"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

When the primary (unnamed) narrator claims that the "things" his friend Jessop "fishes" up out of life "fascinated as well," (32) a link is made between the narrative act and "fantasy." The word "fascinate," as defined by OED, points to the state of being deprived of power by a look, representing "a state between attraction and repulsion." As Jacqueline Rose has argued, "fantasy, even on its own psychic terms, is never only inward-turning; it always contains a historical reference in so far as it involves, alongside the attempt to arrest the present, a journey through the past." (33) The "present" that is arrested in the narrative act is therefore a point from which the past is linked to an itinerary of desire, but that linkage is paradoxically registered at the level at which the narrator constantly fails to capture what he seeks to posit as the "real." Although Jessop's subsequent narration of the story about his friend and his native concubine, Celestinahami concerns the telling of "brutal things," (34) the paradoxes in which the narrator finds himself initially entangled while attempting to define love continue in his narration, appearing in the form of the unbridgeable gap he encounters at the end of the narration.

In this story, the attempt to tell about "brutal things" concerns love and the question: what is the "real" when we think of love? This question was anticipated in the letters Woolf had written to Strachey from Ceylon in which he spoke of his sexual escapades in the following manner: "I shall go awhoring, I think, in desperation as women are so cheap & it doesn't matter if you get syphilis in Jaffna." (35) In the same letter, Woolf had mentioned his own desperate attempt to confront his sexuality in a land where most colonials found themselves caught between protecting their status, and their fantasies of power as white men. In the metropolis, the trigger to the narrative of "A Tale" comes when the sight of two lovers kissing in the moonlight prompts four individuals to tell stories of their first love. The four interlocutors are clearly representative of figures in the Bloomsbury circle--the narrator, an ex-colonial; Alderton, the novelist; Pemberton, the poet; and Hanson Smith, the critic. Within this group, Jessop is presented as a singular, brooding individual, and a man whose knowledge comes from elsewhere, outside the familiar metropolitan world. Commenting on the nostalgic romanticism of his interlocutors who are intent on knowing the reality of love, the narrator says with characteristic cynicism: "You talk as if you believed all that: it's queer, damned queer. A boy kissing a gift in the moonlight and you call it love and poetry and romance. But you know as well as I do it isn't. It's just a flicker of the body, it will be cold, dead, this time next year." (36)

However, right from the outset, Jessop struggles to name what he calls "love": when he reiterates that "[t]he real thing, it's too queer to be anything but the rarest; it's the queerest thing in the world," he conveys both a sense of its immensity and the impossibility of categorizing or reducing it to its essence. The slippages register at the level of language; for example, as soon as he posits that love is "immense, steady, enduring," he undermines that by asserting that it is experienced not more "than a second, and then it's only a feeble ripple on the smooth surface of [people's] unconsciousness." Similarly, he claims that love's queerness lies in the fact that it isn't "animal," but neither is it "vegetable or mineral." It appears that all definitions of love fall into this predicative paradox: each definition is provisional since its relational (or predicative) reality cancels out the kernel of definitional meaning--its nominal reality. Clearly, it is Moore's "specter" that looms behind this portrayal of Jessop's struggle to name. That struggle is further heightened as Jessop undertakes to narrate his tale--of what he had "seen" (37)--as a way to account for the "mysterious" thing called love. The turn to narrative, on the part of Jessop, then marks a significant moment in the story's attempt to force the idea into some form of representational and narratorial clarity. But as I indicate later, the "meaning" of the narrative is itself lost at the end when the interlocutors dismiss it as being another "sentimental" tale (perhaps implying that it was no more than another story modeled after the melodramatic tales of western men falling in love with, and then abandoning, native women, made familiar by Kipling's and other adventure narratives).