Conrad's Shadow by Lawtoo Nidesh;

Author:Lawtoo, Nidesh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Can the Subaltern Imitate?

This second, less-reassuring hypothesis is in line with recent developments in postcolonial studies that urge critics to move beyond binary distinctions between colonizer and colonized and, by extension, narratives and counternarratives in order to explore the underlying complicities and ambivalences that tie these structural polarities. Homi Bhabha, for instance, in The Location of Culture, argues that “the place of difference and otherness, or the space of the adversarial . . . is never entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional.”28 Along similar lines, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Gayatri Spivak writes: “I repeatedly attempt to undo the often unexamined opposition between colonizer and colonized implicit in much colonial and postcolonial discourse study.”29 Within the field of Conrad studies, Edward Said is probably the critic who saw this ambivalence and structural complicity most clearly. Thus in Culture and Imperialism he states: “Between classical nineteenth-century imperialism and what it gave rise to in resistant native cultures, there is . . . both a stubborn confrontation and a crossing over in discussion, borrowing back and forth, debate” (CI 30; my emphasis). And then, in a flash of critical insight that joins the two strands of discourse we have been following all along, he adds: “Many of the most interesting postcolonial writers bear their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending toward a new future” (30–31). These illuminating comments appear in the context of a discussion of Heart of Darkness, and since the name of Achebe surfaces as a representative of such “interesting post-colonial writers,” we can see how they pave the way for Said’s late affirmation that “Things Fall Apart is unintelligible without Heart of Darkness.”30 Indeed, as we had multiple occasions to confirm, Things Fall Apart is not only a text that, contra Conrad, advocates a “revision of the past” but also a text that, with Conrad, bears the traces of the colonial language of “frenzy” and the wounding stereotypical representations it entails.

If we now want to further Said’s innovative line of inquiry and continue to move beyond the authorial disciplinary dichotomies that—for forty years now—have informed the race quarrel, I suggest that we must not let go of the intrinsic, impersonal discursive logic that motivates the re-presentation of a frenzied conception of the subaltern subject at the heart of a celebrated counternarrative. A consideration of the “crossing over” between Conrad’s and Achebe’s ambivalent take on the scarring issue of mimetic frenzy opens up a productive, intermediate space to interrogate the more general network of discursive logic that ties—in a mimetic double bind—the subaltern counternarrative to the dominant narrative. In the process, the question of mimesis can no longer be restricted to the cultural meaning and social function of ritual frenzy (anthropological mimesis), nor to the narrative implications of this aesthetic representation (narrative mimesis). Rather, it needs to be supplemented by an approach that considers mimesis from a new postcolonial perspective (postcolonial mimesis).

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