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The Colonial Bildungsroman: "The Story of an African Farm" and the Ghost of GoetheAuthor(s): Jed EstySource: Victorian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Spring, 2007), pp. 407-430Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4626328 .
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The
Colonial
Bildungsroman:
The
Story of
an
African
Farm
and
the
Ghost of
Goethe
JED
ESTY
f there is one thing upon which Olive Schreiner's North American
readers
and
critics now
generally
agree,
it is
that The
Story
f
an
African
Farm
(1883)
is
an odd
duck in
terms of
genre
and
style-a
kind of
Southern
exotic
or
literary
platypus
whose
ungainly
combination
of
parts
and
functions
seems to
flummox
both
classification
and
periodiza-
tion. To
describe
the novel
to new
readers
requires
an
entire
glossary
of
generic
categories,
for
it is
one
part
South
African
plaasroman
(farm-
novel),
one
part
New Woman
fiction,
one
part
Dickensian
farce
(featuring
pale sentimental orphans and ruddy sadistic adults), one part naturalist
tragedy
(with
a
merciless
rising
sun and a
pitiable
fallen
woman),
one
part
colonial
Gothic,
one
part
Victorian
melodrama
(featuring
hopeless
love and
missed
letters),
one
part
allegorical
tale,
one
part
satire of
provincial
manners
(with
a
dusty
Boer
wedding
scene),
one
part
spiritual
autobiography,
and one
part
neo-Transcendentalist
novel of
ideas.
More-
over,
The
Storyof
an
African
Farm,
despite
its
nineteenth-century
date of
publication,
seems to
anticipate
a
number
of
modernist
fictional
tech-
niques. Addressing these problems of periodization, literarygeography,
and
stylistic
taxonomy,
I
propose
that
Schreiner's
novel,
which
is
nothing
if
not sui
generis,
can
profitably
be
re-read in
relation to
the
history
of an
as
yet
unmentioned
genre,
the
bildungsroman.
Understanding
Schreiner's
programmatic
undoing
of
the
proto-
cols of
the
nineteenth-century
bildungsroman
can
help
us
situate
African
ABSTRACT:
his
essay
examines
the
plot
structure,
characterization,
and
figurative
language
of
Olive
Schreiner's
The
Story of
an
African
Farm,
suggesting
that the
novel's
assimilation of an uneven and markedly colonial temporality unsettles the inherited
formal
dictates of
the
Goethean
bildungsroman.
Like
other
late-Victorian
and
modernist
works set in
the
colonial
contact
zone and
fixated on
youthful
protagonists
who
do not
or
cannot
mature
(including
works
by
Kipling,
Conrad,
Woolf,
Joyce,
and
Rhys), African
Farm
nvokes
yet
breaks
the
bildungsroman's
genetic
code
of
progressive
temporality.
It
thus
literalizes
the
basic
political
and
economic
fact of
imperial
time:
the
colonies do
not-in
a strict
sense
cannot-come of
age
under
the
rule of
empire.
SPRING 007
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408
JED
ESTY
Farm
both
in
space,
as an
example
of
the
colonial
novel of
(under)development,
and in
time,
as
part
of a
set of
late-Victorian-to-
early-modernist
novels that revise
the
coming-of-age
plot by
fixating
on
youth.
The
combination of
gender
and
colonial concerns
that
animates
Schreiner's first novel
no doubt
partly
accounts
for its
initial
success
in
the
1880s and 1890s and
its
renewed
prominence
in
the 1980s
and
1990s,
when feminist and
postcolonial
approaches
raised its
profile
in
North
American curricular
and
critical
debates. Of
course,
as both
John
Kucich and
Anne
McClintock have
recently
noted,
African
Farm's
open
design-what
some critics have seen as its
immature or
haphazard
quality-imparts
to the
text a
high
level of
ideological
indeterminacy,
so
that it has
been read
variously
as
counterfeminist
and
feminist,
anti-
imperial
and
imperial,
nonracist
and
racist.'
For this
reason,
my
inter-
pretation
will bracket the
question
of
political
intention,
in
favor
of a
concentrated insistence on
the
problem
of
narrative
form. The
novel's
remarkable force
stems,
I
think,
not
from
Schreiner's
avowed
views-
hopelessly
mixed
and
impossible
to
correlate
definitively
to
the book
we
have-but from its
systematic
assimilation of an uneven and
markedly
colonial
temporality
into its
plot
structure,
characterization,
and
figura-
tive
language.
Its
conspicuously
awkward
temporal
scheme
challenges
the formal dictates
of
the
Goethean
bildungsroman
(with
that
genre's
conventional
sense of
teleological
and
masculinist
destiny)
even as it
registers
the
deep
contradictions of colonialism
itself as a
discourse of
progress.
Such a
reading begins
to
address,
more
broadly,
the
problem
of the
bildungsroman
in
the
age
of
empire.
Perhaps the best way to define the age of empire here is not to
cite
Eric Hobsbawm
(though
his
dates,
1875-1914,
would
align
rather
neatly
with
my
argument),
but to
recall Hannah
Arendt's account of
modern
imperialism,
which
assigns
a
significant place
to 1880s South
Africa. Arendt defines
high imperialism
as
the
eclipse
of national
by
international
capitalism,
especially during
the
1870s and
1880s,
noting
the
increasing
intensity
and
instability
of
speculative
and
extractive
modes of wealth creation as measured
against
more
traditional lines of
industrialization (135). Focusing special attention on South African
colonialism,
Arendt
notes the breakneck
growth
generated
by
the
opening
of
the
Kimberley
diamond mines
just
at the time of
African
Farm's
publication
and traces the
origins
of
apartheid
back
to the
Kimberley
boom
and to the
imperial project
defined
by
Cecil
Rhodes. In
Rhodes's South
Africa,
she
suggests,
the "so-called laws of
capitalism
VICTORIAN STUDIES
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
409
were
actually
allowed to
create
realities"
without
the
counterweight
usually
provided by
national
politics
(136-37)
-an
imbalance that
fore-
stalled
and avoided "normal
capitalist
development"
(203).
If
South
Africa stands as a
special
case of
racialized labor
exploitation
and
unfet-
tered
capitalism,
its
new mode of
production
also
signals,
for
Arendt,
the
beginning
of a crisis that
was not
just
peripheral
or
colonial,
but Euro-
pean
and even
global,
a crisis in
which the
modernizing
ethos
and
self-
reliant
bourgeois dynamism
that drove
Western
industrialization
began
to
dissipate.
The
Boers,
she
claims,
were the "first
European
group
to
become
completely
alienated from the
pride
which Western man
felt
in
living
in
a world
created and
fabricated
by
himself"
(194).
Arendt's idea
of a
newly
unrestrained
capitalism
operating
outside the national
boundaries and moral
limits of
middle-class
prog-
ress
proves quite
telling
for
literary
history
in
general,
for the
bildungs-
roman
as the
genre
of
progress,
and for
African
Farm n
particular.
The
novel
provides
a
suggestive
colonial
gloss
on
what
Lukacs
describes
as
"the crisis
of
bourgeois
realism" in
Europe,
which he
sees as
rooted in
the failure of the 1848
revolutionary
movements and the concomitant
decline
in
the
fortunes of the
concept
of
progress
itself
(85,
174).2
Lukacs's
account
overlaps
with
Arendt's
notjust
chronologically
but in
its
explan-
atory
logic,
suggesting
in
broad
terms
that
the crisis
of
realism
in
the
novel
is
coterminous with
the end of
the
national-industrial
phase
of
European
modernization.
What
mediates
between
his
history
of
forms
and her
history
of
socioeconomic
structures
is
precisely
the
faltering
concept
of
middle-class
progress,
a
concept
incarnated
in
fiction in
the
bildungsroman.
Arendt and
Lukacs also
converge
in
viewing
the
imperial
era
as
the
moment when
a certain
kind of
racialized
thinking
became
entrenched within
capitalism,
disrupting
the
middle-class
commit-
ment to
social
mobility.
In
Arendt's
analysis
of
colonial
South
Africa,
and in
Lukacs's
analysis
of
Darwinian
and
Nietzschean
thought,
the
regressive
logic
of
racialism
began
in
the
later
nineteenth
century
to
replace
the
progressive
elements of
the
European
bourgeoisie's
project
of modernization (Arendt 159; Lukacs 175).3 Lukacs translates this
left-liberal
thesis into
literary
history
as a
crisis
in
the
novel,
which was
left
without
socially representative
protagonists,
without
the
durable
and
dynamic
plot
of
social
mobility
and
provincial
education,
and
without the
historical
depth
or
allegorical
traction
of
classic
realism.
Many
rightly
view this
Lukacsian
story
as
schematic,
and
its
provenance
SPRING
2007
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410
JED
ESTY
and
chronology
are
clearly
more
continental than
British.
Nonethe-
less,
if
we
understand its
effects to
unfold
gradually
in
the
several
decades after
1850,
it does
resonate
with the
displacement
of the
realist
social
novel
by
naturalistic
elements
and,
more
specifically,
the
displacement
of
socially integrative
Victorian
bildungsromane
such
as
David
Copperfield
nd
Jane Eyre
by
the
common
late-Victorian
plot
of
disillusionment and
alienation.4
But
how,
beyond
historical
coincidence,
do the
crisis of Euro-
pean
realism and
the
shifting
temporal
contours of
the
bildungsroman
intersect with the rise of the new
imperialism
and the
reorganization
of the
colonial
periphery?
Few texts
are as well
positioned
to
help
address that
question
as
Schreiner's
African
Farm,
in
which
we can
begin
to
grasp
the
shifts-from realism
to
naturalism,
from
self-made
protagonists
to
environmental
victims,
from
regional
to
global
maps
of
uneven
development,
and from
apparent
class
mobility
to
racialized
class stasis-that took
place
as the
Victorian
bildungsroman
was reor-
ganized
in
the world
of
fin
de siecle
imperialism.5
This
framing
of
Schreiner's text not
only
throws into relief some of the novel's odd
parts,
it also
allows us to
reinterpret
the work within
a
larger
set
of
1880-1920
Anglophone
fictions
(including major
works
by
Wilde,
Joyce,
Woolf,
and
Conrad)
that seem more
deliberately
designed
to
turn the
bildungsroman
inside out.
The
point
of
such a
reinterpretation
is not to
finesse the Victo-
rian/modernist
borderline,
nor even to
argue
that
colonial fiction
was
central to the innovations of the
late-Victorian novel
of
consciousness,
but to situate AfricanFarm within a particular conceptual, historical,
and
generic
crisis
in
the
discourse
of
progress,
and to use the novel
to
establish the fissile
logic
of the
bildungsroman
as
it breaks down and
breaks
apart
the entwined narrative
tele
of
personal maturity
and social
modernization. What
kind
of
novel,
we
might
ask,
can
keep
faith with
the
complex
interaction of
European
narratives of
progress
and with
thejuddering tempo
of modernization
in
a
fully
extended
yet unevenly
developed
world
system?
The
answer
lies in
the narrative form and
linguistic texture of African Farm itself: Schreiner shows us what a
coming-of-age story
looks like when its social referent is the
very
fron-
tier of
imperial
capitalism,
when it addresses
a
form
of modernization
with no national boundaries and few
political
limits-that
is,
when it
enacts what Arendt calls "a
supposedly permanent
process
which has
no
end or aim but
itself"
(137).
VICTORIAN
STUDIES
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THE
COLONIAL BILDUNGSROMAN
411
I.
To situate
African
Farm n
this
way
is
to
suggest
a
new structural
approach
to the colonial
bildungsroman,
one that
tracks the
formal
and
stylistic
correlates of both
developmental
and
anti-developmental
thinking
during
the breakdown of historical
positivism
and the
massive
but strained
expansion
of
European political hegemony.
Let us
first
stipulate
a
broadly European literary-historical
claim
about the
1880-
1920
period
by
recalling
some of
its landmark fictions: Franz
Kafka's
Metamorphosis1914), which short-circuits and hideously travesties the
development
of its middle-class male
protagonist;
Marcel
Proust's
Remembrance
of Things
Past
(1913-27),
which
displaces
the
plot
of
devel-
opment
with the
plot
of
recollection and distends its
temporal
frame
over hundreds
of
pages;
Thomas
Mann's
The
Magic
Mountain
(1924),
which describes Hans
Castorp wasting away,
literally
unbecoming
himself
in
an
Alpine
sanatorium;
Oscar
Wilde's The Picture
of
Dorian
Gray
(1891),
in
which the
protagonist's
arrested
aging
process
antici-
pates the endless youth of another fin de siecle protagonist, Kipling's
Kim.
Whether
by
metamorphosis,
dilation, truncation,
consumption,
or
inversion,
these forms
thwart the realist
proportions
of
biographical
time that had
previously
defined the
bildungsroman.
This is not to mention
the
stylized
alternation
between
compres-
sion and
expansion
in
the work
ofJoseph
Conrad,
Virginia
Woolf,
and
James
Joyce,
the
three most influential
novelists of the
era.
In
Lord
Jim
(1900),
The
Voyage
Out
(1915),
and A
Portrait
of
theArtist
as a
Young
Man
(1916), these writers reworknarrative time viayouthful protagonists who
conspicuously
do not
grow up.
Moreover,
they
use
plots
of
colonial
migra-
tion to
establish the
blocked attainment
of
maturity
or social
adjustment.
All
three novels are
what
I
would call
anti-developmental
fictions set in
underdeveloped
zones. For this
reason,
they suggest
an
interesting
geographical
frame for the
longstanding
idea that
modernism
resists
the
"tyranny
of
plot" by
reorganizing
storyline
into more
lyrical,
picto-
rial,
mythical,
thematic,
aleatory,
or
elegiac
shapes-and
that it
mounts
variouslystyled radical, bohemian, queer,
and
feminist
challenges
to the
dictates of
bourgeois
socialization in
the
process.
From
Schreiner's
African farm
to
Conrad's Asian
straits
to
Joyce's
Irish
backwater to
Woolf's
South
American
riverway,
colonialism
disrupts
the
bildungs-
roman
and its humanist
ideals,
producing jagged
effects on both
the
politics
and
poetics
of
subject
formation.
SPRING
2007
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412
JED
ESTY
The novels I
have
mentioned
exemplify
a
central
yet
surpris-
ingly
under-explored
link
between
modernist
aesthetics and
modern
colonialism:
the
reorganization
of
developmental
time
in
reciprocal
allegories
of
self-making
and
nation-building.
A
larger
argument
might
extend
this observation
further
to
include,
for
example,
the
work of
Somerset
Maugham,
Elizabeth
Bowen,
Oscar
Wilde,
and
Jean
Rhys-all
cosmopolitan
emigr6s
who cast
doubt on the
ideology
of
progress through
the
figure
of
stunted
youth
or
perpetual
adolescence.
At one
level,
it is
not
surprising
that a
group
of
imperial
fictions
should
feature endless
youth:
such a
trope
conforms to the
wish-fulfilling
aspects
of
imperial
romance and
adventurism. But
none of
these
novels-not even Kim-is
a
simple
romance. Their
anti-bildungsroman
temporality
and colonial
settings
suggests
a
more
complicated
and
interesting story,
one that
unexpectedly prefigures
the
early
modernism
ofJoyce
and
Woolf.
To
pursue
these
connections,
we
might begin
with Franco
Moretti's
provocative
argument
that
the
European
bildungsroman's
historical vocation was to
manage
the effects of modernization
by
representing
it within a
safe narrative
scheme.
During
the
golden
age
of
European
realism
(from
Goethe to
George
Eliot),
youth
was the
master
trope
of
modernity
itself,
signifying
the
constant transforma-
tion of
industrial
society
and
the
growing
interiority
and
mobility
of
middle-class
subjects.
However,
"to become a
'form',"
Moretti
writes,
youth
must be endowed with a
very
different,
almost
opposite
feature to
those
already mentioned: the very simple and slightly philistine notion that youth "does
not last forever." Youth is
brief,
or at
any
rate
circumscribed,
and this enables or
rather
forces
the a
priori
establishment of a formal constraint on the
portrayal
of
modernity. Only by
curbing
its
intrinsically
boundless
dynamism, only by agreeing
to
betray
to a certain
extent its
very
essence,
only
thus,
it
seems,
can
modernity
be
represented.
6,
emphasis original)
The
young protagonist's open
development
is
ultimately
contained
by
the
imposition
of a static state of adulthood.
"A
Bildung
is
truly
such,"
writes Moretti, "only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded:
only
if
youth passes
into
maturity,
and comes to a
stop
there"
(26).
In
Moretti's
model,
the
bildungsroman
reflects a
deep
counterrevolu-
tionary impulse
embodied
in
Goethe
and
Jane
Austen,
whose works
turn
on their
ability
to
reconcile
narrativity
and
closure,
free
self-
making
and social determination.
VICTORIAN TUDIES
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THE
COLONIALBILDUNGSROMAN
413
But
if
the standard novel of
socialization
figures
modernity's
endless revolution in the master
trope
of
youth,
then
what is the
social
referent for the
counter-trope
of
adulthood,
that
containment device
upon
which
everything,
in the
end,
depends?
If
capitalism
never
rests,
what
allegorical
correspondence
can
explain
the
capacity
of the
form
itself to
put
the brakes on
development, thereby
preventing
the
bildungs-
roman from
becoming
a
never-ending story?
Here we
arrive at a
possi-
bility
that
remains a bit buried
in
Moretti: that
nationhood
supplies
the
bildungsroman
with a
language
of
historical
stability,
a final form
amidst
the vast
changes
of industrialization. And indeed, the
dynamic
tension
between
youth
and adulthood in
the
nineteenth-century
bildungsroman
often does
play
out as a
struggle
between the
open-ended
temporality
of
capitalism
and
the bounded
counter-temporality
of
the nation. Of
course,
romantic
nationalism was influential in
the German
philosophical
milieu
of the
early
bildungsroman.
Goethe, Schiller,
Lessing,
and Herder
worked
in
an
organic
culture
increasingly
identified with
the national
state,
one whose
temporality
and
harmony
could be
reflected
in
the
representative personality. The formalization of
bildung
as a narrative
device turned
on
a
specific,
doubled
notion of
becoming:
the aesthetic
education of the
bourgeois subject
(Schiller)
and
the
development
of the
people
into the
historically
meaningful
form of
the nation
(Herder).
Bakhtin
codified this
relationship
when he
claimed
that a
true
(and
thus
truly
modern)
bildungsroman
presents
"an
image
of
man
growing
in
national-historical ime"
(25,
emphasis
original).
For
Bakhtin,
as for
Luka.cs,
narratives that
fuse
individual
experience
and
social development require a tacitly masculine and explicitly national
form
of
emergence.
These are
the
premises
woven into
Bakhtin's
account
of the
bildungsroman's
pride
of
place
in
the
history
of
realism.
Such
novels
provide
an
image
of
man
in
the
process
of
becoming....
Changes
in
the hero
himself
acquire plot significance
....
Time is
introduced
into
man,
enters
into his
very
image,
changing
in
a
fundamental
way
the
significance
of all
aspects
of
his
destiny
and
life. This
type
of novel
can be
designated
in
the
most
general
sense
as the
novel of human emergence.... Everything depends upon the degree of assimila-
tion of
real
historical time.
(21,
emphasis original)
"National-historical time"
allows the
Goethean
bildungsroman
to
recon-
cile the
unbounded
time of
modernity
and the
bounded
or
cyclical
time
of
tradition.
Goethe's
apparently
limitless
attraction to
the inner
life
of
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414
JED
ESTY
developmental processes,
be
they
botanical,
geological,
anatomical,
or
sociohistorical,
is
rendered lucid
by spatial
movement that is based
on
emergent
national
distinctions within
Europe,
for
example,
in
the oft-
cited Italian
Journey
(1816-17).
Bakhtin
specifically
excludes
from
Goethe's
concrete and
"realistic"
historical
imagination
the
far-away
realms of the
exotic,
the
sublime,
and
the wild
(34).
A
defining
historical tension thus
emerges
between
the "realist"
clock of the
bildungsroman
(bounded
by
national
time)
and the
poten-
tially
unbounded forms of
temporality
associated with
supra-national
forces that
gained significance
in the wake of the French and Industrial
Revolutions.
Those forces-whether identified
as universalist
political
rationality
or
global
economic
hegemony--unsettled
the
concept
of
culture itself insofar as
they
threatened to
spill
outside
the
spatial
and
temporal
borders of the nation-state.
In
the
British
sphere,
Burke and
Coleridge
consolidated this central
opposition
between a
national
culture
in
which
proportionate
social and
personal growth
can
occur
in
harmony
and
a
multi-national civilization in
which such
growth
has no
organic
checks or balances. The late-Victorian formalization of
global
imperialism
thus exacerbated a
symbolic split
between the
insular nation
(a
culture
proper
to the
bildungsroman's allegory
of
development)
and
the
imperial
state
(a
culture-diluting
unit
whose
spatiotemporal
coordi-
nates violate "national-historical"
ime).
We can
expand
the terms and the historical reach of Moretti's
analysis by hypothesizing
that the
developmental logic
of the late
bildungsroman,
with
African
Farm
as our
main
test
case,
undergoes
drastic revision as the (relatively) stable temporal frames of national
capitalism gave
way
to
a
more
conspicuously imperial
frame of refer-
ence,
in
which modernization
itself
seemed
alternately
stalled and
unbridled. What seems
like the transformation of the
bildungsroman
into the novel
of
disillusionment
(with
its
logic
of fixed social hierar-
chies,
broken
destinies,
and
compensatory,
if
socially
eccentric,
private
or
artistic
visions)
has an
allegorical analogue
here: the
imagined
harmony
between culture
and the
state,
taken
as a
way
to
manage
the
uneven development of capitalism, comes under pressure as a new
phase
of
global empire-building
reveals modernization
to be an
unpre-
dictable,
mercilessly
uneven,
and
supra-national process.
Colonial
modernity disrupts
the
progressive
yet stabilizing
discourse of national
culture
by
breaking up
its cherished
continuities.
It is in this sense that
empire
throws
out of
joint
the Goethean
formula for narrative closure
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THE COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
415
along
with
the
customary
temporal alignment
between
biographical
and
"national-historical time."
More
precisely,
since
capitalist
modernization was
always
uneven
and
since the
allegory
of
progress
embedded
in
the
bildungs-
roman
was,
in
practice,
unstable from the
beginning
(in
Scott,
in
Austen,
in
the
Brontes),
perhaps
we should
say
that what
happens
is a
shift
in
register,
where
the thematics of
uneven
development
attach
increasingly
to
metropole-colony
relations rather
than
solely
to
national urban-rural
tension-a
reading
of
later Victorian
fiction
that
accords with
Raymond
Williams's basic
insight
at the end of The
Country
and the
City
(279-88).
The
allegorization
of
uneven
development
becomes
more
conspicuous
and more
colonially-coded
between 1880
and
1920
in
the
modernist fiction
of
unseasonable
youth.
There,
temporal
experimentation
scrambles
biographical
time,
fewer
middle-
class
protagonists
can be
managed
into a mature
social
accommoda-
tion,
and
youth
comes to
figure
not
just
the
managed
dynamism
of
industrial
capitalism,
but the
uneven
development
of
colonial
moder-
nity.
Youth,
increasingly
untethered from the model and telos of adult-
hood,
seems
to
symbolize
the
dilated/stunted
adolescence of
a
never-quite
modernized
periphery,
and
thus,
in
a
global system
that
fully
traverses
core
and
periphery,
to
symbolize
modernization
as
a
"permanent
process
which has no
end or aim
but itself"
(Arendt
137).
In
such colonial
fictions of
unseasonable
youth,
imperialism
brings
the
bildungsroman
and its
humanist
ideals
into a zone
of
stub-
bornly
racialized
global
anachronism,
deforming
the
genre's
basic
temporal framework,its essential commitment to progress. In works like
African
Farm
(or
Lord
Jim),
the
temporality
of
deferral
and
dilation
struc-
tures the
entire
novel;
it is
often
ascribed to
individuals and
groups
on
both
sides of the
colonial
divide.
As
many
commentators
have
noted,
imperialism
generally
casts
its
subject
peoples
not
as
radically
different,
but as an
underdeveloped
or
youthful
version of
their
rulers,
not
quite
ready
for
self-government.
But
imperialism
also
casts
its own
agency
as
youthful
and
rejuvenating;
its
beneficiaries are
rendered
young
outside
the finite marketsand social constraints of the Old World.
And
yet
such
youthfulness,
though
it
seems
to
promise
economic
or
social
vitalization
at
the
frontier,
also
tells a
more
troubling
story
about
imperial
time.
Following
Sara
Suleri's
reading
of
Kipling,
for
example,
we can
take Kim's
resplendent
youth
as a
figure
for
the
frozen
present
of
imperial
time.
In
Suleri's
view,
the novel
testifies to
the
futility
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416
JED
ESTY
of
the
imperial project,
which must
confront "the
necessary
perpetua-
tion of its adolescence in
relation to its
history"
(111).6
Kipling's
anti-
bildungsroman--like
LordJim
r
AfricanFarm-literalizes
the
problem
of
colonialism as failed or
postponed
modernization,
giving
an
aesthetic
form
to
what
Dipesh Chakrabarty
has called the endless "not
yet"
of
imperial history
(8).
The colonial
thematics of
backwardness,
anachro-
nism,
and uneven
development
thus become the
basis
for
a
non-teleolog-
ical
model of
subject
formation-a late-Victorian
model of social
delay
and narrative distension that
will,
in
the hands of
Joyce
and
Woolf,
become a hallmark of modernist
style.
II.
The
signature plots
of
Kipling
and
Conrad-endless
youth
and
sudden
death-may
appear quite opposed
to each other in
mode and
in
tone,
but from
a
broader
literary-historical
perspective
we can see that
they
are related instances of the
breaking
of
the
bildungsroman,
wherein
stalled colonial
development
and recursive
plotting
reinforce each other.
Schreiner's
African
Farm
embeds
and
entwines these
plots,
too,
in
an
earlier
story
of failed colonialism. Her
utterly provincial protagonists
are
as distant
from the
metropole
as
they
are
sealed
off from the inner life of
Africans,
who feature here
only
as domestic and
agricultural
labor.
African
Farm
s,
as
J.
M.
Coetzee
puts
it,
a
"microcosm
of
colonial South
Africa: a
tiny community
set
down
in the
midst
of the vastness of
nature,
living
a closed-minded and self-satisfied
existence.... The farm is
pettiness in the midst of vastness" (65). Its little world reflects the intra-
European
rivalries
of
southern
Africa,
with
the main
sympathies
attached
to
English
stepchildren living
in
a Boer household.
Three
separate
bildungsroman plots
define the novel's
orphan
triumvirate:
Waldo, Em,
and
Lyndall, young
sufferers who endure
the
slapstick
violence
of the Dickensian villain
Bonaparte
Blenkins
in
the
first
half of the
story.
The second half
begins
with
a
kind
of
spiritual
biog-
raphy pertaining
mostly
to
Waldo,
then shifts
gears
and
gains
momentum
as a feminist novel of ideas and a provincial tragedy along the lines of
Hardy's
Tess
of
the d'Urbervilles
1891).
Stolid
Em follows the lit
pathway
toward
marriage; Lyndall,
a
precocious
embodiment
of New Woman
aspirations,
leaves
the farm
in
search of a
worldly
education;
and
Waldo,
dreamy
son of
the deceased
German
overseer,
seeks
an
otherworldly
education
while
tending
to the farm. Each
develops
outside
the
proto-
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
417
cols
of realistic linear
time-a
fact that
is
highlighted
throughout
by
explicit
commentary, patterned
imagery,
and
unorthodox
narrative
pacing
and
structure.
Sandra
Gilbert and
Susan
Gubar
(among
other
readers)
have noted
that the
novel's two
halves are
rather
disjointed,
so
that
the
protagonists'
"youth,
presented
in
the first
book,
is
completely
discontinuous
with the
adulthood
they
have
mysteriously
managed
to
attain
in the second"
(56).
This
oddity
of
construction--quite
akin,
I
think,
to
the famous
bifurcated
structure of
LordJim-is
only
the
most
obvious
manifestation of
an
antidevelopmental
logic
that
shapes
the
entire novel.
Em,
for
example,
matures so
rapidly
that she
is,
in
effect,
domesticated from
the
start: her
youth
is
-illed,
leaving
her
to
wonder
"if
all
people
feel so
old,
so
very
old,
when
they get
to
be
seventeen"
(219).
In
the
cases of
Waldo
and
Lyndall,
whose
parallel
plots
occupy
the main
thread of
the
second half
(his
Germanic
metaphysical
quest
as
a
lapsed
believer,
her
Anglo
sociopolitical
quest
as a
fledgling
New
Woman),
the
tempo
of
growth
is
more
complicated
and
dilated.
The
novel
opens
with an
agonizing
scene in
which a
ticking
clock
torments
Waldo;time haunts him from
beginning
to end. In the middle, Schreiner
meditates
on
Waldo's
growth
in
a
somewhat
jarring
first-person
plural
voice,
so
that his
intensely idiosyncratic
thoughts
are
presented
as
the
normal
phases
of
childhood
cognition
that
"we"
all
pass
through.
This
description
occupies
its
own,
anomalous
chapter,
entitled
"Times
and
Seasons,"
and is
lodged
at the
pivot
point
of
the
novel
very
much in
the
manner
of
Virginia
Woolf's
"Time
Passes"
section in
To
the
Lighthouse
(1927).
The
sequence-now
much
commented
upon-is
dominated
by
the notion that the soul's private time is discrete and incremental:
They say
that in
the world
to come
time is
not
measured
out
by
months
and
years.
Neither
is it
here.
The soul's
life has
seasons
of its
own;
periods
not
found in
any
calendar,
times
that
years
and
months will
not
scan,
but
which
are
as
deftly
and
sharply
cut
off from
one
another
as the
smoothly-arranged years
which
the earth's
motion
yields
us.
(137)
In
"Times and
Seasons,"
Schreiner
restricts
Waldo's
development
to
the spiritual and intellectual
plane,
deliberately
distinguishing
it from
the full
human norm
of
the
Goethean
mode.
The
peculiarly
asocial
nature
and
syncopated
time of
Waldo's
development
takes
shape
in
relation to
the remote
colonial
setting
of the
farm;
he
is not
subject
to
everyday
realist
temporality,
but
instead
models his
subjectivity
on
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418
JED
ESTY
deep
and inhuman
forms
of
zoological,
geological,
and
metaphysical
time.
Just
as
Conrad's
Jim
is
suspended
between
the
high
ideals and
low
practices
of
empire,
Waldo
dwells in
a
peripheral
zone
somewhere
between
beautiful
absolutes
and
brutal facts.
He
grows
up
well
outside
the
civilized "hum
and buzz"
of
Lionel
Trilling's
middle-class
mores
(106).
In
fact,
he does
not
grow
up
at
all,
for
despite
the
outward
elon-
gation
of
his
limbs,
Waldo
remains a
pious
ragamuffin,
an
ageless,
curly-haired
cherub of
Germanic
intellection.7
Waldo's
passion
for
homespun
and
purple
metaphysics,
flow-
ering
in what Schreiner codes
as the
vast cultural
emptiness
of
the
African
veldt,
cuts
directly
against
the
Goethean
formula of
concrete
historical
thinking.
The
colonial
setting
allows
Waldo to
encounter
instead
abstract
existential
concepts
and the
hard
facts of
merciless
nature. Thus
Waldo's
governing
time
is both
more and
less
abstract than
the
profoundly
civilized
and realist
time
ascribed to
Goethe
by
Bakhtin,
Lukaics,
and
Moretti. The
conventional
aspects
of
Waldo's
entire
bildung
plot
are
compressed
into a
single
letter,
a
miniature scale
model of
a
provincial
novel of
development:
boy
leaves
farm,
goes
to
town,
seeks
fortune,
meets
good
souls and
bad,
tastes
new
tastes,
sees
corruption
and
earns
companionship,
learns
trade,
gains
informal
education,
then
returns to the farm.
The
story's
skeletal and
indirect form
intensifies the
microcosmic
restriction of the
novel's
action to the
farm.
Waldo's circumscribed
destiny
is both
determined and
figured
by
colonial
conditions,
especially
insofar as
the farm is a
vulnerable
settlement that does
not, itself,
develop.
The land is
dry
and unfor-
giving, the livestock bare-ribbed, and the crops scant; the only wealth
created
in
the
novel comes
through
marriage
or
inheritance;
and
this
curious absence
of
production
is
matched with a
notably
anemic rate
of
reproduction among
the settler
class.
Against
this
backdrop,
we can
see that
Waldo's failure to
develop parallels
the
non-emergence
of a
genuine
culture or
society
in
this
fictionally
distilled
reflection of
colo-
nial South Africa.
Waldo's
African farm
is-like the
Patusan of Lord
Jim-an
"outpost
of
progress"
in
which
there is no real
progress, only
local realignments of limited resources and arbitrary power. The
modernization
of economic and
social life fails in
both
novels;
both
consistently
attribute its
failure to the
impermanent
and
fragile quality
of colonial settlement.
Near the start
of
African
Farm,
Waldo
observes
the
following
as he
contemplates
the
passing
of the
Bushmen: "And
the wild bucks have
gone,
and those
days,
and
we
are
here. But
we will
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
419
be
gone
soon,
and
only
the
stones will lie
on here"
(50).
By
restricting
itself to members of a
marginal
settler class
(though
one that
manages
to disenfranchise
the
indigenous
peoples),
Schreiner's
novel
empha-
sizes the futurelessness of
life eked
out on the
edge
of the veldt.
On the
other
hand,
despite-or
perhaps
because
of-the
hardscrabble boundaries
of Waldo's life
(paralleled
in
the dank
jungle
privations
of
Jim's
reign
in
Patusan),
there is in
African
Farm a
brief
romance
of
colonial
innocence based on
a vision of
virgin
land
and
unalienated
labor,
of colonialism
without
the
contradictions of
Euro-
pean capitalism.
But these
romances-Jim's
and Waldo's-are in fact
fully
encapsulated by
the
novelistic
structures
that surround
them.
In
the
end,
their
colonial
bubbles of
pastoral
or
neo-feudal social
harmony
are
burst
by
the
reassertion of
modernity;
both
European
man-boys,
briefly
astride Asian
and African
nature,
then must
trade
lyrical
contentment
for sudden
death. Like
Jim,
Waldo
expires
after a
brief
frontier
episode
of inner
and outer
harmony
and
remains
everywhere
a
walking
figure
of
nondevelopmental
time.
Lyndall's separate journey is equally
compressed
and fatal:
she leaves the
farm,
attends
school,
encounters
the
world,
takes a
lover,
becomes
pregnant,
returns to
the
farm,
leaves
again,
gives
birth,
and
dies,
all
the while
attempting
to
throw off
the coils
of
Victorian woman-
hood and
offering
a
cogent
dismissal of
marriage
as a
degrading prop-
erty
arrangement.
At one
point, Lyndall
reviews
for
Waldo the
ideological
burdens of a
girl's
education:
The curse begins to act on us. It finishes its work when we are grown women, who
no more
look out
wistfully
at a
more
healthy
life;
we are
contented. We fit
our
sphere
as
a Chinese
woman's
foot fits
her shoe.... In
some
of us
the
shaping
to
our end
has been
quite
completed.
(189)
This kind
of
education
works,
like the
bildung
of
Moretti's
darkest
Lukaicsian
vision,
by
securing
the
consent
of the
subordinated,
causing
them
freely
to
accept
restraint.
Schreiner
ironizes
the motif
of
the
bound
Chinese
foot
by
literalizing
it,
providing Lyndall
with her own
tiny
hands and feet.
Lyndall's
size
does not
represent
her
subjection
to
womanhood,
but
her
willful
refusal to
mature.
Still,
if
Lyndall's
plotline
is
not
the
story
of
social
compromise
with
"women's
roles,"
neither is it an
emancipa-
tion
story. Lyndall's
precocious
political
sensibility spurs
her
toward
SPRING
2007
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420
JED
ESTY
freedom,
but her
critique
of
contemporary gender
arrangements
cannot
provide
a
public
role or
social resolution
equal
to her
private
sense of
destiny.
Often Schreiner
presents
Lyndall
as immured
within
her own
vision,
stuck within a
closed circuit of
introspection:
"I
am so
weary
of
myself
It is
eating my
soul to its
core--self,
self,
self "
(241).
In
Lyndall's
consumption
of soul
by
self,
development
has
disintegrated.
Just
as
for
Waldo's
metaphysical
lust,
so for
Lyndall's
freethinking
ambition: these inner drives can be
described,
but not
integrated
into
the
logic
of
a
socially
realized character.
Thus,
in
Lyndall's
case,
African
Farm offers a
colonially-inflected
example
of a familiar
pattern
in
Victorian
fiction,
where
female
protagonists complicate
or violate the
masculine vocational and sexual model of
middle-class
consent,
leading
to
what
feminist critics have seen as a
necessary
refusal of
bildung,
a
dissenting "voyage
in"
(Abel,
Hirsch,
and
Langland),
or a
tragic plot
of
self-renunciation.8
The
novel's
colonial
and
feminist concerns
converge
in
Lyndall's
monologues
on the educated
provincial
woman's limited
capacity
to
abstract herself into universal narratives of human or civilizational
prog-
ress.
In
the
following
passage,
for
example, Lyndall
weaves classical and
colonial
vignettes
into an
expansive
transcultural
perspective:
I
like to
realize forms of life
utterly
unlike mine. ... I like to
crush
together,
and see
it
in
a
picture,
in
an
instant,
a multitude of disconnected unlike
phases
of human
life-mediaeval
monk with his
string
beads
pacing
the
quiet
orchard,
and
looking
up
from the
grass
at
his feet
to
the
heavy
fruit-trees;
little
Malay boys playing
naked
on a
shining
sea-beach;
a Hindoo
philosopher
alone under his
banyan
tree,
thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a
troop
of Bacchanalians
dressed in
white,
with crown
of
vine-leaves,
dancing along
the Roman streets... a
Kaffir witch-doctor
seeking
for herbs
by moonlight...
I
like
to
see it
all;
I feel it run
through
me-that life
belongs
to
me;
it makes
my
little
life
larger;
it breaks down the narrow walls
that
shut
me in.
(214-15)
This
global
fantasy
of
males
freely harvesting
the fruits of nature and
culture
establishes
Lyndall's
shrewd
views about the
privileges
of
imagi-
native
self-projection.
The
passage
assumes a more
pointed
meaning
when we recall that
Lyndall's
secret
pregnancy
is
emerging
at
just
this
point,
establishing
a fine
counterpoint
between two
modes of self-exten-
sion. Its
placement
in the text underscores
Lyndall's
restriction
to
private
fantasies of
mobility,
cultural
prestige,
and
social
vocation,
as well as to a
delimited
public
role as handmaid and nursemaid
to male
destiny.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
421
Lyndall's
sophistication
also serves
to
define her
as an
autho-
rial
surrogate
who
provides
oblique
commentary
on the
gendered
abstractions
that
drive the classic
bildungsroman
with its
"typical"
hero
figuring
the fate of
the
collective. At one
point,
in
fact,
Lyndall
all
but
declares that the
problem
of
allegory
is a
feminist
one:
And
sometimes
what is more
amusing
still
than
tracing
the
likeness
between
man
and
man,
is
to trace
the
analogy
there
always
is
between
the
progress
and
develop-
ment
of one
individual and of
a whole
nation;
or
again,
between a
single
nation
and
the entire
human race. It is
pleasant
when it
dawns on
you
that
the one is
just
the other
written out in
large
letters;
and
very
odd to
find all the
little
follies and
virtues,
and
developments
and
retrogressions
written
out
in
the
big
world's book
that
you
find in
your
little
internal self.
It is
the most
amusing thing
I
know
of;
but
of
course,
being
a
woman,
I
have not
often time
for such
amusements.
Profes-
sional
duties
always
first,
you
know. It
takes a
great
deal of
time and
thought
always
to look
perfectly
exquisite,
even for
a
pretty
woman.
(198-99)
Lyndall's
arch tone
points
to the
bitter fact
that
women
bear a
blocked
relation to a mode of self-representation whose narrative equivalent is
allegory
and,
even
more
particularly,
to
the
bildungsroman
as a
symbolic
device
that binds
subject
to
nation in
a
shared
trajectory
of
"progress
and
development."
Her
remarks
testify
to
the
pleasure
of
making
these
symbolic
narratives,
but
she
seems
also to
be
mocking
their
substance. In
fact,
Schreiner's
self-conscious
approach
to
bildung-a
critique
that
is
both
colonial
and
feminist--presents
alle-
gory
itself
as an
adolescent or
naive
form
of
representation.
In
the
"Times and
Seasons"
chapter,
for
example,
the
narrator
describes
it as
a
passing
preoccupation
of
youth:
"For
an
instant our
imagination
seizes it:
we
are
twisting,
twirling,
trying
to
make
an
allegory"
(143).
This
is a
juvenile
and
male
prerogative
associated,
significantly,
with
that
hermetic
German
idealist
Waldo.
Here is
Schreiner's
irony
of alle-
gory:
that
Goethean
developmental
thinking
is,
after
all,
underdevel-
oped
thinking.
Lyndall's
plot
does
not
merely
parallel
but
implicitly
comments
on
Waldo's,
casting
a
skeptical
gaze
on
his
youthful
idealism
and his
Goethean
penchant
for
seeking
the
drama of
progress
in
all
things.
In
"Times and
Seasons,"
Waldo
conducts a
series
of
experiments
geared
to
finding
metaphysical
and
narrative
meaning-systematically
develop-
mentalmeaning-in
every
phenomenal
cranny
of his
little
universe,
from
the
geological
to
the
zoological.
He cracks
eggs
"to
see
the
white
spot
SPRING
2007
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422
JED
ESTY
wax
into the chicken"
and dissects "dead
ducks and
lambs,"
ooking
for
traces of
ontogenetic
symmetry
and
phylogenetic
design
in
their
viscera,
avid to confirm that "all
is
part
of a
whole,"
that
development
casts its
sheltering
meaning
over
the
barnyard
and across the
stratified earth
of
the
Karoo
(152-54).
This,
reflects the
narrator,
is how
the
mystified
youthful
mind
tries to shore
up
the
evidence of nature
against
the
"weltering
chaos" of
experience.
The
principles
of
unification
and devel-
opment,
which,
as
many
have
noted,
allude
quite directly
to Schreiner's
own formative
encounter with Herbert
Spencer's
First
Principles
1862),
provide
a foil for the novel's dramatic revision of
developmental
allegory.
Schreiner thus
presents
allegorical
thinking
as a
passing
phase
in
the
life
of her
German-romantic
boy
hero
but also
in
the
history
of Euro-
pean
ideas. The narrator
explicitly
locates herself in
an era of
rational
skepticism
about
all
forms of historical
or
developmental
design,
whether
derived from
philosophy, religion,
or
science. With the erosion
of these
bases for
allegorical thinking
and thus for the
linear or
teleological
time
of the
bildungsroman,
Schreiner
organizes
(or
disorganizes)
her novel
according
to a more random and cruel form of
temporality,
a naturalist
clock
whose
uneven,
unpredictable
strokes cut across
any
sense of
pure
progress,
whether individual or civilizational.
In
setting
this naturalist clock
against
the
romance
of
impe-
rial
progress,
Schreiner
also
establishes a formal
pattern
repeated
with
variations
by
Conrad
in Lord
Jim,
also a
story
of colonial removal and
frozen adolescence.
The
two novels share the arch-naturalist motif of
the
puny
"human insect": Schreiner's
beetle,
rolling dung, symbolizes
"astriving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing," thereby estab-
lishing
the
epigraphical keynote
for
Waldo
and
Lyndall
in
Book Two
(107, 135).
Likewise,
Conrad's remote
patron
Stein sees
Jim,
with
his
futile
romanticism,
as a
perfect specimen
of the
fragile,
beautiful,
but
inevitably
sad human
Lepidoptera.
More
tellingly, African
Farmshares
with
Lordfim
a
two-phase plot,
the bifurcation of which
highlights
the
work's refusal
or
incapacity
to narrate
growth
or to
synthesize
the
objective
and
subjective
conditions of
soul-making.
Both texts center
on European colonial protagonists whose biographical time is frozen-
yet-accelerated;
and for both the
temporal logics
of romance and natu-
ralism
simply
co-exist,
falling
to either
side of the
synthetic
possibilities
of Bakhtinian realism with its
temporal
mean of linear
growth.
The
point
of
establishing LordJim
s an intertext
for
AfricanFarm
is not to
argue
for direct
influence,
but to
analyze
related instances of
VICTORIAN STUDIES
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THE COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
423
uneven
development
encoded
into
protagonists
who
cannot
mature
and
colonies that
cannot
modernize in
late-Victorian
fiction.
Conrad's
Jim
fails to
accumulate
experience just
as his
colonial
enterprises
fail
to accu-
mulate
wealth;
the old
bildungsroman
link
between
self-production
(the
hero who
creates his
own
personality)
and
production
per
se still
obtains,
but in
an
inverse
or
negative
form.
Jim
is
not so
much a
psychologically
dynamic
character
as a
walking
principle
of
imperial
time,
a
colonial
Dorian
Gray
to
Marlow's
picture,
since
Marlow
takes on
all the
sad,
sagging weight
of ethical
doubt
that
Jim
manages
to
repel.
When
Jim
dies,
he remains inside a bubble of
super-virginal
egoism,just
as
Kipling's
Kim
remains in
the
neverland
of
imperial
adolescence,
and
just
as
Lyndall
seems to
trap
the
mature
political
consciousness of a
New
Woman in
a
tiny,
charming body
that
cannot
age
until it
dies.
III.
In
all of
these texts
a set of
unresolvable
existential
or social
conflicts also functions
narratologically
to divide romance and natu-
ralism.
These
conflicts,
finally,
refer
to
the
structuring
contradiction
between
the
progressive
imperial
ethos of
worldwide
modernization
and
the
stubborn
facts
of
uneven or
under-development
in
the
colonial
periphery.
Such
a
triple
crisis--existential,
generic,
and
political-
defines this
fiction's
relationship
both to
emergent
modernist form
and
to
the
high
phase
of
European
imperialism.
The
original
magic
of
the
genre,
which
was to
assimilate work
into
a
narrative
of
education-to
harmonize production and self-production- comes under strain in a
colonial
setting
that
appears
to
reenchant
and
globalize
this
formula,
only
to
disenchant it
with
a
vengeance.
In
other
words,
the
original
contest
between
capitalism
(work)
and
culture
(aesthetic
vocation)
that
was so
effectively
knitted
together
by
the
bildungsroman
(with
its
implic-
itly
national
telos)
is
given
form
as a
narrative
contradiction in
the
high
imperial
age.
In
colonial
novels of
frozen
youth,
symbolic
maturity
is
deferred for
both
colonizer
and
colonized in
a
story
of
perpetual
becoming. Such novels untie the original Goethean knot. They consti-
tute a
genre
breaking
open,
revealing
rather
than
reconciling
the
tensions
that
were
always
at
the
core of
the
bildungsroman:
the
narrato-
logical
tension
between
youth-as-plot
and
adulthood-as-closure,
and the
historical
tension
between
modernization
processes
that
never
sleep
and
national
discourses
that
posit
origins
and
ends.
SPRING
2007
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424
JED
ESTY
Of
course,
if
African
Farmshares with Lord
Jim
and Kima
partic-
ular
relation between
problematic
acculturation and
uneven accumu-
lation in
the
colonial
contact
zone,
its feminist concerns
also
differentiate it
from the work of
Conrad and
Kipling. Lyndall's
critical
perspective
on
colonial
failure
in
South
Africa and on
the more
general
allegory
of
progress
stems from her
recognition
that
expanding
the
soul's
destiny by analogy
to the
progress
of the
nation or the
race is to
some extent a male
(juvenile)
prerogative. By
highlighting
the
novel's
formal
dismantling
of various
progress
narratives
associated with
European modernity,
I am
suggesting
an
approach
that differs in
method and
emphasis
from,
but remains
complementary
to,
Anne
McClintock's account of the
ways
in
which
postcolonial
and
feminist
readings
of Schreiner
might
intersect: "the radical
significance
of
[African
Farm]
lies
in
Schreiner's
conviction that a
critique
of the
violence
of
colonialism also
entails
a
critique
of
domesticity
and the
institution of
marriage"
(278).
After
all,
Schreiner's case is a
tricky
one,
since,
as
her
best recent critics have
reminded
us,
her attitude toward
European
colonialism was
complex,
ambivalent, and
shifting.9
One of
the virtues of a formalist
approach
to
African
Farm,
then,
is that it
sepa-
rates
postcolonial
and feminist
reading
from
intentionalist
reading;
it
also
prevents
a
predictable
but
inapt
investment either in
the thematics
of
alterity
or
in
the
reciprocal allegorization
of
woman and native.
Indeed,
African
Farm
quite
clearly
resists the
interpretive
frame of colo-
nial
"otherness,"
of crosscultural identification and
marginalization,
in
large part
because it so
thoroughly
commits
itself
to the
logic
of
colonial failure and provincial tragedy. In this way, it falls outside the
model described
by Gayatri Spivak
with
respect
to
Victorian
novels like
Jane Eyre,
n
which white women
establish a kind of
subjective
freedom
by obscuring, displacing,
or
demonizing
a racialized other. Schreiner's
commitment to the
problematics
of
colonial
development
entails the
failure of both cultural and
biological
reproduction
at the
periphery,
which
puts
her novel
quite
at odds
with the
gendered
project
of
impe-
rial
humanism that
Spivak
identifies both
in her
reading
of Bronte and
at large in her Critique fPostcolonialReason.1o
I
have
proposed
that the
trope
of
frozen
youth
takes on a
new
and
more intense form
in the later nineteenth
century
as it hitches
its
broken
allegory
to the
problem
of colonial
development.
If this
argu-
ment seems
to
imply
a deterministic
relationship
between colonial
conditions and
emergent
modernist
style,
I hasten to
emphasize
that
VICTORIAN STUDIES
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
425
my
claim is
not
that the manifold
experiments
in the
interruption
of
narrative time
by
fin de
siecle
and modernist writers need
be
under-
stood
exclusively
according
to the
problematic
of
"imperial
time."
Nor,
certainly,
do
I
want to
suggest
that
they
were
the first
to
vex the
devel-
opmental
plot
with
delays,
inversions,
and
other assorted forms
of
silence,
cunning,
and exile. Yet there
is,
I
think,
a
suggestive
relation-
ship
between
colonialism and adolescence
in
African
Farm and in
the
other novels
I
have
mentioned,
one that invites
literary-historical
expla-
nation. The more
strongly
materialist version
of
my
argument
might
claim that these texts
register
a new
phase
in
global capitalism,
but
even
if
we remain
skeptical
about that
claim,
even
if
the intertwined
trope
of frozen
youth
and colonial
underdevelopment
reflects
not so
much
an
implacable geopolitical
base as a
handy symbolic affinity,
the
trope
seems to
play
a crucial role
in
the
emergence
of
experimental
modernist
fiction.
By
separating
adolescence from
the dictates
of
bildung,
modernist
writing
creates an autonomous
value
for
youth
and
clears
space
for its
own resistance
to
biographical plotlines
while
regis-
tering
the
temporal
and
political
contradictions of colonialism as a
discourse
of
progress.
As
the
symbolic
center of
the traditional
bildungsroman
model,
youth metaphorizes
modernization until adulthood
arrives
to
fold the
dynamism
of
youth
into
a
psychobiographical
conceit of
uneventfulness that we
might
call the
long
plateau
of
middle
age.
In
the set of
youth-fixated
novels
I
have
identified,
though,
youth
retains
its
grip
on the center of the
text
in
a
way
that
exposes
the
unending
narrativity of modernization rather than resolving it into a functional
allegory
of the
nation-state
as
the end of
history.
The
trope
of
adoles-
cence,
once
conceived
as
entailing
the
trope
of
maturity
(and,
by
alle-
gorical
extension,
the
inexorability
of
modernization
as an
organic
process),
comes
to
refer both
to that
developmental
process
and to its
undoing
or
failure. The
late-Victorian
and
modernist novels
I
have
discussed
lay
the
myth
of
progress open
to its own
contradictions
without
claiming
a
position
of
ideological
transcendence-without
insisting, for example, on an Archimedean critique of empire. The
novels
act neither as
a radical
counterdiscourse to the
imperial
meta-
narrative
of
modernity,
nor as its
apologetic
discursive
partners,
but
instead
expose
from
within
modernity's
basic
temporal
contradictions
where
they
are most
raw,
in
the
colonial contact
zone.
A
novel like
African
Farm,
which invokes
yet
breaks the
bildungsroman's
basic
SPRING
2007
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426
JED
ESTY
genetic
code of
progressive
temporality
literalizes
the
pervasive
polit-
ical and
economic fact of
imperial
time:
the
colonies do
not--cannot-
come of
age
under
the rule of
empire.
But when
endless
youth
snaps
into sudden
death,
these
novels also
reinforce the
notion that
modern-
ization,
like
human
aging,
cannot be
simply
or
fully
resisted from
the
outside. This
way
of
plotting imperial
time's
unevenness--first
in
arrears,
then
hurled into
the future
along
the horizon
of a
singular
modernity-acknowledges
cultural
difference
yet
insists on
the
force
of
teleological
historicism
as
part
of
both colonial
and
neocolonial
thinking
in the
long
era of
globalization.
Those
unseasonable
youths
Lyndall
and
Waldo,
like
Conrad's
Jim
and
Kipling's
Kim,
like Woolf's
Rachel
Vinrace
andJoyce's Stephen
Dedalus,
embody
the
powerful
unsettling
effects of the
colonial
encounter with
humanist ideals of
national culture and
aesthetic
education that
had,
from the
time of Goethe and
Schiller,
determined
the inner
logic
of the
progressive
bildungsroman.
Of
course,
that inner
logic
has
always
been
more stable
in
theory
than in
literary practice.
It
will be
immediately
apparent
to Victorian
specialists
that the
generic
definition of
the
bildungsroman
can be
loosened to include
almost
any
novel
or,
as more
often
happens,
tightened
to the
point
where no
novel fits.
Here,
as we look
in
vain
for a true
bildungsroman,
we tumble
quickly
from Forster to
Hardy
to Eliot to Dickens to
Bronte to Austen
to Scott and
finally
even to
Goethe,
whose Wilhelm
Meister,
many
Germanists now
agree, appears
to violate most of the
generic
rules
invoked
in
its honor. This
problem
has been laid out
by
Marc
Redfield,
who argues that the bildungsroman is itself a "phantom formation."
Redfield's
poststructuralist liquefaction
of
the
genre
makes
sense,
but
it remains true
that
bildung-Goethe's ghost,
if
you
will-has
shaped
not
just
literary
criticism but also
literary
practice
for
generations,
a
fact not altered
by
the
concept's
nonfulfillment
in
any
given
text. To
put
it another
way,
even
if
the
bildungsroman's unmaking
is
always
coeval with its
making,
it remains
worthwhile to
try
to see broad
patterns
in the
process
of its
unmaking
and even-at a metacritical
level-to explain why a phantom genre is such a recurrent object of
theoretical desire.
It is with
this
in
mind that
I have at times adduced a
positivist
or normative notion of
the
genre
derived from Marxist
theory
while
also
breaking
with
that tradition in
seeing
novels like
African
Farm as
something
more
than the
disjecta
of a
postrealist
age
in which the
VICTORIAN STUDIES
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
427
bourgeois
novel,
folded in
on its
own
subjectivity,
could
no
longer
project
the true
shape
of
history.
Against
that
Lukacsian
judgment,
I
think
these
dilatory
adolescent
novels
manage
to
encode the
contra-
diction
between
developmental
and
anti-developmental
time
into the
language
of
human
interiority.
They
neither
reproduce
nor
ignore,
but
instead
objectify
the master
allegory
binding
the
growing
soul
to
the
modernizing
nation. If
the
classical
novel of
youth
was
formed
by
the
eschatology
of
nineteenth-century
nation-building,
the
modernist
version
assimilates the
temporality
of an
imperial
era
when
nations
spilled
their borders and when
capitalism's
boundless
dynamism-its
remorselessly
permanent
and
thoroughly
uneven
revolution--became
an
unignorably global
phenomenon.
In
this,
they
represent
the
narra-
tive art of a
new
era,
still
ours
perhaps,
in
which
the
time of
moderniza-
tion
seemed
both
hyper
and
retro,
both
futurist and
barbaric.
These
novels of
uneven, frozen,
or
endless
youth
manage,
in
other
words,
and
against
all
expectation,
to
fulfill the
original
function
assigned
to
the
bildungsroman by
Bakhtin: the
assimilation
of
"real
historical
time."
University f
lllinois
NOTES
I
would
like to thank
Lauren
Goodlad,
Stephanie
Foote,
Carl
Niekerk,
and
Andrea
Goulet for
their
comments on
an
earlier
version of
this
essay.
1Kucich
reads the
novel's
structure of
masochism
as
the
key
to its
elusive
poli-
tics,
usefully
summarizing
feminist
approaches
that
have,
since
Showalter,
centered on
Schreiner's
feminist
heroes as
appealing figures
forced to
confront
failure, death,
and
self-renunciation
(81).
McClintock
captures
the
paradoxical
and
shifting
views of
Schreiner
on
race and
empire
(258-60);
on
this
point,
see
also
McCracken,
156.
2Lukics
suggests
that
after
1848,
and with
the
widespread
discrediting
of
Hege-
lian
thought,
"the idea
of
progress
undergoes
a
regression"
as
the
concept
of
continual but
uneven
social
evolution
gives
way
to
twin
and
opposing
concepts
of
history,
both
ground-
less
and
nondialectical:
first,
the
bourgeois
hypostasy
of
progress,
a
cartoon
teleology
in
which
"history
is
conceived as a
smooth
straightforward
evolution";
and,
second,
a
narra-
tive of
stasis and
decline
in
the
West
(174-77).
These
are the
twin
ideologies
of
history-
the
simple-progressive
and
the
static-regressive
that I will
later
suggest
can
be
mapped
onto the narrative categories of romance and tragedy, the torn halves of later nineteenth-
century
fiction
that
follow from
what
Lukaics
ees as the
broken
synthesis
of
realism.
3Kucich
finds
the
absence
of
class
society
and
social
mobility
in
colonial
South
Africa to be a
crucial
element of
Schreiner'swork
and
its
peculiarity
in
the
British
canon.
4Recent
studies of
the
bildungsroman
as a
genre,
including
those
of
Moretti,
Fraiman,
and
Redfield,
tend
to
conclude with
George
Eliot,
which
suggests
that
Eliot's
SPRING
2007
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428
JED
ESTY
novels of
the 1860s and
1870s mark the end of
the British
bildungroman's
classic
phase.
Barthes
develops
the
larger
history
associated with Lukaics,
dentifying
the
signs
of the
"break-up
of
bourgeois
writing"
and the
onset
of
modernism in
the
post-1848
period,
as
class divisions became more
rigid
and
writing
about the social whole from
a
supposedly
"general"
perspective
became
accordingly
more difficult
(60-61).
5As
GoGwilt has
suggested,
Schreiner's novel can be
read as a kind of
limit text
for Victorian realism and for
its
regnant
concepts
of
education and
culture-as
a
text
that
signals
the
"simultaneous
globalization
and
disappearance
of
European
cultural
ideals"
(5).
GoGwilt
rightly
emphasizes imperialism's
power
to unsettle
some of the
tenets of
European bildung,
but
he
argues
that Schreiner's
writing
reveals the
concept
of
culture--associated
in
the
English
tradition with
both Arnold and Mill-as "in its
origins,
nihilist"
(5).
Here he
recruits Schreiner into a
broad-gauge
critique
of
Enlight-
enment
values,
pursuing
a kind of Nietzschean
transvaluing
or even
deconstruction of
the culture
concept
as nihilist to its core and from its
inception.
By
contrast,
I read
the
text as
revealing
not the culture
concept's
essential
corruption
but its
transformation
and attenuation in the colonial
setting
and at the
fin
de siecle.
6Arendt's
analysis
of
imperialist
culture is
startling
because it
generates
an
exact and
prescient reading
of the
lack of
temporal
dynamism
or
narrative
progress
in
Kim that
predates
by
forty
years
both Suleri's
point
about frozen adolescence and Said's
point
about the
pleasures
of its
all-India technicolor
spatiality.
Since the
"very
essence"
of the
imperial system
is "aimless
process,"
Arendt
suggests,
it is
fitting
that the novel's
spies
and bureaucrats are subsumed into the endless
process
of the
Great
Game,
a liter-
alization of
anti-developmental
logic
for which the best
figure
is the
unaging
Kim
himself:
"Purposelessness
is the
very
charm of Kim's existence"
(216-17).
70Of
ourse,
the
intellectual formation of Waldo and
Lyndall
has other than
German
roots,
the two most
frequently
noted
being Spencer
and Emerson.
For
a discus-
sion
of
the
novel's
steeping
in various
nineteenth-century
discourses of
progress,
see
Burdett
24-30.
'For more on the
general question
of
the female
bildungsroman,
see
Abel,
Hirsch,
and
Langland;
Felski
(122-53); Fraiman;
Showalter.
Influential feminist read-
ings
of
Lyndall's
thwarted
bildung
include Gilbert
and Gubar
(51-63)
as well as
DuPlessis
(20-30).
And for a more recent
reading
of the
problem
of women's access to
education
or culture in
African
Farm,
see Sanders
(19-56).
90On
his
point,
see
Burdett; Chrisman;
Kucich
(81-82);
McClintock
(258-95);
Sanders
(19-56).
1"I
admire
the satiric brio of O'Connor's
vigorous
polemic against Spivak-
derived
readings
of Victorian
fiction,
which she claims have shouldered aside other
ways
of
reading
novels,
and
have
thereby
flattened out
the authentic
and
complex
meaning
of the
fiction under
analysis.
But like
Brantlinger
and
David,
I see no real
evidence that
postcolonial
approaches imply political
reductiveness or
literary
hamhandedness
more than
any
other
critical
orientation,
including pure
formalism.
Indeed,
I have found
in
postcolonial
work-including Spivak's
own tribute
to the
enduring
value of
Shelley's Frankenstein-many
fresh
ways
to
grasp
the
"powerful
struc-
turing
influence" of Victorian fiction
on
contemporary
critical
thought
(O'Connor
239).
VICTORIAN
TUDIES
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THE
COLONIAL
BILDUNGSROMAN
429
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