The colonial experience and the Third World novel: an exo-cultural study of the novel in Africa, the West Indies and Polynesia

Abstract

This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of thirty-four novels by twelve novelists from Africa (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah and Ngugi wa Thiong'o), the West Indies (V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Roger Mais and V.S. Reid) and Polynesia (Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera, and Patricia Grace). Against the background of the English literary tradition, current literary theories, and critical responses to the Third world novel, the dissertation explores the novelists’ embodiments of their perceptions of the colonial experience in significant literary forms, and highlights the principles informing interactions among authorial ideologies, content, techniques, and formal properties. Two hypotheses are developed. First: expository, linguistic, characterization, and structural techniques are causally linked with the novelists’ social visions. Next: the Third world novel hybridizes western and indigenous literary traditions, and exploits oral aesthetic resources as part of novelists’ quests for authentic forms to embody their visions. Chapter One, the Introduction, reviews the socio-historical and critical backgrounds of the novel. The theoretical crux of the research is chapter Two. This chapter briefly examines oral literature in terms of the psychodynamics of orality and highlights the patterns of interaction between oral literature, oral noetics, and the novel of the colonial experience. A hypothetical pyramidal model is developed to illuminate how form, themes, and techniques broadly evolve in accordance with novelists’ “ideologies.” Ideology influences the novelist’s conception of his work within particular cultural noetics-hence the balance between traditional (oral) elements and modern elements (characterized by the psychodynamics of textuality and chirographic culture). The pyramid’s left base angle comprises affirmation themes explored through predominantly oral conventions. Post-colonial disillusionment leads to social criticism (at the pyramidal apex) projected through mainly modernist techniques. Radicalization of novelists’ ideologies leads to a convergence, at the right base angle, of oral and modernist techniques into a novel of “radical traditionalism.” These patterns and hypotheses form the bases of investigating other issues in all subsequent chapters. Chapter Three examines how the interactions between theme, technique, ideology and cultural noetics affect spatio-temporal setting, depiction of spatio-temporal reality, and the use of mythology. Chapter Four investigates linguistic techniques and relates these to cultural noetics, with emphases on linguistic experimentation and manipulation of narrative voice. Chapter Five reviews the concept of characterization and attempts to establish the proper role of oral literature in characterization by highlighting such techniques as name symbolism and manipulation of types, stereotypes and mythical archetypes. Formal, technical and stylistic features are related to novelists’ social visions in Chapters Six and Seven. Chapter Six highlights the use of eschatological and rite of passage paradigms in cultural affirmation. Chapter Seven explores novelists’ use of these same paradigms in interpreting post-colonial failures and charting society’s journey into the future. In all these investigations, authors (novels) are juxtaposed on individual and on regional bases to illuminate their affinities and differences. Several major conclusions are finally drawn about the novel’s literary background, thematic preoccupations, techniques, formal properties, and directions of further development.