The Novel
The novel has
been the aesthetic object of choice for a majority of postcolonial
scholars. While postcolonial writers have by no means failed to produce
poetry nor have critics in the field entirely neglected verse, it is the
novel and studies of the novel that have had the greatest influence in
the field. To some degree, this focus on the novel reflects a general shift
of attention within literary studies away from poetry towards narrative,
but we can further attribute the novel's predominance in postcolonial studies
to three factors: the representational nature of the novel, its heteroglossic
structure, and the function of the chronotope in the novel.
The representational power of the novel, its ability to give voice to a
people in the assertion of their identity and their history, is of primary
importance to postcolonial writers and scholars. Poetry, of course, can
also serve this purpose, but it is the novel, typically understood as communal
and public (and seen as more accessible to Western readers than poetry
which is often perceived as culturally and locally specific), that in the
work of creating its own world, inevitably recreates and reflects the world
out of which it comes. A critic might look at the way a novel both contributes
to and comes out of a narrative of nationhood (or how it does or doesn't
operate) in the context of decolonization and resistance efforts. Postcolonial
scholars do not limit this interest in representation and identity solely
to the novels of postcolonial nations. Edward Said has written on the novels
of empire, examining the way they represent the relationship between empire
and colony.
Essential to this exploration of the novel as a representational form is
an interrogation of the whole question of representation. This concern
with representation as such is to be found in many branches of literary
studies; in postcolonial studies we might narrow our questions down to
three general areas: authorship and origin, genre, and language.
Questions
and Issues
Authorship and origin: Which novels and which novelists speak
best for the postcolonial nation? The postcolonial condition? Do we study
those novels that reflect a metropolitan experience or those more expressive
of a national experience?
Genre: What issues are raised by how a novel represents? What is
significant about the novel following the model of the mimetic, linear
narrative of realism, presenting a "straight" take on identity
and history? What is at stake in the postcolonial novel taking a more postmodern
(typically metropolitan) route, which emphasizes the postcolonial condition
as fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid?
Language: Should the postcolonial writer write in English or in
the nation's native language? Should we only study literature written in
English (generally metropolitan texts) or should we also consider work
in translation?
Postcolonial critics examining the ways the newly formed nation speaks
its identity have found in the heteroglossic structure of the novel a particularly
rewarding object of study. Heteroglossia is a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin
to describe the novel's organization of socially diverse and competing
discourses. Postcolonial studies has given special attention to the many
voices present in the novel, sometimes in the service of amplifying those
voices that have perhaps not been heard in traditional literary study and,
more generally, in the attempt to emphasize the heterogeneous nature of
the novel and the nation.
Studies of the novel as chronotope, another term coined by Bakhtin, have
perhaps not been as important in the field as those focusing on issues
of representation, identity, and heteroglossia, but it is an issue of large
importance, especially in the work of more postmodern novelists like Salman
Rushdie and critics like Homi Bhabha. Bakhtin defines chronotope as
"the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships
that are artistically expressed in literature . . . [it] is the primary
means for materializing time in space, . . . a center for concretizing
representation." The connection between time and space must be made
in order for the narrative to be built upon it, but this connection does
not precede the narrative. It is forged in the telling of the story; every
narrative must tell itself, must create the conditions for its own existence.
This struggle to graft time and space to each other is a task of absolute
importance in the building and maintenance of the nation. Like the novel,
the nation must tell itself in making connections between indicators of
space (often arbitrary borders) and indicators of time (stories, events,
episodes, moments). Postcolonial critics study the novel as part of this
grafting, as a reflection of it, and as a model of the process of nation
building.
Author: James Murphy, Spring 1996
Links
within this site
Postcolonial Studies at Emory
(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J.
Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)
