More on Mimicry

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.

Mimicry and Whole Subjects?

Today I reread Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Man," and understood less this time than ever before. Emily, consider this a call to arms-- I assume this is on your list and have great hopes that you can help me!  But be warned, what follows is really undigested.

In the essay, Bhabha argues that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite." His first example of colonial mimicry comes in the essay's epigraph, an excerpt from Sir Edward Cust's "Reflections on West African Affairs...1839."  Cust cites the policy of conferring "on every colony of the British Empire a mimic representation of the British constitution."  I take the time here to include this example because often, Bhabha's notion of mimicry gets (mis)read as a 'strategy' by which the colonized imitates the colonizer, in the hope of gaining access to colonial power.  But Bhabha is explicit that mimicry is rather "one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge."

Sure. But this becomes awfully muddled once Bhabha begins discussing the gaze.  If I've understood correctly, once colonial mimicry has accomplished its goal of "partial representation," the colonized posses a particular type of gaze that contains within it the seeds of subversion.  In other words, the colonizer grants/inflicts partial subjecthood on the (usually racialized) colonized individual.  The colonized 'other' then looks back at the colonizer with a gaze that "shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze," but is also markedly different, thus rendering the observer observed by this uncanny mimic man.  

Still following?  Me too, or so I thought.  (How) have we made the move from mimicry as a strategy of colonial control to mimicry as the activity of the colonized?  Moreover, Bhabha's formulation hints toward a conception of subjecthood that seems awfully retrograde.  I don't want to suggest that Bhabha envisions a pre-lapsarian moment in which the colonized subject is "whole" or somehow "unspoiled," but it does seem like Bhabha grants the possibility of "wholeness" to the colonizer, even if only as a "wholeness" that can be disrupted by the ambivalent gaze of the colonized.  When Bhabha writes that "partial representation re-articulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence," I can't get around the surprising fact that such an argument depends upon a notion that identity has an essence.  Post-colonial theory appears to largely discard such an idea, so what are to make of Bhabha's work here?

I'm also interested in Bhabha's thoughts on camouflage--"As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically." If we concede that mimicry is not simply a strategy of colonial subjugation, but also one of resistance, or at least response, on the part of the colonized, might we connect colonial mimicry to minstrelsy, to camp, or to drag? At what point do we cross the line from mimicry to mockery?