Postcolonial mock-epic: Abrogation and appropriation

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2000 by Fuchs, Jacob

Today, several decades after Achebe's "Colonialist Criticism," postcolonial writing in the developing nations still resists the assumptions and practices of the literatures exported from the metropoles during the colonial period. This resistance is a complicated matter, and it is no exaggeration to say that conflict has raged intermittently among many postcolonial writers regarding how it can or should be carried out and how far it might go. Much eighteenth-century writing in English, including work that does not directly allude to the classics, is also postcolonial, with Greece and Rome as the cultural metropoles. These the writers resisted, with varying degrees of purposiveness, and the resistance was political in a broad sense, was nationalistic. It was neither uniform nor consistent, and it employed two tactics, appropriation and abrogation, whose mutual relationship is never very clear--as contemporary postcolonial writers have learned in their time (Ashcroft 38-39). Every postcolonial work is a site of struggle, with a past that the writer wishes to "other," but not completely other, and with a present that is unsatisfactory because it seems so perilously new. Today, one would look to the novel as the vehicle for this ambivalent and bifold struggle; among the eighteenth-century forms, mock-epic is that in which it occurs most openly--if we look for it. That is what I propose we do. I propose that mock-epics, even the majority of them now considered sub-literary, become fully invested with life when read as postcolonial literature.

A political unlikeness shall now be considered. To be sure, eighteenth-century Britain lacked a history of political domination by Greece and Rome. There were no Greek or Roman sahibs that needed displacing, while postcolonial writers in former European colonies could hardly help being affected by the circumstances accompanying the physical departure or removal of an alien ruling class. That this is a significant difference I need not say, but it does not alter the fact that a nation needs a language. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes that "the nation is conceived in language, not blood" (47). And this language should be a "print-language" (74), Anderson says, so writers, literary people, have a very important part to play, extending beyond "culture" in its narrow sense, in building nation-ness. In Europe, "Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes ... became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper" (47). This is all very well, but these print-languages were then exported to other parts of the world where they remained, as print-languages, after the French, English, or Spanish had themselves departed. The "myth of centrality embodied in the concept of a 'standard language"' therefore remains (Ashcroft 87). The problem, of course, is that this language, with its spurious centrality or universality, so obviously becomes alien once the sahibs leave.

Those who remain could write in an indigenous language, make that the nation's "print-language," but this approach does not seem satisfactory to most writers in the developing nations today (Achebe, "African Writer"). Or one can somehow change the way one employs the metropolitan language. When used differently from the way it is used in England, write Ashcroft et al., "English becomes english" (87), no longer a standard language, but a medium one can use for one's own purposes, unrestrained by a tradition that came from someplace else. With english, presumably, one can then go about creating an authentic national literature, ultimately obtaining "seizure and control of the means of interpretation and communication" (Ashcroft 97). Decolonization is then complete. The authors of The Empire Writes Back seem to have no doubt that this is happening in the former British colonies. Obviously, people are trying to do it. It seems mistaken, though, to assume that it is the language itself they are trying to change, as "English becomes english" implies. Experiments have been made in that direction; as part of its nativist program in the 1970s, the bolekaja movement sought to make African writing in English or French "autonomous" by infusing it with traditional African orature. This experiment was not a success. The Nigerian Nobelist Wole Soyinka rechristened bolekaja "Neo-Tarzanism," and it seems to have made no lasting impression (Soyinka). In reality, most efforts to "change" English and French so that postcolonials can use them to describe their own lives and lands are really efforts to challenge the conventions of the metropole's literature.