Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

Part 10 Continued from last week

As we teach these texts, it is important that we situate them within the larger colonial discourse. It is up to us to examine these literary texts as reflectors and inflectors of social change and how they breathe within the parameters of colonialism. What this means is that these novels – their narrative discourse, formal structures, language and tropes, representational strategies – have to be examined carefully in terms of the dynamics of imperialism and colonialism.

This is something that Raymond Williams failed to do adequately. It is partly the result of his flawed theoretical framework. On the other hand a literary critic and a literary scholar such as Edward Said was able to make this connection between European literature and imperialism in more cogent ways.

Similarly, we can press into service the kind of colonialism-driven framework of analysis promoted by theorists such as Edward Said, as opposed to Raymond Williams, in assessing Sinhala literature. Let us, for example, consider the famous trilogy of Martin Wickremasinghe – Gamperaliya, Kali Yugaya and Yuganthaya.

In Gamperaliya, Martin Wickremainghe seeks to reconfigure the collapse of the feudal social order and the emergence of the middle class in Sri Lanka, and how this evolution into a capitalist economy influenced interpersonal relationships.

He of course portrays capitalism as an ambiguous blessing. The author points out with great sensitivity how this change is facilitated by both internal and external factors. What Martin Wickremasinghe is seeking to do in the novel is not only to mirror change but also to define and evaluate it. The second novel in the trilogy is Kaliyugaya and deals with the predicament of a family that was introduced to us in the first novel moving away from traditional contexts and trying to absorb rapidly westernisation and urbanisation as a way if self-advancement.

In the second novel, the discourse of cultural modernity that was initially given shape in the first novel is fleshed out further. Yuganthaya is the third novel in the trilogy and can be read an allegorical conflict between capitalist and socialist forces for supremacy and the eventual triumph of the latter. In this novel, Wickremasinghe has created a cultural space in which the complex ramifications of capitalist modernity can be staged purposefully.

These three novels, then, examine the meaning of cultural modernity in important ways. In order to understand the deeper implications of the author’s intent we need to bring into the discussion the problematic of colonialism and colonial modernity. Such a move would allow us to open the trilogy to more imaginative interpretive endeavors. In other words, a kind of analysis that Raymond Williams ignored in his assessments of English fiction can be pressed into service productively. So far, I have been discussing the importance of colonialism in understanding modern fiction. Our discussion, however, can be enlarged to include literary texts produced in earlier times.

Let us, for example, consider the dramas of Shakespeare. We can read plays such as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Titus Andronicus through the lens of colonialism with great profit. The tempest, to take one instance, is a play that can be examined very productively in terms of colonialism.

During Shakespeare’s time, Europeans were looking for new markets and colonies abroad. This had the effect of making English more open culturally and at the same time intolerant of foreigners. Even as the people began trade activities with people from other cultures, they were also hostile to those that appeared foreign. Read carefully, Shakespeare’s dramas convey a sense of this dual movement. The Tempest illustrates this powerfully. The Tempest has been read by different commentators in different ways. Octavio Mannoni argued that people in colonised societies, such as Caliban in the tempest, suffer from a dependency complex. Roberto Fernandez Retamar saw Caliban as a metaphor for oppression as well as rebellion of the Americas against colonial domination.

Aime Cesaire made use of Caliban as an articulate freedom fighter who represented current struggles in the Caribbean. There have been many other interpretations of Caliban. What these exegetical endeavours illustrate is the indubitable relevance of colonialism-linked frames if intelligibility to de-code Shakespeare’s The Te

As a literary critic remarked, ‘Shakespeare has shaped the views of readers across many cultures and ages on questions of racial and colonial difference; conversely the readers’ experience of racial tension have shaped their responses to the plays.’ This makes it all the more important that we apply colonialism-driven frameworks in examining plays of Shakespeare.

In this column, then, what I have aimed to do is to focus on a glaring omission in Raymond Williams’ writings, namely, his unwillingness to engage deeply with issues of imperialism and colonialism, and to make use of this interpretive absence as a way of thinking about our own efforts at literary re-description and evaluation. We need to think through carefully the problematic of colonialism so that we would be in a better position to assess our own literary writings in Sinhala, Tamil and English more perceptively.