The Guilty Desire to Appear Innocent: Colonial Imagination

Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European novel: 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998).

Penetrate; seize; leave (and if needed, destroy). It’s the spatial logic of colonialism; duplicated, and ‘naturalized’, by the spatial logic of the one-dimensional plot. And then, at the end of the journey (with the exception of Heart of Darkness), we don’t find raw materials, or ivory, or human beings to be enslaved. In lieu of these prosaic realities, a fairy-tale entity—a ‘treasure’—where the bloody profits of the colonial adventure are sublimated into an aesthetic, almost self-referential object: glittering, clean stones: diamonds, if possible (as in King Solomon’s Mines). Or else, an enigmatic lover: a sort of jungle Dracula, who in two very popular texts (She, Atlantide) is actually a supernatural being. Or again, and most typically, at the end of the journey lies the figure of the Lost European, who retrospectively justifies the entire story as a case of legitimate defense. The Congo, the Haggar, central Africa, the land of the Zulus, the Sahara outposts: in this continent teeming with white prisoners that long to be freed, Western conquest can be rewritten as a genuine liberation, with a reversal of roles (a ‘rhetoric of innocence’, I have called it in Modern Epic) this is possibly the greatest trick of the colonial imagination. [End Page 62]

And innocence—that is, the guilty desire to appear innocent—is what comes to mind in front of figure 29. I found it by chance, in an issue of the Journal of Geography for the year 1974 (nineteen-seventy-four), in an article entitled ‘A Game of European Colonization in Africa’. As you can see, it is a board game designed as a teaching aid, a sort of ‘Monopoly’, where the five players (‘England, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal’) throw the dice, move, buy the various territories (the most expensive one if the Cape of Good Hope), draw the ‘Fate’ and ‘Fortune’ cards (the worst, a ‘native [End Page 63, Figure 29 Omitted] uprising’; the luckiest one, a gift from an ‘American philanthropist’). And I will add only this: to win, you must build, not houses and hotels, but schools and hospitals.

Franco Moretti (2)

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Few things have been so exhilarating for aesthetic studies—and so fatal to their empirical solidity—as Hegel’s marriage of philosophy of history with idealist aesthetics. In the Aesthetics, every historical epoch has in essence one ideal content to ‘express’, and it gives ‘sensible manifestation’ to it through one artistic form. It was practically inevitable that—following the argument in reverse—once one had defined a rhetorical form one felt authorized to link it directly to the idea—single, solitary, resplendent—in which a whole epoch is supposedly summed up. Inevitable, and wrong—or at least, nearly always. Although from time to time moments of extraordinary intellectual and formal compactness occur, as a rule the opposite happens in history, and no system of values has ever been able to represent a Zeitgeist without being challenged by rival systems.

Moretti, Franco. “The Soul and the Harpy” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. trans. Susan Fischer, et al. London: Verso, 1983, pp. 1-41.

quotations of Franco Moretti (1)

最近我越发觉得 Franco Moretti 对我的研究很有用，特别是今后的研究。应该细看他的书。也巧。中午在Free Speech Cafe 读 Moretti，很自然地想起曾经向我大力推荐的法语系 Hampton 教授。果然看到了他也在买饭，一见面我就从书包里拿出 The Soul and the Harpy，其实是今天才又翻出来的。一年多没见了。有多巧。说明我和 Moretti 有学术缘份，来日方长。

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It is impossible to deny that human society is a multifarious, complex, overdetermined whole; but the theoretical difficulty obviously lies in trying to establish the hierarchy of different historical factors. the solution to this problem is, in turn, broadly an historical, empirical one. In an essentially agrarian society, climatic changes will have a far greater importance than in a basically industrial one. If the majority of the population is illiterate, the written culture will oscillate between playing a wholly negligible part and having an overwhelming and traumatic function (as the printing of the Bible demonstrated). If, on the other hand, everyone is able to read, the written culture is unlikely to turn up such extreme effects, but in compensation it will become the regular and intimate accompaniment to every daily activity.

As historical periods change, then, the weight of the various institutions, their function, their position in the social structure change too. When, therefore, the historian of literary forms begins to look for those extra-literary phenomena which will help him (whether he knows it or not) orient and control his research, the only rule he can set himself is to assess each instance carefully….

Let us take the knowledge of state structures and politico-juridical thought. This will be very helpful—and theoretically ‘pertinent’—for analyzing tragic form in the age of


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absolutism, but it will be a lot less so for studying comic form in the same period. In the eighteenth century it will remain important for analyzing the ‘satiric’ form of the novel, and yet be almost totally irrelevant for analyzing the ‘realist’ novel. Or again, a study of sexual prohibitions and certain dream symbols deriving from them can provide many suggestions about the literature of terror and practically nothing about detective fiction of the same decade. Conversely, the emotional reactions to the second industrial revolution will be pertinent to the analysis of science fiction, rather less so to that of detective fiction, and quite insignificant for the literature of terror.

… The different institutions of history have uneven rhythms of development, and in this respect the primary task of criticism is to outline the evolution of its own area of analysis, even if this leads it to move away from or contradict periodizations operating elsewhere. The reconstruction of a unified historiographical map is a subsequent, and typically interdisciplinary, problem. But it can be successfully tackled only if one possesses knowledge corroborated against the specific criteria of each particular area.

A final point of specification, even if the scope of the argument makes it superfluous: an extra-literary phenomenon is never more or less important as a possible ‘object’ or ‘content’ of a text, but because of its impact on systems of evaluation and, therewith, on rhetorical strategies. The phenomenon of popularized science is not ‘part’ of detective fiction because the detective works ‘scientifically’ (which is true enough but banal). Rather, we can say (taking a greater risk) that ‘science’ enters crime fiction by way of a particular semiotic mechanism (the decipherment of clues) and a narrative function reserved for it alone (the final denouement). If we analyse these two rhetorical choices further (and increase the risk


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of being wrong even further) we can say that the decipherment of clues presupposes that ‘science’ is identified with an organicist ideology based on the ‘common-sense’ notion that differences in status cannot be altered; that the ending of the detective novel sketches an image of temporality where ‘science’, instead of being an activity which solicits some sort of ‘progress’, plays a drastically stabilizing role, guaranteeing the immutability of the given social order, or at least reducing its changes to a minimum.

Moretti, Franco. “The Soul and the Harpy” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. trans. Susan Fischer, et al. London: Verso, 1983, pp. 1-41.