Linguistic fieldwork at the end of empire: British officials and American structuralists in Anthony Burgess’ Malayan trilogy

In 1959 Anthony Burgess published Beds in the East, a novel set in Malaya in 1957, the year the Federation of Malaya achieved independence. Towards the end of the book, Burgess introduces a new character, Temple Haynes, a professional linguist from a US university who is studying the phonology of Temiar, the language of one of Malaysia’s indigenous ethnic minorities. This paper examines Burgess’ depiction of Haynes and his sometimes fractious relationship with the British ‘Assistant Protector of Aborigines’, Moneypenny (also a speaker of Temiar). It is interesting to examine this fictional representation because it uses material familiar to students of the History of Linguistics to develop a certain picture of imperialism and decolonisation, one that shifts questions about the politics of western intervention onto the US but also worries about the personal investments of British representatives in colonised and decolonising space. Thus Burgess’ text offers the reader a dramatic portrait of the practice of linguistic fieldwork as part of a particular vision of Malaya at the ‘end of empire’.