|
|||||
|
|
CHAPTER 8 In this chapter, I look at examples of scholarship that critique works of one culture from within another and compare them with critiques from within the original culture. First I will take a look at my writing about Mary TallMountain and secondly at several scholars' work on James Joyce (endnote 1). The purpose is to reveal problems within the cross-cultural projects just by virtue of limits of understanding from one culture to another. By no means do I want to say that cross-cultural understanding is impossible. But academic commentary from a colonizing culture on works of a colonized culture (especially endangered indigenous cultures) is questionable because of the power connected to the academic voice and limited insights that being an outsider inevitably brings with it. In my experience and that of other "halfies," understanding a culture that one was not born and raised in takes a very long time of living immersed within that culture. I have lived in the United States half my life and still cannot say I fully understand what it is to be American. My feeling is that I will never completely understand, although I certainly can say more than someone who has never lived or only lived for a short while in the States. But it is still pertinent to ask what positive contributions commentary by non-indigenous academics on indigenous cultures may have offered and may still offer. In her acknowledgments to those who helped get The Sacred Hoop finished and published, Paula Gunn Allen includes many non-indigenous helping hands, among them Judy Grahn, white poet and publisher for editorial and other help, and academics who encouraged and supported Gunn Allen with teaching jobs, publishing, and editorial commentary. Other indigenous writers and scholars can tell similar stories. There have been and are useful, stimulating, supportive efforts coming from the western academy. However, the 1990s and 2000s have brought a time of change. Pushing against continuing colonial practices in the academy and elsewhere, indigenous scholars increasingly call for western academics to give up the privilege of defining indigenous cultures. As Sherry B. Ortner says in her article, "Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture," I would argue that we are still in the process of playing out many of the changes set in motion in the sixties...At the same time, quite a few things have happened since then, both out in the world and in the pages of academia. Sticking to the academic front, there has been an extraordinary growth of concern about the question of how we produce and authorize the claims we as scholars make about the world. (163) Indigenous scholars, writers, researchers, and scientists need space to define their cultures for themselves. At the Pacific Writers Forum mentioned in Chapter 1, I talked with Maori scholar Toroa Pohatu, who told me that Maori academics had separated themselves for at least a year in order to delineate and solidify a Maori university. Disengaging from the colonial culture is necessary, she said, when indigenous peoples are not only decolonizing but building something indigenously based for themselves. They cannot continue to rely on colonial models or be affected by them while they build an alternative. Manu Meyer's work on Native Hawaiian epistemology is another case. The examples I give in this chapter will, I hope, further clarify why indigenous scholars are asking for a moratorium. Mary TallMountain The first example I will address is that of articles I have published about my friend, the Athabascan poet, short story and essay writer, Mary TallMountain. I have two papers and an Encyclopedia of Literary Biography entry published: one article in Spring 1994 in Ariel, "Mary TallMountain's Writing: Healing the Heart Going Home;" and the other in Summer 1997 in S.A.I.L., "Reflections on Mary TallMountain's Life and Writing: Reflecting Mirrors." I began writing about TallMountain when I was an M.A. student at Sonoma State University, California, in 1992, when the long-time professor of the research methods class assigned us to write six papers on a writer in English who was not of Euroamerican ancestry--the assignment he gave each year in the research class. I elected to write on TallMountain rather than someone I could not actually meet because the opportunity was there to work with someone in the body--a much more shaky and frightening prospect but also a richer and more fulfilling one. Mary TallMountain was a good friend of Paula Gunn Allen, who was a teacher and friend of mine, and she lived close by me. The relationship I developed with Mary TallMountain was very close, independent of my work on her writing. We read each other's poetry at readings, made silly faces, laughed a lot, drank tea, talked about suffering in the world. She told me she would always be there for me, even after death. But close as I was to her, I am not Athabascan, not even Indian. I do not know her culture of origin (though I do share her culture of exile) and therefore cannot understand her writing in its light or, as Gunn Allen can and has, in the light of the American Indian experience of colonial oppression. Our closeness is no guarantee that I will not distort the meaning of her work in my image and it does not excuse me from acknowledging the privilege that led to my being an M.A. and then a Ph.D. candidate who has access to conferences and publishing and teaching. An example of the difference work from inside a culture can make is a review Mary TallMountain wrote of Gunn Allen's novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. I read several reviews by non-Native critics, but the only one that made sense of the novel for me was the one by TallMountain, who read her friend's work from a spirituality that illuminated the book as no non-Indian academic exploration could. TallMountain writes: This novel arose from a mystical dialog between its creator and the writer. The creator is Spider Grandmother. Legend: From Double Woman, twins emerged who "would give human form to the spirit which was the people, and would make all that lives upon the earth." And everything began. These concepts, elaborately defined in the novel, hang behind the action as a veil of thought, an ever changing veil which controls all that exists. Such mysticism separates the work from literature of other cultures, so that it is impossible to classify. It renders this review unlike others because it deals with different levels of the life and the spirit of the poet....She has delved deeply into mystic thought; the novel gathers her findings. This reviewer has followed the novel throughout its growth from its inception and her attempts to relate her impressions for readers who may identify with these concepts, who are interested in the life of the spirit. Such a theme can not be understood or written linearly. The reader needs to be truly engaged with it. Only this process will mine its depths. (1) TallMountain's sharply intelligent appraisal illuminates the novel with an understanding previously unavailable to me because the experiences of Indian spirituality as well as of oppression as an Indian in the novel are shared by TallMountain and Gunn Allen and not by me. Before I read TallMountain's review, I could not grasp Gunn Allen's work. The first criticism I have of my own work is that it did not come about as a result of a need within the American Indian community. It was a project conceived by a white professor at a predominantly white college and, in its normal form, gave little or nothing of use back, as far as I know, to the communities it focused on. My own articles on TallMountain's writing were not, as TallMountain's review was, elicited by a request from her, the object of my study, or anyone who knew her and wanted to call forth a critique or an appreciation of her work. The spark was a requirement for the M.A. in English at Sonoma State University, not a need from within a part of the Indian community or even a reflection of an already established friendship. I chose to go and meet TallMountain and to get to know her and write about her because to do so was more challenging and interesting than covering someone I could only read about in books and who had already been written about many times before. I had no idea of the enormous extra-curricular, extra-academic rewards that were in store for me in getting to know Mary TallMountain. TallMountain's generous nature, my delight in finding her, and the almost complete lack of writing about her luckily gave me the opportunity to follow my heart as well as my head in the six papers I produced on her for the class. I found nothing in my searches for academic articles on her, very little in the way of reviews of her work. What I did find was many people who used her work in their teaching, admired her as an elder and a visionary, thanked her for helping them heal through writing. If this sounds like a tribute, that's because it is. If the work I have done has been a help to those who are using her poetry and stories in their teaching, I am happy, but it was not with that end in mind that I set out to write about her. I began purely as a way to get through a degree that would hopefully result in a job for me somewhere and a living for me and my children. My heart connection to her and her work came later and might not have happened at all. The second criticism I have is that the articles I wrote and the papers I delivered at conferences are from the perspective of an itinerant Englishwoman, long-time resident in the white sector of the U.S.A. Nowhere in my papers do I acknowledge that I might not know what I am talking about. This is particularly true because I was writing as an M.A. student and wished to appear "scholarly," "right," and "knowing my subject." The fact that each paper was received by my professor with delight and an emphatic "A" supported me in the assumption that what I was doing was not only appropriate but laudable. It is also true that TallMountain herself was glad to be (finally) the focus of critical attention, and our friendship and her delight in my own poetry made her confident that I would not distort who she was. However, at the time I was writing these papers, she had already suffered a stroke that left her with aphasia and therefore she was unable to focus on what I had written in order to review it and correct misrepresentations or mistakes I made. By this time, she was hardly able to write responses to the many requests she received to give readings and submit her work. My writing went unreviewed by anyone qualified until I submitted two of the papers to refereed journals. Even then, whether the referees included Indian reviewers who knew TallMountain's work I do not know. The point here is that my "scholarship"--what I knew to become a "TallMountain scholar"--was based on a friendship of a year with TallMountain, three years of study with Paula Gunn Allen, good-hearted intention, empathy with her Inbetween culture, talking to many people who knew her and/or used her work in their teaching, and little else. What did I know of Athabascan culture? Nothing except what she herself, who was taken away when she was six years old and who no longer recognized it as the home she had sought when she returned to Nulato, told me. What do I know of American Indian spirituality? Nothing except what Paula Gunn Allen told us in her workshop on women's spirituality, where she purposely focused on the work of G.I. Gurdjieff more than anything Indian, and what memory and imagination growing up in cultures other than my own has to tell me. The shame of it is that there is no one who knows more out there, who has the insider knowledge to give a truer picture of her, who is publishing work on Mary TallMountain. No one, that is, except Gunn Allen herself who has written about TallMountain for years but only briefly, the latest being four pages in her recent On the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing, Loose Canons (127-131). While I still get joy from reading what I have published about TallMountain, recalling the time I spent with her and my love for her as a person, there are several places in particular where my published work on her falls down because, in the sense I have been outlining in this dissertation, I do not know what I am talking about and/or my own imagination, my own values and agendas are what drive my portrayal of her work without my having been up-front even with myself about it. I am in danger of the kind of misty-eyed romanticizing Linda Smith talks about (12-13). This can be seen, for instance, in the article in Ariel, where I say, "TallMountain utters into being, into rebirth, the roots that nourished her mothers before her and continue to nourish her" (138). It is not for me, a wandering Englishwoman, to say whether Mary TallMountain in fact achieved this re-rooting of herself in Athabascan spirituality or to sound as though I know what Athabascan spirituality might be. As I say above, I know very very little of American Indian sacred knowledge and even less about Athabascan practice. How much of what I say, then, depends on TallMountain's representation of herself to me and how much my own longing to re-establish my roots through connection with my ancestors? The question does not come up in my writing as to the ability of TallMountain herself to represent the Athabascan way of life without romanticizing it (she acknowledges in "My Wild Birds Flying," that she cannot consider her birth village Nulato as the home she has been seeking) and whether that matters (136). At least having been raised until she was six years old among the people of her Koyukon Athabascan mother makes her likely to have retained at the very least an intuitive sense of the spirituality she represents. But familiarity with a Koyukon Athabascan spiritual reality certainly has nothing to do with my own embedded claim to understand my friend Mary TallMountain's writing. Admittedly, the Ariel article addresses a search for (a non-physical) home, a search both Mary TallMountain's and my own. There is no denying she made that journey, both in her written words and from her conversations with me and there is no doubt that I understand such a search from a similar place of exile. But that does not justify a claim that the roots TallMountain reclaims are those that nourished her mother and grandmother. Both Mary TallMountain and I traversed years of internal searching, reclamation, therapy, writing, dreaming because our earthly homes of origin had been taken from us. The "home" that we each came to, therefore, was not and could not be the one we had started from and was not the same as the ones our mothers and grandmothers knew. It was through a journey into her Indian roots, with Paula Gunn Allen's help, that Mary TallMountain grew back to health and vitality from a path that could have destroyed her. I cannot question the validity of that journey and of her arrival but neither can I speak confidently about it. I do not have the insider knowledge of its landscape. At a forum on "Indigenous Epistemology" at the Center for Hawaiian Studies at U.H. Manoa, Australian Aboriginal scholar Dennis Foley (quoting Linda Smith and Manu Meyer among others) pointed out that he sees his scholarship as "contemporary" indigenous knowledge rather than traditional indigenous knowledge. He said the indigenous-based scholarship of an Aboriginal academic cannot be equated with the knowledge of elders. The former must give way before the latter. And if contemporary indigenous scholars cannot speak before the knowledge of indigenous elders, then how much less can the non-indigenous scholar speak before indigenous scholars. In the case of my articles on Mary TallMountain, what solutions might there be to the problem? Another quote from Dennis Foley: "The more indigenous academics there are, the more we will be able to represent ourselves from within indigenous epistemology, indigenous ways of knowing." Noenoe Silva reinforced this statement when she said that one important way non-indigenous academics can help is to make space for indigenous students to become academics, to help them in any way we can. What needs to happen is not only that western academics step back so indigenous academics can come forward, but that we assist in this happening. We have the power and some know-how at this point to make the path through academia less weighted against the indigenous student, and we can ask for help in right ways of changing the status quo. James Joyce The second example I want to put before you is James Joyce. There is an enormous body of literary criticism on Joyce's writing. Theories about his writing range from those describing him as a global citizen who embraces relativism and the postmodern situation--"nothing fixed, nothing sure, all ludic play"--to those that attribute an unstinting realism to everything he wrote, comparing him to Dickens. How are we to distinguish accuracy from artifice from self-aggrandizement in this range? Surely, as I have stated in the rest of this dissertation, the criteria for deciding have to rest within Joyce's lived context. Those outside Irish culture--whether in Ireland or in exile--can claim to understand him but they do not have the insider knowledge to make their claims stick. To illustrate this proposal, I will take a look at three critics who write about Joyce's later works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One of them will be an Irish critic who reads Joyce through the history of the Irish fight for independence; one will be an Irish critic who stands within the bounds of English/American academic discipline and uses non-Irish theory to get a fix on him; and one will be a non-Irish literary critic. I will examine them against the background of what Joyce himself said about what he was doing in his later writing, which I claim is the first order of business. I do this because Joyce was nothing if not his own critic and, given what I have said about the colonialism of representing those of another culture from outside it, he must be given the first voice. My insistence on Joyce's primacy in understanding his own work has also to be understood against the background of many theorists' disregard of theory within practice. The practitioner in this case is an Irish writer who was working before, during, and after Irish independence. I recall again the Pacific Writers Forum and the faculty member who deplored lack of theory in the discussion between the writers. Literary theorists position themselves as experts on texts. They tend to regard the authors of these texts as artisans lacking the theoretical distance and faculties necessary to understand the deeper and wider implications of their own work--a stance which leaves literary scholars in charge of unravelling and expanding on the meanings of the works produced. In light of the different cultures and classes (not just in work culture but in nations and ethnic groups) to which authors and critics often belong, Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone of "[m]iscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning" between cultures is useful ("Arts" 37). The contact zone is where two cultures have contact but, one being in power over the other, there is no place for equal exchange of experience and ways of seeing the world to produce mutual understanding. As the Black civil rights movement in the U.S. and the women's movements have shown, it has been necessary for the culture whose power of self definition has been curtailed to learn the culture of the one in power, just for survival. The reverse is not true, leading to isolation of theorists from the realities they study and the constant development and (inter)change that goes on in practice. The sense in which Joyce is the final arbiter on his own work is that it is his work, and all of who he was and is has to be taken into consideration by a literary critic bent on understanding him if the criticism is not just to be an image of the critic and his theory. An additional reason Joyce has primacy in commenting on his own work is the same we as individuals give for claiming authority over what we mean in conversation, public or private. Even in a professional relationship with a therapist, who may, in the enclosed space of her office, claim deeper theory- and intuition-driven insights into what we say, we are still the ultimate arbiters of whether she is right or not, of whether what she suggests makes sense in the contexts of our lives. She cannot tell me what I feel without my acquiescence. She makes suggestions, and I either agree or disagree. This is not just a matter of respect but--as Wittgenstein shows in numerous discussions of intention, motive, and other "internal" experiences--of logical tautology (though respect is certainly a large factor in granting that a speaker knows best what she is saying) (Philosophical Investigations p.223ff). What we can and cannot say (the logic) of intention or feeling includes that the speaker/writer/feeler is the last word on it; that is part of the definition--how we can use them without making nonsense--of the words "intention" and "feeling," which is why I refer to the situation as tautologous. This is not to say there is no room for conversation and discussion. Others can offer suggestions and maybe even open up areas the speaker had not recognized, but if the speaker rejects someone's idea of what she is saying and remains unbudgeable, the argument stops--not because there might not be more to say but because someone cannot be the final judge of what another feels. Others can continue trying to persuade the speaker/writer to accept their interpretations, but they logically cannot prove she has intentions or feelings she refuses to recognize. It is part of the definition of "feeling." The writer (especially the dead writer!) has a much harder time controlling what is attributed to her than a speaker does (if in fact a writer even wants to control what she has written once it is published (endnote 2)), but where a writer has written down her intention and what she has said she is saying makes sense in the context of her life, who can say they know better without being ridiculous? The argument for the death of the author, as Soyinka says about the assumptions of our separation from nature, of the sign from what it refers to, is part of a constructed falsity and it ignores that, as Jamaican scholar and writer John J.M. Figueroa pointed out during his 1994 visit to U.H. Manoa, we must never forget that books are written by people. Writings incorporate the vision, the wisdom, the opinions, the frailties of human beings, who offer them to the world at large. We may very well make mistakes when we try to understand them, but that doesn't mean the writers are not present in their work--it only means we can be mistaken in reading them, just as we can be mistaken in reading the mood of a good friend. Joyce did not hold back from theorizing his own writing and commenting on it, in his fiction and outside of it. We have reams of letters, reported conversations, probably more material than we have on the friends we talk to from day to day. As Robert Ryf says in A New Approach to Joyce, "Joyce's works are not written...they are constructed. The principles upon which these constructions are based are his esthetic theories, formulated in the Portrait and demonstrated in all his works" (106). One of Joyce's most famous expositors, Richard Ellman, for instance, describes Joyce responding to Wyndham Lewis' criticisms in Finnegans Wake via a lecture by his character Shaun, parodying Lewis, and via the fable of the "Ondt and the Gracehoper" (608). What does Joyce say about his own writing? I believe it is necessary to pay attention to the lack of choice he had in the language he had to write in. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which has been universally recognized to include Stephen Dedalus as a self-portrait of the young Joyce (endnote 3) (as Dylan Thomas' follow-up, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog contains stories of Thomas' youth), Joyce presents the following feelings, through Stephen, about the English language: He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought: --The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (166) (my italics) Joyce was 32 years old when Portrait began to be serialized in The Egoist. He began Ulysses and Exiles the same year, 1914. The quote above is that of a seasoned writer and someone who had been writing and thinking aloud about his writing for years. Through the mouth of Stephen in Portrait, Joyce claims that the English language is foreign to him, that it carries with it the constant reminder that he is its prisoner. The words, "home," "Christ," "ale," "master," carried (and carry) with them their Englishness. In 1914, England was still "master" in his "home" of Ireland, a master of such cruelty that many Irish were willing to die to get free after a fight of nearly 1000 years since the arrival of the first Normans. The "unrest of spirit" Dedalus/Joyce experiences when he uses English words, as compared to the naturalness they find in the mouth of "the countryman of Ben Jonson," has everything to do with that colonization (endnote 4). As Maori activist Hone Harawira said at a 1999 forum on "Decolonizing the Mind" in Honolulu, you cannot "carry your values and your culture in another man's language....Within your own language are encapsulated the values and the principles of the people." Kanaka Maoli doctor Kawika Liu repeated this understanding in an on-line discussion when he said, "to subscribe to the language of the colonizer is to reproduce his authority." If this is true, it is insulting to understand Joyce only as a supreme artist in the English language. At present (September 30, 2001), I am reminded of Joyce's bitterness in the bitterness of many Kanaka Maoli friends seeing the U.S. flag flying once again over Iolani Palace at the decision of a mainly haole-missionary-descended Board of the Friends of Iolani Palace. As it was in Ireland and Ngugi wa Thiongo's Kenya, in Hawai'i the English language was enforced by punishing children in the schools for speaking their language (Hawaiian was the dominant language of Hawai'i before the advent of the "government without citizens" of 1893). I hear Kanaka Maoli friends speak of feeling "schizophrenic" because they have internalized both colonized and colonizer and they have to choose at every turn which value to act on, or, more frighteningly, they find themselves acting in ways which are not, at root, in their own interests. They speak a language (and often only that language) enforced on their grandparents and great grandparents with the cane, with shaming, with soap in the mouth, with demeaning punishments. This is not a theoretical thing but an embodied, physical one. I am certain that Joyce's words would ring a bell with Kanaka Maoli who read them and who suffer continuing indignity. Noenoe Silva, in her article "Kanaka Maoli Resistance to Annexation," finds an ally in Ngugi wa Thiongo as she points out that "an important part of the subjugation [of Hawai'i] was the taking away of our 'olelo maoli--our real language." She goes on, When the U.S.-identified oligarchy ended Hawaiian-language public schools in 1896, they ripped out the bridge to our kupuna, the bridge to our understanding of ourselves as a people with a proud past. A generation then grew up, ignorant for the first time of the language and mo'olelo of their grandparents, and unable to understand the grief and undercurrents of rage that must have pervaded the lives of their parents and grandparents who lived through the devastating effects of epidemics, denigration of their customs, and loss of their nation. Ngugi has called this experience "a cultural bomb": "The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves." (41) Robert Welch echoes Silva's words as he writes about Irish culture: "For ni Domhnaill and for Hartnett the loss of the Irish language was a cataclysmic blow to the psyche of the Irish people in that it ripped out and tore asunder all the secret interiors that sponsor the manifold activities that go to make up a culture"--Ngugi's "bomb" (3). Colonization locks the colonized population into a schizophrenic relationship with the colonizer's language, into Joyce's cracked lookinglass, as those who comment on the destructive effects caused by outsider representations of the colonized continue to claim (endnote 5). Outsider representations of insider culture without insider knowledge only exacerbate this injustice, giving distorted representations in what is often the only language available. They also suck the air from the lungs of an examination of a colonized culture by those on the inside and cause outsider representations to be internalized among the colonized. In 1914, James Joyce began Ulysses, at the very start of which he reiterates what he had said about fretting under an English "master" in Portrait. In a scene on page six, the cynical Buck Mulligan shows Dedalus his face in a cracked servant's mirror: --The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you! Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness: --It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookinglass of a servant. At the very start of Ulysses, Joyce has again pointed to what he sees as the servitude and distortion of colonized Irish self-expression (endnote 6). Buck Mulligan continues, --Cracked lookinglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. (6) Immediately, empire, the robbery of the colonized of goods, language, and culture comes into the foreground--the bitterness of those "in the shadow of [the English] language." Where does Joyce choose to go when he decides English will no longer do? Although (perhaps because) he had proved himself stunningly capable of writing in English, Joyce made the decision part way into Ulysses to give up the language under which his soul fretted, whose words his voice held at bay. How be a writer in a language that is crippling, that contains in it all the reminders of a thousand years of brutal oppression? The argument between Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan, who takes the road of least resistance and greatest self-enrichment--accomodation to the English--is the argument over how to write an Irish novel in a context that is controlled by the English (endnote 7). By the time Joyce reached the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses, the writing was rapidly swerving away from what was already challenging prose in the sections before toward resettling the work into Irish. The chapter begins: Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing. Imperthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more. (210) Joyce's work was from this point on rejected even by his friend and supporter Ezra Pound, by Wyndham Lewis, and by many others for what looked to them like growing self-indulgent obscurity. To accusations of meaninglessness, Joyce responded, "They cannot understand it. Therefore they say it is meaningless. Now if it were meaningless it could be written quickly, without thought, without pains, without erudition; but I assure you that these twenty pages now before us cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit" (Ellman 610). Like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which was described by F.R. Leavis as a "sport," Ulysses (and later Finnegans Wake even more so) could/can not be crammed into any of the standard English/American categories of "novel" or even of fiction because all three were stubbornly Irish in origin (108). Emily Bronte wrote in the tongue (endnote 8) she knew best, gotten from her Irish father, son of a bard from the Valley of the Boyne, from her Cornish mother and aunt, and from the Yorkshire moors culture that surrounded them, and all the Brontes (including the more genteel Charlotte and shy Anne) were rejected at first by critics in London as unworthy to join polite society. James Joyce on his part (from a family that struggled up from peasant roots in Cork and were brought to poverty again by his father), was dismissed by Virginia Woolf and scoffed at by Wyndham Lewis because he was lower class, never mind his Irishness, which comes up for comment over and over again by friend and foe alike. Mid-way, then, through Ulysses, Joyce turns away from English and towards Irish--not Gaelic, in which Joyce hadn't the command to write as he needed (as Haunani Kay Trask says she hasn't enough of Hawaiian to write poetry) just as and at the same time, Ireland was turning away from England and towards its own independence (Trask, Pacific Writers Forum). In Finnegans Wake, he undertakes wholesale Irish de-colonization of Standard English. Joyce did not speak Gaelic, though he was not ignorant of it. He had the grasp Irish friends of mine in the 1970s had. As local Englishes in Hawai'i are scattered with Hawaiian words and constructed around Hawaiian grammar, Irish English is scattered with Gaelic words and constructed within Gaelic grammar. Like Hawaiian, Gaelic is a layered language, full of metaphors and levels of meaning, self-reflexive, and rooted in an ancient, non-Christian culture, all of which comes fully clear in his last two books. Finnegans Wake cannot be understood if it is read as a British English work. It uses recaptured Irish English to write against Standard English for reasons similar to those which took Ngugi wa Thiongo away from English and back to his native language of Gikuyu in Devil on the Cross: The novel, at least the writing of it, needs only pen and paper. Nevertheless, I had first to resolve the question of to which tradition I would reconnect myself: that of the Afro-European Novel to which A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood belonged or that of the African novel of which I had no previous experience. No neutrality. I had to choose. But in a sense the choice had been settled for me by Kamiriithu and by the very fact of my detention. I would attempt a novel in the very language which had been the basis of incarceration. I would reconnect myself not to the Afro-European novel of my previous practice but to the African novel of my new commitment. (Decolonizing 71) Joyce made a choice of commitment to "the Irish novel" as he launched into Ulysses and then Finnegans Wake. Why do so many non-Irish and western-trained Irish critics continue to insist on treating Joyce as first a British and then a global writer? Focused as they are on Joyce's membership of a world class of authors, which makes him a global writer susceptible to the attribution of global theories and contexts and therefore the property of all (endnote 9) (just as the Bronte Society focused and continues to focus on ensuring that the Bronte sisters are seen as middle class English women), most of us miss the fact that, after Portrait, Joyce ceased to attempt in literary English the representation of what it was to be Irish. Seamus Deane has said in his Introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, that he sees the most important project for that collection of critical essays to be: repossession of these (and other) authors for an interpretation...governed by a reading of the conditions in which their work was produced and in the Irish conditions in which it was read. It was inevitable that Yeats and Joyce would initially take most of our attention, since it was they, more than anyone else, who had been (mis)read in the light of what was understood to be English or British literature, international modernism, the plight of humankind in the twentieth century. (11) The project is ongoing since it is from the very book Deane is introducing that the quotes from Terry Eagleton in the note above derive, and they continue to present Joyce as a writer of dissolution and separation, of postmodern relativism. Marilyn Reizbaum in "Canonical Double Cross," asserts that Joyce is a "minor" writer, suggesting that he has been misread, ushered into the canon by what is tantamount to a denial of (in Lloyd's terms) the work's "oppositional relationship" to the canon and its operations. This means that Joyce's "revolution of the word" is an act of "deterritorialization," since Joyce is writing in a (m)other tongue....As to the historical canonicity of Joyce, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is worldwide reterritorialization--an appropriation to the mainstream "high culture" aesthetic--that is accountable. (169) But Reizbaum is concerned with Irish and Scottish women writers and does not go on to explore the materiality of Joyce's Irishness. It is Irish literary scholar Enda Duffy who takes Joyce's self-attributed "four-footedness" seriously and shows in extended detail his alignment and wrestling with portrayal of and questions about Irish colonization, the rebellion, and impending independence in The Subaltern Ulysses--his "commitment" as Ngugi puts it, to Irishness. Joyce the practitioner is finally placed in context. Duffy says, at the beginning of his book, I want to reclaim Ulysses in these terms for Irish readers as the text of Ireland's independence and by doing so, return it to readers everywhere as a novel preoccupied in ways not suspected heretofore by its metropolitan critics with both the means by which oppressed communities fight their way out of abjection and the potential pitfalls of anti-colonial struggle. (1) (my italics). Duffy chronicles the writing of Ulysses through the last seven years of Irish uprisings toward freedom from English rule in 1921 and, as he says, insists on setting it back down on the ground--in the context in which it was written. He reclaims it first for Irish readers. He can show--instead of the usual portrayal of a writer alienated from Ireland and concerned only with the play of language--a Joyce who is concerned with concrete and urgent Irish problems that continue in a country whose people are sceptical to this day of what they see as a neo-colonial government. For the rest of the world, he offers Joyce as a writer concerned with struggles that continue to beset colonized peoples everywhere. He shows that Joyce cared about very practical things, as he said he did, and how he cared, what questions he asked, what he wanted to know, and why. Duffy understands Joyce's linguistic obscurity in the context of the subaltern writer who "can only speak through the medium of the oppressor's language, which will always seem compromised" and who is censored both by the colonizer and by his community, who live in fear of English scrutiny and punishment (7). Duffy attributes the "strangeness" of Joyce's later work and of magical realism in other colonized places to an inability to represent the unrepresentable, the "terror of everyday life in the anti-colonial war" (8). In doing so, he ignores what I see as also vital--the roots of this "strangeness" in the non-linear, non-western, spiritually grounded cultures that produce them. But, in insisting on reclaiming Joyce firmly for Ireland, for situating him back in the city Joyce said could be reconstructed through a close knowledge of Ulysses, Duffy has begun reclaiming the power of the insider to Irish culture to say what does and what does not make sense in speaking of Irish literature. Robert Welch claims (as do indigenous people who experience the continuity of their culture from contact to the present despite devastation) that Irish culture has succeeded in surviving through all the years of English brutality and the further years of globalization: "And yet we experience Irishness; we know that there is such a thing, now, as an 'Irish way of life' and even though, as with the rest of the elements that comprise that complex, there is much that is tawdry in it, we know it is there" (4-5). It exists and it is not up for grabs by the global community as long as there is space for the Irish to define themselves. Another Irish critic, David Lloyd, uses metropolitan or global forms of literary theory to understand Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Adopting ideas from Homi Bhabha about hybridity, he describes Joyce as embracing rather than turning away from the consequences of colonization--"inconsequentness," "adulteration"-- in his writing after mid-Ulysses ("Adulteration and the Nation" 105, Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders"). What Lloyd focuses on is Joyce's representation of continuing damage done to Irish culture by the presence of the English colonial power. I notice as I read Lloyd, however, that what he attributes to constant disruption and destruction of Irish ways of life--for example, burlesque whose subject is difficult to locate, ellipses in thought that must be filled, no recognizable sequence of thought--by the incursion of English colonialism in all its guises, can also be recognized as akin to ways of thought claimed by other indigenous peoples as modes in which oral cultures--even those that have been gutted by colonization --operate. An instance that comes to mind is Charlie Isaacs' characterization of the ellipses in the way kupuna (elders) in Hawai'i teach: In this writer's experience within his own ohana (family), the kupuna often speak in a very abstract way. The western mind sees gaps between these spoken phrases; there does not appear to be information that will link the seemingly disparate statements. The mind that has been trained in the Western world thinks in a more lineal fashion and expects sequential evidence to be more neatly placed before it so that the mind can arrive at the proper conclusion. However, my kupuna expect me to know certain things and if I do, it all makes sense and, if I don't then I have less than a full understanding. But I respectfully do not take a long leap to a conclusion. (3) What Lloyd calls "adulteration" is also reminiscent of the attributes Vilsoni Hereniko attaches to the oral culture of his homeland: the reliance of meaning and truth on relationship, so that meaning and truth shift with circumstance and "the law" can be adjusted to fit the occasion; linear and chronological telling is not necessary, and so on. The occurrence of gaps in Irish thinking is mentioned by Lloyd quoting Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic-League in "The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland." Hyde says, "It is nearly impossible to find three verses in which there is anything like an ordinary sequence of thought. They are full up of charms that the mind must leap, elipses [sic] that it must fill up, and detours of movement which only the most vivid imagination can make straight" (102). Lloyd credits the effects of hundreds of years of colonization for these modes of thinking, but it seems equally likely to me from reading Hereniko, Manu Meyer and others on indigenous epistemology, and from hearing Irish storytellers and just the riff of nightlong conversations, that other explanations are possible. Using Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity, Lloyd characterizes such gaps and detours in Joyce's work as "a deliberate stylization of dependence and inauthenticity, a stylization of the hybrid status of the colonized subject as of the colonized culture, their internal adulteration and the strictly parodic modes that they produce in every sphere" (110). Because he relies on or against theorization by "metropolitan critics" like Bhabha, Bakhtin, and others not indigenous to Ireland, Lloyd ignores Joyce's commitment to what Yeats called "Irishry" or the continuity of Irish culture and to affirmation or the positive building of a new prospect, something Duffy does acknowledge (Welch 10, Duffy 188ff). Lloyd quotes Hyde to highlight the fractured nature of Irish song in the nineteenth century. But, rather than seeing Joyce as exposing the failure of Irish to remain genuine, it is possible to read him as celebrating the surviving play of language and culture. I notice that Hyde--because he relied on a paradigm of logic for literate rather than for an oral culture--explained that "to tell a story in verse requires an orderly, progressive, and somewhat slow sequence of ideas, and this is the very faculty which the Gael has not got--his mind is too quick and passionate," (102). Similarly, Lloyd ascribes the instability, changeability, "continual modulations," the "multiplication of possibility," an "entire inter-contamination" of voices, "internal heterogeneities," "adulteration of discourses," "ceaseless interpenetration of different discourses" of the structure of Ulysses to Joyce's intention of representing the hybridity of a colonized culture (109, 107). While this may be so, it does not take into account the possibility that Joyce was celebrating the still existent oral culture alive and well among the people he was representing in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. W.J. McCormack, in "James Joyce, Cliche, and the Irish Language," points out that because of English oppression, including suppression of the Irish language, [t]he Irish language, though it possessed a fine and ancient literature, survived orally.... [F]ormulaic elements in the Irish language point to the language's survival orally during the prolonged period of suppression which the Gaelic culture endured. In the absence of printing houses, newspapers, and entrepreneurial publishers operating through the Irish language, what would have been literature in less politically suppressed and economically underdeveloped societies became oral in Irish. The attendant transformation of literary forms into oral art (folk poetry, recitation, story-telling, etc.) encouraged the preservation of formulaic elements reminiscent of ancient epic rather than contemporaneous literary culture. (329-30) Hyde found such gaps and leaps in the songs he collected because they were oral--not a written, expression, as he himself acknowledges. Joyce builds on that tradition beginning in Ulysses and culminating in Finnegans Wake. As McCormack claims, Joyce pushes a living Irish tradition of oral literature through the printed cliches of industrialized English: Just as the Joycean narrative consistently seeks to break down the rigid categories of life and death to reveal a larger and more positive interaction than those formulated in the bourgeois world as life-in-death and death-in-life, so too the categorization of languages (English, not Irish; Irish, not English) is progressively undermined. Joyce should be seen not simply as part of an English-language tradition which includes Sterne, Conrad, Beckett, and Nabokov, but seen also as the first modern Irish novelist, the novelist who writes not only in English but also out of Irish. (333) Duffy, Welch, and McCormack remark on the raucous, belligerent humor with which Joyce's characters come back at English colonization and which Duffy sees--embodied in Molly Bloom--as a possible answer to the inevitability of neocolonialism. If, as Lloyd himself said in a paper given for the U.H. Manoa English Department in 1995, it is public memory that is preserved in Irish street ballads, what is depressingly described as a mark of the destruction of a culture can be seen, alternatively, as a sign of its survival. Joyce left Ireland because he could not work there, under the censorship of both the English in power and that of the Irish under their thumbs. He did not leave believing that Irish culture no longer existed and could be replaced by a relativist, postmodern, nihilistic globalism. He fully intended, as he said often and in writing, to preserve the Irish culture he knew existed and could call up at any time. He succeeded beyond doubt in what he called his "joke," the pages of an Irish book, Finnegans Wake. Examples of what Duffy calls "metropolitan critics" abound. One noticeable difference in their work is its theoretical nature. Terry Eagleton, for example, after rightly observing that metaphysical musings without concrete positioning in a lived understanding are very likely to bring unpleasant results in the real world, goes on as follows: A utopian thought that does not risk simply making us ill is one able to trace within the present that secret lack of identity with itself which is the spot where a feasible future might germinate--the place where the future overshadows and hollows out the present's spurious repleteness. To 'know the future' can only mean to grasp the present under the sign of its internal contradictions, in the alienations of its desire, in its persistent inability ever quite to coincide with itself" ("Nationalism, Irony, and Commitment" 25-26) (italics mine). In the midst of sensible reflections on the non-place of irony in radical activism and the dangers of metaphysics, Eagleton intersperses (just, I suppose, as I intersperse my attempt at an alternative to colonial academics with my own colonialism) metaphysics Borgesian in convolution, as the above example shows. Warning against abstraction and universalization, he falls often and easily into it (32). At the same time as he celebrates the "triumphant unity" of "particular and universal" that Ulysses represents, he comments on its "suggesting with its every breath just how easily it could have done the same for Bradford or the Bronx" (34, 36). The "it" here cannot surely be Ulysses. Does he rather mean "the" modernist style of writing, also an unlocatable category? He is discussing Ulysses, however, so I assume it is Joyce's work he means, and if this is so, I take it as a vindication of Duffy's difficulty with "metropolitan critics," since such a reading dismisses the unmistakable "Irishry" (to this reader) of this and all of Joyce's writing. Eagleton goes on to read the Wake as "'pure' difference" which "merely collapses back into 'pure' identity, united as they are in their utter indeterminacy," a reading which ascribes "a prior equalizing of all items that then enables them to enter into the most shockingly idiosyncratic permutations" (136). Namely, Eagleton seems entirely to miss the extraordinary levels of perceivable, enjoyable, challenging, verifiable meaning that make Ulysses and the Wake bigger books than almost any other because he wants to see them as utterances of (and/or against) globally enforced sameness. Unlike Duffy, who sees multiple questions and much-thought-upon possible solutions to colonization in Ulysses, Eagleton says, "Joyce, then, poses the problem of totalization, rather than providing us with any very adequate solution" (136). My insistence is, to paraphrase Paula Gunn Allen's "You can take the Indian out of Indian country, but you can't take the Indian out of the Indian," "You can take Joyce out of Ireland but you can't take Ireland out of Joyce" (Hoop 6). Well, here I am, an English woman in U.S. occupied Hawai'i tempted (oh so tempted) to do my own pontificating on what and what not Joyce is. Even as I write and point to the evidence that Joyce was writing Irish English and not some global mishmosh of "shockingly idiosyncratic permutations" in his later works, I cannot be the one to be making this decision either. Or, rather, I can talk away all I like but the last word rests with Irish critics, whether they use non-indigenous theory or not. A global discussion is currently taking place over whether the Irish are an indigenous people. Again, that is not for non-Irish to decide. The cheek of us, I say! Is someone not English going to decide whether I am English or not? I think not. In the Indigenous Anthropology class Lynette Cruz, Maria Orr, and Kawika Tengan taught in 2001 at U.H. Manoa, there was lively discussion about what needs to happen when there is a dispute about the disposition of bones appropriated by archaeologists and kept in a museum. Sometimes there are arguments among the families who claim the bones about who is to get them, where they are to rest, how they are to be treated and so on. Both Kanaka Maoli and non-Kanaka Maoli students and the three Kanaka Maoli teachers were firm in their statement that, whatever the ultimate decision, it is up to the families to work the problems out among themselves. Non-indigenous archaeologists and anthropologists have no place in that discussion ("Indigenous Anthropology," Monday, September 22, 2001). As I have been claiming with reference to Joyce's work and throughout this dissertation, it is the cultural insider's viewpoint that has priority within global literary criticism, just as it has within archaeology/anthropology and other cross-culturally commenting disciplines, if only from an ethical standpoint, and this includes any argument that needs to go on between indigenous scholars like Duffy and Lloyd. The argument over what kind of approach is most appropriate to understand the later Joyce also belongs within the community that produced him. As I have already repeated, it is damaging to indigenous peoples for non-indigenous researchers to pronounce upon, describe, delineate the cultures of any indigenous peoples, (endnote 10) as though non-indigenous scholars are the ones with defining knowledge that will clinch arguments about what is what, who is who, where is where, for those peoples or even in collaboration with them (endnote 11). It was, for me and for the indigenous students and teachers in that class, not a debatable matter that non-indigenous scholars have to stay out of the business of indigenous peoples when it comes to making the kinds of decisions described above, acting as experts in the understanding of various aspects of indigenous cultures. It is not without pain that I say this, for the reason that I would love nothing better than to be able to write and argue my beliefs, based in these very arguments for the priority of an insider's viewpoint, on Joyce's and other indigenous writing. However, the only context in which I now consider it appropriate for non-indigenous researchers to set foot in indigenous knowledge of any kind is when they are specifically called upon, asked by indigenous peoples to help them with a particular situation. And, in those situations, I believe it is the indigenous peoples who are to have complete control over what is said, how it is said, how the research is conducted, and whether and how the results are to be published. The knowledge, as was repeated over and over again in the Indigenous Anthropology class and, textually, in many other places, belongs to the people themselves. The researcher, by virtue of her studies, does not gain possession of or control over that knowledge. This axiom is becoming fairly accepted in the fields of anthropology and sociology, but literary studies, including cultural studies, whose purview mingles noticeably with anthropology and social studies, lags behind (Baynam, "Indig. Anthro."). Another class discussion was over the word "indigenous"--a sticky and fraught topic but also one which can only be decided by indigenous peoples themselves, individually and collectively. As Kelly Kraemer and others show, what is appropriate and meaningful within an indigenous movement or just within a community cannot be decided from outside or by outsiders. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, as I mentioned above, defines the word "indigenous" to indicate the political situation of peoples who have been colonized in their struggles to unite against colonists and includes within it a practical knowledge of how to live on that land (7, 12-13). Ward Churchill uses the term "indigenist" to describe native peoples who have more in common among themselves than they have with the peoples who have colonized them ("Indigenist" 4-5). In the class, there was general agreement that though the term is problematic, it serves as a cohesive vocabulary that links groups of people who have been colonized, are struggling against colonization, and are deeply connected to the land through continuing reverence for their ancestors and that land. Their relationship to the land is completely different from the relationship of the colonizers to that land, as evidenced in the current issue of "Maluhia Me Ka Pono," the newsletter of the Hawai'i Area Program, American Friends Service Committee: "The Land Issue: Focus on the 'Aina," in which Noenoe Silva says of "aloha 'aina" ("love for the land"), "it cannot be only a passive admiration for the beauty of our one hanau (birth sands); it includes a love for the native people and our traditional language and culture, and respect for our national sovereignty" (7). Definition and use of words like these is not a static, cemented occurrence but an ongoing, alive, changing development with the shifting existence within relationships that happens in practice. On the back of this kind of living definition, I believe the prior/primary knowledge about indigenous cultures comes from within those cultures. In order to make space for that priority, we non-indigenous scholars need to make room for indigenous voices to be heard. We need to "make" room because our voices have held the floor for so long, have been so unchallenged, are still listened to even by indigenous populations over their own. The very fact of our overwhelming presence in most of the professional positions offering the opportunity to have such a voice speaks volumes. It is time to back away so the people we usually publish and teach about can publish and teach about themselves. 1 The Irish are an indigenous people if one accepts the characterization that they are a people rooted in the land of their origin, connected by descent, i.e., lineage/genealogy, and that they have been colonized. 2 Perhaps this is a large part of the reason that Virginia Woolf suffered so much every time her work was published and issued into the hands of the critics and the reading public. A labor that came deeply from her heart was then given to people who didn't know her, to be dissected and pronounced upon in public--a difficult prospect but something authors in the age of mass printing have to get used to. 3 See for instance Colbert Kearney, Frank Budgen (51, 59, 172), Patrick Parrinder, "Introduction," Fargnoli and Gillespie (50, 55-56, 81), Ryf (106ff), Ellman ( Joyce 9, 25n, 33, 120-121, etc., and Letters 147n), Robert Welch (109-112), 4 Cork born scholar and poet Robert Welch, in Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing, claims that Joyce is not attacking English in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, that he is in fact showing its splendid capacity, but why, then, so savagely reject it first (111)? I believe it is Irish English that Joyce is celebrating, not English English, and Robert Welch's insistence (with which I agree) that Joyce is "four-footed,"one who sets out "things are as they are"--not a "postmodernist, relativist"--argues more for believing Joyce is committedly Irish, that he cares passionately about Ireland, than that he is only playing when he declares himself imprisoned by the English language (104, 117). 5 See e.g., pp.26, 46, 70n, 74, 83-84, 86, 105, 124, and 156 above. 6 I am reminded immediately of Mary TallMountain's poem "Schizophrenia," in which she chronicles the internal split she experienced between literally self-killing despair born of displacement into a culture not her own and the new hope she had found in writing herself back into existence with Paula Gunn Allen's help (Light on the Tent Wall 42). TallMountain says, "In one of my quick clips of vision, Paula and I are caught changeless, sitting still and rapt, Indian women bound by the enduring thread of a common dream, a powerful purpose"--a re-experience which saved her life ("You Can Go Home Again" 8). Gunn Allen likens TallMountain to Coyote who dies and reconstitutes himself over and over again. She writes, "The works contained in this volume are to be contemplated more than read. They can be savored by those who have themselves seen the precipice and taken the fall. By those who have seen their own flesh and bones scattered about the floor of the plain, and who have wit and strength enough to reconstitute themselves and keep on keeping on" ("Here There Be Coyote" 4). 7 I am reminded of the series at the Center for Hawaiian Studies in Honolulu, "Being Sacred and Authentic in a Global Context," which addressed the problems of being Kanaka Maoli in a world whose dominant values are those of the colonizer. 8 I use "tongue" to incorporate context as well as actual words. My tongue includes my culture, everything that has gone into making my language what it is. The context in which the Brontes spoke and wrote was not an English one. In my paper, "Emily Bronte: The Passion of an Irish Rebel," I demonstrate the ground from which their writing sprung, a ground which includes the wild stories of their father which he got from his bard father, the accent noted by their editors in London, the exploits of their uncles in Ireland, the influence of their Cornish aunt, and the very un-English Yorkshire environment in which they lived. They were not an English family by any means. Joyce's tongue, when he finally rejects English, becomes as Irish as he can make it. 9 See for instance Terry Eagleton in "Nationalism, Irony and Commitment:"
10 As I have been trying to make clear throughout this work, these are not my words but those of indigenous authors, activists, students, teachers, with whom I am familiar through reading, friendship, and professional relationships. 11 A visiting archaeologist, Dr. Baynam showed the class a video about archaeology in the southwest United States, in which one of the white researchers, toward the end of the film, claimed that what is needed now is a "bi-cultural" collaboration between tribes and researchers to come up with new bi-cultural viewpoints on the pasts of native cultures. I pondered what that would mean for me as an Englishwoman. I said to the class afterwards that I could imagine myself fighting tooth and nail to prevent any bi-cultural (U.S. and English) definition of what it is to be English. As I have ample practical evidence to show, no one who is not English born and bred can know the deep roots of my culture and I need no one from outside to help me define it! |
||||
|
From: |