رسائل دكتوراة
English
2012
Rudyard Kipling, Edward Morgan Forster, William Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad: The British Imperial Tradition and the Individual Talent
Bouteldja Riche, Mouloud Siber
كلية الاداب واللغات-جامعة مولود معمري - تيزي وزو · الجزائر
This thesis studied the dialectic of imperial tradition and individual talent in the non-fictionaland fictional works of Rudyard Kipling, Edward Morgan Forster, William SomersetMaugham and Joseph Conrad. Taking its bearings from the postcolonial theory and criticalcategories elaborated by Edward Said, it argued the point that variation on the theme ofcommitment to Empire is close to “degree zero” in the four writers’ works in spite of theirsignificantly different ideologies. “Authorial ideology” is superseded by the “generalideology” of Empire as each and every author invests his “talent” in enhancing that imperialtradition that Said calls Orientalism. In their texts, it is the “textual attitude” that prevails intheir perception of the Other in the opposition of the Oriental man’s primitiveness and theWestern man’s progress. I also argued that if the authors wrote in support of Empire, it wasbecause it was the imperial ideology that enabled them to circulate their “talents”. One of myassumptions in developing the argument is that literature is just like money or currency.Writing at a time of high imperialism, the four authors could not have coined their artistictalents and put them into circulation without confirming to the general culture of empire thatpercolated to their respective audiences. It is the numismatic mark of empire on their talentthat enabled them to be listened to and read by the public and this numismatic mark as I triedto demonstrate throughout the dissertation is characterized by monologism. Theintertextuality between the four authors at the level of content is of the domain of pastiche asthere is no significant “clash of referent” of the Empire. The Other voice in the writers’intertexts remains the same in spite of individual attempts to differentiate their style. The fourof them are preoccupied with the maintenance of empire through the proposition of solutionsand strategies to that shared goal. In short, I attempted to illustrate the ideology of differencein the four writers’ works in the opposition they establish between narrative and vision in therepresentation of the Other (the Orientals) versus the Same (the Westerners) and theassociation of the Oriental space with the demonic, the abnormal, the diseased and themarginal, and the Western space with the norm and the centre. This binary aesthetics isunderpinned by the assumption that the Orient and the Oriental man are there to be studied, tobe controlled and restored to the Western rational norms. The writers’ allegiance to art and thedevelopment of individual talent comes second to the allegiance to the country and itsimperial interests. Thus, whether their personal style is classified as realist or modernist, itdoes not question the existence of empire, and as such their works read as allegories ofempire. In this sense, the dialectic of imperial tradition and individual talent turns short.
