Tracking the “Native Informant”: Cultural Translation as the Horizon of Literary Translation
HENRY STATEN
Within or, at the boundaries of, literary studies, the most radical extension of the contemporary reflection on the “ethics of translation” is unquestionably that of Gayatri Spivak, with its relentless pursuit of inaccessible cultural otherness. What makes this pursuit so difficult to follow, as some critics have complained, is the accompanying metacritical reflection, adhering simultaneously to Marxism, radical feminism, and deconstruction, on the positionality of the theorizing Metropolitan eye in all its varieties, especially those most closely related to Spivak’s own perspective: the Metropolitan first-world feminist and the “diasporic” intellectual who has come from the Third World to ply her trade in the West. Metracritical reflection is of course the characteristic mark of poststructuralist, and especially deconstructive, writing in general; but Spivak goes beyond any other theorist in her attempt to give a historically and culturally specific content to each moment of her reflection. Unlike, say de Man, for whom the abyssal obscurity of subjectivity emerges from a general problematic of language, and is, so to speak, an empty abyss, the tortuousness of Spivak’s account results from a sort of inaccessible overfullness of the context within which subjectivity must in each case be located;1 there is always too much history, too much human reality beyond what language can adequately represent.
The evocation of an inaccessible overfullness throws us from the “classical” deconstruction of Of Grammatology, with its suspicion of fullnesses of all kinds, inaccessible ones in particular, into the terrain of Derrida’s later “affirmative” deconstruction, with its valuation of the “experience of the impossible” that is prior to all calculation, including the calculation of differance.2 However, even experienced readers of Derrida and Spivak can have trouble understanding how the new overfullness of affirmative deconstruction is to be distinguished from the transcendental fullnesses of ontotheology, or of more homely forms of “nostalgia for presence” such as Rousseauian primitivism. Thus, for instance, when Spivak says in her magnum opus, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, that “knowledge of the other subject is theoretically impossible”3 she must mean other subjects in general, including Western subjects; yet it is the non-Western other, and at the limit the “Aboriginal,” who is for Spivak the supreme figure of the unspeakable excess of postcolonial reason, the human who comes before the subject and is thus the most “wholly other” to whom she feels responsible:4
The figure of the New Immigrant has a radical limit: those who have stayed in place for more than thirty thousand years. We need not value this limit in itself, but we must take it into account. Is there an alternative vision of the human here? The tempo of learning to learn from this immensely slow temporizing will not only take us clear out of diasporas, but will also yield no answers or conclusions readily. Let this stand as the name of the other of the question of diaspora. (402)
How is this thought of the aboriginal related to the idea of the “Native Informant” that Spivak tells us it was her original aim to track in this book (ix)? The native informant, variously referred to by Spivak as a “figure” (ix), an “unacknowledged moment” (4), “a name for that mark of expulsion from the name ‘Man’ ” (6), and an “(im)possible perspective” (9), is not any actual person or group but an artifact of colonialist ideology; with the term “aboriginal,” by contrast, Spivak gestures at the complex reality of the historical peoples who have remained invisible behind this ideological construct. Yet Spivak says that in the classic ethnological and philosophical texts of the Western tradition the native informant is “needed and foreclosed” (6), implying the existence of a real, if inaccessible, subject position behind the concocted ideological figure. Thus, for example, Spivak speaks of the effacement of the native informant as “the foreclosure of the subject whose lack of access to the position of narrator is the condition of possibility of the consolidation of Kant’s position” (9), and in a “casual rhetorical gesture” (30) that Spivak excavates from the Third Critique this limit of the human is named as the “New Hollander [Australian aborigines] or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” (26–27). Spivak uses the figure of the native informant to trace the complex way in which certain Western texts both open and seal off a certain space of alterity, and this space, while it is not identical with real aboriginality, communicates with it in some way.5 Is there then some thought of nativeness or aboriginality at the root of both the colonialist foreclosure and Spivak’s validation of alterity? There is no readily available answer to this question. Spivak is testing the limits of contemporary deconstructive thinking, and the reader must attempt to think along with her and, if possible, to develop new lines of thought of his own.
I will structure my own attempt around two questions that I pose here as naively as possible. First, How can Spivak posit a limit idea of subjectivity deemed aboriginal or native and still be following a deconstructive itinerary? And second, Supposing I could show that this was still deconstruction—why would such a demonstration matter? Why is it necessary for the postcolonial theorist to practice deconstruction?
Postcolonial studies of all stripes share in common the goal of validating the non-Western other so far as possible in her own terms, terms that often do not exist in any readily available form, if at all. The literate, institutionally empowered critic or theorist seeks to articulate in writing the heretofore unheard experience, perspective, and interests located at subject positions that have not previously had access to such articulation; and the pursuit of this articulation, while it has obvious political overtones, is fundamentally an ethical task. Spivak has called this task “translation in general” or “cultural translation,” and has situated the task of literary translation within its encompassing horizon.6
Cultural translation was always implicitly the horizon of literary translation, but this background problem could be underplayed so long as translation theory focused primarily on translation across languages belonging to the European tradition. Because ethnology studied cultures outside this tradition, its development, as Derrida noted in his most famous essay, marked the beginnings of the rupture of “centered” Eurocentric thought. Yet, as Derrida also noted, the discourse of ethnology continued to inhabit the interior of the system of concepts it began to supersede. The final collapse of the ethnographer’s confidence in the possibility of knowing the other in its otherness began around the time “Structure, Sign, and Play” was written, and was influentially declared a done deal in 1986 in the Clifford and Marcus anthology Writing Culture.7
The new ethnography struggled with the problem that the attempt to know the cultural other would either treat this other as an object, thereby stripping her of her subjectivity or, in attempting to represent the interiority of another culture, treat it as the mirror of our own. From a pragmatic ethnological standpoint, however, this problem meant only that improved, more flexible and self-aware methods of investigation and what Mary Louise Pratt called a richer “discursive repertoire” (49) were called for. In Michael Fischer’s formulation, “anthropological cultural criticism” ought to be “a dialectical or two-directional journey examining the realities of both sides of cultural differences so that they may mutually question each other, and thereby generate a realistic image of human possibilities and a self-confidence for the explorer grounded in comparative understanding rather than ethnocentrism” (217). There was still a controlled lucidity and epistemological optimism in the approaches to otherness espoused in this volume that belied the almost impenetrable obscurity of the question that it opened, the question of an otherness that would escape the purview of even the most scrupulous ethnological method. The poststructuralist mindset discerned beyond the lucidity of the “writing culture” admonition—“cultural otherness is more other than was previously realized; we must be attentive to the lenses through which we refract our view of the other”—the abyss of an ethical task, and hence of a trans-ethnological discursive space that, for a number of writers, including Derrida, called for the turn to Levinas.
The task then became to know the other in a way that respects the constraint of radical or absolute otherness; a paradoxical conception that necessitates giving up the conceit of knowledge altogether, whether objective, subjective, or any fusion of the two. If there is a relation to the other as other, Levinas taught, it cannot be one of knowledge; it can only be an ethical relation, one that comes prior to any epistemological or even ontological question or presupposition.
Levinas’s meditation on the other was philosophical rather than ethnological, as indeed, in its underpinnings at least, was the poststructuralist reflection in general. Concepts that could be held relatively stable by theorists of ethnography were for poststructuralism sites of what threatened to become endlessly reflexive critique. Fischer’s “dialectical or two-directional journey” implied not only the stability, each within its own boundaries, of subject and other, but of the discursive dialectical rules that would govern such an equal exchange—an implicitly Habermasian picture whose shortcomings have subsequently been detailed by feminist and poststructuralist critiques of Habermas. Clifford evokes both Nietzsche and Derrida as essential contributors to the new idea of ethnographic writing, but prunes his references to a handy size: Nietzsche gives us perspectival historicism (7), Derrida contributes the idea that speech is already writing (118). Clifford does not mention Nietzsche’s critique of the value of all values, or Derrida’s deconstruction of presence.
It is entirely proper that the authors represented in Writing Culture, given their discursive aims, should have drawn the limits of their reflections where they did. Trying to think cultural translation in the context of globalizing modernity, while simultaneously plumbing the depths of the critique of the Western episteme, and then to write in a way that at every moment registers the totality of one’s awareness, is a nearly impossible task; yet it is the task Spivak has taken upon herself. She speaks of the encounter with the other in terms that, mediated through Derrida, are almost Levinasian: translation is a “surrender” to the other’s text; we are responsible to a most intimate, secret encounter with the other that is nevertheless “theoretically impossible.” The site of the other is for Levinas pre-ontological; to evoke the “(im)possible perspective” of the other in Spivak’s terms as either that of “the native informant” or the aboriginal, by contrast, evokes an “ontic”—worldly or historical—site, which is however to be investigated against the backdrop of the impossible encounter of ethics.
Meditating on the complexly stratified space of otherness deemed native or aboriginal that Spivak’s text variously evokes, I detect or invent a relation, beyond Spivak’s letter, between her account of the ethics of literary translation, with its emphasis on knowing the target language intimately, and the question of nativeness or aboriginality. Is it by a merely casual ambiguity that the most intimate knowledge of a language is said to be native? The secret that is in some measure broached in the intimate surrender to a text is not the secret of ultimate ethical encounter, which as such is in principle impossible. But the experience of this surrender seems to serve as at least an intimation of the encounter that can itself, as such, never be. And the door to this possibility is opened by the translator’s acquisition of something approximating native knowledge of the language. Every culture, no matter how civilized or advanced, is constituted at its most elemental human level as a space of nativeness in a strong sense, as a space of knowledge and relation that must in principle remain largely implicit, by definition unknowable from any perspective of universality; the native speaker is the one who uses a language with the knowledge of this context “in her bones.”8 Spivak names this translinguistic cultural dimension of language, this “silence between and around words,” rhetoric, arguing that rhetoric in this sense disrupts the translatable “logic” of language (“Politics of Translation,” 180–81). The translator has access to the rhetoric of the text only if her familiarity with the language being translated is such that “one sometimes preferred to speak in it about intimate things” (183). Of course translation theory, even in an intra-European context, has always recognized the nonlinguistic specificity of cultural situations with which the language of texts is suffused, and the necessity for something approaching “native” knowledge of the language that is translated. It is also true that European peoples have numerous prejudices against each other, and there is a status hierarchy among them; but there is a quantum leap in the difficulty of literary/cultural translation when it becomes a case of Europe’s others.9 For the translator attempting to render into a hegemonic language a language from the Third World, everything becomes more problematic, more intensely “political,” than in anything envisioned by pre-postcolonial translation theory.
I discern a structural relation, unremarked and perhaps unintended by Spivak, between her problematic of translation and her tracking of the native informant. Certainly there is no aboriginal on the other end of this impossible encounter; when Spivak translates Ram Proshad Sen or Mahasweta Devi, the subject in question is literate, author of written texts, and, as a caste Hindu, far removed from the Indian “tribals.” This author is however still a native in the crudest, most unreconstructed Eurocentric sense of the term, as a member of the human species who has not been (sufficiently) Europeanized. We should not ignore this sense of nativeness; it allows us to see the continuity with each other of concepts that would otherwise seem unrelated, and to map the spectrum of meanings along which the notion of nativeness, not without contradiction, slides.
The Third World writer is thus a native in the sense that almost everyone in any culture is, as intimate with the silence of the “mother tongue,” and in addition a native in the sense that her mother tongue is embedded in the silence of a non-European culture. In the latter sense, Spivak’s attempt to render into English the original voice of Sen or Devi is an attempt to bring a “native informant” out from under her occlusion or foreclosure.10 Spivak more than any other theorist has taught us that there is no single lived experience even within the culture to which one is “native,” that the subject is marked by a multitude of striations of which race-class-gender are only the most readily nameable; the space of nativeness is never going to be “an undifferentiated transcendental preoriginary space” (286). And yet the privilege she gives to knowing the language intimately, for example Bengali, as “the language in which the other woman learned to recognize reality at her mother’s knee” (191), indicates a certain quasi-homogeneity of the culturally specific, “Bengali” dimension of language-transcending silence. To know the language intimately will not by itself guarantee faithful translation of a given text, since the subject position of the writer will inevitably be more or less heterogeneous to the translator’s; and the real test of the translator’s cultural/linguistic knowledge is the ability to make value discriminations among the texts in the target language (189–90); but intimate knowledge of the language opens at least the possibility of “surrender” to that culturally specific heterogeneity, the surrender that would make something like translation possible.
Where is the Aboriginal in all this? The Aboriginal would be native in both the first two senses and then one more, as the one most alien to European culture, the one most securely expelled from the name “Man.” The figure par excellence occluded by that of the native would be the most native of natives, apparently a (female) member of a Paleolithic culture, the culture furthest removed from the overlay of colonialism, hence representing “the inaccessible intimacy of the least sophisticated, least self-conscious way of being” (238).11 Although one cannot take literally the notion of people who have “stayed in place for more than thirty thousand years,” there have been until quite recently a few small groups, for example in New Guinea, that at least approximated this definition; practically speaking, however, as Spivak is well aware, the cultures of most of the groups that can still meaningfully be called “tribal” or “indigenous” around the world have been long since penetrated in greater or lesser degree not only by more “advanced” or “civilized” cultures, as for example the tribal peoples of India by the culture of the caste Hindus, but by European culture itself. Practically speaking, the native is always already more or less a colonial subject; and Spivak goes to great lengths to keep the prior contamination of categories always explicitly in view.
Spivak has always stressed the inaccessibility under the most favorable conditions of otherness in general; as I read it, the invocation of Paleolithic culture names the worldly vanishing point of all the varieties of inaccessibility that turn up everywhere in her investigations. This vanishing point also serves as a check on the presumptive nativeness of any given native informant, so that if the “New Immigrant” must be measured against the “radical limit” of Paleolithic woman, so would Spivak’s Rani of Sirmur. For if the Rani is a woman and subjected by both Hindu patriarchalism and British imperialist paternalism, she is also a caste Hindu, therefore structurally superior to the Indian “tribals” (a fact that, Spivak points out, the British were quick to recognize and turn to their advantage [228]) and heir to an ancient literate “high” culture. Even though she has left no written trace of herself, “in trying to locate the Rani we may be groping in the margins of official Western history, but we are not among marginal women in their context” (239). Similarly, in the case of the Gypsy-Greek woman Hanife Ali: Spivak calls her “the gendered subaltern as native informant,” yet, at home in Komitini, Ali was “the cusp-person of the Gypsy community, the one who translated for the visiting American” (407). For the Americans at the workshop in New York, she takes on the vague outlines of “subaltern/native informant”; but in her own village, she might be a woman of rank, education, and, relatively, superior social and economic class.
Oriented toward the “radical limit” of aboriginality, we remain alert to the fact that Ali is somewhere on a spectrum of possibilities of nativeness: she functions as native informant but the native informant does not exist. If there were a true native informant it would be the aboriginal, but by definition the aboriginal qua aboriginal, as inhabiting “the inaccessible intimacy of the least…. self-conscious way of life,” cannot function as an informant for the Western observer.
If there is today no empirically existing pure other of Western civilization, there is a scale of degrees of closeness to and distance from the fully constituted “metropolitan subject.” On my reading, Spivak’s notion of the aboriginal marks the furthest point of this scale and calibrates all the other forms of nativeness and native informant. The transcendental or quasi-transcendental notion of radical alterity is the most severe constraint on our notions of ethical encounter, which Spivak conceives on this basis as both imperative and impossibility; this notion, however, is meta-ethical and does not by itself provide us with any political point of application. Spivak needs the notion of the aboriginal in order to link radical alterity to the problematic of Westernizing, capitalist globalization; the aboriginal is not the transcendental but worldhistorical other of globalization. On Spivak’s radical analysis, even Marx did not think this otherness on its own terms, even to the degree that that is possible.
This furthest point is evoked most strikingly in “Politics of Translation” when she touches on the Caribbean bone flute, made of human bone, discussed by Wilson Harris. “Consuming our biases and prejudices in ourselves,” Harris writes, “we can let the bone flute help us open ourselves…. The link of music with cannibalism is a sublime paradox” (quoted in Outside, 196).12 Spivak shrewdly observes that this remarkable passage presents a striking contrast with Hegel’s famous account of the bone, in the form of the skull, as the limit of representation, glossed by Zizek as “the inertia of a non-language object”; one might add that the cannibalism that is associated with the bone flute is for the West the limit of primitivity, of other-than-civilization, the most barbarous of barbaric customs. Against Hegel and Zizek’s reading of this moment in Hegel, Spivak, following Harris, reads the bone flute as a figure of “the obligation of the translator to be able to juggle the rhetorical silences” between two languages. Spivak complains that for Hegel the passage between spirit and bone would be “mere logic,” thereby ignoring the silence, the intimacy, of the rhetorical dimension of language that the bone flute evokes and to which the translator must submit. Spivak does not, as the hasty reader might think, succumb here to the melocentrism that, in carrying the power of expression beyond the limits of articulate language, expresses the nostalgic core of logocentrism;13 her musical bone does not pipe “unheard melodies sweeter yet”; it arrests the reader in a moment of pure affection by an almost entirely inaccessible otherness of which only some trace of a trace remains, in the mode of a vanished, inaccessible, yet strictly historical time, the traumatic resonance of which still registers on the present day “natives” of the Caribbean. Similarly, in the example from Toni Morrison that precedes Spivak’s discussion of the bone flute, the effaced trace of the history of slavery in the United States marks the limits of language, a dimension of silence that not only cannot be, but ought not be, transgressed; yet the effacement of the trace, the silence, to which Spivak calls attention is not the terminus of her discourse. There is always a historical signification to the effaced marks on which Spivak focuses: no matter which culture or which historical moment it comes from, it always signifies the silencing, traumatizing effect of dominating power on those it has historically dominated, and above all but not only—for Spivak always insists on the lines of domination-subjection that fissure from within the colonialized cultures for which she speaks—the effects of European imperialism and colonialism. Thus the limit of language, “rhetoric” that “points at absolute contingency,” sends Spivak, and many who have followed her lead, off to the historical archive, and produces an efflorescence of “logic,” of historical analysis that is fully articulated even if the human reality toward which it turns our gaze is not.
Spivak’s project must be clearly distinguished from two positions that would be equally uncritical and equally inadequate. The first would be the nostalgic pursuit of the pure immediacy of a native culture that Western modernity has covered over; the second would be the simple rejection of the first on the basis of a demystified awareness that there is no pure originary presence, that the subject is always already decentered, and that speech is always already writing. The latter set of propositions, true as far it goes, by itself yields only a new universal structure of subjectivity-as-differance; it is a set of critical guidelines that the rigorous translator must keep always in mind but which by themselves can teach us nothing about the specificity of any given cultural translation and blocks off any possibility of validating some genuinely other cultural perspective, what Spivak calls “an alternate vision of the human,” on the basis of which we could make a judgment on the ethical foundations of our own culture.
Spivak’s meditation on the native informant and the aboriginal suggests that the ‘primitive’ must be distinguished from the ‘civilized’ and then valorized in a certain, very precisely controlled way if we are not always covertly to reintroduce a precritical valorization of “civilization” into our most enlightened attempts to criticize Eurocentric thinking. This civilizationist prejudice turns up most frequently, and most disastrously, in discourses that affirm the dignity of some, not all non-Western cultures by awarding them the honorific of ‘civilization’ which on the sternest Eurocentric view belongs only to the West. Since the genus ‘civilization’ in these discourses continues to be normed by the species “Europe,” the valorization of some of Europe’s others by this honorific covertly maintains that very privilege of the West that is explicitly being challenged. Civilizationist thinking too readily assimilates the virtues of the non-Western civilized to our own, and in so doing passes an implicit judgment on those cultures that are not at the level of these presumed virtues. I will give three notable examples of civilizationism in postcolonial theory.
First, Rey Chow’s recent attack on Derrida’s account of the Chinese ideogram in Of Grammatology.14 Derrida’s account of the ideogram is part of his analysis of Western logo-phonocentrism, which privileges so-called “phonetic” writing over other, more “primitive” writing systems—the very analysis cited by Clifford as Derrida’s crucial contribution to the critique of Eurocentrism. Derrida’s deconstructive critique of logocentrism yielded a generalized concept of writing according to which it was no longer possible to draw a simple boundary of essence between cultures with and cultures without writing, or between cultures with true, fully achieved, phonetic writing, and cultures with imperfect, hence more or less primitive writing systems made up of nonphonetic ideograms, hieroglyphs, pictographs, mnemonic markings, or the like.
Now, the question of writing is not one question among others in the definition of what will count as civilization, or, given a hierarchy of civilizations, what rank a given civilization will be accorded in that hierarchy. No doubt writing begins as a system of marks with commercial and administrative functions; for the ideology of civilizationism, however, the telos of writing is the pure self-transparency of spirit, and only in phonetic writing is this transparency fully possible. Only in phonetic writing can literature, philosophy, and theology find their fulfilled form and civilization accede to the realm of the properly moral or ethical. Here we arrive at the pinnacle of the pyramid formed by this ensemble of civilizationist themes: the civilized “man” is defined pre-eminently as the one who is properly moral or ethical. I am getting a little ahead of myself here, but the question of phonetic writing must be grasped from the outset in the context of the teleology that gives it its importance, a teleology that is inescapably, consciously or, more often, unconsciously, Hegelian.
Chow, apparently oblivious to Derrida’s deconstructive critique, notices only one thing: that Derrida treats the Chinese written mark as an ideogram, and Chinese writing therefore as for the most part nonphonetic. The civilizationist axiomatics on the basis of which Chow reads dictate her conclusions in an entirely predictable way: Derrida’s denial that Chinese writing has the same character as Western writing must mean that he is demeaning China, indulging in cultural stereotypes, “hallucinating China” (70); for Chow, to value Chinese civilization justly one must recognize that, just like Europe, it has reached the telos of phoneticization.
Chow uncritically relies on the logo-phonocentric norm as a value and remains indifferent to the questioning of this norm in the book she claims to be criticizing—and this while positioning herself as more critically anti-Eurocentric than Derrida, as revealing in Derrida’s epochal critique of Eurocentrism a spot of Eurocentric blindness. Chow’s blunder shows that the critique of Eurocentrism requires more than sharp intelligence and a desire to vindicate the other against Eurocentric slurs (she hurls the word “stereotype” at Derrida at least a dozen times in this short piece); it requires a deconstructive tracing of the dialectical crossings and returns of the entire system of presuppositions behind Eurocentrism.
There are of course empirical questions regarding Chinese writing that, in principle at least, have nothing to do with civilizationism or its deconstruction. Scholars have debated the nature of the Chinese ideogram for generations, and nothing guarantees that the account to which Derrida subscribes will ultimately gain universal acceptance.15 What is clear, however—although this too goes unnoticed by Chow—is that even the scholar of Chinese writing on whose authority she rests her case against Derrida operates under the compulsion of the logo-centric axiomatics. Chow’s authority, John DeFrancis, does indeed conclude, on the basis of very extensive analysis of Chinese writing, that it is “basically” phonetic.16 But if Chinese is phonetic, if this is the telos in terms of which it is to be judged, not as an externally imposed norm but as intrinsic to its nature, this is the judgment that logically follows for DeFrancis: Chinese writing is a “mess” (262), an “abysmally” bad example of a phonetic scheme (129) comprising an “outsized, haphazard, inefficient, and only partially reliable syllabary”17 that lay about as a “disorderly conglomeration” until “Western scholars” reduced it to some sort of order (Chinese Language, 93) because “the Chinese seem to have almost a penchant for avoiding simplification and standardization” (119).
Chow’s attempt to vindicate Chinese writing in the face of Derrida’s purported Eurocentrism thus, in the absence of deconstructive vigilance, turns out to have the opposite sense from what she intends. A meager acceptance of Chinese as basically phonetic—an acceptance that is moreover valuable only on the basis of European logocentrism—is bought at the price of an alternate stereotype.
Detectable in DeFrancis’s judgments is the following, familiar schema of civilizationist thinking: a culture, or some aspect of a culture, might be deemed outside the essence of the properly civilized, hence as “barbaric” or “savage,” or it might be included within the circle of essence, but at some distance, and perhaps, as in the case of DeFrancis’s judgment of Chinese writing, the greatest possible distance, still within the circle of essence, from the center or fullness of that essence. Primitiveness is measured along a discontinuous scale; the truly primitive is the other-than-civilized; but within civilization there are degrees of primitivity.
This schema is important for understanding my second example: Edward Said’s 1999 presidential address to the MLA, which was, like Chow’s essay, published in PMLA.18 The lure of pure spirit as telos of civilizationist thinking is clearly evident in Said’s remarks, where the name of the civilizationist telos is “humanism,” defined as “recovering … the topics of mind from the ‘uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,’ ” by the action of an isolated, “heroic” individual, “pen in hand, manuscript or book on the table,” whose “positive, convinced, self-reliant action of thinking” attempts to “impose credibility on the vast background acreage of human possibility that has not yet been organized” (289).
Said does not specify just what he understands by the unorganized “background acreage” of human possibility but, as the area of human life not under the command of the pen, the book, and the mind, its scope would be vast indeed, both within any given individual insofar as he is more or other than the “topics of mind,” within a given culture, insofar as not everyone in it has become a heroic, literate humanist, and, massively, in those quarters of the world where erudite humanism has not yet, or just barely, arrived. This massive exclusion is only implied; in the foreground is the inclusivist gesture typical of civilizationist anti-Eurocentrism; Said wants to bring under the aegis of humanism the “Islamic schools” of the Middle Ages, as well as certain “Indian and Chinese humanists” of the premodern period. These non-Westerners “prefigured” what in the West is called “humanism”; they “were doing what we think of rather quaintly as Western things well before the West was capable of either knowing about or doing them itself ” (288).
Said is quite rightly contemptuous of the historical ignorance or amnesia of those who do not recognize the magnitude of the Islamic contribution to what is thought of as European culture; but he seems unaware of anything at all problematic about finding the value of Islamic, Indian, and Chinese civilization in what they prefigure of the Western achievement. The irony in the tag, “what we think of rather quaintly as,” signals Said’s belief that these things are not in fact properly called “Western”; and yet what Said says about the things in question (the “topics of mind,” the literate man’s battle against—note the startling reversal of the sense in which Yeats uses the phrase!—the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor”)19 confirms everything, except for their Western origin, that we as unreconstructed Westerners already think about them. Said wants only to note the belatedness of the West in arriving at this telos called humanism—a telos that is apparently the same always and everywhere, and therefore equally discoverable by any culture no matter how other to the West.
Said’s validation of Muslim civilization in this address, and in many other places, has something in common with the strategy of a certain type of identitarianism that has flourished in the United States, notably the Aztlanist movement among Chicanistas (which linked Chicano identity to Aztec civilization)20 and various forms of Afrocentrism among African Americans (for example the type influenced by Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, which claims Egypt as the ancestral Black African civilization). Because Europeans have historically been reluctant to grant that other cultures had genuine civilizations, these identitarians presume that there is some essential point of pride and dignity to be made by linking their people to a historical culture recognized as possessing at least some of the qualities that the European tradition has valorized.
Suppose what is not at all clear, that the relation to a past civilization could, in principle, be “inherited” in some biological, cultural, or transcendental way, or, if not inherited, somehow “strategically” laid claim to or appropriated. The question remains: why should we accept the idea that civilization is ennobling in the first place, that my cultural identity is somehow validated by the civilization connection? Does the notion of such validation not imply a view of culture, and of humanity, that is essentially of a social-evolutionist and ultimately of a Hegelian type? If I take pride in the notion that I am related to the Aztecs or the Egyptians, does this not entail a corresponding depreciation of the tribes the Mexicans call the “bárbaros del norte” or of the hunter-gatherers of subequatorial Africa? If we are somehow raised in the scale of value by our link to civilization, what are we to say of those vast segments of humanity who cannot lay any such plausible claim, those who have, as Spivak hyperbolically says, “stayed in place for over thirty thousand years”? Are they merely “a vast background acreage of human possibility”?
Without a demystifying analysis of the value of civilization that it invokes, the strategic move of identifying one’s group with Aztec or Egyptian or Indo-Aryan or Medieval Islamic culture carries encoded within it the same crypto-Eurocentric value that it opposes. And it is not clear what, in the wake of such analysis, would remain of the strategy. For is not civilization, be it as humanist as you like, inherently imperialist? As Benjamin’s famous formula has it, “every document of civilization is a document of barbarism,” or, as Nietzsche earlier and more vividly put it, “we might compare dominant culture to a victor who reeks of blood, who drags the vanquished along as slaves in his triumphant procession.” Civilizations are created by overcoming the autonomy of the smaller, originally “tribal”—and in practice often more democratic—organizations in which human beings live at an earlier stage of history; the ideological concept of civilization as it exists in the West interprets this conquest as the triumph of a more highly evolved and articulated form of the human spirit over the dim light of primitivity.
My third example is at once the clearest instance of civilizationist prejudice and also the point at which the moving ground beneath the deconstructive inquiry begins entirely to give way. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart21 has been subjected by a multitude of critics, both Western and African, to an ethical normativity that is, as Michael Valdez Moses has noted, transparently Hegelian in its presuppositions, most often with the laudable intention of justifying the apparently “primitive” ethical fabric of Umuofia by showing that its customs, myths, and institutions are ethically enlightened in a way that we can approve and even admire—prefigurations, one might say, of civilized morality. The protagonist Okonkwo, however, is deemed not to live up to what Bu-Buakei Jabbi calls the “more or less rounded system of values” of Igbo society, with its complex balance of masculine and feminine that Okonkwo subverts by his one-sided adherence to the code of violent masculine heroism. According to critics of this tendency, implicit within Igbo society as a whole are our own highest values of respect for the other and of critical reflection on traditional norms, and Okonkwo is not an adequate representative of the ethical wisdom of his culture.22 Nevertheless, having granted the recognition it deserves to the sophistication of the Igbo ethical world, the contemporary critic must confront the fact that, even though Okonkwo does not represent Igbo society at what from our sociohistorical perspective we judge to be its best, nevertheless he does truly reflect quite fundamental aspects of Igbo culture: its high valuation of war and the warrior, its contempt for unmasculine men, its customs of human sacrifice and exposure of newborn twins. Okonkwo has killed five men in battle and taken their heads as trophies, and on ceremonial occasions he drinks his wine from the skull of his first victim; and he is respected and admired for this. It remains true, then, as Jabbi says, that Okonkwo’s “inadequacies exemplify to some extent the clan’s own central cultural malaise; that is, those cruel customs of ignorance perpetuated by them.”23 When Christianity comes, preaching lovingkindness and egalitarianism, it answers to what Solomon Iyasere calls a “pre-existing need” felt by certain people in Umuofia who, already before the coming of Christianity, were troubled by the cruel side of Igbo culture (75–76).
These critics and others who make similar arguments are alive to the problems of Eurocentric distortion of African realities, and critical of colonialism; yet they end up rendering a judgment on Okonkwo and his culture that coincides with the most ordinary liberal-Eurocentric view of the matter. There is some universal, humane set of values that recognizes and respects the dignity of every individual regardless of what sort of character or achievements this person might have, and it is in the European tradition that these values came to mature expression. Umuofia, by contrast, even at its best reflects the highest ethical values only as in a cracked mirror; there is some ethical telos of human culture to which primitive Africa needed to find its way. In the event, it was Europe that showed the path; ideally the Africans would have gotten there on their own, but in any case the telos would have been the same. Hence Biodun Jeyifo ends his Marxist reading of the novel with these reflections:
What if the colonizers had not come? Was the precolonial social order so static that its internal dialectic could not have found its own synthesis, its own resolution? That is, would people like Ikemefuna and Nwoye, the women subjected to the harsh patriarchal order or forced to cast away their twin children, or the despised osu have received restitution without colonialism? If we accept Amilcar Cabral’s revolutionary dictum that postcolonial societies “must return to the upward path of their own culture,” what such paths are indicated in the dialectic of Achebe’s narrative?24
Okonkwo, and that aspect of Igbo culture that he epitomizes, seem indefensible not only by the standards of traditional European morality but even more by those of the most advanced contemporary anti-Eurocentric humanism with its strong feminist tendency. What would Spivak say about this cultural otherness? When she discusses the Caribbean bone flute she does not dwell on the implications of its cannibalistic origins, the warrior cannibal of whom there is a reminiscence in Okonkwo’s habit of drinking from a human skull. When we look back to the pre-civilized for “an alternative vision of the human,” at what point, and in what form, does it become necessary to invoke the telos implied by Cabral’s notion of the “upward path”? Is Hegel always right, in the end? The enlightened contemporary critic can laugh at The Philosophy of History much more easily than he can escape the system of its philosophical presuppositions. It is not at all clear that we can answer the question, “What is the value of civilization?,” without recourse to notions of the refinement or elevation or superior ordering power of the human spirit whose force depends on the contrast with states of human being that are defined as characteristic of earlier “stages of development” of human society. Perhaps, beyond the prejudices in favor of phonetic writing or erudite humanist literacy, we might be able to discern some realm of humane ethical consciousness and practice that is the essential core of the values we confusedly think of as “civilized,” such that we could then, without civilizationist prejudice, locate the presence of this core in this or that “pre-civilized” society; but the case of Things Fall Apart suggests that we do not yet know how to separate this essential core of value from the full reality of a historical culture without at least implicitly confirming the civilizationist judgment on barbarism.
My own feeling is that, while I cannot simply reject the values they invoke, Okonkwo’s critics have moved too fast to judgment. It is not a matter of defending him against their charges, or justifying the cruelties of Umuofia—although I am certain that the contemporary liberal notion, popularized by Richard Rorty, that “cruelty is the worst thing there is” begs all the crucial questions. It is a matter of shifting the ground of the debate in such a way that we do not immediately fall into the either/or of barbarism and enlightenment. This rush to judgment always forecloses deconstructive reflection on the civilizationist prejudice. We are well aware that our own civilization is not perfect; we think it embodies the ethical telos, yet, paradoxically, cruelty and inhumanity exist under the aegis of Westernizing globalization on a scale that, given the numbers of human beings involved, arguably exceeds the inhumanities of any previous age. Is this merely a contingent misfortune, leaving untouched the purity of the ethical principles themselves, and of our hearts insofar as we subscribe to these principles? What if ethical principle, be it as humane as you like, and historical reality are bound together so indissolubly that the purity of ethical principle will always turn out to be a deluded idealization? At the limit, the deconstructive reflection reaches Nietzsche’s abyssal question regarding the value of all previously existing (European, humanist, civilizationist) moral values. But Nietzsche looked back only as far as the archaic warrior nobilities for his alternative vision of the human; perhaps we need, with Spivak, to look even further back. And then Umuofia, which is very far from a Paleolithic culture, could be thought about not from the perspective of some future to which it has not yet attained, but from the past that it shares with all other cultures, a past in which, if we are to believe Marshall Sahlins, scarcity had not yet been instituted, economic man not yet invented, nor the corresponding large concentrations of power and hierarchical distinction that are so characteristic of civilization and are already present in a fairly developed form in Okonkwo’s Igboland.25
Yet we also need to approach with an attitude of greater respect precisely those aspects of Things Fall Apart that we find most indigestible, because in such an approach we can learn something about cultural difference that our ordinary goodhearted openness will not accommodate—and not only something about cultural difference but about literary representation as well. For the enigma of literary representation lies very close to that of cultural difference. Literary works, even when they emanate from our own culture, are subject to the same type of undeconstructed moralization to which Things Fall Apart has been subjected. The tension between our everyday humane values and the integrity of the literary work is isomorphic with the tension between these values and the integrity of another culture. As a literary representation of another culture, Things Fall Apart presents us with both of these tensions at once; but, at the limit, “our own” culture is as unknowable as is that of “the other” and the ethics of cultural translation is the ethics of reading.26
NOTES
1. As in “Politics of Translation,” discussed below.
2. Spivak gives an important summary account of this turn in Derrida’s thought in Critique, pp. 423–31 (see esp. 426–27).
3. Ibid., p. 283.
4. Speaking of the question, famously posed in the name of an anthology, “who comes after the subject?,” Spivak comments: “I have indeed thought of who will have come after the subject, if we set to work, in the name of who came before, so to speak. Here is the simple answer … : the Aboriginal.” Critique, p. 27n.
5. See also p. 352, where Spivak invokes the “(im)possible perspective of the Native Informant” and turns in the paragraph immediately following to “Japanese indigenous minorities” and, once again, the Australian aborigines.
6. Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” pp. 179–200.
7. James Clifford and George E. Marcus eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
8. Cf. Mary Douglas’s important reflections on the “restricted code” of the space of nativeness in her book (mostly neglected by literary theorists), Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
9. Who may, of course, be located within the borders of Europe that are visible on a map.
10. Spivak however draws a strict distinction between surrendering to a text and surrendering to the author as “intending subject” (“Politics of Translation,” 190). The essential question of exactly where, and how, the intending subject comes into Spivak’s problematic of otherness is one that I cannot explore here.
11. Within the limits of this essay, I have not been able to do justice to the fact that the problematic of gender is always central to Spivak’s thought. I realize this is a severe limitation.
12. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993).
13. On the transformation of logocentrism into melocentrism in Rousseau, see Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 196–201 and esp. 248–49.
14. Rey Chow, “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese led to Globalized Theory;” PMLA 116(1), Jan. 2001, pp. 69–74.
15. Derrida’s analysis does, however, draw powerful independent confirmation from an article by Chad Hansen, “Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas,” Journal of Asian Studies 52(2), May, 1993, pp. 373–99. Hansen, a scholar of traditional Chinese thought, through a sophisticated philosophical analysis based on Wittgenstein arrives at the same conclusion reached by Derrida: that the notion of the ideogram is merely confused if it posits a self-interpreting mental semantic entity, but makes good sense if conceived as a conventional sign, made of a mixture of elements, some originally pictorial, some phonetic, that has meaning by virtue of syntax and historical convention alone.
16. John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: fact and fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984).
17. John DeFrancis, Visible Speech: the diverse oneness of writing systems (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989).
18. Edward W. Said, “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism.” PMLA 115(3), May 2000, pp. 285–91.
19. The quotation is from “The Magi,” whom Yeats describes as searching for the mystery on the “bestial floor” because they are “unsatisfied” by “Calvary’s turbulence.”
20. I have commented on the internal tensions of Aztlanism and Chicanismo in general in “Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: the Case of Hunger of Memory,” PMLA (January, 1998), pp. 103–16.
21. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, [1958] 1962).
22. Cf. what Spivak calls the “race-divisive” distinction made by the British in the nineteenth century between the “bestial Hindu” and the “noble Hindu” (Critique, p. 236).
23. Simon O. Iyasere ed., Understanding Things Fall Apart: Selected Essays and Criticism (New York: Whitston Publishing Co., 1998), p. 138.
24. Biodun Jeyifo, “The Problem of Realism in Things Fall Apart: A Marxist Exegesis,” in Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, ed. Bernth Lindfors (New York: MLA, 1991), pp. 112–17; quotation from 117.
25. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: de Gruyter, 1972). This immensely important book, which has been, like Mary Douglas’s cited above, surprisingly ignored by literary theorists, uses exhaustive quantitative and statistical data to make its case for the nature of economic life among the most “primitive” human groups.
26. The question that opens out as I am forced to bring this essay to a close is the following: Does the attempt to read Okonkwo with respect not, perhaps, reveal a fundamental fracture that would run through culture, text, and translation/reading alike, a fracture between literature as faithful representation of the savage core of culture (where “savage” does not necessarily mean “primitive”) and literature as serving an ever more humane vision of humanity?