Thinking about colonialism in Robert Silverberg's 'Downward to the Earth'

It's slightly ironic perhaps that the book I was reading whilst writing my previous few posts was Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth, a science fiction novel which is explicitly engaged with issues of colonisation in it's depiction of the alien planet Belzagor and it's sentient alien species the Nildoror and the Sulidoror. Since any consideration of fiction written by British writers about India is in some sense going to be related to issues our history of colonialism in the country. Even Mark Tully's book, in it's autobiographical introduction, contrasts his own position with that of the British who served in the army of clerks which administered the Raj. It was published soon after he left employment with the BBC, so it's understandable that he might have wanted to have set out his reasons for staying in the country rather than returning to Britain, a situation analogous to those British subjects who chose to stay on in India after 1947.

I've read little of Robert Silverberg's work to date, but from reading Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree years ago, around the time when I still thought of myself as primariliy a reader of science fiction, I know that the best period of his fiction was between 1967 and 1976, when he transformed himself from a writer of competent adventure fiction into a much more 'literary' writer, often exploring themes of alienation. 'Sombre period Silverberg' as Aldiss and Windgrove dub it. Both Clute and Nicholls' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Wikipedia essentially concur with such a view. It's clear from the dates that the beginning of this 'classic period' of Silverberg's fiction coincided with the heyday of science fiction's New Wave. Like Ursula LeGuin, I don't see Silverberg as part of the New Wave exactly, rather they existed more in parallel. In their work, we still have all the old genre stand-bys: spaceships, alien planets and races, lasers, robots, but depicted with a more literary quality of language than most earlier writers in the genre achieved.

In some ways, whilst this begins as a novel explicitly engaged with colonialism, it then becomes something else. It takes place in a world in which it is already implicitly assumed that colonialism is inherently wrong; the human colonists have already withdrawn from the alien world after they discovered that the alien elephants they had exploited were actually sentient. Yet references to Kipling and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the fact that it was a private company engaged in the exploitation of the planet's sentient alien species clearly allude to the way in which the history of imperialism is intimately bound up with that of capitalism, all suggests that the novel is engaged with metaphors for real world colonialism.

Yet there's something inherently problematic about using science fiction in such a way, and Silverberg is sensible enough to include a critique of this in an aside within the novel itself when a rather unpleasant human tourist suggests that there was a difference between the colonisation of Africans and that of aliens who mostly resemble elephants. The problem with using science fiction metaphors to engage with real world problems is that it's also a largely realist genre, where within the context of the narrative the alien planet is a real place. Certainly, any novel which is so indebted to the classic tropes of science fiction's previous era is going to have a similar problem. The alien jungle in which most of the narrative of Downward to the Earth takes place is depicted with a marvellous fecundity, replete with images of body horror and of overflowing alien life. As far as the narrative is concerned, it's a 'real' place. World-building is a large part of the appeal of any science-fiction.

The problem with attempting to map the exploitation of alien species onto real world colonisation is that the victims of human imperialism and colonialism didn't belong to another species, but were other humans. Obviously, there's an equally long history of racial and cultural 'othering' which continues to this day and has served to justify our histories of imperialism and colonialism. Many of the victims of colonialism are reduced to the status (literally as well as metaphorically) of animals, but that's also a historical process, one which is done to people who actually belong to the same species, differing only by the colour of skin, language or culture. Which is why such a process has to be carried out, to obscure the basic fact that we all belong to the same species and that there's rather more ways in which we resemble each other than those in which we differ. That is a little harder to sustain when your alien looks like an elephant.

Another related problem with this trope is that it can result in a form of wish fulfilment, most recently seen in James Cameron's Avatar, in which the alien species has access to some kind of transcendent mystical power which ultimately defeats the invading humans (which raises a further question of why this force only intervenes when things have got into a particularly poor state for the 'good' aliens; if it was there all along, then why didn't it intervene earlier?). Obviously you can fight your way out of an empire, history gives us plenty of examples of that, but reducing such a conflict to the status of an (all too literal) deus ex machina does tend to be rather insulting to the real world suffering of people engaged in such conflicts in both the past and the present (this is why I like Caitlin Kiernan's reading of Avatar: she elides any metaphorical weight of human colonisation and reads it as the purely misanthropic idealisation of the natural world taking its revenge on exploitative humanity; it's still a form of wish fulfilment, but one entirely in keeping with the logic of the invented world).

It's probably a little naive to assume that a private company would just pack up and desist from exploiting profitable resources simply because they've discovered that an alien species is sentient, as has apparently occurred before the beginning of Silverberg's novel, but then as I observed up above, the issues of colonialism are something of a feint, as the novel climaxes in something which, whilst wholly in keeping with the reality of the world in which the narrative occurs, is also purely metaphorical, speaking in a language of Biblical cadence to a yearning for transcendence and a meeting between opposites which is unexpectedly lovely and hopeful. And perhaps that does finally hold out something to the real world: a hope for a way in which we might begin to heal some the wounds left by our history.

Toru Dutt...The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers

Judging a book by its cover

One of a number of books I picked up during the extended death rattle of our local Borders. I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to this exactly. Turu Dutt is not a writer I'd ever heard of before. Something about the cover, Renoir's Two Girls Reading in the Garden. There are whole swathes of art history about which I know little, so I'm actually more familiar with some of the films of his son, but this is a lovely picture. Idealised certainly. A picture of how we want to imagine reading. I like that there are two of them pictured, an act which is often seen as solitary (and usually is in my experience) becoming a communal one.

It's not a bad choice of cover for the novel, since it's a picture which is French and also one that was painted in 1890, about a decade after the novel's composition. Mademoiselle D’Avers, whose diary and narrative voice constitute the bulk of the novel apart from a final epilogue which switches to an omniscient narrator, is hardly solitary - she interests herself in everyone around her - but the form of a diary isolates her for the reader. Her simple language is very effective in creating a gentle narrative flow which carries you along. It's an novel of adolescence, frequently rooting it's scenes in a lucidly described natural world. Mademoiselle D'Avers is a kind hearted person, deeply pious, and perhaps as a consequence misses important information about the web of relationships in which she finds herself when it's all fairly obvious to the reader. Her rural idyll also encompasses madness, jealousy, murder, sickness and death. Which is not to say that isn't an optimistic book, suffused as it is with a gentle and kindly Christian faith.

It's also one of those books which is interesting as much for its author as for its story. Toru Dutt as her name implies, was not French, like every character who appears in her novel, but Indian. Its funny to imagine how this book ended up in our Borders, published by Penguin India and with a price in rupees on the back cover. Both of the novel's introductions (there are two, one for this edition, and one which was attached to the novel on it's original publication in France in 1878) push for a biographical reading, a reading which is not unconvincing. Toru Dutt set her fiction in France, and her other possibly uncompleted novel written in English in England, because it was only in the West that she could imagine the freedom for her heroines to choose who they loved. Even in a liberal family such as the one to which she belonged, the women where prevented from going into society in contrast to what they experienced in the West. Written in secret, her novels were only discovered after her early death at the age of 21, prepared for posthumous publication by her loving father.

The more you read about Toru Dutt, the more romantic a figure she becomes. Both of her siblings died young, with all of her literary work (she was also a poet, translater and writer of critical essays) produced within only a few short years before her own young death. Her family apparently lived for a time in both France and England, her father only deciding against settling there because of the illness of his children. Judging by the quotes from her letters included in the novel's 1878 edition she appears to have strongly identified herself with France and the French nation. She's clearly significant as an author simply because she came first. Author of one of the first Indian English poems, the first novel in English by an Indian woman, and the first novel in French by an Indian of either gender. The latter, The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers, is particularly fascinating because she wasn't the product of French colonization, but of English. G.J.V. Prasad, author of the novel's modern introduction, sums it up well when he describes it as a 'unique product of the colonial encounter', written in French during British dominance of India, a Christian novel written by an author who was born as a Hindu (Toru's family converted when she was 6), a French novel that her father dedicated to the English Viceroy of India. The many layers here are fascinating for the way it inevitably complicates the idea of the colonial encounter. Here in the West (and in academia!) it's routinely imagined as the simple encounter between a single self and other. An author such as Toru Dutt and her various imaginative identifications complicates that rather naive assumption.

What's most fascinating to me is how utterly she seems to vanish into France in her novel. There's the odd wrong note, such as when Mademoiselle D’Avers comments that the count, the man with whom she is in love with for the first half of the novel, is clearly of noble birth because of his pale skin, a sentiment more pertinent to the society Toru Dutt was imaginatively trying to leave. Otherwise it feels entirely of France to me. The novel it brings to my mind is one written more than thirty years later, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. It's a unfair comparison really, since I don't think it's nearly as good as that French classic, but both novels are stories of adolescence. They both present the reader with a seemingly idyllic, placid surface which obscures a more troubling reality. Perhaps that's a good description of the move from childhood to adolescence?

I suppose that I'm fortunate that those two girls caught my eye! Partly perhaps because the novel borrows the form of a diary, I found myself reading it mostly as a few pages a time in between attending to other things. It creates a real sense of intimacy. Toru Dutt is clearly more knowing than her protagonist, which might give pause for too much enthusiasm for any biographical reading. Despite the sometimes dark events which surround the protagonist, and its tragic ending, what the novel leaves behind is a feeling of Mademoiselle D'Avers' kindness.