"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

It is a little curious that although such questions and other similar ones--about the limits of realism and narrative authority, and desire and representation--were central to the practices of Bloomsbury writers (for example, Virginia Woolf and to some extent Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster), Leonard Woolf's story awakened no interest, or even curiosity, among them. It is clear, however, that from the very beginning this slim collection was relegated to the margins, where it did not even find a place in the political discussions about imperialism that continued unabated within the Bloomsbury circle in the postWar era. For a postcolonial reader of these stories, the questions seem to proliferate in different directions, and become useful as a way to locate "A Tale Told by Moonlight" within the larger context of the discourse of Bloomsbury aesthetics, modernist orientalism, and the institutions of the modern liberal State in relation to colonialism. Re-establishing the links between Leonard Woolf's professional status as a career colonial bureaucrat and his metropolitan Bloomsbury liberalism can explain how the crisis of representation gestures toward Woolf's troubled relationship with his own class-defined metropolitanism and with the enterprise of modernity and civility that formed the very ideological core of that metropolitanism. Through its ruptures and elisions, the story points more toward the structural relation between colonialist/orientalist discourses of fantasy and power and their metropolitan base, than to Bloomsbury-inspired stylistic experimentation in narrative. Furthermore, these ruptures also bring to the fore the inherent impossibility of retaining or sustaining the power and credibility of a liberal authorial consciousness to mediate between what Michael Taussig calls the "fiction" (9) of the metropolitan State and the political reality of the colony. This impossibility can be understood by taking into account the fetishistic relations instituted by the State, relations that are seen to constitute metropolitan aesthetic identity by adjudicating what many liberals claimed to be the interior domain of metropolitan subjectivity and desire. (10)

1

   "... Reality is nothing, it is only in writing and imagination that things
   are wonderful or horrible or supreme; in reality they are sometimes just
   beautiful, nearly always ugly & always vague & dire." (Woolf, Letters
   45-46).

In October 1904, after completing his Cambridge education but failing to qualify for the coveted Indian Civil Services, Leonard Woolf accepted a cadetship in the Senior Crown Colony of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). From 1904 to 1911 he was to serve in various capacities as a colonial administrator--in Jaffna in northwest Ceylon where he was temporary replacement for a magistrate and police officer, undertaking emergency measures for famine relief; in Kandy, where, as an office assistant, he was involved in the sale and settlement of Crown land as well as managing labor problems of English tea planters; in Hambantota, a remote district in southeast Ceylon, where at the age of twenty-seven, he was promoted to the virtually independent post of assistant government agent. In addition to keeping an official diary, as mandated in 1808 by the then-Governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, in which he noted in meticulous detail his public duties, Woolf corresponded regularly with his friend Lytton Strachey, who had also been a member of the Young Apostles at Cambridge to which Woolf had belonged. (11)