Leonard Woolf and the book in the jungle

Abstract

This article considers the representation of the book in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). The depiction of the book or the act of writing in the colonial context as an “event” — inspiring awe or scepticism in the illiterate native or painfully/pleasantly reminiscent of the colonial administrator’s life at “home” — is certainly not a fictional scene exclusive to Woolf. However, differently from his contemporaries, Woolf responds to the book in colonial Sri Lanka not as shorthand for modernity, but as colonial fetish. A century since its publication, it is possible — and perhaps profitable — to discuss The Village in the Jungle beyond its marked affiliations or stark disassociations with the fictions of Woolf’s peers including Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and William Butler Yeats to name a few; rather, we can afford to take the longer view of his work. By way of gleaning particular insight into Woolf’s treatment of the book in the jungle, this article will invoke the fiction of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, staunch anti-imperialist and also fierce critic of post-independence corruption, whose novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) were published in the final decade of Woolf’s life. Woolf’s affiliations with Achebe might therefore be referenced as an index of the radicality of his anti-colonial sympathies.