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!)

Justice Pits Belief Against Reason: We Disagree

We both really liked the Justice article—the ways in which it critiques how criticism operates, in particular—and we were therefore surprised when our discussion led us to a critique of an underlying assumption that Justice makes in his argument. In talking about the role of belief systems in our texts, we explored how, as Justice says, “doubting and investigating the miraculous begin almost simultaneously with believing it” (Justice 19). Justice encourages us to break out of an assumption that belief is separate from other modes of “cognitive experience,” by drawing upon Aquinas’ model of faith in which “the formulary of belief is not that which goes without saying, the plush carpet of presupposition, but that which has to be said, and then said again, because saying it provokes reactive intellectual energy” (Justice 13).

By applying this model of faith solely to the question of miracles (i.e. events that occur for supernatural rather than natural reasons), Justice might be selling Aquinas and Augustine’s reading of human perception short. We realized that Justice’s model assumes the givenness of a person who experiences the world as an Enlightenment subject of reason. Doubt must be a part of and simultaneous to belief because reason tells us that miracles are likely not believable. Justice penetrates the opacity of the medieval believing subject—whom criticism has frozen “into an idiot deadpan behind which either of two extreme possibilities might lie: they must speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (Justice 11). But he does so by locating doubt within their belief system, implying that medieval subjects have trouble believing (as we ourselves do, or would) because of the self-evidence of natural law. We are not accusing Justice of anachronistically inserting an Enlightenment subjectivity into too early an era, which would fall directly into the trap Justice is warning us against: namely, assuming that medieval mindsets are inherently impenetrable to us. Rather, the protagonists in our texts reveal to us the belief systems under which we operate in the contemporary moment; these characters want to think and behave as rational, Enlightenment subjects, but they remain in the orbit of belief systems. It is not simply that belief is an act of will over an otherwise rational intellect. It seems, at least in our texts, that belief is as built-in as rationality; the mind struggles rather to distinguish between and reconcile the two.

Is it really the case that we (21st-century scholars) can’t identify with the perceptual account of belief? Answering that question is complicated by our own systems of belief and knowing, which adhere faithfully (at least in part) to a world characterizable by a scientific framework. Thus, when Sarah Boyle, protagonist of “Heat Death of the Universe,” begins to meditate upon the “second law of thermodynamics,” which “can be interpreted to mean that the ENTROPY of a closed system tends towards a maximum and that its available ENERGY tends towards a minimum,” the reader is free to interpret this as a factual clarification. Never mind that Boyle’s own perceptual experience provides her with little evidence that “a time must finally come when the Universe ‘unwinds’ itself, no energy being available for use,” nor that the imagery this brings to mind is far more reminiscent of the apocalyptics of medieval manuscripts than of anything that might correspond to our “reality”: “She thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence” (Zoline 3).

In fact, the more we discussed the role of knowledge systems reflected in “Heat Death,” the more we realized that Sarah Boyle is seeking the sense of security or certainty that a “factual” account of her life might supply, but in doing so she is really operating on religious and mythological registers as much as she is reflecting facts about the world. Drawing from her religious “texts,” namely “children's dictionaries, encyclopedias, ABCs and all reference books,” which leave her “transfixed and comforted at their simulacra of a complete listing and ordering,” Sarah writes notes to herself around the house.

[On the] lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mandalas, and the words, "Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns." (Zoline 3)

This passage’s blending of magico-religious (“to ward off … she has written” or the use of buddhist iconography) and the factual/authoritative is symptomatic of the story as a whole. By seeking to participate in the “factual” world by gleaning meaning from it or considering herself a part of it, Sarah cannot help but slip between the banal and the miraculous, the workings of her own perceptual world and the workings of a world which exceeds her and which must be taken upon faith or authority.

A glance at the world of Sarah Boyle shows how this blending of belief and fact operates within the framework of Enlightenment reason, but in By the Sea, this picture is complicated. The protagonists of the novel must negotiate a Western standard of rationality alongside a  postcolonial heritage that seems to function similarly to medieval culture as seen by Western critics: that is, Western colonizers relate colonized subjects to mysticism and an immature historic past.

Toward the end of By the Sea, Latif comes to Saleh’s apartment to hear about Saleh’s backstory. Their pasts and their family histories are deeply interconnected—most importantly, Saleh took possession of Latif’s family’s house, and now he has come to Britain using Latif’s father’s name and passport. The novel gives the two protagonists’ competing, but not mutually exclusive, accounts of what happened in their pasts. The characters seem to privilege the truth that can be imparted by rational knowledge over their culture’s traditional mode of Islamic storytelling. Latif in particular, who is an English professor in London, introduced by Rachel to Saleh as “an expert on your area” (Gurnah 65), makes the association of Zanzibari religious and folkloric traditions with a historic past that is inaccessible, or at least incomprehensible, to the rational Western subject. The following comments that Latif makes to Saleh imply that he perhaps looks at his “nativity,” his childhood, as being “native” in that other sense:

“I think I imagined you as a kind of relic, a metaphor of my nativity, and that I would come and examine you while you sat still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually like a jinn raised from infernal depths. Do you mind me talking to you like this?”
“If you have to,” I said. “Which jinn do you have in mind? Which jinn sitting still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually?”
“Do you mean which story?” he asked, smiling, frowning, trying to tease out a memory. “I can’t remember. I have an image.”
“Horned? Does the jinn in the image have a horn? One horn in the middle of a huge forehead? … ‘Qamar Zaman,’” I said, “That story has the stillest, shiftiest jinn in the whole A Thousand and One Nights. With a horn in the middle of his forehead. My favourite jinn, an utter grotesque, which is how you imagined me.”
“No, no, definitely not ‘Qamar Zaman,’” he said. “I know that story very well.”
“Well, which, then? You’re the expert.” (Gurnah 169–170)

In this game of chicken, Latif realizes that he doesn’t want the jinn he was thinking of to be a particular jinn, because that demonstrates that he has been thinking on the level of mythology. By denying the specificity of “Qamar Zaman” and saying “I know that story very well,” he calls upon his status as literary scholar, as if his knowledge of English literature means he has rationally studied and critiqued the stories of his childhood. But he has already admitted that he had an image of the jinn he’d pictured Saleh as, and Saleh’s ironic appropriation of Rachel’s term for Latif as an “expert” calls into question Latif’s distance from this folklore. He wants to think of himself as a rational subject, trying to find the truth of what happened, but he finds himself operating within the traditional belief system of storytelling and jinns.

In conclusion, we recall the moment in Justice’s article where Christina of Markyate has a vision that the abbot wore the wrong color the day before—this is so extraordinarily miraculous that her supporters realize they hadn’t actually believed in miracles before then. The abbot discovers that “what he has used as a convenient heuristic premise is actually the rudest fact: it is not as if she can see him; she just can see him. He thereby learns to believe what he believes” (Justice 17). In addition to this being a truly delightful moment, it seems clear that the medieval believers Justice describes are not merely Enlightenment doubters overcoming their rationality with the force of will. Rather, it seems that they can’t necessarily tell the difference between believing and knowing, or faith and reasoning. We think our characters (and humans in general) have this problem too.

Borders, Toxins, and the Refugee Condition

I really enjoyed the Chen article and especially like the ways in which it brings together discourses on environmental justice, critical race studies, queer theory, and biopolitics. Were I to teach it, I would certainly use it in a lesson on a primary text related more directly to toxicity than By the Sea. Gain, by Richard Powers, is in my experience many people’s go-to text regarding toxicity, the environment, and global/transnational capitalism, and would probably work nicely in this case (it could also lend itself to a discussion of whiteness re: toxicity), but I’m sure there are many other texts that I’ve not yet encountered that would work well, or even better, in combination with the article. For the purposes of this blog post, however, let’s suspend disbelief and pretend that I’m teaching an upper-level undergraduate class for which I have had my students read By the Sea, Chen’s “Toxic Animacies,” and the Tompkins chapter on “Graham’s Imperial Dietetics.”

I would focus my class on going through Chen’s article and using it to explicate the basic strands of queer, environmental, and race criticisms upon which it expands. After that, I would bring in By the Sea to start a discussion on borders, biopolitics, and toxicity. Introducing the idea of thinking through a possible connection between refugees and toxins, I would break the class up into groups and assign each group a coupling of a quote from the novel and a quote from a critical essay to analyze.

Group #1

When Latif asks Saleh about why he chose not to reveal that he speaks English to the immigrations officers, Latif says that without English, “You’re just a condition, without even a story” (Gurnah 143). Chen’s conclusion states, “Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives” (Chen 281-2). Gurnah and Chen are using the word “condition” in different ways, but what similarities can we read into them? How does Saleh’s lack of a backstory in the eyes of the British government affect his subjectivity, his animacy? What happens when the British government does “quarantine” refugees in detainment centers?

Group #2

For this group I would combine the above quote from Chen with the line that the airport immigration officer, Kevin Edelman, tells Saleh, even though he thinks Saleh doesn’t understand: “People like you come pouring in here without any thought of the damage they cause” (Gurnah 12). What damage does the British state think that refugees can cause; what will Saleh’s effects on the British nation be?

Group #3

Chen’s essay opens with the observation that “figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion” (Chen 266). When Saleh is first placed in a homestay in the small seaside town in England in which the present tense of the novel is set (he later is given his own apartment), he is repulsed by the guest room and ends up sleeping on a towel on the floor: “I daren’t even sit on [the bed] out of an irrational fear of contamination, not just fear of disease but of some inner pollution. … sitting on the floor of that dusty overcrowded room, unable to think about anything else except my own worthlessness” (Gurnah 56-7). Remember the very last line of the book, when Saleh visits Latif in London and worries about the messy state of Latif’s apartment, wondering whether he’ll have clean sheets: “I had Alfonso’s towel with me if the worst came to the worst” (245). How can we use Chen’s analysis of toxicity to think about these instances of repulsion, these worries of contamination? What do these show us about Saleh’s experience as a subject? What effects does British culture or the British state (his condition, rather than reading Saleh as a condition) have on him?

Group #4

While being questioned by Kevin Edelman, Saleh reflects on why the British government has offered asylum to Zanzibaris: “It was a cheap way of showing stern disapproval, and there weren’t too many of us” (Gurnah 10). In her article, Tompkins discusses how 

in Alcott’s vision the body/home is thus ever susceptible to collapse and/or pollution and ever in need of shoring up against the threat from without. … However much the civilized body, domicile, and nation seek to seal themselves off from the exteriority of nature, they can never wholly succeed without some impossible act of sewing up the mouth and orifices, without becoming entirely isolate. This would, of course, mean death. (Tompkins 76)

If we think of refugees as metaphorical toxins entering the British nation, how can we use Tompkins’s assessment of the impossibility of complete isolation to explain what Saleh sees as the British rationale for offering Zanzibaris asylum?

I’d then have each group present their ideas and have a brief class discussion to synthesize these readings and think about the questions of national borders, imperialism, biopolitics, and the subjectivity of refugees in By the Sea.

(P.S. Here’s a fun fact, because I can’t resist talking about my alma mater: In the early 1840s, Oberlin College strictly enforced the Graham diet in its dining halls.)

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.

The Bartleby Archetype and Escaping Power, by Tom and Sophia

In “The Mesh of Power,” Foucault asks, “Why do we always conceive of power as law and prohibition, why this privilege?” (Foucault 3). He introduces “an analysis of power that would not simply be a negative, juridical idea of power, but rather, the idea of a technology of power” (Foucault 2). We are going to focus on the first technology of power that he describes, that of discipline, which for Foucault is “absolutely not saying, ‘you must not,’ but rather essentially obtaining a better performance, a better production and a better productivity” (6). By looking at “Bartleby the Scrivener” and its role in By the Sea, we want to explore in what ways Bartleby as an archetype establishes or symbolizes a technique of escaping power and how this technique interacts with the development of discipline.

The narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a lawyer with a firm on Wall Street, praises Bartleby for his discipline, which he believes will impact other workers at his firm. In the brief job interview that the narrator recounts with Bartleby, few words are exchanged and none are remembered, but the impression is long lasting. “A motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold...I can see that figure now--pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby” (Melville 15). The traits which the lawyer emphasizes here — neatness, respectability, and sadness — are in contrast to his description of his other clerks, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, each of whom are adequate at their jobs, but have an indelible flaw. Turkey is a drinker, Nippers affected by anxious tendencies, and Ginger Nut, a twelve-year-old boy, is simply the clerk who fetches the other clerks lunch: together they lack the productivity the lawyer desires for his office. The lawyer hopes that bringing in Bartleby will have what Foucault refers to as a norming effect, increasing the productivity of the other workers without imposing actual prohibitions on them. “I engaged him,” he says, “glad to have among my corps of copyists a man so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey and the fiery one of Nippers” (Melville 15).  

Here we begin to see the emergence of a technique of escaping the power of discipline: the appearance of discipline and the use of this appearance to infiltrate the apparatus. Without his important first impression, Bartleby would not have been hired by the lawyer and entered into a position where his refusal would have consequences. Let’s look at the first instance of this refusal and try to develop a view of this as an archetype. The narrator summons Bartleby to his desk to review some legal copy with the “natural expectancy of instant compliance” as his boss (Melville 17). But without moving from his desk, Bartleby “in a singularly mild, firm voice” says “‘I would prefer not to’” (Melville 17). From this brief exchange, we can make several observations. First, the surprise of the refusal hinges on an expectation. The lawyer’s assumption that Bartleby will automatically respond to his request is connected to his position as a boss and the subservience he commands from his other workers. This subservience is immediate and verbal, the clerks frequently addressing him with words like “‘With submission, sir’” at the beginning or end of their sentences (Melville 9). The tone of the refusal is unemotional but “firm.” Bartleby’s lack of emotion was initially a reason for his hiring, but here it proves effective when turned against the order of the boss, stunning him into silence. Bartleby makes no move to come towards the lawyer, but with his words, he remains still at his desk. The refusal comes as an individual response. In describing the duties of his clerks, the lawyer talks about their frequent collaboration. However, in asserting “I would prefer not to” Bartleby is effectively separating his labor from his fellow workers. But is he really refusing? Bartleby’s response works because the lawyer does nothing to compel him against his preference, but it implies that it is not an outright refusal, that he could be compelled to do the task. This creates an intense sensation of anger in the lawyer. He thinks, “Doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises,” but instead he calls on Nippers to do the work for him, leaving Bartleby alone (Melville 18). Bartleby’s technique works by operating within the framework of discipline — Bartleby’s deferential tone; that he stays at his desk, in the position to do the work, even though he won’t produce — at the same time that it deviates from the norm on the individual level.

“Bartleby the Scrivener” crops up throughout By the Sea, at first subtly within the narration (Saleh describes how Rachel, his asylum case worker, wants him to buy a telephone, “but I prefer not to” [Gurnah 41]). Later, Saleh reveals to Rachel that he does in fact speak English and she asks him why he hadn’t said so: “‘I preferred not to,’ I said, glancing at the brick wall through the window opposite me” (Gurnah 65). Thus begins the novel’s Bartleby motif, in which Saleh positions himself as a type of “Bartleby” and he, Rachel, and Latif repeatedly discuss the story and their varying interpretations of it. Saleh tells Latif that “for some reason I was reminded of it when I arrived here” (Gurnah 158). One sees this explicitly when the brick wall out the window of Rachel’s legal office reminds Saleh of the imagery in the story, but it also applies more generally to his situation as a refugee, to his enmeshment in a system of power whose actors do not know or care to understand his backstory. Upon his arrival in England, Saleh is not punished or told “you must not”; rather, he is disciplined, expected to present himself as the “right” type of refugee who could be a productive member of British society were he granted asylum, to conform to “the principle of the norm” (Foucault 15). He writes, “I feel defeated by the overbearing weight of the nuances that place and describe everything I might say, as if a place already exists for them and a meaning has already been given to them before I utter them” (Gurnah 68).

Saleh references “Bartleby” to resist this discipline, to refuse to produce what is expected of him by “preferring not to.” But in doing so, he deploys an archetype and again speaks words that already have a meaning attached to them. Saleh convinces Rachel to read the story, and she does not love it as Saleh and Latif do: “Too much gloom and resignation in it, she thought, and the symbolism was oppressive … Too much self-pity for all her liking” (Gurnah 168). Her interpretation is not necessarily to be taken at face value, especially coming from someone who, although she is trying to help Saleh, is neglecting to learn about his past, who is perhaps not aware of the oppressive system — in Zanzibar but also as a refugee in England — from which he is attempting to escape. However, this causes Saleh to reconsider his own interpretation of what he and Latif agree is “a beautiful story” (Gurnah 65, 156).

In the final pages of the novel, Saleh takes his first trip to London to stay with Latif. Echoing By the Sea’s first “Bartleby” reference, Latif encourages Saleh to buy a telephone: “‘I have no urge to do so,’ I said, and saw him smile. I thought I knew what he was thinking. He would have preferred me to say, I prefer not to. But I had been thinking of what Rachel had said, and thought I would read ‘Bartleby’ again before speaking his words as the utterings of an admired desperado” (Gurnah 244). Saleh rephrases his refusal, retaining the sense that he has no desire to produce what is expected of him by societal norms, but destabilizing his position as a “Bartleby,” sidestepping the technique of escaping power that he has until now been deploying. This raises the question: Is Bartleby’s technique necessarily a good thing? What consequences does using this technique have on the bodies of “Bartlebys”? Saleh may have realized that he’s pigeonholed himself by citing the “I would prefer not to,” that Latif and Rachel each read him in a particular way based on their personal interpretations of the story. By calling into question Bartleby’s status as “an admired desperado,” Saleh raises an even more fundamental question. There seems to be an underlying assumption that Bartleby’s technique of escaping power is successful, but does it really work?

Literature and Non-literature, Truth and Stories

In “The English Apparatus,” Robert Scholes questions the hierarchy of “literature” and “non-literature” that has been established and reinforced by the institution of the English department and literary studies. He urges us to rebuild the English apparatus by reconceptualizing what the “truth” of literature is, by acknowledging that the lines dividing texts within this hierarchy are not fixed but overlapping: “There is a difference between practice and earnest, which we must acknowledge. We err only when we make the gesture of erecting this difference into two ‘worlds,’ one of which is held to be all practice, the other all earnest” (Scholes 10). He compares the English apparatus’s reverence for literature to a reverence for religious scripture but argues against this, saying that “the varieties of literature must be seen as temporal rather than eternal. If literature is not scripture, then it cannot be outside of human time” (Scholes 13).

By the Sea does not deal with the exact same hierarchy of literature vs. non-literature, but its characters do reveal a common bias for knowledge and truth over stories, only to undermine this distinction in the telling of their own stories. My blog posts have yet to mention the character of Latif Mahmud, which reveals my own subconscious bias in interpreting the novel as primarily Saleh’s story. To clarify and fill in some of the gaps that I’ve left open: The novel is composed of six chapters, the first and last two narrated by Saleh, but the middle two narrated by Latif, the expatriate Zanzibari professor called in to help translate for Saleh. It turns out that Latif and Saleh come from the same town and that their personal histories are deeply intertwined: Because of a loan to a third party that was never repaid, Saleh took possession of Latif’s childhood house; in the present tense of the novel, Saleh has entered England using Latif’s deceased father’s passport (and hence his name). A central question is whether Saleh was in the right when he took the house — whose inheritance was it? And although I’ve told you only about Saleh so far, we readers of By the Sea do get to hear both sides.

Scholes writes, “If wisdom, or some less grandiose notion such as heightened awareness, is to be the end of our endeavors, we shall have to see it not as something transmitted from the text to the student but as something developed in the student by questioning the text” (14). By the Sea, as a text, is very aware of how it makes its readers question the truth in the stories it tells, and this interplay must be central to any interpretation of the novel.

Latif is an English professor, and within the first few pages of his section, he has this outburst, disconnected from and interruptive of the narrative that he is telling: 

I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own bits of offal, for God’s sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretary’s office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day. (Gurnah 74)

Not only does he set up a hierarchy of prose over poetry, but he reinforces the idea that truth and clarity are the aim of literature, that obfuscatory stories are of less value. (And here we need to keep in mind: Saleh and Latif’s flashbacks in the novel themselves operate on the level of legend, a mixture of timeless cultural (Islamic/Zanzibari) tropes and local gossip.) Even though Latif claims a preference for the lucid truth, he can’t help reading the world in myths and stories. When Latif is asked to help a refugee named Rajab Shaaban, his father’s name, he suspects that it must be the man who claimed his parents’ house, but he only confirms his suspicions upon finally visiting Saleh:

I knew this man, had seen his eyes on the streets, had seen the way they looked at Hassan years ago, and had even taken a letter from him to deliver to my brother. And if it wasn’t him I had taken the letter from, then it was a man very like him. And if those weren’t his eyes from years ago, then they were very like them. That secret smile made me shudder. (Gurnah 100)

Saleh, while also privileging knowledge over stories, makes the reader aware of his precarious position as a storyteller: “I feel that I am an involuntary instrument of another’s design, a figure in a story told by someone else. Not I. Can an I ever speak of itself without making itself heroic, without making itself seem hemmed in, arguing against an unarguable, rancouring with an implacable?” (Gurnah 69). At the same time that Saleh is being read/written as an archetypical asylum seeker, he is telling us his “true” story, which strips away the first-person “I” from any other character and does not allow for Latif’s version of the events. (The reverse of course goes for Latif’s telling, as well.) Yet Saleh is wary of making himself out to be heroic — or maybe not, but he is at least warning the reader that, just like the British officials spinning him into a yarn about refugees, he may not be trusted to tell the real “truth.”

These thoughts are themselves resistant to concise summation, so I’m going to end with some questions. Should we read stories that seem clear and “truthful” as legends, as poems? Does the first-person narrator ever not make him/herself out as a hero? Can this tell us anything about the arbitrariness of the literature/non-literature hierarchy? Am I right to extend Scholes’s prescription for teaching writing/literature to the idea of reading how texts situate, undermine, and question themselves?

Speaking to Maps and Furniture

The first chapter of By the Sea introduces one of the novel’s main motifs, exemplified by the moment when Saleh Omar explains, “I have always had an interest in furniture. Furniture and maps. Beautiful, intricate things” (Gurnah 19). I am interested in teasing out the complicated relationship that Saleh, a colonized subject, has to these items that Benedict Anderson shows “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion” (1).

Anderson writes of “the alignment of map and power” (4), explaining how the census, map, and museum all worked to place colonies under surveillance by imposing externally produced categories and grids at the same time that the colonial state appropriated and reshaped local history to reinforce its sovereignty. These tools operate by means of their “emptiness, contextlessness, visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility” (Anderson 8), reshaping the local, colonized peoples’ understanding or reading of their own history.

With this in mind, I’d like to turn to the case of the character Saleh Omar. As a colonized subject who is hyperaware of the nefarious history of maps and archeological items but nevertheless covets them, he at once reaffirms Anderson’s argument and pokes holes into it, or at least poses questions not addressed by Anderson. In the first chapter, Saleh repeatedly returns to his fascination with furniture and maps. The very first mention comes when he writes, “I have always had an interest in furniture. At the very least, it weighs us down and keeps us on the ground, and prevents us from clambering up trees and howling naked as the terror of our useless lives overcomes us” (Gurnah 3). In this sentence we see how Saleh’s colonial education may have shaped his understanding of himself, the image of howling naked in the trees perhaps alluding to the white colonizers’ image of the “savages” whom they conquered. Saleh sees furniture as a civilizing object. However, I believe there is another layer to this: Saleh is a displaced person; he writes this as he describes his daily trips to furniture shops in the small seaside British town where he waits for the decision in his asylum case. Furniture grounds him in the sense that it allows him to shape a place in the world for himself. The legacy of British colonial rule has objectified him and entangled him, homeless, in the midst of global imperial networks, but he finds a way to personally reappropriate British furniture to make his own fleeting home.

Saleh was in fact an antique furniture salesman back in Zanzibar, and he sold mostly to tourists. He understood the implications of his work:

[My countrymen] did not have the same obsessive need of them that my European customers had — to acquire the world’s beautiful things so they could take them home and possess them, as tokens of their cultivation and open-mindedness, as trophies of their worldliness and their conquest of the multitudinous parched savannahs. (Gurnah 20)

Likewise, he is aware of the ways in which colonial states used maps to assert their power:

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. (Gurnah 35)

The move from plunder to possession that Saleh describes is related to Anderson’s argument, the colonial state using maps and artifacts to retroactively construct a history that legitimizes their claims. Saleh shows us how the colonized subject is taught to read maps in this way; although he understands the historical forces at work in their production, he also learns to desire the world through maps. He first sees a map in school as a child, and this is a pivotal moment in his life, his teacher drawing a map of the world without lifting his chalk from the board. The British colonial education system introduces Saleh to maps, awes him with “the fluency with which [the teacher] created an image of the world for us” (Gurnah 38). He finds distant places beautiful because of their distance but knowable because of maps. His talking to maps is an attempt to extend himself to those places, to take on the act of colonizer that is not fully available to him, except as a colonized person submitting to the sovereignty of the colonizers. (His participation in the sale of local artifacts to Europeans is another example of this.) In the unsympathetic flashbacks of another character we also learn that Saleh was seen by some as a plunderer in his own community, acquiring the deed to a house that may or may not have rightly been his inheritance. The degree to which maps and furniture enable Saleh’s own plundering or submit him to the will of the colonial state is contestable.

Yet I wonder about what the maps sometimes say back to Saleh. Must his love of maps and furniture be wholly in line with the state-imposed “alignment of map and power”? Or is there a way in which his relationship with these objects attempts at finding a way out of the colonial system, at giving Saleh agency in the world, at placing or locating himself in a world where he sees himself as just another object possessed by Europeans? Furniture and maps won’t be able to extricate him from the network in which he’s been caught up, but maybe they help Saleh make a shield for himself out of his colonizers’ own tools.

Can There Be a Postcolonial "Children of the Land"?

(Please excuse the wonky formatting—I'm still figuring out how this works!)

Considering that my primary text is a postcolonial novel about a Zanzibari asylum seeker in England, you may have expected me to write about Mbebe’s “Necropolitics” article. However, I was intrigued by Chakrabarty’s questions regarding the confrontation of postcolonial and climate change studies: “If, indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, How do we bring them together in our understanding of the world?” (Chakrabarty 200). Industrialization and colonization, both processes effected by powerful human agents, are intricately connected. They are involved in a feedback loop, in that human subjugation of other humans has powered the industries that have fueled globalization, which in turn has threatened this very mode of existence—“human life as developed in the Holocene” (Chakrabarty 213)—at the same time that it has reinforced the inequalities upon which it is based. Because climate change threatens all people, Chakrabarty impels us to consider humans as a universal species—it is at this level that we have become a geological agent and inaugurated the Anthropocene. He admits the value of the postcolonial “critique that sees humanity as an effect of power,” but “[does] not find it adequate in dealing with the crisis of global warming” for that reason (Chakrabarty 221). I was motivated to seek in By the Sea not an answer, but perhaps a hint, a response of any kind, to the question posed by Chakrabarty: “How do we relate to a universal history of life—to universal thought, that is—while retaining what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal?” (Chakrabarty 220).

This of course requires me to read against the grain. By the Sea is set during the Anthropocene, but its concerns are clearly postcolonial. While the environment—especially the sea—plays an important role in the novel, it does not address human “geological agency”—and not even indirectly. However, I think my unconventional reading is in line with Chakrabarty’s call to action; he hopes to “[probe] the limits of historical understanding” (Chakrabarty 220).

There is a brief moment in the novel that seems to me to get at Chakrabarty’s question. An overarching theme in this text about refugees is home and homelessness, place and dislocation. After being imprisoned in Zanzibar for many years, the protagonist, Saleh Omar, is moved to a tiny island where he and a few other prisoners are being held along with deportees waiting to be sent back to Oman. One day, the ship comes to take the deportees, and the prison’s commanding officer encourages Saleh to board with them. Saleh, however, is committed to his memory of home and to returning to his wife and daughter (whom we know, because this is a flashback, are likely dead by this point), so he remains on the island to stay out his indefinite prison sentence. For the next few days, the troops are more lenient with the prisoners left on the island, and one night at dinner, Saleh has this conversation with the commanding officer:

“You should’ve gone with your brothers,” the commanding officer said.

“They’re your brothers too,” I said, though I said it mildly for fear of offending our ruler, so mildly that I had to repeat it before he heard me.

“Yes,” he said laughing. “The Omanis fucked all our mothers.”

“And this is as much their home as it is mine, as it is yours,” I said.

“Sote wananchi,” he said satirically, booming with his knowing laughter. All of us are children of the land. (Gurnah 228)

Here the notion of “brotherhood” or universality is understood by the characters as ironic and “satiric.” Politics and history have differentiated Omanis from Zanzibaris, just as they have differentiated prisoners from members of the military. The idea of there being a universal “children of the land” is a ridiculous platitude. Yet, with Chakrabarty’s encouragement, we can see how all of these people’s dislocation indeed represents a commonality. Perhaps we can see them as children of the same negative space or fellow children of dislocation. The prisoner eating and joking with the commanding officer, surrounded by the sea on an island that is home to neither of them and with no sense of how long they will be there, are also in this moment stripped of the characteristics that give one power over the other, that differentiate them.

Nevertheless, even in this brief moment the possibility of universality is disregarded and enmeshed in sarcasm. We can look for a sense of species that is not biological or ecological — that accepts dislocation and disconnection from the land as its basis — but this too will face resistance.

Primary Text: By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah

By the Sea (2001) by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Blurb from a review in the New Internationalist:

"Set in two seaside towns half-a-world apart, the book opens as Saleh Omar arrives in Britain on a dank November day to claim asylum. … Although he understands every word said to him, he pretends to be unable to speak English and the immigration officials call upon Latif Mahmud, an expatriate academic, to translate. Mahmud’s links with Omar are much closer than a shared exile from their homeland, the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar. As Omar’s application for refugee status is processed, the men tell their stories and the plot becomes a complex maze, winding back upon itself in an intricate pattern of trickery and betrayal, lies, debts and revenge. The personal tales are set against the nightmarish post-colonial history of Zanzibar. … By the Sea … explores, with great depth and subtlety, the human histories behind the words we bandy about so freely and with so little understanding: exile, dispossession, displaced person, refugee, asylum seeker."

P.W. "By the Sea (Book)." New Internationalist 343 (March 2002): 31.