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Milla Schofield responds to Jonathan Rutherford' essay on Enoch Powell
Review of Enoch
Powell's Island Story
© Milla Schofield
2008
Jonathan Rutherford's work on masculinity and English nationalism in Forever England is a great example of the intellectual work done in the 1990s to historicize nationalism and uncover the structures of meaning that have given it its force. The chapter "Enoch Powell's Island Story" does a great deal to reveal the nature of the man who, in many ways, now embodies postwar English nationalism. We find race, gender and nation definitively entwined in the chapter. Freudian analysis explains Powell's racism. His dogged commitment to a white English nation is the result of an ongoing search for the symbolic equivalent of maternal love. He is, moreover, psychologically split in two: "Powell's own life was an attempt to reproduce the external compulsion of the desert, to construct an unyielding personal intellectual and theological order which would structure and contain his instinctual and emotional life." Powell the romantic and Powell the intellect are caught in ongoing struggle.
In broad strokes, two academic arguments have developed on Powell and his 'rivers of blood' speech - two arguments that reflect something of a political divide. Many of those critical of Powell, who have notably written mainly from the cultural studies tradition, have uncovered Powell's mythic love for England and argued that it was the traumatic loss of the British Empire that caused Powell to embrace ethnic nationalism. Others, meanwhile, argue that Powell made the arguments he made about immigration because he was, above all else, concerned with the prospects of liberal democracy in Britain. Liberal democracy could not survive, argued Powell, in the face of communalism. Unfortunately, Powell's critics and Powell's sympathizers are, in many ways, talking past each other. Again, Powell is split in two: the brain and the gut, the liberal and the racist.
It is not so much Jonathan Rutherford's diagnosis of Powell's psychological damage that is useful in the current debate on Powell. Simon Heffer, Denys Blakeway, and Powell's other recent rehabilitators would probably be pleased to accept that Powell had a mother complex. And, with such a diagnosis, we are left prone to find undue satisfaction in uncovering the unhealthy roots of Powell's racism and leaving the argument at that. It is, rather, Rutherford's assertion that Powell's political vision was marked by a loss of meaning - with the loss of Empire - which promises to move the debate dramatically forward. As Rutherford puts it:
Powell's idealized India … was a sublime symbol of the continuity
of his mother's presence. Independence destroyed its possibility, and
symbolized his abandonment… when his idealized world was shattered, he
was confronted with that wordless original loss: a loss of meaning.
Rutherford argues that Powell filled the void left by the failure of the British Empire with a romantic "mythologizing of English nationalism." Powell was, in many regards, a romantic; his poetry attests to this. This is, however, where I diverge from Rutherford's analysis.
In Powell's political work, structure and function clearly took precedence over any essential meaning or humanistic ideal. I would argue that the key to understanding Powell's racist views is not via a commitment to any essential myth of an unchanging, white England or natural order. Powell was, politically, a cynic: the void remained.
This does not mean that Powell saw no utility in national myth, in a poetics of the nation. Like a true Tory, Powell embraced nationalism's functional relationship to political authority. This would enable him, by the mid-1960s, to call for a new national myth. Britain's old myths, he believed, no longer held: the nation was going mad. Powell called it "post-imperial neurosis."1 Powell would argue that the British public required a new national identity to cure itself, that this required a new conception and writing of history, and most important to this new history was the treatment of empire: "I am not quite saying that the new history will be 'Britain without Empire,' but it will be very nearly 'Britain with the imperial episode in parenthesis.'"2 It was the job of the politician and politics - it was his job, he explained - to rewrite Britain's national story. And so, in 1968, Powell offered a racist national myth.
The work of Powell's critics who have attempted to come to grips with Powell's racism by representing Powell as a believer in Englishness as an essential and unchanging truth, miss that Powell thought about culture in terms of power. Powell, like many other Tories before him, viewed the essential fragility of national myth. In large part, the academic stalemate in the debate over the roots of the 'rivers of blood' stems from the fact that critics of Powell must do more than work to reveal Powell's unbalanced or damaged love of England - rather, they must confront Powell's political priorities. Powell's racism did not just come from the gut.
In fact, the recent rehabilitation of Powell challenges us to develop ways of thinking about the politics of exclusion that go beyond the important work done on cultural nationalism in the 1990s. It was not just, as Rutherford argues, an "internal narrative" of romantic and nostalgic longing that compelled Powell to embrace Old England. It was rather, I would argue, Powell's absolute political rejection of universal principles and human rights - and a shared humanity - that enabled him to make the arguments he did, to put nation above all else, and to treat some people as wholly expendable.
Milla Schofield is currently writing a biography of Enoch Powell and completing a doctorate in history at Yale University entitled, "Postimperial Burdens: Enoch Powell, immigration and the politics of Britain's colonial past."
Notes
1. Enoch Powell, German Service 17/6/1965, Churchill Archives Centre, The
Papers of Enoch Powell, POLL 4/1/27.
2. Ibid.