Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction

Aliki Varvogli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415995825
• eBook ISBN: 9781136627026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that 'go outward' literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US's geographical borders.

Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature's engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

Part I

Africa and the Limits of Fiction

How and why do white American authors write about Africa? These are the two main questions this part of the study addresses. The responses outlined here show two opposing approaches to the representation of Africa, with two of the authors opting for a style that aspires to the relative objectivity of non-fiction, while the other two aim for a high literary style. Philip Caputo and Dave Eggers have gone for a documentary style that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Caputo is best known as a foreign correspondent, writing in a genre that is not free of ambiguity, but relies on the assumption of a more or less unproblematic relationship to reality. Acts of Faith is a novel based on the real situation in Sudan, but inhabited by fictional characters. However, the style and organization of the book aspire to the objectivity of the documentary. Eggers has ‘ghost written’ a Sudanese refugee’s story of escape to the US, but the complex relationship between author and subject raises a number of questions about generic boundaries, vexing notions of authorship, fiction and autobiography. Mortals and The Darling are both set in African countries; the former exclusively in Botswana, the latter partly in Liberia as well as briefly in Ghana. The two authors are unusual in American letters, each for different though not unrelated reasons: Rush has only written novels set in Africa, while Banks, unusually for a white author, considers race to be the defining narrative of the United States. In addition to The Darling with its Liberian setting, he has also written Cloudsplitter, a novel concerning abolitionist John Brown, and narrated by his son. Rush’s and Banks’s engagement with Africa has few similarities with previous literary endeavours in American letters. Though neither can fully escape cliché or stereotyping, they depict their chosen countries in ways that do not eliminate the human factor, to echo Achebe (8), nor do they merely provide an exotic background for an essentially Euro-American story. Despite their many and obvious differences, what these books have in common is the fact that they use their African settings in order to interrogate notions of belonging, home, and the nation-state more generally, and the effects of America’s foreign policies not only on these countries, but also on the US itself. In other words, these are not novels that simply tell us how America has shaped African politics; they also tell us how US involvement abroad cannot be separated from issues closer to home.

The African countries that my selected novelists deal with have been shaped by US foreign policy in varying degrees, and some in ways that are much more direct and obvious than others. The conflict in Sudan, for example, can be traced back to the days of joint British and Egyptian rule. Sudan gained its independence in 1956, but its former rulers did little to help resolve the tension arising from the North/South divide. More than half a century later, Sudan’s problems can no longer be understood in the context of its colonial past alone, and the various conflicts within the country are of course far too complex to outline here. What is of interest, though, is the US’s attitude to Sudan. Officially designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department in 1993, Sudan has recently become ‘a strong partner in the war on terror’ (‘Council on Foreign Relations’). In 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell drew attention to the conflict in Darfur, using careful language to reveal but also mask the Bush administration’s views: ‘Call it a civil war. Call it ethnic cleansing. Call it genocide. Call it “none of the above,”’ Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘The reality is the same: There are people in Darfur who desperately need the help of the international community’ (Grzyb 36–7). Sudan is an oil-rich country, and therefore its relationship to the US is driven by material as well as ethical considerations. The ambivalent and changing attitudes towards Darfur and civil war in Sudan, and the campaigning of high-profile celebrities such as George Clooney and Mia Farrow have sustained media interest, and prompted the London Times correspondent Rob Crilly to call his book on the subject Saving Darfur, Everyone’s Favourite African War. In sharp contrast with Sudan, Liberia is hardly ever in the news. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s election to the presidency in 2005 drew considerable attention, but on the whole the country has remained obscure in the western media. Even the trial of Charles Taylor did little to shine light on this small, muchsuffering country, since he was being tried for crimes committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone. And yet Liberia occupies a unique place in the story of US relations with African countries. Established as a homeland for freed American slaves, it soon became a two-tier society, where those returning slaves replicated the patterns of dominance and oppression they were accustomed to, and assumed superiority over the natives they displaced in order to build their imagined African homeland. Given the complex ironies and the rich opportunities Liberia can afford the American novelist interested in exploring African American ideologies and representations, it is surprising that Liberia does not feature more prominently in American letters. Finally, Botswana, setting of Norman Rush’s epic spy novel, occupies an entirely different place in the western imagination, though it is admittedly a very small place. Botswana, which gained its independence from the British in 1966, is one of Africa’s great success stories. With the exception of AIDS, which remains its largest problem, it is a stable democracy with an expanding economy. It rarely makes the news and is not associated with any of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century, and its profile in the Anglophone world has been raised significantly with the publication of the gentle, cosy tales of Alexander McCall Smith and his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.

The image of happy Africa that we find in Scottish McCall Smith’s stories is largely absent from American literature, which is likely to concentrate on the more familiar images of suffering, war and slavery. In addition to happy Africa and suffering Africa there is also symbolic Africa, and it is the latter that dominates the white literary imagination in America. How does an American author around the beginning of the twenty-first century write about Africa? These questions may of course be answered in as many ways as there are countries in Africa, but the four books discussed here in Part I have been selected not only for the critical interest they arouse but also because they can be shown to be representative of wider trends in American writing. The words ‘Africa’ and ‘America’ are themselves inaccurate, problematic, and more often than not chosen for the sake of convenience. Nevertheless, they do help to highlight precisely the role that language plays in both constructing and obscuring identities, and above all they point up the arbitrariness of much of the discourse surrounding race, ethnicity and nationality. This can be seen more clearly if one uses the example of two countries: the USA and Sudan, subject of two of the books under discussion. The CIA Factbook, which is reasonably reliable at the same time that it betrays the US’s imperialist tendencies, describes the makeup of the two countries as follows: USA ethnic groups are 79.96 per cent white, 12.85 per cent black, 4.43 per cent Asian, 0.97 per cent Amerindian and Alaska native, 0.18 per cent native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander, 1.61 per cent are two or more races (July 2007 estimate). A note further clarifies that ‘a separate listing for Hispanic is not included because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean persons of Spanish/Hispanic/Latino origin including those of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican Republic, Spanish, and Central or South American origin living in the US who may be of any race or ethnic group (white, black, Asian, etc.); about 15.1 per cent of the total US population is Hispanic.’ Sudan, meanwhile, is 52 per cent black, 39 per cent Arab, 6 per cent Beja, 2 per cent foreigners and 1 per cent other. It is obvious that the meaning of ‘black’, for example, is different in each case, while the designations of ‘foreigner’ and ‘other’ seem more like gifts to the humanities scholar than meaningful categories to describe groups of people.

What this attempt to name and classify racial or ethnic groups demonstrates is that language can be used to create meaningless entities and artificial distinctions, and that the pseudo-science of the nineteenth century that first proposed these categories has left a lasting legacy that seems hard to shift. One need only compare the CIA’s description of Sudan with an earlier attempt to impose the meaning and order of language onto an African landscape. In his Journey Without Maps (1936), Graham Greene set out to explore Liberia and did, in fact, consult not one but two maps of the country. One was produced by the British, and it contained dotted lines to indicate where rivers might be, and names for villages that Greene never found, probably because they did not exist. The second map was produced, tellingly, by the United States War Department, and it was completely different: it depicted a big, empty space with the words ‘Cannibals’ written across it. ‘It has no use for dotted lines and confessions of ignorance,’ writes Greene.

[I]t is so inaccurate that it would be useless, perhaps even dangerous, to follow it, though there is something Elizabethan in its imagination. ‘Dense Forest’; ‘Cannibals’; rivers which don’t exist, at any rate anywhere near where they are put; one expects to fi nd Eldorado, twoheaded men and fabulous beasts represented in little pictures in the Gola Forest. (46)

The British and American maps, which are also not unlike Charlie Marlow’s childhood maps, tell us a lot about the ways in which the Euro-American imagination has constructed Africa, and even though today’s maps are more sophisticated and accurate, the gap between imagination and reality remains a large one. Maps have long been sites were westerners project their fears and desires of the ‘other,’ but they are also visual representations of the ideology of the nation-state: they represent visually the idea that a demarcated geographical space contains a race, a people, a nation. Reality often evolves more quickly than our conceptions of it, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is not just the shifting borders in numerous countries that render maps quickly obsolete; it is also the ease with which ideas, capital and people flow, communicate and travel across real and virtual space that challenges the usefulness of the map.

Such notions are relevant in the study of Acts of Faith and What Is the What. Both novels open with maps of Sudan, and to examine them sideby-side is to begin to understand some of the complexities and challenges involved in the representation of contested space in Africa, and of imagined space in books. First of all, the shape of the country itself provides a lesson in geopolitics: most of the northern border with Egypt, and some of the western border with Libya and Chad is drawn in straight horizontal and vertical lines: the lines that speak of negotiation, compromise, and international treaties portioning out space. The rest of the country’s outline is jagged and irregular, indicating the natural borders of geographical space. Eggers’s map is crude and lacking in detail: it only contains place names relevant to the story, and it only represents two of Sudan’s neighbours: Ethiopia and Kenya, places of refuge for the Lost Boys. Caputo’s map depicts all the neighbouring countries, it gives more place names, and more crucially it gives some idea of the country’s internal divisions: where Eggers’s map has Northern and Southern Sudan (the main warring parties), and a place called Darfur, Caputo’s further clarifies the areas of Northern, Western and Southern Darfur. Finally, by the time this book goes into print, Sudan may well be split into two separate countries, and the map therefore redrawn one more time.

In addition to their interest in maps and borders, the books I examine here use other tropes of space to engage with Africa, and in so doing they tell us a lot about American conceptions of ‘the dark continent.’ Caputo represents a series of temporary dwellings where his aid workers attempt to combine the small comforts of domestic space with the demands of the humanitarian mission. The natural environment is not depicted as particularly hostile, with the threat coming from militiamen and not animals, disease or hostile terrain. Deng’s narrative in Eggers’s book juxtaposes the image of the American home with that of the African bush. Because the narrative begins with Deng’s apartment being broken into, and Deng being tied up by his assailants, the narrative actually begins by questioning our assumptions regarding safe and dangerous spaces. Norman Rush depicts a modern Botswana and describes cinemas, shopping malls and gated communities for privileged foreigners, but as the plot unfolds his protagonist leaves behind the relative safety of built-up Africa and confronts his arch-enemy in the Kalahari desert, away from the city and the confidence that brings him. In addition, Rush uses the trope of Hell throughout his narrative. Although he does not make a simplistic or obvious connection between Africa and Hell, the inclusion of such discourse in the novel cannot easily be separated from the African setting. Russell Banks uses the narrative structure of his novel to distance himself from and question the moral values of his deeply flawed white American protagonist and narrator; her views of a grotesque Africa are not his own, and the juxtaposition of the jungle with the all-female American farm at the beginning of the novel invite a consideration of space: of black and white, safe and perilous spaces, and gendered spaces.

In all four novels, Africa is represented as a site of war. Caputo’s and Eggers’s books deal with real wars, while Rush and Banks both pit white Americans against black Africans, and engage in various forms of confrontation. Rush more explicitly and Banks by implication associate their African characters with the grotesque and the devilish. However, none of these books perpetuates the image or myth of Africa so familiar from books like Heart of Darkness. The spaces and sites of conflict are not symbolic landscapes, or representations of mental dispositions; at least not exclusively. The authors depict real countries, victims of political machinations. These are countries that are not lawless and chaotic; they are governed and misgoverned, and also aided and betrayed by the US and other ‘protectors’. The historical and political specificity of these books, coupled with the imaginative use of Africa as backdrop for conflict effectively ensure that these are texts that make a dual use of Africa, seeing it as real and symbolic at the same time. The various ways in which the authors combine the two uses of Africa depend a lot, as I shall be demonstrating, on their chosen genres and narrative strategies.

The novels by Rush and Banks can be described fairly unproblematically as literary novels, while the other two stretch and redefine the limits of fiction. Caputo’s and Eggers’s books deal with war in Sudan, and in many ways they can both be described as narratives of trauma. Robert Eaglestone has explored the ways in which African trauma has been represented and has shaped western narratives. Reading Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2003), Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man (2006), Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005), Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2006), and Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (2007), Eaglestone concludes that a ‘harsh critic’ might easily accuse them of offering ‘a voyeuristic opportunity or of colonizing atrocity. It is true that they criticize the West … [but] these critiques are located in an English-speaking, Western-facing context that reduces the force of the critique’ (84). The books discussed in Part I are all certainly ‘Western-facing,’ but there lies their strength: they are not only Western-facing in their representations of African traumas, but also in their scrutiny of Western—and more specifically American—identities and narrative forms. Eaglestone describes the books he analyses as ‘forms of engaged literature that seek to influence, explain, and educate’ (84); this is true of the books I discuss too, but the point that needs to be stressed is that they do not only explain what goes on in Sudan, Botswana or Liberia. They illuminate the role of the US as world policeman, philanthropist, liberator and colonizer, and they suggest that our understanding of American identity cannot, and should not, be separated from a consideration of the US’s role on the world stage.

Caputo and Eggers deal with unfolding realities and unfinished wars, and their engagement with the contemporary to some extent shapes their chosen forms. Eaglestone usefully compares narratives of African trauma to holocaust narratives, but for the comparison to be meaningful, the African trauma narratives need to belong to a past that is deemed ‘closed,’ concluded in a meaningful way. This is not the case with the war in Sudan depicted in Caputo’s novel, and it is not true in Eggers’s novel in the sense that Valentino Deng does start a new life in the US but is also able to return to the scene of trauma where the strife he left behind is still present. Both authors have developed narrative strategies that enable them to engage with unfolding events, and that help them to overcome the problem of writing with little or no hindsight. Caputo has chosen to tell his story as fiction, and he has made some important choices: his novel contains a large cast of characters and does not have a single identifiable protagonist of the kind we normally expect in a white American novel. Moreover, the stories are told in a straightforward chronological order that lends the book the feel of a soap opera but serves the more important function of highlighting the lack of closure or distance from the events depicted. The novel’s last chapter is narrated in the present tense, thereby emphasizing the fact that there is no looking back, no re-assessment of lives lived and mistakes made. Eggers similarly ends with no resolution, summing-up or sense of closure. This is inevitable given that the book tells the real story of a young man’s adventures, but given that Eggers and Deng have decided to fictionalize what is effectively a ghost-written autobiography, the decision to imitate life rather than fiction by eluding narrative closure is instructive.

Chapter 2 scrutinizes two literary novels that participate in but also subvert the literary tradition of white imaginative engagement with Africa. These novels emphasize their literariness through allusion, intertextuality, elaborate narrative strategies, self-reflexiveness and unreliable narration, thus placing themselves at the other end of the spectrum from the realitybased, documentary-style fictions of Caputo and Eggers. Norman Rush has a Milton scholar as his protagonist, and the novel contains several allusions to the work of James Joyce and Gustave Flaubert. Though the book tells a spy story and contains mystery and suspense, it is also a text that places great emphasis on interiority and aligns itself with the modernist tradition of literary fiction. In his review of the novel, James Wood notes that

Mortals is many things, and does many things beautifully, but its central achievement has to be the fidelity with which it represents consciousness, the way in which it tracks the mind’s own language. This concern with the insides of our minds makes Rush almost an original in contemporary American writing.

Wood argues that Rush’s engagement with interiority owes a debt to Joseph Conrad. According to Wood, Conrad has had little influence on American authors, but Rush is the exception to the norm. He sees the ‘Conradian alienation principle’ being masterfully employed, and applauds Rush’s adaptation of Conrad’s action sequences and plot structuring. Curiously, though, he has little to say about Conrad’s depictions of Africa. He does note that ‘knowledge is not simply exotic and informational, but something amassed as life is amassed, as a pile of experiences rather than a wad of facts,’ which can be understood indirectly as praise for Rush’s depiction of Botswana. He further refers to the setting as ‘the fabric’ rather than the ‘backdrop’ of Rush’s fictions, and yet stops short of making a direct comparison between Rush and his literary ancestor in their attitudes to representations of Africa. Through this omission, Wood perhaps unwittingly illustrates the fact that the assumption that Africa serves as backdrop to a novel primarily interested in interiority is one that the western reader and critic cannot entirely shake.

Russell Banks is also interested in interiority, but he goes about exploring it in a different way. His novel is narrated by an unreliable narrator who revises, disguises, suppresses and reveals facts about her life in Liberia while all the time moving from past to present and back again. The disorienting effect of her narrative serves as an analogue for her own confused and conflicting feelings towards her African self, but it is not the actual Liberian setting that causes such disorientation. It is rather her attitudes to gender and sex relations, her white liberal guilt and her attempt to reconcile her various roles as wife, mother, political activist and animal carer that cause the confusion. Still, upon its publication the book received criticism for its depiction of Liberia. Mary Gordon, reviewing in The New York Times, noted that

[t]he Liberia to which Hannah returns...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Africa and the Limits of Fiction
• PART II Travel and Globalization
• PART III Dislocation and/at Home
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index