Jen Boyle

jeboyle@uci.edu

Department of English and Comparative Literature

University of California, Irvine

Science ‘Racing’ History: Narrative Authority and ‘Empirical’ Embodiment in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688)

In a recent article on the materiality of informatics, N. Katherine Hayles asserts that of all the “bizarre beliefs…likely to stupefy future generations is the postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction”(147). While Hayles goes on to acknowledge the critical and even emancipatory potential of non-essentialist theories of the body, she qualifies her celebration of contingent and denaturalizing theory with a caveat: we must further emphasize the complicated, and sometimes obscured, articulations of and between the body and embodiment. Hayles traces a complex interplay between incorporation as embodiment, and inscription as ‘the body’, in demonstrating how complicated such categories can become in creating new subjective and objective modes of experience, and how such re-structuring has led to the ‘disappearing body’ of post-modernity. Hayles deploys the categories of embodiment and the body to explore how new genres (in the case of her article, virtual reality or cyberspace) mediate a re-organization of perceived boundaries between materiality and discourse. She expands on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between incorporation and inscription in developing a flexible heuristic for discussing epistemic shifts between material and discursive categories, and how these two categories work together to create cultural constructs. In her article, Hayles takes issue with the tendency in post-modern theorizing to de-naturalize the body, while treating embodiment as a fairly ahistorical, abstract, and secondary interest – i.e. the universality of performance or enactment. She is careful to point-out that such theoretical mediations often reproduce the very modernist division between abstraction and essentialism they claim to uncover and dismantle. An example from Foucault is marshaled by Hayles to demonstrate that “it is possible to deconstruct the content of the abstraction while leaving the mechanism of abstraction intact” (6). She further suggests that if we are to complicate our understanding of de-naturalized and disembodied modes of meaning, we must articulate embodiment in connection with the body: “The body points toward the normalized and abstract, whereas embodiment refers to the contextual and enacted. What discourse is to the body, instantiated experience is to embodiment. Discourse is associated with inscription, instantiated experience with incorporation. One way to understand the articulation between embodiment and the body, then, is to explore the connection between inscribing and incorporating practices” (6). While my purpose today is not to extend Hayles’s discussion of new cyber technologies and their material and discursive implications, I am concerned with the power of genre in historical or paradigmatic shifts, and the present status of contingency, or denaturalizing, as a theoretical framework and as a historical narrative.

Indeed, much of our current interest in fragmentation, contingency and post-essentialist theory emerges from a fairly specific and self-confident re-assessment of that essentializing moment which precedes us: the Enlightenment. When Donna Haraway generated her “monstrous” reading of the cyborg body in 1989, she did so with one eye glancing obliquely into the future and another gazing back at the taxonomizing divisions of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her manifesto relies on a more revealing re-telling of the enlightenment story, an ironic disclosure and dismemberment of the occluded yet gendered and raced body of early modern science and political theory. The rhetoric of post-modernity and the self-reflexive contingency of much late-twentieth-century critical theory is premised on a need for interrogating what are assumed to be previous naturalizations of gender, class, and race, those bodies and embodiments passed down to us from a less enlightened historical moment.

I would like to turn now to a text from the late seventeenth century that looks in many ways like an artifact of the discursive and material re-organization that Katherine Hayles examines in her article on cyber informatics. While Aphra Behn’s 1688 prose piece, Oroonoko, certainly was not constructed in cyberspace, it was a product of two newly-emerging material and discursive spaces: historical prose and empirical science. My reading of Behn’s early eighteenth-century text is in response to Margaret Ferguson’s recent challenge to post-modern feminism to re-examine how it juggles the categories of race, class, and gender, and in the process of this re-examination to “suspend… assumptions about what a category like race means or meant to members of a different culture” (Hendricks, 211). The methodological implications of these assumptions are significant if we consider the extent to which methodologies and politics are fused at our moment in history. Contingency according to someone like the Anglo-American critic and pragmatist Richard Rorty implies an infinite (though bounded) amount of political and social possibilities – interpretive communities simply manifest in accordance with the use-value and subsequent embodiment of various linguistic and interpretive paradigms. Yet, that elided space -- the slippery movement from meta, realist philosophical narratives to the embodiment of new interpretive paradigms and contingently arrived at interpretive communities -- itself can become an odd and evasive abstraction; a mechanism left behind long after former conventions and paradigms have been deconstructed and dismembered.

Narrative Empiricism in Oroonoko

I will begin by qualifying a claim I advanced a moment ago, that Oroonoko is neither an early version of the modern novel or a tract on slavery – both common interpretations of the generic mode of the text – as much as it is a developing nexus between the empirical experimental essay and historical fiction. The two genres are blended throughout the text, and function as a laboratory for testing the potential for re-writing history through empirical science. Behn introduces her work as an attempt to tell the story of a “royal slave” whom she encountered while living in the English colonies of Surinam in what is now South America. She reassures the reader that she has tried to rely on eyewitness accounts in telling Oroonoko’s story, using secondhand information only for those exploits she and members of the colony were not present to witness.

Behn’s appeal to the authority of the eye-witness account is a product of the newly-instantiated empirical science. The members of the early British Royal Society, the first official British institution for scientific pursuits, established in London in 1662, founded their methodologies on the capacity for learned men to exchange eye-witness accounts in a climate of mutual trust. Yet, contrary to the teleology we have constructed, empiricism in early modern England was not the essentialist realism we understand to be at our moment. Francis Bacon, empiricist and founding figure of the Royal Society, laid the groundwork for a methodology for knowledge production that would resist the closed and dogmatic scholastic philosophies that had prevailed well into the middle of the seventeenth century. Bacon’s Novum Organum, or, ”new program and instrument,” for intellectual pursuits was grounded in aphoristic and contingent inquiry – observation and experience were important mediations of such knowledge, but every inquiry was to be further contextualized by its local circumstances, whether political, textual, or philosophical. A second order awareness of the limits -- and danger -- of unmediated and foundational approaches to knowledge is a principal concern in the work of early modern empiricists like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and John Locke. As Anne Bratach has pointed-out in a recent article, the experimental essay, like the novel, develops an “ethos of accumulation” through narrative (210). However, in early modern empirical theory, it remains crucial that such accumulation remain a kind of movable yet particularized economy: Bacon’s empirical manifesto featured an aphoristic narrative style, and explicitly described his methodology as the collection of autonomous “discrete seeds”; both analogical and methodological valences of this phrase are constitutive of Bacon’s program.

Aphra Behn was not only inheriting a cultural or ideological predisposition to the genre of the experimental essay, she also took an explicit interest in its potential to expand the authority of and access to various forms of knowledge. While Behn is well known for her work in Restoration comedy, less attention is paid to the fact that she had a direct interest in the new science and was an acquaintance of Thomas Sprat’s, author of the History of the Royal Society . More importantly, in 1688 – the same year that she produced Oroonoko – Behn undertook a translation of Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes by the French philosopher, Bernard de Fontenelle. Fontenelle’s dialogue is a treatise on science and astronomy written for women, the first of many that would appear in England and on the continent in the following century. In her Preface, Behn demonstrates her knowledge of early modern science and offers her support for scientific pursuits. While she translates the entire text un-amended, she does draw attention to the fact that, while texts such as Fontenelle’s are to be lauded for the inclusion of women as a worthy audience for scientific matter, the tendency to have women characters in the dialogue oscillate between expounding as if they were as knowledgeable as the most learned scientists in Europe and then exhorting a “greate many Silly things” (Works, 85), makes such efforts less authoritative than they might be. This lament is an echo of a complaint heard throughout Aphra Behn’s works – albeit an ironic one in certain instances: the “female pen” is a surrogate or, at best, a prosthetic for a real authorial presence.

Science, History, and the Contingency of Race/Res

Oroonoko can be considered that narrative laboratory where Aphra Behn returns to re-tool the limits of a diffused and, in certain ways, democratized, authority. While generic conventions of the experimental essay, such as attention to detail and appeals to observed phenomenon, are present throughout the narrative, it is Oroonoko himself who best embodies the spirit and substance of the contingency of empirical science. Behn’s narrative begins with a secondhand overview of Oroonoko’s history, describing Oroonoko’s success in martial campaigns, his status as a prince within his own African society, and his ill-fated love for Imoinda, a woman who, within the patriarchic economy of her society, is early on conscripted to life in the harem of the monarch, Oroonoko’s grandfather.

When the narrative shifts to the English colonies in Surinam, after Oroonoko is tricked by an English slave trader into visiting his ship only to be chained and shipped for sale as a slave, we see a shift in the genre of the narrative as well – what was formerly historical romance dilates to include empirical digressions. Yet, the description Behn offers of Oroonoko is not one typically associated with colonialist discourse on the native; while there are brief references to his physical stature, his “glorious Jet” skin, and his “Roman nose,” the most elaborate description in the text portrays Oroonoko as literally the embodiment of Francis Bacon’s reformed conception of knowledge as a collection of “discrete seeds” or atoms: he is a slave to a new English economy, where he also learns his manners, he is educated by a Frenchman, and he speaks with the words and rhetorical savvy of a Roman emperor. From here on, significant descriptive moments in the text are representative not of a narrative pursuit of ‘realism’, but of a movable and contingent economy of accumulation. Indeed, the first subtly implied rationalization of slavery we get in the text is based on our female narrator’s distinction between natives and non-natives. While the indigenous people of Surinam are described as sharing many of the same physical features and cultural preferences as the slave population in the colonies, they are exempt from slavery because they are an essential part of Surinam. As Behn explains it, the “natives…supply us with what tis impossible for us to get…so that they, on all Occasions, very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress ‘em as friends;” while those “whom we make use of to work in our Plantations of Sugar, are…Black-Slaves altogether; which are transported thither in this manner” (11). Worth noting here is the fact that even though “Black-slaves altogether” is employed as the distinguishing classification of those bought and sold for work on the plantations, this designation is not constructed out of any definitive physical or cultural categories; to the contrary, Behn requires “slaves” to have been transported from somewhere else, and even more significantly, perhaps, to be “transported thither in this manner,” implying that both the material and narrative use-value of such a population must precede and predestine their role in the material and discursive economy of the colony. Behn’s emphasis here reveals that the essential feature of racializing has nothing to do with empirical veracity or taxonomizing, but is about Othering through abstraction and narrative authority.

The first part of Oroonoko is structured primarily out of various empirical accumulations that are then abstracted or dispersed into other contexts. The empirical gaze, or observing eye, is itself allowed to enter into Behn’s contingent economy. At a key moment in the text, a trip to visit the Surinam indians is described. The observing party -- which includes Behn as narrator, Oroonoko, and several other English men and women from the colony -- encounters the Surinams in the context of their own village. The indians are surprised by the visit, but some of the more reclusive members of the community still come-out to investigate the English:

By degrees they grew more bold, and from gazing upon us round, they touched us; laying their Hands upon all the Features of our Face, feeling our Breasts and Arms, taking up one Petticoat, then wondering to see another. (48)

This passage has been described by Anne Bratach as an inversion of the western subject/object gaze, one which allows the “native” population to take on an active role as investigator or observer and to appropriate the power associated with the gaze. Yet, it must be noted that while the Indians appear to be the ones actively observing the English, Behn has gone to great lengths to inform us that this was a planned excursion to the Surinam village; indeed, the expedition even includes a small “Burning-glass” brought along to offer demonstrations of small science experiments. Moreover, throughout the described encounter with the Indians, Oroonoko temporarily vanishes from the narrative, and we are explicitly told that he has lagged behind so as not to confuse or startle the Surinams. This momentary shift in narrative perspective serves as a reminder to the reader of the power of the empirical gaze, and further functions as an ironic demonstration of the fact that such empirical exercises can be staged or produced for effect – that empirical practices and rituals are indeed performances. The ‘effect’ enacted in the text up to this point is the incorporation and self-conscious deployment of the empirical genre, which has provided Behn with narrative authority, and, to a degree, masked the fact that it is a “female pen” which has appropriated such authority. When Oroonoko re-appears in the text, we witness another shift in the narrative impulse. What has been an experimental foray into what Katherine Hayles has outlined as the incorporating practices afforded by a new discursive mode, now becomes a laboratory for representing bodily inscription.

Oroonoko, who has by this time been re-named Caesar [briefly qualify], re-appears in the text when he comes upon the Indians conversing with the English and notices that the bodies of many of the Indian men are cut or mutilated. He inquires about this oddity and is informed that the men have mutilated themselves in a ritual designed to demonstrate courage and the willingness to actively participate in battle. The practice is reserved for generals who wish to lead and govern the practice of war; each, in competition, “when asked What they dare to do to shew they are worthy to lead an Army…he, who is first ask’d, making no Reply, Cuts off his Nose...and the other does something to himself, and perhaps deprives himself of Lips and an Eye…” (50). Oroonoko’s own ethnographic observation here is a significant foreshadowing of body mutilation, but also serves to elicit a subtle an ironic reminder of Behn’s avowed frustration with a male authority that, in her cultural context, does not have to be qualified by deed or action. This is one of many implied swipes at the male English virtuosi, or gentleman philosopher, who is allowed a removed and inactive authority – social status, class, and gender are prime determinants of who is sanctioned to practice science and philosophy. A few lines later in the text Behn makes a wry comparison of the Surinam practice of self-mutilation to English gentleman of war who send younger men off to sacrifice their bodies in martial conflict. This scene also foreshadows the emphasis on bodily inscription and incision and a literal and figurative ‘cutting away’, or excision, that predominates from this point forward.

What has been discursive incorporation up to this point in the narrative is transformed into representations of a more ‘material’ inscription. Just prior to the encounter between the English and the Surinams, Behn offers her first explicit reference to “rac[‘d]”; and though we are given a more particularized description of the bodies of the Surinam Indians, it is a description that animates in great detail the tattoos and markings the indians place on their own bodies for ornamentation. Here, the raced and incised body is invoked as a representation of the power of writing the body, and peformatively shifts the emphasis to the aesthetic power inherent to signifying the body through inscription. Behn’s focus on bodily and material incision enters into a dialectical interplay with the ‘cutting away’ of her dependence on a conscious appropriation of the empirical genre: with the exception of descriptions of bodily incision and dismemberment, we begin to see less empirical digressions in the text and more historical references. As Oroonoko grows impatient with his status as a slave (and the potential for his child to be born a slave), he initiates a rebellion among the slave population. Oroonoko manages to stir the slaves into subversive fervor through Roman rhetoric, and his entire speech to the other slaves is almost word for word, rhetorically and thematically, a Roman apology for war (“the Roman” and “the Tuscan”). When the rebellion finally takes place, Behn initiates her own remove from the narrative with a commentary on the English Governor who takes it upon himself to pursue the escaped slaves: “He was a fellow, whose Character is not fit to be mention’d with the worst of the Slaves. This fellow would lead his Army forth to meet Caesar…; most of their Arms were of those sort of cruel Whips…; some had rusty useless Guns for show; others old Basket-hilts, whose Blades had never seen the Light in this Age” (55). Another level of narrative inscription appears in this passage. Behn’s experiment with genre and discursive authority has resulted in her ability to narrate history at a distance. However, this version of history is arrived at contingently through Behn’s appropriated “empirical” authority, and through the narrative re-inscribing or re-writing of the ‘object’ of that history, Oroonoko. The digression into useless weapons of war serves as another example of the ineffectiveness of a dogmatic and un-proven authority – in this case, Englishmen who carry weapons they have never used as accoutrements for “show.” This also functions as a further reminder from our narrator that authority is contingent and can be excised from one context and incorporated into another: Roman acts of aggression, a typical foundational story to English nationalism, has been ‘cut away’ and re-told as a slave rebellion. The subversive agents here, however, are not “rusty guns,” but words and narrative veracity; history is transported along with Behn’s newly-emerged authority to tell Oroonoko’s story.

Oroonoko’s history ends with a gruesome iteration of incision and excision. Cornered with the prospect of capture and torture, Oroonoko slits the throat of his pregnant wife Imoinda [tangent], and then, in a drawn out confrontation with the English mob pursuing him, begins to cut away into his own body, literally removing his intestines at one point, putting them on display for his pursuers, as if engaging in a scientific demonstration of anatomical science. In the final scene, Oroonoko is drawn and quartered, and though our female narrator has by this point expressed many times over her sentiment and empathy for Oroonoko, she spares us no details of the final transport and ultimate destination of the pieces of Oroonoko’s body, which are handed-out to the English like atomized artifacts from an expedition.

In the end, we have a version of Katherine Hayles's ‘disappearing body’. The complex dialectic between incorporation and inscription enacted in Behn’s text brings us full circle. Behn, in designing her own narrative authority, literally constructs Oroonoko out of empirical and transported fragments, and finally she reverses this feedback loop and re-fragments her production. Yet, there is a remainder to this accumulative economy: Behn ends her narrative with a new designation for her authority writ large; what was formerly a “female pen” is now the “reputation of my pen” (65). The dialectic suture of body and embodiment enabled by Behn’s genre experiment has allowed our narrator to gesture toward assimilation into a new interpretive community, one that affords authorial reputability.

There is a second remainder or trace to be found at the end of this prose piece. Indeed, race still circulates at the close of Oroonoko; but the economy of race that persists to the end of the narrative is not some essential cataloguing or distinction of culture or physiology, but rather a re-formed product of self-reflexive contingency. The re-gendering of Behn’s narrative embodiment through the inscription of Oroonoko’s body is a material and discursive re-structuring that is made possible by the contingency of early modern empiricism. Race in Oroonoko is not an essentializing taxonomizing of the body; it is instead a product of the inscripting and incorporating practices of a de-naturalizing contingency, a generic emergence which seems to thrive on contextual and narrative fragmentation. The empirically arrived at ‘disappearing body’ at the heart of Aphra Behn’s early modern text is at least a specter of the remaining body at the center of post-modern narrative contingency and fragmentation.

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1994.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Ed. Joanna Lipking. New York and London: W.W Norton & Co., 1997.

Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn. Ed. Janet Todd. 6vols. London: William Pickering, 1993.

Bratach, Anne. “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre, and Restoration Science.” Journal of Narrative Technique. Ypsilani, MI. vol. 26 no. 3 (1996): 209-227.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York and

London: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Materiality of Informatics.”

Configurations: a Journal of Literature and Science. Baltimore. Vol. 1.1 (1993): 147-170.

Hendricks, Margo and Patricia Parker eds. Women, “Race,” Writing. London and New York:

Routledge, 1994.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin

Smith. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.