LITR 5831 Colonial-Postcolonial
Literature
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James
Seth
20
November 2011
Writing about Discourse: Multivocal Narratives and Multinational
Exchange in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
As a form of writing tied
directly to modernism, the novel uses both dialogue and narration to tell its
story, a story that, by its very structure, demands a “multivocal” telling
(White). One of the three basic characteristics that define the novel, according
to Mikhail Bahktin, is “its stylistic three dimensionality, which is linked with
the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel” (11). A necessary layer
in this “multi-languaged consciousness” is the narrator, who understands,
interprets, and subsequently relays the messages and events in the novel’s
complex reality. The narrator may act as a guide, allowing the reader to view
the narrative landscape outside of a character’s point of view, which includes
their biases and attitudes. However, the narrator relies on dialogue to make a
more complete account of events, examining “different parts of the reality being
represented” while mapping out the “personal and cultural trajectory, direction,
or history” (White).
In colonial and postcolonial
literature, the narrative voice may also be used as a formal device, manipulated
by the author to represent, expand, or emphasize a theme connected to the
novel’s position as a proponent of imperialist culture or a multinational
culture. The narrative voice undergoes a series of changes when characters tell
stories within the novel or text. When characters assume the role of narrator,
they outline the events differently than the speaker before them, telling
stories in their own unique way. While colonial literature interprets the oral
tradition of storytelling through multiple narrators, thus attempting a
“multivocal” account, postcolonial literature often examines its own oral
traditions through a single, well-spoken narrator in a first-world narrative
structure, offering a voice that connects to the past while looking ahead to
discourses affected by multinational exchange.
In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” the narrator, presumed to be Kipling himself, is an essential voice in his own discourse on colonization. However, Kipling uses several narrators, which offers a multi-layered retelling of the events. First, there are two Rudyard Kiplings: the writer of the story, and the narrator portrayed as the writer, who is both the literary narrator and a character who interacts with others. The narrator-Kipling first engages with Peachey Carnehan through small talk, which develops into a conversation that reveals personal details:
We talked politics—the politics
of Loaferdom, that sees things from the underside where the lath and plaster is
not smoothed off—and we talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted to
send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, the turning-off place from
the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My friend had no money
beyond eight annas, which he wanted for dinner, and I had no money at all [. .
.] (99)
Through talk of politics and
postal arrangements, the narrator-Kipling learns (and subsequently discloses)
new details about Peachey, who is then unnamed, at the station. Kipling’s
writing style is casual and conversational, making it easy to disregard details
initially perceived as unimportant. The telegram that Peachey mentions to
Kipling is what instigates the story’s central plot, and it is, like their
conversation, an effective discourse in the sense that it effects the story’s
central plot, told by Peachey. For Kipling, every discourse, both in person and
in writing, is essential to the story’s function. Kipling’s multivocal story
understands narrative and dialogue in a variety of mediums, such as newspapers,
telegrams, telephone conversations, novels, and face-to-face talks. Each
interaction tells a story of some kind, a story that continues to evolve as the
narrator discovers new facts and meanings. After receiving news from a letter
stating that “‘There has been much laughter [in Peshawur] on account of a
certain mad priest who is going in his estimation to sell petty gauds [. . .] He
passed through Peshawur and associated himself to the Second Summer caravan that
goes to Kabul’” (109). Narrator-Kipling determines that, “The two, then, were
beyond the Border. I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King
died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice” (109). Narrator-Kipling’s
observations upon receiving news produces details in the story, filling gaps in
the central plot with Peachey and Dravot that do not appear explicitly in the
story from Peachey’s narrative.
Kipling’s decision to have
Peachey tell the adventures of Dravot and himself to narrator-Kipling, a
bewildered audience to say the least, is as much a calculated move as his other
attempts at achieving a multivocal narrative, such as the inclusion of
dispatches, letters, and hearsay. Kipling plays up the “nervous tension” in the
press room and describes when “there crept to my chair what was left of a man”
(109). Peachey, on the verge of physical and mental collapse, reveals his
identity to Kipling, saying, “I am Peachey—Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, and
you’ve been setting here ever since—oh, Lord!” (110) This description folds into
Peachey’s tale of conquest and failure, a tale told from man who claims, “‘I
ain’t mad—yet, but I shall be that way soon” (110). Kipling’s decision to make
Peachey narrate seems suspect due to Peachey’s questionable mental state;
however, Kipling gives his narrator self the role of diligent reporter, who
takes the story directly from the only source who is able to tell it. Critics
such as Thomas A Shippey and Michael
Short have argued for the creation of an artificial language for the narrator,
as well as additional narrative structures, which they term “frames,” as a
vehicle for Kipling (the writer) to add an additional layer of interpretation
for the events surrounding Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan:
Kipling used two devices to make narrative mode convey his story's theme: the
setting up of an individualized language for the story's central narrator, and
the use, around the centre, of a series of multiple "frames" acting as ironic
commentary on events and also (with as much importance) as a deliberately
uncertain "legitimization" of the story that is told. (76)
Kipling’s narrative layers can seem daunting to analyze, especially when there
are so many forms of narration happening throughout “The Man Who Would Be King.”
However, Shippey and Short’s argument is that Kipling’s purpose is to challenge
the reader on how to find truth, a theme also explored in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.
Kipling attempts to turn the voices on themselves “ironic[ally],” mocking the
very means of discourse that modern (and especially Western) societies depend
upon for information. Shippey and Short claim that in Kipling’s work, the use of
“frames” is “increasingly to force
some new slant on the reader's apprehension, often reminding him very
aggressively that his sense of truth is limited by his own experience, and that
this is an unreliable guide” (76). This “apprehension” is a feeling deeply
embedded not only within the immediate narrative, but also within the larger
project of the colonial writer, which attempts to seek out the unsought and
claim the unclaimed.
Kipling adds even more complexity
to the account by shifting in time, another literary device commonly employed by
colonial writers. Though narrative typically moves from past to present in the
colonial novel, Kipling’s layered short story begins in the present, shifts to
the future, recalls events in the past for what is perhaps the central
colonization narrative, and finally brings the story to the present. Kipling’s
decision to chronicle the events this way creates a much more complex narrative
structure than more linear, coherent narratives such as Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness. Kipling the writer
emphasizes the dichotomous shifts in time between the narrator, who lives a
relatively mundane life, and Peachey and Dravot, who experience excitement,
adventure and peril in the two years that separate their meeting with Kipling:
The wheel of the world swings
through the same phases again and again. Summer passed and winter thereafter,
and came and passed again. The daily paper continued and I with it [. . .] A few
great men had died in the past two years, the machines worked with more clatter,
and some of the trees in the office garden were a few feet taller. But that was
all the difference. (109)
Kipling’s allusion to a “few
great men” ironically refers to Dravot, who is initially seen as a god but is
later exposed as human. The emphasis on time shifts and differences in
perspective is crucial to the multilayered plot; in the civilized nation,
“machines worked with more clatter,” referring to the repetition and movement of
modern technology, which is often depicted in a positive light compared to
things tied to tradition. The deadpan observation that “some of the trees in the
office garden were a few feet taller” emphasizes that way that modern western
society can fall into a mechanical routine once conflict is managed and order is
restored. Stories, much like Peachey and Dravot’s invasion into the narrator’s
chronicle, upset the predictable reality that we make for ourselves when we try
to minimize confusion and disarray.
Like Kipling, Joseph Conrad
employs several narrators, first using an unnamed narrator to set up the
scenario on the Nellie, and then allowing Charlie Marlow, the second narrator,
to tell his tale about the Belgian Congo. Kipling and Conrad’s works both rely
on stories told between men, a framework that understands narrative as
interactive, rather than a solitary occupation performed without an audience. In
both cases, the audience is as essential to the story as the person telling it.
The narrator of Heart of Darkness
explicitly describes how telling stories strengthens the relationship between
the men aboard the Nellie: “Between us there was, as I have already said
somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long
periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s
yarns—and even convictions” (1). The narrator’s word “tolerant” attempts to
undermine the way that the men, particularly the narrator, become absorbed in
the sea tales, but his description of Marlow challenges his dismissive attitude.
Before Marlow begins his tale, the narrator places him in a special category of
storytellers, one that can effectively construct a narrative, attributed to the
fact that Marlow is the “only man . . . who still ‘followed the sea’” (3):
The yarns of seamen have a direct
simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut.
But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be expected), and to
him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in
the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the
spectral illumination of moonshine. (3)
In contrast to the stories of
other men, which put the narrative in a nutshell, so to speak, Marlow’s yarns
are engaging, placing the men directly in the story without disclosing the
meaning immediately.
Marlow’s tales force the men to
search for the meaning, a glowing light in a fog that is as mysterious as the
sea. The narrator’s metaphors of light, darkness, mystery and ambiguity
effectively shape the story to come, one that insists on being navigated both
thoroughly and anxiously. Through the voice of the unnamed narrator, Conrad not
only explains why Marlow’s stories are so engrossing, but he also presents his
own method for narrative, providing readers a story with implications that
cannot be discerned easily. In this way, Conrad’s multivocal narration comments
on its own devices and techniques, providing the blueprints for a “good” work,
which, in a broader sense, includes Heart
of Darkness.
Exchange is a crucial theme in
colonial and postcolonial literature. In colonial discourse, the exchanging of
goods signifies modernization, as it leads to greater economic prosperity for
the first world. In postcolonial discourse, however, exchange occurs not simply
through material means, but in all areas of the human experience: culture,
language, custom, dialect, identity, and ideology, among others. The cultural
exchange between the first and third world predicated in colonial literature is
reclaimed in postcolonial literature, and the source of this
exchange—language—is also an exchange in itself. In literature, a form specific
to first world culture, the narrative works to “[mediate] tradition and change.”
(White) This mediation can be understood through the voices within the
narrative; according to Plato, “narration may be either simple narration, or
imitation, or a union of the two” (19-40). What Plato perceives as “imitation”
is the dialogue between characters in drama, an imitation of language that is
dangerous due to its power of influence over the audience.
The postcolonial novel, like its
colonial predecessor, blends both dialogue and narration, especially when
commenting on the power of discourse; however, postcolonial authors such as
Chinua Achebe gives more authority to one main narrator than dividing the task
between multiple speakers. This decision gives more responsibility to the
narrator in understanding and empathizing with all of the novel’s characters, a
task that underlines the role of postcolonial writers, who are the voices of a
burgeoning multinational world.
In
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
comments extensively on the oral tradition in his native country while writing a
work that is located specifically within the culture of the first world.
Proverbs are another way that men in the Ibo culture interact with each other,
using sayings from their culture in conversation. In
Things Fall Apart, traditional
discourses, such as proverbs, are often challenged by reactions that undermine
their importance. Achebe juxtaposes a serious explanation about the importance
of proverb told by the narrator with a response that is anything but:
Having spoken plainly so far,
Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of
conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which
words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting
round the subject and then hitting it finally.
In short, he was asking Unoka to return the two hundred cowries he had
borrowed from him more than two years before. As soon as Unoka understood what
his friend was driving at, he burst out laughing. (7)
The narrator first elevates the
importance of proverb in Ibo conversation, and then weakens the effect of
proverb by describing Unoka’s reaction. Unoka laughs because he is too far in
debt with other villagers to pay back Okoye. In this example, material exchange
(the two hundred cowries) clashes with cultural exchange (proverb). Achebe
demonstrates that while conversation can mediate conflict peaceably, it cannot
correct and manage every problem. Also, Achebe’s narrator does not disclose any
of Okoye’s proverbs specifically, further shadowing tradition in an
English-speaking, first-world narrative style.
Though Okoye’s
parables are dismissed early in the novel, Achebes narrator discusses male and
female narrative in great length, offering a gendered but enlightening discourse
that is not generally explored in colonial literature.
Things Fall Apart is a novel privy to
the gender expectations of African culture, and though the narrator does not
align itself on one side or the other in terms of tolerance, the narrator
thoroughly describes the difficulty for characters to reconcile between
masculine and feminine attitudes on discourse:
So Okonkwo encouraged the boys to
sit with him in his obi, and he told
them stories of the land—masculine stories of violence and bloodshed. Nwoye knew
that it was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still
preferred the stories that his mother used to tell, and which she no doubt still
told to her younger children—stories of the tortoise and his wily ways, and of
the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged
the whole world to a wrestling contest and was finally thrown by the cat [. . .]
That was the kind of story that Nwoye loved. But he knew that they were for
foolish women and children, and he knew that his father wanted him to be a man.
(53-4)
Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, is seen as
effeminate by his father for not willingly participating in masculine activities
and stories, which are an essential part of the transition to manhood.
Therefore, he tries to assimilate him in a discourse on war and bloodshed,
topics where Okonkwo is especially knowledgeable. Though the narrator of
Things Fall Apart seems distanced at
times, he chooses to reveal specific facts that present connections between
discourse and idea. Nwoye’s mother tells a story of a bird who “challenge[s] the
whole world to a wrestling content,” demonstrating behavior characteristic of
Okonkwo. However, the bird eneke-nti-oba
is “finally thrown by a cat,” highlighting the faults in being too outwardly
aggressive and proud. The bird, believing that no one can defeat him, finds a
worthy adversary and is thwarted, exposing its weakness. The bird in many
respects acts as a metaphor for both Okonkwo and the masculine narrative of
excessive machismo and competitiveness. This story, along with several others
mentioned, becomes feminized and thus weakened in terms of its relation to male
growth. In reality, the story of
eneke-nti-oba offers an important lesson in understanding boundaries, as
well as humility, something that Okonkwo is afraid to embody and project in his
outward image.
Another crucial
task that Achebe’s novel achieves through narration is depicting how white
nations, specifically England, respond to the stories, myths, and folklore of
the Ibo culture. While Mr. Brown, a Christian missionary, does not seem greatly
threatened by the Ibo stories, Rev. James Smith “saw things as black and white.
And black was evil” (184). Achebe makes several references to the way that Rev.
Smith interprets and reacts to the Ibo beliefs, such as the
ogbanje. When a woman allows her
“heathen husband to mutilate her dead child,” Rev. Smith conceives this as an
atrocity; the narrator notably echoes Smith’s language, calling the husband a
“heathen” when, in reality, the husband allows the wife to perform the act “to
discourage [an ogbanje] from
returning” to plague the mother and reenter her body (185). The narrator steals
Smith’s language to mock it, demonstrating how the first-world interprets the
third without a complete understanding of the culture. Storytelling, closely
tied to Ibo culture, becomes a threat when Rev. Smith discovers what it empowers
the Ibo to do:
Mr. Smith was filled with wrath
when he heard of this. He disbelieved the story which even some of the most
faithful confirmed, the story of really evil children who were not deterred by
mutilation, but came back with all the scars. He replied that such stories were
spread in the world by the Devil to lead men astray. Those who believed such
stories were unworthy of the Lord’s table. (185)
Though in many ways, Rev. Smith’s
wrath without reason reflects the same anxieties of hypermasculine characters
such as Okonkwo, who continually attempt to demonstrate strength through force.
In this case, Rev. Smith, who “danced a furious step” (185) is in the same
situation, coming face-to-face with a people that do not reflect his own
upbringing, his own background, and his own firmly-held notions. As a
multinational discourse, Achebe’s novel understands colonialism as a stripping
of tradition to preserve another, a function effectively portrayed through
Smith’s actions. William Ferris explains the effects of colonialism as a removal
of culture, rather than effecting a fusion of two:
The
overall effect of colonialism was a de-Africanization of traditional life that
sought to destroy art, religion, and other cultural traditions of the native
people. Writing in the wake of colonialism and its cultural de-Africanization,
the role of the African writer is twofold. He must describe the full horror of
colonialism and its threat to the progress of humanity, and he must help
resurrect the cultural traditions of his people. (27)
For postcolonial writers like
Achebe, reclaiming their national identity occurs through the creation of art.
The powerful verbal art of storytelling acts as a way for characters to
understand not only their gender assignment, as it does for Nwoye, but also the
lessons and meanings rooted in their
past, told by their ancestors to their descendants. Achebe’s novel views this
reclamation of history and humanity through oral narrative as a necessary
function in strengthening both the self and the collective. Storytelling within
both colonial and postcolonial literature is a powerful function that allows
authors to emphasize specific aspects of narrative that are crucial to their
greater mission as the voices of their national identity. Within this mission,
writers convey the anxieties of discovery (colonialism) and the anxiety of loss
(post-colonialism) that are intimately connected to their national history and
culture.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua.
Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor
Books, 1994. Print.
Bahktin, Mikhail.
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P,
1981.
Conrad, Joseph.
Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover,
1990. Print.
Ferris, William R. Jr. “Folklore
and the African Novelist: Achebe and Tutuola.”
The Journal of American Folklore,
Vol. 86, No. 339 (Jan-Mar. 1973), pp. 25-36. JSTOR. 21 November 2011. Web.
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Man Who
Would Be King.” The Man Who Would Be King. New York:
Penguin, 2011. Print.
Plato.
The Republic. c. 373 BCE. Benjamin
Jowett, translator.
The Dialogues of Plato, 4th ed.
(Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1953); reprinted in Hazard Adams, ed.
Critical Theory since
Plato (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971): 19-40.
Shippey, Thomas A. and Michael
Short. “Framing and Distancing in Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King’.”
The Journal of Narrative Technique,
Vol. 2, No.2 (May 1972), pp.75- 87.
JSTOR. 19 November 2011. Web.
White, Craig. “Narrative.” LITR 5831 World Literature: Colonial-Postcolonial Course Page. 18 November 2011. Web.
