Nationality (if it really is not a convenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels of present-day scientists have given the coup de grâce) must find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word.
—James Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”
Although both Mittelholzer and Lamming were readily associated with a serious, high intellectual tradition of experimental writing, the work of Samuel Selvon (who famously traveled to Britain in 1950 on the same boat as Lamming) is often understood in much different terms. Noted especially for its skillful use of creole language forms and its comedic vivacity, Selvon's writing has conventionally been read as colorful, intuitive, light-hearted reportage, rather than an artful product of thoughtful literary construction—a perception that remains active in present-day Caribbean criticism. Interestingly, it is Lamming himself who serves as an authoritative source for the idea of Selvon as a simple, naturally endowed folk writer. In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming describes Selvon's writing as “essentially peasant” and characterizes this quality as something unattributable to anything but its author's spontaneous, natural genius: “no artifice of technique, no sophisticated gimmicks leading to the mutilation of form, can achieve the specific taste and sound of Selvon's prose” (45). Taking Lamming's cue in a 1977 article, Frank Birbalsingh, in one of the first scholarly arguments for Selvon's importance as a founding figure of West Indian literature, classifies Selvon as a writer who “lacked the firm, intellectual underpinning” necessary for what Birbalsingh considers genuine literary greatness. However, the critic concedes, Selvon is nevertheless important, since “what one misses of intellectual interest and technical control in Selvon's work, one gains in humour, compassion and ultimately pathos” (“Samuel Selvon,” 20). Such early, influential Caribbean commentary falls within a line of argument that in fact echoes the tendency of early British literary reviewers to perceive of Selvon as an effortlessly talented, almost primitive artist.1 If, as Louis James observes, “Selvon in the 1950s and 1960s was himself largely disregarded as a serious writer” (“Writing the Ballad,” 104), a form of this ambiguously condescending attitude has dogged Selvon's reputation into more contemporary literary debates.2
Subsequent critical discussion has at times positioned itself against this influential view of Selvon as the unselfconscious embodiment of folk genius. For instance, Susheila Nasta presents her 1988 compilation, Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, as in part an effort to circumvent the “obvious limitations in a strictly ‘peasant’ approach to Selvon's fiction” (9), asserting that Selvon's writing is “clearly the result of a conscious and sophisticated craft” (8). Nasta includes an article by Harold Barratt—“Dialect, Maturity, and the Land in Sam Selvon's A Brighter Sun: A Reply”—that explicitly articulates this view. In response to Birbalsingh's seminal assessment of Selvon, Barratt argues instead for the author's craftsmanship, asserting that Birbalsingh's comments “tend to reduce Selvon to the status of, say, a mediocre painter who reproduces a West Indian beach scene with such photographic accuracy that it becomes a cliché with no character of its own” (331).3 One of the most prominent and polemical examples of criticism opposed to the characterization of Selvon as an intuitive, untutored author is Kenneth Ramchand's introduction to the Longman Caribbean Writers Series 1985 reissue of The Lonely Londoners. In this introduction (a reworking of his pointedly named 1982 article “The Lonely Londoners as a Literary Work”), Ramchand takes great care to argue for the novel as a consciously composed text, seeking to redress a situation in which “it has become usual to speak of the narrator's stance in The Lonely Londoners as being similar to that of a calypsonian” (“Introduction to This Novel,” 10). For Ramchand, such a view is harmful in that it has “been accompanied by a willingness to concede that this book is loose or episodic” (10). Accordingly, he focuses on delineating the novel's narrative technique such that “we are drawn to recognize in Selvon's literary artefact a tightness of structure…subtlety in the development and revelation of theme; linguistic cunning; and an appropriateness in the presentation and deployment of characters” (10). In characterizing the novel as an “artefact,” Ramchand makes clear that Selvon's work should be appreciated not as an arbitrary series of humorous sketches but as a complex and sophisticated piece of literary art. Ramchand likewise makes clear his views regarding the political valence of these readings, observing in the competing, calypsonian interpretation a subtext of purist cultural nationalism: “beware, the implied argument seems to run, beware of using Eurocentric critical tools to assess our literature” (10).
Ramchand's assessment brings out with unusual clarity the antinomy that structures much critical reception of Selvon's work by both the postwar London commentariat and his more contemporary critics: an often absolute choice between championing Selvon as a true West Indian folk artist or recognizing his achievements within a system of traditional British literary values. This antinomy, of course, lies at the foundation of a stubborn postcolonial debate about cultural singularity and difference, in which a localized cultural nationalism, purportedly free of any European taint and frequently associated with “the folk,” is juxtaposed with an insistence on the values of a definition of high culture coded as European.4 The scholarly debate surrounding Selvon indeed has the contours of just such an uneasy opposition, oscillating between contentions that his novels are best read either as articulations of simple, yet valuable West Indian folk customs or as something more worldly and consciously crafted and, hence, more conversant with European literary tradition. One irony of such a debate, of course, is that critics who insist too strongly on Selvon's innate, natural peasant style of writing risk duplicating the early, racially tinged British characterization of his novels as the amusing products of a primitive prodigy uncorrupted by European cultural norms (as well as the dismissal of Selvon's attempts to write more philosophical novels engaged with urban, international themes). A deeper irony emerges if one examines Selvon's first three novels—A Brighter Sun (1952), An Island Is a World (1953), and The Lonely Londoners (1956)—as an accumulating series of formal literary experiments in the modernist vein. Seen through such a lens, these three novels (and, indeed, almost all of Selvon's writings) take shape as literary-formal arguments designed to counteract and ideally overcome the stubborn disjunction between the terms “Caribbean” and “cosmopolitan.” In this way, as the epigraph to this chapter intimates, both the aims and the execution of Selvon's work hold subtle resonances with that of his modernist forebear James Joyce. Despite their obvious differences, both authors employed a marked variety of linguistic and narrative experimentation as a means of gesturing toward the need for a complex, nonreified understanding of cultural and political identity, an identity that might be “rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word.” Vincent Cheng's postcolonially inflected characterization of Joyce's texts argues that they “advocate and allow for a simultaneous acceptance of (on the one hand) heterogeneity and difference, and (on the other) a potential sameness and solidarity of similarities-in-difference shared by different peoples, within an inter-cultural, inter-national perspective” (Joyce, Race, and Empire, 293).5 As this chapter hopes to show, Selvon's novels embark on much the same task in—appropriately enough—both parallel and divergent ways.
Selvon's first novel, A Brighter Sun, poignantly advances a message of interethnic equality and understanding. Deceptively simple (perhaps similar in this way to Joyce's debut book, Dubliners), the novel generally presents itself as a conventional bildungsroman, detailing the maturation and increasing consciousness of its young Indo-Trinidadian protagonist, Tiger. On its face, A Brighter Sun contains little that would counteract a reader's understanding of it as a straightforwardly descriptive realist narrative, and its central thematic concern—Tiger's recognition of the underlying humanity of all people—is thus difficult to overlook. Tiger's ruminations following his extended family's prejudiced behavior toward his African-Trinidadian neighbors, Joe and Rita, indicate the beginning of this recognition. Responding to his relatives’ insistence that he find some Indo-Trinidadian friends, Tiger thinks,” Why I should only look for Indian friend?…Is true I used to play with Indian friend in the estate, but that ain't no reason why I must shut my heart to other people. Ain't a man is a man, don't mind if he skin not white, or if he hair curl?” (48). Tiger confirms this slowly consolidating ecumenical outlook near the end of the novel when he remarks to Joe, “it look to me as if everybody is the same,” proposing that instead of emphasizing his Indian ancestry by wearing a dhoti, he should “think of all of we as a whole, living in one country, fighting for we rights” (195). This conversation caps Tiger and Joe's halting but ultimately successful efforts to forge a friendship despite their differing ethnic and racial backgrounds, candidly signaling the novel's affirmative views on intra-island solidarity.6 The book's emphasis on Tiger's deeply philosophical musings on society and the significance of human life, coupled with his painstaking sloughing off of prejudice, marks Selvon's attempts to portray Tiger as a complex human being who comes to a hard-won conclusion about the necessity of recognizing and cultivating the foundational links between people of all kinds.
There is only one formally unorthodox feature in the novel: many of the chapters begin with factual descriptions of international events that gradually telescope down into local Trinidadian happenings. This feature serves to underscore the book's primary concern, discussed above, with linkage and belonging. Though Simon Gikandi's Writing in Limbo interprets these “newsreel” openings (which some reviewers compared to John Dos Passos's manipulation of journalistic accounts) as essentially comic juxtapositions illustrating the remoteness and relative unimportance of Trinidad, they can also be read as narrative mechanisms connecting Tiger's circumscribed but ever-expanding world with the world as such. While it is true that Tiger (along with Selvon himself) expresses doubts about the meaningfulness of so small a country as Trinidad within the global context, the profound role that the American road and base construction has on everybody in the novel certainly indicates the connection between Trinidad and larger historical events: jobs proliferate, new cultural forces appear, rivalries between soldiers and local men come to a head. The chapter beginnings increasingly interweave international developments with more serious local effects, and the last occurrence of the news listings, in the final chapter of the novel, describes significant local changes directly resulting from the end of the war:
V-E and V-J Day celebrations were marked by patriotic demonstrations and wild merriment; steel bands, growing in the war years, took to the streets for the first time, and pandemonium reigned as Trinidadians were allowed to indulge in two days of Carnival…. Censorship was stopped altogether, motorcar zoning abolished, and restaurants were allowed to serve meals late in the evening. In the sugar and oil industries wage agreements were signed, but many people were still out of work, and labourers marched in the street with placards, and a delegation visited the Governor, seeking relief. (210)
This passage, while emphasizing in some ways the overwhelming control the Trinidadian colonial government exercised during wartime, also pointedly notes postwar ramifications at the very heart of modern Trinidad's self-conception—labor struggle and the music of Carnival. In doing so, Selvon would seem to suggest not simply a comedic dismissal of Trinidad's negligible status vis-à-vis the wider world, but an insistence on its intimate connection, however unacknowledged or overlooked, with international affairs. Indeed, Tiger's final worries about stasis in Trinidad express frustration with the way in which his fellow islanders seem oblivious to the fact that they exist in a wider world: “there was too much of this sameness, all over, in the gardens, in the shops, in the village streets. What difference did anything make? It seemed no one knew that a battle had been won” (214). This portrayal suggests not the lack of an important connection with the wider world, but the lack of an awareness of such a connection on the part of most Trinidadians.7 The “newsreel” passages, then, can be seen to address this shortcoming, reinforcing the book's claims about the need to recognize meaningful linkages across cultural and geographical boundaries.
Although Selvon's first novel thus attempts to underscore Tiger's fundamental humanity and his connections to people throughout the world, the vast bulk of the critical reception of A Brighter Sun tended to read the novel in a much less inclusive way. The British response consistently obscured the book's apparent message of a unified humanity by distancing both the novel's characters and its author as guilelessly primitive natives who come from an unalterably foreign, exotic part of the world. In the Manchester Guardian, for example, Elizabeth Jenkins emphasizes the strange and the simple in her two-sentence review of the novel, describing it as “a very touching and attractive picture of native life in Trinidad and the marriage of two young West Indians, Tiger and Urmilla, who in Europe would be still at school.” A notice in New Commonwealth treats the work as mainly of anthropological interest, suggesting that the “novel thus has documentary value, in addition to the appeal of its unusual setting.”8 Naipaul, in the New Statesman, looking back at A Brighter Sun in 1958 (upon Selvon's publication of a sequel, Turn Again, Tiger), also emphasizes the uncomplicated charm of Selvon's first novel, describing it in familiar terms as a “simple, lyrical and moving book” (826).
In addition to the characters and the setting, Selvon himself gets characterized in a faintly condescending, unflattering light.9 The Times Literary Supplement, for example, praises A Brighter Sun quite highly, calling it “a first novel of quite remarkable quality” and complimenting Selvon on “his handling of the picturesque native idiom.” However, it finishes with a somewhat backhanded bit of praise, comparing the novel to Douglas Firbank's Prancing Nigger and remarking how unusual it is to find a writer who can describe “the quality of native colonial life so dispassionately and with such literary skill when he himself has been a member of a similar community to that which he describes.” Although this review implies in some sense that it is the book's disinterested portrayal that is so remarkable, there lurks beneath this a palpable surprise at how talented the “native” writer actually is (Ross, “Struggle for Existence”). Lionel Hale's review in the Sunday Observer also compliments Selvon's realistic portrayal, but Hale, too, suggests that the book's “natural and dramatic rhythms” are largely a product of simple mimetic reflection. Even the Times Literary Supplement’s 1972 review of the paperback reissue of A Brighter Sun describes the novel as “a simple account of life in a Trinidadian village” and, echoing the “calpysonian” account of The Lonely Londoners, contends that “it is not so much a novel as a series of portraits loosely strung together” (“Storm-Tossed”).10 Citing Lamming's depiction of Selvon as a folk poet, the reviewer opines that the latter is not so much a novelist as a precocious recorder of mundane facts who “recreates with an impressive accuracy the feel of the place, and the passage of the seasons.” Although frequently positive, the reviews of A Brighter Sun are characterized by a resolute refusal to apply the book's overt message of equality to their own literary reflections, insisting instead on seeing Selvon largely as a recorder of tropical customs and native simpletons who somehow managed to put together, without much forethought, some writing that reflects its surroundings.11
In this context, the characteristics of Selvon's second novel, An Island Is a World, can be read as a concerted attempt to advance a similar message of universality while circumventing any dismissals of Trinidad or Trinidadians (and, of course, novels written by Trinidadians) as simple, primitive, or merely amusing oddities.12 The very title seems to signal a shift from the folksy, tropical image of A Brighter Sun to a more overtly philosophical expression linking specific place and the world as a whole.13 The protagonists, too, offer a much different picture of Trinidad's inhabitants: the story centers around two brothers, Rufus and Foster, who have been raised in a middle-class home in Trinidad's second city, San Fernando.14 Finally, the settings of the novel are considerably more international, as during the course of the novel Rufus emigrates to the United States and Foster to England, and their father-in-law, Johnny, the lower-class object of much comedy, eventually departs for India. Indeed, the novel announces its departure from the limited awareness of the characters in A Brighter Sun in its first lines, which make a point of showing Foster's global consciousness and Trinidad's concrete place as (a small) part of the world:
Every morning when Foster awoke, it was the same thing. The world spun in his brain.
The world spun in his brain, and he imagined the island of Trinidad, eleven and a half degrees north of the equator. He saw it on a globe, with the Americas sprawled like giant shadows above and below, and the endless Atlantic lapping the coastlines of the continents and the green islands of the Caribbean. The globe spun and he saw Great Britain and Europe, and Africa. The eastern countries, Australia. (1)
The beginning of the novel thus palpably portrays its main character as an educated, self-aware man ruminating on the geographical space he occupies—a stark contrast with Tiger's initial status as a wide-eyed, illiterate peasant farmer. Perhaps most important, the style of the book is pointedly different from A Brighter Sun: the novel eschews (via its prologue) a strict historical chronology; narrates with a variable mix of dialogue, third-person observation, letters, and introspective internal monologue; and, most noticeably, engages in disorienting, abrupt, and unannounced shifts of scene that serve to illustrate its major theme. Thus, An Island Is a World advances a similar message to its predecessor while, in both content and form, seeking to sidestep the simplistic stereotypes of West Indian guilelessness that characterized the previous novel's reception.
As Salick observes, there is a definite thematic continuity between Selvon's first two novels: both novels focus on “the depiction of the hero, struggling to find knowledge and meaning, expressed through the archetype of the journey” (Novels of Samuel Selvon, 77).15 Indeed, the prologue to An Island Is a World makes this continuity quite apparent, focusing as it does on Foster's daily ruminating (similar in its general subject matter to Tiger's in A Brighter Sun) about the meaning of his life and his place in the world. Moreover, A Brighter Sun’s overarching moral—the necessity to acknowledge common ties between people—appears almost immediately as well. In the prologue, Foster is depicted riding a bus to work in Port of Spain, consciously articulating his connection to everybody else: “he sat down, feeling sorry for all the passengers. It was a humble sorrow, like if he had said, ‘We are all in the same boat, I am sorry’” (4). Just as Tiger's reflections on the world and his place in it lead to an understanding of the foundational commonality in everyday human living, Foster's own vexed philosophizing—his restless movements between abstract thought and unselfconscious absorption in the mundane rhythms of his life—enables him to realize a similar fundamental truth: that by embodying the local on his island home in the Caribbean he also genuinely becomes a part of the wider world.
With regard to Selvon's first two novels, however, it is not the thematic continuities but rather the discontinuities (also noted by Salick) that are most illustrative. While Foster is implicitly paralleled with Tiger in his questioning consciousness of the world around him, the circumstances in which he is introduced are considerably different from the rural Chaguanas cane fields of Tiger's upbringing.16 Foster's thoughts occur, significantly, on a crowded bus driving to the capital, Port of Spain, which is described as “a city with emotion and life and radios and a modern sewerage system” (4), thus emphasizing Trinidad's modernity. He is depicted glancing at another passenger's newspaper, reflecting that its contents involve “New York, London, the Middle East,” and “things happening all over the world” (4), offering a further suggestion of Trinidad's modernity and its (modern, newspaper-informed) awareness of events around the globe. The settings of the novel encompass much of this world as well: while Tiger and Urmilla's move from Chaguanas to Barataria can be read as a spatial emblem of an increasingly urbanizing creolization within Trinidad proper, the main characters of An Island Is a World move back and forth from Trinidad to England, the United States, Venezuela, and India, in a conspicuous insistence on the island's global interconnectedness. If Tiger's preoccupations are generally limited to a national stage, Foster and his friends are engaged in activities spanning much further afield. Thus, in thematic terms, An Island Is a World demonstrates an interest in topics of a more urban and international nature than the easily romanticized and exoticized peasant setting of its predecessor.
These tendencies toward expansion and more explicit global interrelation are mirrored in the book's techniques, which differ considerably from A Brighter Sun. The most noticeably nontraditional technique Selvon employs in the novel is a series of abrupt, intentionally confusing transitions into different scenes involving different characters and locations. The nature of these shifts is first hinted at in the transformation between the prologue, describing Foster, and the beginning of part 1, which centers around Johnny, Foster's eventual father-in-law. The prologue ends with the trailing off of Foster's interior thoughts, followed by part 1, which jumps immediately into a description of Johnny, a completely new and unknown character: “Every morning when Johnny awoke in the largest room of his house, he used to feel for his wife, though he knew she had risen long ago to prepare breakfast. But he did it all the same, out of habit, because Mary was a big ball of soft flesh, and he liked when could throw his legs over her, and his arms” (8). This second beginning to the novel provides a complete and sudden break. Not only is the audience thrust into the thoughts and habits of an unfamiliar character, but that character's concerns are noticeably different from Foster's solitary philosophical meditations. Johnny's thinking here is concerned with physical sensations—his wife, breakfast, and the pleasurable feelings of lying in bed with her—and it quickly emerges that Johnny, a lower-class, comically drunken jeweler who rarely thinks about more than money and alcohol, seems to have almost nothing in common with Foster, whether temperamentally, intellectually, or in terms of social class. However, despite this sudden, seemingly interruptive introduction to a character who seems completely remote from Foster, Selvon also suggests that they are somehow similar. The prologue begins with the words “every morning when Foster awoke” (1), while part 1 begins with a precise echo, only changing the name—“every morning when Johnny awoke” (8). In abruptly juxtaposing character and scene with almost no introduction or preparation, Selvon emphasizes the considerable differences between Foster and Johnny, while also subtly suggesting their similarity via an exact repetition of the phrases that introduce them. Although Michel Fabre has dismissed this “contrastive device” as “clever but sometimes artificial” (“Samuel Selvon,” 154), the technique, continued throughout An Island Is a World, formally enacts the novel's advocacy of a worldview that recognizes a type of negotiated similarity within difference as the basic human condition.17
The book's sudden, unannounced juxtapositions initially act to catalyze confusion, in that names or details do not seem to make sense. This feeling is succeeded by a reorganization of assumptions and expectations occasioned by the recognition that the novel has changed its subject from one character to another. For instance, chapter 8 begins with an account of Foster's brother Rufus's first days in America and a transcription of his first letter home to Rena, his wife. After a precisely detailed episode in a bar, the narrative describes how Rufus sneaks home to bed, then specifies that “the next day he got a letter from Rena asking him for a divorce” (94). With no break, the narrative continues with a letter, beginning with the salutation “Dear Dog” (94). The reader naturally expects this letter to be the one from Rena to Rufus asking for a divorce, and the greeting does little to challenge this expectation.18 However, the very first line of the letter—“here I am, little man in big country, and though I hadn't intended writing many letters, I have a feeling I will” (94)—reveals that the writer is certainly not Rena. By the next paragraph of the letter, it emerges that the writer has to be Foster, but the disorienting effect is palpable and generates important effects. Most notably, perhaps, it draws attention to the friendly irony of Foster's address: expecting the use of “dog” as an insulting dismissal of Rufus, the reader is forced to reinterpret the greeting as humorous, underscoring the context-dependent status of textual interpretation and bringing attention to the very different valences that can attach to one, very simple word. The initial notion of a little man in a big country brings out the similarity of the immigrant situation shared by Foster and Rufus, while the long, detailed, and very introspective nature of Foster's letter appears as a highly noticeable contrast to Rufus's earlier letter to Rena (91), which is concerned almost exclusively with mundane material details regarding travel and the weather. In all these effects, Selvon makes clear to the reader that there exist important parallels between these situations, even though they occur in very different parts of the world between people involved in two very different types of relationship. He makes equally clear that crucial differences—especially in tone, affection, and level of personal concern—must likewise be kept in mind.
Other prominently abrupt transitions provoke the same awareness of basic similarity underlying only apparently irreconcilable differences. When Foster's best friend, Andrews, proposes marriage to his girlfriend Marleen in chapter 10, the chapter ends with his simple, hesitant question: “Marleen, darling, will you—will you marry me?” (124). Chapter 11 begins with another line of dialogue, “How can I marry you?” (125), though the text goes on to relate that it is Rufus, not Marleen, who is speaking. This is a clear manipulation of the reader's expectations and again encourages a consideration of how the situations between the two couples—Andrews and Marleen, as well as Rufus and his American girlfriend Sylvia—are similar in certain ways, yet also markedly different. Indeed, Andrews's earnest, shy, and humbly honest approach to his relationship with Marleen contrasts strikingly with Rufus's approach, which employs devious excuses meant to avoid revealing that he is already married. However, not long after this, Selvon provides another juxtaposition that underscores the crucial similarities between the two couples. In this instance, at the end of chapter 11, Andrews and Marleen are depicted having a heartfelt discussion about their marriage and its potential to disrupt Andrews's political and social advance due to Marleen's lower-class status. Andrews ultimately convinces Marleen that she matters more to him than any other concerns, they agree to marry, and the chapter ends on this promising note:
They stayed a long time on the hill, and when the sun sank and darkness fell they were still there, locked in each other's arms.
The new car shone in the darkness. (139)
Chapter 12 begins with a conventional narrative marker of passing time—“two weeks later” (140)—as if the novel is continuing on with the tale of Marleen and Andrews. However, the focus of the action is in fact Sylvia, and the time marker apparently refers to the abortion that she and Rufus arranged for her to have. Despite the unromantic, potentially traumatic implications of the event, the novel concentrates on what the event has done to improve their relationship. Indeed, the result seems to be similar to the heartfelt discussion against which these events are juxtaposed: “Sylvia was back at work, and she and Rufus were talking about what had happened as people do after their experiences, examining themselves to find out why it was that it didn't matter as much as it did at the time” (140). The abortion and the subsequent reflection it inspires in fact strengthen their relationship: “instead of drifting them apart, the incident drew them even closer together. Passion hadn't gone its natural course and died…. Now it was deeper, smoother, like after a happy honeymoon” (140). Thus, although the circumstances are utterly different in most ways, the intense personal interaction, reinforced by the invocation of a honeymoon, draws the depictions of the two couples together, implying that they in fact have much more in common than the superficial distinctions originally suggested. Again, Selvon implies, one should not lose track of either the differences or the similarities between the situations.
The novel's technical portrayal of this subtle interlinking of universality and particularity emerges most visibly in the treatment of the two brothers, Rufus and Foster. The inherent configuration of brotherhood, of course, provides a convenient mechanism for indexing the notion of similarity and difference: the two brothers share a very close genetic bond, yet their physical and emotional attributes are patently distinct. As Ramchand observes in his introduction to the novel in its 1993 reissue: “the initial contrast between Rufus's positiveness and Foster's hesitancy, between Rufus's pursuit of love and achievement and Foster's entanglement in thought and speculation does not prevent us from recognising the parallels between the two brothers’ lives” (xviii). The novel's abrupt transitions serve to solidify recognition of this complicated symbolic relationship between the two brothers. One such transition occurs in the novel at a moment in which Rufus is in confusion about how to explain his need to go back to Trinidad without revealing that he is already married. Rufus's thoughts work toward justifying his dishonesty to Sylvia, as he thinks, “they had been together so long without her knowing anything and no big catastrophe had happened, that he was led to believe she need never know the whole truth,” and then continue with a resolution to tell only as much as is absolutely necessary: “nevertheless, she had to be told that he had to leave the country” (142–43). Similar narrated thoughts continue immediately after, with no indication of any shift in consciousness: “It was not until some time after that he realised the dimensions of the matter. Accepting it had been easy, so that when the realisation came it came like a new problem” (143). This interior monologue continues for several paragraphs before a parenthetical reference to Julia, Foster's English girlfriend, indicates that this second section is not about Rufus distracting himself from his untruthful relationship with Sylvia, but about Foster distracting himself from his own denial concerning Julia. The depiction of self-delusion is startlingly appropriate for either brother's situation. Foster's thoughts on immediacy—“it seemed to him that the heart of the matter was not the important thing, that what was important was the background of the days they lived, the places where they walked, the way she looked” (143)—are equally appropriate for Rufus's dogged devotion to the everyday rhythms of his life with Sylvia. However, when it is finally revealed, the difference between the two situations (especially on an ethical level) appears vast: Rufus is in fact consciously withholding the truth from Sylvia, but Foster is desperately, and more or less unconsciously, trying to convince himself that his relationship with Julia is still viable. Nevertheless, it is suggested, these two situations cannot be too rigidly distinguished, and lying to oneself, or being incognizant of one's own deeply felt reactions, is of a piece with a more obvious type of dishonesty.
Another of these fraternal juxtapositions occurs in chapter 13, which begins by depicting Rufus's reluctant departure from America back to Trinidad to arrange a divorce from Rena. This section ends with a description of Rufus's thoughts: “he wasn't looking forward to Trinidad at all. All his thoughts were on the great continent behind him, not the small Caribbean island he was heading for…. It was as if the ship were traveling backwards all the way to Trinidad, the way he kept his mind on America and the life he was leaving behind” (151). These musings are followed immediately by similar deliberations: “if only there were some creed to hold on to, some culture, some doctrine that offered hope, something worth dying for” (152). Such thoughts, couched in a more philosophical terminology, are ultimately identifiable not as a continuation of Rufus's interior monologue, but of Foster's, as he too contemplates returning to Trinidad. Seeking cosmic purpose, Foster looks around and approvingly observes people “going to their jobs, or going home, or seeking to entertain themselves for the evening…. They know, they are satisfied, they have little destinations in their minds, little goals and ambitions” (152). These humble pursuits alone, however, do not seem adequate, as the next passage conveys dismay at the inattentive immediacy of Foster's fellow West Indian emigrants: “No sense of gain or loss, no backward glance. No hope of making progress in the old ‘Brit'n,’ but it was better than living on the ‘rock.’ Here and there they slouched about the streets, men without future or hope or destiny” (153). Prefiguring the sense of aimlessness portrayed in The Lonely Londoners, Selvon here suggests that Foster, like his brother, is struggling to reconcile the everyday features of emigrant life with some bigger significance. Thus, despite their apparently divergent reasons for returning home, both brothers share an exile's longing to anchor their everyday activities in a larger purpose. The differences are surely important as well: Foster is longing for such meaning, while Rufus is at this moment living it, and their decisions about where to live are tellingly distinct. Nevertheless, the outlines of their desires are the same. With this set of complex juxtapositions, the novel again emphasizes a sense of difference coexisting within an underlying sameness.
Although distinctive in its own right, the formal drive of An Island Is a World finds similarities in Joyce's work. One of the dominant concepts of Ulysses, parallax, is a case in point. Seizing on the astronomic understanding that objects appear differently from different positions on the earth, Joyce's novel emphasizes the need to arrive at “proper” assessment via multiple points of view, enacting this process by illustrating how the radically dissimilar interior monologues of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus ultimately find common ground in both thought and action over the course of the day. The parallactic technique of Ulysses—its famously shifting viewpoints and discourses—“makes concrete Joyce's method of subtly forcing the reader to synthesize…shifting perspectives” (Heusel, “Parallax as a Metaphor,” 135).19 The disorienting scene shifts of An Island Is a World aspire to an analogous outcome, intertextually extending A Brighter Sun’s message of cross-ethnic similarity across an even wider geographical and cultural terrain.
On the thematic level, An Island Is a World closely connects Foster's personal identity crisis with the larger question of national identity, shedding light on the overtly national-political valences of particularity and universality that comprise the novel's major theme. The central image Selvon uses to describe Foster's self-deception while exiled in London is striking. Unhappy and directionless in London, Foster thinks of his situation as one that “was like keeping your shadow behind you, but one day the sun threw it out in front of you and it went and flattened itself against a wall so that as you walked forward it seemed to stride like a live thing and the two of you collided” (143). The figure is compelling, because Selvon himself has referred to his “Trinidadianness” in the same terms: discussing Trinidad in 1979, Selvon noted that “this island is my shadow and I carry it with me wherever I go” (Foreday Morning, 224–25). The overlap between these images emblematizes the intersection of the personal and political in the novel's thinking.
At first glance, Foster seems to reject any narrowly national identification. Early in the novel, Foster's longing for a communal human togetherness is expressed in a poetic line he relates to Andrews: “Oh kiss me the universal kiss…and there's an end to the world's wrangle” (62). Later in the book, observing some Indo-Trinidadians gathered together for passage to India, Andrews asks Foster if he can relate to them, and Foster responds with a similarly antinationalist message, saying, “I see their position the same as I'd see it with any other nationality. They're human beings to me, not Indians or your Trinidadians” (213). When Andrews points out how the European-trained missionary Father Hope's thesis on “a universal religion, a common ground” (236), sounds exactly like Foster's own philosophical goals, Foster initially rejects the comparison but ultimately displays an embarrassed ambiguity that confirms Andrews's observation. In one of his final conversations with Julia, Foster also expresses this desire for the world to transcend narrow identifications, when he complains, “No one thinks of the world. I am an Englishman. I am an American. I am a white man. I am a black man. No one thinks: ‘I am a human being, and you are another’” (155). Given these examples, Foster's personal concerns about belonging and responsibility suggest a philosophy of worldwide commonality opposed to any aggressively nationalist sentiment.
On the other hand, the novel also sees the goal of an easy universalism as misguided. One of Foster's letters to Andrews vividly underscores the book's discomfort with a facile belief that “all o’ we is one.” In discussing the folly of his previous faith in the automatic cosmopolitanism of Trinidadians, Foster makes clear his sense that such unity can only arise from a foundation of particularity:
I used to think that this had merit, that we'd be able to fit in anywhere with anybody, that we wouldn't have prejudices or narrow feelings of loyalty to contract our minds. I used to think we belonged to the world, that a Trinidadian could go to Alaska and fit in, or eat with chopsticks in Hong Kong, and he wouldn't be disturbed by the thought that he belonged somewhere else. I used to think of this philosophy as being the broadest, the most universal, that if it ever came to making a decision on an issue involving humanity itself, we'd have an advantage with this disadvantage, as it were, that we'd be able to see the way clearer, unbounded by any ties to a country or even a race or a creed. (106)20
After dismissing his earlier optimism concerning universal brotherhood, Foster proffers his new beliefs, tempered by his international experience: “it isn't like that at all. Other people belong. They are not human beings, they are Englishmen and Frenchmen and Americans, and you've got to have something to fall back on too” (106). Continuing in this vein, Foster asserts the need for some kind of national identification: “So I feel now, that all those idealistic arguments we used to have at home don't mean a thing. You can't belong to the world, because the world won't have you. The world is made up of different nations, and you've got to belong to one of them” (107). As Ramchand notes in the introduction, for Foster “this is a hard lesson to learn, a sad loss of the dream of universal understanding and tolerance” (xxiii), but it leads to an important change of attitude: a recognition that one can arrive at universal goals only through solid grounding in the particular.
Ramchand's view emphasizes cultural nationalism as Foster's response to this crisis—his expressed desire “to build up a national feeling, living as we are in scattered islands with our petty differences” (106)—and goes on to relate this national feeling to Foster's critique of English society, with an implication that the vibrant, young potential culture of the West Indies might supersede the tired, old European version. However, Foster's vision of cultural nationalism in fact has distinctly communal, international aspirations (and the novel seems equally wary of the tired corruption of Trinidadian politics, something that as the narrative ends is about to be addressed, intriguingly, by a British royal commission). Foster's emphasis on Trinidad carefully positions it among other countries: “We never sort of visualized Trinidad as part of the world, a place to build history, a young country which could reap the benefit of the bitter experiences of older countries” (106). Moreover, to ignore the world and focus only on narrow identitarian interests, as Foster explains elsewhere, would be an abdication of responsibility: “it's defeat from the beginning. You talk about the state of the world as if it belonged to somebody else, and we're just renting a room” (155). For Foster, Selvon makes clear, a nationalist sense is fundamentally important, but only when it is rooted firmly in a larger, worldwide context.21 In this regard, Selvon's view echoes that of Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth regarding the imbrication of national and international consciousness, an approach that insists on the need for a strong, confident national identity, but only within the context of the need to participate in an international community, not simply for one's own country's (or indeed one's own) advantage.
This model of actively belonging to the world, of asserting (in distinctive ways) one's own individual membership in constituting a communal relation, is at the core of the novel's politics. In order to belong to the world, Selvon's novel suggests, one must first be aware of it at a local, personal level. One of Foster's meditations names this as a crucial aspect of meaningful human life: “Be forever conscious of living. The world spins, and somewhere on that globe you are, a microscopic dot in a land mass” (129). Importantly, this global perspective is Foster's prescription for preserving uniqueness and avoiding a state in which “each action is mechanical, habit charting a beaten, circular course, criss-crossing over the beaten, circular courses of every man” (128). However, Foster also conceives of such minutely attuned awareness as a necessary first step in any world political process: “We used to think we could put open minds to the world's problems, not mindful of anything particular ourselves. But watch that ochro tree in your own back garden, and see how it is thriving. That post under your house which is rottening, you'd better take it away and put in a new one” (107). Here, Selvon connects a wholly abstract musing on the world's problems to a minutely mundane focus on the everyday, suggesting, as Ramchand expresses it, how the novel “explores not the separation of the private and personal from the public and social, but the necessity for the one to be involved in the other” (“Introduction,” xx).22
This necessity helps explains the downfall of Father Hope, whose life of sacrifice in helping the poor, rural residents of Veronica is otherwise portrayed in the novel as an almost miraculous exercise in political and moral achievement. Father Hope is indeed, as Salick characterizes him, a heroically “educated, dedicated, and selfless” (84) character whose philosophy provides the novel's title. In conversation with Foster, Father Hope insists that “an island is a world, and everywhere that people live, they create their own worlds” (73). This message is in keeping with the novel's own views about the importance of the local, and Father Hope's belief that “a man couldn't save the world but perhaps he could save a few souls” (71) resonates with the book's consistent critique of high-minded but totally abstract visions of social belonging. However, there is a suggestion that Father Hope's views are not cosmopolitan enough, notwithstanding his early years of travel and education in Europe. As the book reveals, “Father Hope never left Veronica to go and preach elsewhere. He had come back to the valley to be alone. And he remained alone, out of touch with the world or even the local happenings in the island” (71). His solitary withdrawal from the world is reiterated just before his mysterious death when he happens on Foster at the edge of the village and remarks that he has “never been this far out of the village yet” (228). Ultimately, however, the outside world—in the form of the British policeman Johnson—does intrude, leading directly to Father Hope's death, suggesting that while an island may be a world, it should not be misapprehended as the world. Selvon's second novel thus intimates that a solipsistic attitude such as Father Hope's, however locally effective, cannot in the end remain viable—a more consciously expansive engagement with the world is needed.
In this way, An Island Is a World both continues and critiques A Brighter Sun. Selvon, when asked by Fabre in an interview about the shift between his first and second novels, observes that he “did not consider it a shift” (“Samuel Selvon,” 68). Indeed, the second novel's depiction of a meditative central character and its careful insistence on an underlying, all-encompassing human commonality coincide convincingly with its predecessor. However, An Island Is a World is nevertheless a departure, notably in its different settings, the variation in social class of its characters, and its much more pronounced experimentalism. It is thus possible to read the change in form and content between the two novels as an intertextual instance of the abrupt, juxtaposed transitions that An Island Is a World employs in its narrative technique, a gesture designed to raise awareness of differences without obstructing or disallowing a recognition of underlying similarities. Importantly moving its predecessor's frame of reference from the intranational to the international level, the novel's form and themes argue for a cosmopolitanism that remains attentive to local specificity. The disposition suggested by Selvon's work is perhaps best captured in Walter Mignolo's concept of critical cosmopolitanism. For Mignolo, the term connotes a process that counteracts the centrifugal, Eurocentric movement toward an abstract universal by emphasizing the dialogic, centripetal influence of diversity as constituted in the colonial “periphery.”23
Read from the metropolitan center, however, An Island Is a World’s attempt to outmaneuver the exoticizing reception of A Brighter Sun by making the same arguments in a noticeably different manner met resistance. In fact, the novel's reception within London periodicals is marked by the same patronizing suppositions about Caribbean culture and intellect that greeted A Brighter Sun, only this time with a much more direct focus on the author himself. Perhaps the most blatant example of this ad hominem dismissal occurs in the Spectator review by Isabel Quigly. In a transition from discussing W. L. Heath's Violent Saturday into her review of Selvon's novel, Quigly succinctly expresses her assessment of Selvon's writing skill: “Mr. Heath knows where he is going: almost too neat-footed, he skirts the dangers of novel-writing with the air of a prim-nosed cat. Mr. Selvon, in An Island is a World, does not.” Quigly goes on to reveal her dismay at the lack of a clearly Caribbean quality to the novel, noting that “apart from the conscious passages of description and local colour, this novel might just as well have been written by an Englishman.”24 Although her observations imply some type of potential parity between the English and the West Indian, Quigly quickly dispels any impressions of egalitarianism by expressing her sense that Selvon is simply not “developed” enough to handle a serious, philosophical novel: “It is absurd to complain that Mr. Selvon has got away, as undoubtedly he has, from his island; absurd to expect the vision of a primitive from one who is at least half sophisticated. But Mr. Selvon at this stage has lost the directness of the one before acquiring the complexity of the other, a common occurrence in a world where the eye of innocence is given spectacles at the earliest age and in the remotest places.” The language of the review reveals a familiar discourse of the West Indian as innocent and childlike, not yet sophisticated enough to write a properly civilized novel like the British.
Like Quigly, the Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Arthur Calder Marshall, identifies Selvon as suffering from the strain of a too-rapid process of civilization: “all novelists have trouble with their second books: the West Indian has rather more trouble than others, if he has transferred from the Caribbean to Europe” (“Caribbean Voices,” xvii). For Marshall, Selvon's migration has dimmed his ability to render bright local color and caused his writing to be “muddied by…intellectualism” unbefitting such a natural talent (xvii).25 Another Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, takes a similar view, dismissing the “tedious and rather shallow philosophy” in the novel and expressing disappointment that “though Mr. Selvon is himself an Indian and a native of Trinidad he does not succeed in bringing either his characters or his setting entirely to life” (“Various Pursuits”). Other reviewers likewise seem to prefer Selvon in his earlier incarnation as purveyor of exotic realism, such as Maurice Richardson, who notes that “the island parts are the best” and celebrates Selvon's handling of dialect, or a reviewer from an unidentified source in Selvon's own papers, who asserts that An Island Is a World is not as successful as A Brighter Sun in such a way as to make clear the critical expectations of Selvon (and other West Indian authors): “it lacks the spontaneity and freshness of the previous [novel]. In this book his main characters are not naïve and simple; they have some knowledge of the society they are in and an awareness of the world and what goes on in it.”26 Thus, it seems, in trying to escape the distancing category of primitive that haunted his first novel despite its message of a common humanity, Selvon's attempts to convey the same message in a manner presumably less likely to be read as primitive end up, by and large, perversely reinforcing precisely that category and his own “natural” place in it.
Selvon's third novel, The Lonely Londoners, can be seen to take up the problem of simultaneously articulating West Indian difference from and similarity to the British people with yet another experimental innovation. This novel, published in 1956, is almost certainly Selvon's most popular, best-known work. In critical discussions of West Indian and postcolonial literature, The Lonely Londoners is consistently invoked as a seminal work, with primary attention falling on its experimental use of a modified vernacular narration.27 The novel's treatment of West Indian immigrant life and its employment of demotic English are so well known, in fact, that during his lifetime Selvon was “concerned that the preoccupation of many readers and critics with these two features of his writing led them to neglect others of equal importance” (Ramraj, “Samuel Dickson Selvon,” 7). In spite of this possibly overabundant critical attention, the narration of The Lonely Londoners clearly merits recognition as a watershed moment in West Indian literature that provides symbolic legitimacy to a pointedly Caribbean way of thinking and speaking. As Birbalsingh observes, one of Selvon's main legacies is that “attitudes and speech habits which our colonial environment led us to believe were not respectable—he made respectable” (Clarke et al., “Sam Selvon,” 63). Judging by their British reception, Selvon's earlier two novels do not necessarily manage to subvert “the conventional associations of dialect with comic characters or with characters on the periphery” (Ramchand, West Indian Novel, 96). However, in his third novel, Selvon's use of an unidentified third-person narrator speaking in a modified West Indian vernacular assertively makes claims for such a language to be recognized as legitimately literary.28 Selvon himself seems to have embraced the notion of his linguistic creole as a means, once again, of articulating a distinctly West Indian consciousness within a mutually understood (among English-speaking audiences) idiom. In one interview, Selvon emphasizes how he strives “to keep the essence, the music” of the way Caribbean people actually speak, while at the same time trying “to avoid some words or phrases which…would be very difficult for an audience outside of the Caribbean to follow” (“Interview with Sam Selvon,” by Dasenbrock and Jussawalla, 115). In conversation with Fabre, Selvon reiterates his desire to somehow portray West Indianness in a language comprehensibly British, claiming that he “wrote a modified dialect which could be understood by European readers, yet retain[ing] the flavour and essence of Trinidadian speech” (“Samuel Selvon,” 66). Thus, The Lonely Londoners appears to share a similar goal to its predecessors, enacting on both a linguistic and a thematic register a sense of (potential) unity-within-difference.
The novel's language does indeed seem to act as “a deliberate subversion of the colonizer's language” (Joseph, Caliban in Exile, 85), a display of linguistic dissonance indicating opposition to the standards of conventional English (and thus, metonymically, of conventional British society). Numerous incidents in the novel underscore this dissonance as a necessary gesture motivated by the ignorance and racism of the British populace. Early in the novel, the narrator describes one of Moses's first experiences with discrimination at work, relating how “all the people in the place say they go strike unless the boss fire Moses” (29), and this incident sets the tone for the novel's consistent if somewhat understated limning of the racist outlines of postwar British society. From the “color-coded” employment office records, to the outright racism of Bart's girlfriend's father, to the prejudiced Polish restaurateur, to the British child's loudly expressed shock upon seeing Galahad's black skin, the novel relates a continuous stream of incidents indicating the validity of one of Moses's early observations to Galahad about the British: “they just don't like black people” (39). As many critics have noted, the novel unmistakably conveys the sense that “under the kiff-kiff laughter” of the novel's characters there is a great deal of unrest and unhappiness (141) caused by a racism deeply embedded in British social patterns.29 Thus, the novel does mark difference quite consciously and, in addition to a frequently jubilant celebration of West Indian moxie, creativity, and resilience, also offers an illustration of the suffering that difference entails, giving the choice of narrative dialect a pointed political valence.
The pain that results from the immigrants’ clearly marked distance from the native population of London seems to preclude any purely celebratory reading of West Indian difference in the novel. The very title communicates some of this ambiguous unease: naming the characters in the novel “Londoners” is a strong claim for West Indian belonging in the British capital city, but the modifier “Lonely” surely signals that a sense of community is missing. Indeed, as Moses envisions the aimless wanderings of the boys in London during the contemplative conclusion of the novel—“he could see the black faces bobbing up and down in the millions of white, strained faces, everybody hustling along the Strand, the spades jostling in the crowd, bewildered, hopeless” (141)—their racial separateness is emphasized, as if to underscore the misery of still not belonging. Thus, while in one sense staking a claim to the validity of a distinct West Indian idiom, the novel is also deeply concerned with reconciliation: like its predecessors, The Lonely Londoners expresses a desire that West Indians be accepted as equal contributors in the social and cultural world. This novel, while certainly gesturing in both language and content toward an articulation of something distinctly West Indian, also takes considerable steps to indicate the need for rapprochement, for a recognition of the efforts necessary for a mutually achieved understanding between “the boys” of the novel and the other inhabitants of their newly adopted home.30
Even at the level of language—so widely celebrated by critics as distinctly, even aggressively Caribbean—the novel asks for such acceptance. Galahad's famous reply to an English woman who complains about his language can be read as the novel's own plea for understanding: “What wrong with it?…Is English we speaking” (93). Moreover, the novel is not solely a critique of British ignorance and prejudice: it does not separate out the responsibility for understanding onto one group or the other. The expectations of British women are certainly not lauded, as revealed in Moses's long, unpunctuated “summer-is-hearts” reminiscence: “but the cruder you are the more the girls like you you can't put on any English accent for them or play ladeda or tell them you studying medicine in Oxford or try to be polite and civilise they don't want that sort of thing at all they want you to live up to the films and stories they hear about black people living primitive in the jungles of the world” (108). However, Moses makes clear that the immigrants choose to go along with these expectations as well: “that is why you will see so many of them African fellars in the city with their hair high up on the head like they ain't had a trim for years and with scar on their face and a ferocious expression” (108). Indeed, there is a sense that the “great restless, swaying movement that leaving [everybody] standing in the same spot” (141) diagnosed by Moses at the end of the novel is a product of both sides continuing on in the same bifurcated roles. British ignorance is one side of the equation, but Selvon hints at the need for West Indian responsibility in the novel as well.
On a formal level, the famous passage about summer enacts what most of the novel's characters seem unable to do. In its breathless, unpunctuated, stream-of-consciousness style, this passage is strikingly reminiscent of Molly Bloom's monologue to end Joyce's Ulysses and thus stands as the most direct textual instance of the Joycean in Selvon's work. Indeed, several reviewers picked up on this parallel, including Gwendolen Freeman in the Times Literary Supplement and Isabel Quigly in the Spectator. In openly paying homage to what was then perceived to be an established part of British literary tradition, while nevertheless narrating in the novel's distinct West Indian demotic, the passage makes a point that aligns with Mittelholzer's Eliotic vision: it manages to signal its affiliation with a recognizably British model at the same time as it advances an unmistakable West Indian difference. It bears mentioning that the Dublin-born Joyce, of course, emphatically resisted identification as an Englishman. Nevertheless, although his texts are now understood to express a sophisticated anticolonial politics, in the postwar years (as the many reviews cited in these pages help illustrate) Joyce was often straightforwardly accepted as one of the foremost representatives of the British literary canon. Clearly, his work, like Selvon's, recognizes the linguistic alienation of colonized subjects. Most famously, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus thinks, as he converses with his English dean of studies, “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine…. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech” (189). Although implicitly accepting the English claim to linguistic primacy here, Joyce's later works explicitly seek to upend the power dynamics inhering in Stephen's uncanny relationship to words: the demystifying counterdiscursive drive of Ulysses (focused most directly on language in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter) and the multilingual verbal exuberance of Finnegans Wake both work to make the allegedly natural, dominant language of English simultaneously familiar and foreign to readers. The long, Ulysses-like passage in The Lonely Londoners works in a similar way, formally conveying a disposition that both recognizes and productively alters the set modes of communication and thus suggesting a framework within which the immigrant and the native-born might be able to converse.
A crucial instance of the novel's advocacy of the need for this type of mutually reciprocal cultural recognition occurs during Harris's party near the end of the novel. The reader's introduction to Harris is as someone snobbishly resistant to his own West Indian roots: “Harris is a fellar who like to play ladeda, and he like English customs and thing…. When he dress, you think is some Englishman going to work in the city, bowler and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm, with The Times fold up in the pocket so the name would show” (111). The suggestion is that Harris is someone who wants to appear English, but, as the narrator wryly notes, “only thing, Harris face black” (111). Despite what are read as pretensions to Englishness, however, Harris clearly has some redeeming qualities that in fact take him outside the category of British identity: “he does be polite and say thank you and he does get up in the bus and the tube to let woman sit down, which is a thing even them Englishmen don't do” (111). Moreover, his linguistic skills are deemed impressive by the narrator: “man, when Harris start to spout English for you, you realise that you don't really know the language” (111).31 While Harris does in many respects strike the reader as a deracinated “Afro-Saxon,” he is also seen to have positive qualities and indeed has much more contact with the white world of London than anybody else in the group. Depicted as primly censuring the more outrageous antics of Five at his fetes, Harris is also, tellingly, responsible for bringing the boys all together (along with some of the few West Indian women depicted in the novel) for a big party at which sympathetic whites are present.32
The most subtle point Selvon makes is when he depicts Harris talking for the first and only time in dialect, urging the boys to be respectful when the band is playing “God Save the Queen” at the end of the evening: “some of you have a habit of walking about as if the fete still going on, and you, Five, the last time you come to one of my dances you was even jocking waist when everybody else was standing at attention” (122). By slipping into dialect, Harris's words serve to signal respect for the boys’ style of communication in his own plea for them to respect others, highlighting the performative nature of his own (and, by implication, everybody else's) speech habits.33 Via this linguistic shift, Selvon suggests that for the boys, adjusting their behavior in accordance with context is not only perfectly plausible but also a productive social strategy. Foster makes a similar point about language use in An Island Is a World, hypothesizing that he and his friends slip into dialect as a strategy of defensiveness, a paradoxical way of communicating an unwillingness to communicate: “Whenever we're talking and we find ourselves losing ground, we fall back on broken English” (66). Similarly, via Harris, Selvon suggests that the boys’ unruly behavior at the party is in some sense a lazily one-sided view of social interaction, making no allowances for the customs or expectations of others.
The same refusal of seriousness criticized by Harris is shown earlier in the novel as well, when Big City convinces a man discussing the color problem at the Orator's Corner near Marble Arch to let Galahad speak on the issue. Instead of letting Galahad speak, however, Big City heckles him until “all the people looking at the two of them and laughing” (99). By depicting such a scene—the most pronounced chance offered the characters for some kind of public discourse about the racism on which the novel concentrates—Selvon suggests that it is not only the ignorance and misplaced fear of the white British population that are at fault. The refusal of the boys to engage seriously with socially sanctioned mechanisms for contact with the native population also contributes to the disunity so prominent in the city. Despite his comic reputation, Selvon also criticized what he saw as a too-prevalent West Indian tendency toward disavowing laughter: “you want to start a serious discussion, and there again, this laughter comes out very clearly. Maybe the laughter started to jar on me and I said, what the hell? Why should we laugh at a serious discussion? Let's rather come to grips with it” (“Interview with Sam Selvon,” by Nazareth, 82). As Ramchand has observed in his introduction to the novel, Moses's final ruminations also point to a need to step back from the reflexive patterns of laughter and forgetting that characterize the boys’ behavior throughout the novel. Indeed, the novel's exhortation to reconsider one's assumptions—“sometimes you does have to start thinking all over again when you feel you have things down the right way” (61)—could be seen to address not only the prejudiced views of white England but the equally stubborn, exclusionary behavior of the boys themselves.34 Selvon's review in the Evening Standard of Joyce Eggington's They Seek a Living, a study of recent migration to Britain, articulates precisely this viewpoint of reciprocal adjustment and engagement: “it is time now for the English people to understand and accept us, for most West Indians are here to stay. But it is vital that we migrants remember that ours is the greater effort towards that understanding” (“Place Out of the Sun”). Such a sentiment directly expresses what is subtly suggested in The Lonely Londoners: if it is in fact true, as the narrator states, that “people in this world don't know how other people does affect their lives” (76), then all are in need of an education.
However, reviewers and critics of The Lonely Londoners generally overlooked this message of universality and reciprocal compromise.35 The contemporaneous reviews of the novel are largely complimentary (as they were for A Brighter Sun), but in a way that reinforces perceptions of difference and incompatibility. Most reviewers greeted the novel with what seems like collective relief that the “natural exuberance overlaid by a rather obtrusive literariness” present in An Island Is a World is no longer discernible (Quigly). Quigly praises the “liveliness” of the novel and its “exotic themes,” and many other critics applaud its curious language, characteristically described by the Evening Standard as “the racy, lively idiom the West Indians use among themselves.”36 The newspaper's characterization of Selvon's linguistic style is accompanied by an apprehension of his characters as pleasant oddities—“those happy-go-lucky people from the sunshine of the West Indies”—and such a pattern is consistent through most of the reviews. The Lonely Londoners was, like A Brighter Sun, generally received as an authentic insider's picture of strangely simple people, with the naturalistic language a further proof of authenticity and artlessness.37 Just as John Lehmann (an early, enthusiastic supporter of West Indian literature) sees The Lonely Londoners’s dialect as an immature, not yet self-conscious linguistic expression in his 1957 “Foreword” to London Magazine (11), other critics saw the novel's characters as “feckless and innocent and trusting” (Shrapnel, review). The reviewer for the Surrey Comet concludes, after reading the novel, that there are only three options for viewing the immigrant characters of The Lonely Londoners: with disinterest, pity, or distaste.38 While this view is unusually harsh, it does serve to underscore the general sense that in trying to depict both the humor and the pain of the recent West Indian sojourn in the metropolis, Selvon's novel was almost universally unsuccessful in convincing metropolitan critics to see the book's characters or its language as anything but fascinating in their unalterable difference. In many reviewers’ eyes, the novel was “fresh and original” and “strikingly vivid” (Richardson, review), but not of any real political, social, or cultural concern to a British audience.
Coupled with this perception of the novel and its characters as refreshingly unsophisticated was, again, a similar perception of Selvon himself. For example, the Surrey Comet reviewer refuses to consider the book a novel at all, complaining that the book's author “makes no attempt to analyze the position” of his characters, while John Betjeman's Daily Telegraph review takes pains to suggest that Selvon is capable not of “connected narrative,” but rather only of “significant reportage.”39 The Times Literary Supplement likewise seems to conflate Selvon with his characters, as a somewhat simpleminded, good-natured West Indian. Identifying Selvon with “his countrymen” in the novel, the review goes on to assert that “the book is in the form of a novel, but there is no plot” (Freeman, review). The events depicted are seen to “give an effect of simpleness and helplessness,” and the review ultimately concludes that Selvon's “tone is humorous and with a tolerance that is perhaps characteristic of the race.” Although she notes the parallel with Ulysses in passing, the reviewer's final observation assesses the novel as a harmlessly amusing insider's account of “rich comic humanity, unhappy most of the time but with moments of uninhibited pleasure beyond the experience of the white man.” The novel thus seems to have strengthened the sense of perceived difference between English and West Indian people, perhaps even reinforcing British expectations of “natural” and “simple” writing and a childlike immigrant people.40
Interestingly, just as British critics generally read the novel as a marker of West Indian difference, critics of Caribbean literature frequently valorize the novel for the same reason, reading the same difference positively. John Thieme, though cautious about its ultimate political efficacy, assesses the language of Selvon's third novel as a carnivalesque subversion of a Western imposition of order, a manifestation of “the kinetic, antiauthoritarian spirit” of West Indian resistance (“World Turn Upside Down,” 201). Margaret Paul Joseph's Caliban in Exile makes the claim that “Selvon's use of the calypsonian's dialect and form, therefore, is itself a proclamation of independence from the colonizer's mode of narrative” (87), using a strongly political metaphor to indicate her perception of the aggressive difference encoded in the novel's language. Salick asserts that Selvon's vernacular usage “liberates the West Indian novel from the strictures of standard English, the language of the colonial master” (Novels of Samuel Selvon, 5), and Fabre, too, emphasizes the sovereign distinction implied by Selvon's linguistic experiment. Although Fabre notionally advances the idea of dialect as a gesture of negotiation between two different but mutually comprehensible linguistic systems—observing that Selvon's language is aimed at “bridging the gap between local Creole and accepted standard English” (“From Trinidad to London,” 222)—he predominantly emphasizes Selvon's linguistic originality as a force acting to “liberate Trinidadian fiction” (221) and to “explode” and “subvert” European mainstream traditions (220). Thus, critics of Caribbean literature often proclaim Selvon's work as a bold announcement of West Indian difference and cultural autonomy. Although their evaluations of the difference between West Indian and English culture are emphatically positive, these critics’ delineations of a pronounced difference partake of the same structural separation as the early British reviewers’ resolutely racialized views of the novel.
Selvon himself seems to emphasize not difference but similarity, and his view of his own literary vernacular coincides with the assertion by F. G. Cassidy endorsed by Ramchand in The West Indian Novel and Its Background that West Indian Creole “coexists with English and the two have more in common than apart” (92). Indeed, in an interview with Fabre, Selvon confesses that he is uncomfortable with the West Indian language in Austin Clarke's novels because it “sets them apart from Canadians. This is not a good thing” (Selvon, “Samuel Selvon,” 75). In contrast, Selvon reveals his own unifying linguistic politics, suggesting what he would do if writing about West Indians in Canada: “build the writing into the society…build their language in as I did in The Lonely Londoners” (75). Selvon does not elaborate on this point, but it is clear that he views the purpose of creole in his writing as a sign of active efforts at mitigating, not enhancing, a sense of segregation.41 Selvon's review of Colin MacInnes's City of Spades, a problematically sympathetic novel about London's new black migrants, also emphasizes this impulse toward incorporation and belonging. Selvon bemoans the fact that the novel accentuates its black characters’ inaccessibility to a white audience by never representing their point of view in the narrative.42 He expresses disappointment at the resolute separation of the black characters the novel seems to support, noting that “it ends on the disconsolate note that ‘civilised’ love cannot touch their enigmatic hearts, and to tolerate them is much more possible than to understand them.” For Selvon, such separation lies at the root of the social strife his novels seek to address.
In this light, the trajectory of Selvon's first three novels can be read as a series of strategic gestures designed to outmaneuver the consistent reception of his universalist message as confirmation of the incontrovertible otherness of West Indians. Certainly, Selvon's work can seem, even to this day, to be trapped in the perverse logic adumbrated by Michael North in The Dialect of Modernism in his discussion of another Caribbean author, Claude McKay, and his use of dialect writing. For McKay, North observes, dialect is already immovably established as a sign of “black Jamaicans as natural, childlike, and full of tomfoolery” (110), such that “language a writer like McKay might use against the standard English…has already been turned into a harmless curiosity before he can get to it” (110). In North's formulation, a writer such as McKay or Selvon can either confirm his audience's primitivist stereotypes by writing in dialect or write standard English in an apparent capitulation to the dominant culture, but both options have been defined in advance on British terms. Derek Walcott has described the two-sided nature of creole language use by Caribbean authors similarly: reviewing one of Selvon's later vernacular novels, The Housing Lark, he notes that such language can “both protect him from and accuse him of being, if not ignorant, then naïve” (“Selvon Has Returned”). In the face of such a bind, Selvon's works execute a strategy of alternation and juxtaposition, attempting to illustrate the simultaneous validity (and context dependence) of identities on both sides of the divide. In this view, Selvon's calculatedly demotic modernist experimentations with language and form point to a way of representing the cosmopolitan without being elitist, of signaling the universal without wholly subsuming the local in the former's abstracting force.
In a postcolonial critical context, these literary articulations of a type of universal human identification can be vulnerable to the critique that they erase racial and ethnic identity and thus elide the damage colonialism instigated in the name of such identities. Certainly, as Elizabeth Ingrams points out, “in his lifetime Selvon suffered for his outspoken refusal to ally himself with any one political cause” (“Lonely Londoners,” 35), and Selvon's evocations of universalism cause critics such as Michael Thorpe to view him as a “nonideological writer” (“Sam Selvon,” 87). Lamming, too, calls his fellow author “the least political of us all” (Pleasures of Exile, 43). However, Selvon's conceptions of the universal always arrive through a more local identification, and his work could hardly be said to overlook the implications of race or imperial domination.43 Selvon's interviews consistently establish his outright West Indian allegiances while preserving a universal frame, such as when he defends his dependence on Caribbean characters to Alessandra Dotti: “But, you see, I am a Caribbean man myself and it is the psyche that I know best, so that other characters from other cultures would really be superficial to some extent…. It isn't my culture and in that sense I would always try to stay with what I know best. This is why, wherever I go, I think I would be writing in a universal way to have my characters be universal too” (“Oldtalk,” 131). What Ken McGoogan characterizes as Selvon's “expansive, inclusive, and welcoming frame of mind” (“Saying Goodbye,” 73) is surely apparent in his early novels, which emphasize the pitfalls of a merely exclusivist, oppositional version of identity. As Gikandi argues, Selvon's writing is expressly concerned to expose the danger that a complacent acceptance of tradition-bound images of self-sufficiency and separatism “entails the imprisonment of the subject in the economy of the other” (Writing in Limbo, 129). However, as Gikandi also notes, Selvon's works simultaneously seek “to penetrate the totality that official discourse promotes” (118), emphasizing Caribbean difference and distinction as a way to counteract the homogeneity upon which empire depends. Combining both impulses, Selvon's novels attempt a careful balancing of the particular and the universal: they advance the notion that differences, while never concretely effaced, can at times—and to great political purpose—be subsumed under a larger category of similarity.44
Perhaps inevitably, the paradoxical nature of Selvon's literary vernacular language itself stands as an apt analogy of his aesthetic attempts to articulate his philosophy of cosmopolitan belonging. The use of dialect, as North describes it, obliges an author to perform a delicate linguistic process of making language distinctively “communal without making it metaphysical or politically exclusive” (Dialect of Modernism, 194), or, as Ramchand characterizes it, enacting the necessity for “dialect to cease to be a secret language and become an open language” (“Sam Selvon Talking,” 99). It is this paradoxical difference—existing precariously under an overarching if not always predominant unity—that the overtly experimental modes of Selvon's first three novels attempt to communicate.45 Although the British propensity to view West Indian fiction in a culturally separate frame seems largely to have drowned out their message, Selvon's early novels—“rooted in Trinidad Creole dialectal perceptions…also open to English experience” (Dickinson, “Sam Selvon's ‘Harlequin Costume,’” 71)—take shape as formal arguments for an ideal, open-ended community without exclusionary closure. In these postwar years, Selvon employs modernist forms to convey his insistence on Caribbean people as particular—and particularly well equipped, in light of the enforced cosmopolitanism of the region—examples of a world citizenry.