KKuunnaappiippii Volume 9 Issue 3 Article 3 1987 MMoonnuummeennttss ooff EEmmppiirree:: AAlllleeggoorryy//CCoouunntteerr--DDiissccoouurrssee// PPoosstt--CCoolloonniiaall WWrriittiinngg Stephen Slemon Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Slemon, Stephen, Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/ Post-Colonial Writing, Kunapipi, 9(3), 1987. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol9/iss3/3 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] MMoonnuummeennttss ooff EEmmppiirree:: AAlllleeggoorryy//CCoouunntteerr--DDiissccoouurrssee// PPoosstt--CCoolloonniiaall WWrriittiinngg AAbbssttrraacctt On Tuesday, 22 June 1897, Britain's loyal subjects — at Home, in the Dominions, and in the Colonies — celebrated in song and spectacle the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria's reign. It was not only the Queen's longevity they were celebrating, not only the remarkable progress of Western technology and science over the past sixty years, but also, and most importantly, the spread of the British Empire itself to the point where it now subsumed one quarter of the world's entire population. 'From my heart,' ran the Queen's message, telegraphed across the globe, 'I thank my beloved people. May God bless them.'' This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol9/iss3/3 STEPHEN SLEMON Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/ Post-Colonial Writing On Tuesday, 22 June 1897, Britain's loyal subjects — at Home, in the Dominions, and in the Colonies — celebrated in song and spectacle the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria's reign. It was not only the Queen's longevity they were celebrating, not only the remarkable progress of Western technology and science over the past sixty years, but also, and most importantly, the spread of the British Empire itself to the point where it now subsumed one quarter of the world's entire population. 'From my heart,' ran the Queen's message, telegraphed across the globe, 'I thank my beloved people. May God bless them.'' The weather in England was glorious — they called it 'Queen's weather'^ — but in the city of Sydney, capital of the Crown colony of New South Wales, the skies looked threatening. Innumerable celebra- tions were planned for the day: a grand march-past of troops along Macquarie Street; a procession in the harbour of splendidly illuminated steamers, each of them packed with singing loyalists; a picturesque display in the Domain of school girls dancing in skirts of royal purple. But one of the 'gayest scenes'^ to be enacted that day was a celebration, not of Victoria herself, but of European setdement on the Australian continent: the unveiling in the Royal Botanical Gardens of a monument to Sir Arthur Phillip, Commander of the First Fleet, and first Governor of New South Wales. This is how the press in Sydney reported it: On the footpaths and in the roadway thousands awaited the beat of the drums and the blare of the brass instruments which were to announce the coming of our brave defenders.... The Union Jack draping the noble proportions of the figure of the first Governor of the colony could be seen from the balconies and windows of the handsome houses in Macquarie-street, and people hung out over the railings all along and posed on the giddy heights of flat-topped roofs.... [A] guard of honor from 1 H.M.S. Orlando formed at the statue [and] was soon surrounded by a patriotic throng. The body guard from the Permanent Artillery under Major Bailey marched in and formed, and the Governor and suite followed... His Excellency was heartily applauded on advancing to the front of the platform.... 'Look at the picture spread out in front of your eyes today, and compare it in your mind with the view presented by this harbour when the Sirius sailed in,' said his Excellency. 'One hundred years or so have passed, and you have this great and populous city, these beautiful gardens, and a magnificent array of shipping which always adorns your harbour. You are now a great and prosperous commun- ity, dependent no longer on help from outside, but self-reliant and self-governing.' (Applause).... His Excellency then pulled the red, white, and blue ribbon, and the Union Jack fell from the bronze figure, the bronze dolphins at the base spouted water, and the people sent up a mighty cheer.... Three cheers were given for the Queen.^ When that flag had fallen and the cheers had died down, the people crowded around this monument would have seen, first, the huge and imposing figure of Phillip himself, dressed in full military regalia and towering above the fountain on his rectangular sandstone column, his right foot purposefully forward and his hand outstretched, as if offering to someone the written document that it displays. As their eyes slid downward to the monument's second level, they would have observed the half-sized classical figures at the four cardinal points: two males and two females, all of them dressed, but in the flowing robes and scant tunics of a distant culture and a more innocent age. They would likely have noticed, also, the bas-relief inscriptions naming each of these figures: 'Neptune' for the bearded man with the trident; 'Commerce' for the reclining woman to his right; 'Cyclops' for the figure beside her (but probably signifying Odysseus, because the virile figure has two eyes and a cunning look), and 'Agriculture', for the woman coddling a sheep. They might also have discerned, if they were close enough, a series of friezes on the statue's rectangular column, each depicting a scene from classical family life, each inscribed for its respective significance: 'Education', 'Patriotism', and 'Justice'. But unless the spectators on that day were very close, they would probably not have noticed the four small plaques on the lowest level of the statue: the level of the fountain water and the bronze dolphins. On each of these four plaques, etched flat into the bronze, is the figure of a naked Aboriginal hunter. And none of these figures is marked by any inscription of language whatsoever. Most viewers of this statue would recognise in it the operations of some kind of allegorical structure, one going beyond the immediate level of figuration — woman as 'Agriculture' or 'Commerce', for example — Monument to Governor Phillip. Botaniccil Gardens, Sydney. Photograph: Reece Scannell. and applying to the semiotic system of the statue as a whole. In its simplest form, allegory (from the Greek alios — 'other' + agoreuein — 'to speak openly, to speak in the assembly or market')*^ is a trope that in saying one thing also says some 'other' thing; it is the doubling of some previous or anterior code by a sign, or by a semiotic system, that also signifies a more immediate or 'literal' meaning.' Allegory thus marks a bifurcation or division in the directionality of the interpretive process, and we can see such a bifurcation cutting across the kind of'reading' that this monument to Arthur Phillip seems to demand. On a literal level, the statue commemorates a specific historical figure from a specific historical moment; it denotes a 'then' and a 'now' and implicity suggests that the two are connected by the kind of development within continuity, change within permanence, that the Governor's speech so stirringly evokes. On this literal level, Phillip's striding figure represents that hallowed moment when European colonists first stepped onto the new land of the Australian continent, and the text he holds forth can be identified as the Letters Patent that authorises the establishment in the colony of the apparatus of British law.^ On an allegorical level, however, the statue clearly signifies a great deal more. In the first place, it deploys a complex and interwoven network of spatial, numerical, and magnitudinal codes in order to construct what appears to be a fairly simple binary system of privilege and power. Phillip stands above, resplendent, while the Abor- igines lurk below; he is vast in size while they are small; his full clothing resounds against their nakedness; his singularity echoes against their plu- rality. Between the two poles of this system is interposed a mediating level: that of the manifold theatre of classicism. The classical world is portrayed as being contiguous to the European present, at once a pedigree of its deeply rooted codes of civilisation and a reflection of its imperial energies, and because of this, the statue can be seen to be combining its basic binary structure with another semiotic code: that of history itself As we read downward, away from the originating moment of colonisation and Phillip's indomitable stride, we find ourselves reading backward through time, past the founding moment of Western culture towards the lost origins of the human race itself Here, on the unknowable, and hence uninscribed, plane of the prehistoric, contemporary Aboriginal culture is figured as the long moment of human savagery, Western culture's deepest roots. As this tripartite structure makes clear, then, this statue of Phillip is less an historical monument than a monument to history, and as such it works not only to construct the category of'history' as the self-privileging inscription of the coloniser, but also to legitimise a particular concept of history: that is, history as the record of signal events, the actuations of great men upon the groundwork of time and space. Within such a concept, where only those 'few privileged monuments'^ of achievement, those events and figures measurable in bronze and stone, have the capacity to signify, colonised cultures must always remain uninscribed. Their communal practices of quotidien existence, their cultural acts of self-defmition and resistance, are written out of the record; and in the process, subjugated peoples are 'troped' into figures in a colonial pageant, 'people without history'whose capacity to signify cannot exceed that which is demarcated for them by the semiotic system that speaks for the colonising culture. On the allegorical plane, then, the monument to Phillip represents the March of History, the inexorable advancement of a universal progress; and significantly, this March finds its purest expression in the territorial acquisition and cultural subjuga- tion implicit in the enterprise of colonialism. From an aerial view, the statue describes a circle: Arthur Phillip at the centre, his eyes looking searchingly toward the horizon; the Aborigines on the statue's outside wall, their gaze downward, fixed upon the ground. Phillip's gaze encompasses the Aborigines, but their peripheral positioning, along with the angle of their vision, makes it clear that within the system of this statue the Aborigines remain ignorant of him. In this monument to the Imperial presence, the signifiers of gaze represent more than the contrast between benighted ignorance and noble enlightenment. Rather, they encode a third system of representation operating in this statue: that of'the objectifying gaze of knowledge'In the logic of the gaze, the percipient constructs that which is 'out there' — individuals, cultures, spaces — into 'units of knowledge','^ not, pri- marily, to effect genuine understanding, but rather to effect a subjective construction of Self The process at work here, in a specifically colonial construction, is not dissimilar to that which some critics see underpinning the practice of pornography, where male viewers inscribe their will onto the bodies of represented women, fixing them to an identity fabricated entirely by masculine desire, and ascribing to them no more than the wish to be subsumed within precisely this gaze.^^ In the imperial context of this statue, that which is Other is 'read' against an already given matrix of identification and learning which erects itself upon the founda- tions of received tradition — the 'codes of recognition'"^ embedded in the metaphysical, social, and political systems of Western culture — and is made to figure in a system designed primarily to interpellate a subjec- tivity for the colonising culture itself There is no gaze outside that of the coloniser, no angle of vision that opens to a future other than that which the statue, as monument to History, inscribes — unless, of course, it is that of the viewers. But the viewers, in recognising the statue as a semiotic system, and in assembling from the codes it deploys the allegory of Imperial Self, become complicit in the colonising gaze, active partici- pants whose knowledge of Western modes of representation is necessary to the communication of the statue's allegorical meaning. Like the Abor- igines figured on the base of the statue, the viewers, too, are constructed by representation. The social 'text' of Arthur Phillip's landfall recurs in a series of celebra- tory moments, the most recent being the physical 're-enactment' of the voyage of the First Fleet during the Australian bicentennial in 1988. The patterns of recurrence which operate through this statue, however, are a little confined to a single national history as they are to a specific temporal moment: in fact, both the ideological process this statue enacts, and the allegorical mode of representation through which it conveys that process, work as a kind of shorthand to that widespread form of cross- cultural management which critics such as Homi Bhabha and Peter Hulme identify as the 'discourse of colonialism'.^'' 'Discourse', as Foucault theorises it, is the name for that language by which dominant groups within society constitute the field of 'truth' through the imposition of specific knowledges, disciplines, and values.'^ Discourse, in other words, is a 'complex of signs and practices which organises social existence and social reproduction', and its function is 'to give differential substance to membership in a social group or class' by mediating both 'an internal sense of belonging to that group [and] an outward sense of otherness'.^' As Foucault puts it, discourse is 'a violence we do to things';'® it is a 'diffuse and hidden conglomerate of power'; and as a social formation it works to constitute 'reality' not only for the objects it appears passively to represent but also for the subjects who form the coherent interpretive community upon which it depends. And so the term colonial discourse, or the discourse^ of colonialism, is the name for that system of signifying practices whose work it is to produce and naturalise the hierarchical power structures of the imperial enterprise, and to mobilise those power structures in the management of both colonial and neo-colonial cross-cultural relationships.'^ This statue to Governor Phillip, then, functions in at least one of its social dimensions as a signifying practice within this discourse of colonial- ism, and the ideological process it sets in train is that system of repre- sentation which Gayatri Spivak calls 'othering':^° that is, the projection of one's own systemic codes onto the 'vacant' or 'uninscribed' territory of the other. By this process, the Other is transformed into a set of codes that can be recuperated by reference to one's own systems of cultural recognition. The unknowable becomes known; and whatever 'spillage' might have occurred in the problematics of racial or cultural difference becomes stoppered by the network of textualization that is inscribed onto the Other and then read as a 'lack' or 'negation' of that which constitutes the Imperial and transcendent One. The Imperial self that engineers this discourse thus fixes the limits of value and signification of the Other to that which takes place within the projected system, and arrogates to (him)self sole purchase on the possibility of organic wholeness. As for the Others, they are determinant in a system of power and self-constitution, elements somewhere 'out there' beyond the circle, awaiting discovery, conquest, appropriation, and interpretation.^' As one court ruling put it in 1854, the Others of Empire are 'people whom nature has marked out as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or development beyond a certain point ... [people upon] whom nature has placed an impassable difference The statue of Governor Phillip functions as one of the more spectacular allegorisations of this figurai system of 'othering', but the investments of allegory in the semiotics of imperialism do not end here. In over- simplified form, allegory can be understood as a mode of representation that proceeds by forging an identity between things, and it reads present events, whatever the signifying system in which they are found, as terms within some already given system of textualised identification or codified knowledge. As Paul de Man points out, allegory consists of semantic repetition in a rhetoric of temporality, and within this rhetoric the sign is always grounded to a another sign which is by definition anterior to it." In allegory, that is, signifiers from the world 'out there' are semantically fixed to a culturally positioned and historically grounded 'master code' or 'pretext' that is inherent in the tradition and is capable of acting as a matrix for a shared typology between the sign and its interpreters. In allegory, signs are interpreted as modalities of preceeding signs which are already deeply embedded in a specific cultural thematics, and they work to transform free-floating objects into positively identified and 'known' units of knowledge.^^ That process of recognition which underwrites the statue to Phillip, then, is inherently allegorical, for it depends upon a rhetoric of anterior reference to the metaphysical, political, and social codes that construct the subjectivity of European colonising societies. And this same structure of allegorical reference and recognition can be seen to have provided an energising impetus to the discourse of colonialism ever since the project oi European imperialism began. This, of course, is a point that needs arguing, but to give one example onlv: when Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean, he named the first two islands he encountered for the Christian deity and the \'irgin. and his next three islands for the Spanish king, queen, and heir apparent. The rhetorical structure of this ritual ot naming is inalienably allegorical, for here Columbus "reads" the site of otherness by reference to an anterior set of signs that is already situated within an overarching, supposedly universal, metaphysical and political master code of recognition. As a discursive practice such ritual works in concen with other forms of textual imposition to assimilate the so-called 'New World" into 'orthodox relation" with the religious and political hier- archies of value that comprised the dominant ideolog\' of Europe at the time.' Columbus"s onomastics help demonstrate, then, that within the discourse of colonialism allegor\- has always functioned as an especially visible technology- of appropriation; and if allegory literally means 'other speaking", it has historically meant a way of speaking/or the subjugated Others of the European colonial enterprise — a way of subordinating the colonised, that is. through the politics of representation. This function of alleger\- in the dominant narrative patterns of imperialist textuality inherendy loads the question of how allegory performs in the context of colonial and post-colonial literatures where, as Homi Bhabha points out. the semiotics of Empire so often return in repetitions whose mimicr\^ bears the traces of a menacing difference.'' Frederic Jameson, in an article entitled 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism'.' has recently addressed the question of how a difTerential. non-western allegorical practice might establish itself as a social phenom- enon, and his site for examining this question is the larger field of third- world textuality. 'What all third-world cultural productions have in common," Jameson argues, 'and what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in the first world' is that "all third-w^orld texts are necessarily ... allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say particularly when, their forms develop out of predominandy western machineries of representation, such as the novel.' The reason for this inherent propensity to allegorical writing, Jameson argues, is that in the third world the determining imperatives of capitalism have not (yet) fissured the cohesive structures of social existence and therefore have not