The Village in the Jungle : An uncolonial novel

Abstract

This article offers a biographical account of the emergence of The Village in the Jungle, and focuses on Leonard Woolf’s internal conflicts, or deep “psychic archaeology”, at the time of writing the novel. It 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.

It is quite hard to talk usefully about novels. Often one is drawn to discussing the literary influences, both contemporary and from the past; or else, the form and structure, which may be either innovative or in a tried-and-tested tradition. It can be equally interesting, especially from a psychological or biographical point of view, to tease out the state of mind of the author. Why this book at this time, what was going on in his mind and in his life?

I would like to suggest that there was a great deal going on in Woolf’s mind and in his life when he wrote The Village in the Jungle (1913). He was in a state of considerable conflict. On leave, he had to adjust to life in England after the transforming years in Ceylon, and if he were to marry Virginia Stephen he could not go back to Ceylon, or remain in the colonial service. That was self-evidently impossible: she would not fit into colonial life either physically or intellectually or emotionally. He found stifling and limiting his upholstered conventional Jewish family life in Colinette Road in Putney. It was the diametric opposite of the mindset of his Cambridge friends and of what was going on in Bloomsbury. But he found them difficult and maddening, as well.

The expectations of him from the two groups were high — and utterly different. His mother was hoping he would marry Sylvia Ross, the nice Jewish girl whose mother was the neighbour and best friend of Mrs Woolf in Colinette Road. And of course he could have, and he might have: it would have been easy, there was something between them. Even after he moved out of Colinette Road and into a room in the Stephens’ new home (38 Brunswick Square) in December 1911, whenever he went home at weekends there was a family visit with the Rosses and “Saw Sylvia” as he wrote in his diary (quoted in Glendinning, 2007: 133). Also “Gloomy” came soon after. And in the evenings on Brunswick Square he talked to Lytton and/or Virginia into the small hours on subjects which were unknown and certainly unmentionable in Colinette Road.

Woolf was conflicted about how to reconcile sexual desire with idealistic romantic love and intellectual companionship. As he wrote in his short story “A Tale Told by Moonlight” (1921), written around the time he was finishing The Village in the Jungle, “The body is damnably exciting […]. It’s only when we don’t pay for it that we call it romance and love” (2006: 257). He was conflicted about his own Jewishness, which the Bloomsburies, in the context of his marrying Virginia, patronizingly decided did not really matter. Indeed, Virginia liked to maximize, for dramatic effect, the fact that she was marrying “a penniless Jew” (V Woolf, 1983: 500), and she allowed herself to be malicious about his mother and her domestic arrangements.

As Woolf fell in love with Virginia he began existing in that state of heightened, emotional tension that comes of being passionately, obsessionally in love: the state in which articulate people who are not poets write poetry and pour out their feelings on paper, as did Woolf. As it was, Woolf was riddled with doubt — about himself, about her.

With a lot of writers you have to intuit their state of mind, reading between the lines of the work, following clues of imagery, setting, constellations of characters or attitudes. It is a chancy exercise, because to write fiction is to turn yourself inside out. It is not like making a cake, or even writing a biography, both of which use ingredients provided extrinsically. What is inside you has to be made into something that can be presented in a finished, confected form. Imagination, yes, but you cannot imagine in or out of a vacuum, and novels can grow out of experiences and memories, or out of grief, desire, anger, obsession, wish-fulfilment, intellectual passion, revenge, fear of what has not yet happened but might, insights, ideas, plus, perhaps, even some irresistible something overheard on the bus. And of course, however close the reader gets to the text, and to the creator of the text, there is much that you can never know about someone else’s mental processes, or even about your own.

I have found a short book by the generally impenetrable Jacques Derrida very suggestive and helpful in this context. It is Mal d’Archive, translated as Archive Fever (1996), subtitled “A Freudian Impression”, and it is really about psychoanalysis. Woolf was never analysed, nor was his wife, though members of the Bloomsbury group were deep into it and Woolf was later to publish Freud at the Hogarth Press. He wrote a remarkably perceptive review of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) when it appeared in English in 1914, at a time when not many people in Britain were familiar with Freud at all.

Derrida is interested in the paper archive. In our case, this comprises the primary historical archive — the letters of Leonard, Virginia, Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, etc., plus their works — and the secondary and infinitely expanding archive — the biographies, works of criticism, and the proceedings of workshops such as the one where this paper was first presented. This secondary archive is never closed; it is endlessly spawning new archival material as well as recalling, reconstructing, and sometimes distorting what is already there. As Derrida says, his own writing became archival the moment he pressed “Save” on his computer (1996: 26).

Yet more interesting than the paper archive is Derrida’s idea of a psychic archive, which is accessed through psychoanalysis, and, I would suggest, through creative writing, at a level beneath consciousness or memory. Derrida (1996: 92) uses an archaeological image of layers of inscriptions which afford glimpses of infinite possibility for archaeological excavation. Colonial memoirs used to have titles like “Through the Punjab with Rod and Gun”. I am not about to romp through Leonard Woolf’s unconscious with Rod and Gun, or take the route of Freudian interpretation of Woolf’s state of mind when he wrote The Village in the Jungle. But what I am immediately interested in, for their revelation of the tensions and conflicts he grappled with while writing the book, are the Aspasia Papers.

The Aspasia Papers are private writings of Woolf’s from the period at Brunswick Square and before he got married, now housed at the University of Sussex. ¹ He had begun to call Virginia “Aspasia” in his diary. Aspasia in life was the cultivated mistress of Pericles in the Athens of five centuries before Christ. Other friends and their behaviours are also disguised by classical names: Marjorie Strachey, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney Turner and so on. Aspasia is described in terms of virginal purity, of mountains with snow upon them, of the wind on the Downs, everything clean and sweet that many of the women he encountered on London streets were not. Aspasia “does not really know the feeling — which alone saves the brain and the body — that after all nothing matters. I am always frightened that with her eyes fixed on the great rocks she will stumble among the stones”. And yet, Aspasia knows that “dung is dung, death death, and semen semen”. Sometimes he thinks she has no heart, and is touched by nothing, and that she cannot possibly understand the meanness and sordidity of real life. For pages he frets about what Aspasia is really like: is she vain and a liar? Yes.

He is also not blind to the oddnesses and inadequacies of his apostolic Cambridge friends, whom he calls “The Olympians” in the Aspasia Papers. He is strikingly objective. Describing the Olympians sitting around in their armchairs, he observes:

I should not be surprised if you thought them rather dull and the silences rather uncomfortable for every so often they sit and don’t even talk. They are however thinking and very often feeling. They think a great deal and talk a great deal of what the others of them think and feel. You would probably call this gossip.

Even G. E. Moore, their mentor and guru, is made ridiculous in Woolf’s remorseless reasoning: “there is nothing but blither blither blither — about the isness of is and the wasness of was and the willness of will and the everythingness of everything”.

As for Woolf himself, whom he styles Namus in the Aspasia Papers, he is “wonderfully intelligent”, but “lustful, a whorer, a gazer after women, vicious because he loves the refinements of vice”. He is cold and hard, there is “no ignoble no cruel act which he would not do — if he could do it secretly”. Moreover, “he is an outsider, a foreigner, from the East”. We are back to the fact that he is a Jew, though he styles himself here a Syrian: “I was born at Jericho and like most of the inhabitants of Jericho I have a long nose and black hair […] I should like to live on Olympus but all Syrians are wanderers, and I doubt whether any of them are really Olympians”. As he wrote to Virginia in a letter: “I am selfish, cruel, lustful, a liar, a probably worse still” (1989: 169).

This, then, was the conflicted and unresolved young man who wrote The Village in the Jungle. Great novels do not grow out of complacency or contentment. And like many great novels, The Village in the Jungle is based on something and somewhere specific. But apart from immersing himself in reading, and reading Sinhalese, he did not have to research his setting and his characters, as many novelists must. He used for some of the incidents his own official diaries and reports, and his letters to Lytton, sometimes verbatim.

Perhaps there is something in his evident internalization of unstable gender barriers (as was the case with the Cambridge friends and with Virginia herself, and Virginia’s closeness to Vanessa) in the fictional twin sisters Punchi Menika and Hinnihami who were beautiful androgynous young girls, “their muscles firm as a man’s” because of their excursions into the jungle, which made them different, and suspect to the villagers (Woolf, 1913: 26). ² And then there is the handsome and long-haired Babun’s physical ambiguity: “His expression was curiously virile and simple, but his brown eyes, which were large and oval-shaped, swept it at moments with something soft, languorous and feminine” (45). It is a seemingly gender-free Woolf who writes the novel. Yet in the Aspasia Papers, in love with a beautiful woman, he violently repudiated the homoerotic world, and the homoeroticism in himself, calling the figure who stands for Goldie Lowes Dickinson “an effete and rotten old lecher in the body of a eunuch frog. I would rather touch a decaying fish than his body”. He was sexually liberated with a woman or women in Ceylon, and later in London, though this was always paid-for love; at the same time, he was aware of Virginia’s idiosyncratic differentness. He was long under the spell of Lytton’s increasingly flamboyant gayness — Lytton did not easily give up his semi-playful persuasion to entice Woolf into his camp.

It was this raw, inwardly exposed, inwardly vulnerable and conflicted state, somewhere quite far down in the strata of Derrida’s psychic archaeology, which liberated Woolf to write such a novel as The Village in the Jungle. It comes from a pure source and a deep well. The first few brilliant pages and the last few brilliant pages about the jungle transcend normal description or place-writing. The jungle is evil, he writes, showing why. This is not just empathy with its power over the villagers — he had felt it himself. There is a passage in his autobiographical volume Growing in which he describes the jungle as “a cruel and dangerous place”, adding that, “being a cowardly person, I was always afraid of it. Yet I could not keep away from it” (1961: 211).

His deeper empathy with Silindu and the others comes from his understanding that the jungle was, simply, all they knew; it was the condition of their existence, their world, both a source of food and a source of danger and death. It is an obvious understatement to say that Woolf’s emotional and physical geography — ranging from his district to Colombo, and outwards to London, Cambridge, Europe, the whole world of Western culture — was unknown, inconceivable, in Beddagama. There are no adequate words to convey this abyss. The villagers are credulous, without abstract speculation, and they are supremely fatalistic. They fall sick and die not only from disease but from grief or terror, curses or spells, or from being removed from their village.

Yet Woolf bridged this abyss, entering as if by direct transmission into the villagers’ simplicity — he uses the word “simple” a lot — and the kind of magical thinking about cause and effect, with its different logic, which is accessed in modern civilization only by children, poets, artists, and those considered mentally deranged. That he could write on this level leads me to believe that Woolf was the right person to be with Virginia at this stage in her life, and not just in the ways that her friends and relations thought he would be — a safe pair of hands — though he was that too. (I have been very struck by the extent that theirs was a made marriage. It would not have happened without the encouragement, the manipulation, almost the conspiracy, of Vanessa and others.)

This feat of imaginative sympathy in The Village in the Jungle impressed me so much that at first I failed to note the carefully emphasized hard edge of economic realism which rules the villagers lives: the chena system of cultivation, the requirement to work on the roads if you could not pay your tax, the constant fear, hunger, and above all the burden of debt, as Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s (2015) essay in this issue has illuminated for us. The long, crippling chain of debt runs from simple villager to wily headman to opportunistic Muslim or Kaffir outsider. It involves borrowing against the harvest, iniquitous interest on the borrowing, impossible ever to redeem, and the reality of starvation if you could not borrow. Woolf the administrator knew how the system worked. It had nothing to do with imperialism, but with the dynamics of subsistence living in a closed society, and the inhumanity of man to man. The conscious, analytical Woolf, the civilized man, the bureaucrat, the imposer of order, is not asleep in The Village in the Jungle.

In fact that conscious, “civilized” Woolf is responsible for what seems to me the only slip in perspective or point of view in the whole book. When Silindu comes into the house of the white Hamadoru, he has never seen anything like it before: “It seemed to him to be full of furniture, and all the furniture to be covered with strange objects” (239). That is through Silindu’s eyes. But then comes a description of the room in terms that Silindu could not have conceived of or had words for: “ugly ornaments, mostly chipped or broken, and a great many spotted and faded photographs, several sentimental pictures, lamps, a book-case” (240). This is Woolf describing Woolf’s own room, and it must have been irresistible, but it breaks the spell. Suddenly and jarringly we are “outside” Silindu’s consciousness and in the author’s own.

Though I do not altogether understand the import of the old Buddhist’s interventions towards the end, I can find no other technical glitch in the novel. Woolf was burning to write something about Ceylon, for its own sake; and, at that time of risk and heightened sensibility (in love, and facing his own demons and Virginia’s), he was released into something greater. Although it was not published until after their marriage, most of it was written or drafted before.

If The Village in the Jungle is a triumph, there is also something heartbreaking about it, because, after this inspired foray, Woolf never again found a way in to the deeper strata of his psychological archive. He was not helped by the responses of his closest friend, as Ruvani Ranasinha (2015) also observes in this special issue. “My tastes”, wrote Lytton Strachey, was not for what he called “blacks etc”, and “the more black they are the more I dislike them, and yours seem to me remarkably so. I did hope for one bright scene at least with some fetid white wife of a governor”. His plea for Woolf’s next novel was “Whites! Whites! Whites!” (quoted in Glendinning, 2007: 155).

Woolf did soon after write about whites in what you might call a modern novel, The Wise Virgins (1914) rehearsing again his sexual conflicts and his painful ambivalence about his Jewish suburban family background, and causing his mother and sisters much anger and unhappiness. Even though he was older, even though he was now married to Virginia, it is an adolescent novel of disgust, alienation and revolt, and his countervailing ambivalence about the Bloomsbury set is still smouldering. Nothing is resolved. The anti-hero Harry, in spite of his love for Camilla/Virginia, despises the climate of her gentile coterie. “There’s no life in [them] […] no dark hair, no blood” (1914/2007: 59). They never did anything. Jews had to do something, just because they were Jews. The gentile women had thin hair, pale faces, no passion. For its time, The Wise Virgins is a candid, faintly shocking, not-bad novel, but it is perhaps not more than that.

The loss of creative depth is definitively apparent in the very first Hogarth publication, Two Stories (1917). One is by Woolf, the other by his wife. Woolf’s “The Three Jews” is another excursion into Jewish identity. It is quite painful. Here are the first two Jews coinciding by chance in a tea-room beside Kew Gardens on a very English spring day: “We show up, don’t we, under the apple-blossom and this sky. It doesn’t belong to us, do you wish it did? […] They do not like us, you know” (1917: 5). Neither is an observant Jew, but still they do not fit in. The third character is a religious Jew whose son has married a goy. He could just about stomach that, but to make matters worse, she was the family servant. His distress is absurd, the episode is like a badly told Jewish joke. There is no idealization of the orthodox here; only a lack of resolution. The fault-lines in this story are mainly structural, to do with an incomplete framing, but that is beyond the scope of this essay: my point is simply that Woolf was still unresolved about being a Jew in England.

Morgan Forster had questioned Woolf’s conventional “framing” of another story, “A Tale Told by Moonlight”. “Present the scene as a blur” out of which the narrative would emerge, advised Forster (quoted in Glendinning, 2007: 2013). Woolf could not do blur. The other item in Two Stories, Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall”, was in a different league. Virginia could do blur, in spades. ³ After reading Two Stories, Lytton wrote that “Virginia’s is, I consider, a work of genius” (Strachey, 2005: 358). This was in a letter to Woolf; and Lytton did not say one single word about Woolf’s own story, “The Three Jews”. The contrast would have been too painful. From that moment on there was a compass correction. Lytton and Woolf no longer corresponded as before, as soul-mates and intimates. Lytton transferred to Virginia “the dialect of our intimacy”. She was finding her fictional voice as Woolf was facing up to the limitations of his own.

He gave up. His life was taken over by the Webbs, Margaret Llewellyn Davies and the Women’s Co-operative, the Fabian Society, the burgeoning Labour Party, questions of international government, the New Statesman. He involved himself with the League of Nations Society, he attended meetings and weekend conferences, joined the Union of Democratic Control and other organizations identified by impenetrable acronyms, and became a lynchpin in the world of seminars, meetings, campaigns, advisory committees — endless committees in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms — an expert on agendas and minutes and motions and white papers and bluebooks. He edited, he compiled, he expressed outrage. In his articles and books, he was a polemicist.

He was still capable of writing lovely paragraphs, especially about the natural world. He wrote carefully, caringly, and with understanding about his wife in his autobiography, but his other self had taken over, terminally. He no longer discussed publicly what it was like to be a Jew in an unthinkingly anti-semitic society. He no longer explored in print his anxiety about his own Jewishness. He no longer wrote about sex and the body. However, much later, at an all-male lunch given by Anthony Powell, as each guest was saying how he would like to spend the last day of his life, Woolf said: “I would like to spend it fucking”. But normally he no longer wrote or spoke with the naked openness that produced The Village in the Jungle.

And yet there was something about him when he was older that magnetized people: a sense of his self-discipline, of sexuality suppressed. Flashes of sympathy from those bright blue eyes of his drew women to him. One must remember that he said of Aspasia that she did not understand that “nothing matters”. “Nothing matters” became his mantra. He said and wrote it all the time. But when late in his life a young BBC producer challenged him on this on a visit to Rodmell, he turned on the stairs on their way up to his office and said to her: “Everything matters”. That is the man who wrote The Village in the Jungle, and however much is said and written about Woolf and his wife and his political books and his work for socialism and as a publisher, this work remains as his lasting artistic legacy.