Préface:
Beyond Polarities
In the twentieth century, literary theory has undergone unprecedented development probably because of the increased exchanges between literature and other fields of knowledge, in particular linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy and Marxism. In the wake of
Ferdinand de Saussure’s major study of the linguistic sign, formalism, structuralism, deconstruction and narratology have emerged as alternatives to the more pragmatic methods used by earlier critics. Yet this radical methodological change did flot affect only the exegesis of literature; it also had important consequences on the way in which writers included self-reflexivity in their creation. This is evident in the works of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry who were the pioneers of a mode of expression in which poetry included a preoccupation with theorizing its own functioning. The essays collected in this volume all show various aspects of this concern. In her paper, Claire Joubert shows that, in Britain too, Virginia Woolf believed in the indistinction of theory and literary
The surprising popularity of metafiction, particularly since the 1970s, has led some readers to believe that this was a discovery of the twentieth century. The genre is actually almost as old as the human endeavour to produce art. One of the most often quoted texts in this regard has been the narration of Arabian Nights, a nineteenth-century retelling of an ancient story originating in the Middle East and possibly in India as well. Salman Rushdie uses the figure of Sheherazade in his novel Midnight’s Children to illustrate the capacity for imagination to defer the advent of death by giving shape and meaning to experience through storytelling. Hedi Ben Abbes’s paper insists on the fusion between the Western novelistic tradition and Eastern storytelling in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Alain Séverac shows that metafiction does not prevent Ben Okri from remaining deeply concerned with the fate of his fellow-Nigerians.
Orality is a major source of inspiration in post-colonial literature. Still the artists’ attitude towards this sometimes remains paradoxical: in her essay, Lydie Moudileno argues that a number of Caribbean writers implicitly hanker after the dream of finding a long-lost slave narrative which might definitely place their tradition within the mainstream of world literature. For Dorita Nouhaud, Asturias’s use of ancient pre-Columbian mythology in his fiction was often based on the reinterpretation of such traditions by European anthropologists, thus rendering irrelevant any search for ‘authenticity’
Post-colonial writing emerged more or less at the time when metafiction flowered in the developed world. Whereas European writers were concerned with mise en abyme and such self-conscious devices, the new post-colonial poets and novelists were generally more preoccupied with the social relevance of their art. Many of them, particularly in the Third World — but not exclusively, as Claire Omhovère shows with her examination of Robert Kroetsch’ s ‘The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart’ — started to publish texts concerned with their own practice, generally highlighting the relevance of their activity to the fight for self-respect and for cultural autonomy. Whereas metafictional works in the West often expressed a retreat from involvement, the first generation of post-colonial writers asserted the relevance of literature to the solution of the many problems which plagued their countries. Initially these ‘marginal’ literatures were viewed with disapproval or, at best, condescension. Because some of them were deeply rooted in the oral traditions of their cultures, they were sometimes considered as inferior by outsiders. The role of the writers in such relatively new contexts required re-definition. This often encouraged post-colonial artists to reflect on the articulation of their cultures with the outside world. The negative judgement levelled at them by some Western critics forced them to highlight their differences and to clarify their position, particularly in relation to the mimetic aspect of their work and to its relevance to the political situation of their region of origin.
Theory seems to have naturally appealed to post-colonial writers perhaps because it naturally opens out to the questioning of many unspoken biases. The development of the New Criticism in the USA and Barthes’ polemics with the defenders of the French academic tradition led to the realization that a work of art could no longer be examined unproblematically as a mere illustration of the author’s biography. Works hinging on a simple comparison between what was seen to be the life of the writer and his production became singularly outdated. Similarly the notion that a piece of writing could be a ‘mirror’ of reality came under severe criticism.
Although post-colonial writers were often concerned with expressing the reality of their cultures through their novels, their notion of what this reality consisted of contrasted with the premises of much realistic fiction. Colonial societies had been appropriated by Western views which the rising intellectuals of the Third World increasingly resented. Consequently, when the first post colonial novels appeared, their authors were naturally aware of the problematic nature of any representation of reality. They intended to redress what they considered to be biased views of their worlds. Still the conditions in which they had grown up predisposed many of them to be more acutely aware of relativism than their Western counterparts. For Otto Heim, who examines the works of Aritha van Herk and Nourbese Philip, the place of experience always resists discursive incorporation. According to Michael Mitchell, Derek Walcott, like many other post-colonial writers, does not pretend to repossess language in a simplistic way. On the contrary, He seeks to find a linguistic form based on internal contradictions and ignorance, even though the poet may explicitly strive towards a type of vision whjch transcends death. Poetry feeds on this light which emerges from a deeply buried Other opening up onto some form of revelation. Still this does not lead to purely formalistic art. On the contrary, as Gilles Macarie argues, it is linked with historiography. Kathie Birat detects a similar preoccupation in the works of Wilson Harris and Caryl Phillips.
In the 1960s, the West was in no way completely dominated by artists who pared their fingernails. On the contrary, Neo-Brechtian aesthetic conceptions had a profound influence, particularly in the theatre. John Chandier shows the power of such artistic tenets in the drama of Edward Bond. The modem French novel was illustrated by the popular figure of Jean-Paul Sartre for whom the involvement of the artist in his community was an essential task. He was equally passionate in his defence of the Négritude movement. His ‘Orphée noire’, constitutes a plea for the recognition of the literary merits of the new black literature. However the influence of Sartre was probably more marked in France than in the English-speaking world, perhaps because the assimilationist doctrine advocated in France brought the African and Caribbean writers educated in Paris closer to the other French intellectuals.
Most former colonies were also acquiring their independence in the 1960s. This coincided with the flowering of literature produced by writers from outside the Western world who felt it was their duty to place their art at the disposal of the fight for national identity. For them, the repossession of history and tradition formed an essential part of their mission. In many African countries, the new writers modelled their practice on the roles of the old storytellers who were meant to educate as well as entertain. According to the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, the novelist should be a ‘teacher’. Literature could not be divorced from the task of transmitting values which would help the younger generations to make sense of the present through the reinterpretation of ancient wisdom.
Achebe considered that an African artist could not legitimately forget his own culture and his community. The writer in an ivory tower could not be further removed from his preoccupation. Because Chinua Achebe and the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o came from traditions in which orality was the rule and literacy was a novelty, the practice of fiction required justification and explanation. They could not simply follow in the footsteps of Western writers such as Joseph Conrad who had inspired them to become novelists. Yet they could not merely emulate the practice of oral storytellers either because they were using a different medium and had to make a place for themselves in an environment where writers were still strange creatures.
Many of them broadcast their views in theoretical papers written on the occasion of academic conferences or collections of essays. In Homecoming Ngugi wa Thiong’o articulates his belief in the revolutionary role of the African writer who must be involved on the side of his people and not simply let himself be carried away by a recreation of an ‘idyllic’ past. Ngugi thinks that the African artist must dive ‘into himself, deep into the collective unconscious of his people [to] seek the root, the trend, in the revolutionary struggle’ (p. 46). This profession of faith with Marxist and Fanonian undertones partly reflects the atmosphere of his early novels. The River Between and A Grain of Wheat mirror this preoccupation, though in a more complex way than what the essays suggest. Trying to explain Ngugi’s novels through the template his theory does not fully render justice to an artist who is far more sophisticated as a practitioner of fiction than as an essay writer.
In the case of Wole Soyinka, some of the papers collected in Art, Dialogue and Outrage cast an interesting light on the mytho-poetic world of such plays as A Dance of the Forests. In ‘The Fourth Stage’ Soyinka comments on the relationship between Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy and Yoruba myths in a manner which contributes to the understanding of the otherwise hermetic world of this ritual play. The new syncretic vision which fuses elements borrowed from various traditions expresses the desire on the part of many post-colonial writers not to be limited by a simplistic opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Both sides of the dichotomy, when they are essentialized, fail to account for a world where television, the internet and the old gods are in no way felt to be mutually exclusive. For writers such as Soyinka, ‘tradition’ is shown to be an ideological fabrication which masks the variability of structures submitted to historical change like ail other human forms of experience.
In ‘Towards a New Oceania’, the Samoan writer Albert Wendt denounces the idyllic visions of the South Seas too often found in Western literature. In an attempt to repossess his part of the world imaginatively, he explores the roots of a Pacific identity towards whose emergence he contributes through his fiction and poetry as well as through his activity as a cultural leader and organizer.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite asserts the Caribbean artist’s right to use English in a different way because ‘the hurricane does not roar in pentameters’. The ‘nation language’ which he professes must take into account the particular tongue developed by generations forcibly transported to the Caribbean during the centuries of slavery. In his case, his practice as a poet is probably more diversified than his philosophical reflections on the nature of the Caribbean experience. His early verse bears the marks of his inspirers, notably Eliot. His more recent poetry, with its Imagist experiments, is strongly influenced by contemporary North American poetry.
Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant occupy a special niche in post-colonial literature; unlike most writers, they do not respect the traditional rhetorical division between criticism and fiction or poetry. Many of their works deliberately mix theory and practice as though the two were absolutely indistinguishable. Glissant’ s Le Discours antillais, is composed of aphorisms, poetry, fiction and theoretical reflection, each discourse being placed side by side with the others and on an equal footing:
Our intention in this work was to accumulate at ail levels. Accumulation is the most appropriate technique for the unveiling of a reality which is itself fragmented.
Glissant borrows some of the vitality of the oral tradition which is so much alive in his culture. He also reflects on the power of Creole, on its particular violence of expression, on its tendency to use ‘detour’ in order to overcome the inferiority complex encouraged by the colonial masters. This profusion of various discourses possesses an almost carnivalesque potential in the Bakhtinian sense of a baroque art which resists being limited by Western highbrow rationality.
Wilson Harris completely fuses theory and practice, his fiction becoming a source of philosophical inquiry. In his essay, Dominique Dubois reaffirms the importance of a constant dialogue between the two. Louis James shows that this refusal to separate imaginary creation and scientific culture is a characteristic of Guyanese fiction. With Wilson Harris, this raises a certain number of problems in so far as the readers must first acquire an intimate understanding of the author’ s sophisticated theoretical framework in order to apprehend what is at stake in the novels. Harris might well reject the relevance of the term ‘theory’ in so far as it is often interpreted as a sophisticated meta-language which merely reduces the work of art to a clearly definable construction. With Wilson Harris, the traditional distinction between widely accepted generic distinctions is subverted. The novel The Eye of the Scarecrow includes a chapter entitled ‘Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile’ in which the narrator addresses a letter not to ‘Dear reader’ but to ‘Dear L—’, in which he comments on what is in fact the author’ s own conception of fiction:
Language is one’s medium of the vision of consciousness…. Language atone can express (in a way which goes beyond any physical or vocal attempt) the sheer — the ultimate ‘suent’ and ‘immaterial’ complexity of arousal. Whatever sympathy one may feel for a concrete poetry — where physical objects are used and adopted the fact remains that the original grain or grains of language cannot be trapped or proven. It is the sheer mystery — the impossibility of trapping its own grain — on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the essential stuff of one’s understanding of the reality of the original Word, the Well of Silence. Which is concerned with a genuine sourcelessness, a fluid logic of image. (p. 95)
Here the narrator expresses the author’s diffidence towards works which pursue the realistic vein as though the language of fiction could be a mirror of ‘reality’. For Harris, on the contrary, language is linked with the essence of reality but in a vicarious and revisionary way. It is a groping for, an approximate and always temporary representation. Each attempt to write is a rehearsal of an act which will never be performed once and for ail. Metaphoric expression is the only valid gateway towards this original ‘Word’ which remains elusive as it looms always further out of reach at the very moment when one attempts to grasp it. It may appear paradoxical that an artist acutely conscious of the impossibility to trap the ‘Word’ should indulge in so much theorizing about the whole process. And yet the contradiction is only apparent in so far as, for Harris, what matters most in a work of fiction is to reflect on this fascinating and impossible quest for meaning through metaphors. For him, language is nothing if not metaphoric. Progress can only be made through the exploration of these metaphors engendering more meaning as they deconstruct one another’s appearance as reflectors of an unchanging reality. The very dynamism of his fiction finds its source in the unveiling of false contradictions and oppositions through the collision between metaphoric representations which are wrenched away from their falsely reassuring anchoring in univocal meaning. This is in no way limited to the philosophy of Wilson Harris: Michel Morel shows that the refusal of polarities is also a major feature in Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In this regard, Michel Morel sheds new light on a novel often interpreted as a mere denunciation of the authors of the fatwa.
Wilson Harris honoured the Université de Bourgogne when he agreed to participate in the conference on ‘Theory and Literary Creation’ organized on 26-27 February 1999. So it is fitting that his address should open this collection of essays largely based on the contributions made on that occasion. Most — but not ail of the articles concern the post-colonial field. The diversity of the approaches represented in this collection witnesses to the vitality of the exchanges between specialists of different literary fields, post-colonialism and post-modernism in particular. The dialectical relationship between the two terms which constituted the subject of the conference illustrates the necessity to transcend individual disciplines and genres in order to account for the richness and vitality of contemporary literature and criticism.
Tables des matières :
Jean-Pierre Durix : Beyond Polarities (pp. 5-10)
Wilson Harris : The Psyche of Space (pp. 11-20)
Kathie Birat: Revisionary Strategies: History and Fiction in the Novels of Caryl Phillips and Wilson Harris (pp. 21-32)
Dominique Dubois : Wilson Harris’s Fictional and Non-Fictional Works (pp. 33-42)
Michael Mitchell : Theory and Derek Walcott’s Omeros (pp. 43-52)
Gilles Macarie : Derek Walcott: Poetry and History (pp. 53-60)
Dorita Nouhaud : Entre le Big Bang et le Boom (pp. 61-72)
Hedi Ben Abbes : La Remise en cause du genre romanesque dans The Moor’s Last Sigh de Rushdie (pp. 73-82)
Claire Omhovère : Variations géométriques autour de ‘The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart’ de Robert Kroetsch (pp. 83-98)
Michel Morel : Haroun and the Sea of Stories: the Oblique Flight of the Storyteller (pp. 99-110)
Lydie Moudileno : Les Discours métalittéraires dans la fiction antillaise (pp. 111-120)
Louis James : Science and the Imagination in the Works of Three Guyanese Writers (pp. 121-128)
Otto Heim : Reading off the Map, or What and Where Is Experience in the Writing of Aritha van Herk and M. Nourbese Philip (pp. 129-144)
Claire Joubert : Literary Unknowing: Virginia Woolf’s Essays in Fiction (pp. 145-160)
John Chandler : Individuality and Characterisation in the Theatre of Edward Bond (pp. 161-174)
Alain Séverac : ‘Dangerous Love: Okri’s Metafiction’ (pp. 175-186)