1The Village in the Jungle (1913),1 Leonard Woolf’s first novel is now a century old and yet its merits as a work of fiction are not fully admitted in Great Britain. Indeed, a century onwards Leonard Woolf is better known for his political works than for his fiction. He had been politically active all his life and especially after his return from Ceylon where he served as a colonial civil servant for seven years. Known as a high flown member of the Bloomsbury Group, a group notoriously considered as high-brow, Leonard Woolf is more often than not associated with highbrow values rather than those of the humble. However, as Goonetillekeobserves, ‘his concern for indigenous life is such that he can write a novel wholly about it with only indigenous people as his major characters,’2 an achievement that even Forster could not accomplish in A Passage to India.

2When first published, The Village in the Jungle was received warmly by the public just to fall into oblivion soon afterwards with the outbreak of the war. The novel, though, received important and enduring attention in Sri Lanka where it was translated and introduced as a set text on secondary school syllabuses.3 Nevertheless, it was not until the Post-war and post-imperial period that it finally emerged from the state of critical neglect into which it had fallen. Recently, the novel has received considerable critical attention from commonwealth specialists4 and much has been written about the colonial or uncolonial nature of Woolf’s novel. Judith Scheret Herz argues that The Village in the Jungle is ‘a profoundly anti-imperialist text’5 whereas Victoria Glendinning in ‘The Village in the jungle: An Uncolonial Novel’6 depicts the portrait of a hesitant imperialist struggling with his ambivalences about empire and about marrying Virginia Woolf. This chapter means to shift the focus slightly and explore the aesthetics of humility in The Village in the Jungle. Indeed, I will show that Woolf’s attempt to write a novel based on his own experience in Ceylon together with his diaries points to his attention to the humble side of life. When explaining about the project of his novel in a later volume of his autobiography, Beginning Again, Woolf describes it as an attempt ‘somehow or other vicariously to live their lives.’7 Furthermore, I will argue that Woolf’s narrative approach in The Village in the Jungle is a democratic one oriented towards the equal treatment of all characters even the most ignored and insignificant ones. Drawing on the notions of disempowerment and empowerment that Jacques Rancière introduced in Le Maître Ignorant, I will show that through the constant struggle of the humble characters to surpass the limits of their disempowered existence, an aesthetics of humility is shaped in The Village in the Jungle.

3In Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904–1911,8 Leonard Woolf writes about his three-year mission in the district of Hambantota and his love for the people and the country that inspired his first novel. He describes his passion for the country and his regrets for having taken charge of ruling it in the following terms:

I fell in love with the country, the people and the way of life. [. . .] To understand the people and the way they lived in the villages of West Giruwa Pattu and the jungles of Magampattu became a passion with me. [. . .] I did not idealize or romanticize the people or the country; I just liked them aesthetically and humanly and socially. But I was ruthless—too ruthless, as I shall show—both to them and to myself (Woolf 1961, 180)

4It is through his love for these people that he came to understand them in a way that few foreigners ever did. His transformation from ‘a very innocent, unconscious imperialist’ (Woolf 1961: 25) to a determined anti-imperialist was indeed brought about by his interest in the daily life of the colonial other. The more remote that life was from his own, the more absorbed he became in it and the more he enjoyed it9 (Woolf 1961, 225). His official diaries10 are also proof to this attention to and love for details of the Ceylonese everyday life. They help shed light on the way his literary work relates to everyday experience. As Blanchot explains, the everyday is fundamentally difficult to capture:

Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification. The everyday escapes. This makes its strangeness—the familiar showing itself (but already dispersing) in the guise of the astonishing.11

5The tendency of the everyday to escape attention is however neutralized by modernist literature, which attempts to take hold of the everyday and to integrate it within the fabric of its fiction. Ben Highmore, resuming De Certeau’s analysis concerning the relationship between the everyday and literature in modern times, claims, in Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday,12 that the only place where every day life becomes more and more vivid is literature. Attempting to immortalize the everyday in literature is a means to give importance to what is usually considered as insignificant. Woolf, in The Village in the Jungle, immortalizes the everyday life of Ceylonese villagers, their quick and passionate angers and their feelings that would have otherwise been forgotten and lost.

6The quotidian thus plays an important role in shaping the aesthetics of The Village in the Jungle. The jungle, whose presence is announced in the very title of the novel, is itself a ‘familiar quotidian environment, both terrifying and commonplace.’13 Indeed, the whole plot of The Village in the Jungle turns around the ordinary train of life in the village and its surrounding jungle. The novel depicts the ordinary and at times tedious daily duties of a colonial administrator who had to keep an official diary where he could record all his activities. In Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, Woolf’s responsibilities as an AGA14 are described as follows: ‘to collect revenue, dispense justice and to travel regularly “on circuit” throughout his district, in order to become familiar with every village and its headman, who acted, unpaid, as intermediary with the colonial administration.’15 As Glendinning writes,16 Woolf was obliged to ride out into distant areas of his district whenever there was a serious disagreement between villagers or a suspected murder. The court scene depicted in the novel is therefore close to his own personal experience as a judge and exemplifies the insertion of the everyday in fiction. The ‘carefully emphasized hard edge of economic realism’17 which rules the villagers lives—‘chena’ system of cultivation, the vicious cycle of debt and the obligation to work on the road if you could not pay your tax and the ever present fear of hunger—are all daily realities familiar to the Ceylonese villagers. The attention paid to such details of the characters’ ordinary lives points to the centrality of the quotidian in the development of an aesthetics of humility in the novel. As Lefebvre claims, the quotidian is the humble element of life:

The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence; thus it is undated and (apparently) insignificant; though it occupies and preoccupies it is practically untellable, and it is the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings.18

7In integrating the everyday in the fabric of his work, Woolf manages to narrate the unnarratable and elusive quotidian of the Ceylonese villagers. At the heart of the novel lies the cruel human price that the headman demands for granting a permit to ‘chena.’ Silindu is poor and his poverty has its origin in a rigid system of obligation of debt and their perpetuation, the British having dictated that only a limited amount of jungle could be cleared for cultivation of ‘chena.’ As Woolf made it clear to his superiors when he was in Hambantota, the survival of families depends upon the ‘chena permit’ (Glendinning 2006, 166). Besides the fact that the number of such permits is limited, they also have to be purchased against the crop that has yet to be harvested or planted. As a result, debt always increases leaving the cultivator powerless to liberate himself from the burden of debts that weakens his position in regarding the headman who keeps an account of them and is apt to use them against him. Silindu like many other villagers is trapped in the vicious circle of never ending debts. Indeed, in Georg Simmel’s words, we could say that what is desperate about the situation of people like Silindu is that they are poor and nothing but poor, and poverty is directly responsible for Silindu’s disempowerment and precariousness: ‘Ce qu’il y a de plus terrible dans la pauvreté est le fait qu’il y a là des êtres humains qui, dans leur position sociale, sont pauvres et rien que pauvres.’19 Commenting on The Village in the Jungle, Kerr claims that ‘there is scarcely any precedent in English fiction, domestic or imperial, for the novel’s articulation of the lives of the extremely poor’ (Kerr 1997, 159). Indeed, as Guillaume Le Blanc mentions in Vies ordinaires, Vies précaires, it is when precariousness is made into narration that it becomes visible.20 The act of writing is a way of making unheard voices heard and to offer them visibility and even importance. Fiction such as The Village in the Jungle, is a platform for giving voice to the voiceless and the ignored.

8Besides its meticulous treatment of the everyday, the novel tends, I argue, towards a democratization of narration. Its main character, Silindu, is a poor cultivator whose strange physical traits coupled with his uncommon behavior and lack of communicational skills, reduce him to the status of a pariah, a complete outsider even among his own people. Far from being a hero or even an anti-hero, Silindu is just a strange and invisible man, a ‘silent little man’ with ‘the pinched-up face of a grey monkey’ (Woolf 1913, 15), and the village nicknames him ‘tikak pissu (slightly mad)’ (15). He never speaks ‘unless he is spoken to,’ sleeps with his eyes open just like some wild animals and is endowed with the power to understand the language of animals. In short, he is a nobody, living in the shadow of others, a voiceless being whose existence is half animal-like, half human. In Le Blanc’s words, we could say that Silindu is ‘an outsider among outsiders’21 (Le Blanc 2014, 38). The people to whom he belongs, though themselves outcasts, reject him because of his affinity with the jungle and its animals. His sense of strangeness among his own people as well as his position as a colonial subject reduce him to a precarious condition and the status of a complete stranger in his own land. As Le Blanc explains in Dedans, dehors: La condition d’étranger, the colonizer by importing his rules to the colonized country, transforms the colonial subject into a stranger in his own land.

[. . .] car le colonisateur, en important l’ordre de sa nation dans le pays qu’il colonise, transforme le sujet colonisé en étranger à son propre pays et crée les conditions d’une histoire de la vie étrangère interminable dans la mesure où, dans un contexte postcolonial de plus en plus étudié, le colonisé est poussé par la misère à devenir un migrant qui tente sa chance dans l’ancien pays colonisateur, devenant un être de nulle part, un paria.22

9Silindu is therefore a being with no place or group to turn to in time of distress. As a result he turns to the jungle as a source of inspiration and solace.

10Likewise the estrangement of the two major female character— Silindu’s daughters—from the rest of the village society is brought about by their own affinity with the jungle and its animals. Silindu’s daughters spend most of their time hunting with their father. As a result they grow up to be different from the other village children. Healthy and beautiful, they soon arouse the jealousy of the village women who call them veddas23 (wild girls). They are also usually compared to animals—their skin is compared to the coat of fawns when the sun shines on it—identified with yakkas or devils and grow up to be outcasts just like their father. Such comparisons are frequent and contribute to the creation of ambiguity within the text. As a result, the aesthetics of humility in the novel goes together with ambiguity, be it the ambiguity between the animal and the human, the powerful and the powerless or even man and woman. Indeed, the extremely close relationship between women and animals is masterfully delineated in order to draw the reader’s attention to their common sufferings as inferior beings and colonial subalterns.24

11The attachment of Hinnihami, the younger wild and untamable daughter of Silindu, to a fawn exemplifies this. When Hinnihami gives birth to a girl, Silindu brings her a fawn to breast-feed. She takes this as a gift from the god and comes to love the fawn even more than her own daughter. Her attachment to the fawn is so great that he becomes her permanent companion. Furthermore, Silindu’s daughters are described as wild since they run wild in the jungle, an act usually belonging to the male sphere and therefore at the origin of their estrangement. Woolf’s choice of marginalized native people such as Silindu and his daughters as major characters is significant of his victim-oriented narrative approach, an approach that favors a democratic narration.

12While hunting in the jungle, Silindu encounters a hungry leopardess whom he addresses as ‘sister’. When he realizes that she too has two children to feed, he leaves the first kill to the leopardess: ‘ [. . .] your hunger is greater than mine. The first kill is yours’ (19). Silindu’s behavior towards the leopardess is humane and significant of the ambiguity between the human and the animal throughout the novel. As Herz maintains, in ‘To Glide Silently Out of One’s Own Text: Leonard Woolf and The Village in the Jungle,’ Woolf understood human nature in terms of animality. But the deliberate ambiguity present in the novel further point to the instability of power relations and the possibility of transgressing social differences and barriers. As can be seen in the episode where the words of a hunter who boasted of his mastery over the jungle are reported, the jungle is composed of humble and insignificant elements so that one can be deceived into believing that he can overcome it: ‘ “why should I fear the jungle?” He would say. “I know it better than my own compound. A few trees and bushes and leaves and some foolish beasts. There is nothing to fear there”’ (Woolf 1913, 9–10). But the hunter who believed in his capacity to overcome the jungle was surprised by its cruel and unmerciful power; in the end ‘the jungle took him’ as it took hold of the village. The jungle is therefore full of mysterious and silent forces that threaten to surface at the slightest provocation. In this respect, the nature of the jungle somehow resembles that of the humble, silent and disarmed but potentially dangerous Silindu, who is capable of action when provoked. ‘The spirit of the jungle,’ Woolf writes, is ‘in the village, and in the people who live in it’25 (14–15).

13Bestiality functions as a metaphor through which the precariousness and the invisibility of the main characters are highlighted. But what is emphasised in the novel is the double nature of the animal as a being who is both humble and ignored, and a being who has the potential if provoked to surpass the limits of its disempowerment and become powerful. The metaphor of bestiality thus points at the ‘humble’ being both a disabling and enabling, disempowering and empowering condition. In other words, Woolf illustrates in his novel what Rancière theorises in Le Maître ignorant26 and takes up in Le Fil perdu,27 where he shows that the ignored people have the capacity to break away from the identities imposed on them by society and take their destiny into their own hands.28 Rancière’s views in regards to the capacity of the subaltern to voice his discontent stands thus in sharp contrast with that of Spivak expressed in her canonical article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? ’29 In The Village in the jungle, the subaltern can speak too. Silindu does in a climactic moment when he voices his discontent in a long interior monologue:

‘They call me a hunter, a vedda? A fine hunter! To be hunted for years now and not to know it! It is the headman who is the vedda, a very clever hunter. I have been lying here like a fat old stag in a thicket while he was crawling, crawling nearer and nearer, round and round, looking for the shot.
Where was the watching doe to cry the alarm? Always he shot me down as I lay quiet. But the old hunter should be very careful. In the end misfortune comes. Perhaps this time I am a buffalo, wounded. The wise hunter does not follow up the wounded buffalo, where the jungle is thick. Ha! Ha!
The wounded buffalo can be as clever as the clever hunter. He hears the man crawling and crawling through the jungle. He stands there out of the track in the shadows, the great black head down, the blood bubbling through the wound, listening to the twigs snap and the dry leaves rustle; and the man comes nearer and nearer. Fool! you cannot see him there, but he can see you now; he will let you pass him, and then out he will dash upon you, and his great horns will crash into your side, and he will fling you backwards through the air as if you were paddy straw. The old buffalo knows, the old buffalo knows; the young men laugh at him, “buffaloes’ eyes,” they say, “blind eyes, foolish eyes, a foolish face like a buffalo,” but he is clever, amma! he is clever—when wounded—when he hears the hunter after him—cleverer than the cleverest hunter. And when it has gone on for years! all his life! What will he do then? Will he lie quiet then? Oh! he will lie quiet, yes, and let them take all from him, daughter and home and food. He will shake his head and sigh the great sigh, and lie quiet in the mud of the wallow, very sad. And then at last they come after his life. Shall they take that too? Then at last he knows and is angry—very angry—and he stands waiting for them. The fools! They come on, crawling still; they do not know that he is ready for them now. The fools! the fools!’. (Woolf 1913, 112)

14The jungle, in whose shadow Silindu is hidden, finally becomes the main source of his power. Silindu who is considered as a fool and ignorant person (133), suddenly turns into a cunning and dangerous animal ready to attack those who intend to harm him. What drives such an invisible man into action is a renewal of his animal instinct. His affinity with the wild world of animals, considered as the main cause of his alienation from civilized society thus becomes the main source of his newly gained power. As Le Blanc claims, a tramp gets his force from his inferior position in society and his incapacity to rise up in the social hierarchy: ‘Le vagabond est le désinscrit qui tire sa force de sa faiblesse sociale, de son impossibilité à être dans le rang’ (Le Blanc 2014, 10).

15The interior monologue exposes Silindu’s transformation from the subaltern into the dangerously empowered and cunning animal capable of killing the hunter. At this point, Silindu acknowledges his passive resignation towards life and its much feared evils but the last stroke of misfortune had made him understand that each and every evil in his life came from the headman. The comparison that he makes between himself and a wounded animal points to his frustration and anger with his situation as a hunted animal. When the headman asks him what he fears in the jungle, he answers that he fears ‘the jungle, the devils, the darkness. But above all, of being hunted’ (135). And it is through the metaphor of hunting that the transition from disempowerment to empowerment is suggested in the novel.

16As Silindu says to the headman just before killing him: ‘But the pain brings anger and with anger, anger, Arachchi, comes cunning’ (Woolf 1913, 135–136). The pain inflicted by the higher orders of society and in particular, the colonial rule becomes the cause of Silindu’s empowerment and a powerful means to transgress the established rules of society. Nevertheless, his animal instinct though perceived as a means of liberation, fails to liberate him permanently from the confines of the colonial law and order. As Le Blanc maintains, there is no liberty after all for a marginalized person (Le Blanc 2014, 30).

17The ambiguity of the novel is not limited to its treatment of animals and humans only and touches on the narrative voice and perspective as well. As Herz maintains, the act of narration in The Village in the Jungle is far more ambiguous than the theories of appropriation would allow (Herz 2001, 79–80). This complexity is evident in Silindu’s monologue, in which his intimate thoughts are recounted as if from within his consciousness. The repeated use of exclamations such as ‘ha! ha!,’ ‘Oh!,’ ‘the fools!,’ and repeated question marks reflect the fragmented thoughts of the colonized subject as they pass through his mind. Furthermore, the use of the Sinhala exclamation ‘amma!’ and the word ‘vedda’ also point to Woolf’s willingness to admit local idiom into his text, thus rendering the narrative voice as unobtrusive and humble as possible. Yasmine Gooneratne’s analysis of the manuscript of The Village in the Jungle, confirms this point.30 The narrator in the aforementioned passage thus glides silently out of the text to render a victim-oriented point of view possible.

18The narrator’s effacement in favor of characters is not limited to Silindu’s monologue and is discernible in the whole novel. Indeed, the narrator who appears to be a first person one at the beginning of the novel suddenly gives way to an omniscient but humble narrator who weaves freely local folklore and mythology into the literary text. Herz thinks that the narrator of The Village in the Jungle, is not only an omniscient narrator but also a helpless one. As he observes, Woolf’s narrator has a particular way of disappearing in the fabric of his own story that one completely loses sight of him.31 As he further argues, the narrator of the novel is ‘a curiously split and subject-less omniscience, obscured by the world it peers into’ (Herz 2001, 80). Mukhopadhyay32 analyses Woolf’s ‘double-voicedness’33 with the help of what James Clifford identified as the heteroglossic ethnographic account.34 As she argues, The Village in the Jungle’s ‘double-voicedness,’ allows ‘for an uncertain ethnography of sorts, permitting Woolf to write from “inside” a culture, using an unnamed, though obviously local, narrative voice which is not afraid of not knowing’ (Mukhopadhyay 2015, 61). Moreover, the narrator’s ‘impersonality’ and ‘bifocality,’ as Kerr claims,35 ‘emancipates him from the defects of vision (and sympathy) of both colonial and native’ allowing him to achieve what Kipling dreamed of with Kim: ‘the friend of all the world, who could go everywhere’ (Kerr 1998, 272). As Kerr explains The Village in the Jungle, ‘seems [. . .] to turns inside out the usual topographies of colonial fiction’ which ultimately results in ‘a sort of symbolic decolonization, in its project of giving autonomy to the point of view of people for whom a colonized space is not a possession but a native habitat’ (Kerr 1997, 158, 160). As he further observes, this victim-oriented perspective36 enables Woolf to construct virtually an entire novel out of ‘the life lived by the native people of Ceylon when there was no colonial presence to observe them’ (Kerr 1998, 272). Woolf’s narrative perspective is indeed a singular one allowing the reader to see both through the eyes of the colonized and the colonizer, a ‘remarkable attempt to think transculturally.’37 We could thus claim that Woolf’s democratic narrative approach leads not only to a democratization of narrative space and character but also to that of the narrative voice and perspective.

19Woolf’s attention to the humble in The Village in the Jungle definitely is in keeping with his political orientation and his defence of social justice and equality. His fictional work is no doubt an expression of his anger and frustration against the precariousness of the people in Ceylon under Empire. With this novel, literature clearly becomes a means of empowerment, a unique and powerful instrument to give permanent and mythical existence to those deprived of the right to exist.