"Telling brutal things": colonialism, Bloomsbury and the crisis of narration in Leonard Woolf's "A Tale Told by Moonlight" - Critical Essay

Criticism, Spring, 2001 by Anindyo Roy

UPON RETURNING FROM Ceylon in 1911, where he had served for nearly eight years as a colonial bureaucrat, Leonard Woolf resigned his post in the colonial service and married Virginia Stephen, eventually settling down with her in their new home, Monk's House in Sussex in 1916. Along with Virginia and Vanessa and their Cambridge friends, Leonard Woolf established the "new" Bloomsbury Group as the center of a liberal aesthetic and intellectual culture fashioned after the tradition inherited from the late Victorians. During this period Leonard Woolf wrote his novel The Wise Virgins (1914), and a novel and three short stories based on his experienced in Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle (1913) and "Stories of the East" (1921). Woolf's five-part autobiography was to appear much later in the 1960s. Despite the growing body of scholarship on Bloomsbury, Leonard Woolf's fiction has been of peripheral interest to literary scholars. The Wise Virgins remains his most widely discussed literary work, mainly because of its portrayal of the troubled relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. (1) Praised by Quentin Bell as a novel of superbly dispassionate observation, but also reviled as a work with "too many blacks in it" (2)--this was the "reason" Lytton Strachey offered for not liking it--The Village in the Jungle was largely ignored by scholars. It was only during the 1960s, nearly fifty years after its first appearance in 1913, that scholars from South Asia recognized the novel as a significant social document about colonial Ceylon. As for "Stories of the East," it failed to generate any interest during Woolf's lifetime, and Woolf's contemporary Bloomsbury friends and peers, who had on other occasions been eager to express their personal views on his work, remained silent about this work. Modern critics seem largely to be unaware of its existence, and despite its republication in 1963 in Diaries in Ceylon 1908-1911: Record of a Colonial Administrator, it has received no significant scholarly attention. Originally handprinted and published by the Hogarth Press in 1921, the collection appears to have quietly slipped out of the memory of Bloomsbury. The most recent, and to my knowledge the only, study of Woolf's colonial stories is to be found in Elleke Boehmer's "`Immeasurable Strangeness' in Imperial Times: Leonard Woolf and W. B. Yeats," in which she calls for their reassessment based on a re-thinking of modernism's troubled relationship with its own metropolitan identity, particularly during the last phase of the "age of empire." (3)

How, then, does one begin to comprehend this silence? Does it have to do with Woolf's reputation as a creative writer, which rapidly faded after 1916 when he entered the arena of liberal left politics in Britain and undertook projects that involved the writing of political pamphlets in support of the League of Nations, and of his famous critiques of imperialism, such as Mandates and Empire (1920), Economic Imperialism (1921), and Imperialism and Civilization (1928)? Did these changes affect the perceptions of his peers and modern critics regarding his "literary" abilities? (4) Or did the silence stem from an inability on the part of the Bloomsbury circle and its critics to comprehend the stories' undercurrents--their persistent and often troubled questioning of the legitimacy of narrative authority derived from the power of metropolitanism and evoked in the name of the liberal State, or their challenge to the deeply entrenched orientalist impulse within Bloomsbury to objectify the colony as the realm of the "other?" (5) Although the stories are narrated in a recognizably modernist form, did the underlying question about questioning authority go beyond the issue of stylistic innovation and open up a particularly "brutal" history of power relations between the metropolis and the colony? (6) Did the recovery of this history mean that Woolf had targeted his own Bloomsbury audience for being complicit in maintaining these power relations while professing to be emancipated left liberals? The present essay proposes that these questions were, in fact, at the very heart of Woolf's political thinking about imperialism immediately following the War, a thinking that was to be modulated and transformed in the succeeding years of his political career. By focusing on the first story in this collection, titled "A Tale Told by Moonlight," I will attempt to tease out the political ramifications of the story's self-referential concern about its narrative possibility and to show how through this process Woolf articulates a troubling vision about the fundamental impossibility of holding on to a truly emancipatory politics while continuing to defend the standard liberal position on the empire.

At first glance, the stories seem to offer a typical orientalist fantasy, predictably fashioned after the popular images of the "East." The first handcrafted edition of this collection--with its woodcut cover designed by the artist Dora Carrington--features a tiger flanked on either side by two palm trees and images of pineapples and other oriental motifs. However, this unabashed orientalism, presented under the guise of Bloomsbury artistic innovation, contrasts starkly with the tone of these stories, a tone that makes them more than just intensely autobiographical or self-consciously modernist. Preoccupied with troubling questions about the "real" which Woolf had been posing all along in his letters to Lytton Strachey from Ceylon, these stories are framed through shifting narratives that constantly force the language of the "real" or "reality" out of the realm of objective narrativization. Implicit in this questioning about the "real" is also a dramatization of a trauma, a trauma that I argue had its source in Woolf's personal experiences in Ceylon and that subsequently acquired an intensely political dimension. As I show in the following pages, this political dimension materializes through Woolf's rendition of colonial fetishism. Like Virginia Woolf in her description of Peter Walsh's "pocket knife" in Mrs Dalloway, Leonard Woolf raises the question of the fetish, but he places it in the colonial context by identifying what William Pietz has called the "moment of capital's political truth," which is "when `private enterprise' is revealed as social government ... and the political-economic reality of capitalist society suddenly appears in public culture as fetishistic." (7) Woolf appears to have intuited that implicit in any narrative representation is a process of aesthetic reification which mirrors the political effects of a capitalist society within which the metropolitan artist discovers his personal voice. In "A Tale," Woolf identifies the process of reification by narrating the story of a man attempting to communicate to his metropolitan audience a relationship he had witnessed between his metropolitan artist friend and a native prostitute of the colony. This narration uncovers the hidden face of that metropolitan culture by excavating the material links between the center of metropolitan power, England, and colonial Ceylon.