國立臺灣大學外國語文學系 碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Taiwan University
Master Thesis
帝國的矛盾：安東尼·伯吉斯《馬來亞三部曲》中的罪 惡感、東方主義想像和語言
The Ambivalence of Empire: Guilt, Orientalist Imagination, and Language in Anthony Burgess’s The
Malayan Trilogy
吳子文 Chee-mun Goh
指導教授：廖咸浩 博士 Advisor: Hsien-hao Liao, Ph.D.
中華民國 98 年 6 月 June, 2009
i
Acknowledgement
First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Liao Hsien-hao.
Prof. Liao taught me how to read and write critically. He helped me proofread my thesis and offered me useful feedback. Without his guidance and encouragement, I could not have completed this thesis. Also, I would like to thank my thesis committee:
Feng Pin-chia, who gave me useful comments to improve my thesis, and Tee Kim Tong, who asked me many challenging but thought-provoking questions.
When I first arrived in Taiwan from Peninsular Malaysia eight years ago, I had not the slightest idea what literature was; hence, I am greatly indebted to many teachers who had introduced me to the remarkable world of literatures in the past seven years of studying in this department. Also, I want to thank all my classmates in graduate school. I had a great time taking courses with all of you. Last but not least, a special thanks goes to my parents, Goh Yeow Loo and Lim Guat Khim, who are now living in Malaysia, for their financial as well as emotional support.
ii
中文摘要 中文摘要中文摘要 中文摘要
在這篇論文中，我認為安東尼·伯吉斯的《馬來亞三部曲》對英國帝國主義 和殖民主義表達了一種曖昧矛盾的態度。一方面，他透過男主角科勞布的描繪，
顯示英國殖民計畫注定會以失敗告終；另一方面，他又運用了一系列馬來亞的種 族刻板角色和異國形象來滿足西方讀者的東方主義想像和殖民主義凝視。在第一 章，我認為是科勞布的罪惡感和他做為一個流放者的身分驅使他對英國帝國主義 提出批判。罪惡感的議題主要從三方面來加以探討，包括安東尼·伯吉斯、科勞 布和大英帝國的罪惡感。在第二章，我針對小說中所描繪的種族刻板角色和無能 的英國角色進行分析。很多種族刻板角色被創造來滿足英國讀者的需求，他們渴 望消費遠東的異國文化。在第三章，我分析小說中融合本土語言與標準英語的混 雜語言，從而探討伯吉斯對殖民主義曖昧矛盾的態度如何同時反映在小說的語言 當中。
關鍵 關鍵 關鍵
關鍵詞詞詞詞：：：：安東尼·伯吉斯、馬來亞三部曲、後殖民主義、罪惡感、刻板角色、語
言、英國帝國主義
iii
Abstract
In this thesis, I argue that Anthony Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy expresses an ambivalent attitude toward British imperialism and colonialism. On the one hand, he shows that British colonial project is doomed to failure through the characterization of Crabbe, the protagonist; on the other hand, a whole range of racial stereotypes and exotic images of Malaya are exploited to fulfill the Oriental imagination and colonial gaze of Western readers. In the first chapter, I argue that Burgess’s critique of British colonialism is mainly prompted by his Catholic guilt as well as his identity as an exile.
The issue of guilt is examined on three levels, including the guilt of Burgess, Crabbe, and the British Empire. In the second chapter, I provide an overview of the racial stereotypes and inept British characters portrayed in the novel. Many racial stereotypes are created to satisfy the need of English readers, who are eager to consume the exotic culture in the Far East. In the third chapter, I analyze how Burgess’s ambivalent view of colonialism is also reflected in the language of the novel by analyzing the “hybridized” language, which combines local languages and Standard English, in the trilogy.
Keywords: Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy, post-colonialism, guilt, stereotypes, language, British Imperialism
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ... i
Chinese Abstract ... ii
Abstract ... iii
Table of Contents ... iv
Introduction: Anthony Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy and Post-colonialism ... 1
Chapter One The Guilt of Anthony Burgess, Victor Crabbe, and the British Empire ... 15
Chapter Two Orientalist Imagination of Malaya and Its People ... 39
Chapter Three Standard English and Local Vernaculars ... 63
Conclusion ... 82
Work Cited ... 85
1
Introduction:
Anthony Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy and Post-colonialism
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993),1 one of the most prolific English novelists in the twentieth century,2 had published more than twenty novels since he began his literary career when serving as an education officer under the British Colonial Service in Malaya3 during the mid-1950s. To “hide evidence of over-production,” he had once published two of his novels under another pseudonym called “Joseph Kell” (Novel Now 212).4 He is also a writer, who, as John J. Stinson puts it, “defies pigeonholing”
(“Novelist on the Margin” 148), since he is versatile enough to have not only produced novels and short stories, but also “autobiography, criticism, books on language, verse, translations, children’s stories, screenplays, and an enormous amount of journalism” (Clune).5 Even Burgess’s identity as a novelist itself rejects any simplistic categorization, because he has turned his hand to writing a variety of sub-genres, including historical novel, spy-thriller, dystopian novel, science fiction, picaresque novel, fantasy novel, etc.
However, his enormous output by no means secures his status as a “great” writer.
Conversely, Burgess’s over-production has frequently exposed him to the attacks of critics, who accuse him of writing too fast at the expense of presenting complete thoughts and coherent themes in his novels (Dix, “John (Anthony) Burgess Wilson”).
Stinson, on the other hand, argues that it is Burgess’s novels that are so “widely diverse in subject matter and mode” that causes his novels to be ignored by the academic community, because critics have difficulties finding a coherent critical framework to analyze his works (“Manichee World” 51). Many believe that the only novel that might survive beyond Burgess is his most widely accepted novel, A Clockwork Orange, which has attained international popularity owing to Stanley
2
Kubrick’s extremely successful film adaptation under the same title.6
In this thesis, I have chosen to work on Burgess’s first published novel, The Malayan Trilogy (1964).7 As the title of its American version, The Long Day Wanes (1965), suggests, the novel deals with the fall and decline of British Empire following the independence of Malaya in 1957.8 The trilogy—originally published separately as Time for Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East
(1959)—is tied together by the setting of Malaya and the protagonist, Victor Crabbe, who serves as a British schoolmaster in Malaya. Crabbe primarily functions as an agent that brings out different characters from various ethnic backgrounds, including British colonials, Malays, Bengalis, Tamils, Sikhs, Chinese, Bugis and Eurasians (Biswell 186). The trilogy is believed to be highly autobiographical, since the identities of Burgess and the protagonist have many characteristics in common.9
The first book of the trilogy, Time for a Tiger, centers on Nabby Adams,10 a colonial police lieutenant, who drowns himself in “Tiger” beer to escape the nostalgia for his “home” in Bombay, India, another British colony. By contrast, Crabbe, who teaches history at a multiracial school named the Mansor school located at Kuala Hantu in the state of Lanchap, is fascinated by the profusion of languages and cultures in Malaya and chooses to “go native,” which ends up alienating his own fellow
expatriates. He often has quarrels with his foolish headmaster, Boothby, who has the habit of yawning when speaking, over issues such as whether to expel a Malay student who has found kissing a girl or to ban a Marxist reading group. After Adams has helped Crabbe buy a second-hand car, Adams and his subordinate, Alladad Khan, bring Crabbe and his wife, Fenella, to different places to experience the country life of local inhabitants. On their way home from Gila, Khan is shot by a Communist
guerrilla, but his injury has ironically earned him a promotion to sergeant. At the end, the headmaster, Boothby, finds an excuse to transfer Crabbe to another school after
3
receiving an anonymous letter accusing Crabbe of encouraging students to boycott the Sports Day. Adams, on the other hand, returns to Bombay after winning a big lottery prize.
The second book, The Enemy in the Blanket, introduces another eccentric English expatriate named Rupert Hardman, a lawyer who comes to Malaya after his face is disfigured in the war. He is forced to convert to Islam out of financial necessity by marrying an Islamic widow with voracious sexual appetite. Not only is his
Englishness threatened by being absorbed into the East, but also his manhood, because Hardman is financially dependent on his Muslim wife. Crabbe now becomes a headmaster of the Haji Ali College located at Kencing in the state of Dahaga. He has an affair with the wife of the State Education Officer, Mr. Talbot, who is addicted to food in a way comparable to Adams’s obsession with alcohol. As if to retaliate against her husband, Fenella is drawn to the local ruler or “Abang,” who likes cars as well as fair-haired women. Similar to the first book, Crabbe does not get along well with the senior master of the school, Jaganathan, who accuses Crabbe of being a Communist sympathizer and forces him to leave. Crabbe ends up having a divorce with Fenella, while Hardman dies in a plane crash on his way to escape from Mecca.
In the third book, Beds in the East, Crabbe has replaced Tabolt’s position as the State Education Officer in an unnamed territory. Rather than depicting inept British expatriates, this book chiefly deals with two important native characters, Robert Loo and Rosemary Michael. Crabbe’s failure to “civilize” Malaya is reflected in his futile attempt to train Robert Loo, a young Chinese genius in music, to become Malaya’s first composer capable of writing a symphony celebrating the approaching
independence.11 Loo’s prospect of becoming a composer is interrupted by his father, who is only concerned with making money, and Rosemary’s sexual initiation.
Rosemary, an “absurdly” beautiful Eurasian, spends her life seeking for a European to
4
marry but has never succeeded. To encourage inter-racial harmony, Crabbe gathers people from different ethnic groups to have a cocktail party, but “confusion” instead of “fusion” ensues when the party ends up in a chaotic fight. Lastly, he takes an upriver journey reminiscent of Heart-of-Darkness to investigate the death of a colonial officer. After arriving at the destination, Crabbe meets an English manager, George Costard, whom he later finds out to be the secret lover of his first wife. His final disillusionment leads to his drowning in the river.
Since The Malayan Trilogy has now largely been forgotten, I see the necessity to justify my choice of the text. In a chapter entitled “Exports and Imports” in The Novel Now, Burgess claims that “British colonialism has exported the English language” to different colonies (162), which gives rise to various “new national literatures in English” (154). Also, he indicates that literary tradition established by colonial novels written by English expatriates or travelers, such as E. M. Foster’s A Passage to India, D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, or Joyce Cary’s novels about Africa has become a
“literary starting point” for native writers writing in English (154). Following his line of thought, Burgess certainly foresees himself as one of the major “exporters” of English language and literature after writing the trilogy dedicated to Malaya.12 Like many colonialist literatures, the trilogy is filled with racial stereotypes and Orientalist imagination of Malaya; however, the Malayan Trilogy remains one of the most significant literary texts in English that has captured and depicted Malaya in its phase of transition.13 Also, the novel’s significance lies in its rich portrayal of characters from various ethnic backgrounds and its interesting depiction of the hybridity and diversity of the languages and cultures of pre-independent Malaya. Therefore, if we put this novel in the context of Malaysia, The Malayan Trilogy is undoubtedly an important modern English literary works that deserves our careful examination as well as reevaluation. Even though the trilogy might not be one of Burgess’s more
5
sophisticated novels, an in-depth analysis of this novel can also improve our
understanding of Burgess’s narrative style and thematic concerns in his early novels.
In spite of its significance, the trilogy has largely been ignored by literary critics in Malaysia due to various reasons. Firstly, the book has been banned intermittently by the government under the Printing Presses and Publications Act14 for obvious reasons of discussing sensitive issues related to Malay supremacy and the national religion of Islam, which are against the law now in Malaysia (Banner 147). For example, Father Laforgue, a French Catholic priest who appears in book two, states that “[o]ne could make many converts here. I am sure of that. But Islam is so repressive. There is no freedom of conscience,” after “helping” a dying Muslim convert into Catholicism (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 315). Secondly, many Malaysian readers, the Malays in particular, might find the indecent Malay place-names
fabricated by Burgess in the novels to be highly offensive, such as the state of
“Lanchap,” which means “Masturbation” or the state of “Kenching,” which means
“Urine.”15 Thirdly, only literature written in the Malay language is recognized as the National Literature of Malaysia; thus, English literature as a whole is marginalized in Malaysia, not to mention an English literary work that is written by a former British colonial officer.
Likewise, the trilogy has also attracted little critical attention in the Western academia since its publication, despite the fact that William H. Pritchard selects the trilogy as one of Burgess’s five best novels in an article published in 1966 (55), and Francis Henry King comments on the novel as Burgess’s “finest literary
achievement.” Richard Mathews even praises the trilogy as “one of the great works of English twentieth century literature,” because it is “full of warmth, humor, literacy, charm, and characters with stature and distinction.” There could be two reasons for The Malayan Trilogy to be undervalued by Western critical circle. Firstly, the
6
post-colonial dimension of Burgess’s works has generally been overlooked by critics, which causes the trilogy’s significance to be downplayed. Secondly, Western critics, who are not familiar with the socio-political situation in Malaya, might encounter difficulties when trying to make a critical analysis of the novel.
It will be my contribution to the field by providing a post-colonial reading of Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy to explore the post-colonial aspect of Burgess’s novels.
However, it is difficult to categorize the text as either a colonial novel or a
post-colonial novel, since the story is set around the years of Malaya’s independence, a key transitional period witnessing the decline of colonial power and the rise of Malay nationalism. Given that post-colonialism is now so diverse in its definition and methodology, I will first clarify the definition of post-colonialism by providing a general introduction to the disputes surrounding the critical concept of
post-colonialism.
Aijaz Ahmad reminds us of the pitfalls of applying colonialism on pre-modern empires or non-European empires, such as the Incas, the Ottomans or, as I would add, the Chinese government’s military threats against Taiwan (9). To avoid making post-colonialism into “a transhistorical thing,” the editors of Key Concepts in
Post-Colonial Studies purpose that post-colonialism should be primarily concern with
“the process and effects of, and reactions to, European colonialism from the sixteenth century up to and including the neo-colonialism of the present day” (188). By the same token, Robert J.C. Young has warned critics against the tendency of
overemphasizing the formation of colonial discourse without taking the historical specificities of colonialism into account (160). Therefore, “post-colonialism” is not equivalent to “post-independence” as its name suggests, but to the whole period that is affected by modern European colonialism. The Malayan Trilogy can therefore be regarded as a post-colonial text, even though the novel is mainly concerned with
7
pre-independent Malaya.
If compared to the issue of temporality, the problem of spatiality is far more complex. Ella Shohat has pointed out the danger of positing a universalized post-colonialism, “which neutralizes significant geographical differences between France and Algeria, Britain and Iraq, or the U.S. and Brazil since they are all living in
‘post-colonial epoch’” (324-5). Even European colonialism itself, as Ania Loomba has shown, is heterogeneous, since over 80% of the global land surface had been occupied by colonial powers by 1930s (15). Hence, in addition to the historical specificities of colonialism, it is also vital to take the spatial specificities into consideration whenever we are practicing post-colonial criticism.
Many post-colonial critics as well as theorists have illustrated the fact that independence does not necessarily bring colonial control to an end, since the rising local elites might turn into the so-called “comprador class,” which replaces the former colonial power with a “neo-colonial form of government” (Ashcroft, Key Concept 128). However, few people would deny the great impact independence has on our everyday life, especially in Malaysia, since citizen rights among different ethnic groups was negotiated and written down in the constitution around the years of independence.16 Malaysia had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence last year. After half a century, I think it would be meaningful to revisit this trilogy, which was also written fifty years ago, to see if it could provide any new insight for us to rethink the critical issues of colonial legacy, ethnic relations, and Malay
nationalism.
Most criticism on Burgess’s novels centers on his persistent Catholic worldview based on Manichaeanism (sometimes referred to as “Manicheeism” or
“Manichaeism”), which refers to “a radical dualism” between light and darkness, the power of good and evil (Stinson, “Manichee World” 52). Numerous critical terms
8
have been coined and employed by critics to illustrate Burgess’s dualistic worldview, such as “radical dualism,” “the clash of opposites,” “ambiguity,” “essential
opposition,” “double vision,” “Pelagianism versus Augustinianism,” “duoverse,” and so on. Even Burgess himself places his novels in the category of “On the Margin,”
which refers to novelists producing both fictional entertainment and serious novel (Novel Now 206).
Jean E. Kennard has given an accurate description of the double nature of Burgess’s novels:
The basic method of each Burgess novel is to present the reader with two visions, sometimes two antithetical world views, sometimes two apparently opposed aspects of one personality, and to invite him to make a choice. The choice often proves to be a false one; the two visions are a double vision, a dualism, inseparable parts of the one reality. (65)
Burgess’s double vision toward human nature and the universe is strongly manifested in his controversial A Clockwork Orange. Alex, the protagonist of the novel, is asked to make a choice, either to have a free will in moral choice or to become a conditioned subject incapable of acting violently by receiving modern medical treatment.
Nevertheless, no critics have tried to associate the dualistic nature of his novels with the concept of ambivalence and the Manichean allegory frequently discussed in post-colonial criticism, which will be the central concerns of my thesis.
Few commentaries have been written about The Malayan Trilogy if compared to A Clockwork Orange, not to mention studying the novel from a post-colonial point of view. Bits and pieces of criticism on the trilogy, however, can be found scattered in books and articles related to Burgess’s novels. Pitchard compares Burgess’s art of entertainment to Dickens’s novels by labeling the trilogy as a “comedy of humours in which […] the narration is external and detached” (58). Carol M. Dix argues that the
9
novel reflects Burgess’s personality as a pessimistic “social realist,” who believes in imperialism (Anthony Burgess 6). A critical framework of “essential opposition” is used by Thomas LeClair to examine Burgess’s novels, since “most of his novels have the dialectic of opposite at their core” (77). He pinpoints the “failing British colonials versus shadowy but feared natives” to be the central opposition in the novel (80).
Stinson, on the other hand, finds more opposing forces in the trilogy, including
“the active and the passive, chaos and order, East and West, the old and the new, yin and yang” (Revisited 29). Similar to Pitchard, Stinson detects a comedic undertone persisting throughout the novel, and he finds satire to be the novel’s dominant mode (Revisited 30). What’s more, he sees a fundamental tension between “the farcical and the satiric” and “the underlying compassionate, nearly tragic, depths” in the trilogy (Revisited 34). Robert K. Morris interprets the work as a tragic-comic novel. He argues that the time in the East is equivalent to “timelessness,” and “inaction is the way of the East” (“Futility of History” 76-77). Therefore, Crabbe, who struggles in hope of contributing something to Malaya out of a sense of “white man’s burden,” is destined to end up in failure. Crabbe’s European-centered belief in progressive time is undermined by the “Tida’ apa” or “It doesn’t matter” mindset in the East, which considers all change to be the same and therefore meaningless. Despite that Morris’s reading implies a subtle critique against the European notion of reason, his criticism remains a humanistic one, because he is inclined to see Crabbe as a tragic-comic hero fighting against “the futility of history.”
David Baulch and Tamara S. Wagner are by far the only two scholars who have made a post-colonial reading of The Malayan Trilogy. In Baulch’s short article, he views the failure of Crabbe as a symbol of “the failure of Britain’s imperial project to establish its Enlightenment notion of reason as a universal standard of justice” (105).
He brilliantly connects Crabbe’s identity as an educator to British colonialism’s
10
ineffectual attempt of trying to transform and unite Malaya into a modern society through the Western notion of reason. Moreover, he interprets Crabbe’s “problematic love” for Malaya as an attempt to relinquish his guilt of having caused the death of his first wife, which is bound to end up in failure (106).
Wagner, an assistant professor teaching in Singapore, have written several articles on the trilogy. In an essay entitled “The Last Englishman,” she examines the ironic dialectics between Crabbe, who wishes to “go native,” and the local inhabitants, who aspire to be westernized. Also, she has discussed peculiar white expatriates such as Adams and Father Laforgue who are homesick for their “homes” in India and China. In another essay, she explores Orientalist elements contained in the novel. In a book about Occidentalism of Malaysian and Singaporean novels, she argues that the significance of Burgess’s trilogy lies in its emphasis on hybridity, which anticipates the emergence of postcolonial literature in the region (Occidentalism 143).
As a Malaysian reader myself, what I find most interesting about The Malayan Trilogy is Burgess’s ambivalent attitude toward British colonialism. On the one hand, he has offered a strong critique against British imperialism through the portrayal of several inept and inefficient white expatriates in the novel. On the other hand, a whole range of stereotypes and exotic images about Malaya are presented to fulfill the Orientalist imagination and colonial gaze of European readers. Hence, this thesis aims at examining the ambivalent attitude of Burgess toward British colonialism as
reflected in the trilogy. I will argue that Burgess’s critical stance against British colonialism is closely correlated with his Catholic guilt. Also, I will explore how the fixed and stereotypical images of the “Orient” are deliberately created by Burgess to fulfill the expectation of Western readers.
The first chapter will explore the topic of guilt in the novel on three levels. The
11
first level will be dealing with Burgess’s own religious guilt in Catholicism. The second level will turn to Crabbe’s guilt. Using the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, I read Crabbe’s compulsive urge to contribute something to Malaya as an attempt to compensate his traumatic guilt of causing his first wife’s death. The third level will relate Crabbe’s guilt to the guilt of the British Empire over its failure to defend Malaya from the invasion of Japanese force during the Second World War. In a sense, Burgess’s critique of colonialism in the trilogy can be read as a distorted desire to compensate his guilt.
The second chapter gives an overview of the stereotypical characters and inept British characters portrayed in the novel to examine the Orientalist imagination of the novels. I argue that many of the stereotypes are created to satisfy English readers living in the metropolitan center, who are eager to consume exotic cultures and images in the Far East. In other words, the work reproduces colonialist relations by consolidating the Orient as the fixed and uncivilized “Other.” I will also compare the realist narrative of the novel to that of ethnography by showing how the exotic and uncivilized “essence” of the “Orients” is exploited to satisfy the colonial gaze of Western readers. In the last section, inept British characters, such as Hardman and Adams, will be used as examples to show the colonizer’s inherent fear of being contaminated or absorbed by the local culture.
The third chapter will examine how the language of the novel reflects the ambivalent nature of Burgess’s attitude toward colonialism. To faithfully capture the polyglossic culture of Malaya, Burgess has incorporated a wide spectrum of
vernacular expressions, including Malay, Urdu, Chinese, Arabic, Bengali, Persian, and Sanskrit, into English, which draw the reader’s attention to the cultural distinctiveness of the colonial society. However, the local languages used in the novels have
gradually become mere exotic decoration to attract Western readers, since the number
12
of vernacular expressions used in the second and third book is greatly reduced. Also, the scatological Malay fictional locations appeared in the novel will also be examined to reveal Burgess’s animosity toward the Malays.
13
Notes
1 His full given name is John Burgess Wilson. The nom de plume “Anthony Burgess,” which combines his first confirmation name and his mother’s maiden name, was adopted, because Burgess’s superiors in the Colonial Service forbade him to publish novels under his real name (Biswell 187). The only book that has appeared under his legal name is a bestseller entitled English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958), which is only published and circulated in Malaya.
2 Burgess is estimated to have an average output of 150,000 words annually (Aggeler, Critical Essays 4). According to Burgess’s explanation, he is motivated by
“the need to earn” and “the fear of an untimely death” to write a lot (Novel Now 212).
3 Malaya gained independence on 31August 1957. “Malaysia” became the official name of the nation when Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak joined the federation of Malaya on 16 September 1963.
4 Burgess had produced five novels in one single year from 1960 to 1961.
Following the publisher’s advice, two of the novels, One Hand Clapping and Inside Mr. Enderby, were published under the name “Joseph Kell” to protect Burgess from critics’ attacks (Stinson, Revisited 10).
5 Apart from his identity as a writer, he is also a composer, broadcaster and university lecturer (King).
6 The film has been included in the list of “AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies” by the American Film Institute (AFI) as one of the one hundred greatest movies in recent one hundred years.
7 Before the trilogy was published, Burgess had already completed two novels, A Vision of Battlement and The Worm and the Ring; however, they were not published until the 1960s.
8 According to Burgess, the novel covers the period from 1955 to 1957, which is the three final years before Malaya gained its independence (Malayan Trilogy viii).
9 In the preface of the trilogy, Burgess assures his readers that most of the characters have counterparts in real life (Malayan Trilogy ix).
10 The name is alluded to the first Islamic prophet, Nabi Adam or Adam’s son, who “raises cain and able enough at drinking” (Burgess, Little Wilson 401).
11 Burgess himself had composed a “Symphoni Malaya,” which involves the audience shouting “Merdeka!” when he was teaching at the Malay College Kuala
14
Kangsar.
12 On the first page of the trilogy, Burgess writes “to all my Malayan friends” in Jawi.
13 In the Novel Now, Burgess has listed a few novels, which “have given us perceptive studies of Malaya in a state of transition,” including Mary McMinnies’s Capitan China, Susan Yorke’s The Flying Fox, and Katharine Sim’s Malacca Boy, Black Rice, and The Jungle Ends Here (157). Other novels about Malaya include Somerset Maugham’s Malayan short stories and Joseph Conrad’s trilogy of Malayan novels, which consist of Almaer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue (Biswell 154).
14 The act originates from Printing Ordinance of 1948, which is introduced by the British Colonial Government. It provides the Ministry of Home Affairs with absolute power to ban any publication that threatens national security.
15 According to Andrew Biswell, an English reader named Mr. Graham Williams, who had spent some years in Malaya, wrote a letter of complaint to inform the
publisher of the meanings of the Malay place-names (193).
16 When the Independence Constitution was drawn up, UMNO, the party representing the Malays, has agreed upon providing citizenship to all qualified individuals regardless of racial background in exchange for a legal protection of Malay privileges (Andaya 276).
15
Chapter One
The Guilt of Anthony Burgess, Victor Crabbe, and the British Empire
Although Burgess’s Manichean worldview, which conceptualizes the universe as perpetually divided between Good and Evil, has generated fervent discussions among critics, few scholars have associated the dualistic nature of his novels to the concept of ambivalence frequently discussed in post-colonial studies. In fact, the Manichean dualism of the trilogy is not as clear cut as many critics have imagined. That explains why conflicting opinions sometimes occur when critics are discussing Burgess’s attitude to British imperialism and colonialism. On one end of the spectrum, you have Carol M. Dix who regards Burgess as a believer in imperialism (Anthony Burgess 6);
on the other end, you have Davis Baulch who interprets the trilogy as “a critique of the British colonial project” (105). Andrew Biswell, the author of Burgess’s most up-to-date biography, reconciles two opposing stances by contending that Burgess’s position toward imperialism is in fact ambiguous, which resembles “[George]
Orwell’s liberal doubts about imperialism” in many ways (155). Indeed, Burgess’s ambivalent attitude toward British colonialism is vividly shown in his critiques of British colonization on the one hand, and his sense of superiority as a white man exemplified in the character of Crabbe who regards the Malays as incapable of ruling the new nation in the making on the other hand.
In post-colonial theory, Homi Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence is by far the most influential yet controversial. In his “The Other Question,” he criticizes Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism for laying too much stress on a reductionist binary opposition between the “Orient” and the “Occident.” Instead, he argues that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized should be an ambivalent one, since “colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet
16
entirely knowable and visible” (71). However, the ambivalence discussed in this chapter is not referring to the ambivalence of the relations between the colonizer and the colonized, but the ambivalence of the colonial discourse itself. In “Of Mimicry and Man,” Bhabha contends that colonial discourse contains an inner contradiction, which alienates its very assumption of “the dream of post-Enlightenment civility,” and it is precisely this inner split that opens up a productive site for mimicry to subvert the authority of colonial discourse (86). Using Charles Grant’s “Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain” published in 1792 as a textual evidence, Bhabha indicates that Grant’s dream of implementing a religious reform in India is paradoxically compromised and transformed into “a form of social control which conflicts with the enunciatory assumptions that authorize his discourse” (87).
It is my attempt in this thesis to examine Burgess’s ambivalent attitude toward colonialism or imperialism shown in his The Malayan Trilogy from a post-colonial perspective.1 The discussion will be separated into two chapters. The first chapter focuses on Burgess’s critiques of British colonialism, while the second chapter centers on Burgess’s complicity with colonial discourse. In the discussion of Burgess’s
critique against British colonialism in this chapter, special emphasis will be put on the issue of guilt, because, as I argue, Burgess’s critique of colonialism is by and large motivated by his urge to compensate and atone for his guilt. The issue of guilt will be given an in-depth study on three separate levels. On the first level, I will discuss Burgess’s personal guilt stemming mainly from his Catholic background. His wife’s guilt caused by the untimely death of Burgess’s mother-in-law has also intensified his feeling of guilt. On the second level, I will turn to examining the guilt of Crabbe, the protagonist of the trilogy, from a Freudian psychoanalytical point of view. Although Burgess has stated that Crabbe should not “be identified with his creator,” Crabbe’s life parallels Burgess’s own life in strikingly similar ways (Little Wilson 400). On the
17
third level, I will venture into reading Crabbe’s guilt as an allegory of the guilt of the British Empire in general, given the historical fact that the British colonial force had received a traumatic blow after its failure in defending Malaya from the military invasion of Japan in 1942.
I
Burgess was born into a Catholic family, and his grandmother is of Irish
descendant.2 Like many children who grew up in a Catholic family, he was sent to a local Catholic elementary school when he was six. Burgess’s Irish Catholic
background had an ineffaceable influence on his life and his novelistic writings (Clune). Since both Irish and Catholics were discriminated against in England,3
Burgess had a consistent feeling of being an exile, just like what Burgess had admitted in an interview: “if you’re a cradle Catholic with Irish blood, then you’re
automatically a renegade to the outside” (Coale, “Interview” 436). That explains why many of Burgess’s fictional characters are often either outsiders or social outcasts (Clune). In The Malayan Trilogy, for instance, many of the British expatriates and native characters depicted are exiles in their own communities. His experience of alienation derived from being a Catholic in Protestant England might also have contributed to his dualistic view of the universe, since he is living at the same time between “two cultures, two sets of allegiances, two identities” (Clune).
However, Burgess did not remain a Catholic for his entire life. The pillars of his faith in Catholicism were gradually shaken by his premature sex with a Protestant girl and a premarital sex with a middle-aged widow when he was only fifteen. He came to see the dogmatic “superstructure” of Catholicism as against human nature. After reading about Martin Luther in a European History class, adolescent Burgess wanted a “reformation” of his own. However, an interlude happened when he confessed his
18
religious doubts to a priest. Burgess was given an advice to read James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to cleanse his sin, and he was virtually
horror-struck by the novel: “I was horrified. The effect of the book was to put me in the position of Stephen Dedalus himself, who’s horrified by the sermon on hell. I was so horrified that I was scared back into the church […] I was so scared of this damn book. The book was dynamite” (Coale, “Interview” 437). Nevertheless, the return to Catholicism was only a momentary one, since he stopped going to the church when he was sixteen, and remained a lapsed Catholic for the rest of his life.4
Burgess’s Catholic background made him a great admirer of Joyce, whose modernist novels had exerted a huge influence on his writings, particularly Joyce’s
“devotion to art” and his “tremendous concern with the language” (“Interview in New York” 504). Apart from Joyce, Burgess had also shown great interest in Christopher Marlowe. He had written a thesis on him when he was studying in Manchester
University, because Burgess detected “a kind of Catholic quality” in Marlowe (Coale,
“Interview” 431). Burgess is especially fascinated by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose protagonist is an over-reacher constantly overwhelmed by “a tremendous flood of guilt” (Coale, “Interview” 432). Although Burgess had dropped away from
Catholic Church in his early life, he found Catholicism a faith impossible to be discarded, given that it is the “only system that makes spiritual and intellectual sense”
(Little Wilson 369). He stresses, for example, in his The Novel Now, that few people, whether or not s/he is a Christian, would deny the doctrine of Original Sin (34). As Geoffrey Aggeler accurately describes, although Burgess is intellectually a “free thinker,” he is emotionally conscious of the imminent menace of “hell and damnation” (“Anthony Burgess” 160).
When Burgess began writing novels, the biggest obstacle that he faced was his almost intuitive obsession with Catholic themes such as guilt and sin. He recalled in
19
his memoir the shock he received when a professor pointed out that the name of the protagonist in his first novel The Vision of Battlements, R. Ennis, can in fact be read backward as “Sinner” (Little Wilson 364). After reading the typescript of Burgess’s first novel, the editor of Heinemann, Rolant Gunt, suggested Burgess to write another novel, which would be more like his “genuine first novel” (Burgess, Little Wilson 367).5 Burgess did what he was told; however, his second novel, The Worm and the Ring, turned out to be a disaster, because he had once again failed to overcome his Catholic guilt after reading Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. Burgess knew that unless he could find a way to liberate himself from the oppression of Catholic guilt, which is marked by his constant fear and awareness of the Original Sin and the
damnation of hell, he would never be able to produce a publishable novel again (Little Wilson 369). An offer of lectureship at Kota Bharu Training College in Malaya
provided him a timely opportunity to escape from Catholicism.
Burgess’s decision to go to Malaya was partly motivated by his intention to explore other religions that are not as guilt-laden as Catholicism, since the “repressive Catholic heritage was a very small and eccentric item in the inventory of the world’s religions” (Little Wilson 373). Burgess and his wife, Llewela Isherwood Jones or Lynne, arrived in Malaya in late August 1954. During Burgess’s stay in Malaya, he was not particularly popular within the community of British expatriates due to his elitist inclination. Take the Malay exam as an example, all Colonial civil servants were required to take proficiency exams in Malay, yet few English expatriates would take the learning of Malay seriously (Burgess, Little Wilson 383). Burgess, who was obsessed with words, happened to be one of the very few exceptions. He learned Malay eagerly and went straightaway passing the Standard One and Two
examinations in less than one year, and the Standard Three exam was passed before he left Malaya, which made him even more unpopular among other expatriates.6
20
Burgess felt that there is in general “a fear of intellectualism” in the colonial administration (Little Wilson 384). His feeling as an exile was intensified by his alienation from the expatriate community in Malaya.
Burgess’s mastery of Malay facilitated his relationships with the natives, which made possible the real-life portrayal of the native characters in his novel.7 Unlike many other European expatriates, his identity as an exile and his Catholic guilt
motivated him to empathize and have interaction with the natives, even though “going native” was widely regarded as a despicable and degraded practice by both white and local community, because colonizers were expected to assert their superiority by keeping proper distance from the natives (Burgess, Little Wilson 389). Therefore, most European expatriates would rather dance or have parties in European clubs than having any contact with the Malayan people. By contrast, Burgess was not only fascinated by the local people and cultures, but also saw his own white skin as “an eccentricity and looked like a disease” (Little Wilson 385). He and Lynne had never bought a car, which is a rarity among English expatriates, partly due to their poverty and Burgess’s reluctance “to emphasize the gulf between the privileged whites and the poor blacks, browns and yellows” (Little Wilson 384).
Burgess’s willingness to probe into the mindset as well as the culture of the Malayan people had led him to see the problems and weaknesses of British colonialism. He was frequently irritated by the inefficiency of British colonial administration in Malaya, which he had satirized in Time for a Tiger through
characters like Adams who spends more time drinking Tiger beer than carrying out his duties, or Adams’s superior, Robin Hood, who is stupid and easily deceived by Adams into believing that he is running the Police Transport efficiently. Furthermore, as a liberal humanist influenced by F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards during his college years at Manchester University, Burgess’s Malayan experience had forced him to realize the
21
fact that “literature is not universal,” since Muslims who were allowed to marry four wives would find Mr. Scobie’s dilemma of loving two women at the same time in the Matter of the Heart to be comical (Little Wilson 403). Burgess gave us a vivid
description of the frustration he had faced when trying to translate the first lines of T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land into Malay:
It would not work. Why, in the tropics, should bulan April be different from any other bulan? How could a bulan be dzalim or cruel? The attribution of a painful quality to a bulan forced the Malay mind to interpret the word as menstruation, which could and can be unpleasant. How could thalji or snow be berlupa or forgetful? What kind of bunga was a lilac? […] The Waste Land revealed itself […] as a very ingrown piece of literature which had nothing to say to a culture which had no word for spring and did not understand the myth of the grail. (Little Wilson 404)
The untranslatability of the poem reveals Burgess’s awareness of the cultural
difference between Britain and Malaya. Nevertheless, his notion that Malayan people are incapable of understanding the Western culture has also exposed his prejudice against the colonized people.
Burgess had, for several times, seriously considered the possibility of entering Islam, since Islam appeared to be more “gentle and permissive” if compared to the repressive Catholicism from which he was trying to run away (Little Wilson 407).8 When writing The Malayan Trilogy, he even saw himself “as a Malayan writer entertaining Malayan readers and, indeed, intended to become a Malayan citizen”
(Novel Now 155). Burgess’s intention to become a Malayan was also partly affected by the drastic change happening in his home country, England. He foresaw his readjustment to postwar England would be “a true trauma,” since British Empire had collapsed and transformed into a hedonistic Britain of which American consumerism
22
had the monopoly (Little Wilson 418). Although Burgess’s love for Malaya is sincere, his attitude toward Malaya and British colonialism remained ambivalent. For one thing, he frequently questioned the Eurocentric and universal assumption of imperial hegemony, which is clearly exemplified in his doubtful response to the universality of English Literature; for another, he often held a condescending attitude toward
Malayan cultures as well as languages. In his view, Western arts should be introduced to Malaya to “civilize” its culture (Little Wilson 416), while the Malay language, which he regards as a primitive language, needs to be modernized (Little Wilson 425).
Apart from his Catholic guilt, Burgess’s relation with his wife is another source of guilt (Burgess, Little Wilson 372). When Burgess was stationed at the British garrison of Gibraltar from 1943 to 1946, Lynne, who was pregnant at that time, was severely attacked by American GI deserters dressed in civilian clothes. They lost their son, and Lynne was advised not to be pregnant again, which had a huge impact on her psychological stability. Unlike Burgess who had found a way out from the suffocating Catholicism after arriving in Malaya, Lynne was overwhelmed by the guilt of leaving her parents in Britain. To make thing worse, her mother died of cancer during her stay in Malaya, and Lynne did not even have sufficient money to go home and attend her mother’s funeral. To relieve the guilt of causing her mother’s death, Lynne spent her days either taking an overdose of sleeping tablets or drowned herself in alcohol, and she had even attempted suicide. Burgess described her desperate condition as “not far from the condition of amok” (Little Wilson 414).9 Aside from Lynne’s nervous breakdown, her relation with Burgess was far from pleasant. Lynne had always had extramarital relations with other men at different stages of their lives, whereas
Burgess also enjoyed his erotic adventures with women of different racial background in Malaya. Burgess’s guilt was intensified by Lynne’s later descent into chronic alcoholism.
23
II
Victor Crabbe, the protagonist of The Malayan Trilogy, is, in many ways, a
fictional projection of Burgess’s own life. As Anthony Radice has explicitly described, Burgess’s novels frequently “blurred the boundaries between fiction and
autobiography to an unusual degree” to the extent that some critics suspect Burgess’s memoirs has often been mixed up with his own novelistic fabrications (Radice). After analyzing the guilt of Burgess himself, I will further explore the guilt of Crabbe from the perspective of psychoanalysis. In fact, the biblical allusion of the name “Crabbe”
has already suggested that Crabbe is troubled by guilt, because the word “crabbe”
means “wild apple” literally, which can be associated with the Original Sin in Christianity.
Unlike Burgess’s guilt, Crabbe’s guilt is not a religious one, but a guilt stemming from causing his first wife’s death in a car accident before he arrives in Malaya.
Similar to Burgess, the traumatic experience forces Crabbe to find a way out by leaving England and working as a teacher in Malaya. In Time for a Tiger, Crabbe’s intense feeling of trauma and guilt is given a vivid and detailed description, which is worth quoting at some length:
Victor Crabbe woke up sweating. He had been dreaming about his first wife who, eight years previously, he had killed. […] The car had skidded on the January road, had become a mad thing, resisting all control, had crashed through the weak bridge-fence and fallen—his stomach fell now, as his sleeping body had fallen time and time again in the nightmare reliving of the nightmare—fallen, it seemed endlessly, till it shattered the ice and the icy water beneath, and sank with loud heavy bubbles. His lungs bursting, he had felt the still body in the passenger-seat, had torn desperately at the
24
driver’s door, and risen, suffocating, through what seemed fathom after fathom of icy bubble lead. It was a long time ago. He had been exonerated from all blame but he knew he was guilty. [my emphasis] (33)
The near-death traumatic experience presented here is very close to the symptoms of
“traumatic neurosis” described by Sigmund Freud. In his controversial “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud argues that “traumatic neurosis” usually occurs to veterans who have survived the dreadful World Wars or passengers who have experienced
“severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life” (12).
According to Freud’s observation, the dreams of patients suffering from
“traumatic neurosis” display an unusual characteristic of “repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident” (13) in order to “conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed” (32). In the second book, The Enemy of the Blanket, Crabbe’s traumatic dream is described for the second time:
At four in the morning he awoke, sweating and terrified by the old dream, dream of a ghost he had thought exorcised for good. He was with his first wife in the car on the freezing January road. The skid, the crashed fence, the dive of whirring car to the icy water of the river, the bubbling, the still body in the passenger seat, the frantic ascent through fathoms of lead to the cold breath of the living night, the crime which could not be expiated. [my emphasis] (275)
The dream is not an ordinary bad dream, but a frightful dream filled with vivid images of destruction and intricate sensations of icy coldness, a dream so real that it is as if Crabbe himself has been forced to return to the “crime” scene and re-experience the trauma. In Freud’s view, such a compulsive repetitive process can be regarded as a
25
fixation to one’s trauma (13). The intrusion of traumatic experience into a patient’s dream has proven how powerful the strength of trauma can be.
In addition, Crabbe’s traumatic neurosis is clearly exhibited in his reluctance to drive a car and to swim, since the action of driving and swimming will remind Crabbe of the traumatic car accident. As a result, he becomes the only European in Kuala Hantu, the place where he first becomes a schoolmaster in Malaya, who does not own a car. Fenella, Crabbe’s wife, complains that “[w]ithout a car life in Malaya was impossible,” since she is virtually excluded from having any social contact with other Europeans without a car. However, Crabbe insists on walking to school everyday under the scorching sun. Even after Adams has found Crabbe a car, it is Adams’s subordinate officer, Alladad Khan, who becomes the driver instead of Crabbe. It is until one day when Khan is unexpectedly assaulted by a communist when driving that Crabbe is forced to reach over and drive again to prevent the car from crashing.
Nevertheless, he remains obstinate in refusing to swim. In the second book, Fenella, who is upset by Crabbe’s selfishness and indifference, decides to test Crabbe’s affection for her by pretending to be drowning in the sea; however, Crabbe fails to overcome his fear when trying to rescue his wife. Fenella concludes that Crabbe is capable of “exorcis[ing] demons” of his past only when his own life is concerned (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 345).
Although Crabbe is often crippled by the traumatic experience and guilt of killing his first wife, he constantly feels an urge to “go native” and to do something constructive for Malaya as a way of finding atonement for and redemption from his guilt. In a conversation with Hardman, Crabbe confesses that his coming to Malaya is
“a kind of heliotropism, turning towards the heat,” because he “just can’t stand the cold,” which refers to the weather in England as well as his near-death experience of drowning (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 255). His desire of trying to make some
26
contribution to Malaya is clearly expressed in a monologue: “I should want to go home, like Fenella. […] But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. […] I feel that I somehow enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. […] I want to live here; I want to be wanted” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 53). To be wanted by Malaya provides Crabbe a sense of meaning to keep on living and to atone for his guilt. His desire to be absorbed by the East is blatantly described in a scene when Crabbe is copulating with his Malay mistress, Rahimah: “he was somehow piercing to the heart of the country, of the East itself” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 38).10 Also, Crabbe’s desire to “go native” is so strong that he abhors his identity as a white man, because he perceives white skin as an “abnormality” and the white men’s ways as “fundamentally
eccentric” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 47).
In the second book, Fenella receives a letter written by “the Voice of the East,”
which indicates how Crabbe and Fenella are different from other colonizers:
…you and your husband [are] not like rest of white men in this country. For they suck from bounteous earth like greedy pigs from udder of mother-sow the great riches of rubber […] they drink at white men’s club and spurn their brothers of skin of different hue. But your husband and you, Sister, in no manner like that. For you have freely mingled and show love to your poorer brothers and sisters. (192)
Crabbe’s determination in contributing something for Malaya is also dramatically shown in his relation with Robert Loo. He encourages Robert Loo to compose a symphony celebrating the independence of Malaya, since culture is a prerequisite for any civilized country, and the symphony will be a precious gift celebrating the birth of a new national culture, which incorporates “not Indian, not Chinese, not
Malay—Malayan, just that” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 423). Crabbe’s endeavor ends up, however, in a total failure, because Robert Loo’s work turns out to be merely a
27
“second rate cinematic stuff” presenting a “distorted image of the West” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 572).
However, his seemingly genuine care for Malaya surpasses many of his foil characters, such as Adams, who refuses to learn Malay despite that he has stayed in Malaya for several years, as he is concerned only with his “home” in Bombay.
Similarly, a Strait Chinese named Lim Cheng Po who appears in the final book has shown completely no interest in doing anything for Malaya, since he cares only for his own interest. Crabbe ridicules him as the typical irresponsible Chinese, who has
“no nation, no allegiance to a bigger group than the family” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 416). In the third book, Crabbe has come up with an idea to invite principals from different races to join a cocktail party as an attempt to alleviate the “atmosphere of mistrust” by facilitating inter-racial understanding (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 426).
Nevertheless, the party ends up creating more “confusion” rather than “fusion” among races (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 452). Crabbe’s life can be summarized as how Robert Loo feels after knowing the death his teacher: “Crabbe has promised much and fulfilled little” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 563).
Like many modernist novels, “alienation” is a recurring theme in Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy. As Stinson convincingly argues, many characters created by Burgess are “literal exiles, people who do not have a feeling of ‘at-homeness,’ but also people who are actually geographically and culturally far removed from their roots” (Revisited 24). Crabbe, for instance, has rejected the white man’s world by not joining “the Club, the week-end golf, the dinner invitations, the tennis parties”
(Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 79). His identity as an exile is twofold. On a psychological level, he is an exile trying to escape from his dreadful traumatic experience of killing his first wife; on a physical level, he is an exile excluded by the European expatriate community in Malaya.
28
Many other native characters presented in the trilogy are also exiles. Ironically, it is precisely the diasporic experience they have in common that bridges the gap
between the colonizer and the colonized. Khan, a Punjabi, has fallen in love with Fenella at first, but his admiration for Fenella is subsequently transformed into a friendly sentiment after he detects Fenella’s loneliness as an exile cut off from her home country, which is no different from his alienated condition as a marginalized ethnic minority in Malaya. Similarly, an unusual fraternal relationship flourishes among Crabbe, Fenella, Adams, and Khan, who are all exiles in their own ways. They go to the party held at the Istana grounds or explore the countryside together by car, forming a rather peculiar fraternal bond among themselves.
If compared to Burgess, Crabbe’s attitude toward British imperialism is equally ambivalent. On the one hand, he has a strong sense of “white men’s burden,” because he often feels that the Malayan people are still in need of the governance and
assistance by the British colonial power, because Malayan people, who have “no common culture, language, literature, religion,” are not ready to govern themselves and form a workable nation (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 415). On the other hand, his identity as a guilt-ridden outcast enables him to reflect critically upon the limitations of British colonial project of trying to “civilize” Malaya. In a lecture, Crabbe is retorted by his students, who wonder why technological progress can bring about happiness to humankind, given that countrymen in Malaya already have plenty of leisure without using any machines (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 48). Also, Crabbe is aware of the negative effect of imposing English education to the local people: “All subjects have always been taught in English, and the occidental bias in the curriculum has made many of the alumni despise their own rich cultures, leading them,
deracinated, to a yearning for the furthest west of all” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 29).
Crabbe frequently feels that the attempt to impose Western values on the East is
29
impossible, since “Logic was a Western importation which […] had a small market”
in the East (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 49).11
Crabbe’s love for Malaya, just like his love for Fenella, is doomed to failure, because his loving of Malaya is merely a desperate attempt to redeem his own guilt, and to escape from his inescapable trauma. Baulch views his problematic love for the country as a “malformed attachment” to atone for the unfulfilled responsibility he owes to his first wife (106). Morris brilliantly argues that the change Crabbe is trying to impose on Malaya is destined to be fruitless, because the “Tida’ apa’” mentality of the natives, which consider all change to be redundant and therefore unnecessary, resists any historical progress (“Futility of History” 77). The recurring word “Tida’
apa’” signifies the cyclical temporality of the colonial society that rejects any
imposition of modernity from the West to “civilize” Malaya. Crabbe’s unreturned love parallels his relation with Fenella, who is disappointed by Crabbe’s selfishness and his infidelity in marriage. After Crabbe has failed to overcome his fear of swimming to rescue Fenella who pretends to be drowning, she finally realizes the truth that Crabbe has “never really been unfaithful” to her, because he has “never started to be faithful”
(Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 345). Even Crabbe himself confesses that his intention of seeking a second wife is merely to “quieten [his] nerves” suffering from his guilt (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 35). At the end, Fenella has a divorce from him and becomes a secretary of a local ruler.
Crabbe’s failure in marriage is foreshadowed in his inability to shake off the burden of the past. As mentioned above, the patient’s mind is paralyzed by his traumatic experience. No matter how hard Crabbe is trying to forget the unpleasant memory, the guilt constantly returns to haunt him. Even though Crabbe continuously reminds himself of the necessity to forget about the past: “History […] the best thing to do is to put all that in books and forget about it. […] We’ve got to throw up the past,
30
otherwise we can’t live in the present. The past has got to be killed” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 538), he never fully succeeds in doing so. And Fenella is deeply disappointed by his unwillingness to “break with the past,” that is Crabbe’s unconscious attachment to his first wife, and love her wholeheartedly (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 343). This attachment is vividly shown on an occasion when he is having an extramarital relation with Anne Talbot: “For him there had only been one time when he had wanted the door locked and bolted, enclosing a love that must never escape. That door was still locked and bolted, but now he was on the outside, only in sleep hammering vainly to be let in again” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 328). The locked love evidently refers to his first wife, who is already dead, yet Crabbe still refuses to open his heart for another woman, just like what Fenella protests:
“…there’s only been one woman in your life. Be honest about it, Victor. You’ve always been comparing me with her. You’ve never been able to see me clearly”
(Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 339).
Freud hypothesizes that death is the ultimate goal of all living beings, since
“inanimate things existed before living ones” (38). Hence, he argues that it is a human instinct that drives the patients who are suffering from traumatic neurosis to
compulsively repeat the traumatic experience. The instinct is named by Freud as “the ego or death instincts,” which refers to “the instinct to return to the inanimate state”
(38). In his autobiography, Burgess reveals that Crabbe’s death is already
foreshadowed in a Malay poem that appears at the end of the second book.12 In the third book, Crabbe feels somewhat reluctant to go to the Durian Estate to investigate a murder case, because Mr. Raj, his former colleague, has already warned him that he will end his life in an up-river (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 487). When Crabbe accidentally comes across Fenella’s poem on a magazine on his journey up river, he feels the unspeakable ominous feeling of “something unseen, unknown, and far more
31
solid,” which can be read as his unconscious death instinct. Although sensing his impending death, Crabbe still decides to proceed to the up-river for investigation, because he is driven unconsciously by his death instinct.
When he reaches the destination, Crabbe’s meeting with another English
expatriates named George Costard leads to his final disillusionment, because Costard happens to be the secret lover of Crabbe’s first wife. According to Freud, all living organisms will develop a layer of protective shield to manage as well as resist the enormous amount of stimuli from the external world (26). However, the protective shell might be broken when the excitation from the outside is too powerful, or when the victim is not well prepared in receiving the shock, since “preparedness for anxiety […] constitute[s] the last line of defence of the shield against stimuli” (31). When Crabbe suddenly realizes that his first wife, the only woman whom he has truly loved, has in fact maintained an extramarital relation with another man, the shock invokes his suppressed traumatic experience and leads to his final disillusionment. Costard accuses Crabbe of having murdered his first wife, and claims that it is Crabbe who refuses to let her go when she is still alive. Crabbe refuses to accept the cruel reality:
“It’s all lies. She loved me. There was never anybody else” (Burgess, Malayan Trilogy 550). At last, Crabbe slips from a boat and drowns in the river.
III
Here, I would like to read Crabbe’s guilt as an allegory of the guilt of British Empire in general. In fact, the novel’s title, the Malayan Trilogy, has already
suggested an allegorical reading of the novel in terms of the socio-political situations of Malaya. In the Novel Now, Burgess has also explained that his intention of writing the novel in the form of a “symphonic scheme” of the trilogy is to record “the
different stages of an expatriate Englishman’s love affair with Malaya, as well as the
32
stages of the process which brought Malaya from British protection to independence”
(94). The Empire’s guilt can be analyzed from various aspects, including the British failure in defending Malaya against the Japanese’s invasion, the ambivalent relations between the British Colonial authority and the Malayan Communist, and the
intensification of ethnic conflicts under British colonial rule. The colonial expansion of the British in Malaya can be dated back to 1874 with the signing of the Pangkor Treaty, which introduced the residential system to the state of Perak (Andaya 158).
Under the residential system, sultan retains his formal title as the state ruler, and a new British resident is appointed as the sultan’s advisor, who owns the actual
authority and power in ruling the state.13 The system was later extended to the states of Selangor, Pahang and Negeri Sembilan, which together form the so-called
“Federated Malay States” or the FMS (Andaya 174). Likewise, a British “advisor”
was also imposed on four northern states and Johor, thereby forming the “Unfederated Malay States.” The FMS, the “Unfederated Malay States,” and the Straits
Settlement—Penang, Malacca, and Singapore—together constitute British Malaya.
Burgess is right when he claims, in the introduction of the trilogy, that the mainland of Malayan had never in fact been directly ruled by the British, since the colonial rule in Malaya operated indirectly with the cooperation of the Malay rulers (Andaya 174).
A drastic turn took place after the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. Although many had foreseen the ominous sign that Japanese army might head southward soon after China was invaded, the British Army was fully convinced that their Royal Navy would safely protect the peninsular from the Japanese invasion, since the dense and
“impassable” rainforest has already provided a strong natural protection for the backdoor of Malaya (O’Ballance 34). However, to the British army’s surprise, the Japanese troops had chosen to intrude Malaya precisely from its back door through tracts of jungle and forest completely left undefended by the British force. On 8th
