Tropes of Vision: a Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Fictions

Abstract

This thesis is a study of narratives which use tropes of vision to articulate the relationships between subjects and their social space. The figure of the sightseer and her field-glasses, in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, is a vehicle for an analysis of colonial modes of apprehension and knowledge, particularly as they cohere around binary categories of identity. In J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians the relation between binary categories of self and other is figured as a specular one, and the spectatorship of otherness is a marker both of power over the other, and of complicity in the oppression produced by that power. This complicity is extended to the narrator and author (who represent otherness as spectacle), and to the reader of fiction, who is characterized not only as a "spectator", but also as a potential voyeur. A fantasy of total vision and control is narrated in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's House of Glass. In this novel the metaphor of the glass house describes the totalising surveillance systems of the Dutch colonial state, as read against Michel Foucault's account of Bentham's Panopticon. The fantasy of complete invisibility structures Ben Okri's utopian society in Astonishing the Gods, in which the mediating categories which produce difference, exclusion and oppression are erased or transcended. This is achieved via a universalism which has the effect of producing new exclusions and oppressions. In Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, a protagonist who, though he holds an idealised view of American society as democratic, equal and "transparent", experiences social space as oppressive and "opaque". In this novel, multiply-coded social space is represented as damaged. In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie gives an account of binary modes of identity construction in a migrant community, through the trope of visibility/invisibility. The novel critiques the either/or logic of binary categories of identification as inadequate for making sense of the range of identities it describes, without successfully escaping that logic itself. In his subsequent novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie offers the palimpsest as a figure which avoids the logic of either/or, without resorting to a vague conglomeration of both in a notion of hybridity. The palimpsest provides a field of representation in which multiple significations can collide and coexist, where multiply-coded social space is neither denounced as damaged nor abolished by utopianism. Instead, the palimpsest is able to describe the inescapable condition of the postcolonial subject.