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Duke University

From the Betrayal of Language: Writing from the Voids of History in the Modern Bildungsroman

Joel Mire

Writing 293

Professor Sachelle Ford

11 December 2017

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Frustrations of language characterize the formation of the artist in the modern novel of

development. Particularly in modernist and postcolonial novels, language associated with a

dominant national power threatens to disregard or mischaracterize the protagonists. Indeed, the

bildungsroman genre, which traditionally sought reconciliation between burgeoning individuals

and nationhood, has, in its 20th Century variations, questioned its very foundation as the “novel

of development.” A constant reminder of cultural difference and national exclusion, the

imprecision of language within postcolonial bildungsromane corners its protagonists into crude

historical categories that do not account for the complicated national affiliations of the

postcolonial age. Consequently, in the genre arguably “connected more than any other to the rise

of modern nationalism” (Boes 3), Bildung, the German philosophical concept which posits the

harmonious nature of self-cultivation of the individual within a society, becomes an unreliable

fiction for characters with cosmopolitan experiences and transnational identities. Still, these

protagonists must grapple with the language of their given national site lest they preclude

themselves from ever realizing their individual and artistic potential. At a certain point, however,

these protagonists discover the need for greater self-expression beyond the claustrophobic space

permitted to them by the linguistic constraints of a dominant, nationalized language.

For a genre that has historically functioned to trace a protagonist’s education and

individualization in a national narrative, the migration prevalent in 20th Century literature calls

for a less restrictive genre of individual development. Indeed, cohesive narratives of individuals

and nations mutually sponsoring each other towards an idealistic, teleological vision of progress

often seem unaware of the complexity of historical national affiliations for cosmopolitan

characters. Moreover, the nation as a bolstering force, an aspirational project, and committed

supporter of the protagonist becomes increasingly unsure. Homi Bhabha attempts to propel the

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Bildungsroman beyond the nation: “Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the

major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of

migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the

terrains of world literature” (17). Thus, the question arises: Can and should the bildungsroman

extend itself beyond national narratives into cosmopolitan novels of development?

Perhaps an answer already lies hidden in the critical project of tying together its uneasy

20th Century members—across national borders, histories and geographies—characterized by

modernist and postcolonial styles. For Bhabha, the cosmopolitan protagonist experiences

development only with local specificity, as a unique hybrid of numerous cultures. Others like

Joseph Slaughter search for a crystallization of the genre amidst the paradoxical, yet generically

familiar terms of universal human rights and the aspirations of internationalism. Tobias Boes and

Rebecca Walkowitz are more open to the adaption of the genre to the globalized age as they

observe the national and political pressures that persist in even the most cosmopolitan of

characters. Among the proponents of the internationalist study of the bildungsroman is Jed Esty,

who argues that literary and political motifs encourage integrated studies of texts across

significant geographical and historical divides. In response to the notion that grouping culturally

disparate texts under an umbrella term like “postcolonial” leads to mischaracterization, Jed Esty

argues that common features and motifs—for example, language pertaining to excrement in

African and European literature—cast light on political tensions that haunt the “gap between

subject and nation” (9).

The protagonists in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tayeb Salih’s

Season of Migration to the North, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy search for autonomous expression

by assuming unique aesthetic modes of writing. These unique aesthetic projects to find creative

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space in language—from Stephen Dedalus’s retreat from suffocating national and filial lexicons,

to Mustafa Sa’eed’s storing of his fragmented identity in a secret archive, to Lucy’s turn from

words to the artistic amenability of images—raise the question, succinctly posed by Homi

Bhabha in The Location of Culture: “Can the perplexity of the unhomely, intrapersonal world

lead to an international theme?” (17). My selection of texts for this paper, which range

geographies and time periods, betray my confidence in the flexibility of the genre to adapt in

postcolonial and modernist literature. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Season of

Migration to the North, and Lucy all explore traditional themes of individual and artistic

aspirations of the genre’s 18th Century origins, but their formations occur in the shadow of

colonialism amidst modern political malaise. I include Season of Migration, a novel not

universally recognized as a bildungsroman, but one that nonetheless regards generically familiar

questions of colonial education, national location, and artistic individualization, in order to

evaluate the salient characteristics of the genre that manifest throughout novels of travel in the

international age.

All of these novels, however, are united most fundamentally in their protagonist’s

postcolonial and modernist experiences with language as the material space of initial

marginalization and ultimate self-liberation. The binding nature of words, while advantageous to

historically favored groups, poses an immense threat to self-representation for the undetermined

protagonists in these bildungsroman. Therefore, the great challenge for the characters is to rise

from the restriction of language—borne in colonialism and persisting into new global systems of

power—into an artistic style that can carve out territory between the grand binaries of historical

narrative. At last, the modern novel of development becomes the flashlight upon these voids of

history, the unseen spaces that house the emerging artist. This paper argues that these modern

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protagonists, disillusioned by language, must search for aesthetic genesis beyond the nationally

predetermined range of language in order to untether themselves from the crude categorizations

of history.

Lexical Disruption in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is the most artistically driven of the three protagonists in

my study. As a burgeoning artist in a novel which “famously narrates a struggle to disengage

from the norms of nation, language, and religion” (Esty 9), Stephen Dedalus’s tumultuous

experience with language serves to highlight the question of national identity in the modernist

novel of development1. Undoubtedly, Stephen’s self-cultivation as a poet is fraught with crises of

Irish national identity, and these crises provide insight into centrality of language as it relates to

characters that paradoxically seek and reject national affiliation.

In Portrait, inconspicuous inscriptions of words stun Stephen, alienating him from a

national belonging within language. These jarring experiences with single words reveal to

Stephen the perpetual foreignness of the English language to his development as an artist in

Ireland. In one instance, when Stephen excitedly runs into town in a tumult of proud and hopeful

emotions, he suddenly reads the word Lotts on a street sign (Joyce 72). Such an insignificant

observation of a common English surname sobers him, and his attention turns from feverish

imagination to the uninspired material conditions surrounding him. “That is horse piss and rotted

straw, he thought. It is a good odor to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now.

I will go back” (72). Based on his encounter with a single English word, Stephen is ejected from

his idealized, individual aspirations of mind into the immediacy of life in Ireland. The word

shocks him out of his frame of mind back into his local experience in Ireland characterized by

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the mundane stenches of horses and straw.

In a conversation with an English dean that is laden with misunderstanding, Stephen

wonders if, more than the arbitrariness of language, his preclusion from Englishness as an

Irishman is detrimental to his poetic development. When Stephen’s reference to a tundish clashes

against the dean’s unfamiliarity with the supposed Irish equivalent of funnel, Stephen laughs

incredulously, for, as he reminds the dean, tundish originates from Lower Drumcondra in

Dublin, “where they speak the best English” (Joyce 158). What begins as a comical

misunderstanding, however, soon takes a deeper significance to Stephen, who becomes

increasingly frustrated by the fact that the English dean perceives Stephen’s proficiency in

English as nothing more than quaint Irish vernacular. Ultimately, a dejected Stephen recognizes

that

His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me

an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice

holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (159)

The familiarity and foreignness of English has roots firstly in the historical imposition of the

English language in Ireland over Gaelic variants and secondly in the important distinction

between proficiency in a language and artistic sponsorship within that language. While Stephen

has acquired English, his Irishness precludes him from close artistic experience in the language

because the words exist without meaning in his national context. This distance between Stephen

and the language is evident in his treatment of words as material objects rather than intrinsic

bearers of meaning. For example, he admits that he has “not made” the words and that his voice

“holds them at bay.” Even though Stephen has acquired a large vocabulary, he commands them

without full confidence.

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Rebecca Walkowitz, in her reading of the tundish scene, contrasts the dean’s single-

mindedness to Stephen’s understanding of tundish and funnel as markers of a kind of semantic

diversity. She suggests that the misunderstanding arises from the encounter between the dean’s

ignorantly pompous understanding of language as a marker of national belonging and semantic

correctness and Stephen’s internally complex relationship to language (Walkowitz 70).

Walkowitz rightfully emphasizes that the dean’s explicit binary perspective of language

implicitly carries an additional—albeit hidden—binary perspective of nationhood that excludes

Stephen. I emphasize, in response, that this scene’s foremost function is to disillusion Stephen

from his colonial situation, for it highlights the alienation caused by colonial influence on

language. The absurdity of the scene comes from the fact that Stephen’s language, which is

technically superior, is nevertheless disregarded by a less-educated colonial and cultural

authority.

Exclusion on the basis of national difference is a frequent struggle for protagonists that

seek reconciliation of their education to their identity. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha

imagines a distinction between “being English and being Anglicized” (128), pointing to the

impossibility of the oppressed colonial individual ever achieving incorporation into the

colonizer’s world. Attempts of the oppressed individual to integrate or mirror the colonists—

perhaps by embracing their language—cannot overcome the distinction of power rooted, at least

in Stephen’s case, in his Irish affiliation. Accordingly, while the colonial atmosphere between

England and Ireland may create only subtle distinctions in language in Stephen’s life, there exists

a greater separation that Stephen’s desperate attempts to overcome make him only more curious

and less English to the dean whose national origin affords him an identity in the language beyond

the range of mere vocabulary.

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From his ambivalent relationship to the familiar yet stubbornly foreign English language,

Stephen at first aspires to poetic expression through a number of personal aesthetic projects in

Ireland. To begin, in response to his frustration with the subjective and elusive meaning of

words, Stephen is drawn to the rhythm of prose, an objective feature of language based on

consonants, vowels, and syntactical structure. He ponders, “Did he then love the rhythmic rise

and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour” (Joyce 140). In his question,

Stephen indicates an important distinction between rhythm and imagery: the “rise and fall” of

rhythm is structurally defined within words themselves, thus making access to the rhythmical

experience of language immediate and open to all. Imagery, on the other hand, depends on

“associations” rooted in legend—outside sources of signification privy only to historical and

national members. Evidently, rhythm attracts Stephen because it cannot exclude him for his Irish

nationality—or, better yet, failure to be English—and instead is an intrinsic feature of language,

in contrast to the subjective, interpretative qualities of imagery. Stephen’s attention to rhythm

intimates his attempt to overcome his artistic insecurity by mastering universal aspects of

language.

Stephen’s greatest artistic effort in Ireland reaches its apotheosis in verse, confirming to

Stephen that his tormented relationship to English in Ireland will not facilitate his full artistic

development. Notably, the finished poem appears directly after a moment of inspiration in which

“symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain” (Joyce 188). Notably, the

language of his inspiration as fluid and expressive is juxtaposed to the rigid meter of his poem

(188). While this distinction highlights Stephen’s prowess with rhythm, it does nothing to

conceal the poorly constructed images that seriously detract from his poem. This struggle with

imagery appears most egregiously in his selection of the adjectives “enchanted” (line 3),

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“Eucharistic” (line 11), “languorous" (line 17). While rhythmically and tonally effective in their

respective lines, these words are aloof, detached from the poem. Consequently, the rhythmical

weaving of lines alone does not establish any immediate semantic intimacy between the words of

his poem. While Stephen’s completion of the poem should signify development and artistic

potential, Stephen’s doubt lingers, as he looks up to the sky for an augury from the birds—thus

disregarding the failed imagery of his poem to a visual omen unmediated by language—for

direction as he considers his future in Ireland.

After his failed experiment with poetry in Ireland, Stephen resolves that he must exile

himself from Ireland in order to find artistic fulfillment. Firstly, however, it is important to note

that throughout his youth Stephen’s authenticity was at odds with his national obligations. In

fact, at one point his friend Davin asks him, “Are you Irish at all?” (Joyce 169). While many of

Stephen’s peers view the Irish national struggle as the path to progress, Stephen answers that in

his opinion, remaining in Ireland is antithetical toward his artistic progress. He then asserts that

rather than serve his nation, family, or the church, he “will try to express [himself] in some mode

of life or art as freely as [he] can and as wholly as [he] can” (208). Beyond equating all of his

responsibilities in Ireland with artistic repression, Stephen indicates that his material reality

keeps him from fullness and wholeness. Indeed, Stephen’s preference for the abstract and

internal leads him to believe that proximity to concrete affiliations befuddles his creativity. By

rejecting all responsibilities in his departure from Ireland, Stephen hopes to access his full self—

in his mind, his deeply internal self—as if it awaited him in an immaterial plane of artistry.

Further, Stephen imagines his national exile as the unfettering to his artistic awakening. He

couches this, however, in the language of paradox that remains unresolved at the end of the

novel, suggesting both that Stephen will realize his long sought after artistry and that his

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development will preserve an Irish identity. Once Stephen assumes narrative control of Portrait

in the form of his journal, he proclaims, “I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has

not yet come into the world” (Joyce 212). In this first paradox, Stephen expresses his desire to

create the uncreated. Moreover, to assert action on an objectified loveliness demands that the

loveliness has presence, yet the loveliness Stephen describes is uncreated. By expressing the

desire to affect the loveliness which he hopes to create, Stephen wants to inhabit the in-between

space of art between nothing and something, which requires navigating between having access to

the finished product while still being its self-fulfilling creator. In the second paradox, Stephen

resolves,

I go to encounter for the millionth time

the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the

uncreated consciousness of my race. (213)

In the beginning of the phrase, encountering a new experience for the millionth time casts light

on Stephen’s hope that by departing Ireland, he will be able to totally inhabit the internal artistic

plane which he surges into when he disregards his national obligations. Pericles Lewis, in a loose

religious allegory, tracks Stephen’s individualization in the context Ireland as a Christ-like

prophet-redeemer of the “conscience of [the race]” (2). In his reading, Lewis characterizes the

“mystical relationship between the novelist-hero and his people” (3) in which Stephen imagines

himself as a paradoxical creator and fulfiller of an Irish national identity. Furthermore, this

supposed “reality” is rooted in the immaterial reality that characterizes Stephen’s conception of

artistry. Finally, Stephen must position himself historically in order to properly historicize his

“race.” As it is impossible to create without consciousness, it is evident that Stephen already

bears a consciousness rooted in his development in Ireland. Such climax is familiar to the

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traditional bildungsroman that intertwines the aspirations of the individual with the nation. As

Stephen liberates himself into a pure artistic mindset, however, he hopes to step outside of the

restrictive aspects of his consciousness in order to create a more universal artistic vision for

Ireland.

Stephen’s arc of artistic discovery ranges from his restriction under language to his

attempted artistic liberation, which is negotiated ambiguous syntax and paradox. Thus, through

artistic maneuvering of language that formerly inhibited him, Stephen nearly achieves the

traditional culmination of the self in relation to a national identity. By transferring the narrative

voice to Stephen in the final pages, Portrait permits Stephen to determine his own position at the

end of the novel. According to Joseph Slaughter in Human Rights, Inc., this climax empowers

the protagonist “by transforming the right to plot into a responsibility to narrate the already-

completed story of human personality development as if it were a voluntary expression of the

individual’s newly acquired freedom to plot” (253). Stephen, in turn, positions himself between

an interminable state of potential and the already developed artist. The tautology of self-

realization, despite its underlying logical impasses, permits Stephen the freedom and artistic

space he needs in order to fulfill himself as a national poet from outside the nation.

Cultural Fragmentation in Season of Migration to the North

While Portrait ends at a point of departure, Season of Migration to the North reels from the

haunting consequences of cultural difference upon Mustafa Sa’eed’s return to Sudan. As Sa’eed

recounts his years spent studying and teaching in England—years that resulted in a number of

suicides by Sa’eed’s sexual partners—his story culminates in his trial for his killing of his

greatest love, Jean Morris. The preparation for the trial, however, reveals the tendencies of

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colonial language to prematurely historicize and objectify. Thus, Season of Migration to the

North explores Sa’eed’s attempts to define himself amidst disparate cultural forces. Although the

novel is not universally considered to be a bildungsroman, Sa’eed’s migration to England and

ultimate return to Sudan in his formative years deal with themes familiar to the postcolonial

bildungsroman, namely colonial education, migration, and national identity. Moreover, the novel

has historically been studied as an oblique member of the genre, such that Musa Al-Halool

defines it as an “allegorical Bildungsroman, spanning the whole period of the British dominion

over the Sudan” (31). For this reason, the text presents explore how the thematic disillusionment

of the bildungsroman protagonist operates in postcolonial novels of travel. Ultimately, while

Sa’eed is less concerned with his artistry than Stephen in Portrait, he similarly desires self-

representation. However, his particular struggle with the racism and misrepresentation by the

England signify the aesthetic challenge of self-representation for protagonists that are

immediately historicized and objectified by the colonial imagination.

As Sa’eed observes his lawyers’ preparation of the defense, he senses that his guilt will be

mischaracterized by the argumentation his lawyers planned for the defense. Sa’eed recounts that

“I sat for weeks listening to the lawyers talking about me—as though they were talking about

some person who was no concern of mine” (Salih 28). Sa’eed’s situation exemplifies an

interesting dynamic between the accused and his defense: the accused must silently observe his

own exclusion from the construction of an identity-based argument of purported truthfulness.

Postcolonial theorist Edward Said develops his concept of Orientalism, in which the Western

mind creates a fictitious representation of non-Western persons as a figurative foil against which

the West could expand its economic and cultural power. He asserts that “Orientalism responded

more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the

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West” (Said 22). In this framework, Sa’eed become a void—a blank page—on which his

Western representors can “draw” a picture of him, objectifying him for a Western audience as

they see fit.

Evidently, Maxwell Foster-Keen and the other lawyers disregard Sa’eed’s self-

representation as a necessary component of his carefully designed courtroom representation by

the defense team. Sa’eed indicates that the prosecutor, Sir Arthur Higgins, too, creates fictions

about Sa’eed: “It was as though his voice came to me from another world. The man continued

skillfully to draw a terrible picture of a werewolf” (Salih 28). In these lines, Sa’eed intimates that

the disconnect of his representation worked to make him an otherworldly figure to the jurors.

The “werewolf”—a seemingly normal man who periodically suffers transfiguration into his

monstrous form for the full moon—is a fitting image for a rhetorical assault on Sa’eed that must

frame in mythical language a decidedly non-Western, irrational, object of history for the Western

imaginations of the jurors.

As the language of the Western imagination imposes itself on him, Sa’eed becomes

exasperated by his entrapment as a non-Western object in a grand historical narrative of West

versus East. Foster-Keen proclaims to the jury,

Mustafa Sa’eed, gentle-

men of the jury, is a noble person whose mind was able to ab-

sorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were

not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease

that assailed them a thousand years ago. (Salih 29)

Foster-Keen, who in fact was Sa’eed’s professor, suggests that Mustafa, affected by “Western

civilization” at the cost of a fall from innocence that “broke” the noble man’s heart. Notably,

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Foster-Keen relies upon a number of abstract terms that frame the argument in terms of the West

versus East narrative in what one would expect to be evidence-based argument. He, for example,

refers to “Western civilization” as if Mustafa walked through its gates upon his moving to

England, but, in fact, Sa’eed had taken curricula imbued with English and European influence

since he was a child. In this sense, Sa’eed grew up in the discourse of Western civilization;

therefore, Foster-Keen’s assertion that his absorption of it could suddenly break his heart is less

convincing, as the cultural influence had already defined Sa’eed’s development from an early

age. In his use of another vague term, “the germ,” Foster-Keen obfuscates the locality of the

women’s suicides associated with Sa’eed with the supposed influence a mysterious disease from

the past millennium. According to Susan Friedman, the English court lets [Sa’eed] off with a

light sentence, buying into the myth of the colonized victim and denying him the dignity of free

will and moral responsibility for his actions” (231) which ultimately disgusts Sa’eed. Thus, the

trial becomes a parade of “liberal guilt.” By laying the origin of the crime in a historical narrative

vaguely suggestive of violence and conquest, Foster-Keen attempts to absolve Sa’eed of the

locality of the tragedies and his crimes by indulging the Western historical imagination.

Sa’eed resents this language of Orientalist stereotyping that strips him of his individual

experience and objectives him in language’s reliance on profound cultural difference to explain

social phenomena. Consequently, he searches for self-expression—just as Stephen does in

Portrait—within the language that restricts him. He redirects the vague terms of Foster-Keen’s

historical narrative back onto its West, suggesting that rather than a passive victim of the violent

germ “imported to [him],” he consciously set the pandemic back upon Europe. “Yes, my dear

sirs,” Sa’eed provokes, “I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which

you have injected into the veins of history” (Salih 79). By using the concrete language of

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pandemic, Sa’eed upsets the Western imagination’s depersonalization to relegate him as an

impersonal bearer of histories present effects by maintaining the language of physicality afforded

by the metaphor of disease. Further, embracing the term—the “germ”—that Foster-Keen

introduced to absolve Sa’eed from the suicides by diffusing the violence into history, Sa’eed

redefines himself as the colonizing assailant. If in his cultural oppression by language, he is

nearly rendered non-existent, Sa’eed surges up against the very rules of the game—embracing

the language that orientalizes him as a reprisal.

Still, the language of racial exclusion looms over Mustafa. The words of Foster-Keen

continually remind Mustafa that he is not a recognizable person to the Western mind, but a

project: “You, Mr. Sa’eed, are the best example of the fact that our civilizing mission in Africa is

of no avail. After all the efforts we’ve made to educate you, it’s as if you’d come out of the

jungle for the first time” (Salih 78). Here, Foster-Keen betrays the fact that even in Sa’eed’s

brilliance, his aberration from what Foster-Keen considers the West’s academic norms and

standards values marks Sa’eed as the uncivilized African. Thus, he is suspended in a no-man’s

land between incorporation and demonization by the West. Bhabha, responding to Franz Fanon’s

‘Black Skins, White Masks”—the double image describing racial identifications in colonial and

postcolonial contexts—recognizes the inescapability of difference that “the white man’s artifice

[inscribes] on the black man’s body” (64). However, Bhabha suggests that an identity emerges

within from the suspension between Whiteness and non-Whiteness that I have described;

namely, the in-between, liminal spaces of identity that surge up out in the subtle dialectical

dynamic between the racial oppressors and the oppressed (Bhabha 64). Evidently, Sa’eed’s

situation is nearly impossible: his acceptance is dependent upon his exact mirroring and

academic reproduction of the West but his racial and cultural differences preclude him from ever

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achieving that perfect reproduction.

Primed by his forced passivity under the harsh categorizations of language, I argue that

Sa’eed comes to inhabit an identity untethered from the restrictive binary of his debated

Westernness by fragmenting his artistic memory in his archive-like chamber in his home in

Sudan. “My Life Story—by Mustafa Sa’eed,” announces the mysterious notebook in Sa’eed’s

personal study. The narrator expectantly flips the page, to find but a single line: “To those who

see with one eye, speak with one tongue and see things as either black or white, either Eastern or

Western.” (Salih 125). The immediate question surrounding this textually bare document is

whether Sa’eed intentionally left it blank, as if to indict those who have commandeered his “Life

Story” with their close-minded cultural theories of harsh categorization. If Sa’eed intended to

denounce these theories, he appears to have failed, both in his journaling project and,

consequently, in his self-proclaimed life story. Perhaps, however, Sa’eed protests in silence, with

no words for those whose cultural understanding is limited by the vocabulary of simplistic

polarities. The sparseness of his line, which is tellingly punctuated with a period, suspending

itself between dedication and address, frustrates any firm understanding of Sa’eed’s tone in the

journal. Had his experiences left him more vitriolic or apologetic when he came to record his life

story? Out of the ambiguous fragment, one aspect of Sa’eed’s identity is clear: his restless

struggle to situate himself in a cultural model rooted in the language of stereotype that leaves

little space for self-representation.

Another article that the narrator discovers in Sa’eed’s chamber intimates Mustafa’s turmoil

within the framework of the Orientalist West versus East cultural model. Before proceeding,

however, it is important to note that I am employing an English translation of an Arabic text.

Thus, the distinctions between what Friedman calls the “aesthetics of indeterminacy” between

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the “high culture of Arabic poetry and the low culture of the Arabic folk tradition” (Friedman

231) do not translate without difference into English. For the scope of my study, however, I am

more interested in aspects of Sa’eed’s poetry relating to sharp binaries and stunted artistry, which

the English translation can communicate less ambiguously.

Upon reading a poem by Sa’eed (Salih 126), the narrator observes that “Mustafa Sa’eed

had no doubt spent long hours searching the right word to fit the metre” (127). Indeed, the

uncompleted poem is highly organized; the two complete triplets have, in order, lines with

twelve, thirteen, and ten syllables with a common rhyme. According to the narrator, the poem

never approaches truth for its reliance on “antithesis and comparisons” (126). While the

implication that Mustafa’s poetic style is stunted by his obsessed attention to his identification

within the grand historical narratives of the West and the East is pertinent, I am interested more

in the fact that the poem is unfinished, destabilizing the carefully metered balance in the final

lines: “Some, souls content, others in dismay. // Brows submissive, others . . .” (Salih 126). Here,

the speaker’s pattern of setting one concept—whether it be love and hate, or some or others—

against a counterpart dissolves. On one level, the unfulfilled ellipsis reveals Sa’eed’s increasing

disillusionment with a grossly inaccurate cultural model that needs the appearance of antithesis,

otherness, and counterpart in order to assign identity and value to different cultural groups.

Indeed, by giving up on the poem in the middle of the third triplet, Sa’eed seems to reject its very

premise firmly rooted in antithesis. On another level, however, the ambivalent poetic project

becomes one scrap of paper among many that, once vaguely reassembled, shed light on an

identity that while tormented by cultural obsessions with cultural difference, ultimately—through

its fragmentation—begins to carve out the space for its liberation.

The paper scraps, when considered together as a mass of artistic interjections, compose

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Sa’eed’s project of aesthetic distinction and plea to become known as a full and complex human

personality. Indeed, Sa’eed’s scattered provocations, ranging from rumination on national

agendas to the progress of time to his love for Jean Morris (Salih 125-127), when considered in

concert with each other, are suggestive of a complex internality that struggling to succinctly

express itself in a constrained vocabulary. By detaching his thoughts from one another

physically, Sa’eed aims to evoke a degree of mysteriousness around his representation—the

secret of Mustafa Sa’eed must live in the unseen, unarticulated spaces between these paper

scraps. “Like pieces in an arithmetical puzzle,” the narrator decides, “he wants to be discovered,

like some historical object of value. There was no doubt of that” (127). If this is true, then the

success of Mustafa’s game is in question. After all, the narrator resents that Sa’eed has chosen

him to piece together Sa’eed’s story; he thinks that “there was no limit to his egoism and his

conceit; despite everything, he wanted history to immortalize him. Notably, Mustafa selects the

character whose experiences in both Sudan and London most closely mirror his own to take the

challenge of making sense of himself. Nevertheless, the narrator recoils from such a charge,

denouncing it as if it would be an indulgence of Sa’eed’s selfishness. Despite his confident

disavowal, however, the memory and mystery of Mustafa Sa’eed looms over the narrator for the

duration of the novel, which suggests that Sa’eed is succeeds in ‘immortalizing’ the tantalizing

question—Who is Mustafa Sa’eed?

Regardless, Sa’eed’s assumption of a fragmentary aesthetic of self-expression marks an

important evolution: a turn from articulation within the dominant Orientalist cast of language to

profuse articulation. In the scraps of paper, Mustafa releases the thoughts that did not come

together in his life, but that he hopes may be reconstructed in a meaningful way in his death.

Thus, while Stephen retreated from his national responsibilities so that he may inhabit a more

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purely artistic plane of self-expression, Mustafa emits copious fragments of his self-expression in

hope that he may be pieced together and understood as more than an object within the cultural

divide between the East and West.

Smudged Progress in Lucy

In Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, the imprecision of language across levels of privilege signifies

the damaging semantics of historical insensitivity. Words, rather than bringing people to

common understanding, reveal profound difference in the novel. Thus, of the three novels in this

study, Lucy reveals the bitter stings of difference which language burdens the historically

oppressed. Lucy’s disillusionment by language stems from painful memories of colonial

education that continually remind her of the difference between the lives of upper class white

America and her own as a migrant au pair from the West Indies.

When Mariah, Lucy’s host and employer, rejoices upon seeing daffodils, Lucy reacts

angrily because she remembers being forced to memorize and recite a poem about the yellow

flowers at her primary school in the West Indies. The subject matter of the verse written by the

“now long dead” (Kincaid 18) poet imply that Lucy had memorized William Wordsworth’s “I

Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” a poem in which the speaker encounters a field of daffodils with

gaiety. Lucy is not so excited; as a child she had made “a vow to erase from [her] mind, line by

line, every word of the poem.” Lucy even had nightmares in which she drowned underneath a

pile of the dainty flowers (18). Evidently, what brings the speaker in Wordsworth’s poem and

Mariah such effusive joy suffocates Lucy from the outset. Words, then, do not evoke common

sentimentalities; the shock of such divergent responses to a “daffodil” throw into question the

potential for Lucy’s potential connection with her host and, more indirectly, the significance of

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English poetry in her life.

Lucy and her host family soon take a journey, quite similar to Wordsworth’s, to a lake

surrounded by daffodils. Lucy, not knowing that the flowers were daffodils because she had

never seen a daffodil before, has the strange desire to “kill them” (Kincaid 29). When Mariah

tells Lucy that they have in fact arrived at a field of daffodils, Lucy becomes stunned to the point

that “every time [she] tried to talk [she] stammered and by accident bit [her] own tongue” (29).

This instance is a physical representation of Lucy’s internal experience with language. Suddenly,

a field of flowers, unbeknownst to be daffodils, lie before her; the discovery of the flower’s true

nature is a betrayal to her. The absurdity of the scene only increases when Mariah mistakes

Lucy’s incredulity and pain for joy. Lucy, of course, spurns her naiveté, turning away from her

attempted embrace. Lucy expresses the profound difference that something as simple as a

daffodil expose between the two:

where she saw beautiful

flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness. The same thing

could cause us to shed tears, but those tears would

not taste the same. (Kincaid 30)

Again, Lucy’s experience in the presence of real daffodils—not merely reading or hearing the

word—heightens the emotional intensity because it manifests her previously internalized hatred

of the flower. The daffodils, more than cause her to feel angry or frustrated, looked like sorrow

and bitterness to Lucy. The equivalent image of the tears, as well, indicate the double-response to

the daffodils from two distinct positions of memory and privilege. Lucy’s colonially imposed

curricula transforms the intended effect of the poetry, for how could one share in the joy of

daffodils when they lie across the sea, privy to the culture that demands you gleefully praise in

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recitations of verse from long-dead poets? Moreover, the yellow color of the flowers runs

throughout the novel (in Mariah’s blonde hair, for example), becoming a signal of colonial

advantages that Lucy cannot enjoy. Irline François, in her analysis of the “daffodil gap,” asserts

that “As [Lucy’s] reactions to Mariah’s appreciation of the weather and her love of daffodils will

demonstrate, Lucy interprets Mariah’s benevolent attentions towards her as an insidious form of

conquest” (86). Furthermore, the power of language is such that a common word can provoke

such disparate responses—reactions rooted in long histories of power, oppression, privilege, and

colonial education—that it can in an instant tear the flimsy cover off the deepest historical chasm

between two people.

In a similar encounter with the idiom of Mariah’s and Lewis’s upper-class friends, Lucy

considers her disenfranchisement in a global system that allows the affluent to delocalize her

home into a vacation destination. When Dinah, a friend of Mariah’s, meets Lucy, she casually

asks, “So you are from the islands?” (Kincaid 56). Later, at a party, Lucy observes all of the

people with “names that were easy on the tongue, names that made the world spin. They had

somehow all been to the islands—by that, they meant the place where I was from—and had fun

there” (Kincaid 64-65). Lucy’s anger rises from the fact that just as there was no common

understanding of “daffodil” between Mariah and Lucy, there would be no commonality between

the Caribbean vacation sites of these high class Americans and her home. This instance,

however, cuts deeper, as the people at the party, so enabled by affluence to neglect others’ reality

and customize their own experience, do not recognize that underneath their “islands” lie islands

that have struggled underneath colonial oppression for centuries. Their casual “fun” exacerbates

the cultural negation, as it juxtaposes the nondescript, ephemeral value that the wealthy gain

from Lucy’s home against the real historical burdens the West Indies bear interminably. If the

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“daffodils" shocked and angered Lucy, then the “islands” repulsed her, further revealing

language to be a damaging reminder of the difference in reality across the spectrum of economic

and national advantage.

Lucy grows increasingly disappointed by language’s failure to bridge the chasm between

identities formed in distinct historical contexts. Late in the novel, Lucy shares with Mariah her

feelings of distrust and resentment toward her mother with uncharacteristic vulnerability. As she

shares previously secret aspects of her life with Mariah, Lucy senses “all sorts of little details of

[her] life” coming back to her, which suggests that in her vulnerability she is beginning to open

up corners of her memory of profound, if not painful, significance to her relationship with her

mother. When Lucy’s emotions choke her up for a moment, Mariah intervenes, speaking of

“women in society, women in history, women in culture, women everywhere” (Kincaid 131).

Mariah then brings a tome of feminist theory that feels like a brick in Lucy’s hands. Staggered by

her emotions and Mariah’s incapability to understand her experience as “something more simple

and more complicated” (131), the potential for the connection between the two dies. Even when

Lucy communicates effusively, in contrast to her usual reticence, the gap between her and

Mariah is so great that Mariah seeks to comfort and inspire Lucy with the generality of feminist

theory. A book that discusses “Women everywhere” cannot understand the “little details” and

Lucy’s nineteen years navigating a painful relationship with her mother. At risk of making the

same mistake as Mariah, I point to Bhabha’s insistence that “the postcolonial perspective resists

the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex

cultural and political boundaries . . .” (248). Mariah’s attempted sympathy looks like the

disregard for Lucy’s specificity as an individual, and, once again, the impasses of misrecognition

and miscommunication keep Lucy and Mariah apart.

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After a number of these depersonalizing encounters with historical oppression through

language, Lucy discovers that another medium, photography, might better represent her

ambivalent attitude. When she looks through a book of photographs, the immediacy of the

images strikes her and evoke memories of her childhood in the West Indies. In contrast to the

numbing effect of language’s penchant for historical insensitivity, the photo draws Lucy further

into her specific memories, enfolding her in her own life experiences. The photos in the book

impress her so much that she decides to purchase a camera (Kincaid 116). Lucy’s amazement at

the local intimacy the photos in the book compels her to imagine that she could achieve better

recognition and self-expression through the artistic medium of photography. Later, Lucy admits

that she “had continued to take photographs, but [she] had no idea why” (160). Evidently,

however, Lucy is drawn to photograph simply out of enjoyment and a desire to make more

beautiful the seemingly mundane scenes of individuals hurrying about their business (160). The

importance of photography to Lucy as an artistic outlet is that, as she herself admits,

photography does not demand that her actions and self-representation be totally calculable—

taking a photo is an almost instinctual process. This artist mindset is open and gestural, in

contrast to the harshness of discrete words in representing differing social experiences. Finally,

in Lucy’s observation that she doesn’t quite understand her attraction to photography, the novel

intimates that Lucy has freed herself from the need to couch in words what she can now express

in images. The ambiguity surrounding her motivations indicate not an arbitrariness or

insignificance associated with Lucy’s art, but, rather, a subconscious recognition of the unspoken

power of photography.

Upon returning with the children to a scene of domestic tension as Mariah’s and Lewis’s

marriage crumbles, Lucy snaps a photo of the family with her new skill, achieving in her strange,

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inappropriate, and yet somehow innocent decision that is perhaps her most complete moment of

self-expression yet. Lucy recounts, “I knew that the end was here, the ruin was in front of me.

For a reason that will never be known to me, I said, “Say ‘cheese’” and took a picture” (Kincaid

118). Lucy’s seemingly unmotivated photo of the family in crisis navigates the line between

callous insult and mundane innocence, allowing Lucy to gently place Mariah and Lewis in the

state of incredulity and cultural disregard that she experiences regularly. By immortalizing the

family’s troubles in a photo, Lucy upsets their facade of perfection and ability to project an

image of themselves as they wish. Veronica Majerol suggests in her essay, “Jamaica Kinkaid’s

Lucy and the Aesthetics of Disidentification,” that “The very idea of such a photograph

undermines and subverts the linear and progressive story told by the family photo album. Lucy’s

inappropriate photo serves to expose some of the gaps or fissures that exist within grand

narratives but seem to be repressed or consistently unrepresented” (4). In Majerol’s compelling

reading of the family as a false representation which mirrors bildungsroman-like aspirations of

progress and perfection, Lucy’s photo disrupts the performance, thus binding the failure of

progress to a material representation. Similarly, the strangeness and subtleness, justified by

Lucy’s experimental phase as a burgeoning photographer and the gray area provided by

inequivalent cultural manners for photography, allow Lucy a greater range of expression than

language permits her. Furthermore, while Lucy tends to either remain silent or overreact in

response to her turmoil with language, photography opens the artistic space for Lucy to inhabit

between silence and offense. Thus, she achieves a greater degree of self-expression through a

new artistic medium that slides between the unavoidable extremes of language.

The final moments of the novel contain Lucy’s most painfully poignant reflection on her

disappointments. In the scene, Lucy unintentionally images her internal sadness in a visual

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smudge, a representation of her frustrated attempts to make progress in her relationships. As

Lucy holds the journal gifted to her by Mariah, she remarks that her “life stretched out ahead of

[her] like a book of blank pages” (Kincaid 163). Here, Lucy accepts the gift from Mariah, who

reminds Lucy that upon leaving her position as an au pair, she had worked to express herself as

an artist and as a working woman in the city. Later, in a private moment, Lucy’s pen hoovers

over the blank pages of the journal, then she writes, “I wish I could love someone so much that I

would die from it” (164). Then come the tears that “fell on the page and caused all the words to

become one great big blur” (164). Where has Lucy, the burgeoning photographer, disappeared to

in this final scene of resignation? I suggest that even in this final attempt to find expression

through language that drives her to tears of profound sadness, Lucy comes ever closer to her

artistry.

As the text betrays her emotions, Lucy’s tears create a new image—albeit a smudged blur.

There, leaning over the metaphorical rest of her life, her sadness transforms the one sentence she

can bear to write into an image of her paralysis. Unable and unwilling to reconcile her

relationship to her mother, caught in an unyielding world, Lucy comes to realize her preclusion

from progress, and she unintentionally images her entrenchment by blurring the words on the

page with her tears. Ultimately, she wishes that she could rediscover the love and grace just so

that she could move on to death. Her desire in the novel’s closing moment reveals her

disillusionment with her life choices that once led her to celebrate: “I was alone in the world. It

was not a small accomplishment. I thought I would die doing it” (161). Clearly, Lucy’s

achievement—being alone—has quickly turned to an unexpected loneliness. While she knew

that stripping off all of the weight of the past could lead to her death, she now lives without

respite, without love. In the end, her unintentional artistry in transforming text to image, as with

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the unmotivated photo of Mariah’s family, marks the bittersweet apotheoses of Lucy’s self-

expression.

As the three texts of my study have charted, travel and colonial education lead to

complicated national and personal affiliations for their protagonists. Moreover, disillusionment

with language indexes the profound restrictions that protagonist’s encounter in their search for

individual artistry and belonging. Of the three novels in my study, Stephen achieves the most

hopeful climax of artistic individualization. Assaulted with a barrage of arbitrary vocabulary, he

falls into a figurative void between Irish national identity and the intellectual legitimacy that

seems to lie only in an inaccessible English language. Eventually, however, he finds artistic

genesis in his resolve to cast off his national affiliations in order to reform them anew. Sa’eed,

less disillusioned by arbitrariness of language, is nonetheless trapped by the racial stereotypes

that he desperately desires to escape. Thus, when his English affiliations ultimately fail his pleas

for self-representation and belonging, he finds solace in the blank spaces of the page and an

incomplete archive—a lexical void that provides Sa’eed the artistic space for individual agency.

Finally, Lucy considers the unacknowledged historical connotations of language that constantly

torment Lucy with painful memories of her childhood and misrepresentation in America. The

language of the white upper class, in its misguided search for understanding, serves to remind

Lucy only of the void of difference between people. Thus, even as Lucy finds a greater degree of

expression in the medium of photograph, her artistic discovery does nothing to allay the

bitterness of her isolation. Unsurprisingly, the moments of self-realization and culmination for

the protagonists of these novels of development tend to be uneasy and unfinished. Ultimately, the

challenge for the characters extends to 20th Century bildungsroman, too, which in these novels

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takes its first hesitant steps beyond reliance upon the relationship between the individual and

nation, thus inviting into the genre the development of cosmopolitan protagonists.

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Works Cited

Al-Halool, Musa. “The Nature of the Uncanny in Season of Migration to the North.” Arab

Studies Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, 2008, pp. 31-38.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Boes, Tobias. Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman.

Cornell UP, 2012.

Esty, Jed. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Literature vol. 40, no. 1, 1999, pp. 22.

François, Irline. "The Daffodil Gap: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy." MaComère: Journal of the

Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 4, 2001, pp. 84-100.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Circulating Modernisms: Collages of Empire in Fictions of the Long

Twentieth Century.” Planetary Modernisms. Columbia UP, 2015. pp. 215-282.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 2000, Oxford UP, 1916.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.

Lewis, Pericles. Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Cambridge UP, 2000. François, Irline.

Majerol, Veronica. “Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and the Aesthetics of Disidentification.” The

Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Vol. 4 Is. 3, pp 17-27, 2007.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978.

Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. New York

Review Books, 1969.

Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International

Law. Fordham UP, 2007.

Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. Columbia UP, 2006.

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1The künstlerroman sub-genre of the bildungsroman deals specifically with the development of the artist. I consider Portrait and in relation to individualization through language as a quality of the novel of development more generally. For this reason, my study is not interested in considering texts explicitly as künstlerroman, but rather the less restrictive bildungsroman.