In our discussion on Friday, it struck me again and again how strongly transitional Confessions is. The moral rigidity of the late Victorians is only intermittently apparent, and the general tone is more reminiscent of an eighteenth-century picaresque than a “standard” Victorian novel. The British presence in India, unmistakable in later novels like Kim, is glimpsed only rarely. Taylor's agenda is also highly ambiguous, resting somewhere between an orientalist critique of the East India Company and a wholesale justification for an expansion of British rule on the subcontinent.
It could be that my tendency to read early eighteenth-century and late nineteenth-century novels leads me to imagine Confessions as straddling a great divide. However, it strikes me that Taylor's struggle with these interlocking ambiguities echoes a shift in England's national character in the same period. This transitional moment is captured in the image of a young Queen Victoria reading galley proofs of Confessions late into the night. Victorians were stepping fully into their role as colonizers and imperialists, but the rhetorical frameworks that allowed them to unselfconsciously assume the mantle of empire had not yet fully developed. In the years to come, the ambiguities present in Taylor's fictionalized account would harden into the jingoism of Kipling. However, in 1839 this transformation was still underway.
How do you read the ambiguity in Confessions? ILaura brought up the peculiar melding of formalism and historicism remarked on by Poovey. To what extent does the Thug Archive shed light on Confessions? How does the novel reflect other Victorian anxieties, such as the rise of a commercial middle class and the emergence of professional criminals? What does the novel suggest about Victorian punishments such as transportation and imprisonment? Does the novel reflect concerns about British power at home? And lastly, is the novel a veiled criticism of the British presence in India or a ready justification for expansion?
Patrick, I have also been attempting to place Confessions in a comfortable chronology of imperialism in British literature, but, unlike you, I have not yet been satisfied with any of my imagined trajectories.
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking of Mansfield Park, which was, of course, written over 20 years earlier, where slavery and imperialism are so buried within the domestic novel as to almost be invisible. Counter-intuitively, however,I feel like theorizing Austen's "position" on imperialism within her novel seems more possible than reaching any conclusions on Taylor's views based on Confessions. Perhaps this is because the lack of detail in Austen leaves the question open to interpretation, whereas the excessive detail in Taylor (even in the abridged edition!) gives us too much information to make room for interpretation. And, as we learned earlier this semester, literary people find more pleasure in the open question than the overly explained.
Piggy-backing on Rose's comment, if Anderson associates the "open question" with a preference for radical politics and the "overly explained" with less radical politics(the form is more easily disciplined, or, thinking of Taylor's two jobs, administered), what do we do with a text like Thug in which the explanation is so excessive as to refuse any kind of discipline? And then where does this leave us if the thrust of an emerging detective methodology is the acquisition of exhaustive local knowledge (from clues to glossaries to trees)? Back, I suppose, at Patrick's original question about a tipping point.
ReplyDeletePatrick, I don't know that I entirely agree that "The British presence in India, unmistakable in later novels like Kim, is glimpsed only rarely" in Confessions of a Thug: it seems to me that the fact that the (admittedly not all-that-intrusive) narrative frame involves Ameer Ali telling this story to an Englishman in an English (I think?) jail means that we are always aware of the colonial presence through the narrator who is theoretically the one telling his story to us. That being said, I, like Rose, don't really know what to make of this colonial presence that I identify. We talked about what the appeal of this text might have been at the time it was published, and while we came up with lots of possible answers, I still don't know into what kind of cultural narrative it can fit.
ReplyDeleteRose, I'm wondering if the reason you find it easier to place Mansfield Park within a chronology of imperialism is not just that it limits the information for you to interpret, but is also that the imperial actors (for lack of a better phrase) and their activities are more present, or at least more readily decodable: Sir Thomas is actively involved in the abuses of imperialism, and we are left to interpret whether or not Austen is critiquing that. With Confessions of a Thug, the difficulty seems to be in interpreting Ameer Ali (and, by extension, Thuggee): is he representative of a chaotic and sensual Colonial Other? or is he a family man administering a group that brings order to an undisciplined country? Or, from the other end of the stick, were Victorian readers consciously drawn to this book because it's hero seems like an administrator of the empire, or was its appeal more as a straightforward adventure story?
It appears that rather than answering questions other people have raised, I've just piled on more, so I'll pass the baton to someone else.
Ameer Ali is prolix, but I don't think he "over-explains." There's another tipping point: the one where so many explanations are provided that interpretation becomes possible, even necessary. Ali - for me - "contains multitudes." He commits atrocious acts, but he cares deeply for his wife and children and father; he's a brave soldier, but he cheats his commander; every chance acquaintance is a potential bunji, but he spends a week gazing dreamily at the sea! It's really difficult for me to read any consistent overt or covert ideology in the novel. The presence of the Sahib is minimal, what he says is boring, and even he seems somewhat taken with Ali; Ali kills hundreds of people, but does as much any person, realistically, would do uphold his own sense of honor; the book exoticizes India, and at the same time tells a story that conforms to English novelistic traditions, and attains (in Ali's accidental killing of his sister) a tragic grandeur that would be familiar to Victorian readers. Apart from the textual politics we can try to parse, I think we can spend time talking about the character of Ameer Ali as a complicated subjectivity that changes (or doesn't) over time. In fact, the heavily-populated, episodic plot, much of which readers might forget even as they're reading the book, renders very effectively, I think, a sense of the passage of time.
ReplyDeleteAlyssa brings up a good point about the framing narrative as personifying the British presence in India, but I wonder what happens when we distinguish the narrator from Meadows Taylor. The introduction to the book (or at least my copy of it!) not only sets up the novel as "almost all true" but also quantifies and qualifies the available data on Thuggee. Unusually for a Victorian novel, it names specific dates, places and people (including "Captain (now Colonel) Sleeman"); it strikes a professional tone, and even includes a 'table' delineating how the thugs have been dealt with by 'the department'. This section ncludes Meadows Taylor's justification for writing the book (his long experience in India) and is signed "London, July, 1839 M.T."
ReplyDeleteThe actual narrator of the rest of the book, however, is more obscure. Unlike that other, famous narrator-biographer to whom every detective story narrator must be compared - he is known not by his last name but by the general term "Sahib," he is not described (unlike Ameer Ali), and his comments on the narrative are generally limited to bland moralizing. After the introduction, the English are seen only through Ameer's eyes - several times he describes them (as being jolly, enjoying hunting, drinking, etc) in a way that elicits no commentary from the narrator. The last words are not from the English narrator, but from "Ameer Ali, the Thug" - the framing narrative is, in a sense, incomplete: although the story begins in London, with Meadows Taylor's justification, it ends in India.
I haven't read the Poovey article that Laura mentioned in her paper, so I'm not sure what she has to say about this, but I think its possible to think of the "Englishness" of the novel as lying beyond or around the framing narrative.
I can tell from these posts that I talked a lot about the Poovey article - which I did like. While doing a terrific job of historically situating Thug, it really used the novel as a test case for a critical exercise examining the usefulness and dangers of historicisms. I would also recommend reading Matthew Kaiser's article "Facing a Mirror: Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and the Politics of Imperial Self-Incrimination" for a different take on Poovey's thesis. If Poovey, after much playing around with different possibilities, ultimately privileges a reading of Thug that sees it as, well, hegemonically subversive (using the patina of imperial admiration to allow severe criticism of the British project - or at least strategy - in India), the Kaiser article sees the text as subversively hegemonic, using criticism of certain aspects of empire as a way to add credibility to its strategy of consolidating and bolstering imperial power.
ReplyDeleteI've had a hard time coming up with something to write here, both because like others, I found "Confessions" tough to analyze, and because I was sick on Friday and so missed out on a discussion I hoped would illuminate the reading for me. I don't know if what I'm going to say will make any sense, or be relevant to the discussion, but I'll give it a shot.
ReplyDeleteJust to return to DeQuincey's 1854 postscript for a moment: I was struck by how that essay lavishes so much attention on the imagination of Williams as a specific type of criminal, unique in his thirst for blood, a nearly alien being; though able to pass as human (tricking women into thinking him trustworthy), his nature and even his body are remarkable one, as "inscrutable" as a tiger. He's a strictly closed-off individual, however; his isolation from other people and from social institutions adds to his "glamour" and danger as criminal.
In "Confessions," in contrast, the star criminal is quite different. As Michael noted, Ali "contains multitudes"; he is a fearsome murderer, but also a family man capable of reflection, empathy, etc. Furthermore, far from being isolated, Ali is a single man acting within a much larger criminal organization. As I was reading "Confessions," I was thinking about Ali as confessing to his crimes as an individual, but also "on behalf of" the much vaster organized crime of Thuggee. This raised a new question for me: what was so captivating about the idea of a large, orderly criminal enterprise, with its own "laws," traditions and institutions, in the context of detective fiction? To me, it seems as if the increasing development and sophistication of police organizations (detectives/surveilers/etc), both domestically and through the East India Company, created a need or a desire, on the part of the police, for more advanced, organized criminals to detect, or even better, a criminal institution, in order to justify and reinforce their own expansion.
I want to second Laura's endorsement of the Poovey article. She mentions a contemporary review that likens Thuggee as portrayed by Meadows Taylor to Irish Ribandism, concluding that humans without Christianity (specifically Protestant Christianity--not Catholicism), are innately depraved. Poovey's interest is in the reviewer's conflation of narrator and author, as well as in the suggestion that Taylor portrays Ali too sympathetically, thus muddling the presumed moral message of the novel. Poovey doesn't, however, discuss the significance of the review's central comparison.
ReplyDeleteWhile we briefly discussed the parallels between Thuggee and other organized crime rings in the Empire, I don't think we discussed Ribandism specifically. The glaring difference between that movement and Taylor's version of Thuggee is that Ribandism was an overtly political movement, formed in resistance to British rule. Thuggee predates the British presence in India and whether or not Taylor portrays the organization with subversive sympathy, he certainly doesn't depict it as actively or explicitly resisting or responding to the British presence, except as an occasional obstacle.
So while Thuggee might be read here as exemplary of the disorder or chaos of India and thus an implicit endorsement of the structure of Imperialism, Taylor does not portray the organization as a deliberate threat to Empire.
I guess I want to second's Laura's reading of the Kaiser article (!). Her point about Kaiser's subversive hegemony argument resonates with what I was trying to get at in seminar: who benefits from the representation of the Sahib as a patient, lenient, openly curious figure? An English police force trying to convince a reluctant English public that they were not a standing army or a "spy police" but rather knowledge-gatherers and administrators. While the "discovery" of Thuggee does not pre-date British presence in India, it does pre-date the transition of that presence from the East India Company to the governing body. So, in a way, the British in India are in a similar position to the emerging police in England -- trying to make an argument about their ability to govern.
ReplyDeleteTo Helen's point: early treatises (late 18th century) I combed for signs of embryonic police/detective life were all "Treatises on Crimes in the Metropolis,." So, yes, existence of crime creates the demand for the police; but as you point out, the existence of the police creates a demand for criminals, indeed perhaps a certain kind of criminal (terrorists?). If we build a bunch of prisons, we need to fill them.
@ Lindsay -- it would be FASCINATING to do some kind of reading of the role/representation of the Irish in the English imagination of the police, from Peel's days setting up the Royal Irish Constabulary to the "Fenian threat" enabling the development of special detective forces at Scotland Yard towards the end of the 19th century.