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Riots in Literature Riots in Literature Edited by David Bell and Gerald Porter Cambridge Scholars Publishing Riots in Literature, Edited by David Bell and Gerald Porter This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by David Bell, Gerald Porter and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-582-7, ISBN (13): 9781847185822 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction...............................................................................................vii David Bell, Jukka Tiusanen, Gerald Porter Chapter One.................................................................................................1 Popular Riot in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI Pascale Drouet Chapter Two..............................................................................................21 Riot and Crowd Action in The French Revolution: Carlyle’s Histrionic Time Jukka Tiusanen Chapter Three............................................................................................51 “Never Again Stop the Way of a Welshman”: Rioting and Rebellion in Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter Tomos Owen Chapter Four..............................................................................................75 The Legal Mob: Mythologizing the Imperial Project in Popular Narratives of the Indian Uprising of 1857 Gerald Porter Chapter Five..............................................................................................93 Representation of Riots in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh Tuomas Huttunen Chapter Six..............................................................................................109 “Lost Creatures”: Responsibility, Representation and Crowd Violence in Nadine Gordimer, Harry Bloom and Sindiwe Magona David Bell Chapter Seven..........................................................................................129 “Burn, baby, burn!”: Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet and the Watts Riots Chloé Avril vi Table of Contents Chapter Eight...........................................................................................151 Antonin Artaud’s Avant-Garde Aesthetics of Disturbance and Audio-Visual Anarchy Ruth Walker Contributors.............................................................................................173 Index........................................................................................................175 INTRODUCTION DAVID BELL, GERALD PORTER, JUKKA TIUSANEN Riots in Literature addresses representations of crowd disorder as manifestations of popular politics, including colonial and postcolonial contexts. While crowd action is difficult to study, literary representation of it is plentiful, and deeply revelatory of political agendas, attitudes and anxieties. The contributors to this volume are interested in the analysis of the interaction of official political culture and crowd politics as represented in literature and orature, and how such representations contribute to the discourses of authority and subversion of their period. The volume examines these perspectives in some detail with contributions covering various cases of mass action and crowd behaviour as presented in a wide range of literary forms in English and French, including postcolonial, colonial, nineteenth-century and Shakespearean representations. The point of departure for this critical study is an understanding that the literary texts examined constitute a mediation of human behaviour through language that promulgates a hermeneutics of crowd behaviour in which the balance of order and disorder is in momentary disequilibrium. Growing out of this perception of the role of the literary text in the mediation of a social phenomenon are a number of key issues that the contributors explore. These comprise the nature of authority and the perception of crowd disorders as an instrument of empowerment, as a challenge to the spatial and political boundaries of power, and as a response to perceived failings in established codes of behaviour to cope with the suddenly acute though previously marginalized and apparently well-managed social tensions in a community. By implication, the rhetoric of power, royal, imperial, national or popular, dominates this discourse. Finally, in the imaginative space of a literary text, the historically situated nature of the events that are mediated there is transposed into an ahistorical discourse of “the riot.” It is the responsibility of any critical analysis to investigate such attempts to turn the fictional text into a strategy of containment whereby the real conditions of disempowerment viii Introduction and disorder are restricted to an imagined and controlled world. Behind such routinized perception there is life and dynamic change to which we wish to give a voice. The terms used to describe disorder are themselves, of course, contested. Words like “mob,” “demonstration” and “protest,” not to mention “riot’ itself, denote a particular perspective based on an elitist taxonomy for dealing with social and cultural phenomena in society. They can often be defined by exclusion: like “tourist” and “alcoholic,” a mob is almost by definition a group that the speaker is not part of. However, the word can be used defiantly or ironically, as in punk lyrics, and as if to assert this polysemy, David Bell discusses the way Sindiwe Magona uses the word in her novel Mother To Mother (1998). It is thus a central tenet of this book that a riot is an arena where disputes between various discursive logics are staged. Of primary concern is the way in which the text describes and designates crowd behaviour using the language of denigration, metaphors of the primitive and animalistic, brutal images, and silences, and where the mediation of the event is expressed in terms of a binary order/disorder. The double discourse of the last has led to a situation where what British historians have called the “Mutiny” of 1857 is known in India as the First War of Independence, a very different thing. In the same way, Chloé Avril’s article refers to the way Walter Mosley describes the Watts “riots” of 1965 as a popular uprising, and E. P. Thompson characterises eighteenth century insurgency as being more an attempt to defend customary rights than to implement political changes (1991, 188). Tuomas Huttunen points out that in Amitav Ghosh, a riot may be “beyond words,” enacting memories and sensations but difficult to turn into language because these would create single meanings. Crowd action plays an essential part in the questioning of authority. A system of order implies not only the possibility but also the likelihood of disorder sometimes originating from among the agents of order itself. In his short story “Fire and Cloud” (1938), Richard Wright showed the police as a “legalized mob,” confrontational even in cases where the satisfaction of basic needs was an issue.1 It might be described as the principle of disorder-in-order. In his novel (and later film) Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood 1960), Sembene Ousmane, for example, includes a striking example of such an incident when the colonial soldiers torch the houses of the railway workers during a strike on the Dakar-Niger line: In the blackness of the night a file of slightly blacker forms slipped out of the courtyard and took up their positions beside the fences and the mud walls of the houses. The sound of hoofs on the hard-packed ground of the street, and the metallic jingle of bridles and stirrups, could be heard clearly Riots in Literature ix now. It was a platoon of horse-soldiers, coming to reinforce the police. No one had told the white sergeant who led them that the police had been routed a long time before. (1983, 112-13) Another example of the legalized riot is the long period of looting and destruction by the British army that followed the relief of Lucknow in India in 1857. This is examined in Gerald Porter’s paper in connection with the concept of “British play.” We are interested in this book in the exercise of such authority as a form of repression; how protesters in different kinds of popular unrest were captured, disciplined and punished. Some protesters even acquiesce in this process: in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines (1988), the narrator’s cousin refuses to go on strike over a student who has been expelled because “a rule’s a rule; if you break one you must be prepared to pay the price” (81-82). This in its turn could be described as the principle of order-in-disorder. As the concepts of life- in-death and death-in-life are important in understanding the response of belated romantics to our finitude, paradoxical concepts are needed to understand our post-revolutionary anxieties over would-be social harmony and longing for immediate and specific social change. Many riots take the form of what Canetti calls the “baiting crowd” in pursuit of a single attainable goal (1984, 49). The lynch-mob in the United States, and the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in eighteenth century London are two of the most familiar examples of this. E. P. Thompson questions Canetti’s category of the one-issue riot. While not every riot pursues a political programme like the 1905 revolution in St Petersburg, every disorder that addresses a grievance can be said to have a broader political dimension: “A riot throws light upon the norms of tranquil years” (1994, 205). For example, the unofficial form of public humiliation exacted by crowds during the rough music and physical tormenting of straying wives, described in such accounts as Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, was not just a form of personal revenge but functioned as a form of social control. In his paper, Tomos Owen shows how the Rebecca riots in Wales that took place in opposition to the toll-roads, at the same time gave the participants a new identity as a gender and racial other. Thompson (1991, 213) also points to the causal links between economic factors and social disturbance when he suggests that, in the eighteenth century, serious riots and the threat of riots enforced the distribution of charity and subsidised food. In Francis Bacon’s words, “the rebellions of the belly are the worst” (1965, 42). The turbulence of the riot led to situations where social classes became fractured and regrouped according to their perceived interests. During the 1830 rising in England associated with the imagined figure of “Captain x Introduction Swing,” the participants included farmers as well as labourers, and the targets were those who were seen as benefiting directly from the system: parsons were dragged through ponds because they exacted tithes from the poor (Hobsbawm and Rudé 2001,158). Many riots are the result of natural disasters, but these too resonate politically, environmentally and socially, like the Irish famine and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. The ecological and biological will by their very urgency reconfigure allegiances, both transient and permanent. Elias Canetti emphasized that all crowds are dynamic: they must grow or they will wither away. They generate a sense of equality, and need direction (1984, 16, 29). They also generate and codify improvised skills in the way repressive action is anticipated and foiled. The role of leaders in crowd activity raises questions of responsibility and culpability, both within the crowd and in response to it, an aspect which is fully explored in David Bell’s discussion of the mediation of riots in South African fiction in chapter six. Gustave Le Bon (Les Foules, 1895) saw crowds in terms of their relation to authority, as controllable or uncontrollable, a distinction followed by Freud in Group Psychology (1921). George Rudé (1965), on the other hand, saw members of a protesting crowd as rational. The stereotypes of the fickle crowd and the manipulative agitator, analysed here by Pascale Drouet through the figure of Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI Part 2, are undermined by actual studies of crowd behaviour. There now exists a substantial research tradition into the history of crowd politics, famously pioneered by George Rudé (1965) Eric Hobsbawm (with George Rudé, 1969), and going through elaboration and revision by E .P. Thompson (1971, 1994) and John Plotz (2000) among others, which we have found useful. As Jukka Tiusanen shows in his study of Carlyle, the psychology of the rioting crowd is complex. Like all traumatic events, a riot represents to those witnessing it a rupture of time where fear and disorder break the preceding moments from future ones. It necessarily involves a conflict of two time senses, the official time of delays and half-measures of appeasement and the time-frame of the crowd, which is urgent and pressing. A similarly complex response can be expected from those who report on riots or compile histories from variously mediated reports and would-be “first-hand” reminiscences which are at best traumatized, at worst self-seeking. All riots become immediately mediated and interpreted, translated and transformed: they have been demonized or romanticized in tableau paintings, painted on mugs, hymned in union songs, documented through newspaper reports and in documentaries and feature films, and (most
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