Intentional dissonance: Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913)

Editor’s introduction to special issue

In March 1913, Leonard Woolf, already married to Virginia, published his first novel The Village in the Jungle to a measure of critical acclaim. It would be the first novel of only two he ever published. Based on notes and observations gathered across the time Woolf spent as a colonial officer in Ceylon (1904–1911), his novel is probably one of the first in the English language to present the experience of colonization from the inside, and from below, that is, from the vantage point of its victims. It is also one of the only colonial fictions to have achieved recognition within the literary canon of the former colony, now Sri Lanka, in which it is set. According to Woolf himself in his autobiography Beginning Again (1964), The Village in the Jungle represented a way of reconnecting with a people who continued to “obsess” him long after he left Ceylon. Writing the novel was, to him, a way of trying “somehow or other vicariously to live their lives” (L Woolf, 1964: 47–8). It was also, he insightfully continued, “the symbol of anti-imperialism which had been growing upon me more and more in my last years in Ceylon”.

Despite his continuing imaginative involvement with Ceylon throughout the 1910s, by the end of that first modernist decade Woolf took the exegetical vision which he had developed, to a degree, in writing The Village in the Jungle into other domains of critical involvement, in particular international political and economic thought. Leaving the terrain of literary fiction to his more self-consciously experimental wife, Leonard Woolf rapidly became one of the most significant theorists of British anti-imperialism in the inter-war period and as a result his two novels, The Village in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), came to fall into the recesses of literary memory. As Victoria Glendinning outlines in her contextualization of the novel, which opens this special issue, Woolf increasingly became involved in such organizations as the Fabian Society, the Women’s Co-operative, the burgeoning Labour Party, the New Statesman and the League of Nations Society (see also Wilson, 1978). Of particular relevance to several of the readings included in this special issue is that he carried out important work for the Labour Party’s Advisory Committee on International and Imperial Questions.

In spite of the efflorescence of colonial travel writing in the 1930s, including work by such authors as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, The Village in the Jungle did not emerge from the state of critical neglect into which it had fallen until the post-war and post-imperial period. In 1947, one year before Ceylon gained independence from Britain, the novel was translated into Sinhala and soon after introduced as a set text on secondary school syllabuses in Ceylon (Dharmadasa, 2007: 57). Its popularity on the Sri Lankan literary scene peaked with Woolf’s return visit to the country in 1960, as Ruvani Ranasinha observes in her essay. By that point, however, Sri Lanka had entered a period of nationalization, which saw the rise of a homegrown, tradition-based literature, most notably Martin Wickramasinghe’s novel Gamperaliya (1944), and the instatement of Sinhala in place of English as the national language. In 1972, the country adopted its current name, derived from the Sanskrit Lanka.

Outside Sri Lanka, it was not until the rise of postcolonial historiography and literary criticism in the 1980s, and subsequently, that Leonard Woolf’s novel gradually came to be recognized for the unique literary statement that it is — iconoclastic in its representation of colonized people and of colonial space; percipient in its undoing of the homilies of empire, the appeals to civilization, progress and profit-making. As Edward Thompson perceptively recognized as early as 1935, by concentrating on “the native scene”, the novel arguably gave a more convincing portrayal of imperial experience than either Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1990) or E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). It also offered a strikingly empathetic portrait of a Sinhala village community, in effect an ethnographic study in narrative form. As I have argued at some length elsewhere, that concentration on “the native scene” was distinguished in particular by a quality of almost postcolonial “double-voicedness”, what can also be described as an intermittent yet orchestrated or intentional colonial dissonance (Boehmer, 2000: 93-111; Boehmer, 2002: 171; Clifford, 1988: 21–54). Woolf achieved this by adopting perspectives from both inside and outside the colonized culture, which then allowed him to explore and, to an extent, unravel the contradictions of empire. In its evocation both of peasant life and, as importantly, the colonial bureaucracy set in contradistinction to it, The Village in the Jungle can therefore be seen to chart the ethical shift and change of perception required to move from the position of a colonial officer to an anti-imperialist stance. As the Sri Lankan literary critic Yasmine Gooneratne wrote in this journal about a decade ago, The Village in the Jungle, viewed in these terms, steps forward as the “first great work of creative art to emerge in modern times from the experience of local living” (Gooneratne, 2004: 2; see also Kerr, 1998; Kerr, 2008).

The Village in the Jungle is set in the Hambantota district in the deep south of the then British colony of Ceylon, the area that Woolf administered as an Assistant Government Agent during the last three years of his time in the country. The storyline follows the seasonal and ceremonial involvements of a small village family of peasant-cultivators: Silindu, the father, his daughters Hinnihami and Punchi Menika, and the latter’s husband Babun. The opening chapters trace the family’s experiences of jungle survival, courtship, marriage, and pilgrimage, but these everyday occurrences gradually give way to a rising tide of loss and hardship as the family’s human enemies seemingly collude with the jungle to stymie their hopes. When the village headman Babehami and debt-collector Fernando are frustrated in their attempts to lure Punchi Menika away from Babun to become Fernando’s mistress, the two conspire against Silindu and Babun, and father and son-in-law are taken to court on a trumped-up charge of theft. A remarkable scene ensues, discussed by many of the contributors to this special issue, in which native and colonial visions of justice and the law converge in time, yet diverge completely in other respects. It begins:

The judge, as he sat upon the bench, looked out through the great open doors opposite to him, down upon the blue waters of the bay, the red roofs of the houses, and then the interminable jungle, the grey jungle stretching out to the horizon and the faint line of the hills. And throughout the case this vast view, framed like a picture in the heavy wooden doorway, was continually before the eyes of the accused. (Woolf, 1913/2008: 114)

Returned to the village after the trial, with Babun in prison, Silindu shoots Babehami and Fernando out of a burning need for retribution, and is sentenced to life-imprisonment for this double murder. Punchi Menika, the family’s last survivor, is left confronting the encroachment of the jungle on the now-deserted village.

In what does the extraordinary percipience of this on-one-level-humdrum tale of jungle life, poverty, exploitation, a trial, and a murder consist? In a nutshell, The Village in the Jungle offers an unprecedented portrait, by a European, of the destructive impact of empire on a native community. Through its careful analysis of the entropic tendencies of the colonial system, which is moulded by Woolf’s reading of J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902/1988), the novel undermines completely that system’s self-justifying claims of promoting civilization and progress. At the same time it explores the complicated, largely asymmetrical and exploitative channels of circulation through which colonial wealth flowed to Europe, thus also interrogating widespread assumptions about the profitability of empire to both the metropolis and its margins. In the novel, the forces of colonial modernity have barely penetrated the indigenous network of jungle villages, and where they have, as in the imposed system of debt collection, this is generally in counter-productive, alienating, and absurd forms. Woolf’s scepticism over the claims of colonial progress is expressed in particularly stringent ways in the trial scene cited above, in which the process of carrying out colonial justice produces misreading and bafflement, on all sides. The law, which for the colonial regime is a manifestation of social advancement, is for the colonized a cruel and meaningless imposition, producing a situation of desperate anomie.

Yet, just as much as Woolf’s core thesis is radical, so, too, is how he conducts his analysis of empire in narrative terms, in particular through the way in which the centre of consciousness in the novel is positioned. He reveals with remarkable interiority how empire operates to the severe disadvantage of those on its peripheries, so taking apart theories of empire as promoting metropolitan wealth and the moral well-being of all. More incisively even than Virginia Woolf’s 1910s work (even taking into account its recent critical reappraisal), Leonard Woolf in The Village in the Jungle sets out his growing understanding first of colonial justice as the imposition of certain logical absurdities on native cultures, and then of an exploitative economic imperialism as fundamental to the machine of empire.

The centenary of the publication of The Village in the Jungle was marked by a workshop held at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, on 9 March 2013, where the novel’s many exploratory and far-sighted aspects were discussed. Papers considered its colonial as well as anti-colonial aspects: its remarkable status both as a prescient exercise in ethnographic writing and an exemplary Sri Lankan and postcolonial fiction. Across the day the discussion looked at how the novel presents the jungle as a malign force and the jungle-dwellers as animalistic, yet also how it sees both as resilient, resisting attempts by colonialists and middle-men to dominate or denigrate the villagers. Within a more contemporary frame, the workshop also considered the narrative’s postcolonial intertexts and its ecological awareness. The day ended with evocative readings by three Sri Lankan writers, Roshi Fernando, Roma Tearne and Romesh Gunesekera. Gunesekera’s story, which closed proceedings, and has since been published as “Humbug” in his collection Noontide Toll (2014), explored the return to a globalized Sri Lanka of Leonard Woolf’s novel. Indeed, The Village in the Jungle is featured as an object in the text itself. Gunesekera’s own second book, Reef (1994), is discussed alongside Woolf’s in Charne Lavery’s contribution to this special issue.

The majority of the papers presented on 9 March 2013 are collected here, most in expanded form. Together, the articles offer a representative array of post-millennium responses to Woolf’s remarkable novel, one hundred years after its first publication, and, appropriately, in the pages of one of the journals in which its postcolonial greatness was first acclaimed. The responses range from the biographical and bibliographical, through the materialist and book-historical, to the postcolonial and intertextual. Different essays consider the novel’s diverse path-breaking thematic and formal aspects, several of them reflecting closely on its almost ethnographic intimacy with, yet also critical distance from, Sinhalese village life. Contributors explore the novel’s relationship to Woolf’s later oeuvre of economic theory and political commentary, as well as his wife’s, including its radical insights into the potent influence of documents and the English language in the propagation and administration of colonial power. The array of perspectives is not exhaustive: creative and anthropological responses could also have been included. Yet the ordering of the essays, running from the biographical through to the postcolonial, does give a sense of the full range of approaches that the novel has invited, while also offering a chronological snapshot of these responses from across the twentieth century. As the postcolonial era matured, biographical readings based on the contexts out of which Woolf wrote gradually made space for interpretations focused more on subaltern and inter-discursive questions. Interestingly, this special issue confronts the status of Woolf’s novel as a postcolonial text from several different perspectives, including the book-historical and the eco-critical.

As stands to reason in a gathering of essays about one book, there are many suggestive interconnections between the contributions and these are signalled where appropriate. Both Victoria Glendinning and Anna Snaith consider the emotional and political conditions of Leonard Woolf’s life in the early 1910s, including his developing relationship with Virginia Stephen, which contributed to the gestation of The Village in the Jungle. The novel’s sometimes mixed reception history preoccupies Ruvani Ranasinha as well as Victoria Glendinning, while Dominic Davies joins Anna Snaith in examining how Woolf frames his critique of empire. Snaith is especially interested in Woolf’s view that empire tends to benefit only a few, whereas Davies lays emphasis on Woolf’s intuitive understanding of empire’s structural violence. Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Nisha Manocha, and Charne Lavery explore the novel’s more obviously postcolonial themes. They consider, respectively (yet in overlapping ways), the ambiguous appropriation of colonial texts on the imperial periphery; the impenetrability and illegibility of the jungle, which contrasts in interesting ways with both Joseph Conrad and Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s representations of the same; and the novel’s prophetic analysis of environmental destruction. Cross-references are briefly made in nearly all the articles, especially where the issues in common are particularly salient.

Victoria Glendinning opens the collection with a biographical account of the novel’s emergence, and focuses on Leonard Woolf’s internal conflicts, or deep “psychic archaeology”, at the time of writing The Village in the Jungle. She suggests that the novel’s unique features of empathy and close observation — weighed in relation both to Woolf’s oeuvre, and to colonial writing more generally — emerged out of a special time in his life. He worked through his ambivalences about empire, and about marrying Virginia, through transmuting into narrative form his own closely observed and often already conflicted reports on his experiences as a colonial officer. In her article, Anna Snaith takes this biographical interest forward, but also moves it in a more critical and intertextual direction by asking what the representation of empire in Virginia Woolf’s writing owes to Leonard Woolf’s experience and insight. She reads Virginia’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915) alongside Leonard’s Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920/1998), a study for which Virginia carried out extensive research. Snaith points to a significant convergence between the two works and suggests that this may signal a more collaborative or symbiotic intellectual relationship between the two writers than critics to date have allowed.

In her account of the publishing history of The Village in the Jungle, especially within Sri Lanka, Ruvani Ranasinha explores the changing critical reception of the novel, especially the acclaim that it enjoyed at a highpoint of Sri Lankan nationalism, which then gave way from the 1990s onwards to readings that concentrated on its imperialist attitude and troping of colonial Ceylon. The reception of The Village in the Jungle in Sri Lanka, she observes, is much more dichotomous and various than is often assumed in the West. Indeed, Woolf has been taken to task in recent decades for his seemingly colonialist representations of the jungle’s subalterns.

Dominic Davies applies the theories of structural violence of Johan Galtung and others to Woolf’s novel in order to argue that this incisive fictional work allowed Woolf to work through a range of political, legal, social, and cultural questions and that this in turn laid the groundwork of his later socialism and growing anti-imperialism. He writes that the narrative “excavates the layers of structural violence that are embedded within, and caused by, the uneven development of Ceylon’s socio-geographical terrain”. For Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, the surprising proliferation of seemingly illegible books and paper in the eponymous village in the jungle is a clear sign of the bureaucratic rule through which empire reproduces itself. However, the sheer material persistence of those same documents not only in the narrative but in Sri Lanka’s colonial archive itself, suggests that the peasants’ interaction with colonial bureaucracy was not simply through oppressive acceptance, but rather through cunning acts of wheedling and manipulation.

Two overtly postcolonial readings appropriately close a special issue focused on an at once intensely colonial yet also postcolonial text. Like Mukhopadhyay, Nisha Manocha finds the symbolic power of the document, especially the book, as recognized in the novel, significant, and draws out interesting parallels with the instances in which European books crop up in colonial spaces in Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe. As this makes clear, Leonard Woolf can be seen as an interesting bridge figure between two fellow-observers of empire’s encroachment and retreat in the twentieth century. Taking a different path to Manocha, Charne Lavery offers a comparative reading of The Village in the Jungle alongside Romesh Gunesekera’s novel Reef, also set in Sri Lanka, and demonstrates how the two novels investigate the ecocritical concept of externality. She recognizes, as do several of the other contributors, the extent to which Woolf’s work is starkly prescient. Not only does it place subaltern characters at the very centre of the narrative, but it also observes how the jungle reasserts its power even over the colonial system. The collection marking the centenary of Woolf’s novel closes, appropriately, on those remarkable scenes, discussed by so many of the contributors, in which the jungle, like an ocean, envelops and finally overwhelms dissonances both colonial and indigenous.