After reading through Jane Marcus's seminal article "Britannia Rules the Waves" a second time, a number of different possibilities came to mind which had not appeared to me the first time when I was more focused on the more broad strokes of Marcus's revolutionary reading of The Waves. The specific claim that The Waves in "Its parody and irony mock the complicity of the hero and the poet in the creation of a collective national subject through an elegy for imperialism" (Marcus 145), stood out to me as it occurred between two interesting references, on the same page, to Woolf's novelistic practice as "postmodern." Marcus suggests that Woolf's "misquotation" of the Romantics, and I would add the modes of parody and irony which likewise require similar cultural "misquotations," align her purposes and methods closer to practices more indicative of postmodernism than modernism, despite the canonical legacy of the text (145). The combustion of these ideas, that Woolf's use of parody and irony might be working in a "postmodern" way by re(mis)appropriating the literature which has helped produce Empire, the white subject, and the national subject which Marcus critiques, caused me to wonder if we might situates Woolf's techniques in a more general setting of culture and colonialism in which the tropes of irony and parody have long history. Essentially, I am wondering if we might continue to think of The Waves and its ironies, using Marcus's work as a springboard, within a theoretical-historical context of what Baudrillard discusses in his posthumous text Carnival and Cannibal.
What Baudrillard explains in the opening essay, "Carnival and Cannibal," is the workings of a "global antagonism" that has existed as long as the West as sought to globalize itself through colonization, not merely militarily and diplomatically but also culturally. The force of carnivalization "passes through the stages of evangelization, colonization, decolonization and globalization, which are themselves historic" (4). These effects of carnivalization have been made painfully apparent over the course of history as Western powers have extended their dominance over other cultures, and even as that power has retreated in its military-diplomatic forms. What results from carnivalization is a scene of oppression under the hegemony of Western power, but also, as Baudrillard points out, scene in which the "'underdeveloped' peoples who have not so far heard the good word of the universal... are simply made a laughing stock and transfigured into caricatures of the Whites..." (5). Without necessarily intending to, the Western domination of those who they considered "underdeveloped," which meant they were ready for "evangelization", etc., also created within the sphere of domination a carnivalized version of the West which in its own way was a parody of the powers which dominated it. The colonized society eventually becomes the farce of its colonizer, masquerading as the master, the Western subject, the Britannia. This is not to say that this masquerade is something the colonized intend, merely that it is an ironic, stylistic/cultural byproduct of carnivalization in its various stages. This sort of parody does not refer to the other force in the antagonism, what Baudrillard calls "cannibalization," wherein the colonized absorb and consume the colonized (metaphorically as cannibals have consumed the missionaries sent them in the literal sense).
The interesting connection with the The Waves and this idea of carnivalization is that carnivalization can be seen in both the characters Bernard and Louis. Woolf is in tune with the carnivalizing effects of the Empire she sets out to criticize through irony and parody via misappropriation of its tropes, its signs, in other words, which is precisely the makings of the masquerade. In order for the colonial power to export itself culturally it must be already carnivalized, i.e. reduced to simulations as a sort of symbolic commodity which the colonies can consume. Britain, through its imperial system bolstered by ideas of the master-subject and, as Marcus/Woolf also insists upon, literature, had become a pageantry of patriarchy, a series of signs which ironically parodied itself. Bernard is the character who is the home-grown already-carnivalized character of the British empire. Woolf has crafted his character to reflect the unconscious self-parody which marked British imperialism. The figure of British imperial masculinity is in Bernard a simulation of itself. The dominating Western subject is a parody of itself. Bernard with his longings for the monlogistic story takes up the trappings of British power in sign only, because Woolf realizes it is the signs of Empire that are the Empire, and it is the signs which the Empire distributes throughout its colonies, in order to dominate but also to the effect of global carnivalization.
Louis, on the other hand, comes from a colony and reflects the carnivalization of the colonized who re-appropriate the signs of empire as an often unwitting parody of the empire itself. Louis's investment in global British trade, his desires to fit into the system and become an integral part to the workings of that system. However, he can only become part of the system in as much as he joins the carnivalesque system of signs which constantly radiate the simulations and regalia of power in power's absence - hence colonial power existing where it is not actually enforced (the insidious nature of empire). Louis's preoccupation with looking the part indicates his complicity with the reverse of Britain's carnivalesque colonialism.
In this light we can see Woolf's use of irony in her depictions of these characters is an irony sensitive to global carnivalization from imperialism. Readers become aware of the existence of the simulated/simulating nature of empire in its domestic and foreign valences because Woolf un/naturalizes the carnival which has become all too naturalized within British culture. The irony is that we begin to see the masquerade that is cultural colonialism because Woolf, in Bernard and Louis, simply restages the carnival in a different setting, the modernist (or postmodernist!) novel by re-appropriating the simulations.
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Baudrillard, Jean. Canrival and Cannibal. Chris Turner trans. London, Seagull Books: 2010.
Marcus, Jane. "Britannia Rules the Waves"
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