Leonard Woolf and the book in the jungle

Abstract

This article considers the representation of the book in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). The depiction of the book or the act of writing in the colonial context as an “event” — inspiring awe or scepticism in the illiterate native or painfully/pleasantly reminiscent of the colonial administrator’s life at “home” — is certainly not a fictional scene exclusive to Woolf. However, differently from his contemporaries, Woolf responds to the book in colonial Sri Lanka not as shorthand for modernity, but as colonial fetish. A century since its publication, it is possible — and perhaps profitable — to discuss The Village in the Jungle beyond its marked affiliations or stark disassociations with the fictions of Woolf’s peers including Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and William Butler Yeats to name a few; rather, we can afford to take the longer view of his work. By way of gleaning particular insight into Woolf’s treatment of the book in the jungle, this article will invoke the fiction of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, staunch anti-imperialist and also fierce critic of post-independence corruption, whose novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) were published in the final decade of Woolf’s life. Woolf’s affiliations with Achebe might therefore be referenced as an index of the radicality of his anti-colonial sympathies.

In the early pages of The Village in the Jungle (1913), the narrator discloses the process by which Babehami, the man who makes it his personal task psychologically and economically to destroy Silindu and his family, becomes headman of the village of Beddagama:

Babehami had been made a headman because he was the only man in the village who could write his name. He was a very small man, and was known as Punchi Arachchi (the little Arachchi). Years ago, when a young man, he had gone on a pilgrimage to the vihare at Medamahanuwara. He had fallen ill there, and had stayed for a month or two in the priest’s pansala. The priest had taught him his letters, and he had learnt enough to be able to write his own name. (2008: 15) ¹

In this description, Woolf’s narrator does not give any indication that Babehami is especially clever. He does not excel in his acquisition of the alphabet: he can only write his name. Physically, he is acknowledged as “small”, and there is a suggestion that he is susceptible to sickness. Lacking both intellectual and physical prowess, this brief account depicts him as an unlikely leader. Relative to his influence in the village, it appears that Babehami acquires his title with little process. It is only by chance, after all, that Babehami learns his letters and in this respect, entirely arbitrary that he is headman of Beddagama. As the narrative progresses and readers learn the extent to which Babehami abuses his governing power for monetary gain and to settle personal grievances, it appears unjust — if not absurd — that the ability to write should be the sole criterion in determining the village’s headman.

In the first chapter of his colonial-era novel, Leonard Woolf, the Assistant Government Agent (1904–1911) of Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, manages to reveal the failure of the British colony’s “meritocratic” government, and perhaps most interestingly, and what will concern this article in particular, the inappropriately revered and fetishized role of writing and hence the book in colonial Ceylon. Why should the ability to write and to master books form a measure of authority in the village of Beddagama and what, then, must be the consequences for the illiterate? Illiteracy, in this context, might also refer to the inability to “read” and therefore participate in imperial structures of knowledge and power. What can this criticism of the value attributed to writing under colonial rule mean for Woolf the colonial administrator and Woolf the writer?

A century since its publication, it is possible — and perhaps profitable — to discuss The Village in the Jungle beyond its marked affiliations or stark disassociations with the fictions of Woolf’s peers including Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, and William Butler Yeats to name a few; rather, we can afford to take the longer view of his work. By way of gleaning particular insight into Woolf’s treatment of the book in the jungle, this article will invoke the fiction of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, staunch anti-imperialist and also fierce critic of post-independence corruption, whose novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) were published in the final decade of Woolf’s life. And yet, in order to make this trans-historical comparison, we must acknowledge the foundational example of Woolf’s contemporary Joseph Conrad, whose conception of the book in Heart of Darkness (1902) provoked responses in both Woolf and Achebe that, though differently historically and culturally placed, serve to draw them together in compelling ways.

Achebe’s concept of the “book” as colloquial shorthand for writing or book-learning can be fruitfully applied to Woolf’s novel. Asako Nakai has identified Achebe’s use of book as “an abstract noun” referring to knowledge that is especially acquired through “European formal education” (2000: 6). It is worth noting that Achebe often deploys the term in a pejorative sense; it is used in contrast to more traditional, pre-colonial methods of teaching and learning in the Igbo home. As a critical catch-all term for European imposed or, at the very least, inflected acts of reading and writing, Achebe’s book is a useful critical term for approaching scenes of reading and writing in The Village in the Jungle. To be sure, the history of literacy in Sri Lanka is not the same as Nigeria; what remains important for the following comparison, however, is the appearance of writing in the jungle and its perceived entanglement in the colonial order. Moreover, this is not a question of Silindu’s illiteracy as one of the marginalized in his community, as is the case for the protagonist in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), as one example. While Woolf is certainly cognizant of the gulf between the village dwellers and the city merchants, he is more interested in offering a critique of the book as the introduction of a system of rule and an orientation to the world that is insensitive to, and incompatible with, pre-colonial Ceylon. This reference to Achebe represents one new point of entry into the debate over Woolf’s colonial and/or anti-colonial fiction: a conversation which has preoccupied readers and critics since the novel’s publication over 100 years ago.

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That the appearance of the written word or the act of writing could be constituted as an “event” in the colonial context — inspiring awe or scepticism in the illiterate native or being painfully/pleasantly reminiscent of the colonial administrator’s life at “home” — is certainly not a thought exclusive to Woolf. Henry Louis Gates has discerned a scene written frequently into the Anglo–African tradition whereby the illiterate African or African American is confronted by the book that refuses to divulge its secrets to him, but “talks” to the white man. ² In the colonial context, Homi Bhabha has identified famously as a trope the “scenario, played out in the wild and wordless wastes of colonial India, Africa, the Caribbean, of the sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book” (1985: 144). Bhabha reads the English book as “an insignia of colonial authority and a signifier of colonial desire and discipline” (1985: 144). However, insofar as the book is always “repeated, translated, misread, displaced” as it appears in colonial or postcolonial fiction, it emerges uncertainly and thus “no longer simply commands authority” (1985: 144; 155). From this perspective, its discovery contains within it the latent possibility of critique.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), which functions as an originary example in Bhabha’s argument, preceded The Village in the Jungle by some years. Heart of Darkness impressed both Leonard and his wife Virginia, and its traces can be found in “Pearls and Swine” (1921) and The Voyage Out (1915), respectively, as Anna Snaith (2015) discusses. There is a remarkable moment in Heart of Darkness when Marlow, perhaps at the height of his bewilderment in the centre of Africa, and on his journey to save the infamous Kurtz, discovers a book. En route to the Inner Station, Marlow encounters a message of warning written in English outside an abandoned hut. After a cursory inspection he determines that a white man lived there recently. A rudimentary table — and a book — have been left behind. Marlow describes the book, An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship, as “an extraordinary find” (1902: 99).

To be sure, Marlow responds to An Inquiry with enthusiasm:

I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. (1902: 99; emphasis added)

According to Bhabha, the book, “as a signifier of authority, […] acquires its meaning after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic image or identity” (1985: 149–50). Marlow’s appreciation for Towson’s book, which he admits to be drab reading material, is that it seems to recall — but also invent — a form of English discipline in the context of its appearance in Africa. Bhabha elaborates, “the acknowledgement of authority depends upon the immediate — unmediated — visibility of its rules of recognition as the unmistakable reference of historical necessity” (1985: 152). According to Bhabha’s line of reasoning, then, the book represents modernity. An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship is “the book of work that turns delirium into the discourse of civil address” (1985: 148). Its authoritative status becomes the reality against which Marlow measures his present experience in the Congo and finds it wanting.

It is worth pointing out that Bhabha’s reading of An Inquiry erroneously suggests that Marlow’s Africa is bereft of text. The Congo is emphatically not wordless: while the African voice is almost completely silenced, Towson’s book is not the only text either generated in or translated to the Congo. Moreover, Marlow does not seem to celebrate the unlikely presence of the book because it is English; he refers to the author of the “cipher” on the book’s pages as “English” rather than Towson. Marlow learns shortly thereafter that the cipher is, in fact, the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and we might consider further its professed significance as an “English book”, for the Russian text inscribed on the margins of Towson’s “illustrative diagrams” and “tables of figures” unsettles the apparent Englishness of what Bhabha argues is a pre-eminently “English” text.

If we consider Marlow’s enthusiasm for An Inquiry in relation especially to the other texts he encounters, including the inane warning sign outside the hut or Kurtz’s infamous report on behalf of the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, his enthusiasm seems to be the result of a momentary break in one discursive universe — the jungle and the pilgrims and those texts that inscribe them — and the opening up of another. The copy, “sixty years old”, and with its references to “chains and purchases”, represents an entirely distinct referential world from Marlow’s experience in the Congo (1902: 99). Crucially, An Inquiry is presented as the antithesis to Kurtz’s report: it is replete with “practical hints”. That is, the “breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle” can be measured and recorded with exactitude while the metaphorical “breaking strain”, of Kurtz, and the imperial project more generally, must be inferred from confounding footnotes scrawled in “an unsteady hand” (1902: 118).

Despite the fact that Bhabha has strategically misread the Englishness of this English book and omitted discussion of the other texts that can be found in Conrad’s Africa, this does not diminish the sense that Marlow’s encounter with the English book, or book, is a palpable event, and one that occurs frequently in colonial and postcolonial fiction. Asako Nakai’s study The English Book and Its Marginalia is devoted to probing those texts that have “recognized the presence of ‘the book’ since Conrad (2000: 3). Brian Richardson (2011) has also traced the afterlife of the scene of Marlow’s discovery of An Inquiry through to novels that explore specifically the incongruous presence of the book in the jungle — though The Village in the Jungle is absent from his discussion. For Richardson, the appearance of the book in the jungle is “particularly resonant since it places a major tool and emblem of civilization within a setting that threatens to negate or destroy it” (2011: 1). It is no accident that Marlow finds An Inquiry well-preserved: it is housed in a hut built by the Russian. However, it is not simply that exposure to the elements — sun, rain, or wind — might destroy the book; it is also that the jungle ideologically represents barbarism insofar as the book, or literacy, represents civilization.

Though critics tend to discuss Heart of Darkness almost exclusively on this subject, Conrad’s first novel and first installment of the “Malay Trilogy”, Almayer’s Folly (1895), reveals that he had been exploring the relationship between the book and jungle for some time already. Almayer, the Dutch colonial trader who resides in Sambir, waits in vain for his mentor, and father-in-law, Captain Jim Lingard to assist him in his virtually non-existent business trading amongst the natives. Impoverished and degraded — he has just returned from watching his daughter abandon him for an “inferior” native man — Almayer confronts the long-neglected office of “Lingard and Co” for a final time. In this scene, one of the most poignant depictions of Almayer’s failure, he discovers that the office’s once costly and carefully procured materials are in complete disarray:

Books open with torn pages bestrewed the floor; other books lay about grimy and black, looking as if they had never been opened. Account books. In those books he had intended to keep day by day a record of his rising fortunes. Long time ago. A very long time. For many years there has been no record to keep on the blue and red ruled pages! In the middle of the room the big office desk, with one of its legs broken, careened over like the hull of a stranded ship; most of the drawers had fallen out, disclosing heaps of paper yellow with age and dirt. The revolving office chair stood in its place, but he found the pivot set fast when he tried to turn it. No matter. He desisted, and his eyes wandered slowly from object to object. […] The desk, the paper, the torn books, and the broken shelves, all under a thick coat of dust. (1895: 199)

While it is reasonable to expect the books and papers housed in the office might pass into a state of desuetude, the level of destruction appears gratuitous. This “thick coat of dust”, like a shroud over these ruined objects, indicates that the room has been untouched for years, yet its chaotic state simultaneously suggests that it has been the site of a deliberate attack. We might read its exaggerated ruin as a commentary on the colony’s inhospitality to these Western artefacts. Thus, for Conrad, to invoke the book in the jungle is at once an opportunity to address colonialist policy and concepts of Western authority, epistemology and methodology, and to observe their dislocation and collapse.

This article reads Woolf’s treatment of the book in The Village in the Jungle as evidence of what, different to Conrad, Elleke Boehmer describes as the “intentioned emergence of colonial dissonance” in fiction (2002: 179). Boehmer is careful to distinguish between those authors who, by virtue of their proximity to the other, oscillate in their perception of the colonial/colonized (following on Bhabha’s discussion of hybridity) and alternatively, those “whose encounter with the alien colonial world, or with colonized self-expressions, becomes self-consciously transformative” (2002: 179). There is, in the latter category, “an awareness” that “develops of other subjectivities, of local resistances, and of the possibility of discursive interchange with — and between them. It is a development that occurs in spite of, and in opposition to, the reassuring separations imposed by the colonial situation in which that voice is enclosed” (2002: 180). There is possibly nothing more reaffirming of the civility and superiority of the colonizer — and therefore their natural right to rule — than the written word. As Neil ten Kortenaar argues, drawing from literacy theorists Brian Street and Ruth Finnegan:

every society is capable of logic, abstraction, and self-consciousness (the qualities that literacy supposedly instils) and that to maintain the opposite is to reinstate the hierarchy of difference that colonialism originally created in the name of civilization and culture. […] The literacy thesis argues, from the point of view of literate westerners who share in hegemonic power, that literacy changes people and brings into being modern individuals. (2011: 13)

And yet, differently from his fictional precursor Conrad, Woolf will respond to the book in colonial Ceylon not as shorthand for modernity, but as colonial fetish. Achebe is also impelled to respond to Conrad’s depiction of the book in the jungle through the prism of personal experience, and arguably, with an even greater sense of urgency, despite the fact he writes decades later. His most critical and direct engagement with Conrad comes through his often-cited lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts in 1975 on Heart of Darkness. In this lecture, Achebe describes Conrad as a “purveyor of comforting myths” (1978: 4). The novel is evidence of the West’s anxiety about “the precariousness of its civilization” and its incessant “need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa” (1978: 13). Towson’s Inquiry, which seems to appear by some miracle in Conrad’s Congo, unscathed from its contact with the jungle, is offered as an example of the phenomenon that Achebe is at pains to elucidate in his dissection of Conrad’s most famous work. However, Achebe takes his criticism a step further when he conflates the appearance of the book in the jungle with Conrad’s own Heart of Darkness, demanding nothing less than a complete revaluation of its privileged status. Citing the novel as “perhaps the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses”, he insists that “the time is long overdue for a hard look at things” (1978: 10). The full impact of Woolf’s depiction of the book in the jungle as fetish is brought starkly into view alongside Achebe’s unabashedly critical voice. Woolf’s unconscious affiliation with Achebe here can therefore be read as an index of the radical nature of his anti-colonial sympathies.

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Babehami’s ascent to power that opens this article can be counted as an early example of the novel’s irreverence for writing. However, Woolf stages his most compelling and thoughtful engagement with writing in the courtroom scene, where the book seems to be not only an inferior mechanism for enacting justice, but, simply put, unnatural. For the most part, Silindu’s contact with writing is the result of his debt, as both Mukhopadhyay (2015) and Davies (2015) explore further in their essays in this special issue. He is all too familiar with the “greasy little notebooks, full of unintelligible letters and figures” of debt collectors waiting for the reaping of chenas (26). The villagers do not own the chenas they have tirelessly worked and sought permission to cultivate: they belong to the British Crown. The narrator explains that “no one might fell a tree or clear a chena in it without a permit from the Government. It was through these permits that the headman had his hold upon the villagers. Application for one had to be made through him” (27). Babehami, meanwhile, literate enough to earn the title of headman, profits through his position in the colonial government. The bureaucracy introduced through the Crown forms a serious obstacle to Silindu and his family: their inability to negotiate successfully this system of permits and petitions condemns them to poverty.

Silindu’s difficulties, however, reach their zenith in the false accusation set against him by Babehami and the creditor, Fernando. After Silindu’s daughter Punchi Menika refuses to have an affair with Fernando, Babehami devises a plot to incriminate Silindu and his son-in-law, Babun. The complainant and the accused make the journey to the courthouse in Kamburupitiya to sit before an English judge, or the white Hamadoru. Silindu and Babun are described as “dazed and confused” (116). Not only is the courtroom utterly foreign as a piece of architecture, but so are the rituals that take place within — including the judge’s written verdict. They are bewildered by the questions posed to them and sit in stunned ignorance as the judge and his interpreter alternate between English and Sinhalese. Woolf is able to emphasize, in part, the ill-suitedness of these legal proceedings by developing a comparison between the action taking place inside the courtroom and outdoors, along the shore. The strategic bracketing of the trial scene with pointed descriptions of the view shared by the judge and the accused through the court doorway encourages a binary reading which pits inside against outside. In this context, the book’s presence appears unnatural.

The judge and the accused are enticed by the scene through the court’s open doors:

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. Their eyes wandered from the bare room to the boats and the canoes, bobbing up and down in the bay, to the group of little figures on the shore hauling in the great nets under the blazing sun, to the dust storms sweeping over the jungle, miles away where they lived. The air of the court was hot, heavy, oppressive; the voices of those who spoke seemed both to themselves and to the others unreal in the stillness. The murmur of the little waves in the bay, the confused shouts of the fishermen on the shore, the sound of the wind in the trees floated up to them as if from another world. (114; emphasis added)

In spite of their fascination with the outdoor scene, the trial ensues. The judge proceeds to ask the accused and the complainant questions that are misunderstood and answered piecemeal or with blatant fabrications. The narrator describes the judge as he begins to write his verdict:

The judge leant back in his chair, gazing over the jungle at the distant hills. There was not a sound in the court. Outside, down on the shore, the net had been hauled in, and the fish sold. Not a living being could be seen now, except an old fisherman sitting by a broken canoe, and looking out over the waters of the bay. The wind had died away, and sea and jungle lay still and silent under the afternoon sun. The court seemed very small now, suspended over this vast and soundless world of water and trees. Babun became very afraid in the silence. The judge began to write; no one else moved, and the only sound in the world seemed to be the scratching of the pen upon the paper. At last the judge stopped writing. He looked at Babun, and began to read out his judgement in a casual, indifferent voice, as if in some way it had nothing to do with him. (125–6)

The sentiments expressed by these passages in particular suggest, through this retrospective critical reading, that The Village in the Jungle is more closely aligned with a historically disparate novel like Achebe’s Arrow of God than the fiction of Woolf’s contemporaries. The novel’s strategic juxtaposition of these passages with the activity of the trial challenges the ideal of progress that bolsters the colonialist cause. In the first scene, the judge, Silindu, and Babun note fisherman hauling in nets of fish. With our second view, all the fish have been sold. If literacy, as has been argued, creates a conception of time that is linear and progressive, this progress is matched and arguably superseded by the events taking place outside. The catching, transporting, and selling of fish entail a process whose outcome can be quantified and, importantly, logically proceeds from the steps that came before it. This scene, unfolding at the same time as the trial, asks readers to reconsider the ideological progressiveness of the judge’s writing; he has constructed a document that narrativizes the incomplete testimony of Silindu and Babun, which is then reduced to a verdict on their innocence. The category of disadvantage that illiteracy represents in the context of Silindu and Babun, unable to read the English Roman alphabet or the Sinhala abugida alphabet that circumscribes them, implicitly questions a system of governance that champions its language and exercise of that language as prototypically modern. That the judge appears to be disassociated from the words he has written, delivering them in a “casual, indifferent voice”, emphasizes the arbitrariness of the elevation of the written word that finds him in a place to decide the fate of these men; it is the very same fetishization of writing that promotes the underhand operator and cheat Babehami to village headman.

Unlike Silindu and Babun, Ezeulu, the protagonist of Achebe’s Arrow of God, is in a considerable position of power. And yet, even as Chief Priest of Ulu whose task it is to set the date of the harvest, Ezeulu is marginalized by his inability to understand the book. He is conscious enough of his illiteracy as a disadvantage that he is willing, even as Chief Priest, to send his son Oduche to Church where he can learn letters. Ezeulu is summoned by the British Administration to Okperi where he, after considerable delay, meets with Mr Clarke, the Assistant District Officer. Although the purpose of the trip is to offer Ezeulu the title of Warrant Chief — an expression of the British colonial policy of indirect rule — Ezeulu is treated more like a criminal than a guest. Ezeulu does reject the offer, but not before he stands baffled by the white man’s writing. On seeing Clarke write with his left hand, Ezeulu wondered “whether any black man could achieve the same mastery over book as to write it with the left hand” (1964: 496).

Neil ten Kortenaar, in his important book Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy, selects this scene in Arrow of God as evidence of Achebe’s deep concern over “European texts that name and contain Africans” (2011: 32), as he made clear in the essay about Conrad. According to ten Kortenaar, “Ezeulu’s ignorance of the source of Clarke’s power is mildly comic, but the comedy is close to pathos” (2011: 29). This is because Ezeulu does not understand that it is mastery of the colonizer’s language and the use of paper as a vehicle for recording, collecting, and transporting information that is the source of his power, and not his left hand. He, like Silindu and Babun, forms the subject of an official government document that he cannot understand and that will most likely be used to incriminate him. It is safe to assume, given that “the Warrant Chief for Okperi was singled out” in the report issued by the Secretary for Native Affairs on Indirect Rule in Eastern Nigeria, that Clarke’s documentation of the incident with Ezeulu was as crude as Clarke’s predecessor’s book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger (1964: 504). This ethnography, first mentioned in Achebe’s earlier novel Things Fall Apart, reappears in Arrow of God as reading material for a new generation of British colonials, Clarke included. The narrator informs us in the concluding pages of Things Fall Apart that this book will make allusion to Okonkwo’s murder of a government messenger and his suicide. The District Commissioner surmises Okonkwo’s story “would make interesting reading” (1958: 168). In fact, the Commissioner thinks, “one could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details” (1958: 168). The irony is unmistakable. Achebe has dedicated an entire novel to capturing the complexity of Okonkwo’s tragic story, and, in Arrow of God, Ezeulu’s shifting social position under the pressures of colonial rule. Although it is with some ambivalence that Woolf represents Silindu’s interiority, he — somewhat like Achebe, and unlike Conrad — is determined to write a novel focalized through the eyes of the local people, the Sinhalese. Yet, as an exercise in writing, the white Hamadoru’s record falls painfully short of the layered and multifaceted view of Beddagama that The Village in the Jungle so self-consciously attempts to register.

This trial does not mark the end of Silindu’s trouble. After murdering Babehami and Fernando, he finds himself once again, at the opposing or objectifying end of pen and paper. According to protocol, the magistrate documents the details of Silindu’s confession, but the narrative, particularly in the form of Silindu’s response, suggests this action is gratuitous and the scene ends in a kind of comic deflation:

The magistrate wrote it down, and then turned to Silindu, and explained to him that the offence with which he was charged was murder, and that he was prepared to take down anything he wished to say, and that anything which he did say would be read out at his trial […] The magistrate wrote down what Silindu said, and when he had finished, sat thinking, the pen in his hand, and looking at Silindu. It was very quiet in the room; outside was heard only the drowsy murmur of the sea. Suddenly the quiet was broken by the heavy breathing and snoring of Silindu, who had fallen asleep where he squatted. (144; 146)

Although the darkness precludes the possibility of seeing outside the judge’s residence, we are attuned to the sounds as they trickle indoors. Nature, the sea, penetrates the room as a reminder of the artifice of this act of writing. To underscore the point, the physical urges of Silindu’s fatigued body completely undermine the entrenched importance of the magistrate’s writing, which otherwise inspires stillness and attention, as was the case in the courtroom. During the trial, it was similarly the observation of the judge and the accused that what they saw and heard outside — people working off the land and water — constituted reality whereas what was occurring in the courtroom was “like a dream”. The voices inside are “unreal”. Moreover, their view of the “interminable” jungle is not presented as an epistemological impasse as in “Heart of Darkness”. Marlow celebrates the mimetic referentiality of An Inquiry in light of the unreadability of Africa and the civilizing charade of the pilgrims. Thus according to him, the book is “real”. The English characters in the fictional colony of Santa Marina in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out share Marlow’s sentiment when they come to depend on the punctual appearance of The Times newspaper as a source of comfort in the face of alterity. Marlow looks to the found text for respite while, in The Village in the Jungle, the judge, Silindu, and Babun turn away from it. It is worth pointing out, however, that the judge expresses doubt as to the appropriateness of the colonial method. He is loath to hang Silindu for murder. Despite the fact that the administration will think it “a very simple case”, he confesses that “it does not seem at all a simple case” to him (146). And yet, the magistrate will follow protocol; he does not intervene on Silindu’s behalf. The imperial bureaucratic machine, in which writing plays a fundamental role, continues to do its work.

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But what, then, is the alternative? For Achebe, the frequent evocation of a storytelling scenario in his fiction serves to remind or teach his readers of a rich tradition in precolonial Nigeria of oral histories and tales that have the capacity to inform and inspire in the manner of the book — including his own. He sets up the comparison directly in Arrow of God when Oduche turns to his Igbo primer, alone, while his mother and siblings, “Ugoye, Nwafo and Obiageli [sit] in a close group near the cooking place” (1964: 515). The sense of community and anticipation that so often builds around Ugoye as she prepares to tell a story finds no match in Oduche’s solitary activity. While it is true that Woolf also includes a gifted storyteller in his novel, Karlinahami, she is not invoked as a relic of Ceylon’s precolonial past. In other words, she is not offered up as a corrective to the book. Rather, Woolf depicts a virtually seamless transition from native book-reading to storytelling during her pilgrimage to Beragama with her family. At first, the learned Buddhist man reading from his holy book, which all have enjoyed, is affronted when Babun suggests that Karlinahami should tell one of her famous stories. However, he is quickly shown to be as absorbed in Karlinahami’s tale as the other listeners.

Woolf offers instead something different than Achebe: a perhaps even more radical reorientation of the book in the jungle. During Silindu’s long journey to the prison at Tangalla, he meets a beggar–wanderer. The pair proves to be quite a spectacle to the onlookers who believe they are witnessing two mad men in conversation. The beggar pulls out a “very dirty English newspaper” and explains that if he stares at it long enough, and if there is no noise to distract him, he will “see things on the paper, not the writing” of course, because he cannot read, but he will “see things themselves” (155). The paper, given to him long ago by a white man, is “of great power”. The beggar explains that before, he “could only see what was doing in this country; but now, by its help, [he] can see over the sea, to the white Mahatmaya’s country” (155). This scene immediately recalls Bhabha’s critical description of the emergence of the English book in the colonies as ambivalent insofar as the book is always a repetition or translation, or susceptible to misreading. In this brief vignette, however, Woolf also dramatizes the possibility of text that is handled with enough confidence — on the part of the colonized — to erase doubt. The colonized employ the tools of the colonizer not only to see themselves askew, filtered through the imprint of English, but also as an opportunity to scrutinize the metropole. That the text in question is a newspaper is particularly relevant to Woolf’s vision. As a record of things past in the conventional sense, the newspaper is no longer useful to the white man; it is dispensable. For the beggar, however, it is a prophetic tool. Woolf turns the trope of the book in the jungle on its head to suggest that the book will avail itself to the native. It is, of course, what postcolonial and anti-colonial writers have known and been doing for decades; Chinua Achebe’s revisitation of Heart of Darkness can be counted amongst the most cited examples and we can consider the degree to which his “books” have sought to undo the weighty literary presence of that one. As The Village in the Jungle so presciently puts it, the English newspaper or English book — that emblem of civilization and progress in the form also of telegraphy, roads, and bureaucracy — can be, and will be, conscripted as an eminently native text.