The impossibility of the spatial dichotomy in colonial narratives : an analysis of the representation and significance of space in E.M. Forster’s a passage to India and J.M. Coetzee’s waiting for the barbarians

• Main Author: Luo, Priscilla Peiyu
• Other Authors: Bede Tregear Scott
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Language::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62732
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

One conspicuous and fundamental distinction is the colonizer versus colonized binary opposition. As such, colonial narratives tend to partition space into two separate halves: the space of the colonizer and the space of the colonized. The former is typically a classification of spaces that are charged with colonial power and control, while the latter is commonly seen to be the space occupied by the colonized natives who are subject to the Empire, but uncontrolled by the colonizers. Characters that do not stay within their own space seem to end up suffering or having to face a terrible consequence. In analyzing the effect of colonial transgression in 1939 film The Rains Came, Prem Chowdhry mentions that the “outcome of this transgression [was] in the mould of several other similar transgressions in the colonial fiction – the woman dies as punishment for breaking social conventions” (207). Similarly, both Aziz and the Magistrate face punishment as they end up falsely accused under the colonial law and remain as outcasts even after they have been seemingly liberated. In Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, Gerhard Stilz mentions that “a colony is a split affair” as the colonizers have the intention to “make the world their home, to use it and transform it along their imported principles and structures” while for the colonized it does not “promise a welcome change to their home” (11). As colonies are “places of imperial expansion, of economical acquisition . . . places of territorial invasion, of alien spoliation, of forceful disappropriation and discrimination”, colonial space is often seen as a space of contestation, of territorial dispute, and of division (11). What Stilz proposes is that there is a contestation of physical space between the colonizers and colonized, which often ends up with the colonizers dominating the subservient, disempowered colonized through the exploitation of their territory. However, in both novels, physical space demonstrate their encompassing qualities, resisting forms of classification and rejecting the notion that one particular space can belong to either the colonizer or colonized. Henri Lefebvre mentions that it is myopic to assume that such classification of space parallels the realities of colonialization: “Indeed each new form of state, each new form of political power, introduces its own particular way of partitioning space, its own particular administrative classification of discourses about space, and about things and people in space. Each such form commands space, as it were, to serve its purposes; and the fact that space should thus become classifactory makes it possible for a certain type of non-critical thought simply to register the resultant “reality” and accept it at face value” (281). It is undeniable that both novels illustrate space as divisible. In Forster’s novel, the division of physical space is clearly portrayed in the first chapter. Coetzee demonstrates this division in a more implicit manner; space belongs to the side that has the ability to command the subjects within it. However, I argue that physical space in both novels is not always divided by one concrete boundary. In fact, the boundary is weak, not in a sense that territorial invasion is easily possible due to disempowerment but that this seemingly concrete boundary that separates the two spheres is easily dissolvable, producing new spaces where the differences between colonizers and the colonized are negotiated, resolved or compromised to generate positive meanings. I argue that beyond the possibility of characters crossing spatial boundaries and being punished for it is the convergence of spaces to ultimately produce new possibilities and meanings between colonizers and colonized. That being said, it is not that the two spaces are mutually inclusive or naturally assimilated into each other. Instead, characters constantly attempt to negotiate their differences within spaces which potentially create new and positive spaces.