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!)