Black Literature and Literary Theory

Henry Louis Gates, Jr

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134838417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Literaturkritik

The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms.

This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely applying contemporary Western theory to black literature, these critics instead challenge and redefine the theory in order to make fresh, stimulating comments not only on black criticism and literature but also on the general state of criticism today.

Part I

Theory: on structuralism and post-structuralism

1
The critic and society: Barthes, leftocracy and other mythologies^*

Wole Soyinka

Roland Barthes is not a familiar name to academia or the general reader in Africa. He died in March 1980. The usual obituary notices appeared in the literary columns of European journals, and brought back to mind instantly, in total recall, the picture of a plump, untidy don at Leeds University where I was a student. As he lectured, his plain academic gown fell constantly off his shoulders from wild Gallic gesticulations meant to propel forward certain ideas on fiction and reality. They were a drastic departure from our normal fare of fiction criticism. No, the figure was not that of the critic himself: I never met him. The speaker was a visiting academic who had come to spread the gospel of the New Fiction from across the Channel to conservative England. We were part bemused, part fascinated; here was the plain old novel being unnecessarily complicated, and words that were once simply words being turned into signs. A totally new language of reality was introduced by this visitation, and the theories of Saussure and Barthes which were seminal influences on the New Fiction entered – at least peripherally, and with resentment – our intellectual baggage of fact and fiction.

Browsing in Dillon’s bookshop in London some days after Barthes’s death, I was drawn again towards his writings. There was a volume of essays I had not encountered until then, being belated translations – some of them as recent as 1977 – of his commentaries on the development of new mythologies, linguistic-semiological shorthands of the old, which were created by the European (French) bourgeoisie. They involved, more importantly, a socially directed investigation of the operations of myth on the daily sensibilities of social man – and of a particular class: the bourgeoisie. Increasingly engaged, I parted reluctantly with some precious pounds and took away the paperback. It did not take long for me to realize that I had stumbled on a perfect paradigm for the social reality of the radical shift in critical language in my own African community: and that is the genesis of the elaboration in the title of this essay.

I also recalled as a student providing my own private syntax for the semantic codes of the then newly introduced Saussurean linguistics – a very simple one, in fact, created through my extremely rudimentary knowledge not even of the French language but of a few French expressions. I shall occasionally draw on it for specific purposes, so I must explain it here. The specialist terms – langue, parole, etc. – will be very sparingly used; when they are, the context will be so clear as to require no elaboration. I propose to stick to familiar semantic units and clusters such as language, meaning, vocabulary, syntax, and so on, in their most ordinary usage. But the word ‘language’ can hardly ever be used in any ordinary sense; indeed, it obviously shed all ordinary sense after its first paradoxical employment as a description of its own system – that is, a system of socially agreed significations. For language does not operate simply as communication but as matrices of discrete activities including, of course, those of articulation and meaning. And when we talk about the language of literature or criticism we assume multiple levels of internal operations of basic cognitives and their triggering social agencies, a matrix of latent and activated meanings which add to our problems of apprehension by acting in a self-constitutive way. To differentiate this particular activity, the socially constituting activity, I recall that I found it useful to devise a simple phonetic pun on the French langage, that word being l’engage:¹ the operation of social cogs within the code of meanings; the engagement of gears within a cluster of codes, shifting the actual intent of language from one matrix and coupling it to another in social operation. The French langage will continue to stand for the totality of options in a system; l’engage indicates the selective operation within the langue, engaging the differential to deliver a socially active meaning. This last is the context of my basic interest and will be what is signified, unless otherwise stated, when the plain ‘language’ is used for convenience, in relation to what the critic or the creative artist actually does with the system. In short, langage is the cold topography before the linguist; l’engage or language is the actual course being mapped by you and me.

And now to the critics, pausing only to state from the outset that their understanding of my own work will not be avoided in this essay. After all, their preoccupations in recent times have tended to suggest that there are no other African authors on the bookshelves or, if there are, that their study is incomplete unless Mr Wole Soyinka is roped in somewhere. This is not an egotistical claim but a statistical fact. From an objective sense of proportion, it is necessary that this inert material return the compliment, manifesting its own critical voice just once in a while. No occasion could be more appropriate than this.

To my knowledge, very few attempts have been made to study the critic as a socially situated producer, and therefore as a creature of social conditioning. Such social conditioning in fact offers no certitudes about the nature of critics’ commitment to the subject that engages them, about their motivations, indeed, about the very nature of their social existence. About the writer, on the other hand, we are traditionally over-informed – which is to say, ingenuously dis-informed, since nothing but selective information, censored, even distorted to suit the critic’s thesis, ever survives the pages in the direction of the reader. But, although readers have at least some measure of fact, fiction and speculation about the writer to engage their interest, regarding the critic they have none. And then, of course, what society? What is the critic’s society? Is it, for instance, a society that we may describe as International Academia? Or is it Ipetumodu? The distinction is crucial. There is a world of difference in the social situation of any critic – either as an exploiter of language for the weekly or twice-weekly seminars of the University of Nsukka, Ibadan or Maiduguri; or as a critic who is profoundly angry that the writer has never even recognized the existence of the social anomalies within Ipetumodu, Abakaliki or Koton Karfi in his or her writings.

We are familiar, probably even excruciatingly bored, with the question: for whom does the writer write? Very rarely, however, is the same degree of social Angst encountered in the case of the critic. Indeed, the question is very rarely posed: for whom does the critic write? For Mr Dele Bus-Stop of Idi-Oro? Or for the Appointments and Promotions Committee and the Learned Journals International Syndicate of Berne, Harvard, Nairobi, Oxford or Prague? Unquestionably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critics who cover reams of paper with unceasing lament over the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when they themselves assiduously engage – with a remorseless exclusivity – only the incestuous productivity of their own academic, bourgeois-situated literature. It is a very convenient case of having one’s cake and eating it, of feeding on yet damning the output of producers of literature in one’s community – often in the most scabrous, dismissive language – continually treading the same grooves, looking for something new to say and never finding it, pouncing on the latest product of the same pariah writer like a famished voyager, building up c.v.s at the expense of the condemned productivity (the genuine productivity, not the parasitic kind which is the critic’s) of the handful of literary workers in the same ossified community. ‘Reactionary’, ‘élitist’, ‘privileged’, ‘a splurge of romantic decadence’, ‘articulator of the neo-colonial agent class’ … well, then, what is the critic doing?

But this is, of course, a very one-sided, partial view. It is true that the critics with whom we are here concerned do venture from time to time into the field of popular literature, popular theatre, popular music – in short, the so-called proletarian art. But, we must ask, in what language? What langue is deployed in this great, generous excursion into non-bourgeois art? When the ‘committed’ critic unwraps the poetry of the ‘ewi’ specialist Lanrewaju Adepoju, the earthy Majority Music Club under Professor alias Majority, the exotic Dan Maraya, whose langue does the critic speak and, therefore, to what society does he address himself? Is he speaking back to Dan Maraya or the ‘Waka Queen’, Salawa?² Can they penetrate the critic’s parole to commence a genuine engagement with language? Is this proletarian art returned to its producers, or is it merely refurbished in the langue of the assessors of the Appointments and Promotions Committee or of the learned journals? In short, is the excursion into Onitsha Market Literature or alias Majority music ever different from opportunism, an appropriation of proletarian production by a member of the bourgeoisie for its small erudite coterie?

I experience in this, naturally, some embarrassment, for when speaking of such a society I equally indict myself An additional embarrassment, even inhibition, stems from the fact that one of the favourite fodders for the ‘commitment machine’ of these critics happens to be none other than the present writer. However, this is one debate which this essay must initiate: in what society is the African critic situated? The stridency of recent criticism makes such a debate inevitable, for criticism has lately outstripped creativity in quantity – at least in Nigeria. I intend to introduce the discussion with an extreme example of the resultant language of alienation – not, however, from papers of the Department of Literature or Drama or Philosophy or African Languages and Literature, but from a popular journal. Indeed, the subject is not even literature at all but a simple social phenomenon: violence. I propose wherever possible to employ the methodology of oblique references, just to widen the area of discussion and provide analogies in related social concerns.

Let us begin with an obviously concerned social critic. He is motivated – shall we concede? – by the phenomenon of violence in society. The journal in which the following passage appears is not even a learned journal; it is the Lagos Sunday Times.³ The immediate cause of the article is a report of student violence at the University of Ibadan. Now nothing can be more proletarian than violence: violence, we know, is one of the few universal commodities; unlike rice, it cannot be placed under licence.⁴ Even so, I wish to stress that violence has to be produced. When offered, it is a product that has involved both risk and labour, and a level of commitment. In a sense, this present act of criticism falls automatically within the same system of appropriation which I am about to address. In other words, what is my purpose? What is the end of attempting to prove that one critic has appropriated the violence of a group of students and converted it to neutral ends? If I were writing in support of, or in criticism of, the act of the students, I could claim that my motives were nobler; I would remain within the immediate cause-and-effect nexus of the originating event, possibly even initiating a movement towards redress. But here I am concerned only to buttress, by a slant of objectives, my contention that academic writers, when they move into the arena of proletarian production, adopt the conversion language of a particular class, the bourgeois intelligentsia. The commodity can be a piece of sculpture, a hunter’s traditional chant, Ladi Kwale’s pottery or Baba Sala’s Comic Muse, a workers’ strike or student violence. And the language is indisputably the language of alienation, even deliberately so, as the following illustrates:

Some University of Ibadan students were some time ago reported as having physically affronted laboratory equipment. In the process the University and the entire Nigerian community lost invaluable science equipment.

Predictably the reactions to the incident followed two lines. On the one hand, there were those who splotch [sic] the students as overfed, over-pampered and overpetted marginal adults who should be called to order. … On the other hand there were those who glori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Criticism in the jungle
• Part I Theory: on structuralism and post-structuralism
• Part II Practice
• Index