Helga Ramsey-Kurz The Non-Literate Other Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English. Costerus NS 2007

The Non-Literate
Other
Readings of Illiteracy
in Twentieth-Century
Novels in English
COSTERUS NEW SERIES 171

Series Editors:
C.C. Barfoot, Theo Dhaen
and Erik Kooper
This page intentionally left blank
The Non-Literate
Other
Readings of Illiteracy
in Twentieth-Century
Novels in English
Helga Ramsey-Kurz
Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2240-9
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in the Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
INTRODUCTION
ILLITERACY AS A THEORETICAL ANATHEMA
17
Chapter 1
In the Humanities: Tabooed
19
Chapter 2
In Literary Studies: Ignored
39
II
Illiteracy as a Literary Theme
57
Chapter 3
Illiteracy in Earlier Fiction
61
Chapter 4
Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Fiction:

Heart of Darkness
77
III THE NON-LITERATE WITHOUT:

UNLETTERED CALIBANS IN DISTANT EUROPE
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
101
Unearthing the Pre-Literate Mind:

William Goldings The Inheritors
109
Projections of a Post-Literate Mind:

Angela Carters Heroes and Villains
123
Postcolonial Returns to a Pre-Literate

Europe: David Maloufs An Imaginary Life
and Gillian Bouras Aphrodite and the Others
139
vi
The Non-Literate Other
IV THE NON-LITERATE IN SIGHT:

THE UNLETTERED NATIVE IN CONTACT NARRATIVES
163
EARLY CONTACTS IN FICTIONAL AFRICA
171
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
But a Glimpse in the Rear View Mirror:

The Unintelligible Native in
Graham Greenes The Heart of the Matter
181
Arrivals on a Bicycle:
The Unintelligible Colonist in
Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart
191
Meeting in the Desert:

Mirages of Literate and Non-Literate
Barbarities in J.M. Coetzees
Waiting for the Barbarians
205
LATER CONTACTS IN NEW ZEALAND AND NORTH AMERICA

Chapter 11
Islands of Preliterate Orality:

Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine and
Patricia Graces Potiki
THE NON-LITERATE WITHIN: ESTABLISHED FORMS

OF NON-LITERACY IN LITERATE CULTURES
ILLITERACY FORGED BY THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM

Chapter 12
Chapter 13
221
231
259
265
The Outcastes Longing to Learn:

Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable
275
Learning to Belong to the Outcastes:

Salman Rushdies Midnights Children
297
Table of Contents
BLACK ILLITERACY FORGED BY SLAVERY AND RACISM

Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
vii
317
The Lure of White Literacy: Richard

Wrights Black Boy
331
Resisting White Literacy: Toni

Morrisons Beloved
347
Forging a Black Literacy: Sapphires

Push and Ernest J. Gaines A Lesson
Before Dying
VI THE ILLITERATE RETURNED:

ILLITERACY IN MIGRANT LITERATURE
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
367
383
The Illiterate Mother: Maxine

Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior
397
The Illiterate Daughter: Joy Kogawas

Obasan
411
Generations of Illiteracy: Amy Tans

The Bonesetters Daughter
425
CLOSING REMARKS
437
BIBLIOGRAPHY
449
INDEX
489
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this book was sparked by David Maloufs novel
Remembering Babylon. The text was given to me by Jake Ramsey, a
voracious reader who became illiterate: an eye operation, which
improved his ability to see, destroyed his capacity to process what he
saw. The damage was irreversible and its effect on Jakes life almost
impossible for others to fathom. One person capable of understanding
was Jakes son who had moved to Austria without any knowledge of
the German language. The illiteracy he suddenly found himself in was
as total as his fathers. Still, it was temporary and in this respect
similar to the handicap of a group of adults I worked with in
Innsbruck several years ago. Life had put them out of touch with
writing. Watching them revive their literacy skills has been more than
a uniquely rewarding experience. It has also alerted me to the
nonchalance with which most literates tend to take their access to
writing for granted.
In light of the endemic ignorance of illiteracy and indifference to
illiterates, especially amongst those comfortably at home in the world
of books and letters, the interest friends and colleagues have expressed
in my work has been absolutely vital. I owe special thanks to Marc
Delrez, Geetha Ganapathy-Dor, Heidi Ganner, Janette Turner
Hospital, Michael Ramsey, Ulla Ratheiser, and Janice Schiestl. They
never stopped giving me the feeling that my ideas were worth turning
into a book and, what is more, they never stopped expecting this book
to appear in print.
The person most responsible for helping this to actually happen is
Cedric Barfoot, whose adamant insistence on crystalline clarity
throughout the editing process has added yet another dimension to my
understanding of literacy. It has shown me that literacy is not only a
condition to be acquired by learning but also one to be facilitated by a
guardedly unpretentious use of language. Unlike in crystals, in writing
there is nothing to be gained by the loss of clarity. Small perturbations
in the characteristically simple structure of crystals produce highly
valued sapphires or rubies. Larger disturbances turn them black. But
arguments unnecessarily convoluted leave the reader in a darkness
even blacker. Or as Cedric Barfoot has canvassed what he believes
one must strive to accomplish even when writing on a subject as badly

charted as that of illiteracy:
Transparent and crystal clear
the prose even on topics
heated to produce black
titanium crystals
glistening facets
and dark edges of light.
Permission to reprint a modified version of the paper Does

Saleem Really Miss the Spittoon? Script and Scriptlessness in
Midnights Children, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXXVI/1
( 2001), 127-45, has been granted by Sage Publishers. The support
of the Austrian Science Foundation by means of a Charlotte-BhlerHabilitation Grant is also gratefully acknowledged.
INTRODUCTION
In the second scene of Romeo and Juliet, Capulet turns to a servant,

hands him a piece of paper, and instructs him to invite everyone on it
to an old accustomd feast.1 So accustomed does Capulet seem to
giving such orders that he does not stop to ask whether his servant can
read. However, Find them out whose names are written here!, the
exasperated servant calls out as soon as his master is out of earshot:
It is written that the shoe-maker should meddle with his yard and the
tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his
nets; but I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ,
and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ.
Still, the problem Capulets servant is faced with is not

insurmountable. I must to the learned. In good time (I.ii.38-43), he
swiftly resolves and wastes no time in begging Romeo, who is just
coming in, to decipher his masters writing for him. Obviously, if
Capulets messenger could read, the young Montague would not have
learned, as he soon does, of the feast at which he will meet and fall in
love with Juliet. The fact that Capulets servant is illiterate sets the
fearful passage of Romeos and Juliets death-markd love
(Prologue, 9) in motion.
This does not mean, however, that the accident of Capulets guest
list falling into Romeos hands is only an ominous fluke. To
understand this, it is important to bear in mind that the exchange
between unlettered servant and learned master shrewdly plotted by
Shakespeare constituted a perfectly ordinary transaction in
Elizabethan times. If Shakespeare comments on the servants illiteracy
as emphatically as he does, Shakespeare must have a special goal in
mind, such as that of identifying the coincidence of the encounter
between Romeo and the servant, and the tragic events ensuing from it,
as the product not only of fate but also of a specific social reality.
In this reality, the illiterate is no outsider but assumes a safe
position within the confines of a strongly diversified culture. The
structural relevance Shakespeare strategically assigns his unlearned
character reflects this position and, with it, the special understanding
of literacy prevalent in the early modern period in England, a time
when printing and manuscript cultures existed side by side and were
contributing to the evolution of a proto-bureaucratic nation state
1
Romeo and Juliet, I.ii.20, from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed.
Peter Alexander, London, 1951 (all further Shakespeare references will be to this
edition).
without, as yet, seeming to threaten a still intact oral culture. In a

climate informed by a progressive diversification of writing
technologies and literate competences, an uneven distribution of
literacy skills and the gradual emergence of a learned elite,2 the public
was alerted rather by displays of more advanced literacy skills3 than
by complete ignorance of any letters.
As Peter Beale shows, while the majority of the population would
still identify themselves as non- or semi-literate, it was learned
individuals who would be viewed with suspicion and hostility and
made the butt of satires by contemporary dramatists.4 Sensitive to the
insecurities generating such an attitude, Shakespeare, too, while
frequently portraying ignorant, unlessond or unschoold
simpletons with emphatic fondness, and, more pertinently even,
allowing them to be viewed with similar fondness by their fellowbeings, routinely represents his more lettered characters as objects of
dislike and distrust. Occasionally, he construes this distrust as an
expression of the speakers own paranoid fears, as in the case of
Dogberry, who advises his watchman not to boast of his reading and
writing skills but to let that appear when there is no need of such
vanity (Much Ado About Nothing, III.iii.17-18); or in that of the rebel
and clothier Jack Cade, criticizing the new ways of the ruling classes,
as he proclaims:
Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb
should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbld oer,
should undo a man? (King Henry the Sixth, Part Two, IV.ii.74-75)
And when the clerk whom his men have arrested confesses that he can
write, Cade, too, takes this as a confession of villainy and treason and
2
Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, translation of Lhistoire

et pouvoirs de lcrit (1988) by Lydia G. Cochrane, Chicago, 1994, 344-45. Cressy
also notes that Literacy was by no means a necessity in early modern England, and
its mystery was limited to less than a third of the population (Cressy, 838 and 842).
3
Especially of fine penmanship, which at the time also involved cutting quills
and preparing ink, and literacy in Latin and Greek, the gilded culmination of the
most rarefied scholarly lite (Cressy, 842).
4
See Laetitia Yeandle, In Praise of Scribes (Book Review): Manuscripts and
Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England by Peter Beal, Oxford: Clarendon
Press 1998, Shakespeare Studies, XXVIII (2000) (19-08-2003): http://search.
epnet.com/direct.asp?
Introduction
orders that the clerk be hanged with his pen and inkhorn about his
neck (IV.ii.104). By contrast, Berowne eloquently reasons his
abhorrence of those continual plodders who derive their authority
merely from books:
These earthly godfathers of heavens lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit to their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
(Loves Labours Lost, I.i.88-91)
After all, he knows that too much to know is to know nought but
fame; / And every godfather can give a name (I.i.92-93). Similarly
plausible are the words with which Imogen curses reading and writing
when she realizes that her husband has been destroyed by Pisanios
forged letters and exclaims, To write and read / Be henceforth
treacherous! (Cymbeline, IV.ii.317-18).
Of all of Shakespeares characters it is probably Prospero who pays
most dearly for placing too high a premium on book learning. He
loses his dukedom to his brother because he himself is too
transported / and rapt in secret studies (The Tempest, I.ii.76-77), too
dedicated to the bettering of his own mind. Though firmly ruling the
island on which he is marooned, the literally well-versed Prospero,
is an outcast, an exile, alien and displaced. His slave, the hag-born,
brutish, monstrous Caliban knows only too well that, without the
books he has brought with him, Prospero is but a sot, as I am nor
hath not / One spirit to command (III.ii.89-90), for the island
demands to be sensed and experienced not visually but aurally. Its
spirits work their miracles unseen, chasing over the sands with
printless foot (V.i.34). As Caliban informs Trinculo and Stephano:
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, ...
(III.ii.120-33)
In his culture, or soundscape,5 Calibans deformity, to which

only the intruding humans take offence, bears little meaning, and the
charge of ignorance pronounced by his master, no justification. As
Caliban reminds Prospero, it was he that showed him all the qualities
o th isle (I.ii.337) and thereby enabled him to subject its inhabitants.
Prospero, though, can only remember that his slave did not know his
own meaning, but would gabble like a thing most brutish
(I.ii.356-57). The foreign ruler of the island values the islanders
orality only where it is used to express their willing acceptance of his
aesthetics. Rarely taking note of his subjects artistic exploits,
Prospero typically stops to listen when he hears Ariel sing a folksong
he has taught him. Why, thats my dainty Ariel! Prospero exclaims
approvingly, adding, not without affection, I shall miss thee; ...
(V.i.95). What Prospero is unable to see is obvious to the audience: the
savage Caliban is more human than Prosperos favourite, Ariel.
Caliban is the one who mingles with the shipwrecked humans washed
to the islands shore and becomes their ally in a base and foolishly
plotted, yet thoroughly human scheme to overthrow Prospero. Only
briefly do Stephano and Trinculo marvel how the monster could
possibly have learnt to speak their tongue. Soon they become used to
seeing Caliban as one of their own kind, and in a state of drunken
stupor Trinculo calls out:
Servant-monster! The folly of this island! They say theres but five
upon this isle: we are three of them; if th other two be braind like us,
the state totters. (III.ii.5-6; italics added)
Yet, it is not Trinculos rhetoric alone that lends greater humanity

to Caliban than his master ever concedes him. What brings him closer
to Shakespeares audience than Prosperos learned wisdom ever
permits the Duke to get is Calibans orality.6 His orality is what
redeems the alleged monster. Unlettered but gabbling and grunting,
the figure of Caliban provides a mirror image to the Elizabethan
groundling, engaging him in a direct rapport, while the controlled and
forbidding speeches of the well-read and lettered Prospero can only
command attentive silence. Yet silence is a more exotic feature of
5
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the
O-Factor, Chicago, 1999.
6
See Smith, especially Chapter 4, 119-21.
Introduction
the Elizabethan theatre, whose acoustic properties render it more like

Calibans island. It therefore is Caliban, Smith suggests, who is more
at home on the Elizabethan stage than the tyrannical Prospero,
forerunner of, and yet already slave to, Cartesian philosophy with its
privileging of visual experience and its ambition to speak with a single
authoritative voice.7
The representation of the unlettered subject as integral part of the
social fabric portrayed by the literary text remained a common
strategy in English literature well into the nineteenth century. But the
sympathetic treatment of an Other inhabiting a cultural space outside
or beyond literate civilization and hence never really within reach of
the text is a more recent phenomenon. It presupposes not only an
understanding of the non-literate as distinctly other or apart from
literate culture but also a sense of the limitations of literate thought
and expression. As the present study documents, its is in probing these
limitations that twentieth-century novels rediscovered a topic
consistently overlooked in other Western discourses of culture, that of
illiteracy or what will, for reasons to be explained later, also be termed
non-literacy or scriptlessness. Yet, before it can describe how
writers from different cultural backgrounds retrieve the theme of nonliteracy from the systematic anathematization it has been subject to in
almost all domains of the humanities in the second half of the
twentieth century, it will deal with the question of why, in the first
place, the Western academy has so consistently and for so long
avoided touching on aspects of literacy and illiteracy.
To fully grasp the importance of this question it is worth taking
note of the following figures: in the world today there are
approximately one billion illiterate adults8 (or one in three women and
one in five men).9 Although, according to UNESCO, relative illiteracy
7
Ibid., 26.
Which, at present, is twenty-seven percent of all adults.
9
This corresponds with UNESCOs estimate that in 1995 885 million adults (i.e.
persons fifteen years old and above) worldwide did not have basic reading and writing
skills. It is also worth noting at this point that, according to 1990 forecasts for the year
2000, the absolute numbers of illiterates would decline from 905.4 to 869.4 million
(cf. Illiteracy, Globalization, The Dilemma of the Definition, Defining the Dilemma
[20-08-2003]: http://www.geocities.com/hayattpolitics /illiteracy.html). The estimated
total midyear world population was 5.5 billion in 1995 and 6 billion in 1999 (cf. US
Bureau of the Census, Total Midyear Population of the World: 1950-2050,
8
rates have been decreasing, the absolute number of illiterate people

keeps growing owing to the rapid increase of the worlds overall
population.10 The problem is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa,
Southern Asia, and the Middle East,11 areas where literacy rates
averaged below sixty percent in 1995. In Bangladesh, two out of five
children leave school too soon to become literate and one out of five
never starts school. By comparison, thirteen percent of American
seventeen-years olds are functionally illiterate; at least a million of
these will go on to graduate from American high schools.12
Admittedly, while the statistics on Third World illiteracy rates are
largely consistent, there is comparatively little agreement on the
absolute illiteracy numbers in more developed countries. For instance,
corresponding rates for the United States range between one and
twenty-five percent.13 Clearly this scatter is due to different definitions
of illiteracy being employed in different surveys. Not all of them take
into account that the definition of illiteracy advanced by the United
Nations as the inability to read and write a simple message in any
language14 is useful only to comprehend the problem in poorly
literate countries. In extensively literalized societies completely
International Data Base, data updated 17-07-2003 [18-08-2003]: http://census.gov/
ipc/www/worldpop.html).
10
It is estimated that thirty to fifty million people are added each year to the total
number of illiterates.
11
Nearly ninety-eight percent of illiterates live in developing countries, and fifty
percent, in. South Asia. In 1970, for every one hundred illiterates in industrialized
countries there were 882 in developing countries. Now there are 1,873. Or, putting it
in a different way, in 1970 there were nine times as many illiterates in developing
countries as in industrialized ones. Now there are eighteen times as many.
12
See Literacy, Feed the Minds: Christian Communication Worldwide (20-082003): http://feedtheminds.org/literacy/about.php.
13
According to the UN definition of illiteracy, America has an overall illiteracy
rate of about one percent. By contrast, the US Office of Education holds that, at least
in 1990, five percent of the adult population living in the United States were
functionally illiterate, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, in turn,
estimates that functional illiteracy among adult Americans ranges at around thirteen
percent, and the National Institute for Literacy claims that more than twenty percent
of Americans aged seventeen and older read at or below a fifth-grade level, i.e. far
below the level required in most workplaces. According to the 2003 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, finally, no less than twenty-five percent of US adults are
functionally illiterate (cf. David R. Olson, Literacy and Schooling, Encyclopaedia
Britannica 2003 Ultimate Reference Suite CD-ROM).
14
Definition of Illiteracy, Columbia Encyclopaedia, 6th edn, 2003 (19-092003): http://www.encyclopaedia.com/html.
Introduction
different demands require different definitions. Recognizing this as

early as 1940, the US Bureau of the Census adopted the concept of
functional literacy to complement its definition of illiteracy - the
inability of any person over ten years of age to read and write in any
language. Its definition of functional literacy again reflects the
intangibility of the problem. With symptomatic vagueness it was
stated that any person with less than five years of schooling would be
unable to engage in social activities in which literacy is assumed.
The standards of definition have been fluctuating considerably ever
since. Between six and eight years of schooling tend to be regarded as
the minimum criterion for functional literacy by different authorities at
present. General confusion seems the almost inevitable consequence
of recent endeavours to chart the forever shifting dividing line
between fully integrated, because sufficiently lettered, and
increasingly marginalized, because insufficiently schooled, members
of modern societies, between insiders and outsiders, centrics and
ex-centrics, users and non-users of the latest sites of information
transfer and reproduction.
This is not the only criticism that has been voiced with regard to
the perennial search for ways of distinguishing between literacy and
illiteracy. As Olson complains, the essentialist debate has caused
literacy to be viewed almost exclusively as the simple ability to read
and write. Far from being a matter simply of decoding graphs into
sounds and vice versa, Olson insists, literacy presupposes many other
faculties:
it involves competence in reading, writing, and interpreting texts of
various sorts. It involves both skill in decoding and higher levels of
comprehension and interpretation. These higher levels depend upon
knowledge both of specialized uses of language and of specialized
bodies of knowledge.15
Even if individuals are not highly skilled in literate activities, Olson

argues further, they know what it is to be literate. This means that they
know what texts are, how they are written and interpreted, how they
accumulate to form a tradition, and how they are consulted and used
15
Olson, Literacy and Schooling.
10
in multiple ways in a literate society.16 Olson calls such knowledge

environmental or lay literacy17 and contrasts it with other literacy
skills too sophisticated for a functionally literate person to perform.
These skills, Olson insists, remain the prerogative of an elite equipped
with a high level of literate competence in certain specialized fields
such as science, law, or literature. It is an impressively detailed
catalogue Olson provides of those skills which any literate society
must strive to produce at least in a small percentage of its population:
In addition to specialized vocabularies, high levels of literate
competence involve knowledge of specialized grammatical
constructions that serve to set out explicitly the logical form of an
argument and of specialized genres or literary forms such as
description, explanation, argument, and instructions that can be used
for building complex linguistic structures or genres, such as narrative
and expository texts. These specialized skills require for mastery
many years of formal schooling. Once such forms are acquired in
literate contexts they can also be used in speech. For this reason
literacy is not tied exclusively to writing; just as one can write in an
essentially oral style, so one can speak in a manner characteristic of
written language.18
For Olson, high or elite literacy is neither a privilege nor a luxury

but a prerequisite for the maintenance and advancement of all the
different literacies practised in a society. It facilitates the creative
production and reception of texts in the process of which a culture
mobilizes and applies, probes and refines, renews and transforms its
various literate competences. Just as the principal function of any
writing system is to preserve language and information through time
and across space, one of the principal functions of high literacy, and
especially of literature as an application of it, may be said to be the
preservation of a cultures literacy through time and across space. As
Olson asserts, the literacy standards of a society are determined
mainly by the range of functions its script serves and the breadth of
16
Similarly, the UNESCO defines illiteracy as the inability to use reading and
writing with facility in daily life (cf. Illiteracy, Lindamood-Bell: Definitions and
Terminology Resource [20-08-2003]: http://www.lblp.com/definitions/illiteracy.htm).
17
Another term suggested by Nash is cultural literacy (cf. Ronald H. Nash,
The Three Kinds of Illiteracy, p. 2 of 7 [20-08-2003]: http://www.google.com/
search?Q=cache:wt/ummit/nashtki.html+illiteracy&hl=de).
18
Olson, Literacy and Schooling.
Introduction
11
its readership. With the growth of readership, he explains, come

increased production of materials to be read, increased number of
social functions the script is used for, and the invention of new, more
specialized genres of writing. Literature not only contributes
significantly to the growth of readerships,19 but also responds to the
varying social functions of writing by mimicking, parodying, and
thematizing them, and actively partakes in the invention and
production of new genres of literate articulation. Literature, in other
words, is not just a product of literate culture. It also interacts with the
infrastructure by which it is produced.
As this book will show, it even reaches beyond it to acknowledge
spaces outside literate culture and position itself in relation to them.
Strangely enough, since the early twentieth century this has remained
a task reserved almost exclusively to writers of literature and the
reason for this is not merely a shortage of information for other
members of the literate elite to process. In fact, ample material
exists that could have elicited a response from domains at least
adjacent to imaginative writing. It is known, for instance, that of 4.2
billion adults in the world, nearly one billion are illiterate. It is also
known that worldwide 572 million people use English as a first or
second language.20 What is it that has prevented scholars in English
studies so far from noting, and stating, that there are nearly twice as
many illiterates as there are speakers of English in the world? Or that
the number of adult users of English21 is lower than that of illiterates in
South Asia alone? What is it that has kept critics and scholars from
considering that the staggering success of Arundhati Roys novel The
God of Small Things is staggering only as long as one ignores the vast
19
In fact, the availability of reading material has been found to be far more
conducive to the literalization of a society than the availability of schooling, and,
conversely, the lack of reading material, far more serious a problem in countries with
poor literacy rates than the lack of schools and teachers (cf. Olson, Literacy and
Schooling).
20
David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language,
Cambridge, 1995, 107. A similar number (namely 508 million) is given in English:
A Language of United Kingdom, Ethnologue.com, 19p (18-08-2003): http://www.
ethnologue.com/show.language.asp?code=ENG. According to other sources, the
number of English speakers ranges between 473 and 730 million (cf. e.g. Frequently
Asked Questions, The British Council United Kingdom [20-09-2003]: http://www.
britishcouncil.org/english/engfaqs.htm).
21
The former being 380 million, which is approximately two thirds of the latter
572 million (cf. US Bureau of the Census).
12
numbers of people who have not bought, nor ever will buy or read the
book. In 1997, when the novel was first published and swiftly
advanced to the rank of the fifth biggest selling book in the world,
230,000 copies were sold in the United Kingdom, a country with a
population of fifty-five million. 150,000 copies were purchased in
India, a country with over one billion inhabitants but admittedly with
only slightly more than eleven million speakers of English.22 The
English and American publishing industries together produce 200,000
titles every year23 a large number until one considers that there are
nearly 400 million adult users of English. As Emilia Ferreiro
establishes, worldwide the publishing industries are catering for, at
best, twenty percent of the worlds population.24 Eighty percent thus
have either highly limited or no access to books at all.
The international appeal of literature, and especially that of the
different Anglophone literatures, belies the comparative small size of
its readerships. The writers studied in this book seem to be acutely
aware of this. They understand that the textual communities in
which their works are produced, circulated, consumed, and processed,
are not the same as the communities about which they write. They are
aware that, as broadly published, multiply translated, and widely
known writers, they have been appropriated into a global culture from
which the majority of the globes population is barred. They know that
the vastness of the territory this culture claims its own is only virtual
and that they themselves are eagerly set up as icons by their publishers
to demarcate this space. The sense of dependence this knowledge
engenders inevitably is at odds with their sense of belonging they
derive from their simultaneous rootedness in a local culture. This
culture conveys a feeling of home that the world in which the writers
have gained international acclaim does not and cannot supply. It is
22
A Million and Counting, Frontline: India's National Magazine, XV/2 (24

January-6 February 1998) (19-09-2003): http://www.frontline.onnet.com/fl1502/1521
340.htm. Admittedly, this source states that only 80,000 hardback copies were sold in
India by the end of 1997. The estimate of 150,000 copies altogether is based on the
fact that both in the UK and Italy the number of paperback copies sold was ten percent
lower than that of hardback copies.
23
This number comprises old and new titles (cf. Book Marketing Limited, Sizing
the UK Book Market, Books and the Consumer 2000 [18-08-2003]: http://www.
bookmarketing.co.uk/bookmarket.asp).
24
Emilia Ferreiro, Reading and Writing in a Changing World, Publishing
Research Quarterly, XVI/2 (2000), p53 9p (20-08-2003): http://search.epnet.com/
direct.asp?an= 3913284&db=afh.
Introduction
13
also for this reason that in their fictional explorations of what they
identify as their native culture, they regularly portray individuals who
do not have books, who do not read books, who cannot read. Yet what,
at the outset, may look like an escape from an all too overwhelming, if
not disturbing or threatening world of letters often proves a form of
creative reconciliation with ones own literacy and the ambivalent
cultural into which it forces one.
The notion of writing ultimately crystallizing in the individual
narratives varies, although not randomly, as the literary journeys
beyond the familiar world of letters are always charted against a
distinctive historical background. The novels studied in this book are
grouped accordingly into texts which are set in Europe and which
interrogate received narratives of Western cultural progress (Section
III), texts set in sub-Saharan Africa, recording the tensions produced
by the imposition of an alphabetic culture on oral societies (Section
IV, Part 1), texts set in New Zealand and North America, documenting
the long-term consequences of an indigenous societys assimilation of
alphabetic literacy (Section IV, Part 2), texts portraying the
coexistence of literate and illiterate people in India (Section V, Part 1),
texts recalling the banning of black people from literacy during
slavery (Section V, Part 2), and, finally, texts describing the immersion
of Asian migrants in a culture with a foreign writing system (Section
VI).
The main setting of each novel is always the illiterate persons
home into which the narrative intrudes, either to re-enact an historical
usurpation and thus expose it or to go even further and symbolically
restore the usurped land to its rightful owner or owners. In any case,
the intrusion is not an epistemic violence but exemplifies a way in
which literacy may be employed to undo or at least counteract such
violence. The new readings of writing yielded in the process also open
up new possibilities of understanding illiteracy. It is not simply placed
in direct opposition to literate culture. Instead it may be located also at
a significant remove from the literate culture in which the text itself is
implicated (as in the novels studied in Section III) or placed in
immediate contact with it (as in the novels discussed in Section IV). In
contrast, the narratives analysed in Sections V and VI describe
illiteracies which manifest themselves inside literate cultures, either as
a long accepted part of these cultures or as an entirely novel and
barely recognized phenomenon. While differing in the way they place
14
the illiterate, the narratives compare in how they offset selfconsciously fictional treatments of illiteracy against carefully
historicized descriptions of specific literacies. Regularly this serves to
deconstruct received assumptions of the illiterates historical
insignificance and assert the existence of truths other than those
recorded in writing are asserted.
At least as salient as formal and structural parallels between the
individual novel is the fact that they appeal to an awareness of
illiteracy at a time when this seems to be considered an utterly
unfashionable pursuit by most of the Western literate elite. Chapter 1
explains why and how illiteracy has been anathemized so
systematically in the humanities since the early twentieth century. It
attributes this tendency to the structuralist prioritization of speech over
writing on the one hand and to a growing scholarly interest in orality
since the 1960s on the other. Although it corrected the phonocentric
bias of linguistic and literary studies, the post-structuralist valorization
of the graphein at first also failed to draw attention to the issue of
illiteracy. More recent studies on the history and functions of writing,
and especially of writing systems other than the alphabetic script,
seem to point in a new direction by having at least departed from a
rigorous denial of the phenomenon.
As will be shown in Chapter 2, a similar development can be noted
in literary studies, which, under the enduring influence of
structuralism, has also denied writing any epistemic significance in its
own right. Logically, it too has appropriated the concept of orality in
the first place to describe why and how literature responds to,
represents, and uses non-literate modes of expression. This is
particularly evident in narratology which routinely construes the
narrative act as an oral performance, thereby overlooking the
possibility that metafiction could, among other things, be the
expression of an enhanced awareness of the actual writtenness of a
text. Section I closes by pointing at the metafictional resourcefulness
of the theme of illiteracy and suggesting that it might indeed be due to
their special awareness of language and its colonizing and
decolonizing capacity that postcolonial writers address this theme with
such remarkable frequency.
While Section I investigates the implications of the insistent
anathematization of illiteracy in the humanities, Section II addresses
aspects of its thematization in literature. It begins with an analysis of
Introduction
15
the circumstances which caused illiteracy to be recognized as a social

problem at the beginning of the nineteenth century and prompted
contemporary British writers to engage in heated debates concerning
the implementation of compulsory schooling for nearly a hundred
years after that. These debates were soon carried into the Romantic
and Victorian novel, which provided an ideal forum to negotiate the
benefits and dangers of mass literacy. They reached a turning point
towards the end of the century after a dramatic surge of literacy rates
in England. The radical rethinking of literate culture in which this
resulted is also reflected in contemporary metafictional exploitations
of the theme of illiteracy. To show this, Section II continues with a
close reading of Heart of Darkness. The analysis as an early instance
of European prose fiction self-consciously interrogating the cultural
significance of writing and using the image of the unlettered Other to
reflect on its own writtenness as an expression of that significance.
Rather than justifying the inherent racism of Conrads portrayal of the
African native, the analysis attributes it to the uncertainties about
contemporary literate culture which clearly pervaded metadiscursive
reflection at the time. Special attention will be paid to explicit
comments on writing and literacy in Heart of Darkness as they seem
to anticipate the deep scepticism informing so many appraisals in
postcolonial literature of the dubious role the written word played in
the colonial enterprise.
From the controversial issue of Conrads Othering of the African
native Chapter 4 moves to representations of non-literate otherness in
twentieth-century narrative fiction, offering some general reflections
on the approach taken to the texts studied in Sections III to VI. This
approach draws on the discussion of the subaltern25 in postcolonial
theory, albeit not without registering a special omission: For although
it frequently describes subalternity in terms of a linguistic
disadvantage, making extensive use of metaphors of speechlessness
and silence, mute(d)ness and voicelessness, postcolonial theory has
not as yet discovered illiteracy as a particular form of subalternity. If it
had, Gayatri Spivak would perhaps have phrased her seminal question
25
As Elleke Boehmer explains, postcolonial theorists use the term subaltern to
refer to subjects of inferior or subordinated rank and to signify, like Other, that
which is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or
negative against which an authority is defined (Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd edn, Oxford, 2005, 21).
16
concerning the subalterns ability to speak up for herself in a

different way. Instead she casts herself in the role of the subalterns
spokeswoman when she could define herself more accurately as the
subalterns scribe. In contrast to literary scholars and theorists, writers
of imaginative literature seem to observe this fine distinction
scrupulously. Sections III to VI try to make visible their special
awareness of the materiality of the writing in which they engage. In so
doing they suggest attributing fictional representations of illiteracy to
an imaginary identification with the non-literate Other prompted by
the realization that the experience of difference may in itself be a form
of sameness.
ILLITERACY AS A THEORETICAL ANATHEMA
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE HUMANITIES: TABOOED
The incontrovertible fact that one in four of the worlds adult

population is illiterate begs the question why scholars of the
humanities and particularly of literature have paid so little attention to
the issue throughout the twentieth century. As the following will show,
there is no simple answer to this question. For a start, the
conceptualization of illiteracy itself is far from an uncomplicated
matter. This becomes obvious if one tries to see the phenomenon in
isolation and understand it as an autonomous category, which
illiteracy is not. Instead it constitutes part of a binary construct, an
opposite of literacy. Illiteracy always implies a difference from or
a lack of that by which literacy is defined. More than that, it manifests
itself only in relation to a literate culture. Individuals or cultures
without a script are not comprehended as illiterate purely on account
of their orality but only when they come into contact with a writing
system or its users. It is solely by virtue of their particular relationship
to a literate civilization, then, that they qualify as il-, non-, or
preliterate. Logically, of all the coordinates by which an illiterates
cultural position is determined, at least one will always be literacy.
This explains why it was not before the nineteenth century that
Western societies began to perceive and discuss illiteracy as a relevant
social, political, economic, and moral concern. As long as illiteracy
constituted a cultural norm and literacy an exception to this norm, no
need was felt to view the absence of literacy skills as a great problem.
But as soon as literacy changed from a privilege reserved for a
wealthy minority into an economic necessity for everyone, it began to
be debated as a marker of social and cultural identity.1 Yet, the keen
interest nineteenth-century intellectuals expressed in illiteracy
subsided rather quickly once Western societies had attained what was
considered universal literacy and started to comprehend literate
competence as a self-evident accomplishment rather than as a moral
choice. As a result, the attention of early twentieth-century
intellectuals shifted from the apparently vanishing minority of those
still unable to read and write to the progressively growing masses they
1
On this see also Chapter 2.
20
Illiteracy as a Theoretical Anathema
were suddenly able to reach and perhaps even to educate through their
writings.
It may be more than a mere coincidence that just at this time, when
writing was being discovered as a means of mass communication,
European cultures saw the ascendancy of structuralism and with it a
novel way of theorizing language. Drawing on Aristotles idea of
language as a means of signification independent of material, as well
as of social, political, and economic realities, structuralist theory
located the meaning of human utterances exclusively in their
metaphysical features, their immaterial systemic regularities, while
disputing that the concrete medium through which a linguistic
message was transported possessed any significance, let alone any
signifying capacity. For Saussure and his followers writing was little
more than a visual representation of speech, a transposition of
essentially immaterial sounds and words onto paper, parchment,
wood, or stone, or, in other words, as immaterial speech made material
as coagulated speech.2
In construing written language as a mere appendage to spoken
language, as a mode of articulation reliant on and therefore secondary
to speech, structuralist theory also revived the originally Aristotelian
notion of pure thinking as an act of transcending plain substance. In so
doing it enforced the typically Western tendency to privilege the
abstract over the concrete, the spiritual over the physical, and the
immaterial over the material. Half a century later it would be to this
tendency that Jacques Derrida would attribute the peculiar spirit of
signlessness by which he believed all Western thinking to be
permeated. He would argue that in having championed the sound over
the visual sign in all its conceptualizations of language since antiquity
the West had omitted to cultivate any awareness of the semiotic
function of writing. In accordance with the structuralist habit of
relegating writing to a secondary status, in 1967 Roland Barthes
noted:
A language does not exist properly except in speaking mass; a
language is possible only starting from speech; historically, speech
phenomena always precede language phenomena (it is speech which
2
Aleida and Jan Assmann, Nachwort: Schrift und Gedchtnis, in Schrift und
Gedchtnis: Beitrge zur Archologie der literarischen Kommunikation, eds Aleida
and Jan Assmann, Munich, 1983, 266.
21
makes language evolve), and genetically, a language is constituted in

the individual through his learning from the environmental speech.3
The same attitude informs also the work of David Olson, who still
asserts in 1994:
Writing is dependent in a fundamental way on speech. Ones oral
language, it is now recognized, is the fundamental possession and tool
of the mind; writing, though important, is always secondary.4
Drawing on Derrida, Jens Brockmeier asserts that due to a typically

Western phonocentric bias the problem of writing possessed no
distinctive identity, neither as a general theoretical, nor as an
historical issue, nor as a specific contemporary constellation at least
until the 1960s.5 Likewise, Brockmeier points out that before then the
phenomenon of literacy had never been conceived of as an
independent epistemic object by contemporary linguists.6 Almost
inevitably, the opposite of literacy, illiteracy, featured even more
obliquely in Western academic discourse during the first half of the
twentieth century. Structuralism practically encouraged Western
thinkers to overlook the inability to read and write as a social concern
and to elide the complex questions illiteracy raises as an
epistemological problem.
In the course of the 1960s, however, a new awareness of writing
took shape which also allowed for a reconsideration of the
phenomenon of illiteracy, albeit only in certain manifestations better
termed non- or pre-literacy. As Brockmeier outlines, it was in
direct response to the dramatic technological, infrastructural, and
social changes brought about by the advent of electronic media and
transforming the Western world at an unprecedented pace that scholars
started to query the structuralist prioritization of speech over writing.
The threat to established forms of written communication which the
new technologies for reproducing and transmitting knowledge
3
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, translation of Elments de smiologie
by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, London, 1967, 16.
4
David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive
Implications of Writing and Reading, Cambridge, 1994, 8.
5
Jens Brockmeier, Literales Bewusstsein: Schriftlichkeit und das Verhltnis von
Sprache und Kultur, Munich, 1997, 55.
6
Ibid., 53.
22
demanded not only disturbed the Wests comfortable reliance on

universal literacy as a self-evident cultural accomplishment,7 but also
prompted a departure from the structuralist idea of the immateriality
of language. This made it possible for literacy to be conceptually
appropriated into a rapidly diversifying cultural landscape and for
writing to be apprehended anew as no longer constituting the principal
means of communication and representation in Western civilization.
Instead it began to be regarded as a medium containable within and
dependent on other media. Written texts began to be discussed as
independent epistemic objects, as self-contained systems of
representation, and as autonomous and coherent complexes of signs.
As it became possible to see writing as much more than a graphic
image of speech or a self-evident anthropological feature, literacy, too,
turned into an increasingly popular object of interdisciplinary
investigation.8
Of course, in light of the insistent eschewing of writing and literacy
as academic concerns throughout most of the first half of the twentieth
century, one cannot resist noting a certain irony pertaining to the
sudden discovery of the validity of these issues as serious theoretical
concerns. As Roy Harris poignantly observes:
It says a great deal about Western culture that the question of the
origin of writing could be posed clearly for the first time only after the
traditional dogmas about the relationship between speech and writing
had been subjected both to the brash counter-propaganda of a
McLuhan and to the inquisitorial scepticism of Derrida. But it says
even more that the question could not be posed clearly until writing
itself had dwindled to microchip dimensions.9
McLuhan and Derrida may have formulated the most radical and
therefore also the most widely noticed attacks on the phonocentrism of
structuralist theory in that they expressly championed the repressed
opposite of speech (or parole) writing (or criture). Nonetheless
other scholars deserve to be mentioned here as well for supporting the
new linguistic trend that generated McLuhans history of print culture
and Derridas theory of the primacy of graphic signs over sounds. The
main focus of these scholars may not as yet have been exclusively on
7
8
9
Ibid., 65-70.
Ibid., 69-70.
Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing, London, 1986, 158.
23
writing, let alone on literacy. Speech still remained central to the work
of Milman Parry, Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, Ian Watt,
and Walter Ong, as well as to that of Leroi-Gourhan, Lev Vygotsky,
and Aleksandr Lurija not, however, as a paradigmatic linguistic
performance but as one with a semiotic purpose markedly different
from that of written texts. Accordingly, the structuralist concepts of
parole or speech were replaced by that of orality, which was
strategically employed and promoted in systematic comparisons of
literate and non-literate cultures, literate and non-literate thought
processes, and literate and non-literate perceptions of and reactions to
the world.
At the same time, the abstract grammars inspired by structuralist
theory were superseded by systematic descriptions (grammatologies
in their most philosophical form) of the concrete features of spoken
and written texts. The diversity of the approaches chosen to document
the materiality of human communication was remarkable. The ensuing
studies ranged from reconstructions of the oral transmission of the
Iliad and the Odyssey10 to descriptions of neurophysiological changes
in the bicameral mind caused by alphabetization,11 from
interpretations of the ascendancy of Greek analytic thought and
rhetoric as a result of the introduction of vowels into the alphabet,12 to
historical accounts attributing developments in the social structure of
chirographic cultures to changes in these cultures literate practices.13
10
Milman and Adam Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers
of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, Oxford, 1971; Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of
Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24, Cambridge: Mass, 1960; Eric A.
Havelock, Preface to Plato, A History of the Greek Mind 1, Cambridge: Mass, 1963.
11
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, Boston, 1976.
12
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, but also Prologue to Greek Literacy, in
Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple: Second Series, 1966-1970, eds C.G.
Boulter et al., Norman: Okla, 1973, 229-91, The Origins of Western Literacy: Four
Lectures Delivered at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, March
25, 26, 27, 28, 1974, Toronto, 1976, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its
Cultural Consequences, Princeton Series of Collected Essays, Princeton, 1982, and
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the
Present, New Haven, 1986.
13
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Themes in the Social
Sciences, Cambridge, 1977, Kathleen Gough, Implications of Literacy in Traditional
China and India and Jack Goody and Ian Watt, The Consequences of Literacy,
both in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. with an Introduction by Jack Goody,
Cambridge, 1968, 69-84 and 27-68.
24
In the process, a number of qualities came to be identified as specific

to writing. McLuhan famously analysed its demands on human vision.
Eisenstein explored the shift from scribal or chirographic to print
or typographic literacy. Illich, Sanders, Clanchy, and others addressed
its independence of the temporal and local context of its conception
and thought about the concomitant possibility of its commodification.
Derrida emphasized the written texts capacity to exist in the absence
of its author and to acquire new meaning beyond that authors death.
Scribner, Cole, and Olson, finally, commented on the contingency of
its con- and reception on the respective agents (that is, the authors or
the readers) command of a special technology and possession of the
necessary tools to use this technology.
Profiled as one pole of a binary construct, writing could no longer
be dismissed as a mere representation of speech. Yet, even if (or
because) this meant that literacy finally came to be comprehended as
an integral property of Western civilization in its own right, illiteracy
remained an anathema. Not only did the new awareness of the
semiotic significance of writing fail to prompt studies on illiteracy.
Such studies were in fact strategically avoided, as the comments of
contemporary scholars on the then popular orality-literacy binary
reveal. In these comments, the term orality is repeatedly referred to
as an ideal solution to the problem of breaking with the overt
primitivism of early twentieth-century studies of non-literate cultures.
The heavy reliance of these studies on such formulations as without
writing, illiterate, primitive, or savage was felt to preclude any
scientifically objective treatment of cultural otherness and to cause
people and peoples without script to be incorrectly represented as
inferior, ignorant, and deficient. By contrast, the concept of orality
was seen as facilitating a politically correct, even egalitarian
description of the differences between typographic and auditive,
between Western alphabetic and non-Western non-alphabetic societies,
because such a description would give primacy neither to the written
nor to the spoken word.
Reflecting on the telling titles of the anthropological works La
Pense sauvage (1962) Les Fonctions mentales dans les socites
infrieures (1910), La Mentalit primitive (1923), and The Mind of
Primitive Man (1922) by the structuralists Claude Lvi-Strauss,
Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, and Franz Boas, respectively, Walter Ong
therefore observes:
25
The terms primitive and savage, not to mention inferior, are

weighted terms. No one wants to be called primitive or savage, and it
is comforting to apply these terms contrastively to other people to
show what we are not. The terms are somewhat like the term
illiterate: they identify an earlier state of affairs negatively, by
noting a lack or deficiency.14
After this curt but explicit dismissal of the term illiteracy, Ong goes
on to grant that the new attention to orality and orality-literacy
contrasts had caused a more positive understanding of earlier states
of consciousness to replace these well-meant, but essentially limiting
approaches.15 Possibly Ong was not aware of the fact that, with his
special justification of the term orality, he effectively sanctioned the
subsequent rigorous tabooing of the term illiteracy and the
systematic negation of the phenomenon itself by other scholars. Nor
did it seem to occur to anyone else that the advancement of orality as a
new research interest was to be undertaken entirely at the expense of a
serious discussion of illiteracy. Instead the invention of the literacyorality binary was hailed as a breakthrough in the humanities. Eric
Havelock, for instance, proclaimed the discovery of orality a turning
point in the age of modernism,16 and J.S. Bruner predicted that this
14
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New
Accents (1982), London, 1988, 174. Likewise, in his re-reading of A Writing
Lesson, a chapter about Lvi-Strauss travelogue Tristes Topiques, Derrida declares
the expression society without writing dependent on ethnocentric onerism and
upon the vulgar because it suggests that people be ordered along a scale of
sophistication according to the degree of their possession of the graphein. Jacques
Derrida, Of Grammatology, translation of De la grammatologie by G.C. Spivak,
Baltimore, 1976, 109.
15
Ong, 174.
16
Eric A. Havelock, Als die Muse schreiben lernte, translation of The Muse
Learns to Write (1986) by Ulrich Enderwitz and Rdiger Hentschel, Frankfurt am
Main, 1992, 47-56. Admittedly, in his paper The Oral-Literate Equation, Havelock
notes that It is of course, a mistake to polarize these [orality and literacy] as mutually
exclusive. Yet even though Havelock does not posit as radical an opposition between
orality and literacy as others do, his analysis does not allow for a consideration of
illiteracy as a category located at the interface of orality and literacy either. (Eric A.
Havelock, The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind, in Literacy
and Orality, eds David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, Cambridge, 1991, 11.) In
Literacy: An Instrument of Oppression, also contained in the collection Literacy
and Orality compiled by Olson and Torrance, D.P. Pattanayak criticizes this omission,
recalling Shiralis dictum that the power and arrogance of literacy knows no bounds
(Shirali as quoted in Pattanayak, 105).
26
discovery would cause a fundamental change of the intellectual

climate in Western societies.17 Even today scholars still like to believe
that the recognition of orality ushered in a totally new era in the field
of letters and learning, that it actually marked the beginning of the
cognitive turn.18
Irrespective of its obvious benefits, however, the introduction of
the allegedly neutral (or neutralizing) concept of orality, instead of
removing the ethnocentric bias of Western scholars against non- or
pre-literate cultures, at best transformed that bias. Many of the
evaluations of purely oral cultures it inspired have since been
criticized for their inherent reductionism. It is with profound
scepticism that assertions according to which cultures without writing
have no history, and hence no sense of difference between past and
future, lack introspectivity, analytical prowess, and concern
with the will as such,19 are incapable of abstraction, and can
intellectualize experience only mnemonically20 are received today.
This scepticism has been enforced by ethnographic studies proving
that almost all linguistic and cognitive properties originally identified
as prerogatives of literacy can also be traced in oral cultures and that,
in literate as well as oral societies, human beings may exhibit forms of
behaviour which scholars have identified as specifically literate.21
Even Walter Ongs groundbreaking work on the basic differences
between orality and literacy as epistemic systems has come under
attack. He has been criticized especially for his claims that non-literate
people do not think in categorical terms but in terms of practical
situations, that they do not operate with formal deductive procedures,
resist definitions of even the most concrete objects, and have difficulty
in articulate self-analysis.22 Distrustful of the essentialist assumptions
17
J.S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Words, Cambridge: Mass, 1986, 72.
Brockmeier, 64.
19
Ong, 30.
20
Ibid., 36.
21
For a detailed catalogue of arguments based on a comprehensive review of
empirical studies, see Brockmeier, 211-20.
22
Ong, 51-54. To support his claims, Ong offers an elaborately argued catalogue
of nine main characteristics distinguishing oral from literate consciousnesses. In any
oral culture, Ong asserts, thought and expression tend to be (1) additive rather than
subordinative (as oral discourse cannot develop a grammar as fixed as written
discourse can), (2) aggregative rather than analytical (as oral cultures rely on
accumulations of epithets and other formulary baggage), (3) redundant and
copious (in that oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility), (4)
18
27
underlying the attempts undertaken by Walter Ong, but also by Jack

Goody, and Ian Watt at delineating the intellectual differences
between simple and complex societies,23 Mari Rhydwen, for
instance, asserts:
A division of human cultures into those that are oral and those that are
literate coincides with other binary divisions (for example
developed/underdeveloped or developing, civilized/ primitive) based
on other criteria: economic, technological and historical. Whether
such coincidence reflects a causal relationship is unproven, though
Ong argues persuasively for the case.24
Rhydwen makes the uncomfortable suggestion that in trying to

distance themselves from the phonocentric bias of structuralism,
scholars advancing the orality-literacy dichotomy only manoeuvred
themselves into a sort of graphocentrism based on tenets no less
problematic than those advanced by structuralist theory. She faults
Goody for implicitly promoting the view that the consciousness of
the literate tradition is more objective and hence more true25 and
charges the proponents of the great divide theory, who distinguish
so scrupulously between oral/auditive and chiro- or typographic
cultures, with, in reality, favouring literacy as the far more desirable of
the two forms of cultural organization.
It is true that Walter Ong identifies writing as the most
momentous of all human technological inventions.26 Without
writing, he is convinced,
conservative and traditionalist, (5) close to the human lifeworld, (6)

agonistically toned (as, with interpersonal relations being constantly kept high in
oral exchanges, both attractions and antagonisms must dominate verbal
communication), (7) empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced
(since only writing can separate the knower from the known and thus set up
conditions for objectivity), (8) homeostatic (as oral societies live very much in a
present) and, finally once more, (9) situational rather than abstract (since oral
cultures tend to use concepts on situational, operational frames of reference that are
minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld)
(ibid., 37-49).
23
Goody and Watt as quoted in Mari Rhydwen, Writing on the Backs of the
Blacks: Voice, Literacy and Community in Kriol Fieldwork, St Lucia, 1996, 10.
24
Rhydwen, 9.
25
Ibid., 11.
26
Ong, 85.
28

the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only
when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its
thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing
has transformed human consciousness.27
Writing ..., Ong reflects at another point, enlarges the potentiality

of language almost beyond measure,28 and free[s] the mind for more
original, more abstract thought than oral discourse could ever
permit.29 Thus writing from the beginning did not reduce orality but
enhanced it, Ong concludes. Believing that literacy opens
possibilities to the word and to human existence unimaginable without
writing, Ong does not doubt that every oral culture today, even if it
values its oral traditions and would agonize over the loss of these
traditions, wants to achieve literacy as soon as possible.30 Holding
the desirability of literacy as indisputable fact, Ong finally poses that
not only oral cultures which have come into contact with writing but,
in fact, any human being exposed to written discourse is bound to
endorse literacy readily and effortlessly. Resistance to literalization, in
turn, seems to constitute a negligible, if not even unthinkable category
in his view.
What was scarcely reflected in the supposedly objective discourse
of literacy and orality which commenced in the 1960s is that with the
term literacy, scholars were referring practically exclusively to the
writing skills that had developed in Europe since the evolution of the
Greek alphabet around 800 BC. As Albertine Gaur points out, the
Eurocentric notion of literacy prevalent in the academy until the late
twentieth century dates back to the Middle Ages. Then the terms
litterae and grammatica were used to refer to Latin as a particular
system of letters and orthography, rather than as a foreign language. A
person who could not read or write Latin was seen as unlettered
even when able to read and write in a vernacular language. This also
explains why, in German, the word for illiteracy, namely
Analphabetismus, literally translated, means the inability to master
the alphabet.31 In the 1960s, the restriction of Western discourses of
literacy to the post-Roman cultural convention was only enforced by
27
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 7.
29
Ibid., 24.
30
Ibid., 175.
31
Albertine Gaur, Literacy and the Politics of Writing, Bristol, 2000, 171.
28
29
the application of the term orality either to pre-historic (or preEuropean) cultures or to cultures that existed in the awareness of
Western societies as distinctively non-European cultures. Thus the
concept of orality did assimilate the connotation ignorance of the
alphabet after all and, according to Mari Rhydwen, even came to
imply a [lack of] willingness to accept, uncritically, [the] implicit
rules of Western intellectual tradition.32
Like several other twentieth-century scholars, Ong, too, put the
alphabet above all other writing systems and argued that it was the
invention of the alphabet that facilitated the ascendancy of Greek
civilization to analytic thought. He promotes the Greek alphabet as a
particularly democratizing and internationalizing script for its
simplicity and straightforward adaptability to different languages.33
With his enthusiastic praise of the alphabet, Ong reiterates a position
already advocated in 1942 by David Diringer, who attributed the
global victory of the alphabet over other scripts to the fact that it is
the most easily accessible and hence the least elitist script. Despite the
relatively uncomplicated principles of coding underlying the alphabet,
Ong chooses to value its appropriation as a unique intellectual feat. He
explains:
The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictograms, has lost all
connection with things as things. It represents sound itself as a thing,
transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, quasipermanent world of space.34
In the processes of learning to use the alphabet, then, the human

subject acquires completely new ways of thinking and advances to a
32
It is with respect to this point that Rhydwen criticizes Goody, arguing by way of
reference to Goodys contentious interpretation of the Chinese attitude to formal logic,
as an articulate expression of what happens in an oral culture that what Goody
really means by literate thought ... is thought that conforms to the norms of the
Western scientific tradition (Rhydwen, 11). Another severe critic of Goody is Harry
Falk who in Goodies for India Literacy, Orality, and Vedic Culture (in
Erscheinungsformen kultureller Prozesse: Jahrbuch 1988 des Sonderforschungsbereiches bergnge und Spannungsfelder zwischen Mndlichkeit und
Schrifltichkeit, ed. Wolfgang Raible, Tbingen, 1990, 103-20) interrogates Goodys
world formula to human cultural history (120) according to which rational thinking
can originate only when writing exists and writing was therefore also a prerequisite of
scientific reflection in India.
33
Ong, 90.
34
Ibid., 91.
30
new level of consciousness. Equally, Marshall McLuhan regards the

internalization of the alphabet as a process completely different from
that of learning any other script, mainly because the translation of
sounds into visual codes demands the total isolation of vision from all
the other senses. Only the phonetic alphabet produces a gap between
the eye and the ear, between the semantic meaning and the visual
code, McLuhan writes: and for this reason it is the phonetic alphabet
alone that is capable of leading man from his tribal existence into
civilisation.35
The almost euphoric accounts of both the invention of the alphabet
and the successful alphabetization of Western societies formulated in
the 1970s and 1980s are informed by more than the deep reverence of
writing Alberto Manguel identifies as an inherent feature of all literate
cultures.36 They also convey a growing sense of pessimism concerning
the future of Western cultures as chirographic and print cultures, as
cultures of books, archives, libraries, of histories documented on paper
and parchment.37 The increasing significance of electronic criture
had made scholars aware of the historicity of hitherto customary
literary practices,38 and, consequently, of the danger of a whole era in
which information storage and communication had been conducted
chiro- and typographically coming to an end.39 Arguably, it was also
as a nostalgic reprisal of the Gutenberg galaxy in the light of its
imminent demise that scholars began to devise histories according to
which the evolution of writing from pictures via linear script forms, to
the representation of phonetic elements reached its eventual peak in
the alphabet.40 Analogously, alphabetic literacy was construed as
having metamorphosed from a prerogative of clerical and gentile
elites, into a more and more generally accessible technology, to
ultimately be laid down as a human right, guaranteed through free
schooling. The impression created in many of these histories that the
literalization of the West was both a linear and natural evolutionary
process has, however, not necessarily been corroborated by historical
35
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,

Toronto, 1962, 33.
36
Alberto Manguel, Eine Geschichte des Lesens, translation of A History of
Reading, Berlin, 1998, 16.
37
See Brockmeier, 33.
38
Ibid., 69.
39
Ibid., 33.
40
Gaur, 2.
31
evidence. Nor has the construction of illiteracy as a temporary

phenomenon progressively receding in direct relation to the allegedly
continuous rise of literacy rates and standards in Europe.41
It is symptomatic of the inaccuracy with which illiteracy is treated
wherever it does attract academic attention that even Jacques Derrida
touches on the topic only lightly and rather dismissively. He for
instance rejects Lvi-Strauss argument that the imposition of total
literacy onto indigenous peoples equals an enslaving violence with
the flippant remark that it cannot be rigorously deduced from such
premises that liberty is the result of illiteracy and the absence of
military service, public instruction or law in general.42 Even if meant
ironically, his telling identification of illiteracy as a symptom of
anarchy makes clear that there is no room in Derridas analysis for
illiteracy as an historical form of exclusion from the cultural
communities he posits or from the systems of signification he
theorizes. In fact, an existence completely without writing is
impossible for Derrida, who insists that practically all signifying
practices deserve to be attested the dignity of writing.43
Furthermore, holding that all humans are able to engage in such
practices (which Derrida explicitly defines as a making use of proper
41
As David Cressy has shown, for instance, in the case of Great Britain, the
detailed analysis of available historical material leads to a far more complex picture,
proving that the importance of literacy has always varied with social, cultural, and
historical circumstances and that the popularization of literacy has always seen
periods of acceleration as well as of recession. Cressys findings are confirmed by
other sources, according to which in the Middle Ages, for instance, England had far
better provisions of schools than in Victorian days. Thus William Smith observes that
the mass of people in medieval England were by no means sunk in brutish
ignorance and that the number of those who could read the vernacular (as evidenced
by the demand for books in the vulgar tongue) is proof that the latter part of the
Middle Ages was certainly not a time of general illiteracy. Correspondingly, he
records a surge in literacy in the Elizabethan period which was not matched, as is
commonly assumed, by any development in the seventeenth century, nor when
English society became more commercial and more complex in the eighteenth
century. He also stresses the need to take into account considerable social and
geographical variations in the early modern period resulting from the remarkable
prosperity of weaving villages. Moreover Cressy warns of an all too optimistic
reading of the cultural climate in England during the Industrial Revolution,
emphasizing the particularly low literacy rates in the urban centres at the time
(William H. Smith, Education, History of, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago,
1969, VII, 982-90, and Cressy, 837-47).
42
Derrida, 132.
43
Ibid., 110.
32
names for the purpose of classification44), Derrida forbids himself to

think of illiteracy as constituting a serious social problem. Instead his
totalizing egalitarianism reduces it to a mere myth.
So did, albeit in a different way, cultural theorists, sociologists, and
anthropologists, especially in the US, beginning to write about the fall
of the entire West into a new state of illiteracy around the middle of
the twentieth century. In their discussions of the impact of the
electronic media on literate cultures, they invariably treat writing as a
collective property, literalization as a collective destiny, and any
cultural developments, such as the advent of new technologies of
communication, as collective experiences. At the same time they argue
that the growing dependence of Western cultures on electronic media
must inevitably result in the decline not of certain strata of Western
societies, but of the entire Western population into a condition of postliteracy. This applies to such pioneering works on the literalization of
cultures as The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) by Jack
Goody, The Consequences of Literacy (1968) by Jack Goody and
Ian Watt, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media
(1964) by Marshall McLuhan, or The Alphabetization of the Popular
Mind (1988) by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, in which the
protagonist is never conceived as an individual human being or an
individual group but always as the entirety of a society, if not even of
mankind.45
While in these studies the illiterate as a potentially problematic
deviation from the existing norm is completely passed over, illiteracy
is discussed at great length as a potential norm of the future. In
Amusing Ourselves to Death, for instance, Neil Postman anticipates
that the third great crisis in Western education after the introduction
of the alphabet and the invention of the printing press46 will be the
44
If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear phonetic
notation, it should be possible to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to
say of obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into
play, practice writing in general (ibid., 109).
45
For a discussion of the ideological reason and implications of this development,
see Paul Goetsch, Der bergang von Mndlichkeit zu Schriftlichkeit: Die
kulturkritischen und ideologischen Implikationen der Theorien von McLuhan, Goody
und Ong, in Symbolische Formen, Medien, Identitt, ed. Wolfgang Raible,
ScriptOralia 37, Tbingen, 1991, 113-29.
46
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourses in the Age of
Show Business (1984), London, 1987, 149.
33
decline of typography in America caused by the persistent expansion

of entertainment industry especially via television:
We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are
given form by television, not by the printed word. To be sure there are
still readers and there are many books published, but the uses of print
and reading are not the same as they once were; not even in schools,
the last institutions where print was thought to be invincible. They
delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for
existence implies parity. There is no parity there. Print is now merely
a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by
the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look
like television screens.47
The illiterate of the future as foreseen by Postman has very little in

common with the illiterate of the present. In Amusing Ourselves to
Death, Postman, by skilful employment of the collectivizing pronoun
we, involves the reader in his scenario of a cultural apocalypse and
the reader is invited to envisage him- or herself as a subject without
script. As a consequence, however, it is already in the act of reading
that Neil Postmans Huxleyan Warning of the complete
abandonment of the alphabet for the sake of the pictographic language
of television turns into a Utopian vision, whose tremendous success as
a book ultimately disproves in a most ironic fashion the authors
hypothesis that Television does not ban books, it simply displaces
them.48 Arguably, the prospect of humankinds return to a new form
of scriptlessness, to which scholars in the humanities were first alerted
by Marshall McLuhans famous proclamation of the end of the
Gutenberg Age in the early 1960s, quenched the last remaining
interest in already existing forms of illiteracy. After all, in view of the
newly discovered pervasiveness of writing in modern societies, the
scope of the changes a demise of typography threatened to bring about
appeared to take on positively staggering dimensions. By comparison,
even the shocking differences between the literacy standards in
developed and developing countries, respectively, had to appear fairly
unspectacular.
47
Ibid., 28. Cf. also Barry Sanders, A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the
Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age, New York, 1994.
48
Ibid., 144.
34
In retrospect, the announcements of the imminent onset of a postalphabetic era, formulated either as pessimistic warnings of a
complete cultural impoverishment or as euphoric promises of an
unprecedented cultural renewal, have been everything but
corroborated by their own effectiveness in print, let alone by the way
in which electronic media have been appropriated by literate cultures.
Thus, in more recent years, the future of literacy has come to be seen
in a different light again. At least in part this has been due to the fact
that, although electronic media have been accepted into practically all
spheres of human existence, this has not steeped Western societies into
the expected state of complete illiteracy after all. Scholars have had to
acknowledge that, rather than threatening written communication,
electronic media have encouraged it in various significant respects;
rather than corroding literacy skills or rendering them redundant, the
computer has necessitated their sophistication and specialization.
Participation in the written infrastructure of a society now
presupposes not only the command of a script but also the ability to
put this command to increasingly complex use. Accordingly, Myron
C. Tuman describes online-literacy as an entirely new form of
literacy in which traditional intellectual abilities combine with
technological manipulative skills as well as with dialogic competences
to form a new operative unity.49 This symbiosis of different
literacies, Brockmeier believes, might even undermine the traditional
predominance of a single medium or of individual media with which
human societies used to be confronted in the past. More than that, they
might even help to prevent these new media from acquiring the
hegemonic status they have so frequently been predicted to assume in
the highly complex information societies of the future.50 Admittedly,
Albertine Gaur still views the new literacies much more sceptically as
a threat to the knowledge collected, stored, and made available by
individual societies. Processed electronically, such knowledge, she
fears, is far more susceptible to corruption, interference, and misuse
than it has been ever before.51
Regardless of how contemporary scholars choose to evaluate the
effects of the electronic media, something other than an urgent
49
Myron C. Tuman, Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age, Pittsburgh,

1992, 24.
50
Brockmeier, 73.
51
Gaur, 168.
35
warning of the complete demise of literate civilization has been

recognized meanwhile as being imperative. Attention has been drawn
to the ongoing diversification of literacy skills and the futility of going
on to construct orality and literacy as monolithic formations. Instead,
it is argued, they need to be understood as multi-layered phenomena
capable of continually producing new interfaces, thereby changing a
vast continuum of communicative practices, ranging from primary
orality to literate behaviour underpinned by highly sophisticated
technologies.52 In the careful mapping of this continuum the term
orality is bound to prove insufficient to describe all forms of
scriptlessness. After all, in denoting the availability of a medium other
than writing and the integration into a culture founded on a noetic
system other than literacy, orality is profoundly unsuited to
circumscribe the kind of linguistic and cultural otherness and
exclusion characterizing the cultural situation of non-literates living
within or on the margins of a literate society. To denote such cultural
positions, a recuperation of the term illiteracy seems avoidable only
with the invention of alternative concepts to complement that of
orality.
While this is yet to happen, other avenues to a new understanding
of illiteracy seem to be opening up as scholars take note of the
poststructuralist call for a less self-assuredly Eurocentric and more
critical and comprehensive examination of literacy. In The
Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), Ivan Illich and Barry
Sanders, for instance, re-examine the effects of literalization on
Western notions of truth, reality, and fiction. They reconstruct the
gradual invalidation of the spoken word following the advancement
and growing authority of writing in Western cultures and document
how this authority was asserted in most spheres of human coexistence.
This led to fundamental changes in administration and jurisdiction,
religious and political propaganda, national and personal identity,
knowledge storage, reproduction, and transmission, and public and
private communication. As Illich and Sanders show in the process, the
transference of the Christian ideal of truthfulness from the spoken (or
orally given) word to the written word seriously destabilized
accepted ideas of authority and eventually caused new concepts of
trustworthiness or reliability to form. In critically highlighting the
52
Brockmeier, 202.
36
resultant insecurities, Illich and Sanders depart from the hitherto

almost celebratory accounts of Europes alphabetization, anticipating
what has since developed into a convincing counter-version
specifically to the western grand narrative of progress, in which the
present Western world represents the highest point of civilization.53
Mari Rhydwen rejects this narrative with the vehemence
characteristic of postcolonial deconstructions of Western ideas of
culture and civilization in her work on the literalization of nonEuropean indigenous peoples, Writing on the Backs of the Blacks
(1996). Reviewing various Western-style discussions of literacy and
tracing different ideological approaches to the issue, Rhydwen
develops an unusually nuanced notion of scriptlessness. Remarkably,
she does so without providing an exact definition of this notion.
Identifying illiteracy instead quite vaguely as the opposite of any idea
of literacy, she convincingly conveys the variability of the concept.
Writing on the Backs of the Blacks illustrates how scriptlessness can
be understood either as a grave condition of political disadvantage or
as an endangered component of aboriginal identity, either as a brutally
imposed or as a cruelly denied form of acculturation, either as a
subjects limitation to the use of a vernacular language or as that
subjects exclusion from a powerful master language. Rhydwens
analysis ultimately raises the question whether, like literacy, illiteracy,
too, is different in different contexts or whether it is just a matter of
interpretation.54
For Rhydwen, this question obtains particular pertinence in any
negotiation of transcultural phenomena, as it is in culturally
heterogeneous contexts that one is most directly confronted with the
difficulty of determining literacy and illiteracy. In themselves
transcultural enterprises, studies taking into consideration also other
than alphabetic scripts show with special clarity that what is literacy in
one cultural context may even be experienced as illiteracy in another.
For while literacy may be coterminous with ones inclusion in one
culture, it can simultaneously mean ones exclusion from or distance
from other cultures possessing a different script. The relativity of
53
Helen Carr, American Primitives, The Yearbook of English Studies: Ethnicity
and Representation in American Literature, XXIV (1994), 199 (see also Robert K.
Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development
of Western Civilization, New York, 1986).
54
Rhydwen, 13.
37
literacy is demonstrated by works such as Florian Coulmas ber

Schrift (1982), G. Sampsons Writing Systems (1985), and Roy Harris
The Origin of Writing (1986), and such impressively comprehensive
publications as Harald Haarmanns Universalgeschichte der Schrift
(1990), Henri-Jean Martins The History and Power of Writing
(1994), A. Robinsons The Story of Writing (1995), M.P. Browns
Writing and Script (1998), and Albertine Gaurs Literacy and the
Politics of Writing (2000). No longer limited to devising a Eurocentric
genealogy of writing, these works advance a comparative evaluation
of the role of literacy in different cultures of the world. In so doing,
they appeal to and help to build an awareness of the complex plurality
of highly sophisticated writing systems either pre-dating the invention
of the alphabet or coincident with its evolution, and prove that there is
not one history of writing but different histories, reflecting different
forms of information storage, answering different needs.55
Even if they do not explicitly address questions of illiteracy either,
the studies just referred to still may be said to prepare the ground for
the recognition of new forms of illiteracy fermenting at the new
interfaces that, as a result of global demographic, economic, and
technological processes, have developed between cultures with
different writing systems. Not screened from but increasingly
susceptible to such illiteracies, modern literate societies may begin to
feel the need and the challenge to investigate illiteracy and its history
anew as an all-pervasive phenomenon manifest at the very centre of
cultures with most sophisticated literacies. It is on such an awareness
of illiteracy as a product of cross-cultural contact, as an aspect of
multiculturality, and as an indication of cultural indeterminacy that the
readings of modern and postmodern fictional constructions of
scriptlessness need to be based. Only thus can one do justice to the
complex answers given in twentieth-century narrative literature to the
questions of how to understand literacy and how to conceive of its
very opposite, a condition commonly described as illiteracy but also
termed more neutrally non-literacy, scriptlessness, or nonwritingness56 here.
55
Gaur, 4.
Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian,
Australian, and New Zealand Literatures, Montreal, 1989, 109.
56
CHAPTER TWO
IN LITERARY STUDIES: IGNORED
Discursive practices make it difficult for individuals to think outside

them, Ania Loomba concludes by way of reflection on Foucaults
understanding of discourse.1 This may explain why, despite the
centrality of writing and literacy to literary studies, the peculiar
history of the concept of illiteracy (or rather of its elision throughout
the twentieth-century) has not taken a noticeably different course in
this particular field of academic inquiry. Rather the ideas on literacy
and writing formulated outside the domain of literary studies in the
course of the last century were readily appropriated and reiterated by
scholars of literature. Instead of advancing their own theories of the
writtenness of their object of research, they allowed themselves to be
guided by the work of anthropologists, philosophers, cultural theorists,
and linguists, taking for granted that these would draw extensively on
literature for evidence supporting their findings. Their willing
surrender of academic territory has not been entirely inexpedient,
though. The abandonment of such seemingly mundane concerns as the
literacy standards outside, on the margins, as well as at the centre of
certain book cultures to other academic disciplines has certainly
simplified the construction of literature as a widely accessed and
indeed universally accessible public site and, logically, of literary
criticism as a scholarly exercise institutionalized for the benefit of a
perfectly homogenously literalized collective.
Originally engendered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
European nationalism, Western criticism from its beginnings has
relied on such constructions and promoted literature and above all,
of course, vernacular literature as a collectively shared cultural
heritage to enforce a sense of belonging and unity across social
barriers. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries literature was
seen as a means to diffuse polite social manners, habits of correct
taste and common cultural standards and thereby incorporate the
increasingly powerful but spiritually rather raw middle classes into
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, The New Critical Idiom, London,

1998, 39.
40
unity with the aristocracy.2 The emergent working class was not to be
excluded either from the scheme of disseminating aristocratic
greatness and noble spirit. They, too, should be improved, as Matthew
Arnold suggested, by way of exposure to the best culture of their
nation.3
According to Timothy Brennan, it was the complicity of
contemporary writers in nineteenth-century nation-shaping that
eventually secured the institutionalization of literary studies and the
installation of an official apparatus of literati responsible for the
compilation and administration of national archives of literature in
most European countries. Since then, it has never really been doubted
that the beneficiaries of these literatis work would be not just certain
privileged classes but, indeed, the people, that is, all citizens of the
nation state. For Brennan, literary study has remained enmeshed in the
European ideology of democracy to this day, even if the people this
ideology invokes became, increasingly after the late nineteenth
century, inseparable from the modern working class.4
Against the background of the ready theoretical inclusion of the
folk, the plebeians, and later of the proletariat in literary and
critical explorations, the systematic occlusion of the illiterate is only
seemingly inconsistent. After all, the special image of the people
underlying the egalitarian commitment of literary scholars to, and
their identification with, the lower classes really accommodates only
assumptions of the lower classes political, economic, and social
disadvantage. It is not so easily reconcilable, however, with the
notions of ignorance and cultural inferiority commonly associated
with illiteracy, for the simple reason that discursive or intellectual
disadvantages do not lend themselves to the same kind of
rationalization that poverty, for instance, invites. While the latter may
be apprehended romantically as a price to be paid, fairly or not, for
moral superiority, the former prompts no such compensatory
projections. That the notion of illiteracy does not operate like that of
poverty is also due to the way illiteracy was understood in the
early days of European nationalism. Then universal alphabetization
was identified as a prerequisite of national coherence. While literacy
2
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1996, 15.
Matthew Arnold, quoted in Eagleton, 21.
4
Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation,
Basingstoke, 1989, 13.
3
41
was accordingly propagated as a special moral virtue, ignorance of the

alphabet was declared a safe passage into moral bankruptcy.
Demonized as a moral danger to literate societies, illiteracy was never
assimilated into the Western nationalistic discourses from which the
idea of literary studies as an essentially democratizing cultural force
originates.5
Coincident with the attainment of universal literacy in Europe at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the officious warnings of
illiteracy formulated by late Victorian thinkers subsided. A different
approach was taken to education as a means of social and national
control. Instead of reading as a literacy skill, the close reading of
literature now came to be promoted as the supremely civilizing
pursuit, the spiritual essence of social formation.6 No room was left
for discussions of literacy in the resultant professionalization of
critical analysis, which, significantly enough, was still advocated on
the grounds that the masses had to be provided moral sustenance by
way of initiating them into the cultural treasures of human civilization.
Instead of the involuntarily illiterate now it was the complacently
ignorant, those theoretically able but evidently unwilling to appreciate
the intrinsic value of literary writing, who were charged with moral
corruption. Instead of illiteracy, philistinism was now regarded by
such renowned champions of literary studies as F.R. Leavis, I.A.
Richards, William Empson, and L.C. Knights in England as a
particularly deplorable form of cultural villainy.
In the subsequent development of the study of literature, as little
attention was devoted to aspects of literacy and illiteracy as in other
fields of research. With the endorsement of the structuralist notion of
the immateriality of human utterances and the supremacy of speech
over writing, literary scholars, too, consigned these two themes to
oblivion the former, admittedly, only temporarily, until it was
recuperated as the opposite of orality, the latter practically indefinitely
as its enduring absence from critical discourse suggests. In spite of
their own understanding of literature as a body of texts composed and
recorded in writing, twentieth-century critics readily embraced the
5
See Paul Goetsch, Der Analphabet in der englischen Literatur des 19.
Jahrhunderts, in Motive und Themen in der englischsprachigen Literatur als
Indikatoren literaturgeschichtlicher Prozesse: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von
Theodor Wolpers, eds Heinz-Joachim Mllenbrock and Alfons Klein, Tbingen,
1990, 242-62.
6
Eagleton, 27.
42
Aristotelian notion revived by structuralist theory that writing

represents but a visual rendering of speech. By tacit agreement they
simply failed to recognize that the term literature precludes the
recognition of oral utterances as literature and that, strictly speaking,
the expression oral literature is only an oxymoronic construction.
Little need was seen to study the specific features and functions of the
alphabet (or of any other script) and to apprehend the literacy of
individual writers and their readerships, or the act of putting down a
text in writing as in any way relevant to the meaning of the text under
study.7 By adhering to the idea of writing as a visual realization of
speech, scholars of literature and especially of narratology helped to
sustain the stigma of the secondary, derivative, subsidiary, which
pertained to writing well into the post-structuralist 1970s.8
Arguably, it was the special phonocentric bias of twentieth-century
literary critics and theorists that prevented them from appropriating
Walter Ongs binary opposition of orality and literacy in the same way
as representatives of other academic disciplines had done. While
outside literary studies, orality came to be studied around the
middle of last century as a noetic economy9 diametrically opposed
to literacy, within the field of literature, the concept of orality was
employed quite differently. As Aleida and Jan Assmann explain, it
was assimilated to invoke and enforce the traditional Western idea of
understanding as the result of a revitalization of dead letters and
their transformation into speech through oral explication. At first
comprehended as an element of literary reception, orality came to
be theorized as an integral part of the literary text itself, rather

than as an aspect apart from it. It was not (nor could it plausibly
be) posited as the opposite of literacy, but as a rather special kind of
literacy event.
Symptomatically, the work of Paul Goetsch, who was one of the
first not only to query but also to attempt to correct the
7
For a discussion of the resistance of literary studies to discourses on the

mediality of writing, see Ong, 155-56, and Cornelia Epping-Jger, Die Inszenierung
der Schrift: Der Literalisierungsproze und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Dramas,
Stuttgart, 1996, 13-17.
8
Assmann, 266.
9
The expression noetic economy seems a useful alternative to the term
epistemology here as it helps to imagine systems of thought and perception as also
materially structured entities.
43
marginalization of oral traditions in the field of literary studies,

discusses not its orality in its own right so much as modes and
instances of how it is represented and transcribed in literature.10 To
this end, Goetsch draws on the distinction forwarded by Koch and
Oesterreicher between the material realization of speech and writing
and their conceptualization. Oral and written utterances, Koch and
Oesterreicher argue, are distinguishable not only by virtue of the
medium through which they are conveyed.11 There are also
preconceived notions of orality and literacy which guarantee that a
spoken text remains recognizably oral, even if written down, and
written texts remain distinctively literate performances, even if
delivered orally. Goetschs declared aim is to reveal how literature
activates, employs, and deploys these particular notions.12 Almost
inevitably, the question fails to arise in the process whether Western
literature (or, more generally speaking, Western literate thinking) at all
differentiates between literate and non-literate oralities. As in Koch
and Oesterreicher,13 in Goetsch, too, the focus stays on highly literate
forms and constructions of orality and highly sophisticated oral
realizations of literacy.14
An even more rigorous occlusion of non-literate oralities from
literary studies can be observed in the field of narratology, where the
term speech is insistently used to refer to the highly literate act of
narrating a story in written form. This is far from an unconscious
slippage, as Seymour Chatmans makes clear with his emphatic
assertion in Story and Discourse (1978) that speech alone is capable of
representing ideas, while writing cannot do more than represent
10
See Paul Goetsch, Vorwort and Mndliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher
Literatur, in Mndliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, Tbingen, 1990, 7-16 and
17-35.
11
Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher, Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania:
Franzsisch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Ronanistische Arbeitshefte 31, Tbingen, 1990, 5.
12
This is also one of the aims of other participants in the large-scale research
project on orality and literacy (bergnge und Spannungsfelder zwischen
Mndlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit) initiated by Wolfgang Raible in at the University of
Freiburg as well as of the research on literary orality in short fiction currently
conducted by the Research Group CRILA (Centre de Recherche Inter-langues
d'Angers) of the University of Angers.
13
The study by Koch and Oesterreicher remains constricted to the literate context
of contemporary Romance cultures.
14
This is not to belittle the work done in this context but to enhance the
onesidedness which a consistent concentration on orality imposes.
44
speech. Disputing that a texts materiality can in itself be constitutive

of meaning, Chatman furthermore insists, that the material book is not
a literary work. The physical condition of a book, he stresses,
does not affect the nature of the aesthetic object fixed by it. To
unearth the virtual narrative contained in a book, its meaningless
surface of typo- or chirographically rendered symbols must be
penetrated in an act that entails far more than plain reading, but a
form of transcendence through which the texts deeper meaning
eventually is unearthed.15 Such an act alone deserves to be called
interpretation, while reading is little more than a physical act of
looking at the books pages. This is, of course, a far cry from Marshall
McLuhans proclamation that the medium is the message. So is
Chatmans postulation that all written texts are realizable orally [and]
innately susceptible of performance. Any reader knows this
intuitively, Chatman argues, and therefore always constructs an agent,
a teller mediating the story he or she is reading, a someone
person or presence actually telling the story to an audience, no
matter how minimally evoked his voice or the audiences listening
ear.16
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan seems to think along similar lines when
she notes that the empirical process of communication between
author and reader is less relevant to the poetics of narrative fiction
than its counterpart in the text.17 Following Wolfgang Isers
conception of the written text as having a virtual dimension which
calls for the readers construction of the unwritten text,18 RimmonKenan declares: In my view there is always a teller in a tale, at least
in the sense that any utterance or record of an utterance presupposes
15
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film, Ithaca: NY, 1978, 26-27.
16
Ibid., 28, 147 and 33-34.
17
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983),
London, 1988, 89.
18
Significantly, in his analyses of this virtual dimension Iser does not conceive of
reading merely as an act of decoding graphic signs either, but explicitly defines it as a
more complex activity involving the audiences compliance with specific instructions
given by the author as to how to imagine reality. (Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser:
Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (1972), 3rd edn, UniTaschenbcher 163, Munich, 1994, 127.) Despite his call for a differentiation of
reading competences or horizons with which different readers or readerships are
equipped to produce different interpretations of texts, Iser never considers the
possibility that an author might refer to a degree of readerly incompetence warranting
the theorizing of an implicit non-reader.
45
someone who has uttered it .... a higher narratorial authority.19

Utterance, in Rimmon-Kenans work, is also employed to refer to
orality as an aspect of narrative fiction and to emphasize the primacy
of speech over writing in the narrative act. For Rimmon-Kenan, too,
the identification of narration as an oral performance or event is more
helpful than the postulation of acts of reading and writing, which, to
her mind, does little to clarify the specificity of narrative fiction.20
Whether the narrator is able to read and write or not is unimportant
to both Rimmon-Kenans and Chatmans conception of the narrative
act. This is not an entirely facetious observation, even if the explicit
identification of a narrating agent as illiterate by the author would be
seen as a purely mimetic gesture and hence as an illusory ploy by both
theorists. As Patricia Waugh and Mark Currie show, there is also
another way of reading specifications of the act of telling especially
when they address the actual or fictional writtenness of the narrative
in which they occur. In fact, as Currie and Waugh shrewdly note, the
idea shared by Rimmon-Kenan and Chatman that in isolating a literary
text from the material reality of its con- and reception one lays open
the higher meaning of that text is particularly difficult to reconcile
with the metafictional attempts of postmodern writers to assert
precisely that reality.21 Waugh and Currie contend that their rigorous
theorizing of the narrative act as a purely aesthetic orality event
restricts Chatman and Rimmon-Kenan to reading metafictional
reminders of the comparatively mundane act of writing in entirely
pessimistic terms as expressions of a literary crisis, of a loss of overall
meaning, and of cultural disorientation. Indeed, apart from
perpetuating popular reductionist constructions of postmodernity as an
expression of cultural entrapment and paralysis, such a reading
completely elides the discursive potentialities of metafiction.
A recognition of these potentialities seems to have become possible
only towards the end of the twentieth century, when Patricia Waugh,
finally proposed attributing the self-reflexivity of twentieth-century
writings to a more general cultural interest in the problem of how
human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the
world(emphasis added). At the same time Waugh claims that the
19
Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 118-19.
21
Patricia Waugh, What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful
Things About It?, in Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie, London, 1995, 40.
20
46
enhanced awareness of meta-levels of discourses and experience in

postmodern cultures is partly a consequence of an increased social
and cultural self-consciousness, as well as of a greater awareness
within contemporary culture of the function of language in
constructing and maintaining our sense of everyday reality.22
Waughs evaluation of metafiction is as optimistic as the comments on
the almost obsessional preoccupation with writing that cultural
theorists and critics discerned in twentieth-century literature.
Refusing to see this preoccupation as an indication of
undecidability, Jens Brockmeier, for instance, proposes
comprehending it as the symptom of an emergent literal
sensuousness prompted by the growing importance of visual and
aural media.23 Brockmeier emphatically denies that the attempts in
postmodern writing to transcend language through language need to
be understood as gestures of resignation to the impossibility of
obtaining certainty through linguistic expression. Instead he proposes
seeing even the most explicitly self-negating metafictional strategies
as ultimately generating highly productive moments within literary
texts investing the language of modernity with completely new
meaning. Thus re-activated, Brockmeier suggests, language is not only
able to reflect the literacy of its speakers but can even serve as a
means to articulate the distinctly literate consciousness of its writers.
Unlike Brockmeiers analysis of the phenomenon of metafiction,
Waughs is founded on the structuralist idea of the immateriality of
language. As a result, it does not accommodate the possibility that
metafiction might actually explore fiction itself as concrete matter
and, in so doing, negotiate the material relationship between the
linguistic system on which fiction relies and the world to which it
refers. Her own approach essentially forbids Waugh from considering
the causal link suggested by Brockmeier between historical changes in
the literate practices and infrastructure of Western cultures and the
periodic flourishing of metafiction. As we write, Brockmeier observes,
we do not simply refer to language, but we relate to language as such,
and we turn it into an object of sensual-practical creation, perception,
and reflection. Therefore, literalization transforms our linguistic
awareness and, in fact, engenders meta-discursive thought processes
22
23
Ibid., 41.
Brockmeier speaks of poetologische Sonderflle literaler Sinnlichkeit (245).
47
to the extent that meta-language may justly be identified as a

distinctive element of the discursive reality of literate cultures.24
It is not difficult to see this could provide a rather useful
explanation for the relative popularity of metafictional writing during
certain periods in the history of Western literatures. Admittedly,
Bradbury and Fletcher, who insist and prove that metafiction is not a
phenomenon as recent as has frequently been assumed, dispute that
there is any relation between the mode of narrative introversion they
believe to have been spawned by an international crisis of
presentation in the twentieth century and the mode of self-conscious
narration characterizing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
narratives.25 Inger Christensen, on the other hand, detects a greater
likeness than dissimilarity between eighteenth and twentieth century
metafiction and holds that the expressions the introverted novel
and the self-conscious mode seem equally applicable to Tristram
Shandy as to Ulysses26 and Rdiger Imhof reasons that a good deal of
what is operative in twentieth-century metafiction, and especially in
postwar metafiction, has been anticipated by Cervantes and Sterne.27
Reviewing the longstanding theoretical debate on the evolution of
metafiction, Michael Scheffel finds it surprising that literary scholars
have still not come up with a convincing historical perspective on the
issue.28 He, too, seems unfamiliar with the widely neglected work of
Illich and Sanders, who, in The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind,
offer a detailed comparative account of how contemporary ideas of
writing and the truth value of written material affect the role of the
narrator in Chaucers Canterbury Tales, Defoes The Journal of the
Plague Year, and Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Thus Scheffel repeats once more what Illich and Sanders
demonstrated before him namely that in order to understand the
intermittent resurgence of metafiction, one would have to comprehend
the distinction between literature and reality as an historical
phenomenon and trace it back to the literate culture of antiquity, more
24
Ibid., 284.
John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, The Introverted Novel, in Modernism:
1890-1930, eds Malcolm Bradbury and John McFarlane, Penguin, 1976, 395-96.
26
Inger Christensen, The Meaning of Metafiction: A Critical Study of Selected
Novels by Sterne, Nabokov, Barth and Beckett, Oslo, 1981, 89.
27
Rdiger Imhof, quoted in Michael Scheffel, Formen selbstreflexiven Erzhlens:
Eine Typologie und sechs exemplarische Analysen, Tbingen, 1997, 6.
28
Ibid., 5.
25
48
precisely to Aristotles historical distinction between historian and

poet and to Platos analogous rejection of poetry as propagation of
untruths.
It is no coincidence that the question on which Illich and Sanders
base their study is exactly that of the truthfulness of literature. What is
more, they take into account how changes in the perception of writing
per se and of its reliability as a vehicle of knowledge have insistently
been transforming not only the Western idea of fiction but also the
ways of realizing, as well as of formulating that idea, especially in
narrative literature. The evidence Illich and Sanders find in the process
perfectly corroborates Scheffels thesis that self-reflexivity is neither
the hallmark of a certain literary period nor the distinctive feature of a
particular genre but a general feature of literariness or
fictiveness.29 It proves that whenever the cultural practice of writing
underwent a major change this had a noticeable impact on the way
writers of fiction configured the relationship of their narrators to the
written word. Thus the growing popularity of secular writing rendered
it politic for Chaucer, for instance, to dissimulate the authority of the
narrators of The Canterbury Tales in order to avert the charge that his
text was challenging the Bibles exclusive claim to credibility. By
contrast, Mark Twain devises a text reflecting Huckleberry Finns
semi-literacy: thereby placing his teller at a safe remove from a
readership utterly ignorant of the world portrayed in the novel. By
way of contrast to this implied ignorance, Huckleberry Finns apparent
lack of learning is translated into a form of insider knowledge and his
tale invested with special credibility.
For Illich and Sanders, references to literacy and illiteracy are
clearly more than comments on contemporary societies serving a
purely mimetic function. In keeping with Brockmeiers thesis that
literacy is a precondition of meta-discursive reflection and that
different literacies produce different forms of such reflection, they
explain how invocations of literacy and the lack of it can function as
metafictional comments that appeal to an awareness of the complex
notions of writing by which a text is determined and with which it
interacts as the product of a specific literacy. It makes sense that such
appeals should occur above all in typical print genres, abound in the
novel, and gain frequency as the literacy standards of a culture
increase or change. This would certainly explain why metafiction is so
29
Ibid., 90.
49
predominantly a feature of postmodern writing but also why it

manifests itself in writing prompted by the invention of printing as
well as by other advances in the reproduction and distribution of
written thought.
A comprehensive historical study linking the development of
metafiction to that of Western literacies would require not only a
narratological approach free of the phonocentric bias of structuralist
theory. It would also demand that we reconsider received narratives of
literalization and the impact of this literalization on the development
of literature and the evolution of individual literary genres. To date
such narratives postulate a fairly uninterrupted linear rise in Western
literacy rates between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, in so
doing, largely disregard the discontinuities and irregularities in
Western literalization as pointed out, for instance, by Cressy and
Smith). Accordingly they interpret references to illiteracy in literary
texts either as the reactions of writers to contemporary processes of
alphabetization30 or as nostalgic reconstructions of a disappearing or
an already extinct orality.31 Remarkably, the principal concern of such
30
See, for instance, Edward Le Comte on Mailer in No One in School Could

Read or Write So Well as Me: Our Semiliterate Literati, Greyfriar: Siena Studies in
Literature, XXVI (1985), 31-48; Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders on Chaucer, Defoe, and
Twain in The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind; Barry Sanders, Lie It as It Plays:
Chaucer Becomes an Author, in Literacy and Orality, eds David R. Olson and Nancy
Torrance, Cambridge, 1991, 111-28; Goetsch (1990) on the illiterate in nineteenthcentury English literature; John G. Bayer, Narrative Technique and the Oral
Tradition in The Scarlet Letter, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History,
Criticism, and Bibliography, LII/2 (May 1980), 250-63; and Lynn Shakinovsky, The
Return of the Repressed: Illiteracy and the Death of the Narrative in Hawthornes
The Birthmark, American Transcendental Quarterly, IX/4 (December 1995), 26981.
31
See, for example, Paul Goetsch, Mndliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher
Literatur, in Mndliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, ed. Paul Goetsch,
ScriptOralia 18, Tbingen, 1990, 17-35; Martha K. Cobb, From Oral to Written:
Origins of a Black Literary Tradition, in Tapping Potential: English and Language
Arts for the Black Learner, eds Charlotte K. Brooks et al, Urbana: Ill, 1985, 250-59;
Klaus Benesch, Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their
Eyes Were Watching God, Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African
Arts and Letters, XI/3 (Summer 1988), 627-35; Eva Boesenberg, Das berleben der
Sprache in der Stille: Zur Adaption mndlicher Erzhltradition in drei Werken
zeitgenssischer afro-amerikanischer Autorinnen, in Mndliches Wissen in
neuzeitlicher Literatur, ed. Paul Goetsch, 229-50; Konrad Gro, Survival or Orality
in a Literate Culture: Leslie Silkos Novel Ceremony, in Modes of Narrative:
Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, eds Reingard Nischik and
Barbara Korte, Wrzburg, 1990, 88-99; Craig Tapping, Voices Off: Models of
50
readings seems to be not so much illiteracy itself as the remedies to

the phenomenon offered by the authors, not so much the narration of
an individuals exclusion from a clearly defined cultural context,
which illiteracy always implies, as the visions of cultural integration at
which illiterates arrive, either through alphabetization or through the
espousal of orality as an alternative inflection of cultural identity.
Projecting onto literary texts a view of illiteracy as a transitory
condition to be either transcended in the process of learning a script or
escaped by resorting to an alternative medium, literary critics have
ignored the possibility that illiteracy may be introduced into a literary
text as a structure that constitutes meaning even without having to be
resolved or transformed. This omission is consonant not only with a
general lack of awareness of the metadiscursive dimension of the
theme of illiteracy or of what one might describe in Robert Scholes
terms as the metafictional resourcefulness32 of the issue. It also
corresponds with the assumption of the superiority and the indubitable
desirability of alphabetic literacy. The same assumption is central to
the argument that the replacement of predominantly oral genres or
traditions by more literate ones is due to a natural or inevitable decline
of non-literate audiences and a simultaneous enrichment of the culture
in question.33 Without its underlying Eurocentrism, however, such a
view proves somewhat difficult to sustain, especially when the history
of individual genres or the literatures of individual ethnic groups are
studied against the more destructive and repressive forces at play in
processes of alphabetization.
Orality in African Literature and Literary Criticism, ARIEL: A Review of
International English Literature, XXI/3 (July 1990), 73-86 and Literary Reflections
of Orality: Colin Johnsons Dr. Woreddys Prescription for Enduring the Ending of
the World, World Literature Written in English, XXX/2 (Autumn 1990), 55-61;
Thomas H. Jackson, Orality, Orature, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, Research in African
Literatures, XXII/1 (Spring 1991), 5-15; Ezenwa, Ohateto, Contemporary Nigerian
Poetry and the Poetics of Orality, Bayreuth African Studies, Bayreuth 45, 1998;
Derek Wright, Orature into Literature in Two East African Novelists, in
Contemporary African Fiction, ed. with an introduction by Derek Wright, Bayreuth
African Studies 42, Bayreuth, 1997, 139-52; and Craig MacKenzie, Translating Oral
Culture into Literary Form: The Short Fiction of Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo
Ndebele and Bessie Head in Contemporary African Fiction, ed. with an introduction
by Derek Wright, Bayreuth African Studies 42, Bayreuth, 1997, 57-65.
32
Robert E. Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, Urbana: IL, 1979, 115.
33
This has been a common interpretation since Ian Watt advanced his thesis in
1957 that the rise of the middle class, the rise of literacy, and the rise of the novel
were related and nearly simultaneous.
51
What was unlikely to be accomplished in the metropolitan centres

of literary studies was achieved outside them in contexts whose
multiethnic composition prevented literary scholars from succumbing
to the illusion that they were working within and for a homogeneously
literalized society, and which rendered practically untenable the idea
of distinctive national literatures and national languages forming
collectively accepted and shared commodities. Emancipated from this
idea the construction of literature as a universally accessible and
universally relevant cultural institution came under scrutiny not
without prompting also a reassessment of the limits of literary
discourse. With according vehemence Bill Ashcroft rejects the hitherto
uncontroversial view that writing is infinitely transmissible and
hence infinitely interpretable. Infinite transmissibility assumes a
totally homogeneous world, he argues: It elides the political and
cultural limits of interpretation and subsumes all writing into a
universalist paradigm.34 Analogously, Ania Loomba criticizes
Western literary criticism for deeming itself above politics altogether,
interested only in something called the human condition, and
hostile to any discussion of cultural difference, colonialism and
imperialism.35 By contrast, its prismatic perception of cultural
pluralism36 has enabled postcolonial criticism to perform
fundamental reassessments of modes of knowledge production
especially with a new interest in representation and discourse.37
In its beginnings, postcolonial critical theory strove with particular
fervour to deploy European traditions of literate discourse,
inherited canons and modes of representation, inherited notions of
what passes for history, inherited language, and the games [it]
plays against our perceptions,38 aiming to unearth some authentically
postcolonial mode of perception and reflection. Inevitably, this led
also to an intensive questioning of the suitability of the English
34
William D. Ashcroft, Constitutive Graphonomy: A Post-Colonial Theory of
Literary Writing, in After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing, eds
Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, Sydney, 1989, 61-62.
35
Loomba, 48.
36
Graham Huggan, Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization
and the Post-Colonial Text, in After Europe, eds Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin,
38.
37
Padmini Mongia, Introduction, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, London, 1996, 4.
38
Craig Tapping, Oral Cultures and the Empire of Literature, in After Europe,
86-94.
52
language for the communication of the postcolonial experience.39

Despite (or because of) its development into a globally shared cultural
commodity, critics and writers disputed the efficacy of a language
inherited from a former colonial power and voiced their doubts that
English could ever be divested of the cultural bias with which it was
charged when installed as a master discourse in the colonies.
In conjunction with the systematic interrogation of colonial
discourse and those in command and control of it, questions of the
mediality of language also began to be raised by postcolonial
theorists. In his contribution to After Europe: Critical Theory and
Postcolonial Writing, Craig Tapping, for instance, exposes the
cultural blindness of traditional literary studies vis--vis non-literate
forms of reflection. It is this blindness that he holds responsible for
the subordination of non-European peoples wherever literacy [had]
confronted orality.40 For him, European culture privileges documents
and texts with notions of authority:
through [them] that same invading culture defines itself, and the
concept of civilisation and humanity ... the gap between discursive
orders is clear ... there is no authority without documents; and, without
authority there can be no truth or meaning, purpose or
justification. Groups of humans who do not use script are by
definition inferior, and often less than human.41
While, according to Tapping, European typographic cultures

successfully derive their rather doubtful supremacy from their failure
to acknowledge the humanity of their illiterate antagonists, literate
postcolonial cultures have had to learn to acknowledge the humanity
of the non-literate Other and, in the process, have been developing
sophisticated ways of expressing that acknowledgement. Tappings
diagnosis of the culturally Others linguistic marginalization and
suppression was supported by other postcolonial critics and, in fact,
constituted one of the main themes of postcolonial criticism and
theory in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His particular
emphasis on scriptlessness, though, has remained a unique attempt to
39
The language debate has been particularly well documented by John Skinner
throughout his book The Stepmother Tongue: An Introduction to New Anglophone
Fiction, Basingstoke, 1998.
40
Tapping, 88.
41
Ibid., 88- 89.
53
theorize linguistic inferiority, unlike all other postcolonial theorists,

not as an oral or aural phenomenon, that is, as silence, voicelessness,
muteness, or speechlessness,42 but as a condition caused in the first
place by the global dissemination of Western (and specifically
Anglophone) literacy.
It is only recently that more attention has been paid again to this
historical process, which Homi Bhabha has, perhaps with somewhat
overly poetical irony, described as the triumph of the writ of
colonialist power.43 In large-scale research projects scholars have
been reconstructing the evolution of individual postcolonial book
cultures. Other projects have been devoted to specific aspects of paper
production, demand, and use as well as to questions of book market
development in settler and other colonies.44 At the same time, the
discussion of language dissemination and appropriation has begun to
take into account the hard facts gained through language and literacy
surveys. All this suggests a deliberate move away from narratives like
Bhabhas, of the sudden fortuitous discovery of the English book in
the wild and wordless wastes of colonial India, Africa, the
Caribbean.45 Works like John Skinners The Stepmother Tongue or
Ismail Talibs The Language of Post-Colonial Literature (2002)
illustrate the usefulness of a more pragmatic description of the roles
played by the English language in different colonial and postcolonial
contexts, roles only insufficiently classified as those either of a lingua
franca or master language. Their underlying methodology offers a
feasible alternative to the generalizing, if not totalizing assumptions of
human discourse developed under the influence especially of Foucault
and Derrida and legitimizes the call for greater historical and regional
specificity, as formulated, for instance, by Ania Loomba.46
42
See also my reading of Spivak on pages 106-107 below.

Homi K. Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817, in The Location of Culture,
London, 1994, 107.
44
The work done within the context of the HOBA (The History of the Book in
Australia) Project and within the History of Print Culture in New Zealand Research
Programme deserves to be specially mentioned here, as well as the research inspired
and supported by SHARP (The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and
Publishing, founded in 1991).
45
Bhabha, 102.
46
Mainly because of their failure to consider the interrelation between different
discourses, Loomba criticizes, the work of postmodern thinkers (including
Foucault) has been of little help in the task of recovering the subaltern subject in
43
54
An admittedly very important point Spivak makes in defence of

Foucault and Derrida is that all metropolitan intellectuals are masters
of obfuscation, having perfected the art of masquerade in their
representations of subaltern agency. She argues that to escape the
blame of epistemic violence scholars of subalternity insistently stage
themselves as absent non-representers who let the subaltern speak for
themselves even if it is obvious that these cannot speak at all. Such
dishonesty, she explains, renders the suppressed Other only more
intangible than the familiar theoretical assertions of its indeterminacy
make it out to be. Correspondingly, Sara Suleri claims that scholarly
discourse routinely specularizes, exoticizes, and fetishizes subaltern
agency in order to distract from the academys ignorance of nonWestern traditions.47 Her argument, too, urges a more precise mapping
of the position of the postcolonial intellectual in relation to the
subaltern Other. Such mapping would entail a careful examination of
the global printscape within which postcolonial scholars and writers
circulate in highly literate manner their highly literate notions of nonliterate subalternity.
This, however, seems impossible without a reconsideration of
globalization which, as Robertson complains, has so far been
discussed only superficially and with no attention to larger
civilizational contours and bases, except for frequently invoked
clichs about late capitalism and/or the salience of the multinational
corporation.48 In reducing globalization, as Robertson puts it, to an
intellectual play zone in which residual social-theoretical interests
and world-ideological preferences may be brandished at random,
scholars of the later twentieth century have successfully avoided
defining their own place in the international arenas in which they
interact. Instead they have helped to perpetuate the image of the
colonial history. Even more strongly condemning, OHanlon and Washbrook argue
that Derridean and post-modern thinkers (including Foucault) display a depthlessness
and make it impossible for us to understand how societies function (Rosalind
OHanlon and David Washbrook, After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics
in the Third World, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXIV/1 [January
1992], 141-67). In so doing they echo Eagletons charge that the work of Derrida has
been grossly unhistorical and politically evasive (Eagleton, 205).
47
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago, 1992, 6 (see also Huggan,
Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market).
48
Roland Robertson, Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the
Central Concept, in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (A
Theory, Culture and Society Special Issue), ed. Mike Featherstone, London, 1990, 16.
55
metropolitan intellectual as a globetrotting scribbler or modern

nomad of high learning, as a master of vast spaces routinely
traversing large distances to meet the subaltern in her Third World
habitat and collect, if need be with the help of some native informant
the kind of life experience which global mobility and membership in
an international litocracy seem unable to supply. As Spivak notes, this
modern type of scholar exists without geopolitical determinations,
somewhere on some international periphery and partakes in a
continuistic unconscious or parasubjective culture conjured by
theoretical verbalism.49 Likewise, the mediations whereby literary
works are selected, translated, published, reviewed, explicated, and
allotted a place in the archives of postcolonial and other literatures
have been barely described. So have, as Aijaz Ahmad points out, the
technical and managerial efforts that go into the compilation and
administration of such archives.50 In theory, these archives remain
immaterial places progressively growing, taking up more and more
space, yet never seen as being actually frequented and never studied
for this frequentation and its history.
As has been stated at the beginning of this chapter, the terms in
which a persons exclusion from literate culture is perceived will
always and inevitably be defined by and contingent on the way in
which literacy is conceptualized by literates. As long as these terms
are vague, the phenomenon of illiteracy remains practically intangible,
and the individual marked by it, invisible. Theoretical haziness about
the location of literate culture and its sites of literary production and
consumption inevitably obscures the coordinates of non-literate
alterity. Conversely, in trying to make subjects unable to read and
write visible, literary texts also give greater visibility to the literacy of
the culture or cultures in which they are so self-evidently implicated.
They may represent these cultures as regional formations but almost
invariably treat them as integral parts of a larger international system
at the same time. Thus they invoke a world in which literature may be
distributed everywhere yet still not be accessible to everyone.
Emphasis, however subtle, on this sad contradiction renders
geographical distances between literate and non-literate people and
49
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Colonial

Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman, London, 1994, 71, 68, and 69.
50
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London, 1992, 44-45.
56
peoples secondary. Enhancing instead the synchronicity of their

existences, it creates a sense of shared involvement in global
processes that allows a new form of identification with the culturally
Other. Arguably, this effect warrants the postulation of a specific
postcolonial metafiction in literary representations of non-literacy that
reconnects the postcolonial text to the metropolitan centres of literary
production and challenges a global litocracy to take responsibility for
the local cultures it portrays.
ILLITERACY AS A LITERARY THEME
As Walter Ong has said, we can never forget enough of our familiar
present to reconstitute in our minds any past in its full integrity.1
What follows is the contention that no literate can ever comprehend
the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all ...
perfectly. Any understanding of the non-literate mind, according to
Ong, is further impeded by the fact that discourses on non- or
illiteracy (or what he prefers calling orality) must take place in
writing. For once the word is technologized, Ong explains, there is
no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without
the aid of the highest technology available.2 Yet, whether the absence
or lack of a script is most adequately and authentically represented in
writing is, as Ong also concedes, more than doubtful. After all, such
representations are merely transcriptions or translations and hence
always in some way an adulteration of the actual phenomenon. As far
as Marshall McLuhan is concerned, any rendering of non-alphabetic
thinking in letters therefore constitutes an aggressive and militant act
of reduction and distortion, of assimilation and liquidation.3
Still, the point of this work is not to expose the epistemic violence
committed whenever a writer attempts to write about illiteracy. Rather
the aim here is to show how the awareness of the danger of
committing such violence prompts individual writers to seek ways of
avoiding it, of directing it away from the non-literate Other onto their
own texts and onto themselves and their own culture. This need not be
a conscious gesture of self-negation, however. It can also represent an
attempt to preserve the constructive moment of what is only too easily
condoned as discursive usurpation, especially from a postcolonial
point of view. Therefore, the object of this study is to consider the
processes of conception, interpretation, and transliteration of illiteracy,
processes in which actual illiteracy is not mimetically represented but
replaced by an image, an idea, or an explanation of how scriptlessness
might be understood, imagined, perhaps even remembered, however
vaguely and erroneously, from a literate persons point of view. This
does not mean that concrete manifestations outside literature will be
passed over altogether. In fact, they shall be considered as potential
sources of inspiration for literary explorations of scriptlessness. It
shall be shown that more often than not descriptions of non-literate
otherness are actually occasioned by the authors own confrontation
1
2
3
Ong, 15.
Ibid., 80.
McLuhan, 61.
60
with illiteracy, either as an aspect of the immediate cultural

environment or through an encounter with a foreign culture. Hardly
ever does illiteracy in a literary text represent a purely fictional
construct referring to no specific historical condition of scriptlessness
whatsoever. The evident historicity of literary treatments of illiteracy
may of course be comprehended as yet another proof of the texts
preoccupation with itself and its own literacy (rather than with the
non-literate), that is, as a proof of its self-reflexivity or
metafictionality. It may, more specifically, be read as a modality of
positioning that text in relation to the literate culture (or cultures) to
which it appeals.
CHAPTER THREE
ILLITERACY IN EARLIER FICTION
Because literary explorations of scriptlessness practically always refer

to actual situations, they do not feature in writings from periods before
mass literacy was achieved; nor do they surface before literacy was
assimilated into a collective cultural consciousness and literary works
began to be addressed to broader readerships who actually identified
as actively reading recipients of literary texts. It was only then that an
idea of illiteracy was at all able to take shape and that a public
discourse on illiteracy could commence. In England, this happened in
the course of the nineteenth century, which is surprisingly late given
that printing, fed by the Renaissance in the fifteenth century,
blossomed already in the sixteenth century with the Reformation and
with European expansion in the New World. Yet, as Peter Roberts
shows, at the beginning of the eighteenth century illiteracy was still
not perceived as a social problem. After all, reading for pleasure was
not a normal practice in the society of the time, reading for business
reasons was not absolutely necessary, and reading of the Scriptures
was not attractive to many.1 Letter writing was still a relatively new
medium and there existed no formal or actual requirement for literacy
either for voters or for representatives.2
The studies by Terry Belanger, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Carey
McIntosh confirm this picture, revealing that England in the 1790s
was a well-developed print society,3 whereas a century earlier, in
1695, print culture was still in its infancy.4 In 1695, Eisenstein
asserts, the life of the written language for most Britons was scribal
1
Peter A. Roberts, From Oral to Literate Culture: Colonial Experience in English
West Indies, Barbados, 1997, 135.
2
Although, as Roberts points out, it was not seen as a requirement for the voters
until a later time. Significantly, the written ballot was not generally instituted in
Britain until 1872, which is after it had become commonplace in Australia and the
United States (Roberts, 121).
3
Terry Belanger, From Bookseller to Publisher: Changes in the London Book
Trade, 1750-1850, in Book Selling and Book Buying: Aspects of the NineteenthCentury British and North American Book Trade, Chicago, 1978, 8.
4
Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness,
and Print Culture, Cambridge, 1998, 169.
62
more than printed.5 Only a few hundred professionals were involved

in the printing, binding, distribution, advertising, and selling of books.
By 1790, however, McIntosh claims, thousands of people made their
living from jobs in the printing world all over Great Britain, and the
majority of the population had to deal one way or another with printed
texts.6
The development of Britain into a full-dress print culture in the
course of the eighteenth century was not an entirely smooth process. It
was propelled by the Copyright Act of 1709, which abolished
censorship and perpetual rights on individual manuscripts, thereby
liberalizing the British printing and book trade.7 Yet at the same time,
it was impeded by legal measures taken against the distribution of
political information, such as the Stamp Act of 1712, which put a tax
on every single newspaper copy.8 Paper consumption was still
minimal and administrative structures were still embryonic9 as the
majority of eighteenth-century Britons could not write well enough to
sign their names or read handwritten texts. Nonetheless, there was
considerable familiarity with reading,10 material for which was
supplied not only by the extremely popular lending libraries but also
by cafs, tobacconists, and haberdashers.11 The lucrative business of
book lending generated private borrowing outlets as well as
university, school, and municipal libraries so that by the end of the
eighteenth century, the British Museum had grown out of the
Parliaments acquisition of private collections; the Bells British
Library had been extended to hold an inventory of 100,000 volumes in
1787;12 and subscription libraries and town public libraries had been
5
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:
Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols,
Cambridge, 1997.
6
McIntosh, 170.
7
Martin, 277.
8
Ibid., 119-21 and 414.
9
Ibid., 293.
10
McIntosh, 171. By the middle of the sixteenth century, books tended to move
from the great hall or the study to the bedroom and even the kitchen and there is
evidence that many yeomen, tradesmen, and merchants read the Bible, books of piety,
or John Foxes Actes and Monuments and works of jurisprudence (Martin, 354).
11
Kathryn Sutherland, Events have made us a world of readers: Reader
Relations 1780-1830, in The Romantic Period, ed. David. B. Pirie, The Penguin
History of Literature, 1994, V, 12.
12
Martin, 171.
63
founded in Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds.13 In other places

public reading rooms and circulating libraries granted extensive access
to books and periodicals. Around 1790 some six hundred libraries and
lending libraries were in operation in England and served a total
clientele of fifty thousand persons.14
Already in the first half of the century booksellers had set up in
larger cities and English peddlers were doing a thriving business in
abridged versions of Robinson Crusoe and Gullivers Travels. This
was only the beginning of the distribution circuits for low-priced
books expanding and of popular novels, books of hours, school texts,
and almanacs being printed in impressive pressruns.15 As a result,
while very few examples of printing before 1695 have survived, the
number of published items recorded in the Eighteenth-Century Short
Title Catalogue amounts to 69,229. Their buyers were no longer only
city dwellers. As McIntosh documents, by the end of the eighteenthcentury, the institutions of literacy could be found throughout Great
Britain, in towns, even villages, and country homes. Inland-shipment
via a vastly extended canal-system16 guaranteed a speedy distribution
of printed matter and was breaking down the isolation of partially
literate communities all over England.17 Almost inevitably, local
papers, magazines, and periodicals were founded18 and began to fill
with announcements for the opening of private schools. Gradually a
new public formed, Martin writes:
a public already accustomed by family tradition to reading the Bible
or a pious work as they gathered in the evening. That public could
already spell out the ballads posted on the walls of the home or read
chapbooks, but henceforth it developed a taste for other texts
reading continued to spread to the humbler categories of a society in
which everyone ... felt surrounded by written culture.19
With the coming of age of European print culture in the eighteenth

century the written word was firmly established as the basic unit of
13
Ibid., 353.
Paul Kaufman, quoted in Martin, 354.
15
Martin, 238.
16
Ibid., 415. Turnpike acts were passed between 1750 and 1780 and by 1790
England could boast of 2,223 miles of canals (McIntosh, 35).
17
Martin, 240.
18
McIntosh, 170.
19
Martin, 355.
14
64
communication and exchange. It had penetrated every part of public

life, and become so conspicuously omnipresent that men and women
felt bound across traditional skills and trade divisions by the very act
of reading. For Kathryn Sutherland literacy finally made it possible
for the concept of class below the middle to develop. There was
an urgent awareness, Sutherland writes, that society, its ranks and
relations, its modes of communication, and even its fantasies were
being reordered by the printing-press, and that something amounting
to a revolution in consciousness was taking place.20 The concrete
experience which produced such feeling, along with a new sense of
inhabiting a distinctive cultural space and sharing a distinctive cultural
identity, is vividly invoked in Sutherlands description of the cultural
landscape taking material shape just before and during the Romantic
period:
At the opposite end of the market from rare books, experimentation
with new typefaces and graphic processes led to a huge expansion of
wall posters, cheap pictorial prints, and political cartoons. Even the
illiterate, particularly in London, were increasingly addressed as
readers, of pictures if not of words; while the proliferation of poster
literature, the language of the walls as it was called, seemed set to
turn the urban landscape into a textual field, a book for all to read.
Playbills, civic notices established written communication at this time
at the heart of cultural practices whose traditional meanings were not
primarily textual every available space on London street walls was
now plastered with virtually aggressive reading material,
telegraphing in dense black titles its essential message to a new
semi-literate public.21
It is in this climate that an awareness of illiteracy finally began to

form. In Britain the first great national political debates on literacy
took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, R.A. Houston
reminds us: In the last years of the eighteenth and early years of the
nineteenth centuries, observers of the British Society realized that
illiteracy was a common and probably undesirable phenomenon
[which was] also ... far from evenly distributed.22 This, however, did
not produce unanimous agreement on the need to abolish illiteracy
20
Sutherland, 43.
Ibid., 9.
22
R.A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, Cambridge, 1985, 2.
21
65
altogether. On the contrary, the population explosion which England

witnessed at the turn of the century and which despite significant
educational advances led to a dramatic growth of the actual number of
illiterates23 caused many to recognize in mass literacy a serious danger
to social stability. The urban middling and working classes (petit
bourgeois, artisans, and factory workers)24 were seen not only as
hitherto innocently barred from education but also as the potentially
most threatening readerships to emerge once they were able to engage
in critical inquiry.25 The fear that a multilayered readership would
promote a dangerous proliferation of oppositional discourses, an
explosive rivalry of truths, Sutherland writes, was matched by an
equal concern that a radical literature would act as cement to
otherwise scattered grievances.26
A heated debate over the benefits and risks of promoting reading
but also writing amongst the lower sections of society ensued. There
were visionaries following the liberal views of Rousseau and
Pestalozzi and advocating mass literacy on the grounds that education
of the poor in all branches of knowledge, including party politics, was
the best security for the peace of the country, and the stability of the
government.27 They were opposed by sceptics who believed that
every nation state needed a large reserve of unlettered people willing
to perform unskilled work and who, intimidated by the events in
France, warned that literacy among the swinish multitude would
breed dissent, radicalism, and crime.28
Yet, this debate could not avert the advance of literacy set in
motion by such technological improvements as the paper-machine, the
23
Between 1780 and 1830 the population of Great Britain had doubled, from
approximately 7 to 14 million. Between 1801 and 1821 the population of Greater
London expanded by over 40 %. According to Martin (399), it rose from 960,000 to
2,300,000; between 1800-1850. The reading public, it is estimated, grew from 1.5 to 7
million (Sutherland, 5-6). By the end of the eighteenth century, literacy had reached a
level of 35 to 40 per cent and continued to rise significantly in the following decades.
24
Sutherland, 6.
25
Ibid., 46-47.
26
Ibid., 21.
27
Henry Brougham (1824), founder of the SDUK, quoted in Sutherland, 43. Two
further prominent proponents of mass education were Andrew Bell and Joseph
Lancaster. Another was William Cobbett, editor of the Political Register (1802-35),
who identified access to the skill of writing as well as to that of reading a socially
empowering, a political rite of passage (Sutherland, 34).
28
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Mary Thale,
Cambridge, 1972, 198.
66
stereotype, and the steel press. It could only delay it together with
the introduction of a complete system of universal compulsory
schooling in England and Wales. The latter was not achieved until
1880 owing to Englands prolonged reliance on philanthropic
initiative and its hesitance to allow the state to intervene in
educational affairs. As a result, a two-tier educational system
developed in the course of the nineteenth century which consisted of
expensive governing schools to educate the future governing elite and
of poorly funded schools that aimed less at encouraging upward
mobility than on imparting just enough literary knowledge to teach the
children of the poor how to read the Bible and learn from it how to be
industrious.29 Judged unnecessary for most, writing was simply not
taught in the schools of The Anglican National Society for the
Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church,
while the Wesleyan Methodists even went as far as placing a total ban
on writing in their schools.30 In this way, Gaur ironically concedes,
the limited and carefully graded introduction of literacy was ... a
success.31
The damage caused by this laissez faire policy transpired when, in
1858, the Newcastle Commission started an inquiry into the state of
national elementary education and, in its report of 1861, revealed
grave defects and glaring inefficiency especially in private-venture
schools. The report finally encouraged the liberal Gladstone
administration to carry out the reforms against which there had been
so much vehement resistance, because it was felt that giving
education to the labouring classes ... would ... teach them to despise
their lot in life, instead of making them good servants ..., render them
factious and refractory, [and] enable them to read seditious pamphlets,
vicious books, and publications against Christianity.32 With the
prohibition of school fees on the elementary level and the introduction
of a special fee grant, free schooling was legally secured to every child
in Great Britain by the beginning of the 1890s. Its effects were
considerable. The average school attendance increased from two
29
Gaur, 174.
Sutherland, 5.
31
Gaur, 174.
32
From a declaration of the President of the Royal Society against the 1807 Bill
for Universal Elementary Education quoted in Gaur, 172-73.
30
67
million in 1876 to four million in 1881.33 Subsequently, illiteracy fell

from thirty-three percent among men and between forty-five and fifty
percent among women in the 1830s to below ten percent among men
and women in the 1880s.34
Almost from the moment illiteracy became a public concern at the
beginning of the nineteenth century it also featured as a central theme
in literature. It is worth bearing in mind that in keeping with a general
indifference to writing and a practically universal lack of interest in
questions of literacy before then, eighteenth-century English literature
passes over illiteracy lightly. Mostly it ignores it altogether, or if it
addresses the issue it does so with characteristically unperturbed
sanguinity. The illiteracy of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer,
for instance, represents an almost endearing feature compared to the
affected modernity cultivated by his mother Mrs Hardcastle. Similarly
in The Rivals Sheridan has illiteracy appear as a far lesser evil than the
kind of ignorance he ascribes to the figure of Mrs Malaprop, who
advises her niece to illiterate her lover from her memory.35
That the inability to read and write was felt to be of no
consequence in the eighteenth century is also documented in The
Complete English Tradesman, in which Defoe describes how a nearly
illiterate man, limited to the use of what seem to be desperately
primitive accounting techniques, still brings his business to prosper.
Likewise, in Moll Flanders literacy is clearly not construed as a
precondition of the eponymous heroines progress through a world
increasingly organized and managed with the help of the written
33
Despite the dramatic population growth at the time, in terms of percentage to
population, the figures suggest a rise school attendance of 8.06 % in 1878 and of
10.61 % in 1881 (Smith, 986).
34
By comparison, in 1760, male illiteracy amounted to 40% and female illiteracy
even to 60%. Cf. also Altick according to whom, in 1840, 67% of men and 51% of
women in England and Wales could sign their wedding certificates with their own
names, whereas by 1900, 97.2% among men and 96.8% among women were able to
do so. As regards the difficulty of assessing what counts as illiteracy, see also Richard
D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public
1800-1900, Chicago, 1963, 170-71, and R.S. Schofield, Dimensions of Illiteracy in
England 1750-1850, in Literacy and Social Development in the West, ed. Harvey J.
Graff, Cambridge, 1981, 201-13, as well as Laurence Stone, Literacy and Education
in England 1640-1900, Past and Present, XLII (1969), 69-139.
35
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals: A Comedy, in The Rivals, The
Duenna, A Trip to Scarborough, School for Scandal, The Critic, ed. with an
Introduction and Notes by Michael Cordner, Oxford Worlds Classics, Oxford, 1998,
19.
68
medium. Both Molls knowledge of letters in her and her experienced

use of modern banking and postal services are simply taken for
granted and remain unaccounted for throughout the novel as does
the astonishing literacy of the simple servant girl who in Richardsons
novel Pamela routinely resorts to letter writing in any moment of
emotional crisis. In the latter case, all the author offers is a curt
clarifying remark that she learnt to read and write from her father, a
teacher by profession. The tuition Pamela received from her parent is
given no further mention in Richardsons novel. Learning to read and
write was evidently not experienced as a significant process of
initiation into a special cultural practice in his time.
This is also the impression Defoe conveys in Robinson Crusoe
with Fridays apparent indifference to Crusoes abilities to use pen
and paper and to draw wisdom from the Bible. Quite
characteristically, while the islander questions the book learning
Crusoe tries to impart to him, he falls to his knees in speechless
veneration when Crusoe shoots a goat. It is the introduction Friday
subsequently receives into the use of firearms on which Defoe
elaborates, not necessarily, however, to suggest Crusoes recognition
and encouragement of Fridays savage nature but, arguably, to stress
the usefulness of more rudimentary survival skills than reading and
writing. Significantly these skills prove indispensable not only in the
confined space of a deserted island but also on Fridays and Crusoes
journey through Europe. On this journey, Crusoe has to discover once
more that the ability to use a gun may, at least at times, prove far more
vital than any amount of book learning. A similar ironic querying of
the actual usefulness of literacy is performed in Joseph Andrews,
which in its account of the protagonists education,36 may mention his
advancement to Writing and Reading,37 albeit only parenthetically.
Far greater importance is ascribed to Josephs training in such
competencies as keeping birds and dogs, riding race horses, and
serving a lady as her foot-boy, the latter entailing such profane
exercises as carrying her prayer book and singing psalms. Alleged
excellence in these earns Joseph a position with the curate Adams,
36
The corresponding chapter is given the promising but misleading title Of Mr

Joseph Andrews his Birth, Parentage, Education and great Endowments, with a Word
or two concerning Ancestry.
37
Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His
Friend Mr Abraham Adams and An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews
(1742), ed. with an Introduction by Douglas Brooks, London, 1970, 18.
69
whose outstanding book learning, the novel typically notes, has

rendered him as entirely ignorant of the Ways of this World, as an
Infant just entered into it could possibly be.38
The consistent belittling of literacy skills in eighteenth-century
narrative prose is remarkable especially given the acute awareness of
their texts writtenness which the authors express at the same time.
Tristram Shandy is a particular case in point with its continual
references to the materiality of writing and at the same time its
demonstrative blindness to the difficulty of accessing literary texts,
especially if these texts are as intricately self-reflexive as Sternes own
narrative. There is no false (or other) modesty about the narrators
flamboyant displays of his own extraordinary learning and literacy.
For him, he tries to make the reader believe, to be well read, versed,
and lettered is a perfectly ordinary accomplishment attained under
perfectly ordinary circumstances and of use always and everywhere,
even in the most ordinary situations. Writing, as he puts it at one
point, when properly managed is but a different name for
conversation.39 This, of course, is an understatement barely
concealing Sternes own fascination with the novelty of the idea that
reading and writing represent universally accepted as well as
universally practised forms of entertainment and intellectual selfimprovement. Analogously, the narrators oblivion to the possibility
that someone might possess no knowledge of letters at all demands to
be read as an indication not of a lack of social awareness on the part of
Sternes hero but of the authors determination to yield a blatantly
radicalized account of the cultural trends of his time. Thus he could do
justice, also stylistically, to the spectacular changes these trends had
wrought. I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other
good people in it, who are no readers at all .,40 Tristram Shandy
establishes categorically not even stopping to think that some people
are no readers because they are unable to read. Sternes hero seems
to rule out this possibility altogether. Illiterates do not really exist in
his view of the world.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, illiteracy had
become a form of cultural difference and disadvantage too serious to
38
Ibid., 19.
Laurence Sterne, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67),
ed. with an Introduction by Samuel Holt Monk, New York, 1950, 93.
40
Ibid., 6.
39
70
lend itself to comic exploitation or downplaying any longer. Writers

were forced to see and acknowledge the otherness of those still
excluded from the new print culture in which they had come to
assume such a central role. They themselves were now the assets of an
emergent industry and market, courted and cared for by publishers
who had risen from relative insignificance into the position of
powerful entrepreneurs, capable of making authors and creating
markets for their wares.41 The new specificity of their cultural role
required a greatly differentiated assessment of the context or
landscape in which they were enacting this role. Writers were
challenged to draw a new mental map of the complex public and its
textual desires and to conceive of a new way to organize audiences
according to their ideological dispositions, their social distances, and
the paradoxically intense pressure of their proximity as audiences.42
In the process, those segments of society who were no readers at all
also had to be ascribed more exact coordinates. Along with a plurality
of readerships equipped with shifting and competing literacies the
unlettered masses of non-readers thus entered the awareness of
nineteenth-century authors as well as their writings. Beside a mass
reading population and its unknowable heterogeneity,43
contemporary writers were faced with something even more
unknowable the otherness of individuals unable to access their
writings let alone to write their own texts.
In the wake of the American War of Independence, the French
Revolution and, later, of the Industrial Revolution and under the
influence of the ongoing controversy over the benefits and dangers of
mass literacy, this otherness was bound to be construed in the first
place as a socio-economic, moral, and political problem. Accordingly,
where the figure of the illiterate appears in Romantic and Victorian
literature it is to epitomize mainly disadvantage and inferiority and
thereby function both as a warning to the ruling classes not to oppose
the introduction of universal free schooling and as an appeal to the
lower classes to undertake every effort possible to educate themselves.
Not surprisingly the ambition to reach the entirety of the latter target
group was frustrated in the process. As Sutherland reminds us, one
must not overestimate the extent to which the labouring poor
41
Sutherland, 36.
Jon Klancher quoted in Sutherland, 25.
43
Sutherland, 40.
42
71
identified with their literary inscription either as Paineite workerscholars or as members of a growing family of the morally
regenerated.44 These sections of society, she explains, were more
easily reached by way of sub-literary genres such as broadsheet
ballads, lurid accounts of allegedly true crimes, and cheap reprint
libraries.45
Still, the insistent launching of written appeals even to those unable
to read is of interest as behaviour symptomatic of a society having
recently endorsed a new technology of communication but as yet
unable to understand the limitations of that technology. In the course
of the nineteenth century this changes so that the initial unquestioning
faith in the universal transmissibility of written messages comes to be
satirically epitomized by figures such as that of Mrs Pardiggle, the
self-appointed School lady, Reading lady, and Distributing lady
in Bleak House, fiercely committed to the distribution of knowledge
amongst the poor yet deaf to their assertions that they cannot read the
books she expects them to study for their own improvement.
For such ironic portrayal of literalizing zeal to find expression in
imaginative writing, a more thorough negotiation of the implications
of literacy and of the differences between literate and non-literate
thinking first had to take place within literary discourse. It was, above
all, in narrative fiction, and especially in the novel that nineteenthcentury writers compared illiterates and literates, their unequal places
in society, the different careers open to them, the moral development
their learning (or the lack of it) held in store for them, and the personal
ties they were able to forge with or without its help. The discrepancies
discovered in the process provided material for complex psychological
dramas of alienation, enacted, for instance, by Heathcliff and
Catherine in Wuthering Heights or by Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam in
Our Mutual Friend. While the differences are sustained throughout
these two novels, the disparity between literate and illiterate characters
is resolved in other texts narrating an individuals gradual acquisition
of the ability to read and write. In such works, the transition from
illiteracy to literacy tends to be carefully extended to accommodate
descriptions of schoolrooms, studies, and libraries, as well as accounts
of contemporary teaching methods and materials, and portrayals of
public school teachers or privately hired tutors and governesses.
44
45
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 22-24.
72
Apart from offering an increasingly elaborate iconography of

literate culture, nineteenth-century writing also developed an
increasingly differentiated picture of the manifold literacies and
illiteracies produced by the laissez faire policy that had been adopted
in educational matters in Britain. The absence of a universal school
system meant that there was no uniform way of learning to read and
write. Logically there was no single pattern either according to which
stories recounting an individuals initiation into literate culture had to
evolve. There are tales of glorious success such as that of John Halifax
by Mrs Craik or of Hester Wilmot by Hannah More and tales of
dismal failure such as that of De Bracy in Ivanhoe or of Krook in
Bleak House. Some novels such as Great Expectations, The Mill on
the Floss, or Jude the Obscure tell of children learning to read and
write. Others tell of adults trying to learn what they were denied in
their childhood, as, for instance, Joe Gargery in Great Expectations,
Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, or the farm workers in Adam Bede.
Rarely do nineteenth-century novels record a relapse from literacy
to a state practically equalling illiteracy. Heathcliff, who after the
death of old Mr Earnshaw loses the benefit of his early education
along with any love for books or learning and cultivates an air of
mental deterioration,46 remains an exception. As a rule, the process
of learning to read and write is represented quite differently, namely
as an irreversible transformation, an irrevocable break with ones nonliterate past. It is also for this reason that literacy, even while its
indispensability is hardly negated in nineteenth-century British
writing, is not always recommended unreservedly as a safe passage to
social mobility or material, let alone moral, improvement.
The corrupting power of learning forms a central theme in many
Bildungsromane of the time and is given very special attention in
Mary Shelleys portrayal of both Frankenstein and his monster, whose
evil nature is invoked only when he comes into contact with the
civilized and learned world of his creator to be rejected by it for his
repugnant appearance. While at first the forgivable reaction of an
unpretentious child, this rejection turns into a brutal injustice when
reinforced by the cottagers with whom the creature has been living,
secretly observing and trying to emulate their refinement. The
46
Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights (1847): Authoritative Text. Backgrounds.

Criticism, eds William M. Sale and Richard J. Dunn, 3rd edn, London, 1990, 52-53.
73
powers of eloquence and persuasion47 he has cultivated in the

process sadly fail him when he reveals himself to the De Laceys. In
their eyes, he still is but an abominable creature and it is the
disappointment at their inability to read him otherwise that causes the
monster to finally endorse the role of the unassimilated savage and
demonic brute ascribed to him. Ironically, when he leaves the cottage,
he is as literate as the people who have rejected him for his apparent
otherness. Yet, as he puts it himself, the effort [has] destroyed all
[his] remaining strength48 and only deprived him of the innocent
delight he used to take in such simple pleasures as the sound of a
stream flowing and the sight of the moon as long as he lived in
complete emigration and unawares of his difference. All he has
ultimately gained from his reading of Paradise Lost (along with
Volneys Ruins of Empires, Plutarchs Lives, and Goethes Sorrows of
Young Werter) is a sharpened sense of his own fall and expulsion from
his blessed retreat after he has tasted the fruit of knowledge.
The idea of the moral superiority of the illiterate implied in the
monsters own account of his gradual penetration of the world of
letters remains a recurrent motif in nineteenth-century literature. Apart
from Romantic celebrations of the unadulterated naturalness of the
still illiterate child English novels offer descriptions of such
superiority in pronouncedly sympathetic portrayals of lower-class
illiterate females. Unaffected kindness, genuine loyalty, and
commonsensical wisdom distinguish such characters as Susan
Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dolly Winthrop in Silas
Marner, and Mrs Grose in The Turn of the Screw from the highlystrung, selfish, and devious literates around them. Nonetheless their
lack of schooling is not their triumph. Far from recommending that
lower-class females should be kept in a state of amiably harmless
ignorance, Hardy, Eliot, and James stress the dependence into which
such ignorance manoeuvres the women in their stories.
Acknowledging the indispensability of literacy as well as the
irreversibility of the process of alphabetization, they see the evolution
of British culture into a fully-fledged print culture with the same
scepticism with which they observe other developments marking the
onset of modernism.
47
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), ed. M.K.
Joseph, Oxford, 1980, 220.
48
Ibid., 135.
74
While still part of a general criticism of Western civilization in

Mary Shelley, the questioning of the moral integrity of literates and
literate society in later writers seems prompted by a direct response to
more specific contemporary developments. This holds true also of
Charles Dickens, who provides what probably is the most
differentiated reading of illiteracy in nineteenth-century England.
With the carefully nuanced descriptions he offers of different peoples
attitudes to and experiences of learning, notably in Great
Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens calls in
question
contemporary
propaganda
according
to
which
alphabetization serves the material and moral improvement of all
peoples within and outside Europe. Although his focus is not on
Britains colonial subjects abroad but on the lower classes of urban
England, Dickens interpretation of learning (at least as provided in
nineteenth-century Britain) as a precarious process of assimilation into
a brutally capitalist system does anticipate the objections to imperialist
cultural policies that began to be voiced by seditionists outside Europe
towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Dickens develops his criticism of literate culture from an angle
almost diametrically opposed to that of Sir Walter Scott, whose
idealistic celebrations of oral Scottish folk culture and Romantic
portrayals of Scottish peasants and vagabonds influenced the nostalgic
treatments of non-literate natives in later nineteenth-century novels
such as The Pioneers by Cooper or Allan Quatermain by Henry Rider
Haggard.49 As Goetsch points out, it is by stressing the superstitious
suspicion and awe of writing apparently felt by the illiterates he
portrays, Scott effectively Others his unlettered characters and
exoticizes their lack of learning. He does so at the cost of attaching the
stigma of cultural backwardness to those whose oral culture he wishes
to protect and preserve. Four and a half decades after the publication
of The Antiquary in 1816 and its portrayal of Edie Ochiltree, the
illiterate news-carrier, minstrel, and historian,50 Dickens in
Great Expectations submits a completely different analysis of illiterate
otherness, granting its intrinsic strangeness but also insisting on every
49
Many of the examples mentioned in this section have been found with the help
of Paul Goetschs comprehensive paper, Der Analphabet in der englischen Literatur
des 19. Jahrhunderts.
50
Walter Scott, The Antiquary (1816), ed. with an Introduction and Notes by
Nicola J. Watson, Oxford Worlds Classics, Oxford, 2002, 44.
75
literates familiarity with it. To this end he appeals to his readers

memory of their own pre-literate childhood in subtly delineating how
his protagonist, still a young boy at the beginning of the novel, fails to
make sense of the meaning of the gravestones of his late parents and
siblings and the letters written on them:
The shape of the letters on my fathers [tombstone], gave me an odd
idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From
the character and turn of the inscription, Also Georgiana Wife of the
Above, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and
sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred
to the memory of five little brothers of mine who gave up trying to
get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle I am
indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been
born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had
never taken them out in this state of existence.51
There is nothing romantic about Pips bewilderment, nothing

suggesting the need to preserve his innocent ignorance. The novels
opening passage leaves no doubt that Pips understanding of the world
will have to change in the course of the narrative and that, in fact, one
of the novels intentions is to narrate the protagonists appropriation of
literacy. Nonetheless Dickens rendering of Pips initial illiterate
incomprehension, sympathetic and comical at once, is more than a
quaint and light-hearted opening. It is a first plea to take into
consideration and even identify with those not included in the reading
population addressed by the novel. This plea is renewed in the later
characterization of Joe Gargery and Magwitch, two illiterate adults
undergoing dramatically dissimilar careers also due to how each of
them resolves the dilemma of never having had any schooling. Unlike
Scott, Dickens abstains from construing characters like Joe and
Magwitch as belonging to a world different and apart from that of his
literate protagonists and readers. Instead he insists on ascribing them a
place within the increasingly print-based and typographically
fashioned cultural landscape of his time and refuses to exempt the
educated inhabitants of this landscape from their responsibility for
their lesser educated fellow-beings. While in Bleak House, Dickens
51
35.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861), ed. Angus Calder, Penguin, 1965,
76
suggests that even if the non-literates otherness exceeds the literates

grasp, this does not consign them to separate universes but makes it
mandatory that literates should still try to realize the scope of their
own incomprehension of what it means to be illiterate.
The systematic familiarization of the unlettered individual in
Dickens needs to be seen in relation to a growing awareness of
illiteracy in actual life. If Dickens illiterate characters no longer
represent creatures at once alien and alienating like Mary Shelleys
monster, Bronts Heathcliff, and Scotts De Bracy, this is also an
indication of the mastery English society gradually gained over the
phenomenon of illiteracy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In fact, Dickens insistence on the essential knowability of the
unlettered Other may even be seen as foreshadowing the abandonment
of the theme in English literature after the attainment of universal
literacy. For once its treatment was limited to purely mimetic
representation, illiteracy could continue to feature in literature only as
long as it was also an actual social concern. After writers had ceased
to exploit it also imaginatively and subject it to fictionalization, the
theme was bound to vanish from literature again the moment it had
lost its historical legitimization.
CHAPTER FOUR
ILLITERACY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION:
HEART OF DARKNESS
The loss of illiteracy as an intellectual concern discussed in the

previous chapter appears to have been enforced by the Eurocentrism
which has encouraged many twentieth-century writers to take the
homogenous literalization of human societies and even more so their
own literacy for granted. By contrast writers, mostly but not
exclusively from outside Europe, with a sense of their own
implication in the history of colonization have retained an interest in
illiteracy especially as a form of potentially subversive deviancy from
Western master cultures. Arguably, one can even posit a specificity of
postcolonial writing where literary texts express an awareness of the
expansion of European print culture beyond national boundaries and
the formation of new literate cultures with locally based yet globally
connected. In the articulation of this awareness the retrieval and
restyling of illiteracy as a form of cultural otherness has played a more
than crucial role. As will be shown, it has led to the evolution of a
typically postcolonial metafictionality in the form of an acute sense of
the exclusion of those from literary reception whose plight
postcolonial literature describes. Accordingly, postcolonial
explorations of illiteracy self-consciously locate the writing subject,
the author, in the paradoxical position of a mediator representing one
of two opposing cultural positions while in reality being, inescapably,
a representative of the Other.
This schizophrenic situation is resolved where the author strictly
abstains or refrains from writing in the name of the scriptless Other
but returns to the fictional distancing performed by earlier nineteenthcentury writers. As in the case of these writers, this does not
necessarily signal a complete indifference or insensitivity to the social
disadvantages illiteracy implies. Rather it reflects a growing insecurity
concerning the possibilities of effective representation, an insecurity
engendered by the realization that the uses to which the English
language and, with it, alphabetic writing had come to be put in the
course of the colonial enterprise were barely conducive to a genuinely
sympathetic understanding of the forms of otherness encountered
outside Europe.
78
A text informed by this insecurity and one of the first to offer a

correspondingly self-conscious treatment of the non-European
scriptless Other is Heart of Darkness. Conrads rendering of the
African native in this text has attracted broad critical attention since
Chinua Achebe famously condemned it for parading in the most
vulgar fashion longstanding prejudices against Africans and for
freely exhibiting Conrads antipathy to black people, his problem
with niggers, his xenophobia by reducing Africa to a
metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity.1 The
clearest indication of Conrads racism in Heart of Darkness, Achebe
argues, is his strategic withholding of human expression from the
African natives. It is clearly not part of Conrads purpose to confer
language on the rudimentary souls of Africa, he asserts. In place of
speech they are given a violent babble of uncouth sounds, allowed to
exchange but short grunting phrases, and most of the time described as
too busy with their frenzy to communicate at all.2 The vehemence
with which critics have responded to these charges is probably also
due to Achebes simultaneous criticism of the academy for having
failed to note or to admit the preposterous and perverse arrogance
informing Heart of Darkness, simply because white racism in Africa
is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely
unremarked.3
To a large extent, the responses critics have since formulated not
only in Conrads but also in their own defence4 revolve around the
1
Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness,

in Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources Criticism, ed.
Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn, Norton Critical Editions, London, 1988, 252 and 257-60.
2
Ibid., 255.
3
Ibid., 257.
4
Conrad has since been praised emphatically for his opposition to imperialist
policies, criticized for venting only a muffled political protest against colonialism in
his oeuvre, and condemned for the crude racism allegedly underlying his writing. The
dazzlingly contradictory readings of Heart of Darkness generated in the past twentyodd years have prompted Chantal Zabus to divide these critics essentially into two
factions: the poachers (Achebe, Janmohamed, Obiechina) and the rangers
(Hampson, Harris, Nazareth, Viola, Said). While, for Zabus, the former are driven by
a morbid obsession of crocodilian mishaps and the ambition to hunt down racist or
colonialist alligators afloat in the literary mainstream and its tributaries, the latter
assume the equally doubtful protectionist stance of gamekeepers of colonial
literature. (Answering Allegations against Alligator Writing in Heart of Darkness
and Mister Johnson, in Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures,
eds C.C. Barfoot and Theo Dhaen, DQR Studies in Literature 11, Amsterdam, 1993,
Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Fiction
79
theme of language and, more specifically, around that of orality.5

What has been ignored in the process, however, is the careful
distinction Conrad draws between the highly literate eloquence of the
white representatives of Europe in his narrative and the pre-literate
voices turned silences of the blacks he has appear mostly on the
margins or in the background of his text. This is important as it is this
distinction which may actually be seen as providing the alternative
frame of reference6 which, according to Achebe, Conrad fails to
supply. Thus the reader cannot differentiate, Achebe contends,
between Conrads own viewpoint and the actions and opinions of his
characters. It would not have been beyond Conrads power to make
that provision if he had thought it necessary, Achebe observes. To
show that Conrad actually did try to make this provision, references to
language and literacy and to the opposites of these, silence and
scriptlessness, will be examined in the reading of Heart of Darkness
that follows. The aim of this reading will not be to refute Achebes
criticism of Heart of Darkness or to reinforce the novels canonical
status in the West, which Achebe queries so emphatically. Instead it
will suggest that both the prominence of the Europeans as characters
and speakers and the overtly reductive treatment of Africans in Heart
of Darkness, rather than affirming contemporary prejudices against
the non-European Other, serve systematically to criticize them.
Achebe apprehends the failure of the African native to appear
centre stage in Heart of Darkness as a clear proof of Conrads racism,
which, he argues, Conrad otherwise manages to hide behind semisincere avowals of concern about the atrocities waged by King
Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo. Nineteenth-century English
liberalism, Achebe maintains, while requiring all Englishmen of
decency to be deeply shocked by these atrocities, did not prevent them
116-38.) For another useful summary of the critical discussion, see Andrea White,
Conrad and Imperialism, in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.H.
Stape, Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge, 1996, esp. 179.
5
Cf. especially Julika Griems study of Heart of Darkness in Brchiges
Seemannsgarn: Mndlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Werk Joseph Conrads,
ScriptOralia 81, Tbingen, 1995, 148-65, and Tony Tanner, who reads the use of
voice in Heart of Darkness as an attempt to rephysicalise language, as it were, to get
it off the page and back into the mouth, and make us aware of how immediately
related it is to the body in Gnawed Bones and Artless Tales Eating and
Narrative in Conrad, in Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry,
New York, 1976, 34.
6
Achebe, 256.
80
from sidestepping the ultimate question of equality between white

people and black people. Instead it permitted the cultivation of a
covertly racist rhetoric gratifying the Western desire for another
world, for an antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization in
comparison with which Europes own state of spiritual grace will be
manifest. It is, however, also possible to argue that far from asserting
Europes spiritual grace by invoking a dark, bestial, horrid African
Other, Heart of Darkness traces a total lack of grace in the white
mans perception of and interaction with non-European Others, a lack
which Conrads European characters, notably the vainglorious Mr
Kurtz, do not even possess the grace to stop and think about.
In order to demonstrate that Conrad, the talented, tormented,
man,7 as Achebe calls him, was not so tormented by the
precariousness of Western civilization as to need constant
reassurance by comparison with a more primitive Africa, it is
necessary to attempt a less polarized reading of African and European
civilizations than Achebe advances in An Image of Africa. Aware of
this, Andrea White specifies the historical context in which Heart of
Darkness was written and recalls that imperialism was never the
stable monolith that it might appear to be from a distance.
She suggests understanding Conrads oeuvre as an attempt to trace
distinctive moments in the development of the British Empire, from
the loosely administered, ad hoc arrangement in Malaya, to the
intensified scramble for land in Africa, to the financial dependencies
established in South America.8 Whites emphasis, rather than being
on the language used by Conrad to describe Africans,9 is on the
shifting nature of European imperialism between 1880 and 1914, a
period during which colonial conquests accelerated greatly and
worldwide, and on Conrads personal inheritance of both a
sensitivity to oppressive autocracy and a profound scepticism about
the idealism of social, and particularly nationalistic, movements.10
7
Likewise Said describes Conrad as a self-conscious foreigner writing of

obscure experiences in an alien language, and only too aware of this (Edward W.
Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge, 1966, 4). The fact
that Conrad does not write in his first language is also stressed by Julika Griem, who,
not completely convincingly, argues that Conrad never managed to use English as a
natural medium but stayed engaged in a stylistic battle with it all his life (Griem, 43).
8
White, 180.
9
This, according to Zabus, forms the main focus in most other studies of Heart of
Darkness (Zabus, 118).
10
White, 180.
81
This approach leads White to identify the specific understanding of

culture prevalent in late nineteenth-century Europe as one reason for
the enduring critical disagreement concerning the ideological position
Conrad assumes in Heart of Darkness. She believes that modern
readers tend to forget that a century ago culture referred to a single
evolutionary process ... the basic, progressive movement of humanity
and by way of citing James Clifford she reminds us that:
while contemporary anthropological and sociological thinking had
spread knowledge about non-European peoples, it had done little more
than codify difference in order to explain their barbarism and our
civilization. By the turn of the century, however ... evolutionist
confidence began to falter, and a new ethnographic conception of
culture became possible. The word began to be used in the plural,
suggesting a world of separate, distinctive, and equally meaningful
ways of life .
White believes that this was not Conrads understanding:

As an early modern, he sensed the current of a world-wide disruption
of peoples and ideas, of exiles and rootlessness, but while his writing
acknowledges and even participates in the decentring of monolithic
unities and traditional hierarchies, it also expresses his sense of loss
and anxiety in response to the perceived disorder.11
For Ian Glenn it is owing to Conrads articulation of this same

sense of loss and anxiety in the depictions of Kurtz and Marlow that
Heart of Darkness has held an unanalyzed power and fascination.
The novel has survived, Glen is convinced, because it captures so
perfectly the class ambivalence of so many Western intellectuals in
the twentieth century and not because of its early treatment of
colonialism or its dramatization of the clash between nineteenthcentury virtue and twentieth-century decadence.12 Jeffrey Williams,
too, pays special attention to Conrads treatment of the emergent class
of Western professionals and recommends reading Heart of Darkness
in terms of a sacralization of the mode of narrative. Such a reading,
Williams believes, demonstrates the ideological mission of modern
11
Ibid., 196-97.
Glenn, quoted in Jeffrey J. Williams, Theory and the Novel: Narrative
Reflexivity in the British Tradition, Cambridge, 1998, 180.
12
82
narrative to normalize and internalize what might be called the

culture of the novel and, more specifically, to establish the
discerning taste for sophisticated narratives narratives of
ambiguity.13
In Williams view, Heart of Darkness hypostasizes a hyperbolic
desire and drive for narrative characteristic of a cultural situation in
which narrative investment becomes a possessive sign of cultural
capital. Not without reason, Williams argues, the narratives told in
Heart of Darkness are made available not to just anyone, but
exclusively to those in the professional community:
Rather than the all-encompassing hailing of narrative interest across
class, age, and gender lines in Joseph Andrews, the narrative circle [in
Heart of Darkness] is limited to the professional circle. And rather
than the more frivolous demonstration of narrative desire for diverting
narratives of leisure class entertainment in Heart of Darkness
the drive for narrative carries much more serious stakes ... assuring the
tenuous position of those rising not on inherited capital but on newly
attained cultural capital, via professional accreditation and
membership.14
Its underlying perception of narrative as cultural capital, to Williams,

turns Heart of Darkness into an exemplary proto-modernist text
which typically foregrounds the formal problematics of gathering and
collating a definitive narrative account, the undoing of narratorial
assurance, and the disruption of the traditional hero.15 As a result,
Williams argues, the actual hero in Heart of Darkness is not Kurtz but
Marlow. The fact that Kurtz is enigmatic and for the most part
unrealized as a character only signals his status as narrative register
over which the other characters pose their explanations and articulate
their interest. Williams concludes, that interest, seemingly natural
and unquestioned is peculiar and excessive.16 And it is this
excessiveness of Marlows drive to hear of Kurtz and to tell his
story that, to Williams, conspicuously asserts the centrality of the
narrative of narrative.17
13
Williams, 153.
Ibid., 179.
15
Ibid., 147.
16
Ibid., 151.
17
Ibid., 152.
14
83
The question, then, which readers of Heart of Darkness are led to

ask themselves, is not what will become of Kurtz in Africa, but what
will become of Marlow, the narrator, in the process of telling his tale
on the Nellie in Gravesend. What F.R. Leavis has called Conrads
adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible
mystery18 never allows the reader to forget that there is a narrative in
progress and to wonder towards which ending this narrative will steer.
In fact, in bombarding, as Achebe puts it, his readers with emotive
words and other forms of trickery, Conrad not only sends his reader
into a hypnotic stupor19 but also keeps alive the desire for a closure
that releases Marlow from his compulsion to speak. For the images
invoked in Heart of Darkness mainly serve to conjure voices rather
than visions, moments of subjective experiencing rather than actual
events, a talking self rather than the world which that self once
encountered. Almost inevitably, Marlows idiosyncratic way of
asserting his voice produces a disturbing imbalance, hinting at the
presence of listeners not allowed to interrupt as well as at the absence
of other witnesses whose version of the narrated events remains
untold. This ultimately creates the impression that Marlows narrative
is not, as Griem suggests,20 a celebration of human speech but a very
critical analysis of its silencing capacity.
To believe that Heart of Darkness unconditionally idealizes oral
narration is to overlook the significant difference between Marlows
speaking, so elaborately staged in Conrads narrative, and the
speaking attempted by the African native, but insistently muffled and
marginalized by the narrator. Even though Marlow delivers his stories
orally, the kind of telling in which Conrads narrator engages has very
little to do with the mode of oral expression and communication he
keeps identifying as a characteristic of the black savages inhabiting
the African wilderness. Marlows narrative is addressed to an
audience consisting of a lawyer, an accountant, a director of
companies, and the narrator, all of them no doubt sufficiently educated
or literate to fully grasp the symbolic dimension of his
discoursing as well as that of Kurtzs. With his audience, Marlow
shares a fairly intimate knowledge of Western history and literature,
of French and Latin, of European and African geography, and, not
18
Leavis quoted in Achebe, 253.

Achebe, 253.
20
Griem, 156.
19
84
least importantly, of the workings of colonial administration, a

bureaucracy utterly dependent on writing.
As Robert Hampson states, the common culture of Marlow and his
listeners is a culture grounded in the shared educational background
of English public schools and a severely limited one for that.21 It
finds expression in Marlows passion for maps,22 his awareness of
language and linguistic nuance, his eloquence, his detestation of unand half-truths, and his deep respect for the binding power and
authority of the written word. Even when lost in the darkest
featureless jungle, Marlow retains his sense of connectedness to
European literate culture. Symptomatically, he keeps remembering
that his mission into the heart of darkness is the outcome of a letter
of recommendation and the subsequent sealing of a contract with his
own signature; one of his tasks on this mission is to transport letters to
various company-owned camps on the way; one of the incidents he
chooses to include in his account of his journey is his retrieval of an
abandoned book on seamanship from complete decay and its
restitution to its owner; the act which concludes his mission, finally,
entails the handing over of the remaining pieces of Kurtzs writings to
the deceaseds Intended.
The high level of literacy that distinguishes Marlows tale also
distinguishes the speeches of his alter ego, Kurtz. The narrator of
Heart of Darkness may portray Kurtz as endowed with, in fact,
existing almost purely as a voice A voice, a voice! It rang deep to
the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds
of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart (HD, 96) and others
may hold the opinion that Kurtz, while a splendid talker, really
couldnt write a bit, nonetheless, Kurtzs orality, like Marlows, is
one informed by a remarkably sophisticated form of literacy. Indeed,
Marlow, as the teller of the tale, actually is the voice that Kurtz is only
said to be.23 Accordingly, Kurtzs existence more often than not is
evidenced in writing: in the packet of letters Marlow presents to
21
Robert Hampson, Heart of Darkness and The Speech that Cannot Be

Silenced, English, XXXIX/163 (Spring 1990), 16.
22
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Heart of Darkness and Other Stories
(1902), with an Introduction and Notes by Gene M. Moore, Wordsworth Classics,
Ware: Hertfordshire, 1999, 35.
23
Vincent Pecora appropriately asks of the voices in Heart of Darkness, Is it still
people who are speaking here? in his paper Heart of Darkness and the
Phenomenology of Voice, English Literary History, LII/4 (Winter 1985), 994.
85
Kurtzs fiance, in the report on the Suppression of Savage Customs

Marlow makes over to some journalist, in family letters and
memoranda without importance (HD, 100) he passes on to some
cousin of Kurtzs, as well as in a note demanding the immediate
removal of an expatriate assistant from the country.
Conversely, when Kurtz is actually evoked as the grand speaker he
is famed to be, it is again written words poetry that he delivers.
You ought to have heard him recite poetry, Marlow is told by one of
Kurtzs admirers. But he never has the chance to do so. Instead he
reads the report Kurtz was commissioned to write for the
International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs
Seventeen pages of close writing, eloquent, vibrating with
eloquence, a beautiful piece of writing:
It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august
Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the
unbounded power of eloquence of words of burning noble words.
There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,
unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently
much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of
a method. It was very simple and at the end of that moving appeal to
every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
like a flash of lighting in a serene sky: Exterminate all the brutes!
(HD, 77-78)
Quite ironically, what Marlow and Kurtz have in common also

separates them. Even though they share the same language and
therefore, as Marlow believes, moments of extraordinary intimacy, it
is the uses to which they put their means of expression that ultimately
drives Marlow to vent his doubts as to whether the fellow was
exactly worth the life [of his native helmsman whom they] lost in
getting to him (HD, 78). With conspicuous consistency Conrad has
Marlow question the progressive encroachment of literate European
civilization on Africa. With corresponding scepticism he takes in the
omnipresence of paper, printed or scribbled upon, even in places
seemingly untouched by, because out of reach of the Western world of
letters. Harmless notes pencilled in the margins of a book or the
anonymous message scrawled on a piece of board and left on the bank
of the river as a warning to Marlow and his crew are placed in sharp
and sad contrast to the meticulous book keeping religiously conducted
86
by the loathsome manager of the Central Station, an individual with

no learning, and no intelligence (HD, 49) yet with the power to
infuse his environment with a disconcerting air of plotting (HD, 52).
Still, Marlows indignant remarks on this papier-mch
Mephistopheles (HD, 54) and clandestine reader of the Companys
confidential correspondence form only a mild reproach compared to
the attack on imperialistic discursive practices that Conrad launches
with Marlows portrayal of the ominous figure of Kurtz.
In this attack, even such innocent literate practices as the recitation
of poetry and the idealistic talk of love or of other higher Western
sentiments obtain a demonically manipulative dimension, prompting
Marlow to condemn them as mere pretences of civilization whereby a
form of baseness is concealed too appalling for him to repeat to his
audience. Kurtzs unbounded power of eloquence of words of
burning noble words, turns out to be a power of evil with which he
holds spellbound both the savages in the bush whom he has made
his personal subjects and his no less gullible expatriates. Interpreting
Kurtz, as Yuan-Jung Cheng does, as the defenceless victim of a
dangerous African wilderness, whose spell, ghost, or lure
invades the colonialist from body to soul and gradually effects his
spiritual decomposition24 means overlooking the importance of the
fact that what enables Kurtz to penetrate the heart of darkness and
sustains him there is his European education coupled with a
specifically European presumptuousness, or what Cheng terms a
Faustian lack of restraint and what Eugene Goodheart identifies as
a
nineteenth-century
legacy
of
the
eighteenth-century
Enlightenment.25
Even his systematic arrangement of the severed heads on his fence,
yet another instance of his penchant for cryptic messages, which he
challenges the horrified Marlow to decode, suggests a curiously
complex (or highly literate) notion of communication. As Cheng
correctly notes, the problematics of language itself constitutes the
axis of Conrads critique of European civilization.26 This also
corresponds with Martin Rays reading of Heart of Darkness as a text
24
Yuan-Jung Cheng, Heralds of the Postmodern: Madness and Fiction in
Conrad, Woolf, and Lessing, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory 4, New York,
1999, 32-37.
25
Eugene Goodheart, Desire and Its Discontents, New York, 1991, 25-26.
26
Cheng, 41.
87
criticizing above all the imperialist practice of superimposing

language upon the indifferent land and people so as to control its
colonies while simultaneously using it to distance and gloss over the
truth.27
This does not mean, however, that, as Cheng believes, reality and
fiction are literally interchangeable in Heart of Darkness and that for
Conrad truth is relative, depending on ones perspective.28
Therefore, Cheng determines, both parties [Kurtz and Marlow] are
right in their own terms.29 It may be true that Marlows vague and
inconsistent use of the terms real and reality throughout the novel
problematizes the boundary between reality and discourses upon
it;30 the gaps in Marlows account may even be indicative of a
certain madness endemic to the narrative;31 and Conrads ultimate
conclusion may indeed be that there is no objective authorial
representation of reality.32 The crucial point, however, is that
Marlows attitude to truth still differs radically from Kurtzs. Unlike
Kurtz, who claims to know truth and therefore believes himself
entitled to command the extermination of brutes, Marlow does not
presume to pronounce life or death sentences over any human
subjects. Instead he becomes increasingly aware of his own fallibility
not only as a narrator but also as a recipient of Kurtzs messages and
therefore makes no attempt to convince his listeners that his account is
more than a subjective reconstruction of his inconclusive
experiences (HD, 35). In fact, as if to give a final proof of the
doubtfulness of his own credibility, Marlow in the end even
volunteers the confession that he, who so detests lies, chose to lie to
Kurtzs Intended rather than tell her what Kurtzs last words really
were.
Therefore, even if, as Cheng argues, neither Kurtz nor Marlow are
absolutely truthful,33 Marlow is still more truthful than Kurtz. It is
through him as the teller of the story that Heart of Darkness conveys
27
Martin Ray, Joseph Conrad, London, 1993, 23.

Cheng, 49.
29
Ibid., 45.
30
Bruce Henricksen, Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative,
Urbana: Ill, 1992, 62-63.
31
Cheng, 52.
32
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, New York,
1991, 8.
33
Cheng, 45.
28
88
how the possibility of fictionality in literature ... turns into a critique

of the world and of literature itself.34 It is because of Marlows and
Kurtzs rootedness in European literacy that, contrary to many critics
objection to Conrads racism, Heart of Darkness demands to be read
as a critique of Eurocentric civilization, not one of African
wilderness.35 Recalling Kurtzs rather liberal handling of truth,
Marlow, who himself distinguishes so scrupulously between the
different truth values of contracts and other documents (especially
those bearing his own signature) and that of poetry or fiction, realizes
the difficulty of positioning himself within his own narrative.
Arguably, this is above all why he lets his tale oscillate undecidedly
and insecurely between pro- and anti-colonialist perspectives,
allowing it to become increasingly inconclusive, yet at the same time,
more and more overtly different from the kind of colonial discourse in
which Kurtz participates. Chantal Zabus legitimate warning not to
ignore the Marlow-Conrad cleavage notwithstanding, epistemological
insecurity is a condition Marlow and Conrad do share. Marlows
failure to make his position vis--vis British colonialism
unambiguously clear in his own narrative is not unrelated to Conrads
own ambivalent situation.
It is in the project of negotiating ones own passage through
prevailing discourses without getting caught in a dangerous current or
running aground and wrecking ones vessel that the scriptlessness of
the African native so elusively portrayed in Heart of Darkness obtains
particular importance. Clearly, the Africans preliterate and hence, for
Marlow, almost inaudible and invisible orality provides a perfect foil
to the literate narrators speechlessness, his utter inability to grasp in
words, let alone in letters, an existence beyond the confines of literate
civilization, an existence in a featureless, dark territory, in an
obscurity far more resilient to inscription than those blank spaces on
the maps of the earth that used to fascinate Marlow as a child. In
recording the blacks babble of uncouth sounds (HD, 46), their
burst of yells (HD, 63), and their howling (HD, 64), as he
describes their bodies streaming of perspiration (HD, 41), their loins
wrapped in black rags whose short ends behind waggled to and fro
like tails, their meagre breasts panting together and their eyes staring
with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages (HD,
34
35
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 47.
89
43), Marlow not only articulates a sense of the natives backwardness

but also lays bare the insufficiency of European epistemology, the
limitations of Western learning, and the inefficacy of Anglophone
eloquence and literacy, none of which suffice to adequately grasp the
Other. For all his learnedness, the narrator must fail in the end at justly
interpreting the native subjects he encounters. His readings remain but
plain surface readings of the Other and, as such, a reflection of his
own incomprehension and inadequacy.
Why the open ocean has such a special appeal to Marlow, who
likes to rely on the security of his experience and learning, becomes
understandable in the light of his discomfort and perplexity at the
unexpected sight of humans on his journey up the river, humans so
totally other that they even resist translation. As long as he steers
safely clear of new land and new people, his course is entirely
determined and controlled by his own knowledge and understanding
of maps and charts. Following the recorded routes of earlier seafarers,
Marlow sails with greater certainty even in seemingly infinite spaces
empty of landmarks than on his trip up the Congo. This inland journey
fills Marlow with unease because on it his nautical literacy is of little
use. He knows that travelling inland may lead to events and
encounters impossible to apprehend in familiar terms. The sixty-yearold copy of An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship he finds in
the wild and wordless wastes he crosses is barely as grand an
insignia of colonial authority as Bhabha makes it out to be in his
reading of Heart of Darkness.36 It really is only a pathetic triumph of
the writ of colonialist power, an instance of Entstellung
displacement,37 but not, however, in the sense Bhabha interprets its
image, namely as an emblem subject to both historical transformation
and discursive transfiguration.
At the place where it is found the text on seafaring is useless and
stands no chance of being transfigured by repetition, that it accrues
new meaning as it is reread by new readers. There are clear signs that
for a long time nobody has returned to the volume which Marlow
retrieves from a pile of rubbish and of which he remarks that it is not
a very enthralling book but one making for rather dreary reading. It
is only to Marlow that it represents something of an amazing
antiquity (HD, 65) because of the unlikely location in which he has
36
37
Bhabha, 102.
Ibid., 107 and 108.
90
stumbled upon it and because of the unaccountably encrypted

comments someone has inserted in the margin.
The possibility that the strange ciphers in the book are proof of
another literate culture than his own having penetrated the land he is
traversing before him does not trouble Marlow the way it troubles
Major Joll in J.M. Coetzees Waiting for the Barbarians (a text which
will be discussed in the following chapter). In fact, he is moved by the
thought that someone else may have found himself at his wits end,
that he is not the first to have reached the limits of his discursive and
imaginative scope, and to have nonetheless tried to hold on to some
form of logical expression in this nowhere. He recalls it occurred
to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would
be a mere futility: What did it matter what anyone knew or
ignored? (HD, 66) This flash of insight provides an explanation for
Marlows obsessive desire to resume speech back in Britain, in an
environment in which his words are not divested of their meaning. In
the process of translating his journey into an oral narrative he indeed
seems to regain a certain degree of control over his experiences. He
finds words even for those moments that struck him speechless when
they actually occurred. It does not matter to him that, as preconceived
formulations of otherness, his words fall short of his promise to relate
the incomprehensible (HD, 34), the unspeakable (HD, 78).
In contrast to Marlow, Conrad chooses not speech but writing as
his medium and in transcribing Marlows tale records all those telling
slippages that may escape even the most attentive of Marlows
listeners but are not meant to be overlooked by Conrads reader. From
the perspective of the disengaged and invisible scribe Conrad has the
fraught text of late nineteenth-century imperialism, as Bhabha puts it,
implode within the practices of early modernism.38 Part of these
practices is the subtle metafictional probing of a texts epistemological
limits. In Heart of Darkness these are reached where the narrative
includes the African native. At such moments the novella documents a
dual constriction: that of the narrator in describing the African and
that of the narrative in correcting the narrators description and
offering an alternative rendering of the unknowable or unspeakable
Other. The latter is declared impossible in Heart of Darkness, which
ultimately is able to accomplish little more than Marlow and conveys
only poor but telling portrayals of the non-European Other, telling
38
Ibid., 107.
91
above all as far as Conrads awareness of the unenlightened and heartless nature of the nineteenth-century colonialist discourse of alterity is
concerned.
Published at a time when full literacy had finally been attained in
Britain, Heart of Darkness still reflects a profound uncertainty
concerning the usefulness and durability of writing and the beneficial
character of literate culture. At first glance, Conrads criticism of
literate civilization seems to go even as far as an emphatic espousal of
the folk art of oral narration in the manner suggested by Walter Scott
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A closer examination,
however, reveals that this is not the case. While the most eloquent
speakers in his tale are highly literate, those living outside European
literate culture are not really given a voice. Their orality is subjected
to overt distortion. Their scriptlessness, on the other hand, is implicitly
identified as the essence of their otherness. While expressed only
indirectly by way of systematic structural marginalization of the figure
of the non-literate in Heart of Darkness, this otherness is formulated
much more openly in later writings.
In the course of the twentieth century the figure of the non-literate
Other comes to assume an increasingly prominent role in narrative
fiction. What has encouraged writers to invent and experiment with
different forms of scriptlessness has been a growing interest in cultural
otherness (and especially with linguistic manifestations of it)
compounded with a growing fascination with the cultural practice of
writing. It is above all in narrations of cultural contact and conflict
that illiteracy has been introduced and imaginatively explored as a
marker of difference. In corresponding texts it has been identified as a
cause of alienation and misunderstanding, but also of personal
attraction and dependence. As such it may crucially determine the
course of the action, providing a motive for conflicts over questions of
cultural belonging, loyalty, and betrayal. Unlike in narratives of the
nineteenth century, however, such conflicts are not directed towards
such a simple resolution as the illiterates initiation into writing.
Alternative scenarios are offered in twentieth-century literature,
scenarios meant no longer to promote mass literacy, but more often
than not to fulfil the opposite end, namely to cast doubt on the
intrinsic value of literate cultures and to expose their uses of writing as
a means of covert epistemic control and violence.
92
The novel has provided an ideal forum for such negotiations as it

allows not only an extensive study of the difference between illiterate
and literate consciousnesses and the necessary development of
illiteracy into a central theme by means of direct and indirect
references to writing both as an act and as an object. As a typical print
genre, it also accommodates the sort of metafictional reflection
through which descriptions of illiteracy are translated into comments
on literacy and literature. It is in this process of translation or
inflection that the illiterate becomes the Other not only of any writing
subject but of the author of the literary text and its reader. As the
critical reception of Heart of Darkness shows, this special
complication has so far been largely overlooked owing to the far
greater interest of critics in the questions concerning the kind of
orality writers ascribe to their non-literate characters and the way in
which they realize this orality in their texts. Here, such questions will
be sidestepped especially where they have already received broad
scholarly attention as in the case of Chinua Achebe, Patricia Grace,
Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston. This is
not to deny the significance of speech and speechlessness in the works
of these and other writers but to simply allow for the consideration of
an additional and hitherto neglected dimension of linguistic otherness
and exclusion contrasting with the intrinsic writtenness of the literary
text.
Like constructions of orality, invocations of illiteracy in twentiethcentury narratives of cultural contact draw on specific historical
situations, thereby extending the negotiations of non-literate otherness
they offer into a discourse of historiography. This discourse tends to
interrogate methods of falsifying history in the process of recording it
in writing and of eliminating more controversial accounts of the past,
notably those illiterate witnesses might have to offer. At the same time
it identifies fiction as a means of rescuing such accounts from oblivion
and asserting them as counter-versions to approved reconstructions of
past events. Yet, the evaluations of the political significance of
literature thus advanced are never wholly optimistic as they are always
formulated in the awareness of writing ultimately being an inadequate
means of reproducing the experiences of illiterates. In light of the
epistemological impossibility of rendering illiteracy in the language of
the fully literalized subject, any narrative reflecting on its own
writtenness must eventually declare its own fragmentation.
93
Remarkably, in all the novels studied in the following chapters this

coincides with the explicit dissolution of the portrait of the scriptless
Other whose disappearance invariably seems to constitute the only
possible closure to the narratives temporary intrusion into the life of
the illiterate. With the fading out of the image of the illiterate, the
presence and validity of letters is reconstituted and literate authority,
at least in part, restored.
The goal of this study is not, however, to merely catalogue
structural consistencies in the rendering of illiteracy by twentiethcentury writers. The following interpretations also aim to relate the
special thematic significance with which illiteracy is invested in each
text to the cultural and historical situation to which it refers. Moreover
and most importantly, they are meant to document the extraordinary
frequency with which illiteracy is addressed and developed into a
paramount theme in the twentieth-century novel. This has
presupposed, first of all, the compilation of a body of texts from a
spectrum of cultural contexts wide enough to reflect the astonishing
synchronicity with which writers all over the world have been
engaging in the construction of a space beyond the limits of literate
culture. This synchronicity is far from accidental: it results from the
evolution of a book culture whose reach, though global, has still
remained disturbingly exclusive.
Probably also because of the pressure to cultivate a certain global
mobility themselves to partake in this book culture, writers from
Britains former colonies seem particularly aware of the disparities
and asymmetries engendered by the dissemination of alphabetic
literacy and by its economic exploitation by an international
publishing industry. Their sense of inhabiting, at least geographically,
a peripheral place, though ameliorated by the foundation of publishing
houses outside the traditional centres of literary production in the
course of the twentieth century, has encouraged their identification
with the culturally marginalized and discursively disadvantaged. So
has their need to define themselves as different from the colonizing
power whose language and forms of artistic expression they have
inherited. As Timothy Brennan has shown, this need developed
already in the early days of the postcolonial nation states when the
ideal of cultural plurality was endorsed by anticolonial nationalists
and appropriated into a new overarching notion of national identity. To
enforce their opposition through a shared sense of difference, the
94
proponents of postcolonial nation states rejected the European notion

of national cohesion founded on equality or rather homogeneity. This
gave special impetus to the discourse of otherness which has since
become one of the most important distinctive features of postcolonial
literature.
This discourse is marked by an open appreciation of and active
search for semblance in the Other, a desire to overcome or bridge
difference. As Megan Vaughan observes, every colonial person is in
some sense, already Other and it is for this reason that postcolonial
literature is able to offer more authentic or more sympathetic
portrayals of otherness than writings from the colonizing centres,
which invariably are informed by the need to objectify and distance
the other in the form of the madman or the leper.39 Though,
reluctant to see denial, distancing, and distortion as specifically
European or colonialist practices, Mary Louise Pratt,40 too, registers a
typically postcolonial preoccupation with questions concerning the
representability of otherness.
This preoccupation is equally manifest in postcolonial theory,
which Williams and Chrisman define as a critique of the process of
production of knowledge about the Other.41 As such, postcolonial
theory construes otherness in the first place as a linguistic
phenomenon as it is through language that any knowledge is
produced. At least this is one of the tenets postcolonial theory has
absorbed from poststructuralist philosophy and developed further.
Under the influence of Foucault and, later, of Derrida, it developed its
Marxist identification with the wretched of the earth into a discourse
of language as an instrument of colonization and of discursive
Othering as a strategy of suppression potentially invertible into one of
subversion. In this discourse linguistic disadvantage has come to be
recognized as a particular category of otherness and constructed along
the orality/literacy binary in terms of a speech- or voicelessness. This
39
Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness,
Stanford: Calif, 1991, 10.
40
According to her model of transculturation as an always mutual cultural
exchange both coloniser and colonized are equally capable of such manoeuvres of
Othering. Literature written on both sides of the colonial divide, she insists, often
absorbs, appropriates and inscribes aspects of the other culture, creating new genres,
ideas and identities in the process (Loomba, 68).
41
Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: An Introduction, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A
Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 8.
95
does not preclude an introduction of the concept of illiteracy into the

debate. In fact, such an extension might even allow the correction of
certain assumptions concerning the very nature of the Others cultural
exclusion and the actual possibilities of her or his inclusion.
To see this it is first of all necessary to consider the postcolonial
idea of literature as a means of discursive empowerment of the Other.
Postcolonial theorists hold that in acquiring the discursive means of
Othering one becomes able to mimic the Otherer, to counteract and
invert the process of Othering. The national literatures of Europes
former colonies are seen as the products of such acquisition,
appropriation, or seizure of the colonizers language. In them the
traditionally Othered apparently take control over their Othering,
simulate it, and transform it into an Othering of the colonizer. How
much control the colonized is actually able to assert in the process has
remained an unresolved question, though. Theorists and writers like
Ngugi wa Thiongo believe that the assimilation of the language in
which one has been Othered is in itself a further submission to
Othering, a form of mimicry that is only partially voluntary and hence
also only partially ironic. Worse, it is a form of mimicry almost
impossible to control because with the adoption of another language
one always adopts an alien and essentially self-alienating noetic
economy. Ngugi asserts in Decolonising the Mind, his 1986 farewell
to English, a specific culture is not transmitted through language in
its universality, but in its particularity as the language of a specific
community with a specific history.42
Conversely, theorists like Graham Huggan and Bill Ashcroft
believe that this economy can be transformed in the event of
appropriation. Convinced of the ability of language to creatively
extend and adapt to new uses, Huggan theorizes a process of
creolization through which existing paradigms are decontextualized.
This generates new spaces to accommodate the Other, while Ashcroft
postulates a postcolonial counter-discourse that reasserts the
margins of language use over the dominance of a standard code.43
Both Ashcroft and Huggan believe that it is language variance, the
innovative application of established structures, that can conjure
42
Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in

African Literature, The Politics of Language in African Literature, Studies in African
Literature New Series, London, 1986, 15.
43
Ashcroft, Constitutive Graphonomy, 62.
96
genuine otherness in postcolonial, or to use Ashcrofts terminology, in

cross- or sub-cultural texts, because, unlike language assimilation or
language appropriation, language variance affirms the distance of
cultures at the very moment in which it proposes to bring them
together.44 According to Ashcroft, such affirmation takes place at the
interface of different codes,45 creating an aphasic cultural gulf or
metonymic gap,46 an immense distance between author and
reader ... the distance traversed in the social engagement which occurs
when authors write and readers read.47 It is in this gap or distance that
an identity is formed which, for Ashcroft, constitutes the dynamic
centre of all cross-cultural literature: an identity marked by linguistic
diffrence and absence.48
Ashcrofts postulation of a void as the place in postcolonial writing
at which established modes of Othering and conceptions of the Other
can be subverted reflects not only his indebtedness to Derrida and
Lacan, who theorize human subjectivity as a complex linguistic
construct forever evading complete definition, but also his proximity
to Homi Bhabha. It is Bhabhas conviction that the colonized subject
must resist pressures and temptations to cultivate a fixed identity vis-vis the colonizer. He believes that fixity must be avoided in any
ideological (that is, in any anticolonial) construction of otherness. For
fixity connotes rigidity as an unchanging order as well as disorder,
degeneracy and daemonic repetition.49 To endorse fixity, Bhabha
claims, is to accept the colonizers invitation to be different from
those that are different.50 Instead the colonized must seek to
appropriate the language of the colonizer, to cultivate a variable
identity, constantly shifting between established discursive practices
and shared conceptual orders, forever evading inscription. Bhabha
fixes this quality of evasiveness discursively by terming it
hybridity or in-betweenness.
44
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 61.
46
Ibid., 72 and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in
Post-Colonial Studies, Key Concepts Series, London, 1998, 137-38.
47
Ashcroft, Constitutive Graphonomy, 63-64.
48
Ibid., 71.
49
Homi Bhabha, The Other Question, in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia, 37.
50
Homi Bhabha, Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial
Condition, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman, 117.
45
97
For Bhabha, Huggan, and Ashcroft alike the seizure of the

colonizers language by the colonized subject for creative selfassertion seems to constitute an entirely unproblematic process. In
their works, questions regarding concrete constraints to a subjects
discursive scope simply do not arise. Their trust in the unlimited
availability of any language, even that of colonial suppression to
everyone marks a problematic departure both from Marxist ideology
as well as from Foucault and his idea of the subjects inescapable
entrapment in the language of existing power regimes. As a
consequence, their attempts to deconstruct the binary opposition of the
colonizer and the colonized and to construct in its stead the constantly
shifting interdependence of Self and Other, and as a corollary of this
interdependence, the indeterminacy of postcolonial identity have
attracted vehement criticism. They have come under heavy attack for
encouraging an imprecise and ahistoric, at times even romanticizing,
view of difference which, while helping to project an optimistic
view of alterity, explains nothing.51
What kind of an argument is it to say that the subalterns voice
can be found in the ambivalence of the imperialists speech?, Rey
Chow, for instance, challenges Bhabhas concept of hybridity:
It is an argument which ultimately makes it unnecessary to come to
terms with the subaltern since she has already spoken, as it were, in
the systems gaps. All we would need to do would be to continue to
study to deconstruct the rich and ambivalent language of the
imperialist!52
Chows argumentation indicates a shift of focus from the language

used by a literate elite in an ideological discourse of otherness to the
dual exclusion of those with no access to that language. Not only are
the discursively disadvantaged she projects misrepresented to the
point of distortion in the ongoing theoretical debates of subalternity;
they are also completely ignorant of the kind of representation to
which they are subjected.
51
Cf. especially Aijaz Ahmad, The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality, in

Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, 276-93, and Arif Dirlik, The
Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Critical
Inquiry, XX/2 (Winter 1994): 328-56.
52
Rey Chow, Where Have All the Natives Gone?, in Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, 127-28.
98
Chows paper is, of course, based on Gayatri Spivaks essay Can

the Subaltern Speak?, which insists on the essential
untranslatability53 of the subaltern discourse. Object formation and
subject constitution in postcolonial texts about the subaltern, to
Spivak, represent linguistic processes which only deflect from the
subalterns silence. Instead of thinking the subaltern as equipped with
a voice that only needs to be heard, Spivak demands that the
subalterns silence be heard. For Spivak the subalterns speechlessness
is not an intellectual pose, a silence by choice, a deliberate gesture of
denial, but an involuntary exclusion from dominant discourse, a
straightforward inferiority or disadvantage. Without a voice, Spivak
argues, the subaltern is not only unable to protest against the atrocities
she must suffer, such as the Indian ritual of sati, of widow burning;
her historical part as victim of such atrocities, too, remains
unacknowledged and hence subject to obfuscation, if not to total
denial. To overlook that the subaltern cannot speak, Spivak therefore
asserts, is not only to disown responsibility for the wretched of the
earth but to allow for their plight to be ignored altogether. Such
repression functions well as a sentence to disappear, she explains by
way of citation of Foucault, but also as an injunction to silence,
affirmation of non-existence; and consequently states that of all this
there is nothing to say, to see, to know.54 There is no space from
which the sexed subaltern subject can speak,55 Spivak insists and
famously adds in an interview: If the subaltern can speak, then,
thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more.56
Rather than saying that the native has already spoken because the
dominant hegemonic discourse is split/hybrid/different from itself, and
rather than restoring her to her authentic context, we should argue
that it is the natives silence which is the most important clue to her
displacement, Chow paraphrases Spivaks viewpoint: It is only
when we acknowledge the fact that the subaltern cannot speak that we
can begin to plot a different kind of process of identification for the
native.57 Instead of vague theoretical formulations of Othering as a
53
Ibid., 128.
Foucault, quoted in Spivak, 102.
55
Spivak, 103.
56
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Harold Veeser, The New Historicism:
Poltical Commitment and the Postmodern Critic, in The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym, New York, 1990, 158.
57
Chow, 128.
54
99
process of discursive disempowerment what Spivak and Chow

demand is a reading of subaltern silence as a concrete condition of
exclusion generated by concrete historical circumstances. As if in
order to rhetorically give special substance to this exclusion, Chow
and Spivak make extensive use of such terms as speechlessness,
muteness, silence, or voicelessness. Yet with their essentially
phonocentric translations of socio-cultural marginalization into
acoustic absences (and, to that, into a physical disadvantage) they
eclipse and implicitly downplay a significant aspect of the problem
they address: they themselves remain silent about a crucial difference
between themselves as spokeswomen of the subaltern and those they
represent.
This difference consists in their ability not only to speak but, more
importantly even, to read and write highly literate treatises on
subalternity. Their own status as representers therefore remains as
safely unchallenged by the subaltern as their representations of the
same. Even if subalterns were able to speak up for themselves this
would not automatically give them access to those institutions at
which their plight is discussed. As most subalterns can actually speak,
the question that really should be asked is if they are also able to read
and write. The pertinence of this question turns the title of Spivaks
essay into a rhetorical ploy to which it is rather tempting to reply that
even if the subaltern can speak, she is still subaltern as long as she
cannot read and write.
What is not merely a facetious comment on Spivak and Chow is of
particular relevance to the processes of identification, mirroring, and
distancing regularly prompted by the appearance of an illiterate in
twentieth-century writings. Such appearances insistently culminate in
moments in which literate people (that is, the author, reader, literate
narrator, or a literate character) becomes aware of their own literacy as
that which renders a full comprehension of the illiterate forever
impossible. Almost invariably, too, this discovery strikes the literate
speech- or wordless, creating the impression that the illiterates
discursive inferiority has mysteriously been reduplicated. The
resultant sense of sameness is misleading, though, and cannot be
sustained. While the literates speechlessness is eventually dissolved
and translated into a literary account of it that of the illiterate is
regularly enforced, as mentioned above, by a special staging of the
illiterates exit from the text.
100
The kind of recognition dramatized in the narratives under study

here is perhaps best described in terms of Slavoj ieks model of the
dualism of imaginary identification and symbolic identification:
In imaginary identification we imitate the other at the level of
resemblance we identify ourselves with the image of the other
inasmuch as we are like him, while in symbolic identification we
identify ourselves with the other precisely at a point at which he is
inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance.58
Identification with the Other at a point at which one is inimitable and

eludes resemblance is exactly what the encounters of literate and
illiterate subjects in literature are about. While at first invoking a
resemblance between the illiterate and the literate by suggesting that
they are equally ignorant of each other, these representations
eventually establish the inimitability of the non-literate Other. They do
so by postulating the literates entrapment in a typographic mode of
thinking as ultimately the only condition on which the ignorance of
the illiterate is predicated.
In the end, this ignorance is always the literates who cannot grasp
the illiterates otherness with the means they have available. It does
not compare with the illiterates lack of knowledge because it does not
entail a real disadvantage, nor produce a serious dependence. The
literate always remains in the powerful position of the representer or
interpreter of the non-literate and may choose to conceal the
inadequacy of the representational tools of literacy by simply
declaring the inscription of the Other infinitely deferred. Such a
Derridean or Bhabhalean solution is not what the texts discussed in
the following opt for. Their admissions of discursive defeat are far
more finite. They lead to closures which mark their authors
acceptance that signification cannot continue where comprehension
has proven impossible.
58
Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York, 1989, 109.
THE NON-LITERATE WITHOUT:

UNLETTERED CALIBANS IN DISTANT EUROPE
Because the subject of this study is a particular form of cultural

marginality it may appear somewhat ironical if the first two novels to
be analysed here are by two British writers so widely acclaimed that
marginality seems one of the most unlikely attributes to be associated
with their names. What is more, neither The Inheritors (1955) by
William Golding nor Heroes and Villains (1969) by Angela Carter
dwell explicitly on conditions of exclusion; nor does either of the texts
seem formally determined by an opposition of centre and periphery.
What warrants continuing this study with a discussion of these two
texts is that both narratives can be shown to maintain and complete the
development which eventually led to the disappearance of the theme
of illiteracy from twentieth-century British fiction.
As has been suggested in the analysis of Heart of Darkness in the
previous chapter, this development consisted in a move from an
intensive querying of the achievements of literate civilization to an
eventual acceptance of mass literacy as a given so self-evident that it
seems to have rendered any further interrogation of illiteracy
redundant. The Inheritors (whose title is taken from a book written
jointly by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in 1901 and
concerned with the destruction of one civilization by another1) is set in
prehistoric France and describes the extermination of a Neanderthal
tribe precipitated by the advent of a group of Cro-Magnon people.
Heroes and Villains is set in a post-nuclear England and portrays a
barbarian clan competing for survival with an ominous caste of former
scholars and with gangs of essentially subhuman mutants. In their
highly pessimistic evaluations of the evolution of humankind in the
past and in the future, respectively, Golding and Carter locate not only
the decline of human civilization but also whatever apex may have
been reached before this decline within Europe. Though effectively
eclipsed or expressly pronounced desolate, Western civilization
remains Carters and Goldings cardinal preoccupation in The
Inheritors and Heroes and Villains and it is clearly enough in
opposition to this civilization that they construe their fictional worlds
as the locations of cultures (in the widest sense of the word) operating
without a script. Golding does so only implicitly by occasionally
foregrounding the complete absence of visual signs from the life of
the Neanderthal community he depicts, while Carter explicitly posits
the obsolescence of literacy in the England of her dystopian novel.
Hilda D. Spear, William Golding: The Inheritors. Notes, Harlow, 1983, 30.
104
As a result, for both novelists non-literacy constitutes a

philosophical concern, a theoretical proposition, an anthropological
phenomenon. It poses not specific social problems but general
ontological questions. Shared by all or most of those at home in the
fictional world invoked, the scriptlessness of the allegorical characters
portrayed by Golding and Carter is extraordinary, abnormal, or
unusual only for outsiders, who, on account of their literacy, are either
alienated or fascinated by it. The role of the outsider being reserved
exclusively to the reader in The Inheritors and almost exclusively to
the central character whose perspective the reader is led to share in
Heroes and Villains, the non-writingness imagined and imaged by
Golding and Carter needs to be studied as a structure asserting itself in
the first place metafictionally rather than thematically. This is not to
say, however, that Goldings and Carters imaginative constructions of
non-literacy remain too formalized and neutral to transport any
political meaning. In addressing such issues as human evolution along
the principle of natural selection and the asymmetries and
dependences produced by technological progress between allegedly
advanced and allegedly backward societies, Carter and Golding
engage in a discourse in many respects similar to the essentially
counter-hegemonic appraisals of culture undertaken in postcolonial
literatures.
Kevin McCarron focussing on the theme of cultural contact in The
Inheritors proposes reading Goldings prehistoric characters, the
Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon people, as the archetypal colonized
and colonizers, respectively. He even suggests comprehending
Goldings use of cannibalism in The Inheritors as a metaphor of the
desires and appetites for complete absorption which the colonizer
denies himself and logically must project onto the conquered people,
the colonized.2 Likewise Lorna Sage emphasizes Carters
preoccupation with the question of what it meant to be English and
her belief in the kind of reverse-anthropology which involves
studying your own culture as if from elsewhere, cultivating the
viewpoint of an alien. I am the pure product of an advanced,
2
Kevin McCarron, William Golding, Writers and Their Work, Plymouth, 1994,
10. See also Stefan Hawlin, The Savages in the Forest: Decolonising William
Golding, Critical Survey, VII/2 (1995), 125-35, and Philippa Tristram, Golding and
the Language of Caliban, in William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, eds
Jack I. Biles and Robert O. Evans, Lexington: Ky, 1978, 39-55.
The Non-Literate Without
105
industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline, Sage recalls Carter

commenting on her own implication in the history of British
colonialism.3
The Australian writers David Malouf and Gillian Bouras, too, deal
with literacy and questions of civilizing progress and decline, drawing
heavily on historical material in their novels An Imaginary Life (1978)
and Aphrodite and the Others (1994), respectively. In their
explorations of the textualisation of history,4 both novelists use nonliteracy as a matrix to define their own highly ambivalent role as
antipodean writers with close affinities to Southern Europe.5 In the
process the traditional image of this particular part of the Old World
as the cradle of Western civilization and in addition as the birthplace
of alphabetic writing is subverted. Greece and Asia Minor,
respectively, are translated into settings in which a writer in exile the
Roman poet Ovid in An Imaginary Life and an autobiographical
projection of Gillian Bouras in Aphrodite and the Others is
surrounded by people unable to comprehend his or her writerly needs
because they are illiterate. What Ovid and Gillian at first experience as
a profound depravity, as a barbarism cruder than anything they could
have imagined they gradually come to appreciate as a marvellous
alternative to their own entrapment within a culture sophisticated to
the point of decadence. Non-literacy in particular, while initially
viewed as a sign of inferiority in each novel, is eventually seen as an
ideal form of epistemological freedom prerequisite to the kind of
dignified innocence the protagonists learn to admire in their unlettered
Gegenber.6
3
Lorna Sage, Angela Carter, Plymouth, 1994, 2-3.

Lee Spinks, Allegory, Space, Colonialism: Remembering Babylon and the
Production of Colonial History, Australian Literary Studies, XVII/2 (October 1995),
173.
5
David Malouf has been living in southern Tuscany for a major part of the year
for over twenty-five years now. Gillian Bouras went to live in Greece with her Greek
husband in 1980 and has recorded the experiences in two books, apart from Aphrodite
and the Others, namely A Foreign Wife and A Fair Exchange.
6
In this book Gegenber is used to refer to the Other not as any opposite
number, but as an agency whose physical existence constitutes an inescapable reality
for the narrating or narrated Self. The German word gegenber (commonly used as an
adverbial preposition and probably best translated as vis--vis) adequately stresses
both the spatial opposition and proximity prerequisite to the mirroring of two subjects
in each other from which can ensue true (rather than purely theoretical) selfrecognition.
4
106
By inference, in all these four novels, the strategic mystification of

the non-literate Other also serves a critical interrogation of the
authors specific historical situation. Goldings interest in the concept
of Original Sin7 which he first expressed in Lord of the Flies before he
reformulated it in more historical/theological terms in The Inheritors
was shaped under the influence of the Second World War, before
which, as he recalls in a 1962 lecture, he had believed in the
perfectibility of social man.8 The war, he states, taught him what
one man could do to another and caused him to believe that the
condition of man was to be a morally diseased creature.9 As Linden
Peach outlines by way of reference to Lorna Sage, Carters fourth
novel, Heroes and Villains, mocks the cultural landscape of the
1960s such as the glamour of underground, countercultural,
movements; the siege of university campuses; the rebirth of dandyism;
and the power acquainted by intellectual gurus such as Timothy
Leary.10 Instead of invoking straightforward binarisms such as those
of patriarchy and matriarchy, wilderness and civilization, reason and
instinct, the novel yields complex hybrid structures suggesting not so
much a categorical rejection of the asymmetries determining Western
cultures but a desire to formulate ways of their creative
metamorphosis. The inventions offered in An Imaginary Life and
Aphrodite and the Others of an ideal Other uninformed by literate
culture, while also readable as general statements on human nature,
are complicated by the authors awareness of their own cultures
difference from the cultures of the Old World. Malouf and Bouras
assert this difference precisely by locating their unlettered characters
within Europe and identifying them as Europeans. In so doing, they
effectively project the same charge of cultural backwardness back
onto the Old World by which the inhabitants of Europes former
colonies so often are (and allow themselves to be) reduced to mere
inheritors of European culture.
The Inheritors and Heroes and Villains perform no comparable
retaliatory gesture but also invert established notions of cultural
7
For a study on how Golding uses The Inheritors to redefine this concept, see
Arnold Johnston, Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding, Columbia:
Mo, 1980, 21-35.
8
Golding, quoted in Johnston, 1.
9
Ibid., 2.
10
Linden Peach, Angela Carter, Houndmills, 1998, 71, and Sage, 18.
107
superiority and progress with the help of equally subtle manoeuvres of

placing or contextualizing the non-literate Other and soliciting the
readers identification or disidentification with their protagonists. To
this end, Golding and Carter choose a fabulist narrative mode
supporting the location of their stories in seemingly unidentified
spaces, apparently disconnected from the world in which the reader
knows the actual texts to have been written. The characters of The
Inheritors, Virginia Tiger observes accordingly, move in an
uncountry, in a landscape only archetypally connected to the overt
world ... a discrete independent universe with laws provided by the
author.11 It is all happening on the edge, in no mans land, among
the debris left by past convictions, Lorna Sage likewise remarks on
what she perceives as the essence of both Carters personal history
and her fiction.12 This does not mean, however, that either Carter or
Golding set their narratives in indistinct exotic places. In fact, rather
than alienating the reader, the authors strategically engage their
audiences in a continuous process of recognition as they direct them
through their imaginary worlds. What causes these worlds to appear
foreign, unheimlich, unreal is not their topography but their
inhabitants and the events they bring about.
69.
11
Virginia Tiger, William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery, London, 1974,
12
Sage, 4.
CHAPTER FIVE
UNEARTHING THE PRE-LITERATE MIND:
WILLIAM GOLDINGS THE INHERITORS
In following the slow and physically strenuous journey of the

Neanderthals in Goldings novel from their winter cave, through
forests and marsh land to their summer quarters, the reader (or, to be
more precise, any British or North American reader) of The Inheritors
traces features of an all too familiar habitat: birches, beech trees,
brambles, thorn bushes, and ivy; owls, ravens, buzzards, hawks,
woodpigeons, moorhens, and starlings, foxes, goats and deer. The
more outlandish inhabitants of Goldings fictional landscape, beasts
such as hyenas, cave bears, and sabre-toothed tigers, remain consigned
to the novels background, reduced either to mere acoustic phenomena
or figments of the characters minds. With the initial impression of its
inherent foreignness thus deconstructed, and its familiarity to the
reader established, the novels setting determines not only that
Goldings characters should be identified as the readers immediate
predecessors,1 but also that Goldings reader identifies with these
characters. This identification is above all a matter of comprehending
the peculiar logic underlying the characters perception of their
environment. As the following passage makes clear, this involves
more than simply picturing the landscapes charted in The Inheritors:
There was always light where the river fell into its basin. The smoky
spray seemed to trap whatever light there was and to dispense it
subtly. Yet this light illumined nothing but the spray so that the island
was like the whole leg of a seated giant, whose knee, tufted with trees
and bushes, interrupted the glimmering sill of the waterfall and whose
ungainly foot was splayed out down there, spread, lost likeness and
joined the dark wilderness. The giants thigh that should have
supported a body like a mountain lay in the sliding water of the gap
and diminished till it ended in disjointed rocks that curved to within a
few mens lengths of the terrace. Lok considered the giants thigh as
Golding, quoted in Tiger, 71.
110

he might have considered the moon: something so remote that it had
no connection with life as he knew it.2
Grasping the complicated geography of the novels setting

presupposes an appreciation of the characters heightened
susceptibility to sensory impressions, of the continuous shift of
perspective and change of scenery reflecting the Neanderthal peoples
profound restlessness, and, not least importantly, of their idea of land
(and more specifically of the land off which and in which they live) as
an anthropomorphic entity. With his extensive use of figurative
language, which enables Golding to represent his setting not just as a
material reality but as an intellectually challenging experience, he
involves readers in a hermeneutic process through which they
eventually move from simply viewing the characters pre-literate
consciousnesses from outside to an empathic understanding of them. It
is this effect that Frank Kermode has praised as a wholly original
technical feat.3 For quite perplexingly, as Tiger observes, although the
point of view chosen by Golding is technically omniscient, the formal
mode consists in something very different: we see most events ...
over the shoulder of the pre-rational mind.4
For Tiger, this mind merely report[s] a series of inexplicable
events.5 In actual fact, it accomplishes far more than that, as it
produces inconsistencies or ruptures in the narrative which readers are
required to fill with their better understanding (their literate reading)
of the narrated events. As a result, the reader is led not only to assume
the Neanderthals point of view but also to appropriate the prehistoric
heros logic and language. To bridge the gaps, as it were, in Goldings
tale, readers must, for instance, come to understand that by flying
twigs Golding (or rather his main character Lok) means arrows and
that by curved sticks he means boughs, that bone hand is Loks
name or picture for a comb, and that a dead snake is what he sees
when he sees a whip. The homines sapientes, for Lok, are not humans
but bone-faces who come across the river not in boats but in dark
and smooth, and hollow logs. As they approach, they keep dipping,
as Lok sees it, not paddles but sticks in the water, sticks that ended in
2
3
4
5
William Golding, The Inheritors (1955), London, 1961, 40.

Frank Kermode, Coral Islands, Spectator, 22 August 1958, 257.
Tiger, 76.
Ibid., 77.
Unearthing the Pre-Literate Mind
111
great brown leaves (I, 115). Overhearing their exchanges, Lok makes
out not words but bird-noises bumps and creakings (I, 136).
Reading Loks mind becomes synonymous with deciphering a text in
another language, a language heavily reliant on visual images as if the
sounds the Neanderthals exchange were not all there is to their
communication. Indeed, thoughts they are unable to articulate they at
least announce by declaring that a picture has occurred to them. In
silent communal contemplation rather than conversation they
eventually come to share their pictures.
Towards the end of the readers carefully monitored initiation into
that language and, through it, into the workings of the characters
preliterate minds, the initial sense of alienation at the Neanderthals
profound otherness is replaced by one of sympathy. This allows the
various disasters with which the prehistoric community is confronted
and which ultimately result in the extermination of this community to
be observed with compassion. The reader feels horror at the
suggestion that one of the Neanderthals has been killed and eaten by
the Cro-Magnon people, alarm when Fa and Lok, too, are defeated by
the new people, and relief the narrative discloses that at least the
youngest Neanderthal, the new one, will survive. These responses
differ significantly from the detachment with which the reader follows
the passing away of the old man Mal shortly after the opening of the
novel. At this point in the novel the strangeness of the individual
characters still prevails. With corresponding reserve Golding narrates
the scene in which the people attend to their dying leader and, after his
death, bury him:
The movements of his body became spasmodic. His head rolled
sideways on the old womans breast and stayed there.
Nil began to keen. The sound filled the overhang, pulsed out
across the water towards the island. The old woman lowered Mal on
his side and folded his knees to his chest. She and Fa lifted him and
lowered him into the hole. The old woman put his hands under his
face and saw that his limbs lay low. She stood up and they saw no
expression on her face. She went to a shelf of rock and chose one of
the haunches of meat. She knelt and put it in the hole by his face.
Eat, Mal, when you are hungry. (I, 90)
Though anticipated, Mals death, when it happens, seems sudden and

swift. This impression is enforced by the marked simplicity of
112
Goldings sentences and the detached accuracy informing his

descriptions of the individual characters actions. It is also enforced by
Goldings immediate shift of focus from Mal to the surviving
Neanderthals and their reactions, which appear remarkably free of
emotion. The two females mechanical preparation of Mals burial and
the simultaneous commencement of Nils keening which, while filling
the air and travelling across the water, remains inexpressive of any
distinctive feelings, the old womans equally expressionless face, and
the oddly optimistic undertones of her appeal to the deceased to accept
her offering of food all this contributes to emphasize the distance
from which the passing away of Mal is narrated.
This same distance is suspended in the course of the novel so that
the reader is able to share the characters and notably Loks
bewilderment at the increasingly unpredictable events. A climax in the
readers and Loks joint reading of these events is reached as Lok
watches the Cro-Magnon tribe become completely inebriated and
perform some sort of hunting ritual involving the mutilation of one of
the men. From his hiding place high up in an acorn tree Lok and Fa
(and the reader) look down on the people who will supersede them,
observing how one member of the strange creatures, Tuami, draws the
image of a stag on the ground. The drawing confounds Lok, who has
never even thought of translating the pictures in his mind into visible
form. Not yet aware what it is that makes Loks body suddenly go
wintry chill (I, 146), the reader, too, is alerted by the sudden
presence of a stag lying flat on the ground yet racing along, always
staying in the same place. Yet, at the same time as the details of the
image are gradually absorbed by Lok the reader comprehends that
what Lok is looking at is but a painting. More importantly, even, the
reader also becomes aware that Lok is still unable to distinguish
between the real thing and its representation. Unlike the reader, Lok
cannot read the image of the stag correctly, and feels caught by the
small dark eye of the animal Tuami has drawn.
Towards the end of The Inheritors this fine difference between the
reader and Lok is deferred as well. The following scene finally relies
on the readers complete identification with Lok as an involuntary
witness of Fas destruction towards the end of the novel:
Fa was sitting by the water holding her head. The branches took her.
She was moving with them out into the water and the hollow log was
free of the rock and drawing away. The tree swung into the current
113
with Fa sitting simply among the branches. Lok began to gibber again.
He ran up and down on the terrace. The tree would not be cajoled or
persuaded. It moved to the edge of the fall, it swung until it was lying
along the lip. The water reared up over the trunk, pushing, the roots
were over. The tree hung for a while with the head facing upstream.
Slowly the root end sank and the head rose. Then it slid forward
soundlessly and dropped over the fall. (I, 216)
There is no discrepancy anymore between Loks and the readers

perception of Fas drowning. Both share the same picture, which is
drawn in simple and unambiguous sentences. The central theme or
force in this picture is not Fa but the log dragging Fa down the
waterfall. What kills Fa aids the advance of the new people who
arrive and leave in hollowed-out trunks. The bitter irony of this lends
special meaning to Loks desperate pleas to the floating tree. His
gibbering makes sense to the reader as more than a superstitious
appellation.
The shock of Fas unexpected end is the last insight Goldings
narrative allows into Loks inner being, a consciousness forever trying
frantically to adjust to new situations. While the fatality of Fas fall
dawns on Lok and, simultaneously, on the reader, Golding fashions a
radical change of perspective whereby Lok, as the only Neanderthal
remaining on the river, is suddenly reduced to a red creature,
trotting around aimlessly, halting, peering, crouching, its long arms
swinging, touching, almost as firm a support as the legs (I, 217):
It was a strange creature, smallish, and bowed. The legs and thighs
were bent and there was a whole thatch of curls on the outside of the
legs and arms. The back was high, and covered over the shoulders
with curly hair. Its feet and hands were broad, and flat, the great toe
projecting inwards to grip. The square hands swung down to the
knees. The head was set slightly forward on the strong neck that
seemed to lead straight on to the row of curls under the lip. The mouth
was wide and soft and above the curls of the upper lip the great
nostrils were flared like wings. There was no bridge to the nose and
the moon-shadow of the jutting brow lay just above the tip. The
shadows lay most darkly in the caverns above its cheeks and the eyes
were invisible in them. Above this again, the brow was a straight line
fledged with hair; and above that there was nothing. (I, 218-19)
114
This passage unmistakably revokes H.G. Wells description of

Neanderthal man, which Golding has chosen as an epigraph for The
Inheritors. In this description Wells speculates that the Neanderthalis
must have been an extremely hairy, ugly, repulsively strange,
possibly cannibalistic, and gorilla-like monster.6 Goldings
imaging of Lok, though toying with a similar ethnographic stance and
mimicking Wells pseudo-objective discursive mode, is significantly
different in that it does without the prejudice which in Wells text, as
John Peter puts it, is as humiliating as it is unexpected.7 Through its
pronounced neutrality the careful depiction of Lok effectively mocks
Wells observations thus completing Goldings scheme to invert the
rationalistic attitude towards natural selection that Wells advocates not
only in his Outline of History but also in his adventure story The
Grisly Folk, from which The Inheritors takes its plot. Golding shares
neither Wells view of evolution as progress and of civilizing progress
as moral improvement, nor does he endorse Wells belief in the
indisputable superiority of modern man over his predecessors.8 The
narratives own progress from an increasingly sympathetic treatment
of Lok and his folk to the dispassionate inscription of the same
character as but an unknown specimen of a primate-like race entails a
lapse similar to the one Golding has humankind undergo as the CroMagnon man supersedes the Neanderthalis. The lapse is humanizing
and dehumanizing at the same time. Accordingly, the change of
6
The entire passage from H.G. Wells Outline of History, quoted by Golding in
his epigraph, reads We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man,
but this seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive
strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetly brows, his
ape neck, and his inferior stature . Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise
of modern man in his Views and Reviews: The dim racial remembrance of such
gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth,
and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore
For an extended discussion of how Golding has used Wells Outline, see Bernard S.
Oldsey and Stanley Weintraub, The Art of William Golding, New York, 1965, 45-47.
7
John Peter, The Fables of William Golding, The Kenyon Review, XIX/4 (Fall
1957), 586.
8
Cf. the interview with Frank Kermode, quoted in Tiger, 71. According to
Bernard Oldsey, Wells Outline to History played a considerable part in Goldings
upbringing because it was accepted as a kind of rationalists gospel by his father. It
was upon reading it as an adult that Golding came across Wells depiction of
Neanderthal man and found it so absurd that he decided to try and correct that picture.
(William Golding, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists, 19301959, ed. Bernard Oldsey, West Chester: Penn, 1983, XV, 124.)
115
narrative mode, which at once strips Lok of his name, his identity, his
history and, most pertinently, of his humanness, for all the objectivity
it facilitates, also exposes the epistemic violence inherent in the
discursive methods cultivated by human civilization along with
literacy.
But, as Johnston asserts, Goldings aim in The Inheritors is much
more than an upending of Wellsian history.9 The perspectival
manoeuvres in The Inheritors have another effect even more
important than the implicit ironic deconstruction of modern
inscriptions of prehistoric man. They allow him to demonstrate the
positive value of the kind of imaginative rediscovery of the past
Golding attempts by inventing a preliterate consciousness. For
Golding, creative invention constitutes an incontestable mode of
reconstructing an unrecorded past. His fictional inscription of
prehistoric human existence is founded on the syllogism that, for want
of written counter-evidence, no representation of the Neanderthal can
really be declared fallible, not even if it posits the Neanderthal as an
intellectually and emotionally refined being. Therefore Mark KinkeadWeekes and Ian Gregor propose reading The Inheritors as a
provocatively fictional re-invention of human life before Homo
Sapiens. Any account of the novel that does not centre on its qualities
of imaginative exploration, they argue, ought ... to be highly
suspect.10 For them, The Inheritors represents a fictional tour de
force, taking us to an otherworld and othertime that we enjoy for their
own sake, irrespective of historical considerations. This corresponds
with their understanding of the mode of the novel as one of
discovery, not an exercise in literary archaeology, science fiction or a
fable about the Fall. By committing himself so radically to the
viewpoint of his People, they argue, by doing his utmost to ensure
that he is kept out of his normal consciousness, Golding does contrive
to see things new, not merely see new things.11
It is important to bear in mind that, in the case of The Inheritors,
the advocacy of an imaginative identification with prehistoric man,
does not automatically mean a destabilization of the narrative, a
putting at jeopardy of the narratives persuasiveness. Conversely,
9
Johnston, 24.
Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor, William Golding: A Critical Study,
London, 1967, 68.
11
Ibid., 69.
10
116
Goldings temporary abandonment of his openly inventive mode by

way of withdrawal from Loks perspective at the end of the novel and
his unexpected adoption of a rather detached narrative style must not
be misread as a move towards greater discursive control (and hence
also towards greater authority) over the Neanderthals pre-literate
otherness. On the contrary, the distance created between the narrator
and the Neanderthal can only be comprehended as an expression of
uncertainty on the narrators part. More than anything else, the sudden
reduction of Lok to it marks the narrators disengagement from the
narrated events, his own reduction to a dispassionate executant of the
narrative, who does not even share the readers knowledge of the
characters names, let alone the understanding of the non-verbal
consciousnesses of Lok, Mal, Ha, Fa, Nil and Liku, which the reader
has acquired in the course of the first eleven chapters of the novel. In
spite of its precision and articulateness, the ethnographic description
of the Neanderthal inserted in Chapter Eleven of The Inheritors fails
to provide any insights into the creature as profound as those
already offered. Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor write that what is seen
is accurate, and yet meaningless without the understanding that so
manifestly does not accompany the vision, and describe the effect of
the sudden change of perspective in the penultimate chapter:
To watch Lok so coldly is to make us uneasily aware of how blind
we would have been even if some accident of time has placed us on
the terrace at that moment. We watch while [Lok] retraces the whole
circuit of the tragic action, so small-looking now and the effect is
like looking through the wrong end of a telescope so that everything is
diminished. Yet the final effect is just the opposite . For there rises
in us a passionate reaction against this vision, a sense of poignant pity
and loss far more powerful through this excess of understatement than
could have been achieved by any direct appeal to emotion.12
The lack of deeper understanding of the Neanderthal so obvious in

the pseudo-scientific portrait of Lok offered at the end of the novel is
measured not only against the readers knowledge of and familiarity
with the Neanderthals as fictional characters. Golding compares it also
to how the Cro-Magnon people in The Inheritors process their
12
Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes, William Golding: A Critical Study of
the Novels, 3rd edn with a Biographical Sketch by Judy Carver, London, 2002, 85 and
90.
117
encounter with Lok and his tribe. Towards the end of the novel, these,
too, as Ted Hughes puts it, begin to look less like demons of original
depravity, more like helplessly possessed and forlorn castaways, who
are full of plans and plots and enterprise.13 This is accomplished
through another final change of perspective in the last chapter, shifting
from the anonymous and uninvolved narrator who reduces Lok to the
red creature to Tuami, the artist and emergent leader of the New
People. While allowing the actual figure of Lok to fade out completely
in the process, Golding successfully restores his vision of prehistoric
man as endowed with an all too familiar humanness and finally
engages the reader in Tuamis attempt to retrospectively understand
his encounter with the Neanderthals:
He rested his eyes on the back of his left hand and tried to think. He
had hoped for the light as for a return to sanity and the manhood that
seemed to have left them; but there was dawn past dawn and they
were what they had been in the gap, haunted, bedevilled, full of
strange irrational grief like himself, or emptied, collapsed, and
helplessly asleep. It seemed as though the portage of the boats ... from
that forest to the top of the fall had taken them on to a new level not
only of land but of experience and emotion. The world with the boat
moving so slowly at the centre was dark amid the light, was untidy,
hopeless, dirty. (I, 224-25)
What renders Tuamis introspective reverie so much more human (and

consequently even more convincing) than the brief ethnographic
discourse preceding it is the uncertainty by which it is informed and of
which Tuami himself is acutely aware. I am like a pool, Golding has
Tuami think as he tries to make sense of the events by the waterfall,
some tide has filled me, the sand is swirling, the waters are obscured
and strange things are creeping out of cracks and crannies in my
mind.
The Cro-Magnon mans realization of his own intellectual
limitations merits special attention here, above all because it leads
Tuami to reflect the possibility of obtaining a clearer idea of things by
resorting to visual representation. If I had charcoal and a flat stone
(I, 227), he reflects the lack of the necessary means which would
13
Ted Hughes, Baboons and Neanderthals: A Rereading of The Inheritors, in
William Golding: The Man and His Books: A Tribute on His 75th Birthday, ed. John
Carey, London, 1986, 168.
118
enable him to express his experiences in a picture, not a mental

picture, but a concrete image revoking moments that otherwise might
be irretrievably lost to either incomprehension or oblivion. Unlike the
Neanderthal people, who communicate mainly by telepathic picture
and mime, Tuami depends on real images for certainty. Without the
necessary tools to create such images, however, his grasp of the world
hardly surpasses Loks. All he knows for certain is his uncertainty. In
the end, the sense of an enduring darkness obstructing his vision of
what lies ahead of him, links and likens Tuami to the Old People and
simultaneously seems to set him at a distance from the modern reader,
as well as from the rather sinister figure of Marlan, whom he hears
whispering in the final scene, They [Lok and his people] live in the
darkness under the trees. Yet, Tuami is not convinced by Marlans
rhetorical attempt at relegating the Other them to the darkness
where he himself has been and perhaps has even felt that he belongs:
Holding the ivory firmly in his hands, feeling the onset of sleep,
Tuami looked at the line of darkness. It was far away and there was
plenty of water in between. He peered forward past the sail to see
what lay at the other end of the lake, but it was so long, and there was
such flashing from the water that he could not see if the line of
darkness had an ending. (I, 233)
The vision recalls an earlier scene which shows Lok looking over
to the island where the New People live and seeing nothing, owing to
the total darkness created by the waterfall which traps all the light
there is in its luminous spray, rendering invisible everything outside
its own dull whiteness. Like Tuami, Lok is denied the enlightenment
he seeks in the seemingly impenetrable world around him. This does
not mean, however, that Tuamis realization at the end of the novel of
his inability to look beyond the darkness before him puts him on a par
with Lok. Rather it marks Tuamis arrival at an understanding of Lok
which no other character and no other narratorial voice in the novel is
ever able to reach. In apprehending that there might actually be an
ending to the line of darkness he sees in the distance and that its
invisibility is a matter not of there being no light but of him not being
able to discern it, Tuami grasps the relativity of both knowledge and
ignorance. He understands that what is unknown to him may be
known by another and that what is unknown to another he himself
may know. It is the awareness of the specificity of his own conception
119
of the world that also leads Tuami to speculate about what he would
know if he had the right tools (charcoal and a flat stone) at his disposal
and to worry about the rightfulness of his peoples actions against
them, the creatures, the hairy red devils. What else could we
have done? (I, 227), he cries out as if appealing to someone who
holds the key to a truth different from what he has always held to be
true so far. The desire to find other truths than those he already knows
is part of his realization of the validity of other perceptions than his
own and absolutely central to his experience of the Other. Founded on
an appreciation of his own epistemological limits, it enables Tuami to
picture, however vaguely, what it must be like for the Other to
encounter the unknown in an Other like himself.
Though not infinite either, Tuamis imaginative powers certainly
surpass Loks. The creature who is told by his own people that he
has only a mouthful of words and no pictures (I, 38) in his head
does not have any conception of difference or alterity. The only
abstraction which he seems able to master is the projection of likeness
onto things and living beings which, in reality, are radically dissimilar.
The arbitrariness of his associations is really only symptomatic of his
inability to comprehend more complex connections, such as that
between the images he watches the new people make and the mental
pictures these images represent. For Lok, the stag Tuami draws on the
forest ground or the portrait of a Neanderthal the young leader of the
new people paints on rock are not representations of Tuamis
perception of reality, but exist entirely in their own right like Likus
little Oa doll, an old root ... twisted and bulged and smoothed away
by age into the likeness of a great bellied woman (I, 33). It is
impossible for Lok to see that the Oa doll is not Oa but merely a
projection of his own (which is also his peoples) picture of the
earth-goddess Oa onto an oddly shaped piece of wood. As far as Lok
is concerned, the Oa doll and Oa are identical. Oa has articulated
herself in the doll.
With no conception of human subjectivity at all, Lok expects
sameness even where there is none, which allows him to identify
unconditionally with any Gegenber yet at the same time renders his
undiscriminating likening of himself to others a potentially dangerous
or even self-destructive attitude. Symptomatically, for instance, he
keenly follows the scent of the Other, certain that he knows who is
moving ahead of him even before he has lain eyes on the creature:
120
There built up in Loks head a picture of the man, not by reasoned

deduction but because in every place the scent told him do this! As
the smell of cat would evoke in him a cat-stealth; as the sight of Mal
tottering up the slope had made the people parody him, so now the
scent turned Lok into the thing that had gone before him. He was
beginning to know the other without understanding how it was that he
knew. Lok-other crouched at the lip of the cliff and stared across the
rocks of the mountain .... (I, 77)
Not a wise fool, who is aware of his own minds fallibility, but a true
dunce, Lok must die tragically unenlightened. He never becomes
aware of the other peoples capacity to destroy him and his people
because he is unable to read the signs which foreshadow his demise
correctly. In comparison to Lok, Tuami appears highly literate,
capable of interpreting his own people, his environment and the events
culminating in the destruction of the Neanderthals with sufficient
accuracy to fear his own annihilation and therefore try to avert it. His
reading of the Neanderthals is the final vision Golding offers the
modern reader. He closes his narrative the moment this vision begins
to shape in Tuamis mind. In so doing, Golding resumes his plea for
an empathic understanding rather than scientifically reliable
knowledge of modern mans predecessors. McCarrons observation
that Tuamis antagonist, Marlan, has the last word in the novel is only
partially correct.14 Strictly speaking, the last written word remains
with Tuami, who, in the final scene, turns away from Marlan to go on
wondering if the line of darkness had an ending. It is thus that, for
the reader, Tuami, the Cro-Magnon man, comes to represent not only
the historical but also the final textual link to Lok, the Neanderthal,
already invisible, but still remembered vividly by Tuami at the very
end of The Inheritors.
Even in terms of the novels narrative structure, then, Tuamis
consciousness is of one higher order than Loks because, unlike Loks,
it is able to accommodate reflections of the Neanderthal not just as an
Other but also as an experience of otherness. This capacity
presupposes a meta-discursive awareness more characteristic of
literate than of preliterate thinking. Indeed, his own reaction to the
encounter with the Neanderthal stresses that the figure of the Cro14
McCarron, 14.
121
Magnon man represents a being less removed from modern than from
Neanderthal man, that, in other words, it constitutes a matrix onto
which Golding projects features of modern literate thinking. As
Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor remind us, we are the inheritors ....,15
and as such we share a special insight with Tuami, who survives also
thanks to his ability to grasp his own dependence on material means of
visual representation not only in order to understand what has
happened but also to draw the necessary conclusions from his
experiences. On yet another level, the novel itself leads to a similar
realization of the limits of modern Western thinking as it shrewdly
exposes, by way of critical reference to Wells, the defects of
contemporary historiography. For, as Wells construction of
Neanderthalis illustrates, where there is uncertainty for want of
written records modern historians may all too readily compensate this
uncertainty by indulging in speculations on the defects of the Other
instead of addressing and admitting their own lack of knowledge. It is
also to counteract the historiographic convention of reducing the
Other to a foil of the historians own ignorance, then, that Golding can
be said to identify Loks intuitive comprehension as a special form of
humanity and humaneness in the middle and main part of The
Inheritors.
15
Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor, 74.
CHAPTER SIX
PROJECTIONS OF A POST-LITERATE MIND:
ANGELA CARTERS HEROES AND VILLAINS
If Goldings criticism of contemporary historiography serves to

legitimize his idea of fiction as an imaginative reinvention of the past,
Angela Carters portrayal of a degenerate Western litocracy
responsible for crudely ethnocentric inscriptions of non-literate
otherness fulfils a very similar function. As Meaney puts it, Carter
produced with Heroes and Villains a kind of revenge upon
anthropology.1 In Anja Mllers view, Heroes and Villains is a
farcical reconsideration of Rousseaus idea of the noble savage and
the naturally good man, also recalling the pedagogical principles
proposed in mile.2 Unlike the idealized vision of education
developed by Rousseau, the experiment in Carters novel fails as the
noble savage never evolves into the free and self-sufficient survivor of
Rousseaus experiment. His master consciously abstains from
teaching him to read and write. While the savage dies and the master
disappears in the end, the female protagonist, from whose perspective
the novel is told, assumes the role of both, trying to appropriate the
culture of her late husbands barbarian people and to impart some of
her literate knowledge to them as their mistress at the same time. The
novel closes, however, before this vision of a matriarchal reenactment of Rousseaus experiment even begins.3 Though
compromised, as Mahoney argues, by the realist framework of the
Bildungsroman,4 Heroes and Villains remains a post-apocalyptic
dystopia, not without confounding the conventional binarism between
1
106.
Gerardine Meaney, (Un)like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction, London, 1993,
2
Anja Mller, Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed, Heidelberg,
1997, 46, note 5.
3
This also explains why, as Mahoney points out, within the feminist work on
Carter, the novel is rarely discussed. Mahoney concedes that an important exception
of this is Gerardine Meaneys reading of Heroes and Villains in (Un)like Subjects. See
Elisabeth Mahoney, But Elsewhere?: The Future of Fantasy in Heroes and
Villains, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism,
eds Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, London, 1997, 73 and 74.
4
Mahoney, 73.
124
civilized and barbarian on which, according to Linden Peach, this

particular genre relies.
The novels deliberate and self-conscious transgression of its own
generic limits goes hand in hand with its special interest in language
and the possibility of transcending linguistic conventions. For Peach,
One of the most innovative aspects of Heroes and Villains is the way
in which the confusion created by nuclear war is pursued at the
level of semiotics. Not only has destruction made naming and
defining profoundly difficult ventures in the post-nuclear world Carter
describes. What is more, the author allows her protagonist to step
outside the only realm left in which the kind of signification familiar
to the reader still seems to be practised albeit with dubious success.
The language but also the literate practices of the patriarchal society in
which Marianne in Heroes and Villains has grown up, rather than
supplying her with an identity, only serve to suppress it. Abandoning
these practices for another noetic economy even if this requires a leap
into the unknown and the espousal of what seems to be a more
primitive mode of self-expression, appears a plausible regression
towards selfhood under the circumstances. By joining a community of
barbarians Marianne undergoes what in Carters own terms is a
process of uncreation5 in which her female Self finally is able to
constitute itself. The role of literacy in the gradual crystallizing of the
heroines self has been completely overlooked in the feminist
criticism of Heroes and Villains.
This is the more surprising as writing is identified as one of the
most important conclusive links bridges to the past that the main
characters in Carters futuristic post-cataclysmic fantasy have lost. It
is also because the nomadic tribe of Barbarians whom Carter places at
the centre of the novel live in an essentially scriptless world without
any libraries and have forgotten how to read that Carters employment
of a pre-novelistic form seems particularly appropriate. She chooses
the formula of picaresque narrative, introducing into it motifs from
European Romance fiction and fairy tale elements, one being an
orphaned heroine venturing into a foreign world. Compounded with a
move forward into the future, this heroines, Mariannes, lapse back
into a more primitive form of existence suggests a disruption of the
normal course of time. Indeed, the characters in Carters novel never
5
Peach, 89.
Projections of a Post-Literate Mind
125
feel that time is passing, for time [is] frozen and clocks only exist to
carve the hours into sculptures of ice.6 Apart from a rough idea of
age and a very basic sense of seasonal changes, which regularly force
the nomadic Barbarians in Heroes and Villains to seek warmer
quarters for winter, the characters of the novel seem to exist without
any conception of time. Like Goldings prehistoric subjects, they
appear to live in an historical vacuum. Although they know that they
have a past, they are unable or unwilling to recall it, as this would
mean recalling an event too traumatizing to remember. It is only
obliquely that they refer to this event as the blast (HV, 2), the
hurricane (HV, 40), or as a moment when the sky opened an
umbrella of fire (HV, 69). What the reader learns to interpret as a
nuclear catastrophe has left the characters with a civilization so
fragmented that all it facilitates is only a most rudimentary form of
human coexistence motivated solely by the individual subjects
anxiety for plain survival.
Three different types of societies have evolved from a formerly
prosperous, but meanwhile obsolete culture: The gentle villagers
who live in the remains of former towns and on the desolate outskirts
of equally desolate larger cities, the Barbarians, nomadic tribes
inhabiting the distant unguessable forest (HV, 4), and the Out
People, creatures wilder than beasts occupying erstwhile cities,
living there in holes in the ground (HV, 107). The villagers are
joined in farming communities with the intellectual luxury of a few
Professors who [correspond] by the trading convoys with others of
their kind in other places (HV, 9). Self-supporting at the simplest
level, they export their agricultural produce in return for drugs and
other medical supplies, books, ammunition, spare parts for machinery,
weapons and tools (HV, 2), but they are also organized enough to
possess barracks, schools and museums, as well as a professional
army for protection against the Barbarians. The villagers regard the
Barbarians as the rabble who come to ravage, steal, despoil, rape
and, if necessary, to kill. The farming communities dread them as
their most dangerous enemies, almost too alien to be considered
human:
Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (1969), Penguin, 1981.
126

Like hobgoblins of nightmare, their flesh was many colours and great
manes of hair flew out behind them. They flashed with curious curved
plates of metal dredged up from ruins. Their horses were bizarrely
caparisoned with rags, small knives, bells and chains dangling from
manes and tails, and man and horse together, unholy centaurs crudely
daubed with paint, looked twice as large as life. (HV, 5)
The wildly exotic appearance of the unlettered primitives forms a

sharp contrast to that of the Soldiers in the villages. Clad in uniforms
of black leather and plastic helmets with glass visors, every one of the
soldiers looks clean and proper, shirts and dresses white as paper,
suits as black as ink (HV, 4: emphases added). Ironically, while the
literate soldiers wear the insignia of their learning as easily disposable
items of clothing, the more elevated status some of the seemingly
uncivilized Barbarians are assigned by their tribe is inscribed directly
onto their skins, which are covered with elaborate tattoos showing
patterns of snakes, birds, suns, and stars, as well as scenes from the
Bible. Imagination and playfulness seem to be special features of the
Barbarians and a lack of both a characteristic of the Villagers. Yet this
impression is somewhat misleading. As Peach stresses, Carter does
not establish a rigid binarism between the Professors/soldiers and the
Barbarians but explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and
binarisms and the ways in which such artificial boundaries are
maintained.7
To this end she reveals that the author of the moving pictures
literally embodied by the Barbarians is Dr Donally, once a Villager
and, as such, member of the highly esteemed caste of the Professors,
meanwhile self-appointed tutor to Jewel, the leader of the Barbarians.
He came with a snake in a box when my father, poor old sod, was old
and ill, Jewel remembers. And the Doctor came riding on a donkey
and ... had cases of books and a whole lot of needles, for the tattooing.
And colours, he brought with him, a whole lot of colours (HV, 27).
With his books and needles and colours, the archetypal colonist
cunningly ingratiates himself with the gullible natives who, in
exchange for the spectacular rituals and ceremonies he choreographs
for them, surrender their bodies to his creative urges. The excruciating
pain they suffer under his hands leaves Donally unperturbed: what
else do you expect from intellectuals, he asks with cold indifference;
7
Peach, 86-87.
127
we are accustomed to examine things and scarcely bother ourselves

about the hurt feelings of the things we examine, why should we?
(HV, 124).
The Barbarians have no difficulty in understanding Donallys
cynicism. It is clearly not some intellectual inferiority that makes them
his dependent subjects. Jewel in particular is everything but a
simpleton and indeed epitomizes an odd combination of
encyclopaedic knowledge and folk wisdom that he both articulates
with an eloquence which baffles Marianne when she first meets him.
What prevents him and anyone else of his people to become Donallys
equal is his masters refusal to initiate him into writing as a means of
strategic manipulation of others. Unlike Lok in The Inheritors, whose
ignorance also encompasses a total lack of awareness of his own
disadvantage, Jewel comes to see his own deficiency with increasing
clarity. He begins to realize that, with the Doctors signature on his
back, he is doomed to be nothing but an exhibit (HV, 124) wherever
he goes.
This insight is not only correct. It also effects a split between the
physical shape created by Donally and the consciousness articulating
itself in dialogues mainly with Marianne, the narrator protagonist. It is
an indication that, for all of Donallys endeavours to reduce Jewel to a
spectacular icon of otherness, a work of art, a fantastic dandy of
the void ... subsumed to the alien and terrible beauty of a rhetorical
gesture (HV, 71-72), the prince of the Barbarians remains his
masters counterpart, a character hardly less developed than that of
Donally. While wilfully diminished in Donallys view to the sign of
an idea of a hero and willingly responsive to Donallys orders to take
off his shirt and let him see his picture, his masterpiece, on Jewels
back, Jewels presence in the text does not depend on Donallys
awareness of it, nor is his development controlled by Donally.
Donallys propaganda fails to conceal the limitations of his own
pathetic authorship. Observe the last work of art in the history of the
world, Donally urges Marianne on one of such occasions in a fit of
mad pride: Observe the grace of line and the purity of execution
(HV, 95). Ive made my mark (HV, 131), Carter has him assert at
another point, ironically using the same diction with which, earlier on
in the novel, Marianne expresses her horror at the mutilation of her
husbands skin. It is like the mark of Cain (HV, 96), she observes at
the sight of the grotesque design of the legend of the Fall of Man.
128
You can never take all your clothes off .... Or be properly by
yourself, with Adam and Eve there all the time (HV, 85). Donally
obstinately defends the practice of tattooing as the first of the postapocalyptic arts (HV, 125). A victim to his own delusions, the Doctor
firmly believes that, in leaving the world of the Professors and joining
the Barbarians, in moving from editing texts or doing research (HV,
62) to inscribing human bodies, he has advanced to a higher form of
existence.
With her vivid description of the ways whereby the Professors in
her village seek to know the Barbarians they hold captives Marianne
tries to communicate to Jewel that Donallys methods of
subordination and inscription are but a gaudy dramatization of the
very same practices he used to employ as a man of letters in his
former life. They would put you in a cage so everyone could examine
you, Marianne warns Jewel not to return to the village with her and
goes on to list the Professors various techniques of determining
otherness:
Theyd walk around you carefully in case you bit them and clip off
your hair and take photographs of the picture on your back, a relic of
the survival of Judaeo-Christian iconography, theyd find that very
interesting. Theyd take away your coat of fur and dress you in a dark
suit and set you intelligence tests where you had to match squares with
circles and circles with squares. And give you aptitude tests. And
manual dexterity tests. And Rorschach blot tests. And
introversion/extroversion tests. And blood tests. And many other tests.
And everything you did or said would be observed and judged,
sleeping and walking, everything, to see how you revealed your
differences, every word and gesture studied and annotated until you
were nothing but a mass of footnotes with a tiny trickle of text at the
top of the page. You would be pressed inside a book ... and all the time
youd be a perfect stranger. (HV, 123-24: emphasis added)
Interested in the workings of the Barbarians minds, yet not in the

least in the thoughts generated by these minds, the Professors may
accumulate data about their enemies intelligence, but they never
attain a true understanding of them. Nor is this what they aim to
achieve with their scientific evaluations of otherness. The sole purpose
of Donallys research into the moeurs of savage tribes (HV, 132) is
to control the Barbarians consciousness and monitor every one of
their actions.
129
Herself a former Villager and literate, Marianne can read Donally

in a way impossible to Jewel, who, humiliated by her better
understanding of his tutor, tries to shrug off her reading of Donallys
masterpiece as a horrible mutilation. He reminds her that he himself
cannot see it. Yet, for Marianne, this does not render the disfigurement
on his back less hideous. On the contrary, Jewels fatalistic
indifference to the injuries his alleged tutor has inflicted on him makes
her realize the wider implications of the Doctors scheme not to teach
his pupil to read and write but to keep him in a state of complete
illiteracy, or in what Donally himself calls a crude state of unrefined
energy. As Donally explains to Marianne, literacy would blur his
outlines, you wouldnt see which way he was going any more (HV,
62). Illiteracy, in turn, secures that Jewel remains an object of
inscription as it prevents him from choosing, or perhaps even
conceiving, his own script. Even as an adult, he has to accept that one
day Donally might flay [him] and hang [him] up on the wall ..., [that
he] might even make [him] up into a ceremonial robe and wear [him]
on special occasions (HV, 86) because, with no control over his own
story, Jewel has no other choice. To exist at all in the fantastic world
created by Carter, Jewel depends on literates, namely on Donally and
Marianne and, on another level, on the reader, to acknowledge his
presence. You can read, read me (HV, 79), he appeals to Marianne,
longing to be authorized into another story than the one Donally wants
him to enact and in which he is but an invention of the Professors, a
mere projection of their fears outside the safe haven of their villages
(HV, 82).
Indeed, her own extensive knowledge of literature, which she
acquired as a child in the library of her father, a Professor of History,
at first seems to allow Marianne to imagine Jewel as the protagonist of
many different stories. At one point Jewel reminds her of the noble
savages to which her father would devote his research (HV, 36) or of
the pictures of American Indians she has seen in her fathers books
(HV, 49); at another point she feels driven to call Jewel a Yahoo and
to abuse Donally for inappropriately naming Jewel the Prince of
Darkness, which, she argues, only a crazy literato would do, for
he [the Prince of Darkness] was a gentleman, as I remember (HV,
63).
Then again, Jewel appears to her strangely magnificent as an
Antediluvian king or a pre-Adamite sultan (HV, 71) or as a figure in
130
the romantic woodcuts at the head of the ballads in her fathers rarest
books (HV, 37). The learned comparisons, however, do not hold. The
web of intertextual references Carter has her cast out to capture an
idea of Jewel tears. None of the images of the Barbarians Marianne
recalls finding in her fathers library when she was a child suffices to
really contain the otherness concealed behind Jewels colourful
facade. Like the text on his back, the texts she read in her childhood
fail to capture Jewels scriptless otherness. Whatever romantic
attraction the idea of the Barbarians Marianne may once have felt to
hold has entirely evaporated (HV, 52). By the end of the novel, she has
thoroughly revised the idea of the Barbarians she has developed from
literary inscriptions of them as well as from her own literate
interpretation of her first encounters with them: quite dissolved was
the marvellous, defiant construction of textures and colours she first
glimpsed marauding her tranquil village, the narrative finally
establishes, it had vanished as if an illusion which could not sustain
itself in the white beams of the lighthouse (HV, 147).
As Gerardine Meaney observes, in Carters post-nuclear setting,
any renewal is inevitably warped, the concept of eternal continuity
has become ironic.8 There no longer is a discourse capable of
capturing the uniqueness of the Other and of translating it into a
lasting concept of exquisiteness. Accordingly, Jewel barely feels
flattered by Mariannes confession that he is the most remarkable
thing she has ever seen. Rather it comes as a devastating blow to him
that Not even in pictures had [she] seen anything like [him], nor read
[his] description in books (HV, 137). For Jewel this means that he
can turn nowhere for proof of his existence. The self-doubt into which
he is steeped by this discovery equals the insecurity Golding has his
central character Lok suffer when, in a moment of disorientation, his
eyes desperately search those of an older member of his tribe and fail
to find a trace of recognition in them. Panic overcomes Lok and he
feels cut off and no longer one of the people (I, 78). Marianne
causes similar fear and despair in Jewel as she pronounces him
unsuited for abstraction and thereby consigns him back to Donallys
tutelage, declaring tattooing the only form of inscription he can ever
hope for:
8
Gerardine Meaney, History and Womens Time, in Angela Carter:

Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Alison Easton, Basingstoke, 2000, 101.
131
you with your jewels, paints, furs, knives and guns, like a phallic
and diabolic version of female beauties of former periods. What Id
like best would be to keep you in preserving fluid in a huge jar on the
mantelpiece of my peaceful room, where I could look at you and
imagine you. And thats the best place for you, you walking
masterpiece of art, since the good Doctor educated you so far above
your station you might as well be an exhibit for intellectuals to marvel
at as anything else. (HV, 137)
As this brutal verbal assault on Jewels pride suggests, for all her
claims to being more civilized and, hence, more humane than any of
the Barbarians, Marianne is not the innocent she professes to be. Her
learning renders herself no less susceptible to violence than the rest of
her new family whose brutal ways she so abhors. I have destroyed
him, she confesses soon afterwards, not without feeling the same
warm sense of self-satisfaction (HV, 147) by which she is suffused
earlier, after she has for the first time in the life killed a human in
combat. The fall from innocence, which she has so far believed
entirely Jewels destiny, turns out to be also hers. She herself is, in
Jewels words, Eve at the end of the world (HV, 124). In coming to
understand Jewels words, she at last admits, When I was a little girl,
we played heroes and villains but now I dont know which is which
any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?
(HV, 125) Therefore, implicit in the title of Carters novel is the same
ambiguity encoded in the title of The Inheritors. Like Golding, Carter
too questions the smug Western equation of civilizing progress with
moral improvement.
As in The Inheritors, the authors doubts in this equation are raised
once more right after the tragic expiry of the non-literate Other has
been pronounced and the surviving parties as agents of a fitter
culture essentially blamed for it. Mariannes remorse after Jewels
death indicates the protagonists internalization of this blame as does
Tuamis fear that, perhaps, they the New People could have acted
differently towards Lok and his folk. Her final sense of guilt contrasts
sharply with the abuses she hurls at Jewel with as yet unchallenged
pride when she comes to live with the Barbarians. Then she still
believes that an existence in the midden of vomit and all-pervading
excrement to which Jewel has brought her is not for her but only for
those sub-human creatures infested with lice, gangrene, ringworm,
and open sores to whom she is introduced. Although Marianne never
132
finds out into whom or into what to place her trust, she learns not to
trust appearances, neither the appearance of the Barbarians, which
seems at once repulsive and irresistible, alienating and intriguing, nor
the all too familiar appearance of the Professors. As Mary Hallab
notes, the civilization of the latter can flourish only in a complete
vacuum. The Professors can indulge in their intellectual pursuits only
as long as they remain securely sheltered from direct experience of
reality. They are innocents, Hallab explains, only insofar as they
reject the horrors and limitations and responsibilities of
experience [and] see the world as extensions of themselves, as
amenable to their wishes. It is their learned blindness to reality that
enables them to make themselves the gods of [a fragmented whole
and to] deny their own humanity, their own role in the chaotic and
imperfect human community.9
Marianne casts her lot with the Barbarians in the end and in so
doing, Hallab argues convincingly, moves, however, reluctantly,
toward a more expanded vision.10 The fall she thus chooses to
suffer does not mark an entirely negative turn of events because it
entails a loss of innocence in the sense not of an original and joyful
form of inexperience, but of a naivety deliberately cultivated out of a
lack of interest in more mundane aspects of life. Mariannes flight
from the village leads her well beyond what the Professors
specialized learning encompasses. Not only does she gain insight into
the life of the Barbarians, of whom she has never known more than
their outward appearance from brief encounters and reasonably
reliable representations in her fathers book. She also comes into
immediate contact with a tribe of mutants whose deformities exceed
the Professors wildest imaginations. Even Jewels singular barbarism
fails to compare with the outlandishness of these figures, appropriately
called the Out People for the fantastic shapes the human form
acquires amongst them:
One man had furled ears as pale, delicate and extensive as Arum lilies.
Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had the
conventional complement of limbs or features and most bore marks of
9
Mary Y. Hallab, Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence, in Functions of

the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the
Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Joe Sanders, Westport: Conn, 1995, 178.
10
Ibid., 181.
133
nameless diseases. Some were ludicrously attenuated, with arms and

legs twice as long as those of natural men, but one was perfect in all
things but a perfect miniature, scarcely two feet long from tip to tip.
(HV, 110)
Fantasy, Samuel Beckett notes, by its very ability to make nonsense its sense and impossibility its reality, undermines the referential
claims of language.11 With her fantastic description of the Out
People, Carter may be said to complete her project of undermining the
referential claims of language and to extend the simple opposition
between Professors and Barbarians into a much more complex
structure. While a straightforward binarism like that between the
village intellectuals and the illiterate barbarians, according to Meaney,
can never really contravene let alone violate12 reality but
ultimately only reinstitute its norms,13 the triangular constellation
created by way of introduction of the Out People has the power to
confuse these norms. Indeed, the appearance of the Out People effects
a confusion outranging by far Mariannes moral bewilderment as to
who in the story are the villains and who are the heroes.
Apart from indirectly calling in question the Professors notion of
barbarism as beasthood, Carters evasive portrayal of the Out People
exposes the tendentiously pseudo-realistic (rather than openly
fantastic) quality of those Western inscriptions of savageness to which
Carter keeps alluding throughout Heroes and Villains as the primary
source of inspiration for the Professors (and especially for Donallys)
fantasies. Like Golding, Carter reads these inscriptions as badly
disguised projections of the insecurities of a Western learned elite,
including even such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin, Lvi-Strauss,
Weber, Durkheim and so on, all marked by fire and blood (HV, 62).
In Heroes and Villains, the accounts of otherness this elite has
accomplished are rejected as mere assertions of a dominant discourse
oblivious to the potentialities of critical introspection and self-doubt.
By contrast, Carters own text insistently negotiates its own limits,
which seem to be reached with the representation of the Out People.
11
Beckett, quoted in Meaney, History and Womens Time, 86.

In the contravention and violation of the real, Joanna Russ sees the main task of
speculative fiction (Joanna Russ, The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction,
Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, XV/1 [December 1973],
52).
13
Meaney, History and Womens Time, 87.
12
134
Already their shapes are too fantastic to be adequately reproduced in

writing. Even as linguistic constructs, they appear de-formed by a
figurative language that tries to capture what is inexpressible in literal
terms and by textual gaps marking what is describable not even in
figurative language. Yet, it is not merely the inefficacy of language
that the self-consciously incomplete and imperfect inscriptions of the
Out People are meant to reflect. They always also draw attention to
the possibility of abstaining from a discursive usurpation of the Other
altogether. The text itself may be read as exemplifying such restraint
in never venturing beyond descriptions of the Out Peoples physical
features, in its resistance to inscribing, ever so cursorily at least, also
their consciousness.
The mind of the Out Person, the man/not-man (HV, 114) remains
anathema. Quite paradoxically, rather than narrowing the novels
discursive scope, this implicit demarcation of the texts outer limits
expands it. By refraining from claiming the Out Peoples minds for
literary inscription, Carter manages to place the images of their
faceless and depersonalized bodies in ironic opposition to the
extensively individualized Barbarians, thereby breaking down the
novels binary structure. The resultant proliferation of otherness is by
no means less productive of ambiguities than a literary excursion into
the Out Peoples consciousness would be. In fact, while the latter
would inevitably lead to a delimitation of possible meanings and
ultimately to a fixation of the Out Persons otherness, the former has
the opposite effect of retrospectively invalidating and confusing
established positions. In the end, Marianne wonders not only who the
villains are and who the heroes; she cannot tell anymore either
whether the life of the Barbarians is proof of the speed with which
[they are] sinking backwards or evidence of their adaptation to new
conditions (HV, 43). At the same time, the reader is required to
decide whether Jewels position resembles the Professors or the Out
Peoples, whether, in comparison to the Out People, he and his people
are more similar to, than different from, the Professors and whether
the Barbarians qualify at all as the villagers true Others, given that
the Out People are so far more other than them.
In this confusion, Mariannes return to the village after Jewels
death represents, though not an unlikely, only one of several possible
closures to the novel. It is clear to her that such a move would
presuppose that Marianne renounce experience for the sake of book
135
learning, that she, in fact, forget her own experience of living amongst
the Barbarians and content herself with passing the Professors
version of barbarism on to the child she is expecting. Yet, rather than
reinstating the high-caste villagers paternalistic view of the Other
and, with it, ironically, of reality, Carter sustains her narratives
fantastic mode until the very end of Heroes and Villains. She closes
the novel with the more utopian than dystopian suggestion that
Marianne might choose to forget her learning, shed her education, and
undergo a sort of deculturation, reaching a state of total scriptlessness
after all at its very end.
Already very early on in the novel, the narratives development
towards such a closure is foreshadowed by the introduction of the
figure of Mrs Green. As a young woman, as rebellious as Marianne,
Mrs Green also ran away from village life, which had become
unbearable for her after her husbands death. Though she has been
living with the Barbarians for many years, she has never completely
capitulated to their ways but retained some of the attributes of the
seemingly so much more refined villagers. When Marianne first
catches sight of her, she has the impression that this stately old lady
... shone like a washed star in that filthy company and ... was
obviously of some consequence in the tribe (HV, 14). At this point,
Marianne does not yet know that Mrs Green will soon become
something of a parent substitute and confidante cum chaperone for
her. The thing to remember about them is, they dont think, the
older woman advises Marianne shortly after her arrival at the
Barbarians camp. They jump from one thing to the next like kids
jumping stepping stones and so they go on until they fall in the
water.... They like bright colours ...., beads, things that shine (HV,
39).
The detachment with which Mrs Green characterizes the
Barbarians is that of a foster mother in the role of which she assumes a
position within the tribe almost as powerful as Donallys. In fact, she
embodies the perfect antithesis to this charlatan who has no other
wisdom to impart to Marianne than the cynical aphorisms he keeps
painting on the walls of the Barbarians communal abode for her to
read. This eccentric way of communicating with Marianne contrasts
not only with the Barbarians, who scarcely exchanged a word with
one another (HV, 14) but mostly conduct their activities in complete
silence for there was little need to talk and very little to talk about,
136
anyway (HV, 44). It also differs from the oral rapport which develops
between Mrs Green and Marianne and seems to constantly belie the
futility of speech suggested by the Barbarians silence. Mrs Greens
characteristic orality, the reader learns, is actually the result of her
disavowal of literacy. She has simply forgotten how to read so that the
copy of Great Expectations she keeps together with other personal
belongings, dresses, aprons, hairpins, and a little case of needles, in a
box in her room, has come to possess a rather odd symbolic value for
her. Having become illiterate, Mrs Green no longer expects that she
will ever return to the village. It is for a much humbler existence that,
after Jewels death, she joins the fishermen on the coast, leaving her
own position within the tribe for Marianne to fill.
Yet, though pregnant, Marianne is not prepared to adopt the role of
nurturer and nurse. Her ambition is rather to exploit the power she has
discovered in herself and assert it to replace Donally, who has
vanished without a trace after Jewels his creations violent
destruction. I shall stay here and frighten them [the Barbarians] so
much theyll do every single thing I say, Marianne promises at the
end of the novel. Ill be tiger lady and rule them with a rod of iron
(HV, 150). Inevitably, Mariannes forgetting of her cultural origins
will ultimately be different from Mrs Greens. Although she will have
no books to help her because her fathers as well as Donallys libraries
have barbarously been burnt, she seems determined to forge a
potentially literate culture of her own by eschewing the gift of
naming and reverting the process of uncreation whereby nature has
come to exist unacknowledged, undifferentiated, and nameless.
Standing on the sea-shore with Jewel and marvelling at its
wonders, Marianne realizes that she can hardly put a single name to
them, though everything had once been scrupulously named. The
fans, fronds, ribbons, wreaths, garlands and lashes of weed had once
been divided into their separate families, wracks, tangles, dulses, etc.
Purse sponge, slime sponge, breadcrumb sponge, blood red sponge ...
(HV, 136). The discovery prompts her resolve that she will neither
surrender [like the Out People] to namelessness, nor begin a
subspecies of man imbibing a suitable indifference to the outside
world with its mothers milk (HV, 137). Instead she determines that
the purpose of her reign over the Barbarians as Tiger Lady will be to
lead them towards enlightenment and some sort of learning after all.
This is finally suggested by the image of the lighthouse, which she
137
believes to be the twin of the white tower in which she was born when
she sees it for the first time:
... and, upon the cliff, a white tower glistened like a luminous finger
pointing to heaven. It was a lighthouse. Its light was put out, like the
womans eyes, but here it stayed and if there were no longer any
storm-tossed mariners to give thanks for its helpful beams, yet,
functionless as it was, it was intransigent. To Marianne, it looked the
twin of the white tower in which she had been born and she was very
much moved for, though neither tower any longer cast a useful light,
both still served to warn and inform of surrounding dangers. Thus this
tower glimpsed in darkness symbolized and clarified her resolution;
abhor shipwreck, said the lighthouse. She fell in love with the
integrity of the lighthouse. (HV, 139)
The final merging of Mariannes old life with her new life, which is
suggested by the uncanny identity between the two lighthouses, marks
a new beginning facilitated by the heroines recognition that, rather
than having to choose between the two modes of existence which she
has come to know, she must reconcile herself to a position between
them and make it her task to direct the Barbarians away from their
fierce rejection of the villagers civilization to a position as hybrid as
her own.
CHAPTER SEVEN
POSTCOLONIAL RETURNS TO A PRE-LITERATE EUROPE:
DAVID MALOUFS AN IMAGINARY LIFE AND
GILLIAN BOURAS APHRODITE AND THE OTHERS
With their portrayal of pre- and post-literate societies respectively,

both William Golding and Angela Carter may be said to fictionally
transcend the cultural situation in which they themselves write, not,
however, without commenting explicitly or implicitly on that
particular situation. Most obviously, the absence of writing from the
non-literate otherworlds described in Heroes and Villains and The
Inheritors suggestively hints at the omnipresence of the written word
and its power in modern civilization; less obviously, it also calls in
question received notions of literacy as a self-evident and enduring
feature of Western cultures by dismantling the popular assumption of
the transition of human societies from non-literate to literate
formations as a linear and irreversible process. At closer analysis, the
implicit criticism of the complacency of Western literate cultures
which Golding and Carter advance in The Inheritors and Heroes and
Villains proves remarkably similar to what has come to be identified
as a typically postcolonial scepticism of Western notions of cultural
superiority and supremacy. Carters and Goldings proximity to this
position is manifest especially where they interrogate writing as a
means of comprehending and controlling the Other and where they
express their distrust of discursive Othering as an exercise merely of
a hegemonic powers self-assertion.
What nonetheless distinguishes Carters and Goldings critique of
literate cultures from that of non-European writers is the catholicity of
their argument. In Heroes and Villains as well as in The Inheritors, the
non-literate is placed in opposition not to a specific culture but to
human civilization in general. The fact that Carters novel is set in
England and Goldings in France is largely irrelevant, because the
authors aim is not to place the story they relate in special relation to
the cultural history (or future) of either of these two countries. With
precisely such an aim in mind, David Malouf in An Imaginary Life
and Gillian Bouras in Aphrodite and the Others set their novels, by
contrast, in thoroughly documented and thoroughly charted historical
140
contexts, whose geographic distance from the locus of the texts

conception, Australia, is tantamount to the temporal distance from the
extratextual reality established in The Inheritors and Heroes and
Villains. Bouras submits a very personal autobiographical portrayal of
her mother-in-law embedded in what appears to be a meticulously
researched documentation of the circumstances which caused Greek
farming women born in the first decades of the twentieth century to
miss out on schooling and remain illiterate all their lives. Malouf
offers a self-consciously imaginative exploitation of the historical fact
of Ovids expulsion from Rome to the Eastern limits of the Roman
Empire which were under constant threat of invasion by Barbarian
hordes during the reign of Emperor Augustus. The way in which both
Malouf and Bouras draw on historical events in their portrayals of
illiterates deserves attention because it turns their novels into very
special instances of the particular interest Australian writers have been
expressing in aspects of scriptlessness over the past one hundred
years.
Malouf and Bouras are not the only Australian writers profoundly
interested in the theme of illiteracy. Indeed, the frequency with which
this theme has been addressed in Australian literature makes it
tempting to posit a specifically antipodean preoccupation with
questions of writing and non-writingness, an idiosyncratic fascination
with the limits of literate culture and their transgression. Over the past
hundred years, this fascination seems to have yielded increasingly
sophisticated readings of illiteracy. The marked historicity of these
readings corresponds with a tendency to identify illiteracy as a
disadvantage shared across racial and ethnic boundaries by aborigines,
migrants, and certain groups of white Australian-born citizens alike.
Moreover, in literary projections of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Australia illiteracy is associated with figures of
convicts and itinerant workers, probably the best known instance
being the 1981 autobiography A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey, who,
born in 1894 and practically orphaned at the age of two, received no
formal education. After the First World War, during which he served
at Gallipoli, Facey taught himself to read and write and began to
compile notes about his life. His semi-literate accounts of the
legendary Gallipoli campaign have no doubt contributed to the aura
commonly associated with the figure of the unlettered underdog in
contemporary Australian writing.
Postcolonial Returns to a Pre-Literate Europe
141
Deliberate fictionalizations of illiteracy in Australian literature

were also produced before Faceys uniquely authentic depictions of
what it means to be unable to read and write. They set in after a period
of public disputes concerning the contemporary state of the Australian
school system not quite as ardent as the controversies going on in
Britain at the same time.1 It is barely mere coincidence that when
these controversies ended in Europe with the attainment of universal
literacy at the end of the nineteenth century, Australian writers began
to introduce illiterate characters into their works with increasing
frequency. They did so for varying reasons. In her novel My Brilliant
Career (1901), for instance, Miles Franklin includes the portraits of
the illiterate farmers Mrs and Mr MSwat, who employ the heroine
Sybylla Melvyn as governess of their children without really
understanding the purpose of learning to read and write. Franklins
vivid descriptions of the ineffectiveness of schooling in the Australian
outback echo the critical depictions Henry Lawson offers of bush
schools, representing them as places at which school masters
shamelessly assert their colonizing power over unlettered children and
adolescents. At the same time Franklins characterization of the
ignorant MSwats as insensitive brutes anticipates Barbara Bayntons
portrayal of the illiterate bully Billy Skywonkie in Bush Studies
(1902).
In Coonardoo, first published in 1929, Katherine Susannah
Prichard addresses the disadvantage of non-literate Aboriginals
confronted with white literate culture. This aspect, while only touched
upon by Prichard, is given greater attention in the novel Capricornia
(1939) by Xavier Herbert and finally translated into an open
discussion of Aboriginal illiteracy in My Place (1987) by Sally
Morgan. Yet another approach to illiteracy is taken by Judah Waten,
who in Alien Son (1952) narrates the cultural exclusion of a well
educated female migrant from Russia unable to speak, let alone to
read or write English and therefore completely dependant on her
Australian-born children to act as her interpreters, readers, and scribes.
In contrast to Watens sympathetically account of his mothers
cultural exclusion, Peter Careys construction of Herbert Badgery,
narrator protagonist of Illywhacker (1985), as an illiterate aims to
stress the fantastic fictiveness of this characters life story. It is the
1
These can be found documented for instance in The Oxford Book of Australian
Schooldays, eds Brenda Naill and Ian Britain, Melbourne, 1997.
142
self-confessed liar and con man himself who claims that he could not
read until late in life. He does so not to win the readers sympathy, but
to warn the reader not to expect recorded history to verify his tale.
In all of these instances, illiteracy is unambiguously represented as
an integral part, good or bad, of the Australian idiom. This makes it
the more noteworthy that David Malouf and Gillian Bouras place the
illiterates they describe in a European context. It will be argued that in
so doing they become able to use non-literacy as a matrix to define
their own highly ambivalent role as antipodean writers with close
affinities to Southern Europe. In the process, the traditional image of
Southern Europe as the cradle of Western civilization and as the
birthplace of alphabetic writing is subverted. Greece and Asia Minor,
respectively, are translated into settings at which writers in exile the
Roman poet Ovid in An Imaginary Life and an autobiographical
projection of Gillian Bouras in Aphrodite and the Others are
surrounded by people unable to comprehend their writerly needs
because they are illiterate. What Ovid and Gillian at first experience as
a profound depravity, as a barbarism cruder than anything they could
have imagined they gradually come to appreciate as a marvellous
alternative to their own entrapment within a culture sophisticated to
the point of decadence. Non-literacy in particular, while initially
viewed as a sign of inferiority in each novel, is eventually seen as an
ideal form of epistemological freedom which alone seems to facilitate
the kind of dignified innocence the protagonists learn to admire in
their unlettered opposite number.
This almost romanticizing validation of scriptlessness at the
expense of literate culture invites a comparison of An Imaginary Life
and Aphrodite and the Others with pre-twentieth-century colonialist
narratives of exploration, which regularly lead from a Western
metropolis into some unknown wilderness outside Europe. In having
their protagonists travel to a wild zone, not somewhere in the New
World, but in Southern Europe, Malouf and Bouras invert this
trajectory, thereby undermining the received opposition of the Old
World as thoroughly charted and tamed territory and the New World
as a realm of vast uncivilized spaces. Malouf and Bouras, two writers
acutely aware of the standard perception of Australian nature as
hostile and barren, translate exactly this perception into evocations of
equally barren and hostile European land. Significantly, to this end,
they do not choose any place in the Old World for representation but a
143
region conventionally perceived as harbouring Europes oldest

civilization and famous for its wealth of ancient monuments.
Gillian Bouras, for instance, sets her novel in a Peloponnesian
village and portrays the Greek countryside surrounding it as a habitat
only of most resilient of plants and creatures. Civilization appears
transient in Bouras rural Greece, where any more vulnerable form of
existence or any attempt, however modest, at subjecting the land to
cultivation seems doomed to decay:
In summer one can walk endlessly on ochre-coloured earth, gather
oregano and wildflowers, see nobody and hear nothing except the
relentless shrilling of cicadas. A distant haze smudges blue mountains;
here and there cypress trees stand like dark-green sentinels. The
hedgerows grow high and thick, and the years have produced a tumble
and twining of prickly pear, ivy, mastic and blackberry. Piles of wood,
safe in the forks of trees, wait to be collected before the first rains
come; sheep and donkey dung has been swept into small cones. The
only sign of change is the occasional glimpse of a crumbling mudbrick house standing deserted amid the straggling remains of an
orchard, a salutary reminder of the inevitability of decay.2
An Imaginary Life, Maloufs watershed work and his most

acclaimed,3 is set in an even more forsaken location. As if consciously
echoing the words with which Arthur Phillip, governor of the first
permanent European colony on the Australian continent, summarized
his impression of Australian land as forest-clad, unkempt, and
uncanny territory offering less assistance to first settlers than any
other country in the world,4 Malouf has Ovid sketch his place of exile
as a an oppressive emptiness, an unchanging desolateness which
day after day fills [his] mind with its perspectives.5 Colourless,
scentless, silent, and cold, the inhospitable terrain quenches any more
refined form of existence:
18.
Gillian Bouras, Aphrodite and the Others (1994), Ringwood: Victoria, 1997, 17-
3
Philip Neilsen, Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf, UQP Studies in
Australian Literature, St Lucia, 1990, 3.
4
Arthur Phillip, quoted in James Ford Cairns, Australia: III. History, in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1969, II, 786.
5
David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978), Sydney, 1980, 15.
144

A line of cliffs, oblique against the sky, and the sea leaden beyond. To
the west and south, mountains, heaped under cloud.
To the north, beyond the marshy river mouth, empty grasslands,
rolling level to the pole.
For eight months of the year the world freezes. Some polar curse is
breathed upon the land. It whitens overnight. Then when the ice
loosens at last, and breaks up, the whole plain turns muddy and stinks,
the insects swarm and plague us, hot mists steam amongst the
tussocks. I have found no tree here that rises amongst the low, grayish
brown scrub. No flower. No fruit. We are at the ends of the earth.
Even the higher order of the vegetable kingdom have not yet arrived
among us. We are centuries from the notion of an orchard or a garden
made simply to please. (IL, 15)
Any reference to cultural progress seems carefully avoided in both

novels, thus sustaining the impression that their settings are most
unlikely birthplaces of an enduring, let alone a thriving, civilization.
Whether it is the bleakness of the land that has prevented its
inhabitants from trying to attain at least some degree of civilization or
whether it is the barrenness of its inhabitants minds that has kept
them from cultivating their surroundings seems impossible to tell. The
perfect correspondence between the simplicity of the peoples lives
and the plainness of their environment remains profoundly enigmatic
to the first-person narrator, dramatized in either case and cast in the
role of the displaced ethnographer-cum-writer alienated by the
absolute stasis which this correspondence engenders.
Both, Gillian, a teacher from Melbourne and mother of three sons
by a Greek immigrant, and Publius Ovidus Naso, Roman of the
equestrian order, poet (IL, 18), once famous and favoured, now
banned for life from the Roman empire, have always been at home in
a culture of swift change and progress. Their clearly idealized
invocations of this culture occur almost exclusively in the context of
nostalgic reveries. An actual return remains impossible for Ovid and
only a vaguely contemplated option in Gillians narrative. Instead of
actually going back to Australia, Gillian enjoys imaginary journeys
backward to the early 1970s, for instance, when the new Whitlam
government began to transform the cultural climate in Australia,
charging it with new optimism and enthusiasm. She also revels in the
recollection of her Greek mother-in-law coming to Australia to be
overawed by her middle-class suburban home, what with all The
145
space, the carpeted floors, the bathroom, the kitchen and its
appliances, the large gardens front and back, and, of course,
television (AO, 130-31). As a special personal triumph she cherishes
the memory of taking Aphrodite Yiayia to see Como, most
graceful of Victorias colonial mansions and witnessing one of
Aphrodites rare displays of amazement at this manifestation of
extreme wealth, ... great beauty, and ... domestic yet grand, opulent,
unattainable, splendour. Two decades later, Gillian still likes to
believe that, for Aphrodite, the experience must have been a village
womans glimpse of heaven (AO, 136).
Ovid, too, nostalgically associates his former life as having with a
particularly auspicious phase of transition in the history of the Roman
Empire. He defines himself as the child of an age of soft selfindulgent muddle, of sophisticated impudence, when we all seemed to
have broken out of bounds at last into an enlightenment so great that
there was no longer any need for belief (IL, 25).6 In this life, Ovid
remembers, he used to feel free to believe in himself and to discover
for his generation a new national style. He was allowed to proclaim
the end of patriotism and of war and to demand other literature to be
written than guides in verse to bee keeping and sheep drench and
other concerns to be addressed by poets than the loves of shepherd
boys with a taste for Greek. The age he believes he has helped to
create with his poetry has its existence in the lives and loves of [the
emperors] subjects. It is gay, anarchic, ephemeral and it is fun (IL,
26).
But I am here, and all this, all of it, is far behind me, Ovid
reminds himself and the reader of the present:
6
The implicit comparison Malouf is drawing here between Rome and London as
thriving centres of imperialist expansion is obvious. Still, this does not suggest that
Maloufs representation of Asia Minor as an unknown wilderness or wasteland serves
solely to establish an analogy to Australia as the most forbidding of all of Englands
colonies. A far more complex process of projection and re-inscription is at work here,
a process which also encodes Maloufs own migration from Australia to Italy (as
Aphrodite and the Others records Bouras migration from Australia to Greece). In
Maloufs portrayal of Asia Minor, the twentieth-century Australian travellers
perception of South-East Europe (to which Malouf, in fact, refers explicitly in a direct
address to the reader at the beginning of the novel [28]) and the Roman exiles may be
said to converge, thereby facilitating a reading of the text not only as an inscription of
the margins of ancient European civilization but also as a discursive re-invasion of a
meanwhile thoroughly inscribed site of European history by total wilderness.
146

I am dead. I am relegated to the region of silence. All I can do is
shout. And that is what I am doing. (IL, 27)
The cultural developments in which they once used to be implicated

seem to have been suppressed, undone, or even reversed in the worlds
to which Gillian and Ovid find themselves transported in Aphrodite
and the Others and An Imaginary Life. A sense of having moved
backward rather than forward, of having returned to an earlier form of
existence rather than of having progressed to a new level of
experience overwhelms them. They look back on the existences they
have left behind, coming to the ironic conclusion that the lifestyle they
have forsaken was much further advanced than the kind of life ahead
of them. Worse even, as exiles unable to maintain any contact with
their spiritual homes, they feel that their own intellectual scope is
progressively crippled, that against their will they become like the
people they live with, or that they are reduced to beings even superior
to them. When one moves from Australia to rural Greece, Gillian
observes, all confidence eventually evaporates, and many aspects of
the personality become atrophied . in extreme cases even sanity is
threatened. The fear that, in coming to Greece, she has given herself
up completely gives Gillian nightmares in which she takes on the
shape of a large, dark, and hairy monster walking on all fours and with
a drooping nether lip, truly horrible to look at (AO, 113). In
Imaginary Life Ovid feels equally disfigured. He complains that his
life has been stripped to the simplest terms (IL, 16) and remarks that
he feels as if [he] had suddenly slipped back a step in the order of
things, or been transformed, by a witchs curse, into one of the lower
species.
Writing from the limits of the known world, from a place of
utter desolation (IL, 26), Ovid begins to believe that he can no
longer address his letters to his wife or his lawyer in Rome or even to
the emperor. He finds himself exiled not just to a wild place, but
beyond the bounds of the language he can use.7 Hence all he can do
is appeal to a reader who lives in another century and whose face and
form he cannot imagine. You can have no idea, he confides in this
7
In fact, as Malouf himself once explained, this extreme form of isolation was his
very first interest in writing An Imaginary Life (see Interview by Jim Davidson, in
David Malouf: Johnno, Short Stories, Poems, Essays and Interview, ed. James Tulip,
St Lucia, 1990, 294).
147
reader, how far we have come, or how far back I have been to see all
this; how rudimentary our life is in its beginning (IL, 30). Like
Gillians seemingly loosely assembled notes and diary entries, Ovids
direct addresses are made with no expectation of a reply. They are
written in the awareness of their writtenness, of their capacity to
preserve their authors reflections for an indefinite amount of time
beyond the moment of their conception.
They also enhance the impression that the first-person narrators of
An Imaginary Life and of Aphrodite and the Others are constructed as
totally void of social contacts, and as existing in a silence more
extreme than the silence of the solipsism in which any modern scribes
produce their writings. It is the first-person pronoun of highly
educated individuals with no one to turn to in their writings but
themselves or to an imaginary audience outside the world to which
they have moved. Inside these worlds, nobody seems to speak their
language and, worse even, nobody has a need for writing, least of all
for the kind of writing in which they both engage, Ovid as a poet,
Gillian as a chronicler of Aphrodites story. It is on account of their
literacy, then, that Gillian and Ovid are exiled not only from their
former, but also from their present lives. They feed me. They provide
a corner where I can sleep. They are not uncivil, Ovid concedes. Yet,
aching for the refinements of the Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in
which all things can be spoken (IL, 21), he still deplores that where
he has come to live, the most basic things prove impossible to
translate back into his own idiom (IL, 22):
But no one in Tomis speaks my tongue, and for nearly a year now I
have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb. I
communicate like a child with grunts and signs, I point, I raise my
eyebrows, questioning, I burst into tears of joy if someone a child
even understands what I am trying to say. In the open I go about
shouting, talking to myself simply to keep the words in my head, or to
drive them out of it. My days in this place, my nights, are terrible
beyond description. (IL, 17)
On one occasion, when a woman hands him some seeds, offering

along with it a word in her language Kors-chka! , Ovid is reminded
of how he would use the Latin names of seeds in his own poetry:
merely for the acoustic effect the words would produce but with no
idea at all what any but the commonest of the seeds looked like.
148
Tasting one of the seeds of Korschka and realizing that its flavour can
bring neither the expected shock of recognition to his palate, nor a
name to his mind, the poet comprehends with dismay that he might
have to learn everything all over again like a child. He wonders
whether, for the rest of his life, he will be reduced to Discovering the
world as a small child does, through the senses, but with all things
deprived of the special magic of their names in [his] own tongue (IL,
22).
Likewise in Aphrodite and the Others, Gillian is suddenly
overcome by a deep sense of futility as she realizes how ludicrous her
exercise of translating peoples lives into stories must appear to
someone like her mother-in-law who has no use whatsoever for ta
grammata, for letters. Gillian knows that Aphrodite has always
resented her reading and writing, for they are not work (AO, 31),
and suspects that her mother-in-law secretly chuckles about her, and
regards her writerly ambitions as evidence of a hitherto unknown
moral failing in [her] character, as proof of her slothfulness (AO,
147). Gillian contends she is, I think, fairly convinced that I am mad:
eccentric at best, insane at worst (AO, 7), and speculates that
Aphrodite must think of her mainly as a woman who
does not talk, or talks only in a certain manner ... but makes noises
which make no sense. She cannot speak very well ...; she does not
have the gift, is not talented in that way. She knows no riddles or
rhymes, is ignorant of proverbs and spells, cannot make jokes.
... Even after she learns to talk, this second woman is often silent,
watching and gazing, looking at who can guess what. And at times
like these, she does not seem to listen to anything or anybody, but
makes squiggles and lines, notes in a little book. (AO, 12-13)
Gillians conjectures as to how her mother-in-law might read are

never verified so that the reader is invited to wonder whether it really
is the illiterate woman who condemns her daughter-in-law because
she cannot spin, weave, knit, or crochet.
What Bouras text actually suggests is that the narrator despises
herself for her inability to make proper knots, or to put a pannier on
the donkey. While Gillian claims that it is Aphrodite who thinks her
totally ignorant, it is she herself who believes she is deficient. She
does not understand how important rope is, she imagines Yiayia say
to herself: She has not the least idea of the basic importance of
149
knots. This self-depreciation via the figure of Aphrodite is followed

by a peculiar gesture of self-assertion. As if to disprove her mother-inlaws secret charge of ignorance and incompetence, Gillian uses her
narratorial voice to proffer the information that, in Greece, much can
depend on the strength of a tether and on the ability to tie knots that do
not slip. Unfortunately her illiterate mother-in-law cannot read what
cultural wisdom she has to impart. More ironically even, the insider
knowledge Gillian tries to display proves insufficient to secure her an
insider status in the village community. While capable of weaving the
thread of time, the weight of history (AO, 13) into a fabric of written
words to philosophize about the basic importance of knots, Gillian
remains a far cry from tying real knots: when she tethers the donkey,
he still pulls free because she has tied the rope the wrong way.
Their cultural and linguistic isolation and the resultant sense of
being stranded in a place far too alien for them to ever become truly
part of it, bring to mind the predicament of such archetypal traveller
figures as Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Jack Martin, Allmayer,
Frankenstein, or Kurtz, braving worlds which have never before been
comprehended in any form of writing and reaching the limits of their
expressive scope as they engage in a discourse with the unlettered
inhabitants of these worlds. Contemporary notions of literacy and
culture dictate, of course, that these figures should be portrayed (if
only ironically) as models of heroic resistance against barbarism.
Their accounts of savage lands and people are always meant to signify
also some kind of victory of lettered thinking over the dangers to
civilization believed to loom in Britains distant colonies. Like their
literary precursors, Ovid and Gillian respond to their displacement by
way of recourse to their own literacy to reading and writing letters
and diaries. In the process, they begin to see their writing as a kind of
social obligation or cultural mission. They come to justify their
writing as an exercise through which they might reach an
understanding of the Other and communicate this understanding to
others.
I wanted to make a gesture, Gillian typically explains her
resolution to set down Aphrodites story, to catch ... the life which is
flowing away from us every minute. This has been, in a sense, a
labour of love (AO, 7), she adds meaningfully. Likewise, Ovid holds
on to the belief that with his writing he is fulfilling a mission, even if
he has no reason to hope that his writings will ever be read. His
150
declared goal is to record for his inheritors any notion ... of what
earth was in its original bleakness, before we brought to it the order of
industry, the terraces, fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens
of the world we are making in our own image (IL, 28).
However, also like their literary precursors, Gillian and Ovid
remain far from a real understanding of the Other. On the contrary, in
the same way they subject their new environment to linguistic
settlement and transform the topographic void which is their new
home into a verbal construct, they also subject the native Other to
conceptual usurpation, reducing it to a Caliban figure, an orphaned
bastard as Roslyn Jolly puts it, with close links to the animal world,
... a shocking, primitive and abominable alter ego.8 Malouf has Ovid
describe the barbarians as another order of beings, those who have
not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully
human (IL, 20). To his ears, their atavistic utterances are but grunts,
moans, and crows, the yammering and howling of creatures reduced to
communicating in a barbarous guttural tongue, or what he also
terms a no-language (IL, 52). Still, he concedes that the Getae are
only relatively savage, less savage than the real barbarians he has
yet to see and hear yowling and yelping like wolves (IL, 56). They
are also less savage than the wolf child whom Ovid, tracks down in
the forest outside Tomis, whom he captures with the help of the
villagers, and subsequently attempts to tame.
The ensuing relationship between the child and Ovid as his captor,
tamer, master, teacher, and eventually as his pupil forms the core of
the novel. In it, Ovids new companion, too, is reduced to a silent
object of inscription, an evasive and forever intangible Other.9 Before
it begins to dawn on Ovid that the Child might actually be his own
childhood Self (or at least its Doppelgnger) beckoning him to return
Roslyn Jolly, Transformations of Caliban and Ariel: Imagination and Language

in David Malouf, Margaret Atwood and Seamus Heaney, World Literature Written
in English, XXVI/2 (Autumn 1986), 297.
9
This, in fact, is how critics mostly read Maloufs portraits of illiterates or semiliterates, thus ascribing such characters a fairly subordinate role in Maloufs work.
See, for instance, Peter Bishop, David Malouf and the Language of Exile,
Australian Literary Studies, X/4 (October 1982), 419-28; Maryanne Dever, Secret
Companions: The Continuity of David Maloufs Fiction, World Literature Written in
English, XXVI/1 (Spring 1986), 62-74, or Nick Mansfield, Body Talk: The Prose of
David Malouf, Southerly, XLV/2 (June 1989), 230-38.
151
into a his own past, Ovid views the creature more as an animal than
as a human being:
Outlined against the blue light between two birches about fifty yards
off, crouched like an animal, staring at us, a small boy as lean as a
stick, with all the ribs of his torso showing under the tanned skin,
bony elbows and knees, and straight black hair to the shoulder, He
springs up at my cry and goes bounding away into the woods. (IL, 4849)
Observing the child in captivity, Ovid notes how the boy howls,
scratching at the wall like an animal, spitting [and] showing his teeth
and his hands with all the fingers tense and extended like claws (IL,
106). He records with an ethnographers detached interest how
nothing like a human sobbing ever comes from him (IL, 73), how he
excites himself with his hand as he has seen monkeys do, how his
limbs twitch like a dogs in his sleep, and how his hairline all along
the spine, reddish in color like a fox (IL, 75), terrifies the women.
The rumour that he is covered with hair and has hooves ... is absurd,
he tries to convince himself and his reader. And yet, when the boy
lays his fingertips on the back of his hand, he cannot help feeling As
if an animal has come up in the dark and touched me with its tongue
(IL, 79).
As a twentieth-century Greek woman, Aphrodite does not lend
herself to exactly the same reductive representation. Still, Gillian, too,
succeeds in portraying her mother-in-law as a Caliban figure of sorts
by exploring what she regards as the older womans most alienating
and, at the same time, most fascinating feature: her illiteracy. It is
Aphrodites inability to read and write that inspires Gillian to put
down her story in letters because no one else has ever done so and
Aphrodite herself never will. It is Yiayias voice in particular that I
try to write down, she announces at the beginning of Aphrodite and
the Others, posing the rhetorical question, for are not voices as
individual as fingerprints? (AO, 3-4). Illiterate or oral people, the
self-appointed biographer argues to legitimize her project, depend on
others to tell them who they are. Oral people are not, usually, selfanalytical, she expounds:
152

They cannot see themselves, obviously, as a layer cake of texts.
Their sense of self most often comes through the evaluation of
outsiders. They are what other people say (AO, 6).
To enforce her diagnosis of Aphrodites incapacity to explain or

even to be herself, Gillian refers to the cases of Panayota, Evgenia
and all the other faceless, nameless Peloponnesian women (AO, 8)
whose families did not consider them worth sending to school as girls
and of whom Gillian, therefore, doubts that they can at all understand
the connection between the vast outside world and their own tiny,
inward-looking one. And did these women realize, she wonders,
that they were never able to confront information from the outside
world directly, that they could not know it in the way they knew facts
in their own world?. Convinced that whatever knowledge Greek
village women in Aphrodites position could obtain would have been
processed and then passed on to them by their male relatives, Gillian
doubts that the females of Aphrodites generation actually possess any
idea of history, of the years of schism, national defeat, and seesawing
between monarchy and republic (AO, 37-38).
Yet, Gillians misapprehension of Greek womens relation to
history does not remain uncorrected. She eventually learns that the
women of rural Greece survived the years of war everything but
unawares and uninformed. Without the women, her sons history
textbook informs her, there would have been no victory.
Grandmothers would mind the children while their mothers would
make bread for the army or carry ammunition where transports could
not go. The women of Kalamata clapped and cheered at the prisoners
who were marched through the streets by the Germans and threw them
bits of food while the men abstained from such demonstrative
gestures. And during the famine in 1941 and 1942, the girls in
Yiayias village kept resistance fighters supplied with food. Unlike
their literary precursors, the narrators of An Imaginary Life and
Aphrodite and the Others undergo a process of realization in which
their perception of the Other changes quite dramatically, causing them
to revise their initial notion of scriptlessness as a sign of intellectual
inferiority.
Writing plays a central role in this process. It is in translating the
non-literate into written language that both Ovid and Gillian finally
arrive at a completely new appreciation of the Others consciousness.
Bouras makes this particularly clear by contrasting the written portrait
153
of Aphrodite with the photographs Gillian has collected of her motherin-law. In the twelve years she has been living in Greece and which
are in part documented in these photographs, Gillian never reaches the
understanding she attains as she is working on her mother-in-laws
biography. A first sign of their relationship beginning to change is a
shift of tone in Gillians description of Aphrodites ignorance. It is a
shift from fascination and pity to affectionate amusement which
insistently undermines Gillians ambitious socio-historical cum
anthropological analysis of the case of her illiterate mother-in-law.
Gillians conscientiously researched case study metamorphoses into
an increasingly personal story as quotations from scholarly literature
(including ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan
Illich and Barry Sanders and Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong) are
replaced by passages in which the author seeks to find and formulate
her own interpretations of Aphrodites otherness.
In the process, she comes to value Aphrodites perception of the
world, so different from her own, as an inexhaustible source of quaint
anecdotes. She records her alarm when she finds that Aphrodite is
trying to cure her sick donkey with Coca Cola; she records how,
during a rare conversation of politics, Yiayia suddenly produces a role
of paper which turns out to be a large photograph of Karamanlis and
passionately declares, Hes the one for me ... Hes very, very good
(AO, 107). She observes how Aphrodite refers to people from a
village two kilometres away as foreigners and is puzzled when she
grinningly replies to her question what this makes of her, Gillian:
Thats different. Youre ours (AO, 112). She recalls introducing her
mother-in-law to a monoglot Australian who had to suffer being
bombarded with questions and comments of increasing loudness
because Aphrodite would simply refuse to accept that he could not
understand Greek. She imagines Aphrodite on her first flight to
Australia, bewildered by the capsule of steel which will somehow get
her to the other end of the world in an amazingly short time (AO,
127) and confused by the forever unchanging view from her window
of which she does not realise that it is not the tarmac at Athens airport,
but the planes wing (AO, 128).
These instances bear a significant resemblance to those scenes in
An Imaginary Life where Ovid records the puzzlement with which the
barbarians and the wolf child take in his writing. This is, for instance,
154
the case when he catches the Child secretly studying his writing
implements:
He shuffles across the floor towards the parchment roll and stares at it,
pokes at it with his forefinger, then lowers his head and sniffs. How it
must puzzle him that the roll still smells of animal hide. Once again
the ink fascinates him. He sniffs at that also, but is careful not to spill
it. He takes the stylus in his hand, and has been observant enough to
grasp it clumsily, but correctly, between thumb and forefinger. He
looks pleased with himself. He dips it in the ink, finding great
difficulty in getting the pen, balanced as it is between his fingers, into
the hole. He crouches over the pot, and there is, on his face that look
of utterly human concentration that one sees on the faces of small
children when they are trying for the first time to draw, or make
strokes for writing or thread a needle the eyes fixed, the tongue
pointed at the corner of the mouth and moving with a gesture of the
hand, as if it too were one of the limbs we have to use as men, one of
our means of pushing out into the world, of moving and changing its
objects. (IL, 80-81)
It is the dramatization of bewilderment, the Others enactment of the

same kind of consternation Gillian and Ovid have always mistaken for
a prerogative of their learning that facilitates a first sympathetic
understanding of, even a momentary identification with the Other. The
comic quality of the above scene is contingent on the childs total
oblivion to the presence of an observer who is translating every detail
of his action into writing.
This does not mean that the savage boy is merely an object of
ridicule, specularization, or exoticization. In An Imaginary Life as well
as in Aphrodite and the Others, the secret gaze of the literate outsider
following the scriptless Other eventually ceases to gratify the need for
reconciliation with human civilization, by which, as Paul Lyons
believes, modern men and women are driven. Instead of reinforcing
their faith in their own culture, the spectacle of the primitive, the
savage, and the barbarous because they are the uneducated Other
forces Gillian and Ovid to accept that, rather than a constructively
communicative and hence socially relevant gesture, writing is an
antisocial exercise that only isolates writers further and further from
the subjects they try to understand by writing about them.
With the explicit questioning of writing and literacy, which must
needs follow this realization, Bouras and Malouf transcend the
155
ethnocentric narcissism which Lyons holds to be only too

characteristic of traditional colonialist representations of the native as
an atavistic and ignorant Other. As Abdul JanMohamed has pointed
out, such renderings are nothing but projections of the inadequacies
sensed in modern cultures onto the figure of the native whose
otherness is strategically represented as a gross deformity so as to
deflect from and thereby preserve the structures of civilized
mentality.10 It is not from some ethnographic ingenuity but for the
sake of this particular agenda, Lyons contends, that Anglophone
writers have frequently attributed savage, even cannibalistic
tendencies to those living outside the familiar territory of literate
civilization. Hence, too, the insistent demonizing or criminalization of
the illiterate in nineteenth-century fiction.11
It seems legitimate, then, to regard it as a departure from
established literary conventions that both Malouf and Bouras deny
their narrators the possibility of recuperating a sense of superiority in
the act of inscribing a non-literate Other12 and instead reduce them to
mere figures of endurance, caricatures of what Mike Marais has called
the intrepid tamer of the wild.13 I am the least person here, Malouf
has Ovid admit, a crazy, comic old man, grotesque, tearful, who
understands nothing (IL, 17). And mine is the defeat, Gillian
admits, for, try as I might, and I did try, I could not be what she and
others wanted, could not become what her world demanded as a right
(AO, 2). As she herself puts it, she finally comprehends the privilege
and the poverty there is in being literate (AO, 7) and sees that
Highly literate people [like her] cannot imagine a world without
books, a world without the search, discovery and discipline of
writing (AO, 130-31). For months, she reflects
10
Abdul JanMohamed, Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and
Literate Modes in Achebes Things Fall Apart, ARIEL: A Review of International
English Literature, XV/4 (October 1984), 19-39.
11
As mentioned in Chapter 2, for instance in Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights,
Great Expectations, or Our Mutual Friend.
12
On Maloufs portrayals of the native Other and his transcendence of colonialist
discourse, see also Marc Delrez and Paulette Michel-Michot, The Politics of
Metamorphosis: Cultural Transformation in David Maloufs Remembering Babylon,
in The Contact and the Culmination, eds Marc Delrez and Benedicte Ledent, Lige,
1997, 150-70.
13
Mike Marais, Omnipotent Fantasies of a Solitary Self: J.M.Coetzees The
Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIX/2
(1993), 48-65.
156
I had been using my own tools to shape a world I now know I can
never live in, had been trying to make sense of the years spent feeling
isolated because I have ta grammata, and because ta grammata I have
are not the right ones. There I was struggling to write a biography of
an illiterate person and becoming daily more aware of the
contradictions involved in the task. (AO, 9: cf. 83)
What she once identified as ignorance Gillian now understands as

another form of knowledge. She ceases to view Aphrodites lack of
schooling, her illiteracy as naivety or ignorance. In fact, she comes to
see herself as unenlightened in comparison to her mother-in-law and
begins to accept that, in their relationship, it is she who must assume
the role of the pupil and learn the things Aphrodite deems necessary
for her to know. Yiayia cannot read, write, ride a bicycle or drive a
car, Gillian reflects:
She has never worn makeup, stayed in hospital or had an operation.
She cannot swim, and has only once been in a boat. She does not
possess a clock or watch. (AO, 96)
Yet, in spite, or, in fact, because of such disadvantages, Yiayia is less

deluded than are people who try to nail time down by reducing it to
space (AO, 96) and who have imbibed the notion of flatness through
different maps and projections (AO, 95). More importantly even, the
older womans consciousness is not burdened with the kind of
extravagant and apparently useless skills and insights her daughter-inlaw may call her own. Her knowledge, though rudimentary, is
absolutely essential to the continuity of life in her village:
She can kill rabbits and hens and use up every portion of a pig. She
has a huge store of genealogical data, and a sizeable store of
mirologia, the songs of fate sung at funerals. She can lay out a corpse.
(AO, 96)
In the end Gillian admits her own small world has made mine
larger: She has given me, strange though it may seem, a link to my
own past (AO, 7-8).
Ovids relationship to the barbarians undergoes a similar
transformation as he becomes aware of the fallaciousness of his own
understanding of the world and discovers that, rather than trying to
157
convert the barbarians to his mode of thinking, he ought to obtain

some insight into theirs by learning their language, which he finds
oddly moving and not at all like Latin, whose endings are designed
to express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling.
The barbarians tongue, he explains, somehow seems closer to the
first principle of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes
things what they are (IL, 65). Willingly, therefore, he allows himself
to be initiated into this other language and, indeed, comes to feel
profoundly liberated by his escapes into the new medium.
I am a Roman, he reminds himself when, roaming the
surroundings of Tomis with the barbarians, he follows the invitation to
join the mens hunting ritual and catches himself trying to imitate their
bloodcurdling death cry. I am a Roman and a poet. But that breath
and the sound it [the cry] carries still moves out from my body into the
world, and I feel freer for it (IL, 45). While, earlier in the novel, he
attempts to teach one of the children in Tomis to speak Latin and even
to read and to write it, Ovid now advances to seeking instruction from
the barbarians himself. From the old man in whose house he stays he
learns how to weave nets, which he finds to be a profoundly satisfying
aesthetic occupation like weaving texts in spoken or written
language. I am happy to learn all this, he therefore notes,
explaining:
What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitted perfectly to another,
and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary
correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business
with nets and hooks, these old analogies. (IL, 64)
A new phase in his transformation from teacher and poet to keen

student of the barbarians silent skills commences when Ovids
relationship to the wolf child leads him outside the village, which he
will finally leave together with the Child, his Child. Venturing
further and further into the land of the real barbarians, whose
savageness, like the Out Peoples in Heroes and Villains, by far
exceeds that of the barbarians, and, at the same time, penetrating
deeper and deeper into complete wilderness, Ovid discovers that his
companions language, too, functions just like writing, as a medium of
poetic appropriation of ones immediate environment. In land utterly
alien to him, the childs language, Ovid realizes, remains a means of
158
communicating with nature far superior to his own attempts at

capturing the surrounding world in letters:
He also assumes, on our walks, the role of teacher, pointing out to me
tracks in the grass and explaining with signs or gestures of his body,
or with imitation sounds, which bird or beast it is that has made them
....
All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind
of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory,
another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. (IL, 93)
In seeking to emulate the Childs wordless communion with nature,

Ovid expects to find the ultimate form of self-expression for himself.
Once, in the early days of my desolation, I thought I might learn to
write in the language of the spiders, the poet declares: Now, led by
the Child, I am on my way to it. The true language (IL, 97). For
Ovid, this true language constitutes some earlier and more
universal language than ... Latin. While he describes Latin as a
language for distinctions, every ending [of which] defines and
divides, he celebrates the Childs language as a language whose
every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation and proclaims:
We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must
discover it again. (IL, 98)
The recuperation of what he lost by growing up and into a

celebrated poet the part of our nature that we share with the
wolves (IL, 10) presupposes a return to a state of being in which
self-assurance is replaced by an innocent, primeval bewilderment at
human nature and its creative capacity, at all that we have discovered
and made in ourselves and in the world around us (IL, 81). As
Malouf has Ovid put it, the cynical metropolitan poet, who barely
knew a seed, flower, or tree, had to enter the silence to find a
password that would release [him] from [his] own life (IL, 32). And
as Malouf himself puts it in the Afterword to his novel: My purpose
was to make this glib fabulist of the changes live out in reality what
had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling
literary display (IL, 154).14 It is a rehabilitation of the exile Ovid,
14
Analogously, in an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, Malouf explains the

point of Ovids exile as an opportunity for the poet to metamorphose into a better
159
then, that Malouf tries to accomplish by making the poets words,

once callously presented under the mere guise of truth, come true in
the reality of his fiction. The price for being taken literally, however,
is that Ovid be portrayed as ultimately merging with his alter ego, the
wolf child, and metamorphosing into a preliterate being himself. This
metamorphosis must end with the poets extinction, that is, with his
physical death in the moment of which he does not know whether he
will be remembered at all, whether any writing of his will escape the
banning of his books from libraries and the public burning ordered by
Emperor Augustus. Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still
known?, he demands of the reader:
Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by
the authorities, in another mans poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying
that has become part of common speech and cannot now be
eradicated? Have I survived? (IL, 19)
The question of survival, of being remembered after ones death, of

leaving ones mark, as Carter has Donally put it in Heroes and
Villains, is also raised, albeit with a slight difference, in Aphrodite and
the Others where Gillian laments that her mother-in-laws memory,
the precious storehouse of the oral/illiterate person (AO, 66), is
failing and where she explains that the purpose of her recording
Aphrodites story is not to immortalise herself, but to secure
Aphrodite the place in history which she, like so many other Greek
women, filled without their own people taking any notice of them.
Arguably, Ovids question, Have I survived? is an expression of the
same patriarchal self-centredness that has occluded women from the
official history of Greece. Coming from Ovid, it is an absurd question,
at least in the eyes of the modern reader who is at once made aware
that already its formulation at the beginning of An Imaginary Life
presupposes that Ovid has survived and is remembered. With it,
Malouf effectively foregrounds the fictionality of his story through
which he gives, indeed gives back, to Ovid an imaginary life, one that
being, an inspired and less self-interested poet as follows: The sting of the
punishment is not just the exclusion from home but also the necessity to define a
different relationship to language. Ovids crime is, after all, in his exorbitant and
rather decadent use of language (Nikos Papastergiadis, David Malouf and
Languages for Landscape: An Interview, ARIEL: A Review of International English
Literature, XXV/3 [July 1994], 83).
160
has little basis in actual fact. As Malouf himself explains in the

Afterword to An Imaginary Life: what I wanted to write was neither
historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible
events (IL, 153). Rather than an act of resuscitating the historical
Ovid, of calling up his spirit, the reconstruction of the poets last
years, for Malouf, represents an act of transforming his image, of
manipulating the worlds memory of him.
The power of writing as a mode of prolonging or extending life
constitutes a central theme in most of the novels studied in this book.
In the four works analysed in this chapter and in Chapters 5 and 6, it
may be seen as even more than a thematic concern. Apart from
reflecting the possibilities of an individuals metaphysical survival,
these novels actually exemplify such survival in presenting their
central characters not only as agents of certain developments, but also
as products of an active remembering. Tuami remembers Lok and the
other Neanderthals after they have died; Marianne listens to Jewels
brother Johnny recounting her husbands death, Gillian records and
reconstructs retrospectively her mother-in-laws life; Ovid appeals to
the modern reader, the unknown friend (IL, 18) living in another
century, to take note of his tale. Thus inscribed, the memory, the idea
of the characters is invested with the same textual substance as are
their actual lives. Spelt out, put down on paper, these lives obtain
material reality, becoming an illustration of the deceaseds story
continuing beyond his or her death. Rather than separating actual
from after-life, the event of the subjects death seems to be embedded
between them and to combine them into a coherent whole. Thus it
marks at best an open ending, not, however, a total closure.
Metafictionally, explicit and implicit reflections on how the
Neanderthal Lok, the Barbarian Jewel, the illiterate Aphrodite, or
Ovid and, with Ovid, the wolf child survive in anothers (or in
an Others) consciousness and eventually are appropriated into a
literate discourse require to be read as highly critical comments on
twentieth-century Western historiography. As has been argued in the
case of The Inheritors, Tuamis recollection of Lok marks a counterdiscursive intervention in received constructions of primitive humans.
Bouras and Malouf, in turn, query the one-sidedness of the received
history of European cultures by exposing its strategic occlusion of any
form of existence that fails to corroborate the picture of South Eastern
161
Europe as the cradle of literate civilization. With their re-invention of

non- and illiteracy as aspects of European cultural history, they
destabilize the popular myth of the grand narrative of progress,15
according to which the West has always assumed the highest point of
civilization, and posit the existence of other stories, broadly
unacknowledged only because they have never been written down. In
the process, they take care not to isolate the alternative trajectories of
cultural development they devise from documented history. Using
public knowledge of Ovids exile and of the turbulences of twentiethcentury Greek history, respectively, Malouf and Bouras not only
validate their own tales of imaginary lives, but also create an
impression of the fragmentary nature of received histories.
On the surface, the counter-histories Malouf and Bouras offer
appear Eurocentric on account of their being set mainly in Europe.
However, the link to Anglophone Australian culture which is
established implicitly in An Imaginary Life and only cursorily in
Aphrodite and the Others is still obvious. More than that, it acquires
special significance in relation to the conflicting associations which
the Eastern Mediterranean evokes in Australian cultural
consciousness. South Eastern Europe is perceived as the place where,
as Gillian Bouras points out, alphabetic thinking commenced and
where, as David Malouf reminds us, the first literary endeavours in the
history of Western civilization were undertaken. Yet it is also the
place of origin of a major part of the Australian population, for many
of whom the displacement they suffered upon their arrival in Australia
must have been intensified by the foreignness of the English language
and the resultant sense of having regressed into a state of complete
illiteracy.
As the grandson of a Lebanese immigrant who never learnt to
speak English, David Malouf possesses the same awareness of the
migrants linguistic deprivation and disadvantage that Gillian Bouras
cultivated both as a teacher of English to non-Anglophone immigrants
and as the wife of a Greek migrant. Quite unconventionally, instead of
identifying the immigrants cultural displacement as a phenomenon
specific to New-World societies, both Bouras and Malouf place it in a
wider historical context and provocatively suggest seeing it also as a
European concern. In so doing, they also contest the myth of the Old
15
Carr, 199.
162
Worlds cultural superiority, apparently more deeply engrained in

Australian thinking than in the thinking of other former settler
colonies. To it, A.A. Phillips, one of Australias leading literary critics
in the first half of the twentieth century, attributes a prevailing
Australian attitude of cultural self-depreciation and subservience to
European culture, famously terming this attitude Cultural Cringe in
an essay that appeared in Meanjin in 1950.
If the Australians cultural servility has since transformed, as Mary
Kalantzis hopes,16 into proud acceptance of their uniqueness as a
hybrid Eurasian people espousing civic pluralism and productive
diversity, it is also owing to the kind of revaluation undertaken in An
Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others of Australian literate
culture and its origins. Neither of the two novels simply aims to
disown non-literacy as a feature of Australian culture altogether. Nor
do the two texts identify scriptlessness as a straightforward sign of
inferiority. On the contrary, with a sensitivity to cultural hubris that
may deserve to be described as typically postcolonial, Bouras and
Malouf scrupulously avoid insinuating that the absence of writing
from a culture is an indication of that cultures backwardness. What,
for them, remains a far more conclusive indicator of a literate cultures
level of civilization is its awareness of non-literate alterity and its
capacity to appropriate it into its collective consciousness and take on
responsibility for it. It is a modest gesture that the latter entails in the
eyes of Malouf and Bouras. All they insist that literates who try to
capture a non-literate Other in writing need to do is to draw attention
to the intractable problem of representing but not speaking for the
other, and to acknowledge those moments when the coherence of
discursive systems is called into disrepute because it is in these
moments that the sign of difference is most clearly articulated.17
42.
16
Mary Kalantzis, Cultural Cringe and Its Others, Meanjin, LIX/3 (2000), 39-
17
Spinks, 173.
THE NON-LITERATE IN SIGHT:

THE UNLETTERED NATIVE IN CONTACT
NARRATIVES
As long as literate and non-literate individuals and groups exist

independently of each other within their different noetic systems the
concept of illiteracy is redundant. It becomes necessary only where an
occasion for comparison arises. In the novels discussed in the previous
chapters this occasion is generated through a move outside the cultural
contexts in which the narratives themselves are implicated. The
glimpse the reader catches of pre-historic man in The Inheritors,
Mariannes abduction and acceptance into a post-nuclear tribe of
barbarians in Heroes and Villains, Ovids exile in An Imaginary Life,
and Gillians sojourn in the village of her late Greek husband in
Aphrodite and the Others all suggest an act of transgression from the
familiar into the realm of the unknown, if not of the uncanny. Where
this move constitutes more than a perspectival manoeuvre,1 the
character undertaking it is alone, entering as an exile, adventurer, or
pioneer of sorts into an entirely new and alien world. The gaze
Marianne, Ovid, or Gillian applies yields self-consciously subjective
descriptions of encounters with non-literate persons, narratives in
which each of the literate observers remains locked in the position of
the spellbound outsider.
The ensuing relationships between the displaced literates and those
they have come to live with resist description in conventional terms.
Typically, the spectacular wedding ritual performed for Marianne and
the barbarian prince Jewel in Heroes and Villains is only to
compensate for the lack of any deeper bond between them. The savage
Jewel with his grandiosely tattooed back can never return Mariannes
exacting gaze but must suffer his own reduction to a passive object of
contemplation and does so most painfully when with his wife.
Likewise the moments of intimacy invoked between the literate and
non-literate protagonists in An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the
Others pass without generating any mutual understanding. Instead the
non-literates in these two novels remain enigmatic and distant, and,
most importantly, free of any conscious desire to change, let alone to
appropriate the literate protagonists mode of thinking. Indeed, the
autonomy the scriptless Other embodies prompts scribes like Ovid and
Gillian, but also Carters heroine Marianne, to dream of a way of
disowning their book learning, of undoing their education, and of
forgetting their literate skills in short, of shedding their literacy
altogether. With the projection of such this impossible development
In fact, only in The Inheritors is this not the case.
166
the narratives themselves finally transcend the extra-textual reality in

which they at first seem rooted.
By contrast, the narratives studied in this section undertake no
comparable transgression. They remain embedded within a distinctive
historical context as they, too, recount certain moments of contact
between literate Anglophone regimes and non-literate native
communities. Their frame of reference never extends beyond the
culture within which they themselves are implicated. In The Heart of
the Matter (1948) Graham Greene charts the administrative structures
set up by British colonists in an unidentified West African colony
during the Second World War. In Things Fall Apart (1958) Chinua
Achebe traces the origins of Nigerian written literature back to the
first exposure of an Igbo community with Western civilization. In
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) J.M. Coetzee recounts a white
colonialists discovery of his unwitting involvement in a brutal
scheme to exterminate a group of desert nomads. In Potiki Patricia
Grace queries the appropriation of Western literacy into Maori culture,
while in Love Medicine Louise Erdrich records the effects of a very
similar process on a Chippewa family.
The historical specificity of the tales determines the mode in which
the cultural encounters are told as well as the constellations that arise
from these encounters. Accordingly, the literate characters in the
narratives examined here are no longer the fantastically displaced
individuals the lonely scribes Ovid and Gillian represent in An
Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others. Rather they are
presented as the voluntary or involuntary agents of a vast and
powerful machinery systematically employing writing as a means of
suppression and exploitation. This facilitates a criticism of Western
literate civilization much more poignant and searing than the general
querying of the intrinsic value of writing and book learning
undertaken in Aphrodite and the Others, An Imaginary Life, Heroes
and Villains, and, indirectly, also in The Inheritors. Whereas these
novels raise few concrete charges against literate civilization, the
narratives by Greene, Achebe, Coetzee, Grace, and Erdrich do. They
identify writing as an instrument of conquest, as a central means of
controlling, disowning, and transforming indigenous societies, of
corroding their oral traditions and in the process destroying their
integrity and cohesion, of destabilizing their value systems and
generating asymmetries and conflicts which effectively weaken their
The Non-Literate in Sight
167
defence against corruption and exploitation. While a perfectly

harmless and mostly well-meant exercise in Malouf and Bouras,
writing is configured as a profoundly dangerous and damaging
activity in The Heart of the Matter, Waiting for the Barbarians,
Things Fall Apart, Potiki, and Love Medicine. These novels grant
writing a power more devastating even than that of Dr Donallys
oddly perverted applications of literacy in Heroes and Villains. Unlike
Donallys graffiti, the writings Greene, Coetzee, Achebe, Grace, and
Erdrich have their most literate characters produce are officially
authorized by regimes taking great pride in their literacy, in fact
deriving moral justification and a claim to cultural superiority directly
from it.
It is in the first place to negate the legitimacy of the colonial
regimes they describe that the novels examined in the following
chapters call in question the assumed intrinsic goodness of the wellread and erudite individual. To this end, they persistently juxtapose
descriptions of their Western characters apparent sophistication with
scenes of utmost brutality. Offices and libraries become anterooms to,
if not themselves sites of torture and execution; would-be writers draw
inspiration from the sight of dead bodies; shrewd negotiators resort to
murderous assaults when their cleverly phrased letters fail to achieve
the results they desire. Predictably, the prime target of the acts of
aggression described is the scriptless native whose ultimate
destruction symbolizes the futility to resist the power of the written
word and encroaching culture it represents. Ali in The Heart of the
Matter, Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, and Toko in Potiki must die;
so must most of the barbarians in J.M. Coetzees novel; Nanapush in
Love Medicine loses his memory and, with his past, also any desire to
continue living.
The blatant injustice of their defeats turns the willing espousal of
literacy by other members of their community into a bitterly ironic
turn of events. Indeed it is exacerbated by the fact that despite their
obedient appropriation of literacy in an often painful process of
indoctrination and self-denial, the strategies of communication they
acquire never really enable them to assert their own rights. Their
erudition and learning do not help them to change the terms which
determine their negotiations with their exploiters. These terms always
remain those of the colonist, most obviously so in Potiki and Love
Medicine. As a result, the indigenous characters presented by Grace,
168
Erdrich, and Achebe as endorsing literacy end up in even greater

states of unease, beside which the ignorance of their still illiterate
fellow beings comes to appear almost like a blessing.
This does not mean that non-literacy is idealized unreservedly by
Erdrich, Grace, Coetzee, or Achebe, let alone by Greene. Rather it is
framed as a perfectly natural aspect of the African natives culture, an
aspect so natural that it begs no special description, analysis, or
justification. Only in the novels set in the later twentieth century, in
Potiki and Love Medicine, is the illiteracy of individual characters
specifically attributed to a conscious choice against the conventional
education supplied by a school system whose cardinal agenda is to
exorcize indigenous modes of thinking. Obviously, this information is
supplied solely for the sake of the uninitiated reader. The members of
the natives community do not need such explication. As Love
Medicine and Potiki suggest, for them to live without writing is not
only the original but also still the most effective form of enacting and
perpetuating their traditions. In their eyes non-writingness signifies a
rare form of cultural purity that endows certain members of their
community with the unique ability to engage in a mystical communion
with their land.
Because the literate natives in Erdrichs and Graces novel have
lost the ability to engage in such a communion, only the illiterate may
claim to be firmly rooted in those places which have not yet been
permeated by writing, those realms not yet seized by inscription or
occupied by zealous scribes and readers. To different degrees The
Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, Waiting for the Barbarians,
Potiki, and Love Medicine therefore rely on settings well outside the
habitat of their literate characters, places devoid of books and paper,
retreats from locations crammed with papers and books, hiding places
in which the non-literate may still move at will, undisturbed by the
ethnographers curious gaze. There the literates vision invariably
becomes blurred, distorted, confused. The ways of seeing to which the
still occasional literate intruders are accustomed fail them, generating
severely flawed images of the land and its people. The reflection of
the face of a Mende boy in the rear mirror of a car, the mirage of a
group of nomads made indistinct by the flickering heat, the sight of a
decomposing body unaccountably hanging from a tree are what the
confused literates eyes take in as they traverse such land in The Heart
of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, Waiting for the Barbarians, or Love
169
Medicine. On the colonists journeys the non-literate Chippewa,

Maori, Igbo, or Mende remains invisible in the darkness, epitomizing
darkness invisible.
In linking the physical expansion of Western literacy directly with
the seizure of native land by Western colonists and with the
continuing usurpation of what little land has remained in native hands
by the white elite of former colonial societies, Greene, Coetzee,
Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich extend and complicate the received story
of the dissemination of the alphabet. Jared Diamond synopsizes this
story as follows:
Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized
political organization as a modern agent of conquest. The commands
of the monarchs and merchants who organized colonizing fleets were
conveyed in writing. The fleets set their courses by maps and written
sailing directions prepared by previous expeditions. Written accounts
of earlier expeditions motivated later ones, by describing the wealth
and fertile lands awaiting the conquerors. The accounts taught
subsequent explorers what conditions to expect, and helped them
prepare themselves. The resulting empires were administered with the
aid of writing. While all those types of information were also
transmitted by other means in preliterate societies writing made the
transmission easier, more detailed, more accurate, more persuasive.2
The novels studied in this section cast severe doubt on the alleged
improvement of existing information flows and on the expediency of
initiating preliterate societies to what Diamond holds to be more
detailed, more accurate, more persuasive modes of knowledge
transfer. At the same time they do not negate the need for native
communities to endorse literacy. Their own writtenness is the most
unequivocal sign that their agenda is not a nostalgic romanticization of
native orality. Rather it is to advocate the invention of new
applications of writing opposed to the uses to which the written word
is put by colonial and neo-colonial powers. Greene, for instance,
devises a mode of ironic self-deconstruction whereby the point of
view of his main character is effectively invalidated to such an extent
that even this characters reading of the death of his Mende boy Ali
seems to command retrospective re-interpretation. Coetzee radicalizes
2
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years, London, 1998, 215-16.
170
this strategy by hinting at the possibility that the literates in his novel
(including the narrator) may have underestimated their enemies (the
dreaded barbarians) intellectual scope all along and failed to realize
that these barbarians possess a writing system so intricate that no
Westerner is able to access it. The implicit and profoundly ironical
empowering and literalization of the native thus performed by Coetzee
in Waiting for the Barbarians points in the direction of what Grace,
Erdrich, and Achebe try to accomplish with their emphatic validation
of native orality as an enduring aspect of their cultures and with their
simultaneous construction of these cultures as highly flexible
frameworks, inherently suited to adopt literate communication.
Indeed, the special way in which Achebe, Erdrich, and Grace
render and employ orality in Things Fall Apart, Love Medicine, and
Potiki suggests far more than a straightforward adoption of or
adaptation to a Western technology of knowledge storage and transfer.
Their texts project their peoples appropriation of literacy not only as
a self-preservative measure but also as a form of cultural enrichment
and renewal. They invite an understanding of writing as opening up
new ways of articulating Igbo, Maori, and Chippewa oralities, thereby
broadening the spectrum of positions their people may assume vis-vis their own and other cultures. As much as critics have been talking
of a distinctly African, Maori, or Chippewa literary mode having been
conceived by Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich, as appropriate it seems to
speak of new oralities literate oralities or oracities crystallizing
in their writings. The synthesis of different noetic systems they forge
in their novels can be shown to enable the authors in the first place to
realize their declared aim to address not so much an international
audience as their own people and provide for them a new context in
which to share and negotiate the experience of their native cultures. It
is only as a secondary goal that they challenge other audiences to
understand and respect this context also in material terms as cultural
space retrieved from colonial usurpation.
EARLY CONTACTS IN FICTIONAL AFRICA
The three novels to be discussed in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 rely equally

on the vantage point of an official representative of colonial power (a
white male bureaucrat in each case) from whose point of view the
non-literate natives portrayed are ultimately Othered. In the process
the intrinsic writtenness of the individual narratives is asserted against
the scriptless orality these narratives address, even if in significantly
dissimilar ways. It is primarily for this commonality that The Heart of
the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting for the Barbarians are
juxtaposed here. Of course, the fact that all three texts are also set (or
at least readable as being set1) in Africa is no mere coincidence either.
This analogy, however, is qualified by the radically different angles
from which Greene, Achebe, and Coetzee represent Africa.
The Heart of the Matter is the literary outcome of Graham
Greenes service for the Foreign Office in Freetown, Sierra Leone,
during the Second World War. Greenes cardinal aim in this novel is
to provide an authentic rendering of the community of European
expatriates stationed in West Africa at the time and of their complete
and utter lack of understanding of things and people African.
Accordingly, Greene largely eclipses the African people from his
narrative and minimizes descriptions of their land and their culture.
By contrast, in Things Fall Apart it is the British colonists whom the
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe strategically marginalizes in favour of
his African characters, their traditions, tales, and experiences. As he
himself has repeatedly noted, the novel was spawned by a profound
sense of discontent with the racist inscriptions of Africans propagated
by European writers such as Joseph Conrad or Joyce Cary.2 The image
of Igbo culture Achebe offers in Things Fall Apart breaks with the
conceptualization of Africa these writers seem to recommend. Not
only is it founded on a pronouncedly non-European perspective; it
also conveys a distinctive sense of appreciation of African culture
with the intention of injecting a new feeling of self-worth in African
audiences and to teach them, as Achebe puts it, that their past with
all its imperfections was not one long night of savagery from which
the first Europeans acting on Gods behalf delivered them.3 Finally,
in Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee submits yet another
reading of what he does not explicitly identify as Africa and the
1
The unspecific setting of Waiting for the Barbarians allows also a different
interpretation.
2
He says so, for instance, in Home and Exile under the special heading Mister
Johnsons Countryman (Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile, New York, 2001, 18-35).
3
Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, London, 1975, 44-45.
174
African native. It is hardly surprising that as a white South African of

Dutch origin, who had studied and worked in Europe and the US
before he became a writer,4 Coetzee, too, should choose to recount the
colonization of a native people from the point of view of an outsider, a
go-between at best, not at all unlike the protagonist of The Heart of
the Matter. Yet while Waiting for the Barbarians, like Greenes novel,
criticizes the brutal indifference of a colonial establishment to the
colonized Other, it does not simply individualize this indifference and
locate it only in certain of its characters. Coetzee goes further and
identifies the inhumanity of the individual colonizers he portrays as
the workings of a sinister propaganda machine systematically
suppressing any understanding between colonizer and colonized.
Despite the different angles from which Coetzee, Achebe, and
Greene develop their stories of cultural contact and, as part of these
stories, their accounts of Western literates meeting non-literate natives
and vice versa, all three authors can be shown to react, consciously or
not, to the standard perception of sub-Saharan Africa as untouched by
literacy until the advent of the Europeans. Coetzee in particular does
so not without remembering that this assumption is flawed. Already in
the eighth century, literacy came to sub-Saharan Africa with the
Berbers, who were the first to make the trek across the Sahara and
subsequently converted many of the merchants of West Africa to
Islam. It is true, however, that the masses of rural peasants retained
their traditional beliefs and stayed unlettered. In the eleventh century,
Islamic conversion was given new impetus by a Tuareg group of
Muslim puritans, the Almoravid intervention. They caused the spread
of Arabic writing as far as the Ghana Empire, from where it was
diffused into the interior of Africa via the learning centres in Djenne
and Timbuktu in Mali during the fifteenth century. Eventually the
Arabic alphabet was adapted for Swahili, the lingua franca of central
and East Africa in the nineteenth century. On the east coast of Africa,
literacy was also disseminated by Arab traders and slavers from the
Or, as Huggan and Watson put it, as a first-world novelist writing out of a
South African context, from within a culture which is as bizarre and conflicted an
amalgam of first- and third-world elements as any of this planet (Graham Huggan
and Stephen Watson, Introduction, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds
Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, with a Preface by Nadine Gordimer,
Houndmills, 1996, 1).
Early Contacts in Africa
175
seventh century onwards although never becoming particularly

popular there either.
Christian literacy was first introduced in Africa by Greek-speaking
Syrian missionaries in the fourth century AD. They brought the
ancient script of the Semitic-speaking Sabaeans to Ethiopia, where it
has remained the official writing system to the present day. Christians
resumed missionary work in Africa only in the second half of the
nineteenth century and it was then that printing commenced in Africa.
Like Arabic literacy, knowledge of the Latin alphabet remained
restricted to a small part of the native population in pre-industrial
Africa, namely, as Ngugi reminds us, to clerks, soldiers, policemen,
and the petty civil servant, the nascent messenger class.5 By the early
1920s the Roman script had replaced Ajami, a variation of the Arabic
script used for Hausa in West Africa. At the same time it came to be
commonly used for Swahili in East Africa. Still, the economic
importance of mass literacy was not recognized until after Europes
colonies began to attain independence.
This also accounts for the limited success of a series of ingenious
attempts made during the nineteenth century to invent special writing
systems for individual African peoples. The scripts created in the
process were not mere imitations of the Arabic and Latin alphabets
but genuine endeavours to demonstrate abilities equal to those of
Western settlers, traders, teachers, missionaries, and administrators.
Though popular, these systems served communities without true
political power and therefore soon disappeared again.6 One case in
point is Vai, an indigenous West African form of writing used on the
coast of upper Guinea. The Vai script is believed to have been
invented between 1829 and 1839 by Momoru Doalu Bukere, who,
legend has it, had come into contact with missionaries, learnt to
admire their habit of communicating over great distances, and
resolved to conceive of a means that would allow his people to do the
same. With similar determination an African tailor is said to have
devoted himself to the fabrication of a script for the Mende, which he
allegedly accomplished in the period of three and a half months.
Together with some of his dignitaries, King Njoya of Cameroon,
finally, contrived Bamum, had it taught in special schools and book
5
Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature, Studies in African Literature New Series, London, 1981, 67.
6
Gaur, 94.
176
houses throughout the country, and encouraged its application in

official documents, histories, correspondence, and Bible translation.
After his death in 1932, this script too disappeared.
The failures of the scripts of the Vai and the Mende, of Bamum
and of Nsibidi, an iconographic Igbo script, are indicative of the
enduring strength of the orally transmitted cosmologies of African
societies. The diversity of African languages and the cohesive force of
African oral traditions seem to have always prevented the kind of
homogenizing process Europe saw in the course of its transformation
into a full-blown print civilization. The chirographically organized
and, in Marshall McLuhans terms, visually biased European
colonizers clearly were unaware of the obstacle that the plurality of
African oralities constituted to a swift and comprehensive
alphabetization of the continent. Apparently deaf to the multiplicity of
African voices and blind to the difficulties which the forced
imposition of Western literate thinking created for Africans, they
confidently adhered to the conviction that writing was a desirable and
beneficial accomplishment easily bestowed on the African native.
The error of this judgment is a recurrent concern in African
writing. Though rarely stated explicitly in Things Fall Apart, the
threat of European literacy encroaching on African life and its
damaging effects on native oral culture looms large in Achebes
novel. The unnaturalness of its implementation in Africa is also
addressed in The Heart of the Matter as well as in Waiting for the
Barbarians. Despite their own dependence on writing as a tool of
artistic articulation, Greene and Coetzee, too, comment on writing
most critically in these two novels, stressing the destructive ends to
which it is employed in the colonial enterprise. Neither in Things Fall
Apart nor in The Heart of the Matter or in Waiting for the Barbarians
is writing used for mediation between colonizers and colonized. Its
function appears to be solely as a means of systematic and sustained
alienation.
At first glance, this negative view seems to derive historical
plausibility from the historical (or, in the case of Waiting for the
Barbarians, from the pseudo-historical) settings of the novels. All
three narratives take place at times or in situations clearly predating
any creative appropriation of writing by the colonized or postcolonial
native. This conveniently allows for any more positive application of
writing to be categorically eclipsed. Yet at least in the case of Achebe
177
and Coetzee this omission has to be seen also in another light. For it
stands in direct contrast to the thoroughly optimistic assumptions
concerning Africas literalization underlying contemporary theoretical
debates over the benefits of Europes influence on African cultures.
Conducted mainly by African writers and scholars of literature, this
debate has revolved above all around the legacy of European
languages, notably of English, and of their adequacy as means of
forging modern African literatures. The views advanced famously
diverge in opposing directions. Calls to dispense with the linguistic
bequest of [their] colonial master altogether and write exclusively in
an African language, as formulated by Ngugi, have been countered by
assertions that the African writer ought to aim at fashioning out an
English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar
experience.7
One of the most remarkable features of the debate is the
commitment of all contesting parties to the creation of an African
literature first and foremost for the African people, in actual fact, for
the African masses, and not for an international audience. While Irele,
Wali, Achebe, and Ngugi alike doubt whether writing in English is
ideally suited to reach the African masses, they do not seem interested
in the question whether writing per se is an appropriate means to this
end. They appear unconcerned by the fact that the African masses can
barely be appealed to either in English or in their own tongues as long
as illiteracy rates in most sub-Saharan African countries stay as high
as fifty per cent and higher.8 Ngugi wa Thiongo, for instance, is
optimistic that the African peasantry could derive the same confidence
and sense of cohesion from literature written in African languages that
the petty-bourgeoisie derived from the hybrid minority tradition of
African-European writing.9
Admittedly the spectacular success of Ngugis novel Petals of
Blood illustrates how even texts written for literate reception can be
7
See also Wole Ogundele, Language, Theory, and Modern African Literature:
Some More Questions, in Meditations on African Literature, ed. Dubem Okafor, 1734.
8
UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Illiteracy Rates by Gender in Sub-Saharan
Africa: 2000-2004 (20-08-2003): www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=4927_201&ID2=
DO_TOPIC.
9
Ngugi, 21. Ngugi even asks at one point, Could I write for an audience that had
never read a novel in the same way as I would write for an audience that had read or
was aware of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Wole Soyinka or Ayi KweiArmah? (75).
178
made accessible to larger non-literate audiences by oral

transmission.10 Despite its vital importance as a specifically African
aesthetic system, oral transmission can, however, barely be relied
upon to guarantee the dissemination of African writing. Nor can its
theorization explain away more mundane impediments to the growth
of the African literatures, such as the smallness of the African book
market, the scarcity of publishing houses, the lack of distribution
outlets, the high cost of books, or the reduced support of African
writers by multinational publishing firms.11 On the contrary, the
Marxist vision of literature as a mass medium underlying the
arguments put forward by African intellectuals ultimately seems to
allow no deeper understanding of the elitist nature of literary discourse
and the exclusion of the African masses from it than do the colonial
inscriptions of Africa in opposition to which this vision has been
forged.
It is for this reason that Abdul JanMohamed objects to the
continuing controversy over the suitability of the English as a vehicle
of African identity. The question African theorists and writers have
failed to ask, he argues, is whether the medium of writing can at all
do justice to the scriptlessness of African societies. Doing justice
to this scriptlessness, for JanMohamed, means first of all representing
the oral/mythic African cultures authentic[ally], that is, in the way
experienced by oral people and peoples, rather than from a
10
The channels by which Petals of Blood as well as A Grain of Wheat reached

also unlettered Kenyans are used even more effectively in Ngugis first Gikuyu novel,
Devil on the Cross, which assumes an implied audience of hearers, rather than
readers (Oliver Lovesey, Accommodation and Revolt: Ngugi wa Thiongos Devil
on the Cross, in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Anna Rutherford,
Sydney, 1992, 155; see also V.S. Srinivas, Politicizing Language: The Relevance of
Ngugis Rejection of English, in Indian Response to African Writing, eds A.
Ramakrishna Rao and C.R. Visweswara Rao, New Delhi, 1993, 102, and James
Vuiningoma, Literacy and Orality in African Literature: The Case of Ngugi wa
Thiongo, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, IX/2 [Spring 1987], 65-70).
11
See Christopher Miller, Literary Studies and African Literature: The Challenge
of Intercultural Literacy, in Africa and the Disciplines, eds Robert Bates, V.Y.
Mudimbe, and Jean OBarr, Chicago, 1993, 224, as well as Bernth Lindfors,
Disciplinary Concerns, in Long Drums and Canons: Teaching and Researching
African Literatures, African World Press, 1995, 127, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, Oral
Power and Europhone Glory: Orature, Literature, and Stolen Legacies, in Penpoints,
Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in
Africa, Oxford, 1998, 117.
179
Eurocentric and thus distinctively literate angle.12 Further, for

JanMohamed, doing justice to African cultures also entails
rendering European literacy from outside to document and insistently
highlight the foreignness still pertaining to originally European literate
practices when applied in an African context.
As the following readings will show, it is precisely this foreignness
that Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, and J.M. Coetzee express, albeit
in radically dissimilar ways, in The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall
Apart, and Waiting for the Barbarians. While in The Heart of the
Matter, a text set in Africa, yet written neither by an African nor for
an African audience, the Othering of Western literate thinking is not
an openly pursued goal, in Things Fall Apart, told almost entirely
from the point of view of Africans who have never had any contact
with Europeans, it certainly is. Yet rather than deconstructing its own
writtenness, Achebes narrative accomplishes the other part of the
project of doing justice to African cultures envisaged by
JanMohamed: with his familiarization of Igbo orality in Things Fall
Apart, Achebe effectively creates a matrix against which the
colonialist literate practices introduced in the final part of the narrative
have to be perceived as unfamiliar, foreign, alien, and alienating.
Coetzee, finally, ventures beyond Greenes criticism of Western
culture by exposing the inadequacy of imperialist inscriptions of
indigenousness, and even stating the implication of his own text in this
inscription. Indigenous orality, it seems, is not an issue in Waiting for
the Barbarians. The natives in this text are profoundly silent. Yet it is
clear that their silence is a sign not of their muteness but the result of
their epistemic colonization through the act of representation. More
overtly than the other two novels, then, Coetzees text questions itself
for attempting to contain in writing what exists well outside the realm
of the written.
12
JanMohamed, 19.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BUT A GLIMPSE IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR:
THE UNINTELLIGIBLE NATIVE IN
GRAHAM GREENES THE HEART OF THE MATTER
In his travel book Journey Without Maps, Greene describes Liberia as

a country saved from melodrama by its irony. In an essay on
Graham Greene, David Lodge notes that the same might be said of
Greenes own fiction. The Heart of the Matter, one of Greenes most
successful novels, can legitimately be classed as a melodramatic text
in Lodges terms because it frames the tragic fall of the protagonist
Henry Scobie, a Catholic Commissioner of Police in a British West
African Colony, as the inevitable outcome of an almost grotesque
accumulation of transgressions, such as adultery, blackmail, murder,
and suicide, events dramatic enough in isolation but exacerbated in
Greenes text by their concurrence and the fact that they happen
against the backdrop of the Second World War. As Lodge notes, the
irony of The Heart of the Matter resides in the way Greene directs the
readers sympathy and antipathy in the course of his narrative. As in
other novels by Greene one is led to identify not with the honest and
brave, but with the criminal and cowardly; not with the rich and
beautiful, but with the poor and ugly.1 This is not absolutely clear
from the beginning, though, when the central character of the novel,
with whom the reader is invited to empathize, is introduced as a model
of integrity and human kindness, sensitive to everyones problems,
diplomatic in his application of authority, caring towards his
dependants.
Yet Scobies goodness proves a far more complex character trait
than is apparent at the outset. This is revealed through his
understanding of himself in relation to his expatriates and of their selfconscious enactment of British culture. At closer analysis one notes
that it is above all by their attitude to writing in general and to British
literature in particular that Greene defines each of his protagonists
positions within the text. In so doing he accomplishes not simply a
1
As pointed out by David Lodge in Graham Greene, in Six Contemporary

British Novelists, ed. George Stade, New York, 1976, 9.
182
The Non-Literate in Sight: Early Contacts
privileging of his most literate characters, which Elizabeth Schafer

regards as the main purpose of Greenes insistent description of items
containing writing and of events in which writing is produced,
delivered, read, quoted, burnt, or shredded.2 In actual fact, Greene can
be shown to be highly critical of the special kind of book learning
displayed by his minor characters. He questions it from the point of
view of Scobie, who expressly distances himself from the other
Europeans in the novel and from their literary airs, declaring fairly
early in the novel that he has no interest in literature and no taste for
reading,3 least of all for poetry. All he has, the reader learns, is a
prose mind (HM, 240) unsuited to understand his wifes literary
ambitions and obligations. Given to reading faces rather than books,
Scobie knows that even if there were a book he could consult on his
wifes peculiar aspirations he would not be any wiser for it because he
would never even bother to read that sort of book (HM, 253).
On the whole, Scobie sees little use for writing other than as a
means of documenting his dutiful execution of the orders he has been
given. Indeed, the commissioner rarely applies his awkward hand
outside his office. For letter-writing, he believes, does not come
easily to him, and his police training, the reader is told, has taught
him never to put even a comforting lie upon paper over his signature
(HM, 141). Moreover, because of his open dislike, if not contempt, for
any show of feelings, Scobie scrupulously avoids disclosing his own
sentiments in written form. His distrust of the harmlessness of writing
as a vehicle of truth is not ungrounded. As Elliott Malamet correctly
points out, instances abound in The Heart of the Matter of writing
obscuring and concealing, rather than revealing its own meaning:
letters are misspelled or lost or stolen; cables informing Scobie about
the illness and subsequent death of his daughter are sent in reverse
order; official government telegrams are contradicted by other
telegrams; Scobies diaries are terse and cryptic; as Yusef say, Words
are very complicated.4
Elizabeth Schafer, Shakespeare in Greeneland: A Note on The Heart of the

Matter, Journal of Modern Literature, XVII/4 (Spring 1991), 590.
3
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948), Penguin, 1962, 72.
4
Elliott Malamet, Penning the Police/Policing the Pen: The Case of Graham
Greenes The Heart of the Matter, Twentieth Century Literature, XXXIX/3 (Fall
1993), 297.
But a Glimpse in the Rear View Mirror
183
By contrast, Scobies expatriates seem perfectly reconciled to the

distortions of meaning effected by writing and make ample use of its
deceptive power, not without often enough succumbing to it
themselves. With enthusiasm they engage in literate practices other
than the mundane activities to which Scobie devotes himself in his
office, such as writing letters, cables, diaries, reports, and notes. Their
commitment is to what they deem higher concerns. They avidly read,
discuss, and write poetry, go to the theatre, consume English novels
shipped over from Britain, and partake in the events launched by the
local library club, thus helping to build an enclave of European culture
safely fenced off against the foreignness of the place in which they
have come to live and cultivated their eccentric bookishness.
Moreover, to underline the omnipresence of European literate
civilization in the West African colony, Greene has the households
and offices of his characters stacked with printed matter of all kinds:
books wiped daily to avoid the damp (HM, 22), daybooks bound in
pig skin (HM, 168), codebooks used for the translation of cables (HM,
168), books on African languages, books on African and other
diseases (HM, 44), maps of the African continent. It is indeed a
claustrophobic intensity5 Greene generates by simulating his
European characters insularity and carefully omitting any
descriptions of the culture of his African characters at the same time.
However, the predominance of things British in the fictional world
outlined in The Heart of the Matter belies the fragility of the fabric of
cultural contacts and exchanges woven by Louise Scobie and
likeminded English men and women. Greene enforces this impression
with his insistent emphasis on the intrinsic foreignness of English
books and libraries in Africa, on the difficulties of their transportation
from England, and on their vulnerability to the African climate,
censorship, and accidental neglect. The most dismal scene of abandon
he invokes occurs on Scobies visit to the home of a young
Englishman who has committed suicide. There Scobie finds books
stained with damp, papers dusty with inattention, and a
missionary filled with remorse because he declined the dead mans
invitation to share his books with him (HM, 87-88). This, the
missionary ponders, might have prevented Pemberton from killing
himself. Yet he was reluctant to supply the desired companionship
5
Grahame Smith, The Achievement of Graham Greene, Brighton, 1986, 92.
184
because Pembertons books were not at all the kind of books he

cares to read love stories, novels (HM, 86). Scobie does not
condemn the missionary for his omission but offers no words of
consolation either. For him, Father Clay is as guilty of the crime of
indifference as the other eagerly literary characters around him.6
One of these is his wife, literary Louise, the city intellectual
(HM, 31), as she is called derisively by others for organizing an
exhibition of arts for shipwrecked seamen. Louise is known to like
arts and poetry, and contemplates becoming a professional and
turning all this experience she thinks she has accumulated while
living in Africa into a little money by writing (HM, 24). Apart from
Louise there is Mrs Halifax, keen organizer of library nights and so
forgetful that she reads the same novels over and over again without
knowing it (HM, 28). And there is Louises ardent admirer Wilson
who professes that he does not read poetry but absorbs it secretly,
like a drug, consumes The Golden Treasury with gusto at night,
especially Longfellow, Macaulay, and Mangan, and who uses Wallace
for public exhibition (HM, 12). It is these characters apparent
passion for literature that Greene criticizes as a profoundly insincere
pose assumed to compensate for their complete lack of interest in
Africa. Scobie, who has come to know and love Africa and to
appreciate the Africans mentality, doubts whether, to people like
Louise and Wilson, truth has ever been of any real value. Rather, he
suspects, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths (HM, 58) for
them. He winces at the banality of their sentimental and pretentiously
poetic language, feels lost in the tangle of lies into which they force
him, and gives up all hope that he will ever meet somebody amongst
his expatriates whom he can, for once, take at their word (HM, 186).
Thus estranged by his fellow-country men and women, Scobie
places his trust in the only two Africans of dramatic significance in the
novel: in his Mende houseboy Ali and, even more so, in the Syrian
tradesman Yusef. In so doing he unwittingly undertakes a move across
cultural borders, which eventually proves a fatal mistake. Ali and
Yusef are inserted into the narrative separately and it is only towards
the very end that the link Greene develops and sustains between them
throughout the novel becomes apparent. Only then can the reader see
that the fact that both characters are illiterate is more than a
6
J.A. Atkins, Graham Greene, London, 1966, 115.
185
coincidence. Their inability to read and write is used as an index of

their marginalized position in the society portrayed by Greene as well
as of their detachment from Scobies Catholicism.7 To this end their
illiteracy is translated also into a textual marginality insofar as neither
character is fully developed and none of their tales completely told.
Apart from these similarities there are important differences
between Ali and Yusef. While Yusef deeply resents his pariah status
and constantly and emphatically complains about it, Ali silently and
with apparent contentment enacts his role of Scobies dependant.
While Alis illiteracy is taken for granted and therefore remains
unmentioned until shortly before his death, Yusefs is insistently
invoked by the tradesman himself, who likes to remind Scobie that,
because he cannot write, no one will ever be able to hold any written
proof of his illicit machinations against him. Nothing is ever on
paper. Everything is always in my head (HM, 92), he keeps stressing.
Not surprisingly, darkness is Yusefs natural element. It is almost
always at night that he makes his entrances either to catch Scobie in
his sleep or to be caught sleeping. Scobies encounters with the Syrian
invariably involve an awakening, someones transition from one state
of consciousness into another, always happening too late to forestall
the deception Yusef has contrived.
The brilliant schemer Yusef who outwits all and sundry, who can
quote Shakespeare as well as Syrian poetry, who has a sound
knowledge of the Bible, and who speaks English fluently seems a
most unlikely illiterate. Indeed, his cunning renders him suspiciously
similar to the well-read Wilson, of whom the reader learns that his
greatest skill is to spy on people, discover their secrets, and use them
against his adversaries (HM, 75). Yusef resorts to exactly the same
stratagems in which Wilson excels and employs them with the same
ruthlessness in a desperate attempt to win the affection of others. The
person whose friendship Yusef most desires and courts is Scobie. Yet
the commissioner remains unresponsive to Yusefs advances, thereby
hurting the Syrians pride and provoking him to ultimately vent his
frustration on Ali. The transference of his aggression onto Scobies
boy is only a logical consequence of his deviousness. Even when he
arranges for Ali to be killed by his henchmen he does so under the
7
As the names Ali and Yusef suggest, Scobies houseboy might be Muslim
and the Syrian tradesman, Jewish. Yet, nowhere in the novel is their denomination
explicitly identified.
186
pretext of doing Scobie a service and disposing of a servant Scobie

can no longer trust.
What is mere pretence in Yusef seems genuine in Ali, the
protagonists faithful servant of fifteen years and innocent victim of
Yusefs and Scobies warped relationship. His sudden death
effectively canonizes Ali in establishing his moral superiority not only
to his murderer but also to his master, one of whose worst sins
consists in his failure to acknowledge and believe in Alis loyalty.
This failure proves symptomatic of Scobies general loss of faith, his
growing scepticism in what once formed the foundation of his belief.
Scobies suspicion of Ali is exposed as ungrounded by way of
references to Alis integrity, the most explicit of which is provided in
the chapter relating Scobies and Alis excursion to a colonial outpost
to investigate Pembertons suicide, in which Yusef seems curiously
implicated. On this excursion, Scobie feels transported back to the old
days when he would go on treck with no one but Ali. For a moment
in his nostalgic reverie, Scobie looks up and into Alis beaming face
and is overcome by a sense that this was all he needed of love or
friendship. He could be happy with no more in the world than this ...
(HM, 84-85). The brief moment of bliss, however, is soon forgotten.
For unlike Yusef, Ali is in no position to remind Scobie of their bond
and appeal to him for his trust. His presence is as unobtrusive and
reliable as a figure on the clock that records the striking of the hours
(HM, 100).
In all the years as Scobies servant, Ali quietly retains a marked
aloofness from his master, as he does from all the other British
colonists. His distance from the foreigners ruling his country is
underscored by his broken English, by his indifference to the
Westerners intellectual pursuits, and by an illiteracy totally unlike
Yusefs, an illiteracy to which Ali seems perfectly reconciled.
Accordingly it is not from Ali himself but from Scobie that the reader
learns about it. In contrast to Yusefs emphatic affirmations of his
cultural otherness, the information is given only once and briefly
when Yusef asks Scobie to send Ali a message. But Ali cant read,
Scobie retorts and Yusef rejoices at the prospect of carrying out his
deadly plan yet again without having to generate any written trace of
his own involvement. What he does not reckon with is that at the
moment of his death Ali will be break his silence and that in the face
of Alis death Scobie will regain faith in his boys loyalty and repent
187
his betrayal. It is thus that the dying Ali robs his adversary of any
remaining chance of winning Scobies friendship.
The images Greene invokes as he translates the cry with which Ali
ends his life into writing are worth noting:
Through the window behind Yusefs head, from somewhere among
the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam
up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of
the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of
wastepaper, a discarded finished cry. (HM, 246)
Alis is clearly not a cry to enter written records, as are the other cries
of his countrymen, which keep ringing throughout the novel without
being noticed. There is the implicit suggestion that Alis silence is the
Africans voice, the scriptless natives orality as perceived by his
colonizers. Deaf to the sound of tongues other than their own these
colonizers do not know how to register, let alone take written note of
the screams that reach their ears. Alis animalistic cry falls under a
desk into a wastepaper basket, is discarded and forgotten. Yusefs
eloquent but ultimately ineffective babble likewise ends with a
pathetic apprehensive yelp, completely ignored by Scobie rushing to
Alis help.
The narratives silencing of Ali as well as of Yusef corresponds
with Greenes systematic occlusion of African voices and his
omission of any description of African orality from his text. So
thoroughgoing is this omission that the narratives setting appears
exchangeable by any other location with a history of British
domination. As a result of this Ali and Yusef are readable as
archetypal colonial subjects with no distinctive cultural profile, let
alone with a history that can be reconstructed from the narratives
superstructure. Their main function is to support Scobies
development thematically and structurally. Once they have fulfilled
this purpose, they make staggeringly swift exits from the text. All
Scobie finds as he follows Alis piercing cry is his boys dead body
lying in an empty warehouse coiled and unimportant like a broken
watch-spring under a pile of empty petrol drums. Scobie registers
Alis slashed neck and Alis yellow eyeballs staring up at him like a
strangers, flecked with red. So complete is Alis departure that
Scobie cannot help feeling as if this body had cast him off, disowned
him I know you not (HM, 247). Even prior to this, Greene has
188
Yusef literally get away with the murder as he curtly announces the
Syrians escape with the words: That was the last Scobie ever saw of
Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the
moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses (HM,
246).
In the second half of the twentieth century especially, this strategy
of relegating the natives of his non-European settings to the
background of his novels earned Greene the charge of Eurocentric
prejudice.8 Legitimate as this charge may be from an orthodox
postcolonial perspective, it still seems worth noting that precisely
because texts like The Heart of the Matter eclipse the non-British
Other so systematically, they also allow the interpretation that they
exhibit at least implicitly a certain level of awareness of their own
limitations as writings that fail to capture an utterly alien Other. For
Greene, that Others foreignness is not just a sub-conscious projection
of the colonialists mind9 but poses a real epistemological dilemma as
it confronts the colonizer with the impossibility for any literate to ever
fully grasp a self that is not literate. Arguably, therefore, Greenes
novel not only exemplifies the unsuitability of Western literary
conventions for the inscription of such an Other. The Heart of the
Matter constructs this unsuitability as part of its protagonists
predicament, which ultimately forces Scobie to acknowledge his own
entrapment within literate traditions and within a far too literate mode
of thinking.
Upon the realization that he himself is irrevocably implicated in
Western civilization and in British modes of perception and reflection,
Scobie resolves to kill himself. Accordingly, the way Scobie sets
about preparing his own exit (from the text and from life) can be
interpreted as a last desperate attempt of the protagonist to free
himself from his own dogged belief in the written word. Not without
reason, the actual act of writing plays an important role in this
attempt: Towards the closure of the novel, Greene describes Scobie as
being consumed by an almost pathological determination to stage his
8
For a commentary on this vein of Greene criticism, see Bernard Schweizer,

Graham Greene and the Politics of Travel, Prose Studies: History, Theory,
Criticism, XXI/1 (April 1998), 95-96.
9
Or, as Schweizer puts it, the suggestion of A figurative substitute for a region
of [the] self that is not easily accessible by cognitive operations of the mind (ibid.,
101).
189
death as the consequence of a fatal illness. To this end, he begins to

manipulate his until then scrupulously truthful records. Thus Scobie at
last appropriates the way in which the other British in the novel make
use of the written medium deceptively, as a means of distorting
reality. Both the extremity of this action and its futility (in spite of his
efforts, Wilson in the end discovers that Scobie did not die from a
natural cause) contribute to a retrospective distancing from the novels
protagonist. Evelyn Waugh does not seem to consider this distancing a
deliberate move as he wrote in an early review of The Heart of the
Matter: To me the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of
God is either a very loose poetical expression or a bad blasphemy, for
the God who accepted that sacrifice would be neither just nor
loveable.10
Waughs emphasis on the theological implications of Scobies
resolution to kill himself and his open rejection of the act per se as an
acceptable conclusion to the novel suggests a failure to register
Greenes own criticism of his main character, a failure to be repeated
in the reception of The Heart of the Matter almost throughout the
twentieth century. As Elizabeth Schafer notes, Despite Scobies
outrageous assumption that he can take responsibility when no one
else can, and despite his pride not only in his responsibility for others
but also in his ability to damage them, critics often seem to be more
sympathetic toward Scobie than Greene himself is.11 To Schafer,
Scobies inordinate pride and rashness, his impulsiveness and lack
of introspection liken him both to Hotspur and Coriolanus and
therefore forbid a reading of his suicide simply as a human solution
to the feeling that life is unliveable.12 It is only because Greenes
allusions to Shakespeare are invariably too intricate for his audience to
identify, Schafer contends, that his narratives gradual investment of
Scobie with villainous features tends to escape the reader.
Yet it is not only to enhance Scobies ambivalent nature that
Greene inserts strategically encoded references to Shakespeare into
the narrative fabric of The Heart of the Matter. Important though these
references appear in foregrounding the protagonists personal
weaknesses, they seem even more significant as markers of the kind of
10
Waugh, quoted in Peter Mudford, Graham Greene, Writers and Their Work,
Plymouth, 1996, 35.
11
Schafer, 588.
12
Mudford, 36.
190
insufficiencies which Greene detects in British civilization in general,

especially in British civilization transplanted to a foreign context and
imposed onto other peoples.13 One could almost go as far as reading
Greenes use of Shakespeare in The Heart of the Matter as an
extremely witty and superbly ironic emulation of the way Shakespeare
is traded in the West African colony described in the novel. Such a
reading of course contradicts Schafers argument that Greene expects
his readers to be both interested in the literary world in all its
manifestations and able to make connections across a wide-ranging
field of reference, in other words to be the sort of literature
connoisseurs Louise Scobie and Wilson so convincingly represent.
Rather it encourages the conclusion that it is for this particular type
of reader that Greene deliberately reserves a special element of
disillusionment as he confronts them with the destructive
presumptuousness of Louises and Wilsons literacy. Even if The
Heart of the Matter finally dissociates itself from its protagonist by
identifying his doubts as those of a deeply disturbed mind and
attributing his predicament to a severe emotional disorder, thereby
rescuing its own reliability as a kind of literary psychograph, it does
not in the end turn to propagating the cultural position of the
archetypal colonists Wilson and Louise. After all, it is with a
considerable amount of self-irony that the novel itself asserts its
resistance to the temptation to venture outside the secure domain of
literate epistemology, as its protagonist does, in the mad expectation
to comprehend the African Other.
13
Schafer, 589.
CHAPTER NINE
ARRIVALS ON A BICYCLE: THE UNINTELLIGIBLE COLONIST IN
CHINUA ACHEBES THINGS FALL APART
The familiarization or de-othering1 of the African native which one
seeks in vain in Greenes narrative, is accomplished in Things Fall
Apart, published in 1958, ten years after The Heart of the Matter.
Achebes novel is set not in a complexly literate context but in a
complexly oral one. While in The Heart of the Matter it is the nonliterate African Other that looms in the background, threatening to
bring down the hero in the end, in Things Fall Apart, it is the literate,
in fact, the highly literate European whose absence permeates the text
and whose appearance ultimately brings about the protagonists
destruction, so that, again, the theme of contact between literate and
non-literate cultures, though initially hardly addressed explicitly,
determines the development of the novel from the beginning. As
JanMohamed demonstrates, Things Fall Apart does not define cultural
contact in principle as a negative event, not even if that contact takes
place between cultures economically and martially as dissimilar as
those of nineteenth-century European and African societies. In fact,
Achebe seems to insist on a primarily optimistic perception of the
asymmetric interfaces evolving from such encounters.
Accordingly, JanMohamed reads Achebes novel as a constructive
attempt at deterritorializing the English language and, along with it,
the novel form by taking both out of the Western context and
transforming them into vehicles of African orality. Achebe recreates
his medium according to his own demands, Wolfgang Klooss
observes likewise, he can deprive the English language of its
colonial character and give it a special Africanness.2 With his
translation of African orality into writing, JanMohamed argues
further, Achebe succeeds in recuperating a vanishing cultural
1
This concept has been proposed by Ulla Ratheiser-Baumgartner in her work on

Patricia Grace (Mapping the Colonial Other/Mapping the Indigenous Self, in
Confluences XXV: Re-Presenting Otherness, ed. Franoise Kral, Paris, 2005, 85).
2
Wolfgang Klooss, Chinua Achebe: A Chronicler of Historical Change in
Africa, in Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, eds Hedwig Bock and
Albert Wertheim, Munich, 1986, 41.
192
experience3 and giving back dignity to Igbo culture by making it

understood that the colonized individual need not be ashamed of his
past.4 For JanMohamed, Things Fall Apart encourages native
Africans to espouse the new chirographic culture in the making so that
they might become able to write their own version of history and
preserve their orality by recording it. What is more, for JanMohamed
the novel does not stop short at creating an awareness of the
destruction wrought by the British in Africa, but encourages its
readership to discard the Manichean terms by which the West likes to
interpret the relationship between oral and chirographic cultures and
conceive of more constructive reconciliatory models of thinking.
JanMohamed leaves little to add to his analysis of Achebes
motives for synthesizing Igbo and Western noetic economies in a
novel titled Things Fall Apart, except for one point particularly salient
with regard to Achebes own cultural position as an African scribe
writing in English rather than in Igbo: Things Fall Apart does not
document the complexity of Igbo orality alone. It also explores nonliteracy or illiteracy as an aspect of the African subjects specific
otherness vis--vis the civilization encroaching on Igbo culture. Yet
even if the title, taken from Y.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming,
was to invoke the loosening of anarchy upon Africa under the
influence of Western civilization, this is not exactly what the novel
itself envisages as the future of Igbo culture. Rather the novel, though
informed by an awareness of the dangers entailed in any cultural
process of assimilation or appropriation, by virtue of its own
writtenness, effectively evidences the feasibility of the cultural
regeneration its author advocates.
In Things Fall Apart Igbo orality is asserted, almost paradoxically,
in the process of being captured in letters. The resultant tension is
minimized by Achebes systematic elaboration of the acoustic
dimension of his tale and his careful avoidance of images that could
be in any way reminiscent of graphic signs, visual images that is, like
writing, static and reproducible, and of sufficient symbolic content to
be meaningful even when taken out of their original context. The
visual images Achebe employs are predominantly non-static, in
3
JanMohamed, 37.
Ibid., 35. As for further critical explanations of the novels immense popularity,
see also Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction,
London, 1991, 31-32.
4
Arrival on a Bicycle
193
constant motion and flux, like spoken rather than written language.
The closest resemblance to reading allowed in Things Fall Apart is in
Achebes description of the workings of Agbala, the Oracle of the
Hills and the Caves. Worshippers seeking knowledge from Agbala
must go and consult a priestess sitting by a fire inside a dark cave,
intuiting the will of her god from the rising smoke. Sometimes the
worshippers too may discern the spirits ascend in the darkness, flying
and flapping their wings against the roof of the cave,5 never uttering
a sound.
As a profoundly transient and changeable reading matter, the
smoke studied by the priestess and the worshippers is a medium not
suited to store knowledge indefinitely. So are other objects, such as
the tokens of hospitality, friendship, or victory Achebe repeatedly
invokes in visual images. The colourful patterns drawn on the walls of
huts to celebrate the Feast of the New Yam, the human heads severed
from the bodies of enemies and used as cups to drink palm wine from
on occasion of the funeral of a village celebrity, grooves drawn into
the soil before the sowing of a new crop are images conjured to
endure only for a certain period. Equally devoid of any sense of
duration are Achebes numerous descriptions of rituals, dances, or
wrestling contests, which all reflect the idea of continuity without
stasis intrinsic to Igbo cosmology.6 The narratives expressed
privileging of progress over duration, action over inaction, the
momentary over the permanent, also informs the following scene
describing the coming of the locusts rather than their presence or the
sight of destruction they leave behind:
At first, a fairly small swarm came. They were the harbingers sent to
survey the land. And then appeared on the horizon a slowly-moving
mass like a boundless sheet of black cloud drifting towards Umuofia.
Soon it covered half the sky, and the solid mass was now broken by
tiny eyes of light like shining star-dust. It was a tremendous sight, full
of power and beauty. (TFA, 39)
Finally, Achebe also pictures signs in Things Fall Apart that do bear a
certain resemblance to writing. His characters draw these signs in
5
12.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), African Writers Series, Oxford, 1986,
Chinua Achebe, Chi in Igbo Cosmology, in Morning Yet on Creation Day:

Essays, London, 1975, 93-103.
194
chalk on the ground or on parts of their bodies, thereby obviously

enacting a ritual not specially accounted for anywhere in the novel.
Not only puzzling to the uninitiated reader, the chalk lines become
redundant as soon as the situation by which their drawing is
occasioned is dissolved.
By contrast, sound never subsides in Things Fall Apart. The text is
replete with acoustic images of the thunderous roars of brave warriors,
the cries of beaten women and abandoned infants, the beating of
drums and booming of gongs, the calls of town-criers, the cracking
voice of a priestess and her piercing screams, and the shouts,
murmurs, and laughter of large crowds. Even silence is described as
the consonance of certain acoustic impressions in the absence of
others:
The night was very quiet . Children were warned not to whistle at
night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more
sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name
at night, because it would hear. It was called a string. And so on this
particular night as the criers voice was gradually swallowed up in the
distance, silence returned to the world, a vibrant silence made more
intense by the universal trill of a million million forest insects. (TFA,
7)
In keeping with the prominence given to sound in the world

represented by Achebe, characters are cast mainly as engaged in oral
exchanges. More often than not their conversations, debates,
arguments, and stories are rendered in direct speech and fashioned as
integral and hence highly formalized part of community life. The
novel itself, which has received broad critical attention especially for
its artful simulation of oral storytelling, draws heavily on unwritten
lore or living memory, frequently referring to Igbo mythology,
citing Igbo proverbs, employing untranslated Igbo vocabulary and
making extensive use of formulaic expressions suggestively
reminiscent of the griot tradition.7
Though never stated explicitly the total absence of writing from the
lives portrayed in Things Fall Apart is never completely concealed.
Achebe hints at it covertly in occasional comments on the language of
7
A griot is a storyteller in traditional West African societies who perpetuates the

oral tradition and history of a village or family.
195
individual characters as well as on the act of narration. The contrast

between the unadulterated orality of the Igbo community and the
texts writtenness represented is further enforced graphically by way
of italicized writing used to off-set the Igbo vocabulary employed. By
inserting and typographically enhancing Igbo words Achebe keeps
disrupting the process of silent reading and alerting the reader to the
phonetic peculiarity of the Igbo language. This effect is of course most
powerful where an entire poem is yielded:
He [Ikemefuna] still remembered the song:
Eze elina, elina!
Sala
Eze ilikwa ya
Ikwaha akwa oligholi
Ebe Danda nechi eze
Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu
Sala
He sang it in his mind, and walked to its beat. If the song ended on his
right foot, his mother was alive. If it ended on his left, she was dead.
No, not dead, but ill. (TFA, 42)
Significantly, the boy Ikemefuna, who has been taken in by

Okonkwo, the hero of the novel, like his own son, does not sing this
song out loud but only in his mind while walking to its beat. His
actual silence thus shared with the reader is part of the subtle
distancing from Okonkwo, engineered by Achebe in preparation of the
sudden killing of the boy by his foster father. The contrast between
Ikemefunas secret and silent reliance on Igbo folklore and
Okonkwos religious observation of Igbo law, which commands the
killing of Ikemefuna, epitomizes the problem Achebe dramatizes in
Things Fall Apart. It illustrates the ambivalent function the Igbo
peoples cultural heritage fulfils by instilling a unique sense of
belonging in the individual and at the same time commanding the
brutal cancellation of this very belonging. As a consequence of his
unconditional identification with his peoples traditions, Okonkwo
internalizes this ambivalence and becomes unable to accept the
changes this ambivalence urges. As Begam notes, Both nationalist
history and heroic tragedy demand that [Okonkwo] remain unyielding
196
and that the Igbos honor their cultural heritage by refusing

assimilation.8
Achebe himself does not see these changes as entirely detrimental.
Nor does he submit a wholly idealized description of pre-colonial Igbo
culture in Things Fall Apart. Even if the text laments the corrosion of
pre-literate Igbo culture under European influence it does not advocate
a return to it either. If one goes back, Achebe replies in an interview
when asked about a revival of pre-colonial Igbo culture, theres
something wrong somewhere, or else a misunderstanding.9 A
backward movement is not what is suggested in Things Fall Apart
either. Instead the novel anticipates the transcendence, for instance, of
the demure suffering of Okonkwos wives and daughters under the
anger and aggression of the ruler of their households or of the
sullenness into which Okonkwos son Nwoye has withdrawn in
response to the constant nagging and beating his father gives him.
The sad demise of Ikemefuna, finally, provides the most
unequivocal criticism of the archaic values advocated and embodied
by Okonkwo,10 who, for all his love of the boy, obeys the Oracle of
the Hills and Caves and carries out its decision that Ikemefunas life
should be sacrificed. Onkonkwos active part in the killing of the boy
deeply alienates his friend Obiereka and his son Nwoye who have
both begun to question the intrinsic rightness of their cultures
traditions and to long for reform and cultural regeneration. While
Obiereka vents his anger at his friend and reprimands him for joining
in the killing of Ikemefuna, Nwoye withdraws from his father ceasing
to communicate with him altogether. Something seems to give way
inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow (TFA, 43). Things
begin to fall apart. The centre ceases to hold.
Though told from the epicentre of the disintegration it records, the
narrative does not fail to take into account the external influences
which hasten the changes following Ikemefunas death. All their
8
Richard Begam, Achebes Sense of an Ending: History and Tragedy in Things
Fall Apart, Studies in the Novel, XXIX/3 (Fall 1997), 401.
9
Achebe, quoted in Kalu Ogbaa, An Interview with Chinua Achebe, Research
in African Literatures, XII /1 (Spring 1981), 6.
10
For critical examinations of how Okonkwo represents the virtues and excesses
of his culture, see G.D. Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe, London, 1969; Eustace
Palmer, An Introduction the African Novel, London, 1972; Arthur Ravenscroft Chinua
Achebe, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert, London, 1969, and Kofi Awoonor, The Breast of the
Earth, New York, 1976.
197
customs are upside-down, the elders of Umuofia for instance remark

on the way in which marriages have recently come to be arranged in a
neighbouring village. But what is good in one place is bad in another
place, one of them rationalizes their own resistance to the modern
habits adopted by their neighbours. And, once more, Obiereka offers a
shrewd reply which is followed by a telling exchange between the
assembled men:
It is like the story of white men who, they say, are white like this
piece of chalk, said Obierika. He held up a piece of chalk, which
every man kept in his obi and with which his guests drew lines on the
floor before they ate kola nuts. And these white men, they say, have
no toes.
And have you never seen them? asked Machi.
Have you? asked Obierika.
One of them passes here frequently, said Machi. His name is
Amadi.
Those who knew Amadi laughed. He was a leper, and the polite
name for leprosy was the white skin. (TFA, 51-52)
Obierikas comparison of the white mans skin colour to chalk

allows for an association of the suggested advent of the Europeans
with the introduction of literacy in Igboland. Of course, Obierika
himself is unaware of the link he conjures. He has never used chalk in
any other way than in a ceremonial gesture preceding the communal
consumption of kola nuts.11 And like most of his fellow beings, he has
never seen a white man (in the literal sense of the English expression)
either. Nonetheless, Machis joke is probably not lost on the
discerning Obiereka. What does seem to escape him and his friends,
however, is the actual threat Western civilization represents to their
culture. Unaware of the imminent danger, the men are still joined in
merriment.
This has changed dramatically when they congregate again six
chapters later to discuss the complete annihilation of the village of
Abame. By then, they have learnt to read their own situation quite
differently. As a result, when Okonkwo, in an attempt to revive the
11
As Sugnet has pointed out, the gesture is explained nowhere in the novel so that
the uninitiated reader is left at a complete loss as to its meaning (see Charlie Sugnet,
Things Fall Apart: Problems in Constructing an Alternative Ethnography, in
Meditations on African Literature, ed. Dubem Okafor, 72-73).
198
jocular tone of their previous discussion, proposes that by white

man his friends must mean an albino, the response is not collective
amusement anymore. He was not an albino. He was quite different,
Obiereka corrects him: And he was riding an iron horse. The first
people who saw him ran away, but he stood beckoning to them. In the
end the fearless ones were near and even touched him. What follows
is an account of how the elders of Abame, upon consulting their
oracle, killed the foreigner lest he should try to break their clan and
spread destruction among them (TFA, 99). Though right in their
estimation of the white mans destructive potential, the people of
Abame fail to anticipate how any evidence of the murder will be
interpreted by other whites. In their naivety they resolve to tie the
white mans iron horse to a sacred silk-cotton tree where it stays for
weeks as a trophy of sorts commemorating the defeat of the enemy.
Yet, the white men who pass through their village one day read the
abandoned bicycle differently. For them it provides a perfect pretext
to command the destruction of Abame.
While thus describing the difficulties the older generation of Igbos
encounters in adjusting their vision to the white mans ways of seeing,
Achebe also discloses the younger generations willingness to endorse
this new way of seeing. Nwoye is one of the young men attracted by
the speeches and the stories of the white missionaries who are
beginning to set up churches and schools all over Igboland:
It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow.
The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to
answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul .
He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The
words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the
dry plate of the panting earth. Nwoyes mind was greatly puzzled.
(TFA, 106)
There is a very subtle, barely noticeable shift of emphasis in this

passage away from the acoustic features of language to its visible
properties. The imagery of drops of frozen rain falling and melting
on desiccated earth foreshadows the progressing inscription of African
soil by European usurpers. Hand in hand with this usurpation goes the
gradual destruction of native oral culture. Symptomatically, it is with
increasing frequency that the Igbo people find themselves struck
speechless without a mouth with which to tell of their suffering
199
(TFA, 127) or, as one of Okonkwos eldest kinsmen puts it in an

urgent plea to the younger generation, they no longer know what it is
to speak with one voice (TFA, 120).
It is part of Achebes scheme to give a sympathetic account of
Okonkwos tragic fall and at the same time undertake an ironic
deconstruction of his outdated heroism that he lets his central
character be the last to turn silent. Unlike so many others of his people
he retains his voice even when he and his kinsmen are taken captives
by the whites. We should have killed the white man if you had
listened to me, he snarls at his muted fellow prisoners (TFA, 140).
Speech, however, no longer suffices to mobilize his clansmen, who
have learnt to fall silent in the presence of the British. At last, when,
soon after their release from prison, his people prove unable to voice
any protest even against the interruption of a gathering by the arrival
of a court messenger, Okonkwo finds himself struck speechless as
well. Trembling with hate and, for the first time, unable to utter a
word, he turns to the messenger, draws his matchet, and beheads the
man (TFA, 146). Looking at the dead body, Okonkwo at once
understands the futility of his deed. He knows that Umuofia will not
rise against the whites and leaves without responding to the voices he
hears asking, Why did he do it? (TFA, 147). Even communication
with his people is no longer possible. All that is left for him to do is to
forestall his own death sentence by hanging himself.
In contrast to his father, Nwoye is the first in the novel to
effectively lose his voice and cease to speak. In the latter part of the
novel he is not only conspicuously absent from the scenes of
collective debate and negotiation, which form the central part of the
Umuofians social life. He also becomes a singularly passive object of
discussion by virtue of his absence. No longer a speaker but spoken
about, Nwoye leaves his family without a word and joins the
missionaries. He seems predestined on account of his taciturnity to
appropriate the colonizers quiet mode of communication and, indeed,
learns to read and write, before he eventually leaves Umuofia to attend
a training college for teachers. Yet even if Nwoye thus escapes the
mental confinement12 in which his father remains entrapped, this
does not mean that Nwoyes transformation is meant to invalidate the
other Umuofians orality. Quite the opposite, while Achebe may well
12
Gikandi, 27.
200
expose the deficiencies of nineteenth-century Igbo culture he never

fails to stress the integrating power of oral traditions.
Achebes recommendation clearly is not for African cultures to
adopt and emulate Western systems of articulation uncritically. Rather
what Achebe seems to envisage in Things Fall Apart are African
cultures confidently using Western modes of expression and
communication to assert their own otherness and adapt the acquired
forms of discourse and knowledge production to it. This vision is
reflected in the portraits of the two missionaries Brown and Smith,
who, as archetypal representatives of Christian culture introduced in
the last part of the novel, function as foils to the new African into
which Achebe has Nwoye develop eventually. As Wolfgang Klooss
remarks on these two characters:
... neither Brown nor Smith is really able or willing to cope with the
nature of African animism. Both attack the religion of the Ibos
because it is part of a non-Christian culture. Their total lack of interest
in Umuofias language and culture may thus be regarded as a logical
expression of the ethnocentric prejudices of their Christianity.13
Still, it is not until the introduction of the District Commissioner as

a kind of secular equivalent to Brown and Smith that Achebe
definitively transcends these prejudices and accomplishes, a semantic
reorganization in Gikandis terms by shifting linguistic values from
the Igbo structures to the colonial ones, from speech which was
the pride of Igbo culture to writing, the mythical practice of Western
history. But if we see writing as a process which is tied up with
questions of power and knowledge, Gikandi continues his argument,
... it is a mistake to confound Achebe and the Commissioner as writers
liberated or entrapped by writing in a colonial language. Both writers
use the same language and mode of representation, but their
ideological function is obviously different and this difference needs to
be stressed. The District Commissioner writes to compress the history
of Umuofia into a general text of colonization; Achebe writes to
liberate his people from that text and to inscribe the values and
ideological claims of Igbo culture in the language and form that
sought to repress it. The ultimate irony of his novel is that although
the Commissioner has the final word in the fictional text, Achebe ...
13
Ibid., 30.
201
writes the colonizers words and hence commemorates an African

culture which the colonizer thought he had written out of existence.14
Apart from the ideological stances from which they write, what
also distinguishes Achebe and the District Commissioner are the
diametrically opposed notions of writing underlying their inscriptions
of African peoples and their cultures. The kind of discourse which
Achebe defines as best suited for a translation of African orality into
written English is radically different from the kind of literacy that
leads the District Commissioner to consider that The story of this
man [Okonkwo] who had killed a messenger and hanged himself
would make interesting reading and to contemplate the inclusion of
the story in the book which he intends to write on the Pacification of
the Primitive Tribes of the Low Niger. One could almost write a
whole chapter on him, he reflects: Perhaps not a whole chapter but a
reasonable paragraph, at any rate (TFA, 147-48).
Precisely by closing on these thoughts of the District
Commissioner15 the novel implicitly raises and answers the question
about its final narrators identity, who, as should be clear from the
novels final words, has produced a text performing the very opposite
of what the District Commissioner has in mind. What the District
Commissioner ultimately achieves is not genuine understanding,
Begam notes, but the illusion of understanding that comes with the
power to control.16 In spite of its systematic shifts in perspective,
which Taiwo proposes reading as a sign of the authors acceptance
that no one point of view is wholly acceptable,17 Things Fall Apart
ultimately shuts out all but one voice and closes by converging from
an at first polyphonic or multi-perspective text to a single tonality or
viewpoint. It is not the District Commissioner but the commissioners
representer who has the last word.
For some critics this representer has a distinctive identity. He
clearly is an individual implicated in the Umuofians story, yet
independent enough to view it from a distance. JanMohamed suggests
that this individual may either be the adult as which Nwoye emerges
14
Ibid., 49-50.
But also through Nwoyes apostasy, of which JanMohamed has remarked that it
opens up another horizon: by espousing the new chirographic culture he creates the
potential for one of his descendants to write a novel like Things Fall Apart (36).
16
Begam, 402.
17
Taiwo, quoted by Gikandi, 33.
15
202
towards the end of the novel or one of Nwoyes descendants. This

corresponds with Richard Begams recommendation to read Things
Fall Apart as projecting an additional ending beyond its actual closure
and onto its sequel No Longer at Ease. In this novel, which is both a
rewriting and a continuation of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwos
grandson Obi, a university-educated civil servant, discusses the
difference between traditional or Aristotelian and modern or ironic
tragedy, incidentally doing so by way of reference to The Heart of the
Matter by Graham Greene. With his analysis, Begam argues, Obi
offers also a retrospective interpretation of Okonkwos fall as a
tragedy rendered pointless by the social changes that at first seem to
necessitate it.18 For Begam, Obi makes explicit what is stated only
implicitly in Things Fall Apart. Accordingly he concludes:
While Achebes novel movingly elegizes the passing away of
traditional Igbo culture, the long view it adopts looking ahead to the
future establishment of Nigeria suggests that Achebes own position
on the modernization of Africa is, at the very least, complicated.19
Even without the intertext invoked in No Longer At Ease it is clear

that the narrative voice asserted at the end of Things Fall Apart
belongs to a subject unwilling to be impartial, or, more accurately,
quite willing to be as impartial as the District Commissioner believes
he will be in his study of African primitives. In devoting not much
more than a reasonable paragraph in fact, even a bit more than a
whole chapter to the Commissioner, the narrator strips the colonist
of his importance and his authority, reducing him almost to a mere
afterthought, a detail which, if cut out, would not change the main
story all too significantly. Importantly, this measure of
marginalization can only be effective if accomplished in print. Only
thus can the commissioners relegation to a handful of pages be made
visible and the dramatic effect avoided which this figures sudden
entry at the end of an oral delivery, for instance, would have.
Despite his marginalization, the District Commissioners inclusion
remains important in the first place for foregrounding the novels
special bias. It reminds the reader that Okonkwos sad career could
have been reconstructed in a completely different manner. The District
18
19
Begam, 404-406.
Ibid., 397.
203
Commissioner, for instance, finds no other feature of the Africans

more infuriating than their love for superfluous words (TFA, 146).
Given the way Things Fall Apart accommodates the Umuofians
commitment to orature, he would no doubt dismiss the novel as a text
littered with unnecessary comments and utterly lacking in the
discipline he so strives to exhibit. His judgement is invalidated,
however, through a final interior monologue in which the reader
learns among other things of the District commissioners resolve
never to attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged
man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor
opinion of him (TFA, 147), he believes.
His projection of how the Africans would read his behaviour stands
in contrast not only to the Igbo belief that touching the body of a man
who has killed himself is sacrilegious. It also conflicts with the sense
indirectly communicated through the sobering bleakness of
Okonkwos demise, that the deceased protagonist, guilty of whatever
crime in his lifetime, deserves a more dignified ending than either the
commissioner or Okonkwos own people are able to grant him. The
likeness the novel establishes in the end between the commissioner
and the men of Umuofia by presenting them as equally unable to
overcome the same fear of failure that eventually defeats Okonkwo
also serves as a marker of difference. It places the novels final
narrator at a distinct distance from the characters loosely assembled at
the end of the novel. They seem united in their lack of sympathy for
Okonkwo as if as a result of the merging of African oral and Western
literate traditions narrated in and exemplified by Achebes novel. The
narrator, however, has clearly transcended this confusion and, faithful
to African notions of poetic language, of what is not superfluous
and undignified, seems to have found a more adequate way of using
writing to give meaning to Okonkwos death.
CHAPTER TEN
MEETING IN THE DESERT: MIRAGES OF LITERATE AND
NON-LITERATE BARBARITIES IN
J.M. COETZEES WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
Chinua Achebes deconstruction of colonialist notions of writing and

literate culture through his ironical reduction of the District
Commissioner to a mere undignified detail is radicalized by J.M.
Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians. Like Scobie in The Heart of
the Matter, the protagonist of this novel is an official representative of
a colonialist regime, a magistrate stationed at a tiny frontier
settlement. Like Scobie, he finds himself in the role of a mediator
between colonizers and natives, and gradually is drawn to the side of
the latter. Like Scobie, he knows that his partiality represents a gross
disloyalty to his country, even a form of treason in the eyes of his
expatriates. And, finally, also like Scobie (and like the District
Commissioner in Things Fall Apart) the magistrate is fully aware that
the colonialist regime to which he belongs has sprung from a
civilization heavily dependent on the cultural practice of writing. He
professes to be a reader of the classics, declares that his favourite
pastimes are the collation of maps of a certain desert region and the
cataloguing of his various collections which he has accumulated
during occasional pseudo-expert archaeological diggings. As he
confesses he devotes himself to these pastimes mainly to avoid
witnessing the brutalities to which his fellow countrymen subject the
natives they hold captives. So as not to have to feel part of their
machinations he keeps retreating to his office and occupying himself
with his ledgers.
In the course of the novel, Coetzees protagonist learns how his
civilization, once transplanted, reduces its own agents to savage
torturers set on extinguishing whatever cultural life they feel they have
to compete with. His reflections on civilization also lead him to realize
how his own language adapts to the task of representing the atrocities
its speakers conceive and commit, and how the victims of these
atrocities, the so-called barbarians, are captured also linguistically in
the ensuing discourse. Symptomatically, as long as the native
barbarians are prisoners of the settlement and as such entrapped in the
206
colonialist narrative of subjection, he himself seems to possess ample

discursive possibilities to capture the Other. He describes the natives
as strange animals1 with vast appetites and volatile tempers,
sick, famished, damaged, and terrified creatures herded in
the corner of a yard to be humiliated and maltreated. Coetzee even
allows his narrator to ponder if it might not be best if these ugly
people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to
make a new start (WFB, 26). The magistrates deeply cynical
reflections do not fail to illustrate the potential brutality of the English
language, and to expose the possibilities of denigration, even of
extinction contained in a discourse so dissociated from the natives that
it is capable of treating them as subhuman objects.
The natives themselves are not granted a voice in the narrative,
their silence, however, is not to be misread as the result of an innate
muteness or any other form of intrinsic linguistic disability. Rather, as
in The Heart of the Matter, it needs to be comprehended as the result
of an unscrupulous silencing, which the novel identifies on a thematic
level and at the same time performs itself by way of ironic emulation
of the very modes of inscription it interrogates. Gilbert Yeoh has
shown how the emphatically confessional mode of Waiting for the
Barbarians supports Coetzees questioning of Western uses of writing
and his exposure of the epistemic violence committed with the help of
the written medium. By analogy with Samuel Beckett, Yeoh argues,
Coetzee employs the strategy of incessant monologic self-examination
to illustrate the fragility of the truth writing can produce and the
impossibility for any self, however rigorously honest, to tell the truth
about itself.2 Owing to the nature of consciousness, Coetzee observes
in his essay Confession and Double Thought, the self cannot tell
the truth of itself without the possibility of self-deception.3 For
Coetzee, human consciousness dictates that self-scrutiny is an
instrument not of the truth but of a mere will to be comfortable, to be
well thought of, and so on.4
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), London, 2000, 19.
Gilbert Yeoh, J.M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Ethics, Truth-Telling, and
Self-Deception, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, XLIV/4 (Summer 2003),
334.
3
J.M. Coetzee, Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau,
Dostoevsky, Comparative Literature, XXXVII/3 (Summer 1985), 231.
4
Ibid., 292.
2
Meeting in the Desert
207
In light of these observations Yeoh finds it necessary to read

Waiting for the Barbarians as a text systematically deconstructing its
own narrators reliability and exposing him as both epistemologically
and ethically constricted. For Yeoh, Coetzees narrator protagonist is
driven by a desire not so much to invoke empathy with the natives as
to merely stage himself as an empathetic witness of their plight. One
of the mistakes the nameless magistrate makes in the process is that he
never lets the subalterns he portrays speak for themselves. In his
reading of Coetzee, Yeoh goes much further than Benita Parry, who
regards the narrator as Coetzees own mouthpiece and sees the
magistrates discursive domination of the barbarians and the resultant
shrinking of the Other to a radically incommensurate being5 as the
ultimate goal of the text.
This leads Parry to suggest that speechlessness in Coetzees
fiction exceeds or departs from the psychoanalytic paradigm it also
deploys to become a metaphor for what cannot be spoken and to
conclude that Coetzees silent subjects are not just victims but
victors, disempowered figures who cannot or will not make
themselves heard in the recognised linguistic system.6 In contrast to
Parry,7 Yeoh posits a discrepancy between Coetzee and his selfinterested narrator and argues that the narratives systematic Othering
5
Benita Parry, Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee, in Critical
Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 37-65. Other
critical readings of Coetzees figurations of silence seem also based on a conflation of
narrator and author in Coetzees novels. Thus Michael Marais, for instance, argues
that for Coetzee silence is a potent political tool through which the other escapes and
challenges the conceptual constraints of imperial cultures whose programmes of
conquest and annihilation are enshrined in language. Silence empowers the other as
guardian, he contends, in fact becomes the means through which it resists the
language of imperialism. (The Hermeneutics of Empire: Coetzees Post-colonial
Metafiction, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and
Stephen Watson, 73-74.) Likewise Graham Huggan notes that in Coetzee silence is a
different kind of speech, a muteness to be perceived either as a form of self-protection
or a gesture of resistance (Huggan, quoted in Parry, 44).
6
Parry, 45 and 48. Admittedly, Parry also argues that Coetzees optimistic
constructions of silence fail to perform the criticism Coetzee aims to encode in his
texts, that this potential critique of political oppression is diverted by the conjuring
and valorising of a non-verbal signifying system (Ibid. 44).
7
So does Teresa Dovey, who holds that the Magistrates autodiegetic narrative
should be regarded as reported speech, enclosed, as it were, by quotation marks at the
beginning and the end (Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories, in
Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson,
141).
208
of the barbarians, their resultant silence, and their conspicuous

absence serve to underline the magistrates dishonesty. In Yeohs
view, the magistrates scenarios, though moving, lack psychological
authenticity. Thus the sentimentalized representation of suffering they
offer enables him to evade the bodily violation he witnesses:
As opposed to truth-telling and genuine empathy, the magistrates
narrative is a self-serving self-deception: It enables his liberal
conscience to feel sincere sympathy for the victims without
countenancing the actual horror of their torture. The true motivation
and effect of his narrative is self-consolidation rather than empathy
and truth-telling.8
In other words, Waiting for the Barbarians calls in question the

speaking for the subaltern in which the narrator pretends to engage. It
is obvious from the beginning that with this markedly literate speaking
Coetzees narrator casts little light on the true nature of the barbarians.
Nor does he attempt to forge any deeper psychological understanding
of them. As Yeoh points out, it is frequently enough that Coetzee
exposes his narrators unwillingness to hear the natives, his discomfort
at the mere sound of their calls, and his desire to believe that he has
heard nothing. Instead of listening to their voices, he keenly speaks
over their heads, overwrites their presence, trying to extinguish
whatever they might be saying by translating their presence into
narration, ultimately received via the silent medium of writing. The
immediacy he gives to his portrayals of individual barbarians by
delivering these portrayals in the present tense is a mere illusion. The
impression of the barbarians proximity, which the narratives special
temporality creates, really only belies the texts writtenness and, along
with it, their actual absence at the moment both of the conception and
reception of their portrayal, their distance both from the narrator and
the reader of the narrative.
What the magistrates account at once hides and concedes, other
than this absence, is its inability to fully grasp the natives otherness.
Coetzees narrator seems preoccupied almost to the point of obsession
with the limits of his comprehensive scope. Repeatedly he asserts that
the natives, when one tries to understand them as more than objects of
suppression, are actually utterly intangible. Above all he says so of a
8
Yeoh, 341.
209
female captive who has been barbarously mutilated by the other

officials at his post. Although a special physical closeness develops
between this female and the magistrate, he claims that he knows what
to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do
with another (WFB, 36), that with this woman it is as if there is no
interior, only a surface across which [one hunts] back and forth
seeking entry (WFB, 46).
The sense which the narrator invokes of her soul-, heart-, or
mindlessness is enforced by his descriptions of her impaired vision.
Looking into her maimed eyes, the magistrate can see nothing but her
blindness, and, in describing the scars of torture on her irises, he can
discursively place himself in relation to her only as her observer. He
claims that there is no way he can penetrate any further, no way of
reaching behind her irises, into her mind and attaining any insight into
her thoughts. I wave a hand in front of her eyes, he asserts:
She blinks. I bring my face closer and stare into her eyes. She wheels
her gaze from the wall on to me. The black irises are set off by milky
whites as clear as a childs. I touch her cheek: she starts. (WFB, 28)
Like her unresponsive eyes, her body, too, to the magistrate is but a
surface onto which one may project ones own fantasies. Envisaging
the figure of the woman, closed, ponderous, sleeping in [his] bed in a
faraway room, he again concludes that The body of the other one is
beyond comprehension. Convinced that the womans body would
do anything to evade his scrutinizing gaze he even conjures the surreal
vision of her closed eyes and closed face filing over with skin, of
her face Blank, like a fist beneath a wig grow[ing] out of the
throat, and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without
entry (WFB, 45).
The magistrate almost succeeds in leading the reader to believe that
it is the woman herself that resists decrypting. Yet the agency with
which he invests the female body here is only too clearly a ploy not to
betray the narrators own part in the distortions he is recounting.
Arguably these distortions are projections of a mind unable or even
unwilling to look all too closely at the suffering of others but fit to
undertake all sorts of contortions in order not to see. As Michel
Naumann puts it, the magistrates words are but mirrors blocking the
210
road of otherness.9 They ultimately disclose no truths about the Other

but give away the narrators fear of such truths. The barbarian
womans alleged elusiveness is really a reflection of the magistrates
fixation on his own self, of a centrism that does not allow for a clear
vision of any Other. His decision to return the barbarian girl to her
people has to be read accordingly as a resolution to dispose of an
Other whose sad presence and past keep interfering with the image the
narrator is trying to draw of himself.
Even if he narrates the ensuing journey as an enterprise in which he
puts his own life at jeopardy for the sake of the barbarian girl, the trip
is as self-interested a venture as anything else the magistrate does in
the course of the novel. Under the pretext of looking for the barbarians
but actually in the hope of reinventing himself, he embarks on a
journey across the desert towards where the nomads winter, entering a
terrain more desolate than anything he has ever seen, wind-eroded
clay terraces, flat marshland, a dead salt lake stretching beneath them,
sometimes under cover many feet deep, sometimes under a mere
parchment of brittle salt (WFB, 66), sand-flats modulating into
duneland. The experience allows him to cast himself in the role of the
lonesome traveller, the daring discoverer, the brave conqueror. Amidst
uninscribed, unmapped, uncharted, unknown land where the wind
keeps blowing clouds of red dusk from nowhere to nowhere, the
magistrate has the impression that Dust rather than air becomes the
medium in which [the nomads] live (WFB, 65), he begins to wonder
whether it is really the girl he has always wanted or the traces of
history that her body bears. Typically, he can find no answer:
My lips move, silently composing and recomposing the words. Or
perhaps it is the case that only that which has not been articulated has
to be lived through. I stare at this last proposition without detecting
any answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The
words grow more and more opaque before me; soon they have lost all
meaning. (WFB, 70)
Ironically enough, just when he discovers that he has left behind

the realm of safe signification he is overcome by the feeling that he
and the girl have grown closer than in months of living in the same
9
Michel Naumann, Coetzees Children of the Earth and Language

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, XV/1 (Autumn 1992), 37.
211
room. For him it is another sign of this closeness that he unexpectedly

finds her engaged in a lively banter with his men using the pidgin of
the frontier with a fluency, quickness, and self-possession that
confound him. For a moment, the discovery of her command of his
language causes him to regret that he has never let her teach him her
own tongue. Yet his profession of remorse comes too late to dissuade
the readers doubts that he would ever bother to learn the nomads
language. His reading of them reveals no ambition to comprehend
more than the material surface of their appearance:
Stirrups, saddle, bridle, reins: no metal, but bone and fire-hardened
wood sewn with gut, lashed with thongs. Bodies clothed in wool and
the hides of animals and nourished from infancy on meat and milk,
foreign to the suave touch of cotton, the virtues of the placid grains
and fruits: these are the people being pushed off the plains into the
mountains by the spread of the Empire. (WFB, 78)
Himself irrevocably part of that Empire, worse even, as he

formulates it, a go-between, a jackal of Empire in sheeps clothing
(WFB, 79), he remains barred from communication with the
barbarians and reliant on the girl to negotiate with them on his behalf
and to inform him of their refusal to enter into any of the deals he
proposes. The impossibility of any fruitful exchange between him and
them and the finality of his relationship with the girl whom he has
been trying to grasp and inscribe as his Other in his own terms
suddenly manifest themselves as inescapable truths. She is going, she
is almost gone, the magistrate pronounces, accepting the inevitability
of their parting, not without relishing their last moments together and
the brief verbal exchange that ensues between them:
This is the last time to look on her clearly face to face, to scrutinize
the motions of my heart, to try to understand who she really is .... I
touch her cheek, take her hand .... There is only a blankness, and
desolation that there has to be such blankness. When I tighten my grip
on her hand there is no answer. I see only too clearly what I see: a
stranger; a visitor from strange parts now on her way home after a less
than happy visit. Goodbye, I say. Goodbye, she says. There is no
more life in her voice than in mine.
The likeness which the narrator attempts to establish between

himself and the girl in the last sentence of this passage is not
212
confirmed by the narrative itself. While he may believe that there is

no more life in her voice than in [his], the narrative continues to
show how his voice survives, as it were, while the girls subsides
completely. In her absence it becomes clear that he has effectively
traded in the real girl for the possibility to imagine her freely and to
re-form her, as he himself puts it, out of his repertoire of memories
according to [his] questionable desires (WFB, 79). He describes how,
back at the settlement, he continues to swoop and circle around the
irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another
over her (WFB, 89). Thus inscribed and re-inscribed the actual Other
is placed at an infinite remove. Signification no longer serves to
salvage truth but to shape myths with which to replace any earlier
intimation of that truth. More than that, upon his return from the
desert, the narrator himself eventually substitutes the Other and
assumes the victim status once reserved for the barbarians.
It is a doubly ironic turn of events that Coetzee contrives by having
the magistrate arrive back at the garrison to be arrested for
treasonously consorting with the enemy (WFB, 85), suspended, and
subjected to the same tortures and humiliations he once knew the
barbarians to be suffering. Not only does the obvious absurdity of the
allegations invite the reader to comprehend the regimes aggression
against its own representatives as a perversely self-destructive urge.
At the same time, the magistrates initial willing acceptance of his
new situation exposes his desperate desire to redeem himself and the
futility of trying to do so by re-enacting the barbarians misery.
Still, the endeavour does not result in a full retrospective
identification with the nomads. As Yeoh rightly observes, the
magistrates narrative can at best create the illusion that he is united
with the barbarians in identical suffering:
What appears as merging identity in suffering is, upon scrutiny, the
repetition of suffering with a difference . the magistrates suffering
seems to bring him into identity with the girl, whereas it in fact
suspends him in a relationship of irreconcilable difference from her.
Coetzees cynical point is that the magistrates suffering under
Empire, though severe and moving to the reader, has no redemptive
value. It brings him no closer toward knowing and being identified
with the girls suffering. No matter how much suffering he undergoes
and no matter how he manipulates language to construct
identification, he is at a differential distance from her suffering. Any
213
semblance of moral identification and empathy conveyed by his

narrative is a self-deception.10
Unlike the girl or any of her people, the magistrate can narrate his
experiences and bestow them onto posterity by recording them in
writing. At the centre of this account he places himself as a figure
gradually metamorphosing into a beast or a simple machine reduced
to jerking his arms, pulling his beard, stamping his feet (WFB, 93).
Shocking images of his physical discomfort are meant to signal and
account for his descent into wordless stupor. So expressive are these
images that they almost let the reader overlook the eloquence with
which this decline is narrated:
I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of
all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialize
under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my
hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who
suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. (WFB, 87)
At least on another plane removed from the narrated events, the

stinking mountain of flesh, so damaged that he who can do no more
than scream and gabble, has retained his persuasive power. And he
manages to summon his rhetorical skills in his final confrontation with
his successor, Colonel Joll. In this scene Joll interrogates the
magistrate about a collection of poplar slips inscribed in an ancient
hand. The magistrate has never been able to decipher these slips. But
when told that he is suspected of using them for secret communication
with the barbarians, he cannot resist the temptation to inform the
colonel that the slips contain a full record of the abominations
perpetrated by Joll and his men. With this ingenious move, the
magistrate briefly confounds the colonel, who does not at all seem to
savour the prospect that someone might have outwitted his censorship
and used a foreign writing system to record all those truths he has
taken such trouble to suppress.
Joll retaliates by announcing what he holds to be a truth equally
discomfiting for the magistrate. You seem to want to make a name
for yourself as the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice
his freedom to his principles, he offers as a bait to continue:
10
Yeoh, 342-43.
214
You want to go down in history as a martyr, I suspect. But who is

going to put you in the history books? These border troubles are of no
significance. In a while they will pass and the frontier will go to sleep
for another twenty years. People are not interested in the history of the
back of beyond. (WFB, 125)
The narrative itself belies Jolls evaluation of what will be deemed

interesting reading. Joll himself vanishes from the text to be
replaced by Mandel, a warrant officer driven by far baser urges than
Jolls petty ambition to clean up local administration and reorganize
the magistrates office from clutter and dustiness to vacuous
neatness (WFB, 91). His barbarities exceed any of the cruelties Jolls
mind is able to concoct. For their extremity alone they must not be
forgotten but recorded in detail. In trying to do so, the narrator
jeopardizes his own credibility. For the horrors perpetrated by Mandel
appear too gruesome for anyone who has suffered them to bear
recapitulating them. That the narrator should be able to actively recall
what he himself experienced seems almost as difficult to accept as the
suggestion that he should be recounting his own experiences at the
very moment of their occurrence. The confusion created alienates the
reader and causes one to feel almost as excluded from the narrative as
the barbarians around which the narrative pretends to revolve.
The refraction of the figure of the magistrate, his splitting into two
figures, namely the magistrate telling and the magistrate told, the
magistrate as narrator and the magistrate as an object of narration,
corresponds with the ambivalent identification enforced throughout
the novel of the desert nomads as barbarians. Jolls and Mandels
actions make clear that there has always been a coming and going of
barbarians even if the title of the novel seems to project their arrival
beyond its own ending. Still the narrator is the only character who
eventually realizes that the attribute barbarian is more adequately
applied to the white perpetrators of barbarities than to their black
victims. All other characters seem to think differently. They have been
taught to identify the desert nomads as barbarians.
The methods used to delete any other possibility of identification
from their minds are revealed in a particularly gory episode. In this
episode the narrator joins a crowd watching a handful of prisoners
kneeling on the ground, bent over a pole to which they are attached by
a wire threaded through their lips. He then observes Joll taking some
215
charcoal and dust and rubbing the word ENEMY into each of their
naked backs. This accomplished, Joll orders a soldier to wipe out the
words again by flogging the men until the writing has dissolved in
their own sweat and blood. It is barely surprising that such reading
lessons instil not so much a deep sense of guilt but profound fear in
the obedient observers, who are easily persuaded that hordes of
barbarians are about to storm their camp to slaughter them. So
petrified are the people in the settlement by such rumours that they
cease to remember how their own people would cheat and humiliate
the nomads whenever these would come into town to trade with them,
and how their own people would follow them into the desert and bring
them back into the settlement to mutilate and murder them. Instead
they tell each other stories of barbarians lurking in the hollows and
coming out at night to prowl about, bent on raping their women and
killing all of them. Convinced against all evidence that these
barbarians have dug a tunnel under the town walls, they forbid their
children to play outside the gates and advise all adults to go nowhere
unarmed.
Eventually their collectively manufactured fiction begins to
engender more symbolic gestures of resistance. WE STAY, they write
on the walls of their houses (WFB, 143), not as a message to the
barbarians, but to give each other more than verbal support against
their imaginary enemy. The narrator is the only one able to see that the
imminence of the alleged barbarians attack is but a myth circulated
by the regime to justify its bellicose manoeuvres. His descriptions of
the growing hysteria amongst the settlers allow the reader to observe
how the obvious unlikelihood of such an attack ever happening
gradually calls in question the drama of their waiting as the only
drama they allow themselves to enact. The blatant futility of their
waiting brings to mind the stark pointlessness of Vladimirs and
Estragons waiting for Godot.11
A further parallel to Becketts play is created through Coetzees
rendering of the public torturing of the barbarians in direct analogy to
the tragic performance of Lucky in Waiting for Godot. Be careful!
. Hes wicked. . With Strangers, Pozzo, bespectacled like Joll,
11
References to Becketts play in Waiting for the Barbarians seem to have

attracted far less critical attention than Coetzees invocations of Kafkas stories. (See
Patricia Merivale, Audible Palimpsests: Coetzees Kafka, in Critical Perspectives
on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 152-67.)
216
warns Vladimir and Estragon to justify the cruelty with which he

treats Lucky.12 According to the intertextual framework conjured by
Coetzee, it is not Godots failure to appear, but Estragons and
Vladimirs failure to notice his appearance that renders their waiting
absurd. Coetzees suggestion may even be that Godot does appear in
Becketts play, namely in the person either of Lucky or of Pozzo, but
that Estragon and Vladimir are unable to register this appearance
because it so differs from what they expect. Likewise the difference of
the barbarians13 presence in the settlement from what the settlers are
waiting for infinitely defers the completion of their waiting. As David
Attwell notes by way of reference not to Beckett but to C.P. Cavafys
poem Waiting for the Barbarians:
There is no conflagration beyond the moment of waiting, with the
effect that Coetzee interrupts and suspends the teleology of the
colonial state; by showing that Empires images of the barbarians are
wholly contingent on its own need for self-realization, he breaks open
the enclosed world of signs on which Empire depends.14
The Empires self-realization, one might add, is contingent on its

images of the barbarians. Without these images the Empire seems
unable to infer any meaning from its own being. It is exactly to this
end that Coetzees narrator keeps trying to picture the barbarians even
after his return from the desert. In the process he draws on the
discursive strategies employed by the Empire to realize its political
ends: excessive self-scrutiny, mystification of the Other and pseudoidentification with it, and, finally, replacement of that Other by
systematic self-victimization are part of his repertoire of rhetorical
ruses.
So is, arguably, the strategy of consigning the barbarians to an
altogether different noetic system. The magistrate does so by
suggesting that they possess another writing system and hence also a
completely different form of thinking. As Attwell has pointed out, this
accords with the Enlightenment idea of barbarians as beings a step
12
22.
13
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, London 1956,
That is, the presence of both the barbarian tormentors and the tormented
barbarians.
14
David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing,
Perspectives on Southern Africa 48, Berkeley, 1993, 71.
217
ahead of savages because they obeyed authority, owned property,

used writing materials, and domesticated animals.15 The projection of
the barbarians as literate beings has nothing to do with a recognition
of sameness, let alone with an identification with the Other. Rather,
one of its purposes is to release the narrator of the novel from the
responsibility to speak or write for the subaltern. After all, if
subalterns have their own script, they need no one, least of all a
foreign scribe, to write for or about them. At the same time, the
delimitation of the magistrates discursive terrain against that of the
barbarians allows for a drastic restriction of the novels target
audience as it excludes the barbarians and any other group with a
different script.
The exclusivity of the readership courted by Coetzees narrator is
not stated openly, however. Instead it is belied by the non-specific
milieu of Waiting for the Barbarians which, as Attwell argues, has
misled some readers to apprehend Coetzees novel erroneously as a
statement on writing, literature, and historiography in general:
Readers of Waiting for the Barbarians frequently take the novels
non-specific milieu to suggest a form of ethical universalism. There is
a difference, however, between the universalism which implies a
humanist conception of a transcendent moral consciousness and a
strategic refusal of specificity, a refusal that is the result of being
painfully conscious of ones immediate historical location. The milieu
of Barbarians is the result, I believe, of just such a refusal.16
For Attwell, the deliberate anachronisms of the novel, its very

remoteness, and its denial of historical plausibility are integral part of
Coetzees scheme to criticize not any human society, but the South
African apartheid state, not any form of writing, but the kind of
literature South Africas totalitarian government tended to encourage
with its own phantasmagoric projections and vocabulary in the early
1980s when Waiting for the Barbarians was written.17 Likewise Yeoh
15
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 73. On the issue of classing Coetzee as a supra-national writer or
defining him and his work in national terms although his novels strike one above all
as ways of escape from the most immediate contexts, the South African, in which
they were produced, see also Huggan and Watson, 1-5, as well as Stephen Watson
Colonialism and the Novels of J.M. Coetzee, in Critical Perspectives on J.M.
Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 13.
17
Attwell, 74.
16
218
reads Coetzees novel as a broader on-going critique particularly of

the white South African liberal humanist novel and its false narrative
of the universal identification of all men.18 The tale of universal
identification of all men, which, according to Yeoh, the guilt-ridden
white South Africa tells itself to comfort itself,19 is false because it
includes far from all men, least of all the victims of South African
apartheid. In the light of their suffering, the mere presence of these
victims would reduce the white South African writers call for an
identification of all men to a cynical insincerity. Hence, too, the
narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians has no other choice than to
relegate the barbarians to a cultural space outside that of his
narratives reception. Given the magistrates implication in the
nomads subjugation, it is not enough for him to know that they are
not able to hear or read his tale. More assuring still than the chance
that they are unable to access his narrative is the idea that they are too
absorbed in their own writing to want to know his version of their
history.
Though describing the non-literate Other from radically different
angles, The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting for
the Barbarians have in common that they try to establish what it is
apart from an irreconcilable otherness between literate and non-literate
cultures that prevents any deeper understanding of that otherness. In
the process all three trace a deep-seated resistance to such
understanding, an unwillingness to know the Other in their characters.
The earliest text, The Heart of the Matter, reveals this resistance to
insight in the most realistic manner, translating it into a moral flaw
which the protagonist realizes too late to amend. As a result, it seems
as if the repentance he feels in the end serves solely to help the reader
to readjust to the discovery that the novel commands ones
identification with someone deeply implicated in a rather questionable
story of cultural expansion, oppression, and negation. As reader, one
can conveniently put ones own ignorance of the African people and
18
Yeoh, 339. Correspondingly Dovey argues that in Waiting for the Barbarians
allegory is thematised as a means of articulating the liberal humanist crisis of
interpretation and notes, While Waiting for the Barbarians offers a critique of a
particular failure of interpretation, it places under scrutiny its own interpretive
practice and that of certain discourses of criticism (141).
19
Yeoh, 339.
219
their culture down to the distorted accounts Greene shows to be

reported back to Europe from the colonies. Not without reason, the
novel itself effectively simulates the indifference of European
colonizers vis--vis native Africans and sustains the sense of their
unconcern to the very end by subordinating even the tragic death of
Scobies illiterate houseboy Ali to the protagonists own suicide. What
actually happens to Ali in the night of his mysterious death remains
untold, which ultimately allows the reader to feel as innocently
ignorant as the unsuspecting victim of Scobies and Yusefs
machinations.
Achebe, by contrast, refuses to grant the reader any such
opportunity of identification with the unknowing colonized. Things
Fall Apart offers, in fact almost forces insights that leave the reader
completely demystified in the end. The information about oral Igbo
culture his novel supplies forces the reader to acknowledge that there
is another form of knowing than the literate one to which Achebes
text appeals. Initiated into this knowing, Achebes reader may
recognize the protagonists dilemma and come to understand
Okonkwos blindness to the inevitability of change as a tragically
incorrigible flaw. Yet while this understanding leads to no complete
identification with the hero it does not instil a sense of superiority in
the reader either. This is prevented by the appearance of the District
Commissioner at the end of the novel whose way of reading
Okonkwos life story turns out to be informed by the same fallibility
to which Scobie succumbs in The Heart of the Matter. In contrast to
Scobie, however, Achebes commissioner does not become a victim to
his own flawed perception of the African Other. As there is neither
repentance nor punishment, his misapprehension of Okonkwo
commands no sympathy but makes the reader uncomfortably aware of
the restrictedness of literate thinking.
The most recent novel of the three discussed in this section,
Waiting for the Barbarians, finally, explores the theme of the
colonists incomprehension of the non-literate native in the most
complexly encoded manner, deliberately challenging the readers to
make up their own mind about the narrators credibility and to query
the knowledge his narrative supplies of the Other who, though
constantly invoked, is rarely close enough to permit any deeper
understanding. Rather than a reader or interpreter of the barbarians,
the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians turns out to be a conjurer
220
of their otherness, a fabulist who, in contrast to Henry Scobie in The

Heart of the Matter and the district commissioner in Things Fall
Apart, consciously and unscrupulously employs story-telling as a
means of transforming the truth and fashioning another self to dispose
of a past too unfavourable to bear recounting. As Coetzees readers
have to discover, it is not only the magistrates immediate audiences
in the text that have been deceived by his rhetoric. The reader too has
been fooled into mistaking the sensationalist brutality of the
magistrates narrative for honesty and overlooking the silence
Coetzees narrator imposes on the nomads while purporting to be
speaking on their behalf. However, with the construction of the
barbarians as capable of writing for themselves, the narrator exceeds
his poetic licence, or so at least Colonel Joll, his sinister antagonist,
thinks. The reader is not explicitly asked to agree with Joll, but not to
do so on this particular point would be to miss one of the few chances
Coetzee offers in his novel to extract oneself from the narrators
propagandistic persuasion.
LATER CONTACTS IN NEW ZEALAND AND

NORTH AMERICA
In contrast to The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting
for the Barbarians, the two novels to be discussed in the following
chapter, Potiki (1985) by Patricia Grace and Love Medicine (1984) by
Louise Erdrich, do not narrate first or early encounters between
literate and non-literate cultures. They are set well after the arrival of
Western literacy in New Zealand and America and its imposition on
the native peoples there, drawing on a hundred and fifty years of
exchange between indigenous minority and white master cultures.
Written in the early 1980s, at a time of worldwide rediscovery and
reappraisal of indigenous cultures1 not only by non-indigenous
establishments but by indigenous peoples themselves,2 both novels
can afford to reconstruct this history in terms far less pessimistic than
the accounts of European expansion submitted by Coetzee and Greene
in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Heart of the Matter,
respectively. Indeed, they offer an evaluation of the future of Maori
and Chippewa cultures, and of Maori and Chippewa oralities in
particular, whose qualified optimism bears a certain resemblance to
the confidence with which Chinua Achebe affirms the principal
compatibility of Igbo and Western epistemologies both in his
theoretical writings as well as in Things Fall Apart.
While Waiting for the Barbarians and The Heart of the Matter
posit an irreconcilable difference between Europeans and Africans,
1
The period is commonly referred to as that of the Maori Renaissance in New

Zealand and of the Native American Renaissance in the US and Canada. Hertha D.
Sweet Wong, Introduction, in Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed.
Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction, Oxford, 2000, 3,
Benjamin Pitman, Te Taha Maori A Culture Re-asserts Itself: Identity and Art in
the Maori World in Arts in Cultural Diversity, ed. Jack Condous, Janferie Howlett,
and John Skull, New York, 1980, 243-50, as well as Jacqueline Bardolph, An
Invisible Presence: Three Maori Writers, Third World Quarterly XII/2 (1990), 13136.
2
Because of the coincidence of their conception it is the original version of Love
Medicine that is compared with Potiki here. In 1993, Erdrich published a new and
expanded version of her first novel (readable also as the first volume of a tetralogy,
with The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace making up the other three
volumes). For a commentary on this rewriting see Elizabeth Devereaux, Love
Medicine Redux: New and Improved, but Why?, Publishers Weekly, 23 November
1992, 30, Jeanne-Marie Zeck, Erdrichs Love Medicine, The Explicator, LIV/1 (Fall
1995), 58-60, and Allan Chavkin, Vision and Revision in Louise Erdrichs Love
Medicine, in Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet
Wong, 211-19.
224
IV. The Non-Literate in Sight
colonizers and colonized and abstain from even contemplating the

possibility of a constructive cultural exchange between them, Things
Fall Apart suggestively anticipates the espousal of alphabetic literacy
as a development potentially beneficial for the Igbo people. As has
been shown, thematically Achebe projects this development beyond
the ending of his novel by hinting at the possibility that his heros son
Nwoye will finally transcend the tragic fates of his father and his
grandfather. Formally, however, Achebe fully realizes the synthesis of
Igbo orality and English literacy he envisages within his novel Things
Fall Apart itself.
Like Achebe, Erdrich and Grace posit literacy and orality not as
mutually exclusive absolutes, but as correlate variables and advocate
the cultivation of an oral literacy (or of a literate orality) that will
enable indigenous peoples in North America and New Zealand,
respectively, to assert their cultural specificity. Yet while interpreting
the appropriation of alphabetic literacy as an indispensable and
perfectly natural development, they do not relate the refusal of some
of their people to participate in this appropriation as special tragedies
quite the opposite. Grace and Erdrich systematically idealize and
mystify the scriptlessness that distinguishes certain of their characters
as a curiously superior form of otherness, absolutely intangible to
literate Westerners and, hence, strangely immune to colonization.
Only at first sight do the fates of their non-literate protagonists
appear identical with those of Okonkwo or Ali, or with that of the
barbarians in Coetzee. They, too, suffer destruction and loss. Yet their
deaths are followed by a kind of spiritual survival, resurrection, or
rebirth, which does not only negate the imminent demise of
indigenous orality, but also helps to assert the aboriginal cultures
continuity in spite of its exposure to the civilizing forces of a white
literate culture. Accordingly Jacob writes that Love Medicine is not
about despair and cultural loss entirely but about a culture in
transition and notes that signs are present in the novel that bode well
for a Chippewa future.3 Likewise Knudsen observes of Potiki that it
3
Connie A. Jacobs, The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People,

American Indian Studies 11, New York, 2001, 95. Similarly, Bak observes that
Erdrich moved beyond the stereotype of the doomed Indian, helplessly trapped
between the two cultural codes of native American beliefs and Roman Catholicism
and that in Erdrichs fiction intercultural conflict is not necessarily destructive, but
Later Contacts in New Zealand and North America
225
performs an active appropriation of the language and the medium of

the Centre, thereby opening up to a renewed sense of cultural
autonomy that allows for the Maori breath of life to be celebrated
again.4 Gordon and Williams observe about the work of Patricia
Grace that it does not simply reflect the ongoing struggle of people
and communities to adapt modernity to their own purposes and
priorities but that it conveys a sense of itself and its language being
deeply and positively implicated in the adjustments of power.5
For Williams and Gordon Graces writing is free of the fear
permeating the works of so many African writers that in writing in
English they might contribute to a homogenization and deindigenization of their culture. Like Erdrich, Grace seems to
comprehend cultural appropriation as a process in which her people
have not been mastered by Western modes of thought and expression
but have learnt to master them. Historically, this is not incorrect,
especially as far as the Maoris and Chippewas alphabetization is
concerned as both the Maori and Native Americans acquired writing
with remarkable swiftness and ease in the course of the nineteenth and
earlier twentieth centuries. By the 1840s, literacy had spread among
the Maori population without much help of English and French
missionaries, mainly on a do-it-yourself basis. So receptive was Maori
culture to new technology in general and especially to writing that,
according to Richard Benton, there soon were proportionately more
Maori literate in Maori than English people in New Zealand (and
possibly in England) literate in English.6
In America the native population espoused literacy with equal
keenness and, when prevented from doing so by white settlers,
rather is available as an ambiguous source of both strength and powerlessness (Hans
Bak, Toward a Native American Realism: The Amphibious Fiction of Louise
Erdrich, in Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Kristiaan Versluys,
Postmodern Studies 5, Amsterdam, 1992, 145-70).
4
Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal
and New Zealand Maori Literature, Cross/Cultures, Readings in the Post/Colonial
Literatures in English 68, Amsterdam, 2004, 2-3.
5
Elizabeth Gordon and Mark Williams, Raids on the Articulate: CodeSwitching, Style-Shifting and Post-Colonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature, XXXIII/2 (1998), 88-89.
6
Richard Benton, The History and Development of the Maori Language, in
Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, eds Graham
McGregor, Mark Williams, and Ray Harlow, Auckland, 1991, 12.
226
devised their own scripts. Probably the most widely spread script ever
invented by a Native American is the syllabary conceived by
Sequoyah between 1819 and 1822 and adopted by the Cherokee
Nation not only for their written constitution but also for translations
from the Christian scriptures and the circulation of news in
Amerindian newspapers such as the Cherokee Phoenix. Particularly
well suited to the Cherokee language, Sequoyahs script became so
popular that by 1825 the vast majority of Cherokee Indians had
become literate. It did not die out even after the Cherokees were
brutally decimated in the time of removal in 1838 and was replaced by
the Latin alphabet only at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Louise Erdrichs native language, Ojibwe,7 is still written in Oji-Cree,
an adaptation of a syllabary which Methodist missionary James Evans
created for the Cree between 1840 and 1846. Though promoted along
with other cultural practices in a relatively recent concerted endeavour
to preserve Ojibway traditions and customs, Oji-Cree is not seen as a
serious alternative to the Latin alphabet, nor Ojibwe as one to English.
Hostility to indigenous literacy was considerable both in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America and New
Zealand. Grace and Erdrich are aware of this and in their writings
expressly refer to the methods of cultural engineering employed to
enforce the use of English in spoken as well as in written
communication among their people. Grace severely criticizes the
educational policy which New Zealand pursued until the 1970s and
which entailed the extension of compulsory schooling to Maori
children in the 1890s, their systematic assignation of teachers who
could speak only English, and the introduction of harsh disciplinary
measures against Maori children using their native language at school.
Her description of the kind of indoctrination to which Native New
Zealanders were subjected during their years at school lend
themselves to a comparison of the accounts offered by Erdrich in Love
Medicine of the forced enrolment of Native American children into
state boarding schools for the purpose of suppressing indigenous
languages and literacies.
7
Otherwise anglicized as Chippewa, Ojibwa or Ojibway and known to its
own speakers as Anishinabe or Anishinaabemowin.
227
Ironically enough, such censoring did not prevent the evolution of

indigenous writing traditions distinctive from white uses of literacy
either in America or in New Zealand, but only delayed it. Maori
literature in the narrow sense of the word began to be produced only
relatively recently and, as a rule, is conceived not in Maori but in
English. Still, as Mark Williams insists, it is no less authentically
Maori literature than traditional songs and chants.8 For its appeal is
in the first place to Maori readers and only secondarily to pakeha and
overseas audiences. This is possible because, unlike the majority of
sub-Saharan Africans, most Maori are bilingual and literate. So are
most Native Americans. Thus Louise Erdrich or Patricia Grace write
in a situation that has never really made it necessary for them to
express the same bitter resentment that Africas first Nobel laureate,
Wole Soyinka, has articulated at having to write in a language that
belongs to the conqueror.9 Instead they have been able to openly
accept the hybridity of their cultural heritage and to make creative use
of their ability to write for and to their own people in English.
In the process they have come to conceive of non-literacy as a very
special form of otherness, one that implies neither disadvantage nor
social marginalization. The indigenous communities portrayed in Love
Medicine and Potiki do not discriminate between people who can read
and write and people who cannot. Indeed, their largely unproblematic
attitude to literacy allows them to accord those untouched by any
knowledge of letters a very special status in their social life as well as
in the narratives these communities create in a collective endeavour of
remembering and recuperating the past. This is important also to the
conception of each novel as a transitional text, that is as one
forming a bridge between traditional oral and modern written
8
Mark Williams, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace: The Maori Renaissance
(15-05-2003): http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl1392/492/williams.html.
9
Wole Soyinka, quoted in Skinner, 79. As for the attitude of other African writers
such as Zaynab Alkali, J.P. Clark, Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa
Thiongo, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Ken Saro-Wiwa, or Eskia Mphalele to
English as a medium of self-expression, see also Skinner, 77-108. On the problematic
of language choice in the context of New Zealand cf. also Michelle Keown, Maori or
English?: The Politics of Language in Patricia Graces Baby-No-Eyes, in The Politics
of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed.
Christian Mair, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures 65, ASNEL
Papers 65, Amsterdam, 2003, 419-29.
228
literature by reviving myth, ceremony, traditional strategies of

storytelling, and tribal ways of knowing.10
Potiki and Love Medicine loosely combine the tales recollected by
individual family members to form a chorus of different characters
speaking in different cadences.11 As multi-perspective or multivoiced novels, they extend Achebes notion of native individuals
enacting life stories emblematic of their peoples history.12 The
engagement of the individual characters with each other in a
communal incantation of their history seems to be suggestive of a
powerful social coherence across generational differences and
temporal distances. Sensing this coherence as they become aware of
their closeness to the non-literate members of their community,
Graces and Erdrichs often highly literate natives ultimately
overcome the alienation from their culture which their indoctrination
with Western knowledge has caused. They learn to see their personal
story not in Western terms as a tale of individuation but as a fate
shared with their ancestors. They understand that, despite the
autonomy their education may have given them, they remain
implicated in their peoples history of suppression, exploitation, and
corruption.13 This eventually enables them to accept their aboriginality
as an historically relevant category and assume responsibility for its
protection and preservation.
For all their optimism concerning the efficacy and integrating
capacity of indigenous writing in English, Erdrichs and Graces texts
are never oblivious of the dangers to which minority cultures (or what
10
For example, Kathleen M. Sands, American Indian Autobiography and Elaine
Jahner, Intermediate Forms between Oral and Written Literature, both in Studies in
American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, ed. Paula Gunn
Allen, New York, 1990, 55-65 and 66-74; and Nancy J. Peterson, History,
Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrichs Tracks, PMLA, CIX (1994), 982-94, as well as
Jacobs, 46-50.
11
Dee Brown, Review of Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, Studies in American
Indian Literatures, IX/1 (Winter 1985), 5.
12
Jacobs speaks of a tribal focus on kinship (105).
13
Jacobs even considers this realization a generic feature of what she calls tribal
novels, that is, narratives permeated by oral residues or lingering evidence of a
pre-literate epistemology (36) manifesting themselves for instance in a sort of
transcendence of Western individualism for the sake of a full integration into a tribal
community.
229
Grace programmatically calls small population cultures14) are

exposed through their interaction with majority cultures. For Terrie
Goldie and Cliff Watego these dangers have been exacerbated by a
growing tendency among majority cultures to make their support of
indigenous arts and literatures dependent on their opportunity to
commercialize them. They argue that as a result genuine patronage of
aboriginal cultures has degenerated into petty patronization serving
mainly the purpose of indigenizing white master cultures by setting
them up as milieus without which native cultures cannot thrive
naturally.15 In Love Medicine and Potiki, Grace and Erdrich
emphatically contradict this assumption and its underlying
identification of Western civilization as the surviving fittest. It is
above all to this end that they stress the vibrancy of Chippewa and
Maori oral traditions and attest their non-literate characters almost
superhuman endurance. While most critics, in isolating signs of
Erdrichs and Graces obstinate optimism, have stressed the
retrospective orientation of their narratives, the following analysis will
show that Potiki and Love Medicine may equally be comprehended as
anticipatory texts projecting a re-indigenization of aboriginal
epistemologies and reasserting the Maoris and Native Americans
claim to aboriginality as one impossible for white establishments to
challenge.
14
Grace, quoted in Keown, 421.

Goldie, Fear and Temptation. Cf. Cliff Watego, Cultural Adaptation in the
South Pacific Novel, World Literature Written in English, XXIII/1 (Spring 1984),
488-96.
15
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ISLANDS OF PRELITERATE ORALITY:
LOUISE ERDRICHS LOVE MEDICINE AND
PATRICIA GRACES POTIKI
A central theme in Potiki and Love Medicine is the constant

imminence of change, which in capitalist Western terms may signify
progress by growth and acquisition, yet for the indigenous
communities portrayed means material confinement and loss. It is
against the shrinking of the actual place inhabited by the native
communities described by Grace and Erdrich that their two novels
may be said to assert themselves discursively. Narration, in Potiki and
Love Medicine, thus serves not only the recuperation of a repressed
cultural past but the repatriation of stolen cultural land. Charting this
land, Grace and Erdrich give centrality to non-literate characters and
in so doing suspend and even revert, at least for the duration of their
narratives, the seemingly inevitable cultural transformations their
novels record. As they let their focus linger on non-literate characters
they create a caesura during which alternative scenarios of cultural
growth in form of a cyclical event rather than an ever-accelerating
unidirectional process become conceivable. The scriptlessness of
Hemi Tamihanas retarded sister Mary in Potiki, as well as that of
Nector Kashpaws brother Eli, and of the hermit Moses Pillager in
Love Medicine is contrapuntal because what it suggests is even less
than a development diametrically opposed to the acculturation to
which most other characters in the novel are subjected: it actually
indicates complete stasis not, however, in the sense of an involuntary
paralysis, but in the sense of a profound state of contentment
provocatively calling in question the drive towards tragic closure
which each novel as a whole seems unable to resist.
In Potiki such a closure is foreshadowed by the lethal combat in
which a Maori community engage to defend their land against wilful
seizure by pakeha property developers. The violence they thus incite
is extreme. It results in the destruction of their wharenui and in the
murder of Toko, their lastborn, their potiki. While most members of
the community are devastated by these events, Tokos mother, the
illiterate Mary Tamihana, continues to cherish what is left to her and
232
IV. The Non-Literate in Sight: Later Contacts
her people and to bestow her affection onto it with unbroken faith in
the vitality of her people and their culture. Her means of expression
are limited, and so she resorts to singing her story, sometimes softly,
sometimes loudly, to herself and to the house.1 Even on the morning
when the Tamihanas go to look at the remains of their meeting house,
Mary is capable of facing the signs of total desolation with confidence
in the future. Standing amongst the disintegrated timbers, she
surprises her people, who are all paralysed by the sight of the
destruction, by pulling a scarred and blackened poupou from the
rubble to bury it so that the new could spring from the old which is
the natural way of things (P, 138).
What, to the uninitiated Western reader, appears to be a clear
symptom of Marys naivety and incomprehension in reality is a sign
of her resilience. Rather than too limited to grasp and adapt to any
changes, Marys mind proves too independent to be manipulated.
Knowing this, her sister-in-law, Roimata, in reflecting on Marys
idiosyncratic way of coping with loss, concludes that, in moments of
crisis, It was those who were not strong that could give ... strength
(P, 129). Even though, unlike other protagonists in Potiki, the childwoman never assumes the role of the narrator to tell her story in her
own words, this does not mean that Mary does not have a story to tell.
Yet, rather than telling it, she sings it along pathways not known (P,
180) to be heard only by those who listen to the whispering of the
wharenui, in other words, only by those with an understanding of
Maori mythology and genealogy.
Likewise, Eli Kashpaw and Moses Pillager in Love Medicine
represent both the durability of Chippewa culture and its almost
mystical inaccessibility to outsiders. Erdrich, too, links their firm
rootedness in their native culture to the fact that, in contrast to the rest
of their people, they have not been contaminated by Western learning.
She does so, for instance, at the beginning of Love Medicine from the
point of view of Albertine Johnson, who contemplates the difference
between her grandfather Nector Kashpaw and his brother Eli. With
sadness Albertine notes the mental disintegration of her grandfather,
once an astute political dealer knowing white reading and writing.
Grandpas mind had left us, gone wary and wild, she muses:
1
Patricia Grace, Potiki (1986), Talanoa: Contemporary Pacific Literature,

Honolulu, 1995, 15.
10. Islands of Preliterate Orality
233
His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in

weeds . Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and
vanished. The same color as water.2
At the same time Albertine cannot help marvelling at Elis unchanging

sharpness. While the well-read Nector Kashpaw tragically ends up
remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without
faces, things that happened out of place and time (LM, 19), the
illiterate Eli, formerly derided as a nothing-and-nowhere person
(LM, 92), in old age is admired for his unrivalled hunting skills and an
almost uncanny understanding of nature. The younger generation
respect Eli because he is the last man on the reservation who could
still snare himself a deer (LM, 29). The children love him for
teaching them how to care, how to listen for the proper birdcall, how
to whistle on their own fingers like a flute (LM, 92). Though
structurally marginalized, precisely like Mary in Potiki, by way of
careful exclusion from the narrative event in which Erdrich has the
other central characters of the novel join, the figure of Eli still retains
a central position within the Chippewa community. His special aura is
authenticated by this communitys remembering, which acquires
particular cultural importance as a collective act of salvaging a unique
Chippewa individuality from oblivion.
As ambivalent as Marys role in Potiki and Eli Kashpaws in Love
Medicine is that of the equally unlettered Moses Pillager in the latter
novel. This characters actual appearances in the novel are restricted
to a single chapter told by Lulu Nanapush, who, against all warnings,
resolves to seek out Moses Pillager on his island and become his
lover. She is told that Moses is windigo (His grandfather ate his own
wife!)3 and that he rarely speaks and, if he does, speaks only Indian.
The novel attributes his taciturnity to his upbringing. It discloses that
his mother, a woman who always had quick ideas, decided to fool
the spirits and pretend that her son was dead in order to protect him
2
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (1984), new and expanded version, New York,
1993, 19.
3
As Jaskoski explains, windigo is the embodiment of winter starvation, a
cannibal who can devour whole villages. Windigo sickness occurs when this
dangerous spirit takes possession of a human soul, causing an irresistible desire to
consume human flesh (Helen Jaskoski, From the Time Immemorial: Native
American Traditions in Contemporary Short Fiction, in Since Flannery OConnor:
Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, eds Loren Logsdon and Charles
W. Mayer, Macomb: Ill, 1987, 57).
234
from a fatal illness which was decimating their tribe. This meant that
Moses had to live invisible. Nobody ever let out his real name.
Nobody saw him (LM, 74-75), the reader learns. The invisibility
defining Moses childhood still pertains to the figure of the adult
Moses Pillager, in fact, it seems to inform his entire career, of which
Erdrich strategically discloses only few details thereby preventing it
from evolving into a story in its own right.
As if to obey the matriarchs resolve, Moses remains hidden as it
were in the background of the novel. Lulu recalls how one summer,
when she was a little girl, he came to her uncle Nanapush and the
two sat beneath the arbor, talking only in the old language, arguing the
medicine ways, throwing painted bones and muttering over what they
had lost or gained (LM, 73). As an adult, walking the trail toward the
centre of his island, Lulu at last stands before the enigmatic Moses,
and her memory of him as the personification of her peoples original
Indianness (or of what they nostalgically believe this Indianness to
have been once) is confirmed:
Suddenly Moses was there, sitting before me on a chair of stones. He
was surprising, so beautiful to look at that I couldnt tell his age. His
heavy hair coursed all the way down his back, looped around his belt.
His face was closely fit, the angles measured and almost too perfect.
(LM, 77-78)
His beauty, vitality, and strength, his silent guardedness and perfect
oneness with nature seem to lend Moses an Indianness superior even
to young Nector Kashpaws. While the latter is much sought for by
white film makers and painters and frequently hired for his good looks
to pose as or act the model Indian, Moses remains difficult to capture
either in words, or letters, or in any other medium of expression. A
verbal approximation to what he is appears possible only by recourse
to figurative language. Through it he is conjured as a mythical Other
reconnecting his people with their cultural origins. As Lulu puts it,
He was made of darkness weightless, fragile (LM, 81): He was
his island, he was me, he was his cats, he did not exist from the inside
out but from the outside in (LM, 83).
The ideal form of indigenous incorruptibility Mary Tamihana, Eli
Kashpaw, and Moses Pillager epitomize is closely tied up with
Chippewa and Maori notions of time. In Native American and Maori
terms alike the stasis in which each of the three characters remains
235
locked does not necessarily signify a lack of progress but simply a

fusion of past, present, and future, a state of continuity maintained
through a constant spiral movement involving returns as well as
advances. As Miriam Fuchs succinctly points out, in Maori, the past
translates into the days in front.4 Correspondingly, Maori
epistemology posits the past as both unfixed and revocable, capable
of being altered into the present, which gradually slips into the future
and thus becomes present time.5 Drawing on Fuchs work, Elizabeth
Deloughrey proposes that Grace employs a spiral temporality where
past and future time is narratively re-experienced in what she terms
the now-time, centred in the being.
This enables her to depart from the traditional linear, plot-driven
narrative of the realist novel and reform the Western individualistic
narrative, so profoundly implicated in nineteenth-century European
imperialism, into a communal Maori narration.6 The resultant
hybridization of Polynesian and Christian temporalities generates
considerable ontological and epistemological uncertainties and creates
the impression that there is yet another story in Potiki, apart from the
one the non-Maori readers grasp upon their first encounter with the
text. Fuchs claims that Something else is occurring ..., some other
scheme of events. Partially told and partially sensed, this other story
presses at the linear sequence, and ... circumscribes simple plot time
within its more dynamic structure.7
For the non-Maori reader to expect a resolution of the uncertainties
inherent in Potiki is futile, according to Fuchs, as the novels
indigenous story remains almost unanalysable8 or unreadable. In
never breaking down the barriers to full comprehension she installs in
her text, Grace situates non-Maori readers at the edge of her
Polynesian narrative, where they can sense its components, but are
4
Miriam Fuchs, Reading Toward the Indigenous Pacific: Patricia Graces Potiki:
A Case Study, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies, XXXVI (October 1993), 579.
5
Ibid., 576.
6
Elizabeth Deloughrey, Patricia Graces Potiki, ARIEL: A Review of
International English Literature, XXX/1 (January 1999), 60.
7
Fuchs, 577. Knudsen submits that this other story, this underlying narrative
form barely visible to the uninitiated eye allows for a reading of the novel as
being told from and by the walls of the wharenui, and of the wharenui itself as
providing, in fact, being the novels subtext (187).
8
Ibid., 580.
236
unable to engage fully or even penetrate beyond its borders.9 As

Fuchs sees it, Graces aim is not to initiate outsiders into her native
culture, but to hold out for apparent display selected aspects of [her]
culture. Because of the partial illiteracy into which she manoeuvres
the non-Maori reader, she argues, Graces work may seem
transparent, but as a cultural production ... is opaque.10
Systematic alienation of the non-indigenous reader, Fuchs reminds
us, is a characteristic not only of Patricia Graces fiction. The
employment of similar strategies of what Reed Way Dasenbrock has
termed culturally coded defamiliarization11 is equally common in
other contemporary indigenous writers. Symptomatically, Barbara
Pittman, in exploring the functions of the chronotope of the road in
Love Medicine, registers a movement away from linear continuity
also in Erdrichs novel as it tries to exist both within and without
dominant culture of Euro-America.12 Likewise David Mitchell
observes that Erdrich in continuously shifting backwards and forwards
between present and past produces convolutions of time and
complications of action that serve to add ambiguity to her narrative.13
In Pittmans view, it is because of the chaos and disorder, which
Mitchell identifies as cardinal features of Love Medicine, that EuroAmerican-trained readers may initially perceive the novel as inscribed
with the picaresque. Erdrichs particular reader manipulation,
however, eventually causes them to realize their own deficit of
understanding and challenges them to try harder, as it were, to shift
position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate the story into a coherent
whole.14
Ibid., 581.
Ibid., 579.
11
Dasenbrock, quoted in Fuchs, 581.
12
Barbara L. Pittman, Cross-Cultural Readings and Generic Transformations:
The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrichs Love Medicine, American Literature: A
Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, LXVII/4 (December 1995),
780.
13
David Mitchell, Cultural Hegemony and the Native American Past in Louise
Erdrichs Love Medicine, in Entering the 90s: The North American Experience:
Proceedings from the Native American Studies Conference at Lake Superior
University, October 27-28, 1989, ed. Thomas E. Schirer, Sault Ste. Marie: Mich,
1991, 164-65.
14
Kathleen M. Sands, Love Medicine: Voices and Margins, in Louise Erdrichs
Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 35.
10
237
The effect of the kind of rapport in which Erdrich engages her nonChippewa audiences is not much different, then, from what Grace
accomplishes by way of systematic alienation of non-Maori readers.
Love Medicine, too, in the end confronts non-Natives with their
ignorance of Chippewa culture. As Rainwater puts it, Erdrichs fiction
vexes the readers effort to decide upon an unambiguous,
epistemologically consistent interpretive framework. It produces a
permanent state of irresolution in which one is left to confront
epistemological dilemmas from the perspective of one at least
temporarily situated outside both systems.15 What intensifies this
hermeneutical impasse in Love Medicine is an ironic deconstruction
of the white practice of casting and recasting the Indian in the forever
unchanging role of the dying brave.16 Depictions of alcoholism and
physical abuse corroding the social life on the reservation contest such
stereotypes and urge a reading of Chippewa culture as a far more
complex structure than popular narratives of extinction suggest.
While insistently reminding their non-indigenous readers of their
lack of insight into the culture of the Maori and Chippewa people,
Grace and Erdrich do not provide them with an opportunity to identify
with representatives of dominant white culture either. Indeed, they
deny them such an opportunity by assigning white literates in Potiki
and Love Medicine the part of a mahaoi haole, which is Hawaian for
intrusive outsiders who casually place themselves where they do not
belong.17 Careful not to attest these unbelonging intruders or
inferior outsiders18 the importance they claim through their constant
interference in the lives of the protagonists, Grace and Erdrich present
them only as indistinct types, absent for most part of their narratives
and present rarely more than as schematic figures looming somewhere
in the background. As a result, even the actions they instigate seem
not so much theirs as the painful experiences of the targets of their
aggression.
15
Catherine Rainwater, Reading between the Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction

of Louise Erdrich, in Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D.
Sweet Wong, 165 and 167.
16
Pittman, 781.
17
Fuchs, 578.
18
Margaret J. Downes, Narrativity, Myth, and Metaphor: Louise Erdrich and
Raymond Carver Talk About Love, MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study
of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, XXI/2 (Summer 1996), 56.
238
The white characters reduction to mere ciphers of dominance and

interference of course enforces the dramatic importance of the nonliterate characters in Love Medicine and Potiki. It is by way of contrast
to the white characters textual marginality that Tokos physical
disability, Marys mental handicap, Moses self-imposed exile to his
island, as well as Elis stubborn adherence to an Indianness long
antiquated all acquire meaning as forms of existence which, however
static, are never uncreative. Beside the white policemen, lawyers, and
investors in Potiki and Love Medicine representing feature- and
storyless types, Moses Pillager, Eli Kashpaw, and Mary Tamihana
come to epitomize native incorruptibility. Theirs is a unique form of
independence, a freedom that is literally metaphysical inasmuch as it
enables them to transcend even temporal and geographic boundaries.
The poem opening the prologue to Potiki captures perfectly the
eccentricity and simultaneous autonomy embodied by these
characters:
From the centre
From the nothing,
Of not seen,
Of not heard,
There comes
A shifting,
A stirring,
And a creeping forward,
There comes
A standing,
A springing,
To an outer circle,
There comes
An intake
Of breath
Tihe Mauriora. (P, 7)
Of course, the centre which Erdrichs and Graces eccentrically

unlettered natives inhabit is situated at a safe distance from anything
traditionally comprehended as central in Western terms. It signifies
an indeterminate space, such as the beach where Mary can be found
when she is not in the meeting-house and where she goes to give birth
239
to Toko. The shore is a ... death place. It is the wasteland ... where
the sea puts up its dead, Roimata reflects and continues:
Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place not land, not sea
there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the
nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull,
searching for the speck, the beginning or the end that is the
beginning. (P, 18)
A similar uncertainty pertains to the place where the nowhereperson Eli lives, which is somewhere way out in the bush (LM,
22). His habit of going into hiding prompts comparisons with a shy
animal (LM, 161) but also with Moses Pillager, whose island,
inhabited by no one except him, is described as a place that is small
and dark at the center of a wide irritation of silver water (LM, 73).
There Moses can perfect the invisibility projected onto him by his
superstitious mother and, separated by a vast body of water from the
outside world, live safely quarantined from the influences disrupting
the lives of the other Indians on the reservation. His sole companions
in the unknown heart of the reservation are cats. Living with them he
becomes cat-like himself, following his spirit guardian,
Misshepeshu, who, as Van Dyke points out, is alternately described as
the big cat and as the horned lynx who lives in lakes.19
While perceived by the outside world as decrepit, deranged,
deformed (P, 102), the non-literate natives in both Potiki and Love
Medicine at least have never been subjected to Western education,
which Roimata Tamihana in Potiki remembers as a most puzzling
confrontation with incongruous sets of ideas, values, and rules:
At school we were given holy pictures and toffees to help us do Gods
will. Gods will was for us to sit still, or stand straight on two feet. It
was His will that we pray, that we have clean handkerchiefs, wear
aprons, bring pennies for souls, eat our crusts, hold our partners hand.
It was His will that we did not push or dribble, whistle, spit, swear, or
make dogs ears in books ....
19
Annette Van Dyke, Of Vision Quests and Spirit Guardians: Female Power in
the Novels of Louise Erdrich, in The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, ed.
Allan Chavkin, with an Afterword by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Tuscaloosa: Ala,
1999, 135.
240

It was Gods will that we sing the alphabet, the multiplication
tables, the hymns and the catechism, and the toffees and the pictures
of the suffering saints were kept in a green Jesus tin. (P, 16)
Even more openly than Roimata, Erdrichs characters interrogate

traditional Western, or more precisely, orthodox Catholic education.
Most of them remember their school days as a time of brutal initiation
into the intricacies of social injustice. All that Lulu Nanapush, for
instance, recalls is the punishments she would receive for running
away from boarding school:
Once, twice, too many times. I ran away so often that my dress was
always the hot-orange shame dress and my furious scrubbing thinned
sidewalks beneath my hands and knees to cracked slabs. Punished and
alone, I slept in a room of echoing creaks. I made and tore down and
remade all the dormitory beds. I lived by bells, orders, flat voices,
rough English. I missed the old language in my mothers mouth. (LM,
68)
Lulus sufferings seem harmless compared to the ordeals another

female in the novel, Marie Lazarre, must endure in a convent school
because a senior nun believes that the half-caste reservation girl is
possessed by the Devil. To exorcise the evil in her, Marie is locked
into a black closet, scalded with boiling water, and stabbed through
the hand with a fork. Ironically, the experience eventually convinces
Marie that there must be some higher and kinder authority without the
support of which she would not have been able to escape the measures
of atonement to which she was subjected. At the same time, the
recollection of the tortures she went through scars her for life, just as
the education they receive at state schools seems to scar most other
children on the reservation.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that few of them have any interest
in the kind of learning imposed by the new, the Catholic, the Bureau
(LM 263). Young Lipsha Morrissey, for instance, decides that he must
quit school for the betterment of his mental powers (LM, 364).
There is a startling resemblance between Lipsha Morrissey in Love
Medicine and Reuben of Te Ope in Potiki, who also decides that at
school he will not learn what he needs to learn. While the former
proudly believes that he can do without white learning altogether
because, as a descendant of Old Man Pillager, he is sufficiently
241
endowed with higher powers (such as the near-divine healing touch

[LM, 333]), the latter comes home from school one day and declares
that he will not go there any more because all he is taught is disregard
for himself and his people. As another character in Potiki puts it, state
schools only rubbished and ignored (P, 65) the customs and
language of the Maori. In contrast to Lipsha Morissey, Reuben
resumes his education after he finds out about the sad story of his
grandfather and the old mans unanswered appeals to the government
to restore to his people land of which the whites had defrauded them.
Reuben goes on to study law so that he may take legal actions against
the usurpers of his ancestral home.
Yet the benefits of his education remain sadly oblique. While
Reuben wins back his familys property, the court decrees that
compensation must be paid for all improvements allegedly made on
the land by the whites. The decision steeps the people of Te Ope into
near bankruptcy. The ironic twist in the outcome of their struggle for
repatriation remains an unforgettable lesson to other Maori
communities and prevents another family, the Tamihanas, from
following Reubens example when, several years later, pakeha
investors try to take over their property. Tragically, their decision to
secede from any dealings with the whites altogether turns out an even
more disastrous mistake. With their insistent rejection of the
dollarmans offers, they only court the gradual seizure of their land
by wilful destruction, the demolition of their sacred sites, and the
killing of Toko. Far too late do they comprehend that communication
with the whites on Maori terms and territory is impossible.
Complete defeat is finally averted by Tangimoana Tamihana who
breaks with her parents philosophy of passive resistance and resumes
Reubens strategy of speaking to the whites in the language of the
whites. This language, however, is no longer legalese but that of
straightforward violence. In response to the pakehas claim that the
destruction of her familys land and their wharenui was but an
accident, Tangimoana stages an accident in which the enemys road
building equipment is completely demolished. The ultimate success of
her scheme is proof of the importance of mimicry, of a strategic
simulation of the colonizers discursive habits. Literacy is seen
accordingly in Potiki: as an indispensable accomplishment in the
Maoris endeavour to assert themselves against aggressors who do not
speak their language, let alone understand their culture.
242
For Knudsen, Potiki stands out from Graces earlier fiction because
it is overtly political and explicitly traditional at once, offering a rare
combination of both agitational and lyrical, outspoken and meditative,
Mori voices.20 It argues the need for an indigenous counter-history
as convincingly as does Things Fall Apart. Also like Achebes novel,
Graces text proposes that such a counter-history should be
transported in a way accessible to members of white literate culture,
yet still distinctly indigenous, in other words, in a way that bears
features of both indigenous orality and indigenous literacy. Similarly,
Louise Erdrich recognizes the need for a synthesis of Western and
aboriginal systems of expression. While she idealizes the solid
rootedness in oral Chippewa culture of such characters as Eli
Kashpaw or Moses Pillager, she also grants that the form of living
these characters have cultivated is possible only for the most eccentric
of the Chippewa people, those living not only well beyond the reaches
of Anglophone literacy but also on the margins of their own native
society.
Sameness with individual members of their community is what still
connects them to their people. Such sameness is manifest in Gerry
Nanapush, son of Moses Pillager, as well as in, June Morrissey, foster
daughter of Eli Kashpaw. Both of these characters form referential
centres towards which Erdrichs novel seems to steer despite the
apparent interest which its individual sections convey in so many
other members of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe Erdrich
portrays. Although Love Medicine hardly ever relates actual
appearances of either June or Gerry, it consistently returns to them,
having individual threads of action run together in their life stories.
The account of constantly intersecting biographies begins with Junes
death and the announcement that June was gone not only dead but
suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow (LM, 7).
It ends with Gerrys escape from prison to Canada, closing with the
comment that, like June, Gerry will not be able to return to the
reservation and his people ever again. Yet, even if absence is the
central theme of their stories, June and Gerry remain palpably present
in the minds of the other characters. What Owens says about June
applies equally to Gerry, namely that she does not return physically
but comes home resurrected as trickster, the fragmented culture hero
20
Knudsen, 186.
243
made whole within memory and story, returning to her Indian

community as mythic catalyst.21
The link Gerry and June represent to their peoples unwritten past
as personified by Moses Pillager and Eli Kashpaw is preserved not
only through their actual re-enactment of their elders eccentricity. It
is also enforced by the memories an even younger generation has of
them. In assembling these memories and showing how they keep
transforming as individual characters compare notes and revise their
own versions of the past, Love Medicine at once explains and
mystifies the strange careers of June Morrissey and Gerry Nanapush.
For Reid it is especially in this respect that Erdrichs novel emulates
the Native American tradition of story telling, which heals itself and
the tribal web by adapting to the flow of the present while never
relinquishing its connection to the past.22
In this process the reader takes on the same function as the listener
in the event of oral narration. As Wong stresses, it is the reader,
rather than the unself-conscious narrators, who weaves the disparate,
contradictory stories into a vision of community and history and
culture.23 The reader for instance is required to make better sense of
Junes unexpected demise in a snow storm than most of her relatives
do. They used to marvel at her extraordinary resilience and tell stories
of how as an infant June survived alone in the forest after her mothers
death, sucking pine sap, grazing grass, and nipping buds like a deer.
Some people on the reservation suspect that she did not die then
because the spirits were protecting and raising her. Her aunt Marie is
certain that the woods were in June ... as if she really was the child of
what the old people called Manitous, that the Devil had no business
with June (LM, 87).
In the years to follow June refuses any help from her aunt but
quietly mourns the loss of her mother, hardly speaking two words to
anyone and never fighting back. Indeed, she seems to succumb to a
curious flirtation with death, on one occasion even persuading her
playmates to stage an execution in which she should be killed by
hanging. A catastrophe is averted by the timely interception of her
aunt who finds June with a neatly knotted rope around her neck,
21
Louis Owens, Erdrich and Dorriss Mixed-Bloods and Multiple Narratives, in

Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 56-57.
22
Paula Gunn Allen, quoted in Reid, 69.
23
Wong, 5.
244
telling her cousins to tighten it more before hoisting her up over the
branch of a tree. You ruined it .... I was supposed to be hanged, her
niece reproves her. Many years later Marie Lazarre still reflects,
deeply mystified, I could almost have sworn she knew what was real
and what was not real, and that Id still ruined it (LM, 90).
The only person whom June trusts is her uncle Eli Kashpaw, who
takes her with him into the woods to shoot mud hens and teach her old
Cree songs. I was seeing how the girl spoke more often once he [Eli]
started coming, Marie remembers.
She picked an old scrap of billed hat from a dump and wore it just like
him, soft and squashed in on her hair. I began to understand what she
was doing as time went on. It was a mother she couldnt trust after
what had happened in the woods. But Eli was different. He could
chew pine sap too. (LM, 92)
Tragically, the knowledge the eccentric old man passes on to June,

while enabling her to survive any storm on the plains, does not
prepare her for survival under less natural circumstances. She dies not,
as most of her relatives choose to believe, because she wandered off
into a blizzard too intoxicated to spot the signs of its coming, but, as
the recollection of her niece Albertine urges the reader to conclude, by
choice. Instead of stating openly that June committed suicide,
however, the narrative suggests only obliquely that she must have
willed herself to put an end to a longstanding hurt. It is through
Albertines fond reconstructions of her aunts story that it dawns on
the reader that drunkenness and moral destitution do not sufficiently
explain Junes demise. Instead the novel seems to submit that June
ended up not so much a fallen woman, as her family would like to
believe, but as a beaten one.
This discovery presupposes a highly literate reading of Junes
story, which only the university-educated Albertine can perform
because she possesses the necessary distance from traditional
Chippewa ideals. It is of symbolic significance that Albertine is Far
from home, living in a white womans basement ... sitting at [her]
linoleum table with [her] textbook spread out to the section on Patient
Abuse when she receives a letter from her mother informing her not
only about her aunts death but also that nobody had bothered to
disturb her in her studies by asking her to Junes funeral. At once the
letter creates a more than formal link between Albertine and her aunt,
245
as is suggested also by the young womans realization how reading

that letter made [her] feel buried, too (LM, 7).
The spiritual oneness Albertine senses between herself and June is
sustained throughout the novel. Also an outsider, Albertine is the only
person, apart from her great-uncle Eli Kashpaw, who is not alienated
by Junes otherness, but admires her for it. If, as Lissa Schneider
argues, forgiveness is indeed what constitutes the true love medicine
in Erdrichs novel,24 Albertine possesses it and applies it to the
memory of June. Whatever she lacked as a mother, she insists,
June was a good aunt to have (LM, 8). Her fond and even grateful
characterization of June in a sense makes up for the unforgiving
picture the rest of the family and especially her son Lipsha draw of
her:
She always kept an extra stick of Doublemint in her coat pocket. Her
neck smelled fresh and sweet. She talked to me the way she talked to
grown-up people and never told me to play outside when I wanted to
sit at the edge of a conversation. She had been pretty .... She had
stayed pretty even when things got so bad with Gordie that she ran off
alone .... She always planned that she would make it somewhere else
first, then send for the boy. But everything she tried fell through. (LM,
8-9)
The girl who adores her aunt wildly grows up remembering the
deceased womans words and finally understanding them.
Absentmindedly overhearing a conversation in which somebody uses
an oddly familiar combination of words, Albertine suddenly recalls
what June said about her husband many years earlier: He used the
flat hand. He hit me good (LM, 17).
In remembering these words, Albertine retrieves the answer to a
question all other members of her family seem either unable or
unwilling to solve. No one except for Albertine Johnson can see it
laid out clear ... how down the limit [her] kind of life would have
gotten June (LM, 9). She finally grasps why her aunt had to sink so
low. Her relatives choose to interpret Junes tragic end as the
inevitable consequence of a madness brought on by the premature
death of Junes mother and enforced by a tendency to idle degeneracy
24
Lissa Schneider, Love Medicine: A Metaphor for Forgiveness, Studies in
American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of
American Indian Literatures, IV/1 (Spring 1992), 1.
246
June has inherited from the Kashpaws. For Albertine, however, this is
not the whole truth, but a judgement contrived and reiterated to deflect
from the familys own part in Junes death. It is against her relatives
endeavours to suppress, deny, and forget their guilt that Albertine
undertakes her remembering and reconstructs incidents of physical
maltreatment June had to suffer from early childhood.
She alludes to the possibility that there might be another version to
the story of Junes hanging, a version according to which Junes
playmates were no less determined to execute June than June herself
was to be executed. As if to enforce this suspicion, Albertines
narrative suggests that her aunt was tortured and abused by her
cousins more than once. Thus she anticipates what is revealed far too
late to save June or at least preserve her familys respect for her: in the
chapter significantly titled Crown of Thornas25 Albertines
suspicion finally is confirmed that Junes husband Gordie Kashpaw,
once a boxer in the Golden Gloves, would regularly beat her in
uncontrolled rage until she left him.
So much is unconscious, passed down through generations, family
to family, Greg Sarris writes in his essay on internalized oppression
and Love Medicine. So much is unrecognizable,26 and because of
this Gordie gets away with murder as does the father of Junes son
Lipsha, Gerry Nanapush. While her family even posthumously
condemn June for the life into which she allowed herself to drift, they
love Gerry for his freewheeling, adore him for his notoriety, and enjoy
the tales of his escapes from high security prisons. No white man has
made a jail that could hold the son of Moses Pillager, they tell each
other. He could fly. He could strip and flee and change into shapes of
swift release, his son Lipsha raves about him. When he discovers that
Gerry Nanapush is his father, he is overwhelmed with pride. By
contrast, when he learns that June is his mother, all he feels is shame.
As long as he does not know all about June and the oppression she
had to suffer, Lipsha remains unwilling to forgive her for abandoning
him when he was a little child. Instead he cherishes his anger at the
woman who allegedly would have drowned him as a baby had she not
been stopped by his grandmother. Yet, there is hope that he will
25
For an interpretation of this title and further biblical references in the novel, see
Rainwater, esp. 164-65.
26
Greg Sarris, Reading Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine as Home Medicine, in
Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 205.
247
overcome his resentment and learn the whole truth about his mothers
sad career from Albertine one day. As he himself reveals towards the
end of the novel, Albertine is the only girl he has ever trusted. It is for
her sake, that he returns to his people in the end, confident that his
homecoming will be a new beginning. Reaching the bridge over the
boundary river into the reservation, Lipsha stops and, looking into the
dark, thick, twisting body of water underneath, remembers how the
old ones used to offer tobacco to the water. Almost simultaneously,
he recalls his mother June and suddenly free of any resentment he at
last manages to concede, there was good in what she did for me, I
know now (LM, 366).
The idea conveyed by this ending of an emergent generation of
Chippewa able to synthesize old and new forms of Indian life with the
help of a far more optimistic and forgiving understanding of their
peoples history, transforms the sadness underlying the reflections on
Junes death at the beginning of the novel. The event does not mark
the ending of Junes story. Not only does she continue to exist in the
guilty conscience of her family. She also experiences a kind of rebirth
in the much kinder recollections of Albertine and Lipsha. The novels
final words have to be read accordingly as indicating the completion
of the homeward journey on which June sets out one night at the
beginning of Love Medicine. As dawn is breaking, Lipsha wakes from
his reverie on the bridge over the boundary river, knowing that there
was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home (LM, 367).
What he is bringing home is his mothers car, which he has won on
his trip and which means much more to him now that his vision of
June is beginning to change.27
In a similar way, Potiki finally leads to the main characters
reconciliation with a past, at first too painful even to remember. Like
Erdrich, Patricia Grace lets her narrative culminate in the sudden
death of a character who has always played a particular integrating
role within the native community she portrays. As in Love Medicine,
this death marks a significant turning point in the narrative, forcing the
natives to re-examine their self-defensively introspective position vis27
As for this homecoming as a characteristic of the orally organized Indian
homing novel, see William Bevis, Native American Novels: Homing In, in
Recovering the World: Essays on Native American Literature, eds Brian Swann and
Arnold Krupat, Berkeley, 1987, 582, and David E. Bynum, The Daemon in the
Woods: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns, Cambridge: Mass, 1978.
248
-vis white society and to face the inevitability of their assimilation to

external pressures. On the one hand, Tokos death foreshadows the
immensity of the sacrifice such assimilation demands of them. On the
other hand, it indicates a way of coming to terms with irreversible
loss, a way which consists in the same optimistic evaluation of the
future at which Lipsha in Love Medicine arrives through the
reinterpretation of his personal history as son of Gerry Nanapush and
June Morrissey.
The ability to see that Good can come from what is not good,
good can come from sorrow, new life from old (P, 159) is what in the
end makes also the Maori in Potiki fit to face their future. More
explicitly than Love Medicine, however, Potiki defines the colonized
indigenes reconciliation with the past as a process of epistemological
readjustment in the course of which available means of
communication and systems of conceptualization are re-examined.
Grace assigns this re-examination special importance in her novel by
weaving into the main plot a separate highly symbolic story describing
the genesis of the Tamihanas wharenui. In so doing, she finds a way
of reinforcing native systems of thought by which the development of
her narrative is crucially determined. In her descriptions of the work
of several generations of Maori woodcarvers, Grace captures the
Maori idea of the artefact as representing an organically grown and
forever growing expression of the native communitys story, an
expression which documents past events and, as a synthesis of these,
reflects the present, while also anticipating the future by virtue of its
conception as a fragment to be continued by later generations.28
Central to Graces theory of Maori art is a thorough understanding
of the woodcarvers medium, which Grace conveys at several points
in her narrative. Ratiocination on means and modes of expression, she
makes clear in the process, is not a prerogative of literate societies.
Grace even goes as far as asking implicitly whether white society
might not lack the ability to subject its discursive practices to equally
sophisticated forms of scrutiny as the agents of the most traditional
Maori art forms are used to applying. Both woodcarving and the
exegesis of the carved images certainly represent far more conscious
28
As Barrow observes, it is thus that through wood carving even death is turned to
social usefulness in Maori life (Terence Barrow, Maori Art of New Zealand, Paris,
1978, 93). Cf. also Knudsen, 196-98.
249
and concentrated exercises in Potiki than the reading and writing done
by the representatives of the white establishment in the novel.
While Grace has white professionals insistently misuse their
literacy skills, thereby unwittingly desecrating their own culture, she
describes the work of the Maori woodcarvers as a quest for truth
conducted under religious observation of longstanding traditions and
in the awareness of the medium and its inherent capacity to generate
meaning. She describes the Maoris deep respect for what they call
wood quiet and believe to be the quiet of trees that have been
brought in out of the wind. This quiet, still, otherness of trees found
by the carver, the shaper, the maker, the reader is told in Potiki, is a
watching quiet,
... because the new-limbed trees have been given eyes with which to
see. It is a waiting quiet, the ever-patient waiting that wood has, a
patience that has not changed since the other tree life. But this tree
quiet is an outward quiet only, because within this otherness there is a
sounding, a ringing, a beating, a flowing greater than the tree has ever
known before.
And the quiet of the house is also the quiet of stalks and vines that
no longer jangle at any touch of the wind, or bird, or person passing,
but which have been laced and bound into new patterns and have been
now given new stories to tell. Stories that lace and bind the earthly
matters to matters not of earth. (P, 87)
Graces poetic celebration of the Maori art of woodcarving

constitutes a thoroughly constructive way of criticizing the uses to
which white civilization subjects the written medium, jeopardizing not
only its moral, but also its epistemological integrity. It allows for a
plea to recuperate also for literate societies a mode of expression other
than the aggressive discourse thriving in a climate of unashamed
capitalist exploitation of land and culture. At the same time it permits
Grace to remind her pakeha readers of one of the most valuable
sources of regenerative energy any society possesses: the art of
storytelling. In Potiki, the Maoris determination to preserve this
source at all costs is provocatively framed as proof of their cultural
resilience to the influences of an increasingly storyless and therefore
increasingly degenerate master culture. Still, Grace does not argue that
there is no way for that culture to retrieve its stories. It seems to be her
belief that this may be accomplished provided the master culture learn
250
from the minority cultures it tends to ignore. Failing to do so, the

dollarman who is given a chance to tell his story in Potiki cannot
overcome his inarticulacy.
One would be mistaken, though, to assume that for Grace the
preservation of storytelling is synonymous with the preservation of a
non-literate Maori orality. On the contrary, the storytellers in her
fiction resort to all kinds of media to give expression to most diverse
levels and forms of literacy. Indeed, in Potiki, Grace even interprets
one of the most advanced and elaborate forms of storytelling in Maori
culture, namely that of woodcarving, as an act definitely more literate
than oral. The same holds true of the Maoris reception of their
carvings. Both events, the actual carving and the contemplation (or
reading) of the carvings, are conducted in silence, the sort of silence
Illich and Sanders identify as a distinctive feature of modern
chirographic societies.
That Patricia Grace should trace that same silence in Maori culture
is not a mere coincidence. For Knudsen, the ritual of carving is
Graces guide to artistic expression and the reference for her cultural
impressions.29 With the analogies she establishes throughout Potiki
between writing and woodcarving she effectively challenges Western
notions of artistic creation as a profoundly individuating process. In
suggesting that writers might be seen like woodcarvers, she also
proposes seeing writing as an entirely communal event. In traditional
Maori societies, Barrow reminds us, were no solitary artists sitting in
garrets awaiting in tortured moments the urge to create something.
For them, life and creation flowed as a deep river, without effort and
turmoil.30 This, Potiki suggests, may also apply to modern carvers
and writers willing to comprehend themselves not as excelling their
fellow-beings but as working for and with them.
With corresponding humbleness the carvers in Potiki concede that
the wood into which they carve their stories as well as the stories that
spring from their carvings possess an inner dynamic beyond their
control. Logically, they may lay no claim to authorship in the Western
sense of the word, namely as a form of original ownership to their
works meaning. Rather their contribution to the artwork is like that of
a midwife helping to bring into existence what already exists and thus
has always belonged to their people:
29
30
Knudsen, 195.
Barrow, 13.
251
The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further
fruiting at the hands of a master.
This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he
master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of
the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb
that is a tree ...
It is as though a child brings about the birth of a parent because
that which comes from under the masters hand is older than he is, is
already ancient. (P, 7-8)
While the Maori community expects the carvers work to be venerated

by many future generations, its creator cannot hope to immortalize
himself through his carvings but must accept that he may not be
known or remembered, except by a few ... those who grew up with
him (P, 8). As Graces novel suggests, fame is not something sought
by the Maori artist, who never perceives himself as in any way
separate from his people but always as part of them.
With her repeated emphasis on the Maoris sense of community
Grace validates what McLuhan identifies as primitive or preliterate
tribal existence. For Grace, the idea of oneness with ones people is
not a sign of backwardness but a prerequisite to understanding
otherness. While Western societies, in viewing otherness either as a
symptom of excellence or one of freakishness, invariably associate it
with a condition of isolation, the Maori in Potiki are shown to accept
persons both most excellently and most freakishly other fellow-beings
into the centre of their community. Mary is one case in point. Her son
Toko is another. Not mentally retarded like his birthing mother, yet
physically fragile and disabled, Toko is different. Quite
characteristically, the way in which his people see this difference is as
a weakness and as a strength at the same time.31 On the one hand, it
makes Toko dependant on their protection, support and care, on the
other, it lends him a special oldness (P, 155) and, with it, a special
wisdom in the eyes of the other Maori in the novel.
When he is still very young his family already know that Toko
was something special theyd been given ... a taniwha, who somehow
gave strength ... and joy to all of them (P, 67). Throughout his life,
but also after his death, his people regard him as their precious one,
31
For Graces own explanation of the status of handicapped persons in preEuropean Maori society, see Knudsen, 205, n. 46.
252
their potiki, which may be read as either referring to the demigod

Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga32 or to the fact that he is the Tamihanas
youngest child, in Maori mythology, Tokowaru-i-te-Marama (P, 161).
In spite of his oldness, he never grows up to lose his innocence; in
spite of his quickness and intuition, his mind is not tamed or groomed
by conventional adult learning. Tokos special knowing is age- and
timeless, or, as he himself puts it, It is a before, and a now, and an
after knowing, and not like the knowing that other people have. It is a
now knowing as if everything is now (P, 52).
Not restrained by Western notions of time, chronology, and
finality, Toko is capable even of anticipating future events. I was the
only one who saw the carved hate and anger on the face of the man
(P, 102), he realizes, yet his people do not hear him when he tries to
warn them of the catastrophes awaiting them. Most of them have lost
what is not really a supernatural but a natural gift in Toko, an
alternative understanding of history, an awareness of another than a
purely temporal logic. For Toko, foreseeing what is to come is a
matter of empathy and identification with the older generation in
whose past he finds his peoples future reflected. It is not by some
special magic but through a sense of connectedness with his
grandmothers story that he is able to visualize the hurt, pain, and
anger ahead of his family:
I understood the years of hurt, sorrow and enslavement that fisted
within my Granny Tamihanas heart. I understood all at once, all the
pain that she held inside her small and gentle self.
And the pain belonged to all of us, I understood that too. I
understood that my sisters angry words shouted in the house of wood,
the house of stories, the house of tipuna shouted into the domain of
Rongo which is the domain of peace were a relief and a release for
my Granny, causing her to shake and laugh herself to tears. (P, 102)
32
The exploits of this hero known throughout Polynesia, Jean-Pierre Durix

explains, include snaring the sun to make it revolve more slowly round the earth,
fishing up new land from the bottom of the sea and attempting to steal immortality on
behalf of his fellow human beings from Hinenui-te-po, the great goddess of
darkness. (Patricia Graces Potiki or the Trickster Behind the Scenes, in A
Talent(ed) Digger: Creations, Cameos, and Essays in Honour of Anna Rutherford,
eds Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier, and Geoffrey V. Davis, Cross/Cultures:
Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 20, Amsterdam, 1996, 436-37.)
253
There is a night of colours. And also a night of stars (P, 133).

This rather cryptic statement of Tokos turns out to be an expression
of the same fear by which his brother Manu is overcome. Manu senses
that they will all have to burn in another fire (Burning. Burning in the
night .... [P, 135]), following the destruction of the meeting house.
Nobody takes the prophesies of the two brothers seriously as nobody
can understand the special way of thinking which Toko and Manu
share as a result of the rather unorthodox education their mother
Roimata decides to let her two potikis receive. She does so out of a
conviction that You had to trust what people knew in their hearts.
People knew things in their hearts, even little kids, or especially little
kids (P, 66). Herself trained as a teacher, she resolves that her two
boys, who did not belong to schools, or rather to whom schools did
not belong, should not be taught in an environment with desks and
books, blackboards, chalk-dust, and coloured pictures ...,
multiplication tables and number lines, jigsaws, scissors and paint, and
an alphabet frieze, and clocks that told us when to start and stop (P,
38). Instead she determines that they learn what they need and want to
learn, because schools [are] all right for some, but ... you [do] not
always find what [is] right. So I became ... a teller of stories, she
recounts, a listener to stories, a writer and a reader of stories, an
enactor, a collector and a maker of stories .... we all became all of
these things tellers, listeners, readers, writers, teachers and learners
together (P, 38-39).
The fact that their education is a kind of initiation into the art of
storytelling does not mean that Manu and Toko grow up in blessed
ignorance of the outer world. As their relatives discover in the process
of teaching the two brothers, any knowledge can potentially provide
material for a story. Still, the knowledge contained in the stories
which James and Tangimoana bring home from school is different
from traditional Maori knowledge. Jamess school stories deal with
people who live in eggshells on paper snow or in matchstick
villages by a paint sea, who sit by cellophane fires with silver
chocolate-wrap feathers and have cardboard homes behind a paper
wall that could not be climbed by the sea (P, 40). In these stories the
charted rainfall ... and cross-sections of mountains, rivers, land and
soil tell people their future (P, 39-40). Likewise, the universe of
which James learns at school can be viewed through a peep-hole in a
cardboard box, paper planets dangling from the threads against navy-
254
blue space, and light coming in through the cellophaned cutout in the
boxs lid (P, 40). Jamess stories are not living stories; nor are
Tangimoanas book stories of queens and kings, monsters, charmers,
murderers, ghosts, orphans, demons and saints, which she writes
down in old exercise books or on scraps of paper. As Roimata puts it,
They were stories, poems, lines, pages, which she left for us to find
and read (P, 40: emphasis added).
Repeatedly Grace foregrounds the special materiality of the stories
derived not from Maori mythology but from outside Maori culture,
accentuates their papery quality and stresses the process of their
making as one of putting meaning onto or into paper. This process is
not just limited to the act of drawing letters, words, or whole
sentences. Grace also refers to other uses of paper. She offers images
of various sorts of stationary, of folded and perforated, glued and
painted cardboard, and more than once of paper cuttings, thereby not
only undermining traditional associations of Western literacy with
immateriality and abstractedness but also reinforcing the parallel she
keeps drawing throughout Potiki between literary writing and wood
carving. After all, paper, in the 1980s still one of the writers main
working materials, is also gained from trees that may have spent
further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier ... Or floating
on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or
sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun (P,
8).
If the woodcarver may be regarded as bringing the figures which
develop first in the forests to other birth with his tools, his mind
and his heart, his breath and his strangeness (P, 7), the same can be
said of the writer whose stories, too, revive the previous life ... within
the tree womb (P, 8), making the past, of which they tell once they
have been put onto paper, a part of the present. Like the woodcarvers,
the writers may choose to write in order to protect his ancestors and
their stories from oblivion, to reshape them in their personal ways and
present their images as a gift to their people. For Grace, this certainly
is the aim that a writer ideally pursues with her work.
To do so, however, it is not enough for the writer to be highly
literate, as it is not enough for the woodcarver to possess the skills of
his craft. As is established at the end of Potiki,
255
The ones who work in words or wood listen for the beat that words
and wood have. Because, although they listen too for the approaching
shadows and the whisperings about the edges of the land, they cannot,
from where they are, hear the sounds distinctly. (P, 184)
What they need so as to fulfil their task is also an awareness of their

own limitations as well as of their dependence on the support of their
people, for there is a chance that some of the things they do not know
may be known by others:
The people work and watch and wait. They pace the tides and turn the
earth. They stand, listening on the shores.
They listen, hearing mostly the quiet. It is the quiet that is trees
growing, the sliding of fish through water, the hovering cloud, the
open-eyed quiet of the night ....
The man letting crumbled earth sift between his fingers hears
mainly that, but listens too for the shadows closing in, the whispering
about the edges of the land.
The woman throwing the line hears the flutter and splash of it as
she casts.
Those who fish with nets hear the creak of oars and the sliding of
the net being let out over the stern. (P, 183-84)
Every humans perspective is special and limited at the same time.

By trying to listen to others and include their voices in their works,
writers may achieve what they cannot achieve on their own, namely a
composition of different knowledges that transcends the limitations of
individual subjectivity and thus manages to convey a higher truth, a
more than personal, that is to say, a communal reality. One of the most
important insights the collectively conceived artwork, be it that of the
Maori woodcarver or that of the Maori writer, affords is that no
human perception ever is absolutely correct.
In keeping with his understanding of the artists mission as
consisting in the acknowledgement and acceptance of the fallibility of
the human mind, the woodcarver in Potiki warns his apprentice to ever
portray anyone in living memory. Instead of presuming that he can
forestall what the future will bring, the carver must admit his own
limitations and, in a gesture of submission to the unknown, leave
certain spaces in his work to be filled by a later carver in possession of
another, not previously attainable wisdom. The importance the
younger generation thus acquire as those who will continue what has
256
been begun by their elders enforces the idea of the all-importance of

collective collaboration in the genesis of the artwork. The artists in
Potiki are never alone. Their work will always be a polyphonic
negotiation of what is right, true, and proper for their people as a
whole.
In the process of such negotiation, every single voice is heard.
There is no chief, the Maori in Potiki try to make clear to their pakeha
visitors who keep demanding to see someone ... who has the say (P,
118). We all have the say, all of us together, Tangimoana explains
her peoples idea of collective responsibility and authority to a
journalist who can respond only with utter consternation at so much
democratic discipline. What remains too difficult for outsiders to
fathom Grace constructs as a perfectly self-evident aspect of the
Maoris social life, based on a collective commitment to the tradition
of open public debate at communal gatherings. Yet, the principle of
free expression is observed not only at formal meetings in the
wharenui but also in personal exchanges between individual family
members. It is an almost ideal community that Grace portrays in
Potiki as it seems to exclude no one, not even their women or
children, from its discourses. They, too, are allowed to speak their
minds and, what is even more important, they are heard by their
elders.
The polyphonic nature of their interactions also forms a structuring
principle of Potiki, which is not only broken up into individual
sections recounted by different characters but includes extended
dialogues, reported and direct speeches. The consonance thus
produced of several characters voices within a single characters
narrative enhances the indifference of the individual narrators to their
own authorial status. Least concerned about his role as narrator is the
eponymous hero. Toko repeatedly stresses that what he has to tell is
derived from other sources than his special knowledge. As if
determined to make his own narrative out to be but a medley of other
peoples tales, Toko conceives it as a series of narrative events,
occasions at which he himself represents a recipient rather than a
narrator of tales. He identifies Roimata as the actual author of a major
part of his account and ascribes other sections to his brother and sister;
he admits to having borrowed certain facts from newspapers and
television and other pieces of information from the people from Te
Ope. I was not born then, but it is all in my mind like a memory (P,
257
81), Toko assures the reader. For him, this is clear, being told a story
is almost the same as being where the real story was (P, 84) and
witnessing it oneself. In reiterating other peoples tales, Toko
functions as a medium for them, giving voice to the real experts of the
Maoris suffering and thereby authorizing them to assert their versions
of Maori history, however subjective or fragmentary, against what is
officially defined as historical truth.
As in Love Medicine, the counter-history, crystallizing from the
accounts offered by individual natives does not identify the noetic
economy of Maori itself as in any way superior to Western modes of
understanding. The final speech which Toko delivers as a kind of
epilogue after his death from the realm of the dead reveals
insufficiencies in the perception of his own people which, too, help to
explain part of the losses they had to experience:
But they do not clearly see the big logs being rolled into position, or
see themselves crouching down behind. They do not quite see the
stones nesting in their own cupped palms. They do not see distinctly
the white sticks stand, and do not see themselves fingering the white
sticks, taking the white sticks in their hands.
They do not hear distinctly the stirring within the house, the
murmuring, the assembling.
They do not clearly hear the footfalls, some of them their own.
They cannot see the shadowless forms, forms of which they
themselves may be the shadows, taking up and shouldering the sunbleached wood. And they do not distinctly see the tekoteko as they
come, taking up the bones, moving in silently beside them. (P, 184)
With this rhetorically powerful delivery at the end of Potiki, Grace

points in the same direction as does Louise Erdrich towards the end of
Love Medicine. Like Edrich, Grace ultimately concludes that the
conception of a counter-history doing justice to her peoples
suppression presupposes an unscrupulously self-critical awareness
amongst the Maori of their own part in this suppression as victims not
only innocent but also ignorant of the forces transforming their lives
and their world. Merely leaving blank spaces in an artwork to mark
the limits of ones understanding is only counterproductive in a
situation where contact between cultures has generated conflict and
where, therefore, to admit incomprehension is to admit defeat. Where
a carver would leave a gap for someone else to insert the figure of
258
Toko at a later time, Grace inserts a speech which she suggests to be

delivered by the late Toko to lament a very special deficiency in his
people, namely the inability to think of themselves as seeing, hearing,
acting, thinking, and communicating beings.
The speech is one clearly impossible to formulate in carving. It
exemplifies a degree of meta-discursivity that goes well beyond the
mimetic intentions pursued by the Maori wood carver. For Grace, it is
only by attaining such meta-discursivity that they will move from
reproducing meticulously truthful accounts on to a critical analysis
and understanding of their own deeds and utterances. The prime
prerequisite to such a move is that their stories are not only inscribed
in wood but also put down in writing as this alone can facilitate the
dissociation and subsequent re-identification with ones past,
necessary to change the future.
THE NON-LITERATE WITHIN:

ESTABLISHED FORMS OF NON-LITERACY IN
LITERATE CULTURES
The place which the non-literate Other inhabits in the novels studied
in the previous chapters is always somewhere outside, if not far
removed from the world of letters to which the narratives refer either
explicitly or implicitly. Invariably, this outside is translated into open
spaces, either themselves infinite or bordering on a seemingly infinite
plain, forest, body of water, or desert. Mostly, these spaces are
described as wild or barely cultivated landscapes, unknown, and in
fact unknowable to strangers. In them, literate subjects tend to get lost
and constantly verge on losing faith in their cultures knowledge
systems. By contrast, in the texts discussed in this chapter, there are
no disoriented travellers trying in vain to apprehend a foreign land by
inscribing it. The topographies of the worlds portrayed are already
known. Open spaces are replaced by enclosed terrains: cities, small
towns, streets, market squares, school buildings, family homes,
classrooms, and even a prison cell form the settings of these novels. In
all of these places, writing is omnipresent. Unlike the nomads in
Waiting for the Barbarians, An Imaginary Life, or Heroes and
Villains, and unlike the members of the Igbo community portrayed in
Things Fall Apart, the Chippewa in Love Medicine, and the Maori in
Potiki, the illiterates have nowhere to retreat to, no alternative space in
which they may assert their specific cultural otherness.
Though at home and rooted in the same cultural terrain as the
literate characters they encounter, the non-literate protagonists in the
narratives discussed in this chapter occupy a position no less
ambivalent than that of their counterparts in the novels by Carter,
Malouf, Bouras, Greene, or Coetzee studied in this book. They are not
complete strangers like these, still they may seem unheimlich in the
Freudian sense of the word as a disturbing inconsequentiality that
derives its terror not from something external, alien, or unknown but,
on the contrary, from something strangely familiar.1 Frequently, their
appearance evokes fears of contamination or feelings of hatred in
others not for the lowly position they occupy, nor for the deplorable
existences they lead, but for insistently reminding their suppressors of
the wrongs they have to suffer. The low-caste illiterates in Mulk Raj
Anands novel Untouchable (1935) and in Salman Rushdies
Midnights Children (1981), and the semiliterate or completely
unlettered blacks in Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright, Push (1996)
by Sapphire, Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, and A Lesson Before
1
David Morris, The Freudian Uncanny (18-07-2003): http://www.theliterary

link.com Port 80.
262
Dying (1993) by Ernest J. Gaines challenge collective consciences,

resist the forgetting whereby those responsible for their predicament
try to evade responsibility, and enact counter-versions to the official
histories promoted by their cultures literati. Thus they come to
embody an Other within, in fact the Other of their own culture, its
alter ego: a repressed and denied, yet not forever repressible and
deniable subjectivity. Inevitably, the processes of recognition,
mirroring, identification, and disidentification ensuing from
encounters with them are dramatically different from those related in
narratives locating the non-literate outside the confines of literate
culture. These processes produce affinities across cultural
discrepancies practically inconceivable in other contexts where the
unlettered Other remains confined to the position of the complete and,
hence, completely intangible Other.
The possibility of literalization plays a significant role in how these
affinities develop: the relationship between illiterate servant and
literate master delineated with more or less straightforwardness at the
beginning of each novel may either solidify into a perverse form of
intimacy enforced by gross physical maltreatment and simultaneous
intellectual starvation; alternatively, it may transform into a symbiotic
dependence between pupil and teacher, a relationship in which it
becomes increasingly unclear whether the part of the teacher is played
by the illiterate or the literate and who assumes the role of the pupil.
This is due above all to the growing uncertainty as to how desirable
the illiterates espousal of book learning actually is. What the
unlettered subject longs most desperately to attain often proves
attainable only at the cost of a most painful process of alienation from
ones people. It necessitates a departure that at the outset seems to
allow no return. Only slowly does it dawn on the various characters
that learning is not synonymous with estrangement but also affords the
opportunity of a return to their people in order to aid other illiterates.
Such returns are eventually performed by Gandhi and the poet in
Untouchable, Saleem Sinai in Midnights Children, Richard Wright in
Black Boy, and Denver in Beloved.
One way they turn their literacy to use for their own kind is by
drawing attention to the predicament of those at the lowest rungs of
their societies. This is also the cardinal aim of the novels themselves,
which try to make visible in writing the longstanding invisibility of
non-literate Indians and black Americans within their own cultures.
The Non-Literate Within
263
Though obviously an ideal solution to the problem diagnosed,

literalization is not identified as the only one in the process. Each of
the six novels analysed below also asserts the need to reconstruct the
unrecorded history of non-literate subalterns and to retrace their
various passages to visibility (as accomplished at least in the
individual narratives), even if this means unearthing tales hitherto
hushed up on account of the unfavourable light they would cast on the
allegedly civilized societies responsible for their banning from
literacy. Thus the novels subversive potential comes to be nourished
not only by the illiterates appearance in the text but also by the
reconstruction of their tales within that text. The telling of these tales
may itself be fictionalized and conceived as a gradual disclosure of a
long-kept and carefully tended secret, or it may serve quite overtly as
a pretext or a context for the articulation of a specific political agenda.
In either case it constitutes a transgressive act of addressing a tabooed
subject, asserting its long-denied historical significance, and thereby
calling in question official accounts of the past.
The difference between the idea of illiteracy thus generated and the
understanding of the phenomenon created in literary explorations of
the scriptlessness of native peoples is significant: whereas the novels
studied in the previous section deconstruct established myths of the
non-literate natives intellectual inferiority and cultural backwardness,
the novels by Anand, Rushdie, Wright, Sapphire, Morrison, and
Gaines on which the following chapters focus portray a quite different
kind of subaltern and describe that subalterns illiteracy as an actual
cultural backwardness and inferiority. Accordingly, domination by
homogenization is not at all their prime concern. Instead they
problematize a politics of segregation founded on the belief that racial
and social differences justify and necessitate the maintenance of
cultural asymmetries. Finally, while writers like Grace, Erdrich, and
Achebe try to counteract the demonizing of native non-literacy by
valorizing native orality, novels like A Lesson Before Dying, Beloved,
Push, Black Boy, Midnights Children, and Untouchable criticize the
denial of literacy as a means of discrimination and assert that the
orality of their non-literate characters, though both vital and valuable,
cannot make up for the cultural marginality they suffer on account of
their scriptlessness. While they may also record and thereby preserve
this orality, the respective texts first and foremost want to warn of the
consequence of illiteracy. To this end all writers under discussion
264
here, with the exception of Salman Rushdie, refrain from idealizing

illiteracy as a form of epistemological freedom and stress instead the
crippling effects it has in societies as heterogeneously literalized as
those of North America and India.
Accordingly, their final visions are devoid of unconditional
optimism. As a rule, the endings towards which they lead their novels
are highly ambiguous. Metaphorical or real deaths are witnessed and
survived, albeit never without the impression of an unforgettable or
incurable trauma having scarred the survivors for life and impairing
their sense of relief at their narrow escapes. So it is that the authors
keep awake a collective memory of cultural exclusion, present this
memory as an essential part of their own cultural heritage, and make
their readers see it as central to their understanding of themselves as
writers. At first sight, this seems an indication of their refusal to
accept any form of reconciliation with their peoples past. Yet, there is
another way of reading the uncompromising openness of their
narratives endings. Rather than a fostering of old resentments, their
refusal to invest the closures of their narratives with any greater
finality can also be apprehended as a gesture of acknowledgement of
the dazzling diversity their societies ultimate acceptance of their most
subaltern subalterns into the domain of letters procures.
ILLITERACY FORGED BY
THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM
Given Indias notoriously high illiteracy rates and given her intricately
multilingual and multiliterate history, one should think that of all
twentieth-century Anglophone literatures it is the literature of the
Asian subcontinent that addresses the issue of illiteracy most
frequently and most openly. However, this is not the case. General
illiteracy in India ranges at sixty-five per cent and at best fifteen per
cent of Indians attain the minimum literacy levels needed for reading
creative writing in any language;1 further illiteracies (mainly in second
languages) are rendered inevitable by the fact that Indias major
fifteen languages rely on rather disparate scripts;2 and only 1.3 million
people in India (out of a population of about nine billion) claim
English as their mother tongue (according to the 1980 census).3
Nonetheless the inability to read or write texts either in English or in
any other Indian language does not form a pre-eminent theme in
Indian English literature. For G.N. Devy this is easily explained.
English, he asserts, is not an Indian language in the same way as it
is the language of England, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the USA.4
When Indians started to use English as their medium of expression at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, this was just another instance
of their characteristic eclecticism:
From early in its history Indian poets and thinkers have with an
amazing felicity used foreign languages for creative writing. Sanskrit,
Persian and Arabic are the most striking examples of foreign
languages indigenized in India. During British colonial rule English
was added to this list. Literary bilingualism has been an integral part
of culture in India. Some of the writing produced had value only
as a linguistic curiosity; but among the Indians who employed English
for creative writing either occasionally or entirely there were some
very capable writers.5
John Oliver Perry, Introduction, in G.N. Devy, In Another Tongue: Essays on

Indian English Literature, Literature in English 4, Frankfurt am Main, 1993, xv.
2
Hindi, for instance, like Marathi, uses the Devanagari alphabet of Sanskrit.
Bengali and Assamese employ a slightly modified version, Gujarati a more distant
one, of the same script. Punjabi and Oriya both have quite distinctive alphabets. Urdu
is written in a Perso-Arabic script, whilst Kashmiri and Sindhi use either the latter or
Devanagari. In the south, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayam have different versions of
the ancient Granta script, while Tamil relies on an alphabet quite unlike any of these.
(Skinner, 31-33.)
3
Ibid., 32.
4
Devy, n.p.
5
Ibid., 1-2.
268
Warning scholars not to assign the English language a special role

within Indian cultural history merely because of its European origin,
Devy stresses that British rule was an alien structure in India, but
linguistic eclecticism was not.6
Since India had strong literary traditions already before the arrival
of the English language and English literature and, in modern times,
has been producing high quality literature in nearly twenty languages,
the socio-cultural role of Anglophone Indian writing, Devy claims,
has always been extremely limited. So has, therefore, its development
in generic, formal, and stylistic respects. Accordingly, Devy registers
an almost total absence of drama as well as a strongly restricted range
of realistic fiction in Anglophone Indian literature. Another difference
Devy notes between Indian language literatures and Indian English
literature is the lack of a specific geographical base7 in the latter. As
Indian English does not belong to any specific area of India, Devy
argues, Indian English literature is prone to be less representative of
Indian society than any literature in Indian languages. As such, he
concludes, the real India has remained as inaccessible to Western
audiences as ever.8 More than that, for Devy, Indian English
literature is written in a language that has an inflated status value
and no or little social base and therefore constitutes an entity with
androgynous cultural traits.9 As the most Westernized among Indian
literatures it draws freely on English models and conventions, aims at
a world-wide readership, and tries to present the native society and its
problems in a manner attractive to buyers outside India, even at the
risk of compromising its authenticity.
For its reception within India, the resultant dual tonality is, of
course, less significant than the fact that those who write Anglophone
Indian literature and those Indians who read it use English as a
secondary language. In Devys view, the bilingualism of its authors
and its Indian readerships generally explains the hybrid nature of
Indian English literature far better than its ambitiously global appeal.
While granting that bilingual literatures tend to exhibit an astonishing
wealth of swiftly appropriated vocabulary and a remarkable syntactic
flexibility, Devy also insists that they are informed by an anxiety of
6
7
8
9
Devy, 2.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 11.
Illiteracy and Caste
269
imminent breakdowns, which results from the constant competition

between rival languages for dominance. For Devy, this is why
bilingual literatures tend to be obsessed with the theme of language
and given to linguistic experimentation. Paradoxically, however, the
tolerance they reflect of linguistic hybridization is rarely accompanied
by an equivalent acceptance of social otherness. As Devy sees it, they
thrive by a process of exclusion of social heterodoxy10 because the
language registers they assimilate belong exclusively to socially
advantaged classes from different geographical areas. Although in one
sense a pan-Indian literature, produced by writers from many
language-cultures, and from diverse religious and geographic
territories, Anglophone Indian literature remains a literature
exclusively for the social upper crust to which its writers and readers
belong. The trouble with Indian English literature, Devy concludes,
is not that it is literature of a minority but that it has been a literature
of social exclusion.11
Given that Indian English fiction is an essentially bilingual,
bicultural, upper class, socially restricted, linguistically cut off from
the going concerns of Indian society, and pan-Indian literature of
migration,12 it is barely surprising that Anglophone Indian writers
show relatively little interest in illiteracy either as a social problem or
as an artistically challenging literary theme. There simply is little
incentive for them to engage in a meta-discursive reflection on issues
their culture has always deemed untouchable even in the vernacular.
Thus, of all English literatures it is Indias that, though initially
probably more predetermined than other literatures to accommodate
discussions of non-literate subalternity, neglects the issue. In so doing
it seems to corroborate Devys criticism that not even those
postcolonial writers who claim to engage in the theme of colonial
victimization ever take up the cause of the really deprived members of
the cultures they purport to represent.
10
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 100. Still, elitism is not an exclusive prerogative of Anglophone Indian
literature. As Asnani observes, all writers in India belong to a middle class which,
though innovative in urge, is also the most tradition bound (Shyam Asnani, New
Morality in the Modern Indo-English Novel: A Study of Mulk Raj Anand, Anita
Desai and Nayantara Sahgal, in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R.K. Dhawan,
New Delhi, 1992, 40).
12
Devy, 100.
11
270
It is doubtful whether all scholars of Indian English literature

would readily agree with Devy,13 for whom Mulk Raj Anand is but a
pontificating social reformist. At the same time, he rejects
Midnights Children for its failure to further its readers understanding
of Indian society.14 Indeed, Devy attests as little credibility to
Rushdies flamboyant criticism of Indian society as he does to
Anands heart-rending depictions of poverty. Ironically enough, in his
dismissal of both authors on account of their apparent lack of social
insight Devy himself overlooks the interest Rushdie and Anand
express in illiterate lower caste Indians and in the cultural position
they inhabit as one diametrically opposed to that of writers. Other
critics who have not attributed special relevance either to the fact that
Untouchable and Midnights Children touch on and toy with the
themes of literacy and illiteracy. If these two texts are analysed in the
following with regard to the interest in aspects of scriptlessness they
have in common, this is not to strategically bypass the obvious
differences between them. These are considerable, even if both
Untouchable and Midnights Children happen to be written by Indians
who, upon their return from an extended sojourn in Europe, were
struck by the cultural and social diversity of their country and inspired
to address issues that had not surfaced in Indian English literature
before. After all, nearly half a century lies between the publication of
Anands first novel and the appearance of Rushdies second.
Not without reason do critics assign Midnights Children and
Untouchable to two different phases of Indian history which,
according to K.D. Verma, constitute also the two characteristic phases
of Indian writing in English: an early phase in the first half of the
twentieth century during which the European fantasy of colonialism
was finally dissolved, and a later phase which saw the evolution of
another fantasy or dream, namely that of the restructuring of the sociohistorical reality of an independent India. As Verma explains, because
the Indian novel has its immediate context in the nationalist movement
the major themes treated by novelists in both phases are nationalism,
13
In fact, as Dieter Riemenschneider shows, the question whether Indian literature
in English (notably the early Indian novel in English) is but an imitative hot-house
off-shoot of European writing or whether it conveys an authentic picture of Indian
concerns and issues has remained a matter of vast disagreement. (Dieter
Riemenschneider, The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse: 1934-2004.
Jaipur, 2005, esp. 1-72.)
14
Devy, 105.
271
the East-West conflict, Gandhian ideology, the struggle for

independence and various social and economic issues such as
casteism, poverty and industrial development.
In the post-independence era, however, Verma differentiates,
the dramatic shift was to the colonial period, re-examination of
imperialism, multiculturalism of Indian society, psychoanalysis of
national identity and emergence of India as a sovereign nation.15 The
gradual move of Indian writers writing in English from a critical
assessment of their country under British rule to visions of a new, free,
and transformed India coincided with a move from stark realism, if
not naturalism, to an equally stark albeit magic realism or surrealism.
This is certainly how the two traditions of Indian English fiction,
largely consecutive according to Verma, yet coincident in the eyes of
other scholars, tend to be described. R.S. Pathak for instance sees the
compassionate realism marking the works of V.S. Naipaul, Raja
Rao, or Mulk Raj Anand continued by R.K. Narayan and Rohinton
Mistri. The pinwheeling intention16 of Salman Rushdie, in turn, he
finds emulated by Shashi Tharoor and Allan Sealy, and perfected by
Vikram Seth.
Chaudhuri, by contrast, observes a certain continuity in the
development of Indian English literature, and contends that, with
English losing its centre and becoming a transnational medium of
expression used by colonizers and colonized alike, the Indian writer
has been loosened from history, bereft of a culture, and freed to
investigate alternative cultural spaces by way of new and
unconventional routes of literary expression. This is also how Sara
Suleri views the Indians appropriation of English and their use of it as
a pan-Indian and international, or, in other words, geopolitically
neutral, medium. For her, this appropriation is a development at least
as instrumental in the Indian writers emancipation from their colonial
past as the event of Independence. If English India represents a
discursive field that includes both colonial and postcolonial
narratives, she writes, it further represents an alternative to the
troubled chronology of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent.
15
K.D. Verma, The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in

English, Houndmills, 2000, 4.
16
Both terms, compassionate realism and pinwheeling intention have been
coined by Pico Iyer as quoted in R.S. Pathak, Prefatory Remarks, in Indian Fiction
of the Nineties, ed. R.S. Pathak., Creative New Literatures Series 15, New Delhi,
1997, ix.
272
For Suleri, English India is not synonymous with the history of

the British rule in India, nor is it solely a linguistic concept, a spillage
from history into language.17 Rather she sees it as the product of
vast cultural as well as continental drifts, of the realization of
nomadic possibilities creating nuances of trauma that cannot be
neatly partitioned between colonizer and colonized.18 The
hybridization accomplished in and through Indian English, for Suleri,
mitigates the transition from coloniality to postcoloniality and in so
doing facilitates the redrafting of Indian history as a narrative
extensive enough to include both imperial and subaltern materials
and [to thereby] demonstrate their radical inseparability.19 To assume
that domination and subordination are mutually exclusive terms and
ignore that the functioning of language in a colonial universe is
preternaturally dependent on the instability of its own facts is simply
schizophrenic, Suleri declares. Moreover, such an assumption does
nothing to encourage the evolution of a non-possessive idea of nation,
one that belongs neither to the colonizer nor to the colonized.20
The difference between Suleris view and Devys, who insists that,
on account of the Britishness Salman Rushdie exhibits, he cannot be
regarded as an Indian writer,21 is symptomatic of the dividedness of
the academy over the cultural value of Indian literature written in
English.22 The way temporary or permanent expatriate writers writing
in English have positioned themselves in relation to other Indian
writers has not helped to resolve the debate. Salman Rushdie, for
instance, has explicitly distanced himself from early Indian English
novelists such as Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan by declaring that
they have many more affinities to Indian writers in the Indian
languages than they do to him who just happens to be writing in
English. I dont think theres a great deal in common, Rushdie
goes on to argue: Midnights Children was partly conceived as an
opportunity to break away from the manner in which India had been
17
Suleri, 3.
Ibid., 5.
19
Ibid., 3.
20
Ibid., 9.
21
Devy, 101.
22
So would other critics insisting on viewing the writings of British-educated
authors such as Salman Rushdie as contributions to Indian culture. (See, for instance
in T.N. Dhar, History-Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel: Mulk Raj Anand,
Nayantara Sahgal, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, O.V. Vijayan, London, 1999,
161.)
18
273
written about in English, not just by Indian writers but by Western

writers as well.23 Ironically enough, while Rushdie believes its
international (or cosmopolitan) flair distinguishes his work from that
of other Indian writers, Stephen Spender discerns that same quality in
Anand and accords him a leading position amongst contemporary,
revolutionary novelists in England.24 Likewise, Verma regards
Anand as Deeply rooted in the European intellectual tradition ...
especially the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, Hume and Kant, the
Romantic movement, the British socialist tradition, modern political
and economic ideologies and the overwhelming responses to the two
world wars.25
Instead of attempting a definitive statement on Rushdies or
Anands Englishness, Britishness, or Indianness, what follows will
probably complicate matters a bit further in showing how in
Untouchable and Midnights Children the portrayals of people from
the lowest rungs of Indian society as illiterates aids the construction of
a subalternity that subverts conventional interpretations of British
colonization as the cardinal, if not the sole reason for the social
injustices prevalent in colonial and postcolonial societies. In
unearthing other forms of suppression and exploitation than those
perpetrated by the British Raj, both Anand and Rushdie engage in the
rewriting of the experience of imperial intimacy. In the process they
move the European colonists to the absolute margins of their stories
and reduce the utterances of these to ludicrously insignificant
performances. It is deeply ironical that this is done in a language
which the authors, and often enough also their Indian protagonists, are
able to put to much more sophisticated uses than their imperial Others.
With almost staggering ease the narratives thus undermine the alleged
duality of margin and center posed by postcolonial theorists blind to
the actual mobility of disempowerment.26 As Suleri criticizes, it is
due to this blindness that most contemporary readings of alterity tend
to remain trapped in the assumption of margin and centre constituting
irreconcilable opposites.
By contrast, in Midnights Children and Untouchable Salman
Rushdie and Mulk Raj Anand effectively dislodge these two
23
Rushdie, quoted in Dhar, 160.

Spender, quoted in Verma, 83.
25
Verma, 84.
26
Ibid., 2.
24
274
opposites, acknowledging non-literate otherness in all its pluralities,

in all its alternative histories.27 What affords them the freedom
necessary to do so is their use of English which leads them into a new
terrain in between or rather outside contesting dominant discourses.
The resultant expansion of available discursive space enables
Rushdies and Anands texts to accommodate what conventionally
escapes literary inscription in Indian literature. Not only because of
the peculiar status English holds in India as a secondary rather than a
master language, but also because Rushdie and Anand use it to
formulate specifically Indian issues, their texts acquire a special
hybridity ultimately more resilient to charges of cultural betrayal than
the works of other postcolonial writers who have chosen to write not
in their indigenous language but in English.
27
Suleri, 1.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE OUTCASTES LONGING TO LEARN:
MULK RAJ ANANDS UNTOUCHABLE
What renders charges of an appropriated Eurocentrism and betrayal of

his own cultural roots unwarranted in the case of Mulk Raj Anand,
and especially of his pre-Independence novel Untouchable, is his
commitment to the emancipation and welfare of the poorest in Indian
society. This commitment is founded on a deep-seated belief in the
capacity of literature to effect social changes. As Anand once
observed, the alleviation of pain ands its expiation are the only values
given to our intelligentsia in the present time.1 As far as he himself
was concerned, Anand found fiction to be the best medium in which
to practice this belief. Hence, when Mahatma Gandhi suggested that
he should write a tract against Untouchability, he chose to write a
novel. A novel, he felt, was more human and could reproduce
contrary emotions and shades of feeling.2
For Dhar, Anands vigorous, critical realism has the effect not
only of giving the English novel a new purposeful shape and form and
stabilizing it as a dominant mode of fiction-writing in India, but also
that of novelizing Indian historiography by systematically opposing its
underlying theories of fatalistic acceptance of God, predestination, and
determinism.3 As Dhars shows, it is mainly this acceptance that
Anand holds responsible for the processes of degradation he believes
to be at work in every fabric of Indian society and to determine most
cruelly the lives of those with no socially approved claim to dignity.4
In granting them a place in his fictional universe and treating them
with sympathy, Dhar observes, Anand has alerted the historians to
their existence [and] made people aware that historical change is the
Mulk Raj Anand, quoted in Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English,

Bombay, 1962, 357.
2
Mulk Raj Anand, quoted in C.J. George in Mulk Raj Anand: His Art and
Concerns, New Delhi, 2000, 18.
3
Dhar, 84.
4
This point is also made by George (24).
276
The Non-Literate Within: Illiterate by Caste
result of the will of all classes in a society and not merely of the select,
privileged few.5
Nonetheless, rather than framing the willpower of the poor as an
imminent threat to social peace, Anands work attempts to construct
human volition as an inherently positive force from which, if
cultivated also by the lower classes, the entire Indian society will
benefit. Though far from endorsing Western values indiscriminately
and indeed often very critical of the injustices he observed in Europe,6
Anand is convinced that its acceptance of human subjectivity and its
respect for the individuals freedom of choice and action place the
West at a significant advantage over other cultures. The Hindu
religion, with its insistent propagation of the principle of divine
intervention in human affairs and its prescription of the Indian
peoples demure acceptance of Gods will, has nothing to offer, in
Anands view, in comparison to the Westerners overwhelmingly
confident individualism. In fact, for Anand, it is what effectively
enforced the subjugation and exploitation of the Indian people by the
British. We put too much emphasis on the unknown fate and
prostrated ourselves towards the deity, under the guidance of our
priestly mentors, Anand reflects.7 In mistaking colonialism for a
divinely ordained fate, Anand believes, the Indians accepted it as they
accepted other gross inequalities in their society with disheartening
passivity and in hopeless silence.8
Dhar, 95-96.
After his graduation from the University of Punjab in 1924, Anand went to
Europe and lived there until 1932 when in a sudden fit of revulsion against [his] own
experience, in elitist Bloomsbury, he followed an invitation by Gandhi to the
Sabarmati Ashram. Yet despite the elitism he may have enjoyed in Britain, he was
acutely aware of the social problems the British society was facing at the time and
which led to the 1926 coal miners strike. Britain, he wrote, was organized and run
in the interest of a small minority which could suppress the majority as violently at
home as it did in the Empire (Mulk Raj Anand, Apology for Heroism, Delhi, 1975,
64). In the 1930s and 1940s Anand divided his time between Europe and India,
lecturing as League of Nations School of Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva and at
Workers Educational Association in London, joining the International Brigade in
Spain, and between 1937 and 1945 associating himself with the British Labour Party.
For a reading of Untouchable as a response to the art for arts sake ethos of the
Bloomsbury group see Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian
Diaspora in Britain, Houndmills, 2002, 15-55.
7
Anand, quoted in Dhar, 90.
8
Dhar, 99.
6
The Outcastes Longing to Learn
277
It is a momentous change in the Indian mentality, then, that Anand

projects in his first novel with his construction of a lower-caste Indian,
in fact of an Untouchable, who wishes to learn to read and write and
indeed contrives most ingenious measures to reach his goal. Anands
protagonist Bakha is a young sweeper forbidden to attend school
because, according to the Hindu belief, his touch would contaminate
not only the other pupils but also the items of knowledge and learning
they and their teachers use. Yet, Bakha is unwilling to accept his lot
and resolves to find and hire a schoolboy as his private tutor. The
journey on which he ventures for this purpose makes up Anands
story. Within the short period of a single day9 this story takes the
reader from Bakhas mud-walled home to his workplace, a row of
public latrines and private houses whose gutters he must sweep daily.
From there Bakha is shown wandering through the streets of his town,
to linger in front of the stalls of a market, enter the courtyard of a
temple and engage in a dispute with a priest, and meet some friends
for a game of hockey. Densely placed acoustic, visual, and olfactory
images create the impression of everything being in motion and Bakha
caught in an inescapable throng of people randomly pulling and
carrying him until eventually he is thrown amidst a vast congregation
of Indians awaiting the appearance of no one less than Mahatma
Ghandi. When Gandhi arrives to address the gathered crowd, Bakha
comes to stand next to a lawyer and a poet and to witness a passionate
dispute between the two men over Gandhi and his ideas of social
change.
At this point, the story of Bakhas quest for learning ends. Bakha
resolves to return home to tell his family about Gandhi and his appeal
to the Untouchables to emancipate themselves not only by strict
adherence to their habits of cleanliness but also by helping to promote
what Gandhi in Anands novel cryptically terms the machine. It is
no grand technological innovation, as one might at first assume, that
Gandhi is advocating. All he recommends is an improvement of the
Indian sanitation system through the introduction of the flush system.
After the novels anticlimactic return to the repulsive matter of
excretion and its disposal, the protagonist, too returns home as if
9
For an analysis of the temporal structure of the novel and the relationship
between narrated time and narrative time see Dieter Riemenschneider, Mulk Raj
Anand, in Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, eds Hedwig Bock and
Albert Wertheim, Munich, 1986, 173-89.
278
finally accepting the impossibility of ever escaping the profanity of his

existence. Bakhas dream of rising above his lowly status and perhaps
even transcending his Untouchability through learning seems
suddenly spoilt as the learned Ghandi, along with the lawyer and the
poet in Ghandis audience, broach (or touch upon) a subject
apparently capable of invoking greater fears of contamination amongst
Hindus than any other issue.
As C.J. George stresses, Indian novelists before Anand, such as
Bankim Chander Chatterji, Ratannath Sarshar and Rabindranath
Tagore, had never ascribed heroship to the so called lowest dregs
of humanity, living in almost poverty, squalor and degradation.10 In
Europe, his realism earned Anand considerable approval by other
writers such as George Orwell and E.M. Forster, who, in his Preface
to Untouchable, praises the novel because it does not reduce Bakha to
a suffering abstraction but conveys the right mixture of insight and
detachment, which no European, however sympathetic, could have
created because he would not have known enough about [Bakhas]
troubles.11 Yet, Anand not only ascribes heroic attributes to low-caste
Indians but also narrates his stories primarily from their point of view
and in so doing allows for unexpected processes of identification
across caste barriers to take place in his novels. Thus in Untouchable,
Bakha, despite his pariah status, keeps comparing himself to people
unlike himself: people who are not untouchable. He sees sameness
where everyone else would see only insurmountable difference and
endeavours to create sameness where others would interpret any
assumption of likeness as sacrilege.
Typically it is at the sight of a higher-caste boy on his way to
school that Bakha is suddenly overcome by discontent at his own
inability to read and write. Although he has never even as much as set
a foot inside a school building Bakha is convinced that he understands
the feelings of this child who is late for school:
Bakha noticed the ardent, enthusiastic look that lighted up the little
ones face. The anxiety of going to school! How beautiful it felt! How
nice it must be to be able to read and write! One could read the papers
after having been to school. One could talk to the sahibs. One
wouldnt have to run to the scribe every time a letter came. And one
10
George, 29.
E.M. Forster, Preface to Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935), Penguin
Twentieth-Century Classics, London, 1990, vi-vii.
11
279
wouldnt have to pay him to have ones letters written. He had often
felt like reading Waris Shahs Hir and Ranjah. (U, 38)
By Hindu notions of propriety, Bakhas thoughts mark a preposterous

transgression. Not only does he afford the temporary luxury of
overlooking the difference he is meant to guard between himself and
members of other castes; he actually chooses to ignore it altogether.
Ironically, this wickedness facilitates an insight which dutiful
compliance to Hindu laws completely denies. By committing the sin
of presuming to leave the limited socio-cultural space to which the
existence of caste confines him, Bakha begins to comprehend that his
illiteracy is a disadvantage manufactured by others and not, as
insistent degradation has led him to believe, an innate inferiority he
must accept as a given. He was a sweeper, he knew, the narrative
allows, but he could not consciously accept the fact (U, 39).
From the beginning of the novel it is made clear that what Bakha
lacks is not intellectual acumen but schooling. As the passage above
illustrates, Anands hero grasps his situation well enough to know
exactly how much money he would save if he were not dependent on
the services of a scribe; he even knows the literature he would
consume if he possessed the skill to do so. He would read the famous
Heer by the celebrated eighteenth-century Punjabi poet Waris Shah.
This poem, which relates the legendary love tale of Heer and Ranjah
in six-hundred odd stanzas and synthesizes Islamic and Hindu folklore
in the process, is not an implausible preference for someone in
Bakhas situation given not only its open criticism of Indian priests
and their hypocrisy but also its categorical condemnation of the caste
system. With his allusion to this piece of ancient Indian literature,
Anand foreshadows his protagonists final development away from
the initial admiration of the British whose mannerisms Bakha learnt to
copy during a sojourn at some regimental barracks. So taken is he by
the ways of the English that he even procures a first primer of English
with the intention to study it on his own and in the hope that this will
make him a sahib one day. In the course of the day narrated in
Untouchable, however, his admiration for the Tommies fades and is
replaced by a new awareness of his own Indianness, a sense of
belonging his Untouchability has always precluded.12
12
There is also an autobiographical dimension to this trajectory. Anand himself

received his early education in a cantonment school which followed an English
280
Well before he hears Gandhis wholesale dismissal of the notion of

Untouchability, Bakha himself has begun to rebel inwardly against the
marginal role he is assigned within Indian culture and, simultaneously,
against his duty as an Untouchable to suffer this role in silence. As
George puts it, he has become a Gandhi disciple without knowing it.13
Indeed, from its very beginning, the novel sets Bakha up as an
exceptional person, as a subject undeserving of his lowly status into
which he has been born, but also fit to transcend it. Already the
outward appearance of the child of modern India (U, 9), as Bakha is
called, distinguishes him from the ordinary scavenger, who is as a
rule uncouth and unclean (U, 16). No onlooker, the narrative asserts,
would fail to notice the immense pent-up resources lying deep, deep
in his body ... as he rush[es] along with considerable skill and alacrity
from one doorless latrine to another, cleaning brushing, pouring
phenoil (U, 16). The intelligence, sensitivity, and dignity his looks
suggest elicit comments to the effect that he is a bit superior to his
job and not the kind of man who ought to be doing this (U, 16).
Even Havildar Charat Singh, the famous hockey player of the 38th
Dogras regiment, who has the Hindu instinct for immaculate
cleanliness and six thousand years of racial and class superiority to
boast of, admits to himself that, for a low-caste man, Bakha looks
remarkably clean (U, 15-16).
Anands insistent references to Bakhas nobility, so strangely in
contrast with his filthy profession and with the sub-human status to
which he [has been] condemned from birth (U, 20), clearly serve to
bias the reader in favour of the protagonist and to encourage
identification with the sweeper boy. Rather than appealing to the
readers forgiveness, the novel commands sympathy with the sweeper
for his immodesty, for the contempt he feels for his own people and
their natu habits (U, 32), and for his dismissal of them as riff-raff,
scum of the earth, dregs of humanity (U, 36). Almost as if to
downplay the political explosiveness of his dissatisfaction, Anand
keeps stressing the naivety that informs it. There is something rather
endearing about the fact that Bakha bemoans not so much his poverty
curriculum and paid no attention to native customs or values but biased children
against them, so much so that when Anand went to England, he readily succumbed to
the temptation of donning the mask of the Brown Sahib (Anand, as quoted in
George, 11).
13
George, 39.
281
and powerlessness as the blatant inelegance of his existence. All

Bakha wants is for the untouchables to cultivate a certain degree of
courtesy and formality and to observe the most basic standards of
hygiene. In light of so much modest idealism it seems easy to excuse
Bakha for believing traitorously that the original Hindu instinct for
cleanliness ha[s] disappeared long ago (U, 85) and for hating his
younger brother Rakha and his listless, lazy, lousy manner (U, 84),
which has led to his contracting malaria, a disease outcastes seem to
endure with great and infuriating equanimity.
Therefore the sympathy Anands novel exacts for its protagonist
corresponds with the special bias the author contrives at the outset of
his narrative. Rather than being against the ruling classes this bias at
first appears to be against the Untouchables as a collective whose
apparent contentment with the ghastly squalor in which they live has a
thoroughly alienating effect on Bakha as well as on the reader. In the
course of the novel, however, Anand qualifies his social criticism by
introducing individual representatives of Indian society and exposing
their part in his central characters failure to obtain the education he
craves. In keeping with his conviction that the function of narrative
writing consists in revealing mans essential nature through the
individual case,14 Anand gradually has members from other castes
emerge from the noisy, colourful, vibrant crowd with which Bakha
keeps moving on his quest for Bildung.
This crowd comprises Indians of all stations of society. What
unites them, according to Anand, is a sadistic appetite for public
humiliation and a deep-seated lust for power. Both are satisfied when
Bakha inadvertently bumps into a higher-caste Hindu. At once
denunciations are poured over the sweeper-boy and the hostility he
feels coming from the Hindu merchants gathering around him causes
him to cower and to let his whole demeanour concentrate in
humility: And he stood still while they raged and fumed and sneered
in fury (U, 49). As the crowd dramatically closes in and presses
round Bakha, staring, pulling grimaces, jeering and leering, the young
sweeper realizes that the barrier between them is insuperable, that this
crowd will refuse not only to understand him but also to let him
14
Dieter Riemenschneider, The Function of Labour in M.R. Anands Novels, in

Crabtracks. Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English: Essays
in Honour of Dieter Riemenschneider, eds Gordon Collier and Frank Schulze-Engler,
Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures 59, Amsterdam: 2002, 369.
282
understand them. It will not permit him, a sweeper, to look at, to

read the crowd with the overt, lifted eye of the ordinary man
curious to know, to solve a mystery (U, 57). Instead he is compelled
to stare beyond the opaque throng of people passing in the streets and,
should he absent-mindedly fix his eye on a single person, to feel
shamefully like a slave stealing an enquiry into the affairs of his
master (U, 57).
The humiliating uncertainty with which this experience of
metaphoric illiteracy infuses Bakha becomes even more acute
whenever he happens to be confronted with individual representatives
of what he otherwise perceives as a single body, an amorphous mass
of people. As distinct faces and figures crystallize from the crowd,
both his fear of their contempt and their fear of contamination by him
erase Bakhas sense of selfhood and transform his humbleness into a
desperate longing that his Untouchability might render him invisible
and thereby reduce him to even less than he already is. There is
nothing to compensate for, let alone suspend the sense of
disintegration that overcomes Bakha on such occasions. Least
comforting of all is what his gradually sharpening vision of the
crowd reveals. The discoveries he must make are disheartening not
only for the scorn and hatred he experiences in the unfortunate faceto-face confrontations into which he keeps blundering, but also for the
intense feeling of injustice they evoke in him as he is made the
immediate target of the upper castes venting their superiority complex.
Of all the attributes distinguishing these castes from the
Untouchables, it is the one Bakha admires and wishes to emulate
most, book learning, that turns out to be a particularly doubtful
accomplishment. In repeatedly portraying the touchable Indians as
engaged in all sorts of reading or writing activities and contrasting the
bookishness of their knowledge with the factualness of the
Untouchables experience, Anand develops a neatly differentiated
picture of the literacies Bakha encounters. This picture ultimately calls
in question the protagonists desire and determination to learn to read
and write. The postponement of his first lesson until after the ending
of the novel constitutes one of the many disappointments Bakha must
countenance on the day he hears Gandhis speech. Still, at the end of
the sixteen hours recounted in Untouchable, this no longer matters
because Anands protagonist has also glimpsed some of the more
repellent features behind the assumed superiority of Indias literates
283
and come to doubt the alleged exemplariness of their performances.

Scanning the delicacies on display in a Bengali sweetmeat-sellers
shop, for instance, Bakha realizes that if he chose the rasgulas,
gulabjamans, or ludus, so lushly, expensively smothered in syrup
they would not be cheap, certainly not for him, because the
shopkeepers always deceived the sweepers and the poor people,
charging them much bigger prices, as if to compensate themselves for
the pollution they courted by dealing with the outcastes. Instead he
asks for jalebis, and in so doing elicits only a scornful smirk from the
vendor of sweets, who finds that jalebis are so coarse that no one
save a greedy low-caste man would ever buy [them] (U, 45).
Bakha seems the only Untouchable sensitive to the shopkeepers
offensive ways and astonished by their ability to exhibit signs of
refinement and crudeness at the same time. The contradictions in the
schematically drawn figures are thrown into relief with the help of
visual images, such as those of the big-bellied lalla ... clad in an
immaculately white loose muslin shirt. The man is busy writing of
some curious hieroglyphics on a scroll book bound in ochre-coloured
canvas and apparently oblivious to either Bakha or his assistants
unrolling bundles of cloth to his customers. It is clear, however, that
his show of concentration on matters less mundane than the selling of
his wares is only part of a carefully devised performance meant to
impress the rustics into buying (U, 44). Another image captures the
confectioner swiftly weighing Bakhas sweets against some iron
weights and a handful of stones he has shamelessly thrown onto his
scales. He then wraps the jalebis into a piece torn off an old Daily
Mail, roles the paper into a ball and flings it at Bakha. While this is
obviously to avoid physical contact with the sweeper, the peculiar way
Bakha registers the vendor using printed matter also suggestively hints
at a certain obsolescence of the literacy that places the merchant at
such an advantage over the sweeper.
Bakhas exchanges with the shopkeepers, which he conducts in the
acute awareness of their proud and cruel indifference to his feelings,
foreshadow the outrage resulting from Bakhas aforementioned
collision with an upper-caste Indian. Ironically enough it is some huge
blocks of letters staring down at him from luridly painted signboards
that distract Bakhas attention so much that he momentarily forgets to
call out the warning words with which he normally announces his
approach: Posh, posh, sweeper coming! (U, 52). The letters have
284
just reminded him that he has arranged for a schoolboy to give him
lessons in reading and writing when Bakha is woken up from his
dream by someone yelling abuse at him. While he struggles
desperately and in vain to apologize to the man he has defiled,
instantaneously the prospect of his first lesson escapes his mind.
Instead of accepting Bakhas abject demonstrations of regret, the
Hindu continues to insult the mortified boy before a growing crowd of
curious passers-by. Finally, the touched takes advantage of an
unexpected moment of general confusion, delivers a hard blow into
the face of the docile sweeper-boy, and swiftly disappears. The
coward, Bakha thinks, barely able to control his anger at the mans
poltroonish exit, like a dog with his tail between his legs (U, 51).
Again the reader is encouraged to share the Untouchables
contempt at the mans mean-spiritedness, which Anand enforces with
images of the aggressors flaming and red-hot eyes, of his closed,
trembling lips which hissed like a snakes, and of his four-foot-ten
frame pathetically trying to assume the towering stature of a giant
(U, 47-50). The irony of the lallas mode of exit is obvious. In
slapping Bakha with his bare hand he himself exposes the absurdity of
his agitation over the sweeper-boys unintentional touch. So does his
emphatic appeal to all bystanders to look at him and see his
defilement, of which there are no visible signs. By contrast the injury
he has inflicted on Bakha is audible as a hard, clear slap through the
air (U, 50) and felt by the injured as a burning pain in his face. What
is more, while the mans defilement remains one only in his own
imagination, Bakhas figure is really dirtied: his turban falls off and
his jalebis are scattered in the dust. This ironic inversion of moral
grounds leads Bakha (and the reader increasingly sympathetic of
Bakhas lot) to a new understanding of his Untouchability.
Bakhas realization of the full implications of his Untouchability
marks a significant turning point, which Anand accentuates by relating
it as a unique epiphanic moment:
. For them I am a sweeper untouchable! Untouchable!
Untouchable! Thats the word! Untouchable! I am Untouchable!
Like a ray of light shooting through the darkness, the recognition
of his position, the significance of his lot dawned upon him. It
illuminated the inner chambers of his mind. Everything that had
happened to him traced its course up to this light and got the answer.
(U, 52)
285
That this form of enlightenment, though not consciously sought by

Bakha, might be superior to book learning is insistently asserted
throughout Anands narrative as it keeps parading spiritual leaders of
Indian society all of which fall drastically short of Bakhas idea of
learned sophistication.
One case in point is Pundit Kali Nath, who moved by the beauty of
Bakhas sister Sohini, condescends to fill her bucket with water from
the well to which, as an Untouchable, she is not allowed access. Yet
he does so not without expecting certain favours from the girl in
return. When Sohini refuses to meet his demands, Kali Nath publicly
defames her as a loose woman and claims that she has defiled him by
her touch. It is with great care that Anand develops the incident and
analyses the manoeuvres whereby the lewd old Brahmin asserts his
superior status even when he has chosen to think or act in a manner
revealing his basest instincts. To emphasize the discrepancy between
who the Pundit pretends to be and who he really is, Anand also reveals
Kali Naths innermost thoughts and shows how they are motivated not
by his religious duties, such as the study of the holy books, the
endless recitation of sacred verses, or the writing of an occasional,
charm or horoscope with a reed pen (U, 29), but by a rather morbid
preoccupation with his intestines, which keep rendering his journeys
to the latrines painfully unsuccessful due to a severe bout of
constipation. The profanity of his worries underlines the indecency of
the passes he tries to make at Sohini and calls in question the authority
for which the faithful and the devout so willingly revere him.
At the same time, the crudity of the Brahmins concerns draws
attention to how far more sophisticated the questions are that trouble
the uneducated protagonists mind. Again, this contrast ironically
subverts the notion of contamination at first proclaimed by the priest,
yet subsequently reinterpreted from the sweeper-boys point of view.
While the crowd on the temple steps sympathizes with the priest,
convinced that he must have suffered most terribly from Sohinis and
Bakhas touch, Anand once more invites the reader to sympathize
with his protagonist who, in spite of the humiliation he has just had to
go through, does not hesitate to expose himself to further degradation
in order to rescue his sister from the clutches of the shameless old
lecher.
286
Given Bakhas humble position in Indian society, his rage at the

priest seems oddly out of proportion; given Sohinis innocence,
however, his chivalry seems perfectly warranted. The result is a
curious temporary transgression of the line conventionally dividing
educated upper- and uneducated lower-class characters in Anglophone
fiction, a transgression indicative again of Bakhas innate ability to
move on in the world:
A busy street lay before the brother and sister when they emerged
from the temple. Bakha ... could not concentrate on the riot of variety
that was displayed in it. He had no patience to see anything or to hear
anything, and he didnt want to speak. Why didnt I go and kill the
hypocrite! he cried out silently. I could have sacrificed myself for
Sohini. Everyone will know about her. My poor sister! How can she
show her face to the world after this? But why didnt she let me go
and kill that man? Why was she born a girl in our house, to bring
disgrace upon us? So beautiful! So beautiful and so accursed! I wish
she had been the ugliest woman in the world! ... (U, 65)
This is not the last ironic confusion Anand creates in Untouchable

of the different notions of honour and dignity professed by the
different groups of Indian society. To completely invert the
conventional perception of Indian society as divided into easily
distinguishable sections, Anands text has yet to include a
representative of the Subcontinents British population. The character
introduced for this purpose towards the end of the novel is Colonel
Hutchinson, chief of the local Salvation Army. In a mildly tragicomic
way, this peculiar specimen of Western civilization, with his habit of
dressing in the costume of the native and his determination to live
among them to achieve the true end of proselytising (U, 121), with
his fondness for study and the unique bravery with which he
endeavours to belong where he is and always will be a foreigner,
complements the young protagonists eccentric nature.15 After his
unfortunate encounters with other Indians, Bakha feels deeply
15
Indeed, Fludernik reads their eccentricity as a sign of sameness, arguing that

the Colonels ambivalence and Bakhas mimicry function equally as markers of
colonial hybridity (Monika Fludernik, Colonial vs. Cosmopolitan Hybridity: A
Comparison of Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan with Recent British and North
American Expatriate Writing, in Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth Century
Indian Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik, Zeitschrift fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik:
ZAA Studies 1, Tbingen, 1998, 264).
287
flattered when the Colonel puts his hand on his shoulder and speaks to
him sympathetically in wrong and badly accented Hindustani. At this
moment the boy is unwilling to note that the short fellow, pitiably
weak and hobbling along on his stick (U, 122) lacks the glamour
normally attaching to the superior, remote and reticent Englishmen
(U, 123).
The sweeper-boy ignores that the Salvation Army missionary has
obviously thrown aside every weight pride of birth and race and
colour in adopting the customs of the natives, swamped the
overbearing strain of the upper middle-class Englishman in him by his
hackneyed effusions of Christian sentiment, and camouflaged the
narrow, insular patriotism of his character in the jingo of the whitelivered humanitarian (U, 124). Bakha tries not to hear the words with
which the Colonel persuades him that he, Hutchinson, is not a sahib
but an outcaste, too. So eager is the boy to project some sort of aura
onto the sorry figure of the missionary that he attempts to suppress his
disappointment that the padre is not dressed like the other British
padres, whose European clothes have always held such fascination for
him. Keen to preserve his secret delight at the Englishmans overtures,
Bakha convinces himself that, because all sahibs are sahibs, Colonel
Hutchinson deserves to be seen as one too. The reader learns that the
young Indian could have cried to receive such gracious treatment
from a sahib, cried with the joy of being in touch with that rare quality
which was to be found in the sahibs (U, 125; emphasis added).
Happy and proud to be in touch with an Englishman, Bakha
listens to the priests incomprehensible sing-song, even joins his
ecstatic hymn-singing without understanding anything of the enquiries
he obediently reiterates as told by the old man and, of course, without
any intention to be recruited into the mans pathetically small army of
converts: He had followed the sahib because the sahib wore trousers.
Trousers had been the dream of his life (U, 128). With this remark,
the narrator divests the Englishman of the superiority the protagonist
is so determined to recognize in him and exposes a final similarity16
between the two characters, whose vanity and lack of realism render
16
This similarity is different from the one Fludernik identifies between Bakha and
Colonel Hutchinson. In fact, its underlying irony raises the question whether the
colonial hybridity the two characters seem to share is merely an illusion. At least in
Bakhas case, this is also suggested by his subsequent flight from the Colonel as well
as by his final return home.
288
both of them oddly susceptible to the illusion that the others company
is a sign of honour bestowed on them. Unaware of the fact that, with
his willingness to communicate with the Englishman, he honours the
missionary as much as he believes the missionary to be honouring him
with his attention and sympathy, Bakha is unable to realize that the
studious missionary has very little to offer apart from a number of
copies of the Hindustani translation of the Bible and of the gospel of
St Luke.
However precious these items of printed wisdom, which Colonel
Hutchinson carries around with him to thrust in the hands of
unsuspecting passers-by, may appear to an illiterate, to the reader they
represent ludicrously inadequate means of enticing a troubled outcaste
with no ability to read to convert to Christianity. Symptomatically,
Hutchinsons bookish talk of Yessuh Messih and Christs superiority
over all humans, who by comparison are but poor sinners doomed to
await Gods pardon in well-deserved misery, is received by Bakha
with a feeling of profound bewilderment which the readers, despite
their better understanding of what is happening, have little difficulty
in sharing. Indeed, it is at this point in the novel that the European
reader becomes acutely aware of the irony of Anands appeal to
readers to identify with the illiterate sweeper-boy, who, baffled and
bored, overwhelmed and uncomfortable, tries in vain to catch
anything of the muffled sounds Colonel Hutchinson is babbling,
mostly to himself.
Predictably, Hutchinsons attempts to proselytize Bakha lead
nowhere but come to an abrupt end when his wife appears on the
scene to abuse her husband for messing about with all those dirty
bhangis and chamars (U, 132). The mem-sahibs shrieking, hoarse
and hysterical voice (U, 133) and plain language catapults Bhaka
back into the reality which, for a short time, he had believed he had
left behind. The Englishwomans yells sound familiar to him, echoing
those angry voices he is used to hearing in his own street. There was
a common quality in the look of hate in the round white face of the
Colonels wife and in the sunken visage of the touched man (U, 13334), Anand offers as an analysis of his heros sudden retreat. It is at
this moment that the prospect of Bakha commencing his education
with the help of an upper-caste boy and so escaping his humble
position seems more unlikely than at any previous point in the novel.
And it is at this very same moment, too, that Bakhas quest is
289
interrupted as he is absorbed into a crowd waiting for Mahatma

Gandhi to appear and give a speech.
For a moment, the mere announcement of the Mahatmas arrival
seems to break down all barriers between men, women and children
of ... the different races, colours, castes and creeds (U, 136) and
allows Bakha for once to feel part of the crowd. Gandhi alone united
him with them, in the mind, because Gandhi was in everybodys mind,
including Bakhas (U, 138), the narrator interprets the crowds
response to the sudden fulfilment of one of its most urgent needs the
activation of a commonality uniting all Indians across the barriers
traditionally segregating them. Such a union is effectively
accomplished, even if only temporarily, by Gandhis speech. Apart
from the propagation of his creed by word of mouth, it is the public
delivery of his own ideas in a language and medium accessible to
every Indian present that, according to Anand, accounts for Gandhis
appeal to the heterogeneous mass. Gandhis words reach even an
individual as humble and feeling as humiliated as Bakha when he
accidentally joins the crowd.
In the end it is clear that the point of Gandhis appearance in the
novel is to enhance the symbolic meaning of the protagonists sudden
flight from the Hutchinsons. It encourages the reader to understand it
as marking the end of his unreflected admiration for the English in
general (and especially for their clothes). In turning away from the
trousered, yet pathetic figure of Colonel Hutchinson and his alienating
citations of Western wisdom and unexpectedly becoming a witness of
Gandhis address, Bakha practically stumbles across an entirely new
meaning of learning. He is black like me, he ponders as he catches a
first glimpse of Gandhi: But, of course, he must be very educated
(U, 143). The learning the Mahatma demonstrates during his address
is not what Bakha so far has understood by education. As Gandhi
himself puts it in Anands novel, wisdom has nothing to do with a
thorough knowledge of the scriptures. Indeed, in his own words, even
the most thoroughly read Hindus have proven to be sunk in
ignorance by denying the Untouchables access to public wells,
temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums. Enlightenment, Anand has
Gandhi declare, is the ability to identify with the Untouchables, to feel
and be like them and to allow them to be and feel like any other
Indian.
290
Listening to Gandhi, whose words finally make explicit what

Untouchable tries to communicate less directly on other levels, Bakha
forgets about his plan to meet the schoolboy who has agreed to be his
private tutor. Gandhis speech, which not without reason happens to
take place at the very time Bakha had arranged to have his first lesson,
points him in a completely different direction and encourages him to
abandon at least for the time being his vision of obtaining
sophistication by learning to read and write. Instead Bakha finally
resolves to return to his father to tell him about Gandhi. Thus Bakhas
ultimate commitment is to an oral task. Part of this self-appointed
mission is to repeat not only Gandhis call for justice to his family but
also the Mahatmas idea of how sweepers can be relieved of cleaning
latrines. The solution sounds fantastically simple to Bakha as it
requires no major effort on the part of the Untouchables, such as that
of trying to become literate. All it involves is the introduction of the
water closet. Dreaming at first only of dressing like a sahib, then
longing to learn to read and write, before allowing a foreigner to tempt
him with the option of finding equality in another religion, Bakha at
last arrives at a drastically mundane solution. He resolves that what he
must learn is all about the ominous machine that, according to Gandhi,
can remove dung without anyone having to handle it.
Of all people, it is a young poet Bakha overhears praising this
machine. The impressive figure (significantly clad in flowing Indian
robes) obviously serves as a mouthpiece for the author himself,17 who,
like Gandhi, considers it as much the responsibility of the upper castes
to improve of the Untouchables situation as that of the Untouchables
themselves. For Arun P. Mukherjee this view and the way in which it
is advocated in Untouchable proves that Anand is not nearly as
radical a writer as most critics believe him to be on account of his
open commitment to Marxist ideology. Rather, she argues, Anands
stance is that of an upper class, upper caste kshatriya Hindu, albeit a
17
This is also confirmed by the detail concerning the poets way of dressing,
which brings to mind Anands accounts of how he changed his outward appearance
during his stay at the Sabarmati Ashram and discarded his corderoy suit and necktie
for Kurta-Pyjamas, thus being converted to the Indian [he] once was (Anand,
quoted in George, 19). A more elaborate treatment of this transformation is offered in
Anands novel And So He Plays His Part at the centre of which Anand places the poet
figure of Krishan Chander Azad. For a detailed study of Gandhis influence on Anand
see the chapter Mulk Raj Anand: The Champion of Gandhian Humanism in Ram,
Jha, Gandhian Thought and Indo-Anglian Novelists, 1983, 55-85, and Marlene Fisher,
The Wisdom of the Heart: A Study of the Works of Mulk Raj Anand, New Delhi, 1985.
291
Marxist.18 The opinions advanced by the poet in Untouchable only

round off Anands reductionist inscription of the Indian subaltern as a
mute and passive figure, which, in Mukherjees view, serves to
confirm bourgeois projections of the Untouchables as incapable of
assuming political responsibility and developing oppositional
activity.19
A reading of Untouchable focussing on Bakhas determination to
change his situation by learning to read and write and on how he tries
to put his plan into action yields a different interpretation. It allows us
to see that the combination of learning and pragmatism, sophistication
and common sense, passionate idealism and unsentimental realism
embodied by the figure of the poet is meant not simply to assert the
bourgeois intellectuals superiority over the illiterate subaltern, but to
specify what kind of knowledge Anand believes pre-Independence
India to need most. For Anand, this knowledge is not a matter of
personal achievement, let alone of an innate brilliance. Accordingly,
while Bakha may be overcome by admiration for the poet, the
narrative requires its reader to perceive this icon of learning from a
different angle.
It does so by neglecting to develop the poet into a full character. As
a result the learning the poet displays appears to be not so much his
own accomplishment as the prerogative of a certain caste or class and
as a symptom and cause of the social inequalities described in
Untouchable. While Bakhas individualism allows for a vision of
social change in the more distant future, the relative impersonality of
the poet enables Anand to posit a social responsibility upon which an
entire collective could be acting already in the present. Anand leaves
no doubt in Untouchable that the poet is literate not for his own
benefit but for the benefit of his country and especially of the poor.
The purpose of his learning is that he can speak not just for himself,
nor necessarily on behalf of others, but before others about the
opportunities for improvement these others might have without
knowing it. His function in the novel, then, is that of an informant or
medium communicating knowledge from upper to lower class or
18
19
Mukherjee, 36.
Ibid., 43.
292
caste20 for the latter to act upon. He is an enabler of action with little
doubt of the subalterns ability to act.
Arguably, Anand appeals to the same responsible learning in his
reader with which he endows the figure of the poet in his novel. This
becomes clear towards the end of the novel, when the narrative
gradually dissolves the identification it has been inviting all along
between Bakha and the reader. Anand accomplishes this final
dissociation from the hero by forcing his readers to find themselves
sharing the position of the poet in their knowledge of the machine
which, for Bakha, is still no more than a miraculous promise. Anands
exploitation of the difference between the protagonists ignorance of
this machine and his literate characters insight into the workings of
the flush system is not entirely devoid of irony though. It enforces the
criticism Anand keeps articulating throughout Untouchable of the
routine assumption that the purity professed by upper-caste (or upperclass) Indians is an indication of their immersion in concerns so much
worthier than the mundane affairs apparently constricting the
Untouchables understanding of life.
It is also to persuade the reader that his protagonist is driven by
much grander urges than any of the other characters with whom he
comes into closer contact that Anand fashions Bakhas innermost
thoughts in a manner reminiscent of Joyces stream of
consciousness.21 The sophistication (or literacy) with which Anand
takes the trouble to render Bakhas thinking in Untouchable is so
conspicuous that it cannot but add to the impression that Bakhas
mind has remained untouched or uncontaminated by the crudely
material concerns that keep troubling people like the lecherous
Brahmin priest who attempts to degrade Bakhas sister.
20
It is in this sense that Balds description of the poet as a spokesman figure
needs to be understood. In response to critics claiming that Anands portraits of
upper-caste Indians invariably are elitist and paternalistic, Bald insists that this does
not apply to the poet in Untouchable because he does not display the same classconsciousness other spokesman figures or false prophets in Anands fiction tend to
exhibit.(Shuresht Renjen Bald, Novelists and Political Consciousness: Literary
Expression of Indian Nationalism, 1919-1947, Delhi, 1983, 115-34.)
21
Indeed, in The Story of My Experiment with a White Lie, Anand himself
attests to the influence of Ulysses on his own writing and especially on Untouchable.
From Ulysses, he observes, he learnt, that the disturbed, restless and paranoiac
stream of consciousness of the people of our time could be reproduced, not as Joyce
had done it, as so much raw material, but in the same kind of direction, so as to
suggest value judgements about the characters (George, 30).
293
This is not to say that Anand completely romanticizes his heros

predicament. On the contrary, in conceding Bakha the innate ability to
learn and move on in the world, Anand only enhances the injustice of
his protagonists failure to change his situation. At the same time,
however, he also asserts that what pre-Independence India needs is not
the personal fulfilment Bakha seeks in learning. Instead he ascribes far
greater urgency to a comprehensive social change coerced from above
and supported from below. For Anand this presupposes that
intellectuals must acquire knowledge of the material conditions under
which the poorest of their fellow-beings live. Only then can they
conceive intelligent and practicable improvements of the satiation of
the dejected. As the final dialogue between the lawyer and the poet
suggests, this will automatically put an end to the slavish emulation of
European ideas which, according to the poet, so many Europeaneducated Indians are dedicated to. The figure of the poet is a
personification of Anands conviction that to attain cultural
independence the Indians must remember their own traditions and
return to the natu habits Bakha is so keen to disown at the beginning
of the novel.
In Untouchable, knowing ones culture ultimately is given priority
over knowing to read and write. Gandhis speech in the end illustrates
to Bakha how any Indian, even an illiterate outcast, may contribute to
a transformation of society. As Gandhi himself shows, this may be
done by recourse to ones orality. Understanding this Bakha actually
redefines his mission and decides to return home to enlighten his
father. Therefore the novels closure does not mark Bakhas defeat nor
his acceptance of his fathers prophecy that he will remain a sweeper
of latrines all his life. Bakha is not defeated by the horrible prospect
of all future days of service in the town and the insults that would
come with them (U, 77). After all, he has found a suitable reply to his
fathers obstinately pessimistic exhortations about the outcastes
position in the world. I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said
about us, he resolves as he proceeds homeward, and all that that
poet said. Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about the
machine (U, 156). With this decision, Anand translates Bakhas
return home into a forward movement. It seems that, as George puts it,
Untouchable closes on a note of faith and idealism.22 Indeed, Bakha
22
George, 29.
294
is ultimately filled with the hope that soon the age of flush system
will come and the sweepers can assume the dignity of status that is
their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society (4344).
Bakhas obstinate, yet never totally self-destructive determination
to overcome the obstacles to his intellectual fulfilment, clearly
distinguishes him from other illiterate characters in the novels studied
in the previous chapters such as Ali in The Heart of the Matter,
Okonkwo and Nwoye in Things Fall Apart, or the alleged barbarians
in Waiting for the Barbarians. At the outset, Bakhas dedication to his
work, the dignity and skill with which he executes his duties seem to
betoken a cultural authenticity reminiscent more of Eli Kashpaw and
Moses Pillager in Love Medicine, or of Toko and Mary Tamihana in
Potiki. Yet as the novel proceeds, this comparison, too, proves
increasingly inappropriate, given both the fierce contempt Bakha feels
for his people and his desperate desire to dissociate himself from them
and their cultural practices.
The swiftness with which Bakha in the end abandons his plan to
learn to read and write, at least for the time being, must not be
misapprehended as an indication of the sweeper boys whimsicality.
Rather it has to be seen in relation to the criticism Anand offers both
of the various literacies in contemporary India and of the British
presence there. In reducing the literacies of almost all of his characters
to mere mannerisms of little more relevance than their mode of
dressing, Anand denies both the educated Indian elite and the British
colonists the superiority they claim. In so doing, he also calls in
question the alleged urgency of implementing universal literacy in
pre-independence India. Cynical as this questioning may appear at
first glance, it does not evade reality but simply puts greater emphasis
on social problems probably of greater urgency in the India of the
1930s than mass illiteracy. Untouchable forces its Western readers to
believe that in Bakhas situation living without access to the world of
letters is still easier to bear than the prospect of being condemned to
clean up other peoples excrement for the rest of ones life. Not
understanding this is an extravagance only wealthy literates can
afford. For Anand, their blindness to the psychological implications of
having to bear the mark of Untouchability is a form of ignorance far
more serious than Bakhas lack of learning and indicative of a crudity
far more detrimental to any society than the illiteracy of a group.
295
It is for this reason that the most immediate consequence of

Gandhis address in Untouchable is to obstruct Bakhas original plan
for the day yet another postponement of the protagonists education.
Education, most critics tend to believe, features only peripherally and
incidentally23 in most of Anands novels, including Untouchable.
This view is remarkable not only in the light of Anands insistent
return to the theme throughout his oeuvre but also in view of how
Anands friend and mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, thought about
education in India. Mass illiteracy is Indias sin and shame and must
be liquidated, Gandhi is known to have declared. Indeed, as Eleanor
Zelliot has pointed out, there was little room for the educated,
politically conscious lower caste Indians in Gandhis concept of
service to the Untouchables.24 Interestingly, in Untouchable, the figure
of Gandhi may represent learning, but in the speech Anand has him
give he does not dwell much on the theme at all. Anand restricts this
function almost entirely to his protagonist. That critics should
completely overlook Bakhas quest for learning beside the more
unsavoury aspects of his Untouchability, is in all likelihood a
consequence not intended by the author, who himself has expressed
his concern at the tendency of scholars to place a higher premium on
theoretical conceptions of subalternity than on a genuine
understanding of it in real life. Accordingly Anand has noted:
Most critics, who have written about my novels, have not noticed that
my fiction arose from the compulsions of life, which have been reenacted by me again and again. They treat my fiction ... in the
dominant English manner, which implies that text is all.25
23
Premina Paul, Major Themes in the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, in The
Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R.K Dhawan, New Delhi, 1992, 19-30; and The Novels
of Mulk Raj Anand: A Thematic Study, New Delhi, 1983.
24
Eleanor Zelliot, Gandhi and Ambedkar A Study of Leadership, in The
Untouchables in Contemporary India, ed. J. Michael Mahar, Tuscan: Ark, 1972, 88.
See also Gajendra Kumar, Untouchable: A Manifesto of Indian Socio-Political
Realism, in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Critical Study, eds Manmohan K. and
Bhatnagar M. Rajeshwar, Delhi, 2000, 151-58.
25
Mulk Raj Anand, The Sources of Protest in My Novels, in Contemporary
Indian Fiction in English: Proceedings of the National Seminar Held at the University
of Kerala on the 80th Birthday of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Kesavapaniker Ayyappa
Paniker, Trivandrum, 1987, 23.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LEARNING TO BELONG TO THE OUTCASTES:
SALMAN RUSHDIES MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN
Like Anand, Salman Rushdie, breaks with the notorious elitism of

Indian English literature and strategically includes detailed portraits of
people marginalized by poverty and lack of learning in the panoramic
picture of Indian society he offers in Midnights Children. Also like
Anand, Rushdie assigns representatives of Western civilization a
markedly subordinate role in his literary exploration of Indias cultural
diversity. In the process, he subjects the official agents of European
literate culture to the same kind of systematic degradation to which
Anand subjects the figure of Colonel Hutchinson in Untouchable. As
in the case of Anands novel, this strategy effects a discrete distancing
from the European literary tradition on which Midnights Children
draws openly and extensively and in which the novel is implicated
also on account of its being written in English. As in Anands text, the
result is a hybrid text, continuously oscillating between contrasting
cultural positions. Also as in Untouchable, the differences between
these positions can be seen as pointing at religious discrepancies.
Yet while Anands cardinal concerns are the Hindu caste system
and Hindu notions of fate and Karma, Rushdies preoccupation is with
Islam. Even though Rushdie does not address the specific status of
writing in Islam directly, it is crucially important to the special
understanding of literature and book culture he advocates in his
writing. For it is in opposition to the Islamic belief in the sanctity of
the written word that Rushdie may be argued to celebrate the freedom
of the creative writer and literatures capacity to generate truths not
only deviating from, but often irreconcilable with those advanced in
consecrated texts. For Rushdie, the authority of imaginative writing
(as against prophetic writing) resides above all in this particular,
intrinsically subversive capacity. Accordingly, he writes in his postfatwa essay Is Nothing Sacred?:
The elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the
acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and
morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point
298

form which fiction begins . The challenge of literature is to start
from this point, and still find a way of fulfilling our unaltered spiritual
requirements.1
Historically, the freedom to transgress established notions of truth

which the West concedes the writer of literature results from the
dramatic proliferation and eventual secularization writing underwent
in Christian Europe during the Renaissance. The Islamic world did not
see a comparable process. In the perception of Muslims, reading and
writing remained profoundly religious practices. The letter, the
written character, as it tends towards the hidden aspect of Allah,2
stayed crucially conditioned by the Muslim calligraphic belief that
everything must pass through the sacred text, that writing is an
absolute, the Absolute, the Sanctum Sanctorum.3 As Sadik Alc
Azms puts it, while bourgeois Europe, decatholicized, modernized
and laicized, accomplished a timely departure from archaic forms of
appropriating, interpreting and acting upon the world, such as myth,
magic, religion, legend, affective encounter, scholastic reason and so
on, Muslim societies have never managed to produce an illusion
comprehensive, potent, and expedient enough to allow them, too, to
opt for the modern scientific systems of knowledge.4
Srinivas Aravamudan believes that this has been only to the
advantage of Muslim societies because it has spared them the
corruption which Western societies have had to suffer under the
ubiquitous telekinematics of subtler and less material information.5
Unlike the West, Avaramudan asserts, the Muslim world has had no
part in the growing hypocrisy of secular expression and therefore is
not responsible for the emergence of anti-religious sentiments in the
1
Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred?, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981-1991 (1991), London, 1992, 422.
2
Khatibi, quoted in Christopher Gibbins, Calligraphy and Dialogics: Moroccan
Writings Islamic Intertextualities (05-07-2000): http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/
conf/poco/paper4. html, 21, 3.
3
Ibid., 4.
4
Sadik Al-cAzm, The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie, in
Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher,
Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 16, Amsterdam,
1994, 285-86.
5
Srinivas Aravamudan, Being Gods Postman is no Fun, Yaar: Salman
Rushdies The Satanic Verses, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of
Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, 188.
Learning to Belong to the Outcastes
299
latter part of the twentieth century or for the elevation of the allencompassing fiction of national security to a condition of unlimited
paranoia. Islamic cultures, Avaramudan claims, cannot be accused of
having allowed the withering-away of the official censorship of
aesthetics [and its] replacement by consensus-seeking mechanisms
(regarding appropriateness, taste, offensiveness) in the mass media
and publishing. This, he believes, has been entirely the Wests
doing.6 For Al-cAzm, however, their adherence to traditional notions
of truth means not only that Muslim cultures have managed to avert
moral contamination. Rather his fear is that the enduring faith in the
intrinsic holiness of writing has entrapped Muslim societies in a
cultural position so outmoded that their survival will depend on the
painful realization that the Islamic emperor has no clothes left on him
anymore.7 Hence the acute cultural nervousness that Al-cAzm
diagnoses in contemporary Muslim societies beginning to grasp the
necessity for modernization at the cost of traditional values and
beliefs.8 In Al-cAzms view, this nervousness also accounts for the
vehement rejection of The Satanic Verses by certain segments of
Rushdies Muslim readership.
The difference between how Muslim and Christian cultures value
the written word is of relevance not only to an understanding of the
surprising impact of Rushdies most controversial novel. It also allows
a more differentiated reading of the sensibility Rushdie articulates in
his work to the cultural significance of books, writing, and literacy.
Deeply Islamic though Rushdies texts evidently are,9 they also reflect
the hybrid identity of someone who left India at the age of fourteen to
Ibid., 189.
Al-cAzm, 285.
8
This is what Paul Ricoeur anticipated already in the 1960s when he suggested
that on the one hand, [the developing world] has to root itself in the soil of its past,
forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the
colonialists personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is
necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality,
something which very often requires the pure and simple abandonment of a whole
cultural past (Ricoeur, quoted in Brennan, 4).
9
It seems worth pointing out that there are also readers who dispute the Islamic
quality of Rushdies texts. So does, for instance, Timothy Brennan who insists that,
apart from revealing his emotional attachments to Sufism in Grimus and Shame,
Rushdie invites his audience to comprehend him as hardly Islamic in any hard sense
(109).
7
300
be educated in Britain and to return to Asia only sporadically.10

Rushdies perception of India is therefore bound to be distinctly that
of a migrants. Yet, as Syed Manzurul Islam claims, this
distinctiveness resides not so much in Rushdies overtly flawed
recollections of his long-lost meta-imaginary homeland of India,11
as in his apparent familiarity with two radically different literacies.
Between these he never ceases to oscillate, thus catering for the
readerships of two (or more) cultures at once and mediating between
their different perspectives. The double-scripted discourse12 Rushdie
employs enables him to demonstrate and experiment with the
possibilities of a modernized Islamic literacy, exploring the losses and
gains such a modernization would entail. In so doing, Rushdie makes
clear that what he advocates is certainly not the modernization of
Indian culture by way of total Westernization but an application of
Western notions of writing, of certain aspects of Western literacy and
of Western literary values to forge a better understanding of
contemporary Muslim culture within the wider context of the
subcontinents multiculturalism. What he accomplishes in the process
are stylishly hybridised literary/cultural text[s]13 with a capacity for
provocation apparently far greater than that calculated by the author
himself.
Rushdies strategic employment of blasphemy, irrespective of the
religious sensibilities he might offend, is unquestionably the most
obvious reason for the unexpectedly violent responses to his writings.
Another may, however, also be sought in the general lack of
awareness of how uncritical of their own and how scornful of each
others literacies both Islamic and non-Islamic cultures are. In what
10
For detailed studies of the specificity of Salman Rushdies hybridity, see also
Josna E. Rege, Victim into Protagonist? Midnights Children and the Post-Rushdie
National Narratives of the Eighties, Studies in the Novel, IXXX/3 (Fall 1997), 34275; Sara Suleri, Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of
Blasphemy, and Jacqueline Bardolph, Language Is Courage: The Satanic Verses,
both in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D.
Fletcher, 221-36 and 209-20.
11
Syed Manzurul Islam, Writing the Postcolonial Event: Salman Rushdies
August 15th, 1947, Textual Practice, XIII/1 (Spring 1999), 128.
12
The term is used in analogy to Elaine Showalters notion of a double-voiced
discourse (see Elaine Showalter, Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, in The New
Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter,
New York, 1985, 261).
13
Graham Huggan, Prizing Otherness: A Short History of the Booker, Studies
in the Novel, XXIX/3 (Fall 1997), 424.
301
ways Rushdie appeals exactly to such an awareness will be analysed

in the following reading of Midnights Children as a translation of the
particular disparities informing Indian culture into English language
and into a typically English (or Western) literary form, the novel.14
The power struggle is no longer merely between author, inner
world, outer world and text; the reader himself has entered the tussle,
Keith Wilson notes, reflecting on the status of the novelist as mimetic
mediator between reader and reality in contemporary literature, and
adds with special regard to Midnights Children: Theory about
reading is forced to confront practice in writing if Rushdies
achievement is to receive any serious discussion at all.15
Correspondingly, Wilson holds that a full apprehension of Rushdies
narration presupposes a particular level of literacy. Rushdies ideal
reader, Wilson argues, is deemed to have a facility at intertextual
cross-referencing of kinds that most contemporary self-conscious
readers might, in one form or another, be assumed to have.16 The
kind of reader Wilson has in mind is able to identify not only
Rushdies allusions to the Arabian Nights but, more importantly, his
references to Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy, James Joyces
Ulysses, or Gnter Grass The Tin Drum. Logically, this reader must
be regarded as far superior to Padma, the servant to whom Saleem
Sinai, the narrator of Midnights Children, addresses his story.
Significantly, while claiming Padmas otherness on the grounds of
her ignorance of European literature, Wilson still sees this particular
female figure, whom Rushdie has re-appear randomly but insistently
throughout Midnights Children, as more than a mere listener to an
orally presented tale. He expressly ascribes her the function of the
readers representative, of a convenient reader surrogate, even as
that of lustful reader vis--vis impotent narrator.17 Wilson chooses
to agree with Timothy Brennan who, in stressing Padmas readerly
naivety, notes Padma is not only a passive receptor, or disembodied
14
Similar projects have been undertaken by Bardolph (Language Is Courage)
and Suleri (Contraband Histories), who both explore the uses of language, and the
specificity of the Indian notion of language in The Satanic Verses.
15
Keith Wilson, Midnights Children and Reader Responsibility, in Reading
Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, 55.
16
Ibid., 65.
17
Ibid., 64, 66, and 60. Other critics, too, define Padmas role as that of the
reader of Saleems tale. See for instance David Birch, Postmodernist Chutneys,
Textual Practice, V/1 (Spring 1991), 3.
302
voice of the national conscience, but a literary critic, whose authority

rests on her being a member of the lower classes.18 Likewise Nancy
E. Batty warns of overrating Padmas lack of learning and separating
her and other lower class Indians, other Padmas in Midnights
Children, from the scholars in a potential community of readers.19
Insisting on attributing much greater textual significance and power to
the figure of Padma than Wilson does, Batty argues that
Saleem makes claims for both the importance and the intrigue of his
existence, but these claims are repeatedly undermined by Padmas
scepticism and by reminders of the narrators mundane and crumbling
circumstances in the fictional present. However, the interpolation of
Padma as both a character and a narratee in the novel mitigates, as
well as exacerbates, the fictional autobiographers disadvantage:
Padma becomes an index for reader-response to the framed narrative
....20
Padmas role as Saleems necessary ear..., Batty stresses, should

not obscure her status as co-creator of his narrative.21 It is under
Padmas influence, Batty insists, that Saleem loses his focus. Padmas
appetite for amusement rather than enlightenment constantly distracts
Saleem from his own concerns and leads him to indulge in longwinded embellishments of those parts of his tale that might please and
interest his listener. Eventually, Saleems vision gets blurred, his
judgement of what is true and what is not fails him; metaphorically
speaking, Saleem, in trying to satisfy Padma, ends up miss[ing] the
spittoon.22 At the same time, Padmas ultimate union with her master,
Batty contends, turns her into a parody of King Sharyar, the knifewielding despot in the Arabian Nights to whom Scheherazade yields
her nightly narratives.23
Critical readings framing Padma as co-editor, if not as co-author of
Saleems tale have one thing in common: in the endeavour to define
her position in relation to Rushdies notional reader, they consistently
18
Brennan, 105 and 101.

Nancy E. Batty, The Art of Suspense: Rushdies 1001 (Mid-)Nights, in
Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher,
69.
20
Ibid., 72 (emphasis added).
21
Ibid., 73.
22
Ibid., 80.
23
Ibid., 79.
19
303
disregard the fact that Padma herself can neither read nor write. This
is surprising, for even if Padmas scriptlessness is referred to
explicitly only once in the entire novel, and then admittedly only in
parentheses, it clearly forms a central aspect of her characterization.
After all, her total ignorance of letters is one of the very first things
the reader learns about Padma. Padma our plump Padma is
sulking magnificently, Saleem Sinai announces only to procede, as if
in an aside not meant for her ears, (She cant read and, like all fishlovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesnt ....).24 All
subsequent references to Padma depend on this piece of initial
information to construct her unambiguously as an audience who
receives Saleems story orally, in a preliterate, or in what Saleem
himself would describe as an old-fashioned or archaic mode.
This creates a limitation that renders the figure of Padma far less
powerful than many critics make her out to be. Semiotically, Padma
occupies the most subaltern position a figure can possibly occupy
within Midnights Children, as she remains relegated to the very
margins of the text from where she cannot even access her own
characterization. Because she cannot read, her objections to Saleems
portrayal of her depend as much on his goodwill for correction as do
her pleas for a more linear and logical progression of his narration.
Ultimately, she has no means of controlling whether he will make the
changes she desires. Even if Saleem feels his certainties disintegrate in
her absence and fluency magically return to his pen as soon as she
returns, these are not effects deliberated by Padma herself. On the
contrary, rather than as Saleems muse she sees herself as someone
who must protect Saleem from his own creative urges. In this,
however, she barely succeeds. In vain she attempts to cajole Saleem
Sinai from his desk and to stop him from wrecking his eyes with that
scribbling (MC, 32). There seems to be nothing she can do to cure
him of his mad fabulism and foolish writery (MC, 193).
The plebeian commentator who tries to temper her masters
erudition must accept that Saleem will not listen to her aesthetic
counsels. As Timothy Brennan notes, her appeals condition, but do
not dictate the form of his writing.25 Saleem, in turn, eventually
succeeds in silencing his listener and forcing her to grant that Of
course, every man must tell his story in his own true way (MC, 211).
24
25
Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children (1981), London, 1995, 24.

Brennan, 106 and 104.
304
Upon this, he can at last announce in triumph, So much for doctors

and asylums; I have been left to write (MC, 212). Exactly from this
moment, Padma recedes into the background of the novel to come to
the fore only briefly when she finds Saleem himself doubting the
reliability of his own memory. At this point her antagonistic force
seems to have vanished. Instead of her typical complaints she
surprisingly offers the consoling words, What are you so long for in
your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time! (MC,
222). Nothing remains of Padmas often quoted what-happenednextism (MC, 39) as she learns to listen unhurriedly to Saleems
lengthy tale, gradually earning the narrators admiration and the
concession that he is entirely content with the uncomplaining thews
of Padma Mangroli (MC, 270). Saleem Sinai even admits,
Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible
and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; Im tracing the
cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and
that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble
keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows ... in this condition, I am
learning to use Padmas muscles as my guides. When shes bored, I
can detect in her fibres the ripples of her uninterest; when she is
unconvinced, there is a tic which gets going in her cheek. The dance
of her musculature helps to keep me on the rails; because in
autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less
important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience
to believe .... (MC, 270-71)
As the narrator/writer/protagonist, at first no bigger than a full

stop, expands into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a
chapter; ... bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one
might say, a book perhaps an encyclopaedia even a whole
language (MC, 100), Padmas object status comes to be defined more
and more exclusively through her corporeality. Saleems growing
preoccupation with Padmas materiality emerges as a correlate to her
metaphysical or meta-representational inaccessibility, that is, to that
particular quality of otherness that distinguishes her from individuals
whose consciousness has undergone the special formatting process of
literalization. To Saleem the writer, Padmas unletteredness represents
an indecipherable enigma and links her to the illiterates Picture Singh
and Tai Bibi, both embodiment[s] of primordial India and ... the
anarchic time of infinity, [and hence] unrepresentable in the mimetic
305
presence of historical time ....26 It is towards this India and its infinity
that Saleem is irresistibly drawn in his endeavours to capture as yet
unknown aspects of Indian history in his ambitious tale, a counterversion to all that has been thought, said, and above all written about
his country.
Yet, however strong the pull towards what is, at least in part, his
true origins,27 this pull cannot effect a complete departure from the life
into which Saleem was transported without his parents knowing so
after his birth. As in the case of the educated, stethoscoped return
(MC, 11) of Saleems grandfather Aadam Aziz from Europe to
Kashmir, in the instance of Saleems return to the slum from which he
was removed as an infant, the homecomers learning constitutes an
insurmountable obstacle to his full re-integration into the world he
feels he belongs. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before hes
learned one damn thing, Tai furiously reproves Aadam, his former
acolyte, and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of
foreign machines, and hes still as silly as an owl (MC, 19). Padmas
protestations against Saleems literary airs echo exactly this reproof
and make Saleem aware of how far his upbringing on the wealthy
Methwold Estate has removed him from the India into which he was
born. For him there is something exotic about Padmas down-toearthery, and her paradoxical superstition. He cannot help marvelling
at her contradictory love of the fabulous (MC, 38) and her
unscientific bewilderment (MC, 238), her bizarre behaviour,
outlandish ... rage, and strange discontent(MC, 121). I began to
see, he writes, that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from
two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncles house
I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh;
(MC, 413).
Although, or because, the world of the illiterate lies so absolutely
beyond the grasp and control of the literate, Saleem Sinai remains
fascinated by the perplexing idiosyncrasies of his so very different
26
Islam, 131.
The question of Saleems origins is actually more complicated than he himself
is willing to see. Saleem may profess feelings of guilt (or indeed by plagued by such
feelings) for having unjustly benefited from growing up at the Methwold Estate, all at
the expense of his adversary Shiva. Curiously, however, it seems to escape him that,
given his real parentage (his natural father is William Methwold), he could, under
somewhat different circumstances, also have been the perfectly lawful heir of the
place he has such scruples about considering his rightful home.
27
306
audience. He admits to feeling overwhelmed by an older learning

when with Padma, who is his mistress and his wife-to-be in a marriage
never to be consummated, and, most importantly, his muse, dutifully
surrendering all aesthetic control to her master. The essence of
Padmas learning, Saleem guesses, is unobtainable for him because as
a literate he has been corrupted by the art of exegesis and unlearnt to
believe what is not spelt out in letters. Tai, just as unimpressed as
Padma is by the power of letters and its mastery, shares this older
learning with her. He may be known as a half-wit whose brain, as
rumour has it, fell out with his teeth. Nonetheless his toothless chatter
regularly inspires awe and fear in his listeners: Awe, because Tai
knew the lakes and hills better than any other of his detractors; fear,
because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering,
... (MC, 14). Obviously aware and proud of the superior wisdom he
possesses, Tai replies when interrogated about his age:
I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die
. I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir .... it is your
history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost
books .... Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I cant
read. (MC, 16)
If Tais special knowledge is knowledge of what has not been, or

cannot be recorded in writing, he might also possess some knowledge
of the future that is unwritten or impossible to write. By this inference
the narrator of Midnights Children reads the ancient ferryman and
owner of the oldest shikara on Lake Dal as endowed with the gift of
seeing, or of foreseeing, a future in which India will be destroyed by
the invasion of foreign ideas of progress. Accordingly he describes
Tai, the living antithesis of ... the inevitability of change(MC, 15),
the watery Caliban (MC, 15), as a messenger bringing this very
future to Aadam Aziz in the form of an urgent summons to a patient
who will later become Aadams wife.
As Tai constitutes the connecting link between the past and the
future that sets in motion the history which will contain Saleem Sinai,
the equally unlettered Picture Singh also seems to offer access into a
future not otherwise foreseeable. Saleem is confident that this
wonderful patriarch of the ghetto will shape the future by the sheer
force of his will; and [will] not be stopped until he, and his cause,
[have] won the day ...(MC, 399-400). For life in the community of
307
the godless, of the public menaces, of the scum of the earth

(MC, 397) has taught Saleem that Picture Singh and the magicians
were people whose hold on reality was absolute, that they gripped it
so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service
of their arts, but they never forgot what it was (MC, 399). Optimistic
that the Indians ancient national gift for fissiparousness (MC, 399)
would find new outlets through the unadulterated socialism advocated
by Picture Singh, Saleem puts what he has kept of his previous life,
his literacy, at the snake-charmers service and becomes a sort of
aide-de-camp to this monumental man (MC, 397):
... his legendary artistry drew large good-natured crowds; and he made
his snakes enact his message under the influence of his weaving flute
music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a prepared
harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross
inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow,
the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police
harassment, hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced
by serpents; and then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk
.... (MC, 413)
The speeches Saleem writes and then reads out are only preludes to
Picture Singhs oral performances, mere complaints about the present,
to be extended into images of another future by the real prophet
Picture Singh. Not entrapped by versions of history recorded in
writing and publicized as officially legitimized truths, the illiterate
Picture Singh can afford to be a visionary. It is from his designs of a
future other than the sorry future the present holds in store for him that
Picture Singh derives his identity. Unencumbered by the vanity a
recorded history of ancestors may instil, Picture Singh need not share
the writers fear that he might be producing a mummy of himself, so
emptied desiccated pickled that it cannot even bleed, or that he might
end up in the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-oftales ... as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster (MC,
447-448). While his vainglorious obsession with how he will be
remembered tragically locks Saleem into his own past, Picture
Singhs, utterly indifferent to what part he will play in some future
past, remains free him to face the future and indeed engage creatively
in its conception.
308
While Saleem may envy Padma and Picture Singh their illiteracy,
believing it to be as a blessed state of unencumbered creativity, he still
abstains from celebrating it indiscriminately as an expression of
plebeian authenticity or of primordial, native virtue. Saleems
enthusiasm for Padmas and Picture Singhs unlettered savageness
does not result from a Romantic identification with the native, the
folk, the people.28 Rather it is due to his alienation from the lower
classes of Indian society, which, despite his fervent denials, finally
becomes manifest in his attitude to Picture Singhs wife Durga, a
washerwoman whose preternatural breasts unleashed a torrent of milk
capable of nourishing regiments and who ... had two wombs (MC,
445). To Saleem, Durga embodies the most repulsive specimen of an
illiterate Indian. In his eyes her entire person negates absolutely the
physical mutilation and destruction for which the narrator of
Midnights Children has cultivated such a pathological fascination.
Saleem feels positively revolted at the mere idea of having his
autobiography contaminated by a single reference to this overly vital,
overly healthy, overly physical female. Nonetheless the figure of
Durga resists his intention to omit, even deny her existence altogether
in his tale. By offering her services as wet-nurse to his seriously ill
son-elect, she secures Saleem the future in which he has lost all
interest as a writer. At the same time, her indispensability forces him
to afford her a mentioning and to concede that, as full of gossip and
tittle-tattle as she was of milk, ... she represented novelty, beginnings,
the advent of new stories events complexities (MC, 445). After all,
there is no denying that it is her vitality, however irritating a material
proof to Saleem of the Indian disease of optimism, that finally saves
young Aadams life, just as it is Padmas vigour that almost manages
to save Saleems.
In direct analogy to his characterizations of Tai and Picture Singh
as endowed with the gift of foreseeing another future, when Saleem
begins to dread the perilously imminent end of his story, Rushdie has
Padma determine with majestically unshakeable resolve: You
listen to me, mister but me no buts! Never mind all that fancy talk
any more. There is the future to think of (MC, 444). As Padmas
illiterate otherness reveals its most appealing aspect, Saleem for a
moment feels tempted to believe that Padma has spoken some
cabbalistic formula, some awesome abracadabra (MC, 444),
28
See Brennan, 108.
309
released him from the fate predicted to Amina Sinai before his birth,
and given him an alternative future. Saleems dilemma, however, is
that he cannot escape his own otherness. Not before long, he
relinquishes the idea that his life might yet take another turn and he
allows himself to be reclaimed by the past he has been conjuring up in
his writings.
Resuming his authority as literate subject, he demands that his
repeated testimonies to a form-crazy destiny which enjoys wreaking
its havoc on numinous days should not be dismissed as just so much
fancy talk (MC, 444). Even more determined now to construct a
history in which he himself is not just included but plays the part of
the protagonist, Saleem is driven to defy the impossibility of recording
what does not yet exist. In a sense, he insists that his literacy has to do
for him what he believes Padmas and Picture Singhs oralities to be
doing for them. The thought that his letteredness might render him
in any respect inferior to his unlettered Others proves utterly
unacceptable to him. No, that wont do, I shall have to write the
future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute
certainty of a prophet, he announces, unwilling to leave the telling
(or pickling) of his future to anyone else. He goes on to de-scribe
his own end, meaningfully framing it as a disintegration into specks
of voiceless dust in an assembly of all those who had a part in his
life: parents grandparents aunts uncles sister friends enemies; one two
three, four hundred million Indians, five hundred six, all uniting in a
stampede to trample their creator, the narrator/author of Midnights
Children.
But Padma, though at last united with the teller and protagonist of
Midnights Children in marriage, is not included in the finale but must
exit the text in the most unspectacular fashion, discreetly drowning in
the crowd gathering around her and Saleem. Her own husband,
master, creator has her pass into the obscurity from which she has
emerged, leaving questions about her association with Mary Pereira,
about her relationship with him, and about her future role as his sons
foster mother untouched. Padmas part in the making of Indian history
goes just as unnoticed as her part in the production of Braganza
Pickle, as an anonymous stirrer of the vat. Immortalization by
autobiographical record is not for everyone in India and in Midnights
Children denotes a privilege on which only Saleem can draw to assert
his superiority over his unlettered vis--vis and have the last word.
310
Disposed of and eclipsed, Padma, in turn, together with Tai Bibi,

Picture Singh, and Durga comes to signify that vast part of Indian
history which is not preserved, chutnified, pickled in writing, but left
to waste in oblivion because its agents are not literate. In the light of
her involuntary disappearance before she has had a proper part in a
proper story, even the last resemblance fades between Padma and the
insatiable tyrant in the Arabian Nights, whom Scheherezade is forced
to supply forever with fresh entertainment. At the end of Midnights
Children it should be more than evident that Padma is not model for
the imperious reader, constantly demanding completion of a story that
has no end,29 nor an ally and adversary, possessing the will to
redress but the power to destroy.30 All that she is allowed to be in
Saleems narration, is the fragment of another, more real (in
Saleems sense of the word) version of Indian history, another
counter-history of the subcontinent that might have offered a more
optimistic outlook on independent Indias future than Saleems, had it
ever been written down.
Clearly then, Padmas presence in Midnights Children serves to
foreground the subjectivity and fictionality of Saleems narrative, not
just explicitly through the incorporation of her repeated exclamations
of disbelief, but also implicitly through the taciturnity about her own
life imposed on her by Saleem. The most important difference
between Saleems listener and Salmans reader does not derive from
Padmas inability to identify the allusions to English and other
Western literatures which Rushdie makes for his reader, but from the
readers ability to identify Padma as the textual element in the
function of which Rushdie juxtaposes her with Saleem. Unlike Padma,
the reader, who can read her characterization, is required to
acknowledge that, side by side on the page, as the translations of two
individuals (imagined or real) into letters, Padma and Saleem stand for
opposites such as exclusion and inclusion, absence and presence,
liminality and centrality, anonymity and identity. The contrast
between the two characters raises questions not just about the validity
of Saleems fantastically subjective account but also about the
prominent status he claims in his own story.31 Padmas failed attempts
29
Wilson, 59.
Batty, 80.
31
Cf. Anuradha Dingwaney, Author(iz)ing Midnights Children and Shame:
Salman Rushdies Constructions of Authority, in Reworlding: The Literature of the
30
311
to challenge his prominence and break out of the role of the silent
listener highlight how the writing of one history can mean the
suppression of another, how the transcription of collective experiences
into letters must turn into a highly competitive act in a culture in
which an inexhaustible plurality of discourses determines the making
of truth. Brian May stresses that unlike other Indian writers Rushdie
focuses not on nationalist historiographys erasures of the past.32
However, considering Padmas consignment to the margins of
Saleems autobiography, one still is tempted to contend that, by basing
the characterization of Padma on her illiteracy, Rushdie does after all
strategically dramatize historiographic erasure in Midnights Children.
Yet Padma is not the only victim of historiographic erasure that
Midnights Children produces. Saleems desperate narrative enterprise
fails to spare him a similar kind of defeat. While he manages to assert
his authorial superiority over Padma on the grounds of his literacy, he
fights a losing battle for the readers credulousness against much more
powerful opponents such as magazines, history books, radio
programmes, Bombay talkies, the songs of Jamila Singer broadcast on
Voice-Of-Pakistan Radio, the Indian cinema, telegrams, and after
telegrams, telephones, the Indian census of 1961, a personal letter to
himself, signed by the Prime Minister, campaign slogans on walls and
banners, gossip whispered at hen-parties and canasta evenings,
legends repeated in the salons of the well-to-do and time and again,
newspapers, scraps of newspapers, windblown newspapers visiting his
shack, newspapers quoting foreign economists, cartoons in
newspapers, graphs in newspapers, the Karachi Dawn, the Times of
India, the Pakistan Times, the Jang. A dazzling collection of official
and unofficial truths keep pouring in on Saleem from all these
channels and, simultaneously, from the inner monologues of all the
so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike (MC, 168)
which he claims to be able to receive telepathically. Finding ones
own version of history and thus ones identity in this overwhelming
polyphony and polygraphy seems a goal attainable only at the risk
of cracking up, of being torn apart under the pressure of choosing
between ones own certainties and the many different ones proclaimed
Indian Diaspora, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson, Contributions to the Study of World
Literature 42, New York, 1992, 157-68.
32
Brian May, Back to the Future: History in/and the Postcolonial Novel,
Studies in the Novel, XXIX/3 (Fall 1997), 270.
312
by others. The effects of the immense effort to defend his own

subjectivity in the end show on Saleem, as he happens to capture a
glimpse of himself in a mirror at the Shadipur bus depot:
Looking upwards into the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a bigheaded, top-heavy dwarf; in the humblingly foreshortened reflection
of myself I saw that the hair on my head was now grey as rainclouds;
the dwarf in the mirror, with his lined face and tired eyes, reminded
me vividly of my grandfather Aadam Aziz ... nine-fingered, horntempled, monks-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed,
castrated, and now prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a
human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature
who had been released from the preordained destiny which had
battered him until he was half-senseless; with one good ear and one
bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black angel of death.
The young-old face of the dwarf in the mirror wore an expression
of profound relief. (MC, 447)
It is as a young-old faced dwarf, as a castrated invalid ready to die

that Padma meets Saleem and becomes not only his listener but also
his servant and nurse. At this very point, her own physical and
emotional integrity is unbroken, in fact, so obviously unbroken that it
not only contrasts sharply with her masters vulnerability but
constantly threatens to deconstruct the position he claims in the text.
As an illiterate excluded, but, ironically, also sheltered from the
majority of discourses against which Saleem must constantly defend
his personal version of Indian history, Padma does not have to suffer
the humiliation, self-doubt, and fragmentation that Saleem
experiences under the exposure to the 1,001 voices of the midnights
children, but also to an infinite multitude of other discourses. Her
occasional outbursts during Saleems narration notwithstanding,
Padma remains safely rooted in her cultural heritage of superstitious
beliefs, moralistic judgements, and credulous dependence.
For her, there still is a higher truth than that contained in
Saleems writing or scribbling, which she cannot help perceiving as
the product of some unhealthy and foolish, if not blasphemous,
obsession. This higher truth, in Padmas view of the world, is absolute
and therefore not subject to interpretation. An escape into another selfmade version of reality remains inconceivable for Padma, as does any
other form of transcendence of the human self through its own recreation in writing. Whereas to the Western literate mind, such
313
fatalism may seem to jeopardize human subjectivity and individuality,

for Padma, it represents the only protection against Saleems sense of
and desire for an ending. It guarantees that, while Saleem insistently
pursues his path towards total disintegration, Padma, in spite of her
willing subordination to Saleem as narrator, stays undamaged by her
nocturnal excursions into his past.
Arguably, it is Padmas evident immunity to Saleems authorial
manipulations that has led critics to overlook her illiteracy and the
subaltern status to which she is relegated within Saleems script as a
result of her scriptlessness. An ironically fortunate escape in the light
of Saleems ultimate defeat, Padmas survival seems to invite readings
that negate her inferior status, her harmlessness, and her unconditional
servitude, so praised by her master. Yet in interpreting Padma as an
imperious, undiscerning, or insufficiently learned reader who
interrupts the flow of the tale, even interferes with it, and tries to
impose on it another logic or moral, critics have only re-enforced a
cultural bias founded on distinctly Western critical notions of writing.
To interpret Padmas interjections mainly as disruptions of her
masters narrative, or to suggest that by arresting Saleems story, by
making it tame and predictable, Padma comes to stand for the
political failures of Third-World socialism prevalent in modern
decolonization struggles,33 is not only to side with Saleem and
support his eccentric subjectiveness, to advocate unconditional
writerly independence, and to argue in principle the validity of fiction
as truth. An interpretation along such lines also questions implicitly
the reliability of illiterate consciousnesses, posits the crudeness of
unlettered thinking in contrast to the sophisticated feats of the lettered
mind, and, not least importantly, invites the conclusion that in
Midnights Children Rushdie favours the specifically Western
assumption of the scribes sovereignty over the script at the expense
of the Muslim insistence on the scripts sovereignty over the scribe. A
closer analysis of the role of Padma in Midnights Children, however,
suggests that Salman Rushdies literary explorations of India do not
really lend themselves to such appropriations. Rushdie may write in a
Western language, draw on Western stylistic and generic conventions,
address Eastern as well as Western audiences, and use Western
avenues of publication, but the subject matter of Midnights Children
33
Brennan, 108.
314
is contemporary Eastern literacy and the othernesses it once created

and still is creating in India. This in itself renders Midnights Children
a hybridized document of cultural difference at the very moment of its
transcription.
In contrast to the cultural contexts to which Rushdie offers the end
product of his writing, the cultural context he lays out in his writing
does not grant the writer celebrity status, nor the literary text great
political or social influence; it does not seem to employ professional
readers or sponsor professionally conducted studies on literature.
Saleem does not consciously participate in a literary discourse, nor
deliberately observe Western literary traditions. Compared to the
author of Midnights Children, he proves just as naive and
incompetent a judge of the events he narrates, as politically confused
and ineffective, as critics tend to make Padma out to be. In choosing
her rather than a metropolitan intellectual as his confidante, Saleem
lets himself in for an enterprise in which he cannot live up to Western
ideas of authorship. With his particular choice of audience, the
fragmentation of his narrative is pre-programmed since it can never
really contain the illiterate consciousnesses it introduces.
This is not entirely deleterious. After all, Saleem submits his
autobiography to the only person he can trust not to be consumed by
those discourses which constantly threaten to distort his own
understanding of the past. In spite of her what-happened-nextism,
Padma in the end does not insist on the nightly supply of forever new
truths. To be able to exert the tyranny of such high expectations over a
narrator or writer is a luxury for which a reader, spoilt by free and
easy access to literature, is far better equipped to afford than an
illiterate listener. While, Salman Rushdie ironically constructs the
metropolitan reader as a voyeuristic consumer, also to draw
attention to his novel as an object of Western consumption,34 he
makes sure that Padma knows her place and knows, too, that it is not
for her but for himself (and, perhaps, for his son) that Saleem desires
to tell his tale. The freedom she offers Saleem by accepting her own
subordinate status ultimately proves that she is the only audience able
to serve the purpose of his tale, a vessel that generously takes up and
stores any amount of fabulation Saleem volunteers. Saleem does not
miss the spittoon. In fact, he excels in a cultural practice the sad
futility of which remains for Rushdies reader to decipher as part of
34
Huggan, 424.
315
the bitterly ironical portrait of Indian culture that Midnights Children

offers.
BLACK ILLITERACY FORGED BY

SLAVERY AND RACISM
The African Americans relation to dominant literacy has been

conditioned by a long history of publicly approved and religiously
monitored exclusion from letters and learning. Like that of the Indian
outcastes, the marginalization of African Americans by the literate
ruling classes follows a trajectory different from the cultural
subordination commonly associated with European expansion.
African Americans were systematically kept from entering and
actively participating in the master culture whose language and
religion they had appropriated. By contrast, most other peoples
exposed to European domination have had the rather doubtful luck of
being absorbed into their colonizers civilization by way of forced
assimilation. Those who resisted assimilation were exterminated. For
American slaveholders, neither the liquidation of those they regarded
and depended upon as their own property nor the forced assimilation
of subjects whom they perceived as too different even to contemplate
as human beings offered a practical means of sustaining their system
of exploitation. Legislation against black literacy suggested itself as a
much more feasible way of coercing slaves into silent acceptance of
their subordination.
Unlike the publicly approved illiteracy of lower-caste Indians, that
of black Americans and the cultural invisibility that it produced
constitutes a widely recognized historical phenomenon today. With
corresponding frequency, indeed insistence, the theme of exclusion
from white literate culture is addressed in modern and postmodern
African-American literature. This has not escaped critical attention, as
the recent enforced interest in the transition of black American culture
from orality to literacy suggests.1 As in other discussions of similar
transition processes, however, the ensuing discourse does not seem to
do justice to the actual complexity both of the specific literacy
1
See, for instance, Henry Louis Gates; Jr., The Trope of the Talking Book, in
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, New York,
1988, 127-169; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of
American Literature, Cambridge: Mass, 1993; Lindon Barrett, African-American
Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority, American Literary History, VII/3
(Fall 1995), 415-42; Trudier Harris, Folk Literature, in The Oxford Companion to
African American Literature, eds William L. Andrews et al., New York, 1997, 28286; Roberts, From Oral To Literate Culture: Colonial Experience in English West
Indies. One exception is Ronald A.T. Judys work (Dis)Forming the American
Canon: AfricanArabic Slave Narrative and the Vernacular (with a Foreword by
Wahneema Lubiano, Minneapolis: Minn, 1993), which takes into account the literacy
of African-Arabic slaves and its impact on the evolution of the American slave
narrative.
320
resulting from it nor to the intricacies of its treatment within literary

texts. This may be due, amongst other things, to the fact that for a long
time the beginning of African-American literature has routinely been
understood as coincident with the abolition of slavery.
Yet, although black literacy was strictly prohibited during slavery,
African-American writing started already before Emancipation.
Accordingly, in Traces of a Stream, a study of literacy and social
change among African-American women, Jacqueline Jones Royster
asserts the need for a reassessment of the beginnings of black
American literature, surprising the academy with evidence of black
females accessing the cadre of well-educated American women
already in the nineteenth century. Likewise Janet Duitsman Cornelius
in her work When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and
Religion in the Antebellum South (1991) documents efforts of
considerable segments of southern society to promote literacy among
slaves and thereby anticipating Roysters observation that despite the
displacement and the oppressive circumstances it generated, the
peculiar institution of slavery also dictated and strengthened
certain patterns of action and belief for African American[s] and
encouraged them to acquire and use literacy both before and after
Emancipation.2
In other words, black American literature sprung from a culture
which, though predominantly oral, was a profoundly subversive,
because secretly literate subculture. However, instead of
acknowledging that the first writing by African Americans was
produced in defiance of the white establishment, orthodox literary
historiography has been constructing the eventual entry of blacks into
literate American culture with unintentional condescension as an
2
Admittedly, Roysters focus is on the female part of nineteenth-century African
American population, which she contends to have been able to retain a sense of self
that resonated with womens roles in West African communities and base on it an
ethos of literate practices (Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy
and Social Change Among African American Women, Pittsburgh Series in
Composition, Literacy, and Culture, Pittsburgh: Penn, 2000, 111). In terms of how
material conditions might affect the formation of ethos, Royster argues, the fact of
their holding such a clear place of value in the economic order [on account of their
reproductive potential], despite the experience of pejoration that actually accompanied
the place, permitted the women to construct a view of themselves as durable. They
could survive and help others do the same. This view supported an ongoing
commitment to long-standing cultural mandates womens roles in assuring the
survival and well-being of the community (112).
Black Illiteracy
321
emergence from a more primitive state of existence. Accordingly the

Oxford Companion to Black American Literature, for instance, notes
that literacy acquires in relation to African-American life and culture
the status of an important mark of citizenship within the human
family and that the evolution of African-American texts and
traditions of letters marks signal accomplishments, because they
seem to provide the most manifest and least ephemeral representations
of full participation in the life of the mind.3 The patronizing
undertones of such announcements tend to be overlooked by scholars
of black literature. Instead it is taken for granted that an authority like
the Oxford Companion should even go to the trouble of reminding its
readers that literacy is of paramount value to any community and
[bears] great benefits in terms of self-worth, socioeconomic worth,
social mobility, access to information and knowledge, and even
rationality, morality, and orderliness.4
The community of nineteenth-century slaveholders hardly shared
this view. Like contemporary opponents to mass literacy in Britain
they had every reason to fear rebellion and to dread black literacy as a
safe route into complete anarchy. Apart from petty crimes such as the
forgery of grocery lists to obtain eatables from county stores in the
name of their masters, slaveholders also feared that reading slaves
would issue passes and free papers for fugitive slaves and, worse
even, learn about the discontent of slaves at other places:
In effect, slaveholders recognized the likelihood of an occasional call
to freedom from the hearts of enslaved men and women. This fact
alone was manageable. What was not so predictable was the potential
effects of insurrectionist leaders who were able to read books about
revolutions and revolutionary heroes and heroines, newspaper reports
of whatever insurrections were occurring or had occurred, and
abolitionist pamphlets that encouraged the quest for freedom and
proclaimed a growing support for the ending of slavery. Literacy in
this context was deemed dangerous and intolerable .5
Slaveholders obviously felt that most brutal measures were both

necessary and warranted to prevent slaves from acquiring even very
3
Lindon Barrett, Literacy, in The Oxford Companion to African American

Literature, 443.
4
Ibid., 442.
5
Royster, 127.
322
rudimentary literacy skills and not even shrank from such extreme
precautions as amputation to prevent slaves from trespassing into their
culture. Yet, criminalization of black literacy through excessively
severe punishment was not entirely effective and failed to intimidate
all slaves into accepting their blackness as a lifelong exile from the
world of letters.
For this, writing was spreading far too rapidly in antebellum
America, which saw the emergence of the most numerous reading
public the world had ever known and the foundation of hundreds of
new periodicals catering for the growing intellectual needs of the
masses.6 Newspapers and periodicals were also the media in which the
increasingly contentious issue of slavery was debated by slaveholders
and abolitionists alike. They served not only journalists in the North to
advance their abolitionist ideas but also irate Southerners to vent their
protest against antislavery propaganda. Indeed, a sinister reciprocity
can be observed between the growing popularity of the abolitionist
press in the north and the increasing severity of the measures for
which the press in the south would be employed to uphold slavery
against all odds. Moreover, it was also in writing that they replied to
abolitionist journals, issued increasingly stringent laws against all
Negroes, free and slave, advertised slaves for sale and published
profiles of runaway slaves.
There can hardly be any doubt that even those who never dared to
try and acquire even most basic skills of written communication must
have possessed some awareness of their emancipation being fought
for and against not only in slave insurrections and on battlefields in
the Civil War, but in yet another manner and medium. Such
knowledge, along with the awareness that writing, when used for the
issuing of free papers, actually had the capacity to seal a slaves
release into freedom, account for the well documented appreciation of
the written medium by African Americans. As Jones informs us, the
blacks fully grasped the symbolic and practical significance of
literacy. They understood the implications of literacy and learning
in political, economic, and social progress and could see clearly
also from the extent to which they were denied access to it that
education could make a difference for individuals and for whole
communities.7 However limited their own command of letters, they
6
7
Starling, 17.
Jones, quoted in Royster, 123.
Black Illiteracy
323
would place immense faith in the written word behind which they
evidently believed a higher than human, infallible and just authority.
As Marion Wilson Starling reports, therefore they would devise most
ingenious ways and means to gain some mastery of the alphabet. Not
infrequently they would do so with the assistance of a white
accomplice found amongst children or mistresses of slaveholders. Yet
even when their access to written texts, writing materials and tools
was more restricted, they would try to learn to read and write, for
instance, by offering to hold the Bible for their masters when these
were reading aloud from it on Sundays, which would allow them to
look at the words recited and memorize them.
However fiercely the whites may have condemned literacy in
slaves as a sinful or even criminal presumption, such ploys were not
regarded as offensive transgressions by the blacks themselves. After
all their own perception of the Bible was as a text access to which was
not at all a white prerogative. In fact, many of them were convinced
that the sole value in knowing how to read was the power it
provided human beings to learn the will of God.8 Slavery, according
to this view, constituted an offence against God because it denied
them not only the God-given skills of reading and writing but also the
enlightenment these skills were meant to bring. This view found clear
expression in the slave narratives written by former or fugitive slaves
already before Emancipation describing their authors suffering and
eventual liberation in an overtly autobiographical form. Therefore
both thematically and by virtue of their own writtenness slave
narratives represent practical applications of the abolitionist ideology
they respresent. As William L. Andrews explains,
In the nineteenth-century slave narrative freedom is understood 1.
most naively as a place the North. 2. most pragmatically as an
economic condition .... 3. most ideally as a state of the mind and spirit
characterized by a sense of awareness of self and a sense of individual
potential to affect the world and to effect ones own future.9
The subversive potential of slave narratives resided not only in

their open advancement of the idea of black emancipation through
8
Starling, 56.
William L. Andrews, Narrating Slavery, in Teaching African American
Literature: Theory and Practice, eds Maryemma Graham, Sharon Pineault-Burke, and
Marianna White Davis, London, 1998, 25.
9
324
intellectual improvement. It also derived from the fact that their

publication meant the sudden coming out of numerous blacks not
just as literates but even more as authors of texts sufficiently
sophisticated to merit being called literary. Given the popularity of
the conviction that blacks were both unworthy and incapable of active
participation in literate culture, the public visibility of highly literate
blacks was vitally important to encourage African Americans to
overcome the prevalent assumption that blackness is essentially
synonymous with lifelong illiteracy. White Americans also were
suddenly required to readjust their image of the blacks. They too had
to begin seeing them as agents of a culture as sophisticated and
complex as their own.10 Accordingly Gates observes that The slave
narrative ... helped usher in a central line of thinking about AfricanAmerican literature as an oppositional tradition, devised to refute
racist allegations that its authors did not and could not create
literature.11
Not only has the perplexingly sophisticated style of some of the
slave narratives prompted sceptics to query their authenticity and to
argue that they must have been written by white campaigners against
slavery, it has also generated a growing interest in the specific nature
of African-American literacy and in its history. Admittedly,
10
Admittedly, this is not a position shared by Cynthia Hamilton, who, stressing

the characteristic restrictiveness of the generic formula of slave narrative (440),
observes that all [slave] narratives pander to the abolitionist polemic of
victimization and that slave authors stay entrapped in the interpretative framework
which bestows meaning on the slaves life within the context of the institution of
slavery and denies authority to the black speaker (433-34). Hamilton attributes this to
the reluctance of a largely white audience to accept a black writer on his own terms
which would invariably force slaves telling their story to accept the insult of
authorizing conventions permitting but a blinkered and partisan perspective
hampering their narratives expressive scope (434-36) Indebted to the Romantic
notion of the freely creative writer-as-artist, Hamilton seems to underestimate the
liberating effect that access to the written medium and permission to use it publicly
must have had for the African American even in spite of other limitations imposed on
their expressive scope. Even when bowing before the dominant middle class
sensitivities and sensibilities of the period (435), the authors of slave narratives must
be conceded to have contributed to a change of attitude enabling blacks perhaps not
immediately to transcend the role of victim but to escape at least that of the
intellectually inferior brute (Cynthia S. Hamilton, Revisions, Rememories and
Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative, Journal of American Studies,
XXX/ 3 [December 1996], 429-45).
11
Gates, quoted in Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and
Identity in Womens Slave Narratives, New York, 1996, 15.
Black Illiteracy
325
corresponding scholarly attention was temporarily deflected by a

critical return to the Harlem Renaissance and by the renewed
preoccupation with African orality that this period inspired with its
insistence that the roots of African-American culture have to be
sought outside the domain of letters. For a while, the powerful
assertions of the beauty of blackness formulated during the Harlem
Renaissance and founded on a revaluation of alternative forms of
cultural codification such as musical production, folklore, and
nightlife12 caused scholars to ignore that the orality they were
studying was actually generated by way of a systematic suppression of
an equivalent literacy.
It is only recently that critics have come to concede that, in trying
to deconstruct the cultural centrality of literacy, to supplant the
medium of writing by music and speech, and to redefine the black
American self in terms of its African origins, the proponents of the
Harlem Renaissance steered dangerously close to a kind of Romantic
primitivism. Thus Henry Louis Gates, for instance, observes that the
Harlem Renaissance failed to find its voice, which lay muffled
beneath the dead weight of the convention of romanticism, which
most black writers seemed not to question but adopted eagerly.13
Scholarly attention has since been directed also to black American
intellectuals who, in the course of the 1930s, suspended the
predominantly aesthetic discourse of the Harlem Renaissance and,
under the impression of urbanization, institutional racism, and war,
turned to more pressing social concerns. As Bernard Bell has shown,
their new commitment found expression in a new naturalistic vision in
the African-American novel between 1937 and 1952.14
At the same time, their focus in their perception of black culture
shifted from black orality, which had been celebrated so
enthusiastically during the Harlem Renaissance, to illiteracy as a
12
Barrett, 444.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self,
New York, 1987, 257. The problematic consequences of an African American
discourse attempting to recast the black American in the role of the noble savage, as
outlined by Gates, have been recognized also earlier by writers such as W.E.B. Du
Bois and Jessie Redmon Fausset. They dissociate themselves from the renewed
Eurocentric visions of the black Other by programmatically choosing as their
protagonists representatives of the black middle class and portraying them as well
trained both in education and citizenry (Barrett, 444).
14
Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Amherst, 1987,
150-51.
13
326
specifically black American predicament. This is not to say that black

American writers after the Harlem Renaissance, or in reaction to the
Harlem Renaissance, simply and conveniently returned to
comprehending the difference between blacks and whites in terms of
an opposition between culturally inferior illiterates and culturally
superior literate rulers. Rather they now began to develop a more
differentiated awareness of the literacy their people had acquired
relatively recently and of the illiteracy in which they had been retained
as a measure of strategic Othering during slavery.
Significantly, narratives recounting a black characters gradual
acquisition of the ability to read and write tend to treat literacy not like
contemporaneous European fictions as a precondition of social
integration but as a source of conflict with white society. This
difference has since turned into a characteristic of African-American
writing. In fact, in twentieth-century black American fiction, the
migration north of well educated protagonists continues to be
construed hardly as a closure but far more often as a beginning to a
quest in which the main character will time and again be made
painfully aware of white Americas misgivings about black literacy
and literate blacks. The novels by Wright, Angelou, Ellison, Walker,
and Morrison, for instance, follow this very mode of recording the
profound distaste harboured by white Americans for signs of
learnedness in their black fellow beings. Invariably they construe it as
an historically grown and enduring peculiarity and explicitly or
implicitly trace it back to the special aversion which would drive
slaveholders to protect their own culture even by way of torture and
murder.
For a long time forbidden to participate actively in the booming
cultural industry the proliferation of writing in nineteenth-century
America had generated, yet, insistently reduced to passive objects of
inscription by that same industry, inevitably blacks have come to
assume a rather ambivalent role towards literacy. This is also reflected
in their literature and in the historical reconstructions of their cultural
past they attempted in writing. Their uncertainty as to the benevolence
the literate culture in which they have always assumed a marginal
position finds symbolic expression, for instance, in a dream at the
beginning of Ralph Ellisons novel Invisible Man, in which the
protagonist is handed an official envelope by his grandfather and told
to read the letter, which is stamped with the state seal. Upon
Black Illiteracy
327
opening the envelope, the narrator finds another inside it and another,
endlessly, as it seems, until, finally, he comes across a short message
in precious letters of gold, reading: To Whom It May Concern, ...
Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.15 The dreamt-up warning
foreshadows the confusing chase to follow from the first-person
narrators combat with an ominous establishment, a combat in which
literacy proves a vital prerequisite to shifting, at least occasionally or
temporarily, from the position of the persecuted to that of the
persecutor.
If any generalizing observation on the treatment of the themes of
writing, literacy, and literate culture in black American writing can be
ventured at all, it is that rather than clarify their authors position
within and in relation to dominant literacy, black American novels
tend to confuse it. More often than not they do so in electing to treat
the writers confusion as their main concern. Arguably, it is the
African-American writers evident difficulties in placing themselves
in relation to dominant literate culture that gives special relevance to
the recurrent figure of the non-literate and semi-literate black
subaltern. Unlike writers from other Anglophone backgrounds,
twentieth-century African-American novelist employ this figure not in
the first place as a cipher of some intangible otherness but primarily as
a symbol of contemporary American blackness borne out of a
complex history of cultural exclusion, participation, and self-assertion.
Consistently narrated as an experience generating a unique sense of
familiarity, the encounter with the non- or semi-literate Other has
become identifiable, even without explicit marking, as a sudden
meaningful turning point in the alienation process which black
protagonists undergo as a consequence of their submersion in a
dominant literate culture. The appearance of the non- or semi-literate
black regularly serves to destabilize the trajectory along which a black
subject is being corrupted by white civilization. This corruption tends
to be construed as a process of gradual sophistication, albeit at the
price of profound disillusionment. The encounter with or return to a
black who has not received such sophistication calls in question the
willingness of the black student of white literate culture to pay that
price. As if to suddenly disrupt the gradual refinement of the narrative
voice reflecting the protagonists assimilation of white literate
15
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947), London, 1965, 32.
328
epistemology and at the same time his or her dissociation from a

personal and cultural past, the Negro who is hardly, if at all, literate is
introduced into the narrative as a telling reminder of the protagonists
history and as a warning not to betray that history.
The protagonist may represent a direct antithesis to such characters
as Dr Bledsoe in Invisible Man, known to have come to college in his
early youth as a barefoot boy who in his fervour for education had
trudged with his bundle of ragged clothing across two states (IM, 98).
Once a director of that same college, Bledsoe proves totally oblivious
of his origins and indifferent to the ambitions of students driven, like
he once must have been, by a painfully acute sense of disadvantage to
try and improve their situation by learning. The most important
counterweights to this archetypal traitor of the black race in Ellisons
novel are Lucius Brockway, senior engineer in the paint factory,
Mary, the protagonists landlady, and, finally, Ras the exhorter. It
almost seems as if the race these characters represent were one apart
from that of the black college boys working in New York to return to
school down South, or from that of the fundamentalists who
sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone ...
with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas,
black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and
passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what
shirt, what shade of grey was correct for spats and what would the
Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event ...; who never read
the financial pages though the purchased the Wall Street Journal
religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against
the body and grasped in the left hand .... (IM, 208)
The protagonist narrator of Invisible Man cannot help noting

something special, something absolutely distinctive about these
characters, secretly scorned by the Brotherhood for their apparent lack
of learning and sophistication. While professing that it is their policy
to strive and reach people through their intelligence (IM, 283), the
brothers chief strategy, in reality, is to bypass people with inferior
educational backgrounds altogether and systematically prevent their
inclusion into the community. As part of their scheme to direct their
ideology at a certain intelligence, they for instance instruct the
protagonist to break off all contacts with his landlady and motherly
friend Mary, of whom he is certain that, in spite of her poor schooling,
Black Illiteracy
329
she knew very well how to live [in Harlem], much better than I with
my college training training! Bledsoing, that was the term (IM,
239). Their expectation is that he should dissociate himself from the
mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street: Our job is
not to ask them what they think, one of the brotherhoods leaders
informs him, but to tell them! (IM, 380).
It is as a contrast to the brothers and to the scientific socialism to
which they subscribe that Ellison introduces the figure of the eccentric
Ras, the exhorter. What distinguishes this character is above all the
crude rhetoric he has cultivated as if in conscious opposition to the
superior learnedness the brothers like to exhibit. With his particular
idiom, Ras challenges those educated fool[s] who tink everything
between black mahn and white mahn can be settled with some
blahsted lies in some bloody books written by the white mahn in the
first place (IM, 303). He insists that, in contrast to the young
blackmen with plenty education, he is not a black traitor to the black
people for the white people. Convinced that the three hundred years
of black blood it has taken to build the whites civilization wahnt be
wiped out in a minute (IM, 300), he cannot see what kind of
education a black can possibly expect to gain by go[ing] over to the
enslaver (IM, 303). As the case of Ras the exhorter makes clear, in
Invisible Man, the ungrammaticality of the half-literate characters
language no longer serves to mark out a cultural disadvantage, but to
differentiate between opposing ideologies, which, for Ellison, are not
merely reflected in, but indeed generated by contrasting
epistemologies.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE LURE OF WHITE LITERACY:
RICHARD WRIGHTS BLACK BOY
Invisible Man is not the first black American novel stressing the
political implications of both literacy and illiteracy in a society
divided by racism. Richard Wrights fictionalized autobiography1
Black Boy does so too. At closer analysis this work, which was first
published in 1945, reveals positively perplexing similarities to Mulk
Raj Anands novel above all for its special treatment of non-literacy as
the peculiarity of a subculture bred by a complexly literate society
through systematic educational discrimination. Like Untouchable,
Black Boy processes personal experiences of cultural inferiority and
narrates them from the point of view of a gifted and ambitious young
male, fiercely determined not to accept the uninspired existence to
which he is constricted by virtue of his caste. I saw a bare, bleak pool
of black life and I hated it,2 Wright recollects, invoking the same
sense of profound discontent that causes Bakha in Untouchable to try
to escape his situation through learning.
There are also stylistic similarities between Untouchable and Black
Boy. Wrights description of black American life in the first half of the
twentieth century is marked by the same didacticism and naturalism
that distinguishes Anands representation of the milieu of the
Untouchables. With shocking frankness Wright describes the poverty
and desolation in which he grew up, invoking an environment
profoundly alien to the average reader.3 He portrays himself as a
drunkard before he begins school, who knows nothing better to do
with his life than to roam the streets and beg drinks at the doors of
saloons. Alternatively he joins a crowd of black children, like himself
abandoned by their working parents for the day. Their favourite
pastime is to observe from a distance a collection of outdoor privies so
1
Katherine Fishburn, Richard Wrights Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim,

Metchuen: NJ, 1977, 6.
2
Richard A. Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, New York,
1945, 151.
3
Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright, with a Preface by Harry T.
Moore, Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Ill, 1969, 16.
332
The Non-Literate Within: Black Illiteracy
ramshackle that they provide a perfect view of their half denuded

visitors and their different ways of performing the act of excretion.
Wrights description of this particular voyeuristic indulgence has the
same effect Anand creates with his exacting portrayal of Bakha as
engaged in the act of sweeping latrines: it foregrounds the very
baseness of the impulses nourishing the protagonists mind, thereby
lending extra plausibility to his desire for learning as a means to
improve his situation.
Nonetheless, Wrights realism does not solicit the same
sympathetic identification with the central character that Anands
novel commands. According to Margolies, although Wright writes
about himself and his own people, he alienates his readers with his
systematic reduction of individual blacks to figures that assume
relevance in his autobiography merely as foils to Wrights persona.
What is more, like Untouchable, Wrights narrative does not
accommodate the development of human relationships.4 The central
character remains alone and preoccupied with the improvement of his
personal situation. Yet whereas towards the end of Untouchable
Bakha resolves to resume the relationships he at first wishes to
relinquish, young Richard makes no attempt to repair the everincreasing estrangement between himself and his family. As a result,
the dominant stance of Black Boy is one of overt egocentrism. This,
and not only, as Fishburn suggests, Wrights emphasis on the
protagonists development into a writer, turn Black Boy into a
Kuenstler- rather than a Bildungsroman.5
For Margolies, the solipsism celebrated by Wright in his
autobiographic novel is not reconcilable with the traditional cause of
black writing, which is to advance Negro freedom:
Insofar as the reader identifies Wrights cause with the cause of Negro
freedom, it is because Wright is a Negro but a careful reading of the
book indicates that Wright expressly divorces himself from other
Negroes. Indeed rarely in the book does Wright reveal concern for
Negroes as a group. Hence Wright traps the reader in a stereotyped
4
On this point see also Charles T. Davis, From Experience to Eloquence:
Richard Wrights Black Boy as Art, in Richard Wrights Black Boy (American
Hunger): A Casebook, eds William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor, Casebooks in
Criticism, Oxford, 2003, 88-89.
5
Fishburn, 7.
The Lure of White Literacy
333
response the same stereotyped response that Wright is fighting

throughout the book: that is, that all Negroes are alike and react alike.6
Margolies essentially echoes the reservations voiced also by some of

Wrights contemporaries. While on the whole the first edition of Black
Boy was received enthusiastically, quickly rising to the top on the New
York Times bestseller list,7 it seems to have affronted black
intellectuals like Du Bois, who dismissed the novel as a work of art
patently and terribly overdrawn.8 In Davis view this reaction is
plausible not only because Black Boy offended Du Bois middle-class
sensibilities but also because it confronted its readers with a reality
simply too painful for the more advantaged blacks in the North to
accept.9
According to this reality black people in the South of early
twentieth-century America were not simply innocent victims of
marginalization. Black Boy provocatively suggests that they courted
and exacerbated their own ghettoization through their lack of
creativity, ambition, and kindness. They were vocal about the petty
individual wrongs they suffered, Wrights persona reflects, but they
possessed no desire for a knowledge of the picture as a whole (BB,
181). He notes how smoothly his peers acted out roles that the white
race had mapped out for them (BB, 216). Instead of a critical faculty
enabling them to escape these roles, he feels, they developed in them
a delicate, sensitive controlling mechanism that shut off their minds
and emotions from all that the white race had said was taboo (BB,
216). Revelling in ignorance they disallowed themselves any of those
intangible sentiments that bind man to man. There was not real
kindness in Negroes, he concludes. Negros had never been allowed
to catch the full spirit of Western civilization. Somehow they lived
in it but not of it (BB, 45).
Ironically, it is their lack of kindness, that, in Wrights view, turns
blacks into devout believers, blind followers of a creed founded on
snobbery, clannishness, gossip, intrigue, petty class rivalry, and
6
Margolies, 18.
William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor, Introduction, in Richard Wrights
Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook, eds William L. Andrews and Douglas
Taylor, 3.
8
W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright Looks Back, New York Herald Tribune,
March 4, 1945, 2.
9
Davis, 97.
7
334
conspicuous displays of cheap clothing (BB, 166-67). For some time,

young Richard allows himself to be seduced by it all, trying to live
the life of an optimist (BB, 167) and to endure his grandmothers
attempts to convert him. Eventually, however, he rebels against the
zealous proselytizing to which his relatives seem so given. In refusing
to practice the anti-individualism preached by the African-American
Church, Richard, in Wrights narrative, like Bakha in Untouchable,
becomes guilty not so much of sacrilege as of disloyalty. The
discomfort this instils in him brings to mind the profound sense of
inadequacy Bakha feels at the end of a day during which every
deviation from his daily routine, whether deliberate or purely
accidental, has earned him gravest disapproval:
I walked home slowly, asking myself what on earth was the matter
with me, why it was I never seemed to do things as people expected
them to be done. Every word and gesture I made seemed to provoke
hostility. I had never been able to talk to others, and I had to guess at
their meanings and motives .... Finding no answer, I told myself that I
was a fool to worry about it, that no matter what I did I would be
wrong somehow as far as my family was concerned. (BB, 158)
Despite, or in fact because of the hopelessness of his own situation,

Richard remains acutely aware of other and, above all, of better
existences lived by his peers. Again, like the Untouchable Bakha in
Anands novel, he follows the movements of the schoolchildren in the
neighbourhood with special attention and longing. Wright recounts
how the children would stop and play en route to their homes and how
he would thumb through the pages of their school books, which they
would leave on the sidewalk, and question them about the baffling
black print (BB, 29). Such episodes anticipate the longing finally
instilled in him by a young schoolteacher and lodger at his
grandmothers, initiates him into the world of fiction. Interrogated
about the books the boy sees her read, she begins to tell him the story
of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives. Enchanted by the tale, Richard has
the impression that the world around him is coming to new life, that it
is beginning to be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, he
recalls:
the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical
presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was
different, somehow. (BB, 47)
335
Against the schematically drawn mentor/muse Wright places the

equally de-individualized figure of his illiterate grandmother, who,
upon discovering her grandsons new interest, categorically bans all
works of fiction from her house, declaring them the Devils work
(BB, 48). Her determination to retain him within the limited scope of
her unlettered existence finally causes Richard to choose the path into
the forbidden terrain of literature, to endorse what his family holds to
be an abominable vice, and to do so ceremoniously by pledging his
resolve in desperate earnest:
I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels
there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in
me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders .... my
mother and grandmother ... had no notion how desperately serious the
tale had made me. (BB, 48)
In restricting his analysis of Bakhas estrangement from his family

to the short time span of a single day, in which Bakha does not even
manage to begin the tuition for which he has made special
arrangements, Anand plausibly sustains Bakhas illiterate otherness
until the very end of the novel and thereby never abandons the option
of Bakhas reconciliation with the world of the Untouchables. By
contrast, Wrights novel progresses well beyond the protagonists
discovery of a world outside his own which he might be able to access
through book learning. The purpose of Wrights text is to relate the
transformation of a naive and illiterate black boy, who by the age of
twelve has still not had one full year of formal schooling (BB, 112),
into a professional writer. As Stepto puts it, Wrights effort is to
create a persona who experiences major moments of literacy, personal
freedom, and personal growth ... and maintains in a very clearheaded way his vision of a higher literacy and a better world.10
Given the novels orientation towards this particular end, it is not
surprising that Richards reconciliation with his past should be
deferred to a later stage in his life. Indeed, it is not until twenty-odd
years after he left the South that Richard returns home to experience
the estrangement his education has wrought between himself and his
father:
10
Robert B. Stepto, Literacy and Ascent: Richard Wrights Black Boy, in
Richard Wrights Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook, eds William L.
Andrews and Douglas Taylor, 108.
336

A quarter of a century was to elapse [before] I was to see him again,
standing alone upon the red clay of the Mississippi plantation, a
sharecropper ... a quarter of a century during which my mind and
consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I
tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin,
though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was
an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking
a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality ... I was
overwhelmed to realize that he could never understand me or the
scalding experiences that had swept me beyond his life and into an
area of living that he could never know. (BB, 42)
My father was a black peasant, the grown-up Wright explains, ...

whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last
fled the city that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms
and borne me toward alien and undreamed-of shores of knowledge
(BB, 43). In spite of the apparently insurmountable difference between
son and father, a tie in the end becomes discernable between them
which is sustained by the shared knowledge and experience of
exclusion from white literate culture.
Ironically enough, it is only in the process of dissociating himself
from the legacy of cultural inferiority and escaping from the
barrenness of black life to alien and undreamed-of shores of
knowledge that at last Richard becomes aware of the white
Americans hatred for their black fellow-citizens. The further he
advances in his education and the more eloquently he phrases his
requests for access into the world of letters, the more likely a target of
racist aggression he becomes. From complete ignorance of racism
(after all, Nothing about the problems of Negroes was ever taught in
the classrooms at school: BB, 181) and the naive conviction that there
were good white people, people with money and sensitive feelings,
only waiting to make his acquaintance, he soon advances to a more
realistic evaluation of his situation or to what Wright himself terms a
Negros reality ... of the white world (BB, 163).
One of the discoveries most difficult for him to accept in the
process is that blacks must always be careful to pander to the vanity of
the whites and feign inferiority when dealing with them so as to abate
their deep-seated fear of blacks who knew, however dimly, the worth
of their humanity. The principal of his school, who warns Richard
not to deliver his own speech at the night of graduation but to accept a
337
version written for him by someone else, fails to teach him that
whites placed a premium on black deceit (BB, 219). By the end of
the novel, however, Richard has learnt his lesson and become able to
act like the other Negroes in his environment when dealing with
whites, pretending to conform to their laws, always grinning and
bowing. He, too, has grasped the benefits of looking as unbookish as
possible (BB, 270), of pretending that he cannot read, of building a
screen of lies to conceal his knowledge and ambitions.
Richard learns to protect himself by hiding his literacy behind a
faade of ignorance not too threatening to whites convinced that book
learning is cultural terrain they must defend against black usurpers. To
avert their aggression he assumes a pose he once used to detest in
blacks. Meanwhile he knows better. Still, his mimicry never amounts
to the same self-degradation other blacks contrive to fend off racist
resentment. The fact that, at the end of his autobiography, Wright is
still able to assert that it never occurred to him that he was in any way
an inferior being (BB, 283), distinguishes him from Shorty, the
elevator operator, of whom Wright notes,
Psychologically he was the most amazing specimen of the southern
Negro I had ever met. Hard-headed, sensible, a reader of magazines
and books, he was proud of his race and indignant about its wrongs.
But in the presence of whites he would play the role of a clown of the
most debased and degraded type. (BB, 248)
To extract but trifling amounts of money from white customers,

Shorty willingly plays the buffoon for them and allows them to vent
their unsatisfied racist urges by abusing him both verbally and
physically with all the aggression they can (or wish to) summon up.
Asked by Wright how he can possibly bear such prostitution, he
simply retorts: Listen, nigger, ... my ass is tough and quarters is
scarce (BB, 250). Despite his learning, Shortys story in the end
proves as tragic as that of Wrights father. When he meets Shorty for
the last time, Richard suddenly grasps that he is moving to the North
not to end like Shorty without a future and without any hope for
change:
Ill never leave this goddamn South, he [Shorty] railed.
Im always saying I am, but I wont . . . Im lazy. I like to sleep
too goddamn much. Ill die here. Or maybe theyll kill me.
338

I stepped from the elevator into the street, half expecting someone
to call me back and tell me that it was a dream, that I was not leaving.
This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from
which I fled. (BB, 281)
The story of Shorty effectively qualifies Richards own ascent to

literacy. It illustrates that a formal education alone, while a
prerequisite to emancipation, does not necessarily, nor automatically
guarantee freedom.11 Rather the case of Shorty seems to suggest that
to assert ones independence against the odds of racial discrimination
one must first reach some form of reconciliation with ones own
otherness. For Richard, this means that he must learn to face the state
of ignorance he once shared with his people and not keep fleeing from
it. Repeated encounters with blacks who cannot read or write help him
to do so. They transport him back to the squalid hovels [where he]
had learned to curse before [he] had learned to read (BB, 109) and
eventually force him to accept semi-literacy and illiteracy as far too
pervasive features of his peoples cultural history and present to ban
from ones own consciousness.
He realizes that to have grown up in an environment that
contained nothing more alien than writing or the desire to express
ones self in writing (BB, 133) is in itself a formative experience. It
suddenly strikes him as meaningful that Read and count was about as
much as most of the people [he] met could do, grownup or children
(BB, 64). The impression of his peoples lack of schooling, created
earlier in the novel, is renewed when Richard takes a temporary job
with an illiterate insurance agent whom he accompanies on his sales
trips to do the writing and figuring for him. On these trips, he is
confronted with such profound ignorance in the children of his
customers that, for the first time in his life, he appreciates his literacy
as a privilege. At the same time, the realization that there are black
children who possess no books to read and, worse even, who read no
books at all, evokes a novel sense of responsibility in him. Seeing that
the main reason for his clients to buy insurance from him is to connect
themselves with someone or something that would make their
children write n speak lak dat pretty boy from Jackson (BB, 151),
11
This assumption underlies Steptos reconstruction of Wrights passage toward

literacy and freedom within the context of such works as Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass (1845), Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), or Native
Son.
339
Richard begins to question the ends to which he has put his literacy
skills so far.
In the process he remembers his illiterate grandfather, a Civil War
invalid, who never received his disability pension, only because
someone, whom he had asked to help him fill out his discharge papers,
had misspelled his name. In retelling his grandfathers story, Richard
arrives at a better understanding of the long letters to the War
Department, which his grandfather would never tire to dictate to
people willing to assist as his scribes. It dawns on Richard that these
letters probably contained a history more important and more
interesting than the information recorded in the official documents his
family has kept of the case. Although he knows that he will never be
able to retrieve this history, he resolves at least to do justice to the
disappointment his grandfather suffered when his painstaking pleas to
the authorities were finally dismissed.
To prove his active participation in the Civil War, his grandfather
had laboriously reconstructed the conversations he had had during the
war and the battles in which he had fought. He had also meticulously
listed all the places he had seen and the regiments and companies with
which he had been in combat. As if in an attempt to authenticate this
neat compilation of historical data, whose value had been negated so
meanly by the War Department Richard composes a moving account
of the moment when his grandfather learnt that all his efforts had been
in vain. With this account he transforms not only the ending of his
grandfathers story but also the context in which it requires to be read:
He would stare at the black print for a long time, then reluctantly,
distrustfully hand the letter to me.
Well? he would say.
And I would read him the letter reading slowly and pronouncing
each word with extreme care telling him that his claims for a
pension had not been substantiated and that his application had been
rejected. Grandpa would not blink an eye, then he would curse softly
under his breath.
Its them goddamn rebels, he would hiss.
As though doubting what I had read, he would dress up and take
the letter to at least a dozen of his friends in the neighbourhood and
ask them to read it to him; finally he would know it from memory. At
last he would put the letter away carefully and begin brooding again,
trying to recall out of his past some telling fact that might help him in
getting his pension. Like K of Kafkas novel, The Castle, he tried
340

desperately to persuade the authorities of his true identity right up to
the day of his death, and failed. (BB, 154)
The surprising link Wright establishes towards the end of this

passage between his illiterate grandfather and the figure of K in
Kafkas The Castle is symptomatic of his idea of literature and its
sociocultural function. As much as the inclusion of the story of his
grandfather in his autobiography allows Wright to contextualize his
own tale of how he became a writer, the comparison of his grandfather
with a character from European literature serves to decontextualize the
old mans tragic fate and place it in a wider framework. With his
allusion to Kafka, Wright deconstructs the impression he creates at the
outset that his grandfathers desperate and vain endeavours to assert
his identity against white American authorities represent no more than
yet another re-enactment of a stereotypical tale. In dissociating the
case of his grandfather from the received story of black suppression
and associating it with a completely different narrative, Wright
isolates the figure of his grandfather from the black collective, which
he himself keeps experiencing as a hostile amorphous crowd
threatening to consume his individuality and to sacrifice it to a mad
cult (rather than culture) of suffering. By suggesting that his
grandfathers story is far more widely applicable than as an illustration
of the injustices inflicted on black Americans, Wright recuperates for
his grandfather the identity and place in history that he was denied in
his lifetime.
Writing about other blacks, rewriting their histories, re-inscribing
their identity these are the tasks to which Wright learns to put his
own literacy in the course of Black Boy. Driven by a new sense of
involvement in his peoples non-literate past, he decides to try and
outwit the system banning blacks from white knowledge, for instance
by denying them access to public libraries. It is no longer purely for
the sake of his own intellectual improvement that Richard seeks the
assistance of an Irish immigrant to obtain the kind of literature in
which he expects to find a better explanation for the motives of racism
than he has been given by his teachers. What he finds in the books he
secretly obtains from the library, however, is not a study of the
specific form of racism rife in the southern states of contemporary
America but a general exploration of the nature of prejudice in a
language so foreign to him that he momentarily re-experiences a kind
of illiteracy:
341
... I opened one of the books and read a title: A Book of Prefaces. I
was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how to
pronounce the word preface. I thumbed the pages and saw strange
words and strange names. I shook my head, disappointed. I looked at
the other book; it was called Prejudices. I knew what that word meant;
I had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard against
Menckens books. Why would a man want to call a book Prejudices?
The word was so stained with all my memories of racial hate that I
could not conceive of anybody using it for a title.
Shocked by the novelty of Menckens theories, Wright can barely

picture the author as a civilized being but imagines him as a raging
demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing
everything American, extolling everything European or German,
laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. And
yet, feeling that he himself has somehow overlooked something
terribly important in life (BB, 271-72), he resolves to venture even
further into the forbidden terrain of fiction and literary criticism where
he finally, catches the glimpses of lifes possibilities (BB, 283) he
has been seeking: I would read and wonder as only the naive and
unlettered can read and wonder, he recalls, feeling that I carried a
secret, criminal burden about me each day (BB, 275-76).
In a sense, reading does to Richard, what the translation of his
grandfathers story into writing posthumously does for his
grandfather. The further his reading removes him from his illiterate
past, the closer he comes to a sympathetic understanding of that past.
Broadening his cultural horizon not without loosening the ties by
which he has always felt inescapably bound to southern black culture
and the legacies of slavery and racism. The literature he consumes
opens up new possibilities of reconciliation with the straitened
environment in which he grew up. Such reconciliation, he learns from
works written by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson,
and Lewis, must take place in the form of a discourse, not
condemning but defensively critical (BB, 283) of American society.
For Wright, one way of mustering the forgiveness such a discourse
presupposes is through the written word and its capacity to wake, even
in the most brutally mangled self, the hope that life could be
different, could be lived in a fuller and richer manner (BB, 281). The
external world of whites and blacks, which was the only world I had
ever known, he concludes at the end of Black Boy, surely had not
342
evoked in me any belief in myself. The people I had met had advised
and demanded submission .... It had been only through books ... that I
had managed to stay alive ...(BB, 282).
Perhaps it is true that Richard Wrights Black Boy and Ralph
Ellisons Invisible Man are exceptions to the rule because of their
open interest with the power of literacy for African American writers.
Still, as this statement stands, it fails to do justice to the remarkable
complexity of both Wrights and Ellisons treatment of the theme. As
the above analysis tries to show, it is not merely because a facility
with written language enables the protagonists ultimate escape from
his circumstances12 that references to literacy and learning are of
special importance in Black Boy. In repeatedly returning to questions
regarding the social relevance of writing, especially for marginalized
groups such as Americas blacks, Wright also deviates from
contemporary notions of African-American character and culture. He
appeals to a new awareness of the black subaltern as part of the
masses, the common people, and, hence, as the metaphor for
America and modern man.13 Wrights particular understanding of
literacy and its significance for black Americans is an important
aspect in his rejection of both the concept of black consciousness and
the values of African-American culture.14 Still, a closer examination
of his view of literate America does not necessarily corroborate
Wrights alleged complete alienation from black culture.15 It rather
shows that what Wright rejects is an all too essentialist position
founded on a reappraisal of orality and non-literacy or illiteracy as
more original or authentic parameters of blackness than literacy.
Wrights objections to the kind of cultural essentialism advocated
by his contemporaries during the Harlem Renaissance predate
attempts of later twentieth-century African-American writers to forge
an entirely new concept of black American literature with the help of
the idea of black orality. These writers insist on seeing black writing
as the result of a hybridization of culturally specific oral and written
traditions. They identify the discursive tension between orality and
literacy as the essence of their culture and try to capture this tension in
their work. In so doing they depart from what has been termed the
12
Barrett, 444.
Bell, 153 and 167.
14
Ibid., 155.
15
Ibid., 156.
13
343
Wright paradigm of naturalism16 as well as from an evaluation of

literate and non-literate epistemologies in terms of social, economic,
and political advantages and disadvantages. Their approach to their
cultures different systems of perception and expression is idealistic in
that it accommodates the confident belief that the cultural
marginalization of blacks in the past can and in fact must be remedied
by the confident assertion of their cultural centrality in the present and
the future. Accordingly, one may see it is as an expression of
optimism that their works synthesize narration and documentation,
fictionalization and anticipation, thereby leading well beyond the
generic confines of naturalistic autobiography to a more open,
imaginative, and experimentalist literary form challenging established
notions of reality and truth.
From Wrights point of view, the ultimate result of this
development could of course also be argued to have been a complete
alienation from the socio-historical reality of black subalternity.
Indeed, as the reception of Alice Walkers novel The Color Purple,
for instance, shows, the integration of non-literate traditions and
epistemologies into the Western logic of text does not completely
satisfy all theorists of African-American culture. In the case of The
Color Purple, it has even prompted stormy debates whether Walkers
recreation of a subliterate black folk speech does not violate received
standards both of art and of blackness.17 One of the main
conclusions to be drawn from these debates is that it is impossible to
solve the question of what constitutes the epistemological basis of
African-American writing by way of recourse to the fixed opposites of
orality and literacy. Seeing this, Marion Kraft arrives at a completely
new reading of The Color Purple, one which suggests interpreting the
protagonists illiteracy as a metaphor not only for her implication in
the history of slavery but also for the complex, almost intangible
nature of her cultural role. After all, as bell hooks points out, nearly
illiterate as Celie is, it is incredible that she should find the time and
space to write at all.
16
Ibid., 167.
Cf. Marion Kraft, The African Continuum and Contemporary African American
Women Writers: Their Literary Presence and Ancestral Past, European University
Studies/Europische Hochschulschriften 14, Series xiv, Anglo-Saxon Language and
Literature, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, 129.
17
344
Drawing on bell hooks, Kraft argues convincingly that Celie does

not really write her story but tells it and that it can only be on yet
another textual level that her story undergoes a transformation into
letters that is, letters to God, to her beloved sister and to a larger
audience.18 The Color Purple, Kraft concludes, is neither just a
discourse on orality and literacy, nor just the story of Celies plight,
struggle and liberation.19 Instead of casting African Americans as
deprived of all remnants of their previous culture, The Color Purple
celebrates not only personal survival of those oppressed by slavery,
colonialism, racism and patriarchal hierarchy, but also the cultural
traditions that have outlived disruptions.20 Positing a dialectics
(rather than an opposition) of literacy and orality, Kraft proposes
comprehending Walkers novel as a speakerly text which does not
simply romanticize Africa and its influence on the African-American
experience but which also deals with social contradictions and
conflicts through a unique storytelling mode that endeavours to be a
new kind of communication with spirits.21
Krafts analysis of The Color Purple as a conscious attempt to
deconstruct the received binarisms of voice and letters, orality and
literacy is not applicable to Alice Walkers oeuvre alone. Sensitive to
the new awareness of the complex epistemological functions of
speech and writing emergent towards the end of the twentieth-century,
Krafts work opens up new avenues also for the study of other
postmodern African-American writers. The following chapter will try
to demonstrate how her special application of Gates concept of the
speakerly text, with its emphasis on the close inter-relatedness of
oral and literate epistemologies in the African-American context,
lends itself to a reading of Beloved and the particular fusion of
preverbal, preliterate, oral, and highly literate modes which this novel
performs.
As Jean Wyatt has argued Toni Morrison creates this fusion to
flout basic rules of normative discourse.22 Like Walkers agenda in
The Color Purple (at least according Krafts interpretation of the
18
Ibid., 133-34.
Ibid., 138.
20
Ibid., 141.
21
Ibid., 128.
22
Jean Wyatt, Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni
Morrisons Beloved, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America, CVIII/3 (May 1993), 474.
19
345
novel), Morrisons in Beloved is to achieve a balance between

mimetic and diegetic, oral and written, African and Western traditions
by merging oral and written structures, and producing a unique
confluence of styles, patterns of expression, and attitudes.23 This
also allows Morrison to unobtrusively incorporate elements of the
gothic in her novel and to develop it into the primary generic
template24 for Beloved. Thus Morrison strategically synchronizes the
structures of two separate and radically different yet coincident
discourses: that of European Romanticism and that of American
abolitionism. What a gothic framework allows, Hamilton explains,
is coverage of the same general area as that of the slave narrative, but
in a manner which highlights the significance of aspects of experience
slighted by the slave narrative: the psychology of violation,
victimization and scapegoating.25 Originally Romantic elements
come to assume an abolitionist purpose in Beloved insofar as the
gothic exposes the perversity of slavery by acknowledging the
ghostly presence of as yet unheard narrative voices before
exorcizing them.26 The realistic mode of the traditional slave narrative
is not able to yield a similar examination of the pathology of
slaveholding.27 For the slave narrative implicitly and categorically
precludes any open display of authority on the part of its author and
prescribes instead a kind of rhetorical subordination by which the
slave or former slave downplays her literacy. Conversely, the
Romantic fantasy, by definition depends on its author being identified
unequivocally as an absolutely reliable agent of truth. For her account
to be trusted, the author (in contrast, of course, to the narrator28) of
23
Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American
Literature, Iowa City, 1997, 114.
24
Cynthia S. Hamilton, Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison
and the Slave Narrative, Journal of American Studies, XXX/3 (December 1996), 445.
25
Ibid., 441.
26
Ibid., 445.
27
Ibid., 441.
28
Illiterate narrators do indeed feature regularly in gothic tales. Granted the
capacity to understand the world in a way absolutely alien to the implied reader and
author, they are characterised as particularly likely media through which supernatural
forces may assert their existence. And yet, what secures the readers willing
suspension of disbelief, is never the essential foreignness of the narrators nonliterate perception alone, but the very tension repeatedly activated/evoked between the
narrators non-literacy and the texts inherent literacy (which, by further implication,
is also the authors literacy).
346
supernatural tales cannot afford to exhibit a real lack of the principal

accomplishments of basic learning. Arguably, it is from this subtle
difference between the slave narrative and the gothic that the
invocations of the preliterate past of black culture in Beloved derive
their authority.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RESISTING WHITE LITERACY: TONI MORRISONS BELOVED
It is said that for Morrison the slave narrative represents a culturally

originary moment and a rich, barely tapped literary inheritance. It is
also said that especially in Beloved, Morrison tries to validate the
voice of the slave narrator, traditionally attested only poor literary
authority. As Caroline Rody notes, Morrison does so in the awareness
of the difference between herself as a best-selling author and her
literary foremothers, the truth-status of whose tales is debated even
today:
Though it is Morrisons huge joy to help slave authors to surface
in contemporary writing , it is also her lot to view them from across
a great divide and see in them the dim faces of origin she will never
fully capture. In the jealous longing of the abandoned daughter, the
novel [Beloved] figures its relationship to the unknown ancestressmuse of the African-American womens literary renaissance.1
Critics, concerned with the spiritual bond Morrison conjures

between herself and her literary antecedents in her fictional returns to
the subject of slavery, commonly overlook that her appraisal of early
black literacy is rarely performed without a highly critical evaluation
of its contemporary white equivalent.2 In Beloved Morrisons scrutiny
of the cultural superiority which white citizens of later nineteenthcentury America would assume over blacks on the grounds of their
alleged learnedness is concentrated in her portrayal of the sinister
figure of schoolteacher. In contrast to the careful psychological
analyses Morrison offers of all her other characters in Beloved, her
1
Caroline Rody, The Daughters Return: African-American and Caribbean

Womens Fiction of History, Oxford, 2001, 34.
2
This is the case not even in Dauterichs reading of Beloved and Jazz, one of the
most recent studies on the hybridization of orality and literacy in Morrison, which
acknowledges that in integrating written and oral forms and rewriting Western
narrative to create a uniquely African American Form of expression, Morrison
gives special prevalence to the theme of illiteracy especially in Beloved (Edward
Dauterich, Hybrid Expression: Orality and Literacy in Jazz and Beloved, The
Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought, XLVII/1 [Autumn 2005],
27-28).
348
portrayal of this figure is uncompromising. It accommodates not a

single explanation, let alone excuse for his brutality other than
primitive racist resentment. Not even his learning and pretty
manners are invoked to function as a redeeming feature. Indeed they,
too, serve to present schoolteacher as the Devil incarnate, deceiving
everyone with his affected airs, yet in reality set on breaking every
black in his charge. The slaves at Sweet Home are not aware of his
fiendish scheme when the little man arrives with a big hat and
spectacles and a coach box full of paper to put things in order after
the demise of their master.3 In their unlettered innocence they misread
his unusually cultured ways as signs of special sophistication and note
with awe that he Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs and knew
Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never [used] it even to
His face (B, 37).
One of the three females at the centre of Morrisons novel, Sethe,
remembers schoolteacher particularly well. Nothing to tell except
schoolteacher, she replies when her daughter asks her about how she
escaped slavery. Because of her ink-making skills, Sethe would feel
reasonably safe with schoolteacher, believing that he depended on her
to write the book to which he would apply himself every evening.
Unable to read, she is unaware that she and the other slaves at Sweet
Home are the contents of this book. Not until much later does she
realize that what schoolteacher is recording are ethnographic data
about blacks obtained from unsuspecting individuals like herself by
way of persistent questioning and close observation.4 I thought he
was a fool, she explains many years afterwards: And the questions
he asked was the biggest foolishness of all (B, 191). What
schoolteacher is really like dawns on Sethe when one day she
inadvertently hears him talking to his pupils about her and that
schoolteacher has told the boys to describe or, as he calls it, to do
her by listing her human characteristics as well as her animal ones
in neatly divided rubrics in their notebooks (B, 193).
The offensiveness of the exercise is ironically elaborated by an
account of how Sethe goes to her mistress to ask her what the word
characteristics means. It is a lesson of a different kind that Mrs
3
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), New York, 1988, 197.

As Peach reminds us, this, of course, is a reference to the crude Darwinist views
propounded by Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton (Linden Peach, Toni Morrison,
Macmillan Modern Novelists, London, 1995, 106).
4
Resisting White Literacy
349
Garner unwittingly gives the young woman. In the end Sethe

comprehends schoolteachers notion of human and animal
characteristics in blacks as well as do his pupils. Schoolteacher was
teaching us things we couldnt learn (B, 191), Sethe remembers. Yet
despite his policy of systematic denial and degradation she learns to
see that he is schoolteacher by name only as does Paul D, another
slave at Sweet Home and victim of schoolteachers aggression.
Schoolteacher ... knew the worth of everything (B, 228), Paul D
concludes after he has had to listen to his own worth being discussed
by schoolteacher in terms of the dollar value of his weight, his
strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future (B, 226). The
money from this here one schoolteacher coldly calculates Paul Ds
price would earn him two young ones, twelve or fifteen years old.
And together with the breeding one [Sethe], her three pickaninnies
and whatever the foal might be (B 227), this would raise the value of
Sweet Home and make him rich.
The insight into literate culture schoolteacher with his callous
expediency gives the blacks provokes their unconscious resistance to
it. As Trudier Harris outlines, this becomes most clearly manifest in
the way the former slaves rememory Sweet Home:
In remembering what it was before schoolteacher arrived, Sethe and
other of its inhabitants imbue it with an aura of myth, of folktale larger
than life .... Schoolteachers appearance is significant in contributing
to this image, for as he destroys what once was, that former state is
highlighted even more in the memories of those who knew it earlier.
The mythical Sweet Home, then, assumes such proportions in direct
relation to the memories of atrocities that spoiled its paradisaiacal
state.5
The distinctly oral quality of their memories, Harris goes on to argue,

lends a folkloristic bent to both the characters perception and the
territory on which they reside. Thus their narratives resist usurpation
by schoolteacher and reclaim instead what he has taken away from
Sethe and the other slaves.
Paul Ds illiteracy needs to be understood in a similar way, not so
much as a consequence of slavery (indeed, his first master offers to let
him learn to read and write) but as a pose of defiance cultivated in
5
Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison,

Knoxville:Tenn, 1991, 176.
350
reaction to schoolteacher and the dubious form of education he

embodies. Paul D has never considered literacy an accomplishment
important for blacks to acquire. He is convinced that there is nothing
important for blacks to be learnt, least of all from books or
newspapers. After schoolteachers arrival at Sweet Farm, his
indifference to the world encoded in those black scratches (B, 155)
which fill up the pages of all kinds of printed matter solidifies into
almost cynical dismissiveness. Books and newspapers, he declares,
are a waste of time (B, 230) for him. He even refuses to look at the
pictures in newspapers, because he is certain that whatever may be
said about blacks in print, they will never be represented benevolently
or truthfully:
A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a
Negros face in a paper, since the face was not there because the
person had a healthy baby or outran a street mob. Nor was it there
because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or
jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that
could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be
something out of the ordinary something whitepeople would find
interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not
gasps. And it must have been hard to find news about Negroes worth
the breath catching of a white citizen of Cincinnati. (B, 155-56)
It is important that Morrison endows Paul D, one of the main

illiterate characters in Beloved, with a differentiated understanding of
the mass culture into which he and his people begin to be absorbed
after the abolition of slavery. The man with the educated hands and
waiting eyes (B, 99) is not an ignorant simpleton but possesses
insights apparently equivalent to conventional literacy skills. In fact,
his non-literate discernment is expressly identified as an awful
human power, likening him to the powerfully enigmatic figure of the
Cherokee he asks for advice on his escape north. For the Indian, too,
literacy is not an indispensable competence. Age-long attention to the
signs of nature has enabled his people to do without the maps used by
the whites. When he learns that Paul D cannot read, he smiles and tells
him to follow the tree flowers. As they go, you go, he prophesies.
You will be where you want to be when they are gone. Following
the instructions of the Cherokee and applying himself to reading the
signs of spring sauntering North, Paul D after five months finds
351
himself in Delaware, where he finally begins to forget schoolteacher

and whatever he associates with him: the taste of iron, the sight of
butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper (B, 113).
Significantly, in contrast to Paul D, the Cherokee is literate. Yet
sadly, his peoples appropriation of white literacy has proven to be of
little use to them. Morrison digresses from her narrative to make this
point and offer an eccentric synopsis of the Cherokee Indians more
recent cultural history. In so doing, she forwards what seems to be the
Cherokees officially acknowledged part in the shaping of
contemporary America, ironically reducing it to a peculiar series of
accidents rather than of concerted efforts to partake in the whites
culture:
Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive
life rather than Oklahoma. The illness that swept them now was
reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred
years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited
George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led
Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek,
cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain,
been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their
language, resisted settlers, shot bear and translated scripture. All to no
avail. (B, 111)
The dignity with which the Cherokee suffer their decimation by

brute devastation and disease remains strongly impressed on Paul Ds
memory. It is especially in contrast to their discreetly applied wisdom
that the whites in Beloved, however well educated in conventional
terms, appear savage agents of a pathetically degenerate civilization.
The ineffectuality of this civilization looms large throughout Beloved
and is effectively enhanced by recurrent images of newspapers
gnawed on the edges by mice, newspapers used to line pallets and
cover dirt floors, and newspapers sitting discarded in heaps in the
corner of some shed. These help to signal that the old days of letters,
petitions, meetings, debates, recruitment, quarrels, rescue and
downright sedition (B, 260) are definitely over when the narrative
begins. No longer united in a spirited struggle for the same cause, as
some of them were when fighting for the abolition of slavery, blacks
and whites in Beloved coexist in a strange state of exhaustion and
defeat, the former, in Bhabhas terms, a community-in-
352
discontinuity.6 An atmosphere of despondency prevails, which is

vividly captured in the carnival episode preceding Beloveds
miraculous re-incarnation.
For Sethe, her visit to the carnival is her first social outing in
eighteen years. Filled with anticipation she ignores the heat, ignores
the doomed roses dying along the lumberyard fence, and ignores the
homeless men sleeping in the open field. It seems that nothing can
stop her from enjoying the excitement of seeing white-people loose
and watching them make a spectacle of themselves (B, 47-48) for
the sake of their black audiences. She ignores that the show they are
offered is a lot less than mediocre and takes no notice of the barker
abusing his black customers, of the One-Ton Lady spitting at them, or
of the Arabian Night Dancer cutting her performance to three minutes
instead of the usual fifteen. Instead she absorbs thrill upon thrill upon
thrill and lets herself be transported into state of exhilaration in
which she may even believe that she is not treading the dust under her
feet but gliding over it, holding hands with Denver and Paul D, just as
the threesome of their shadows does all afternoon (B, 48).
Still, images of dying roses and rotten roses, of a Wild
African Savage shaking his bars and yelling wa wa, and of Paul D
feeding Sethe with candy she does not really want taint the impression
of Sethes happiness. The reader is not allowed to forget that the bliss
experienced by Sethe and the other characters at the carnival can only
be temporary. Slaverys signifying disciplines of dressage7 are not
simply unlearnt through a temporary reversal of roles. The
entertainment received for the price of two pennies does not really
grant oblivion but marks a rather ambivalent ending to the drama
about to be disclosed in flashbacks as the individual protagonists
rememory8 their personal stories in the chapters to follow.
In the reconstruction of this drama, the narrative keeps returning to
schoolteacher as the epitome of all the evil wrought by white
American culture. Tragically, Sethe, herself a victim of that culture,
6
Homi K. Bhabha, By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth

Century, in The Location of Culture, 199.
7
April Lidinsky, Prophesying Bodies: Calling for a Politics of Collectivity in
Toni Morrisons Beloved, in The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni
Morrison, eds Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, London, 1994, 205.
8
On rememory functioning in Beloved as a trope for the imagination of ones
heritage and the physical quality Morrison ascribes memories, see Rody, 28, and
Peach, 101, respectively.
353
feels responsible for its crimes. I made the ink, she accuses herself
towards the end of the novel: He [schoolteacher] couldnt have done
it [that is, mistreated blacks, patronized, tortured and murdered them]
if I hadnt made the ink. The statement is a clear indication of Sethes
mental disorder at the end of the novel, which Morrison emphasizes
further by casting her heroine in a pose strikingly reminiscent of
Ophelia despairing over the loss of her beloved. Jackweed raise up
high . Lambswool over my shoulder, buttercup and clover fly,
Sethe sings, when Paul D finds her, lying on her bed, her hair, like
the dark delicate roots of good plants, spreading and curving on her
pillow (B, 271). Sethe, like Ophelia, in the end is unable to forgive
herself for her own ready acquiescence to schoolteachers requests and
insists that, by supplying the ink for schoolteachers odd perversions
of the functions of learning, she allowed herself to become an
accomplice to the atrocities her master committed. It is not only in
order to escape his violence but also to withdraw from the influence of
schoolteachers learned mind and to protect her own children from it
that Sethe decides to leave Sweet Home in search of a life without
even the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from
which it was made (B, 6).
Sethe herself never advances from the role of the ink-maker to that
of the ink-user. Unlike other slave narratives, Beloved does not
construct the female slaves liberation as an entry into literate culture.
Admittedly, there is mention in the novel of Sethe learning the
alphabet immediately after her successful escape from Sweet Home.
The way, however, in which this information is imparted rules out that
her introduction to written language acquires the same importance it
possesses in other works of African-American literature. Sethes
acquisition of basic literacy skills is listed along with the cultivation
and sophistication of other everyday competencies, without reading
and writing being attested particular value. Indeed, in Morrisons
analysis of her main characters gradual emancipation, Bildung, in the
classic sense of the word, plays only a secondary role:
Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the
names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they
had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with
her own; which made it better: one taught her the alphabet; another a
stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what
to do with the day. Thats how she got through waiting for Halle. Bit
354

by bit ... along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing
yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self another.
(B, 95)
Sethe remains at a level of learning not even definable as semiliterate. She can recognize some seventy-five printed words, half of
which she knows from newspaper clippings recounting the grim story
of how she murdered her own children. This barely matters in the
seclusion of her new life. As far as Sethe is concerned, no person,
however lettered, possesses more authority than she does to tell and
explain this story. She does not believe in the authenticating power of
the written word and, by the end of the narrative, has become
completely independent of the literate culture into which all other
characters gradually become absorbed. Indeed, in the eyes of others
she appears to represent a serious threat to that culture. Rumour has it
that Everytime a whiteman come to the door she got to kill
somebody. Her illiteracy, Paul D concludes half in jest, is a blessing
for the local postmen because it means that they do not have to risk
their lives delivering letters to her house. Wouldnt nobody get no
letter (B, 265), Stamp Paid retorts, greatly amused by the idea of the
unlettered Sethe sabotaging the local mailing system.
Stamp Paids and Paul Ds punning jocularity makes light of the
rigorous exclusion from emergent facilities of literate communication
(post, press, and other forms of print) experienced by black Americans
towards the end of the nineteenth century. Implicit in Morrisons
almost cynical allusion to the blacks cultural marginalization
sustained well beyond the abolition of slavery is the assertion of
alternative modes of accessing and subverting the emergent
infrastructure of modern literate society and of retrieving texts that
lie beyond or are occluded by authoritative versions.9 As the darkly
humorous exchange between the two men exemplifies, recourse to
orality constitutes one such alternative. Indeed, for Sethe and the other
inhabitants of 124, once a way station where messages came and then
their senders, where bits of news soaked like dried beans in spring
water until they were soft enough to digest (B, 65), speech
represents the only way of asserting their personal experiences against
officially recorded history. The rememoring in which they engage
together is an exclusively oral exercise of activating the past, of
9
Peach, 97.
355
invoking it, and conjuring up its long-absent agents even against

forces tabooing that past.10 Baby Suggs public appellations to the
dead, Sethes tales of the horrors she has undergone, complemented
by Paul Ds account of his escape and his journey north, and Denvers
attempts to piece her mothers tales together to a coherent whole all
are symptomatic of an inability (or unwillingness) to forget, of a
desperate need to keep the past alive. The efforts of the three women,
Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Denver, finally are rewarded by Beloveds
unexpected return and sustained by the uncanny figures sojourn with
them.
Called up by Sethes and Baby Suggs insistent reiterations of past
events, Beloved herself appears to challenge the message encoded in
the few letters on her gravestone. Too brief, too incomplete to put the
childs soul to rest, the affirmation of her mothers love, hastily
chiselled into the pinkish stone, seems to, metaphorically speaking,
cry out for Beloveds ghost to emerge and to, literally, embody what
the seven letters fail to express. Years later, Sethe still wonders
whether, if she had offered her own body for more than ten minutes to
the graver, he would have given her the whole thing, every word she
heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say,
surely), instead of forcing her to settle for the one word that
mattered. The single word Beloved, Sethe knows later, is more
than an awkwardly insufficient expression of her loss. Lacking the
welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones, Beloveds grave stands
as a constant reproach to the living and a permanent provocation to the
dead, not only for the degrading way in which its inscription was
obtained. Accordingly, once she has realized that Rutting among the
stones under the eyes of the engravers son was not enough (B, 4-5)
to put her infants soul to rest, Sethe begins to read the strange
occurrences in her house (such as mirrors shattering, trembling
floorboards, moving furniture, tiny handprints appearing in cakes and
chickpeas) as signs of her late infants venom.11
10
On Sethes story as a forbidden tale, a tabooed subject, see Aoi Mori, Toni
Morrison and Womanist Discourse, Modern American Literature: New Approaches
16, New York, 1999, 117.
11
In spite of her obvious discursive disempowerment, critics tend to read Beloved
as superior to all other characters owing to a power seen primarily as evil,
demoniacal, or parasitic. Cf. for instance Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The
Novels of Toni Morrison, 153-58.
356
It is clear that only a being will resort to such signs that either
possesses no voice to make itself heard or has never acquired the more
advanced skill of self-expression through writing. As Morrisons
novel keeps reminding the reader, Beloved is not even two years old
when she dies: Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even
(B, 4). When she returns as an adult, she still does not possess
anything other than pre-literate means of communication. The first
thing Paul D notices as soon as the strange young woman appears on
their doorstep, raises her voice, and tells them her name, is the
careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not
read but had memorized the letters of their name. They heard the
voice first later the name (B, 52), the reader is told. Beloved is a
character more voice than name, more sound than writing, even when
silent.12 For Beloveds silence, like that of so many coloredwomen
of her time, has nothing to do with the soundlessness in which writing
is either produced or consumed. Rather it refers to a story rigorously
denied and eclipsed from recorded history. Paul D knows that it
bespeaks a sorrow impossible to describe or to inquire into.
Symptomatically, even when fast asleep, Beloveds silence is
accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing, which Paul D and
Sethe, not yet aware of Beloveds true identity, nor, therefore, of her
immortality, initially interpret as the sign of some life-threatening
illness.
With their concern for Beloveds well-being, Morrison commences
her ironic subversion of conventional notions of the inherent
spirituality of ghosts which she sustains throughout the novel by
means of repeated references to Beloveds corporeality.13 As a
reincarnation of precisely that which letters have proven unable to
express, in other words, as the personification of the direct antithesis
to what her name signifies in writing,14 she cannot be merely a spirit
in the traditional sense of the word. Literally embodying an Other that
resists abstraction, Beloved requires to be described as a physical
12
For Harris, the sheer sound of her voice compares to the power invoked in
some folktales in which there is a magical component to the spoken world (Harris,
169-70).
13
On this, see also Harris, 157.
14
Critics understand Beloved mainly as a collective term designating not a
single child but the pain and anguish of the 60 million blacks who have been
enslaved, tortured and killed (Peach, 102). This does not seem to do complete justice,
though, to the special intention behind Sethes choice of the name.
357
entity instead, bearing her own signs of a distinctively material

otherness.
Apart from her unmistakable gravelly voice and the song that
seemed to lie in it (B, 60) and apart from the characteristic sound of
her breathing, it is some barely visible marks on her forehead that
finally establish her identity and, along with it, the narratives
expansion into the domain of the supernatural. These marks, imprints
of Sethes fingers left from when she held up the dying girls head
with bloodied hands for everyone to see, underline the symbolic
subversion of the written medium suggested by Beloveds return from
the dead as an event uncannily invalidating the announcement of her
death on her gravestone. The scars prove an effective reminder of the
violence inflicted on Beloved. Still, they are not just yet another
visible reproach against Sethe for killing her own daughter. Rather
they demand to be read as symbols of a shared legacy of suffering,
repairing the fractured bond between mother and daughter on the basis
of the knowledge that the mothers body, too, has had the mark of
slavery imprinted on her, not for herself, but for others to see, feel,
and remember even beyond her death.
As inscriptions of the common experience of most extreme
physical violence, both the fingerprints on Beloveds forehead and the
revolting clump of scars (B, 21) on Sethes back forge a bond that
extends back in time to include also Sethes mother, yet another
woman, branded for her blackness by some unknown agent of white
civilization purporting to own her. Indeed, all Sethe can remember of
her maam is her mother taking her behind the smokehouse to bare
her breast and show her a circle and a cross burnt into the skin on her
rib. Evidently more truthful than letters, the scar tissue on the bodies
of three generations of black females combine to a counter-discourse
in Beloved which records, in a shockingly naturalistic manner, what
tends to be omitted from official versions of black history. Still, for all
their expressiveness, the visible signs of mutilation, even though they
imprint themselves on the memories of those who have actually laid
eyes on them, ultimately remain sadly without the authority assigned
to letters, as they do not endure, like paper, but fade, once
decomposition sets in, from public consciousness. As the case of
Sethes mother shows perhaps most clearly in Beloved, scars do not
facilitate the comforting detachment from the past which the written
medium makes possible by virtue of its capacity to reserve what has
358
long ceased to exist for later retrieval from oblivion. The sad futility
of her mother teaching Sethe to recognize her by her branding
transpires when she is hanged and, by the time they cut her down,
nobody, can tell whether her body did bear the sign of a circle and a
cross or not (B, 61).
Thematizing the different functions and effects of white literacy in
varying, yet carefully tuned ways, the stories of Baby Suggs, Sethes
mother, and Sethe herself, of Paul D and Beloved, but also of Stamp
Paid, the most literate character of all of them, may be said to
complement each other perfectly in their emphatic negation of the
benefits of white literacy. This negation is linked to a desperate
longing for oblivion, which these characters erroneously expect to find
by going north. For resentments and aggression fester and quench all
hope for a new beginning for the black community Morrison describes
in her novel. In so doing, she systematically deconstructs the popular
idea of a thriving black oral counter-culture, effortlessly beginning to
bloom after the abolition of slavery.15 Instead she emphasizes the
wearing uncertainty dominating early black communities still haunted
by a past too close and too terrible to forget and faced with the sole
yet hardly appealing option of processing that past by assimilating
cultural practices as yet known to them only as instruments of their
own suppression and exploitation. Sethes resigned words Im tired
.... So tired .... I dont have no plans. No plans at all (B, 271-72)
express not only her personal fatigue but also the desolation of her
people, and notably of the women among them. They capture a
pessimism absent from both the traditional slave narrative and
Romantic gothic fiction. Though a synthesis of these two genres,
Morrisons novel offers neither a celebration of the fugitive slaves
escape into physical and material freedom nor an idealization of the
black subjects imaginary faculties, suddenly set free by the abolition
of slavery. If not more realistic than the way in which the subalterns
liberation tends to be narrated in either genre, Morrisons assessment
of the beginnings of modern African-American culture certainly
deserves to be seen as far more sensitive to the odds against which
blacks began to articulate their ethnic identity after the Civil War.
15
As Linden Peach, too, points out, Morrison views emancipation most critically
as an event that brought not freedom but the widespread slaughter of former slaves
(99).
359
This is also of relevance with regard to the special role Sethes

daughter Denver plays in Beloved. Denver is the youngest and only
one of Sethes children born free, the only one not visibly scarred by
her peoples history, and the only one, too, able to share her mothers
story and to maintain a major role in it as witness of Sethes worst
ordeals, as antagonist and confidante and, finally as saviour of Sethes
life. Her evolution from unborn foal, to new-born baby, from
unencumbered toddler to her mothers sole companion in prison, from
an eager schoolgirl enjoying the company of her peers to a mute,
almost autistic child fanatically mourning her murdered sister, from
resentful adolescent to caring adult contrasts sharply with any of the
other careers recounted in the novel. Protected when still in her
mothers womb by schoolteachers nephews who dig a hole for
Sethes enlarged abdomen before playing on her and taking the milk
from her breasts; protected again at her birth by Amy, the whitegirl
on her way to Denver, and, hours later, by the warmth of a coat
donated by a black boy helping Stamp Paid to take her and her mother
upriver; protected, once more, from her mothers fatal blow by Stamp
Paid, and saved, finally, from domestic disaster by her former teacher,
Lady Jones, Denver seems predestined to survive the catastrophes
impinging on the lives of all the other blacks around her. Her special
ability to elicit help even from complete strangers, an ability manifest
already in the first days of her life, allows the reader to anticipate that
Denvers story will take a course different from the stories of all other
characters in Beloved. Her development can at last encompass an
intellectual liberation and is not limited to the physical freedom her
mother achieves by fleeing from Sweet Home. Denvers quest
eventually leads her beyond the familiar into a world different from
what her own people have told her the world of the whites to be like.
Already in the first part of the novel, seven-year-old Denver makes
her way to Lady Jones who, for a nickel a month, ... did what
whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little
parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book
learning (B, 102). Within a year, Denver learns to spell and count
and, what is even more important, experiences an atmosphere of
learning, totally unlike anything the other members of her family have
ever known:
The nickel tied to a handkerchief knot, tied to her belt, that she carried
to Lady Jones, thrilled her. The effort to handle the chalk expertly and
360

avoid the scream it would make; the capital w, the little i, the beauty
of the letters in her name, the deeply mournful sentences from the
Bible Lady Jones used as a textbook. Denver practiced every morning;
starred every afternoon. She was so happy that she didnt even know
she was being avoided by her classmates ... (B, 102)
Book learning, for a whole year so real and so tangible, dissolves

into memories of acoustic and visual images the moment Denvers
history catches up with her and retrieves her from the peaceful enclave
of Lady Joness parlour. The shock of being reminded by one of the
other pupils of her mothers crime and her own sojourn in prison
catapults Denver into a state of total indifference to the outside world
and effectively ruptures the story of her progress. Struck deaf and
dumb and paralysed by complete apathy, Denver decides that ... there
was no point in going back to Lady Jones if you couldnt hear what
anybody said. Instead she resolves to apply herself to learning to
read faces and ... how to figure out what people were thinking, so I
didnt need to hear what they said (B, 206). In other words, the
devastating impact of her regained memory drives Denver to
exchange the kind of learning offered by Lady Jones for the nonliterate wisdom applied in her home. She gradually internalizes the
superstitious beliefs cultivated by her guilt-ridden mother and her
care-worn grandmother. Consumed by their obsession with Beloveds
ghost, she disconnects herself from the present thus also risking the
special future this present might hold in store for her. No longer
enacting a story that promises to evolve separately from that of the
other characters, she also ceases to be different from Sethe and Baby
Suggs, Halle and Paul D, different, that is, from the older generation
who have never known the freedom she has known all her life.
Yet, the corrosion of Denvers identity in light of her mothers and
her grandmothers history, which the sudden merging of Denvers
story with the story of these two women suggests, constitutes only a
temporary threat. The education Denver has received at Lady Jones
cannot be undone completely. During her self-imposed imprisonment
at 124 fond memories of her schooldays resurface, though heavily
encoded, in her fantasies of a reunion with her father, the angel man,
who is remembered by his family for his love of Animals and tools
and crops and the alphabet, for his ability to count on paper, and
for his capacity to tell where it hurt and [to] fix it too (B, 208).
Denver does not know that her father has been living in a state of
361
complete mental derangement ever since he bore witness to the

whipping schoolteachers nephews give Sethe. Therefore she never
gives up hope that Halle will come to live with her and Beloved and
restore her to the world of learning of which she used to be a part
until it got quiet around her. Out of a sense of having been cheated
by Sethe, whom she holds responsible for the silence into which she
has drifted and resents for her refusal to disclose to her the whole truth
about Beloveds death, Denver fixes her mind on her father,
cherishing what distinguishes him most from his wife as well as from
other blacks: his literacy.
If you cant count they can cheat you. If you cant read they can
beat you (B, 208). This, Baby Suggs tells Denver, used to be her
fathers motto. Despite the derision it earned him, Halle would pursue
with determination his plan to learn to read and write. It is thus that he
eventually can buy free his mother. The tale of how her fathers
learning saved her grandmother and the memory of Baby Suggs
desperate longing to be able to read the Bible assure Denver that
literacy is an accomplishment worth aspiring to after all. In her dreams
her unknown father comes to embody what she herself longs to be and
what she, indeed, has the potential to become. Yet as long as she does
not know the whole truth about her fathers story she stays entrapped
in the past, like all the other characters in the novel, and therefore
unable to resume her previous course of learning.
The caesura in Denvers education extends over several years and
is finally brought to an end by Beloveds sudden disappearance a few
months after her equally sudden first appearance. During this period
of suspended conventional learning, Denver applies herself with
increasing obsession to the oral reconstruction of her family history.
In dialogues with Beloved and Sethe, she begins to re-live key events
of her earlier existence up to the moment when her mother attempts to
kill her and her siblings in order to spare them a return to slavery. The
effects of this re-enactment of the past prove devastating, mainly
because the exercise precludes a forgetting or leaving behind or a
putting to rest of bygone events. Breaking down temporal distances
and restoring immediacy to the re-collected incidents, it generates
confusion, conflict, and new despair. Still, it is not simply for the sake
of opening old wounds that the three women evoke the past in oral
reflections. The systematic deconstruction of their stories (and, by
implication, of their identities) only precedes a process of
362
reconstruction in the course of which a new understanding of the past

is reached. The most important re-construction described in the novel
is, of course, that of Beloveds death. It finally appeases Sethes mind
enabling her to let go of Beloved and release her into an after-life in
which the dead daughter no longer has to enact a vengeful ghost but
may continue to exist as a harmless spirit of nature.
Beloved is not brought back to life for ever. Her death is not
undone in the process of the other female characters remembering. It
is not the past but Sethes and other peoples memories of it that are
changed in the end. Denvers part in this change is opaque. Beside her
mother, she assumes an increasingly passive role as the novel leads up
to the re-staging of the scene that culminated in Beloveds killing
nearly twenty years earlier. Sethes and Baby Suggs insistent
remembering of the events resulting in this killing, not only have
called up Beloveds spirit, but also prompt Denver to retreat into the
position of the unsuspecting child aware neither of the pain and
desolation felt by her mother, nor of the imminent danger.
Accordingly, all she can relive is her own incomprehension and
defencelessness at the time, while her mother must re-experience the
horror of the situation in all its intensity. In the event, Sethe at last
discards the burden of her guilt and finds a way of reacting to the
approaching danger that leaves her own children unharmed. Instead of
repeating the mistake of trying to save her children by murdering
them, she allows herself to vent her wild despair on someone else
present: a white male, who, although not schoolteacher, her tormentor,
but ironically her long-standing benefactor, derisively nicknamed the
bleached nigger (B, 260), still appears to her a more suited or
deserving victim of her resentment than any of her own children. The
symbolic measure of correcting a previously committed wrong settles
what up to this point has rendered Sethe unable to face the memory of
her daughter.
The manner in which Sethes inner conflict is resolved in the end
does not fail to have the intended alienating effect on the reader. It is
clear that the texts inherent logic is hardly able to accommodate the
unexpected turn of events which points beyond the familiar generic
limits of gothic fiction. The ending of the novel leads particularly
close to these limits as it identifies the figure of Beloved not just as a
ghost who challenges the living to put her to rest, but also as the
personified memory of an unresolved traumatic experience.
363
Morrisons structurally complex attempt to incorporate in her ghoststory-cum-slave-narrative this psychologically plausible conclusion
reflects a special awareness of the restrictions of literate
epistemologies. There can be no doubt that Morrison understands the
medium of writing as one which, by definition, depends on a clear
differentiation between past and present and, indeed, reinforces this
differentiation by virtue of its own enduring presence as actual text.
By inference, writing is not nearly as suited for a therapeutic reediting of the past as are the oral returns to former times undertaken
by the protagonists in Beloved. For Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D, a
translation of their experience into lasting material signs can only
mean the finality they have learnt to dread as slaves. For good reason,
they favour the indeterminacy of an existence without letters over the
kind of assurance with which others have issued estimates of their
bodies value, hand written listings of their human and animal
features, and sensationalist accounts of their stories. Their choice
suggests nothing as ambitious as a conscious cultural decision to
assert their specific orality, for instance, as an aspect of their African
descent. Rather their omission to endorse white literacy needs to be
seen as part of their endeavour to free themselves not only from the
influence of the master culture that has always Othered them, but
above all from the memory of living under the agents of that culture.
In Beloved, then, Morrison can be said to reflect the highly
complex and even contradictory ways in which literacy features in the
history of black American literature. She even makes the
unconventional suggestion that immediately after slavery some blacks
had reason to feel that the espousal of literacy conflicted with their
emancipation from the traumatic legacy of suppression. Hence
individuals like Sethe, Paul D, or Sixo, whom Morrison describes as
those most brutally mistreated under slavery, eschew literate culture
also after they have attained freedom. Denver, on the other hand,
represents a new generation able to perceive book learning not as a
threat but as a possibility of self-improvement. In letting her novel
close with Denvers resumption of her education, Morrison extends
her special reappraisal of African-American orality. She expands it
into an historical evaluation of African-American culture which
implicitly takes into account also the evolution of a distinct
autonomous African-American literary tradition in the course of the
twentieth century. While she may depart from the popular convention
364
of using the career of an aspiring black intellectual as the trajectory

along which to develop her analysis of culture, she does not
completely eclipse the perspective she herself assumes as a postmodern black American writer. Nor does the historical setting of her
novel force her to do so. Instead it seems to allow Morrison to retrace
her own implication in black American literary history to a very
specific moment in the past, not normally identified as particularly
conspicuous point in the development of African-American writing,
yet evidently spectacular in her evaluation of the circumstances that
generated a black American literate culture.
In Beloved, these circumstances are not directly associated with the
abolition of slavery or with the movement north of vast numbers of
fugitive slaves. Freedom, in other words, whether obtained by escape
or granted legally, is not identified by Morrison as the main impetus
behind the literalization of black Americans in the late nineteenth
century just as slavery is not defined explicitly as the cause of their
illiteracy. In questioning the uncomplicated linearity of the received
history of African-American culture and composing a counter-history
from the personal stories of individual blacks, Morrison unearths far
more complex motives for the espousal of, or for the conscious
abstinence from, literate learning by black Americans than the
conflicting legacies of slavery and emancipation constitute.
The reasons for Sethes daughter Denver to seek out her former
teacher after ten years of insistent non-communication with the
outside world are, firstly, a desperate need for someone who
wouldnt shame her on learning that her mother sat around like a rag
doll, broke down, finally (B, 243) and, secondly, her absolute
confidence that of the few people she knows she can trust Lady Jones
unreservedly. Denvers faith in her teacher is rewarded by immediate
and complete understanding and an offer of help so discrete that the
girl is spared the embarrassment of having to accept what she can
never repay. Other women in the community begin to follow Lady
Jones example of motherly care and to take turns in delivering food
to the doorstep of Denvers house, never allowing themselves to be
seen in the act but always leaving scraps of paper containing their
hand written names along with their donations:
Every now and then, all through the spring, names appeared near or in
gifts of food. Obviously for the return of the pan or plate or basket;
but also to let the girl know, if she cared to, who the donor was,
365
because some of the parcels were wrapped in paper, and though there
was nothing to return, the name was nevertheless there. Many had Xs
with designs about them, and Lady Jones tried to identify the plate or
the pan or the covering towel. When she could only guess, Denver
followed her directions and went to say thank you anyway whether
she had the right benefactor or not. When she was wrong, when the
person said, No, darling. Thats not my bowl. Mines got a blue ring
on it, a small conversation took place. (B, 249)
The experience of the womens use of writing16 in their collective

demonstration of solidarity encourages Denver to allow a white
woman to experiment on her and to teach her stuff. When they
meet for the last time in the novel, even Paul D realizes that Denver
no longer needs to be warned that there is Nothing in the world more
dangerous than a white schoolteacher (B, 266). Safely accepted into a
community which has found its very own applications of the written
medium, Denver can be relied upon to assert her identity in the
learning process to which she allows herself to be subjected. The
feeling that Denver has acquired not only the necessary confidence but
also a special understanding of her peoples story creates a longing in
Paul D to talk to Denver more than he has ever done or wanted to do
before. Yet, their conversation is interrupted and he never learns her
version of the events.
The subtle rupture in the narrative produced by Denvers and Paul
Ds unfinished conversation lends itself to an interpretation more
tenable than is obvious at first glance. What legitimises attributing
special importance to the omission of Denvers own account of what
happened at 124 is, first of all, that it is followed by an awkwardly
inarticulate and ungrammatical attempt made by Paul D to formulate
what he would have liked Denver to explain in her words:
He left her unwillingly because he wanted to talk more, make sense
out of the stories he had been hearing: whiteman came to take Denver
to work and Sethe cut him. Baby ghost came back evil and sent Sethe
out to get the man who kept her from hanging. One point of agreement
is: first they saw it and then they didnt. (B, 267)
16
It is symptomatic of the tendency to construe black culture as a predominantly
oral culture and ignore the importance of its literacy that Lidinsky describes the
gestures of female support narrated in this part of Beloved as offerings of dialogic
orality (210), ignoring the fact that Lady Jones main role in the novel is to initiate
Denver into literate culture.
366
The helplessness reflected in this passage not only refers back to

Denvers announcement that she will accept Miss Bodwins offer to
teach her book stuff and to send her away for further education
afterwards. It also serves to emphasize the cultural significance of
Denvers plans for her people as it finally establishes a connection
between understanding and linguistic competence, or, more precisely,
between understanding and literacy. Thus the scene of Paul Ds and
Denvers last encounter in the novel provides a justification for literate
learning which Paul D has never managed to accept. It permits the
expectation that literacy will render future generations of blacks
capable of processing their past in a manner more coherent and,
therefore, also less painful than the way in which Paul D and his
contemporaries allow themselves to be haunted by their memories.
However, as Denvers story illustrates, the purpose of book
learning is neither to exorcize ghosts by literally signing away the
past to oblivion nor to appease troubled minds with the wellformulated answers sought by Paul D to the often tormenting
inconsistencies in their stories. As her special relationship to Lady
Jones suggests, Denvers learning will involve instead an appreciation
of the limits of literacy, a feeling for when her silent understanding (or
simply a scrap of paper containing her signature) is all that is needed.
So it can be claimed that a further meaning is encoded in the two
characters final parting. Toward the end of the scene, Paul D asks
Denver whether she really believes Beloved to be her sister. The girl,
however, does not give a clear answer nor does she wish to hear Paul
Ds opinion. I have my own [opinion] (B, 267), is all she says,
thereby indicating that she has learnt to see the validity of anyones
story. Clearly, Denver has come to understand that for all her learning
she does not possess the answers to Paul Ds questions, that her story,
or Sethes, or Beloveds are but personal recollections, though equally
worthy of cherishing and passing on. The final section of the novel
constitutes a highly poetic articulation of precisely this realization. It
allows the interpretation that the authorial voice behind it is Denvers,
and that, by implication, Morrisons identification, at least at the very
end of the novel, is with Denver and the ambiguity Denver embodies
rather than with any other of her characters. This interpretation is
corroborated also by the history of black writing and literacy, black
orality and illiteracy Morrison advances in Beloved.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FORGING A BLACK LITERACY: SAPPHIRES PUSH AND
ERNEST J. GAINES A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Texts such as Beloved, Black Boy, and Invisible Man may be said to
have alerted African-American writers to the initial difficulties their
people had in espousing literacy and forging a literate culture of their
own. Arguably it is owing to their influence that black literacy and
illiteracy have been addressed with increasing openness in black
American literature in more recent years. Two novels deserve special
mention here as instances of how African-American writers have
moved on both from the fictional returns to slavery ventured by
Morrison in Beloved and from the autobiographical accounts of the
making of black writers undertaken by Wright in Black Boy. The
widely acclaimed novel A Lesson Before Dying (1993) by Ernest J.
Gaines and the lesser known1 novel Push (1996) by Ramona Lofton,
who writes under the name of Sapphire, are set in the twentieth
century and tell the story of illiterate blacks whose cultural stance is
neither one of self-conscious opposition to white literate culture, nor
one of desperate longing for integration into it. Rather in Push and A
Lesson Before Dying illiteracy is associated with a state of inaction
and, hence, of stasis from which the unlettered subject is unable to
escape without help. This intensifies the impression of the
hopelessness of the principal characters situation; and at the same
time it lends special importance to the figure of the teacher Gaines and
Sapphire introduce into their narratives not only to account for the
eventual transformation of their illiterate protagonists into silently, yet
visibly articulate individuals.2
1
The attribute lesser known deserves to be qualified here as Push has certainly
been acclaimed by teachers in American literacy schools for its naturalistic depiction
of an adult student re-entering school and recommended as particularly well suited
teaching material inciting student reading and writing (see Anson M. Green, Risky
Material in the Classroom: Using Sapphires Novel Push [10-03-2006]: http://www2
wgbh.org/MBCWEIS/LTC/ALRI/usingpush.html).
2
Accordingly, Sapphire has remarked that one of her main intentions in writing
Push was to convey the power of intervention in a human beings life who is
troubled (Owen Keehnen, Artist With a Mission: A Conversation with Sapphire,
368
The figure of the teacher also allows Gaines and Sapphire to

present their own experience from a convincingly authentic angle. As
Gaines once observed in an interview, for him, this experience
coincided with his first attempts at writing:
I probably started writing when I was only seven or eight or nine
because I lived on a plantation at False River. Very few of the older
people who lived on the plantation could read or write: Both their
reading and writing was very limited, so I would always write their
letters for them and then read the letters that they would get in the
mail. I also read the Bible and things like that for them.3
Likewise Sapphire, who worked as a literacy teacher for teenagers and

adults in New York for eight years, has commented on her
preoccupation with questions of literacy and illiteracy in her writing.
Asked about the central character of Push, she noted:
Shes a composite of many young women I encountered when I
worked as a literacy teacher in Harlem and the Bronx for 7 years.
Over and over I met people with circumstances similar to hers, many
with her amazing spirit. I wanted to create a novel with a young
person like that. To me she has not existed in literature before. She
existed on TV but as a statistic as an 18-year-old HIV+ woman
who can't read with two children. I wanted to show her as a human
being, to enter into her life and show that she is a very complex person
deserving of everything this culture has to offer.4
Implicit in Sapphires expressed wish that her readers should

understand her protagonist as a very complex person deserving of
everything this [that is, American] culture has to offer is the charge
that that same culture fails to recognize the intrinsic value of its
illiterate members and even construes them as deserving of the neglect
that has shaped their careers. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no
brain, Sapphires heroine, Clareece Precious Jones knows: The
tesses paint a picture of me an my muver my whole family, we
Owen Keehnen Interviews [10-03-2006]: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/
Keehnen/Sapphire.html).
3
An Interview with Ernest Gaines, by William Parrill (1986), in Conversations
with Ernest Gaines, ed. John Lowe, Literary Conversations Series, Jackson: Mo,
1995, 172.
4
Keehnen, 1.
Forging a Black Literacy
369
more than dumb, we invisible.5 To assert herself against the view that
she is but Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed,
finded a job for (P, 31), Precious must learn to read and write.
Similarly Gaines conceives the alphabetization of his central character
as a process of subverting the popular equation of illiteracy with an
innate intellectual and moral inferiority. As in Push, in A Lesson
Before Dying, the gradual emergence of an alternative discourse of
non-literacy, which insists on the illiterates ability and desire to learn,
effects a transgression of generic limits. According to Babb, Gaines
questioning of traditional views of American history and culture in A
Lesson Before Dying displaces traditional modes of ordering a
novel. As a result, Gaines breaks with a history that devalues
African-American culture and substitutes in its place a rich
communal folk history along with narrative conventions rooted in
African-American orality.6 What Babb overlooks is that in allowing
his protagonist to acquire the ability to read and write, Gaines, like
Sapphire in Push and like Morrison in Beloved, gives special value not
only to African-American orality but also to African-American
literacy and so extends the conventions not only of American but,
even more specifically, of black American writing. For this reason,
too, it is important to see that Gaines and Sapphire construe their
protagonists advancement to literacy as more than an externally
wrought miracle. By locating the capacity for improvement within
their main characters they indirectly posit their own cultures potential
for self-renewal even against the odds of persistent discrimination and
repression.
The immensity of the transformation which Sapphires and Gaines
main characters undergo under the influence of their teachers in Push
and A Lesson Before Dying is measured against the extremity of the
situation in which they are placed from the start of the narratives.
Right at the beginning of A Lesson Before Dying, Jefferson, an
unwitting party to and only survivor of a liquor shop shootout, is
convicted of murder and sentenced to death by electrocution. Though,
obviously unfounded, the sentence is clearly irreversible so that the
reader expects the novel to steer towards no other ending than the
5
Sapphire, Push (1996), London, 1998, 30.

Valerie Babb, Old-Fashioned Modernism: The Changing Same in A Lesson
Before Dying, in Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, ed. David C.
Estes, Athens: Ga, 1994, 251-53.
6
370
dying announced by the title of the novel. The inevitability of the

novel closing tragically also qualifies the optimism connoted by the
noun lesson. In fact, the prospect that the learning recounted will
end in death invokes a profound sense of futility. Ironically, this
futility is precisely what the narrative eventually turns out to contest.
For in learning to write, Jefferson becomes able to survive, at least
metaphorically, in the minds of others. The incorporation of his diary
in the novel allows the reader to hope that at least in the recollection
of his readers he will stay alive as more than the brute murderer to
which he was reduced during his trial.
The title of Sapphires novel is equally ambivalent, referring to the
hours of labour awaiting the heroine Precious Jones, pregnant by her
father for the second time in four years. The verb push also refers to
the self-improvement Precious has decided to accomplish before her
death, which appears almost as inevitable as Jeffersons in A Lesson
Before Dying since Precious has been diagnosed HIV positive. As for
Jefferson, for Precious, too, literacy signifies a mode of
transcendence, of metaphysical survival of a story no longer enacted
like that of her ancestors by an entire collective, but lived through in
tragic isolation. The two young blacks at the centre of Push and A
Lesson Before Dying seem literally singled out by fate to die
prematurely. What reconnects them to those who, in all likelihood,
will survive them is their final resolution to outwit fate in the short
time left to them and to bring their life stories to a conclusion of their
own imagining.
Gaines and Sapphires emphatic assertions of the resilience of
black Americans against systematic erasure never amount to an open
celebration of it. This is prevented by their uncompromisingly realistic
treatment of their protagonists sad careers. Neither Gaines nor
Sapphire suggests that the limited literacy skills their protagonists
acquire can significantly transform their situation in the short time
covered by the narratives. All their learning can do for Jefferson and
Precious in their lifetime is to help them accept their stories and to
give expression to this acceptance. The modesty of this goal
corresponds with the novels limited scope which in both cases
remains rigorously constricted to the small worlds Jefferson and
Precious know. Push and A Lesson Before Dying both capture the
claustrophobic atmosphere of life in a dank tenement apartment in
mid-1980s Harlem, and in the strictly segregated small town of
371
Bayonne in 1948. The confinement of the narrators movements to

short trips between the local school building, to a number of private
homes, and to the local prison house in A Lesson Before Dying, and
between a college classroom and a two-room flat in Push intensifies
the dominant sense of limitation. So does the concentration of each
narrative on a single relationship between two characters, developing
inconspicuously and with little dramatic effect7 over the relatively
short period of only a few months and not even two years,
respectively. The pace of this development, too, correlates with the
main characters discursive and intellectual confinement and enforces
the apparent hopelessness of their endeavours to transcend this
confinement.8
The narratives demonstrative unpretentiousness ultimately turns
out to be their underlying aim, in keeping with which the main
characters development takes place silently and visible only to a few.
Unlike the persona of Black Boy the protagonists of Push and A
Lesson before Dying do not learn to read and write to become widely
acclaimed writers. The texts Precious and Jefferson produce are for a
very small group of confidantes, most importantly their teachers,
Grant Wiggins in A Lesson Before Dying and Blue Rain in Push. Both
of them are blacks devoted to imparting literacy skills to other black
people. In their teaching they differ radically from the condescending
or even brutal instructor figures in Invisible Man, Black Boy, or
Beloved. What they set in motion is a process of mutual initiation into
a shared culture and into aspects of that culture hitherto unknown
either to the teachers themselves or to their pupils.
Correspondingly, the rather unconventional teaching methods
gradually developed by Grant Wiggins in A Lesson Before Dying and
7
According to Beavers, calmness of action is a hallmark of Gaines: Rather than
dramatizing a violent explosion embodying radical change, he explains, Gainess
fiction depicts a slower reaction, one that is no less disruptive, largely because the
participants continue to adhere to conventions, despite the pervasive nature of the
changes taking place (Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of
Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, Penn Studies in Contemporary
American Fiction, Philadelphia, 1995, 173).
8
Throughout most of he novel, Carmean writes about the main character of A
Lesson Before Dying, Jefferson is silent, his lack of voice indicative of both his rage
and inability to be heard, Convinced that no one will accord him human dignity,
Jefferson avoids language because hogs dont talk (Karen Carmean, Ernest J.
Gaines: A Critical Companion, Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary
Writers, Westport: Conn, 1998, 119-20).
372
employed with impressive virtuosity by Blue Rain from the beginning

of Push involve introducing their pupils into something other than the
basic applications of reading and writing. Encouraging their protgs
to express themselves freely in letters, to find their very own way of
asserting their thoughts in written form, Blue Rain and Grant Wiggins
usher in a process of self-acceptance and individuation which
eventually enables Precious and Jefferson alike to understand their
situation as one that still demands to be lived actively rather than
endured impassively. The activity of writing acquires special
significance in this context. What Babb remarks about A Lesson
Before Dying also pertains to Push:
There is an ingenious stress on both the power of voice and the power
of writing, for while Gaines crafts a language suitable to articulating
the thoughts of a young man whose life is over before it has begun, it
is the act of writing down these utterances that begins Jeffersons
regeneration.9
The assistance their teachers give them is rewarded by the pupils

growing appreciation of what their learning does to them. Jefferson
writes in his diary: you been so good to me mr wigin an nobody aint
never been that good to me an make me think im somebody.10 The
notebook containing these words documents Jeffersons final
acceptance of his teachers advice to write down his thoughts and
emotions instead of surrendering to complete mental paralysis while
waiting for his execution. Jeffersons writing is marked not only by
mangled spelling, but a growing meta-discursive awareness. Included
in his notes is the self-conscious remark that what he has chosen to do
is, to jus put down anything come into my hed an if it aint rite jus
scratch over it an go on ... (LBD 229). In grasping the complete
absence of pre-meditation from his musings, Jefferson has actually
advanced to a new level of consciousness, a more sophisticated form
of literacy than the unorthodoxy of his orthography and grammar may
reveal at first glance.
Precious Jones offers a similar declaration in the journal book Blue
Rain instructs her to keep. Her writing appears even more heavily
encrypted than Jeffersons. It seems suggestive of a highly
9
Babb, 260-61.
Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (1993), New York, 1994, 232.
10
373
individualized notion of language, creatively deployed by Precious

Jones in her emphatically poetic addresses to her teacher. As an
expression of her deep and, at first, even unconditional adoration of
Blue Rain, Precious text still appears as dialogic as Jeffersons.
Again, rather than a barrier to understanding, the overt lack of
orthographic and grammatical correctness of the protagonists writerly
endeavours demands to be seen as an appeal or challenge to the reader
to experience the task of deciphering posed as an engagement with
another script:
One yr I ben scool I like scool I love my techr ... Blue wmon
who tech me who hep me I don no whut
to sa it hard to xplxn i nver tel mi hole store. (Push, 91-93)
In working out certain consistencies in Precious idiosyncratic spelling

the reader (that is, the teacher Precious addresses explicitly and, at the
same time, the reader of the novel) gets to know the protagonists
personal code. In a sense, the novel simulates a process of
familiarization or literalization not unlike the one the protagonist goes
through in the course of the novel. The most important effect of this
simulation seems to be that the reader becomes capable of a dual
identification, namely with the barely literate pupil and the highly
literate teacher as addressee of her pupils writings at the same time.
This is important as Blue Rains role, like Grant Wiggins in A
Lesson Before Dying, is not that of a passive recipient. Rather she acts
as a co-creator of her pupils text, thus instilling a growing sense of
belonging in Clareece. What nourishes Precious and Jeffersons
rekindling feeling of attachment is their teachers unfailing interest in
them and their writings. In patiently transcribing all of Precious
messages into correctly spelt phrases, Blue Rain, for example,
commits herself not only to teaching correct or standard English but
also to learning her students language. Although she strictly refrains
from using Precious ungrammatical English herself, Blue Rain
succeeds in communicating the mutuality of their discourse to
Precious. Intrigued by the possibility that she might be as much Blue
Rains teacher as Blue Rain is hers, Precious attempts to emulate her
teacher, who never tires of reminding her not to forget to put the date
on her journal entries. Mz Rain / Dan frget rite day Ms R (Push,
72), the young girl mimics her teacher in one of her letters, and, unlike
on previous occasions, does not forget to sign her note in the manner
374
Blue Rain always does, namely by placing Ms before her own

name.
The exchange of roles marks the advancement of Precious to the
position of her teachers equal. The act of pushing to which the title of
the novel refers is no longer conceived as one of coercion but of the
self-motivation to learn. The idea of pushing oneself instead of being
pushed, of applying ones own energies to the attainment of ones goal
rather than relying on the assistance of external forces gradually
crystallizes in Sapphires novel, transforming Blue Rains role as
teacher into that of a midwife repeatedly urging Precious to keep
pushing with her own force whatever creative potential may be
waiting for expression inside her. Precious fears that the birth of her
second child will be as traumatic as that of her first, which, she
believes, she only survived because of a Spanish ambulance man who
expertly advised her when to push. Because she is unable to retrace
her rescuer, whom she likes to think of as god because No man was
never nice like that to [her] before (Push, 11), Blue Rain must take
his place and function as protectress, birth assistant, and promoter of
new life.
Ironically, Blue Rain, a lesbian with no children of her own, has no
idea of what it means to give birth and raise children. Typically the
only advice she has for Precious is to give both her children up for
adoption. Precious is appalled by her teachers lack of understanding
and overcome by a deep sense of pity for her: the same pity Blue Rain
felt when she discovered that Precious is illiterate. She is just ABC
teacher, not no social worker or shit (Push, 79), Precious generously
excuses her teachers ignorance of the deeper meaning of motherhood,
seeing that despite her eloquent talk of isms Blue Rain does not
know everything:
Ms Rain love Color Purple too but say realism has its virtues too.
Izm, smizm! Sometimes I wanna tell Ms Rain shut up with all the
IZM stuff. But she my teacher so I dont tell her shut up. I dont know
what realism mean but I do know what REALITY is and its a
mutherfucker, lemme tell you. (Push, 83)
Blue Rains final acceptance of Precious decision to bring up her

children herself is expressed only implicitly through the ready support
she gives the young mother in putting her plan into practice. Her main
role in the novel is to recede into the background as Precious learns to
375
control her story herself. Accordingly, towards the end of Push, the
narrative ceases to yield any more of Blue Rains notes. Precious
finally is the only narrator or, in fact, the sole author of her story. This
is also signalled by the final part of the novel which is made up of a
collection of texts Precious and her class mates have produced under
Blue Rains supervision. The distinctive style and typeface of this
collection simply titled class book allow it to be seen as a discrete
unit, an anthology in its own right, edited to expressly credit not the
teacher but her pupils with the authorship of their own texts.
By contrast, throughout A Lesson Before Dying, the teacher Grant
Wiggins remains the main narrator. Of the thirty-two chapters making
up the novel, thirty are told from his point of view. Grants accounts
of his visits and of his attempts to monitor Jeffersons progress are
complemented by descriptions of how his own life changes under the
impact of the events leading up to Jeffersons execution. Instead of the
illiterates literalization it is the teachers gradual realization of his
function as Jeffersons teacher that remains the narratives cardinal
concern. Thus the lesson recounted is as much Grants as it is
Jeffersons. At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns how
Grants aunt pleads with him to go and see Jefferson in prison and
restore some sense of pride in him so that Jefferson may face his
execution like a man. Grant, however, is convinced that what he can
do as a teacher, namely teach what the white folks ... tell [him] to
teach reading, writing, and rithmetic (LBD, 13), will not be
enough to repair his shattered sense of self. He fears that all he would
be doing is to tell someone how to die who has never lived (LBD,
31).
Yet, it is precisely because he is a teacher that Tante Lou has
elected him as Jeffersons last companion. For the shrewd woman
gathers that it is above all his lack of learning that keeps Jefferson
from coming to terms with his sentence. She does not ask Grant to
give Jefferson lessons in the conventional sense of the word. Her hope
is that the teachers erudition and sophisticated manners alone will
impact on Jefferson and awake some higher feelings in him so that he
may at least muster all the pride left in him to die with dignity. This is
a complex scheme which the old woman puts before Grant with the
explanation that Jefferson must be granted some kind of rehabilitation
after the gross degradation his own defendant caused him by declaring
him an unthinking hog, a cornered animal, a thing that acts on
376
command. Instead of saving the accused, the defendants final appeal

to the jury to forgive Jefferson for never having evolved further than
his ancestors in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa, only adds
another crime to the charge, that of being too uncivilized to deserve
staying alive:
A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of
cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your
corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable
of planning a robbery or a murder. He does not even know the size of
his clothes or his shoes. Ask him to name the months of the year. Ask
him does Christmas come before or after the Fourth of July? Mention
the names of Keats, Byron, Scott, and see whether the eyes will show
one moment of recognition. Ask him to describe a rose, to quote any
passage from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. ...
What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen?
Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this. (LBD,
7-8)
Beavers astutely reads the lawyers closing argument as an appeal

to the all-white jury to acquire a new form of literacy and view
Jefferson with new eyes, namely as devoid of any intentionality and
hence incapable of hostility towards white society. Yet by drawing on
the familiar rhetoric of African-American inferiority, originating in
nineteenth-century phrenology and keenly applied during slavery, the
lawyer, according to Beavers, is doomed to fail in his endeavour to
save Jeffersons life.11 The lawyers narrative becomes incoherent,
Beavers explains: largely because it neither argues for a new social
order, nor challenges the present one; indeed, his most grievous error
is his failure fully to conceptualize his audience, to cross racial lines to
tell a new kind of story.12 For all their simplicity, Tante Lous verbal
appeal to Grant to undo the defendants offensive assertion of
Jeffersons unworthiness reveal far greater pragmatic wisdom than the
well-educated lawyers dismally unsuccessful ploy.13 Its success
11
While Beavers is convinced that this is the purpose of the defence attorneys
delivery, Babb accords it a far more malevolent stance, stressing that the summation
itself has all the earmarks of dogma used to devalue African Americans (Babb,
253).
12
Beavers, 175.
13
In her life experience and shrewdness, Tante Lou of course resembles the most
famour female protagonist in Gaines oeuvre, the illiterate Miss Jane Pittman. For a
377
hinges on its modesty. After all, Tante Lous plan presupposes not the
conversion of a master class to a new literacy, but merely the
endowment of a single individual with some understanding of the
purpose of most rudimentary reading and writing skills.
Ironically enough, of all people it is Grant Wiggins, raised by
Tante Lou to receive a better education than any of his peers in
Bayonne, who is at first unable to grasp the purpose of this plan.
Grants scepticism, which he hardly dares express before his aunt, is
conveyed mainly in interior monologues. His secret reveries reveal an
almost pathetic indifference, a state of lifelessness and inertia,
unpardonable in light of Jeffersons predicament. The misery of the
illiterate convict calls in question Grants doubts in the usefulness of
teaching. In light of what awaits Jefferson, Grants imaginative returns
to his former teacher, Matthew Antoine, seem a dubious form of
escapism. The reader cannot help feeling that it is mainly to justify his
own apathy that Grant keeps recalling how Antoine used to urge him
to see the futility of trying to wipe away peel scrape away the
blanket ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those
brains in the past three hundred years (LBD, 64).
Comparing the behaviour of his pupils to that of the old men who
never had the chance to go to school, Grant is struck by how little the
plantation has changed since he himself was a schoolboy and
concludes that Antoine must have been right after all. Theres no life
here, the embittered old man used to tell him: Theres nothing but
ignorance here (LBD, 65). Grant overlooks that what Antoine never
seems to have acknowledged is that the children at the plantation at
least have a makeshift school to attend, whereas most of the older
generation remained illiterate because To learn anything, [they] had
to attain it by stealth and through an innate sense of things around
[them] (LBD, 41). Obstinately refusing to acknowledge any sign of
improvement, Antoine would go on prophesying that his pupils
destiny was either to die violently or to run and run (LBD, 62). The
warning brings to mind the dream in which the central character in
Invisible Man discovers that the official letter his grandfather has
given him contains nothing but the command, Keep This Nigger-Boy
Running.
study of the role of women in Gaines, see Marcia Gaudet, Black Women: Race,
Gender, and Culture in Gainess Fiction, in Critical Reflections on the Fiction of
Ernest J. Gaines, ed. David C. Estes, 139-57.
378
Tante Lous fierce optimism and Antoines disparaging pessimism

do little to resolve Grants inner conflict. The opposing views dividing
the community of blacks and at conflict inside Grant seem to make
simple kindness impossible and to prevent Grant from offering the
support Tante Lou asks him to give Jefferson. His inability to act fills
him with growing discontent and anger, which he vents on his pupils
albeit only to feel even greater frustration. The critical self-portrait
Grant gives of himself as first-person narrator adds to the tension
created by repeated reminders of Jeffersons pending execution. The
growing brutality of Grants outbursts in class ironically suggests that
it is not only the convicted Jefferson who needs to be released from
the brutishness in which he seems entrapped and poses the question
whether Grant is indeed the person best qualified to do so.
The unnerving stasis, in which the narrative appears to be
suspended, is broken when Grant goes to see the planter Henri Pichot
to ask him for permission to visit Jefferson in prison. This episode,
too, is charged with tension created by expectation and delay. Grant
has to wait for hours in Pichots kitchen to be heard by the planter and
the other whites who have assembled in the library for drinks and to
discuss Grants request. Convinced that nobody can make that thing
[Jefferson] a man and that one might as well let him go like he is
(LBD, 46), they can see little point in Tante Lous wish to see
Jefferson reformed. I think the only thing you can do is just
aggravate him . And Id rather see a contented hog go to that chair
than an aggravated hog (LBD, 49), the local sheriff argues, adding
dismissively and with none of the grammatical sensibility Grant
strategically displays in the conversation to irritate his listeners:
There aint a thing you can put in that skull that aint there already
(LBD, 50).
The whites open detestation of his (or any other blacks) learning
is a central theme in A Lesson Before Dying. It prompts the sheriff to
warn Grant that he might be just a little too smart for [his] own good
(LBD, 49) and is just as manifest in the school superintendent who
tellingly inspects the childrens teeth rather than their intellectual
achievements when he comes to visit Grant Wiggins school. As
Carmean points out, the incident sharpens Grants awareness of the
connection between his students and Jefferson.14 It also makes him see
an analogy between the superintendents disregard for his work as a
14
Carmean, 119.
379
teacher and the whites keen anticipation of witnessing a black mans

debasement at the moment of his execution. At the same time he
realizes that there is really little difference between the perverse
pleasure which the white men seem to derive from the spectacle of
Jeffersons apparent boorishness and the resentment they exhibit at his
learning: their attitude to any black is informed by the conviction that
education is and must remain entirely a white prerogative. Therefore
prompted to identify with Jefferson as a victim of the same hubris he
has known all his life, Grant decides to comply with his aunt and to
try to inject some self-esteem into Jefferson. In the process Grant
himself undergoes a transformation. He gradually sheds the cynical
indifference and cold resignation with which he at first seeks to
persuade Tante Lou and Miss Emma to accept that Jefferson, once
convicted, is well past needing anyones help. He overcomes the fear
that his visits to Jefferson might humiliate him in the eyes of the
whites, and break [him] down to the nigger [he] was born to be
(LBD, 79). He grasps that he would disgrace himself and his own kind
far more if he did not try to alleviate the strain of Jeffersons last
waiting.
Grant begins his tuition by bringing Jefferson biscuits and sweet
potatoes and using his visits to the prison to remind Jefferson that he
is not a hog but a human being. He then organizes a transistor radio
for Jefferson and supplies him with a pencil and paper knowing that
these are but modest items of luxury. As Reverend Ambrose believes,
Grant should be having conversations about God with Jefferson
instead. Reading, writing, and rithmetic, the pastor reminds Grant,
is not what the community sent him to school for. In the eyes of the
priest, the teacher has failed in his task. Not without glee, he tells him
so:
And thats the difference between me and you, boy; that make me the
educated one, and you the gump. I know my people. I know what they
gone through. I know they done cheated themself, lied to themself
hoping that one they all love and trust can come back and help relieve
the pain. (LBD, 218)
For Beavers, the pastors pompous condemnation of Grant and the

mundane nature of his exchanges with Jefferson are indicative of a
special ability to link imagination and performance and to conceive
of himself and his flock as inhabiting a redemptive space: Gainess
380
Ambrose, Beavers writes, sees himself as a communal resource

whose function is not therapeutic, but analgesic. As a result, his
successful enactment of tribal literacy15 forms a stark ironic contrast
to the self-critical appeal with which the teacher urges Jefferson to try
and see some worth in himself:
... I want you to show them the difference between what they think
you are and what you can be. To them, youre nothing but another
nigger no dignity, no heart, no love for your people. You can prove
them wrong. You can do more than I can ever do. I have always done
what they wanted me to do, teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Nothing else nothing about dignity, nothing about identity, nothing
about loving and caring. They never thought we were capable of
learning these things. Teach those niggers how to print their names
and how to figure on their fingers. And I went along, but hating
myself all the time for doing so. (LBD, 191-92)
With Grant, Gaines draws the figure of a teacher totally unlike

schoolteacher in Beloved. He is black and, although shrewdly
opportunistic at critical moments, not at all reconciled to racist
discrimination. Most importantly, he eventually allows himself to be
guided by his own pupil. His ability and willingness to learn the
lesson Jefferson teaches him not only before but also at the moment of
his dying distinguish him from Reverend Ambrose. Obviously
insensitive to the horror and embarrassment of Jeffersons execution,
the preacher announces that he will attend it. The idea appals Grant,
who suddenly realizes the need for a theology for his people that is
more than an opiate for suffering.16 Defying Ambroses admonitions,
he does not give up the hope that Jefferson may find the strength not
to die as Reverend Ambrose would have him die:
He [Reverend Ambrose] will be strong, Wiggins suspects, attempting
to envisage the scene from which he has chosen to stay away. He is
going to use their God to give him strength. You just watch, Jefferson.
You just watch. He is braver, braver than I, braver than any of them
except you, I hope. My faith is in you, Jefferson. (LBD, 249)
Grants hope is not disappointed. His efforts do not prove in vain. As

a witness of the execution reports back to him, Jefferson was the
15
16
Beavers, 177.
Babb, 259.
381
strongest man there .... And straight he walked (LBD, 254). The
message completes the young teachers lesson. Humbled and suddenly
indifferent to the reverends petty ambition to be seen as the educated
one, he steps before his class, not like Ambrose wearing a mask of
bravery, but crying. As Carmean formulates it: At the novels end,
Grant, the most detached and eloquent character, will be unable to
express the depth of his feelings in words.17 A symbolic sameness
with Jefferson settles over the class in this final scene, as they rise
before their teacher with their shoulders back (LBD, 256). While all
the other characters in the novel have retreated elsewhere,
shamefacedly, to process the knowledge of Jeffersons death and their
implication in it, this young community seems powerfully united by
the knowledge that Jeffersons story is not too disgraceful to
remember, but something that its main protagonist, as one of them,
has made worth retelling.
17
Carmean, 120.
THE ILLITERATE RETURNED:

ILLITERACY IN MIGRANT LITERATURE
In the novels discussed so far, non-literacy is invariably conceived of

as a condition preceding literacy. Implicit in this conception is the
understanding of literalization as both an irreversible process of
acculturation in a single direction. The respective fictional
constructions of the non-literate as Other are based on this
understanding. They identify scriptlessness as a form of thought and
perception irrevocably transcended in the moment of literalization. To
use the words of the British novelist Anita Brookner, once a thing is
known, it can never be unknown.1 The fictional explorations of nonliteracy studied in the previous chapters suggest that, once one has
learnt a script, one must always go on reading the world as a literate
since there is no way of forgetting, or unlearning the writing system
one has acquired. Quite differently, the writings addressed in the final
three chapters of this book do not posit literacy and non-literacy as
necessarily consecutive and therefore mutually exclusive modes of
thinking. Instead they describe situations in which highly literate
subjects suddenly find themselves rendered illiterate as a result of
their confrontation with a script unknown to them. Logically, the
narration of their histories follows a trajectory diametrically opposed
to that underlying most other literary inscriptions of non-literate
alterity. In proposing that illiteracy does not have to precede literacy
but can also follow it, that it may form not the beginning but the end
of a subjects quest, not the starting point but the final outcome of a
process of acculturation. They do not only challenge Western notions
of book learning as an inalienable advantage they also expose the
material limitations of literate knowledge.
The stance assumed in the fictional constructions of non-literacy
analysed below could not be more truly post-colonial. For the
historical situation in which each narrative embeds the literate
subjects return to illiteracy ensues not directly from colonial
expansion but from its aftermath: the collapse of European empires,
the gradual weakening of Europes cultural hegemony, the assertion of
other civilizations, cultures, and literacies as potentially productive,
influential, and even dominant systems, and the resultant evolution of
a new quality of cultural exchange, significantly determined by such
dramatic demographic developments as mass migration to (and not, as
formerly, from) the alleged centres of Western civilization. Recording
this historical shift of orientation, the texts studied below, rather than
responding to the global dissemination of Anglophone literacy and its
1
Anita Brookner, Look at Me (1981), London, 1982, 5.
386
imposition on non-Western societies, record a process in the opposite

direction, namely the Wests inundation with foreign literacies and
oralities and the systematic appropriation of these to the point of their
total absorption by Western civilization.
Accordingly, the narratives reflect on themselves as translations
and transcriptions of an Other originating in a foreign, that is, nonalphabetic, writing tradition.2 Mainly for this reason writing
predominates in the corresponding texts thematically, formally, and
meta-discursively at once. On a more comprehensive scale than in
other texts, descriptions of culturally specific writing materials,
conventions, and rituals, of reading tools, facilities, and practices
combine to create variegated spaces of literate activity and to convey
the impression that the characters inhabiting these spaces and the
events making up their stories are as much written as they are
fictional. In the meticulous portrayals of worlds never short of paper
and ink but indeed crammed with writing of all kinds, literacy finally
comes to be conceived of as a phenomenon in its own right, as an
aspect of cultural identity apart from speech.
Under the carefully differentiating scrutiny this presupposes,
writing is profiled as a certain individuals (or a certain groups)
command of a particular code, as that individuals (or groups) access
to a specific infrastructure created and owned by a specific culture.
Correspondingly, illiteracy, rather than being identified in general
terms as the inability to understand and make use of any writing, is
explored as a condition of exclusion from only one specific system of
graphic signs. Logically, there is no need to conjure a world totally
without letters (or of other graphic signs), to project a world beyond
the confines of the literary text. Instead of bordering on a beyond or an
outside into which the narrative discourse refrains from venturing, the
cultural landscapes charted in the works discussed in this chapter
remain finite and commensurable.
Such commensurability, enhanced by the material allpervasiveness of the written medium, far from simplifies the
negotiation of cultural otherness. Less foreign than the completely
non-literate, the figure of the Other who knows how to read and write
in one script, yet not in another resists inscription in straightforward
2
As Yuan puts it, the China narrative becomes a translation of a translation in
fact, a cultural reconstruction (Yuan Yuan, The Semiotics of China Narratives in
the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan, Critique XL/3 [Spring 1999], 297).
The Illiterate Returned
387
oppositional terms. Instead a theorizing of subtle nuances of alterity, a

discrimination of diverse modalities of hybridity as demanded by
Ella Shohat,3 seems necessary to grasp the implications of belonging,
by birth or descent, to more than one literate culture without being
able to actively participate in all of them. The authors of The Woman
Warrior (1975), Obasan (1983), and The Bonesetters Daughter
(2001), Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa and Amy Tan, were
each born and educated in the West. Nonetheless, they write not only
about their own alienation from the culture of their origin Chinese
and Japanese, respectively but also about the foreignness of their
parents in the country to which they migrated in the first half of the
twentieth century. In so doing they process their families special
experiences of discrimination, in the form of brutal hostility against
Japanese Canadians towards the end of the Second World War, as
well as the utter disregard for the learning of highly educated Chinese
migrants to America in the early twentieth century.
These experiences stand in contrast to the favourable and indeed
enthusiastic reception of the works of Tan, Kogawa, and Kingston by
American and Canadian readers. The success of their writings testifies
to an interest in and an acceptance of cultural otherness in the
countries in which they grew up that their parents never seem to have
known. Still, this acceptance is not unconditional. It presupposes the
writers full assimilation into what Lawrence Rosenwald has
ironically described as a devotedly monoglottal mainstream.4
Rosenwald insists that despite their official commitment to cultural
diversity in the more recent past, the USA has always privileged a
single language and a single script over all other available media of
human interaction and thereby successfully maintained a certain level
of homogeneity against all prevailing trends towards cultural
diversification.5 This also applies to Canada, Australia, and Great
Britain. The standard justification for their unofficial policy of
3
110.
Ella Shohat, Notes on the Post-colonial, Social Text, 31-32 (Spring 1992),
4
Marc Shell, Babel in America: Or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the
United States, Critical Inquiry, XX/1 (Autumn 1993), 127.
5
Accordingly Judith Oster recalls Theodore Roosevelts credo, We have room
for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for
but one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people (Roosevelt, quoted in
Judith Oster, Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American
Literature, Columbia: Mo, 2003, 169.
388
homogenization is that culturally pluralistic societies must have some

kind of common linguistic tool if communication is to occur at all.6
However, to interpret the absence of other languages and
literacies from American, Australian, Canadian, and British
mainstream cultures as a natural ingredient of social coherence is to
underestimate the pressures put on non-Anglophone immigrants to
Anglophone countries not only to give up their primary languages but
also to repress the traumatic experience of language loss. For Tove
Skuttnabb-Kangas, the assimilationist immersion education practised
in most parts of the world, and especially where killer languages
like English dominate, effects a reductionism so damaging that one
may justly speak of linguistic genocide.7 Skuttnabb-Kangas warns
that the systematic denial of mother tongue medium instruction to
minorities prompts involuntary transfers to majority languages. The
resultant language loss not only weakens ethnic cultures but also
deprives the world of its most important depositories of linguistic
diversity.
According to Kenji Hakuta, the effects of what Louis-Jean Calvet
has termed glottophagie8 are nowhere as dramatic as in America.9
For, as Marc Shell puts it, forgetting language difference is still
the urgent component of Americas understanding of itself.10 As a
result of the sheer magnetic power of American linguistic
assimilation, Rosenwald believes, the multicultural literature
produced in America, though rich in scenes of language and dialect
contact, has no collective triumphant accomplishment of linguistic
diversification to relate, nor a corresponding utopia to project.11
Instead Americas ethnic literatures, in conforming to the dictate of
6
Te-hsing Shan, Redefining Chinese American Literature from a LOWINUS
Perspective: Two Recent Examples, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism,
Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors, A
Longfellow Institute Book, New York, 1998, 118.
7
Tove Skuttnab-Kangas, Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: The Threat Form
[sic] Killer Languages, in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Christian
Mair, 33-34.
8
That is, the eating of other languages by English (Louis-Jean Calvet, quoted in
Rosenwald, 341).
9
Kenji Hakuta, Mirror of Language: The Debate of Bilingualism, New York,
1986, 166-67.
10
Shell, 127.
11
Lawrence Rosenwald, American Anglophone Literature and Multilingual
America, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages
of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors, 341.
389
monolingualism prescribed by mainstream US culture, restrict

themselves to yielding tenacious, imprecise approximations to
Americas linguistic history and topography. The same sad pattern
therefore keeps repeating itself as ethnic literatures develop: a phase
of extensive reflection on English as a foreign language tends to be
followed by one of self-conscious assimilation, before migrant or
ethnic writing transforms into cosmopolitan writing which, practically
indifferent to its linguistic origins, merely generates unilingual
puddings with lots of multilingual plums:
To unofficially but predominantly anglophone America comes a
nonanglophone immigrant group. The nonanglophone-speakers retain
their language for a while; probably their nonanglophone literature
records the pressures exerted by English on their language, probably
the English language is expanded by loanwords taken from their
language, and probably, as members of this group begin to write of
themselves in English, these English texts dramatize the linguistic
encounter. Probably, after a while, the intensity of the encounter
diminishes, the texts dramatize the linguistic encounter less often.12
As far as Chinese American writing is concerned, the

dramatization of the linguistic encounter has remained a major
preoccupation for over two decades. American born writers especially,
who are insiders more to English than to the Chinese culture they
depict, appear deeply interested in such encounters. Yet rather than
locating them at the interface of the Chinese American community
and white American society, their narratives let them occur within the
Chinese American community itself. Thus differences in language and
literacy have come to be translated from a barrier between Caucasian
Americans and Chinese immigrants into a barrier dividing different
generations of Chinese Americans.13 This inevitably produces new
12
Ibid., 345 and 341.

This is not to contest Lees argument that in choosing English to recount the
Asian Americans linguistic alienation, writers like Maxine Hong Kingston reinscribe
cultural difference in the white-dominant American society (Ken-fan Lee, Cultural
Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingstons and Tans Ghost Stories,
MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the
United States, XXIX/2 [Summer 2004], 123). This reinscription does not simply
happen on another textual level than the thematic location of difference in the ethnic
community; the ethnic community itself is a but a microcosm simulating a Chinese
life, yet thriving on American soil, as it were, and therefore related more to the
13
390
scenarios in the drama of linguistic assimilation to which a characters

appropriation not only of English but also of the alphabet may add a
significant complication. For such appropriation invariably proves the
beginning of an irresolvable conflict of loyalties turning into a
fundamental linguistic dilemma when the other language (and script)
in which the migrants tale is not told begins to haunt the teller,
demanding to be recognized as a legacy that can never be discarded.
The ways are varied in which Chinese American writers attempt to
overcome the sense of betrayal resulting from the choice of language
and medium that their implication in two cultures requires them to
make. For Chinese writers in America writing in Chinese about
Chinese Americans, the solution seems to be to court audiences in
China with portrayals of America.14 For immigrant and sojourner
Chinese American writers, who shift from their primary language to
English, it seems to consist in seeking primarily to explain and justify
China and Chinese ways to the Western world.15 American-born
Chinese American writers, at least as much at home in English as in
Chinese, in turn, need to find yet another approach. As Amy Ling
explains, they
tend to be more individualistic and to have an inward focus. Because
they have grown up as a racial minority, imbibing the customs of two
cultures, their centres are not stable and single. Their consciousness ...
is double; their vision bifocal and fluctuating .... they look inward with
an urgency to comprehend and balance the bicultural clashes they
have known and must reconcile .... Their purpose is to explain
themselves to themselves.16
Remarkably, it is above all in immigration narratives by writers

who have never lived in their parents or grandparents culture and
therefore may never have acquired a full command of their families
original language and script, that the foreignness of spoken and
written Chinese or Japanese is given special consideration. This is, for
present American situation than to their original context in Chinese society (Yuan,
292).
14
On this group of writers, see for instance Te-hsing Shan, who names Helena
Kuo and Lin Tai-yi as its most prominent representatives.
15
Amy Ling, Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition behind Maxine
Hong Kingston, in Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, ed.
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction, New York, 1999, 136.
16
Ibid., 137.
391
instance, the case in Maxine Hong Kingstons novel The Woman

Warrior and in Obasan by Joy Kogawa. In spite of the broad critical
attention and acclaim these two texts have received, their authors
pronounced interest in the vanishing ability of American or Canadian
born Asians to participate not only in the oral but also in the written
discourses of the cultures from which they originate has gone largely
unnoticed. This is due to the same phonocentric bias that has caused
Western critics to overlook the centrality of the theme of illiteracy in
other works studied in this book. Yet it is also symptomatic of a
tendency in Asian-American studies to understand Asian as merely
an adjectival supplement to the more emphatically posited
American and to pay little attention to the relevance of Asianness
for Asian America.17
As if to counter this deficit and give concrete substance to this
Asianness, Amy Tan undertakes what at first glance appears to be an
unusually direct inquiry into the specificity of Chinese writing in The
Bonesetters Daughter. Yet, what Amy Tan discloses in the process is,
above all, her own distance from the Chinese writing tradition, which
is reflected by her descriptions of the Chinese ink-making trade, of
ancient inscriptions on oracle bones, and of the fascination these
inscriptions inspire in American archaeologists, of Chinese
soothsayers and antiquaries, and of letter-writing as the only means of
maintaining human bonds during the political upheavals in China in
the first half of the twentieth century.
Tans text is informed by an almost obsessive nominalism,
suggestive not so much of her familiarity with Chinese culture as of
her alienation from it. The mass of ethnographic and historical details
she supplies combine into an informative, yet not necessarily
sympathetic picture of Chinese writing traditions. Images
foregrounding the materiality of Chinese writing, while exoticizing
Chinese literate practices, create an illusion of tangibility that belies
the alienation inevitably felt by the uninitiated Westerner when
confronted with a piece of Chinese writing. Rather than trying, like
Tan, to dissuade this sense of alienation in their writings, Kingston
and Kogawa endeavour to capture and comprehend it as an essential
aspect of their own cultural identities. This endeavour proves charged
17
Belinda Wai Chu Kong, Species of Afterlife: Translation and Displacement in
Twentieth-Century Chinese-English Contexts (Arthur Miller, Gao Xingjjan,Maxine
Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Ha Jin), Ph. D. Thesis, University of Michigan, 2005, 4.
392
with difficulties. After all, Kingston and Kogawa, like Tan, try to
process in Western form and language their personal affinities to a
literate tradition fundamentally different from the one in which they
live, communicate, and work and through which they primarily define
themselves. As Ken-fang Lee phrases it: In weaving the old cultural
references from both Chinese and American backgrounds into their
work Tan and Kingston also bring the newness and foreignness
into the wor(l)d.18
One foreignness Kingston, Tan, as well as Kogawa convey in The
Woman Warrior, The Bonesetters Daughter, and Obasan is that of
the Chinese and Japanese scripts to readers literate only in alphabetic
systems. Unlike the letters of these systems, Chinese characters do
not represent meaningless sound units but words and with them, by
implication, ideas and concepts.19 The same holds true of Japanese
characters, which essentially are adaptations of Chinese signs to the
phonetic requirements of the Japanese language.20 The lexical
extensions which the Chinese language has undergone over the past
four thousand years have effected a growth of the repertoire of
Chinese characters to about 50,000 different signs, only 3,500 to 9,000
of which, however, are commonly listed in modern dictionaries. To
the outsider, most of these signs represent arbitrary combinations of
strokes with no relation whatsoever to the meaning they designate. To
the initiated user of Chinese, their pictorial origin is often obvious, so
that even today, many characters can be shown to have their root in
pictures derived from nature and other concerns central to the agrarian
society which fostered Chinese writing. Still transporting their original
meaning, Chinese pictographs, then, may be seen as fulfilling a dual
historical function: while, like any other script, a means of recording
the present, they afford insights into Chinas cultural past at the same
time. Such insights are of interest not only to the historian. Some
knowledge of the history of the Chinese script is absolutely essential
18
Lee, 106.
Gaur, 87-88.
20
In Obasan, Kogawa addresses the illiteracy of the descendants of Japanese
migrants and in so doing reflects on a script closely related to Chinese writing, yet
also different from it. The Japanese, who had no script of their own, began to
appropriate Chinese writing and paper-making technologies from the fourth century
onwards. However, as their language was not sufficiently represented in ideographs,
they extended the Chinese script by two independent syllabaries so that modern
Japanese is a hybrid of three different writing systems (Gaur, 129 and Haarmann 395404).
19
393
for any reader of Chinese, especially to understand the written fixation

of abstract concepts. This, Henri-Jean Martin explains, is why the
original representation of Chinese characters is always explained at
school.21
The historical role of the Chinese script has prompted a great deal
of speculation on the part of Western scholars over its impact on the
mentalities of Far Eastern peoples. It has been central to the argument,
for instance, that far more than other writing systems the Chinese
script encourages associative thought processes or to the claim that it
is the Chinese script that renders the Chinese peoples reflective
awareness and spontaneity in the moral realm radically different from
the mental categories and frameworks of Western societies.22 Thanks
to its origins, Martin writes,
the Chinese script expresses totally different preoccupations from
alphabetic writing systems. It reflects the mentality of a people for
whom superior wisdom lies in a conformity with nature, but who
esteem abstraction as the path to the comprehension and interpretation
of nature.23
Apart from expressing something of the natural order of the world,

one of the earliest purposes of writing in Chinese was that of
divination, the science that revealed connections between words and
things, proper names and the deductions that could be drawn from
them, the reality of the written word and the message it transmitted.24
The first goal of Chinese writing, Martin suggests, was to furnish not
an instrument of communication, but a tool of symbolization.25
Accordingly, the first Chinese scribes were guided not by the idea of
noting down a linguistic utterance, but by an understanding of
writing as a means of translating the concrete and singular into the
abstract and general, of deriving universally applicable truths from
isolated phenomena and perceptions. In the case of the invention of
the Chinese script, Martin therefore concludes, it would be more
accurate to speak of the creation of a written language, not simply a
writing system.
21
Martin, 22.
Joseph Needham and Jacques Gernet, quoted in Martin, 89.
23
Martin, 22.
24
Ibid., 89.
25
Ibid., 21.
22
394
Not representing, translating, or replacing other signifiers (in the

way in which the letters of the alphabet represent, translate, or replace
sounds), Chinese characters have to be seen as possessing a meaning
of their own. They offer, as Martin puts it, the possibility of
dissecting the signifier to advance knowledge of the signified.26
Transporting the signified differently from spoken Chinese, at times
even lending the signified an altogether different significance, Chinese
writing plays a special role in the negotiation of meaning, facilitating
semantic reconciliation, for instance, where spoken Chinese loses its
intelligibility owing to the vast number of homophones in Chinese.
Accordingly Martin explains: Because homophones are in principle
represented by different signs, a Chinese speaker can trace the
corresponding sign in the hollow of his hand or write it down on a
scrap of paper if his interlocutor has not understood the sense of a
word.27
As a medium complementing, often completing speech and
rendering it more explicit in the process, yet never simply copying
spoken utterances, the Chinese script engenders writing and reading
processes quite unlike those common in alphabetic cultures. The
indebtedness of Chinese exegetic conventions to the art of divination,
the proximity of Chinese calligraphy to painting, as well as the ancient
idea, still prevalent in China, of writing as a form of asceticism
mastered only after a long apprenticeship are some of the most
obvious indications that both writing and reading in Chinese tend to
be employed to a far greater extent as contemplative activities than are
literacy skills in Western societies.
Because it is made up of images, Martin observes, the
ideographic page demands a certain effort of reorganization that is all
the more active because all the characters that compose it are rich in
ambiguities. Compared to the ease with which alphabetic systems are
learnt, the input required of the individual reader and writer of
Chinese is phenomenal. While the simplicity of alphabetic systems
makes it possible for reading and writing to become wholly
automatized activities, the complexity of the Chinese script
presupposes concentrated attention to the material shape of the
graphic sign in the process of deciphering it. As a consequence,
whereas metadiscourse in alphabetic cultures is focussed on the
26
27
Ibid., 89.
Ibid., 23.
395
phonetic features of language, and thus on the immaterial aspects of

linguistic utterances, metadiscourse in cultures with ideographic
scripts takes into special account the visual realization of words and
the aesthetic expressiveness of materially realized symbols.
The kind of metadiscourse Chinese and Japanese scripts
encourage, their complex historical significance, their efficacy as
means of abstraction and symbolization (and, in the case of Chinese,
of linguistic reconciliation where oral communication is in danger of
breaking down), their intricacy, and, not of least importance, their
profound foreignness to outsiders can be shown to feature prominently
in the literary interrogations to which Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy
Kogawa, and Amy Tan subject their own hybrid cultural identities.
Though practically omnipresent in the lives of the Asian communities
described in The Woman Warrior, Obasan, and The Bonesetters
Daughter, to the migrants daughters, from whose point of view these
communities histories are told, writings in Chinese and Japanese,
respectively, never convey a sense of familiarity but appear
profoundly alien. Whether the women narrators possess some
knowledge of their parents script or none at all, the ideographs, which
form such an ubiquitous component of their private worlds, never fail
to capture the essence of their own families foreignness, of a
strangeness deeply unsettling because it manifests itself where it is
least expected, namely in that which is, and in those who are, most
familiar to the narrator protagonists.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE ILLITERATE MOTHER:
MAXINE HONG KINGSTONS THE WOMAN WARRIOR
The Woman Warrior is replete with images of writing. There are birth
charts and immigration papers, permission slips and school diplomas,
anthropology books and dictionaries, writings on laundry packages,
words pinned on the cloth of corpses, letterings on shop windows and
office doors, and warnings stencilled on boxes containing fragile
items. Her characters in America stay in contact with their homeland
through an uninterrupted flow of letters on blue airmail paper
reporting the latest atrocities committed by the Communist regime,
begging for money, and arranging for more members of the family to
emigrate to the United States.1
Along with the information, requests, threats, invitations, promises,
truths, and untruths which these items of writing contain, they
document the Chinese immigrants struggles to assert their cultural
and historical identity not only vis--vis non-Asian Americans but also
vis--vis those of their own kind born or raised (or both) in America.
This links the innumerable allusions to writing in The Woman Warrior
to the many references Kingston makes to other discursive practices,
such as talk-story,2 chanting folk tales or reciting special spells
against misfortunes. These are complemented by images of paper, not
in the form of written messages, but of origamied replicas: paper
suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles
(WW, 22) are donated to the spirits of the dead; artful cut-outs are
brought as souvenirs from China. They represent mythical figures not
infrequently engaged in the act of writing, such as the scholar who
always carries a fan ... His brush and quill and scrolls tied with ribbon
1
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among
Ghosts (1975), London, 1981, 51.
2
Talk-story is an Hawaiian pidgin phrase, borrowed street language selected by
Kingston To describe the passing down of tales from the old generation to the
young (Susan Brownmiller, Susan Brownmiller Talks with Maxine Hong Kingston,
Author of The Woman Warrior, in Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior: A
Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, 178).
398
jutt[ing] out of lace vases or an orange warrior-poet with sword and

scroll (WW, 111).
The many different uses of paper, modalities of representation, and
forms of communication to which Kingston refers in The Woman
Warrior seem to blur rather than clarify the meaning she ascribes to
writing. This corresponds not only with the narrator protagonists
initial difficulty in positioning herself as her mothers biographer but
also with her idea of writing, and especially of the Chinese script, as
representing an intrinsically unreliable medium. More than once in
The Woman Warrior, Kingston associates the unreliability of the
written medium with the ambiguity of Chinese ideographs. She
describes how she becomes most acutely aware of the intangibility of
Chinese writing when she attempts to Romanize the spelling of
individual Chinese words or to translate them into English. In the
confusion into which she is propelled by such efforts, the narrator has
the impression that Chinese symbols lifted their feet, stretched out
their wings and flew like blackbirds (WW, 66-67), or that their
individual strokes transform into two black wings of a bird crossing
the sun (WW, 26).
Lee believes that the way Kingston describes Chinese ideographs
creatively and imaginatively is bound to be received differently by
readers who are familiar with the Chinese script and those who are
not. He points out that for the latter, it may be impossible to imagine
exactly what Kingston describes, while readers with knowledge of the
Chinese script can visualize the ideographs she is representing
verbally.3 What the uninitiated reader is able to share with the reader
literate in Chinese, though, is Kingstons vision of Chinese characters
suddenly coming to life, changing their form, and in the process
taking on a completely new meaning under the eyes of the reader.
Such a transformation is most artfully rendered in the chant of Fa Mu
Lan, in which Kingston suggestively compares the strokes of a
Chinese ideograph with the shape of a black bird that the inspired
writer must follow to reach the end of the woman warriors tale.
Whether drawn in ink, pencil or charcoal, blurred beyond
intelligibility or as distinct as the narrators childhood memories, the
strokes direct the writer warrior from ignorance through confusion to
enlightenment, at the point of which the writers awareness of the sign
3
Lee, 107.
The Illiterate Mother
399
as sign vanishes and the ideograph is perceived as just two black

strokes:
The call would come from a bird that flew over our roof. In the brush
drawings it looks like the ideograph for human, two black wings.
The bird would ... lift into the mountains (which look like the
ideograph mountain), there parting the mist briefly that swirled
opaque again. I would be a little girl of seven the day I followed the
bird away into the mountains. The brambles would tear off my shoes
and the rocks cut my feet and fingers, but I would keep climbing, eyes
upward to follow the bird. We would go around and around the tallest
mountain, climbing ever upward. I would drink from the river, which I
would meet again and again. We would go so high the plants would
change, and the river that flows past the village would become a
waterfall. At the height where the bird used to disappear, the clouds
would grey the world like an ink wash.
Even when I got used to that grey, I would only see peaks as if
shaded in pencil, rocks like charcoal rubbings, everything so murky.
There would be just two black strokes the bird. Inside the clouds
inside the dragons breath I would not know how many hours or
days passed. Suddenly I would break clear into a yellow, warm world.
New trees would lean towards me at mountain angles, but when I
looked for the village it would have vanished under the clouds. (WW,
26)
The ordinary act of looking also becomes a form of highly

imaginative reading at other moments during the story of the woman
warrior, whenever Fa Mu Lan miraculously catches a glimpse of her
previous life in the reflection in water, in the flames of a campfire, or
in the evening sky. As the water shook, then settled, she recounts
one such occasion, the colours and lights shimmered into a picture,
not reflecting anything I could see around me. There at the bottom of
the gourd were my mother and father scanning the sky, which was
where I was (WW, 28). I stared into the fire, she tells of another,
which reminded me about helping my mother with the cooking and
made me cry. It was very strange looking through water into fire and
seeing my mother again. I nodded, orange and warm (WW, 31).
Similar metaphoric extensions into the surreal also distinguish
Kingstons treatment of speech and music. Comparisons of a human
subjects voice to a crippled animal running on broken legs, claims
that the same voice is jarred by splinters and bones rubbing jagged
400
against one another (WW, 152), or similes which liken the high notes
issued from a reed pipe to icicles in the desert (WW, 186) all point at
a thoroughly unorthodox view of language, which seems to
accommodate only in part conventional distinctions between speech
and writing, orality and literacy, English and Chinese. These opposites
tend to merge in The Woman Warrior, a text which keeps allowing the
reader to forget that almost all the dialogue it records are translations
from Chinese into English.
Only occasionally is the readers attention drawn explicitly either
to English as the medium transporting the narrative or to Chinese as
the medium in which the narrated exchanges are actually being
enacted, with the thematic focus, however, remaining clearly on the
Chinese language and on Chinese discursive conventions and
idiosyncrasies. Therefore a host of explanations of Chinese words and
of interpretations of individual ideographs are offered, imparting, for
example, that the gold circles crossed with seven red lines on the
metal tube holding Brave Orchids medical diploma represent joy
ideographs in abstract (WW, 57), that the Chinese I has seven
strokes, that the word dream translates into Chinese as the
language of impossible stories (WW, 82), or that the ideograph used
on packages to mark fragile contents literally means use a little heart
(WW, 61). The the charming words of the language used by
Caucasian Americans yield no equivalent peculiarities and, also
acoustically, English does not stand comparison with Chinese, as it is
not uttered with the same shrillness and volume with which the
immigrants voices ring through Chinatown:
They turn they radio up full blast to hear the operas . And they yell
over the singers that wail over the drums, everybody talking at once,
big arm gestures, spit flying. You can see the disgust on American
faces looking at women like that. It isnt just the loudness. It is the
way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful
like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as
regular as Italian. We make guttural peasant noise and have Ton Duc
Thang names you cant remember. And the Chinese cant hear
Americans at all; the language is too soft and western music
unhearable. (WW, 154)
401
The thematic emphasis on Chinese effectively deflects from the

fact that the novel4 itself is written in English, that the narrators
language is not Chinese, and that her primary script is that of the
Roman alphabet. As a result, the impression is created that the English
language, both in spoken and in written form, is oddly absent from the
lives Kingston describes in The Woman Warrior.5 The same quality of
inaudibility and invisibility seems to pertain to English that the
Chinese migrants ascribe to its users, the Caucasian Americans, by
identifying them as ghosts, Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts,
Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-andDime Ghosts ... (WW, 90).6 On a purely thematic level, then,
Kingstons text may be said to perform exactly the same categorical
negation of English, which the author identifies as one of the most
alienating aspects of her parents generation, who callously ask What
do numbers matter? when reminded that the dates on their
4
Because of its autobiographical content, some critics have been hesitant to read
The Woman Warrior as a fictional text. Nonetheless the term novel will be used
freely here as this chapter is not primarily concerned with the generic categorization
of The Woman Warrior, a matter significantly complicated by Donald C. Goellnichts
suggestion to comprehend Kingstons narrative as a hybrid of theory, fiction, and
autobiography. Drawing on Barbara Christians claim that people of color have
always theorized and that theory therefore is inherent to ethnic literature (or at least
to certain forms of it), Goellnicht proposes that The Woman Warrior, as well as
Obasan, ought to be seen as theoretical fictions or fictionalized theory,
autobiographical theory or theoretical autobiography (Donald C. Goellnicht,
Blurring Boundaries: Asian American Literature as Theory, in An Interethnic
Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-kok Cheung, Cambridge, 1997,
341).
5
Conversely, Quinby identifies language as one of the invisible presences
marking The Woman Warrior out as a memoir (Lee Quinby, The Subject of
Memoirs: The Woman Warriors Technology of Ideographic Selfhood, in Critical
Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Laura E. Skandera-Trambley, Critical Essays
on American Literature, New York, 1998, 130). In Lees terms, Kingston challenges
the concept of English as a unitary, linear, and continuous entity and invites readers to
engage with cultural translation. English is made foreign to its own monolingual
native speaker. For those who are monolingual, Lee observes further, this
experience of reading puts them in the labyrinth of heteroglossia and forces them to
confront multicultural discourses (Lee, 107).
6
On ghosts in The Woman Warrior, see Reed Way Dasenbrock, Intelligibility
and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English (Excerpts), in Maxine
Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, 164-65, as well as David
Leiwei Li, Re-Presenting The Woman Warrior: An Essay of Interpretive History, in
Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Critical
Essays on American Literature, New York, 1998, 193.
402
immigration papers are wrong, arguing that, after all, White Ghosts
cant tell Chinese age (WW, 97); or who sardonically declare that the
law forbidding bigamy in America simply doesnt matter, should a
Chinese man wish to take a second wife (WW, 131); who
unashamedly instruct their children to lie to Americans and to Talk
the Sales Ghosts down. Make them take a loss (WW, 152), and who
stubbornly refuse to believe that white Americans cannot speak
Chinese, insisting that the ghosts feign ignorance of their language
only to spy on them.
The almost neurotic hostility to Anglophone American culture
which Kingston attests her migrant characters erupts most violently
when they are confronted with their own childrens appropriation of
the English language. At best, their fluency in the ghosts language is
perceived as a profitable accomplishment acquired for the benefit of
the entire family. Mostly, however, the older Chinese tend to view
their offsprings command of English with profound suspicion and to
interpret it as the main reason for their alienation from the Chinese
culture. Symptomatically, they perceive this alienation not as a
difference but as a lack. For them their English speaking descendants
are Ho Chi Kuei, which as Lee points out, in Cantonese means
ghost-like, or sook Sing, which means bastard.7
Ignorance of Chinese is considered pardonable only in the very
youngest generation. The inability of the adolescents to translate what
they say into Chinese, in turn, is deplored as a sign of degeneracy; so
is their use of English in private exchanges with other Chinese. Yet
even if indicative of a most tragic experience of cultural deprivation,
the parents disapproval is recorded not uncritically, nor without
humour. In Lees view, Kingston (or rather her narrator) creates a
parody by ironically bringing in the experiences of alienation and
defamiliarization of ethnic people living in the so-called melting
pot or salad bowl.8 As part of her scheme of ironically mimicking
the repressive ways of the older Chinese migrants, she reduces many
of those guilty (like herself) of having betrayed their Chinese roots to
nebulous figures without distinct physical features, without distinct
histories or personalities and, most importantly, without a name.
Disowned by the narrator in the same way the narrators father has
disowned his drowned-in-the-well sister (WW, 13), the younger
7
8
Lee, 111.
Ibid., 112.
403
Chinese in The Woman Warrior stand punished in the only way

someone like Brave Orchid would find appropriate for children who
have disgraced their family.
The ironic nature of the blanks Kingston inserts in her text in
imitation of her older relatives disregard for her own generation
receives special emphasis through Moon Orchids dismissive
reflections on her sisters eldest daughter, whose American name,
Moon Orchid finds, sounds like Ink in Chinese (WW, 120).
Nowhere in the novel, not even in the passages recounted from the
aunts point of view, is the girls name disclosed, nor its phonetic
resemblance to the Chinese word for ink explained. For the aunt, the
niece remains but an absent-minded and messy girl, forever
smeared with ink and with no name that can be remembered
properly. The reader, in turn, is given to understand that the alleged
bearer of the name Ink is the author herself and sensitive to the
appropriateness of her English first name, Maxine, for what a
similar word denotes in Mandarin.9
Moon Orchids inability to understand the new meanings her
language acquires in the American context confers special importance
onto her niece as mediator between the two cultures between which
the immigrants live. Maxine clearly situates herself between Chinese
and American, Ling notes, attributing an identity to herself through
the modulation of voice.10 Her command of English (or American)
allows the younger woman to transliterate her parents and her aunts
rejection of American culture into an expression of that same culture.
Through Maxines acts of narrative revision by translation, the cycle
of doom is broken and the past digested,11 the spell of the Others
invisibility is broken. Though still called ghosts, albeit in written
English, the younger Chinese, just like their unidentified aunt, whose
fragmented story of transgression keeps haunting the family even in
America, assume material form as their lives are transferred onto
paper.
Writing in English to undo the Chinese immigrants rhetoric of
denial and its tragic consequences, Kingston knows, is anything but a
9
The Mandarin word for ink is m shu or m shuir.

Amy Ling, Maxine Hong Kingston and the Dialogic Dilemma of Asian
American Writers, in Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Laura E.
Skandera-Trombley, 174.
11
Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent Americna
Literature, Charlottesville: Va, 1998, 11.
10
404
harmless enterprise. While for her people disowning somebody by

tacit denial is punishment, telling on another person is revenge. The
idioms for revenge, she explains, are report a crime and report to
five families: The reporting is the vengeance not the beheading,
not the gutting, but the words (WW, 53). In giving a name to a crime,
in revoking it in writing, the culprits guilt and shame are made both
public and permanent. While in the eyes of her parents a language of
ghosts and therefore invisible and inaudible at once, English, as the
medium in which Maxine conceives her Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts, represents a potent means of self-assertion.12 In
exposing her parents prejudices and superstitions and recording their
gruesome tales about China, in disclosing carefully tended family
secrets and revealing her relatives hidden fears and resentments,
Kingston, apart from breaking the silence she has cultivated to make
herself American-feminine (WW, 155), reacts to the injuries she has
received from her own people; or, as Rabine rightly notes,
She transforms the oral story into writing and by this act denies the
power of the community that maintains its cohesiveness through the
oral tradition. A story that is oppressive when orally transmitted
within the context of family and community is liberating when
transformed into writing.13
In the process, she extracts herself from the story into which she
has been willed by her mother, the story of a woman warrior, deeply
rooted in Chinese traditions, fighting her parents cause in America
disguised as an interpreter, typist, airline attendant or, perhaps, even as
a doctor. Though Brave Orchids daughter concedes, The
swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar (WW, 53), she finally
subverts the designated position defined by her mothers past
experience.14 What we have in common are the words at our backs
she explains. And I have so many words chink words and gook
words too that they do not fit on my skin (WW, 53). Yet, this does
not mean that she must re-enact the legend of Fa Mu Lans perfect
12
This is suggested here in spite of David Leiwei Lis charge that the Western
critics hope for the salvation of the Asian American female through the power of the
English language is an expression merely of colonialist benevolence (Lee, 197).
13
Leslie W. Rabine, No Lost Paradise: Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in
the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, in Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman
Warrior: A Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, 95.
14
Yuan, 299 and 298.
405
filiality, according to which the woman warrior has oaths and names
carved on her back by her father, along with her peoples grievances
and her parents address so that the loyal daughter may never forget
them and always find her way back to her kin (WW, 40). The futility
of the mission for which, she suspects, her mother has loosened her
tongue by cutting her frenum is only too obvious to the narrator/author
of The Woman Warrior, who comically reflects,
To avenge my family, Id have to storm across China to take back our
farm from the Communists; Id have to rage across the United States
to take back the laundry in New York and the one in California.
Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and
Asia. (WW, 50)
In resorting to writing, rather than, like her mythical role model, to

more concrete forms of combat, Brave Orchids daughter achieves her
own emancipation from the traditional Chinese ideal of the warrior.
For, in Chinese, wu, warrior, like zhi, raw material, not yet
polished or decorated, is an antonym of wen, which signifies a set of
marks combining to form a simple written character, while also
referring to the vein in stone or the grain in wood, to bird tracks, to
the tracings on a tortoise shell, and, by extension, to literature,
courtesy, and manners.15 By implication, then, her decision to wage
her personal war in letters enables Kingston to synthesize the
opposing principles of chaos and order, destruction and creation,
barbarity and civilization, represented by wu and wen. What she
accomplishes is a text using the language and script of one culture to
capture the specificity of another and in so doing give expression to
her acceptance of her own hybridity.
Though a novel focussed on the theme of immigration to America,
The Woman Warrior barely relates this acceptance to her personas
assimilation into Anglophone, let alone Caucasian, American culture,
but construes it almost entirely as a matter of finding ones place in
the community of Chinese Americans. For Maxine, this mainly means
defining this place in relation to her mother. Though she may tell her
mother towards the end of the novel, Ive found some places in this
country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there ..., she knows
that she cannot avoid her childhood home forever. The daughter
15
Martin, 20.
406
realizes that she must reconcile herself not only to the difference that
separates her from Brave Orchid but also to the sameness that creates
a lasting bond between them. Not closing without the accomplishment
of this reconciliation, The Woman Warrior may be said to end on a
highly optimistic note.
Still, there is a profoundly sad side to Kingstons discovery of
herself within her mother, closely related to her literacy in English and
her decision to become a writer. This transpires when one considers
the career recounted in The Woman Warrior in the context of
Kingstons family history: Kingstons father had received a rigorous
education in China for a career as a professional scholar. He had
studied the ancient Chinese classics, traditional Chinese philosophy,
poetry, and calligraphy, before he went to America to work as a
window washer and gradually save enough money to invest in a
laundry. Unlike most Chinese women of their generation, Kingstons
aunts and her mother could read. In early twentieth-century China, this
in itself was unusual. Kingstons mother even had trained in medicine
and midwifery, run a practice as a Western-style physician, and
superintended a field hospital during the Second World War. Upon
her arrival in America, she, too, had to discover that there was no
demand for her expertise in the American medical system. The only
work she found was as a tomato picker, cannery worker, and housecleaner.16
In The Woman Warrior, Kingston does not openly address how her
parents removal from their intellectually stimulating professions must
have exacerbated their sense of deprivation and displacement in
America. Still, she tries to reconstruct at great length the life her
mother must have led as a physician, highly respected for her learning,
indeed, renowned for being brilliant, a natural scholar who could
glance at a book and know it (WW, 63). When after her medical
training, Brave Orchid returned to her home village a doctor,
Kingstons story runs, she was welcomed with garlands and cymbals
the way people welcome the barefoot doctors today:
My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she
rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had gone away ordinary and
16
E.D. Huntley, Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion, Critical

Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, Westport: Conn, 2001, 1-2.
407
come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down
from the mountains.
When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagers said Ahhh,
at my good shoes and my long gown. I was always dressed well when
I made my calls. Some villagers brought out their lion and danced
ahead of me . (WW, 73-74)
In China, we learn, Brave Orchid was even rich enough to keep a

slave, whose excellent skills included a high command of the Chinese
script. Before Brave Orchid buys this slave, she puts her to the test.
The irony with which Kingston invests the corresponding scene is so
subtle that it almost escapes the reader: Pondering whether she should
buy the girl or not, Brave Orchid produces an American pencil of all
things. With it, she writes something in Chinese, a felicitous word
such as longevity or double joy, which she then shows to the girl,
telling her, that if she is able to memorize and reproduce it correctly,
she will buy her (WW, 77). In the United States, the same proud
woman doctor and employer of a slave is little more than a slave to
her husband, to her customers, and to the ghosts she believes either to
have followed her to America or who want to drive her back to China.
Although Kingston portrays Brave Orchid as a deeply superstitious
and fiercely intolerant, if not paranoid and xenophobic female, her
narrative makes allowances for her bitter resentment. You have no
idea how much I have fallen coming to America, Brave Orchid
rebukes her children not entirely without reason (WW, 74). After all,
her sons and daughters seem to have no way of knowing what their
mother has forfeited by coming to America. Indeed, to foreground
their ignorance Kingston lets it surface in the narrators language,
which, she tells Brownmiller, is meant to sound a lot more naive than
I am.17 Why didnt you teach me English? (WW, 48), Kingston has
her persona thoughtlessly reprove her mother, thereby exposing the
daughters indifference to Brave Orchids exclusion from the ghosts
language and blindness to the shame associated with her cripplingly
poor command of English.
Occasional slippages in her narrative betray that the daughter (at
least as a woman writer or writing warrior) is not completely ignorant
of her mothers handicap. For instance, she recalls how her parents
once were called to her school to account for the disorderly behaviour
17
Brownmiller, 177.
408
their daughter had been displaying. In her reconstruction of the

incident, the narrator lets slip that the teachers looked serious, talked
seriously too, but [that her] parents did not understand English
(emphasis added, WW, 149). Likewise, on another occasion, when
explaining why Brave Orchid, herself a surgeon, could not do as
Moon Orchids husband did and practise openly in the United States,
she has the mother curtly retort that this was because she could never
learn English, because she was not smart enough to learn ghost
ways (WW, 135).
It is only indirectly, through the story of Brave Orchids sister
Moon Orchid, that Kingston explores what it must have meant for an
educated Chinese woman like her mother to come to live in a culture
in which she is essentially deaf, dumb, and illiterate. Persuaded by her
sister to join her in the United States, seek out her unfaithful husband,
and force him to take her in as his lawful wife, Moon Orchid
emigrates to America to relive the trauma of Third Wife whom her
father had brought back from his travels and whose language nobody
understood: At first she talked constantly ... After a while she never
talked any more (WW, 81). Rather than as a gradual process of
disintegration, Moon Orchids retreat into silence and a state of
confusion in which her inability to understand English no longer
matters is described as an abrupt change triggered by her encounter
with her husband, who deals her a fatal blow by declaring her unfit to
live in his house because she would not be able to speak to his
important American guests. You cant talk to them, he blames
her, You can barely talk to me (WW, 139). It is from Moon Orchids
reaction that the reader can glean the enormity of the insult she has
received:
Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She
wished she could also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked
like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like
a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and
they had become ghosts. (WW, 139)
Disowned by her husband and, hence, annihilated socially, Moon

Orchid believes herself deserving of further destruction and is
suddenly seized by paranoid fears that some ghost, possibly Mexican,
because she cannot speak Spanish either, might be plotting against her
life. Eventually, there is no other solution for Brave Orchid than to
409
have her admitted to a mental asylum. Shortly before Moon Orchid

dies, she tells her sister, who has come to visit her in the hospital:
Oh Sister, I am so happy here .... we understand one another here. We
speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I
understand them. (WW, 144)
The story of Moon Orchid precedes the final chapter of the novel,
which is titled A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe. Before it closes
with a short tale of the poetess Tsai Yen and the song she invents to
the sound of the reed pipes played by the barbarians who hold her
captive, this last section of The Woman Warrior thematizes silence
and the failure to sing, or rather, to raise ones voice enough to be
heard singing. In the process, it compares Brave Orchids exclusion
from Anglophone American culture with the difficulties experienced
by her daughter as a result of her bilingual upbringing. With her shift
of focus from her mothers linguistic depravity to her own desperate
attempts at finding a voice to speak for herself, Kingstons
inscriptions of displacement and inarticulateness become significantly
more explicit. With an openness she seems unable to muster when
writing about Brave Orchids marginalized position, she records the
speechlessness, voicelessness, and silence inhibiting her as a child and
preventing her from developing a sense of belonging either to the
community of Chinese immigrants or to the other, the Anglophone
America.
The articulate manner with which she conveys, at least
retrospectively, the claustrophobia of her entrapment within her own
muteness is above all proof of the daughters eventual attainment of a
voice, of her cultivation of an adequate and effective way of selfexpression, central to which is her choice of English as the medium in
which to write her own stories. This choice, inevitably, leads to her
dissociation from her mothers stories and marks a break in the novel,
after which the figure of the mother recedes into the background. This
coincides with the beginning of a new chapter in which the narrator
recapitulates from a new distance the mothers habit of talking-story.
As she ultimately comprehends, this distance is both unavoidable and
necessary. For it at last facilitates the daughters acceptance of her role
as a translator whose accounts of her mothers predicament, even if
only imperfect reconstructions of the original story, fulfil a special
410
purpose in that they make Brave Orchids history accessible to nonAsian readerships.
It is the mediating capacity of the other cultures language or
instruments (such as the letters of the alphabet) to which the tale of
Tsai Yen alludes as it describes how the abducted woman begins to
express her sorrow in songs about China and about her family there.
Her words seemed to be Chinese, the story reads, but the
barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they
thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering
(WW, 186). An important role is assigned to Tsai Yens children in
the tale as intermediaries between the barbarians and their mother,
whose lament they help to make understandable (or at least audible) to
her captors. The children did not laugh, Kingston writes, but
eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter
campfires, ringed by barbarians (WW, 185). When Tsai Yen is
ransomed after twelve years in captivity, she brings her song back
from the savage lands. Though originally composed to the music of
the barbarians reed pipe, Tsai Yens own people readily adopt it and
sing it to their own instruments. The Eighteen Stanzas for a
Barbarian Reed Pipe, Kingston offers as a final observation at the
very end of her Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts, has become
an integral part of Chinese folklore because It translated well (WW,
185).
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE ILLITERATE DAUGHTER: JOY KOGAWAS OBASAN
The idea of linguistic transformation with which Maxine Hong

Kingston concludes The Woman Warrior is formulated also at the
beginning of Obasan. In the Foreword to the novel, Joy Kogawa
writes,
There is a silence that will not speak.
Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a
sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic
deep. To attend its voice is to embrace its absence ....
Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with
speech, there is in my life no living word .... Words, when they fall,
are pockmarks on the earth. They are hailstones seeking an
underground sea.1
There are truths unspoken and unwritten, meanings not yet

discovered, still unformulated. This is what the central character and
narrator of Obasan, Naomi Nakane, discovers as she searches for a
way of coming to terms with her familys disintegration and the
mystery of her mothers disappearance at the end of the Second World
War. To unearth deeper meanings, she eventually comprehends, one
must learn to conduct speaking and listening, writing and reading as
quests for the unsayable, for that which lies beyond what humans
believe imaginable, beyond the obvious and expected. As Devereux
puts it, Naomi must recover from the amniotic deep a freeing
word, or a language which liberates her.2 What Kingston allows to
be buried by language, underneath an avalanche of words uttered
1
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1983), New York, 1994, np (emphases added).

Cecily Devereux, The Body of Evidence: Re-Membering the Past in Joy
Kogawas Obasan, in Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian
Womens Writing, eds Coomi S. Vevaina and Barbara Godard, New Delhi, 1996, 23143. And in a comparison of Obasan and Beloved, Grewal notes that the terrain of
both novels is ... how to name that which is both unnamed and unnameable, how to
mediate silence and speech, and how to transform wreckage into a body of grace
(Gurleen Grewal, Memory and the Matrix of History: The Poetics of Loss and
Recovery in Joy Kogawas Obasan and Toni Morrisons Beloved, in Memory and
Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures, eds Amritjit
Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan, Boston, 1996, 142).
2
412
thoughtlessly, irrationally, often despairingly, and to devastating

effect, Kogawa has her characters embed with great care in silences to
protect others from hurt. What is accomplished by Brave Orchids and
Moon Orchids tirades, laments, warnings, and spells in The Woman
Warrior, is achieved by the strict abstinence from speech and writing
practised by Naomi Nakanes mother and aunt in Obasan. While
rendered unrecognizable by words in The Woman Warrior, truth is
made intangible by the absence of words in Obasan.
In both novels, signification, of which silence is but one variation
for Kogawa, becomes obsolete and demands renewal. For the sake of
such renewal the narrators ultimately resort to recording their stories
in a language of their own. By writing, they resolve inconsistencies,
fill vacancies in the tales they have received, explain to themselves in
their own terms what others have been unable to explain to them.
Often translation must suffice in the process as a means of
approximation to truths too difficult to tell. Indeed, in making bearable
what would cause excessive hurt if delivered as raw fact proves a way
of reconciliation with the past as well as with cultural difference.
To synthesize English and Asian narrative conventions, both
Kingston and Kogawa have the English-speaking narrators of The
Woman Warrior and Obasan reconstruct from memory and in
translation folktales their mothers once told them in Chinese and
Japanese, respectively. Remarkably, in each novel one of these tales is
about a child living in idyllic seclusion with an elderly couple until the
time comes for that child to leave in order to explore and conquer
foreign lands. Yet this is already where the similarity ends between
Kingstons use of the tale of the lonely warrior and Kogawas way of
integrating it in her novel. While in The Woman Warrior, the chant of
Fa Mu Lan represents an idealizing account of the heroines
unparalleled bravery, her stoic endurance of barely imaginable
hardships, and her glorious victories won in the disguise of a male,
Naomis recollections of the Momotaro-story in Obasan remain
rigorously limited to the heros unencumbered life with the old old
man and the old old woman, white-haired and bent double with age
(O, 66). Moreover, while Maxine recalls the tale of Fa Mu Lan with
mixed unease, feeling that it sums up her alienation from her mother,
Naomi, in her own retelling of the Momotaro-story, salvages a sense
of the harmonious togetherness her mothers descriptions of the aged
couple and their whispery rice-paper house (O, 66) would convey.
The Illiterate Daughter
413
The act brings back to the narrator of Obasan delicious moments

of closeness to her mother, moments she cherishes fondly as a gift,
round and complete as an unopened peach ready for a fresh feasting
(O, 67). Symptomatically, Naomi recalls that, not even when
Momotaro had finally to set out on his journey, was the understanding
between him and his grandparents spoilt either by sadness or by
resentment:
... silence falls like feathers of snow all over the rice-paper hut, she
relates. Inside the hands are slow .... There are no tears and no touch.
Grandfather and Grandmother are careful, as he goes, not to weight
his pack with their sorrow. (O, 67)
In Naomis shortened version of the Momotaro-story, the hero never

returns, nor does there seem to be any urgency for him to do so. After
all, unlike Fa Mu Lan, Momotaro does not carry with him, inscribed
on his back, the sufferings and expectations of his elders. This leaves
him free to travel while the old folks wait, alone in the misty
mountains and knowing that What matters in the end, what matters
above all, more than their loneliness or fears, is that Momotaro behave
with honor. At all times what matters is to act with a fine intent (O,
68).
The noble discretion of Momotaros grandparents, the sense of
freedom their stories instil in their grandson, and the faith they place
in him that he will never disgrace them strike a chord in Naomi who
remarks of her own childhood:
I cannot remember that I was ever reprimanded or punished for
anything, although that seems strange and unlikely now. The concept
that a child could do wrong did not seem to exist. There was no need
for crying. (O, 68)
It is the perfect unanimity among Japanese Canadians to which

Kogawa here alludes, the affectionate trust of the older members of
the immigrant community in the younger generation, and their willing
acceptance of their otherness that form the most obvious thematic
contrast between Obasan and The Woman Warrior. The reasons for
this contrast are not difficult to make out. While both Kogawa and
Kingston record the progressive fragmentation of the ethnic
communities to which they belong, their own experience forces them
414
to understand this fragmentation in completely different terms.

Kingston narrates it as a psychologically complex process of cultural
assimilation and mutual estrangement. Kogawa attributes it to crude
measures of liquidation employed by the Canadian government
against its Japanese citizens in reaction to the Japanese bombing of
Pearl Harbour. In other words, while Kingston accuses the ethnic
community itself of allowing its social fabric to tear under the strain of
dislocation, Kogawa blames external forces openly and wholesale for
the destruction of her protagonists family and of so many other
Japanese Canadian families during and after the Second World War.
In the context of this specification, cultural assimilation is explored
not, as in The Woman Warrior, for its effects on individual
immigrants and their families but for how it is itself affected by
immigration policies which propagate assimilation as the immigrants
responsibility, yet prevent such assimilation wherever this seems
opportune. This contradiction remains a central theme throughout
Kogawas novel as it exposes the racist practices assumed by the
Canadian government against subjects of Japanese origin in the wake
of the events of 7 December 1941. Obasan is an emphatic assertion of
Canadianness of these citizens, strategically portraying them as people
who have grown up on a daily fare of English literature including the
tales of Peter Rabbit, the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, Anne
of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Girl of the Limberlost, and The
Prince and the Pauper. They are proud owners of King George/Queen
Elizabeth mugs commemorating the royal visit, who hoist the Union
Jack at the top of their gardens, and whose children enjoy making
scrapbooks of the Royal Family.
The instances Kogawa offers as proof of the loyalty of her
Japanese characters to the British Crown form an ironic contrast not
only to the charge of collective treason brought against Japanese
Canadians. As illustrations of their willing mimicry of a patriotism
reduced to the thoughtless perpetuation of colonial clichs, these
instances also qualify the subtle ways in which Kogawas characters
express their national pride in their own words: I am Canadian,
Naomi, for example, finds written in her aunts manuscript. The
statement is underlined and circled in red, so hard that the paper was
torn (O, 47). On the same page she also discovers the following
declaration:
415
The exact moment when I first felt the stirrings of identification with
this country occurred when I was twelve years old, memorizing a
Canto of The Lady of the Last Minstrel.
So many times after that, I repeated the lines: sadly, desperately,
and bitterly. But at first I was proud, knowing that I belonged.
This is my own, my native land. (O, 47-48)
Aunt Emilys recollections grow into yet another canto or song

recounting how she would wave the words This is my own, my
native land around like a banner in the wind, when she was still
politically unenlightened, how she would cling desperately to them
once the war had started, and how the words changed into the
question: Is this my own, my native land?, after her home had been
sold and she herself re-registered, fingerprinted, card-indexed, roped
and restricted. Even then, she insists, the answer would remain the
same: Yes. It is. For better or worse, I am Canadian (O, 48).
The fact that Aunt Emilys medium of self-expression is not
Japanese but English is not commented upon in Obasan; nor is the
circumstance that the primary language of the narrator Naomi is also
English and that her tale and, as a direct consequence, the novel
Obasan, are conceived in English. It would be wrong, however, to
conclude from this that, for Kogawa, the linguistic preference of her
characters, and especially of her narrator, is not an issue. Rather the
absence of any explicit metadiscursive discussion of the subject needs
to be read as a deliberate omission whereby the author strategically
evades any definitive renunciation of the Japanese language and, with
it, of Japanese traditions. Instead of expressly excluding the possibility
of her characters recording their recollections in Japanese from the
outset, Kogawa implicitly sustains it for the sake of its deconstruction
at the point when the narrative begins to record the gradual
disappearance of the Japanese language from its characters lives.
Japanese words and phrases inserted in the narrative and then
translated, phonetically exact transcriptions of the broken and
characteristically accented English of the older Japanese Canadians,
recurrent accounts of gatherings held in a mixture of English and
Japanese may all create the impression of the characters oscillating
constantly and automatically between languages. Yet, the bilingual
nature of their oral exchanges only belies the corrosion to which the
older characters refer implicitly when they remark that the Nisei, the
second generation Japanese, are not very Japanese-like (O, 48) or
416
that the Sansei, the third generation Japanese, have become so

thoroughly Canadian (O, 100).
There are recurrent hints in Obasan that many of the Issei, the first
generation Japanese, speak no English at all or not enough to cope
with all the problems and regulations (O, 113). Their dependence on
younger Japanese for translations conveys probably most clearly how
redundant their language has become for them as Canadian citizens.
To survive in the Canada of the 1940s, turns out to be above all a
matter of being able to read all the printed material newspapers,
form letters, documents, and maps issued to administer and
publicize the measures dictated by the Canadian government against
its citizens of Japanese descent. Reading, for Naomis family, obtains
a new, sinister meaning. It is everything but and Extravagant, playful
act whose raison dtre has to be established. While in Chinese
American literature intellectual pursuits and art in particular tend to be
represented as antithetical to the self-justifyingly serious activities,
in Obasan reading and writing are also identified as activities serving
utterly profane purposes.3 Before the novel can reflect on literature as
self-expression, it must deal with these. For, as Kogawa herself
declares, The minority writers project begins with the act of defining
or naming the enemy, the wolves that youre supposed to be
attacking.4 In describing the gross perversions to which the Canadian
authorities would subject the written word in the name of patriotism,
Kogawa exposes a particularly evil side to that enemy, thus taking
into her own hands the naming power previously possessed only by
the dominant group.5
The wanted lists and blacklists of Nisei marked out for deportation,
the signs posted on all highways saying Japs Keep out (O, 103), the
letters in the papers declaring the Japanese a lower order of people,
stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada (O, 139-40), and
demanding that further propagation of the species be prevented (O,
116) in order to preserve the British way of life, are all illustrations
of what Aunt Emily later identifies as the palpable power of print,
wondering how she and all the other Japanese could have failed to
notice the blatant lies issued by the government, the false promises,
3
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Culture: From Necessity to

Extravagance, Princeton, 1993, 166.
4
Kogawa, quoted in Devereux, 232.
5
Devereux, 233.
417
the overtly racist accusations. What a bunch of sheep we were, she

blames herself retrospectively: Polite. Meek. All the way up the
slaughterhouse ramp (O, 45). By the time Naomis family begin to
grasp the seriousness of their situation they no longer possess any
effective means of protest. The Japanese newspapers in Canada have
been closed down, letters and postcards by Japanese subjects are
censored, whole families are moved to places with no provision for
the education of their children. We are the despised rendered
voiceless, Naomi writes, describing their elimination from Canadian
culture, stripped of car, radio, camera, and every means of
communication, a trainload of eyes covered with mud and spittle .
We are the scholarly and the illiterate (O, 132).
As the communication within the community breaks down, no
incentive to maintain the Japanese language remains. Where there are
schools, the adults decide that it would be unwise to allow their
charges to attend Japanese-language classes. At the same time, they
find it wise and politic to hide their childrens too overtly Japanese
first names (Tak for Takao, Sue for Sumiko, Mary for Mariko) and
to shorten long, unspellable, unpronounceable surnames. My books
are signed M. Naomi N., or Naomi M.N., Naomi explains: If
Megumi were the only name I had, Id be called Meg. (O, 241) All
this takes place after the homes of the Japanese have been looted and
their personal mementos of Japan stolen or destroyed, among them
ornaments, musical instruments and scrolls, items symbolizing more
than the owners attachment to a place, namely, their attachment to
something other than a purely British Canadian culture.
In correspondence with Kogawas understanding of silences,
absences, vacancies, and voids not as signs of nothingness but as first
manifestations of an imminent process of restoration, replenishment,
or completion,6 her narrative swiftly shifts at this point from an
6
Seeing this presupposes a departure from the conventional negative
understanding of silence applied, for instance, in Devereux reading of Obasan,
according to which silence is denial and amputation, while the finding of voice is the
texts process of remembering (236). In line with this reading, Devereux perceives
the enduring silence of Naomis mother as a sign of her erasure. By contrast, Manina
Jones at least senses that Obasan enacts a kind of paradox: it is its own wake, the
celebration of a story that is both lost and found (Manina Jones, The Avenues of
Speech and Silence: Telling Difference in Joy Kogawas Obasan, in Theory between
the Disciplines: Authority/Vision/Politics, eds Martin Kreiswirth and Mark A.
Cheetham, Ann Arbour: Mich, 1999, 228). This remains reconcilable with the
understanding of silence in Kogawa proposed here, namely not as a suppression, but
418
account of what her characters have lost to a description of how they

continue life after this loss. There is a word for it, Naomi writes in
an attempt to give a name to the new life she and her family try to live
without all those objects in which their cultural identity used to be
encoded. Hardship is the word that comes to her mind and that, for
Naomi, epitomizes this other life. By hardship she means in the first
place a life without refinement, without luxury, without the benefits of
culture, a life in such squalor and discomfort that it eventually kills the
human subjects responsiveness to such things as beauty, learning, and
civility. Is it so bad?, Naomi remembers her Aunt Emily, who was
spared deportation and forced labour, asking incredulously. Do I
really mind?, she also asks herself and concludes: Yes, I mind. I
mind everything. For even in retrospect there is no way of not
minding the rawness of the life they were forced to lead, exiled to the
margins of the culture in which she had grown up:
The flies and flies and flies from the cows in the barn and the manure
pile all the black flies that curtain the windows ....
Its the chicken coop house we live in that I mind. The uninsulated
unbelievable thin-as-cotton-dress hovel never before inhabited in
winter by human beings ....
Its the bedbugs and my having to sleep on the table to escape the
nightly attack, and the welts over our bodies. And all the swamp bugs
and the dust . And the muddy water from the irrigation ditch ... and
the tiny carcasses at the bottom of the cup .
Or its standing in the beet field . We are tiny insects crawling
along the grill and there is no protection anywhere. The eyes are
lidded against the dust and the air cracks the skin, the lips crack,
Stephens flutes crack and there is no energy to sing anymore ....
There are no other people in the entire world. We work together all
day. At night we eat and sleep. We hardly talk anymore. The boxes we
brought from Slocan are not unpacked. The King George/Queen
Elizabeth mugs stay muffled in the Vancouver Daily Province. The
cameraphone does not sing. (O, 233-36)
One important discovery Naomi makes as she tries to describe the

horrors of her years in exile is that these horrors can be told, that her
as a deferral of articulation, as a protective measure chosen to let a story, or history
grow with time and give it a chance to be disclosed at the right moment, that is, when
it is no longer hurtful. This certainly is the main motive for Obasans protracted
silence and nowhere in the novel is this criticized as a loss or waste of time.
419
language, English, does suffice to capture them, that she herself

possesses the capacity to retrieve what she has always believed too
unbearable to remember. Yet, while forced to admit the feasibility of a
personal history contesting the official stories of forever grinning and
happy Japanese evacuees, she remains convinced of the futility of
such an endeavour. The misuses of writing she herself has witnessed
during her childhood and adolescence, to her, are only repeated by the
paper battles fought by Aunt Emily, always erasing, rewriting,
underlining, trying to find the right mix that strikes home (O, 49),
and by people like her aunt, clack[ing] away at their typewriters,
spreading word like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky,
having their desperation gathered into cool print by the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians (O, 225). For Naomi,
Aunt Emilys angry writings, all her papers, the telegrams and
petitions, are like scratchings in the barnyard, the evidence of much
activity, scaly claws hard at work. What good they do, those little
black typewritten words rainwords, cloud droppings (O, 226), she
confesses, she does not know. After all, writing cannot undo what
happened. It cannot substitute reality. It cannot change the truth but
only generate different versions of it. The words are not made flesh,
she declares: Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again.
All my prayers disappear into space (O, 226).
Naomis doubts in language as a means of expressing or exorcising
the pain she and her relatives had to suffer are enforced by the
realization that Aunt Emilys battles for compensation will never undo
the damage caused. Seeing that there is no way of ever redressing
completely the injustices done, Naomi has no other option than to
renounce Aunt Emilys policy of verbal protest and to follow the
example of her other obasan, which is the Japanese word for aunt.
In contrast to her sister, Obasan has retreated into absolute silence,
not, however, out of a survivalist intention to forget, nor merely to
give herself up to silent grief, as Gurleen Grewal suggests.7 The
actual meaning of the stoic silence in which Obasan and Uncle have
ensconced themselves surfaces when they for once break it and
intercept one of Aunt Emilys tirades by calmly asserting their
gratitude, which is a movingly humble gratitude for life even to
7
Grewal uses this term in her analysis of Toni Morrisons novel Beloved to
explain Sethes categorical negation of the past and compare it to Obasans refusal to
speak about bygone things (159).
420
Canada. Arigatai. Gratitude only, the quiet little aunt announces, to

which her husband, who had been listening tensely up to this point,
adds emphatically:
In the world, there is no better place .... This country is the best. There is food.
There is medicine. There is pension money. Gratitude. Gratitude. (O, 50)
As the unexpected proclamation of the elderly couple reveals,

complete abstinence from speech does not mean that there is nothing
to say. Grewal quite aptly defines Uncles and Obasans taciturnity as
a language of silence.8 Analogously, Devereux proposes reading the
figure of the little aunt as the novels eponymous centre and
primary repository of memory,9 as a text upon whom is inscribed a
language that must be interpreted.10 In Kogawas own words, Obasan
is the bearer of keys to unknown doorways and to a network of
astonishing tunnels ... the possessor of lifes infinite personal details
(O, 18-19). Even if her frail body seems so drained of energy that
Naomi feels the time is approaching for her aunt to die, even if her
incomprehensible mumbling, occasionally interrupted by incongruous,
yet still intelligible remarks, leads her niece to believe that the old
woman must be lost in utter confusion, Obasan does not embody total
defeat. Her suffering has not, as her niece suspects, turned her to
stone. Blinded by her concern for her aunt, Naomi is unable to see
that, though seemingly indifferent to Aunt Emilys efforts to
recuperate the past, Obasan is far from indifferent to the past itself. As
turns out, she is not as unlike her younger sister as Naomi thinks. The
elder of her aunts may have been born in Japan and the younger in
Canada, yet they both share the same origin, the same history, the
same family name. They are both childless survivors, and devoted
aunts of Naomis and sisters of Naomis mother.
As such both feel responsible to protect their niece from the truth
about her mothers disappearance during a visit to Japan in 1945. On
this one point the sisters are united in silence. In finally allowing this
silence to be broken, they bring about the closure towards which they
have both been propelling the narrative from opposite directions. Yet,
not even to this end, does Obasan speak up. Instead she has a
longstanding friend of the family disclose the secret she and her sister
8
Ibid., 147.
Devereux, 238.
10
Ibid., 240.
9
421
have been keeping from Naomi. It is the priest Nakayama-sensei who

at last reads out to Naomi and her brother Stephen the last letters their
family ever received from Grandma Kato in Japan. He has to impart
the contents of these letters orally to Stephen and Naomi because they
cannot read the Japanese writing on the thin sheets of blue-lined ricepaper kept in two envelopes about as narrow and long as bank
cheques. Early on in the novel, Naomi comes across these letters for
the first time as she finds Obasan reading them, holding the
magnifying glass about two inches from the sheet (O, 55). The scene
anticipates Naomis later dependence on another person to access her
own personal history.
The idea of people functioning for each other as media through
which to attain knowledge about oneself occurs to Naomi when she
tries to interrogate Obasan about the mysterious letters. Her aunt says
nothing, yet the old womans small hand travelling over the table like
an electrocardiograph needle, delicate and unreadable (O, 55) tells
her that there is a truth her prodding questions have failed to elicit.
The conception of the human subject as a text to be read, studied, and
deciphered and, conversely, of the act of reading as a profoundly
intimate exchange between humans is also expressed at a later point in
the novel when Naomi recalls her brother imparting to her the
contents of a letter from their father:
One time Stephen was reading a letter Father sent but I did not know
where Father was. The handwriting in the letter was as even as waves
along the beach, row on row of neat curls and dots, perfect pebbles
and shells on an ordered shore. I could only stare at the waves as
Stephen deciphered their code. Father was telling us to be like
Ninomiya Kinjiro, to help Obasan, and to study hard. (O, 160)
The reliance of the pre-school child Naomi, who cannot read, on her
elder brother to reveal to her the meaning of her fathers handwriting
is revoked when the adult Naomi, herself a teacher of English at a
Canadian school, listens to her former teacher Nakayama-sensei, who
finally answers the question everyone else has always been evading:
What is written? (O, 279). A matter of a long time ago, the priest
replies:
Senso no toki in the time of war your mother. Your grandmother.
That there is suffering and their deep love. (O, 279)
422
It is not simply the reading-out of some old letters that follows. Along
with the words in the grandmothers letters, what Nakayama-sensei
offers is an exegesis by someone whose authority is founded on more
than a sound knowledge of the Japanese script, someone capable of
discerning when tactful kindness is needed in his reading:
He reads the letters in silence once more, then begins reading aloud.
The letter is addressed to Grandpa Kato. It is clear as he reads that the
letters were never intended for Stephen and me. They were written by
Grandma Kato.
...
Senseis faltering voice is almost drowned out by the splattering
gusts against the window. I stare at the gauze-curtained windows and
imagine the raindrops sliding down the glass, black on black. In the
sound of the howling outside, I hear other howling.
Sensei pauses as he reads. Naomi, he says softly, Stephen, your
mother is speaking. Listen carefully to her voice.
Many of the Japanese words sound strange and the language is
formal. (O, 279)
As always in Obasan, yet more overtly than anywhere else, reading

is described as a communal event here. It is neither a solipsistic
process nor one that takes place in silence, but an experience that
restores the ethnic we, or what Illich and Sanders have termed the
educated community.11 The mother at last speaks through Grandma
Katos letters and through Nakayama-senseis voice to her children.
This is made possible by the priests willingness to act as a medium
through which the truth contained in the letters can reach his listeners
undistorted. Stevens and Naomis illiteracy is not a lonely condition
either, but, almost miraculously, the cause of a new togetherness
shared orally. In capturing this togetherness, Obasan confers meaning
onto scriptlessness as cultural difference potentially capable of
occasioning social regeneration.
What in the end distinguishes Naomi from Aunt Emily is that
Naomi learns to absorb the past as she remembers it with the help of
the written evidence she can obtain, whereas her aunt never ceases to
try and change it. The difference that ultimately crystallizes between
Naomi and Obasan, in turn, is that Naomi does not re-enact her
11
Illich and Sanders, 123.
423
mothers silence about the extremity of her sudden defacement and

gradual dying but chooses to translate it, to make finally visible and
audible the cacophony life wrote into [her mothers] bones (O, 294).
The letters tonight are skeletons. Bones only, Naomi concedes,
adding: But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms (O, 292).
While Aunt Emilys protest remains directed against an anonymous
enemy making its appearance in the form of public protests against the
Canadian governments enduring racism, Naomis writing is an
intensely personal protest against her uncles, her mothers, and
Obasans silence. Gentle Mother, she writes, we were lost together
in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction (O,
291). Let there be flesh, she pleads: The song of mourning is not a
lifelong song (O, 295).
Her quest for another song, another language than that of silent
grief leads Naomi to another form of writing, one readable even by
those who cannot read, one that requires not conventional literacy
skills but an ability to recognize and decode more basic clues to lifes
secrets, a sensitivity to the subtleties of silence, to that which is not
spelt out in letters. Rescuing/writing her maternal and racial past12 is
only one purpose of Naomis narration. Another is to rescue a use of
language and letters with which she can identify:
Father, Mother, my relatives, my ancestors, we have come to the
forest tonight, to the place where the colors all meet red and yellow
and blue. We have turned and returned to your arms as you turn to
earth and form the forest floor. Tonight we picked berries with the
help of your sighted hands. Tonight we read the forest braille. See
how our stained fingers have read the seasons, and how our serving
hands still serve you. (O, 295)
Not without reason this passage is reminisicent of the ending of

Patricia Graces novel Potiki. With the direct address to Naomis
diseased relatives, fashioned as a ceremonious appeal to an imaginary
congregation, the novel finally draws attention to itself as Naomis
poetics put into practice. This poetics is founded on an understanding
of creative writing as a way of preserving what less thoughtful uses of
the written word destroy. The imagery of the narrators hands getting
12
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Japanese American Womens Life Stories: Maternality
in Monica Sones Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawas Obasan, Feminist Studies,
XVI/2 (Summer 1990), 307.
424
stained by the juice of the berries growing on what, to her, is ancestral

land, suggests her willingness to accept the traces that her past leaves
on her. Her body becomes the paper on which her family inscribe their
story. Unlike in The Woman Warrior, this inscription is not a painful
tattooing, but painless, impermanent, and, most importantly, visible
also to the person inscribed. She offers herself as a medium for others
and does so, like Nakayama-sensei, humbly but by choice. In the
event she assumes not authority over, but responsibility for her
familys history. Her experience of her own dependence on others to
read out to her signs of the past has enabled her to understand this fine
difference.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GENERATIONS OF ILLITERACY:
AMY TANS THE BONESETTERS DAUGHTER
With her vision of a modality of writing different from anything her

aunts, her mother, and she herself have experienced, Kogawa allows
Obasan to end on a note not at all dissimilar from the tonality in
which Kingston concludes The Woman Warrior by revoking the
mythical figure of Tsai Yen and her Song for a Barbarian Reed
Pipe. For the daughters in both novels, a reconciliation of the past
and the present, of their Eastern and Western origins, of their mothers
otherness and sameness ultimately becomes possible. As the daughters
gradually come to accept their own hyphenated identities in the
process of remembering or rewriting their mothers stories, the novels
suspend any hard and fast distinctions between Western and Eastern
traditions of thinking, Western and Eastern conceptions of truth,
Western and Eastern literacies. Indeed, the distinctions between the
different cultural backgrounds of the narrator protagonists blur. Their
narratives, although conceived in English and containing only
translations of Chinese or Japanese words and only descriptions of
Chinese (or Japanese) ideographs, turn out to be truly hybrid
expressions of their hybrid personae.
Amy Tans novel The Bonesetters Daughter describes a similar
development. It recounts the gradual metamorphosis of the youngest
of the three female protagonists, Ruth Luyi Young, daughter of a
Chinese immigrant to the United States, from a professional ghost
writer to a real writer, from a co-author to an author in her own right,
from the small-type name that followed with1 on the title page of
her publications to the large-type name accrediting authorship to her
alone. As in The Woman Warrior and Obasan, in The Bonesetters
Daughter, the gradual acquisition by the daughter figure of an ability
to tell her story in her own terms, in her own language, and according
to the writing tradition in which she feels most at home, is contingent
on her learning to understand her mother. To this end, Ruth must learn
about her mothers previous life in a culture practically unknown to
1
Amy Tan, The Bonesetters Daughter, London, 2001, 37.
426
her, but also obtain a measure for her own distance from that culture.
The completion of this learning process and the daughters emergence
from it as a writer is announced at the end of The Bonesetters
Daughter with the words,
Her ability to speak is not governed by curses or shooting stars or
illness. She knows that for certain now. But she does not need to talk.
She can write. Before she never had a reason to write for herself, only
for others. Now she has that reason. (BD, 337)
As a conclusion to Tans fictional exploration of the differences

between Chinese and American literate practices, Ruths final
espousal of writing in a creative act of self-expression also marks her
acceptance of her indebtedness to seemingly irreconcilable writing
traditions. In the event, her grandmother Bao Bomu, of whom Ruth
does not even know that she is her grandmother until the end of the
novel, is assigned the role of Ruths muse:
In the Cubbyhole, Ruth returns to the past. The laptop becomes a sand
tray. Ruth is six years old again, the same child, her broken arm
healed, her other hand holding a chopstick, ready to divine the words.
Bao Bomu comes, as always, and sits next to her. Her face is smooth,
as beautiful as it is in the photo. She grinds an inkstick into an
inkstone of duan.
Think about your intentions, Bao Bomu says. What is in your
heart, what you want to put in others. And side by side, Ruth and her
grandmother begin. Words flow. They have become the same person,
six years old, sixteen, forty-six, eighty-two. (BD, 338)
Bao Bomu is an artist, cultured and deserving of respect (BD,

188). This is how Ruths mother LuLing describes Bao Bomu to her
daughter and how Ruth images her in her own narrative. The only
child of a renowned bonesetter, Bao Bomu is well educated for a
Chinese woman of her time. However, the fact that she can read and
write fills others with profound suspicion and is seen as the source of
the disasters that befall her. Thus when on her wedding day her father
and husband-to-be are brutally murdered, she is only grudgingly
accepted into her fiancs family. They take her in because she is
pregnant, but, to avert the disgrace an illegitimate child would bring
on them, insist that Bao Bomu should henceforth be known as
Precious Auntie, not mother but aunt by name only to LuLing. Bao
Generations of Illiteracy
427
Bomu accepts the arrangement and watches her daughter grow up in

the rich family of ink-makers. To be able to stay close to LuLing, Bao
Bomu abstains from disclosing the identity of her fathers and her
husbands murderer, who is a friend of the family, until LuLing
consents to marry this man. To warn her daughter, Bao Bomu writes
to her, yet irritated by her alleged aunts interference, LuLing neglects
to read her letter. Instead she announces her engagement, thereby
driving her mother to commit suicide.
Bao Bomu cuts her throat with a knife used for carving inkstones.
Clearly, the way Precious Auntie chooses to extract herself from the
family of ink-makers, into which she would have been properly
married except for her fiancs premature death on their wedding day,
lends special meaning to her self-destruction as a symbolic
renunciation of her literacy. It is not for the first time that Bao Bomu
tries to symbolically disown this privilege. Years earlier, after
witnessing the brutal murder of her father and her bridegroom, she
takes to the same ink-studio in which she is found dead after her
dispute with her daughter to poison herself with burning resin. Yet the
oily ink, ablaze as a blue soup of flames (BD, 167), instead of
killing the bonesetters daughter, disfigures her face and renders her
speechless for life. Defaced and muted, Bao Bomu becomes more than
ever dependent on writing for communication and on her inky hands
(BD, 157) to say what her mutilated mouth can no longer say.
These hands yield characters particularly fine and more like
painting than writing, very expressive, running down like cloud-swept
branches (BD, 188). Many years after Bao Bomus tragic death, her
granddaughter Ruth still marvels at the beauty of her grandmothers
writing, which, however, she is unable to read. From her mother, Ruth
learns that to bring forth such writing requires intense labour. This is
how Bao Bomu once explained the art of calligraphy to LuLing, at
least in LuLings reconstruction of the past:
Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out of a bottle. You
can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the
problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You
simply write what is swimming at the top of your brain. And the top is
nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when
you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step of
cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself.
428

What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind?
(BD, 189)
By the end of the novel Ruth seems to have freed herself from the
conviction her mother believes to have inherited from Precious Auntie
that the actual act of writing must be conducted with great effort so as
to cleanse the writers mind and heart. Ruth ultimately endorses the
view that, under certain circumstances, writing can also be performed
with great ease. To her, words at last come automatically,
effortlessly. They simply flow. Yet, what at first glance seems to
mark Ruths break with her cultural legacy is framed as a reappropriation of it. For when Ruth applies herself to the new form of
writing she has found, Bao Bomu keeps appearing to her and, inspired
by her grandmothers voice, Ruth seems to reach what LuLings first
husband, Kai Jing once defined as the fourth and highest level of
beauty:
We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without
motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is
what innocent children have. It is what old masters regain once they
have lost their minds and become children again. (BD, 234)
If one accepts Kai Jings comforting idea that the fragmentation of

the human mind in old age signifies a return to the purity and ease
which perfect the beauty of childhood, then Ruths attainment of total
effortlessness in writing also marks her becoming one with her
mother, whose rapidly advancing dementia frees her from the pain of
all too accurate recollection. At the very beginning of the novel,
LuLing says to her daughter, we are the same but for opposite
reasons (BD, 1). Nowhere in The Bonesetters Daughter is this
observation truer than when, in the novels penultimate paragraph,
Ruth and Bao Bomu, granddaughter and grandmother, are envisioned
as writing together, about what could have been, what still might be
... of a past that can be changed. The Bao Bomu Ruth believes to
hear, poses the rhetorical question: what is the past but what we
choose to remember? (BD, 338). At last free like her mother to
change the past, to remember selectively, to shape her own story, Ruth
can commit herself to fiction writing as a celebration of human
subjectivity. She cannot have inherited such ease from Kai Jing, Ruth
knows, because he is not her biological father. But this does not
429
matter. What matters much more is that her mother once afforded the
luxury of erroneously including her in her Chinese past and
remembering Ruth as part of her life with Kai Jing. By a mistake
never explicitly corrected, Ruth momentarily becomes the
archaeologist Kai Jings daughter, not only passing on his wisdom of
the beauty of effortlessness but ultimately even re-enacting it in her
own writing. Because she has learnt to comprehend the relativity of
truth and to appreciate the significance of the minds slippages, Ruth
is able to do so even if Kai Jing is not really her father. The past,
even revised, was meaningful, she knows in the end (BD, 330).
Indeed, the only past available to Ruth is a revised one. Unable to
read her mothers notes herself, she is forced to commission
somebody to translate them for her and employs Mr Tang a survivor
of World War Two, the civil war in China, the Cultural Revolution,
and a triple coronary bypass (BD, 287) and a writer whose works,
while famous in China, have remained untranslated and unknown in
the United States. From the beginning, Mr Tang makes clear to Ruth
that he will not just transliterate word for word. I want to phrase it
more naturally, he explains, yet ensure these are your mothers
words, a record for you and your children for generations to come.
They must be just right (BD, 288).
Yet Mr Tangs interference into LuLings life story, into all the
things she didnt want to forget. The things she couldnt talk about
(BD, 315) is discrete. It remains limited to translations of Chinese
proper names into English: Precious Auntie for Bao Bomu,
Immortal Heart for Xian Xin, the name of GaoLings and LuLings
home village, End of the World for momo meiyou, the ravine
outside the village into which the dead body of Precious Aunties was
thrown. With the help of an aunt, Ruth can easily construct these
translations. Indeed, as the aunt sounds out the originals, they acquire
additional meaning. Thus the translation provides not only a record of
past events but marks the beginning of Ruths reintroduction to the
language she failed to learn when she was younger:2
Or as Lee puts it, Translation releases the foreignness, the unfamiliar part
within the text/culture itself. It is through the process of mutual translation . that
two cultures or two worlds come into existence and are endowed with new meanings
(Lee, 121).
430

Bao can mean Precious, or it can mean protect. Both are third
tone, baaaooo. And the mu part, that stand for mother, but when its
written in bao mu, the mu has an extra piece in front, so that the
meaning is more of a female servant. Bao mu is like saying babysitter, nursemaid. And bomu, thats auntie. I think her mother
taught her to say and write it this way. More special. (BD, 320)
The overall accuracy of his translations confirms Mr Tangs

authority as a mediator between the Chinese mother and her far more
American than Chinese daughter. In more than one respect, Mr Tang
resembles the figure of Nakayama Sensei whose knowledge of the
Japanese script renders him the prime administrator of truth in
Obasan. Like Sensei, Mr Tang assumes the role of a kind of father
substitute who reintegrates the alienated daughter into her family and,
with his disclosure of longstanding family secrets, effects the reunion
of a badly fragmented community. As in Obasan, rather than
confirming patriarchal hierarchies, the intervention of the male
translator covertly ironizes them as the occasion does not fail to
remind the reader that full command not only of two different
languages but of two different scripts, and, by implication, unlimited
freedom to move between two different cultures, are the prerogatives
of male members of the ethnic communities portrayed.
Conceived as an assertion of female literacy contesting
stereotypical associations of female ethnicity with orality and, more
specifically, of Chinese femininity with illiteracy, Maxine Hong
Kingstons autobiography, in turn, typically does without the idealized
figure of the male translator-saviour. In The Woman Warrior, the
female protagonists are, literally, left to their own devices the
daughter to the English language and her alphabetic literacy and the
mother to her knowledge of the Chinese language and script. In the
absence of a mediator, understanding can be accomplished only by
abstraction as the female antagonists realize that otherness is an
experience they both share. Sameness in difference is also what is
achieved in Obasan as Naomi is finally given a way of understanding
her mothers silence even though she knows that silence would never
be an option for herself.
The translation conducted by Mr Tang in The Bonesetters
Daughter, by contrast, is to delete differences, to bridge opposites by
creating an artificial sameness. Symptomatically, unlike what happens
in Obasan or The Woman Warrior, the act of translating from Chinese
431
into English is described as a remarkably unproblematic procedure.

While Kingstons and Kogawas narratives repeatedly refer to the
impossibility of capturing in English idiosyncrasies of either Chinese
or Japanese thinking, Tans text does not record any truly
insurmountable linguistic difficulties comparable to the dilemma of
understanding the American I or here with which the Chinese
American schoolgirl finds herself confronted in the Woman Warrior:
How could the American I, assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese,
have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of
politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to
write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness: I
is a capital and you is a lower-case. I stared at that middle line and
waited so long for its black centre to resolve into tight strokes and dots
that I forgot to pronounce it. The other troublesome word was here,
no strong consonant to hang on to, and so flat, when here is two
mountainous ideographs. (WW, 150)3
Clearly, it is not Mr Tangs artistry alone that enables him to

render LuLings account so perfectly accessible in English like the
magic thread to mend a torn-up quilt (BD, 297). As Ruths tellingly
free use of the image of the quilt in connection with her mothers story
suggests, cultural incompatibilities are not Tans central concern in
The Bonesetters Daughter. On the contrary, Tan seems determined to
accredit Chinese migrants and their descendants, but also American
society a sheer unlimited assimilating capacity. This explains why,
even less than in Obasan, the migrant daughters fluency in English
and her obvious Americanness, her liaison with a Caucasian American
and her private and professional involvement in what might be
apprehended as a distinctly American way of life are never
identified as causes of conflict between her and her mother or other
members of the family.
Compared to the careful balancing Kogawa undertakes of Obasans
and Uncles emphatic gratitude to Canada against Aunt Emilys anger
at her own country and compared to Kingstons allusions to the
discrimination suffered by Chinese immigrants in America, the
attitude to the United States Tan represents in The Bonesetters
Daughter appears to be one of almost unreserved approval. Not only
3
For a convincing reading of this passage, see Quinby, 131-33.
432
is America the place to which LuLing and her sister take refuge from
civil war, the communists, and predatory relatives, it is also the
country Ruth identifies as the only place where her increasingly
demented mother can feel truly and safely at home. Nowhere in
China, the novel suggests, would Ruth be able to find a place like the
paradisal retreat into which she resolves to book her aged mother.
Though an asylum for old people, Mira Mar Manor does not look like
one. The grand building, flanked by windswept cypress trees, looking
out on the Pacific, and surrounded by shady arbours and luxurious
gardens with flowers thorn-free and non-toxic all of them, no
deadly oleander or foxglove that a confused person might nibble on
(BD, 303), is run by a polished-looking Indian man in suit and tie
with a warm smile, a British accent, and the looks of a stockbroker.
Weve tried to think of everything that a family would think
about, this man assures Ruth as he takes her on a tour of his
establishment (BD, 302). The novel seems to allow no doubt that Ruth
has made the right choice of abode for her mother. After all, the reader
learns that Mira Mar Manor employs a nutritionist to make up the
residents monthly menu according to their needs and preferences,
supplies a delivery service from approved restaurants, and offers
escorts to monthly medical appointments. It even counts among its
residents the managers own Jewish mother, a former sociology
professor, as well as a former piano teacher. As if it were merely a
quaint irrelevancy, the director of this distinguished multicultural setup briefly wonders which Chinese it is, Mandarin or Cantonese, that
one of his caretakers can speak. LuLing would in any case be in good
company and well cared for, he assures the daughter of his prospective
client: one of the cooks is Chinese, too.
The prospect that LuLings story will be brought to a happy
conclusion in the glamorous setting of Mira Mar Manor, creates a
sharp contrast to the preceding descriptions of Precious Aunties
tragic life, of the sad losses LuLing has had to suffer, and of the
problems Ruth encounters as she tries to accept her mothers
progressive dementia. Indeed, the contrast is so extreme that the
reader is led to expect Tan to ironically implode the all too optimistic
vision of LuLing literally and metaphorically ending up as a resident
at Mira Mar Manor. Against this expectation, however, Tan enforces
her conception of a fairy-tale finale with the disclosure of yet another
family secret which, in a manner rather American, at least in Ruths
433
understanding of the different cultures to which she belongs, resolves

all her concerns regarding the financial costs of admitting her mother
to a high-class retirement residency.
In keeping with Tans increasingly overt emphasis on the
importance of her characters material prosperity, she lets Ruth make
the unexpected discovery that, over many years, her mother has been
procuring considerable profits by randomly investing money on the
stock exchange. The revelation leaves the daughter with no more
excuse for delaying her plan to devote herself to writing down her
own story as well as that of her mother and her grandmother. Tans
repeated references to her protagonists pecuniary problems as the
main reason for her inability to become a serious writer points at a
provocatively if not even a cynically mundane view of the writing
profession; as does the suggestion at the end of The Bonesetters
Daughter that the sudden removal of all her financial worries should
promptly effect Ruths transformation from a ghost writer to an author
in her own right. As the novels closure implies, the kind of writing
which Ruth finally endorses is an indulgence, a privilege of the wellto-do, a luxury that has always been denied to Ruths mother and
grandmother by the repressive system in which they grew up.
Analogously, Ruths inability to read the Chinese script is
identified as an extravaganza reserved to the spoilt and fanciful. Ruth,
we learn, would have had a chance to learn how to read and write in
Chinese, but she did not study hard enough. She herself understands
retrospectively that had she listened to her mother, she would not be
scanning in vain the large calligraphed characters now withholding
Precious Aunties and LuLings life stories from her; nor would she
depend on a translator to save these stories from oblivion. In the light
of LuLings rapid mental deterioration, her daughters omission to
learn Chinese writing seems a particularly disastrous negligence. The
thought that she might have forsaken the possibility of ever knowing
her mothers story leads her to understand that she is no better than
LuLing, who, in callously refusing to read Precious Aunties letter,
unwittingly disowned her own mother and killed her. As if under a
curse cast over all of the mythical bonesetters daughters, over all of
his female descendants, including those geographically far and safely
removed from the spirit of their forefather, Ruth re-enacts LuLings
fatal mistake of ignoring the notes her mother has addressed to her
and, with it, the keys to her own Self contained in her family history.
434
The reading of The Bonesetters Daughter as a story which is not

in the first place about the fragmentation of a migrant family, but
about two sadly warped mother-daughter relationships is corroborated
by the novels extraordinary genesis. As Tan has explained in
interviews, the character of LuLing is modelled on her own mother,
whose real name she did not learn until the day her mother died.4
According to Tan, the shock of the discovery that she had never
wholly known her own mother prompted her to retrieve the
manuscript of her novel from her publisher and subject it to extensive
re-writing, a procedure which took nearly five years. What Tan does
not seem to have done in the process is to try to grasp her own
longstanding misapprehension of her mother as a consequence of the
cultural difference between them. Unlike Kogawa and Kingston, Tan
does not consider linguistic and cultural incompatibilities between
first and second generation Asian Americans insurmountable
obstacles to mutual understanding. For her, comprehending the Other
is in the first place a matter of devoted attention, which she posits,
throughout The Bonesetters Daughter, as a moral obligation.
Convinced of the essential intelligibility and translatability of
human nature, Tan downplays linguistic and scribal differences as
perfectly manageable challenges with which multiethnic societies
such as that of the United States are faced. Correspondingly, Tan
abstains from reflecting at great length on the complex processes of
translation, transformation, and translocation which the representation
of Chinese ideographs in Western form entails. In contrast to both
Kingston and Kogawa, Tan does not admit to either herself or her
protagonist reaching the absolute limits of their understanding of the
Chinese Other. Complete epistemological destabilization never occurs
in The Bonesetters Daughter. None of the narrators or narrating
agents in the novel has to resort to a rhetoric of incomprehension, all
maintain their self-assured embeddedness in Western narrative
conventions.
This is also noted by Sheng-mei Ma, who, in a study of The
Hundred Secret Senses, exposes Tans dependence on nineteenthcentury stereotypes. Ma finds this dependence disconcerting because
of the ethnocentric theories of American identity it encourages Tan to
perpetuate. These theories, Ma argues, are informed by a late capitalist
4
Jamie Edwards, Amy Tan: Interview, Bookreporter.com (18-07-2003):

http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-tan-amy-2asp.
435
New Age ethos and reflect an omnivorous appetite of absorbing and

commodifying alien cultural elements.5 Disagreeing with critics such
as Malini Johar Schueller, Stephen Souris, and Yuan Yuan, who all
insist that Tan, not wholly unlike Kingston, positively recreates a
distinctive Chinese American identity,6 Ma contends that Tan does no
such thing but engineers and marionettes New Age ethnicity and
primitivism by rendering the Chinese simultaneously animalistic
and divine.7 With her obsessive whitening of characters, the eager
packaging of tropes easing the Western readers entry into the
Orient, and her routine evocation of fuzziness in her descriptions of
China for the express purpose of touristic impressions and
narcissistic wish-fulfillment,8 she has the Chinese Other merge into
a generalized, marketable thing, which loses any particular identity
and even its sense of being out there.9
This also applies to LuLings final consignment to a perfectly selfenclosed universe with which Tan declares LuLings ink-making past
a closed matter. In so doing, she reduces the Chinese script to an
object as anachronistic as the precious oracle bones traded in preCommunist China. Thus defamiliarized or even exoticized, Chinese
writing no longer compares to the writing in which Ruth engages. The
sort of literary composition for which at the end of the novel Ruth
5
Sheng-mei Ma, Chinese and Dogs in Amy Tans The Hundred Secret Senses:
Ethnicizing the Primitive la New Age, MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the
Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, XXVI/1 (Spring 2001), 30.
6
Schueller, for instance, praises Tan for subverting East-West cultural
dichotomies by appropriating (and thus questioning) the rhetoric of universalist
feminism (78) and presenting the Joy Luck daughters cultural origins as multiple
and complex, while Souris focuses on the potential for active intermingling of
perspectives (Malini Johar Schueller, Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity:
Maxine Hong Kingstons Tripmaster Monkey and Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club,
Genders, XV [Winter 1992], 78, and Stephen Souris, Only Two Kinds of
Daughters: Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club, MELUS: The Journal
of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, IXX/2
[Summer 1994], 99-123). Yuan even goes as far as arguing that Tan, like Kingston,
resists the hyphenated experience embodied by the so-called mestiza consciousness
and that her writing marks a transition from the position of separation and alienation
to that of accommodation and re-position, initiating a positive self-invention instead
of a denial of ethnic origin (Yuan Yuan, The Semiotics of China Narratives in the
Con/texts if Kingston and Tan, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, XL/3
[Spring 1999], 302).
7
Ma, 44.
8
Ibid., 31.
9
Ibid., 37.
436
repairs to the laptop in her small office and her mothers artful
drawing of ideographs, which the daughter constructs as no more than
a mildly alienating childhood memory, constitute conspicuously
separate events. Their separateness suggests that Ruth never has to
mirror herself in her own mothers otherness. She never has to
cultivate a sense of her own difference from her Chinese mother, not
even when confronted with LuLings writing. LuLings linguistic
handicap and alienation in American culture is neither analysed nor
reduplicated by Ruths inability to read the Chinese script. Ruths
illiteracy is never really experienced as an illiteracy, but only as a
momentary condition of alienation, swiftly resolved by the
commissioning of a translator. The contrast to Kogawa and Kingston
is fundamental and, indeed, disconcerting. It seems to confirm
Rosenwalds observation that, after several decades of careful
sensitization to aspects of non-literacy by ethnic writers, a systematic
evasion of these aspects and a strategic belittling of their significance
is bound to set in as the insatiable appetite of international readerships
for all things outside its own centre causes self-consciously peripheral
writers to be swallowed up into the mainstream.
CLOSING REMARKS
The idea for this book sprang from a reading of David Maloufs novel
Remembering Babylon (1993). The narrative is set in nineteenthcentury Queensland and starts with the sudden appearance of an
adolescent boy at an outback settlement. Having lived with aborigines
for years, the boy has practically forgotten how to speak English and
at first can communicate with the settlers only by way of pantomime.
As he watches the local priest and the schoolteacher put down in
writing the life story they think he is enacting before them, the boy,
who has never learnt to read and write, has the feeling that some
magic is being performed. He senses that he is known and that his
forgotten former self is about to come back to him:
He knew what writing was but had never himself learned the trick of
it. As he handled the sheets and turned them this way and that, and
caught the peculiar smell they gave off, his whole life was in his throat
tears, laughter too, a little and he was filled with an immense
gratitude. He had shown them what he was. He was known. Left alone
with the sheets, to brood and sniff, the whole of what he was, Gemmy,
might come back to him, and he began to plot, as he thought of his life
out of sight there in the ministers pocket, how to steal it back.1
Towards the end of the novel, Gemmy decides to return to his

previous life in the bush. Yet before he leaves he goes to see the
schoolteacher in order to retrieve the papers that contain his story. The
teacher knows that the boy cannot read and hands out to him a bundle
of exercises he has been correcting. These Gemmy takes with him and
surrenders to the pouring rain, watching them turn to pulp and almost
ecstatic that his life has at last been set free again by the powers of
nature. Gemmys error is the readers gain. If the schoolteacher had
not been able to fool Gemmy, the boys story would probably not
have been preserved for a later readership, a readership more
sympathetic than the xenophobic settlers who remain too scared of
Gemmys otherness to tolerate his presence amongst them.
There is nothing pathetic about Gemmys innocent respect for the
power of the written word. In fact, his appreciation of writing shames
those who, though fiercely defensive about their culture, do not realize
they are defiling the fragile civilization they have been trying to build
in their strange new homeland when they use their own excrement to
smear words of threat and abuse against Gemmy on the walls of his
shed. Gemmys dignified lack of aggression commands the readers
1
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993), London, 1994, 20.
440
sympathy and conveys a sense of the pure love for writing to which
the author himself seems to aspire.
The desire to give value to imaginative writing has been one
feature common to all the texts analysed in this book. This does not
mean, however, that illiterates have been introduced into these texts
merely as foils to artistic longing. Their role has proven to be far more
complex than that. One cannot stress this enough, especially since the
critical reception of the works analysed has always favoured a
somewhat reductionist interpretation of characters unable to read and
write. Indeed, the specific otherness of these characters has rarely
been accredited sufficient significance to be commented upon in more
than a footnote. If the discovery of an enduring fascination among
twentieth-century writers with illiteracy has allowed the original idea
for The Non-Literate Other to develop into a larger plan, the
realization of this plan was crucially complicated by the failure of the
academy to take note of this fascination.
This failure needed to be accounted for at least in order to
demonstrate the originality of literary representations of illiteracy and
to stress the personal commitment underlying them. Mostly, this
commitment has had its origin in personal experiences. Many of the
authors discussed in this book have taught reading and writing to
children or illiterate adults.2 Some have witnessed the transition of
their own cultures from orality to literacy.3 Others have testified to the
same process from the other side as it were: as representatives of a
regime imposing its culture on indigenous peoples against their will.4
Several of them have seen members of families handicapped by their
inability to read and write in the script of the society in which they
lived, or have themselves experienced situations of such exclusion
when faced with the script of their own ancestors.5
Such experiences seem to have instilled in the individual writers a
profound sense of gratitude for the ability to express themselves in
writing as well as an appreciation of otherness that theoretical
discourse rarely exhibits. In fact, the sympathetic understanding this
book has traced in so many literary representations of non-literates
2
Notably Bouras and Sapphire, Grace and Kogawa. Erdrich taught poetry and
writing to young people. Kingston taught English as a second language at several high
schools.
3
Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich, for instance.
4
Greene and Coetzee.
5
Malouf, Bouras, Kingston, Anand, and Wright, as well as Kogawa and Tan.
Closing Remarks
441
differs radically from the commitment to the cause of the subalterns,

the wretched of the earth, the lowest of the low to which
contemporary theorists of culture and literature like to subscribe. As
has been suggested in Chapter 4,6 their routine equation of discursive
disempowerment with silence, muteness, or voicelessness has
prevented a proper appraisal of illiteracy and the social disadvantages
caused by it. This equation has effectively distorted the problem above
all by deflecting from the impossibility of those without learning to
ever participate in the learned discourses through which they are
officially defined.
Admittedly, the actual exclusion of those unable to read and write
is not really remedied by the literary works considered in The NonLiterate Other, since these works, too, address only literates. Yet they
take great care not to reduce the illiterates they present to mere objects
of inscription. To this end, they strictly refrain from making illiteracy
available as an easily comprehensible condition of otherness. Instead
of providing detailed ethnographic, sociological, or anthropological
information, they call in question the legitimacy of rendering
illiterates merely in terms of such information. This questioning is part
of a more general criticism of literate civilization for the manifold
abuses to which it has put writing. This book has isolated a number of
dramatic accounts of such abuses to illustrate how they frame writing
as an instrument of most brutal subordination and the illiterate as its
defenceless and innocent victim. The mutilation of Sethes back by
schoolteacher in Beloved, the maiming of the barbarian womans
eyes in Coetzees novel, the tragic traumatizing suffered by Moon
Orchid in Kingstons autobiography, the killing of Toko in Potiki, or
the atrocities to which Naomis family is subjected in Obasan are
probably the most shocking instances of perverted literacy the
compiled corpus has yielded.
These instances both confirm and exceed the warning voiced by
Plato, one of the Western worlds first opponents to universal literacy.
Plato rejected writing as an artificial memory that would implant
forgetfulness in the souls of humans. To him, the technology of
writing represented a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.
Accordingly, he refused to see any true wisdom in writing but
insisted that writing was a mere conceit of wisdom, eminently
6
Cf. pages 106-107.
442
dangerous should it fall into the hands not only of those who
understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it.7
According to Martin, Plato did not categorically oppose writing and
really meant his criticism as a hermeneutic appeal for a proper use of
literacy. Judging a medium still novel at his time, Plato, naturally, saw
nothing paradoxical in the fact that he himself would use this medium
to formulate his objections to it. In Platos perception of writing,
letters were merely ancillary to sounds, and writing ancillary to
speech. By inference, anything rendered in writing had first been
rendered memorable in speech. That writing in itself could fulfil a
mnemonic function was not yet a scenario possible for Plato to
envisage.
A world in which writing has become practically omnipresent has
its own modes of remembering and forgetting and it is these that
engage contemporary novelists concerned with the role of graphs and
scripts in the making of history. In contrast to Plato, they perceive
writing not as an amenity encouraging collective amnesia but as a
vital means of counteracting oblivion. For them, it is a way of both
preventing and, more importantly even, of reversing processes of
forgetting. This is clearly suggested by the title of Maloufs novel
Remembering Babylon, which returns to a specific moment of
Australian history to salvage a story strategically omitted from official
records. Like Maloufs imaginative reconstruction of Gemmys life,
the tales of illiterates assembled in this book attempt to counteract the
selective remembering of literate societies and to correct their
histories.
In this respect twentieth-century constructions of the non-literate
Other differ most from literary treatments of illiteracy in earlier
novels. Though set in the nineteenth century, Gemmys story does not
compare to that of the illiterate characters one finds in the novels of
that time. The point of Remembering Babylon is not to recount how
Gemmy becomes an accepted member of the community he enters by
learning to read and write. Rather its point is that the narrative
retrospectively integrates Gemmy into Australian history without
adulterating his otherness or negating the atrocities it provoked. To a
similar intent each section of The Non-Literate Other has attributed
the special historicity of the analysed works. As has been argued, by
including the perspective of subjects culturally marginalized on
7
The Phaedrus, as quoted in Martin, 91-92.
Closing Remarks
443
account of their illiteracy, these works have offered completely new

versions of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the ascent of communism
in China, the abolition of slavery, Indias achievement of
Independence, the beginning of colonization in Nigeria, Britains role
in Africa during the Second World War, the German occupation of
Greece, Ovids exile in Asia Minor, and even of the succession of
Neanderthal Man by homo sapiens.
As much as the texts have asked to be understood as journeys into
their own pre-literate past, they have lent themselves to interpretations
as symbolical journeys into the authors preliterate childhoods. In
either case a full recuperation of the part of ones history that precedes
literalization tends to be framed as an absolute impossibility. The
realization that ones preliterate past is irretrievably lost once one has
learnt to read and write has been one of the most important
conclusions at which practically all the fictional explorations of
illiteracy considered in The Non-Literate Other eventually arrive. It
also accounts for the pronouncedly fragmentary nature of the
illiterates story, which almost always ends with the non-literates
premature disappearance from the text. The resultant ambiguity
consistently serves to mark the literates epistemological defeat a
defeat that is not entirely deleterious. For it at least it facilitates an
experience of unknowingness similar to the illiterates and thus an
identification with the scriptless Other no ethnographic study of
illiteracy can afford.
At first glance, what Jacques Derrida has written about
representations of blindness in painting seems to apply also to literary
representations of illiteracy. Every time, Derrida observes, a
draftsman lets himself be fascinated by the blind, every time he makes
the blind a theme of his drawing, he projects, dreams, or hallucinates a
figure of a draftsman, or ...draftswoman.8 Analogously, one could say
that every time a writer is fascinated by a non-literate, every time nonliteracy is made a theme of writing, that writer projects dreams, or
hallucinates a figure of a writer. Yet, Derridas analogy is not entirely
unproblematic. For not once does Derrida reflect on blindness as a
serious handicap, never does he concede that it is also a physical
disadvantage distinguishing the truly blind from the seeing painter. In
8
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins,
translation of Mmoires daveugle: Lautoportrait et autres ruines (1990) by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago, 1993, 2.
444
Derridas view, what blind persons portrayed by a painter epitomize in

the first place is the blindness that artists feel at the moment when
their gaze shifts from the sight to be represented onto to the blank
canvass:
In truth, I feel myself incapable of following with my hand the
prescription of a model: it is as if, just as I was about to draw, I no
longer saw the thing. For it immediately flees, drops out of sight, and
almost nothing of it remains; it disappears before my eyes, which, in
truth, no longer perceive anything but the mocking arrogance of this
disappearing apparition. As long as it remains in front of me, the thing
defies me, producing, as if by emanation, an invisibility that it
reserves for me, a night of which I would be, in some way, the chosen
one. It blinds me while making me attend the pitiful spectacle.9
What the Western worlds grand theorist of writing betrays here is

his own blindness to the difference that separates those physically
unable to see from those momentarily suffering a metaphoric
blindness. After all, the painter still sees an actual canvass whereas the
vacancy perceived, according to Derrida, by the blind is never
anything but a subjective impression no other person can share or
verify. Apparently oblivious to this difference Derrida projects his
own narcissistic identification with mythical blind men celebrated as
seers of another world or time, such as Homer, Milton, Joyce, or
Borges, or onto the painters whose works he explores. However, it is
doubtful whether these or other painters really share his idea of
blindness as a sense of dazzling and overpowering vacancy
temporarily hindering, yet eventually encouraging creative urges.
Alternatively, their portrayals of the unseeing could also be interpreted
as celebrations of seeing, inspired by the recognition of what it must
mean to literally see nothing at all.
Such a recognition certainly underlies all the narratives studied in
this book. For all the identification they may court with the nonliterate Other, they never go as far as declaring the difference between
the literate and the non-literate null and void. A sense of the nonliterates disadvantage always persists, and it is with regard to this
disadvantage that the individual authors define their own position as
one either at the centre or on the margin of a minority or mainstream
culture and their work as opposing or supporting that culture. Close
9
Ibid., 36.
Closing Remarks
445
attention to the way each narrative places itself as writing in relation

to the non-literate Other has yielded the structure of the main part of
this book: Sections III to VI have suggested a gradual advancement
into the foreign matter of illiteracy, a process in which the theme of
illiteracy is appropriated by degrees: first, by a self-defensive
projection into the distance, then by a description of dramatic
moments of contact. Other narratives processing historical instances
of illiteracy cultivated within literate societies allow for an even
deeper narrative involvement, while representations of new forms of
illiteracy may confuse and temporarily invert established notions of
sameness and difference.
Therefore what this book has derived from the compiled corpus of
imaginative writings is a counter-narrative to the forgetting of the
illiterate unofficially, yet insistently practised by the academy. It
proposes not only the endurance and urgency of illiteracy as a sociocultural problem throughout the twentieth century, but also its
variability with time and place. The narrative submitted is a first
account with no claim to completeness or finality but devised in the
hope that other stories may follow to help elucidate further the
neglected matter of scriptlessness. If for no other reason, such stories
are needed to cast light on the as yet poorly charted avenues of literate
communication connecting the worlds literate elite across vast
geographic distances.
Without thorough knowledge of these avenues, the terrain of
literate culture remains an indistinct wild zone, unintelligible not only
to the non-literate outsider. This prohibits a real understanding of the
cultural place of modern writers and the reach of their works, which
have long ceased to be explicable merely in geopolitical terms. Other
terms need yet to be established by way of an exploration of the
central role of literacy in the process of European colonization and
expansion, of the different ways in which writing (and, more
specifically, the Latin alphabet) was appropriated outside Europe, and
of the cultural changes that ensued from this appropriation. This could
reveal an as yet unacknowledged connectedness between todays
literatures and allow the theorizing of a global print culture held
together by affinities across geographic distances potentially more
powerful than the ties forged by geographic proximity across racial or
cultural discrepancies.
446
Thinking of literacy as a global infrastructure would also facilitate

a different understanding of the illiterates confinement and exclusion.
It would sharpen our awareness of literate activity as one of the main
determinates of those cultural centres in relation to which
contemporary literary and cultural theorists tend to locate cultural
peripheries. Although the actual coordinates of these centres have not
changed much over the past one hundred years, writers not physically
stationed at the capitals of literate production are finding it easier and
easier to access them. Their own mobility as well as that of their
books has made it necessary to revise our idea of the empire from
which they are writing back. We are required to see that these
writers, while using and keeping alive historical ties, have also
transformed these ties into currents along which a kind of writing can
flow markedly different from the political treatises, acts and
edicts, administrative records and gazetteers, missionaries reports,
notebooks, memoirs, [and] government briefs10 European
imperialists once used to remain connected with their homelands. As
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin put it, tools of control have become
weapons of resistance.11 Access to these new weapons, however, is
not unlimited but continues to distinguish and separate those
articulately representing the Empire from those represented by it. Still,
there is hope that, for all the scepticism routinely voiced by
postcolonial critics and theorists, the modern empire of representers is
a beast more benevolent than the one from which it has sprung, and
that the representations it engenders are motivated by other than
purely competitive urges. The writers studied in this book encourage
this hope. In finding new sympathetic ways of dealing with cultural
otherness, they prove that knowledge and learning need not always be
arrogantly mistaken for proof of an innate superiority but may also be
employed wisely with gratitude, modesty, and tact.
10
Boehmer, 14.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice on Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edn, New Accents, London,
2002, 217.
11
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INDEX
Achebe, Chinua, 78-80, 83, 92,

169, 174, 177, 227, 228,
263, 440n; Things Fall
Apart, 155, 166, 167, 168,
170, 173, 176, 179, 191-20,
205, 218-20, 223, 224, 242,
261, 294
Africa, 8, 13, 53, 77-91, 173220, 225, 227, 344, 376,
443
African-American, 49, 262,
319-81
Ahmad, Aijaz, 55, 97
Aidoo, Ama Ata, 227
Ajami, 175
Al-cAzm, Sadik, 298, 299
Alkali, Zaynab, 227
Allen, Paula Gunn, 228, 243
Almoravid intervention, 174
alphabet, 14, 29, 32, 105, 142,
169, 393, 394, 410; Arabic,
174; Devanagari, 267n,
functions of, 42; Greek, 23,
28, 29; invention of 29, 30,
37; Latin, 175, 226, 401,
445; alphabets in India, 267
alphabetic literacy, 77, 93, 161,
393, 394
alphabetization, 13, 23, 29, 30,
36, 40, 49, 50, 73, 74, 176,
225, 353, 369, 390 (see also
literalization)
alterity, 91, 97, 119, 274, 387
(see also otherness)
Altick, Richard D., 67
Anand, Mulk Raj, 269-74, 335,
440n; Untouchable, 261-63,

270, 273, 274, 275-315,
331-32, 334
Anderson, Sherwood, 341
Anishinabe, 226
Arabian Nights, 301, 302, 310
Arabic, 174, 175, 267, 319
Aravamudan, Srivinas, 298
Aristotle, 20, 42, 48, 202
Arnold, Matthew, 40
Ashcroft, Bill, 51, 95, 96, 97,
446
Asnani, Shyam, 269
Assamese, 267
Assmann, Aleida and Jan, 20,
42
Atkins, J.A., 184
Attwell, David, 216, 217
Australia, 53, 61, 140, 143-46,
153, 161-62, 267, 387
authorship, 127, 250, 314, 375,
425
autobiography, 105, 140, 142,
279, 304, 308, 309, 311,
314, 323, 331, 332, 337,
340, 343, 367, 401, 430,
441
Awoonor, Kofi, 196
Babb, Valerie, 369, 372, 376,
380
Bald, Shuresht Renjen, 292n
Bamum, 175, 176
barbarian, 103, 123-33, 140,
150, 153, 156, 157, 160,
165, 167, 170, 205, 207-24,
490
210-20, 224, 294, 409-10,

425, 441
Bardolph, Jacqueline, 223,
300, 301
Barrett, Linden, 319, 321, 325,
342
Barrow, Terence, 248, 250
Barthes, Roland, 20, 21
Batty, Nancy E., 302, 310
Bayer, John G., 49
Baynton, Barbara, 141
Beale, Peter, 4
Beavers, Herman, 371, 376,
379, 380
Beckett, Samuel, 44, 47, 133,
206; Waiting for Godot,
215-16
Begam, Richard, 195-96, 201202
Belanger, Terry, 61
bell hooks, 343, 344
Bell, Bernard, 10, 62, 65, 325,
342
Benesch, Klaus, 49
Bengali, 267, 283
Benton, Richard, 225
Bevis, William, 247n
Bhabha, Homi, 53, 89, 90, 96,
97, 351, 352
Bible, the, 48, 61, 62n, 63, 66,
68, 126, 176, 185, 226, 288,
323, 351, 360, 361, 368
Bildung, 281, 353 (see also
education)
Bildungsroman, 72, 123, 332
bilingualism, 227, 267, 268,
269, 409, 415
binarism, 19, 24, 25, 27, 42,
94, 97, 123, 126, 133, 134
Birch, David, 301

Bishop, Peter, 150
Boas, Franz, 24
Boehmer, Elleke, 15, 446
Boesenberg, Eva, 49
book learning, 5, 68, 69, 135,
165, 166, 182, 262, 282,
285, 335, 337, 359, 363,
366, 385; lending, 62;
market, 53, 178
Book Marketing Limited, 12
bookishness, 183, 282
Bouras, Gillian, 167, 261,
440n; Aphrodite and the
Others, 105, 106, 139-62,
165, 166
Bradbury, Malcolm, 47
Brennan, Timothy, 40, 93, 299,
301, 302, 303, 308, 313
Brockmeier, Jens, 21, 26, 30,
34, 35, 46, 48
Brogan, Kathleen, 403
Bront, Emily, 72, 76; Wuthering Heights, 71, 72, 155
Brookner, Anita, 385
Brougham, Henry, 65
Brown, Dee, 228
Brown, M.P., 37
Brownmiller, Susan, 397, 407
Bruner, J.S., 25, 26
Bukere, Momoru Doalu, 175
Bynum, David E., 247n
Caliban, 5, 6, 104, 150, 151,
306
calligraphy, 394, 406, 427
Calvet, Louis-Jean, 388
Canada, 267, 387, 416, 420,
432
Index
Carey, Peter, 61, 117; Illywhacker, 141
Carmean, Karen, 371, 378, 381
Carr, Helen, 36, 161
Carter, Angela, 105, 107;
Heroes and Villains, 103,
104, 106, 123-37, 124, 125,
133, 135, 139, 157, 159,
165, 166, 261
Cary, Joyce, 173
caste, 103, 126, 135, 240, 261,
270, 277-305, 283, 288,
290-91, 295, 297, 271, 319,
331
Cavafy, C.P., 216
Cervantes, Miguel de, 47
Chatman, Seymour, 43, 44, 45
Chatterji, Bankim Chander,
278
Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury
Tales, 47, 48, 49
Chavkin, Allan, 223, 239
Cheng, Yuan-Jung, 86, 87
Cherokee Phoenix, 226
Cherokee, 226, 350, 351
Chinese, 29, 387-23, 397-98,
400-10, 412, 416, 425-26,
429-36
Chippewa, 166, 169-70, 22326, 229, 232-34, 237, 239,
242, 244, 247, 261
Chow, Rey, 97, 98, 99
Chrisman, Laura, 94
Christensen, Inger, 47
Christianity, 35, 66, 128, 175,
200, 226, 235, 287-88, 37071
Clanchy, Michael T., 24
Clark, J.P., 227
491
Clifford, James, 81
Cobb, Martha K., 49
Cobbett, William, 65
Coetzee, J.M., 155, 169, 174,
177, 224, 440n, 441;
Waiting for the Barbarians,
90, 166, 167, 168, 170, 173,
176, 179, 205-206, 223,
261, 294
Cole, M., 24
colonialism, 15, 51, 77, 78, 81,
88, 105, 176, 270, 276, 344,
385
colonization, 14, 77, 93, 94,
141, 169, 174, 179, 200,
224, 273, 443, 445
Conrad, Joseph, 173, 177;
Allmayers Folly, 149;
Heart of Darkness, 15, 7792, 103, 149
Cornelius, Janet Duitsman, 320
counter-discourse, 95, 160,
357, 445; history, 210, 242,
252, 257, 272, 305, 309,
310, 328, 339, 354, 364,
369, 419 (see also history)
Craik, Mrs, 72
Cree, 226, 244
Cressy, David, 4, 31, 49
Crystal, David, 11
Currie, Mark, 45
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 236,
401
Dauterich, Edward, 347
Davidson, Jim, 146
Davis, Charles T., 332-33
Davis, Marianna White, 252
Defoe, Daniel, 47, 49; Moll
492
Flanders, 67; Robinson

Crusoe, 63, 68, 149; The
Complete English Tradesman, 67
Deloughrey, Elizabeth, 235
Delrez, Marc, 155
Derrida, Jacques, 20-22, 24,
53-54, 94, 96; Memoirs of
the Blind, 443-44; Of
Grammatology, 25n, 31-32
Dever, Maryanne, 150
Devereaux, Elizabeth, 223
Devereux, Cecily, 411, 416-17,
420
Devy, G.N., 267-70, 272
Dhar, T.N., 272-73, 275-76
Diamond, Jared, 169
Dickens,
Charles,
Bleak
House, 71, 72, 74-75; Great
Expectations, 72, 74, 75,
136, 155; Our Mutual
Friend, 71, 72, 74, 155
Dingwaney, Anarudha, 310
Diringer, David, 29
Djenne, 174
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, 338
Dovey, Teresa, 207, 218
Dreiser, Theodore, 341
Du Bois, William E.B., 325,
333
Durix, Jean-Pierre, 252
Durkheim, Emil, 133
Eagleton, Terry, 40, 41, 54
education, 32, 41, 65, 66, 68,
72, 84, 86, 123, 135, 140,
165, 168, 226, 228, 239,
240, 241, 253, 279, 281,

288, 289, 295, 322, 325,
328, 329, 331, 335, 336,
338, 350, 360, 361, 363,
366, 377, 379, 388, 406,
417
Edwards, Jamie, 434
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 24,
61, 62
electronic media, 21, 32, 34
(see also media)
Eliot, George, Adam Bede, 72;
Silas Marner, 73; The Mill
on the Floss, 72
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man,
326-29, 331, 342, 367, 371,
377
Emecheta, Buchi, 227
Empson, William, 41
epistemic violence, 13, 54, 59,
115, 206
Epping-Jger, Cornelia, 42
Erdrich, Louise, 92, 225, 263,
440n; Love Medicine, 16670, 223-24, 226-29, 231-58,
261, 294
ethnocentrism, 25, 26, 123,
155, 200, 435
Eurocentrism, 28, 35, 37, 50,
77, 88, 161, 179, 188, 275,
325
Europe, 13, 28, 31, 36, 41, 51,
52, 62, 68, 74, 77, 79, 80,
81, 95, 101, 103, 105, 106,
139, 141, 142, 145, 161,
174, 175, 176, 177, 219,
270, 276, 278, 298, 305,
385, 445
European expansion, 61, 223,
Index
319 (see also colonialism)
Evans, James, 226
Facey, Albert B., A Fortunate
Life, 140-41
Fausset, Jessie Redmon, 325
Ferreiro, Emilia, 12
Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews, 68, 82
Fishburn, Katherine, 331, 332
Fletcher, John, 46-47
Fludernik, Monika, 286-87
folk, 40, 74, 91, 114, 127, 131,
308, 343, 369, 397
folklore, 114, 195, 279, 325,
410
Ford, Ford Madox, 103, 143
Forster, E.M., 278
Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments, 62n
Foucault, Michel, 39, 53-54,
94, 97-98
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant
Career, 141
Freud, Sigmund, 261
Fuchs, Miriam, 235, 236, 237
Gaines, Ernest J., 262; A
Lesson Before Dying 263,
367-81
Galton, Francis, 348
Gandhi, Mahatma, 262, 275,
276, 277, 280, 282, 289,
290, 293, 295
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 319,
324, 325, 344
Gaudet, Marcia, 377
Gaur, Albertine, 28, 30, 34, 37,
66, 175, 392
493
Gegenber, 105, 119
George, C.J., 275, 278, 280,
290, 292, 293
Gernet, Jacques, 393
Gibbins, Christopher, 298
Gikandi, Simon, 192, 199, 200,
201
Gladstone, William, 66
Glenn, Ian, 81
global dissemination of English, 52; of literacy, 29, 385;
print culture, 12, 77, 445;
printscape, 54
globalization, 12, 29, 37, 53,
54, 55, 56, 93, 269, 385,
445, 446
Goellnicht, Donald C., 401n
Goetsch, Paul, 32, 41, 42, 43,
49, 74
Goldie, Terry, 37, 229
Golding, William, 123, 125,
130; Lord of the Flies, 106;
The Inheritors, 103-104,
106, 107, 109-21, 127, 131,
139, 140, 160, 165, 166
Goldsmith, Oliver, She Stoops
to Conquer, 67
Goodheart, Eugene, 86
Goody, Jack, 23, 27, 29, 32
Gordon, Elizabeth, 225, 252,
281
Gothic, 345, 358, 362
Gough, Kathleen, 23n
Grace, Patricia, 92, 169, 191,
225-44, 263, 440n; Potiki,
166-68, 170, 223-24, 22729, 231-58, 261, 294, 423,
441
Granta, 267n
494
graphein, 14, 25
graphocentrism, 27
Grass, Gnter, The Tin Drum,
301
Greene, Graham, 169, 184,
261, 440n; Journey Without
Maps, 181; The Heart of the
Matter, 166-68, 173-74,
176, 179, 181-90, 191, 202,
205, 206, 218, 219, 220,
223, 294
Gregor, Ian, 115, 116, 121
Grewal, Gurleen, 411, 419,
420
Griem, Julika, 79, 80, 83
griot, 194
Gro, Konrad, 49n
Gutenberg, Johannes, 30, 32
Haarmann, Harald, 37, 392
Haggard, Henry Rider, 74
Hakuta, Kenji, 388
Halifax, John, 72, 184
Hallab, Mary, 132
Hamilton, Cynthia S., 324, 345
Hampson, Robert, 78, 84
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the
Obscure, 72; The Mayor of
Casterbridge, 73
Harris, Roy, 22, 37
Harris, Trudier, 319, 349, 35556
Hausa, 175
Havelock, Eric A., 23, 25
Hawlin, Stefan, 104
Herbert, Xavier, Capricornia,
141
Hindi, 267
Hinduism, 276, 277, 279, 280,
281, 284, 290, 297

historicity, 14, 30, 60, 140, 442
historiography, 92, 121, 123,
160, 217, 275, 311, 320
history, 14, 95, 139, 142, 159,
160, 187, 228, 233, 263,
307, 309, 340, 354, 356,
357, 364, 369; and writing,
26, 51, 92, 105, 127, 149,
192, 200, 214, 218, 223,
247, 271, 311, 442
Homer, 23
Houston, R.A., 64
Huggan, Graham, 51, 54n, 95,
97, 174n, 207n, 217n, 300,
314
Hughes, Ted, 117
Huntley, E.D., 406
hybridity, 96, 97, 98, 106, 137,
162, 177, 227, 268, 274,
286, 287, 297, 299, 300,
387, 392, 395, 401, 405,
425
hybridization, 235, 269, 272,
342, 347
Igbo, 166, 169-70, 173, 176,
179, 192-93, 219, 223-24,
261
Illich, Ivan, 24, 32, 35, 47, 48,
49, 153, 250, 422
illiteracy, 3, 4, 15, 19, 21, 29,
31, 33, 37, 40, 50, 59, 61,
67, 77, 92, 168, 185, 263,
279, 282, 294, 303, 308,
312, 349, 367; definition of
8-10, 19, 36, 52, 96, 345,
363; discourse of, 7, 13, 14,
19, 21, 24, 25, 31, 35, 40,
Index
61, 134; of the reader, 236;
rates, 7, 8, 11, 177, 267; vs.
literacy, 9, 36, 165 (see also
non-literacy, non-writingness, and scriptlessness)
illiterate, the, 45, 64, 92, 100,
305; as Other see nonliterate Other; in Australian
literature, 141-42; in nineteenth-century
literature,
70-86, 155
Imhof, Rdiger, 47
immateriality of language, 22,
41, 46
imperialism, 51, 74, 78, 80, 86,
90, 97, 105, 145, 179, 207,
235, 271 (see also colonialism and European expansion)
inarticulateness 250, 409 (see
also muteness, silence,
speechlessness, and voicelessness)
India, 12, 13, 23, 29, 53, 54,
264, 265-315, 443
indigenous culture, 179, 22326, 242, 274; literacy, 22627, 242; orality 179, 224,
242; societies, 13, 31, 166,
227, 231, 440; writing in
English, 228, 229, 235, 236
(see also native)
ink, 4, 126, 154, 329, 348, 353,
386, 391, 398, 399, 403,
427, 436; making, 348, 353,
391, 427, 436
Innis, Harold, 23
invisibility, 118, 234, 239, 262,
319, 401, 403, 444
495
Irele, F. Abiola, 177
irony, 68, 71, 73, 85, 95, 113,
115, 126, 127, 130, 134,
135, 146, 149, 167, 169,
170, 181, 190, 199, 200,
202, 205, 206, 210, 212,
237, 240, 241, 273, 279,
283-88, 292, 312-15, 336,
348, 351, 356, 362, 370,
374, 377, 378, 380, 402-03,
407, 414, 430, 433
Iser, Wolfgang, 44
Islam, 174, 279, 297, 298, 299,
300
Islam, Syed Manzurul, 300,
305n
Iyer, Pico, 271n
Jablon, Madelyn, 345
Jackson, Thomas H., 50n
Jacobs, Connie A., 224, 228
James, Henry, The Turn of the
Screw, 73
JanMohamed, Abdul, 155,
178-79, 191-92, 201
Jaskoski, Helen, 233
Jaynes, Julian, 23
Johnson, James Weldon, The
Autobiography of an ExColored Man, 338
Johnston, Arnold, 106n
Jolly, Roslyn, 150
Jones, Manina, 417n
Joyce, James, 173, 177n, 292,
444; Ulysses, 47, 292n, 301
Judy, Ronald A.T., 319n
Kafka, Franz, 215; The Castle,
339, 340
496
Kalantzis, Mary, 162

Kannada, 267n
Kashmiri, 267
Kaufman, Paul, 63
Keehnen, Owen, 367, 368
Keown, Michelle, 227n, 229n
Kermode, Frank, 110, 114
Khatibi, Abdelkbir, 298
Killam, G.D., 196n
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 92,
386, 387, 389, 432, 434,
435, 436, 440n, 441; The
Woman Warrior, 387, 39091, 392, 395, 397-410, 41114, 424, 425, 430-31
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 115,
116, 121
Klooss, Wolfgang, 191, 200
Knights, L.C., 41
Knudsen, Eva Rask, 224, 225,
235, 242, 248, 250, 251
Koch, Peter, 43
Kogawa, Joy, 387, 391-92,
395, 425, 431-32, 434, 435,
436, 440n; Obasan, 387,
391, 392, 395, 401, 411-14,
425, 430-32, 441
Kong, Belinda Wai Chu, 391
Kraft, Marion, 343, 344
Kreiswirth, Martin, 417
Krishan Chander Azad, 290
Krupat, Arnold, 247
Knstlerroman, 332
Kuo, Helena, 390n
Lacan, Jacques, 96
Latin, 4, 28, 83, 147, 157, 158,
175, 226, 445
Lawson, Henry, 141
Le Comte, Edward, 49n

learned elite, 4, 133
learnedness, 89, 326, 329, 347
learning, 26, 50, 55, 74, 89,
118, 126, 132, 135, 136,
145, 167, 192, 232, 240,
252, 262, 264, 277, 278,
285, 289, 291, 292, 293,
302, 319, 323, 322, 325,
328, 337, 342, 348, 353,
360, 361, 364, 365, 366,
370, 372, 378, 380, 387,
398, 406, 426; lack of, 48,
74, 294, 297, 302, 328, 375
Leavis, F.R., 41, 83
Lee, Ken-fan, 105, 389, 392,
398, 401, 402, 404, 430
Leroi-Gourhan, Andr, 23
lettered, 4, 6, 9, 69, 149, 313,
354 (see also literate)
letters, 75, 306, 344, 357, 442;
images of, 283, 298, 327,
355, 360, 397
letter-writing, 61, 68, 149, 167,
182, 183, 339, 351, 354,
368, 373, 377, 391, 397,
417, 421, 422, 423, 427
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 24, 31,
133; Tristes Topiques, 25
Lvy-Bruhl, Lucien, 24
Lewis, Sinclair, 341
Li, David Leiwei, 401, 404
libraries, 30, 62, 71, 124, 136,
159, 167, 183, 340
Lidinsky, April, 352, 365
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 423
Lindfors, Bernth, 178n
Ling, Amy, 390, 403
literacies, 10, 14, 34, 37, 48,
Index
49, 70, 72, 226, 250, 282,
294, 300, 385, 388, 425
literacy, 4, 9, 10, 22, 35, 49,
88, 89, 103, 105, 139, 166,
167, 169, 175, 176, 179,
190, 223, 224, 226, 241,
242, 254, 300, 327, 335,
338, 342, 350, 361, 363,
366, 370, 372, 380, 385;
alphabetic, 13, 24, 30, 33,
50, 93, 224, 392, 394, 430;
and slavery, 320, 322; and
the literary text, 60; Anglophone, 406; as a global
infrastructure,
446;
as
otherness, 104, 147; black
literacy, 319, 320, 321, 322,
323, 324, 326, 347, 367,
369; conventional, 350,
423; critique of, 366, 427,
441; discourse of, 28, 36,
41, 64, 67, 154, 326;
dominant, 319, 327; Eastern, 314; female, 430; forbidden, 263, 341; functional, 9, 10; high, 10, 43,
54, 79, 84, 86, 91, 99, 120,
191, 228, 244, 254, 324,
344, 373, 385; indigenous,
226, 242; Islamic, 300;
limitations of, 76, 99, 100,
219; mass, 15, 61, 65, 70,
91, 103, 175, 321; oral,
224; partial, 4, 63, 64, 140,
150, 327, 354; rates, 8, 11,
15, 31, 49; rudimentary,
267, 322, 353; skills, 4, 7,
9, 10, 19, 34, 35, 69, 249,
322, 339, 350, 353, 370,
497
371, 375, 377, 379, 380,
394, 423; standards, 10, 33,
39, 48, 84, 301; understanding of, 9, 55, 149, 227,
342; universal, 19, 22, 41,
76, 141, 294, 441; uses of,
227; vs. orality, 25, 26, 28,
35, 42, 43, 136, 224, 342,
343, 344, 347, 400;
Western, 49, 166, 169, 223,
224, 254, 300; white, 237,
249, 351, 358, 363
literalization, 8, 11, 28, 30, 32,
35, 36, 46, 49, 65, 71, 72,
75, 77, 91, 141, 167, 169,
170, 177, 197, 225, 226,
262, 263, 284, 290, 291,
304, 319, 338, 341, 359,
363, 364, 369, 370, 373,
375, 385, 440, 442, 443
literate authority, 93, 309;
civilization, 7, 19, 35, 88,
91, 103, 155, 161, 166, 183,
441; communication, 170,
354, 445; culture, 7, 11, 13,
15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 30, 32,
34, 47, 55, 60, 63, 72, 74,
77, 84, 90, 91, 93, 106, 136,
139, 140, 141, 142, 162,
191, 205, 218, 223, 224,
242, 262, 297, 319, 324,
326, 327, 336, 349, 353,
354, 363, 365, 367, 387,
445; discourse, 51, 160;
elite, 11, 14, 97, 445;
knowledge, 123, 385; practices, 9, 23, 43, 46, 86, 124,
179, 183, 282, 320, 391,
426; societies, 10, 26, 35,
498
37, 41, 74, 139, 248, 249,

331, 354, 442, 445;
thinking, 7, 23, 26, 27, 28,
29, 43, 46, 59, 71, 110, 120,
121, 149, 176, 179, 188,
190, 219, 228, 312, 328
literate, the, 26, 35, 43, 55, 71,
73, 74, 76, 99, 100, 129,
150, 155, 162, 165, 168,
170, 174, 191, 217, 218,
223, 237, 282, 294, 324,
440, 441
literati, 40, 262
litocracy, 55, 56, 123
Locke, John, 273
Lodge, David, 181
Lofton, Ramona (see Sapphire)
Logan, Robert K., 36n
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,
184
Loomba, Ania, 39, 51, 53, 94
Lord, Albert Bates, 23, 106
Lovesey, Oliver, 178n
Lurija, Aleksandr, 23
Lyons, Paul, 154, 155
Ma, Sheng-mei, 155, 207, 300,
435-36
Macaulay, Thomas Babington,
184
MacKenzie, Craig, 50n
Mahoney, Elizabeth, 123
Mailer, Norman, 49n
Malamet, Elliott, 182
Malayam, 267n
Mali, 174
Malouf, David, 167; An Imaginary Life, 105-106, 13962, 165, 166, 261; Re-
membering Babylon, 105,

155, 439-40, 442
Mangan, James Clarence, 184
Manguel, Alberto, 30
Mansfield, Nick, 150n
Maori, 166, 169, 170, 223,
225-27, 229, 231-58, 261;
Renaissance, 223n; woodcarving, 248, 249, 250, 254,
255
Marais, Mike, 155, 207n
Marathi, 267n
marginality, 91, 103, 185, 238,
263
marginalization, 52, 99, 227,
333, 343, 354
Margolies, Edward, 331, 332,
333
Martin, Henry-Jean, 4, 37, 62,
63, 65, 86, 87, 149, 393,
394, 405, 417, 442
Marxist, 94, 97, 178, 290
master culture, 77, 223, 229,
249, 319, 363; language,
36, 53, 274
Masters, Edgar Lee, 341
materiality of texts, 16, 23, 44,
69, 254, 304, 391
May, Brian, 311
McCarron, Kevin, 104, 120
McIntosh, Carey, 61-63
McLuhan, Marshall, 22, 24,
30, 32, 33, 44, 59, 176, 251
Meaney, Gerardine, 123, 130,
133
media, mass, 299; other, 21,
22, 32, 34, 46, 250, 299,
322, 345, 387, 421
Mencken, H.L., 341
Index
Mende, 168, 169, 175, 176,
184
Merivale, Particia, 215
meta-discourse, 46, 48, 120,
258, 269, 372, 386
metafiction, 14, 15, 45, 46, 47,
48, 49, 50, 56, 90, 92, 104,
160
metafictional resourcefulness,
14, 50
metropolitan intellectual, 54,
55, 314
Michel-Michot, Paulette, 155
Middle Ages, 28, 31
migration, 13, 140, 141, 144,
161, 300, 340, 387, 388,
389, 390, 392, 395, 397,
400, 401, 402, 403, 409,
413, 414, 425, 431, 432,
434
Miller, Christopher, 178
Milton, John, Paradise Lost,
73
mimetic, 45, 48, 76, 258, 301,
304, 345
mimicry, 95, 241, 286, 337,
414
Mistri, Rohinton, 271
Mitchell, David, 236
Mongia, Padmini, 51, 96
More, Hannah, 72
Morgan, Sally, 141
Morgan, Sally, My Place, 141
Mori, Aoi, 355n
Morrison, Toni, 92, 324, 326;
Beloved, 261, 262, 263,
344, 345, 347-66, 367, 369,
371, 380, 411, 419, 441;
Jazz, 347
499
Mphalele, Eskia, 227n
Mudford, Peter, 189
Mller, Anja, 123
Muslim, 174, 185, 298, 299,
300, 313 (see also Islam)
muteness, 15, 53, 99, 179, 206,
207, 409, 441 (see also
inarticulateness,
silence,
myth, 32, 161, 215, 228, 298,
349
mythology, 194, 232, 252, 254
Naipaul, V.S., 271
naming 124, 129, 136, 416
Narayan, R.K., 271, 273, 286n
narration, 43, 45, 47, 50, 71,
83, 91, 105, 195, 214, 235,
243, 301, 303, 310, 312,
343, 385, 423, 435
narratology, 14, 42, 43
Nash, Ronald H., 10n
Nasta, Susheila, 276
nationalism, 39, 40, 80, 271,
272
native, 74, 78, 126, 166-68,
173, 174, 179, 188, 203,
205, 206, 207, 208, 219,
223, 225, 226, 227, 228,
229, 233, 234, 236, 238,
239, 242, 243, 247, 248,
257, 263, 268, 287 (see also
aborigines and indigenous
culture)
Native American, 224-47; Renaissance, 223n
Naumann, Michel, 209, 210
Nazareth, Peter, 78
500
Needham, Joseph, 393

Neilsen, Philip, 143
New Zealand, 13, 37, 53, 22127, 248
Ngugi, wa Thingo, 177, 227n;
A Grain of Wheat, Devil on
the Cross, 178n; Decolonising the Mind, 95, 175,
177n; Petals of Blood, 17792
Njoha, King of Cameroon, 175
non-alphabetic thinking, 59;
writing, 36, 392
non-literacy, 105, 142, 264,
335, 363 (see also illiteracy,
non-writingness and scriptlessness)
non-literate culture, 23, 24,
191, 218, 223, 360; Other,
15, 16, 52, 59, 76, 77, 78,
91, 92, 93, 100, 106, 107,
131, 154, 155, 162, 165,
188, 218, 261, 262, 305,
306, 309, 385, 442, 443,
444 (see also Other, the);
otherness, 15, 35, 55, 59,
92, 100, 123, 162, 274, 385;
thinking, 23, 52, 59, 71,
313, 314, 343, 350 (see also
oral)
non-writingness, 37, 104, 140,
168
Nsibidi, 176
Naipaul, V.S., 271
Oesterreicher, Wulf, 43
Ogundele, Wole, 177n
Ojibwe, 226
Oji-Cree, 226
Okara, Gabriel, 227n

Oldsey, Bernard S., 114n
Olson, David R., 8, 9, 10, 11,
21, 24, 25, 49
Ong Walter, 23-29 32, 42, 59,
153
oracity, 170
oral culture, 4, 26, 28, 29, 74,
176, 198, 219, 320, 358,
365; literature, 42, 50, 227;
narration, 83, 90, 91, 243;
societies, 13, 26, 27, 151,
178; traditions, 28, 43, 166,
176, 200, 203, 229, 343
oralities, 43
orality, 6, 14, 19, 21, 23, 24,
25, 26, 27, 28, 35, 41, 42,
43, 45, 49, 52, 59, 79, 84,
88, 91, 92, 94, 136, 169,
170, 173, 176, 179, 187,
191, 192, 195, 198, 199,
201, 224, 242, 250, 263,
293, 319, 325, 342, 343,
344, 347, 354, 363, 365,
366, 369, 400, 430, 440; vs.
literacy (see literacy vs.
orality)
Oriya, 267n
Orwell, George, 278
Oster, Judith, 387n
Other, the, 7, 52, 54, 56, 77,
79, 80, 89, 90, 95, 96, 100,
106, 118, 119, 120, 121,
130, 134, 139, 152, 154,
160, 188, 190, 191, 207,
210, 218, 219, 262, 273,
356, 386; from the literates
point of view, 94, 97, 150,
154, 206, 216, 217, 262;
Index
inscription of, 211, 212;
knowledge of, 149, 150
Othering, 15, 74, 94, 95, 96,
98, 139, 173, 179, 207, 326,
363
otherness, 24, 35, 77, 91, 186,
261, 386, 387, 446 (see also
non-literate otherness and
alterity)
Owens, Louis, 242, 243
pakeha, 227, 231, 241, 249,
256
Palmer, Eustace, 196n
Papastergiadis, Nikos, 158n
paper, 3, 20, 25, 30, 53, 65, 68,
74, 84, 85, 98, 126, 153,
160, 168, 182, 185, 253,
254, 283, 348, 350, 351,
357, 360, 364, 365, 366,
379, 386, 392, 394, 397,
398, 403, 412, 413, 414,
419, 421, 424; consumption, 62
papers, 63, 168, 183, 278, 321,
322, 339, 397, 402, 416,
419, 439
Parrill, William, 368
Parry, Benita, 23, 207
Parry, Milman, 23
Pathak, R.S., 271
Paul, Premina, 295
Peach, Linden, 106, 124, 126,
348, 352n, 354, 356n, 358n
Pecora, Vincent, 84
Perry, John Oliver, 267
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich,
65
Peter, John, 114
501
Peterson, Nancy J., 228
Phillip, Arthur, 143
phonetic, 30, 32, 195, 392,
395, 403
phonocentric, 14, 21, 27, 42,
49, 99, 391
Pitman, Benjamin, 223n
Pittman, Barbara, 236, 237,
376
Plato, 23, 48, 441; Phaedrus,
442
Plutarch, Lives, 73
Postman, Neil, 32, 33, 298
post-structuralism, 14, 42
Pratt, Mary Louise, 94
preliterate, 19, 88, 111, 115,
120, 159, 169, 251, 303,
344, 346, 385, 443
Prichard, Katherine Susannah,
Coonardoo, 141
primitive, 24, 25, 27, 67, 80,
124, 150, 154, 160, 251,
321, 348
primitives, 126, 202 (see also
barbarians)
primitivism, 24, 325, 435
print culture, 22, 30, 61, 62,
63, 70, 73, 77, 445; genre,
48, 92
printed matter, 63, 183, 283,
350, 416
printing, 4, 32, 49, 61, 62, 63,
64, 175
Punjabi, 267, 279
quest, 249, 277, 281, 288, 295,
297, 321, 326, 359, 385,
423
Quinby, Lee, 401, 431
502
Rabine, Leslie W., 404

Rainwater, Catherine, 237n,
246n
Rao, Raja, 271
Ratheiser-Baumgartner, Ulla,
191
Ray, Martin, 86, 87
readership, 11, 12, 42, 44, 48,
61, 65, 70, 192, 217, 268,
299, 300, 410, 436, 439
reading, 33, 41, 44, 61, 63, 64,
70, 182, 193, 195, 201, 208,
214, 215, 267, 323, 339,
341, 416, 421, 422; and
writing, 5, 69, 148, 298,
323, 394, 411, 416, 440
Reid, E. Shelley, 243
religion, 35, 195, 198, 200,
249, 269, 276, 285, 290,
297, 298, 300, 319
Renaissance, 61, 223, 227,
298, 325, 342
representation, 7, 15, 20, 22,
24, 30, 51, 54, 56, 59, 76,
77, 87, 97, 99, 100, 112,
115, 117, 119, 121, 132,
133, 142, 145, 151, 155,
179, 200, 208, 321, 331,
393, 398, 435, 440, 443,
445, 446
representer, 54, 99, 446
Rhydwen, Mari, 27, 29, 36
Richards, I.A., 41
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela,
68
Ricoeur, Paul, 299
Riemenschneider, Dieter, 270,
277, 281
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 44,
45
Roberts, Peter A., 61, 319
Robertson, Roland, 54
Rody, Caroline, 347, 352
Roman Empire, 140, 145
Romance fiction, 124
Romanticism, 273, 308, 325,
345
Roosevelt, Theordore, 387n
Rosenwald, Lawrence, 387,
388, 436
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 65,
206, 273; mile, 123
Roy, Arundhati, The God of
Small Things, 11, 22, 37
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 320
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown,
239
Rushdie, Salman, 40, 271, 272;
Midnights Children, 26163, 270, 273-74, 297-315;
The Satanic Verses, 298,
299, 300, 301
Russ, Joanna, 133n
Sabaeans, 175
Sage, Lorna, 104, 105, 106,
107
Said, Edward, 78n, 80n
sameness, 16, 99, 119, 217,
242, 278, 286, 381, 406,
425, 431, 445
Sanders, Barry, 24, 32, 33, 35,
47, 48, 49, 132, 153, 250,
422
Sanders, Joe, 132
Sands, Kathleen M., 228, 236
Sanskrit, 267
Sapphire, 440n; Push, 261,
Index
263, 367-75
Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 227n
Sarris, Greg, 246
Sarshar, Ratannath, 278
Saussure, Ferdinand, 20
savage, 6, 24, 25, 68, 73, 83,
86, 88, 123, 128, 129, 149,
150, 154, 155, 165, 205,
217, 325, 351, 410
savageness, 133, 157, 308
Schafer, Elizabeth, 182, 189,
190
Scheffel, Michael, 47, 48
Schneider, Lissa, 245
Schofield, R.S., 67
Scholes, Robert, 50
school, 8, 11, 31, 33, 62, 63,
66, 67, 71, 72, 84, 125, 141,
152, 168, 175, 198, 226,
239, 240, 241, 253, 261,
277, 278, 279, 289, 328,
331, 334, 336, 367, 371,
377, 378, 379, 393, 397,
407, 417, 421, 440
schooling, compulsory, 15, 66,
226; free, 30, 66, 70
Schueller, Malini Johar, 435
Schweizer, Bernard, 188n
Scott, Sir Walter, 74-76, 91,
376; Ivanhoe, 72; The
Antiquary, 74
scribe, 16, 90, 141, 147, 165,
166, 168, 192, 217, 278,
279, 309, 313, 339, 393,
401
Scribner, Sylvia, 24
script, 10, 14, 19, 24, 29, 30,
33, 34, 36, 42, 50, 52, 59,
103, 129, 175, 176, 217,
503
226, 267, 313, 373, 385,
386, 387, 390, 392, 393,
394, 395, 398, 401, 405,
407, 422, 430, 433, 436,
440, 442
scriptlessness, 7, 33, 35, 36,
37, 52, 59, 61, 79, 88, 91,
104, 135, 140, 142, 152,
162, 178, 224, 231, 263,
270, 303, 313, 385, 422,
445
scriptures, 226, 289
Sealy, Allan, 271
Sequoyah, 226
Seth, Vikram, 271
Shah, Syed Waris, Hir and
Ranjah (Heer Ranjha), 279
Shakespeare,
William,
in
Greene, 185, 189-90; Coriolanus, 189; Cymbeline, 5;
Henry IV, Part One, 189;
King Henry the Sixth, Part
Two, 4; Much Ado About
Nothing, 4; Romeo and
Juliet, 3; The Tempest, 5, 6,
104, 150, 151, 306
Shakinovsky, Lynn, 49n
Shan, Te-hsing, 388, 390
Shell, Marc, 387, 388
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Frankenstein, 72, 73, 149,
155
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley,
The Rivals, 67
Shirali, K.A., 25
Shohat, Ella, 387
Showalter, Elaine, 300
sign, 20, 22, 44, 62, 67, 82, 89,
103, 105, 120, 127, 142,
504
143, 147, 152, 153, 158,

162, 169, 179, 192, 193,
201, 211, 216, 224, 229,
232, 244, 251, 283, 284,
286, 288, 326, 348, 350,
355, 356, 357, 363, 373,
377, 386, 392, 394, 398,
402, 416, 417, 424
silence, 6, 15, 53, 79, 90, 98,
135, 146, 147, 158, 179,
186, 187, 194, 195, 206,
207, 208, 220, 250, 276,
280, 356, 361, 404, 408,
409, 411, 412, 413, 417,
419, 420, 422, 423, 431,
441 (see also muteness,
Sindhi, 267n
Skinner, John, 52, 53, 227, 267
Skuttnab-Kangas, Tove, 388
slave narrative, 319, 323, 324,
345, 347, 353, 358
small population cultures, 229
Smith, Bruce R., 6, 7
Smith, Grahame, 183
Smith, William H., 31n, 49,
67n,
Souris, Stephen, 435
Southern Europe, 105, 142
Soyinka, Wole, 177, 227
Spear, Hilda D., 103
speech, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 24,
41, 42, 43, 44, 78, 83, 90,
92, 94, 97, 99, 136, 159,
194, 200, 207, 257, 258,
282, 289, 290, 293, 295,
307, 325, 336, 343, 344,
354, 386, 393, 394, 399,
411, 412, 420, 442

speechlessness, 15, 53, 88, 92,
98, 99, 207, 409 (see also
muteness, silence, and
voicelessness)
Spencer, Herbert, 348
Spender, Stephen, 273
Spinks, Lee, 105, 162
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty,
15, 25, 53, 54, 55, 98, 99
Srinivas, V.S., 178, 298
Starling, Marion Wilson, 322,
323
Stepto, Robert B., 335, 338
Sterne, Laurence, 47, 69, 301
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram
Shandy, 47, 69, 301
Stone, Laurence, 67n
structuralism, 14, 20, 21, 22,
23, 27, 41, 46, 49
subaltern, 15, 53-55, 97-99,
208, 217, 263, 264, 272,
291, 292, 303, 313, 327,
342, 358
subalternity, 15, 54, 97, 99,
269, 273, 295, 343
subculture, 320, 331
sub-Saharan Africa, 8, 13, 174,
177, 227
Sugnet, Charlie, 197n
Suleri, Sara, 54, 271, 272, 274,
300n, 301n
Sundquist, Eric J., 319
supernatural, 252, 345, 346,
357
Sutherland, Kathryn, 62, 64,
65n, 66, 70
Swahili, 174, 175
Syrian, 175, 184, 185, 188
Index
Tagore, Rabindranath, 278
Tai-yi, Lin, 390n
Talib, Ismail, 53
Tan, Amy, 386, 440n; The
Bonesetters Daughter, 387,
391, 392, 395, 425-36
Tanner, Toni, 79
Tapping, Craig, 49n, 51, 52
teacher, 11, 68, 71, 126, 129,
144, 150, 157, 158, 161,
175, 199, 226, 253, 262,
277, 290, 334, 340, 347,
348, 349, 350, 351, 352,
359, 361, 362, 364, 365,
367, 368, 369, 371, 372,
373, 374, 375, 377, 379,
380, 381, 408, 421, 432,
439, 441
teaching, 71, 123, 233, 253,
349, 358, 367, 371, 373,
377
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre,
133
television, 33, 145, 256 (see
also media)
Telugu, 267n
Tharoor, Shashi, 271, 272
Tiger, Virginia, 107, 109, 110
Tulip, James, 146n
Tuman, Myron C., 34
Twain, Mark, 47, 48, 49n
typographic culture, 27, 52;
thinking, 100 (see also
literate thinking)
United Nations, 8
uncanny, 137, 143, 165, 194,
233, 355
UNESCO, 7, 10, 177
505
Untouchables, 275-95, 319,
331, 335
Urdu, 267
US Bureau of the Census, 7, 9,
11
Vai, 175, 176
Van Dyke, Annette, 239
Vaughan, Megan, 94
Verma, K.D., 270, 271, 273
vernacular, 28, 31, 36, 39, 269
Viola, Andr, 78
voice, 79n, 83, 84, 344, 372,
403, 409, 417n, 422; narratorial, 44, 83, 118, 149,
201, 202, 256, 257, 327,
345, 347, 366; of the
subaltern, 98, 206, 302
voicelessness, 15, 53, 91, 94,
99, 356, 371n, 405n, 409,
441
Volney, C.F., Ruins of Empires,
73
Vygotsky, Lev, 23
Wali, Obi, 177
Walker, Alice, The Color
Purple, 343-44
Washbrook, David, 54n
Watego, Cliff, 229
Waten, Judah, Alien Son, 141
Watson, Stephen, 174n, 217n
Watt, Ian, 23, 23n, 27, 32, 50n
Waugh, Evelyn, 189
Waugh, Patricia, 45, 46, 189
Weintraub, Stanley, 114n
Wells, H.G., Outline of History, 114, 115, 121
West Africa, 166, 173, 174,
506
175, 181, 183, 190, 194,

320
White, Andrea, 79n, 80, 81
Williams, Jeffrey, 81-82
Williams, Mark, 225, 227
Williams, Patrick, 94
Wilson, Keith, 301
Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, 223
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 416
World War II, 106, 166, 173,
181, 387, 406, 411, 414,
443
Wright, Derek, 50n
Wright, Richard, 326, 440n;
Black Boy, 261, 262, 263,
331-46, 367, 371; Native
Son, 338
writing, 20, 66, 151, 154, 158,
160, 166, 176, 250, 311,
372, 441; act of, 45, 188,

372, 397, 428; as transcription, 192, 234, 344; limitations of, 90, 119; notion of,
13; system, 10, 13, 14, 19,
29, 37, 170, 175, 213, 216,
385, 392, 393
Wyatt, Jean, 344
Yeandle, Laetitia, 4
Yeoh, Gilbert, 206, 207, 208,
212, 213, 217, 218
Yuan, Yuan, 86, 386, 390, 404,
435
Zabus, Chantal, 78, 80, 88
Zeck, Jeanne-Marie, 223
Zelliot, Eleanor, 295
iek, Slavoj, 100

Helga Ramsey-Kurz The Non-Literate Other Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English. Costerus NS 2007

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The Non-Literate

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 171

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Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

ILLITERACY AS A THEORETICAL ANATHEMA

In the Humanities: Tabooed

In Literary Studies: Ignored

Illiteracy as a Literary Theme

Illiteracy in Earlier Fiction

Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Fiction:

III THE NON-LITERATE WITHOUT:

Unearthing the Pre-Literate Mind:

Projections of a Post-Literate Mind:

Postcolonial Returns to a Pre-Literate

The Non-Literate Other

IV THE NON-LITERATE IN SIGHT:

EARLY CONTACTS IN FICTIONAL AFRICA

But a Glimpse in the Rear View Mirror:

Meeting in the Desert:

LATER CONTACTS IN NEW ZEALAND AND NORTH AMERICA

Islands of Preliterate Orality:

THE NON-LITERATE WITHIN: ESTABLISHED FORMS

ILLITERACY FORGED BY THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM

The Outcastes Longing to Learn:

Learning to Belong to the Outcastes:

BLACK ILLITERACY FORGED BY SLAVERY AND RACISM

The Lure of White Literacy: Richard

Resisting White Literacy: Toni

Forging a Black Literacy: Sapphires

VI THE ILLITERATE RETURNED:

The Illiterate Mother: Maxine

The Illiterate Daughter: Joy Kogawas

Generations of Illiteracy: Amy Tans

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The Non-Literate Other

one must strive to accomplish even when writing on a subject as badly

Permission to reprint a modified version of the paper Does

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In the second scene of Romeo and Juliet, Capulet turns to a servant,

Still, the problem Capulets servant is faced with is not

The Non-Literate Other

without, as yet, seeming to threaten a still intact oral culture. In a

Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, translation of Lhistoire

The Non-Literate Other

In his culture, or soundscape,5 Calibans deformity, to which

Yet, it is not Trinculos rhetoric alone that lends greater humanity

the Elizabethan theatre, whose acoustic properties render it more like

The Non-Literate Other

rates have been decreasing, the absolute number of illiterate people

different demands require different definitions. Recognizing this as

Even if individuals are not highly skilled in literate activities, Olson

Olson, Literacy and Schooling.

The Non-Literate Other

in multiple ways in a literate society.16 Olson calls such knowledge

For Olson, high or elite literacy is neither a privilege nor a luxury

its readership. With the growth of readership, he explains, come

The Non-Literate Other

A Million and Counting, Frontline: India's National Magazine, XV/2 (24

The Non-Literate Other

the circumstances which caused illiteracy to be recognized as a social

The Non-Literate Other

concerning the subalterns ability to speak up for herself in a