Theory of African Literature

Implications for Practical Criticism

Chidi Amuta

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786990037
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This groundbreaking work, first published in 1989, was one of the first to challenge the conventional critical assessment of African literature, and remains highly influential today. Amuta's key argument is that African literature can be discussed only within the wider framework of the dismantling of colonial rule and Western hegemony in Africa. In exploring the possibility of a dialectical, alternative critical base, he draws upon both classical Marxist aesthetics and the theories of African culture espoused by Fanon, Cabral and Ngugi. From these explorations, Amuta derives a new language of criticism, which is then applied to works by modern African writers as diverse as Achebe, Ousmane, Agostinho Neto and Dennis Brutus. Amuta's highly original and innovative approach remains relevant not only for assessing the literature of developing countries, but for Marxist and postcolonial theories of literary criticism more generally. The author's elegance of argument and clarity of exposition makes this a distinguished and lasting contribution to debates around cultural expression in postcolonial Africa.

1 Ideological Formations in the Criticism of African Literature

Literary and art criticism is one of the principal methods of struggle in the world of literature and art. Mao Tse-Tung¹

All criticism must include in its discourse … an implicit reflection on itself; every criticism is a criticism of the works and a criticism of itself. In other words, criticism is not a table of results or a body of judgements, it is essentially an activity, i.e., a series of intellectual acts profoundly committed to the historical and subjective existence … of the man who performs them. Roland Barthes²

In the nearly three decades of its emergence and consolidation as a distinct academic undertaking, scholarship on African literature (especially in the form of criticism) has displayed astonishing self-neglect. Although quite copious in exegetical output, criticism has not looked sufficiently inwards in order to rediscover its real motivations, challenges and social relevance. This is not to suggest an absence of metacritical undertakings. But such effort as has been made by Abiola Irele, Dan Izevbaye, Albert Gerard and others has been articulated within an intellectual context that takes bourgeois criticism for granted as a specialized form of discourse whose practitioners must abide by certain rules. The socio-historical determination of criticism has not quite been at issue until very recently.

It was perhaps Wole Soyinka who, in his 1980 inaugural lecture at the University of Ife, forcefully challenged African literary critics to the fundamental task of concretely positioning their profession in a social and historical context. His articulation of the challenge was characteristically pungent:

Very little … has been attempted in studies of the critic as a socially situated producer, and therefore as a creature of social conditioning, a conditioning which in fact offers no certitudes about the nature of his commitment to the subject which engages him, his motivations, indeed, about the very nature of his social existence.³

This chapter sets out to explore this vital area, as a prologue to the rest of the volume. My specific task here is to identify, revise and criticize the discernible ideological standpoints that have come to characterize critical discourse on and evaluations of African literature to date for the following reasons: firstly, to highlight the dangers inherent in the growing and unrestrained constrictive professionalism and academicism in the criticism of African literature; secondly, to attempt an analytical exposition of the informing social theories behind the different ideological positions which different critics on the literature in question have assumed, with a view to indicating the direction of critical consciousness; and thirdly, to underline the place and role(s) of the critical intelligence in our contemporary socio-political discourse and praxis. These objectives are however pursued in the context of a clear theoretical conception of the nature and overall epistemological status of criticism in general and literary criticism in particular.

Criticism, Ideology and Society: A Dialectical Overview

Criticism as a product and process of active interrogation of human sociality and its cultural manifestations is of an ancient lineage. Its raison d’être would appear to be the human awareness of sociality and the imperfections which are inherent in the various relationships into which people must enter with one another. In its most fundamental expression, criticism as a social practice circumscribed by the existence of language is hardly detachable from the rest of social discourse. It is integral to discussions about the prospects of rain in the next planting season, about the best blacksmith in the hamlet, the need to separate church and state, the status of best-sellers, the anti-nuclear movement as well as whether or not Third World countries should continue to spend the greater parts of their gross national product on servicing doubtful debts or about whether Achebe or Soyinka will ever get the Nobel prize in literature! Because criticism is indubitably integral to the social evolution process, its fates and fortunes trace nearly the same trajectory as social history. The issues that form the object of criticism, its forms and functions as well as its specific ideological predilections are contingent upon the current preoccupations of society itself. In other words, the series of critical acts in a society across time are in themselves structurally analysable along a diachronic paradigm. Thus, criticism does have a history; specific fashions and trends in social and cultural criticism come into being, become dominant and fade away as a result of specific and determinate historically identifiable causes. This is the socio-historical axis of criticism as a constitutive social practice.

Even as a specialization, literary criticism thus derives from an instinct that predates the existence of the literary text or the literary event. As Eaglet on rightly observes,

criticism has a history, which is more than a random collocation of critical acts. If literature is its object, it is not its sole point of genesis; criticism does not arise as a spontaneous riposte to the existential fact of the text, organically coupled with the object it illuminates.⁴

The crucial “point of genesis” and ultimate conditioning factor of literary criticism is to be sought in the very class heritage of society itself. The class position of the critic, his self-perception in and mode of insertion into the prevailing class formations of his society influence and even determine the ideological colouring of his critical products. In this context, we conceive of ideology simply as “a relatively formal and articulated system of meanings, values, and beliefs, of a kind that can be abstracted as a ‘worldview’ or a class outlook”.⁵ Consequently, if we examine the range of critical reflections on the literature and art of a society across time or even in a specific epoch, it becomes possible to make discriminations among them in terms of ideological leanings. Precisely, as members of the cultural academy preoccupied with literature, we are critics, just as architects, engineers, or doctors are professionals, each practising a specialized calling from a definite ideological position and attitude to society. What distinguishes the calling of the literary critic is the very nature of the subject – literature – a truthful illusion.

It is, therefore, possible and, in fact, imperative that the notations “liberal”, “conservative”, “radical”, “leftist” and so on, should also be applied to positions which critics and their products assume. This is the class-ideological axis of criticism.

In the global history of ideas, an understanding of the dialectical interrelationship between the two axes of criticism (the socio-historical and the class-ideological) is crucial to a comprehension of the role of criticism in the cultural front of the larger struggles that define social existence in different societies and in different epochs. A random sample of specific critical traditions in world culture would corroborate this observation.

In most traditional or pre-colonial African societies in which the production and consumption of literature were part and parcel of communal self-assertion and self-projection, the critic was hardly distinguishable in the arena from the rest of the audience or the performer. In fact, the three functions could be (and were often) played out simultaneously by one and the same person. An example that I can readily call to mind is the very dramatic annual Ekpe festival dance in Ngwaland which features masquerade displays, choral processions and widespread audience participation in the form of dancing and chanting.⁶ At the height of this euphoric display of communal self-fulfilment at the bounty of harvest, it is usual for an individual dancer to step aside, admire a fellow dancer of outstanding ability and join others in carrying the distinguished performer shoulder-high amidst hilarious applause and approving comments. Days and weeks after the festival, domestic and public gossip in farms and other places of gathering are enlivened by critical reflections on outstanding or unsatisfactory performance at the recent festival. Performers derive their fame and acclaim from a cross-section of such informal evaluations. This is criticism at its most organic and instinctive profundity, for here it derives from and is part of the ritual of communal living. Solomon Iyasere makes a similar observation in respect of oral performance culture among the Edos of Nigeria and generalizes as follows:

The role of the critic in the African oral tradition was a complex one. He was not a literary technician in search of ossified precision and foreign patterns and designs, but a spontaneous entertainer, a historian and a wordmaster – in short an artist. Criticism was not divorced from the creative process but an essential part of and adjunct to it. Creativity and criticism enjoyed a symbolic relationship. Critical evaluation and the composition of a work of art were regarded as facets of the same process and, in most cases, aspects of the same moment.⁷

Similarly, the wave of anti-feudalist and anti-establishment strikes, student unrest and general armed struggle associated with the revolution in China earlier in the 20th Century culminated in, among other things, the 1919 Cultural Revolution. The basic tenets of this revolution questioned accepted literary traditions, fashions and aesthetic values. Most young writers were agreed that “literature must stop being esoteric and start serving the whole society”.⁸ The attendant literature eschewed the traditional penchant for idolizing the philosopher-king and celebrating events around the court. Instead, the new literature dwelt on the experiences of commoners within the emergent revolutionary society with its heavy emphasis on egalitarianism, communalism and a certain romantic simplicity. Examples of this trend can be found in such works as Lao Xiang’s story “A Village Lad Drops Out of School” and Jiang Chi’s “On the Yalu River”. The thinking behind this radical development in Chinese literary consciousness was articulated into a coherent artistic manifesto in Mao Tse Tung’s “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and the Arts”.⁹ The theoretical positions and critical canons articulated in this document acquire meaning and significance mainly within a framework that defined for literature a pragmatic functionalism in China’s revolutionary struggle against her imperialist aggressors, especially the Japanese.

In pre-Athenian and Athenian Greece a critical response to the Homeric epics and the great tragedies was a heightened and integral aspect of audience participation in the literary event. Professor Bowra writes:

Much of their art was popular in the sense that it was performed before large crowds in the open air. But even so they never made the mistake of judging the intelligence of an audience by that of its lowest members. Poetry, being a serious affair, demanded attention and concentration, and the Greek audience responded to the claims on them, becoming good listeners and intelligent critics.¹⁰

Consequently, even Plato’s poetics and metaphysics of static universals spared a thought for literary art in relation to society. Compelled by the need to safeguard the moral health of his imaginary polis from the possible corrupting influence of the poet as an artificer of illusions, Plato jettisoned the poet from his ideal republic and thereby inadvertently inaugurated the form and content dichotomy in Western critical discourse and aesthetic epistemology.

Accordingly, the reality of medieval Western society was the primacy of the Christian God in the order of things. This state of affairs was dramatized by the supremacy of the Catholic church in Rome and the prevalent conception of humankind exclusively as candidates for salvation whose life on earth had to be spent in pious and miserable self-immolation. Scholasticism, the dominant intellectual tradition of the period, although it had little time for sustained and orchestrated poetic enunciations, produced in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas the outlines of a poetics that emphasized the subliminal immanence of the divine in all natural objects and therefore in all imitations of nature. At best, scholastic aesthetics were essentially formalistic and emphasized Christian morality. Further on in the history of the Western world, the romantic period was characterized by a sense of revolt against the ossifying rationalism of the preceding neo-classical intellectual tradition and the unsettling ecological and moral repercussions of the nascent Industrial Revolution. The response of literature to this pressure took the form of a revolutionary celebration of the natural, th...