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Acknowledgements
The process of putting together a volume of essays has been especially enlightening, and it is perhaps not presumptuous to think that editors often begin with strong convictions of what they want to achieve, and a vague idea of whether the volume will reflect those convictions. What I originally conceived only in imagination was a gathering of like-minded scholar-teachers who were interested in the subject of historical fiction and, more particularly, historical fiction about Asia. Thanks to the financial support of the Centre of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at Nanyang Technological University, I was able to play host to scholars from different parts of the world in a workshop that this book derives its title from: Asia and the Historical Imagination. Between July 31 and August 2, 2015, the participants were engaged in a lively and rigorous discussion of the projects they were working on, and I am delighted they have contributed to this modest volume of essays. Asia and the Historical Imagination would have remained an imaginary project if not for their support and expertise. And of course, special thanks to Sara Crowley Vigneau, Connie Li, at Routledge, and my research assistants, Hong Yuchen, and Long Chao, for their infinite patience and goodwill.
7 Cosmopolitan Retellings and the Idea of the Local: The Case of Salman Rushdie’s Shame 127 Divya Mehta
8 Connections, Contact, and Community in the Southeast Asian Past: Teaching Transnational History Through Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace 155 Maitrii Aung-Thwin
9 “Until It Lives in Our Hands and in Our Eyes, and It’s Ours”: Rewriting Historical Fiction and The Hungry Tide 181 Sarottama Majumdar
notes on contributors
Maitrii Aung-Thwin is an area-studies specialist of Southeast Asia, with particular expertise in Myanmar history, politics, and society. His research engages conversations from the fields of postcolonial studies, socio-legal studies, intellectual history, public history, and transnational studies. His publications include: A History of Myanmar since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations (2013), Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (2011), and A New History of Southeast Asia (2010). He is currently Associate Professor of Myanmar/Southeast Asian history and Convenor of the Comparative Asian Studies Ph.D. Program at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Aung-Thwin is a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation (USA), former president of the Burma Studies Group (USA), former member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Asian Studies (USA), former Chair of the AAS Southeast Asia Council, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
King-kok Cheung is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She was born in Hong Kong and received her Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. She was the UC Education Abroad Program (EAP) Study Center Director in Beijing (January 2008–August 2010) and will be UC EAP Study Center Director in Shanghai (September 2015–August 2017). Her fields of interest include comparative literature, comparative American ethnic literatures, Asian American literature, and Renaissance British literature. She is the author of Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Cornell, 1993; Japanese edition
2015) and Chinese American Literature Without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); editor of Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers (University of Hawaii Press, 2000), An Interethnic Companion to Asian American literature (Cambridge, 1996), “Seventeen Syllables” (Rutgers, 1994), Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (MLA, 1988), and a coeditor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Her articles have appeared in Amerasia Journal, American Literary History, Biography, Bucknell Review, MELUS, Milton Studies, PMLA, Positions: East Asia
Critique, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Transnational Literature. She is the 2012–13 Recipient of the UCLA Hoshide Teaching Award in Asian American Studies.
Hyunjung Lee is currently a Professor of Asian Studies and Theatre in the College of Foreign Studies at Kansai Gaidai University, Osaka, Japan. She had previously taught in the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore from 2009 to 2017. Lee’s research interests include theatre studies, literature, and cultural studies. Her publications have appeared in Korea Journal, Theatre Research International, and in the Journal of Popular Culture, among other journals. She has contributed book chapters in various edited collections published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Rowman & Littlefield. Lee has also co-edited a journal special issue entitled “Colonial Modernity and Beyond: The East Asian Contexts” in Cultural Studies (2012). She is the author of Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Kit Ying Lye is currently a lecturer at Singapore University of Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University. Her primary area of research focuses on the use of magical realism in the representation of violence that occurred during the period of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Her research interests are mainly magical realism, history and its remembrance, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. She has recently published in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints.
Sarottama Majumdar teaches English literature at an undergraduate college affiliated to the University of Calcutta. She is a research fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. Her research interests include culture and identity formation in nineteenthcentury British India on which she has published and presented papers.
Divya Mehta holds a D.Phil. from the University of Sussex. Her research project has been concerned with literary genre and form to read for history. She has examined distinct expressive economies, critical moments, and transitions in twentieth-century postcolonial national histories and the accompanying upheavals of gender organization. She is currently teaching at the University of Delhi (India), and her courses include the study of Indian literatures in English and in translation, world literatures, and British literature. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, world literature, the theory of the novel, and gender and feminist theory.
I-Chun Wang teaches English literature at Kaohsiung Medical University. Her interests in scholarship include English Renaissance drama, migration studies, and comparative literature. In addition to articles, Wang’s book publications include Disciplining Women: The Punishment of Female Transgressors in English Renaissance Drama (1997) and Empire and Ethnicity: Empire and Ethnic Imagination in Early Modern English Drama (2011). She edited and co-edited special issues for journals such as Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, CLCWeb, and the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and book titles include Ocean and City, and Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination.
Jane Yeang Chui Wong is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University. Her research and teaching interests include Renaissance literature and historiography, Asian fiction in English, and modern drama. In 2015, she organized a three-day conference, Asia and the Historical Imagination, at Nanyang Technological University. Her work on Asian literature focuses on the relationship between art and representation in Singapore, especially in drama. Her research in modern drama also extends to twentieth-century British drama. In 2013, she published Affirming the Absurd in Harold Pinter (Palgrave). Her contributions to modern drama can also be found in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Modern Language Review, TDR: The Drama Review, and Theatre Research International.
CHAPTER
1
Asia’s Other History
Jane Yeang Chui Wong
Asia and the Historical Imagination is concerned with the significance of region and locality, and its method is most immediately preoccupied with the exploration of local networks of political and cultural exchanges that have been, and still are, at the heart of an Asian polity. This interdisciplinary project conceptualizes the ways in which literary scholars and historians think about fictional histories, and how the study of historical fiction can generate critical dialogues that attempt to bridge the great divide between the two disciplines and draw attention to some of the challenges scholars face in the interpretation of imagined narratives within historical frameworks. The region’s history, the colonization and decolonization of many of its countries, and their rapid development in the race to participate in the globalized economy are duly documented in textbooks and mainstream media. The social and cultural impact that accompanies the larger political reconfiguration on the global stage has been carefully examined but the less tangible impact of these changes is recorded in imagined voices. In considering the role of imagined voices against the backdrop of historical narratives, an Asian-centric approach to historical fiction aims to produce more meaningful and nuanced discussions of what it means to be literary and historical when dealing with a genre that essentially has a different set of criteria and boundaries.
J. Y. C. Wong (*) Nanyang Technological University,
J. Y. C. Wong (ed.), Asia and the Historical Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_1
At one level, there are geographical boundaries; at another, there are cultural boundaries, and these are often in flux and fluid as they are determined, defined, and reinvented by socio-political and economic imperatives. Political and ideological boundaries, which are especially pertinent to this volume given the number of essays that focus on Southeast Asian countries, are more strategic. The term “Southeast Asia” came into use from Britain’s commanding post, the Mountbatten Command, in Colombo. Eventually, the Americans, French, and Dutch used it too, and the term was used to locate the vulnerable region that was in close proximity to the two main powers of the East: China and India: “The Americans took some time to accept it because they thought in terms of East Asia, or the Western Pacific. They never looked at South Asia much, the way the British and the French did. On their side, Europeans saw India and they saw China; and they saw the region in between as a residue. So the French used the term ‘Indochine’,” which reflected their understanding of the region as being “a bit of China and a bit of India.”1 Southeast Asia, in the eyes of Western strategic planners, was situated in terms of India and China. But from the 1980s onwards, the orientation of the region changed. The decolonization of Asia was complete when Hong Kong and Macau became special administrative regions of China in the 1990s, and TimorLeste gained independence in 2002. The responses to the decolonization in these places are certainly not the same as those in India, Burma, Malaya, or Singapore in the 1940s and 1960s. International coverage and diplomatic dialogues, too, mapped out new local, global, and, for the purpose of our study of literature and history, rhetorical boundaries. Questions of national security and national welfare have also transformed the ways nations perceive and express political and cultural identities, and arguably, nowhere are these complex issues more powerfully and sensitively articulated than in historical fiction.
Without delving into the theoretical debates about narration and narrativity that are beyond the scope of this collection, it should be noted that Asia and the Historical Imagination is nonetheless indebted to their influence on literary representations of historical events. Literary narratives are, after all, fictional narratives; the implication of narrating and narrativization and its significance in the development of modern historiography have been persuasively discussed in Hayden White’s seminal essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), among his other works. Given his interest in the role of imagination in historical discourse, it is no wonder that the historian has received as much attention in literary
circles, if not more so, than among historians. Even though the two disciplines adopt vastly different research methods, they are both interested in storytelling:
Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give to real events the form of a story […]. What is involved, then, in that finding of the “true story,” that discovery of the “real story” within or behind the events that come to us in the chaotic form of “historical records”? What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display the formal coherency of a story?
In the enigma of this wish, this desire, we catch a glimpse of the cultural function of narrativizing discourse in general, an intimation of the psychological impulse behind the apparently universal need not only to narrate but to give to events an aspect of narrativity.2
Historical fiction’s place is distinct and unique, not simply because it shares the impulses of the two disciplines but because it subverts their assumptions as well; as Michel de Certeau puts it, “Fiction is the repressed other of historical discourse.”3 In “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Maria Margonis describes the historical novel as a “no-man’s land on the borders of fact and fantasy.” The questions she raises are questions that are on the minds of every historian and literary critic, and, of course, the historical fiction novelist: “What responsibility does a novelist have to the historical record? How much—and what kinds of things—is permissible to invent? For the purposes of fiction, what counts as evidence?”4 These types of questions seem to imply that fiction must play with history’s “rules” (whatever those rules are) to properly represent.
Many of the literary works covered in this volume are less interested in addressing, assessing, or critiquing the history as “properly represented” than they are in examining how the stories resist articulation; it is the tensions in this resistance, manifest in the authors’ attempts to represent proscriptions of political loyalties and cultural identities, the oppression of marginalized groups, and the suppression of persecuted voices, that essentially produce other stories—these are stories that cannot be properly represented in history’s story. Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1932/1962) asserts that the emergence of historical fiction after the French Revolution was especially significant. Using a Marxist framework, he sees the genre as a form in which the masses can find meaning in class struggle and in the people’s attempt to map out the historical and social
implications in the wake of rising fascist sentiments in Europe.5 More recently, scholars like R. Johnsen and Jerome de Groot have regarded historical fiction as an important supplement to more conventional histories, which generally neglect underrepresented groups and marginalized voices.6 For Richard Slotkin, historical fiction opens up avenues for historical inquiry that are traditionally closed to conventional histories:
[Historical fiction] can do more than re-create historical events, ideas, manners, environments. It can create a simulacrum or model of the historical world, miniaturized and compressed in scale and time; a model which embodies a theory of historical causation. The hypothesis can be tested by a kind of thought-experiment: assume that events are driven by the conditions and forces you believe to be most significant—what sort of history, what kind of human experience, then results? For the thought experiment to work, the fiction writer must treat a theory which may be true as if it was certainly true, without quibble or qualification; and credibly represent a material world in which that theory appears to work.7
This aspect of historical fiction has also led historians to give new meaning to the understanding of history, and what was once dismissed as nothistory is now recognized as an important element of historical inquiry; what historical fiction “lacks” in objectivity, it gives back many times over with its approach to the ethical-oriented subject.8
Arguably, history, together with the historical fiction writer, is the cocreator of the fictional characters in the novels covered in this volume; and in many cases, these characters struggle with their co-creator to control and produce alternative histories. The objective of Asia and the Historical Imagination is to analyze and demonstrate how this is achieved through literary representation and how so-called truth-telling can only be narrativized and made meaningful with narrative devices that contest assumptions of historical truth. Historical fiction creates a new imperative for historical understanding that is quite apart from the writing and reading of historical narratives; it breaks away from the descriptive protocol that demands the turning of events into coherent stories that promote cognitive meaning, and as it will become apparent in the following chapters, historical fiction often creates meaning by bringing the chaos of events to the foreground and into the lives of its fictional characters—the burden of meaning-making lies entirely with the reader and his/her assumptions of conventional histories. Within the context of regional histories, these
assumptions also question how the interplay between history and fiction can produce meaningful and critical narratives against the backdrop of a globalized world.
Regional concern rarely plays a central role in the study of historical fiction; to situate regional significance in the literary representation of history, we should begin by approaching the limitations of examining historical fiction within a global context first. Historical fiction’s links to world literature should not be underestimated here; they share a priority to represent histories, peoples, and cultures—to tell the truth in its various forms and permutations, and to convey that knowledge. David Damrosch, for instance, has pointed out that, aside from taking into consideration the production and transmission of literary texts in a globalized context, there are also questions about how to represent a topic that seems boundless: “If world literature is the sum total of everything ever written, we have to deal not only with an endless array of texts but also with a plethora of local histories and competing literary cultures, which may not have anything resembling an overall history even if such a mass of material could be mastered and presented.”9 Others like Tim Parks, Philip Hensher, and Pankaj Mishra are skeptical about the authenticity of texts that attempt to reproduce and represent local conditions of countries and nation states. Mishra feels that “the homogenizing and depoliticizing effects of [such novels as produced by Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh can be] exaggerated, to the point where every writer of non-western origin seems to be vending a consumable—rather than a challenging—cultural otherness. […] such hip self-identifications as ‘Afropolitan,’ risks obscuring that the traumas of the postcolonial world … still mould the themes and preoccupations of writers from Africa and Asia, and oblige them to explore social as well as intimate relationships.”10 In other words, Damrosch’s and Mishra’s observations are concerned with the limitations of generic representations of history and culture, the general, and the particular: literary representations can fail to represent.
The anxiety of the failure to represent history and culture can, in part, be addressed with a more rigorous approach toward identifying and situating the changing spheres of political and cultural influences against a more sensitive reading of regional significance. Asia is one such region. This is highlighted in the inaugural issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias (2005). Editors Tina Chen and Eric Hayot note that now, “more than ever, the singularities of world history … require us to understand the past, the present, and the futures of Asia. The immediate reasons for doing so are
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clear: the increasing influence, economic and political, of the new Asian superpowers, China and India; the alternative systems of human rights emerging from the ‘Asian values’ debate; Asia’s role as the socio-cultural vanguard of global futures and global geographies”11 (vi). The journal’s vision is one I would like to emulate in Asia and the Historical Imagination:
Vibrating between the general and the particular, we may well want to consider the ways in which the very categories of generality and particularity operate to produce the ways we know the world in front of us—to consider, for instance, how something like “Asia” has served historians, sociologists, anthropologists, or literary critics in both roles, how the general category of the Asian can emerge as a call to “method” (as in the work of Kuan-hsing Chen) even as it serves in particularization as a justification for the production of a post-imperialized planet.12 (vii)
Method in Chen Kuan-Hsing’s Asia as Method (2010) is concerned with the interruption of decolonization and deimperialization with the outbreak of the Cold War, and how the assessment of imperial histories has shaped Asian studies in Asia. But it is his framework, which privileges the importance of regional interactions that I find most compelling:
[U]sing the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt. On this basis, the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives. This method of engagement, I believe, has the potential to advance a different understanding of world history.13
Inter-Asia approaches toward the study of Asian histories and cultures have been immensely productive and continue to be so as the synergies that stem from its diverse peoples and ideologies are remarkably complex and plentiful by virtue of the countries’ shared history as a region and by their geographical proximity.14 These imperatives can be applied to the study of world literature, and Asian historical literature, because they underscore the complex networks and exchanges of political and cultural polities that have been, and will be, at the heart of an Asian identity that is as fragmented as it is unified. And there is no better place to trace these fault lines than in historical fiction, where historical facts are laced with imagination. Unconventional, or what some have called alternative, histories destabilize
History with a capital H. As Brian Fay remarks, unconventional histories— be they literary histories or art installations—“[expose] the strengths and limitations” of historical inquiry; they “[open] doors onto ways we can understand the past (and can understand our understanding of the past), and potentially ‘reveal new conceptual resources and novel forms of representation that might be useful in deepening the possibilities of history as a discipline’.”15
To study history in literary narratives requires a leap of faith that does not come naturally to the conventional histories, but it is a leap that can be more representative of historical moments than those that have been carefully scrutinized and represented as historical facts, especially in countries where minority voices and those that challenge state-sanctioned ideas are still very much discouraged and muted. Kit Ying Lye’s essay on contemporary Indonesian literature is especially concerned with the suppression of voices in the 1960s, when political alliances in Asia shifted with the onset of the Cold War in Europe. While Western powers grappled with communist threats, newly independent nations in Southeast Asia found themselves in a political dilemma; they had to take sides and realign their political loyalties with the communists or their Western alliances. Asian nations that rejected communism were consequently embroiled in violent campaigns that were, in some cases, used to legitimize widely unpopular authoritarian regimes. Indonesians witnessed some of the most violent years in their country’s history after a failed coup in 1965 (also known as the September 30th Movement) brought about the persecution of communists, and those who were suspected of supporting their cause. Artists and intellectuals were identified as such, and with Suharto’s assumption of power in 1966, his government sought to suppress and eliminate all forms of expression that were deemed sympathetic to the Left.
Lye notes that most of the political fiction that reassessed Indonesia’s violent past was not reassessed until the early 2000s, even though historical fiction that engaged with the socio-political predicament during the Cold War years was plentiful. Authors like Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Putu Wijaya, Umar Kayam, and Y. B. Mangunwijaya reflected on the mass murders that followed the coup. Most of these authors employ the use of the Wayang and a Javanised Mahabharata to represent the events of 1965–6 in their attempts to undermine Suharto’s master narrative of the coup. For Lye, what is more pressing is the question of that which has been intentionally omitted in these works; the stories and testimonies do not explicitly discuss the 1965 coup even while they attempt to creatively represent the
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politicide which followed it. What can these omissions tell us about the struggle of the people of Indonesia, their responses to the government, their attempts to come to terms with new realities, and their political and moral positions as they witnessed the violence? In her study of Y. B. Mangunwijaya’s Durga/Umayi and Umar Kayam’s Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, Lye provides some insightful answers to these questions as she explicates the use of magical realism in these works in relation to the political climate in which they were produced. Working under the strict and often dangerous conditions of state censorship, magical realist literature imaginatively mediates moral conscience, and demonstrates how literary forms can serve as a necessary mouthpiece to represent silenced voices.
I-Chun Wang’s “Cultural Encounters and Imagining Multi-cultural Identities in Two Taiwanese Historical Novels” in Chap. 3 is also concerned with voices, or, more specifically, retrieving voices that have been marginalized in official Taiwanese history. Wang’s essay is a response to the largely monolithic character of Taiwanese historical narratives, which privilege the Han Chinese perspective. This aspect of conventional Taiwanese history is, however, slowly being revised, in part because of the popularity of historical novels that have proliferated over the last decade. Wang’s historical context is seventeenth-century Formosa, in an era of exploration, trade, and cross-cultural encounters, and her subject is the historically underrepresented indigenous Sirayans, whose culture was threatened by newcomers from the Dutch East India Company and the Han government. These cultural encounters provide a rich backdrop for the two novels at the center of this chapter: Fu Er Mo Sha San Zu Ji(A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa 福爾摩沙三族記, 2012), and Ci Tung Hwa Zhi Zhan(The Battle of Ci Tung Hwa 刺桐花之戰, 2013).
Wang observes that historical documentation of early modern Taiwan is widely available in Western colonial writing, but much less so in Southeast Asia. The novels Wang analyzes in this chapter consider how native peoples like the Sirayans perceived cultural encounters, and the complex political, social, and economic relations among the locals, the new arrivals, and the conquerors. Wang argues that these encounters were imperative in the identity-making and remaking process of the Sirayans, and in creating collective memories and a collective identity. The authors of these novels exemplify one of the most important characteristics of historical fiction. In creating highly personal narratives and equally compelling characters, the authors imagine their strengths and vulnerabilities into
being. In retrieving these voices that are lost to mainstream, conventional histories, they demand that readers reconsider the far-reaching implications of cultural encounters, how the negotiation of socio-politics and cultural policies contributed to Taiwan’s multicultural identity.
Identity formation and disintegration, and their more direct connections with realpolitik, feature most prominently in Chaps. 4 and 5. The authors of these chapters work around the contours of China and its relation to the West and within the Asian region. King-Kok Cheung’s astute analysis of the political and psychological tensions in Ha Jin’s Map of Betrayal calls attention to the ways in which history and fiction fuse to create complex narratives that question assumptions of personal loyalties and national allegiances, and the wider implications of the migrant story. The Map of Betrayal is arguably one of Ha Jin’s most structurally complex novels. Jin’s protagonist, Gary Shang, is loosely modeled after the real-life Chinese double agent, Larry Wu-Tai, who infiltrated the CIA for 30 years and was convicted in 1986 for leaking classified information to the Chinese government. The transpacific exchanges between China and the United States are underscored by Shang and his daughter, Lilian; their accounts, including Lilian’s attempts to learn about her father’s history, take readers through some of the more turbulent periods in Chinese history. But Jin also weaves his personal experiences with political concerns in China and the United States with Shang’s narrative, further fusing history and fiction, and complicating an already complex narrative that spans more than five decades.
For Cheung, the layering of identities, which cannot be disassociated from personal and political loyalties, extends, in the character of Shang, into geographical, cultural, and intergenerational concerns that at times overlap, and at other times clash, with each other. Readers of Jin’s novel may find it to be fragmented because of its shifting perspectives, but Cheung’s argument will persuade them otherwise. Her analysis of the national, cultural, and linguistic liminality of Shang’s character, which essentially extricates some of the more problematic issues of individual and political identities, demonstrates that the thematic and structural doubling in the novel effectively underpins the psychological preoccupations of a man caught between state and individual, past and present. These intersections are mapped on to a third-person account of Shang’s life, which alternates with his daughter’s first-person narrative, and the narrative of the family Shang abandoned in China. Cheung is particularly interested in the themes of duplicity and self-division in the migrant story, and how
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Jin’s narrative strategy—in pairing himself and Chin, and Shang’s history with that of his grandson, Ben—create a powerful commentary that interrogates the reach of state power and nationalism over individual lives.
Following Cheung’s discussion of dual identities in the previous chapter, my essay on Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue explores the limitations and implications of dual identities in the decades that bracket World War II in Singapore. This chapter focuses on the cultural and political aspects of Chineseness in Singapore in the immediate years that led up to and followed the independence of the city-state in 1965. Within the context of Breaking the Tongue, this chapter considers the development of a Singaporean Chinese identity in this period, and frames my discussion as a response to assumptions of Chineseness in Singapore amidst more recent tensions between Singaporeans and Chinese migrant workers.16 Assumptions that Singaporean Chinese should/ought to “side” with Chinese migrant workers because of their shared ancestry and ethnicity are contentious and rejected. These tensions are often explained with cultural differences, but where exactly do we locate these differences when many Singaporean Chinese still retain a deep sense of their ancestry and heritage, and still continue to observe Chinese value systems? These much more nuanced differences resist articulation in conventional historical narratives of cultural history in Singapore, but in Loh’s novel, they receive careful and sensitive treatment as she captures the ambivalence of Chinese identity formation in the early years of Singapore’s independence with her protagonist, Claude Lim, whose quest to construct a distinct Singaporean Chinese identity, set apart but also with the “great civilization” of China, is modeled after the experiences of Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kwan Yew.
The nationalistic impulses that shape Loh’s novel also shape nationalist aspirations elsewhere in Asia. Hyunjung Lee’s approach to stage and film adaptations of Korea’s ancient past in Chap. 6 concentrate on the ways in which popular media fuses history and fiction to advocate nationalist sentiments and the degree to which this is viable, especially when the works she examines are portrayed as exaggerated fantasies of the past. Her essay investigates recent South Korean cultural productions that recreate historical traumas in three works: The Last Empress, a musical theatre production, The Lost Empire, a music video, and Hanbando, a historical fiction film. All three works feature a historical female icon, Empress Myoungsung. Lee’s discussion is grounded in a close analysis where these cultural works
juxtapose a single, century-old incident—Queen Min’s assassination— onto contemporary South Korean social contexts to inculcate anti-Japanese sentiment. Lee suggests that the three works variously re-enact historical trauma and adopt it as a crucial visual ingredient to appeal to public sentiment.
The recreation of the traumatic, even, is of particular interest as Lee questions the producers’ ways of inflicting the Korean trauma upon the image of Queen Min on-screen, and how reinterpretations of the ancient past work alongside the pressure and aspirations of global ambitions in the future, fusing together to produce a cultural product that envisions the country’s future. Lee asserts that the workings of visualization in these three works posit Queen Min’s role within ambivalent frameworks (i.e. between traditional/modern and national/global desire), and she discusses how such positioning manipulates the empress’s significance in order to fulfill Korea’s desire for global visibility and success.
By conflating the story of Queen Min’s tragedy with contemporary national concerns and transforming the figure of the queen into an undying “spirit,” the narratives create a nationalistic icon that promises the nation’s bright future in the global era. Lee’s essay stresses one of the most important aspects of historical fiction in drawing attention to how the reimagination of histories is intrinsically linked to an imagination of the future, and recreations of historical narratives, which are conventionally rooted in local nationalistic discourse, are often serve to shape narratives of globalized futures.
Divya Metha’s essay in Chap. 7 is concerned with another element of the global discourse as she situates Pakistani history within the transnational and cosmopolitan frameworks of postcolonial history. Metha’s discussion calls attention to the textual dynamics of the interface and interflow between history and fiction, particularly in terms of the organization of meaning through specific formal ordering. The textual dynamics inherent in this formal ordering registers the complexities of transference from the historical to the fictional, and through her study of Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Metha approaches the political interventions made by historical fiction in the structuring horizons of socio-cultural intelligibility in forming historical narratives, as she explores the prescience and historical resonance of Rushdie’s choice of genre for the task of imagining a nation and the fault lines of its social (gender) organization.
Emphasizing the appropriateness of this critical approach, which is especially pertinent in examining texts that are set against the backdrop of
Asian postcolonial cosmopolitanism, Metha highlights the novel’s aesthetically hybrid magic-realist negotiation of gender issues in Pakistan, and considers the ways in which local marvelous narrative forms contribute to such a negotiation. Taking into account the mixed cultural and formal cast of Shame, and the transnational and cosmopolitan conditions of its setting, this chapter also situates the novel’s intervention in critical debates about Pakistani history around the global travel and circulation of aesthetic frameworks in a postcolonial context. In doing so, Metha raises questions about what a culturally “cosmopolitan” literary retelling of history offers to our understanding of that past? What can be the value of this specific optics to read history? And what relationship can such a historical novel have with various modalities of the local? These questions are at the heart of the historical fiction discourse, and as Metha attempts to formulate some possible answers to them within the context of Pakistani cultural and cosmopolitan currents in Rushdie’s novel, Maitrii Aung-Twin relates his experience, as a professor of history, in addressing some of these questions in the classroom.
The last two chapters in this volume further assert Amitav Ghosh’s standing in both historical and literary spheres. As the only writer in the volume flying the historian’s flag, Maitrii Aung-Twin’s essay gives literary scholars a rare glimpse of how historical fiction can be used in history classes. He provides a brief account of some of the challenges he faces in seeking appropriate materials to teach Asian history, and the limitations of conventional histories in teaching Asian history. This is particularly so because new transnational agendas in Asian studies continue to produce research that destabilizes intellectual, spatial, and political boundaries, and because attempts to teach “the region” or country-based histories have become increasingly more difficult to sustain. Even though the content of pre-1830 Southeast Asian history adequately covers the region’s dynamic transnational networks, developed over long-standing interactions of different cultures, religions, commercial and linguistic networks, post-1830 historical content has been less sensitive to these important intersections and the region as a global crossroads, as Westphalian boundaries begin to frame how Southeast Asian experiences are written and taught.
Aung-Thwin’s essay gives readers a rare glimpse of how a literary text like Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000) can be used to resolve some of these inadequacies and how a historical novel can serve as a practical supplement in the teaching of Burmese history. The novel, he asserts, has been instrumental in addressing the broader intellectual concerns of the period and
serves as an effective way to bridge pre-colonial histories with colonial and postcolonial experiences. For instance, Ghosh’s depiction of the circulatory experiences of particular communities during the colonial/postcolonial period in Myanmar amplifies an important approach through which a more fluid regional history might be taught. Ghosh’s characters are given highly personal narratives, and their stories, all bound up with the historical exigencies of the period, provide a thought-provoking platform for students to consider the wider implications of historical representation and what constitutes the Southeast Asian experience.
Sarottama Majumdar’s interest in Ghosh takes a different trajectory as she picks up on Ghosh’s interests in anthropology and the environment, and her study of the ecological elements in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) is as promising as Aung-Thwin’s reading of The Glass Palace; it is entirely possible for The Hungry Tide to be used in an ecologist’s classroom or an environmental conservationist’s lecture. Majumbar’s reading of Ghosh’s novel draws attention to the delicate relationship among migrant movement, fishing communities, and “intruders” (like scientists) who threaten to change, for better or worse, the environment that has sustained local inhabitants for generations. The complex structure of the novel serves as a springboard for Majumbar’s discussion as she charts the dizzying yet seamless juxtaposition of cultural and sociological exigencies of a specific location, the endangered biosphere of the Sundarbans, and a moment within a timeless scope. Majumba is concerned with the ways in which Ghosh has endowed this historically rich region—the great riverine delta of Bengal (politically, a part of India and Bangladesh)—with characters separated by privilege, and social rank, and, among them, a nineteenthcentury Scotsman who dreams of a utopian settlement on an uninhabited island in the Sundarbans. In tracing the interconnectedness among them, and the historical disappearance of a number of dispossessed Hindu refugees from Bangladesh (East Pakistan) from around the island (circa 1978), Majumbar seeks to develop an historically and ethically informed interpretation of a seemingly fragmented novel, as Ghosh’s narrative strategy achieves a balance both unique to and assimilative of an indigenous imaginative tradition.
The contributors in Asia and the Historical Imagination share a common vision in their take on historical fiction. They all recognize that at the heart of this unique genre is its sensitivity to local conditions and its ability to recast and reimagine those sensibilities in narratives that demand a different kind of historical inquiry. It is a kind of inquiry that dares to imagine,
to speak, and to revolt, and within that locality that is Asia, where the diversity of languages, cultures, and political ideologies converges. In setting the boundaries around the Asian region, this volume of essays does not discount the influences and exchanges between Asia and the rest of the world. Rather, we hope that its focus on different localities, while confined within a continent, will work toward amplifying some of the shared values, and at other times conflicting agendas, that have shaped the way in which the region articulates its anxieties of the past in anticipation of the future. The essays that follow strive to create a constellation of political, cultural, and ethnic links that will form a larger picture of how historical fiction can refigure perceptions of how dominant power relationships in Asia can be reimagined within a uniquely Asian context.
Notes
1. Ibid., 95.
2. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980), 8.
3. Michel de Certeau, qtd. in Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, National History, and the Historical Reality,” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005), 147.
4. Maria Margaronis, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Historical Workshop Journal 65 (2008), 138.
5. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Routledge, 1962).
6. R. Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2010), and Jerome de Groot, This Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010).
7. Richard Slotkin, “Fiction for the Purposes of History,” Rethinking History 9 (2005), 226–7.
8. See Beverley Southgate, “A New Type of History”: Fictional Proposals for Dealing with the Past (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2015).
9. David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History 39.3 (2008), 483. Also see his edited collection, World Literature in Theory (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), esp. “Part Two: World Literature in the Age of Globalization,” 69–246.
10. Pankaj Mishra, “Beyond the Global Novel,” Financial Times, Sept. 28, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc0-00144feab7 de?mhq5j=e6.
11. Tina Chen and Eric Hayot, “Introducing Verge: What Does It Mean to Study Global Asias?”, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.1 (2015), vi.
12. Ibid., vii.
13. Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 222.
14. Chen Kuan-Hsing, ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 1998); Chen Kuan-Hsing, and Chua Beng Huat, eds., Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007).
15. Brian Fay, “Unconventional History,” History and Theory 41 (2002), 1.
16. Malcolm Moore, “Singapore’s ‘Anti-Chinese’ Curry War,” Telegraph, Aug. 16, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/singapore/8704107/Singapores-anti-Chinese-curry-war.html, and Wong Chun Han, “The Strike That Rattled Singapore: A WSJ Investigation,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2013/08/26/the-strike-that-rattled-singapore-a-wsj-investigation/
CHAPTER 2
Can One Speak of the September 30th Movement? The Power of Silence in Indonesian Literature
IndonesIa’s new order
The onset of the Cold War in Europe had its repercussions in Southeast Asia as newly independent Southeast-Asian nations found themselves having to “choose a side” as they re-evaluated their relationships with both communists and their Western alliances. In Indonesia, the Cold War manifested as a violent persecution of communists following a failed coup in 1965. With his assumption of power in 1966, Suharto’s regime actively oppressed and eliminated artists and intellectuals deemed sympathetic to the Left, or who had trespassed any acceptable censorship markers. Under Suharto’s Orde Baru [New Order], Anna-Greta Nilsson Hoadley explains, “[t]he printed word was regulated by the New Order regime in a number of ways” as the press’s duties came to be defined as “working for national unity and stability” and “contributing to the country’s development.”1 Also in place was “the requirement that every publication had to have the government’s permission to be printed” while “expressions of protest of various types against the government, unrest of a political or religious sort
K. Y. Lye (*)
Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore
J. Y. C. Wong (ed.), Asia and the Historical Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_2
in the country, and particularly, the very repressive conditions in those areas where there were active security concerns such as East Timor, Irian Jaya, and Aceh” were banned from publication.2 As such, most of the political fiction that reassessed the nation’s violent past was overlooked until the early 2000s despite the seriousness and urgency inherent in its subject matter. The lack of translated writings presents a challenge to the study of such political fiction, but even more pressing is the “atmosphere of self-censorship” which “effectively prevented many other books from being written” since 1965.3
Despite tight control of the press, historical fiction that critically assessed the socio-political situation in 1965–6 Indonesia was plentiful. The coup in 1965 (or the September 30th Movement) and the bloody nationwide mass murders that followed were common subject matters for authors such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Putu Wijaya, Umar Kayam, and Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya. They espoused in their works the urgent need to reassess the nation’s violent past, engaging the silence that surrounded the remembrance of the 1965 mass killings with what Tony Day identifies as a realism inspired by nationalism, as they actively opposed Suharto’s regime.4 Often, these authors draw on their personal experiences in the aftermath of the failed coup of 30 September 1965. More importantly, they use literature to expose the culture of fear and selfcensorship imposed by the ruling regime. In addition, these authors, through their self-reflexive protagonists, debate their individual responsibilities as artists and as representatives of their fellow Indonesians.
However, what is particularly interesting and pressing is that which has been intentionally omitted from these works; these stories and testimonies do not explicitly discuss the 1965 coup even as they attempt to represent the politicide which followed it. Even in testimonials such as Abdul Latief’s “I, the Accused” (2000), the proceedings of the night of the coup, and the consequent pillaging of villages and mass murders remain largely unspoken.5 Instead, what these writings seek to present are experiences that cannot be publicly recounted. Through a reading of Y. B. Mangunwijaya’s Durga/Umayi (1991) and Umar Kayam’s Sri Sumarah and Other Stories (1980), we can attempt to discern the politics of representation and, possibly, gain insight into the remembrance of the 1965 coup in Indonesian literature.
The September 30th Movement (sometimes referred to as G30s) was to become a definitive moment in modern Indonesian history. On the night of 30 September 1965, six generals in Sukarno’s army were abducted
from their homes and murdered in the early morning of 1 October 1965; their bodies were thrown into an unused well in Lubang Buaya [Crocodile’s Pit] near Halim Air Field where the Partai Komunis Indonesia [Communist Party of Indonesia] (PKI) and Sukarno’s supposed “Fifth Force” were based.6 An announcement was made on public radio on the morning of 1 October 1965 that General Untung had uncovered a CIA-funded coup to overthrow President Sukarno, and that the President had been escorted to Halim Air Field for his own safety.7 General Suharto, who was spared assassination during the coup, stepped forward to command the Army and, in a surprising move, quelled the coup, and ordered the evacuation of President Sukarno from Halim Air Field. According to Theodore Friend, by the evening of the same day, “[m]uddled pronouncements and patriotic rallying cries by radio from the G30s movement were followed, contradicted, and silenced by announcements directed by Suharto’s headquarters.”8 Suharto’s military unit publicly claimed there had been a counter-coup and that those who were responsible were members of the communist-leaning PKI.9 As suspicions of Sukarno’s involvement in the coup mounted, Suharto began to consolidate support from the Army and student bodies, and finally, on 12 March 1967, placed Sukarno under house arrest and assumed full presidency.
Suharto envisioned a New Order of economic progress and modernity, and an administration without any ties to the communist parties previously associated with Sukarno. He promised to bring to justice those whom he had declared responsible for the brutal assassinations of the generals in the early morning of 1 October 1965. In areas such as West Java, “as few as 10,000 may have been killed,” and in Bali, “massacres ran out of hand,” as did the killings in Aceh, with the nationwide persecution of communists.10 Most commentaries about the September 30th Movement concur that members (even alleged members) from communist-run social groups such as Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, or Institute for the People’s Culture) and Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, or Indonesian Women’s Movement) were executed or detained without trial. Friend points out that “[t]ogether, the numbers of the executed and the incarcerated, probably over two million, convey a massive and systematic campaign of extermination, suppression, and stigmatization.”11 At least half a million Indonesians were killed, while many more disappeared or were detained without trial in the extremely violent persecution of alleged communists or, indeed, anyone suspected of having had any connections with communist organizations.
While we might expect a historical event this massive and violent to be discussed extensively in art and literature, the events of October 1965 through March 1966 remain very much under-represented in Indonesian literature. Moreover, even when the coup and mass killings are mentioned, these violent events are often glossed over.12 The lack of in-depth representations of the coup and its bloody aftermath is primarily due to two deciding factors: the events of 30 September 1965 were, and continue to be, shrouded in ambiguity, and, more critically, Suharto’s version of the coup silenced all other forms of testimony and historical fiction. Budiawan succinctly illustrates the political climate when he explains, “only a small circle of Indonesian scholars learned and discussed” alternative versions of Suharto’s master narrative, and they did so “silently.”13 And as we will see in the works of Mangunwijaya and Umar Kayam, the terror that followed the coup is presented only via vague accounts offered by evasive survivors and witnesses who remain reluctant to speak.
IndonesIan MagIcal realIsM and suharto’s Master narratIve
Like most of Mangunwijaya’s political essays and prose, Durga/Umayi provides a satirical and acute commentary on contemporary Indonesian history. As per Mangunwijaya’s concern with the “little people” and their voices, which were “lost in history,” Durga/Umayi is consistent in its reassessment of an Indonesian history that has been shaped and regulated by Sukarno and Suharto since the former’s proclamation of independence in 1945.14 Inspired by the plots of Wayang (shadow play), Mangunwijaya presents modern Indonesian history as a complex system of good and evil derived from a Javanized Mahabharata. Durga/Umayi begins with a prologue, “Foreshadowplay,” that sets the tone and premise of the novel.15 The “Foreshadowplay” narrates the myth of Lady Uma, how she came to be cursed and transformed into the Goddess Durga, and thus prepares readers for the introduction of the novel’s protagonist, Iin Sulinda Pertiwi Nusamusbid.16 The narrator informs the readers that Iin or Tiwi, as she is more popularly known, is “an asset and source of national pride.”17 From the beginning, Tiwi is at the centre of most of the important events in modern Indonesian history, at times even actively steering these historic moments for personal gain. Tiwi realizes she shares an intertwined fate with Indonesia, not because she might be a descendant of Lord Wisnu (as her father claims), but because of her “inherited talent” as a woman with
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I had fastened a cluster of large water-buttercups into my bodice, and I thoroughly appreciated the widow's kindness in looking at them, and taking no notice of my blushes. She was talking on in a pleasant, rambling way, and I was gradually getting cool again, when the page threw open the door and announced Mr. Greystock.
William Greystock came in, dark, bland, inscrutable as he always was. He had black eyes, deep-set, and black hair, closely cropped, that lay in thick ripples over his head. As he wore no moustache, there was nothing to veil the hard outline of his thin lips and prominent chin; and I thought then (as I think now) that his was the strongest and most cruel profile I had ever seen in all my life.
He talked well and fluently; admired Lady Waterville's flowers, and even deigned to praise my humble buttercups. I told him that I had bought them of a little girl in the street, just because they reminded me of my old home; and then he asked me if I had not lately written some verses about the country.
My cheeks grew hot again. Lady Waterville looked with an amused glance from William Greystock's face to mine.
"I did not know that Miss Coverdale ever wrote poetry," she said to him. "Pray, how did you find it out?"
"Through Ronald," he replied, with one of his peculiar smiles. "I went into his room last night and found him as usual with his beloved guitar. He was setting some lines to music; I asked who had written them, and he told me."
"Does he always tell you everything?" I inquired, trying to speak playfully, and succeeding very badly.
"Yes," was the quiet answer.
"He has inherited his love of the guitar from his Aunt Inez," said Lady Waterville, not looking at me. "She had quite an unreasonable fondness for her guitar, poor woman! I used to see her sometimes when she was first married to Colonel Greystock, and I always thought her a most extraordinary person. Ronald's mother, her own sister, was not like her in the least."
"I have often looked at those two portraits in the diningroom," said I. "Mrs. Hepburne was not nearly as handsome as her sister, but I like her face better."
"Ronald is exactly like his aunt," Mr. Greystock remarked.
"As I was saying," went on Lady Waterville, "I always thought Inez a most extraordinary person. She expected too much happiness and never got any at all. Poor thing! She was a disappointed woman from beginning to end. Any one with a genius for scribbling might make a novel out of her history."
"I should like to hear it," I said.
Lady Waterville was rather fond of storytelling, and she had been, as I soon discovered, more than commonly interested in Inez Greystock.
"Inez and Estella Winton," she began, "were the daughters of Captain Winton, an English naval officer who had married a Spanish lady. The mother died when the children were young; the father was often at sea, and they were left a good deal to their own devices. Inez was beautiful, and had, of course, a train of admirers; but she cared for no one save a young soldier, who was known in those days as Lieutenant Greystock. He liked her well
enough, Louie, but not half as well as she liked him. She lavished gold, you see, and got only silver in return."
"My uncle was a matter-of-fact man," put in William, in his quiet voice. "There never could have been an atom of romance in his nature."
"Just so," said Lady Waterville. "Inez was a fool to expect too much from him. He was not rich enough to marry, nor patient enough to bear with her exacting ways, and the affair ended, as such affairs often do, in a quarrel and a parting."
"What a pity," I cried, regretfully.
"I don't know that it was a pity, Louie. They would have gone wrangling through their youth together. But Inez, foolish girl, could never forget Greystock, although she married the richest man of her acquaintance, a Mr. Wendall. He was a diamond merchant, and after their marriage, he brought her to this very house, and invited Estella to come and live with them."
"He was a good husband, I believe," said William.
Inez
"He must have had the patience of Job," Lady Waterville replied. "After enduring his wife's irritable temper for seven years, he died, and left her handsomely provided for. And then, for two years more she lived here in peace and quietness with Estella and the guitar."
"No wonder that she chose to be painted playing on it," William Greystock remarked. "Her fondness for the thing must have amounted to a positive mania. It had belonged to her mother, had it not?"
"To her mother and grandmother. It was never far from her side, and she would compose airs and set words to them, just as Ronald does now-a-days. That portrait in the dining-room is Inez herself; there she sits as she did in life, her great Spanish eyes looking into space, and her guitar resting on her knees. It is a fine picture."
"It is beautiful," I said, "but very sad. And her second marriage—how did that come to pass?"
"It came to pass through Colonel Greystock's need of money," answered Lady Waterville, with her usual frankness. "William knows that I am telling an unvarnished tale. His uncle returned from India on leave, and sought out his old love, and Inez fancied, no doubt, that she had found her lost youth again. Captain Hepburne was Colonel Greystock's friend, and he happened to fall in love with Estella. On the same day the two sisters were married, very quietly, in St. George's Church, and the two husbands took their wives back with them to India."
"Then Inez was happy in her last days?" said I.
But Lady Waterville shook her head.
CHAPTER III.
INEZ.
WILLIAM GREYSTOCK was looking at me with a quiet, provoking smile.
"Miss Coverdale will be disappointed in the story," he said. "It is only in the fairy-tales that the prince and princess, when they are brought together, 'live happily ever afterwards.' For my part, I think a woman is sincerely to be pitied if she marries the hero of her first love-dream."
I knew that he was talking at me. From the very beginning of my intercourse with Ronald Hepburne, he had been watching me silently, and reading this tell-tale face of mine until I had often wished desperately for Mokanna's silver veil to hide my burning cheeks. They did not burn when he was not present; it was that quiet, persistent scrutiny which made me intolerably self-conscious, and deprived me of all ease and freedom. I disliked William Greystock heartily, and I was unwise enough to show my
aversion. If I had been a woman of the world, I should have concealed it under a pleasant manner and a sweet smile; but even then I could hardly have helped making an enemy of him.
For, if he had found out my secret, I had discovered his. Strange and incredible as it may seem, he had actually fallen in love with Lady Waterville's companion, the simple little girl fresh from the country. And with him, and with those like him, love merely means a strong desire for possession, not a willingness for self-sacrifice. It was the sort of love that will strike because it is forbidden to caress, and longs to wound the thing that will have none of its kisses. I do not think that a love of this kind is very common now-a-days; strong feelings have gone out of fashion, and men and women usually accept their disappointments with admirable coolness and good sense. But here and there we do occasionally find a fierce heart beating under everyday broadcloth, and then we are wise if we avoid, as much as possible, all intimate association with its owner.
I would not take any notice of Mr. Greystock's remark, and did my best to look as if it had made no impression upon my mind. But Lady Waterville could not let it pass; and I fancied that she, too, felt it was aimed at me.
"I really believe William is right," she said, thoughtfully. "There is nothing in life so sad as disillusion, and nothing that so embitters a woman's nature. Well, I must tell you the end of my story, Louie; it is nearly finished now."
"You left Inez and Estella in India," said I, a little impatiently.
"Yes; they went to India, and the elder sister had the satisfaction of seeing the happiness of the younger. This was the only joy that poor Inez could ever have known, her own wedded life was a bitter disappointment; she had been married—not for the old love's sake, but for the money's sake."
"Yet she might have been happy if she could have been content with a moderate affection," put in William, with his detestable smile.
"She could be content with nothing that fell short of her expectations," Lady Waterville went on. "There are children who refuse the crust because they cannot get the cake; Inez was only a passionate, grown-up child. She had quarrels with her husband: and Estella made peace between the pair more than once. But the peace-maker was soon removed; her health failed after the baby Ronald was born, and Captain Hepburne sent his wife and child home to England."
My eyes filled with tears, and I drew back into the shade to shelter my face from William's glances. From Ronald I had heard how his father had fallen at the taking of Delhi, and I hoped that Lady Waterville would pass quickly over the last parting of the husband and wife. Perhaps she divined my thoughts; moreover, it was the story of Inez Greystock, and not the story of Estella Hepburne that she had volunteered to tell.
"After Estella's departure," she continued, "the breach widened between Colonel Greystock and Inez. She left off her tantrums, and ceased to make bitter speeches—indeed I think her stock of bitter speeches must have been quite exhausted—but she cared less and less for her husband's society, and loved to shut herself up alone with the guitar.
She had no children; she made no friends; other women could not break through the impenetrable barrier of reserve which she had built up around her. I daresay a great many people pitied Colonel Greystock; but I don't think he concerned himself very much about his melancholy wife. He went his way, and left her strumming on the guitar and brooding over her miseries. You are angry with him, Louie, I see."
"He is just the kind of man I could hate!" cried I.
"Nonsense, my dear. He was moral and highly respectable, quite an ornament, as people said, to his profession. A heart, you know, is a most unfortunate thing for any one to possess; it is sure to retard one's advancement in life. Colonel Greystock was a lucky man; he had no heart, and he got on very well indeed. In fact, he seemed always to escape the disasters that overtook others, and when the mutiny broke out at Meerut, he happened to be away from the place."
"It was there that his wife met her death," said William Greystock.
"Yes, but the particulars have never been fully known. It was on a Sunday that the Sepoys rose, and most of the ladies of Meerut were in church. Inez, poor soul, was at home in her own house, and was killed there. It was said afterwards that a native soldier tried vainly to save her life, and that she had begged him with her last breath to take care of her guitar. A most incredible story, it seems to me."
"I don't know that it is incredible," William remarked. "She was either quite mad, or there really was a mysterious reason for preserving her guitar. Ronald, you know, has always inclined to the latter belief. He thinks that if the
guitar could be found, those missing jewels of hers would be found also."
"That story of the missing jewels is a mere fiction," Lady Waterville answered, contemptuously. "Surely, William, you are not romantic enough to believe in such a wild tale! No one ever saw those wonderful jewels; even Colonel Greystock declared that his wife had never mentioned them to him. The only person who ever spoke of their existence was Estella Hepburne, and her account of them was of the vaguest kind."
"But she believed in them," said William, "and I fancy she must have had some substantial reason for her belief. They were chiefly diamonds, I think; and had been left, of course, to Inez Greystock by her first husband, Wendall, the diamond merchant."
Lady Waterville was so astonished at Mr. Greystock's absurdity that she became almost excited.
"It was just because Wendall happened to be a diamond merchant that somebody started that fable," she cried. "If Inez had ever possessed any diamonds, she would have flung them at your uncle's feet in the excess of her devotion. Why, she was perfectly infatuated about him! The moment he returned to her, all her old love revived, and she gave him everything she had."
"Excepting this old house," said William.
"Excepting this house. This was intended to be the home of the Hepburnes and their son. Inez never meant to live in it again; she always said that when the Colonel had done with India, she should persuade him to go to some quiet country place. I think she had a dream of growing old
with her husband, and of finding him a lover to the very last."
"But the guitar, was it never found?" I asked.
"My dear Louie, is it likely that such a thing would ever be found? Imagine all the destruction and confusion of that terrible time! No, don't imagine it, for if you do you will not get a moment's sleep to-night."
I had no desire to picture the horrors of the mutiny, and I said so. Yet I secretly resolved that the next time Ronald and I were alone together, I would lead him on to talk of the lost guitar.
It was now time to dress for our usual drive before dinner. Mr. Greystock, who was well acquainted with Lady Waterville's habits, rose to depart, but lingered, standing, to say a few last words to me.
"Hereditary traits are an interesting study, Miss Coverdale; don't you think so?" asked he.
"I suppose they are," I replied, carelessly. "It is clear that Ronald has inherited his aunt's passion for the guitar," he went on.
"He is a happier fellow than I am."
"Indeed!" I said, with an air of incredulity.
"Well, he is young, to begin with. And he has gifts, and I have none; do you wonder that I envy him a little?"
"Yes, I do wonder," I answered. "I thought you were very well satisfied with yourself and your lot."
"Lately I have become dissatisfied. Mine is an empty life, and I'm beginning to grow disgusted with it. As to Ronald, he gets all the good things that he wants."
I only said: "Does he?"
"I am sure you know that he does. I am no judge of such matters, but I have heard it said that he has a way which no woman can resist. It must have been his Aunt Inez who gave him those tragic, musing eyes, and that look of unfathomable sorrow which he puts on sometimes. It is all very effective."
I gathered up my energies and succeeded, I believe, in preserving a tolerably calm face.
"Good-bye," he said. Then stepping back, he added, in an easy tone: "We were speaking of hereditary traits; by the way, there is one trait which Ronald has inherited from his father."
"What is that?" I foolishly asked.
"A love of gambling."
William went his way in quiet triumph, and left me with a dull ache in my heart. I ran quickly upstairs to dress for the drive; and then, finding that Lady Waterville was not quite ready, I went down to the dining-room and stood gazing at the portrait of Inez.
It was painted by a master's hand, and showed a beautiful brunette, wearing a gown of dark-red velvet, and holding the guitar upon her lap. The face, perfectly oval in shape, was thrown a little forward, as if listening; and the wonderful eyes, large, luminous, heavily fringed with black lashes, were so full of passion and sorrow that their gaze
thrilled me with pain. Ronald's eyes were not so splendid as these, yet they had a little of this unfathomable melancholy; and the shape of his face was like hers. There was a strong likeness between this ill-fated Inez and the nephew who had never known her.
Hearing Lady Waterville's slow footstep on the stairs, I turned away from the picture and went out into the hall.
"You look rather sad, Louie," she said, as I joined her.
CHAPTER IV.
RONALD.
I LIVED two years with Lady Waterville; and to outside observers, mine must have seemed the most peaceful and uneventful of lives.
But any one who could have seen beneath the surface would have found impatience, anxiety, and heartache always going on within me; and yet I was neither impatient
nor anxious about myself. It was for Ronald that I suffered. Until he entered my life, I had been contented with little joys; pleased with trifles; easily moved to gladness; but he came, and shadows came with him. It was a very common love-story after all; and I know that many a girl who reads these pages will pause and say to herself: "This is my experience."
He loved me deeply and truly, all the more because I was not only his love but his friend. To me were confided embarrassments, worries, even mistakes, and there was never any fear of being repulsed or misunderstood. I was a mere country girl; but I had thought and read and studied in my uncle's quiet cottage, and I found the hero of my real life-story not so very much unlike some of the heroes of fiction. My knowledge of human nature was only secondhand, but affection turned it to good account, and made the best of it.
Moreover, I had always possessed that useful power of assimilation which makes it a positive delight to be confided in. In old days, when boys came to stay at the rectory, I had seldom failed to adapt myself readily to such themes as interested them. I learned the names of their schoolfellows and masters in a trice, and never confused identities, and I would talk with them for hours about people I had never seen, and games I had never played. To this very day, I retain the parting tokens of their boyish friendship—a formidable knife with several blades, some marbles, and a pocket telescope, through which I have never yet been able to discern a single object, near or far.
And now that Ronald Hepburne came to me for sympathy, I seemed to live, move, and have my being in him and his concerns. Outwardly I belonged to Lady Waterville, but I scarcely gave her a thought; I could think
only of Ronald and the difficulties that beset his path, and made it impossible for us to walk side by side.
Later on, I learned that William Greystock had pretended to remove those difficulties. To him, as to an elder brother, Ronald had naturally confided his desire to increase his income and marry. Mr. Greystock had acquired a reputation for keen sagacity; he was acquainted with city men, and even Lady Waterville spoke with respect of his abilities for business. With his knowledge and influence it seemed easy for him to obtain a post for Ronald, but somehow that post was never found, and once or twice when the poor fellow, had thought himself almost sure of a situation, there had been a mysterious obstacle placed in his way.
Yet his belief in William remained unshaken. Ronald himself was constitutionally delicate, and seemed to have a natural incapacity to push through the crowd of fortuneseekers and gain his end. But William, who had never known a day's illness, seldom failed in getting anything he wanted, and yet he was always so cool and deliberate in his actions, that his object was attained without apparent effort or fuss. He was an energetic man, and Ronald was an indolent one.
Impartial observers, looking at the two men, invariably decided that William Greystock was a far better and grander character than Ronald Hepburne. William had added to his income by shrewd and cautious money-making; he gave liberally to public charities, he bestowed advice on frivolous bachelor friends, and was regarded by them as a model counsellor. Lady Waterville quoted his wise sayings continually, and was often heard to wish that Ronald—"poor, foolish, fascinating Ronald—" would put himself completely under the guidance of Mr. Greystock.
"Do you think Mr. Hepburne fascinating?" I said, one day.
"Yes," she answered, "and so do you, Louie. I admire that soft, languid manner of his; and you are in love with his melancholy face and manifold misfortunes. It does not matter to you that he brought a good many of those misfortunes on himself; like all women of your type, you are willing to heal wounds without inquiring how they were gained. In my opinion, you are a ridiculous girl, and I won't waste any more sound advice upon you!"
These words were said in her usual good-humoured way, and accompanied by a caressing pat on the shoulder. I had not then acknowledged that Ronald was my lover, and in Lady Waterville's presence we met only as friends. But I think she suspected that there was something more than friendship between us.
"I grant that your advice is always sound," I said, "yet if I followed it, I don't believe I should be happy. It is quite possible for some natures to be uncomfortable in the midst of comfort."
"Perfectly true," she replied. "As for you, Louie, you could not rest without wearing yourself out for another's sake. Your life is not worth living unless it is lived for somebody else. For me, and for thousands of other women, self is sufficient. It is not sufficient for you; but you are as heaven made you."
I knew that if I married Ronald, Lady Waterville would persist in regarding me as an interesting martyr to the end of her days. I knew that she would speak of me to her friends as a perfectly unselfish girl who had thrown herself away on a good-for-nothing man. But was Ronald really
good-for-nothing? I was a better judge of his character than any one else could possibly be. A true love is never blind; it is keener-sighted even than hate, it makes itself acquainted with all the weak places in the loved one's nature that it may mount guard over the undefended spots. And my insight into Ronald's inner self revealed to me a wealth of unsuspected good.
Knowing that I understood him far better than she did, I permitted Lady Waterville to say what she liked; but she could not delude me into the belief that I was a heroine. Nor could she even persuade me to alter my opinion of Mr. Greystock.
It was Lady Waterville's custom to leave town in the beginning of August, and stay away until the first of October; and when I first came to live with her, this autumn holiday had seemed very pleasant to me. I enjoyed the life one leads at a gay watering-place, and found that military bands, stylish costumes, and casual acquaintance were much to my liking. But the second autumn was not half as delightful as the first. I did not want to leave London, and felt listless and bored at the seaside. Straitened means had condemned Ronald to do penance in town till through the hot weather; and what were sea-breezes to me? It was a joyful day when my term of banishment was ended, and we returned to the old house in Hanover Square.
It was afternoon when we found ourselves in George Street again—a dim, quiet afternoon, made cheerful by some last gleams of autumn sunshine. The cab stopped at our door, and I got out with such a beaming face that the parlour-maid congratulated me on my appearance. It was the last time that I ever heard that cheery phrase:
"How well you are looking, miss, to be sure!"
In the days that came and went afterwards, most people surveyed me with a silence that was more eloquent than words. Miss Coverdale, the petted companion of Lady Waterville, with her rounded cheeks and smiling lips, was soon destined to become a creature of the past.
We lingered long over our afternoon tea, and were still sitting with the cups and the little table between us, when Ronald came in. He was looking noticeably worn and sad— so sad, that after one glance at his face all my gay spirits deserted me.
"We have been enjoying ourselves immensely," said Lady Waterville, in a mischievous tone. "Louie got through a good deal of flirting; it's astonishing to see the progress that she has made in the art! Last year she was a mere beginner, but now—"
"Now she is more disgusted with flirtation than she ever was in her life!" I interrupted, with impatience. "Why do you misrepresent Louie, Lady Waterville? You know she is sick of the band, and the pier, and all the seaside nonsense, and heartily glad to be at home again!"
Lady Waterville gave a sleepy little laugh, and sank back upon the cushions of her chair. In the next minute, she was snoring audibly; and Ronald and I were as much left to ourselves as if she had been in another room.
He drew nearer to my side as I sat in the glow of the firelight. There was a shaded lamp on a distant table, and the drawing-room was but dimly illuminated that evening. But the flickering flames revealed the lines on his face, and lit up the melancholy eyes that sought mine with a troubled gaze.
"I have been very lonely, Louie."
Is there any woman who can hear this confession from a man, and refrain from pitying him? Women are themselves accustomed to loneliness, and to many of them it is only another word for peace. We are not, as a rule, so sociably inclined as men; we can be content with a soft chair, a book, and the unfailing cup of tea, when a man will pine for companionship, and go out of doors, in rain or wind, to seek the face of a friend. I had learnt from Ronald's letters that he had missed me, but when we came face to face again, I knew, for the first time, that his yearning had become an absolute pain.
I could not find words to say to him at that moment; but involuntarily my hand touched his, and was seized and held in a close clasp. My eyes were fixed upon the fire; but they saw visions of an Eden, sunlit and glorious, full of granted desires and realised dreams. Perhaps he, too, saw the same vision, and rebelled all the more fiercely against his cramped and fettered life.
"Are we never to be happy together?" he whispered, passionately. "Are we to wait on and on, and let the best part of our lives go by? I have only a poor home to offer you, Louie; but I will work for you, dear. Will you come to me?"
Lady Waterville still slumbered peacefully; the large tabby cat kept up a drowsy purr on the hearth-rug at my feet, and there was no one near to utter a word of caution. Yet, in my own heart, a stern voice failed not to make itself heard above all love's fervent pleadings; and for an instant I paused, and listened to that inward warning. Then Ronald's eyes met mine, and the bright vision of an Eden came back at once; I should have been more than woman if I could have resisted its spell.
"I will come to you," I said, softly. And a brilliant flame shot suddenly up from the neglected fire, and showed me all the joy and triumph in his face.
CHAPTER V.
RECOVERY.
IF we had been wise, we should have waited till my nurse could give us rooms under her roof. But we would not wait. And so it came to pass that we were married, one grey autumn morning, in St. George's Church, and took up our quarters among strangers. Lady Waterville was seriously angry. She even went so far as to say some cutting things that I could not easily forget. I parted with her coldly, and left the old house with a firm determination not to enter it again unless I was sent for.
