THE GREAT POLYMATH—historian, novelist, critic, and political scientist—C.L.R. James begins that majestic book Beyond a Boundary with a chapter called “The Window.” In it he describes the window of his childhood house at the turn into the twentieth century—through this window he could see the cricket pitch of the town of Tunapuna. There, standing on a chair at six years old, he spent many Saturday hours watching men practise the art of cricket. He also describes a childhood of reading incessantly and in particular William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In Beyond a Boundary, James writes, “Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.”2 Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me. Scholars have gone over these lines of James’s with varying interpretations. Among these interpretations is that James was throwing shade on Marx, but if one reads the sentences before that one, one might approximate a truer answer. “I laughed without satiety at Thackeray’s constant jokes and sneers and gibes at the aristocracy and at people in high places.”3 Here, James credits Thackeray with exposing the hypocrisy of the nineteenth-century British aristocracy. James is responding with the alternate knowledge of a man historically on the other side of that aristocracy. James continues, “But the things I did not notice and took for granted were more enduring: the British reticence, the British self-discipline, the stiff lips, upper and lower. When Major Dobbin returns from India, and he and Amelia greet each other, Thackeray asks: Why did Dobbin not speak?…George Osborne writes a cold, stiff letter to his estranged father before going into battle, but he places a kiss on the envelope which Thackeray notes that his father did not see.”4 Here, James points to the British mores promulgated at the time, mores that were to become tropes in the national consciousness, tropes that James was inculcated in despite their glaring contradictions. Then the passages about colonial teaching practices in the colonized world: “Not only the English masters, but Englishmen in their relation to games in the colonies held tightly to the code as example and as a mark of differentiation.”5 And the ways in which those codes of coloniality lay contradictorily and harshly in the colonized. “I was an actor on a stage in which the parts were set in advance. I not only took it to an extreme, I seemed to have been made by nature for nothing else. There were others around me who did not go as far and as completely as I did.”6

James’s Beyond a Boundary analyzes the game of cricket in order to set out the terms of coloniality laid down by the British and the acquisition and demolition of those terms by West Indies cricket of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s:

In the West Indies the cricket ethic has shaped not only the cricketers but social life as a whole. It is an understatement. There is a whole generation of us, and perhaps two generations, who have been formed by it not only in social attitudes but in our most intimate personal lives, in fact there more than anywhere else. The social attitudes we could to some degree alter if we wished. For the inner self the die was cast…Along with restraint, not so much externally as in internal inhibitions, we learnt loyalty. It is good to be loyal to what you believe in—that, however, may be tautology. Loyalty to what is wrong, outmoded, reactionary is mischievous. To that in general all will agree, even the reactionary.7

Lisa Lowe, in The Intimacies of Four Continents, interprets James’s formulation—that Thackeray, not Marx, made him—as James’s appreciation of the way the novel describes the history of global empire. She writes:

Literature and culture mediated these early nineteenth-century world conditions, not by literally reflecting them in a fixed, transparent fashion, but rather by thematizing the manners in which imperial culture simultaneously recognized yet suppressed the emerging contradictions of the era…Literature mediates these asymmetries of dominant, residual, and emergent forces, inasmuch as it may portray that such conditions were more often grasped as isolated effects, glimpsed in particular objects in the social fabric, rather than seized totally or framed systematically.8

Perhaps Thackeray, not Marx, made me too. Made and unmade. But perhaps, more importantly, James made me. His book on the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution; his novel Minty Alley; his political theory Notes on Dialectics. And when I read those lines of James in Beyond a Boundary, the elegant work on cricket and literature and politics, they took me back to my own childhood and first reading of Vanity Fair—back to Amelia Sedley, Becky Sharpe, William Dobbin, Rawdon Crawley, George Osborne. Like James, I read Vanity Fair first at a young age, perhaps twelve, and then in my twenties in a nineteenth-century literature class at university. The memory of my childhood reading brings not lessons in restraint and the code of masculinity, or inhibition, or the great sprawl of colonial domination, that last colonial domination (at least not on the surface), although ingested as the acceptable and inevitable, the fabric of social hierarchies, the material world itself. But that memory summoned the codes and lessons of femininity. Amelia Sedley’s and Becky Sharpe’s thrown into stark moral relief—Amelia: gentle, rosy-cheeked smiling, pliant, and good; Becky: cunning, ungrateful, bitter, and destined for no good. The narrative summoned me to attend to the example of Amelia Sedley, innocent and unconscious of the world, and therefore safe. And Becky Sharpe, too worldly, too clever, too grasping, too knowledgeable, and therefore doomed. I was with Amelia, wanting her to be happy, wanting her to have Osborne, wanting Dobbin to take care of her. Why couldn’t Becky behave?

For as Thackeray himself says later:

Miss Sedley (whom we have selected for the very reason that she was the best-natured of all, otherwise what on earth was to have prevented us from putting up Miss Swartz, or Miss Crump, or Miss Hopkins, as heroine in her place?) it could not be expected that every one should be of the humble and gentle temper of Miss Amelia Sedley; should take every opportunity to vanquish Rebecca’s hard-heartedness and ill-humour; and, by a thousand kind words and offices, overcome, for once at least, her hostility to her kind.9

The obvious parody of femininity notwithstanding, because, after all, the outcome/alternative is unavailable in the text, I was called to choose. Then there was another figure, who appears on page 7 of Vanity Fair: “Miss Swartz, the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s.”10 But I barely remembered her and only found her again as a stunning surprise on rereading. Thackeray also had a drawing of Miss Swartz, a drawing I must have decidedly forgotten or clinically forgotten, since to me, it was such a horrific drawing of a Black woman seemingly uncomfortable in cosquelle Victorian wear. Reading narrative requires, demands, acts of identification, association, affiliation, sympathy, and empathy, acts of en/inhabiting. And while James associated with and inhabited the faithful, loyal, and restrained Dobbin, the heroic George Osborne, I inhabited the good, kind, gentle, somewhat insipid Amelia. (You must remember that “insipid” is one of the categories of femininity.) The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this identification as it had prepared James—the goods, information, the structures of bureaucracy, the physical colonial layout of place attenuating location, the systems of education in schools, language, manners—the hierarchies were already set out and therefore so were the ambitions. Or, at least I was invited to inhabit Amelia by the mere presentation of her as innocence and goodness, silence, inaction, and vapidity as “character” in the text.

But how did I miss Miss Swartz? Why did I not enter Miss Swartz? Yes, she was not the main protagonist, but why did I forget Miss Swartz? And why on several readings was Miss Swartz always a surprise to me? A shock that took me away from, that disturbed, the narrative and that threatened to impede. And how, how did I miss on the very first page of Vanity Fair another figure, how did I read right by him? He was, after all, the furniture, the opening mechanism for transporting all of Thackeray’s text. And, of course, Vanity Fair is a parody, a critique of aristocratic Britain during this phase of imperialism. But even in a critique and parody, blackness is doubly parodied. Because blackness is parody. So how did I miss Sambo? On the first page! What slippage of interpretation accomplished that? Why did I notice him only with dismayed recognition after years of decompression out of imperialist aesthetic? Did I miss him or take him, and Miss Swartz, for granted, did I swallow them as the indigestible but necessary meal of coloniality on the way, nevertheless, to occupying and identifying with the colonial? For the text to work on this reader the way that it is supposed to, I cannot see her, I cannot remember her or Sambo. She, they, had to remain a perpetual surprise. Like the surprise of seeing myself that is not myself. I must have recognized her with disappointment as the representation of me, the stand-in for blackness and all its significations, and even as a child I understood them both to be without future in the narrative, and subject to horrifying sanctions.

Back to Vanity Fair. Here is Sambo on the first page:

While the present century was in its teens, and on one sun-shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black servant, who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinkerton’s shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell… “It is Mrs. Sedley’s coach, sister,” said Miss Jemima. “Sambo, the black servant, has just rung the bell; and the coachman has a new red waistcoat.”11

How did I, on first reading, miss them? Or did I? Miss Swartz is mentioned thirty-six times. Her wealth as the daughter of a planter (who we are told is Jewish and an undesignated Black woman—read enslaved) does see her married to aristocracy eventually, and throughout Thackeray makes great play of her without suggesting what particular quality of her we must make play, leaving us to (arrive, as if on our own at) race as the laughable quality. Both Sambo and Miss Swartz are figures of the comic. The comic appears to position them diametrically to their actual importance to the text’s economic obligations. Another figure, Loll Jewab, an Indian man who is a servant, is variously described as mistaken for the devil or having yellow eyes and white teeth—a farcical dismissal of India’s importance to the colonial project. The names themselves are caricatures.

Thackeray’s narrative schema, his arrangement of elements of action, requires and places these figures as settled. Our reading and writing practices too—reading and writing as practices located within the ways we live and imagine ourselves in the world—admit and require the schema. We are as curious about them as we are about a necessary bit of denotative furniture described. They enrich the text in crucial ways, but they do not live. Thackeray, after all, is writing this text in 1847; he is aware of his time, referring to the avarice without condemning or addressing slavery, the slave trade, the exploitation of India and China. The mores of the British aristocracy are his main concerns, not colonial exploitation. And the novel is a scathing indictment of those mores, but nowhere does it indict what that wealth is built on. Thackeray was born in India, his father a secretary of the East India Company.

Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism:

Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the facts of empire, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity and frequency than in the British novel. Taken together, these allusions constitute what I have called a structure of attitude and reference.12

I want to say that, perhaps more than allusion or reference, my point is that these are embedded in the production of form of the novel and structure of feeling intended to be produced by the novel. Everyone, meaning individuals and corporations, had their hands in slavery and colonial exploitation, just as today they have their hands in oil or minerals and electronics as they destroy the earth on which we live, the oceans, the air, and say it is about jobs and our livelihoods.

So, I am talking about what sits in narrative as a result of the genesis, the action and long duration, of certain regimes in our material lives, certain relations of power, so as to make invisible or ordinary, or a given, those power relations. And I am talking about how those power relations are embedded in narrative.

James would have seen this as I did later: the aristocracy flush with money, their fortunes flowing; the Napoleonic Wars’ deep effects on control of territories in the New World; colonial conquest embedded in the book without any of the actors from those places speaking, only appearing as fixed. The action of Vanity Fair takes place during British slavery. (The writing of the novel takes place shortly after abolition.) Slavery is never mentioned in the text, but virtue, modesty, goodness, and religion and god are. So, there is a society proceeding as if these things are divisible from enslavement. Conquest gives the narrative its velocity and moral reasoning—but it is the welfare of the conquerors that is at stake. Parody never undermines them.

For me, of course, the whole novel is immersed in slavery. Thackeray may be talking about the superficiality of class and gender, but for me it is the glassy surface, a mirrored surface of violent narrative that one is watching and inhabiting and underneath is the pedagogy of colony. While class and gender (the making of white class, white gender) may have been the obvious subjects of the narrative, race and colony as bedrocks of power are startlingly unremarked; in fact, normalized, stipulated, matter-of-fact.

The constant reinforcement of the unseen, unread, the hardening of narrative position, is the pedagogy of colony.

Which brings me to Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. An historical novel of the life of Henry Esmond, it was published in 1852. The time of the novel is the early 1700s. For my purposes, it is not important what the story is. I want to look at the language—what it transmits, the state of being it describes, the mind, the philosophical orientation of the speaker. I want to look at the language, in this case, English, as vehicular—as transporting ideas of the normal at the level of syntax and feeling; as marking the relation of objects.

The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. begins:

The estate of Castlewood, in Virginia, which was given to our ancestors by King Charles the First, as some return for the sacrifices made in His Majesty’s cause by the Esmond family, lies in Westmoreland county, between the rivers Potomac and Rappahannoc, and was once as great as an English Principality, though in the early times its revenues were but small. Indeed for near eighty years after our forefathers possessed them, our plantations were in the hands of factors, who enriched themselves one after another, though a few scores of hogsheads of tobacco were all the produce, that, for long after the Restoration, our family received from their Virginian estates.13

Notice the tenor of the paragraph, the relational claims it makes, the elevated stance of the speaker. Notice the emotive words it deploys—returns for the sacrifices, given to our ancestors, our forefathers possessed. Note the invocation of the King, the words great as an English Principality, then the gesture to the wrongfully disadvantaged state of the family. All these words go to invoking regard and sympathy and summoning association. To read this first paragraph is to read two worlds: the world being addressed and the world buried in the address. So, let us look at other words in the text, their deployment and their effects: Potomac and Rappahannoc, our plantations, factors, hogsheads of tobacco. This language is of objects relating to the inanimate or in the case of factors two senses, figure/sums, and advantage. But what do I read from Potomac and Rappahannoc but Indigeneity and previous habitation—old habitation if something like the name of a river is resistant to an English principality; and in plantations—forced labour/enslavement of Black people, after all we are in Virginia, that labour exploited to produce hogsheads of tobacco. Suddenly my reading is populated by a force of Black people unmentioned, moving about, living, and it is populated by their suffering. A set of exploitative relations comes into focus in this now. But the vehicular language suspends the meanings of this exploitation and human suffering and replaces them with a dreary tale of white disenfranchisement.

In his essay “Aesthetic Reflection and the Colonial Event: The Work of Art in the Age of Slavery,” Simon Gikandi writes:

First, colonial events and subjects are never centered in the European discourse on the aesthetic, which dominates the 18th century, but they occupy important footnotes or addenda; if the aesthetic acquires its ideal character by its force of exclusion…it is, nevertheless, haunted by that which it excludes…Since the end of the 18th century, debates about the aesthetic…[have been] concerned with the nature and judgement of beauty and explanation of artistic phenomena—and unconcerned with the turbulence associated with the colonial empire.14

From The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. again:

Neither my father nor my mother ever wore powder in their hair; both their heads were as white as silver, as I can remember them. My dear mother possessed to the last an extraordinary brightness and freshness of complexion; nor would people believe that she did not wear rouge. At sixty years of age she still looked young, and was quite agile. It was not until after that dreadful siege of our house by the Indians, which left me a widow ere I was a mother, that my dear mother’s health broke. She never recovered from her terror and anxiety of those days, which ended so fatally for me, then a bride scarce six months married, and died in my father’s arms ere my own year of widowhood was over.15

I have to admit reading this with cold-bloodedness, or at least I cannot do what the reader is hailed to do, which is to juxtapose the refinement, good taste, beauty, and rectitude of the mother, ergo England, against the dreadful siege and terror of the Indians. The reader occupying the autobiography of reading. Instead, I admit to laughter and satisfaction at this siege and the early decease of the mother. That I say I have to admit and call myself cold-blooded, and I admit to laughter as if it isn’t warranted, speaks to the presumption that the vehicular language has transported the pathos to the correct subject and that I am that reading subject who must respond to the material transported—namely, identification with the protagonist and some moral tenet, some tenet of proper aesthetic appreciation.

Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. begins with the conceit of a preface from Esmond’s daughter:

Though I never heard my father use a rough word, ’twas extraordinary with how much awe his people regarded him; and the servants on our plantation, both those assigned from England and the purchased negroes, obeyed him with an eagerness such as the most severe taskmasters round about us could never get from their people. He was never familiar, though perfectly simple and natural; he was the same with the meanest man as with the greatest, and as courteous to a black slave-girl as to the Governor’s wife. No one ever thought of taking a liberty (except a tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never forgave him): he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him, and brought down the most arrogant by a grave satiric way, which made persons exceedingly afraid of him. His courtesy was not put on like a Sunday suit…They say he liked to be the first in his company; but what company was there in which he would not be first?…[He] had a perfect grace and majesty of deportment, such as I have never seen in this country.16

To reiterate Gikandi, the aesthetic can never be sutured against or cauterized from the “colonial event,” but even more so I propose that the colonial event is the aesthetic—that the pleasures, tastes, manners include the juxtaposition. What is pleasing, what is in beautiful form, is the violence. It is a possession; not unpleasant or ugly, it is a desired and valued commodity of an elevated mind, a good character. The virtues espoused cannot be separate from the moments of their production and description.

I don’t have to point out the absurdity of the purchased Negroes obeying him with eagerness just because Esmond was good and courteous, humble and of perfect grace, and possessing majesty of deportment. But I want to point out how we are being hailed to enter the fantasy of relations, regularized into the hierarchy. There was an enormous production of this type of fiction/fantasy, all of it sent around the English-speaking world, producing not only the way to live but also the way to imagine and the way to write.