Writing against Empire
This essay was originally published on 16 February 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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After the last newsletter, I received an e-mail from a reader who objected to its anti-German stance. This concerned me as it was not what I intended. The reader did not give me permission to publish his views, so I won’t address them here, but perhaps a clarification is required. It was certainly not anti-Germans. Germany has Die Linke, one of the few significant left-wing parties still active in Europe, particularly after the demise of Corbyn’s Labour Party, and it has had a formidable Green Party for a very long time. Like every nation, it is complex spectrum of very different beliefs. But it is the most powerful country in Europe by far, and as night follows day, powerful countries use that power. I have promised my colleague to abandon the subject of Brexit, so I won’t pursue this argument but rather I’ll be taking it as the starting point for empire in Europe and how literature has dealt with it.
Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy were all maritime empires of varying degrees and for varying periods of time. Far from being in the business of bringing “civilisation” as they claimed, they were all plunderers that brought financial disaster and at times genocide. Literature was possibly the only art to challenge imperial narratives, and we can look at a few examples. The peoples the empires encountered were not necessarily similar to each other: some were more sophisticated as in the case of India, whose white moghuls could not believe their luck (the works of William Dalrymple are advised for this), while others were low populations fully integrated into the ecology of their lands (which some of the wiser European observers considered to better and perhaps even happier than the uninvited imperial newcomers).
I expect that all readers will have heard of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and many will have read it. I personally haven’t, in spite of having read his other works and having intended to read it for decades. I would like to draw your attention to two books which are considered to be similar. Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales are possibly his greatest work of fiction. They were ignored for a very long time, mainly because they were so far ahead of contemporary attitudes, and show that problems started to arise almost as soon as the Europeans made their presence felt (the Oxford edition the link directs you to also has an excellent introduction that puts the work in its historical context). Lev Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, which concerns Tsarist Russia’s encroachment on Muslim lands in the Caucasus where the same mix of cultural superiority and condescending romanticisation of the indigenous population occurred as elsewhere (the link directs you to the edition published by Alma Books / One World Classics whose translation by Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes is excellent and the introduction once again is very useful). Tolstoy wrote it at the same time as a very different novel, Resurrection, which demonstrates the longevity and variety of Tolstoy’s prolific career.
Literature may have played a role in uncovering the evils of empire, but I doubt that people paid much attention to them, and both of these books were ignored, so deeply embedded were the narratives of empire. In more recent times, literature has taken on the role of reminding us of recent and ancient crimes. Bao Nihn's The Sorrow of War, the most honest account of the Vietnam War, is written from the viewpoint of the victims, and refrains from moral judgement. It is enough to recount the miseries of warfare and personal sacrifices of millions in an asymmetric conflict. Matthew Kneale’s satirical novel, English Passengers, is a fine example of this. It tells the gruesome story of how British rule annihilated the entire indigenous population of Tasmania in a period of around twenty years in the early nineteenth century. We know almost nothing about these people or peoples, except the brutal reality of their disappearance. The novel’s plot starts with passengers travelling to the Australian island, each with his own eccentric reasons based on entirely European prejudices. The crew is from the Isle of Man and have few ambitions of this kind, create a tension that drives much of the humour. That is the fiction, but the author clearly did some research, and the Englishman who returns to London in a desperate attempt to stop the genocide is probably based on a real person. Such a person is also to be found in Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Centre of the World: Van der Donck, the tragic hero of this non-fiction work, returned to Amsterdam from the then New Amsterdam (later to be New York), with the express intention of changing the policy on relations with the Native Americans (Mahicans and Mohawks). It was a radical plan and astoundingly he managed to convince the government, who gave him powers to make the required changes. While he was on his return journey, England declared war on the Netherlands and war is never an enlightened councillor, so the government changed its mind and power was given to Peter Stuyvesant, a more traditional and ruthless imperial figure now celebrated by a brand of cigarettes – and who knows, possibly somewhere a statue. The island in question (we’ll forgive the author for the centrality he gives to the modern empire, as it is a good book) is of course Manhattan and the book is a history of New Amsterdam, which in the author’s opinion provided the liberalism that is the U.S.’s better self, though I have always been unconvinced about how liberal that “liberalism” really is. It is essential to remember that evil is not the property of any single nation or people, but it is found in its more potent form wherever there is a concentration of power. Literature has the privileged vantage point of being able to point this out without having to provide the solutions. That, if anything, is for the readers to do.
How could we forget Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who in his youth travelled the world and observed “primitive peoples” and found them not to be primitive at all? If Darwin had read his works (unfortunately not so many did), he would have known that “primitive” languages were actually more complex than modern ones, instead of dismissing them with typical European arrogance as the “lowest savage who uses hardly any abstract terms” so distant from “the highest races”. If “civilisation” had listened to the rationalism of Von Humboldt instead the irrationalism of the market, the world would have avoided the horrors of the twentieth century which may well be upstaged by those of this century.
A lot of books, and not one of them published by Vagabond Voices! For no particular reason, the only anti-imperial books are anti-Soviet, and it is arguable that the Soviet Union was an empire in the traditional sense, given that the imperial country was poorer (in per-capita terms) than most of the satellite states it ruled. I have often promoted them in this newsletter, but I will do so again in the name of that economic self-interest which fortunately doesn’t govern our every action as the “neoliberals” believe (poor lost souls!).
Ričardas Gavelis’s Memoirs of a Life Cut Short is one of my favourites. The author’s wife said that when he finished it, he said “That’s another one for the shelf,” by which he meant their bookshelf where he had kept his unpublished manuscripts since he had become a banned writer. They were however all published before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Another favourite is Rein Raud’s The Death of the Perfect Sentence, which tells of the fall of the Soviet Union in an original and fair-minded manner.
Another Estonian take on the fall of empire is A.H. Tammsaare’s I Loved a German, which concerns the fall of the Tsarist empire and the birth of an independent Estonian state. Tammsaare, who was a social-democrat which meant that he was a Marxist in those days (the term was coined by Marx and Engels, whilst “communism” was an ancient if somewhat vague concept) and a believer in non-violence (quite possibly under the influence of Tolstoy), writes without malice or hatred: intent upon also giving the viewpoint of the losers in that situation – German-speaking landowning class. The witty conversations around the lunch table, dominated by an officious and controlling landlady, could easily be transferred to the theatre.
The style differs from that of his monumental pentalogy, Truth and Justice, which we are also publishing.
Then there is Pauls Bankovskis’s 18, an extraordinary Latvian novel or, perhaps more correctly, an anti-novel in which the reader’s every expectation is subverted. His Latvian publisher had insisted on an afterword which is a key to a complex work, and the ideas he puts forward explicitly in those pages constitute a significant reflection of the nature of a small nation. You see what happens when I switch into marketing mode – I’m as bad as the worst of them. I had intended to mention only the first two and then got carried away!
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, February 2020
Header image: The fourth painting in The Course of Empire series by Thomas Cole; Destruction, oil on canvas, 1835