The Funny Business of the Swedish East India Company: Gender and Imperial Joke-Work in Jacob Wallenberg's Travel Writing
[In the following essay, Rose examines the 1781 Swedish travel narrative My Son on the Galley by Jacob Wallenberg, arguing that the author's comic sexual descriptions are an attempt to deal with feelings regarding Sweden's colonial exploitation of China and the East Indies.]
COLONIAL COMEDY
“Incarcerated for almost eighteen months on a ship and continually surrounded by wearisome monotony, may I not be permitted to seek refreshment in literary games?”1 During an eighteen-month voyage from Gothenburg, Sweden to Canton and back (1769-71), Jacob Wallenberg, chaplain aboard the Swedish East India Company ship Finland, entertained himself and his shipmates by composing Min son på galejan [My Son on the Galley].2 First published in 1781, two and a half years after its author's death at the age of thirty-two, Wallenberg's comic and episodic travelogue is considered a classic eighteenth-century Swedish prose text and stands out among contemporary Swedish works for its enduring readability. In all, it has seen twenty-five editions and has appeared in a vast number of anthologies. My Son has also been translated into Danish (1944), German (1975), Italian (1971), and English (1993).
The reception of Wallenberg's text has largely remained within the scope of conventional literary criteria and, despite the historical nature of the narrative, no critic to my knowledge has attempted to negotiate between Wallenberg's comic text and the context of mercantile expansion in which it is so intimately implicated. Wallenberg's “literary games” such as placing a “Preface to the Gentle Reader” at the end of the first book prompted the important Enlightenment author Christoph Martin Wieland, in his presentation of a 1782 translation to a German reading public, to assign My Son a place in the Sternian tradition of comic travel narratives.3 Subsequent critical treatment has followed Wieland's lead in assessing Wallenberg's travelogue according to traditional literary paradigms. While in the 1920s Niels Afzelius, in what remains the most thorough discussion of My Son, argues against reading Wallenberg in the tradition of Sterne4 and identifies the Linnean tradition as the “solid trunk” [fasta stam] around which Wallenberg's text winds, his primary concerns remain the text's generic affiliations and questions of influence.5 Even more recent treatments of My Son—whether formal analyses of the techniques of Wallenberg's jokes (Ebel), for example, or arguments concerning the extent to which the text is fact or fiction (Sjöberg)—fail to deal with it as imperial discourse.6 Indeed, I would argue that the near-total critical disregard of any but the most incidental connections between Wallenberg's narrative and the mercantile exploitation of the East Indies, which is the occasion of his journey, attests to the effectiveness of Wallenberg's humor in making a mere joke of the serious business of exploitation.
Yet while Wallenberg's innovative narrative draws, generically, on traditions as diverse as the French voyage comique, the novels of Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, the moral weekly (such as, in Sweden, Olof von Dalin's Then Swänska Argus), and the Swedish Bacchanalian tradition of which Carl Michael Bellmann is the most esteemed representative, it is a comic account of a real voyage. Its most important intertexts remain the meticulous naturalist travel accounts of Wallenberg's Linnean compatriots. In his highly entertaining text, Wallenberg self-consciously parodies the humorless facticity of the narratives published by, among others, Olof Torén, who described his journey to the East Indies in letters to Linnaeus, and the Linnean disciple Pehr Osbeck. As Mary Pratt and others have noted, the Linnean disciples' increasingly global enterprise, over the second half of the century, of travel and travel writing was made possible by arrangements with overseas trading companies, above all the Swedish East India Company.7 Wallenberg, who somewhat reluctantly took the cloth in order to sail with the company, was thus very much in the position to spoof the writings of his more sincere counterparts. But while Wallenberg adopts a parodic stance vis-à-vis naturalist discourse, his comic endeavors are made possible by the same project of mercantile expansion as their scientific research. Indeed, the Swedish East India Company could support the joking cleric and the scientists with ease, as it enjoyed, in its peak period from which Wallenberg's account stems, returns of threehundred percent.8
In this essay, I wish to explore the crucial question that the various formalist approaches (broadly defined) to Wallenberg's text have not been equipped to ask—namely, how the dynamic intersection of comedy and colonialism we encounter in Wallenberg's text functions as an ideological intervention. My concern will not be with formal aspects of Wallenberg's comic narrative per se but rather with how the author deploys comic narration in his very specific scene of writing—a Swedish East India Company boat sailing to China in the interests of economic exploitation. For, as Freud argues in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, humor cannot be grasped fully through analysis of its techniques alone, but must also be understood as social process.9 James English articulates the social dynamics of the joke-work nicely when he writes that “what the joke does is to intervene in a particular system of social relationships, putting into circulation a ‘mutilated and altered transcript’ of certain of the system's elements, a ‘most strange revision’ of the problems or contradictions that bind those elements within the system (JRU 160, 162).”10 I shall thus be attending to the work that Wallenberg's jokes perform—that of distracting from colonial violence through humor—and to their complex workings, the witty condensations and displacements by which they perform this task.
In reading Wallenberg's humor seriously, I wish to demonstrate the necessary convergence and interchange of sexual and colonial objects in the economy of his imperial joke-work, or socialized dream-work. Thus my project engages, in a specific context, a central problem of colonial studies—the difficulty of articulating coloniality and sexuality in such a way as to recognize the mutual constitution of the sexual and colonial other. The work of Christopher Lane and Anne McClintock represents two approaches to the problematic of gender and colonialism. In his subtle psychoanalytic study, The Ruling Passion, Lane unravels, in a body of colonial British literature, underlying ambivalences legible primarily along the axes of masculine identification and same-sex desire. While Lane's project aims to help “shatter Britain's colonial legacy, once and for all,” his “interest lies predominantly in the violent effect of sexual desire on ontology.”11 Thus Lane proceeds on the assumption that the political function of ambivalence is essentially disruptive, an assumption he shares with Homi Bhabha. In Bhabha's suggestive and challenging work, we likewise frequently encounter the implicit equation of textual ambivalence and the fracturing of the political subject with a disruption of colonial politics per se.12
In its psychoanalytic dimensions and interest in ambivalence and paradox, my analysis is in dialogue with Lane and Bhabha; the specific context I examine, however, challenges the assumption that paradox is inherently subversive. I am thus in agreement with McClintock's insightful critique, in Imperial Leather (1995), of critical slippage between formal structures and their assumed political effects.13 Also employing psychoanalytic strategies, McClintock usefully calls for layered and historically nuanced analysis of localized colonial dynamics. Indeed in my analysis of the elusive ways in which Wallenberg's witty discourse rewrites relations of power in the colonial exchange, I attempt to demonstrate how paradox, in Wallenberg, does not function as a negative limit at which power unravels, but rather as a driving force propelling the imperial project.
This conspicuous aspect of Wallenberg's discourse pushes us to expand the parameters of the ongoing discussion of the interrelationships of paradox, gender, and colonialism exemplified, for example, in connection with the eighteenth-century English context, by Laura Brown's Ends of Empire, to which the present analysis is indebted. Brown, albeit in a manner more in keeping with traditional critique of ideology, also tends to read the contradictions and paradoxes of ideology as inherently noxious to its workings. Thus she perceives in the trope of the commodified female agent in which, she argues, such contradictions and paradoxes become concentrated, not only a powerful mechanism of empire but also a site of its potential subversion. “[W]omen,” Brown asserts, “can disturb the coherence of mercantile capitalist ideology … in part because they are so essential to its self-representation.”14 As I will try to demonstrate, the productivity of the paradox that accrues in Wallenberg's figures of commodified women puts pressure on the assumption that ideology necessarily functions according to principles of coherence. This is not to say that we should abandon the critical project of hastening the end of empire for which Brown forth-rightly calls. It does require, however, that we move in our theorization of colonial discourses beyond the prevalent view that ideological contradiction and paradox—including the contradictions and paradoxes of gender—disturb ideology, and that we begin to consider more fully their ideological functions.
SPOOFING LINNAEUS
I share with Mary Pratt the guiding assumption that narratives such as Wallenberg's which are intimately caught up in conquest—whether mercantile or colonial—will employ strategies for disavowing what Pratt (perhaps all-too-liberally) calls “guilt.”15 In his parodic treatment of the naturalists' posture, Wallenberg eschews the strategies for narrating the “anti-conquest” which Pratt identifies in naturalist accounts such as that by the Linnean disciple Anders Sparrman.16 An excursion into traditional Linnean travel accounts will therefore establish a useful backdrop to Wallenberg's comic upstagings. Pratt sees in the naturalist-collector the “utopian image of a European bourgeois subject simultaneously innocent and imperial, asserting a harmless hegemonic vision that installs no apparatus of domination. At most naturalists were seen as handmaidens to Europe's expansive commercial aspirations.”17 Even as science and commerce serve each other's interests, the two are “carefully held distinct.”18 The “innocent” naturalist's guiding trope is self-effacement, a tendency to subsume cultural domination into natural order or, put differently, a tendency for the “guilty” subject of (exploitative) knowledge to vanish innocently into his (overwhelmingly his) presumedly value-neutral object of study.
Pehr Osbeck's speech on the purpose of travel, delivered in 1758 on the occasion of his induction into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, provides a remarkable example of the kind of oscillation Pratt describes between acknowledgment and disavowal of the economic interests of science:
Attention has always its use, which in part appears immediately, and in part avails posterity … Each of our senses expects its peculiar gratification, and this sometimes from the most distant parts of the world. That other nations may not run away with all the advantages arising from carrying merchandize from place to place, we are obliged to fetch foreign goods ourselves by long voyages. It is advantageous to trade to take time, and to have a free uninterrupted course; and therefore we prefer going by sea: to this the compass is not only useful, but absolutely requisite; yet it is probable that at first the effects of the load-stone were looked upon as trivial, and it is doubtful whether the inventor got a proportionable reward for its discovery: but time has shewn, that the first attention to this object has been of great and almost inestimable use. Our attention must therefore not merely extend to those things of which we already see the use, but likewise to those from which we still may expect it.19
The vacillation between a more or less “innocent” rhetoric of objective science and a frankness concerning the economic stakes in the imperial scramble for the East, in which science is implicated, continues throughout Osbeck's speech. Most important in terms of the current discussion is to note that the scientist remains a humble servant of science and nation, even as he makes discoveries for which (economically advantageous) uses eventually will be discovered. He has no vested interest in, no personal desire for, what he observes and records; indeed, it is this supposed blindness with respect to the possible economic and utilitarian ramifications of his professional activity which requires ever more meticulous observation on his part. As the ultimate usefulness of the scientist's observations will not necessarily be apparent to him, he must take diligent note of simply everything. Not the scientist himself, but rather Science—in its own good time, in the sanguine spirit of progress, and at a comfortable remove from the contact zone—will capitalize on these observations.20 In fact, the more “innocent” the scientist is, the keener his eye becomes and must become. Paradoxically, the more perfectly apolitical he becomes in his practice of science, the more perfectly he serves the national political agenda of economic exploitation of the Far East. His involvement in a process of exploitation is occulted in the figure of the noble scientist whose only desire, to cite the closing words of Osbeck's speech, is “a desire of knowing more.”21
It is plainly Osbeck's vanishing act, his ability to become completely transparent so as not to obscure the light of science, which prompts Linnaeus to hold up Osbeck's account of his 1750 voyage to China as a shining example of how travel narratives should be written. In his letter in praise of Osbeck's book, Linnaeus writes:
You, Sir, have every where traveled with the light of science: you have named every thing so precisely, that it may be comprehended by the learned world; and have discovered and settled both the genera and species. For this reason, I seem myself to have traveled with you, and to have examined every object you saw with my own eyes.
If voyages were thus written, science might truly reap advantage from them. I congratulate you, Sir, for having traced out a way in which the world will follow your steps hereafter; and, pursuing this career, will remember the man who first pointed it out.22
It is the transparency of Osbeck's text, capable of bringing learned readers face to face with the objects it catalogues, that is exemplary. Any marking of the subjective perspective of the travel account, or any textual opacity in the account, would be, scientifically speaking, a blemish.
In a letter to his friend Jakob Lindblom dated 11 February 1769, shortly before embarking upon a grand tour across Europe, Wallenberg describes his motives for travel, motives which contrast markedly with the naturalists':
Neither hunger for bread nor thirst for water, but rather hunger for beautiful white womanflesh, as well as thirst for those drops which bedded down blessed Old Noah when he discovered his shame. God forgive me my sins, I have examined myself and found no other motives for my desire to travel than these … And still I want to become a minister. Yes, brother, I have already accepted the Company's call for next Christmas: and this, too, is a motif for first satisfying my lust-hungry soul, before I enter into an estate [stånd] which forbids me this. Terrible fasting! I see already what war a minister wages with his flesh. Enough. Do not show this to those who might disapprove.23
The purpose of Wallenberg's European journey (1769) is sexual conquest of “white womanflesh,” and, Wallenberg anticipates, this desire will not easily be sublimated after taking the cloth in order to sail with the Swedish East India Company. In contrast to the self-effacement of the Linnean narrators, Wallenberg is everywhere present in My Son. Instead of vanishing into the natural order of what he narrates, he tends to assimilate, in one way or another, all that he encounters into the decidedly social category of humor:
There have been others before me who have pressed similar East Indian fosterlings into your arms but each and every one of them seems to have inherited too much of his father's earnestness. Brelin stands on Ascension Island and brings tears to your eyes with his lies; Osbeck, useful but glum, stuffs your hands full of natural curiosities; and Torén, more good-humored than the others, might possibly have been able to amuse you with his pretty little acquaintances in Suratte and China but you watched as the life flowed out of him along with the last drop in his ink-pot … Permit me, then, to eradicate them with my prattling progeny. I am an enemy of furrowed brows and desire only to be able to bring youth to every face.
(MS, 57-58)
If the model naturalist text can be termed “transparent,” Wallenberg's text would have to be called “opaque” or “saturated.” In one particularly striking example of Wallenberg's tendency to emphasize the materiality of his text, the author goes so far as to make a word-image (the technique is familiar to contemporary readers from concrete poetry) of the object of his interest (a porpoise's horn), thus literally absorbing the referential world into his emphatically textual “literary games” (see [below]).
O!
Young.
Man. You.
Who. Go. Court-
ing. Do. Not
Choose. With. Your.
Eyes. Closed. For. The.
Waters. Of. Marriage. Are.
Perilous. One. In. Twenty.
Avoids. Shipwreck. Therefore
Take. Soundings. Keep. A. Log.
Take. Bearings. Bend. Your. Back.
In. The. Door. Where. Others. Have.
Bumped. Their. Heads. Test. The. Shallows.
Before. You. Venture. Into. The. Storm. Or.
Else. Consider. Your. Fate. In. This. Horn. That.
I. Have. Had. Erected. As. A. Warning. To. You.
Likewise, the author's singularly whimsical drawings and “moral taxonomies” of animals openly parody the methods of documentation underpinning Linnean science:
I intend to describe the souls of my small animals whereas others have restricted themselves to the bodies … Let others stick to the fins and tails as long as they want to. I shall thus be opening up a new field of learning and I hope to attract more attention to myself as a result.
(MS, 69)
Whereas the naturalist text aspires to transparency, Wallenberg raises in a joking way the enterprise of mimetic representation only to undermine it with textual games. If the naturalist is wont to remove himself from the scene of narration, Wallenberg upstages the ostensible subject at hand in the comedy of his narrational performance.
GENDER, JOKE-WORK, AND THE DIS-ORIENTATION OF IMPERIAL DESIRE
While the kind of foregrounding of self and text we encounter in Wallenberg would be, according to Pratt's argument, a dangerous game for scientists by the 1770s, Wallenberg evades implication in the exploitative project through a strategy of joke-work. As gender plays a key role in the dynamics of Wallenberg's joke-work, I must explain that Wallenberg's original readers were his companions on ship, among whom he would circulate his material sheet by sheet as he composed it. It is evident from Wallenberg's correspondence, moreover, that he was aware that My Son was too risqué for a clergyman to publish and that it was hence destined to be read only by a small circle of friends and acquaintances associated with the Swedish East India Company.24 In contradistinction to the gender of readers of the joke-texts, however, Wallenberg's jokes themselves are conspicuously preoccupied with women. As we shall see, Wallenberg's figures of women serve as the chief means of dissembling the desire for imperial conquest.
In his comic renderings of the journey, Wallenberg consistently associates Swedish women with notions of home and domesticity. Furthermore, he casts women as the ultimate telos of, and driving force behind, the mercantile journey. “In short,” he writes, “a pretty girl is the spring that really drives the works, whatever the ends may be” (MS, 44). Thus Wallenberg's deployment of female figures participates in a “geographical notation” which, according to Edward Said, is legible by the end of the eighteenth century in fiction as well as historical and philosophical writing. Said argues that such notation comes to manifest itself in a pervasive “hierarchy of spaces by which the metropolitan center and, gradually, the metropolitan economy are seen as dependent upon an overseas system of territorial control, economic exploitation, and a sociocultural vision; without these, stability and prosperity at home—’home’ being a word with extremely potent resonances—would not be possible.”25
Indeed, in Wallenberg's account, the journey abroad is resolutely oriented toward home, embodied in Swedish womanhood. “So why are we traveling to the Indies?” Wallenberg reflects. “The answer is there to be read in the eyes of Swedish womanhood. We would run around the whole earth for one meaningful look from a beautiful girl. We would sail far away from them so as to get that much closer to them at the same time” (MS, 44-45). Wallenberg adds that “Thinking of pretty girls and becoming a poet is one and the same thing,” and continues in verse:
That you may sweetly lap at tea and gossip,
We brave the waves aboard a storm-tossed ship;
To bring home porcelain for your trifling pleasure,
We face the winds and stormy weather.
We run the risk of drowning
That you may grace the ball, clad in China's all, unfrowning.
…
Oh, girls, for shame! Fall not a victim of these idlers [sic] deceit,
A seaman may not bow and scrape but he picks up the receipt.
Your dandy does his courting with sycophantic verses
While we support our pleadings with overflowing purses.
Your officer may offer you a withered family tree,
But with a pocket full of doubloons we can woo financially.
…
Then come and join us as we prance
To the clinking music of the doubloon dance,
To the clinking music of the doubloon dance.
(MS, 45-46)
Wallenberg's poetry jokingly acknowledges the economic incentives underwriting the paradoxically homeward orientation of the traveler's desire. This tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment and the homeward orientation of the narration converge to displace attention from the location and process of the exploitative extraction of wealth onto Swedish bourgeois femininity and a farcical domestic rivalry between the well-paid East India sailors and the increasingly impoverished Swedish aristocrats.
The final line of the above poem (“Piasterns klang är vār musik”) is rendered literally as “The piaster's clink is our music.” Wallenberg thus imagines an exchangeability between luxury products (ivory, tea, porcelain, silk) and Swedish women, while also making claims that his poem is in certain respects synonymous both with Swedish women, who inspire the poem, and with the music of piasters, which is also the poem's music. The Marxian theory of the commodity can help us understand the links Wallenberg makes here (and elsewhere).
I understand the Marxian Commodity as the fetishized and exchangeable form of products of labor which veils the real labor or social relations (here the asymmetrical relations of imperial mercantilism) that produced them. In Ends of Empire, Laura Brown has argued, in the English context, that the shift that occurs in literary portrayals of women during the course of the long eighteenth century, whereby depictions of women as desired objects yield to portrayals of women as desiring subjects, participates in a broader ideological scapegoating of bourgeois women as the ultimate agents behind the colonial project.26 In other words, Commodified Woman is held responsible for the traffic in the very accessories that constitute her.27 Woman as the scapegoat or legitimating trope of colonialism serves the ends of empire so well because her desire for luxury products is by definition unfulfillable: the greater the quantities of exchanged luxury goods becomes, the greater, too, becomes Woman's imagined desire for them.
As Brown repeatedly points out, however, the scapegoating of women cannot suppress the contradictions of mercantile expansion with absolute success. Brown's analysis proceeds through a reading of the trope of the naked and the dressed woman in Pope; she asserts that female figures provide a means by which “mercantile capitalism is naturalized, rationalized, and ambiguously affirmed. Indeed, the ambiguities and anxieties of this transitional period seem to be concentrated in the figure of the woman, who stands for the whole complex and unresolvable problem posed by the early history of capitalism.”28 The problem with the commodified female agent, to state this differently, is that she has no presence, is always displaced into her accoutrements. Thus she will always stand in more or less problematically for the diffuse traffic in colonial commodities; she is not, as she is held to be, the agent behind and prior to this traffic, but rather its effect. The ostensible agent of mercantile expansion, she is never manifestly there.
If the bourgeois woman can be seen, generally, as effect and legitimizing trope of the money economy so implicated in imperial conquest, in Wallenberg she figures as effect of and legitimizing trope in the joke economy in which the relations of colonial domination are rewritten, and by means of which recognition of individual culpability can be deferred or “passed on.” Wallenberg's jokes function as textual commodities of sorts; like commodities, they absorb (exploitative) social relations and circulate them in veiled form in an economy of socially symbolic (joke) exchange. In a chapter addressed to hypothetical critics, Wallenberg makes the following apologia for his preoccupation with women:
You might, of course, reproach me with better reason for including so much about women in my worthless jottings—as if I were some effeminate petticoat pup. But everyone must know that these are the wares that sell best. You are never going to be left in the lurch with pretty wares of that sort even if you have shiploads of them; learned literature, on the other hand, will lie unasked for on the bookshelves like great piles of planks. So allow me to continue retailing my works undisturbed. Apart from which, I have a duty to please those of my friends present on the ship. Their usual question is: ‘Have you got anything about girls?’ When I answer no—as I did with this chapter—they go off with long faces and don't want to read what I've written.
(MS, 100)
Wallenberg here acknowledges both the commodified status of his feminized texts and the homosocial distribution of desire achieved in their circulation. The imaginary women traded in the homosocial joke economy replace, indeed consume, the colonial spoils. Euphemized objects, they serve to orient the male travelers' desire away from the sites of conquest—to dis-Orient, if you will, imperial desire.
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE OTHER WOMAN
Thus far I have been treating broad trends, techniques, and strategies evident in Wallenberg's text. It will therefore be helpful now to analyze in more detail the cultural work being performed—especially in and through the categories of gender, nationality, and race—in two complex instances of Wallenberg's imperial joke-work.
In a chapter entitled “Oddments Concerning Capetown,” Wallenberg comments on the slaves there:
The slave race is smallish and weak-limbed. I have seen four of them gathered around a load that a single one of our lads from Dalarna would have thrown onto his shoulder—the slaves included. I think this can be traced to their improper intercourse, for both sexes are thrown together in a camp and they couple randomly like mindless animals, often at as young an age as twelve or thirteen. The way their masters leave them to their worthless heathendom is indefensible. There's the Dutch conscience for you! If there is to be any healthy breeding, then a European has to be involved. It is for this reason that a host considers it a great courtesy to his humble house if a guest happens to become enamored of a black-eyed maiden, for anyone who enlarges his slave girls is also enlarging his wealth. An Englishman will occasionally take a dear black sweetheart, and an urbane Frenchman does not miss the chance of throwing himself aux pieds de sa belle brune. My own innocent countrymen, however, generally consider this to be bestiality.
Which do you think is blacker: her skin or their deeds?”
(MS, 111).
The passage contains several jokes of varying complexity. There is first a fairly straightforward racial joke (“the slaves included”), underscoring the physical superiority of strapping Dalarna lads over the sickly slaves. The next joke, regarding the Dutch (“There's the Dutch conscience for you!”), does not upbraid the Dutch for the brutality with which they regulate sexual practices among the people they enslave but rather, at the expense of the slaves, chastises them for not intervening in what are supposed to be the slaves' “naturally animal” sexual practices. How the European intervention into the “breeding” process of slaves manifests itself becomes clear as the passage continues. The fact that the systematic rape of black women represents good business sense and yields economic growth is not the focal point of critical or satirical humor; rather, this brutal reality is displaced into the rather harmless stereotype of the penurious Dutchman and a rivalry between other male national stereotypes (English, French, Swedish). The joke, which Wallenberg frames as a grotesquely inappropriate juxtaposition of the rhetoric of courtly love and the presumed subhuman status of the women to whom it refers, is now on the Englishman and the “urbane” Frenchman. Peter Graves, the English translator of My Son, is, in my view, misleading when, referring to this scene in his introduction, he writes that Wallenberg “has no sympathy with the rapacious aspects of European colonialism … [and] deplores the sexual exploitation of black women by white colonists” (MS, 12). I would argue that the subhuman treatment of enslaved black women is not the object of critical humor; rather, the assumed subhuman status of the enslaved women is the unreflected presupposition of Wallenberg's diffusing humor. The joke is clearly on the Frenchman and the Englishman for showing themselves to be so uncultivated as to commit bestiality. The precondition of Swedish “innocence” is the presumed subhumanity of the enslaved black women, the implicit site of innocence of course being the Swedish woman back home, for whom the morally superior Swede waits. His desire is not implicated in literal and figurative rape for profit.
Since Wallenberg consistently deflects attention away from the colonial encounter, his extended depiction of the Javanese companion of a Swedish corporal is of special interest. The corporal has settled on Java in the employ of the Dutch colonists because of what he perceives to be Sweden's lack of freedom. Wallenberg finds in him “the same thing as is to be found in all deserters from Sweden: they confuse the concepts of freedom and licence … There are hundreds of them running around London and Amsterdam praising their foreign freedom, which in actual fact consists of nothing but the chance, as patrons of some licentious whorehouse on Sundays, to dispose of everything they have earned in the week” (MS, 160-61). Those who seek fortune abroad in Europe rather than investing in home are doomed to squander their earnings in whorehouses instead of taking their wages home to establish themselves and marry. In this staged argument about the virtues of Sweden, Wallenberg articulates national pride by contrasting competing models of—purchasable—femininity. This strategy culminates in his excruciatingly detailed description of the Javanese woman, a pointed contrast to his habitual light tone. Transfixed by the “ghostly apparition” suckling a “white” child, Wallenberg asks the corporal “whether it was the custom in this country to employ wet-nurses from the underworld” (MS, 61). Notwithstanding his professed unwillingness to detail the “witch-like appearance” of the semiclad woman for fear of “causing pregnant women to abort in terror,” Wallenberg proceeds:
Had she been as black as a Moor or an even yellowish-brown like a Hottentot I would have called her bearable, but there were green diamond-shaped marks, yellow crescents and streaky black clubs scattered at random on her ashen skin. It looked to me as if all the Cupids on the island had come together to paint her but had been unable to agree on the primary colours and had started arguing just like the builders of Babel; in the confusion they had spilt red lead, white lead, umber and gutta-percha together and then taken to their heels. Projecting of jaw and grinning like a monkey, she showed two rows of teeth the colour of blood and with long strands of the betel she was chewing sticking out of them. Her eyes were dark-brown, bleary and dripping, and they appeared to be edged with red frieze. When she walked I could count all the muscles and veins in her shrunken calves since they twisted and turned between her flesh and her skin in numerous blue meanderings as if representing a map full of rivers, streams and brooks. When I add to this that her breasts, or udders to be more accurate, hung down round her waist like two pendulous bagpipes, you will all understand that our corporal had every reason to decamp from an oppressive Sweden for the sake of such a sweetheart.
(MS, 161-62)29
I would propose that the reason why Wallenberg's portrayal of the woman's grotesquerie escalates to this extraordinary extent is that his caricature of her physical incongruities is the strategy by which he attempts to resolve the genuine problem she poses for his guiding ideology. The Javanese woman has, as it were, sidetracked a Swede from what Wallenberg idealizes as a homeward journey to a Swedish wife. Both symptom of ideological tension and a strategy for overcoming it, Wallenberg's depiction oscillates between horrified fascination with the woman's corporeality and flights into simile, culminating in his hallucination of the woman's body as a grotesque map. Indeed, the incongruity, in Wallenberg's rendering, of her physical apperance signals the disorienting function she has with respect to an ideology that avails itself of idealized Swedish women precisely in order to disclaim implication in the always local and material practice of asymmetrical exchange with the colonial Other: an Other whom Wallenberg seems momentarily as unable to look away from as to look at. Wallenberg's comic build-up of ideological fault lines in his grotesque description of the woman's body sets the stage for his eventual punchline-like apostrophe in which he winks to his readers that she certainly was worth leaving Sweden for.30 The deflating trope redirects the narrative gaze toward “home” and the ideologically sanctioned models of femininity, domesticity, and maternity redeemable there.31
THE FUNCTION OF PARADOX
As we have seen, Wallenberg's narrative of voyage proceeds largely through jokes whereby Swedish women are presented as the true and final orientation of the traveler's desire, as the ultimate reason for his traveling abroad. Swedish women are inscribed, in both senses of the word, as the journey's “end.” As Wallenberg writes, comparing Swedish women to Dutch women at the Cape, “Were I allowed to choose a whole harem as the Turks do, I would do my choosing here but, compelled to be satisfied with one, I demand more durable wares” (MS, 117). The Swedish wife is cast as the end of the journey, as the quintessential good investment, as the final cashing in of one's chips.
In this episode, as throughout the text, we must, however, recognize that the Swedish women idealized in Wallenberg's jokes are simultaneously presented as degraded commodities: they are “durable wares;” they make for highly marketable texts; they can be wooed financially. Thus ultimately more crucial than the analogical relation between the woman created in joke exchange and in commodity exchange is the ideological contingency of the former on the latter. The Swedish woman is the exalted end of the journey and end of commodity exchange only, paradoxically, to the extent that she can be bought. She enters the comic transactions through which she becomes idealized in already degraded form. Wallenberg's jokes thus not only idealize Swedish women but also acknowledge the joke involved in their very idealization. Swedish women ultimately remain the butts of the very jokes which compliment them only backhandedly, indeed only as a joke.
Just as, in Brown's analysis, the figure of the commodified woman provides but ambiguous affirmation for the project of mercantile expansion, so, too, does Wallenberg's figure of the Swedish woman become the locus of ambiguity. Indeed, alongside the dominant tendency to cast Swedish women as the superior, faithful women to whom the Swedish East India sailors shall return, there are also a conspicuous number of jokes that turn on the theme of the cuckolded Swedish sailor. I can only allude to the cuckoldry jokes, but the porpoise's horn to which I referred above (see fig. 1) is in fact a good example; its mock inscription cautions sailors to be careful in choosing a wife or they will run the risk of being cuckolded.32 The status of women represented in the humor of cuckoldry stands in the way of completion of the (matrimonial) journey and underscores the ambiguity which Swedish womanhood embodies. Freud's theory of the psycho-social dynamics of “dirty” joke-work can illuminate Wallenberg's oscillating figurations of Swedish women alternately as ideal and debased, as faithful and cuckolding wives.
The precondition, according to Freud, for the pleasurable swapping of smut between men is the absence or unavailability of the desired woman. The “ideal case” of the desired woman's unavailability occurs when a third person, another man, is present, thus precluding the possibility of the woman's “immediate surrender.” Whereas in private (when a man and woman are alone together) talking dirty can serve as a means of seduction, in social situations (when a woman is in the presence of more than one man), the exchange of smut between the men can substitute for the aggressive desire for the woman.33 The problem, of course, is that the homosocial pleasure achieved in the joke-exchange can only be achieved intersubjectively: the joke teller can never be immanent as a sexual subject, as he is always dependent on a third person, the other man, “in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.”34
Thus if the radically bifurcated nature of the commodity precludes Woman (as exchange value) from ever being manifested in actual women, then the ambiguity underlying the humor of cuckoldry essentially reiterates this paradox.35 Where Woman is an ideological product of material and symbolic exchanges between men, cuckoldry is not merely a threat to marriage but in a sense its very precondition: the ideal Swedish wife on whom Wallenberg's narrational strategies so frequently pivot exists only as a shared male fantasy inextricably tied to the shared male practice of mercantile expansion.
We would be wrong to assume that the paradox that becomes concentrated in Wallenberg's text in the figure of the Swedish woman/wife poses a problem to the workings of colonialism. It appears rather as a structuring principle of the imperial ideology, a driving force propelling the mercantilist project. That the slippery logic of Wallenberg's imperial Witz succeeds by means of the very contradictions on which ideology is traditionally thought to stumble might encourage a move away from approaching ideology as problematic, toward a more functional mode of criticism that seeks less to identify where ideological “problems” lie than what they in fact do. I would thus like to conclude by underscoring how in Wallenberg's account the tensions which accrue in the figure of the Swedish woman/wife are consistent with, and even perpetuating forces in, the colonial project. A final anecdote from the author's life can serve to illustrate my point.
After bragging at some length about how lucrative his chaplaincy with the Swedish East India Company has proven, Wallenberg writes in a letter to Paul Juringius dated 21 June 1771 that his financial situation is now such that, “if I didn't fear horns, I could modestly manage to marry.”36 And in a letter to Jacob Lindblom dated 30 November of the same year, Wallenberg writes: “From the newspapers you will have already heard that I am going a second time to the East Indies. If it were an occupation on land, I would not desire anything better. If I might take a wife with me, I would get married: but now I am spooked by the shadow of presumable horns.”37
The cuckold's horns, with which Wallenberg seems preoccupied, aptly pose his dilemma, one which throws into relief the structuring paradox of the joke-work with which we have been concerned. While the point of imperial travel is a wife, the point of a wife, in the final analysis, is further travel, travel which both presupposes and perpetuates the homosocial or “cuckolding” economy of which the figure of the ideal wife is a mere effect. Thus Wallenberg's dilemma should not be understood as an ideological snag or moment of crisis. Instead of a wrinkle in the smooth surface of the imperial ideology, the paradox of Swedish womanhood would appear to be one of its most productive mechanisms. If, as I have argued, the joke-work which I have attempted to elucidate makes possible an evasion of, for lack of a better phrase, “colonial guilt,” it would seem to do so not despite, but rather by virtue of, the impossibility, the implicit contradiction, of its logic. Thus it is fitting that we take leave of Wallenberg as he prepares to embark on his second of three journeys oriented toward an imagined, and imaginary, wife who stays perpetually at home.
Notes
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Jacob Wallenberg, My Son on the Galley, trans. Peter Graves (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1994), 59 (hereafter MS and cited parenthetically in text). Citations in English of MS are from this edition.
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The odd title refers to a line from Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) which had become a set phase in eighteenth-century Sweden.
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See Der teutsche Merkur 4 (November 1782): 192.
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See Nils Afzelius, “Min son på galejan och den komiska resebeskrivning,” Samlaren (1924): 203-10.
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Afzelius, “Min son på galejan och den komiska resebeskrivning,” 227.
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Uwe Ebel, Studien zur skandinavischen Reisebeschreibung von Linné bis Andersen (Frankfurt: Haag and Herchen Verlag, 1981), 62-88; and Sven G. Sjöberg, “Jacob Wallenberg in Sydafrika—ett sanningsvittne?,” Svenska Linnésällskapets årsskrift (1982/83): 57-75. See also Sjöberg's annotated bibliography of Wallenberg scholarship, “Jacob Wallenberg: Bibliografisk förteckning 1942-1982,” Linköpings biblioteks handlingar 11 (1986): 73-86.
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See Mary Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25.
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See Svensk uppslagsbok, ed. Gunnar Carlquist and Josef Carlsson, 32 vols. (Malmö: Förlagshuset Norden AB, 1947-55), 30:917.
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See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (1905; New York: Norton, 1960), chap. 3 and esp. chap. 5.
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I am indebted to English's discussions of literary humor as a socially symbolic event. I also follow English in being unconcerned about whether or not the moments I refer to as jokes adhere to a “knock-knock” formula. See James F. English, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 16.
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See Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 13 and 9.
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See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). For instance, in “Sly Civility,” Bhabha is concerned to point out how, in the colonizer's “paranoid” (projecting aggression) discourse, the “litigious, lying native” (100) effects a “crisis of authority” (101) by refusing to deliver the “confession” that is demanded of him—refusing, as it were, to reflect the colonizer in his own image. “It is this ambivalence that ensues within paranoia as a play between eternal vigilance and blindness, and estranges the image of authority in its strategy of justification” (101). Bhabha appreciates this “estrange[ment of] the image of authority in its strategy of justification” as a problem for the paranoid colonizer's self-representation but remains relatively unconcerned with the effects of this estrangement, effects which likely include increased violence against the “slyly civil” natives.
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For her critique of “colonial mimicry and ambivalence,” see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 62-65.
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See Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 21.
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Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 57.
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Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 49-57.
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Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 33-34.
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Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 34.
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Pehr Osbeck, A Voyage to China and the East Indies, by Peter Osbeck … Together with A voyage to Suratte, by Olof Toreen … and an account of the Chinese husbandry, by Captain Charles Gustavus Eckeberg, trans. John Reinhold from Godlieb Georg's German translation of the original Swedish (London: B. White, 1771), 130-31. What is lost in the double translation is compensated for by the inclusion in the German edition (upon which Reinhold's English translation is based) of supplementary texts such as Osbeck's speech and Linnaeus's letter cited below.
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I borrow the term “contact zone” from Pratt's Imperial Eyes.
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Osbeck, A Voyage to China and the East Indies, 147.
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Osbeck, A Voyage to China and the East Indies, 127-28.
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Jacob Wallenberg, Samlade Skrifter, ed. Nils Afzelius (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1941), 2:126. All references to Wallenberg's letters are to this edition. Translations from Wallenberg's letters are my own.
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After returning to Gothenburg, Wallenberg writes in a letter of 30 November 1771 to his friend Jacob Lindblom: “I have amused myself with a travel narrative, singulier and ridicule, which is admired by all, save for the established old and wise. The tour is new, and it would be complete if the author were not a clergyman” (Samlade Skrifter II, 141). He further comments in a letter of 21 June 1771 to Paul Juringius: “I have written a madcap East Indian travel narrative, which is now being passed from man to man, although the mates [deck officers of a merchant ship ranking below the captain] are cross over it” (Samlade Skrifter II, 138).
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Edward Said, “Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), 36.
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Felicity Nussbaum makes a similar argument regarding the shift in women's status from object to agent. See Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995).
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Commenting on Addison's poetry, Brown writes: “It is as if navigation, trade, and expansion are all arranged solely for the delectation and profit of womankind. Women wear the products of accumulation, and thus by metonymy they are made to bear responsibility for the system by which they are adorned. The activities and motives of male mercantilists and the systematic, bureaucratic, piratical, or mercenary dimensions of imperial expansion disappear behind the figure of the woman, who is herself subsumed by the products she wears.” See Brown, Ends of Empire, 118.
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Brown, Ends of Empire, 133-34.
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In calling the Javanese woman a “wet-nurse from the underworld” and referring to her “pendulous” breasts as “udders, to be more accurate,” Wallenberg privileges the breast in his depiction of non-European femininity as grotesque. For an engaging discussion of the cultural significance of the breast in the eighteenth century, see Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), chap. 2.
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The Swedish Marxist critic Victor Svanberg rightly stresses Wallenberg's bourgeois sensibilities and optic; he does not, however, interrogate this optic as a technique and symptom of imperial narration. It is surely his blindness to this current in Wallenberg's narrative that allows Svanberg to refer to the Javanese woman without reflection as a “long-breasted hag”: “On visits in the harbors we get to follow an observer who is curious and at the same time reserved … Wallenberg does not wish to get really close. One sole attempt is made at individual psychology in conversation with a Swede who had taken up residence on Java with a long-breasted hag, but the interviewer remains uncomprehending and disapproving. ‘Was this anything to abandon home for?’ he asks. The wonders of the wide world tempt him, but he never loses his balance” (my translation of Svanberg's Swedish). See Victor Svanberg, Medelklassrealism (Södertälje: Gidlunds, 1980), 63, 61-65.
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The suckling child is the Javanese woman's own by the Swedish corporal. That Wallenberg sees the racially mixed couple's two children as “white” and insists that “they were the very image of their father” (MS, 62) would seem to suggest a desire on his part to believe that the “Swede's” children were able to pass through their mother's body without being touched by it.
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The porpoise's horn inaugurates a series of chapters consisting in monologues by various sailors on how best to choose and discipline a wife so as not to be cuckolded. See MS, 135-46. These pages, however, are by no means the only references to cuckoldry.
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A social situation constituted in a plurality of women, even the possibility of a joking woman, seems not to have occurred to Freud. Indeed, Freud's reasoning here is a poignant example of his general inability to theorize female desire: “[S]mut is directed to a particular person, by whom one is sexually excited … Smut is thus originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction (my emphasis)” (Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 97).
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Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 100.
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Luce Irigaray's discussion of the dynamics of the “hom(m)osexual” exchange of commodified women has been suggestive for my reading of Wallenberg's deployment of the figure of the Swedish woman. See “Women on the Market” in Irigaray's This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 170-91.
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Wallenberg, Samlade Skrifter II, 137.
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Wallenberg, Samlade Skrifter II, 140.
I wish to thank Jim English for his helpful comments on a draft of this paper. A version of this essay was read at the 1997 International Association of Philosophy and Literature conference.
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