"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 his story then, Woolf works through deferrals, dislocations and the impossibility of making the narrative go beyond a particular point, as a way to articulate this awareness. It is precisely because of this that the story provides for us a compelling site for examining the relationship between the violence of colonialism and the violence of representation, a relationship in which the "real" is not an entity to be located as a thing per se, but is the very texture of representational fictionality through which the colonial state and its citizens mask the violence of their own civic and cultural identity. Woolf seems to have suspected that the Bloomsbury circle, despite its unorthodox views on representation, could not see beyond that fictionality.

2

One of the outstanding features of "A Tale Told by Moonlight" is its persistent concern with defining and capturing the "real," a word repeated so obsessively that it begins to dominate the language of the narrative. (29) The story is simple: the unnamed narrator and his metropolitan friends have gathered under a moonlit sky on a fine summer evening in England to talk about their first loves. Inspired by the sight of two young lovers kissing under the moonlight, they begin debating the reality of this emotion. Invited to define it, the narrator finds himself incapable of providing an unambiguous answer to his interlocutors, and therefore opts to tell them a story from his own life which he hopes will clarify the issue. The narrator tells about Jessop, his friend in the colony, who once invites his other friend, Reynolds, to pay him a visit. Reynolds is a struggling novelist, worn out by life in England, looking for an opportunity to revive his failing artistic inspiration. He arrives in Ceylon and is introduced by Jessop to a local prostitute, Celestinahami. Attracted by her, Reynolds eventually marries the prostitute and settles down with her in a little cottage by the ocean. He starts writing again, and this time it is a novel about the "East." However, as time passes Reynolds loses interest in the woman, and eventually leaves her to return to England, after making a monetary settlement with her. Soon after Reynolds's departure, Celestinahami's western attired body is found floating on the waters outside the cottage. This is the point where the narrator ends his story, and the reader, like his interlocutors, are left to wonder whether what they just heard is not simply another "sentimental" tale about love with a tragic ending. (30)

What distinguishes the story from the letters is that the obsessively repeated word occurs within a narrative where the "real" is now supplanted by the term "love": "love" is yet another example of an object--so to speak--whose reality needs to be established and tested. In fact, the manner in which the narrator and his interlocutors in "A Tale Told by Moonlight" debate the reality of love is reminiscent of the discussions about the "real" within the Bloomsbury group. As Raymond Williams notes, one of the "declared founding principles of Bloomsbury" was the emphasis on candor and clarity. Williams writes: "the candid avowal, or any other kind of statement, must expect to be met by the question: `what precisely do you mean by that?'" (31) While trying to define "love," each member of the group expects the other to provide a clear and unambiguous definition. It is worth noting that the unnamed narrator's failure to do so is symptomatic of an unease with, or perhaps an inability to follow, the principles of intellectual debate set forth by Bloomsbury. A significant difference between the letters and the story is that in the latter the original relationship between the narrator (Woolf) and the interlocutor (Strachey) has shifted. Instead of the man, Leonard Woolf, communicating in his letters the events that he experiences (and the affect triggered by those experiences) to a friend on the other side of the globe, we have their fictional rendering in the form of a story within a story, with multiple narrators, characters, and dual fictional settings. The framing of the fictional narrative through the use of double narrators and double locales creates the necessary distance through which Woolf expected to re-locate this "real" through its fictive narrativization. This distancing is also manifested in the interruptions and reiterations at the very beginning as the narrator attempts to define love, which introduces a kind of modernist doubleness within the narrative, so that the representational impulse is constantly destabilized by being caught between visibility and invisibility, the factual and the interpretive, knowledge and desire, determinism and randomness, and self-presence and the imagined "other." In other words, the narrative is tracked in the very form where the will to truth meets its own impossibility. The constant reiteration of that elusive "it" (referring to love)--that stands in for but cannot itself be the "real"--haunts the very telling, which makes it impossible for the narrator to locate the center from where the story can be told.