Postcolonial mock-epic: Abrogation and appropriation

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

But there is nothing straightforward about this kind of resistance. Postcolonial writers today must challenge the conventions of the novel, but how can one know when a writer is doing this? Just what are these conventions? There is no set list. And which are the most important and so most worth challenging? A European critic claims that Achebe's novels "challenge the formal criteria of [the novel's] generic conventions" (Harlow xv). An African considers the fiction of Achebe conventional, despite its anti-colonial content, above all in being "realist," as is the entire "first generation of modern African novels" (63). This critic, Kwame Anthony Appiah, posits a "second stage" that "rejects, indeed assaults, the conventions of realism" (64); but, of course, realism-assaulting is itself a convention of modern fiction. As long as writers are writing in a metropolitan language, they cannot simply order the conventions of its literature to leave the country by sundown.

These hang on whether one employs abrogation, either by simply violating or parodically mocking them, or appropriation, by modifying them for one's own "material." For example, the Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah's "second-stage" novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born abrogates traditional novelistic conventions, such as having a hero with a name: Armah's is known only as "the man." "Beautyful" might be thought of as an abrogation of spelling conventions (although the word is [mis]spelled that way in a graffito the man notices on a bus). But "beautyful" brings "beautiful" to mind, and "the man" has its disturbing effect only because heroes have names. Not wanting to be disturbed, a conventional reader may very well decide that "the man" is really a name, after all: Everyman, or Man of the People. In appropriating, obviously, the writer explicitly adheres to a traditional convention, which may be affected very little, especially if the postcolonial writer uses it unimaginatively. It will hang on, however, even when its character appears much changed because of radically different material, so that, possibly, the effect becomes indistinguishable from that of parody. The original, the source, hangs on: this is the genealogically authoritative tradition of the metropole, to which source of universal and unchanging light anyone who writes seems obliged to go. How frustrating all this must be for those who wish to clear a space for themselves! And yet, how fascinating and vibrant as sites of struggle, as works of great art that must contain enormous tensions, are the novels of Achebe, Armah, Soyinka, and many others!

One can say as much, for essentially the same reasons, about the great mock-- epics and even about those considered less than great. There are important differences, certainly, because the epic differs from the novel in several respects important to those who appropriate and abrogate (it is usual for the same writer to do both, although the ratio shifts from writer to writer and text to text). Of all the European novels a writer in Africa or Asia might read, comparatively few (such as Heart of Darkness) possess special interest because of their setting, and one would not wish to be limited to these: the postcolonial novelist must therefore wrestle with the rather ghostly presence of a genre. So did the mock-epic poet. The presence of epic only seemed less ghostly because of the systematization or rigidity imparted by the "rules" and because there are far fewer epics than novels, even "great" novels; the composer of mock-epic frequently brought in the convention (ghostly) and alluded to Homer's or Vergil's use of it (concrete) at the same time. The novel has both genealogical authority and ubiquity. The epic had only the first of these qualities--in great measure, of course, for those who revered the ancients. The novel is written in the same European language that the postcolonial novelist uses, but the epics, at least the oldest and most exemplary, were in the ancient languages. This may mean that the epic seemed easier to escape from as one wrote, but it also may have made it harder to mock, since one can't touch the language itself. Nonetheless, despite this survival factor, the epic was probably easier to abrogate in the eighteenth century than the novel is presently: because it seemed so plain what the epic conventions were, parody of the epic was much simpler to bring off than parody of the novel. However, the novel is easier to appropriate from than the epic was because of an abundance of subjects and objects to modify into something native. But resistance occurs in each case, and in each case is a form of political resistance connected to the development of nation-ness.