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A RT E FA C T S O F W R I T I N G
 Artefacts of Writing
Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters
from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing

PETER D. McDONALD

1
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Peter D. McDonald 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935543
ISBN 978–0–19–872515–2 (hbk.)
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Picture to yourself this universe of script and print and inscription. Does it not
seem as if man had added a new realm to nature? Everyone that has eyes can see
this language, and few suspect their liability to confound it with anything else.
Andrew Ingraham, 1903

Because we have failed to see the great character of India in relation to the
world as a whole, we have been inclined in our thoughts and actions to follow
a much-diminished idea of it, an idea bred of our calculating minds that casts
no light. Nothing great ever comes of this kind of thinking.
Rabindranath Tagore, 1921

When it comes to the state, one never doubts enough.

Pierre Bourdieu, 1991
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Note to the Reader xi

Introduction 1

PA RT I : 1 8 6 7 – 1 9 4 5
1. Oxford at the Crossroads: England and the world beyond 35
‘Dead languages (laughter), talk of culture’ 35
Foreign words 39
The Law of National Character 49
A League of Minds 59

2. T. S. Eliot vs the League and UNESCO 75

Nonsense about culture 75
Spiritual soil 81
The Criterion vs the ICIC 97
Lévi-Strauss vs UNESCO 105

3. ‘Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence Day’:

Finnegans Wake and the modern state 110
A monstrous vision 110
Political thinking: Léon Metchnikoff 118
Linguistic thinking: Otto Jespersen 125
Philosophical thinking: Fritz Mauthner 132
Finnegans, wake! 138

PA RT I I : 1 9 4 6 – 2 0 1 4
Prologue: The ‘C’ in UNESCO: A very short introduction153

4. Notes towards a Vagabond Humanism:

Mphahlele’s Tagore/ Rabindranath’s Bāuls 173

5. Against State Literacy: J. M. Coetzee vs the novel 191

6. Beyond Translation: Antjie Krog vs the ‘mother tongue’ 209

7. Against Naturalization: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and the

‘interplay of languages’ 226
viii Contents 
8. Beyond Multiculturalism: Tagore . . Joyce . . . Rushdie . . Chaudhuri 243

Postscript: Between Sky and Ground—The art of Xu Bing 261

Notes 273
Acknowledgements 305
Select Bibliography 307
Index 321
 List of Illustrations

I.1. Map showing some of the literary geographies traced in this book. 29
1.1. Photograph of Matthew Arnold’s ‘dreaming spires’ from Henry W. Taunt,
The Oxford Poems of Matthew Arnold (Oxford: Henry W. Taunt, 1911), 74. 36
1.2. James Murray’s diagram of the English language from ‘General Explanations’,
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, vol. 1 (1884), xvii. 45
1.3. Still from Mary Field (dir.), ‘History of the English Language’ (1943)
illustrating that the English word ‘plunder’ is borrowed from German.
© British Council Film Collection. 48
1.4. Anon., ‘The Dublin Orator’ (c. 1759), showing Thomas Sheridan addressing
the scholars of Oxford about the importance of studying English. © The
Trustees of the British Museum. 50
3.1. Portrait of the artist as a young anarcho-socialist: photograph of James Joyce
by Camille Ruf, Zurich, c. 1918. The Poetry Collection of the University
Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. 124
3.2. Final page of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), by permission
of Faber and Faber. 149
A.1. UNESCO’s neoclassical logo, by permission of UNESCO. 157
4.1. Front cover of Mphahlele’s newsletter The Voice of Africa (December 1950). 174
4.2. Front cover of the UNESCO Courier (December 1961) commemorating the
centenary of Tagore’s birth. 177
5.1. Front cover of the school edition of F. A. Venter’s Swart Pelgrim (1961),
highlighting the story’s rural and ethnic preoccupations. Reproduced by
permission of NB Publishers. 193
5.2. Front covers of J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983),
Ravan Press: Johannesburg and Foe (1986), Ravan Press: Johannesburg,
in their first South African editions, drawing attention to K’s minimalist
identity and the question of the English writing system. The British
publishers used the same designs. By permission of Pan Macmillan SA. 201
6.1. Inside page of Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne (1989) with quotations from various
sources, including the extract from Contending Ideologies in South Africa
(1986). Reproduced by permission of NB Publishers. 213
6.2. Title page of Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne (1989) showing one variety of
‘tongvis’. Reproduced by permission of NB Publishers. 215
7.1. Title page of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s little magazine damn you 6
(1968), by permission of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. The Rare and
Manuscript Collections Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University,
New York. 228
x List of Illustrations
7.2. Front and back covers of Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1976) juxtaposing the
religious and the secular. By permission of Adil Jussawalla. 242
8.1. Marginal notes on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) faxed
around the world by the UK-based Islamic Foundation. Western Cape
Provincial Archives and Records, Cape Town. 245
8.2. F. N. Souza’s self-portrait ‘Ulysses’ (1988) that provided part of the
inspiration for Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad. By permission of
Amit Chaudhuri. 257
P.1. Xu Bing’s 天书/Tiānshū or Book from the Sky (1987–91) showing
Buddhist sutras or scrolls hanging from the ceiling, traditional
paper-bound and thread-stitched books set out across the gallery floor,
and modern poster-style newspapers covering the walls. Installation view at
‘Crossings’, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1998. © Xu Bing Studio. 264
P.2. Close-up of one book from Xu Bing’s 天书/Tiānshū or Book from the Sky
(1987–91) showing the pseudo-characters. © Xu Bing Studio. 266
P.3. Interior pages of Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground (2012).
© Xu Bing Studio. 269
P.4. Front cover of Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground (2012), highlighting
the figure of ‘Mr Black’. © Xu Bing Studio. 271
 Note to the Reader

I use two styles of referencing in this book. To refer to most printed, archival, and digital
sources I use Arabic numeral endnotes in the conventional way. For any additional infor-
mation, I use webnotes cued by lower-case Roman letters that refer you to the supplemen-
tary website for this book. By incorporating a diverse range of primary materials, including
images, interviews, and music, the website also uses the Internet’s multimedia capacities to
think beyond the relatively static medium of the book, extending its scope and replaying its
major themes in a different key.
The site can be found at <http://www.artefactsofwriting.com>.
 Introduction

‘A RT E FAC T S O F W R I T I N G’

This book is about the challenges some forms of literary writing pose to the way
states and multistate bodies have conceptualized language, culture, and commu-
nity since the 1860s. The fact that it is also about the way you might at this point
be looking at its main title needs some preliminary explanation. The epigraph from
Andrew Ingraham, the nineteenth-century American educationalist, and accom-
plished dabbler in philology and philosophy, sets the scene. ‘Everyone that has eyes
can see this language’, he remarked in one of his Swain School Lectures (1903), but
few stop to consider ‘its origin, its changes, its relation to other phenomena both
in and out of language’ and ‘few suspect their liability to confound it with anything
else’.1 Why is this? And why should we care? But first of all, why did Ingraham care
more than a century ago?
Ingraham would in all likelihood have disappeared from history had I. A. Richards
and C. K. Ogden not made a passing reference to him in The Meaning of Meaning
(1923) where he appears as a ‘little-known’ exponent of linguistic scepticism.2 To
illustrate his thinking, they quoted the following nonce-English sentence from
another of his Swain School Lectures: ‘The gostak distims the doshes’.3 The sentence is
obviously nonsensical, since no one knows what the three pseudo-words mean,
but, given the conventionality of its underlying syntax—in this case, the simple
subject-verb-object structure—it nonetheless conjures up a world about which
certain claims can be made. ‘We know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak’,
Ingraham noted, and that at least ‘one distimmer of doshes is a gostak’. ‘And so we
may go on’, he commented, ‘and so we often do go on, not employing the words
to stand for things, or to call up thoughts in our minds, but to replace things, to
be substitutes for thought’ (154). In the same lecture series, he showed how we
often ‘go on’ in much the same freewheeling way about everyday words and phrases
such as ‘Europe’, ‘the English Constitution’, and ‘the English language’, conjuring
up more proxy things, other ersatz thoughts (148).
Given their own concerns about the ‘hypnotic influences’ of what they called
‘word magic’, Ogden and Richards recognized the force of Ingraham’s scepticism
and its wider significance in the new era of mass democracy.4 At a time ‘when new
millions of participants in the control of general affairs must now attempt to form
personal opinions upon matters which were once left to a few’, they observed,
there was a need not just for linguists and philosophers but for ‘practical persons’
to reflect on the ‘profound influence of superstitions concerning words’.5 They also
2 Introduction

believed it was necessary to ‘examine critically the most important of all the instru-
ments of civilization’ because language constitutes ‘the most conservative force in
our life’.6 Following the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, whose study
of the oral culture of the Trobriand Islanders in New Guinea appeared as a supple-
ment to The Meaning of Meaning, they accepted that these ‘superstitions’ could be
traced back to ‘the linguistic illusions of primitive man’ who believed in the efficacy
of verbal ‘spells’.7 Yet, in their view, such beliefs persisted at all levels of contemporary
literate society as well—‘throughout the whole religious world’, in the daily press,
which threatened democracy ‘by the dissemination and reiteration of clichés’, and
‘in the work of the profoundest thinkers’.8 They were especially critical of ‘modern
Platonists’—notably nineteenth-century German idealists—who believed in ‘the
doctrine of the Logos, variously conceived as the supreme reality, the divine
­soul-substance, as the “Meaning” or reason of everything, and as the “Meaning” or
essence of a name’.9 As they saw it, however, the answer to all this mystification lay
not in Ingraham’s scepticism, which they felt tended towards ‘linguistic nihilism’,
but in a new positivistic ‘science of Symbolism’ that promised not just to dispel
‘verbal superstitions’ by clarifying the relations among words, thoughts, and things,
but to put knowledge, and indeed democracy, on a more secure footing.10
Ingraham was not the first and he was certainly not the last exponent of linguis-
tic scepticism. And, at one level, there was nothing very original about the critique
of language he proposed which owed much to a well-established tradition of anti-
Platonic nominalism. Explaining his wariness about the way ‘the English language’
is commonly conceptualized, for instance, he argued that if we think the phrase
refers to some ‘ideal’ or ‘abstract’ entity, then we have to conclude that ‘what we
call English does not exist at all’ (137–8). To demonstrate this, he showed how
even a simple question like ‘Where is the English Language?’ turns out to be far
more challenging than it seems when posed philosophically. He was not asking ‘in
what localities on earth speakers of English are found?’, a relatively straightforward
matter of geography, but in what ‘states’ the language could be said to exist, a much
trickier problem of ontology (121, 127). ‘All I can find is a scrap here, a bit there’,
he wrote, ‘and the English language I fear I shall never get to hear or to see or to know’
(138). So far, so familiar. What gave his nominalism a degree of originality was the
radical conception of difference that underpinned it—his taxonomy of six distinct
linguistic ‘states’. Clarifying the ontological challenge as he saw it, he distinguished
‘sight-English’ (writing), ‘sound-English’ (speech), ‘vibration-English’ (sound waves),
‘movement-English’ (expressed, for instance, by the mouth and larynx), ‘nerve-
English’ (neural activity in the brain), and ‘thought-English’ (the language of inner
reflection) (139). The marks made ‘on the cylinder of the phonograph’ constituted
a further state and he would no doubt say the same about the coded form of the
language recorded in binary on computer files today (127). His main point was to
show how each ‘state’ constitutes a unique world of its own. Given the physiology
of ‘nerve-English’, for instance, he believed ‘sight-English’ had to be sharply distin-
guished from ‘sound-English’ since ‘no physiologist doubts that something differ-
ent is going on in the brain when one writes and when one speaks, when one hears
and when one reads’ (130). He consequently agreed with the nineteenth-century
 Introduction 3

German linguist Friedrich Techmer who recommended ‘the separate and distinct
learning of the spoken and the written language’, so that young readers learn to
link ‘the spoken word with the meaning, the written word with the meaning’ with-
out ‘as is usually the case in schools’ associating ‘the spoken and the written’ (131).
As we shall see, this is not a view that finds much favour among contemporary
cognitive neuroscientists.
Ingraham’s other reasons for insisting on the sight–sound distinction are less
controversial. Even though the English writing system is conventionally considered
phonetic, or sound-based, it is, in his view, best thought of as a distinct cultural
artefact—a ‘universe’ of its own ‘as if man had added a new realm to nature’ (122).
Commenting on the notorious opacity of its orthography, which has long exer-
cised spelling reformers, he observed: ‘Here a character that stands for a single
sound, and again for a group of sounds, and here one that represents a whole word
or sentence; and another that does not stand for a sound at all, but for some idea;
here again characters that have ceased to stand for anything, and there others that
never did stand for anything’ (122–3). The main title of this book bears out his
observations, particularly if we compare the three words, or eighteen substantive
characters, in their conventional orthography to two other notations—the
International Phonetic Alphabet and the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) own
less technical phonetic rendering. In each case, the transcription attempts to
­capture what the lexicographers take to be a standard British pronunciation:
Artefacts of Writing
/ˈɑːtᵻfakts/ /ɒv/ /ˈrʌɪtɪŋ/
ah - t - i - f - a - kts / o - v / r - eye - t - i - ng11
The dual task the letter ‘i’ performs in ‘writing’, standing both for the long /ʌɪ/ (as
in ‘fly’) and the short /ɪ/ (as in ‘pit’), which is further complicated by the ‘e’ in ‘arte-
facts’ (comparable to the /ᵻ/ sound in ‘business’); the silent ‘W’; the non-phonetic
markers, including the uppercase letters and the italics that follow the printing con-
ventions for book titles—these are just some of the more conspicuous points at
which the written characters and spoken sounds diverge, giving the lie to the adage
about things being ‘as easy as ABC’. This is even more obvious if we recall that the
sounds articulated as /rʌɪt/ (‘r - eye - t’) can be written as ‘write’, ‘right’, ‘wright’, or
‘rite’. Ingraham’s argument is more difficult to sustain in the case of other languages
based on the Latin alphabet, some of which, like Italian, are far more transparent,
but, as these title words show, he had good reasons for distinguishing the two key
‘states’ of English or, at least, for questioning our ‘liability to confound’ them.
Having appealed to physiology and orthography, he then turned to history. The
quirks of the ‘seen language’ arose, he noted, because it had ‘for more than 800
years’ been ‘shading off in place and time into other languages without number; so
that it is hard to say where the English language ends, and where something else
begins—some language that is not English’ (121–2). This long, ongoing, and end-
lessly protean history, which predated the Norman Conquest of England in the
eleventh century—the transformative event Ingraham highlighted—is also present
in the title of this book. According to the OED, the word ‘artefact’, meaning ‘an
4 Introduction

object made or modified by human workmanship’, first entered English from

Latin in the mid-seventeenth century; whereas the noun ‘writing’ derives from the
Germanic verb ‘wrítan’, meaning ‘to score, outline, or draw the figure of (some-
thing); to incise’, the first recorded use of which the OED gives as King Alfred’s
translation of Pope Gregory’s treatise Cura Pastoralis (c. 590) which it dates from
c. 897. Uniquely among modern European languages of the same lineage, English
has retained the Germanic root-word in this case—compare German ‘schreiben’,
Danish ‘skrive’, and Dutch ‘schrijven’, all of which derive from the Latin verb
‘scribo’. The Germanic languages also supplied the preposition ‘of ’. The title’s three
silent characters reflect the scriptural, as opposed to lexical, intricacies of this ‘shad-
ing off’. Norman scribes introduced the letter ‘w’, which, as its name indicates, first
took the form of a double ‘u’ (‘uu’), in the eleventh century as a substitute for the
runic character ‘ƿ’ (wynn). As the Latin alphabet had no way of representing a
number of Germanic sounds, including /w/, Old English scribes initially used
some runic characters to plug the gaps, adopting them from the writing system
various Germanic tribes, including the Angles and the Saxons, brought from con-
tinental Europe in the fifth century. Though initially sounded, the /w/ had fallen
silent by the seventeenth century. The other two silent characters—the blank
spaces on either side of ‘of ’—entered Old English in the seventh century after Irish
scribes introduced word separation to Latin. Reinforcing Ingraham’s strictures on
difference, this had much to do with their unique relationship to Latin as a foreign
language and to their newly acquired Christian faith as a written tradition. ‘Since
Irish is not a Romance language’, Parkes observes, ‘its speakers tended to regard
Latin primarily as a written or “visible” language’, and hence ‘as a different mani-
festation of the language with its own “substance” ’.12 By contrast, the ancient practice
of scriptio continua, which they abandoned in part because it made few concessions
to readability—consider #artefactsofwritingideasofthestateandcommunitiesofletters-
frommatthewarnoldtoxubing—treated writing mainly as an aide-mémoire or secondary
record of speech.
Though Ingraham’s exacting taxonomy of linguistic ‘states’ remains debatable,
the most recent neuroscientific studies bear out his claims about ‘nerve-English’
expressing itself differently ‘when one hears and when one reads’. Using new
­imaging technologies and drawing on experimental work from the early 2000s, the
leading cognitive neuroscientist Stanislaus Dehaene has identified a region of the
brain’s lower left hemisphere that ‘appears uniquely concerned with written as
opposed to spoken word recognition’—what he calls the ‘visual word form area’ or,
more colourfully, the ‘brain’s letterbox’.13 Over the course of several years of inten-
sive training, this area adapts itself to the minute, highly specific visual demands of
reading, making it possible for the ‘literate brain’ to recognize W, w, and ω as the
same letter and to associate words even when their uppercase and lowercase forms
bear no resemblance to each other as in ‘reading’ and ‘READING’.14 Attuned as it
is to the peculiarities of each writing system, this proficiency is cultural through
and through, in contrast to ‘spoken language processing, which may have enjoyed
a species-specific evolution’.15 Readers of Mandarin, Bengali, and English, for
instance, learn to see writing through different eyes, as it were, depending on the
 Introduction 5

graphic conventions of each script. Ingraham and contemporary neuroscientists

part company, however, when it comes to the learning process itself. For Dehaene,
Techmer’s call for ‘the separate and distinct learning of the spoken and the written
language’ is not just unfounded but counterproductive, since the processes are
interconnected at every level. For one thing, we learn to read in ‘three major phases’,
each of which depends and continues to depend on the other: ‘the pictorial stage, a
brief period where children “photograph” a few words; the phonological stage,
where they learn to decode graphemes into phonemes; and the orthographic
stage, where word recognition becomes fast and automatic’.16 For another thing,
even expert ‘orthographic’ readers whose proficiency is ‘based on a direct lexical
route straight from the letter string to its meaning’—or, rather, to their own ‘men-
tal dictionary of word meanings’—are obliged to revert to the ‘phonological stage’
when they encounter unfamiliar words, hesitating over, and perhaps painstakingly
sounding out, pseudo-words like ‘shuit’ or neologisms like ‘mutuomorphomuta-
tion’.17 Playing sound, sight, and meaning off against each other is, of course, also
a vital part of the pleasure we get from puns (as in ‘Reading is not a safe space’). ‘In
adults, both reading routes exist’, Dehaene observes summing up the contemporary
neuroscientific consensus, ‘and both are simultaneously active.’18
For all his sometimes questionable appeals to physiology, orthography, and his-
tory, Ingraham’s concerns were primarily philosophical rather than empirical. By
drawing attention to the unique qualities of ‘sight-English’, he wanted to challenge
our ‘liability to confound it’ with ‘other phenomena both in and out of language’,
and to substantiate his nominalist critique of ‘ideal’ English, and, indeed, of all
forms of conceptual reification. Looked at in his terms, Artefacts of Writing can
neither be confused with ‘ah - t - i - f - a - kts / o - v / r - eye - t - i - ng’, nor can it
be identified with ‘the English language’ understood as a countable thing with
clear boundaries and a stable identity, or perhaps even a unifying Logos or ‘divine
soul-substance’. That we do not ordinarily think in this way as adept ‘orthographic’
readers is unsurprising, maybe even necessary. Trained as we are to look through
rather than at writing, we attend primarily to what we take to be the meaning,
skimming off, as Samuel Beckett sardonically put it, ‘the scant cream of sense’,
overlooking the intricacies of the immediate visual experience and the tangled his-
tories that shaped it.19 By questioning this culturally acquired habit, and by calling
for the study of writing as a distinct linguistic ‘state’ at the turn of the last century,
Ingraham was ahead of his time. It was another fifty years before I. J. Gelb pub-
lished A Study of Writing (1952) in which he proposed ‘a new science of writing
which might be called grammatology’, a designation Jacques Derrida made famous
with De la Grammatologie (1967), and it was another thirty years before the field
became an accepted part of mainstream linguistics, following the publication of
Geoffrey Sampson’s Writing Systems (1985).20 Ingraham would probably have been
happy with the term ‘grammatology’, which comes from the Greek ‘grammata’,
meaning ‘written mark’ or ‘inscription’, though he may have preferred ‘Lect
Studies’. Puzzled by the fact that English has no term for ‘the seen language’ in all
its manifestations, he suggested calling it ‘lect’, evoking ‘lectus’, the Latin for ‘read’.
Unlike other common English formulations that privilege ‘the mode in which this
6 Introduction

“lect” is produced’—‘written language, printed, engraved or type-written language’—­

the new coinage, in his view, usefully highlighted the fact that ‘we use our eyes to
recognize it’ (122). That Ingraham insisted on this not just because he wanted to
change how we look at writing but because he wanted to transform how we think
about ‘the English language’ is central to my own larger argument in this book. Yet
it is not a contribution to ‘Lect Studies’ as such. Instead, taking inspiration in part
from Ingraham’s passing remarks about other everyday abstractions like ‘Europe’
and ‘the English Constitution’, I consider how looking differently at writing might
change how we think not just about language but about culture, community,
and the state.

I D E A S O F T H E S TAT E

As an American nominalist, Ingraham no doubt had political as well as philosophical

reasons for wryly invoking ‘the English Constitution’ in his Swain School Lectures.
In England ‘the constitution’ can ‘sustain endless changes’, Alexis de Tocqueville
remarked in Democracy in America (1835), ‘or in reality it does not exist at all’.21
By this he meant there was no single written document setting out its constitu-
tional arrangements and expressing its most cherished ideals as a sovereign state, an
elementary fact of English, indeed British, political life that remains true today.
Unlike the precariously United Kingdom, but like the United States and just
under 200 other countries today, the three modern states that feature prominently
in this book—India, Ireland, and South Africa—all have formal c­onstitutions
which, as we shall see, serve both as documents of basic law and as expressive arte-
facts of writing that codify particular ideas of culture and community. This last
point applies equally to the constitution of UNESCO which, as a multistate
organization engaged directly with questions of language, culture, and community,
also has a central place in this book. In all these instances, the constitutional ideals
might be thought of as artefacts of writing because they are ‘made or modified by
human workmanship’—to return to the OED’s first definition—usually after
lengthy, often fraught processes of negotiation and drafting. I shall return to the
details of this workmanship shortly.
Before I do so, it is worth pausing to recall that some ideas of culture, commu-
nity, and the state have also been artefacts of writing in a second sense. According
to the OED, the word ‘artefact’ acquired a further meaning in the 1870s when
scientists began to use it to refer to ‘a spurious result, effect, or finding in a scien-
tific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or
procedure itself ’. When it comes to writing, these effects can more often than not
be attributed to our habitual ‘liability to confound it’ with ‘other phenomena’, as
Ingraham put it. Yet, in the early 1960s, they seemed more like the product of
a specific methodological procedure or phase of intellectual, even institutional
history. That the three principal architects of this way of thinking—Jack Goody,
Ian Watt, and Marshall McLuhan—shared a similar intellectual background may
be no coincidence. All three studied English literature at Cambridge University in
 Introduction 7

the 1930s when I. A. Richards was an influential presence—he was recruited in

1919, the inaugural year of the new free-standing English ‘Tripos’. Though
Richards went on to write The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) which did
much to professionalize English studies, he also co-authored The Meaning of
Meaning (1923) which opened the discipline up to a wide range of other fields,
including anthropology, politics, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. His own
training had been in what was called the ‘Moral Sciences’, a field encompassing
philosophy and psychology. This disciplinary adventurousness left its mark on
Goody and McLuhan: after taking their English degrees, only Watt became a
professional literary critic—Goody turned to anthropology and McLuhan to
media and communications studies.
In 1963, after establishing themselves in their respective fields, Goody and Watt
also went on to co-author a landmark scholarly article on ‘The Consequences of
Literacy’. Goody had by then produced a number of key ethnographic studies
of Ghana, and Watt had made his name with The Rise of the Novel (1957).
Reflecting their shared interests as well as their different areas of expertise, the
article centred on two claims. The first was historical and relatively uncontentious.
What they termed ‘phonetic writing’—‘a system completely based upon the repre-
sentation of phonemes (the basic units of meaningful sound)’—emerged, they
claimed, with ‘the Near Eastern syllabaries, which developed between 1500–1000
B.C’, though it became ‘the alphabet proper’ in ancient Greece ‘probably in the
eighth century B.C’.22 Their second claim was more controversial because it
involved a form of ‘word magic’. This writing system, alphabet, or script—they
blurred the distinctions—formed the ‘essential basis’ for ‘many characteristic cul-
tural institutions of the Western tradition’ and for ‘the distinctive features of
Western thought’ (320). This was not, they insisted, because ‘phonetic writing’
expressed some or other idea of the eternal, unchanging ‘Greek genius’ or ‘Greek
mind’—they consciously distanced themselves from the kinds of ‘verbal superstition’
with which Ogden and Richards associated traditions of nineteenth-century
­philosophical idealism (320). Rather, ‘the overwhelming debt of the whole of con-
temporary civilization to classical Greece must be regarded as in some measure’ a
consequence of ‘the intrinsic differences between non-literate (or proto-literate)
and literate societies’ (332). Just how far this reorientation represents a break with
the idealist tradition remains to be seen. Given Goody’s expertise, they drew pri-
marily on West African oral cultures as examples of the ‘non-literate’, while, for the
‘proto-literate’, they referred mainly to the Chinese writing system which they
considered ‘logographic’ because it has ‘a separate sign for each word’, rather than
letters standing for sounds (314).
They began their argument by focusing on the effects different media have on
the way cultures relate to the past. Unlike oral cultures, which are characterized by
a ‘homeostatic process of forgetting’ when it comes to their own history, they
claimed literate cultures create a unique ‘historical sensibility’ that is at once indi-
vidualistic, dynamic, and sceptical (311, 344). This might be considered true of any
culture that keeps lasting written records, though, in their view, it is peculiar to the
cultures of ‘phonetic writing’, since the ‘proto-literate’ Chinese system also tends
8 Introduction

‘in the direction of intensifying the sort of homeostatic conservation found in non-
literate cultures’ (337). This pattern repeated across other areas of cultural life as
well. Whereas the Chinese writing system reflected the ‘concreteness of Chinese
thought’ as well as its ‘primary concentration on social action and traditional
norms’, once again making it ‘an articulate expression of what happens in an oral
culture’, the Greek system gave rise to a ‘new kind of logical method’, identified
with the syllogism, and ‘our accepted categories in the fields of knowledge’—
‘theology, physics, biology and so forth’ (330, 337). For Goody and Watt, these
various intellectual script-effects, which, to use Ingraham’s formulation, could be
considered to reside in language, extended beyond language as well. Because ‘the
alphabet makes it possible to write easily and read unambiguously about anything
which the society can talk about’, ancient Greece created the first ‘really literate
society’, laying the foundations for ‘democracy as we know it’ (332). In ‘the
Hellenic world’, they claimed, developing a stock historical genealogy John Dunn
rightly rejects, ‘diverse people and countries were given a common administrative
system and a unifying cultural heritage through the written word’ that was accessible
to ‘a majority of free citizens’ (332).23 By contrast, taking their cue in part from
Gelb’s Study of Writing, the Chinese system fostered ‘a literate elite of religious,
administrative and commercial experts’ that ‘maintained itself as a centralised gov-
erning bureaucracy’ (314). Importantly, these conservative political consequences
arose not just because it is difficult to learn thousands of individual characters—a
point few Chinese readers would deny today—but because ‘pictographic and logo-
graphic systems are alike in their tendency to reify the objects of the natural and
social order; by so doing they register, record, make permanent the existing social
and ideological picture’ (314–15). Again, this propensity to reinforce a traditional
‘collective attitude’ at the expense of innovative ‘individual thought’ was also a
hallmark of West African oral cultures (315). As this summary account shows,
their analysis of such ‘intrinsic differences’ presupposed a familiar story of progres-
sive modernization at every point.
Recognizing the potentially controversial nature of their central thesis, Goody
and Watt were keen not to overstate their case. They noted that literacy had long
been under suspicion in the Western tradition itself, dating back at least to Plato,
and they took issue with some nineteenth-century liberal reformers, like James
Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, who made large claims about the beneficial
effects of literacy on democracy. They were also careful to distance themselves from
early anthropologists, like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who made ‘categorical distinctions
between the thinking of “primitive” and “civilised” peoples’ (344). Yet they were
uneasy about the prevailing ‘reaction’ these earlier ways of thinking provoked
because it disavowed ‘some of the most basic problems of human history’ in the
name of ‘diffuse relativism’ or ‘sentimental egalitarianism’ (344). These disavowals
had not only been ‘pushed too far’; they were needless because a new generation
of early twentieth-century anthropologists, among whom they included Franz
Boas, Edward Sapir, Bronisław Malinowski, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Claude
Lévi-Strauss, had already developed new approaches to the question of ‘intrinsic
differences’ based not on discredited ideas of race or dubious cultural hierarchies
 Introduction 9

but on the manifest diversity of languages. The trouble was these language-centred
anthropologists had underplayed, if not ignored, the effects of writing. While
‘Whorf and other anthropological linguists have noted these differences between
European institutions and categories on the one hand and those of societies like
the Trobriands [Malinowski] and the Hopi [Whorf ] on the other, they have tended
to relate these variations to the languages themselves, giving little weight to the
influence of the mode of communication as such, to the intrinsic social conse-
quences of literacy’ (342). Or, again, Whorf acknowledged that ‘Newtonian space,
time and matter, for example, are directly derived from SAE [“standard average
European”] culture and language’—a central premise of what came to be known as
the linguistic relativity thesis—but he failed to show how these were also ‘charac-
teristic of societies with easy and widespread systems of writing’—the foundation
of Goody and Watt’s own media relativity thesis (341).
Whorf had a special significance because he shared their opposition to philo-
sophical idealism. As Underhill notes, Whorf ’s own thinking was ‘forged from the
materialist mechanics and dynamics of cause and effect common to most nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century positivist thought’.24 From him they took the idea of
‘SAE culture and language’, which suited their own generalized notion of ‘phonetic
writing’, and the German-word Weltanschauung (usually translated as ‘world-view’),
which underpinned their own version of the relativity thesis. The ‘most significant
elements of any human culture’, they observed, ‘are undoubtedly channelled
through words’, which encompass ‘such items as ideas of space and time, general-
ised goals and aspirations, in short the weltanschauung of every social group’ (305).
Whorf himself tended to use this term as a synonym for ‘world-view’ or ‘thought
world’ by which he meant ‘more than simply language, i.e. than the linguistic pat-
terns themselves. I include all the analogical and suggestive value of the patterns
(e.g. our “imaginary space” and its distant implications), and all the give-and-take
between language and culture as a whole, wherein is a vast amount that is not lin-
guistic but yet shows the shaping influence of language.’25 With some justice,
Whorf has gone down in history as the most dogmatic of linguistic relativists, but,
as this formulation suggests, he does not always fit the caricature. The phrases ‘shap-
ing influence’ and ‘analogical and suggestive’ are not easy to reconcile with a model
of strict linguistic determinism, nor is his claim that a Weltanschauung emerges out
of a complex ‘give-and-take between language and culture as a whole’. It is also
worth noting that, given his interest in specifically linguistic communities, rather
than ‘social groups’, a world-view is for him a phenomenon in and of language not
external to it. Goody and Watt’s corrective version of the relativity thesis, by con-
trast, reinforces all the worst aspects of the caricature. On their account, the SAE
Weltanschauung, which they construe as a distinct way of thinking (Whorf ’s pri-
mary concern) and as an integrated system of collective values, cultural institutions,
and political arrangements, derives directly from ‘phonetic writing’ which consti-
tutes its ‘essential basis’. Given the level of abstraction at which they pitched their
analysis, it is difficult to see this as much of an advance on the idealists’ airy invoca-
tions of the ‘Greek genius’. Their analysis can be distinguished from Whorf ’s in one
other respect as well. As their implicit narrative of modernization reveals—from
10 Introduction

oral to proto-literate to literate—their relativism, like Whorf ’s, was neither diffuse
nor egalitarian. Yet, while Whorf often ridiculed ‘our vaunted English’, extolling the
conceptual subtleties of Hopi instead, Goody and Watt had few doubts about the
superiority of SAE ‘phonetic writing’ and all it magically conjured into existence.26
Read alongside ‘The Consequences of Literacy’ Marshall McLuhan’s The
Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), which appeared a year earlier, seems like an uncannily
pre-emptive rebuke. For one thing, McLuhan rejected the idea that oral cultures
show no ‘capacity or opportunity for independent and original thought’; for
another, he saw the advent of ‘phonetic writing’ as a cultural catastrophe.27 ‘Literate
man, when we meet him in the Greek world’, he insisted, ‘is a split man, a schizo-
phrenic, as all literate men have been since the invention of the phonetic alphabet’
(26). He did not use the word ‘schizophrenic’ lightly or entirely metaphorically.
‘Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic
meaning and visual code’, thereby instituting a wholly new set of ‘ratios or propor-
tions among the senses’, rupturing the primal integrity of the ‘human sensorium’
(31, 41). As we have seen, given the evidence for the ongoing interconnectedness
of the phonological, the orthographic, and the lexical in the literate brain, this
sensory-cognitive version of the Judeo-Christian Fall narrative makes no sense in
contemporary neuroscientific terms, though for McLuhan it was central. The
­dissociation the Greeks effected was not just psychic, however: it was cultural,
since ‘only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the
­civilized sphere’ (31). In McLuhan’s primitivist lexicon ‘civilized’ was synonymous
with ‘schizophrenic’, ‘abstract’, and ‘visual’, whereas ‘tribal’ signified ‘wholeness’,
‘concreteness’, and the ‘audile-tactile’, associative patterns he had no hesitation in
projecting onto his own idiosyncratic cultural map of the world. While ‘areas
like China and India are all still audile-tactile in the main’, he claimed, ‘Africa’
epitomized ‘the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral word’ (22, 25). In the
end, however, McLuhan’s analysis was less an anticipatory repudiation of the world
according to Goody and Watt, than a direct inversion of it. Like them, he saw
Greek ‘phonetic writing’ as an exclusively ‘visual code for speech’, but he recast
their positive account of its transformative effects in starkly negative terms (53). In
his view, the future lay in the new ‘post-literate’ media of the ‘electronic age’—
notably the telegraph, radio, film, and television—that promised to overcome ‘the
detribalizing power of the phonetic alphabet’, cure Western ‘schizophrenia’ by
reclaiming the repressed ‘Africa within’, and unite ‘the entire human family into
a single global tribe’—hence his utopian vision of the ‘global village’ to come
(3, 9, 26, 36, italics added).a
There was, however, one key respect in which McLuhan reinforced Goody and
Watt’s corrective version of the relativity thesis. Like them, he insisted that ‘the
medium is the message’, as his most famous catchphrase had it; or, in other words,
that the language-centred relativity thesis had to be extended to writing and the
other modes of communication as well.28 Yet, here too, there was a difference.
Though McLuhan made much of the disastrous consequences of Greek phonetic
writing, his primary target, as his title indicated, was the ‘Gutenberg revolution’
which not only inaugurated the era of print in fifteenth-century Europe but
 Introduction 11

­ eralded the age of European nationalism (153). Whereas political commentators

h
tend to trace the latter back to the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and Utrecht
(1713), which established a system of sovereign European states, McLuhan, fol-
lowing Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications (1950), argued that ‘print, in
turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform,
centralizing forces of modern nationalism’, thereby laying the foundations for the
nationalistic versions of the linguistic relativity thesis itself (226). Whereas Goody
and Watt turned to Whorf, McLuhan looked back to the Prussian idealist philoso-
pher Wilhelm von Humboldt, citing the following key statement from On the
Diversity of Human Language (1836) via Ernst Cassirer and in Susanne K. Langer’s
translation:
Man lives with his objects chiefly—in fact, since his feeling and acting depends on his
perceptions, one may say exclusively—as language presents them to him. By the same
process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and
each language draws a magic circle round the people [Volk] to which it belongs, a circle
from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another. (36)

A few sentences earlier, Humboldt had written ‘there resides in every language a
characteristic world-view [Weltansicht, not Weltanschauung by which he meant
something different]’.29 Again, like Whorf, Humboldt saw this as a phenomenon
in and of language; whereas McLuhan, like Goody and Watt, believed that the
effects of print were social and political as well as cognitive. If the ‘Gutenberg revo-
lution’ instituted the ‘fixed point of view’ characteristic of nationalist thinking, it
also fostered the centralizing modern state and a new idea of community as a uni-
form nation with a single standardized language (250). McLuhan, it should be
said, did not appeal to Humboldt merely as an exemplar of nation-centred linguis-
tic relativity. In keeping with his utopian vision, he saw the passage from the
Diversity of Human Language as an endorsement of his own ambition to ‘transcend
the limitations of our own assumptions by a critique of them’ (36). Humboldt’s
relativism, as he saw it, was fundamentally emancipatory, since he showed ‘we can
now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds, but pluralis-
tically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously’ (36). For him, the ‘global village’
to come was, in other words, not just post-literate but post-national. Like many
commentators, he ignored the fact that Humboldt, for all his relativism, always
insisted on seeing languages as open-ended rather than ‘closed systems’, the expres-
sive potential of which is endlessly extendable, a point I return to on a n ­ umber of
occasions throughout this book.30
Unlike Goody and Watt’s idea of Europe or the West as a product of phonetic
writing, McLuhan’s idea of the modern nation-state as an artefact of print had a
long and influential afterlife. In the early 1980s, the political scientist Benedict
Anderson gave it a Marxist inflection, turning McLuhan’s ‘print culture’ into
‘print-capitalism’, in an effort to understand why socialist internationalism seemed
consistently to lose out against nationalism in the worldwide anti-colonial struggle.31
‘Nationality’, ‘nation-ness’, and ‘nationalism’ were, he argued, ‘cultural artefacts of
a particular kind’—he called them ‘imagined communities’—the ‘obscure genesis’
12 Introduction

of which lay not in Gutenberg but in the ‘revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of

capitalism’ that fuelled the burgeoning European book trade in the early sixteenth
century (4, 24). As a revisionist Marxist who had his own qualms about philosoph-
ical idealism, the phrase ‘imagined communities’ had a particular resonance for
Anderson partly because it acknowledged the strong feelings of attachment the
idea of the nation aroused but mainly because it enabled him to move beyond
the generally dismissive terms in which nationhood had been discussed within the
Marxist tradition where it tended to be regarded as an instance of ‘false conscious-
ness’. ‘Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness’, he
insisted, ‘but by the style in which they are imagined’ (6). When it came to the
nation as such, two print artefacts played an especially influential part in this pro-
cess: the newspaper and the novel. While the newspaper performed a kind of ‘mass
ceremony’ at ‘daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar’ by bringing
‘thousands (or millions)’ of otherwise scattered readers together as a ‘secular, his-
torically clocked, imagined community’, the novel—or at least the ‘old-­fashioned
novel’—brought characters who might also ‘be largely unaware of each other’
together in ‘the same clocked, calendrical time’, conjuring up a supplementary
‘imagined world’ for its readers that was ‘a precise analogue of the idea of the
nation’ (35–36, 25–26). Though much disputed, Anderson’s central thesis trans-
formed the way nationalism was understood in the political sciences over the next
two decades, while simultaneously reshaping debates about the novel and the
nation within literary studies. In 2007, however, the literary critic Joseph Slaughter
inventively extended its scope, identifying a similar analogue between the ‘world
novel’—more specifically the Bildungsroman—and the ‘imaginary international
community of human rights’ established after 1948.32 Picking up on the quarrels
over the drafting of Article 29 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
centred on the ‘development of the human personality’, Slaughter gave a detailed
account of ‘the sociohistorical alliance between the Bildungsroman and human
rights as mutually enabling fictions’—underscoring this literary argument, he
noted that the quarrels involved a clash over the interpretation of Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (1719).33
Neither Anderson nor Slaughter subscribed to the deterministic elements of
McLuhan’s thesis, which made his idea of the nation a figment of his own method-
ology, yet, in arguing for the various analogues to which they were committed,
they remained indebted to one aspect of his thinking. For McLuhan, as we have
seen, the transformative effects of print could be discerned not only in politics but
in thought, engendering what he called the ‘fixed point of view’. Following a simi-
lar logic, Anderson claimed that the newspaper and the novel foster the national
imaginary by creating a homogeneous sense of time for the reading public, and
Slaughter argued that the Bildungsroman shapes the international imaginary by
tracing the plot trajectories of characters as they succeed or fail to develop as ‘full
personalities’, that is, become incorporated members of a larger community
of rights holders. It is worth noting in passing the emphasis both placed on com-
munity, signalling an important departure from Goody and Watt who, predictably
enough, saw the novel as an expression of Western individualism emerging from
 Introduction 13

‘the autobiographical and confessional direction of such writers as St Augustine,

Pepys and Rousseau’ which ‘replaced the collective representations of myth and
epic’ (339). This reiterated one of Watt’s main arguments in The Rise of the Novel.
Like Anderson and Slaughter, I discuss various ideas of community throughout
this book—not just national and international, but sub-national and supra-
national—and the many ways in which literary works intersect with them. Unlike
Anderson and Slaughter, however, I take written constitutions to be the primary
site of these ideas, treating literary works, and, indeed, some oral forms, as second-
ary; at the same time I consider how, in some cases, these secondary forms have the
potential not just to supplement statist ideas of community but to challenge them.
I return to this second point in the next section of this introduction. For now,
I need to develop the first by considering what it might mean to see ideas of
­community neither as spurious effects of an analytical method, nor as imaginary
analogues of novels or newspapers, but as the products of constitutions understood
as artefacts of writing in the OED’s first sense, that is, as objects of human, specifically
state, workmanship.
Responding to Anderson, Bhikhu Parekh, the Indian-born political scientist
who has served as an advisor to the British government and UNESCO on cultural
diversity, argues it is essential to recognize that modern communities are not only
‘imagined’. They are in a double sense also ‘participatory’: first, because they are
‘nurtured daily by the knowledge or belief that their members share a common
moral and social vocabulary’; and, second, because they are sustained or imperilled
by the modern state and by the international structures to which it may or may not
ally itself, including organizations like UNESCO.34 For better or worse, the state
and these multistate bodies articulate their own ideas of community via their own
customary or constitutional vocabularies. Unlike those magically conjured out of
phonetic writing or print in the case of Goody, Watt, and McLuhan, or those
inspired and instilled through reading in the case of Anderson and Slaughter, these
ideas affect entire populations, no matter where they happen to be on the spectrum
of literacy, and they have a unique public authority. ‘The constitution is a political
document hammered out in difficult negotiations and embodying such consensus
as is thrown up by the parties involved’, Parekh comments, and, as such, it is ‘a
collectively agreed structure of authority’ that ‘stabilizes the wider political process’.35
In fact, as the nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Bagehot observed, con-
stitutions are usually composite genres, comprising two main elements: ‘first, those
which excite and preserve the reverence of the population—the dignified parts, if
I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts—those by which it, in fact, works
and rules’.36 Preambles tend, for instance, to exemplify the first, while the main
provisions cover the second.
This does not mean that either part lays ‘down once and for all a body of political
principles’—most constitutions allow for amendment—but it does mean that, as
artefacts of writing, they have exceptional prestige and shaping power.37 ‘A consti-
tution is not a parchment of paper’, the Indian Supreme Court Judge H. R. Khanna
remarked, ‘it is a way of life and has to be lived up to.’38 Yet, as Parekh intimates,
it remains an all-too-human document, expressing an achieved but often fragile
14 Introduction

consensus among particular parties at a given historical juncture. For the Indian
poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, from whom I have taken the second epi-
graph to this book, constitutions also tend to reflect a certain ‘kind of thinking’—a
product of what he called ‘our calculating minds’—that is in itself always open to
question. Tagore did not have an existing state or document in mind. He was criti-
cizing the ‘diminished idea’ of India’s ‘great character’ to which he believed Indian
nationalists of the 1920s had dedicated themselves in their struggle against British
rule. Yet his scepticism about what he took to be their consensus, which began to
dominate his own thinking after he withdrew from the campaign against the
British partition of Bengal in 1907, has, as we shall see, a bearing on some of the
most basic principles of modern constitutionalism. As I consider the details of his
thinking at various points throughout this book, I shall focus here on its general
implications for constitution-making as such, particularly in relation to the ques-
tion of cultural diversity which was among Tagore’s greatest concerns. It also lies at
the heart of my own larger argument.
Tagore died in 1941 and so did not live to see the terms in which the Constitution
of India was eventually framed, first during the Constituent Assembly debates,
which ran from 1946 to 1949, and then in the final document, which was enacted
on 26 November 1949. Had he done so there is no doubt that he would have
admired many aspects of it, including the fact that it embodies what Granville
Austin, the American constitutional historian, called ‘the principle of accommoda-
tion’, that is, ‘the ability to reconcile, to harmonize, and to make work without
changing their content, apparently incompatible concepts—at least concepts that
appear conflicting to the non-Indian, and especially to the European or American
observer’.39 Austin regarded this as one of India’s most original contributions to
the history of constitution-making, attributing it to the ‘absorbtive and syncretistic
features of Hinduism’.40 As he noted, the constitution accommodates ‘federal and
unitary systems of government’ as well as ‘republicanism and monarchy’—the
­latter because independent India, though a republic, chose to remain a member of
the Commonwealth, unlike Ireland which formally broke its last remaining ties to
the British monarchy and the Commonwealth of Nations in 1949.41 The same
principle informs the constitution’s approach to cultural diversity and the conflict-
ing demands of tradition and modernity. These tensions permeate the document
as a whole, but they emerge most clearly in the section detailing the ‘Fundamental
Duties’ of every citizen (Section 51A), three of which stand out: every Indian citi-
zen is bound ‘to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture’, ‘to
develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’, and
‘to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people
of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities; to
renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women’.42 These contending and
converging duties reflect what Jacobsohn aptly calls India’s constitutional trad-
ition of ‘ameliorative secularism’ which commits the state and its citizens to fos-
tering, rather than simply tolerating, diverse linguistic, cultural, and religious
traditions, on the one hand, and to promoting modernization and reform, on the
other.43 I return to the distinctive aspects of this tradition in Chapter 8. No doubt
 Introduction 15

most European and American observers of Austin’s generation—he was born in

1927 and published his classic study of India’s constitution in 1966—would have
found this particular form of accommodation, which anticipated international
debates about multi- and interculturalism by over two decades, as baffling as any
of the others.
It would not have baffled Tagore. Indeed, he would probably have been heart-
ened by it and by the fact that the consensus about ‘ameliorative secularism’ was
achieved in the face of strong opposition from the more extreme Hindu national-
ists in the Constituent Assembly. Ever since giving a provocative series of lectures
condemning nationalism during the First World War, he had always affirmed
India’s historic diversity, holding it up as a counter to the ideals of ‘racial unity’ that
fuelled the ‘political and commercial aggressiveness’ characteristic of ‘Western
Nationality’.44 Reflecting his own syncretic, and, as we shall see, anti-statist, vision
of Hinduism, he argued that India had ‘produced something like a United States
of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism’.45 At the same time he
had been as outspoken about its need to modernize, given its ‘idolatry of dead
forms in social institutions’, the caste system above all, which he saw as orthodox
Hinduism’s most deplorable legacy.46 As the Indian political commentator Sachin
Sen remarked in 1961, however, Tagore would have questioned the constitution’s
commitment to ‘the concept of the social service State’ which was ‘the anti-thesis
of [his] political philosophy’.47 This founding affirmation was reinforced, and,
controversially, given a more specific political inflection, when Indira Gandhi’s
government added the words ‘SOCIALIST’ and ‘SECULAR’ to the preamble
during the Emergency of the mid-1970s, re-describing India as a ‘SOVEREIGN
SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC’.48 Though Tagore fash-
ioned his own political philosophy out of an eclectic blend of traditions, ranging
from, among others, Buddhism to nineteenth-century English liberalism and from
medieval Indian spiritualism to the anarchic humanism of the Bāul singers of
Bengal, it centred on a profound scepticism about the modern Europeanized
nation-state, or, more specifically, about state sovereignty and the allied idea of
national self-determination. While he feared the first because, as Sen put it, ‘the
national spirit, promoted by the nation-State has an “imperialism” of its own’; he
refused to fetishize the second because he believed ‘people must think internation-
ally or perish’—given Tagore’s preference for the term ‘civilization’, the adverb
‘intercivilizationally’ applies equally well.49 ‘Because we have failed to see the great
character of India [as a civilization] in relation to the world as a whole’, he wrote
in 1921, ‘we have been inclined in our thoughts and actions to follow a much
diminished idea of it [as a nation-state], an idea bred of our calculating minds that
casts no light.’50 In fact, since this ‘kind of thinking’, which he saw as a deforming
European import, posed as much of a threat to India’s own diverse communities,
it would be fair to say he believed people must think interculturally at all levels or
perish. This belief underpinned his own capacity for accommodation, making it
possible for him to condemn both the British partition of Bengal and the nationalist
reaction to it, just as he denounced colonial rule more generally while simultaneously
questioning the terms in which it was being resisted.
16 Introduction

Yet, as Tagore’s own language indicates, his scepticism was at least as philosoph-
ical or even poetic as it was political. Though he sounded at times more like an
­anarchist than a liberal, his target was not just modern constitutionalism, or the
rhetoric of anti-colonial state-building, but the forms of thought he took them to
exemplify. Here, too, his concerns centred on the question of cultural diversity.
India, he wrote in 1917, was right to revere what the constitution came to call
‘our composite culture’, but ‘what she failed to realize was that in human beings
differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever—they are
fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and vol-
ume’, always part of a ‘world-game of infinite permutations and combinations’.51
Given the philosophical foundations on which the sovereign, self-determining,
Europeanized modern state rested, and the fact that it concerns itself only with
‘the aspect of a whole people as an organized power’—recall Parekh’s description
of the constitution as ‘a collectively agreed structure of authority’ that ‘stabilizes
the wider political process’—Tagore believed this labile, unpredictable aspect of
diversity would always elude its grasp.52 He was, in this respect, closer to Pierre
Bourdieu, from whom I have taken the third epigraph for this book, who believed
that ‘when it comes to the state, one never doubts enough’, than to James Tully,
who argues that contemporary constitutions can be redesigned to ‘preserve legal,
political and cultural plurality rather than impose uniformity and regularity’.53
For Tully, constitutions should be understood as ‘continual negotiations’, not as
‘fixed and unchangeable agreements reached at some foundational moment’.54
Yet, as his own language suggests, this is easier thought than said or written.
Describing his own intercultural ideals, he finds the allure of a reifying metaphor
irresistible: ‘the strength of the constitutional fabric’, he claims, ‘consists in the
interweaving of ­different threads.’55 I return to the questions this kind of language
raises in Chapters 3 and 6.
Given his doubts about the state and the mono-, multi, or intercultural ideals
expressed in constitutions, Tagore put his faith in civil society and the very differ-
ent ‘ideals that strive to take form in social institutions’.56 As an educationalist who
founded an alternative school and university in Bengal, he chose to express his own
ideals institutionally through centres of learning committed to creative expression
and to particular forms of intercultural exchange that would not only open Indian
civilization to the world but enable it to cast its own light abroad.b Visva-Bharati,
which he founded in 1921 as a counter to the European idea of the university, spe-
cifically to Calcutta University which the British established in 1857, was dedi-
cated to upholding ‘India’s obligation to offer to others the hospitality of her best
culture and India’s right to accept from others their best’.57 Unlike Calcutta
University, which he believed was given over to ‘book-learning’, even ‘intellectual
infanticide’, and to turning Bengali into an ‘artificial language’ wholly devoid
of ‘creative vitality’, it was committed to ‘the creation of new thought by new
­combinations of truths’ and to using the ‘shock’ of the ‘foreign’ to strengthen ‘the
vitality of our intellect’—here again the ‘our’ referred to India as a civilization.58
On this Tagorean model of the intercultural, which balances obligations and rights,
the indigenous and the foreign, and puts the emphasis on the vitalizing effects of
 Introduction 17

mutual transformation, ‘purified nationalism’ is as much of a problem as ‘rootless

cosmopolitanism’, to use a familiar distinction Tully cites—as we shall see, it is no
less at odds with the conventional forms of relativism and universalism that have
haunted organizations like UNESCO.59 After his early nationalist phase as a young
poet, Tagore devoted himself to the same intercultural cause as a writer, experi-
menting with various literary modes in both English and Bengali in an effort to
fashion a language of collective self-affirmation which, unlike the state’s reifying
and potentially coercive language of sovereignty and self-determination, or plural-
ity and compositeness, would be equal to the challenge of thinking interculturally
in the midst of ‘life’s flow’.60 That two of his songs later became national anthems
for two very different countries, one for India, the other for Bangladesh, was char-
acteristic of the range of his own oeuvre and the complexity of his vision. I return
to this in Chapter 4.
For Tagore, the ‘social’ rather than ‘political’ task of building a culturally and
creatively diverse civil society was not India’s alone; it was, as he wrote in his 1917
lectures, one that confronted ‘all nations’.61 It proved to be no less demanding for
an organization like UNESCO which, as I show in Chapter 2 and in the prologue
to Part II, has struggled to come to terms with diversity throughout its history,
partly because it is essentially a multistate body. As a brief comparison of the con-
stitutions of Ireland (1937) and South Africa (1996) shows, the challenges have
remained no less acute at the level of individual states. In the tradition of modern
democratic, secular republicanism, established by the US and followed by India,
the South African constitution begins with the paradoxically self-constituting
declarative phrase ‘We, the people’. By contrast, the Irish constitution starts in the
imperative mode: ‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all
authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must
be referred’—the phrase ‘We, the people of Éire’ then follows.62 This reflects the
priorities of its principal architect, Éamon de Valera, who, as a devout Catholic
nationalist, was committed to the idea of ‘an anti-materialist, rural, self-sufficient,
Gaelic Ireland’.63 Though the constitution did not go so far as to establish a state
religion, Article 44.2 noted ‘the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic
and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of
the citizens’, effectively giving the other Christian denominations it listed and the
Jewish faith an official but secondary status. This Article was deleted in 1972 partly
in the interests of promoting religious diversity, and partly to meet the require-
ments for joining the European Union which Ireland did the following year. Given
the history of apartheid’s divisiveness, the South African preamble highlights the
need to ‘build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place
as a sovereign state in the family of nations’.64 In response to pressure from
Afrikaner nationalists, however, a clause was added to the Bill of Rights protecting
‘persons belonging to a cultural, religious or linguistic community’ (Section 31).65
These rights may not trump any others, and they can be limited in ways that are
‘justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality
and freedom’ (Section 36), but, as the anti-apartheid activist and linguist Neville
Alexander noted in 2001, they represent a potential threat to the ideals of shared
18 Introduction

democratic citizenship (see Chapter 6). To mitigate this, Alexander believed it was
essential to reconceptualize diversity. Having rejected the reifying language ‘favoured
by the dominant classes, who prefer a universe that is perceived to be stable and
static’, he argued that ‘our goal, if I may paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, should be the
depiction of the world as changing and changeable’.66 Tagore would have approved,
though he would probably have questioned Alexander’s Brechtian idea that ‘the
dominant classes’ have a monopoly on the language of reification. Alexander
repeated his call for reconceptualization during a UNESCO debate about diversity
in 2007 (see Prologue to Part II).
There is one final observation I should make at this point about the links
between these three constitutions, given my own larger argument. As artefacts of
writing, all three are not only instances of ‘sight English’, to recall Ingraham’s
­taxonomy, they were all, like UNESCO’s founding constitution, originally framed
and drafted in English. In the Irish and Indian cases this was not fortuitous.
Having taken advice from de Valera, who told him that the Irish constitution-
makers had found Gaelic ‘hard going’, Jawaharlal Nehru successfully argued dur-
ing the heated Constituent Assembly debates about language that the original
English version had initially to be given priority over any translations, notably
into Hindi.67 Nonetheless, given the painful legacies of colonialism, all the parties
to the various negotiations, whether in Ireland in the 1930s, India in the 1940s,
or South Africa in the 1990s, were acutely conscious of the language question
which, as Gandhi remarked in 1918, lay at the heart of any project to reclaim the
dignity of a colonized people and build a viable post-colonial state. ‘It is my hum-
ble but firm opinion’, he wrote, ‘that unless we give Hindi its national status and
the provincial languages their due place in the life of the people, all talk of Swaraj
[“self-rule”] is useless.’68 During a political speech defending Gaelic in 1937, de
Valera put it more philosophically. Recalling one of the central tenets of the lin-
guistic relativity thesis, he argued that ‘the best way to preserve the philosophy of
life, to preserve the distinctive and spiritual and cultural life, of the people is the
language’.69 Given the particularities of their respective colonial pasts, each group
of constitution-makers addressed the challenge of linguistic recuperation and the
question of the future legal status of English differently. While the Irish recog-
nized Gaelic as ‘the national language’ and ‘the first official language’, making
English the second, the South Africans granted it equal ‘official’ status alongside
ten others, ranging from Afrikaans to isiZulu, none of which is designated
‘national’. Partly because of the pressures from Hindu nationalists, partly because
the debates were overtaken by the trauma of Partition, and partly because of the
complexities of India’s multilingual polity which are never purely linguistic—they
involve multiple scripts and numerical systems as well—the Indian constitution-
makers were eventually obliged to abandon their favoured ‘principle of accommo-
dation’ and to settle for what Austin called a ‘half-hearted compromise’.70
While they declared ‘Hindi in the Devanagari script’ to be ‘the official language
of the Union’, deliberately setting it apart from Urdu while at the same time
avoiding Gandhi’s incendiary word ‘national’, they authorized the continued use
of English in parliament and the courts for a period of fifteen years when its status
 Introduction 19

would be reviewed (Articles 343–9).71 They also recognized a further fourteen

(later twenty-two) regional languages in a separate schedule, including Urdu
which became the national language of Pakistan, made provision for linguistic
minorities, and, more remarkably, proposed to develop a new multilingual Hindi
‘as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India’
(Article 351).72 I consider the ­history and longer-term consequences of these
compromises in Chapter 7.

COMMUNITIES OF LETTERS

As a poet-philosopher and champion of alternative education who escaped the

strictures of formal schooling in colonial India largely because of his wealthy ­family
background, Tagore was always wary of ‘professionalism’ which he provocatively
linked to the ‘Cult of the Nation’. Driving home the analogy, he called it ‘the
region where men specialise their knowledge and organise their power, mercilessly
elbowing each other in their struggle to come to the front’.73 For some of his
­critics, particularly those committed to the established academic disciplines, each
with their own sovereign territories, scholarly cultures, official languages, and rites
of naturalization, this made him at best an idealistic dreamer, at worst a dilettantish
dabbler. In a long letter of May 1922, turning down an invitation to join the
­governing body of Visva-Bharati, Jadunath Sarkar, then India’s leading academic
historian, insisted that a university education was about ‘intellectual discipline and
exact knowledge’, not about what Tagore in Bengali called creative ‘ananda’ (liter-
ally, ‘joy’ or ‘delight’).74 Yet the issue was never professionalism as such for Tagore.
‘Professionalism is necessary, without doubt’, he wrote in Creative Unity (1922),
‘but it must not be allowed to exceed its healthy limits.’75 This book pays homage
to Tagore’s wariness, or, put more positively, to his willingness to think outside
compartmentalized disciplines of any kind. It does so in two ways: first by being
an exercise in Tagorean intellectual history, and second by developing a style of
literary criticism or, rather, anti-criticism after Tagore. This, too, needs some
­preliminary explanation.
Throughout this book I refer to individual thinkers and writers, ranging from
the familiar (Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot) to the relatively obscure (Léon
Metchnikoff and Fritz Mauthner), all of whom contributed significantly to the
history of ideas about language, culture, community, and the state since the 1860s.
Yet, following Tagore, I recognize that such ideas belong not only to the history of
thought, but to the history of individual and collective action—ideas as a spur to
mass mobilization—and to the history of institutions—ideas as a motive force
shaping, and in turn shaped by, ‘social’ (non-state) and ‘political’ (state) bodies of
various kinds. The emphasis I place on social institutions in particular reflects my
indebtedness not only to Tagore but to the cultural turn within international rela-
tions which the historian Akira Iriye effected in the late 1990s when he set out ‘to
examine the history of international relations since the late nineteenth century not
as a story of the interactions among sovereign states but in terms of cross-national
20 Introduction

activities by individuals and groups of people, not always or primarily as represen-

tatives of governments but as agents for movements transcending national
­entities’.76 Some of the specific ‘cross-national activities’ I consider are, indeed, wholly
‘social’ in Tagore’s sense or ‘cultural’ in Iriye’s. The best examples being the many
‘little magazines’ I discuss, ranging from T. S. Eliot’s Criterion and Eugene Jolas’s
transition, which linked up the metropolitan literary worlds of Paris, New York, and
London in the 1920s and 1930s, to Es’kia Mphahlele’s The Voice of Africa and Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra’s damn you, which promoted new forms of cultural internation-
alism from, respectively, a Johannesburg township in the early 1950s and the suburbs
of Allahabad a decade later. Other such initiatives include the many international
language projects linguists developed from the late-nineteenth century, the most
successful of which was Esperanto, and, of course, the ‘cross-national’ or intercul-
tural activity of writing itself or at least the literary forms that feature prominently
in this book.
Exactly where some of the other activities on which I focus might be placed on
the social-political, civil-state spectrum is less clear. This is particularly true of the
International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC), the precursor to
UNESCO established under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1922.
Though set up in part to advise the League’s Council on cultural matters, it pro-
tected its autonomy by insisting its members serve in their own right not as state
representatives, and by developing its own forms of cultural internationalism
which included fostering relations among universities, sponsoring the newly emer-
gent field of international relations itself, and, perhaps most significantly for my
purposes, attempting to recreate a new globalized ‘Republic of Letters’ during the
interwar years. Though UNESCO was deliberately designed to curb the ICIC’s
autonomy—its own governing body comprises state representatives—it, too, cre-
ated a degree of independence for itself, developing initiatives of its own and, as
importantly, ways of thinking about cultural questions that sometimes go beyond
the terms member states are collectively willing or able to accept. As I argue in the
Prologue to Part II, the disjunction between the concept of cultural diversity as
UNESCO came to define it in a long-running series of internal debates and as
the member states articulated it in formal policy documents at the turn of the
­millennium is among the most striking examples of these conflicted dynamics.
My interest in tracing the tangled relations between the social and the political,
the intellectual and the institutional, the national and the international, also goes
some way towards explaining why this book begins with a chapter on the University
of Oxford. Historically, or at least from the early modern period, the university strove,
as a ‘social institution’ in Tagore’s sense, to embody the ideals of the European
‘REIPUBLICAEQUE LITERATORUM’ (‘Republic of Letters’), as the Latin inscrip-
tion over the main entrance to the Bodleian Library declares. The entrance forms
part of the library’s inner quadrangle which was completed in 1619.c Yet, as the
dedicatory inscription below the figure of King James I on the opposite side of the
quadrangle indicates, which is also in Latin, the lingua franca of the seventeenth-
century Republic of Letters, the historic ideals of a self-governing ‘cross-national’
scholarly community depended substantially on state patronage. ‘Of kings the
 Introduction 21

most learned, the most generous and the best’, the inscription reads, while the
statue shows James ‘presenting copies of his published works to female figures
representing Fame and the university’.77 The most epochal of these works was the
‘King James’ Bible (1611) to which Oxford scholars contributed, marking the
university’s slow, often grudging adjustment to the rise of the vernacular lan-
guages in the world of learning and beyond. Oxford University Press went on to
publish what became the standard edition in 1769. At the point at which I take
up the story of Oxford’s many entanglements a century later, the university was a
very different place in a very different Europe. Yet, since it is in the nature of
enduring institutions for their legacies to become embedded not just in stone
statues and inscriptions but in everyday practices and ways of thinking, the
emblematic juxtaposition of monarchical power and scholarly republicanism in
the Bodleian’s ­quadrangle, which reflects Oxford’s own customary ‘principle of
accommodation’, remains as pertinent today as it was in the early seventeenth
century and the late nineteenth.
Under pressure from some members of its own community who deplored its
‘idolatry of dead forms’, to recall Tagore’s phrase, and from the British state, now
in the guise of a democratic government elected on a limited male franchise, the
university began an extensive programme of modernization in the mid-nineteenth
century that eventually led to its formally supporting the study of modern
European languages and to the establishment of the School of English in 1894. At
around the same time, the academic Delegates of the University Press agreed to
underwrite what became the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest and most costly
lexicographical project ever undertaken. As I show in Chapter 1, these develop-
ments provoked intense quarrels not just about the intricacies of university politics
and the protocols of disciplinary knowledge in the late-nineteenth century, but
about the identity of the English language, the university’s historic role as a guard-
ian of classical humanistic values (or European ‘civilization’), and its new responsi-
bilities as a curator of the nation’s vernacular literary heritage (or ‘national
character’). These debates were, of course, nothing new, and they were not peculiar
to Oxford. When it came to the study of English literature, Edinburgh University
led the way in the 1760s, with the Indian-founded Hindu College in Calcutta
­following in the 1810s, London in the 1830s, and Trinity College Dublin in the
1860s.d Though Cambridge began to debate the question of modern languages at
around the same time as Oxford, it created its own Faculty of English only in
1919. I focus on Oxford for two main reasons: first because the OED turned it into
a globally iconic guardian of the language, and second because the university had
a disproportionate influence on the tradition of cultural internationalism developed
within the League of Nations, and, indirectly, within the very different tradition
that took shape under the auspices of the UN. Referring to the emergence of the
new world order after 1945, the political historian Mark Mazower notes: ‘If the
failed Versailles order had been the work of a generation of Oxbridge classicists,
perhaps now American social science, as handmaiden to enlightened statesman-
ship, could take over and help find a solution to the European Malthusian
­nightmare.’78 One of the most influential figures among these ‘Oxbridge classicists’
22 Introduction

was, as we shall see, Gilbert Murray, Professor of Greek at Oxford in the first decades
of the twentieth century.
For Tagore, the challenge diversity poses for any modern society is as intellectual
as it is institutional, since the two are mutually influential. Centres of learning like
Visva-Bharati had, in his view, not just to be autonomous; they had to promote
vitalizing modes of creative expression as a counter to the reifying thought of the
state—hence the provocative force of the equation he drew between academic pro-
fessionalism and nationalism. As commentators have long observed, this has a
special pertinence in the case of vernacular literary studies which allied themselves
to the nation-state from their inception, institutionalizing the idea of a national
literature in university and school curricula. Yet, for Tagore, this was only part of a
larger and more worrying problem. As he saw it, academic literary critics were all
too often driven by the same territorial imperatives as nationalists, and, worse still,
the critical ethos and language they favoured, far from countering official thinking,
only reinforced it. ‘Worthy critics have a pair of scales at their disposal’, he wrote
with mock reverence in an essay of 1894. ‘They have worked out a fixed weight and
number of set formulations for literature: whatever composition is placed before
them, they can confidently stamp it on the back with the appropriate number and
seal.’79 This figure of the critic as assured dealer in cultural goods and guardian of
the canon, for whom literature is a reified commodity that can be known in
advance and valued precisely, cast a shadow over the first half of the twentieth
century when criticism, like many other emergent fields in the humanities,
attempted to establish its academic credentials by modelling itself on the natural
sciences. This was the burden of Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
and René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949)—to name only
two conspicuous examples—but, as we have seen, the same ambitions informed
Ogden and Richards’s project to found a ‘science of Symbolism’ and Gelb’s ‘science
of writing’.80 For Tagore, this made criticism little more than an exercise in label-
ling and categorization which has nothing to do with literature as a vitalizing
mode of creative thought and everything to do with the critic’s own ‘calculating
mind’. Given his irritation at various Marxist and materialist attempts to write
him off as a bourgeois idealist in the interwar years, it is likely he would have been
as dismayed by the turn against criticism’s early scientific pretensions in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century when, as Rita Felski notes, academic critics
became wedded to a new professional ethos which she calls ‘critique’.81 In this
guise, the critic is no longer the assured masculine dealer in cultural goods but, in
Felski’s colourful formulation, the anti- or counter-canonical feminized ‘scholar-
turned-sleuth’ who ‘broods over matters of fault and complicity; she pieces
together a causal sequence that allows her to identify a crime, impute a motive,
interpret clues, and track down the guilty party’.82 For this kind of critic, it is as
if one never doubts enough when it comes to literature, rather than the state. For
all its antagonism to the earlier models, this alternative, which drew heavily on
the social and political rather than the natural sciences, has as little time for criti-
cism as ‘a coproduction between actors [“reader” and “text”] that brings new
things to light’, as Felski put it.83
 Introduction 23

Tagore’s answer to the problems of criticism he identified in the 1890s was to

advocate a kind of anti-criticism in which the critic ‘eschews argument and classi-
fication’ in the interest of reclaiming literature as a vitalizing object of experience,
rather than an inert object of study.84 For this self-consciously inexpert anti-critic,
he wrote, the point is ‘to gift his readers only with the state of mind induced in him
on reading’.85 This comes close to prefiguring Derek Attridge’s recent characteriza-
tion of his own post-critique style of criticism that centres on literature as an
­experiential ‘event’. ‘A work of literature as constituted within a given cultural
context’, he explains in one nuanced formulation, ‘would be a linguistic text that,
when read in the appropriate way, yields a literary experience.’86 As he recognizes,
this way of putting it risks circularity and threatens to turn criticism into a form of
autobiography, much like Tagore’s appeal to the critic’s ‘state of mind’. Yet, for
Attridge, these risks are worth taking since they make it possible for critics to avoid
the fictions of objectivity that deform other academic disciplines, notably philosophy.
‘Philosophers may write as if their words are impersonal expressions of truth, sub
specie aeternitatis’, he notes, ‘but the critic doesn’t need this kind of illusion: we
write as individuals, with individual combinations of knowledge, prejudice, skill,
and sensitivity.’87 This sounds like an endorsement of Tagorean subjectivism but,
as Attridge is quick to point out, the alternative to philosophical or scientific
impersonality is not anti-critical impressionism but a kind of critical communal-
ism: ‘I belong to a group whose members share a great many of my own mental
and emotional habits and norms—or, to be more exact, I belong to a series of
groups that operate in concentric circles, each one sharing less with me than the
one inside it—and my reading practices are in part determined by those habits and
norms.’88 The qualification ‘in part’ is key since this leaves room both for what
Attridge calls each reader’s evolving ‘idioculture’ and for literary works themselves,
or rather the experiential events they make possible through acts of ‘coproduction’,
to ‘bring new things to light’, disrupting and potentially transforming communal
as well as individual ‘habits and norms’, including preconceived ideas of literature,
and, in the process, gifting others with something more than an autobiographical
report of the critic’s own ‘state of mind’.89 The emphasis Tagore placed on the need
to strengthen ‘the vitality of our intellect’ via the shock of the foreign suggests that,
despite his own subjectivist phrasing, he too entertained these wider communal
possibilities.
Part of the value of seeing reading as an act of ‘coproduction’, particularly one
that involves a constant process of learning and unlearning, is that it keeps profes-
sionalized academic literary criticism within ‘healthy limits’. In my own case, it has
also helped to define the subject, scope, and structure of this book. Though many
reading experiences, rather than any fixed set of norms or methodological principles,
let alone any general theory of criticism, have shaped and continue to shape my
own evolving engagement with literary writing—all the writers and works featured
in Part II have been especially influential, for instance—repeated, often bewilder-
ing, encounters over a number of years with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)
proved pivotal for this book. As I return to this in Chapter 3, I shall h ­ ighlight
only two details at this point, each of which has a bearing on Attridge’s seemingly
24 Introduction

circular characterization of literature as an experiential ‘event’ and Felski’s related

concept of ‘coproduction’. The first concerns the context within which Joyce wrote
the Wake or, to borrow his own figure, the ‘envelope’ into which he placed his
‘­letter’. Drawing on various genetic studies, which document the extraordinary range
of his source materials, I consider the ways in which the Wake belongs not to the
history of literature—though it of course occupies a singular place there as well—
but to the history of thought, focusing on some key if often marginalized examples
of the political, linguistic, and philosophical thinking that emerged out of late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe. In each case, however, my con-
cern is not to construct a genealogy of influence or to track Joyce’s compositional
methods. Rather, it is to draw attention to his practice of creative adaptation,
showing how each thought-envelope opens up a different perspective on the liter-
ary experience the letter-Wake yields when framed in this way. Following the logic
of Joyce’s figure, this experience cannot of course be limited to the context of writ-
ing or initial production since envelopes by definition both contain and do not
contain their contents. Part of my own purpose in this book, which is inevitably a
contemporary envelope for Joyce’s now historical letter, is to show how the
­experience of reading the Wake can be recycled in different intellectual and institu-
tional contexts, raising no less challenging questions about the history of thought
beyond Joyce’s time and place.
As I have already hinted with reference to Anderson and Slaughter, Joyce’s
inventive approach to the perennial problem of text/context, or letter/envelope,
has wider implications for my own argument. Both Imagined Communities and
Human Rights, Inc. see literary works—or, rather, the ‘old-fashioned novel’ and the
Bildungsroman—as analogues to various statist ideas of community, as, in effect,
supplementary letters within these larger context-framing envelopes. Developing
this aspect of his analysis, Slaughter notes that ‘part of the historical literary social
work of the Bildungsroman is to naturalize and universalize the impossible
­temporality and contorted conceptual grammar of human rights personality develop-
ment, so that the rules of its composition appear commonsensical’—hence the play
on the American legal abbreviation ‘Inc.’ (‘Incorporated’) in his title.90 Discreetly
extending the range of his central thesis, he adds in his conclusion: ‘I have attempted
to show the mutuality, complementarity, and complicity of literature and the law as
they cooperate in mundane, but important, ways to universalize and naturalize the
­normative image of the human in human rights.’91 Much the same could be said
about Anderson’s account of the novel as an instrument for incorporating the
­normative idea and temporalities of the nation among the reading public. Given
Slaughter’s resonant word ‘complicity’, it is not difficult to see how this kind of
analysis feeds the professionalized ethos of critique in Felski’s sense.
Though many writers see themselves as the guardians or heralds of one or
another idea of community in the way Anderson and Slaughter envisage, willingly
embracing a role to which many cultures and sub-cultures attach considerable
value, and though many institutions, including schools and universities, promote
literature because it has the potential to produce incorporative public effects of the
kind they analyse, most of the writers on whom I focus in this book have sought,
 Introduction 25

like Joyce, to create different spaces for themselves and their work. For them, writ-
ing, and by extension reading, is not a supplementary act or event of incorporation
but a singular act or event of disincorporation, particularly vis-à-vis state-spon-
sored ideas of community whether monocultural, multicultural, intercultural, or
something else. Following his early nationalist phase, this, as I have suggested, was
true of Tagore as well. Does this mean these writers have an alternative vision of
community we might identify with a single name? Some negative possibilities have
been suggested, especially in the French philosophical tradition. After Jean-Luc
Nancy proposed the Tagorean idea of an ‘inoperative’, ‘goalless’, or ‘unorganized’
(désouvreé ) community in the late 1980s, Maurice Blanchot countered with the
more emphatically negative Beckettian adjective ‘unavowable’ or ‘unnameable’
(inavouable).92 Yet, since each writer, indeed each work, articulates this seemingly
impossible sense of community differently as a literary experience rather than as an
idea, it is sufficient, for my purposes, to call their alternative anti- or simply
non-statist. All the more positive terms—‘universal’, ‘international’, ‘cosmopolitan’,
‘world’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’, even Tagore’s ‘civilizational’—are either too gener-
alized, too liable to conceptual reification, or too freighted with their own ques-
tionable histories, though if I had to settle for a single affirmative term Joyce’s
Wake-word ‘everintermutuomergent’ seems more fitting than most.93 I return to
the question of reading and disincorporation in Chapter 3 in relation to Joyce, and
across all the chapters in Part II, each of which links a writer or group of writers
active in the period after 1945 to particular policy debates and ways of thinking
about community within UNESCO, focusing on questions of cultural and lin-
guistic diversity as well as a range of normative ideals and concepts, including
humanism, translation, indigenous knowledge, universalism, and relativism.
The second way in which the experience of reading Finnegans Wake has been
pivotal for this book can best be summarized by rephrasing Attridge’s language-
centred characterization of literature as an experiential event: ‘A work of literature
as constituted within a given cultural context would be an artefact of writing that,
when read in the appropriate way, yields a literary experience.’ Among the many
explicit and admonitory reading lessons the notoriously unreadable and unread
Wake offers is that, from the very beginning, we learn to read in an inappropriate
way because we are habituated, through the schooling system and its processes of
incorporation, to look through rather than at writing (see Chapters 5 and 6). To
follow Joyce’s own provocative figure for this, which centres on the impulsive
desires of a heterosexual male voyeur, we strip away the writing, whether as so-called
‘ordinary’ orthographic readers, for whom the meaning is all, or as professional
literary critics, for whom the ‘set formulations for literature’ or the ‘linguistic text’
or the ‘guilty’ subtext is all. At one level, the Wake is a compendium of puzzles
designed to frustrate this culturally acquired desire. Like some elaborate neurosci-
entific experiment, it probes the limits of literacy, interfering with our orthographic
expertise by confronting us with unfamiliar pseudo-words (‘shuit’), new coinages
(‘mutuomorphomutation’), plays on word separation (‘bi tso fb rok engl a ssan
dspl itch ina’), and by insisting, like Ingraham, on the uniquely visual qualities
of the English writing system.94 The latter are conspicuously displayed in its
26 Introduction

unpunctuated title which can be made to mean very different things with no
change to the words or letters understood as graphemes representing phonemes—
compare Finnegan’s Wake to Finnegans, Wake! Moreover, again like Ingraham, Joyce
insists, partly through his ubiquitous use of puns, on a categorical distinction
between what might be called ‘sight-Wakese’ and ‘sound-Wakese’.
At another level, however, the Wake is rather more than an overly long experi-
mental word-game. As an Irish writer born in 1882, Joyce confronted the chal-
lenge of writing in what was, for Ireland, an imposed foreign language in various
ways throughout his career, but when he began the Wake in the early 1920s, soon
after the publication of Ulysses and the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922, he
chose neither to recuperate Gaelic in the interests of reclaiming the dignity of the
Irish people, nor to remake colonial English by indigenizing it as an independent
Ireland’s second official language—the Free State constitution prefigured the
­language provisions of 1937. Rather, he decided to disintegrate and re-foreignize
it, partly through his signature device of the interlingual portmanteau, while
simultaneously extending its expressive potential, thereby disabling its capacity to
be the bearer of any one culture, idealized ‘national character’, or reified
Weltanschauung. In Chapter 3, I focus on the implications this has for literature as a
vitalizing mode of thought and on the extreme literary experience it affords which,
to recall Tagore’s ambitions for the kind of education he hoped Visva-Bharati would
offer its students, centres on the transformative shock of the foreign. Across the book
as a whole, I reflect on the consequences of this not just for how we look at the
English language and its writing system but for how we think about culture and
community outside the reifying terms of the state. In Part II, I also consider the
longer-term significance of Joyce’s re-foreignizing strategies for writers from beyond
the Euro-American Anglosphere who chose English as a literary medium after 1945.

F RO M M AT T H E W A R N O L D TO X U B I N G

This book was written mostly in 2015, exactly fifty years after the conference, held
in the Iraqi city of Basra, which marked a turning point in the emergence of the
‘World State’—at least according to The Shape of Things to Come, the fictional
‘­history of the future’ H. G. Wells published in 1933.95 Written out of his sense of
outrage at the horrors of nationalism and empire and his exasperation at the fail-
ures of the two dominant forms of early-twentieth-century internationalism—the
League of Nations and the Communist International—the story envisages an
alternative future, confidently dividing history into a series of epochs, the most
recent of which it calls the ‘Era of European Predominance’ or the ‘Era of National
Sovereignty’ which it dates from the Treaty of Westphalia to the First World War (27).
As this suggests, Wells, like many of his generation, associated nationalism with
state-sponsored violence, not with popular emancipation. According to his epochal
model, the end of the war also marks the beginning of the ‘Era of the Modern
State’, though he identifies the chaotic years from 1919 to 2059 as a sub-epoch,
calling it the ‘Age of Frustration’ (27). The 1965 Basra conference signals a new phase
 Introduction 27

in this era because it inaugurates the ‘Air Dictatorship’, an uncompromising regime

that finally confronts the task of building the modern state apparatus required to
forge a ‘single world community’ (26). This is not just because the ­aviators are
among the first to appreciate the advantages of globalized collective planning and
unification, but because it is a ‘conference of scientific and technical workers’ who
recognize that ‘there can be only one right way of looking at the world for a normal
human being’ (292, 347).
In their later guise as the puritanical ‘Modern State Fellowship’, the architects of
the new world order abolish the ‘Arts and Law curricula of the old regime’, giving
pride of place to ‘General Psychology’ and ‘social science’ in their new system of
‘mental disinfection’ (377, 379). They have a particular aversion to the ‘aesthetic
and sexual preoccupations’ of modern literature and to Finnegans Wake above all
(415). In the end, however, the ‘stern and thorough cleansing of human life’ they
institute turns out only to be a temporary if painfully protracted phase (417). After
almost a century of enforced re-education, the collectivized, Soviet-style world
economy is functioning, all religions have been purged, and C. K. Ogden’s Basic
English is established as the lingua franca—this was Ogden’s influential answer to
the international language debates of the early twentieth century. Once the foun-
dational dirty work is done, however, a new ‘modernized World-State, socialistic,
cosmopolitan and creative’ emerges in which ‘individuality’ and even the ‘aesthetic
ideals of the past’ make a return (442, 446). Wells reaffirmed this reconciliatory
conclusion in The Rights of Man (1940), a prescient ‘Penguin Special’ in which he
sketched a new international human rights order, anticipating a non-fictional
future in which ‘socialism’ and ‘individualism’ might each have a place—these
were the late-nineteenth-century terms in which he thought. ‘This collectivism
which is rolling down upon us from the East knows nothing of the tradition of
personal rights’, he wrote, confirming his early disillusionment with Stalinism.
Yet, since the Soviet system represented the only viable means towards social and
economic justice, he argued it was essential for ‘our Atlantic world’, that is, Britain
and the US, to ‘see to it that it is collectivism in the freedom and the light’.96
I return to Wells’s statist idea of a ‘single world community’ at various points in
what follows. My only reason for invoking it here is that it highlights one final
aspect of this book’s scope and structure. Part I covers the years 1867 to 1945,
focusing primarily on England, Ireland, and Europe; Part II, which begins with a
short prologue surveying the history of the concept of culture within UNESCO
from its inception to the present, then extends the historical range from 1946 to
2014, centering primarily on a disparate group of writers from South Africa and
India. The postscript in which I discuss the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing
pushes the geographical range further still. Yet, given the emphasis I place on non-
state actors, and, more importantly, on anti- or non-state forms of writing, the
literary geographies I trace have little or nothing to do with the state’s mappings of
the world or, indeed, with the traditionally statist geographies academic literary
studies, whether in their national or comparativist modes, have tended to favour.
In some cases, these alternative literary geographies recognize the importance of
the nation, opening up ways of seeing ‘the great character of India’, or Ireland or
28 Introduction

England or South Africa or China, in ‘relation to the world as a whole’, to recall

Tagore, but in other cases they follow a very different set of trajectories that begin
at city level (Arnold’s Oxford, Joyce’s Dublin, Mehrotra’s Allahabad, Krog’s
Kroonstad, or Chaudhuri’s London), traverse various local, national, regional, and
supra-national boundaries, and only then open out to ‘the rest of the world’
(see Fig. I.1). As the Wake has it, the ‘citye of Is’ is at once ‘urban and orbal’.97 On
this account, the pathway leads from city to world, though when we begin at ground
or page level, as it were, with the literary experience each work and each co-pro-
ductive act of reading affords, then the movement is never one-way or predictable.
Thinking interlingually and interculturally in these terms involves re-imagining
‘the history of literature in the world’, to borrow an incidental formulation from
Rebecca Walkowitz’s recent critical study Born Translated (2015), while resisting
the temptation to call for ‘a new idea of literature’ (i.e. ‘World Literature’) appro-
priate to a global age, the focal point of Walkowitz’s own argument.98
For all her openness to conceiving ‘community as something we discover’
through each act of reading rather than as a pre-given ‘linguistic, territorial, or
political entity concurrent with either author or reader’, Walkowitz remains profes-
sionally committed to a version of ‘World’ literary studies formulated along the
lines the American scholar David Damrosch has promoted over the past decade or
more.99 ‘A generation ago, when the term “world literature” was used in North
America’, Damrosch notes in his field-defining Longman Anthology (2009), ‘it
largely meant masterworks by European writers from Homer onward, together
with a few favoured North American writers, heirs to the Europeans. Today, how-
ever, it is generally recognized that Europe is only part of the story of the world’s
literatures, and only part of the story of North America’s cultural heritage.’100
Given the geographical scope of this book, it would be easy enough to tag it as a
further contribution to this burgeoning field. Yet, as I have already intimated,
I remain as wary of this conceptualization as of any others not just because it is too
liable to reification (or anthologization), reflecting, in this case, an image of literary
history determined in part by the disciplinary polemics and pedagogical impera-
tives of the American university at the outset of the twenty-first century, but
because it downplays the realities of institutional and state power.101 In a recent
commentary on Damrosch’s project, the American French scholar Emily Apter
highlights the same limitation, though, given her commitment to comparative lit-
erary studies, she focuses on the question of translation. ‘Border-crossing’, she
notes, ‘has become such an all-purpose, ubiquitous way of talking about trans-
lation that its purchase on the politics of actual borders—whether linguistic or
territorial—has been attenuated.’102 If, following the historian Akira Iriye, I draw
attention to the ‘cross-national activities’ of non-state agents, I also acknowledge
throughout this book that, for better or worse, the state remains a dominant actor
in the world, whether at the national level as articulated in policy or constitutional
terms, or at the international level as expressed through multistate organizations
like UNESCO. After all, though some of Wells’s predictions in the 1930s were
prescient—consider the rise of the technocratic social sciences in the post-war era,
for instance—the history of internationalism after 1945 has so far not played out as
Fig. I.1. Map showing some of the literary geographies traced in this book.
30 Introduction

he imagined it might in the year Hitler rose to power. While a total of 63 countries
became members of the League of Nations between 1920 and 1939, famously
excluding the US, the United Nations now boasts an overall membership of 193.
As Damrosch observes, rehearsing the familiar McLuhanite consensus Apter
rightly challenges, the world may be ‘growing smaller’ as ‘people and products
surge across borders in the process known as globalization’ but there are no signs of
Wells’s ‘Era of National Sovereignty’ coming to an end.103 If anything, it has become
more entrenched not just because nation-states (and national loyalties) have prolif-
erated, in some cases gaining an uncertain new strength (think of Trump’s US and
May’s more fragile UK), but because they remain the cornerstone of the contem-
porary international (e.g. United Nations) and supranational (e.g. European Union)
order, whether real or virtual.
Anglophone literary studies have for the most part abandoned statist histories
more readily than they have geographies, despite the resilience of some historical
categories, ‘Victorian’ being among the most tenacious. As Jonathan Bate remarks
in his General Editor’s Preface to the multivolume Oxford English Literary History
(2002–), which is intended in part to ‘undertake a critical investigation of the very
notion of a national literary heritage’, ‘literary history is distinct from political
­history’, and, as he rightly cautions with regard to the twentieth century, ‘to propose
a single break at, say, 1945’—as I have done in the two-part structure of this
book—‘would be to fall in with the false assumption that literature moves strictly
in ­tandem with events’.104 Yet, having said this, he then adds that ‘a historical
understanding of literature cannot be divorced from cultural and intellectual
revolutions or the effects of social change and the upheaval of war’.105 This goes
some way to explaining why the series divides the century and a half I cover in this
book across six volumes in the way it does: The Victorians, 1830–1880; From
‘Victorian’ to ‘Edwardian’, 1870–1914; The Modern Movement, 1910–1940;
Literature among the Wars, 1930–1970; The Last of England?, 1960–2000; and The
Internationalization of English Literature, 1948–2000. As the guarded quotation
and question marks in some of these titles indicate, all such classifications and
boundaries will always be debated—does internationalization start only after
1948, for instance?—though, for something like the Oxford English Literary
History, the primary purpose of which is curatorial—hence Bate’s phrase ‘historical
understanding’—these periodizations are as good as many others and certainly
better than the neat epochal model on which Wells relied to project his ‘history of
the future’ in The Shape of Things to Come.
As I have already indicated with reference to Joyce’s figure of the ‘envelope’ and
the ‘letter’, however, my own aims are not primarily curatorial. Rather, taking the
literary works I have selected as my starting point, or the experiences they yield as
artefacts of writing that open up ways of thinking outside the reifying terms of the
state, I follow their lead not just into the cunning passages of literary, linguistic, and
orthographic history, which has always been supra- or non-national, but into the
intersecting histories of thought, institutions, and modern constitutionalism and
into a tangled archive of repeatedly sifted, recycled, and adapted inheritances.106
Here, too, the unpredictability of the chronologies and interconnections is central.
 Introduction 31

In Chapter 4, to cite just one example, I follow the threads that lead from Es’kia
Mphahlele, the most eminent black South African writer of the apartheid years, to
Tagore and then from Tagore to the 500-year old oral tradition of the Bāul singers
of Bengal, a labyrinthine history that raises new questions about UNESCO’s
understanding of humanism and the ideals of interculturality it began to promote
at the turn of the millennium. Equally, across the book as a whole, I consider how
the radical legacies of Tagore and Joyce, and, indeed, the traditionalist conservative
legacy of T. S. Eliot, speak to our own ongoing, and, in principle, unending, struggle
to come to terms with linguistic and cultural diversity.
Another random document with
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gobbling season, and the Stag in autumn, may also be drawn within
shot by the same means. I once “tolled” two Loons with my hat from
a distance of nearly half a mile, and although they were at one time
so near to me that I could clearly perceive the colour of their eyes, I
had no sure opportunity of firing at them, as it was in the pairing
season, and they never once dived, or raised their wings to flap
them, so that, knowing the extreme agility with which they disappear
when they have seen a gun snap, I judged it useless to shoot. Until
my visit to Labrador I had supposed, agreeably to the common
belief, that the Loons always repose at night on the water, which,
however, I have since assured myself they rarely if ever do.
Colonel Montagu, than whom none has written more correctly on
the habits of the birds of Great Britain, having procured a wounded
Loon, placed it in a pond, and observed the manner in which it made
its way under the surface of the water. “In swimming and diving,” he
remarks, “only the legs are used and not the wings, as in the
Guillemot and Auk tribes, and by their position so far behind, and
their little deviation from the line of the body, the bird is enabled to
propel itself in the water with great velocity, in a straight line, as well
as turn with astonishing quickness.” This I have no doubt was the
case with the individual observed; but that this is not the usual mode
of proceeding of the species is equally true. Having myself seen
Loons pass and repass under boats, at the distance of several feet
from the surface, and propel themselves both with their feet, and
their half-extended wings, I am inclined to believe that when not
wounded, and when pursuing their prey, they usually employ all the
limbs.
My friend Thomas Nuttall, who kept one for some time, gives the
following account of its manners while in his possession. “A young
bird of this kind which I obtained in the Salt Marsh at Chelsea Beach,
and transferred to a fish-pond, made a good deal of plaint, and
would sometimes wander out of his more natural element, and hide
and bask in the grass. On these occasions he lay very still until
nearly approached, and then slid into the pond and uttered his usual
plaint. When out at a distance he made the same cautious efforts to
hide, and would commonly defend himself in great anger, by darting
at the intruder, and striking powerfully with his dagger-like bill. This
bird, with a pink-coloured iris-like albinos, appeared to suffer from
the glare of broad day-light, and was inclined to hide from its effects,
but became very active towards the dusk of the evening. The pupil of
the eye in this individual, like that of nocturnal animals, appeared
indeed dilatable; and the one in question often put down his head
and eyes into the water to observe the situation of his prey. This bird
was a most expert and indefatigable diver, and remained down
sometimes for several minutes, often swimming under water, and as
it were flying with the velocity of an arrow in the air. Though at length
inclining to become docile, and shewing no alarm when visited, it
constantly betrayed its wandering habits, and every night was found
to have waddled to some hiding place, where it seemed to prefer
hunger to the loss of liberty, and never could be restrained from
exercising its instinct to move onwards to some secure or more
suitable asylum.”
The same valued friend has corroborated the result of my
observations respecting the number of eggs usually laid by this
species, by stating as follows: “About the 11th of June, through the
kindness of Dr J. W. Harris, I received three eggs, which had been
taken from the nest of a Loon, made in a hummock, or elevated
grassy hillock, at Sebago Pond, in New Hampshire.”
The range of this species is immense. It occurs on the waters that
fall into the Pacific Ocean, and has been observed on the Columbia
River. In the Fur Countries it is plentiful; and, as I have already
stated, it breeds in many parts of the United States. It is found
equally in Europe, and the northern parts of Asia. In all these
countries it moves southward on the approach of winter, and returns
when the mild weather commences in spring.
Unlike the Cormorant, the Loon usually swallows its food under the
water, unless when it happens to bring up a shell-fish or a
crustaceous animal, which it munches for a while before it swallows
it. Fishes of numerous kinds, aquatic insects, water-lizards, frogs,
and leeches, have been found by me in its stomach, in which there is
also generally much coarse gravel, and sometimes the roots of
fresh-water plants.
Although the flesh of the Loon is not very palatable, being tough,
rank, and dark coloured, I have seen it much relished by many lovers
of good-living, especially at Boston, where it was not unfrequently
served almost raw at the table of the house where I boarded.
A female bird particularly examined by me presented the following
appearances. From the point of the bill to the end of the tail it
measured 34 inches; to the claws 41; the extended wings were 71;
the bill measured 5 inches along the gape; the breadth of the body
was 8 inches, its depth only four; the wings were 2 inches shorter
than the tail; and the weight was 10 lb. 11 oz. avoirdupois. The first
primary was longest. The trachea, which was even and flattened,
being in diameter about 5/8 of an inch by 1/2 inch, was 16 inches
long. The eggs were numerous. The gizzard was moderate, and
contained many large pebbles. The intestines were 7 feet long, and
about the same size as a Swan’s quill. Every bone and sinew was
strong and tough. The tongue resembled in shape and size that of
the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The bones of the wing and leg were
almost solid, the cavity for the marrow being very small. All the
bones of this specimen were presented to Mr Thomas Allis, of the
Friend’s Retreat, near York.
My friend Captain James Clark Ross, of the Royal Navy of
England, once placed at my disposal a specimen of the Loon
procured in a very high latitude, and which, having closely inspected
it, I found to differ from the one represented in the plate, only in
having the point of the bill slightly elevated or recurved, and of a fine
yellow tint. Dr Richardson informed me that, on one of his arduous
northern journeys, he saw a very large and handsomely crested
Diver, which, although somewhat prematurely, I propose honouring
with the name of Colymbus Richardsoni.

Colymbus glacialis, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 221. Adult.—Lath. Ind. Ornith.
p. 799.
Colymbus Immer, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 222. Young.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. p.
800.
Colymbus glacialis, Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis of Birds of United States, p.
420.
Great Northern Diver or Loon, Wils. Amer. Ornith. vol. ix. pl. 74, fig. 3.
Colymbus glacialis, Richards. and Swains. Fauna Bor. Amer. vol. ii. p. 474.
Loon, or Great Northern Diver, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 513.

Adult Male. Plate CCCVI. Fig. 1.

Bill as long as the head, straight, stout, much compressed, tapering
to a point. Upper mandible with the dorsal line descending and
slightly convex towards the end, the ridge convex, narrowed towards
the point, the sides convex beyond the nostrils, the edges sharp and
considerably inflected, the tip narrow and sharpish. Nasal groove
short, nostrils basal, linear, direct, pervious. Lower mandible with the
angle extremely narrow, and extending beyond the middle, the
dorsal line straight and sloping upwards to the point, the ridge
convex and narrow, the edges sharp and involute; the tip attenuated.
Head of moderate size, oblong, narrowed before. Neck rather long
and thick. Eyes of moderate size. Body elongated, much depressed,
of an elliptical form viewed from above. Wings small. Feet short,
rather large, placed very far back; tibia almost entirely concealed;
tarsus short, exceedingly compressed, sharp-edged before and
behind, covered all over with reticulated angular scales; hind toe
extremely small, connected with the second by a very small
membrane; the anterior toes united by articulated membranes, the
fourth or outer longest, the third a little shorter, the second
considerably shorter than the third, all covered above with very
numerous narrow scutella, the second toe with a free two-lobed
membrane; claws very small, depressed, blunt.
Plumage short and dense; of the head and neck very short, and
blended; of the lower parts blended, short, with slight gloss; of the
upper compact, glossy; the feathers in general oblong, those of the
upper parts with the extremity abrupt. Wings proportionally very
small and narrow, curved; primaries strong, tapering, the first
longest, the second almost as long, the rest rapidly graduated;
secondaries broad, and rounded. Tail extremely short, rounded, of
twenty feathers.
Bill black. Iris deep bright red. Feet, tarsi, and toes, of a livid greyish-
blue, their inner sides tinged with pale yellowish flesh-colour; claws
black, lighter at the base; webs brownish-black, lighter in the middle.
Head and neck dark greenish-blue, with purple reflections. On the
throat a small transverse patch of white, longitudinally striated with
dusky; about the middle of the neck, two large patches of the same,
separated in front to the distance of an inch, behind continuous, but
when the feathers are laid close, appearing as if separated by a
longitudinal dark band about half an inch in breadth. The under parts
glossy white, excepting the feathers on the sides under the wing,
which are black, each with two, three, or four elliptical white spots, a
faint dusky band across the vent, the lower tail-coverts, which are
brownish-black tipped with white, and the axillar feathers and larger
wing-coverts, which have a dusky streak along the middle. The sides
of the neck at its lower part are longitudinally streaked with black and
white, there being two oblong spots of the latter on each feather
towards the end. The upper parts are glossy black, variegated with
spots of white in regular transverse slightly-curved lines having the
convexity backwards. These spots vary in form and size, being small
and roundish towards the neck and sides, larger and somewhat four-
sided along the middle of the back: largest and rectangular on the
scapulars, very small and roundish on the hind part of the back and
tail-coverts. The upper part of the wing is similar, with smallish spots;
the alula and quill brownish-black, a few of the inner secondaries
only having two white spots at their extremity. Tail brownish-black,
paler at the tip.

Adult Male. Adult Male. Young.

Length to the end of tail, 32 7/8 36 31 1/4
................................claws, 39 1/4 40 1/2 36
................................wings, 31 1/4 — 29 3/4
carpal joint, 16 3/4 — 16 1/4
Extent of wings, 57 1/2 52 54 1/2
Wing from flexure, 15 1/2 — 14 1/4
Depth of body, — 6 —
Breadth, — 9 1/2 —
Bill along the ridge, — 3 4/12 —
Gape-line, — 4 1/2 —
Tarsus, — 3 5/12 —
Hind toe, — 9 1/2 —
Its claw, — 2/
12 —
Outer toe and claw, — 4 1/2 —
Middle toe, — 4 1/4 —
Inner, — 3 9/12 —
Tail, — 29 1/12 —
Wing from flexure, — 14 1/2 —
 Weight, 8 3/4 8 1/2 9

The female is generally smaller, but in all other respects resembles

the male. Weight 10 lb. 11 oz.
Young in winter. Plate, CCCVI. Fig. 2.
Bill pale yellowish-green, the ridge and tip of the upper mandible
dusky. Iris brown. Feet dusky externally, pale yellowish flesh-colour
internally, webs dusky, but yellow in the middle. Claws yellowish-
brown. All the upper parts are of a uniform dark greyish-brown, each
feather margined with lighter, the lower parts white; the sides of the
neck at the lower part whitish, streaked with dusky; the sides dusky,
without spots.
Towards spring the eye assumes a redder tint, and the plumage of
the upper parts gradually becomes spotted with white; and when the
moult is completed about the end of summer, the plumage is as in
the adult, although the tints are improved at each successive moult
for several years.
A fine male killed at Boston, 34 inches in length, with an alar extent
of 56, presents the following characters. There is a general layer of
subcutaneous adipose tissue, and the skin is very tenacious. The
external aperture of the ear roundish, very small, having a diameter
of only 2 lines. The tongue is 2 inches 1 line in length, fleshy, as high
as broad, slightly concave and longitudinally grooved above,
tapering to a horny point. On the palate are 6 rows of papillæ; the
posterior aperture of the nares is linear 2 1/2 inches in length. The
aperture of the glottis is 1/2 an inch long, with numerous papillæ
along its sides and behind. The pharynx is extremely dilatable, as is
the œsophagus, which is 17 inches long, passes along the right side
of the neck, together with the trachea, and when distended has an
average diameter of 2 1/2 inches, but on entering the thorax
contracts to 1 1/2. The structure of the œsophagus in birds may be
very conveniently examined in this species, the different layers being
remarkably developed in it. Properly speaking, it has only two coats,
—the outer muscular, its external layer composed of transverse or
circular fibres, the internal of equally distinct longitudinal fibres,
which are not straight, but irregularly undulated. The inner, or
mucous coat, when contracted falls into longitudinal plaits. The
proventriculus is 2 3/4 inches long, the glandules large, roundish,
simple, and disposed in a continuous belt. Over this part, the
transverse muscular fibres are remarkably developed. The right lobe
of the liver is 5 3/4 inches long, the left lobe 5 1/2. The heart is very
large, of a broadly conical form, 3 inches long, 2 3/4 inches in
breadth. The stomach is three inches long, 2 1/2 in breadth, of an
elliptical form, a little compressed; its lateral muscles 9 lines in
thickness, and composed of strong large fasciculi; the tendons 1 1/2
inch in diameter; the cuticular lining thick, its upper and lower parts
marked with strong longitudinal ridges having numerous transverse
fissures; the grinding surfaces irregularly wrinkled, with a deep
fissure down the middle of each. The pylorus is 8 lines in diameter
when distended, and is destitute of valve, but has a strong prominent
rim. In the stomach were remains of fishes, and some pebbles,
chiefly quartz, the largest 4 lines long. The intestine measures 6 feet
6 inches in length, and varies in diameter from 8 to 6 lines. The
rectum is 3 1/2 inches long, the cloaca extremely large, forming a
cavity about 3 inches in diameter. The cæca are 1 3/4 inch long,
cylindrical, rounded at the extremity; one of them 7 lines, the other 9
lines, in diameter.

The trachea, when moderately extended, measures 13 1/2 inches in

length, inconsiderably depressed, its transverse diameter at the
upper part 9 1/2 lines, at the lower 6 1/2 lines; the rings cartilaginous,
of moderate breadth, uniform, with a contraction in the middle before
and behind, their number 134, the four lowest united. The bronchi
are composed of about 20 narrow cartilaginous half rings. The
contractor muscles are very broad but thin, their fibres irregularly
disposed in front; they become thicker and narrower toward the
lower part, and are continued beyond the sterno-tracheal muscles,
which come off from the 20th ring from the inferior larynx, to the
membrane between the last tracheal and first bronchial ring.
 BLUE HERON.

Ardea cœrulea, Linn.

PLATE CCCVII. Adult Male and Young.

Along with a few other Herons, this is, comparatively speaking,

confined within narrow limits along our southern coast in winter. It
occurs, however, in most parts of the Floridas, where it is a constant
resident, and whence, at the approach of summer, vast multitudes
are seen proceeding northward, in search of suitable places in which
they may rear their young in security. Many, however, go southward,
beyond the limits of the United States, and proceed coastwise to
Texas and Mexico to spend the winter, especially the younger birds,
when still in that singular white plumage which differs so much from
that of the young of every other known species of this genus, except
that of the Reddish Egret (A. rufescens). At New Orleans, where it
arrives at the same period, both from Mexico and the Floridas, its
first appearance in spring is about the beginning of March; at which
time also multitudes leave the Floridas on their way eastward, to
settle in Georgia, the Carolinas, and other States farther east, as far
as Long Island in that of New York. Beyond this, I believe, no birds of
the species have been met with. They rarely, if ever, proceed far
inland, or leave the shores of our large rivers and estuaries. On the
Mississippi, the swamps and lakes on the borders of which are so
well adapted to the habits of these birds, few individuals are ever
seen above Natchez. About the beginning of September, by which
time the young are able to shift for themselves, they return
southward.
When in the Floridas, during winter, I observed that the Blue Herons
associated with other species, particularly the White Heron, Ardea
alba, and the Louisiana Heron, Ardea Ludoviciana, all of which were
in the habit of roosting together in the thick evergreen low bushes
that cover the central parts of the islands along the coast. Their
passage to and from their feeding places, is as regular as the rising
and setting of the sun, and, unless frequently disturbed, they betake
themselves every night to the same locality, and almost to the same
spot. In the morning, they rise with one accord from the roosts on
which they have been standing all night on one leg, the other drawn
up among the feathers of the abdomen, their neck retracted, and
their head and bill buried beneath their scapulars. On emerging from
their retreats, they at once proceed to some distant place in search
of food, and spend the day principally on the head waters of the
rivers, and the fresh-water lakes of the interior, giving a decided
preference to the soft mud banks, where small crabs or fiddlers are
abundant, on which they feed greedily, when the inland ponds have
been dried up, and consequently no longer supply them with such
fishes as they are wont to feed upon.
There, and at this season, Reader, you may see this graceful Heron,
quietly and in silence walking along the margins of the water, with an
elegance and grace which can never fail to please you. Each
regularly-timed step is lightly measured, while the keen eye of the
bird seeks for and watches the equally cautious movements of the
objects towards which it advances with all imaginable care. When at
a proper distance, it darts forth its bill with astonishing celerity, to
pierce and secure its prey; and this it does with so much precision,
that, while watching some at a distance with a glass, I rarely
observed an instance of failure. If fish is plentiful, on the shallows
near the shore, when it has caught one, it immediately swallows it,
and runs briskly through the water, striking here and there, and thus
capturing several in succession. Two or three dashes of this sort,
afford sufficient nourishment for several hours, and when the bird
has obtained enough it retires to some quiet place, and remains
there in an attitude of repose until its hunger returns. During this
period of rest, however, it is as watchful as ever, and on hearing the
least noise, or perceiving the slightest appearance of danger,
spreads its wings, and flies off to some other place, sometimes to a
very distant one. About an hour before sunset, they are again seen
anxiously searching for food. When at length satisfied, they rise
simultaneously from all parts of the marsh, or shore, arrange
themselves into loose bodies, and ascending to the height of fifty or
sixty yards in the air, fly in a straight course towards their roosting
place. I saw very few of these birds during the winter, on or near the
river St John in Florida; but on several occasions met with some on
small ponds in the pine barrens, at a considerable distance from any
large stream, whither they had been attracted by the great number of
frogs.
The flight of the Blue Heron is rather swifter than that of the Egret,
Ardea candidissima, and considerably more so than that of the Great
Blue Heron, Ardea Herodias, but very similar to that of the Louisiana
Heron, Ardea Ludoviciana. When the bird is travelling, the motion is
performed by flappings in quick succession, which rapidly propel it in
a direct line, until it is about to alight, when it descends in circular
sailings of considerable extent towards the spot selected. During
strong adverse winds, they fly low, and in a continuous line, passing
at the necessary distance from the shores to avoid danger, whether
at an early or a late hour of the day. I recollect that once, on such an
occasion, when, on the 15th of March, I was in company with my
friend John Bachman, I saw a large flock about sunset arising from
across the river, and circling over a large pond, eight miles distant
from Charleston. So cautious were they, that although the flock was
composed of several hundred individuals, we could not manage to
get so much as a chance of killing one. I have been surprised to see
how soon the Blue Herons become shy after reaching the districts to
which they remove for the purpose of breeding from their great
rendezvous the Floridas, where I never experienced any difficulty in
procuring as many as I wished. In Louisiana, on the other hand, I
have found them equally vigilant on their first arrival. On several
occasions, when I had placed myself under cover, to shoot at some,
while on their way to their roosts or to their feeding grounds, I found
it necessary to shift from one place to another, for if one of them had
been fired at and had fallen in a particular place, all that were in its
company took care not to pass again near it, but when coming up
diverged several hundred yards, and increased their speed until
past, when they would assume their more leisurely flappings. In
South Carolina, where they are very shy on their arrival, I have seen
them fly off on hearing the very distant report of a gun, and alight on
the tops of the tallest trees, where they would congregate in
hundreds, and whence they would again fly off on the least
apprehension of danger. But when once these Herons have chosen
a place to nestle in, or reached one in which they bred the preceding
year, they become so tame as to allow you to shoot as many as you
are disposed to have.
While on Cayo Island, in the Gulf of Mexico, on the 10th of April
1837, I observed large flocks of the Blue and Green Herons, Ardea
cœrulea and A. virescens, arriving from the westward about the
middle of the day. They flew at a considerable height, and came
down like so many hawks, to alight on the low bushes growing
around the sequestered ponds; and this without any other noise than
the rustling of their wings as they glided through the air towards the
spot on which they at once alighted. There they remained until
sunset, when they all flew off, so that none were seen there next
day. This shews that although these species migrate both by day
and night, they are quite diurnal during the period of their residence
in any section of the country which they may have chosen for a
season. It is more than probable that it has been from want of
personal knowledge of the habits of these birds, that authors have
asserted that all Herons are nocturnally inclined. This certainly is by
no means the case, although they find it advantageous to travel by
night during their migrations, which is a remarkable circumstance as
opposed to their ordinary habits. In the instance above mentioned, I
found the birds remarkably gentle, which was probably owing to
fatigue.
The Blue Heron breeds earlier or later according to the temperature
of the district to which it resorts for that purpose, and therefore
earlier in Florida, where, however, considerable numbers remain,
during the whole year than in other parts of the United States. Thus I
have found them in the southern parts of that country, sitting on their
eggs, on the 1st of March, fully a month earlier than in the vicinity of
Bayou Sara, on the Mississippi, where they are as much in advance
of those which betake themselves, in very small numbers indeed, to
our Middle Districts, in which they rarely begin to breed before the
fifteenth of May.
The situations which they choose for their nests are exceedingly
varied. I have found them sitting on their eggs on the Florida Keys,
and on the islands in the Bay of Galveston, in Texas, in nests placed
amidst and upon the most tangled cactuses, so abundant on those
curious isles, on the latter of which the climbing Rattlesnake often
gorges itself with the eggs of this and other species of Heron, as well
as with their unfledged young. In the Lower parts of Louisiana, it
breeds on low bushes of the water-willow, as it also does in South
Carolina; whereas, on the islands on the coast of New Jersey, and
even on the mainland of that State, it places its nest on the branches
of the cedar and other suitable trees. Wherever you find its breeding
place, you may expect to see other birds in company with it, for like
all other species, excepting perhaps the Louisiana Heron, it rarely
objects to admit into its society the Night Heron, the Yellow-crowned
Heron, or the White Egret.
The heronries of the southern portions of the United States are often
of such extraordinary size as to astonish the passing traveller. I
confess that I myself might have been as sceptical on this point as
some who, having been accustomed to find in all places the Heron to
be a solitary bird, cannot be prevailed on to believe the contrary, had
I not seen with my own eyes the vast multitudes of individuals of
different species breeding together in peace in certain favourable
localities. Such persons may be excused from giving that credit to
my account of the Passenger Pigeon which posterity will, I trust,
accord to it.
The nest of the Blue Heron, wherever situated, is loosely formed of
dry sticks, sometimes intermixed with green leaves of various trees,
and with grass or moss, according as these materials happen to be
plentiful in the neighbourhood. It is nearly flat, and can scarcely be
said to have a regular lining. Sometimes you see a solitary nest fixed
on a cactus, a bush, or a tree; but a little beyond this you may
observe from six to ten, placed almost as closely together as you
would have put them had you measured out the space necessary for
containing them. Some are seen low over the water, while others are
placed high; for, like the rest of its tribe, this species is rather fond of
placing its tenement over or near the liquid element.
The eggs are usually three, rarely four; and I have never found a
nest of this species containing five eggs, as is stated by Wilson,
who, probably found a nest of the Green Heron containing that
number among others of the present species. They measure an inch
and three quarters in length, by an inch and a quarter in breadth,
being about the size of those of Ardea candidissima, though rather
more elongated, and precisely of the same colour.
The young bird is at first almost destitute of feathers, but scantily
covered with yellowish-white down. When fully fledged, its bill and
legs are greenish-black, and its plumage pure white, or slightly
tinged with cream-colour, the tips of the three outer primaries light
greyish-blue. Of this colour the bird remains until the breeding
season, when, however, some individuals exhibit a few straggling
pale blue feathers. When they have entered on their second year,
these young birds become spotted with deeper blue on some parts
of the body, or on the head and neck, thus appearing singularly
patched with that colour and pure white, the former increasing with
the age of the bird in so remarkable a manner, that you may see
specimens of these birds with portions even of the pendant feathers
of their head or shoulders so marked. And these are produced by full
moultings, by which I mean the unexpected appearance, as it were,
of feathers growing out of the skin of the bird coloured entirely blue,
as is the case in many of our land birds. In all these stages of
plumage, and from the first spring after birth, the young birds breed
with others, as is equally the case with Ardea rufescens. You may
see a pure white individual paired with one of a full blue colour, or
with one patched with blue and white. The young, after leaving their
parents, remain separate from the old birds until the next breeding
season. At no period can the young of this species be confounded
with, or mistaken for that of the Ardea candidissima, by a person
really acquainted with these birds, for the Blue Heron is not only
larger than the latter, but the very colour of its feet and legs is
perfectly distinctive. Indeed, during the time when the young Blue
Heron is quite white (excepting on the tips of the outer primaries), it
would be easier to confound it with the young of the Reddish Egret,
Ardea rufescens, than with that of any other, were the feathers of its
hind head and neck of the same curious curled appearance as those
of that species.
My friend John Bachman informs me, that in South Carolina, this
species not unfrequently breeds in the company of the Louisiana
Heron, the nests and eggs of which, he adds, are very similar. He
has specimens of these birds in all the different stages which I have
described. At New Orleans, the Blue Herons, during the transition of
their plumage from white to blue, are called “Egrettes folles,” or
foolish Egrets, on account of their unusual tameness. My friend
Bachman and I, shot, on the 6th and 9th of April, several specimens
spotted with blue feathers, and having their crests and trains
similarly mixed, although of full length; but in most of the specimens
obtained, the white was still prevalent. I have shot some in
Louisiana, in autumn, in the same curious dress.
This species, though larger than the Snowy Heron, Ardea
candidissima, is considerably inferior to it in courage; and I was
much amused as well as surprised, when at Galveston Bay, on the
24th of April 1837, to see one of that species alight near a Purple
Heron, attack it, and pursue it as far as I could follow them with my
eyes. When the Blue Herons are on the sea-coast they not
unfrequently repose on the large mud or sand bars, at some
distance from the adjacent marshes; but they generally prefer
roosting on trees or bushes, when there are any in their
neighbourhood. The Creoles of Louisiana not unfrequently eat the
flesh of this species, and although they by no means consider it
equal to that of the Night Heron, some of them have assured me that
it is not bad food. Like other birds of this family, they become larger
with age, and the male is usually somewhat superior in size to the
female; but, with this exception, no difference can be perceived in
the external appearance of the sexes.

Ardea cœrulea, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. 1. p. 238.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii. p.
689.
Ardea cœrulea, Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis, p. 300.
 Blue Heron, Ardea cœrulea, Wils. Amer. Ornith. vol. vii. p. 117. pl. 62. fig.
3. Adult.
Blue Heron, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 58.

Adult Male in full plumage. Plate CCCVI. Fig. 1.

Bill much longer than the head, rather slender, very slightly
decurved, compressed, tapering to a point. Upper mandible with the
dorsal line nearly straight for two-thirds of its length, then slightly
decurved, the ridge convex, broad at the base, gradually narrowed to
the point; a groove from the base to near the end, the sides convex
beneath, the edges thin and sharp, with a slight notch close to the
tips. Nostrils basal, linear, longitudinal, with a membrane above and
behind. Lower mandible with the angle extremely narrow and
elongated, the dorsal line beyond it ascending and almost straight,
the sides sloping outwards, and flattened, the edges sharp and
slightly inflected, the tip acuminate.
Head rather small, oblong, compressed. Neck very long and slender.
Body slender and compressed. Feet very long; tibia elongated, its
lower half bare, very slender, covered all round with angular scales,
of which the posterior are large; tarsus elongated, slender,
compressed, anteriorly covered with numerous broad scutella,
laterally and behind with angular scales. Toes long, slender, with
numerous broad scutella above, flattened and reticularly granulate
beneath. Claws rather long, arched, compressed, acute, that of hind
toe much larger and more curved, the inner edge of that of the third
finely and regularly pectinate.
Space between the bill and eye, and around the latter, bare.
Plumage soft, thin, and blended. Feathers of the upper and hind part
of the head very long, linear, with loose barbs; of the sides of the
neck loose and inclined obliquely backwards, of its lower part much
elongated, narrow, and tapering to a point; of the middle of the back
extremely long, linear, acuminate, their tips projecting about five
inches beyond the tail. Wings long, and very broad; primaries broad,
tapering, and rounded, the first, second and third almost equal, the
latter being only a twelfth of an inch longer; secondaries broad and
rounded; some of the inner only half an inch shorter than the longest
primary, when the wing is closed. Tail very short, small, even, of
twelve rather weak feathers.
Bill ultramarine blue at the base, gradually shaded into black towards
the point; the bare space between it and the eye, as well as the
edges of the eyelids, ultramarine. Iris pale yellow. Legs, tarsi, toes,
and claws, black. Head and neck of a rich deep purple, inclining to
vinaceous; the lower part of the neck and all the other parts deep
greyish-blue, the edges of the feathers lighter.
Length to end of tail 24 1/2 inches, to end of wings 25, to end of
elongated dorsal feathers 26 1/2, to end of claws 30 3/4; wing from
flexure 11 1/2; tail 4 2/12; extent of wings 42; bill along the ridge 3 4/12
along the edge of lower mandible 4; bare part of tibia 2 2/12; tarsus
3 5/12; first toe 11/12, its claw 2/12; middle toe 2 1/4, its claw 7/12.
Weight 1 lb.
The female is similar to the male, but smaller. Weight 11 oz.
The young are at first sparely covered with yellowish-white down.
When a fortnight old, the bill is yellow, with the tips greenish-black;
the feet greenish-yellow, the claws dusky, with the tips greyish-
yellow. The general colour of the plumage is pure white, but the
down which tips the feathers of the head is brownish-white; two of
the alular feathers are tinged with dull bluish-grey, and the outer
seven or eight primaries are broadly margined on both sides to the
length of about an inch and a half with the same colour of a deeper
tint, the extreme tip white.
When fully fledged, the bare parts at the base of the bill, and the
basal half of the upper mandible, are light greenish-blue, the rest
black; the lower mandible yellow, with a patch of black, an inch and a
quarter in length on each side at the end. Legs, tarsi, and toes
greenish-blue, the sides yellowish; claws dusky. The feathers of the
head are slightly elongated; those of the back are also elongated,
but much broader and shorter than in the adult. The feathers on the
upper part of the head are of a faint bluish-grey; and the alular
feathers and eight outer primaries are tinged with the same colour.
At this period, the length to the end of the tail is 22 inches, to end of
claws 28 1/2; bill along the ridge 2 7/8; wing from flexure 11; tail 4 2/12.

In November, when the moult is advanced. The bill is black, dull blue
at the base. The feet are nearly black, as are the claws. The occipital
feathers are now two inches and a half in length, and some of the
dorsal feathers extend as far as the tips of the wings; those of the
lower part of the neck have also a length of about three inches. The
general colour of the plumage is white; the upper part of the head,
the hind neck, back, anterior edge of the wing, and outer primaries at
the end, of a faint bluish-grey tint; some of the elongated feathers of
the back darker.
Length to end of tail 22 inches; to end of claws 29 1/2; bill 3; wing
from flexure 11 1/4.

A year old. Bill nearly as in the adult; feet bluish-black, the plumage
is white, with the upper parts pale greyish-blue as in November, but
the whole interspersed with numerous feathers of a deep greyish-
blue, similar to that of the adult; the primaries and tail being still
white.

Length to end of tail 23 1/4; extent of wings 32 1/2; bill 3 1/8. Weight 9
oz.