"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

In "A Tale," the appearance of the fetish is dependent not on simple narration of its objective presence, but on a crisis of narration--one that refuses to be resolved through the traditional norms of realist, or the unconventional modes of modernist narration. In fact, it is this crisis, enacted through the repeated challenge presented to the author of its representability that is articulated by the narrator's persistent question, "what is the real"? Without this, the fetish could have been easily absorbed by the author's representational impulse in order to disappear as yet another exotic "object" in the world of other objects. Although the technique is Conradian, the life of this narrative is predicated on keeping this question of the real alive at its own margins, and not letting it be sublated into a pure symbolic idea. As in Conrad, the narration is always pushed out of focus to a site of diffusion, but this is a site that allows the fetish object to reveal its own political reality. In fact, throughout the story the question of the real survives while the quest for an answer that will fully satisfy the interlocutors seems doomed from the very beginning. This is highlighted by Woolf's description of the story's interlocutors who are modeled on a typical Bloomsbury circle of metropolitan artists and critics. Their expectations about what the story signifies is mirrored in their will to know its truth, reasserted with renewed energy every time the narrator brings up the question of the "real." The narrator, however, fails to perform this task: his struggle to communicate the meaning of the story exemplifies, in some sense, his own frustrated effort to pin down the real in a form that can be easily communicated to, and read and consumed by, his metropolitan audience. The fact that the story is ultimately rejected by his interlocutors as being "sentimental" is indicative of the narrator's failure to present that real in this "meaningful" form. What, then, does the story convey by constantly foregrounding the impossibility of meaning as defined by these normative standards of metropolitan expectations?

In a sense, that impossibility has to do with Woolf's own efforts to translate a personal experience into one of shared meaning. Given Woolf's experiences in Ceylon, the appearance of the fetish--and the crisis of representation triggered by the question of its representability--can be seen as linked to an inescapable feeling in him about the incommunicable nature of the trauma he encountered there. I will return to this sense of trauma later in the essay, but at this point I wish to draw attention to the tone that distinguishes this story from that of his colonial novel, The Village in the Jungle. (8) In the novel, Woolf had been able to adopt and maintain the tone of a detached observer and recorder: the novel's realism is clearly discernible in its unmediated evocation of the sense of the "real," constructed through a faithful rendition of the life and struggles of the rural poor in Ceylon, which Woolf had observed from close quarters. Yet, that self-assured felicity of direct observation seemed unavailable to Woolf in "A Tale." Instead, the "Tale" appears to move unevenly through the opaque spaces that open up between the observer/teller and the colonial world evoked by that telling, hovering precariously on the impossibility of ever capturing the real story that lurks in the interstices, time and again struggling under the weight of the unnamable and inexpressible. Even the sense of the reality of colonial bodies described and objectified by the narrator is often racked by a pervasive narrative unease. The questions linger: what did these bodies mean when embodied within a story told by a man from the colony to his metropolitan interlocutors? Was it possible to craft a language that could capture the desire that propels these representations? Could this desire be named?