All of this week’s readings are connected by the common theme of myth as it relates to and manifests in culture in order to achieve a particular end. Levi-Strauss asserts simply that myth “corresponds to a universal way of organizing daily experience” (819). We see this statement enacted in the “Just So Stories”, particularly in the account of how the camel got his hump, as the camel is literally saddled with a hump as punishment for his laziness. The structure of the story follows Srauss’s formula: We are presented with a question that addresses two opposites and aims at presenting the solution. The myth’s moral is one of utilitarian virtue which warns a hump will develop from boredom and a poor work ethic. Thus, myth provides a model for explaining contradiction and also is also that contains the beliefs of a society. While all of this is obvious and easily grasped, the most interesting part of Strauss’s article is how he says it is the repetition of and in myth which renders its structures apparent. And I think it is with this notion in mind that a segue into Said’s discussion of Orientalism and colonial discourse is most meaningful.
Said argues that “knowledge [or a lack thereof] of the Orient creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” and that colonialism is a self-affirming, self-fulfilling enterprise that is dependent on imagined binaries of superiority/inferiority, strength/weakness, etc which tautologically claim Western dominance over the East. His main gripes are that the Western understanding of the East lacks objectivity and instead favors a fixity whereby the colonized people are both historical and ahistorical, they (the Orientals) have a “history” of being weak that is supposedly permanent and unchanging. This is where Strauss’s repetition comes into play since the colonizing force is constantly having to remind itself of the reasons for colonization. Said emphasizes the paradoxical nature of colonial thought by showing how there is both a visibility and an invisibility inherent to it-- the power structures are able to be seen in Christian missionaries, schools, and government which propagate Western ideals, yet the ideology behind this propagation is veiled. In a nutshell, colonial rule is dependent on a fixity of the Other, out of which comes a stereotype of the Other as weak, stupid, and tons of other negative things in order to maintain power.
Said obliquely address the anxiety of the colonizer, especially when he quotes Kissenger, “Thus the duty of men in the Post-Newtonian (real) world is to construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity” (47). But overall he seems more concerned with addressing how the West uses its imagined narrative of the East to justify subordinating it.
In his essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discourse, and Colonial Power” , Homi Bhabha elaborates on this notion of the anxiety in the stereotype, indeed his whole corpus is concerned with probing the ambivalence of the relationship between colonizer and colonized in order to get beyond this Western “epistemic violence”, to borrow from Spivak, that Said talks about. What Bhabha means by ambivalence is that colonial discourse inheres in contradiction: the West colonizes in an effort to “civilize” but its methods of doing so are aggressive and racist. Bhabha says that the colonizer’s anxiety over this ambivalence is unconsciously apparent and he connects the sterotype to the fetish:
Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor
as substitution (making absence difference) and metonymy (which contiguously
registers teh perceived lack). The fetish of stereotype gives access to an identity
which is predicated as much on mastery as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a
form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and
disavowal of it (Location of Culture, 74-5).
Bhabha goes on to say this disavowal of difference in the stereotype is captured by Lacan’s Mirror Stage insofar as image is not identity. Said also touches on this briefly when he mentions something about the colonized subject never being able to see the colonizer age so as not disrupt the image of authority. Basically, Bhabha considers how colonial rule is born of stereotypes, myths, narratives of superiority, and the tension in this narrative which stems from an inherent contradiction and, further, how the potential for this tension to be turned into a resistance to Western hegemony.
As you may recall, I am working with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao for our assignments in this class, a text that is steeped in myth, hybridity, and the experience of diaspora. The passage that I’m going to have us look at tomorrow presents myth as the kind of resistance Bhabha mentions. Oscar Wao is the story of an overweight Dominican ghetto nerd who grew up in Jersey and can’t get a girl to save his life. Diaz appropriates all kinds of culture in the narrative--sci fi novels, comic books, classical literature, and Latin dictators to name a few. The kind of writing that Diaz does has been dubbed “post-post colonial” in that it articulates the second generation experience of colonialism, one that occurs in a Western, imperialist country. With all of the cultural borrowing that we see going on today would we be willing to say that there is such a thing as the post post colonial?
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