Allegories of History: The Aesthetic of Critical Redemption in Post-1980 Postcolonial Novels

Abstract

This dissertation argues that post-1980 postcolonial novels reinvent allegory as a narrative-cum-visual form to reimagine the nation in a globalized, neoliberal world. Postcolonial novels have long been read by literary critics as national allegories, their narratives of private lives interpreted as signs of a people’s collective march towards redemption in historical time. This form is taken to have flourished during the movements for independence when postcolonial societies, specifically their newly forming elites, posited nation-building as the utopian horizon of individual struggles. But I find that increasingly, postcolonial novels undermine the older allegorical form. J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Wilson Harris’ The Carnival Trilogy (1985-1990), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) fashion damned worlds in which the actions of characters resist their narrativization into a shared horizon of redemption. I contend that these novels are still allegories, only of a different kind. They assume an aesthetic of critical redemption akin to that of Baroque allegory, which Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, describes as a method for accessing providential meaning in a world from which God has disappeared. These novels pursue redemption through their critique of the now defunct “god” of the sovereign nation as the protector of a people’s unfolding destiny. They register in their narrative fragmentation postcolonial societies’ loss of a collective sense of history in a globalized, neoliberal world. But they also display in the sheer configuration of narrative fragments, captured in an image and read as an allegorical sign unto itself, the historical time experienced by subaltern populations who could never be assimilated into the nation’s teleological progress to begin with. This dissertation identifies the emergence of a new allegorical form in postcolonial literature that invites readers to survey the ruins of the old bourgeois narrative of nationalism for signs of alternative forms of redemptive horizons. My dissertation offers a whole new method of reading for history in postcolonial novels, one that follows a novel’s development as both a narrative and an image. Each chapter focuses on one of the above four novels, examining its characteristic syntax of narrative fragmentation – parataxis, concretization, and digression, respectively. If this syntax interrupts a novel’s narrative continuity and obscures its narrative history, it simultaneously makes itself visible over time as something to be looked at; it becomes visible as the visual configuration of narrative fragments. Each novel, ultimately, displays in its syntax the substance of its allegorical message. I argue that while my method finds its most adequate object in post-1980 novels, it affords a new insight into the redemptive, utopian impulse of novels from an earlier time that also register in their narrative fragmentation a critique of the nation. I provide Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road (1960) as an example. Coetzee, Harris, and Smith have all cited the Nouveau Roman as a stylistic influence. If these authors inherit Simon’s narrative techniques, their novels, in turn, retroactively make visible the allegorical form of Simon’s 1960 novel.