by John Updike
In a footnote, Kahler criticizes Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis for its “fundamental error in assuming that reality is a stable thing, always the same for all ages and persons,” and adds that “different writers have merely approached it in different ways. In fact, the reality of any given period is the product of struggling and advancing consciousness.” But Kahler’s attempt to formulate his sensation that reality is constantly expanding, and literature with it, produces labored prose:
In considering the reciprocal creation of consciousness and reality, it is difficult to gauge what share the arts in particular have had in changing reality. The same process of reciprocal effects takes place in several fields: between historical event and historical consciousness (a question which deserves special study); between philosophical, political, and socio-economic theories and the corresponding realities; and of course in the natural sciences, where change in the real environment shows up most distinctly, although these changes are not necessarily the most profound. All these elements coalesce and affect each other.
What does this say but that things are all mixed up? Auerbach’s stately and relatively static series of panels, each treating in great detail a lengthy quotation from successive literary epochs, manages not only to register a more sensitive impression of each masterpiece but to convey the feel of evolutionary movement more convincingly than Kahler. For what is “advancing consciousness”? Aristotle carried as many pieces of baggage, as many thoughts and facts, in his inner space as any modern savant. True, most of his baggage is now considered nonsense, but so will our baggage be. Does consciousness advance or merely shift its ground? What of the worlds of lore and observation lost to urban civilization? The Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, and the Bedouins as many for camel dung; is not the great poetry of snow and camel dung certainly behind us? How many of the three and a half billion persons living now, on the very frontier of the advance of consciousness, have appropriated more of the real world to their inner space than, say, a Carolingian serf? To most American housewives, electricity is as magical as mana to a Polynesian. The present young generation, steeped in technology, shows an astonishing willingness to live by astrology and diabolism, not to mention hallucinogens and Krishna. Are the fundamentals of human existence amid the wonders and menaces of advanced industrialism much different from the situation of Cro-Magnon man amid the wonders and menaces of untamed nature? All of recorded history has occurred in too brief a span for any evolutionary change; we confront life with the brains of cavemen. A mother suckles us; a joy of the senses crystallizes; alien shapes loom to block our desires; some desires are granted satisfaction; most are not; we age; we die. How has the drama of European cultural history, played on a little forestage of a continent by a cast of characters that was never more than a fraction of the population of the world, affected any of this? More specifically, how does modern narrative, of which Tristram Shandy in its self-conscious self-pleasing may be taken as the first instance, change “reality”? Picasso and Pollock turn up on fabric designs, but what happens to the modern masters of narrative? Indeed, the penetration of art into men’s lives would seem, by some equation Kahler never suspects, proportional to the strength of its alliance with religion. Compared to the age of the cathedrals, we live remote from our art. Religion and technology are alike at least in that both attempt to cope directly with the pain of our existence: the first by offering us a supernatural consolation, and the second by dealing with our diseases and difficulties piecemeal. In comparison, modern art offers only distraction, sublimation, and a kind of empathy with the mental and spiritual aristocrats who are artists. The “patterns, structures, and techniques of consciousness” are of little profit to the run of men, and as overpopulation and diminishing natural resources reduce the margin of play in the world, refined literary art may be squeezed out even from the colleges.
What is “internalization”? There is no doubt that science accumulates, and human life is changed by its expanding discoveries. But culture may “internalize” new knowledge in the sense that the body internalizes the tip of a splinter; that is, cushions and anesthetizes it to make it ignorable. Kahler gives us a lively example of culture at work. The microscope was developed more gradually than the telescope, and the public was slow to grasp its implications. Suddenly, however, late in the 17th century, “observations with the microscope became a fashionable pastime in English society. Amateur experimenters of both sexes (‘virtuosos’ and ‘virtuosas’) became curiosity collectors and went about with pocket microscopes as some people do today with Geiger counters, looking for Leeuwenhoek’s ‘animalcules’ in whatever came their way. They found tiny ‘water flyes’ and ‘water lice,’ ‘eels’ and ‘worms’ in blood and saliva.… English literature of the period reacted … with satires upon this fad.” Are not we, in a world so out of our ken and our control, all “virtuosos” and “virtuosas” running about trying to tame the truth by turning it into group fun, into a fad? What was Pop Art but a way of subduing to fun the frightful raw trashiness of our man-made wilderness? And is the process so different from that whereby the first paintings, of bison and antelope, subdued to an appearance of control the terrible uncertainties of the hunt? Does art, then, operate as a progressive force or as a reactionary one, not to advance consciousness but to lull and muffle it—to make consciousness, indeed, passably bearable?
Some of these questions may be quibbles. Others may be riddles. They arise in response to an elegant and piquing book.
* Current but not recently coined. “L’amour est l’assouvissement de deux désirs par le contact de deux épidermes”—Chamfort (1741–1794).
† And evidently ended there: two promised further works, the novel The Trans-Atlantic and Gombrowicz’s Diary, still await, eight years later, publication.
AFRICA
Out of the Glum Continent
BOUND TO VIOLENCE, by Yambo Ouologuem, translated from the French by Ralph Manheim. 182 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
THIS EARTH, MY BROTHER …, by Kofi Awoonor. 232 pp. Doubleday, 1971.
THE WANDERERS, by Ezekiel Mphahlele. 351 pp. Macmillan, 1971.
The art of fiction, our beleaguered heroine, glances desperately about for rescue. Perhaps Africa will save her. Has not black music, via jazz and rock, transformed the ears of the world? Did not African masks inspire Cubism and destroy forever the sweet face that had reigned in European art from Giotto to Renoir? More to the point, have not rural societies, such as Russia, Ireland, and the American South, historically poured fresh vernacular energy and heroic simplicity into Europe’s tired mainstream of literature? And has not sub-Saharan Africa already figured vividly, in the fiction of Conrad and Greene, Rider Haggard and Joyce Cary, as a skein of exotic color and a “heart” of primal mystery? So might we not expect, as the post-colonial African generations take their place among the world bourgeoisie, a passionate intelligentsia to arise and enunciate native truths, to embody in renewed fictional forms a living reality that has hitherto been seen only through white eyes?
The publication, a dozen years ago, of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart gave plausibility to high hopes. Writing with a beautiful economy, Achebe seized the basic African subject—the breakup, under colonialism, of tribal society—so firmly and fairly that the book’s tragedy, like Greek tragedy, felt tonic; a space had been cleared, an understanding had been achieved, a new beginning was implied. Now, in an Africa rid of overt European domination, the artist inherits the confusions of anticlimax, of conflicts grounded not in the grand encounter of two cultures but in petty self-interest, leading to tangled catastrophes like the destruction of Mr. Achebe’s fellow-Ibos in Biafra. For all their tenderness and brilliance, three recent novels by young Africans—Yambo Ouologuem of Mali, Kofi Awoonor of Ghana, and Ezekiel Mphahlele of South Africa—left this reader in the mood for gloomy generalizations. Myopic lumping being one of the white West’s affronts, however, let each book speak.
Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound
to Violence, written in French, interspersed with Arab and Bantu exclamations, conveys, through Ralph Manheim’s translation, a startling energy of language. It begins:
Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and, overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! wa bismillah! … To recount the bloody adventure of the niggertrash—shame to the worthless paupers!—there would be no need to go back beyond the present century; but the true history of the Blacks begins much earlier, with the Saifs, in the year 1202 of our era, in the African Empire of Nakem south of Fezzan, long after the conquests of Okba ben Nafi al-Fitri.
Ouologuem writes as a griot—“a troubadour, member of a hereditary caste whose function it is to celebrate the great events of history and to uphold the God-given traditions.” He tells, or sings, the story of Nakem, an African state much like Mali: bordering the Sahara, watered by the Niger (called here the Yame), ruled since the Middle Ages by a Muslim dynasty called the Saifs. The book’s heroic subject, on the public level, is the Saif rule, the cunning and ruthlessness that enable these Berber and Jewish chieftains to subjugate by terror and division the tribes of “niggertrash” and then to outwit the white conquerors when they come, using the colonial officials as a mask for their own continuous, corrupt, and refulgent power. On the private level, the book’s hero is Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi, the son of a slave cook and a serving woman, educated in mission schools and in Paris, and returned to Nakem in hollow triumph as the “man of the hour,” the winner of a popular election that is merely Saif rule in yet another guise. The author, however, is often distracted from the relatively domestic events of Kassoumi’s progress by gaudy, curiously noisy images of physical violence:
Saif howled as though wounded and at the same time threw something into Chevalier’s eye, which it penetrated with a splashing sound punctuated by a cry.
His knife whirled, twice he planted it in her left breast, slitted her belly from top to bottom. Suddenly expelled, her pink viscera crackled.
A hyperbolic violence also drives Ouologuem’s poetry into absurdity—“I regale the air with the idiotic laugh of my gums undermined by the caries of twenty centuries of history”—and pushes his satire into jubilation. Of Raymond-Spartacus, it is said, “His academic success in the land of the Flencessi [the French] had been bruited among the people, who declared that he was better educated than the best educated of white men—after God, by golly: o djangui koié! Wasn’t it true that in homage to his science a white woman had savored the ecstatic felicity of marrying Raymond the illustrious builder, for—tjok!—he spouted mathematics and physics as easily as his mother had shelled peanuts.” Though a Christian missionary is sympathetically presented, Ouologuem mocks mercilessly the pro-African aestheticism of the “Shrobeniusologists,” who find in the bloody empires of the African Middle Ages “a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism.” Hoodwinked by fake artifacts hastily planted in the marshes and mud, the Shrobenius family in turn hoodwinks Europe with “a cult of the good nigger,” “a philistine Negromania without obligation or sanction.” Such romanticism Ouologuem sternly mocks, insisting, “Prehistory in a tailcoat: there stands the African.”
The intelligence expressed by this book seems all too withering, all too Gallic. The last chapter is an arch dialogue between the Christian Bishop Henry and the reigning Saif, suddenly as dialectical as Sartre himself: “Destiny never wearies of forgiving, by proxy. How could it weary? If it did, would it not know Tedium, the empty consciousness of a time without content?” The point of the debate, and of the novel, seems to be that
violence, vibrant in its unconditional submission to the will of power, becomes a prophetic illumination, a manner of questioning and answering, a dialogue, a tension, an oscillation, which from murder to murder makes the possibilities respond to each other, complete or contradict each other. The outcome is uncertainty.
The Bishop and the Saif fall to playing chess, cozy in the certainty that rulers like the Saif will be “forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics” and that “such was the earth of men that the balance between air, water, and fire was no more than a game.”
Such refined and utter pessimism may be necessary to surmount a heritage so despairingly seen. But while Ouologuem senses a “gigantic hunger for self-destruction” in the world, he also admits and particularizes “the intoxication of feeling alive”; though no political solution can be envisioned, the woeful history of Nakem is indignantly felt. For all the book’s incongruities as it leaps from idiom to idiom, it delivers on its opening promise of intensity; its furniture is incandescent. Without any note of sentimentality, apology, or excuse, a fully literate African has opened himself, and us, to modes of human existence prior to civilization:
Her head was turned toward Yame and her body in tears was covered with watery suns.
The silence sleeps, dreaming of the sky where the clouds envy the moon. Here’s the bank of the Yame River, with its black swell, its dampness. The river. Southward. Southward. I’ve got to. They’re expecting me. Why sleep? Maybe I’ve arrived. I run to catch myself, I follow myself at a gallop. I stop, body erect, arms stretched forward. I’m like a lemon without juice. I can’t see myself anymore. Neither my hands nor my limbs. Sleep. I’m afraid of the snakes. Sleep. Dream. Sleep. I’m afraid of the red ants. I don’t want to be eaten. I wish I could turn into an animal and survive this menacing forest, its mosquitoes, its flies, those black things that crawl out of its belly in the darkness. Fire. I want fire. With fire I’ll fear nothing. The snakes will go away. The rabbits will go away. The monkeys will chatter. The animals will think I’m armed. I’ll be saved. I’ll wait till daylight. Only then will I sleep.
This Earth, My Brother …, by Kofi Awoonor, is a more amiable work, just as Mr. Awoonor’s contemplative gaze from his jacket photograph is more amiable than Mr. Ouologuem’s flash-lit stare. The jacket and title page insist that the book be called “An Allegorical Tale of Africa,” though it seems no more allegorical than any novel is; i.e., its hero represents many men and his plight illustrates an aspect of the human condition. The hero, Amamu, is a young Ghanian lawyer, who, through the alternation of objective and introspective chapters (set, I think too fussily, in different sizes of type), proceeds to nervous breakdown and death. The stress he suffers is presumably the inordinate gap (and here the typographic device may have a point) between his primitive, hopeful, partially idyllic past and the mediocre, nagging, disappointed present of his life in an African metropolis no better able to cope with corruption and pollution and poverty than any other modern city. While a desert glitter and an imperial past lend fiendish glamour to Ouologuem’s Mali/Nakem, Awoonor’s Ghana is familiarly dismal, except that all the faces are black and the problems of overdevelopment experienced in America are matched by the not dissimilar embarrassments of underdevelopment. Amamu is a thorough bourgeois male—uneasy in his work, a witness to injustice yet a professional participant in it, a citizen perpetually testifying, inwardly, to his own puzzling incrimination in the venal, weary workings of a mercenary society:
The Lebanese merchants are bargaining away native lands; even a government that proclaims socialism—a confusion of ideas, beliefs, and magic—cannot provide the answer. So the children turn beggars in the market place, as the eminent men play golf on the Achimota course. The best golf course in the country.
In the Senior Common Room, the scholars of the land are debating international communism, and providing new arguments for Fabianism that died in its country of origin.…
The beer is good; there are two excellent breweries and one is soon to be built in the Western Provinces to brew wholesome beer for the people.
Meanwhile, drinking water is short in the north and in the Ewe country.
On the private level, Amamu’s binds are the familiar ones of the bourgeois male: the boyhood/manhood bind, the wife/mistress bind. The mistress, Adisa, a warm and servile whore, merges with boyhood l
oves and visions—“the woman of the sea, his cousin love of those years long long ago rising from the sea. She rose slowly, head first, adorned with sapphires, corals, and all the ancient beads her mother left for her pubertal rites. She rose slowly from a dream sea.” And this vision of Mother Africa merges in the currents of Amamu’s nostalgia with the Britannia who ruled the waves. Christian hymns haunt his walks and reveries; he remembers the Empire Days, held on Queen Victoria’s birthday—the uniformed dark children singing songs freshly learned, “miniature Union Jacks stuck in their shirt pockets”; the handsome mustached officers; the speeches proclaiming, “To be true imperialists, we must maintain unshaken our faith in God, in the Empire, and in ourselves. God bless you all.” With the recession of the Empire, this faith has faded, leaving nothing but empty revolutions. “All revolutions must go astray. That is divine justice.” Nkrumah Circle is renamed National Liberation Circle; that is modern Ghanian history.
It is a land of laughing people, very hospitable people. That’s what the tourist posters proclaim. They forgot to add that pussy is cheap here, the liquor is indifferent, and the people suffer from a thousand diseases.
The novel itself struggles against the soggy atmosphere of lassitude. The chapters of interior soliloquy lapse into an unlikely literariness:
The flash point of creation, birth before birth long tunnels tunnels roads of womb darkness stilled the mind’s eye cannot behold, prescience prenativity of total darkness, the foreknowledge of the grave the exhilaration and impatience of the emergence.