about demille

8/2/2019 About Demille

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James DeMille

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

1888

A common device used to bridge the mundane and fantasy worlds in early imaginative literatur

was the lost narrative discovered in the opening chapters. DeMille's anonymous novel is typical o

the lot. A manuscript is found floating in a copper cylinder by sailors, and is read aloud by its

discoverers. The story tells of one Adam More, shipwrecked in southern latitudes in 1843, and lefto drift in an open boat with his companion Agnew. Their first stop is an island inhabited by black

cannibals, who entice the men on shore, and dine on Agnew. More barely escapes, and is drawn b

currents southward across the sea towards a vast mountain range. The boat plunges through a dark

tunnel beneath the peaks, and emerges in a calm inland sea surrounded by green, fertile lands,

although this area should be, by More's best calculations, in the Polar region. Upon landing, he

finds a strange race very much resembling Arabs. They take him to their underground city, where

he is taught a language similar to Arabic by the beautiful Almah, and discovers that the cultural

and moral values of this peculiar race are weirdly inverted. The pseudo-Arabs see better in the

dark than in daylight. They seek poverty, giving their possessions to whomever will take them;they long for death as the highest blessing of their lives; and, although peaceful, they practice

human sacrifice and cannibalism on hundreds of willing victims. Adam and Almah fall in love,

and find that they are destined to be given the honor of dying for her people. At the last moment,

More kills several of the populace with his rifle, and the multitudes, awe-striken, fall down and

worship him as a god who can bring the greatest good-death-instantly. The Arctic and Antarctic

regions were frequently employed as settings for lost race novels during the last half of the

nineteenth century.

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Documents

Cannibals and critics: An exploration of James de Mille's Strange Manuscript

Maggie Kilgour. Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of

Literature. Winnipeg:Mar 1997. Vol. 30, Iss. 1, p. 19-37 (19 pp.)


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A contrapuntal reading of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

Gerson, Carole. Essays on Canadian Writing. Toronto:Fall 1995. Iss. 56,

p. 224-235

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Citation style: ProQuest Standard

Document 1 of 2

Cannibals and critics: An exploration of James de Mille's Strange Manuscript

Maggie Kilgour. Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of

Literature. Winnipeg:Mar 1997. Vol. 30, Iss. 1, p. 19-37 (19 pp.)

***** Abstract (Summary) *****

Kilgour discusses the lurid interest in cannibalism that appears in both modern

culture and criticism. James de Mille's "Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper

Cylinder" is examined.

***** Full Text *****

(8599 words)

Copyright MOSAIC Mar 1997

In 1972, Rene Girard noted that although incest and cannibalism are equally

important to the foundational myths of the West, "we are perhaps more

distracted" by the former than the latter. He speculated, however, that incest

may have claimed greater attention "only because cannibalism has not yet found

its Freud and been promoted to the status of a major contemporary myth" (276-77). While Girard's observation may have been true in 1972, it seems less so in

1997, when we are in the midst of a veritable boom of cannibal literature,

films, and criticism. Since the 1960s the cannibal has become a major modern

mythical figure-especially in films ranging from George Romero's Living Dead

series, through other cult hits such as Soylent Green, The Texas Chain-Saw

Massacre, Eating Raoul, Parents, Eat the Rich, Big Meat Eater, CHUD, to more

recent art films: The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover and Delicatessen.

Even more tellingly, perhaps, cannibalism has moved into the Hollywood

mainstream, through the film adaptations of two novels, Fried Green Tomatoes


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and, most famously, Silence of the Lambs which sent a cannibal to the academy

awards.

In many of these works, cannibalism clearly provides a delicious, if rather

reductive, image for the nightmare of a "consumer" society, uneasy about its

own material appetites, including its own increasing hunger for such lurid

tales. So, for example, in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the refugees from thecannibal zombies hide in a shopping mall, whose walls separate two mirrorforms

of conspicuous consumption. The image of the cannibal thus serves the satiric

function of revealing the heart of darkness within contemporary society,

reminding us that civilization conceals its own forms of savagery. The satiric

potential of the cannibal as a form of cultural critique may in turn suggest

the reasons why this figure also seems to be playing an increasingly important

role in recent anthropological, New Historicist, post-colonial, and feminist

analyses of literature and society. I recently participated in a "Symposium" at

the University of Essex, on "Consuming Others: Cannibalism in the 1990s," whichfeatured presentations by a number of critics who have been exploring the

implications of what William Arens first controversially called the "man-eating

myth," including Arens, Gananath Obeyesekere, Peter Hulme, Francis Barker, and

Marina Warner. The fact that there exists such an interdisciplinary group

concerned with this unsavory subject is significant. It is indicative of a

current critical concern with our cannibal past-by which I mean not our savage

prehistory, but rather the history of Western imperialism and its subsumption

of so-called "cannibal societies" through "colonial discourse" which defines

the "other" as primitive and barbaric. It is symptomatic too of recent interest

in the legacy of imperialism: our cannibal present, in the form of the moderncapitalist world of isolated consumers driven by rapacious egos. Connected to

our thinking about the past that has produced our present, cannibalism has

emerged as a topic of interest as part of contemporary criticism's desire to

redefine differences, sexual, textual, racial-to deconstruct the boundaries

that in the Western tradition have too often been formed along the line of

binary oppositions.

Traditionally, of course, cannibalism has served as the image of absolute

difference-the strict boundary that divides the civilized from the savage, thehuman from the monstrous. In this, it is an extension of how food and eating in

general are used to define personal, national, and sexual identities. In

accordance with the saying "you are what you eat," cultural identity is

constructed by dietary taboos that define what is and is not edible. Foreigners

are frequently defined in terms of how and, especially, what they eat, and

denounced on the grounds that they either have bad table manners or eat

disgusting things-the French, for example, are called "frogs" for eating the

frogs legs that no dainty Brit, nourished on nice blood pudding and other

assorted organs, would deign to touch. Eating thus becomes a means of creating


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cultural differences. As an even more charged kind of consumption, cannibalism

provides an image for the construction of clear boundaries between groups: "we"

are civilized and eat nicely, "they" are barbaric and eat savagely; "we" eat

normally, "they," perversely. As Arens has argued, the charge of cannibalism

can thus be used as an ideological device to justify racial, religious,

political, and sexual attacks against any group seen as different from and

therefore threatening to a body politic. Defined as consuming threats to socialorder, such forces can then themselves be, if not literally subsumed, at least

assimilated, and at times annihilated.

The figure of the cannibal has always served a function of constructing the

identity of one group through opposition to an "other." Stories of

anthropophagy go back to prehistory, occurring for example in the myth of the

Golden Age, whose gilt may have been tarnished somewhat by the presence of the

indiscriminately appetitive Cyclops. In these early myths, the cannibals tended

to be remote figures, distant either in time or space. In the ancient classicalworld there were always rumors of others who lived on the fringes of

civilization, and whose half-human status was signified by the fact that they

were said to eat each other. Such myths suggest little about the people they

described, and more about the cultures who spread them, and their fears of what

lurked at the edges of an expanding empire. While each culture creates its own

peculiar demons, the anthropophage typically provides a mythic image for the

elements that threaten civilization: the wild untamed nature that resists the

advances of culture. Such forces can be projected also onto the society's own

past, as a state of savagery out of which it has just emerged and into which it

fears it may regress; the figure of the man-eater can thus support narrativesof evolution and progress, proving the superiority of the civilized over the

natural (Arens 14-16).

The most famous classical cannibals appear in Homer's Odyssey, as obstacles to

Odysseus's quest. In Horkheimer and Adorno's influential reading of the epic,

Odysseus's journey becomes a central myth of enlightenment, which represents

the struggle between the forces of progress and regression (43-80). Odysseus's

meetings with the Cyclops and Laistrygonians influences later epics and tales

of conquest, which use the devouring cannibal to symbolize savage elementshostile to the spread of culture and empire. Yet Odysseus's story is more

ambiguous than it appears, for his journey home suggests another type of

regression, while the cannibals are literalizations of his own powerful

appetite (See Kilgour 23-24).

With the discovery of the New World in the Renaissance, moreover, the

ambivalent resonances of anthropophagy become even more complex, as the

encounter with the foreign native reinforced by opposition an emerging sense of

the modern Cartesian subject (Kilgour 147-50). In contrast to the European who


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increasingly defined himself as an autonomous independent entity, clearly

differentiated from others, the cannibal became the embodiment of an "other"

who destroys individual boundaries. As the modern Western ego increasingly came

to be founded upon faith in production, progress, and individual autonomy, the

cannibal inversely came to represent consumption, regress, and the annihilation

of discrete identity. In the figure of the cannibal, the West found the epitome

of the loss of personal or cultural identity involved in "going native": theimage of the self completely subsumed and assimilated by the "other." The New

World cannibal thus helped construct the modern European identity by contrast,

serving as a mirror image of modern Western values; at the same time, however,

the cannibal represents the annihilation of the modern self. The horror of

cannibalism thus lies in the fact that it both gives us a sense of who we are,

and yet is a threat to that identity, representing most graphically the

dissolution of the individual.

The discovery of the New World and the expansion of Western empires marks onesignificant renaissance in cannibalism literature, when the perennial myth of

the man-eating "other" took on new symbolic force as a projection of modern

dreams and nightmares. The cannibal is the perfect demon for a culture based on

geographic and scientific expansion and progress, which yet fears its own

consuming appetites and so displaces them onto others. The doubling of the

cannibal and the consuming explorer-or exploring consumer-is illustrated

further in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's text set a new model for realistic

tales of shipwreck and cannibalism which are typical of the second renaissance

of cannibalism literature in the 19th century. In the writing of authors such

as H. Rider Haggard, Herman Melville, and, most famously, Joseph Conrad, thefigure of the cannibal also begins to reflect a growing awareness of the

consequences of the imperial project that the Renaissance began. In their

works, imperialism is represented as selfdestructive, for it undermines the

very differences upon which it depends. Whereas supporters of imperialism

feared that, by bringing together the civilized and the savage, imperialism

could be seen as leading to the erosion of stable cultural differences, its

critics could argue that, in its savage treatment of others, imperialism merely

revealed the deeper barbarism of civilization (Brantlinger 227-74).

To indicate some of the complexities of the figure of the cannibal during this

period and the implications for late 20th-century critical interests, I want to

look closely now at a less well-known 19thcentury text: A Strange Manuscript

Found in a Copper Cylinder, published anonymously in 1888. Its author, who died

before the text's publication and may not have finished the work, was James de

Mille, a Canadian professor of rhetoric and classics who also published over

thirty popular novels in his short life. The theme of cannibalism enters de

Mille's novel through a story that is found inside the titular cylinder-making

de Mille's text an example of "CanLit" not only in the usual sense of "Canadian


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literature," but also as "Cannibal lit," and even "Canned lit." Moreover, the

text as a whole seems a lusty cannibalizing of many literary genres; it is a

satire in its original meaning of "hotch-potch," which stews together utopian

and dystopian writings, the anatomy and the "symposium," as well as adventure

tales, travel narratives, and pure Swiftian satire (see Woodcock 175; Parks 64-

65; La Bossiere 43; Kime 280-302; Kilian 61-63; Guth 42).

Until recently, de Mille's heterogenous novel was seen as both formally and

thematically incoherent and either ignored or mentioned only as a kind of

curiosity in early Canadian writing. Since its 1969 reprint, however, it has

received more attention and is being slowly assimilated into the CanLit canon.

This is partly because, as Linda Lamont-Stewart has argued (21, 35), shifts in

trends in literary criticism have made it seem of greater value and relevance.

Its formal and moral contradictions can now be appreciated by a postmodern

esthetics which privileges openness, parody, self-reflexivity (Lamont-Stewart

128-30; Wilson 139-40), and by a postcolonial politics which seeks out worksthat expose the crackings of monolithic ideology (Milnes 89). The critical

developments which have encouraged recent interest in de Mille's novel are thus

similar to those behind our current concern with the cannibal: a focus on

"otherness," heterogeneity and difference, rather than on esthetic and cultural

unity. As I will argue further, the text itself suggests an even deeper

affinity between criticism and cannibalism. (I should begin by confessing,

however, that Canadian literature is foreign territory for me, which I do not

mean to claim for my own imperial theory. But de Mille's novel reminds us that

criticism too cannot help familiarizing the strange, that is, understanding

literature in terms of its own obsessions.)

The genre generally associated with a formal telos and unity that is used to

transmit a unified vision of society is the epic, the celebration of conquest

and empire. De Mille was a professor of classics (among other things), and his

text draws upon the classical epic paradigms he knew well. As they are thrown

into the generic melting pot, however, they lose their unifying and containing

power, and simply become one set of available literary conventions and

traditions. Within the text, elements from the linear and closed epic blur with

its generic "other": the mode of romance, which is circular, open, andaccording to David Quint, therefore the genre not of the imperial conqueror but

of the conquered (9). From the beginning, the text provides us with a divided

vision, a bifurcation between cannibals and Christians, them and us, which

draws on the epic conflict between conqueror and conquered. The novel falls

into two parts, or rather two concentric circles: an outer frame narrative and

an inner one. This division makes it structurally similar to Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein; both narratives also follow two parallel quests, one of which is

to a world of ice and snow, which are set up as polar images of each other.


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The exploration of a frozen world in both these works recalls other Romantic

versions of the epic quest and conquest-e.g., "Alastor" and "The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner," which themselves look back to the infernal expeditions by the

diabolical imperialists to the "frozen Continent" that marks the boundary of

Hell in Paradise Lost (Book II, 587-628). Like these models, de Mille gives us

a narrative in which an epic journey or quest has turned into an attempt to

transgress human boundaries. Traditionally, this kind of Promethean quest,which recalls also the voyage of Melville's Ahab with his own desire for

whiteness, is used to convey warnings against the evils of transgression: the

violation of the limitations assigned to human beings leads to self-

destruction.

Aside from such literary antecedents, however, literal polar exploration was in

itself big news in the mid-19th century. The exploration of frozen lands of

whiteness required a different form of representation from the penetrations of

the tropical hearts of darkness, though one in which the rhetoric of colorplayed an equally powerful role. In the explorations of the dark continent, an

easily recognizable opposition was set up between the darkness of the landscape

and its peoples and the whiteness of the mission. At the frozen poles, however,

the whiteness of the landscape seemed to reflect the noble enterprise itself,

and could be used as its very image. As one writer of the 1850s

enthusiastically explained:

For three hundred years the Arctic seas have now been visited by European

sailors; their narratives supply some of the finest modern instances of human

energy and daring, bent on a noble undertaking, and associated constantly withkindness, generosity and simple piety. The history of Arctic enterprise is

stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice mountain. (qtd. in

Stone 9)

Whereas Africa is the place where differences meet, the arctic poles bring

about a union of the same. So too in Frankenstein, Walton sets out for the

frozen north, longing for "the company of a man who could sympathize with me;

whose eyes would reply to mine" (19), a desire that is satisfied when he meets

his double, Victor Frankenstein.

The journey into a world of pure white likeness, however, introduces a new

danger. If in Africa, the difference between the civilized and barbaric was

clearly marked in the opposition between black and white-even though the black

territory threatened to destroy that difference by engulfing the white center-

in the expeditions to the poles there is already an identification between

inside and outside that suggests both a pure and harmonious point of origin and

also a potential threat. In writers like Poe and Melville, white itself becomes

an ambiguous color, suggesting a transcendence that really means a destructive


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loss of all differences. In Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which de

Mille's strange manuscript is clearly copying in certain respects, the story

breaks off as it moves abruptly from an allblack world to an all-white one.

While whiteness strikes horror into the natives' dark hearts, it brings

numbness to the white men, a total apathy and loss of sensation, which seems to

mirror the dissolution of the narrative. If meaning, like imperialism, depends

on the construction of absolute differences, it is consumed in Poe's story bythe total harmony of inside and outside, and the story breaks off through the

fiction of the death of the author. The disappearance of differences in the

snowstorm leads to the elimination of a point of origin outside of the text and

to the abrupt conclusion of the narrative in blinding blank whiteness.

On the surface, however, and in the public eye, whiteness was seen to symbolize

the purity of polar exploration. It seemed scandalous, therefore, when in 1854

John Rae discovered evidence which implied that, under the pressure of

starvation, the members of the Franklin expedition might have eaten each other.Rae's discovery became a minor cause celebre, taken up by Dickens, one of the

most oral and cannibalistic of writers, who found the very idea that British

naval officers would sink to the level of savages unimaginable. Dickens

insisted upon the total opposition between the Esquimaux, denounced as

untrustworthy liars and treacherous hosts, and British gentlemen. He admitted

that members of the English lower classes might possibly stoop to cannibalism

as they had not been brought up properly-but officers? Never! Cannibalism is a

question of up-bringing: "the better educated the man, the better disciplined

the habits, the more reflective and religious the tone of thought, and the more

gigantically improbable the `last resource' becomes" (qtd. in Stone 11).

The outer frame of de Mille's novel depicts a symposium of such welleducated,

upper-class gentlemen, on a kind of leisure cruise in the south seas, a voyage

with no identifiable goal beyond the conspicuous consumption of time, money,

and food. Their boat is becalmed, giving us a nice image, as Stephen Milnes has

noted, for a 19th-century loss of faith in progress (90). One of the major

occupations on board the ship is eating, which figures prominently in both the

inside and outside of the text, thus setting up two contrasting forms of

consumption. As befits men of leisure, moreover, the travelers talk and play;one of them invents a thrilling game of betting on paper boats, which they

race, in a kind of bathetic parody of the traditional epic games. In the course

of one race they discover a floating black object, which one character is

convinced is a tin of meat. The contents of the copper cylinder, however, are

not edible, though they can be consumed, and the gentlemen admit that what they

have found is even better than meat. What the cylinder contains is a manuscript

(the "Canned lit") which becomes the center of the text, as they take turns

reading it to pass the time. The novel consists of this (fictitiously) oral

presentation of the story, with an occasional pause for meals and commentary on


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what they have read. The trip thus turns into a symposium of eating and

interpretation, in which the inside and outside of the story are further placed

in a balance of production and consumption, since the story is produced by

being consumed.

The narrative contained in the manuscript reflects the outer narrative and also

looks back to the common literary antecedents of both, especially the Odyssey.It is the story of a sailor, Adam More, whose return home is impeded by an

encounter with cannibals. While he hopes that his text will make it home, and

convey his story to his father (in which it is of course only partially

successful, for it reaches civilization but not necessarily its intended

paternal source and destination), it seems extremely likely that he, unlike

Odysseus, will not get home.

The manuscript explains how, on a journey back to England from Van Dieman's

land, More's ship, like that in the frame narrative, is becalmed, in his casenear the south pole in a land of ice and snow. He and another sailor, Agnew, go

ashore, partly simply to kill time by killing things, but also for the thrill

of exploring new territory, "a place never before trodden by the foot of man"

(28). As in the case of other epic questers before them, curiosity concerning

strange lands proves dangerous. The desire to explore new worlds sidetracks

them from their larger goal, the journey home, for, while they are out

exploring, the two men are cut off from their ship by a snowstorm. The

whiteness which ends Poe's narrative begins this one. The two humans find

themselves in a position of complete helplessness, when their small boat is

swept up by a powerful current. Agnew's encouraging speech (which echoesspeeches of earlier voyagers: the imperialist Aeneas; Dante's damned Ulysses,

who sets off on a transgressive voyage also towards a pole; the final speeches

of Victor Frankenstein) is ironic and indicates the confusion of activity and

passivity: "It is better to die while struggling like a man, full of hope and

energy than to perish in inaction and despair. It is better to die in the storm

and furious waters than to waste away in this awful place. So come along. Let's

drift as before" (39-40). Human striving is simply drifting with the current.

The sailors' situation thus again mirrors that of the leisure-cruisers in the

frame. Both inside and outside scenes recall further the epic topos of theunsteered or uncontrolled ship, which symbolizes human impotence (Quint 83-96,

248-68). In Romantic writing, too, the image of the "drunken boat" (Frye 200-

17) suggests the Romantic individual who heroically surrenders himself to

higher powers beyond his control.

In de Mille's world, too, humans cannot control their own fate. They can,

however, interpret it. For the voyagers on the outside cruise, literary

criticism is a form of compensation for enforced passivity, an illusory attempt

at mastery. Similarly, the helpless More and Agnew now argue over the direction


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they are taking and debate their destiny. As characters, the two men are set up

as polar opposites: Agnew the happy optimist who believes that they are heading

north; More the gloomy pessimist who is certain that they are being sucked

south into an abysmal maelstrom.

The polarity of their mental attitudes increases when they reach a land and are

met by its inhabitants. More sees the people as less than prepossessing,harpyish creatures like "animated mummies" (43): "the emaciation of their horny

frames; their toes and fingers were like birds' claws; their eyes were small

and dull and weak, and sunken in cavernous hollows, from which they looked at

us like corpses-a horrible sight" (45). The image of the harpies (which becomes

explicit later, 237) recalls the epic voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas, other

heroes whose quests are impeded by hostile half-human forces. The differing

responses of More and Agnew are telling. More is repulsed by and suspicious of

the natives, and thinks that "our only plan was to rule by terrorto seize, to

slay, to conquer" (50)-a statement which has caused Stephen Milnes recently toidentify him with colonialist discourse and practice (95-96). Agnew, in

contrast, accepts the natives and their albeit rather primitive hospitality

quite happily, telling More not to hurt them and assuring him: "they're not a

bad lot. They mean well. They can't help their looks. You're too suspicious and

reserved. Let's make friends with them, and get them to help us" (46).

The polarization of the two men is further dramatized as Agnew cheerfully goes

outside with his hosts, while More is left brooding in a cave. There he

witnesses an appalling spectacle that confirms his worst fears: his hosts bring

in and nonchalantly begin to cook a human body. He reads this as a sign of hisown fate: "The horrible repast showed plainly all that was in store for us.

They received us kindly and fed us well only to devote us to the most abhorrent

of deaths." At that moment a gun goes off and: "At once I understood it. My

fears had proved true" (50). He hears Agnew screaming to him to flee for his

life, and does so, making it back to his boat. Agnew, however, is lost,

presumably killed and eaten. A kind of imperialist poetic justice seems at

work: the stranger who identifies and sympathizes with the indigenous people,

the guest who willingly shares his hosts' food, "goes native" in an extremely

graphic way. Agnew's fate is a literalization of his own inability to see thedifferences between himself and the natives; in contrast, More is the

imperial.ist who turns the world into a "manichean allegory" (Milnes 89). This

opening episode establishes the pattern of oppositions which de Mille drives

home rather relentlessly in the central part of the text, partly through

imagery of darkness and light, black and white. After losing Agnew, More is

again carried on by his boat, like the Romantic solitary of Shelley's

"Alastor." He finally passes through an outer world of infernal darkness, and

emerges into an inner world of light, "not a world of ice and frost, but one of

beauty and light" (63), "light so lately lost, and supposed to be lost forever"


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(60). He celebrates this transformation of darkness into light, outside into

inside: "I had passed from that outer world to this inner one, and the passage

was from death unto life, from agony and despair to sunlight and splendor and

joy" (63). There is obviously a kind of rebirth occurring here, in which poor

Agnew has served as a ritual scapegoat.

The passage from inner to outer marks More's entrance into a brave New Worldthat turns out to be his own turned upside down: a world not of lightness, as

he expects, but of total darkness. At first he misreads its nature, and sees

its inhabitants, a people called the Kosekin, as the antitheses of the odious

cannibals he has just left. Whereas the cannibals were described as emaciated

and mummified, with sly faces expressing semi-human savagery, these people are

merely "small in stature and slender in frame" with facial expressions of

"great gentleness" (64). Whereas the cannibals lived in primitive caves, he

finds in this new world signs of what he can recognize as culture: the land has

been worked, there are roads and "manifest signs of cultivation andcivilization" (63). In his initial response to these people he sees them as

very different from the cannibals, and similar to himself.

Only gradually does More recognize that in fact these Kosekin are the same as

the cannibals and thus again a polar image of his own society. From first

seeing this world as similar to his own, More comes quickly to read it

antithetically as an inversion of it. At first he is taken very much by their

intense kindness and hospitality to him, a stranger, which he would never

expect from his own people. He soon learns, however, that this is the practice

of a society whose goal is self-denial and self-sacrifice, whose "rulingpassion is the hatred of self" (116), and whose ultimate aim, therefore, is to

achieve total self-annihilation by being eaten. In contrast to Western egotism

and materialism, they suggest a social model based on an extravagant ideal of

altruism, which leads them to crave being consumed. For the Kosekin, self-

destruction is in fact natural to all humans; as one of them explains to More:

"we are all so, for we are so made. It is our nature. Who is there who is not

self-denying? No one can help that....Of course I love death-all men do; who

does not? Is it not human nature? Do we not instinctively fly to meet itwhenever we can?...Who does not feel within him this intense looking after

death as the strongest passion of his heart." (128-29) More tries to explain to

them the view of human "nature" that prevails in his old world:

"The love of life must necessarily be the strongest passion of man. We are so

made. We give up everything for life....Riches also are desired by all, for

poverty is the direst curse that can embitter life; and as to requited love,

surely that is the sweetest, purest and most divine joy that the human heart

may know." ( 131 )


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This horrifies his cannibal friend, who calls such feelings "unnatural" (132),

exclaiming: "Oh, sacred cavern gloom! Oh, divine darkness! Oh, impenetrable

abysses of night! What, oh, what is this?....You call good evil, and evil good;

our light is your darkness, and our darkness your light" (131). The Kosekin see

More's values as against human nature, which according to them strives to

transcend the merely natural; as one Kosekin tells More: "This is human nature.We cannot help it; and it is this that distinguishes us from the animals. Why,

if men were to feel as you say you feel, they would be mere animals" (132).

The text thus seems to set up an opposition between Western self-assertion and

materialism (represented by the leisure-crew and their continual consumption)

and Kosekin self-abnegation and spirituality. The contrast enables a critique

of Western consumerism. Yet there is obviously a deeper irony here which undoes

the polarity and complicates the satire, for the Kosekin quest for

transcendence returns them to sheer materialism. This dream of escaping theflesh ultimately reduces the human to its most material form, food, which

identifies it with, rather than freeing it from, the lower physical world.

More's naive reading of the Kosekin as the antithesis of our society is used as

a foil, which enables "us" more sophisticated critics to see an identity

between the two worlds.

Rather than representing an alternative, the Kosekin are then clearly a

nightmare version of modern capitalist society. A "work ethic" underlies and

determines their systems of relations. Their society is as competitive as ours,

only here the competition is to give rather than receive, be consumed ratherthan consume. Their quest for transcendence of self takes to an extreme one

ideal within Western culture. As one of the readers in the outside frame

suggests, the Kosekin have in fact only put into practice what much of humanity

holds in theory to be true:

"the Kosekin may be nearer to the truth than we are. We have by nature a strong

love of life-it is our dominant feeling-but yet there is in the minds of all

men a deep underlying conviction of the vanity of life, and its worthlessness.

In all ages and among all races the best, the purest, and the wisest havetaught this truth, that human life is not a blessing; that the evil

predominates over the good; and that our best hope is to gain a spirit of

acquiescence with its inevitable evils. All philosophy and all religions teach

us this one solemn truth, that in this life the evil surpasses the good. It has

always been so." (223-24)

In this respect, the object of satire seems to be, as George Woodcock has

argued (174, 178) the self-destructive tendency of Romanticism and Victorian

society: its antimaterialism and loathing for the body. Extreme materialism and


13/33

extreme idealism seem equally attacked. But de Mille also suggests that the two

poles are identical in a way which troubles social and individual coherence and

stability. Social order in general involves a constant struggle between the

appetites of the individual and the needs of society as a whole. While

capitalism especially feeds on egotism, it depends on an ideal of altruism to

check individual rapaciousness. The poles of the novel reflect a split within

modern Western society and also the individual psyche itself: the tensionbetween what Freud will call eros and thanatos, between egotism and altruism,

the desire to consume and to be consumed. Yet de Mille creates further a

strange symbiotic relationship between these conflicting drives. Kosekin

society shows that altruism can be a form of egotism. The tension between the

two impulses is in fact an illusion, for the quest for transcendence of the

material is itself merely another form of materialism.

While the clash between More's Western values and Kosekin beliefs is central to

the text, the opposition seems ultimately a product of his bifurcating mind.Part of the satiric humor of the text lies in More's inability to see likeness:

his sense of his own complete alienation from the Kosekin. He is the

prototypical "accidental tourist," the colonialist transformed into a rather

comical commercial traveler who divides his experiences into tidy piles.

Refusing to "go native," he rejects the advances of a female Kosekin, Layelah,

although she, as a member of a philosophical radical group, stands against

Kosekin values, and offers to help him escape. Although he feels attracted to

her, he falls in love with Almah, another outsider, with whom he feels he has

more in common, since both are "aliens here, in a nation of kind-hearted and

amiable miscreants" (113). Ironically, however, through his love for her hebecomes more like the Kosekin. For a Western culture fed on egotism, the horror

of cannibalism lies in its obliteration of the individual ego. Yet, this is

also what love traditionally achieves: an, albeit less literal, breakdown of

individual boundaries and merging of selves-which is one reason why the

languages of love and consumption are often intertwined (Kilgour 7-8). The

Kosekin point out that More has been transformed by love:

"You are growing like one of us....When you are with Almah you act like one of

the Kosekin....Oh, almighty and wondrous power of Love!...how thou hasttransformed this foreigner!...you will soon be one of us altogether....Almah

has awakened within you your true human nature. Thus far it has lain dormant;

it has been concealed under a thousand false and unnatural habits, arising from

your strange native customs. You have been brought up under some frightful

system, where nature is violated. Here among us your true humanity is unfolded,

and with Almah you are like the Kosekin." (155-56)

More's love is self-sacrificing; he is ready to die to save Almah. For the

Kosekin, such ideal love can be fulfilled only in cannibalism: they decide to


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honor the couple's consuming passion by separating them, sacrificing them, and,

as the greatest privilege of all, eating them, and thus fully, and literally,

integrating them into the Kosekin community.

More and Almah are to be sacrificed at the most important holiday of the year.

The Kosekin year is divided into two seasons: one long day and one long night,

so that light and darkness are physically polarized. Time therefore has to beorganized during these periods by purely artificial units, which mark one more

victory of human artifice over the natural order. The ends of both seasons are

times of great celebration. More and Almah are to be sacrificed at the end of

the period of darkness, at which time "the dawn of that long day...was now

approaching. The sight of that dawning day gave me new life. It was like a

sight of home-the blessed dawn, the sunlight of a bright day, the glorious

daybreak lost for so long a time, but now at last returning" (242). His own

return home having been broken off forever by this prolonged interlude with

cannibals, More sees this moment as itself a different kind of return. At thispoint, moreover, the story seems to come full circle: in the most honored

paupers whom he now meets, the obtuse More finally recognizes the hideous

cannibals who ate Agnew at the beginning of his polar expedition.

In this revolution, however, the tables turn. Bold sailor that he is, More

decides that he will not submit without a struggle, although he realizes that

fighting people who are eager for death puts him in an peculiar position.

Drawing his rifle, he shoots those about to kill Almah. Total chaos ensues, as

the crowd of spectators, eager to be killed, yet also desirous of giving others

that great honor, simultaneously rush toward him and draw back. Suddenly theyhail him as "Father of Thunder! Ruler of Cloud and Darkness! Judge of Death!"

He realizes that "these people no longer regarded me as a victim, but rather as

some mighty being-some superior, perhaps supernatural power, who was to be

almost worshipped" (246). Like the stereotypical explorer encountering natives,

he decides "to take advantage of the popular superstition to the utmost" (247),

as does Almah who now, assuming the proper Kosekin female role of subordination

by speaking first, proclaims them the new rulers of the people. She promises

that they will sacrifice themselves for the people by living in luxury and

light, and giving them a "new era" of laissez-faire poverty, "in which everyman may be as poor as he likes, and riches shall be unknown in the land" (250).

She and More will take on the burdens of wealth and light: "Can any rulers do

more than this for the good of their people?" (249). At this moment the dawn

breaks, "and the bright light of a day began to illuminate the world," as More

cries apocalyptically: "The long, long night at last was over; the darkness had

passed away like some hideous dream; the day was here-the long day that was to

know no shadow and no decline" (251).

This second passage from darkness to light brings a new revolution in fortune.


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From being on the margins of the society, More and Almah have now been

symbolically, rather than cannibalistically, absorbed by it, and so become its

representatives. The outsiders are now the ultimate insiders, rulers of the

people through the establishment of a system of mutual exploitation, a kind of

reciprocal cannibalism, in which Almah and More's desire for wealth and life

will perfectly complement the Kosekin's desires for poverty and death. For both

More and the Kosekin, selfishness is satisfied under the cover of completeself-sacrifice. While More suggests that they try to flee, the now dominant

Almah recognizes the possibilities in their new situation. Although she has

constantly expressed longing for her home, Almah has also always told More that

escape was impossible. Her actions now defer their exit, and return us to the

opening preface to the manuscript in which More had written that "escape is as

impossible as from the grave" (25). At the end, they remain within Kosekin

society, and Almah calms him: "we need not hurry. We are all-powerful now, and

there is no more danger....Let us go to the nearest of our palaces and obtain

rest and food" (252).

The story breaks off abruptly at this point, not because the manuscript is

incomplete but because one of the readers is hungry. Featherstone, the owner of

the boat and winner of the 1850 Upper Class Twit of the Year Award, yawns and

says: "That's enough for today...I'm tired and can't read any more. It's time

for supper" (252). This is the last word in the text, which significantly picks

up and echoes Almah's interest in "rest and food."

Critics have speculated as to whether the posthumously published text was

finished or not (Monk 243-45; La Bossiere 41-54; Wilson 137-38; Milnes 101). Inlight of the text's recognized resemblance to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon

Pym, one might suspect that de Mille was experimenting with the form of the

fragmented story, and trying it for a certain effect. If so, then the way that

the Strange Manuscript breaks off does seem appropriate. Rather than end with

Poe's fiction of the death of the author (which was, however, uncannily

realized through de Mille's early demise), de Mille's concludes with the hunger

of the reader, which ensures that both suspended quests are brought to hasty

and inconclusive ends.

If the conclusion is open in one sense, however, it seems closed in another,

for inside and outside come together. At the end of the text, Almah and More

are left inside the society from which they were originally alienated, and

whose ways of eating they rejected and projected. The outside has become the

inside. The closing frame works towards a further assimilation. If Poe's abrupt

ending manages to subsume the fictional author, de Mille's allows him to

incorporate his fictitious readers. Through the framing construction of the

interpreters, de Mille manages to introject interpretation. To avoid being

eaten alive by critics he eats them first. The text thus offers us, as


16/33

Gwendolyn Guth has argued, a "satire of exegesis" (42) which we are encouraged

to add to, and finally try to connect with, the other satirical targets of the

text.

n de Mille's Strange Manuscript, there are four questers turned criticsreaders

who read because their journey is arrested-two university professors, plus an

esthete named Melick, and the boat's aristocratic owner, Lord Featherstone. Thefour argue over the meaning of the story, differing especially in their

interpretation of the relation of the inner narrative to any external reality,

including their own. Each has a different interpretation appropriate to his

character and social position. The two professors offer scientific readings,

which treat the text as literal truth, "a plain narrative of facts" (216). For

the first, an anthropologist, the story provides proof of the survival of

prehistoric races into modern times. As he sees it, the huge monsters that More

encounters on his travels are clearly evolutionary throwbacks, species of

dinosaurs that survived without developing, just as the Kosekin are an ancientrace of people, who, cut off from contact with other races, have developed

uniquely. They are thus a completely different people, "an aboriginal and

autochthonous race" ( 148), who have nothing in common with any other human

race. On this last point, the other professor, a philologist, disagrees.

Applying Grimm's Law with appropriately grim determination, he argues at length

that the Kosekin are a Semitic race, whose language is very close to Hebrew.

Thus the race is not completely alien. Moreover, although he believes the tale

to be true, he also notes how it is told in a way that reveals something about

Western culture as well as the Kosekin: "the facts are themselves such that

they give a new coloring to the facts of our life. They are in such a profoundantithesis to European ways that we consider them as being written merely to

indicate that difference" (216). For him, this "other" is a reality in its own

right, but is also similar to the self, about whom it reveals further truths.

Ironically, considering de Mille's own form of employment, the academic mind in

his text seems a literalist one, which reads with reductive referentiality. It

is the esthete, Melick, who interprets the tale figuratively. Melick's

insistence that we read fiction as fiction, and not in terms of its

correspondence to an external referent, has made him popular with recentreaders. For Guth, Melick's mockery of the others' scientific theories is a

wonderful "exposure of academic elitism" (46; see also Wilson 142), which

enables de Mille to satirize his own profession. A confirmed skeptic, Melick

judges the text solely by esthetic standards, by which he finds it lamentably

inadequate-for many of the same reasons that readers have criticized de Mille's

work. He argues that More's story is badly written, completely conventional,

predictable, and altogether "Sinbadish" (75). It reveals no truth about real

natives, but is merely "a satirical romance," "directed against the

restlessness of humanity." As Melick sees it:


17/33

"[More's story] mocks us by exhibiting a new race of men, animated by passions

and impulses which are directly the opposite of ours, and yet no nearer

happiness than we are....The writer thus mocks at all our dearest passions and

strongest desires; and his general aim is to show that the mere search for

happiness per se is a vulgar thing, and must always result in utter

nothingness." (215)

The "other" for Melick is an utter fiction used to teach a moral about

universal human nature: that "the happiness of man consists not in external

surroundings, but in the internal feelings" (215-16). For this esthete, the

text not only resists reference to any outside world, but also reveals the

superiority of the inside over the outside. While Melick's more sophisticated

reading may have some appeal to us, in its imposition of strict antithetical

categories (fiction/reality, inside/outside), it seems to echo both Kosekin

dualism and More's mode of perception. As all three readers try to use theirown values and criteria to make sense of the strange tale, their understanding

of the story mirrors More's own attempt to grasp events.

More's stupidity and lack of comprehension seem most clearly reflected in the

last reader, Lord Featherstone, who offers no interpretation at all, nor any

remarks beyond a few tasteless anti-Semitic jokes and a comment on the Kosekin

aversion to wealth: "Not a bad idea, though, that of theirs about money. Too

much money's a howwid baw, by Jove!" (151). Whereas Melick asserts the power of

mind over matter, Featherstone seems to epitomize the victory of matter over

mind. He is a brainless member of a purely consumer class, whose need forphysical feeding puts an end to the figurative consumption, which is also the

production, of the text.

Featherstone's ending of the story at the moment in which Almah and More become

Kosekin rulers drives home the identification that de Mille has set up between

inside and outside narratives and worlds. The text gives us not only two mirror

worlds, but also two antithetical forms of closure, which also reflect each

other. The inner tale follows the closed pattern of epic conquest, although the

story concludes on a more positive note than is usual in the traditional epic:the conflict between colonist and indigenous peoples ends when their values,

apparently irreconcilible, turn out to be felicitously compatible. At the same

time, the image of the serendipitous reconciliation of differences, undercut

already by the satire, is further undermined as a form of resolution by the

frame, which turns closure into openness. The tale is left open, however, not

because differences cannot be reconciled, but because, as at the end of Poe's

"unfinished" story, there are really no differences at all.

The Kosekin's cannibalism, the sign of cultural difference, anticipates the


18/33

final eradication of difference. As I mentioned earlier, cannibalism is an

image that traditionally has been used to construct boundaries and binarisms,

to affirm the opposition between the civilized and the savage. Yet the act

itself suggests the dissolution of oppositions: it is the place where desire

and dread, love and aggression meet, where the body is made symbolic and where

the literal becomes the figurative. For the Kosekin, whose thinking is as

deeply dualistic as More's, cannibalism represents the ultimate attempt on thepart of human nature to transcend the material world of the flesh, yet

paradoxically it does so by making the human mere meat. Cannibalism always

involves a complementary establishment and conflation of differences: it

depends upon the setting up of a clear antithesis between eater and eaten,

which then, by the logic that "you are what and who you eat," disappears. The

horror of cannibalism lies not in its figuration of radical otherness and

difference but in its embodiment of undifferentiation and the disappearance of

the principle of alterity.

erhaps this is why the cannibal is appearing so frequently in criticism today

which, even after the fragmentation of the empire of deconstruction, is

concerned with investigating the instability of the binary thinking that has

influenced Western thought and literature. Whereas cannibalism was used by the

colonial discourse of the past to construct boundaries, today it is invoked in

attempts to deconstruct them. If differences are artificial-in the same way

that, according to Arens, cannibalism is a fiction-if differences are just

myths that we tell about "others" in order to create the category of

"otherness," then they also may be rewritten and reconstructed.

Yet, the possibility of the dissolution of all differences, the abolition of

alterity, raises other fears. The deconstruction of oppositions is occurring at

a time that is characterized also by a new territorialism, when racial and

sexual differences especially are frequently celebrated, and warnings are made

about the danger of appropriating others' voices and identities. If to some

critics, breaking down boundaries appears to constitute an attack upon an old

imperialist ideology, to others it simply reproduces it, as a form of

subsumption which denies alterity by assimilating the "other." With its satire

of all hungers, including the reader's hunger for meaning, de Mille's StrangeManuscript implies that there may be no real distinction between the cannibal,

the colonialist, and the critic. Certainly, the suspicion today that all ideals

of altruism or dreams of transcendence cloak material motives makes such

distinctions difficult to define. Perhaps that is why cannibalism is such an

illuminating figure for criticism today, which questions boundaries, including

those that delimit the world of criticism itself, as it

marchesimperialistically?-into new territories, colonizing other disciplines to

help it remap the world and replace the poles.


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[Reference]

WORKS CITED

Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1979.

Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, eds. Cannibalism in Question:

Cultural Approaches. London: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,

1830-l914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

de Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. Toronto:

McClelland, 1969.

Frye, Northrop. "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism."

The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP,

1970. 200-17.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP 1977.

Guth, Gwendolyn. "Reading Frames of Reference: The Satire of Exegesis in James

de Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder." Canadian

Literature 145 (1995): 39-59.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John

Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1982.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Carribean 1492-1797.

London: Methuen, 1986.

Kilian, Crawford. "The Cheerful Inferno of James de Mille." Journal of Canadian

Fiction 1.3 (1972): 61-67.

Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of

Incorporation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

Kime, Wayne R. "The American Antecedents of James de Mille's A Strange

Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder." Dalhousie Review 55.2 (1975): 280-306.

La Bossiere, Camille R. "The Mysterious End of James de Mille's Unfinished

Strange Manuscript." Essays on Canadian Writing 27 (1983-84): 41-54.


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Lamont-Stewart, Linda. "Rescued by Postmodernism: The Escalating Value of James

de

[Reference]

Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder." Canadian Literature

145 (1995): 21-36.

Milnes, Stephen. "Colonialist Discourse, Lord Featherstone's Yawn and the

Significance of the Denouement in A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper

Cylinder." Canadian Literature 145 (1995): 86-104.

Monk, Patricia. The Gilded Beaver: An Introduction to the Life and Work ofJames de Mille. Toronto: ECW P, 1991.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. "`British Cannibals': Contemplation of an Event in the

Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer." Critical Inquiry 18 (1992):

630-54.

Parks, M. G. "Strange to Strangers Only." Canadian Literature 70 (1976): 61-78.

Quint, David. Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford UP,

1980.

Stone, Ian R. "`The Contents of the Kettles': Charles Dickens, John Rae and

Cannibalism on the 1854 Franklin Expedition." The Dickensian 3.1 (1987): 7-15.

Warner, Marina. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. London: Vintage,

1994.

Wilson, Kenneth C. "The Nutty Professor: Or, James de Mille in the Fun House."

Essays on Canadian Writing 48 (1992-93): 128-49.

Woodcock, George. "De Mille and the Utopian Vision." Journal of Canadian

Fiction 2.3 (1973): 174-79.

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[Author Affiliation]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MAGGIE KILGOUR, Associate Professor of English at McGill University, is the

author of From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of

Incorporation, and The Rise of the Gothic Novel. She enjoys having people fordinner.

***** Indexing (document details) *****

Subjects: Literary criticism, Culture, Novels, Cannibalism,

Canadian literature, History & criticism

Classification Codes 9172

People: De Mille, James (1836-80), De Mille, James

Author(s): Maggie Kilgour

Author Affiliation: ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MAGGIE KILGOUR, Associate Professor of English at McGill

University, is the author of From Communion to

Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation, and

The Rise of the Gothic Novel. She enjoys having people fordinner.

Document types: Feature

Document features: References

Publication title: Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of

Literature. Winnipeg: Mar 1997. Vol. 30, Iss. 1; pg. 19,

19 pgs

Source type: Periodical

ISSN: 00271276

ProQuest document 11371677

ID:

Text Word Count 8599

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Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/

pqdweb?did=11371677&Fmt=3&clientId=65082&RQT=309&VName=PQD

======================================================================

=========

Document 2 of 2A contrapuntal reading of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

Gerson, Carole. Essays on Canadian Writing. Toronto:Fall 1995. Iss. 56,

p. 224-235

***** Abstract (Summary) *****

James De Mille's "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" poses a

number of textual and philosophical questions. The novel was written during the

1860s but was not published until 1888. Gerson explores the postcolonial

dimensions of De Mille's text.

***** Full Text *****

(4681 words)

Copyright ECW Press Fall 1995

CRITICAL READERS of James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a CopperCylinder, written during the 1860s but not published until 1888 and likely left

unfinished (Parks, Introduction xx-xxiii), are intrigued with the many textual

and philosophical questions posed by this novel. Commentary stimulated by the

New Canadian Library edition of 1969 focuses on De Mille's sources, the meaning

of his satire, and the placement of this text within the fields of nineteenth-

century popular and utopian fiction (see Gerson; Hughes; Keefer; Kilian; Kime;

Parks, "Strange"; and Woodcock, "An Absence," "De Mille"). Later criticism

confronts the ironies created by the book's metafictional narrative structure

(see Beddoes; Lamont-Stewart; and Wilson) as well as some of the problems posedby the uncertain dates of its composition and completion (see La Bossiere;

Monk, Gilded; and Woodcock, "Book"). The following discussion builds on these

readings by exploring some of the postcolonial dimensions of De Mille's text in

a kind of "contrapuntal reading," to borrow a term from Edward W. Said, tracing

in the book two complementary processes: "that of imperialism and that of

resistance to it" (Culture 66). My discussion also complicates the question of

intentionality. While I do not wish to attribute a 1990s mind-set to a man who

died in 1880, I think that De Mille's individual historical position on the

margins of several political and economic empires opens his text to concerns

2
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about discourses and manifestations of power. It is not farfetched to suggest

that references to the suppression of Indigenous peoples, while casually placed

within the text, were not penned by De Mille in utter ignorance of their wider

implications. When Adam More teaches the Kosekin melodies "created by the

genius of the Celtic race" (De Mille 108), he is likely more oblivious than was

De Mille to the English appropriation of the culture of conquered Celts. By

drawing our attention to De Mille's use of William H. Prescott's History of theConquest of Mexico as a source for his description of the sacrificial practices

of the Kosekin, Wayne Kime likewise invites us to situate A Strange Manuscript

within the broader framework of postcolonial analysis (290-93). At the same

time, we should not forget De Mille's own caution about "... German

commentators who find in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus or the Oedipus of Sophocles

or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes of which the authors could

never have dreamed" (227), a comment teasingly given to Oxenden, the

philologist whose literary sensibility is as shallow as his linguistic analysis

of the Kosekin language seems impeccable.

De Mille's biography provides ample evidence of his experience of the

complexities of national and international political and economic power. Born a

New Brunswicker in 1833, he inevitably became a Canadian in 1867, and during

his years at Dalhousie College (1865-80) witnessed the decline of the Maritime

region within Confederation. In August 1850, just as he turned seventeen, he

embarked on a year-long trip to Europe with his older brother. En route, he

gathered material--with a special interest in Italy and ancient Rome--that

would inform his fiction for three subsequent decades. In addition, he was

educated in the United States (at Brown University), and his literary careerwas shaped by the cultural imperialism of the burgeoning American publishing

industry that determined the market, audience, and to a large degree the

content of his novels. He was, moreover, an accomplished linguist who must have

been aware of the larger historical situations associated with the rise and

decline of world languages; and as the author of a textbook on rhetoric, he

knew something about the power of discourse itself.

A Strange Manuscript is structured as a frame narrative in which one group of

characters--an eclectic assortment of educated Englishmen aboard LordFeatherstone's becalmed yacht--read and comment on the central text, the

"strange manuscript" written by British seaman Adam More, which they find

floating in a "copper cylinder." Within More's document, which is written on

papyrus and tossed into the sea in the hope that its finder will inform More's

father of his son's fate, is enclosed yet another missive. This letter, which

More found on the corpse of a shipwrecked sailor who had perished of starvation

in Antarctica, situates the surrounding texts within the context of

contemporary economics and demographics:

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Bristol April 20, 1820.

my darling tom

i writ you these few lines in hast i don like youar gon a walen an in the south

sea dont go darlin tom or mebbe ill never se you agin for ave bad drems of you

darlin tom an im afraid so don go my darlin tom but come back an take anothship for America baby is as wel as ever but mises is pa an as got a new tooth

an i think you otnt go a walen o darlin tom

sea as the wages was i in New York an better go thar an id like to go ther for

good for they gives good wages in America. O come back my Darlin tom an take me

to America an the baby an weel all live an love an di together

Your loving wife

Polley Reed. (22)

Within More's story, Tom's corpse seems to foreshadow the dire fate awaiting

More and his companion, Agnew, adrift in a small boat in unknown Antarctic

waters; the letter itself elicits no comment from the gentlemen reading More's

manuscript, nor has it received attention from subsequent critics reading De

Mille's book. However, from a postcolonial perspective, reading "to include

what was once forcibly excluded" (Said, Culture 66-67), this letter occupies a

core position in the larger text. Embedded within the book's narrative layers,

its placement corresponds to the centrality of the economic imperative that layat the heart of British imperialism and whose success was contingent upon the

toil of poorly educated and usually anonymous workers such as Tom and Polley.

Entering De Mille's highly literary text at this nearly illiterate (yet

strikingly eloquent) centre, by reading the book through Polley Reed (as her

name punningly invites), inverts its hegemonic structure by calling attention

to the marginalization of both women and workers in its surrounding narrative

layers.

Like Polley's letter, both the novel's frame story and More's manuscriptcontain specific geographical positionings that situate their respective

narratives within the metanarrative of empire. During the winter of 1850, the

Falcon, a yacht whose name metonymically identifies the predatory nature of its

owner's nationality and class, carries bored Lord Featherstone and "a few

congenial friends" from London to "southern latitudes" off the coast of Spain

and North Africa (1). En route to the Mediterranean, the cradle of classical

European culture and power, the vessel is becalmed "between the Canaries and

the Madeira Islands" (1), land belonging respectively to Spain and Portugal,

originators of modern European imperialism. Featherstone's opening posture,

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reclining on deck "in an Indian hammock" (1), identifies him as a direct

beneficiary of the British Empire, just as his lisp places him within the line

of effete aristocrats targeted by British social satirists since the

Renaissance. Within this framework,the opening paragraph of More's account

situates his 1843 voyage to more distant southern latitudes, as mate of a ship

chartered by the British government to convey convicts to Van Diemen's Land, as

a venture directly bolstering the project of empire. More's boat, theTrevelyan, likely named for Sir Charles Trevelyan, an influential career

administrator from 1826 to 1865 who laid the foundations of both the education

system in British India and the civil service in England, proves to be an

appropriately christened vessel for one who will behave like a prototypical

imperialist when he encounters an unknown Native society. Representative of

More's attitude is his continual reliance on his rifle and pistol to "inspire a

little wholesome respect" (31), a reliance De Mille parodies in allowing him an

apparently endless supply of ammunition.

As More attempts to explicate the geography of the Antarctic region in which he

is trapped, he cites the voyages of Captain James Cook (10) and Sir James Ross

(20, 64), two explorers whose connections with Canada may be coincidental, but

are scarcely irrelevant. During the Seven Years' War, Cook's charting of the

St. Lawrence River facilitated Wolfe's landing at Quebec; Ross spent several

decades with expeditions into the Canadian Arctic before turning to the

Antarctic in 1839. The very names Cook and Ross, while accurately representing

documented European activity in the region of the South Pole up to 1843, also

inevitably invoke the globalizing possessiveness of the empire upon which the

sun did not set--with a fillip of additional resonance for informed Canadians,among whom must be included the extremely knowledgeable Professor James De

Mille.

Aboard Featherstone's becalmed, parodic ship of state floats the essence of

empire, compo

sed of wealth (Featherstone), science (Dr. Congreve), and

language, the latter divided into philology (Oxenden) and literature (Melick).

This selection of readers for More's manuscript supports current postcolonial

analyses of knowledge and discourse as the underpinnings of empire; notablyabsent among Featherstone's companions is any direct representative of

government, religion, or the military, the institutions most overtly engaged in

the actual enforcement of colonialism. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and

Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt examines how the allegedly neutral

discourses of science and travel have worked as colonizing strategies,

controlling and subduing otherness by the very acts of naming and cataloguing

within a Eurocentric system of knowledge. Said, in the first portions of

Culture and Imperialism, demonstrates that the English novel, as an

"incorporative, quasiencyclopedic cultural form" (71), has similarly functioned

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as an instrument of empire, naturalizing imperial political and economic power

by giving it a familiar presence within popular narrative conventions. On the

yacht, De Mille shows discourses of science in conflict with one another and

also with literary criticism, as their fictional representatives fail to agree

on the authenticity and meaning of More's text. He thereby interrogates not

only the limitations of the discourses themselves but also their power as

strategies of containment: "each looked at the other; Melick elevated hiseyebrows, and Oxenden shrugged his shoulders; but each seemed unable to find

words to express his amazement at the other's stupidity, and so they took

refuge in silence" (229).

The parodic subversion of authority represented by this impasse is intensified

by the shipboard division between gentlefolk and crew, a telling

exemplification of Said's connection between the conventional invisibility of

both servants and empire (Culture 63). While Featherstone's employees remain

even more anonymous than the corpse of shipwrecked "darling tom," theirnecessary presence is obliquely signalled in the sumptuous repasts, "served up

by the genius of the French chef whom Lord Featherstone had brought with him"

(60), that regularly interrupt the reading of the manuscript and provide

occasions for discussion and dispute. "[O]n board the Falcon dinner was the

great event of the day" (60), followed by late-night supper (143), breakfast

(155), dinner (226), and, finally, as Featherstone's closing words reveal,

"It's time for supper" (269) once more. This cycle of consumption, dependent

upon anonymous labour and initiated by Congreve's assumption that the cylinder

must contain preserved meat (5), articulates the consuming motive of imperial

expansion that sends sailors such as Tom and More to distant polar regions, andbecomes horrifically realized in the cannibalism of the Kosekin.

As a mid-Victorian fiction authored by a professor of classics, history, and

literature who, according to his nephew Lawrence J. Burpee, "was thoroughly

familiar with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and had a good working knowledge of

Arabic and Sanskrit" (qtd. in Parks, Introduction xxxiii), A Strange Manuscript

participates in the orientalism of its age. The academic orientalism that

facilitated European imperialism by establishing "intellectual authority over

the Orient within Western culture" (Said, Orientalism 19) flourishes in DeMille's creation of the Kosekin, a people suspiciously familiar to the yacht-

bound readers of More's manuscript, those avatars of empire who discern

similarities to Hebrew in the Kosekin language and yet resist recognizing

echoes of their own values in Kosekin cultural practices. At the same time,

frequent manifestations of popular, essentialist assumptions about oriental

culture appear in the casual commentary of both the yachtsmen and Adam More.

Oxenden impressively links the Kosekin language with Hebrew through his

knowledge of philology, yet when the mysterious cylinder is first discovered,

this Cambridge scholar speculates that it might contain "the mangled remains of

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one of the wives of some Moorish pasha" (6). The narrator expands upon this

remark: "Were there treasures inside--jewels, or golden ornaments from some

Moorish seraglio, or strange coin from far Cathay?" (7). In a similar vein,

Featherstone later interrupts serious discussion about the identity of the

Kosekin with a casual anti-Semitic jest about Jewish acquisitiveness (152).

More, for his part, first finds the Kosekin "not unlike Arabs, but they were

entirely destitute of that hardness and austerity which the latter have" (54).To him their language resembles Arabic (77), and he describes their furnishings

as "divans and ottomans" (73); this placement of the Kosekin within an Islamic

paradigm allows him later to propose polygamy by marrying both Layelah and

Almah (180-81), the latter reminding him of "those Oriental beauties whose

portraits I had seen in annuals and illustrated books" (75).

More's manuscript is read by the cruisers on the yacht, but it also reads them,

as it counterpoints, inverts, and ultimately deconstructs the system of

knowledge and understanding underpinning Western vision and practice. As theyachtsmen comment on More's text, its representation of the Kosekin love of

poverty ironizes the materialism and accumulation of wealth that allow the very

existence of the yacht and its leisured guests. Their attempts to subsume

More's experience within their own intellectual order by applying their

knowledge of philology, palaeontology, and literary criticism, while

simultaneously distancing themselves from Kosekin values, blind them to the

similarities between their culture and that of the Kosekin. Textual clues to

this mirroring include similar phrasing in both narratives' opening

descriptions of becalmed ships, the echo of Melick's name in the Kosekin title

"Melek," the name of the lowest/highest class, and parallel conclusions whereall characters seek "rest and food" (269). A number of critics (see Kilian;

Watters; and Woodcock, "De Mille") have pointed out the ironic resemblances

between the apparently opposite practices of the wealth-hating, death-loving

Kosekin and the Victorian culture that De Mille satirizes through this

inversion. Monk takes this analysis one step further when she states that the

net effect of the moral complexity evoked by A Strange Manuscript "is to throw

into doubt not just western codes of values but the concept of codes of value

as such" ("James" 94). It is this question that I wish to pursue. By showing

that opposites are not contrary but indeed fundamentally the same, De Millequestions the binary thinking that supports and justifies Western values,

including the Western project of imperialism.

Adam More's own name invokes both the first practitioner of imperialism, the

biblical Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden, and Thomas More, the

author of Utopia, the first widely disseminated alternative social vision based

on a redistribution of property to emanate from modern Europe. The chapter in

which More arrives in the land of the Kosekin is appropriately entitled "The

New World," recalling the attraction of America to Polley Reed. Here he

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perceives a strange culture in terms of the oppositional values with which his

own culture justifies its hegemonic assumptions: the primacy of light,

"enlightenment," and life over darkness, ignorance, and death, which in turn

supports the absolute hegemony of "we" over "them," morally cast as the victory

of "right" over "wrong." In this binary vision, value is asserted by the

naturalizing of one's own cultural practice. More describes his experience with

the Kosekin in terms of a running debate over human nature in which they arelabelled "unnatural" (102), while the Kohen and, later, Layelah invoke "human

nature" (127, 131, 158, 174) to explain various Kosekin beliefs and customs.

By having both More and the shipboard commentators perceive this new world as

directly opposite to their own, De Mille shows them locked into their own

limited binary vision. Their only choices are identity or absolute difference;

but the latter, De Mille demonstrates, is really sameness. Shaped in terms of

hierarchy and inverse materialism, Kosekin society is marked by the same

competition for status and power that characterizes European culture: the richstrive to give away their wealth, workers go on strike for "harder work, longer

hours, or smaller pay" (137), the power of the paupers is envied, and crime is

the frequent resort of those frustrated by their inability to achieve their

goals otherwise. Even the chief pauper bemoans "the folly of ambition" (249).

An assessment of relationships within Kosekin society reveals that human

nature--that is, self-interest--is indeed virtually identical in both worlds.

At the same time, De Mille hints at a truly alternative socioeconomic vision

when More tells us that "Secret movements are sometimes set on foot which aim

at a redistribution of property and a levelling of all classes, so as to reducethe haughty paupers to the same condition as the mass of the nation" (138). Of

the ten "peculiar doctrines" (169) formulated by the radical Kohen Gadol (all

phrased negatively, mimicking the repeated "thou shalt nots" of the Ten

Commandments), the only one not reiterated by More as being normal in his

country is the last: "The paupers should be forced to take a certain amount of

wealth, to relieve the necessities of the rich" (169-70). The real opposite of

inequality, De Mille implies, is equality. Understanding this notion raises

problems that are both conceptual and perceptual, as revealed through the

characters' responses to the position of women in Kosekin society. While Morekeeps asserting the equality of Kosekin women, the shipboard commentators,

locked into their notion of opposition, never comment on this aspect of Kosekin

life. (Might De Mille be slyly reminding us that the real opposite of

patriarchy would be matriarchy?) Moreover, as in Thomas More's Utopia, the

situation Adam More describes proves somewhat less equitable than he thinks.

While he begins by declaring that "Women and men are in every respect

absolutely equal, holding precisely the same offices and doing the same work,"

he immediately adds the qualification that "women are a little less fond of

death than men, and a little less unwilling to receive gifts" (142). The result

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is that in the army and navy, women "are usually relegated to the lower ranks,

such as officers and generals," and in marriage "The wives are ... universally

the rulers of the household, while the husbands have an apparently subordinate,

but, to the Kosekin, a more honorable position" (142). Later, his notion of the

"perfect liberty" (167) of Kosekin women is upended by the comedy of his

distress when Kosekin women "take the initiative" (179, 193) in declaring love:

The fact is, it doesn't do for women to take the initiative--it's not fair. I

had stood a good deal among the Kosekin. Their love of darkness, their passion

for death, their contempt of riches, their yearning after unrequited love,

their human sacrifices, their cannibalism, all had more or less become familiar

to me, and I had learned to acquiesce in silence; but now when it came to this

... it really was more than a fellow could stand. (179-80)

De Mille's burlesque of the injured male ego (see also 193-94) climaxes during

More's flight with Layelah, when he prefers the vulnerable and submissive"Layelah in distress" to the challenging "Layelah in triumph" (218). Fitting

the novel's play with binarism is its depiction of the two major female

characters, Almah and Layelah, as physically similar (tall, beautiful, with

dark hair contained by a gold band) yet cast as conventional opposing

stereotypes: the helpless virgin in need of rescue versus the forward

seductress.

Reading More's text, Melick recognizes some similarity between Kosekin

individuals and Western Europeans when he cites Milton's Satan--"What matter

where, if I be still the same" (227)--to support his view that the text is asatire "exhibiting a new race of men, animated by passions and impulses which

are directly the opposite of ours, and yet no nearer happiness than we are"

(226). When we consider Melick's comments from a metanarrative perspective, we

can see that he articulates the general deconstructive slant of the book in

which he and the narrative he is reading are written. What he misses--and what

De Mille might want his readers to appreciate (if we allow him sufficient

intentionality)--is the comic implosion of binaries posited by Kosekin logic.

On several occasions when More attempts to construct oppositional arguments or

plans that would allow him to escape his fate, he is countered by the fact that"The Kosekin do not always act ... as one would suppose" (240). Distinctions

between opposition and similarity collapse when the Kosekin are shown to enact

literally some of the cultural dicta that in Western culture function only as

rhetorical flourishes. Thus the Kosekin elevation of unrequited love is based

on the familiar Western notion that "Love is more than self-denial; it is self-

surrender and utter self-abnegation" (132). The Kosekin parody of the Golden

Rule, "Everyone is eager to help his neighbor" (189), translates sometimes into

murder and sometimes into comedy, as in the absurd struggle at the base of the

pyramid in the final scene. During the battle with the sea serpent, More is

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impressed by the "blind and desperate courage" of "men who thought nothing of

life, but flung it away at the command of their chief without dreaming of

flight or of hesitation" (90, 91-92). Here, De Mille openly tips his hand in

relation to the rhetoric of war, creating a moment of silence in More's

narrative as significant as that noted earlier among the shipboard experts

analysing his text. The Kohen remarks: "Have you not told me incredible things

about your people, among which there were a few that seemed natural andintelligible? Among these was your system of honoring above all men those who

procure the death of the largest number. You, with your pretended fear of

death, wish to meet it in battle as eagerly as we do, and your most renowned

men are those who have sent most to death." More is tongue-tied: "To this

strange remark I had no answer to make" (157).

Silences in all three narrative layers--those of Tom Reed, Adam More, and the

yachtsmen--culminate in the final silence of the unfinished book. It ends on

parallel high points of imperialism: More and Almah, "all-powerful now" (269),stand on top of the pyramid on which they were to be sacrificed, in control of

the mob who had expected their deaths; Featherstone in turn exerts his

authority with his closing words, "That's enough for to-day.... It's time for

supper" (269). But this success is only temporary: on a basic narrative level,

we never receive the remainder of More's own story and therefore never learn