, but do its best to help preserve them'.35 IIParata,36 the dance that traditionally opened the Carnival festivities in Valletta since the times of the Knights, had been allowed to degenerate. This was attributed to the 'total lack of prosperity in the country', as to stage it adequately required proper financial means. It was suggested that a popular subscription should be set up to cover the necessary expenses.37 This suggestion came from the journalist Spartaco (the pseudonym of E. L. Vella), who wrote many articles critical of the regime; it seems to be a jibe at the colonizers, implying that if the Maltese wanted to preserve their identity they must safeguard it without help from the British. This kind of criticism became tolerated less and less. In 1902, Vella himself had to stop writing, as he risked losing his job with a London-based company.38 Carnival between and after the wars

During the First World War Carnival seems to have been on the wane, and after, when Malta was in deep financial recession, the newspaper Malta states that it is useless to expect cheerful festivities when there is no

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money to spend. Maltese politics after the war were certainly fraught with tension. Meanwhile, the key political issue, known as the Language Question, defined as the pivot of party politics at the time and which had its origins in nineteenth-century colonial politics, became a serious struggle for identity. The nationalist movement under Enrico Mizzi fought for an Italianbased culture and asserted a Maltese right to self-determination. The Constitutional Party, led by Count Gerald Strickland, wanted to elevate Malta to Anglo-Saxon standards, which Strickland believed to be the best. Strickland, a complex personality, became Prime Minister in 1927, and was widely defined as both imperialist and patriotic. He was not very tolerant of opposition, and during the Second World War he had Mizzi interned in Uganda, on the pretext that he was supportive of the enemy and could therefore betray the country. In 1924, the pro-Italianists created two floats for the Valletta Carnival. One attempted to show Strickland in a new light, and depicted him trying to break the ties between Malta and England but failing because the Devil himself would not let him. The other, in a country where the Catholic church was all powerful, showed Strickland conniving with Martin Luther, who strokes him and holds his hand, thereby leading the public to associate this figure with the Devil.39 Two years later, the proStricklandians in Gozo created a float that shocked the pro-Italians by defacing the Italian flag.40 In 1929, when the Labour Party (which was formed in 1921) was following a pro-British policy, it produced a column symbolizing the laws passed by Strickland, with Mizzi and his deputy trying in vain to tear it down.41 The satirical floats,42 which were so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seem to have disappeared after 1935; there are practically no recorded descriptions of this kind of float to be found after this date. The official rules governing Carnival remained unvaried from the beginning of the century to the 1970s, when it became specifically forbidden to poke fun at political or religious figures. Yet political pressure may have been exercised to stop the building of such floats; it is difficult to explain otherwise the sudden disappearance of such a prominent feature in Carnival and may be attributable to several factors - fear of repression from Strickland or, as Herbert Ganado suggests, the over-zealousness of the Carnival Committee, which, in wanting to organize too much, ended up killing spontaneity in the Carnivals.43 For a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, politics interfered with Carnival far more directly. The Labour Prime Minister, Dom Mintoff, who in February 1956 was fighting for integration with Britain (a plan he later abandoned), moved the beginning of the four days of Carnival to Easter Saturday (7 April). Mintoff resigned under protest on 21 April 1958 and the following year Carnival was again moved to February - but Mintoff's party followers were instructed to boycott the festivities. In 1960, two Carnivals were celebrated at the same time in

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February: the national Carnival in Valletta, which the Labour Party nicknamed Il-Karnival ta' l-Inglizi (The Carnival of the English), and a Labour Party Carnival at the Empire Football Stadium in Gzira, which they called Il-Karnival tal-Maltin ghall-Maltin (The Carnival of the Maltese for the Maltese). Both sides tried to attract spectators; the English launched the Carnival by sending a Royal Navy helicopter over the main street in Valletta and letting off colourful balloons, whilst the Labour Party had full-scale celebrations replicating those in the main square in Valletta, with floats and dancing companies.44 All this happened just four years before Malta became independent.45

The Anglo-Maltese Pantomime In Malta over the past century, Pantomime, a distinctly British form of popular entertainment,46 has developed from little more than a revue into a full-blown extravaganza. By the end of the 1980s it had become Malta's most popular form of live indoor entertainment. The Anglo-Maltese Pantomime is produced annually by the Malta Amateur Dramatic Club (MADC) at the Manoel Theatre, an eighteenthcentury baroque theatre house built by the Portuguese Grand Master, Antonio Manoel de Vilhena, for the members of the Order of the Knights of St John. The MADC is a very active amateur dramatic company. It regularly produces popular musicals - from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! to the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice sensation Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat, from Lionel Bart's Oliver! to Menkin and Ashaman's Little Shop of Horrors. Each theatre season it also produces at least one regular production from the so-called legitimate theatre: such as a work by Chekhov, Moliere, or Strindberg, and British comedy: Oscar Wilde, Alan Ayckbourn, Joe Orton, and so on. The MADC was formed in 1910 and the company was originally intended as a club by the British for the British in Malta. Most of the original members were officers of the British Army and Navy, mostly the latter. The first production by the newly formed company was Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, a traditional British Pantomime, written and devised by Major Campbell Todd and presented at the Manoel Theatre. Partly due to the fact that Major Todd left the Maltese islands and partly due to the outbreak of the First World War, productions then ceased. The 1914-1918 War made it difficult for the club to engage in large-scale productions and, between the wars, the club was more concerned with straight theatre than with Pantomime. However, soon after the end of the Second World War, Graham Britton directed Sinbad the Sailor at the Knights Hall for the Christmas season of 1951. Britton had started with the club directing Noel Coward's This Happy Breed in March 1951. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, attended, although his wife, Princess Elizabeth (soon to become Queen Elizabeth II),

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'could not attend as she had a chill'. During the summer of the following year, Britton directed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.47 at San Anton Gardens, which at that time was the residential palace for the Governor General. Various Christmas Pantomimes were presented by other British services groups after the war. For some years a Royal Air Force group, known as the Ariel Players, did Panto at the Manoel Theatre with great success. Like all other British Services groups, the Ariel Players folded some time between Malta's independence and the closing of the British military base on the islands. It was therefore a natural step for the MADC, which had started taking in Maltese members during the late 1950s, to take up the tradition of Christmas Pantomime from 1979, the year the Maltese islands ceased to provide Britain with its Mediterranean military base. To understand the MADC and its theatrical activities one must examine the sociopolitical dimensions in operation behind it over the years. Consider this, in a letter to Ella Warren, MADC's long-standing honorary secretary, from Lord Louis Mountbatten, writing from the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, London, on 4 August 1964: Now that Malta is to get her independence you are faced to a certain extent with the situation which the famous Simla Amateur Dramatic Club faced in India in 1947. I urge you to go all out to get as many Maltese members as you can and to get them actively interested in taking parts in the various plays. I am sure that this will give the Club the necessary 'Maltese' standing in an independent Malta.48

Naturally, Lord Mountbatten's advice did not go unheeded, as can be deduced from the report of the Committee for the season 1964-65: Gradually we have come to see the great importance of presenting something really good and something that our audience, largely composed of the kindly disposed inhabitants of these islands, never get a chance of seeing in London.

Interestingly, although there is no mention of taking MADC performances on tour to Britain, the MADC boasts a UK representative on the souvenir programmes for its productions.49 However, it was only in 1972 that the MADC first presented a Maltese play, Ir-Raheb by Erin Serracino Inglott. The unique characteristics of the Anglo-Maltese Panto

Since 1979, the year Malta ceased to be a British military base, the MADC Panto has been the greatest success of the Maltese theatre from a boxoffice point of view. Pantomime has always been a big money-spinner. Edward Mercieca, MADC chairman throughout most of the 1990s, called it 'a cash cow', because it helps the club finance the rest of its theatrical activities.50 As Paul Xuereb points out in his book The Manoel Theatre, 'its

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intriguing Anglo-Maltese cultural and linguistic medley have endeared the panto to local middle-class audiences'.51 Herein lies a very important observation which should not be glossed over. Unlike its British counterpart, the Anglo-Maltese Pantomime is patronized not by a supposedly 'unsophisticated' audience, but by the Maltese middle class. Not only is the audience middle class but so are the cast and crew. The members of the MADC are mostly middle managers, university students and graduates, bank employees and school teachers from the bourgeoisie of Malta. Their everyday speech is a cross between Maltese and English, with which many Maltese people feel uncomfortable, and non-Maltese-speaking persons have a hard time understanding, even if they speak and understand English. Interestingly, they make fun of this linguistic phenomenon themselves in Pantomime, where the Dame and other characters often use an Anglo-Maltese dialect. In recent years, the MADC Pantomime has attracted attention not only by just being what it is expected to be, but also by being extremely pungent in its political commentary and its sexual jokes. In 1983, for the production of Puss in Boots, 'the Manoel Theatre were suspicious that companies were departing from the script as submitted to them and the Censor. As a result they warned [the MADC] that they would be taping all the performances.'52 The following year, a senior government official from the Ministry of Culture walked on stage during a performance of Robinson Crusoe because he felt that the political jokes were too offensive and not in the interest of the public good. These incidents have increased audience interest in the MADC Pantomime, and they are a major reason for the enduring audience to keep asking for more, year after year. Conclusion

Whereas the origins of Carnival in Malta certainly predate the arrival of the Knights of the Order of St John in 1530, those of the Pantomime are intrinsically linked to the British presence on the island. Carnival is celebrated all over the islands, and by all sorts of people, whereas Pantomime, which is staged in Malta's principal theatre, appeals mainly to a social elite. Just as formerly, when a person's presence at a select Carnival ball was taken as a tangible sign of that person's social rank, today attending or participating in the MADC Pantomime is also seen as a way of confirming social adherence to the prosperous middle class. Political criticism is an essential feature of both events; however, it is certainly much milder in today's Panto than it was in Carnival under British rule. Whereas all political beliefs and social ranks were included in Carnival, the political beliefs reflected in Pantomime are closer to those of one party - the Nationalist Party. As political satire dwindled and was prohibited in Carnival after 1970, the MADC Panto became a privileged venue for barbs

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against the political regime, especially in the 1980s after the incident during Robinson Crusoe when attending the Pantomime meant stating clearly one's political tendencies. In the past few years, political satire in the Panto has become increasingly harmless, while a political flavour is creeping into the spontaneous village carnivals. Carnival lost its popularity in the 1970s due to strong government intervention, and the official Carnival celebrations in Valletta and Rabat (Gozo) are now becoming a product to be sold to tourists, and locally serve mainly to attract children. In contrast, the rise in popularity of Pantomime in the past decade can be attested by the fact that two different initiatives have been taken to produce Pantomime in Maltese, modelled on the English tradition. One of the Maltese Pantomimes is staged for schoolchildren, and is more of a musical play. The other, which is gaining in popularity, has been staged for the last few years in Maltese, and plays to a paying public at the Catholic Institute. Notes 1. Up to the time of independence, in 1964, the history of Malta is that of a country dominated by one foreign power after another: the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Aghlogite Arabs, the Normans, the Angevins, the Aragonese, and the Knights of the Order of St John who, in 1798, peacefully surrendered the island to Napoleon on his way to Egypt. The French period in Malta was brief (two years) and turbulent; the Maltese revolted and asked the King of the Two Sicilies, their lawful sovereign, to send reinforcements to help them. The King sent Lord Nelson, who at that time was visiting his lover. 2. See H. Frendo, Party Politics in a Fortress Colony: The Maltese Experience (Malta, Midsea Books, 1979). 3. Traditionally, Carnival celebrations started on Thursday (giovedi' grasso) with a ball given by the civil servants. On Saturday, the official Carnival started at midday with a traditional dance called 'parata', and went on up to Tuesday. 4. Democrito, 1842, no. 2, p. 6. The following is the original text, translated by V. A. Cremona: 'Democrito, a fine observer and spectator of all that is said and done in public and private, has heard that some bearded fellows (who have nothing besides the hairs of their beard) are not very happy with him. In order to conform to the tastes and qualities of the former, he is growing a pointed beard, a moschino, and two long whiskers like a cat's.' 5. Michel Foucault, 'Discipline and punish', in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984), p. 209. 6. Giahan, 18 February 1847, p 1. The fact that the newspaper is in Maltese means that it is probably addressed to the lower classes. Although Maltese was spoken by all, the language of the Maltese middle and upper classes, as well as that of the courts, was Italian. The British strove to replace this with English and a long struggle ensued referred to as the 'Language Question' - which in reality was a harsh struggle for national identity. It was only really solved in the Second World War when Italy became the enemy; it was felt that it was unpatriotic to speak Italian. 7. Giahan, 18 February 1847, p. 2. When the Maltese overthrew the French, they were led by an elected body of citizens known as the Congresso Nazionale (National Congress). "The Congresso, representing all the cities, towns and villages, expected a Consiglio Popolare to administer the constitution that would be agreed upon, particularly with regard to legislation and taxation, subject to the King's assent'; H. Frendo, 'Maltese colonial identity', in V. Mallia Milanes (ed.), The British Colonial Experience 1800-1864: The Impact on Maltese Society (Msida, Malta, Mireva, 1988), p. 191.

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8. 'Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry (August 1812)', p. 130, quoted in Frendo, 'Maltese colonial identity'. 9. The Harlequin, 7 March 1840, p. 70. 10. 'The Clown or the balls', 27 February 1840, p. 1. Although the article refers to any kind of ball, the date it is written on is around the Carnival season. 11. La Rigenerazione, 16 February 1877, p. 1. 12. Ibid. 13. The Malta Chronicle, 13 February 1891, p. 3. 14. The Enterprise, 18 March 1878, p. 1. 15. The Malta Chronicle, February 13, 1891, p. 3. 16. See Herbert Ganado's description of veljuni in Rajt Malta Tinbidel (Malta, Klabb Kotba Maltin, 1977), vol. 4, p. 39. 17. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Vintage Press, 1994), p. 144. 18. Malta, 8 February 1898, p. 1. 19. Malta, 20 February 1890, p. 2. 20. Malta, 24 February 1903, p. 2. 21. The Enterprise, 11 March 1878, p. 1. 22. Ganado, Rajt Malta Tinbidel, vol. 1, p. 52. 23. The Enterprise, 11 March 1878, p. 1. 24. Troops going to the war fought between Russia and Turkey were stationed in Malta. See C. A. Price, Malta and the Maltese (Melbourne, Georgian House, 1954), p. 127. 25. The Congress of Berlin was held in June 1878 and presided over by Otto von Bismarck. At this conference, Britain, France, Austria, Germany and Russia (known then as the Great Powers) pledged their continued commitment to the preservation of the Ottoman Empire. 26. This commission had been appointed as early as 1873 and had found that many Maltese lived in inhuman conditions of poverty. C. A. Price describes their findings as follows in Malta and the Maltese: 'In 1873-74 another rise in European prices imposed fresh burdens upon the islands. The government appointed a Commission of Enquiry and again evidence was taken concerning the many Maltese forced to live on carob-beans or practise total abstinence for periods of 24 hours at a stretch. The commission recommended a full-scale programme of sanitary reform to improve health and of organised immigration to relieve distress' (Report of the Sanitary Commission 10 October 1874 - quoted from Malta Times 21 and 28 November 1874). 27. Malta, 14 February 1900, p. 2. 28. Quoted in Malta, 24 February 1900, p. 2, and followed by a discussion on the injustice of this new rule. 29. See Malta, 8 October 1901, p. 2; the newspaper not only defends the Boers but states that in future Britain's enemies would be Malta's friends. 30. Malta e le sue dipendenze, 12 February 1907, p. 2. 31. In certain cases they also had an organized dimension under the form of dance. However, as villagers and residents tend to be more and more attracted to the spontaneous carnivals, all events containing any formal organization are deemed uninteresting and attendance is low. 32. Malta, 15 February 1893, p. 2. 33. Malta, 2 March 1897, p. 2. 34. II Risorgimento, 14 February 1907, p. 2. A committee was finally formed in 1908 (see Malta, 21 February 1908, p. 2), but the first official Carnival Committee was not created until 1926. 35. Malta, 19 February 1898, p. 2. 36. This was a dance celebrating the victory of the Knights of St John - who ruled Malta from 1530 to 1798 - over the Turks in 1565, that was fought on Maltese shores. In it, dancers dressed as Knights 'fight' others dressed as Turks and, in the end, a little girl representing Malta is lifted up symbolizing victory. 37. La Gazzetta di Malta, 26 February 1892, p. 2.

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38. See Frendo, 'Maltese colonial identity', p. 101. 39. Malta, 5 March 1924, p. 2. 40. Malta, 24 February 1926, p. 2. The float bore a coffin draped in the Italian flag, with the words PN (for Partit Nazzjonalista, i.e. Nationalist Party) and Tragic Happening on the sides. The coffin was surrounded by four men, one of whom had a knife in his hand, which he continually plunged into the coat of arms of the Savoy monarchy. 41. Malta, 4 March 1929, p. 2. 42. A description of satirical floats is given in Il-Berqa, 7 March 1935, p. 10. 43. Ganado, Rajt Malta Tinbidel, vol. 3, p. 399. 44. Il-Helsien, 29 February 1960, p. 8. 45. In 1962 there were fresh elections and the Nationalist Party came to power; in 1964 Malta became independent. 46. It is usually based on tales for children and features stock characters in costume who sing, dance and perform skits similar to sketches in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century variety shows and music hall routines. The Cambridge Guide to the Theatre (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992) entry for Pantomime on p. 751 states the following: 'Pantomime, English: A form of entertainment so indigenous that its conventions have to be interpreted to non-Britons.' 47. Shakespeare has been another MADC tradition every summer to the present. 48. Quoted in J. C. Mompalao de Piro, The MADC Story 1910-1985 (Malta, MADC, 1985), pp. 65-6. 49. The MADC travelled to Solihull, England to present one of its productions in 1982. The play was Butterflies Are Free by Leonard Gershe. This was the only time the MADC has performed overseas. 50. From an interview in 'Oh, yes it is!': The Making of Aladdin & His Wonderful Lamp. Unpublished dissertation in the form of a video production presented at the University of Malta by Coryse Borg in 1996. 51. Paul Xuereb, The Manoel Theatre: A Short History (Malta, The Friends of the Manoel Theatre, 1994), p. 154. 52. Mompalao de Piro, The MADC Story, p. 106.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Trickster-outlaws and the comedy of survival JONNA MACKIN

But if there is any ceremony which goes across the board and is practised by lots and lots of tribal people, it is having a sense of humor about things and laughing. Louise Erdrich (interview)

Law courts and Indian country

Anishinabeg on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, who have been engaged in longstanding legal battles against the lumber industry, have erected a billboard depicting Nanabozho, their traditional trickster hero, whacking Paul Bunyan (the great lumberjack and icon of white Minnesotan identity) over the head with a walleye salmon.1 Locals periodically chop down the sign like lumberjacks, and the people on the reservation put it back up again.2 The billboard spells out in cartoon some of the underlying political tensions for the Anishinabe tribes of Minnesota and Wisconsin, who contend that the US government, in concert with lumber companies, conspired to fraudulently dispossess them of hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land and the accompanying revenue.3 Law courts have been the primary arbiters of these conflicts, where the Minnesota Anishinabeg have won some major cases. For example, the 1977 State vs. Zah Zah decision substantiated some of their claims to illegal tax forfeiture of lands, but issues of native usufruct rights are caught in ugly controversies raging in contemporary Indian country. The Red Lake band's sign marks the boundary of their sovereignty as one enters the reservation, with a walleye salmon as a symbolic weapon in what is also a very real battle over fishing rights and natural resources.4 The walleye as weapon is a comic image that signals the tribe's intention to dominate the discourse of rights through humour. This chapter takes as its subject the way that humour in literary texts re-enacts these political and social tensions for modern Anishinabeg; it assumes there is a 'political unconscious' embodied within the pages of

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fiction.5 Humour is an important element in the novels of Anishinabe (Chippewa) novelists Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor. Both authors are successful within a Western publishing establishment that prizes them as 'ethnic' exemplars of native traditions. Paradoxes of assimilation and tribal identification like these inform their shrewdly humorous portrayals of modern Indians striving to regain lost cultural modes and lifeways. Their versions of law courts and outlaws show how humorous representations engage social and political tensions. The conflicts adjudicated in law courts have important and real effects on Indian economic and political survival, but they also oddly reflect the metaphysical struggles between Indians and the US national state. Donald Fixico, Native Scholar in History at Western Michigan University, views these legal events from within the context of Anishinabe traditions. These were woodlands Indians, and plants and animals 'were an integral part of their infrastructure and ethnogenesis'.6 A clan structure based on humananimal alliances has been a fundamental part of their society. Thus their fight to protect forestry and fishing rights is, in another sense, a struggle to protect an entire social structure that presumes a specific relationship to the natural world. Indian-White conflict arose also and fundamentally out of an epic confrontation between two kinds of society. In each, land was of great importance but served a distinctive role. The struggle between Indian and White, therefore, was not only over who would have access to resources, but over the nature of the resources themselves and their place in social relations and cultural order.7

What is at odds in Indian-White clashes is the contest of two opposing world views. Law courts have become important sites where the identity of tribal units is arbitrated. The ways that Indian groups define themselves often lack evidentiary status in US courts, especially when based upon oral narratives, which Indians regard as sacred and courts regard as 'hearsay'. Indians today find themselves in the paradoxical situation of seeking retribution via the very system that originally disenfranchised them. In fact, they have become adept at winning court cases based on the very treaties that removed them from their lands. Tribes have won major court battles over issues like the repatriation of Indian remains and the settlement of land claims, and their forensic activism has also resulted in the potential to reap huge profits from gambling casinos on reservations. This adaptability to another system of judgement, that of European jurisprudence, illustrates how Indians assimilate and use Western modes in the service of claims from a tribal system unrecognizable to Western law. Such expertise indicates a kind of trickster-like ability to adapt to what some have called 'extrinsic' systems of justice. 'Trickster' is a complex term indicating an ability to subvert surreptitiously. It is an ability that has been essential to Indian survival.

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The trickster Trickster is an important and even sacred figure for many tribes. He often represents a kind of meta-level justice because he is outside and above social and behavioural systems. In traditional Anishinabe belief systems, the mythical trickster is named Nanabozho, and he is crafty and cunning in the service of survival.8 In one of the many stories about him, Nanabozho tricks toad-woman into sharing her secret rituals; he then kills her, skins her, and puts on her skin as a disguise. Some versions tell of his discovery of fire, and in several versions of traditional deluge myths he is credited with saving Anishinabe culture and lifeways. When he lands on a small island, he is able to save the world with the aid of a few small creatures. He sends them down to get some earth, and when muskrat returns with a grain of sand, Nanabozho recreates the world from this small morsel. Nanabozho is also sexually curious, as in one of the tales when he puts rabbit fur between his legs to experience what it might be like to be a woman with a man. Not surprisingly, it doesn't go too well. Basil Johnston, who learned of Nanabozho from stories told by his Anishinabe elders, tells us that Nanabozho is sometimes clever, sometimes lazy, often incompetent yet otherwise capable of magic. It is in his failure, as well as his success, Johnston writes, that Nanabozho was a hero to his people.9 Writing on the Anishinabeg of Manitoulin Island, Theresa S. Smith sees Nanabozho as the artist figure, re-creator of culture and a mediator between sky-beings (Thunderers) in the heavens and the water-monsters (Mishebeshu) of the deep. He is a carrier of exchange between various positions within the realm of sentient beings. By extension, she sees him also as the figure that represents self-relating: 'he is a whole self who sometimes responds to his instinct or appetites, sometimes to his intelligence, and very often uses the latter in the service of the former'.10 He is a shape-changer, a creature of many manifestations, all of them deriving from his contingent relationships with the world. Christopher Vecsey, noted scholar in Colgate University's philosophy and religion department and director of Native American Studies, similarly helps us bring the myth back full circle to the contemporary struggles of Midwestern Chippewa, for he interprets it as arising from a central concern related to hunting. Nanabozho helps 'the Ojibwas to cross a formative threshold . . . he breaks the solid kinship with the animals, gaining for himself and implicitly for other Indians to follow the right to hunt'.11 Myth brings a kind of ordered understanding to the earth that helps humans to survive physically. Through his power of transformation and representation, Nanabush (Nanabozho) understood the world; to understand stones, he became a stone. Tor his attributes, strong and weak, the Anishnabeg came to love and understand Nanabush. They saw in him, themselves.'12

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The Nanabush figure becomes a central point of articulation between tradition or history and contemporary literature. In the novels of Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor, Nanabush is not only embodied in specific characters, he also informs what Vizenor himself has called a 'trickster discourse', becoming a modus operandi of the text.13 Vizenor is particularly fascinated with tricksters because he considers them to be keys to modern ways of knowing, ways that replicate Indian oral traditions. In the introduction to Trickster of Liberty he writes: Jacques Lacan reasoned that what arises in language returns to language; words are ambiguous . . . 'Behind what discourse says, there is what it means . . . and behind what it wants to say there is another meaning, and this process will never be exhausted.' Words, then, are metaphors and the trickster is a comic holotrope, an interior landscape 'behind what discourse says' . . . The author cedes the landscape to the reader and then dies, the narrators bear the schemes, bodies are wild and the trickster liberates the mind in comic discourse.14

Uniquely among American Indian writers, Vizenor is attracted to postmodern theory because he feels that such theory deploys 'trickster strategies'. In the introduction to Trickster of Liberty, for example, the dialogue between native Sergeant Alex Hobraiser and the 'anthropologist and aerobics instructor' Eastman Schicer illustrates the performative character of naming. Alex refuses to confirm Schicer's fixed definitions and descriptions of the meaning of her language. Schicer had recorded 'every sound she made last summer and then transcribed her words to discover what he believed was a "trickster code" . .. "You're a paid word piler," she shouted'.15 The androgynous Alex, refusing to identify as male or female, raises the linguistic hob ('a rounded peg or pin used as a target in quoits and similar games').16 In fact, 'to raise hob with' is defined as 'to cause a destructive commotion in; disrupt completely',17 and she most definitely wants to disrupt the anthropologist's attempt to interpret her culture. The name 'Eastman' evokes the eastern academic establishment, perhaps from some prestigious Ivy League university, coming west to perform Scheisse, the German word for shit. Or it might be the Eastman of Eastman Kodak, recording distorted snapshots of Indians as curios and tourist attractions. Once these associations begin to build, language is freed from its fixed positions to move and shake standard versions of reality. As if to fix him in a position, Alex's dogs continually mount Schicer as he pontificates about her culture, their names speaking his significance for Indians: white lies and chicken lips. Trickster discourse changes the shape of our understanding, freeing imagination to play with associations. Playing with word mongrels also potentially releases Alex and her culture from stereotypes imposed upon them by the language of white culture. In addition to trickster discourse, trickster figures are multiply present in Vizenor's fictions. In Heirs of Columbus, a retelling of the Columbus legend

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that 'founds' America, Stone Columbus, a direct (and undoubtedly unacknowledged) descendant of Christopher Columbus, is a 'mixed-blood tribal trickster' who leads his motley tribe in the founding of a new community where 'humor rules and tricksters heal'. Stone anchors his new tribe on a bingo barge, provocatively evoking contemporary sovereignty issues in reservation casino gambling. He is a trickster connected to Nanabozho through his name: 'Naanabozho, the compassionate tribal trickster, had a brother who was a stone: a bear stone, a human stone, a shaman stone, a stone, a stone, a stone.'18 Stone is also an outlaw, operating a bingo barge at a time before the legalization of tribal gaming. His case will be determined in a court of law, but in this court - unlike Western jurisprudence - imagination and storytelling have evidentiary status. The judge considers virtual light shows of trickster Nanabozho as she deliberates on the case. Needless to say, such legal proceedings are grounded in assumptions that differ from Western logical positivism. When Vizenor sets the 'trial' of Stone Columbus for illegal gambling, the playful venue of a court that hears stories in stones and litigation in lasers is also a mask for an aggressive re-visioning, restructuring of a legal system that unfairly prejudices cases against those who do not share the same foundational assumptions. Our very enjoyment of Vizenor's newly imagined word-constructs and playful scenarios makes us his allies in a linguistic war for survival. Embodied within the humorous transaction is a covert attack upon the power structures that have held Indians in thrall to white cultures and systems of justice. Indians must conduct business in a language that was once foreign to them, but the ability to turn this forced assimilation into humorous transactions signals an ability to regenerate and to recruit our identification. Literary tricksters

The Nanabozho myth cycles suggest that as his people entered the modern world, Nanabozho retired from his career as founder and transformer, but 'there are contemporary Ojibwes who still feel his presence and are convinced that he can be awakened as a symbol of Anishnaabe identity and vitality'.19 Such an Ojibwe is the novelist Louise Erdrich, who celebrates the outlaw trickster in the character Gerry Nanapush, 'the famous Chippewa who had songs wrote for him, whose face was on protest buttons, whose fate was argued over in courts of law, who sent press releases to the world'.20 Gerry ghosts his way through several of Erdrich's novels, most of which concern the interconnected tales of an extended mixed-blood family of Chippewas on and off a reservation very much like that of her own Turtle Mountain Band. Gerry first ends up in prison as a result of a fight with a cowboy to settle the question of 'whether a Chippewa was also a nigger'. Things didn't go well in court, and Gerry was 'socked with

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a sentence that was heavy for a first offense, but not bad for an Indian'.21 That's when his string of prison escapes begins. It seems that Gerry spends most of his time in prison mainly 'for breaking out of it', and his escapes and escapades take on the form of near miracles, including squirming his 6-foot, 200-pound frame into a prison wall and vanishing, and impregnating his wife Dot Adare from behind prison bars. Through a hole ripped in her pantyhose and a hole ripped in Gerry's jeans they somehow managed to join and, miraculously, to conceive.'22 His vanishings are comical evocations of the magical exploits of his spiritual soul mate Nanabozho. His hair stiffened. His body lifted like a hot-air balloon filling suddenly. Behind him there was a wide, tall window. Gerry opened it and sent the screen into thin air with an elegant chorus-girl kick. Then he followed the screen, squeezing himself unbelievably through the frame like a fat rabbit disappearing down a hole. It was three stories down to the cement and asphalt parking lot.23

He keeps on escaping because, basically, he felt like he had served his time, for 'Gerry's problem, you see, was he believed in justice, not laws'.24 Like Gerry's mythical ancestor, his operational code derives from spiritual instincts that do not necessarily coincide with those of the society around him. As he says, 'Society? Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.'25 Gerry plays by his own rules, and he becomes a kind of hero to his people, for somehow his rules point to the idea of a higher law that does not necessarily align with the kind of justice that deals out harsh sentences that are 'not bad for an Indian'.26 Gerry's outlaw survival points to the defence of a people who have been powerless to resist the crushing force of US governmental authority. As James McKenzie suggests, Erdrich's novels pay homage 'to the tenacity of a small, minority culture pitted against the juggernaut of contemporary American life'.27 It should be clear that the trickster is not only a mythical reference point, but is also now a textual embodiment of humour. When Erdrich writes of Gerry's sentence, 'it was not bad for an Indian', there is a kind of tongue-in-cheek acceptance of what is obviously an injustice, an ironic stance that constitutes both an acceptance and a rejection of the 'justice' embodied in this judgment. The fact that the federal system cannot hold Gerry, that he outwits them and tricks them each time, subtly implies his ultimate victory. Erdrich makes great comedy out of his escape methods, inventing wilder and more preposterous forms with each novel. In The Bingo Palace Gerry even miraculously escapes from a plane crash. His victory is bittersweet, however, for he continues to be plagued by law enforcement. But he survives, and he continues. Erdrich displays the fecundity in Gerry's style of outlaw-ism when she describes his in-utero baby as a convict waiting to escape:

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the child was as restless a prisoner as its father, and grew more anxious and unruly as the time of release neared. As a place to spend a nine-month sentence in, Dot wasn't much . . . The child was clearly ready for a break and not interested in earning its parole, for it kept her awake all night by pounding reasonlessly at her inner walls or beating against her bladder until she swore.28

Functioning like Vizenor's neologisms, Erdrich's extended metaphors string into stories that provide activities for the imagination, stretching and unbinding one idea from another until new creations are born - like Gerry as nascent being each time he escapes from prison into a new world. The continual resurgence of this Chippewa trickster-outlaw recreates the world out of grains of prenatal stuff. Working like dreams, language recombines and replaces, weaves and disengages, until our imaginations are brought newly created energies from the quotidian chaff of poverty and injustice. Dreams and humour work according to many of the same principles, which is why so much of this metaphorical playfulness can seem inherently funny, even though we're not always conscious of the particular joke being made. Theorizing jokework

In considering how humour expresses a given 'political unconscious', James English notes that 'humor is a social practice, an activity by means of which work is performed within and upon a concrete and historically specific social situation'.29 It's an observation that, as English reminds us, was not even new when Henri Bergson made it in 1900 in Le Rire. However, it has been 'denied, neglected or bracketed' in humour studies since that time. English points out that 'humor is an event, not an utterance' and 'comic incongruity is social contradiction'.30 Thus, when we say that the playfulness of Vizenor's laser courts or Erdrich's escapist prisoner is a kind of covert action against the structures of dominance that have held them powerless, we are recognizing the inherent social transaction that lies imbedded in the process which made these representations humorous from the start. We might say that this playfulness takes charge of the discourse, changes the terms by which we perceive justice, and makes the dominant structures - in this case the law - the butt of a joke. Thus, couched in humour we have a kind of rearguard action against this law. But what constitutes the peculiar efficacy of these transactions, where they may, under certain conditions, accomplish more than more strident polemicizing to effect change? Thinking of comedy as inversion or subversion of dominant authority has become more common since the rediscovery of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his theory of carnival.31 But I would suggest that in comic transactions we actually have an operation considerably more complicated than a simple sub version/containment model: we have powerful

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manipulations of basic psychic processes that build subjectivity. A prominent American Indian theorist, Vine Deloria, noted that in the Civil Rights struggle for blacks in the US, comedian Dick Gregory: did much more than is believed when he introduced humor . .. He enabled non-blacks to enter into the thought world of the black community and experience the hurt it suffered. When all people shared the humorous but ironic situation of the black, the urgency and morality of Civil Rights was communicated.32

As Deloria implicitly recognizes, humour accesses powerful ethical force by manipulating identifications through fantasy. The metaphoric processes we have referred to in Vizenor and Erdrich are built on identifications and disidentifications, using language to forcefully engage our sympathies and construct or deconstruct associations. Metaphor and metonymy manipulate psychosymbolic material, breaking images loose from their history and recombining them through fantastic associations that produce a kind of sense in nonsense. In fact, Sigmund Freud proposed that dreamwork and jokework function according to the same basic principles of condensation and displacement, except that dreams are highly individual and jokes are essentially social.33 Jokes, like dreams, elevate the basic conflicts and even violence inherent in social life into the stuff of texts and images.34 Samuel Weber, in The Legend of Freud, has pointed out that Freud's whole psychoanalytic enterprise rested on his ability to convince the scientific community that he did not create the seeming nonsense that resulted, but in fact that it was an integral part of the subject's imaginary path to selfhood. Jokes, then, occupy not a frivolous position but one that is central in the processes by which we imagine ourselves.35 Keith Basso, a sociologist who focuses on the social potency of jokework among the Western Apache, describes what he calls the 'joking window' as a kind of linguistic miracle, a makeshift studio where Apaches accomplish their impersonation of the cultural symbol 'Whiteman'.36 Within this joking window, they are able to manipulate an imaginary version of the 'Whiteman', presenting concrete formulations of 'an abstract cultural symbol'. The makeshift window, which exists only for the duration of the joke, allows Apache jokers to play with attitudes and behaviours that otherwise would not be tolerated. For example, Basso describes a joking performance that exemplifies the way cultural contrasts are transformed into joking material. The setting is an Apache home, J is a cowboy and L is a clan 'brother' of J. J: Hello, my friend! How you doin? How you feeling, L? You feeling good? J: Look who here, everybody! Look who just come in. Sure, it's my Indian friend, L. Pretty good all right! [J slaps L on the shoulder and, looking him directly in the eyes, seizes his hand and pumps it wildly up and down.]

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J: Come right in, my friend! Don't stay outside in the rain. Better you come in right now. [J now drapes his arm around L's shoulder and moves him in the direction of a chair.] J: Sit down! Sit right down! Take your loads off you ass. You hungry? You want some beer? Maybe you want some wine? You want crackers? Bread? You want some sandwich? How 'bout it? You hungry? I don't know. Maybe you get sick. Maybe you don't eat again long time.37

Basso points out that this joking imitation of an Anglo-American portrays him as grossly incompetent in the conduct of social relations. Specifically, Apaches think whites use the word 'friend' in a socially irresponsible way, calling people friends whom they have barely met, causing Apaches to suspect they use the term when they want something. Also, unsolicited queries about someone's health or emotional state are considered 'impertinent violations of social privacy'. And except when participating in activities that require physical contact, Apaches avoid touching one another. Apaches also consider it rude to repeat a question more than once or twice. It is also considered discourteous to demand replies. In contrast with the understated ways of expressing social relations, this exaggerated portrayal of the Anglo envisions him as rude and obtrusive, and a violator of considerate social norms. The joke of this exaggerated role-playing lies in the way that it savages the oppressive 'Whiteman' by imitating him. 'In short, the world of joking provides moral cover for immoral social acts. It is a rough-and-tumble playground in which Apaches can violate cultural norms and avoid the consequences such violations normally entail.'38 Thus far we are still in covert subversion territory. What is particularly important for our discussion here is the fantastic quality that grounds the ability to make these risky jokes. I would suggest that fantasy is a necessary part of all humour. A closer look at the work of vision and imagination provides some clue as to the unique efficacy of jokes to rearrange psychosymbolic material. Fantasy, joking and power

Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek points out that the subject that exercises the most potent force upon the social field is imaginary, a subject that imagines itself as seen from a viewpoint outside itself, which 2izek designates as the viewpoint of the ego ideal. This perspective sees the self as from a vast distance, the self seeing the self being seen. Imagining this relation makes it clear how the illusion reveals not merely an ideal and its inversion, but how the ideal and inversion themselves are part of a larger scheme of self-relating. This viewpoint is fantastic - 2izek calls it 'the virtual self - for it exists nowhere in reality.

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Ego-Ideal is precisely the viewpoint assumed by the subject when he perceives his very 'normal' everyday life as something inverted. This point is virtual, since it figures nowhere in reality . . . as such, it is of a strictly symbolic nature.39

The various positions of self-relating constitute a web of associations so thick as to be undecipherable, and it is this web which holds all together. Bound by laws of relationship, of civilization and of repression, what lies outside this law is the subject and its enjoyment (jouissance).*0 As we anatomize fantasy projection using Zizek's topography, we can see how manipulating the positions of self-mirroring produces the virtual self. For example, Western Apache jokers diffuse social tensions through enacting fantastic versions of 'Whiteman'. In addition to reducing anger, the transaction accomplishes a distancing function, producing an ability not only to bear suffering, but also to reaffirm the group as agent in the transaction. The Apache joker in the above example not only discharges hostile energy by ridiculing the 'Whiteman', he also ratifies the social arrangements of the Western Apache and places them within the dominant position in the joking window. According to 2izek, modern states establish the collective by organizing frameworks for communal enjoyment, but 'the element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated/41 Cultural sites, 'structured by means of fantasies',42 constitute communities through shared enjoyment of national myths. In relationship to an imagined 'our way of life', the power in constructed enjoyment becomes available to the colonized as well as to the colonizer. 'Our way of life' can be organized in relation to an entirely imagined 'thing', such as the 'Whiteman'. By imaging alterity, the community fantasizes its agency. The impact of comic transactions as a type of access to the power of communal enjoyment can be observed directly in a text like Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Here Erdrich performs a complex operation on the self-concept of her fictional band of Chippewas, by making their 'mixed-blood' status a paradigm for modern Indianness. While she has often been criticized for exposing negative images of Indians, I would maintain that drawing the images of pathos and trauma with humour ties these images to the social violence that caused them. Her humour responds to tragedy with a survival strategy that preserves the strengths of Chippewa culture and allows it to draw what it needs from white culture. Joking allows her to re-tell the story from the standpoint of subject rather than object (or abject). Tracks is part of a trilogy that includes Love Medicine and The Beet Queen, about an extended circle of families living around the territory of Argus, North Dakota. It picks up the story in a period before Love Medicine, around the time of continuing encroachment by whites upon Indian land. The clear villains in the story are lumber companies like those who dispossessed the Red Lake Chippewa of their land. In fact, the

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narrator Nanapush tells his story to dissuade one of the characters from marrying a member of the family who leased their land to the Turcot Lumber Company so the timber could be cleared. Tracks, set in 1912-1924, concerns the early removal of the Pillager Chippewas from their cabin on Lake Matchimanito.43 Centring upon the story of Fleur Pillager, the last of a clan, who 'messed with evil, laughed at the old women's advice and dressed like a man', it is narrated in alternating Verses' by two narrators: Pauline Puyat, crazed mother of Marie Lazarre - a central character in Love Medicine - and a tribal elder named Nanapush, a gifted storyteller and wily trickster who has watched the passing of the old ways. 'I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot.'44 Nanapush has watched his tribe unravel 'like a coarse rope, frayed at either end' as they succumbed to smallpox and starvation. As he watches the decimation of the tribe, he ultimately realizes that the only way to survive may be to cooperate with the Government. To become a bureaucrat myself was the only way that I could wade through the letters, the reports, the only place where I could find a ledge to kneel on.'45 Pauline is a Puyat, a family of 'mixed-bloods, skinners in the clan for which the name was lost', a 'skinny big-nosed girl with staring eyes'.46 She has always wanted to be like her mother, who 'showed her halfwhite', or like her grandfather, pure Canadian, for she knows that to be an Indian is to perish. 'I saw through the eyes of the world outside of us. I would not speak our language.'47 She follows Fleur to Argus, where she works alongside her in a butcher's shop with four men. Fleur's sexual potency is the foil to Pauline's lonely, sex-starved soul. As Pauline describes Fleur, 'Her glossy braids were like the tails of animals, and swung against her when she moved, deliberately, slowly in her work, held in and half-tamed. But only half.'48 Pauline became her 'moving shadow'. Pauline's attraction to Catholic mysticism and her obsession with strange kinds of self-mortification provides an outlet for her frustrated sexual impulses and also attracts the attention of Old Man Nanapush. She provokes a good deal of laughter as avatar of a perverted kind of spiritual excess. Pauline seeks to master the impulses of her body by denial of its demands, and the extremity of her effort renders it comic. When Nanapush discovers her wearing her shoes backwards, he says, 'God is turning this woman into a duck!'49 After discovering that she never (rarely) goes to the bathroom in order to perform a perverted kind of penance, he tricks her into drinking too much sassafras tea, and then proceeds to tell stories of a deluge. As Pauline's feet jiggle when she attempts to keep control, Nanapush stops mid-story to remark, 'A wonder . . . This duck can jitterbug!'50 Pauline's excesses, it turns out, are the mirror reverse of Fleur's. Her 'rape' by Napoleon Morrissey, a coupling she ignorantly seeks, is a grotesque reversal of the sexual attraction between Fleur and her husband Eli. Both women bear a daughter. Both women nearly drown several times; Fleur's 'drowning' is made to seem mystical, Pauline's

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comic. She nearly dies of exposure when she heads out into the lake in Nanapush's leaky boat. Pauline is a useful foil; a kind of comic doll that can seemingly be pilloried with impunity. But Pauline is also the co-narrator of the story. The narrative does not exist without her perspective, her gaze, her telling. Some readers have attempted to see her as a foil to Nanapush, seeing him as the traditionalist, a decolonized character who has returned to his native roots from his sojourn in white society. Susan Stanford Friedman offers two readings. In one she calls the 'post-colonial', Nanapush is interpreted according to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks: 'Nanapush represents the attempt to decolonize the mind, to go back to a pre-contact identity.'51 The other, which she calls the 'syncretic', sees Pauline as of equal stature with Nanapush, who achieves a large portion of strength from her syncretic mixing of faiths. In this reading Pauline is a strong female exemplar, somewhat like a medieval Catholic saint on her own native vision quest. Friedman suggests that the text supports both views. But I would suggest that Nanapush is the narrator who ultimately achieves the reader's sympathy and identification, because Nanapush is the joke-maker. Both narrators are in the privileged position of 'seers'; and both have adopted a 'syncretic' view of white culture, but Nanapush achieves narratorial dominance through the use of humour. Erdrich's use of Nanapush is an indication of her syncretic politics and her link to traditionalism through the trickster. In the symbolic interplay between Pauline and Nanapush, the social coordinates available to modern Indians are played out. Erdrich has spoken of her own mixed-blood heritage, where the Indian part is 'the part of you that is culturally different'.52 The question posed by the two narrators concerns the way to survive feeling 'culturally different' in a society that demonizes your difference. Because Nanapush is the narrator who elicits our sympathy, the 'subject' that he presents for identification offers an answer. It imagines itself as part of an ongoing community, passed along a thread strung back and forward in time, perpetuated through local connections among people along the string. He holds the tribe together with his string of talk: Talk is an old man's last vice. I opened my mouth and wore out the boy's ears . . . I shouldn't have been caused to live so long, shown so much of death, had to squeeze so many stories in the corners of my brain. They're all attached, and once I start there is no end to telling because they're hooked from one side to the other, mouth to tail.53

In making group formation part of the process of storytelling, Erdrich's politics of ethnicity work as envisioned by Fredrik Barth in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Barth focuses not on the specific content of ethnicity, what he called 'the cultural stuff, but on the process that differentiates 'us' from 'them', on 'the social processes which produce and reproduce, which organize, boundaries of identification and differentiation between ethnic

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collectivities'.54 This is not a racial politics, where the amount of native blood, or skin colour, or specific facial features determines one's Indianness. This is an ethnic politics, where boundaries are determined by activities of identification and disidentification, where collectivities are created - even temporarily - from a shared relationship to an imaginary 'thing' and the enjoyment it produces. It should be clear by now that humour can be such an activity. By making it a key feature of the character that she offers for sympathetic identification, Erdrich provides a specific kind of intervention in the process of subject formation and, by extension, in the process of group formation. Because she offers the 'mixed-blood' as a metaphor for the only political alternative available to modern Indians, she reifies the character who finds a way to preserve the past and appropriate the present. Humour, in Erdrich's view, is essential to survival because of the particular way that it constructs the fantasy of a virtual self that survives domination and preserves sanity. Conclusion

Ultimately, then, for both Erdrich and Vizenor, jokes provide a way of repositioning the subject. By exploiting the potential for change inherent in social conflict, humour is capable of realigning the bases for individual and collective identifications. The social contract that establishes Western law assumes a rational base; it leaves out the 'fantasy-space within which a community organizes its "way of life" (its mode of enjoyment)'.55 When enjoyment of shared fantasies changes the grounds for communal organization, a newly identified subject may become a symbolic outlaw in relation to previous social coordinates. Tricksters operate as outlaws who manipulate meta-level fantasies and who are then in a position to realign the social world. Erdrich and Vizenor re-imagine through humour the cultural sovereignty of modern Anishinabe. These two authors' comedy adopts and celebrates the trickster's power, replicating a process that has long been held sacred by many American Indian tribes. Notes 1. Anishinabeg is one version of the plural form of the tribal designation Anishinabe, one of several names for the group. Preferred by Gerald Vizenor and other tribal members who like to emphasize the traditional, Anishinabe (one of many spellings) is the name they historically called themselves. It indicates simply 'man' or 'self in an Algonquian language. The name Ojibwe comes from the Algonquian word ojib meaning 'puckered up'. It was given to the tribe after contact with whites. Some believe it designates the puckered moccasins worn by the tribe; others that it designates the treatment given to enemies. The name Chippeiva, preferred by the American government, was a later one, which may have derived from a corrupted pronunciation of Ojibwe. It became the official designation adopted by the Bureau of American Ethnology. Chippewa is the most familiar in the United States; it is often associated with experiences of the tribe after assimilation by whites. It is also the designation preferred by Louise Erdrich. For further information see William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway People (St Paul, Minnesota

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Historical Society Press, 1984) and Theresa S. Smith, The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World (Moscow, ID, University of Idaho Press, 1995). 2. The politics of this anecdote, and many other forms of playful cultural appropriation by indigenous peoples, is discussed at length by Rosemary Coombe in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998), p. 179. Coombe attributes the anecdote to Brenda Child. The author of this chapter received an email message from Child confirming the incident and specifying that Coombe herself had never visited the reservation. 3. See Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920 (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994) for a detailed history of the land dispossession of Minnesota Anishinabeg. 4. In a related and recent settlement, the band settled a longstanding claim that the US government mismanaged their timber resources, resulting in the loss of $400 million in revenue. They agreed to accept a much-reduced payment of $53.5 million, which certainly represents a 'good deal' for the government, and as Louise Erdrich might say, 'not a bad deal for an Indian'. 5. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1981). 6. Donald L. Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (Niwot, University of Colorado Press, 1998), p. 104. 7. Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 35. 8. There are many variant spellings for his name, among them: Nanabush, Winabozho, Weenaboozo, Manabosho, and Nana'b'oozoo. Nanabozho is the Grand Portage, Minnesota spelling - see Timothy G. Roufs, The Anishinabe of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (Phoenix, Indian Tribal Series, 1975), p. viii. 9. Basil Johnston, Ojibway Heritage: The Ceremonies, Rituals, Songs, Dances, Prayers and Legends of the Ojibway (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1990), p. 94. 10. Smith, Island of the Anishnaabeg, p. 172. 11. Christopher Vecsey, Imagine Ourselves Richly: Mythic Narratives of North American Indians (San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1991), p. 91. 12. Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, p. 20. 13. See Gerald Vizenor, Trickster discourse: comic holotropes and language games', in Gerald Vizenor (ed.), Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), pp. 187-211. 14. Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xi. For an excellent review of this book see Elaine Jahner in Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 37-9. 15. Vizenor, Trickster of Liberty, p. xiii. 16. Random House College Dictionary of the English Language (New York, Random House, 1988). 17. Ibid. 18. Vizenor, Trickster of Liberty, p. 5. 19. Smith, Island of the Anishnaabeg, p. 156. 20. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York, Bantam Books, 1989), p. 258. 21. Ibid., p. 162. 22. Ibid., p. 160. 23. Ibid., p. 169. 24. Ibid., p. 61. 25. Ibid., p. 263. 26. Ibid., p. 162.

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27. James McKenzie, 'Lipsha's good road home: the revival of Chippewa culture in Love Medicine', American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (1986), p. 56. 28. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 164. 29. James F. English, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 1. English offers one of the most useful and astute analyses of comedy and the way it works towards communitarian ends. 30. Ibid., pp. 5-8. 31. Bakhtin saw Carnival as inversion of the sacred. Carnival gained theoretical currency with the 1968 publication of Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White refined the idea of comic subversion in The Poetry and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1986), by pointing out that this inversion was very often sanctioned by the parodied authority structures in feast days set aside for such purposes. 32. Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), p. 146. 33. Condensation in psychoanalytic terms is the process whereby an idea is made to contain all the emotion associated with a group of ideas. Displacement is the shifting of an affect from one mental image to another to which it does not really belong, as in dreams. Both terms are considered to be basic to joke processes by Sigmund Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976). 34. To the concern that I work with Western European models on a literature written by people who disclaim association with Western European models of cognition, I reply that neither Louise Erdrich nor Gerald Vizenor has disclaimed such association. Vizenor provides lists of European authors who influence his texts, many of whom are theorists of deconstruction and post-structuralism, and Erdrich herself cites Western sources as influential upon her work. She was educated at premier institutions in the West, receiving a BA from Dartmouth College and an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. In addition, both are not only mixed-blood, but also make a point of theorizing the politics and culture of mixed-bloods or metis in their work. It would be nearly impossible in contemporary USA to claim that Native American culture has not been influenced by Western or white culture, down to the very language of their literature and law. 35. I am not concerned with any kind of taxonomy or hierarchy of humorous types and effects, for I consider this kind of generic consideration of humour to be orderly but unenlightening. Even though Sigmund Freud himself got distracted by the task of defining different types of jokes or comedic moments, he was ultimately most concerned - as am I - with what it does, rather than what it is. 36. See Keith Basso, Portraits of 'The Whiteman': Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols among the Western Apache (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994). This is the only sociological book-length monograph I'm aware of that rigorously studies forms of American Indian humour. I consider Kenneth Lincoln's Indi'n Humor (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992) a rather rambling discussion of his personal reflections on the subject. 37. Basso, The Whiteman, p. 46. 38. Ibid., p. 44. 39. Slavoj 2izek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London, Verso, 1994), p. 11. 40. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 80. Weber contests the Lacanian notion of 'lack' and claims that, according to Freud, the unknown is not an absence but a presence. 'Nothing . . . permits us to conclude that the navel of the dream [here standing in for the subject] is either central or empty. On the contrary, it seems curiously full, oversaturated, and if it presents difficulties to our understanding, it is because it contains too much rather than too little . . . If Freud's description of this navel differs from Lacan's, it is precisely because it brings into movement just what Lacan seeks to arrest: the very notion and place of a center. Freud's navel neither contains a center, nor comprises one. It does something very different: it straddles the unknown.'

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41. Slavoj 2izek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1995), p. 201. 42. Ibid. 43. Erdrich has created a mythical place, evocative of the Great Lakes area near her grandfather's Turtle Mountain reservation where she spent much time. Mackinac Island and Manitoulin Island were and still are important sites for Chippewas. Warren's History of the Ojibzvay People describes a landscape of dense woodlands and lakes where the tribes carried out their traditional activities in earlier times, and the description is similar to Erdrich's descriptions of Pillager land. Erdrich cites Manitoulin Island on the frontispiece to her novel, and she and her husband at that time, Michael Dorris, have written about a visit to the Chippewas on Manitoulin Island. Teresa S. Smith's study of the Anishinabe religion focused on the Anishinabe of Manitoulin Island. 44. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York, Harper & Row, 1988), p. 2. 45. Ibid., p. 225. 46. Ibid., pp. 14-16. 47. Ibid., p. 14. 48. Ibid., p. 18. 49. Ibid., p. 146. 50. Ibid., p. 150. 51. Susan Stanford Friedman, 'Identity politics, syncretism, Catholicism and Anishinabe religion in Louise Erdrich's Tracks', Religion and Literature, vol. 26, no. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 108. 52. Joseph Bruchac interview, 'Whatever is really yours' in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1987), p. 77. 53. Erdrich, Tracks, p. 46. 54. Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity; Arguments and Explorations (London, Sage Publications, 1997), p. 12. 55. 2izek, Tarrying, p. 215.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Capturing the antipodes: an imaginary voyage to Terra Australis PAUL LONGLEY ARTHUR

Fantasies of the antipodes antipodes la. Those who live on the opposite side of the earth to each other or to oneself. Ib. Those in any way resembling the inhabitants of the opposite side of the earth. 2. Places on the surface of the earth directly or diametrically opposite to each other; a place diametrically opposite to another, esp. Australasia as the region on the opposite side of the earth to Europe. 3. Exact opposites.1

The idea of the antipodes has a long history. Classical thinkers first used the term to refer to the whole of the southern hemisphere, most of which remained completely unknown to Europeans until at least the sixteenth century.2 The myth of the antipodes grew out of an ancient geographical theory of balance. The driving force behind the myth was 'the principle that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe'.3 A great southern continent (one far larger than Australia) featured in the classical imagination as early as the fifth century BC. Greek thinkers, including Pythagoras, and following him Aristotle and later Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy, supported the belief that the earth was spherical and that a great south land must exist to balance those of the northern hemisphere.4 These theories were the basis of Renaissance geographical thought, and of the persistence of the idea of Terra Australis incognita, which was elaborated in different ways in the eighteenth century by de Drosses in France, Callander in Scotland and Dalrymple in England.5 It was a persuasive European projection that was not finally disproved until the second voyage of Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century, which determined, once and for all, the true extent of the Australian continent. The eastern coast of the landmass Cook charted showed that it was far smaller than the great southern continent needed to prove the 'great south land' theory.6

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The word 'antipodes' has a range of meanings that reflect the term's long historical evolution. The geographical parameters of this region were mobile, redrawn on maps in response to received knowledge gradually brought back to Europe by returning explorers. It was from 1460, with the first successful Portuguese ventures into the Gulf of Guinea, that European explorers began to make physical inroads into the southern hemisphere.7 Gradually, as parts of the southern world were named and mapped and made sense of, the projected antipodes diminished in area until finally it 'settled' over the area of present-day Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, around the seventeenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the term came to represent all that was unique about the British settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand when compared, as they usually were, with Europe. This chapter discusses the way seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans used myths and fantasies to help conceptualize cultural contact with the frontier world of the antipodes. The focus in the following pages is on a unique genre of literary fiction, known as the 'imaginary voyage', that played a special role in helping to articulate Europe's colonial role in the frontier region of the antipodes. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as the first European explorers were setting foot on antipodean land, writers of imaginary voyages began offering enticing visions of natural wealth and the potential for colonialism in the antipodes. The region of the antipodes was the most popular setting for imaginary voyages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Australia, as we know it today, did not accurately feature on European maps until the early nineteenth century. However, the antipodes had been the subject of a vast body of literature since it first featured in the classical imagination. The genre of the imaginary voyage, therefore, signifies the continuation of a long history of imagining the antipodes in myth and popular imagination. In this chapter I draw on the example of a representative imaginary voyage: Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750).8 This mid-eighteenth-century text presents a politicized vision of the potential benefits of European colonialism in the antipodes that is typical of many eighteenth-century imaginary voyages. In Australia, and in Oceania more generally, the subject of imaginary voyage fiction is particularly topical now, at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, when there is a renewed interest in the original European voyages of discovery. In Australia, this interest has manifested itself in impressive public displays that have included building true-to-life replicas of James Cook's famous ship Endeavour, the first European vessel to navigate and chart substantial parts of Australia's eastern coast in the late eighteenth century, and of the Duyfken, the Dutch ship that made the first recorded European contact with the Australian continent in the late sixteenth century. It has also offered an opportunity to reflect on the dire consequences of European intervention on the indigenous populations who were so rapidly and irreversibly affected in the wake of first contact.

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Colonial fantasy voyages

Adventures, real or imaginary . . . may serve as pilot's charts, or maps of those parts of the world, which every one may chance to travel through; and in this light they are public benefits.9 Voyage accounts offered alluring 'tickets of passage' to distant destinations for European readers. In this quotation, taken from a contemporary review of Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, no distinction is made between real and imaginary adventures. Like maps, claims the anonymous reviewer, both kinds of travel writing act as guides for readers who 'may chance' to travel through to distant lands. For most Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century, travelling to the antipodes was neither desirable nor practical. And yet, a huge market for voyage and travel literature developed during the course of the century, aimed at and consumed by a broad reading public. 'Curiosity will always make travellers, and a still more extended curiosity, produces readers for their narratives', wrote the editors of the British Critic in 1797.10 Whether presented as real or imaginary, accounts of voyages to distant places had the liberating effect of transporting readers to new imaginative terrains. 'If we consider the true use of these writings', observed the reviewer of Peregrine Pickle, 'it is more to be lamented that we have so few of them, than that there are too many'. 'And where is the traveller', asked the same reviewer, 'who would complain of the number of maps, or journals, designed to point him out his way through the number of different roads that choice or chance may engage him in?'11 In 1799, half a century after Peregrine Pickle was first published (and directly following the most sustained early period of European exploration in the antipodes) the editors of the British Critic claimed that voyages and travels 'always were, and must be, popular' because 'they administer to a curiosity which is liberal and almost universal' and 'give the satisfaction of knowledge, without exacting the labour of serious study'.12 Compared with the unpredictable and often tortuous physical experience of many months at sea in uncharted waters, mental voyaging was a pleasurable activity which followed safe and well-defined routes marked out by the inviting ordered lines of words on pages. The term 'imaginary voyage' is only one of many that have been used to refer to a genre that has had no commonly accepted definition. Through time and in different languages, critics have referred to the imaginary voyage variously as the 'voyage imaginaire', 'voyage extraordinaire', 'fabulous voyage', 'fictitious voyage', 'marvellous voyage' and 'wonderful voyage'.13 In 1941 Phillip Gove published The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study. This bibliographically dense and detailed history remains the most comprehensive study of the evolving usage of the term 'imaginary voyage' to date. Gove traces the earliest

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critical recognition of the term to a dissertation by Francois Augustin Paradis de Moncrif, entitled Reflexions sur quelques ouvrages faussement appeles ouvrages d'imagination, presented to the French Academy in 1741.14 Although the term voyage imaginaire had been used occasionally in France before this date,15 it had not yet been used, according to Gove, as a literary classification.16 In English, the term 'imaginary voyage' appeared much later: there was no recognition, discussion, or even passing use of the term (not even in book titles, for example) before the nineteenth century.17 Gove's study focuses on the eighteenth century (it includes an annotated 'checklist' of 215 imaginary voyages published between 1700 and 1800), but his broader aim was to provide a survey of the attempts made by critics to define the genre of the imaginary voyage from the time of its first critical recognition in the eighteenth century up until the early twentieth century. Having consulted more than 150 dictionaries and encyclopaedias up until 1940, Gove concluded that 'no satisfactory definition of the imaginary voyage as a type of literature has ever been devised'.18 Imaginary voyages were popular in Europe from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. The two most famous examples are Gulliver's Travels.19 and Robinson Crusoe.20 This new form of fiction simulated contemporary accounts of discovery voyages by incorporating the latest knowledge of the world in painstaking detail, and adopting the same matter-of-fact rhetoric used in genuine voyage accounts. Despite their high levels of realism, these stories often presented comical, satirical visions of a topsy-turvy new world waiting to be discovered. Over the course of two centuries marked by European colonial activity that led to the modern colonial era (approximately 1870-1960), writers of imaginary voyages in the setting of the antipodes helped to create a social acceptance of colonial expansion by imagining environments in which a European presence was constructed as natural, beneficial and welcomed.21 Described in very general terms, imaginary voyages are stories told of European male travellers voyaging, often alone, to imaginary distant lands, making contact with people there, generally living there for an extended period of time, and then returning, usually against the odds, to publish a personal account. These popular texts repeatedly act out the fictionalized assertion of European colonial power by casting a travelling European character as a benevolent educator, arbitrator and facilitator of cross-cultural contact. The voyage itself is an essential element of the story. As in accounts of real voyages of exploration, it is the voyage that is the condition that allows the events to take place sequentially, as though they had really happened. While imaginary voyages typically celebrate the tenets of European colonialism, they do not always sanction colonial conflict. This unique form of popular fiction provided a channel that writers used to comment on the issues brought up by real cross-cultural contact. Imaginary voyages are often Utopian in their visions of 'other' worlds, are usually written in

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a satirical style and incorporate veiled attacks on contemporary political figures and practices, including the processes of colonial expansion itself. Like the millions of participants in today's Internet chat rooms, the authors of imaginary voyages often published their accounts anonymously or pseudonymously so as to protect their identity and not be held accountable for radical ideas put forward. Unlike official colonial voyage accounts, fiction offered a critical forum for debating the significance of European encounters with other cultures and for questioning the value of colonization itself - and even the general assumption that Europe had a right of place in new worlds. As fictional counterparts to genuine accounts of travel and discovery, these stories expose the desires, fantasies and expectations of Europe imagining its way into the antipodes. Imaginary voyages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were predominantly British and French. They were written in other languages and published in other European countries, and routinely translated between languages, but no country produced them in the numbers that Britain and France did. It is not surprising that these two nations had the strongest traditions of imaginary voyage writing.22 They were the great imperial powers of the eighteenth century, and it can be assumed that writers and readers alike would have had a general awareness and even a taste for stories of colonial adventures that portrayed their home nations making contact with distant lands and successfully exerting control over them. Despite the rivalry between Britain and France, and also as a result of that rivalry, texts were translated quickly between these two languages.23 However, there were differences between the two traditions of imaginary voyage writing, especially in the late eighteenth century when romanticism in French literature took a specific form that dovetailed with British romanticism. David Fausett's book Images of the Antipodes is a comprehensive reference source for the emerging differences between British and French imaginary voyages.24 Both nations, nevertheless, produced stories telling of colonial encounters in the far-away antipodes at exactly the time they were both setting their sights on colonizing that very region. Fantasy frontiers

There was simply no reliable way for readers to gauge the truthfulness and accuracy of any account, however worthy it seemed, without an established store of knowledge to draw on and make comparisons with. Incredible discoveries sometimes seemed too fantastical to be taken seriously. There is even one case of a noted twentieth-century historian failing to discriminate successfully between fact and fiction in an imaginary voyage text that had been mistaken by readers as a genuine travel account for almost two hundred years.25 This was a frustrating issue for readers and writers alike, even in the late eighteenth century after almost

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two centuries of European contact with the antipodes. Mario Mantra, for example, who accompanied James Cook on his first voyage from 1768-71, and secretly published his own record of their travels before the official account was released, was concerned that readers were not generally prepared to believe descriptions of cannibalism in Africa and America. Mantra complained that Some gentlemen, who never left their homes, have ventured, on the strength of speculative reasoning, to question the veracity of those travellers who have published accounts of cannibals . . . treating as falsehoods every relation, which from their ignorance of human nature, appears to them improbable.26

Mantra pleads with readers to believe the contents of his own account and cautions, 'let them not indulge the same freedom on this occasion; the fact will be too well attested to be rendered doubtful by their visionary impertinent objections'.27 The example of European colonialism and crosscultural contact in the Americas was a particularly strong influence on general perceptions of the antipodes and the perceived potential characteristics of its human population. Cannibalism in North America presented the most shocking and frightening image of 'savage' life in distant parts of the world. Later the spectre of cannibalism in New Zealand consolidated the stereotype but in the setting of the antipodes. The cautious response of readers to these incredible reports was understandable. Visiting the great south land Apart from interest in famous examples such as Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, and a general acknowledgement of the genre in library cataloguing classifications, there has been very little critical attention paid to the imaginary voyage genre. Today the genre is barely known and remains poorly understood.28 Over the past two centuries, imaginary voyages have proved to be a confusing proposition for historians, who have typically dismissed them as 'just stories', or even as corruptions of the empirical project of discovery and exploration that are best ignored. There are equally complex reasons for their general neglect in the field of literary studies. Even though the genre has been widely acknowledged by name, there has never been any common agreement on what exactly constitutes an imaginary voyage, beyond its origin in romance forms and its status as an early style of modern prose writing that was a prototype for the novel. Another barrier is the fact that imaginary voyages have never formed a coherently linked tradition or body of works, although there are isolated examples of cross-referencing between early examples in cases where authors were aware of existing examples. The most common approach has been to read imaginary voyages

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'backwards' in terms of golden age myths and the genre's relationship to the long history of European Utopian thought. However, because the antipodes were increasingly becoming a real place with genuine political concerns for Europeans, it is not useful only to think of imaginary voyages as a traditional form of Utopian fiction. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, written by Robert Paltock but first published anonymously in London in 1751, is exceptional because it was so widely read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.29 Peter Wilkins has been recognized as a major source for later literary works and is one of the few imaginary voyage texts published in the wake of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels that was not overshadowed by their fame.30 It combines the realism of one with the fantastic elements of the other, and in this sense it typifies the imaginary voyage genre as it developed in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the Preface to the 1884 edition, Bullen placed Peter Wilkins on a high literary footing, considering it to be as important as the Odyssey and Arabian Nights, two classic accounts of imaginary travels. Peter Wilkins, to his mind, deserved a place among these famous texts as one of 'the world's benefactors'.31 Although the story of Peter Wilkins begins in the familiar setting of England, it soon takes the reader further afield. Imaginary voyages had the advantage over genuine voyage accounts of being able to transport readers beyond the boundaries of European geographical knowledge and into unexplored regions. In this way, imaginary voyages could satisfy a desire beyond the curiosity to know about newly discovered places. As in the case of Robinson Crusoe, Wilkins leaves his family following a domestic dispute. He has many dangerous and life-threatening experiences at sea, in Africa and later on the way to the South Pole, before being shipwrecked on the rocky promontory of the great south land of the Australian continent. The first half of the book builds up a highly realistic and convincing picture of Wilkins's life, including his childhood, schooling, marriage and his adventures at sea before the shipwreck. From the moment Wilkins is shipwrecked, however, the story moves into fantasy mode. Wilkins and his boat are inexplicably sucked into a dark cavern and come out at the other end in a beautiful lush land that seems to be uninhabited. Wilkins lives in a grotto that he gradually turns into a comfortable living space. He spends a number of years there before discovering a community of human-like flying creatures. The males are called Glumms and the females Gawreys. Wilkins marries a flying woman named Youwarkee and they have children. Their wings for flying are called the Graundee. Wilkins describes the first time he sees Youwarkee fly in these words: It is the most amazing thing in the World to observe the large Expansion of this Graundee, when open; and when closed . . . to see it sit compact on the body . . . they make the Body and Limbs look extremely elegant: and by the different Adjustment of their Lines, on the Body and Limbs, the whole, to my

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Fancy, somewhat resembles the Dress of the old Roman Warriors, in their Buskins; and to Appearance seems much more noble than any factitious Garb I ever saw .. ,32

In the mid-eighteenth century, the antipodes remained a largely uncharted physical space, but the region was also a vast conceptual space, a stage of the imagination on which the most bizarre events and scenes could be enacted. Peter Wilkins contains many scenes that show Europe taking a colonial control over the antipodes. Wilkins introduces gunpowder and strategies of European warfare, for example, and uses his European 'arts' and weapons to quell a civil dispute between rival groups of flying creatures. Easily impressing the inhabitants of the discovered land with the materials, technology and beliefs he brings to the island, Wilkins is soon hailed as a new leader of the flying people in a ceremony at which the King announces 'I am to signify to you, that the mighty King Georigetti, and all his honourable Colambs, commanded me to give you Rank according to your Merit.'33 Although he never fully takes on a leadership role, Wilkins establishes colonies, abolishes slavery, creates mines and factories, and teaches various European cultural practices to the people of the Australian continent, including writing. Critics such as Juliana Engberg have acknowledged Peter Wilkins as a fabulous vision of calculated colonization which tested out many of the values of Britain's second empire a generation before it became a reality.34 The hero has been described as a 'prophetic figure' by one critic who notes that, through the character of Wilkins and his encounters with the flying people, the text 'seemed to presage the real cross-cultural relations about to unfold in the South Pacific' with the resumption of European discovery voyages in the second half of the century.35 With the blindness to cultural diversity that so often directed the way in which the eighteenth-century Europeans made sense of the places they colonized, Wilkins does not stop to consider that he might be destroying a culture. His impulse is always to mould the society to European standards. When his wife Youwarkee dies, Wilkins leaves the country surprisingly suddenly and with little regret, perhaps because he has run out of reforming schemes.36 Only at one point does he notice that his actions may not have benefited the flying people in the way that he intended them to. On that occasion he reflects 'I am afraid, I have put them upon another way of thinking, tho' I aimed at what we call civilizing of them'.37 Fantasy stories told of European colonization in imaginary voyages such as Peter Wilkins consolidated the sense of European control over the antipodes because they enacted discovery voyages and staged scenes of colonial encounters in a way which made them appear natural, routine and desirable, even (and often especially) to the colonized themselves. This form of imaginative writing was a highly political 'means to an end' in the sense that its imaginative projection of European penetration of

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uncharted regions of the antipodes was a conceptual act of occupation that provided models, and added impetus, for actual colonization. Romance of the marvellous

Although Peter Wilkins is only one of many hundreds of eighteenthcentury examples of imaginary voyages, it epitomizes the genre in the way it combines the two discursive elements of realism and fantasy.38 In this sense, imaginary voyages have an affinity with older and more traditional forms of romance literature. Standard descriptions of romance forms highlight exaggeration, embellishment and an extension in fictional representation from the domain of the real into the imaginary. Dictionary definitions of romance, for example, refer to typical characteristics ranging from the mildly imaginative 'events remote from everyday life', graduating through 'extraordinary adventures' and 'wild exaggeration', and reaching the more developed 'other-worldly' presentation of 'highly imaginative events', 'extravagant fiction' and even 'inventive falsehood'.39 At issue is not the presence of imaginative play so much as the degree to which the real or the plausible is imaginatively embellished at the hands of the romance writer. In the early nineteenth century, romances were grouped, to use a contemporary analogy, by the degree to which 'the marvellous formed the web' (that is, the substance) as opposed to simply 'the embroidery' (that is, the ornamentation).40 Eighteenth-century romances ranged from those that simply exaggerated real-life events to those that gave credence to the impossible and the supernatural. Imaginary voyages, it seems, were difficult to classify as a particular kind of romance for the reason that they occupied both ends of this broad spectrum. The two archetypal texts, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, represent each of these two extremes.41 Whereas Gulliver's Travels was received by contemporary readers as the impossible satirical fantasy that it is, Robinson Crusoe was so convincingly real-to-life that it was initially accepted as the genuine account of a castaway.42 The very fact that some imaginary voyages were presented with so highly developed a realism as to pass as authentic accounts gives an indication of the difficulties experienced by early critics trying to delineate and classify the genre in a century during which there was little available knowledge of the antipodes in Europe. By convention, imaginary voyages closely simulated the rhetoric and literary conventions used in actual European sea voyage accounts. Because the antipodes remained largely unknown to European readers, there could not yet be any accepted standards by which to make a reliable measurement of antipodean 'reality'. Readers, understandably, were not easily able to gauge the extent to which imagination and invention played a part in colouring the visions of the antipodes put forward in imaginary voyages. The resultant vulnerability to exaggeration and embellishment,

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of course, did not only affect the way in which readers made sense of prose fiction. The first-hand accounts, including the official journals of European discovery voyages to faraway places like the antipodes, often contained images that at first seemed so bizarre and unbelievable as to be worthy of the work of the most highly skilled and imaginatively freereigning romance writer. Many of the English romantics were familiar with Peter Wilkins. Charles Lamb, for example, knew the text from his school days, and Shelley read it as a child, and again later with Mary Shelley in 1815.43 Robert Southey noted Scott's high opinion of it as 'a work of great genius', and Southey himself referred to the winged people as 'the most beautiful creatures of imagination that ever were devised'.44 Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised Peter Wilkins the most extravagantly. In Table Talk, he is reported to have described the book as 'a work of uncommon beauty', claiming that it 'would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale to Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins' and explaining that he himself 'once projected such a thing' but was stopped by 'the difficulty of the preoccupied ground'.45 Over the centuries that have passed since Peter Wilkins was first published, critics have described the text in equally favourable terms. They too have associated it with the kind of imaginative expression characteristic of romanticism. John Dunlop, for example, in his History of Fiction (1814), praised the author of Peter Wilkins for having created 'a new species of beings, which are amongst the most beautiful offsprings of the imagination'.46 Soon after, an anonymous contributor to the Retrospective Review in 1823 claimed that 'as a work of imagination, it appeared at a season .. . too early'.47 In 1927, Rowland Prothero agreed with the 1823 reviewer. In his words, 'Peter Wilkins appeared too soon', for 'it appealed to the sense of wonder and curiosity which characterized the romantic movement'.48 In 1957 Oliver Edwards claimed that Paltock 'had a poet's imagination', and that 'his descriptions of scenes and events have a sense of wonder and a delicacy allied to their matter-of-factness which weave an enchantment all his own'. Edwards pondered the question of whether Rousseau would have read Peter Wilkins and speculated that 'it must have delighted him if he did'.49 And finally, in the Introduction to the 1973 edition of Peter Wilkins, Christopher Bentley, offering an explanation for the lukewarm reception when the book was first published, also claimed that it had appeared before its time. A generation later, he explained, 'the Gothic novelists and the Romantic poets had transformed literary values, and Peter Wilkins was discovered'.50 Peter Wilkins is exceptional in the sense that it was actually read by the romantics and remained popular enough with readers in the nineteenth century for critics to have voiced a range of contemporary opinions about it to which we now have access. However, Peter Wilkins is not unique in its presentation of antipodean fantasies clothed in a realistic rhetoric. Although other texts may not have been subject to the same degree of extensive historical scrutiny, most imaginary voyages generally contain

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exactly the same formula of highly imaginative and emotive elements that led critics to read Peter Wilkins as an early product of romanticism. Conclusion

Imaginary voyages are a form of colonial fantasy writing that imaginatively permeated uncharted terrains in advance of empirical knowledge. Physical borders were more than a defence of national boundaries. They often marked the point at which knowledge merged with hearsay, fables, legends and wild speculation. Read from today's perspective, with a focus on the images of colonial contact they helped to negotiate as well as produce and perpetuate, stories told as imaginary voyages of European travellers encountering new lands and peoples are important for a broader understanding of how ideas about colonialism in the antipodes began and evolved. Just as the antipodes were at last able to be described at first hand, the regular publication of imaginary voyages over the course of approximately two centuries guaranteed the ongoing function of the imaginary as a forum for registering and negotiating Europe's changing ideas about Europe's own role in the antipodes. Notes 1. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Leslie Brown, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), vol. 1, p. 90. 2. Alan Frost and Glyndwr Williams (eds), Terra Australis to Australia (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 1. 3. Anon., 'Burney - Behring's Strait and the Polar Basin', Quarterly Review, vol. 18, no. 36 (1818), p. 449. 4. William Eisler, The furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 10. Also see Miriam Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land (St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 5. 5. Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 6. 6. Ibid.; see also David Fausett, Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Stereotyping (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1995), pp. 6-10. 7. Robert Clancy and Alan Richardson, So South They Came (Silverwater, NSW, Shakespeare Head Press, 1988), p. 38. 8. Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, ed. C. Bentley (London, Oxford University Press, 1973). 9. Anon., The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle', Monthly Review, vol. 4 (March 1751), pp. 356-7. 10. Anon., 'Voyages and travels', British Critic, vol. 10, Preface (1797), p. ix. 11. Anon., The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle', p. 357. 12. Anon., 'Voyages and travels', British Critic, vol. 13, Preface (1799), p. x. 13. Phillip Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 7-11, 79-80, 82, 100; Julia Ciccarone, Fictitious Voyages (Melbourne, Robert Lindsay Gallery, 1996), p. 2.

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14. Gove, Imaginary Voyage, pp. 20-6. 15. Ibid., p. 4. Gove gives the example of a French book entitled Voyages Imaginaires, published in 1711. 16. Gove, Imaginary Voyage, p. 20. 17. Ibid., p. 5. 18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. H. Davis (Oxford, Blackwell, 1959). 20. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Running Press, 1995). 21. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), p. 1. 22. David Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land (New York, Syracuse University Press, 1993), p. 63. 23. Walter Raleigh, The English Novel: Being a Short Sketch of Its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of Waverley (London, John Murray, 1895), p. 218. 24. Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, see pp. 1-10. 25. I am referring to the historian Ernest Scott, who, like readers before him, made the mistake of reading Fragmens du dernier voyage de La Perouse as a genuine travel narrative. See W. Horton's Preface to Fragmens du dernier voyage de La Perouse (Fragments from the Last Voyage of La Perouse), ed. and trans. J. Dunmore (Canberra, National Library of Australia, 1987), p. vi. 26. Mario Mantra, quoted in Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Mantra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist, Servant of Empire (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1995), p. 51. 27. Ibid. 28. Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, p. 8. 29. Although Peter Wilkins appears on the list of new books announced in the Gentleman's Magazine for November 1750, only some copies are dated 1750. A pseudonymous contributor to The Monthly Magazine, or British Register first identified Paltock as the author of Peter Wilkins in 1802. See A. H. Bullen's Introduction to the 1884 edition of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (London, Reeves & Turner, 1884), pp. viii, xi. 30. Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, pp. 72-3. 31. See Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, ed. C. Bentley, pp. xv-xvi. Further references are to this edition. 32. Ibid., pp. 140-1. 33. Ibid., p. 257. 34. Ibid., p. xviii; see also Juliana Engberg, 'The colonial corridor', in Colonial Post Colonial (Melbourne, Museum of Modern Art, 1996), pp. 11-12. 35. Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, pp. 77-8. 36. Peter Wilkins, ed. Bentley, p. xvii. 37. Ibid., p. 215. 38. Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, pp. 15-16. 39. Shorter Oxford, vol. 2, p. 2621. 40. Anon., 'Dunlop's History of Fiction', Quarterly Review, vol. 13, no. 26 (1815), p. 389. 41. Gove, Imaginary Voyage, p. 68. 42. Raleigh, The English Novel, p. 134. 43. Peter Wilkins, ed. Bentley, p. ix. 44. Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London, Longman, Brown & Green, 1847), p. 231. 45. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana of S. T. Coleridge, ed. T. Ashe (London, Bell, 1923), pp. 331-2. 46. John C. Dunlop, The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Writers of Fiction from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age (Edinburgh, Bell, 1814), vol. 2, p. 591. 47. Anon., 'Peter Wilkins', Retrospective Review, vol. 1, no. 7 (1823), p. 122.

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48. Rowland Prothero, The Light Reading of Our Ancestors (New York, Farrar and Rinehart, 1927), pp. 283-4. 49. Oliver Edwards, Talking of Books (London, Heinemann, 1957), p. 39. 50. Peter Wilkins, ed. Bentley, p. xiv.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Conclusion GRAEME HARPER

In a New York Times Magazine article of 1 May 1966 entitled 'Good-bye, Mr Bones',1 the author suggests that there are two types of humour among Afro-Americans. The first is external humour, which allows for adjustment to the hegemonic white culture. The second is an internal humour, which is largely pro-Afro-American and anti-white. This notion of external and internal world view operating in unison is a powerful tool for dealing with the colonial world, both for those experiencing it, and for those critically approaching it. It relates directly to the formulation of concepts of identity, history, nation, empowerment and, more broadly, to notions of change. It is the concept of personal and social change that forms the backdrop for much of the work of comedy and fantasy. In Salman Rushdie's 'magic realist' Midnight's Children, narrator Saleem Sinai is born at the exact moment of India's independence. Despite that, he is not the independent, post -colonial Indian that some might expect. Indeed, we must vigorously question the phrase Catherine Cundy uses in her study of Rushdie: that Sinai is 'a mirror of the life of India itself'.2 'An Anglo?' Padma exclaims in horror. 'What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?' 'I am Saleem Sinai/ I told her, 'Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piece-ofthe-Moon. Whatever do you mean - not my own?' 'All the time/ Padma wails angrily, 'you tricked me. Your mother, you called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that you don't even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You don't even care that your mother died giving life to you? That your father is maybe still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?'3

Sinai here is no mirror. Too much lies beneath his surface, too much does not reflect directly back at the reader for the mirror metaphor to explain what is happening. However, if we were intent on some encompassing metaphoric statement, Sinai might be described more accurately as akin to the Dal and Nageen Lakes, over which he travels with the 'ancient' boatman Tai. Those lakes - reflecting the present back at us, and yet preserving beneath their waters some unseen sense of self; those lakes as the bearers of the future (e.g. in the form of the influence of Western

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medicine carried in by the Sinai family) and the past (e.g. in the form of the mysterious death of the 'foreign woman', Use Lubin). Rushdie's Saleem Sinai is not only the holder of the abrogated experience of 'internal' Indianness, borne along in the personal histories and local knowledge of the indigenous population and filled with non-Western beliefs, he is also the holder of an external Indianness: an idea of India founded on the appropriations and hybridizations brought about, largely, by Western imperialism. That he can be both these things at once is Rushdie's point. That colonial situations substantially effect kinds of comedy and of fantasy that recall and reinforce this very fact is mine. If those of us publishing in the West about colonial situations have any hope of critically approaching the discursive practices of comedy and fantasy then we need to question the categories of Western metaphysics first, in order to realize the possibilities of alternate, and non-Western, world views. Not to do so is to read colonialism in either a sentimental or a 'reconstructed' fashion, the reading, that is, of the paternally kind Imperialist. Thus, while Jacqueline Rose, talking about fantasy, is quite right to point out that 'the boundaries between reality and hallucination are culturally specific and historically (as well as psychically) mobile',4 it needs to be added that seeing a need to fix those boundaries is equally charged with cultural intent and that the idea of even calling something 'fantasy' might well be comic in an alternative culture. Toine van Teeffelen, a specialist on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, has noted: A major methodological problem in the study of Western images of the nonWestern other is how precisely such images surface in discourse. Much poststructuralist theorising, pre-eminently concerned with text and self-other contrasts, pays scant attention to the concrete manifestations of images as they are evoked, negotiated, and adapted in talk and in writing.5

Irrespective of where individual writers in Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism have positioned themselves - as it turns out, either mostly on the reflective surfaces of Rushdie's 'lakes' or beneath them - each has attempted to give critical form to the discourses of comedy and fantasy at the point of negotiation with the perceived reality. That some of these writers favour examining the dissolution of imperial ideals, while others consider the retention of indigenous ones, makes perfect sense. Were there any value in conclusive, overarching consensus at this point it might well be that comedy and fantasy make significant contributions, which are still under-discussed in colonial studies, to how we all attempt to explain the morally or ethically inexplicable, whose morals and whose ethics being widely open to interpretation. And yet, such a statement seems at best only to show how inadequate broad critical statements can be. Better perhaps to end with Morton

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Gurewitch's statement in the opening chapter of his book Comedy: The Irrational Vision: 'Comedy' has to be recognised as a matrix term that embraces miscellaneous impulses, which can be sensed empirically as effects before they are regarded as intentions.6 Ditto fantasy. And ditto the culture, and our critiques, of colonialism. Notes 1. }. Boskin, 'Good-bye, Mr Bones', New York Times Magazine, 1 May 1966, pp. 31-92. 2. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 28. 3. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London, Picador, 1981), p. 118. 4. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 105. 5. Toine van Teeffelen, 'Metaphors and the Middle East: crisis discourse on Gaza', in Jan Nederveen and Bhikhu Parekh (eds), The Decolonisation of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London, Zed Books, 1995), p. 113. 6. Morton Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 48.

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Index

absurdist fiction 111-12 Africanness 74-5 Allende, Isabel: The House of Spirits 114 Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima 114 animals 13, 16, 30, 33, 97, 98 animal stories 90, 93-4, 95-6, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 birds 29,30-3,34 talking animals 95, 101, 102 tiger 117, 120, 121, 128, 134 Anishinabe, see Native Americans; Chippewa antipodes 205-6, 210, 212, 213 see also Fausett, David Apache, see Native Americans Arabian Nights 59 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen: The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures 6, 17-18 assimilation 190 Australia 205-6, 212; see also antipodes; Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin; Carey, Peter; Cook, Captain James; imaginary voyages; Ward, Glenyse Bakhtin, Mikhail 165,166-7, 168,174 n.53, 195, 203 n.31 Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics 14 Rabelais and His World 13 Ball, Charles: The History of the Indian Mutiny 120, 128 Barth, Fredrik: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries 200

Bergson, Henri 113,195 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic 13 Bhabha, Homi 39,168,171, 173 n.30 bogey man 100 Bombal, Maria Luisa: 'New Islands' 114 Borges, Jorge Luis: A Universal History of Infamy 104 Brantlinger, Patrick 119 Buchan, John: The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction 141 Cabrera, Raimundo: From the Park to the Moon 73,80-1 Cacia: Los Africanitos 76 Cairo, see Egypt Callaway, Rev. Canon Henry 27-9 Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus 27-9,31,33 cannibalism 210 Cape Town see South Africa Carey, Peter: Illywhacker 18, 20 Carnival 175-88, 195 Carpentier, Alejo 'Journey to the Seed' 109 lo real maravilloso americano 105-6 cartographic fantasy 75-7 cartoons 120-5 see also Punch Cheever, John 106,107 The Enormous Radio' 106 Chippewa, see Native Americans Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 109 Biographia Literaria 109

234

INDEX

comic timing 167-71 Cook, Captain James 9, 205-6, 210 Coward, Noel: This Happy Breed 183 crinolines 117-19,129-39 Cuba 73-88 criollo (Cuban-born) class 73, 74 Cubans on the moon 80-4 public culture 74 stock 'black' characters 74 see also Cabrera, Raimundo; Cacia; cartographic fantasy; Fernandez, Francisco, Piloto, Alfredo; Saragacha, Ignacio; teatro bufo; Villoch, Federico Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe 208, 210, 211, 213 displacement 15-18 Edge worth, Richard and Maria: Essay on Irish Bulls 161-5,167 Egypt 140-57 Cairo 140-57 elves 94, 97 Erdrich, Louise 190, 192, 193, 196, 198, 201, 202 n.l, 203 n.34, 204 n.43 The Beet Queen 198 The Bingo Palace 194-5 Love Medicine 198,199 Tracks 198,199 Esquivel, Laura: Like Water for Chocolate 108 European travel 59 Ewing, Juliana: The Brownies and Other Tales 93 Fairbridge, Dorothea: Piet of Italy 146-7 fairy tales 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101-2 Fanon, Frantz 158,159, 170 Black Skins, White Masks 200 Faulkner, William: 'The Old People' 114 Fausett, David: Images of the Antipodes 209

Fernandez, Francisco: Lafundacion de un periodico o Los negros periodistas 76 Fitzpatrick, Percy: Jock of the Bushveld 91 Forster, E. M. 48, 51 A Passage to India 40, 55 n.l 1 Foucault, Michel 176 Fraser, James Bailie The Kuzzilbash: A Tale ofKhorasan 59 Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan 60, 70 n.9, 71 n.73 Freemasonic lore 151-4 Freud, Sigmund 2,196, 203 n.33, 203 n.35 'Jokes and the Comic' 2 Fuentes, Carlos: 'Aura' 114 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 12,104,108, 110, 111, 112 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World' 110-11 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' 111-12 gnomes 95 Godden, Rumer 39, 54 Kingfishers Catch Fire 40-8, 53, 56 n.30, 56 n.37 Gogol, Nikolai: The Nose' 107, 111, 113,114 Gordon, Lucie Duff Letters from the Cape 146 Letters from Egypt 146 Grant, James: First Love and Last Love 127,128 Gurewitch, Morton: Comedy: The Irrational Vision 220 Haggard, Henry Rider Ayesha 152 King Solomon's Mines 150,152-3 She 152 Hall, R. N.: Great Zimbabwe 150 Hawkesworth, John: Almoran and Hamet 59

INDEX Hazlitt, William: Lectures on the English Comic Writers 9 Hockley, William Browne: Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo 67-8, 72 n.74 Hope, Thomas: Anastasius, or, Memoirs of a Greek 58-9 Husserl, Edmund: eidetic reduction 16

imaginary voyages 206-17 India 9, 42, 58-60, 68 Hinduism 46-7, 67 Indian Rebellion of 1857 117-29, 133-9 Kashmir 41, 43-8 Raj 39,42,43 see also Ball, Charles; Godden, Rumer; Scott, Paul; Treveleyan, Sir George Interspersed, F. D.: Fact and Fantasy from the Veld: Stories for the Children 92 Irish jokes 158-74 Irish bulls 161-4, 174 n.56 see also polyglossia; comic timing irony 110-11

Jackson, Rosemary 21 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 14 Jerusalemgangers, see South Africa jokes 2, 195, 196, 197 see also Irish jokes Joyce, James 159 Ulysses 166 Juby, Phyllis: South African Versions of Popular Nursery Rhymes 94 Juta, Rene: Cannes and the Hills 148

Kafka, Franz: The Trial 114 Kashmir, see India Kipling, Rudyard 148,156 n.40 Jungle Books 93, 94 Konig, Juliet 101

235

Lawrence, D. H. 147, 148 Sea and Sardinia 147 Leviseur, Herbert: Desert Magic 93 Lewis, C. S. 24 Lloyd, Christopher: Explanation in Social History 9 McHale, Brian: Postmodernist Fiction 17 McPherson, Ethel Native Fairy Tales of South Africa 100 Wonder Tales of South Africa 100 magic realism 104-16 Malta 175-88 British military operations 175-7, 183, 184 British rule 175 Carnival Sunday 176 Catholicism 176,186 DomMintoff 182 festive calendar 175 Giahan (Maltese-language newspaper) 177 il-Konslu 179 kazin (club) 181 Malta Amateur Dramatic Club (MADC) 183-5 Malta Chronicle 178 perlina (confetti) 179 Mann, Thomas: The Wardrobe' 109-10 Manning, Olivia 39-40, 54 The Rain Forest 48-53 masks 176 Masonic fantasy 140-57 Masson, Madeleine: The Story of the Little Moo Cow 95 mbari 11 'Mediterranean' Cape Colony, see South Africa metaphor 196 metonymy 196 Mill, James: The History of British India 60 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de: Persian Letters 59 moon, see Cuba

236

INDEX

Moore, Thomas: Lalla Rookh; an Oriental Romance 60 Morier, James 58-72 The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan 58, 61-4, 67-70, 72 n.85, 72 n.86 The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England 58, 65-70 Ayesha, the Maid of Kars 58 Hajji Baba, Zohrab the Hostage 58 Morrison, Toni: Beloved 114 Nanabozho 191,193 Native Americans 189-204 Amshinabe 189-90,191, 201 Apache 196-7,198 Western Apache 196,198 Chippewa 190,191,193,195,198, 204 Midwestern 191 Pillager 199 Red Lake 199 see also Erdrich, Louise; Nanabozho; trickster outlaws; Vizenor, Gerald New Zealand 206, 210 nursery rhymes 98 Nzekwu, Onuora: Blade among the Boys 10 Okri, Ben: The Famished Road 18-19, 20 orientalism 61 Paltock, Robert: The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins 206, 211-13, 214-15 Pantomime 175,183-8 Paz, Octavia 106,107 'My Life with the Wave' 106 Penner, Dick: Fiction of the Absurd 111 Persia 58-69 Piloto, Alfredo Un Matrimonio en Haiti 76 Del infierno a la gloria, viaje fantdsticocomico-lirico 76 pixies 95, 97, 98 polyglossia 165 Punch 117-19,120-5,126,128-39

racism 74 Raj, see India Rhodes, Cecil 140,149 'Symbols of Rhodes' Way from Cape to Cairo' 149 Ridley, Major E. G.: Tales of the Veld Folk for the Kiddies 92 Roh, Franz 104, 108 Rushdie, Salman: Midnight's Children 10, 11, 19, 218

Said, Edward 11,12,168 Saragacha, Ignacio: Bufos en Africa 75-6 Schreiner, Olive Dream Life and Real Life 97 Dreams 97 The Story of an African Farm 97 Scott, Paul: Staying On 54 n.6 Serracino, Erin: Ir-Raheb 184 Serres, Michel 168 Sheridan, Frances: The History of Nourjahad 59 Shirley, Cecil J.: Little Veld Folk 92 slavery 66 Smilewell, Samuel: Art of Joking 169 Smith, Wilbur 154 Smollet, Tobias: The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle 207 South Africa 89-103, 140-57 African elements 97-100 Afrikaans-speaking whites 89, 96, 98 Cape Town 101,140-57 children's literature 89 English speakers 89-91, 96, 99 imported elements 92-7 Jerusalemgangers 140 'Mediterranean' Cape Colony 143-6 Nationalism 100-1 South Pacific 212 Southey, Robert 214 Suarez, Vincente Pardo y Los principes del Congo 76 El Sultan de Mayari o El mono tiene rabia 76

INDEX Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels 208, 209, 213

teatro bufo 73-84 theories of comedy Incongruity Theory of Comedy 13 Psychic Release Theory of Comedy 13 Superiority Theory of Comedy 13 Thomas, Nicholas: Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government 71 n.72 Todorov, Tzvetan 31 The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 14, 24 Trevelyan, Sir George: Cawnpore 126 trickster outlaws 189-204 Tutuola, Amos: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts 10

237

Ward, Glenyse 12 Unna You Fullas 10 Waugh, Evelyn Black Mischief 50 A Handful of Dust 53 Weber, Samuel: The Legend of Freud 196, 203 n.40 Webster, Richard: Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis 14 Weinthal, Leo Africa News and Cape-to-Cairo Bulletin 142 Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route 142 Wilde, Oscar 159 women 39-57, 117-39 female bodies 118 Young and Hollaman: Magical Realist Fiction 105, 107

Uitlanders 101 Zimbabwe ruins 147-51 Ziv, Avner: National Styles of Humour 1 Villoch, Federico 77-8 2izek, Slavoj 78, 79, 83, 197-8 Vizenor, Gerald 190, 192, 195, 196, 201, Zulu narratives, 203, 203 n.34 'Ukcombekcantsini' 23-8 Heirs of Columbus 192-3 see also Callaway, Rev. Canon Henry Trickster of Liberty 192