Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Agents and the problem of agency: the context
- 2 Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
- 3 Kipling's “Law” and the division of bureaucratic labor
- 4 Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
- 5 T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
- 6 Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novel of imperial manners
- Conclusion: work as rule
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Agents and the problem of agency: the context
- 2 Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
- 3 Kipling's “Law” and the division of bureaucratic labor
- 4 Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
- 5 T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
- 6 Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novel of imperial manners
- Conclusion: work as rule
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
An explorer visits a penal colony one day to observe an apparatus. The guardian of the apparatus is an officer, who, without being asked, proceeds to explain the history of the ingenious machine to the explorer. The machine, it seems, was originally a product of the fertile imagination of the exalted “old Commandant,” who was responsible for “the organization of the whole penal colony” in former days.
As the explorer soon discovers, the apparatus itself is no ordinary engine of torture. It is, in fact, a writing machine, the “Designer.” Equipped with a harrow fitted out with a sharp needle, the apparatus is designed to write into the naked flesh of the prisoner the commandment that the prisoner is charged with having disobeyed. It does so by making numerous slow passes across the body of the prisoner while he is strapped helplessly to its bed. While the first of these etchings creates superficial wounds, each time the apparatus finishes a complete sentence, the needle, which is fitted into the arm of the apparatus, returns to the beginning again to make another cut — each subsequent pass producing progressively deeper marks in the prisoner's body as the apparatus embellishes its initial sentence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940Writing and the Administration of Empire, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998