Postcolonialism is concerned with the processes of colonization and its effects on different societies and cultures. Its focus is primarily on how the colonial experience has shaped not just the former colonies of Europe, but colonizing countries such as Britain, and ‘settler’ nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It is important to acknowledge that the ‘post’ in postcolonialism does not refer simply to a historical period after the colonial rule of a particular country is over, such as, for example, post-August 1947 when India secured its independence from Britain. The colonial process, theorists insist, is never ‘over’ in the way a single event is over but is continual. India, in a variety of social, political, and cultural ways (we might consider the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in late 2007, for example) is still subject to the effects of Empire.
When it comes to literary criticism and theory, postcolonialist reading strategies concentrate on specific representations and debates in literary texts. Representation, whether through the media, art, or other cultural practices, is a crucial and powerful means of maintaining control over a people – but also a way by which the colonized can resist, subvert, or critique the colonial process. There are two main kinds of postcolonialist reading strategies: those which tease out the colonialist assumptions in European literature (e.g. classics such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park or Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), and those which examine literature produced within a once-colonized nation (e.g. Nigeria, Kenya, or India, for example) or by writers from an ethnic group within Britain and the United States.
It is within this second category of criticism that the idea of postmodernism has tended to be invoked. Postmodern strategies can be identified in fiction produced in former colonies, such as the ‘magic realism’ of South American writers such as Gabriel Garciá Marquez (Colombia) and Isabel Allende (Chile). Most often, though, postmodern theory has supported postcolonialist readings of work produced within England and the United States, where there is a significant number of writers belonging to immigrant communities from previously colonized countries. This focus, after all, is what we might expect from an Anglo-American theoretical phenomenon like postmodernism, especially one which, as Linda Hutcheon has argued, is geared toward developing a critique ‘from within’ rather than from a detached position outside.
The very practice of writing fiction in English inevitably means positioning one's writing in relation to the ‘traditional’ forms, techniques and practices of the English literary tradition: conventions such as linear narrative, the development of character, and detailed empirical description. In postcolonialist texts, however, such techniques are often combined with the conscious and deliberate deployment of features of local, non-European traditions, whether oral or written. The result is a juxtaposition or cross-fertilization of genres or modes which has obvious similarities with postmodern forms of narrative. Prominent examples (returned to below) are Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which marries the conventions of the Indian oral narrative tradition with those of the European genre of the Bildungsroman, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which articulates African identity from ‘inside’ the distinctively European–American genre of the detective story.
This stylistic similarity services a broadly similar philosophical position, too. Both postmodernism and postcolonialism challenge the notion of a single authoritative viewpoint which claims to be universal, which conceives of human beings as sharing an ‘essential’ core of subjectivity, and which is associated with European Enlightenment thought. The multicultural world we live in would seem to bear little relation to this picture, which seems designed to serve the majority and keep everyone in their place.
But we must acknowledge at this point that some postcolonial theorists have been troubled by the comparison between postmodern and postcolonial ‘experience’. ‘The “post” in post-colonial’, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin insist in an oft-quoted refrain, ‘is not the same as the “post” in postmodernism’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995, 118). They contend that postmodernity is just too abstract to be considered an experience the way postcoloniality can. Unlike postcolonialism, postmodernism ‘doesn't appear to be the primary framework within which most of the world's population carries out its daily life’ (118). Similarly, Simon During has argued that making a case about postmodernity being a condition which affects us all, a framework in which ‘we’ all live, means that the idea of difference is wiped out – rather ironically given the impetus of much postmodern thought (During, 1995, 125).
Yet aside from the problem of postmodernity, the fact is that the use of postmodernism in a more qualified sense of ‘narrative technique’ has been much less contentious in postcolonialist criticism. In this area the focus has been on how in certain texts an attitude of self-reflexivity about narrative in general, and historiography in particular – an attitude which is commonly defined as postmodern – facilitates postcolonial critique. This is what the readings of postmodern–postcolonial novels in this chapter will concentrate upon.
Narrative, in the form of metanarratives or smaller-scale rhetorical myths, is one of the principal means by which a dominant group within society can impose its values upon those it subjugates. This is made clear in the Chinese–American Maxine Hong Kingston's notable combination of fiction and memoir, The Woman Warrior (1975). Kingston's own identity, as the memoir shows, has been constructed through stories, primarily the cautionary tales her mother used to tell her to try to shape her into a subordinate good wife, true to Chinese custom and those cultural narratives which put pressure on her to be ‘American-feminine’. But in The Woman Warrior Kingston effectively reclaims these narratives by rewriting them, making them her own. She demonstrates that just as narrative can be an ideological weapon, so it can also function as a response to ideology. Her memoir suggests that interrogating narrative is really about interrogating historiography.
Postmodern–postcolonial writing repeatedly suggests that the writing of history is the chief ideological means of imprisoning subjects in a subordinate social and political position. It is not surprising, then, that Linda Hutcheon's category ‘historiographic metafiction’ is frequently brought into the discussion in studies of contemporary postmodern–postcolonial fiction in Britain and the United States. Both postmodernism and postcolonialism, Hutcheon suggests, are engaged in a ‘dialogue with history’ (Hutcheon, 1995, 131). Both are reconstructing their relationship with a previous historical moment: modernism's ‘ahistoricism’, in the case of postmodernism, and the imposed culture of an imperial power, in the case of postcolonialism. Indeed from Hutcheon's perspective modernism can be considered the cultural counterpart of any particular colonial power because of its elitism, its impulse towards totalization, and its habit of appropriating ‘local’ artistic practices.
As we saw in the previous chapter, British historiographic metafiction, typically the product of white, bourgeois, Oxbridge-educated novelists, deals with history in a general, ‘philosophical’ sense, developing a powerful argument-in-fiction about how history works and is to be understood. A more ‘postcolonial’ kind of historiographic metafiction shows the more specific effects of history on a particular people. This point requires some clarification. Of course a historiographic metafiction like Swift's Waterland is deeply interested in the effects of history and geography on the people of the Fens region of England. However, the Crick family's experience is clearly intended to stand for Everyman's – as their names, Tom, Dick and Henry (Harry), suggest. This claim to universality is problematic from a postcolonialist perspective.
The three postmodern–postcolonial novels which are the focus of the following discussion – Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo – could each be considered examples of historiographic metafiction. Each shows that official colonial history must be confronted by what we might call ‘cultural memory’, an alternative way of accessing the truth of the past through narrative which depends upon the collective memories, as flawed and partial as they are, of subjugated peoples. As a result, each of them chooses not to tell a straightforward, linear story about the past from a stable narratorial perspective but presents the reader instead with a far more challenging, multi-layered, discontinuous, even rhizomatic, narrative from a varying or unreliable narratorial point of view. Each merges together, or ‘cannibalizes’ (to use a provocative term from postcolonial theory) a set of conventional genres – classic realism, fantasy, Gothic ghost story, detective fiction – to challenge the notion of a single overarching metanarrative. Each, we might say, puts postmodern approaches to narrative to use in a precise political way.
Despite the understandable objections voiced by postcolonial theorists about claiming postmodernism as a general condition which can ‘explain’ the postcolonial, these novels suggest that the postmodern approach to narrative can usefully be regarded by those analysing some examples of postcolonial fiction as a set of general ‘laws’ according to which the specific debates addressed within the individual texts can be better understood. All narrative, postmodernism asserts, can never be universal nor objective but is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, and manipulated by its narrator for rhetorical or political purposes. The impact of this ‘truth’ on a specific people is what postcolonial fiction by Rushdie, Morrison and Reed powerfully portrays. Most important of all, the way postmodern narrative implicitly implores its readers to consider their role as readers takes on an extra urgency in postmodern–postcolonial fiction. Each of the three novels appeals to its readers to actively respond to what it tells them.
Midnight's Children can be (and has been: see Lee, 1990) considered an exemplary British historiographic metafiction. It emerged at the same point in the early 1980s as other classic examples such as Swift's Waterland, D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, and Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot. The parallel with Waterland is particularly valid, given Rushdie's novel's rambling, digressive first-person narrative, which constantly eludes its narrator's efforts to control it. Saleem Sinai is troubled by the fact that ‘[t]he different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments’ (Rushdie, 1981, 187).
Like Swift in Waterland, Rushdie uses his novel's complex structure to demonstrate how the patterns of history impact directly on the lives of individuals. Saleem refers to himself as ‘handcuffed to history’ because he is born precisely at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 – the exact date history records as marking ‘India's arrival at independence’ (9). This momentous accident of birth, which befalls other children too, explains Rushdie's title. The midnight children come to embody ‘the new India, the dream we all shared’. It means they are ‘only partially the offspring of their parents – the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history’ (118).
The inseparability of the individual and the historical is emphasized even more literally in Midnight's Children through the conceit of having Saleem's body transform throughout the novel in correspondence with the fate of the nation. His face itself comes to resemble a map of India, its blemishes representing Pakistan (because, as his sadistic geography teacher Zagallo remarks, ‘Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India!’ [232]). Gradually his face splits and cracks, he loses a finger, then part of his scalp and hair, as the nation is scarred from conflict or its boundaries shift. At one level this might be seen as an ironically literal representation of the concept of the ‘decentred’ or ‘split’ subject. But the novel's literal depiction of ‘human geography’ (231) (as Zagallo puns) is a striking way of conveying just how powerfully the workings of history can become imprinted upon our sense of who we are.
Oddly, though, for all its preoccupation with writing India's history, the history in Midnight's Children is marred by obvious errors and embellishments. The most notorious of these is when Saleem claims Indira Gandhi had been accused by her son Sanjay for bringing about her husband Feroze's death (421). This – in an episode which confirms how dynamic the ontological confusion generated by historiographic metafiction can be – resulted in Indira Gandhi successfully prosecuting Rushdie for libel in 1984, forcing him to read out a public apology in court and his publisher to remove the passage from future editions of the novel. But more significant is Saleem's admission that he had previously made an ‘error in chronology’ and used the wrong date in recounting of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (166). This immediately leads us to question the veracity of everything else we have been told in the novel, and to question Saleem's reliability as self-appointed historian.
But here we have to understand that Midnight's Children does not in fact set out to provide an alternative to the ‘official’, colonial narrative of India. The novel is deliberately booby-trapped as a signal that it is not to be read for its accuracy. Accuracy is not easy to determine when it comes to the history of a postcolonial nation, because reality has been swallowed up into the historiography of its colonizers. Saleem states that
in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence – that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.
(Rushdie, 1981, 326)
Colonial rule depends upon the ideological activity of reconstructing history in the image of the present. This has the effect of erasing from the record crucial building blocks needed to construct a counter-history. In these circumstances, in the absence of reliable histories of an oppressed or colonized people, memory becomes crucial – however flawed it may be – because it is, as Catherine Cundy puts it in her study of Rushdie, ‘the chain which connects the postcolonial subject to his or her disrupted history’ (Cundy, 1996, 35). The equation between memory and identity is emphasized most directly in Midnight's Children when Saleem is hit on the head by a flying spittoon and goes into a state of amnesia, thus losing not only his memory but his entire sense of who he is.
As Cundy points out, ‘In terms of history as it affects the individual, it does not matter when Gandhi was assassinated, only that he was, and how this impinged on the individual and collective consciousnesses of Indian citizens’ (Cundy, 1996, 33). Even an alternative, personalized, and fictionalized story like Saleem's nevertheless has historical validity. He makes it clear through the text that the India he represents in his book is his India, one that bears a strong relation to the real nation and its history, but which is also a simulacrum in the Baudrillardian sense, a map which ‘precedes the territory’: ‘in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time’ (Rushdie, 1981, 166). Saleem's memory may be flawed but at least it is his memory.
During the moment of soul-searching which results from recognizing his error, Saleem asks, ‘Does one error invalidate the entire fabric?’ (166). Of course the question is rhetorical: the answer can only be no. The novel implies that the fabric of narratives is the only chance we have of determining any meaning. While it repeats the ‘message’ of other historiographic metafictions, that history is purely a narrative entity, Midnight's Children also affirms the opposite: personal narratives, outright fictions even, are legitimate forms of history.
And this points to another significant difference between Rushdie's novel and ‘white’ historiographic metafiction. Rushdie's novel, for all its intertextual references to narratives in the European literary tradition, such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Günther Grass's The Tin Drum, and Forster's A Passage to India, is equally influenced by the vast, convoluted narratives in Eastern literature, such as Scheherazade's 1000 Nights or the Indian epics The Mahabharata and Ramayana. Rushdie himself has described the novel in terms of the non-linear movements of Indian oral narrative, a form which ‘goes in spirals or in loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again, sometimes summarises itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story teller appears just to have thought of, then comes back to the main thrust of the narrative’ (Rushdie, 1985, 7–8). In keeping with this oral narrative context, the reader of Midnight's Children feels very much ‘spoken to’ throughout the novel, and not just because there is a built-in narratee, Padma, Saleem's lover and his ‘necessary ear’ (Rushdie, 1981, 149), who listens and responds to his narrative as it goes on. Saleem persistently appeals to his reader to discern the ‘meaning’ of his narratives. On the first page he tells us he will soon die and so ‘must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something. I admit it: above all things I fear absurdity’ (9).
Yet it would be a mistake to think that our task is to assemble the bits and pieces of the novel into one coherent biography of its narrator or an alternative history of India. Lyotard's rhetoric in The Postmodern Condition is not that we replace each metanarrative with a better one, but that we accept the validity of numerous localized, personalized, ‘petits récits’ (Lyotard, 1984, 20). Reading Midnight's Children shows us that there is no one single truth about India which we must figure out, but that there are numerous competing ‘truths’. History can only be encountered meaningfully by comparing, or ‘swallowing’, to use Saleem's own metaphor, a diet of narratives rather than subjecting oneself to one overarching narrative. ‘And there are so many stories to tell, too many’, he remarks at the beginning, ‘such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well’ (9).
Cultural memory is even more central to Toni Morrison's Beloved, a novel which also uses its complex non-linear narrative structure to rewrite history. Just as Midnight's Children complicates an area of existing historical knowledge, Beloved was conceived deliberately as a way of addressing what its author termed a 300-year-long ‘national amnesia’ about the subject of slavery. The need to fill in the gap means the reader of Beloved feels implored to respond to the narrative even more urgently than in the case of Midnight's Children. Its narrative structure effectively turns us into witnesses rather than just observers, urged to share the novel's judgements on history.
The novel is based on a real event which occurred in Kentucky in 1856, when an escaped slave called Margaret Garner chose to kill her own daughter rather than have her endure the suffering and degradation of being taken back into slavery. Beloved's central character Sethe cuts her two-year-old daughter ‘Beloved's’ throat with a saw at the point of recapture for the same reason. She also tries to kill her two boys, and contemplates slaughtering her youngest daughter, Denver. It is difficult to imagine a more horrific act. Yet placing it at the heart of her novel enables Morrison powerfully to inform readers distanced by time about the horrors of the forgotten Holocaust (Beloved's dedication page states simply ‘Sixty Million and more’) at the heart of American history. The idea of a mother killing her own baby daughter seems incomprehensible, beyond sympathy, yet the novel forces us to consider the brutal context that made such an act possible.
Beloved explodes the myth of the ‘paternalist’ system of slavery in the American South, which imagines black slaves as part of the extended family of a stern yet ultimately benign slavemaster. The reality was that the slaves were forced to work until breaking point in the plantations, were denied personal and family relationships that free white people took for granted, and were frequently subjected to violent abuse and humiliation. Sethe's murder of Beloved is counterbalanced by numerous acts of violence against her and her fellow slaves by their white masters on a farm ironically named ‘Sweet Home’ in Kentucky. A month before the murder Sethe had been whipped to the point of death before being chained up and having to endure two white boys sucking mockingly at her lactating breasts while the slavemaster looked on. Her own mother was hanged, probably for trying to flee the house where she was a slave, and one of the male slaves, Sixo, is roasted alive by the slavemaster. Even after Beloved's death Sethe is forced to have sex in order that the headstone is engraved. This is why her daughter, unnamed at the time of the murder, is known as ‘Beloved’, for she is still unable to afford the full inscription ‘Dearly Beloved’ (Morrison, 1987, 5).
With such horrific details of the everyday realities of life on the plantation, Morrison fills in the void in the established historical narrative. But she also intended Beloved to fill the gaps in a particular form of literary narrative. Her interest in the topic of slavery was triggered by reading slave narratives, a genre of African-American writing which has become of particular interest to scholars of American literature in recent years. A huge number of autobiographical accounts of the experience of being a slave were produced by black African-Americans in 1840–60. They are valuable because they are personal testimonies from a community rendered voiceless by their experience, and useful to historians for the details they provide about life as a slave.
Yet they are also subject to heavy self-censorship. As Morrison has described it herself, slave narratives ‘had to be authenticated by white patrons’. This means that the texts typically ‘draw a veil’ over the most horrific incidents in the authors' lives. They also tend to conform to a Biblical narrative trajectory, presenting their authors as sinners seeking redemption through the suffering of being a slave, a convention which points to the importance in the slave houses of indoctrinating slaves through religious education. What struck Morrison was that while the slave narrative is an autobiographical genre on the face of it, missing from its examples is a sense of who the writers really are, what they thought and how they felt: ‘while I looked at the documents and felt familiar with slavery and overwhelmed by it, I wanted it to be truly felt. I wanted to translate the historical into the personal’ (Schappell, 1993, 103).
Beloved, then, is a fictionalized slave narrative which, ironically, has greater truth claims than authentic slave narratives which were fictionalized for ideological reasons. Making a narrative more obviously artificial in order to present a range of ‘truths’ is a typically postmodern ironic strategy. And just as its fiction can suggest a more accurate ‘truth’, so the obvious ‘constructedness’ of Beloved's discontinuous and fragmented narrative (considered one of the novel's most postmodern elements) conveys a truth about the workings of memory.
Reading the novel is a process of being presented with pieces of narrative from a variety of different time periods without an indication of when they took place and how they connect. This structure places special demands on the reader who, in order to understand what happens in the story has to assemble the narrative fragments into a chronological, ordered sequence. The ‘present’ of Beloved is 1873. Sethe is now living with Denver in Cincinnati as a free woman, having been spared the death sentence after the intervention of abolitionists, though she continues to be shunned by the black community for her actions. At the beginning of the novel she is reunited with one of the male slaves, Paul D. (whose name signifies his status as property rather than a member of a family), who has escaped from prison in Georgia and come to Ohio. His attempt to seek her out suggests that the black community is finally ready to forgive Sethe. Soon Paul D. moves in with her and they become lovers, and attempt to start a family. Through representing the consciousness of both characters and their conversations, the novel repeatedly revisits their pasts as slaves in the period from 1850 until 1855, the year of the death of Beloved.
The novel's refusal to detail past events in a chronological, linear sequence is quite appropriate, as both Sethe and Paul D. are determined to banish the past from their minds. We are told near the start that Sethe is trying as hard as she can ‘to remember as close to nothing as was safe’ (Morrison, 1987, 6). But she is quite unable to prevent vivid images of the past returning, not just horrific ones, such as young slaves hanging from the trees in the plantation, but also pictures of the sheer natural beauty of Sweet Home Farm's surroundings. In many ways the memories of beauty trouble her more, for her memory seems unwilling to distinguish between pain and happiness. It never refuses any image or event, no matter how horrific, and is always ‘greedy for more’: ‘Why was there nothing it refused?’ (70). This sense that memory has an agency all of its own takes further Midnight's Children's emphasis on the elusiveness of the past.
Beloved's insistence on the dynamic power of memory has a counterpart as plot device, and this is the ghost of Beloved. From the moment she is buried, Beloved has literally been haunting Sethe's and Denver's house, 124 Bluestone, in the manner of a poltergeist. The visitations have long since caused Sethe's two sons, Buglar and Howard, to flee. Although Paul D. banishes the ghost from the house ‘[w]ith a table and a loud male voice’ (37) soon after moving in, it is replaced by an even more disruptive presence, in the form of a mysterious young woman named – uncannily it seems – Beloved. The ghost-baby appears to have metamorphized and materialized into a young woman of exactly the age Sethe's daughter would have been had she lived. She immediately splits Sethe and Paul D. apart, causing him to leave their bed and eventually sleep outside the house in the open air. Then she seduces him. Sethe becomes obsessed with her, too, and gives up her job, her health deteriorating as if her very identity is being sucked out of her by Beloved.
Beloved is an extraordinary creation (the term ‘character’ does not quite seem appropriate for her). She is vulnerable, lonely, vindictive, full of rage and sexual desire, but also capable of great tenderness. She seems to be searching for all the dead infant was denied: life, love, sexual experience, vengeance. Rather than a single individual, she seems to be composed of the spirits of many other women, such as Sethe's mother-in-law Baby Suggs or even the comic little girl Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin (one of Beloved's key intertexts). Her indeterminacy has prompted critics to see her as an example of postmodern characterization where character is not presented as coherent and stable but as something multifarious and endlessly ‘in process’ (see Duvall, 2000). Besides the uncanniness of memory itself she might also be regarded as a representative of the millions of other black people killed or silenced by slavery, or even (according to the epigraph of the novel, from Romans 9:25) one of the Israelites, cast out then forgiven by God for betraying Him: ‘I will call them my people, / which were not my people; / and her beloved, / which was not beloved’.
One of Beloved's functions in the novel is to ensure that any attempt to reassemble the fragments of the narrative into a coherent order, the way one might with a non-linear modernist narrative like The Good Soldier, remains frustrated. Within the represented world of the story, it is impossible to decide whether the young woman Beloved is in fact a materialized ghost, the spirit of Sethe's dead daughter, or if she is simply an unhinged young woman who just happens to have the same name as a dead person. In this respect Beloved conforms to the tendency of postmodern narrative to keep conjectural possibilities open. We cannot dismiss the character of Beloved as being ‘unreal’, nor decide that she is ‘real’. All we can do is say that she is both simultaneously. As such she parallels the operation of time in the novel. So vivid are Sethe's memories, and so unable is she to exert control over them, that the clear distinction between past and present is collapsed: living in the present means also living in the past.
This is a rhizomatic rather than arborescent approach to time, and as a result the novel's structure in fact resembles another rhizomatic organism, the unconscious. Sigmund Freud held that the unconscious can acknowledge no distinction between past and present, nor between right and wrong or good or bad. One of the prominent critical moves in discussing Beloved has been to consider it in relation to psychoanalytic theory, especially its understanding of trauma. Trauma (which comes from the Greek word for ‘wound’) is something too painful to be experienced directly, but which nevertheless – in keeping with the mechanism of the unconscious – makes itself felt in a displaced or disguised way. It only makes itself known through its representations, that is, by finding an outlet where it can disguise itself or displace itself onto other things, such as neurotic symptoms or dream.
Critics such as Peter Nicholls and Jill Matus have argued that structurally Morrison's novel replicates the structure of trauma (Nicholls, 1996; Matus, 1998). The narrative in Beloved ‘enacts a circling or repetition around the traumatic event’, the scene in the woodshed, which Matus calls the story's ‘unspeakable heart’ (Matus, 1998, 112). Although Sethe is tormented by her inability to prevent images from the past returning, there is one memory which never appears in her mind directly, and that is of the actual events in the woodshed when she murdered her daughter.
The episode is eventually rendered in terrible, haunting detail, though this is not until over half-way through the novel. It is focalized through the consciousness of ‘schoolteacher’, the brutal white owner of the plantation who has caught up with Sethe and her family following their escape. Doing so means that Morrison can powerfully present us with an insight into the mindset of the white slavemasters, who regard the black slaves as sub-human beings, equivalent in value to farm beasts. Schoolteacher is disturbed by Sethe's violence but only because it results in damage to some valuable stock and demonstrates that white masters must not ‘mishandle’ their black slaves (Morrison, 1987, 149). But confining the episode to schoolteacher's perspective also means that Sethe remains shielded from remembering the events in the woodshed herself.
Freud argues that trauma must be dealt with by a particular kind of confrontation, which psychoanalysis specializes in engineering: a full act of ‘remembering’ rather than merely continuing to ‘repeat’ neurotically (Freud, 1991). To remember trauma is effectively to ‘act’ upon it, rather than allow it to dictate our behaviour. This gives us a model for the patterns of repetition in the novel. The disruptive interventions of Beloved function as uncanny repetitions in the lives of Sethe and Paul D. signalling that they are both continuing to ‘repeat’ the past in psychoanalytic terms rather than properly ‘remember’ it. Indeed this is something which has been clear from the outset. In beginning with two returns from the past, Paul D.'s and Beloved's, the plot emphasizes that the past is something that must be confronted.
What is especially powerful about Beloved is the way its postmodernist narrative structure dovetails with this Freudian logic. The novel's complexity means that the reader is put in the position of traumatized subject. It is only on a second reading that we fully comprehend the overall framework and hence the significance of each narrative segment. The novel thus begs us to re-read it, and to do so is to ‘remember’ it rather than allow it to continue ‘repeating’ events – in other words, surprising and shocking us with its violence and Gothic elements. Because Sethe cannot ‘remember’ the events of the woodshed directly, it means that we need to do it for her, take on the burden.
This is a collective task, and something the novel has carefully insisted upon throughout. Although the main ‘victim’ of the past is perhaps Sethe, the fact that Paul D. is there with her, also burdened by his own memories (symbolized by his carrying a rusty tobacco tin round his neck containing mementoes from the past), emphasizes that this is a trauma that must be confronted together. The sense of a collective engagement with the past is strengthened by the idea of ‘rememory’ – an idea in which Sethe believes – which states that momentous past events leave their traces on the real world, and can also mean that one person's experience can become ‘remembered’ by someone else (Morrison, 1987, 35–6). Rememory thus disrupts conventional notions of time, and complicates the idea of separate, coherent identities.
Sethe's need to come to terms with the past, then, is something shared by the readers of the novel. However plausible we consider the idea of rememory in real life, there is one space where rememory does operate, and that is fiction. Reading a novel causes us to take on the memories of its characters as our own. Beloved represents Morrison's challenge to her readership – especially an American one – to overcome the ‘national amnesia’ about slavery and ‘remember’ it fully. It is therefore a novel with an insistent message, though its triumph is that this message is delivered without didacticism but by the text remaining a puzzle that cannot completely be solved. Beloved never lapses into theoretical polemic but remains a beautiful, shocking work of art.
Given its sheer stylistic exuberance Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972) is even more obviously ‘postmodern’ than Beloved or Midnight's Children. In it, passages of original narrative are punctuated continuously by reproductions of historical documents such as paintings, period advertisements, photographs, song lyrics, and a facsimile of a handwritten letter, as well as different textual forms like dramatic dialogue, epigraphs, quotations, and footnotes, and visual effects such as drawings, cartoons, shaded areas and extensive capitalized or italicized passages. The first chapter comes before the epigraphs and title page, and the novel ends with a ‘Partial Bibliography’ of 104 items.
Its juxtaposition of numerous different kinds of texts – often by other authors than Reed – is once again reminiscent of Burroughs's ‘cut-up’ method, though instead of ‘punk’ as a musical analogy for Mumbo Jumbo's style, a more appropriate one would be jazz. As one of Reed's major influences, the writer Ralph Ellison, once told him in an interview: ‘anywhere I find a critic who has an idea or a concept that seems useful, I grab it. Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style from the styles around him, I play by ear’ (Ellison, 1978, 132).
As such the novel is as parodic and textually inventive as anything by Coover or Barth, and can be seen as emerging from the same melting-pot of metafictional experimentation and left-wing social awareness which produced the US metafictionists. However, Reed is dedicated to developing ‘the true Afro-American aesthetic’ in his writing (Martin, 1984, n.p.), and this suggests that Mumbo Jumbo's intertextuality is less about deconstructing previous traditions such as realism and modernism and more about productively mapping out African–American culture, from the slave narratives to modernists such as Ellison. This is born out by the vast number of intertextual allusions in Mumbo Jumbo (mapped out by Henry Louis Gates Jr's exhaustive reading of the novel in his book Figures of Black) to texts not just in the Black American tradition but to key influences on this tradition, such as Egyptian mythology.
Reed's emphasis on the ‘Afro-American aesthetic’ suggests, too, that the novel, as literary form, may be conceived differently by black writers to the white American metafictionists of the 1960s. Because the African–American experience has tended to be more extensively explored in other media, primarily music (and music is one of Mumbo Jumbo's subjects), it means the novel retains a freshness and sense of potential for black American writing which has disappeared from its ‘exhausted’ white counterpart.
Comparing Reed with the white American metafictionists might even lead us to consider more dynamically the relation between postmodernism and postcolonialism in a specifically American context. While American literary theory and practice undoubtedly share a critical heritage with its European counterparts, drawing on the same European theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, etc., the fact is also that US culture is itself thoroughly ‘postcolonial’ as a result of the nation's multicultural history. Reed has pointed to a prevalent misunderstanding about the United States, that it is ‘an extension of European civilization’ (Martin, 1984). As Mumbo Jumbo demonstrates, the nation is just as much influenced by Africa. Rather than regarding postmodernism as something which suddenly erupts in American writing in the 1960s as a ‘decentring force’, one which undermines ‘the categories of a universal authority’, it can be regarded instead as a confirmation of ‘the essentially subversive nature of much American literature throughout its development: subversive, that is, of the authority of the European centre and its forms and expectations’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1988, 163).
If we follow this logic, we might be led to conclude that American literature is always already postmodern. More plausibly, though, we might argue that American literature can be regarded as profoundly shaped by postcolonial experience from the outset; it is writing which has always, at some level, set out to subvert Eurocentric metanarratives. The subversive, parodic elements we associate with postmodernism can be regarded, as Reed suggests in Mumbo Jumbo, as rooted in African art and culture.
Mumbo Jumbo gears its self-reflexive pyrotechnics towards examining the cultural expression of blackness and what this signifies in modern white (American) civilization. It focuses on a real historical period: what is commonly regarded as the beginning of the ‘Jazz Age’ in the 1920s in the US, a time when Black American music – jazz, ragtime and blues – and their associated lifestyle and values suddenly exploded into popular culture. One of the key triggers for this ‘Negro vogue’ was the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, the impact of a community of black artists associated with the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City in the 1920s and early 1930s (including writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston).
The novel's term for this moment, however, is ‘Jes Grew’. This curious label can be explained by a statement in The Book of American Negro Poetry by the black writer James Weldon Johnson, included as an epigraph in Mumbo Jumbo, which affirms that ‘The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, “jes’ grew”’. Topsy, the little girl in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), has never known her parents, and when asked (in stage versions of the novel popular in the early 1850s) if she knew who made her, she replies, ‘I jes’ grew!’
The fact that Uncle Tom's Cabin trades on numerous racist stereotypes of black people, even though it was written by an abolitionist, signals immediately that the name Jes Grew is treated ironically by the novel. The idea of its sudden eruption sums up the unease of the white authorities in the face of a dangerous carnivalesque force. Carnival, as the literary philosopher Bakhtin argues, is an oppositional energy – exhibited at its purest in actual street carnivals which permits the subjugated to have a momentary outlet for their frustrations in the form of fun and laughter – which works to undo the strict hierarchies and codes of behaviour by which modern, Western, Enlightenment society is organized.
From the outset the novel plays on the idea of the music as ‘infectious’, as something one cannot help dancing or tapping one's foot to, and as a phenomenon whose popularity spreads rapidly, by describing it as a plague. The first chapter makes it clear that this is in fact an ‘anti-plague’, for where plagues are normally ‘accompanied by bad air […] Jes Grew victims said that the air was as clear as they had ever seen it and that there was the aroma of roses and perfumes which had never before enticed their nostrils’ (Reed, 1972, 6). However, the (white) authorities in New Orleans and across the American South treat it as if it were a real outbreak, and marshall all their resources to stamp it out.
It becomes clear early on in the novel that what Jes Grew really stands for is the energy and vibrancy associated with blackness. Blackness is presented by the book as a force signifying freedom of language, body and also thought which exists in powerful opposition to the repressive, ordered value-systems of ‘whiteness’. Music is indeed the most palpable signifier of blackness. Black music, which realistically can be considered the roots of all the dominant contemporary musical styles (rock n’ roll, soul, rap, hip hop and R&B), has had an enormous influence on post-war US – and consequently British and European – ‘white’ popular culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, shaping social phenomena such as lifestyle, language, and fashion. This is a very powerful kind of cultural ‘colonization’, and there seems to be a special irony that such a subjugated part of the American population (especially so during the time of Mumbo Jumbo's composition in the early 1970s) could wield so much cultural influence.
But the other reason why the name Jes Grew is to be taken ironically is that African–American music did not simply explode out of nowhere in the 1920s. Rather the moment was itself prepared for by previous cultural conditions and practices. The poet Franklin Rosemont has argued that twentieth-century black American music ‘originated in the culture of the slaves who were systematically deprived of the more “refined” instruments of human expression’ (Salaam, 1995, 351). They were prevented from reading or writing, and even from using drums or other instruments in case these were used as a call to arms to other groups of slaves nearby. This meant that other modes of creative expression, such as writing or art, were denied to them and they had no option but to direct their creative energies towards the spoken word, chanting, or rhythmical movement, the kind of activities permissible on the plantation.
Music, then, is a clear example of how one can read an entire cultural history into a cultural practice. Black music was shaped by the experience of slavery and its very nature can be interpreted as a response to this experience and its social consequences. It is not enough, Kalamu ya Salaam argues, to claim that black music is influential because it is ‘so good’. The fact is that it is good because in America ‘where our people were uniformly denied the opportunities of concrete expression and mass assembly, all our soul was poured into the ephemerality of music’ (Salaam, 1995, 353). Far from being a creation that ‘jes grew’, music is to black Americans,
our mother tongue. Our music is a language used not only to express ourselves, but also to assert ourselves in world affairs. Additionally [it] serves as a unifying force in our external conflict with our colonizers and as a unifying force in encouraging us to struggle against the internalization of oppressive concepts as well as struggle against our own weaknesses.
(Salaam, 1995, 375)
These arguments serve as a useful summary of what are perhaps the two driving forces behind Reed's novel: its interest in what constitutes ‘blackness’, and its very structuralist assumption that every cultural phenomenon ‘means’ something only in relation to other things. Cultural forms and specific texts do not ‘just grow’ out of nothing.
While it is ‘about’ music on its surface, Mumbo Jumbo is really more deeply concerned with literature. This is clear from its paratextual form, and also from the way it deals with its comic-thriller plot. Mumbo Jumbo spins out a yarn that shows the spread of Jes Grew is no accident, but is because the ‘plague’ is deliberately travelling from the American South to New York in order to ‘cohabit’ with its ‘text’. ‘Jes Grew is seeking its words. Its text’, we are informed early on. ‘For what good is liturgy without a text?’ (Reed, 1972, 6). Realizing this, the authorities enlist the help of a detective, PaPa LaBas, to discover its source and to get to the text before Jes Grew can.
The idea of a search for a key text is a dominant motif in a particular subgenre of postmodern writing (which we shall consider fully in Chapter 7), the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘anti-’ detective story. LaBas's quest means that Mumbo Jumbo is on one level a parody of detective fiction in both its classic English ‘clue-puzzle’ and American ‘private-eye’ forms, which becomes positively Borgesian in its expansion from a basic thriller plot into a vast conspiracy ranging across history and involving hidden texts. This expansion is what makes it a postmodern detective novel, as it frustrates the reader's desire to arrive at the satisfying closure provided in classic detective fiction. LaBas calls himself ‘a jack-legged detective of the metaphysical who was on the case’ (211–12), and the novel's fragmented form invites its reader to become ‘literary detective’, moving from one extract or parody to another in an effort to decode what it all means, only to find there is no satisfactory solution. Even though LaBas finds out who the murderer is, the mysterious Jes Grew text is never found.
Thus Mumbo Jumbo provides a postcolonial spin to the critique of the Enlightenment which drives postmodern detective fiction. The implication – as Richard Swope has argued – is that the framework of classic detective fiction is representative of the puritanical Western/Eurocentric tradition of rationalist thought which Reed seeks to challenge (Swope, 2002).
LaBas does manage to trace the recent explosion of Jes Grew back to an ancient Egyptian dance craze which had taken New Orleans by storm in the 1890s and to discover that Jes Grew is a combination of three African traditions: African dance, the Egyptian myth of Osiris, and Haitian voodoo. Its genealogy suggests that, of course, the Jes Grew ‘text’ (which is actually called the ‘Book of Thoth’, named after another Egyptian God) symbolizes more than simply the spirit of the Jazz Age but nothing less than what Gates terms ‘the text of blackness’ itself. In other words Jes Grew is a manifestation of the very essence of African–American culture, the vitality of which makes it so influential and subversive to white American culture (representatives of which in the novel are called ‘the Atonists’, an Egyptian mythological term denoting the dehumanizing ethic associated with the god Set, in contrast to impulses towards natural expression associated with the god Osiris).
Mumbo Jumbo's openness about the ‘constructed’ nature of texts is why Gates considers the novel an exemplary postmodern one. Mumbo Jumbo flaunts its intertextuality rather than conceals it ‘under the illusion of unity’, as a modernist text does. The ‘Partial Bibliography’ is the most obvious example of this deliberate exposure, as its references demonstrate that all texts ‘are intertexts, full of intratexts. Our notions of originality, [Reed's] critique suggests, are more related to convention and material relationships than to some supposedly transcendent truth’ (Gates, 1989, 256).
This suggests, in fact, that the idea of ‘Jes Grew’ or ‘blackness’ being reducible to an authoritative Word, or set of clear commandments, is untenable and runs counter to the very spirit of Jes Grew. It is not surprising that the Jes Grew text cannot be found. If Jes Grew signifies blackness, then blackness is not an essence, but a vast network of linked influences and traditions. It is not, in Gates's words, a ‘transcendent signified’, but rather something which ‘must be produced in a dynamic process and manifested in discrete forms, as in black music and black speech acts’ (Gates, 1989, 272).
Gates here offers a response to the critique of postmodernism advanced by another prominent African-American cultural critic, bell hooks, who had contended that the postmodern rhetoric against unified subjectivity was problematic at a point in history when black people, through popular cultural forms like rap music, were beginning successfully to articulate a positive and specifically ‘black’ identity. Even more controversially, Gates might be suggesting that just as we can regard American literature as always already postmodern so we might even see the spirit of blackness and postmodernism as equivalent.
The paradox implicit in his reading of the novel, however, is that while the novel may be read as affirming the impossibility of condensing blackness into a single text, it does point to a version of this text which actually exists – and that is itself. After all it is within Reed's complex, endlessly inventive and multi-layered narrative, and nowhere else, that the history of Jes Grew is comprehensively set out (even though it does this via postmodern self-reflexivity rather than modernist illusory unity). Mumbo Jumbo both ‘jes grew’ and didn't ‘jes grew’. On one hand, like all fiction, it developed piece by piece out of an idea which Reed developed through historical research, textual appropriation and creative imagination. But, on the other hand, its paratextual, intertextual status means that it is the product of its author's immersion in popular and literary culture – not just black American but also (as the use of the detective genre shows) white as well.
We are by now familiar with the idea that one of the definitive aspects of postmodernism is its contradictory nature. Mumbo Jumbo, like other postmodern-postcolonial texts, shows that the use of postmodern literary form to explore the experience of a particular group of people has the effect of making this experience both specific and universal.