The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere

Abstract

[...]The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness is ambitious in scope and raises compelling and potentially provocative questions about the ethics of narrating - and acknowledging - "Otherness".

Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2009)

When Jane Eyre encounters the mysterious ghostly figure that haunts Thornfield Hall in the novel which bears her name, she struggles to find a way of describing something that seems so alien, and so fundamentally different, to herself, claiming eventually that it reminded her of "the foul German spectre - the Vampyre" (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Norton 2001), p.242). Of course, the true identity of this mysterious figure is ultimately revealed to be the first Mrs Rochester, a Creole woman who has made her way from the Caribbean to take up her position as the archetypal madwoman in the attic, and is something infinitely more troubling than Jane's initial impression implies. As colonial/racial other, Bertha is perceived by her husband as the inverse of Jane herself, as he makes clear when he places his two brides directly alongside one another: "look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder - this face with that mask - this form with that bulk" (Jane Eyre, p.251). Yet for all her "differences", Bertha Rochester is not entirely "other" to her English counterpart at all; she is a disturbingly familiar monster, an uncivilised and barbaric version of femininity that colonial ideologies insisted could be controlled and improved (but never promoted to a position of equality with the coloniser - or the patriarch, for that matter).

But Jane's first impulse on initially encountering Bertha is a compelling one. In that initial moment of contact between the two characters, Bertha exists as an image of what Tabish Khair might term "an alterity which cannot be subsumed simply into negativity or similarity" (pp.145-46). It is an "otherness" for which Jane cannot account. Only by coding the unknown figure in Gothic terms, as vampire, can she find a way in which to narrate the "otherness" that she has registered. In this, she is faced with the same task as so many of the colonial and postcolonial writers discussed throughout The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, in which Khair undertakes "an examination of the ways colonial and post-colonial literatures within or influenced by the Gothic genre negotiate with and narrate (or fail to narrate) Otherness" (p.3).

The book proposes "a re-examination of central (and pertinent) aspects of both [the Gothic and postcolonialism] through a discussion of the problematics of narrating the Other" (p.3) over the course of its two main sections - "The Gothic and Otherness" (which focuses on nineteenth-century manifestations of colonial Gothic) and "Postcolonialism and Otherness" (where the attention turns instead to Gothicinflected work by postcolonial writers). These sections are bookended by useful introductory and concluding chapters which establish the methodological and philosophical frameworks on which Khair draws throughout his discussion of alterity and subjectivity (in particular, the work of Emmanuel Levinas). His focus, he insists throughout, is on the British Empire and its post-colonies, and in particular (in the section on colonial Gothic), on "how colonial Otherness is encountered in [...] Gothicised narrative[s] that [take] place in Britain" (p.72) - though these parameters are not always rigidly maintained. The first main textual analysis in Chapter 1, for example, comes from The Phantom of the Opera (1909-1910), while Moby Dick (1851) provides a focal point in the conclusion; similarly some of the texts discussed (such as Heart of Darkness [1899]) may be narrated from the centre of the Empire but the main action largely takes place outside of it (even if Marlow, the novel's main narrator, makes it clear that London itself is a Gothic place, haunted by different kinds of colonial legacies and knowledge). Discussions of the likes of Dracula and (somewhat cursorily) The Moonstone fit Khair's parameters more directly, as does Wuthering Heights (1847), which is prioritised here over Jane Eyre (1847) (despite the detailed discussion of Jean Rhys' prequel/rewrite Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) in Section 2). In the process, admittedly, Khair does make some well-intentioned but ultimately somewhat tenuous observations about how Heathcliff's "otherness" might resonate in a contemporary context.

Imagine an intelligent dark-skinned person, slipping into the countryside of a peaceful European country from somewhere disturbingly "post-colonial", lying dormant for many years and then snaring the families that harboured him in a net of violence, revenge and terror. It might sound like an account of the so-called "sleeper agents" that organisations like Al Qaeda are said to send into the heart of Europe, but actually it would be one way of describing Heathcliff. (p.64)

There are more persuasive textual readings on display elsewhere, however, and in Section 2 Khair turns to a discussion of a similarly broad-ranging and diverse collection of postcolonial writing. These include Erna Brodber's Myal (1988), Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997), Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996), Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (2005) and Midnight's Children (1980), and particularly thought-provoking discussions about textual representations of vodou, and what he sees as the limits of magic realism. This breadth of reference is simultaneously a strength and limitation of the book as a whole, on the one hand providing ample - and often fertile - ground in which to explore the central thesis, but also making for a slightly disparate discussion at times.

Throughout the book, Khair emphasises the ways in which the Gothic and the postcolonial are concerned with the narration of "Otherness". By identifying the Gothic as a "'writing of Otherness'" he "allude[s] most simplistically to the fact that it revolves around various versions of the Other, as the Devil or as ghosts, as women, vampires, Jews, lunatics, murderers, non-European presences etc." (p.6). In the colonial Gothic, these figures often carried with them connotations of racial otherness too, contributing to the popular establishment of a colonial/racial binary, in which the racial Other was coded as less-than-human. The postcolonial writer, then, is faced with the task of renegotiating this binary, in order to achieve agency, and is enjoined to "write a different story", as Chinua Achebe once put it (cited in Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (Heinemann 1991), p.16). Khair's interest, then, lies in examining the ways in which colonial and postcolonial writers employ the Gothic mode as a way of narrating and acknowledging the agency of the Other as Other, and not simply as what he terms the "Self-same".

"For the Other to be Other," Khair writes "there has to be difference - and space for its acceptance, interplay and recognition" (p.158), and in considering the space that the Gothic provides for the textual representation of this difference, Khair raises some interesting possibilities. Of particular note is his assertion that colonial Gothic texts "dealt with the racial/colonial Other, lacking the language to narrate its alterity but sometimes managing to register its presence, if negatively, as 'terror', 'fear' and other states of strong emotion" (p.101). For both colonial and postcolonial writers of the Gothic, it seems, language remains key, and often seems incapable of accounting for moments of "irreducible alterity" (p.101). For Khair, however, it seems that the textual failure to speak on behalf of the "Other" in these instances does not amount to an outright failure to perceive "Otherness" itself - in fact, he insists, "we can still leave space open for the alterity of the Other to be registered - but not explained away or, as literature, narrated 'fully'" (p.172). It is in these moments that "the Other is registered in its full alterity; its agency is recognised as independent from that of the Self and, hence, at least, potentially terrifying" (p.173). He ends by opening up the discussion once more to consider broadly how our encounters with "Otherness" function in terms of contemporary global discourses about "terror" - in theoretical terms, this is an intriguing question, certainly, but ultimately it is one that cannot be contained or resolved within the book itself.

In the end, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness is ambitious in scope and raises compelling and potentially provocative questions about the ethics of narrating - and acknowledging - "Otherness". If the book ultimately raises more questions than answers in its meditation on this topic, these nevertheless remain questions that bear further investigation, and may provide foundations on which future scholars will continue to build.

Jenny McDonnell