Housing the Public:
The Novel, Domesticity, and the Public Sphere in Thailand
by
Boyd, Chayanon Ruamcharoen
Professor Maya Nadkarni, Advisor
Sociology and Anthropology Department, Swarthmore College
April 9, 2015
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
Chapter 1
The Novel of Dokmaisot and the Civilized Family
17
Chapter 2
Writing Of (f) Excess: Dokmaisot and the Scene of Writing
41
Chapter 3
Engendering the Thai Citizen:
People of Quality and the Thai Modern Political Subjectivity
69
Conclusion
86
Bibliography
89
1
Introduction
Housing the Public: The Novel, Domesticity, and the Public Sphere in Thailand
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million-a number of
possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been
pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision
and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape
and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have
expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find.
- Henry James, preface to The Portrait of a Lady
Thus writes Henry James, who himself sets the house of fiction trembling.
"The house of fiction" -the phrase that aligns the domestic and the fictional. The
portrait of a lady dwelling comfortably in the house can be seen through a million
windows. Perhaps, she is a spectacle of sedentary humanity, for as Jilrgen
Habermas pointed out in his classical account of the public sphere, the intimate,
domestic sphere has become the enclave for "human beings pure and simple"
(2001:56) in the bourgeois, industrial society. Humanity itself is put on display for
scrutiny, not unlike the object of study in modern science. Historical conflicts are
evacuated from unchanging domestic life, and so is politics-the term that stands
in for all sorts of troubles beyond our control. "Domestic privacy," Lauren Berlant
writes, "can feel like a controllable space, a world of potential unconflictedness
(even for five minutes a day): a world built for you" (2000:6). "A world built for
you"-what's more you can ask for? But who has the privilege of dwelling in such a
stable house all her life? For after all, do not all sorts of unavoidable troubles not
break in through the window from the world outside, in the public where politics
takes place? What is fiction doing in the midst of all this, in the harsh realpolitik
that can only look at literary flourishes with contempt? And what of the labor
expended to maintain it? Put in economic terms, what is the stake in maintaining
2
the house of fiction? To ask such questions is already to set the house of fiction
trembling, for no more is fiction sheltered from politics which breaks in through
the window at night. Nevertheless, if politics from the world outside invades into
the house of fiction, the house of fiction, too, transgresses into the public world
outside. The pages that follow are concerned with the house in Thai fiction, but
they up the ante on the house of fiction by treating the house in Thai fiction not as
a purely fictional account severed from the so-called real world, but as itself
participating in the making of Thai political culture. As such, the pages to come are
pressed to ponder over the novel, domesticity, and the public sphere in Thailand,
for their developments, as I will show, are bound up with one another.
The house is an overdetermined sign that floats around amidst the slippery
rhetoric in Thai domestic politics. An example will suffice to illustrate this. On May
16,2010,
an accomplished Thai TV actor-director, Pongpat Wachirabunjong, turned
his acceptance speech for the Best Supporting Actor award into a platform for a
political speech against the Red Shirt protesters, who had at the time taken over
the financial district in Bangkok for months. His rhetoric likened the Thai nation
to a home whose continuation to today was beholden to the hardworking
father- king.
As this is an award begotten from my portrayal as a father, do permit me to talk a
little about the father. The father is the main pillar of the house. My house is big,
really big. A lot of us reside in it. I reside in this house, which is very beautiful.
Beautiful and cozy. But before it could become like this, the ancestors of the
father have to lose a lot of sweat, a lot of blood. They have to give their lives in
exchange for it, to build a house like this.
After recalling the memory of the debt, he urged that those ungrateful to the father
(i.e., the Red Shirts) leave the country. The speech was telecast nationally, and the
camera showed many in the award ceremony applauding, with some being moved
3
to tears. Despite its innocuous appearance, hidden behind the fac;ade was the
massacre of Red Shirt protesters on the streets that was concurrently taking place.
Three days after his moving speech, the military crackdown on the protesters
finally concluded, leaving almost a hundred Red Shirt protesters dead. The loss
would prove an enduring wound that serves as a catalyst for the political struggles
to come.
Who would have known that the cozy image of the house-which stands in
for humanity itself, pure and simple-could lend itself to be used as a rhetorical
weapon to justify such horrendous deed? What are we to do with the uncanniness
that arises from seeing home in a different light, after a catastrophe happens, as
other than itself? The concerns that drive this thesis have to reckon with so many
transgressions that took place in Pongpat's evocation of homeliness for political
ends in a public arena that nonetheless was not intended for political debates.
Above all, however, one cannot help but be provoked to wonder what happens to
those who, upon hearing this cozy speech, are "unhomed." "To be unhomed,"
Homi Bhabha writes with the Jamesian house of fiction dwelling in the back of his
mind, "is not to to be homeless, nor can the 'unhomely' be easily accommodated
in that familiar division of social life into private and the public spheres"
(1992:141). In this thesis, I will investigate into how the intimate domestic sphere
informs the political public sphere in Thailand. I will do so, however, by looking
specifically at the discourse about writing and reading.
Being Stopped in the Track: The Prehistory of This Work
Being thrown out of the path that I imagined would be untroubled was what
precipitated the project of this thesis. In the summer of 2014, I set out to conduct
4
the interviews with young members of the Thai middle class in order to understand
how their intimate lives intersect with the national politics in the public sphere.
The implicit premise behind my original research plan was that for most people,
what happens in the intimate realm of life shapes much of their identities, and if I
am to understand why certain groups of people feel about politics in this or that
way, it is indispensable to understand how intimate life and politics in the public
sphere are indissociably intertwined. Three days after my flight landed in Thailand,
however, the military staged a coup d'etat which put the junta in charge of the
country. The junta still remains in power today, and the coup-makers have yet to
signal to any plan to return to democracy. Because of the political situation in
Thailand, I was pressed to change the plan for my course of action. Already at the
origin, an end.
Yet in the end, there is a new beginning. This new beginning took me to the
Thai novel, a genre that once upon a time was hugely popular. Yet, why study
fiction in a thesis written in the subject of anthropology? One is reminded of the
slippery dividing line between ethnography and the novel-and as I have
overheard several times, the advice for students writing ethnography is to draw
some literary techniques from the generic conventions of the novel. A vignette,
however, will suffice to illustrate this precarious business that I somehow find
myself involved in.
A friend of mine at a different school-whose name will be unrevealed, of
course-took an introductory course in anthropology, and one of the reading
assignments was Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. After the
midterm exam, the students in the course received an email, in which the
5
professor insisted, not without fury, that Ruth Benedict's book is not a novel. What
prompted this insistence, he revealed in the email, was a student's comment in his
midterm exam which likened The Chrysanthemum and the Sword to the novel. "It
reads like a novel." Nobody can tell for sure whether that is a compliment if what
is being read is intended to be an ethnography. The primary distinction between
the novel and ethnography, of course, is that one is supposed to be fictional, and
the other is supposed to be real-yet, can the distinction be drawn so neatly?
A lot of discussions circle around such a question already, and my concern
here is not to involve myself in the debate around this question per se. Rather, I am
interested in the way in which fiction helps construct the social reality-which is
to be distinguished, I think, from the identity between the social reality and
fiction. In what follows, I seek to understand the place of fiction within the public
sphere: how much does fiction inform the deliberation that takes place in a public?
First, however, a few words about the idea of the public sphere are in order before
we delve into the remaining of my project.
The Idea of the Public Sphere
Current understandings of the public sphere (in original German,
0ffentlichkeit) owe a huge debt to Jilrgen Habermas's influential book, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (2001[1962]). First published in German in 1962,
the book has inspired lively discussions around the idea of the public sphere in the
English-speaking world since its English translation has been put to press in 1989.
These discussions are at the intersection of many disciplines, such as political
science, philosophy, literary studies, communication studies, sociology, and
anthropology. The idea of the public sphere is central to the "deliberative turn" in
6
democratic theory, which refers to a rethinking of democracy that moves away
from the emphasis on voting-which presupposes individuals as rational
decision-makers-to deliberation taking place in the public sphere that is
formative of public opinion (see Chambers 2003). What is at stake, one can argue,
is the critical understanding of democracy that has become increasingly crucial in
the post-World War II world order which has witnessed the jubilant spread of
liberal democracy, culminating in Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the end
of history in the 1990S (on the anthropology of democracy, see Paley 2002).
To be sure, the idea of the public has caught attention of thinkers before
Habermas. The modern public sphere has inherited the radicalism of the French
Revolution that handed sovereignty from the monarchy to the people. The ethic
implied in the idea of the public sphere has affinities with Enlightenment
thoughts. There is a tendency to identify Immanuel Kant's An Answer to the
Question: What is Enlightenment? (2006[1784]) as an early apparition of public
discussions. The Kantian ethic, with its apotheosis of free "public use of reason"
(Kant 2006:19), would deeply inform Habermas's project. In the liberal tradition,
John Stuart Mill has questioned whether public opinion in fact suppresses the
voices of the minority (1978[1859]). In the early twentieth century, the
Dewey-Lippman debate, which resurfaced again in debates in the 1980s, explored
the question of public opinion in order to assess the American democracy (see
Carey 1989).
Ink would perhaps not be unduly wasted in recapitulating Habermas's
original model of the public sphere, which he himself would later revise in
7
response to various critics. In an encyclopedia article, Habermas provides a
succinct account of his concept:
By "the public sphere" [OffentlichkeitJ we mean first of all a realm of our social
life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is
guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in
every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body.
They then can behave neither like business or professional people transacting
private affairs, nor like members of a constitutional order subject to the legal
constraints of a state bureaucracy. Citizens behave as a public body when they
confer in an unrestricted fashion [ ... J about matters of general interest (1974:49).
Several qualifications ensue. For Habermas, the public sphere was to mediate
between society and the state. Public opinion formed in the public sphere was to
supervise the public authority, which had hitherto been the preserve of royal
power. Habermas privileges the "liberal model" of the public sphere, which he
argues reached its zenith in eighteenth-century Western Europe before its
downfall in the "industrially advanced mass democracy organized in the form of
the social welfare state" (1974:54). From the liberal public sphere as an institution
locatable in social history, he derives the principles of the ideal public sphere: open
access to all citizens, the bracketing off of difference among citizens, and norms of
communication that ensure public use of reason. As such, the liberal public sphere
is at once prescriptive in that it shores up an ideal of good governance, and
descriptive in that it is useful as a category of social analysis.
While recognizing the emancipatory potential of Habermas's concept of the
public sphere, many critics have called it into question on different grounds (for
early critics in the English-speaking world, see Calhoun 1993; Robbins 1993). In the
English-speaking world, Nancy Fraser's critique of Habermas (1990) in particular
has been especially influential. Some critics have put into question the
exclusionary operations that are inseparable from the liberal public sphere a la
8
Habermas. Notwithstanding the principle of open access to all, women especially
are often excluded from formal channels to participate in the public sphere (e.g.,
Landes 1988; Ryan 1990). Another principle of the liberal public sphere is that
private persons are to engage in public debates while bracketing off difference and
social inequalities. Fraser has argued that there would still exist "informal
impediments to participatory parity that can persist even after everyone is
formally and legally licensed to participate" (1990:63).
Doubt is also cast upon Habermas's choice to privilege the liberal public
sphere, at the cost of putting out of sight other competing public spheres. The
term "counterpublics" is deployed to name alternative arenas for those who are
excluded from the hegemonic public sphere. In the German-speaking world, Oskar
Negt and Alexander Kluge's Public Sphere and Experience (1993[1972]) puts forward
the concept the proletarian public sphere rooted in human experience as the
counterpoint to the bourgeois public sphere which is too often allied with capitalist
interests. Fraser calls for attention to what she terms subaltern counterpublics,
which are "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social
groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses" (1990:67). Many subsequent works
continue to rework the notion of publics and counterpublics (see, e.g., Warner
2002). Scholars have argued that in order to nurture deliberative democracy that is
more hospitable towards difference, the fantasy of a unitary public sphere should
give way to a pluralistic model of the public sphere that attends to context-specific
difference (see, e.g., Fraser 1990; Habermas 1994; Young 1998).
Of particular concern for this project is the critique of the public-private
distinction that is constitutive to the liberal public sphere. The liberal public
9
sphere-which Habermas takes to be a normative category-is the arena where
citizens discuss not their private matters but things of common concerns.
However, as Fraser points out, what counts as common concerns is always
contingent on negotiated situations (1990:71). Relegating certain concerns to the
private realm is a tool with which to make the public deliberation the preserve of
privileged groups. With regard to gender, Francis Cody remarks that "a large body
of feminist scholarship has questioned the role of privacy in social thought and has
critically examined the specific means by which this sphere has been cast in
gendered terms" (2011:40; e.g., Fraser 1985; Rosaldo 1974; Ryan 1990). The
equation of private domesticity with women in effect excludes women from the
public sphere.
Several scholars have highlighted the porosity of the private-public
distinctions. Attention to their recursive logic works against the tendency to regard
the private and the public as reified categories (see, e.g., Gal 2002; Hill 2001;
Tomlinson 2007). The leakage of the private into the public have been explored,
providing new grounds on the liberal model of the public sphere (Berlant 1997;
Warner 2002). Heed has also been paid to the role of emotion and affect-both of
which are often relegated to the private realm-in public life (Cvetkovich 2003;
Cvetkovich 2007; Mazzarella 2009). Scholars have also crafted new models of the
public sphere that disturb the private-public distinctions (e.g., Benhabib 1992).
Citizenship and the Public Sphere
While citizenship as a concept has a genealogy that stretches back to
antiquity, anthropology of citizenship seeks to displace this inheritance from
Western political theory by instead looking at concrete practices where citizenship
10
unfolds in actuality. The liberal theories of citizenship in particular have shaped
the dominant understanding of citizenship as membership of national
communities which entails both rights and corresponding duties (Lazar 2013:1).
The essay by T.H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class" (1983[1950]), has served
as the reference point for scholars who work with and against the liberal tradition
of political theory. Aihwa Ong's work on citizenship as subject-formation a la
Foucault (1996) and Renato Rosaldo's concept of cultural citizenship as the "right
to be different and to belong in a participatory democratic sense" (1994) mark early
anthropological engagements with citizenship. Both of them shed light on how the
study culture can inform the study of citizenship.
With regard to the Habermasian public sphere which promises open access,
debates around citizenship continue the theme of unity and difference and, by
extension, that of inclusion and exclusion. The ideal of universal citizenship that
strives towards the unitary public sphere-which includes everyone-has been
called into question on the ground that it obscures the ways in which certain
groups have in practice been systematically excluded from deliberating public
opinion (Young 1984; Young 1998). Moreover, it fails to account for the ways in
which those formally excluded from citizenship (for example, from
enfranchisement) can find alternative means to assert their influence upon public
opinion in the hegemonic public sphere (e.g., Ryan 1990). Universal citizenship,
therefore, is inadequate both for understanding the complexity of political
belonging in the public sphere which is always already divided, and for ensuring
the inclusion of marginalized social groups.
11
Dimensions of citizenship that have to do with emotion and affect cut
through the private-public distinctions that are crucial to the public sphere. In
coining the phrase the "intimate public sphere," Lauren Berlant asks "why acts
that are not civil acts, like sex, are having to bear the burden of defining proper
citizenship" (1997:5). Her concept of the intimate public sphere bears repeating
here:
The intimate public of the U.S. present tense is radically different from the
'intimate sphere' of modernity described by Jiirgen Haberman. Habermas
portrays the intimate sphere of the European eighteenth century as a domestic
space where persons produced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense
of self which became a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and
alienated in the nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. In
contrast, the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship
as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values,
especially acts originating in or directed towards the family sphere. No longer
valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary
nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constricted
nation of simultaneously lived private worlds. (Berlant 1997:4-5)
While Berlant is creating the concept of the intimate public sphere specifically for
the context of the United States, it would not be amiss to let her concept travel to
Thailand, for as we have seen earlier, the Thai public sphere, too, is replete with
acts that draw legitimacy from the familial.
Notes on Methodology
12
Who builds this barrier constituting the text as a sort of island that no reader can
ever reach? This fiction condemns consumers to subjection because they are
always going to be gUilty of infidelity or ignorance when confronted by the mute
"riches" of the treasury thus set aside. The fiction of the "treasury" hidden in
the work, a sort of strong-box full of meaning, is obviously not based on the
productivity of the reader, but on the social institution that overdetermines his
relation with the text. Reading is at it were overprinted by a relationship of forces
(between teachers and pupils, or between producers and consumers) whose
instrument it becomes.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (2011: 171)
Despite the ubiquity of textuality in everyday life, the way in which the
reader engages with the text too often goes without saying. Complicit with such
elision, the fiction of the "treasury" that Michel de Certeau names above helps to
shore up the scene of reading that disavows its own social character, leaving only
the solitary reader and the text within sight. The text comes to be imagined as the
self-complacent object with no necessary connection to the world, and how much
of the treasure lodged therein that the reader can exploit depends on his or her
reading proficiency. In my thesis, however, I take care to appreciate the text's
worldliness, to use Edward Said's concept rather freely. "Whether a text is
preserved or put aside for a period, whether it is on a library shelf or not, whether
it is considered dangerous or not," he writes, "these matters have to do with a
text's being in the world, which is a more complicated matter than the private
process of reading" (1983:35).
I choose to study Dokmaisot, a female novelist writing in the early twentieth
century, because her novels are often credited as the inaugurator of the genre of
"family-life" novels, and the family is a topic that interests me in this thesis.
Moreover, Dokmaisot wrote across the 1932 revolution, the important event in Thai
modern political history that marked the transition from absolute monarchy to
democracy. "Critics are not merely the alchemical translators of texts into
13
circumstantial reality or worldliness," Said writes, "for they too are subject to and
producers of circumstances, which are felt regardless of whatever objectivity the
critic's methods possess" (1983:35). If it is as de Certeau claims that reading is
"overprinted by a relationship of forces," such overprinted relationship of forces
at once enables and limits what is possible in the kind of reading that I set out to
do. A more rigorous anthropological approach will oblige me to unearth the social
lives of Dokmaisot's novels, but since the study of print culture in Thailand has
just begun, it is still difficult to locate the archives-let alone to access it-that will
be useful for finding out how her novels have been read throughout Thai modern
history. The fact that I turned to the novel because the coup prevented my original
research from happening also means that I was not well-equipped enough to
research into the audience of her novels in great depth. Indeed, this is exacerbated
by the difficulty inherent in researching into reading practices, which as de Certeau
points out, leaves behind traces only sparingly. As historian Roger Chartier puts it,
de Certeau's caution "constitutes both an obligatory base and a disquieting
challenge for any history that hopes to inventory and make sense out of a practice
(reading) that only rarely leaves traces" (1992:1).
Nevertheless, we are not without hope. I compensate for this lack of
information with two strategies. First, I will make use of the secondary literature
about the print culture in the early twentieth -century Siam/Thailand in order to
get at a picture, however sketchy, of the textual world in that period of history. As
we shall see, many works provide an indirect access into the discursive formation
around literature. Second, I will treat the novels of Dokmaisot as self-reflexive, for
indeed, many instances in her novel stress the importance of reading and writing
14
practices, and often they cast themselves as same or different from the genres that
preceded them. The picture pieced together might not be satisfactory, but given
the limited resources and time, I hope this will at least be an opportunity for
speculation.
The Shape of This Thesis
While I imagined the scope of this project to be much bigger than what it is
now, the similar argument still underwrites this project in its current incarnation.
In this thesis, I hope to explore the way in which the family and politics were
intertwined in various ways. Although the family often implies closed intimacy,
the fiction about the family should be thought beyond the national boundaries of
Siam/Thailand, for the conjugal family and monogamous marriage were cultural
forms adopted from the West thanks to their high value within the discourse about
civilization. The novel of Dokmaisot, I hope to argue, helped to fashion such
foreign cultural forms as Thai in their identity.
In the first chapter, I outline the historical context in which to consider the
novel of Dokmaisot. In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries,
monogamy and the conjugal family were though t as high up in the hierarchy of
civilization. Following the existing body of scholarship, I will suggest that
Siam/Thailand, too, was conscripted into this hierarchy. Far from being marginal
to Thai political modernity, the transition from polygyny to monogamy is a crucial
aspect of the transition from absolute monarchy to democracy. It will be my
argument that the novel of Dokmaisot labored to render the monogamous,
conjugal family congruous with the cultural climate of the nation.
15
In the second chapter, I ask in what ways Dokmaisot's writing compromised
the foreignness of the novelistic genre. I will focus on her short story, "After
Seeing Voltaire," which I will treat as an allegory for how the political and the
literary were implicated. I will show that in "After Seeing Voltaire," commercial
literary production was denigrated in value, in contradistinction to pure literary
production which denies economic calculation. While at first sight, this seems to
merely reproduce the Culture Industry paradigm of the Frankfurt School in which
mass consumer culture is seen as obstructing the public use of reason, I will
suggest that following Pierre Bourdieu, the disinterestedness of pure literary
production reflected the contestation within the literary field that Dokmaisot
engaged in. In writing, therefore, Dokmaisot was accruing symbolic prestige for
the culture form of the novel that was denigrated due to its foreignness. This
accretion of prestige adds another layer to our discussion of how the cultural form
of the monogamous, conjugal family was being indigenized.
In the third chapter, I focus on the most famous of Dokmaisot's novels,
People of Quality. It will be my argument that People of Quality narrates the
cultivation of the modern political subjectivity, but the attention to its gendered
dimension will reveal that the political was situated vis-a-vis the cultivated
individual as 1) male was to female and 2) public to private. If it is granted that the
novel is a technology for cultivating the self in order to become a private person
prepared for their participation in the public sphere, then my reading of People of
Quality will reveal how citizenship was engendered in Siam/Thailand in such a way
that the complexity of the political was compressed into the binary opposition
between male and female. Despite the suffrage given to both men and women
16
immediately after the 1932 revolution, People of Quality reveals that the
female-gendered subject was political insofar as it was unpolitical, supplementing
the male-gendered subject who was burdened with the responsibility to discuss
matters of common concern in the public sphere. In the process of indigenization
of the novel and the monogamous, conjugal family, I hope to suggest, Dokmaisot's
writing reproduced the gendered hierarchy that organized both the novel and the
civilized family.
Chapter 1
The Novel of Dokmaisot and the Civilized Family
The photograph of Dokmaisot, the pen name (literally meaning "fresh
flowers") of a famous Thai female novelist writing in the early twentieth century,
catches her in the act of reading. With her eyes addressing the beholder who may
chance upon this photograph, there is no ques tion that she was posing for the
camera. While there is no way to tell for cer tain just by looking at the photograph
whether in fact she was reading, it is worth remarking that the act of reading
seems the performance exemplary of being the novelist . The message of such
performance is disarmingly simple: she reads books. Such disarming simplicity,
however, can linger only for a little while before it invites more questions. Who
was Dokmaisot? What might she be reading? What to make of her outfit? Her
pearls? "Dokmaisot as she was reading books for diversion," reads the caption of
the photograph in her biography (Somphop 1986:unpaginated). Contemplating on
18
her relaxed posture, I cannot help but wonder whether reading is leisurely for
her-but then, what of Dokmaisot's reputation in her day as a "serious" writer
whose novel was not to be read for pleasure?
Questions can keep sprawling, but the more pressing question is this: why
Dokmaisot? In the present chapter, I concern myself with the public sphere in
Siam/Thailand as the nation underwent the momentous transition to its
democratic polity. The 1932 revolution in Siam/Thailand, perhaps, will serve as the
metonymy for such transition to democratic polity which, to be sure, was more
profound than could be condensed in one such singular event. In particular,
however, my interest lies in the way in which the public sphere is intertwined with
the intimate domestic sphere, for in Jilrgen Habermas's classical account (2001),
both spheres are co-dependent in their development. Since Dokmaisot's life
spanned across the 1932 revolution, her writing can be mapped onto the story of
Siam/Thailand's transition to democracy. I choose to study her writing due to its
attention to the quotidian in the intimate domestic sphere which is nonetheless
emplotted into narrative as per the generic convention of the novel. In Thai literary
history, Dokmaisot is canonized as the pioneer in the genre of the "family-life
novel" (see, for example, Suphanni 1976:243 and Trisilpa 1999:48). According to
Habermas, the novel in eighteenth-century Western Europe served as the
technology with which the individual rehearsed his domestic intimacy so as to
learn to be the private person who participated as a citizen in the public sphere.
Dokmaisot's family-life novel, therefore, is apt for the task of unraveling the
entanglement between public and private that continues to shape much of Thai
democratic culture.
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The study into Dokmaisot so as to understand something about the Thai
political public sphere must be considered alongside Dokmaisot's work and life,
Thai political history, and the textual circulation of the novel under the purview of
European imperialism. In what follows, I will first provide a portrait of Dokmaisot
as a point of entry into the political history of Siam/Thailand. I will suggest that
she is to be understood as ruminating on the vicissitudes that her time pressed
upon her as a member of the declining Thai elite. Then, I will provide a brief
account of such history, which I will situate vis-a-vis European imperialism and
colonialism. While Siam/Thailand has never been formally colonized by any
European power, its implication in the project of European imperialism cannot be
denied. Nevertheless, its semi-colonial status puts a caveat on any simplistic
distinction between colonizer and colonized in the analysis of Siam/Thailand. To
begin to comprehend the complexity of the nation vis-a-vis European imperialism
and colonialism, it will be instructive to look at the civilizational discourse into
which Siam/Thailand was conscripted. As per historian Tamara Loos (2006), at the
heart of the civilizational discourse in Siam/Thailand from the mid-nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century was the family: to be civilized was to have
monogamy in place. To transition from polygyny to monogamy, however,
encompassed not only the level of the politico-legal, but also the level of the
cultural. Indeed, it will be my argument that the "family-life novels" of
Dokmaisot, along with other novels in the genre that she helped inaugurate, took
as their task such cultural reworking that the transition from polygyny to
monogamy demanded.
Dokmaisot and Her World
20
Dokmaisot is the pen name of M.L. Buppha Nimmanhaemin (nee Kunchorn)
born from 1905 till 1963. A daughter of Chaophraya Thewet, who was an intimate
advisor to King Chulalongkorn (Somphop 1986:17), Dokmaisot grew up and lived
most of her life in her father's house which hosted his many wives and offspring.
When she was four, Mom Chao Chom, her father's aunt, asked to bring Dokmaisot
to raise her in the palace. It was not until she was thirteen that she returned to her
father's house and started attending Saint Joseph's Convent, a French missionary
school, where she completed a high-school diploma in French. She started her
writing career when she was twenty, publishing Her Enemy [Sattru khong chao Ion]
(1929) as her first novel. As she was a prolific writer, her oeuvre includes thirteen
novels, several short stories, and writing of different genres. Her poor health,
however, pressed her to end her writing career in 1948, when she was forty-three
years old. In the same year, she married Sukit Nimmanhaemin, a Thai politician
and a diplomat, and with him she moved to India where Sukit served as the
ambassador of Thailand.
In the Thai literary canon, Dokmaisot figures at the dawn of the Thai novel
amidst the process of differentiating itself from the Western novel. Her first novel,
Her Enemy (1929), alongside Prince Akatdamkoeng's The Circus of Life [Lakhon haeng
chiwit] (1929) and Sriburapha's The Real Man [Luk phuchai] (1929), is considered by
Thai literary critics to have inaugurated the golden age of the authentically Thai
novel (see, for example, Wipha 1975:82, Trisilpa 1999:20-5, and Smyth 2000:173).'
For a critique of the overemphasis on these three authors in the Thai literary canon, see Thak
Chaloemtiarana: "This overemphasis, I would argue, elides the importance of novels published
before that date, and at the same time funnels scholarly energy towards only those novels
identified in the canon itself. If the year 1929 demarcates the birth of authentic Thai novels,
then anything written before that is less important, or worse, is considered inauthentic"
(2009:90). To be sure, pre-1929 novels were doubly depreciated in the Thai literary canon, for
1
21
Before the golden age that commenced in 1929, most novels in the literary market
were translations and adaptations of Western fiction. These translations and
adaptations were considered to be lowbrow, feeding into escapist dreams that
thrived on the minds and the bodies of readers. The trio, however, marked the
rupture in Thai literary history that represented the novel's newfound capacity to
ruminate on the "local" problematics that Siam/Thailand was facing. All three
pioneers of the Thai novel are said to have raised the literary prestige of the genre
so that no more would it shy away from the reality. More will be said later as to the
pre-1929 textual world vis-a-vis the Thai political history, for, to be sure, the story
is more complex, involving Siam/Thailand semi-coloniality that conditioned the
textual circulation within the nation in a peculiar way. As we will see, it will be
important to the argument put forward in the present chapter to understand this
story. Let us, for now, put into sharper focus the shape of Dokmaisot's corpus.
Dokmaisot's novels evolved over her writing career. Despite such evolution
and the fact that she also wrote in non-novelistic genres, she is best known as the
Thai female novelist who wrote about the Thai upper-class family.2 As aforesaid,
the novel as a literary form itself is subordinated to Thai poetry, which is considered to belong
properly to the literary heritage traceable back to the ancient kingdom (see Smyth 2000:173-4).
'The chronological list of Dokmaisot' s novels is as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Her Enemy [Sattru khong chao 10ngJ (1929)
Nit (1929)
Nandana [NantawanJ (1929)
The FirstMistake [Kwam pid khrang raekJ (1930)
The Secret Past [Kam kaoJ (1932), translated into English by Ted Strehlow (1992)
Three Men [Sam chail (1933)
One in a Hundred [Nueng nai royJ (1934)
An Accident [UbattihetJ (1934)
The Victory of Luang Narueban [Chai chana khong luang naruebanJ (1935)
People of Quality [Phu dil (1938)
Thusls the World [Ni lae 10kJ (1940)
The Last Literary Work of Dokmaisot [Wannakam chin sud tai khong dokmai sotJ (1949),
unfinished
22
Thai literary historians consider her to be the pioneer in the genre of the
"family-life" novel, which, for the first time, depicted the Thai intimate domestic
life in a manner much more realistic than the escapist novels that pervaded the
literary market before she-along with Prince Akat and Sriburapha -came along.
It is no surprise, therefore, that her early novels still bear the marks of the
melodramatic plot that still persisted from their predecessors-the escapist
novels-that Dokmaisot attempted to put behind. 3 As her writing career
progressed, however, her novels became more complex, taking on the burden of
discussing the social issues that Siam/Thailand was facing in the early twentieth
century. Her literary effort culminated in her last completed novel, Thus Is the World
[Ni lae 10k] (1940), which is celebrated by literary critics as the finest of all her
novels. 4 The most famous of her novels, however, is People of Quality-a
centerpiece of the present chapter. Another salient characteristic of Dokmaisot's
novels is the heavy influence from Buddhism, which can be attributed to
Dokmaisot's profound religious belief. Given the fact that she is well-known for
her "family-life" novels, the choice of studying Dokmaisot may seem strange in
light of the present chapter's commitment to its argument about the political.
In her review of the English translation of Dokmaisot's The Secret Past by Ted Strehlow (1992),
Katherine A. Bowie writes:
3
"Makes me think of Barbara Cartland!" my mother said after finishing this
thoroughly entertaining, romantic Thai novella. Indeed many parallels can be
drawn between the lives of Dokmaisot and the English "Queen of Fiction."
However, while Cartland is trivialized as unserious by modern literary critics,
Dokmaisot's contribution to Thai literature remains respected to this day. Unlike
Cartland whose novels are essentially escapist, Dokmaisot's romances raised
moral issues. (Bowie 1993:157)
The comment above serves as an evidence for the marks of the melodramatic plot in The Secret
Past, an early work of Dokmaisot. Indeed, to be called into question is the notion that her work
eventually breaks off from the escapist fiction that preceded her.
4 Thus Is the World has won the Asian Novel Award in Japan. It was subsequently translated into
the Japanese language.
23
Nevertheless, the move to see her novels in relation to their world is by no means
new. Let us now rehearse what scholars have to say as to Dokmaisot's writing
vis-a-vis the social transformation that brought the nation into modernity,
political and otherwise.
To heed the relationship between Dokmaisot's novels and society is to
follow a long tradition in the theory of the novel that endeavors to relate the genre
of the novel to society. The theoretical question that will preoccupy us in reading
Dokmaisot is, therefore, in what way the novel and society are related. Indeed,
given the well-entrenched notion that the novel is a modern genre par excellence,
our theoretical question will be pressed to concern itself, more specifically, with
modern society. Siam/Thailand's social transformation in Dokmaisot's time
towards modernity only serves to place more import upon the task of explicating
the way in which Dokmaisot's novels were rooted in their social environment. In
what follows, I will summarize Trisilpa Boonkhachorn's account of such
rootedness put forward in her influential book on the relationship between the
Thai novel and Thai society, The Novel and Thai Society (1932-1957) (1999). I will
treat her account as representative of the scholarly opinion on Dokmaisot's writing
in Thai literary criticism. It can be abridged into two main points: first,
Dokmaisot's novels reflected the decline of the old aristocratic class in
Siam/Thailand and the hope for its dignified survival in the next generation; and
second, their female lead characters represented the new Siamese woman who was
more individualistic, thanks to women's access to education and the influx of
Western culture.
24
Firstly, amidst the decline of the old aristocrats who had hitherto been
economically and politically powerful, Dokmaisot's novels represented the
attempt by the new generation of the aristocrats to bargain with the new society
that was more hostile to them. Trisilpa identified the crisis faced by the new
aristocrats both on the order of the cultural and on the order of the economic. The
democratic culture that was gaining currency in Siam/Thailand called aristocracy
into question, but according to Trisilpa, "Dokmaisot ... saw the hope for the
aristocrats to continue to prosper in life and society if they would assente to some
changes in their value system:" the illustration that Trisilpa gives is Dokmaisot's
encouragement for new aristocrats to have the careers that were previously
deemed unfit for them (1999:50). On the economic order, the economic power of
the old aristocrats was being jeopardized. According to Trisilpa, "the expanding
capitalist economic system gave a new role to the merchants, who had become
powerful economically [chao sua] and had become the nouveau riche [phu di mai]"
(1999:53). The old aristocrats disparaged the nouveau riche for being counterfeiters
with no respectable genealogy. In the first aspect ofTrisilpa's account, Dokmaisot
appears complicit in a conservativist project in that she is invested in conserving
the old order, although at the necessary cost of some alterations of such order.
As such, Trisilpa's first point, which treats Dokmaisot's novels as
conservatively dealing with the the decline of the aristocrat, seems unaligned with
Trisilpa's second point, which lends itself to be read as progressive. Briefly put, her
second point is that Dokmaisot's female main characters reflected the emergence
of the new Siamese woman, who was becoming more individualistic due to
women's recent access to education and to Western influences. In her words,
25
... Dokmaisot's novels have made an important contribution to the development
of the Thai novel in another aspect: they placed importance on the female
characters, who were different from the traditional values about women. Her
female characters, especially the lead characters, were often women who have
had modern education, either from the Convent, or from living aboard. This
taught them to be sociable as well as to be self-confident. Therefore, the female
lead character in each of Dokmaisot's novels had her own individual identity,
with the character development as the story progressed. (Trisilpa 1999:58)
Take note of how, in Dokmaisot's novels, it is the female leads who propel the
thrust departing from the background of the traditional values associated with the
female gender. Rather boldly, Trisilpa suggests that the new woman ala Dokmaisot
was, in her phrasing, "beyond her time," just before she goes on to argue that such
was the case because of the Western influence on the character-building in
Dokmaisot's novels (1999:59). In dealing with such temporal disjuncture, Trisilpa
explains it away by accrediting it to Dokmaisot's individual, if not also idealized,
set of values. As such, the progressivism of her female leads is fashioned as a
blemish on novelistic realism.
Let us keep in mind as we move forward such disjuncture between the
individuality of Dokmaisot's lead female characters and the traditional set of
values which failed to catch up with the her progressive female characters. Having
given a compressed picture of how Dokmaisot fit into her world, I will now venture
to give a more thorough account of Thai political history which provides the
context for Dokmaisot's writing. If the novel-the genre which in Siam/Thailand
became indigenized in the early twentieth century-is indeed a modern genre par
excellence, it will not come as a surprise that Thai political history, as well, narrates
the arrival of modernity in Siam/Thailand. Yet, for a long time now, Thai
historiography has witnessed the long-standing but still ongoing politics of
modernity, which consists in the contestation over the story of how modernity
26
arrived in the Thai nation. While it might seem merely rhetorical, the cultural
politics played out in such contestation has as its stake no less than the legitimacy
of democracy in Siam/Thailand, for the strategy of rendering the political
technology of democracy unsuitable to the Thai soil has proven a powerful ally of
political conservatism. Lest it be forgotten, it is by no means easy to neatly isolate
modernity from a whole host of other "modern" phenomena, which ranges from
nationalism, democracy, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. To tell the story
of Thai modernity, therefore, is to set oneself adrift in the historical narrative that
touches on this constellation of terms.
Thai Modernity: Thailand vis-a-vis European Imperialism and Colonialism
The 1932 revolution that transitioned Siam/Thailand from absolute
monarchy to democracy serves as a metonymy for the larger social transformation
towards modernity, but one that was circumscribed by the unequal relations
between Siam/Thailand and imperial nations. The Bowring treaty, signed in 1855
with Britain with the effect of liberalizing foreign trade in Siam, inaugurated the
unequal relationship between Siam/Thailand and the imperial nations. In addition
to putting Siam in an economically disadvantageous position, it also pressed Siam
to grant the British empire extraterritoriality, exempting citizens of the British
empire from being subject to Siamese jurisdiction. The terms established by the
Bowring treaty would not be revoked until after the 1932 revolution, which, as
aforesaid, transitioned the nation from absolute monarchy to democracy.
According to the master narrative in Thai history, what went on in the long
negotiation between imperial nations and Siam was the process by which Siam
"modernized" itself-a case of autochthonous modernization in contrast to other
27
cases in Southeast Asia, which unlike Siam have been subject to modernization
from outside. King Chulalongkorn (1853-1910), who reigned from 1868 until his
death in 1910, reformed the political system in Siam by the expansion of
bureaucracy, which necessitated the enormous reform in many realms of social
life, ranging from education to table manners. What was in the making during
Chulalongkorn's bureaucratization was the modern Thai nation, but one that was
under absolute monarchy. Modernity, then, was to be the gift bestowed by the
king. 5 A corollary of modernity, democracy, too, was eventually to be the gift given
to the nation from the king, yet the 1932 revolution pressed the nation to
transition to democracy sooner than the monarchy envisioned when the soil for
planting it was still not ready-although, of course, the time of the not-yet to
which such master narrative subscribes is to be put in question. 6 In 1932, a group of
military officers and civil servants staged a coup d'etat to take power from
Prajadhipok, then the king of Siam. The coup d'etat has come to be known as the
1932 revolution, the history of which is still subject to ongoing, heated debates to
As historian Maurizio Peleggi notes, "The view of the Fifth Reign [of King Chulalongkorn) as a
period of momentous change and of King Chulalongkorn as a Prometheus-like figure who
bestowed the gift of modernity on Thai society is deeply entrenched in both historical writings
on Thailand and in the Thai collective consciousness. Such a view owes a great deal to a number
of dissertations submitted at U.S. universities in the late 1960s and early 1970S that
documented the establishment in Siam of administrative, educational, military, and ecclesiastic
institutions after the Western pattern-a process that goes under the name of Chakri
Reformation" (2002:4). Indeed, the question Peleggi raises is what we are to make of the
"modernizing" measures in the reign of King Chulalongkorn. His answer is that, "far from
being a by-product of the wider of administrative and institutional reformation, the
refashioning of the royal elite's public image was a key element in the project of asserting their
'civilized' status and, consequentially, their claim to 'national' leadership" (Peleggi 2002:3).
6 Indeed, the time of the not-yet posited here resembles the same justification that the British
empire has used to justify its colonial measures: its colonial subjects cannot be left to govern
themselves, yet. Another question that arises here, almost naturally, concerns the inheritance
of democracy from Europe. For the People's Party, the members of which were the instigators of
the 1932 revolution, can be said to originate in Europe among Thai students abroad.
5
28
these days-for directly tethered to such history is the question of whether
democracy is suitable for the Thai nation.
It will be instructive to position Thailand vis-a-vis European imperialism and
colonialism so as to introduce a crucial motif in the history of Thai modernity, for
in spite of the disavowal of Thailand's colonial status in the writing of Thai history,
such history is all the same a product of the nineteenth century where colonialism
by imperial nations was at the zenith in the region of Southeast Asia. Much ink has
been spilled over the debate as to whether and in what way Thailand has been
colonized. To a novice student of Thailand's official national history, the primal
lesson tells the story of the nation's successful evasion from colonization by
imperial powers, thanks to the cunning genius of the Thai kings. Having foreseen
the threats to sovereignty posed by powerful Western nations, the Thai kings, one
after another as if the continuation of the royal lineage were free of any rupture,
negotiated with Western nations in order to protect the nation's sovereignty. To
the evasion from colonization Thai modernity owes its singularity, the claim to
which has been the principal motif in the official Thai history. That Thailand has
never been formally colonized has been cited as the reason that the country cannot
be compared to other nations, in Southeast Asia in particular, that are
post-colonies. Thus the epigraph with which Benedict Anderson commences his
influential review of Thai studies: "What damn good is this country-you can't
compare it to anything!" (1978:196). He puts into question the claim to the
singularity of Thailand, claiming that the master narrative in Thai history, briefly
recounted above, is but the cultural product of the hegemonic elite who have
monopolized the cultural production in different realms in Siam/Thailand.
29
Any seasoned but critical student of Thailand, however, will not hesitate to
ridicule the official version of Thai history that apotheosizes the monarchy under
whose guidance the country managed to keep its sovereignty. Instead of upholding
the exceptionalism of Thai studies, the task set out for the revisionist
historiography is to enable comparison. Thongchai Winichakul's Siam Mapped
(1994) is the landmark of such revisionist historiography. His most valuable labor
is to decenter the monarchy from the center stage of Thai history. In its stead, he
proffers an account in which, far from possessing hyperagency, the monarchy's
sovereignty was circumscribed in many ways by colonialism: by studying how the
Thai nation came into being as a geopolitical entity after its increasing intensified
contact with imperial powers since the mid-nineteenth century, Thongchai reveals
the way in which the Thai elite was conscripted into the cartographical discourse
from the West: the modern Thai nation came into being as the modern map was
being drawn. Such circumscription puts Thailand back into the comparative field,
which enables the analytical possibility of exploring into the way in which the
emergence the Thai modern nation, not unlike that of other post-colonial nations,
was deeply entangled with European imperialism and colonialism.?
Where is Siam/Thailand, then, vis-a-vis European imperialism and
colonialism? If it has indeed never been formally colonized, how ought we to take
this fact into account while at the same time avoiding the fallacy of falling back
onto the exceptionalist thesis? In her pathbreaking study on the family law,
historian Tamara Loos writes:
Siam sits at the nexus of colonialism and imperialism, where its sovereignty was
qualified by imperial nations at the same time that its leaders enacted colonial
7 The exemplary work that paves way for such task is Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson's The
Ambiguous Allure of the West (2010).
30
measures domestically, sometimes in conscious competition with encroaching
imperial powers. Rather than isolate Siam as exceptional, Siam's split identity as
colonizer and colonized makes it eminently comparable to both and
simultaneously capable of illuminating the limits of the categories. (Loos 2006:3)
According to Loos, while Siam's sovereignty was circumscribed by imperial
nations, it was also an imperial force encroaching upon its Muslim south. To
understand the political history of Siam/Thailand, therefore, we must reckon with
what Loos calls its split identity, irreducible to either side of it. 8 In Loos' study,
"connecting the halves of Siam's split identity is law-the institution of modernity
par excellence in Siam" (2006:3). For the purpose of the present chapter, I will
suggest that the novel, too, is the institution of modernity that likewise connects
the halves of Siam's split identity. But for now, in the next section, I will sketch
how Siam/Thailand was conscripted into the civilizational discourse that was
decisive in the politics of modernity in the early twentieth century, and how
marital practices were indissociably bound up with the civilizational discourse.
The Civilized Family: Imperialism and the Question of Polygyny
In the making of the Thai nation from the mid-nineteenth century to the
early twentieth century, the civilizational discourse played a crucial role in that it
provided a technology for imagining the Thai nation among other modern nations
in the world. By civilizational discourse, I mean the discourse that gradates peoples
and nations according to their levels of civilization. The term "civilization" has
been inflected by its many different uses. Yet, as Norbert Elias observes, while "it
8 As Loos remarks, "There are limitations to comparing Siam to either an imperial state or a
colonized state. Although Siam shares the characteristics of a colonized state vis-a-vis the
European imperial powers and of an imperial power toward the Muslim south, it cannot be
conflated with either one" (2006:75).
31
always seems somewhat difficult to summarize in a few words everything that can
be described as civilization,"
... when one examines what the general function of the concept of civilization
really is, and what common quality causes all these various human attitudes and
activities to be described as civilized, one starts with a very simple discovery: this
concept expresses the self-consciousness of the West. One could even say: the
national consciousness. It sums up everything in which Western society of the
last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or "more
primitive" contemporary ones. By this term Western society seeks to describe
what constitutes its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its
technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its scientific
knowledge or view of the world, and much more. (Elias 1994:3)
Since the concept of civilization, according to Elias above, expresses the national
consciousness, it becomes a technology for imagination the nation as limited. For
as Benedict Anderson argues, "The nation is imagined as limited because even the
largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if
elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations" (2006:7). In his words, again,
«((our' nation is (the best'-in a competitive, comparative field" (Anderson
2006:17), and it is into this competitive, comparative field that the civilizational
discourse puts Siam/Thailand.
Indeed, it was the gradation of peoples and nations made possible by the
civilizational discourse that allowed European imperialist powers to posit the
inferiority of uncivilized nations. Such inferiority furnished European imperialism
with the justification for the colonization of uncivilized nations, the process of
which was camouflaged as the benevolent civilizing mission. Yet, while it is true
that the agency of the colonial subjects is circumscribed by colonial measures
taken by imperial nations such that those subjects cannot be said to have
volunteered to participate in the project of Western civilization, it is not the case,
32
either, that they have been rendered passive. Rather, they are the conscripts of
civilization, in anthropologist Stanley Diamond's sense:
In fact, acculturation has always been a matter of conquest. Either civilization
directly shatters a primitive culture that happens to stand in its historical right
of way; or a primitive social economy, in the grip of a civilized market, becomes
so attenuated and weakened that it can no longer contain the traditional culture.
In both cases, refugees from the foundering groups may adopt the standards of
the more potent society in order to survive as individuals. But these are
conscripts of civilization, not volunteers. (Quoted in Asad 1992:333)
In his essay on Diamond which commences with the quotation above as its
epigraph, Talal Asad makes the point that" social and cultural variety everywhere
increasingly responds to, and is managed by, categories brought into play by
modern forces" (1992:333). Any claim to singularity notwithstanding, Western
civilization has already conscripted the colonial subjects into its playing field.
Nevertheless, by no way is this to imply that the colonial subjects lack the agency
to "play" in such field. On the contrary. Yet, as Asad warns, cultural creativity is
not indeterminate, but rather conditioned by imperial forces.
Although Thailand has never been formally colonized, it has not been
immune to the civilizational discourse. While, earlier, the imperialist forces
appeared to the Siamese ruling elite as the threat to the national integrity, as the
nineteenth century drew to close they came to be taken by the allure of the West.
In Thai, "civilization" was transliterated as siwilai-a term that posits an alterity
from its original, but still remains tethered to it. The unbridgeable gap that keeps
apart civilization and siwilai bespeaks the process of cultural translation that gives
pause to any thought that regards the quest for siwilai in Siam as a mere imitation
of the West. As Thongchai writes in his essay on the civilizational discourse in
Thailand:
33
Not unlike the eclectic ideas of what constituted civilization that evolved in
Europe over many centuries, ideas on how to make Siam siwilai ranging from
etiquette to material progress, including new roads, electricity, new bureaucracy,
courts and judicial system, law codes, dress codes, and white teeth. This list
could be much longer. But unlike the European experience, the Siamese quest for
siwilai was a transcultural process in which ideas and practices from Europe, via
colonialism, had been transferred, localized, and hybridized in the Siamese
setting. (Thongchai 2002:528-9)
The stake in the quest for siwilai was no less than to project Siam as one among the
great nations of the world. As Thongchai has argued, the quest for siwilai from the
late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century "was an attempt originated
by various groups among the elite, later including urban intellectuals, to attain and
confirm the relative superiority of Siam; as the traditional imperial power in the
region, Siam was anxious about its position among modern nations" (2000:529). In
other words-and to repeat-Siam projected itself into what Anderson calls "the
competitive, comparative field" (2006:17). It will not suffice, therefore, to state
that Siam/Thailand "colonized itself," for the Siamese ruling elite in the late
nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was by no means resigned to a
sense of inferiority, but rather aspired to be on an equal footing with other
imperial nations in the West. Nevertheless, it will be important to press upon
Thongchai's insistence to regard the Siamese quest for siwilai as a "transcultural
process," for regarding it as such allows us to think about the agency of the
cultural brokers who translated, as it were, civilization.
The family was an arena in which the dynamics of the civilizational
discourse played out. Regarded as the locus of morality, the family in its various
stages in the evolutionary scale became the indicator of moral progress that
34
culminated in the bourgeois family, at its height in Victorian England. 9 In the
civilizational discourse, therefore, to be civilized was to have the heterosexual,
monogamous marriage as the basis for the bourgeois, conjugal family (Service
1985:99).10 "Victorian thinkers rightly understood the link between the bounded
modern Family and the modern state," Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia
Yanagisako write in their joint article, "although they thought the two related by a
necessary teleology of moral progress" (1997:76). It might be tempting to discard
altogether the teleology of moral progress that parallels the teleological
development of the kinship structure and the marital institution. Nevertheless, it
is worth recalling Asad's point, well-made because it calls into attention how the
categories brought into play by modern forces have come to condition the making
of culture everywhere in the modern world. Such teleology which placed the family
in each society on an evolutionary scale, therefore, was brought to bear on the
civilizational discourse that had been indigenized by the Siamese elite. In other
words, the Siamese quest for siwilai was pressed to reckon with the equation of the
To be put in question is the well-entrenched notion that the family-or rather, The Family-is
an entity to be found in every society and culture. What do we look, exactly, for when we want to
compare the kinship systems of different cultures and societies? Bronislaw Malinowski, "the
anthropologist who first convinced social scientists that The Family was a universal human
institution" (Collier et al. 1997:71), propounded the functionalist view that The Family was an
institution for nurturance:
9
Malinowski's book on Australian aborigines thus gave social scientists a concept
of The Family that consisted of a universal function, the nurturance of young
children, mapped onto (1) a bounded set of people who recognized one another
and who were distinguishable from other like groups; (2) a definite physical
space, a hearth and home; and (3) a particular set of emotions, family love. This
concept of The Family as an institution for nurturing young children has been
enduring, probably because nurturing children is thought to be the primary
function of families in modern industrial societies. (Collier et al. 1997:72-3)
Elman Service devotes a few chapters to studying the work of Lewis H. Morgan, whose Ancient
Society (1877) put forward an evolutionary theory, according to which a society's kinship
structure and marital institution determined its governmental organization and its place in the
evolutionary scale.
10
35
heterosexual, monogamous marriage with civilization. However, the Siamese elite
was reluctant to adopt monogamy despite their awareness of the imperial
civilizational discourse that privileged such marital practice, and this because of
the extent to which the domestic politics in Siam was predicated upon the practice
of polygyny.
In Loos's study, her focus on the family law allows her to uncover the stakes
in the debates around polygyny in Siam/Thailand. Early ethnology took as its
primary object of study the kinship structures and the marital practices in different
societies, thereby producing the evolutionary theory of kinship that regarded
monogamy as most civilized. On the other hand, jurisdiction -and this is
important to Loos-was the means by which the imperial forces rendered
hegemonic the Christian heterosexual, monogamous marriage. "A country that did
not at least formally adopt heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the basis for its
modern family system," Loos writes, "was not considered fully modern by other
powerful countries, most of which were Western, Christian, and imperialist"
(2006:101). Nevertheless, despite the fact that the pressure on Siam/Thailand to
adopt monogamy began as early as the mid-nineteenth century," the Siamese
ruling elite had hesitated to abolish polygyny, in contrast to other non-Western,
non-colonized nations (for example, Japan and Turkey) which were quick to adopt
monogamous marriage law. Loos writes, furnishing us with an explanation:
The historical, cultural meanings and political functions of polygyny [in Siam) far
exceeded the narrow colonial conception of it as a sexual and immoral practice.
Polygyny performed vital political work in Siam, integrating the kingdom's
powerful political rivals and manifesting the association between masculinity
and power. Outlawing polygyny in favor of monogamy was anathema to Siamese
elite political and cultural norms. Trading in on the discourse of imperial
To be more precise, in 1855, when the Bowring Treaty was signed that put Siam in a
disadvantageous position, economically and juridically, vis-a-vis Britain.
11
civilization, Siam's elite began to advocate polygyny as central to that kingdom's
distinct form of Buddhist modernity, in explicit juxtaposition to Christian
European modernity. (Loos 2006:102)
"Historically," according to Loos, "polygyny performed political work that spilled
over the boundaries of its definition as a mere marital category. It functioned to
integrate geographically disparate settlements into the kingdom, to provide the
monarch with numerous male relatives to govern the kingdom, and to construct
Siam's masculine political culture" (2006:110).12 Its importance to Siam's
traditional political culture since as far back as the sixteenth century prevented the
enforcement of monogamous marriage from being a matter of course in the
modernizing measures taken by the Siamese ruling elite starting in the late
nineteenth century. Despite several moments of crisis that pressed the judiciary
body of Siam to pass the monogamous marriage law, it would always be deferred
until after the 1932 revolution that overthrew absolute monarchy (Loos
As Loos crucially points out, however, this brought about the divide that
rendered Thai/Siamese modernity distinct from European modernity. While Siam's
sovereignty was indeed circumscribed by imperial forces, its "domestic sovereignty
over cultural practices within an imperial context meant that practices like
polygyny were subject to polarizing politics" in its domestic cultural politics (Loos
2006:128). As such, polygyny was a sign that was overdetermined by the forces of
different political factions within Siam's domestic politics, which sought to secure
cultural hegemony. Debates around the question of polygyny emerged in the
emerging public sphere in Siam, especially in the 1920S, the decade before the 1932
For a detailed treatment of these three functions of polygyny in Siam, see Loos's explication
of her summary (2006:110-7).
n
37
revolution (see Barme 2002:157-94). In 1935, the monogamous marriage law was
passed, and as a result, extraterritoriality-established since the Bowring Treaty in
1855-was revoked, once again putting Siam in a more equal relationship,
economically and politically, with imperial nations.
While Loos puts emphasis on the legal dimension of the civilizational
discourse around the family, much of the politics that emerged around the
overdetermined sign of polygyny took place outside the institution of law. '3 It took
place on the order of the cultural, as well. It would not suffice to state that
Siam/Thailand put in place monogamous marriage law due to the political and
economical reasons, for while this was true, we must add that marital practices
were cultural practices, as well. Siam's sovereignty over cultural practices meant
that if monogamy became hegemonic in Siam/Thailand after a cen tury-Iong
struggle, its hegemony owed not to imperial forces alone, but rather-and more
decisively-to Siam's domestic cultural politics. Such cultural politics was
polarizing, in that it engendered two poles of opinions which reflected provisional
alliances in the battle over hegemony. Defenders of polygyny often took to mining
Buddhism as a source of Siam's difference from Christian imperial nations that
were propagating the hegemony of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Although
Theravada Buddhism in itself offered no definitive stance towards polygyny, the
defenders claimed that the religion of Siam, unlike Christianity, did not prohibit
polygyny (see Reynolds 2006). On the other hand, as the criticism directed towards
the ruling elite intensified in the early twentieth century, commoners who opined
In fact, to discuss solely the institution of law is to privilege the undertaking of those with
access to the judiciary apparatus, although, to be sure, it was not the case that those in the
wider public outside the judiciary apparatus had no power to supervise the state on such matter
(see Loos 2006:125-129).
13
against polygyny increasingly associated its practice with men of the ruling class.
Inheriting liberalism from Europe, they vilified polygyny as an outmoded practice
that signified the backwardness of the ruling elite (see Barme 2002). In no way,
however, did opinions on polygyny align neatly with class positions, for there were
as many members of the ruling class who advocated against polygyny as there were
commoners who endorsed it. These opinions on polygyny were irreducible to being
the superstructure that reflected the economic base, but rather belonged to the
order of the cultural, relatively autonomous from the order of the economic.
A species of cultural products, the novel served as a technology by means of
which factions waged into the cultural politics around marital practices. Since they
had as their primary object of study, as it were, the quotidian of the intimate
domestic sphere, Dokmaisot's "family-life" novels were part of such cultural
politics, which, lest it be forgotten, was circumscribed by the specter of the foreign
civilizational discourse that conferred the highest value on the conjugal,
monogamous marital practices. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said treats the
novel as the cultural artefact of imperialism. In stressing the importance of the
novel to imperialism and vice versa, he writes:
The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who
owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going,
who won it back, and who now plans its future-these issues were reflected,
contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. (Said 1994:xii-xiii)
For Said, narrative-which he treats as synonymous with culture, having
established the novel as the metonymy for it-was a crucial aspect of imperialism.
The novel concerning the family, therefore, is the terrain-or rather, to borrow
Pierre Bourdieu's term, the cultural field in which the contestation over the
marital practices which are overdetermined by imperial forces takes place.
39
Although Siam/Thailand, unlike the colonies of the British empire, enjoyed the
sovereignty over its cultural practices, the specter of empire still haunted these
cultural practices, even in the enclave of the family that was allegedly best
preserved from colonial control.
Conclusion: The Novel of Dokmaisot and Colonial Control
The novel, not unlike law, therefore, was the institution of modernity in
Siam/Thailand that connected the two halves of Siam/Thailand's split
identity-colonizer and colonized. In upholding the value of the heterosexual,
monogamous family, on the one hand, Dokmaisot's novel imagined Siam/Thailand
to be high up in the hierarchy of kinship structures and marital practices
underwritten by the imperialist civilizational discourse. Her novel revealed the
nation's self-aggrandizement as one of the great nations. On the other hand,
however, in adopting the cultural practices from the West in order to shore up its
self-aggrandizement, the novel of Dokmaisot helped to subject Siam/Thailand to
colonial control. The split identity of Siam/Thailand can be put in other terms. It
could be understood as subjectivation, in that in order for the nation to recognize
itself as a subject, it must also subject itself to the game, namely, the civilizational
discourse, the rules of which are already set by imperialism.
In other words, the task taken up by Dokmaisot's writing should be
understood as the indigenization of foreign cultural forms from the West. Both the
novel and the monogamous, conjugal family were foreign cultural forms, which
were both crucial to the construction of the Thai nation within the civilizational
discourse. Nevertheless, Dokmaisot herself was aware of the irrevocably foreign
40
origins of the cultural form of the novel. In the next chapter, I will ask how such
foreignness was compromised.
41
Chapter 2
Writing Of (f) Excess: Dokmaisot and the Scene of Writing
But like convex and concave in a Borromini fa<;ade, inside and outside are here
part of the same design, because the novel is always commodity and artwork at
once: a major economic investment and an ambitious aesthetic form.
-Franco Moretti, "On The Novel" (2006:ix)
In her heyday, Dokmaisot remained elusive to the reading public, despite
being well-known as that famous novelist. The mist shrouding her name endowed
her with something like a magical quality, which no doubt contributed to her
seemingly demiurgic power of authorship. It would not be until the 1960s that the
information about her life became available to the public when her biography was
published. Indeed, the publication of her biography was part of the larger trend
that conferred increasing importance upon literature. More was known about her
life from childhood to the end. More was known about her intention behind
writing. However, Somphop Chantaraprapha, the biographer of Dokmaisot, gives
us something ostensibly more. With the novelist's flair, he gives us Dokmaisot's
scene of writing itself:
Her writing equipments comprised about a dozen of neatly sharpened graphite
pencils in a cup, an eraser, a cutter, a pile of foolscap paper, some cigarettes and
matches, and an ashtray. The night was when her writing could go on
uninterrupted. As the night grew older, the flow of her writing grew even more
fluent owing to the serene silence. When she could not come up with anything to
write, she would puff out a cigarette and let her eyes wander along the smoke
rings, one after another, until her thought which was drifting along the smoke
became clearer, clearer, before it crystallized. Then she would put out the
cigarette and return to writing. (Somphop 1986:48)
Such disclosure of the scene of writing, once kept distant from the public, does not
tell us much. It would do injustice to Somphop, though, if it were left unsaid that a
whole ensemble of scenes accompany this scene of writing so as to paint the
picture of Dokmaisot's life. As it appears, however, the scene of writing that he
42
gives us leaves out in order to stage the night's serenity. The scene of writing
reveals as much as it conceals-or, better, it conceals by way of revelation.
In the present chapter, I attempt to recover something of what is left out
from Dokmaisot's scene of writing in order to understand the way in which the act
of writing was thought to be bound up with the political. Put otherwise, I attempt
an evaluation of Dokmaisot's stake, conceived in the broadest sense, in writing her
novels. The centerpiece for this chapter is "After Seeing Voltaire, " a short story by
Dokmaisot written in 1944. As we shall see, the short story is key to thinking about
how Dokmaisot's novel straddled the divide between the West and Siam/Thailand.
"After Seeing Voltaire" is a strange story about a fictional famous Thai author who
is possessed by the ghost of Voltaire upon seeing a film about him. Upon
encountering the scene in the film in which Voltaire is writing, the Thai author
imitates Voltaire's peculiar writing practice. As a result, his popularity rises
exponentially. He then becomes something like the domineering patriarch in the
literary world, dominating lesser writers and publishers alike. His popularity ends
up being so enormous that he is invited to become a representative in the
Parliament, and his political career continues to soar as he is on his way to
premiership. In the end, however, he awakens from his possession only to find
himself in the banality of life, again, before warning his roommate about the ghost
of Voltaire that might possess him.
It is my conviction that in studying Dokmaisot's writing, it is indispensable
to bring into picture the world in which her writing emerged. As we shall see,
Dokmaisot's textual world was populated by the genre of the novel, a cultural
artifact that travelled from the West-principally Britain but also France. The
43
foreign origins of the novelistic genre call for the analysis of Dokmaisot's writing
that is sensitive to the process of cultural translation, which is not reducible to
merely linguistic translation of the novel. They also call for the attention to the
way in which such process of cultural translation was at once constrained and
made possible by Siam/Thailand's semi-colonial status vis-a-vis European
imperialism. For as Edward Said argues, "imperialism and the novel fortified each
other to such a degree that it is impossible ... to read one without in some way
dealing with the other" (1994:71). I will provide an account of the textual world in
which the foreign novels, both translated and adapted, circulated in the early
twentieth century. Such an account will serve to hold up my argument that "After
Seeing Voltaire" allegorizes the contestation within the world in which she
participated. Indeed, the question that will guide my discussion is this: how did
Dokmaisot's writing compromise foreignness and fashion the foreign cultural
forms-the novel and, by extension, the monogamous, conjugal family-as Thai.
In offering my argument, I will hold that "After Seeing Voltaire" should to be
read in the context of Thai modernity, the arrival of which was inextricable from
the global capitalist market that inserted itself into the Thai nation. Taking as my
clue her reference to commodities and mass media in the short story, I will
consider Dokmaisot as a cultural producer who operated within mass culture that
flooded the urban life of the early twentieth-century Siam/Thailand. If Jilrgen
Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere sees the emergence of
consumer culture as precipitating the disintegration of the public sphere which
reached its height in Western Europe in the seventeenth century, it will be my
argument that Dokmaisot's attitude towards the mass media and consumption
44
that swayed urban Siam/Thailand mimes Habermas's. In other words, for
Dokmaisot, the commercialization of art-its transformation into
"advertising"-was bad news. In the cultural logic propounded in the short story,
the thoughtless imitation of Voltaire's scene of writing in the cultural artefact
from the West-the film Voltaire-impaired the critical consciousness crucial to
the classical model of the Habermasian public sphere.
In borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the literary field (1996), I will
seek to sharpen my argument in order to reconstruct it as an account of what Arjun
Appadurai would call the politics of tournament of values (1988:57). As an analytic
tool, the literary field refers to a space of literary production governed by certain
rules-a social game in which agents invest. In Bourdieu's formulation, the literary
field composes of two spheres, opposed but also codependent: one of pure
production that denies economic calculation, the other of commercial art. In the
cultural logic of Dokmaisot's short story, the imitation of Voltaire's scene of
writing in the film leads the Thai author to fall prey to commercialization, to
succumb to the logic of economic calculation. Furthermore, the West is mainly to
blame for such commercialization-and thus the equation of mass consumer
culture with the insertion of Siam/Thailand into the globalizing political economy.
If the novel is the cultural form that straddled the West and the Thai
autochthonous literary world, it will be my argument that in writing the novel,
Dokmaisot attempted to fashion it as Thai by way of transforming into the product
in the sphere of pure production.
Indigenizing the Novel: The Cultural Poetics of the Novel and Imperialism
45
The theory of the novel is of several strands, but as I have remarked in
passing above, to pose the question as to the relation between Dokmaisot's novels
and the larger social transformation is to follow a long tradition in the theory of
the novel that regards the novel as bound up with modernity. "Central to the
theorization of the novel as a historical entity," Michael McKeon writes in his
introduction to the anthology of the theory of the novel that takes a historical
approach, "is the premise that the novel, the quintessentially modern genre, is
deeply intertwined with the historicity of the modern period, of modernity itself"
(2ooob:xv). To regard the novel as a historical entity intertwined with modernity is
a choice, not a matter of course. Dokmaisot's novels will be regarded as such
historical entities, yet modernity-and by extension the novel as the modern genre
par excellence-is unthinkable without taking into account European imperialism.
As Edward Said argues, "imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a
degree that it is impossible ... to read one without in some way dealing with the
other" (1994:71). In his account, the institution of the novel was complicit in the
expansion of empire in that not only did it expand the horizons of the readers in
the metro pole, but it also performed the cultural labor of instilling within the mind
of the colonized reader the authority of imperial nations. '4 As is the case with other
institutions of modernity that have established themselves on the soil of
Siam/Thailand, however, the the institution of the novel was conditioned by the
nation's semi-coloniality vis-a-vis imperial nations in Europe. As I shall make
Said has in mind in particular the British empire, which rose in its dominance since the late
sixteenth century, reaching its peak during World War I. "It is not entirely coincidental," he
writes, "that Britain also produced and sustained a novelistic institution with no real European
competitor or equivalent" (1994:71).
14
apparent, its semi-colonial status at once enabled and limited the formation of the
novel in Siam/Thailand.
First, however, the cultural work of the novel in the colony needs
qualification, for the fiction popular in the colonies was not identical to the British
novel of "serious standards." As, apropos of India, Priya Joshi writes,
The British novel of "serious standards" was introduced in India in the
nineteenth century as a means of propagating and legitimating Englishness in
the colony. Yet the fiction consumed most voraciously-discussed, copied,
translated, and "adapted" most avidly into Indian languages and eventually into
the Indian novel-was the work of highly popular British novelists, today
considered relatively minor and far from serious, whose fortunes soared for
generations among enthusiastic and loyal Indian readers long after they had
already waned in Britain. (Joshi 2002:4)
Despite the steps taken by the British empire to introduce the British novel of
"serious standards" to India, such novel was confined in education. Outside the
education system, "bad fiction" reigned. In literary critic Q. D. Leavis's classic
account of the novel, with which Joshi's study commences, she laments the
disintegration of the reading public as a result of the "supremacy of fiction and the
neglect of serious reading." "For Leavis," Joshi writes,
reading bad fiction- by which she meant works that "make a brute assault on
the feelings and nerves" such as the fiction of Marie Corelli and William Le
Queux-meant liking it and looking for more of it, thus leading to "the
disintegration of the public" ... and a decline in the British novel from the days
of Richardson and Scott, Austen and Eliot, when it had "serious standards."
(Joshi 2002:4)
Joshi does not share Leavis's view, yet her summary above suggests that if "bad
fiction" prevailed in India, this meant that the Indian reading public was of a lesser
quality. What this conjures up is the image of the unthinking mass, similar to the
kind that is dominated by the culture industry that hinders critical consciousness
demanded by democratic culture. The argument that takes a stance against the
47
domination by the culture industry finds its way into Habermas's argument, which
laments the commodification of culture that makes impossible critical reason.
While Siam/Thailand was never formally colonized, the fiction that was
popular on its soil from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century
was of the similar species as the fiction that was consumed most voraciously in
India. The novel became popular in Siam/Thailand only in the late nineteenth
century: before the popularity of prose fiction, the literature of Siam/Thailand
consisted mainly of poetry. In her 1976 study on the early history of novel-writing
in Siam/Thailand, Suphanni Warathorn lists, alphabetically, the most popular
foreign fiction writers in the Siamese literary market from 1900 to 1932, and
indeed, Marie Corelli and William Le Queux are on the list. IS With regard to the list
of translated authors, Suphanni observes that "content-wise, translators were
often interested in exciting stories, and not in books with literary value that today
have come to be regarded as literature" (1976:82). The first translation of the novel
into Thai was of Marie Corelli's Vendetta!; or, The Story of One Forgotten (1886) in
1900 (Suphanni 1976:54 -5). According to Suphanni, as far as "the novel about life"
is concerned-by which she means "the novel whose content deals with human
life in some of its aspects, such as love, suffering, joy, and vengeance"-Marie
Corelli along with Charles Garvice greatly influenced the writing of the novel in
The full list: Francis William Bain, Sir James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Edward Frederic Benson,
Guy Boothby, Marie Corelli, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Emile Gaboriau, Charles
Garvice, Elinor Glyn, Archibald Clavering Gunter, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, Hedon Hill, D.
Humphreys, William WymarkJacob, Hall Kane, Maurice Leblanc, William Le Queux, Gaston
Leroux, A. W. Marchmout, Richard Marz, Sax Rohmer, Temple Thurston, Thoumill Smith, Louis
Tracy, and Herbert George Wells (Suphanni 1976:80-2).
IS
Thailand (1976:83).'6 Despite their immense success in the market, both authors,
however, suffer the same fate of falling into oblivion because their novels-often
bearing melodramatic plots-fall short of the "serious standards" with which
literary critics elect literary works into the canon. It would not be amiss to say that
the foreign novels that gained popularity in Siam from the late nineteenth century
to the early twentieth century were "the fodder on which the subalterns chew the
cud in the cantonments of empire," in the words of Leonard Woolf who explained
to his wife, Virginia Woolf, the popularity of the author in India who was relatively
unknown in the metropole (cited in Joshi 2002:36).
Since it has never been formally colonized, Siam/Thailand differs from India
in its sovereignty over cultural practices. No imperial powers have attempted to
establish the educational system in Siam/Thailand that taught European
languages. Consequently, the cultural brokers who translated or "adapted" foreign
novels-mainly in English and, to a lesser extent, in French-into Thai were
confined to the ruling class with the means to send their offspring abroad. In
Joshi's study, her "implicit premise is that if the British novel was a success in
India in certain select forms, its colonial readers made it so" (2002:4). For her, the
consumption of the novel in India involved not only the process of sifting through
the cultural artefacts from the West on the part of the Indian readers but also their
direct influence over the cultural production of the fiction in the metro pole. While
the power of readership in Siam/Thailand might not be as far-reaching as that of
the Indian readership, those in different capacities in the Thai literary market still
To be sure, other sub-genres, for Suphanni, have their respective influential writers, as well.
For example, the subgenre of the "adventure novel" has Sir Henry Rider Haggard (Suphanni
16
1976:88).
49
exercised agency, though in a rather different manner. Just as polygyny was not
ruled out due to imperial pressures alone, but more crucially due to the domestic
cultural politics, the business of "importing" the foreign novel-or, the very form
of the novel itself-lay in the hand of autochthonous cultural brokers.
In 1901, the magazine Lak Witthaya, literally meaning" stealing knowledge"
or "plagiarism," appeared for the first time. It marked the first appearance of the
foreign-language novel in Thai. Its very name betrayed its intention to "published
mainly foreign literature in translation or adaptation-literature which is 'stolen'
from other languages" (Wibha 1975:39). Founders of the magazine-Prince
Bidyalankarana, Phraya Surintharacha, and Chao Phraya
Thammasakmontri-were among the first Thais who studied abroad in England.
Despite their original intention to create the platform where ideas, old and new,
could be exchanged and circulated, these three authors dominated the magazine
(Wibha 1975:39). Nevertheless, the importance of Lak Witthaya is not to be
underestimated, for it crucially left its imprint on the Thai textual world. In Wibha
Senanan's words,
But as far as Lak Witthaya is concerned, it is important to note that since the
time it was in circulation, a new door had been opened to the Thai world of
words, the door that brought in "Sweetness and Light" from a Western culture.
And, from Lak Witthaya, the Thai literary stream had been turned into a new
direction, the turn that marks the modern period in the history of Thai literature.
(Wibha 1975)
Another witness to such a turn in the Thai literary history was Luang
Bunyamannoppanit, the famous writer at the time who wrote,
... In my understanding, the Thai language underwent a revolution in the year
that Vendetta [the first novel translated into Thai) appeared, because the prose
in Lak Witthaya was of a different kind that was a new thing for Thais who were
not used to the English language. When they got to read new stories of new
tastes, they became interested. (Quoted in Suphanni 1972:55)
50
Suphanni is quick to add to this that "the prose of Vendetta not only effected a
transformation so momentous that it deserves to be called a revolution, but also
was the model for the prose in other Thai novels to come" (1972:56).
If it is as Wibha states in The Genesis of the Novel in Thailand that "on the
whole, prose fiction in the formative years of the development of the novel
appeared largely, as one can see, in a borrowed form of various sorts and in
degrees" (1975:81), such fiction-especially the species that was published in Lak
Witthaya-also would be categorized as "bad fiction," as Q. D. Leavis calls it.
Kwandee Rakponse notes in passing the reason for its popularity,
Naturally, when Thai people first began to turn away from their traditional style
of writing, i.e. poetry, and to learn about the emergence of an unfamiliar type of
fictitious narrative, they could not yet see how the new form could possibly carry
an artistic value like their metrical compositions which had been devised for
reciting and listening. The new prose writing resembled their folk tales so that so
that stories were what they expected from it. Thus, romantic novels, with exotic
adventures and with settings and atmosphere not confined to any particular
country or society, served the purpose well. Realistic novels like those of Hardy,
George Eliot, or Charles Dickens, which required a certain amount of knowledge
about England from the readers, had no place at the outset, or for some decades
later. (Kwandee 1975:14)
While Kwandee's claim requires scrutiny that deserves a lengthier discussion,
suffice it to say here, for lack of space, that the so-called "romantic novels"
flourished on the soil of Siam/Thailand at the dawn of the new era marked by the
first apparition of translated foreign fiction in Lak Witthaya. In Siam, the genre of
fiction that was hugely influenced by the publications in Lak Witthaya was known as
reuang an len, literally meaning "diverting fiction." Indeed, while in the early 1900S
the genre of diverting fiction [reuang an len] was still considered a sign of literary
progress in Siam, its value became depreciated as the 1920S drew to close, having
come to denote, as historian Thanapol Limapichart tells us, "either merely a book
51
for entertainment, and thus not to be taken seriously, or potentially a dangerous
book as it was seen as a source of vice for women and young readers" (2008:100).
Such depreciation of value owed not in small part to the institution of the
Royal Society of Literature [wanna khadi samosornl in 1914, endorsed by King
Vajiravudh who reigned from 1910 to 1925. In the royal decree to establish the Royal
Society of Literature,
Vajiravudh commented that despite the significant increase in both writers and
readers, writers of the day scarcely paid attention to proper use of language, nor
attempted to compose anything knowledgeable or useful. Often, they simply
imitated what others had done. On works of foreign translation, they also chose
to translate only mediocre books from other languages. (Thana pol 2008:69)
His words, quoted above, were directed at translated foreign fiction published in
the magazine Lak Witthaya and the body of literature that its influence engendered.
Along with royally sanctioned writers, Vajiravudh undertook to translate "great"
works of literature from foreign languages. Take as an example his translations of
Shakespeare's plays, which have received lavish praises to this day. In the absence
of the British empire that, in the case of India, brought in the English novel of
"serious standards," it was, in the case of Siam/Thailand, the monarchy who was
responsible for such cultural translation. Indeed, as Thanapol would argue, the
lasting legacy of the Royal Society of Literature in Siam/Thailand is the
dissemination of the very criteria by which books are evaluated (2008:98-9).
Vajiravudh introduced a new term, wannakhadi, which could be roughly translated
as "high literature," to denote writing of higher literary value, and the institution
of high literature still holds hegemony contemporary Thailand.
As the Royal Society of Literature forged the literary canon of high literature
[wannakhadil, the genre of diverting fiction [reuang an lenl increasingly came to be
52
cast as low-brow literature, reaching its nadir in the late 1920S. Nevertheless, as
far as its sale figure was concerned, diverting fiction [reuang an len] continued to
rise. According to Thanapol, "Siam's literary production expanded significantly
during the late 1910S and the 1920S" (2008:101). The expansion involved not only
the sheer increase of books and journals in the market, but also in terms of "easier
access to books and journals than in the past" (Thana pol 2009:104). Moreover, the
new readership came into being that comprised of young readers, male and female,
who received modern education, thanks to the autochthonous educational reform
implemented since the reign of King Chulalongkorn (Thana pol 2008:104 -6). While
previously modern education was the preserve of the ruling class, King
Chulalongkorn's expansion of bureaucratic polity demanded more officers than
could be supplied by members of the ruling class. '7 Commoners of lower origins
were, therefore, granted access to modern education, in order to equip them with
administrative competency. Consequently, literacy among commoners arose, yet
this alone would not suffice to explain the newfound popularity among commoners
of the genre of diverting fiction [reuang an len]. As PatrickJory notes in his study of
books in Thailand, "Whereas the centre of Buddhist learning had been the
dhamma, the new ideal of learning appears to have been focused on competency in
reading and writing and the handling of books (wicha nangsu)" (2000:356). What
contributed to the popularity of diverting fiction [reaung an len], I would also
suggest, was also such paradigm shift in education.
The literary market of diverting reading [reaung an len] expanded, a parallel
proliferation took place of the concerns as to the didactic function of books.
Indeed, one of the reasons why Chulalongkorn fathered so many children was that he hoped
for them to man the expanded bureaucracy that he was trying to establish.
17
53
According to Thanapol, books and articles that offered reading instructions
emerged starting from 1910S when the literary market was blossoming
(2008:106-8). Moral criticisms, Thanapol also shows, that saw diverting reading as
leading the reader astray also rose in prominence (2008:110-5). These criticisms
expressed concerns that diverting fiction would harm readers, especially women,
who would therefore be misdirected from the path toward a person with moral
integrity. For the content of diverting fiction-which consisted, mostly, of love,
marriage, relationship, and erotic behaviors-would plant the worldly sinfulness
in the minds and the bodies of readers. Indeed, some critics would go so far as to
raise the question of whether the diverting fiction would prevent a child from
growing up to be a good citizen (Thana pol 2008:112). One reason for the emergence
of the proliferating concerns as to the didactic function of diverting reading was, I
would suggest, the association of the genre's growth with print-capitalism which
allowed for the "democratization" of the genre. While diverting fiction was
previously monopolized by the ruling elite in the early 1900s, the genre of diverting
fiction became "democratized" as the literary market expanded in the 191OS, in
that commoners now could produce fiction themselves.
The genre of diverting fiction [reaung an len], however, was not without its
defenders. As Thanapol argues, the genre would undergo a transformation that
elevated its status. For him, Song Tepasit, a Thai writer and government officer
who studied in Britain, was an important force that drove such transformation.
Having the opportunity to study abroad in Britain, he acted as a cultural broker
who transmitted to the literary world of Siam/Thailand the discourse around how
fiction was to teach its reader about life. Speaking against the moralists who saw
54
diverting fiction in bad light, Song proclaimed that "[there was perhaps] no better
way to teach about 'ethical conducts' [chanya], than by showing 'examples' of
human behaviors and sentiments" (quoted in ThanapoI2oo8:121). For Song, not
only was fiction to serve didactic functions, but it was also to take human nature as
an object of study, as it were, in that it ought to mimic life. In the transformation
of the genre of diverting reading epitomized by Song's intervention, therefore,
coincided these two functions of fiction. Indeed, Thai literary history of is wont to
regard such transformation as a development towards realism in the history of the
Thai novel.
One can locate Dokmaisot in the transformation of diverting fiction [reaung
an len]. As literary critic Ninlawan Pinthong, who was contemporary to Dokmaisot,
wrote of People of Quality in 1938,
People of Quality would fall into the category that the Westerners call the
"novel" [transliterated into Thai). The term has many translations in Thai. It is
generally called diverting fiction [reuang an len). Yet this term confuses me.
Some novels are written for serious reading [an ching ching), like the recent
Western novels that they held to be excellent. Most of these were written for
serious reading. People of Quality cannot be categorized as diverting reading
[rueang an len), because I understand the author's intention to be for it to be
read seriously [an ching) .... this book describes to us thoroughly what the true
"people of quality" [phu di) are, and since this story is didactic, it cannot be
called diverting reading [reuang an len).
People of Quality was one of the first novels that began to become "serious" and
realistic. Therefore, the question that will guide our discussion in the next section
will be: why was Dokmaisot invested in the generic transformation of diverting
fiction? Before I go on to discuss Dokmaisot's investment, I will offer my reading of
the short story, "After Seeing Voltaire," in which the fictional author's thoughtless
imitation of Voltaire's scene of writing impaired the critical consciousness
demanded by democratic culture. I will suggest that the attitude towards mass
55
media implied by the short story's cultural logic bears rEsemblance to the Culture
Industry paradigm proffered byTheodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in that it
sees the mass consumption of culture as detrimental to reason. Indeed,
Habermas's account of the decline of the public spherE follows the Culture
Industry paradigm.
Dokmaisot and the Scene of Writing
Voltaire's scene of w ri ling, from The Affairs of Voltaire (1933)
The film to which "After Seeing Voltaire" refers is most likely TheAffairs of
Voltaire (1933), directed by John G. Adolfi and starring George Arliss. While it was
not possible for me to get hold of this film itself, the summary of the film is as
follows.
Voltaire is portray..ct as a prophet of democracy, the man who "..ctucat..ct the
masses to think and act," the harbinger of the Fr~nch Republic. H~ stands for thE'
values of liberty, tolerance and justice. Set in 1762, it shows Voltaire w riting
pamphlets to protest about the oppression of t hE' people, th~ corruption of the
Establishment, and thE' suppression of human rights. The King, Louis XV, is
profligate and self-absorbed, claiming to rule by divine right, and his minister,
Count de Samac, runs a police state with torture, rigged trials and political
executions. Voltaire urges the King to listen to the voice of the people and
introduce reform. In order to get rid of him, de Samac frames Voltaire for selling
military secrets to Prussia and Voltaire is imprisoned in the Bastille. But
Voltaire's servant is able to prove that it was de Sarnac who was selling state
secrets. Voltaire is pardoned but the King refuses to listen to him and a final
montage shows how this led directly to the French Revolution and the
introduction of Voltaire's values. (Richards 2014:unpaginated)
The intertextuallink to The Affairs of Voltaire in Dokmaisot's short story involves
more than the direct reference, for in "After Seeing Voltaire," the fictional Thai
famous author, Mr. Windham Windsor,'8 mimes Voltaire's writing practice,
likewise writing pamphlets disseminating the values of democracy with the same
writing technology. As I shall proceed to show, such mimesis parodies the original
scene of writing in the film about Voltaire, accusing it of having commercial
interests.
The apparition of Voltaire's scene of writing marks the point where the
narrative abandons the reality effect. The reality effect is the term I borrow from
Roland Barthes to name the illusion of verisimilitude concocted up by the
seemingly useless details that serve no other functional purpose in narrative but to
signify that "we are the real" (1982:16).'9 "After Seeing Voltaire" commences with
Mr. Windsor's return to his apartment. The description of the beginning scene
presses itself on things that furnish the scene in a realistic manner, though not
without a little touch of playfulness. As such, it engenders the reality effect. Once
I thank Peera Songkiinnatham, who helped translate the short story into English (Dokmaisot
n.d.). The fictional author's name, Mr. Windham Windsor, is translated from Khun WatWatami.
Noticing that the author's name alludes to the wind and that the wind is alluded to again later
in the short story, Peera chooses to render the Thai proper name into an English proper name
that can be rendered non-singular because of its allusion to the wind.
19 In creating the concept of the reality effect, Roland Barthes-the early Roland Barthes, that
is-subscribes to the project of making possible the structural analysis of narrative that regards
narrative as a self-complacent object of study severed from the real world. In contrast, I want
merely to borrow his concept to denote the narrative technique in modern realism.
18
57
he "plucked a pencil from an Asahi-beer glass mug, and opened a folder
containing his unfinished drafts," the ghost of Voltaire inserts itself into his mind
to haunt him.
At that moment, Mr. Windsor pictured Monsieur Voltaire the way he had
appeared on the movie screen, walking hunchbacked like a shrimp, restless,
shrunken, a posture more fitting for a witch than an acclaimed poet.
Nevertheless, Voltaire was a human being who had significance for the history of
more than one European country, and left a body of works that the world had to
study with attention to this day. (Dokmaisot 1973a:46)
Voltaire (1694-1778), of course, is the nom de plume of the famous French writer of
lasting influence. The passage above from Dokmaisot indicates some familiarity
with Voltaire as that great European thinker. At the same time, it distances itself
from him byway of asserting a disjuncture between his appearance in the film and
his worth in European culture. In effect, this disjuncture speculates about the
filmmaker's lack of the critical consciousness, which results in Voltaire's
resemblance to "a witch." The first apparition of Voltaire immediately draws up
Voltaire's scene of writing in the film:
The kind of work that brought Voltaire to fame and popularity among certain
kinds of citizens of France, was belles-lettres. Voltaire composed his writings
anytime the mood struck him-this is one of his abilities evidenced by the
movie. Picturing how Voltaire authored his work with a fountain pen (how
patient he was to have to constantly dip the pen!), Mr. Windsor recognized the
blessings of today's arts and sciences that had created the ballpoint pen and the
typewriter for a greater convenience in writing for him. Besides, Voltaire penned
his works by candlelight, because in his time people didn't know how to use
electricity, but writing by candlelight seemed quite befitting, as candlelight was
not glaring to the eyes. And Voltaire's work room also looked shaded like a
dreamer's [nak kit nak funl room.
Once Voltaire finished a piece of work, he would throw it from the table,
leaving it scattered by the chair. This was a strange method, one that helped
Voltaire's writing to "flourish" [feuangl, perhaps. (Dokmaisot 1973a:S6-7)
As mentioned above, Mr. Windsor's scene of writing mimes Voltaire's so as to
satirize it. Indeed, Dokmaisot describes Mr. Windsor's scene of writing as follows:
58
But Mr. Windsor did not get lost in fame; he still worked like a machine. By day,
lavishing his generosity; by night, writing by candlelight, all the papers written
with a fountain pen strewn around the table. (Dokmaisot 1973a:62)
After Voltaire's scene of writing is staged, the short story alludes to Mr. Windsor
falling asleep, before narrating the hyperbolic account of Mr. Windsor's fame and
productivity. His book is reprinted sixty times, meanwhile" someone got thrown
off the train window for stampeding to buy Mr. Windsor's books" (Dokmaisot
1973a:58). Such hyperbolic account is clearly intended to produce not the reality
effect, but rather the satirical effect.
Curiously, the haunting of Voltaire's scene of writing in Mr. Windsor's mind
assumes a filmic quality. "Mr. Windsor set out to review a draft from the evening,"
Dokmaisot writes, "but the various images on the silver screen were stubbornly
trying to project onto his brain" (Dokmaisot 1973a:57). In the early
twentieth-century Siam, film was regarded by the cultural elite as a lowly art form
that was oriented towards profit-making rather than aesthetics shielded off from
money. "The cinema," historian Scot Barme writes, "and by extension the printed
materials it inspired, was disparaged by certain members of the elite as 'an eighth
grade art form'" (2002:49). Indeed, according to Barme, the market of the novels
accompanying Western films was proliferating at the time that Dokmaisot was
writing, but these novels were often written by the emerging middle class:
Up to this time, the translation of Western language materials had largely been
the preserve of members of the royal and aristocratic elite well versed in
European tongues. However, with the spread of modern secular education,
increasing numbers of young middle-class men and women also became familiar
with foreign languages (primarily English and, to a lesser extent, French). It was
from among their ranks that a new wave of translators emerged, using their
talents to produce film booklets as well as adapting what have been described as
'indifferent [foreign) novels' for the stage. (Barme 2002:49)
59
The figure of the writer who writes a booklet for a foreign film resembles the figure
of Mr. Windsor in that the latter, too, writes with a film in mind. They are also
similar in that in both can be found the nexus between writing and
money-making. Indeed, Mr. Windsor's spectacular productivity is almost magical:
The" oeuvre" of Mr. Windsor burgeoned [p/i dok ok pan) bewilderingly. 1000
copies of his work were printed for the first edition. Then for the second edition,
10000 copies. Then for the third, fourth, fifth editions, each time multiplied
tenfold, with another 0 added to the end. (Dokmaisot 1973a:57)
It should not come at a surprise that the writing technology and practice
from the West is in Dokmaisot's short story associated with money-making in the
capitalist market. As anthropologist Rosalind Morris writes, "The episode that is
most frequently said to stand at the origin of Thailand's insertion into the
globalizing political economy occurred in 1855, with the signing of a treaty by Sir
John Bowring and then King Rama IV, or Mongkut (r.1855-68)" (2002:66). Ifwe
follow Morris in treating such insertion into the globalizing political economy as
the advent of the foreign in Siam/Thailand, the film's dissemination of Voltaire's
scene of writing will appear as part of this globalizing political economy in which
not only capital but also culture circulated. In the next section, I will demonstrate
how in the cultural logic of "After Seeing Voltaire," the thoughtless imitation of
Voltaire's scene of writing impairs the critical consciousness instrumental to
democratic culture of the political public sphere.
Mass Consumer Culture and the Public Sphere
Excess both in fame and in productivity of Mr. Windsor in "After Seeing
Voltaire" knits together the lack of critical consciousness, on the one hand, and the
art of money-making in the capitalist society, on the other. The hyperbolic account
of Mr. Windsor's productivity is immediately followed by the description of his
60
charisma that bespeaks his bewildering fame. His charisma eventually secures him
a seat in the Parliament:
Then again, the name of Mr. Windham Windsor reverberated throughout the
Kingdom of Siam, not only among philosophes who raised their heads and
dropped their jaws in awe and adoration, but also politicians who looked at Mr.
Windsor with admiring eyes, to the point where Mr. Windsor had a seat in the
Parliament of the People's Representatives. (Dokmaisot 1973a:6o-1)
However, his subsequent abuse of his charismatic authority for political ends
betrays the lack of critical consciousness that democratic culture demands. Despite
his "civilized" act of throwing a pack of cigarettes at his critic in the Parliament, he
is still well-received by the public:
Anyhow, as Mr. Windsor went out of the assembly there was a huge uproar of
citizens squeezing against one another this way and that, all in the plaza, calling
out as if to shake the earth: Vive Mr. Windsor! Vive Windham! Bansai! Chai-yo! 3
cheers, hip-hip- hurray! Then the citizens carried Mr. Windsor from the plaza;
they arrived in Bang Kapi plains in one split second. (Dokmaisot 1973a:62)
His popularity keeps rising until he is on his way to premiership, and this allows
him to use his power arbitrarily:
Mr. Windsor's fame exploded far more impressively than Westerners' fireworks.
Later he became the Minister of Interior, and got to exercise his power by
banishing his wife on grounds that she stir-fried pumpkin but forgot to add eggs.
Right now he was about to become Prime Minister, to have his royal palanquin
wait at his doorsteps. (Dokmaisot 1973a:63)
In satirizing Mr. Windsor's political career, Dokmaisot connects his spectacular
popularity in the literary market-that is, his profit-making prowess-to the lack
of critical consciousness. For his popularity blinds the public to the fact that he is
in no way suitable to become a Prime Minister. Dokmaisot's distrust bears
resemblance to the Culture Industry paradigm inaugurated by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they characterize mass
culture as mass deception.
61
It is well- known that Jilrgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere treats the advent of mass consumer culture as precipitating the
disintegration of the public sphere. As such, it subscribes to the Culture Industry
paradigm of the Frankfurt School. Habermas writes,
Along the path from a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that merely
consumes it, the public sphere in the world of letters, which at one point could
still be distinguished from that in the political realm, has lost its specific
character. For the" culture" propagated by the mass media is a culture of
integration. It not only integrates information with critical debate and the
journalistic format with the literary forms of the psychological novel into a
combination of entertainment and "advice" governed by the principle of
"human interest"; at the same time it is flexible enough to assimilate elements
of advertising, indeed, to serve itself as a kind of super slogan that, if it did not
already exist, could have been invented for the purpose of public relations
serving the cause of the status quo. The public sphere assumes advertising
functions. The more it can be deployed as a vehicle for political and economic
propaganda, the more it becomes unpolitical as a whole and pseudo-privatized.
(Habermas 2001:175)
According to Habermas, mass culture does away with the critical
consciousness-that is, with reason-that renders people passive in their
uncritical consumption of the commodified culture. Dokmaisot, too, will share a
similar view with regard to the cultural artefacts that travelled from the West,
which refers not only to the film about Voltaire that is adorned with his scene of
writing, but also to the genre of diverting fiction [reuang aan len] that she sought to
leave behind.
It should not come at a surprise that the thoughtless imitation represents
the passivity of the uncritical consumption of mass culture, for in The Dialectic of
Enlightenment-the text that articulates the Culture Industry paradigm-Adorno
and Horkheimer are concerned with the condition in which "Culture today is
infecting everything with sameness" (2002:94). Not unlike Habermas, they speak
of the triumph of advertising in the culture industry that assumes the almost
62
magical persuasive prowess. At the end of their chapter on the culture industry,
they write, "That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the
compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same
time, they recognize as false" (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002:136). As
anthropologist Michael Taussig writes of the mimetic faculty in the modern era
that Adorno and Horkheimer discuss,
Fascism, in this analysis [of Adorno and Horkheimerl, is an accentuated form of
modern civilization which is itself to be read as the history of repression of
mimesis-the ban on graven images, gypsies, actors; the love- hate relationship
with the body; the cessation of Carnival; and finally the kind of teaching which
does not allow children to be children. But above all, fascism is more than
outright repression of the mimetic; it is a return of the repressed, based on the
"organized control of mimesis." Thus fascism, through the mimesis of mimesis,
"seeks to make the rebellion of suppressed nature against domination directly
useful to domination." (Taussig 1993:68)
Indeed, fascism represents for Adorno and Horkheimer the shortcoming of the
Enlightenment reason. What Taussig points out is that the culture industry
proceeds not byway of repressing mimesis, but rather by organizing mimesis.
Of course, the problem of the culture industry cannot be banished from the
Habermasian model of the public sphere, because the public sphere can only take
place through media, that is, through institutions that produce collective
experience-for example, cinema and newspaper. Yet such institutions risk being
commodified, and once commodified they get in the way of the public use of
reason. As we have seen above, such is the warning Jilrgen Habermas issues
against the mass democracy-and yet, as Lauren Berlant writes,
But if the emergence and expansion of institutions that generated an intimacy in
which people participated actively were seen to be crucial to the democratic
polity, institutions that produced collective experience, like cinema and other
entertainment forms, came to mix the critical demands of democratic culture
with the desire for entertainment taken for pleasure. Since the nonrational and
noninstitutionally indexed aspects of the intimate had been (theoretically)
banished from legitimate democratic publicness, pleasure- knowledge creates
problems for the notional rationality with which collective critical consciousness
is supposed to proceed. (Berlant 2000:4)
It is the unbreakable tie between pleasure and knowledge that poses the problem
here. The pleasure-knowledge nexus is constitutive to the institution of the novel,
a technology for rehearsing subjectivity in order to cultivate oneself as a citizen.
The novel, then, rests upon the slippery nexus between money and aesthetics. The
slippage between money and aesthetics corresponds to that between the foreign
and the domestic in the writing of the novel. Just as the novel as an aesthetic form
threatens to "degenerate" into a commodity produced for the sake of money, the
novel as a technology for autochthonous writing threatens to "degenerate" into a
foreign cultural form. In the next section, however, ra ther than take the devaluing
of commercialized art as a given, I will seek to understand Dokmaisot's hierarchy
that ranked pure aesthetics higher than commercial art through Pierre Bourdieu's
concept of the literary field.
The Literary Field: Between Art and Money
In The Rules of Art (1996), Pierre Bourdieu puts forward his theory of the
literary field, about which he offers the following words:
From now on, the unified literary field tends to organize itself according to two
independent and hierarchized principles of differentiation: the principal
opposition, between pure production, destined for a market restricted to
producers, and large-scale production, oriented towards the satisfaction of the
demands of a wide audience, reproduces the founding rupture with the economic
order, which is at the root of the field of restricted production. (1996:121)
The concept of the field in Bourdieu may be understood as a social game that has
reality insofar as the agents invest in it. Once established, this social game abides
by certain rules. The agents have investment in different positions that they take in
the field. Although their capital might not be economic in the restricted sense, the
logic of calculation underwrites the rules of the game. Indeed, elsewhere Bourdieu
would write,
The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a
discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who
are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion
of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated
labor (in its materialized form or its 'incorporated,' embodied form) which, when
appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents,
enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.
(Bourdieu 1997:46)
The literary field is one field among others, and for Bourdieu, it has a historical
genesis. The literary sphere comprises of two spheres, which are opposed but in
fact have come about intertwinement. On the one hand, the sphere of pure art
regards literary production as disinterested, shoring up the pure aesthetics that
denies the economic logic that underwrites it. In this sphere, the value of the
literary product is symbolic, accruing symbolic prestige rather than money. On the
other hand, in the sphere of commercial art, literary production involves interest
and economic calculation. The two spheres will form two poles within the literary
field.
The capital closer to one pole in the literary field can move away from it
towards the other pole through the process of transubstantiation, "whereby the
most material types of capital-those which are economic in the restricted
sense-can present themselves in the immaterial form of cultural capital or social
capital and vice versa" (Bourdieu 1997:46). For Bourdieu, the transubstantiation
that converts the economic capital, in the restricted sense, into the symbolic
capital will need to bury, that is, to hide its interestedness. Indeed, I will suggest
that the generic transformation from the genre of diverting fiction that
Dokmaisot's novel attempted to effect should be understood as this process of
transubstantia tion.
Dokmaisot includes in her own novels the moral criticism of diverting
fiction [reuang an len]. The most vivid instance of this can perhaps be found in her
early novel, Nit (1929). The following passage from Nit decrees a moral judgment on
the way her minor character, Rassami, deploys diverting fiction as escapist fiction
in the face of life's hardship.
In that time, Rassami could only find pleasure only in two occasions. One was
when she came to visit her aunt at her house for a couple hours, and the other
was when she had diverting fiction [reuang an len) in her hands. It was
lamentable that both sources of her pleasure did harm to her. The books that she
bought were of the kind that their authors wrote without shame, for these
authors only wanted their books to sell, so that money would flow into their
pockets. They never worried about the danger of such books as the source of
moral degeneracy [kwam chua rail in the mental dispositions [sandan) of Thai
young men and women. Seeing only the covers of these books offended the eyes.
Once one read the story, its content offended the inner mind [jail. It aroused
lust, something which young women should be kept away from. These books
often staged as the hero somebody who had vengeance as his guiding
principle-a behavior inappropriate to Thai people who were Buddhists. They
staged the woman who saw love as more important than their pride and virginity
as the heroine. These kinds of men and women were not socially respectable, yet
the prose of the story compelled the reader to sympathize to the point where
imagination led him to thoughtlessly comply with it. We have learned since
childhood that being accustomed to something is what shapes our habits. So
Rassami, who was accustomed to the kind of heroes and heroines of which we
have already spoken, began to comply with them .... Rassami had to discontinue
her education. The customs inculcated by the school did not have enough force to
resist the new things to which she had been accustomed. The reader will surely
be able to guess what sort of person Rassami will become later. (Dokmaisot
1973b:38-40)
This passage set swirling several threads of the problematic around the moral
didacticism vis-a-vis writing. Staged as a foil to the main character of the novel,
Nit, who is the exemplar of the woman with moral integrity for Dokmaisot,
Rassami is led astrayby the diverting fiction-which was "the source of
66
degeneracy"-and fails to grow up to be like Nit. To sum up the logic behind
Dokmaisot's criticism of diverting fiction, greedy writers write diverting fiction to
make money without any regard to morality, and young women and men who read
their books are led to thoughtlessly adopt the erroneous system of values in the
books. Dokmaisot's association of money-making with the morally degenerate
genre of diverting fiction calls to mind her association of money-making with the
foreign writing practice epitomized by Voltaire's scene of writing.
As we have seen above, the genre of diverting fiction was in large part
translations and "adaptations" of foreign fiction. The opposition between foreign
and domestic in "After Seeing Voltaire," then, was mapped onto the opposition
between the diverting fiction and the novel. To illustrate the chain of analogies
between oppositions that Dokmaisot had in mind, I draw up a table to organize
these oppositions:
Diverting fiction/Film
Profit-making
Moral degeneracy
Lack of education
Escapism
Foreign
Dokmaisot's writing
Pure aesthetics
Moral excellence
Education
Realism
Domestic
It will be my suggestion that the transubstantiation that Dokmaisot's novel
effected transitioned from the entries on the left-hand column to those on the
right- hand column. As Bourdieu insists in his theory of the literary field, setting
up the realm of pure aesthetics cannot but produce its negative counterpart,
namely, the commercialization of art. In upholding the prestige of pure aesthetics
through the denigration of commercial art, then, Dokmaisot participated in the
process of creating the literary field
a la Bourdieu. In other words, she effected the
transubstantiation of the novel from commercial art into pure aesthetics.
If the foreign was associated with money-making-with calculation in
general, then through the process of transubstantiation, Dokmaisot also
re-fashioned the foreign genre of the novel as Thai. Just as calculation that
underlies the sphere of pure production is hidden, or rather, denied, the
foreignness of the cultural production of the novel was buried in the process of
transubstantiation. The indigenization of the novel consisted in the process of
transubstantiation, which hid at once economic calculation and foreignness. Once
belonging to the sphere of pure production that was sheltered from the ordinary
laws of the economy, the novel of Dokmaisot became the material suitable for
being the medium in the liberal model of the public sphere privileged by
Habermas.
Conclusion
What does all this have to do with the family? If the family and the
"family-life" novels of Dokmaisot corresponded to each other, then the question
of how Dokmaisot disguised, as it were, the foreignness of the novelistic genre was
analogous to the question of how she indigenized the cultural form of the
monogamous, conjugal family. We should not fail to speculate, however, that
upholding the media from the sphere of pure production means the elision of the
counter-publics that do not necessarily have to be in alignment with the idealized
version of the public sphere in Habermas's account. The investigation into such
counter-publics is another project, which this thesis cannot accommodate. In the
next chapter, I seek to bring attention to the way in which the subjectivity
68
produced in the advent of the public sphere in Siam/Thailand was gendered in such
a way that reproduced the hierarchy of gender within the family discourse
inherited from the West.
Chapter 3
Engendering the Thai Citizen: People of Quality and the Thai Modern Political
Subjectivity
A year after the 1932 revolution that transitioned Siam/Thailand from
absolute monarchy to democracy, the first constitution granted suffrage to both
Thai men and women. The immediate enfranchisement of women after the 1932
revolution should come across as curious. In her reassessment of the study of
women's suffrage in Thailand, historian Tamara Loos questions "whether
women's suffrage is a comparably significant marker of women's political progress
in Siam" as much as it is in the political history of Britain and of the United States
(2004:170). As Loos points out, women's suffrage in Thailand was strange given
the lack of any organized women's movement at the time. In her remark, not only
did the coup leaders ignore the issue of women's rights, but historians have also
colluded in its omission. Treating the 1932 revolution as gender-blind, historians
ignore how gender played into the engendering of Thai democratic citizenship.
Historians and historical anthropologists of Thailand alike call for a more nuanced
study of women's citizenship in Thailand that goes beyond taking women's
suffrage granted by the 1933 constitution as the taken-for-granted hallmark of
women's political participation (Loos 2004 and Bowie 2010). In this chapter, the
novel of Dokmaisot will furnish us with a source material with which to explore
citizenship beyond enfranchisement.
Nakarin Mektrirat's pathbreaking study of 1932, The 1932 Revolution [Kan
patiwat sayam po so 2475l devoted only a few lines to Dokmaisot's writing. His
project may be described as a deconstruction of the 1932 revolution by revealing its
heterogeneity. Contra the well-entrenched view that the 1932 revolution was a
70
singular event incongruous with the contemporary political climate, Nakarin
contends, the revolution was in alignment with the political opinions of many
social groups at the time. Despite citing the novels by Dokmaisot as evidence of the
transformation of the old elite into the new middle class, Nakarin largely ignored
the gender dynamics that the novel of Dokmaisot invites us to ponder about. The
present chapter attempts to regard Dokmaisot's writing as an opportunity to
investigate the engendering of Thai citizenship at the dawn of democracy. In other
words, it offers us the window through which to see something of how women
were subjectivized as citizens.
The present chapter takes the most famous of Dokmaisot's novels, People of
Quality (1938). I will offer a political history of People of Quality, in which I will
explicate what sort of subjectivity the novel helped propagate and, by extension, in
what sense it was political. Published only a few years after the 1932 revolution,
People of Quality narrates the story of Wimol, the daughter to an elite old man,
Phraya Amornrat, who is powerful both economically and politically, thanks to his
high status under the royal patronage. Like the stereotypical elite man from older
times, he practices polygyny and is taken with lavish lifestyle. However, after a
number of unsuccessful economic ventures and the decline of absolute monarchy
after the 1932 revolution, he has but little money left, while still awkwardly holding
on to his social prestige. The man's untimely death divides People of Quality's
narrative into two. The novel commences by recounting Wimol's comfortable life
where money is never a worry. Her life seems to blossom beautifully until the
death of her father, after which it is revealed to her that he does not leave enough
money to maintain the lavish lifestyle that everyone under his patronage is used
71
to. In order to finance her brother's costly but prestigious degree in Britain while at
the same time sustaining what is left of her father's family, Wimol decides to cut
unnecessary spendings, to rent out her father's house, and to labor for money.
However, her parsimony jeopardizes her dead father's prestige. While Wimol
continues to face hardships, Phraya Ponlawat and his ailing wife move in to her
father's house that she rents out. Without Wimol noticing, he works behind the
scene to help her with several difficulties. The novel rewards Wimol for her
determination by freeing her from economic constraints: her brother's study is
now financed by the government. Phraya Ponlawat and Wimol fall in love, and
while they still have not got married by the end of the novel, the concluding scene
alludes to such marriage after the eventual death of Phraya Ponlawat's wife.
As a modern genre, the novel has been instrumental to the shaping of the
individual subject. Influentially, Ian Watt regards the rise of the novel as a
manifestation of the large-scale change in Western society in the eighteenth
century
... [ofl that vast transformation of the Western civilisation since the Renaissance
which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another
very different one-one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but
unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at
particular times and at particular places. (Watt 2001:31)
What Watt refers to as the "vast transformation of the Western civilisation" taps
into the grand narrative of Western capitalist modernity, in which the rupture took
place that propelled the world into modernity with the West as the origin.
However, the rise of individualism also parallels the rise of the novel, for the
modern age "presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate
of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at
72
particular places." In other words, the novel is an account of the individual's life,
compiling particularities that border on chaos into narrative. Indeed, the prototype
of the novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, narrates the development of Robinson
Crusoe the sovereign individual by way of putting into account Crusoe's particular
experiences. As the institution of modernity, the novel is the technology with
which the individual sees the model of themselves. For Watt, this was a significant
shift, because for the first time, the ordinary individual can see the reflection of
themselves in the literary work, in contradistinction to earlier times when only
people in power possessed such rights.
The invention of the individual in the modern era has a political dimension
to it. In Jilrgen Habermas's model of the public sphere, the novel serves a crucial
function as the technology with which the individual rehearses their subjectivity. It
is crucial to note that for him, the public sphere and the intimate, domestic sphere
developed in intertwinement rather than in opposition. The transformation that
brought about the public sphere was predicated upon a particular kind of private
persons who cultivated themselves in the intimate, domestic sphere. Habermas's
prime example of how the novel was instrumental in such development is Samuel
Richardson's Pamela (1740), a popular novel that was written in the form of a
collection of letters. "Through letter writing," Habermas writes, "the individual
unfolded himself in his subjectivity" (2001:48). Upon reading the novel-like
Pamela, for example-the reader rehearsed their interior subjectivity:
On the one hand, the empathetic reader repeated within himself the private
relationships displayed before him in literature; from his experience of real
familiarity (Intimitat), he gave life to the fictional one, and in the latter he
prepared himself for the former. On the other hand, from the outset the
familiarity (Intimitat) whose vehicle was the written word, the subjectivity that
had become fit to print, had in fact become the literature appealing to a wide
public of readers. The privatized individuals coming together to form a public
73
also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to
the process of enlightenment which they together promoted. (Habermas
2001:50-1)
In Habermas's account, it is the correspondence between the privateness of the
interior subjectivity cultivated within the bourgeois, conjugal family and the
privateness of such family in the politico-economic sense that gives rise to the
public sphere. As he writes, "The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was
based on the fictitious identity between the two roles assumed by the privatized
individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property-owners and
the role of human beings pure and simple" (Habermas 2001:56). The novel helped
shore up such fiction of identity by way of disavowing the economic aspect of
privateness. The commonplace theme in the domestic novel that will serve the
prime example of such disavowal is the tension between love and money, since the
domestic novel labors to fashion marriage as conjugal, thereby ridding it of its
contractual guise. 20
For Habermas, therefore, the successful invention of the private individual
fit for the political public sphere is contingent upon the extent to which the social
dimension of the subject is successfully disavowed, leaving behind only what
appears to be the interior subjectivity that is sovereign from outside forces.
However, I will suggest that in its gendered dimension, the individual-citizen
propagated by Dokmaisot's People of Quality is more nuanced than what Habermas
offers. Nancy Armstrong writes of the domestic fiction that "the novel exercised
'0 A novel that is apt for demonstrating this point is perhaps Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778), in
which Burney takes pain to write off the appearance of marriage as contractual. The heroine,
Evelina, belongs to a lower social status than her eventual partner, so the problem to be solved
for the novelist is how to marry Evelina to her socially superior partner so as to raise her social
status, while at the same time laboring to make this mobility appear as resulting from conjugal
love, rather from calculation.
74
tremendous power by producing oppositions that translated the complex and
competing ways of representing human identity into a single binary opposition
represented by male versus female" (2006:474). In other words, in order to write a
political history of the novel, it will be of paramount importance to recognize that
the novel is political insofar as it appears unpolitical-and more, it appears
unpolitical insofar as it is successful in hiding its complex political dimension
under the binary opposition between male and female. In the economy within
People of Quality-whose parsimony or profligacy should command our attention,
given the extent to which what is on display in the novel and what is not are
important to its politicalness-the political makes appearance only sparingly.
Nevertheless, the fact that it appears at all should command our attention, for as
we shall see, it coincides with the shoring-up of the binary opposition between
male and female that serves as a hidden epigraph that guides our reading of the
novel.
Taking as the basic premise that People of Quality functioned as an apparatus
for producing the Thai modern political subjectivity, the present chapter will
proceed as follows. Firstly, I will argue that People of Quality narrativizes the
cultivation of the modern female-gendered individual. In my reading, the death of
Wimol's father marks the rupture that precipitates the fall from the pristine origin
of the idealized home, and such fall introduces money as the threat to unwind the
oneness of home that has hitherto been maintained by her father's
living-presence. Moreover, the maturation of Wimol that the death of her father
facilitates is reflected in her more discerning ability to read. Secondly, I will argue
that the novel relegates the political to male-gendered characters, leaving the task
75
of the cultivation of the self to the heroine. Despite the immediate
enfranchisement of women after the 1932 revolution, therefore, women's
citizenship was limited to the upkeep of the self and, by extension, of home.
People of Quality and the Cultivation of the Modern Individual
In their work on modernity, anthropologists of Thailand are mainly
interested in thinking about modernity from the margins of (see, for instance,
Mills 1997, Morris 2000, and Jonsson 2004). It will be anthropologist Michel-Rolph
Trouillot's argument that "Modernity as a structure requires an other, an alter, a
native-indeed, an alter-native" (2002:224). Indeed, in its split identity as
colonizer and colonized, Siam/Thailand is both other and othering: it is otherwise
from the Western modernity, and yet in its self-aggrandizement as a great modern
nation, it has constructed its own native other against which Thai modernity has
been defined. In her work, Mary Beth Mills studies the lived experience of women
migrant workers from rural Thailand, the site imagined as the enclave for the Thai
natives sheltered from modernity. According to her, Thai modernity is predicated
upon the rural-urban opposition. For the migrant workers, the modern woman is
more of an ideal image than a lived experience. To describe this ideal image, Mills
writes,
Than samay [than samay is a Thai word for "modern") beauty is not defined
primarily through conventional images of maidenly modesty and interpersonal
restraint-ideal standards of behavior for unmarried women in the
countryside-although, as in the final scene of the deodorant commercial, these
qualities may be invoked to establish the essential "good girl" characteristics of
a modern woman. Instead the modern woman is identified, on the one hand, by
her sophisticated use of fashion and other market commodities of bodily display,
and, on the other, by the ease with which she negotiates the diverse scenes and
dynamic pace of urban life. Like the young woman laughing over their coffee or
dashing across a busy street, the than samay woman's beauty is linked to her
active, mobile participation in urban society. (Mills 1997:43)
In Mills's argument, the ambivalence expressed bywomen migrant workers
towards modernity is because they are at once part of this field of desire to be
modern and marginalized in it due to their insufficient economic power. The
perspective from the margins, then, functions like a deconstructive prism through
which modernity is refracted. In what follows, however, I will wonder whether
ambivalence towards modernity is not already inherent in the construction of the
modern Thai woman.
People of Quality is a novel about the cultivation of the individual. Its second
chapter commences with the letter that Khun Sae-Wimol's stepmother who
functions as the source of morality-writes to Wimol on the occasion of her
birthday. In her letter, she claims to give Wimol two presents, one visible while the
other invisible. The visible present is a sapphire pendant, while the other is the
wisdom for adults which Wimol is to learn by heart.
But now, you must become more than just a beloved daughter of your father. You
must be a lady [khun) in the house whom those under your command both love
and fear. You must see to it that your renown, like a fragrant odor, spreads far. It
will be auspicious for you. It will bring you esteem. It will also bring you joy. This
means that even though before being a good person in a childlike way is good
enough for your parents, now you must be a good person in a mature way, you
must know what good people in the wider world are like, and then you must
follow their examples. (Dokmaisot 1998:13)
Her stepmother's words prognosticate Wimol's coming of age. According to her, it
is the cultivation of the individual as Wimol grows up to be adult that will become
the source of her worth. Her invisible present is something that Wimol has to turn
over in her mind, not something apparent that does not require any subtle reading.
As such, once it is installed in Wimol's mind, it becomes the depth of the
individual from which morality springs.
77
People of Quality forges the individual out of a crisis, which consists in the
incommensurability between its protagonist, Wimol, and the world around her
following from her fall from the pristine origin. By the pristine origin, I have in
mind the idealized image of home sheltered from the contingency from outside
that threatens to disrupt it. As such, it is a place free from any worry, economic or
political. The first chapter of People of Quality depicts the pristine origin of Wimol,
who is raised in a well-to-do elite family, by demonstrating how unlike her cousin,
Sudjai, Wimol never has to face any economic hardship that might disillusion her.
Wimol's shelter is thanks to the paternal authority that has been passed down
through generations. This is most evident when Wimol discourses with Sudjai
about their grandfather. As Sudjai criticizes their grandfather, Wimol becomes
angry as she reflects on their grandfather:
The face of the listener [Wi mol) was starting to turn sour. For Wimol, "Grandpa"
was like the deity with countless virtues. But Wimol grew up in an era that came
many decades after the era of "Grandpa." Besides, she was also well educated. It
was quite normal, then, for her to not see "Grandpa" as somebody who was
always in the right. So, she did not say anything to oppose the words that she
had heard. (Dokmaisot 1998:6)
While Wimol still retains her fetishistic belief in her grandfather's virtue, all the
same the politico-economic source from outside begins to do away with her
idealized picture of home. After Wimol's reflection, Sudjai continues her criticism
of their grandfather. As Wimol can keep mum no longer, Sudjai responds by
pointing out their grandfather's unequal treatment of his grandchildren:
"Oh, don't say that! It's because you are the beloved grandchild of grandpa.
You are the grandchild of his lady [khun yingl. All your life, have you ever known
any hardship? Why don't you try being me-just for a month ... "
"If I were you, I would not think too much about what went on before I was
born. I would only worry about the present. Grandfather [khun a pral was
someone who everyone must give approval. He had only one wife, loved his
children equally. Given this, shouldn't you be putting him on a pedestal?"
"Well, I already grant you that you are a special human being. After your first
wahh! when you were born, Grandpa already worshipped you, putting you over
his head [tun wai bon hua). Once you grew up, everybody was pampering you.
Then once you become a grown-up girl, your dad let you be the caretaker of the
house [mae ban). Every month, he would deliver to you a good chunk of money.
When you say something is a bird, it is a bird; when you say something is a
bough, it is a bough [chi nok pen nok chi mai pen mai)o If you didn't love your
dad, then you would be even worse than the beasts. Me, I am the eldest child, I
have to do everything, whether it be for my dad, my mom, or my younger
siblings- I have to do all of that alone. Wouldn't it make more sense that my dad
should think to give me more things than he gives others? But oh, no, he was so
stingy. I can't ever touch his money. If I did he would grumble at me."
(Dokmaisot 1998:6-7)
Sudjai's response betrays how Wimol's world is sheltered from the economic
worry. While money helps keep her pristine origin in place, its abundance creates
the illusion that it is exterior to her home.
Unlike Sudjai, Wimol does not possess the ability to read the world as having
economic calculation as its underlying foundation. The conversation between
Wimol and Sudjai takes place just before they arrive at their destination, the
birthday party of Chan pen, also a child of a well-to-do elite family. In the closing
scene, her lack of ability to read money into the world is most evident as they hand
the birthday present to Chanpen. Struggling economically, Sudjai does not bring
any present for Chanpen. Instead, she claims to share the present to Chanpen with
Wimol:
"It [the gift) is already here," Sudjai answered from the back of the car, at the
same time as she handed the present to Chan pen.
The other party held it in her hand, her eyes looking as if to query Sudjai
about why she did not bring her present. Sudjai quickly said, with a voice much
lower than before.
"We come here together, we share our present to you." (Dokmaisot 1998:8)
Sudjai's embarrassment comes from being pressed to treat the gift as calculable.
For although the gift involves calculation, its ontology as a gift is predicated on the
disavowal of calculation. In the prose in the first chapter, it is not coincidental that
79
calculation is always carried out by Sudjai, while Wimol's consciousness is
rendered free of calculation. This goes to show that Wimol is exempt from having
to read the brief exchange, quoted above, between Sudjai and Chanpen as involving
money and, thus, calculation.
Pierre Bourdieu writes of the family that it is
a world in which the ordinary laws of the economy are suspended, a place of
trusting and giving-as opposed to the market and its exchanges of equivalent
values-or, to use Aristotle's term, philia, a word that is often translated as
"friendship" but which in fact designates the refusal to calculate; a place where
interest, in the narrow sense of the pursuit of equivalence in exchanges, is
suspended. (Bourdieu 1998:65-6)
The family, therefore, is sheltered from the laws of the economy that run rampant
outside it. In the same manner in which Bourdieu understands many of his
concepts, the family is a well-founded fiction, an illusio that has existence insofar
as social agents take it seriously. However, its existence is not only transcendental
but also immanent, in that the well-founded fiction becomes embodied and
institutionalized in practice, passing from a structuring structure into a structured
structure. While Bourdieu will insist on the economic calculation that underwrites
all of the social world, it is not secondary to his argumen t tha t calcula tion is denied
in some context such as in the family. On the contrary, the denial of calculation is
precisely what makes the symbolic capital succeed in making invisible its nature as
capital. Wimol's refusal to calculate will be understood as constitutive of the
fiction of the family as a world opposed to the ordinary laws of the economy. Not
unlike Bourdieu, therefore, Sudjai recognizes calculation in gift-giving, while
Wimol fails to do so.
The death of Wimol's father, however, unmasks the illusion of the shelter
that shields off the economic and political concerns. It precipitates the fall from
80
the pristine origin in that her home is no longer stable, but rather is threatened to
be torn apart because her economic power is jeopardized. As the plot summary
above already tells us, his death leads to the exposure of his actual economic
worth, which is not enough to maintain the household as before and to send money
to her brother in England. Having been appointed as the representative of her late
father and, by extension, the leader of the household, Wimol has to cut household
spendings in order to gather what is left of her father's family together. Wimol's
decision to rent out her father's house signals that whereas before she can take her
house for granted, after her father's death she is forced to read the monetary
aspect into her home-and such reading threatens to lodge difference into the
pristine origin of the idealized home, thereby disintegrating it.
Reading the World: From Diverting Fiction to the Novel
The metaphor of reading will guide Wimol's maturational process that is
precipitated by the death of her father. The cultivation of her individuality will be
described as the development of the ability to read discerningly. Dokmaisot takes
pains to show that Wimol is deeply affected bywhat she reads. A scene where
Wimol has to part way with Udom, her childhood lover, will serve to illustrate this.
In the novel, Udom and Wimol grow close to each other when they are very young.
One day, however, Udom has to leave for his family's new house. On the day of
departure, nobody wakes Wimol up to send offUdom at the train station. In her
quarrel with Khun Sae, her stepmother, Wimol confesses to her the terms she has
established with Udom:
"When 1 reach the train station, 1 will not cry. 1 promised Khun Udom already
that 1 will be brave!"
Brave! Such a word in such a situation? Khun Sae felt like the language was
coming from the escapist fiction [reuang pralom 10k), and "I promised Khun
Udom" gave her pause. Had there been the cultivated fantasy [bam pen) of being
81
the hero [phra ekl and the heroine [nang ekl in the diverting fiction [reuang aan
lenl between her daughter and her nephew? (Dokmaisot 1998:46-7)
What concerns Khun Sae is precisely Wimol's inability to read the diverting fiction
without taking it seriously. This harks back to the previous chapter's concern with
the generic transformation from the diverting fiction to the novel, which vilified
the diverting fiction as propagating moral degeneracy. Not unlike Rassami who in
one of Dokmaisot's early novels, Nit, confuses fantasy with real life, the young
Wimol falls prey to the allure of the diverting fiction, and if it were not for Khun
Sae to intervene, Wimol would have ended up having the same fate with Rassami.
However, after the death of her father, Wimol had learned to read the world
with a more discerning eye. Indeed, People of Quality sees the fall from the pristine
origin as pressing Wimol to read the world in a different way than she is used to
prior to her fa ther' s dea th:
... Seeing her girl friends at Chanpen's house prompted her [Wimol) to think
that Sudjai was a wise person who could read the world, while she, on the other
hand, was a fool in this regard. Wimol was embittered about the world for a
while, before the determination was born in her to get even with [kae muel the
dirty "world" as quickly as possible. But then, she recalled the duties and the
honesty which still bound her [mad tual, so she was newly determined to shake
off the "world" that she knew from her heart, and look at the "world" that
surrounded her instead. It was a "world" that was small and narrow compared to
the "world" that had passed. It was a new "world." But when this "world" had
shown no insanity yet, it seemed her duty to cultivate herself so that she would
not be shaken off by this "world" again, and to be content with her new "world."
(Dokmaisot 1998:198)
As the "new" world encroaches upon her, she is forced to acquire the literacy that
allows her to see calculation as foundational to the world around her. Here, the
unfolding of her individuality is predicated upon her ability to read the world to see
the logic of calculation behind it. In the next section, I will seek to the answer the
following question: in what sense is the subjectivity political?
82
The Apparition of the Political: Engendering the Political Subjectivity
As I have mentioned above, the appearance of the political in People of
Quality is spare. In fact, there is only one such passage near the beginning of the
novel, when Phraya Amornrat-Wimol's father-is conversing with those who
come to his house to attend Wimol's birthday party. It is revealed here that the
adjudication of King Prajadhipok (1893-1941, r. 1925-1935)-a significant event in
the political history of Thailand that signifies the defeat of royal power-puts on
Phraya Amornrat's shoulder the burden of financing his son's education in Britain.
Dokmaisot writes,
"The money from the king's benevolence, yes, but since His Majesty abdicated, I
have been sending my own money. My son happens to have his eye on the degree
that everyone thinks is very difficult. A degree in advanced accounting, which
only two Thais have attained so far. I don't know how much he will cost me .... "
(Dokmaisot 1998:29)
The death of the paternal authority is therefore twofold. Before the death of
Wimol's father, there is the metaphorical death of the paternal authority
represented by the king. The financial constraint that functions like Wimol's
corset is, therefore, linked to King Prajadhipok's adjudication, a political event of
the national scale.
The slippage back and forth between the national scale and the household
scale allows for Phraya Amornrat to liken his household to the nation. In the same
exchange at his daughter's birthday party, the following exchange takes place:
"So that means, things are already fitting just how they are now, then." His
[Phraya Amornrat'sl face was filled with playfulness, before he continued to
speak, "If something could lastingly fit something, why would we have to study
so much history? And why would we have more models of government than we
can memorize?"
"It seems that Chao khun is conservative [konserwetipl to the extreme," Mr.
Chongrak asked when he saw that his brother still had not let out a word in
response.
"Oh, it is not easy to find anybody who is extreme in the kind of things that
you asked about. I feel like they are brave rather in looking out for their food
stock. But actually, I see good and bad as always existing side by side,
inseparable. Because of this, I do not hate changes. You don't have to look
farther than my own house. I never stop making changes to it. Even though they
come to nothing really, the house still looks intriguing. It brings a little good
spirits to my heart." (Dokmaisot 1998:31)
As the exchange intensifies, Wimol quietly slips away from the main room where
the party is held to meet Udom, her lover from childhood. Her exit may be
conceived as an exit from a political public sphere into a private sphere. While it
might be tempting to regard Wimol's upkeep of the household after her father's
death as an allegorical political theory of how to construct the self, it is strange
that it is Phraya Amornrat who is endowed with the right to make such metonymic
link. Such strange division of labor is also reflected in the fact that Wimol has to
prepare for the birthday party for guests who her father invites, even though she
cannot care less about these guests. While Phraya Amornrat solicits praise for the
birthday party, Wimol must be content with being silent.
In her article, "Family Feuds," Anne McClintock asserts that the family is an
apposite trope with which to understand the nation. "The family trope," she
writes is important in at least two ways." She explains,
First, the family offers a "natural" figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within
a putative organic unity of interests. Second, it offers a "natural" trope for
figuring historical time. After 1859 and the advent of social Darwinism, Britain's
emergent national narrative took increasing shape around the image of the
evolutionary Family of Man. The "family" offered an indispensable metaphoric
figure by which hierarchical (and, one might add, often contradictory) social
distinctions could be shaped into a single historical genesis narrative. Yet a
curious paradox emerges. The family as a metaphor offered a single genesis
narrative for national history, while, at the same time, the family as an
institution became voided of history. (McClintock 1993:63)
Likewise, the family in People of Quality operates in a similar manner. If read as an
allegory for the Thai nation, the house in the novel not only naturalizes the
division of labor within the household, but also magically amalgamates the sense
of history within it and the lack thereof. Phraya Amornrat's house naturalizes the
division of labor, because both Phraya Amornrat and Wimol appear to share a
backstage in that they are both invested in presenting in a certain way the family
of which they are members. It puts together the sense of history and the
timelessness of the family in that while the history of Phraya Amornrat's
household is read as an allegory for the Thai nation, the family trope appears to be
natural and timeless.
It will be noted, however, that the opposition between male and female
within the family is aligned with the opposition between public and private. While
it is Phraya Amornrat who handles the discussions concerning the political,
Wimol's performance is limited to the presentation of the self. If according to
Habermas, the novel is the technology for rehearsing subjectivity in order to bring
about a private person, it should be added that the attention to gender reveals the
way in which the female-gendered subject was burdened with the task of
cultivating individuality but at the same time was confined within the house.
Conclusion
In the traditional historiography of Thai women, the modern era was
associated with the transition from the indigenous matrilineal family to the
modern, conjugal family based upon monogamy (Loos 2004:171). As we have seen,
in such transition, women were made into modern subjects. In other words, they
were conscripted into modernity. Yet the female-gendered subject could only
function as a supplement to the male-gendered subject in that only
male-gendered subjects were granted the rights to discuss the political. This
85
suggests that in the process of indigenization of the foreign cultural
forms-namely, the novel and the monogamous, conjugal family-Dokmaisot's
writing reproduced the gendered hierarchy that was present within them. Such
reproduction, I hope, will add a new layer of complexity into the way in which
Dokmaisot's novel should be thought as straddling the West and Thailand.
86
Conclusion
It is my hope that this project has shown something about the various ways
in which the family and politics are deeply interconnected. In focusing on the
writing of Dokmaisot, I hope to reveal how her writing was the process of
indigenization of foreign cultural forms-the novel and the monogamous, conjugal
family-which corresponded to each other. Dokmaisot, I have argued, attempted
to remold these foreign cultural forms as Thai.
While in Thai political history the 1932 revolution often marks the transition
from absolute monarchy to democracy, the official version of such history regards
the revolution as a failure. After 1932, Siam/Thailand was dominated by military
dictatorship until the 1973 uprising, which successfully overthrew the military
rule, albeit with the casualties of the death of several college students who
participated in the revolt. The rise of military rule after the 1932 revolution
furnishes the royalists with the evidence for the prematurity of the 1932
revolution. Endowed with incomparable sagacity, the king-during the 1932
revolution, Prajadhipok-already planned the smooth transition to democracy,
according to the royalist historiography. The People's Party-who staged the coup
d'etat to take power from the monarchy-ruined his plan by prematurely
transitioning the country to democracy. The long-drawn period of military
dictatorship after 1932 is ample proof that the People's Party, far from following
the liberal ideology inherited from the West, simply acted because of their will to
power. This commonplace understanding of the failure of the 1932 revolution is the
product of the long battle over cultural hegemony in Siam/Thailand. By the 1970s,
the winner was already decided, and from then on, the royalist narrative of Thai
history has become well-entrenched. The labor of undoing such royalist historical
narrative has just begun. Indeed, nuances need to be added to the view that regards
the time between the 1932 revolution and the 1973 uprising as the dark period of
military dictatorship, in order to recover the cultural politics that is the
pre- history of what now is the reified version of Thai history. To read Dokmaisot's
writing in its context, then, is to recuperate something of the reified history of the
period.
Nevertheless, early Thai novels-like Dokmaisot's-are seen as affliated
with conservative cultural politics, and this because those who functioned as the
conduit through which the genre of the novel traveled to Thailand were often
offsprings of the royal family whose European education was funded by the king
(Kasian 2001:8). Their affinities with the monarchy dissuaded them from adopting
radical politics that ran rampant in Europe where they went to study. Take, for
example, Prince Akatdamkoeng Rapeepat, the author of the first celebrated Thai
novel, The Circus of Life (1929). As Kasian Tejapira describes the novel:
In this novel as well as its sequel, the embittered member of the royal family, in
socio-economic decline, aims his most virulent invective not at the
undemocratic political regime in Siam nor at the wealthy white imperialists in
Europe, but at the "Bolshevik Hindus" who dare try to incite him against his
beloved Chakri absolute monarchs, to whom Siam owes her survival and
independence. This kind of political conservatism was uncannily mixed with
progressive, middle-class social values, causing some later critics to mistake him
for a revolutionary democrat! (Kasian 2001:8)
I would argue that Dokmaisot's novels, too, fall under such political
conservativism at which Kasian points his finger. Nevertheless, her novels were
also part of Thai political modernity. In other words, while Dokmaisot's work
should be considered as conservative, it was not conservative in that it failed to be
modern. On the contrary, it should be thought as conservative only insofar as it
88
succeeded in camouflaging the traditional authority as modern. Indeed, as Dilip
Parameshwar Gaonkar remarks, "in the face of modernity one does not turn
inward, one does not retreat; one moves sideways, one moves forward" (1999:17).
To reiterate, this project would have benefited from the access to the data
about how the texts of Dokmaisot were read. A rough sketch of the social life of her
writing will be offered here, in hope that perhaps it will be a guide for further
research into the subject. By the 1970s, Dokmaisot was so famous that the new
publications of her novels needed but little explanation about her. Yet, in the wake
of the Marxist-inspired literary theory that conferred value only upon literature
that represented the oppressed class, the novels of Dokmaisot also became
depreciated as complicit in conserving the old aristocracy. After the 1970s, the
golden period of Thai literature, the novels of Dokmaisot waned in popularity, but
were still in print. Because of the recent expiration of copyright, Dokmaisot's
writing is expected to gain resurgent interest. The new publications of her writing
are already underway.
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