90 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
to etch the words “ENEMY” onto the backs of the “barbarian” cap-
tives before having them publicly flogged (p. 115).^33 The words are
then “washed clean” by the sweat and blood of the prisoners, with
physical pain thereby literally erasing the undesirable concept from
the material bodies in which they originally rested (p. 115).
For Foucault, in disciplinary societies, it is not enough to say that
violence—and the threat of violence—arbitrate social relations; its
visual enactment is also important in maintaining authority.^34 T h i s
notion led to his declaration that the transmission of social power
is at its most visible “at the extreme points of its exercise [... where
it] installs itself and produces its real effects.”^35 In the ritualistic
instances of both the Magistrate and the Colonel, we also find sub-
tle references to baptism: the idea of purging the body of undesirable
faults to signify a new beginning. In the case of the Colonel, this
involves the exorcism of all resistance to imperial authority through
an act of purifying violence; for the Magistrate, it constitutes an
attempt to cleanse both the girl and (more importantly) himself of
the crimes perpetrated by Joll and his men.
However, it is the degree of control that both men exert on the
bodies of those in lower social positions that presents the strongest
parallel, prompting the Magistrate to declare that “the distance
between myself and her torturers is [... ] negligible” (p. 29). The
failure of conciliation that ensues from this situation is emblema-
tized in a symbolic scene in which the Magistrate attempts to “read”
the woman’s face, only to perceive his own reflection: “I take her
face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her eyes,
from which twin reflections of myself stare solemnly back” (p. 44).
Benita Parry explains that the Magistrate’s attempts at empathic
connection are thwarted by their very medium of communication:
a “recognized linguistic system” that immediately and unavoidably
disempowers the “barbarian girl.”^36 However, we could also locate
the source of this conciliatory failure in the protagonist’s inability to
view the world in a way that is undistorted by the Empire’s epistemo-
logical and ontological influences. For Wright, such a failure is inevi-
table because, given his proximity to the imperial power nexus, there
“simply exists [... ] no external space in which [... the Magistrate]
can behave—or even imagine behaving—differently.”^37