Mobility and Corporeality in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literature: Bodies in Motion 1793625670, 9781793625670

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Mobility and Corporeality in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literature

Mobility and Corporeality in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literature Bodies in Motion

Edited by Jaine Chemmachery and Bhawana Jain

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Quotes throughout reproduced from When the Wanderers Come Home by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-2567-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-2568-7 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Jaine Chemmachery and Bhawana Jain PART I: OTHER(ED) AND MARGINALIZED BODIES IN MOTION 25 1 Lucy’s Transgressive Moves in Lady Audley’s Secret 27 Sun Jai Kim 2 Through Time and Space: Traveling Bodies in Archaeological Fiction 43 Nolwenn Corriou 3 “Doomed with Motion”: Transient Bodies in Light in August 61 Solveig Dunkel PART II: DISABLED BODIES, AILING BODIES, AND MOBILITY 77 4 The Shelleys’ Tried Bodies in Their Travel Literature: Demystification and Mythmaking Fabien Desset

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5 Representing the Sick Male Body in David Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865–1873) Guillaume Didier

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6 Disability and the Modalities of Displacement in the Early Fiction of J. M. Coetzee 113 Paweł Wojtas PART III: RECONCEPTUALIZING MOBILE BODIES IN TRANSNATIONAL SPACES 7 Writing Away from the Main: The Traveling Ways of Jamaica Kincaid’s Unruly Prose Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika 8 Wilson Harris’s Resurrected Bodies Fabienne Franvil

131 133 151

9 Immobility, Female Corporeality, and Self in the Transnational Space in Jude Dibia’s Unbridled 169 Cédric Courtois PART IV: MIGRANT BODIES, UNSTABLE IDENTITIES, AND SUBJECTIVITIES IN TIMES OF CRISES

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10 “[T]raveler / without a Country”: Wandering Bodies in Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s When the Wanderers Come Home Maureen Fielding

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11 Mobility and Shame: The Refugee and the Terrorist in Mohsin Hamid and Jhumpa Lahiri Neela Cathelain

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12 Impossible Journey Home: From Compliant to Resistant Bodies, an Analysis of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire 221 Sandrine Soukaï Index 237 About the Editors

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About the Contributors

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1 The Rhodes Colossus, Striding from Cape Town to Cairo, Punch, 1892 46 Figure 2.2 Map of Kukuanaland, from King Solomon’s Mines 47 Figure 3.1 Digital Yoknapatawpha 62 Figure 5.1 Livingstone’s second-stage Unyanyembe Journal 101

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Acknowledgments

We cannot thank enough the speakers who did us the great honor of participating in the conference “Body in Motion, Travelling Bodies” at the University of Paris 8 - Vincennes Saint Denis in May 2019 that led to the publication of the volume and who came a long way, from different parts of France, Germany, Poland, Greece, and also from the United States, to be part of this event. We are also immensely thankful to the colleagues and friends who have participated in this endeavor by reviewing the chapters of this volume, in particular Claire Joubert and Kerry-Jane Wallart for their insightful remarks on our work. We would like to thank the Musée de l’art et d’histoire de Saint-Denis which hosted the conference. We also want to thank University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis and more particularly TransCrit, our research center, for showing great support with the organization of the conference. This project “Travelling Bodies” was born a few years ago when the Louvre Museum organized an exhibition entitled “Corps en mouvement” or “Moving Body.” This, along with other reasons like the apparent lack of research on the intersection between body and movement in Anglophone literature, motivated us to pursue our collaborative research on this topic. So, in 2017, we organized a half day seminar on this theme and we are very happy to see that the few colleagues who participated in this seminar have continued to support this project by contributing to the volume. It is nice to see that what started as a mere reflection on the stakes associated with bodies moving across borders—from travelers’ bodies to refugees’ bodies, especially in our contemporary times—could lead to such a publication. Of course, this study is work-in-progress as it cannot claim to cover the many disciplines and topics that can be engaged with when thinking of the articulation between movement and corporeality. We are indebted, of course, ix

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to scholars such as the late John Urry, and also Mimi Scheller, Kevin Hannam who have been trailblazers and have contributed to establishing the “mobilities turn” and the “new mobilities paradigm” in the Humanities; to Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau; to Tim Cresswell, Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, Lynne Pearce, and many others. In November 2020, Chris Ewers gave an online paper at the “Transport and Mobility History” seminar held by the Institute of Historical Research on the usefulness of discussing mobility from the vantage point of literary studies. This confirmed even more the need for researchers to look further into the articulation between corporeality, mobility, and literature. Last but not least, we wish to heartily thank our families and friends whose support has proved inestimable during the time we spent working on this project. This would not have been possible without them.

Introduction Jaine Chemmachery and Bhawana Jain

This volume takes on particular significance in regard to the global lockdowns most of us experienced in 2020. While the lockdowns enhanced certain mobilities, they provoked the immobility of some people and their bodies depending on various social, economic, geographical factors. Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis complexifies the notion of what Urry, Sheller, and Hannam call “corporeal movement” (Hannam et al. 2006, 9) as different forms of movements at the local, national and transnational levels were either inhibited or promoted during this time. In this context, it is therefore interesting to think about questions such as: Which bodies have been able to move voluntarily under lockdown? Whose bodies have been forced to remain immobile? Whose bodies have been forced, on the contrary, to move? In France, there was a polemic in the Spring of 2020 about the confinement diaries written by Marie Darrieussecq or Leila Slimani as these authors were seen as romanticizing lockdown by writing confinement diaries about how they left their Parisian flats to settle in their secondary houses, in the countryside or at the seaside and were only then “forced” to immobility. Slimani writes about telling her children it was a bit like Sleeping Beauty1 while Darrieussecq mentions being able to watch deer grazing on the uncultivated parts of her garden.2 On the one hand, people from elite classes were able to be mobile, be it in real or imaginative ways, demonstrating their agency and power as they had the occasion to expose themselves to new experiences and adventures. On the other hand, one might be struck by the haunting images of marginalized—often male—bodies, which, under lockdown, were forced to mobility in India after the announcement of COVID-19 induced lockdown in March 2020. Consequently, millions of workers hit the roads trying to reach their homes in the neighboring states as “megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens . . . like so much unwanted accrual” (Roy 2020). In 1

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an article for the Financial Times, Arundhati Roy highlights how rather than favoring social distancing, the lockdown forced hordes of “othered” bodies to stick together, creating “physical compression.” Indeed, as the state borders were ultimately sealed, those “unwanted” people were forced either to immobility or to moving on and on, and sometimes back to where they had started their journey, where neither home nor loving relatives awaited them. Similarly, one may think of the bodies of carers who had to go and work in hospitals, but also of those of subalterns—the underpaid cashiers who worked in supermarkets. These recall the bodies of the “invisible women” that Françoise Vergès referred to before the COVID-19 crisis, those who literally “open the city” (Un féminisme décolonial 2019, 7), being both invisible and integral to the good functioning of the city. All these examples invite us to further our understanding of complex overlapping and contradictory forms of mobility and to clearly distinguish between the various subjects who “travel” or move across spaces and those that are reduced to mere bodies, if not commodities. COVID-19, in the words of Roy, exposed “brutal, structural, social and economic inequality,” and raised critical questions about social inclusion and exclusion. The situation had also been aggravated by the disciplinary measures imposed upon bodies by hegemonic powers around the globe. According to Foucault, “[t] he plague3 is met by order” (Discipline and Punish 197) as the controlling mechanisms of the government penetrate “even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power” (Discipline and Punish 198). Similarly, any free movement, which was previously considered as normal could be, hence, punished by government-imposed laws during this pandemic. However, this led to massive uproars as several incidents were reported across the world about the misuse of disciplinary powers by the police against people of color, often living in underprivileged areas, suggesting that it was perhaps preferable for some bodies to be less visible on the streets, and therefore to be less openly mobile. The case of George Floyd is a telling example in this respect. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter protests were seen across the United States and the globe as people challenged the imposed rules of restricted movement and exercised their rights to mobility and protest for justice by performing bodily resistance through walking together on the streets. Together these collective public assemblies of bodies4 condemned the hegemonic power structures targeting vulnerable and precarious5 bodies. Such bodies as black bodies, hence, are not merely an Other but are, to some extent, hyper-embodied as a representative racialised type. The hyper-embodiment of the body of colour in this context does not translate into immobility, but characterises the body

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primarily as a material body. An effect of this marking is that the mobility of the body is not the free and transformative mobility of the Subject, but always continues to ground racialised and gendered meanings, as may be clear in a consideration of the ‘nomad’ or the black athlete or dancer. (Cresswell, Uteng 2008, 43)

The COVID-19 crisis has thus highlighted, in a very unique way, how categories of race, gender, and class need to be taken into account when discussing the articulation between bodies and movement. The objective of this book will be to study how such categories relate to notions of disciplined mobility, counter-mobilities, vulnerability, and power relations, which are significant elements to be pondered when studying corporeal mobilities. Besides, a growing interest in the use of e-learning tools during the lockdowns, supported by many universities and international organizations such as UNESCO, both in the Global North and South, has enabled the development of “ virtual mobilities” (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 218), rendering virtual face to face (and to some extent, body to body) encounters possible in an unprecedented manner and by opening up new forms of hybrid spaces, while destabilizing boundaries between home and workplace, mobility and immobility, presence and absence. The Mobile Cultures and Societies Research Platform also refers to the mobility/immobility dialectics in their call for papers for their 2021 conference entitled “Entangled Im/Mobilities”: “In what way can processes of immobilization generate mobilities and how can mobilisation produce immobility?” The COVID-19 crisis has confirmed the necessity that scholars engage with the concept of “im/mobilities” understood as “the potential for movement or stillness which is ‘entangled in the way societies and cultures assign meaning through talk, images and other representations and live out their lives’” (Adey, referring to Cresswell, 2017, 7). Mobility, hence, cannot be thought of without its corollary, immobility. As Tim Cresswell and Tanu Priya Uteng stated in “Gendered Mobilities”: “Mobilities have truly become the hallmark of modern times. But how this hallmark is experienced and represented is far from stable. On the one hand it is positively coded as progress, freedom or modernity itself; on the other hand it brings to mind issues of restricted movement, vigilance and control” (1). What needs to be highlighted is that sometimes, the capacity for some to move will depend on the fact that the movement of others be hindered. As Sara Ahmed insightfully notes, “idealisation of movement, or transformation of movement into a fetish, depends upon the exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way” (2004, 152). Mobility indeed involves power relations or, to put it differently, people do not have equal access to mobility.

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These times marked by COVID-19 shed an interesting light upon the articulation between bodies and (im)mobility that are examined in this volume. Our aim is to depict how mobility transforms discourses on the body, among others, and how bodies that have been marginalized for a long time—female, differently abled and “othered” bodies—may become a site of negotiation of the experience of mobility. The introduction will first engage with the theoretical framework of the concept of “corporeal mobility”—both physical and embodied,6 then will discuss how this is depicted and performed in writings from the English-speaking world and will further analyze the specific modalities of writing about mobile bodies in the Anglophone contexts. More generally, the objective of this edited collection is to discuss the ways in which writing about mobile bodies transforms both bodily representations and discourses on the body, as well as how it challenges discourses about mobility by making corporeality an essential feature of moving across the world. WHY FOCUS ON “CORPOREAL MOBILITY”? The circulation of people has increased since the sixteenth century not only through phenomena such as the development of trade, the Middle Passage, and colonization, but also due to the technological developments implemented by the Industrial Revolution since the nineteenth century which favored various types of mobilities (human and material), be it through the railway or steamships, to name a few examples. This has intensified further today due to democratized travel.7 The internet in the contemporary era has contributed to increased mobility of goods, people, and ideas, among others: “From the ships, sea routes, and interconnectivity of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) to the complex mobilities of diasporas and transnational migrants in the modern world (Cohen, 1997), multiple interacting mobilities have long been significant” (Urry, Sheller 2006, 209). Yet, policies in some English-speaking countries such as Great Britain or the United States (due to Brexit, U.S. isolationism and protectionism)8 have somehow impacted circulation of goods and people. Hence, it becomes all the more significant to ponder on questions pertaining to mobility and border (individual, national) crossings. Today, hindering certain bodies from crossing borders may be used as a political argument to fight terrorism while the journalese phrase “migration crisis” cannot hide the very corporeality of the men, women, and children struck by war and starvation, who are looking for a place to inhabit, but can sometimes be expelled from places of transit or the countries they manage to arrive in, when they do not die at sea. The Mediterranean Sea, as the door to Europe for many, has recently come to be associated with a cemetery—as was the Atlantic Ocean in the context of the triangular trade. Images of people

Introduction

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displaced by war or climate change, sometimes their dead bodies swept on foreign shores, are ubiquitous on our screens and media, which is also why we felt the urge to discuss corporeal mobility. Besides, we also feel that although researchers are beginning to take interest in such topics like through the research project “Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces”9 (2020), there is still a need for engaging with such issues. Mobility, today, has come to encapsulate a wide range of movements, “from the large-scale technologies of global travel, to transnational interconnections, to everyday local mobilities—including journeys by foot, road, rail, air, and sea, at local, regional, national and transnational levels” (Aguiar et al. 2019, 2). However, critics argue that mobility does not simply imply physical movement (Marzloff 2005). The cultural geographer Tim Cresswell clearly distinguishes between movement and mobility as the former is considered as an “abstracted mobility” and the latter a “thoroughly social facet of life imbued with meaning and power,” in other words “socially produced movement” (On the Move, 2–4). Sheller elaborates on mobility to include “some of the more purely ‘social’ concerns of sociology (inequality, power, hierarchies) with the ‘spatial’ concerns of geography (territory, borders, scale) and the ‘cultural’ concerns of anthropology and media studies (discourses, representations, schemas), while inflecting each with a relational ontology of the co-constitution of subjects, spaces and meanings” (Sheller 2013, 47). Hence, mobility brings together many social, spatial, and cultural concerns in unprecedented ways, and in doing so, creates complex and multivalent relations among subjects (which are both human bodies and embodied subjects), spatiality, new technologies, and infrastructures. Scholars such as Leopoldina Fortunati and Sakari Taipale (2017) have more recently distinguished between “macro-mobilities” (consistent physical displacements such as travels), “micro-mobilities” (small-scale displacements including bodily movements), “media mobility” (new mobility provided by new gadgets), and “disembodied mobility” (the transformation in the social order), creating new useful sub-categories for the concept. In regard to corporeality, the “body” has long been conceptualized in the West as the minor component in the Cartesian paradigm, as opposed to the mind. Yet, feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz and Donna Harraway called for a “rediscovery of the body,” suggesting that “the body is simultaneously a historical, natural, technical, discursive and material entity” (Harraway 1991, 209). They helped to conceptualize it as a site of performance, relationality and as “a site of practices, comportments and contested articulations” (Bray and Colebrook 1998, 37). Although both corporeal and mobility turns emerged as separate fields of inquiry, contemporary scholarly works have illustrated complementarities between these two. Precursor works emerged as early as the 1990s such as Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992) or Caren Kaplan’s Questions of

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Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996). John Urry, at the turn of this century, conceptualized the term “corporeal travel” (2002) to include the physical travel of people for reasons as distinct as work, leisure, family life, migration, and escape. Furthermore, Urry and Sheller conceptualized the body as an embodied subject that would experience and construct different geographies: “recentring . . . the corporeal body as an affective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies” (Sheller and Urry 2006, 216). Later scholarly works have used the umbrella term of “corporeal mobility” and have broadened the scope of this study. In a subsection entitled “Embodied Subjectivities,” Aguiar, Mathieson, and Pearce insist on how central embodiment is to movement and also remind us of Urry’s take on mobility and the body: [T]ravel always involves corporeal movement. . . . Bodies navigate backwards and forwards between directly sensing the external world as they move bodily in and through it, and discursively mediated sensescapes that signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning. The body especially senses as it moves. It is endowed with kinaesthetics, the sixth sense that informs one what the body is doing in space through the sensations of movement registered in its joints, muscles, tendons, and so on. (2007, 48)

Our intention is thus to further the work that has consisted in articulating mobility and corporeality by opening the scope more specifically to the many bodies that can be depicted as mobile. In this context, it is relevant to see how the analytical lens of corporeal mobility broadens when studying it in conjunction with other fields such as feminist, post(colonial), and disability studies. In feminist studies, works such as Gendered Mobilities (Cresswell, Uteng 2008) and Gender and Mobility in Africa: Borders, Bodies and Boundaries (Hiralal, Jinnah 2018) have shown a growing interest in the field of research intersecting body studies and mobility studies. The study of this “corporeal turn” (Sheets-Johnstone 2009) has also led to the emergence of new discourses in trauma studies along with LGBTQIA+ studies or studies in “medical tourism” (Botterill, Pennings, and Mainil 2013) dealing with the circulation of corpses, body parts, and even organ transplantations. Much of the work on embodied mobility has drawn on Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology” and his conceptualization of the “body-subject”: Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’ . . . Consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learnt when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things

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through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 137–139)

Indeed, Iris Young seems to have been inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s work to draw together phenomenology and performance of gender: Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common, first that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second that the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention. (Young 1990, 146)

Feminist approaches to phenomenology still insisted upon the differentiated experiences of men and women. Therefore, works by Sara Ahmed, especially Queer Phenomenology, were critical as they brought insight into how queer and/or racialized bodies orientate spaces differently and how bodies do not just occupy spaces and times, but also transform them.10Ahmed’s work is also crucial in how it brings together corporeality and mobility when she writes about emotion and affect being irremediably linked to movement (Ahmed 2004). From a more historical perspective, during the nineteenth century, mobility was strongly associated with colonialism and imperialism which determined who was entitled to travel and to move, for example in the South African context where one may speak of “racialized mobility” (Gibson 35). At that time, the fact of moving or traveling across spaces and borders was often a privilege for the bodies of explorers and colonizers. Travel and exploration were therefore primarily reserved for white male and representatives of muscular Christian masculinity, while traveling became synonymous with adventure and/or romantic endeavor. Any digression from such norms as travel by gendered, racialized, and differently abled bodies was seen as difficult, if not impossible, except in some cases, like the movement of slaves which came to be legitimized by the plantationary system, among others. Jennie Germann Molz reminds us that there are still traces of obstacles to movement for certain categories of people in our very contemporary times even if situations always need to be nuanced and eras contextualized: It can be harder for travellers to move and harder for them to fit in when the meaning of their bodies is being read off the surface, especially when the body’s surface already tells another story about the traveller and when skin or gender or sexuality already places the traveller as a misfit. Just as access to mobility is secured for some bodies, made difficult for some bodies and altogether denied to

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other bodies, so too is ‘fitting in’ contingent on the body. In particular, women, travellers of colour, queer travellers and disabled travellers may find moving and fitting a difficult affair. (Germann Molz 2006, 16–17)

In another instance, Germann Molz recalls Chris D!’s anecdote in her article “Cosmopolitan Bodies.” Chris D!, a black American globe-trotter, has no problems traveling in Africa but had a hard time when traveling in Vienna or Cairo as he was thought to be a Nigerian immigrant. Only by showing his American passport could he be seen as entitled to be there. As Puar summarizes, “Some bodies, bodies read as brown, black, yellow, female, differently abled, queer, and so on, by necessity must always negotiate the discursive structures that render these bodies Other ” (1994, 93). This recalls Sara Ahmed’s contention in Queer Phenomenology that her body and name always precede her passport, hence her nationality, in airports. This also hints at the cultural flexibility of bodies which can be assigned and perceived differently, depending on the borders they cross and spaces they go through. We contend that along with what might be said in various discourses about, and sometimes against, traveling bodies, and what many disciplinary approaches may bring to the study of corporeal mobility,11 literature offers alternative ways of thinking about moving bodies, especially English literature, given the historical processes that have implied people, objects, ideas, and bodies moving and crossing all kinds of borders in the context of Anglophonia.12 WHAT THE STUDY OF ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE CAN TELL US ABOUT “CORPOREAL MOBILITY” The various processes of colonization, decolonization, and globalization which have shaped the English-speaking world for centuries have certainly redefined ways of representing and writing the body through literature. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) to contemporary literature, for instance Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) up to adaptations of Chaucerian work in the form of Refugee Tales,13 traveling texts and bodies have been at the core of Anglophone literature. Bodies transform themselves as they cross political, national, or cultural boundaries, and so do texts centered on bodily experiences which circulate across national, transcultural, and temporal borders in our world. An important reference to corporeal mobility in literature is Homer’s epic hero Odysseus and his journey. Odysseus, the protagonist of the Greek epic poem The Odyssey, is the archetype of the eternal traveler. In his poem “Ulysses,” Tennyson describes his zeal to travel and his quest to explore new horizons:

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That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees . . . . . . my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset . . .14

Odysseus discards the stability of his “dwelling,” in favor of traveling to other destinations to quench his incessant thirst for mobility and experience. Here, Odysseus’s affective speech gives voice to his lurking desire to explore unknown territories, making him one of the most famous travelers in classical Western literature and myth. In The Odyssey, when Odysseus lands on the island of the Cyclops with some of his men during his journey home from the Trojan War, the Cyclops asks him about his identity. He replies “Nobody—that’s my name. Nobody— so my mother and father call me” (Homer, 223). The use of the anaphora “Nobody” symbolizes disembodiment. In an attempt to save himself from being devoured by the monster, Odysseus negates his body. This example illustrates how travel and the traveler’s body are inextricably linked in this myth that can be said to be foundational of a certain conception of travel and of the traveler in the West. British writers such as Tennyson and James Joyce15 have later reimagined this character in their works, exploring further the connection between mobility and corporeality. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some British novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) drew on the picaresque genre, staging roguish characters on the move. The importance of the moving body was also visible in British travel narratives and the writings that emerged in the context of the British Empire. Chronicles, diaries, reports on expeditions or the “Grand Tour” have indeed explored the question of traveling bodies. In an article entitled “An Introduction: Travel and Body” (2005), Marguerite Helmers and Tilar J. Mazzeo recall that “the implied presence of the body has been one of the ways in which travel writers guaranteed the authenticity of their accounts” (267). Carl Thompson’s Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016) reiterates the recurring presence of the body within the genre of travel writing. White male explorers were the ones mostly traveling, imposing their views of the world on the European public.16 These writings also exemplify Said’s identification of imperial representations of the Eastern population and its landscape as “passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East” (Said 138), while London was the imperial center controlling “the whole of the Empire through its archives, its museum collections and generally through all the information and objects collected and transported from the colonial territories” (cf. Corriou in this volume). Such depictions of the East as

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“othered” spaces that could unsettle the West find an echo in imperial Gothic literature which, according to Nolwenn Corriou’s article in this book, instead of empowering the colonizer and asserting British masculine domination over Eastern lands and populations, reveals in fact “the weakness of the imperial metropolis through the failings of the English traveling body.” This figure of the failing or frail traveling body also appears in some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical writings. The life writings, diaries, travel chronicles of the Shelleys and Livingstone, for example, deconstruct the normative discourses related to the white male body and travel romance to raise issues of vulnerability, disability, and mortality. These works often draw on confessional mode and first-person narrative to convey the authors’ perspective on bodily weaknesses. These experiences are then embodied within the text itself. On the one hand, mobility may have severe consequences on the traveling bodies and more particularly in the wake of new technological advancements. Mathieson’s work Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (2015), for instance, depicts how new structures of modernity such as railways in Victorian literature led to the embodied experience of being deprived of one’s individuality, if not reduced to a non-human product. On the other hand, mobility ascribes greater agency and empowerment to traveling, border-crossing, and more often, female characters. Works such as Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) portray female bodies which, instead of being fragile and condemned to immobility and domestic spaces, gain agency, through mobility, and even create their own gendered places within public spaces through embodied practices. Pamela K. Gilbert in her article “The Body” talks about the role of literature in dealing with gender issues, “the literary was a space in which gender norms were not only chronicled and upheld, but exposed and challenged. The literary was a site of discipline, but also of transformation, allowing for a heteroglossia in which productive tension can be found between the hegemonic and the emergent” (Gilbert 5). English literature since at least the nineteenth century has portrayed the resistance and agency not only of gendered bodies, but that of many other marginalized bodies too. The figure of marginalized mobile bodies, such as racialized, differently abled, refugee, pervade Anglophone literature, from American to postcolonial literatures, depicting how these bodies are relegated to otherness by the hegemonic populations. In refugee literature, these characters many a time lack ties with space/place and are forced to always be on the move in search of home, belonging, and stability. As their lives oscillate between constant mobility and instances of imposed immobility, these refugee characters strive to move on in search of home and identity. Power relations between hegemonic forces and marginalized beings can be seen as one of the central issues that Anglophone literature has depicted since

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the nineteenth century, be it in slave narratives, Apartheid literature, or post 7/7 British literature. The plight of the oppressed victims in different sociopolitical contexts predominates in works by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Kamile Shamsie. In their works, hegemonic powers impose restrictions on certain bodies, making them disabled and even “docile” (Foucault). Paweł Wojtas’s article in this book on the works of Coetzee asserts: “corporeal (im) mobility is inextricable from the questions of political oppression, displacement, and confinement of certain social groups, such as women, colonial subalterns, or people with disabilities.” Bodies hence seem to be defined in terms of domination and subservience. Contemporary literature and rewritings on the Middle Passage, the Partition of India or the Windrush generation have also focused on traumatized and mutilated bodies in motion. The characters in Wilson Harris ’s works often carry the baggage of Middle Passage and slavery. They constantly feel that their bodies are stuck between confinement and displacement as they tirelessly and constantly struggle to break free from political and social compulsions, using their bodies and mobility as weapons. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, postcolonial and migration writers have been increasingly interested in bodies which can be made disabled, invisible, and are transformed when they transgress borders between the personal and the public, the Global North and South. Such authors have reflected upon the dialectics between home and elsewhere. Works by postcolonial writers such as Jude Dibia and Jhumpa Lahiri suggest that bodies have the ability to narrate untold, silent, and non-representable socio-historical experiences of mobilities, be it micro-mobilites or macro-mobilities. The moving body, whose skin operates as a border but not only, can be perceived as a testimony of experiences of leaving, border-crossing, and re-settling in their writings. It may also serve as agency of resistance, transgression, and identity reconstruction while embodying hopes of liberation and empowerment in the host country. As Elizabeth Grosz reminds us: “As well as being the site of knowledge-power, the body is thus also a site of resistance, for it exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counter-strategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways” (Grosz 1990, 64). Hence, the bodies seem to be always caught in a process of becoming. Anglophone literature is not only pregnant with representations of mobile bodies; it also displays mobilities within literature. The postcolonial Bildungsroman is one such genre which has appropriated the Western Bildungsroman to highlight the poetics of corporeality in the postcolonial context. Authors resort to “imaginative mobilities”17 in their artistic endeavor as their imagination transgresses boundaries of time and space to get an insight into psychological workings (“voyage intérieur”

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as is said in French) or to imaginatively conceive of pasts and futures. Mobility can thus be conceived as “ontological mobility” and can lead to representations of fluid identities. One can also witness mobilities within the oeuvre of one single author. Jamaica Kincaid, for instance, constantly shifts between different genres, escaping from fixed standards and labels. Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika’s study of textual mobility in relation to the works of Kincaid may also apply to several other authors in English literature: “the author’s dislocating syntax, foregrounding equivocal word arrangement and unlikely collocations, along with her consistent use of digression and misuse of punctuation highlight motion on yet another mode” (Kekeh-Dika in this volume). This is an important way in which mobilities pervade literature. The digital era has also taken imaginative mobilities to another level as writers have been able to turn to the internet to access a greater range of subjects. Kamila Shamsie explained in an interview the type of digital research she carried out about religious fundamentalism in order to write Home Fire and how anxious she felt that she might come under the radar of European authorities.18 When talking about contemporary digital era, one also sees the emergence of new formats of digital or cyber literature in the Anglosphere, such as Rick Moody’s short story, “Some Contemporary Characters,” which was written in 153 bursts of 140 characters or less, to fit the medium. Such authors are using transmedial design to convey stories and are also reconstructing the readerauthor connections in innumerable ways.19 As was mentioned earlier, other fields of academia have explored the crux between body and motion, such as studies on organ transplantation which provides interesting examples of (parts of) bodies in movement. Yet, a novel like Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015), which offers a glimpse into the lives of Indian characters moving from India to Britain, grappling with prejudice, poverty, and unemployment, also features Avtar, one Indian character who has sold one of his kidneys to travel to England with student visa. This is one among many examples that can show the extent to which literature can prove useful in providing scholars with renewed directions into the study of “corporeal mobility.” CORPOREALITY AND MOBILITY IN NINETEENTH- TO TWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE In this volume, we wish to probe how the narration of mobile bodies questions social identities and discourses on sexuality, nationality, race, terrorism,

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and may produce new subjectivities and relationalities. As Urry and Sheller recall in their article setting up their “new mobilities” paradigm, All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces—these and many others fill the world’s airports, buses, ships, and trains. (2006, 207)

Here are some of the questions that fostered our reflection: How are body circulations depicted and performed in writings from the English-speaking world? Are there specific modalities of writing about mobile bodies in the Anglophone context? Whose bodies are in motion in Anglophone literature? How does analyzing such a diversity of bodies transform mobility studies? And in parallel, to what extent is the field of mobility studies useful to rethink corporeality? How do mobile bodies possibly transform the genres of travel writing and migrant fiction written in English? How do such writings transform, or at least impact, real bodies and their cultural representations? How does modernity affect representations of the body in travel, migration, and refugee literature? And in more ethical terms, we wanted to think about how we could speak, from an academic point of view, about subjects and bodies being displaced, traumatized, forced to move or to remain immobile, without speaking on behalf of real subjects. How are we to analyze such literature from the comfort of our homes and institutional academic positions? As a matter of fact, there seems to be a lack of research on the intersection between body studies and mobility studies in Anglophone literature despite the fact that it abounds with stories of circulation of characters and of how movement is experienced through their bodies.20 This collection of essays is thus an occasion for international scholars to investigate the intersection of literary, mobility, and body studies, among others, in the English-speaking world. It undertakes to provide further insight into how bodies and embodied subjectivities have been portrayed in complex and ambivalent ways from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century in Anglophone literature. It felt indeed necessary to trace the relation between corporeality and mobility back to the nineteenth century for as Kate Hill argues, If Mary Baine Campbell can write of the twenty-first century, “the old motifs of the journey—home, departure, destination, the liminal space between—have lost their reference in the lived experience of most people who are not tourists” (Campbell 2002, 263), . . . this hyper-mobility and loss of fixed points has its roots in the nineteenth-century. (Hill 2016, 1)

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Categories of “home” and “away” have themselves been redefined as “traveling concepts” and their “provisional nature . . . forged in the nineteenth century (Hill 2016, 7–8) and we would add, partly in Anglophone literature. Current discussions on home-going, homelessness, and regrounding thus find their roots in earlier depictions of travel and movement, hence the inclusion of essays tackling the Shelleys as travelers or nineteenth-century explorers. The volume draws on various methodologies, from literary analysis to archival examination. It also gathers contributions from international scholars from across the globe. In this volume, we are looking more particularly into how issues of gender, race, national identity complexify the articulation between body and movement and can create new subjectivities, sometimes fragmented, sometimes re-made as a whole, as well as redefine the spaces in which bodies move. The book aims at deconstructing normative representations of gender, disability, and identity by conjuring up alternative mobile bodies. We also wish to reflect on the various ways of traveling, ranging from travel as recreational activity to forced mobility (or immobility). Our objective is thus to explore the different scales of mobilities and their impact on bodies in different spatial (urban, countryside, Western, non-Western) and temporal (from nineteenth- to twenty-first century) contexts. The book will therefore demonstrate how human bodies are always in processes of transition as they navigate across transnational and local spaces, either through simple acts of movement such as walking, a movement enhanced by technologies or while migrating and traveling in transnational spaces. Indeed, we wish to question mobility’s frequent association with a Western conception of modernity as indeed, mobility is not just a prerogative of the West. Many of the articles in this volume will thus focus on mobility as it is experienced by often “othered” bodies and performed in texts written in the Global South. The book is divided into four parts. Part I of the volume discusses representations and performance of bodies in motion that have been othered and marginalized in English literature, especially bodies of female travelers or wanderers. Sun Jai Kim’s chapter looks into the moves of Lady Audley who, through her mastery of railway timetables but also of active walking, manages to challenge her opponent’s lesser mobility, and thus gains agency. The author states that the work stands out against more traditional depictions of male bodies in motion in the nineteenth century. This article embraces mobility not just as physical movement but also technology-enhanced movements, as well as it reflects on the effects of technology on bodies. It indeed shows how new mobility infrastructures may affect human bodies, leading to the reconstruction of the female subject and complexifying notions of space and place in this novel, reminding us by the same token of the centrality of technology in mobility studies.

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Although Nolwenn Corriou’s article also takes us back to colonial times, it introduces us with doubly “othered” bodies, those of Egyptian mummies. The mummy figure challenges the imperial dynamics according to which the male figure could be seen as the explorer and the female as the territory to be conquered, as Said showed in Orientalism (1978). Corriou’s article defines the body of the mummy as a polymorphous body moving reluctantly, as it is forced outside Egypt, and consequently seeking for revenge. Besides providing a reflection on body commodification, her chapter shows how the colonial body, in the form of the mummy, may threaten the archetypal Victorian male body, thus articulating another form of embodied mobility in the British colonial context with Stephen Arata’s concept of “reverse colonisation.”21 Finally, Solveig Dunkel’s article deals with transient bodies in Faulkner’s Light in August, more particularly the bodies of a Black man and a pregnant woman moving through America in the interwar period, which adds new intersectional layers to the analysis of “othered” bodies in motion. The article shows how the two bodies may be altered by “oppressive Southern perceptions of gender, sexuality and race” (Dunkel, in this volume). It also discusses the dialectics of mobility/immobility as it highlights instances of imposed mobility and forced immobility, thus opening the scope to more complex forms of mobility which are not always associated with conscious will or recreational leisure. Part II, entitled “Disabled Bodies, Ailing Bodies and Mobility,” will focus on more alternative figures to the white, healthy, male travelers, that is to say, on disabled and/or ailing bodies in literature written in English. Clifford had thought about the difficult predicament of “free[ing] the related term ‘travel’ from a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational, meanings and practices” (1992, 106). More recently, Mazzeo and Helmers recalled how the “imperial eye at its most penetrating” has come to be identified with “the disembodied organ of an unmarked white, male body that is always subject and never object” (Mazzeo, Helmers 2005, 268). This is where Odysseus introducing himself as nobody rings interestingly, as Odysseus remains the archetype of the traveler in the West. The idea at the heart of this part is hence to present alternative figures to the normalized traveler trope as the latter is characterized among others by his healthy condition. Indeed, as Roger Keil reminds us, “disease has often been associated with immobility” (Roger Keil (388–397) in Routledge Companion to Mobility). Fabien Desset’s article on the traveling bodies of the Shelleys re-centers notions of illness and weakness as the couple travels throughout Europe on foot, by boat, or on a mule’s back, which suggests the trials that may be associated with traveling, especially in nineteenth-century Europe. Desset’s

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contribution interestingly discusses the mythification and mystification of Shelley’s traveling body in his works as opposed to what could be read in the couple’s diaries. Guillaume Didier’s article shows how another mythic figure, that of Livingstone, the archetypal British explorer, challenges the norms both of Victorian masculinity and traveling masculinity by presenting disease as an essential component of his exploratory endeavors. It underlines how reading archives can challenge the heroic stance of such explorers and even the discourse that was mostly conveyed in their travel narratives. Contributions particularly by Corriou, Didier, and Desset show to what extent sickness is inextricably linked to mobile bodies, while all the papers in this section challenge hackneyed discourses about mobility being that only of elite, healthy, white, and often male bodies. Finally, Paweł Wojtas’s article discusses early works by J. M. Coetzee and shows how mobility has to be thought of alongside considerations of race, but also disability. His work particularly highlights how depicting “restricted mobility” in the South African context and impaired bodies may challenge the ableist perspectives that have long pervaded in discussions on mobility. The third section of the book deals with the ways in which we can reconceptualize mobile bodies in our contemporary times. It consists in a reflection on the possible articulation between mobility and empowerment. Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika’s article tackles several forms of mobile bodies in regard to Jamaica Kincaid’s works—be they the author’s name, works as bodies that evolve through time and space, the mobility of her “oeuvre” between genres, or the questioning of bodily integrity in her works through a performance of fragmented bodies that can hardly be reconfigured into a whole. Fabienne Franvil’s chapter also deals with the Caribbean, this time focusing on the limbo dance. It shows how this type of dance articulates corporeality, movement but also the history of bodies as they experienced the Middle Passage or slavery, or as they are reimagined and transformed through various mobilities (spatial or creative) in contemporary times. Her article partakes of the structural reflection in the volume on how corporeal mobility may be instrumental in gaining agency and empowerment and how cultures travel through moving bodies across transnational spaces. As Elvira Pulitano puts it, the Caribbean can be seen as being characterized by the diasporic condition. According to her, “the writings of Kincaid, Cliff, Danticat, and Phillips reflect a literary aesthetic that map gender geographies of displacement and belonging at the same time as they transcend conventional identity binary paradigms and narrative structure (male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, fiction/non-fiction)” (2016, 7). In her book, Pulitano

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also asks a set of questions that cannot but echo the very ones we have asked ourselves when conceiving this very volume: What do the stories narrated by Kincaid, Cliff, Danticat, and Phillips tell us about the movement of people mapped out in contemporary diaspora discourse and how do their fictions illuminate the experience of migration? How are the various tropes characterising conceptualisations of diaspora—such as the tension between host country and homeland, the myth of return, exile, and so forth—explicated when enacted in the daily experience of individuals ‘living’ the diaspora condition? . . . How do the categories of gender and sexual orientation affect the changing character of Caribbean diasporas? (2016, 7)

If some of these questions apply to the Caribbean, larger ones may be asked in regard to other transnational spaces. Cédric Courtois’s contribution focuses, for instance, on the mobility of a female character between Africa and Europe in Jude Dibia’s Unbridled and invites us to complexify the idea that mobility equals empowerment. While the novel presents the evolution of this female protagonist whose movement is hindered while she is in Nigeria to her body becoming progressively more mobile as she becomes a subject and an agent, and can express her own voice, Cédric Courtois’s article also highlights the specific take that the novel operates on the traditional Bildungsroman by looking into the specificities of corporeal movement when it is embodied by an African, female subject. This once again challenges more traditional images of male travelers in literatures written in English. Finally, the fourth section focuses on migrant bodies, identities, and subjectivities in contemporary times of crises. Maureen Fielding analyses poems taken from When the Wanderers Come Home by the Liberian American poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley in order to draw insightful connections between the intimate and the political when for instance, in the poems, fighting a disease echoes fighting a war. The study delves into what “coming home” might mean for displaced or violated female subjects—and their bodies—while it underlines a connection between trauma and migration. One can also think about how readers across the world, being faced with texts on “corporeal mobility,” often traumatic, in cultures different than their own, may relate to others’ experience through empathy. Neela Cathelain’s contribution focuses on two mobile figures, those of the terrorist and of the refugee in Mohsin Hamid’s and Jumpa Lahiri’s works. These figures, albeit standing in stark contrast, may be related in terms of how they undergo processes of evolution, though their transnational mobility often differs from the fantasy of social mobility that can be found in the Bildungsroman. Cathelain looks into how these two figures may challenge

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discourses on both mobility and corporeality. Her article makes it a necessity to think of affect, and of the feeling of shame, as productive components of a reflection on corporeal mobility. It also echoes David Lloyd’s contention that shame and mobility should be thought of conjunctively as he showed in a lecture entitled “Colonial Shaming and Postcolonial Shame” in December 2020.22 Lastly, Sandrine Soukai’s chapter, which focuses on Kamila Shamsie’s novel, Home Fire, also considers the figure of the terrorist within a more general reflection on how mobile bodies, both living or dead, moving across borders or forced to immobility, may evolve from being compliant to resistant. Her article also focuses on transnational connections and information mobilities made possible by the internet. As we are completing this collection, we can only acknowledge that much more could be said about the representations and performances of “corporeal mobility” in literatures written in English but we hope to have contributed in raising awareness about these questions.

NOTES 1. French Intellectuals Slam Leila Slimani Over Tone Deaf COVID-19 Diary (moroccoworldnews​.c​om). Accessed on November 25, 2020. 2. The ‘Let-Them-Eat-Cake’ Lockdown Diaries (thedailybeast​.c​om). Accessed on November 25, 2020. 3. Although Foucault talks about the strict measures taken by the government, such as constant inspection, quarantine, against plague in the seventeenth century, his statements certainly hold relevance in the COVID-19 context. Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 4. In her speech entitled “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” (2011), Judith Butler discusses the material and bodily nature of the masses, moving and speaking together in public space: “So when we think about what it means to assemble in a crowd, a growing crowd, and what it means to move through public space in a way that contests the distinction between public and private, we see some way that bodies in their plurality lay claim to the public, find and produce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments” (3d7​2261​800b​ c7ac​2f73​5327​0a8f​59287​a9be​.pdf (semanticscholar​.o​rg)). Butler considers that these “congregate” bodies, which are no longer silent or passive, are making a difference through their collective action and solidarity. She particularly insists on the materiality of such bodies and on how the possibility of politics exists by their relationality: “For politics to take place, the body must appear . . . No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone, when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerged from

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the “between.”” Mobile bodies can, hence, act as weapons of resistance, transgression, civil disobedience, and be empowered through the collective. 5. In Frames of War (2010), Judith Butler argues that “precariousness” is the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other (14). To her, precarious people are people who “are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection” (25–26). 6. Indeed, corporeal mobility implies physical mobility—the distance that is traveled from a place to another—but also “embodied mobility” (Sellberg 2015). The body is at the heart of travel: it is what will experience weariness or excitement, what will be submitted to vaccination; it is in other words the physical mass that experiences movement. The body is literally what the mobile person drags along with themselves when traveling. Corporeal mobility does not only refer to physical bodies moving, but also to the perception of such mobile bodies. 7. One may think of how people use apps such as GPS to find directions nowadays or how far easier and cheaper it has become to travel through Europe or the world on trains, planes, yet at the expense of the environment. 8. This was particularly visible with Donald Trump’s motto “America First” as well as the fact that one of his pledges during the 2016 election campaign was to have a wall erected along the border between the United States and Mexico. 9. For more information on the project, see: https://mfo​ .web​ .ox​ .ac​ .uk​ /event​ / webinar​-thanatic​-ethics​-circulation​-bodies​-migratory​-spaces 10. This echoes Michel de Certeau’s work The Practice of Everyday Life where de Certeau explains how people, by occupying a place with their bodies and their practices, transform it into space. This also connects with Urry’s work on the “tourist gaze” in which he discusses the corporeality of tourists and here again, how they may transform places into spaces by the mere fact of physically occupying the former. Cf. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2012). 11. Cf. for instance Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (2015) or Mobile Bodies, Mobile Souls: Family, Religion and Migration in a Global World (2011). 12. In their groundbreaking volume Mobilities, Literature, Culture (2019), Aguiar, Mathieson, and Pearce highlighted that one key aim of their book was to encourage literary scholars to draw on mobilities theory in their research and to help mobilities reach out people outside the social sciences. 13. For more information, cf. About—Refugee Tales. Accessed on December 9, 2020. 14. See here: https://rpo​.library​.utoronto​.ca​/poems​/ulysses. 15. It is therefore interesting to see how “James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses (1922) is everywhere concerned with the body, with how it works, what it does, with how it is talked about—from personal relationships to cultural production to religion to politics” (Bennett and Royle 195). 16. One main exception to these male traveling accounts would be Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) where one may read about how crucial it was to her to be seen in her Victorian skirts, echoing the idea that the mobile body may be read as sign and performance.

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17. “Imaginative mobility” was defined by John Urry in Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 21st Century. Noel B. Salazar recalls “how imagination . . . and imaginaries . . . are crucial for very different forms of human (im)mobility” (“On imagination and imaginaries, mobility and immobility: Seeing the forest for the trees”). 18. Kamila Shamsie. Interview. Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire | Adapting Antigone and Googling While Muslim—YouTube. Accessed on December 6, 2020. 19. Digital writings such as travel blogs or travelers’ personal websites have also confirmed the centrality of the body in their traveling accounts: “Though travellers often describe their websites as sites of virtual travel, their online journals are replete with ‘body stories.’ Travellers transport their readers via vivid accounts of intestinal illnesses, uncomfortably crowded bus rides, unbearably filthy toilets, suffocating humidity, delicious food and incredible views that provide the reader with vicarious access to the traveller’s world” (Germann Molz 2006, 6). 20. We should mention here Emma Bond’s book, Writing Migration through the Body (2018) which studies the body as a site of articulation and negotiation of the transnational experience of mobility in a selection of recent migration stories in Italian. 21. See Arata. 22. For more information, cf. Inaugural conference—Shame Network (hypotheses​ .o​rg). The aim of this conference held online on December 4, 2020 was to initiate the work of the Shame Network and to discuss shame from an interdisciplinary perspective.

WORKS CITED About—Refugee Tales (https://www.refugeetales.org) Adey, Peter, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, Mimi Sheller, editors. The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2014. Adey, Peter. Mobility. Second edition. London, New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. Aguiar, Marian, Mathieson Charlotte, and Lynne Pearce. Mobilities, Literature, Culture. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Banerjee, Bidisha, Judith Misrahi-Barak, and Thomas Lacroix. “‘Thanatic Ethics’: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces,” http://www​.cpch​.hk​/thanatic​-ethics​-the​-circulation​-of​-bodies​-in​-migratory​-spaces/​?fbclid​=IwA​R1xO​ry3B​pkpgljOLJ​_kvQ​ZkOs​GGbg​i8MK​fnOT​S3H3​gLrQ​sfAfs8​_ZfUtMo. Accessed December 2, 2020. Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle (editors). An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Fifth Edition. Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2016. Bond, Emma. Writing Migration Through the Body, New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

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Botterill, David, Guido Pennings, and Tomas Mainil. Medical Tourism and Transnational Healthcare, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2008. Bray, Abigail and Claire Colebrook. “The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (dis)Embodiment.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 24. no. 1, 1998, pp. 35–67. Butler, Judith. “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” Transversal​.a​t. 2011. ———. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. Clifford, James. “Travelling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Cary Nelson Lawrence and Paula Treichler. London; New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 96–111. Cresswell, Tim. “Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility: The Case of Female Tramps and Hobos,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 24, no. 2, 1999, pp. 175–192. ———. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, London: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 17–31. Cresswell, Tim, and Tanu Priya Uteng (editors). Gendered Mobilities, Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. 1722. Wordsworth Classics, 2001. Fortunati, Leopoldina and Sakari Taipale. “Mobilities and the network of personal technologies: Refining the understanding of mobility structure,” Telematics and Informatics, vol. 34, Issue 2, May 2017, pp. 560–568, https://www​.sciencedirect​.com​/science​/article​/abs​/pii​/S0736585316303173​?via​%3Dihub. Accessed December 2, 2020. Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. 1749. Ware, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books: New York, 1995. Germann Molz, Jennie. “Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and Travelling to Fit,” Body & Society, vol. 12, no. 3, 2006. Gilbert, Pamela K. “The Body.” Introduction to special issue of Victorian Network, vol. 6, no.1 (Summer 2015), pp. 1–6. Gibson, Sarah. “Railing Against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa,” in Mobilities, Literature, Culture, edited by Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 35–63. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-3​-030​-27072​-8​_2. Accessed November 26, 2020. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. “Inscriptions and body-maps: Representations of the corporeal,” in Feminine/Masculine and representation, edited by T. Threadgold and A. CrannyFrancis, Allen & Unwin, pp. 62–74. Hannam Kevin, Sheller Mimi, and John Urry. (2006) “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–22, DOI: 10.1080/17450100500489189 Harraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, 1991. Helmers, Marguerite, and Tilar J. Mazzeo, “An Introduction: Travel and Body,” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 267–276. Hill, Kate. “Narratives of Travel, Narratives that Travel,” in Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects, edited by Kate Hil. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2016, pp. 1–10. Hiralal, Kalpana, and Zaheera Jinnah (editors). Gender and Mobility in Africa: Borders, Bodies and Boundaries, London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Books: 1997. https://sites​ .middlebury​.edu​/feastsandfestivals​/files​/2015​/09​/odyssey​-book​-9​.pdf. Accessed November 26, 2020. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Keil, Roger. In Routledge Companion to Mobility, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 388–397. Kingsley, Mary Henrietta. Travels in West Africa: Congo français, Corisco and Cameroons, London, Macmillan, 1897. Marzloff, Bruno. Mobilités, trajectoires fluides. Monde en cours Bibliothèque des territoires. La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2005. Mathieson, Charlotte. Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Moody, Rick. “Some Contemporary Characters.” on Twitter (＃ElectricLit) Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge, 1992. Puar, Jasbir K. “Writing My Way ‘Home’: Traveling South Asian Bodies and Diasporic Journeys,” Socialist Review 24(4), 1994, pp. 75–108. Ritter, Mikkel, and Karen Fog Olwig (editors). Mobile Bodies, Mobile Souls: Family, Religion and Migration in a Global World, Proceedings of the Danish Institute in Damascus, Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2011. Pulitano, Elvira. Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean: Diasporic Literature and the Human Experience, New York; London: Routledge, 2016. Research Platform Mobile Cultures and Societies, “Entangled Im/Mobilities” project. https://mobilecultures​.univie​.ac​.at​/en​/conference2021. Accessed December 6, 2020. Roy, Arundhati. “Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal,’” Financial Times, April 3, 2020. https://www​.ft​.com​/content​/10d8f5e8​-74eb​-11ea​-95fe​-fcd274e920ca. Accessed November 26, 2020.

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Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Salazar, Noel. “On imagination and imaginaries, mobility and immobility: Seeing the forest for the trees,” Culture and Psychology, Sage Journals, June 2020. Sellberg, Karin, Lena Wanggren, and Kamillea Aghtan (editors). Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement, Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Shamsie, Kamila. Interview. Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire | Adapting Antigone and Googling While Muslim—YouTube. Accessed December 6, 2020. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exter: Imprint Academic, 2009. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A, 2006, vol. 38, pp. 207–226. Sheller, Mimi. “Sociology After the Mobilities Turn,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, Mimi Sheller, 2014, pp. 45–54. Tennyson, Alfred L, “Ulysses,” originally published in Poems, 2 vols. (Boston: W. D. Ticknor, 1842). Available online at https://rpo​.library​.utoronto​.ca​/poems​/ulysses. Accessed December 5, 2020. Thompson, Carl, editor. Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, London; New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2016. Urry, John. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 21st Century, London: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Mobility and proximity.” Sociology, vol. 36 issue. 2, pp. 255–274. ———. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Urry, John and J. Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Los Angeles; London; New Delhi; Singapore; Washington: Sage, 2011. Françoise, Vergès. Un féminisme décolonial, Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2019. Young, Iris M., Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1990.

Part I

OTHER(ED) AND MARGINALIZED BODIES IN MOTION

Chapter 1

Lucy’s Transgressive Moves in Lady Audley’s Secret Sun Jai Kim

INTRODUCTION Diverse fields, such as postcolonial writings, migration studies, trauma studies, and cultural geology, have recognized the role that mobile bodies played in the narration of socio-historical experiences of border-crossing, traveling, and empowerment. In particular, mobility studies have shown great interest in rounding out the ways in which mobile bodies constitute the classed, gendered, and racial geographies in different spatial settings. However, there have been relatively few studies on how physical and social practices coalesce in embodied practice of women. In this chapter, I seek to delve into a richer understanding of female mobility through my reading of one of the most powerful Victorian narratives on women’s mobility, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Through her promotion of mobility as a heroine’s virtue, Braddon invests Lucy Graham with a power to rethink the gendered domains of space solidified in the Victorian era. The chapter first examines how the novel recasts female mobility in the public space as an embodied performance and then analyzes the narrative strategy of the novel, by which Lucy’s bodily empowerment is accentuated. I will finally rethink the putatively conventional ending of the novel. Most strikingly in this novel various means of motion such as railways, broughams, and walking provide Lucy with a venue of triumph. I will closely examine how the novel pursues an exploration of female mobility, transformed and transforming, through the body’s involvement with these means. LUCY’S BODY ON THE RAIL I consider the ways in which Lady Audley’s Secret explores the new dynamics of space through presenting a series of crimes committed by Lucy Graham, 27

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who becomes Lady Audley through bigamy in the early parts of the novel. Rooted in her acute understanding into how the bourgeois masculine order is constructed around the perfunctory maintenance of a safe domestic space, the series of Lucy’s crimes menace the normative structure of Victorian society. Most noticeably, the enclosed new space of the railway compartment provides Lucy with an intensified sense of privacy, even more than in the domestic sphere where she is not entirely free from surveillance,1 and with self-gratification in fabricating the enclosed private unit despite a dangerous sensation of being incarcerated among the other traveling commodities and bodies at the same time. In this respect, I refer to Mathieson’s recent observation in Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (2015) of how the bodies in Braddon’s sensational novels are transformed into a nonhuman commercial product, embodying “the notion of the traveler-as-parcel,” and into a space itself within the modern railway system (83). However, differing from Mathieson who focuses more on the characters’ loss of individuality on the railway journey, I contend that the novel incessantly recasts Lucy’s body as a contested terrain and as a constructed effect of her public performance by maximizing her mobile agency throughout the journey and expanding the base of her movements. Taking advantage of the enclosed form of the compartment, Lucy domesticates the public space of the public transportation and protects herself from potential threats of being discovered. Lucy’s domestication of the railway compartment, I argue, becomes a miniature of the novel’s larger stories of her empowerment through movements. Her empowerment is manifested through her series of embodied public performance and I particularly refer to Gender Trouble (1990) in which Judith Butler rethinks the notion of a matrix of power introduced by Michel Foucault. For Butler, there exists no power that acts by itself, but only a reiterated acting that functions as power in its persistence and instability (xviii). Viewed from this angle, Lucy’s public performance can be understood as a form of reiterative recast of power: she cleverly exploits the mask of Victorian femininity to paradoxically exercise her incredible mobility, which enables her to explore the modern public transport and to commit crimes while continuously violating her roles defined by the patriarchal order in the family, those of mother and wife. Throughout the narrative, Lucy is characterized by the speed of her thoughts and shrewdness to understand complicated railway timetables. The novel criticizes middle-class male authorities by showing that Lucy’s physical stamina and understanding of the modern railway system far surpass those of Robert Audley, a nephew of Sir Michael (Lucy’s second husband) and a barrister who traces her. Until he decides to investigate the past of Lucy to solve the mysterious disappearance of his friend George Talbot (Lucy’s first husband), Robert is apt to be described as rather slothful and indifferent to winning a case: in short, “he was a handsome, lazy, care-for-nothing

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fellow” (32). Lucy competes with Robert over prompt and timely movement to escape his dragnet or to forestall his investigation. Lucy defeats Robert in movement thanks to her agility and punctual reading of sophisticated railway timetables across cities. Contextualizing Robert’s railway travel within the arrival of capitalist modernity, Mathieson describes Robert’s torpor in the railway to be “his non-human status” “incarcerated by the confining effects of new structures of modernity” (Mobility in the Victorian Novel 84). Mathieson’s description is drawn from Braddon’s caricature of Robert during his journey on an express train to Southampton. Braddon writes: Robert’s body, wrapped in “so many comforters and railway rugs,” is seen to be “a perambulating mass of woolen goods rather than a living member of a learned profession” (161). In the railway compartment, shrunk with cold and swathed in blankets, Robert is even seen to have undergone disembodiment. The line is blurred between his human body and an indistinct mass of objects. Lucy’s mastery of the railway travel for her criminal purposes, however, stands in stark contrast to Robert’s helplessness and reluctance. Considering the complexity of the contemporary railway timetables published in England and the difficulty that Victorian people experienced in accurately reading them to take the pertinent train, Lucy is at the forefront of training and mobilizing the ability of modernistic time management to her own advantage. Lucy’s sense of time is far ahead of Robert in all its bearing, particularly in that she makes a move when Robert relaxes attention: for instance, witnessing a brougham bearing Lucy driving through the snow-flakes in the cold snowy morning in January astonishes Robert. The incredible physical mobility Lucy exerts to accomplish her purpose reflects on an extensive scale her keen reading of Victorian industrial society rapidly moving toward modernity which has built around the railway. The industrial society’s rapid growth was entwined with its promotion of a punctual conception of time as the time table of trains illustrated with their great influence on people’s daily lives. Lucy’s mobility is the force that enables this new conception of time to be concretely established into the narrative. Lucy’s infiltration into the public transportation system threatens Robert’s professional calmness and forces him out to enter into competition with her in the public sphere. Contrasting Lucy’s clever use of the railway travel to Robert’s futile detective work, Daniel Martin also highlights how cunningly Lucy uses “the railway’s annihilation of spaces” to create her “multiple identities” (140). Becoming a contested terrain of transgressive public performance, Lucy’s body also starts to represent the women on the railway in the mid-Victorian period. Indeed, Martin writes: “He [Robert] may eventually be able to arrest Lady Audley’s movements, but her body itself functions as a synecdoche of a larger dispersal of mobile women riding the rails in search of upward mobility throughout the early to middle years of the Victorian

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era” (140). Similarly, in After the Great Divide, Andreas Huyssen has shown interest in the pervasive notion which held ground during the nineteenth century that mass culture and the masses in the public sphere are associated with femininity: “The fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass” (52). The novel represents what Huyssen conceptualized as “the fear of woman” in Robert’s fatiguing experiences of incessantly chasing Lucy via the railway travel. Against the anxieties that Robert undergoes, Lucy smoothly moves to different locations in England via the railway, which allows her to leave her past miseries including poverty, failed honeymoon, and her former identity behind the movements of mass. Throughout her movements, Lucy’s body liberates itself from former marks of “the petty miseries, the burning shames, the cruel sorrows and the bitter disgraces” (171) and embodies a formative energy, which should be understood, according to what Butler argues that “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (Gender Trouble xix). My constative claim about Lucy’s embodiment is referring to her body’s performative quality in Butler’s sense. The novel’s description of Robert’s railway journey is interspersed with its emphasis on the bleakest of landscapes in England, which mirrors Robert’s sense of solitariness: “The shrieking engine bore him on the dreary northward journey, whirling him over desert wastes of flat meadow-land and bare corn-fields, faintly tinted with fresh sprouting green” (241–242). Robert almost loses half his sense of self among a crowd of passengers, porters, and a heap of suitcases. While Robert’s body almost loses its sense of location and more critically experiences a shivering sensation of loneliness among the passengers, Lucy keeps her sense of safe privacy in the public space of the railway compartment and holds a level of composure, which contributes to building up her sense of empowerment. When Robert first comes across Lucy on the railway platform, “the platform at Shoreditch,” he is puzzled by how defiant, punctual, and sparkling Lucy is. Lucy’s conformative energy behind her complete self-possession confounds Robert (144). Robert thinks: “She is altogether a different being to the wretched, helpless creature who dropped her mask for a moment, and looked at me with her own pitiful face, in the little room at Mount Stanning, four hours ago” (145). On the other hand, Lucy isn’t embarrassed at all by the encounter and lets Robert open the carriagedoor for her: she graciously spreads “her furs over her knees” and arranges “the huge velvet mantle in which her slender little figure was almost hidden” (145). The sartorial details demonstrate that Lucy has exactly predicted what would be required for her to maintain her dignity during the railway journey. The corporeal description, “her slender little figure,” sounds almost unisex as

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she hides her feminine body in the railway amenity. Hiding her femininity in the mantle would cover her from any potential attacks or robbery that targets the travelers. Lucy’s mastery at performing ambiguous gendered identities amplifies her freedom in mobility. Lucy’s trained proficiency at protecting her grace in the railway compartment is based on her sense of independent movements and mastery of how the railway system works. In contrast, Robert keeps feeling that he is forced into the travel, the pursuit of Lucy’s secret, and his body is often swept along in the crowds and colossal heaps of luggage: “Amidst a crowd of porters and scattered heaps of that incongruous and heterogeneous luggage with which travelers encumber themselves, he was led, bewildered and half asleep, to another train, which was to convey him along the branch line that swept past Wildernsea, and skirted the border of the German Ocean” (242). In short, the energy of Robert’s body is significantly drained on the rail, whereas the fact that Lucy manages to domesticate the portion of the mobile public place like the railway compartment grants her a sense of agency even in the very last moment of her shameful banishment from England to a mad house in Belgium at the end of the narrative. Traveling by the Dover route to the mad house where she is supposed to be incarcerated, Lucy is “comfortably wrapped in her furs”; “she had not, forgoteen her favorite Russian sables even in this last hour of shame and misery” (383). Viewed from this angle, I can even contend that Lucy’s incarceration in the mad house at the end of the story is not a complete loss of her control but a rather grim opportunity to exert her domesticating skill in another public space. That Lucy should improvise a performance of femininity for the purpose of deceiving Robert and other potential observers in the London railway station demonstrates that the novel separates the power of domestic femininity from Victorian home to complicate the sense of masculine order which heavily relies on the female integrity in behavior. The following lines of Lucy to Robert when they meet at the London station demonstrate how she can cover the real motivation of her travel to London—to snatch the former letters of hers that Robert has secured as evidence of her past married life to George—by assuming to be only interested in consumption of luxury items and decorative materials as men would commonly expect women’s relationship to capitalist market to be. Lucy speaks to Robert: “You will think me very foolish to travel upon such a day, without my dear darling’s knowledge too; but I went up to town to settle a very terrific milliner’s bill, which I did not wish my best of husbands to see; for indulgent as he is, he might think me extravagant; and I cannot bear to suffer even in his thoughts” (145). The moment of this exchange between Lucy and Robert is when Lucy has just arrived at the station and seated herself in a “down-train for Colchester” (144) and “the train moves as she spoke” (145). Lucy’s speed of thought is

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in line with the speed of the train. Lucy immediately assumes the role of a consumption-oriented woman when confronting Robert. Beneath the mask, Lucy is shrewd enough to take immediate action the moment she hears about “the packet of letters written to the missing men by [George’s] dead wife” and she is defiant enough to bribe a blacksmith to sneak into Robert’s room to get the letters, which might have betrayed her secret of bigamy as the handwriting on them is hers. The novel thus stages a confrontation between a working-class woman, Lucy, who elevates herself to the status of upper-class woman, Lady Audley, by contriving bigamy, and a middle-class bourgeois man, Robert. Critics have shown particular interest in analyzing gender dynamics operating within the novel around the issue of mobility and sense of modernity. They have made inquiries into the novel’s depiction of gender-specific stamina, mobility, and engagements with modern technology such as the railway system. For instance, Eva Badowska, Martin, and Mathieson all point out that, different from domestic fiction, a sensational novel like Lady Audley’s Secret trains its subjects to move outside of the household and gives them opportunities to understand modernity by exposing them to the narrative thrills and new devices such as the Victorian railway.2 Badowska focuses on how Braddon’s novel effectively captures the paradox of modern culture, its newness and modernity’s destined obsolescence. In particular, Badowska regards Robert as representing anxieties about the threat posed by Lady Audley to the old Audley estate, yet she also argues that his amateurish clumsy investigation into Lady Audley’s crimes reflect the novel’s insight into the paradox of modernity: its “incipient obsolescence” (158). Everything regarded as modern is already on the decline. Meanwhile, Martin argues that the novel depicts “a secret mobility at the heart of women’s role in the public sphere” as a real threat “during the formative years of railway expansion” (132). Martin focuses on revealing the gender difference in accepting modern technology by comparing the male professional Robert’s incessant fatigue caused by the railway travel to Lady Audley’s inexhaustibility on the rail. Martin contends that Lady Audley’s journey in the Victorian railways exemplifies an unprecedented mobilization of women’s bodies in the public sphere. In a similar vein, Mathieson points out Robert’s disembodiment and loss of individuality on the rail, while she explores how the mobile bodies contributed to placing the concept of mobile/traveling culture in the Victorian novels.3 Mathieson significantly argues that Robert gradually becomes an “indistinct object” through repetitive displacement in the compartment (from the traveling space) and that Lucy secures privacy in the compartment by wrapping her body with furs and mantle (84). However, although Mathieson insightfully points out Lucy’s sense of privacy cultivated in the compartment, she does not meaningfully separate Lucy’s exceptional sense of space within the

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railway carriage as a formative energy from Robert’s when she generalizes in the conclusion that modern space is produced through the human bodies’ increasing involvement with the system. Although Badowska, Martin, and Mathieson all touch upon how the novel depicts gender-specific engagement with space and modernity, they do not particularly view the way Lucy becomes empowered by mobility as congruent with the novel’s overall interest in exploring a woman’s increasing sense of liberty. They rather identify Robert’s physical exhaustion and alienation with the novel’s reflection on the effects of modernity and technology. However, I interpret the novel’s reflection on modernization including the railway system and women’s increased movements in the public space in a more positive outlook. Drawing upon the novel’s particular narrative strategy of focalization on Lucy in the next section, I contend that the novel empowers Lucy with greater physical stamina for her to be able to embark on criminal adventures against the patriarchy. As the means of motion at the center of my analysis changes from railways to walking in the next section, Lucy’s transforming relation with her own body is closely examined. In the next section, my reading is particularly built around the close reading of the scenes where the narrator immediately endows Lucy with extraordinary power and where the narrator’s voice becomes much closer to Lucy’s through internal focalization. In my reading of the narrator’s close engagement with what Lucy mentally undergoes in moving her body beyond the constriction of the gender norms, Lucy’s adventures to different locations via the modern railway system extend to signal the novel’s interest in an expansion of domestic women’s might and mobility thanks to their performative understanding of bodies beyond domestic duty and labor. LUCY’S MOVEMENT AND EMPOWERMENT In this section, I argue that the novel explores Lucy’s sense of liberty and mobility by creating a series of scenes where Lucy’s discernment of her wretched situation fills her body with an exceptional physical energy and generates an act of empowerment including committing bigamy, outplaying Robert, and experiencing a new sense of space in the railway.4 In particular, the novel’s feminist narrative rising from the narrator’s in and out of internal focalization through Lucy is pieced with the narrator’s various uses of the loaded term “misery” in the scenes under consideration. In the dramatic scenes under study, Lucy’s class identity particularly becomes a contested issue as the term “misery” clearly alludes to Lucy’s previous domestic difficulties, secret bigamy, and most importantly, her original working-class identity while the background of the scenes, her luxurious boudoir at Audley

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Court, stands for her dramatic rise in social status to an upper-class woman through bigamy. Lucy’s unrestricted mobilization of the ideal feminine behaviors for her criminal purposes in the public space like the railway station casts in doubt the authority of the domestic woman believed to reside in the Victorian living room. I argue that the word “misery,” which has been conventionally associated with a state of human suffering as a result of poverty or mental affliction in literature, carries more extensive and nuanced connotations such as power, sublimity, a sense of deep isolation, guilt, treachery, and identity when it is used directly and combined with Lucy’s mobile agency in the novel. By adding ontological implications to the word and indirectly disparaging the male characters’ simply melodramatic understanding of it, the novel builds up the depth and dignity of Lucy as a character, through whom it explores the extent to which a working-class woman like Lucy can achieve in terms of sexual liberty and freedom of movement. The complicated sense of misery that Lucy inwardly feels begins to operate as a modifier that Lucy employs to distinctively define her identity in front of others, and more importantly, to enact her own movements. For Lucy, calling herself a miserable woman engenders a particular sense of emancipation. After complaining about her wretchedness to Phoebe Marks, her former maid, by saying that she is “wretchedly miserable,” Lucy immediately feels an unexpected gladness: “She was glad to be able to complain even to this lady’s-maid. She had brooded over her fears, and had suffered so long in secret, that it was an inexpressible relief to her to bemoan her fate aloud” (300). Lucy’s awakening to the sense of emancipation then leads to her gesture of empowering herself through exerting mobile agency. Right in front of Phoebe, a representative for Luke, her husband, who asks for money in return for keeping the secret, Lucy newly proclaims her identity as “the most miserable of women” and plans out her moves while silencing “Phoebe’s consolatory murmurs” with “an imperious gesture” (303). Rejecting Phoebe’s sympathetic response to her proclamation of identity, Lucy turns down a familiar sentimental framework of interpreting domestic misery. For Lucy, naming herself as “the most miserable of women” is an ironically empowering gesture that radically detaches her out from other women of all classes. The next moment, she scarcely listens to Phoebe’s complaints about her husband—“these commonplace details” in Lucy’s terms—while she asks herself a question: “Had she Lucy] not her own terrors, her own soul-absorbing perplexities to usurp every thought of which her brain was capable?” (304). In these transformative moments where Lucy newly defines herself as the most miserable woman, “her horrible egotism of her own misery” (309) overpowers everything about and around her, so much so that she can no longer tolerate any facet of a commonplace

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domestic life such as a chat with Phoebe which has defined her daily life so far. The narrator’s deliberate employment of the polyptotons “misery” and “miserable” in transformative manners in describing Lucy is accompanied by remarks on the physical changes in her body, which attest to its radical stamina. Lucy’s body becomes a location of empowerment, and the narrator closely observes the progress of empowerment either in a first-person observation mode or in a first-person omniscient mode. While varying the narrative perspective from a state of observation to the omniscient narration, the narrator does not exactly adopt internal focalization in narrating Lucy’s physical changes. Braddon’s narrator does not identify herself with Lucy when it comes to Lucy’s bodily experience. Moreover, in tentatively withdrawing the omniscience of the narrative and only observing the changes in Lucy’s body, Braddon yields up her authorial authority over Lucy’s body and lets Lucy autonomously engage with the power of it. For instance, making up her mind to put the Castle Inn to the torch with the intention of killing Robert, her enemy, Lucy carefully equips herself for the nighttime walking to the Castle Inn. A series of dramatic changes happen in Lucy’s body: “Lady Audley’s face was no longer pale. An unnatural crimson spot burned in the center of each rounded cheek, and an unnatural luster gleamed in her great blue eyes. She spoke with an unnatural clearness, and an unnatural rapidity” (313). However, the repetitive use of the adjective “unnatural” underlines the inscrutability of the changes occurred in her body. Unable to determine her body’s mood and changes, the narrator can only describe her observation about Lucy’s physical signs without explaining changes in her feelings. However, the narrator soon reasserts an informed authoritative tone in the next moment by reading that Lucy’s mind and body are unconscious of fatigue: “The excitement which she was under held her in so strong a spell that neither her mind nor her body seemed to have any consciousness of fatigue” (314). Knowing Lucy’s mode of fatigue more than Lucy, the narration gets close to non-focalized narrative. In another moment, when the narrator describes Lucy’s involuntary action of twining her hair before the dressing table, a dash of omniscience blends in with the narrator’s observation: “My lady twined her fingers in her loose amber curls, and made as if she would have torn them from the head. But even in that moment of mute despair the unyielding dominion of beauty asserted itself, and she released the poor tangled glitter of ringlets, leaving them to make a halo round her head in the dim firelight” (297). Tracing the involuntary movements of Lucy’s fingers, the narrator keenly perceives how “unyielding dominion of beauty” dictates Lucy’s involuntary action even in her great despair. However, the overall narrative point of view in the dressing table scene is an outside observation. Braddon’s self-consciousness of the narrative appropriation of the character

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of Lucy is most intricate in her fluctuation between her assertion and retraction of the narrative authority over Lucy’s body. Thus, there is more room for Lucy to indulge in her body’s power. The narrator’s careful retraction of the narrative authority over Lucy also appears in the scene where her misery becomes the exact motivation for her arson attack on the Castle Inn. The first-person narrator “I” affirms her incompetency in recounting what Lucy thinks and suffers at the moment of her gritty determination: However verbose I may be in my description of her feelings, I can never describe a tithe of her thoughts or her sufferings. She suffered agonies that would fill closely printed volumes, bulky with a thousand pages, in that one horrible night. She underwent volumes of anguish, and doubt, and perplexity; sometimes repeating the same chapters of her torments over and over again; sometimes hurrying through a thousand pages of her misery without one pause, without one moment of breathing time. She stood by the low fender in her boudoir, watching the minute hand of the clock, and waiting till it should be time for her to leave the house in safety. (314, emphasis is mine)

To be more precise, the narrator oscillates between parading her omniscient knowledge of Lucy’s sufferings and repudiating any sophomoric treatment of them. The narrator does know that Lucy’s agonies would “fill closely printed volumes, bulky with a thousand pages.” However, the expression, “a thousand pages of her misery,” also implies that comprehending every page of Lucy’s misery is almost impossible. The narrator’s retraction of her epistemological power to fully describe Lucy’s sufferings and what constructs all the pages of her misery makes Lucy’s miserable feeling inviolable. Through creating the inviolable aura around Lucy’s mental status, the narrator gives authority to Lucy’s action based on it. However, although the narrator retracts from omniscience, she still describes the urgency and gravity of what is going through Lucy’s mind. The narrator knows the speed at which Lucy is revisiting her book of misery. The narrator handles the scene in and out of internal focalization through Lucy, while grasping the dramatic tension between Lucy’s inward perturbation and the scene’s quiet stillness. The pace in which Lucy hurries through “a thousand pages of her misery” seems to prevent the infiltration of sentimentalism in her mind. Lucy’s reminiscence about her past life is described with a sharp staccato touch: “the old life, the old, hard, cruel, wretched life—the life of poverty, and humiliation, and vexation, and discontent” (316). The staccato mode of Lucy’s thoughts is reflected in her quick steps: “She walked with a firm and rapid step under the archway” (317). Lucy’s recollection of her miserable feelings paradoxically fuels her energy to move and take actions.

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To what extent does the narrator side with Lucy and look positively on Lucy’s mobile agency, which helps her to explore outside domesticity? In an attempt to answer the question, I take note of the narrator’s particular comment on Lucy’s mobility. In the aforementioned scene where Lucy walks at night to Mount Stanning, the narrator says: “Fragile and delicate as she was in appearance, she was a very good walker” (317). The simplicity of the sentence indicates the narrator’s earnest approval of Lucy’s physical vigor, in spite of her misleading outward frail look. Lucy’s feminine outlook is recast in the framework of her physical legerity. The quoted sentence directly presents the superiority of Lucy’s physical condition without a touch of criticism, irony, or sarcasm. It seems as though the narrator wants to make Lucy’s superior mobility apparent to readers. In the immediately following sentence, the narrator also writes: “She had been in the habit of taking long country rambles with Mr. Dawson’s children in her old days of dependence” (317). The narrator creates contrast effects between Lucy’s past economically dependent situation and her sustained habits, throughout the situation, to train her own body by emphasizing how Lucy took long “rambles” in her “days of dependence.” In this regard, departing from the attitude of anxiety expressed by Robert over Lucy’s mobility, the narrator positively presents how Lucy had a habit of rambling, which contributed to building her present fit body. Lucy’s strong body runs counter to the Victorian ideal of femininity which is prescribed as fragile and delicate.5 The coexistence of Lucy’s apparent fragility and her extraordinary physical stamina questions the stereotypical ideas of gender. As Lucy’s body encompasses corporeal qualities associated with both Victorian men and women, her body renders the matrix of gender stereotypes troubled. Further on, the narrator presents Lucy’s nighttime walking which lasts about an hour within a gesture toward drawing sympathy from the reader. Describing how steep the way to the Castle Inn is, the narrator attracts the reader’s attention to Lucy’s sense of urgency. Breaking the way through the darkness, Lucy walks with an uncommon courage born out of her miserable feelings: “The way to Mount Stanning was very hilly, and the long road looked black and dreary in the dark night; but my lady walked on with a desperate courage, which was no common constituent in her selfish, sensuous nature; but a strange faculty born out of her great despair” (317–18). While frankly acknowledging that Lucy has a “selfish” and “sensuous nature,” the narrator emphasizes the mode of desperation of Lucy which dominates the walking scene. Lucy has determined to commit the crime to eliminate the threat of Robert, which would duly relegate her to a life of poverty and humiliation again. Overcoming herself, she is armed with “defiance and determination” at the moment (316). What moves her “with a firm and rapid step” to Mount Stanning is again, ironically, “her great despair” (317). The

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narrator’s description of the scene denotes the hint of sympathy the narrator feels toward Lucy at the impending moment of her crime. The narrator affirms the despair and desperation of Lucy are a real deal, which Lucy should fight against. In this game, Lucy conquers herself by exerting her power to walk. The battle between Lucy and Robert reaches its climax at the Castle Inn at Mount Stanning where Robert stays for a night to excavate Lucy’s secrets. Lucy carries out a full-scale attack on Robert. The riskiness of Lucy’s action increases—from bigamy to attempted murder—as she becomes acutely aware of Robert’s scrutiny of her past and his threat to reveal her secrets. If Robert relies on collecting more circumstantial evidence for his scrutiny, Lucy accurately calibrates her physical strength needed for the execution of crime. In this section, I have analyzed how the pace of Lucy’s thoughts about her misery created a series of transformative moments before Lucy determined to walk to Mount Stanning at night to confront Luke regarding the matter of money—the money Luke intends to extort from her as security for keeping her secret—and, more crucially, of putting Robert, her real enemy, at risk by arson. The scene of Lucy’s walking toward Mount Stanning at midnight testifies to her incredible space perception and welldisciplined physical endurance. Lucy accurately estimates the time required to reach the destination on foot by gauging the distance. It reflects her confidence in, and understanding of, her own physical ability. The narrator acknowledges Lucy’s motive nerves and even defines her as “a very good walker” despite her vulnerable body. That Lucy treats walking “a distance of three miles” lightly indicates the lengthy training of her body while rambling outside with Mr. Dawson’s children. This fact implies how cleverly Lucy has utilized the time allocated to her, according to the discipline of the middle-class doctor’s house, for physical training. Lucy’s stamina is grounded in her confidence in controlling the power of her body, which is expressed in her measurement of the time needed for walking at her own tempo. Crucially, the mobile agency of Lucy is channeled through her management of time and, accordingly, she can surpass Robert, who is more accustomed to wasting his time.6 In the rivalry with Lucy, Robert finally discards his deep-seated mental frame of seeing a female as an object of protection and sympathy. After escaping from the throes of death because of Lucy’s arson attack at him in Luke’s Castle Inn at Mount Stanning, Robert confirms that he would no longer consider Lucy as a proper woman who is apt to arouse his sympathy for her abnormal behavior. The following lines are Robert’s declaration to Lucy: After last night’s deed of horror, there is no crime you could commit, however vast and unnatural, which could make me wonder. Henceforth you must seem to

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me no longer a woman; a guilty woman with a heart which in its worst wickedness has yet some latent power to suffer and feel; I look upon you henceforth as the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle. (345)

Robert’s remark strips Lucy’s mask of femininity off. Seeing through Lucy’s power of execution, mobility, and criminality, he proclaims a full-scale match between the two. Robert redefines Lucy’s identity as “the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle” (345). What Robert’s redefinition of Lucy also signifies is that she, a working-class woman elevated to the upper class by bigamy, transgresses the class/gender roles and the common principle of social behaviors. Robert’s line “there is no crime you could commit, however vast and unnatural, which could make me wonder” inversely implies the extent of his shock at the uncontrollability of Lucy’s character. If Lucy’s thorough understanding of Victorian femininity and her intelligent playing out of it has helped her in the competitive game with Robert so far, Lucy’s full-out demonstration of mobility through her nighttime walking, which signifies her radical throwing off of the mask of Victorian femininity, and its significant criminal effects immensely perturb the beliefs of the middle-class male professional that Robert is. CONCLUSION In exploring Lucy’s alternative domestic life built around a bigamous marriage, the narrator of the novel fluctuates between omniscient narrative and observant mode of narration when depicting Lucy’s miserable emotions. Alongside the withdrawal of the omniscient perspective, the narrator shows that Lucy’s journey of empowerment as an individual is mapped onto her creative reinterpretation of her miserable situation and demonstration of mobility. My exploration of the narrative uses of the loaded term “misery” in association with Lucy’s mobile agency rereads the novel as a strong feminist narrative despite its seemingly conventional ending. Although Robert realizes his dream of “a fairy cottage” with Clara in the end, “Audley Court is shut up” and Sir Michael Audley “has no fancy to return to the familiar dwelling-place in which he once dreamed a brief dream of impossible happiness” (445–446). Maintaining a peaceful domestic life is heavily intertwined with a destruction of another domestic life. In this regard, reading irony into the narrator’s last comment, “I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace” (446–447), is compelling. At first glance, the statement seems to simply defend her choice of ending the story with a happy ending. However, a close reading of the sentence reveals

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an ironic undertone. I contend that the sentence asks readers to appreciate the main contents of the story despite its conventional ending. The novel presents Lucy’s transgressive movements as a performative embodied practice, which questions the normative matrix of genders and the materialization of bodies according to it.

NOTES 1. As Lady Audley belongs to an upper class, she is placed under the protection of numerous domestic servants. 2. See Eva Badowska. Discussing the link between modern railway travel and a secret mobility of women, Daniel Martin notes Braddon’s narrative’s capacity “to conceptualize the ideology of bourgeois masculinity as process of continual nervous and physical exhaustion” (133). 3. See Mathieson. Pointing out that journeys were “a vital and active presence in the structures of the Victorian novel,” Mathieson also importantly emphasizes the novels’ underlying “preoccupation with the space of nation: what the nation-place is, and where it is located within an expanding world-order” (1). 4. The second part of this chapter has been developed from Chapter 4 of my doctoral thesis, “Rereading ‘Misery’: Working-Class Women on the Move in British Novels from the 1850s to the 1890s.” 5. The novel dramatically captures the self-contradictory nature of Lucy’s appearance when it describes the portrait of Lucy secretly ensconced in the ante-chamber of her boudoir: “It was so like and yet so unlike; it was as if you had burned strangecolored fires before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before” (70–71). When the portrait is said to have “the aspect of a beautiful fiend,” the novel underscores how elusive Lucy’s physical signs can be. 6. The severest criticism of Robert in the novel, which is refracted through Lucy’s perspective, is about his inertia. Lucy soliloquizes and frames Robert’s indolence as an illness of mind: “The mind becomes stationary; the brain stagnates; the even current of the mind is interrupted; the thinking power of the brain resolves itself into a monotone. As the waters of a tideless pool putrefy by reason of their stagnation, the mind becomes turbid and corrupt through lack of action” (287).

WORKS CITED Badowska, Eva. “On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, 2009, pp. 157–175. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2008. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York, Routledge, 1993.

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Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1987. Martin, Daniel. “Railway Fatigue and the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Review, vol. 34, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 131–153. Mathieson, Charlotte. Mobility in the Victorian Novel. New York, MacMillan, 2013.

Chapter 2

Through Time and Space Traveling Bodies in Archaeological Fiction Nolwenn Corriou

In 1912, Conan Doyle wrote in The Lost World that “the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere” (Doyle 2001, 15). The impression that the world was shrinking and that any opportunity for adventure was fast disappearing was very common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 By allowing British travelers to fill in the blanks in the maps, nineteenth-century exploration had given way to a certain sense of disenchantment.2 As the knowledge of the world developed through the discoveries of geography, geology, archaeology, and the constitution of an “imperial archive” (Richards 1993), a rational vision of the world seemed to prevail over a religious or even a magic understanding of nature and man.3 The literature of the late nineteenth century, however, was rife with novels and short stories concerned with travel and adventures. Works by Henry Rider Haggard or George Alfred Henty were meant to inspire their young male readers with an interest in imperial travel and conquest. These entertaining romances would “teach” the Victorian reading public about the real and imaginary dangers the British body was submitted to through imperial exploration, from being trampled down by an elephant to being boiled alive by a savage tribe. The readers would also learn about all the marvels that could be discovered on the “Dark continent,”4 from diamond mines to lost ancient civilizations and, perhaps first and foremost, a renewed sense of manhood and belonging for the British explorer. The traveler’s body is at the heart of the genre of the imperial adventure novel insofar as it is transformed and often damaged by the hardships it undergoes and the encounters it makes on the way, so that the body that comes home is rarely the same as the one that left the metropolis to go on an adventure. Within imperial literature, the late-Victorian genre of mummy 43

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fiction is particularly noteworthy insofar as it brings together two bodies (the archaeologist and the mummy) that appear at first sight to be constructed in binary opposition to each other (living/dead, male/female, British/Egyptian, moving/static, subject/object). At the turn of the century, archaeology was frequently used in fiction as a metaphor of imperial relations,5 the interaction of the (invariably male) archaeologist and the (often female)6 mummy reproducing imperial dynamics of possession and domination which were echoed by the processes of excavation and collection.7 According to Ailise Bulfin, the imperial origin of this literature accounts for the two main directions taken by mummy fiction as it expresses both the desire for the British Empire to subjugate Egypt and the fear of failing to do so.8 Indeed, most stories merge romance with Gothic elements, the love story between the archaeologist and the dead Egyptian body almost invariably leading to catastrophic consequences. This is the well-known motif of the mummy’s curse9 which was made popular by fiction, often to denounce the transgressions of the British Empire and express the fear that the imperial territories might rise against the colonizer and have their revenge in the way the mummy does. Travel is a central motif of the genres of archaeological10 and mummy fiction since they deal with archaeologists traveling to Egypt and other imperial territories to discover archaeological sites, but also with artifacts and human bodies traveling to the metropolis to be displayed in private or public museums. By considering texts such as Haggard’s She (1887) and King Solomon’s Mines (1885), two central texts of the genre of imperial romance, and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), I want to examine how colonial (colonizing or colonized) bodies are set in movement and what is at stake in the changes involved by their travels within the imperial territories and from or toward the metropolis. Both novels by Haggard focus on the changes experienced by the bodies of the explorers while Stoker’s novel, by staging the displacement of the mummy’s body, suggests the effects this forced journey can have on the colonizing body. Contrary to Conan Doyle’s pessimistic assessment, it appears that there is still room for adventure within archaeological travel. My contention is that the encounter of the traveling bodies of the archaeologist and the mummy is a temporal as much as a geographical experience which transforms both bodies. As a consequence, this contributes to challenging the binary distinctions between the body of the archaeologist and the antique body discovered. Moreover, the analysis of H. D. Everett’s novel Iras: A Mystery (1896) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1898), which are both articulated around the shared journey of a mummy and its owner, provides interesting insights into the gendered dynamics at play within mummy fiction by staging the travels of a female mummy (Iras) and a male one (Pharos) whose bodies experience displacement in opposite ways.

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PENETRATING THE IMPERIAL BODY: A JOURNEY IN TIME AND SPACE In novels dealing with archaeological quests or treasure hunts outside of Egypt, the absence of a mummy does not preclude the presence of a colonial body encountered by the British travelers; one that has to be thoroughly explored in order to be conquered and controlled, the “body of the land” that the treasure hunters wander amorously as they move toward their goal. Many fictional stories of exploration—as well as many travelogues—relate the fear of losing one’s way. Losing sight of the river the explorer is following or taking a wrong turn could be a matter of life and death. That is why mapping was such an essential part of imperial travel, enabling the colonizer to acquire better knowledge of the land while furthering its conquest.11 In his analysis of the imperial archive, Thomas Richards considers the way British explorers valued any kind of knowledge as a path to a better understanding—and therefore a better domination—of the colonized territories. A great part of this work consisted in mapping the territories, allowing the colonizer to embrace the land in one look and contain it by tracing lines and inscribing British names on the landscapes. In fiction, the motif of the map is often conjured up to evoke imperial domination. In King Solomon’s Mines, Kukuanaland is first seen from the top of a high hill: “The landscape lay before us like a map, in which rivers flashed like silver snakes, and Alp-like peaks crowned with wildly twisted snow wreaths rose in solemn grandeur, whilst over all was the glad sunlight and the breath of Nature’s happy life” (Haggard 2007, 80). This visual and physical domination of the land, common in imperial literature, echoes the representation of Cecil Rhodes straddling the African continent published in Punch in 1892 (figure 2.1). In this cartoon, a gigantic Rhodes stands proudly on the continent laid at his feet like a map, crushing underfoot the two extremities of Africa in an act of contemptuous domination. Like Rhodes in this representation, the traveler’s body is a strong, dominating, male body off to conquer the African continent. Conversely, the African landscape is invariably represented as a virgin female body, lying at the feet of the British traveler, waiting to be penetrated and conquered. This is a common motif of nineteenth-century travelogues which was taken up by writers of imperial romances. As he approaches “the swelling line of the Zanzibar coast” (Burton 28), the Victorian explorer Richard Burton unambiguously describes the landscape as female: Earth, sea, and sky, all seemed wrapped in a soft and sensuous repose. . . . The island itself seemed over-indolent, and unwilling to rise; it showed no trace of mountain or crag, but all was voluptuous with gentle swellings, with the

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Figure 2.1  The Rhodes Colossus, Striding from Cape Town to Cairo, Punch, 1892.

rounded contours of the girl-negress, and the brown-red tintage of its warm skin showed through its gauzy attire of green. (Burton 28–29)

In this passage, the personification of the landscape serves to present the land Burton is about to visit as a female figure, offered to the aesthetizing gaze of the male traveler. This reclining, eroticized character echoes the figure of the odalisque which Piya Pal-Lapinski analyzes as an embodiment of the highly sexualized exotic or colonized body such as it was imagined by nineteenth-century British culture.12 Anne McClintock has analyzed the common Orientalist representation of the African landscape as a voluptuous and lascivious woman, waiting to be unveiled, as a way to translate imperial domination into gendered domination whereby the male imperial metropolis subjects the female colonial territory to its patriarchal rule13 (figure 2.2). As they penetrate Kukuanaland, Haggard’s explorers also discover a female body they aim to conquer by traveling along its curves. The map provided by Haggard at the beginning of King Solomon’s Mines explicitly

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Figure 2.2  Map of Kukuanaland, from King Solomon’s Mines.

presents the land as a lascivious female body, offered to the dominating gaze of the traveler (and reader). Its sexualization is reinforced by the description made of the two hills named Sheba’s Breasts: These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. (Haggard 2007, 66)

The protagonists have to climb to the top of the hill to enter Kukuanaland. From there, their trip takes them all the way down to the mines indicated on the map as the triangular mouth of the treasure cave. Here again the sexual

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symbolism is quite explicit since the object of the heroes’ desire (the diamonds) can only be reached by penetrating what is described as a “pit.” As the map shows, the woman represented by the landscape is reduced to her sexual functions: she has breasts and genitals, but no head or legs. As a consequence, the exploration undertaken by the male traveling body can appear akin to a sexual experience. However lascivious, the African land is not as easy to conquer as it looks: it is essentially hostile and dangerous for the travelers who attempt to master it. Sheba’s Breasts are a cold and deadly place where the protagonists find the body of a Portuguese traveler who failed to conquer the land and its riches. Similarly, they are almost devoured by the vagina-like cave in which they get trapped as they attempt to get their hands on King Solomon’s treasure. The travelers’ bodies have to suffer and survive to eventually claim ownership of the land. However, the displacement described in King Solomon’s Mines and She is not only of a geographical nature. Indeed, as the travelers move across the space of the African body, they soon come to realize that they are also traveling in time. In her Egyptian travelogue, Amelia Edwards describes how she felt she had crossed “the threshold of the past” (Edwards 363). There are many such thresholds for the travelers to cross as they enter the sexualized lands imagined by Haggard. In She, Holly, Leo, and Job have to risk the integrity of their bodies to eventually reach the land ruled by Ayesha at the end of an initiatic journey. The territory they travel is far from appealing: “The country is all swamp behind, and full of snakes, especially pythons, and game” (Haggard 1887, 49), “now that the sun was getting high it drew thin sickly looking clouds of poisonous vapor from the surface of the marsh and from the scummy pools of stagnant water” (Haggard 1887, 63). The disgust aroused by this marshy and reptilian environment appears in the alliterations of the [p] and [s] sounds. The description concludes with those words: “And then ourselves—three modern Englishmen in a modern English boat—seeming to jar upon and look out of tone with that measureless desolation” (Haggard 1887, 66). Interestingly, the discrepancy described here is not conceived in terms of environment. However alien these three Cambridge men may feel in the wild nature they are exploring, it is in terms of temporal displacement that they consider their situation as the repetition of the word “modern” suggests. The British traveler in Africa is not so much alien as he is anachronistic. Having crossed the threshold of the past, the protagonists are taken on a trip back in human history: in the Amahaggers’s land, they soon discover the remnants of an antique civilization of Egyptian origin represented by Ayesha. This discovery of a past civilization surviving in the present is a common motif of imperial adventure stories and of archaeological fiction where “geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference

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across time” (McClintock 40). Thus, our Victorian travelers are transported, not only all the way across Africa, but also all the way across time, to the origins of humanity which natural sciences had recently revealed to be much more ancient than had been previously believed. Anne McClintock argues that this representation is part of a collective image of the African continent constructed by travel literature and imperial romance as an “anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned” (McClintock 41). This idea was reinforced by descriptions of African populations as primitive, child-like, located half-way between man and beast and prisoners of a historical past Western nations had long left behind them. Imperial travel appeared as an opportunity to discover the “missing link” of Darwinian theory while asserting the superiority of the British body. Paradoxically, in Haggard’s novels, instead of proclaiming the superiority of the British conqueror, their travels draw the protagonists into a regressive movement toward a collective historical past. In King Solomon’s Mines, the characters’ path first takes them to the two hills named Sheba’s Breasts. They first seem desirable as they constitute the threshold that will allow them to penetrate Kukuanaland. However, by the time they get to the top of the cold and deadly mountains and reach what is described as a “nipple,” they are starving and nearing exhaustion. They are eventually saved thanks to the nourishment provided by melons whose shape echoes that of the breast-like mountains. This scene suggests that the characters have regressed to an earlier stage of their development: they are now babies feeding on the nipple of the African landscape. The next step of their journey takes them even further in this regressive process as they find themselves imprisoned in a cave that now appears as a uterus they are about to emerge from, reborn. This seems to be the end of their reversed journey down the path of history and human evolution. Their examination of the mines provides them with a confirmation of the biblical tales about King Solomon’s mines, but also with evidence of a history that goes far beyond biblical times. Having regressed into fetuses, they have reached the origin of humanity. However, their journey does not end there and the characters emerge from the cave in a scene that is unambiguously evocative of a birth. They first have to leave behind them the water which, like amniotic fluid, has kept them alive before they reach a narrow tunnel: “a squeeze, a struggle, and Sir Henry was out, and so was Good, and so was I, and there above us were the blessed stars, and in our nostrils was the sweet air. . . . Sitting up I halloed lustily” (Haggard 2007, 217). The reborn triplets undergo the same experiences as a newborn, breathing their first breath and uttering their first scream. Like the travelers of She, the heroes of King Solomon’s Mines have traveled in time

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as much as in space, descending to a personal and collective origin before being reborn to their original self. Paradoxically, this rebirth leaves the travelers’ bodies changed and damaged: Leo’s hair has turned white in She, as has Holly’s in King Solomon’s Mines. Imperial travel may be a source of empowerment but the encounter with the African body or land may just as well wreck the body in travel. The same holds true of the imperial body when it finds itself confronted, in the metropolis, to a colonial body snatched from its place and time of origin to be taken on a journey to the modern world of imperial Britain. THE ASTRAL BODY: MUMMIES IN TRAVEL In the archaeological fiction dedicated to Egyptology, the colonial body is also represented as a moving body, traveling mostly against its will. Indeed, mummy fiction often depicts ancient bodies uprooted from their burying place and made to travel to Europe to be displayed there. Susan Pearce has analyzed Egyptian mummies as “bodies in exile,”14 pointing to the gap that existed between the life lived by ancient Egyptians and the commodification of their bodies, stolen from their tombs and exhibited in Europe as curios. It is primarily as imperial looting that mummies are forced to travel to England. The displacement of the mummy of Iras in H. D. Everett’s eponymous novel epitomizes the fate of the traveling colonial body. An object of scientific interest, she is also paradoxically described as a commercial product, answering the demand of the archaeologist Ralph Lavenham for an “unviolated” sarcophagus. Once acquired in Egypt, she is sent to England to be delivered to her new owner. However, the journey is far from smooth as the mummy is believed to bring back luck onboard the ship: So far all was well, but the very quintessence of bad fortune seemed to have come on board to us with that mummy. . . . There was not a single sandbank which that dahabeeyah did not run her nose upon, and everything it was possible to foul she fouled. Once we were in imminent peril of sinking, mummy and all, and were saved as it were by a miracle. (Everett 50)

This dreadful trip down the Nile echoes real concerns and superstitions concerning the transport of mummies. Many sailors refused to take them onboard, fearing for the safety of their ship and crew. To smuggle what is described as an “unlawful mummy” (Everett 47) out of Egypt, Lavenham’s friend and colleague, Skipton, labels it “Turkish sponges.” Iras therefore arrives in England as an unwilling traveler disguised

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as a commercial product. She soon becomes quite something else when her body is revealed: Thrown carelessly out of the disturbed wrappings, and hanging over the edge, was a woman’s arm—slender, exquisitely rounded, warm with life. . . . The rotten shreds of tissue had been torn apart by the movement of the arm, and there within lay the sleeper in the perfect bloom of her young womanhood, white robed from throat to foot, the darkly fringed eyes still closed, the soft breathing just stirring the linen folds which veiled her breast. (Everett 77)

What appears in this passage is not so much an object of science as an object of desire, the view of the mummy’s arm outside the wrappings working as an invitation for the archaeologist to undress the rest of the body. From then on, the novel takes on romantic tones as it tells the story of a doomed love between the archaeologist and his mummy. Lavenham and Iras elope to get married before going on a honeymoon which is also a flight from an ancient curse. Having turned into an object of desire, Iras becomes once more an unwilling traveler, taken on a long and difficult trip as the archaeologist’s wife. In this instance, the mummy is just as passive as she was when she traveled from Egypt to England: from the point of view of Lavenham, Iras is obediently following her new husband while other characters who come across the couple describe the archaeologist traveling on his own and carrying a burden thrown over his shoulder. Whether she is actually dead or alive,15 Iras is a passive passenger taken on a trip she did not choose to make. What is noteworthy in Everett’s novel is that the way the unwilling colonial traveling body changes throughout its travels echoes imperial dynamics. The “export” of the mummy parallels the exploitation and appropriation of the resources of the Empire: by being treated as a commercial product, Iras enters dynamics of commodification of Egypt’s past and artifacts.16 Even the language used by Lavenham refers to material possession rather than to feelings as he declares “to have one belonging to me, depending on me, how sweet the possession!—how welcome the burden which, with all loyalty of a glad heart, I would carry!” (Everett 90). When Lavenham does start literally carrying his burden around Scotland, his marriage to Iras is a way to assert his complete possession of her.17 In Iras: A Mystery as in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, the journey of the colonial body from Egypt to England serves to invest the mummy’s body with a new meaning, as the mummy goes from being a dead body imbued with historical and religious meaning to being a commodity, a museum artifact, an object of desire, and even a work of art as the frequent comparison of her skin with satin or ivory suggests. This transformation of the mummy’s body is again suggestive of imperial dynamics: redefining the

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colonial body as a work of art or a scientific object allows the colonizer to control it by locking it into a case while turning it into an object of desire enables the archaeologist to achieve possession and domination through a marriage that reproduces the alliance the British vainly wished to establish with Egypt. However, the mummy is not entirely powerless when it comes to being displaced against her will. Within the space of the museum, she is able to initiate a form of paradoxically stationary travel as she returns to life. Like the African body or landscape, the museum is an anachronistic space where past and present coexist and sometimes merge. The return of the mummy drags irresistibly the archaeologist or the museum visitor into the past: “There were so many ancient relics that unconsciously one was taken back to strange lands and strange times. There were so many mummies or mummy objects, round which there seemed to cling for ever the penetrating odours of bitumen, and spices and gums . . . that one was unable to forget the past” (Stoker 35). Without moving, the narrator, Malcolm Ross, experiences a form of time travel that takes him to ancient Egypt. The omnipresence of the past and its invasion of public and domestic museums suggest that ancient Egypt has traveled to Western cities and is reborn in those anachronistic spaces. In Conan Doyle’s short story “The Ring of Thoth,” the Louvre also constitutes such an anachronistic space entirely inhabited by ancient Egypt: “He was alone with the dead men of a dead civilisation. What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century! In all this chamber there was scarce an article from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years” (Doyle 2008, 4–5). Here, the sense of displacement is both geographical and temporal: the outside of the museum belongs to nineteenth-century Paris while the inside of it belongs to ancient Egypt. The mummies and “mummy objects” act as a threshold that transports the viewer to Egypt and the past. The idea that one can travel while the body remains stationary18 draws a parallel between the museum visitor unwillingly taken on a trip to the past and the mummies, described as motionless but able to travel thanks to their “astral body,” since the mummies’ bodies “could become astral at command, and so move, particle by particle, and become whole again when and where required” (Stoker 130). The capacity of the mummy to materialize where and when she will contributes to making her a formidable enemy. In this respect, the Egyptian mummy both conforms to and subverts imperial and gender expectations and representations. In the descriptions of her motionless body, lying in her sarcophagus, offered to the gaze of the archaeologist,19 she resembles the African landscape of imperial representations and the “passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East” (Said 138) that Said identifies in the Orientalist imagination. However, by fighting back through the

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actions of her astral body and using Margaret Trelawny’s voice to express her thoughts and desires, she disrupts those gendered and imperial paradigms to assert her own will and power. In the same way as the mummy’s body, ancient Egypt appears able to travel through time and to materialize in the here and now of the archaeologist. This is the case, for instance, in Haggard’s short story “Smith and the Pharaohs,” in which the eponymous character finds himself locked at night in the museum of Cairo and wakes up to find that the mummies of all the ancient royal families have come back to life to plot their revenge upon those who desecrate their resting places. The invasion of the present by Egypt’s antique past needs to be read in the imperial context that saw the rise of mummy fiction. The omnipresence of ancient Egyptian objects immediately appears ominous, like in this passage from Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” which describes Edward Bellingham’s room: Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf; while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in a double noose. (Doyle 2008, 170)

The repetitions of “headed” and “and” as well as the many compound words emphasize the uncontrollable multiplication of objects that have invaded the student’s room in Oxford. This echoes what Stephen Arata has described as “reverse colonization” in his analysis of Dracula.20 He contends that Dracula’s desire to appropriate British culture to better settle in England expresses the Victorian fear of a foreign invasion, coming from empowered colonies. The mummy rising to wreak her revenge upon the archaeologist may be read as a metaphor for nationalist movements in the Empire, while the way she occupies, and even invades, the British scientific and domestic space appears as a threat of reverse colonization. In Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian, the mummy of Phtames returned to life as Pharos takes this threat to extremes through the journey he imposes to Forrester, the British painter who owns his mummy. The kidnapping of the British man taken to Egypt mirrors the forced displacement of the Egyptian mummy. The end of the novel reveals that his revenge has a much broader scope as it actually concerns the whole British society and even the whole of Europe. Pharos’s journey echoes in reverse the travels of Egyptologists:

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indeed, the ancient Egyptian leaves his homeland to seize whatever he will in England and goes as far as invading Forrester’s home (but also his mind through a hypnotic method) to recover his own mummy. He then kidnaps Forrester to enlist his help in returning his own mummy to its tomb. Thus, the Egyptian mummy21 reproduces the imperial dynamics of appropriation and displacement of the artifacts, the English painter having this time taken the place of the antiques. In fact, everything Pharos does consists in inverting the topoi of mummy fiction. Usually, the movement is from Egypt to England, and from the past to the present. In Guy Boothby’s novel, however, the characters travel from England to Egypt, from the museum to the pyramids and eventually from the present to the past by means of hallucinations that take Forrester to a “foreign” time. Meanwhile, the resurrection of the mummy is reversed into the slow decay of the British character as Pharos works restlessly at destroying his companion through physical as well as psychological methods. In his effort to invert imperial dynamics, Pharos aims to correct them: by returning the mummy to its place of rest, he undoes the work of the archaeologist and thus displaces the location of power. In mummy fiction, the movement toward England, and particularly London, expresses the power of the metropolis which controls the whole of the Empire through its archives, its museum collections and generally through all the information and objects collected in the colonial territories.22 By traveling in reverse, whether spatially or temporally, Pharos asserts his own power over the imperial center and threatens the imperial order.23 Pharos’s final travel in the novel achieves his revenge and the destruction of Western civilization. Indeed, having entirely subjected Forrester to his will and inoculated him with the plague, he is able to disseminate the virus throughout Europe and then in the different layers of British society by dragging a passive Forrester across the continent back to London. His return to the metropolis allows him to claim his victory over the former imperial master. The many journeys of Pharos and his inversion of imperial routes have become synonymous with empowerment for the Egyptian character while the British body is left almost lifeless as a result of these travels.24 THE LIVING DEAD: REGRESSION AND DEGENERATION The colonial body of the mummy is not alone in being affected by the displacement it undergoes. The changes endured by the archaeologist’s or traveler’s body as he enters the anachronistic spaces inhabited by ancient bodies and objects can also be read in imperial terms.

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In The Jewel of Seven Stars, Abel Trelawny, owner of the mummy of Queen Tera, is described by the narrator, lying unconscious, after he was attacked by Tera’s astral body: As I looked at the stern, cold, set face, now as white as a marble monument in the pale grey light, I could not but feel that there was some deep mystery beyond all that had happened within the last twenty-six hours. Those beetling brows screened some massive purpose; that high, broad forehead held some finished train of reasoning, which the broad chin and massive jaw would help to carry into effect. (Stoker 47)

Rendered motionless by his encounter with Tera, the unconscious archaeologist appears quite similar to the Egyptian mummy who is lying next to him in his bedroom. The comparison of his skin to white marble calls to mind the admiring descriptions of the queen’s ivory skin while the adjectives used to depict his face (“massive,” “broad”) echo the representation of excessively gigantic Egyptian monuments (a word also used to describe the archaeologist here). Even the word chosen to characterize his bushy brows (“beetling”) suggests there is something vaguely Egyptian about his face considering the importance of the beetle in ancient Egyptian culture. Trelawny seems to complete his metamorphosis into a mummy when his wounded wrist, echoing Queen Tera’s own stump, is described wrapped in bandages that look very much like the mummy’s wrappings. The similarities between archaeologists’ bodies and their objects of study are to be found in a number of texts pertaining to mummy fiction. In Conan Doyle’s “The Ring of Thoth,” the main protagonist, John Vansittart Smith, is said to look like an ancient Egyptian, while in “Lot No. 249,” Edward Bellingham, having spent a long time traveling in the Middle East looking for antique artifacts is described thus: It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. . . . His light-grey eyes were still open, the pupils dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. (Doyle 2008, 171)

The horror his shriveled face and body inspire mirror the repugnance caused by the mummy he keeps on his desk while his dry body and fixed eyes are uncomfortably reminiscent of the appearance of a corpse. These two examples underline the idea that by bringing into contact the past and the present, the living and the dead, the ancient and the modern, the

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travels in space and time implied by the anachronistic space of the museum result in the creation of hybrids that present characteristics of both categories. In the imperial context of archaeological fiction, the uncanny and sometimes deadly process of contamination through which the Western traveler is transformed into his Other translates, not only the fear of reverse colonization, but also a very Victorian anxiety that the British Empire might lead to the destruction of British civilization by the prolonged (often sexual)25 contact with the natives. The idea of a pathological contamination is related to Max Nordau’s notion of degeneration26 as an infection that could spread through Western countries and eventually lead to the death of Western civilizations. In Pharos the Egyptian, the motif of contamination is taken quite literally as Pharos inoculates Forrester with the virus of the plague so that the British painter may in turn unwittingly contaminate everyone who crosses their path as they travel from Egypt, through Germany, Belgium, and France back to England. As a consequence of the journey of this unknowingly sick body, the plague spreads through Europe and Pharos is avenged of the sins of the Western world against Egypt and its past. Signs of degeneration pervade archaeological fiction in many forms. One may notice a certain criminal deviance in the very way archaeology is represented in fiction: indeed, the opening and penetration of tombs is often depicted in sexual terms.27 In Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs,” Smith has to shatter a “virgin rock” (Haggard 1920, 16) in order to “violat[e] a tomb” (Haggard 1920, 21). The act of discovery is akin to rape, as is the process of mummy unwrapping that quickly adopts a sexual tone in The Jewel of Seven Stars when the narrator describes his growing excitement as the wrappings are torn away. The necrophiliac desire felt by Lavenham in Everett’s novel or by Smith in Haggard’s novella also points to the degeneration of the male Western characters.28 The degeneration of British civilization also appears in the fate of a number of the protagonists of archaeological fiction: Holly and Leo are very damaged, physically and morally, at the end of She, while the heroes of “Smith and the Pharaohs,” and Iras: A Mystery seem affected by madness. There is something essentially pathological about the Victorian body in travel, a body that seems to go through human evolution in reverse as it travels in time. The risk of degeneration is suggested by the appearance of Holly in She: To begin with, he was shortish, rather bow-legged, very deep chested, and with unusually long arms. He had dark hair and small eyes, and the hair grew right down on his forehead, and his whiskers grew right up to his hair, so that there was uncommonly little of his countenance to be seen. Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla. (Haggard 1887, 2)

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This description of the apish academic points to Darwin’s theory of evolution and specifically the “monkey theory” that fascinated fiction writers after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Upon his arrival in South Africa, Holly is immediately nicknamed “Baboon” by the locals. In traveling in the Empire and into the past, it would seem that he has reached the origin of the human species and become himself the “missing link” that nineteenthcentury travelers were hoping to find in Africa. Returning to Conan Doyle’s idea that “the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in,” it appears that in archaeological fiction, although new geographical spaces are indeed becoming rare, this does not entail the end of travel. Archaeological research and museums still allow the imperial traveler to go on adventurous journeys, this time by traveling back in time. This journey in time opens up new spaces for the romance which Conan Doyle feared might be disappearing but it also opens the way for what Patrick Brantlinger has named the imperial Gothic, that is to say the narrativized expression of anxieties concerning the Empire, from reverse colonization to regression and degeneration. In imperial Gothic literature, the imperial travel, meant to empower the colonizer and assert British masculine domination over lands and populations represented as female and submissive, reveals in fact the weakness of the imperial metropolis through the failings of the traveling body. Journeying across the “Dark Continent” or in a colonized antique past, the individual British body—standing at large for the national body—appears as a decaying body, regressing to earlier stages of its development or struggling with injuries or diseases. The preserved Egyptian body, on the contrary, having survived a long trip through history to come to the British metropolitan center, challenges the Victorian constructions of gender and race by inverting power dynamics and asserting the strength of the colonial body. To put an end to this threat, archaeological fiction suggests that the colonial body has to be prevented from moving by being kept under lock in the museum or, better, returned to its tomb. This way only, the mummy is expected to remain nothing more than a sleeping beauty29 that should never ever awake, lest it should take the archaeologist on a horrific journey. NOTES 1. This idea was already to be found in Heart of Darkness when the narrator describes his childhood passion for maps, saying that “at that time there were many blank spaces on the earth” and one only had to pick any of them to enjoy the “glories of exploration” (Conrad 11).

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2. This is what Patrick Brantlinger underlines when he describes one of the themes of imperial Gothic as “the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world” (Brantlinger 230). 3. The occult societies that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century paradoxically strove to reconcile a magical vision of the world with the latest scientific discoveries. A figure such as E. A. Wallis Budge provides a striking example of the intersection of science and magic insofar as his work as an Egyptologist at the British Museum led him to socialize with literary figures of the time and prominent members of various occult societies such as the Ghost club where his stories and anecdotes delighted the listeners. See Luckhurst (2012). 4. The phrase was made popular by Henry Morton Stanley’s travelogue, Through the Dark Continent: Or, The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa, and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. 5. See Deane. 6. Very few texts deal with a male mummy. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1898) are some of the rare exceptions. 7. Indeed, as an imperial science introduced with Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt, Egyptology reproduced imperial dynamics of exploitation both of the local workers and of the country’s antique past which was appropriated to be displayed in European museums. 8. See Bulfin. 9. See Luckhurst, op. cit. 10. Novels such as She or King Solomon’s Mines by Haggard can be described as pertaining to archaeological fiction insofar as they are concerned with the exploration of ancient sites and the discoveries thus made by the adventurers. 11. In fiction, the example of Kim underlines the link between mapping and control of the imperial territory, the knowledge acquired in the process of delineating the land reinforcing the local power of the British administration. 12. See Pal-Lapinski. 13. See McClintock. 14. See Pearce. 15. The whole novel questions the actual return to life of the mummy and plays on this very uncertainty. 16. See Daly. 17. In mummy fiction, the desire for imperial conquest is often metaphorically represented as amorous conquest. See Deane. Op. cit. 18. A striking example of this phenomenon is Haggard’s novel The Ancient Allan (1920) in which Allan Quatermain lives many adventures in Egypt and the Orient without leaving the living room of his host, Lady Ragnall. Through the use of an ancient drug, Quatermain and Lady Ragnall visit their own first incarnations and relive their past lives in a form of prolonged hallucination. 19. The objectifying gaze of the male narrator can be seen in his aestheticing description of Tera’s body which is introduced by these words: “It was like a statue carven in ivory by the hand of a Praxiteles” (Stoker 235). Much like the mummy, the archaeologist’s daughter, Margaret is also described as a beautiful object.

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20. See Arata. 21. By dint of being a male mummy, Pharos is represented as radically different from female mummies. This echoes Victorian representations of gender. Indeed, when the female mummy is passive and (apparently) entirely submitted to the will of her male owner, Pharos is defined by his sense of agency and his leading role in all the travels undertaken by the central protagonists. 22. As Edward Said underlines it, “the Orient studied was a textual universe by and large; the impact of the Orient was made through books and manuscripts, not, as in the impress of Greece on the Renaissance, through mimetic artifacts like sculpture and pottery” (Said 52). 23. Pharos can be read as a figure of the author: he delineates the narrative he wants to create and is often seen retelling and reinterpreting the story such as it was told by the British character. In this respect, Pharos subverts Orientalist representations by reappropriating the power to speak and telling his own story. 24. The end of the novel, however, reestablishes imperial order: Pharos dies, punished for his hubris by the old gods of Egypt. His mummy is discovered a second time and becomes the property of Western archaeologists once again. 25. This notion is present in mummy fiction which often involves a romantic plot in which the archaeologist falls in love with a mummy. 26. See Nordau. 27. See Corriou. 28. In The Jewel of Seven Stars, an incestuous undertone is added to this necrophiliac desire as Trelawny shares his bedroom with a mummy who looks exactly like his daughter Margaret. 29. See Dobson.

WORKS CITED Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1996. Boothby, Guy. Pharos the Egyptian. London, Ward, Lock & Co., 1899. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830– 1914. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1988. Bulfin, Ailise. “The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 2011, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 411–443. Burton, Richard. Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast. London, Tinsley Brother, 1872. Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Lost World and Other Thrilling Tales. 1912. London, Penguin Classics, 2001. ———. “The Ring of Thoth.” 1890. In Tales of Unease. Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 2008. ———. “Lot No. 249.” 1892. In Tales of Unease. Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 2008. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. London, Penguin Books, 1994.

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Corriou, Nolwenn. “‘A Woman is a Woman, if She had been Dead Five Thousand Centuries!’: Mummy Fiction, Imperialism and the Politics of Gender.” Miranda (online), no. 11, 2015. https://doi​.org​/10​.4000​/miranda​.6899. Accessed August 21, 2020. Daly, Nicholas. “That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy.” Novel, no. 28, 1994, pp. 24–51. Deane, Bradley. “Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. Greensboro, vol. 51, no. 4, 2008, pp. 381–410. Dobson Eleanor. “Sleeping Beauties: Mummies and the Fairy-Tale Genre at the Fin de Siècle.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 2017, pp. 19–34. Edwards, Amelia. A Thousand Miles up the Nile. New York, A.L. Burt, 1878. Everett, H. D. Iras: A Mystery. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1896. Haggard, Henry Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. 1885. London, Penguin Classics, 2007. ———. She. London, Longman, 1887. ———. “Smith and the Pharaohs.” 1913. In Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Stories. London, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1920, pp. 7–74. ———. The Ancient Allan. London, Cassell and Company, 1920. Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. London, Penguin English Library, 2012. Luckhurst, Roger. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2012. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. London, William Heinemann, 1895. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London, Routledge, 1995. Pal-Lapinski, Piya. The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration. Durham, N.H., University of New Hampshire Press; Hanover, N.H.; London, UP of New England, 2005. Pearce, Susan. “Bodies in Exile: Egyptian Mummies in the Early Nineteenth Century and their Cultural Implications.” Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture, edited by Sharon Ouditt. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, pp. 54–71. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London, New York, Verso, 1993. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London, Penguin, 1995. Stanley, Henry Morton. Through the Dark Continent: Or, The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa, and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1878. Stoker, Bram. The Jewel of Seven Stars. 1903 (1912). London, Penguin Classics, 2008.

Chapter 3

“Doomed with Motion” Transient Bodies in Light in August Solveig Dunkel

William Faulkner is not usually regarded as a travel novelist. When one thinks of Faulkner and the notion of space, the Southern microcosm of Yoknapatawpha county is immediately conjured up, a fictional enclosed space inspired by Faulkner’s native Lafayette county in northern Mississippi. For some critics, Yoknapatawpha is the Deep South in miniature, a Faulknerian “two inches of Ivory”—an idea that Phillip Muehrcke and Juliana Muehrcke phrased this way: “Faulkner created his county to contain the essence of Mississippi and of the South” (Muehrcke 318). Yet, considering Faulkner as a regional writer exclusively, enclosed in his small fictional territory, means greatly restricting the actual compass of his work. The online project “Digital Yoknapatawpha” (http://faulkner​.iath​.virginia​.edu/) is a striking illustration of this idea: the fruit of a collaboration between an International Team of Faulkner Scholars at the University of Virginia, this project aims at creating a digital map of Faulkner’s novels (figure 3.1). Even though the core of the novel takes place in the fictional town of Jefferson, the epicenter of most of Faulkner’s saga, the map generated for Light in August (1932) shows the actual scope of his characters’ movements on a national scale.1 Yet, it remains true that one of the structural principles of a Faulkner novel is the confinement of an individual or families in a single place. Light in August stands apart in that respect as it tells the stories of two isolated and rootless characters, a young woman and a racially ambiguous man, wandering through the Deep South and beyond its borders in search of a sense of identity, as highlighted by Robert M. Slabey: Unlike Faulkner’s other novels and stories, most of which deal with the history of families, such as the Sartorises, the Compsons, the McCaslins, the Snopeses, Light in August concerns isolated individuals—the part-Negro murderer Joe 61

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Figure 3.1  Digital Yoknapatawpha.

Christmas, the defrocked minister Hightower, the semi-recluse Joanna Burden, and the pregnant newcomer Lena Grove. (266)

The periphery in Light in August, a novel centered around marginal characters, is actually the center. The main protagonists are paradoxically united by their profound isolation, as they are all treading on the edge of the social gatherings constituting families or towns. Indeed, there is nothing stronger than the community in Faulkner’s territory: both benevolent and destructive, the community of Jefferson is the driving force of the survival or demise of the main characters. After all, the people who feed Lena and enable her to reach her destination are also the ones who scream for bloody murder and demand Joe’s head on a stick. The overpowering sense of community reaches its climax in chapter 15, where all the inhabitants of Jefferson are turned into a homogenous body with a collective voice and perspective, an uncanny Greek chorus of sorts, in which the town is personified through the use of the following recurring metonymy: “as far as the town knew,” “The town wondered for a while,” “In time the town either forgot or condoned,” “the town blinding its collective eye” (341, my italics).

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In addition to their common alienation from society, the four main characters in Light in August are mostly defined by their relationships to movement. For instance, Reverend Hightower and Joanna Burden are confined to, or even imprisoned, in the town of Jefferson. As opposed to Hightower and Joanna’s inertia, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas are defined by their transience, and are represented as constantly on the move. If Hightower and Joanna appear entrapped by their ambivalent attachment to a community that rejects them, Joe and Lena are “doomed with motion” (170). Restless, they are motivated by their different ends: Lena is looking for the father of her unborn child, while Joe wanders restlessly, haunted by his ambiguous origin. The characters of Lena and Joe function as negative reflections of each other, especially in their approach to movement. Lena and Joe’s relationships to motion seem conditioned by their corporeality. Indeed, in Light in August, movement is fundamentally linked with the body and one’s relationship with it. But corporeality and identity constitute a problematic match, as bodies move in space, time as well as in shape—it seems that movement affects the body as much as the body affects movement. In this chapter, I will analyze how Faulkner weaves two antagonistic and yet correlated journeys in Light in August. At first glance, the bodies of Lena and Joe as well as their relationships to movement seem to be built on a series of binary oppositions between lightness and darkness, femininity and masculinity, life and death: Joe’s journey, frantic and seemingly animated by a death drive, comes to a stop with the amputation of his body through the act of castration; Lena’s journey, much more peaceful, ends with the act of giving birth, of creating a new life in a new body. However, these two modes of traveling appear to depend on each other, at a literal as well as at a formal level, and allow a dialogue on the subject of transient bodies. I will study Joe’s relationship to transience, and its implications on the notion of identity. It seems that Joe uses motion in Light in August as a form of protection, which ultimately fails to work. However, with Lena’s journey, Faulkner suggests that movement can offer a form of salvation, or at least a counterbalance to the descending vortex of Joe’s precipitation into death. Light in August is Faulkner’s longest novel. With more than sixty different characters, it is bustling with motion, with multiple narrative strands and overlapping subplots. Right from the very first page, the importance of traveling is emphasized, and “the road,” a leitmotiv as much as a full-fledged character, appears in the first four words of the incipit. Light in August opens in medias res, on a dusty summer road, with a journey already in progress: Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.2 All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on

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the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before.” (5)

Lena’s voice, tinged with a Southern drawl, acknowledges the distance already crossed before the novel even began. The beginning of the second chapter introduces Joe Christmas and his arrival to work at the Jefferson planning mill. Through the perception of Byron Bunch, one of the novel’s main characters who works at the mill, the stranger is immediately associated to ceaseless movement: “there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home” (31). Joe’s absolute lack of ties to a single place is highlighted by the heavy emphasis on negative forms, as the suffix “-less” and the four occurrences of “no” show. Anchorless and consequently in constant motion, Joe is similar to an unmoored ship, constantly threatened by getting lost at sea. The first main characters introduced in Light in August are both immediately defined by their movements, even though these two strangers never physically meet in the whole novel. These two characters are a priori complete opposites, as a white young woman and a racially ambiguous man suspected of having a nonwhite father. However, despite these obvious differences, they still echo each other on several fundamental aspects: they are both social pariahs, outcast because of their very corporeality—Lena, unwed, carries under her dress an “unmistakable burden” (9), while Joe Christmas struggles with an ambivalent identity encompassed by the oxymoron “white nigger” (259). Despite appearing white, Joe is obsessed with the possibility of being of African American ancestry—a taboo of the highest order in the context of the Jim Crow South of the early 1930s. The novel never explicitly settles the issue of Joe’s racial origins, and it is that dubiousness, that gray area, which best characterizes Joe. For both of them, mobility is to be found even within their bodies, challenging the perception of the body as a finite, stable entity. Transience is immediately presented as a major theme of the novel. Surprisingly, the adjective “transient” only appears once in Light in August, in reference to a town near which Joe grew up with his foster parents after his adoption: The town was a railroad division point. Even in midweek there were many men about the streets. The whole air of the place was masculine, transient: a population even whose husbands were at home only at intervals and on holiday—a population of men who led esoteric lives whose actual scenes were removed and whose intermittent presence was pandered to like that of patrons in a theatre. (173–174)

The town itself is defined by the impermanence of non-places:3 it is nothing but a crossroads, a railway node, through which men come and go constantly.

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This ephemerality gives to these transient men an almost unreal existence. They live “removed . . . scenes,” and by being compared to “patrons in a theatre,” their existences seem theatrical and unreal. In the construction of the passage, the idea of transience is intrinsically associated to the notion of masculinity. Male transience (and female rootedness to a single place) is expected in Western cultures. Men move; women are deeply rooted to the domestic sphere.4 Even in narratology, male characters are traditionally the ones that enable the narrative to move forward, while women characters are relegated to “obstacles” rather than protagonists, as Teresa de Lauretis explained: Each reader—male or female—is constrained and defined within the two positions of a sexual difference thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the subject; and female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the other. . . . In this mythicaltextual mechanics, then, the hero must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female and indeed, simply the womb. . . . In so doing the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she is an element of plotspace, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter. (118–119)

This emphasizes the subversive quality of Lena’s journey, even if her rebellion is temporary. As for Joe Christmas, he is transient in all the polysemy of the word: according to the English Oxford Dictionary, the expression “transient worker” used to refer to “a person who moves between short-term jobs, a migrant worker.”5 The stock market crash in 1929 and the consequent Great Depression undoubtedly led to an explosion of the number of migrant workers, as a section of the American population was forced to take the road in search of survival, traveling the nation hoping to find employment. Light in August, along with John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), or Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Worker on California Highway (1935), partake of the artistic tradition deeply anchored in an economic and historical reality relating the condition of migrant workers in the 1930s. Movement, in the poor states of the Deep South, occurred at the expense of stability and family, but was also inevitable in a degrading economic context. But Joe is not on the move to look for work, or at least not primarily. His movements are motivated by a quest for identity. Joe’s transience is organic in nature, in the sense that the narrative treats his body as if it was malleable and amorphous. Joe’s frantic wanderings seem to be caused by a desire to escape from his racially ambiguous body. A fugitive from the self, he tries to escape his own skin by being in constant motion. Throughout the novel, Joe moves in

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and out of spaces dominated by whiteness—the majority of the South, for instance—and spaces dominated by blackness—like Northern cities, such as Detroit and Chicago. By moving from one cultural space to another, his body undergoes mutations, showing that for Joe, mobility lies within his body. However, these changes are always in negative, always marked by a reverse process—as if his body was rejecting the spaces that he was crossing, or as if the spaces which Joe crossed rejected his body, in the manner of an organism rejecting a foreign body. In spaces dominated by whiteness, like the Deep South, his supposed blackness seeps through, despite that fact that he passes as white. Similar to the return of the repressed, the blackness which he desperately tries to keep at bay resurfaces. The first physical description of Joe in the novel is a telling illustration of this fact: his face is described as “darkly and contemptuously still” (25). A few lines later, the narrative voice emphasizes the “darkness” of his face once more: “with his dark, insufferable face” (26). Faulkner’s careful choice of word is meaningful. While the adjective “black” refers to a color in a first place, and by extension the color of one’s skin, “dark” is a much more ambiguous adjective: the possibility of racial blackness is suggested but not confirmed explicitly; the term is also closely associated to a moral dimension, to sullenness or even the possibility of evilness. The darkness of Joe’s face, seen and interpreted through the eyes of a white worker of Jefferson in this quotation, is a fantasized projection— the novel never explicitly settles the issue of Joe’s race, and his skin is never described as explicitly black. Instead, at other instances in the novel, Faulkner plays with that gray area of meaning and lays strong emphasis on his skin’s yellowish color, the color of parchment: “the flesh a level dead parchment color” (28), “his parchmentcolored finger” (91), “parchmentcolored face” (94), “the smooth parchment skin” (113). The term “parchmentcolored” itself is ambiguous: a good example of Faulkner’s love for neologisms, it is neither a canonical word, nor clear in the color it refers to, as the color of parchment is in no way homogeneous.6 Moreover, the parchment is the material of palimpsests, manuscripts on which several levels of scripture can appear, making it a mobile, unstable surface. Interestingly, the mention of the ambiguous “darkness” of Joe’s complexion occurs in spaces dominated by the racial understanding of the “one-drop rule,” the ideology according to which an individual is considered black (or rather nonwhite) if he/she possesses even the smallest degree of black African ancestry. As F. James Davis highlighted it in Who Is Black?: One Nation’s Definition, the “one-drop rule” reveals the paradox of race and color, as race used to be determined by the color of one’s skin and physical attributes: “The phenomenon known as ‘passing white,’” Davis added, “is difficult to explain in other countries. . . . ‘Passing’ is much more a social phenomenon than a biological one, reflecting the nation’s unique definition of what makes

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a person black. The concept of ‘passing’ rests on the one-drop rule and on folk beliefs about race and miscegenation, not on biological or historical fact” (Davis 14). Indeed, the paranoid obsession with a supposed “invisible blackness” was pervasive in the Southern states in the 1920s, and numerous state legislatures in the South attempting to define a clear race status show the determination in creating impermeable racial categories. According to the racial standards of the white community of Jefferson, Joe is indeed black, even if it is a racial categorization by default. The oxymoronic periphrasis “white nigger” emphasizes the inner contradictions of racial categories which direct Joe’s life and movements. This process of rejection goes both ways. In spaces described as dominated by blackness, Joe’s whiteness seems to come back with a vengeance: He was in the north now, in Chicago and then Detroit. He lived with negroes, shunning white people. He ate with them, slept with them . . . He now lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being. And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial. (170)

The violence of Joe’s bodily mutations is fully displayed in this excerpt, crystallized in a sense of physical sickness as Joe contorts in pain on his bed. Chest, ribcage, blood, nostrils: the fragmented body parts, almost animated by a will of their own, desperately try to adapt to the social and racial context. Presently living in America’s two greatest black metropolises,7 Joe “shun[s] white people,” attempting once more to adapt fully to his environment. But fighting for adaptation, again, is a losing battle. His flesh remains white, and in his attempt to reject his “white blood,” his body keeps on getting whiter. Joe’s internalization of an essentialist conception of race and blood on his own body is clear—the mention of his lover, described as “ebony carving,” suggests a fetishization of the black female body, a fetish fitting the white supremacist ideology and the race-based system of the segregated South. The black body, in colonial discourse, is defined by its “nonwhiteness,” as Frantz Fanon observed: “Not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon 90). Blackness becomes then the polar opposite of the notions traditionally associated with whiteness, such as the pure, the sacred, and the innocent. The black body, consequently, is

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assimilated to the savage, the impure—it is deemed and interiorized by Joe as abject. But this abjectness does not exclude sexualization. According to George Yancy, during slavery and even in the aftermath of the Civil war: ideologically framing the Black female body as always sexually available, indeed, hypersexed, served to obscure the fact that the “hypersexed” Black female body was a fantasy whites themselves created. In short, as argued, the Black body became the phantasmatic object of the white imaginary. (146)

In this extract from Light in August the black body is displayed here as a source of aesthetic and sexual pleasure, and the description of the black woman as an “ebony carving” takes her out of the realm of humanity to turn her into a piece of carved wood, pleasing to the eye but inert and ultimately voiceless. In the same way, the strong emphasis on the synesthesia “dark odor,” a pseudobiological argument used to insist on a biological differentiation between black and white people, shows the depth of Joe’s racial prejudices. The spiritual war Joe wages against himself is turned into a biological struggle—but it can only lead to failure, as whiteness, just like blackness, is nothing but a projection of expectations, and his body ends up exactly as it started: nothing more than a body. The supposed essence of blackness remains unattainable to him, “dark and inscrutable.” Yet, the somatic impact on his flesh is undeniable, as his body, in conflict with itself, whitens, writhes, and strains. In pain, the body is quartered, tortured by “physical outrage and spiritual denial” (170). Because of these incessant mutations, Joe has no other choice but to remain the Other, the alien. Hence, he embodies the notion of transgression, as his racially unreadable body transgresses Southern conceptions of race; he is doomed to transgress every space he crosses. Transition, transformation, transient, transgression—all these notions encapsulate Joe’s paradoxical corporeality and movements, and are united by the same prefix trans-, linked with the idea of going across, beyond, outside of, but never remaining in. In that respect, Joe has a transient identity: the self, or identity, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur postulated, can be defined by two fundamental aspects which he names ipse and idem. While ipse is identity understood as selfhood, as what makes a subject unique, idem is identity as sameness across and through change. In other words, ipse makes the individual unique, while idem makes it permanent. In the novel, Joe is able to assert his ipse-identity. During his dysfunctional relationship with Joanna, he is still able to assert his uniqueness through a chiasmus: “She is still she and I am still I” (205). But Joe lacks the idem-aspect of the self that constitutes a stable identity: depending on his spatial location, his identity fluctuates and transitions ceaselessly. As it is impossible for him to settle into a clearly delineated identity in a clearly defined body, Joe remains trapped in an artificial no-man’s land between

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blackness and whiteness; a liminal state that he tries to counter by being constantly on the move: “He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty: he might have seen himself as in numberless avatars, in silence, doomed with motion” (170). The street, the road: almost an entity in itself, a singular form to embrace the endless miles to come, running forever “like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool” (8). But if the experience of the road has the dream-like quality of endless opportunities for Lena, it is akin to trying to run on the spot in a nightmare for Joe. Movement, for Joe, is a physical symptom of psychological distress. Joe uses motion as a protective mechanism against his traumas, which revolve around his childhood, his deep-seated fear of women linked to the absence of the mother and, as the narrative makes it clear, his indeterminate origins. During the final stages of his dysfunctional relationship with Joanna, the lover he ultimately beheads, Joe is said to begin to be afraid: “But he began to see himself as from a distance, like a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass. He had not exactly thought that yet. What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. . . . He was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, ‘I better move. I better get away from here’” (195). Joe’s life revolves around this one main impulse (“I better move. I better get away from here”), repeated throughout the novel like a mantra: “I reckon I better get out of here. I reckon I better get out of here” (167), “I got to get out of here” (168). However, contrary to the escape way that the street and the road are supposed to offer, the notions of inertia and immobility come back several times in the novel like a haunting leitmotiv. Not moving means sinking: immobility is associated in the novel with imagery of pits, of sewers, of quick sand, of bottomless holes, and here, of “a bottomless morass.” In this image, there is something quite similar to the clinical symptoms of dissociation, or depersonalization: the connection between the mind and the body is severed, and Joe can only watch himself passively sink from a distance. The lack of motion seems to strip Joe of his sense of agency. However, the agency that movement is supposed to bring merely leads to another failure. Here lies the profound paradox of space and movement in Light in August: motion can never be an outlet nor a way out, as all space turns out to be nothing but an illusion, just another form of imprisonment, another cage: “When he went to bed that night his mind was made up to run away. He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage” (122). The comparison with the eagle, emphasized twice, holds significance: as a bird of prey, the eagle is traditionally associated with the ideas

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of freedom and power. But the independence suggested by the poetic image is immediately reversed by the conjunction “but,” and any hope to escape from his body can only be short-lived. As a matter of fact, Joe will end up jailed in the town of Mottstown before his death, behind bars, more canary than eagle. The narrative voice takes on a tone of tragic irony (“though he did not then know . . .”), foreshadowing the inevitable failure of Joe’s travels, which will end with his castration and consequent death. The manner of Joe’s death is significant. First of all, and even though this is obvious, death is the end of movement. By being lynched and castrated, a preferred tool of repression against African Americans in the South of the 1930s, his identity is finally but unfairly stabilized in an ill-fitting racial identity by the rest of the community. The act of castration, specifically, reveals the sexualization of black bodies and the obsession with black men’s sexualities.8 As historian Dora Apel analyzed in Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob, “as a violent and perverse homoerotic exchange, castration reveals the common white obsession with the black penis and a displaced desire to ‘consume’ the body of the Other. Not surprisingly, the fascination with and fetichization of the black penis made it the most highly prized lynching souvenir” (Apel 136). Indeed, there is something deeply jubilant and ecstatic in Percy Grimm’s handling of Joe’s penis, “flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. ‘Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell’” (349). In Joe’s death, his movements have been stilled as his identity is fixed on his body. Indeed, the last mention of Joe in the novel leaves no doubt as to the racial category he has been assigned to in death—when the anonymous furniture dealer giving a ride to Lena in the final chapter of the novel learns that she comes from Jefferson, he answers: “Oh. Where they lynched that nigger” (373). But the cruel and illusory settlement of the question of Joe’s identity is nothing if not profoundly unsatisfactory. Joe’s gruesome death happens in the antepenultimate chapter of Light in August. Yet, the novel does not come to an end on this cruel image, as Lena reappears, gently, bringing a softer ending to twenty chapters of violence and darkness. In this way, she inaugurates the circular narrative of Light in August, which opens and closes on the same vision of Lena riding away, gently rocked by the wagon. The image of the circle is vital in Faulkner’s treatment of bodies in motion: while Joe’s body endlessly vacillates between the two extremes of a racially biased spectrum, pendulum-like, Lena’s belly is steadily expanding as her child grows in her. As André Bleikasten poetically phrased it, “Lena moves in the timeless time of eternal recurrence, along a soft curve retracing and rejoining itself in a circle ever rebegun. As to her own time (if we can credit her with a time of her own), it is like a smaller circle within the large one, closed in upon itself, throbbing with the pulse of living matter” (Bleikasten 276). Lena has the same relationship to

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time and to movement: what comes around goes around, as time and space appear cyclical to her. She travels “with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season” (41). There is no need to hurry: as opposed to Joe’s agitated scrambling, Lena moves with a paradoxical “nomotion” (331): “Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road” (8). The distance for Lena is “roadcarved and definite” (12); her trajectory, although not in a straight line, is precise and defined. While Joe runs frantically, she walks slowly, carelessly, “swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself” (10). Her growing belly directs her pace, even though Lena’s gender and pregnancy should have implied a reduced, or even an impossible mobility. Pregnant women tend to be excluded from travel narratives, but in Light in August, Lena embodies never-ending movement. Like the roundness of her belly and the circularity of her travel, Lena’s pregnancy and motion remind us of a circle, a geometrical shape which embodies movement without obstacles: “a body does get around” (30, 507), Lena self-consciously repeats at the beginning and at the end of Light in August. The preposition “a-round” shows the way body and movement feed off each other for her. Undoubtedly, Joe Christmas and Lena Grove’s separate travels communicate on a textual level by being reflections of each other in negative. But they also resonate on a formal level: in the economy of the novel, Lena Grove’s arrival and departure envelop the story of Joe Christmas. Indeed, the first and the last chapters are dedicated to her movement in and out of Jefferson, while the core of the novel incorporates Joe’s childhood, numerous travels and ultimate demise. Movements on the road and narrative direction appear to be correlated. Joe’s narrative strand is mostly composed of analepses—he is stuck in a retrospective, backward-looking timeline. His movements, therefore, are erratic in space as well as in time. Lena, however, lives only in the present, as the first words of the novel indicate: “Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks . . .” (5, my italics). Her past is only mentioned very briefly at the beginning of the novel, in passing, through a brief summary of the death of her parents, moving in with her brother’s family before becoming pregnant and running away to find her lover. Her past is never mentioned again in the novel, as it is already behind her: “Behind her the four weeks, the evocation of far is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices” (7). The future, in the same way, is never explicitly mentioned by her. As Catherine Porter phrased it, Lena lives in “a moving present capable of leading us virtually anywhere” (Porter 87). Lena’s first action in Light in August, beside walking and gazing at an upcoming wagon in the distance, is

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to take off her shoes: “When she felt the dust of the road beneath her feet she removed the shoes and carried them in her hand” (7). A traditional reading of Lena Grove has highlighted her primeval function in Light in August. André Bleikasten, for instance, has argued that “Lena belongs to this pure mythic space prior to the fall into time, and as has often been pointed out, she turns out to be herself a mythic figure, a new avatar, in Faulkner’s fiction, of the primal mother or earth goddess” (Bleikasten 277). However, it could also be added that instead of belonging to “this pure mythic space prior to the fall into time,” disconnected from reality and the passing of time, Lena is defined by her presentness. Throughout the novel, Lena slides in and out of the narrative, elusive and free. In her ability to escape from the narrative, she shares with Joe a sense of shapelessness: “Beneath the faded garment of that same weathered blue her body is shapeless” (11). Yet, in her case, shapelessness does not seem to hold the same morbid connotation as for Joe, as it enables her to escape the dark core of the novel, as well as the weight of expectations put on women. She is a marginal character, quite literally, as she occupies the first and last chapter. Yet, Faulkner granted her the beginning and the ending of the novel, the two most primordial parts; the entrance gate and the exit door. She is the novel’s bright margin, the luminous frame to the dark and violent core of the novel—therefore, she embodies the eponymous light in August. In this way, she acts as a buffer between the readers and the prowling violence at the core of the novel. She may also be a shroud for Joe’s corpse—instead of leaving us on the image of Joe bleeding out from his mutilated groin in chapter 19, Lena takes us in chapter 21 on her ongoing journey with her and her newborn infant in the light of August, thus imbuing a vision of death with a vision of life. Indeed, Lena’s journey, while framing Joe’s, represents a counterpoint to his life of trauma and tragedy. While Joe’s movements could be represented in endless spirals, a descending vortex, betraying the impossibility to stabilize his identity into his body, Lena’s movements consist in one perfect circle, from Alabama to Mississippi and then back to Tennessee. For Joe, the novel is the final destination of years of bleak wanderings. For Lena, it is merely a stop along the way, a stopover on the road. Lena remains on the edge of the story and of the novel, and by doing so, she does not get sucked in the violence, misogyny, and bigotry wrecking chaos in the core of the novel. Like a figure on ancient Greek pottery, she treads softly on the margins, on the periphery: “she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (8). Once again, Faulkner partakes in his paradoxical treatment of motion. Lena’s deliberate movements are “without progress,” as she seems to constantly come

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back to her starting point, but they are also never-ending. In the mention of the urn lies a literary allusion to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Indeed, the ghost of Keats’s influence can be found everywhere in Faulkner’s body of work—in Light in August specifically, Lena seems to perfectly embody the beauty and timelessness suggested by Keats’s urn. Just like the urn is for Keats an artistic experience of contemplating beauty—with the very famous line “beauty is truth; truth beauty”—the journey, for Lena, is an end in itself, an aesthetic experience. In the final pages of the novel, she is described by the anonymous furniture dealer giving her a ride as “just sitting there, riding, looking out like she hadn’t ever seen country—roads and trees and fields and telephone poles—before in her life” (380). She is traveling with no other ulterior motives; her movements become a form of feminine transgression in a society where women, and especially mothers, share an almost symbiotic relationship with the domestic sphere. At the beginning of the novel, Lena lives with her brother and his “labor- and childridden wife” (5). Lena’s sister-in-law is the perfect example of a mother stuck in a stifling domestic sphere, as she is literally immobilized in bed: “For almost half of every year the sister-in-law was either lying in or recovering. During this time Lena did all the housework and took care of the other children” (5). This first taste of motherhood and domesticity seems to have motivated Lena’s yearning for free roaming, a fact that the furniture dealer explains in this way in the final chapter of Light in August: Do you know what I think? I think she was just traveling. I don’t think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I don’t think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her. And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could. Since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life. (380)

Finding the father of her then unborn child, the first explanation given for her journey, was only a pretext for the actual purpose of movement: movement itself. But it remains hard to tell if this is really the case, as the discourse is once again nothing but a projection upon Lena, an attempt at rationalizing her motivations: “you know what I think? I think . . .” (my italics). When the final chapter of Light in August comes to an end, beyond the final period, Lena has not settled yet, leaving open the possibility of a never-ending journey. Light in August is saturated in a rhetoric, imagery, and formal structure opposing immobility and wandering. Joe’s ceaseless movements, as well as

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his constantly mutating flesh, display the impossibility of a body which does not conform to social expectations of either blackness or whiteness, masculinity and femininity, a binary societal system based in the belief of impermeable races and genders which are to remain immutable. A grim story from the very beginning: Joe is “doomed with motion” (170) as he appears doomed to perish. During his final flight, hunted by a group of white men and their bloodhounds, Joe suddenly stops in his tracks, as “he crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand” (449). However, Faulkner made the decision to not end the novel on the vision of a body immobilized for eternity. Lena’s journey, in that way, brings a sense of beauty and dignity to the grim tale of Joe’s life. Ultimately, these two contrasted experiences of movement reveal how deeply body and motion are related. While Joe’s body is split between his black blood and white blood, and will ultimately die by amputation, the novel’s ultimate image evokes two bodies in fusion, being gently rocked by the road: Lena is breastfeeding9 her newborn son in the wagon “sitting there with her face as calm as church, holding that baby up so it could eat and ride the bumps at the same time” (379). For her, freight trains and modern means of transportation are never far away, but their frenzy can only be contemplated from afar, similar to giant mythical creatures slowly moving in the distance: “(the train) appeared out of the devastated hills with apparitionlike suddenness and wailing like a banshee” (5). In Joe’s frantic journey, “broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons” (223), a multitude of means of transportation, technology paradoxically hinders the freedom of his movements. Lena, however, favors the simple and slow rocking of wagons and trucks. In the final words of the novel, almost identical to the first ones, Lena celebrates a unified relationship to the body, through the very subtle use of one letter, a small indefinite article: “My, my. A body does get around. Here we ain’t been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee” (381, my italics). Transient bodies, in Light in August, mark the impulse to transgress oppressive social obligations.

NOTES 1. Like many other novels by Faulkner, the plot of Light in August is mostly set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawhpha. However, Light in August is remarkable by the plurality and the width of places mentioned. For instance, Joe is said to have traveled “Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi” (224). Joanna Bundren, in chapter 10, narrates her family history and her relatives’ movements to Mexico.

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2. “A fur piece” is a Southern expression, which means “a far piece.” Here, Lena acknowledges the distance she has already traveled before the novel even started. 3. The neologism “non-place” was coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé in his work Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. The term refers to anthropological spaces of transience where people remain anonymous. These spaces, according to Augé, do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places.” Among non-places, Augé mentions motel rooms, shopping malls, train stations, and airports, among others. 4. If some women also had to take the road in the aftermath of the Stock Market crash of 1929, that number pales in comparison to the large number of male migrant workers working on farms having to leave their households. As David B. Danbom phrased it, in the 1930s, “transience remained an overwhelmingly male enterprise” (Danbom 172). 5. See entry for “transient worker” in the Oxford English Dictionary. 6. In a metanarrative perspective, the reference to Joe’s skin as “parchment” also turns him into a writing surface. His singularity indeed makes him a perfect Faulknerian subject. 7. The expression “black metropolis” was coined by African American social scientist St. Clair Drake and his research associate, Horace R. Cayton, in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, published in 1945. It provides an in-depth analysis of African American urban communities in American cities. 8. Angela Davis, in her chapter “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist” in Women, Race and Class, emphasizes the historical groundings for the obsession for black male sexuality in the aftermath of the Civil War. 9. The final breastfeeding scene of Light in August is oddly similar to the final image of The Grapes of Wrath, in which Rose of Sharon suckles an old starving man. The two novels share a closing image imbued with equal spiritual power with breastfeeding—a famous motif in visual art in which the Virgin Mary holds the dead Christ in her lap.

WORKS CITED Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, Rutgers UP, 2004. Augé, Marc. Non-lieux : Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris, Le Seuil, 2015. Bleikasten, André. The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 2016. Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1994. Danbom, David B. Going It Alone: Fargo Grapples with the Great Depression. Minneapolis, Minnesota Historical Society, 2005. Davis, F. James. Who Is Black?: One Nation’s Definition. University Park, Penn State Press, 2010.

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Drake, Saint C., et al. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1984. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York, Grove Press, 2008. Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York, Vintage International, 2011. Lange, Dorothea, photographer. Migrant Worker on California Highway. 1935. Library of Congress, Washington. Library of Congress, www​.loc​.gov​/item​ /2017768863/. Accessed October 2019. Muehrcke, Phillip C., and Juliana O. Muehrcke. “Maps in Literature.” Geographical Review, vol. 64, no. 3, 1974, pp. 317–338. Porter, Carolyn. William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2007. Railton, Stephen. The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. https://faulkner​.iath​.virginia​.edu​/index​.html. Accessed October 2019. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Slabey, Robert M. “Joe Christmas, Faulkner’s Marginal Man.” Phylon (1960–) vol. 21, no. 3 (1960), pp. 266–277. Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York, Penguin Classics, 2000. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Part II

DISABLED BODIES, AILING BODIES, AND MOBILITY

Chapter 4

The Shelleys’ Tried Bodies in Their Travel Literature Demystification and Mythmaking Fabien Desset

Traveling on a mule’s back or on foot, sailing on seas or rapid rivers, facing storms and drowning, bodies were definitely put to the test when Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley eloped to the Continent in 1814, and when they traveled back to Switzerland in 1816, before eventually settling in Italy in 1818. It was above all to behold the world that they left England, but the accounts of the Shelleys in their letters, journals, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) and, more indirectly, their poems (“Alastor,” 1815) and novels (Frankenstein, 1818) show that the wonders of a foreign land could be mixed with trials. Even worse, it was during their days in Italy that their children Clara and William died, not to mention Mary’s miscarriage. The irony is that it was also to seek a more congenial climate that the Shelleys had left England for Italy, as Percy Bysshe had a weak constitution. This chapter will show that, beneath the varnish of sublime landscapes and picaresque adventures lies a less pleasant reality that affected the Shelleys’ bodies. Although the descriptive eye tends to outshine the other senses and the physical body often disappears behind the creative or philosophising mind, there are traces, in their writings, of the impact of travel on their bodies, especially Percy Bysshe’s. It is possible to analyse this physical impact in three stages, starting with the poet’s weak constitution, which traveling could make even weaker, then focusing on the gap between his physical inadequacies and his romantic aspirations, as well as the distinction between internal and external sensations, before concluding on death, the terminus for the Shelleys’ traveling bodies. The study will also attempt to see if this physical impact of traveling found its way into Shelley’s poetry and prose.

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SHELLEY’S FRAIL CONSTITUTION: SEASICKNESS, COACH JOGGING, AND BODILY FATIGUE Percy Bysshe Shelley was tall, slim, and had been bullied at school partly because of his androgynous looks. He often felt poorly, suffering from nervous attacks, chronic abdominal illness, consumptive symptoms or ophthalmia (Holmes 111–115, 286, 143, n.). It was believed at the time that traveling to the south of Europe could improve such a weak constitution (see H. Shelley 9, Letter no. 4, June 7). Travel tried his “delicate health” when he experienced his first sea-storm on his way to Dublin, with his first wife and her sister Eliza (Holmes 116). The return was not more relaxed, as it took thirty-six hours, because of a contrary wind: Then we had above a mile to walk over rocks and stone in a pouring mist before we could get to the inn. . . . As soon as we could get supper we did. We did not eat anything for 36 hours all the time we were on board, and immediately began upon meat; you will think this very extraordinary, but Percy and my sister suffered so much by the voyage, and were so much weakened by the vegetable system, that had they still continued it would have been seeking a premature grave. (H. Shelley 5–6, Letter no. 3, April 16th, 1812)

Harriet’s letter shows bodies at the mercy of sea-storms, the sailor’s selling promises and Shelley’s adoption of vegetarianism a month before (Holmes 129). Sailing to the Continent, first only with his second wife-to-be, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her step-sister, Jane “Claire” Clairmont (1814), and then with their children William (1816), Clara, and Claire’s daughter Allegra (1818), could also be as dangerous, as the poet recounts on July 28th, 1814, in his wife’s Journal: Mary was much affected by the sea, she could scarcely move. She lay in my arms throughout the night; the little strength that remained to my own exhausted frame was all expended in keeping her head in rest over my bosom. . . . We were proceeding slowly against the wind, when suddenly a thunder squall struck the sail and the waves rushed into the boat; even the sailors believed that our situation was perilous; the wind had now changed, and we drove before the wind, that came in violent gusts, directly to Calais. Mary did not know our danger; she was resting between my knees, that were unable to support her; she did not speak or look, but I felt that she was there. I had time in that moment to reflect, and even to reason upon death; it was rather a thing of discomfort and disappointment than horror to me. We should never be separated, but in death we might not know and feel our union as now. (3–4)

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This account is typical in that the physical reality is somewhat eclipsed by the epic and even philosophical dimensions. Shelley’s style is picaresque, as the other extracts from this entry also show: the sentences are often short; the semi-colons barely leave the reader any time to take breath; the adjective “violent,” the adverb “suddenly” or the climactic “a thunder squall struck the sails and the waves rushed into the boat” more than suggest “danger,” while “even the sailors believed that our situation was perilous” shows the extraordinariness of the situation. That Shelley is left to write this narrative in Mary’s journal may be due to the authoritative skill of a more experienced writer. Obviously, they had already contemplated publishing what they were to write, as they were themselves reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway and Denmark (1796). The poet’s tragic flaw is even turned into heroism, when “the little strength that remained to [his] own exhausted frame was all expended in keeping [Mary’s] head in rest over [his] bosom.” At the same time, he rejects the cliché of reunion-indeath for a more empirical, materialistic, and commonsense reflection on the deeper experience of life and sensations. However “disappointed” he claims to have been, the experience is therefore positive, a victory of the will over matter, be it the sea or his frail frame. There are actually two realities, what the bodies experience and what the poet makes of it. His “knees” are too weak and Mary’s “head” listless, because of the stress, “[sea-]sickness and fatigue” (History of a Six Weeks’ Tour 2–4), but this weakness is again turned into strength as Shelley’s “arms,” “bosom,” and “knees” prop Mary up all the same. On the one hand, the focus on body parts and limbs rather than organs of perception paradoxically emphasize the strength of the poet. On the other hand, the poet’s memory is rooted in physicality, even in some sort of sexual embrace due to the reference to the knees. Yet this emphasis on bodies is fugitive, compared to the overall epic of the situation. “[Sea-]sickness” and the ensuing physical exhaustion are mentioned in the other accounts of sea-crossing, like Mary’s version of this one in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (2–4), which is less heroic, since it is her point of view that is given to the public and she slept most of the time. Despite the resulting omissions, she adds that the sailors “succeeded in reefing the sail,” which makes them more heroic than her husband, and is more explicit as to her situation: “I was dreadfully sea-sick, and as is usually my custom when thus affected, I slept;” “Exhausted with sickness and fatigue, I walked over the sands with my companions to the hotel.” Apart from the word “companions,” neither refers to the third person, and body, traveling with them, Claire’s. The sea-crossing from the Netherlands, on September 11th, 1814, “almost kill[ed]” them (M. Shelley, Journal 14), but the “perpendicular” and “overhanging” hyperboles describing the waves (History 79–81) again turn experience into an epic colored by Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime.

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Shelley definitely felt more pleasure at sailing on rivers and lakes, as he wrote to T. L. Peacock from Lucerne: “The waves of this lake never afflict me with that sickness that deprives me of all enjoyment in a sea voyage; on the contrary, the tossing of our boat raises my spirits and inspires me with unusual hilarity” (Letters 1: 476, May 17th or 15th, 1816). Typically, Shelley’s mental state overcomes his physical sensations, although they are necessarily linked. Traveling by coach was neither a pleasant experience for the Shelleys. They often complained about long negotiations, lack of comfort, delay or their fellow travelers: Nothing in the world can be more wretched than travelling in this German diligence: the coach is clumsy and comfortless, and we proceeded so slowly, stopping so often, that it appeared as if we should never arrive at our journey’s end. . . . we jogged on all night [in another “cabriolet”] behind this cumbrous machine. . . . we first rested about three hours at this stage, where we could not obtain breakfast or any convenience, and at about eight o’clock we again departed, and with slow, although far from easy travelling, faint with hunger and fatigue, we arrived by noon at Clêves. (M. Shelley, History 72–73)

The word “cabriolet,” shortened into “cab” toward the end of the nineteenth century, indeed comes from the passengers “jogging” like goats (Latin capra)—Claire uses the word “Cabriole” in her journal (38). The discomfort is also caused by overcrowding. T. J. Hogg tells how worried Shelley had been when he believed to have been “infected” with elephantiasis on a coach (457–458), although it was just another instance of hypochondria. Still, it is easy to imagine what Shelley might have felt three years later in Germany, where discomfort turned into “disgust”: “Nothing could be more horribly disgusting than the lower order of smoking, drinking Germans who traveled with us; they swaggered and talked, and what was hideous to English eyes, kissed one another” (History 67). Here, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch conspire to nauseate the Shelleys. There is also the frustrating paradox of not moving at all. That day, they did not cover more than nine miles, “five times slower than a snail’s walk” (M. Shelley, Journal 14, September 6, 1814), which makes Mary’s exasperation and exhaustion understandable. When, earlier on in Switzerland, their “cabriolet broke down,” they “were obliged to proceed on foot” (History 59), which made “Mary groan” (Journal 12, August 29th). Although their feet seem to have been the main casualties, “hunger” and “fatigue” are the generic ills that affected all their traveling bodies, and they may have been furthered by a naturally weak constitution and the “vegetable diet.” However straining and dangerous, traveling by boat, at least on rivers, therefore seems to have been

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less trying for them, as Mary concludes at the end of History of a Six Weeks’ Tour: “we . . . enjoy[ed] the beauteous Rhine, and all the brilliant shews of earth and sky, perhaps more, traveling as we did, in an open boat, than if we had been shut up in a carriage, and passed on the road under the hills” (78–79). Shelley’s frail constitution may also have played a part in his “bodily fatigue” on Vesuvius and in museums. It was not so much on climbing Vesuvius, Shelley insists, as on going down that he experienced “intense bodily fatigue”: We went to Resina in a carriage where Mary & I mounted on mules, & Clare was carried in a chair on the shoulders of four men . . . & then went on foot up the cone; this is the only part of the ascent in which there is any difficulty & that difficulty has been much exaggerated. It is composed of rocks of lava & declivities of ashes; by ascending the former & descending the latter there is very little fatigue. . . . We descended by torch light, & I should have enjoyed the scenery on my return but that they conducted me I know not how to the hermitage in a state of intense bodily suffering, the worst effect of which was spoiling the pleasure of Mary & Clare. (Letters 2: 62–63, no. 488, December 17th or 18th, 1818)

The subsequent references to this volcano, mainly in Prometheus Unbound, do not mention that fatigue, although Panthea, who travels by air, and Asia, who is also to sail up a river, experience a faintness caused by volcanic vapors and the winds: “the vapor dim thy brain” (17) and “my brain / Grows dizzy” (49–50), says Asia to Panthea. Perhaps the hypochondriac Shelley believed that the “sulphurous smoke” and “intense heat” acted badly on his delicate health. However, despite Shelley’s insistence on fatigue (“very little fatigue” means there is some), what is emphasized in the rest of the description is the sight and sound of Vesuvius, which is compared to the sublime glaciers of Mont Blanc they saw in their previous tour. The most direct influence of bodily fatigue on composition is found in the Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence (1819), where Shelley even goes so far as to project his own “bodily fatigue” (Letters 2: 70, no. 491, January 23rd–24th, 1819, to T. L. Peacock) on the Ganymede he saw in Florence: “the knee being a little bent as those who are slightly, but slightly, fatigued with standing” (Shelley’s Prose 350). The last phrase is the very one used in his letter to Peacock to refer to himself standing in museums, so that Shelley combines his own experience with his aesthetic discourse. Indeed, the expression “slightly, but slightly” echoes “lips parted but slightly parted” in his description of Correggio’s painting of Christ in Bologna (Letters 2: 49, no. 486, November 9th, 1818, to T. L. Peacock), a phrase that embodies ideal aesthetic balance. Shelley’s ekphrasis of Ganymede is therefore an aesthetic representation of his traveling body, among other things.

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The best example, however, of a “fatigued” traveling body—a non-traveling one would be Prometheus on Caucasus—is “that frail and wasted human form” in “Alastor,” composed after the first tour on the Continent: . . . wildly he wandered on, Day after day, a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame. And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair Sered by the autumn of strange suffering Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone. (244–254, The Poems 1: 473)

Of course, as the Gothic “spectral form” of line 259 suggests, this exhaustion is also a literary motif, like the Ossianic wind sighing through his “scattered hair” or the “weary waste of hours” borrowed from the Wandering Jew and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner—maybe combined with a memory of coaches. Travel only reinforces what is above all psychosomatic, since “decay” is above all caused by the Poet’s “brooding care,” namely his vain search for ideal love. Typically, while his “strange suffering” and travel make him “lean” and even more than skinny, the eye literally outshines the rest of the picture. The evocation of the suffering traveling body thus at once underlines the predicament the Shelleys were in, with a degree of self-pity and humility, and their ability to overcome obstacles, which also makes their narratives more exciting for the readers of their letters and edited journals. When the body is referred to, it is lost in the greater epic picture, while Percy Bysshe’s weak constitution is redeemed by the victory of his will over matter. ROMANTIC SENSATIONS AND QUIXOTISM What the reader actually remembers in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour and other references to travel is the stimulation of the senses, sight especially, and, to a lesser extent, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. The key phrase for sight is “picturesque”—Shelley does not seem to suffer from ophthalmia when in Savoy; the hardness of marble is felt in his descriptions of temples and statues; smell is stimulated by the flowers of Rome, and taste by the fruit eaten along the way, while the “cacophony of the French” (Letters 2:

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3–4, no. 460, April 6th, 1818, to T. L. Peacock) is eventually replaced by the sweeter Italian tongue and the concerts they attend in the cities. Perhaps the most sensuous experience is that described by Percy Bysshe in the temple of Jupiter in Pompeii, as it is synesthetic: the “blue sea” was seen “reflecting the purple heaven of noon above it,” while the “distant deep peals” of Vesuvius “seemed to shake the very air & light of day which interpenetrated [their] frames with the sullen & tremendous sound.” They also “pulled out [their] oranges & figs & bread & [?soil] apples,” and their perfumes made the scene complete. Shelley’s sensory experience even transports him to the time of the ancient Greeks, whose “upaithric” buildings allowed “the light & wind, the odour & the freshness of the country” to “penetrat[e] the cities” (Letters 2: 73–75, no.491, January 23rd, 1819, to T. L. Peacock). These happier experiences find their ways into poetry, Prometheus Unbound for instance: “through their snow-white columns flowed / The warm winds, and the azure ether shone, / And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen” (II, iv, 95–7, The Poems 2: 563) thus again combines sight with touch. There are also scenes of interpenetration, as when Panthea, who flies from one place to another, is filled with the essence of Prometheus, although the poet emphasizes her internal sensation: “I saw not—heard not—moved not— only felt / His presence flow and mingle through my blood / Till it became his life and his grew mine” (II, i, 79–81). Perhaps it is significant that such a transcending experience should occur when the traveling bodies are at rest. Another pleasant yet more thrilling experience was sailing down the Rhine. At Lucerne, the Shelleys embarked on a “diligence par eau” and sailed on the Reuss before reaching the Rhine: The Reuss is exceedingly rapid, and we descended several falls, one of more than eight feet. There is something very delicious in the sensation, when at one moment you are at the top of a fall of water, and before the second has expired you are at the bottom, still rushing on with the impulse which the descent has given. . . . . . . we engaged a small canoe to convey us to Mumph [Mumpf]. I give these boats this Indian appellation, as they were of the rudest construction—long, narrow, and flat-bottomed: they consisted merely of straight pieces of deal board, unpainted, and nailed together with so little care, that the water constantly poured in at the crevices, and the boat perpetually required emptying. . . . it was a sight of some dread to see our frail boat winding among the eddies of the rocks, which it was death to touch, and when the slightest inclination on one side would instantly have overset it. . . . The same morning a boat, containing fifteen persons, in attempting to cross the water, had upset in the middle of the river, and every one in it perished. We

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saw the boat turned over, floating down the stream. (M. Shelley, History 57–58, 64–65)

Whereas the first experience on the Reuss is pleasant, even sensuous, as the feeling of speed and the “delicious” sensation of going down is mixed with the view of the river, the second is less serene. There is no mention of bodies but the reader can imagine Mary Shelley’s heart heaving and her limbs tingling with thrills. However, “dread” succeeds to delight, which structures her account, by offering variety, even chiaroscuro, to her readers. The external sensation of “touch,” still mixed with “sight,” and the smell of fir suggested by “deal board” replace the more internal delight felt before, and, indeed, the description of the canoe, with its boards and nails, or the mention of the “rocks, which it was death to touch,” add some physicality to the account. The description of the boat as a “canoe” made up of barely nailed planks may be hyperbolic, as travelers often exaggerate the wonders of what they saw or the squalor of the places they visited, accommodation especially. On the other hand, it might be true to the actual conditions of early travel, just as traveling today in certain countries can be hazardous. Still, Mary Shelley exaggerates the exoticism of the situation, by referring to an American “Indian” canoe, and emphasizes danger, by using adverbs that make her account even more subjective, like “constantly,” “instantly,” and, above all, “perpetually,” the superlatives “rudest” and “slightest,” and the hyperbolic adjective “innumerable.” Like the adverbs, the adjective insists on the multiplicity of dangerous situations, while opposing short-lived fragile human beings to more eternal Nature, whose depiction announces the everlasting glaciers of Percy Bysshe’s “Mont Blanc” (1816). Again, the experience is positive and propaedeutic, as it inspires Shelley with the sailing in “Alastor,” composed a year later: A little shallop floating near the shore . . . It had been long abandoned, for its sides Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. . . . . . . [He] took his lonely seat, And felt the boat speed o’er the tranquil sea Like a torn cloud before a hurricane. . . . The straining boat.—A whirlwind swept it on, With fierce gusts and precipitating force, Through the white ridges of the chafèd sea. The waves arose. Higher and higher still . . . . . . The little boat Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam

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Down the steep cataract of a wintry river; Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave; Now leaving far behind the bursting mass That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled— As if that frail and wasted human form Had been an elemental god. . . . (299–350, P. B. Shelley, The Poems 1: 475– 477)

Benjamin Colbert suggests that, in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, “Mary Shelley may be remembering through the glass of Shelley’s poem” (51–3). However, her Journal entry for August 29th, 1814, already featured the “small and frail” boat that “require[d] much attention to prevent an overset” (12), as Colbert yet notes, and a “slight canoe” (13, August 31st). Another source, as Mary Shelley already revealed in her “Note on Alastor,” (P. B. Shelley, Poetical Works 47), was “his favourite poem ‘Thalaba’ [1801],” where Robert Southey’s “one and only seat” in “The little boat” that “mov’d on” (XI, xxxi, 2–4, xxxv, 2, 237–243) partly accounts for the vanishing of Shelley’s traveling companions in “Alastor”. Matthews and Everest also quote Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, III, vii, 27) for the less exotic word “shallop” that Shelley substitutes for the “canoe” of the Journal. Both terms actually recall the French “chaloupe” and “canot,” which can be embarked on, or attached to, a larger boat, especially for emergency reasons, like the “slight canoe that accompanied our boat”—the “diligence par eau” was already a French phrase. So, even if History of a Six Weeks’ Tour expands on “Alastor,” both works directly draw on the Shelleys’ sailing and turn it into an epic, while the literary borrowings from Thalaba and other works suggest that the Shelleys were already transforming their experience when traveling. The transpositions of Percy Bysshe’s “felt the boat speed” and “Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave; / Now leaving far behind the bursting mass” into Mary’s “There is something very delicious in the sensation, when at one moment you are at the top of a fall of water, and before the second has expired you are at the bottom,” also suggests that the sensation was perhaps less pleasant to him than to her. Besides that sensation, there are references to the poet’s weak constitution and physical appearance discussed in the first part. It is also through the description of the shallop that the Poet is described: “Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints” not only refers to the canoe described by Mary but to the Poet himself, who indeed projects what he feels onto the boat, for instance through the hypallage “lonely seat” or personification “straining boat.” Shelley often uses the latter adjective for the eye, so there is an obvious physiological dimension in the phrase, recalling Shelley’s strain when traveling, especially on “the chafèd sea,” whose memory is here combined

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with his experience of sailing down rivers. The last lines of the passage make the identification of the Poet with the frail bark even more obvious: “As if that frail and wasted human form / Had been an elemental god.” It actually sends us back to Shelley’s second crossing of the Irish Sea, when, “wasted” by seasickness and his “vegetable diet,” his will had eventually ruled over matter. Out of romance, but also because of their limited finances, the Shelleys chose to travel on foot from Paris to the Alps during their first journey on the Continent: We resolved to walk through France; but as I was too weak for any considerable distance, and my sister could not be supposed to be able to walk as far as S*** each day, we determined to purchase an ass, to carry our portmanteau and one of us by turns. . . . It was dusk, and the ass seemed totally unable to bear one of us, appearing to sink under the portmanteau, although it was small and light. We were, however, merry enough, and thought the leagues short. . . . Finding our ass useless, we sold it before we proceeded on our journey, and bought a mule, for ten Napoleons. . . . At about one we arrived at Gros Bois, where, under the shade of trees, we ate our bread and fruit, and drank our wine, thinking of Don Quixote and Sancho. (13–16)

This testimony incidentally shows the difference of temper between Mary and Claire, who was more inclined to indulge in physical activity, here walking, and follow Shelley. They were, at first, so self-confident and “merry” as to identify themselves with Don Quixote and Sancho, who rode an ass, thus transporting themselves into a picaresque novel. Contrary to their future travel on the cabriolet, the feeling of freedom they must have felt made “the leagues short.” We only suffer for the ass, which was “weak and unfit for labour,” leading Mary to joke that they set out “carrying the ass” (Journal 6, August 8th). Shelley almost sounds disappointed by the absence of “adventures”: “I led Mary on her mule [note the possessive], with the exception of eight miles, which Jane rode. . . . We arrive without adventures, though not without feelings of pride and pleasure” (Journal 7, August 9th). Indeed, “pride” was necessary to publish a private tour. However, alluding to Don Quixote, rather than Sir Launcelot, is also a way to mock oneself, showing that the Shelleys were aware of the folly of their expedition; their romantic fantasy was not unalloyed with doubts. The Quixotic plan was not only put to the test by the summer heat and insects, bodily fatigue and painful feet, but also by Shelley’s spraining his ankle: S*** had hurt his ancle [sic] so considerably the preceding evening, that he was obliged, during the whole of the following day’s journey, to ride on our mule

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[again note the possessive]. . . . Thousands of insects, which were of the same white colour as the road, infested our path; the sky was cloudless, and the sun darted its rays upon us, reflected back by the earth, until I nearly fainted under the heat. (M. Shelley, History 21–22)

Mary’s mule thus ended up being Percy Bysshe’s. As “S***’s sprain rendered [their] pedestrianism impossible,” they eventually exchanged their mule in Troyes for a “voiture that went on four wheels” (26). By the time they reached the Swiss border, “S**’s ancles had become very painful” (M. Shelley, History 37–38). There is no record of renewing the experience. It is also significant that pedestrianism and carriages are limited in Shelley’s poetry, compared to sailing and boats: only the Poet in “Alastor” really travels on foot, but he also sails a lot. The Wandering Jew rides a horse, but he has already left his wanderings behind when Shelley’s eponymous poem (1810) begins. Likewise, although the winged cars and horses in Prometheus Unbound (III, iv, 111–121) recall Mary’s description of the cabriolet in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (“an unintelligible article of harness, resembling a pair of wooden wings fastened to his shoulders,” 8), Shelley had already used them in Queen Mab (1813), had other models in mind (e.g., the biga in the Vatican), and made those cars fly. There is one instance of sprained ankles in Shelley’s poetry, though, but it is in his translation of Euripides’s Cyclops (1819) and is not an addition: “our ankles / Are spraining with standing here” (651–652, The Poems 2:408). Besides, the sprain is not caused by traveling, being an excuse from Ulysses’s companions not to risk themselves thrusting a spike into the Cyclops’s eye. DEATH: THE FINAL STAGE OF TRAVELING BODIES Ralph Pite emphasizes the reality of Shelley’s travels and the irony behind his exaggeration of pastoral Italy: Transporting three young children, their mothers, and servants across France and Switzerland must have imposed considerable strain on Shelley. He makes no mention of those circumstances, choosing instead a more impersonal narrative in which (following a long-standing convention) he describes arriving in Italy as an entry into Eden. . . . the calm he attains is always exposed to irony too . . . (31–34)

Traveling long distances in a coach was indeed a dangerous thing to do when you had very young children, especially in those times of high infant mortality rates. Clara (born September 1817) was not one year old, Allegra (January

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1817) just one, and William (February 1815) three when the Shelleys departed for Italy. Traveling first proved fatal in Venice, where their daughter Clara died in September 1818: “Our little girl . . . showed symptoms of suffering from the heat of the climate. Teething increased her illness and danger. . . . We had scarcely arrived at Venice, before life fled from the little sufferer, and we returned to Este to weep her loss” (M. Shelley, “Note on the Poems of 1818,” P. B. Shelley, Poetical Works, 229). In fact, Clara showed ominous symptoms even before reaching Este, and it is the opinion of Ursula Orange and Richard Holmes (443–7) that not only the hot August climate but also Shelley’s travel directions to his wife were largely responsible for Clara’s death: Pray come instantly to Este, where I shall be waiting with Claire & Elise with the utmost anxiety for your arrival. You can pack up directly you get this letter & employ the next day in that. The day after you get up at four o’clock, & go post to Lucca where you will arrive at 6. Then take Vetturino [coach] for Florence to arrive the same evening. From Florence to Este is three days . . . I shall count 4 days for this letter 1 day for packing 4 for coming here—On the ninth or tenth day we shall meet. (Letters 2: 37–38, no. 479, August 23rd)

He had yet already lost a premature daughter in 1814, so, although he “fe[lt] secure there [was] no danger” and felt “anxi[ous]” for the delay, this was more than carelessness. In the letter, Mary’s and her child’s bodies are more or less reduced to shipped goods. Shelley’s description of gondolas in Venice to Peacock, on October 8, just after Clara’s death, seems to have been drawn from her being carried in such boats: “The gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic and picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis” (Letters 2: 42–43). The one-year-old child, like the moth, was indeed short-lived, but it is strange that the poet should find his simile so “romantic and picturesque,” unless he sought some comfort in an after-life for his child’s soul. The idea is recast in “Julian and Maddalo” (1819), first in a draft (“that most ghastly bark”), and then in the final version of the poem (“so, o’er the lagoon / We glided, and from that funereal bark / I leaned, and saw the city” (87–89, The Poems, 2: 668 and n.), in which his grief is more perceptible. As in “Alastor,” the body merges with the boat that carries it, and here, the empty chrysalis might as well be Clara’s corpse as Shelley’s bereft heart. Nor did their son William survive long: “We came to Italy thinking to do Shelley’s health good—but the Climate is not [by] any means warm enough to be of benefit to him & yet it is that that has destroyed my two children” (M.

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Shelley, Letters 74, no. 72, July 29th, 1819, to Marianne Hunt). William’s death was caused by what Mary calls “this hateful Italy” and more precisely “the pestilential air of Rome” (73, no. 71, June 27th, to Amelia Curran): “the heat of this southern climate disagrees with William—he has had a dangerous attack of worms . . . We are advised above all things to pass the summer in as cool a place as possible” (71, no. 69, May 30th, to Maria Gisborne). As Richard Holmes comments, “The bustling ménage that had left Dover in 1818 was now depleted. . . . The household seemed to be infected, it was a ruin, a graveyard” (519). The losses were heavier on Mary, who also had a miscarriage in June of the same year (P. B. Shelley, Letters 2:434, no. 715, June 18th, to Jane Williams) and did not recover from it until the next month (M. Shelley, Letters 179, 181, no. 144, August 15th, to Maria Gisborne). Allegra was also to die of typhus in a convent in 1822. The Shelleys’ traveling bodies had found a terminus in death. The poet himself drowned in the Gulf of Spezia while sailing through a storm with his friend Edward Williams and their boat boy Charles Vivian, on board the Don Juan, named after Byron’s 1821 poem. The children’s deaths and Percy Bysshe’s drowning also show that the Shelleys might not always have been hyperbolic in their accounts of traveling. Finally, Shelley’s suicidal sailing recalls his previous experiences and “Alastor” (“A restless impulse urged him to embark / And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste,” l. 304–305) and it is curious that he did not learn from experiences. Shelley did not wish to die; on the contrary, he probably felt more than alive when facing the elements, thus identifying with his Poet or Promethean characters. The likeliest reason, then, is that, like the “restless” and “impatient” (300) Poet in “Alastor,” he was too psychologically rigid to turn back, once he had made plans: “I always go until I am stopped,” he told John Trelawny (71), “and I never am stopped.” Trelawny recounts what Shelley’s ultimate traveling body looked like when he found it on the shore: The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless. The tall, slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats’s poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt on my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley’s. The other body[’s] . . . flesh, sinews, and muscles hung about in rags, like the shirt, exposing the ribs and bones. . . . Vivian[’s] was a mere skeleton, and impossible to be identified. (Trelawny, 122–123)

In Trelawny’s gruesome account, the travelers are reduced to their “dress” and belongings, to which the witness gives voice, as in ekphrastic prosopopoeia,

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in order to identify them. Trelawny’s account already amounts to mythmaking, although the gross details may also have been intended as realistic ones. What survives is Shelley’s recognisable “tall, slight figure” as well as traces of his brilliant mind here embodied in Sophocles’s and Keats’s works thrusted in his pockets. Nor is Trelawny done with gross details and mythmaking. After quickly burying the corpse in the sand, the bodies were dug out again and burnt on the beach: Lime had been strewn on [the body]; this, or decomposition, had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo colour. Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinkingcup, I was determined Shelley’s should not be so profaned. The limbs did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of Williams’s body, so that the corpse was removed entire from the grave. . . . more wine was poured on Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. . . . The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled, as in a cauldron, for a very long time. . . . The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt. (136–138)

There is in this account a relish for horror and unorthodox mourning (the “cauldron” simile), not unmixed with some anger at the loss of friends or, as Trelawny puts it, at “the blow of an idle puff of wind” that “changed” the entire “scene” (125–126). Shelley would probably have laughed at the description, but he would also see Trelawny continuing his epic of a frail body driven by an unalterable will versus the elements. Body parts are clearly symbolical here, so it is difficult to tell whether this is reality or pure myth: Byron’s desire to keep the skull is a mix of Hamlet (V, i), in which the hero picks up Yorick’s skull, and the Gothic or Ossianic tradition of drinking in skulls; Shelley’s limbs still attached to his body, unlike Williams’s, make him tenacious even in death; his brain burning “for a very long time” at once refers to the strength of an organ that has accumulated so much knowledge and of the will over matter; and the heart that “remained entire” stresses the main strength of the poet of love, despite the shortcomings mentioned earlier. Compared to that Gothic mythmaking, the fictional and Christ-like statue of a naked Shelley in Oxford looks dull.

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CONCLUSION The Shelleys’ experience of traveling is a mix of romance and tragedy. Not only was the traveling body strained by seasickness, uncomfortable coaches, and sprained ankles, but death also “depleted” the Shelleyan household. What survives, though, is the description of sublime scenery and epic or picaresque episodes, as the testimonies of Shelley and his circle seek to emphasize the victory of a frail body driven by an unalterable will over matter, the main idea behind Prometheus Unbound and the much more pessimistic “Alastor.” Autobiography thus meets fiction, even when bodily fatigue turns into poetry, and myth eclipses reality. Paying attention to the reality of those traveling bodies makes the picture more complete and the concept of romanticism more ambivalent.

WORKS CITED Clairmont, Jane. The Journals of Claire Clairmont, edited by Marion K. Stocking, Cambridge [Mass.], Harvard UP, 1968. Colbert, Benjamin. Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision. Farnham; Burlington VT], Ashgate, 2005. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London, Routledge, 1909. Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. 2nd ed., London, Flamingo, 1995. Orange, Ursula. “Shuttlecocks of Genius: an Enquiry into the Fate of Shelley’s Children.” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, no. 8, 1957, pp. 38–52. Pite, Ralph. “Shelley and Italy.” The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Michael O’Neill et al., Oxford, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 31–47. Shelley, Harriet. Letters from Harriet Shelley to Catherine Nugent. London, Printed for Private Circulation, 1889. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, London, Thomas Hookham Jr. and C. and J. Ollier, 1817. ———. The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, edited by Frederick L. Jones, Norman, The University of Oklahoma Press, 1944, 2 vols., vol. 1. ———. Mary Shelley’s Journal, edited by Frederick L. Jones, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1947. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Frederick L. Jones, Oxford UP, 1964, 2 vols. ———. The Poems, edited by K. Everest et al. London and New York, Longman, 1989–2013, 4 vols. ———. Poetical Works, edited by Mary Shelley, London, Edward Moxon, 1839. ———. Shelley’s Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, edited by David L. Clark, New York, New Amsterdam Books, 1988.

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Southey, Robert. Thalaba the Destroyer: A Rhythmical Romance. London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809, 2 vols. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ware, Wordsworth XE “Wordsworth” Classics, 1999. Trelawny, Edward John. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1858.

Chapter 5

Representing the Sick Male Body in David Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865–1873) Guillaume Didier

David Livingstone spent the last eight years of his life, from 1865 to 1873, traveling in East and Central Africa.1 His main goals were to solve the age-old mystery of the source(s) of the White Nile river and, through his reports, to raise awareness in Britain about the Arab-Swahili slave trade—although the purpose of his journey is also open to some debate. Bridges indeed argues that “whether he was an explorer for the Royal Geographical Society, a Foreign Office consul, a missionary or a ‘missionary statesman’ may be debated” (Bridges 165). During this final expedition, Livingstone’s health quickly deteriorated, and he lost contact with the outside world; mid-way through his journey he was “found” in November 1871 by Henry Morton Stanley, a journalist sent by the New York Herald to investigate. However, Stanley could not convince Livingstone to come back to Britain with him, and after Stanley’s departure, Livingstone went on searching for the source(s) of the Nile until his death in north-eastern Zambia on May 1, 1873, due to anal hemorrhage and other ailments which he had been suffering from ever since the start of his expedition. This chapter focuses on how the body plays a significant role in Livingstone’s final manuscripts.2 It sets out to investigate the remarkable sense of vulnerability that pervades the explorer’s last field records, to an extent which subverts Victorian ideals of masculinity. If different travel writings endorsed these masculinity ideals during the Victorian era, Livingstone’s final manuscripts explore the notions of vulnerability and physical weakness to convey the negative effects of mobility on the body. Foucault has famously defined the body as “a surface on which events are inscribed,” that is, the physical matter on which history is “imprinted” (Foucault 148). The body has also been described in a work on Victorian 95

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disability as “a relation of power,” in that both male and female bodies are defined in terms of domination and subservience according to their relations to a given society and political state (Esmail and Keep 46). This idea has been discussed further in relation to the British Empire: historians of imperialism have argued that “bodies have been a subject of concern, scrutiny, anxiety, . . . sites through which imperial and colonial power was imagined and exercised” (Burton and Ballantyne 5–6), and this is certainly true of the bodies of explorers. According to Felix Driver, “Livingstone’s body was integral to his reputation as an explorer” (Driver 70): upon his return to England from previous travels, scars left by wildlife and diseases on his body served as evidence of the explorer’s extraordinary resilience and of his achievements. Most famously, when Livingstone’s body was returned to England at the end of his final journey, the scars left by a lion attack decades earlier were the only thing that allowed post-mortem identification (Fergusson 566–567). Victorian male explorers have therefore often stood for ideals of manliness, endurance, and determination, being always “on the move” and unable to “hold still.”3 Moreover, the ideological normativity often identified in Victorian culture was limited neither to women’s bodies nor to the metropolis. The bodies of male expeditionary travelers—who journeyed through regions at a great distance from European metropolitan centers—were also subject to normative regulation. There was “a truly Foucaldian regime of controls that affected life in the tropics in its minute details and down to the depths of a person’s psyche” and which “had become articulated around the concept of hygiene” (Fabian 59). Hygiene was indeed understood by the explorers themselves as a form of self-discipline, and as a key criterion for the success of an expedition. Yet one cannot accept the assumption that male bodies in the expeditionary context may only stand for “heroic British imperial masculinity” (O’Cinneide, in Boehm 86). The Final Manuscripts indeed foreground a sick body, and a dying man that has to make do with long delays instead of being in full control of his expeditions. These impressions are at odds with the more assertive aspect of somatic representations found in published Victorian-era travel narratives, which as a rule focus on the explorer’s final achievement. Livingstone’s final manuscripts illustrate the fact that the male body “may also be radically changed by diet, drugs, economic resources, and environmental factors” (Nussbaum 22, qtd. in Boehm 88). To that extent, the representation of Livingstone’s sick body becomes a privileged site for both the inscription and contestation of hegemonic ideology. With a focus on bodily change, close analysis of the manuscripts thus exposes “the contradictions that emerge as ‘weakening and atrophy of the body threaten all the cultural values of masculinity’” (Murphy 94, qtd. in Kilshaw 197). This analysis must therefore engage with different, more contingent4 meanings attached to somatic representations. To be vulnerable is “to be

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capable of being physically or emotionally wounded”; it is also “to be open to attack or damage, or assailable” (Soanes and Stevenson 1621). In the case of Livingstone, vulnerability then encompasses both actual physical weakness and the emotions with which the explorer relates to that weakness, by regarding it as a bodily display of inner fragility. However, there has been little effort to ground the concept of vulnerability in men’s studies as a whole, with the notable exception of Kilshaw’s Impotent Warriors. In other studies of masculinities, men’s sense of their own weakness is often alluded to per default. This study does not seek to dismiss the notion of hegemonic masculinity altogether; nor does it argue that Livingstone’s case may be framed into the alternative concept of “subordinated masculinities.” It rather seeks to posit vulnerability in relation to hegemonic masculinity, insofar as “masculinity has long been associated with strength, toughness and vigour, while sickness has been coded as weak and feminine” (Kilshaw 184). It is this potential for a man of being or appearing weak, and its circumstantial—yet structural—role as a threat to the stability of hegemonic masculinity which is of interest here: it may indeed serve as a historical reminder that “‘masculine domination’ is open to challenge and requires considerable effort to maintain” (Connell and Messerschmidt 844). Moreover, this study argues that the representation by Livingstone of his own body in field documents illustrates what has been called “the limits of normativity concerning Victorian male bodies” (Allin 114). By showing how the more pragmatic aspects of nineteenth-century exploration of Africa may have influenced somatic representations in field literature, it furthers Fabian and Kennedy’s views about the need to debunk myths related to the explorer’s manliness. First it will show how Livingstone’s final manuscripts evoke alternative but not subordinated conceptions of Victorian masculinity to frame the explorer’s suffering in metropolitan discourse about male hygiene and Muscular Christianity. Manliness was then thought to rely on motion and agency; yet it will then be argued that those same Manuscripts emphasize the paradox of expeditionary travel as motionlessness instead of teleological motion and point to the explorer’s actual loss of agency. Finally, this study will focus on Livingstone’s evolving perception of his own body as something defined by solidity, impermeability and control: events in the course of the expedition lead him to admit that such a definition, grounded in metropolitan Victorian discourse about male bodies, collapses with the experience of sickness in the field. While on his last journey Livingstone produced many types of field writings5 which form the corpus studied here: the field diaries and the Unyanyembe Journal, named after the town of Unyanyembe in modernday Tanzania, where the journal was kept during most of the expedition. Livingstone used seventeen field diaries to jot down his most direct impressions about the trip; whereas the Journal “primarily functions as a record of

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important information rather than on-the-fly notations” (Ward and Wisnicki, “The Unyanyembe Journal: An Overview”). EXERTION AND MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY The narrative of being assaulted by diseases may first appear to celebrate the explorer-author’s extraordinary qualities of manly resilience, determination, and bravery; it is encompassed by the Victorian discourse on male hygiene and discipline, which “was the quality most likely to ensure the success of scientific work under difficult circumstances” (Fabian 78). Livingstone’s belief in the virtues of hygiene and discipline is illustrated at length in his final manuscripts, as the physical effect of travel is associated with both low—animal—pleasure and spiritual elevation. Motion and exertion are praised as the healthy attributes of travel: The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is very great—When on lands of a couple of thousand feet elevation—brisk exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles—Fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain—the mind works well—The eye is clear—the step is firm—and a day’s exertion always makes the evening’s repose thoroughly enjoyable. (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [044])

That such assertions can be found in field documents illustrates the prevalence of metropolitan discourse, even in remote places. Here the field document consists in a list not of observations about the surroundings, but of metropolitan precepts that are found to correspond with field experience. The dashes and list of short notes effectively convey a sense of speed about the explorer’s writing and match the pace of his actual, physical motion. Yet these cheerful statements are made at an early stage of the journey; they are seldom found later, as Livingstone is gradually faced with obstacles and sickness.6 Livingstone’s understanding of the connection between physical exertion and health of body and mind is specifically oriented toward religion, as he makes clear by defining the principles of Muscular Christianity early in the journey: “the sweat of one’s brow is no longer a curse when one works for God—It proves a tonic to the system and is actually a blessing—No one can truly appreciate the charm of repose unless he has undergone severe exertion” (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [045]). Physical exertion is therefore not practiced for its own sake, but as a matter of moral, religious even, elevation; its healing virtues are accounted for insofar as the manly man’s effort also implies his willingness to work and suffer.

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James Eli Adams, while commenting on Charles Kingsley, the founder of the doctrine of Muscular Christianity, described the doctrine as “the unification of physical strength and evangelicalism” (Adams 150, qtd. in Reidy 170). It was part of a wider cultural debate in Britain about hygiene and bodily health: “The ‘physical culture’ debate . . . was a wide-reaching series of discussions that sought ways to guard against the weakening and enfeeblement of the individual and collective British body” (Reidy 170). In that context, Livingstone’s work is presented by the explorer himself as the best remedy against tropical diseases. Livingstone’s concern for hygiene may also be related to Protestant work ethics: “The pugnacious spirit is one of the necessities of life. When people have little or none of it, they are subjected to indignity & loss” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVI: [0178]). Max Weber has famously shown how such an ascetic, resilient, and combative ideology of labor centers not on greed of future gain, but on the moral virtue attached to work, which is enough to justify one’s suffering (Weber 42–43). As their faith entailed a shift of focus from “combative ideology” to moral improvement, missionaries may have stood for an alternative masculinity: their model of manliness was, according to John Tosh, “one of patient endurance rather than bravery in battle” (Tosh 202). Yet a focus on the field reality of physical exertion also requires us to qualify Plotz’s general argument that Victorian men were unable to “hold still” (Plotz xiii). Certainly motion is presented by Livingstone as a requisite to health; and he often acknowledges that being out and working is what is healthy for a man: “ill all day & night—am always so if not working” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary X: [0018]); “Ill with fever as I always am when stationary” (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [363]); “I get fever severely and was down [26th] all day—but we march as I have always found that moving is the best remedy for fever” (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [606]). The association between working and being on the move, however, is misleading: most ethnographic work, geographical observations, as well as most of the writing, were probably conducted during forced halts, and generally indoors, in the tent or in the shade of a tree (Fabian 46); so motion cannot be, as a general rule, equated to labor and actual fieldwork. Famous illustrations represent the doctor’s taking notes while being carried by porters in his final days,7 but these certainly did not stand for the majority of the notes he took during the trip. Even early-stage field documents are mostly to be considered in the context of motionlessness. The symbolic association between working and moving should then be contested, as the Final Manuscripts highlight a paradox: the explorer’s work consisted in the motionless representation of motion.

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MARTYRDOM AND REFLEXIVITY In the final diaries, one notices a gradual shift from the ideal of Muscular Christianity to martyrology: “If the good Lord gives me favour & permits me to finish my great work I shall thank & bless him—though it has cost me untold toil—pain—and travel—this trip has made my hair all grey” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVI: [0051]); Livingstone no longer relies on Christian values so as to account for the practical necessity of hygiene, but to consider the symbolic value of pain, which he defines as “only a means of enforcing love” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XV: [0007]). The martyr is an even more passive model of masculinity, focusing on both physical and mental endurance in the face of suffering, mimicking the model given by the passion of Christ. Livingstone self-consciously embodies a more peripheral model of manliness than that of hegemonic masculinity. This becomes particularly conspicuous in the last field diaries: “25th March 1873—Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair—I encourage myself in the Lord my God and go forward” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVI: [0076]). The explorer no longer puts faith in his own physical ability as he did early on, but in overarching Providence, which alone can see him through his journey. This shift toward passivity is also coherent with the reflexive aspect of somatic representations in the manuscripts.8 As the manuscripts illustrate how Livingstone’s own body is subject to change and external circumstance, they convey a keen sense of self-awareness: “I have been greatly weakened by a severe attack of pneumonia It reduced me to a perfect skeleton but by three months rest I am happy to find my strength returning” (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [507]). The oxymoronic phrase “perfect skeleton” occurs several times in the manuscripts, as well as in texts written by other explorers.9 As seen later, Livingstone seems to be running out of place and ink to do fieldwork correctly and eventually has to write over previous text (see figure 5.1), which renders the diary partly illegible. A parallel may then be drawn between the explorer’s scarified and worn-out body and the text as palimpsest. By highlighting the material conditions of writing, the palimpsest indeed underlines the fragility of the textual fabric (figure 5.1). Moreover, the author’s gaze upon his own poor physical condition—due to starvation and disease—leads him to objectify his own body in writing. Usually a visible mark of male empowerment, the body is here shown as something undesirable—a skeleton—so the gaze may not actually legitimate the phallic order: the represented male is neither perfect, nor complete, nor powerful; a far cry from the image of “authority and omnipotence” (Neale 13).

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Figure 5.1  Livingstone’s second-stage Unyanyembe Journal. Source: David Livingstone Centre, Blantyre.

The change from one pattern of alternative masculinity to another has so far been considered as a result of the explorer’s increasing anxiety in the progress of his trip and as the effect of sickness. Yet, as has just been shown, textual and material evidence also suggest that the explorer gradually attributes new, different meaning to his failing body, to an extent that is not fully encompassed by metropolitan discourse. This change is illustrated further by the explorer’s hinting at his own objectification in his private diaries, as Livingstone acknowledges that he was carried, and that his body was reduced to a dead weight—a mere object—in the manuscripts.

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MOTIONLESSNESS: FALLING BEHIND AND BEING CARRIED As Livingstone’s journey progresses, his confessions of physical weakness hint at his own loss of agency—defined here as “the human capacity to act” (Ahearn 12). To Livingstone, being a white Britishman means that he should be able to choose where to go and have the strength to go there. This manly ideal of the explorer as an autonomous traveler, whose agency is warranted by his constant and autonomous motion, has been named by Johannes Fabian “Einzelreisende, [literally] the agent who knows his destination” (Fabian 40). The explorer is therefore unwilling to be reduced to “portable property”; (Plotz 2) yet the Final Manuscripts suggest that his own body is more and more objectified. At first Livingstone is reluctant to lose some status and recognition: the display of strong leadership seems to be part of a male competition with the rest of the caravan staff: “I fail in the march too—I used to be the first & am now the last” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary X: [0058]). This change of status, which occurred on December 28, 1867, marked a turning point in the expedition and was thought significant enough to be copied into the Unyanyembe Journal: “We came on to the Rivulet Chirongo and then to the Kabukwa where I was sick—Heavy rains kept the convoy back—I have had nothing but coarsely ground sorghum meal for some time back—and am weak—I used to be the first in the line of march, and am now the last” (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [357]). This rewriting of the field diary entry at a later date substitutes the expression of vulnerability (“and am weak”) to the factual observation “I fail in the march too,” which illustrates the parallel drawn by the explorer between physical weakness and his slow pace, as the end of the sentence is presented as the logical result of this confession. As Livingstone’s physical health deteriorates, the confessions of loss of agency become more and more direct, to the benefit of native agency. In “A Body of Evidence,” Justin Livingstone argues that: Livingstone’s mangled corpse, no less than his funeral, was itself a site of multiple and conflicting significations. His carcass actually became a symbolic space on which a wider debate over the capacity and authority of black Africans could be played out. Underlying the entire discourse of the remains, their return was a story of native reliability and black capability. (J. D. Livingstone 17–18)

The explorer himself may have anticipated these developments, as he concedes he has been carried: “12th = very unwilling to be carried but on being pressed allowed the men to help me along by relays to Chinama” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVII: [0009]). The expression of sheer pain is given

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increasing importance in the manuscripts, as when Livingstone returns to Ujiji with the help of slaver Muhamad Bogharib: Muhamad Bogharib very kind to me in my extreme weakness but carriage is painful—head down feet up alternates with feet down head up—jolted up and down & sideways changing shoulders involves a toss from one side to the other of the Kitanda—sun vertical blisters any part of the skin exposed—I shelter my face & head as well as I can with a bunch of leaves but it is dreadfully fatiguing in my weakness. (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [497])

Instead of discussing the help he received from a slaver, which was an ideological quandary to him, Livingstone’s diary entry emphasizes the impression of painful transport: his body no longer appears as a whole entity, but as loose bits and pieces. In doing so, the written account loses contextual value about the progress of the expedition, the better to focus on the explorer’s own body in a complacent yet straightforward telling of pain. In some rare instances, the explorer even considers that his sick body is subjected to the gaze of natives, as when some locals in Manyema help him hide his extreme weakness: . . . [April 1867] After I had been a few days here I had a fit of insensibility which shews the power of fever without medicine . . . tried to lift myself from my back by laying hold of two posts at the entrance but when I got nearly upright I let them go & fell back heavily on my head on a box—The boys had seen the wretched state I was in & hung a blanket at the entrance of the hut that no stranger might see my helplessness (D. Livingstone, UJ 280)

Such excerpts are markedly at odds with the assumption of the “imperial eye” that has dominated scholarship on this type of expeditionary literature. Here one can hardly contend that “the gaze enables white men to be in the subject active position, possessing power, control, authority” (Kestner 14). Not only does the explorer contemplate the possibility of a native gaze—insofar as natives are then granted agency and the explorer concedes that their judgment over his sick body may be of some importance to him—he also ascribes feelings of pity to natives helping him, which contrasts with statements made by other explorers, such as Baker and Stanley, regarding the lack of empathy among the peoples of East and Central Africa. THE LEAKY BODY AND MALE IDENTITY Livingstone’s experience of his failing body in the field therefore reveals cracks in the metropolitan discourse of manliness, which is centered on

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control. The Final Manuscripts convey the impression of the leaky male body, one that is unable to contain fluids. In a study of fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction, Leslie Allin argues that “[underscoring] the leakiness of male bodies” may allow readers “to pull apart traditional narratives of British manliness and male narratives about empire” (Allin 116). As has been shown, the resilience, hygiene, and discipline praised in metropolitan discourse emphasized the ideal of male self-containment. Traditionally it is “woman’s corporeality [that] is inscribed as a mode of seepage . . . The metaphysics of uncontrollability [and] the association of femininity with contagion and disorder, the undecidability of the limits of the female body . . . are all common themes in literary and cultural representations of women” (Grosz 203, qtd. in Allin 116). Schippers considers feminine attributes to be necessarily exterior elements—opposites even—to hegemonic masculinity. As a result, any attribution of such features to a man standing for an ideal of manliness such as Livingstone may be disruptive of the male hegemonic order: Because femininity is always and already inferior and undesirable when compared to masculinity, it can sustain features of stigmatization and contamination. In contrast, masculinity must always remain superior; it must never be conflated with something undesirable. . . . Masculinity maintains its position of superiority in relation to femininity and men maintain legitimate possession of those superior characteristics regardless of who is embodying femininity or masculinity. This means that there are no masculine characteristics that are stigmatized as contaminating or as subordinate. (Schippers 96)

Yet rather than asserting strength and solidification of gender boundaries, the field documents seem to express anxiety about bodily porosity. While admitting to unmanly vulnerability, Livingstone seems to operate different types of discursive and textual strategies—the use of punctuation and Latin, metatextual comments to his editor—to contain such admissions and frame them in the field documents. These, therefore, also underline the explorer’s attempts to frame his own weakness. Perhaps because he felt the effects of sickness more keenly than other explorers, Livingstone went further in the depiction of his ordeal and discloses substantial information about his worsening physical condition, be it incontinence: “14th Sepr 1867 Ill with fever or some allied affection ‘urina urinans’—headache—distress causing groaning when I was insensible better yesterday” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary X: [0004]) or anal hemorrhage: “20th Decr 1867—A guide has been sent for by Casembe and we wait for him today & start tomorrow (very ill with bleeding in large quantities)” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary X: [0054]); “I feel it much internally & am glad to move slowly” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XV: [0024]). Here the field

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documents provide rare instances of an explorer dealing with urinary incontinence, bowels disorder, and dysentery: the inner mobility of fluids threatens the material unity of the explorer’s body, and in doing so is presented as an impediment to general motion. It has been argued, however, that these were frequent complaints among exploratory parties: “As far as other diseases are concerned, I suspect . . . the most formidable killer of European travelers was dysentery rather than malaria, a term that was just gaining currency” (Fabian 64). As explorers were less explicit about issues related to diarrhea and dysentery than they were about malaria—often referred to as “fever”—one may suspect self-censorship occurred from one stage of document to the next. By exerting control over information about the explorer’s own vulnerability, such censorship may act as counterbalance to bodily permeability and looseness. From such a perspective, Livingstone’s words “Positively not to be opened,” written on the package enclosing the Unyanyembe Journal and handed over to Stanley to be returned to Britain, are given new meaning. Mentions of hemorrhage can be found in both the Field Diaries and Unyanyembe Journal, but none of these remain in the Last Journals edited by Horace Waller and published posthumously. Gilbert writes that “the literary was a space in which gender norms were not only chronicled and upheld, but exposed and challenged. The literary was a site of discipline, but also of transformation, allowing for a heteroglossia in which productive tension can be found between the hegemonic and the emergent” (Gilbert 4). Such instances of conflicting discourse can be observed even in early-stage field documents. In the Final Manuscripts, Livingstone often writes about anal hemorrhage between parenthesis: “(2d April left very ill with dysentery— This is private)” (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [278]). 10th the headman of the village explained and we sent two of our men who had a night’s rest with the turn again of yesterday (I am pale bloodless and weak from bleeding profusely ever since the 31st March = last an artery gives off a copious stream and takes away my strength) = Oh how I long to be permitted by the Overpower to finish my work. (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVII: [0008])

It seems as if autobiographical writing were to unfold on the margins of the travel record: through a singular use of punctuation, the field documents anticipate threats to manliness as “the male body and male imagination [are construed] as porous entities, rather than solid ones” (Allin 114). Ward and Wisnicki argue that “there is evidence that Livingstone adds some such notes long after the fact, reinforcing his focus on future publication” (Ward and Wisnicki, “The Unyanyembe Journal: An Overview”); yet a parallel may be drawn between the public display of normative patterns of masculinity on the

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one hand, and the confession of weakness and permeability that are bound to remain private on the other hand. Livingstone, then, struggles with confessions of physical weakness, insofar as porosity may threaten the explorer’s sense of his male self as uncontained or uncontainable. Paradoxically, though, Livingstone reintroduces the notion of discipline and self-containment with regards to hemorrhage. Losing blood is, he claims, good to prevent fever, and the diaries and journal both develop the idea of “safety valves”: “I lose much blood but it is a safety valve for me and I have no fevers or other ailments” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVI: [0041]); “22nd Rainy morning I was ill all yesterday but escape fever by Haemo​.​rr” (D. Livingstone, Field Diary XVI: [0058]). The trust Livingstone put in hemorrhage as a remedy against malarial fever was arguably what led him to his death and the ideology of manly control over his own body had devastating consequences for the explorer. Bridges contends that Livingstone’s “refusal to undergo an operation for the complaint in 1864 before returning to Africa was practically sentencing himself to death . . . why, precisely, did he refuse an operation? Apparently because he recoiled from the publicity” (Bridges 165). The discourse on manliness and male hygiene and discipline,10 along with the prejudice against “unmanly” medical intervention, therefore led to increased physical weakness. This has also been noted in modern-day studies of men dealing with sickness and physical weakness: [Sick men] reaffirm a strongly moral normalising discourse about “being a man” yet tend to separate roles and values from male physical and sexual attributes . . . individuals with rigid ideas about masculinity [may] suffer greater stresses with illness than are suffered by those who do not hold such views. Inhibited emotions, over-reliance on aggressive behaviour, a need for control and an obsession with competitiveness are noted as basic dispositions that can account for problems. (Kilshaw 197)

The sense of secrecy and censorship about sickness should then also be related to Livingstone’s rigid notion of what manliness means. While looking back on his decision not to undergo surgery, the explorer cites the RGS president and veteran traveler Sir Roderick Murchison as a model of manliness: When baffled by untoward circumstances the bowels plague me too and discharges of blood relieve the headache and are safety valves to the system—I was nearly persuaded to allow Mr Syme to operate on me to close the valves but Sir Roderick told me that his own father had been operated on by the famous John Hunter and died in consequence at the early age of forty—He himself when a soldier spoiled his saddles by frequent discharges from the Piles but would never submit to an operation and he is now eighty years old—His advice saved

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me for they have been my safety valves. (D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe Journal [554])

It has been argued that Livingstone saw fluids as a threat to bodily integrity and motion; but here the explorer presents anal hemorrhage as “safety valves” against fever. This paradox is supported by authoritative knowledge: the example of Murchison, who suffered from similar ailments, leads Livingstone to associate manliness with bodily porosity. Herbert Sussman has famously posited a tension between fluid and solid body as essential to the formation of Victorian manhood (Sussman 133–134); yet it is this very tension which seems to crumble down near the end of the Final Manuscripts. At a late stage in the final manuscripts, the shift of symbolic values attached to liquids and solid matter indeed seems to verify Hurley’s argument that “if the distinction between liquid and solid can be effaced, then other, more crucial oppositions [between manliness and femininity, for instance] threaten to collapse as well” (Hurley 35, qtd. in Allin 117). Normative discourse about gendered bodies, which prevailed in previous field diaries, has in the end revealed its lack of substance. That there is some change at work in the late field documents is illustrated by Livingstone’s final statements in Field Diary XVII about his own weakness. These feature markedly different rhetorical strategies from earlier material, which, it has been shown, is more conspicuously steeped in a metropolitan ideological background. Among them is one of Livingstone’s most famous sentences, written on April 19, 1873, around ten days before his death on the May 1, 1873: “I am excessive[-] ly weak & but for the donkey could not move a hundred yards = It is not all pleasure this exploration—. . . no observations now owing to great weakness = I can scarcely hold the pencil & my stick is a burden” (D. Livingstone, FD XVII: 29). The statement “I am excessively weak” is repeated on the next day, as if to reassert the truth of it; yet at the same time, as the explorer is brought to a final halt, his use of humor and euphemism (“not all pleasure”) may also highlight a less rigid attitude toward teleological motion, toward travel writing (the stick indeed becomes “a burden”) and toward what his own vulnerability entails. If, according to Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, “colonial projects and their processes were frequently believed to throw white male bodies into crisis (making them vulnerable to disease, insanity, and hybridization),” it has been argued that field documents do record something deeper and more varied than a naïve belief in metropolitan doctrines. The “unstable equilibrium” which according to Sussman defines male identity (Sussman 2–3) is best grasped in the Final Manuscripts—rather than the posthumous Last Journals—where Livingstone reveals his efforts and failures to cope with increasing motionlessness. Moreover, the explorer’s dying body, being

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gradually objectified by himself and others, shows that boundaries between subjects and objects were, at least in the expeditionary field, negotiable and permeable. Such bodily changes were perceived as many threats to hegemonic masculinity; yet the discursive strategies operated by the explorer in the Manuscripts partly fail to contain other images of the male body that contradict ideals of manliness. The explorer’s relationship with his own motionless and leaky body in the texts does not only hint at individual and circumstantial vulnerability, but threatens the stability of hegemonic discourse and challenges strategies of othering. As a result, the focus on somatic representations and physical male vulnerability in expeditionary literature does not merely reveal contradictions inherent in hegemonic masculinity: it also highlights concrete, but complex challenges posed by the experiences of travel to Victorian gender normativity itself. While this study has drawn attention to such challenges, its observations concerning bodily permeability may have wider consequences for discussions of the explorer’s body as physically and materially involved in the field, and challenge the stability of male hegemonic discourse further. In How I Found Livingstone, Stanley and Livingstone discuss the notion of being buried in Africa. Quite ironically, what Stanley records is also the doctor’s fear of permeability—desecration—yet Livingstone seems to find the African wilderness less threatening to the dead body than contemporary Britain: In passing through the forest of Ukamba, we saw the bleached skull of an unfortunate victim to the privations of travel. Referring to it, the Doctor remarked that he could never pass through an African forest, with its solemn stillness and serenity, without wishing to be buried quietly under the dead leaves, where he would be sure to rest undisturbed. In England there was no elbow-room, the graves were often desecrated; and ever since he had buried his wife in the woods of Shupanga he had sighed for just a spot, where his weary bones would receive the eternal rest they coveted. (Stanley 600–601)

Through Stanley’s words, the explorer paradoxically points to the purity of the African setting as something that does not challenge physical boundaries between the embodied self and its wild surroundings. To that extent, it is useful to point to the embodied experience of explorers in the field: to deal with them as male bodies being submitted to external change and conditions, rather than as the overarching personae they often fashioned themselves to be in published narratives. Such a focus is what allows scholars to find elements of contradiction within hegemonic discourse, which may be obscured and sometimes shut out of expeditionary accounts in the rewriting and editing of early-stage documents. In doing so, work on archive material such as Livingstone’s final manuscripts both complements our knowledge on these

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expeditions, as well as it complexifies our current perception of Victorian gender norms.

NOTES 1. I would like to express my most sincere and profuse thanks to Adrian S. Wisnicki, director of Livingstone Online, for his help with the archive. I would also like to thank him, Justin D. Livingstone, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on early drafts for this chapter. 2. In this chapter, I draw on the critical edition of David Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865–1873) published under the direction of Megan Ward and Adrian S. Wisnicki on Livingstone Online, the leading scholarly resource for Livingstone’s writings as a whole. Ward and Wisnicki’s edition includes images and transcriptions of fourteen first-stage Field Diaries from Livingstone’s final journal (I-VII, X, XIVXVII) plus the second-stage Unyanyembe Journal. These texts are the focus of my analysis in this chapter and henceforth any general references to “final manuscripts” will refer to these fifteen manuscript items. The quotes from Livingstone’s field writings are based on the Livingstone Online transcriptions of the manuscripts, and use the explorer’s own choice of spelling and punctuation. 3. In Portable Property, John Plotz focuses on the influence of portable objects in Victorian perceptions about travel and the Empire. Valentine Prévot has argued that Victorian (young) male bodies traveling abroad could similarly be considered as an instance of British commodities being circulated in the imperial network (Plotz xiii, qtd. in Prévot). 4. In “Travellers’ Bodies and Pregnant Things: Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones,” Muireann O’Cinneide supports a similar view for the meanings of imperial objects (Boehm 101). The notion of “male crisis” is discussed further in Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy (Showalter 9). 5. Livingstone also produced maps, letters, and various other documents or objects in abundance. 6. One may argue there is a shift in tone as early as the second Field Diary, when Livingstone’s manly enthusiasm and self-confidence is tampered and assertive statements brought to a halt by repeated bouts of fever: “As these illnesses take their toll and the route becomes more difficult, the tone of the diary changes from hopeful to worried” (Wisnicki and Ward, “Field Diary II: An Overview”). 7. One such instance may be found in the second volume of the Last Journals, and is entitled “The Last Mile of Livingstone’s Travels.” It features Livingstone taking notes while being carried in a litter by some of his African followers (Livingstone and Waller II 295). 8. Livingstone’s London Missionary Society connections may be relevant to the discourse of martyrdom he deploys. One of Livingstone’s most celebrated LMS predecessors was John Williams, who traveled to the South Pacific and was killed by a group of islanders. He became known to contemporaries as a “martyr

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missionary”—and Livingstone would doubtless have been aware of such Protestant missionary martyrs who were precursors to his own work. 9. See, for instance, Baker: “We were perfect skeletons” (Baker, The Alber N’yanza II 160). 10. See earlier references to “the pugnacious spirit.”

WORKS CITED Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca (New York), Cornell UP, 1995. Ahearn, Laura M. “Agency.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 1/2, 1999, pp. 12–15. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43102414. Accessed May 28, 2020. Allin, Leslie. “Leaky Bodies: Masculinity, Narrative and Imperial Decay in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.” Victorian Network, vol. 6, no. 1, May 2015, pp. 113–135, www​.victoriannetwork​.org​/index​.php​/vn​/article​/view​/58. Accessed May 28, 2020. Baker, Samuel White. The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of the Nile and Explorations of the Nile Sources. London, Macmillan and co., 1866. Bridges, Roy. “The Problem of Livingstone’s Last Journey.” Proceedings of a Seminar Held on the Occasion of the Centenary of the Death of David Livingstone at the Centre of African Studies. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh 1973, pp. 163–185. Burton, Antoinette, and Tony Ballantyne, editors. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, Duke UP, 2005. Butler, Judith. “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86, no. 11, 1989, pp. 601–607. Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, Dec. 2005, pp. 829–859, doi:10.1177/0891243205278639. Accessed May 28, 2020. Driver, Felix. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford, Blackwell, 2001. Esmail, Jennifer, and Christopher Keep. “Victorian Disability: Introduction.” Victorian Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 45–51. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/ vcr.2009.0032. Accessed May 28, 2020. Fabian, Johannes. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. Fergusson, William. “Examination and Verification of the Body of the Late Dr. Livingstone.” The Lancet, 18 Apr. 1874, pp. 565–566. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Nietzsche, edited by John Richardson and Brian Leiter, Oxford, Oxford UP, 1978, pp. 139–164. Gilbert, Pamela K. The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England. Columbus, The Ohio State UP, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1994.

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Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2004. Kestner, Joseph A. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Farnham, Ashgate, 2010. Kilshaw, Susie. Impotent Warriors: Gulf War Syndrome, Vulnerability and Masculinity. New York, Berghahn Books, 2008. Livingstone, David, and Horace Waller. The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death: Continued by a Narrative of His Last Moments and Sufferings, Obtained from His Faithful Servants, Chuma and Susi. London, John Murray, 1874. Livingstone, Justin D. “A ‘Body’ of Evidence: The Posthumous Presentation of David Livingstone.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–24. Murphy, Robert F. The Body Silent. New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1987. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle.” Screen, vol. 24, no. 6, Nov. 1983, pp. 2–17, doi:10.1093/screen/24.6.2. Accessed May 28, 2020. Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in EighteenthCentury English Narratives. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. O’Cinneide, Muireann. “Travellers’ Bodies and Pregnant Things: Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones.” Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Katharina Boehm, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 84–103. Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton, Princeton UP, 2008. Prévot, Valentine. “Territoires méridionaux et îles australes: laboratoires du masculin dans les premiers romans d’aventures pour garçons victoriennes.” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, no. 83, June 2016. journals​.openedition​.or​g, doi:10.4000/ cve.2515. Accessed May 28, 2020. Reidy, Michael S. “Mountaineering, Masculinity, and the Male Body in MidVictorian Britain.” Osiris, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 158–181, doi:10.1086/682975. Accessed May 28, 2020. Schippers, Mimi. “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony.” Theory and Society, vol. 36, no. 1, Mar. 2007, pp. 85–102, doi:10.1007/s11186-007-9022-4. Accessed May 28, 2020. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London, Virago, 2010. Soanes, Catherine, and Angus Stevenson, editors. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 11th ed., Oxford, Oxford UP, 2004. Stanley, Henry Morton. How I Found Livingstone, Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa. London, S. Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1872. Sussman, Herbert L. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1995. Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire. Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2004. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, Gloucester, Peter Smith, 1988.

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Ward, Megan, and Adrian S. Wisnicki, editors. David Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865–1873). 1st ed., In Livingstone Online. Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, directors. University of Maryland Libraries, 2018, www​.livingstoneonline​.org​/uuid​ /node​/ef7677b7​-0212​-4c34​-bb8e​-ce826eefb0af. Accessed May 28, 2020. ———. “Field Diary II: An Overview.” In David Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865–1873). Megan Ward and Adrian S. Wisnicki, dirs. Livingstone Online. Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, dirs. University of Maryland Libraries, 2018, www​.livingstoneonline​.org​/uuid​/node​/1d5af01e​-faa6​-4ef8​-9176​-fc6458fb77f. Accessed May 28, 2020. ———. “The Unyanyembe Journal: An Overview.” In David Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865–1873). Megan Ward and Adrian S. Wisnicki, dirs. Livingstone Online. Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, dirs. University of Maryland Libraries, 2018, www​.livingstoneonline​.org​/uuid​/node​/b37eb894​-0985​-448c​-a9b2​ -da5c4a5dcdb8. Accessed May 28, 2020.

Chapter 6

Disability and the Modalities of Displacement in the Early Fiction of J. M. Coetzee Paweł Wojtas

INTRODUCTION The experience of restrictions on mobility at first hand and the awareness of the oppressive tactics of Western regimes were a significant factor in the shaping of Coetzee’s early fiction. Partly due to his involvement in the protest campaign against the presence of police forces on the university campus during his visiting assistant professorship at the State University of New York, Buffalo in 1969, Coetzee was unable to obtain his visa extension and forced to return to South Africa shortly after completing his teaching duties (Attwell 13). The insights into the American invasion of Vietnam that Coetzee gained during his brief spell in Buffalo, followed by his witnessing of the intensification of violence in South Africa during the apartheid, compelled him to question the moral implications of political violence in his early fiction that drew on both of these political settings. The plight of the oppressed victims of political regimes, meditation on the suffering of the socially marginalized Other and restrictions on mobility would remain the prevailing themes of Coetzee’s early fiction of the apartheid era. Eugene Dawn, the nameless barbarian woman, Michael K, Friday, and Magda1 count among the characters whose limited mobility is the result of the combination of the repressive strategies of forced domestic or institutional confinement enacted by the state2 and normative social narratives. As regards the latter aspect, these characters, who live with or show the symptoms of various mental, sensory, and physical disabilities, are doubly constrained by the prejudicial metanarratives of normalcy prevailing in the societies in which they live and by the political oppression of state apparatus. As such, they may be said to epitomize the social model of disability, which holds that “people 113

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with impairments are disabled by society, not by their bodies” (Shakespeare 172). The main thrust of this idea is that disability is an outcome of the inadequate measures that societies take to accommodate people with disabilities. People with impairments are disabled by the social facilities that are tailored to the necessities of the statistically “normal” people, or “normates” (GarlandThomson 8). Restrictions on mobility imposed upon the characters of Coetzee’s early fiction result from the narratives of normalcy that consign people with disabilities to social fringes or various forms of institutional control. When Coetzee emigrated permanently to Australia in 2002, his misgivings around the convergence of normativism and state ideology showed no signs of abating. Although the cultural and political climate of present-day Australia proved less stifling than in the South Africa of the apartheid era, Coetzee continued to chart the social ramifications of ableism in liberal societies in his later fiction, most notably in Slow Man (2005), and also in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Coetzee’s concern is that both the oppressive tactics of the apartheid regime and the welfarist paternalism3 of the liberal societies in different ways sustain various forms of the narratives of normalcy. His response to this quandary is to contemplate disability in terms of the ethical encounters between characters as a way to countervail the political instrumentalization of their social existence, a theme that is common to Coetzee’s both early and later fiction. This paper focuses specifically on Coetzee’s early novels in an attempt to chart the ways in which his probing of the metanarratives of normalcy through the figuring of the dynamics of corporeal (im)mobility is inextricable from the questions of political oppression, displacement, and confinement of certain social groups, such as women, colonial subalterns, or people with disabilities; aspects that the later fiction ponders only to a limited extent.4 THE POLITICS OF DISABLEMENT In his “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1987) Coetzee does not mince his words about the intellectual climate in South Africa at the time: The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life. All expressions of that inner life, no matter how intense, no matter how pierced with exultation or despair, suffer from the same stuntedness and deformity. I make this observation with due deliberation, and in the fullest awareness that it applies to myself and my own writing as much as to anyone else. South African literature is a literature in bondage. (Doubling 98)

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The point of Coetzee’s diatribe is unambiguous: literature cannot flourish under restrictive political circumstances. Notable is, however, his choice of words used to reflect these limiting effects: “stunted” and “deformed,” both of which call to mind physical impairment. Although it could be argued that in doing so Coetzee reinforces ableist metaphors associated with disability, what is at stake here is not a pathologization of the language of disability so much as an indictment of the disablement of culture at the hand of political authorities. If the condition of South African literature is akin to that of disability, it is because South Africa and its nonwhite inhabitants have been disabled by the oppressive politics of colonialism and apartheid; a handicap that Coetzee claims to have experienced as well: “written . . . as a white South African into the latter half of the twentieth century, disabled, disqualified, . . . writing without authority” (Doubling 392). At this juncture, disability is for Coetzee not merely a barren metaphor; rather, it should be understood as a manifestation of the writer’s own experience of political disablement as a citizen and censorship as a writer. In much the same vein, the characters of Coetzee’s early novels suffer from various forms of social and political disablement at the hands of oppressive authorities, which in turn results in the restriction of their freedom or mobility. This resonates with the underlying assumption of the social constructionist model of disability, which is that cultural, social, and political contexts put up barriers that have disabling effects on the daily functioning of people with impairments. The social model of disability, which developed from the principles established by the British disability rights organization, The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), proved instrumental in deflating the dominance of the medical model of disability, under the rubrics of which disability was believed to be an inherent function of the body. One of the figures of UPIAS was Vic Finkelstein, a white South African with disabilities who was exiled in England for opposing the apartheid regime in the 1960s, and who drew comparisons between apartheid and ableism “to show how disabled . . . were systematically classified as a separate group and how they were systematically segregated from full participation in nondisabled society” (Priestley 23). However, it should also be mentioned that apartheid did not only serve as a byword for the segregationist policies meted out to people with disabilities but actually produced and sustained ableist structures. Under apartheid people with disabilities suffered various forms of discrimination and marginalization due to their disability, which materialized as “limited access to fundamental socio-economic rights such as employment, education and appropriate health and welfare policies” (Howell et al. 48).5 The social model was therefore significant in the context of apartheid because the adoption of “a social interpretation of disability allowed disabled people to both challenge

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the idea that their segregation was in any way inevitable and to focus on strategies for social change” (Priestley 23). Forced territorial and institutional segregation, whether applied to the nonwhite population or the disabled,6 was seen as a product of socially constructed prejudicial norms rather than an essential principle that legitimized exclusionary practices of the state. Alert to the issues of social exclusion and political violence that apartheid produced, J. M. Coetzee constructs in his fiction a complex picture of an intermixing of these iterations of violence. As he writes elsewhere along similar lines: “In South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body” (Coetzee Doubling 248). With these issues in mind, I endeavor to address in the pages that follow some ways in which Coetzee’s fiction dramatizes both an indictment of the political disablement of socially oppressed people and a critique of ableist discourses.7 In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the barbarian woman is subjected to physical disablement, as she is crippled and blinded by the regiment of Colonel Joll. She unambiguously epitomizes a victim of the oppressive colonial practices of the Empire whose functionaries customarily resort to enacting violence on the subjects to maintain the façade of superiority. The myth of the barbarians purportedly threatening the stability of the Empire sustained by the officials is inculcated into the inhabitants of the colonial outpost to justify the atrocities committed on randomly selected victims of political persecutions. These scaremongering tactics are systematically reinforced by the officials to keep the inhabitants subservient to the dictates of the Empire in return for the protection against the barbarians.8 Like the social narratives of this sort, the disablement of the body, to which both the barbarian girl and the Magistrate are variously subjected, serves as a measure used to keep the population in a state of perpetual stasis and submission.9 Torture is Colonel Joll’s customary practice for handling political prisoners during interrogations: “First I get lies, you see—this is what happens—first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth” (Barbarians 5). Scenes of this sort come precariously close to allegorical representations of real-life events. One of the torture scenes, which ends in the prisoner’s death (Barbarians 6), is reminiscent of the official report on the death of one of the leading figures of the anti-apartheid Black Consciousness Movement, Steve Biko, at the hands of state security officers (Kannemeyer 332). On a broader scale, the theme of mobility control that the novel dramatizes is metonymic of the legislations introduced by the apartheid regime to restrict the free movement of black South Africans from rural to urban areas, including the infamous Group Areas Act that enforced racial segregation and mobility restrictions resulting from the assignment of racial groups to fixed residential and occupational segments in urban areas (Stites 50). Similarly, among other regulations of this sort was the enforcement of

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“banning orders,” which served to consign a person accused of violating public order to a magisterial district, suburb, or place of residence and prohibit them from visiting public institutions (Dugard 138). The physical disablement of the barbarian girl is also participatory of the novel’s undermining of the rationalistic assumptions on which the idea of the Empire is founded. The uneven exchange of power between the colonizer and the colonized takes place through two forms of optical domination: one of the observer over the object of seeing and the unseen over the seen. The Empire can survive as long as it is capable of retaining the status of the invisible panoptical observer in relation to its subjects. The imperial officers do not as much dread the barbarians10 as they fear the prospect of being assailed by an unseen enemy: “The barbarians come out at night. Before darkness falls the last goat must be brought in, the gates barred, a watch set in every lookout to call the hours” (Barbarians 134). This power dynamic is probed by the Magistrate through his relationship with the disabled barbarian girl. In the intimate scene in which the Magistrate commits himself to washing the deformed feet of the girl, as if in a ceremonial act of cleansing or expiation of guilt, he demonstrates a profound awareness of his complicity in the atrocities inflicted by the regime he serves. The Magistrate seems to experience an epiphanic moment when he looks the girl into the eyes: “I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me” (Barbarians 47). This passage offers a moment of the reversal of the optical power dynamic in which the seer loses his invisibility, and therefore dominance, through the unseeing eye of the girl.11 No longer invisible to himself, the Magistrate becomes symbolically displaced from his dominant position in an act suggestive of Lévinas’s “emptying” of oneself in the faceto-face encounter with the Other (29). “[W]e are all the more blind to the eye of the other,” proposes Jacques Derrida, “the more the other shows themselves capable of sight, the more we can exchange a look or gaze with them” (106). While the gaze of the sighted dissimulates the seer’s projecting vision, the other’s blindness, which reflects rather than projects, compels meditative self-reflection on the part of the seer. The girl’s blind stare interpellates the Magistrate to contemplate and admit his complicity in the oppressive regimes of the Empire, and by extension Coetzee’s own complicity in reinforcing these oppressive structures. As Teresa Dovey proposes: the Magistrate’s obsessive attachment to the girl illustrates the way in which the suffering victim becomes a means of establishing an identity for the liberal writer: in bearing witness to the other’s suffering, and ultimately in claiming an

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equivalent suffering for him/herself, the writer casts him/herself in the role of seer, truth-teller, blameless one. (144)

Central to the affirmation of the writer’s identity at the expense of the Other is his positioning himself as the “seer.” As sight connotes knowledge and therefore power, it is symbolically poised as an instrument of control of the colonizer. By staging the symbolic reversal of power relations through the dynamic of seeing and blindness in the novel, Coetzee compels the reader to contemplate the ethical implications of political violence. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the physical and sensory impairment of the barbarian woman, which is the result of the violent policies of the Empire, both symbolically and literally links with the oppressive forms of political disablement meted out to those that the Empire consigns to its outside. If, as demonstrated in this section, Coetzee interrogates the politics of disablement and debilitation as a direct form of oppression, such disabling effects, which also translate into the characters’ restriction on mobility, are also presented in the writer’s novels as a function of systemic ableism, which shall be the subject of the following section. DISPLACEMENT, CONFINEMENT, AND ABLEISM Like the barbarian girl, the eponymous protagonist of Life & Times of Michael K (1983) is a victim of political oppression, as he attempts to flee civil warstricken Cape Town. Nevertheless, the deep-seated source of his social estrangement is not politics so much as society. As a reclusive colored South African man with an uncorrected cleft lip and arguably learning difficulties, K epitomizes the defining characteristics of social stigma listed by Erving Goffman: blemishes of character, physical deformity, and tribal stigma (4). Engelhard Weigl observes that K’s physical impairment is a more substantial factor in his stigmatization than his ethnic or class background and social status (79). K is repeatedly mocked on account of his disability by random people that cross his path, such as the soldier who “parod[ies] the movements of K’s mouth” (Michael K 37). The nameless medical officer narrating the second part of the novel unsuccessfully attempts to persuade K to undergo a corrective surgery of his deformed lip so “he would find it easier to get along if he could talk like everyone else” (Michael K 130–131). Albeit seemingly well-meaning, the officer reinforces ableist clichés around disability experience by judging Michael by the social standards of physical normalcy. By dismissing Michael’s justification of his refusal to accept the offer, “I am what I am”12 (Michael K 130), the officer reinforces a form of what Miranda Fricker refers to as “testimonial injustice,” which takes place when “prejudice

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causes” a non-disabled person “to give a deflated level of credibility to” an account provided by a person with disabilities about their experience (1). As a medical officer, the intradiegetic narrator fails to think outside of the mindset of the “medical model of disability,” which “tends to consider disability as a deficit: a problem or pathology that needs to be treated, concealed or dealt with through rehabilitation” (Hall 2016, 166). The social disablement of Michael, stemming from the attitudinal ableism of society and testimonial injustice of medical officials, drives the eponymous protagonist into resorting to two forms of self-imposed displacement: territorial13 and sensory displacement. Seeing institutional control as stifling, Michael repeatedly retreats from various forms of confinement and dependence, such as labor and rehabilitation camps, into rural areas: “It is enough to be out of the camps . . . If I lie low, I will escape charity too” (Michael K 182). K’s social and institutional claustrophobia is perhaps most forcefully conveyed by his refusal to accept food in confinement, which causes him to suffer extreme body emaciation. The fact that K depends on the produce of the land for his dietary sustenance implies that natural spaces offer the autonomy that social institutions deny him. The systemic ableism of such institutions sustained by the medical metanarratives around disability forces people with disabilities into various forms of dependence. Unlike the social environment, which undermines disability experience by creating prejudicial attitudinal barriers, the natural environment serves for Michael as a venue for a recalibration of his abilities. Most indicative of this is Michael’s displacement of abilities on the continuum of sensory perception acuity precipitated by his interaction with the natural environment: He had become so much a creature of twilight and night that daylight hurt his eyes. He no longer needed to keep to paths in his movements around the dam. A sense less of sight than of touch, the pressure of presences upon his eyeballs and the skin of his face, warned him of any obstacle. His eyes remained unfocussed for hours on end like those of a blind person. He had learned to rely on smell too . . . Though he knew no names he could tell one bush from another by the smell of their leaves. (Michael K 15)

By repositioning his sensory perception in keeping with the rhythms of ecosomatic existence,14 K is a figure of “cripped environmentalism,” which is based on the assumption “that the experience of illness and disability presents alternative ways of understanding ourselves in relation to the environment” (Kafer 204). Michael’s environmentally determined enhancement of olfactory acuity at the expense of vision loss is indicative of Coetzee’s critique of rationalism. Seething with terms that equate seeing with knowing (such as

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illuminate, enlightening, insight, etc.) Western epistemology is fundamentally sight-centered. The implications of this cultural coding are both social and political. Western modernity is defined by forms of “scopic regime,” which refers to the pervasiveness of sight-centered narratives on which all aspects of social existence, such as urban infrastructure, public facilities, education, and culture, are founded.15 The privileging of vision entails a reinforcement of prejudicial assumptions about people with visual impairment. These “metanarratives of blindness,” as David Bolt calls them, denote socially constructed narratives “in relation to which those of us who have visual impairments often find ourselves defined” (10). The political implications of sustaining the primacy of sight-centered epistemes have to do with the linking of vision and colonialism. In Barbarians the relation between the seer and object of seeing is analogous to that of the colonizer and colonized. As an instrument of the subjugation of the Other, vision complies with institutional control, to which Michael is reluctant to yield. Unlike the sense of sight (as the distance sense), smell (the contact sense) connotes immediacy (Bolt 72–73), which in environmental terms implies cohabitation with nature rather than its violent appropriation. Most importantly, however, Michael’s olfactory hyper-sensitivity overrides logocentric and scopocentric impulses (K, after all, “knew no names”), which are complicit with the scopic regimes of modernity in terms of creating categories conceived to legitimize acts of political violence inflicted on underprivileged social groups. In this way, the turn from the scopic to osmatic existence figures as an ethical gesture intended to countervail the instrumentalizing impulses of sight-centered, rationalistic discourses that reinforce ableist metanarratives. Laura Wright proposes that Coetzee’s works are “implicitly political by virtue of [their] resistance,” which materializes through “an ethical analysis of representation” (7). Such a critical analysis of representation includes a critique of realist modes of depicting the world that often reinforce normative social structures. Coetzee thus practices a form of “narrative displacement,” which denotes “conscious refusals by both author and characters to ascribe any status to consistent notions of the ‘truth’” in both fictional and historical discourses (Wright 10). One of Coetzee’s ways to renounce the claim for objective or authoritative discourse is to cede the subject position to those that inhabit the outside of the centers of political power in order to resist any prescriptive notions of what counts as true, dominant, or normal. In doing so, Coetzee offers a version of what Susan Gallagher refers to as “writ[ing] for—in support of—the Other without presuming to write for—assuming power over—the Other” (193). Coetzee’s use of narrative displacement marks the self-reflexive gesture of a text that becomes a platform for an undoing of uneven relations of power and ableist discourses. This is the point at which narrative displacement crosses

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paths with K’s self-imposed territorial displacement, as both of these serve to counter epistemic injustice. K’s socially marginalized disabled body is also the body in flight whose perpetual movement and retreat into nature links with the protagonist’s silent refusal to inhabit the sites of political violence and attitudinal ableism. Another Coetzee character who shares Michael’s fate in terms of territorial displacement and social disablement is Foe’s Friday. An African man coming from an unknown tribe, Friday is introduced as a servant to Cruso stranded on the desert island. Later, he follows Susan Barton, the narrator of the story, to England, where the two continue to live together after their rescue. As a sequel of sorts to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the novel takes far-reaching liberties with its source material: not only by replacing the archetypal castaway with a female figure, who has no place in the original story, as the narrator but also by rendering Friday mute or silent. As an African man, Friday cannot enjoy the privilege of territorial mobility the way his white fellow travelers, Cruso and Barton, can. Even though it is unclear what his origins are, he is taken aboard the ship to England against his will by Susan. Although Susan Barton takes pains to treat him like a companion rather than a servant during their mutual sojourn in England, the combination of racial otherness and disability places him in the position of subservience in relation to both Cruso and Barton. Friday, whose life Coetzee sees as a “history of mute subjection” (Doubling 248), seems to be involuntarily subjected to a pattern of forced displacement followed by restricted mobility: when he ends up on the desert island, he becomes Cruso’s hand; when forcefully brought to England from the island, he becomes domesticated by Barton. Whereas Friday’s ontological status of an archetypal colonial subaltern is rather unambiguous, his supposed muteness begs more thorough scrutiny. When Cruso urges Barton to look into Friday’s mouth to see for herself that he has no tongue, she only remonstrates that it is too dark for her to look and thus to substantiate this claim: “‘Do you see?’ he said. ‘It is too dark,’ said I. ‘La-la-la,’ said Cruso. ‘Ha-ha-ha,’ said Friday. . . . ‘He has no tongue,’ he said” (Foe 22–23). For all of Cruso’s assertions, Lewis MacLeod argues that there is no textual evidence to confirm Friday’s muteness. He goes on to argue that the default ascriptions of disability to Friday only show how in the process of reading “discursive supposition becomes incontrovertible fact” (MacLeod 7). What this implies is that Friday acts as a narrative device that reflects the normative assumptions on which the readers are socially trained. This “discursive dependency upon disability” exposes what David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis,” which denotes the process by which authors, texts, and readers depend on disability as a category in opposition to which they can assert their normative identity through prevailing cultural narratives (47). However, it is also legitimate to consider

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Friday as a victim of political disablement rather than a person with a disability. Along these lines, Rosemary Jolly proposes that Friday is “colonised and therefore disabled, at least in relation to the power of narrative, since his tongue is rendered (as) dysfunctional” (13). Implicit in the supposition that Friday is disabled by the colonial powers to which he is subjugated is the possibility that his dysfunction is social rather than corporeal. If his silence is elective rather than the result of an impairment, Friday may be said to allegorize the ways in which colonial regimes create disabling conditions for their subalterns, which serve to deprive them the powers of articulation.16 Nevertheless, the novel refuses to sway in favor of such an allegorical reading unreservedly. What complicates the allegorical interpretation of the novel along postcolonial lines is its double ending, which refuses to offer closure on the matter of Friday’s silence. In both endings, unnamed narrators attempt to figure out Friday’s cryptic silence by inspecting his mouth. Whereas the first narrator reports: “I raise a hand to his face. His teeth part. I press closer, and with an ear to his mouth lie waiting” (Foe 154), the second says: “I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in” (157). Both attempts must fail because they find Friday in “a place where bodies are their own signs” (157), and these bodies-signs do not lend themselves easily to the rigors of logo-centric interpretation. To Sue Kossew, the ending of the novel is a form of “counter-discourse” to “textual colonization,” by which Coetzee raises the question “whether there is a means of ‘giving voice’ to the Other without imposing a colonising author/ity” (173). Therefore, “the structure of the text” and “the different models of authorship within each section” partake in the strategies of undoing the models of authority and authorship that have been liable for enforcing oppressive tactics against the silenced Other (173). What Coetzee manages to accomplish by frustrating the meaning-making processes of the novel is to demonstrate how writers and readers are complicit in reinforcing the conditions of social and cultural disablement. The narrators of the ending part of the novel seem to allegorize the reader’s compulsion to overcome the “hermeneutical impasse” that results from their encounter with characters that challenge normative cultural assumptions (Quayson 49). This is to challenge the conventional ways in which writers use characters with disabilities to “hold up a mirror in which the reader can see herself,” and in opposition to whom the reader affirms their sense of cultural superiority (Kleege 14). The ambiguity around Friday’s muteness is thus Coetzee’s way to elude the instrumentalizing impulses of literary texts meted out to characters with disabilities, and in doing so counter reductive forms of narrative disablement. Coetzee’s nuanced ways of resisting such instrumentalizing discourses are well demonstrated in his first novel, Dusklands (1974). When the character with microcephaly, Harry, disappears from the plot soon after his first

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introduction by the narrator, one may be forgiven for thinking that what we are witnessing here is a classic case of narrative prosthesis. After all, Mitchell and Snyder point to “the extermination of the deviant as a purification of the social body” (54) as one of the consecutive stages of the prosthetic deployment of disability in literary narratives. In my reading of it,17 however, by a self-reflexive flaunting of Harry’s disappearance from the plot—“I am sorry there is no more of him in my story” (Dusklands 9)—Coetzee, through the narrative account of Dawn, provides an implicit critique of the instrumentalizing tactics of literary authors that relegate characters with disabilities to functions in fictional narratives. This self-reflexive textual strategy of representational displacement18 helps Coetzee challenge the reader to contemplate the normative assumptions that they bring to the process of reading. The attempt at challenging the reader’s hermeneutic practices is one of the ethical effects of the text’s resistance to ableist metanarratives achieved through the deployment of textual devices that elude the traditional sense-making mechanisms reinforced by literary fiction.19 Apart from resisting the modes of the narrative prosthesis, Dusklands also dramatizes the pairing of political violence and confinement. The first section of this bipartite novel, “The Vietnam Project,” tells a story about Eugene Dawn’s involvement in a psychological warfare project for the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. This part, narrated by Dawn in the first person, follows the narrator’s gradual lapse into psychosis, which directly results from his exposure to the materials recording the atrocities orchestrated by the American government. Hospitalized for attempting to murder his son, Dawn bears all of the characteristics of a person who has internalized the medical notions of normalcy: “Everyone agrees I am a classic example of the sudden breakdown, the aberration” (Dusklands 74). Having accepted his condition as aberrant, Dawn pledges unconditional subjection to the rehabilitative practices of the state. As noted by Foucault, “confinement” is designed by the state to conceal “a metaphysics of government” (63). This effect could be achieved through a belief in “an ethical power of segregation,” which is instrumental in sanctioning the confinement of “all forms of social uselessness” (Foucault 58). Although Dawn’s attempted murder would be deemed morally reprehensible by any moral and legal standards, the novel dramatizes some ways in which the state monopolizes narratives around morality as a way to pathologize the mental state of the individual as well as the ways in which the individual absorbs the narratives of normalcy: “I approve of the enterprise of exploring the self” (74). What is ironic, however, is that the state that now lends its hand to “cure” Dawn is the same state that has precipitated his descent into psychosis in the first place. What Coetzee attempts to achieve through a staging of his unreliable narrator is to mount a critique of the ways

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in which states construct disability to conceal their pathological practices. To paraphrase Jean Baudrillard’s statement about “prisons [which] are there to conceal the fact that it is the society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral” (25), forms of confinement function to divert public attention from the fact that it is society that is disabled by the totalizing practices of the state; that disability is a social construct sustained by society as a way to repress the awareness of its dysfunctions. Like Eugene Dawn (although in a different social and political context), Magda, the protagonist of In the Heart of the Country, acts as a figure of confinement, internalized ableism, and social disablement. As in Dusklands, the figuring of the protagonist as possibly mentally ill through narrative devices is not as much to ascribe a medical condition to Magda as to dramatize the disabling effects of societies and states that restrict the freedom and mobility of their citizens. As a spinster living with her overbearing father on a South African farm, Magda lives a cossetted life that seems to have taken a toll on her psychological state. Sheltered from social relations, which resonates with the general social climate of segregation typical of the apartheid regime that Coetzee witnessed for the best part of his life, Magda internalizes ableist narratives that are closely linked with a pathologization of femininity in patriarchal regimes. She explicitly accepts her role in society assigned to her by men: “This is my fate, this is a woman’s fate” (Heart of the Country 116). Related to this self-consignment is the fact that Magda’s self-proclaimed psychological derangement—as she calls herself a “crazy old lady” (6), “mad hag” (8), “mad old woman” (86), “crazy old queen” (150)—is not so much a function of her congenital or acquired mental condition as her internalization of ableism and misogyny which she imbibed while living in a perpetual confinement with her domineering father. Her sense of vulnerability stemming from these social norms underlies the trappings of obsession that she displays: “[W]hat is the point of my story? Do I feel rich outrage at my spinster fate? Who is behind my oppression?” (5). Although some critics have ascribed mental illness to Magda,20 with her condition allegorizing colonial, patriarchal, and political oppression, it is perhaps more accurate to argue that rather than being a disabled character, Magda is a victim of social disablement triggered by cultural narratives associating femininity with psychological derangement. In this sense, Coetzee counters the armor-plated assumption sustained in the literary tradition that “madness is the only reasonable response for women to the strictures of a patriarchal society” (Schalk 172). Such formal effects of In the Heart of the Country as unreliable narration, inconsistencies and implausibilities of the plot, and textual fragmentation, which fly in the face of realist representation, may suggest that rather than being a story about a character suffering from a mental condition, the novel foregrounds the demiurgic powers of an

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authoress struggling to remain in control of the story of her own making. Magda, in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s terms, represents the figure of the “madwoman in the attic”; one whose “efforts of self-creation . . . seem to contradict the terms of her own gender definition” charted by the patriarchal society (48). Whether Magda could be read as mentally ill or not is secondary to the consideration of the social and political disablement forced upon her: as under such constraining circumstances “isolation [feels] like illness, alienation [feels] like madness” (Gilbert and Gubar 51). Domesticated and dominated by her father and patriarchal forces operating beyond her command, Magda uses her story as a way to recuperate her autonomy, mobility, and space; a milieu that must remain forever inaccessible for a female writer (or storyteller for that matter) who transgresses the laws of masculine authority in attempting to claim the authorship of her life-story. If Magda is mad, her madness is a disabling role forced upon her for her inability to renounce her claim for writing. Coetzee, in his reading of Magda’s character, prefers to call her “passionate” than “mad” (Doubling 61). “Magda,” he continues, “is an anomalous figure: her passion doesn’t belong in the genre in which she finds herself” (62). Again, the link between writing and identity is thus reinforced. Coetzee hesitantly concedes that “Magda may be mad” (61), but the bigger picture is that her otherness or “anomaly” is a result of failing or refusing to fit into the social norms—including the norms of genre and writing—she finds herself written into and writing inside of. CONCLUSION: DISPLACING ABLEIST DISCOURSES Susan Sontag states in no uncertain terms what she makes of the metaphorical deployment of illness in cultural narratives: “Illness is not a metaphor” (3). Sontag militantly argues that the experience of the ailing body is fundamentally “resistant to metaphoric thinking” (3). Like other discursive and literary devices based on semantic dualism—such as allegory, double entendre, innuendo, or pun—metaphor risks subsuming the complexity of embodiment under unexamined comparisons and associations. Metaphors of illness of disability are, nevertheless, pervasive. They are part and parcel of the common language we use daily. Writers on their part are rarely exempt from grave cultural biases embedded in language, and Coetzee’s novels self-reflexively acknowledge the biases of authorship. Some trappings of “discursive dependency” on disability that Coetzee’s fiction displays arise from his implicit self-reflexive critique of the ways in which literary authors instrumentalize disability discourse and characters with disabilities. In this way, Coetzee’s self-conscious ableism is linked to the fact that he “is willing to bare his own back to his own rod, to declare himself at once part of suffering humanity and

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of that which makes it suffer” (Kannemeyer 343). As I have endeavored to argue throughout this chapter, such self-reflexive devices, and other formal effects, are conceived to compel the reader to challenge their received ableist assumptions. Nevertheless, Coetzee’s commitment to an undoing of metanarratives of normalcy is at its most robust in his staging of the suffering body. Coetzee’s characters are acutely aware of their aching and unwieldy bodies, stuck between confinement and flight, or else displacement and immobility, tirelessly going against the grain of the politics of disablement imposed upon them by political institutions and cultural narratives alike. Coetzee’s ways of negotiating the terms between the singularity of the disabled body and the pressures it experiences from the outside world are subtle. And it is by playing out these covert subtleties—ones that develop from textual effects rather than overt pontificating of disability identity politics—that Coetzee’s denunciation of the discourses of normalcy is at its fiercest. NOTES 1. Characters and protagonists of the novels Dusklands (1974), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Foe (1986), and In the Heart of the Country (1977), respectively. 2. Although the word “state” is used in general terms here, it should be remembered that these novels deal with different political backgrounds—such as the United States (Dusklands) and South Africa (Life & Times of Michael K and In the Heart of the Country), among other less specified or fictionalized contexts—against which the issues of the suffering and/or disabled body are staged. 3. This is to denote a system that implements benevolent policies orientated at maximizing the welfare of people with disabilities at the cost of their personal autonomy. Such seemingly benevolent policies remain oppressive in the way they implement normalcy and stigmatize disability. 4. For further reference on the issues of disability in Coetzee’s later fiction, see Hall, Disability and Modern Fiction. 5. See Howell et al. for further reference on the formation of disability activist groups in South Africa during apartheid, most notably the Disabled People South Africa group. 6. About the compounding of racism and ableism under apartheid, Howell writes: “[t]he lived experiences of black and white disabled people under apartheid were very different and reflected the general inequalities between white and black people in South Africa” (48). 7. Although, as stated, the issue of racial violence is a central concern to Coetzee’s novels of the apartheid stage, and one that might offer valuable insights into the intersectional aspects of ableism, this topic has been comprehensively explored in Coetzee scholarship and criticism to date and exceeds the scope of this paper. My focus is

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therefore on the ethical implications of the political and social disablement of people with disabilities rather than the nonwhite population of apartheid South Africa. 8. The Empire sustains the narrative about barbarians “com[ing] out at night” (134) and by doing so posing the invisible, insidious threat to the Empire and its inhabitants. The public spectacles of torture meted out to the captured “barbarians” (see 18, 113–115) are conceived to convince the population that the enemy is real and under the Empire’s control. 9. However, it is important to bear in mind that different forms of control apply to different social groups, such as fisherfolks, barbarians, or residents of the oasis. 10. In a sense, the Empire is predicated on the existence of the tangible enemy in opposition to which it defines itself. For both the title of the novel and the idea that the Empire needs barbarians to legitimize itself, Coetzee is indebted to the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. The closing lines of his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) aptly exemplify this tendency: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution” (Cavafy 19). 11. This episode recalls the opening scene of the novel in which the Magistrate describes his face-to-face encounter with the Colonel who wears sunglasses. 12. This phrase is reminiscent of the aposiopesis in the barbarian woman’s first words to the Magistrate by which she attempts to describe why the Magistrate should not want someone like her: “‘I am . . .’ —she holds up her forefinger, grips it, twists it” (Barbarians 29). The wording and body language are cryptic but may suggest an act of violence inflicted upon her or else, as in the case of Michael K’s use of the phrase “I am what I am,” her awareness of her physical deformity. In Coetzee’s latest novel do date The Death of Jesus (2019) an iteration of this phrase, “I am who I am” (35) is uttered by David. Considering the biblical allusion of both the title of Coetzee’s latest novel and the biblical provenance of the passage, Coetzee’s use of this phrase in his novels in its various iterations seems to imply that the characters who utter it (K, the barbarian woman, David) refuse or are unable to speak of themselves in the rationalistic terms that are expected from them. 13. For a detailed account of the aspect of territorial displacement in Michael K, see Sikorska. 14. Matthew J. C. Cella proposes the term “ecosomatic paradigm” to denote a “foreground[ing of] the inseparability of ecological context and somatic experience” (585). 15. For further discussion on scopic regime, see Martian Jay’s “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” and Downcast Eyes. 16. In Coetzee’s reading of the novel, “Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body” (Doubling 248). Implicit in this interpretation is the assumption that violent acts of disablement necessitate the awareness of the irreducibility of the body in suffering, which speaks against the acts meted out to it. 17. See Wojtas for further reference on narrative prosthesis in Dusklands. 18. I use this term to refer to a conscious removal of a character from the plot in an attempt to question the instrumentalization of disabled characters in literary texts. 19. See Attridge (1–31) for an extended discussion about the linking of ethics of otherness with the formal effects of Coetzee’s modernism. 20. See Poyner and Rody.

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WORKS CITED Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing Face to Face with Time. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2015. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York, Semiotext(e), 1983. Bolt, David. The Metanarratives of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2016. Cavafy, C. P. Collected Poems, edited by George Savidis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton, NJ, Princeton UP, 1975. Cella, Matthew J. C. “The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 574–596. Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. London, Vintage, 2008. ———. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992. ———. Dusklands. London, Vintage, 1982. ———. Elizabeth Costello. London, Vintage, 2003. ———. Foe. London, Penguin Books, 1987. ———. In the Heart of the Country. London, Vintage, 2004. ———. Life and Times of Michael K. London, Vintage, 2004. ———. Slow Man. London, Vintage, 2006. ———. The Death of Jesus. London, Harvill Secker, 2020. ———. Waiting for the Barbarians. London, Vintage, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993. Dovey, Teresa. “Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories.” Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, edited by Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Limited, 1996, pp. 138–151. Dugard, John. Human Rights and the South African Legal Order. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1978. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Gallagher, Susan V. A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard UP, 1991. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

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Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1963. Hall, Alice. Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. ———. Literature and Disability. New York, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Howell, Colleen, Schuaib Chalklen, and Thomas Alberts. “A history of the disability rights movement in South Africa.” Disability and Social Change: A South African Agenda, edited by Brian Watermeyer et al. Cape Town, Human Sciences Research Council, 2006, pp. 46–84. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 3–27. ———. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994. Jolly, Rosemary. Colonisation, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.M. Coetzee. Athens: Ohio UP, 1996. Kafer, Alison. “Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability.” Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited and with an introduction by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln & London, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 2017, pp. 201–241. Kannemeyer, J.C. J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Melbourne and London, Scribe, 2012. Kleege, Georgina. “Dialogues with the Blind Literary Depictions of Blindness and Visual Art.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–16.  Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Post-colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1996. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2006. MacLeod, Lewis. “Do We of Necessity Become Puppets in a Story?” or Narrating the World: On Speech, Language, and Discourse in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52: no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–18. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2000. Poyner, Jane. J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. London, Taylor and Francis, 2016. Priestley, Mark. “Developing Disability Studies programmes: the international context.” Disability and Social Change: A South African Agenda, edited by Brian Watermeyer, Leslie Swartz, Theresa Lorenzo, Marguerite Schneider, and Mark Priestley. Cape Town, Human Sciences Research Council, 2006, pp. 19–30. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness. New York, Columbia UP, 2007. Rody, Caroline. “The Mad Colonial Daughter’s Revolt: J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country.” The Writings of J.M. Coetzee, edited by Michael Valdez Moses. Durham, NC, Duke UP, 1994, pp. 157–180.

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Schalk, Sami. “Disability and Women’s Writing.” Literature and Disability, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 170–184. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability: The Basics. London and New York, Routledge, 2018. Sikorska, Liliana. “Michael K’s Odyssey: Displacement and Wandering in the Context of the Medieval Concept of Homo Viator in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K.” A Universe of (Hi)Stories. Essays on J.M. Coetzee, edited by Liliana Sikorska. Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 87–109. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York, Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Stites, Bill. Democracy: A Primary Source Analysis. New York, Rosen Publishing Group, 2005. Weigl, Engelhard. “Life and Times of Michael K (1983).” A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee, edited by Tim Mehigan. Rochester and New York, Camden House, 2011, pp. 76–90. Wojtas, Paweł. “’Form follows dysfunction’: Coetzee’s Narrative Ethics of Disability.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018, pp. 71–87. Wright, Laura. Writing “Out of All the Camps”: J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement. London and New York, Routledge, 2009.

Part III

RECONCEPTUALIZING MOBILE BODIES IN TRANSNATIONAL SPACES

Chapter 7

Writing Away from the Main The Traveling Ways of Jamaica Kincaid’s Unruly Prose Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika

“Silently, she had instructed me to follow her example, and now I too traveled along on my white underbelly, my tongue darting and flickering in the hot air” (At the Bottom of the River 55)1. These, the words of the anonymous salamander-like “I” of “My Mother,” one of the stories of the author’s first collection, foreshadow the series of travels and transformations (of the “I,” body and text) occurring in Jamaica Kincaid’s large production.2 The author was born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in 1949 and changed her birth name in 1973 after having emigrated to the United States.3 Her pseudonym, “Jamaica Kincaid,” somehow puts Antigua, the writer’s island of origin, at a distance, and obliquely connects her back to the Caribbean. In this regard, one may argue that this self-assigned equivocal nom de plume embodies a floating “fragment”4 which signifies according to “the sea of circumstance” (Agard 63–4).5 It might also be figuring one version of the Caribbean “portable self” and the difficult process of migrating, remembering, redefining self, and “gathering the pieces” which Carole Boyce discusses in her latest book, Caribbean Spaces: Escape From Twilight Zones (63, 95). “Where shall I place myself?”(153), this is the upfront question enunciated by Kincaid’s speaker in My Garden (Book): an uncanny medley of pieces on self, reading, writing, gardening, traveling, botany, and history; this query raises the issue of choice, of not abiding by “instructions,” and the urgency of looking for the most adequate places and routes for the self which run throughout Kincaid’s production.6 This author has been part of the American and Caribbean literary landscape for more than four decades and she has followed many writing routes as her varied and demanding production demonstrates: fiction, nonfiction, autobiographies of sorts, memoirs, 133

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essays (long and short), garden pieces, travel writings, magazine articles. Such variety translates Kincaid’s refusal to stay in what she calls “the fixed form” (Best American Essays xii) and her unwavering attempts at escaping from “standards” and labels.7 Creative mobility is at work in Kincaid’s world embedded, for instance, in the ways in which her writing, like the unusual wisteria in My Garden (Book): “goes from one form . . . to another” (12) in a seemingly haphazard way.8 In this chapter, I intend to demonstrate how corporeal and word mobility as figured in Kincaid’s writings embodies some tentative symbolic responses to the thorny question of positioning one’s body/text and the unlikely paths it takes. I would first like to argue that Kincaid’s singular prose travels away from the main road in the ways in which the body keeps disconnecting, disassembling from reassuring images of the body as whole and complete, from constricting boxes and location, in a sometime erratic process of reshaping or claiming new territories to inhabit. Kincaid’s representation of the body (male, female, neutral) is often a deconstruction of it, a questioning of wholeness as deceptive prerequisite on the way of becoming. I would like to address, in the second part, how Kincaid’s prose itself performs textual mobility.9 The author’s dislocating syntax, foregrounding equivocal word arrangement and unlikely collocations, along with her consistent use of digression and misuse of punctuation highlight motion on yet another mode. My last part will tackle the ways of composition as ingrained in the motif of the fugue and knitting in Kincaid’s most recent novel, See Now Then, and how it resonates or conflicts with the idea of “destination” (Mr. Potter 89). THE BODY UNBOUND In his well-known essay, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (1992), Derek Walcott addresses the role and modes of memory and the issue of creativity in the Caribbean. The essay begins with a performance of the Ramleela, an old ritual from India, which takes place in the village of Felicity in Trinidad. In relating the performance, Walcott concedes that he has first misread the performance, seeing the ritual as some flat re-enactment of dead remains of memory before realizing its force and restorative value (Walcott in Donnell 504). According to him, the performance is more than it may appear at first sight and should not be experienced as a literal imitation of an old rigid ritual; Walcott insists on the way in which the performance and the performers’ bodies in motion do translate the ritual into another form and create other ways of carrying memory, of inhabiting the body, the landscape and the world.10 Developing his line of thought, Walcott conjures up the image of a broken vase suggesting that what may look like fragments are neither dead

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nor inert pieces, but can be transported into new life and act as “celebrations of real presence”: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of the original shape” (504). At the end of his essay, Walcott aptly conjoins performance, the vase, the potential of the fragment, and his own art to the issue of creation and figurative mobility, “Poetry is an island and breaks away from the main”11 (507). The fragment impregnates much of Caribbean literary imagination (Brathwaite 1992, Agard 2000, Cliff 1985) and critical discourse on Caribbean literatures (Benítez-Rojo 1992) as signifying both destruction, loss, and speechlessness, but also the capacity of the Antillean body/text to restore itself as it possibly can and shape new pathways. This motif also figures the complex dynamic operating between the common social body and the single part, between the majority and its block of common knowledge and the “centrifugal” force of fragments.12 Kincaid’s focus on the fragment and the single part may read then as foregrounding the ways in which the single self or the body in pieces can be “a stand-in for a life, a soul, a future” (Danticat 20). The truncated body of Annie John seems to signify as such in Kincaid’s first novel: I got out of bed, gathered them up in my arms, . . . and gave them a good bath. . . . The pictures were in a little heap off to one side of the room. . . . None of the people in the wedding picture, except for me, had any face left. In the picture of my mother and father, I had erased them from the waist down. In the picture of me wearing my confirmation dress, I had erased all of myself except for the shoes. (Annie John 119–120)

This scene comes before the novel ends with Annie John’s leaving her island for good and highlights the narrator’s uncontrolled and silent rebellion against her family as she washes away family pictures. What is left at the end of this process is just a split off, a synecdoche of Annie John’s body and some remains of the family body which are now erased, decentered, and placed in “a heap . . . to one side of the room.” Only the character’s face and shoes remain in the picture figuring, as it were, what is needed to walk out of the photograph, of the family constricting frame and “regular rhythm.” This episode puts to the fore the capacity of one body part, of what has been separated from the rest to go free and possibly reconnect elsewhere. Annie John’s unpremeditated healing gesture literally defamiliarizes the collective and the single body estranging them from the familiar (tradition as enclosed in family photographs, daily practice) and helps Annie John make her first tentative step outside the frame (Courtman 1999).

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Kincaid’s subsequent production shows how a number of body pieces find their way out and travel from one text to the other—the feet and soles of mother figures, emblems of lost presence (AM 198), the blank face of the father (Mr. Potter), the hands of the knitter and the gardener (Talk Stories). Those orphan body parts stand out as unmarked sites which, like Annie John’s “face,” seem to resist being captured or contained in description until they can reappear elsewhere, in another book, “in another form” making body and memory concrete, different, and alive again (SNT 32). This constant circulation of recurring words and body parts embeds a textual and symbolic mobility which recalls the “spectacular” quality which Benítez-Rojo sees as being some of the most salient qualities of the Caribbean novel. Beyond the issue of verbal performance, Kincaid’s traveling words read as a way of (temporarily) inscribing in texture what displacement, or transplantation may bring about—disjunctive language, “misshapen” forms, orphan words, body parts, remains of all kinds of fragments floating by themselves (My Garden (Book): 164), a seemingly nondescript common soil of sorts. See Now Then, Kincaid’s latest novel to date, travels back to her first novel, Annie John and the family and the body in pieces motif. The book explores the breaking up of the auto-fictional Sweet family with Mrs. Sweet, the mother figure (fictional daughter Annie John possibly turned into a mother figure), the turbulences and the disruption of selves trying to keep the family body from falling apart.13 Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the book which I consider emblematic of Kincaid’s portraying of body parts: her lips [Mrs. Sweet] were like a child’s drawing of the earth before creation, a symbol of chaos, the thing not yet knowing its true form: and that was just her physical entity, as if imagining her as something assembled in a vase decorating a table set for lunch or dinner to be eaten by people who wrote articles for magazines, or who wrote books on the fate of the very earth itself, or who wrote about the way we live now, whoever we may be, just our tiny selves nothing more nor less. (See Now Then 11)

On the surface, the vase on the table stands out as a functional, nondescript thing, however, it turns out to be a much more disquieting image. The description of Mrs. Sweet’s lips relates her to some formless mass, “something,” unfinished, reduced, and estranged to itself. The passage is told from the point of view of Mr. Sweet who, after unflatteringly reviewing his wife’s body, piece by piece (neck, shoulders, legs, torso, nostrils, cheeks, ears) just before the above excerpt starts, closes his account by “assembl[ing]” and literally transporting and locking up a part of her in a vase and in a belittling simile. Kincaid’s image might comment back to Walcott’s beautifully restored Caribbean vase and resonate both as a plain dismissal of Walcott’s image and

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a statement about the power of writing to simultaneously transport and deviate from old images and constricting containers.14 Kincaid’s vase is indeed traveling in several directions at once, back to Walcott’s elegant metaphor, to the demeaning comparison of Mr. Sweet and to the narrator’s flat voice which de-emphasizes figurative language. One may wonder why the author has chosen to foreground “lips” rather than the “mouth” or any other parts of the face. Highlighting lips somehow estranges them from the mouth and further enhances lack and speechlessness. “Lips” graphically show and signify here because they stand by themselves markedly dissociated from the mouth and the body, an incongruous, contained, and silent presence. Later, in the course of the novel, this brief reference to “lips” takes on additional weight, and that the words themselves leapt up to meet my eyes and that my eyes then fed them to my lips . . . and my lips that are the shape of chaos before the tyranny of order is imposed on them is where I find myself, my true self, and from that I write; but I knew how to write before I could read, for all that I would write about had existed before my knowing how to read and transport it into words and put it down on paper. (SNT 29–30)

Kincaid vividly restores value and sense to “lips” and the body as location of creativity, genuine subjectivity, and writing voice. The excerpt shows the literal and organic circulation and transport of words, the vital process from inside the body to outside, up to the eyes and down to the lips, that is the essential body routes from which writing can surge (bypassing reading) before getting directly on the page. The long and convoluted passage figures the complex process of writing and the engagement of the body. The traveling lines from “words” to “eyes” and “lips” make Mrs. Sweet’s face into a mobile space or a map attesting to the emergence of originary language. SPARE PARTS, OR THE UNRULY PATHS OF JAMAICA KINCAID’S BODY/TEXT The turn of the new century saw Kincaid somehow turning away from fiction (with the exception of her novel Mr. Potter 2005), publishing two books and articles on gardens (Kincaid 1999a, 1999b, 2001, 2007), sketches (Kincaid 2001), a travel book (Kincaid 2005), and some editing work (Iweala 2005). Kincaid navigating in-between genres during that period of time reads as her continuing attempt at exploring the various ways in which to write in the “constant and unchangeable ‘now’” (SNT 102). I would like to posit that Kincaid’s handling of, not so much, the fragment as the fragmentary contributes to making her prose a traveling, polymorphous,

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organic body of sorts. An organism is a multicellular body performing three vital functions: self-conservation, self-reproduction, and self-regulation (Schlanger 14). These features could well apply to Kincaid’s body of works with its capacity of keeping itself alive and in circulation by drawing on inside and outside material, reusing its own textual components and subject matter,15 and keeping skillful balance between repeating itself while eschewing sterile duplication. Indeed, despite appearances, Kincaid’s work features a body/text which is in a constant process of “becoming” as the narrative voice has it in “Girl,” the first story of At the Bottom of the River (3–4).16 As Kincaid’s oeuvre unravels, the written body converts and transmutes into various forms and states; the example of Mrs. Sweet turning to mud is one tiny but meaningful example of the unexpected transformations of the body— “and now Mrs. Sweet turned not into stone but a mound of mud” (SNT 175). In a similar fashion, words, irrespective of sense, stand out as mobile components which keep turning into something else as the author arranges and disarranges them: recurring words, phrases, motifs, quotes circulate from one book to the other, or inside one given piece, travel around singly, or in groups, sometimes separating, sometimes recombining in a different order, spelling, context. See Now Then is emblematic in this regard, magnifying as it does the overwhelming presence of countless words (adverbs, verbs, nouns) and punctuation signs (parentheses, semi-colons, or dashes), textual fragments which make their abrupt and intrusive way in a place where they do not originate. Consider for example the following excerpts, In the night, way into the middle of the night, when the night isn’t divided like a sweet drink into little sips . . . . (ABR 6) It was in the middle of that night, way, way into the middle of that night, fifteen minutes into the new day, that the beautiful Persephone was born. (SNT 114)

Some forty years after the publication of At the Bottom of the River, the opening lines of “In the Night” make a new entrance in See Now Then as if looking for another suitable destination. The generic and dream-like atmosphere, the sense of undivided time prevailing in the long original sentence have now given way to a shorter, dryer, time-bound moment which is now attuned to the sense of impending failure permeating Kincaid’s recent book. Traveling common phrases and words thus make Kincaid’s production an unstable, temporary ensemble which constantly repeats itself, re-adjusts itself, and needs to be constantly re-tested (Benítez-Rojo 24). This echoes with Kincaid’s concern for reworking ordinary words and things, it also points to the unpredictable and difficult labor of articulating “diasporic subjectivities” and the “multiple subject positions” of those concerned by migration, exile,

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and displacement (Kaplan 103–104). In Kincaid’s universe, some of those subject positions are figured by the recurrence of seemingly accessory items: asterisks, round brackets, tiny, insignificant, though subversive locations for the “I” in its enterprise of derailing discourse and interrupting the thread of “established narratives.”17 As the writer moves in and out of texts separating and breaking up narrative lines into autonomous pieces, re-assembling them in a different order and shape, the reading space turns into an unstable zone challenging readers to change positions and to adjust to uncertain ground if they want to keep being on the same page as the recurring and unrelenting voice and presence of the “I, the person writing this now” (GB 159). See Now Then—the imperative mood loudly claims for attention and invites one to be attuned to the various voices resonating from the book, to change one’s vantage point and delve back into Kincaid’s universe at large in order to reconfigure the connections between the pieces and texts scattered along the writer’s way. Many leitmotifs, quotes from various sources, aphorisms, commonplace phrases, lists, parentheses saturate See Now Then like so many fixtures or spare parts used to refashion body and text. The return of words as sounds punctuates Kincaid’s writings figuring as it were the process of life and creation, its stops and new beginnings, its illogical unraveling and motley texture also recalling self and the ways of “personal memory” (SNT 65). Kincaid’s book puts together different genres—fiction, nonfiction, autofiction, unreliable autobiography, and myths. Mrs. Sweet, the mother figure, is a knitter and a writer who goes by the name of Jamaica Sweet born on May 25 as the writer herself (176) and reads to her son a book misleadingly entitled See Then Now. Kincaid conflates parody and the world of myths (the Sweet children are named Heracles and Persephone), intermingling references to consumer society (the Myrmidons, the McDonald’s restaurant toy soldiers) with off-key allusions to highbrow music, classical music and popular songs, films, titles, and cuts of all kinds from the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, children’s books, cookbooks, books on gardening and geology. Going back to intra-textual space and material, this novel also extensively borrows from Kincaid’s previous writings and stock of words which represent the secondhand material needed to feed writing and experiment with other ways of doing things, “and many other things were secondhand, or thirdhand, numerous unknown hands had claimed them before— . . . sitting at her used desk, in her used chair, in front of the used typewriter and trying to see a Then—because there is always a Then to see Now—” (SNT 71). Kincaid has always expressed her taste for secondhand clothing and objects; this resurfaces here in the connections of the writing figure with the secondhand, thirdhand hands and memories which help keep her in line with other spaces and time frames. Significantly, the “secondhand” also reads

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as a kind of fertile variation on the body and the “hands” highlighting as it were new ways of putting things and time together and setting into motion the immobile character sitting at her “used desk.” As such, a number of the deceivingly superfluous or secondhand parts or “cuts” surfacing Kincaid’s writings read as vital constituents giving additional body and density to text as they delineate new conduits for word and thought to be revitalized and passed on (Snead 220). The couple “now” “then” well typifies the function of the “secondhand” material navigating through the writer’s prose. Those tiny words have been impregnating Kincaid’s writings from the beginning signaling the small readjustments to be made to come to terms with life and choice—“See Now Then, See Then Now” (65). In many ways, those words perform as textual spare parts, as comments or seemingly senseless eruptions emanating from the “true voice” trying to be heard and read. Inscribing the highly visible presence of “now” and “then” embeds the traces and labor required to get to a language of one’s own and to defamiliarize what precedes.18 See Now Then rings a bell to readers who are familiar with the writer’s production and her lavish use of “now” and “then” as way of taking stock of past life and writing. In “Biography of a Dress” (1992), for example, “now” “then” go in a pair punctuating the whole story, figuring the long process between “not knowing” and “knowing” (96). Those two ordinary adverbs travel through the story mostly in round brackets, figurative niches or asides housing self-reflexive comments of the “I.” The numerous repetitions put to the fore the slight changes happening along the way, adding or subtracting something as the text moves on, a favorite composing device for the author. The same pair becomes more daring in See Now Then disregarding what the narrator calls “holy grammar” (89); “now” “then” now circumvent their grammatical status performing as adjectives or nouns (“a Then to the Now” (7); “that now moment” (90)). The pair of adverbs seems to have lost their regulating function as they proliferate into a series of assemblages of jumbled up temporalities: But Mrs. Sweet was looking out at her life: . . . and she was thinking of her now, knowing that it would most certainly become a Then even as it was Now, for the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then, and that the past and the present and the future has no permanent present tense. (13)

Throughout the whole book, “now” and “then” keep performing in a disorderly fashion, showing up in caps or lowercase, sometimes separately or in pairs, sometimes assembled together according to or against the rules of grammar as so many pieces gone off the line.

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Kincaid’s fragmentary prose, with its cuts, stops, digressions, repetitions, and variations, keeps departing from the semblance of narrative line not unlike Mrs. Sweet herself who is described as being “a red light on the uninterrupted smooth, long easily manageable curved road through some green mountains” (86). Mrs. Sweet disrupts routine just like Kincaid’s battery of ordinary words and punctuation signs hampers the easy way of sentence19 and sets up crossroads forcing the reader to stop and ponder which way to take (“See Now Then, See Then Now” 65), or what to do with an open-ended way, see for instance, “Say Now about then:” this unfinished, truncated clause leaves a section unfinished, hanging up on the page before the narrative moves on to something else (SNT 119). “To me the world is cracked, unwhole, not pure, accidental” says Kincaid’s speaker (GB 126), one could extend these characteristics to Kincaid’s wording itself. The author’s unhinged structure and syntax, along with the mingling of pieces of uncanny voices mirror the intricate and painful process of body, self and language forming and deforming as the multi-directional narrative travels on. At the heart of Kincaid’s unruly universe lies a desire to find and articulate what is “not yet known” (SNT 152), even if it takes impairing body, form, and narrative. This is something which aptly resonates with Chawaf Chawaff’s book, Le corps et le verbe, la langue en sens inverse, and her foregrounding of the symbolic violence and damage it takes to write from the body, to get rid of “deficient” words and bypass if necessary the mediation of language itself in order to access directly to the liberating “flesh of life” (Chawaf 15). KNITTING AND THE FUGUE, OR THE QUESTION OF COMPOSITION See Now Then reverberates and amplifies much of what has been prevailing in Jamaica Kincaid’s works—an ongoing and obstinate concern for words, the “formation” and expression of one’s subjectivity and one’s place in the world. Kincaid’s “twisting” and disfiguring syntax and narrative lines put those nagging questions to the forefront, as well as those concerning composition and the adequacy of form, shape, material to one’s self (See Now Then 10). This is signified through the struggle between sounds which prevails in the whole novel, “the sound of Mr. Sweet revising and rewriting parts of his fugue,” “an empire of sound—a symphony, a fugue, especially a fugue” (83) clashing with the sounds of the washing machine, Mrs. Sweet’s in-between voice, or Heracles’s “big and loud laugh” (50). The novel stages an impossible encounter between two creative practices and lines, those, on the one hand, of Mr. Sweet, the monodist,20 who

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works in his garage alone, plays the harp and composes fugues whose tones “expanded and all wrapped up in a neat procedure” (83), the one who is surrounded by “notes and notes of music . . . arranging themselves into every known form but never into forms not yet known” (35). On the other hand, there are the unpredictable knitting and writing lines of Mrs. Sweet, “she had taught herself the ways of knitting, slipping the knitted stitch off the needle and then retrieving it by twisting it in the opposite direction, . . . and even so Mrs. Sweet understood that her method of doing this would meet with the disapproval of any Olympian authority” (152). See Now Then is indeed about authority, about authorship and conflicting ways of composition. The divide lies, as it were, between Mr. Sweet’s “known” and contained forms and the digressive, inconclusive lines of Mrs. Sweet.21 Attempting to create within the carefully measured and circumscribed space of “known” forms, Mr. Sweet cannot come to terms with his wife’s off-key, improvisational creative process and interest in the little details of life: “Oh now, knit and purl, knit and purl, ten stiches that way, twenty stiches the other way, drop some number of them now, pick another number of them up later and form a pattern that will then be shaped into a wearable garment, or a covering for a bed: for what is she doing now?” (163–164). This excerpt figures knitting as a form of composing (“form,” “pattern,” “shaped into”) and improvising in the mundane time of “now.” Framed by “now,” this sentence begins with a one-stress clause with the number of stresses, syllables, and words gradually augmenting until the sentence reaches its close. The haphazard increase (from ten to twenty stiches), unjustified lapses (an unknown number of stitches are dropped or added), and the moving on to a transitional end signified by a question mark and a return to the “now” of the story’s time seem to equate with the irregular and “not known form” or rhythm which Mr. Sweet despises. Knitting as composing tells much on the contrary about the engagement of Mrs. Sweet’s body, hands, and fingers and her never-ending quest of a form which might be suitable to “now” and “then.” Dropping stiches, disregarding counting, de-emphazizing “the tyranny of order” (29), Mrs. Sweets worries the line, gesturing toward Kincaid’s own deceivingly ill-matched, disorganized prose and syntax and concern for the single part and its free ways of relating to a whole which is never defined beforehand (“a . . . garment, or a covering for a bed”).22 Mrs. Sweet’s thought says it all about the labor of mending and restoring involved in her knitting and writing process—drawing on the little, providing form and pattern adjustable to all, and intuiting the value of the menial to get new things out: “she did not think of what was imprisoned in each stitch, each stitch being a small thing in itself that would make up a whole” (40). One might argue that knitting as domestic and creative praxis points to the ways in which stitches can help germinate what has been contained (“little things”). Composing as such is not so much

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remaining in a set pattern as it means welcoming the irregular, daily life interruptions and being oblivious to pre-determined destination (a key word in Kincaid). The knitting motif brings the reader back to the “straight stiches,” the regular, predictable, “overburdened” quality of the mother’s stitches in “Biography of a Dress.” This is a reminder of the no-choice way or “the fixed form of the day” which most of Kincaid’s oeuvre has been running away from (94, 96). In See Now Then, Mrs. Sweet carries on such flight away from the regular line as she drops and twists the line following her own rhythm and pattern to “make up a whole.” The fugue (coming from Latin fuga) is defined as a musical style of composition in which two or three voices enter one after the other, each one imitating and chasing the previous one. The first voice introduces the “subject” or “theme,” the second voice gives the “countersubject” (which is a response as well as a counterpoint to the first voice), and the third voice (“response”) is a return to the subject (Arnold 857–860). One episode, in this regard, seems to typify the impossibility for Mr. and Mrs. Sweet to match voices and follow the same lines to make a whole. The passage is too long to be quoted in full here, it is made of three paragraphs of almost similar beginnings: “The telephone rang; . . .” (subject as enunciated by first voice 61); “The telephone rang: . . .” (second voice, 61); “But the telephone did ring and Mr. Sweet answered it.” (third voice, 64)

“The telephone rang;” is the first line and cum-like subject of the whole passage which I see as a kind of mock fugue. It introduces a twenty-one-line sentence, a digressive piece of interior monologue in which Mrs. Sweet is imagining what and who might come from the outside. The initial line is repeated at the beginning of the next paragraph with slight modification, the semi-colons are replaced by colons and the paragraph is now indented, which makes the paragraph more formal and perhaps clearer with the colon giving a semblance of sense. This second voice, “The telephone rang: . . .,” grows into a larger section of two pages alternating the voices and thoughts of Mr.Sweet and Mrs. Sweet on family and life, and mingling various speech modes, interior monologue, indirect speech, free direct and free indirect speech (61–64). “But the telephone did ring” heralds the third voice and the ending of the piece putting an end as it were to the digressive, rambling interior monologue of the first voice of Mrs. Sweet and goes back to a concrete and factual event, that of Mr. Sweet answering the phone and negotiating on how to pay bills. The inner voice of Mrs. Sweet has disappeared at this point as if it had chosen to keep silent and bifurcate from the patterns of the fugue. On a larger scale, one could argue that such bifurcation agrees with Kincaid’s cuts out

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and misuses of syntactic routes and figures one among the many idiosyncratic traveling lines of flight or “escape routes” (2013) which Kincaid has embedded in her writings to signify her distinctive place and voice in the Caribbean and global literary landscape. TWONESS, OR THE “FINALITY OF IT ALL” See Now Then ends on a sense of disenchantment and journeys back to earlier origins: the creation of the earth (SNT 181), the “twoness” prevailing in Kincaid’s earlier books (“My Mother” in At the Bottom of the River, Annie John (17)), Mr. Sweet’s father’s commanding note to his son on how to live a good life with: “two households, two wives, two sofas, two knives” (SNT 90). As the novel comes to an end, Mrs. Sweet’s body broke in two as if she were made of something to be found in the Pennsylvania formation but she was not made from that, she only knew of that, and she wept and wept over the broken body of her son, who now lay on the couch . . . Mrs. Sweet broke in two continuously, kept breaking over and over again, never into many pieces, just the same two, her heart, her head. (See Now Then 159–160)

Breaking in two makes the character kin to some undefined stone in the Pennsylvania formation, another kind of estrangement from self, body, and home. Home as referred to in My Garden (Book): comes to mind, “My house I can easily describe: . . . My home cannot be described so easily; many, many things make up my home” (30–31). Home in Sweet Now Then has confirmed its status as a univocal cliché (“their own home sweet home” GB 134), it is clearly unable to accommodate and preserve “all the many things that truly made up . . . true self” now downplayed and reduced to “two” broken parts (SNT 87). Those “two” parts flatly supersede the numerous fragments and things found in Kincaid’s writings and leave little option for a “cracked” whole to be regenerated. Going down from the “many” to “two” equates with a shrinking, diminutive self and body. The description of powerful Heracles, the son and symbolical double of Mrs. Sweet is significant here, his powerful, “retractable” body (107) which can stretch “across the valley” (50) has lost mobility and is wearing out: “there his hand lay isolated like a part of a landmass, submerging or emerging, neither one or the other. But he was dreaming of flowers, of fields upon fields of wheat in flower” (151). Suspended in-between states (neither “one or the other”), Heracles is slowly turning to immobility (“lay,” “isolated,” “dreaming”), the wheat image sends him back to mythical times, to his mother Demeter, goddess of fields and wheat. Later on, this process accelerates as Heracles and his mother, Mrs. Sweet shrink

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down as the strange conceit shows it, “And he [Heracles] folded up as if he were a croissant. . . . And he folded up and so did his mother” (169), exemplifying a figural fall from organic growth (the “landmass” of the island of Barbuda, (19) to the state of ready-made soft food to be consumed easily. In the very end of the novel, the landscape image reappears as if traveling and talking back to the opening landscape scene. One may wonder to what extent Kincaid’s end is signifying on the fugue one more time; the ending, a flat counterpoint, contrasts with the novel’s prelude showing a varied landscape (waterways, things, people, and memories) which Mrs. Sweet “could” look or imagine from her window (3–6). The main character now is in a kind of limbo between the inside and the outside, “separated and shielded . . . from all that lay outside the Shirley Jackson house, . . . she could see a landscape so different from the one in which she was formed: that paradise of persistent sunshine and pleasant weather, a paradise so complete it immediately rendered itself as hell; outside now there was spring” (SNT 182). The question of writing and body formation (“formed”) and belonging surfaces in the reference to landscape. “Form” is used in the past and passive mode questioning the constraints of distant past. Mrs. Sweet (the writer/knitter figure) is poised between the sunny hell-cum-paradise of the island (136) and the indeterminacy of “spring,” of “the very large trees, some of them evergreen, some of them deciduous and right then in bud” (182). Kincaid leaves the reader in between as always: the concluding paragraph (181–182), with its fluid and well-regulated flow, seems to mirror the linear and regular ways of narrative and reflect back to Mrs. Sweet’s loss of faith in literature, “looking into an abyss, but that would be literature; . . . and at the bottom of this metaphor or just a true representation lay her life, the remains of it, the substance of it, the summation of it, the finality of it” (173). The equation of keeping balance between worlds seems unresolved.23 One can wonder then if See Now Then does not powerfully stage the (temporary?) failure of self which takes place and shows the limits of a language which seems to have lost momentum and the resources to keep “true” self alive.

NOTES 1. The following abbreviations will be used to refer to Kincaid’s works: ABR, At the Bottom of the River, AJ, Annie John AM, The Autobiography of My Mother, GB, My Garden (Book):, AF, Among Flowers, TS, Talk Stories, SNT, See Now Then. 2. In “My Mother,” the organic body of the “I” can de-multiply and grow new parts. See Heracles’s body in SNT: “whack, was the sound of his head sliced away from his body . . . as he (Mr. Sweet saw Heracles pick his head off the floor and replace it on his neck” (36).

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3. On Kincaid’s pseudonym, see Marcia Franklin, Idaho PBS Interview with Author Jamaica Kincaid, December 6, 2016. https://video​.idahoptv​.org​/video​/dialogue​-author​-jamaica​-kincaid/. See Dance (2016, 116). 4. I am referring here to John Agard’s rendering of the Caribbean archipelago in his concrete poem “Scatter” (Agard 175). 5. This is borrowed from John Agard’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Old Tie” which revisits Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird” (1926). Agard’s trickster spider Nansi raises the issue of changing appearances and names (Agard 63–64). 6. The issue of “place” echoes the ongoing debates about labels and how to qualify and place the writers and artists from the Caribbean and elsewhere in safe containers—“postcolonial” (Gilroy 1993), “diaspora” (Hall 2019, Boyce Davies 2013), “dyaspora” (Danticat 2010), “exile” (Birbalsingh 1996), “global” (Casanova 1999), “transnational” (Pulitano 2016), “migrant,” or “immigrant” (Agard 1982, Danticat 2010). McKenzie’s and Bramberger’s collection of stories, Where We Started. Stories of Living Between Worlds, from writers from the Caribbean and from various parts in Europe is an interesting move away from labels in vogue (2019). 7. See how Kincaid dismisses the term “diaspora writer” as she defines herself as “a sort of exile” (Kincaid in Birbalsingh 1996, 143). 8. On landscape and geography in literature, see Rose (1993). On Kincaid’s positioning in a large intertextual landscape that cannot be explored in the space of this essay, see Bigot & al. (2019), Kekeh (2016). 9. See Kincaid’s story “In Central Park” (Talk Stories 54–56) which reads as an interesting variation on the term “lines” and the ways of the artist. See Kekeh (83). 10. Brazilian folk wood pieces (ex-voto pieces) significantly exemplify artistic and religious mobility as expressed in body parts, see https://cgconcept​.fr​/fondation​ -cartier​-paris​-exposition​-nous​-les​-arbres​-video/. Accessed March 5, 2020. 11. Part of my title is borrowed from Walcott (Walcott in Donnell 507). 12. I am borrowing from “The Poet” (Williams 1944, 74). On the use of cut as mode of composition, see Kincaid’s “A Cut and Slash Policy” (1992, 21–25). On negotiating one’s multiple “identities” see Appiah (2018, 18). 13. See Jamie Herd’s comprehensive article “Rootstock or Scion: Grafting Radical Difference in Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then” (Bigot & al, 2019, 31–53). 14. Kincaid is known for voicing out her resistance to “grand language” (Kincaid in Birbalsingh 142). 15. In Lucy, Lucy keeps making lists of things she does not want to carry nor remember, they however give “shape” to her present (Kincaid 1991, 90). 16. On the notion of becoming, see Deleuze and Guattari on how to escape from major, official language: being a “master of the signifier” is to “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming—minor” (Deleuze and Guattari in Ferguson 68). 17. See the island as footnote image as location for the “I” (SNT 112). In My Garden (Book): round brackets work both as niches from which to counter botanical

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brackets and to accommodate the I-voice. On the uses and functions of brackets in Kincaid, see Kekeh (2016, 114–123). 18. In a different context, see what Stephen Orgel says about traces, “the book is not simply a text, it is a place and a property” (5), a place to appropriate and leave traces on. 19. See Gayatri C. Spivak’s analysis of interruption and the epistemological value for the subaltern to interrupt uninterrupted mainstream thought. See Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler? (Spivak 19). 20. A “monody” is an ode sung by a single actor in a Greek tragedy usually containing one melodic line. 21. Three recurring words associated with Mr. Sweet, the “vase,” the “capsule,” the “pocket” typify his will to contain people and forms, and contrast with the loose stitches of Mrs. Sweet’s knitting. See the vase image containing Mrs. Sweet’s lips (11), the space capsule (He “wished his son a safe passage to the edge of the universe in a faulty capsule” 51), and his pocket containing his (“daughter, now carefully hidden in his pocket, out of her mother’s sight” 79). 22. With the knitting and stich motif the author goes back to her earlier stories as a way of addressing the possibility of finding new writing pathways. See “Knitting” (TS 233–235). 23. It is quite rare that Kincaid’s speakers make so blatant references to the “I” as an “immigrant” arrived in the States on a “banana boat” (See Now Then 16). The novel makes very explicit some issues which had remained invisible so far.

WORKS CITED Agard, John. Man to Pan. A Cycle of Poems to Be Performed with Drums and Steelpans, Havana, Casa de las Américas, 1982. ———.Weblines. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe Books, 2000. Appiah, Anthony Kwame. The Lies that Bind Us: Rethinking Identity. (2018). Croydon, CPI Group. 2019. Arnold, Denis, editor. “Fugue” in Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la musique. Tome 1 A à K. The New Oxford Companion to Music. Translated by Marie-Stella Pâris. Paris, Robert Laffont, 1988, pp. 857–860. Benítez-Rojo Antonio. (1992). The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by J.E. Maraniss. Durham and London, Duke UP, 1996. Bigot, Corinne. & al editors. Jamaica Kincaid as Crafter and Grafter. Agency, practice, interventions. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, Summer 2018, vol. 19 (2019 print). Brathwaite, Kamau. Middle Passages. New York, New Directions Book, 1992. Boyce Davies, Carole. Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones. Urbana, Champain, ILL., University of Illinois Press, 2013. Chawaf, Chantal. Le corps et le verbe. La langue en sens inverse. Paris, Presses de la Renaissance, 1992.

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Courtman, Sandra. “What is Missing from the Picture? Reading Desire in the Dyche Studio Photographs of the Windrush Generation.” Wasafiri, (Spring) no. 29, 1999, pp. 9–14. Dance Cumber, Daryl. In Search of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid’s Mother and Muse. Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2016. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton & Oxford, Princeton UP, 2010. Deleuze G. & F. Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature?” in Russel Ferguson & al, editors. [1990]. Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA, The MIT UP, 1991, pp. 59–70. Donnell Alison, Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. London, Routledge, 2006. Glissant, Edouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris, Gallimard, 2006. Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. (1993). London, Verso, 1995. Hall, Stuart. Identités et cultures 2: Politiques des différences. Translated by A. Blanchard and Florian Voros, edited by M. Cervelle, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2019. Herd, Jamie. “Rootstock or Scion: Grafting Radical Difference in Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then” in Bigot and al, editors, 2019, pp. 31–53. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham and London, Duke UP, 1996. Kekeh-Dika, Andrée-Anne. L’imaginaire de Jamaica Kincaid: Variations autour d’une île caraïbe. Pessac, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2016. Kincaid, Jamaica. [1978]. At the Bottom of the River. New York, Aventura, 1985. ——— [1983]. Annie John. London, Pan Books, 1985. ——— Lucy. New York, Plume, 1991. ———. “Biography of a Dress” Grandstreet 43:3, 1992, pp. 92–100. ———. “I Use a Cut and Slash Policy of Writing: Jamaica Kincaid Talks to Gehrard Dilger.” Wasafiri, no. 16, 1992, pp. 21–25. ———. “Introduction.” J. Kincaid and Robert Atwan, Series editors., Best American Essays, Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995, pp. xii–xv. ———. “Putting Myself Together,” The New Yorker, 20–27 February 1995, 71:1, pp. 93–101. ———. The Autobiography of my Mother. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. ———. “Jamaica Kincaid: From Antigua to America” in Birbalsingh, Frank, editor, Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. London, Macmillan Caribbean, 1996, pp. 138–151. ———. My Garden (Book):. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. ———. (editor). My Favorite Plant. New York, Vintage, 1999. ———. Talk Stories. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. ———.Mr Potter. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

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———. Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya.Washington, DC., National Geographic, 2005. Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation. New York, Harper Perennial, 2005. With an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid. ———. See Now Then, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. ———. Idaho PBS Author Jamaica Kincaid. Interview with Marcia Franklin, 12.6.2016 https://video​.idahoptv​.org​/video​/dialogue​-author​-jamaica​-kincaid/ McKenzie, Alecia & A.M. Bamberger, editors. Where We Started. Stories of Living Between Worlds. Hambourg / Paris, AMP2, 2019. Pulitano, Elvira. Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean. New York and London, Routledge, 2016. Stephen Orgel. The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2015. Rose, Gillian. Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Oxford, Blackwell, 1993. Snead, James E. “Repetition as a Figure in Black Culture” in Russel Fergusson & al. editors, Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambrige, Mass., The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 213–230. Spivak, C. Gayatri. Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler? Translated by Jérôme Vidal. Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2009. Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (1992) in Alison Donnell & Sarah L. Welsh, Editors. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 503–507. Williams Carlos, William. “The Poet” (1944). The Wedge in William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems II 1939–1962. Exeter, Carcanet Press, 2000, p. 74.

Chapter 8

Wilson Harris’s Resurrected Bodies Fabienne Franvil

The human body is a key representational medium in art in general and in literature in particular. Its vitality and symbolic depth make it an efficient inroad into several concepts and practices in popular culture, cultural studies, anthropology, and so on. In the postcolonial context, the perception of bodies, and their function in literature, has often come under scrutiny. From the trade of human bodies, with the to-and-fro movements between the old continent and the New World that started at the end of the fifteenth century, to the circulation of all types of bodies in contemporary times, and to the bodies of thought such as postcolonial theories on both sides of the Atlantic—the genealogy of postcolonial studies partly results from intellectual exchanges, transactions, and reinventions between the two sides of the Atlantic—and beyond, moving bodies people Wilson Harris’s novels, especially those included in The Carnival Trilogy which comprises Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).1 These novels are essentially dynamic and mobile in essence as they revolve around the crossing of frontiers and boundaries that separate the living from the dead, humans from the realm of animals as well as the plant world, or cultures. Wilson Harris is concerned with resurrecting or reviving matter thought to be dead. This dead or static matter consists of human bodies which the writer unearths, bodies that undergo transformations through dance, particularly the limbo dance revised through an original revisiting of the Middle Passage; texts as bodies that come alive under the writer’s pen thanks to a specific use of language which he deconstructs to develop a new one, more adapted to the realities of the margins2 he addresses. But mobile bodies are also bodies in exile. As a result, the narratives Harris weaves give birth to a new form of fiction, predicated on what he calls “infinite rehearsal,”3 sketching the contours of mobile and fluid identities through the concept of cross-culturalism.4 151

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Tackling some of his novels through the lens of mobility and corporeality thus proves particularly relevant as his oeuvre provides a dynamic and original contribution to Caribbean literature thanks to the constant movements in the narratives depicting mobile bodies, human bodies, dead or alive, dancing human bodies, textual bodies, bodies in exile designed to move the narratives forwards, and aims toward a fiction that transcends the traumas of the past. HUMAN BODIES IN MOTION: CROSSING THE FRONTIERS BETWEEN THE DEAD AND THE LIVING Harris’s characters all seem to belong to the realm of the dead, in some way or other. They either rub shoulders with it, or are ghosts themselves and often move from the realm of the dead to that of the living. The dynamic and intimate relationship between both realms promises fruitful and active collaboration: “It [a crow hovering over the corpse of a man] seemed to resent and yet to approve the transformation of the living into the dead and the compassionate alliance of the dead with the living” (The Whole Armour 267). Ghostly characters appear in The Far Journey of Oudin, a novel set against a background of swamp, jungle, and savannah, in which a strange drama is played out. The chief characters are an evil money-lender Ram, the illegitimate Beti, Oudin the beggar whose origins are unknown, and Oudin’s partner. Focusing on the traumatizing effects of slavery on the West Indian society, the novel depicts how the new-found freedoms and perceived social progress experienced by former peasants mask the fact that the old masterslave structure is reasserting itself among the descendants of an exploited people. Oudin evolves as a dead yet materialized character, which enables him to freely move from the sphere of the living to that of the dead and to experience his own death as a means of living a parallel life, as it were. By so doing, he realizes the potential of dead matter that can be revived and apprehended as a resource to be exploited, despite a sense of void and deprivation: He [Oudin] felt his heart stop where it had danced. It was the end of his labour of death. . . . It was a new freedom he now possessed. He roused himself to stand on his dry feet, and to swallow his saliva over and over again. There was a shot of rum on the shelf in the room and he poured it out into a cup as a miser counts the change he hoards—stealthily as a ghost swallowing the last drop. (123)

The ghost is also a relevant illustration of Harris’s characterization process based on the principle of multifaceted characters. The following passage highlights the presence of ghosts as evidence of the living legacy residing in what is considered as dead. It reveals ghosts’ capacity to disturb and question

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established facts and initiate the fundamental revisionary process inherent in Harris’s fiction: “Much more so the stranger who comes from the dead, dead fictions, dead legacies, dead traditions that are not as dead as they seem but alive, alive as a threat or a challenge we have not yet absorbed, alive as revisionary fabric, revisionary truth” (The Infinite Rehearsal 215). Ghosts can also travel through time and space in a fluid manner. Delusive and volatile, they can change roles and universes, and appear as adequate creatures to represent the immaterial part of some of Wilson Harris’s characters like Everyman Masters in Carnival or Oudin in The Far Journey of Oudin, both dead characters springing from the bowels of the earth to question their past. As independent characters, ghosts obey rules beyond those of the conventional novel, outside chronology, plot, and usual characterization. Ghostly substance consists of the dormant substratum of past experience, eclipsed civilizations and what is not immediately accessible but key to creation as ghosts provide the essential resources needed to weave the fabric of the narratives. They stand for the inarticulateness of an entire oppressed and silenced people and represent traces of fragments of consciousness which the writer refers to as “living fossils” or “absent presence” (Harris “The Absent Presence” 81), working as revealers of the existence of the unconscious (and consciousness) and the dynamic interactions that occur between these immaterial bodies. In The Secret Ladder, the final book of The Guyana Quartet, Russell Fenwick, the government surveyor, and a captain of a strong-willed crew embark on a journey along the Canje River. During their expedition, they encounter Poseidon, the oldest inhabitant of the area and alleged descendant of an escaped slave. The puzzling and almost spectral character of Poseidon leads Fenwick to doubt Poseidon’s real existence, as his lack of substance and his fleeting, elusive figure make it difficult for him to conceive of Poseidon as a flesh and blood being: “He had occasionally glimpsed an ancient presence passing on the river before his camp but had never properly seen it or actually addressed it” (369). Poseidon reminds Fenwick and his crew of the eclipsed, the local people whose territory has often been trampled, destroyed, abused, and then ignored. As an in-between character, Poseidon illustrates the dialectical relationship between life and death, corporeality and immateriality, the past and the present. The trope of ghosts that act as doubles appearing “to invoke the dead and the living who re-visit or re-play the deeds of the past in a new light of presences woven into the tapestry of past actions” (Harris “A note on the Genesis of The Guyana Quartet” 10–11), enables the writer to question the Caribbean past and revisit some key events through characters like Donne in Palace of the Peacock. Set in Guyana, it depicts an expedition into the hinterland led by Donne, a white colonialist. He and his multiethnic crew, representative of the current Guyanese society, are in pursuit of an Amerindian woman called

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Mariella who had run away from Donne. Over the course of the journey it becomes apparent that Donne’s crew go through a painful reenactment of their first deadly voyage: “The whole crew was one spiritual family living and dying together in a common grave out of which they had sprung again from the same soul and womb, as it were” (39). It is suggested that they now exist in a state between life and death as they reemerge from the grave as ghostly counterparts of their own dead unreflecting selves: “Where there had been death was now the reflection of life” (Palace of the Peacock 38). As agents of spatial and chronological mobility, these de-fleshed creatures reconnect the characters to their own past and their ancestors as well, those who crossed the Atlantic and underwent mental and physical transformations that Harris exploits as symbols of artistic creativity. The Middle Passage, the crossing of the frontiers between the known and the unknown for millions of slaves, provides a relevant illustration of the way Harris revisits history as a living organism submitted to the principle of infinite rehearsal. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE REVISITED: DANCING OUT OF THE SLAVERY BOND During slavery, African bodies were made numb, impotent, and treated as mere commodities, since they were someone else’s possession. Consequently, self-assertion goes for the characters through a process of sensuous physical presence thanks to an active body. Freedom for the enslaved is firstly seen in terms of unrestricted physical movement. Caribbean postcolonial writers apprehend human bodies as dismembered bodies restructuring themselves through the exploration of the literary space that plays a key role in the reconstruction process. Diverted from their usual framework, bodies become a means of communication as language is mediated through them to transcend the silenced or stifled feelings, the frustrations and humiliations that have been endured by slaves and their progenies for centuries. Elleke Boehmer interestingly underlines that “the silenced, wounded body of the colonized is a pervasive figure in colonial and postcolonial discourses, but its valencies differ significantly. In the process of postcolonial rewriting the trope of the dumb, oppressed body undergoes significant translations” (Boehmer 268). The mistreated and uprooted slaves’ bodies spur the writer’s imagination in such a way that the painful voyage becomes a symbolical exploration of bodily and imaginary resources, both interacting with each other since bodily movement nourishes imagination which in turn proves inspirational for the body. Body movement thus corresponds to imagination in action, a combination that could be coined “imaginaction.” Harris explores the way human bodies may transform a traumatic and painful event into artistic creation

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through an original conception of the limbo dance which represents the archetype of artistic corporeal expression aimed to transcend and translate suffering into art. Related to other types of dance in the Americas, the limbo dance has, in Wilson Harris’s imagination, accompanied the slaves’ bodies throughout the Middle Passage and has survived into other forms of bodily expression, some of which now pertain to tradition and folklore. The link between the human psyche and the body is thus key to understanding how movement impacts consciousness. Harris deftly addresses the way thought manifests itself in external signs, in bodily gestures and coordinated movement, sustaining an inner-outer dialectic between inner thoughts and outer expression: “And it became essential now to recover a medium of inner / outer response that had triggered the dance long ago, dance as flight, dance as escape, dance as a visitation of terrifying responsibility for one’s deeds. Dance as lightning wings” (The Four Banks of the River of Space 273). The Middle Passage provides the writer with food for sustaining this dialectic. The writer extracts the painful and fragmented bodies out of discourse to let them express themselves. He interestingly describes dance as an activation of subconscious and sleeping resources in the phantom limb of dis-membered slave and god. The incubation of new energies is to be found in movement, not stasis, hence dance takes on a fundamental meaning. Dance triggers a state that releases sleeping energies that become vital resources. An activation which possesses a nucleus of great promise—of far-reaching new poetic synthesis. (“History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas” 8)

Limbo refers to the sense of being nowhere as a result of forced displacement which caused psychic division as well. Bodies and the psyche find themselves in limbo. The following statement underlines the need to recognize these phenomena: “I believe that the limbo imagination of the folk involved a crucial inner re-creative response to the violations of slavery and indenture and conquest, and needed its critical or historical correlative, its critical or historical advocacy” (11). This is what Harris endeavors to do through a recurrent use of music and dance which should be given no less intense attention than written words. Harris thus undertakes to educate the reader’s ears and eyes to these arts’ significance. The limbo dance strains bodies, mobilizes each and every limb, and requires suppleness and adaptability. It is a manifestation of creativity as well as an intuitive strategy for dealing with historical crises or traumas. Harris relates the limbo dance to the slave condition: “Limbo was born, it is said, on the slave ships of the Middle Passage. There was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders” (“History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas” 18). Akin to the crossing of frontiers, the bodily

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contortions imposed by the limbo dance symbolize the passing from one state to another, whether it should refer to exile or the metaphorical shift from human to animal quite frequent in Harris’s texts. Indeed, important features of Amerindian mythologies appear in the narratives, especially those dealing with metamorphoses involving humans and animals such as spiders, jaguars, tigers, crocodiles, and vultures. Harris thus demonstrates how a blunt historical fact can be transformed into myth associated with dance which has suffered “sea-change,” to quote the writer’s words, a change that has brought new meaning for he contends that “the limbo dance becomes the human gateway which dislocates (and therefore begins to free itself from) a uniform chain of miles across the Atlantic” (“History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas” 11). The writer’s approach consists in bridging the gap between an outer frame and inner dislocation, a riddle that finds an echo in what Derek Walcott terms “creative schizophrenia” with the body as a medium to solve this enigma, speaking an androgynous idiom to break the binary oppositions. The sense of “in-betweenness” generated by this intricate situation, since the genealogical links with Africa have been lost and Europe still carries all the baggage of enslavement and colonization, corresponds to what Edouard Glissant calls “twilight consciousness” (Caribbean Discourse xvi) located between the ancestral sources and the colonizing structures. To Harris, the twilight situation “half-remembers, half-forgets” (Tradition, the Writer and Society 64). The slaves’ bodies oscillate between submission and resistance, revealing unexpected strength. Consequently, the sea takes on a regenerative power as it sets dislocated, fragmented, and painful bodies in motion and activates the literate imagination. The limbo dance is part of Harris’s focus on body movement and visual arts at large. It fits in the issue of rebirth since it requires the awakening of the whole body. Although the practice has become scarce, it may be connected to “break dance” evoking the brisk and broken movements of the modern art mostly practiced by young African Americans but also by Afro Caribbean dancers, developing a diasporic link between Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. The limbo dance can also be related to the traditional Guyanese dance called “Kaséko” developed by the descendants of escaped African slaves. In both cases (“break dance” and “Kaséko”) the dancers’ bodies are broken into movement. This perfectly illustrates the invisible connections established between the slaves and the current inhabitants of those areas where slaves’ descendants have spread their rhizome-like roots to take up Edouard Glissant’s famous concept. Dealing with ruptures and bridging the geographical gap at the same time, using physical and artistic means, the heirs to the limbo dance prove able to cope with distance and discontinuities, which are part of Harris’s paradoxical conception of history. Indeed, as Paul

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Sharrad relevantly notes it, Harris works “at a double task: on the one hand, imaginative liberation from the tyranny of a history which denies [indigenous populations, uprooted slaves and indentured labourers] a past (and thus a presence), and, on the other, immersion in history to recover/recreate a past” (Sharrad 94). Pursuing this twofold objective, the writer sustains an ambiguous relationship to history as he strives to reclaim a lost history while rejecting history as it was written by the conquerors and colonizers. The limbo dance represents “a profound art of compensation which seeks to re-play a dismemberment of tribes . . . and to invoke at the same time a curious psychic re-assembly of the parts of the dead god or gods. And that re-assembly . . . issued from a state of cramp to articulate a new growth” (“History, Fable and Myth” 9), Haitian vodun, with its syncretic fusions of African and European religious practices, is similar to the limbo phenomenon in that it “breaks the tribal monolith of the past and re-assembles an inter-tribal or cross-cultural community of families” (15). The limbo dance thus functions as an attempt to express through space what could not be expressed in words, which reveals a fascinating connection between movement and language. Wilson Harris produces hybrid texts predicated on movement and words and mobilizing several sensory channels, which allows him to shift from bodies in motion to mobile texts. Moving bodies prove instrumental in producing mobile texts with dynamic dialogical structures and dancing words as the writer is engaged in locating a zone of speech so that every voice may find articulation through bodily gestures and metamorphoses. THE HARRISIAN TEXTS AS BODIES IN MOTION Harris’s texts appear as living organisms thanks to an intimate relationship between the characters and the landscape with which the writer is very familiar,5 strong reliance on environmental features, but also the creation of versatile characters. The narratives which the writer weaves depict extremely mobile environments submitted to the vagaries of the ocean or the swift and jerky rhythm of the rapids. The brutal landscape shifts create disruptions in the narrative stream which follows the movements of the boat, plunging the reader into past or future events, for both get blurred. This permanent oscillation illustrated by analepses and prolepses highlights the idea that time periods overlap, as the scene taken from Palace of the Peacock shows: A white fury and foam churned and raced on the black tide that grew golden every now and then like the crystal memory of sugar. From every quarter a mindless stream came through the ominous rocks whose presence served to pit

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the mad foaming face. The boat shuddered in an anxious grip and in a living streaming hand that issued from the bowels of the earth. We stood on the threshold of a precarious standstill. (24)

The crew’s bodies are shaken in such a manner that they release part of what is deeply buried inside them: “Donne gave a louder cry at last, human and incredible and clear, and the boat-crew sprang to divine attention” (Palace of the Peacock 25). Spirituality gradually takes over material bodies as mobile corporeality functions as a spur to spiritual elevation. The motif of the rapids as dynamic agents of transformation, carrying relics of the past and refreshing them, running across the world, brewing cultures and civilizations as well, permeates the narratives, especially in the writer’s first and last novels. Indeed, in The Ghost of Memory, the river turmoil pervades art and culture: “Those rapids are not described in this painting, they are in the painting, so much that they become curiously relevant to all Cities, every culture. This is an unconscious medium that is universal though we may hear it, see it, without knowing that we hear or see” (60–61). Functioning as a leitmotiv, a symphony enlivening the kingdom of the dead inhabiting the novels, the rapids provide stamina and contribute to renewing old myths. The journeys are, more often than not, initiated on sailing boats heading nowhere or toward indefinite places, exposed to the raging seas and sometimes ending in shipwrecks the writer explores as events to be staged and revisited as all the characters appearing in that passage died: “The weather suddenly changed. The window on the stage shook. Tiger overturned into a ragged chest, ragged inner sail, inner curtain, ragged cross-currents. Alice bobbed up in Tiger’s tail and swam with Peter and Emma to land. She swung back and dived to save the others” (The Infinite Rehearsal 214). Furthermore, the continuous tension between land and water, the interior and the coastland due to the perpetual encroachment of the ocean on rivers and on land, plunges the characters into uncertainty: “Everyone knew that their region and their home was an enormous half-world and half-shadow composed of empoldered6 plantations and a veneer of settlement against the encroachment of the sea and the river and—above all—the jungle reaching far and everywhere” (The Far Journey of Oudin 273). These moving frontiers acting as mobile environmental bodies represent opportunities to revisit some cultural symbols and historical events by setting bodies in motion. Furthermore, Harrisian characters correspond to a nucleus of selves, a community of beings, endowing them with extreme mobility. They are multidimensional, particularly those who act as guides as is the case in Carnival, a revised version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which describes the inner workings of memory wandering in the meanders of consciousness. Everyman Masters (a versatile dead character playing the role of the guide through Hell

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and Purgatory), helps Jonathan Weyl, his spiritual biographer, to reconstruct his fragmented memory. As the former exchanges with Amaryllis, Jonathan Weyl’s wife, who enquires about Everyman Masters’s “character-masks,” his multisided nature is revealed: “Why do you call your character-masks first and second and third and fourth as if they are the Carnival kings and queens of vanished times” (Carnival 166); Masters answers: “‘Not only vanished times,’ . . . ‘Times of succession as well. Every puppet of disaster moves in parallel with a spark of redemption, the spark of succession’” (167). The increasing, ascending order of the numbers attributed to the several masks organized in “dynasties” highlights their positive evolution. Each event (and its revision) punctuating their lives constitutes a notch upward in the ladder of their existence or existences. The undetermined and multisided character can don several characteristics and is never fixed in any type of role as the protagonist in The Ghost of Memory observes: “Trickster, philosopher, beggar, lover, wanderer, hero, thief, villain. . . . Perhaps we share these traits and many more” (20). Ranging from illiterate laborers and peasants, usurers and well-off farmers appearing in The Far Journey of Oudin, to a younger and more educated generation and intellectual representatives of technological progress, or artists in later novels, especially in Ghost of Memory, Wilson Harris’s characters come off the beaten track. Plus, the protagonists are sometimes endowed with several functions. Not only does the writer build multifaceted personae, he also weaves mobile narratives. But more relevant to the dynamic aspect of the narratives is the way characters are made to evolve and move within the fictional space. Dealing with the shores of human existence, the writer moves from the surface to the depth, from the sea to the forest, from the conscious to the unconscious, and from the visible to the invisible. Harris’s novels oscillate between the core and the shores of human existence and nonexistence and this permanent back and forth movement is visible in everyday routine. Indeed, in The Far Journey of Oudin, as Beti washes clothing in the river, the wooden spade she uses sets the river in motion causing a back and forth movement as if life were springing through the repetitive and regular gesture of her arm: “The rhythmic thud, thud, thud became an interminable undivided pulse that beat in the depths of the river’s smoky reflection where it waved up and down with Beti’s rising and falling arm and sliced forwards and backwards, where her heels shook the planks and broke the water-top” (The Far Journey of Oudin 134–135). As a matter of fact, Beti’s back-and-forth body oscillation makes her sick, and she realizes that she is pregnant by Oudin. The movement, heavy with sexual connotations, is associated with the fluidity of the river and the potential fertility it may bring to the earth. In The Secret Ladder, Fenwick is caught in the jungle’s incessant movement as it “kept crawling and returning” (358). The jungle appears as a giant octopus spreading its tentacles all over the space

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where the protagonist strives to evolve, but he seems to be overwhelmed by “the encroaching image of the forest reaching into the river side” (358). This inner competition illustrates the ebb and flow movement pervading the narratives and constantly questioning the validity and legitimacy of conquest, as Fenwick partly stands for the colonial power intent on exerting control over a territory. Raising the crucial issue of colonial infringement on the locals, Fenwick’s mission lays the foundations for a postcolonial mutual dialog that is not easily established and regularly broken off. These tricky exchanges partake in the underlying dynamic developed in the narrative. Movement and dynamism are also implemented by the resort to a dynamic language through several linguistic devices. Indeed, the repeated use of the coordinating conjunction “and,” known as polysyndeton, materializes the long and uninterrupted flow of thoughts, imparting fluidity to the characters’ psychological evolution: “The shock of the nameless command and the breath of the water banished thought and the pride of mockery and convention as it banished every eccentric spar and creed and wishful certainty they had always adored in every past adventure and world” (Palace of the Peacock 79). In addition, the endless capacity for metamorphosis as organizing agent is illustrated by the way Harris transforms words through word-combinations. The writer creates compounds by associating two words, completely altering the image evoked by the original term that would have otherwise been a quite common one. Through this process, a fishing basket meant for the fish that has just been caught becomes a “basket-brain” (The Far Journey of Oudin 208) when Oudin observes that the basket looks like a decapitated head, with its two parts reminiscent of the two brain hemispheres. Then, as Oudin progresses in his inner pilgrimage, the basket evolves and is turned into a “basket-head” (210), his head, as he realizes that the sacrifice of his life is the price to pay if he wants “to be the forerunner of a new brilliancy and freedom” (210). Mobility and corporeality are thus implemented through mobile human and textual bodies, which leads us to the theme of displacement and exile as major features of Caribbean history and identity. BODIES IN EXILE The crossing of the Atlantic provides Harris with new opportunities for his literary creation and enlarges his readership as well. Observing from a geographical distance, he develops and sharpens his creative imagination, focusing on this faculty in some of his essays to contend that “all cultures are partial in themselves” (“The Age of Imagination” 17). To him, the twentieth century “was an age of unparalleled movement and an age of profound exile” (The Womb of Space 120). He believes that the state of exile is native

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to the Caribbean, due to the notion of displacement inherent in Caribbean history. He argues that “A poet’s state of ‘exile’ in his or her own country is endemic; inevitably poets have turned to Europe or the United Sates, where they have emigrated across generations” (The Womb of Space 121). Simon Gikandi underlines that dispossessed in their own land, exiled writers would re-territorialize themselves and reassert their identity through discourse and narration (Writing in Limbo 38). Deterritorialization and re-territorialization which characterize a constant process of transformation are thus imagined and implemented through creative imagination. Similarly, the concept of “maroonage” as a metaphor for cultural production in foreign lands and for writing in a colonial situation has evolved over the last decades to become a literary trope designed to express movement and resistance to models which do not meet one’s cultural expectations. It is a symbolic exile from the “norms,” but not necessarily utter rejection. Far from discarding the norms, Harris relies on them to better depart from them, displaying his ability to move to and fro, from the accepted norms to his literary landscape peopled with ghosts and hybrid creatures. Hybridity thus appears as subversion of norms as well as mastery of these norms. It is a means of introducing new or unknown cultural elements issued from the margins. Remaining on the outskirts of artistic creation to avoid being caught in a specific trend or genre, Harris preserves a certain degree of creativity. This accounts for the numerous references to borders (a mobile term per se since it implies interaction between two or more territories) in his novels and essays. The characters are always located on the edge—a recurrent word in the writer’s oeuvre—of something new, discovering new territory, while the writer keeps developing new literary creativity through endless explorations. It is noted that Harris’s frequent use of the word “edge”—a possible synonym for margin—in his essays and novels, an almost imperceptible crack, has the capacity to initiate change and introduce alternatives to fixities and absolutisms. In Carnival, Masters explains the importance of shaking the foundations of violence, describing how the reversal of tautological patterns, either patterns of violence or ideals, can be achieved through limited means, like the lifting of the corner of a veil. It can be implemented thanks to “a dual hand within an irreversible function to yield an edge, if nothing more, a subversive edge, that turns into the terror of pity, the terror of beauty, the terror of gentleness, to ravage our minds and purge us through violence of violence” [emphasis on “edge” added] (Carnival 86). As a matter of fact, most novels are set close to the ocean or water or related to a watery environment, like the four novels that constitute The Guyana Quartet, The Four Banks of the River of Space or The Infinite Rehearsal. The characters evolving in these novels often seem to be on the verge of a new era whose characteristics remain blurred and difficult to pinpoint. This unknown space closely associated with fluidity

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evokes the inner changes occurring within themselves when crossing oceans or touching water. But being in exile also means being in exile from oneself. Indeed, the ghostly characters of Oudin, Donne, Everyman Masters, or the protagonist in The Ghost of Memory appearing in Harris’s novels are invisible, torn characters in exile of themselves, having lost their own corporeal substance after sudden death which becomes a symbol of the loss of their cultural heritage and background. This symbolic exile represented by spectral presences rather than physical ones lays the stress on the ambiguous nature of those who have lost part of themselves through cultural deprivation on their own territory, and who are now trying to reconnect to their surroundings. The raging waters causing shipwrecks or disrupting some characters’ progress in space recur in the narratives, evoking the Middle Passage on board slave ships, a frequent motif. These painful passages from one place to another seem to indicate the violence of imposed exile, as well as the necessary rupture between body and soul to enable the power of imagination to emerge and prevail over matter and materialism. Momentarily separating the body from the spirit, foregrounding the latter and undermining the former, is part of Harris’s focus on the faculty of imagination which requires that the body become superficial to alleviate physical pain. Indeed, by transcending their corporeality and laying the emphasis on immateriality so as to draw from their imaginary resources, slaves’ bodies endeavor to divert physical suffering and to shift to more spiritual resources, as Harris underlines it when he describes the limbo dance as “a creative phenomenon of the first importance in the imagination of a people violated by economic fates” (“History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” 14). Exile is also related to the dialogical relationship between Harris and the characters he builds and which lead him to look for other sources of inspiration: The characters who appear in a writer’s fictions are, in a sense, his or her creations. But there is another sense in which those characters seek him out and create him in turn. And I think this bears on the theme of exile. . . . Exile, then is an inner and outer summons that may pull the imaginative writer to meet the character of the future. (“Exile, philosophic myth, creative truth, thrust and necessity: an interview with Wilson Harris” 54)

Harris thus considers exile as part of creation at large, which impacts identity and Caribbean culture as well, as Alison Donnell underlines: “the notion of West-Indian/Caribbean identity as it occurs in the West Indian literature is inextricably associated with the phenomenon of exile” (Twentieth-century Caribbean Literature 2). The exiled Caribbean writer is permanently under

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the influence of foreign perceptions formed in a rapidly changing society. Moreover, exile triggers a reconsideration of the relationship between the colonial and postcolonial character and the metropolitan center as the movements between the motherland and the colonies, which used to be the privilege of white colonizers, shift from a one-way process to a bilateral, even multilateral, one, expanding cultural and national frontiers. As a vector of cultural and intellectual exchanges exile affects identities as bodies of ideas and thoughts are exported and enriched through the social and cultural interactions they foster. Wilson Harris’s conception of exile is closely linked with the creative resources a writer needs to nurture his inspiration, as he explained in an interview with Kalu Ogbaa: And, therefore, to move out of the Caribbean deepens implications one already sensed in native South America or native Caribbean. In other words, wherever one lives, one is in exile, because the tasks which confront us today are tasks that cannot be solved in a one-sided manner. . . . A writer who lives, let’s say, in an area in the Americas may discover that there are characters that have summoned him into other continents and that summons is the necessity of fate as of freedom. (55–56)

Exile, closely associated with the theme of homecoming through a revision of The Odyssey in The Infinite Rehearsal also testifies to the writer’s keen interest in this sensitive issue. Most of Harris’s characters return to the places where key events have durably and deeply impacted their lives through initiatory journeys into their unconscious using the medium of dreams or symbolic death, as both are very close. His last novel illustrates the way his link with Guyana has permeated the narrative. Such an intricate situation probably accounts for his outstanding imaginative faculties to recreate a familiar cultural and geographical background in his texts. Indeed, in Ghost of Memory, the narrator travels through art, in a painting. As he reflects on art, he changes places swiftly and finds himself in Guyana: “I moved on the bank of the ancient River in the Forest” (3), which seems to represent a symbolical navel for the artist who always associates the places where he is with the forest he was so familiar with. Therefore, the inner/outer dynamic operates at his own personal level as he managed to draw resources from within and project them without, endowing them with a universal dimension. As a result, Harris sketches fluid identities through mobile, multifaceted and changing characters. He has also developed a new form of novel. His works tell of journeys or pilgrimages during which two forces confront each other: a cold, even cruel, materialism and idealism in search of a spiritual community.

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EMERGENCE OF A NEW TYPE OF FICTION The dramatic entrance of some characters through the door of memory and imagination breaks the rules of time and space to introduce a new type of novel in which characters and authors share a common space and interact in a constructive dialog designed to raise fundamental questions related to the meaning and origins of creation, leading Harris to explore uncharted territory in order to extend the world of the novel, through the enlargement of Caribbean artistic perspectives. Harris’s purpose in writing may be summed up as follows: “If I do write now, I do not claim to be original, but to tap the innermost resources of eclipsed traditions in the refugees’ voices that W. H. heard in the sea” (The Infinite Rehearsal 258). W. H., the writer’s double that Harris fictionalizes, possesses an acute perception that enables him to delve into valuable cultural and historical material that is believed to have disappeared. Drawing from multifarious resources, thanks to an extremely dense and multiethnic cultural background, added to an extended knowledge of literature and art, Harris suggests probing human creative and imaginative resources to address the traumas of the past as well as the plagues of our modern societies and to develop cross-cultural dialogs. In so doing, he adumbrates the contours of new forms of transnational and plural identities encompassing the past, the present, and the future. Harris has continuously experimented with fictional modes, genres, and narratives roles, instilling paradigmatic changes within the novel to renew its form and content and find space for expressing the complex and sometimes unknown Caribbean reality. As a result, the Harrisian narrative embraces several literary genres, verging on philosophical analysis, without corresponding to any defined type of writing. The writer advocates the production of “a revolution in the novel [which] seeks to visualize a fulfilment of change . . . rather than consolidation” (Tradition and the West-Indian novel 28–29), precluding any attempt to categorize his fiction. He also insists on the importance of innovating novel forms to portray the discontinuities of Caribbean experience. Christine Pagnoulle underlines the innovative nature of Harris’s fiction as follows: “If Harris’s works in prose that are not essays deserve the name of novels, it is in the first and strongest sense of the word: they are unfailingly innovative” (76). CONCLUSION It clearly appears that traveling bodies pervade Harris’s oeuvre. The moving or dancing bodies allow him to capture these mobile bodies, human or textual ones, in their inchoate, unfinished form, echoing the principle of infinite

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rehearsal. Exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can provide us with new and dynamic narratives. Harris explores the way accepted boundaries lose their absolute limiting powers in a creative revisionary perspective. Human bodies set in motion on board slave ships during the crossing of the ocean have gradually become symbols of the transatlantic cultural exchanges that have been developing between Europe and the Americas. Laetitia Zecchini and Christine Lorre underline these huge and complex interactions to analyze the dynamics of these trips between the old continent and the New World which have also acquired a symbolical meaning. The Middle Passage in Harris embodies the horrendous crossing of the Atlantic for millions of slaves, as well as the advent of creativity born of an extreme situation in which battered bodies and wounded souls coalesce to remember but also to re-member and to transcend one of the darkest moments of history. From bodies to souls and the other way round, art goes through this painful yet creative Middle Passage which transfigures everyday realities and strives to reconnect with the broken community. This shift from governed to governing bodies is central in Harris as the author is engrossed in releasing the creative imagination through the medium of bodies. Dance is thus part of what Harris calls “the arts of the imagination” (“History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” 31) that should be related to the history of the Caribbean. Harris has transformed the literary landscape of the Caribbean postcolonial literature thanks to his incredible genius and his capacity to move beyond fixities.

NOTES 1. A particular focus will be put on Palace of the Peacock, Harris’s first novel, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Secret Ladder, The Carnival Trilogy, and The Ghost of Memory, the writer’s last novel. 2. In postcolonial studies, margins refer to the former colonies located in the periphery of the mother land. 3. The writer’s concept of “infinite rehearsal” suggests the cyclical nature of all things, time, life, death, consciousness, or art. To Harris, literature has the essential task of opening the reader’s mind to the necessity to constantly reexamine biases and partialities, the reader’s and the writer’s alike. He thus produces narratives which sustain this endless process. His language suggests a revision of fixed definitions, a search for more dynamic concepts and a fluidity of meaning that crosses the novels which appear as interwoven and embedded within one another, through the leading thread of unfinished processes. As a former scientist, Harris may partly draw his concept of infinite rehearsal from a similar enterprise in science, continually challenged by new discoveries and revising earlier and partial misconceptions. Wilson Harris’s novel The Infinite Rehearsal (1997) foregrounds the process of revision as an act of permanent revolution in terms of the writer’s ever-transforming consciousness.

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4. In Harris, cross-culturalism differs from multiculturalism which rests upon ideas of the toleration and coexistence of different cultures. Different cultures coexist side-by-side with each other, but they remain different, and the relationship between them is, in that sense, static. The principal difference that cross-culturalism brings out, then, is that it assumes a more dynamic relationship between different cultures; it implies that those cultures interpenetrate and engage with each other in far-reaching and mutually transformative ways. 5. Wilson Harris worked for several years as a government surveyor in the heartland bush of his native Guyana, which helped him develop in-depth knowledge of the Guyanese forest; an experience which was instrumental in his career as a writer since the exploration of the Guyanese forest proved a spur to his fiction. 6. Empolder or impolder: to make (land that is underwater or periodically flooded) cultivable by the erection of banks of levees to prevent or control inundation and by adequate drainage: https://www​.merriam​-webster​.com​/dictionary​/ empolder

WORKS CITED Boehmer, Elleke. “Transfiguring: Colonial Body into Postcolonial Narrative.” Novel: a Forum on Fiction, vol. 26, no. 3, 1993, pp. 268–277. Dash, Michael. “In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature.” Kunapipi, vol. 11, no.1, 1989, pp. 17–26. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M, et al. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2005. Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. London, Routledge, 2006. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1992. Glissant, Édouard, and J. M. Dash. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville, Virginia, UP of Virginia, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 2011. Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock in The Guyana Quartet. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. ———. The Far Journey of Oudin in The Guyana Quartet. London, Faber and Faber, 1985. ———. Carnival in The Carnival Trilogy. London, Faber and Faber, 1993. ———. The Four Banks of the River of Space in Harris, Wilson. The Carnival Trilogy. London, Faber and Faber, 1993. ———. The Infinite Rehearsal in Harris, Wilson. The Carnival Trilogy. London, Faber and Faber, 1993. ———. The Ghost of Memory. London, Faber and Faber, 2006. ———. “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3, 2008, pp. 5–37.

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———. “The Age of the Imagination.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 2, no. 1/2/3, 2000, pp. 17–25. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/40986080. Accessed October 4, 2020. ———. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London, 1973. ———. The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1983. ———. “The Absent Presence: the Caribbean, Central and South America.” The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks by Wilson Harris, edited by Alan Riach and Mark Williams, Liege: Liege UP, 1992. ———. Harris, Wilson, C. L. R. James. Tradition and the West Indian Novel: A Lecture Delivered to the London West Indian Students’ Union on Friday, 15th May, 1966. London: London West Indian Students’ Union, 1965. ——— and Ogbaa, kalu. “Exile, Philosophic Myth, Creative Truth, Thrust and Necessity: An Interview with Wilson Harris.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, 1983, pp. 54–62. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/40793445. Accessed October 4, 2020. Maes-Jelinek, Hena, and Ledent, Bénédicte. Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2002. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. “Charting the Uncapturable in Wilson Harris’s Writing.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 17, no. 2, 1997, pp. 90–97. Pagnoulle, Christine. “Through and Beyond Demarcations: Wilson Harris’s Carnival.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 5, 1992, pp. 75–84. Sharrad, Paul. “The Art of Memory and the Liberation of History: Wilson Harris’s Witnessing of Time.” Callaloo: a Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, vol. 18, no. 1, 1995, pp. 94–108. Zecchini, Laetitia, and Christine Lorre. “Le postcolonial dans ses allers-retours transatlantiques: glissements, malentendus, réinvention.” Revue française d’études américaines, vol. 126, no. 4, 2010, pp. 66–81.

Chapter 9

Immobility, Female Corporeality, and Self in the Transnational Space in Jude Dibia’s Unbridled Cédric Courtois

In the “Acknowledgments” section in his novel titled Travelers (2019), Nigerian writer Helon Habila expresses his “gratitude . . . to the voices [of migrants and refugees] whose stories animate [his] book” (n.p., emphasis mine). The issue of migration foregrounds the presence of the body in relation to space and mobility—an aspect phenomenologists could name embodied mobility.1 Travelers stages African characters who, because they are migrants or refugees, are by definition on the move—the substantive “migrant” is derived from the Latin migrare, “to remove, depart, move from one place to another” (“Migrant”). Migration is intrinsically linked to corporeality as shown in the countless news reports that have addressed the “migrant/refugee crisis” in a biased manner through ominous descriptions of hordes of anonymous moving bodies advancing toward European countries. Migrants and refugees are Habila’s eponymous “travelers” who are mobile and who flee their homelands in order to reach and attempt to make it in European countries, in search of safer “homes,” hoping to start new, and imagined better, lives. In one of the epigraphs to Travelers, Habila quotes a line from Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses”: “I cannot rest from travel” (Habila 2019, n.p.), Ulysses admits. In the Victorian poet’s oftquoted text, Ulysses speaks from his home in Ithaca, and explains that he has greatly benefitted from all the voyages he has made in his life. This mobility has transformed his whole worldview and despite his old age, he still yearns to continue to explore the world so as to physically and metaphorically expand his horizons. Tennyson’s poem contains various intertextual references to world literature, among which Homer’s epic Odysseus. Unlike Homer’s text, Tennyson’s poem shows that for Ulysses, Ithaca has become nothing but “barren crags” (75); this description of Ithaca sharply contrasts with Homer’s. For the Greek king, traveling 169

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is associated with the positive ideas of discovery and self-betterment, while remaining home symbolizes stasis and a dearth of opportunities. Tennyson’s poem is thus an ode to mobility. Migratory movements have become particularly visible in twenty-first-century postcolonial fiction. In The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (2014), Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller explain that the titular “age of migration” describes the interconnectedness of current societies as the world is becoming increasingly fluid.2 This is not a recent phenomenon, yet what has changed is its scale and the fact that it is a global phenomenon whereby “[i]nternational population movements are reforging states and societies” (Castles xii). It would be interesting to analyze not only the impact of border crossings upon “states and societies,” but also their (corporeal) impact upon those who cross these very borders: the protagonist of Nigerian writer Jude Dibia’s second novel, Unbridled, is one of these people. Habila’s Travelers and Dibia’s Unbridled foreground the odyssey of twenty-first-century Ulysses, that is, African migrants and refugees.3 However, their border-crossing experiences of mobility are certainly not positive ones, and it could be argued that the metaphor consisting in referring to the migrants and refugees as Ulysses euphemizes their trials. Habila’s Travelers can represent a point of entry into Dibia’s Unbridled.4 Alongside the characters who inhabit the pages of Habila’s novel, Ngozi can be considered as one of these travelers whose odyssey is described. Through this novel, Dibia makes poetics and politics converge. Unbridled is part of a whole corpus of Nigerian Bildungsromane written since 2000 by the third generation of writers.5 A Bildungsroman—also called “novel of formation” or “coming-of-age novel”—hinges around “the development of the protagonist’s mind and character . . . the passage from childhood through varied experiences . . . into maturity, which usually involves recognition of one’s identity and role in the world” (Abrams 229). Traveling is a cornerstone of the Bildungsroman genre. Its hero, classically embodied by Wilhelm Meister in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels (1795–1796) or Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1865), leaves the family nest and travels the world in order to gain the experience and knowledge which will be necessary for him to become a worthy member of society. However, when the normative triad—white, heterosexual, male—is altered by the protagonist’s gender, the meaning of the novel greatly varies. The adjective “feminine” used in the title of this article echoes what Iris Marion Young explains in her essay “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality” (1980) where she explores the differences between “feminine” and “masculine” movements from a gendered and embodied phenomenological

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perspective; she uses concepts developed by both Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and her approach has motivated the use of the word “feminine” in this article. She explains: In accordance with Beauvoir’s understanding, I take “femininity” to designate not a mysterious quality or essence that all women have by virtue of their being biologically female. It is, rather, a set of structures and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation is lived by the women themselves. Defined as such, it is not necessary that any women be “feminine”—that is, it is not necessary that there be distinctive structures and behaviour typical of the situation of women. (30–31, original emphasis)

Unbridled stages a heroine who is prevented from being mobile because of the social, economic, and historical context in her native Nigeria. Therefore, the (im)mobility of bodies in this Nigerian national context will be analyzed before one delves into the impact of Ngozi’s family upon her Bildung. Dibia debunks Nigerian patriarchy, which is depicted as a system that triggers Ngozi’s trauma and slows down the development of her subjectivity, body, and voice as a woman. Ngozi therefore believes that mobility can liberate her from the shackles of patriarchy. Finally, Ngozi’s transnational mobility—or (female) odyssey—turns out to be both liberating and detrimental to the liberation of her body and voice. “[A]PPREHENDED AND ARRESTED”: THE IMMOBILIZATION OF INDOCILE BODIES BY THE NIGERIAN STATE In Dirty Skirts: Body Politics and Coming-of-Age in Feminist Fiction of the Caribbean Diaspora (2019), Wiebke Beushausen explains that “[b]odies are fundamental components in literary texts, the coming-of-age novel in particular” (77). As a Bildungsroman, Unbridled is no exception to this. It develops a poetics and a politics of corporeality through the emphasis on the protagonist’s body at nearly all the stages of her development as an individual. Dibia puts in place a “corporeal narratology” as defined by Daniel Punday in Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology (2003).6 Unbridled, whose most striking characteristic is its use of a rhetoric of everyday life, is a narrative pertaining to Social Realism, a mode which is representative of the Bildungsroman in its traditional form.7 The Bildungsroman genre is traditionally focused on the white, heterosexual, male body as normative. As it is originally an androcentric genre, the stress on the female body in Unbridled

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can be considered as a rewriting of some of its norms. Nevertheless, in female avatars of the genre as represented by Unbridled, the female body carries meaning and bodily issues enable the reader to better analyze and understand the situation in which the female protagonist finds herself. Dibia addresses the vulnerability of the female body as shown in Chapter 3, aptly titled “Naked,” to which one will return later in this analysis. Unbridled also foregrounds the female body in order for the reader to be able to relate to the protagonist, a female migrant, the latter’s presence being rarer in African fictional narratives about migration.8 Unbridled makes poetics and politics converge. Through the story of Ngozi, Dibia delves into the reasons why some Nigerian people decide to leave their country. It shows how the pressures the characters undergo can partake of their willingness to flee when they find the opportunity to do so. Ngozi and her fellow compatriots’ life experiences are first of all the stories of immobile bodies. Indeed, as Chapter 6 titled “Reason to Believe” indicates, the policies implemented by the powers that be—“arresting unionists” (76); “warnings of dire consequences from the government against any civil servant who didn’t show up for work” (77); “the coming police vehicle and the gun-toting rascals called policemen” (70)—are problematic for Ngozi’s Bildung. She is a young Nigerian woman who decides to escape from her country’s political, economic, and social hardships in order to settle in London to marry James, a white English man she meets on a dating website. Ngozi arrives in the UK in 1997 and although she does not mention any Nigerian politician in particular, the social, and historical contexts described in the novel bear much resemblance with some events that took place in Nigerian history. From 1993 to 1998, military dictator Sani Abacha ruled the country with an iron fist and Nigerian people suffered from the violent measures his administration enacted. In this context, the boyfriend of one of Ngozi’s close friends, a secondary character called Pius, who is a political activist and who expresses his disagreement with the authorities, disappears for a while, probably abducted by the military, as tensions in the country gain momentum: “Pius was very involved in the labour movement. He had become more so involved after the government and the Petroleum and Gas conglomerates had once again increased the price of fuel, gas and kerosene. The price of everything went up; food, transportation, rent—everything” (Dibia 74). The state of the economy and the impact of political decisions made by the military leader’s administration directly affect the inhabitants’ daily lives.9 The repetition of the adjective “involved” shows the importance for every individual—or, as Pius’s Marxist approach tends to point to here, every worker—to get politically and physically involved. Yet, rebellious bodies have to pay a price. Any attempt at fighting for “what is right” (Dibia 82) is quelled by the military authorities: “The labour unions had been

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threatening to go on strike for over a week now if the government refused to reverse their stand and subsequently, the police announced that any form of strike would be looked upon as illegal and anyone involved would be apprehended and arrested. . . . Things were hard enough in the country” (Dibia 74). This passage insists on the direct threats to the bodies of people who plan to strike and possibly demonstrate against the government’s unjust measures. Pius’s wish for political involvement—with verbs of action such as “fight” and “challenge”—is crushed by the military. As a consequence, rebellious bodies are “apprehended and arrested,” the verb “arrest” contains in itself the idea of stopping movement. These two words point to the authorities’ goal, which is to make these rebellious mobile bodies immobile and therefore, harmless, because once they have been arrested—and possibly tortured— they become invisible, hidden in the Nigerian goals. Dissident opinions are simply silenced. The Nigerian State is clearly responsible for the immobilization of Ngozi and other Nigerian denizens because military dictatorship is unwilling to let indocile bodies run amok. The actions of the military are tied to larger systems of power as Michel Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). According to the French philosopher, in the eighteenth century, the body became a site of transformation. It had to be controlled and dominated through surveillance. Prisons, but also torture in the context of 1990s Nigeria, are used as weapons to annihilate rebellious subjectivities; the aim is to deconstruct indocile—and protesting—subjects. Bodies have to be made docile by being “subjected, used, transformed and improved” through (institutional) violence (Foucault 136) because docile/ immobile bodies are easier to control than indocile/mobile ones (Foucault 137). Ngozi’s friend Uloma even remembers that her own father “was killed by the military some years ago” because “[h]e was always protesting with the trade unions and the labour unions and he was always in and out of prison” until he “was found dead . . . with bullet wounds on his body” (Dibia 77). However, one could argue that being “in and out of prison” is still suggestive of movement as opposed to being “found dead”: this shows that when the Nigerian authorities aim to properly “arrest” an opponent, they have recourse to the most drastic measures.10 Any political involvement against the military government may end up with bodies literally made immobile. Not only does such petrification affect men and women alike (Dibia 78), but also Lagos as a whole, Africa’s most populous city: The streets were deserted as well the next day. There were no buses or taxis on the empty streets and everyone stayed locked inside their homes. It was difficult to know what was happening in other parts of Lagos as the electricity wasn’t restored and there were no newspaper vendors on the streets either. We could not watch television, listen to the radio or get hold of newspapers. I felt trapped

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in those two days. I kept thinking of the conversation we [Uloma, Princess, and Ngozi] had about hating Nigeria and wanting to leave for London. (Dibia 80)

This passage is saturated with negations characterizing Lagos through a form of lack or absence, which impacts the development of the inhabitants who lock themselves in their own houses. People’s inability to have access to “newspapers” has to be read in light of what Benedict Anderson explains in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). Newspapers, which flourished in the eighteenth century, “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (Anderson 25). In Unbridled, by not giving citizens access to newspapers in order to avoid antigovernment social unrest, the authorities prevent them from forming a community and deter (rebellious) bodies from being mobile (“I felt trapped in those two days”).11 The violence of the State Ngozi witnesses leads to an epiphany she shares with other characters in the novels of the third generation of Nigerian writers: “I hate this country . . . I just hate this country . . . One day, I would leave this Godforsaken place . . . I’ll save and get a passport if I have to . . . I’m just tired of this country” (Dibia 79). While the repetition of “this country” suggests a form of stasis, the passport implies movement. The tension between immobility and mobility is not only present in Nigerian society as a whole but also in Ngozi’s own family where she suffers from gender-based violence. PATRIARCHY AND THE BRIDLED FEMALE BODY In Nigeria Ngozi faces patriarchal gender-based sexual violence which clearly has a profound impact on her mobility, the construction of her identity, and the development of her voice. In The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (2014), Michael Humphrey writes: The phenomenology of violence reveals that it violates individuals physically and psychologically. Violence causes injuries and erodes our subjectivity, thereby diminishing us. Its potency lies in the existential crisis it threatens for individuals and in the bodily memory with which it leaves its victims. . . . The lessons of totalitarian violence . . . are that individuals can be unmade, lost to themselves, through the vulnerability of their bodies. (133)

A phenomenological approach to Unbridled is worthwhile, as it permits to focus on both Ngozi’s body and mind in a context of trauma. References to Ngozi’s body should be analyzed as indicators about her state of mind. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty alludes

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to the “lived body” or “one’s own body” (100)12 and explains that the subject is defined by his or her perceptions and his or her embodied existence. According to Havi Carel in Illness; The Cry of the Flesh (2008), the body is always “embodied” and “enworlded” (15). The title of Dibia’s novel sheds light on a concern with corporeality. First, the word “unbridled” is employed three times in the novel: it is the title of chapter 7 but its most strategic use appears at the very end (Dibia 230). “[U]nbridled” is indeed the very last word, highlighted through the combined effect of italics and end focus that emphasizes the result of Ngozi’s Bildungsprozess, which consists of the liberation of her body and mind.13 Also worthy of note is the circularity implied by the use of this adjective both as a paratextual element—the title on the cover of the book—and as a word employed by Ngozi at the end of the novel. This formal circularity mirrors Ngozi’s mobility in the diegesis per se, as she leaves Nigeria in 1997 and, four years later, she goes back for her father’s funeral. These formal and narrative circularities also echo what Mary Anne Ferguson (1983) identifies as a typically feminine development in the female Bildungsroman. For this feminist critic, the Bildung of female protagonists often follows a circular pattern because they must learn the art of wifehood and motherhood. However, Dibia’s novel does not conform to this specificity of the classic female Bildungsroman since in the time span of the novel, Ngozi does not become a mother, and she decides to divorce James in order to start a happier sentimental life with James’s flatmate, a Nigerian man called Providence. Another element as regards the word “unbridled” also has much to do with corporeality and (im)mobility. Indeed, “unbridled” indicates a passage from a form of imprisonment to liberation. In the context of the novel, this word emphasizes the limitations imposed onto not only the feminine body in a patriarchal society, but also the feminine body’s underlying strength and empowerment. The Online Etymologic Dictionary mentions that “unbridled” is used “originally in the figurative sense of ‘unrestrained, ungoverned’” (“unbridled”). Moreover, the entry “bridle (n.)” refers to “‘headpiece of a horse’s harness, used to govern and restraint the animal” while the entry “bridle (v.)” indicates “to control, dominate; restrain, guide, govern” (“bridle”). If Ngozi is “[f]or once, unbridled” (Dibia 230) as she claims at the end of the novel, it means that before her Bildungsprozess reached completion, she faced patriarchal control, domination, and restraint. The term “bridle” also carries allusions to voice and self-expression. Indeed, Unbridled depicts Ngozi’s silencing by the patriarchal systems of both Nigeria and Britain.14 Therefore, Ngozi is silenced for daring to denounce the unacceptable: her father’s incestuous act against her. As a consequence, she is ostracized and exiled to Lagos in order to live with her aunt and uncle. Ngozi’s stagnation in Nigeria therefore also originates from her own family who is responsible

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for keeping her immobile because of the trauma she suffers from, a trauma which is a source of stasis within the framework of the Bildungsroman genre. In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), Franco Moretti explains that one particular example of traumatic event—the first World War—has put an end to the Bildungsroman genre in Europe: At the polar opposite from experience, in a trauma the external world proves too strong for the subject—too violent: and institutions . . . tend of course to be careless and shattering in their violence . . . [F]aced with an increasing probability of being wounded, it is quite reasonable for the subject to try and make himself, so to speak, smaller and smaller. (234)

Trauma deeply affects the body and Ngozi describes the violent scene of incest that is detrimental to her development as a woman: He pounced on me and before I knew it, he had ripped off my wrapper and pinned me to the raffia mat on the floor . . . His thick black fingers that tickled me once now violated me. . . . He suckled my breasts, biting hard on the nipples before discarding his wrapper and roguishly parting my tiny legs, stinging his way inside me. The pain tore into me, taking me to that faraway place that seemed better than death. (Dibia 164)

In this passage, Ngozi is a vulnerable teenager who undergoes her father’s attack. He is described as a sexual predator whose violent actions make him belong to the realm of animality (“pounced,” “stinging”). The use of dental consonants attests to the violence that is at stake, while labial consonants could mirror a stammer, which affects Ngozi because of the incestuous violence she goes through.15 By using the verb “pinned,” Ngozi conveys the idea of a stasis induced by her father’s extreme sexual violence. As a result of this rape, her “body [is] defiled” (Dibia 165)—which echoes the fact that she considers that her “temple had long been desecrated” (Dibia 110). Moreover, later in the novel when Ngozi lives with her uncle and aunt in Lagos, the latter suspects she has had sexual intercourse with a neighbor and decides to test her virginity, thus desecrating her intimacy even more. This scene recalls a similar episode in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by American-Haitian writer Edwige Danticat. The testing of Ngozi’s virginity undoubtedly worsens the initial trauma (induced by what her father did to her when she was a child). By testing her virginity—which consists in inserting pepper-covered fingers into Ngozi’s vagina to check if the hymen is still present—the aunt is trying to assert (patriarchal) control over her niece’s rebellious and mobile body. This constitutes a humiliating and oppressive practice aimed to punish her.16 Ngozi is then forced to leave her aunt and uncle’s house (as Chapter 2, titled

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“Saved / August 1992” explains). Although she ends up on the street, she expresses an intense sense of relief: “Freedom once gained is so profound and so sweet that negative thoughts impending challenges ahead never seem to bother the beneficiary. So I walked through the rain, I had no sense of foreboding but only a single focus sustaining me. I am free. I am free. I am free at last” (Dibia 16). The use of the polyptoton “freedom/free,” as well as the repetition of the adjective “free,” imply that from that precise moment on, Ngozi’s Bildungsprozess can begin because she has broken the oppressive chains of patriarchy. However, a proleptic reference to “impending challenges ahead” indicates to the reader that there is uncertainty about her future. Sexual trauma leads to Ngozi’s incapacity to fully make her voice heard. She assimilates this feeling to a form of death; this is highlighted through the use of the metaphor of burial in the prologue. She indeed refers to “all the anger and hurt that had been buried within [her] for all these years” (Dibia n.p.). Later, she adds: “I was suddenly remembering many things from the past, things I had long buried within me and hoped desperately never to excavate” (Dibia n.p). She seems to be saying that her past experiences leading to her trauma have condemned her to immobility and a form of social death. In Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body (2007), Oliver S. Buckton, who refers to the presence of the corpse in Robert Louis Stevenson’s oeuvre, explains that “travel is the stimulus needed to renew dying energies and restore the inert, moribund body to life” (36). This statement can be broadened and used in the context of Ngozi’s transnational mobility. A TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSFORMATIONAL ODYSSEY AU FÉMININ Unbridled describes a quest for the liberation and embodiment of the feminine body and voice. Ngozi decides to leave Nigeria in order to start a new life in Britain. This shows her resilience after the traumatic events she went through. In the Prologue, she explains: I came to England in January of 1997. It has been four years now. It was the first and only time I had left the shores of Nigeria and I remember how excited I had been. Excited is not quite the right word, though more like—I felt triumphant, like I had accomplished something huge. Things had happened to me when I was young, some very terrible things and then I wanted something else for myself. I wanted to write my own history and not live out the history already drafted for me. So I left. I met a man and I left. I left the rot of my past behind and I was finally moving on to better things. I was so naïve I had been so

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desperate for a new life and a new identity that I was ready to believe anything and anyone. (Dibia n.p.)17

No fewer than seventeen occurrences of the personal pronoun “I”—together with references to “me” or “myself”—saturate this passage that consequently puts to the fore the development of Ngozi’s subjectivity, her passage from passivity to agency, after many years in search of her own self. The verbs of action and those expressing feelings denote her emergence as a subject and an agent. The novel’s very first sentence clearly stresses the completion of the Bildungprozess: “I have finally found my voice!” (Dibia n.p., original emphasis). In Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009), Ellen McWilliams explains that the female Bildungsroman “explor[es] aspects of human progress and development [and draws] the mapping of an odyssey of selfhood in which internal machinations of the self are foregrounded” (McWilliams 11–12). With hindsight, Ngozi thinks about her life and tries to understand her past and why she has become the person she is at the time when she is telling her story. The previous passage quoted reveals much about the expectations of the candidates for exile when they decide to leave. Britain embodies a place of opportunities, far from a Nigeria that does not seem to provide any chance for personal fulfillment. There is a gradation from “excited” to “triumphant,” which shows what transnational mobility—migration toward the North—represents. Exiles believe they have achieved something “huge” once national borders have been crossed. Mobility is central for Ngozi who clearly insists on the idea of a departure with the four occurrences of the verb “left.” What is at stake is for Ngozi to leave behind what she assimilates to the substantive “rot,” the rotting process implying an incapacity to develop or, worse even, immobility/death. Although rotting implies a process, something that is not static, here Ngozi seems to have reached the final stage of the rotting process, that is, ultimate rot, complete stasis. Several forms of displacement appear in Unbridled. Before leaving for the UK, Ngozi meets James online. Transnational mobility is possible first of all through the Internet, and this virtual mobility is already problematic. The content of James and Ngozi’s virtual exchanges reveals James’s fetishism regarding the bodies of African women: “JaKing: Hello lovely! Read you profile and loved it. I would love to get to know you better. I’m English and based in London. I have a thing for blacks” (Dibia 7). He displays an Orientalist vision of African women since he seems to have essentialized them. Despite this initial unease, Ngozi accepts to exchange with James because London embodies an important step in her Bildung. The departure to a new country—and not any country, the former colonizer’s—represents a new beginning: “I read through all the messages and I immediately saw all kinds of possibilities: marriage and life abroad. I would be able to walk

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away from the past, a past that still haunted me even after all those years. . . . Here was an opportunity to finally discard the family name I was born with” (Dibia 7–8). Displacement/mobility is once again present in this passage with the verb of action “walk away.” The uses of the quasi-anadiplosis—“the past, a past”—and the adjective “haunted” point to the trauma to which Ngozi associates her past. Moreover, by saying she aims at “discard[ing] the family name [she] was born with,” she seems to be alluding to a form of “shedding.” “Shedding” is a momentous moment that Esther Kleinbord Labovitz identifies in the female Bildungsroman: “a significant act whereby the heroines rid themselves of excess baggage as they proceed in their life’s journey” (253). This shedding process implies getting away from feelings of fear, guilt, or shame,18 in order to break away from patriarchy. As a teenager in Lagos, after meeting her wealthy neighbor Tiffany who tells her about her experiences in London, Ngozi explains: I dreamt of London. For many nights after visiting Tiffany, that was all I thought about. Images of the weird red bus filled my thoughts with wonder. Was all of London like Trafalgar Square—clean paved floors and fountains with giant lion sculptures? . . . I dreamt of London. I dreamt that night and in the dream I was walking the streets of London with the wind in my hair—my new hair—blowing the silky threads of this new crown ever so seductively into my face. (Dibia 49–54)

The young woman expresses her fascination for London as a touristic place. In her dreams, Ngozi is mobile (“walks the streets of London”). In Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), walking in the city means appropriating space. The walker interrupts and (re)organizes, (re)plans the spatial power relations, and escapes from the power’s eyes. In her dreams, London allows Ngozi to become a new woman, as shown by her “new hair.” However, the (European) dream turns out to be a nightmare: But in my dream I walked in my bare feet and soon my feet began to bleed. There was a lot of blood everywhere. Bucket-full. The trail of blood followed me even when I was sure that all this blood couldn’t have come from me alone. I ran to one of the fountains and dipped my feet into its water and suddenly the water turned blood-red. I looked up and the stone lion came to life and roared at me. (Dibia 54–55)

London has become an ominous city, as the polyptoton “bleed/blood” shows. It represents a menace for Ngozi even before she has left Nigeria. She embodies a sacrificial Christ-like figure who goes through the pains associated with Passion, as the bleeding feet and the aforementioned “crown,” reminiscent

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of Christ’s crown of thorns, indicate. This could also echo the episode of the rape, suggesting that trauma moves with her. Another displacement has to do with Ngozi’s London experience and her encounter with James. When she arrives in 1997, she experiences a drastic change since she is renamed by James, initially with her blessing. Ngozi becomes Erika (Dibia 1). This renaming could be interpreted as a denial of her Nigerian identity, particularly because the name Ngozi is too difficult to pronounce for a British man like James. However, she initially welcomes this new name because it strips her of the burden of her past. Postcolonial writers have deemed the Bildungsroman an appropriate genre, which they have transformed in order to depict the construction of the self. Marianne Hirsch writes that the Bildungsroman has become “the most salient genre for the literature of social outsiders, primarily women or minority groups” (Hirsch 300), in other words, for subaltern voices. When it comes to female Bildung, one of the rewritings offered consists in shedding light on women’s impossibility to move. One of the earliest examples in the novel appears in chapter 1 titled “James,” which stages the first encounter between Ngozi and this English man. Ngozi’s body is once again central: “[James] was a tall man and I could feel my bones crush against his frame” (Dibia 1). The crushing sensation felt by Ngozi at the very beginning of the novel, when she has just arrived in Britain, can be read as a prolepsis, therefore giving clues about her future in James’s flat—her feeling claustrophobic—and, more broadly, in the patriarchal society embodied by James. The reference to “frame,” a rigid structure, can also be interpreted as an allusion to patriarchy. The experience of living with James in a flat in London does not provide the liberation that Ngozi expected. On the contrary, she associates living in Britain to a suffocating experience leading to a loss of “identity and sense of self”: I had to juggle a number of emotions and conflicts all at once, as I made tea. There was the issue of not seeing Bessie, which I knew I was not going to abide by. Then there was James and the total feeling of suffocation I was going through with him as well as the ever-enclosing wall of losing my identity and sense of self. I also had to deal with the fact that I was now an illegal alien in London. (Dibia 121)

At this precise moment in the diegesis, Ngozi and James are not married yet and the fact that he has confiscated her passport makes her an even greater victim of the oppressive atmosphere and attitudes she has to face in Britain, because she cannot move as she would like to. In the Prologue, Ngozi explains: “No one tells you that you are all on your own when you leave your country and head for another man’s land with your foolish dreams and hopeless hope.

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No one tells you to stop hoping and stop dreaming. Soon enough you find out by yourself” (Dibia n. p.). The use of the oxymoronic “hopeless hope” blatantly shows the dangers awaiting the ill-prepared men and women willing to go to Europe. The diasporic space is indeed a space of vulnerability, as shown in chapter 2, titled “Naked,” where nakedness is both physical and metaphorical. The following scene takes place after a row between Ngozi and James: There were promises of marriage and citizenship while I was still in Nigeria, but nothing was said that night. The only noise he made was grunting and ejaculating expletives while he jabbed at my insides with his withering prick. Did he care that I felt no pleasure from this? . . . I felt wounded inside like only a woman could feel, raw and bruised from within my cave as he thrust in with so much force, imploding all my senses . . . I lay in bed with the covers up to my chin . . . It occurred to me then that when women surrender to men, they lose all forms of their individual identity and become powerless, stripped of every vestige of their womanhood and are left feeling naked. (Dibia 31–32)

The nakedness which Ngozi mentions is a form of vulnerability whereby undocumented female migrants have no power over their own bodies and minds. She is there only for James’s own pleasure. He does not seem to pay any attention to her bodily satisfaction. Nonetheless, once she realizes she cannot live with him any longer, and once she has obtained her marriage certificate, she decides to leave him and join James’s former flatmate, aptly called Providence, in Leicester. Ngozi’s Bildung is also characterized by mobility inside the diasporic space itself. From the beginning of the novel, once she has announced that she has “finally found [her] voice” (Dibia n.p., original emphasis), she describes her mobility within the English territory: “I came to this sudden realization as I watched the lush, snow-coated countryside pass by as the train made its way from Leicester to King’s Cross, St. Pancras Station. Past Bedford, past Flitwick, Harlington, Leagrave, Luton and Nottingham” (Dibia n.p.). Ngozi’s passage through transit points could indicate that she herself is in transition and being transformed. This railway journey triggers a remembering process which allows her to assess what she has done/achieved in her life. She explains: My voice had been loud and clear, which hardly surprised me, and was very much alive within me. Though I was elated, I was still very much quiet. Thoughtful and a tad bit afraid. I was afraid of all the anger and hurt that had been buried within me for all these years. Afraid of what damage this new-found voice of mine could cause. (Dibia n.p.)

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This passage points to her empowerment since her voice has become a potent tool. She is still hesitant, but before she boards the plane to go back to Lagos for her father’s burial, she is more than ready to finally voice what she has been through and tell her family the truth. In Unbridled, Dibia lays the stress on the articulation between (im) mobility, feminine corporeality, and self. He describes the coming-of-age of a young Nigerian woman, from her native Nigeria to Britain—where she finally obtains a British passport—and from passivity to agency. The transnational space is expected to be one that could enable Ngozi to liberate herself from her traumatic past. However, it is also detrimental to her Bildung as a young woman, as she faces racism which she had never known in Nigeria, and still goes through patriarchal practices, albeit in different shapes. In the eyes of some minor characters, her skin color—or, her whole body—makes her “Other.” With this novel, Dibia offers a cautionary tale to warn (female) candidates for exile and takes up the role of representing the voiceless and powerless female migrants. NOTES 1. To Maurice Merleau-Ponty (143) and other phenomenologists, mobility is mediated through the body. Merleau-Ponty does not depict the human body as the object of physiology and anatomy dissociated from its surroundings but as the subject that manages to draw its possibilities of being mobile in a certain situation (this includes cultural and historical contexts). Anthony Elliott and John Urry refer to the “experiential texture” (67) of the lives of people on the move; they allude to people they call “globals,” that is, the “global elite,” “a new social class” (67), but their reference to an “experiential texture” also holds in the context of the novel under study in this chapter. John Urry also explains that “humans are sensuous, corporeal, technologically extended and mobile beings” (51). 2. This fluidity has been analyzed by Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (2007), or by Arianna Dagnino in “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity” (2013). 3. Two meanings of the word “odyssey” from the Merriam-Webster dictionary online will be used: “a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune” and “an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest” (“odyssey”). 4. Jude Dibia is known for writing politically committed fiction. His debut novel, Walking with Shadows (2005), is the first Nigerian and African novel whose protagonist is a homosexual man. It gives visibility and possibly a voice to a member of the LGBTQ community at a time when their existence in Nigeria is denied, silenced, and/or punished by the authorities. Since the toughening of already extremely harsh anti-LGBTQ laws in Nigeria under the Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2014, Jude Dibia has been living in exile and is the current guest writer of Malmö City of Refuge, part of the International Cities of Refuge Network

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(ICORN), an independent organization of cities sheltering writers and artists considered at risk. 5. The third generation of Nigerian writers was born after 1960, the year of the country’s independence. This generation is increasingly mobile and transcultural and mostly focuses on issues related to migration, exile, displacement, and so on. 6. Punday writes: “Since the body is a part of our narratives and our narratologies . . . we can ask how the body is used as a component of stories, and can do so using traditional narrative elements like plot, character, and setting. A corporeal narratology pursued in this direction enriches these traditional terms for speaking about narrative, and provides practical analytic tools for categorizing stories and analyzing their effects” (ix). 7. When it comes to the link between fiction and reality, in Hopes and Impediments, Chinua Achebe shows how interconnected African literatures and realities are: “Literature . . . gives us a second handle on reality, enabling us to encounter in the safe manageable dimensions of make believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real life” (117). 8. Two other noteworthy novels about Nigerian—and Sudanese—migration to Europe are Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009). They both foreground female characters. For a comparative study of these two novels, see Courtois (2019). 9. See Courtois’s article (2018) titled “‘In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics’: Helon Habila and the Flowing Together of Politics and Poetics,” which sheds light on these political issues in Helon Habila’s work. 10. The story of Uloma’s father is reminiscent of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s, the author of Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985). Saro-Wiwa was politically involved and vocal during the Abacha years (1993–1998), particularly as part of MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People), defending the right of the Ogoni to receive money—and compensation—from the State’s exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta. After he was arrested and sent to prison alongside other (Ogoni) environmental activists who demanded justice, he was executed by hanging in 1995, which led to Nigeria being expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations until May 1999. This execution clearly pointed to the poor level of freedom of speech offered to Nigerian citizens in the 1990s. 11. One is aware of the limits of the term “community” in this Nigerian context, as there exist about 370 tribes in this federal State. What is called the “National Question,” or “Nigerian project,” is still problematic in the twenty-first century. 12. In his translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomonology of Perception, Donald A. Landes explains: “Merleau-Ponty’s quasi technical use of le corps propre is as difficult to translate as it is central to the text. The phrase, which literally means ‘one’s own body,’ has often been interpreted as ‘the lived body,’ but an equivalent French term (such as le corps vécu) does not appear in Phenomenology of Perception” (xlviii). 13. See also “Beyond the Cartesian Self” (2016) by U.S. philosopher Lynne Baker (15–17). 14. For centuries, many women were submitted to the wearing of masks, scold’s bridles, or branks. The latter were used to punish women by gagging them for being troublesome in the eyes of a male-dominated society. Scold’s bridles were used in

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Scotland and England from the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. They consisted of a metal frame which was placed over a woman’s head. A bit was inserted in the woman’s mouth to keep her tongue down and therefore prevent her from talking. There was a process of reification at stake in this practice, as a bridle was, and is still, used for horses. These types of bridles or masks were also extensively used as punishment for slaves in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 15. The question of the unsayable nature of trauma has often been raised. For example, in another context, in Smothered Words, Sara Kofman asks: “How can one speak of that before which all possibility of speech ceases?” (9). 16. Contrary to Dibia’s novel, Danticat’s stages the protagonist in a more active position. Indeed, Sophie uses a pestle so as to break her hymen in order not to go through the shameful practice of virginity testing by her own mother. On the one hand, by harming herself, Sophie regains power over her own body. Yet, in the patriarchal society she lives in, she becomes a worthless woman at the same time as she has lost her virginity before marriage. In Unbridled, it is Ngozi’s father who breaks her hymen; this points to Ngozi’s complete lack of power/agency over her own body, notably triggered by the shame she feels after she has been raped; shame prevents individuals from setting themselves free from their bodies. 17. The reference to “the shores of Nigeria” can echo Ulysses’s shores of Ithaca. 18. The concept of “shame” is precisely at the heart of Neela Cathelain’s essay in this very volume.

WORKS CITED Abel, Elizabeth, et al., editors. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, University Press of New England, 1983. Abani, Chris. Becoming Abigail. New York, Akashic Books, 2006. ———. GraceLand. New York, Picador, 2004. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 1957. Boston, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 2009. Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments. New York, Doubleday, 1989. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London, Verso, 1991. Baker, Lynne Rudder. “Beyond the Cartesian Self.” Phenomenology and Mind, vol. 1, 2016, pp. 48–57, https://doi​.org​/10​.13128​/Phe​_Mi​-1964. Bakhtin, M. M. “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” Speech Genre and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michaek Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 10–59. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, Polity, 2007. Beushausen, Wiebke. Dirty Skirts: Body Politics and Coming-of-Age in Feminist Fiction of the Caribbean Diaspora. heiBOOKS, 2019. “bridle.” Etymonline​.co​m. Online Etymologic Dictionary. Accessed May 20, 2020.

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“bridled.” Etymonline​.co​m. Online Etymologic Dictionary. Accessed May 20, 2020. Buckton, Oliver S. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body. Athens, Ohio UP, 2007. Carel, Havi. Illness; The Cry of the Flesh. Durham, Acumen, 2008. Castles, Stephen, et al. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. 1993. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Courtois, Cédric. “‘In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics’: Helon Habila and the Flowing Together of Politics and Poetics.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2018, pp. 55–68, https://doi​.org​/10​.4000​/ces​.289. Accessed May 20, 2020. ———. “The Travelling Bodies of African Prostitutes in the Transnational Space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009).” Women on the Move: Body, Memory, and Femininity in Present Day Transnational Diasporic Writing, edited by Silvier Pellicer Ortín and Julia Tofantšuk, New York, Routledge, 2019, pp. 25–45. Dagnino, Arianna. “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity.” The Journal of Transcultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, pp. 130–160, https://doi​.org​/10​.11588​/ts​.2013​.2​.9940. Accessed May 20, 2020. Danticat, Edwige. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York, Soho, cop., 1994. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011. Dibia, Jude. Unbridled. 2007. Cape Town, Jacana Media, 2008. ———. Walking with Shadows. Morrisville, Lulu, 2005. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. London, Penguin Books, 2003. Elliott, Anthony and John Urry. Mobile Lives: Self, Excess and Nature. London, Routledge, 2010. Feng, Pin-chia. The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading. New York, Peter Lang, 1997. Ferguson, Mary Anne. “The Female Novel of Development and the Myth of Psyche.” The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, et al., Hanover, University Press of New England, 1983, pp. 228–243. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Translated by Alan Sheridan, New York, Vintage Books, 1995. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. 1795–1796. Translated by Thomas Carlyle. London, Chapman and Hall, 1898. Habila, Helon. Travelers. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.” Genre, vol. 12, no. 3, Fall 1979, pp. 293–311. Homer. The Odyssey: The Story of Odysseus. Translated by Deborah Steiner. New York, Signet Classics, 2007. Humphrey, Michael. The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014. Labovitz, Esther Kleinbord. The Myth of the Heroine. The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century: Dorothy Richardson, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Christa Worlf. New York, Peter Lang, 1986.

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Kofman, Sara. Smothered Words. Evanston, Northwestern UP, 1998. McWilliams, Ellen. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Farnham, Ashgate, 2009. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945. Translated by Donald A. Landers. London, Routledge, 2014. “migrant.” Etymonline​.co​m. Online Etymologic Dictionary. Accessed May 20, 2020. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. 1987. Translated by Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 2000. “odyssey.” Merriam​-Webster​.co​m. Merriam-Webster, 2020. Web. Accessed May 20, 2020. Punday, Daniel. Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. 1985. Harlow, Longman, 1996. Shaffner, Randoph P. The Apprenticeship Novel. A Study of the ‘Bildungsroman’ as a Regulative Type in Western Literature with a Focus on Three Classic Representatives by Goethe, Maugham, and Mann. New York, Peter Lang, 1984. Tennyson, Alfred. The Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. New York, Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1891. “unbridled.” Etymonline​.co​m. Online Etymologic Dictionary. Accessed May 20, 2020. Unigwe, Chika. On Black Sisters’ Street. London, Vintage Random House, 2010. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007. Waggoner, Jess. “Cripping the Bildungsroman: Reading Disabled Intercorporealities in Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, Fall 2014, pp. 56–72, https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.2979​/jmodelite​ .38​.1​.56​#metadata​_info​_tab​_contents. Accessed May 20, 2020. Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” 1980. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 27–45.

Part IV

MIGRANT BODIES, UNSTABLE IDENTITIES, AND SUBJECTIVITIES IN TIMES OF CRISES

Chapter 10

“[T]raveler / without a Country” Wandering Bodies in Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s When the Wanderers Come Home Maureen Fielding

INTRODUCTION Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, a Liberian poet living in the American diaspora, survivor of the wars in Liberia, immigrant, minister, mother of four, and professor of English, is not only “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century” (Eze 283), but she is also a prolific writer in general. She is the author of six books of poetry, a children’s book, an unpublished memoir, a website, articles, and daily, sometimes multiple times a day, Facebook posts. She has won multiple awards, has been interviewed many times, and is frequently invited to read at prestigious venues such as the Library of Congress and the Ford Foundation. Still, there are only a handful of critical essays written about her work. In a 2009 essay, Richard Douglas-Chin notes that Wesley’s work “still awaits critical engagement on the part of diasporic literary scholars” (240). In his 2014 essay “The Open Wounds of Being,” Chielozona Eze laments that Wesley “has not attracted as much scholarly attention as she deserves” (283). Currently, an MLA search only turns up two scholarly articles on her work. Much attention has been paid to Holocaust narratives and Vietnam War literature and films about or by American soldiers, but relatively little attention is given to the voices of war’s “Others” in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Like the works of Le Ly Hayslip, Loung Ung, W. D. Ehrhart, Eli Wiesel, and others who have survived wars, Wesley’s poetry can be considered part of what Kali Tal has dubbed the literature of trauma. Kal defines this literature this way: “Literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author. Literature of trauma holds at its center the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience, but it is also 189

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actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the writings and representations of nontraumatized authors” (17). In “Where Have All the Years Gone,” her account of returning to Liberia, Wesley writes, “If what I now saw was what war does to a nation, then why does anyone start a war?” (89). In all her writings, Wesley gives voice to Liberians who have experienced war. Her poems should be required reading for anyone contemplating initiating war because her work reminds one, if the daily news reports do not, that the majority of victims during war are civilians. In her work, Wesley remembers not only the victims of war, but also the way of life that has been lost, and she articulates the process of recovering from trauma while simultaneously developing a new identity as a healer. Her 2016 autobiographical book of poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, was written during and after a visit to Liberia where she interviewed and collected the stories of women who had survived atrocities. Like her other books, When the Wanderers Come Home recounts the impact of war on Liberia and Liberians, not only remembering the traumatic events, but also providing a healing message. This book, however, is especially infused with the effects of war on bodies, both physically and spatially, and the resulting liminality. Liminality is reflected in Wesley’s work as she questions her identity and describes herself as a wanderer. In When the Wanderers Come Home, she returns again and again to the subject of wandering, displaced, lost, and damaged bodies. The collection contains many images of ghosts and dreams, images commonly associated with unrest, mobility, unreality, intangibility, and the subliminal. There are twenty-six mentions of ghosts and thirty-four of dreams in the fifty poems. As the poems move back and forth from Liberia to the United States, from the corporality of bodies and body parts to the liminality and intangibility of ghosts, the book reflects a struggle between corporality and liminality, between immobility and mobility, between Wesley’s sense of her own liminality and her evolving identity. Hamish Dalley also observes that postcolonial writers frequently “locate traumatic affects in the body” (369). Unsurprisingly, damaged bodies and body parts figure prominently in Wesley’s work. In “What Took Us to War,” Wesley refers to “pieces of decayed / people” (6). In the Liberian civil wars from 1989 to 2003, according to some estimates, 150,000–300,000 Liberians, including 15,000–50,000 child soldiers, died.1 Many of the bodies were lost and never received proper burials. In addition to war crimes such as torture, rape, sexual slavery, summary executions, and forced conscription of child soldiers, the Liberian wars were also characterized by mutilation, amputation, dismemberment, decapitation, the cutting out of hearts and fetuses, and even cannibalism, including women being forced to eat their husbands’ body

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parts,2 and many survivors today have missing limbs or permanent physical injuries. Sexual violence was also rampant during and after the wars, with women experiencing particularly cruel forms of violence resulting in permanent physical effects.3 Displacement was another significant feature of the wars. Not only did the war ultimately force almost the entire population of 3 million to leave their homes at some point for weeks to years, but also many Liberians who left their homes during the first war, both those who had been repatriated and those who were still refugees, were forced to flee a second time (U.S. Committee). Women and children were disproportionately affected.4 Liberia itself is a nation born of mobility and bodies, transnationalism and circuits, its people first disembodied and transformed into cargo for transportation in ships across the Atlantic Ocean and then returned as freed slaves, some voluntarily, some involuntarily. Post-traumatic stress disorder is ubiquitous in Liberia. Combat, with its risk to life and limb, is traumatic, but rape involves the body in equally lifethreatening violence. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman argues that rape and combat are equally traumatic. Abel Learwellie, program officer at the Lutheran Church in Liberia’s Trauma and Reconciliation Program says, “[In] Liberia, . . . the whole society is traumatized” (Veseley-Flad).5 In The Rites of Passage, French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep describes a core of certain rituals that signified transition from one social identity to another. Van Gennep noticed a three-stage pattern in these rituals: “preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition) and post liminal rites (rites of incorporation).” During “rites of separation” social identity is stripped away. The second phase, rites of transition, takes place in isolation from society. The third phase is a symbolic rebirth, where the individuals are invested with their new identity and reintegrated into society in their new roles. The first phase, the preliminal, parallels the experience of trauma and displacement where social identity is stripped away. Liminality resides in the middle phase, where traumatized individuals often exist in isolation from society. In his chapter on “Territorial Passage,” van Gennep describes what he calls “magico-religious” territorial passages, that is passages between physical territories that have sacred or magical boundaries. An individual who physically moves through these kinds of boundaries “finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds” (ch. 2). Elaine Scarry also shows how the language of war disembodies both soldiers and civilians: in war and in torture, “the incontestable reality of the body—the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of—is separated from its source and conferred on an ideology or issue or instance of political authority impatient

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of, or deserted by, benign sources of substantiation” (62). War refugees and migrants whose bodies are literally physically displaced from their homes and cultures, thus undergoing an unwanted territorial passage, frequently waver between two worlds before “re-integrat[ing] into society in their new roles.” The collection is divided into three parts which have clear parallels to van Gennep’s three-stage pattern of liminality. Book I, “Coming Home,” focuses on rites of separation, both leaving and returning to Liberia. Book II, “Colliding Worlds,” focuses on rites of transition, Wesley’s intercultural and interracial experiences as a Liberian living in the United States and traveling to other countries, and Book III, “World Un / Breakable,” focuses on rites of incorporation, her experience with both her battle with cancer and her development of a new identity as a warrior, survivor, and healer. In this narrative movement from fleeing a war-torn country to battling a disease-ridden body, Wesley makes the connection between migration and the traumatized body explicit. BOOK I: COMING HOME Book I, “Coming Home” is filled with poems describing both the transformation of Wesley’s home and body and her inability to return home in its fullest sense, that is to both a pre-war Liberia and pre-migrant self. The title of this book suggests movement, the act of returning and entering after having been separated from home and country. The opening poem, “So I Stand Here,” reflects on the returning migrant’s physical paralysis and transformed body. Unable to lift her feet to cross the threshold of her former home, she stands at the doorpost, an outsider. Beginning her collection with this image of a threshold (the third word in the poem) makes the liminality of her experience overt. The root word of liminal is “limen,” which is Latin for threshold. In psychology, liminal refers “to the point (or threshold) beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced” (“Liminal”). Van Gennep calls the rites “executed during the transitional stage liminal (or threshold) rites,” and in trauma theory, liminal refers to the loss of identity or sense of belonging. Tal writes, “Trauma is enacted in a liminal state, outside the bounds of “normal” human experience, and the subject is radically ungrounded” (15). Those who have been displaced by war are particularly “ungrounded.” In the poem “So I Stand Here,” the sense of loss of cultural connection is symbolized by bodily amputation and transformation. Body parts can no longer function as they have in the past: Wesley writes, “I do not have the hands to greet / my kinswomen, and the hand with / which I take hold of the kola nut is shriveled / by travel” (4). A gourd of water, which she could once carry easily, now “weighs heavily upon [her] head.” Not only is she now unable to

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lift her feet to cross the threshold, but her “feet no longer know how to walk the old paths / we used to walk.” She fears that she is “too impure to meet [her] ancestors.” The loss of physical ability, bodily knowledge, and connection to her birthplace has much in common with second-generation American poets’ concerns, such as Korean American poet Ishle Park’s fear in her poem “Jejudo Dreams” that her tongue will not work and her Korean ancestors will “mistake [her] for a white bakwai ghost” (25). “So I Stand Here” also includes her first use of ghost imagery to describe the liminality of the people themselves: “I do not know these / people, birthed from the night’s passing / of lost ghosts” (4). Ironically, in a poem about the speaker’s inability to move, she invokes a contrasting image of disembodied spirits who are characterized by their extreme mobility, their ability to pass through walls, fly, appear, and disappear across vast geographic distances. In the poem “Erecting Stones” Wesley insists that she cannot really go back. She recognizes the permanent and profound transformation she has undergone and her many losses when she responds to a neighbor who says, “I hear you’re back” (8). The poet replies, “No, we’re not . . . We’re only picking up the broken pieces of the years, / erecting stones, so the future can live where we did not.” Carol Blessing points out that the end of Wesley’s wandering, a return to home, will not undo the losses she has suffered: “Homecoming inevitably means loss for the exiled one, as the world before can never be regained—the lost years with the family, the lost life as it had been” (85). Wesley concludes “Erecting Stones” with a sweeping statement about the sense of unrest, unreality, intangibility, and impermanence of Liberia: “This is a country of ghosts” (9). While Wesley is the one who has wandered geographically, even those who remain in the country are disembodied wanderers. The long poem “Becoming Ghost,” describing her experiences collecting women’s war stories and dealing with her memories, blends significant corporal imagery with liminal imagery. She recounts the horror of witnessing women on their way to executions, rape, and mutilation: “the empty arms of those women, led away / from us, in line, their screaming infants, tossed / aside like dirt, or dashed against a wall” (27). As she lists atrocities, she focuses on her sense of the liminality of her identity: “As if a changing person were inside the single / person, as if I were a new personality of itself / outside of itself each time” (26). In another line, she connects her ghostly imagery with her corporal imagery: “As if I were the mind of many ghosts, collecting / ghosts stories, the mind that discovers more bones / at the burial site of old human skulls and bones / we came here to forget” (27). In the same poem, she repeats the story of a woman forced “to hold down / the legs of her younger brother, to hold him / in place, to calm his fighting legs and body / as rebels shave off his head” (28). She describes the effect on

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the woman: asking her to do this “is to ask her to die / forever inside out. Is to ask her to move her body / inside the body of another woman, is to ask her / to live a life of dying again and again” (28). Finally, Wesley describes the stories’ physical transformative effect on herself: “I am becoming a body of water / as if my own tears were not sufficient for my own life” (29). Water, a frequent symbol in Wesley’s work, reflects both the idea of the speaker’s body’s ceaseless movement and the speaker’s corporal instability. Not only does Wesley carry her own trauma, but having taken on the survivor’s mission—to return and collect Liberian women war survivors’ stories of rape, torture, and death—she has subjected herself to secondary trauma and her further loss of corporality: “I have become a new ghost, occupied by many other ghosts. / As if I have stopped being so that the dead will live” (29). Jean-Michel Ganteau asserts that “the perpetual, spectral presence of the past prevents time from flowing” (“Vulnerable” 94). For the survivors, the past is always present. “The Killed Ones” is rife with images of roaming ghosts and allusions to bodily atrocity: they “are in the marketplaces / some, without their heads. Some without their hearts.” This poem concludes with a restatement of the final line of “Erecting Stones”: “This is a country of ghosts.” But perhaps no poem in Book I depicts the poet’s experience of liminality better than “A City of Ghosts.” Wesley begins, “I have been taken over by ghosts . . . and old bones” as if “to keep the souls of those who left / and forgot to take their souls” (33). In her essay on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Linda Krumholz asserts that the ghost, Beloved, has three functions: she is “the return of the repressed past,” she “initiates the individual healing process,” and she “is the reader’s ghost, forcing us to face the historical past as a living and vindictive presence” (400). In the same way, Wesley’s ghosts remind us of the suffering that others have faced and the consequences of that suffering, the continual disembodied wandering of the traumatized. “I Go Home,” a dream poem expressing both the poet’s sense of liminality and continuous circular motion, also depicts the experience of traumatic repetition first described by Freud: “I go home every night, barefoot, walking, / running. Sometimes, I’m driving my car, / and suddenly, the car is gone” (37). In this poem, in her dreams, she returns night after night to Monrovia “from the smooth roads of my / too peaceful neighborhood, here in America” (38). But she returns “not to this decade, where [she has] / survived it all [but to] the war and the torture / of hundreds of thousands, death / and near death.” In this poem she is “that small child / running” and “a high school teen.” She is an adult who has “to travel thousands of ocean / miles in [her] sleep” to find her mother’s grave, but significantly, her mother’s gravesite is now lost, symbolizing trauma victims’, migrants’ and refugees’ inability, despite continuous movement, to reach the lost home.

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BOOK II: COLLIDING WORLDS Book II “Colliding Worlds,” a title that suggests violent movement, focuses on her intercultural experiences as a Liberian American living in the United States and traveling to other countries. In this section she travels both physically around the world to Columbia, Morocco, and Libya, and imaginatively between her sense of not belonging or being truly American and her sense of connection to disasters and violence in other countries and the violence of the global economic system that benefits the rich and causes the continued suffering of the poor. Book II also begins with another dream poem; in “In My Dream,” the speaker is trapped in a liminal zone having lost both her means of transportation and her identity. I’m . . . stranded at an airport. I’ve lost my car or lost the keys in my lost purse. Or I’m in the airport security line without my passport, a lone traveler without a country. (49)

This powerful poem of displacement, immobility, and loss of identity, however, does not focus on the speaker despite the narrative first person. Rather she uses this poem to make the connection to others who have come to the United States in traumatic circumstances: She writes, “I’m the lost and unfound, from those /who did not come on boats, / those that did not come ticketed / in chains.” These are clear allusions to African slaves, but she asserts her membership among Those who came, ticketed by live bullets, grenades, and rocket missiles, those, still bleeding from their sides, those who found their way here by crawling among the dead. (49–50)

In this section, Wesley makes clear her kinship with people who have experienced disaster, violence, poverty, and especially forced displacement and loss of home and country. In “Sometimes, I Close My Eyes,” she announces her global vision: “Sometimes I see the world.” However, after a recitation of scenes of poverty and violence, she concludes with a line about her ambivalence about seeing all this: “Sometimes / I close my eyes, so I don’t

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have to see the world” (52). Collective memory and “diasporic consciousness” can also unground one as one moves imaginatively across time and space. Yet, she follows this line with poems about natural disasters and poems about countries which have experienced war: “Sandy,” about 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, one of the deadliest and most destructive Atlantic hurricanes in history; “Tsunami,” about the 2011 tsunami in Japan that killed 20,000 people; “Medellin from my Hotel Room Balcony”; and “To Libya.” These four poems in particular show the poet’s connection to traumatic events globally. In “Medellin from my Hotel Room Balcony,” she reflects upon her sense of common experience with Columbians who have endured the long war. In “To Libya,” she returns again to images of damaged bodies and death: “there will be masses of graves of masses, / broken glass of pierced people, / and the children dying or already dead” (73). The most potent symbol of the poem is the torn bits of hair lying on the street “forgotten after the clean-up” (73). Michael Rothberg argues that Westerners are deeply implicated in traumatic events in places like Liberia: “We are more than bystanders and something other than direct perpetrators in the violence of global capital. Rather, . . . we are implicated subjects, beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously” (xv). In previous books Wesley addresses the global capitalist system that now exploits the poor in post-war Liberia. The poem “Making Happy People” from her 2010 book Where the Road Turns attacks the corruption and global economic system that have allowed African elites to steal their countries’ wealth, deposit it in secret Swiss bank accounts, and then live the high life in Europe. In “Coming Home,” also from Where the Road Turns, she writes, “They say the war is over, but the poor still groan” (Where 93). Many trauma scholars have critiqued both the Western concept of trauma and the Western focus on healing the individual. Stef Craps argues for a new definition of trauma, pointing out that trauma is not always a single blow or event (49), the traditional model of traumatic experience. He points out the limitations of current approaches to trauma: “one tends to leave unquestioned the conditions that enabled the traumatic abuse, such as racism, economic domination, or political oppression” (50). Wesley takes up this issue again in three somewhat surprising and sometimes funny poems about dogs in Book II of When the Wanderers Come Home. In “When I Grow Up,” “The Inequality of Dogs,” and “You Wouldn’t Let Me Adopt My Dog,” Wesley reflects on her in-betweenness, her inability to cross the threshold to American life as a typical dog owning American, and the vast inequality of wealth in the world. American dogs are differentiated from other dogs. “The Inequality of Dogs” depicts them as luxuries, cuddled

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on sofas. She recalls a homeless woman in Medellin surrounded by her eight dogs, and Liberian dogs who “in the war,. . .were more masters / than dogs, eating everything, including us” (64) and “the new Liberian skinny, / hungry dog. . . / a dog, barking hard. . .. / at the gate of the rich” (66). In “You Wouldn’t Let Me Adopt My Dog,” Wesley explains to her daughter her reasons for not adopting a dog: . . . I wonder if the child somewhere in my home village had a bowl of dry rice and palm oil to eat this morning. . . . my father still needs me to send money to feed a house full of motherless children who have taken to living with him after the war. (61)

These three poems evoke the diasporic dilemma. The speaker is at the same time physically displaced from and psychologically fixated on the home country, thus experiencing a mind/body split. As Khachig Tölölyan notes, “diasporas are resolutely multilocal and polycentric, in that what happens to kin communities in other areas of dispersion as well as in the homeland consistently matter to them” (651). Thus, while Wesley is physically in the United States, she is still in Liberia, concerned about the crushing poverty.6 Wesley repeatedly highlights that for the poor, the war and trauma are not over.7 Researchers have found that PTSD persists for decades in the areas of Liberia which experienced the most violent conflict. While these areas continue to bear the “burden of psychopathology,” rather than focus on more psychological services, the researchers posit “interventions aimed at rebuilding social and physical infrastructure” as “an inextricable part of mental health treatment in these countries” (Galea 1750). Indeed, healing cannot come about when populations continue to experience repeated or continuing trauma. Crafs points out that “the traumatic impact of racism and other forms of ongoing oppression cannot be adequately addressed within the conceptual frameworks which trauma theory provides” (50). Wesley already knows this, and her poems operate in the larger arena. She tells an interviewer that poetry was an escape for her during the war, but now she tries “to show that the artist does not exist in isolation from his surroundings” (Beattie-Moss). Eze notes that, rather than privileging individual psychological recovery, Wesley “reminds all Liberians that the healing duty of memory is for all. Healing cannot be partial” (296). Her focus on the concrete manifestations of trauma, broken bodies, displaced people, destroyed homes, hungry children, clearly shows that psychological healing cannot occur without physical and economic healing.

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BOOK III: WORLD (UN) / BREAKABLE The title of Book III, “World (Un) / Breakable,” the final section of When the Wanderers Come Home, again emphasizes global mobility and physicality, but its parenthetical prefix highlights the paradox of the ease and difficulty of physical destruction. Wesley again employs the liminal imagery of dreams and movement as she deals with the corporal battle with uterine cancer, making explicit connections between her war with cancer and the war in Liberia. In several poems she is again mobile, at an airport, on a train, in an airplane. In other poems, she recounts visits to doctors. However, a recurring theme in this section and even in these poems of liminality and corporality is voice and the assertion of her identity as a woman of power, a healer, and a nurturer. In the first poem of Book III, “I Want to Be the Woman,” the title is an assertion, but the final line is a more powerful assertion of identity: “Yes, I am Khade Wheh, / the mother of mothers” (83). Khade Wheh is a Grebo praise name used to describe a great woman or girl. It means “head wife” or “great mother.” In “When I Was a Girl,” Wesley, asserting her right to have a voice, describes how her stepmother told her to shut up because “[a] woman should be quiet” (86). But she ends the poem staring into her step-mother’s “mean eyes” and then immediately begins “chattering again, chattering / on with my friends, chattering / about the worries / of a fourteen-year-old stepchild” (86). The repetition of “chattering” reinforces her powerful voice and the impossibility of silencing her. “A Room with a View,” her first poem about battling cancer, alludes to E. M. Forster’s eponymous novel which focuses on the power of travel to transform and the importance of bodily integrity, and concludes with the happy return of the lovers not just to Italy, but to the very room they had shared at the beginning. In the poem, Wesley sees the “city, three rivers, bridges / broken and unbroken” (105). While bridges and rivers (clear references to the novel’s setting in Venice) are a means of moving from one place to another, some of these “bridges are so broken, they have become only / relics of the past,” highlighting her immobility and inability to return home. Her main interest, however, is “only for the homes on the far hill; homes, / I have heard, to come down, sliding when heavy / rains overwhelmed the city.” Her interest in the homes evokes again her fixity in the past, the instability of home, but also the mobility of home and the ability to return home, for these homes “rise” again “and their owners again repossess them” (105). The poem interweaves what she sees from her hospital window, her body, noting that she is on the “fifth round of chemotherapy” (105), and memory of the past, “[A]ll you can do is reflect on the beauty / of your past life.” The poem ends by reinforcing her physical presence: “I am still here” (105).

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The next three poems focus on hair, weaving together memories and the body, moving geographically between Liberia and the United States, and temporally between the past and the present. “Braiding Hair” is a memory of her mother braiding her hair, and “Losing Hair” is a powerfully physical poem comparing her body’s war with the Liberian war. In this poem she writes, “[T]o keep life in my veins, they must purge / all life out of my veins” (107). She reflects ironically on the similarity between chemotherapy and the war: I feel like I am again, at war, Liberia, in a refugee camp, where Peace Keepers cannot keep peace without war, cannot save life with the taking of life. To rescue us, they shoot and kill, and all around, we lie dead. (107)

The double meaning of shoot—medical and military—reminds us of the instability of language and the permeability of the body. Employing a verb of motion, she asserts again her powerful will to survive: “my cells will again rise out of nothing” (107). “Hair” takes up the positive theme of this conclusion, and movement becomes a healing action rather than the trauma of displacement and wandering: “Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies / it cannot come to life, you were told. / So dance into the new hair / that awaits you some day” (110). The biblical reference also alludes to Ngugi wa Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat with its powerful vision, in the aftermath of violence, torture, and killing, of national, communal, and familial hope and healing. In the last poem of When the Wanderers Come Home, “2014, My Mamma Never Knew You,” Wesley describes herself as “a woman warrior” (111) and tells us, “I went to war with this old Monster” (112). She uses the verb of motion—“went”—as opposed to “fought” or “battled.” She also tells us that her experiences in the Liberian wars have prepared her to “meet and conquer / the Monster” (112). She then notes the advent of a new bodily trauma for Liberia and herself: “a new Monster, Ebola, like war, like cancer” (114). This monster reminds the reader of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the nameless, gigantic, eight-foot-tall monster created from dead body parts by Victor Frankenstein, a supposedly civilized European scientist. Frankenstein’s monster, like war and disease, travels everywhere from the most civilized cities of Europe to the most remote places of the earth, such as the North Pole. In the conclusion, Frankenstein dies, and the monster disappears saying he will kill himself, but monsters have a way of returning, even as Frankenstein brought dead body parts to life. Wars have a way of returning, often reanimated and resurrected by the past. The narrator, a writer, a sea captain, a traveler, and

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leader, like Wesley, is the only one alive at the end of the novel, and Wesley concludes both the poem and collection with this final image of mobility and an assertion of an identity as a fighter, a survivor, and a healer: Sometimes, I just want to walk until I walk until I walk to a place where I was meant to go. Sometimes the road itself loses its footpath. Sometimes, all we can do is to stand here and fight the Monster. Sometimes, I start my day with a prayer. Maybe, this is all I was born to do. (114)

Wesley is also an ordained minister and regularly preaches at her church and others. In an interview she asserts, “To be a survivor, you’ve got to have faith” (Toccket). In Trauma and Recovery Judith Herman has described the importance of a belief system to survivors: “[t]he arbitrary, random quality of [the trauma victim’s] fate defies the basic human faith in a just or even predictable world order. In order to develop a full understanding of the trauma story, the survivor must examine the moral questions of guilt and responsibility and reconstruct a system of belief that make sense of her undeserved suffering” (178). Wesley’s faith in the predestination of her path is reflected in her work. In their introduction to Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega assert that “liminal trauma narratives . . . educate us ethically by catching our attention and whetting our attentiveness” (12). The works they analyze “get the readers to open themselves to the violence of experience, to train their attentiveness and responsiveness, and to favor risk-taking over non-involvement” (14). Wesley’s poetry performs a similar function. In “Medellin From My Hotel Room Balcony,” she asserts the power of language, writing, “a poem can hold back the war” (68). As the United States engages in its endless wars, proxy wars, and regime changes with the resulting destruction of countries, displacements of millions, and casualty counts in the millions, readers should take the horror of Wesley’s literary depictions of trauma with them and work to find ethical solutions to injustice and avoid militaristic solutions, whether the issues be domestic or global.

NOTES 1. The TRC estimates that 300,000 were “killed during the 14-year period by every faction including vigilante groups, militia and the ECOMOG peacekeepers” (Republic 34).

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2. Ritualistic killing, the use of body parts for witchcraft, and cannibalism have been practiced by a number of societies in Liberia. These practices are believed to give power and protection. These continue to be a problem today and frequently increase during elections (United Nations Mission in Liberia). (United States Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2019.) 3. Most sources acknowledge that sexual violence during the wars was extremely high, especially for female combatants. In “Rape Counseling for an Entire Nation,” Theresa Wiltz writes, “between 60 percent and 90 percent of the female population— women, girls, babies—was raped at some point between 1989 and 2003.” However, other sources dispute these numbers, arguing that the percentage is much lower. Several other studies also discuss the difficulty with accurately tabulating the numbers of individuals who were sexually assaulted during the war. See Stark et al.; Stark and Ager; Hynes; and Scully et al. During the war, women were also “beaten in humiliating ways, stripped naked with objects forced into all orifices or turned upside down and with hot pepper forced into their vaginas” (Republic 35). One study found that over half of the women also experienced sexual torture that had permanent gynecological effects, such as genital prolapse, perineal tears, and rectal vaginal fistulae (LieblinKalifani et al. 10). Researchers also point out that in the aftermath of the war, rape and domestic violence increased, and forced prostitution and trafficking occurred throughout the country (Liebling-Kalifani et al. 3). The TRC report states, “Refugee and internally displaced (IDP) girls were regularly exposed to rape, sexual abuse and prostitution in camps and also faced robbery, harassment, intimidation, molestation and sexual violence. Refugee and IDP girls, of which 80% were under 18, were sexually exploited by soldiers, men with money, block leaders, businessmen and humanitarian workers, including those from non-governmental organizations” (Republic 34). 4. As of 2000, 137,000 Liberian born individuals were living in other countries. (“Connecting”). According to the TRC, “Approximately 300,000 Liberians were internally displaced by 2003 and another 320,000 were refugees in neighboring countries” (Republic 34). As of 2013, that number was 225,000 (United Nations, DESA). According to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an estimated 80 percent of the displaced were women and children. 5. Wiltz characterizes Liberia as “a nation with a collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder.” A 2008 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association put the figure at 44 percent of all adult households surveyed (Johnson). Furthermore, the JAMA report found that 74 percent of female former combatants who experienced sexual violence and 81 percent of male former combatants who experienced sexual violence experienced PTSD symptoms (Johnson 676). These numbers are probably low because of the lack of reporting on sexual violence, especially on sexual violence against males (“Sexually abused”). 6. Vesley-Flad points out that 90 percent of Monrovia’s inhabitants are so poor that they “have nothing at all” (5). The 2019 United Nations Human Development Index ranks Liberia at 176th out of 189 countries (United Nations, United Nations Development).

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7. A 2010 study found an unsurprising correlation between trauma and PTSD and economics in Liberia: villages which had experienced more traumatic events, such as displacement and violence had higher levels of PTSD and lower social capital, and villages with unequal wealth distribution also had higher levels of PTSD; however, villages with more equal wealth distribution had lower levels of PTSD (Rockers 456–457).

WORKS CITED Beattie-Moss, Melissa. “The painful, joyful heart: A conversation with Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.” Penn State News. September 5, 2005. news​.psu​.edu​/story​/141738​ /2005​​/09​/05/ research/painful-joyful-heart. Accessed March 18, 2013. Blessing, Carol. “Exile and Maternal Loss in the Poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.” Exile and the Narrative / Poetic Imagination, edited by Agnieszka Gutthy. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Cambridge Scholars, 2010, pp. 77–92. Britt, Sam Irving. “Liberia.” Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices, edited by Thomas Riggs. 2nd ed. Vol. 3: Countries, Greece to Philippines. Farmington Hills, MI, Gale, 2015, pp. 295–304. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed June 29, 2015. Craps, Stef. “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York, London, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014, pp. 45–62. Dalley, Hamish. “The Question of ‘Solidarity’ in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle.” Humanities, vol. 4, no. 3, 2015, pp. 369–392. ProQuest, doi.10.3390/h4030369. Accessed February 11, 2020. Douglass-Chin, Richard. “Landscapes of the Interior: Liberian-American Diaspora in Foundational and Twenty-First-Century Writings of Exploration and Nation.” CLA Journal vol. 52, no. 3, 2009, pp. 238–255. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/44325475. Accessed June 17, 2020. Eze, Chielozona. Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy. Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ——— “The Open Wounds of Being: The Poetics of Testimony in the Works of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2014, pp. 282–306. Accessed June 5, 2015. Galea, Sandro, et al. “Persistent Psychopathology in the Wake of Civil War: Long-Term Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Nimba County, Liberia.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 100, no. 9, 2010, pp. 1745–51. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2009.179697. Accessed February 11, 2020. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. “Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability.” Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega Jaén. Routledge, New York, 2014, pp. 89–103. Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega Jaén. Introduction. Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega Jaén. Routledge, New York, 2014, pp. 1–18.

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Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1992. Hynes, H. Patricia. “Girl soldiers: forgotten casualties of war.” Peace and Freedom, vol. 77, no. 1, Spring-Summer 2017, p. 4+. Gale In Context: Global Issues, https:// link​-gale​-com​.ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/apps​/doc​/A499493860​/GIC​?u​=psucic ​ &sid​=GIC​&xid​=d88f986d. Accessed November 3, 2018. Johnson, Kirsten, Jana Asher, and Stephanie Rosborough. “Association of Combatant Status and Sexual Violence with Health and Mental Health Outcomes in Postconflict Liberia.” JAMA [H.W.Wilson - GS] vol. 300, no. 6, 2008, p. 676. doi:10.1001/jama.300.6.676. Accessed June 30, 2015. “Key statistics on diaspora from Liberia.” Connecting with Emigrants: A Global Profile of Diasporas. OECD Publishing. 2012. doi: dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1787​/9789264177949​ -grap​h162​-en. Accessed June 29, 2015. Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1992, pp. 395–408. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/3041912. Accessed August 6, 2020. Liebling-Kalifani, Helen, et al. “Women war survivors of the 1989–2003 conflict in Liberia: the impact of sexual and gender-based violence.” Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–21. Gale In Context: Global Issues, https://link​-gale​-com​.ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/apps​/doc​/A261869831​/GIC​?u​ =psucic​&sid​=GIC​&xid​=79ebb0ef. Accessed September 5, 2020. “Liminal.” Collins English Dictionary. Harper Collins, 2019. www​.collinsdictionary​ .com​/us​/dictionary​/english​/liminal. Accessed July 13, 2015. Park, Ishle. The Temperature of this Water. New York: Kaya Press, 2004. Republic of Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Final Report. Volume Three: Appendices Title I: Women and the Conflict. 2009. http://www​.trcofliberia​ .org​/reports​/final​-report​.html. Accessed September 5, 2020. Rockers, Peter C., et al. “Brief Report: Village Characteristics Associated With Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Postconflict Liberia.” Epidemiology, vol. 21, no. 4, 2010, pp. 454–458. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/25680573. Accessed February 19, 2020. Rothberg, Michael. “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York, London, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014, pp. xi–xviii. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Kindle Edition. New York, New York, Oxford UP. 1985. Scully, Pamela et al. “Conflict Profile: Liberia” Sept. 3, 2013. Women’s Media Center. www​.womensmediacenter​.com​/women​-under​-siege​/conflicts​/Liberia. Accessed June 10, 2020. “Sexually abused males are the neglected casualties of Liberia’s civil war.” New Scientist, vol. 199, no. 2669, 2008, p. 4. ScienceDirect, doi​.org​/10​.1016​/S0262​​ -4079(08)62017-5. Accessed March 8, 2015. Stark, Lindsay, and Alastair Ager. “A Systematic Review of Prevalence Studies of Gender-Based Violence in Complex Emergencies.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse,

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vol. 12, no. 3, July 2011, pp. 127–134, doi:10.1177/1524838011404252. Accessed November 3, 2018. Stark, Lindsay, et al. “Measuring the Incidence and Reporting of Violence Against Women and Girls in Liberia using the ‘Neighborhood Method’.” Conflict and Health, vol. 7, 2013. ProQuest, doi​.org​.ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/10​.1186​/1752​-​ 1505​-7​-20. Accessed November 3, 2018. Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge, New York, Cambridge UP, 1996. Toccket, Anne Marie. “Surviving the War and Living Again: A Conversation with Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.” Penn State News. November 7, 2005. news​.psu​.edu​/st​ory/ 141051/2005/11/02/research/surviving-war-and-living-again. Accessed January 6, 2015. United Nations, DESA-Population Division and UNICEF. “UNICEF Liberia Migration Profiles.” 2014. esa​.un​.​org/miggmgprofiles/indicators/files/Liberia​.pd​f. Accessed October 21, 2019. United Nations Mission in Liberia. An Assessment of Human Rights Issues Emanating from Harmful Traditional Practices in Liberia. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. December 2015. https://unmil​.unmissions​.org​/ sites​/default​/files​/report​_on​_harmful​_traditional​_practices​.pdf. Accessed August 10, 2020. United Nations, United Nations Development Program. United Nations Human Development Report 2019: Inequalities in Human Development in the 21st Century, p. 306. http://hdr​.undp​.org​/en​/content​/2019​-human​-development​-index​ -ranking. Accessed November 15, 2019. U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. U.S. Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 2002 – Liberia, 10 Jun. 2000. The UN Refugee Agency. www​ .refworld​.orgcgi-bintexisvtxrwmain?page=printdoc&docid=3d04c1357. Accessed October 21, 2019. United States Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2019. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. /www​.state​.gov​/reports​/2019​ -country​-reports​-on​-human​-rights​-practices​/liberia/. Accessed September 3, 2020 Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. 2nd ed. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, David I Kertzer. Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 2019. Vesely-Flad, Ethan. “Healing Trauma and Stopping the Cycle of Violence: Fellowship interviews Abel Learwellie.” Fellowship. 77: 4-6 (Summer 2012), pp. 18-21. ProQuest, http://ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/login​?url​=https:/​/search​ -proquest​-com​.ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/docview​/1002684809​?accountid​=13158. Accessed August 20, 2015. Wells, Randy. “After All the Flame,” IUP magazine. Winter-Spring 2004. Nov. 16, 2012. Wesley, Patricia Jabbeh. When the Wanderers Come Home. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. ———. “Where Have All the Years Gone?” Black Renaissance 13.1 (2013), pp. 86–91. ProQuest, http://ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/login​?url​=https:/​/search​

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-proquest​-com​.ezaccess​.libraries​.psu​.edu​/docview​/1365661442​?accountid​=13158. Accessed April 20, 2015. ———. Where the Road Turns. Autumn House Press, Pittsburg, PA, 2010. Wiltz, Teresa. “Rape Counseling for an Entire Nation.” The Root. Dec. 9 2010. www​ .theroot​.com​/rape​-counseling​-for​-an​-entire​-nation​-1790881933. Accessed March 15, 2015.

Chapter 11

Mobility and Shame The Refugee and the Terrorist in Mohsin Hamid and Jhumpa Lahiri Neela Cathelain

In this chapter, which focuses on works by Mohsin Hamid and Jhumpa Lahiri, I will explore the particularity of the figures of the refugee and the terrorist in relation to the affect of shame, mobility, and the novel form. Following my contention that mobility and shame are both characteristic of the novel form, I argue that the novels under study, which put forward the liminal figures of the refugee and the terrorist, experiment with characters who extract themselves from shame through extreme forms of physical or metaphorical mobility. I will be analyzing three novels: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is the story of Changez, the first-person narrator who came back to Pakistan after going to Princeton, working in the United States and enduring the changes that 9/11 and its aftermath ignited in American society. His latest novel, Exit West (2017), is about two refugees, Saeed and Nadia, who find themselves fleeing to the West through magical doors that open on Greece and the United States. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) is the story of two Bengali brothers, Subhash and Udayan. Subhash leaves India and moves to Rhode Island to pursue a PhD while his brother joins the revolutionary Naxalite movement and dies in violent circumstances that remain mysterious until the end of the novel. His pregnant widow, Gauri, is taken back to the United States by Subhash, who marries her, but she soon abandons him and her daughter Bela. If shame is, as Timothy Bewes argues, “an experience of the dissolution of the consolation of forms” (Bewes 46), it could be defined as the experience of the incommensurable, the self-conscious experience of one’s inadequate positioning, of the misalignment of the self, and of being both subject and object. In Eve Sedgwick’s Shame and its Sisters, Tomkins suggests 207

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“that the pulsations of cathexis around shame, of all things, are what either enable or disenable so basic a function as the ability to be interested in the world” (Tomkins in Sedgwick 5). While shame can indeed result in stasis or paralysis, it can also lead to further displacement and to forms of escape and resistance: shame is the motivation, the activation of the narrative itself, and acts as the primal disorientation which impels the protagonist to extract themselves from their problematic situation or situatedness. Indeed, the premise of this chapter is the inextricable link between the novel form and the two narrative strands of the picaresque and the Bildungsroman. Both are centered around what Lukács describes as the evolution of a protagonist in a disenchanted world and negotiate their acculturation, normalization, as well as their contestation of the established social order—in other words, both engage with a formation (Bildung) which contains the seeds of its own failure, a search for values (as Lukács argues1) that engages incommensurable scales. Recent works have emphasized how the narrative failure of Bildung is inherent, rather than marginal, to the Bildungsroman.2 While the novel form has evolved from the particularities of narratives focused on the picaro or the Bildungsheld, I claim that their overall structure is the paradigm of the novel; and if shame is the affect of transgression, intimate yet public, individual yet social, what Sara Ahmed calls “the double play of exposure and concealment” (Ahmed 104), I identify it as the central affect of the novel form, an affect which moves from the protagonist to the text as a whole. Indeed, the affect of shame can move across bodies and become more than a mere internal psychological condition, as Deleuze emphasized in Critique et clinique—this dimension is, more largely, an important aspect of the definition of affect.3 Tomkins’s emphasis on “the strange rather than the prohibited” and his observation that shame appears before the infant has any “concept of prohibition” (Tomkins in Sedgwick 5) place shame outside of the realm of culture. Indeed, the type of shame I am discussing here has more to do with the subject’s interest and investment in the world than with honor or guilt (which attaches to a specific object): I am articulating shame around narrative structures and mobility rather than cultural prohibition. However, I acknowledge that a cultural understanding of shame has to be taken into account in texts that engage with postcolonial questions—national belonging, relation to the former colonizers, rejection or reclamation of their codes and languages, and so on. A novel like Rushdie’s Shame is thus purposely immersed into this multifaceted, contagious affect as it relates to national, religious, and postcolonial identity: in a Pakistan obsessed with honor and authenticity, shame is the paralyzing affect that sustains national identity and breeds violence. Shame, in this particular instance where it is appropriated and shaped by identitarian, nationalist ideals (and thus drastically repurposed as

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an indiscriminating political tool), generates stasis and melancholic cathexis rather than mobility. What is the relation between the mobility on which the novel hinges (since its picaresque roots and Bildungsroman developments) and the particular forms of migration and displacement which Lahiri and Hamid explore? Mobility is a broader concept that encompasses migration, that is, the displacement of the body which can induce either shame of one’s contingent embodiment, or loss of shame as the recognition that other becomings (“devenirs” in French) are possible. But mobility is not just physical: geographically static subjects can thus experience a form of mobility. This is why I interpret the figures of the refugee and of the terrorist as they are (tentatively) constructed by Hamid and Lahiri as characterized by the extreme mobility of the self, its concomitant unveiling and scattering. If shame can disable interest in the world, the loss of shame can also lead to desubjectivation—that is, to the dissolution of the (narratively constructed) subject, or its descent into madness/psychosis. In that sense, those novels are taking up and renewing the problems of shame and sensibility which are key to character construction and to its failure, and were prominent diegetic and stylistic features of the early Anglophone novel.4 Beyond theories of the novel and affect theory, I am rooting this analysis in Foucault’s exploration of shamelessness, exposure and the ethics of truth. In Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France, what he applies to modern art in general, which he defines as “the vehicle of cynicism in the modern world” (Foucault 188), is an ethics of truth that does not gesture toward a form of transcendence or a set of norms. Truth is the process of unveiling, which, in turn, constitutes an ethics as the relation of the self to the self—the Cynics transform this process into a shameless scandal. For Foucault, art is the site of irruption of what is underneath, of what has no possibility of expression. The Cynics thus define the unconcealed life as “the life which does not make one blush because one has nothing to be ashamed of” (251): they dramatize the principle of non-concealment, turning it into shameless life, life in anaideia (the brazen life), an other life (une vie autre) (255). Foucault goes further by interpreting revolutionary movements as “bearing witness by one’s life in the form of a style of existence” and defining “terrorism as practice of life taken to the point of dying for the truth” (184–5). The refugee and the terrorist thus offer two different modalities of the immanent, unconcealed life that Foucault envisions as a vestige of the Cynics. If, as I argue, Hamid’s and Lahiri’s novels participate in this scandal of truth by portraying characters that resist or lose shame in different ways, those characters expose or conceal themselves according to a logic that leads them to either attempt to discard shame altogether, or to recuperate it as self-incarnation, self-fashioning.

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SHAME AND THE FIGURE OF THE REFUGEE According to Edward Said in Reflections on Exile, the notion of “exile” was crucial in the development of modern Western culture. However, “against this large, impersonal setting” of the “age of the refugee,” “exile cannot be made to serve notions of humanism. One must set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created” (Said 39). Thinking about global migration and opposing it to a romanticized, cosmopolitan Western account of exile is a change in scale which implies a completely different, “impersonal” conceptualization of migration—the opposition between famous writers in “exile” and the migrating “masses” is particularly telling. I nevertheless argue, against Said, that the figure of the refugee (insofar as we can find it (re)constituted in novelistic fiction) introduces a difference in degree, not in kind. The narrator in Hamid’s Exit West seems to go even further in the theorization of migration as a universal, structural phenomenon, encompassing physical and literal, spatial and temporal migrations, by observing: “We are all migrants through time” (Hamid 2017, 209). A striking feature in Hamid’s novels is the tension between subjectivation, the character being constituted as a singular psychological and fleshed-out entity, and the character becoming other, turning into an anonymous/depersonalized figure. While this speaks to Hamid’s investment in showing migration as a universal phenomenon, this tension is particularly interesting when we consider the various ways in which the figure of the refugee is constructed in Exit West. Saeed and Nadia, first come across bodies (of the unknown masses) that arrest the gaze and become an obstacle to movement: Some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life. . . . Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting. Possibly dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making turns not to run over an outstretched arm or leg. (Hamid 2017, 26)

The description moves from a typology of different groups, punctuated by the repetitive rhythm of “some, others, others,” to the mention of mere limbs in the protagonists’ path. The refugee thus becomes a body devoid of shame because it is already completely exposed and vulnerable, hyper-visible (as a material body) to the point of invisibility (as a human subject). What Saeed and Nadia experience is what Marielle Macé calls “sidération” in Sidérer, considérer: migrants en France en 2017. “Sidération” is a state where the mind freezes and turns what is seen into something monstrous: here, the refugees’

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shame of being exposed has morphed into Saeed and Nadia’s own shame of seeing the obscene. The refugee is made obvious (in the etymological sense) as it literally makes the characters deviate from their path. The refugees are shown as shameless: it is the refugees’ exposure (both in the sense of becoming a spectacle and of being at the mercy of the elements) that has made them lose shame. In other words, as their precarious living conditions destabilize the boundaries between public and private space, shame itself loses its usual currency. In a related way, we later discover the particularity of the refugee crisis when it comes to shame: “[Saeed suspected] that they were ashamed, and that they did not yet know that shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular shame in being ashamed” (Hamid 2017, 184). This passage implies that shame loses its potency when it affects large groups rather than individuals—indeed, if shame becomes a “common feeling,” there is no one toward whom that shame can be directed. Rather than operating as a liberating resistance against the paralyzing affect of shame, shamelessness, for the refugees (or the “displaced”), functions as the loss of the right to feel shame, that is, the right to experience the full gamut of human emotions in a social, interpersonal setting. The main innovation of Exit West, compared to Hamid’s other novels, is the magic realism device of imagining portals that directly transport characters from one country (and one house) to another. This means that the narrative is focused on the notion of displacement, but not on the actual journey—the characters are in one place, then suddenly in another, and we lose the progression of migration. The emphasis on the shock of displacement, on the shift as the aftermath, insists on the “indecent” disruption that Macé talks about, which has to do with the juxtaposition of spaces that should not communicate—an experience of misalignment that I link to the affect of shame. In the novel, this indecency parallels the arrival in a domestic space, and a feeling of voyeurism and intrusion. The characters never experience the limit as a zone that might be inhabited or organized, but only as an uncomfortable, shameful break. Hamid and Macé are both interested in the idea of indecency, of a wound or tear in the social fabric: Hamid’s magic realism thus captures the profound shame of being misaligned, displaced. Shame can thus be characterized as a fall, a vertigo, the revelation of an unbearable truth. From this, we may infer that the key moment of exposure in the novel is not the more spectacular representation of the refugees’ objectivized bodies blocking Saeed and Nadia’s path, but Saeed’s own intimate experience of otherness as alienness, as irreducible to his own experience as a refugee, and therefore his experience of himself as alien. The shame felt by Saeed when he is observed and physically touched by foreigners is linked to his incapacity to respond in that moment to the gaze of others because he cannot situate himself in relation to them—the loss of reassuring coordinates is perceived as a

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violation: “This touched upon something basic, something tribal, and evoked tension and a sort of suppressed fear. He was uncertain when he could relax, if he could relax, and so when he was outside his bedroom but inside the house he seldom felt fully at ease” (Hamid 2017, 149). In ‘“What it feels like to be an other’: Imaginations of Displacement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction,” Eva Menger emphasizes the idea of “cognitive estrangement” at play in the novel, a term coined by Darko Suvin in 1979 to analyze science fiction (or speculative fiction) texts. However, this passage shows that the estrangement is not really cognitive: this experience is described in bodily terms and calls to mind a Tomkinsian understanding of affect rather than a cognitive process which would rather engage knowledge, conceptualization, and understanding. In her article “Taking Place and Finding One’s Place: Unhomely Events in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017),” Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot focuses on “the event as an uncanny chronotope” (7): “In both novels, the notion of home is re-evaluated along the plot, and its meaning regularly shifts” (9). But, for Saeed, the opposition is not between the home and the homely: as we see in the passage quoted earlier, the home itself is divided. Beyond the experience of the uncanny, the experience of shame seems primordial, ontological, and leads him to retract and conceal himself in the intimate space of the bedroom. A similar type of disorientation related to displacement can be found in Lahiri’s novel, when Subhash (who moves to the United States) reflects on his relation to the country where he has exiled himself. For instance, when he comes back to the house where he first lived in Rhode Island, he finds it “disquieting,” as if “his presence on earth [were] being denied” (308). In both Hamid and Lahiri, we thus find moments of extreme disorientation linked to a dialectic of concealment and exposure. As we have seen earlier, the obscenity of the refugees whom Saeed and Nadia encounter before leaving is already being staged, put forward, organized into a reality that makes sense (the refugees’ tentative creation of a makeshift world that mimics and temporarily replaces the one they have lost). But unlike Macé who turns to the shift from “sidération” to “considération” (regard, thoughtfulness), that is, to the attentive, poetic reorganization of a disrupted world, I would rather take another look at the obscenity of Saeed’s encounter—an encounter which slips beyond ordinary visibility, a stripping away that engenders no narrative, that pushes beyond narratives and beyond answers. What could be understood as an ethical turn in contemporary philosophy, in the context of the refugee crisis, with Macé but also Guillaume Le Blanc and Fabienne Brugère’s book La Fin de l’hospitalité, focuses on a shift in perception which privileges attention, welcoming, hospitality, and which parallels a Deleuzian ethical framework: the shame of seeing should awaken a turn toward other becomings. If we think of shame as an experience of self-conscious disorientation and suspension,

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we may indeed argue that the novel form offers the ethical potential of a shift in perception, a reorganization of the world after shame. However, is there an ethics of the novel that, indeed, enables the reader/author/characters to resist, evade, or destroy shame? While I find the hypothesis of shame as an ethical form of suspension seductive, I would like to trouble this optimistic reversal of shame and suggest that what the novel provides is rather the glimpse of something unbearable in the constitution of the subject to which the novel form has, since its inception, been associated. What the figure of the refugee puts forward in a new, potentially troubling way is the obscene, the overexposure that Agamben famously analyzed as “bare life” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The novel form enacts, in various ways, a stripping away, a reduction, an exposure of the flesh. According to Mary Bryden’s analysis of Deleuze: Deleuze describes Lawrence’s degraded and tortured body not in some Kristevan sense as inhabiting the zone of the abject, attracting disgust through the transgression of boundaries, but rather acting as a focus for the fascinated spirit. In these conditions, where the body is mired and muddied in a prefiguring of its own disintegration, the spirit glimpses the security of an end point. The spirit leans over the body: shame would be nothing without this leaning, this attraction towards the abject, this voyeurism of the spirit. (Bryden 21)

In that sense, Hamid’s novel refuses to show the refugee as the abject, but points to this leaning, this unbearable voyeurism within one’s psyche. The refugee is not constructed as the abject, which could be understood as the threatening other, the other side of the subject. The refugee, through the experience of exposure, participates in an ethics of truth, a form of ethics that engages with pure otherness (by recognizing its impossible conceptualization) rather than reproduces the dialectic of the same. SHAME AND THE FIGURE OF THE TERRORIST As we have seen in the first section, Exit West primarily departs from the typical novelistic journey of formation insofar as it does not present an explicit search for social mobility, financial success, or for self-betterment: what literally moves those characters has more to do with immediate survival. In contrast, The Reluctant Fundamentalist more closely adheres to the Bildungsroman archetype, as Changez rises and embodies social success. However, as always in Hamid’s work, this very trajectory is overturned. Indeed, the novel does not constitute a failure of Bildung: it is rather a complete reversal, as post-9/11 America itself becomes a shameful body

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instead of remaining the idealized land of promise which the immigrant seeks. This is where the affect of shame departs from the psychological subject5—Changez’s girlfriend Erica mediates or embodies post-9/11 American shame. The nation is allegorized and personified by Erica, who is described by Renee Lee Gardner as “a shame-filled and apologetic America”: Erica carries the shame of her country, which Gardner links to Butler’s idea of “dislocation from First World privilege,” through her “self-abnegation” and suicide (Gardner 110). Shame understood as the loss of honor, as disgrace, attaches to Erica, while Changez faces what I have called ontological shame earlier—a state of self-conscious disorientation, of uncertain identification, the type of shame which I have identified as motivating narrative. But through his first-person narrative and his increasingly disembodied, unreliable persona, Changez gradually moves toward shamelessness: after his Bildung, which takes the shape of Westernization, goes awry, Changez’s psychology and sensibility are obscured, blurred, as well as his (potential) turn to fundamentalism. This resistance to shame produces shame on the stylistic level, which is marked by the “double play of exposure and concealment” characteristic of that affect. Indeed, the uncertainty of Changez’s position is projected onto the ambiguity of the first-person narrative: his formal, courteous, almost obsequious diction is both the speech of the acculturated, sophisticated assimilé and the ironic mask put on by the West’s most disillusioned victim. This seemingly monologic novel not only is constantly shifting between voices, between shades of reliability; but it also functions as an exposure of the self that paradoxically implies a greater likelihood of obfuscation. It is this stylistic process of obfuscation that I am interested in with respects to the figure of the terrorist, in both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Lowland. If we follow Bewes’s terminology, the “event” of shame “arises precisely in the failure of thematization, representation, and location” and this differs from what he calls “instantiated shame,” which can be “thematized and located in a subject” (Bewes 188)—for instance, Erica, who is the incarnation of American shame. If we consider Baudrillard’s lens in “L’Esprit du terrorisme,” terrorism has to be understood on the side of the spectacular, of the power of the symbolic over the real, and blurs the line between fiction and reality. But in the novels, it is that very potential for spectacle which drains the characters of substance. Rather than insisting on the spectacle of violence, Hamid and Lahiri bury it, turn it into a failure (Udayan merely kills an innocent policeman), or into pure ambiguity (with the back-and-forth move between Changez and the American). In that process, Changez and Udayan become shadows rather than full-fledged characters. According to Madeline Clements, The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s narrator is a “monster, martyr, mimic or middleman apparently embodied by Hamid’s ‘Changez’,

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but given flesh by the apostrophised Western interlocutor and reader” (78). She develops Changez’s ambiguity, both as a novelistic character and as a terrorist—and we might infer that those two uncertainties feed off each other: “The ‘fundamentalist’ of his novel’s title remains unrepresented; like an empty signifier, Changez floats free. His are potential rather than actual affiliations; it is not possible to determine whether Changez is responsible for an act of Islamic terror, or to what extent he subscribes to a radical Islamist’s agenda” (Clements 78). Clements thus counters psychoanalytic and philosophical interventions and notes that reading Changez’s psychology is potentially misleading and dangerous, since it fails to take into account Hamid’s ambiguous fictionalization (82), that is, the possibility that the text yields no coherent psychological profile. Similarly, Mullan (2011) showed Changez’s ability to change “fundamentally” when seen from different perspectives. Changez is therefore a text which resists interpretation and reading. Rather that delving into the psychology of the character, the narrative thus takes us away from him. Changez becomes a shameless figure as he shames his interlocutor, taunts him, makes him uncomfortable, and plays with his cultural assumptions: the locus of shame is purposely displaced by the narrator. A similar point is made by Monica Chiu, who calls “this narrative turn a reverse specularity in which the assumed object of the gaze (Changez, the Other, the post-9/11 Middle Eastern-looking bearded man) strategically demands that the reader scrutinize herself” (113). This creates a shift as “[t]he novel thus nurtures the narratee’s compassion for a man who has pulled himself up by his metaphorical bootstraps” but is eventually alienated from the protagonist (Chiu 114–115). In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Udayan’s execution, although it is not an act of terroristic sacrifice per se, nevertheless obeys a logic of revolutionary action leading to an inevitable death, a practice of brazen, shameless life as Foucault defined it, which takes that very life to its limits: the terrorist figures a complete loss of shame, and a turn toward pure motion. Udayan’s death is thus scattered throughout the novel in the form of an unspoken secret; his death is the displaced, unspeakable center of the novel. We see here that the repercussions of terrorism are a disseminated terror that travels across continents and leads to further forms of displacement: terror is an affect derived from shame, from the dislocation of the self that creates more dislocation. On the level of character construction, the terrorist functions as a failure of narrative and a failure of character in both novels: if Changez can initially be read and recognized as the hero in a Bildungsroman, his potential status as a terrorist remains unclear; if Udayan haunts The Lowland, his presence in the pages is rare and we are given no access to his psychology. They are both shadows, traces, puzzles.

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Contrary to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Lowland is a third-person narrative shifting between characters: Udayan has to be read through his widow Gauri, the complicit partner and the one who remains behind. Gauri is no conventional diasporic widow and is by no means an innocent bystander: she played a part in her husband’s terrorist plot, which caused a man’s death. Her implication is key in the economy of the novel, since it is revealed at the end and sheds light on the mysterious events that led to Udayan’s demise—but, more importantly, because Gauri is constructed as the reluctant trace of her husband’s actions, the silent accomplice. Gauri thus asks to be read as (and in relation to) the figure of the terrorist. She is a particularly ambiguous character because she is never allowed to completely embody the revolutionary activist, as Udayan takes on that role fully, but also refuses to embody the grieving (or angry) widow, cultivating his memory through their daughter: “But her worst nemesis resided within her. She was not only ashamed of her feelings but also frightened that the final task Udayan had left her with, the long task of raising Bela, was not bringing meaning to her life” (Lahiri 196). Her horror at the idea of being cast in the role of parent is related to her desire to tame time, and her staunch refusal to become an Andromache-like figure and be trapped in either (or both) the past, with Udayan’s memory, or the future, with her child Bela. She thus refuses both the logic of memory and grief, and what she calls the “logic of parenthood”: “Again, as it was after Udayan’s death, there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby’s lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood” (Lahiri 414). Udayan’s premature death forms “a grave in her mind’s eye” whereas the present is “a hole in her vision” (132). In that sense, having the present take over the past means engaging with the hole, with the void that can never be filled with projections from the past or the future—the projections that constitute “her mind’s eye,” which precedes and obliterates the act of seeing by imposing pre-established significations on what is about to be seen: Only the present moment, lacking any perspective, eluded her grasp. It was like a blind spot, just over her shoulder. A hole in her vision. But the future was visible, unspooling incrementally. She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. (Lahiri 132)

Gauri attempts to dissociate herself from the linearity of time, and from space as a sedimentation of history. This bears an interesting resemblance to the act of destructive terror as inaugurating a break in time, opening a void

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in the present to create another time, another future. This point is made by Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, especially in Thesis XV, where he recounts that, during the July Revolution, several clock-towers were shot at: “The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action” (Benjamin 1974). Gauri’s obsession with taming time, destroying its linearity, could thus be read as a revolutionary act taken beyond the moment of action, into a philosophy and a stylization of her own life. Gauri, however, does not die: she pushes forward, leaving her second husband and newborn daughter, going further West in a form of what Edouard Glissant would call “nomadisme en flèche” (Glissant 30)—the type of nomadism linked to conquests and invasions. It is quite significant that she chooses to flee to California, which she associates to barrenness, purity and silence. Her obsession with time and the future and her horror of reproduction reflect the annihilation of the terrorist act, as does her gradual self-refashioning into a monk-like figure, shedding her saris and chopping off her hair, figuratively shedding her skin, becoming more and more unreadable precisely as she exposes herself: Her hair hung bluntly along her jawbone, dramatically altering her face. She was wearing slacks and a gray sweater. The clothes covered her skin, but they accentuated the contours of her breasts, the firm swell of her stomach. The shape of her thighs. He drew his eyes away from her, though already a vision had entered, of her breasts, exposed. (Lahiri 168–169)

This passage, before she leaves Subhash and Bela, emphasizes the disturbing aspect or her attire, drawing attention to the shape of her body—the projected neutrality of her clothes and severe haircut thus paradoxically eroticizes her by suggesting both nudity and mystery. The reader therefore has very little access to her thought process, but is turned into a witness of the leaning of her spirit toward the body. On a more general level, both The Lowland and The Reluctant Fundamentalist depict characters who have lost their own narratives—but while Gauri’s life remains beholden and subordinated to Udayan’s death, Changez is the character who attempts a movement of reappropriation, but through an ironic, cynical posture, which opens the text to contradictory interpretations, starting with the title. In Lahiri’s novel, the characters’ misaligned relation to their own narratives translates as silence and obsession migrating from character to narrator, an endless alternation between concealment and exposure. Subhash, Udayan, Gauri, and Bela are all silent characters, haunted by the shadows of those they cannot be like and/or with; in that sense, their experience of disorientation and inadequacy parallels their self-imposed mobility. Subhash lives in the

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shadow of his brother, which is made very explicit from the beginning of the novel: “Subhash was thirteen, older by fifteen months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there” (Lahiri 7). Bela, the daughter of terrorists, is described as a torn character, wandering on a highway as a child, unsure of where she should stand—but as she grows up, she grounds herself more firmly on the earth by working on farms and is described as changed, as if she had been claimed by the soil: “When she came home on weekends he saw that the shape and texture of her hands were being altered by the demands of her labor. He noticed calluses on her palms, dirt beneath her nails. Her skin smelled of soil. The back of her neck and her shoulders, her face, turned a deeper brown” (Lahiri 270). We thus see her as haunted by her absent mother and her more absent father, as she slowly becomes another Udayan, albeit a non-revolutionary, non-political one, choosing the country over the city, instability over family, poverty over comfort. By anchoring herself within a particular land, Bela thus offers a new model of simultaneous mobility (escaping her family and moving between states and farms) and immobility (being grounded, in harmony with the earth), which captures the ambivalent roots of second-generation immigrants. In those novels, the refugee and the terrorist are at the center of the narrative, but they are also characterized by their liminality, specifically in the sense that they signal where the novel reaches its structural limits—characters who are either constructed (the refugee) or construct themselves (the terrorist) as pure surface. I argue that those figures show the experience of shame can lead to an exacerbation of sensibility, an intensity of life felt through the vibrancy of the flesh, but can also lead to one wasting away, to withdrawal and concealment of the flesh. Novel protagonists therefore exist (or take on literary consistency) only as they embrace shame as life and evade shame as death. The two figures on which I have focused take this oscillation to its extreme, as the refugee may come to envision shame as reincarnation, a defense against forced exposure, while the terrorist embodies shamelessness until, or as death. But we may also consider the revolutionary act as the incarnation of a truth that disincarnates the character, and therefore as the ultimate act of creation (not of production, but relating to aesthetics, to the stylistics of existence), an act of jouissance opening a breach and allowing for the affirmation of life unto death.

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NOTES 1. Georg Lukács. The Theory of the Novel (1920). 2. For instance, see Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of SelfFashioning by Aleksandar Stević (April 2020). 3. “Affect is not a thing but rather refers to processes of life and vitality which circulate and pass between bodies and which are difficult to capture or study in any conventional methodological sense” (Blackman 4). 4. See Wendy Lee, for instance, who claims that “[i]nsensibility seems to express the philosophical problem of narrative” (1) in Failures of Feeling. 5. The affect of shame thus shows its ability to expand beyond the subject, a characteristic which is key to theories of affect, which reject “the theories of subjectivity” (Blackman 21). It is important to note, however, that my analysis places those novels in relation to theories of the novel, and relies on the premise that the novel form, in its European and Anglophone instantiation, is always centered on the construction of the human subject and on the question of identity. Examining the porosity of the notion of subject and the expansion of affect beyond its bounds thus does not imply a complete “rejection of the need for theories of subjectivity” (ibid.), since those theories are at the core of the novel form itself.

WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Redwood City, Stanford UP, 1998. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2004. Abingdon, Routledge, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. “L’Esprit du terrorisme.” Le Monde​.fr​, March 6, 2007. www​.lemonde​.fr​/disparitions​/article​/2007​/03​/06​/l​-esprit​-du​-terrorisme- par​-jean​-baudrillard​ _879920​_3382​​.html. Accessed December 10, 2019. Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History. 1974. Translated by Dennis Redmond, 2005. https://www​.marxists​.org​/reference​/archive​/benjamin​/1940​/history​.htm. Accessed December 10, 2019. Blackman, Lisa. Immaterial Studies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. London, Sage, 2012. Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, Princeton UP, 2010. Bryden, Mary. Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Chiu, Monica. “Double Surveillance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” Scrutinized! Surveillance in Asian North American Literature. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Clements, Madeline. Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et clinique. Paris, Edition de Minuit, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II). Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.

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Gardner, Renee Lee. “Suicide as an Invocation of Shame in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic. Edited by Myra Mendible, Bloomington, Indiana UP, 2016. Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la Relation. Paris, Gallimard, 1990. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London, Hamish Hamilton, 2007. ———. Exit West. London, Hamish Hamilton, 2017. Jeanniard du Dot, Maëlle. “Taking Place and Finding One’s Place: Unhomely Events in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017),” Sillages critiques. December 25, 2019. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. 2013. New York, Vintage Books, 2014. Le Blanc, Guillaume, and Fabienne Brugère. La Fin de l’hospitalité. Paris, Flammarion, 2017. Lee, Wendy. Failures of Feeling. Redwood City, Stanford UP, 2019. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. 1920. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1971. Macé, Marielle. Sidérer, considérer: migrants en France en 2017. Lagrasse, Verdier, 2017. Menger, Eva. ‘“What it feels like to be an other’: Imaginations of Displacement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction.” Studies in Arts and Humanities, vol. 04, issue 02, 2018. Mullan, J. (2011) “Guardian Book Club: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid: Week Four: Readers’ Responses,” The Guardian, May 21, 2011. [Online] https://amp​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2011​/may​/07​/reluctant​-fundamentalist​-mohsin​ -hamid​-club. Accessed December 10, 2019. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2000. Sedgwick, Eve and Adam Frank, editors. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, Duke UP, 1995. Stević, Aleksandar. Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of SelfFashioning. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Chapter 12

Impossible Journey Home From Compliant to Resistant Bodies, an Analysis of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire Sandrine Soukaï

He wants to come home. He wants me to bring him home, even in the form of a shell. (Shamsie, 196)

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Home Fire (2017), British Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie’s seventh novel is a “post-9/11 Antigone” (Chambers 208). Issues of displacement, migration, uprootedness, sense of belonging, and the problematic definition of home are common concerns of diasporic and of post-9/11 literatures. “The genre of post 9/11 novel” has been developing over the past decade, notably among (diasporic) South Asians, Americans, and British.1 Home Fire adapts the Greek tragedy to the spread of the War on Terror in the UK in the wake of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks. Shamsie’s rewriting of Sophocles’s play centers on the increasingly precarious status of Muslims marked by reinforced airports security checks, travel restrictions, passport confiscations, and the threat of British citizenship withdrawal. This threat refers to Theresa May’s 2014 attempts at curbing citizenship rights through new anti-immigration and anti-terrorist laws (Shaheen, Qamar and Islam 161–162). Travel and mobility also structure the novel whose protagonists are migrants or descendants of migrants. The plot focuses on two British families of Pakistani origin, the lower middle-class Pashas (a trio of orphaned siblings, the twins, Aneeka and Parvaiz, brought up by their elder sister, Isma) and the upper-class Lones (Karamat Lone, the British Home Secretary; his rich American Irish wife, Terry; their carefree son, Eamonn and their overachieving daughter, Emily). While both families primarily follow opposite social 221

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trajectories, their destinies intersect and intertwine as the narrative unravels through a “matryoshka technique” that encases five sections.2 Each gives voice, in turn, to the protagonists named after their Greek counterparts: Isma (Ismene), Eamonn (Haemon), Parvaiz (Polyneices), Aneeka (Antigone), and Karamat (Creon). The narrative navigates the readers across five locations: London; Amherst, Massachusetts; Istanbul; Raqqa, Syria; and Karachi, Pakistan. As such “the novel’s structure echoes the five acts of a Western drama” (Sethulekshmi 72), though Shamsie herself asserted this was coincidental as she worked freely through several rewritings of the original.3 While Antigone privileged obedience to the laws of the gods over the law of men, in Home Fire, loyalty to the British state is pitted against a justice based on family love. After leaving London to join the media branch of ISIS in Raqqa (Syria), nineteen-year-old Parvaiz Pasha is killed in Istanbul before being able to return home. He is then stripped of his British citizenship and his body remains in Karachi as he is denied burial in the UK. The story moves from Aneeka’s elaborate plan to get him home when he is still alive to her desperately defiant plea to the British Prime Minister to obtain the repatriation of the body. Shamsie’s adaptation of Antigone to the challenges faced by migrants and their descendants in postcolonial societies is not unique. Seamus Heaney’s 2004 play, The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone, denounced both the Bush administration’s War on Terror and British colonial oppression of Ireland. Among the Greek classics transposed by postcolonial writers, Antigone has proven particularly attractive, as testified by some African adaptations for the stage,4 or the London verbatim stage performance Another World by Gillian Slovo to whom Shamsie dedicates her novel.5 Postcolonial rewriting of the Western canon often relies simultaneously on imitation and subversion.6 Yet, Home Fire reverses the ongoing center-periphery power relationships between the British metropolis and its former South Asian colonies in a very innovative way. The narrative takes the readers on journeys through time and space so as to connect the contemporary burning issue of homegrown radicalization to the lingering impacts of historical British and American imperialist policies, notably in South Asia and the Middle East. This chapter will first discuss how thanks to a delayed and partial narration of events articulated through a jumbled timeline, the novel problematizes physical and metaphorical mobility for two of its overlapping figures, the terrorist and the migrant (or descendant of migrants). The analysis will then move on to demonstrate that while the diegesis climaxes in a psychologically and somatically traumatic impossible “return home,” the narrative still takes readers across yet-unexplored borders by calling for a “thanatic ethics”7 that elicits their own “implication” in,8 or collective responsibility for, the current social and political crisis of global terrorism.

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TRAVELING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WAR ON TERROR Controlled Bodies, Restricted Travels, and Mobility Real or imagined, willed or imposed, travels recur as pivotal moments in the novel. From its very onset, the narrative posits traveling as an embodied experience fraught with challenges, obstacles, and potential dangers. The story opens on an airport security check as Isma Pasha, about to board a plane for New York, is held back for a minute body and luggage inspection at Heathrow: “Isma was going to miss her flight. The ticket wouldn’t be refunded because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room” (1). At first, Isma seems to be interrogated merely for being a British Pakistani Muslim, and despite not bearing any distinctive physical sign that might betray her, no Quran, no hijab, not even a trace of her research interests (later revealed as the “sociological impact of the War on Terror,” 39). Recounted from Isma’s perspective in free indirect speech and through internal focalization, the narrative progressively unveils hints indicating that this interrogation is less gratuitous than it seems. This scene exemplifies a technique used throughout the novel: partial and progressive disclosure of information. Two narrative choices produce that effect. First, each of the five sections is filtered through the inevitably limited viewpoint of a focalizer. Secondly, the timeline is nonlinear and constantly moves forward and backward in time and through space. The readers find out about the meaning behind the interrogation scene through a discontinued series of flashbacks which interrupt the narrative present only to reveal limited information. The first hint given by the acerbic interior monologue is that Isma had anticipated the interrogation and had prepared her answers. The interior monologue conveys the absurdity of the whole process as the carefully phrased answers Isma gives to the customs officer are pinned against those she had rehearsed with Aneeka. Amid the eclectic list of questions, the irrelevance of a cooking TV program is highlighted in italics: “He wanted to know her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, the Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites” (5). This question echoes the infamous “Norman Tebbit’s cricket test” which,9 in an interview on her novel, Shamsie proudly declared failing every year.10 Here, however, the protagonist is forced to comply and perform the role of a model citizen. “Performing” is indeed what Isma does as her body language is under scrutiny. The tiniest wrong facial expression or move could make her fall under further suspicion. The importance of physical appearance is underlined as Isma is suspected of being a thief by a female control officer

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for having an expensive-looking jacket, which eventually turns out to be a former customer’s hand-me-down. Nonetheless, while Isma’s performance suggests she has given in to the pressure exercised by the control officers, she ultimately clears the interrogation thanks to her ability to remain in control of her body language. The explanation for the interrogation unravels much later, and enigmatically, as it appears Isma’s younger brother has left his UK family home and he now scarcely keeps in touch with his twin, Aneeka, via Skype messages: “she [Isma] looked at her brother’s name. She hadn’t seen it here since that day in December when he’d called to tell them the decision he’d made without any consideration of what it would mean for his sisters” (10–11). The Pasha siblings’ physical mobility is so constrained that they cannot meet freely, but thanks to technologies, such as the phone or Skype, communication still flows, however sporadically, in what Arjun Appadurai called a “technoscape” (Appadurai 297–298). The term has also been used in mobility studies. For instance, Sheller and Urry point that “contemporary landscapes are shot through with technological elements which enrol people, space, and the elements connecting people and spaces, into socio-technical assemblages . . . but also the informational technologies such as signs, schedules, surveillance systems, radio signals, and mobile telephony” (9). Parvaiz’s Skype messages keep him connected to Aneeka and his UK home. Nonetheless, disseminated clues indicate that his departure from home could lead to permanent separation: “Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost for ever” (12). Parvaiz’s destination is then suggested through the embedded narrative of Adil Pasha’s, their father’s, irrevocable departure. The circumstances of his disappearance are only uncovered in bits and pieces and no complete picture of what actually happened to him ever emerges. Adil’s story is related when Isma discloses to Eamonn that his father, a MP, had refused to help look for information about her father when the latter was reported to have died on his way to Guantanamo where he was being transported to after being detained in a torture camp in Bagram for two years on terrorist charges. Further elements are postponed to the third section of the novel, narrated through Parvaiz’s eyes. For Isma and Aneeka, Adil was merely a threat hovering over the family as by deserting their home he became the reason they could be evicted: “my [Isma’s] father wasn’t yet a terrorist who could have us all driven out of our homes if any of us said the wrong thing to the wrong person” (93). For his children, Adil existed merely as a fugitive, erring shadow through a few pictures of his different journeys in Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, and so on, all showing him with a group of friends sporting Kalashnikovs. It is only then that the readers grasp the subtext of the opening scene and understand that Isma is being suspected of, both metaphorically and literally, following in

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the footsteps of her terrorist father and her recently radicalized brother, since Adil’s unexplained disappearance prompted Parvaiz’s journey to Raqqa only a few days prior to Isma’s departure for the United States. Through its nonlinear structure the novel subverts the inescapable causality of Greek tragedy while still providing a background contextualization to the radicalization of Parvaiz and its impacts on his whole family. The family story hinges on travels and departures, which either chosen, dictated by loyalty to community or family or, yet again, imposed by circumstances, mark an abrupt dislocation. Dis-location, as highlighted by the hyphen, breaks apart the family body and has lasting emotional but also corporeal impacts on both those who travel and those left behind. The Pasha family is dismembered from the onset due to Adil’s absence. In his absence, Isma is left to provide for the family and make arduous choices that ultimately lead to selling their home. Once the household no longer provides the safe haven it should, the very definition of home and sense of belonging is challenged. As demonstrated in mobility studies, movement and stillness are intricately linked.11 In the novel, the need to belong and to find new moorings call for corporeal mobility and the quest for a new home. Traveling Toward Another Home: A New Narrative Explanation to Radicalization The meaning of “home” is questioned in the very title of the novel, an echo to a famous First World War song “Keep the Home Fires Burning” by Lena Guilbert Ford which exhorted “the women left behind to keep up their houses and their spirits despite justifiable fears” (Chambers 210). Yet, as argued by Chambers, the title also reads as a warning that terrorism could imminently trigger a “deflagration” within the British nation itself. The two understandings of “home,” as family cocoon and nation-state, conflate in the narrative. Isma’s departure for the United States is marred by uprootedness since the Pasha children resolve to sell their family home. Parvaiz’s strong resistance to selling gives way to a feeling of abandonment and helplessness when he is betrayed by his twin, Aneeka, the one he had felt both emotionally and physically one with all his life. As Aneeka pushes for the sale a few days prior to Isma’s departure, Parvaiz is seen drifting away, literally and psychologically. He eventually finds a new refuge and sense of belonging in the company of the jihadi recruiter, Farooq. As the plot unfolds through Parvaiz’s recollection of the events, the portrayal of the young-man-turned-terrorist provides in-depth psychological, social, familial, and political contextualization as the author refuses to present Parvaiz as a “violent horrible man who goes off.”12 Inspired by a report on Islamization published by Charlie Winter, Shamsie highlights the sense of camaraderie fostered by recruiters.13 Parvaiz

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is approached by a young Muslim praising Adil Pasha’s acts of bravery as a jihadist. His exploits are recounted through a series of tales glorifying his many journeys to war zones where he put his body on the line to fight the enemy. Parvaiz is drawn to the idea of learning more about his father even if this would ultimately require heading to the Middle East. If finding out about his father might be the trigger to Parvaiz’s departure for Raqqa, the final push comes from his need for a place to belong. Farooq offers him an alternative ideal vision of home through a series of photographs replete with idyllic and bountiful landscapes populated by beaming faces. A long lecture on the equalitarian welfare state offered to fellow jihadists brings to life this faraway imaginary place. The two disturbing clichés which tarnish this golden promise land, one showing a dead child’s body and another capturing kneeling men about to be shot, are rapidly brushed aside. Still, Parvaiz only resolves to depart for Raqqa after experiencing, at Farooq’s hands, a second session of torture aimed at reproducing the “enhanced interrogating techniques” Bagram prisoners are known to have gone through. While he had unwillingly been subjected to torture before, Parvaiz decides to go through another session as if this somatic experience of pain could connect him with his dead father.14 Morally and physically exhausted, Parvaiz heads back to the Preston Road family home and texts Aneeka to please hurry home. Her failure to grasp the urgency in his plea leads her to decide to sleep at a friend’s place that night. Dejected and forsaken, Parvaiz decides to head to Raqqa, seduced at the idea of finding there a sense of brotherhood and asserting his virility. As he adopts Farooq as his family, English proves insufficient to convey the depth of this newfound bond and he turns to Urdu: “his yaar. . . . The Urdu word came closer than ‘friend’ to explaining how he thought of Farooq. Or even better, jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound” (134). Parvaiz had lived all his life in perfect symbiosis with Aneeka. Once the latter distances herself, Parvaiz “allow[s] the wound to fester” to “receive the antiseptic” from Farooq (133). Yet, in a tragic foreshadowing, the Urdu phrase “jigari dost” announces the fatal end: Parvaiz suffers a deadly wound at Farooq’s hands when he later decides to cut his ties with ISIS and return to the UK. Though modeled on a tragedy whose end is foretold, the narrative includes twists and turns that challenge determinism thus pointing to the multi-layered factors that can drive an individual to radicalize. Any of the incidents in the line-up of events that finally pushes Parvaiz out of his family home, out of the UK and to the ISIS media branch in Raqqa might have ended differently. Once he has resolved to leave, Parvaiz seems to inexorably head toward defeat and death. Yet, the narrative maintains suspense and hope throughout as his strong desire to come home and Aneeka’s earnest plans and constant

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pleas for him to return spread throughout sections three and four of the novel, respectively told from Parvaiz’s and Aneeka’s perspectives. “Returning home” becomes a narrative leitmotiv; the sentence is repeated multiple times, identically or with small variations, and through the use of diverse technologies: Skype messages, informal half-joking mobile texts, muffled tearful phone conversations. While the “technoscape” formed by these technologies ensures a connection is maintained between Parvaiz and his sister, it also simultaneously points to their inability to move and meet freely.

STATELESSNESS AND HOMELESSNESS: THE UNBURIED BODY AS A CIPHER OF INTERTWINED TRAUMAS AND INJUSTICES Impossible Return Home In the novel, returning home is dependent on the legal right to mobility. Parvaiz’s passport is confiscated by control officers once he reaches Raqqa. When trying to return to the UK, he has to rely on Aneeka’s elaborate plan. It involves her meeting him in Istanbul and obtaining, with Eamonn’s help, the British Home Secretary’s support for Parvaiz’s journey back. Ultimately, Aneeka’s passport is taken so she cannot go to Istanbul, and Eamonn’s efforts are cut short as his father will not tolerate his relationship with Aneeka. Yet, Aneeka’s and Eamonn’s failures are only revealed after Parvaiz’s death (in section four). Instead, the plot first leaps forward and backward in time through Parvaiz’s eyes (in section three) to convey his resolve and keep the possibility of a return home open. Section three starts in an Istanbul electronics shop six months after Parvaiz’s arrival in Raqqa, a scene which takes place only a few hours prior to his death. A flashback technique then takes the readers back to London, and Parvaiz’s motivations for leaving home, then the narrative rapidly fastforwards to his experience in Raqqa over the past months, before moving again back to Istanbul. These rapid shifts are further refracted within the plot which oscillates again several times between Raqqa, London, and Istanbul with, additionally, a jumbled timeline in each of these locations. The story’s fast traveling from one event, one time and one place to another mimes Parvaiz’s frantic run as he is fleeing from the clutches of ISIS. Parvaiz recalls confessing his vital need to escape to Aneeka during a phone conversation: “No, I just . . . I can’t stay here. I can’t do it. They’ve taken my passport so I have to but I can’t. I thought if I learnt the rules . . . but I can’t. I can’t. I just want to come home” (174).15 The repetitions and ellipses convey his panic and desperation. However, his ability to run away seems deeply compromised

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as his current prayer—“Tomorrow at this time he’d be back in Preston Road. Inshallah”—is immediately thwarted by a laconic death threat message, which is easily attributed to Farooq given the use of the affectionate nickname the latter had given Parvaiz: “You’re a dead man, my little warrior” (168). Taken on a dizzying roller-coaster ride of narrative shifts alternating between hope and despair, the readers are left as breathless as the running protagonist and they can almost experience somatically Parvaiz’s dread as death’s shadow draws closer. Parvaiz’s section ends with him bravely resolving to face the British Consulate in Istanbul and plead guilty if only to be given the right to go home: “I’m prepared to face trial if I’ve broken laws. Just let me go to London. But he was the terrorist son of a terrorist father. . . . He didn’t know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he had attached to his own heels” (171). The narrative stretches in opposite directions: Parvaiz’s fear is pitted against his determination to flee; his hopes for redemption are thwarted by his helplessness. Though he manages to head toward the Consulate, the demons clinging to his heels impede his mobility and suggest he might never escape his past and the place he is running from. Parvaiz’s death is paradoxically first unveiled through Aneeka’s fervent denial of the news: “he was on his way to her, the texts he had sent stuck somewhere in a foreign network; this happened sometimes, a logjam of communication unable to cross borders for hours or days at a time. . . . He was on his way to her, flying home, watching the stars from his window seat” (185). In Aneeka’s eyes, Parvaiz’s physical absence can only be attributed to a temporary glitch. This is not surprising as, so far, digital technologies had kept the twins connected and their private “technoscape” had seemingly bypassed the British high surveillance systems. Ultimately, Parvaiz’s death is given substance through the set of mobile data provided by various media. Stylistically, section four is the most ambitious of the novel as it combines various texts and media (TV interview transcripts, tabloid and broadsheet reports, tweets and poetry) whose content is transcribed in distinctive typographies, fonts, and styles that give body to what Appadurai termed “mediascapes”: “Mediascapes” . . . refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information . . . and to the images of the world created by these media . . . . [T]hese mediascapes . . . provide . . . large repertoires of images, narratives and ‘ethnoscapes’ to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of “news” and politics are profoundly mixed.16

The diversity of media used in the novel allows the confrontation of multiple viewpoints on the controversial issue of the British government’s

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post-mortem withdrawal of Parvaiz’s citizenship and its subsequent ordering of his burial in the only place Parvaiz remains a citizen of, Pakistan. The Home Secretary’s interview gives credence to governmental legal and juridical justifications: As you know, the day I assumed office I revoked the citizenship of all dual nationals who have left Britain to join our enemies . . . . His body will be repatriated to his home nation, Pakistan . . . . I will not let those who turn against the soil of Britain in their lifetime sully that very soil in death. (188)

Yet such motives are undermined once put alongside the series of Islamophobic trending hashtags that they spark: “#WOLFPACK #PERVY PASHA and #DONTSULLYOURSOIL and #GOB​ACKW​HERE​YOUC​AM​ EFROM” (190). The narrative undermines this growing hatred by underlining its deep political and historical roots through a phone conversation between the British Home Secretary and the Pakistan High Commissioner. The British government’s rejection of Parvaiz is reinterpreted as an imperialist gesture when the High Commissioner blames the UK for using Pakistan to dump its unwanted citizens. This argument is strengthened when it is voiced by a third party, the representative of the human rights group Liberty: “Removing the right to have rights is a new low. Washing our hands of potential terrorists is dangerously short-sighted and statelessness is a tool of despots, not democrats” (my emphasis, 198). The narrative intimates that colonial and/or imperial power structures and hierarchies are perpetuated in the contemporary unfair treatment of British Pakistani dual nationals, but it does not merely reproduce dichotomic visions as not only is a third party heard but the latter acknowledges his (unwilling) “implication” in the evil he denounces.17 The combination of multiple communication technologies, media, and literatures gives body to “technoscapes” and “mediascapes” that allow for a mobility of information, ideas, and even ideologies (democracy versus despotism) about Parvaiz’s repatriation even when corporeal mobility has been halted. The novel’s “technoscapes” and “mediascapes” give birth to “image-centred, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer . . . is a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives” (Appadurai 299). Parvaiz’s life story leads to both empathy and vilification based on imagined and reconstituted elements. Yet ultimately these accounts enable the dead to move virtually through time and space. The controversy around the British government’s denial of repatriation recalls real-life events and the problematic treatment of the dead bodies of migrants who leave their homeland, willingly or not, and sometimes die

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before reaching their destination. What happens to their remains that are at times only washed ashore or that cannot be properly identified? What happens when a body has been criminalized? Such questions are still neglected by migration policies and organizations. That is why a “thanatic ethics” need be developed, and, as suggested by the scholars currently spearheading a project bearing this name, the academic study of arts and literatures can participate in the conceptualization of such an ethics. A critical analysis of Home Fire’s engagement with intertwining past and present (his-)stories of suffering calls for an “implication” based on responsible and ethical solidarity toward victims of injustice, including dead migrants. Multidirectional Memories of Traumatic Dislocation and Injustice: From Implication to Ethical Solidarity In Home Fire, Shamsie explores simultaneously several historical traumas to provide contextualization for Islamic radicalization.18 The novel connects contemporary homegrown radicalization to harsh state (British) policies and the increase of everyday forms of prejudices and hatred that spread at exponential high-speed through new digital means of information and communication but also to the colonial roots of Islamophobia and fundamentalism. For instance, Isma reads the seemingly new and exceptional legal restrictions imposed after the 7/7 attacks as a continuation of former colonial domination: “if you look at colonial laws you’ll see plenty of precedent for depriving people of their rights” (38). The narrative subtext reckons with the intergenerational transmission of “multidirectional” memories of past tragedies (colonialism, Partitions, the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Iraq war in 2003),19 a memorialization process that Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory” (1997, 13 and 2008, 103). The continuum between historical forms of racial, religious, and ethnic discriminations and current endemic social injustices such as Islamophobic sentiment suggests that past traumas are emotional and somatic wounds that can move from one generation to the next. The transmission of psychological and corporeal pain crystallizes in the vivid depiction of impossible grief Aneeka experiences: Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them. But this was not grief. It did not cleave to her, it flayed her. It did not envelop her, it leaked into her pores and bloated her beyond recognition. . . . This was not grief. It was rage. . . . She held it to her breast . . . and sharpened her teeth on its gleaming claws. (193)

The graphic portrayal of Aneeka’s “flayed” body conveys the depth of her somatic trauma. Her pain figuratively distorts her body into a raging beast

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as she is refused the right to bury the twin she had been viscerally bonded to in life. This denial implies that the memorialization process cannot be completed. Aneeka’s experience recalls the grief, mourning, and memorialization process victims of traumatic loss must work through to overcome their suffering. Memorialization is a doubly challenging task for diasporic descendants of South Asian migrants since they bear the burden of several traumas of uprooting and violence that cannot be confronted easily due to temporal, spatial, and emotional distance but also given the double collective amnesia enforced by South Asian governments to promote seamlessly unified new-born modern nations in 1947 and 1971. Yet, through their art, writers like Shamsie participate in an embodied “post-amnesia” memorialization that is a “retrieval of those affective and cultural connections that amnesia denied,” a “return to the exploration of places lost” (Kabir, 2013, 26). Shamsie’s novel confronts and transcends multi-layered traumatic erasures to face contemporary social and political conflicts and injustices. This complex memorialization is given body through literary choices such as dizzying space-time shifts, the combination of varied textual forms and typographies, graphic depictions of pain. These devices elicit the readers’ sensory and affective participation and move them freely across time and space, beyond ideological and political borders, and closer to the traumatic experiences lived by others. Nonetheless, Home Fire “eschew[s] from Manichean categories of good and evil” (Santos Bridiga 155). The narrative blurs the legal and juridical categories of victim and perpetrator/terrorist that are at the core of the War on Terror as it delves into the psychology of a terrorist without eliciting hatred, empathy, or identification. Instead, readers are made aware of their own “implication” in the story told. For Rothberg, the “implicated subject,” as a third subject position, complicates the dichotomies between victim and perpetrator in such a way that any individual may develop “long-distance solidarity” with victims of traumas which are not their own.20 Shamsie fully embraces her position as an implicated subject with regard to the Islamization of British society by writing about subjects that she feels she cannot step away from.21 She does not comfortably slide into the position of a “victim” but strives to offer a more diverse picture of Muslim culture and populations than the violence-prone one so easily congealed now in public opinion through the media, notably by connoting positively elements from Muslim language, dress-code, and literature. The Urdu words disseminated sparsely through the novel always translate warm feelings of homeliness, intimacy, friendship, and family. Similarly, the Muslim hijab, which recurs as a sartorial image throughout the novel, goes from being a stigma alienating Muslim women and marking their oppression by Muslim men, in the eyes of Western societies, to being a powerful

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instrument through which Aneeka asserts authority over her body and rebels against unjust British laws. In one of the most erotic scenes of the novel, Aneeka playfully appears naked to her lover, Eamonn, except for the white hijab she keeps on, claiming that she is free to choose to whom she wishes to show parts of her body: “I get to choose which parts of me I want strangers to look at, and which are for you” (172). Aneeka’s use of the headscarf subverts the Orientalist unveiling gaze as she freely displays her sensuality. This subversion climaxes in the final apocalyptic mourning scene broadcast live to the world from a Karachi park. As dusty winds rise and rage, Aneeka’s dupatta floats off her shoulders to temporarily block everything from view. Feral howling and blowing winds resound, then the dupatta is taken off the camera to unveil only one clear face, Parvaiz’s, as he lies unburied: For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging through the park, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face, her dark hair a cascade of mud, her fingers interlaced over the face of her brother. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the Home Secretary, who took a step back. . . . In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead body. (224)

Parvaiz’s face stands out neatly while Aneeka’s appearance is far from the sensuous beauty attributed to women in Orientalist discourses. Instead, she has turned into the embodiment of the “raging beast” that had metaphorically evoked her emotional turmoil and physical pain a few pages before. Male/ female, Western/Eastern power hierarchies are lastly reversed as the British secretary, who watches the scene on TV from London, is compelled to step back, a movement that signals his defeat. Shamsie also challenges a reductionist vision of Islam as she connects this culture to Sufi poetics through a trope she is particularly fond of: the doomed lovers Laila and Majnun (Bhattacharji 393). Kabir comments on the popularity of this tale throughout the “Islamicate” world.22 The original tale warns against the destructiveness of overly passionate love and sees the raving male lover wander through the desert in search of his dead beloved. However, Home Fire reinterprets the myth. Though the novel ends on the embrace of the ill-fated lovers Aneeka and Eamonn prior to a final deadly explosion, when the Laila-Majnun tale is mentioned in the narrative it is in reference to Aneeka’s sisterly love and devotion to her dead twin. An ultimate subversive act is thus achieved through this intertext as Aneeka, who was considered as a temptress and a whore by the press, becomes a tragic hero(ine) in the Pakistani public opinion for whom she stands for both Laila and Majnun. It is by navigating the readers through multiple rewritings and layering of both

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Western and Muslim classics that Shamsie’s narrative also invites them to move away from predetermined subject positions and question their implication in the contemporary rise of Islamophobia. Home Fire is an ambitious adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy Antigone to address the explosive issues of identity politics, migration policies, military and economic imperialism, the War on Terror, and so on. If Shamsie draws inspiration from an atemporal tale whose tragic denouement is foretold, her narrative is both a solemn and a thrilling tale hinging on suspense, ellipses, twists, and turns. Relying on a tale initially meant for the stage could congeal the protagonists into distant (stereo)types rather than individuals.23 Yet, this choice successfully invites the readers in the story by allowing discursive cultural, temporal, and spatial border-crossings. As the readers move through the various space-times explored by the characters, both physically and imaginatively, they are made to share their emotional and somatic reactions through embodied memories, especially those relating to pain and loss. Though “mediascapes” help Parvaiz’s story and body to circulate, notably through cameras broadcasting worldwide the final Karachi park scene, Parvaiz’s physical remains are forever stranded in Pakistan, unable to return home. Parvaiz’s unburied body is but a metonymic symbol of the larger issues at stake as it echoes real-life events.24 The narrative focus on the dead “shell” (mentioned in the epigraph of this paper) and on bodily pain and suffering (the sessions of torture, Aneeka’s visceral rage, the gun wound on Parvaiz’s body) operates a return to the corporeal etymology of the word “trauma.” This reinforces the readers’ implication in the issues narrated, since, as Caruth observed, we are “implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). As the curtain drops before the final detonation, the last word remaining on the page is “peace.” More than a “wake-up call for the British government” (Shaheen, Qamar and Islam 153), this is a call for an acknowledgment of collective responsibility at local, national, and international levels, for appeasement and for an ethical solidarity that encourages every individual’s commitment against any and all forms of abuse of power and injustice.

NOTES 1. See Aroosa Kanwal, 112–156. For American and British novels on jihadism, see Jago Morrison, 567–584. 2. See Tishani Doshi. 3. See Frances Gertler. 4. See Barbara Goff, see also James Gibbs. 5. See Michael Billington.

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6. See Ankhi Mukherjee, 1–23. 7. The project “Thanatic Ethics: the Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces” headed by Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, and Dr Thomas Lacroix organizes a series of webinars in fall and winter 2020 on questions relating to the circulation and repatriation of migrant bodies. 8. See Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1–28. From the Latin implicare, translated as “folded into,” “implication” cannot be reduced to “identification” (or even “disidentification”), neither does it equate the legal term “complicity” as an “implicated subject” remains usually unconscious of his/her own implication. The implicated subject might be “directly” or “indirectly” a “beneficiary” of the suffering of another. Implication is both “synchronic” and “diachronic” as it is possible to be implicated in the contemporary injustices suffered by another and also, indirectly, in the distant origins of the latter’s present woes. 9. The Tebbit test, also known as the cricket test, was a phrase coined in April 1990 by the British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit. Tebbit used the phrase to refer to what he perceived as a lack of loyalty to the England cricket team among South Asian and Caribbean immigrants as well as their descendants. He suggested that those immigrants who support their native countries rather than England during cricket matches are not integrated enough into the UK. 10. See Vanessa Thorpe. 11. See Sheller, 789. See also Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, 1–22. 12. See Doshi. 13. Ibid. 14. See Ruth Blakeley and Sam Raphael, 250. The terminology “enhanced interrogation techniques” is discussed by the authors as they document some of these practices with legal and juridical sources. 15. The ellipses in this quotation appear in Shamsie’s text. 16. See Appadurai, 298–299. For Appadurai an “ethnoscape” is: “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons,” 297. 17. See Rothberg, The Implicated Subject. 18. See Pei-chen Liao. 19. See Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. 20. See Rothberg, The Implicated Subject. 21. See Doshi. 22. See Kabir, “Affect, Body, Place. Trauma theory in the world,” 63. Note that the word “Islamicate” used by Kabir is attributed to Marshall Hodgson. He used the term in the introduction to his history, The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam. For him this term can refer to the society and culture of Islamdom, while the world “Islamic” would exclusively have religious connotations. 23. See Peter Ho Davies. 24. See Yasmeen Serhan. Several newspapers commented on hundreds of Imams in the UK refusing to bury dead terrorists in June 2017 and there had been similar cases previously in the UK, in America, in France, and in South Asia.

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Kabir, Ananya J. “Affect, Body, Place. Trauma theory in the world.” In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eagelstone. London, Routledge, 2014, pp. 63–75. Kanwal, Aroosa. “Re-imagining Home Spaces: Pre- and Post-9/11 Constructions of Home and Pakistan Muslim Identity.” Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction Beyond 9/11. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 112–156. Liao, Pei-chen. “Engaging Politically from the Margin: Critical Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Kamila Shamsie.” EurAmerica, vol. 47, no. 3, 2017, pp. 263–297. Mukherjee, Ankhi. What is A Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford, CA, Stanford UP, 2014. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation. Stanford, CA, Stanford UP, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA, Stanford UP, 2019. Santos Bridiga, Marcela. “Necropolitics and National Identity in Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Interdisciplinar, vol. 31, no. 9, 2019, pp. 153–167. Serhan, Yasmeen. “When Mosques Refuse to Bury Muslim Terrorists.” Atlantic, June 1, 2017, https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/international​/archive​/2017​/06​/why​-a​-mosque​ -is-​refusing​-to​-bury​-the​-manchester​-attacker​/528648/. Sethulekshmi, R.S. “An Antigone at the Time of Islamophobia: Analyzing the Muslim Diasporic Identity in Home Fire.” Universal Review, vol. 7, no. 12, 2018, pp. 71–76. Shaheen, Aamer, Sdia Qamar, and Mohammad Islam. “Obsessive ‘Westoxification’ versus the Albatross of Fundamentalism and Love as Collateral Damage in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Journal of Research (Humanities), vol. 54, no. 54, 2018, pp. 150–167. Sheller, Mimi. “The new mobilities paradigm for a live sociology.” Current Sociology Review, vol. 62, no. 6, 2014, pp. 789–811. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. Mobile Technologies of the City. London and New York, Routledge, 2006. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Kamila Shamsie: ‘Being a UK citizen makes me feel more able to take part in the conversation.’” Guardian, August 27, 2019, international edition, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2017​/aug​/27​/kamila​-shamsie​-home​-fire​-man-​ booker​-longlisted​-author​-interview.

Index

ableism, 16, 114–16, 118–21, 123–25, 126nn6–7 activism, 126n5, 172, 183, 216 aesthetics, 16, 58n19, 68, 73, 83, 218; kinaesthetics, 16 Africa, 6, 8, 17, 19n16, 45–46, 48–50, 52, 57, 58n4, 66, 95, 97, 102–3, 106, 108, 109n7, 113, 121, 154, 156–157, 169– 70, 172–73, 178, 182n4, 183n7, 189, 195–96, 222; African American, 64, 70, 75n7, 156; South Africa, 7, 16, 57, 113–16, 118, 124, 126n2, 126nn5–7 Agamben, Giorgio, 213 agency, 1, 10–11, 14, 16–17, 28, 31, 34, 37–39, 59n21, 69, 97, 102–3, 154, 158, 160, 178, 182, 184n16 Aguiar, Marian, 6, 19n12 Ahmed, Sara, 3, 7–8, 208 alien, 48, 68, 180, 211 alienation, 33, 63, 125, 215, 224, 231 ambivalence, 13, 63–64, 93, 195, 218 America, 15, 19n8, 67, 155, 163, 165, 194, 213–14, 234n24; American, 8, 10, 17, 65, 75n7, 86, 113, 123, 133–34, 189, 193, 195–96, 201n5, 207, 214, 221–22, 223n1; American Haitian, 176; American Indian/native American, 86; black American, 8; Korean American, 193; Liberian American, 17, 195

apartheid, 11, 113–16, 124, 126nn5–7, 127n7; anti-apartheid, 116 Appadurai, Arjun, 224, 228–29, 234n16 archaeology, 43–45, 48, 50–59; archaeological fiction, 43, 48, 50, 56, 57, 58n10 archive, 9, 16, 43, 45, 54, 108, 109n1 authorities, 12, 28, 115, 172–74, 182n4 authority, 34–36, 100–103, 115–16, 122, 125, 142, 191, 232 autobiography, 10, 93, 105, 133, 190 Bildung, 171–72, 175, 177–78, 180–82, 208, 213–14; Bildungsroman, 11, 17, 170–71, 175–76, 178–80, 208–9, 213, 215, 219n2 black, 2–3, 8, 15, 37, 66–68, 70, 74, 75nn7–8, 102, 116–17, 126n6, 146n5, 157, 176, 178; Black Atlantic, 4; Blackness, 66–69, 74 blindness, 117–20, 216 borders, 2, 4–8, 11, 18, 19n8, 31, 61, 89, 161, 170, 178, 222, 228, 231 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 27–29, 32, 35, 40n2 British Empire, 9, 44, 51, 53, 54, 56–57, 96, 104, 109n3, 116–18, 127nn8–10 Butler, Judith, 18n4, 19n5, 28, 30, 214

237

238

Index

Caribbean, 16–17, 133–36, 144, 146nn4–6, 152–56, 160–65, 171, 234n9; Caribbean literature, 135, 152 Caruth, Cathy, 233 censorship, 105–6, 115 circulation, 4–6, 13, 19n9, 136–38, 151, 234n7 citizenship, 181, 221–22, 229 city, 2, 52, 64, 90, 173, 179, 182, 198, 210, 218 class, 1, 3, 27–28, 32–34, 38–39, 40n1, 118, 182n1, 217, 221 Coetzee, J. M., 11, 16, 113–26, 126nn4– 7, 127nn9–10, 127n12, 127n16, 127n19 colonialism, 7, 114–15, 120, 230 colonies, 53, 163, 222; colonial, 6, 9, 11, 15, 44–46, 50–52, 54, 57, 67, 96, 107, 114, 116, 121–22, 124, 153, 154, 160–61, 163, 222, 229–30; decolonial, 2 color, 2, 66, 182 commodity, 2, 28, 51, 109n3, 154, 228 community, 62–63, 67, 70, 157–58, 163, 165, 174, 182n4, 183n11, 225 control, 2, 3, 9, 30–31, 38–39, 45, 52– 54, 58n11, 96–97, 103–6, 114, 116, 118–20, 125, 127nn8–9, 135, 160, 166, 173, 175–76, 223–24, 227 corporeality, 4–7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19n10, 63–64, 68, 104, 152–53, 158, 160, 162, 169, 171, 175, 182 Cresswell, Tim, 3, 5 crime, 27–28, 32, 37–39, 230; war crime, 190 crossing, 4, 8, 66, 88, 151–52, 154–55, 160, 162, 165; border-crossing, 10, 11, 27, 170, 233; sea-crossing, 81 dance, 3, 16, 146n3, 151–52, 155–57, 162, 165, 199; limbo, 16, 145, 151, 155–57, 162 dead, 5, 18, 32, 44, 48–49, 51–52, 54–56, 66, 75n9, 84, 92, 101, 108, 134, 151–54, 157–58, 173, 191,

194–96, 199, 226, 228–30, 232–33, 234n24 de Certeau, Michel, 19n10, 179 Deleuze, Gilles, 146n16, 208, 213 diary/diaries, 1, 9–10, 16, 18nn1–2, 97, 99–107, 109nn2–6 Dibia, Jude, 11, 17, 169–72, 175, 182n4, 184n16 digital, 12, 20n19, 61, 228, 230 disability, 6, 10, 14, 16, 96, 113–15, 118–19, 121, 123–26, 126nn3–5; disabled, 8, 11, 15, 114–17, 119, 121–22, 124, 126, 126n2, 126nn5–6, 127n18 discourse/s, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 16–18, 67, 73, 83, 97–98, 101–8, 109n8, 116, 120, 122, 125, 126, 135, 139, 154, 155, 161, 232 disease, 15–17, 19n5, 57, 96, 98–100, 105, 107, 192, 199 disembodiment, 5, 9, 15, 29, 32, 191, 193–94, 214 displacement, 11, 16, 19n5, 32, 44, 48, 50, 52–54, 114, 118–21, 123, 126, 127n13, 136, 139, 160–61, 178–80, 183n5, 191, 195, 199–200, 202n7, 208–9, 211–12, 215, 221; displaced, 5, 13, 17, 52, 70, 117, 190, 192, 197, 201nn3–4, 211, 215 domestic, 10, 28, 31–35, 39, 40n1, 52– 53, 65, 73, 113, 142, 200, 211 domination, 10–11, 44–46, 52, 57, 96– 97, 117, 175, 196, 230; dominated, 66–67, 103, 125, 173, 183n14 embodiment, 2, 6, 30, 46, 125, 177, 209, 232; embodied, 2, 4–6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 19n6, 27–28, 40, 92, 108, 169– 70, 175, 180, 214, 223, 231, 233 empathy, 17, 103, 229, 231 empowerment, 16–17, 27–28, 30, 33, 35, 39, 50, 54, 100, 175, 182; empowered, 19n4, 33, 53; empowering, 10, 34 engagement, 32–33, 137, 142, 189, 230

Index

epic, 8, 19, 81, 84, 87, 92–93, 169 escape, 6, 29, 65, 69–70, 72, 106, 119, 144, 146n16, 155, 172, 197, 208, 227–28 estrangement, 118, 144, 212; estranged, 136 ethics, 5, 13, 19n9, 99, 114, 118, 120, 123, 127nn7–19, 200, 209, 212–13, 222, 230, 233, 234n7 exertion, 98–99 exile, 17, 50, 138, 146nn6–7, 151–52, 156, 160–63, 165, 178, 182, 182n4, 183n5, 210; exiled, 115, 161–62, 175, 193, 212 expedition, 9, 58n7, 88, 95–97, 102–3, 108–9, 153 exploration, 7, 27, 39, 43, 45, 48, 57n1, 58n10, 97, 107, 154, 166n5, 209, 231 explorer, 7, 9, 14–16, 43–46, 95–109, 109n2 face, 3, 30, 35, 40n5, 55, 66, 71, 74, 91, 103, 117, 119, 122, 127n11, 135–37, 158, 179, 217–18, 226, 232 Fanon, Frantz, 67 fatigue, 32, 35, 81–84, 88, 93 Faulkner, William, 15, 61–63, 66, 70, 72–74, 74n1, 75n6 female body, 31, 45–47, 67–68, 104, 170–72, 174–75, 177 femininity, 9, 28, 30–31, 34, 37, 39, 52, 63, 73–74, 97, 104, 107, 124, 170–71, 175, 177, 182 flesh, 66–69, 74, 91, 141, 153, 213, 215, 218; de-fleshed, 154; fleshless, 91 foreign, 5, 53, 163, 211, 228; foreign body, 66; foreign lands, 79, 161 Foucault, Michel, 2, 11, 18n3, 21, 28, 95, 123, 173, 209, 215 fragility, 10, 37, 86, 97, 100 fragment, 14, 16, 67, 92, 133–38, 144, 153, 155–56, 159; fragmentation, 124 frailty, 10, 37, 81, 83–88, 92–93 freedom, 3, 31, 34, 70, 74, 88, 115, 124, 152, 163, 177, 183n10

239

Freud, Sigmund, 194 fundamentalism, 12, 214–15, 230 Ganteau, Jean-Michel, 194, 200 gender, 3, 6–7, 10, 14–17, 27–28, 31–33, 37, 39–40, 44, 46, 52–53, 57, 59n21, 65, 71, 104–5, 107–9, 125, 170, 174, 203 Gender Trouble, 28, 30 ghost, 58n3, 73, 152–54, 161–62, 190, 193–94 Glissant, Edouard, 156, 217 global, 1, 3, 5, 11, 14, 144, 146n6, 170, 182n1, 195–96, 198, 200, 210, 222; globalization, 8; Global North, 3, 11; Global South, 11, 14 grief, 90, 216, 230–31 Hamid, Mohsin, 17, 207, 209–15 Harris, Wilson, 11, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 163, 165, 166n5 healing, 98, 135, 190, 194, 196–97, 199 health, 15–16, 80, 83, 90, 95, 98–99, 102, 115, 197 Helmers, Marguerite, 9, 15 Hirsch, Marianne, 180, 230 home, 1–3, 8–11, 13–14, 17, 31, 43, 54, 64, 73, 144, 158, 169–70, 173, 189, 191–95, 197–98, 212, 218, 221–22, 224–31, 233; homecoming, 163, 193; homelessness, 14, 197, 227; homeliness, 231 identity, 9–11, 14, 16, 30, 33–34, 39, 61, 63–65, 68, 70, 72, 103, 107, 117–18, 121, 125–26, 160–62, 170, 173, 178, 180–81, 189–93, 195, 198, 200, 208, 219n5, 233 illness, 15, 20n19, 40n6, 80, 90, 106, 109, 119, 124–25 image, 1, 3, 4, 17, 49, 65, 69–70, 72, 74, 75n9, 100, 108, 109n2, 117, 134, 136– 37, 144–45, 146n17, 147n21, 160, 179, 190, 192–94, 196, 200, 228–29, 231 imagery, 69, 73, 193, 198

240

Index

imaginary, 43, 68, 154, 162, 226 imagination, 11, 20n17, 52, 105, 135, 154–56, 160–62, 164–65, 169, 174, 212, 223, 229 immigrant, 8, 146n6, 147n23, 189, 214, 218, 234nn9–16 immigration, 165, 221 immobility, 1–3, 10, 14–15, 18, 20, 69, 73, 126, 140, 144, 174, 177–78, 190, 195, 198, 218 imperialism, 7, 96, 222, 229, 233; imperial, 9–10, 15, 43–46, 48–57, 58n2, 58n7, 58n11, 58n17, 59n24, 96, 103, 109nn3–4, 117, 229 individuality, 10, 28, 32 journey, 2, 5, 8–9, 13, 28–30, 32, 39, 40n3, 44–45, 48–51, 53–57, 63, 65, 72–74, 82, 88, 95–98, 100, 102, 144, 153, 154, 158, 163, 179, 181, 211, 213, 221–22, 224–27 Kincaid, Jamaica, 12, 16–17, 133–45, 145n1, 146n3, 146n7, 146n9, 146n12, 146n15, 147nn17–23 Kingsley, Mary, 19n16 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 11, 17, 207, 209, 212, 214–18 landscape, 9, 30, 45–46, 48–49, 52, 79, 133–34, 144–45, 146n8, 157, 161, 165, 224, 226, 234n16 language, 51, 115, 125, 127n12, 136– 37, 140–41, 145, 146nn14–16, 151, 154, 157, 160, 165n3, 191, 199–200, 208, 223–24, 231 liberty, 33–34, 229 liminality, 190–94, 198, 218 Livingstone, David, 10, 16, 95–108, 109n2, 109n5, 109n8, 110n8 local vs. global, 1, 5, 14, 58nn7–11, 233 location, 30, 33, 35, 54, 68, 134, 137, 139, 146n17, 214, 222, 227; dislocation, 156, 214–15, 225, 230; multilocal, 197

magic, 43, 48n3, 191, 207; magic realism, 211 manliness, 96–97, 99–100, 103–8 masculinity, 7, 10, 16, 28, 31, 40n2, 57, 63–5, 74, 95–97, 99–101, 104–6, 108, 125, 170; muscular masculinity, 98–100 Mathieson, Charlotte, 6, 10, 19n12, 28–29, 32–33, 40n3 Mazzeo, Tilar J., 9, 15 media, 5, 222, 226, 228–29, 231; media mobility, 5; mediascapes, 228–29, 233; mediation, 2, 6, 141, 154, 182n1, 214; transmedial, 12 memory, 81, 84, 87, 134, 136, 139, 157–59, 162–64, 174, 176, 196–99, 216, 234n19; postmemory, 230 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6–7, 171, 174, 182n1, 183n12 Middle Passage, 4, 11, 16, 151, 154–55, 162, 165 migrant (adjective), 17, 65, 75, 234n7 migrant (noun), 4, 75, 146n6, 169–70, 172, 181–82, 192, 194, 210, 221–22, 229–31 migrant fiction, 13 migration, 4, 6, 11, 13, 17, 19n11, 20n20, 27, 138, 169–70, 172, 178, 183, 183nn5–8, 192, 209–11, 221, 230, 233 modernity, 3, 10, 13–14, 29, 32–33, 49, 120, 127n15, 182n2 mourning, 92, 231–32 movement, 1–3, 5–7, 12–14, 16–17, 19nn6–11, 28–31, 33–35, 40, 44, 49, 51, 53–54, 61, 63–65, 67–74, 74n1, 116, 118–19, 121, 151–52, 154–57, 159–61, 163, 170, 172– 74, 192, 194–95, 198–99, 209–10, 217, 225, 232; Naxalite movement, 207 mummy, 15, 43–45, 50–57, 58n6, 58n15, 58n17, 58n19, 59n21, 59nn24–25, 59n28; mummy fiction, 44, 50, 53–55, 58n17, 59n25

Index

myth, 9, 16–17, 65, 72, 74, 75n8, 93, 97, 116, 139, 144, 155–58, 162, 232; mystification, 16; mythification/ mythmaking, 16, 79, 82, 92 nation, 40n3, 49, 65–66, 174, 183, 190–91, 201n5, 214, 225, 229; international, 3, 13–14, 61, 170, 179, 182n4, 233; national, 1, 4–5, 8, 14, 57, 61, 163, 171, 178, 183n11, 199, 208, 233; national (noun), 229; nationalist, 53, 208; nationality, 8, 12; transnational, 1, 4–5, 14, 16–18, 20n20, 146n6, 164, 169, 171, 177– 78, 182, 191 Odysseus, 8, 9, 15, 169 ontology, 5, 12, 34, 121, 212, 214 oppression, 11, 113–14, 118, 124, 196– 97, 231; colonial oppression, 222; oppressed, 11, 113, 116, 153–54 Orientalism, 15 otherness, 10, 121, 125, 127n19, 211, 213; othered, 2, 4, 10, 14–15 pain, 67–68, 88–100, 102–3, 141, 154–56, 162, 165, 176, 179, 191, 226, 230–33 Partitions, 230; Partition of India, 11 patriarchy, 28, 33, 46, 124–25, 171, 174–77, 179–80, 182, 184n16 Pearce, Lynne, 6, 19n12 performance, 5, 7, 14, 16, 18, 19n16, 27–29, 31, 134–36, 222, 224 periphery, 62, 72, 165n2, 222 phenomenology, 6–8, 170, 174, 183n12 place, 6, 10, 14, 39, 40n3, 100, 121–22, 141, 144, 146n6, 147n18, 169, 176, 178, 212, 216, 226, 234n22; nonplaces, 64, 75n3; place (countable), 3, 4, 19nn6–10, 31, 40, 48, 50, 53– 54, 61, 64–65, 69, 74n1, 85–86, 91, 98, 117, 122, 133, 138, 158, 162–64, 169, 174, 178–79, 193–94, 196, 198–200, 211, 216, 226–29, 231

241

poem, 8, 17, 19n14, 79, 87, 89–91, 94–95, 127n10, 146n4–5, 169–70, 192–200 poetry, 79, 85, 89, 93, 135, 189, 197, 200, 228 police, 2, 113, 172–73, 214 politics, 18n4, 19n15, 96, 114–15, 118, 126, 126n2, 127n7, 170–72, 174, 183n9, 228, 233; policies, 4, 115, 118, 126n3, 172, 222, 230, 233 postcolonial, 10–11, 18, 27, 122, 146n6, 151, 154, 160, 163, 165, 165n2, 170, 180, 190, 208, 222 power/s, 1–3, 5, 11, 27–28, 31, 33–36, 38–40, 53–54, 57, 58n11, 59n23, 70, 75n9, 96, 100, 103, 105, 117–18, 120, 122–24, 137, 156, 160, 162, 165, 172, 173, 179, 181, 184n16, 198, 200, 201n2, 214, 222, 229, 232–33 precarious/ness, 2, 19n5, 158, 211, 221 predicament, 15, 84 pregnancy, 71 pregnant, 15, 62, 71, 159, 207 privacy, 28, 30, 32 Puar, Jasbir, 8 public vs. private, 2, 10–11, 18n4, 27–34, 44, 52, 105, 117, 120, 124, 127n8, 208, 211, 231–32 Pulitano, Elvira, 16 Quixote, 88 race, 3, 12, 14–16, 57, 66–68; interracial, 192; racial, 27, 61, 64–68, 70, 116, 121, 126n7, 230; racialized, 2, 3, 7, 10 railway, 4, 10, 14, 27–34, 40n2, 64, 181 rape, 56, 176, 180, 190–91, 193–94, 201n3 raped, 184n16, 201 reader, 12, 17, 20n19, 37, 40, 43, 47, 65, 72, 81, 84, 86, 91, 104, 118, 121–23, 126, 139–41, 143, 145, 155, 157, 165n3, 172, 177, 194, 199–200, 213, 215, 217, 222–24, 227–28, 231–33

242

Index

reading, 16, 27, 29, 33, 35, 39, 43, 72, 81, 91, 121–23, 125, 127n16, 133, 137, 139, 190, 215 realism, 171; magic realism, 211 refugee, 8, 10, 13, 17, 19n13, 164, 169– 70, 191–92, 194, 199, 201nn3–4, 207, 209–13, 218, 234n16; refugee literature, 10, 13 repatriation, 222, 229, 234n7 rewriting, 11, 102, 108, 141, 154, 172, 180, 221–22, 232 romance, 10, 43–44, 49, 57, 88, 93 Rushdie, Salman, 208 Said, Edward, 9, 15, 52, 59n22, 210 Sedgwick, Eve, 207–8 sensation(s), 6, 28, 30, 79, 81–82, 84–87, 180, 192 senses, 6, 79, 84, 181 sexuality, 7, 12, 15, 30, 75n8; homosexual, 16, 182n4, 223 shame, 18, 20n22, 30–31, 179, 184nn16–18, 207–18, 219n5 Sheller, Mimi, 1, 5–6, 13, 224, 234n11 Shelley, Mary, 79–83, 86–91, 199 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 16, 79–93 Shelleys (the), 10, 14–15, 79, 82, 84–85, 87–88, 90–91, 93 sickness, 16, 56, 67, 81–82, 88, 97–98, 101, 104, 106; seasickness, 80, 88, 93 silence, 69, 122, 217; silenced, 122, 153–54, 173, 175; silent, 9, 11, 18n4, 52, 121, 135, 137, 143, 216, 217 somatic, 68, 96–97, 100, 108, 119, 127, 226, 228, 230, 233; Global South. See global; South Africa, 7, 16, 21, 57, 113–16, 118, 124, 126–29 space, 6, 10, 13–14, 16, 18n4, 19n10, 27–28, 33, 38, 40n3, 45, 48–50, 56, 61, 63, 65, 69, 71–72, 105, 125, 139, 142, 146, 147, 151, 153–55, 157, 159, 161–62, 164, 169, 179, 181–82, 196, 216, 222, 224, 229, 231, 233; space (countable), 2–3, 5, 7–8, 10, 14, 16–17, 18n4, 19n9, 27–34, 43,

48, 52–53, 56–57, 57n1, 66–68, 75n3, 102, 119, 133, 137, 139, 147n21, 181–82, 211–12, 224, 234n7 Spivak, Gayatri, 147n9 stasis, 116, 155, 170, 174, 176, 178, 208–9 states, 1, 14, 65, 67, 124–25, 138, 144, 170, 201, 218; United States, 2, 4, 19n8, 126n2, 133, 147n23, 156, 190, 192, 195, 197, 199, 200, 207, 212, 225 stigma, 104, 118, 126n3, 231 subaltern, 2, 11, 114, 121–22, 147n19, 180 subjectivity, 137, 141, 171, 174, 178, 219n5 suffering, 34, 36, 80, 83–84, 90, 95, 97, 99–100, 113, 116–18, 124–26, 126n2, 127n16, 155, 162, 194–95, 200, 230–31, 233, 234n8 surveillance, 28, 173, 224, 228 survival, 62, 65 survive, 48, 57, 90, 92–93, 117, 199 survivor, 189, 191–92, 194, 200 technology/ies, 5, 14, 32–33, 74, 224, 227–29; technoscape, 224, 227–29 terror, 161, 209, 215–16, 218, 229; War on Terror, 221–23, 231, 233 terrorism, 4, 12, 209, 214–15, 222, 225 terrorist, 13, 17–18, 207, 209, 213–18, 221–25, 228, 231, 234n24 torture, 68, 116, 127n8, 173, 190–91, 194, 199, 201n3, 213, 224, 226, 233 transformation, 3, 5, 10, 51, 65, 68, 105, 133, 138, 151–52, 158, 161, 173, 192–93 transience, 15, 61, 63–65, 68, 74, 75nn3–5 transition, 14, 68, 142, 181, 191–92 transport, 20n19, 28–29, 50, 52, 74, 85, 88–89, 103, 136–37, 172, 191, 195, 211, 224 trauma, 6, 17, 27, 69, 72, 152, 155, 164, 171, 174, 176–77, 179–80, 182, 184n15, 189–92, 194, 196–97, 199–

Index

200, 202n7, 222, 227, 230–31, 233, 234n22; post-traumatic, 190, 201n5; traumatized, 11, 13, 190–92, 194 Urry, John, 1, 6, 13, 19n10, 20n17, 182n1, 224, 234n11 Uteng, Tanu Priya, 3, 6 victim, 11, 108, 113, 116–18, 122, 124, 174, 180, 190, 194, 200, 214, 230–31 Victorian, 10, 15–16, 19n16, 27–29, 31–32, 34, 37, 39, 40n3, 43, 45, 49, 53, 56–57, 59n21, 95–99, 107–9, 109nn3–4, 169 violence, 19n5, 67, 70, 72, 113, 116, 118, 120–21, 123, 126n7, 127n12, 141, 161, 162, 173–74, 176, 191, 195–96, 199–200, 201n3, 202n7, 203, 208, 214, 231; political violence, 113, 116, 118, 120–21, 123; racial violence, 126n7; sexual violence, 174, 176, 191, 201nn3–5; totalitarian violence, 174 voice, 9, 17, 33, 53, 62, 64, 66, 70–71, 91, 122, 137–41, 143–44, 147n17,

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157, 164, 169, 171, 174–75, 177–78, 180–82, 182n4, 189–90, 198, 214, 222; refugees’ voices, 180; subaltern voices, 180; voiceless, 68, 182 vulnerability, 3, 10, 95–97, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 124, 172, 174, 176, 181 wandering, 61, 65, 72–73, 89, 158, 182n3, 189–90, 193–94, 199, 218 wandering Jew (figure of the), 89 war, 4–5, 17, 68, 118, 189–204, 226, 230 Wesley, Patricia, 17, 189–90, 192–200, 202, 204 writing, 1, 4, 8–11, 13, 16, 20n19, 27, 75n6, 79, 95, 97–100, 105, 107, 109n2, 114–15, 125, 133–34, 137, 139–40, 142, 144–45, 147n22, 161, 164, 182, 200, 231; autobiographical writing. See autobiography; postcolonial rewritings, 154, 222; rewriting, 11, 102, 108, 141, 154, 172, 180, 221–22, 232; travel writing, 9, 13, 95, 107, 134 Young, Iris, 7, 170

About the Editors

Jaine Chemmachery is senior lecturer in postcolonial literatures at Sorbonne Université. She wrote a PhD dissertation on R. Kipling’s and S. Maugham’s short stories on Empire and the relation between colonialism, modernity, and the genre of the short story (2013). Her main research fields are colonial and postcolonial literatures, Victorian and Neo-Victorian literatures, and modernity. Her current research focuses on mobility studies, body studies, and the representation of precarity/precariousness in literature. Among her recent publications are “Orientalising London and the Victorian Era: Questioning Neo-Victorian Politics and Ideologies” (Polysèmes, 2020) and “The Mark of the Beast as Trace of History: Animalistic Tattoos in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009)” (La Peaulologie, 2020). Bhawana Jain is an assistant professor at the University of Angers. She obtained her PhD in English literature from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. Her research focuses on contemporary migration and postcolonial literature. She has a particular interest in issues pertaining to diaspora, trauma narratives, and cross-cultural encounters. Her papers have been published in several books and journals. She also has coedited a volume entitled Contemporary Research in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning (2020). She has previously taught at the University of Delhi and at University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

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About the Contributors

Neela Cathelain is a PhD candidate in English at Tufts University. She is interested in the theory of the novel, transnational literature, and affect theory. Before living in Boston, she received her MA from Université ParisSorbonne in 2014 and graduated from the Ecole normale supérieure in 2017. Nolwenn Corriou is a teaching fellow (professeure agrégée) at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research explores the archaeological motif at the turn of the twentieth century and the representations of the mummy in the imperial context, as well as their psychoanalytical implications. She has published articles on Egyptological and mummy fiction (“‘A Woman is a Woman, if She had been Dead Five Thousand Centuries!’: Mummy Fiction, Imperialism and the Politics of Gender,” Miranda, 2015, no. 11; “‘Birmingham Ware’: Ancient Egypt as an Orientalist Construct,” Journal of History and Cultures, 2019, no. 10) as well as on the representation of the mummy figure in films (“The Return of the Victorian Mummy: Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy (2017), A Modern Orientalist Tale” Polysèmes, 2020, no. 23, Contemporary Victoriana). Cédric Courtois is a senior lecturer at the University of Lille specializing in Nigerian literature, which was the focus of his PhD dissertation, entitled “Itineraries of a Genre. Variations on the Bildungsroman in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction” (2019). He has published various articles and book chapters on the rewritings of the Bildungsroman genre in contemporary Nigerian fiction, mobility studies, refugee literature, and LGBTQ studies. His research interests include postcolonial literatures, decoloniality, transnationalism, transculturalism, gender studies, ecopoetics, ecofeminism, gender studies,

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About the Contributors

and the ethics and aesthetics of violence in African literatures written in English. Fabien Desset is currently teaching as a lecturer at the University of Limoges, France, and is a member of the EHIC (Human Spaces and Cultural Interactions) and SERA (the French Society of Studies in English Romanticism) research groups. He is working on art and ekphrasis in the Shelleys’ poetry and prose, and has published several articles on Romantic Hellenism, mythopoeism, intertextuality, art and ekphrasis, including “Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice” (2016), “From ‘The Cimmerian Ravines of Modern Cities’ to the ‘Upaithric’ Temples of Pastoral Greece: The Place of Nature in Shelley’s Ancient Ruins” (2015), “Winckelmann’s Contribution to P.B. Shelley’s Philosophy of Art” (2015) and “Transtextual Transformations of Prometheus Bound in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: Prometheus’ Gifts to Humankind” (2017). He has also edited a collection of articles in Transparence romantique (Limoges, PULIM, 2014). Guillaume Didier is currently studying for a PhD in British literature at Sorbonne Université, under the supervision of Pr. Frédéric Regard. He is affiliated with the French academic research team VALE: Voix Anglophones: Littérature et Esthétique (EA4085), which unites French academic researchers in British literature at the Sorbonne; and with the corresponding doctorate students team OVALE. He is also a member of the French Society for the Study of Travel Writing in English, for which he has recently written a review of Adrian S. Wisnicki’s Fieldwork of Empire 1840–1900. Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature (Routledge, 2019). Guillaume Didier’s research focuses on masculinities and the British narratives of exploration of the White Nile in the nineteenth century. He is interested in men’s studies, travel writing, literature about East and Central Africa, and ecocriticism. Guillaume Didierł is also currently teaching British history, British literature, and translation classes at the Sorbonne. Solveig Dunkel is a doctoral candidate at Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, France. After having completed a master of Research at Paris Diderot University, where she took an interest in the aestheticization of violence in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, she passed the agrégation of English language, a French competitive state examination. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “William Faulkner’s Poetics of the Body (Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying).” While completing her PhD, she teaches American literature and history at Université de Picardie—Jules Verne. She is a member of the Unité de Recherche EA 4295 CORPUS.

About the Contributors

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Maureen Fielding is an associate professor of English and women’s studies at Penn State Brandywine where she teaches women’s studies, literature, composition, and creative writing. She specializes in trauma and testimony in post-colonial women writers’ work. Her articles on Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, and Le Ly Hayslip have appeared in Journal of the African Literature Association and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, among others. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Rubbertop Review, Adanna, Black Fox Literary Review, and other journals. She is working on a novel inspired by her experiences as a Russian intercept operator in West Berlin during the Cold War. Fabienne Franvil works as an ESL teacher at the Faculty of Science, University of the French West Indies, in Guadeloupe. She has gradually developed a keen interest in literature as she was studying at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, specializing in languages, literature, history of ideas and civilization in English-speaking countries. After writing a master’s thesis dedicated to a comparative study of Rudyard Kipling’s and Joseph Conrad’s works (“Identity and Alienation in R. Kipling’s and J. Conrad’s Short Stories”), she completed her PhD in postcolonial literature with a focus on Wilson Harris’s fiction (“Spectrality and Immateriality in Wilson Harris’s Works”). Fascinated by what is sometimes referred to as the “New English Literatures,” these literary voices emerging from former British colonies, she is now continuing her research on Caribbean and African American literatures. Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika is a maître de conférences (associate professor) at Université Paris 8 Vincennes—Saint-Denis (France) where she teaches American and Caribbean literatures, and translation. She is the author of a monograph, L’imaginaire de Jamaica Kincaid, variations autour d’une île caraïbe (Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2016), and she has published articles on the works of Austin Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Gayl Jones, Sherley A. Williams. She has coedited with Corinne Bigot and KerryJane Wallart, Jamaica Kincaid as Crafter and Grafter: Agency, Practice, Interventions Wagadu Journal, 2018, print version 2019), with Maryemma Graham and Janis A. Mayes Toni Morrison, Au-delà du visible ordinaire / Toni Morrison, Beyond the Ordinary Visible, (Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2014), and Formes et écritures du départ: Incursions dans les Amériques noires, co-edited with Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (L’Harmattan, 2000). Sun Jai Kim is a lecturer at Chung-Ang University and Sangmyung University, Republic of Korea. She received her doctoral degree from Michigan State University with a dissertation entitled “Rereading ‘Misery’:

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About the Contributors

Working-Class Women on the Move in British Novels from the 1850s to the 1890s.” Her research interests include Victorian literature, feminism, narrative theory, disability studies, and thing theory. She has published on Ella Hepworth Dixon and Helen Keller in the edited volumes. Sandrine Soukaï holds a thesis in Anglophone studies entitled The Shadows of Partition in Indian and Pakistani Novels in English (Sorbonne University Press, forthcoming). She is assistant professor in postcolonial literatures, British literatures, and urban studies at Gustave Eiffel University, France. She is a member of the research group LISAA (Literatures, Knowledges, Arts) and an associate member of VALE (Anglophone Voice, Literature and Aesthetics). Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, South Asian and Partition literatures, literatures and memories of indenture, Caribbean literatures. She is the author of articles on Dalit and Partition literatures. She notably published “Shadows and Fugitive Selves in Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie’s Partition Novels” in Mapping The Self: Place, Identity, Nationality (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015) and “Hybridity of Partition novels in English: reshaping national identities in The Shadow Lines (1988) and Burnt Shadows (2009),” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 40 no. 2, Spring 2018, 69–79. Paweł Wojtas is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Artes Liberales. He completed his MLitt degree in English Studies at the University of Stirling (2008) and PhD at the University of Warsaw (2012). In 2018, he acted as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of York, executive editor of the scholarly journal Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw, and translator in literary studies and cultural criticism. He has published on twentieth-century and contemporary international fiction: James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Witold Gombrowicz, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as transgression in popular culture, and is currently researching literary representations of disability in the works of J. M. Coetzee. His main areas of interest are international modernist and contemporary fiction, disability theory, philosophical ethics, and narrative theory.