“I must write and write,” wrote Lee Kok Liang in postwar London, “so that like Joyce, I may put Malaya on the map; there shall be no more half-hints that we aren’t of the same standard as the rest of the leading nations in the world in culture and in appreciation of things beautiful.”Footnote 2 In the journal he kept from 1952 to 1954, the Malayan law student sojourning in England wrote approvingly not only of James Joyce but also of nineteenth-century “Russian writers,” novelists who in Benita Parry’s words, shared with Joyce—and now, belatedly, with Lee himself—the experience of “writing from outside of capitalism’s centres,” and who offered models of how such writing might be assimilated in the metropolis by “a literati enchanted or disturbed by their innovative stylistics.”Footnote 3 Yet Lee would return to his native Penang to careers as a lawyer, municipal politician, and writer, without achieving the metropolitan recognition for which he had hoped. The high-water mark of this literary quest would remain the autobiographical article “Return to Malaya,” published in Encounter magazine in 1954, and yet signaling his permanent departure from London. Lee would become a major figure in Malaysian literature in English, but even here the novel he developed from his journal and on which he pinned his hopes of a larger audience, London Does Not Belong to Me, continued to be out of place. It remained in manuscript during his lifetime and was only published posthumously in 2003 by a small Malaysian publishing house, achieving little international notice or distribution.
Contemporary readers who do manage to obtain copies of Lee’s novel may experience further surprise when they come to read the text of London Does Not Belong to Me. Here is a novel written by a politically aware, self-described “Malayan writer“ at a moment of nationalist awakening before independence in 1957, a period in which socialist and ethno-nationalist imaginings were caught up in the political structures of colonialism and in which the Cold War ran hot through the violence of the Malayan Emergency. It features a putatively Malayan protagonist, designed to “put Malaya on the map” of world literature. Yet it is also a text that does not mention the word Malaya at all. Its shadowy narrator is clearly seen by the British, Irish, French, and Australian characters with whom he associates as racially and indeed frequently civilizationally other, but his nationality is never explicitly stated and his ethnicity only gently hinted at. This silence makes the novel difficult to interpret both within the historical context of decolonization and within national and postcolonial literary paradigms.Footnote 4 It also seems difficult to find a home for Lee’s work within newer critical and theoretical frameworks centred on diaspora, world literature, or the city. Unlike world literature’s texts, it has few readers. Lee’s novel’s depiction of a narrator as a stranger has affinity with many of the texts in a study such as John McLeod’s Postcolonial London, but it does not “rewrite the metropolis” to include new communities, rather simply accepting exclusion and estrangement as a defining feature of the postwar imperial city.Footnote 5 The plenitude of communal metropolitan life in the intertexts to which its title refers, Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me and its associated 1948 film adaptation, is replaced by isolation and absence.Footnote 6
The presence of Lee’s journal, however, offers the possibility of drawing on a tradition of textual analysis in decolonization that moves beyond the issue of readership and reading publics. Elleke Boehmer’s discussion of “male leaders’ autobiographies,” and my own work on “national autobiographies” of national fathers, has explored how these narratives are not only exercises in storytelling but also in elite subjectification, of the production of gendered subjectivities that form prototypical identities for postcolonial national subjects. Such work on textual subjectification, indeed, extends beyond autobiographical texts. Simon Gikandi and Bruce Berman, for instance, have looked at a very different exilic text from Lee’s, Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, written in London in the interwar years. Kenyatta’s use of functionalist anthropology while writing his study under the supervision of Bronislaw Malinowksi at the London School of Economics, Berman argues, enabled a transformation of “personal experience into scientific discourse.”Footnote 7 Kenyatta’s self-authorization as a representative Kikuyu was a political act, but at the time of the text’s publication it reached a surprisingly small audience: sales before the destruction of the first print run during a 1941 air raid were only fractionally over 500 copies.Footnote 8 For Gikandi, Facing Mount Kenya is part of a larger “idiom of self-making” by Kenyatta in which the legacies of colonial governmentality intersect with “subjective desires.”Footnote 9 If a text such as Facing Mount Kenya grants Kenyatta agency in what Gikandi characterizes as the “theater of colonialism,” it is also part of “the cultivation of the private self” in elite self-imagining.Footnote 10 We might also think of a further genre of unpublished texts. Many members of the postcolonial elites who would lead their countries after decolonization—including Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Razak in Malaysia, and S. Rajaratnam and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore—had, like Lee, studied law. Although testimony from the dock by politicians in the colonial courtroom has often been considered in terms of subjectification,Footnote 11 attention might also be given to the devising of agential arguments by progressive lawyers and the manner in which these stories of self-making claim “narrative kinship,” in Jerome Bruner’s terms, with other narratives that are seen as socially legitimate.Footnote 12 As Meredith Terretta notes, there is clearly work to do here.Footnote 13
The mention of Bruner provides us with a way of thinking through novelization as self-making. Bruner’s early work on narrative focuses on individual and cultural meanings of the self in a particular social context, and on “practices in which ‘the meanings of Self’ are put to use.”Footnote 14 Bruner’s work is now seen as part of a growing narrative turn in the social sciences from the 1980s onward, and as a foundational element for both narrative psychology and narrative therapy. In literary studies, Bruner’s insights have been most influential in scholarship on auto/biography, eagerly embraced by Paul John Eakin and then challenged as “narrative imperialism” by other critics such as James Phelan.Footnote 15 Yet in the process of their reception, Bruner’s initial focus on literary texts, and indeed the modernist novel, has largely been forgotten. Bruner’s famous distinction between paradigmatic thought authorized by “verifiability” and narrative thought supported through “verisimilitude” arose from his lived experience as a cognitive and developmental psychologist drawn to literary texts “under the spell of Camus, Conrad, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Burgess, Berman, Joyce.”Footnote 16 Indeed, modernist novels, with their focus on subjective experience, their reference to and yet departure from canonicity, became the model for Bruner’s notion of narrative as “subjunctivizing” reality,Footnote 17 “trafficking in human possibilities rather than settled certainties.”Footnote 18 This in turn provided Bruner with an opportunity to consider the self as narrated in a specific “cultural-historical situation”Footnote 19 and to begin to examine these practices of narration, each of which “escapes or embraces or re-evaluates and reformulates what the culture has on offer.”Footnote 20 A focus on the process of writing rather than reading, seeing the novel as a practice of the public construction—and indeed crystallization—of new modes of self-making within a sociocultural and historical context, may thus offer new possibilities. Such an approach views the intersection of literature and the social from the angle of a socially constituted self that writes “narratives of deviation” while maintaining complicity with the canon.Footnote 21
In the case of Lee’s text, the presence of both a journal and a novel that is arguably a novelization of the journal allows us to explore this process with some precision. And if Lee’s experience of writing a novel in London is almost unique among his Malayan contemporaries, the experience of subjectification he documents is not. Returned Malayan students from the United Kingdom would play a central role in the governing of the new nation-states of Malaya, then Malaysia, and in particular Singapore, as politicians and as civil servants. The novel thus plots a key moment in the psychic formation of postcolonial national elite subjects.
The Place of the Novel
Addressing the question of meanings and practices of self-making first necessitates placing Lee’s novel in a series of contexts. After the end of the Second World War, the British returned to the remnants of their empire in Southeast Asia but were clearly living on borrowed time. Burma achieved independence in 1948, but Malaya had to wait almost a decade longer, during which British and Commonwealth forces suppressed a Marxist insurgency and attempted to foster a compliant Anglophile elite to take over the reins of governance. An expansion of tertiary education played a key part in such efforts. The English-medium University of Malaya, founded in Singapore in 1949, rapidly grew in size.Footnote 22 A considerable number of other Malayan students went to Australia, which was in the process of expanding its higher education system.Footnote 23 Many more, including successful and frequently affluent elite students who would in the course of time be political leaders of an independent Malaya and its successor nation-states of Malaysia and Singapore, went on to universities in the United Kingdom, either privately, or on government scholarships.
The course of Lee’s early adult life followed these currents of history. He arrived in Australia in January 1949 to study as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, and then left for London in September 1951, arriving a month later to read law at Lincoln’s Inn. By all accounts, Lee found life at the Inns of Court “very boring and stagnant,” his fellow students “cut-and-dried-and-stewed under appropriately immobile collars.”Footnote 24 He worked for a barrister in London for six months after passing exams,Footnote 25 and then, after a little over two years in London, he returned to Malaya in February 1954. Lee wrote and published short stories in small magazines in Melbourne and London. Settling in Penang, he became a lawyer, politician, and continued writing, revising the short stories from his Australian and London days and writing new ones.Footnote 26 His short story collection The Mutes in the Sun (1963) established him as an important emerging voice in Malaysian literature. Lee was unique among his Anglophone contemporaries in supplementing social realism with austere modernist technique, often using limited, unreliable, or fragmented narration to convey the disorientation of a society in transition from colonialism to independence. He continued to write and publish: a novel, Flowers in The Sky (1981), and a second collection of short stories, Death Is a Ceremony, in 1992, the year of his death. London Does Not Belong to Me has a complex genesis: it is based on a journal of Lee’s London sojourn that still survives. Although he seems to have begun working on an early version of the novel on the SS Carthage on the voyage back to Malaya in 1954, Lee apparently returned to work on it a decade later, in 1963,Footnote 27 and he eventually produced a completed typescript, passing a carbon copy of this to his friend, the Australian academic Syd Harrex. Harrex, with the help of fellow scholar Bernard Wilson, edited the text for posthumous publication in Malaysia in 2003.
The second context is a social rather than personal one. London in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the space in which London Does Not Belong to Me is set, was a space of imagination for a multicultural Malaya, away from the pragmatic compromises of political organization in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. A decade previously Singapore’s future minister for culture, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, had used his wartime sojourn in the imperial capital to meditate on the colonial construction of race. In 1942, with Malaya occupied by the Japanese, Rajaratnam laid the responsibility for potential interethnic conflict firmly “with a complex and diseased colonial policy” of divide and rule, which might be swept away after the end of the war by “a federated world based on community of interests and aspirations.”Footnote 28 Writing four years later, he was more sanguine, noting that the British on their return had already been successful in channeling political participation “along racial lines.”Footnote 29 The legacy of the colonial plural society, in which Malay, Chinese, Indian, and other smaller communities addressed the state as subjects and community members, not citizens, would continue to vex pre- and post-independence formulations of multiculturalism.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the prospect of independence for Malaya firmly on the horizon, the number of Malayan students in England, and especially London, increased. By late 1953, when Lee was preparing to return home, a thousand Malayans were studying in Britain, half of those in the capital.Footnote 30 In 1949, Malaya Hall opened in Bryanston Square, near Marble Arch, with accommodations for twenty-one students, a dining room, and a larger reading room: it quickly became a social center for Malayan students in the capital and also a focus for political activism that the British and colonial authorities attempted to monitor and control.Footnote 31 In London, organizations such as the Malayan Students Union, the socialist Malayan Forum, and the more explicitly ethnic nationalist Malay Society of Great Britain, and publications such as Hujan Mas, Suara Merdeka, and the more radically anticolonial Malayan Monitor debated the structure of a future Malayan nation-state and the development of a Malayan culture.
Published from late 1950 onward, the Malayan Forum’s newsletter Suara Merdeka was perhaps the most significant of these, many of its articles written by students who a decade later would be political leaders in Malaya, Malaysia, and Singapore. The journal contained a variety of articles on Malayan independence, and the future of Malaya, mostly focusing on the possibilities of a multicultural polity in which “the different communities [would] learn to think and act as one solid unit.”Footnote 32 While the Malayan Emergency simmered thousands of miles away, the forum’s leadership and the Colonial Office engaged in an elaborate dance regarding the limits of political expression. The editors of Suara Merdeka were pragmatic enough to obtain messages of support for their magazine from colonial luminaries such as Malcolm Macdonald, Commissioner-General Southeast Asia, and Malayan High Commissioner Henry Gurney. Yet the publication was frequently critical of racial discrimination in institutions such as the Malayan Civil Service and elite social clubs in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, as well as regarding the detention of political activists without trial. This criticism prompted concern from various branches of colonial governance, which attempted to avoid direct censorship through a management of critique behind the scenes. Singapore and Malayan authorities were thus asked to remind students on government scholarships that civil service regulations forbade “Government officers from contributing political articles to this particular paper or ask them if they do contribute such articles they should submit them for approval to Government authorities.”Footnote 33 In late 1953, the Malayan Forum was briefly taken over by a more left-wing faction, with John Eber, a former political detainee, now elected honorary secretary: the Colonial Office expressed alarm, but chose not to intervene.Footnote 34
Lee was very much caught up in the student politics of the time. In Melbourne, he had been acting secretary general of the Malayan Students Association, contributing at least one article on nationalism to their newsletter, The Malayan Inquirer, speaking to a symposium on the politics of nationalism and decolonization in Southeast Asia, and writing to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru requesting a contribution to the journal.Footnote 35 In London, he was less visible, but still maintained the progressive politics that led him into political fiction and activism in the 1960s. In his journal and correspondence, he is alive to the politics of decolonization in London. On February 15, 1952, for instance, he noted that he had happily slept though the funeral of King George because “I had not suffered any loss at all.” Lee attended at least one meeting of the League of Coloured Peoples, but found himself unengaged by the discussions, finding the liberal politics and eccentric attendees at the event more interesting as anthropological writing cues than as a touchstone for serious discussion.
Lee’s journal also repeatedly reveals an additional dimension that marked Malayan students’ lives in London: a growing awareness of how racism structured the larger politics of which their experiences were part. The students forged connections with their peers from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa. They participated in gatherings of colonial students, in leftist parties ranging from the Labour Party to the Communist Party of Great Britain, and, like Lee, in antiracist organisations such as the League of Coloured Peoples. Experiences of racism in London were multilayered. Some Malayan students were protected by privilege and claimed never to have felt discriminated against, although they acknowledged the more blatant prejudice against Indian and African students.Footnote 36 Other colonial students discovered that in specific social contexts class trumped race. A male student, for instance, found being addressed by white servants and cleaners as “sir” disconcerting, jogging him into an awareness of the extent of racialization in the colony from which he came.Footnote 37 Attempts to find lodgings in London independent of the British Council, however, soon revealed widespread racism, with many landlords and landladies refusing to rent to nonwhite students. Correspondence in Hujan Mas, the Malayan Student Union’s newsletter, noted that “colour prejudice” saturated the experience of Malayan students in the United Kingdom.Footnote 38 “It may not be ‘official’ in character in the sense of segregation,” one student wrote, “but there is always the ‘unofficial’ way of expression. Coloured people are not happily received into society.”Footnote 39 Spaces such as Malaya Hall were often overseen by retired colonial officials or unofficials who expected colonial students to know their place. Maurice Baker remembered the chairman of the hall’s board of governors, Mr. Ward, as “an ex-planter who was a typical ‘old guard’ colonialist who was used to giving orders to Asians and who could never treat us as equals.”Footnote 40 Students regularly complained to the Colonial Office and the British Council about Ward and the warden, Mr. Barraclough, who had an attitude of “rough patronage” “towards Asiatics.”Footnote 41 Lee Khoon Choy would recall an altercation with him when the warden confiscated a copy of the Daily Worker.Footnote 42 Yet in the face of residual colonialism and societal racism, the internal tensions between Malayans from different communities seemed to dissolve, and sojourn in London was often fondly remembered by returning students as an almost utopian experience of living in a multicultural Malayan community.
Before returning to Lee’s novel, one further element of this environment seems significant. Hujan Mas, Suara Merdeka, and the numerous memoirs and oral history interviews that document Malayan student life in London in the 1950s map the cognitive issues of political debate onto the minutiae of everyday experience. Class and racial dynamics crystalize in every chance meeting and friendship, while random social interactions become overdetermined as symbols of relative levels of societal “development.” One area in which this process seems most intimate is gender. In one respect, London offered the possibility of relationships across the cultural boundaries marked out by colonialism’s cultivation of tradition: Hedwig Anuar writes of the prevalence of “inter-racial couples” among the Malayan student community, and of emancipated practices such as “going Dutch” on dates.Footnote 43
Yet most Malayan students were male, and their self-fashioning in the metropolis was often relational, in intimate contrast to female others. Maurice Baker, for instance, professed disgust that the University of London Nutford House hostel in 1949 was “more of a brothel than a students’ hostel” in which “sexual activities of the undergraduates from the British Commonwealth” enacted the dynamics of decolonization. White women now “mingled with coloured students as equals… . A few African young men looked upon their sexual ‘conquests’ of white girls as a sort of revenge for the humiliations their parents or relatives had suffered at the hands of their colonial masters. A few fell genuinely in love … . Some brought prostitutes into the hospital and wasted no time in getting down to business.”Footnote 44 Baker’s own account of his sojourn in London before returning to a successful academic and then diplomatic career in Singapore, however, also makes use of a gendered dynamic. He writes of relationships with “English girls” who “were generous in granting their favours and never assumed that mutual affection would necessarily lead to matrimony” and presents his return to Malaya as the making of a choice between a relationship with an Englishwoman or his fiancée, Barbara Balhetchet, from the Eurasian community to which he was anxious to claim membership.Footnote 45
This dynamic also persists in contemporary student publications. In a satirical article disguised as a letter to the editor in Suara Merdeka, one student bemoaned the fact that Malayan students were “taking an active interest in politics and the fate of our country. This, sir, is very sad and very foolish. We have only to leave everything to the care of our benevolent white fathers, as we have done these many, many years and everything will be all right.”Footnote 46 As an alternative, he asked the male staff of the journal to “join me and my wise friends in our jolly blonde and brunette hunting” and to “leave Malayan girls strictly alone because they are … very ‘unsporting’—if you know what I mean.”Footnote 47 The Malayan Forum Women’s group, which appears to have been founded in early 1952, struggled against such sexism and its members, in correspondence, advocated discussion of women’s education and “opportunities and responsibilities” in the new Malayan society.Footnote 48 Yet the gendered dynamic persists in much self-fashioning among Malayan students. Frederic Jameson famously considers the third world novel a national allegory that brought “the libidinal and the political components of individual and social experience” into a new configuration.Footnote 49 The evidence from Hujan Mas and Suara Merdeka suggests that such libidinal allegories precede novelization; they are expressive of selves that are formed in London drawing on, and yet deviating from, a canon of gendered subjectivities and will later be elaborated on in anticolonial politics and, indeed, novels. These gendered performances of selfhood are something more precise than allegories: returning to Bruner, we might see them as schemata, naturalized mental structures of knowledge, a concept popularized by Jean Piaget but, as Bruner notes, ultimately deriving from the work of British psychologist Frederic Bartlett.Footnote 50 As Bruner would suggest, such schemata are steeped in “constituent beliefs and the larger-scale narratives that contain them … in temporal configurations or plots.”Footnote 51 Practices of selfhood enacted in the magazines, indeed, would be deployed in the arena of post-independence politics by the students who returned to occupy positions as senior civil servants or political leaders.
The Novel and Its World
How might the relation of Lee’s novel to this context be explored as an example of a larger argument about the social place of the novel as a practice of selfhood? The presence of a journal that has many similarities to the London Does Not Belong to Me, and from which Lee’s novel clearly evolved, is useful here in thinking about the nature of the novel as a literary text. Mikhail Bakhtin notably writes of “novelization” as part of a process in which the generic properties of the novel, its “spirit of process and inconclusiveness,” bleed into other genres in a modern world “still in the making.”Footnote 52 Lee’s text indicates a more modest application of the word: to look at the differences between novel and journal and to consider in particular the processes of self-making that operate in the transition from one genre to another. In this we might identify processes of what Bruner terms “narrative accrual” as autobiographical experience is placed with larger social narratives.Footnote 53
One important caveat is necessary before proceeding. Lee’s journal is a form of life writing that precedes the writing of his novel in strictly chronological terms, but it does not necessarily represent a mimetic or realistic account of his sojourn in London; it is a literary text in itself, not simply a “chronicle” in Hayden White’s terms, a temporally ordered series of events drawn from a life awaiting the fictionalizing process.Footnote 54 The differences between journal and novel have less to do with a process of movement from life to art and more to do with the types of verisimilitude they create. The journal’s literariness thus arises from its primary purpose: it is a writer’s journal, filtering, recording, and processing material that may later be used in published texts. It features a series of vignettes of London life that sometimes appear raw and impressionistic, at others elaborately reworked. These descriptive fragments without an intrusive narrator are supplemented by others written in the first person, in an experimentation with different forms of focalization and narration. Lee documents dreams, his own thoughts on and struggles with writing, responses to books he has read or literary events attended, and, above all, a series of encounters with friends. He mentions political events and the activities of other Malayan students, but he writes nothing about his studies in law or his subsequent work experiences, despite the racism he would later recall being subject to. Early in the journal, Lee seems to have made a commitment to dating entries. The text thus begins with an entry for January 2, 1952, but dating becomes infrequent and inconsistent after the first few pages. In addition, many of the fragments in the surviving typescripts appear to be out of chronological order. An undated account of Lee’s reactions to the 1953 Peter Brook production of Thomas Otway’s Restoration drama Venice Preserv’d, which opened in May 1953, is followed several pages later by an entry dated “Friday 27-2-1953,” describing a visit to a Royal Academy exhibition that closed in March. The sense of reading a diary, however, is maintained by the immediacy of the entries and lack of retrospective narration. The journal ends with a long and very detailed account of Lee’s visit to Paris in January 1954. Although this is also written in the narrative present as a series of long diary entries, some internal textual evidence suggests that it was written retrospectively, on the SS Carthage during Lee’s return voyage to Malaya. The final entries in the journal describe experiences on the ship, and at one point briefly outline Lee’s plans for writing the text that would eventually become London Does Not Belong to Me.
In terms of chronology, the novel does not differ as much from the journal as one might expect. It, too, describes a series of encounters and relationships in London, filtered through the consciousness of a first-person narrator who has lived in Australia and calls on an Australian friend soon after his boat arrives.Footnote 55 This narrator remains nameless in the text, but his otherness is shown both through his own self-consciousness about his accent and the way others look at him, as well as in the names others give him: a “funny man”Footnote 56 or a “foreign boy.”Footnote 57 Toward the end of the narrative, the protagonist also makes a trip to Paris, which is described in detail, and returns to London only to prepare to leave again. The final scene places him not on a ship, but on a train that leaves an unspecified London terminus, taking him away to a “new life.”Footnote 58
The establishment of a consistent narrational perspective, however, is only one of a number of novelizing transformations that reshape the journal into a more generically coherent literary text. The first of these is plot. The stasis of the early narrative is interrupted by the disappearance of the Australian expatriate Cordelia, with whom the narrator has pursued a hesitant and furtive romance. For much of the remainder of the novel, the narrator seeks Cordelia, only finding her at the moment he loses interest in his quest. Although the plot’s rising action, climax, and denouement seem conventionally Aristotelian, London Does Not Belong to Me is more experimentally modernist in the second transformation: its use of various levels of temporality. The fragmentary, mostly short entries of the journal are replaced by a number of scenes of regular length that serve as chapters. The majority of these cover only a few hours of story time, usually describing a meeting between two or more characters; most begin with a temporal transition: “A week later I called again”Footnote 59; “It was now nearly a month since the night of the party.”Footnote 60 Other events of the story are often encountered analeptically during such scenes either through characters’ spoken recollections or through the unvoiced memories of the narrator. Finally, the diffuse imagery of the vignettes of London life in the journal is consciously reworked so that it is more unified and more symbolically resonant. The journal, for instance, describes a friend purchasing “a dorsal-sleeved black woolen jersey” at Bond Street; when the jersey appears in the novel, its “sleeves are like fins,”Footnote 61 and part of a chain of images of the sea present early in the novel: Cordelia’s hair “like wavelets running up the beach”Footnote 62 or the narrator’s unspoken thoughts compared to “caged fish.”Footnote 63 Heat and cold, similarly, move from the status of simple descriptive elements of setting in the journal to contrasting elements of an overdetermined symbolic binarism in the novel.
These literary elements enable a larger textual transformation in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Lee’s journal features a large cast of friends and acquaintances, some Malayan, some Australian, some British, some French, and others from various parts of a rapidly disintegrating empire. In the novel, the Malayan characters and a concern for other Malayans vanish: one Indian migrant from East Africa remains, and by the end of the narrative he is confined to an asylum. In his journal, as part of a political commitment that began in Australia and continued all his life, Lee imagined the formation of a multicultural Malayan polity that would move beyond the racialization of communities fostered by colonialism. At one point in the journal he makes a note of “deaths” of Malayan students in England: “A Malay boy found dead in his room—asphyxiated—burial in Muslim fashion to be held in Cardiff. A Chinese boy died of a gastric ulcer. A Malay girl suffering from very severe burns—face disfigured, hair completely singed.” Added to this concern for all Malayans as a united community is an at times almost scopic interest in people who are racially ambiguous: Eurasians, a Romanian in Paris who resembles a “fair-skinned Indian” or “a dark girl, strong, gypsy-like, features virile, … 1/4 Maori.” In the novel, such boundaries are policed. The few cultural markers that persist for the narrator do not identify him as a Malayan national, but as an ethnic Chinese. Lee’s narrator cooks “steamed fish dipped in soya sauce,”Footnote 64 discourses on “the Yin and the Yang … the Chinese idea of duality,”Footnote 65 and takes an Australian friend to “an expensive Chinese restaurant,”Footnote 66 where he handles his chopsticks “adroitly” in contrast to her clumsiness.Footnote 67 The only words in an Asian language in the text occur when the narrator recalls the words of a Mandarin Chinese song that are mis-transliterated in the published text.Footnote 68 If Malaya vanishes, then, so does Lee’s hybrid Straits Chinese heritage, replaced by a composite racialized Chinese identity that would become a feature of the racial governmentality in Malaya’s successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.Footnote 69
Transformations in this cultural unconscious of the text have parallels in changes in the way gender is represented. In the journal, women are often observed from the outside as part of a phantasmagoria of London streets and, less commonly, interiors. One woman’s legs appear as “two stalks of celery, well-cleaned and washed in cold water,” as she walks on “the wet pavement in her winter overcoat.” Lee’s Irish maid merits two separate descriptions, a celebration of cheeks like “apples; her neck alabaster, although she may not have washed it every morning; her complexion … radiant, as if health is bursting from her, and fatty smooth.” Drinking tea with a male friend, Lee notices a “sunny faced woman, with hair swept back into a bun, black dress, laughing”; returning home on Bayswater Road, his eyes are drawn to “4 prostitutes haggard of faces, palms gripping the elbows, as the cold wind blew … —no one in sight, except 4 plump nuns, short of height.” In contrast to this, all the close friendships featured in the journal are with men, and many scenes of homosocial intimacy in the journal are reworked but remain recognizable in the novel. The plot of the novel, however, is largely driven by two relationships with women. The narrator’s desire for Cordelia, who constitutes the “magnet” toward whom the “iron filings” of the plot are drawn, has no equivalent in the journal.Footnote 70 Cordelia’s foil in London Does Not Belong to Me is Beatrice, a friend and sometime lover from the narrator’s Australian university days, whom he abandons in his pursuit of Cordelia and reconciles with only to leave again as he departs from London at the end of the narrative. Beatrice has a shadowy antecedent in the journal, a “J” to whom Lee writes and who does not reply—“Is it my fault? Did I press her too hard?”—but her role greatly expands in the novel. Gender also intersects with racial otherness and belonging. In the journal, many of Lee’s male friends in London are from Australia and New Zealand; in the novel they are British and French. The layers of Malayan ambiguity and cultural crossings written out of the narrator’s life are now displaced onto the figures of two Australian women: white but colonial, sojourners whose difference is invisible to the eye, but emerges, as the narrator’s does, when they open their mouths. Following Bruner, we might say that a storytelling process—the invention of a supporting cast of characters—is a practice of selfhood, in its orientation toward “reference groups” and “significant others” who “set the cultural standards” by which the self is measured.Footnote 71
A final component of these transformations is sexuality. In London Does Not Belong to Me, the narrator desires women but is desired by men: by Tristam, a “tall youth with light wavy hair” who often calls on him,Footnote 72 and later by Stephen, a “big man with a shock of curly brown hair”Footnote 73 who may also have been Cordelia’s lover. Although the narrator portrays himself as resisting their advances and having textual representations of homosexuality such as Proust’s The Cities of the Plain “forced … on me” by his friends,Footnote 74 the narrative continually contrives to produce situations where seductions can be easily attempted, with the narrator often inviting male friends to sleep over on his spare bed. Although the journal is also to a degree coy about sexual desire, it has a much wider frame of reference regarding homosexuality. Homosexual intertexts expand beyond Proust to include Angus Wilson’s The Wrong Set and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lee “ward[s] off” attempted seductions by a friend, but also muses on how “once when I was very young … I was seduced by a Malay boy.” To greater extent than in the novel, there is an awareness of surveillance: Lee writes of homosexual desire articulated by friends at Oxford, but also the mortification of one of them when he was publicly outed as a “pederast” at a formal dinner. The journal largely avoids confession and certainly engages in its own codifications and displacements of sexuality. It is tempting, for instance, to read the very detailed depictions of cruising and casual encounters at theaters told to Lee by friends as camouflaged representations of the writer’s own experiences. Yet all in all, sexuality is clearly contained and emplaced in the novel in a more elaborate way than in the journal. A useful metaphor for this process is the fate of Lee’s journal entry in which he recalls a childhood vision of Malaya: “naked boys, whose brown bodies, glistening with sweat and droplets of fresh water, poise on the tops of railings, before plummeting, screaming and yelling, into the river.” In the text of the novel, this becomes a picture on the wall of an Indian restaurant where the narrator dines with Tristam, “clumps of banana trees, three or four cows, women in saris, and young boys diving naked into a stream.”Footnote 75 It becomes an aesthetic object, influenced by a canon of Orientalist writing about South and Southeast Asia, and thus distanced from immediate association with the self.
The Novel and Self-Fashioning
Novelization in Lee’s text, we have seen, is a process of formalization—Lee’s experiences of London undergoing a process of selection, narrational filtering, temporal arrangement, emplotment, and aesthetic unification. This process resembles the manner in which decolonizing writers placed their experiences within other genres: the romance plot of the autobiography in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru or Kwame Nkrumah; Kenyatta’s functionalist anthropology; Mandela’s “I Am Prepared to Die” speech from the dock at the Rivonia trial. In each case, these texts exhibit what Bruner terms “joint narrative accrual,” entering into a canonical genre in order to devise “narratives of deviation” from the canon.Footnote 76 The formal qualities of Lee’s text, of course, are very different from the other three genres mentioned previously. Nehru, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Mandela each aim to create a unified modern subject—future citizen, political agent, anthropologist, homo juridicus—who answers back to colonialism and plots a new future. In Lee’s hope of putting Malayan literature on the map, the text itself serves as an agent and indeed its agency failed. And yet the literary qualities of the modernist novel, its fragmentary and garmenting nature, enable a vision of subjectification at work, an archaeology of a process of self-making that the other texts have already reinterred.
What contours are revealed by such an archaeology of the self? Lee’s novel, we have noted, focuses its energies on gender and sexuality even as it turns away from the imagined multicultural community of Malayans-to-be in exile. Lee’s protagonist’s final exit from a London terminus mimes the author’s own leaving London on the train from Waterloo to Southampton, with the SS Carthage waiting in the docks. “I closed my eyes” his narrator writes, “not wishing to see any of the passengers. They belonged to my new life and I did not want to meet them until I was ready.”Footnote 77 In Lee’s own life, he would meet many fellow passengers. Malayan independence would come in 1957, followed by the formation of Malaysia in 1963, and Singapore’s precipitate leaving of the federation in 1965. In Malaysia, the visions of multicultural fluidity in exile would be replaced with the realpolitik of a management of ethnicity taken from the colonial state and a doctrine of ketuanan Melayu, or Malay political primacy, promulgated by successive Alliance governments as an imagined social contract. The fate of Singapore, where returned Malayan students would play a prominent role, was more complex. The city-state’s leaders had always thought of themselves as culturally Malay(si)an; Singapore’s split from Malaysia in 1965 left it, uniquely among postcolonial nation-states, with no usable cultural narrative of the past apart from that of crisis. In this crisis, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s “moment of anguish,”Footnote 78 it turned to gendered subjectification, Lee’s masculinist ethos of a “rugged society,”Footnote 79 elite social reproduction,Footnote 80 and institutional homophobia, the homo juridicus whose rights decolonization claimed transforming very early into the homo economicus of neoliberalism.Footnote 81
London Does Not Belong to Me, indeed, is prefaced by an introduction by the Malaysian writer K.S. Maniam, whose literary career also commenced with an autobiographical novel, The Return, based on a late colonial childhood, sojourn in England, and a return to the problematics of multiculturalism in the new nation-state. Maniam begins by placing Lee within a number of different frameworks: a national literary tradition, postcolonialism, and—less plausibly—postmodernism. Yet he moves quickly to what draws him personally to the text, the possibilities of a novelistic “witnessing process” in “the nebulous region of fact becoming fiction.”Footnote 82 For Maniam, there is an implied message to the “common reader” of the novel in the making of selfhood: “observe, understand and broaden out.”Footnote 83 Lee might well have concurred. In one entry in his journal, he produced a note to himself to continue writing that might also be taken as an injunction to future readers, thinking of the practices through which selves are made and then unmade. “Think clearly,” he wrote, “and don’t let your cramped hand, with the slight numbness in the little finger, distract you. You feel like tearing this page—don’t. Let these deficiencies stare out at you—for you are responsible for them.”
