"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

At this point, personal experience as evidence of the reality of love seems to be the only recourse available to Jessop for pinning down this ever-elusive real. Acknowledging that love comes "in strange ways and places, like most real things, perversely and unreasonably," (38) he locates the reality of love in his own experiences in the remote outpost of the empire. The colonial terrain makes itself visible at this juncture not only as the site of Jessop's narration but also of his desire to account for the "perverse" and the "unreasonable." In all of this what the reader encounters is Jessop's own desire--to fulfill what he claims to be his friend Reynolds's wish to "see life, to understand it, to feel it." (39) Such a sense of palpable life, original and unhampered by the illusionary haze of the metropolis, seems to be what Jessop offers to his friend who is exhausted by the pressures of metropolitan life. However, this invitation to "see life" is also an invitation to an initiatory rite that Jessop extends almost immediately after his friend reaches Ceylon, and it is not surprising that Jessop then takes him to the den of the local Colombo prostitutes.

What the uninitiated Reynolds had "never seen before" subsequently yields up a form of visibility to both of these white men, that is typically fashioned after the orientalist image of the exotic East: "all the smells of the East rose up and hung heavy upon the damp hot air in the narrow streets." (40) Jessop's voyeuristic narrative penetrates through this overwhelming mass of sensations right to the interior of the den:

   There was one of those queer native wooden doors made in two halves; the
   top half was open and through it one saw an empty white-washed room lighted
   by a lamp fixed in the wall. At the other end were two steps leading up to
   another room. Suddenly there came the sound of bare feet running and
   giggles of laughter, and ten or twelve girls, some naked and some half
   clothed in bright red and bright orange clothes, rushed down the steps upon
   us. We were surrounded, embraced, caught up in their arms and carried into
   the next room. We lay upon sofas with them. (41)

The scene is organized around the progression of the gaze of the narrator, which moves through the material frames of the doorway into the heart of the den. The suddenness, registered in the words "embraced, caught up in their arms" implies a sense of entrapment, immediately followed by Jessop's assertion of his ability to master it through the knowledge of the "other," the entity located in the interior of the frames. The act of knowing enunciated at this point in the narrative is constructed as the ability to grasp and fix the objects--here the bodies of the naked prostitutes--both sexually and epistemologically:

   They knew me well in the place, you can imagine what it was--I often went
   there. Apart from anything else, it interested me. The girls were all
   Tamils and Sinhalese. It always reminded me somehow of the Arabian Nights;
   that room when you came into it so bare and empty, and then the sudden rush
   of laughter, the pale, yellow naked women, the brilliant colours of the
   cloths, the white teeth, all appearing so suddenly in the doorway up there
   at the end of the room. And the girls interested me: I used to sit and talk
   to them for hours in their own language: they didn't as a rule understand
   English. They used to tell me all about themselves, queer pathetic stories
   often. They came from villages almost always, little native villages hidden
   far away among rice fields and coconut trees, and they had drifted somehow
   into this hovel in the warren of filth and smells which we and our
   civilization had attracted about us. (42)