Stories of the East: Leonard Woolf and the Genres of Colonial Discourse

Stories of the East: Leonard Woolf and the Genres of Colonial Discourse Douglas Kerr University of Hong Kong LEONARD WOOLF worked as a colonial administrator in Ceylon from 1904 to 1911. He was to produce narratives in five different genres based on his Ceylon experience: letters, most of the surviving ones being to his university friends in England such as Lytton Strachey; diaries; a novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913); three short stories, called Stories of the East (1921); and part of an autobiography published in the last decade of his life. The "stories of the east" in each of these five genres register one man's participation in colonial discourse, and they are very different . There seems no reason, or need, to privilege one over the others. The letters give an immediate and highly personal reaction to experience ; the autobiography revisits that experience with the hindsight of a long and shrewd lifetime. The diaries are the authentic voice of day-today colonialism talking to itself. And the novel and stories allow a perspective from the angle of imaginative truth, raised above the exigencies of factual representation. None of them stands at the centre: all of them, the full constellation, are the real stories of the east. This investigation of the language of Woolf s colonial writings will pay particular attention to the pragmatics of these texts, and the way that what is actually said in them is determined in part by the addressee and the circumstances of the address (what I will call the set of the text). It will also attend to the part that genre itself plays in determining what is observed—in both senses: what is seen, and what is said—in these writings. 261 ELT 41 : 3 1998 There are interesting and, on the face of it, puzzling discontinuities between Woolf's Ceylon writing in two genres, the diaries and the letters , which coincide in time and sometimes in topic. Letters and diary are, besides, generically close relatives, each of them producing a narrative in serial form and without the benefit of any retrospect of closure. As we examine the two genres as vehicles of Woolf's colonial narrative, we can see two different and parallel stories being told, their difference being a function of the different construction of the persons—first, second and third—in the discourse,1 and by the different nature of the genres themselves. Who, first of all, is the I who writes Woolf's letters to Strachey, Moore, Sydney-Turner and the rest?2 He is a young man, given to the discussion with his peers of intellectual and aesthetic matters, critical and analytical in his habits, often arrogant in tone. Such discussions, and the cultivation of the personal relations that sustain them, seem to be the most important things in his life. For such a person, a term of service in this outpost of empire is experienced first of all as a catastrophic alienation; the letters themselves become the voice of that alienation, and its only relief. It was this /, so starved of its nourishing element, that announced an intention to shoot itself in a drunken letter to Strachey, from Jaffna, in April 1906.3 Sometimes the lines of communication seemed too thin to hold, and this was a first person that depended on a plurality, a quite precise sense of community—of people like us. This intellectual and emotional community —Woolf, Strachey, and other lights of the Cambridge Apostles society who were to become the nucleus of "Bloomsbury"—shared a group self-consciousness which the letters foster with a constant circulation of ideas, judgments, jokes, gossip and congratulation. What Woolf has to say about his life in Ceylon is primarily in the rhetorical service of sustaining this sense of us, this collective self which is the main theme of the correspondence. In this sense, the letters are really about themselves, phatic communion, and only incidentally about Ceylon. While the letters nurse and sustain this community, they also patrol its frontiers: every us is defined by difference from them. There are spirited assaults, in Woolf's Ceylon letters, on the suburban futilities of colonial types and expatriate life...