Strategically Reading *By the Sea* Through Spivak, and Vice Versa

Since By the Sea seemingly allows the subaltern to speak (to reference Gayatri Spivak’s most famous essay), I think that teaching it alongside her “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” would open up many questions about how the novel “reads” subalternity. This is not to start from an assumption that Gurnah’s protagonists simply and easily give voice to the subaltern subject, but rather to put into conversation the ways in which his text and her deconstruction trouble the notion of subaltern consciousness(es). In teaching the two texts together, I would ask students to look for the ways in which Gurnah’s novel provides examples of the techniques discussed by Spivak (admitting that novelistic writing is of course different from the critical historiographical analyses she is looking at) and use Spivak’s essay to open up questions about and critiques of the representations of subalternity in By the Sea. I would structure this lesson around three main themes:

Essentializing the Subject

Spivak locates the work of the Subaltern Studies group within the critical project of the post-structuralists, identifying a common “question[ing of] humanism by exposing its hero” (10). In fact, she asserts, “what had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness, though the élite profess otherwise” (Spivak 12). However, her article argues that, if we read their work against the grain, we can see them strategically essentializing the subaltern in order to confront the difficulty of giving the subaltern a voice (or locating the subaltern’s voice), which is actually the paradox of anti-humanist criticism: that it too essentializes, “the object of [its] criticism [is] irreducible” (Spivak 13). In deliberately and strategically projecting the lessons of subaltern studies onto deconstructionist criticism at large, she notes, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Spivak 16).

I would use this question to frame a discussion of By the Sea as a novel in which two subaltern characters seemingly get the chance to speak, to tell their stories. In a previous post I mentioned the line in which Saleh asks, “Can an I ever speak of itself without making itself heroic?” (Gurnah 69). This is a central question of the book, particularly because we get two different characters’ competing versions of the same story, and we begin to wonder if Saleh and Latif are making themselves out to be heroes when they are not. Their narrating allows us to hear the story from the side of the postcolonial subject, rather than from the side of the colonizers, but the contested nature of their assertions highlights that there is no singular, essential subaltern either. Can one read By the Sea as an example of the “reading against the grain” of subaltern historiography that Spivak champions? How do the overlapping stories presented in the novel reveal the “limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic”? I would ask students to keep in mind Spivak’s emphasis on essentialism as strategy and her warning that “it would get the group off the dangerous hook of claiming to establish the truth-knowledge of the subaltern and his consciousness” (26).

Rumor

Spivak looks at rumor in relation to the subaltern, and this is another point of contact between her work and By the Sea. The novel establishes a tension between the truth of history and knowledge and the uncertainty of local gossip and stories, a dichotomy I approached from a different angle in my post “Literature and Non-literature, Truth and Stories.” Saleh and Latif share a negative opinion on rumor, at the same time that we can see them perhaps participating in it in their contrasting stories. Saleh writes that rumors “are difficult things to know, and miserable matters to talk about, but they are the currency of daily commerce in a small town and it would be false not to speak about them. Nevertheless, it makes me uncomfortable to do so. And now I feel foolish and dissembling for protesting so much” (Gurnah 31). Latif later tells Saleh, “I’m not saying that history does not matter, knowing about what happened so we understand what we are all about, and how we came to be as we are, and what stories we tell about it all. I mean I don’t want recriminations, all this family business, all this muttering that stretches further back all the time” (Gurnah 195).

I would use this troubled relationship with rumor to approach Spivak’s discussion of it. She locates rumor within the tradition of deconstruction as a form of writing (as opposed to the phonetic privileged by logocentrism): “No one is its origin or source. Thus rumour is not error but primordially (originally) errant, always in circulation with no assignable source” (Spivak 23). How does this definition of rumor in relation to the subaltern come to bear on the fraught nature of rumor in By the Sea? Where does rumor give voice to ideas more errant than the authoritative, essentialized truth in the novel?

Women

Spivak’s final subject is the role of women in subaltern studies, and this also poses a question as to the presence (or absence) of women in By the Sea. Spivak writes, “In a collective where so much attention is rightly paid to the subjectivity or subject-positioning of the subaltern, it should be surprising to encounter such indifference to the subjectivity, not to mention the indispensable presence, of the woman as crucial instrument” (27). 

Although the novel is arguably narrated by two subaltern subjects, they are both male, and they only briefly discuss female characters. Nevertheless, these women seem to be very important. Latif writes of his mother, whom he said goodbye to when he left to attend university in the GDR and never saw again: “Her last words? I don’t remember, nothing memorable. … I did not remind myself to secrete away the images and the sights and smells of that moment for the sterile years ahead, when memory would strike out of silence and leave me quivering with helpless sorrow at the way I had parted from my beautiful mother” (Gurnah 111-112). Another vivid characterization that Latif gives: “my mother, unhurried and unafraid, almost fastidious in her refusal to be secretive, came strolling out, looking like a beautiful woman going to meet with her lover” (Gurnah 108). The important women in Saleh’s life were his wife and daughter, both of whom he adored and both of whom died during the early years of his imprisonment. He places a lot of weight on his daughter’s name: “Raiiya, that was what I called her, an ordinary citizen, a common indigene. Her mother thought the name a provocation, and certain to be an embarrassment to her when she grew up, so she called her Ruqiya after the Prophet’s daughter with Khadija, his first wife and his benefactor. But she did not live long, she died” (Gurnah 47). These women appear but fleetingly in the text, just as they did in the protagonists’ lives. In what ways do their presences speak out in the novel, and in what ways are their absences (and their literal deaths) silencing? Does By the Sea also participate in “the apparent gender-neutralizing of the world finally explained through reason, domestic society sublated and subsumed in the civil” (Spivak 30)?

To get to the end of this very long blog post (sorry!) and sum up, I think that these texts would work together very nicely as both a way to introduce the field of subaltern studies and to look more closely at By the Sea, at both its accomplishments and pitfalls (read through the lens of Spivak) as a postcolonial novel.