Jenny Brewer

30 September 2011

Confronting Intertextuality, Exploring Narrativity

            This course has been more challenging than I expected, perhaps for the very reasons I expected it not to be. I hold a Bachelors in Fine Arts and a Masters in Library Science, and the combination of these means that, while I am at ease in discussions of aesthetics and live and breathe text- I am accustomed to view content packages on their own terms, as self-contained entities. Bringing colonial and postcolonial literature into dialogue is challenging to one such as I, who has been accustomed to treating each work of literature as a world unto itself. I have had to learn to hold books open in my head long after I have finished them, and to jump from the book in my hand to the books in my head while reading. I become frustrated with myself when I get lost in the story in front of me and forget to compare what Lucy just said to what Crusoe did last week. I have not yet succeeded in this- every time I have tried to think in terms of dialogue between texts, my brain has gone the very literal route of creating dialogue between characters:

Lucy interrogates Friday, accusing him of painting a submissive picture of Caribbean islanders and thus making colonization look easy enough to create the circumstances of her birth and life (DeFoe). Friday accuses Lucy of being an accessory to "the cultural process by which subversion or dissent is ultimately contained by ‘power’" in the ubiquity of her story on Colo PoCo syllabi and asks her how it feels to have made all West Indian girls into sluts (Baldic)? Lucy says "at least my novel is a novel! My novel is a formal but humanizing account! Yours is didactic description! My character has a trajectory! You are a caricature! And finally the black little girls in pink organdy crinolines march in to sing of how the colonized can overcome their subjugation to hold up a mirror to the colonized, thus achieving self-other transformation for them both; and everyone hugs and goes home (Walcott).

I am working on this, but I can also see how this problem hints at why fiction provides such fertile territory for postcolonial studies. This tendency to get lost in a narrative is what makes novels such powerful vehicles for ideas: when caught up in the drama on the page there is a tendency to automatically accept the assumptions and agendas which inform that drama.  In this way, literature can be co-opted to reinforce the norms of the dominant culture, or it can challenge it.

            A further challenge for me in this course has been the apparent devaluing of the principle of ars artis gratia that the practice seems to encourage (Murphy, 703). As a graduate of a conservatory fine arts program, it has been very difficult to overlook some glaring compromises in aesthetics that seem to have been made whenever transmitting the work's message required it.  For example, I felt that Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and Lewis and Dinah in Lucy were not fully realized characters and were instead archetypes pressed into service to carry water for the author's agenda; and that the narrative arcs of both novels were, especially in the case of Crusoe, far "flatter" than storytelling for the story's sake would demand. I can see that putting aside my early training regarding ars artis gratia is essential for the study of multicultural literature, as Chinua Achebe himself has denounced this attitude as Eurocentric, and claimed the opposite, that art exists only to serve the community (Innes, 244). 

            The novelist's art is perhaps ideal for this purpose. Narrative is a powerful vehicle for cultural information due to its potential for pseudo-justification (the persuasive appeal of stories is disproportionate to their real evidential support) and seduction (a story can lead to irrationality due to its emotional appeal) (Livingston 25). "Representations of sequences of events, and of agents and their strivings [...] can serve to illustrate or to challenge a theory, and [...] contribute to hypothesis formation" (Livingston 34). Care must be taken with information received from fiction, because fiction based on true events is become part of cultural memory which transforms the "past into myth, that is, into stories which make sense{...} and which therefore exert normative and formative power" (Erll 167). A previous student in this course even seems to suggest this can be pre-emptive: “Colonialism is not only a process of occupying others' territories and exploring them, but is a textual act too. Works of literature justify occupation, experts and travelers have studied the geopolitical and religious aspects of the colonized people. Imperial Europe has framed means to rule and keep its cultural and political hegemony over native societies” (Yassin). A colonizer's native culture will have inculcated him with the idea that the natives of the outpost to which he's bound will be happier with him in charge. The effortless assumption that Crusoe makes upon meeting Friday- that he is the master- would have been lodged comfortably in the subconscious of, say, the Governor of Britain’s East Africa Protectorate in 1895 (Ingham, 740).

            It is only fair that postcolonial voices should have their chance to undo this damage. Colonial and postcolonial fiction offer expanded opportunities for the general public to learn about world history, contemporary events, and the global future.  The immersion and immediacy of a story “helps to inform consideration of the inner life of historical fact in terms of offering a richer perspective on the meanings of past lives as well as the lives of those in the present" (den Heyer and Fidyk 154).  “A Small Place” forces us to inhabit the reality of the colonized and to confront in a visceral way the too-familiar reflection of a privileged vacationer. We cannot help but see the parallels between that vacationer and Crusoe- despite Crusoe's profound lack of such conveniences as luggage or company. Studying colonial and postcolonial texts alongside one another seems the perfect way to counteract the power of both ends of the spectrum to sneak biased information past our critical faculties.  Whatever constructs Robinson Crusoe might have set up will be automatically undermined by Lucy, however, this also means that any uncomfortable reflection we confront in Lucy can be mitigated by our sympathy for the narrator in The Man Who Would be King.

            Beyond the scope of this class, the intertextual method has great potential for primary and secondary educators. Primary and secondary multicultural education comprises several approaches that proceed from weak, additive practices which promote tolerance through pluralism and cultural relativism, to stronger ones that examine the relations of power through which dominant and dominated groups and identities are constituted (Keith 540).  It has been shown that multicultural education efforts often begin and end with teaching about cultural differences (Baer 24). However, studying multicultural texts alongside Western classics has been proven to yield a more profound self-other transformation than studying multicultural texts alone, which seems to add a tepid tolerance (Keith 540). Simply reading Lucy might spur students to be more sympathetic to be more sympathetic to Caribbean islander, but actively comparing Lucy to Robinson Crusoe makes us confront urges toward domination and resistance rather than just comparing identities of "American" and "Caribbean." However, this process can become very politicized in light of the need to keep reading lists, especially secondary- or freshman survey-level, at length which can be covered in a single semester. This means that one title is dropped for each title that is added. Critics charge that this can lead to a loss of perspective- as Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read Things Fall Apart, but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from” (Donadio).

            However, the chances of seeing this method adopted on a large scale in America's public schools seem remote.  Colonial and postcolonial discourse is not part of American social consciousness due to easy but uncomfortable comparisons available between European colonial behavior and current American policies.  America can be said to have invented "postcolonial colonialism." The difference between "classic" colonialism and American colonialism is that "without the immediate political risks associated with direct rule, it is possible to pursue American strategic interests without review of the status of human needs and human rights in countries within the ever-widening American sphere of influence" (Trombold 204).  The last thing we would ever want to do is to start looking at the manifestations of colonialism, as opposed to the definition. By definition, we are not colonialists. However, our actions in the Middle East and Latin America have yielded much the same fruit. We would recognize this if we looked very closely at postcolonial literature. Therefore we are much more comfortable sticking to the kind of multicultural education that increases tolerance, as this can be done without taking us out of our comfortable denial.

            As previously stated, multicultural education has become highly politicized. Attempts to move current methods away from pluralism, and toward the transformation that an intertextual study of colonial and postcolonial texts might afford, are only likely to exacerbate the situation.  This state of affairs has the potential to make it easier and easier, moving forward, for Americans to remain blissfully unaware of the similarities between plantations and maquilas.  Educators of conscience should do all they can to change this, lest the seventeenth century repeat itself.

Works Cited

Baer, Allison L., and Jacqueline N. Glasgow. "Negotiating Understanding Through the Young Adult Literature of Muslim Cultures." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy54.1 (2010): 23-32. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 Sept. 2011.

Baldic, Chris, ed. "New Historicism." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, 2008

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/crusoe/crusoe3.htm

den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts Through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones Between Then and Now."  Educational Theory57.2 (2007): 141-157. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 Sept. 2011.

Donadio, Rachel. "Revisiting the Canon Wars." New York Times. 16 Sept. 2007. Web. 25 Sept 2011

Erll, Astrid. "Re-writing as re-visioning." European Journal of English Studies10.2 (2006): 163-185. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 Sept. 2011.

Ingham, Kenneth. Rev. of British Rule in Kenya, 1895-1912: The Establishment of Administration in the East Africa Protectorate by G. H. Mungeam. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 30: 740-741. JSTOR. 30 Sept 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/612445>

Innes, C. L. Rev of Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays by Chinua Achebe. Research in African Literatures 7 ( 1976): 242-245. JSTOR. 30 Sept. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3818720>

Keith, Novella. "Getting beyond anaemic love: from the pedagogy of cordial relations to a pedagogy for difference." Journal of Curriculum Studies42.4 (2010): 539-572. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 Sept. 2011.

Livingston, Paisley. "Narrativity and Knowledge." Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism67.1 (2009): 25-36. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 Sept. 2011.

Murphy, John J. Rev. of  The Social Christian Novel. by Robert Glenn Wright. American Literature 61 (1989): 702-704. JSTOR. 30 Sept. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2927017>

Trombold, John. "Neo-Roosevelt, or, Why Post-Colonialism is Premature." Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies7.2 (2005): 199-215. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 25 Sept. 2011.

Walcott, Derek. "Crusoe's Island.” Web. Accessed 30 Sept 2011. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. <http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731copo/readings/walcottcrusoesisland.htm>

Yassin, Dawlat Yassin. "Colonial and Postcolonial Experience in Literature." Feb.18 2008. Web. 30 Sept. 2011. <http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731copo/models/2008/midterms/mt08yassin.htm>