Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature

Chapter 1
Introduction
Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated yet to the niveau of the classic.
--Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragment 36
Modernism and African Literature
This book argues for establishing the interpretive horizon of twentieth-century literature at capitalism's internal limit. In the classical Marxian conception this limit is the rift between capital and labor, but this rift knows many displacements, the most important of which is the division of the globe between wealthy nations and a much larger and poorer economic periphery. The literary texts primarily considered here come from each side of this divide: British modernism between the world wars, and African literature during the period of the national independence struggles. The following pages will insist that neither of these two literatures--each produced in a period of extraordinary political possibility--can be understood on its own; rather, the full meaning of each only emerges in relation to the other and to the rift, both internal and external, which they each try in different ways to represent.
But what does British modernism have to do with African literature? Provisional answers are not hard to come by. First, the prestige accorded modernist literary texts by colonial-style education at mid-century cannot be overestimated. The relationship to modernism of the African literature that emerged with the great national independence movements (a relationship not only to modernism proper but also to the entire new-critical canon, itself an enlarged and domesticated modernism then in full hegemonic bloom) is deeply ambivalent. The critical edge of the great modernisms presents a model, while their institutional weight as the vanguard of European culture presents both an obstacle and a formidable spur to new and sometimes aggressively oppositional literary production. One need only think here of the well-known kinship between n�gritude and European surrealism, but other examples come readily to mind.1 Indeed, each of the African writers considered in this book was explicitly engaged in the vital refunctioning of modernist tropes and strategies to suit sometimes contrary representational ends. Cheikh Hamidou Kane takes over the central problems of French and German existentialism only to resolve them in a completely novel way; Chinua Achebe invests the apocalyptic visions of Yeats and Eliot with new meaning; and Ngugi wa Thiong'o begins from a Brechtian theory of practice with which North American critical theory has never quite come to terms.
In what follows, however, these direct and sometimes genetic connections cannot be the primary or even initial point of analysis. In the context of African literature and modernism, we have been permanently warned away from influence study by Ayi Kwei Armah's funny but devastating response to Charles Larson's The Emergence of African Fiction, which claims to show Armah's formal debt to James Joyce. Armah's intervention made it clear that the "language of borrowing and influence is usually a none too subtle way Western commentators have of saying Africa lacks original creativity."2 In the case of Larson's analysis of Armah's Fragments, the evidence of influence was demonstrably flimsy; but it is not clear even what one is to do with a genetic relationship that can be definitely established.3 The very language of "influence" is in any case misleading, since, as Borges once said, a writer creates his own precursors rather than the reverse. As Adorno put it in more agonistic terms, every act of imitation is at the same time a betrayal, and the mere fact of an "influence" is not enough to establish the movement of this dialectic in any particular case.4 The point, then, is not that this kind of literary history is totally irrelevant, but rather that its meaning is wholly contingent on literary interpretation: "To become good literary historians, we must remember that what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature and that what we call literary interpretation--provided only it is good interpretation--is in fact literary history." 5 Our surest bet lies not with exploring empirical or genetic literary history but by asking what is historical about the works themselves.