Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (review)

The British Empire has meant different things to different people at different times, and for those raised during the ascendance of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), it is an enterprise easily identified with all sorts of unspeakable villainies absent a single redemptive quality. Very recently, however, the Empire seems to have suffered a fate that even villains would fear: it has become obsolete, a historical curiosity about as familiar and as relevant to most undergraduates as the Hundred Years' War. Confronting the impregnable wall of this ennui, one wonders if the Empire is that interesting after all, and even whether it is still worthy of study.

Douglas Kerr's Eastern Figures reminds us why the Empire is interesting and, even more, why studying it remains critical today. And that Kerr does so in a volume as lean and shapely as this one is credit indeed, especially given the range of his coverage and his intensive treatment. This work has evidently taken a lifetime of reflection and every word, perfectly chosen, seems to echo volumes that, unlike E. M. Forster's "boum" in A Passage to India (1924), remain explicable and audible across time and distance.

The book sets out to write a literary history of modern British writing on empire. It creates what Kerr calls a "gallery of figures" (5), mostly men from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who reveal the multiple perspectives that constituted Britons' evolving relationship with home and hinterland, self and other, nation and empire. The study's credit remains its estimable focus: this is a literary history that stays committed foremost to the literary object. Thus, Kerr's approach, interdisciplinary though it is, sticks closely to literary texts and to attitudes toward empire that literary writing betrays. If this focused practice—to read literary texts literarily—seems old fashioned in the new word order of promiscuous discipline hopping, it isn't. Kerr's virtuoso selections of less-known texts by well-known figures (Rudyard Kipling's unsigned "Bubbling Well Road" [1888], for instance, or W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's Journey to a War [1938]) as well as many writers outside the standard selections renew the familiar Kipling and Auden by placing them in refreshing new contexts to develop Kerr's central point: the Empire was a contested, contorted reality for all who came into contact with it. Even those who purported clear views, such as Kipling, Auden, James Fenton, and Anthony Burgess, found themselves beached on the shores of ambivalence and even confusion at key moments of contact.

And why not? The late Empire was a chimerical beast, its illusions of permanence crumbling even as it proclaimed mastery over a sun that never set. Thus, Charles Dickens's certitude, already dated in 1848, that "the earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in" (Dombey and Son [Bradbury and Evans, 1848], 2) gave way to fear and anxiety half a century later: in "Bubbling Well Road" the lost narrator vainly tries to master an alien landscape and can only threaten to destroy it after it eludes him. Forster's A Passage to India reveals the liberal imagination's understanding of a colonial reality that would be, only "not yet . . . not there" ([Harcourt, 1984], 362), the lines with which the novel ends. Meanwhile Burgess, writing of Malaya in the late 1950s on the eve of independence, and Leonard Woolf, reflecting on a decolonized Ceylon in 1960, reveal both the shortcomings of the imperial project as well as those of decolonization.

Kerr's masterful study brings us close to the monument and allows us to see its fissures. His extraordinary eye and his keen selections remind us why literary history is so crucial for understanding the age: literature captures the structures of feeling often before they are cemented as doxa. Reading writers writing about the contact zone, we apprehend not just ways of speaking about empire, but also ways of "listening" to it...