In 2000 David Batchelor produced a literary intervention upon the notion of Chromophobia[1], literally fear of colour or hue, and proposed an argument that societal structures and power relations which have enabled the development of a “virtuous whiteness of the West”[2] with this whiteness “woven into the fabric of culture”[3]. In this state of Chromophobia colour is observed as a negative “other” in comparison to the properties and associated value of white-ness. As Batchelor explains:

“the other that is colour is everywhere: around and in and of us… it can only be imagined away.”[4]

From the earliest cultural documents Batchelor observed reference to the dangerous, excessive qualities of colour. As the immediate association of colour and sin in this passage in the bible indicates:

“though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”[5]

Furthermore Batchelor proposes that there is no area of mainstream culture that is not marked by this societal need to denigrate colour for the safety and idealisation of monochrome. He draws examples from theorists in education to the work place, from art to politics, in order to support his argument that the language of marginalising colour is entrenched in the fabric of society[6]. That tradition dictates that colour be contained and subjugated by line and form and done so most completely.

There is an apparent opposing notion, termed as Chromophilia, which Batchelor claims plays upon very different associations to colour. Batchelor refers to the work of Julia Kristeva and her study of the artist Giotto’s approach to colours and to a positive, pre-symbolic, association with colour whereby inner feelings of excitement and arousal can be arrived at through the utilisation of colour in art. This is the Chromophilic position and is expressed by Kristeva as:

“the sublimated jouissance of a subject liberating himself from the transcendental dominion of One Meaning (white)” and is evidenced by “chromatic clashes and harmonies”[1].

This essay will refer later in more depth to the term Jouissance, which literally means joy.

Batchelor goes on to outline several texts, including books, films, sculptures and artists to illustrate his argument. In particular literary works such as Moby Dick by Herman Melville and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad apparently incorporate the story of this Chromophobia. Batchelor argues for a kind of inattention to colour in the above books leading to language establishing a grey world, “a grainy monochrome”[2]. Therefore, in contrast, the introduction or particular reference to colour is felt as very noticeable; for example in The Heart of Darkness colour seems to come to life in the scene staged around a map of the interior of Africa “a large shining map, marked with the colours of the rainbow”[3]; which seems to act as a kind of strict container for all of the excitement and danger associated with the narrative. For Moby Dick the lack of colour is emphasised and all of the interest plays upon the whale, in its reverential and emphatic whiteness. The whale is the focus of all their efforts, a prestige, what they are searching for, want revenge from and seek to destroy. These, Batchelor argues, are powerful allegories for the control of colour.