Fictions of (In)Betweenness 9173463051

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ACTA UNIVERSITATIS GOTHOBURGENSIS GOTHENBURG STUDIES IN ENGLISH 68

Fictions of (In)Betweenness

Claudia Egerer

ACTA UNIVERSITATIS GOTHOBURGENSIS GOTEBORG SWEDEN

ACTA UNIVERSITATIS GOTHOBURGENSIS GOTHE^fBURG STUDffiS EST ENGLISH 68

Fictions of (In)Betweenness

Claudia Egerer

,

A C T A UNIVERSITATIS G O T H O B U R G E N S I S GOTEBORG SWEDEN

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CO

Doctoral Dissertation at Goteborg University 1996 ©Claudia Egerer, 1997 ISBN 91-7346-305-1 ISSN 0072-503X

Distributors: A C T A UNIVERSITATIS GOTHOBURGENSIS Box 5096 S-402 22 GSteborg, Sweden Printed in Sweden by Kompendiet GSteborg 1997

Abstract

Egerer, Claudia. 1997. Fictions of (In)Betweenness. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Gothenburg Studies in English 68. 199 pp. Goteborg. ISBN 91-7346-305-1 In this study I seek to show how both fictional and theoretical texts engage in 'worrying the lines' between conceptions of home and exile. I analyze the ways in which home and exile are problematized in novels by Louise Erdrich, J. M . Coetzee, David Malouf, and bring them into contact and collision with similar re-conceptualizations in the writings of Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Homi Bhabha. In chapter one I argue that whereas Said reverses the home/exile hierarchy, Erdrich hybridizes the notion of home.

In chapter two, drawing on Derrida's concept of

diffdrance, I show how Coetzee's novels unhome the unspoken suppositions that underlie our understandings of what constitutes home and exile. Bhabha's discussion of the unhomeliness of home is brought to bear on intimations of the homefulness of exile in Malouf s novels in chapter three of my dissertation. I see the texts discussed as participating in the rethinking of such issues as centre/margin and self/other that we have come to associate with theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism. These texts position themselves as texts of (in)betweenness in that they are all engaged in 'thinking the between' of (binary) oppositions. I argue that in their attempt to think against and across categories, articulations of (in)betweenness in the texts discussed cannot be fixed in either a postmodern or postcolonial space. Rather, (in)betweenness is a mode of thinking that is dependent on what I call a postcolonial awareness.

Key Words: (in)betweenness, 'worrying the lines,' hybridity, unhomeliness of home, homefulness of exile, postcolonial awareness

Works of art always springfromthose who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. Rainer Maria Rilke

As far back as he can see he has been ill at ease with language that lays down the law, that is not provisional, that does not as one of its habitual motions glance back sceptically at its premises. J. M . Coetzee

Contents

Acknowledgements

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Preface

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Introduction: "Worrying the Lines"

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Chapter One: Exploring the (In)Between Spaces: Cultural Hybridity in Louise Erdrich's Fiction

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Chapter Two: Texts of Silence and Alternative Modes of Empowerment: Reading Coetzee's Waitingfor the Barbarians and Foe Chapter Three: Unhomely Lives and Homefulness in Malouf s An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon

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Postscript: Fictions of (In)Betweenness

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Works Cited

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Index

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Acknowledgements

Looking back on the time I spent working on my project from the vantage point of today, the pleasures I experienced stand out more than the hardships. I remember it, in particular, as a time of intellectual stimulation, intensive debates, and continuous learning. One of the things I have discovered is that no one writes or thinks in isolation, but that writing is a process dependent on interactions with others. The evolution of my thesis owes a debt of gratitude to many who generously offered me thek support, encouragement, and time. I am especially indebted to my supervisor, Docent Danuta Fjellestad, whose unfailing support for my project was invaluable. Throughout the writing of this thesis, I have benefited from her perceptive and constructive criticism, which helped to shape my text and sharpen my thinking. I wish to express my special appreciation to Professor Lennart Bjork, whose astute comments and sound judgments made my hfe difficult for a time but my text so much better. I would like to take this opportunity also to thank Professor Harald Fawkner, who originally set me on the course of academic research and whose influence was formative in many ways. I find that today I think and write both with and against him. I have had the good fortune to spend six weeks at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College in 1993. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the School's teachers and participants for providing

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an inspiring atmosphere and a forum for intensive debates. At my home department in Goteborg I have profited greatlyfromthe criticism offered by the faculty and graduate students of the work-in-progress seminars. I am most gratefiil to Dr. Alan Shima for his generous help. My thanks go also to Dr. Hans Lofgren and Docent Britta Olinder whose insightftil observations have been a great help to me. Fereshteh Zangenehpour deserves a special mention for undertaking the task of reading and commenting on the whole thesis. To David Dicksson, Magnus Gustafsson, and Christine Raisanen I am indebted for many valuable suggestions. Bryan Errington kindly agreed to read my manuscript at short notice, and I would like to thank him for his editorial help. My special thanks go to Harriet Solving-Gustafsson, who was a steady rock in every moment of crisis and who was always willing to help far beyond the call of duty. Helena Ardholm and Anna Greek kept me afloat in more ways than I could mention; I am grateful for being able to share the excitements and frustrations of writing with fliem. Last, but not least, I am indebted to my students who played the part of sounding boards over the years and who left me with the suspicion that I have learnedfromthem more than they will ever know. The above was written in April 1996, and I have since moved to a new position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, where most of the revision of my manuscript took place. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues at the Department of English, and Professor Jeremy Hawthorn in particular, for their unquestioning help and unstinting encouragement. I am also gratefiil for the grant I received from the Faculty of Arts at NTNU. Claudia Egerer, Trondheim, February 1997

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PREFACE

The texts offictionand theory I will be discussing share what Henderson so aptly describes as a refusal to "occupy a single territory" (Borders, Boundaries, and Frames 2). Common to all the texts is that they discuss border crossings—national, cultural, personal, and generic. Louise Erdrich, J. M. Coetzee, and David Malouf could be termed "marginal" authors in the sense of writing from and about the experience of marginality and the concerns which arise from it. The same is true of Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Homi Bhabha. Their texts differ, however, in the depiction and evaluation of marginality, each pointing to the particular circumstances and the ensuing consequences which highlight the tensions operative in a position that questions and complicates traditional either/or and neither/nor solutions. One recurrent question, we will see, pertains to the uses and the usefiilness of a term like "marginality," itself part of the old terminology of dualisms, vis-a-vis the demands placed on us by an increasingly hybridized understanding of the world. The following novels will form the core of my analysis: Erdrich's Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace; Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe; Malouf s An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon. I will bring the problematization of the relation between home and exile m thefictionaltexts into contact and collision with

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similar attempts in theoretical discourse.

I aim to show how the fictional

texts at once incorporate theoretical thinking and through their very mobility trouble theoretical conceptions by demonstrating the limits of critical concepts. In doing so, texts of fiction generate a need for a more extended inquiry, encouraging the quest for new theoretical perspectives. Even a brief outline suggests that the literary texts engage in an exploration of the borderline between home and exile. Louise Erdrich's tetralogy—Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994)— is staged on the border of the reservation and is concerned, both on a thematic and narratological level, with the crossing of borders. These border crossings are linked in a number of ways to one of the most potent images in the novels, an image all readers are familiar with, but which means different things to different people—^home. Erdrich manages to complicate the notion of what constitutes home and deals with the theme of homecoming in unexpected ways, opening the floor to alternative readings. J. M . Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Foe (1986) approach the border issue from a different perspective.

Waiting for the

Barbarians, staged around a frontier setflement, moves in the space between the boundaries drawn by the colonial powers, that is, the lines between oppressor and oppressed, centre and margin, home and exile. But for the Magistrate, who runs the affairs of the settlement as the representative of the Empire, these Unes become increasingly arbitrary as events force him to reconsider his own understanding of matters. He is faced, like the reader, not only with the question of who the barbarian is, but, as I will show, he has to negotiate conflicting conceptions of home and exile. Far more than an ' For instance, the issue of home and exile as portrayed in the novels is closely related to other poststructuralist interests such as the notions of self and other, centre and margin.

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allegory of colonialism. Waiting for the Barbarians brings questions of responsibility and human agency to the fore and forces its readers to see beyond the boundaries of home, nation, and Empire to the territory within.^ Foe is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with overtones from Moll Flanders and Roxana. The novel explores the borders between past and present, public and private, but most of all the relations between the familiar and the different.

My reading aims to investigate how Coetzee's

characters are entangled in the intricate web of home and homelessness highhghted against the famihar rendering of these notions in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. David Malouf s An Imaginary Life (1978) and Remembering Babylon (1994) question the conceptual boundaries of home and exile through the grid of memory. In both novels the focus is less on any particular place or nation than on what might be termed the "country of the mind" which is shaped and reshaped through a perpetual conflict between self and world, imagination and language. In An Imaginary Life the focus is on the Roman poet Ovid's exile from the capital to the edges of the Empke and his encounter with a nameless wild boy referred to as "the Child." Living at the margins of the Roman Empire, Ovid is stranded between worlds and faced with the necessity to cope with his isolation and the difficulty of ^ In the course of the story, the Magistrate begins to understand that "[ejvery boundary line is a myth," an insight Wilson Harris elaborates in his first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960). Although its settings and background differ from Malouf s—the storyline evokes the history of the European pursuit of gold—^Harris' novel also complicates the invader-invaded conflict by constructing a highly complex and incestuous relationship between the two groups. Harris' technique of re-envisaging history through memory, dreams, and imagination, seen here as universal conditions, serves to question the unequivocal binarism of historical "fact." The line quoted above, "[e]very boundary line is a myth" (17), is spoken by crew-leader Donne, an Elizabethan adventurer with imperial ambitions who is also the curious alter ego of the narratorial I/eye (repeatedly addressed as "dreamer" by Donne).

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communication. Although in a place distant from Rome, exile is not so much marked by geography—his Uving at the edges of the known world— but is identified as a state of mind far more isolated and isolating than the fact of deportation. It is this state of mind which forms the vantage point in the novel, a temporary position between the remembered past and yet-tobe-formulated present that leads to the reconstruction of self Remembering Babylon, at fu-st glance a deceptively simple story about a man (Gemmy) who turns up in a white settlement on the outskirts of "civiUzation" in midnineteenth-century Queensland, investigates the powers of memory as constitutive of a sense of belonging by tracing the attempt to reconstruct Gemmy's story from bits and pieces of memory and imagination. The line between fact andfiction,memory and constiiiction, home and exile is increasingly blurred and difficuh to draw. Like the other texts included in my investigation, the question of what constitutes home is central to Malouf s novel, which in many respects touches on the questions raised in Waiting for the Barbarians. In the context of these fictional inquiries into home and exile, Said's thoughts about exile, Derrida's concept of differance, and Bhabha's notion of unhomeliness are important. I will discuss these terms in detail in the chapters, but for now suffice it to say that these three thinkers, in their own ways, explore concerns similar to those I discuss in relation to the novels. In their writings, exile, differance, and unhomeliness signify a certain movement rather than refer to a definite position. Like any other system, however, modes of thinking are prone to ossification and the very gesture that brought about innovation may in time become so institutionalized that it resists or even precludes change. One example would be the eagerness and comparative ease with which deconstruction has been absorbed by and incorporated into the system, how

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quickly it has turned into a recognized method of reading, supplying us with yet another blueprint for interpretation. Initially, Derrida's inquiry into and his exposition of the hierarchical structure of binary oppositions revolutionized theoretical thinking and offered a way out of structuralist models of thought. Derrida's demonstration of the arbitrariness of binary oppositions and the interrelation of the binary pair shifted the focusfromthe privileged term to the underprivileged one, which opened new avenues of inquky and required different patterns of reading.

Yet in time the dynamism of

Derrida's approach solidified into a politics of reversal where the formerly underprivileged term gained ascendancy. Today, deconstruction has turned into a method with its own rules and regulations, where the rigorous Derridean reading is in danger of becoming arigidone.^ In this respect I see more promise in the Uterary texts to escape the ossificatory tendencies which constrain theoretical discourses. Although informed by the insights of theory, texts of fiction are not restricted to or delimited by them. Thus, in the three chapters, I read reconceptualizations of home and exile as portrayed in the fictional texts side by side with (re)negotiations of home and exile forwarded m the writings of Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Homi Bhabha. In the introduction, I will situate the novels and my reading of them in the larger context of postmodern and postcolonial modes of thought as well as discuss the various ways in which these literary and theoretical texts participate in the articulation of

^ Derrida himself is aware of the impossibility to ultimately keep manifestations of what he terms "the metaphysics of presence" from creeping back into discourse, and nowhere does this mode of thinking reassert itself more forcefully than in the teaching situation. Anyone involved in the teaching of theory will be familiar with the frustration one experiences when faced with the students' desire, inevitably followed by defeat, "to understand deconstruction." One solution would be the attempt to settle for one definition of differance, if only for the sake of explanation; another the temptation to simplify deconstruction to a "look-for-the-aporia" approach, both descriptive of the way in which deconstruction is "taught" and "applied" in some institutions today.

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(in)betweenness. In chapter one, "Exploring the (In)between Spaces: Cultural Hybridity in Louise Erdrich's Fiction," I will examine how Erdrich and Said, respectively, "worry the Unes" between home and exile.

Whereas Said

privileges exile over home, Erdrich troubles Said's optimistic view in a number of ways.

She contextualises the question of home and exile by

Unking it to the specific needs of individual characters, whose attempts to come to terms with different understandings of what constitutes home and exile serve to disclose the spUt in both concepts. I wiU also briefly touch on the issue of (in)betweenness as portrayed in a later novel. The Crown of Columbus (1993), which is the result of a joint venture between Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. The middle chapter, "Texts of Silence and Alternative Modes of Empowerment: Reading Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe," disrupts the expUcit investigation of home and exile my text engages with in the other two chapters.

While there are few overt references to home,

Coetzee's novels are seen to unhome the unspoken suppositions of home that inform the readings of texts. As we will see, this impUcit questioning of traditional modes of thinking about home and exile is at work in both the novels I discuss, but is taken the farthest in Foe. Coetzee's treatment of silence, put into play through the number zero, is seen in the context of Derrida's differance. I wiU argue that while the characters Susan and Foe exile difference, Coetzee's text embracestiiesilent and the different. In the third chapter, "Unhomely Lives and Homefiilness in Malouf s An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon," Bhabha's discussion of the unhomeliness of home is brought to bear on intimations of the homefulness of exile in Malouf s novels. I wiU show that, of all the writers discussed in

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this text, Malouf is the one who is most "at home" in the mode of thinking I term (in)betweenness.

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Introduction "Worrying the Lines" Forever on the periphery of the possible, the border, the boundary, and the frame are always at issue—and their location and status inevitably raise the problematic of inside and outside and how to distinguish one from the other. Mae G. Henderson'

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. Martin Heidegger^

As the epigraphs to this chapter suggest, the concept of the border is crucial to my project. Forever on the periphery of the possible, the border is an intriguing place to start for anyone interested in worrying the lines.^ I will seek to show how both theoretical and fictional texts "worry the lines" between conceptions of home and exile by looking at the ways in which

' With these sentences, Henderson opens her introduction to Borders, Boundaries, and Frames (1). ^ From "Building Dwelling Thinking" in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (356). It was originally given as a lecture at the Darmstadt Symposium on Man and Space on August 5, 1951, and in German this quote reads as follows: "Die Grenze ist nicht das, wobei etwas aufhort, sondem, wie die Griechen es erkannten, die Grenze ist jenes, von woher etwas sein Wesen beginnt." See Martin Heidegger, Vortrdge und Aufsatze (155). ' I have come across the expression in Mae G . Henderson's introduction to Borders, Boundaries, and Frames. She uses it as a description of the strategy the essays in the volume employ in their questioning of the border. By way of illustration of what it means to critically engage with living "on the border" (2), she refers to Gloria Anzaldiia and Trinh T. Minhha, as examples of writers who incessantly probe binary oppositions.

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these concepts are rethought and engaged with in a number offictionaland theoretical discourses.

With my focus on "worrying the hues" between

conceptions of home and exile as elaborated in theory and fiction, the question that wiU shape my reading is: How are the issues of borders negotiated infictionaland theoretical discourses? The concepts of home and exile are not new andfigurein texts from all periods. What is new is the way in which these terms are approached today and what questions they give rise to. Much of contemporary critical thought attempts to disrupt the conventional binarism of home and exile by introducing such terms as "unhomeliness" and "homefulness." Dissatisfied with "home" as the privileged term and trying to rethink the border between home and exile in terms of unhomeliness of home and homefulness of exile, the texts I discuss position themselves as texts of (in)betweenness in that they are all engaged in "thinking the between."^ From the perspective of (in)betweenness, theorizations of home and exile are closely linked to what I would like to call a postcolonial awareness. Dependent on the interaction between postmodern and postcolonial modes of inquiry, postcolonial awareness signals at once the understanding of its own hybridized status as well as the recognition of the necessity to develop new modes of explication. Setting aside for the moment the diversity of theories grouped under the headings of the postmodern and the postcolonial,

A note on the parenthesized spelling of (in)betweenness: on the level of writing it serves as a visual marker of difference, one that can be seen but not heard. In this sense it both connects to and plays on Derrida's differance as well as Coetzee's Cruso (as discussed in the second chapter). It is also meant to draw attention to the difficulty of expressing a new mode of thinking in the "old" language, where the traditional interpretation of the prefix in as a metaphor of containment invariably contaminates our understanding—hence, to be in between (preposition) or inbetween (adjective) is to be caught between two things or to inhabit an intermediate position. Rnally, the parenthesis can be seen to invoke the border as in conceptualizations of home/exile, where the hyphen functions as a metaphor of the thematic boundaries.

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we can distinguish a common interest ascribed to each approach: postmodem thought is generally understood as a Western concern, engaged in rethinking the margins, whereas postcolonial thought is seen to derive from the former colonies, with its focus on rethinking die centre. Working with the concept of postcolonial awareness aims to signal my conviction that it is no longer productive, nor indeed desirable, to make such crude divisions into a postmodern or a postcolonial mode of thinking if we want to engage with die complexity of the texts at hand. The formulation of (in)betweenness should thus be understood not only as a critique of older modes of thinking but also as an attempt to actively engage the insights of what is generally perceived as conflicting and even antithetical discourses. For me, postcolonial awareness is inseparably linked with our Uving in a postcolonial world, marked by attempts to come to terms with the tensions foUowing in the wake of coloniaUsm that affect former colonizers and colonized equally, if differentiy.^ Seen in this Ught, postcolonial awareness has far-reaching connotations in its suggestion of a new mode of reading. As such, it is not to be limited to texts from former colonies. * For instance.

I am aware that this understanding of postcolonialism is at odds with the definition put forward by the writers of the influential The Empire Writes Back, in which postcolonialism is seen as a term pertaining to "all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonialization to the present day" (2). This definition, however, does not include the former colonial powers, since Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin set up postcolonialism as a countemarrative to European colonial discourse. Although this strategy aims to interrogate and ultimately invert the hegemony of power, it still moves in the conceptual framework that legitimated colonialism—the narrative of progress and reason associated with the Enlightenment; thus replacing one totalizing grand narrative with another. * John Hawley suggests, for instance, that one of the reasons more and more academics are drawn to studies of hybridity, might be because "so many of us now find ourselves living in various intervals between cultures, amid languages, across borders" {Cross-Addressing 8). He also offers what might serve as a gloss of postcolonial awareness when he recognizes that "our entry into the twenty-first century is marked by a heightened sense of cross-cultural and interpersonal (con)fusion" (1, emphasis added).

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whereas the increasing drive towards globalization involves a questioning of the concept of the nation state in the Western world, many of the former colonies react with upsurges of nationalism directed towards the creation of a nation state.' But despite such different reactions, each nation and culture, irrespective of its status as former colony or colonial power, has to negotiate the situation that arose from the theories and practices of imperiaUsm. This negotiation involves a constant re-negotiation of borders of various kinds. A similar interest in the re-negotiation of borders informs my approach to "worrying the lines." It is important to keep in mind that "worrying the Unes" impUes mobiUty; it signifies thinking across Unes, concepts, and modes of thinking, and should be read as indicative of the reluctance—on my part and that of the writers I discuss—^tofirmlyinhabit one place. I am aware that tiiis strategy is not without risks, but I hope that it is not without rewards, either. Or, to put it differentiy, I know that I constantly incur, to borrow Trinh T. Minhha's words, "the risk of falling off one side or the odier side of the limit while undoing, redoing, modifying this limit" (Framer Framed 21S)}

^ In a lecture entitled "Identity, Authority and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveller,"given at the University of Cape Town in September 1990, subsequently printed in the 1991 issue of Pretexts, Edward Said addresses the issue of new nationalisms in former colonies from the perspective of national and cultural identity. His argument points to the paradox at the heart of ex-colonial nationalisms - in claiming their own right of definition, nationalist states often imitate what they rejected in the colonial powers. Nevertheless Said acknowledges that, as a first step, nationalism "is a necessary thing" for "those of us just emerging from marginality and persecution" (80). At the same time, nationalism's insistence on a limited view of ethnic identity that focuses "principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity," invariably and "ironically places us where as subaltern, inferior, or lesser races we had been placed by nineteenth century racial theory" (80). This is not a unique dilemma, however. Karen Lawrence reminds us in her introduction to Decolonizing Tradition that, as "feminists know, strategically it is hard to abandon a voice and a 'self that one has never fully 'possessed'" (7). ' At this point a few words on the Vietnamesefilmmakerand critic Trinh T. Minhha whose work has helped to shape my thinking are in order. While I do not use

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An obvious risk is that mobiUty might be interpreted as a shirking of responsibilities, a reluctance to take, and make, a stand. The question to ask is whether it is possible to occupy one position all the time, on all issues, or whether this view of positionality is merely a myth, an expression of the desire to be fiilly at home in, and in control of, one's own thinking and writing. Although often officially endorsing the ideology of change (and progress), the academy tends to stabilize, indeed, to privilege conventional and traditional intellectual positions.

No doubt any number of different

ethical, moral, and political positions are available to an intellectual today. But it is equally clear that tiie university, as collector, disseminator, and guardian of knowledge, has its own system of valorizing and endorsing certain positions. Today, more and more ex-centric^ academics expose and question this regularizing function of the academy. Edward Said, for instance, employs the metaphor of the traveller to characterize the present-day academic. He proposes this image because it "depends not on power, but on motion, on a wiUingness to go into different worlds," because "the traveller crosses over, traverses territory, abandons fixed positions, all the time" ("Identity, Authority, Freedom" 81, last emphasis added). From Said's perspective, then, the university can be thought of as "a place to voyage in, owning none of it but at home everywhere in it" (80), which, by the way, is a fitting

any particular terminology she has coined, her writings have a bearing on my own approach of "worrying the lines." I have already indicated that the expression is taken from Henderson's introduction to Borders, Boundaries, and Frames, but the phrase "worrying the lines" is indebted to Trinh, whose style of writing inspired it. Trinh will thus be present throughout my text, visible at times, and at others a ghost between the lines. ' I deliberately use Linda Hutcheon's term here to refer to a critical stance interested in the shifting of perspectives. For a detailed discussion of "excentric," see Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism, especially 57-73.

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metaphor for the mode of thinking I term (in)betweenness—intent on thinking with, against, and across categories. While it lies beyond the scope of my project to discuss either postmodernism or postcolonialism in any comprehensive way, I would like to examine some points of contact and conflict between the two before I attempt to position my own text in the increasingly labyrinthine theoretical landscape."* The various theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism are formulated in response to radically changed economic, political, and social realities; the realities sometunes referred to as postmodemity and postcoloniality. Generally, these changed conditions are regarded in terms of a crisis of civilization. This crisis cannot be assigned to one single cause. It permeates all strata of life and is operative on a global scale.

Once

successful structures and institutions have lost their efficiency and powers of persuasion. We see stable economies crumble and the concept of the nation being eroded as economies are globalized. At the same time, nationalist forces work towards the construction of fundamentalist states. All this

Postmodernism has turned into an umbrella term, uneasily covering a proliferation of often contradictory theories and commentaries. By now, there exist numerous accounts from a variety of perspectives of what constitutes postmodernism. While I refer to a few of the texts on this issue in my introduction, like Hassan's The Postmodern Turn (1987), Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1984), Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism (1990), and Habermas' "Modernity - An Incomplete Project," this is an indication of my own preferences and by no means exhausts the list. For a discussion of the philosophical aspects of postmodernism I refer the reader to Best and Kellner's Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991) which, to date, offers one of the most comprehensive studies. Three collections of critical essays with contributions from disciplines such as art, architecture, politics, feminism, mass media and gender studies may be useful complements. See Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (1993) and Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984) as well as Nigel Wheale, Postmodern Arts (1995). For an introduction to postcolonial thinking see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (1989) and The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (1996), Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994) and Nation and Narration (1990), and Spivak, In Other Worlds (1987) and 77ic Post-Colonial Critic (1990).

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creates an elusive sense of disorientation.

Best and Kellner discuss the

feeUng of disorientation today, but renund us that our postmodern age is not the fu-st to experience such a "crisis" (viii-ix). All cultures make similar claims in times of transition, and the move from what is experienced as traditional values into the emerging new world is never without friction. Yet crisis can also be thought of in its original Greek sense as a turning point, which enables us to appreciate it as a possibility and as an incentive to instigate both re-visions and new visions.

In response to unsettling

socioeconomic developments and intellectual turbulence, new modes of thinking need to be articulated. Both postmodern and postcolonial theories can be seen to grapple with the necessity to formulate a critique of modernity and its discourse of rationality and progress, albeitfromdifferent perspectives," Each is involved in a process of de-coding,

focusing on

different aspects of the issue at hand in an attempt to develop effective strategies for re-coding. Despite the fact that both postmodem and postcolonial studies undisputedly share similar concerns, the relationship between the two is a somewhat troubled one. Linda Hutcheon's essay "Circling the Downspout of Empire" provides us with a good illustration of where the crux of the matter lies. She begins, not surprisingly, by reflecting on the elusiveness of the term "postmodem," but comes up with a workable definition which

" Two influential books dealing with the legacy of modernity, as well as the present and future of the nation state might be mentioned here: Samir Amin's Eurocentrism (1988) and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Both offer very different descriptions of the present and predictions for the future. Whereas Fukuyama seems to embrace the tenets of modernity, understanding history as a "single, coherent, evolutionary process" (xii) which leads him to conclude that we have reached "the end of history" (xi) with liberal democracy as "the final form of human government" (xi), Amin dismisses any such universalist and universalizing approaches as belonging to the old and useless "Eurocentric" paradigm.

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describes as postmodem all "art which is paradoxically both self-reflexive (about its technique and material) and yet grounded in historical and poUtical actuaUty" (150).

Hutcheon offers no corresponding definition of

the

postcolonial, but identifies postcolonialism's "major difference" from postmodernism, one that postcolonialism is seen to share with feminisms: both have "distinct political agendas and often a theory of agency that allow them to go beyond the postmodem limits of deconstmcting existing orthodoxies into the realms of social and political action" (150).

This distinction

requires, however, that we understand postmodernism as "poUtically ambivalent: its critique coexists with an equally real and equally powerful compUcity with the cultural dominants within which it inescapably exists" (150). Postcolonialism's strong and decisive political motivation, on the other hand, is understood to derive from and seen as "intrinsic to its oppositionaUty" (150). Thus, for Hutcheon, who understands much of the postmodem inquiry as a "luxury of the dominant order" (151) which the postcolonial world can iU afford, the concerns of postmodem and postcolonial approaches are of necessity spht.'^ To shed more Ught on the point Hutcheon is making here, let me tum to two readers on postcolonial theory pubUshed in 1995 and 1996: The PostColonial Studies Reader edited by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin, and Contemporary Postcolonial Theory edited by Padmini Mongia. Although each reader positions itself carefiiUy in the postcolonial field, the former does so by setting up an opposition between its concems and those of postmodernism, whereas the latter acknowledges its indebtedness to the postmodem nexus. It is interesting to note that both readers are directed

Hutcheon cites current redefinitions of subjectivity as one area where both feminist and postcolonial discourses must take a different, less radical stance than the postmodem challenge poses to representations of an autonomous subject, simply because you cannot question what you do not, and have never, fully possessed.

27

primarily at smdents, with the explicit aim of providmg a comprehensive survey of postcolonial theory, and dius likely to be die fu:st contact students will have with this field of study. The argument put forward by the editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader would seem to coincide with Hutcheon's view.

They insist that

"post-colonial studies are based in the 'historical fact' of European colonialism, and die diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise" (2, emphasis added). My emphasis points to the weight that is given here to foundational aspects, a move that certainly differs firom the postmodem attempt to question the feasibility of foundations per se. Note also the hyphenated spelling of "post-colonial" which can be read as a textual marker indicating its difference in statusfrompostmodernism. But the hyphen would seem to have more far-reaching connotations than differentiating between postmodernism and "post-colonialism." The preface to the reader elaborates on the dispute within the "postcolonial/postcolonial" field where theorists of the former are said to interpret it as "an amorphous set of discursive practices, akin to postmodernism," and the latter are theorists who seem to asign it a "more specific, and 'historically' located set of cultural strategies" (xv). I have no quarrel with this distinction as it seems to be one of (political) preference. Yet in their introduction to the "Postmodemism and Post-ColoniaUsm" section the editors take the issue a step further by claiming that notwithstanding of any tiieoretical similarities, "the practices of poststmcturalist and post-colonial reading are completely distinct" (118).

This distinction, diey argue, consists m diat

postmodem practices, and poststmcturalist ones as subsumed under them, are seen to work for the preservation of the canon despite their articulation of new theoretical tools, whereas post-colonial practices are portrayed as breaking the pattem Uirough dieirti-ansformationalstrategies. Hence, the

28

editors interpret post-colonialism, again in keeping with Hutcheon's understanding of the term, as a "discourse of oppositionaUty" (117), which, although it may employ poststructuraUst strategies, nevertheless confirms "the poUtical agency of the colonised subject" (117). What is more, the post-colonial is seen as unequivocaUy committed to, as weU as defined by, its poUtical aims which, in tum, are to map and eventuaUy overtum "the imperial process in colonial and neocolonial societies" (117). I experience a sUght unease in the face of discussions like these. To begin with, I beUeve that the postcolonial critique is subject to an ambivalence similar to that Hutcheon sees as marking the postmodem realm. Even if we accede that, generaUy speaking, postcolonial thought (or "postcolonial" as the editors would have it) is motivated by poUtical concems, it would be hasty to assumetiiatthe poUtical bias per se suppUes us with the blueprint of how to achieve change.

So despite the fact that a group of

postcolonial critics adopts a prescriptive stance, telling us along which poUtical Unes to Uiink, this should not mislead us to diink that there is consensus on that issue. In addition, I am suspicious of seemingly sunple and clear-cut definitions like the one forwarded by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin. While its oppositionaUty indubitably is one of the definitive element in die fabric of postcolonial theory, it is far too restrictive an approach to explain postcoloniaUsm exclusively in terms of a reaction to imperial theories and practices, under which banner, it is unpUed, dieories of postmodemism fall.'^ One of the strengths of Mongia's Contemporary Postcolonial Theory is

" An example of the interwovenness of the postmodem and the postcolonial is offered by the editors of a volume on literaure and migration. Writing Across Worlds (1995). King, Connell and White point out in their preface that many of the literary texts they engage with are to be understood as "postmodem explorations of the post-colonial, multicultural encounter^ (xii, emphasis added).

29

that it does not shy awayfroma discussion of the dissensus that marks the postcolonial field and that it manages to present a fairly unbiased account of the oppositional strategies.*'* In her introduction to the collection of essays, Mongia is quite adamant in her rejection of "prescriptive definitions of what should or what does constitute postcolonial theory" since diis would preempt any attempt to "engage the tensions between the divergent perspectives" (3).

So while both readers allow for die fact that

postcoloniaUsm is not, to borrow Mongia's words, a "cohesive discourse" (3), the editors of The Post-Colonial

Studies Reader identify the

postcolonial position, defined in opposition to postmodem theories and practices, as superior to the others due to its expUcidy poUtical agenda. My brief reference to two of the coUections on postcolonial thought indicates that theories of postcoloniaUsm are indeed as diverse as the various positions to be discovered in postmodem thinking. But instead of reading the multipUcity of perspectives in eachfieldas a sign of hope suggestive of a less totaUzing approach, it seems that die temptation is strong in some quarters to posit one strategy as superior to the others, maybe m an attempt to summon die more ex-centric thinkers back into the fold. It seems as if we inevitably faU back into estabUshed patterns of thought, no matter how much we try to avoid this. The questions Homi Bhabha formulates in his The Location of Culture capture diis tenacious propensity to think in oppositional terms:

An example of this would be the presentation of the debate between Ama Ata Aidoo and Homi Bhabha at the 1991 New York conference entitled "Critical Fictions," where Aidoo expressed her fears that the term "postcolonial" might serve as a cover-up of real circumstances, erroneously suggesting "regimes of power substantively different from colonial structures" (1), countered by Bhabha's assertion to the contrary, that the postcolonial directs "our attention . . . to inequities in modes of representation" (1). Mongia proceeds to examine the implications pertaining to each position, but refrains from the temptation of making the choice for us by giving more weight to one than the other.

30

Must we always polarize in order to polemicize? Are we trapped in a politics of struggle where the representation of social antagonisms and historical contradictions can take no other form than a binarism of theory vs politics? Can the aun of freedom of knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation of oppressor and oppressed, centre and periphery, negative image and positive image? (19)

Must we indeed? To do so would result in a return to theories and practices we are in the process of questioning, and by "we" I refer to anybody who takes on the complex task of thinking and writing from the position of "post," be it a postmodem or a postcolonial stance. To my mind, it is more productive to acknowledge that postmodem and postcolonial practices exist side by side, and often hand-in-hand, in the moment in time called postcoloniahty which, let me stress again, is not limited to people from former colonies, but signifies a certain mode of thinking informed by postcolonial awareness. Another question that comes to mind is why there should be a need to distinguish postmodemism (and postcolonialism for that matter)fi-om"post-colonialism" on a qualitative basis. For me, it is more productive to treat them as umbrella terms for a number of different strategies used when interpreting texts and the world, and as such the terms are usefiil only in a limited fashion in order to generalize, but break down as soon as we get down to the particular. In a similar fashion, the question of politics cannot, to my mind, be treated from a general and generalizing perspective if it is to be taken seriously. Nevertheless one kind of postcolonial criticism seems to privilege political readings. From this position, critics of postcolonial texts are at best

31

expected to articulate the political implication of dieir reading. At worst, such poUtical readings are marked by a certain ideological conformity. I say diis because in my own reading I bracket the poUtical impUcations of "worrying die Unes" between home and exile. This is not to deny that my reading might have impUcations for die "real" world. Let me state this unequivocaUy: I am not arguing against poUtical readings of texts. What I am opposed to is the assumed one-to-one relationship between text and world, and die unspoken consensus that a "proper" postcolonial reading, by necessity, is a leftist, if not marxist, interpretation. I beUeve, with Edward Said, that to make "the practice of inteUectual discourse dependent upon conformity to a pre-determined poUtical ideology is to nulUfy inteUect altogedier" ("Identity, Audiority, and Freedom" 73). In addition to my unease about the nature and agenda of exclusively poUtical readings, I perceive a danger of estabUshing yet another oppositional hierarchy, die dismantling of which is the objective of both postmodemism and postcolonialism. I beUeve, therefore, that it would be hasty to appropriate Hutcheon's statement about the major difference for the postcolonial field. While her distinction between postmodemism and postcoloniaUsm works weU on the level of generaUty, it should not be interpreted as the quaUtative marker certain postcolonial critics make it out to be. At this point, let me return to the visions that theories of postmodemism and postcoloniaUsm share. The ones that are cmcial to my project are their inquiries into the constmctions and impUcations of binarisms in general and centre/margin relationships in particular. As stated before, my project links the rethinking of the centre/margin binarism to conceptions of home and exile, probing the ways in which a number of texts deal with diis issue. In diis context, we must not forget diat die notion of home is central to our

32

thinking, and to be at the centre is pregnant with connotations of being at home, of belonging. Consequenfly, the marginal position is seen as a loss of home and belonging in the sense that to be in exile is to be removedfromthe centre to—or beyond—the margins.

Yet the traditional distinction into

home and exile cannot be sustained at this point in time as the margins become home for an mcreasing number of people. It is this need for a new mode of thinking that prompted my strategy of "worrying the lines" and the subsequent articulation of (in)betweenness. As one of the attempts to engage in the formulation of contemporary (re)visions diat aspire to avoid the replication of binary categories, (in)betweenness is indebted to both postmodem and postcolonial reconceptuaUzations of the centre/margin dichotomy. But it seems to me that both are now caught, to different degrees, in a web of their own making, deUmiting their options unnecessarily. I have mentioned the political bias which marks and to some extent hampers theories of postcoloniaUsm in their attempt so formulate new visions.

Postmodem thought, on the other hand, discussing the centre-

margin problematic from the perspective of the margins, seems to have become mesmerized by a reversal of the traditional hierarchy. In this respect I see more promise in the direction certain postcolonial thinking takes. As yet relatively new, postcoloniaUsm is afieldthat is stiU emerging, characterized by a variety of positions. Since it is an area stiU in the making, it carries the promise of dynamism; the various perspectives are not yet settled into stable positions. PostcoloniaUsm, for instance, does not stop at redefining the centre, but also attempts to combine it with the margins. So instead of focusing on the central or the marginal, privileging the one over the otiier, postcolonial thought approaches the issue of binarismfroma third quarter. MarginaUty is stUl a major concem, but it is used in a more specific sense, formulating such questions as: marginal in relation to whom or what?

33

Under what historical and social circumstances? One result is, for instance, that the same person who is seen as "central" in one respect may appear to be "marginal" in anodier, an insight which points to tensions widiin and between categories and so complicates easy classification. It has to be remembered, diough, diat a concem widi die unpUcations of positionality is not exclusively a theoretical or critical domain since, for some tune now. Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Chicanos, women writers and other so called minority writers have disturbed die canon by revealing die misrepresentations of then: culture in hterature and by claiming therightto their own voices and positions to speak from. As diverse as these groups are, diey all share die experience of being described and defined by odiers, and are motivated by the urge to reclaun dieir own voices. As Eleanor Skoller argues in The In-Between of Writing, this insistence on the difference of their own experiences was only a first step and is now supplemented by a desire to translate that personal experience into "critically innovative and innovatively critical works" which "bespeaks a breaking up of boundary hues" (2). Skoller identifies this move as a postmodem strategy'^ and regrets that too few women writers perceive its potential as a "place where women would be able to articulate new visions,

envision

new

articulations—a

horizon that

sparkles

with

possibilities" (3). She refers to works on postmodem writers by Hassan, Dillard, and Huyssen as a case in point: the bibUographies consist mainly of

" This "breaking up of boundary lines" cannot be nairowly defined as a postmodem strategy, however. Christopher Gittings' "A Collision of Discourse: Postmodemisms and Postcolonialism in The Biggest Modem Woman of the World," for instance, discusses the ways in which Canadian literature participates in a "breaking up of boundary lines" between the postmodem and the postcolonial. He argues that Susan Swan's text and others like it employ a technique where "postmodemism and postcolonialism work together to break down master narratives of Canadian colonial subjectivity" and as such constitute "a hybrid of both discourses" (82, emphasis added).

34

male contemporary writers "whose works have become part of the canon and are currendy being discussed in intellectual journals, book reviews, and university classrooms throughout much of the Western world" (3).'^ At the same time Skoller points to two female critics, Irigaray and Cixous, whose writing differs from "male" texts by being "analytical and poetic, personal and abstract" (7). This new writing questions the dominant conventions and "tries to de-theorize (male) theoretical positions by exploding them with a torrent of language that is rarely found in theoretical/philosophical disquisitions" (7).

One problem with SkoUer's

argument is that she tries to lay claim to this new hybrid writing maiidy as a feminist strategy, thereby limiting its scope and excluding other groups. To me, the strategy of border crossing is today operative on many levels and provides a real opening towards a discourse of (in)betweenness, a discourse that in its emphasis on mobility attempts to re-envisage and re-defme boundaries as sites of interaction. What I propose to do here is not to attempt to articulate an alternative solution to the problematics of border construction."

To put forward

alternative solutions would be to go against the grain of my own investigation which explicidy engages widi what we might term "postmodem controversies" from the perspective of "worrying the lines." The expression indicates first of all that my concem is with the border—^how it is

The critical works she mentions are Diab Hassan, Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodem Literature (2nd ed; Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982); Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction (1982; New York: Harper, 1983); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986). " I have to admit, though, that "alternative solutions" has a seductive ring to it, maybe because we live in an age that celebrates "otherness." The formulation of alternative solutions is at once suggestive of two things: "solution" implies at least the possibility of settling the questions at hand one way or another, while the attribute "alternative" indicates that they might be resolved in a novel fashion, if not in a better way.

35

constructed, perceived, interpreted. In this respect my own writing overlaps with the concems of postmodemism since the postmodem debate revolves around all kinds of borders, boundaries,frameworks.We could say, then, that one central concem of postmodem thinkers consists of problematizing the concept of borders, both in a general sense and more specifically as in the theorizing of the interface between hterature and theory, modernity, and postmodemity, postmodemisms and postcoloniaUsms. But I feel uncomfortable widi die term "problematize," To me, in addition to being wom and awkward, die term is troublesome because it seems to assume a rather one-sided conception of thinking as an exclusively intellecmal activity. While the Cartesian body/mind spUt, relegating thought to the brain and feeling to the heart, is under attackfromvarious quarters, it is predominandy in feminist theories that thinkers seem to be interested in conceptuaUzing and theorizing the body.

Triidi, for instance, states in

Woman, Native, Other that we "write—think and feel—(with) our entke bodies rather dian only (with) our minds or hearts" (36). So, in addition to its focus on borders per se, my preference for "worrying the Unes" should be understood as a questioning of the boundaries modem discourses posit between the corporeal and the cerebral by attempting to incorporate the double move of an inteUectual and emotional approach.'* In this context it is ironic to realize that the modem ideas under attack today can still be seen to covertly infiltrate postmodem writing practices, if only in the shape of their terminology. I am aware, however, that my own discourse is not exempt from such contamination. Nor do I claim diat I have resolved the difficult question of

" I have engaged with the problematics of the corporeal and the cerebral in another context, where I discussed the relation between theory and experience, and the impact it might have on our understanding of how change occurs. See Egerer, "Experiencing a Conference on Change," especially 668-69 and 674.

36

how to write the body. No doubt my own text moves very much in the intellecmal mode required by its genre. My emphasis on the doubling of an intellectual and emotional approach has to be understood in a different hght. It is meant to signal my conviction that all discourses, whether popular, intellectual, scientific, poetical or theoretical, are shaped by desire to some degree, albeit some discourses tend to deny this. Nevertheless, I think most writers can remember instances where thek prudent "scientific" approach was interrupted by something I can only call a "gut feeUng," and, if diey chose to give in to this impulse (a reversal of Coleridge's person from Porlock) found it to be most productive. Again, my own text is no exception to this. I, too, had a "gut feeUng" which directed my attention to details my inteUect overlooked and which, in the course of composition, worked themselves into the fabric of my text. For example, my choice of the expression "worrymg the Unes" over die more widespread term "problematize" is the result of such a "gut feeling" which then shaped the course my inquiry took, focusing on the articulation of (in)betweenness in texts offictionand theory. Before I proceed to discuss the significance of Bhabha, Derrida, and Said for my project, let me retrace my steps to focus on what I started out with: die concept of die border. What do we mean by the border? What is die function of the border? How do we envisage borders? How does our perception of borders influence our reading of texts and the world? It would seem that the answers to diese questions presuppose binary oppositions, for as soon as we speak of a border, itsfimctionof separating entities is inevitably activated, which in tum situates us within the terminology of inside and outside, here and there, self and other, theory and practice, and so on. Within the framework of binary thinking, differences

37

are often perceived in terms of oppositions and leave us with either/or choices:tilingscan only be one or die other. In his Universe of the Mind, Lotman claims that every culture "begins by dividing the world into 'its own' intemal space and 'then:' external space" (131).

This seemingly universal boundary between self and other is

culturally significant since it results in a binary division (much critiqued by poststincturahst perspectives) where the "other" is perceived not only in opposition to the self but also as that beyond the border line, Uterally "out of bounds," symbohzing the impermissible. If we attempt to question such a dichotomous understanding of the world, we are faced with a dilemma: the move to deconstinct binary oppositions by demonsti-atmg the arbitrariness of die division uito primary and secondary terms destabiUzes the hierarchy, but it often results in a reversal and leaves the division as such largely intact. Alternatively, the attempt to collapse the border altogether resolves the binary opposition bind, but with the result that differences are liable to disappear into Sameness. Consequenfly, if we wish to retaui differences as differences^^ but without reverting to a system of binary oppositions, we may well begin by reconsidering the impUcations of different constructions of borders. Not only does a system of binary opposition require clear-cut borders to function, but the border itself seems to be locked in a conceptual dichotomy with transgression as its "other," since boundaries presuppose transgression and vice versa.

Although

transgression seems to be a universal concept, the term is problematic. AU

" It is important to bear in mind that this willingness to recognize difference as difference is largely a question of ethics, ofrespect,and that it presupposes a decentering move. This entails that conceptions of self and other, for instance, arc seen to function on a par, differcnt but not oppositional. Let me strcss that I do not wish to imply that these differences are absolute, precluding the possibility of interactive exchange, on the contrary; I believe that the recognition of difference as difference opens up new avenues of inquiry.

38

cultures are familiar with its impUcations and transgression is penaUzed because of its disruptive and subversive potential. ParadoxicaUy our culture is structured by transgressions, beginning with the bibUcal rendering of original sm: man was expeUed from Paradise to an earthly existence of blood, sweat, and tears as punishment for this first trespass. The example firom Genesis demonstrates that the concept of transgression is intimately Unked with authority: it is always the position of power which commands the right to establish and maintain boundaries. Reading, like writing, is always engaged, consciously or unconsciously, in negotiating borders, boundaries, frames, and it is important to remember the extent to which the faculty of imagination is dependent on transgression. Richard Kearney's survey of the history of human imagination in The Wake of Imagination defines unagination as "characterized by an act of rebelUon against the divine order of things" (80).

Thus imagination presupposes a

transgressive move, linking creativity to a violation of the norm and the breaking of frameworks. It is no coincidence that the genre that has die concept of transgression buUt into its very framework, the novel, emerged in the eighteenth century

^° Literary history in general and the novel in particular illustrate the power of transgression; conventions of writing are continuously altered by the move beyond given frameworks. Indeed, as the Russian formalists argued, the "literariness" of the work of art consisted of its transgression of boundaries. Likewise, Roman Jakobson ends his essay 'The Dominant" with the observation that the "simultaneous preservation of tradition and breaking away from tradition form the essence of every new work of art" (30). The concept of "literariness," dependent on the distinction between dominant and automatized functions of language, focuses our attention on the act of transgression; in order to appreciate the "literariness" of a work we must first be able to recognize that boundaries have been crossed. I might add that, as an art form, the novel is exceptional in its disregard of the constraints that control other literary forms. The term itself, etymologically derived from the Latin novus (=new), contains the connotation of new and unusual, encompassing the notion of progress and change. The novel, therefore, in order to be a hovel, must strive to transgress its own boundaries and, paradoxically, change is here a prerequisite to maintain the status quo. Let me add that I am aware that the persuasive force of my argument is dependent on the framework of the English

39

But transgression seems to be onmipresent in our daily lives as well. We live in a time when transgression seems to be the order of the day and where its subversive force is more and more undermined by the ubiquity of die term.^' Today, transgression seems to affect all strata of hfe; lately "Magic Eye" or 3-D images have swamped die market, focusmg our attention on images serving as frames for other images.^^ The question we have to ask ourselves is if it is still possible to speak of transgression when totiransgressbecomes the norm. It is almost as if we have exchanged the concept of carnival, a temporarily sanctioned transgression,

for an

authorized celebration of transgression per se?^ language—the French term roman, for instance, would appear to maintain the links to the older tradition of romance writing rather than suggest any complicity with the new. ^' An illustration of the prevalent use of transgression is given by Keith Booker in Techniques of Subversion in Modem Literature. He quotes the fastfood giant Burger King's campaign slogan "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules" (9) as an example of the "appropriation of transgressive rhetoric by the dominant forces of bourgeois culture" (9). What is interesting here is not so much Booker's identification of bourgeois culture as the culprit (a critic of a different political persuasion might prefer the term "dominant culture") as the implications the slogan has for this discussion. Transgression is here subsumed under the idea of enlightened progress; "breaking the rules" indicates both an awareness of the rales and of the individual's licence to transgress them now and again. The product of computer science. Magic Eye images can take any shape or colour but their shared characteristic is that the visible image is a mask obscuring the "real" image. In order to see the "real" image you have to leam to unfocus your vision, or rather to focus a point beyond the visible image; thus the traditional picture in all its visibility is nothing but a frame or boundary that has to be negotiated if you want to perceive the image beyond. Transgression takes thus the form of a built-in principle of visual perception. I refer here to Bakhtin's discussion of carnival in terms of subversion. Eagleton, although he recognizes carnival as "a permissible rupture of hegemony," does not share Bakhtin's confidence that the transgressive potential of literature has genuine political impact. For a fuller discussion see his Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981). I agree with Eagleton in his rejection of carnival as an unequivocal symbol of subversion, but Eagleton's distrast of the political force of literature is unconvincing in view of the long history of censorship. We have to keep in mind the double bind of transgression: while it may be sanctioned to a certain extent and this actually serves to fortify the status quo, it is also always penalized by the

40

All this would seem to imply that a shift has occurred not only in literature, but also in the general pubhc's understanding of transgression where more emphasis is placed on the progressive imphcadons of the term. If the concept of transgression is gradually losing its connotation of subversive force in favour of a socially inscribed notion of progress, both in hterature and our day-to-day hves, where does this leave us? It could be argued that if the only genuine transgression would seem to consist of not transgressing, then we have reached an ominous impasse. I do not wish to unply that this impasse should be read as an instance of the "death of transgression," but I would hke to argue that it signals an increasing difficulty for recognizing when and how transgression occurs. The question that interests me most is: how we can think, write, and read transgressively? It seems to me that the emerging interest in the (in)between is an attempt to come to terms with transgression in the age of multiple border crossings, and the impUcations this holds for notions of self and other, home and exile. Characteristically, like the noveUsts discussed in the chapters that foUow, the theorists engaged in the articulation of die (in)between have themselves experience of multiple border crossings. For Bhabha, (in)betweenness is evocative of the border and the desire to cross it, signalUng the "contemporary compulsion to move beyond; to torn the present into die 'post' ... to touch the future on its hidier side" {Location of Culture 18). Situated in the interstitial space between postmodemism and postcoloniaUsm, Homi Bhabha, not surprisingly, begins his Location of Culture by invoking the interest of postmodem critical thought in authorities in power because of its very real subversive potential. Transgression works in subtle ways and no one can be certain if and for how long it can be contained within the system. As to its political force it has been argued that even though it might not satisfy Eagleton's demands for explicit political action, the transgressive tendency of literary works is politically effective in so far as it serves to refocus our perceptions of the world and to alter our ways of thinking.

41

articulations of "beyond" and "post" as indicative of die move towards and into die beyond:

It is the trope of ourtimesto locate the question of culture in die realm of die beyond. At the century's edge, we are less exercised by annihilation—the deadi of die author—or epiphany—die bkth of the 'subject'.

Our existence today is

marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, Uving on the borderlines of the 'present', for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of

the

prefix

'post': postmodemism, postcolonialism,

postfeminism... (1)

Most importantly, Bhabha's reflection on the ubiquity and elusiveness of the prefix "post" draws attention to the shiftiness of the borderUne. The border is envisaged not in terms of beginnings and endings but as a "moment of transit" (1).^'* This "moment of transit" is understood as positioned between

In Bhabha's reflection on "post" we hear an echo of a statement Daniel Bell made in 1973: "It used to be that the great literary modifier was the word beyond ... But we seem to have exhausted the beyond, and today the sociological modifier is post' (qtd. in Hassan, The Postmodem Tum 86-7). But in contrast to Bell, Bhabha does not conceive of a border as a single line of demarcation which is crossed at will, but rather as a space of multiple lines criss-crossing one another. While Bell seems to imply that the terms "beyond" and "post" are used more or less synonymously, where the latter takes on the connotations of the former, his statement catches my attention since it hints at a reversal of direction. Both terms draw attention to the border, but where the "beyond" seems to point ahead, towards a border, already identified but yet to be crossed, the "post" seems to look back on a border already traversed. To complicate matters further, the "posts" seem to have proliferated. Critics speak today of "postfeminism" and "postculturalism," as, for instance. Eve Tavor Bannet does in her Postcultural Theory (1993) which deals with what she terms "other theories" (ix), referring to less institutionalized approaches that take us "beyond the boundaries of current Cultural

42

conceptual categories, and allows the "emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement

of

domains

of

differences"

where

the

"intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, commimity interest, or cultural value are negotiated" (2). Bhabha, concerned with the (cultural and political) articulation of the postcolonial experience, stresses die importance of the interstices (the hybrid locality) as a site of "encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values" (173, emphasis added). It is here, in his discussion of the border doubling in terms of both space andtime,as a hybrid locaUty and a moment of transit, that Bhabha's thinking opens up new and productive avenues of inquiry. "Living on the borderlines" is not exclusively a question of looking back or ahead, but marked by an experience of (in)betweenness where both options signify. As a consequence, direction does not matter so much as mobihty itself

In a

similar vein, culture is understood both as an "uncomfortable, disturbing practice of survival and supplementarity—^between art and politics, past and present" and as a "moment of pleasure, enlightenment or liberation" (175). I might add that Bhabha's personal history suggests first-hand experience of the (in)between state his theoretical work investigates and formulates. While there is, to date, not much biographical information about Bhabha, he is clearly engaged in border crossings.He was bom in India and was for a number of years lecturer at the University of Sussex, Brighton, before moving on to a position in Chicago.

Theory" (ix). Other "posts" that come to mind are "postmarxism" and Vizenor's "postindian" in his Manifest Manners. I attended Homi Bhabha's seminar 'The Interdisciplinary Imperative: Modernity and the Postcolonial Condition" at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1993. Although Bhabha was always available for and interested in discussions, he was reticent about his own past. I did not pursue the issue at the time since I was much more interested in his theoretical position and grappling with the often difficult task of understanding his complex images and concepts.

43

In this context I would like to briefly refer to Trinh's understanding of (in)betweenness.

In Framer Framed, Trinh, hke Bhabha, interprets die

prefix "post" as indicative of an (in)between state. She refers to die "post" as pointing back "to a nascent stage of modernism, a dawning stage before die closure," understood as "a stage between closures" (152).^^ Trinh is a fdmmaker, feminist, and theorist who depicts herself as writing "from a hybrid place" {Framer Framed 140).

Like Bhabha, she understands die

process of hybridization as referring to the negotiation of difference not only between cultures but above all within culture." While the writings of Derrida can be seen as impUcated in the "post" in numerous ways, die most obvious being the poststrucmrahst engagement with and inquiry into die tradition of modem philosophy, "poststmcturalist dieory does not," as Best and Kellner point out, "provide an account of postmodemity or intervene in the postmodem debates" (31). Nevertheless Derrida is pertinent to my project of investigating a number of different conceptuahzations of home and exile. For one thing, Derrida's texts are all concerned with borders and Umits, be it the hmits of philosophy or, more generally, the hmits of thinking.^* Like the other theorists mcluded in this study, Derrida is continually on the move, searching to formulate different perspectives that destabilize conventions of thought. Moreover, (in)betweenCompare this to Lyotard's claim in "Answering the Question: What is Postmodemism?" that a "work can become modem only if it is first postmodem. Postmodemism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant" (79). " See Trinh, Framer Framed 144 and Bhabha, The Location of Culture 13. In this context I would like to point to Dmcilla Cornell's The Philosophy of the Limit (1992) which attempts to develop what she calls an "ethical reading" (ix) of deconstruction. Approaching the issue from within the framework of legal interpretation, Cornell relates Derrida's deconstruction to Levinas' philosophy of alterity and renames Derrida's project the "philosophy of the limit," highlighting the importance of deconstruction in exposing the "limit of any system" (2).

44

ness traverses Derrida's thinking in the concept of differance, wiiich is, in Bennington's words, "always in between or in-the-process-of (80). The notion of (in)betweenness, as hnked to borders and border crossings, takes on a shghdy different and, if possible, more personal timbre in relation to Edward Said. His history reads like an illustration of a life hved between a multiphcity of borders: a Christian Arab, bom and raised in the Middle East but Westem-educated and with a PhD from Harvard (where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Joseph Conrad), Said would seem to personify the state of (in)betweenness. In Michael Sprinker's introduction to Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Said is described as a scholar whose work has "resolutely resisted any easy disciplinary or professional pigeon-hoUng" (1). Said, apart from being an active participant in a multitude of scientific disciphnes, "from history and sociology to anthropology and area studies (particularly the Middle East)" (2), is also deeply involved in the Palestinian cause. Interestingly, Bhabha, Trinh, and Said are cited as examples of postcolonial writers while Derrida is not,^^ even diough theu: work indubitably is inspired by his. This can be explained, in part, by the fact that Bhabha, Trinh, and Said can all lay claim to what might be termed a "postcolonial background," that is, their countries of origin can be seen to be situated on the periphery of the Western world. It would seem that Derrida differs from Bhabha, Trinh, and Said in that he is firmly positioned in the poststmcturalist field. But does this mean that there are no Unks, no crossings-over and no connections whatsoever?

While Derrida's texts

suggest that there is no such thing as writingfromoutside any system, there is always also some spill-over which prevents what he terms an "interiority

^' All three are, for instance, represented with several essays in The Postcolonial Studies Reader (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995).

45

of meaning" (Truth in Painting 6l)}°

Geoffrey Bennington's Jacques

Derrida, written jointly with Derrida, hints at yet another, less obvious, motif for what I identify as Derrida's obsession widi margms and his own (in)between stance. In a section entitied "Curriculum Vitae," Bennington traces Derrida's history, beginning with the naturaUzation of his grandparents as French citizens in Algiers.

Derrida's confrontation with

antisemitism, and the difficulties related to being a French Jew ui Algeria, and widi the "miUtancy of belongmg m general" (327) have all found theuway into Derrida's texts.^' Bennington's claun is diat, more dian anything, it is Derrida's "difficulty widi belongmg, one would almost say of identification, [which] affects die whole of J. D.'s [Jacques Derrida's] oeuvre" (327).

Thus it becomes clearer diat Derrida's concem is witii

intemal and extemal borders, text and context, centre and margin, which cannot be separated but where one is seen to contaminate the other. Consequendy I will argue that Derrida, like Bhabha, Trinh, and Said, can be seen to write about the problematics of borders and limitsfroma position of (in)betweenness, a perspective which is on the move, between and across boundaries, incessantiy attempting to formulate different visions.^^

Speaking about the parergon, Derrida points to the doubling of borders in terms of intemal and extemal limit. The frame (of the painting, the clothing of the body etc) is seen to trouble the figure/ground distinction in that it is the "decisive stmcture of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning ... and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic" (61, emphasis added). " Bennington names Glas, The Postcard, Schibboleth and Ulysses Gramophone in particular. Hybridity's (in)between state can also be seen in their work which crosses established boundaries in numerous ways in an attempt to articulate this hybrid position. In the "Acknowledgment" section of his The Location of Culture, Bhabha interrupts the usual reference to more or less well-known colleagues by giving credit to "the crucial influence of ideas that come from outside (or beside) the Academy" (x). Trinh's style of writing andfilmmaking,where a work of theory displays unexpected poetical traits, and

46

It is the notion of mobility that is crucial to (in)betweenness. As James Chfford formulates it in his essay on travelling theories, it is not merely the postcolonial origin of writers and theorists like Trinh and Said that characterizes their (in)between stance, but thek constant practice of "movpng] theories in and out of discrepant contexts" (184). So while a particular perspective—^postcoloniahty—^marks

thek

work, it is

the

dynamism of thek positionahty that opens new vistas. Writing from thek different "borderlands," "[t]heks is not a condition of exile, of critical 'distance,' but rather a place of betweenness" (184).^^ Eerily, Gloria Anzaldua, a Chicana poet and writer describing herself as a woman of the "Borderlands," corroborates the existence of Clifford's place of betweenness.

She prefaces her text by elaborating on the

sensations of living in this "place of betweenness:"

Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity, is like dying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element. There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the future

where her "documentary" films rest uneasily in this or any other category, has confounded her critics and made it difficult to get her material published. In Framer Framed, Trinh tells her interviewer Judith Mayne that this might be seen as one of the penalties incurred for impinging on disciplinary borders by mixing different modes of writing, signalling her awareness of the fact that "theory is not theory if it is not dispensed in a way recognizable to and validated by [academics]" (138). Robyn Alexander's report from the 1995 A U E T S A Conference in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, indicates that the notion of travelling theorists meets with mixed response and, from a political perspective, is seen as problematical. In his keynote address, Kwame Anthony Appiah referred to himself as a "travelling "cosmopolitan patriot"" (26) and argued for the "usefulness of cultural hybridisation" (26). This elicited the question whether his notion was not "dangerously 61itist" (26) since "most African and other Third Worid subjects did not have the luxury of nomadic movement around the worid, and experienced movement, rather, in terms of forced migrations and removals" (26). See Alexander, "AUETSA 1995," 26-7.

47

evolution of humankind, in being 'worked' on. I have the sense diat certain 'faculties'—^not just in me but in every border resident, colored or non-colored—and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened. (no pagination)

Anzaldua's words invoke an ahnost rehgious sense of rebirth, but she is at pains to draw attention to the ubiquity of die borderland, present "wherever two or more cultures edge each odier, where people of different races occupy the same territory ... where the space between two individuals shrinks with mtimacy." Thus the borderland is not somewhere else or in some periphery but always right here, encouraging us all to recognize the necessity to cross borders. King, Connell, and White theorize different aspects pertaining to this necessity of border crossing in Writing Across Worlds, a collection of essays engaged in the investigation of hteratures of post-migration. Interested m a mobile positionahty, the editors attempt to formulate new vistas concerning in particular re-interpretations oftiraditionalterms hke "migrancy" or the mode of writing employed by scholars. From diis perspective, the term "migrancy" it is no longer denoting "a mere interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but a mode of being m the world—migrancy," an example of which is the "French West Indian concept of errance, wandering" (xv).

Moreover, the editors identify dieir own cross-

disciplinary approach as in keeping with the "estabUshed genre of work hnking geography with literature" but deviating from it m so far as they concentrate on exploring movement rather than place. Chfford's text drives a similar point home but is important in anotiier respect, too, since it estabUshes a link between the concepts of home and

48

theory. He argues that it is the critic engaging in multiple border crossings who challenges the "propensity of theory to seek a stable place" (183), thus contributmg to an "unhoming" of dieory, which is now no longer "naturally 'at home' in the West" (179). Theory, hke die theorists, can be seen to "travel," and is "always written from some 'where'" (185). Note that for Chfford the "where" signifies not so much place as "itineraries: different, concrete histories of dweUing, immigration, exile, migration" (185). What is at stake, then, is the mobihty within and between categories, which could be seen to serve as a safeguard against stagnation. It is in this mental territory that conceptualizations of (in)betweenness can occur.

In their attempt to think against and across categories,

articulations of (in)betweenness cannot be fixed m eitiier a postmodem or a postcolonial space.

Rather, (in)betweenness is a mode of thinking that

emerges from the moment in time where the narratives of the postmodem and the postcolonial overlap. As such it is indebted to, and dependent on, what I earher referred to as a postcolonial awareness.

From this

perspective, the various postmodemisms and postcoloniaUsms can be seen as a number of points in a continuum and understood as different, if related sets of ideas. This understanding of (in)betweenness is specific to ourtimesand it is no accident diat both the fictional and the dieoretical texts included in my investigation were written, widi a few exceptions, during die second half of die 1980s and die early 1990s. The texts I refer to as fictions of (m)betweenness are written by authors who themselves inhabit a space marked by (in)betweenness which, let me emphasize this again, is not merely an expression of their "postcolonial" origins but rather indicative of diek wiUingness to cross borders.

While all of them are interested ui die

49

articulation of (in)betweennness, they do so, as I wiU argue, to varymg degrees. Even diough the novehsts and theorists I refer to could be seen as hyphenated audiors and all of the theorists mentioned use the conventional speUing of "in-between" widi a hyphen, I have chosen to write "(in)betweenness" parendiesized and widiout a hyphen.

As I akeady

suggested in a footoote, my spelling aims to signal, and represent visually, die new and different use of the term m my text to denote that (in)betweenness is the result of repeated border crossings, between and across diverse conceptual and cultural boundaries. By the same token, theory's propensity to travel across cultural and conceptual borders has resulted in a new perception of what it entails to cross borders, and increasingly theorists and critics are attempting to "think die between" from a number of different perspectives.

I have mentioned

Bhabha's notions of hybridity, Trinh's concem with an unaginative theoretical discourse and Said's theorization of exile as pregnant with possibihties for a new vision of alterity as empowering. This is not to say that an incipient interest m the (in)between cannot be gleaned in earUer texts, in texts written in—and about—(an)other context(s). Helene Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa," for instance, locates writing in the (in)between when she argues diat "writmg is precisely working (in) die in-between, inspecting die process of the same and of die other" (883). While Cixous's text is concemed with the writing subject, with the giving of voice to women, silenced in Western discourse, it points to a new and productive area of inquiry. Today, more and more writers are engaged in sunilar projects and dius contiibute to a theoretical landscape still m die makmg. Hugh Silverman's Textualities dies to articulate "the signification of die 'place between'" (1) which for Silverman denotes die site of "multiple

50

textualities" (2). Textuality is thus a "differential notion" (2) and not an identity. Silverman's subtide "Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction" could be read as an indication of being situated somewhere in the middle, but Silverman is adamant that his "juxtapositional deconstructive reading ... elaborates a place of difference as a place of understanding" (2) and therefore requkes borders to be crossed and re-crossed. Stephen Sumida approaches the issue from the perspective of Asian-American hterature, paradoxically both central and marginal in that its very marginaUty to the canon ensures it a place at the centre of critical attention. Pointing to the unproductiveness of continuing to speak of centires and margms in a quickly changing world which requires "a theorizing not only of difference but also of heterogeneity and hterary history in new ways" (810), Sumida proposes that we imagine "centers without margins" in the form of "a radiance: a center that radiatesripples,hght, waves, energy" and where "all atoms [are] connected and interacting—^but without a crust or surface" (808). From this perspective, I find myself simultaneously at the centre of die postmodem and postcolonial terrain and at its margins, on new ground which is always in die making. I write from a space in which multiple borders criss-cross each other incessantiy, changing the lay of the land. I am m an emerging borderland, which is not to be understood simply as a space between spaces, but rather as the result of border crossings. It is an oddly "homeless" and "homeful" position to be m and marked by a certain paradoxahty, since I read and move m and across several paradigms. So just as my tide Fictions of (In)betweenness refers not only to the texts of fiction but also to the fictionahty of (in)betweenness, my own (in)between position is, in a sense, a fiction. It is afictionin so far as we can think the between, but it is more difficult to imagine in what ways we can inhabit an (in)between position. It is as if die concept of positionality automatically

51

presupposes enclosures which posit usfirmlywithin, pinning us down in one paradigm. My own text, nevertheless, seeks to elucidate the notion of a mobile, anamorphic positionahty whose oscillation creates die (ui)between as a space of possibihties.

52

Chapter One Exploring the (In)between Spaces: Cultural Hybridity in Louise Erdrich's Fiction

I've read learned anthropological papers written about people like me. We're called marginal, as if we exist anywhere but on the center of the page. Our territory is the place for asides, for explanatory notes, for editorial notation. We're parked on the bleachers looking into the arena, never the main players, but there are bonuses to peripheral vision. Out beyond the normal bounds, you at least know where you're not. You escape the claustrophobia of belonging, and what you lack in security you gain by realizing—as those insiders never do—that security is an illusion. Dorris and Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus^

Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, on the borders of the reservation, with a German-American father and a Chippewa mother. A graduate of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, she is also a member of the Tiutle Mountain Band of Chippewa, but does not speak any Native languages.^ ' The words in the epigraph (124, emphases added) are spoken by the protagonist Vivian Twostar, a mixed-blood Navajo who refers to herself as belonging to the "lost tribe of mixed bloods, that hodgepodge amalgam of hue and cry that defies easy placement" (123). A similar hybridity can be accorded to the text itself if one remembers that, although Erdrich is adamant that all her novels were written in collaboration with her husband Michael Dorris, The Crown of Columbus (1991) is the first novel that is published under both names. ^ She can be seen to belong to the generation of writers Gerald Vizenor refers to in Manifest Manners as "postindian warriors" (4). Reminiscent of the argument Said put forward in Orientalism, Vizenor argues that "the Indian" is an "occidental invention" (11), and that it is one of the objectives of postindian warriors to question this invention

53

Even this sketchiest of biographies suggests that Erdrich has travelled across cultural borders most of her hfe.

Indeed, she can be seen to mhabit a

location on the interface between several cultures, a location which, as the epigraph indicates, results in the understandmg that "security is an iUusion" which allows her to "escape the clausti-ophobia of belonging." This, m tum, faciUtates her awareness of the importance of both inter- and intracultural interaction, diat is, the ongoing negotiations of cultural positionahty. Today, a number of theorists undertake to redefine cultural and national positionality in terms of hybridity. Homi Bhabha, for example, theorizes the complexity of the cultural position in his introduction to Nation and Narration.

He argues that the "'locahty' of national culture is neither

unified nor unitary m relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as 'other' in relation to what is outside or beyond it" since "the problem of outside/ inside must always itself be a process of hybridity" (4, emphasis added). But whereas Bhabha draws attention to hybridity as a process of the doubhng of inside and outside that shapes and re-shapes any culture. Said focuses on a more personal aspect of hybridity. He states m the introduction to Culture and Imperialism that his text is, in many ways, "an exile's book" (xxx). Exile, for Said, is not connotative of deprivation but functions as a marker of hybridity, a position pregnant with possibilities, not least because it is also a site of conflict where different patterns of thought meet and colhde and constandy need to be (re)negotiated. Thus inhabiting the locus of hybridity is often marked by an experience of belonging to "both worlds, without being completely o/either one or the other" (xxx). Such (re)negotiation of conceptual borders is a characteristic of Erdrich's

and to "create their stories with a new sense of survivance" (4) and to "observe postmodem situations" (12).

54

texts, which, as I will show, not only trouble the hne between such received categories as Nadve American and Western cultures, but question and comphcate conventional dichotomies of a more famihar nature such as home and homelessness. While the concept of home is a central concem for Erdrich as well as for her characters, "home" is by no means an unequivocal term in the novels.

Characters with different and at times conflicting

understandings of what constitutes home and how to create it are juxtaposed, which, as we will see, tums the text into a field of tension between differing views. Notwithstanding then- own beUefs and desires, all the characters m Erdrich's texts are engaged m the process of re-negotiating their hybridity, a process to which their perceptions of home are central. My aim in this chapter is to trace the various understandings of home as expressed by the characters in order to reveal the ways m which Erdrich's texts "worry the hues" between home and exile. We will see, however, diat irrespective of Erdrich's fascination with the potential of hybridity, the tetralogy repeatedly gives m to a nostalgia for the old way of hfe, lamenting lost certainties. Two theoretical perspectives mform my reading: Bhabha's definition of hybridity as a process simultaneously at work within and between cultures, and Said's appreciation of hybridity as a site of (productive) conflict. I wiU begin widi a general intiroduction of Erdrich's teti-alogy, dien look at its mode of constiiiction, foUowed by a brief outline of its critical reception before I tum to a detailed mvestigation of home and exile. I focus on four of the central characters who, paradoxically, are portrayed as marginal: June, Lipsha, Nanapush, and Pauline.

I will

concentrate my readmg on Love Medicine^ and Tracks, makmg, however, a

' I refer here to the first edition of Love Medicine. Louise Erdrich published an expanded version of the text in 1993, in which she added the following chapters: The Island, Resurrection, The Tomahawk Factory, and Lyman's Luck. I base my reading on thefirstedition since the expanded version does not alter the story developed in the first

55

number of cross-references to the other two texts. Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace constitute a tetiralogy, where the four novels function as a constellation of texts. I use the term "constellation" both in the sense of a configuration of related issues and m its meaning of a brilhant assemblage. While each text stands on its own, it can also be identified as connected to the others in a number of ways. Most unportandy, die texts share a common ground in their thematization of the hves of marginal(ized) characters from both sides of die reservation border who are connected in various ways to the protagonists of the stories, the Kashpaw and the Morrissey fanuhes. Interestingly, marginahty in all its forms is a central concem in all the texts. The characters—^mixedbloods, homosexuals, drifters. Native Americans and German-Americans—^find themselves in the position of "main players," negotiating between the "claustrophobia of belonging" and the bonuses of "peripheral vision." But, as we will see, the connection between the texts is strengthened by a shared narrative technique consisting of a number of firstperson narratives interspersed with comments by a third-person narrator. In diis respect each consecutive novel can be seen as a variation on a theme, adding bits and pieces of information to the stories told in the previous book(s), mosdy by supplymg the reader with a different narrative perspective which as often as not clashes with another. At the same time, each novel is made up of oddly self-contained chapters. In the case of Love Medicine, about half of it appeared in die form of short stories in hterary joumals prior to the pubhcation as a novel.'* This

edition. I will, however, consult the later version where it seems appropriate for my discussion. * The seven chapters of the 1984 edition previously published in joumals are: "Crown of Thorns," "Flesh and Blood," "Lulu's Boys," 'The Red Convertible," "Saint

56

circumstance leads Hertha D. Wong to argue diat Love Medicine should not be labelled a novel at all but ought to be understood in terms of a "short story sequence" or "short story cycle"(171).

She argues that Love

Medicine's "multiple narrators confound conventional Western expectations of an autonomous protagonist, a dominant narrative voice, and a consistendy chronological hnear narrative" (173). Its web-hke stiiicture invokes the image of a spider's web—a common feature of Native American mythology—^which, as Wong points out, serves to "convey the interconnectedness of aU aspects of hfe" (172).

What I've said so far might

fallaciously suggest diat Wong is trying to make a case for the distincdy Native American character of Erdrich's narrative technique, but that would be to overlook the ramifications of Wong's argument. Instead of delimiting Erdrich's method of composition to one category, Wong attempts to open it up by pointing to its affinities to modernist writing techniques: the image of die web, she contends, is useful since it "might more accurately reflect die cychcal and recursive nature of stories that are informed by both modernist hterary strategies ... and oral traditions" (172).' Nevertheless Wong's argument has some flaws. For one diing, it makes sense only if we share her understanding of the novel as a "continuous and unified narrative" (171), a definition that works weU for the eighteendicentury novel but one that has been steadily losing its vahdity ui diis century. Today, as for the last twenty years or so, a novel constructed along die hues of a "continuous and unified narrative" would constitute just one

Marie," "Scales," and 'The Worid's Greatest Fisherman." publication see Hertha D. Wong 170, fn 3.

For further details of

' Like many other commentators, Wong recognizes the influence that William Faulkner's writing has had on Louise Erdrich. She mentions the use of interrelated characters, the importance of specific settings, the "haunting power of the past" and-the death of a central female character that sets the story into motion.

57

example among many others of how to write a novel. For another, Wong seems so intrigued by the modernist connection that she ignores possible hues of contact between traditional oral techniques of storyteUing and postmodem strategies. Notwithstanding her obtusity in this respect, Wong's characterization of Erdrich's narrative techiuque reads like a textbook example of the postmodem emphasis on both plurahty and the importance of the local: "[n]o one story is more important than any other; but each narrative has special significance for a specific context and hstener" (182). The connection between oral modes of storyteUing and our own postmodem tum is not as spurious as it might seem. Indeed, as Gerald Vizenor points out in his introduction to Narrative Chance, "oral cultures have never been without a postmodem condition that enlivens stories and ceremonies" and asserts diat die postmodem is characterized by "a situational pattem" weU suited to Native traditions (x, xu). To activate the terminology of my thesis—"worrying the Unes" between conceptions of home and exile—^Erdrich can be seen to unhome our genre expectations by creating a hybrid text where oral traditions and postmodem narrative techniques obhquely interact. This would seem to suggest diat Erdrich's tetralogy moves on the interface between different modes of Uterary (and cultural) expression, incorporating definitive features from each tradition which cannot be clearly demarcated, incessantiy criss-crossing each odier's territory. Luikmg aU die novels is die practice of different points of view, sometunes overlapping, sometimes coinciding, sometunes contradicting but always stressing the personal and fragmentary nature of the narrative.

The sections told by die mipersonal narrator represent one

interpretive paradigm assuming the audiority of objectivity, whereas die other chapters, narrated m the fu-st person by different characters m the story, entail switches between discourses, creating an atmosphere of

58

subjectivity. =The former is directed towards a centre, closure, while the latter is propelled outwards, away from the centre, eluding closure. Yet her approach differs from modernist techniques m the respect that the various points of view do not work together and dius cannot be unified into a coherent whole. Of interest to my argument is what happens m die gap between narrators, the tensions created by the technique of overlapping and contrasting voices which results m different narrative positions, requiring the reader to continuaUy revise her or his reading. In Love Medicine and The Beet Queen six first person narrators-cum-characters share the burden of storyteUing with an unpersonal third person narrator. The reader's first instinct is to perceive the difference of narratological status in traditional terms; hence the first person voices are construed as subjective, imphcated as they are in the teUing of their own story, a view which is emphasized by dieir double function as both narrators and narratees.

Conversely the diird person

perspective is perceived as objective, detached from and in control of the narrative. It foUows that the "subjective" position is seen to entaU an indepth but limited perspective,

whereas die "objective" position is

understood to have access to the "whole" story. A closer reading, however, reveals that Erdrich is not working widi the estabUshed categories of omniscient and hmited point of view. In The Beet Queen, for instance, the third person narrator introduces the eleven-year-old Mary as so "ordinary that it was obvious she would be this all her life" (1); a statement diat is proven wrong by events diroughout die novel, suggesting diat Mary possesses extraordinary mental powers. One example would be the "dead blue radiance" (77) that emanates from Mary's hands m die middle of the night, awakening and terrifying Sita. Another is Mary's uncanny abihty to hear and see what remains hidden from the rest of the

59

world: on a day when Mary "hear[s] die wild plums ripen," Mary has a premonition of Celestine's unborn child, "a girl... widi a headfiil of blazing dark red curls" who peers at her aunt Mary with "a stubborn intensity" (143) definitive of what we later come to know as baby Dot. Similarly, the individual perspectives offer their own imperfect understanding of what has happened m the past and how diis affects the present and the futare. None of the narrative perspectives, however, holds die key to the story which evolves, not unlike a spider's web, weaving an intricate network of independent yet interrelated stories. Nothing m the texts allows us to decide whether die web-hke structure is symbohc of traditional Native American cosmology or whether we should read it as suggestive of the postmodem partiality to networks. At diis point, a brief introduction to each of the four texts might be helpful. Together, the novels span over eight decades with Love Medicine as the text widi the greatest temporal scope. The plot of Love Medicine covers over fifty years, beginning in 1981 with the death of June Kashpaw. It dien jumps back to 1934, from where the story unfolds, with gaps between, to the year 1984. Love Medicine is staged inside the reservation close to the border and traces the destinies of two Native American famihes, the Kashpaws and the Morrisseys. Their (hi)stories are told from eight different perspectives, one in the third person and seven in thefirstperson by Albertine Johnson, Marie Lazarre who, now married, resumes her story as Marie Kashpaw, Nector Kashpaw, Lyman Lamartine, Lipsha Morrissey, Lulu Lamartine and Howard Kashpaw. The novel opens and closes with a homecoming,firstdiat of June and dien her son Lipsha's. In The Beet Queen, the storyhne moves out of die reservation to Argus, a smaU town on the border. Now die Adare and Kozka famihes, presumably of German-American origin, are at the heart of die story. The connection

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with the famihes m Love Medicine is estabhshed dirough Fleur Pillager, Russell Kashpaw and Dot's mother Celestine, daughter of Regma Morrissey and James Dutch. Again, the story mms on a homecoming of sorts—^Mary Adare's arrival in Argus—and concludes with her niece Dot's homecoming. The novel spans forty years, beginning in 1932 to end in 1972, which means that The Beet Queen moves roughly in the same temporal space as Love Medicine but on the other side of the border. The third novel. Tracks, covers only twelve years, and the story is once more situated mside the reservation. As is the case with its two predecessors, the theme of homecoming provides the narrative energy in Tracks, where Nanapush's story aims to bring Lulu back to the reservation. Plots are revisited, mysteries solved and new ones created, and it is now clear that all the characters are related m a number of ways. Tracks also constitutes a move back in time, begmning m 1912 to move gradually to 1924, leaving a gap of eight years between the ending of Tracks and the beginning of The Beet Queen. The novel comprises a move back mtimein several senses: the impersonal narratorfromthe two preceding novels has vanished, and of the multi-voiced narration widi its rapid change of perspective only two voices remain, Nanapush and Pauline Puyat. Pauline's narrative, interrupting Nanapush's account, can be read as an addition to his story, but is at the sametimea curious kind of dialogue in which the voice of theftiturecomments on the voice of the past. Where Nanapush embodies traditional Native American values and fights to preserve the old ways, Pauhne does everydiing in her power to escapefromreservation hfe into a different world. The fourth novel. The Bingo Palace, concludes die tetralogy by picking up where Love Medicine left off, in 1984. In many ways it is a sequel to Love Medicine, widi its focus on Lipsha, June's son, who retiims once more

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to the reservation to grapple with his role m the world. He is also the firstperson narrator and shares die task of telhng die story with an unpersonal third-person narrator and an oddly composite voice incorporating many voices. In keeping widi the odier three novels. The Bingo Palace ends with a celebration of ambiguous homecomings as June, Gerry, Lipsha, and Fleur re-enact earher disappearances in a snow storm and, m Reur's case, the territory around Matchimanito Lake. As my brief introduction to die teti-alogy suggests, a common featiire of the texts is, as I stated earher, their concem with marginal(ized) existences and their negotiation of notions of home and homecoming, seeking to explore what it means to retum to or be at home in a Native American and American framework, without, for that matter, consdiicting these categories as merely oppositional. Rather, each characters seems to be portrayed as an ever-changing canvas, a painting-in-progress, in which conflicting world views compete for supremacy without quite resolving diek differences. In a similar vein, there is no clear distinction between Native and non-Native characters. Despite the fact that the Kashpaws and Morrisseys can claim some centi-ahty in the stories, the genealogy of the two famihes is comphcated and difficult to foUow; nobody is quite what or who diey seem to be.

For one thing, there are the intermarriages, both between the

Kashpaws and the Morrisseys, and between these famihes and Canadians and Swedish-Americans. AU ui all, this would seem to suggest, as Ann •Rayson recognizes, that "die confluence of Indian-white heritages ... presents readers with a unique chaUenge and a new look at the old and perhaps useless label of 'marginaUty'" (27). But despite Erdrich's "Indian-white" heritage and aldiough her texts question notions of purity by focusing on characters of mixed heritage who grapple widi die chaUenge of hybridity, critics niost often situate the novels

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within the framework of Native American hterature. In general, critical readings tend to focus on the ethnic elements m her novels such as myths of the Chippewa* people and Native Americantiraditionwith its collective perspective and its privileging of communal over individual values.' Yet critical response to Erdrich's fiction is far from homogeneous and two strands in particular stand out, which I wUl caU a "separatist" and a "melting pot" approach respectively. As we wiU see, the former largely ignores the tensions between different cosmologies by focusing on the Native American aspects in her writing, and the latter attempts to resolve intratextual tensions by way of an amalgamation of disparate elements. For instance, some critics highhght the Native American elements at the expense of other influences and interpret Erdrich's novels as "acts of recovery" (Owens 53), claiming that her writing constitutes a "new approach to the treatment of the American Indian infiction"where the "noble savage" is replaced with die "ignoble citizen" (Magalaner 95) but m which "characters caU upon tradition to guide their hves" and diereby "[celebrate] native American survival and [credit] spiritual values widi diat survival" (Barry and Prescott

* The term "Chippewa" is derived from "Ojibwa(y)" which in tum refers to the "Anishinabeg" meaning "our people." For more information on the Chippewa see William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway People. ' For examples of this see William Gleason, "'Her Laugh an Ace": The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine," Jennifer Sergi, "Storytelling: Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich's Tracks," Victoria Walker, "A Note on Narrative Perspective in Tracks," James Flavin, "The Novel as Performance: Communication in Louise Erdrich's Tracks," Lissa Schneider, "Love Medicine: A Metaphor for Forgiveness," and Pauline G. Woodward, "Chance in Louise Erdrich's The Beet Queen: New Ways to Find a Family." Recent dissertations (mostly from feminist and sociopolitical perspectives) confrnn that critical interest largely focuses on the specificity of Native American culture. See Pauline Groetz Woodward, New Tribal Forms: Community in Louise Erdrich's Fiction (1991); Maria DePriest, Necessary Fictions: The Re-Envisioned Subjects of Louise Erdrich and Alice Walker (1991); Lydia Agnes Schultz, Perceptions from the Periphery: Fictional Form and Twentieth Century American Novelists (1990).

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137, 123). At the extreme end of the "separatist" spectrum die Laguna Pueblo writer Leshe Marmon SiUco takes a different view. In her discussion of Erdrich's second novel, The Beet Queen, Silko accuses Erdrich of obscuring her Native American origins as weU as misrepresenting the shared, communal experience of the oraltiraditionby seUing out to "academic, postmodem, socaUed experimental influences" (178). For SiUco, the postmodem and the Native American stance are incompatible since she perceives them as belonging to two different cultural and narrative traditions.* Gerald Vizenor, however, hke Erdrich a Chippewa writer, criticizes any such separatist approach in his introduction to Narrative Chance (1991), because such a perspective narrows the scope of postmodem criticism by interpreting the word postmodem to mean "separation from communal experience" (xii). Critics who, like Vizenor, favour a "melting pot" approach attempt to merge Native American and mainstream American practices by pointing to Erdrich's dual cultural background and by acknowledging influences firom (post)modem Westem thought. Jeanne Smith reads Erdrich's texts from the perspective

of a "transpersonal selfhood

[that] transcends cultural

boundaries," which combmes a "vision of expansive, unboundaried self reminiscent of Whitman" with a concept of identity firmly grounded in "Chippewa heritage" (13).

James Stripes interprets Erdrich's novels in

terms of "interventions in the writing of tribal histories" employing a "variety of hterary conventions" (26). Stiipes dien compares the texts'

* Susan P6rez Castillo opposes Silko's narrowly categorizing evaluation of The Beet Queen in her article "Postmodemism, Native American Literature and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy" (1991). While Castillo admits that she sympathizes with Silko's concems, she argues that Silko probably "[underrates] Erdrich's subtlety" (287). Invoking poststructuralist theories, Castillo points out that Silko's interpretation is a misunderstanding grounded in a "limited concept of ethnicity and an essentialist, logocentric view of referentiality" (288).

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multivocality to Bakhtinian dialogism, suggesting that Bakhtm's "multivocal discourse offers an appropriate heuristic for histories of the borderlands: die fusion of cultural practices, languages, and cosmologies which were once alien to one another" (29, emphasis added).

Pursumg a different track,

Catherine Rainwater's semiotic reading argues that the complexity and ambivalence of Erdrich's texts "frustrate narrativity" and "represent extreme cases of code conflict' (406, emphasis added) which cannot be resolved and which "lead the reader away from synthesis ... into a permanent state of irresolution" (409, emphasis added). Rainwater locates the code conflict in the reader who, confronted with the text's juxtaposition of WesternEuropean and Native American societal codes, "must pause 'between worlds' to discover the arbitrary structural principles of both" (422). But for Rainwater this does not entail a questioning of the concepts that shape our notions of what constitutes "a culture" m the first place; instead, she concludes that it alerts the reader to locate his or her interpretative difficulty m the cultural difference which can only be negotiated if the reader realizes the pertinence of the Native American behef that "the world takes on the shape of die stories we tell" (422). However, despite then: difference m bias, most of the critical interpretations arrive at similar conclusions, namely that Erdrich's novels firmly inhabit the framework of Native American hterature. But whereas separatist readings tend to downplay or ignore the unportance of non-Native influences, the melting pot approach seeks to defuse cultural conti-adictions by fiising Westem and nonNative uito a coherent whole.^ It is obvious diat

' By way of example, Vizenor embraces the postmodem insofar as it evokes and echoes traditional Native American practices; Smith's notion of transpersonal selfhood is linked predominantly to Native American mythology which does not establish borders between the individual and the world; and Stripes' concept of cultural fusion is belied by the space and prominence he grants Native American issues in his own text.

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the tensions between different cultural traditions in Erdrich's writing create a state of uncertainty and uneasiness which is experienced as a problem to be solved. Common to both critical strands is the desire to situate Erdrich's texts exclusively witiiin one category, aldiough mcreasingly critics question the vahdity of clear-cut boundaries and propose a different path of inquiry in an attempt to overcome the restiictions that binary diought patt:ems unpose on readings.

Joni Adamson Clarke draws attention to the ways m which

Erdrich's novels can be seen "not just as poeticalfictionbut also as theory" (31).

Her study of Tracks focuses, like Smidi's reading, on the trans-

formational aspects m the text, which for Clarke do not merely reinforce an edinic interpretation, but suggest that Erdrich's novel blurs die hues between fiction and theory and can be seen as a "site of unaginative dieoretical discourse" (29). Erdrich's text is seen to challenge the under-standmg that "theory can only exist in language diat is heavy, abstract, prescriptive, monotonous and accessible only to the few who are academicaUy trained to understand 'high discourse'" (29).'° Clarke imphes, then, that Tracks represents "the kind of dynamic theory which, Kristeva might say, is 'not a form of murder'... because it does not 'kiU substance to signify' nor mask the polyphony of many voices" (41)."

To explicate her claim, Clarke refers to Trinh's observation in Native, Woman, Other that often theory and literature are seen not only as different discourses, but are also understood in terms of male and female writing. Trinh argues, in Woman, Native, Other, that in this mode of thinking theory is usually "synonymous with 'profound,' 'serious,' 'substantial,' 'scientific,' 'consequential,' 'thoughtful,' or 'thought-engaging'" (41) discourse. Clarke adds thatfiction,by contrast, is generally described "by adjectives that are the antithesis of those used to describe theory—'playful,' 'imaginative,' 'nonserious'" (30). I might add that Trinh's and Clarke's argument, however compelling, is true only in general terms; there are, and have been, thinkers of both sexes whose writings belie such a clear-cut division into one or the other. " Clarke quotes here from Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (Trans. Margaret Waller [New York: Columbia UP, 1986] 72,75).

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Although Clarke's interpretation, like mine, suggests that fictional texts "worry the hues" between theory and hteramre, her claim diat Erdrich's novel constitutes what she refers to as "imaginative theoretical discourse" is somewhat problematic in that it fixes Erdrich's text in yet another category.'^

To my mind. Love Medicine and Tracks play on and call

attention to the dangers of any such categorizing moves. I read the two novels as questioning Said's univocal privileging of exile as weU as the conventional privileging of home. More specifically, I see Erdrich engaging in "worrying the hues" in her suggestion that the concepts of home, homecoming, and exile are fiiU of tensions and uncertainties in themselves. I recognize a certain affinity of thought between my own project and Arnold Krupat's critical strategy oudined in The Voice in the Margin where he advances the suggestion that (Native American) criticism should work widi a Keatsean "negative capability." This entails employing a double perspective instead of adopting either a Native American or a Westem paradigm (14).

In his later work, Ethnocriticism, Kmpat exphcates the

double perspective as a rejection of a "monohdiicaUy 'Indian or Western'" (17) way of reading, based on the behef that cultural difference is "better conceptualized in dialogical radier dian oppositional terms" (19).

He

proposes what he terms an "ethnocritical perspective [which] is consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity (rather than homogeneity) as die social and cultural norm" (3, emphasis added). Kmpat insists that ethnocriticism should be understood as a "commitment to a movement between grounds" (22, emphasis added) and diat edinocritical discourse

Moreover, I find it unfortunate, that Clarke tries to delimit this new "imaginative theoretical discourse" by claiming it for female theorizing only. I see no evidence of and no need for such an exclusive theoretical affiliation and hope to show that Erdrich's writing incorporates common features of—as well as shares similar concems with—the texts of Coetzee and Malouf.

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"seeks to traverse rather than occupy a great variety of 'middle grounds,' bodi at home and abroad" (25, emphasis added). Krupat's formulation of ethnocriticism is sunilar to my own articulation of (in)betweenness in the sense that both notions signal their discomfort widi a fixed positionahty. Krupat's ethnocriticism, however, differs from my project of "worrying the hues" m two respects: it is developed m relation to ethnohistory, multiculturahsm, and cosmopolitanism and marked by a materialist stance with a socio-pohtical agenda (see especiaUy 38).

He critiques post-

modernist orientations on the grounds of their "radicaUy epistemological relativism" (7) which, he argues, results m htde more dian a "catachrestic narrative politics" and a "language game for the privileged" (13) that does htde to change die pohtical status quo. Krupat's critique of (Lyotard's) postmodemism is based on what he perceives as its reluctance to comment on social reahty. More to the point, he argues that the social reahty of all the marginal(ized) people who incessantly teU dieir "petits recits" without ever being heard posits no threat to the contmued existence of dominant "grands recits." I sympadiize widi Kmpat'sfiiistirationat die impasse he sees m this, but I do not think that it is possible to speak of postmodemism m such general terms; rather, there are now a number of confhctual articulations of postmodemisms vying for attention. My own approach, then, is more tentative and less inchned to estabhsh a method for socio-pohtical action. Although I am aware that, one way or anodier, no writing can escape to be imphcated in pohtics, my main concem here is not to formulate an agenda for pohtical action. Like Kmpat, I am concemed with border crossings which are not hmited to crossing from one paradigm to another, but involve a wiUingness toti-avelacross and between conceptional pattems. My project, however, is more modest in its aims. Krupat's ethnocriticism operates in a larger field and, moving on the

68

interface between anthropology, history, philosophy, and ethnic studies, is "very htde concemed with specifically hterary texts" (31). Conversely, my project is dependent on and interested m hterature, especiaUy since I beheve that hterary texts are freed from some of the constraints that delimit critical writing. In consequence, works of hterature often offer a fresh perspective on the concepts debated in theoretical discourse. I am particularly interested in tracing the ways in which, and to what extent, Erdrich's teti-alogy engages m the articulation of (in)betweenness with her strategy of interrogating traditional understandings of home as "belonging" versus homelessness as "not-belonging." Cultural belonging is often coupled with rehgious behefs and the texts thus stage a confrontation between divergent modes of thinking where the "claustrophobia of belonging" is contrasted with the possibihties of "peripheral vision." In her novels, Erdrich theorizes the cultural commonplace of home by ahgning it with concepts normaUy associated with its opposite, that is, instances of need, lack, ahenation, and deadi, which makes it difficuh to place her characters in one cultural paradigm. Consider the opening hues of Love Medicine: "The morning before Easter Sunday, June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oU boomtown WilUston, North Dakota, killing tune before the noon bus arrived that would take her home" (1). These few hues, told m a detached third person narrative, estabhsh time and place as weU as the name of a woman who we know nothing about yet, except that she is on her way home.

The name Kashpaw might alert observant readers to her Native

American origin which would suggest that the home she is heading towards is a reservation. The next sentence, "she was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved" (1), confirms diis suspicion. Moreover, the text activates aU kinds of prejudices. For one, it

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invokes the cultural chche of "easy" women of colour in June's meeting with the man in the bar. It appears obvious that she seems to depend on men for money. Therefore her decision to postpone her journey home, pardy because of the man's "good-sized wad of money" and pardy because she has a feehng that he "could be different" (3) reinforces the prejudicial view of June. It does not matter if she misses her bus since she is not expected "up home on the reservation" (3). The man is a mud engineer and his profession sparks the memory of another mud engineer she has known, one who was "killed by a pressurized hose" (3). Fascinated and unable to tum her thoughts away, June hngers over the gmesome details and later, alone in the Ladies Room, she allows herself for the first time to think that he might not be different after aU. This realization does not stop her, though, and when she retums to the man it is with thefirmknowledge that no matter what happens "she would get through this again" (4). Later, in the car, she submits to the attentions of a man who murmurs the name of anotiier woman, keeping her thoughts focused on the car heater, uncertain "whether she was more dmnk or more sober than she'd ever been in her hfe" (5). Giving in to a sudden panic, June leaves the sleeping man in his car, headed towards the town of Wilhston "when she decide[s] to walk home instead of going back there" (6). Thinking of her uncle Eh, June moves on and

Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin tumed crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on. The snow fell deeper diat Easter dian it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home. (9) 70

The first five'pages of Love Medicine proceed to teU the story of June Kashpaw's homeconung m a matter-of-fact, unsentunental, and detached manner. No explanations are offered for June's behaviour, no sympathy for the woman spills over into the narrative. In fact, the story itself is less unusual than the prose, which takes an oddly poetic tum attimes:"He was peehng [an egg], sky blue as a robin's, palmmg it while he diumbed the peel aside, when she walked through die door" (2). Poetiy alsotingesJune's homecoming which is depicted in such terms diat most readers constme it as her retum to the reservation, only to discover that "homecoming" here indicates that "June was gone—^not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow" (7). At this point the imagery takes on a new and unexpected significance. It is the day before Easter Sunday, the man offers June the gift of an Easter egg and June "walks over [the snow] like water"finallyto come home. The Christian overtones are unmistakable but June's impulse to animate the hose—to imbue it with deathly hfe, springsfiromthe Native American behef that everything is connected, so that humans, animals, and things can be said to "hve"—clashes with the Christian imagery m the text. This raises several questions. What exactiy is this "home" referred to m the text? Is it "hfe" in a Christian heaven or its Chippewa equivalent diat hes at the end of die four-day road to death? Are there any clues in the text that would aUow us to choose between Christian and Native American metaphors? This is ui part a rhetorical question, one diat cannot be answered conclusively since diere are no distinct indications as to which world view is privileged in the text. As we will see, characters are shown to be exposed to and mfluenced by bodi Native American mythology and die credos of Christendom, more often than not wavering between the two, confusing diverse and disparate elements into something new and strange.

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June Kashpaw is a case m point. As I stated earher, there is htde information about June's hfe in the pages leading up to her death. It is as if June exists only for a moment, as an episode, a woman comefromnowhere only to vanish into nothingness.

June only acquires a history in the first

person narratives, dirough the memory of the odier characters, as more detail is added to her story. The pictare that slowly emerges from the various narratives is fiiU of paradox and contradiction. Albertine Johnson, for instance, remembers June as a figure of contradiction, a part of die family yet a person apart, never quite at home anywhere. June is someone who "had no patience with children" but who neverdieless was a "good aunt to have—die kind that spoiled you" (8) and told you that you "had princess hair" (7). June was "raised by Great-uncle Eh ... when Grandma's sister died and June's no-good Morrissey father ran off to high-time it in the Cities" (7). It seems as if history repeated itself, however, because June runs off to marry her cousin Gordie Kashpaw against her family's wishes, only to leave hrni and their son King hke the "no-good Morrissey" (8) she is made out to be. In keeping with diis image June drinks too much and is disliked by customers and family alike, a misfit on bodi sides of the border. Her efforts to hold down a job fail just as her attempts at married hfe come to nothing. Albertine mforms us diat her mother Zelda who "naturally hadn't thought weU of June" (9) put down June's death to drinking, claiming that she probably "wandered off too intoxicated to reahze about die storm" (9). Secretly, Albertine disagrees, convinced that "[e]ven drunk she'd have known a storm was coming" (9).

Aureha, Zelda's younger sister, puts

Albertine's half-formed thoughts into words when she refers to June's homecoming as suicide because "what did she have to come home to after ah? Nodiing!" (12).

Aureha's comment augments the vision of June's

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homelessness glimpsed earher in her dependence on men, bodi on- and offreservation. But Albertine is more inchned to be sceptical. After all, what did anyone know "in fact, about the diing that happened?" (9).

She

imagines June "laughing, so sharp and determined, her purse clutched tight at the bar" m the company of men to whom "an Indian woman's nothing but an easy night" (9), voicing the prejudice diattingedthe opening pages. But whereas most people, both inside and outside the reservation, see June mainly as a failure and a disgrace, Albertine understands that June breaks "httle by httle, into someone whose shoulders sagged when she thought no one was looking, a woman with long ragged nails and hair always growing from its beauty-parlor cut" (8). The image that unfolds in Albertine's narrative is of a strangely homeless woman, an embarrassment to her family and a social failure m the eyes of the world. Yet there is another side to June to be gleamed between the hues, an intimation of a strong-wiUed, even ruthless woman who makes her own choices, irrespective of the cost to herself and others. A contradictory account of June is given by Marie Lazarre Kashpaw, daughter of Pauhne Puyat and Napoleon Morrissey, raised by the Lazarre family. June is the daughter of Marie's sister Lucille and a Morrissey man, "the whimng no-good who had not church-married" (63) Lucille. Despite diis, Marie "didn't want June Morrissey" (63) at furst, a gkl that came with a rosary round her neck put diere by Crees for their own protection, diinkmg diat she was raised by "the spirits" (64). But when she takes her ui she soon feels an odd kinship with the girl, who does not resemble the Lazarres or the Morrisseys, ahnost "as if she really was the child of what the old people called Manitous, invisible ones who hve in the woods" (65). June spends more and moretimewidi Nector's brodier Eh, hvuig ui thetiraditionalway

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and described as "a nodiing-and-nowhere person" (69), and finally moves in widi him at her own request. One of the events that stands out m Marie's recollection of June's childhood years has become a fanuly mydi: the day diey tried to hang June. Alerted by Zelda to die children's macabre game, Marie rushes out to find June with a rope around her neck.

But Marie does not beheve in her

children's assertions that June is the instigator of the game until she is faced with June's disappointment:

"I'll show you where to put the rope," I yelled. I was going to knot it and use it again on them, when I heard a dry htde sound, a tearless weeping sound,fromJune, and I tumed. She was standing upright, taU and bone-thin and hopeless, with die rosary wrapped around her hand as it is wrapped around the hands of the dead. "You mined it." Her eyes Winked at me, dry, as she choked it out. "I stole their horse. So I was supposed to be hanged." (67, emphasis added)

Again the rehgious overtones are strong, invoking June's ambiguous Easter homecoming. Widi this m mind, the hanging scene alludes to the bibhcal story of the cmcifixion, and the hanging of the diief; a connection that is reinforced by the rosary around June's neck. June is cast in the ambiguous role of both diief and Christ, but die image is given an additional twist by June's outrage at the untimely intermption. The story of June's hanging resurfaces shghdy differentiy diirty-three years later, in Albertine's narrative. It is retold in the family cfrclefromthe perspective of Marie Kashpaw, Aureha and Zelda.

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Each of die women

remembers and interprets the episode differendy. Aureha argues that June did not mind, Zelda stresses her own part in coming to June's rescue and Marie laughs at the memory of being caUed "a damn old chicken" (21). What had once been a frightful and inexphcable experience has now, with the patina of time, taken on a different hue—^it is not only the source of nostalgia and amusement but also a cherished memory invoked to sttengdien die bond between the members of the family. June's story grows and expands with details as the novel progresses, but June herself remains oddly elusive. The descriptions of her may differ in detail, but both Albertine and Marie feel compassion for June. For Albertine she is a woman whose "clothes were fuU of safety pins and hidden tears" (8) and Marie senses that there "was a sadness [she] couldn't touch there. It was a hurt place, it was deep, it was with her all the time like a broke rib diat stabbed when she breathed" (68). Ahgned with conflicting images of Christ, the Devd and wood spirits, June herself shows no sign of being a rehgious person. She was brought to Marie's house with a rosary around her neck, albeit not as a sign of her own Christian behef The rosary had been put there as a superstitious precaution, protecting people from some unimaginable harm that June might infhct on them. Yet Marie recognizes that "the Devil had no business with June," convinced that once "the sores healed she would be perfect" (65). It transpires that home, for June, was never a happy or easy place. She is an outsider in her own family, in her own community, and this does not change when she leaves the reservation for the big cities.

She leads a

doubly marginal existence in so far as she moves at the periphery of human relations and depends on men for her mcome. Thus she never fitted in or belonged, not happy to lead die life of an Indian on die reservation and UI equipped to be successful in the world beyond its reaches. Instead June

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closes off the pam m some mner part of herself, a "room [that] was locked" (4), where she "stayed shut" (69). Neither a Cadiohc nor a behever m the old tradition, June faUs dirough the cultural grids available to her. In one of the additional chapters in the 1993 edition, entided "Resurrection," June is described as a person who does not "know the rules" of the white people and who does not "act much like she knew she was an Indian, either" (268). It would be hasty, however, to cast her in the role of the victim, since she displays a remarkable resihence, and aU the narratives at hand suggest that June made her own decisions and is in control of her actions. An indication of June's strengdi is that although she dies in the very fkst pages of the novel, her presence is felt throughout. A resdess wanderer and troublesome figure m people's hves, June acquures more presence and unportance in death than when she was ahve. June's mixed heritage and her access to different cultural expressions do not result in a doubled cultural awareness, just as her self-chosen exile is void of die possibihties Said celebrates. It appears to be marked, instead, by a tragic non-belonging that precludes any attempts at negotiation.

It would seem, then, that her tragedy does not

springfromher inabihty to adapt to and make her home in any one culture, whether Indian or American, but that, failing to recognize her own potential for change, she keeps herself alooffromboth cultures. Maybe Albertine is right, remembering another June, fim-loving and careless, but also a strong woman who is an example to others, one who would

be dancing if diere was a dance hall m space. She would be dancing a twostep for wandering souls. Her long legs lifting and falhng. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way aU grown-up women were supposed to smeU. Her amusement at

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both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons. (35)

Albertine proves herself to be more perceptive than most when she discloses to die reader that Lipsha Morrissey is "June's boy" (28). Another of the abandoned children raised by Grandma Marie Kashpaw, Lipsha is told that Marie saved his life when she interfered as his mothertiedhim "in a potato sack" to "throw [him] in a slough" (189). Lipsha grows up to resent his uneventful life and the gratitude expected of him. Referred to as "the biggest waste on the reservation" (189), June's son bolsters his self-confidence partly with his Indian heritage, "statistically we're the smartest people on the earth," and partly with tales of his own prowess possessing what he refers to as "die touch" (190).'^ By the same token, he is convinced that "God's been deafening up on us" whereas the Chippewa gods "like tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Misshepeshu" (194) are better since "at least they come around" (195) . What is more, the Chippewa gods wiU do you "a favor if you ask themright"(195). It is this conviction of the preferabihty of Chippewa gods that leads Lipsha to commit attagicmistake. A witness to Lulu Lamartine's amorous interest m his Grandpa and afraid diat Nector Kashpaw might choose Lulu, who looks like "a house fixed up with paint and picky fence," over Marie who resembles "a house left to weather away into the soft earth" (196) , Lipsha decides to tip the scales in Grandma's favour by tiding his

" According to Native American mythology, this special power or medicine is not an unlimited force but circumscribed by certain restraints. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen describes that whereas as person in possession of that power, like Lipsha, may "use this extra force without being harmed by it" (72), the power can be used only "under certain conditions, and for certain purposes" (73).

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hands at a traditional Chippewa love medicine. The only problem is that most love medicines seem to require die impossible; one asks for a special kind of seeds he would not know how to find, another demands that he "catch frogs in the act" (200). Lipsha solves the dilemma by deciding to feed the hearts of a pair of Canada geese, "a bird what mates for hfe" (200), to Marie and Nector. Stalking the geese, but too cold and uncomfortable to wait long enough to catch any, Lipsha opts for an ominous shortcut by buying a couple of turkeys, "birds that was dead and froze" (203). Just to be on the safe side, Lipsha takes the turkey hearts to the convent to have them blessed, but, failing to convince the priest to comply, Lipsha sidles up to the holy water and "put [his] fingers in and blessed the hearts, quick, with [his] own hand" (205). When Grandpa Kashpaw chokes on the fake goose heart, mainly because of his reluctance to eat at all, which prompts Marie to hit hun "between the shoulderblades to make him swallow" (205), Lipsha takes full responsibihty, convinced diat it was the unholy mixture of the love medicine that kiUed the old man. It is an unholy mixmre in every sense of the word, a rehgious practice concoctedfiromtwo systems of behef at odds with each other in the service of a man who is inchned to bend the rules of both. At this point in the novel, Lipsha is depicted as constandy torn between his Native American legacy, which he knows imperfectiy, and die beckoning of another culture, and, faihng to hve in eidier of them, it is tempting to interpret him as yet anodiertiagiccasualty of cultural homelessness. Yet Lipsha's problems cannot be explained m terms of his hybrid position between cultures. Much of his status or lack diereof resuUsfi-oma spht in his family, the old rift between the PiUagers and Morrisseys. Lulu's son, Lyman Lamartine, is wary of Lipsha whom he sees as a "combination of the two age-old factions that had torn apart our band" (rev. ed. 312).

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But whereas his mother June withdraws from people into herself andt nature, Lipsha hangs on to people. Gerry tells him that he is "a Nanapusii man" (271), referring not only to his own ancestry, but also to Lipsba's special powers as a healer, reminiscent of the original Nanapush in Tracks, In the old days when rehgion, with smallpox in its tow, first hit his conununity, this Nanapush proved to be a resourceful man whose prowess at StoryteUing got hun through the worst times. Faced with die unwanleidi presence of a young Cathohc priest, Nanapush setded down to talk "in boiii languages in streams that ran alongside each other, over every rock, aromml every obstacle" {Tracks 7), keeping the priest at bay. Lipsha is Nanapush's offspring in name and body (he has the weak Nanapush heart), but he is also the spiritual hek to that older, mythical trickster Naanabozho'* on which Erdrich's Nanapush is modeUed. Orphaned hke Naanabozho, Lipsha sets out to "get down to the bottom of [his] heritage" (248), realizing for the fnst time diat it is up to him to determine who he is, that "[b]elonging [is] a matter of deciding to" (255). He decides to retum to the reservation in die only diing left of June, the car boughtfromher insurance money. Driving along ariverhe thinks of June, dying m die snow, dispersed in the water, as a "part of the great loneliness being carried up the driving current" (271), and, crossing the water, he "bring[s] her home" (272). This second homecoming of June, embodied in a car, reveals die layers of divergent rehgious behefs and cultural thinking paradigms in Erdrich's text. It can be seen both as a mirror and a strange transformation of June's The trickster Naanabozho, both man and spirit, is a common figure in Chippewa mythology. He is orphaned at the age of one and brought up by Nookorois, his grandmother. As a young man he sets out on a quest for his parents, encountering a number of adventures along the way. For more information see Gerald Vizenor, Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories (100-31), and Basil Johnston. Ojibway Ceremonies (163-65).

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first homeconung. Her embodiment m die car suggests die Native American framework with its insistence on the interconnectedness of all things, but at die sametimeit is also a weird alteration of this behef Note that Erdrich's unlikely choice of transformational vehicle is a car, this most Westem of ah apphances with its connotations of freedom and mobihty, invoking the American tradition of being on the road. This ambiguous homecoming in the car also generates the story for The Bingo Palace.

June's errant son Lipsha is summoned back to the

reservation once more by way of his father's "wanted" poster, a poster diat serves both as a calhng and a warning to die son. Lipsha retums but cannot untangle himself from the hves of his parents, aware that Gerry and "my mother, June, have always been inside of me, dark and shining, theuabsence about the size of a coin, somediing I have touched against and shpped" (259).

Helpuig his criminal father to escape, Lipsha braves a

bhzzard in a stolen car, his father at the wheel and an inadvertentiy kidnapped baby wailing ui the back seat. The baby, Lipsha realizes, is valuable to his father as a hostage, preventing their pursuers from shooting. Lipsha wants to retum the baby to its famihar surroundings more than anything, identifying with its phght, but somehow circumstances seem to be beyond his control. They drive along newly-ploughed roads when suddenly another car mns alongside and Lipsha is hardly surprised to recognize diat it is "June's car, and that she is drivmg" (256). But Gerry "tiims out of die safety of die snowplow's salvation," foUowing the "blue car'stiraU"(257). FinaUy, stuck in the snow, Gerry leaves the stolen car with Lipsha and the baby behind, getting into June's car whose "beams trace die aur, open spaces in the dark wind, and the car begins to move" (258). At this point in the narrative the echoes from Love Medicine resonate strongly: June and Gerry vanish into the snowstorm, abandoning Lipsha to

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his fate for the second time. The echoes grow even stionger as it becomes obvious that Lipsha's third homecoming is ahnost an exact repetition of June's homecoming m Love Medicine, except for two details.

First,

Lipsha's homecoming in The Bingo Palace is less structured by rehgion and depicted in more secular terms than June's homecoming in Love Medicine, which, as we have seen, bears traces of a Christian resurrection as well as of Native American behefs.

Second, Lipsha is not alone. Trying to gather

what warmth there is for the infant, Lipsha curls himself around the baby, comforted by the knowledge that "here is one child who was never left behind" (259), he drifts off into sleep:

I'm almost happy things have tumed out diis way. I am not afraid. An unknown path opens up before us, an empty trail shuts behind. Snow closes over our tracks, and then keeps moving like the tide. There is no trace where we were. Nor any arrows pointing to the place we're headed. We are the trackless beat, the invisible hght, the thought without a word to speak. (259)

But Lipsha's death in the bhzzard is ambiguous. In one sense it reverberates with imphcations of losing one's tracks, hteraUy and metaphorically, of being lost and homeless in every sense of the word.

In another sense,

paradoxically, it also imphes the opposite—that Lipsha has overcome his spiritual homelessness and found the belonging he searched for most of his hfe, but not, as might be expected, with his family on the reservation. Instead he discovers his home widi diis nameless baby, a sttanger's child from a world different from his own.

His transition from the singular

pronoun "I" to the plural form "we" signals die change diat occurs: "/ am

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not afraid.

An unknown padi opens up before us, an empty trail shuts

behind." It is at this moment that Lipsha grasps the M l imphcations of something he only ghmpsed earher—that "belonging was a matter of deciding to." The motif of homecoming is not a feature limited to Erdrich's texts and has attracted some critical aO;ention. Wilham Bevis, for instance, invokes die notion of homecoming to estabhsh a difference between Native American and classic American writing in their observation of what he caUs "leaving" and "homing" plots. In Bevis' "Native American Novels: Hommg In," the classic American novel is characterized by a "leaving" plot, i.e. a movement by an individual towards freedom, personal growth and fiilfilment away from his home. Native American texts, in tum, are distinguished by their "homing" plot where the protagonist finds fulfilment in remming home to his family and culture (580).

Fulfilment, for the Native American

protagonist, is seen as closely hnked with and resulting from close affinity with his native society and culture. Bevis' interpretation, striking in its simpUcity, rings tme at furst glance but on closer inspection mms out to be an attempt on his side to upgrade Native American hterature in relation to mainstream American writing, based on traditional conceptions of cultural difference in hne with other critical readings which depict Native American hterature as foregrounding the centrality of family and communal values. But "family" and "home" are cential concepts ui aU cultures and are closely associated with the individual's sense of belonging and happiness. Home as a place of childhood memories, a secure haven in which to hold the world at bay, a place where we can let down our guard for a while and spend time with those closest to us—but also a place we have to leave eventually to make our own way—these are images all of us are famihar with. Hence homecoming is not simply a description of the act of coming

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home, but is also imbued with a host of sentunental and highly personal values.

As the passages from Erdrich's novels quoted above indicate,

conventional notions of home and homecoming are called into question in her writing. Home is not oidy a place and a presence to retum to. Likewise, homecoming is associated much more with forms of absences—loss and death—than with a physical retum to a specific place. At this point m my reading it might be useful to broaden the discussion by looking at the concept of home and its opposite from another perspective. For this purpose, let me tum to Edward Said's essay "The Mind of Winter" which is an expose of his personal reflections on the complex interdependency of home and exile. In Said's thinking, both concepts are highly ambiguous and the conventional dichotomy of home and exile—^with home as the primary and privileged term—is open to questioning. He points out that it is possible to reverse the connotations of the two terms, where home becomes a place of danger, and exile the refuge normaUy associated with home.

Moreover, exile is an interesting option insofar as exiles "cross

borders, break barriers of thought and experience" (54). For Said, it is the very act of crossing borders, the experience of seeing "the entire world as a foreign land" which can be conceived as promoting an "originahty of vision" (55).

These border crossings are not limited to national or geographical

boundaries but involve the individual's mind in the negotiation of borders between the memory of the past, the experience of the present and the vision of the fumre. The position outside one's homeland and mside another country, and the inner border crossings diis entails is seen as potentially empowering. Whereas most people are famihar with "one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two" which, according to Said, results m a "contirapuntal" awareness (55).

Contrapuntal awareness

signifies, as Said defines it in another context, the questioning of binary

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division into "us" and "them" by "according neither the privilege of 'objectivity' to 'our side' nor the encumbrance of 'subjectivity' to 'theirs'" (Culture and Imperialism 312).

But at the same time as exile may be a

valuable experience as regards the individual's perception of himself and the world. Said cautions us that to regard exile one-sidedly as "beneficial, as a spur to humanism or creativity, is to belittle its mutilations" (50). The doubleness of exile, which Said invokes in his essay, is also seen to contaminate the notion of home: "homes are always provisional" (54). Home is not always and necessarily the haven of safety convention would have us beUeve. The selfsame borders that delimit our home from the rest of the world are liable to turn into incarcerating walls, keeping the world out at the cost of keeping us locked inside.

But Said does not stop here. In

addition to complicating the traditional connotations of each term. Said also reverses the hierarchical order by privileging "exile" over "home." In his thinking, exile has an edge over home in so far as it entails multiple border crossings.

Said valorizes exile as potentially empowering since the

negotiation of geographical boundaries is seen as the first step towards the crossing of inner borders. The relocation of self in a foreign environment involves the questioning of (old) values and the inner journey rehes on the faculty of memory to negotiate the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, safe and dangerous, past and present. In Erdrich's novels, as in Said's thinking, "homes are always provisional," with a number of different understandings of home clashing. June and Lipsha are exiles in their own world, not quite of it yet not fiilly apart. Both cross geographical boundaries and try to negotiate inner borders, making their homes here and there in their various ways, and both experience that "homes are always provisional." On a similar note, Erdrich's concern with conflicting conceptualizations

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of home is evident in the two narratives that chronicle the story of the Kashpaws and Morrisseys in Tracks, a story that is told in the hope of bringing Lulu Nanapush home. In this novel Nanapush and PauUne alternate as narrators, commenting on each other and on events in the story from their individual perspectives. As we will see, the question of home takes on a new urgency as the two narrators' views collide in this text. The storyUne in Tracks traces, as the title suggests, the destinies of the characters introduced in Love Medicine and The Beet Queen through a move back in time. The similarities with the two earlier texts are unmistakable, but the opening pages seem to suggest that more emphasis is being given to the Native American aspects than before.

Whereas the ambiguity of the

religious overtones in the opening scenes of Love Medicine makes it difficult to decide whether to interpret June's homecomingfromthe perspective of a shamanistic Native American or a Christian framework, the first pages of Tracks suggest that there is no such undecidability at work in this text which focuses on the story of the Chippewas, pressing home the adversity of reservation life. The first indication is given in the chapter-heading Manitou-geezisohns which carries its own translation, Little Spirit Sun, underneath. The Native American element is strengthened by the name of the narrator, Nanapush, reminiscent of the Chippewa trickster Naanabozho.

Then the opening

paragraph describes the hardships and injustices experienced by the Anishinaabe tribe:

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die. For those who survived the spotted sickness from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissioux land where we

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signed die treaty, and dien a wind from the east, bringing exile m a storm of government papers, what descended from the north in 1912 seemed impossible. (1)

Here the mode of storytelling, the communal "we," reinforces the Native American theme of the narration. In addition to community the pronoun suggests a shared identity and a sense of belongmg. It is exactiy diis feehng of belonging that Nanapush's narrative invokes in his attempt to bring Lulu, his adopted granddaughter, home. For Nanapush exile is a negative term, connotative of a loss of the old ways he isfightingto preserve at aU costs. It might be tempting to surmise that Tracks, as the opening and the move back intimesuggests, is Erdrich's most "Native American" text where the Native American framework is stressed unequivocaUy. But although the events take place ahnost exclusively within the confines of the reservation, the characters m Tracks are shown to be grapphng with the conflicting demands which arise from their contact with two disparate cultures and rehgious. In what foUows I wiU focus on the two narrators, Nanapush and Pauline, to investigate in what ways the characters' cultural hybridity affects their understanding of what constitutes home. We are told that Nanapush has had a "Jesuit education m die haUs of Saint John before [he] ran back to die woods and forgot aU [his] prayers" (33). To remforce this statement he teUs us that his name, Nanapush, aUudes to "trickery and hving in the bush" (33). He invokes his heritage as one of the Anishinaabe who, despite epidemics of smallpox and consumption, survived and tried to preserve the old ways. Nanapush himself "refused to sign the settiement papers" (2) that would take over Anishinaabe land in exchange for money. The land is important to Nanapush since his understandmg of home is hreyocablytiedup with it. For

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Nanapush, the worst that can happen is to encounter "the uncertainties of facing the world without land to call home" (187), which could be glossed in one term: exile. There are signals in Tracks, however, that Nanapush is not quite what he appears to be and that his narrative is subject to conflicting desires. Whereas he claims that he abandoned Catholicism because "the old gods were better" (110), he nevertheless discards the belief of some of his tribespeople that their misfortune "was the doing of dissatisfied spirits" (4) by taking the more secular view that their problems derive from "hving, from liquor and the doUar bill" (4). This statement suggests that Nanapush is more influenced by Western modes of thought than he is willing to admit: he locates the cause of his people's problems in individual behaviour grounded in, or at least influenced by, social conditions, "Uquor and the dollar biU," as opposed to "dissatisfied spirits." This has to be understood in the context of Native American mythology where everything is seen as interconnected, and where, consequently, the social cannot be dissevered from the spiritual world.'^ By a similar token, Nanapush's attempts to establish himself as a guardian of the old ways clash with Pauline's description of his family. Her narrative points instead to the hybridity of his clan where "the new [is] made up of bits of the old, some reUgious in the old way and some in the new" (70). Pauline's portrayal of the Kashpaws in terms of hybridity could also serve as a definition of herself. Nanapush describes her as "an unknown mixture of ingredients" which resulted in that they "never knew what to call

See, for instance, Paula Gunn Allen's statement in The Sacred Hoop that "for millennia American Indians have based their social systems, however diverse, on ritual, spirit-centered, woman-focused world-views" (2). Unlike Western thought paradigms, Native American thinking does not "draw a hard and fast line between what is material and what is spiritual" (60).

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her, or where she fit" (39). Pauhne herself is aware of her margmal status, both on- and off-reservation.

She refers to her famUy, the Puyats, as

"mixed-bloods, skinners m die clan for which the name was lost" (14) and Pauhne yearns to be "like [her] grandfather, pure Canadian" (14).

She

rejects her native language in favour of Enghsh because she sees "through die eyes of the world outside" (14). Not surprisingly, then, she refers to her tribe as "diem," not as "neenawind or us" (138). Since she does not feel at home on the reservation, Pauhne leaves to work in the town of Argus, only to discover that she is "invisible to most customers and to the men m the shop" (15). On her retum to the reservation, Pauline decides that, in order to create a place for herself, she "must get married" (72), but her encounter with Napoleon does not lead to marriage; on the contrary, it results m an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. When her attempts to abort the child fail, Pauhne fights and resists giving buth to the last minute. Wrenched into the world against her mother's wiU, Pauhne's daughter Marie is discarded with the words that she is "marked by the devil's thumbs" (136) and given up to be raised by Bemadette Morrissey. Pauhne's interpretation of Marie's bhthmark is subject to the same process of hybridity the other characters experience. Drawn to Christian rehgion, Pauhne's view of the Christian God nevertheless derives, as Catherine Rainwater remarks, from a "non-Christianframeof reference" (409). Aspiring to become a nun, Pauhne still beUeves in Misshepeshu, the Chippewa lake creature, but now she caUs him Satan. The effect of this confused interpretation is that Pauhne's version of the "satanic lake monster is more horrible dian either die Christian Satan, who is not appeasable but who cannot victimize the tmly innocent, or the Chippewa monster, who can capture die innocent but who is appeasable" (Rainwater 409).

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What is

more, Pauline seems to be unable to distinguish between Christ and Satan, so when she speaks of and to "Him" it might be either. When "He" asks her in a vision to meet him in the desert, PauUne is uncertain whether she is talking to Christ or Lucifer, wondering "[w]hich master had given [her] these words to decipher" since without question she must "hate one, the other adore" (193). In a similar vein, she tries to appease Christ as she would the lake monster. She attempts to win Christ's favour by enduring an assertion of self-inflicted pain. Atfirstshe only exposes herself to cold and hunger, offering her discomfort like a prize. Later, she wears her shoes on the wrong feet and relishes the resulting "painful sores" as an "ingenious reminder of Christ's imprisonment" (146). Her next move is her refusal to relieve herself other than at dawn or dusk because God "had hinted that [she] might gain eternal Ufe if [she] never broke [her] pact and paid the privy an extra visit" (148). Although each of her secret practices is discovered andridiculedby Nanapush, PauUne perseveres in her efforts to impress her tribe with her newly gained power as the disciple of Christ. Matters come to a head when she lets herself be drawn into a contest of power with Nanapush, who describes the scene in the following words:

She prayed loudly in CathoUc Latin, then plunged her hands, unprepared by the crushed roots and marrows of plants, into the boiling water. She lowered them farther, and kept them there. Her eyes roUed back into her skuU and the skin around her cheeks stretched so tight and thin it nearly spUt. If she opened her mouth, I thought, pure steam might blast into the air. Moments passed. Then she shrieked, jumped. She clawed straight through the flimsy tent walls, scattering the willow poles, collapsing the blankets and skins all

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around us. Then she ran, by die hght of her scalded arms, and foUowed the dark path back to town. (190)

This experience sorely tries Pauhne's faith in God. Formerly she had beheved that the Christian God is stronger, that it was their behef in him that made "the whites more shrewd" proven by their greater material wealtii, "some even owning automobiles," whereas the "Indians receded and coughed to death and drank" (139). The white community's affluence results m Pauline's wish to be "not one speck of Indian but wholly white" (137). On the other hand, she deshres to be recognized by her tribal family and yearns to acquire the same respect that is given to Reur Pillager, a woman weU versed in the old Chippewa ways. Pauline, who interprets Reur as "the hinge" between "the people and the gold-eyed creature in the lake"(139), is convinced that Reur's fearful power stems from her communion with Misshepeshu. InitiaUy the potency of the new white God held the promise of power for Pauline,ttansferringthe awe and respect the community felt for Reur to herself once it transpured that "it would be Pauhne who opened [the door]" (139). After the scalding of her hands, however, the preconditions have changed. Pauhne is certain diat "Christ had hidden out of frailty, overcome by the ghtter of copper scales, appalled at the creature's unwinding length and luxury.

New devils require new gods" (195).

Aldiough she has learned diat Christ, "lamblike and meek," is no match for the Chippewa gods, she is safe m die knowledge that she herself has "sti-engdiened, daily, on His tests and privations" (195), and is weU suited to mediate between the two godheads. In the end shefindsa homefid position in her behef that it is her mission to interpret between conceptions of Misshepeshu and Christ: "It was I widi the cunning of serpents, I with skiU

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to win forgiveness" (195). Thus the scalding of her hands with the ensuing insight that her God is no match for the lake creature has supplied Pauline with the means to outrank Fleur; instead of merely acting spokesperson between God and her people, she is now called upon to mediate between two gods, godlike herself as Christ's "champion. His savior too" (195). Pauline's plan seems to work. "Christ will take [her] as wife, without death" and she is convinced that "the monster was tamed that night, sent to the bottom of the lake and chained there by [her] deed" (204).

She is

appointed teacher at St Catherine's school in Argus where she proposes to use her influence on other Native American girls "to purify their minds, to mold them in [her] own image" (205).

Yet the narrative does not

corroborate Pauline's godlike vision of herself, stressing instead her resemblance with Misshepeshu. Reptilian-fashion, Pauline "shed[s] a skin" (195). Water seems to be her natural element and her immersion in it is "so terrible, so pleasant" that Pauline momentarily abandons Christ "and all His rules and special requkements" (154). While it would be easy toridiculePauline's sacrifices, as Nanapush does, or, like Rainwater, to interpret Pauline's religious mixture in terms of a "warped theology" (409), Pauline's attempt to combine two different religious views into an amalgam that both fits and ameliorates her own position on the margins singles her out as one of the survivors.

It is

important to remember that, however incongruous her composite religion seems to us, Paulihe manages to do what Nanapush does not: she makes a life for herself in the face of her community's disapproval andridicule.'*So

'* Reading the introduction to The Sacred Hoop, it struck me that Pauline's religious hybridity bears some resemblance to Paula Gunn Allen's own method. Influenced by two different cultural systems of thought, Allen speaks of her method as being "somewhat western and somewhat Indian" (7).

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we could say diat despite Pauline's reappearance as Sister Leopolda in The Beet Queen, her chosen home is neither the old Chippewa rehgion nor Christianity but rather a position on the interface between the two. For Nanapush, who chooses to stay on reservation land, "home" signifies the traditional Chippewa way of life with its loosely knit family groups. This understanding of home grounded in family is shared by non-Native characters hke Mary Adare and Wallace Pfef, who go to great lengdis to acquire diat home for themselves. For others, like Karl Adare, June and Lipsha, to name but a few, "home" is not a place and not to be found in tradition or in die past, but is always somediing somewhere ahead, still to be discovered. Their marginahty is not perceived in opposition to some central authority but rather characterized by its narrative position between different cultures. But it appears that none of the characters is unaffected by this cultural amalgam, invariably negotiatuig between the lure of another, more affluent culture and the desire to hold on to the famiharity of the traditional way of hfe. In a sense, they can be said to be dislodged and estranged ftom their tradition, exiles in Said's terms of having lost "their roots, their land, their past" (51), as they move in a space between cultures. But whereas Said focuses on the possibihties inherent in the state of exile, Erdrich's characters tend to take a more nostalgic view of the lost home. Some manage to find this "home" eventually but aU do so in different ways and for different reasons. Cultural hybridity, depicted as both an opportunity and a disadvantage, but which seems to be mosdy a source of despondency and pain for many of Erdrich's characters, is stiU, in the tetralogy, a process to be worked through. But whereas Erdrich troubles Said's optimistic view of exile m Love Medicine and Tracks, as indeed in the whole tetralogy, she seems to move

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closer to Said's position in The Crown of Columbus. This novel is the result of a collaborative effort between Erdrich and her husband Michael Bonis. In The Crown of Columbus, the mixed blood or breed, embodied by Associate Professor of Anthropology Vivian Twostar, fully embraces her cultural hybridity as a means to "escape the claustrophobia of belonging," perceiving herself, Uke Pauhne in Tracks, to be "the catch" (124) that relates one culture to the other. But whereas PauUne claimed all the prominence of that position for herself, unable and unwUUng to acknowledge any similarity between Fleur and herself, Vivian Twostar displays a more generous frame of mind.

This allows her to see Columbus, rather unexpectedly, in a

different Ught: not one-sidedly as the enemy who instigated the colonization of Native American land but instead to acknowledge that there are points of contact which, paradoxically, become apparent the more "disparate and contradictory the facts [she] accumulated about Columbus, the more [she] understood the man" (125). History is re-interpreted, since Columbus can be re-envisaged as a man who "spoke all languages with a foreign accent" who "didn't completely fit in, anywhere" and who was therefore always "trying to forge Unks, to be the Unk,fromone human cluster to the next" (124). Or, put differently, in this Ught Columbus can be understood as an image of the cultural hybrid who "[has] to think global because the whole world [is] the only context in which he [is] unambiguously a fiiU member" (124). As we win see in the next chapter, there are certain tensions at work in Coetzee's writing as weU. The inquiry into the (in)between takes a different form in Coetzee's texts where notions of home and exile surface less conspicuously, but, as will become apparent, no less urgently, than in Erdrich's texts.

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Chapter Two Texts of Silence and Alternative Modes of Empowerment: Reading Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe

The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness. Trinh T. Minhha'

In the light of Erdrich's "marginal" status both as a female writer and as a relative newcomer on the Uterary scene, whose writing moves on the interface between her Native American and German-American heritage, Coetzee would seem to occupy a much more "central" position. As a white South African male, Coetzee lives and writes from the position of a member of the dominant group^ and as such has access to a power that is denied to ' Trinh prefaces her text Woman, Native, Other with a personal note on storytelling 'The Story Began Long Ago...," from which this quotation is taken. I am intrigued by Trinh's conceptualization of the story as a gift, an empty gift, which moves back and forth and isfilledwith various meanings but never quite fiilly appropriated because the story is seen to fiinction according to its own logic, setting its own limits, never those we wish to ^ply to it.

^ This should not be taken as a suggestion on my part that Coetzee embraces the tenets of apartheid, but that he, like many of his conteir^raiy white South Afiicans inhabits, however reluctantly, a position of power vis-^vis black South Afiicans. While apartheid as a principle of government may belong to the (recent) past, most of Coetzee's work was written under the hegemony of apartheid, whose consequences are still very much evident and will continue to shape people's lives for some time to come, so that the influence of apartheid cannot be neglected.

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the majority of Native Americans. In addition, as David AttweU points out m die "Editor's Preface" m Doubling the Point, a collection of Coetzee's critical essays and interviews, Coetzee is today seen to belong to "the foremost rank of contemporary writers of fiction" (1). Yet a division into "marginal" or "central" breaks down on closer inspection. A brief look at the critical response to Coetzee's texts illustrates diat his writing is construed as marginal to some concems and central to others.^ Some argue that hisfictionshirks its responsibihty to South African reahty and detect in it Coetzee's "refusal to accept historical responsibihty" (JanMohamed, "Economy of Manichean AUegory" 73), whereas others read his texts as aUegories of "contemporary South Africa" (Post 145), dramatizing "the comphcity of colonial settler narratives with exploitative pohtico-historical processes" (Wright 118).

For others

of more

deconstiiictive interest Coetzee's primary concem is in language. Lance Olsen takes as his point of departure diat "Coetzee's is a writing that dissects, recharts, interrogates, challenges, casts into doubt" and diereby "places civUization, authority, humanism and tmth under erasure" (47), and Paul WiUiams, focusing on Foe, argues that the novel is not a "clever allegory or analogy of 'the South African situation,'" (33) but instead is concemed with enacting "the inabihty of art to copy reality and the unbridgeable gap between text and world" (34). Yet anodier group of critics attempt to reconcile self-reflexive elements in Coetzee's texts with a contextual reading, arguing that while texts hke Foe can be read as an

' I make no claims to a conprehensive survey of Coetzee criticism here, for this I refer the reader to other sources, for instance Lance Olsen's "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians," Attwell's / . M. Coetzee, Macaskill's "Charting J. M . Coetzee's Middle Voice," and Macaskill and Colleran's "Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J. M . Coetzee's Foe."

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"allegory of the creative process" (Splendore 58), they also comment on the social realities in South Africa since Coetzee "exposes the hidden compUcities, demystifies good intentions and lays bare the ambiguity of the social drama" (Splendore 60). Different as these critical perspectives are, what seems to be at issue here are confUcting notions of how to position Coetzee's texts in respect to contending interpretive paradigms. Within a materialist, context-oriented framework, Coetzee's writing is seen as "marginal" in the sense that it falls short of taking an explicit stand against South African socio-historical conditions.

But seen as South African postmodern writing it is also

"marginal" to the tradition of postmodernism itself insofar as the majority of postmodern texts are associated with either South- or Anglo-America. From this perspective, we now move into a minefield of conflicting and overlapping categories where polarities like marginahty/centrality and materialist/discursive history are insufficient tools to work with because they tend to obscure tensions between and within categories; tensions my project of "worrying the Unes" aims to highlight and which I see at work as shaping factors in thefictionaltexts. Both Erdrich and Coetzee, as well as Malouf (as I will show in the next chapter), engage in border crossings in their writing, moving in and out of frameworks, making it difficult to fixate their position. Reading AttweU's comments in Coetzee's Doubling the Point, a collection of Coetzee's critical essays and interviews, alerts me once more to the problematics of positionality. Looking back on Coetzee's texts and his personal history. Doubling the Point is written in the form of a multiple dialogue: carried out between Coetzee and Attwell, between Coetzee's essays and his fictional texts, and between Coetzee's Ufe and work. Throughout, the text stages the strange dance of one-step-forward-one-step-back between interviewer and

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interviewee, critic and novelist. What transpkes, in the text and between die hnes, is the unpossible task of (self)positioning, now part and parcel of die critical enterprise, marked by AttweU's desire to assign Coetzee a specific position and by Coetzee's reluctance to comply. Coetzee's Soudi African background in particular seems to invite questions as to where he stands, pohtically and ethicaUy.'' It is obvious from the interviews that AttweU would hke to claun Coetzee for the postcolonial field, and to clear himfromcharges of pohtical quietism by demonstrating die historico-pohtical awareness figuring in his texts.

But although I

sympadiize with AttweU's intentions, in his defense I detect a certain comphcity with the critics who formulated the accusations, if only in the sense of wanting to inscribe Coetzee into the stiong position that he refuses to inhabit.

In a later pubUcation, / . M. Coetzee: South Africa and the

Politics of Writing (1993), AttweU states that his purpose is to "assert again and again the historicity of the act of storyteUing, continuaUy reading the novels back into their context" (7).

Yet in Doubling the Point Coetzee

repeatedly opposes attempts at being dius positioned, and distances himself from a mode of thinking that constiiicts a new opposition between notions of "exhausted metropohs and vigorous periphery" (202). He seems to object In his address to the 1987 Weekly Mail Book Week in Cape Town, subsequently published as "The Novel Today," Coetzee confronts some of the accusations directed at him and other novelists whoreftiseto overtly position their texts in a historico-politKal context. He argues that there exists no simple one-to-onerelationshipbetween the novel and history, or between the novel and politics. Consequently, "a stoiy is not a message with a covering, a rhetorical or aesthetic covering" (4). Novels are "not made up of one thing plus another thing, message plus vehicle, substmcture plus superstructure." (4). The point Coetzee is at pains to make here is that, for him, as for me, there is "always a difference; and the difference is not a part, the part left behind after the subtraction ... the difference is everything" (4, emphasis added). Salman Rushdie voices a similarreluctanceto read literary texts in terms of their engagement with history. In "'Errata': Unreliable Narration in Midnight's Children," discussing the obvious historical misrepresentations by the narrator, Rushdie argues that this is "a way of telling thereaderto read the book with a healthy distrust, a scepticism" because "[h]istory is always an ambiguous affair" (100).

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to these categorizations not only because the "old opposition metropolisperiphery has lost its meaning" (202), but also because he senses in himself a reluctance to participate on either side, privileging instead the tensions that arise from "a will to remain in crisis" (337). It is exactly this "wiU to remain in crisis" which is definitive of what Coetzee acknowledges as his difficulty "with the project of stating positions, taking positions" (205). I see a similar "will to remain in crisis" in hisfictionaloeuvre, where tensions between different and conflicting conceptions are not resolved but allowed to create a hybrid territory that is the result of the criss-crossing of boundaries. I see Coetzee's writing as deeply involved in a questioning of positions of power. Coetzee demonstrates that while conventional patterns of power/powerlessness invariably inscribe themselves in various ways into the fabric of his novels, they also resist resolution in terms of an either/or fashion. To state it differently, Coetzee's texts generate more questions than answers. In the following I will trace the trajectory of two related issues, that is, how dichotomous conceptions of authority and the commonplaces or topoi of home and homelessness are cast in doubt in the novels. With this in mind, I will focus on two of his novels. Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe, where the former is set in the realm of an imaginary Empire at its moment of crisis, and where the latter undertakes the complex task of recasting Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Again, I will attempt to show in what ways these texts can be seen to "worry the Unes" of binary thinking in general, and of conceptions of home and homelessness in particular, by moving across a multipUcity of borders.

But before I embark on my

discussion of the novels, let me briefly turn to one of Coetzee's critical texts. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, in an attempt to trace what Richard Begam recognizes as reverberations of Derridean differance.

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In White Writing, Coetzee acknowledges two major concems that touch on the concept of home at issue in my investigation. Hisfirstconcem is widi die European history of ideas and its impact on the practice of "thinkmg Africa" through its own cultural grid; the second is widi die land itself. Focusing on pre-apartheid South African hterature, Coetzee sets out to explore how European notions of man, its theories of cultural progress and racial division shape and endorse the vision of South Africa as an "archaeological site" (10) on a lower evolutionary level dian Europe. Coetzee's examination of the conceptual pattems that underhe the strategy of "thinking Africa" are in line with Said's discussion of "the oriental" as an invented category of Westem thought m Orientalism and the "essentiahst positions" supported by Darwin's theory of evolution, which Said identifies, in Culture and Imperialism, as the basis for the European claim that "Europeans shouldrale,non-Europeans be mled" (120). In connection with the land itself, Coetzee addresses the mythical underphmings of die idea of home, visible m the behef diat "when people are 'at home in' or 'at harmony with' a particular landscape, diat landscape speaks to them and is understood by them" (10). This myth of home as a place of ultimate harmony and complete understanding is brought into contact and conflict widi the concept of "white writing." Coetzee explains diat "white writing" should not be understood as a racial marker, different from black writing, but that "[wjhite writmg is white only msofar as it is generated by the concems of people no longer European, not yet African" (11, emphasis added). For Richard Begam this echoes Derridean differance, "diat fugitive term which no longer occupies a place widiin die Westem metaphysical tradition but which has not yet estabhshed itself on an altemative ground" ("An Interview with J. M . Coetzee" 423). It is striking here that Coetzee and

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Begam understand white writing and differance, respectively, in terms of no longer and not yet. The phrase indicates an (in)between position, and it stresses the provisional nature and the transitional status of white writing and differance. But the phrase also carries overtones of a physical and ontological uprootedness; a state of homelessness which is characterized by a lack of position which is often experienced as powerlessness. In Wute Writing Coetzee touches on the question of homelessness in his discussion of the early twentieth-century "biologized history" (137) of thought which spawned the "myth that Western Europeans were biologically destined to rule the world" (138). Coetzee discusses how this myth surfaces in Sarah Gertrude Millin's novels as an obsession with the notion of blood rather than race.^ In Millin's novels blood is either black or white blood, where each is understood to retain its "inherent identities" (150) even when they are mixed. Thus, writes Coetzee, in Millin's novels a person of mixed blood is seen to have two identities, "not a new compound identity," a state which "instead of allowing him to belong to both parentages, his two identities make it impossible for him to belong to either" (150), which situates that person in the space of homelessness. Coetzee undertakes to show that this "neither/nor" understanding of identity has its roots in Social Darwinism with its beliefs in cultural (i. e. racial) purity and the ensuing obsession with blood, biology and race. Although Coetzee discusses this issue in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South A&ican literature (which shared its concern

' Coetzee describes Sarah Gertrude Millin as "the most substantial novelist writing in English in South Africa between Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer" (138) who is no longer read since her ideas on race today "seem dated and even morally offensive" (138). Coetzee's argument is that these ideas were not sin^jly the result of colonial prejudice but were grounded in what was then seen as "respectable scientific and historical thought" (138).

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with racial identity with European literatures), I suspect that although Western culture has abandoned overt allusions to the dogmas of Social Darwinism in the wake of the fall of National Socialism, the spectre of purity is still, to some extent, with us today. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the discussion of purity versus impurity presupposes an oppositional bias, which casts "hybridity" as the not-pure, the tainted.

But if instead we activate the concept of

(in)betweenness, hybridity is not understood as tainted, and therefore no longer marked by the homelessness that derives from its belonging to neither culture.

Rather hybridity's (in)between position is pregnant with con-

ceptions of what I would like to term homefulness (potential access to a multipUcity of centres), which designates the condition of possibihty for a different perspective, a perspective where empowerment Ues not in appropriation but in creating a space for difference. Coetzee's emphasis on the constructedness of binarisms, as in notions of "black" and "white," clearly aUgns him with the interests of poststructuralism, but he is carefiil to point out that it should not be construed that he is writing from the position of poststructuralism. In the interview with Begam, Coetzee recognizes certain affinities between the poststructurahst enterprise and his own concerns in White Writing, but maintains that he never intended his book to contribute to theory. To Coetzee, "white writing" is a "catchall term for a certain historically chcumscribed point of departure in writing about (South) Africa, and perhaps about colonized worlds in general" (423). It might be argued that his willingness to include poststructuralist insights as such is no sign of (in)betweenness since it could be well accommodated within the larger framework of postmodernism, but that would be to overlook Coetzee's insistence on keeping his distance from any one -ism, whether it is labelled Eurocentrism, Anglo-Americanism,

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postmodernism, or poststructuralism. It is precisely Coetzee's reluctance to inhabit a position in any one category and a willingness to cross repeatedly various borders that serve as a guarantor for Coetzee to avoid the trap of appropriation of otherness.

For him, any discourse risks perpetuating the

classification into binarisms of, for instance, black and white as long as it is based on absolute categories of identity and otherness; or, to use Coetzee's words, the "black is black as long as the white constructs himself as white" (Begam 425). Indeed, Coetzee's writing seems to puzzle critics by resisting categorization. Some critics, I have argued, interpret this as a shirking of responsibihty which has to be addressed in critical terms. A few critics, however, focus on the affinities of Coetzee's texts with different modes of thought.

Teresa Dovey, for instance, challenges the referential under-

standing of fictional discourse by situating Coetzee's novels in a space of "criticism-as-fiction, or complexity {Novels 9).

fiction-as-criticism,"

stressing their theoretical

In J. M. Coetzee David Attwell, disputing the

general reading of postmodernism as anti-historical, describes Coetzee's novels as "situational metafiction, with a particular relation to the cultural and poUtical discourses of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s" (3). Despite their different emphases, both Dovey and Attwell acknowledge what I label Coetzee's (in)between status. Dovey dismisses any polarizing move into historico-poUtical or poststructuralist readings of Coetzee's texts on the grounds that such an approach "overlooks the potential area between the two, which is concerned to theorize the ways in which discourses emerging from diverse contexts, and exhibiting different formal assumptions, may produce different forms of historical engagement" (qtd. in Attwell 2, first emphasis added). In a similar vein, Attwell points out that "Coetzee's novels are located in the nexus of history and text; that is, they explore the

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tension between these polarities" (23). In a way, Attwell and Dovey touch on the major premise of this study: the reading of Coetzee's novels in terms of fictions of (in)betweermess and the openings this provides.

Attwell's term "situational metafiction" is

especially usefiirin signalling Coetzee's postmodern strategies without precluding historio-political concerns. But Attwell's reading of Coetzee as enclosed in a First-World-within-the-Third-World approach leads him to argue that Coetzee's response to his positionaUty is to "interrogate the specific form of marginaUty he represents" (4). Marginality here signifies not only loss of power; Attwell perceives Coetzee's marginaUty as doubly troubled by his "complicated postcoloniaUty" (4), where his relations to Europe might be construed to imply complicity with oppressive systems of power. Despite his rejection of critical polarities, Attwell's reading still moves within the centre/margin dichotomy where the one is granted authority to define the other. Yet in his eagerness to clear Coetzee of accusations of complicity—^if only through his discursive silence on matters expUcitly political—^Attwell overlooks that Coetzee's depiction of alterities is an inherently political move, pointing to alternative strategies of empowerment. Coetzee does not claim the superiority of one position (of knowledge); instead he positions his characters within many different paradigms, each characterized by certain insights and blindnesses. Thus his texts supply the ground of interaction between these various positions.

Coetzee's own

voice, if discernible at all, remains just one among others. Coetzee's texts offer no resolutions, faciUtate no privileged interpretations, and thereby constitute a space of multiple points of contact between text, reader, and context. Let me turn to a reading of Waiting for the Barbarians to show how 103

Coetzee's strategy serves to displace power relations based on the traditional division into centre and margin.^ The frame narrative teUs the story of an unnamed Empire in decline plotting its outward expansion under the guise of forestalUng an impending barbarian invasion. The Empire's scheming has tragic results, both for the natives who are tortured for their "invasion" of the Empire, and for the Empire itself, which is defeated not by the alleged enemy but by the hostile environment. Not surprisingly, then, the overall storyUne of Waiting for the Barbarians has produced a number of critical readings that situate the text's concern in a South African context.^ Bracketing for the moment the question of the novel's impUcations for the South African situation, let me move fi-om the frame narrative into the heart of the text. Here, the battle between Empire and its imaginary enemies is overshadowed by the drama that is enacted on a more personal plane as the line of conflict shifts to be drawn mainly between two servants of Empire, the Magistrate and Colonel JoU. Boundaries of all sorts are drawn and redrawn in the novel. The frontier * As several critics have pointed out, the novel takes its name from C. P. Cavalfy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" about the last days of the Roman Entire in which the expected arrival of the barbarians never takes place, leaving the Empire in a state of despondency: "And now what will become of us without Barbarians?- / Those people were some sort of solution" (qtd. in Attwell 71). ^ For instance, Susan Van Zanten Gallagher sees in the novel an "allegorical landscape that loosely suggests the Roman Empire on the verge of collapse but undoubtedly points to South Africa today" (281) and in which Coetzee works out "some tentative strategies for the novelist confronted with the question of torture" (277). In a similar vein, Attwell has made a good case for the implications of the dropped definitive artice, for him Coetzee's use of "Empire" draws "attention to the universalizing forms of self-representation underlying imperialist endeavors" (71). For Attwell this suggests not so much an "ethical universalism" as "a strategic refusal of specificity" (73) on Coetzee's part, necessitated by his writing from a South African context. But the lack of the definite article could have another meaning: maybe "Empire" is simply the name of a system, any system, that has exhausted itself and outlived its usefulness but which is obsessed with one thing only: "how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era" {Waiting for the Barbarians 133).

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that divides the realm of Empire from the country of the barbarians is not a mutual border but a line drawn from the inside, an enclosure that protects the interior from the outside. Whereas the citizens belonging to the Empire may at any time cross it in any direction without incurring a penalty, the same licence is not granted to those who Uve on the other side; any attempt at border crossing is now interpreted as an act of hostility and as such punishable.

This division into Empire and barbarians suggests a simple

"us/them" framework for the novel, reminiscent of Lotman's argument that every culture begins with a division of the world into "its own" internal and "their" external space. As we will see, this dichotomy is destabilized from the outset in Waiting for the Barbarians by the inclusion of a third position, embodied in the Magistrate. When we first encounter him, the Magisfrate is thoroughly at home in his little world, content to lead "a quiet life in quiet times" (8) in the sleepy backwater settlement that "Uved in the time of the seasons, of the harvests, of the migration of the waterbirds" and which he recognizes as "paradise on earth" (154). In all his years on the frontier he has never seen evidence of barbarian hostiUty and discards the rumour that the "barbarian tribes were arming" (8) as yet another "episode of hysteria about the barbarians" (8). Although his identity is tied to his position as a "country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire" (8), he hves in his own world on which the existence of Empire and barbarians alike has httle impact, and where both remain only a shadowy thought at the fringes of his consciousness. At this point in the story, the Magisfrate positions himself in a space separate from both Empire and barbarian territory and displays a fervid interest in decoding the ancient "wooden slips" (15) he discovered in the desert. In this respect he poses as a "specular border intellectual" as defined 105

in JanMohamed's essay "Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-AsHome: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual."

Jan-

Mohamed distinguishes between a "syncretic border intellectual" who is able and willing to incorporate diverse cultural elements into a new syncretic vision, and a "specular border intellectual" who is "unable or unwUling to be 'at home' in these societies" and who uses this "interstitial cultural space as a vantage point" (97). But the visit of the interrogation expert Colonel Joll from the Third Bureau, "the most important division of the Civil Guard" (2), disrupts the Magistrate's "homely" routines and, as we will see, confronts him with an uncomfortable reaUty he so far has chosen to ignore. JoU's arrival turns "what was once an outpost and then a fort on the frontier [that] has grown into an agricultural settlement" (5) back into a frontier garrison intent on taking and interrogating "barbarian" prisoners. When an old man and a boy are brought in for interrogation, the Magistrate recognizes them as "destitute tribespeople" (4) and is horrified by Joll's unwavering conviction that they are members of a barbarian raid party who have to be tortured in order to get "the truth" (5). Faced with the relentless brutality of the representatives of Empire, the Magistrate is tempted to do "the wise thing," to look the other way "with no question about what the word investigations meant" (9) in order to preserve the tranquillity of his hfestyle, only to realize that this course of action is impossible for him:

But alas, I did not ride away: for a while I stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself. (9, emphasis added)

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This passage is crucial in its ambiguity.

Superficially it implies the

Magistrate's refiisal to take the easy way out by pretending that the torture is not happening, that he understands himself to be in opposition to the practices of Empure, but his choice of words suggests something more sinister.

He couches the act of torture in iimocent language, speaking

noncommittaUy of "noises" and "tools" rather than of "screams" and "instruments of torture," which indicates his own complicity in the act, if not by active participation then at least by passively observing.* Yet the more he attempts to distance himself from JoU's methods and ft-om the "empire of pain" (23), the more he appears in collusion with it. On the one hand, the Magistrate's perception of JoU and the barbarians as intruders into the serenity of his existence, as "them" opposed to "me," repeats the same act of self-centricity the Magistrate identifies and condemns in the practices of Empire. For the Magistrate, Empire and barbarians alike are outside the parameters of his Ufe, and part of his indignation with JoU's arrival touches on his wish to return Ufe to the way it was before, that is, at leisure to foUow his own whims and desires at a far remove from both Empire and barbarians. Thus he orders "that arrangements be made to restore the prisoners to their former Uves as soon as possible, as far as possible" (25, emphasis added). On the other hand, his taking the barbarian girl who had been one of JoU's prisoner's into his house after JoU's return to the capital "worries the line" between Magistrate and Joll.

Looking at her injured and almost-

bUnded eyes he asks "Did they do it to you?" (29, emphasis added), positing

' From this perspective the term waiting takes on a new meaning, not as in "waiting for the barbarians" which is given the lie in the novel by Joll's prisoner-taking excursions across the border, but in the sense of the Magistrate's reluctance to interfere, waiting for the situation to resolve itself and tum back to normal.

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a boundary between himself and the instruments of Empire. But his followup question "What did they do?" (29, emphasis added) and his obsessive interest in attending to her broken feet reveal his own ghouUsh fascination with torture. His neat division into "me" and "them" is shattered by his realization that "[s]he is as much a prisoner now as ever before" (55) and that the "distance between [himself] and her torturers ... is neghgible" (27). But he still insists that there is "nothing to Unk [him] with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars" (44). In his ambivalent posture towards his own role in the events, the Magistrate is oddly reminiscent of what Albert Memmi categorizes as "the colonizer who refuses" (19), that is, a person who benefits from colonial rule but who denounces its practices.'

A "colonizer who refiises" typically

insists, like the Magistrate, that he never participated in acts of oppression and cruelty but who suspects, nevertheless, that he "shares a collective responsibihty" (Memmi 39) as a member of Empire. The problem consists of the double rejection that the "colonizer who refuses" engages in. On the one hand, the Magistrate stresses his difference from the oppressor, Joll, but on the other, he cannot admit to an affinity with the oppressed, the barbarian girl. His predicament is not solved until he realizes, as Sartre puts it, that "there

are neither good nor bad colonists: there are coloniaUsts"

(Introduction to The Colonizer and the Colonized xxv). It is not until he has crossed the physical boundary of Empire, venturing deep into the country of the barbarians to return the girl to her people, that the Magistrate is able to traverse an interior border which takes him beyond ' In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi rejects notions of (innocent) colonists by establishing and characterizing two categories of colonialists: the "colonizer who refiises" and the "colonizer who accepts" (19-76). Both are implicated in the colonial enterprise, but where the former tries to justify his life in spite of his rejection of the colonial situation, the latter attempts to legitimize colonialism and his own part in it.

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the petty concerns of his earUer life. For the first time he meets the people referred to as barbarians "on their own ground and on equal terms" (72), ashamed as he realizes his own part in all that has happened and that

here I am patching up relations between the men of the future and the men of the past, returning, with apologies, a body we have sucked dry—a go-between, a jackal of Empire in sheep's clothing] (72, emphasis added)

On his return to the settlement, the Magistrate is imprisoned and tortured as a traitor to Empire, and, forgetting his recognition of himself as a "jackal of Empire in sheep's clothing," he once again constructs himself in opposition to JoU. Consequently, when new captives are brought in, cruelly tied together with wire piercing their flesh, die Magistrate speaks up in public, fiieUed by his desire to prove "that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of Ught there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian" (104). His accusations directed at JoU, "You are an obscene torturer! You deserve to hang!" (114), are countered by JoU's taunt "Thus speaks the judge, the One Just Man" (114). The significance of JoU's mockery is brought home to the Magistrate when he has learned "what it meant to Uve in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and weir (115, emphasis added). In a sense, his transformation from being a mirrorimage of JoU to a mirror-image of the barbarian girl is completed, down to the smaUest detail in the shape of a "crust Uke a fat caterpiUar" (115) his fingers once traced at the edges of her eye. Stripped of the protective shield of his administrative position and reduced to a human being intent only on

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his naked need for survival, the Magistrate finally appreciates what he fleetingly glimpsed in his meeting with the barbarians. This is the moment at which the carefully constructed world of the Magistrate, divided into "me" and "them," collapses. It becomes painfully apparent that his efforts to preserve his position as a Magistrate of Empire, at the same time as he wishes to distance himself from its practices, has failed. The Magistrate is no longer at home in his own world as the Une between "me" and "them," torturer and tortured, home and exile, is blurred: the entity that constitutes home for the Magistrate in a geographical sense is now experienced as exile in terms of values. Paradoxically, it is only when the Magistrate has crossed the Une between torturer and tortured, when he has been reduced to a state "past shame" (117), that he can finaUy see his own compUcity in the acts of Empire. He realizes that he is "no less infected with [Empire's mad vision and images of disaster] than the faithfiil Colonel JoU" (133) and that he himself is "the lie that Empire teUs itself when times are easy, [JoU] the truth that Empire teUs when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less" (135, emphasis added). Clearly the Magistrate's statement situates the novel in a colonial framework and Coetzee's Empire displays typical characteristics of imperial rule down to its commitment to a "specific ideology of expansion" (Said, Culture and Imperialism 225). But Coetzee's text takes the reader beyond the Umits of (post)colonial readings in its insistence that there can be no conclusive answers.

The Magistrate cannot be tied down to any one

position, be it that of a border intellectual, a colonizer who refuses, or a victim like the barbarians. In the course of the novel, he repeatedly crosses back and forth between these positions which results in the insight that it took a reversal of roles to teach him the "meaning of humanity" (115), but

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he cannot shake the suspicion that something has been "staring [him] in the face, and still [he does] not see it" (155). The Magistrate's unease may serve as a bridge to my discussion of Foe inasmuch as the characters in this novel, especially Susan, share a position similar to that of the Magistrate. Susan is unable to think beyond the obvious. She is at home in her own Uttle world and attempts to cope with difference

by translating it into sameness;

understanding and Ustens without hearing.

thus she sees without

I will show that although

Coetzee's Foe is silent on the issue of home, interrogations of home and homelessness inform all aspects of his novel and are inscribed through the concept of silence. We will see that, like Derrida's notion of dijferance, Coetzee's use of silence interrogates tacit assumptions about the relationship between culturally constructed concepts, concepts we feel at home with and tend to treat as if they were indisputable givens. The following questions are never stated expUcitly in the text but they are, nevertheless, impUed throughout. What exactly is home in the novel? Is it the island, or England? Or is it rather an island of the mind, an England of the mind? If so, where is Friday's home? Is it in exile in England, on Cruso's island, or somewhere else altogether? And where are Cruso and Susan at home? Is it on the island, in England, or in the conventions of writing Susan is at pains to uphold at times, and to question at others? Coetzee's text offers no definite answers and, what is more, it troubles the answers we supply in a number of fanciful ways. To begin with. Foe, as one of the robinsonnades'° spawned by Robinson As Attwell points out in J. M. Coetzee, it is impossible to trace the vast amount of robinsonnades. He states that already "by 1895 there had been... 277 imitations" (133, fh 7). To name but a few of the better-known novels inspired by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, see Muriel Spark's Robinson (1958), Michel Toumier's Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967), and Adrian Mitchell's Man Friday (1975).

Ill

Crusoe, is inevitably read against the backdrop of Defoe's text. The story of Robinson Crusoe is part of the European cultural heritage and readers familiar with this tradition feel at home with the concept of Robinson Crusoe —a man who builds a civilization from scratch—and with the concomitant images of shipwreck, Crusoe's man Friday and the island. Thus the use of a traditional storyUne with weU known characters plays on the readers' knowledge and serves to raise certain expectations which, as my reading aims to show, are troubled by the novel's characters and action.

Put

differently. Foe can be understood to fiinction as a paUmpsest where the "original" story is still visible enough to make strange what appears as famihar at first glance. We might say, then, that Coetzee's text both offers a comfortable place of recognizable conventions for the reader to feel at home with, and that it simultaneously introduces enough difference to trouble this feeUng of belonging. Foe opens with the story of the female castaway Susan Barton's arrival on a desert island inhabited by the likewise castaway Cruso and his slave Friday, invoking images of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. SuperficiaUy, both novels move in the same temporal space, and both feature a desert island with Cruso and Friday. The arrival of a female castaway, whose history bears traces of both Moll Flanders and Roxana,^^ seems to be a mere addition to the original story. By the same token, the introduction of M r Foe, author, into the story strengthens the link between Foe and Robinson Crusoe, especiaUy when we remember that Daniel Defoe was the son of James Foe, a resident of Stoke Newington as is Foe's M r Foe.

'' The references to Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana are unmistakably present in Foe. Like Moll, Susan leads the life of a man, claiming the santerights,and the name Susan is reminiscent of another Susan who changes her name to Roxana; who like Susan Barton loses her beloved daughter only to be approached by an unknown woman who claims to know her.

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But even though Coetzee's narrative incorporates components from Defoe's best-known novels as well as details from Defoe's Ufe, Foe cleverly manipulates the reader's expectations, unmasking itself in the process as an unhomely readmg of Robinson Crusoe. What first appears as a version of the discourse of the Same in the novel is revealed to contain irreducible differences. Obvious borrowings from Defoe's novel—the characters of Cruso and Friday and the island episode—tum out to be major distortions of the originals. Cruso differs in more ways from the original Crusoe than by the mere loss of an "e"; unlike Crusoe he is not the narrator of his own story, he is not interested in estabUshing his own kingdom on the island, or in teaching Friday—^and he has lost all desire to escape. In Foe, Cruso is merely an old man who Uves in what appears to be self-chosen exile, buUding meaningless stone walls and when the castaways are finaUy rescued by a merchant ship, Cruso dies of "woe, the exttemest woe" (43). Foe's Friday is not the image of the eighteenth-century noble savage'^ the reader encounters in Defoe's novel, acknowledging Crusoe's superiority by kneeUng down and kissing the ground, setting Crusoe's "Foot upon his Head" as a "token of swearing to be [Crusoe's] Slave for ever," along with aU the other signs of "subjection. Servitude, and Submission imaginable" (Defoe 206, 203, 206). In Foe, Friday is described as "a Negro with a head of frizzy wool" with the typical "smaU duU eyes" and "broad nose" and "thick Ups" (56), thus not of the "dun oUve Colour" with a small nose "not flat Uke the Negroes" and the "thin Lips" (Defoe 2056) of the original

Defoe's Crusoe describes Friday as being "a comely handsome Fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong Limbs, not too large; tall and well shap'd, and as I reckon, about twenty six Years of Age. He had a very good Countenance, not a fierce and surly Aspect; but seem'd to have something very manly in his Face, and yet he had all the Sweetness and Softness of an European in his Countenance too, especially when he smil'd" (205, emphasis in original).

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Friday. But most of all he differs in his inabiUty to speak because of the lack of a tongue. Coetzee's Friday is not even the human parrot Defoe's Crusoe fashions himself, conversing by echoing his master. The island is not the lush tropical isle of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe but barren, empty, and silent apart from the howUng winds and shrieking apes. It is a bleak place where Cruso's "morose silence" (36) and meaningless industriousness "would brook no change" (27): a most unfit place to establish Crusoe's economy based on the resources available and barely sufficient for survival. Indeed, Coetzee's island is portrayed in terms suggestive of a place of exile rather than of home. Time and again Susan reflects on the difference between the "homely" desert island as described in Robinson Crusoe, and the sterile place in which she finds herself, urging Cruso to "home" it. She is appalled when she discovers that Cruso "kept no joumal... because he lacked the incUnation to keep one" (16), and, lacking paper and ink, she urges him to "bum the story upon wood, or engrave it upon rock" (17). It seems as if Susan knew what Craso does not: how to be a proper Cmso/e. Throughout Foe, Susan's understanding of how Craso should behave is put into colUsion with Craso's actual behaviour, whereby Craso is highhghted as a character who does not follow the novelistic tradition of castaway stories Susan is famihar with. In the same vein, what seems Uke an addition to the original story the introduction of Susan is not so much an accessory or even a distortion as a recasting of Robinson Crusoe. At first glance it would seem that Coetzee uses a woman to take the place of Defoe's Crasoe, which might imply diat he aligns himself with the feminist issue. This may suggest that Foe might be a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe with a female protagonist in charge of the story. Yet on closer inspection this woman reveals a striking resemblance to Defoe's Crasoe. Not only is she described as taUer than Friday and stronger

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than Cruso, she is also shown to be in possession of all the energy and enterprise characteristic of Robinson Crusoe. Do I mean to say, then, that we should read Susan as a mere recasting of Robinson Crusoe in a female body, not a female version of him? This would seem to be the case if we remember her insistence that Cruso is lacking in all the respects that count or rather that counted to Defoe's Crusoe. On the one hand, Susan Barton resembles the original Crusoe in her attention to detail, her insistence on the importance of the written word, her conviction that the story should reflect reahty.

On the other hand, she is strangely

knowledgeable about the genre of castaway stories in general and Robinson Crusoe in particular, which signals her metafictional status in Coetzee's text. This posits Susan within the Defoenian framework of thought, making her a metafictional interloper in Coetzee's novel, a castaway from another time and as much out of place in Foe as her being a woman would make her in Robinson Crusoe. Hence Susan Barton, referring to herself as "Mrs Cruso" (42), would seem to be Crusoe incarnate, whereas Foe's Cruso is Crusoe but in name. But we must not forget that she differs from Crusoe in another respect: whereas Defoe's Crusoe shows no sexual desire whatsoever, Susan expUcitly draws attention to her bodily needs. Whereas she merely submits to Cruso's wishes once, she responds to Foe's kiss as "a woman answers her lover's" (134) and when they make love she claims the privilege to choose the position and "straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman)" (139). On this note, Susan paradoxicaUy seems to be and not to be Robinson Crusoe, just like his namesake in the novel. It is Foe's status as yet another text in the series of robinsonnades inspked by Defoe's famous first novel where the overt and covert aUusions to Robinson Crusoe resound throughout the novel, creating its subtext, that entices the reader to engage in the labyrinthine game of establishing 115

similarities and differences which leads, as we will see, to a questioning of certain givens. Foe's thematization of silence is one of the more obvious variations on Defoe's novel. Coetzee's silent Friday differs from Defoe's Friday. Whereas the latter can be taught Crusoe's language and, consequenfly, be brought to speak about his own background, the history of Coetzee's Friday cannot be disclosed. Deprived of his tongue, Friday is presented as "unhomed" from human speech.

The novel in its entirety circles around

Friday's tongueless mouth and for Susan and Foe the key to the story of Foe seems to be held and withheld by Friday's silence. Traditionally silence is perceived as a withdrawal or as a withholding of meaning, hence the desire to break that silence in order to recover its hidden significance. For Susan, Friday is nothing but the "hole in the narrative" she yearns to fill (121). The story she so desperately wants to tell keeps eluding her, "doggedly holds its silence" because of "the loss of Friday's tongue" (117). This gaping emptiness is interpreted as the sign of his slavery, his signature, but Susan imagines another lack, wondering "whether the lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation; whether by a dumb slave [she] was to understand a slave unmanned" (119). Friday is nothing but a thing that obstructs the telling of her story, and her desire to find a means to give "voice to Friday" (118) is "not that of bringing Friday to speech but that of speaking Friday's silences: the voice she wishes to give him is her own" (18), as Graham Huggan observes in "Philomena's Retold Story: Silence, Music, and the Post-Colonial Text." But apart from Susan's exasperation at what she perceives as Friday's withholding of his story, his silence has also been read as a manifestation of impotence, as the mark of the oppressed, just as freedom of speech signifies sovereignty. This interpretation of silence might explain why the novel is so 116

often placed within the discursive frame of postcoloniaUty. In Friday's case, this particular perspective would seem to be justified considering his status as a mutilated, tongueless, black slave, evoking and overlaid with images of another Friday. Friday's silence seems to prompt critics to read Foe in terms of a master/slave relationship. In "'Foe': The Story of Silence," for instance, Paul WiUiams understands Friday as "the archetypal slave" where slavery is seen as the cause of his silence (36). Yet the factual evidence in the novel about Friday's history prior to his arrival on the island is scant. Cruso's stories about Friday's origins are incompatible. One claims that Friday arrived with Cruso on his ship as "a mere child, a Uttle slaveboy"; the other, revealed in a feverish murmur, that Friday is a cannibal Cruso had "saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow-cannibals" (12). Neither version can explain Friday's lack of a tongue and Cruso, pressed by Susan's questions, speculates that "slavers cut out his tongue and sold him into slavery" (23). Susan reacts with the horrified question "[w]hy would they cut out a child's tongue?" (23). Cruso repUes that perhaps

the slavers, who are Moors, hold the tongue to be a delicacy ... [o]r perhaps they grew weary of Ustening to Friday's wails of grief, that went on day and night. Perhaps diey wanted to prevent him from ever teUing his story: who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken. Perhaps they cut out the tongue of every cannibal they took, as a punishment. How will we ever know the truth? (23, emphasis added)

Susan fails to hear that Cruso's explanation is quaUfied by a number of "perhapses" and ends with a question how wiU we ever know the truth? 117

She focuses on what makes sense to her and perceives Friday, much as Williams, as the ultimate victim, "[fjirst a slave and now a castaway too," and in addition "[r]obbed of his childhood and consigned to a life of silence" (23). In this respect Susan is a vivid example of how interpretation is dependent on the paradigm we inhabit; expectation rules our perception. Susan divides the world into masters and slaves, which leads her to interpret Friday's silence as a "helpless silence" and to construe Friday as "the chUd of this silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be bom that cannot be bom" (122). Yet at other times she reaUzes that her desire to "educate him out of darkness and silence" is supplanted by her need to "use words only as the shortest way to subject him to [her] will" (60). She incorporates at once the double role of benefactor-cum-oppressor, which is often overlooked by critics who choose to cast her in the role of benefactor.

This critical pre-

dilection to insert the novel into the specific JBrame of apartheid may be explained in part by Coetzee's South African background and Susan's straightforward reading of Friday as a slave in need of help. Robert Post's "The Noise of Freedom: J. M . Coetzee's Foe" interprets Foe as "an allegory of contemporary South Africa" (145) with Friday symboUzing the plight of the South African non-white majority, and where his "mutilated mouth is a major cause of his remaining a slave" (147). By the same token, Susan Barton is interpreted both as a representation of the "liberal white South African" (145) and an embodiment of "the poetic imagination of Coetzee ... calhng out for non-white South Africans to be permitted speech so that their plight will be heard and recognized throughout the world" (15253). Any such reading remains bUnd to Friday's othemess and fails to see that by choosing to interpret Friday along those lines, by accepting the other 118

characters' rendition of him, we are impUcated in their appropriation of hun. M y argument is that the complexity of Coetzee's novel casts doubt not only on resolutions of this kind but on the desire for and pretense of the possibihty of resolutions per se. Perhaps another way of putting this is to say, with John Fowles, that "[m]ystery, or unknowing is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy" {Aristos 21). I have so far looked at some instances and subsequent readings of tiie thematization of silence in Foe, focusing mainly on Friday's silence. Read through the concept of (in)betweenness, it is not his silence as such that is of interest, but the fact that it is a wordless silence, emphasized by the recognition that silence in Foe is significant, not of the absence of sound but rather the absence of words. The island itself is described as a "barren and silent place" (59), yet we are told that it is inhabited by apes and all kinds of birds filling the air with their incessant "chirruping" (7). Marooned on the island yet safe, Susan's first sentiment is not reUef but anguish, "who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind?" (8; emphasis added). Cruso may not be mute but Susjui describes him as "tight-lipped and sullen" (35), a man with "no stories to tell" (34) and "the morose silence which he impressed upon [their] hves would have driven [her] mad" (36). Indeed, at times the discrepancy between the scarcity of human voices and the intensity of non-human sounds is so unbearable that Susan fashions herself "a cap with flaps to tie over [her] ears ... to shut out the sound of the wind" (35). The reading that emerges questions and destabihzes the dichotomy between silence and language by introducing a third term into their midst, noise, demonstrating

at once die insufficiency of the binary pair

silence/speech to account for the phenomena of non-meaning sounds, giving 119

the he to Friday's silence.

For it is only from the (op)position of

silence/language, which holds that to have no words is to be silent, that Friday can be construed as "silent."

But Friday is capable of making

sounds; when he is asked by Cruso to sing for Susan, Friday begins "to hum in a low voice" (22), and echoing Cruso's "La-la-la" he voices a deep " H a ha-ha" (22).

I am not suggesting that Coetzee substitutes "noise" for

"language" in the binary pair, but that he hybridizes the binary construction, calling into doubt the truth-value of interpretation in general and the vaUdity of either/or explications in particular. For who is to say at which point "noise" turns into "language" and what presuppositions underUe the strategies used in the attempt to valorize and determine "meaning?" In the same vein, the self-same silence that is interpreted as a consequence of subordination can also be seen as a language of empowerment. Let me explain what I mean here by the language of empowerment by turning to the zero-images in the novel. Today, in Western culture, the numeral zero is hnked to an absence, to emptiness, and is as such seen as a symbol of nothingness. Brian Rotman describes the introduction of the metasign zero into Western consciousness sometime during the thirteenth century as a major signifying event, affecting changes in the codes of numbers, visual depiction and monetary exchange—and as such instrumental in bringing about the Renaissance. Discussing the shape of zero, Rotman notes that instead of

hteral mimesis, copying a space by a space, one can depict an absence through a signifier that contains a gap, a space, an absence in its shape. The most elemental solution, the urmark of absence, is any instance of an iconographic hole; any simple enclosure, ring, circle, ovoid, loop, and the like, which

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surrounds an absence and divides space into an inside and an outside. Thus, presumably, the universal recognition of 'o', ' O ' , '0' as symbols of zero. And thus a circle of associations hnking zero and 'nothing.' (59)

In Foe, these zero-images puncture the text, embroidering it with eloquent silences that fiinction as a running commentary on bodi what is said and what is left unsaid. This uncanny doubhng of text and silence invites a different reading, a hstening, a wilhngness to be open to the unexpected. The abundance of zero-images, images of an iconographic hole with an enclosure around an absence, can be visuahzed in the island itself. It is waUed in by oceans, inhabited by Friday and Cruso who hve in a hut void of fiimiture, described as "a circle of sticks" (54). Seen through Susan's eyes, the island appears to be lacking in every respect; it is "empty" both of the comforts and of the sentiments associated with home. Cruso and Friday labour building meaningless walls around barren and empty terraces that will never be planted stone walls enclosing emptiness, symbolizing the vacancy of the image of zero. This emblematic zero is a far cry from Robinson Crusoe's virginal island, waiting for man's labour to bring it to fruition. In Foe, Cruso and Friday are not building a civihzation and in "a year, in ten years, there will be nothing left standing but a circle of sticks to mark the place where the hut stood, and of the terraces only the walls" (54). Cruso's island is no garden of Eden either, despite Susan's description of her first encounter with Cruso "in the days when he stiU ruled over his island, and [she] became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday" in

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terms suggestive of Genesis (11).

Instead this "hortus conclusus"'^ is

perversely devoid of civihzation, the very image of an anti-garden guarding an empty nothingness. The island's sterility is oddly reminiscent of Coetzee's discussion of African nineteenth-century landscape writing where the "landscape remains ahen, impenetrable, until a language is found in which to win it, speak it, represent it" {White Writing 7). We could substitute "Friday" for "landscape" to acknowledge the difficulty of representing Friday's silence. Coetzee's observation points to the dkect link between language and power: in order to penetrate, to control, one must discover a means of representation. Language, the word, is our principal means of affirmation as weU as representation.

This imphes, by extension, that one cannot

appropriate what caimot be spoken, or, in Foe's words, untU "we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story" (141). The heart of the story is also the most persistent zero-image of all, Friday, "a man with a dazzling halo about him" (5), and with an empty, tongueless mouth and "vacant" gaze (69). This is Susan's description of Friday, and interestingly her first impression of him is not so much of the man, but of the halo surrounding him. This halo can be understood in a number of ways: it may refer to the distinguishing mark of a saint, an aura of majesty and glory, but it can also be seen as yet another of the many circular images in the text, invoking the shape of a zero. But where the halo could be seen as heightening the secrecy and force of the zero, Susan perceives only emptiness, an emptiness accentuated by Friday's name. Taken on its own, "Friday" is not so much a proper name as the appeafance of one. We

" I am here referring to the medieval notion of the hortus conclusus as the enclosed garden of civilization, as opposed to chaos and the unknown. For a fuller discussion of the concept of the hortus conclusus see John Fowles, TTie Tree 60-79.

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do not even know who named hun, since Foe offers httle by way of explanation,

hi the opening pages Friday is simply referred to as "die

Negro," and only after Susan's reminder that for "readers reared on travellers' tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands and shady trees" (7), conjuring up images of the best-known travellers' tale of all, the nameless Negro becomes Friday. Quite obviously, echoing the position of the reader famihar with Defoe'e tale, Susan ahgns Foe's Friday with Defoe's Friday. In the same manner, she does not question Friday's position in the novel he is the proverbial slave who is portrayed not as a man but as a thing, as "an animal wrapt entirely in itself (70), as an i s l ^ d in need of "a bridge of words" in order to reach the world of people (60). She seems to have forgotten her own arrival on the island and her indignation at Friday's and Cruso's initial reactions to hen Friday regarding her "as he would a seal or porpoise thrown up by the waves" (6) and Cruso viewing her "more as if [she] were a fish cast up by the waves than an unfortunate fellow-creature" (9). Yet from Susan's perspective, Friday is the one on the outside, not quite part of the world of people as she knows it. In The Tree, John Fowles points to the human arrogance that disanimates everything beyond our understanding and which to a great extent justified the slave trade: "If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal" (73).''*

"* It must be remembered that Fowles points here to the double motives characteristic of the colonial enterprise; on the one hand the need for raw materials, cheap labour and new en5)ires, on the other the conviction that the less advanced peoples are fated to be ruled by the more advanced civilization. Not only did the latter justify the former, it conveniently added a moral dimension to colonialism Within this fi^amework of thought it was in the best interest of the colonized, who were too ignorant to know their own good, to be subjected to a higher civilization and the benefits it promised in terms of education, religion, work, culture.

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Obsessed with the idea of uncovering Friday's secret, Susan attempts to teach him to write, but he thwarts her intentions by covering the slate with "eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes" (147). These walking eyes are, as AttweU recognizes, "Friday's trademark ... the footprint of Robinson Crusoe and every Robinsonnade" and interpreted as "tokens of [Friday's] position as the 'wholly Other'" (114). This othemess is emphasized by the fact that Friday's signature, walking eyes, contains the double image of a procession of "walking eyes/I's" - a multitude of observing, thinking subjects. We do not know what Friday's images may have looked like—we can only unagine them—^but they could be envisaged as zeros: zeros shghdy tilted to give the appearance of an eye, and they might be empty or fiUed in, or with a shape in the likeness of a pupil. What is interesting, then, in both cases, eyes/I's and zeros, is that Friday may be disputing Susan's (and our own) reading of him in terms of emptiness. Far from nuUifying himself, Friday's ambiguous images open up an unexpected vista invisible to Susan's eye. Firmly incarcerated in the Defoenian framework of imaginary voyages, the superiority of economic man and images of the noble savage who can be raised to a higher state of being if he is educated by benefactors from a more advanced culture, Susan can perceive only the most obvious of several possibihties:

"Is Friday learning to write?" asked Foe. "He is writing, after a fashion," I said. "He is writing the letter o." "It is a beginning," said Foe. 'Tomorrow you must teach him a." (152) 124

Neither Susan nor Foe doubt that what Friday is writing is the letter o; it does not strike them that instead Friday may be beginning at the very beginning, with the sign for zero, 0. Both characters are too much at home in the system of letters to reahze that Friday might be writing numerals instead of letters. Thus they read o when Friday might be writing 0, missing the point completely.'^ If he is writing a zero, Friday is referring to a system of knowledge that is both anterior to and different from their own. As we will see, by writing zero instead of producing the letters they expect, Friday may be estabUshing a link widi another past and another culture, once more gainsaying the interpretation of zero as a sign of emptiness. The ambiguity opened up by this reading would seem to be backed up by the history of the zero-image.

It appears that its shape as weU as its

impUcations were not always tied to conceptions of emptiness.

Brian

Rotman observes that the old Hindu numeral zero first reached Africa via Arab merchants before it was introduced into Europe (59). What he does not mention is that somehow along the way it underwent a crucial change in representation: from a dot (.), the original sign for zero, to an iconographic hole (0).'* Thus zero made its entry into Europe in a radicaUy altered shape, where the dot (.), suggestive of fuUness, is replaced by the zero (0), an emblematic figure of emptiness. " I have come across two other critical readings that acknowledge the possibility of Friday writing a zero. Paola Splendore hints at the possibility that Friday may be writing a zero, but only in the form of a (bracketed) question "(or is it a zero?)" (58) which she then rejects in favour of the interpretation of Friday as "another of Coetzee's totally harmless and mysterious characters... who simply by being there, by rejecting help fixim the outside, make the essence of their oppression stand out" (60). Richard Begam's "Silence and Mut(e)ilation: White Writing in J. M . Coetzee's Foe" claims that there is "a strong tendency to interpret these redundant O's as zeros" (123), but concludes that any such reading would construct Friday as a "narrative absence" (123). '* I am indebted to Fereshteh Zangenehpour for bringing this to my attention.

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With this in mind, zero becomes a potent marker of (in)betweenness: no longer confined to either a symbol of fullness or emptiness but possibly both. How, then, does this different understanding of zero affect the interpretation of Friday's figures? If he is writing a zero instead of the letter o, he is not only thwarting Susan and Foe's expectations but also evading their demands at conformity. What is more, he can no longer be interpreted as "empty," as lacking. Instead he is "fiiU" and "empty" at die same time: empty only in a world where Susan and Foe set the parameters for knowledge, their knowledge, but fuU of an other, different knowledge not accessible to a gaze which recognizes only what it already knows. Cast in a world which can perceive differences only as the other side of sameness, Friday is fated to be the "wholly Other" in every sense of the word. But die reading must not stop here. I have argued that the ambiguity of the passage does not allow for an either/or reading in terms of Friday writing either the letter O or the numeral 0. Seen as pictograms, letter and numeral are indistinguishable from one another—they look the same but carry different meanings. Yet this difference is not absolute; there are points of contact and convergences. Reading Derrida's Parages, Eve Tavor Bannet discusses the notion of au-dela which, for Derrida, signifies the step into a different medium, the beyond. Of interest here is the link between au-dela and its medium water (eau)" which opens a number of possibihes since water leads "to the sea (mer) and to the mother (mere), and to all manner of generative and merging and submerging Uquids and fluids" (62). The stress on the generative and merging quaUties is crucial to my

" Derrida arrives at water as medium based on its being an "infinite metaphor": "not only because by a happy chance eau-dela (waterfromthere) is almost literally a translation of the biblical word for heaven {sham-mayim) but also because, as one might expect from an infinite metaphor, it leads the step in an extraordinary number of directions" (62).

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discussion of the simultaneous similarity and difference of the letter o and die numeral 0.

To elaborate my point, let me return to Bannet reading

Derrida's reading of au-dela

and the water metaphor which "[b]y

assonance, au/eau becomes the O - the nothing from which everything comes and to which everything returns, the O of the WhoUy Other, that is nothing like what we know and the zero of self-effacement" (62). Here the letter and the numeral shift place almost imperceptibly, at once symbols of sameness and difference. So while it is vital to recognize that Friday's sign can be read either as the letter o or the numeral 0, it cannot be read in an eidier/or fashion without losing much of its potency. Reading his attempt at writing as "rows and rows of the letter o" as Susan and Foe do is one-sided in so far as it overlooks die possibihty diat he might be writing "rows and rows of the sign zero." It imphes that Susan and Foe only recognize what is obvious to them—^teaching Friday to write letters must mean diat what he is writing is a letter.

His "letters" also serve to allay Susan's fears that Friday might

wiUfuUy resist her, his eyes holding "a spark of mockery ... an African spark, dark to [her] Enghsh eye" (146), and to prove Foe right in his prophesy to Susan that Friday will eventually learn, that he "may yet be visited by die Muse" (147). On the odier hand, read as "rows and rows of the sign zero," Friday would be seen not only to thwart their desires, but also to lock himself into the position of resistance, keeping himself intact but also separate from any attempt at communication. He would be incarcerated into himself, a thing beyond all reach.

That this should be the case is belied by his earlier

attempts to communicate: he signals to Susan to follow him when she first arrived on the island, carries her on his back when she steps on a thorn, and in England he plays the flute with her. She recognizes this as a kind of 127

conversation, but is displeased since "there was a subtle discord all the time" (96) even though the notes seem to be the same. Susan is looking for similarity in everything; she equates communication with speaking the same language—her language. Friday's "language" is beyond her, and teaching and learning are one-way processes for her: she teaches and he learns. This makes it impossible for her to be sensitive to a different scenario than the one she has set the stage for. By contrast, read as both/and, Friday's figure signals the advent of the totally unexpected which opens the interpretation in unforeseen ways. Friday can now be seen as making a statement of his own: simultaneously and deviously bodi evading and fiilfilling Susan and Foe's (and die reader's) expectations while asserting his right to his othemess, Friday's zero-cumletter-0 invokes an other, different conception of its symbohsm. Friday signals that by faihng to listen, by closing their minds to his othemess, Susan and Foe and critics alike, while aiming at communication, contribute to his total appropriation. My reading of Friday as paradoxically both fiill and empty is corroborrated by Richard Begam, aldiough he arrives at this interpretation via a different route.'* In "Silence and Mut(e)ilation: White Writing in J. M . Coetzee's Foe," Begam estabhshes a hnk to Defoe's Friday when he equates Friday's " O " with worship of the great Benamuckee, the god of Friday's people. He refers to die scene where Cmsoe asks Friday " i f diis old Person had made all Things, why did not all Things worship him," to which Friday rephes: "All Things do say O to him" (Defoe 217). Begam argues that seen in the hght of the original Friday's answer, Friday's writing

'^Begam's article with his discussion of O was published in the winter of 1994, a couple of months after I had presented my reading of the zero-image in Foe in J. M. Coetzee (ed. Liliane Louvel).

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takes on a different connotation where "the O represents not an empty cipher but a divine circle" (124). Begam then brings the two interpretations of Friday's writing in terms of fullness or emptiness into play to show how "die terms of its signification are transposed, reversed, turned upside down" (124).'^ He concludes by acknowledging, as I do, the difference of Friday's speech, which cannot be appropriated for a Western or a non-Western framework of diought, but which inhabits "an undefined middle ground, a form of expression that, quite simply, resists classification" (127). Begam's reading is one of the few that do not cast Friday in the role of the victim. Maybe the dieme of appropriation is so obvious in Foe, so famihar, that we fail to react in any other way than to perceive Friday as an image of the ultimate victim. Observant to Susan and Foe and with the ageold images of master and slave relations in our heads, we cannot see beyond tiieir projections to perceive anytiiing breaking the pattern. Concentrating on Susan and Foe's attempts to make Friday speak, eager to discover the hidden story, it is easy to forget tiiat communication is a two-way process and that language is far from a transparent medium. Failing to hsten to Friday on his terms, the reader unwittingly re-enacts the total appropriation of the other that runs through Robinson Crusoe unquestioned and that Foe thematizes exphcidy. Coetzee's novel demonstrates how this inabihty to diink across and against famihar patterns (embodied in the characterization of Susan and Foe who lack the abihty to move beyond the pattern by listening to the other's silence instead of trying to erase it through appropriation) leads to an

" Begam's argument evolves around the ambiguity of the elliptical shape: it can be read both as numeral and as letter. While he refers to the "divine circle" as a metaphor of fiillness, it is the interaction between symbol of fullness and symbol of emptiness that allows him to point to Friday's writing as something new that "resists classification."

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impasse where all understanding breaks down. In Foe, Friday's "silence" is not die only all too obvious mark of Coetzee's play on the potential meaningfulness of silence. Another instance of a silence that troubles because it makes strange what appears to be familiar is exemphfied in die speUing of "Cruso" where the lack of an "e" can be read simply as a distinguishing mark fi-om the urtext's Crusoe. Yet the interesting aspect of this authorial "misspelhng" hes not so much in the omission of the letter "e" as in the fact that the difference is silent, it cannot be heard in the pronunciation of the name—Crusoe/Cruso sound the same. The deviant speUing exists only visually as a missing letter on the page; a silence that cannot be heard, only be written or read, but which makes all the difference. Again, the echoes of Derridean dijferance, a term and concept whose potency derives from a "silent lapse in spelhng," reverberate strongly {Margins of Philosophy 3). Derrida points out that the "graphic difference (a instead of e)" (3) diat distinguishes differance from difference, alters the meaning(s) of the term in a number of ways:

First, differance refers to die (active and passive) movement that consists in deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving ... Second, the movement of differance, as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all oppositional concepts that mark our language, such as, to take onlya few examples, sensible/intelhgent, intuition/signification, nature/culture, etc ... Third, differance is also the production, if it can stiU be put this way, of these differences, of the diacriticity that the linguistics generated by Saussure, and aU the structural sciences modeled upon it, have recaUed is the

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condition for any signification and any structure ... From this point of view, the concept of differance is neither simply structuralist, nor sunply geneticist, such an alternative itself being an "effect" of differance. (Positions 8-9)

In Margins of Philosophy, Derrida elaborates on the problematics inherent in the construction of the sensible/inteUigible opposition, "one of the foundmg oppositions of philosophy" (5), which is subverted by the "movement of differance ... a differance which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, and which is located ... between speech and writing" (5).

Of interest to my argument is that, in both cases—

Crusoe/Cruso and difference/differance—the alteration in spelling "remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard" (3). More to the point, however, Derrida's "mute mark" is doubly mute in the case of Cruso; Coetzee's spelling of "Cruso" extends Derrida's concept by replacing the "e" in "Crusoe" not with anodier letter but with the absence of a letter: the paradox of a graphic silence. This graphic silence can be unagined in terms of a zero—CnisoO—which intensifies the play of the Derridean term.

This different speUing emphasizes the affinity between

CrusoO and Friday in Foe, which posits diem in complete contrast to their namesakes in Defoe's novel. In addition, where the concept of differance focuses the reader's attention on the relational aspect of meaning, permanendy deferred and always subject to and generated by its difference from other meanings, Coetzee's CrusoO entices the reader to extend this insight to another system of signification. On the one hand, the zero in CrusoO strengthens the hnk with the Derridean concept—the letter "a" needed to differentiate between 131

diiiirtncddijferance

is the first letter of the alphabet, just as zero precedes

all other numerals. Bodi die letter "a" and the numeral "zero" share the initial position in their respective system of signification and as such possess the power to act as effigies of beginnings. On the other hand, CrusoO's zero does not belong to the system of letters but represents a different semiotic order, dius focusing our attention on the irreducible element of odiemess inherent in the concept of differance. As Derrida elaborates in a footnote, "differance is not a process of propriation in any sense whatever;" differance "is neither position (appropriation) nor negation (expropriation), but rather other" (Margins 26, fin 26). othemess

contained in CmsoO's mute zero has

This

several important

imphcations. First, it hnks CmsoO to images of tombs in Coetzee's novel. In one of her monologues addressed to Friday, Susan refers to CmsoO's terraces as tombs:

The fartiier I journey from his terraces, the less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more hke tombs: those tombs the emperors of Egypt erected for diemselves in the desert, in the building of which so many slaves lost their lives. (83^)

An expression of her fmstration at the apparent futihty of Friday's and Cmso's labour, Susan's simile also strengthens the hnk between CmsoO and die personification of die mute zero in die text, Friday. Botii are "other" and not proper^" to Coetzee's (and, for tiiat matter, Defoe's) text. Consdned in

^° "Proper" is here used in the Derridean sense of le propre, invoking all senses of the word: proper, property, propriety. For a fuller discussion, see translator's footnote in Margins of Philosophy, 4, fh 1.

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terms of a Hegelian master/slave dialectic, their relationship makes no sense and there are no clues to solve "the mystery of [Friday's] submission" (85). Without visible gain, doggedly, both men labour side by side building stone terraces for no apparent reason. In this context, questions of who is the master? and who is the slave? become meaningless. CrusoO and Friday function on a level moving between paradigms, offering an abundance of interpretations, inviting the reader to pay heed to die mark of dieir othemess, and thus open up new and unexpected modes of signification where the sign zero signals both completeness and emptiness. In the final analysis, neither CmsoO nor Friday can be fuUy appropriated—completely understood— although both appear to be victims to obvious appropriation. In the case of Foe's CmsoO, his laborious building of stone walls that encircle an "empty" hut, invoking images of nothingness, remains meaningless to Susan and reader alike, reminiscent of the secrecy and silence of the tomb. But unlike Derrida's tomb,^' carrying an inscription in stone, CmsoO's stones remain blank, empty, enigmatic. Susan's question whether CmsoO does not wish for "a memorial to be left behind, so that the next voyagers to make landfall [on the island], whoever they may be, may read and leam about us" (17), draws the enigmatic reply from CmsoO that it is enough for him to leave his "terraces and waUs" (18) behind. Neady sidestepping Susan's demand for some kind of written memorial, CmsoO continues to build his own version of a monument where the blank stone walls are his signature inscribed on the island. As concems Friday, the (hi)story that began with Susan's account of her arrival on CmsoO's island, a monologue addressed to a silent, unidentified reader who seems as elusive as Susan's story itself, is saturated with ^' Derrida compares the "a" of diffdrance to a tomb: "it remwns sitent, seerel and discreet as a tomb: oikesis" (Margins 4).

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Friday's silences which add up to an impressive display of potency. From the beginning it is not Susan's command of language that initiates the telhng of the story, but the enigma of silence and die desire to attain it. Susan describes how she "would hold [her] breadi and dip [her] head under the water merely to know what it was to have silence" (15).

Yet far from

appropriating that silence for her own use, it is Friday who slowly takes her over:

" M r Foe," I proceeded, speaking with gathering difficulty, "when I Uved in your house I would sometimes he awake upstairs Ustening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a weUing of black smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling in my bed. M y lungs, my heart, my head were fuU of black smoke." (118)

Subjected to the smoke of Friday's silences and the elusiveness of her own words, Susan begins to doubt the authority of language, questioning why and to whom she speaks "when there is no need to speak" (133).

This

scepticism leaves her a helpless witness to her own self-doubt, a person no longer in control, demanding to know "[w]ho is speaking me" (133). More than a question, Susan's "who is speaking me" is an admission of her faUure to make sense of Friday, to "make Friday's silence speak" (142). But it is not only Susan who is enveloped by Friday's silences; with the writing of Friday's "o" Foe's voice disappears altogedier.

Foe, bearing

traces of Daniel Defoe, audior, and identical widi the tide of die novel, agrees with Susan's (niis)reading of Friday but contradicts her conventional 134

belief that "[l]etters are the mkror of words" with the poststructuralist insight that "[w]riting is not doomed to be die shadow of speech" (142). It is a measure of Coetzee's sleight of hand that he here neady assigns the role of postmodern speaker to the "fadier of realism" (De)Foe while he turns a conspicuously metafictional character like Susan Barton into a proponent of reahsm. But botii Foe and Susan, author and audior-m-spe, appear to be voices from the past when they lose their narrative voice to a nameless narrator the instant the narration switches to the present tense.

This unidentified

narratorial "I/eye" discovers the bodies of what appears to be Foe, Susan, and Friday in an unidentified house.

Showing htde interest in the two

former, the narrator approaches Friday, who, teeth clenched, is still alive but with a pulse "faint, as if his heart beat m a far-off place" (154). Turning him over, the sound of his body is "faint and dry, like leaves faihng over leaves" and hstening to Friday's breadiing, the narrator hears "die faintest faraway roar ... the roar of waves in a seashell... the whine of the wind and the cry of a bird" (154). The narrator leans close, listening for "the caU of a voice," but, like Susan and Foe, aU he can hear is "noise" because ft-om Friday's mouth "issue the sounds of the island" (154). Friday's island-sounds result in a break in the narrative hne; when it is resumed we encounter the first-person narrator outside a house identified as Daniel Defoe's by a blue-and-white commemorative plaque.

The same

personages occupy its space, but the narrator heads straight for the dispatch box containing Susan's yellowed letter reading "Dear M r Foe, At last I ould row no fiirther" (155), and from here on die narratorial voices of Susan and die new narrator merge into a nightmarish scenario where their desire to "make Friday speak" takes them to "the home of Friday," a place beyond words, "where bodies are their own signs" (157).

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Coetzee's compelling narrative illustrates how the very symbol of subjection, Friday's tongueless silence, can be seen as a means to resist and undermine that subjection by usurping the story, gaining in potency until it finally overwhelms die narration:

From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up dirough his body and out upon me; it passes dirough the cabin, through the wreck; washing the chffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to die ends of the earth.

Soft and cold, dark and unending, it

beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (157)

Interestingly, diis passage conjures up a sensation of deja vu connected with definitions of freedom uttered by Susan and Foe earlier in the text. Freedom, for Susan, is "a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth" (100-101). Foe defines freedom as nothing but a "puff of air" (149). He counters her claim that she knows what Friday desires, "to be hberated" (148), by argumg that she confuses her own desires with those of Friday, because words hke "freedom" are "words without a home" (149). Thus Foe's closing tines, this mysterious flow emanating from Friday's moudi, engulfing all, can be read as a declaration of freedom that brings the story fiill circle by taking the reader back to the beginning, sensitized to the double entendre of silence. For Susan, however, there is no "back to the beginning." Having experienced the difference of the island it becomes impossible for Susan to feel fiilly at home on her return to England. After her exposure to Cruso's island Susan, like the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, feels 136

unhomed from her former modes of dunking. Susan is troubled by the difference between Crusoe and Cruso, the Friday in possession of (or is it possessed by?) die language of the master and the mutilated and forever mute Friday. She feels less at home in her role as Friday's benefactor, asking herself whether Friday was not, after all, "die helpless captive of [her] desire to have [their] story told" (150). In Coetzee's text difference is at work everywhere. Playing on the "desert island" conventions famihar to the reader. Foe unhomes our reading by making us observant to the differences at work in the text. The primary force of this unhoming, as I have tried to show, is Coetzee's exploration of silence. In a sunilar vein as Derrida's dijferance, Coetzee's sfrategy of silence draws attention to as weU as questions the unspoken cultural assumptions that govern our perceptions of die world.

Conventional

divisions into home or exile break down in a novel where die divergent understandings cannot be reconciled: die place that signifies exile to Susan is shown to be home to Cruso who, on the trip back to England, dies "of woe, the extremest woe."

But more than anything it is Friday's mysterious

silence, hnking to the notion of Derrida's dijferance and to the mute misspelling of Cruso, diat unhomes our reading experience. Fmally let me stress most emphatically that Foe cannot be reduced to simply another master-slave story where the silenced black slave helplessly awaits his rescue from well-meaning white benefactors. If it were, it would perpetuate the very cycle of tyranny and subjugation it seeks to expose. By the same token, Coetzee's text does not simply identify the enemy, as Derek Wright claims, in "the imperial text through which the white author shuts the racial and cultural othemess of colonized peoples into closed European myth systems and codes of interpretation" (118). Rather Foe looks for the "foe" in our own tacit comphcity in practices of exploitation. A case in point here

137

is the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, who eventually has to admit to his own complicity with the methods of Empire that he despises. While it is a commonplace today to recognize die "enemy" in the imperial text, Coetzee's novels constitute a testing ground for new modes of thinking. Resisting polarized models of interpretation, his texts propose a more complex view in their suggestion of the numerous ways in which a strong positionality, determining who is the master and who the slave, runs the risk of covertly perpetuating a system that is overtly rejected. Like Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe demonstrates a blurring of die inside/outside - us/them - home/exile dichotomies. In both novels Coetzee refrains from providing his readers with a single, authoritative perspective by inserting characters that inhabit and cross between different paradigms mto one (con)text

uncommented on, unacknowledged but woven into the

narrative. But, as I have argued throughout, it would be hasty to assume that Coetzee's strategy is indicative of a shirking of responsibihty. His refiisal to identify die "correct" response tied to inhabiting the "right" position is not political quietism. Rather it draws attention to how a fixed positionality is partly incriminated in the expropriation and/or appropriation of everything that does not pertain to that position. By bringing different positions, with all dieir particular insights and bhndnesses, into contact and conflict within the space of one novel, Coetzee points to the necessity to abandon famihar and safe positions in favour of a more mobile approach. In the next chapter I wiU continue to discuss notions of home as conceptualized from the space of (in)betweenness which, as will be apparent, is taken further in Malouf s writing than in that of either Erdrich or Coetzee.

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Chapter Three Unhomely Lives and Homefulness in MalouPs An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon

We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Edward Said'

Like Erdrich and Coetzee, David Malouf can be understood as someone who writes about the problematics of marginahty in such a way as to make us question the traditional connotations of the term and related concepts.^ His texts can be situated within the larger frameworks of postmodernism and postcoloniahsm which, as I argue in the introduction, can be seen to overlap

'Edward Said, 'TheMindof Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile" (54). The title is taken from Wallace Stevens' poem 'The Snow Man" and Said uses Stevens' image of "mind of winter" to invoke the unsettled and unsettling experience of life in exile. ^ To date, Malouf has published nine novels, three collections of poetry, a number of critical articles and written a play. While he is recognized as one of the most promising writers in Australia, there has been surprisingly little critical interest in his work, especially in Europe. But there are indications that he is coming to the attention of a larger audience and recently a full-length study of his oeuvre was published in Sweden. See Karin Hansson, Sheer Edge: Aspects of Identity in David Malouf s Writing.

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in the sense that they both are concerned with die dismanthng of centre/margin binarisms. Let me say too that the relationship between the postmodern and the postcolonial project is an uneasy one, one where the issue of politics and agency seems to constitute the principal divide. David Malouf s novels An Imaginary Life (1978) and Remembering Babylon (1993) can be seen to reside, if somewhat uneasily, in that divide as creative texts which stage die famihar theoretical centre/margin debate in a fictional form. So while my reading of An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon focuses on constructions of home and homelessness and tries to tease out all the different and conflicting interpretations of the concepts as activated in Malouf s novels, the questioning of borders remains an inherent part of my investigation.

I wiU examine the ways in which Malouf s texts involve

famihar notions of home and its opposites, homelessness and exile, and investigate how the clashing of different understandings works towards the destabihzation of these concepts. As I wiU show, notions of home are hnked to memory in the two novels I discuss. This connection between home and memory is particularly conspicuous in Remembering Babylon, which is the text I focus on in this chapter, but, as we wiU see, this link is also present in An Imaginary Life. Subsequently my references to An Imaginary Life seek to elaborate on the issues discussed in Remembering Babylon and to point to certain convergences, as well as to shifts of perspectives, between the two novels. Finally I wiU point to ways in which Malouf s texts can be seen to participate in the postmodem-versus-postcolonial debate by comphcating theoretical distinctions concerning the issue of politics and human agency. In Remembering Babylon, all perceptions of home are negotiated through stories and seem to be inextricably interwoven with memory, where memory 140

constitutes a doubled ground of potential hindrance or incentive for new perceptions of home. I want to explore the impUcations of the connection between (re)constructions of home dirough memory, treading the borderline of past and present, to see how it influences individuals in their capacity to deal with difference. Before I tum to my reading of Rembering Babylon, a short synopsis of the story might be in order. The fictional Gemmy is a boy who is stranded along the Austrahan shores and Uves with a group of Aboriginals for sixteen years, and who appears, mysteriously, on the outskirts of a white settlement. At first the settiers treat him as a diversion and try to piece togetiier his history from the scraps of his memory. He becomes friendly with the boy Lachlan and the minister M r Frazer and is taken in by the Mclvor family, but when two Aboriginals show up in the vicinity the community's suppressed suspicions surface. Some of the viUagers interpret him as a threat to their safety and their harassment of Gemmy includes the Mclvor family who find themselves estranged from their neighbours.

What foUows is pardy an

attempt to reconstmct Gemmy's mysterious past and pardy an exposition of the settiers' krational fears projected onto a man who seems to be neither black nor white. Put simply, the novel dramatizes Gemmy's position on the margins of two cultures and their troubled response to his difference, and while die main storyhne focuses on his life at the settlement, it is intermpted by firame narratives which attempt to recover his earher history. Gemmy's story is entkely fictional but Malouf informs his readers in an afterword that the story is inspired by the words spoken by a Gemmy Morril or Morrell in Queensland, Australia, more than a century before. Remembering Babylon opens on what appears to be an almost pastoral scene: three children playing on the outskirts of a midnineteenth-century setdement m Queensland. But from the very beginning there are several 141

indications that the familiarity of the scene is deceptive.

The narrator

announces that the children see "something extraordinary" (1), and diat dieugame of make-believe consists of "a forest in Russia" where they are "hunters on the track of wolves" (1). What follows reveals tiiat diis makebelief world is taken from a school book—its Russian envfronment is completely unknown to the children who "had no experience of snow" (1). In the scene leading up to the encounter with the "exfraordinary" announced in the opening paragraph, what the children see coming at them out of the no-man's-land dirough the glare of die heat is somediing "more like a watery, heat-struck mirage dian a diing of substance" (2). Theu: first impulse is that it must be a black man, but the boy Lachlan can make out only a "thing" that "was not even, maybe, human" (2). Rather its looks

suggested a wounded waterbfrd, a brolga, or a human that in the manner of the tales they told one another, all spells and curses, had been changed into a bird, but only halfway, and now, neither one thing nor the other, was hopping and flapping towards them out of a world over there, beyond the no-man's-land of the swamp, tiiat was the abode of everything savage and fearsome, and since it lay so far beyond experience, not just their own but their parents' too, of nightmare rumours, superstitions and all that belonged to Absolute Dark. (2-3)

The famiUarity of the pastoral opening takes on a sinister dimension once we leam that the farm is situated on the border of a ti-tree swamp, "the land over there that was forbidden to [the children]" (2). This land "beyond" is described as die origin of expected danger, "die abode of everything savage 142

and fearful". So already a few pages into the novel, the division into inside and outside, famihar territory and the unknown, safety and danger seems to be clearly estabhshed.

The setflers envisage danger as something that

comes from the outside, and the border fence is the line of demarcation between their world and the potential tiireat of the beyond. It is less certain what form this danger may take. Who or what is it, precisely, that threatens to invade their territory? In the absence of a clear image of the "menace" the settiers channel their fears into expressed expectations of being "raided by blacks" (2), but the deeper horror springs from their apprehension of the unknown, "so far beyond their experience" it is conceivable only as the "Absolute Dark." Thus it is the very uncertainty underlying their elders' fears which shapes die children's perception in the moments before their actual encounter with the unidentified creature.

Intangible superstitions surface die minute the

children realize that it is not a raid, and whatever it is coming towards them now takes the form of a "mirage," a diing of wonder that cannot be. Halfhuman, half-bu-d, "neidier one diing nor die other," it seems to be die personification of "nightmare rumours," an object of horror. In the actual confrontation scene, this object of horror leaps "onto die top rail of the fence," hanging there suspended between their world and the unknown widi "its arms outflung as if preparing for fhght" (3). For a split second everything is stiU in the balance with the outcome undecided; the "thing" on the fence is not quite a fugitive, not yet an intruder but something inbetween. It might stiU decide to tum and mn, or it might come down on their side of the border. At this precise moment the narrative is mptured by a startling tum of events: the creature cries at them not to shoot: "I am a B b-british object!" (3). Let me pause here to reconsider what has happened in the story so far. 143

Three children are playing in die paddock on dieir farm when die narrator announces diat they are about to see "somediing extraordinary." In the paragraphs leading up to the event, the community's fears and expectations enter the narrative in die shape of die children's interpretation of the mtirider initially as a raid by blacks and then as something not human, an object of horror. When tiiey finally come face to face widi diis somediing reminiscent of "a scarecrow diat had somehow caught die spark of Ufe" (3), aU diek expectations are shattered; what they see is neidier a black intruder nor a ghosdy apparition out of some nightmare.

It is a man, a white man,

addressing diem in tiieir own language, his words uncannily echoing thek own objectification of him, "I am a B-b-british object." Widi these surprising words, signifying what might be termed Gemmy's "leap into discourse,"^ the "exdraordinary" has happened and, as I suggested earlier, this results in a break in the storyhne, emphasized by a blank space in the text separating die tale so far from what is stiU to come. But what is it, exactiy, that is so exceptional? Is it the surprise encounter between the children and an unknown man? Or die circumstances under which it takes place?

Or rather the unexpectedness of the words spoken and then:

comphcity with the children's (mis)conceptions? Clearly it is a combination of the events outUned above, leading up to the unexpected selfobjectification of Gemmy which constitutes the extraordinary moment announced on the first page. But I would like to argue that the "extraordinary" portrayed in the narrative events is reinforced by the mode of narration. Though the story is told in the third person by an impersonal narrator, the perspectives vary.

' See Bill Ashcroft, 'The Return of the Native: An Imaginary Ufe and Remembering Babylon" 51. Ashcroft, reading from a postcolonial perspective, interprets Gemmy's "leap into discourse" as an illustration of how the "possibilities of the [Lacanian] 'Imaginary' might be possibilities for postcolonial society" (51).

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The focus changes, and it seems as if the narrative voice is weaving in and out between the narrator's and the children's point of view until the boundaries between the two are blurred. This transient shift m focahzation paraUels and adds to the uncertainty created here by the development of events, where it is not clear what it is the children see. The same uncertainty works to destabilize apparent dichotomies by calling presumably clear-cut divisions into question. I have argued above that the viUagers interpret the world by a simple either/or logic as "our viUage" and "their territory" where danger is located in the beyond, synonymous with the "Absolute Dark." But this beUef is troubled by die uneasy awareness diat apart from being "isolated, at the end of the hne" (5), their viUage is buUt on land that only a few years ago had been "on the other side of things, part of the unknown" (9). In a place where "the very ground under their feet was strange" (9) they feel threatened by natives who are "forever encroaching on boundaries that could be insisted on by dayUght" as a border "empowered widi aU the audiority of die Law," but they are aware diat at night it "reverted to being a creek-bed or ridge of granite like any other" (9). Despite then: efforts to rid the land of "every vestige of the native" (10), to make it "just a bit Uke home" (10), tiie land itself is unfamiUar and may resist thek attempts to demystify it. The sense of being "submerged, of being hidden away in the deptiis of the country, but also lost" (9) is not easy to shake. Here die terrain of home is inextricably bound up with strangeness and underneath all their homemaking efforts, coloured by memories of another home, hes the recognition that they are "in a place where there were no sureties of any kind" (78). In diis frame of mind, stiU attempting to transform what is too close to the unknown into a semblance of home, the settiers are confronted widi Gemmy, "the black white man" (10), who, unwittingly, embodies both die 145

personification and the focus of their half-acknowledged fears. On the one hand, Gemmy serves as a reminder that while the viUage may be their home, they are not at home in it; on the other, Gemmy raises the spectre of what the unknown country might do to them. For the time being, I wiU take a closer look at die impUcations "home" holds for the setders, to return later in more detaU to the spectre Gemmy's presence conjures up. How is it possible to be home but not at home! What are the implications of having a home without feehng at homel The term "home" carries all sorts of connotations of intimacy and security: one's family, one's house, one's birthplace, one's native land.

Our language

abounds in well-known metaphors iUustrating the centraUty of home: "home, sweet home," "my home is my castie," "home is where the heart is," to cite but a few. From earUest childhood, we are surrounded by images of home as a haven of safety and a place of privacy; a place where it is possible to wididraw from die demands of the world into an inner circle of warmth and belonging. In Remembering Babylon, the settiers, most of them British immigrants, subscribe to this sentimental conception of home which continuously clashes with their daily experience of living in a foreign environment. While they do not form a homogenous group, they are hnked by a desire for a better fiiture. The envisaged future holds the promise of a new start, overlaid with idealized memories of their former homes, and the wish to recreate them in a larger, sunlit country. The Mclvor family, who originaUy came from Scodand m search of a new beginning, is a good example of die powerful influence that memory exerts on the interpretations of tiieir present situation. Their children, who have never seen Scotiand, grow up with images of "the superiority of "hame"" (56). For Janet, die oldest daughter, "Scotiand, home, was sacred"

146

(55, emphasis added) but at times she is overwhehned by the power it wields over her, puzzled by the fact that Scodand "belonged so much more sdrongly to all the highest emotions in her dian die place she was in" (55). Memories of the old home are transferred from the parents to the children, and the extent to which "home" is located in the past and equated with a particular country is striking. The concept of home is no longer simply associated with a feeling of security, a place of belonging, limited to the immediate family, but suddenly takes on a "national" character; "Scotiand" and "home" are used as if they were synonymous terms. The conflation of home widi Scotiand is reinforced by the difference of the new envuronment, where die land and its chmate seem to be hostile to dieir efforts at cultivation and diey have to "leam all over again how to deal with weadier" (9). The unhospitable chmate and "the fearful loneliness of the place" (110) chip away at the villagers' sense of identity.

EUen

Mclvor's troubled awareness of the lack of continuity is symptomatic as she reahzes just how much her self-unage depends on "die presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of dieu- passing and spaces stiU warm with breadi" (110). Worst of all is diat, stuck between uncharted regions, diey are aware of being surrounded by natives, "tribes of wandering myaUs who, in their traipsing this way and diat all over the map" (9) show httie regard for boundaries designed to keep them out. The chasm between images of home as a famihar place and the reality of hving in unmapped territory is aU the more unsettling since more than physical boundaries are caUed into question. Experiencing the new place through the grid of their own culture, faced with the country's othemess and disturbed by thek sense of not belongmg, of being lost, they react by trying to constmct a likeness of home through the eradication of all that differs from it. 147

Until that is accomplished, the

settlement is home but in name, lacking all the quahties they associate with the term. There is no feehng of belonging to a land which "had never been ploughed" and where each "unidentifiable sound" reminds them tiiat it was "an event in the land's history, no part of [theirs]" (9). We could say, then, that die settlement inhabits a position between conventional categories of home and exile, where exile denotes a state of mind, a kind of nostalgia bom fi:om the awareness of being cut off from everything familiar (see chapter one). This (in)between position is fraversed with conflicting notions of being simultaneously in the centre, with the village as representative of civilized hfe, and on the margins, with the viUage as civiUzation's last outpost in an alien envuronment. Thus the viUage's situation on the border of the known world and the threatening beyond could serve as a metaphor for the settler's disturbing sense of physical and emotional dislocation, of being home without being at home. The setdement's osciUation between its fiinctions as sanctuary and prison further destabilizes the meanings of home. It represents a safe place insofar as the viUagers feel comparatively secure within its borders, but also a place where the same borders that keep intmders out double as prison waUs keeping the inhabitants inside. It is important here to remember that these borders are not primarily physical ones, but that they exist mairdy in die settlers' minds where this imagined boundary is "empowered with aU the authority of the Law" (9). At the same time the viUagers know that aU "the white man's audiority" (9) might count for httie in the unknown regions beyond and that what safety there is to be had is connected to the confines of their setdement. Here I would like to broaden the perspective by turning to discussions of the concepts of home and homelessness and tiieir unphcations m theoretical discourse. I prefaced my discussion of Malouf s texts witii a quotation from 148

Edward Said's "The Mind of Winter," the text I refer to in chapter one. Let me just repeat here that in this essay Said both questions the traditional connotations of home and exile, and reverses the hierarchical order by privileging exile over home. Like Said, Bhabha aims to destabihze binary divisions, but unhke Said, he does so by introducing a third term. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha captures the profusion of conflicting emotions pertaining to articulations of home in what he terms "unhomehness"'* (9). Taking the oppositional construction of home/homelessness

as his point of departure,

Bhabha

comphcates the picture with an unexpected move: instead of attempting to reverse the internal order, he questions their relationship by positing the concept of "unhomeliness" in their midst.

He is adamant tiiat to "be

unhomed is not to be homeless" (9); rather the "unhomely" marks the elusive sense of displacement brought about by an unsetthng difference within the home itself where "home" is experienced as another world. This shiftiness of the notion of "home" as something which is inevitably brought to bear on (and thus is always involved in) the experience of our daily hves and influences our perceptions of the world, permeates the writings of Homi Bhabha. Shunning the loaded word "exile" as the obvious counterpart to "home," Bhabha rejects any notions of stabihty and permanence. Instead he points to the mobihty widiin and between categories by arguing that "unhomehness" is "the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and die world" (9).

* Bhabha's use of the term "unhomely" is indebted to Freud's 'The Uncanny," in which Freud sets out to trace the apparent opposition between "unheimlich" (uncanny) and "heimlich" (homely, native). Important to my discussion of unhomeliness in the following is Freud's recognition that "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" (220).

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If "unhomeliness" cannot be read as "homeless," how should we then understand it? Bhabha locates it "in fictions tiiat negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites" (9), and these sites are not exclusive to the postcolonial experience. "Unhomeliness" is at work not only in the destabihzation of home/homelessness, but also dramatizes what Bhabha calls the "paradoxical boundary" (10) between die private and die pubhc. The "unhomely" moment marks a space of displacement where the borders separating seemingly oppositional categories become confused, and where boundaries may serve as bridges or, to use Bhabha's words, where "the personal-w-the-pohtical; the worid-m-the-home" (11).^ Bhabha's discussion of "unhomeliness" takes place against die background of world and nation, world and self, public and private. Bhabha's examples of "unhomely" moments in hterature are taken from a wide range of texts. He quotes from Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story, Auden's poem "The Cave of Making" and Springam's Goethe's Literary Essays. His point is to question the reading of "world literature" as mainly concerned with "the dransmission of national traditions" (12), to suggest another reading that focuses on "border and frontier conditions" (12) as the concern of world hterature.* In other words,

' A concrete example of the difiTiculty of drawing a line between the personal-a&political that comes to mind is the fatwa that Salman Rushdie's publication of The Satanic Verses gave rise to. At a public speech delivered in connection with the publication of the Swedish translation of The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie stated that he considered The Satanic Verses to be his most personal and least public book which, nevertheless, resulted in the/aftMfl.

' In this context, CMord's observation in "Notes on Travel and Theory" that it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that "every center or home is someone else's periphery or diaspora" (179) points to a certain "unhomeliness" concerning theory itself.

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a literature where the difference without is not a threat to national identity but now seen as a catalyst to the recognition of the difference within. How do Said's and Bhabha's contemplations on the issue of home relate to the settiers' understanding of the concept outiined in Remembering Babylon! In what ways can these three accounts be seen to contribute to the larger centre/margin debate? In answer to the first question it would seem that the settlers' understanding of home (which should not be confused with diat of Malouf or the novel) moves firmly widiin the centre/margin binarism, whereas Said and Bhabha cannot be easily accommodated widiin die dichotomy. The settiers' world-image rests on the distinction made up of the oppositional pair of old home (Europe) and new home (Australia). In die process of homemaking, widi memories of what constitutes home brought to bear on their present situations, they yearn for an analogy of their old homes transplanted into a new envuronment. Memory plays a major part here in the reconstruction of home: the new home in Queensland is experienced in stark contrast to the remembered home in Europe. But these memories are never questioned, the colhsion between remembered and present experience of home does not involve an act of learning on the immigrants' part. They perceive the world blinkered through memories of "home," and every divergence from this is interpreted as a threat. In consequence, their only way of deahng with difference consists of the resolution to eradicate all dissimilarity.

We might say that while the setflers cross geographical

boundaries, this crossing does not include the negotiation of inner borders, and that this refiisal to leam precludes any chance of perceiving the new country as home on its own terms. Here it is well to bear in mind that while die settlers' position differs dramatically firom both Said's and Bhabha's perspective, the novel as a 151

whole does not. Malouf clashes the settlers' world view with Gemmy's (hi)story, and in the course of the conflict a more ambiguous picture emerges which shares certain points of contact with the thinking of Said and Bhabha. On the one hand, the setders represent what Said describes as some of the less appealing tendencies of exiles to display "an exaggerated sense of group solidarity as well as a passionate hostihty toward outsiders, even those who may in fact be in the same predicament" (51). They may not be exiles in the political sense, but are nevertheless subject to the loss of "their roots, their land, their past" (51). On the other hand, the settlers' condition fiilfills Bhabha's criteria of unhomehness since their "home turns into another world" (10). Increasingly the setders-as—exiles experience their existence as unheimlich, albeit not so much in the Freudian sense of "everything that ought to have remained ... secret and hidden but has come to hght" (10)' that Bhabha associates with it, but in terms of a more direct translation as "uncanny."

ParadoxicaUy, in the novel this ghosthness is due to "the

absence of ghosts" (110), the feeling of absolute loneliness in the face of the knowledge that "no other hves had been Uved here" (110). As we wiU see, it is the unheimlich aspect of unhomehness, the uncanniness of othemess within home, which figures in—and reconfigures—^notions of home in Malouf s text. In Remembering Babylon the unsetthng difference within the home is inscribed predominantiy in the figure of Gemmy.

To some, Gemmy is

potentially "in league with the blacks" and possibly an "infiltrator" or "spy"

' Bhabha refers to Freud here, but the actual quote, "'Unheimlich' is the name for everything that ought to have remained... secret and hidden but has come to light' (224, emphasis in original), is Schelling's. Freud explicates it further by consulting the entry on "heimlich" in Grimm's dictionary: "4. From the idea of the 'homelike', 'belonging to the house', the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from th eyes of strangers, something concealed secret' (225, emphasis in original).

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(38) ; to others, he is a "parody of a white man ... [an] mutation gone wrong" (39) . The former, ahgning him with the blacks, ask him casually "whether die tribes ... were in the habit of gathering at any one particular spot, and in what numbers" (63), in an attempt to gain some useful information about the enemy in order to engage "in what diey hoped would be an easy war" (63). The latter, more concerned about Gemmy himself than any information he might (with)hold, toil over the feasibihty of reverting him "to being a white man" (39). So while the community is divided in its interpretation of Gemmy the man, his past invokes the same sense of dread in aU of them. He had hved with a black ttibe and shared "aU the abominations tiiey went in for" (39). The villagers do not specify what these "abominations" might have consisted of, "unwilhng to let the shadow of it pass dieir hps and become a fact in tiieir world" (39), but the unage hidden behind the unspoken words may be that of cannibahsm. I suggested earher that Gemmy's presence in the community serves as a catalyst for unearthing shadowy and elusive fears of what hving in a strange country might do to the people. With the spectre of "cannibahsm" we have reached the heart of darkness which forms the viUager's profoundest fear: more than anything they are disturbed by Gemmy's "mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness" (43). Like the country diey inhabit, his guise of famiharity is all the more hideous in its superficial concealment of an incomprehensible othemess. They know that Gemmy "had started out white" (40). But at certain angles "he was not white" (40). Something in "his features ... gave hun die look of one of Them" (40).

This

transformation from a civihzed white man into a native—^how could it be possible? Was there after all any tmtii in the stories that claimed "that white men who stayed too long in China were inchned to develop ... the slanty

153

eyes and flat faces" (41) of die Chinese? Could it be diat die mere proximity of die unknown would affect changes upon themselves beyond the grasp of dieir wildest imagination? The impossibihty of knowing for sure increases dieir awareness of "being in a place that had not yet revealed all its influences upon tiiem" (41). At tiie back of theu: minds, ahnost intangible and out of reach, is the suspicion that their new home might change them before they have a chance of transforming the land.

Gemmy's shaky

command of only a few "mismanaged and distorted" (40) words of Enghsh gives rise to uneasy questions: "Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It" (40). The sheer horror of such a possibility resides in the imphcations it holds for themselves and for tiieir children: if it could happen to Gemmy, was there not a chance it might happen to them? The htde teUtale "it," not specified m die text but smgled out by its itahcized print and repetition, reverberates with an infinitude of horror. The pronoun embodies the entire register of their identity as white people, their whole civihzation, home, and as such it signifies everything that distinguishes them from the "natives" at the other end of die hne, stiU submerged m the primeval mud of the dawn of civihzation. But their dread of Gemmy's othemess, manifest in his unsettling combination of both black and white, mns deeper than racial arrogance. The mere hint of losing "it" confronts them with something they beUeved to have left behind forever: the unwelcome reminder of a shared origin materializes in the smeU of "your own sweat, of a half-forgotten swamp-world going back deep in both of you" (43), stripping you of all vestiges of superiority until "you meet at last in a terrifying equality that strips the last rags from your soul and leaves you so far out on the edge of yourself that your fear now is that you may never get back" (43). In die eyes of die settlers, Gemmy, who widi tiie speed of die flick of an eyehd "could show either one face or the other" (43), is a

154

constant reminder of this precarious divide featuring the coming-together of a disavowed past and a romanticized present, an unacceptable and horrific meeting best forgotten. With the recognition of the settlers' troubled response to Gemmy's doubleness as both self and other, past £uid present, it is time to leave their perspective to picture Gemmy as he appears to the black tribe. They find him "washed up at low tide in tiieir bay" (22), lying half in water, half on land.

Like the children in the opening scene of the novel, they cannot

immediately make sense of what it is they see. His obvious difference from diemselves is taken to be the sign of a creature from "some other world, or life" (23) from which this "sea-calf or spirit was stiU emerging" (23). This scene is an uncanny doubhng of Gemmy's encounter with the children; both times he inhabits the position between—on the fence dividing the country into the famihar and the unknown and on the beachline separating land from sea.* Eerily, both die children and die tribe at first interpret Gemmy not as human being but as an indefinable thing, the one as a creature half-way between bird and human, the other as half sea-calf, half-spirit. The tribe's fkst reaction to this creature is one of wonder, but when they reahse he is a human being the blacks try "to elbow him off the track" (25) and at best "tossed hun scraps" (25) or a "mouthful of seeds" (25). Gemmy's persistence fmaUy results in a place on the periphery, in "the * This scene is also oddly reminiscent of Susan's arrival on Cruso's and Friday's island in Foe, at once its echo and its reversal. When Friday finds Susan, she has been "carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach" (5) and he regards her "as he would a seal or a porpoise thrown up by the waves" (6). The uncanny similarity masks another dimension, but one that makes all the difference. Because where Gemmy is seen and described firom several perspectives, Susan is the narrator of her own tale. We reexperience her arrival on the island filtered through her consciousness, her prejudices colour her response to the situation as potentially dangerous and lead her to conclude that maybe she has "come to an island of cannibals" (6).

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second or diird ring from die fire" (25). He is left more or less to his own devices and when he is eventually accepted by the tribe it is in the "halfapprehensive way that was proper to an in-between creature" (28, emphasis added). As an "in-between creature," Gemmy is set off from the rest of die tribe. They are wary of him and he is allowed fewer hberties than other members of the group, and Gemmy's nightmares are interpreted as proof

"that

although he had the look of a man, he was not one, not yet" (28). They leave him be, watching, waiting for the day when, "fuUy arrived among diem" (28) he would "let go of die odier world" (28). His difference is a cause of apprehension, but, as time passes, Gemmy's wondrous arrival in their midst becomes simply "another tale they told" of a being "half-child, half-seacalf (27) tiiat had "changed before tiiek eyes from a sea-creature into a skinny human child" (27). Gemmy parfly beheves in these stories but "in some other part he did not" (27). At the edge of his mind Ungers "a different story" (27) and his position on the margins of tribal hfe, his "questionable status" (28), functions as an incentive to chng to that other story. When rumours of "spirits, whitefaced, covered from head to foot in bark and riding fourfooted beasts" (29) reach the tribe, Gemmy leaves them in quest of those other people. When he comes upon horse droppings the smeU of them fills his head witii "a kind of clattering" (29), but the image still eludes him. It is not until he sees a man swinging "a long-handled, bladed msdrument" (30) that image and meaning coincide: "Axe" (30).

Later, after watching a

woman feeding her hens, he manages to steal a handful of the feed, gobbling it down greedily, dizzied by die "taste of it, the sfrangeness, the famiharity" (31). AU tiiese incidents bring him to the reaUzation that he wants "to be 156

recognised" (32). As he runs towards the border fence "he had no notion of abandoning the tribe, even less of breaking from one world to another" (32). Faced with Lachlan's "gun" and the prospect of being shot at, Gemmy scrambles onto the fence and miraculously rediscovers a long forgotten language: "Do not shoot. I am a British objecf

(33).

Interestingly, in

Gemmy's version of the encounter the staimner is forgotten, and the itahcized print marks die singularity of the occasion: it does not seem to matter what is said or how it is said, only that the long lost words have finally been spoken. For Gemmy, unlike the settlers, memory is not predominantly a cerebral tiling; he remembers with his whole body, and his earhest recoUection comes to him after he has been forced to leave the viUage and is staying in Mrs Hutchence's house. It is triggered by "the smeU of the wood" of the pinewood chest m the room, "quite unhke tiiat of any of die local timbers" (146). The famihar smeU takes him back to his childhood, referred to in his mind as "the maggot stage" (146), where he is busy clearing sawdust from under machines whose sounds fiU his head. The location is not clear but he seems to be in a factory of sorts in Victorian England, along with odier children like him. It is these other chUdren, "his feUow maggots" (147), he remembers most vividly and "their communal heat and breath was a thing his body had never forgotten or known again" (147). It is just a shred of an image, incomplete and lacking in detail, yet the powerful sensation of unconditional belonging is so vivid it is almost tangible. There is no doubt that in Gemmy's corporeal memory home is equated with this sense of belonging where aU boundaries momentarily cease to exist. What is invoked in this symbiosis of "communal heat and breadi" is a kind of Ur-belonging, reminiscent of the womb. Gemmy does

157

not exist as Gemmy, he is as yet undefined by others, he is just a maggot among maggots. In the description of Gemmy's first years the apparent incommensurabihty of his own viewpoint and the narrative perspective is striking. If Gemmy's body seems to have forgotten the hardships of child labour, the text offers enough clues as to tiieir severity. Whereas the recollection of eating a mixture of sawdust and grime overwhelms Gemmy with the recognition that he had "never since tasted anything so good" (146), the narrative states that, around the age of five or six, this particular "maggot" is "discovered" as the "shape of an ancient, undernourished child and become[s] WiUett's Boy" (147, emphasis added). This passage in the novel constitutes one of the finest and most unhomely examples of Malouf s sleight of hand in orchestrating narrative point of view in an unexpected manner. As reader, I am repeatedly subject to a shght unease, something is not as it should be, something jars. This is due, in part, to the destabihzation of focus—an uncertainty about who is telhng the story, whose perspective dominates at any given moment.

The discordant

representation of events makes it difficult to come to an unequivocal conclusion; whose perspective is more "correct," Gemmy's or that of the narrator? One way to solve the dilemma would be to invaUdate Gemmy's version; after all, he was an infant at die time without means of comparison and his memory could only be partial, lacking, incomplete if not to say altogether faulty. In doing so, one would privilege the other perspective, suggestive of the inhumanity of Gemmy's condition, more in accord with one's own feelings of outrage at the cruelty of Gemmy's fate. But this move on the reader's part is complicated by the awareness that it is precisely the metamorphosis from maggot to boy, die initiation into die world of people.

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that puts an end to Gemmy's happiness. While WiUett is identified as "die first being" (147) he remembers and everything comes "dirough Willett, including his name, Gemmy" (148), diis does not compensate for die loss of the earlier closeness.

Gemmy's world has expanded only to shrink,

containing mamly the inexphcable existence of WiUett, the source of "unquestionable commands; of curses, blows, growls, slobbery kisses" (147). Gemmy may have a home but he is unhomed in the most ghasdy sense of the word; he is alone and finds himself in an environment beyond his understanding, subject to WiUett's every whim, keeping house for him and handUng the rats used in rat fights. It is not quite clear if the fire tiiat kiUs WiUett and that causes Gemmy to run away is an accident or a conscious act of resentment, but when he is discovered as a stowaway onboard ship, Gemmy is stiU haunted by imagies of WUlett. Despite his fear of the man he feels lost without him: a "world from which Willett had entkely disappeared was inconceivable to him" (153). Later, hving with the tribe, he is "[yjoung enough to leam" and "young enough also to forget" (26), but even tiiough tiiis new world "proved no different m essence from his previous one" (26), his forgetting is never more dian partial. While the unhomehness of home, experienced in various degrees witii WiUett, tiie tribe and the settiers, characterized by Gemmy's position on the periphery, never quite part of the community, superficially replaces older memories, his body does not forget the earher intimacy associated with the "maggot" stage. Perhaps tius recognition constitutes the most unhomely moment in die novel, the shocked awareness that the only sense of belonging Gemmy ever experienced should be tied up with something as ghasdy as the powerlessness and dependency of his years of infant dmdgery.

This clash of

perspectives suggests that unless we are prepared to understand Gemmy on 159

his own terms we are no better than the settlers who try to recover his story not so much by listening to hun than by "find[ing] words for him" (17).^ No matter how good their intentions are, to perceive Gemmy oidy in their (our?) own terms, from their (our?) perspective, would be to participate in the victimization of him we abhor. While in one very real sense of the word Gemmy is a victim of the circumstances of his bktii and his position m the world, there is another, no less real, dimension to his story. We have to be willing to validitate his experience by allowing him to speak in his own voice instead of appropriating his story by speaking on his behalf. In other words, instead of trying to translate difference into a likeness we could understand, we have to take seriously difference as difference.

It

comes therefore as a surprise that this openness of nund can be glimpsed in the novel in one of the settiers, the minister M r Frazer. When he seeks the company of Gemmy, Frazer seems to be willing to meet Gemmy on his own terms. Gemmy, in tum, tmsts the minister and "open[s] himself entkely to whatever might emerge from their silent communing when ... they went out together to botanise" (65-66). Seeing the land through Gemmy's eyes, the minister recognizes that the country "is habitable already" (129) and that "no continent lies outside God's bounty" (130).'° The hostihty of die foreign envfronment is not so much a property of the land itself as a figment of the newcomers' mind, an arrogant insistence that " i f the land will not present itself to us in terms that we know, we would rather die than take it as it is" (130). Frazer begins to realize what Gemmy has known all along:

' Again, this quotation invokes Coetzee's Foe where Susan and Foe, like the settlers, are motivated by conflkting intentions in their desire to "make Friday's silence speak" (142). The italicized print denotes that these lines and the following lines are entries in Frazer's field notebook, whkh are italicized throughout in the novel.

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There was no way of existing in tWs land, or of making your way through it, unless you took into yourself, discovered on your breath, the sounds that hnked up all the various parts of it and made them one. Without that you were bhnd, you were deaf. (65)

Thus "existing in tiiis land" is a mutual affair; the settlers' survival is seen to be dependent on their capacity of "changing [themselves] rather than it" (132). The mutuahty of the process points to the homefiilness associated with "existing in this land." The phrase hints at an elusive but crucial difference where "this land" referred to and envisaged is no longer dependent on ideas of nation, race or origin, but suggestive of hybridity." This reahzation leads the minister to regard Gemmy as "a forerunner" (132), as someone who points the way into die future. He is "no longer a white man, or a European" but "a true child of the place as it will one day be" (132). Those "who are willing to look, and to see, without prejudice" understand that "in allowing himself to be at home here, he has crossed the boundaries of his given nature" (132). It is Gemmy's very hybridity that allows him, and Frazer, to experience his position between cultures not in terms of homelessness but, on the contrary, as replete with homefulness. Interestingly, Frazer is the only character m the novel who seems to be willing to meet Gemmy on his own terms and who does not regard him as

" In "Being there, being There: Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism: Kosinsky and Malouf," Gareth Griffith makes a similar point. He proposes that in Malouf s writing geography "is shown to be 'imaginary,' and so empowered not to fixity but to change" (141).

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lacking; where the aboriginals wait for him to "fuUy arrive" and the other villagers see a "black white man" who is a bit of both but not quite either, the minister alone interprets Gemmy's (in)between state in positive terms. In this respect, Frazer's understanding of Gemmy could be aligned with Said's valorization of exile as facihtating ttie crossing of inner borders— Gemmy is a "forerunner" only because he is able to "cross the boundaries of his given nature." But Gemmy is not an exile in die sense put forward by Said.

What Said seems to have in mind is someone like himself, an

intellectual with knowledge of the world. It is precisely this knowledge of the world that seems to constitate the precondition to die negotiation of inner borders—the clash between memories of the homeland and the experience of another country.

Moreover, the very position outside the homeland

appears to enable the expatriate to perceive that homeland in a clearer hght. Said is obviously motivated by a concem for the intellectual's role as regards political change and in an interview broadcast on Swedish television in September 1995, he argues that "the intellectual has to stand outside, be an exile from national ttadition" in order to formulate moral questions about the status quo.'^ It seems as if the notion of exile and subsequent border crossings is seen mainly in relation to the intellectual. JanMohamed's "border intellectual" who I discussed in relation to Coetzee's Waiting to the Barbarians would be another example of this.

But neither Said's nor JanMohamed's

theoretical concepts can acount for Gemmy's position in a satisfactory manner.

Gemmy is not an inteUectual. He has htde knowledge of the

This paraphrase is taken from the interview with Edward Said in the program NIKE, broadcast on Swedish television, Channel 1, on September 15, 1995. In it Said explicates further the idea that the intellectual "must be marginal, cannot be close to power."

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world, and is not quite sure most of the time where he is. His control over the conditions of his own hfe seems to be scant if perceptible at aU, yet he manages to cross inner borders. Quite cleverly and deviously Malouf has comphcated the notion of Said's exiled inteUectual and Abdul JanMohammed's "border inteUectual" by replacing it with the unlikely figure of Gemmy. In a similar manner but seen firom a different angle, Frazer's notion of "forerunner" could be harnessed into an interpretation of Gemmy as a parody of what Keith Booker identifies m his Techniques of Subversion as "the legend of the independent, rebeUious individual" (9) so extensively employed in literature. This reading would embue Gemmy's character with subversive potential, positing hkn as a postmodern comment on the famihar figure of the male outsider embarking on the quest for personal freedom. It is unportant to recognize that whereas these critical perspectives acknowledge that there are different ways of crossing borders, each with its own imphcations, they also supply us with a blueprint of how to interpret them. If the experience of geographical border crossing, whether enforced or voluntary, involves certain risks for die individual, there are also potential rewards m the form of a broader understanding of the power relations operative between self and world. In Malouf s novel the act of border crossing is a much more uncertain affah and often subject to chance, out of the conttol of the individual. If Said's model presupposes at least die possibihty of human agency, dus model seems to break down m the face of Gemmy. Gemmy, die focal point of the novel and portrayed from a number of confUcting perspectives, resists any attempts at definition and remains a mystery. How are we to make sense of a character who in the midst of his apparent powerlessness seems to be imbued with a potency that belies his role of the victim?

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It would be futile to read Gemmy as an example of a colonized subject struggling to obtain political agency aldiough, paradoxically, he can be seen as a comment on this. His words on die fence ("I am a British object") are more than a confusion of terms in someone who has almost forgotten the language. Gemmy's choice of words is an uncanny mimicry of his own position as weU as that of the tribe, all the more unsetthng because they are spoken by chance. Yet the members of the tribe are objects and without (political) agency only from a perspective that does not honour tiieir respective difference. In Malouf s novel it is apparent that the Austrahan tribe is not without agency and that its members hve in a society regulated by a complex system of rules.

It is only because their way of hfe is

threatened by white invaders that the question of pohtics enters tiieir world; and here we should bear in mind that "politics" always refers to our understanding of the term, our political system, not theirs. As concems Gemmy, the temptation is strong to interpret him as without agency, as the ultimate victim of circumstance. But although the majority of people in his vicinity assume the right of definition over him, he is not entirely at the mercy of others. While many changes in his hfe happen by chance this should not obscure the fact that Gemmy is the instigator of some of them. He is die one to leave Willett, it is his decision to leave the tribe in search of the white people whose presence brings memories of his past to die surface. Finally, towards the end of the novel, Gemmy turns up at die village school to "claim back his hfe" (176). It is not important that he walks off, not with the recorded history of his past, but with some of "the exercises [George Abbot] had been correcting" (177). What matters is Gemmy's sense of accomphshment, the reahzation that "for the first time ... he could go any way he pleased" (180). We never leam what happens to Gemmy; he disappears from the 164

narrative, lieading away from tiie settlement, "walking now in a known landscape" (181). He might be returning to the black tribe, or continue to wander on his own or even settie down somewhere. In the final analysis, Gemmy's whereabouts are of subordinate importance. What matters is that Malouf s text provides Gemmy with a discursive position of his own, a position to speak from. Other voices may attempt to appropriate him in their desire to interpret hrni from tiieir perspectives, and thus may be seen to be complicit, in varying degrees, widi the (post)colonial practice of speaking the "other," assigning Gemmy the role of an object of knowledge. But this reading of Remembering Babylon as an allegory of (post)coloniahsm is comphcated by the absence of an identifiable position of power. Already in the opeiung pages of the novel die marginal position of the settlers is stressed; they hve "at the end of the hne" of known civihzation and are painfully aware of the vulnerabihty this imphes. While tiiey can be seen as party to the "colonization" of AustraUa, pushing the black tribes further out, the settlers are depicted as distanced from any real power and in theu- own way as peripheral to its concems as the blacks themselves. The settlement consists of immigrants firom various backgrounds whose one common denominator seems to be that they had, and have, little if any access to pohtical agency and power. M y intent here is not to absolve the settlers of any comphcity with the colonial enterprise, but rather to point to the imphcations their representation in Remembering Babylon gives rise to. Read against the background of Bannet's critique of Foucault's hegemonic constmction of subjectivation for its preclusion of negotiation, it would seem that Malouf s text sketches a different scenario where subjects are not necessarily confined within the dichotomous paradigm of "exercising power

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or being subject to power" (Postcultural Theory 38).'^

Positions of

authority are here far from transparent and consequently power relations are seen as contingent and fluctuating in often unpredictable ways. The same unsettling mobihty within and between concepts, comphcating the polarity of "home" and "exile," can be ghmpsed in Malouf s earlier novel. An Imaginary Life}'^ With its plot taken from classical antiquity—the Roman poet Ovid's exile in Tomis—the novel would seem to move in a world very unlike Remembering Babylon's nineteenth-century Austeaha. Yet there are two related storyhnes in An Imaginary Life which estabhsh a link with the concems of Remembering Babylon, bridging the gap between the centuries. I wiU therefore preface my discussion of notions of home and exile in An Imaginary Life with a brief comparison between the two novels. Like Remembering Babylon and in keeping with Coetzee's Foe, Malouf s earher novel is, as the author informs us in an afterword, a "fiction with its roots m possible events" (153). Taking the Roman poet Ovid's banishment firom Rome and subsequent exile in Tomis—a "barbarian" village on the outer margins of the known world—as its point of departure, the novel is built around Ovid's reflections on his earlier life and the difficulty of adapting to new and very different circumstances. Yet while Bannet's main critique concems Foucault's "hegemonic construction of society, history and subjectivation" which "makes it impossible to explain either how docile, disciplined, confessing and totally subjected bodies in a conq)letely carceral society can also become plural, shape-changing and resisting subjects, or how any subject can in such circumstances 'think the unthought'" (40). It wouU seem that the text itself is subject to some discussion as to its "postcolonial" status. Gareth Griffith argues in "Being there, being There: Postmodernism and Postcolonialisnr Kosinsky and Malouf," that while An Imaginary Ufe is postcolonial "in provenance, as an Australian work," he concedes that it is not "overtly concerned with the post-colonial experience, or place" (134). However, An Imaginary Life fulfills the criteria of a postcolonial text in so far as it "displays post-colonial discursive features" (134) which Griffith identifies as "linguists displacement, physical exile, cross-culturality and authenticity or inauthenticity of experience" (134).

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both novels proclaun their status as fictional adaptations of "historical" events, the fictitious element is more pronounced m An Imaginary Life. Not only is our knowledge of Ovid's hfe and exile scant, but all we know comes, as Malouf acknowledges, "from die poet himself... httie of what he teUs us is rehable" (153). The lack of historical data on Ovid's exile, both as to why it was imposed and the uncertainty of his fate after he left Rome, inspired Malouf to reinvent the poet's story, and to braid it witii tales of the Child, the mythical child of the wildemess. So it could be argued that whereas Remembering Babylon moves in a framework of thinking not so distant to our own, its superstitions and prejudices still recognizable to a contemporary reader, Malouf s earher novel takes us into a world still in the grip of what might be termed pre-rational thought. At the same time, the link with the imagery and the concems expressed in Remembering Babylon is obvious. As early as in the opening pages, which fiinction as a kind of prologue to the story proper, the imagery strikes a famihar tone. The narrator is Ovid, remembering an incident from early childhood. He sees himself "playing under the olives at the edge of [his] farm" (9) where he encounters a "wild boy" (9).'^ Rumour has it that tiiis boy hves with wolves, in the ravines "beyond the cultivated farms and villas" (9) and that the wolves leave the wildemess to "raid the outlying pastures" (10). More frightening, though, is whether there is tmth ui the stories that hold that there are men "who can transform themselves into wolves" (10) and tiiat tiie child might be such a "wolf boy" (10). The second encounter with the child occurs m Ovid's old age, when he is banished from Rome to spend the remainder of his life on the outer margm of the known world, the viUage of Tomis, which is in constant danger of " Again, the italicized print is Malouf s. Ovid's reflections on his first encounter with the Child serve as a kind of prologue to the story about to be told in the novel.

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being "attacked by the savages who inhabit the open grasslands" (17). One day, hunting widi the villagers, he comes across "the prints of a human foot, bare, small, the prints perhaps of a child" (47).

Touching them, Ovid

suddenly sees "the child, and sd-anger stiU, recognize[s] hun" (48). He remembers "the Child who used to be [his] secret companion at Sulmo" (49), and aldiough the others have also seen the boy, it is Ovid who is sceptical, was the vision real? Yet he cannot let go; dreaming uneasily at night he convinces himself that the boy is "the wild boy of [his] childhood. [He] knows it now. Who has come back to [him]. He is the Child" (54). The two encounter-scenes differ m tone. The one made up of Ovid's recollection of a childhood event, so distant in time yet close enough for him to see it before his inner vision, is not an of actual meeting. It is a mental image deciphered, read through the memory of a childhood fantasy where the imaginary friend takes the guise of a wolf boy, invisible to everyone else and conversing with Ovid in a "tongue of [their] own devising" (9). The child, "always the same age" (9), disappears when Ovid reaches puberty, and their special language is now long forgotten. The other is a "real" event which uncannily echoes Ovid's childhood fantasy and his conviction that he would meet the ChUd again. In both accounts the historical and geographical setting may differ from that of Remembering Babylon, but it is obvious that the encounters constitute variations on a theme. In the earUer book the fear of natives is intermingled with an ancient dread of wolves, and instead of Gemmy there is a mythical wolf or deer child, yet the conceptual framework is the same. It does not require a leap of imagination to see the connections between the imagery in the two novels, and to estabhsh a link between the wUd boy and Gemmy. The egregious binarism of inside and outside, here and beyond, permeates the childhood recollection in its contrasting images of cultivated farmland

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and barren wildemess and die safety of home to be defended against attacks from the unknown.

Subsequently, the wild boy's uncertain status,

simultaneously an imaginary companion and a mythical cross between child and wolf, is in marked contrast with the orderhness of Ovid's world in general, and in keeping with the status of Gemmy in the Austrahan setdement. The similarities of the two novels' conceptual concems have resulted in critical claims that Remembering Babylon is a continuation and extension of the earher novel. BiU Ashcroft, reading from a postcolonial perspective, argues in "The Retum of the Native: An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon" tiiat the Child from An Imaginary Life "retums as Gemmy in Remembering Babylon, moving once again across the border between 'wildemess' and imperial discourse, but for a quite different purpose" (51). Ashcroft identifies a reversal of border crossings in the two novels: while the Child is responsible for Ovid's move to a place beyond and outside language, Gemmy, "the post-colonial Imaginary" (58), retums from the region beyond (imperial) language to "demonstrate how the possibihties of the 'Imaginary' might be possibihties for post-colonial society" (51). In other words, Gemmy is interpreted here as amending what was disturbing in the earlier novel, that is, he exemphfies the "potential for social change which had seemed curiously arrested at the end of An Imaginary Life" (51). I wiU come back to Ashcroft's reading of die two novels in my discussion of their postcolonial implications, for the time being I would like to point out tiiat in order to rescue die end of An Imaginary Life for a postcolonial reading, Ashcroft has to constmct the Child as a precursor of Gemmy. But there are other options, and although Malouf s portrayal of the Child in An Imaginary Life and Gemmy in Remembering Babylon points to possible hues of contact, I think it would be hasty to conflate the two or to 169

see the one as the development of the other. The Child in An Imaginary Life is a curious mix of childhood makebelief, myth, and inexphcable reality. At die same time tiie Child's pordrayal is limited to Ovid's perspective, tinted by his beliefs, expectations and recollections of what has been. As we have seen, die actual encounter in Ovid's old age is overlaid witii memories of his childhood companion, and the wild "deer" boy from the grasslands beyond Tomis is recognized and identified as "the Child." So from the outset, the Child seems to inhabit an ambivalent space between mydi and reahty, tiiat is, a position curiously sinular to tiiat of the narrator, Ovid himself In addition, both appear to be osciUating between states of belonging and non-belonging, home and exile. Ovid's banishment to Tomis would seem to be an obvious example of exile as the experience of being unhomed, if not without a home. He finds himself in the company of barbarians, "relegated ... to the Umits of the known world, and expelled from the confines of [his] Latin tongue" (26), reduced to "a crazy, comic old man, grotesque, tearful, who understands nothing, can say nothing" (17). Ovid is surrounded by signs he cannot decipher, die very landscape is alien and he feels as if he "belonged to another species" (17). Worst of aU, he is now a man with "no official existence" (16). Yet An Imaginary Life comphcates this famihar chain of events in a number of ways. For one thing, Ovid's description of his exile is not so much the depiction of a particular place as the characterization of "a state of mind" (16). Ovid would seem to have been "exiled" long before he was banished from Rome, if we interpret exile as a sense of non-belonging. Thinking back on his childhood days at Sulmo, Ovid recaUs the PariUa festival where he is asked to perform the ceremony of hghting the fires, an office usually his brother's

duty.

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The brotiier is remembered

as

"seriousminded, and filled widi a deep sense of loyalty ... to [his] father, to the farm whose every boundary stone he knows, to the family, which is so closely bound up with the country" (86). By contrast, Ovid played the part of the "frivolous one" (86) who cherished the boundary stones not as symbols of die tra;ditions and belongingness of home, but as demarcations of a hne beyond which "die world begins" (87). Set at "the edge of what is" (87), the boundary stones signify all that might be, the world of mystery and possibihties. It is diis movement between different perceptions of the function of the border as closing in and opening up that makes this passage so interesting. On the one hand, the boundary stones carry different meanings for Ovid and his brother.

For Ovid, they embody die promise of the unhmited

possibihties of the world outside while his brother cherishes them as tokens of home.

So in a sense, these stones might be said to symbohze the

difference between the two brothers. But Ovid's wiUingness, on the other hand, to take on his brother's role in die domestic ceremony, his recognition that this is a festival he has "always loved" (87) and his joy at being "gathered into the web of things" (88), signals that he, too, cherishes and has access to the sense of belonging he seems to mock in his brother. Yet unhke his brother, Ovid is positioned on the edge, m the space between home and the world, moving back and forth, never quite at home in either. From this perspective, the imaginary companion of his childhood days can be understood as personifying Ovid's desire to make contact with the world outside while confirming the safety of Ovid's own world. It is the child who allows Ovid to cross between worlds, between states of being. The child, always encountered "at the edge of the farm," can be seen to come from tiie regions of the beyond m several senses. His obscure origins place him somewhere between a "wild boy" and the mythical "wolf child," 171

at the same time as his role as imaginary friend lodges him in the depths of Ovid's imagination. So it could be argued that this child personifies movement, functions as an agent of "worrying die hues" between die known and unknown regions within and witiiout, answering to the needs of a boy unhomed in every sense of the word, hovering on die brink between childhood and adolescence, home and the outside world, suspended, as it were, between worlds. This line of argument can be substantiated by the cfrcumstances surrounding the retum of die Child m Ovid's old age. It does not seem like a coincidence that the Child reappears at a time when the poet is stripped of his former position of power and has to negotiate a situation reminiscent of his childhood days.

Without a common language, Ovid once more

"communicate[s] hke a child" and dreams of breaking out of the confines of the village "into the grasslands beyond die edge of [his] world" (17). The only difference is that Ovid is now an old man, with most of his life behind him, and Tomis is not his parental home but a forgotten place on the outer margins, where the unknown beyond is not the lure of the Roman Empire but absolute wildemess. The Child thus re-enters Ovid's life at a point in time when he seems to be have come to the end of the hne, leading a marginal(ized) existence in a marginal(ized) place. It is important to note here that Ovid's peripheral position in the village is circumscribed not so much by his being in exile, a persona-non-grata forced into their midst, as by his inabihty to communicate and, consequentiy, to understand the mles that guide their hves. It is only when he acquires some command of their language tiiat Ovid begins to re-evaluate their culture. Where before tiieir world seemed incomprehensible and thek tongue barbarian, Ovid gradually becomes aware of the expressiveness of thek language and how different die worid appears seen "dirough this other

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tongue" (65). With his entry into their language, Ovid casts off the cloak of exile, reconciled to the fact that he will never retum to Rome, convinced that "this place is the tme destination" (94) he has been looking for: "I belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of my s e l f (95). Should we then interpret Ovid's insight as iUustrative of the "redemptive view of exile" (53) Said recognizes as a conunon topos in so much of classic Westem literature, where exile often takes the shape of a "prelude to somediing bigger" (53)? In a sense Ovid's subsequent decision to teach the Child not Latin but "the language of these people" (94) would seem to confirm the beneficial aspects of exile; he has finally created his own place in the world. But Malouf s Ovid is no Petrarch or Aeneas from classical antiquity and no fictional version of Said or even Malouf His exile does not foreshadow some greater event in history, and his writings do not benefit from his "contrapuntal" awareness but cease altogether. Instead Ovid has to face what he has tried to escape for so long; the fact that he has always hved on the edge of tilings, impossibly situated in the movement between what has been and what is still to come:

I am the poet Ovid-bom on the cusp between two houses of the zodiac, where the Fishes, tugging in tiieir opposite directions, plunge below the horizon, and the Ram ascends; between two cycles of time, the miUenium of the old gods, tiiat shudders to its end, and a new era that wiU come to its crisis at some far point in the future I can barely conceive o f (19, emphases added)

It is Ovid's position of (in)betweenness, pictured here as being bom 173

between two signs, living between two eras, that catches my imagination. Does this mean that he is hopelessly caught m a kind of no-man's-land, the helpless victim of a cruel fate? I do not diink so. Malouf s Ovid is never stationary, never fully "at home" or "in exile." B y the same token, he is not "caught between" the two states either, but portrayed as a fraveller moving across a multiplicity of borders. His awareness of his past destiny and his "entering the dimensions of s e l f is accompanied by the recognition that the process set in motion long ago is yet to be completed. Far from regaming his identity, Ovid experiences a gradual loss of his "separate and individual soul" (96).

Instead of Ovid teaching the ChUd, leading him into his

individual self dirough language, the Child assumes the role of the teacher, drawing Ovid into his own world which is inseparable firom the rest of the universe. Frightened at furst, Ovid finally accepts "the final metamorphosis" (96) and lets himself be led by the Child "deeper mto the earth, further from the far, safe place where [he] began" (145). During their journey, Ovid gets closer to the Child only to realize that "for all this closeness, he seems more and more to belong to a world that hes utterly beyond [Ovid], and beyond [his] human imagining" (149). At this point in the text Ovid experiences two different moments in time in a kind of weird synchronicity, when he contemplates that it seems as if die Child

moved simultaneously in two separate worlds. I watch him kneel at one of his humble tasks, feeding me, or cleaning of my old man's mess. And at the same tune when I look up, he is standing feet away, as when I furst saw him in the pinewood, a shght, incandescent figure, naked against the dusk, ahready moving away from me in his mind, already sfraining forward to 174

whatever hfe it is that hes out there beyond our moment together. (149)

These hues are reminiscent of the opmion Frazer eventually forms about Gemmy m at least two ways. First, they invoke Frazer's notion of "existing in this land" as a mutual process, involvmg a wilhngness to change oneself rather than the land. Second, the words suggest a certain nostalgia on tiie part of Ovid, shrular to Frazer's, of not belonging to this new and different land otiier than by proxy. The affinity between the Child and Gemmy would appear to be further strengthened by Ovid's conjecture that the Child may, after aU, be "some foundhng of the Gods" (150), which sets him off from the rest of humanity. In this respect, Ovid's perception of tiie Child's difference in positive terms coincides with Frazer's notion of Gemmy as "forerunner." If this passage estabhshes a link between Ovid and Frazer and the Child and Gemmy, the foUowing scenes cast doubt onto tiiis speculation. As he watches tiie Child wandering off, "lost for a moment in his own childhke pleasure at being free" (152), Ovid is tempted to caU out to die boy. But Ovid resists his unpulse, because to call die Child back "might be to miss the fullness of this moment as it is about to be revealed" (152, emphasis added). Watching the Child disappear into the distance, Ovid is filled witii the "fullness of the moment" which is experienced as a potent sensation of homefulness in the rapid moves across time and space:

It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there. (152)

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Ovid's final words invoke the prologue, his first encounter with the Child. They hint at Ovid's reunion with the Child, at the same time as they signal his release, letting the Child go. Ovid's final words —"I am there"— signal an arrival in a place and state of mind where all movement rests. From this perspective, the Child is very different from Gemmy in Remembering Babylon. While both share the position of marginality in their respective worlds, and can be interpreted as exiles from life, Gemmy's situation is in many respects the opposite of the Child's. Where Gemmy is bom in England and brought to Australia by a mixture of chance and circumstance, the Child's origins are unknown and at best shrouded in myth and fantasy.

There are no indications that the Child ever knew any

language, whereas Gemmy lost and recovered his.

While it may be

tempting, as Ashcroft does, to construct both as versions of the child of the wilderness "breaking into the circle of civilization" (51), I would like to argue that Gemmy's story has more affinities with that of Ovid than with the Child's. Although living in different centuries, both were bom into societies built on and stractured by their status as strong colonizing powers, the Roman Empire and England. Yet, as the son of a rich landowner and remembered as one of the great poets, Ovid would seem to have been dealt the better cards by fate. Nevertheless Malouf s Ovid is shown to share a predicament similar to that of the seemingly less fortunate Genrniy. Bom at opposite ends of the social spectrum their personal histories, though obviously differing in respect to each character's material and intellectual possibilities, still appear to be uncannily analogous. Not only do they find themselves separated from their own culture and language, faced with the need to survive in a foreign environment, but, strangely unhomed in their own society, as we have seen, both Ovid and Gemmy could be said to lead "marginal" lives from the outset. Gemmy's words on the fence, "I am a

176

British object," inadvertently disclose his position in his native country. By die same token, Ovid's recognition tiiat exile is more "a state of mind" than an actual place takes on a new urgency in the hght of his childhood memories. Similarly, bodi are engaged in the process of border crossing— negotiating hues between past and present, home culture and foreign culture, self and other, and, finaUy, their own selves. In a similar vein, bodi are shown to experience and re-experience a number of metamorphoses and Ovid, hke Gemmy, can be seen as someone who "has crossed the boundaries of his given nature." In their different ways, Ovid and Gemmy signal a wiUingness to adapt to the land rather than to shape it according to their wiU. If Gemmy is a forerunner and a true child of the place as it one day wiU be, Ovid's potential for changing himself rather dian the world around him signals a kinship across the centuries. This brings me back to the ChUd. If he is not a precursor of Gemmy, as Ashcroft holds, what is his role in An Imaginary Life!

M y reading

constructs Mm as an Ulustration of the odiemess within, an interpretation which is corroborated by Karin Hansson's discussion of the Child in terms of the Unconscious in her study Sheer Edge: Aspects of Identity}^ Moreover, she hnks the notion of die wolf child with the concept of exile by tracing the etymology of die term wolf, where die Middle Latin "wargus" also denotes a "stranger" (57). Thus we could read him as an exemphfication of all that is dark and unknown, an embodiment of humanity's deepest and oldest fears, something we attempt to "exile" from our lives but cannot quite suppress.

Or, to tum SchelUng's definition on its head, we

'* Hansson approaches Malouf s texts from the perspective of identity-formation and her purpose is to "illuminate the continuity and unity of his fiction and poetry" (6). Her detailed and informed reading results in a comprehensive and convincing interpretation of Malouf s work, but her desire to prove its unity differs greatly from my own perspective.

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could understand the Child as an instance where unheimlich is something that ought to have come to light, but has remained secret and hidden. M y reading of the Child as a site of conflicting forces rather than as an instance of postcolonial struggle, as Ashcroft suggests, would seem to move in the postmodern realm. Yet, as we have seen, it is exactly this division into one or the other that is questioned in texts like An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon. So while both novels can be read as texts which concern themselves with postcolonial issues, they can also be seen to exceed the framework of postcoloniality in their destabilization of notions of political and human agency. Refusing to be fixed as exclusively postmodern or postcolonial texts. As such, they call for a different approach, a hybridized reading that negotiates the tensions between different reading paradigms. To repeat, one of the strengths of Malouf s writing is that polarizations break down; concepts such as authority and centrality lose their power of definition since there seems to be no single position of authority in the novels, only different degrees of marginality. Constructing the story fi-om numerous perspectives, each "marginal" in its own right, the text turns into a site of collision between diverse positions which cannot be conflated into a privileged vision. For instance, the unhomeliness glimpsed in the text cannot be contained in Bhabha's definition of the "estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world" since, as we have seen, Malouf s unhomehness works on many levels and appears in different shapes. B y the same token, fixed concepts like "home" and "exile" turn into disputed territories in Malouf s Active universe, exposing the rriyth of clear-cut definitions. We might say, then, that the novels are engaged in the process of "worrying the lines:" between conceptions of home and homelessness.

178

power and impotence, innocence and experience, fiction and theory, postmodernism and postcolonialism.

179

Postscript Fictions of (In)Betweenness

Homes are not places, and they are not where hearts are, since we all carry our hearts wherever we go. Home is an attitude, areadinessfor death and dispossession, a kind of self-heedness that makes the entire universe a home. Ihab Hassan'

Differences do not only exist between outsider and insider—two entitites—they are also at work within the outsider or the insider—a single entity. Trinh T. Minhha^

The epigraphs prefacing the postscript refer us back to my analysis of reconceptualizations of home and exile in literary and theoretial discourse, discussed in the preceding chapters. Hassan's observation that "homes are not places," that homes are "not where hearts are," and that "home is an attitude," invokes the different conceptions of home co-present in the texts discussed. In a similar vein, Trinh's recognition of difference as The passage is taken from Hassan's Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades, 249-50. For me, it is a comment on the myths of home and exile discussed in my text, as in many others today. Hassan continues: "Hugo of St. Victor had it right: 'The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land'" (250). ^ Taken from Trinh's "No Master Territories," Post-Colonial Studies Reader (218).

180

simultaneously acting between and within, alerts us to the provisional dimension of identity, which focuses our attention on the negotiation of outer as weU as inner borders. Read together, the epigraphs serve as a reminder of the point I wanted to make in this study: that the strategy of "worrying the hues" aUows us to approach the problematics of border crossing from a new and potentiaUy productive quarter. I hope to have shown that the fictional texts I refer to as fictions of (in)betweenness engage in a similar rethinking of the binary opposition of home/exile as is to be found in theoretical discourse. Due to genre constraints, however, which invariably encode and legitimate certain discursive strategies of meaning-making, theoretical discourse seems to be slower to fiiUy explore the possibilities opened up by new modes of thinking than texts of fiction. M y ami has not been to define or codify, but rather to pursue a different trajectory of diought, illustrative of a mode of thinking that is emerging from the changing inteUectual dynamics which has had an impact on both fictional and tiieoretical discourse today. Let me briefly recapitulate how Erdrich, Coetzee, and Malouf participate in tiiis new mode of diinking from the perspective of (in)betweenness through tiieir strategy of juxtaposing the characters' divergent understandings of what constitutes home or exile in such ways as to suggest that the ttaditional home/exUe dichotomy is problematic today. FoUowing the trajectory of their writing it seems that Erdrich is ambivalent in her articulation of (in)betweenness.

While she is intrigued by its possibilities,

she is also reluctant to abandon die fiction of home. As we have seen, exUe carries less positive connotations in Erdrich's novels dian it holds for Said. Seen from die characters' perspective, home is both a geographical place, as for Nanapush, and an attitude, as Pauhne and Lipsha demonstrate.

June,

finally, who is depicted as the most homeless character of all, is shown to embody both home and exile in her own person. In addition to their attempt

181

to come to terms with the demands of two conflicting cultures, the characters are shown to grapple with their personal desires, requiring them to negotiate the borders of their own experience. A l l of them are seen to inhabit their positions with a certain unease; their homes are marked by the influences of a different culture and an other mode of thinking that trouble the distinction between binary categories. Home is a sentiment, a nostalgic desire to return to the place and the values of a time past, at the same time as home and exile are shown to be split: home is both home and exile, and exile is both exile and home. Erdrich's portrayal of the characters reveals that none of them is fully at home or completely in exile. In The Crown of Columbus, however, nostalgia is shown to give way to excitement, resulting in the depiction of hybridity as one way to meet the demands of the future. Whereas Coetzee does not mention home explicitly, the questioning of received notions of home and exile is eerily inscribed in his texts by bringing forth unspoken, silent, cultural conceptions of what constitutes home. He plays on his characters' (and his readers') perceptions of home to unveil how much their understandings are dependent on tacit cultural assumptions that blind them to the recognition of difference as difference, that is, to perceive difference in non-hierarchical terms, unfettered by traditional value-judgments.

In Waiting for

the Barbarians, the Magistrate's

expressed belief that home is a place and a sentiment is severely shaken when his home environment suddenly reveals its guise of personal exile. In Foe, Susan's unwillingness to see the strangeness that disrupts what appears as familiar is contrasted with Cruso's disinterested utilitarian view of home as a place of labour, not sentiment. In a similar vein, tbngueless Friday's home resembles none we can recognize since it is described metaphorically as a place "where bodies are their own signs," taking us into unexplored territory beyond words where traditional models of understanding break

182

down. I hope to have shown that Coetzee destabihzes a number of notions we, like Susan and Foe, feel "at home" with, by making silence his central textual concem.

In this I see Coetzee as following the trajectory of

Derrida's concept of dijferance. Whereas Coetzee pursues his inquiry into received values of home obhquely, Malouf takes die (in)between position the fiirthest.

Malouf

envisages home as incorporating a certain unhomehness and points to the homefulness inherent m the (in)between position. While he touches on both Bhabha's and Said's re-conceptualizations of the binary pair of home/exile, Malouf elaborates his point differendy. In Remembering Babylon and An Imaginary Life, conventional conceptions of home and exile are displaced by articulations of the unhomehness of home and the homefulness of exile. The settiers' situation is marked by a nostalgia that derives firom their feeling of being home without being at home, which is contrasted in the novel with the difference within home that is inscribed in Gemmy.

But whereas

Gemmy personifies a frightening "mixture of monsttous strangeness and unwelcome likeness" for most of the settiers, Frazer is shown to recognize him as a "foremnner" who embodies the promise of a future built on a hybridized understanding of self. For Ovid, fmaUy, the vision of home and exile is hnked to a state of mind rather than a place. Botii Ovid and die Child are depicted as travellers, never fiiUy at home or in exile, moving across a multiphcity of intemal and extemal borders, perpetually undoing die home/exile dichotomy. It would seem, then, that Erdrich is the writer who takes an ambivalent stance with a nostalgic desire for the lost centre where Coetzee inhabits his position with surreptitious ease and Malouf, fmaUy, seems to feel completely at home in what formerly was understood as a site of homelessness. This attempt to articulate new and different ways of understanding the cultural

183

commonplaces of home and exile has led me to argue that such fictional texts participate in the rethinking of values we have come to associate with postmodern and postcolonial theories. These fictional texts are in many respects products of the times we live in, shaped by similar influences as those that affect my own critical thinking, influences I referred to throughout in terms of "postcolonial awareness," affecting both the postmodern and the postcolonial realm. Hence I believe that it is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone engaged in the processes of writing and reading today to stand outside what might be termed postmodern debates. Nor is it possible not to address what some see as the offspring of postmodernism, postcolonial theories, especially when engaging, as I have done, with authors "worrying the lines" between home and exile. But, as I have argued throughout, this mode of thinking—engaging in "worrying the lines" between categories— equally shapes my understanding of postmodernism and postcolonialism as sites of interaction, continuously working on each other, criss-crossing each other's territory. By the same token, is is important to remember that the strategy of "worrying the lines" is mainly concerned with questions, and that answers are always preliminary, serving as stepping-stones to new questions. As such, this approach is always in-the-process-of, dependent on a mobility between and across a multiplicity of borders, incessantly shaping and reshaping its own perception of the world and the theories that attempt to map it.

184

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196

Index

CastiUo, Susan Perez, 64n Cixous, Helene, 35, 50 Clarke, Joni Adamson, 66-7 Chfford, James, 47-9, 150n Coetzee, J. M . , 14-15, 18, 94-138, 182-3 Doubling the Point, 96-7 Foe, 95-6, 98, 111-38, 155n, 160n, 166 Waiting for the Barbarians, 98, 103-11, 136-8 White Writing, 98-101, 122 contrapuntal awareness, 83 Cornell, Drucilla, 44n

agency, 15,140,163-4,178 Alexander, Robyn, 47n Allen, Paula Gunn, 77n, 87n, 91n Amin, Samir, 26n Anzaldria, Gloria, 47-8 Appiah, Kwame Andiony, 46n Ashcroft, B i l l , 144n, 169, 176-8 Ashcroft, Bill Garedi Griffidi and Helen Tiffin, 22n, 26-9 Attwell, David, 95, 96-7,102-103, 104n, 11In, 124 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 42n, 126-7,1656 Barry, Nora, 63 Bhabha, Homi K, 25n, 30-1, 41-3, 54-5,149-52 Begam, Richard, 98-9, 125n, 128-9 Bennington, Geoffi-ey, 46-7 Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner, 25n, 26, 44 Bevis, WiUiam, 82 beyond, die, 41-3, 127, 143,174 binary oppositions, 17, 20n, 21, 31, 32-A, 37-8, 66,101,168 centre/margin: 22, 32-4,96-8, 104, 140,148, 151 us/tiiem: 105-7,108-10,145 language/silence: 40n, 119 Booker, K e i d i M . , 163 borders and boundaries, 37-43 between cerebral/corporeal: 34-5 between self/otiier: 38 negotiation of borders: 23, 39, 54,83-4, 162, 177, 181 ^

deconstruction, 17,44n, 51 Defoe, Daniel, 112,135, Robinson Crusoe, 98, 112-15, 128-9 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 44-5, 46, 1267, 130-3 differance, 98-100, 111, 13032, 137, 182 diiference as difference, 38, 160,182 Docherty, Thomas, 25n Dovey, Teresa, 102-103 Eagleton, Terry, 409n Erdrich, Louise, 14,18, 53-93,18182 The Beet Queen, 59-60 The Bingo Palace, 61-2, 93 Love Medicine, 55-6, 59, 6061, 69-80 Tracks, 55-6, 59, 60-1, 6979, 80, 85-92 197

Kearney, Richard, 39 King, Russell et al, 29n, 48 Kmpat, Amold, 67-9

Erdrich, Louise and Michael Dorris, The Crown of Columbus, 16, 53n,91-2,182 ethnocriticism, 67-8 exile, 16, 8 3 ^ , 87,110, 148,152, 170,172-3, 177

Lawrence, Karen R., 23n Lotman, Yuri M . , 38 Lyotard, Fran9ois, 25n, 44n Macaskill, Brian, 95n and Jeanne Colleran, 95n Malouf, David, 15-16,139-179,183 An Imaginary Life, 140, 16678 Remembering Babylon, 140, 141-65 Magalaner, Marvin, 63 marginality, 13, 33, 51,55-6,95-8, 103,139,155-6,176,178 Menmai, Albert, 108 memory, 15-16,140-1,146-8,151, 157 mobility, 16, 23-4,43,47-9, 67-8, 138,174, 184 modernity, 24n, 36 Mongia, Padmini, 29-30

Flavin, James, 63n Fowles, John, 119,122n, 123 Freud, Sigmund, 149,152n Fukuyama, Francis, 26n Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten, 104n Gittings, Christopher, 34n Gleason, William, 63n Griffith, Gareth, 161n, 166n Hansson, Karin, 139n, 177-8 Harris, Wilson, 15n Hassan, Ihab, 25n, 42n, 180 Hawley, John C , 22n Heidegger, Martin, 20n Hendersson, Mae G., 13, 20n, 24n home, 32-3, 55, 69, 82-3, 84, 92, 99, 111, 145-54,157, 171, 182 homecoming, 69-76,79-81 homefulness, 18, 21,18,101,161, 175 Huggan Graham, 116 Hutcheon, Linda, 24n, 26-9 hybridity, 21, 24n, 25n, 26-9, 34n, 43, 92-3,101, 120,161 (in)betweenness, 18-19, 21-2, 25, 33, 35,45-52, 69,119, 126, 156, 162,174, 181

Olsen, Lance, 95 other, the, 35n, 38,118,124-9,132, 147,153-4,163 Owens, Luis, 63 positionality, 16, 23-4, 3 4 , 4 7 - 8 , 5 12, 54, 68,96-8,131,165 "post," 42-4 postcolonial awareness, 21-2, 31, 49,184 postcolonialism, 22,25-32,45,13940 postcoloniality, 25,31,117,178 postmodemism, 22,25-33,58,12340 postmodemity, 25,36 Post, Robert M . , 95,118

Jakobson, Roman, 39n JanMohamed, Abdul R., 95,106, 162-3 Johnston, Basil, 79n

198

white writing, 98, 100 WiUiams, Paul, 95,117,118 wolf boy, 15, 167-9,171, 177 Wong, Bertiia D., 57-8 Woodward, PauUne Groetz, 63n "worrying tiie lines," 14,18,20-1, 23, 24n, 32, 33, 37, 53, 55, 58, 67-8,172,178,181,184 Wright, Derek, 95,137

Rainwater, Catherine, 65, 88, 91 Rayson, Ann, 62 Rotman, Brian, 120-1,125 Rushdie, Sahnan, 97n, 150n Said, Edward, 23n, 24-5, 32, 45, 545, 8 3 ^ , 99,110,139,149, 151-2, 162-3,173 Sartre, Paul, 108 Schneider, Lissa, 63n Sergi, Jennifer, 63n silence, 16, 111, 116-20,130-6 Silko, Leshe, 64 Silverman, Hugh J., 50-1 SkoUer, Eleanor Honig, 34-5 Smith, Jeanne, 64, 65n, 66 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 25n Splendore, Paola, 96,125n Sprinker, Michael, 45 Stevens, WaUace, 139n Stripes, James D., 64-5 Sumida, Stephen H., 51

zero-images, 120-29

transgression, 38-41 traveUmg dieory, 47-8, 50 Trinh, T. Minh-ha, 23-4, 36,44, 46n, 66n, 94,180-.1 uncanny, die, 149n, 152-3,155 unheimlich, 149n, 152,178 unhome, to, 18, 49,58,116,137, 159,170,172,176 unhomehness, 21,149-50,159 Vizenor, Gerald, 42n, 53n, 58, 64, 65n, 79n WaUcer, Victoria, 63n WalUs, Brian and Marcia Tucker, 25n Warren, WilUamW.,61n Wheale, Nigel, 25n 199

45. H E L E N A

BERGMANN.

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Vocabulary in a Foreign Language. A Study of Reading Strategies. 1991. 171

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Middle English Words for "Disgrace" and "Dishonour". 1981. 228 pp. 50.

A R N E

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RONALD

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Our

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English Verb See: A Study in Multiple Meaning. 1993. 390 pp. 65.

ELISABETH

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JENNIFER

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Hearts". A Study of the Portrayal of Youth in a Selection of Post-War British Working-Class Fiction. 1982.

Indirect Object in Present-Day

225 pp.

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52. D A V I D

I S I T T . Crazic, Menty and

Idiotal. An Inquiry into the Use of the Suffixes -al, -ic, -ly, -and -y in Modern English. 1983. 282 pp. 53.

MARI-ANN

BERG.

Aspects

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Time, Ageing and Old Age in the Novels of Patrick White, 1939-1979.

1983.203 pp. 54. T H O M A S

D .K N O W L E S .

Ideology,

Art and Commerce. Aspects of Literary Sociology in the Late Victorian Scottish Kailyard. 1983. 278 pp. 55.

M . M . GINA

RIDDLE.

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Melville's "Piazza Tales". 1985. 318 pp. 56. B E A T R I C E W A R R E N .

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TORBORG

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Honour's Tongue. 1985. 171 pp. 59. U L F D A N T A N U S . Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist. 1985. 235

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68.

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EGERER.

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Fictions

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32. KARI N M O L L E R . The Theme of Identity in the Essays of James Baldwin. An Interpretation. 1975. 196 pp. 33. SOLVE O H L A N D E R . Phonology, Meaning, Morphology. On the Role of Semantic and Morphological Criteria in Phonological Analysis. 1976. 221pp. 34. M A R G A R E T CHESNUTT. Studies in the Short Stories of William Carleton. 1976. 213 pp. 35. ERIK F R Y K M A N . "Unemphatic Marvels". A Study of Norman MacCaig's Poetry. 1977. 70 pp. 36. I N G V A R S O D E R S K O G . Joyce Gary's "Hard Conceptual Labour". A Structural Analysis of To be a Pilgrim. 1977.180 pp. 37. M A L L M O L D E R

STALHAMMAR.

Imagery in Golding's The Spire. 1977. 225 pp. 38. INGEGERD FRIBERG. Moving Inward. A Study of Robert Ely's Poetry. 1977. 225 pp. 39. O L O F L I N D S T R O M . Aspects of English Intonation. 1977. 272 pp. 40.

M A R G A R E T A

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Intelligibility. An Evaluation of some Features of English produced by Swedish 14-year-olds. 1977. 260 pp. 41. BEATRICE W A R R E N . Semantic Patterns of Noun-Noun Compounds. 1978. 260 pp. 42. S T I G JOHANSSON. Some Aspects of the Vocabulary of Learned and Scientific English. 1978. 60 pp. 43. A L V A R E L L E G A R D . The Syntactic Structure of English Texts. A Computer-Based Study of Four Kinds of Text in the Brown University Corpus. 1978. 120 pp. 44. STIG J O H A N S S O N . Studies of Error Gravity. Native Reactions to Errors Produced by Swedish Learners of English. 1978. 140 pp.

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English,

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Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, IV. 1963. 129 pp. 17.

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Fictions of (In)Betweenness Claudia Egerer The concepts of home and exile are not new and figure in texts from all periods. What is new is the way in which these terms are approached today and what questions they give rise to. This study explores reconceptualizations of home and exile in literary and theoretical discourse, reading novels by Louise Erdrich, J.M. Coetzee and David Malouf side by side with the writings of Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. It argues that in their attempt to think against and across categories, to 'worry the lines' between conventional understandings of home and exile, these texts participate in the articulation of (in)betweenness.

A C T A UNIVERSITATIS G O T H O B U R G E N S I S Gothenburg Studies in English 68 Distributor: A C T A UNIVERSITATIS G O T H O B U R G E N S I S , Box 5096 S-402 22 Goteborg, Sweden I S B N 91-7346-305-1

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