Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress, The

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Lemly, John

Isabel Hofmeyr. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xii 314 pp. Illustrations. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65. Cloth. $22.95. Paper.

In his "Author's Apology," John Bunyan promises his reader, "This book will make a traveller of thee." That simple claim Isabel Hofmeyer has taken to heart in her dazzling recontextualizing of one of the world's most familiar and translated texts. Moving beyond much earlier commentary-"armchair surmise" (15)-she takes her readers on a global journey back and forth, from England to far-flung colonies and missions across three centuries. She offers not so much a reading of Bunyan as a reading of his readers and their readings and rereadings. Rejecting her predecessors' unexamined assumptions, she attempts, "through detailed tracking of the text as a material object, to highlight the superfluity of textual practices, the diversity of audiences and reading strategies, and the unexpected outcomes that arise when texts travel from and into complex and crowded worlds" (230).

This pioneering voyage of discovery leads her to offer remappings of the Protestant Atlantic, of the interface between oral and literate culture, and of the divided domain of Bunyan scholarship. Her case studies reveal a complex circulation of The Pilgrim's Progress around a worldwide public, not merely one-way along the predictable route from "metropole" to "colony." Rich examinations of its myriad translations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa demonstrate how "the idea of the book occupies a para-literate zone in which texts become multimedia and mulitlingual portfolios ... configured across the printed and the spoken, image and text, and, at times, heaven and earth" (27). Chapter 6, "Dreams, Documents, and Passports," is especially incisive, exploring this talismanic power of a text and linking an emerging literacy back toward ancient ideas of the miraculous and forward toward both oppressive colonial bureaucracy and vibrant popular culture. Questioning another binary, between Bunyan's canonization as an "English" classic and his earlier global appeal, she examines how in Britain the new secular discipline of English literature in the twentieth century has taken the place of ardent Nonconformist evangelism.

Like Bunyan's narrative, Hofmeyr's own study tends to be episodic. Her impeccable scholarship has unearthed vast findings that no single volume could contain, and any simple linearity would not sustain her richly interconnected, circular argument. That said, the volume's cumulative power becomes most compelling as the final chapters fully display her hermeneutic gifts. The chapter titled "Illustrating Bunyan" is among the most memorable, like the very "frightening pictures" that Chinua Achebe recalls from his childhood encounter with an Igbo Pilgrim's Progress. Her modest observation that a Kongo edition with photographic illustrations has no precedent in European versions leads Hofmyer to acute reflections on how fiction and photograph, past and present, merge to serve multiple audiences. The next chapter's brief look at four African novelists similarly contests the presumptuous categorizing of such terms as "the English book" (Homi Bhabha) or "the African novel" (Achebe). Her provocative readings of Fagunwa, Tutuola, Ngugi, and Dangarembga show how their encounters with an African Bunyan open up new possibilities in their fiction.

Shakespeare, even more a seventeenth-century English "universal," says that imagination is grounded in a "local habitation and a name." Hofmeyr insists that an understanding of Bunyan's book, indeed, of any cultural artifact or culture itself, must be rooted in particulars, in the intricate processes by which it is made, remade, consumed, resisted, and circulated. She has set forth a remarkable, daunting model for how that might be done. Anyone interested in Africa or books has much to learn from hers.

John Lemly

Mount Holyoke College

South Hadley, Massachusetts