The Colonial Bildungsroman

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The Colonial Bildungsroman: "The Story of an African Farm" and the Ghost of GoetheAuthor(s): Jed EstySource: Victorian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Spring, 2007), pp. 407-430Published by: Indiana University Press

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The

Colonial

Bildungsroman:

The

Story of

an

African

Farm

and

the

Ghost of

Goethe

JED

ESTY

f there is one thing upon which Olive Schreiner's North American

readers

and

critics now

generally

agree,

it is

that The

Story

f

an

African

Farm

(1883)

is

an odd

duck in

terms of

genre

and

style-a

kind of

Southern

exotic

or

literary

platypus

whose

ungainly

combination

of

parts

and

functions

seems to

flummox

both

classification

and

periodiza-

tion. To

describe

the novel

to new

readers

requires

an

entire

glossary

of

generic

categories,

for

it is

one

part

South

African

plaasroman

(farm-

novel),

one

part

New Woman

fiction,

one

part

Dickensian

farce

(featuring

pale sentimental orphans and ruddy sadistic adults), one part naturalist

tragedy

(with

a

merciless

rising

sun and a

pitiable

fallen

woman),

one

part

colonial

Gothic,

one

part

Victorian

melodrama

(featuring

hopeless

love and

missed

letters),

one

part

allegorical

tale,

one

part

satire of

provincial

manners

(with

a

dusty

Boer

wedding

scene),

one

part

spiritual

autobiography,

and one

part

neo-Transcendentalist

novel of

ideas.

More-

over,

The

Storyof

an

African

Farm,

despite

its

nineteenth-century

date of

publication,

seems to

anticipate

a

number

of

modernist

fictional

tech-

niques. Addressing these problems of periodization, literarygeography,

and

stylistic

taxonomy,

I

propose

that

Schreiner's

novel,

which

is

nothing

if

not sui

generis,

can

profitably

be

re-read in

relation to

the

history

of an

as

yet

unmentioned

genre,

the

bildungsroman.

Understanding

Schreiner's

programmatic

undoing

of

the

proto-

cols of

the

nineteenth-century

bildungsroman

can

help

us

situate

African

ABSTRACT:

his

essay

examines

the

plot

structure,

characterization,

and

figurative

language

of

Olive

Schreiner's

The

Story of

an

African

Farm,

suggesting

that the

novel's

assimilation of an uneven and markedly colonial temporality unsettles the inherited

formal

dictates of

the

Goethean

bildungsroman.

Like

other

late-Victorian

and

modernist

works set in

the

colonial

contact

zone and

fixated on

youthful

protagonists

who

do not

or

cannot

mature

(including

works

by

Kipling,

Conrad,

Woolf,

Joyce,

and

Rhys), African

Farm

nvokes

yet

breaks

the

bildungsroman's

genetic

code

of

progressive

temporality.

It

thus

literalizes

the

basic

political

and

economic

fact of

imperial

time:

the

colonies do

not-in

a strict

sense

cannot-come of

age

under

the

rule of

empire.

SPRING 007







408

JED

ESTY

Farm

both

in

space,

as an

example

of

the

colonial

novel of

(under)development,

and in

time,

as

part

of a

set of

late-Victorian-to-

early-modernist

novels that revise

the

coming-of-age

plot by

fixating

on

youth.

The

combination of

gender

and

colonial concerns

that

animates

Schreiner's first novel

no doubt

partly

accounts

for its

initial

success

in

the

1880s and 1890s and

its

renewed

prominence

in

the 1980s

and

1990s,

when feminist and

postcolonial

approaches

raised its

profile

in

North

American curricular

and

critical

debates. Of

course,

as both

John

Kucich and

Anne

McClintock have

recently

noted,

African

Farm's

open

design-what

some critics have seen as its

immature or

haphazard

quality-imparts

to the

text a

high

level of

ideological

indeterminacy,

so

that it has

been read

variously

as

counterfeminist

and

feminist,

anti-

imperial

and

imperial,

nonracist

and

racist.'

For this

reason,

my

inter-

pretation

will bracket the

question

of

political

intention,

in

favor

of a

concentrated insistence on

the

problem

of

narrative

form. The

novel's

remarkable force

stems,

I

think,

not

from

Schreiner's

avowed

views-

hopelessly

mixed

and

impossible

to

correlate

definitively

to

the book

we

have-but from its

systematic

assimilation of an uneven and

markedly

colonial

temporality

into its

plot

structure,

characterization,

and

figura-

tive

language.

Its

conspicuously

awkward

temporal

scheme

challenges

the formal dictates

of

the

Goethean

bildungsroman

(with

that

genre's

conventional

sense of

teleological

and

masculinist

destiny)

even as it

registers

the

deep

contradictions of colonialism

itself as a

discourse of

progress.

Such a

reading begins

to

address,

more

broadly,

the

problem

of the

bildungsroman

in

the

age

of

empire.

Perhaps the best way to define the age of empire here is not to

cite

Eric Hobsbawm

(though

his

dates,

1875-1914,

would

align

rather

neatly

with

my

argument),

but to

recall Hannah

Arendt's account of

modern

imperialism,

which

assigns

a

significant place

to 1880s South

Africa. Arendt defines

high imperialism

as

the

eclipse

of national

by

international

capitalism,

especially during

the

1870s and

1880s,

noting

the

increasing

intensity

and

instability

of

speculative

and

extractive

modes of wealth creation as measured

against

more

traditional lines of

industrialization (135). Focusing special attention on South African

colonialism,

Arendt

notes the breakneck

growth

generated

by

the

opening

of

the

Kimberley

diamond mines

just

at the time of

African

Farm's

publication

and traces the

origins

of

apartheid

back

to the

Kimberley

boom

and to the

imperial project

defined

by

Cecil

Rhodes. In

Rhodes's South

Africa,

she

suggests,

the "so-called laws of

capitalism

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

409

were

actually

allowed to

create

realities"

without

the

counterweight

usually

provided by

national

politics

(136-37)

-an

imbalance that

fore-

stalled

and avoided "normal

capitalist

development"

(203).

If

South

Africa stands as a

special

case of

racialized labor

exploitation

and

unfet-

tered

capitalism,

its

new mode of

production

also

signals,

for

Arendt,

the

beginning

of a crisis that

was not

just

peripheral

or

colonial,

but Euro-

pean

and even

global,

a crisis in

which the

modernizing

ethos

and

self-

reliant

bourgeois dynamism

that drove

Western

industrialization

began

to

dissipate.

The

Boers,

she

claims,

were the "first

European

group

to

become

completely

alienated from the

pride

which Western man

felt

in

living

in

a world

created and

fabricated

by

himself"

(194).

Arendt's idea

of a

newly

unrestrained

capitalism

operating

outside the national

boundaries and moral

limits of

middle-class

prog-

ress

proves quite

telling

for

literary

history

in

general,

for the

bildungs-

roman

as the

genre

of

progress,

and for

African

Farm n

particular.

The

novel

provides

a

suggestive

colonial

gloss

on

what

Lukacs

describes

as

"the crisis

of

bourgeois

realism" in

Europe,

which he

sees as

rooted in

the failure of the 1848

revolutionary

movements and the concomitant

decline

in

the

fortunes of the

concept

of

progress

itself

(85,

174).2

Lukacs's

account

overlaps

with

Arendt's

notjust

chronologically

but in

its

explan-

atory

logic,

suggesting

in

broad

terms

that

the crisis

of

realism

in

the

novel

is

coterminous with

the end of

the

national-industrial

phase

of

European

modernization.

What

mediates

between

his

history

of

forms

and her

history

of

socioeconomic

structures

is

precisely

the

faltering

concept

of

middle-class

progress,

a

concept

incarnated

in

fiction in

the

bildungsroman.

Arendt and

Lukacs also

converge

in

viewing

the

imperial

era

as

the

moment when

a certain

kind of

racialized

thinking

became

entrenched within

capitalism,

disrupting

the

middle-class

commit-

ment to

social

mobility.

In

Arendt's

analysis

of

colonial

South

Africa,

and in

Lukacs's

analysis

of

Darwinian

and

Nietzschean

thought,

the

regressive

logic

of

racialism

began

in

the

later

nineteenth

century

to

replace

the

progressive

elements of

the

European

bourgeoisie's

project

of modernization (Arendt 159; Lukacs 175).3 Lukacs translates this

left-liberal

thesis into

literary

history

as a

crisis

in

the

novel,

which was

left

without

socially representative

protagonists,

without

the

durable

and

dynamic

plot

of

social

mobility

and

provincial

education,

and

without the

historical

depth

or

allegorical

traction

of

classic

realism.

Many

rightly

view this

Lukacsian

story

as

schematic,

and

its

provenance

SPRING

2007







410

JED

ESTY

and

chronology

are

clearly

more

continental than

British.

Nonethe-

less,

if

we

understand its

effects to

unfold

gradually

in

the

several

decades after

1850,

it does

resonate

with the

displacement

of the

realist

social

novel

by

naturalistic

elements

and,

more

specifically,

the

displacement

of

socially integrative

Victorian

bildungsromane

such

as

David

Copperfield

nd

Jane Eyre

by

the

common

late-Victorian

plot

of

disillusionment and

alienation.4

But

how,

beyond

historical

coincidence,

do the

crisis of Euro-

pean

realism and

the

shifting

temporal

contours of

the

bildungsroman

intersect with the rise of the new

imperialism

and the

reorganization

of the

colonial

periphery?

Few texts

are as well

positioned

to

help

address that

question

as

Schreiner's

African

Farm,

in

which

we can

begin

to

grasp

the

shifts-from realism

to

naturalism,

from

self-made

protagonists

to

environmental

victims,

from

regional

to

global

maps

of

uneven

development,

and from

apparent

class

mobility

to

racialized

class stasis-that took

place

as the

Victorian

bildungsroman

was reor-

ganized

in

the world

of

fin

de siecle

imperialism.5

This

framing

of

Schreiner's text not

only

throws into relief some of the novel's odd

parts,

it also

allows us to

reinterpret

the work within

a

larger

set

of

1880-1920

Anglophone

fictions

(including major

works

by

Wilde,

Joyce,

Woolf,

and

Conrad)

that seem more

deliberately

designed

to

turn the

bildungsroman

inside out.

The

point

of

such a

reinterpretation

is not to

finesse the Victo-

rian/modernist

borderline,

nor even to

argue

that

colonial fiction

was

central to the innovations of the

late-Victorian novel

of

consciousness,

but to situate AfricanFarm within a particular conceptual, historical,

and

generic

crisis

in

the

discourse

of

progress,

and to use the novel

to

establish the fissile

logic

of the

bildungsroman

as

it breaks down and

breaks

apart

the entwined narrative

tele

of

personal maturity

and social

modernization. What

kind

of

novel,

we

might

ask,

can

keep

faith with

the

complex

interaction of

European

narratives of

progress

and with

thejuddering tempo

of modernization

in

a

fully

extended

yet unevenly

developed

world

system?

The

answer

lies in

the narrative form and

linguistic texture of African Farm itself: Schreiner shows us what a

coming-of-age story

looks like when its social referent is the

very

fron-

tier of

imperial

capitalism,

when it addresses

a

form

of modernization

with no national boundaries and few

political

limits-that

is,

when it

enacts what Arendt calls "a

supposedly permanent

process

which has

no

end or aim but

itself"

(137).

VICTORIAN

STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL BILDUNGSROMAN

411

I.

To situate

African

Farm n

this

way

is

to

suggest

a

new structural

approach

to the colonial

bildungsroman,

one that

tracks the

formal

and

stylistic

correlates of both

developmental

and

anti-developmental

thinking

during

the breakdown of historical

positivism

and the

massive

but strained

expansion

of

European political hegemony.

Let us

first

stipulate

a

broadly European literary-historical

claim

about the

1880-

1920

period

by

recalling

some of

its landmark fictions: Franz

Kafka's

Metamorphosis1914), which short-circuits and hideously travesties the

development

of its middle-class male

protagonist;

Marcel

Proust's

Remembrance

of Things

Past

(1913-27),

which

displaces

the

plot

of

devel-

opment

with the

plot

of

recollection and distends its

temporal

frame

over hundreds

of

pages;

Thomas

Mann's

The

Magic

Mountain

(1924),

which describes Hans

Castorp wasting away,

literally

unbecoming

himself

in

an

Alpine

sanatorium;

Oscar

Wilde's The Picture

of

Dorian

Gray

(1891),

in

which the

protagonist's

arrested

aging

process

antici-

pates the endless youth of another fin de siecle protagonist, Kipling's

Kim.

Whether

by

metamorphosis,

dilation, truncation,

consumption,

or

inversion,

these forms

thwart the realist

proportions

of

biographical

time that had

previously

defined the

bildungsroman.

This is not to mention

the

stylized

alternation

between

compres-

sion and

expansion

in

the work

ofJoseph

Conrad,

Virginia

Woolf,

and

James

Joyce,

the

three most influential

novelists of the

era.

In

Lord

Jim

(1900),

The

Voyage

Out

(1915),

and A

Portrait

of

theArtist

as a

Young

Man

(1916), these writers reworknarrative time viayouthful protagonists who

conspicuously

do not

grow up.

Moreover,

they

use

plots

of

colonial

migra-

tion to

establish the

blocked attainment

of

maturity

or social

adjustment.

All

three novels are

what

I

would call

anti-developmental

fictions set in

underdeveloped

zones. For this

reason,

they suggest

an

interesting

geographical

frame for the

longstanding

idea that

modernism

resists

the

"tyranny

of

plot" by

reorganizing

storyline

into more

lyrical,

picto-

rial,

mythical,

thematic,

aleatory,

or

elegiac

shapes-and

that it

mounts

variouslystyled radical, bohemian, queer,

and

feminist

challenges

to the

dictates of

bourgeois

socialization in

the

process.

From

Schreiner's

African farm

to

Conrad's Asian

straits

to

Joyce's

Irish

backwater to

Woolf's

South

American

riverway,

colonialism

disrupts

the

bildungs-

roman

and its humanist

ideals,

producing jagged

effects on both

the

politics

and

poetics

of

subject

formation.

SPRING

2007







412

JED

ESTY

The novels I

have

mentioned

exemplify

a

central

yet

surpris-

ingly

under-explored

link

between

modernist

aesthetics and

modern

colonialism:

the

reorganization

of

developmental

time

in

reciprocal

allegories

of

self-making

and

nation-building.

A

larger

argument

might

extend

this observation

further

to

include,

for

example,

the

work of

Somerset

Maugham,

Elizabeth

Bowen,

Oscar

Wilde,

and

Jean

Rhys-all

cosmopolitan

emigr6s

who cast

doubt on the

ideology

of

progress through

the

figure

of

stunted

youth

or

perpetual

adolescence.

At one

level,

it is

not

surprising

that a

group

of

imperial

fictions

should

feature endless

youth:

such a

trope

conforms to the

wish-fulfilling

aspects

of

imperial

romance and

adventurism. But

none of

these

novels-not even Kim-is

a

simple

romance. Their

anti-bildungsroman

temporality

and colonial

settings

suggests

a

more

complicated

and

interesting story,

one that

unexpectedly prefigures

the

early

modernism

ofJoyce

and

Woolf.

To

pursue

these

connections,

we

might begin

with Franco

Moretti's

provocative

argument

that

the

European

bildungsroman's

historical vocation was to

manage

the effects of modernization

by

representing

it within a

safe narrative

scheme.

During

the

golden

age

of

European

realism

(from

Goethe to

George

Eliot),

youth

was the

master

trope

of

modernity

itself,

signifying

the

constant transforma-

tion of

industrial

society

and

the

growing

interiority

and

mobility

of

middle-class

subjects.

However,

"to become a

'form',"

Moretti

writes,

youth

must be endowed with a

very

different,

almost

opposite

feature to

those

already mentioned: the very simple and slightly philistine notion that youth "does

not last forever." Youth is

brief,

or at

any

rate

circumscribed,

and this enables or

rather

forces

the a

priori

establishment of a formal constraint on the

portrayal

of

modernity. Only by

curbing

its

intrinsically

boundless

dynamism, only by agreeing

to

betray

to a certain

extent its

very

essence,

only

thus,

it

seems,

can

modernity

be

represented.

6,

emphasis original)

The

young protagonist's open

development

is

ultimately

contained

by

the

imposition

of a static state of adulthood.

"A

Bildung

is

truly

such,"

writes Moretti, "only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded:

only

if

youth passes

into

maturity,

and comes to a

stop

there"

(26).

In

Moretti's

model,

the

bildungsroman

reflects a

deep

counterrevolu-

tionary impulse

embodied

in

Goethe

and

Jane

Austen,

whose works

turn

on their

ability

to

reconcile

narrativity

and

closure,

free

self-

making

and social determination.

VICTORIAN TUDIES







THE

COLONIALBILDUNGSROMAN

413

But

if

the standard novel of

socialization

figures

modernity's

endless revolution in the master

trope

of

youth,

then

what is the

social

referent for the

counter-trope

of

adulthood,

that

containment device

upon

which

everything,

in the

end,

depends?

If

capitalism

never

rests,

what

allegorical

correspondence

can

explain

the

capacity

of the

form

itself to

put

the brakes on

development, thereby

preventing

the

bildungs-

roman from

becoming

a

never-ending story?

Here we

arrive at a

possi-

bility

that

remains a bit buried

in

Moretti: that

nationhood

supplies

the

bildungsroman

with a

language

of

historical

stability,

a final form

amidst

the vast

changes

of industrialization. And indeed, the

dynamic

tension

between

youth

and adulthood in

the

nineteenth-century

bildungsroman

often does

play

out as a

struggle

between the

open-ended

temporality

of

capitalism

and

the bounded

counter-temporality

of

the nation. Of

course,

romantic

nationalism was influential in

the German

philosophical

milieu

of the

early

bildungsroman.

Goethe, Schiller,

Lessing,

and Herder

worked

in

an

organic

culture

increasingly

identified with

the national

state,

one whose

temporality

and

harmony

could be

reflected

in

the

representative personality. The formalization of

bildung

as a narrative

device turned

on

a

specific,

doubled

notion of

becoming:

the aesthetic

education of the

bourgeois subject

(Schiller)

and

the

development

of the

people

into the

historically

meaningful

form of

the nation

(Herder).

Bakhtin

codified this

relationship

when he

claimed

that a

true

(and

thus

truly

modern)

bildungsroman

presents

"an

image

of

man

growing

in

national-historical ime"

(25,

emphasis

original).

For

Bakhtin,

as for

Luka.cs,

narratives that

fuse

individual

experience

and

social development require a tacitly masculine and explicitly national

form

of

emergence.

These are

the

premises

woven into

Bakhtin's

account

of the

bildungsroman's

pride

of

place

in

the

history

of

realism.

Such

novels

provide

an

image

of

man

in

the

process

of

becoming....

Changes

in

the hero

himself

acquire plot significance

....

Time is

introduced

into

man,

enters

into his

very

image,

changing

in

a

fundamental

way

the

significance

of all

aspects

of

his

destiny

and

life. This

type

of novel

can be

designated

in

the

most

general

sense

as the

novel of human emergence.... Everything depends upon the degree of assimila-

tion of

real

historical time.

(21,

emphasis original)

"National-historical time"

allows the

Goethean

bildungsroman

to

recon-

cile the

unbounded

time of

modernity

and the

bounded

or

cyclical

time

of

tradition.

Goethe's

apparently

limitless

attraction to

the inner

life

of

SPRING

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414

JED

ESTY

developmental processes,

be

they

botanical,

geological,

anatomical,

or

sociohistorical,

is

rendered lucid

by spatial

movement that is based

on

emergent

national

distinctions within

Europe,

for

example,

in

the oft-

cited Italian

Journey

(1816-17).

Bakhtin

specifically

excludes

from

Goethe's

concrete and

"realistic"

historical

imagination

the

far-away

realms of the

exotic,

the

sublime,

and

the wild

(34).

A

defining

historical tension thus

emerges

between

the "realist"

clock of the

bildungsroman

(bounded

by

national

time)

and the

poten-

tially

unbounded forms of

temporality

associated with

supra-national

forces that

gained significance

in the wake of the French and Industrial

Revolutions.

Those forces-whether identified

as universalist

political

rationality

or

global

economic

hegemony--unsettled

the

concept

of

culture itself insofar as

they

threatened to

spill

outside

the

spatial

and

temporal

borders of the nation-state.

In

the

British

sphere,

Burke and

Coleridge

consolidated this central

opposition

between a

national

culture

in

which

proportionate

social and

personal growth

can

occur

in

harmony

and

a

multi-national civilization in

which such

growth

has no

organic

checks or balances. The late-Victorian formalization of

global

imperialism

thus exacerbated a

symbolic split

between the

insular nation

(a

culture

proper

to the

bildungsroman's allegory

of

development)

and

the

imperial

state

(a

culture-diluting

unit

whose

spatiotemporal

coordi-

nates violate "national-historical"

ime).

We can

expand

the terms and the historical reach of Moretti's

analysis by hypothesizing

that the

developmental logic

of the late

bildungsroman,

with

African

Farm

as our

main

test

case,

undergoes

drastic revision as the (relatively) stable temporal frames of national

capitalism gave

way

to

a

more

conspicuously imperial

frame of refer-

ence,

in

which modernization

itself

seemed

alternately

stalled and

unbridled. What seems

like the transformation of the

bildungsroman

into the novel

of

disillusionment

(with

its

logic

of fixed social hierar-

chies,

broken

destinies,

and

compensatory,

if

socially

eccentric,

private

or

artistic

visions)

has an

allegorical analogue

here: the

imagined

harmony

between culture

and the

state,

taken

as a

way

to

manage

the

uneven development of capitalism, comes under pressure as a new

phase

of

global empire-building

reveals modernization

to be an

unpre-

dictable,

mercilessly

uneven,

and

supra-national process.

Colonial

modernity disrupts

the

progressive

yet stabilizing

discourse of national

culture

by

breaking up

its cherished

continuities.

It is in this sense that

empire

throws

out of

joint

the Goethean

formula for narrative closure

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

415

along

with

the

customary

temporal alignment

between

biographical

and

"national-historical time."

More

precisely,

since

capitalist

modernization was

always

uneven

and

since the

allegory

of

progress

embedded

in

the

bildungs-

roman

was,

in

practice,

unstable from the

beginning

(in

Scott,

in

Austen,

in

the

Brontes),

perhaps

we should

say

that what

happens

is a

shift

in

register,

where

the thematics of

uneven

development

attach

increasingly

to

metropole-colony

relations rather

than

solely

to

national urban-rural

tension-a

reading

of

later Victorian

fiction

that

accords with

Raymond

Williams's basic

insight

at the end of The

Country

and the

City

(279-88).

The

allegorization

of

uneven

development

becomes

more

conspicuous

and more

colonially-coded

between 1880

and

1920

in

the

modernist fiction

of

unseasonable

youth.

There,

temporal

experimentation

scrambles

biographical

time,

fewer

middle-

class

protagonists

can be

managed

into a mature

social

accommoda-

tion,

and

youth

comes to

figure

not

just

the

managed

dynamism

of

industrial

capitalism,

but the

uneven

development

of

colonial

moder-

nity.

Youth,

increasingly

untethered from the model and telos of adult-

hood,

seems

to

symbolize

the

dilated/stunted

adolescence of

a

never-quite

modernized

periphery,

and

thus,

in

a

global system

that

fully

traverses

core

and

periphery,

to

symbolize

modernization

as

a

"permanent

process

which has no

end or aim

but itself"

(Arendt

137).

In

such colonial

fictions of

unseasonable

youth,

imperialism

brings

the

bildungsroman

and its

humanist

ideals

into a zone

of

stub-

bornly

racialized

global

anachronism,

deforming

the

genre's

basic

temporal framework,its essential commitment to progress. In works like

African

Farm

(or

Lord

Jim),

the

temporality

of

deferral

and

dilation

struc-

tures the

entire

novel;

it is

often

ascribed to

individuals and

groups

on

both

sides of the

colonial

divide.

As

many

commentators

have

noted,

imperialism

generally

casts

its

subject

peoples

not

as

radically

different,

but as an

underdeveloped

or

youthful

version of

their

rulers,

not

quite

ready

for

self-government.

But

imperialism

also

casts

its own

agency

as

youthful

and

rejuvenating;

its

beneficiaries are

rendered

young

outside

the finite marketsand social constraints of the Old World.

And

yet

such

youthfulness,

though

it

seems

to

promise

economic

or

social

vitalization

at

the

frontier,

also

tells a

more

troubling

story

about

imperial

time.

Following

Sara

Suleri's

reading

of

Kipling,

for

example,

we can

take Kim's

resplendent

youth

as a

figure

for

the

frozen

present

of

imperial

time.

In

Suleri's

view,

the novel

testifies to

the

futility

SPRING

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416

JED

ESTY

of

the

imperial project,

which must

confront "the

necessary

perpetua-

tion of its adolescence in

relation to its

history"

(111).6

Kipling's

anti-

bildungsroman--like

LordJim

r

AfricanFarm-literalizes

the

problem

of

colonialism as failed or

postponed

modernization,

giving

an

aesthetic

form

to

what

Dipesh Chakrabarty

has called the endless "not

yet"

of

imperial history

(8).

The colonial

thematics of

backwardness,

anachro-

nism,

and uneven

development

thus become the

basis

for

a

non-teleolog-

ical

model of

subject

formation-a late-Victorian

model of social

delay

and narrative distension that

will,

in

the hands of

Joyce

and

Woolf,

become a hallmark of modernist

style.

II.

The

signature plots

of

Kipling

and

Conrad-endless

youth

and

sudden

death-may

appear quite opposed

to each other in

mode and

in

tone,

but from

a

broader

literary-historical

perspective

we can see that

they

are related instances of the

breaking

of

the

bildungsroman,

wherein

stalled colonial

development

and recursive

plotting

reinforce each other.

Schreiner's

African

Farm

embeds

and

entwines these

plots,

too,

in

an

earlier

story

of failed colonialism. Her

utterly provincial protagonists

are

as distant

from the

metropole

as

they

are

sealed

off from the inner life of

Africans,

who feature here

only

as domestic and

agricultural

labor.

African

Farm

s,

as

J.

M.

Coetzee

puts

it,

a

"microcosm

of

colonial South

Africa: a

tiny community

set

down

in the

midst

of the vastness of

nature,

living

a closed-minded and self-satisfied

existence.... The farm is

pettiness in the midst of vastness" (65). Its little world reflects the intra-

European

rivalries

of

southern

Africa,

with

the main

sympathies

attached

to

English

stepchildren living

in

a Boer household.

Three

separate

bildungsroman plots

define the novel's

orphan

triumvirate:

Waldo, Em,

and

Lyndall, young

sufferers who endure

the

slapstick

violence

of the Dickensian villain

Bonaparte

Blenkins

in

the

first

half of the

story.

The second half

begins

with

a

kind

of

spiritual

biog-

raphy pertaining

mostly

to

Waldo,

then shifts

gears

and

gains

momentum

as a feminist novel of ideas and a provincial tragedy along the lines of

Hardy's

Tess

of

the d'Urbervilles

1891).

Stolid

Em follows the lit

pathway

toward

marriage; Lyndall,

a

precocious

embodiment

of New Woman

aspirations,

leaves

the farm

in

search of a

worldly

education;

and

Waldo,

dreamy

son of

the deceased

German

overseer,

seeks

an

otherworldly

education

while

tending

to the farm. Each

develops

outside

the

proto-

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

417

cols

of realistic linear

time-a

fact that

is

highlighted

throughout

by

explicit

commentary, patterned

imagery,

and

unorthodox

narrative

pacing

and

structure.

Sandra

Gilbert and

Susan

Gubar

(among

other

readers)

have noted

that the

novel's two

halves are

rather

disjointed,

so

that

the

protagonists'

"youth,

presented

in

the first

book,

is

completely

discontinuous

with the

adulthood

they

have

mysteriously

managed

to

attain

in the second"

(56).

This

oddity

of

construction--quite

akin,

I

think,

to

the famous

bifurcated

structure of

LordJim-is

only

the

most

obvious

manifestation of

an

antidevelopmental

logic

that

shapes

the

entire novel.

Em,

for

example,

matures so

rapidly

that she

is,

in

effect,

domesticated from

the

start: her

youth

is

-illed,

leaving

her

to

wonder

"if

all

people

feel so

old,

so

very

old,

when

they get

to

be

seventeen"

(219).

In

the

cases of

Waldo

and

Lyndall,

whose

parallel

plots

occupy

the main

thread of

the

second half

(his

Germanic

metaphysical

quest

as

a

lapsed

believer,

her

Anglo

sociopolitical

quest

as a

fledgling

New

Woman),

the

tempo

of

growth

is

more

complicated

and

dilated.

The

novel

opens

with an

agonizing

scene in

which a

ticking

clock

torments

Waldo;time haunts him from

beginning

to end. In the middle, Schreiner

meditates

on

Waldo's

growth

in

a

somewhat

jarring

first-person

plural

voice,

so

that his

intensely idiosyncratic

thoughts

are

presented

as

the

normal

phases

of

childhood

cognition

that

"we"

all

pass

through.

This

description

occupies

its

own,

anomalous

chapter,

entitled

"Times

and

Seasons,"

and is

lodged

at the

pivot

point

of

the

novel

very

much in

the

manner

of

Virginia

Woolf's

"Time

Passes"

section in

To

the

Lighthouse

(1927).

The

sequence-now

much

commented

upon-is

dominated

by

the notion that the soul's private time is discrete and incremental:

They say

that in

the world

to come

time is

not

measured

out

by

months

and

years.

Neither

is it

here.

The soul's

life has

seasons

of its

own;

periods

not

found in

any

calendar,

times

that

years

and

months will

not

scan,

but

which

are

as

deftly

and

sharply

cut

off from

one

another

as the

smoothly-arranged years

which

the earth's

motion

yields

us.

(137)

In

"Times and

Seasons,"

Schreiner

restricts

Waldo's

development

to

the spiritual and intellectual

plane,

deliberately

distinguishing

it from

the full

human norm

of

the

Goethean

mode.

The

peculiarly

asocial

nature

and

syncopated

time of

Waldo's

development

takes

shape

in

relation to

the remote

colonial

setting

of the

farm;

he

is not

subject

to

everyday

realist

temporality,

but

instead

models his

subjectivity

on

SPRING

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418

JED

ESTY

deep

and inhuman

forms

of

zoological,

geological,

and

metaphysical

time.

Just

as

Conrad's

Jim

is

suspended

between

the

high

ideals and

low

practices

of

empire,

Waldo

dwells in

a

peripheral

zone

somewhere

between

beautiful

absolutes

and

brutal facts.

He

grows

up

well

outside

the

civilized "hum

and buzz"

of

Lionel

Trilling's

middle-class

mores

(106).

In

fact,

he does

not

grow

up

at

all,

for

despite

the

outward

elon-

gation

of

his

limbs,

Waldo

remains a

pious

ragamuffin,

an

ageless,

curly-haired

cherub of

Germanic

intellection.7

Waldo's

passion

for

homespun

and

purple

metaphysics,

flow-

ering

in what Schreiner codes

as the

vast cultural

emptiness

of

the

African

veldt,

cuts

directly

against

the

Goethean

formula of

concrete

historical

thinking.

The

colonial

setting

allows

Waldo to

encounter

instead

abstract

existential

concepts

and the

hard

facts of

merciless

nature. Thus

Waldo's

governing

time

is both

more and

less

abstract than

the

profoundly

civilized

and realist

time

ascribed to

Goethe

by

Bakhtin,

Lukaics,

and

Moretti. The

conventional

aspects

of

Waldo's

entire

bildung

plot

are

compressed

into a

single

letter,

a

miniature scale

model of

a

provincial

novel of

development:

boy

leaves

farm,

goes

to

town,

seeks

fortune,

meets

good

souls and

bad,

tastes

new

tastes,

sees

corruption

and

earns

companionship,

learns

trade,

gains

informal

education,

then

returns to the farm.

The

story's

skeletal and

indirect form

intensifies the

microcosmic

restriction of the

novel's

action to the

farm.

Waldo's circumscribed

destiny

is both

determined and

figured

by

colonial

conditions,

especially

insofar as

the farm is a

vulnerable

settlement that does

not, itself,

develop.

The land is

dry

and unfor-

giving, the livestock bare-ribbed, and the crops scant; the only wealth

created

in

the

novel comes

through

marriage

or

inheritance;

and

this

curious absence

of

production

is

matched with a

notably

anemic rate

of

reproduction among

the settler

class.

Against

this

backdrop,

we can

see that

Waldo's failure to

develop parallels

the

non-emergence

of a

genuine

culture or

society

in

this

fictionally

distilled

reflection of

colo-

nial South Africa.

Waldo's

African farm

is-like the

Patusan of Lord

Jim-an

"outpost

of

progress"

in

which

there is no real

progress, only

local realignments of limited resources and arbitrary power. The

modernization

of economic and

social life fails in

both

novels;

both

consistently

attribute its

failure to the

impermanent

and

fragile quality

of colonial settlement.

Near the start

of

African

Farm,

Waldo

observes

the

following

as he

contemplates

the

passing

of the

Bushmen: "And

the wild bucks have

gone,

and those

days,

and

we

are

here. But

we will

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

419

be

gone

soon,

and

only

the

stones will lie

on here"

(50).

By

restricting

itself to members of a

marginal

settler class

(though

one that

manages

to disenfranchise

the

indigenous

peoples),

Schreiner's

novel

empha-

sizes the futurelessness of

life eked

out on the

edge

of the veldt.

On the

other

hand,

despite-or

perhaps

because

of-the

hardscrabble boundaries

of Waldo's life

(paralleled

in

the dank

jungle

privations

of

Jim's

reign

in

Patusan),

there is in

African

Farm a

brief

romance

of

colonial

innocence based on

a vision of

virgin

land

and

unalienated

labor,

of colonialism

without

the

contradictions of

Euro-

pean capitalism.

But these

romances-Jim's

and Waldo's-are in fact

fully

encapsulated by

the

novelistic

structures

that surround

them.

In

the

end,

their

colonial

bubbles of

pastoral

or

neo-feudal social

harmony

are

burst

by

the

reassertion of

modernity;

both

European

man-boys,

briefly

astride Asian

and African

nature,

then must

trade

lyrical

contentment

for sudden

death. Like

Jim,

Waldo

expires

after a

brief

frontier

episode

of inner

and outer

harmony

and

remains

everywhere

a

walking

figure

of

nondevelopmental

time.

Lyndall's separate journey is equally

compressed

and fatal:

she leaves the

farm,

attends

school,

encounters

the

world,

takes a

lover,

becomes

pregnant,

returns to

the

farm,

leaves

again,

gives

birth,

and

dies,

all

the while

attempting

to

throw off

the coils

of

Victorian woman-

hood and

offering

a

cogent

dismissal of

marriage

as a

degrading prop-

erty

arrangement.

At one

point, Lyndall

reviews

for

Waldo the

ideological

burdens of a

girl's

education:

The curse begins to act on us. It finishes its work when we are grown women, who

no more

look out

wistfully

at a

more

healthy

life;

we are

contented. We fit

our

sphere

as

a Chinese

woman's

foot fits

her shoe.... In

some

of us

the

shaping

to

our end

has been

quite

completed.

(189)

This kind

of

education

works,

like the

bildung

of

Moretti's

darkest

Lukaicsian

vision,

by

securing

the

consent

of the

subordinated,

causing

them

freely

to

accept

restraint.

Schreiner

ironizes

the motif

of

the

bound

Chinese

foot

by

literalizing

it,

providing Lyndall

with her own

tiny

hands and feet.

Lyndall's

size

does not

represent

her

subjection

to

womanhood,

but

her

willful

refusal to

mature.

Still,

if

Lyndall's

plotline

is

not

the

story

of

social

compromise

with

"women's

roles,"

neither is it an

emancipa-

tion

story. Lyndall's

precocious

political

sensibility spurs

her

toward

SPRING

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420

JED

ESTY

freedom,

but her

critique

of

contemporary gender

arrangements

cannot

provide

a

public

role or

social resolution

equal

to her

private

sense of

destiny.

Often Schreiner

presents

Lyndall

as immured

within

her own

vision,

stuck within a

closed circuit of

introspection:

"I

am so

weary

of

myself

It is

eating my

soul to its

core--self,

self,

self "

(241).

In

Lyndall's

consumption

of soul

by

self,

development

has

disintegrated.

Just

as

for

Waldo's

metaphysical

lust,

so for

Lyndall's

freethinking

ambition: these inner drives can be

described,

but not

integrated

into

the

logic

of

a

socially

realized character.

Thus,

in

Lyndall's

case,

African

Farm offers a

colonially-inflected

example

of a familiar

pattern

in

Victorian

fiction,

where

female

protagonists complicate

or violate the

masculine vocational and sexual model of

middle-class

consent,

leading

to

what

feminist critics have seen as a

necessary

refusal of

bildung,

a

dissenting "voyage

in"

(Abel,

Hirsch,

and

Langland),

or a

tragic plot

of

self-renunciation.8

The

novel's

colonial

and

feminist concerns

converge

in

Lyndall's

monologues

on the educated

provincial

woman's limited

capacity

to

abstract herself into universal narratives of human or civilizational

prog-

ress.

In

the

following

passage,

for

example, Lyndall

weaves classical and

colonial

vignettes

into an

expansive

transcultural

perspective:

I

like to

realize forms of life

utterly

unlike mine. ... I like to

crush

together,

and see

it

in

a

picture,

in

an

instant,

a multitude of disconnected unlike

phases

of human

life-mediaeval

monk with his

string

beads

pacing

the

quiet

orchard,

and

looking

up

from the

grass

at

his feet

to

the

heavy

fruit-trees;

little

Malay boys playing

naked

on a

shining

sea-beach;

a Hindoo

philosopher

alone under his

banyan

tree,

thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a

troop

of Bacchanalians

dressed in

white,

with crown

of

vine-leaves,

dancing along

the Roman streets... a

Kaffir witch-doctor

seeking

for herbs

by moonlight...

I

like

to

see it

all;

I feel it run

through

me-that life

belongs

to

me;

it makes

my

little

life

larger;

it breaks down the narrow walls

that

shut

me in.

(214-15)

This

global

fantasy

of

males

freely harvesting

the fruits of nature and

culture

establishes

Lyndall's

shrewd

views about the

privileges

of

imagi-

native

self-projection.

The

passage

assumes a more

pointed

meaning

when we recall that

Lyndall's

secret

pregnancy

is

emerging

at

just

this

point,

establishing

a fine

counterpoint

between two

modes of self-exten-

sion. Its

placement

in the text underscores

Lyndall's

restriction

to

private

fantasies of

mobility,

cultural

prestige,

and

social

vocation,

as well as to a

delimited

public

role as handmaid and nursemaid

to male

destiny.

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

421

Lyndall's

sophistication

also serves

to

define her

as an

autho-

rial

surrogate

who

provides

oblique

commentary

on the

gendered

abstractions

that

drive the classic

bildungsroman

with its

"typical"

hero

figuring

the fate of

the

collective. At one

point,

in

fact,

Lyndall

all

but

declares that the

problem

of

allegory

is a

feminist

one:

And

sometimes

what is more

amusing

still

than

tracing

the

likeness

between

man

and

man,

is

to trace

the

analogy

there

always

is

between

the

progress

and

develop-

ment

of one

individual and of

a whole

nation;

or

again,

between a

single

nation

and

the entire

human race. It is

pleasant

when it

dawns on

you

that

the one is

just

the other

written out in

large

letters;

and

very

odd to

find all the

little

follies and

virtues,

and

developments

and

retrogressions

written

out

in

the

big

world's book

that

you

find in

your

little

internal self.

It is

the most

amusing thing

I

know

of;

but

of

course,

being

a

woman,

I

have not

often time

for such

amusements.

Profes-

sional

duties

always

first,

you

know. It

takes a

great

deal of

time and

thought

always

to look

perfectly

exquisite,

even for

a

pretty

woman.

(198-99)

Lyndall's

arch tone

points

to the

bitter fact

that

women

bear a

blocked

relation to a mode of self-representation whose narrative equivalent is

allegory

and,

even

more

particularly,

to

the

bildungsroman

as a

symbolic

device

that binds

subject

to

nation in

a

shared

trajectory

of

"progress

and

development."

Her

remarks

testify

to

the

pleasure

of

making

these

symbolic

narratives,

but

she

seems

also to

be

mocking

their

substance. In

fact,

Schreiner's

self-conscious

approach

to

bildung-a

critique

that

is

both

colonial

and

feminist--presents

alle-

gory

itself

as an

adolescent or

naive

form

of

representation.

In

the

"Times and

Seasons"

chapter,

for

example,

the

narrator

describes

it as

a

passing

preoccupation

of

youth:

"For

an

instant our

imagination

seizes it:

we

are

twisting,

twirling,

trying

to

make

an

allegory"

(143).

This

is a

juvenile

and

male

prerogative

associated,

significantly,

with

that

hermetic

German

idealist

Waldo.

Here is

Schreiner's

irony

of alle-

gory:

that

Goethean

developmental

thinking

is,

after

all,

underdevel-

oped

thinking.

Lyndall's

plot

does

not

merely

parallel

but

implicitly

comments

on

Waldo's,

casting

a

skeptical

gaze

on

his

youthful

idealism

and his

Goethean

penchant

for

seeking

the

drama of

progress

in

all

things.

In

"Times and

Seasons,"

Waldo

conducts a

series

of

experiments

geared

to

finding

metaphysical

and

narrative

meaning-systematically

develop-

mentalmeaning-in

every

phenomenal

cranny

of his

little

universe,

from

the

geological

to

the

zoological.

He cracks

eggs

"to

see

the

white

spot

SPRING

2007







422

JED

ESTY

wax

into the chicken"

and dissects "dead

ducks and

lambs,"

ooking

for

traces of

ontogenetic

symmetry

and

phylogenetic

design

in

their

viscera,

avid to confirm that "all

is

part

of a

whole,"

that

development

casts its

sheltering

meaning

over

the

barnyard

and across the

stratified earth

of

the

Karoo

(152-54).

This,

reflects the

narrator,

is how

the

mystified

youthful

mind

tries to shore

up

the

evidence of nature

against

the

"weltering

chaos" of

experience.

The

principles

of

unification

and devel-

opment,

which,

as

many

have

noted,

allude

quite directly

to Schreiner's

own formative

encounter with Herbert

Spencer's

First

Principles

1862),

provide

a foil for the novel's dramatic revision of

developmental

allegory.

Schreiner thus

presents

allegorical

thinking

as a

passing

phase

in

the

life

of her

German-romantic

boy

hero

but also

in

the

history

of Euro-

pean

ideas. The narrator

explicitly

locates herself in

an era of

rational

skepticism

about

all

forms of historical

or

developmental

design,

whether

derived from

philosophy, religion,

or

science. With the erosion

of these

bases for

allegorical thinking

and thus for the

linear or

teleological

time

of the

bildungsroman,

Schreiner

organizes

(or

disorganizes)

her novel

according

to a more random and cruel form of

temporality,

a naturalist

clock

whose

uneven,

unpredictable

strokes cut across

any

sense of

pure

progress,

whether individual or civilizational.

In

setting

this naturalist clock

against

the

romance

of

impe-

rial

progress,

Schreiner

also

establishes a formal

pattern

repeated

with

variations

by

Conrad

in Lord

Jim,

also a

story

of colonial removal and

frozen adolescence.

The

two novels share the arch-naturalist motif of

the

puny

"human insect": Schreiner's

beetle,

rolling dung, symbolizes

"astriving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing," thereby estab-

lishing

the

epigraphical keynote

for

Waldo

and

Lyndall

in

Book Two

(107, 135).

Likewise,

Conrad's remote

patron

Stein sees

Jim,

with

his

futile

romanticism,

as a

perfect specimen

of the

fragile,

beautiful,

but

inevitably

sad human

Lepidoptera.

More

tellingly, African

Farmshares

with

Lordfim

a

two-phase plot,

the bifurcation of which

highlights

the

work's refusal

or

incapacity

to narrate

growth

or to

synthesize

the

objective

and

subjective

conditions of

soul-making.

Both texts center

on European colonial protagonists whose biographical time is frozen-

yet-accelerated;

and for both the

temporal logics

of romance and natu-

ralism

simply

co-exist,

falling

to either

side of the

synthetic

possibilities

of Bakhtinian realism with its

temporal

mean of linear

growth.

The

point

of

establishing LordJim

s an intertext

for

AfricanFarm

is not to

argue

for direct

influence,

but to

analyze

related instances of

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

423

uneven

development

encoded

into

protagonists

who

cannot

mature

and

colonies that

cannot

modernize in

late-Victorian

fiction.

Conrad's

Jim

fails to

accumulate

experience just

as his

colonial

enterprises

fail

to accu-

mulate

wealth;

the old

bildungsroman

link

between

self-production

(the

hero who

creates his

own

personality)

and

production

per

se still

obtains,

but in

an

inverse

or

negative

form.

Jim

is

not so

much a

psychologically

dynamic

character

as a

walking

principle

of

imperial

time,

a

colonial

Dorian

Gray

to

Marlow's

picture,

since

Marlow

takes on

all the

sad,

sagging weight

of ethical

doubt

that

Jim

manages

to

repel.

When

Jim

dies,

he remains inside a bubble of

super-virginal

egoism,just

as

Kipling's

Kim

remains in

the

neverland

of

imperial

adolescence,

and

just

as

Lyndall

seems to

trap

the

mature

political

consciousness of a

New

Woman in

a

tiny,

charming body

that

cannot

age

until it

dies.

III.

In

all of

these texts

a set of

unresolvable

existential

or social

conflicts also functions

narratologically

to divide romance and natu-

ralism.

These

conflicts,

finally,

refer

to

the

structuring

contradiction

between

the

progressive

imperial

ethos of

worldwide

modernization

and

the

stubborn

facts

of

uneven or

under-development

in

the

colonial

periphery.

Such

a

triple

crisis--existential,

generic,

and

political-

defines this

fiction's

relationship

both to

emergent

modernist form

and

to

the

high

phase

of

European

imperialism.

The

original

magic

of

the

genre,

which

was to

assimilate work

into

a

narrative

of

education-to

harmonize production and self-production- comes under strain in a

colonial

setting

that

appears

to

reenchant

and

globalize

this

formula,

only

to

disenchant it

with

a

vengeance.

In

other

words,

the

original

contest

between

capitalism

(work)

and

culture

(aesthetic

vocation)

that

was so

effectively

knitted

together

by

the

bildungsroman

(with

its

implic-

itly

national

telos)

is

given

form

as a

narrative

contradiction in

the

high

imperial

age.

In

colonial

novels of

frozen

youth,

symbolic

maturity

is

deferred for

both

colonizer

and

colonized in

a

story

of

perpetual

becoming. Such novels untie the original Goethean knot. They consti-

tute a

genre

breaking

open,

revealing

rather

than

reconciling

the

tensions

that

were

always

at

the

core of

the

bildungsroman:

the

narrato-

logical

tension

between

youth-as-plot

and

adulthood-as-closure,

and the

historical

tension

between

modernization

processes

that

never

sleep

and

national

discourses

that

posit

origins

and

ends.

SPRING

2007







424

JED

ESTY

Of

course,

if

African

Farmshares with Lord

Jim

and Kima

partic-

ular

relation between

problematic

acculturation and

uneven accumu-

lation in

the

colonial

contact

zone,

its feminist concerns

also

differentiate it

from the work of

Conrad and

Kipling. Lyndall's

critical

perspective

on

colonial

failure

in

South

Africa and on

the more

general

allegory

of

progress

stems from her

recognition

that

expanding

the

soul's

destiny by analogy

to the

progress

of the

nation or the

race is to

some extent a male

(juvenile)

prerogative. By

highlighting

the

novel's

formal

dismantling

of various

progress

narratives

associated with

European modernity,

I am

suggesting

an

approach

that differs in

method and

emphasis

from,

but remains

complementary

to,

Anne

McClintock's account of the

ways

in

which

postcolonial

and

feminist

readings

of Schreiner

might

intersect: "the radical

significance

of

[African

Farm]

lies

in

Schreiner's

conviction that a

critique

of the

violence

of

colonialism also

entails

a

critique

of

domesticity

and the

institution of

marriage"

(278).

After

all,

Schreiner's case is a

tricky

one,

since,

as

her

best recent critics have

reminded

us,

her attitude toward

European

colonialism was

complex,

ambivalent, and

shifting.9

One of

the virtues of a formalist

approach

to

African

Farm,

then,

is that it

sepa-

rates

postcolonial

and feminist

reading

from

intentionalist

reading;

it

also

prevents

a

predictable

but

inapt

investment either in

the thematics

of

alterity

or

in

the

reciprocal allegorization

of

woman and native.

Indeed,

African

Farm

quite

clearly

resists the

interpretive

frame of colo-

nial

"otherness,"

of crosscultural identification and

marginalization,

in

large part

because it so

thoroughly

commits

itself

to the

logic

of

colonial failure and provincial tragedy. In this way, it falls outside the

model described

by Gayatri Spivak

with

respect

to

Victorian

novels like

Jane Eyre,

n

which white women

establish a kind of

subjective

freedom

by obscuring, displacing,

or

demonizing

a racialized other. Schreiner's

commitment to the

problematics

of

colonial

development

entails the

failure of both cultural and

biological

reproduction

at the

periphery,

which

puts

her novel

quite

at odds

with the

gendered

project

of

impe-

rial

humanism that

Spivak

identifies both

in her

reading

of Bronte and

at large in her Critique fPostcolonialReason.1o

I

have

proposed

that the

trope

of

frozen

youth

takes on a

new

and

more intense form

in the later nineteenth

century

as it hitches

its

broken

allegory

to the

problem

of colonial

development.

If this

argu-

ment seems

to

imply

a deterministic

relationship

between colonial

conditions and

emergent

modernist

style,

I hasten to

emphasize

that

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

425

my

claim is

not

that the manifold

experiments

in the

interruption

of

narrative time

by

fin de

siecle

and modernist writers need

be

under-

stood

exclusively

according

to the

problematic

of

"imperial

time."

Nor,

certainly,

do

I

want to

suggest

that

they

were

the first

to

vex the

devel-

opmental

plot

with

delays,

inversions,

and

other assorted forms

of

silence,

cunning,

and exile. Yet there

is,

I

think,

a

suggestive

relation-

ship

between

colonialism and adolescence

in

African

Farm and in

the

other novels

I

have

mentioned,

one that invites

literary-historical

expla-

nation. The more

strongly

materialist version

of

my

argument

might

claim that these texts

register

a new

phase

in

global capitalism,

but

even

if

we remain

skeptical

about that

claim,

even

if

the intertwined

trope

of frozen

youth

and colonial

underdevelopment

reflects

not so

much

an

implacable geopolitical

base as a

handy symbolic affinity,

the

trope

seems to

play

a crucial role

in

the

emergence

of

experimental

modernist

fiction.

By

separating

adolescence from

the dictates

of

bildung,

modernist

writing

creates an autonomous

value

for

youth

and

clears

space

for its

own resistance

to

biographical plotlines

while

regis-

tering

the

temporal

and

political

contradictions of colonialism as a

discourse

of

progress.

As

the

symbolic

center of

the traditional

bildungsroman

model,

youth metaphorizes

modernization until adulthood

arrives

to

fold the

dynamism

of

youth

into

a

psychobiographical

conceit of

uneventfulness that we

might

call the

long

plateau

of

middle

age.

In

the set of

youth-fixated

novels

I

have

identified,

though,

youth

retains

its

grip

on the center of the

text

in

a

way

that

exposes

the

unending

narrativity of modernization rather than resolving it into a functional

allegory

of the

nation-state

as

the end of

history.

The

trope

of

adoles-

cence,

once

conceived

as

entailing

the

trope

of

maturity

(and,

by

alle-

gorical

extension,

the

inexorability

of

modernization

as an

organic

process),

comes

to

refer both

to that

developmental

process

and to its

undoing

or

failure. The

late-Victorian

and

modernist novels

I

have

discussed

lay

the

myth

of

progress open

to its own

contradictions

without

claiming

a

position

of

ideological

transcendence-without

insisting, for example, on an Archimedean critique of empire. The

novels

act neither as

a radical

counterdiscourse to the

imperial

meta-

narrative

of

modernity,

nor as its

apologetic

discursive

partners,

but

instead

expose

from

within

modernity's

basic

temporal

contradictions

where

they

are most

raw,

in

the

colonial contact

zone.

A

novel like

African

Farm,

which invokes

yet

breaks the

bildungsroman's

basic

SPRING

2007







426

JED

ESTY

genetic

code of

progressive

temporality

literalizes

the

pervasive

polit-

ical and

economic fact of

imperial

time:

the

colonies do

not--cannot-

come of

age

under

the rule of

empire.

But when

endless

youth

snaps

into sudden

death,

these

novels also

reinforce the

notion that

modern-

ization,

like

human

aging,

cannot be

simply

or

fully

resisted from

the

outside. This

way

of

plotting imperial

time's

unevenness--first

in

arrears,

then

hurled into

the future

along

the horizon

of a

singular

modernity-acknowledges

cultural

difference

yet

insists on

the

force

of

teleological

historicism

as

part

of

both colonial

and

neocolonial

thinking

in the

long

era of

globalization.

Those

unseasonable

youths

Lyndall

and

Waldo,

like

Conrad's

Jim

and

Kipling's

Kim,

like Woolf's

Rachel

Vinrace

andJoyce's Stephen

Dedalus,

embody

the

powerful

unsettling

effects of the

colonial

encounter with

humanist ideals of

national culture and

aesthetic

education that

had,

from the

time of Goethe and

Schiller,

determined

the inner

logic

of the

progressive

bildungsroman.

Of

course,

that inner

logic

has

always

been

more stable

in

theory

than in

literary practice.

It

will be

immediately

apparent

to Victorian

specialists

that the

generic

definition of

the

bildungsroman

can be

loosened to include

almost

any

novel

or,

as more

often

happens,

tightened

to the

point

where no

novel fits.

Here,

as we look

in

vain

for a true

bildungsroman,

we tumble

quickly

from Forster to

Hardy

to Eliot to Dickens to

Bronte to Austen

to Scott and

finally

even to

Goethe,

whose Wilhelm

Meister,

many

Germanists now

agree, appears

to violate most of the

generic

rules

invoked

in

its honor. This

problem

has been laid out

by

Marc

Redfield,

who argues that the bildungsroman is itself a "phantom formation."

Redfield's

poststructuralist liquefaction

of

the

genre

makes

sense,

but

it remains true

that

bildung-Goethe's ghost,

if

you

will-has

shaped

not

just

literary

criticism but also

literary

practice

for

generations,

a

fact not altered

by

the

concept's

nonfulfillment

in

any

given

text. To

put

it another

way,

even

if

the

bildungsroman's unmaking

is

always

coeval with its

making,

it remains

worthwhile to

try

to see broad

patterns

in the

process

of its

unmaking

and even-at a metacritical

level-to explain why a phantom genre is such a recurrent object of

theoretical desire.

It is with

this

in

mind that

I have at times adduced a

positivist

or normative notion of

the

genre

derived from Marxist

theory

while

also

breaking

with

that tradition in

seeing

novels like

African

Farm as

something

more

than the

disjecta

of a

postrealist

age

in which the

VICTORIAN STUDIES







THE

COLONIAL

BILDUNGSROMAN

427

bourgeois

novel,

folded in

on its

own

subjectivity,

could

no

longer

project

the true

shape

of

history.

Against

that

Lukacsian

judgment,

I

think

these

dilatory

adolescent

novels

manage

to

encode the

contra-

diction

between

developmental

and

anti-developmental

time

into the

language

of

human

interiority.

They

neither

reproduce

nor

ignore,

but

instead

objectify

the master

allegory

binding

the

growing

soul

to

the

modernizing

nation. If

the

classical

novel of

youth

was

formed

by

the

eschatology

of

nineteenth-century

nation-building,

the

modernist

version

assimilates the

temporality

of an

imperial

era

when

nations

spilled

their borders and when

capitalism's

boundless

dynamism-its

remorselessly

permanent

and

thoroughly

uneven

revolution--became

an

unignorably global

phenomenon.

In

this,

they

represent

the

narra-

tive art of a

new

era,

still

ours

perhaps,

in

which

the

time of

moderniza-

tion

seemed

both

hyper

and

retro,

both

futurist and

barbaric.

These

novels of

uneven, frozen,

or

endless

youth

manage,

in

other

words,

and

against

all

expectation,

to

fulfill the

original

function

assigned

to

the

bildungsroman by

Bakhtin: the

assimilation

of

"real

historical

time."

University f

lllinois

NOTES

I

would

like to thank

Lauren

Goodlad,

Stephanie

Foote,

Carl

Niekerk,

and

Andrea

Goulet for

their

comments on

an

earlier

version of

this

essay.

1Kucich

reads the

novel's

structure of

masochism

as

the

key

to its

elusive

poli-

tics,

usefully

summarizing

feminist

approaches

that

have,

since

Showalter,

centered on

Schreiner's

feminist

heroes as

appealing figures

forced to

confront

failure, death,

and

self-renunciation

(81).

McClintock

captures

the

paradoxical

and

shifting

views of

Schreiner

on

race and

empire

(258-60);

on

this

point,

see

also

McCracken,

156.

2Lukics

suggests

that

after

1848,

and with

the

widespread

discrediting

of

Hege-

lian

thought,

"the idea

of

progress

undergoes

a

regression"

as

the

concept

of

continual but

uneven

social

evolution

gives

way

to

twin

and

opposing

concepts

of

history,

both

ground-

less

and

nondialectical:

first,

the

bourgeois

hypostasy

of

progress,

a

cartoon

teleology

in

which

"history

is

conceived as a

smooth

straightforward

evolution";

and,

second,

a

narra-

tive of

stasis and

decline

in

the

West

(174-77).

These

are the

twin

ideologies

of

history-

the

simple-progressive

and

the

static-regressive

that I will

later

suggest

can

be

mapped

onto the narrative categories of romance and tragedy, the torn halves of later nineteenth-

century

fiction

that

follow from

what

Lukaics

ees as the

broken

synthesis

of

realism.

3Kucich

finds

the

absence

of

class

society

and

social

mobility

in

colonial

South

Africa to be a

crucial

element of

Schreiner'swork

and

its

peculiarity

in

the

British

canon.

4Recent

studies of

the

bildungsroman

as a

genre,

including

those

of

Moretti,

Fraiman,

and

Redfield,

tend

to

conclude with

George

Eliot,

which

suggests

that

Eliot's

SPRING

2007







428

JED

ESTY

novels of

the 1860s and

1870s mark the end of

the British

bildungroman's

classic

phase.

Barthes

develops

the

larger

history

associated with Lukaics,

dentifying

the

signs

of the

"break-up

of

bourgeois

writing"

and the

onset

of

modernism in

the

post-1848

period,

as

class divisions became more

rigid

and

writing

about the social whole from

a

supposedly

"general"

perspective

became

accordingly

more difficult

(60-61).

5As

GoGwilt has

suggested,

Schreiner's novel can be

read as a kind of

limit text

for Victorian realism and for

its

regnant

concepts

of

education and

culture-as

a

text

that

signals

the

"simultaneous

globalization

and

disappearance

of

European

cultural

ideals"

(5).

GoGwilt

rightly

emphasizes imperialism's

power

to unsettle

some of the

tenets of

European bildung,

but

he

argues

that Schreiner's

writing

reveals the

concept

of

culture--associated

in

the

English

tradition with

both Arnold and Mill-as "in its

origins,

nihilist"

(5).

Here he

recruits Schreiner into a

broad-gauge

critique

of

Enlight-

enment

values,

pursuing

a kind of Nietzschean

transvaluing

or even

deconstruction of

the culture

concept

as nihilist to its core and from its

inception.

By

contrast,

I read

the

text as

revealing

not the culture

concept's

essential

corruption

but its

transformation

and attenuation in the colonial

setting

and at the

fin

de siecle.

6Arendt's

analysis

of

imperialist

culture is

startling

because it

generates

an

exact and

prescient reading

of the

lack of

temporal

dynamism

or

narrative

progress

in

Kim that

predates

by

forty

years

both Suleri's

point

about frozen adolescence and Said's

point

about the

pleasures

of its

all-India technicolor

spatiality.

Since the

"very

essence"

of the

imperial system

is "aimless

process,"

Arendt

suggests,

it is

fitting

that the novel's

spies

and bureaucrats are subsumed into the endless

process

of the

Great

Game,

a liter-

alization of

anti-developmental

logic

for which the best

figure

is the

unaging

Kim

himself:

"Purposelessness

is the

very

charm of Kim's existence"

(216-17).

70Of

ourse,

the

intellectual formation of Waldo and

Lyndall

has other than

German

roots,

the two most

frequently

noted

being Spencer

and Emerson.

For

a discus-

sion

of

the

novel's

steeping

in various

nineteenth-century

discourses of

progress,

see

Burdett

24-30.

'For more on the

general question

of

the female

bildungsroman,

see

Abel,

Hirsch,

and

Langland;

Felski

(122-53); Fraiman;

Showalter.

Influential feminist read-

ings

of

Lyndall's

thwarted

bildung

include Gilbert

and Gubar

(51-63)

as well as

DuPlessis

(20-30).

And for a more recent

reading

of the

problem

of women's access to

education

or culture in

African

Farm,

see Sanders

(19-56).

90On

his

point,

see

Burdett; Chrisman;

Kucich

(81-82);

McClintock

(258-95);

Sanders

(19-56).

1"I

admire

the satiric brio of O'Connor's

vigorous

polemic against Spivak-

derived

readings

of Victorian

fiction,

which she claims have shouldered aside other

ways

of

reading

novels,

and

have

thereby

flattened out

the authentic

and

complex

meaning

of the

fiction under

analysis.

But like

Brantlinger

and

David,

I see no real

evidence that

postcolonial

approaches imply political

reductiveness or

literary

hamhandedness

more than

any

other

critical

orientation,

including pure

formalism.

Indeed,

I have found

in

postcolonial

work-including Spivak's

own tribute

to the

enduring

value of

Shelley's Frankenstein-many

fresh

ways

to

grasp

the

"powerful

struc-

turing

influence" of Victorian fiction

on

contemporary

critical

thought

(O'Connor

239).

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TUDIES







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