The Historical Novel in Ayi Kwei Arnah. Socialist Literature and the Bourgeois Cultural Tradition

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The Historical Novel in Ayi Kwei Armahand David Caute: African Literature,Socialist Literature, and the BourgeoisCultural Tradition

M. KEITH BOOKER

I n his highly influential The Historical Novel (first published in 1937, thoughnot translated into English until 1962), Georg Lukacs identifies the great histor-ical novels of the nineteenth century as the quintessential literary expressions ofthe ideology of the European bourgeoisie in their period of ascendance to power.In particular, Lukacs argues that those novels narrate the historical processthrough which the bourgeoisie managed to overturn the feudal-aristocratic orderand to establish themselves as the new ruling class of Europe. Lukacs (echoingThe Communist Manifesto) thus provides important reminders that the Europeanbourgeoisie-by the 1930s widely regarded as culturally stodgy and politicallyconservative-were at one time a radically revolutionary class that wroughtsweeping changes in European society. Moreover, in his discussion of the his-torical novel-and in his other discussions of European realism=-Lukacsreminds leftist writers that literature played a central role in the revolutionaryvictory of the European bourgeoisie over their feudal-aristocratic predecessors.

For Lukacs, the best bourgeois historical novels, because they contain strong

utopian dimensions within the context of an inexorable forward movement ofhistory, can provide object lessons for socialist writers who seek to overcome thecultural domination of the European bourgeois tradition. In this sense, Lukacs'scomments are clearly relevant to the situation of African and other postcolonialwriters, who must similarly overcome a long legacy of cultural domination by theEuropean bourgeoisie. Lukacs's description of the decline of European realismduring the era of bourgeois decadence that set in after the middle of the nine-

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teenth century also is applicable to the African situation. I t was. after all, thedecadent European bourgeoisie (not the young, dynamic bourgeoisie of earlieryears) who scrambled to colonize Africa in the late nineteenth century. This col-onization might itself be taken as a major symptom of decadence. Moreover, asFrantz Fanon has emphasized (especially in the essay "The Pitfalls of NationalConsciousness" in The Wretched of the Earth), one of the major dangers facingthe postcolonial world has been the potential power of an indigenous bourgeoisiethat springs forth from the heads of their European masters already fully deca-dent, skipping entirely the phase of energetic activity and accomplishment thatmarked the earlier years of the bourgeoisie in Europe.

African writers seek to employ literature as part of a program to generate newpostcolonial cultural identities that transcend this inherited decadence and thatescape definition by the colonial past. Yet, ironically, they have quite often doneso within the bourgeois genre of the novel, and especially the historical novel.After all, given the material impact of colonialism on African history and thesymbolic impact of colonialist historiography on the African imagination, it isobvious that history is a crucial area of contest for African writers who seek towrest control of their cultural identities from the metropolitan center of Europe.African postcolonial literature is faced with the double task of challenging Euro-

pean colonialist culture and proposing positive African alternatives. For this rea-son, African historical novels must perform the critical task of confronting thetradition of colonialist historiography as well as the utopian task of recoveringpositive visions of an African past that is usable in the construction of a betterfuture. Critics of African literature need to attend to both aspects of this task.While avoiding the trap of reading African literature according to European par-adigms, it is also essential to recognize that African and European literature arenot entirely unrelated and that comparative studies of the two potentially can domuch to illuminate both. Moreover, given the centrality of the historical novel toboth European bourgeois literature and African postcolonial literature (and theimportance of history itself as a point of confrontation between postcolonial cul-tures and the legacy of colonialism), comparative studies of European andAfrican historical novels should be of particular value.

I n this essay I make a beginning toward such a comparison by reading Armah's1979 novel Two Thousand Seasons together with David Caute's 1966 novel TheDecline of the West. Both of those works are historical novels that deal directlywith the impact of European colonialism on the history of Africa and address the

questions of history and colonialism within an antibourgeois ideological frame-work. To that extent, both Armah and Caute are engaged in projects of whichLukacs would presumably approve. On the other hand, both Two Thousand Sea-sons and The Decline of the West exhibit many of the signs that Lukacs associ-ates with bourgeois literature in its period of decadence.

Perhaps the most prominent symptom of apparent decadence in both novelsinvolves the central use of images of violence and cruelty. Of course, even in

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decadent bourgeois literature such imagery may, in fact, be intended as a sub-versive offense against bourgeois propriety. But significant from that point ofview is Allon White's warning against a "false essentializing of transgression" inthe works of a family of writers that includes Sade, Baudelaire, Lautreamont,Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Burroughs, Pynchon, and Joyce (60). White insiststhat one does not mount an effective political program merely by conductingextreme formal experiments or by filling one's work with material that is offen-sive to bourgeois taste. Furthermore, for White, "[tlhe question of the politicaldimensions of sexual and aesthetic transgression can only be answered histori-cally" (60). In short, effective transgression requires the specification of a socio-

historical dimension rather than simply the presentation of shocking images.From that perspective, the spectacular violence of both Two Thousand Seasonsand The Decline of the West might be compared to Flaubert's Salammbo, afavorite Lukacs example that similarly depicts life in Africa as informed by sen-sational and abject violence, liberally illustrated with tortures, beheadings, cru-cifixions, and the like. As Lukacs points out, Flaubert's disgust with the bour-geois society of nineteenth-century France seems to have driven him to attempt,in Salammbo, to escape into an exotic realm entirely divorced from his contem-porary world. To effect that radical gap between ancient Carthage and modem

France, Flaubert had to efface history from his text as much as possible; sensa-tionalism compensated for the resulting loss of energy. The result is a text inwhich "inhumanity, cruelty, atrocity and brutality become substitutes for the lostgreatness of real history" (193). Lukacs may be right that, in the escapist specta-cles of cruelty that inform European texts like Salammbo, we can see the formerdynamism of the European bourgeoisie beginning to go to seed. But the violenceof so many African texts is surely an example of a fidelity to social reality ofwhich Lukacs could not entirely disapprove. The legacy of colonial violence inAfrica is well known; and recent events in places like Sudan, Somalia, andRwanda have provided vivid reminders that even the postcolonial history ofAfrica has often been one of carnage and brutality. It is thus not surprising thatany number of works of African literature center on violence. Such works, how-ever, differ widely in their diagnosis of the sources and implications of this vio-lence. Two Thousand Seasons provides an especially thoughtful and measuredanalysis of that question, one which explores the roots of postcolonial violencein colonial domination while at the same time acknowledging indigenous contri-butions to the baleful history of violence in Africa. In the pursuit of that dialec-

tic, Armah's book employs numerous scenes of cruelty and violence, which heplaces within the context of a perspective so anti-African that it has been accusedof racism in reverse. I Soyinka argues that Armah's book participates in the anti-colonialist discourse of African thinkers like Cheikh Anta Diop in the same waythat the writing of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard participates in the dis-course of European colonialism (107-8). Armah employs a sweeping historicalscope that allows him to indict both European colonialism and the earlier Arab

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intrusions (especially those involving slaving) as sources of destruction and dys-function in African society. Indeed, to an extent Armah lumps Arabs and Euro-peans into the same category of "white" destroyers and predators. But he avoidsdepicting violence as inevitable and strongly suggests the possibility of signifi-cant change over time, often through evoking the positive potential of a heroicAfrican tradition of resistance to foreign domination.

Perhaps the European work that addresses such issues most effectively isCaute's relatively little known The Decline of the West. That work traces the his-tory of the fictional African nation of Coppernica (a sort of amalgam of Algeriaand the Congo-somewhat in the mode of the "Congheria" of Armah' s Why Are

We So Blest?) from the French colonial period through a violent revolution thatleads to independence and then focuses primarily on the postcolonial period,when the postrevolutionary regime (led by new president Raymond Tukhomada)finds itself threatened by enemies on all sides. British, American, and Frenchcapitalists (represented by Soames Tufton, Chester Silk, and Aristide PIon,respectively) seek to exploit the nation's rich copper reserves; holdover Frenchmilitary officers (led by the neo-Nazi Armand Keller and the sadistic AndreLaval) dream of retaking political power in the former colony; and indigenousopponents of the Tukhomada regime (led by the ambitious Fernand Ybele and his

lieutenant, the religious fanatic Jean Liwele) work in complicity with the foreignforces in an attempt to overturn the existing order in Coppernica.

Despite depicting violence and depravity in Coppernica, Caute's book is surelyone of the least Africanist European novels about Africa, managing to avoid usingAfrica (in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, carried on more recently inthe African novels of Graham Greene and William Boyd) as merely a milieu forEuropean adventures. For one thing, Caute's backdrop is not only the violence oflife in Africa but the realities of spectacular violence in Europe and America. If

African reality makes the confident sureties of Walter Scott unavailable to Armah,then Auschwitz does the same to Caute. In any case, Caute also manages to treatAfricans as sympathetic characters without condescending to them in the mannerof Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson. In Caute's book the most positive characters areTukhornada and his supporters, the former guerrilla leader Kundula Maya, and theEuropean-educated poet Amah Odouma. Moreover, although Tukhomada's forcessometimes do resort to violence, especially during the revolution through whichthey come to power, they generally do so only in direct response to the moreextreme violence of their enemies. Indeed, it is the very hesitation to employ strong

measures against their opponents that leads to the fall of the regime in a counter-revolution engineered by Laval, backed by PIon and Tufton, and featuring Ybeleand Liwele as figurehead leaders. Caute, in fact, is quite careful to identify Europeas the principal source of the most extreme violence that afflicts Africa, linking themachinations of Laval, Keller, and others directly to the legacy of Nazism, whichhovers like a specter over the text and functions as a key symptom of what Cautediagnoses as a fundamental sickness in the European psyche.

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Caute's Coppernica represents the classic postcolonial situation (warnedagainst by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth) of ongoing neocolonial capital-

ist domination by foreign powers working in league with an unscrupulous (anddecadent) indigenous bourgeoisie. Caute, the author of a generally laudatorybook-length study of Fanon and his thought, may in fact have derived some ofhis insights from Fanon. Granted, the nature of Fanon's work is such that anyappropriation of it by a white European writer is necessarily suspect, thoughCaute rightly points out in his study that Fanon's work has been more widelyread in the West than in Africa and was more important for the intellectual devel-opment of black militants in America than of black peasants in Africa (97).Armah, however, is an important exception to this phenomenon. The importance

of Fanon to Armah is well known; Lazarus insists that "any attempt to delineatethe conceptual horizon of these three novels must take the work of Frantz Fanonas its point of departure. Armah's intellectual debt to Fanon is profound, andfreely acknowledged" (27).

Fanon thus provides an important framework within which to compare Armahand Caute. But the relevance of Fanon here points toward the relevance of Lukacsas well. Lazarus, for example, argues that, despite obvious contextual differencesbetween the two thinkers, Lukacs in fact has much in common with Fanon, espe-cially as "the position he elaborated in the context of proletarian struggle inEurope in the 1910s and 1920s was analogous to that which Fanon would latercome to formulate in the context of the national liberation struggle in Algeria"(16). The Decline of the West, despite some of its abject naturalistic detail, has asweeping historical scope that clearly recalls the historical novels praised byLukacs. Moreover, Caute's book is narrated in an essentially realist style, thoughit might be pointed out that, in his later work, Caute moves away from realismand begins to challenge the bourgeois tradition in formal as well as thematicways. In his book-length essay The Illusion, for example, he argues that "realism

is burnt-out, obsolete, a tired shadow of a once-living force. It has to go." Mean-while, in The Occupation and The Demonstration, a play and novel that with TheIllusion constitute an unusual multigeneric trilogy, Caute carries out that insight,writing in an antirealistic mode often reminiscent of Brecht. Bernard Bergonzi,in fact, suggests that the tum away from realism in the trilogy represents

a defiance of the literary ideals of the Old Left and the central Marxist tra-dition; notably represented by Lukacs's attempt to draw into the cause ofprogress and historical inevitability not just the historical fiction of Sir Wal-ter Scott, but the whole of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism. (47)

The Decline of the West, on the other hand, might be taken as Caute's attempt tocarry out Lukacs's advice to look to writers like Scott as models.

Armah's text, not surprisingly, deviates from the European realist traditionmore radically than does Caute's. For one thing, Two Thousand Seasons drawsupon African oral traditions in its consistent maintenance of a griot-like narrative

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voice. Wright describes Two Thousand Seasons as the result of Armah's "searchfor a narrative mode which would approximate to more genuinely African forms

and provide a focus both more explicitly African and more revolutionary thanthat offered by his previous novels" (221). In so doing, according to Wright,Armah "bursts the bounds of historical realism, period-setting and naturalisticnarrative and moves into the terrain of myth, legend, and racial memory" (222).In a similar vein, Armah's characterization, including the use of a plural narra-tive voice, is consistently collective, whereas Caute's book features well-definedindividual characters. Lazarus concludes that the two most striking formalaspects of Armah's book are its approximation of "the idiom of orature" and its"formulation of resistance as a collective practice" (221 l.

On the other hand, Caute's characters, however individualized, also have a clear-ly allegorical quality. In addition to Tukhomada, Silk, Tufton, Pion, Keller, Laval,and Ybele, the book features characters like Jason Bailey, a typical talented butalienated African American; Zoe Silk, a dazzlingly beautiful blonde who preys onAfrican American men in search of a sexual energy that she lacks; James Caffrey,an idealistic young British man with no acceptable focus for his idealism; the for-mer British colonial soldier Malcolm Deedes, the former Coppemican guerrillaleader Kundula Maya, and the European-educated Coppemican poet-politicianAmah Odouma. All of these figures represent identifiable types as much as distinctindividuals and recall Lukacs's emphasis on the central role played in the histori-cal novel by characters whose typicality makes them the embodiment of largesocial and historical forces rather than individual eccentricities.

For Lukacs such characters are effective in the work of a novelist like Scottbecause of the links they establish between the private (personal) and public(political) dimensions of life, allowing the novels to capture a sense of socialtotality in their representation of the movement of history. Most of Caute' schar-acters, especially the American and European ones, are radically alienated from

the social world around them. As a result, despite their ability to represent typi-cal positions within society, they lack the kind of connection to the social totali-ty that for Lukacs is central to the characterization of novelists like Scott. To anextent, the separation of Caute's characters from any sense of social totality isonly to be expected. Lukacs himself emphasizes that that sense tends to be lostin European literature after 1848. Indeed, for Lukacs the loss of an ability to con-ceive of such a close connection between the public and private realms consti-tutes a crucial symptom of the loss of historical sense that characterizes bour-geois literature in the late nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie, havingfirmly established their hegemony in Europe, have lost their revolutionary ener-gy and become a decadent and reactionary class:

With the growing social division of labour and the complication of socialrelations in class societies, a division between the public and private occursin life itself. Literature as the reflection of life cannot help reproducing thisprocess. (133)

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Caute's book is not, however, merely a reflection of neocolonial reality, but acriticism of it. His critical (leftist) perspective therefore suggests that the alien-ation of his characters from the social totality should not be taken as a limitationin his vision so much as an element of his commentary on bourgeois society.Indeed, that alienation is an explicit theme of The Decline of the West, the title ofwhich can be taken not only as an allusion to Spengler but as a nod to the Lukac-sian notion of bourgeois decadence and decline after 1848. 2 In one scene, Cautepresents a confrontation between James Caffrey's idealistic brother Alec andtheir anti-Semitic father, who is defending the exclusion of Jews from his golfclub. The father, who agrees that public British policy should oppose the kind of

anti-Semitism represented by Nazi Germany, nevertheless argues that the club isa separate, private matter: "Now, my home, my private home, the home I havebought with my own money, my own savings and my own sweat-surely I caninvite in whom I like? Am I not a free man? Am I taking away someone else'sfreedom? The club is the same; it's private" (197). Later, Caute presents the storyof Malcolm Deedes's impoverished childhood in Scotland, which largely con-sists of an education in class difference, translating to a growing perception ofthe separation between the public and private realms and of the dog-eat-dog real-ities of alienated life under capitalism:

All joys, it seemed, were private, all sorrows public. To be private was tohave, to be public was to have taken away, expropriated, distributed. Whena friend cast covetous eyes on your ball, bat or stolen bike, it was time toremind him, "It's preevit!"-then fight on the piss-stained concrete, in dank,fetid alleyways, high treble voices shrill as dying birds, blood and yellow-green snot. (50 1)3

That kind of imagery is common to The Decline of the West and Two ThousandSeasons. Meanwhile, the sense of a breakdown in the connection between pub-lic and private life that is crucial to Caute's book-a marker of the alienation thatis central to capitalism in its decadent period-recalls Jameson's influential (ifcontroversial) argument that all "third-world texts"-and particularly the majorcharacters in those texts-must necessarily be read as "national allegories." ForJameson, the allegorical nature of such texts arises from the fundamental natureof third-world societies, in which the continuation of traditional communal ener-gies prevents the radical separation between public and private realms typical ofWestern societies. That continuing sense of connection between the public and

private worlds translates into literature in which there is no clear boundarybetween individual characters and the societies in which they live, leading to asituation in which "the story of a private individual destiny is always an allego-ry of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society"("Third-World" 69, Jameson's emphasis).

Jameson's sweeping characterization of third-world texts has been criticizedon numerous fronts, perhaps most cogently by Aijaz Ahmad, who objects both to

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Jameson's argument that third-world literature is distinct from first-world litera-ture and to Jameson's notion that all third-world texts are basically alike in theirfocus on the story of decolonization and nation building (95-122).4 Nevertheless,Jameson's notion of national allegory can be useful, especially given that itinvolves a sophisticated and plural sense of allegorical representation, rather thana mere Bunyanesque "table of equivalences." Numerous allegorical charactersappear in Armah's work. One thinks of Teacher in The Beautyful Ones Are NotYet Born, Baako Onipa in Fragments, and Modin Dofu in Why Are We So Blest",all somewhat allegorical visions of the alienated postcolonial intellectual. Alien-ation is, in fact, the principal theme of these three novels, which clearly compli-

cates Jameson's idealized vision of the third-world novel-which among otherthings posits third-world literature as a source of nonreified cultural capital thatmight help first-world intellectuals to overcome their own alienation. Of course,Jameson's vision itself comes very close here to an academic version of globalcapitalism in which the Third World supplies raw materials (in this case litera-ture) while the more advanced first world employs those materials to produce fin-ished products (in this case criticism)." In any case, Armah's delineation of thedeviation of his Anoans from the traditional African way quite often bears somestriking resemblances to the Marxist critique of the alienation and social frag-mentation brought about by capitalism. For example. Armah emphasizes the eco-nomic motivation of the European destroyers who exacerbate that deviation, not-ing that despite their use of Christianity as a tool of social control, in point of facttheir "only worship" is "profit" (213). The destruction of the traditional Anoanway then consists precisely of the breakdown in the strong sense of social total-ity envisioned by Jameson in his conceptualization of the third-world nationalallegory. a breakdown closely related to the alienation resulting from a growingfascination with western commodities, to "the people-killing fascination withthings, the hypnotism of the white destroyers' shiny things ... things to set peo-ple apart from people" (314). The impact of these commodities on the tradition-al Anonan way can also be usefully understood within the context of Lukacs'semphasis on the phenomenon of reification (a key marker of decadence), inwhich such a fascination with things is accompanied by a reduction of all aspectsof human life (most importantly social relationships) to a thing-like status.Indeed, Armah points toward a similar diagnosis of Anoan society after the intru-sion of colonialism:

A people are already trapped in spirit when they agree to the use of things tohurl themselves separately against each other. The root of the disease is notin the abundance of things but in relationships growing between users. (315)

On the other hand, the "way" itself is centrally informed by an organic senseof connection between private and public life very similar to that attributed byJameson to third-world societies:

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The single agent's action is waste motion; the single agent's freedom uselessliberty. Such individual action can find no sense until there is again thathigher connectedness that links each agent to the group. Then the single per-

son is no cut-off thing but an extension of the living group, the single willbut a piece of the group's active will, each mind a part of a larger commonmind. (210)

Chida Amuta is thus correct that for Armah "the community rather than the indi-vidual is the essence of African social existence" (44). Moreover, Two ThousandSeasons is an ultimately optimistic text that points toward a renewal of the "way"in the development of postcolonial Anoan society. Armah's book features a num-ber of positive figures, like the spokesman Isanusi, who contribute to the process

of that restoration much in the mode of Jameson's national allegories, althoughArmah also insists that the history of Africa includes events that go well beyondthe bounds of colonization and decolonization. Armah's plural narrator-the col-lective choral voice of an age group of eleven girls and nine boys-is an evenmore effective national allegory, and one that escapes the lingering individualismpotentially embedded in Jameson's focus on the use of a single character to rep-resent a national struggle.

Chinyere Nwahunanya emphasizes the utopian dimension of Two ThousandSeasons, noting that "while Armah speaks of a lost Eden whose values, thoughlost for now, are not irretrievable, his vision is also a utopian vision, a vision ofthe ideal, for it prescribes a course for charting the future direction to Africa'ssocial and spiritual health" (558-9). Jameson's continuing insistence on theimportance of utopian thinking is again relevant here, though Nwahunanya'scharacterization of the "way" as a prescription for the ideal African society maybe an oversimplification of Armah's historical vision, which is consistently ori-ented toward the future. Although Two Thousand Seasons emphasizes the valueof a usable past, that past is not something to be recovered so much as something

to provide inspiration for the future, which remains open." Thus, Armah's narra-tor repeatedly declares that "we are not a people of yesterday." And, althoughending with an optimistic proclamation that "our people will live, and will nec-essarily destroy the white destroyers infesting us together with their helpers theparasites," the narrator also insists that past destruction will be succeeded by "avision of creation yet unknown" (317, 321).

The particular utopianism of Two Thousand Seasons recalls the rejection ofnostalgic utopianism in Armah's essay "African Socialism: Utopian or Scientif-ic?" Through that future-oriented vision, Armah (echoing Fanon) also attempts

to transcend that "arrestingly vulgar, premature decadence" with which hecharges African postcolonial regimes in this same essay (28). The issue of deca-dence is also crucial to Jameson's characterization of third-world literature,though in a less-obvious way. Jameson's vision of the inability of first-world lit-erature to connect to a social totality is largely a restatement of Lukacs's descrip-tion of decadent bourgeois literature; Jameson's belief in the presence of such

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connections in third-world literature echoes Lukacs's characterization of theEuropean historical novel (or, alternatively of the social novels of Balzac) in the

early nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie were still young and energetic.Jameson's national allegories, for example, are not far from the Lukacsiannotion of typical characters.

Jameson's recent emphasis on the importance of third-world and other subal-tern literatures comes dangerously close to a neo-Africanist vision of Africa as athrowback to the younger days of Europe-that is, as a source of raw, primitiveenergies that transcend the hypercivilized decadence of the West. 7 On the otherhand, Jameson is saved to an extent from charges of Africanism by the fact thathis suggestion of third-world literature as a model for first-world intellectuals

directly echoes Lukacs's similar recommendation of texts from the heyday ofEuropean realism. In addition, the ability of Armah to produce an effective utopi-an vision through appeal to the traditional Anoan way suggests that the energiesperceived by Jameson may not be entirely imaginary. It is certainly the case thatTwo Thousand Seasons maintains a much stronger sense of social totality thandoes The Decline of the West, which lacks any significant utopian dimension."Thus, although Caute's book presents an extended critique of bourgeois deca-dence, it may itself fail to escape that decadence. Spengler is particularly relevantin that sense, and Caute begins his book with an epigraph from Der Untergangdes Abendlandes that identifies the phenomenon of imperialism as a crucialmarker of European decadence and decline. In that epigraph, by suggesting the"expansive tendency" as a central force that will lead to the downfall of Europeancivilization, Spengler oddly echoes the otherwise very different vision of Marx,for whom the eventual fall of capitalism was to be centrally informed by the insa-tiable quest for expansion.

Spengler, of course, lacks the utopian dimension that counterbalances thedescription of bourgeois decadence in Marx's (and Lukacs's) work. Yet Spengler

oddly anticipates the emphasis of anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and AimeCesaire on the decadence of modern Europe. In his seminal manifesto Discourseon Colonialism, Cesaire explicitly identifies imperialism as both a symptom anda cause of bourgeois decadence and of the descent of Europe into savagery-andeventually to domination by the newer and more insidious imperialism emanat-ing from America." Cesaire's position resembles and, in fact, influences Fanon's(and hence Armah's) later comments on Europe as a source of premature deca-dence in Africa. But Cesaire and Fanon both nevertheless maintain hopes ofutopian renewal in Africa and the Caribbean, thus anticipating the emergence ofa utopian dimension in Two Thousand Seasons. Meanwhile, Caute's lack of autopian dimension may not be surprising given Lukacs's descriptions of deca-dence in Europe.

Lukacs implies in The Historical Novel that even socialist literature of the1930s tends to be decadent and thus needs to return to bourgeois predecessorslike Scott and Balzac in search of renewed energies. Of course, utopia is quite

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easy for the European historical novelists favored by Lukacs, given that the bour-geois history drawn upon by a writer like Scott is probably the greatest narrative

of triumph and success in all of history. And socialist novelists of the 1930s haveat least some political reality to draw upon in constructing their utopian visions.However, hopes for a similar socialism triumphant, spurred by the beginnings of"actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and encouraged bythe near collapse of capitalism in the depression years of the 1930s, were to cometo naught. The decadence of Caute' s text should be viewed in light of the fact thatthe socialist revolution envisioned by Lukacs failed to materialize in Europe, ahistorical fact that casts considerable doubt on Lukacs's belief that the revolu-tionary literature of European realism could provide useful models for an anti-

bourgeois cultural revolution in Europe.One could argue that European realism is actually a more relevant model for

postcolonial writers like Armah, who can draw upon the revolutionary historicalchange represented by decolonization. The problem, of course, is that decolo-nization may not, in retrospect, have been so revolutionary after all. Armah,drawing upon Fanon, makes that point quite explicitly in the "African Socialism"essay, noting that the supposedly revolutionary change of decolonization was inreality merely an evolutionary change in which a decadent African bourgeoisiestepped into the shoes formerly occupied by a decadent European colonial bour-geoisie, leaving the class iniquities of African society firmly in place (28).10 Toan extent, then, Armah and Caute are very much in the same historical boat, writ-ing in the wake of fizzled antibourgeois uprisings that render the triumphant real-ist literature of the European bourgeois revolution rather unsuitable as a modelfor either. African and European leftist writers share a number of problems inattempting to construct a narrative of the past that escapes decadence and con-tributes to a positive utopian vision of the future. Among other things, that his-torical parallel suggests that, rather than take Lukacs's advice to tum to European

realism for examples of effective revolutionary literature, African postcolonialwriters and European socialist writers should perhaps make common cause andseek to learn from each other.

Jameson suggests as much when he argues that Western leftist intellectuals canrecover from third-world literature a sense of social totality that has been large-ly lost in the radically fragmented societies of the postmodern West. A similarinsight is embedded in Jameson's description of the Third World as one of thefew last remaining bastions of potentially productive cultural energy in the midstof a world that is otherwise entirely caught in the net of capitalist globalization.He remarks that "the only authentic cultural production today has seemed to bethat which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of thesocial life in the world system," a category that for him includes such heteroge-neous entities as third-world literature, black American literature, British work-ing-class rock, women's literature, gay literature, and the roman quebecois (Sig-natures 23). That "authentic cultural production" serves as a potential paradigm

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for European leftist literature much in the way Lukacs had hoped European real-ism would do. And certainly it is plausible to presume that those "marginal pock-

ets" can draw upon alternative cultural energies (such as those associated withtraditional African cultures) that might be unavailable to more "mainstream"writers in the metropolitan centers. Moreover, those energies are quite oftenexplicitly socialist (though not necessarily Marxist). And certainly postcolonialliterature is specifically socialist (or at least anticapitalist) in its orientation. I I

With proletarian literature and socialist realism both apparently routed in theWest-and now therefore in their own periods of decadence-Jameson may becorrect that postcolonial and other "marginal" literatures are the leading contem-porary alternatives to the global cultural homogenization of late capitalism.'?

Nevertheless, there have been (western Cold-War stereotypes to the contrarynotwithstanding) numerous examples of successful European leftist literature.Writers like Brecht, Gorky, and Sholokhov might potentially provide extremelyuseful models for African postcolonial writers. Indeed, African writers likeNgugi have clearly learned from such European predecessors. At the same time,contemporary writers in Africa and in Europe should also be able to profit fromthe ultimate failure of European leftist literature to contribute to the growth of avital socialist culture in the middle decades of this century. Fortunately (with theCold War ostensibly over), serious studies of that literature are finally underwayin the western academy. Those studies are beginning to produce powerful lessonsin cultural politics to which any contemporary writers interested in opposing thedomination of European bourgeois culture would do well to attend. Cary Nelsonhas recovered the work of American proletarian poets in ways that have power-ful implications for how we study literary history; James Bloom's studies of thework of leading American leftist writers like Mike Gold and Joseph Freemanchallenge the traditional notion that modernism and proletarian literature occupyopposite poles in American cultural history; James Murphy's work on crucial

cultural debates on the Left in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United Statesshows those debates to have been far more complex and sophisticated than theyhave usually been represented to be by western cultural historians; and BarbaraFoley's insightful remarks on the inability of leftist writers to break free of thefundamental assumptions of traditional bourgeois aesthetics provide crucialwarnings to future writers who would seek to transcend those assumptions.

African postcolonial and European leftist writers are both engaged in attempt-ing to contribute to the development of new cultural identities that escape thedomination of the European bourgeois past. The end of the twentieth century is

a historical moment in which earlier utopian hopes of liberation have been frus-trated, overwhelmed by the seemingly irresistible historical juggernaut of capi-talist globalization. Works like Caute's The Decline of the West suggest that theEuropean Left maintains an active critical intelligence but may have lost much ofits ability to imagine effective utopian alternatives. Utopia is not always availableto postcolonial writers, either, but Armah's Two Thousand Seasons suggests the

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relative vitality of utopian visions in African postcolonial literature. The parallelsbetween the works of Armah and Caute suggest that in the era of late capitalism,

European leftist writers and African postcolonial writers are natural allies in theirattempts to resist the growth of capitalist global hegemony. Indeed, given thathegemony, such alliances are not only possible, but essential.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

NOTES

I. Wright, for example, argues that "the growing tendency to blame all Africa's woes upon theWest. most pronounced in Why Are We So Blessed", stiffens in Two Thousand Seasons. into an explic-it racism" (233). On the other hand, see Fraser for an argument that the racism of Two Thousand Sea-sons is not a liability because the book treats race in a symbolic and mythological, rather than realis-tic. mode (72-3).

2. Indeed, Caute clearly uses Spengler less as a textual source than as a reminder of certain deca-dent strains in European culture. For example, Spengler's prophecies of the decline of industrializedEurope and the concomitant rise of the more "primitive" (and thus presumably more vital) societiesof Asia and Africa serve as an inspiration to figures like the sinister Keller, who hopes to build anAfrican power base in Coppemica that will eventually allow him to establish a neo-Nazi regime inFrance as well.

3. Caute himself has identified "the tension between man's private and public existences" as the"central 'problematic' of my thinking and writing" (qtd. in Bergonzi, 49).

4. But see Clint Burnham for a useful reminder that Jameson frames his argument in this essaywithin a cascade of disclaimers (156-64).

5. On some of the implications of that situation, see the recent article by W. J. T. Mitchell.6. Indeed, Armah's utopian vision corresponds in many ways to the notion of "open" utopia

described by Raymond Williams. For a good discussion of the complexity of Armah 's utopian vision,see Ato Sekyi-Otu,

7. On the consistency with which an entire array of nineteenth-century European discourses onAfrica tended to envision Africa as radically separated from Europe in terms of temporal develop-ment, see Mudimbe, who notes that European writers in fields like botany, anthropology, andphrenology "attempted to prove that in Africa the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as wellas the people, represent relics of a remote age of antiquity" (107).

8. The closest Caute's book comes to a utopian moment occurs at the book's end when Odouma,freshly rescued from Laval by a band of pro- Tukhomada guerrillas, urges them not to harm the cap-tured Caffrey, who had formerly served as Laval's lieutenant but who prevented Laval from killingOdouma.

9. In addition, Cesaire provides a catalogue of incidents of colonial violence that anticipates thedescriptions by both Caute and Armah of the impact of the European intrusion on African society(18-21).

10. That same observation also constitutes a central insight of Armah's first and best-known novel,The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968).

II. See, for example, E. San Juan for a spirited survey of some of that literature.

12. Jameson's most important and extensive discussion of the culture oflate capitalism appears inPostmodernism, or. The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism.

WORKS CITED

Ahmad. Aijaz. In Theory: Classes. Nations. Literatures. London: Verso. 1992.Arnuta, Chidi. "History. Contemporary Reality and Social Vision in Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thou-

sand Seasons." Journal of the Literary Societv of' Nigeria I (1981): 40-5 I.

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Armah, Ayi Kwei. "African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific')" Presence Africaine 64 (1967): 6-30.---. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann, 1969.---. Two Thousand Seasons. Chicago: Third World P, 1979.---. Why Are We So Blest? Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974.Bergonzi, Bernard. "Fictions of History," The Contemporary English Novel. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury

and David Palmer. New York: Holmes, 1980. 43-65.Bloom, James D. Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. New York:

Columbia UP, 1992.Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics ojMarxist Theory. Durham, North

Carolina: Duke UP, 1995.Caute, David. The Decline o{ the West. New York: Macmillan, 1966.---. Frantz Fanon. New York: Viking, 1970.---. The Illusion: An Essay 011 Politics, Theatre, and the Novel. New York: Harper, 1972.Cesaire, Airne. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans, Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review P, 1972.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove P, 1968.Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U. S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941.Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1993.

Fraser, Robert. The Novels (){Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction. London: Heinemann,1980.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism. or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Caroli-na: Duke UP, 1991.

---. Signatures of the visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.---. 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15 (1986):

65-88.Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: U of

Nebraska P, 1983.Mitchell, W. J. T. "Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism." Transition Sb (1992): 11-19.Mudimbe, V . Y . The Invention (){Africa: Gnosis. Philosophy. and the Order of Knowledge. Bloom-

ington: Indiana UP, 1988.Murphy, James F. The Proletarian Moment: The Controversv over Leftism ill Literature. Urbana: U

of Illinois P, 1991.Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recover)': Modern American Poetrv and the Politics of Cultural M e m -

orv. 1914-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.Nwahunanya, Chinyere. "A Vision of the Ideal: Armah's Two Thousand Seasons." Modem Fiction

Studies 37.3 (1991): 549-60.San Juan, E. Jr. From the Masses. to the Masses: Third World Literature and Revolution. Minneapo-

lis, Minnesota: MEP, 1994.Sekyi-Otu, Ato. 'Toward Anoa ... not back to Anoa": The Grammar of Revolutionary Homecoming

in Two Thousand Seasons." Research ill African Literatures 18.2 (1987): 192-214.Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.White, Alion. "Pigs and Pierrots: The Politics of Transgression in Modem Fiction." Raritan II

(1982): 51-70.Williams, Raymond. "Utopia and Science Fiction." Science-Fiction Studies 5 (1978): 203-14.Wright, Derek. Ayi Kwei Armah ' 0 1 'Africa: The Sources of His Fiction. London: Hans Zell, 1989.

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The Historical Novel in Ayi Kwei Arnah. Socialist Literature and the Bourgeois Cultural Tradition

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