I’m back to reading novels (after, as Greg said, acting out my own marriage plot), so I’m finally going to respond to Sarah’s post on mimicry and add a bit on the two Naipaul novels I’ve just finished. Sarah, you’ll be delighted to hear that according to Simon there’s not one, not two, but at least three slipping definitions of mimicry in Bhabha’s essay. I think he includes mimicry in fact (the mimic man himself, Macaulay’s brown Englishman, black skins, white masks, etc.), as well as mimicry in discourse. In discourse, I think mimicry is both a strategy and a desire, a strategy for colonial power and knowledge that has buried within it a desire for the “not quite” Other. The mimic man is produced not by the strategy of colonial power but by the ambivalent limit desire places upon that strategy. And then when the mimic man returns the gaze, his mimicry reveals the desire buried within the strategy, and that’s when it becomes a menace or a threat. I’m not sure the colonized is a resisting agent observing the colonizer so much as his observation reveals the ambivalence of the colonizing discourse—the menace or threat is also part of the game of strategy and desire. As always with Bhabha, I could be making all this up.
Also in Simon’s class we read what he calls Bhabha’s Lost Essay (lost, perhaps, because it was written without recourse to mr-fancy-pants word play, punning, or punctuation). It’s called “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” and while mimeticism gets pulled down, the word “mimicry” isn’t yet in use to replace it. Bhabha’s example is Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. The typical view of Biswas is that the metaphor of the house bridges the void between the descriptive, realist, somewhat exotic colonial content and the literary value of the text, the transcendent bits, the universal appeal. In this way the book can enter the canon and be read by a class of preppy 10th graders in Buffalo. He doesn’t seem to be complaining that the colonial content is read as merely the background for universal appeal, but also that the colonial content becomes, in some way, a metaphor for universality, and thus disappears.
Bhabha thinks it would make a lot more sense to read the colonial novel in terms of metonymy rather than metaphor. He’d also like to replace realism’s irony with the colonial uncanny. His argument about Biswas rests on the bleak moments of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy, sometimes written down, sometimes published in the local paper, acted out only in Mr. Biswas’s mental breakdown halfway through the novel. (I bought some of this, though Simon thinks Naipaul is not the example Bhabha needs, because while Mr. Biswas is a comic figure, or seemed so in 10th grade, this time around the novel seemed unrelentingly grim). In Bhabha’s essay, colonial fantasy quickly calls authority and intention into question, shatters the mirror of representation, breaks apart Western identifications with Mr. Biswas as a character or Trinidad as a place, and “sets itself up as an uncanny double.” Quick alignment of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy to “The horror! The horror!” and “Ou-boum” in the Marabar Caves, and the essay ends. It’s awkward and abrupt, but it seems that metonymy was the way Bhabha got from mimesis to mimicry.
I’m wondering if the “metonymies of presence” in the mimicry essay can connect to Mr. Biswas, to Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men and to Sarah’s question about essences. These two characters have no essence that isn’t inflected by mimicry, yet they fill their novels entirely, there’s no clear essence or wholeness of Englishness that is also in the novels and is clearly being mimicked. If in metonymy the object refers to a whole, then what is the whole in this case? I think it’s not England, or Englishness, or the colonizer. The mimic man wasn’t created by the colonizer but by the colonizer’s discourse, the mix of ideology and desire, and that is the whole to which Bhabha’s metonymies of presence refer. As in camouflage, it’s not a matter of mimicking the whole owl or the whole forest, it is, in the Lacan epigraph, “against a mottled background…becoming mottled.” Or becoming a soda machine, whatever.
Also in Simon’s class we read what he calls Bhabha’s Lost Essay (lost, perhaps, because it was written without recourse to mr-fancy-pants word play, punning, or punctuation). It’s called “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” and while mimeticism gets pulled down, the word “mimicry” isn’t yet in use to replace it. Bhabha’s example is Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. The typical view of Biswas is that the metaphor of the house bridges the void between the descriptive, realist, somewhat exotic colonial content and the literary value of the text, the transcendent bits, the universal appeal. In this way the book can enter the canon and be read by a class of preppy 10th graders in Buffalo. He doesn’t seem to be complaining that the colonial content is read as merely the background for universal appeal, but also that the colonial content becomes, in some way, a metaphor for universality, and thus disappears.
Bhabha thinks it would make a lot more sense to read the colonial novel in terms of metonymy rather than metaphor. He’d also like to replace realism’s irony with the colonial uncanny. His argument about Biswas rests on the bleak moments of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy, sometimes written down, sometimes published in the local paper, acted out only in Mr. Biswas’s mental breakdown halfway through the novel. (I bought some of this, though Simon thinks Naipaul is not the example Bhabha needs, because while Mr. Biswas is a comic figure, or seemed so in 10th grade, this time around the novel seemed unrelentingly grim). In Bhabha’s essay, colonial fantasy quickly calls authority and intention into question, shatters the mirror of representation, breaks apart Western identifications with Mr. Biswas as a character or Trinidad as a place, and “sets itself up as an uncanny double.” Quick alignment of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy to “The horror! The horror!” and “Ou-boum” in the Marabar Caves, and the essay ends. It’s awkward and abrupt, but it seems that metonymy was the way Bhabha got from mimesis to mimicry.
I’m wondering if the “metonymies of presence” in the mimicry essay can connect to Mr. Biswas, to Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men and to Sarah’s question about essences. These two characters have no essence that isn’t inflected by mimicry, yet they fill their novels entirely, there’s no clear essence or wholeness of Englishness that is also in the novels and is clearly being mimicked. If in metonymy the object refers to a whole, then what is the whole in this case? I think it’s not England, or Englishness, or the colonizer. The mimic man wasn’t created by the colonizer but by the colonizer’s discourse, the mix of ideology and desire, and that is the whole to which Bhabha’s metonymies of presence refer. As in camouflage, it’s not a matter of mimicking the whole owl or the whole forest, it is, in the Lacan epigraph, “against a mottled background…becoming mottled.” Or becoming a soda machine, whatever.
1 comment:
Emily- Thanks for this great post, and for the truly disturbing photo you've found to go along with it.
The idea that the "whole" could only be this mix of ideology and desire, a 'subject' already trying to displace and assimilate an 'other' feels very useful.
In our conversations about Marx, Zahid often stresses the fact that no matter how much we might like to read in a notion of a pre-Lapsarian subject, we must avoid doing so, because for Marx, there is no 'before' Capital that we can return to. I think that your post alerts me to the ways that I might have been looking, in Bhabha for some sort of "whole"--an either/or--that would exist outside of the colonial parameters in which we must always situate ourselves in his work. Mimicry is then far more dialectic than I was allowing for in my previous post, and once I see this, mimicry in fact and in discourse becomes less a question of "wholes" and more a question of...well...of infinite regress. Uh oh.
I'm also very interested in your point that "the colonial content becomes, in some way, a metaphor for universality, and thus disappears," not for what it says about colonialism, but for what it implies about universality. I don't quite understand how the colonial content can be both the universal and the fantasy that ultimately shatters identification, but it's provocative to think about how universality may be more pernicious as a "strategy" than the usual subjection based on dis-identification that poco theory stresses.
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