Materiality and Mystification in "A Passage to India"

Abstract

Discussion on imperial project in British literary consciousness has customarily been confined to colonial novel, a category of convenience covering a range of genres and qualities. More recently work disclosing material and psychic dissemination of empire in metropolis has included detecting its symbolic, reconfigured or displaced presence in canonical and popular writing.1 The preferred procedure of critics is to trace how colonial tropes and rhetorics were brought by nineteenthand early twentieth-century writers to their dramatizations of dominant gender and class conditions within imperial homeland. Such work which draws attention to larger if blurred horizons of English novel has also introduced into discussion problems associated with use of analogical strategies in criticism: by reiterating fiction's unsecured metaphoric linkages as constituting social knowledge about ideological coalescence of gender, race and class, these critics conflate sites and temporalities of different oppressions.2 In this way, such criticism collapses distinctiveness of discourses and topoi that represent those oppressions.3 Theorists of novel, however, who address transcoding between historical processes and textual practices, and perceive effects of empire in literature as mutable, locate these signs in form rather than figurative recastings. Edward Said, who discerns assertion of narrative authority as characterizing British novel during age of imperial consolidation connects emergence of literary modernism with changes in metropolitan apprehensions of empire. For Said turn from the triumphalist experience of imperialism ... into extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality and corrosive irony ... which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society and culture, includes a response to external pressures on culture from imperium (Culture 227). In a different argument which all same intersects with Said's understanding of correspondence, Fredric Jameson maintains that modernist crisis in novel was intensified by imperialism, stylistic ingenuity of Conrad's novels providing key articulations of increased fragmentation of individual consciousness in an age of growing commodification and brutal colonization (Political 17).4