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Visions of an Incurable Rationalist: Leonard Woolf ’s Stories of the East

2012; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1920-1222

Catherine Nelson-McDermott,

South African History and Culture

Leonard Woolf opened Imperialism and Civilization (1928), his thorough and lengthy anti-imperialist statement (Edmonds and Luedeking 37), with the epigraph men moralize among ruins. The ironic distance this quotation cast over his political treatise shadowed Woolf's career. In fact, the ironic, sometimes sardonic, rationalist humanist pose Woolf adopted his works transmuted and occasionally vitiated an otherwise anguished protest against the western, particularly the British, imperial system. Stressing this rational approach to social change, Woolf's political theories, the final analysis, were troubled their attempts at transforming because a scientific rationalism has been one of the tools used to justify European imperialism. As well, rationalism is a weak weapon against imperialist and capitalist self-interest, and it leads to what Edward Said famously called a sterile, contemplative, formal irony, or paralyzed gestures of aestheticized powerlessness (Orientalism 222-23). Woolf himself gestured to this point when he spoke of John Maynard Keynes's Memoir Club essays: in one important point he is, I think, wrong. It is true that he and his generation believed the efficacy of reason, but it is not true that any of us believed the rationality of human (Beliefs 993). Woolf understood the often ineffective nature of relying on reason, musing that even politics, where is so suspect and so unwelcome, I have an absurd, pig-headed feeling that one ought to use one's reason (Downhill 88). (1) However, while Woolf's work and writings are reflective of the specific problematic imperialist discourse of his time, they also participated and reflected a political modernist project which made it possible for certain aspects of his time to have erupted (however partially and abortively) into possibility and change. It is true that, through his position as a colonial servant what was then Ceylon, (2) Woolf participated something Said defines as a corporate Imperial drive to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its 'natural' role as an appendage to Europe (Orientalism 86). Nonetheless, Woolf also spent most of his life lobbying the Labour government, and out of power, to decolonize Britain's territories and colonies. He was for twenty-seven years Secretary of the Labour Party's Advisory Committees on International Affairs and Imperial Questions. Woolf's anti-imperialist work was a precursor to much academic anti-imperialist work today and also an important source of current United Nations policies. Thus, Woolf's work needs to be read light of Said's contention that a huge and remarkable adjustment perspective and understanding is required to take account of the contribution to modernism of decolonization, resistance culture, and the literature of opposition to imperialism (Culture 293). The following extended reading of Woolf's early Ceylonese work, Stories of the East, analyzes the troubled and partially resistant nature of the text through this late-Saidian lens. Although written earlier, the three tales contained Stories of the East (A Tale Told by Midnight, Pearls and Swine, and Two Brahmans) were published by Hogarth 1921. The title later changed to Stories from the East when these stories were reprinted with Woolf's official Diaries Ceylon (originally written when he was employed as an Assistant Government Agent Ceylon the early part of the twentieth century). The stories had not been widely available until this document was published, nor have they been widely available since (though they are recently reprinted two editions with introductions by Victoria Glendinning and Christopher Ondaatje). (3) Mervyn de Silva, his 1963 introduction to this reprint of the stories and diaries published Sri Lanka, noted the stories' curious ambivalence (liv) and suggested that One's final impression . …