Sandra Yowell
Colonial/Postcolonial Lit.
Professor White
July 5, 2001

Final Exam: Realism and the Hope of Deliverance

After his encounter with a spirit from the other world, Hamlet accepts that his father’s ghost might have returned to Denmark—and also that the apparition might be an evil spirit sent to deceive him.  The existence of the spirit world itself is not called into question by the prince.  In literature after this period, spirits will retain their literal existence for hundreds of years.  Since the middle of the nineteenth-century, ghosts have been mainly relegated to popular literature, and philosophy has become more and more resistant towards “dreaming” of a metaphysical world.  

The move toward naturalism and realism in art has meant discarding old myths.  The idea that humans are spirit and flesh—a Promethean spark enclosed in clay—is no longer exactly valid, especially in postmodern literature.  So if a human being can no longer be defined as that which is created by a Spirit, and possessing a spirit, what does it mean to be human?  In the film A.I., a robot boy who dreams is characterized as having the essential human quality of believing in the invisible.  Humans have faith in the creations of their minds, however far-fetched.  Consequently, we are the dupes of our own imaginations. 

This naturalistic definition of humanity is radically different from the tradition that humans are the creation of gods.  Imagination, our ability to conceive of such things as fairies, gods, spirits, and ghosts, might be linked to the internal spirit/spark of older definitions.  The important reversal is that instead of being the offspring of the gods, humans beings are now defined as those who invent the gods and the supernatural.  With a few qualifications, A.I. embraces naturalism and death as oblivion, the final fate of humans.  If it is prophecy, then it is that the memory of the human race might survive a little while longer than it does, but humans will be extinguished.  This is not entirely different from the view of many twentieth-century authors, including Joseph Conrad’s vision of human destiny. 

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart are set in roughly the same time period—the late nineteenth-century.  In both, there is horrible evil, suffering, and annihilation.  Conrad takes Africa as his great metaphor for the oblivion of death and the darkness of the human psyche.  For his narrator, Marlow, there is no deliverance from this nightmarish abyss.  After Kurtz’s death, Marlow says, “There remained only his memory and his Intended—and I wanted to give that up, too, to the past, in a way—to surrender personally all that remained of him with me to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate.”  Marlow does not so much as locate darkness in Africa, as in the human fate to be eradicated completely.  Kurtz has also seen his fate; his last words are, “The horror.  The horror.”  The narrator Marlow admires that Kurtz recoils against the darkness and oblivion at the depth of human experience, but Kurtz’s rejection of whatever it is he see is itself overcome by death. 

In an interview collected in African Writers Talking, Achebe was asked about his favorite authors.  He answered, “I used to like Conrad particularly”(6).  His fondness for Conrad turned into frustration later, as Achebe realized how Conrad perpetuated the superiority myth of the colonizers.  Later Achebe would accuse Conrad of racism, but something of Conrad’s intense vision of human evil had already been imparted.  Both authors reject the myth of deliverance, the sort of hope embedded in Negro spirituals such as “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”  In Things Fall Apart, the hope offered by the missionaries is only a path toward destruction.  But Achebe does exactly really return to the traditional African myths, either, or dwell on the Ibo belief in the immortality of the spirit.  He records their beliefs, but for Achebe, there is no deliverance from the darkness that the white man brings.  In the novel Europeans begin the destruction of Nigerian civilization; what remains of the Igbo culture is altered completely.  Achebe echoes Conrad’s realistic philosophy, even while reversing many of Conrad’s myths of African darkness. 

To reverse the idea that Africa was a clean slate before the colonizers came, Achebe set his novel in the time right before Europeans penetrated the village of Umuofia.  The protoganoist Okonkwo, a great man in his village, is respected for his strength and cunning.  But after contact with the Europeans, Okonkwo is deeply humiliated, and he seeks oblivion in death.  His friend, Obierika, and the tribe is horrified at this crime against the gods.  But Obierika saves his greatest outrage for the English.  Confronting them with Okonkwo’s body, he says:  “‘That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia.  You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog….’ He could not say any more.  His voice trembled and choked his words”(208).  Obierika does not say, “The horror,” but he instinctively recoils against the horrible oblivion into which his friend has passed.  Unlike Marlow, Obierika locates the darkness in the white race.  In Things Fall Apart, the British eradicate a culture, without any more thought than they would have in clearing out a forest.  Chinua Achebe himself was reared as a Christian, but he later came to reject his “delusion of divine destiny” and claimed that he wrote Things Fall Apart as “an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son”(PCSR, 191-2).  It is as if the author’s earlier Christian beliefs were a betrayal of his people and history, and by recounting traditional Nigerian culture, Achebe has made peace of some sort with his heritage.  At the same time, Achebe writes a story that is a fierce rebuttal to Conrad’s idea that the jungle is a void.  In Achebe’s world, it is the Europeans who lack moral knowledge.  

The Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who, like Achebe, was taught Christianity,  experiences the same rage against the cruelty of colonialism and religion in his poems.  In the “Ruins of a Great House,” Walcott depicts a mansion decaying, and in that the decay of empire: “And when a wind shook in the limes I heard / What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse / Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.”  The Bible and the sword, or violence, arrive almost simultaneously in Things Fall Apart.  Both are seen as disastrous to the old way of village life.  The moral darkness that Conrad details is still here, but it has been given a new home—imperialism.  Walcott lets his rage be washed away by forgiveness—compassion for the British people who have also been conquered, he notes.  But the tension between the colonized and the colonizer is still present; in the absence of any faith in complete deliverance, peace is temporary. 

Any vision of peace among men, then, must be fantastical in a realistic text.  It is in that vein which Walcott writes “The Season of Phantasmal Peace.”  That season, which he imagines ushered in by birds that symbolize different nations, “lasted one moment, like the pause / between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, / but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long”(32-4).  Walcott’s beautiful vision is not the same vision of peace as that of previous generations, who believed in a literal time of future peace.  Negro spirituals like  “Peace in the Valley” express a more concrete hope in peace: “There’ll be peace in the valley for me some day… / I pray no more sorrow and trouble will be.”  Walcott’s poems represent a certain enchantment with deliverance myths.  But his season of peace is self-consciously imaginative; it employs the tropes of Biblical passages with almost exaggerated eloquence.  The heft of his language gently fades away into the phrase “this season lasted one moment.”  Moments of amity and peace are significant, but they do not constitute a rigid structure of belief.  There is as much sadness in them, it seems, as joy.  The heart of darkness is pierced by some light. 

            This is almost the philosophy of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things.  In A God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy refers frequently to a “Heart of Darkness,” perhaps most memorably when the policemen come to arrest Velutha for breaking the Love Laws.  Roy writes, “…a posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, clumping into the Heart of Darkness”(287).  The horrible act the policemen commit against Velutha is a Conrad-like abyss of experience—the encounter between innocence and the horror of human nature not ruled by any moral law.  But that is not the entire view of the novelist.  In an interview about her book, Roy said, “The story tells of the brutality we’re capable of, but also that aching, intimate love.  And for me the twins are what that is about…the ability to actually dream each other’s dreams and to share each other’s happiness and pain.”  Still, Roy’s novel portrays death as oblivion—there is no hope that Velutha or Ammu will return, or will meet in the afterlife.  Like the other authors, Roy’s narrative is deliberately based on realism. 

            It is Roy’s language that defies imperialist expectations.  In Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” he envisions an India that is delivered from its darkness by the tool of English:  “We must at present do our best to form…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”(PCSR, 430).  The language of the imperialists, Macaulay believes, will bring moral reformation to India.  As is usual, the colonizer assumes that the colonizer has no morals or sophisticated language.  Roy makes use of English in a way Macaulay never predicted.  Her novel, which depicts a Syrian culture that has been established in Kerala for many hundreds of years, is neither enlightenment, science, religion, or any other category which the statesman thought English was useful for teaching.

There is some irony in that the four authors studied here were brought up to believe in Christian doctrine, even though their texts hide any specific dogma of faith.  The narratives of the authors are greatly influenced by Christianity and the language of the Bible, but they are dominated by the absence of faith in the afterlife, in spirits of the dead, in final judgment, and in heaven.  These twentieth-century narratives incorporate native myths, colonial myths, and the ideas modern and postmodern philosophy.  But the most persistent idea is that of emptiness: the darkness of Conrad’s jungle, the uninhabited History House in Roy’s novel, the oblivion of death in Things Fall Apart.  In cultures of faith, people believe that there were was life beyond the nothingness that is death—that death is not oblivion.  Modern and postmodern narratives reflect the absence of dogma and certainty.  Derrida’s work emphasizes the absence of presence, and that is close, I think to a theoretical definition of the void or abyss that Kurtz and Marlow looked into.  Realism will not accept that deliverance could be permanent.  Instead, there are seasons of phantasmal peace.  There are evenings spent in contentment with a lover.  An earthly, temporary deliverance.

Dear Sandra,