Interpreting *By the Sea*: A Retrospective

I was fascinated to look back through my posts from this quarter and trace the trajectory of my analysis of By the Sea. Even though the topic of each week’s post was contingent upon the random articles that comprised that week’s readings, my thinking in fact developed along a clear line. (Perhaps this is a function of my usually choosing a general idea in the novel to think about before even reading the critical essays.) Back in October I chose By the Sea as my primary text because I knew and liked the novel, and, importantly, because I had never written about it and knew that my pre-existing interpretive framework was quite basic. There was however one topic that I knew interested me in the novel, what had made me remember it from that class I took my junior year of college: the motif of maps. My first two posts of the quarter, connecting the text to Chakrabarty and Anderson, followed directly from this interest. I am not in the least surprised by the conclusion of my first post—I still hold to it, as well—that perhaps this novel is asking us to locate a common humanity only in people being “fellow children of dislocation.”

Along those lines, I'm surprised that I never got the chance to discuss a related issue: that of homes, homelessness, and inheritance. I mentioned so many times the plot wherein Saleh takes possession of Latif’s childhood home, but I guess because I didn’t find any of the secondary readings to speak quite to this question, I never got to it. Instead, my third and fourth posts show a pivot in my thinking about the novel. They reveal the point at which I started to focus more on the intersection of storytelling and resistance, connected but not limited to Saleh’s use of “Bartleby.”

The idea that most inspired me emerged in my fifth post, dealing with Spivak. Throughout the quarter I’ve been considering the implications of By the Sea’s role as a postcolonial novel, and Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism helped me clarify that thinking. Every post I wrote deals with the ambiguities and contradictions inherent to the postcolonial subject; how Saleh and Latif are constantly straddling two worlds; how they participate in, attempt to participate in, or look down upon the discourses of those two worlds. One way in which this comes out is through irony, which I point to in my first and last posts. As a critic of this text, I am constantly running up against this dichotomy and trying to figure out how the protagonists and the novel itself value Zanzibari and British systems of knowing in opposition to one another. To quote myself explicating the Spivak a few weeks back:

Her article argues that, if we read [the Subaltern Studies group’s] 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). (Bamert)

This idea really helped me think through the narrating (and therefore vocal) postcolonial subject as a limit case. The constant back and forth and questioning of value systems in the novel, the hypocrisy sometimes exhibited by Saleh and Latif, can be read as part of this paradoxical critique of Western humanism. I’d probably say now that my very broad-stroke reading of By the Sea is that it is about the interpretation of stories. The novel enacts many varied interpretations, and it lends itself to yet others. I wouldn’t say that this is a big departure from how I read the novel before writing these posts, but it certainly does situate my interest in postcolonial dislocation and mapping within a broader and better defined discursive context.

(Thanks also to Tom and Katherine for some great collaborative post writing that helped me develop my interpretation of the novel!)

Teaching Spivak with "Bartleby"

"Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" by Gayatri Spivak and "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville is an odd couple, a complicated pairing of texts, though it might seem at first obvious how they could be read together. A lesson with both of these texts could do several things. First we can think about our perspective as readers when we approach "Bartleby" and what kind of spin our ideological dispositions bring to the table. Then, by reading Spivak against Melville, we might consider a more difficult inquiry, what are the limits of our comparison? How do postcolonial subjects differ from hegemonic subjects, even those who are oppressed?

For our first step, we could consider what Spivak proposes at the end of her introduction as the most important consequence of the Subaltern Studies collective's work, that "the agency of change is located in the insurgent or 'subaltern'" instead of colonial authorities (3). Our point of view is critical to how we read literature or history. From the perspective of capitalist ideology, the character of Bartleby might be considered a bum, which some have already suggested, and the story as a whole could be read as a cautionary tale about insubordination that reinscribes the value of work. But from a  a Marxist perspective, "Bartleby" might be read quite differently. Instead of ceding to the dominant narrative, the story would celebrate the refusal of work and stands as an allegory for successful resistance to capitalist domination. This might help us reflexively understand what Spivak is saying when she talks about "reading as active transaction between past and future" (5).

We might also think about how to go about performing this kind of reading. Without a written account from Bartleby's perspective, what material do we have to work from to reconstruct his point of view? How might we measure the effectiveness of his rebellion? Spivak writes "it is only the texts of counter-insurgency or elite documentation that give us the news of the consciousness of the subaltern" (12). Okay, so if we can view "Bartleby" as a text of counter-insurgence, that enables some interesting moves. We might read the story as the production of a moral crisis in the lawyer. The magnitude of the crisis would be the metric of Bartleby's rebellion and tell us a good deal about its effectiveness.

So far this has been pretty fun, but now the critique. First, though Bartleby is exploited, he is certainly not subaltern. I don't think Spivak really provides a definition of the subaltern subject that drives this point home for undergraduate students. In fact, she provides some evidence that might be interpreted to contrary: "What had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought" (12). So first, let's clarify this point. What dilemma is Spivak talking about here? Is it particularized predicament of the subaltern, or is it a generalized problem of historiography? What from this essay has broader implications, that is, what is a universal critique, and what is specifically related to postcolonial studies? Then, here's a block quote that I would make a slide of to clarify the subaltern subject, definitely not from Wikipedia:

“ . . . subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for [the] Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie. . . . In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern. . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern' . . . They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.”  

The excerpt above is from an interview Spivak did in 1992, and it's much more explicit than the text. With this in mind, what are the limits of our reading Spivak with "Bartleby"? Let's have a conversation about oppression vs. subalternity. What are the particular characteristics of the subaltern subject that differentiate them from Bartleby as a pastiche of exploited workers? How might we then leverage "Subaltern Studies" as a criticism of "Bartleby"?

What was Pacific Literature?

An Excerpt from the Preface of The Norton Anthology of Pacific Literature,

Rebecca Hogue, PhD, Editor (New York: W.W. Norton, 2025)

To be read in conjunction with The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara for ENL 180, University of California

“While my substitution of the formulation “what was x” may seem perverse, the recent publication of this highly anticipated volume of canonical Pacific literature brings to bear many questions of spatiotemporal scope as well as sequence.  What “attachments,” borrowing from Ilan Stavans’s Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, does Pacific literature have to place, language, and identity?  What has, what does, and what will constitute Pacific literature?  In this groundbreaking collection we examine subaltern literatures of a wide and diverse national, linguistic, and geographic range.  Although anthologies of Pacific writings have been in publication since the 1940s, early anthologies only contained anglophone literatures by European and Euro-American settler colonists, missionaries, and other travel writers such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London.  Inspired by the increase in publication of works of other historically underrepresented minorities and in the post-Civil Rights era, the 1970s delivered an awareness of indigenous histories from the Americas into the Pacific.  The publication of oral histories, myths and legends, and other cultural artifacts such as chants and traditional dances moved from the margins to the mainstream throughout the Pacific.  By the 1980s and 90s, multiculturalist anthologies and the formation of the “local” Asian diasporic community began to infiltrate, and arguably, replace indigenous representations of island cultures.  Upon recognition of this imbalanced approach to representing island cultures, literary critics and historians began toward the turn of the 21st Century to reassessing not only the importance of the subaltern voices of the Pacific, but what spatiotemporal scope must be applied to the region.  Is it, as Arif Dirlik proposed, a Pacific Rim, or perhaps, as the United States Department of Defense has posited, a Transpacific Region?  Or could it be best classified as Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa suggests, Oceania, which he characterizes as a pathway to “each other and everything else”?  While many anthologies organize their sections around modern conceptions of the nation-state, as well as pre- and post-Western contact Pacific Islands, this collection orients geographically around and through the Pacific Ocean and includes literatures in English, Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) and other pidgin dialects, Indigenous literatures in translation from such cultures including but not limited to Hawai’i, Samoa, New Zealand/ Aotearoa, Easter Island/ Rapa Nui, Guam/ Guahan, Yap, Chuuk, Fiji, Australia, Taiwan, and Alaska.”

[...]

“Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), anthologized here, presents an anachronistic view of Micronesia.  Touted for its style in its initial reception, and presented as “literary” unlike other contemporary representations of the Pacific, People nevertheless perpetuated Orientalist depictions of Micronesians while aiming to critique colonialism in the region.  Despite the controversial portrayal of native peoples, Yanagihara’s work remains one of the most widely read novels on the Pacific and thus a seminal example of the legacy of colonialism and challenges of subaltern subjectivity for the region.”

Write the power: Spivak, Cleland, and fun with who gets to speak

Gayatri Spivak’s “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” isn’t an obvious pairing with Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. But the connections with women in both texts, as well as Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended,” work together to create the basis for what could be a really fun lesson.

First off, I want to acknowledge that Spivak and Cleland don’t completely match up in time and space (although he did spend a significant amount of time in India… I really need to read more of Fanny Hill in Bombay in order to flesh out this argument). Spivak points out that theory “cannot produce universals,” though it can “produce provisional generalizations” (17). It’s important to recognize that no theory is universal or one-size-fits-all; those who don’t (as she explains in more detail on the following pages) end up with huge gaps in their analysis. For example, Marx is great, but his working-class subject doesn’t map completely onto the subaltern subject here (14-15). In other words, check yourself before you wreak your theory (and yourself). Articulating where the gaps lie will help in better understanding how they effect your analysis.

So now the fun part: Let’s say it’s an upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today.

I’d use Spivak’s discussion about how “the subaltern’s view … cannot be recovered” as a way to set up some context for Memoirs (12). Those who get to write have power and Fanny writes her own story, making sure it’s not forgotten. Yet, much like these peasants whose “view of the struggle will probably never be recovered,” the majority of sex workers in 1700s London were streetwalkers whose views were also not recorded in a way we can access today (Spivak 12). There are many 18th-century writers who talk about seeing women in the streets, being harassed by them (thanks Boswell), but much of the prostitute narrative, fictional or not, concerns women who work indoors and have a higher-class, often regular, clientele. The lack of voices from less-educated folks makes reconstructing a rounded historical context difficult, especially since so many texts are anonymous. I’d then lead us into looking at how else Cleland’s text seems idealized and what historical evidence from less fortunate/well-off prostitutes does to our interpretation of Fanny’s narrative. For example, hardly anyone gets pregnant and Fanny never gets VD – she is far from typical for her time. Just as this authentick 18th-century edition of Cosmopolitan indicates.

Another teaching point would come from Spivak and Armstrong’s talk about the role of women as exchange objects, not subjects in and of themselves. I would give my students some readings from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin on this topic, then use it as a lens to look at the relationships within Memoirs. The fact that women don’t function “properly” as exchange objects is one of the problems with prostitution. We’d use these readings to look at Cleland’s Memoirs in comparison with texts we’d already read in the class, such as Charles Walker’s Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Most Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723) and Eliza Haywood’s The Anti-Pamela (1741). It would be a way to consolidate what we’d been working on before, then set us up for whatever our next readings would (like de Sade or something equally fun).

(I’d also want to do something with how Armstrong explicitly talks about revisiting and revising her ideas from before (530-31) as a tool for revising papers and thinking critically. But that’s another topic for another time.)

Teaching in Concentric Circles

Without giving too much individual detail, I want to use the students in Desiree’s American/Ethnic Studies class (for which I TA) as a sample group. They are about evenly split between English majors and non-majors, and most are in their later years of college. While there are a few who clearly stand out in terms of grasping a nuanced interpretation of each text, on the whole both sections of the class struggle with moving beyond surface-level observations.

           

Since Desiree’s lectures give them a more comprehensive thematic and contextual understanding of the novels/films, I try in section to teach smaller-scale approaches that could kickstart some paper ideas. Often what this means is that I will choose a couple specific and unusual analyses that are designed to be defamiliarizing and unexpected. My own interests sway these toward structural questions, which I use because many of the students have never been exposed to the possibility of thinking outside and around content.

Though the Spivak is probably not the kind of text that would come up in this undergraduate class, I’d like to use it to demonstrate the type of lesson I’d construct to get the students engaged and thinking about paper topics. Since the entirety of the article is a bit much for this project, I’ll pull out one particular section that connects well to Woman on the Edge of Time.

“A theory of change as the site of the displacement of function between sign-systems […] is a theory of reading in the strongest possible general sense. The site of displacement of the function of signs is the name of reading as active transaction between past and future” (Spivak 4-5).

Since the notion of a “sign-system” isn’t very legible without a lot of background theory, what I’d focus on here is the latter idea: “reading as active transaction between past and future.” Woman is a great place to start with this kind of thought because of its obvious link to temporal displacement, so my goal here would be to show how the more abstract concept of reading can work within the novel in several different ways.

In general, when I structure my lesson plan around something conceptual like this, I start with the textual example that will have the most immediate (and least conceptual) application for the students. In Woman on the Edge of Time, for instance, there is an early scene where Connie interacts with a “screen set into the wall” in the future utopia that she assumes is a television but that turns out to be more like a tailored newsfeed. She turns it on and it responds with information that is unintelligible to Connie.

‘Good light, do you wish visual, communication, or transmission? You have forgotten to press your request button.’ […] She pushed T for transmission, she hoped. The screen began flashing the names of articles or talks, obviously in plant genetics. As the screen flashed the meaningless titles, she read the other buttons. One said PREC, so she tried it. A description like a little book review came on and remained there for two minutes.

           

Attempts to increase nutritional content in winter grain (Triticale siberica) suitable short season northern crops maintaining insect & smut resistance. Promising direction, full breeding info. James Bay Cree, Black Duck Group, 10 PP. 5 DC. 2 PH.

Feeling watched, she shut the set off guiltily and jumped back. (Piercy 64-65)

Here Connie is a very concrete manifestation of the transaction between past and future, and it comes out as a function of her inability to comprehend what she reads. Instead, she feels herself part of some illicit action, as though the difficulty she has (or even the attempt at) reading this future text with her past knowledge is somehow transgressive.

From this point I would move outward in stages--hence the title of this post--to get the students comfortable with the practice of pulling back and expanding their perspectives on the content. I would talk about how Connie’s transitions between past and future and the ability to move between them can be a kind of reading—in the novel they call it “catching,” but it is, in effect, the inhabitants of the future reading Connie’s receptivity, situation, and potential, and using that to introduce her into their environment. This of course cannot happen without some exchange in the other direction, hence the transactional nature. I would then move even further out and talk about how the physical act of us reading Woman on the Edge of Time is by its nature also a transaction with our own past, given when the book was written and its connection to a certain moment in women’s history. I would suggest it can be a kind of reading of our future as well, since many of the technological advances in the book are part of our current existence and many more are potentials on the horizon.

I’ve found this approach interesting as a demonstration of the variety of ways students can analyze a text, though I can’t say whether it has been successful. The idea is that it will help at least a few break away from the all too common plot-retelling that happens in papers. From what I’ve seen, some of that is a consequence of not being able to think of a unique analysis or one that excites the student when writing, so my lessons are an attempt to continuously expand the parameters while also suggesting specific, actionable methods for thinking about a text.

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.