Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilisation” in which we find ourselves?
—Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Like Mittelholzer, the Barbadian author George Lamming was readily received in postwar literary London as an experimental “high-art” writer. In contrast to Mittelholzer's eclectic habits of innovation tout court, however, Lamming's experimentation was consistently understood as a recognizable species of self-consciously difficult writing in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf. In a Caribbean Voices program dedicated exclusively to Lamming's work, broadcast on 4 January 1948, Henry Swanzy's introductory remarks capture this sense of Lamming's indecipherability, asserting that in his poems “one finds a strange, oblique, violent, passionate emotion, which I feel, somehow, may prove of importance to the Caribbean” (CV, 4 Jan. 1948).1 Swanzy's qualifying “somehow” betrays doubt in his own ability to gauge the precise meaning and import of Lamming's work, an uncertainty that is explicitly articulated in his commentary after the first poem is read: “We start with that rather mysterious poem because it seems typical of this writer, who never says, straight out, exactly what he means.” Swanzy thus introduces difficulty as an identifying characteristic of Lamming's work, while maintaining with cautious imprecision that the work is, somehow, meaningful and important. One year later on Caribbean Voices, Arthur Calder Marshall reiterates this theme, concluding a reading of five Lamming poems by commenting, “I wonder what you made of that. It's not easy stuff, as you heard” (CV, 9 Jan. 1949)
Such critical evaluations of Lamming as difficult—many indeed critical in the sense of negative—appear in more contemporary accounts as well. Rudolf Bader's entry in the encyclopedic International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers begins its discussion of Lamming's works with the caveat that “many readers find George Lamming's novels difficult” (“George Lamming,” 143). While Sandra Pouchet Paquet has insightfully suggested that the political concern of Lamming's novels “has a direct bearing not only on his novels’ themes, but on their structure and the particular fictional elements he employs” (Novels of George Lamming, 10), A. J. Simoes da Silva finds Lamming's complex ambiguity politically constraining, and Supriya Nair's Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History likewise agonizes over the political implications of Lamming's inaccessibility. For his part, Lamming seems to welcome the critical consensus that he is a “difficult” writer, saying, “this means that I have to be read more slowly than would be the case with some writers, which I think is a good thing” (interview, by Munro and Sander, 11). Immediately after this comment, Lamming signals his awareness of the potential elitism in such a view, an aspect that has animated critiques of Lamming's novels throughout his career. Nevertheless, here and elsewhere, he remains unwavering in his commitment to avoiding simplification.
Lamming's view of the salutary effects of reading more slowly provides a key to the formal aspect of his intentions regarding difficulty—a hallowed modernist effort at “interrupting the ‘realistic’ processes of habitualized communication” (Eysteinsson, Concept of Modernism, 238). The interruptive motivation behind Lamming's prose style has been elegantly articulated by David Scott, who argues in the preface to his interview with Lamming that the latter's novels entail a confrontation with “this obligation: to pause, to doubt, to question, to wonder out loud about the assumptions, the conditions, the terms, the conventions, the values in relation to which, at any given moment, we pursue the projects we pursue” (Lamming, “Sovereignty of the Imagination,” 74). In a similar vein, George Steiner has suggested that literary difficulty's most important effects include “forcing us to reach out towards more delicate orderings of perception” and “drawing attention…to the inertias in the common routine of discourse” (On Difficulty, 40). Fredric Jameson likewise posits the function of difficult, resistant texts as the deliberate frustration of methods of quick reading “intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing” (Marxism and Form, xiii). These assessments of literary difficulty speak to a fundamental aim of Lamming's novels: to transform uncritical, passively receptive readers into skeptical, suspicious ones, alert to the cultural, ideological, and political frames within which all narrative is produced and received.
As suggested by the epigraph, this ethical imperative to reexamine, consistently, the very bases of one's own self-conceptions is something that lies at the heart of Woolf's modernist practice as well. In parallel with Lamming, Woolf lauds the “obstinate resistance” of a text as a positive, productive quality, such that readers “must stop, go back, try out this way and that, and proceed at a foot's pace” (“Reading,” 32). Bemoaning the current state of writing as “almost servile in the assiduity with which it helps us on our way, making only the standard charge on our attention” (32), Woolf, too, sees literature working properly only if it offers a transformative challenge to a reader's habitual frames of understanding. In observing that “the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it” (“Modern Fiction,” 106), Woolf asserts her insistence on the counterconventional nature of worthwhile fiction and in another essay presents this dynamic as plainly confrontational. Discussing the value of authors to readers, she notes that “they are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it” (“How Should One Read,” 10). In this way, it becomes clear that Lamming and Woolf share a belief in literature's obligation to demystify and restructure habitual patterns of thought and interpretation: for both authors, texts should forcefully resist readers’ routines in hopes of directing them somewhere new.
Lamming provides a description of precisely this kind of reordering, epiphanic effect in his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, delivered by the character Boy Blue as part of a long philosophical discussion that the narrator, G., and his friends have on the beach: “You hear something, an’ it come to you as a kind of surprise, then it connect up with another something you'd hear long time back, an’ what with one thing an’ another…when they all together you see yourself face to face with something that is true or very very strange. Or it make you remember something that you didn't remember all the time” (133). Boy Blue's sense of transformed apprehension (whether new or theretofore only dimly realized) is valorized in the book as a first, hesitant step toward alleviating what Lamming has called the “tragic innocence” of his first novel's characters (Conversations, 49). Elsewhere, Lamming invokes the same experience of newly awakened understanding as the goal of all meaningful literature, which, in Lamming's view, necessarily aims “to create an awareness of society which did not exist before; or to inform and enrich an awareness which was not deeply felt” (“Caribbean Creative Expressions,” 3). As Paquet has noted, Lamming clearly sees his “fiction as an instrument of social transformation” (Novels of George Lamming, 4), and the complexity of his prose lies at the heart of this vision, aiming to interrupt habitual thought patterns and catalyze a reassessment of the values and goals urged by conventional discourse.
While this assessment of the uses of difficulty sheds important light on the ideal functions of Lamming's opaque literary style (and on ways in which difficulty might converge with postcolonial literature's interests in counterdiscursivity writ large), it is also important to consider the technique's valence in the social and literary milieu in which Lamming's novels were created and received. More recent critical considerations of difficulty have pinpointed its relevance and interpretability less in the work itself than in the intertwined relationships among text, reader, and the publishing and critical arenas. Leonard Diepeveen's The Difficulties of Modernism, for example, focuses on how literary difficulty becomes meaningful via the social relationship between author and reader, with cultural and class concerns (expressed particularly by psychological feelings of anxiety and inadequacy in Diepeveen's account) at the foundation of difficulty's effects.2 This more sociologically sensitive account of literary difficulty suggests something more behind Lamming's perplexing literary technique, emphasizing the sociopolitical thrust of his trademark style.
As noted in chapter 1, Lamming had strong tendencies toward iconoclasm, both literary and political, well before arriving in London in 1950. Like Mittelholzer, he considered disputation both constructive and necessary, and he encouraged opportunities for intellectual contention and debate. Lamming's arrival in England seems to have reinforced these tendencies, especially concerning the issue of race. Lamming's letters to Collymore shortly after arriving grimly register his dismay at the strongly negative British reaction to the incoming thousands of West Indian migrants (as does a contemporaneous poem broadcast on Caribbean Voices, “Dedication from Afar: A Song for Marian”), and he briefly muses about moving to the more welcoming cultural climes of Paris as a result. Circumstances prevailed, however, to keep Lamming in London. In the context of this cultural atmosphere, marked by the consolidation of (white) British national character, Lamming's embrace of modernist tactics thus seems calculated to preserve a strong sense of racial and national difference. In addition to the larger aesthetic goal of reawakening critical consciousness in his readers, Lamming's aesthetic choices serve to enunciate his own sociocultural position in a particularly combative way.3
Although this combativeness might seem counterintuitive for a young writer from the colonies trying to establish himself, a modernist affiliation nevertheless makes some sense for Lamming in the postwar context. As a black West Indian immigrant, Lamming was already clearly recognized as an outsider in an almost monolithically white postwar England and was thereby seemingly readymade to fit into a category (modernist writer) often associated with difficulty.4 On the other hand, contemporaneous racial discourses surrounding West Indians insisted on their essential primitiveness, lack of culture, and childlike status, with the implication that high cultural achievement from the Caribbean was simply not in any way conceivable. These poles of “outsider” and “primitive” are crucial, and they find a close conjunction with the twin dangers of assimilation and exoticism Peter Hulme identifies as the main pitfalls in reading (what he terms) Third World literature from the metropolis. The parallels between these sets of terms are provocative, and within them Lamming's modernist difficulty can be read as an assertive literary-political gesture aimed at preserving a West Indian (racial, political, cultural) difference while countering an English exoticism that tended to read West Indians as simple, unthinking (and unworking) residents of a tropical paradise. In this reading, the category of (modernist) outsider functions to allay the threat of assimilation, while the invocation of a highly intellectualized cultural tradition (modernism) strategically disrupts, on several levels, the dismissive reduction of West Indian artists to simple, natural creatures of merely anthropological interest.
In such a light, the modernist difficulty of George Lamming appears as a strategy aimed squarely at engaging his readers—in a double sense of both aggressive confrontation as well as attentive interlocution—in an earnest discussion about the legacy of empire. The double valence of engagement echoes the ambivalent activities of the crabs on the beach in In the Castle of My Skin, who are represented as either making love, fighting fatally, or both. By putting the crabs, “stuck like things put together” (132), conspicuously contiguous to Boy Blue's description of intellectual epiphany, “the way a thing put itself together” (133), Lamming suggests that engagement, whether of the “clawing wildly” (132) or the “steady, and quiet and sacred” (133) sort, ends in the “twist and shift of quiet and suggestive” (133) understanding. As the works of an anticolonial West Indian writer obliged to publish in postwar London, Lamming's opaque, resistant texts function as a mechanism for disrupting the unexamined acceptance of a racial hierarchy long naturalized by Britain's imperial worldview and, subsequently, as an invitation for both colonized and colonizer to construct a more productive, mutually respectful future.
In a talk commemorating Selvon, Lamming relates an anecdote that underscores the type of interruptive, anticolonial reordering of perception he sees as necessary. The story involves his querying an Englishwoman about the arrival of a letter. She responds that no letters have arrived, though she has been checking carefully for “black stamps.” Lamming interprets it thus: “she meant stamps marked Africa or India, China or the West Indies. One kind, honest and courteous old woman had fixed almost two thirds of the World's population with one word. You might say that the woman was a simple example of ignorance but I maintain that ignorant or not it has fundamentally to do with a particular way of seeing” (“Coldest Spring,” 6).5 Resisting the simple, dismissive interpretation of the woman as ignorant, Lamming analyzes her speech as a fundamental effect of her (colonizer's) perception, something The Pleasures of Exile consistently identifies as “an inherited and uncritical way of seeing” prevalent on both sides of the colonizer/colonized divide (76). It is against these stubborn, ingrained, and effectively naturalized patterns of colonial perception that Lamming positions his literary difficulty, hoping to oblige his audience to pay more attention, as Steiner would have it, to the “inertias in the common routine of [colonial] discourse.” Lamming's difficulty—whether militantly aggressive or passionately encouraging6—seems designed, in various ways for various audiences, to instigate the type of defamiliarized, more broadly synthesized reconsideration of “civilization” (and its implicit other, “savagery”) suggested by Woolf in this chapter's epigraph.7
Postwar literary critics did not fail to associate Lamming's difficult texts with what seemed to be their prewar, high modernist predecessors (and Lamming, unlike Mittelholzer, made no particular efforts to resist such comparisons). The Times Literary Supplement review of In the Castle of My Skin muses that “one is tempted to rename this book, ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a young Barbadian.’ It recalls James Joyce of the Portrait and certain scenes in Ulysses, not by virtue of imitation but in a curious similarity of vision” (A. C. Marshall, “Youth in Barbados”).8 The same TLS reviewer makes a similar comparison in discussing The Emigrants, noting the novel's similarities to Ulysses and complaining that “the book is unnecessarily difficult to read” (A. C. Marshall, “In Search”). The Spectator reviewer highlights Lamming's unusual technique, again evoking a likeness to Joyce: “Mr. Lamming does not restrict himself to straightforward narrative and description but, at moments of extreme tension, moves into dramatic dialogue, into poetic incantation and into the sort of stream-of-consciousness writing that Joyce has made us familiar with” (Jennings, “Better Break,” 411). The Observer reviewer, Edwin Muir, brings in the example of Faulkner to elucidate Lamming's prose, while the London Magazine decries The Emigrants as “deliberately experimental,” a novel that has “indulged in innovation at the expense of form,” and again (perhaps exasperatingly) brings up a comparison with Joyce (Stern, review, 109). In the end, it seems evident that whether or not they approved (and at the time many did not), Lamming's contemporary British literary commentators identified him as a writer in the old high modernist tradition, someone whose prose was “heavy and dense,” “whose style jarred and confused the reader” (A. C. Marshall, “Time and Change”).
Critics clearly noted Lamming's efforts to avoid assimilation into the contemporary cadre of British realist writers as well. The New Statesman review of Of Age and Innocence, penned by V. S. Naipaul, notes that while Lamming “has devised a story which is fundamentally as well-knit and exciting as one by Graham Greene…he is not a realistic writer” (827). V. S. Pritchett's review of In the Castle of My Skin in an earlier issue is even clearer in making the distinction, arguing that the “book makes our kind of documentary writing look conventional and silly” (“Barbados Village”).9 Since Lamming's style could be comfortably compared to that of older modernist writers, it was not easily allied with his British contemporaries, yet many reviewers also had difficulty assimilating the meaning of Lamming's novels, pointing with particular discomfort to his style. The Observer review of The Emigrants is typical—“The author switches from scene to scene and period to period for no obvious reason, is elliptical without excuse, and obscure where everything is plain” (Muir, “Indirections”)—as is the London Times when it excoriates Of Age and Innocence for being “badly confused by [Lamming's] method of narration which includes extracts from diaries, flashbacks, and other devices which…do not provide clear and coherent reading.”10 Of course, it is precisely the British request for coherence and clarity that Lamming's difficulty seeks to resist. Indeed, from Lamming's viewpoint it is the long-established imperial British narrative itself, purportedly coherent and clear, that has naturalized at an almost unconsciously deep level “the habitual weight of a colonial relation” that typically equates West Indians with primitive, unthinking children (Pleasures of Exile, 25).11
Lamming provides a critical demonstration of the expedient and deceptively authoritative workings of the “clear and coherent” colonial narrative in In the Castle of My Skin. The backdrop to the crucial incident is the landlord Mr. Creighton's party, during which Trumper, Boy Blue, and the sometime narrator, G., sneak onto the estate premises and are almost caught after stumbling onto a soldier trying to seduce the landlord's daughter in the darkness. The chapter dealing with the boys’ near disaster is a first-person account, and it is followed immediately by a more traditional, third-person account of Ma and Pa, the characters representing the archetypal peasant tradition of the island. The focal point of the chapter is Ma's discomfort at relating to Pa the story she has heard from Mr. Creighton, which emerges eventually as the landlord's narrative of events the night of the party. It is expressly noted that the “landlord's story was incredible” (187), that it is one Ma “wouldn't have believed were not the source of information beyond suspicion” (184). When the landlord's predictably self-serving narrative does emerge—that the boys had attempted to rape the young woman—both Ma and Pa placidly accept its truth, their placidity and its rote nature emphasized by Lamming's presentation of it in dramatic dialogue, with the implication that they are simply acting out their prescribed roles in accepting an account the reader knows to be fabricated. An earlier instance of dramatic dialogue in the novel acts similarly: in the conversation of the four schoolboys with the victim of the head master's beating (a clear evocation of slavery), the rote, repetitive, and circular dialogue of the boys, punctuated by the victim's reiterations of his lack of knowledge, is rendered in dramatic form, broken up into “normal” narration only when the victim himself begins to make some analytic connections and convey to his school friends his interpretation of what has just befallen him. Elsewhere in the novel, Lamming describes the pervasive logic of uncritical absorption explicitly, emphasizing its linguistic, literary basis: “The language of the overseer. The language of the civil servant. The myth had eaten through their consciousness like moths through the pages of ageing documents” (27). The image is one of passive decay, suggesting the dissolution of active consciousness through its unthinking accession to accepted ideology. In the novel this mental inertness extends to encompass the whole village “in a pattern that remained constant. The flow of its history was undisturbed by any differences in the pieces” (24). The depiction of Ma and Pa's seemingly prescripted relation to the landlord's narration suggests how much “the pattern has absorbed them” (32), rendering them unable to act or believe differently. In its formal features, In the Castle of My Skin seems designed to interrupt precisely such behavior, to militate against the complacent submission to discourse it entails. For Lamming, simply presenting the “clear and coherent” tale preferred by the London Times would thus be self-defeating: in distinguishing himself from the preponderance of realist authors emerging into prominence in 1950s London, Lamming was not only signaling his own difference but also signaling the importance of a different (ostensibly more difficult) discourse.12
In the contemporary reviewers’ resistance to Lamming's complexity, another, more racially motivated aspect is also detectable: apparently underlying many of the critiques of Lamming as a type of failed modernist is the supposition that he is better suited to writing intuitively and “more naturally.” The most explicit statement of this view occurs in the Times Literary Supplement’s 1955 review article “Caribbean Voices,” discussed in the first chapter.13 After describing how Mittelholzer's work attempts to remedy what the reviewer takes for granted as the widespread West Indian inability to think historically in any way outside of the immediate moment, the article introduces Lamming with a distinctly arch appraisal: “The discontinuity of consciousness which Mr. Mittelholzer attempts to eradicate is accepted by Mr. George Lamming, apparently, as normal to the human condition” (xvi). The import of such an assessment is not merely to suggest that Lamming, the naive native, has yet to grasp the sophistication of his European brethren—foolishly mistaking his own culture's condition (of ignorance) for a universal one—but also serves to reduce Lamming's writing process to a largely unconscious representation of his own confusion. The article reiterates this view throughout, asserting, for example, the reviewer's difficulty in establishing whether the book is about the childhood of one boy or about that of a group of boys: “it is also difficult to see how conscious the author was of what he was doing. The reasons for the shift from the first to the third person cannot be perceived by the intellect. It would be hard to justify it by analysis” (xvii).14 The emphasis on “intellect” and “analysis” reveals an investment in a long-familiar discourse about non-European irrationality, and the review continues in a similar vein, postulating that “Lamming's effects are achieved intuitively” and concluding that “in far too many cases the author becomes self-consciously an ‘experimental writer’ whose effects are much less original than those he achieved unconsciously when he was not trying” (xvii). Before going on to castigate Selvon for the “same muddied intellectualism” (xvii), the author of the review remarks that Lamming has not quite developed out of his “natural brilliance” into a more controlled, professionalized writer.15 Even as sensitive a critic as Pritchett, although he clearly if somewhat paradoxically distinguishes Lamming from the portrayal, describes the context of In the Castle of My Skin in similarly blithe terms: “We are in the heart of a coloured or half-coloured community, sharing its sudden, unreasonable passions…its naïve illusions about the world outside” (“Barbados Village”). Other critics are not so generous. One reviewer of The Pleasures of Exile complains about Lamming: “He is no theoretician: his spasmodic attempts to mix Haiti, Hakluyt, The Tempest, and Portland Place into a critical synthesis on the British West Indian's position only make lumpy literary porridge. He is best when he just talks on about London and the Caribbean” (“Place in the Sun”).16 Another suggests that Lamming has yet to surmount the inherent difficulty that in the Caribbean the “laws of cause and effect are held in abeyance” (Marshall, “Youth in Barbados”). In the end, it seems that such ethnocultural suppositions, expressed as issues of aesthetic critique, might provide another rationale for Lamming's insistence on difficulty.
Marshall notes Lamming's personal suspicion of “just documentary” writing in the Caribbean context (CV, 22 Mar. 1953), and in The Pleasures of Exile Lamming himself makes the connection between a sophisticated use of language and the need to fight the degrading assumptions fostered by the discourse of colonialism. Placing the issue into his characteristic Prospero-Caliban trope, Lamming argues that Caliban must order (command) Prospero's attention by ordering (narrating) a new form of history, with the issue of language firmly at the center of the effort: “We shall never explode Prospero's old myth until we christen Language afresh; until we show Language as the product of human endeavour; until we make available to all the result of certain enterprises undertaken by men who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants of languageless and deformed slaves” (118–19). The modernist echoes of this call to make language new are unmistakable, if differently politicized, as Lamming's emphasis on language as a human endeavor fashions constructivism into an anticolonial strategy.17 Elsewhere in the book, Lamming praises German scholars who have been taking an interest in West Indian literature, because (as opposed to Kingsley Amis) they are interested in paying earnest attention to what Caribbean writers have to say. Heading off any concerns about European exploitation by these scholars, Lamming emphasizes, “what really matters here is that they are serious readers and the nature of their interest is a good basis for dialogue” (29). In this light, Lamming's overtly challenging literature can be seen as a rejection of any notions of primitive genius or unthinking native intuition. It stands instead as a pointed invitation to consider Caribbean people as intelligent, conscious shapers of language and hence as thinking beings in their own right.
This perception of non-Europeans as primitive, immature, or otherwise not up to Western standards of ratiocination finds its academic apotheosis in the practice of anthropology. Although Jed Esty is persuasive in arguing that as early as the 1930s, with the steadily more evident decline of the British Empire, the English began turning the anthropological lens inward onto their own perceived national culture, his emphasis on emergent British nativism should not obscure the fact that the outward gaze at the “others”—usually objectified and judged lacking—retains a major hold on the British cultural imagination in the postwar years.18 The special autumn edition of the Times Literary Supplement of 1962—“A Language in Common,” devoted to writing in English by non-English (including Scottish and Welsh) writers—provides a glimpse of how impermeable these imperially inflected social and cultural categories remained. The section's review of Caribbean writers, “The Caribbean Mixture,” begins with a disquisition on the intransigent resistance of cultures to fusion, attributing it to an inherent, disinterested universal law that when two cultures (in the article, also rendered equivalently as “races”) are juxtaposed, one, apparently by happenstance, “usually adopts the habits of a master race and imposes its cultural pattern on the other” (Singer, “Caribbean Mixture”). The reviewer, positing this chance capitulation of one culture to another, then asserts that such a relationship may at first lead to diffidence on the part of the subject culture, but then later allows for a sort of minor culture—the example, of course, is West Indian literature—to flourish. The article goes on to connect this minor culture to other objects of anthropological interest: “The emergence of a school of self-assured West Indian writers can thus be related to…the continually expanding interest in folk-lore, to the Scottish Renaissance and to that tale of Myles na Gopaleen's where the American recording engineer tapes the grunting of pigs under the impression that it is an authentic Irish story.”19 The far from elevated company in which West Indian literature is grouped—seemingly as a kind of amusing anthropological curiosity—is underscored at the end of the article, whose conclusion unreservedly states that no West Indian writer, “viewed from the highest standards, has yet contributed much to the English language.” The concluding sentences of the review find solace for this artistic failure in the purely anthropological function of West Indian literature: “they have given us insights which would otherwise have been denied us into the kinds of life that are lived in the tropics and—what has not been mentioned before because it is so obvious—many wonderful glimpses of the scenery that can be found there.” The pronoun usage clearly delineates the contours of the chosen community, as Caribbean writing, outside the pale in several senses, is reduced to the level of a tourist's narrowly ethnographical glimpse of the exotic, denied any possibility of being a truly literary achievement.20
Thus, if from a more producer-centered view, Lamming's constructivist highlighting of the Caribbean artist aims at countering claims of West Indian simplicity, a more reception-oriented vantage can espy in Lamming's attempts to disrupt narrative a mechanism designed to short-circuit any easy attempt by readers to process the descriptions of Caribbean characters and situations in an objectivizing, anthropological way.21 Lamming's technical experimentation functions in this way as a strategy to resist consumption of his novels as, in the phrase singled out by Jeremy MacClancy's discussion of anthropology in early twentieth-century Britain, “the latest form of evening entertainment” (“Latest Form,” 78).22 In discussing the importance of his generation of West Indian writers, Lamming notes the shortcomings of previous efforts to depict Caribbean society, explicitly connecting anthropology with what he characterizes as realistic representation that is merely rudimentary: “We have had the social and economic treatises. The anthropologists have done some exercises there. We have had Government White papers as well as the Black diaries of Governor's wives. But these worked like old-fashioned cameras, catching what they can—which wasn't very much—as best they could, which couldn't be very good, since they never got the camera near enough” (Pleasures of Exile, 37–38). The old-fashioned, mechanical apparatus of a distanced anthropological realism, in Lamming's view, must make way for a different, more sophisticated rendering by the West Indian novelist.
Lamming remarks on the deleterious effects of remote, uninvolved observation in The Emigrants in a brief disquisition by Tornado, one of the more heroic and politicized of the novel's eponymous characters. In response to the suggestion that the British-Caribbean relationship is one of an unaffectionate parent to child, Tornado takes issue with the metaphor, identifying the problem more with knowledge, empathy, and a sense of egalitarian awareness and respect: “Seems to me…the people here see these things from their side. They know that England got colonies an’ all that, an’ they hear ’bout the people in these far away places as though it was all a story in a book” (186). This type of removed, distracted perception of an urgently felt and lived human existence is what Tornado sees as most criminal in the English. He goes on to suggest that West Indians would “be nastier to the English than to any one, because we'd be remembering that for generations an’ generations we'd been offerin’ them a love they never even try to return” (186). For Tornado, it is the personal nature of such a betrayal—the refusal of human reciprocity on the part of the English—that is the most serious crime. In a personal anecdote, Lamming provides a further example of the casual objectification implicit in the English relationship with its colonial subjects, describing a cordial conversation with a Chelsea pensioner that ends with the older man's parting words: “Oh, by the way, there is something I wanted to ask you. Do you belong to us or the French?” (“Coldest Spring,” 7). Lamming notes the extraordinary naturalness of the man's demeanor in asking such a question, expressing amazement at how casually this man “had turned the person to whom he was speaking into an object, into one of his possessions” (7).
Lamming directly depicts the horrifying effects of such a dispassionate, disinterested approach to others toward the end of The Emigrants. Dickson, thinking he has been chosen by his white landlady for seduction on the basis of education—“the common language of a common civilization,” as Dickson expresses it (254)—discovers that both she and her sister only want to observe him as a foreign thing: “The women were consumed with curiosity. They devoured his body with their eyes. It disintegrated and dissolved in their stare, gradually regaining its life through the reflection in the mirror” (256). The consequences for Dickson of this anthropological consuming of his objectified body are disintegration, dissolution—indeed, he goes mad—a complete demolition of him as a person; the landlady's mirror—her own racist representations—takes control, providing the only remaining form of his body's existence and giving the lie to Dickson's notions of a civilized commonality. The scene is overtly experimental in form, juxtaposing Dickson's increasingly ragged and disjointed thoughts with a third-person narration, bringing home the stark difference between a (supposedly) objective view, associated with the English ladies, and the hopes, fantasies, and eventually insane disappointment of the human being who is caught in their objectivizing view.23
In a later novel, Season of Adventure, Lamming also casts doubt on the ability of an analytic, anthropological approach to do justice to its subject. This novel—his fourth and by far his most realistic, least experimental in form—is famously interrupted near its end by the “Author's Note,” a direct intrusion into the third-person narration by the authorial voice.24 The essential thrust of the section is the ultimate unknowability of Powell, the failure of analytic (and poetic) interpretation to adequately contain his motivations and thoughts. The narrator discounts “logical analysis,” insisting that “there must be another way to the truth of Powell's defeat” (331). While acknowledging the provisional worth of traditional analytical methods, the “Author's Note” suggests that something nearer and more involved is necessary to recover Powell's truth: what is required is no less than an acceptance of responsibility for Powell's actions. Pointedly removing the reader from immersion in the narrative flow of events, this singular authorial interruption makes clear that it is only with an intimate, deeply felt understanding of Powell's humanity—something anthropology apparently cannot offer—that an appropriately ethical relation can be established. Immediately following the “Author's Note” there is another passage suggesting the illegitimacy of a presumed objective view distanced from empathic understanding. Here the novel forthrightly declares that such a view “can only prove, select and prove, the details of an order which it has assumed; a method of discovery that works in collusion with the very world of things it sets out to discover” (333). The use of “things” underscores the paucity of this kind of scientific method in dealing with people, and “collusion” contains ominous undertones suggesting its unsuitability for accomplishing what the author names as his most critical task: to fight “against the Lie as it distorts the image of my neighbor in his enemy's eyes” (330). As it concludes, the “Author's Note” reveals that in order to recover the truth, the reader cannot simply abstract Powell into an illustration of analytic theory or a mere character in a tale. Instead, the putative author models the type of personal accountability the novel deems necessary, countenancing no excuses and making a plain confession: “I am responsible for what happened to my brother” (332). In forcibly removing the reader from a complete investment in the ethnographic realism of the narration by its intrusion, the “Author's Note” points to the necessity of a deeper commitment, beyond anthropology, as it were, to an idea of Powell's ineffable humanness. Though the TLS review may find Lamming's “use of techniques like changing narrators in mid-narrative, and of tricks with space and time…pretentious and ineffectual” (Singer, “Caribbean Mixture”), such “tricks” seem to preclude any sheer apprehension of his novels as the wonderous reportage of a particularly observant and literate native informant.
Thus, in the context of the contemporaneous British reception of his novels, the difficulties of George Lamming appear as a strategic effort to navigate a complex literary and social field with a particular political valence: his use of difficulty allows him to maintain a certain distinction from the most popular literary practices of the day while protecting against an often unwitting exoticism that carries such distinction to adverse extremes, steering a careful but combative route between Hulme's poles of assimilation and exoticism. Lamming himself was keenly aware of the paradoxes of his position as a postcolonial intellectual living in the imperial metropole. In analyzing the role of the BBC's Caribbean Voices in the creation of a West Indian literature, Lamming articulates the economic, political, and cultural constraints of his position, observing that the BBC “played a role of taking the raw material and sending it back, almost like sugar, which is planted there in the West Indies, cut, sent abroad to be refined, and gets back in the finished form” (interview, by Munro and Sander, 9). In another published interview, with Ian Munro, Lamming acknowledges that the dependence of young West Indian writers “on the verdict of the English publishing houses,” even in 1971, “has not substantially changed” (“Writing and Publishing,” 19). Such an awareness, perhaps, leads Lamming to note the acceptance of the “new West Indian novel” in England as “deserving if somewhat dubious” (CV, 6 July 1958). Given this clear-eyed cognizance of the overbearing realities of the postwar British literary field—still molded by the powerful ideologies of colonialism—Lamming's use of difficulty can be viewed as a pragmatic, militant technique designed, at one level, to prevent his English readers from simply consuming his books without taking pause to consider the historical, human source of the text with which they are confronted.
Of course, the tactical politics of interruption and distinction within the British literary field—however savvy, strategic, or successful—by no means exhaust the potential meanings of Lamming's difficulty. Beyond signaling the active subjectivity and intellection of West Indians, as well as their principled divergence from mainstream British cultural and political tendencies, Lamming's arduously complex novels also display a more constructive engagement with his readers, exhorting them toward particular ways of analyzing and engaging with the world around them. Although more focused on the relevant sociocultural dynamics, even Diepeveen acknowledges the pedagogical impulse at the root of literary difficulty, observing that such texts can inspire a number of responses, “but the option that the difficult text does not encourage is that of half-consciously rubbing one's eyes over hundreds of pages of text” (Difficulties of Modernism, 234). If Lamming's aesthetic output positions him, in his own description, “as a kind of evangelist” (“Sovereignty of the Imagination,” 197), its primary message would seem to lie largely in this direction: his works’ formal features oblige readers to consider carefully the meanings created through the linguistic “process of exchange which we take for granted in all our daily activities” (Coming, Coming Home, 29).25 In this effort, Lamming's difficulty enacts a sophisticated hermeneutical and political project designed to change the habit of merely instrumental, unengaged reading into an active practice of reading sensitive to the unavoidable complexity of intersubjective communications.26
The question of whom Lamming has in mind as readers, however, has traditionally been a vexed one. On one hand, there can be little doubt that even though his postwar West Indian audience was limited by socioeconomic and educational conditions, Lamming wrote with an ideal Caribbean readership firmly in mind. He has noted that his “greatest pleasure would be to know that the cane-cutters and laboring class [of the West Indies] read and understood In the Castle of My Skin” (interview, by Munro and Sander, 11). An autobiographical radio manuscript by Selvon recounts a conversation with Lamming that confirms the importance he attributed to his West Indian audience: “We both agreed one had to be careful not to let the praise [in Britain] go to one's head—what we were concerned with was how West Indians at home would greet our work.”27 Early in his career, Lamming saw himself and his fellow Windrush writers as the progenitors of a critical canon of West Indian literature on which future work could build: he asserts in The Pleasures of Exile that his generation of West Indian writers “are to the new colonial reader in the West Indies precisely what Fielding and Smollett and the early English novelists would be to the readers of their own generation” (38).28 However, as he makes clear in 1958 on Caribbean Voices, Lamming viewed the building of a West Indian readership as a long-term, future-oriented process, not something immediately realizable within the region: reflecting on the hesitant embrace of West Indian literature by its home audience, he observes that “the creation of this reading public whose elements already exist is a job which remains to be done” (CV, 10 Aug. 1958).29 Beyond this resolutely hopeful focus on a yet-to-be-actualized Caribbean readership, Lamming has also stressed that he thinks his books should be “relevant to intelligent and sensitive reading in any part of the English-speaking world” (interview, by Munro and Sander, 11), considerably broadening the conception of the audience he hoped to reach.
The ecumenicism of this conception is important, and while it surely has a pragmatic basis in the unequal institutional conditions of literary production prevalent then and now, it also suggests Lamming's unwillingness to accede to any straightforward, binary divisions into European and Caribbean. If for Lamming the “inherited and uncritical way of seeing” (Pleasures of Exile, 76) against which he works is the foundational postcolonial problem, it is a problem shared by all.30 Indeed, in a more recent interview Lamming defines “colonized” in an extremely far-reaching manner as simply any political position embracing models and texts uncritically (“Sovereignty of the Imagination,” 177). Composed amid the growing momentum for decolonization around the globe, Lamming's novels appear to address both sides of the traditional colonizer/colonized divide, seeking to unsettle either side's easy resort to “the safer notion of ethnic or national similitude” (Nair, “‘Invented Histories,’” 175), and thus signaling Lamming's effort to keep open the possibility of productive, if necessarily agonistic, communication.31 In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming pointedly lays claim to Caribbean people's creative political agency, asserting that, at the historical juncture in which he was writing, “the language of modern politics is no longer Prospero's exclusive vocabulary. It is Caliban's as well” (158). The implicit corollary to this situation is provided in a different section of the book, in which Lamming asserts that “the time is ripe—but may go rotten—when masters must learn to read the meaning contained in the signatures of their former slaves” (63). If Lamming was interested in fashioning a future, Caribbean reader, he also directed this activist concern elsewhere, toward a present audience based in Britain. As he insists in The Pleasures of Exile, the correct question to ask regarding the Windrush generation of novelists is not what they have contributed to English writing, but “what the West Indian novelists have contributed to English reading” (44, emphasis added).32 Addressing their historical moment, Lamming's difficult novels propose a model of reading aimed at productively defusing the tensions and potential misunderstandings arising from two simultaneous phenomena: the unprecedented Caribbean immigration to Britain as well as the contentious politics of postwar decolonization.
At the beginning of The Emigrants, Lamming provides a portrayal of reading that argues for the act as a crucially generative, if fragile, nexus of knowledge, action, and human meaning. The narrator of the novel, in a recollection of how he got on the ship sailing for England, discusses the turning point in this stage of his life—a realization that the freedom he had been enjoying in Trinidad was a purely private, personal, and contextually limited endowment. At this moment, he comes to realize that his newfound independence “was a child's freedom, the freedom too of some lately emancipated colonials…. It was a private and personal acquisition, and I used it as a man uses what is private and personal, like his penis” (13). Directly contiguous to the narrator's epiphany about the boundaries of a solipsistic liberty is his day spent reading a novel entitled The Living Novel. His description of this reading reveals it to be emblematic of bad reading practice: he recounts that he “read it as though by habit, page after page for several hours” (14), emphasizing the routine, unengaged, and mechanical nature of such a practice. Immediately after this description, the narration moves on to the fragmented monologue of the narrator to his friend, who, though listening, “nodded keeping his head down as though it made no difference what was said” (14). Like the narrator's reading, his unnamed friend is merely reacting automatically, not truly responding to the words, but instead placidly agreeing with whatever is said. What Lamming presents here is a collocation of juxtaposed events all vividly symbolizing the malaise that leads to his narrator's departure. A lack of engagement and interaction are at the heart of this malaise: the juvenile sense of personal freedom, the disengaged reading, and the hollowly mechanical “dialogue” all appear to be undirected, aimless, ultimately private activities. The narrator underscores the sense of meaningless stasis, saying, “The Novel was alive, though dead. This freedom was simply dead” (14). The book clearly censures this type of mindless unsubstantial activity, and although the novel form seems to hold out some promise of life, a lifeless, habitual, disengaged style of reading—one that does not actively seek understanding or connection—cannot bear this promise out. Lamming's juxtaposition of three apparently unrelated activities in this scene formally conveys the suggestion that the breath of The Living Novel can only be provided by a reader's own attentive engagement with the text.
At a climactic moment in Of Age and Innocence, Lamming makes a similar, if more overt, claim about what is at stake in the practice of reading, again warning against the dangers of an insensitive consumption of texts. In this scene it is Bill, the somewhat sympathetic British character who has been devastated by the loss of his girlfriend Penelope in the asylum fire, who is depicted as a self-absorbed, inattentive reader. The text in question is a scrap of his friend Mark's diary that Bill discovers, which despite the import of its contents only reconfirms the confused, vengeful thoughts that have already been accumulating in Bill's mind. As he first looks at the paper, Bill “could hear nothing but the silence of the paper spread across his hands and the weight of the gun in his pocket” (305), as both his inability to “hear” what the writing is saying and its link to thoughtless violence are indicated. When he finally reads the paper, he does so in a careless and opportunistically utilitarian manner: “he read a line, skipped angrily over a passage which seemed irrelevant to his need, and then continued…waiting for the name of Shephard to increase his frenzy” (307). Lamming makes clear in this passage that Bill is not truly reading, but simply using the text as a pretext for confirming his own prejudices. Indeed, it is implied that Bill can hear only himself out of the words on the page, as just before he begins to read, he can “hear nothing but his breathing against the paper which lay across his hands” (306).33 The effect of Bill's bad reading practice is to harden his own inclinations toward murdering Shephard into a lunatic clarity that the scrap of diary “defined his duty. His mind was free from the slightest fear of consequences, closed to any doubt about the origin of the fire” (307). This narrow, self-serving certitude is, ironically, precisely what the passage from Mark's diary decried (as well as something consistently devalued in Lamming's oeuvre). Mark's thoughts specifically, in fact, postulate that a passion for revenge inevitably leads to self-destruction, such that Bill's actions are directly counter to the clear-cut message of the text he “reads.” Although the concreteness of the connection between bad reading and violence may seem a bit heavy-handed—perhaps in part due to being dramatized in a more realist manner rather than formally conveyed—the seriousness of a sensitively engaged reading practice is clearly articulated.34
At the root of this seriousness, of course, is a postcolonial variation on a venerable literary dilemma: how to put literary revelations and lessons into operation in the world, as it were, writ large. For Lamming, the poles of the literary and the real find unification in the recurrent need for what could be called semiological estrangement, that is, an approach to the world (and/as text) that consistently reexamines, re-views, and recalibrates. While it would be reductive to claim that Lamming writes difficult novels because the reality he is describing is likewise complex, it nevertheless seems that the engagement that his difficulty aims to generate in his readers would ideally extend well outside the confines of merely reading a book. Parallel to Bill's irresponsible reading habits in Of Age and Innocence, an inability to decipher the words, gestures, faces, and facts around them frequently distinguishes the least valorized characters in Lamming's works. The inhumane police chief Crabbe—who serves as that novel's exemplar of authoritarian colonial power—is a noteworthy example. A police officer who goes against Crabbe's orders in aiding the newly emergent political order explains his actions by reference to Crabbe's conscious social alexia: “‘An’ I was loyal in my fashion,’ he said, ‘I was loyal. I can do it again, till Crabbe an’ all like Crabbe learn not to take this face for granted like some rock you don't care to read. My face hold a meanin’ too, an’ any stranger here must read me like one man learn to read another he hold in friendship’” (389).
A similar portrayal of human interaction undermined by bad “reading” practices occurs in The Emigrants between Mr. Pearson and Collis. In analyzing this scene, Paquet aptly observes that both characters “are trapped by inherited colonial attitudes and postures” (Novels of George Lamming, 40). Although the English Mr. Pearson makes efforts to overcome his prejudices and be considerate to his emigré visitor, he ultimately fails in his interactions with Collis. After an unsettling telephone call from his factory dramatically sours the mood (thus suggesting the dehumanizing demands of capital), Pearson enacts his own power-enabled conception of social intercourse as “an encounter between a definition and a response” (139), reducing Collis from someone himself capable of defining and judging to a being acting with pure reflex to the terms already set. At this juncture, “Collis understood that he did not then exist for Mr. Pearson, and he understood too that Mr. Pearson didn't exist for himself” (139). The twofold disintegration of personhood depicted here, in which interlocutors rehearse old prejudices and cease to do justice to the other's subjective consciousness, is once again something Lamming would term “colonial,” the easy trap of rote behavior that his fiction seeks to disrupt (and it is no accident that in both examples above, the interaction proceeds along familiar colonial fault lines of race and class). Paquet maintains that such encounters in the novel are “invariably destructive to the emigrant psyche” (40). However, the moments of possibility for connection in this scene, ultimately foreclosed but palpably present before the interruption of the telephone call, point to a potential for stepping beyond these rote roles. In an echo of the ethical dictum of Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office, Lamming suggests here and throughout his work that one must approach others in a spirit of analytic openness, paying the solicitous attention necessary to decipher the rich network of impressions, desires, and historical experience bound within even one person.
Such a stance accounts for the prevalence in Lamming's novels of scenes of long, tortuously uncertain, and conflicted conversations. If the frequency and intensity of politically fraught (and ultimately allegorical) interpersonal encounters increase markedly in Lamming's late novels, Natives of My Person and Water with Berries, his early novels nevertheless display a similar investment in careful intersubjective congress. As Paquet makes clear, this practice serves, crucially, as an aesthetic insistence “that the worlds of personal relationships and private self are intimately connected with the world of politics” (57). Additionally, it brings Lamming's novels into a noticeable alignment with Woolf's, in that an intricate oscillation between individual consciousness and public interaction characterizes her most prominent experimental works, especially Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. While Woolf's primary focus is certainly more Anglocentric—that is, less obviously anticolonial—than Lamming's, both writers share a concern with the deep, inner complexity of human consciousness. Woolf's well-known description of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” bears an obvious affinity with Lamming's interest in portraying the convolutions of everyday thought processes. As she observes: “The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there” (“Modern Fiction,” 106). For Woolf, as for Lamming, the impulse to represent these mental processes with such minute sensitivity is positioned in opposition to “the accepted style” (106), serving as a necessary part of fiction's moral thrust toward disrupting the reflexive simplifications of social intercourse.
A positive statement of this ethical obligation to accord due interpretative attention to others takes place in The Emigrants in Lamming's depiction of the basement barbershop, a space offering a comparatively comforting community within the harsh alien environs of England. It is, at least, a location where the men can be secure in the knowledge that “they were not in the wrong place” (127) (though with the litotes, Lamming signals the always partial, tenuous nature of such security).35 Although Azi—whose language is “a deliberate approximation to the text” (129)—seems to disrupt the communal communication to some degree with a type of stilted, automated response, the general model of attentive, respectful communication holds in this scene. The barber himself embodies this sensitivity most vividly, as he realizes that the men in the room “were his immediate community, and any word, attitude, gesture, was an occasion for thinking” (128). It is this carefully thoughtful approach to otherness that Lamming's difficulty aims to inculcate in his readers, in relation to his books themselves, as well as to words, attitudes, and gestures encountered in the world.
While this implied equivalence between the text and the world is open to a number of critiques, Lamming's view is consonant with Derek Attridge's more recent attempts to argue for a structural parallel between reading an unfamiliar text and encountering “the other.” Attridge posits that meaningful reading “involves working against the mind's tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard, registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling in a particular work” (“Innovation, Literature, Ethics,” 25). The language employed here is redolent of the emphasis in Season of Adventure on Fola's awakening to the conscious realization of herself as “Fola and other than” (174–75), which might serve as a representative figure for this concern in Lamming's work. As in Lamming's portrayal of Fola, Attridge takes care to emphasize that the other thus understood is “a relation or relating rather than an object,” an “act-event” that is “not a fixed set of signifiers or signifieds but something like a potential meaning awaiting realization without wholly determining it in advance” (25).36 Lamming's novels suggest a similar model, aligning sensitivity to textual nuance with an ethical posture toward other people. A simple example of this sensitivity occurs near the end of The Emigrants, when the narrator encounters a pensioner in the street. When faced with the elderly man's stereotypical, presumptuous question about whether he is African, the narrator, rather than taking offense or aggressively countering the question, simply replies: “No, but I know what you mean” (225). In doing so, the narrator reveals a tolerant understanding of the ignorance of his interlocutor, without allowing it to remain unchallenged. For Lamming, such hermeneutics of social communication are foundational, and he has consistently held that it is a universal ethical duty—particularly but not exclusively catalyzed by writers and artists—to preserve a space of consideration, to express the obligation to “deal effectively with that gap, that distance which separates one man from another” (Conversations, 40). Whether at the level of theme or form—between two characters or between reader and text—the difficulty of Lamming's novels highlights the need for such an attentive interpretive reciprocity, a process at the heart of Lamming's vision of social democracy as a “free community of valid persons” (Sovereignty of the Imagination, 1).37 Far from a coercive, arguably imperial demand for understanding the point of his works (a stance frequently, if sometimes unfairly, associated with earlier modernist “genius” figures), Lamming's artistic plea to his audience is simply respectful engagement with the intricacies of ideas and language. The resistance to facile interpretation so prevalent in his works coveys this entreaty, modeling “how extraordinary are the multiple frontiers of behavior we have to explore and negotiate to find ways of entering with courtesy into each other's world” (Sovereignty of the Imagination, 54).
As the intricate, and often failed, attempts at personal interaction in Lamming's work emphasize, however, this epistemologically receptive disposition brings with it no simple guarantees of agreement or commonality. The novels take care to illustrate that any ethics of rigorously open-minded analysis is constantly challenged by the intrusion of mundane, individual concerns that disrupt its efficacy. Lamming has described the travails of an ordinary person seeking to understand the world: “even if the desire for struggle is real, the urgencies of living make it very difficult to sustain his interest: because there is something to be done, something which requires his immediate attention if life is to be liveable. Day-to-day living keeps intruding on that private and solitary world of concerns. It may take the form of the bad-tempered husband who makes trouble when he cannot find something more dramatic to occupy his energy. Or the rent is overdue” (Conversations, 42). There is a recognition here of competing demands and responsibilities, the persistent incursion of the outside world—often in the form of other people's needs—into an individual's potential space of reflection and consideration. Moreover, as in the case of Collis and Mr. Pearson in The Emigrants (or, even more so, Teeton and the Old Dowager in Water with Berries), the historical weight of habit and customary understanding must also be reckoned with.
Even within the nominally cohesive community of the village in In the Castle of My Skin, historically conditioned understandings disrupt relationships at the most basic level. Lamming emphasizes this troubling state of affairs via the discursive phenomenon the narrator calls “My People.” The capitalization of the phrase underscores its inertly hegemonic presence, and the term describes an all-encompassing colonized mindset, a self-hatred inculcated by racism through the mechanism of the plantation overseer. Everybody is “affected by this image of the enemy which had had its origin in a layer from which many had sprung and through accidents of time and experience forgotten” (26). The internalized racial discrimination against their neighbors, and even friends, affects the villagers everywhere and at all times: “Suspicion, distrust, hostility. These operated in every decision. You never can tell with my people” (27). The Emigrants, too, in its painful ending, gives the lie to any straightforwardly utopian conceptions of solidarity resulting from a careful sensitivity to the surrounding world. In the final scene, the Governor is importuned by the Strange Man's recollection of their earlier oaths of communal loyalty, “how de las’ time de chaps say how in rain or sun, poor or rich they'd always stick together” (268). However, when confronted with the prospect of offering hospitality to a large group of new arrivants, “the Governor seemed to collapse. He felt no loyalty towards the crowd outside” (268). When he looks to Collis for some confirmation of a requisite group loyalty, Collis flatly denies it, asserting, “I have no people” (270). The private prerogatives and priorities of these characters—in many ways incommunicable to each other—disrupt any easy notions of even the most apparently justifiable solidarities. For Lamming, individual sovereignties (the term he often employs for a person's ability to analyze for themselves) will not unproblematically overlap or agree, and whole communities cannot be expected to cohere magically without tension and struggle.38
Thus, the expanded notion of reading revealed in Lamming's novels points to a further iteration of difficulty embodied in the texts’ politics of interpretation: a recognition of the complex, contending relations between individuals themselves, and their consequences on notions of community. The difficult relationship between individual and community in Lamming's oeuvre has been noted by critics such as Paquet, whose monograph in fact begins with the perceptive claim that Lamming's novels always center around the relation between individual and community, private and public: “private experience is examined in relation to the larger public events at the centre of every novel” (Novels of George Lamming, 1). If the emphasis for Paquet is often on the determinant structuring effects of the colonial system—a unidirectional outlook that risks underplaying Lamming's immense concern with the creative potential within individual subjectivity—the identification of an ongoing, unresolved tension between these two spheres in Lamming's work is irrefutable. The discomfort between Fola and various members of the tonelle community (not to mention her own family) is illustrative in this regard: despite her exceptional efforts to understand and act in solidarity, there is palpable and ineradicable tension in Fola's interactions with others throughout the novel, parallel to that expressed in the “Author's Note” vis-à-vis Powell. As Ramchand has suggested in “The Artist in the Balm-Yard,” the complexity of Season of Adventure arises from the novel's attempts to relate individual to community simultaneously, an uneasy effort whose lack of conclusion conveys a good deal of suspicion about the ease of intracommunal allegiance.
In the Castle of My Skin, of course, traces in great detail this same tension between individual attainment and community responsibility, with narrative resolution eschewed in favor of G.’s uneasy embarkation into exile. In his early review of Paquet's The Novels of George Lamming, John Thieme almost offhandedly observes that Lamming's “whole oeuvre to date represents an attempt to reconcile divergent impulses towards individualism and community” (22). Thieme maintains that such an attempt is essayed in Lamming's novels via formal means, “through apparently centrifugal blocks of narrative in which conventional plot interest is surrendered in favour of a mode which gradually reveals how individuals interact and function as parts of a community” (22). Thieme's description is insightful, though the notion of reconciliation in any of Lamming's novels—which famously end in exile, discord, uncertainty, betrayal, uneasy peace, or explosive violence—does not properly capture the combative way in which Lamming's works resist interpretive closure. Thieme's naming of Lamming's “apparently centrifugal blocks of narrative,” however, preserves the notion of personal and social contradiction more effectively, hinting at a much more dialectical approach to the world contained within the form of Lamming's work. In the Castle of My Skin can illustrate this approach, enlarging as it does from a discrete consciousness to a much broader sociohistorical understanding of what is experienced, what Jameson has described as “a widening out of the sense of the social ground of a text” (Political Unconscious, 75).
The entire narrative energy of In the Castle of My Skin strains for this widening of the social ground beyond the circumscribed world of G.’s personal subjectivity to Creighton's village and ultimately the political economy of the island itself (while The Emigrants, Lamming's subsequent novel, expands its narrative space even further, to the social and political environs of England). In the former, this instructive widening finds thematic expression in the character of the shoemaker, who is approvingly described as thinking for “the first time…of Little England [i.e., Barbados] as a part of some gigantic thing called colonial” (99). The formal expression of this principle occurs in the increasing scope of the separate segments of the book, from the students’ first early questionings of imperial dogma, to the boys’ earnest philosophizing on the beach, on to the revelation of Slime's ties to foreign capital and Trumper's own racial epiphany garnered from his travels in the United States. While Neil ten Kortenaar is right to say that the novel heavily emphasizes the fact that “Trumper has recognized the connections that in the modern world bind human beings together and bind some hand and foot” (“George Lamming's,” 53), his mistaken insistence that the novel gives Trumper the last word—and the subsequent weight he (along with other critics) gives to Trumper's somewhat monological understanding of the world—ignores more subtle messages contained within the text as a whole.39 Indeed, Trumper's invocation of the phrase “My People” (295) duplicates the phrase (also capitalized) used to describe the phenomenon of implacable internecine suspicion that poisons village life earlier in the book. The narrative in fact casts suspicion on Trumper's stance, questioning its rigidity and closed-minded self-certainty: “Whatever he suffered his assurance was astonishing. He had found what he needed and there were no more problems to be worked out. Henceforth his life would be straight, even, uncomplicated” (298). Later, G. confirms the damaging effects of Trumper's self-assurance when he relates that “it was as though [Trumper] knew what I wanted to say and it didn't matter because he knew what was wrong” (301).40
Furthermore, contrary to ten Kortenaar's claim, Trumper is not given the last word in the novel: G., as narrator, is, and indeed, G.’s final conversation is not even with Trumper but with Pa, who, like the shoemaker, represents someone constantly seeking new answers. Pa's creative intellect, capable of “using the same raw materials to produce different dreams” (83), stands in sharp contrast to the conceptually moribund future predicted for Trumper. Pa, like Trumper, has been abroad, in his case to Panama: as Lamming notes in his interview with Scott, Pa “has worlds to compare” (“Sovereignty of the Imagination,” 152). The crucial difference seems to be Pa's consistent efforts to question and reexamine his present circumstances, rather than simply relying on past lessons: his multiple “worlds” provoke broader, more diverse horizons than the narrow homogeneity of Trumper's “My People.” The narrative drive of the novel, then, works in an ever-expanding scope: it clearly marks the important aspects of Trumper's view—the need for communal action against the forces of socioeconomic oppression and exploitation—but refuses the ideological closure that he advocates. From this important global insight, the novel returns to the singular, particular viewpoint of G., dialectically subsuming the former back into a consideration once again by the latter's skeptical consciousness.
Thus, In the Castle of My Skin suggests that the reader Lamming seeks to construct might best be described as a carefully dialectical one. What Thieme calls “centrifugal blocks”—certainly the main component of difficulty blocking transparent, conventional readings of Lamming's earliest novels—formally call forth the necessary analytical traits of making (and reformulating) wider connections and contextualizing (and recontextualizing) in an ever-widening sphere of understanding, which in turn allows for a revised view of one's own personal position. An example of this type of thinking occurs in Lamming's 1956 address to the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, “The Negro Writer and His World,” in which Lamming resists the limitations of the particularizing term “negro writer,” in lieu of putting emphasis on “his world” and, more particularly, the interlocking relations between that writer and “his world.”41 While acknowledging the overwhelming nature of the suffering inflicted on black people worldwide, Lamming maintains that it is essential that any writer, when writing or thinking about the situation, does not lose sight of “the connection between the disaster which threatens to reduce him and the wider context and condition of which his disaster is but the clearest example” (Conversations, 45). In a later essay, Sovereignty of the Imagination, Lamming articulates the importance he places on wider contexts, describing his Christian upbringing in Barbados as a form of indoctrination, not due to the moralizing content or even the strictness with which it was enforced, but fundamentally because it did not include any meaningful context. Such training fails, in his view, because it “never provided me with a critique of my relation to where I was born or the social forces shaping my belief” (3). In the same essay, Lamming declares that the exploration of contextual connections is the basis of his artistic and intellectual project: “I work from the assumption that a mode of perception is not autonomous. It evolves and matures within a specific context, and its function reflects the context from which it is inseparable” (34–35). Critical analysis, he goes on to say, is predicated on the need to “seek to identify, isolate, and define the various components of a particular context” (35). Reflection on wider, systemic circumstances, followed by a return to one's personal experience, thus marks the continuous, shifting, and active cycle of reading that Lamming envisions for his audience. The unremitting nature of this process, however, suggests its inability to provide a permanently stable or predictable basis for community agreement.
Lamming's work, then, consistently argues that “what a person thinks is very much determined by the way that person sees” (Pleasures of Exile, 56)—that is, the way that person interprets the world. As Munro observes, for Lamming political change can only be achieved in conjunction with “a profound change in outlook” (“George Lamming,” 168) or, as Imre Szeman describes it, “the politics of consciousness must precede any other politics” (Zones of Instability, 79). Lamming's novels thus work to advance a longstanding modernist tenet (by now something of a truism) that the reader has a consequential role in constructing meaning.42 In Lamming's writing, this view also finds specific resonance with one of the most fundamental of Marx's insights about subjects actively creating, within material limitations, their own consciousnesses and material surroundings.43 Properly reading, for Lamming, thus becomes an intricate process in which one must constantly strive to comprehend sociolinguistic exchange within its broader social and historical determinants. These determinants in Lamming's work are centered on recognizable postcolonial concerns—namely, the historical, psychological, and economic effects of imperialism—but they are, perhaps vexingly, mediated through a complex web of individual experiences and predispositions that resist any simple categorical reduction. As Lamming emphasizes, no individual can depend upon a purely private understanding as accurate; for the writer, as for everybody, self-understanding is “modified, even made possible, by the world in which he moves among other men. Much as he might like to think it otherwise, it is through the presence of others that his own presence is given meaning” (Conversations, 44). Lamming's work is thus designed to create a reader who recognizes this interdependence and subsequently understands that “knowledge is therefore social in character” (Sovereignty of the Imagination, 35). However, Lamming also acknowledges the limits to creative human freedom by signaling the presence of power within social relations, such that the role of humanistic pursuit is limited to one that “helps us to understand, what is the context of power, the character of that social reality within which those individual personal relationships take place, because those personal relationships cannot be regarded as having an autonomy. Those individual personal relationships have got to be in some way a reflection of another reality which is social” (Conversations, 204). The act of reading imagined in and demanded by Lamming's novels thus involves intense self-critical perception, “an unending process of thinking of how one has always to rework the ways in which one claims and exercises the power and the authority of an individual and subjective perspective” (“Sovereignty of the Imagination,” 123). His work, in however utopian a way, seeks to inculcate these tendencies in its readers, contemporary and future, Caribbean and Euro-American, directly confronting them with the need to take into account the responsibilities of interpretation and its subsequent ramifications in the material and political spheres.44
The notions of engagement that the difficulty of Lamming's work solicits, then, encompass several distinct but overlapping meanings. In the context of a postwar British audience steeped in a racially hierarchical worldview, this engagement appears initially in a more militant vein, seeking to confront and disrupt dominant reading practices that would either overlook the important differences between Lamming's writing and that of his British contemporaries—simply assimilate it, in other words—or treat it as an exoticized, primitive, “natural” object of merely anthropological interest. This combative element also has unmistakable utility in the Caribbean context as a foundational step in the process of what Lamming sees as mental decolonization by questioning and undermining the easy certainties inherited from colonial rule. However, the engagement that Lamming's texts seem to invite from readers also takes on a slightly more constructive, conciliatory tint appropriate to the tense situations resulting from Great Britain's postwar imperial decline. In this context, the difficult structures of Lamming's novels first of all encourage a careful opening out of the reader's consideration from the detailed, intricate negotiations of an individual consciousness—certainly never given short shrift in any of Lamming's novels—to the complicated, often contending relationships such consciousness inevitably provokes with both other individuals and larger social, economic, and political currents. The novels’ challenging techniques—such as the persistent juxtaposition of the competing views and aspirations of the different characters in The Emigrants or the abrupt alternation between characters’ intense internal ruminations and occurrences in the external, political realm in Of Age and Innocence—oblige the reader to provide connections in an ever-expanding, ever-changing context, to reconcile disparate, even contradictory elements into a meaningful whole. In this sense, Lamming's novels oblige the reader to enact a specific ethic of reading, making visible in the process that the interpretive act is an intersubjective negotiation. Placing particular emphasis on the mutual creation of meaning, Lamming thereby suggests the subject's potentially powerful role in creating his or her own material and cultural surroundings. With the literary as the primary example, Lamming parallels communication with simply being in the world, arguing that neither can properly be undertaken unless one consistently operates with a reciprocally agreed recognition of others as thinking, feeling subjects.
In the passionate belief that language “is always at the heart of our response to conduct” (interview, by Munro and Sander, 15), Lamming's novels—echoing Woolf's—seem designed to question, challenge, and oblige reconsideration of the uses to which language has been and continues to be put. His adoption of modernism's difficult, counterconventional forms, not to mention its utopian energies, operates on several levels, articulating a forcefully distinct Caribbean worldview while simultaneously addressing, with both assertiveness and sympathy, a wider metropolitan audience. For Lamming, the difficulty of modernist style provides a forceful mechanism for conveying his insistence that Caribbean people be treated as creative, thinking human beings, as well as his adamant belief that, for all people, ethical interchange necessitates a skeptical and supremely sensitive epistemological disposition.