Terrible Beauty by Marian Eide;

Author:Marian Eide; [Eide, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Allegory

In a much criticized essay of 1986, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson claimed “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel.”42 This argument has provoked a number of potent critiques from the rhetorical to the political, but the underlying assumption of the necessary, allegorical politicization of postcolonial literature has persisted.43 Jameson meant to suggest—and he develops this facet of his argument more explicitly in his conclusion—that postcolonial narration is allegorical “where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself.”44 In allegory, Jameson finds the equivalent consciousness in symbols structured to do explicitly social work, directness impossible for conventional literature whose politics must remain unconscious to do the mystified work of maintaining material advantage under the cover of cultural capital.

Pascal Casanova identifies the loosely allegorical approach as ubiquitous to postcolonial literary criticism, which “posits a direct link between literature and history, one that is exclusively political. From this, it moves to an external criticism that runs the risk of reducing the literary to the political, imposing a series of annexations or short-circuits, and often passing in silence over the actual aesthetic, formal or stylistic characteristics that actually ‘make’ literature.”45 While Jameson insists on the political reading of “third-world” novels, his call cannot be said to overlook the literature’s formal characteristics; rather his argument rests on allegory, and that allegorical reading is still a fairly ubiquitous approach in postcolonial literary criticism, one anticipated in the composition process by writers from the postcolonies. In the context of Casanova’s broader argument, such writers will not be read widely unless they conform to expectations set by postcolonial criticism’s mandate for transparent national allegory.46 The critical reception that writers of the postcolony can expect, notes Natalie Melas, will “purport to fix and code them,” and “assume that they transparently represent a culture or can be reduced to a discernable chain of historical causes and effects or to a set of material conditions.”47

Neil Lazarus suspects, however, that “if Jameson had not postulated his ‘national allegory’ hypothesis we would have had to invent it,” because the postcolonial preoccupation with the individual life in the context of a national narrative is particularly pressing.48 Lazarus argues, however, that Jameson’s allegory hypothesis addressed a particular problem: the critical practices in which works from the postcolonies were received in the imperial center; this writing was often seen either as “inferior or as derivative.”49 Jameson wished readers to recognize that postcolonial writing did not derive so much as it appropriated European and American forms; the Anglophone literary heritage was turned to new purposes in African narration, for example. Jameson demanded, through the allegorical claim, that critical evaluation be built on more stringent narratological grounds.

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