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Student Midterm submissions 2015 (2015 midterm assignment) |
LITR 5831 World Literature |
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Heather Minette Schutmaat
27
September 2015
Perspectives on Reading Texts in Dialogue
Camille Buxton’s essay, “The Dialogue Between Colonial and Postcolonial Texts,”
centers on the dialogue between Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and
Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and
provides an examination of how the act of transnational migration affects both
Crusoe and Lucy. Buxton states that in Robinson Crusoe and Lucy,
“acts of transnational migration are similar as both protagonists leave their
homelands where opportunities for economic advancement are few, and immigrate to
new countries that offer more prospects.” However, Buxton also points out that
although these narratives are similar in the way that they fit the
transmigration model, as they both involve leaving a homeland for economic
opportunities in another country, they’re also incredibly different because of
the protagonists’ social classes and worldviews. Buxton demonstrates that in
Robinson Crusoe, “immigration occurs as a colonial movement of the European
middle class to colonial sites of economic opportunity” while in Lucy
“immigration is a third world exportation of the lower or working class to first
world countries to meet the demands of the upper class for a servant class.”
I found Buxton’s essay incredibly insightful because in my reading of
Robinson Crusoe in dialogue with Lucy, I focused primarily on the
similar colonial-like attitudes of Crusoe and Lucy’s employer Mariah, and Buxton
helped me to understand how the narratives also engage in dialogue on the
subject of the protagonists’ transmigration. She also provides a very thorough
and informative analysis of how the protagonists’ experiences and perspectives
differed greatly because of Crusoe’s position as a colonizer and Lucy’s
position as the formerly colonized, and after reading her essay I feel inclined
to pay closer attention to the ways in which transmigration experiences differ
depending on one’s class and motivations.
After reading this essay, I decided to search for more essays centering on
dialogue and found Veronica’s Ramirez’s essay “Dialogue
between Texts: If Only Lucy Could Talk to Crusoe...” Ramirez states, “Reading
texts in dialogue allows you to trace the common subject thread, in this case
colonialism, and see it in its own historical and political environment and see
the same subject within a different text.” Like Buxton, Ramirez also
demonstrates how Robinson Crusoe and Lucy engage in dialogue about
the subject of transmigration, and explains that although Lucy and Crusoe seem
to be in exact oppositions to each other, as the colonizer and colonized, they
are both transnational migrants and “isolated in a distant place that is not
their original home.”
The most interesting and informative aspect of Ramirez’s essay, and the way
it differed from Buxton’s, was her discussion of how Robinson Crusoe and Lucy
also engage in dialogue and relate “in terms of imperialistic attitudes in their
personal relationships, such as relationships with the other sex.” Ramirez shows
this connection by explaining that “Crusoe treats women as part of the
colonizing and trade culture within which the novel is set,” which demonstrates
his sense of superiority, and similarly, “Lucy goes out of her way to distance
herself from, and remain superior to the men in her life.” I found this
fascinating not only because I didn’t make this connection in my reading of the
texts, but also because Ramirez implies at the beginning of her essay that she
read Lucy the first time with a focus on “Lucy’s sexual exploits,” and I
couldn’t help but speculate, in terms of intertextuality, that Ramirez’s initial
reading of Lucy is what led her to make the connection between the
imperialistic attitudes of Crusoe and Lucy in their relationships with the other
sex.
Like the essays of Buxton and Ramirez, Timothy Assel’s essay “Colonial
and Post-Colonial Dialogue: Defoe and Kincaid” also focuses on reading
Robinson Crusoe and Lucy in dialogue. However, his essay discusses
how bringing colonial and post-colonial texts into a dialogue “allows a reader
to see historical events from different perspectives” and also “allows a reader
to consider issues of post-colonial society.” For example, Assel points out that
“Crusoe’s utopian society is dependent on Friday’s unquestioning loyalty and
devotion to his master” and then shows how a reader may view this from a
different perspective when reading it in dialogue with Kincaid’s “A Small Place”
by asking “What if Friday’s feelings towards Crusoe were the same feelings
expressed in Kincaid’s ‘A Small Place?’” Assel’s answer is that “If Friday had
discarded the yoke of slavery and abandoned Crusoe, Crusoe’s dreams of governing
a prosperous island community would have been dashed to pieces like
ship-wreckage in a raging storm.” Using this technique of asking and answering,
Assel demonstrates how differently things could have ended up in postcolonial
society. Reading Assel’s essay, as well as Buxton’s and Ramirez’s, was
incredibly useful in further understanding how reading colonial texts in
dialogue with postcolonial texts can generate new and extended meanings and
prove effective, as all three students provided unique perspectives.
Exploring the Process of Intertextuality
The
most essential theoretical term to understand when studying the relationship
between colonial literature and postcolonial literature is that of
intertextuality. Intertextuality is the idea that literary texts do not exist
independently of one another, but instead depend on each other for meaning. In
order to achieve a thorough understanding of how the process of intertextuality
works, it’s incredibly helpful to first take a look at post-structural
linguistics—the area from which the theory of intertextuality derived. In the
later 20th century post-structural linguistics “reconceived words'
meanings as interdependent on each other—a word or sign no longer has a direct
reference to what it signifies but works only in relation to other signs and
words.” That is to say that no word has a natural, or innate meaning, and our
ability to interpret any single word depends on its association with other words
in the language system. While this is undoubtedly a complex process, as it
involves our brains forming associative bonds between words that ultimately make
up a network of language, I believe it can be simplified to the understanding
that “no word has meaning in isolation but only insofar as it relates to and
differs from other words in the language system” (McLaughlin 85-86).
Just
as post-structural linguistics theorized that words depend on each other for
meaning, “post-structural literary studies posited that literary texts do not
exist independently of each other but rather in a network of shared words
(signs), meanings, and contexts.” Therefore, the theory of intertextuality is
founded on the idea that no text exists in isolation from other texts, as “there
is no writer who hasn't read, no text that isn't imprinted by or responding to
other writings” and readers are inevitably creating associative bonds between
texts to generate meaning, just as they do words.
The
theory of intertextuality is crucial when studying colonial and postcolonial
literature simultaneously because it helps readers to identify and understand
the process by which literature of two seemingly separate and distinctive worlds
may “share, connect, duplicate, and relate to each other,” especially when
consciously put in dialogue with one another. As we see when reading
postcolonial literary texts in dialogue with colonial literary texts, this
process may take place on an explicit level and according to an author’s
intentions, as writers sometimes draw directly on previous literary works to
generate meaning in their own texts, and other times it takes place according to
the connections readers make as they move back and forth from one text to
another.
A
powerful example of intertextuality on an explicit level and according to an
author’s intentions is Jamaica Kincaid’s direct reference to William
Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” in her novel
Lucy. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,”
when read on its own, is a simple and lovely poem written in 1804 by an English
Romantic poet in which a lonely and sad speaker is overcome by joy upon seeing a
field of daffodils, and the experience has such an impact on him that any time
thereafter, when he feels down or despondent, he can simply think of the
daffodils and his heart fills with joy.
Like
the speaker in Wordsworth’s poem, Kincaid’s character Mariah tells Lucy that
when she sees daffodils “in bloom and all massed together” and when “a breeze
comes along and makes them do a curtsy to the lawn stretching out in front of
them,” she feels “so glad to be alive” (Kincaid 17). This causes Lucy to
remember the time she was made to memorize Wordsworth’s poem at Queen Victoria’s
girl’s school in the West Indies, and recite it in front of an auditorium full
of people. After Lucy recited the poem, everyone praised her and told her how
proud the poet would have been, but it was then she was at the height of her
“two faced-ness.” Lucy says, “Outside I seemed one way, inside I was another;
outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed
both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my
mind, line by line, every word of that poem” (Kincaid 18). Lucy tells Mariah
about this experience with “such an amount of anger” it surprises both of them.
For Mariah, like the speaker in Wordsworth’s poem, daffodils symbolize spring
and beauty and hope. For Lucy, daffodils symbolize a colonial education that
forced her to memorize and recite a poem about flowers she wouldn’t see until
she was nineteen, and about a sentiment that may never speak to her reality.
Here, readers can observe the process of intertextuality taking place in
Kincaid’s intentional use of a colonial text in her postcolonial novel to
demonstrate how differently Mariah and Lucy see the world.
Furthermore, by reading Wordsworth’s poem in dialogue with
Lucy, readers may generate new or
extended meanings of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” For example, if a student
initially reads this poem in the context of Romanticism or alongside other
Romantic poems, he or she will most likely conceive the meaning of the poem to
be the powerful influence of nature, or nature as beauty and truth. However,
after reading the poem in dialogue with
Lucy, the reader’s interpretation of the poem may change because of its
association with Lucy’s anger, and he or she may reconceive it as an
illustration of the privileged position of the colonizer.
Another example of intertextuality taking place by the associations readers make
as they move back and forth between texts is my experience reading
Lucy in dialogue with Daniel Defoe’s
colonial novel The Life and Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe. Lucy tells us that her employer Mariah treats her with
respect and kind-heartedness, ultimately loves her like a member of the family,
and even says, “Mariah was the kindest person [she] had ever known” (Kincaid
73). However, when reading Lucy in
dialogue with Robinson Crusoe, it was
nearly impossible not to draw parallels between Mariah’s treatment of Lucy and
Crusoe’s treatment of his slave Friday, and thus I saw Mariah in a light I
perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Crusoe is resolute in his quest to turn
Friday into a man like himself, and although on a smaller scale, Mariah also
tries to force Lucy to see the world the way she does. For instance, even after
being completely aware that for Lucy daffodils and Whitman’s poem elicit anger
and sadness, Mariah still takes Lucy to a field of daffodils, wanting Lucy to
find the flowers as lovely as she does. Like Crusoe, Mariah displays an
ethnocentric and colonial-like determination for Lucy to conform to her views of
the world.
Therefore, within Kincaid’s
novel, readers can identify the process of intertextuality taking place
according to both Kincaid’s intentions and to the associations readers make
between Lucy and other texts. In
other words, readers can observe how Lucy
depends on other texts for meaning as well as how the meaning of the novel
can change when read in dialogue with other texts such as
Robinson Crusoe. This process is of
course more recognizable for students studying the dialogue between colonial and
postcolonial texts because it is our job to identify intertextuality at play and
to deliberately bring classic literature of European colonialism and emerging
literature from the postcolonial world into dialogue in order to generate new
and extended meanings, and bridge the space between the worlds. However, the
process of creating associative bonds between texts to generate meaning, just as
we do with words in the system of language, is something all readers do, even if
unconsciously. For example, I shared with my mother the powerful excerpt from
Kincaid’s novel in which Lucy sees daffodils for the first time:
They
looked like something to eat and something wear at the same time; they looked
beautiful; they looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary
idea. I did not know what these flowers were, and so it was a mystery to me why
I wanted to kill them. I wished that I had an enormous scythe; I would just walk
down the path, dragging it alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down at
the place where they emerge from the ground. (Kincaid
29)
After
reading this passage to my mother, she immediately recalled the literary text
Marigolds by Eugenia W. Collier—a
short story in which a female protagonist acts on an emotional impulse and pulls
from the ground all of the marigolds, the only thing beautiful, in her
impoverished neighbor’s yard. The
associative bond my mother formed between the passage in Kincaid’s novel and the
short story Marigolds (because of the
connection between strong emotions and flowers) will undoubtedly influence her
reading of Lucy, and will ultimately
contribute to the meaning she gains from the text. This demonstrates the nature
of intertextuality by showing how “all readings are preconditioned by other
texts and readings, which are themselves in turn changed by what you're reading
now.” Therefore, a downfall of intertextuality is that “literary texts are read
less as timeless, autonomous, universal masterpieces than as nodes in a network
of other texts and cultural expressions.” However, a more positive view of the
theory of intertextuality is that it essentially makes texts talk to each other,
and can therefore help bridge the space between the colonial and postcolonial
worlds and reconcile their opposing narratives. More generally speaking, the
theory of intertextuality also makes the possible readings of a single literary
text infinite, and I believe that boundlessness of interpretation is, in a large
part, the magic of literature.
Works
Cited
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe. Course Website.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990. Print.
McLaughlin, Thomas. “Figurative Language.” Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Chicago: UP, 1995.
Research Plan
Research Posts
For my first research post, I plan to finish watching part one and two of White
Teeth and write an analysis that focuses on identifying course objectives in the
film, as well as showing how characters in the film correspond with characters
in the texts we have read. For my second research post, I would like to write an
analysis with the same approach on the work of one of the following major
figures of postcolonial film that I found on Emory’s postcolonial studies
website: Shyam Benegal, Gurinder Chadha, Claire Denis, Shekhar Kapoor, Srinivas
Krishna, Farida Ben Lyazid, Ken Loach, Deepa Mehta, Ketan Mehta, Mira Nair,
Peter Ormrod, Horace Ove, Pratibha Parmar, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen.
