Realism, Form and the Postcolonial Novel

N. Robinette

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137456083
• eBook ISBN: 9781137451323
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Confronted with apartheid, dictatorship or the sheer scale of global economics, realism can no longer function with the certainties of the nineteenth century. Free Realist Style considers how the style of the realist novel changes as its epistemological horizons narrow.

1

The Form of Emergence: George Lamming’s The Emigrants

Abstract: In The Emigrants, George Lamming experimented with the form of the novel as he sought to portray an original historical experience: the immigration of Caribbean peoples to Britain. This chapter argues that The Emigrants employs modernist techniques in support of a fundamentally realistic drive to map social life. Moving from the flutters of consciousness to an assured detailing of milieu and social forces, Lamming reinvents realism for the Empire Windrush generation. In doing so, The Emigrants demonstrates the possibilities for realist experiment in postcolonial and Black British literature.

Keywords: Lamming; peripheral realism; Windrush

Robinette, Nicholas. Realism, Form and the Postcolonial Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137451323.0004.

Though largely ignoring the historical and economic explanations that framed his earlier work on realism and modernism, Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism nevertheless provides a suggestive parallel account of the fate of the nineteenth-century novel. His new approach focuses on an animating tension internal to realism, a delicate and ultimately unsustainable counterbalance that finally unraveled into modernism. On the one hand, realism functions through recit, a temporality of past-present-future, a narrative focused on the event and constructed from a third-person perspective: “The time of the recit is then a time of the preterite, of events completed, over and done with, events that have entered history once and for all.”¹ On the other hand, realism generates a descriptive field, an ekphrasis, an eternal present in which the body can be represented as a site of an emerging new affect.² These antinomies were at best barely held in check and their “final battle will be raged in the microstructures of language and in particular against the dominance of point of view which seems to hold the affective impulses in check and lend them the organizing attribution of a central consciousness. Engaging this final battle will however exhaust and destroy it, and realism thereby leaves an odd assortment of random tools and techniques to its shriveled posterity.”³

In order to consider realism in the postcolonial novel, we must reverse this account of the tensions within realism and their culmination in modernism. Consider Jameson’s description of new affects erupting into realism, troubling the categories that normalize consciousness and allow for a central, governing perspective: “Affects are singularities and intensities, existences rather than essences, which usefully unsettle the more established psychological and physiological categories.”⁴ Certainly, this would be an apt description of the opening of George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954), a novel that begins in a perspective restricted by the confusion of immigration and in which the narrative cannot resolve itself into either first- or third person. The emergence of new cognitive and bodily experiences—indeed, a new social class—shapes the form of The Emigrants in a manner that aligns it with Jameson’s reading of modernism. And yet, this was only a beginning of the Anglophone Caribbean and Black British novel. The Emigrants overcomes these unsettled categories and their narrative effects: as its characters arrive on the new ground of London, so does the novel begin to describe milieu and to fuse what Erich Auerbach called “everyday reality” with “fluid historical background.”⁵ Rather than accepting the negation of the epistemological and social possibilities of realism, Lamming seeks to map diasporic London and synthesize a new perspective appropriate to a new social class.

Indeed, Lamming’s work must be understood in terms of an attempt to resolve fundamental tensions of epistemology and form, consciousness and perspective. Simon Gikandi has written that “for many influential critics of Caribbean literature, it often seems that Lamming cannot find an adequate mode of narration to carry out the linguistic and epistemological revolution to which his works are committed.”⁶ Though rightly emphasizing the unruliness of Lamming’s prose and its peculiar effects, Gikandi rather ambiguously frames Lamming’s work in terms of “the essential feature[s] of Caribbean modernism.”⁷ Indeed, the new realist turn may be said to address just such ambiguity in our critical concepts. At any rate, even as he invokes modernism, Gikandi restates a conception central to the theory of realism since Lukacs: “In Lamming’s early fictions, then, each ‘substance’ seeks its ‘form,’ but the end result is usually heterogeneity in narrative stances and styles.”⁸ Thus, identifying Lamming with peripheral realism clarifies the relationship of innovation and epistemology in his work, a tension that critics that have felt but not explicitly named or fully theorized.

Indeed, it is this tension between an idiosyncratic presentation and the devotion to Caribbean reality that drives Lamming’s novels. J. Dillon Brown notes that “from virtually the beginning of his publishing career, Lamming’s writing has been described as difficult,” a difficulty that perplexed early reviewers of his work.⁹ However, in contrast to the heterogeneous formal strategies and consequent difficulty of his prose, Lamming’s novels have an undeniable realistic purpose. As Supriya Nair notes, “Lamming insists on fiction in the final instance as more effectively performing the task that should have been the historian’s.”¹⁰ If truth may “hide” in the fictional and the formal, it is not for the purpose of concealment, but the purpose of revelation.¹¹ Raising a marginal experience to the level of literary narrative and constructing a cognitive map through “any method of presentation,” this experimental realism preserves an historical awareness that may otherwise disappear from conscious reflection.¹²

Consequently, Lamming insists upon an artistic intention that (without negating his obvious debt to modernism) recalls the realist project. For Lamming, the novel must commit to the unrepresented history of the socially marginalized. He has said that

I do not know whether literary scholars make the connection, but one of the functions of the novel in the Caribbean is to serve as a form of social history. The novelist thus becomes one of the more serious social historians by bringing to attention the interior lives of men and women who were never thought to be sufficiently important for their thoughts and feelings to be registered. (If you are poor and black, the notion that you are a subject of study only makes sense to the police).¹³

Although Lamming writes with striking narrative and stylistic variety, this historical knowledge is the privileged term in his artistic endeavor.¹⁴ The wild eclecticism evident in his novels may typically be associated with a more avant-garde orientation, but Lamming’s frequently opaque work must instead be approached as a calculated instance of historical investigation. The aesthetic complexity of his novels cannot be separated from the task of thinking about and portraying social reality. Operative within Lamming’s innovative narration lurks a “controversial insistence on the ‘here and now’ of historical reality and its conditions of possibility.”¹⁵

These antinomies are best evident in Lamming’s 1954 novel, The Emigrants. Here, Lamming developed a portrait of diasporic peoples as they cross the Atlantic and settle in mid-twentieth-century London. As the title suggests, The Emigrants is less about particular characters than shared experiences. He takes the group, rather than the individual, as his unit of analysis; though the emigrants are certainly differentiated, protagonists do not clearly stand out from the crowd. Instead, Lamming generates a more collective portrait: characters drawn from about the Caribbean congregate aboard a transatlantic steamer and wait for their arrival in England; they settle in the city, moving between hostels and barbershops and hair salons secreted from the police; they are drawn into the lives of African emigrants, white British citizens and former colonial officers; they discuss ideas, politics, and decolonization, like less prominent compatriots of C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, or Jomo Kenyatta; they try to find work and homes and build families. In the course of the narrative, Lamming conducts the kind of broad survey of social life typical of the realist novel, building outwards from the restricted perspective in which he began.

In portraying the journey of these emigrants and the society they establish in London, the novel produces a spontaneous form of its own. Lamming puts less emphasis on plot in order to focus instead on atmosphere and extended dialogue; other than the emigrants’ arrival in Britain, there are few decisive events in the novel. Instead, various perspectives condense and cohere to one another as Lamming forms an image of this diasporic class: the narration may be reflective, interior, and expressly antirealist, only to suddenly become reliable, exterior, and realistic in orientation; it may drift with no more than direct discourse to hint at the setting and action, but then project a surprising concreteness through the description of a street scene or a bourgeois dinner; and the narrator may occupy an intradiegetic position one moment, an extradiegetic position the next.

The Emigrants does not offer the formal bearings of a familiar mode, genre, or literary project. Changing tactics and techniques rapidly, the novel demonstrates the fluidity and unpredictability of realistic representation on the periphery of capitalism. Lamming’s formal audacity forces the reader to negotiate and renegotiate the disorientation of the emigrants’ historical becoming so that, far from naturalizing its subject, we are repeatedly destabilized and reminded of the rhythmic sedimentation and stirring of social life. The irregularity the novel is a necessity of representing the uneven motions of history that have made and remade this class in exile.

This formalization of diasporic emergence is most evident in the large scale of the novel, in narrative strategies that shift across pages rather than sentences or paragraphs. A longer selection will best begin to establish the basic rhythms and eccentricities of the work and the formal patterning of the narrative. The following passage opens the second half of the novel, “Rooms and Residents” and picks up several weeks after the emigrants have arrived in London. The diction and rhetorical strategies are, in fact, rather straightforward. More significant is the quality of Lamming’s circuitous and hazy portrayal. He slows the pace of the scene so the reader must linger in confusion as these two emigrants progress across a room and through a door:

When the door closed, blocking the light, the street disappeared like a thief [ ....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Form of Emergence: George Lammings The Emigrants
• 2  Dionysius Ear: Nuruddin Farahs Sweet and Sour Milk
• 3  The Transparent State: Zo Wicombs You Cant Get Lost in Cape Town
• Bibliography
• Index