Of greasy notebooks and dirty newspapers: Reading the illegible in The Village in the Jungle

Abstract

This essay examines the proliferation of colonial bureaucratic documents in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). With these ranging from account-books to gun permits and legal notices, the essay argues that documents play a fundamental yet mundane role in the lives of the novel’s characters. In the varied responses to these documents, from the confusion of the illiterate peasants to the sly manipulations of the village headman, it is their materiality that is highlighted, revealing them to be objects that are modified, circulated, handled and left unread. The essay goes on to argue that the novel also presents us with examples of documents and colonial spaces that simply cannot be read, thus exposing the limits of any colonial bureaucracy’s efficiency.