Literary Primitivism by Etherington Ben

Literary Primitivism by Etherington Ben

Author:Etherington, Ben [Etherington, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter 7

CLAUDE MCKAY’S PRIMITIVIST NARRATION

Among the authors whose work is considered in this book, Claude McKay’s primitivist novels conform most closely to the abstract morphology of primitivism that I have identified, at least outwardly. If literary primitivism were an equation, McKay’s Banjo could occupy the other side of the equals sign:

In his work primitivism is pursued with an earnestness that the other writers either ultimately pull back from or rhetorically finesse. With McKay there is an abiding sense that authentic primitive experience is still within reach, so in both style and form the contradictions of primitivism are manifest all the more directly. We glimpse simultaneously that which is supposed to be primitive and perceive more acutely its present impossibility as a social reality.

In his work there is also something of a convergence of the authorships considered in this study, giving us an opportunity to think about some of the direct historical connections between otherwise disparate primitivist practices. Most conspicuously, McKay was an enthusiastic reader of Lawrence, with whom he declared a spiritual kinship, and would become a catalyzing influence for the poets of negritude. If a discussion of McKay promises neatly to tie together the threads of this study, though, reading his fiction serves only to underline literary primitivism’s instability. His primitivist plunge involved taking real artistic risks, the results of which have not always aged well. It also puts into relief the achievement of Césaire, who absorbed these risks into the style and form of his work. McKay’s work, and particularly Banjo, his novel about dock life in Marseille, brings out the world-historical character of primitivism, an aspect that several critics have discussed in terms of “transnationalism.” Deeply conscious of the totality of the imperial world-system, McKay’s narratives gravitate not to some notional unmediated primitive beyond the vanishing colonial frontier but rather the lumpenproletarians, the vagabonds, and the drifters who have no place or stake in the system other than the pleasures that can be gained from it. In their pursuit of pleasure, and the deep-seated instincts that McKay believes drives this pursuit, the chimera of the primitive fleetingly attains presence. His unrelenting pursuit of immediacy pushes him to primitivize the substance of narration itself.

McKay and Negritude

In September 1937 Léopold Senghor addressed Dakar’s Chamber of Commerce on the subject of “The Cultural Problem in French West Africa.” He presented to his audience as the model “native intellectual”: a graduate of an école normale supérieure and the first black francophone recipient of the Agrégation. He chose the subject of literature and assimilation, asking his audience: “Can we conceive of an indigenous literature which is not written in an indigenous language?”1 His answer was a qualified yes. Whether on the African continent or throughout the global diaspora, Africans express themselves with “a certain savour, a certain odour, a certain accent, a certain timbre, inexpressible by European instruments.”2 He moved to a discussion of the literary efforts of some of his Caribbean contemporaries before closing with a citation of a comment from



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