A Little History of Literature (34 page)

Dickens's Fagin in
Oliver Twist
shows its author as panderiing to gross racial stereotypes – no defence holds up. In later life he re-gretted Fagin and made changes when the novel was reprinted. He also made amends by introducing a saintly Jewish character into one of his last novels (Riah, in
Our Mutual Friend
). However, Fagin remains for many readers unforgiveable, even in soft-centred films and musical adaptations such as
Oliver!
.

One of the angriest rows in the last few years has been over the head of the dead poet, T.S. Eliot. It was spearheaded by a polemical book by the critic (and lawyer) Anthony Julius who used as evidence remarks made by Eliot in early lectures (later suppressed) and lines in the poems to argue that the poet was anti-Semitic. The evidence is, many objective commentators contend, inconclusive. Eliot has been as fiercely defended as he has been denounced. But the dust kicked up by the row has not yet settled and probably never will.

A useful starting point in thinking about all this is to acknowledge that literature is one of the few places that race is openly discussed, and where the rawest issues it raises are made accessible for debate and quarrel. It's a place where society can work out its attitudes. Most of us would see this as a good thing, whatever our personal opinions or sensitivities, and whatever feathers are ruffled.

Take, as an example of literature going where other forms of discourse fear to tread, Philip Roth's novel,
The Human Stain
(2000). The hero is a Classics professor, of advanced years and the highest reputation, at a distinguished university. He is Jewish. He innocently ‘mis-speaks’ in class, offending two African American students, and is instructed by a college tribunal to attend a course of ‘sensitivity training’. He refuses, on principle, and resigns. It eventually emerges that he is not Jewish after all, but African American. He had hidden his real identity because that was the only way he could, at that time, make a career in higher education. The alternative was
to follow his other talent – as a black boxer. He chose to be a white classicist. The novel itself makes the large point about there being ‘only one race, the human race’. And another: that we should ignore the political correctness which inhibits us from talking about race. As a novelist, Roth is not one for inhibition.

There is a big difference between how American and European literatures deal with race. America was substantially built, from the ground up, by slave-power, human beings imported involuntarily from Africa (those, that is, who survived the so-called ‘middle passage’). It is now seen as one of humanity's great crimes against humanity. Toni Morrison, for example, opens her novel
Beloved
(1987) with the epigraph:

It caused huge offence, alluding, as it was generally supposed, to the (‘only’) six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and suggesting that there were greater holocausts that America chose to ignore. Morrison's narrative centres on a ghost, from the era of slavery, which can never be exorcised and should never be ignored.

A bloody civil war was fought to abolish American slavery. Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have remarked, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, that he wished to shake the hand of the little woman who had started that great war. A modest woman, Stowe might well have replied that actually it was started by brave abolitionists and, if a book was to be congratulated, it should be an autobiography published seven years before hers, in 1845:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
. After gaining his freedom, Douglass devoted his life, and his considerable literary abilities, to the cause of the abolition of slavery. The opening paragraphs still have the power to shock, delivered, as they are, in deliberately passionless language:

British literature's concern with race is linked to the empire which the home country won, held for centuries, and lost (Chapter 26). Since the 1950s, when the British Empire was blown away by the ‘winds of change’, the context of racial discussion has been ‘postcolonial’ and radically different. The whole imperial project has been examined sceptically and, at times, guiltily by British writers in what is now the most multicultural literary world anywhere on the planet. This multiculturalism has opened up what some would say is the richest seam in Britain's recent literature, with writers such as Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, and a new interest in such writers as the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri (a Booker Prize winner) and, originally from the West Indies, the novelist Wilson Harris and the poet Derek Walcott (a Nobel Prize winner).

Another British West Indian author, V.S. Naipaul, expressed in his Nobel Prize-winner's speech the complexities of a post-colonial writer like himself. His grandfather's generation had been brought to Trinidad, from India (then a British dominion), as ‘indentured labour’, mainly as office workers. Naipaul grew up ‘over the bones of the island's exterminated “aborigines”’, and alongside the descendants of black slaves from Africa. Outstandingly clever, he won a scholarship to Oxford University and made his ‘home’ in England as what he called a ‘mimic man’: English, but not English; Indian, but not Indian; Trinidadian, but not Trinidadian.

The British live in a post-colonial era, but have colonial ‘ownerships’ been fully abolished? Not everyone would agree they have. The greatest Nigerian novelist, many would claim, is Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). He was christened Albert Achebe, after Queen Victoria's consort. His first published novel – still the work for which he is famous worldwide – is
Things Fall Apart
(the title
is a quotation from the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats). It first came out in 1958, in Britain. His later works were all first published in Britain or the USA. In later life, Achebe's main employment was in American universities. Derek Walcott, the most distinguished of post-colonial poets, was also employed in a prestigious American university for most of his career. Can fiction – or poetry – so rooted, or authors so salaried, be truly independent? Or are there still colonial shackles clanking in the background?

The USA is where the most interesting literature centred on racial themes is happening. The classic text is Ralph Waldo Ellison's
Invisible Man
(1952). Unlike his fellow African Americans, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Ellison wrote not realism but allegory; his fiction is playful in method, but deadly serious in content. He initially planned a short novel and in 1947 published what remains a core element of
Invisible Man
, ‘A Battle Royal’, in which, for the entertainment of jeering white men, black men are stripped naked, blindfolded, and made to fight each other in a boxing ring for sham prizes. As eventually published, the novel hinges on another conceit: ‘I am an
invisible man
… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.’ The USA, the novel says, has ‘solved’ its racial problem by wilful blindness.

Invisible Man
is a jazz novel. Ellison loved the improvisational freedom of the great African American art form – one of the few freedoms his people could lay claim to. Louis Armstrong's ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?’ haunts the novel like a theme song. As its lyrics lament:

Toni Morrison, America's greatest living African American novelist (many would say ‘American novelist’
tout court
) is similarly inspired by what is called the one original art to come out of the USA. Discussing her 1992 novel,
Jazz
, she explained:

The jazz Ellison loved was ‘traditional’ New Orleans jazz (hence Louis Armstrong). He disliked Swing and ‘modern’ jazz, thinking them ‘too white’. The jazz that most influences Morrison is the ultra-improvisational, post-modernist Free-Form jazz that Ornette Coleman pioneered in the 1960s.

In general terms one could argue that in Britain (in its literature at least) there has been a kind of ‘blending’ – a dissolving of racial difference. Toni Morrison has insisted on maintaining angry difference. This anger is at its hottest in her early novel,
Tar Baby
(1981), in which a character concludes: ‘White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those personal things in life.’ At a conference at that time, Morrison herself roundly declared: ‘At no moment in my life have I ever felt as though I was an American. At no moment.’ In later years, particularly after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, her comments about race have softened, but never to the point that she regards herself as ‘American’ rather than ‘African American’. An angry sense of racial separation burns in all her work.

The endeavour of most politicians and, indeed, most citizens in the USA is to bring about a condition of enlightened colour-blindness. To rise, that is, above the racial division which has caused the country so much pain, and historically cost it so much blood. American literature and its figurehead writer, Morrison, have declined to buy into this. They have used, and still use, the division to explore black identity creatively. To dive into it, that is, rather than float above and forget it.

We find a distinct African American presence nowadays in such literary enclaves as ‘private eye’ detective fiction. The career of Walter Mosley's black hero, Easy Rawlins, is chronicled in a series of novels, beginning with
Devil in a Blue Dress
(1990), which, in their background, chronicle the history of race relations in Los Angeles. Chester Himes did the same for New York, with his
Harlem Cycle
series of the 1950s and 1960s (which he began writing in prison,
and concluded in exile, in Paris). Samuel R. Delany, an African American science fiction writer, has brought a new imput to that genre. There are those who would argue (and I am one) that there is a strong vein of Whitmanesque free verse (Chapter 21) in the blues and, more recently, rap, both of which are African American preserves. In short, there has been no blending out, and American literature is the stronger for its many colours.

What, to sum up, is literature's role in the complex relationships of race, society and history? There is no simple answer. But we can borrow the heartfelt cry in Arthur Miller's play,
Death of a Salesman
: ‘attention must be paid’. Where race is concerned, literature is paying attention and we can be grateful for it. But it does not always make for comfortable reading.

CHAPTER
36

Magical Realisms

B
ORGES
, G
RASS
, R
USHDIE AND
M
áRQUEZ

The term ‘magic realism’ became current in the 1980s. Suddenly everyone seemed to be knowingly dropping it into conversations about the latest thing in literature. What, though, does this odd term mean? On the face of it, ‘magic realism’ looks like an oxymoron, jamming together two traditionally irreconcilable elements. A novel is ‘fictional’ (it never happened) but it is also ‘true’ – that is, ‘realistic’. The mass of British fiction, from Defoe, through what has been called the ‘Great Tradition’ (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence), on past Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, to Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt, has tended towards literary realism. So too in the USA, where the mainstream followed Ernest Hemingway's injunction to present life ‘as it is’. There were, of course, writers of fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, but they resided in a quite separate compartment. Gormenghast Castle is a very different kind of structure from, say, the country houses of Brideshead or Howards End. Magic realism was a new literary hybrid.

Varieties of magic realism had in fact been around for almost half a century before the 1980s. One can see a number of works
playing with the idea in an experimental way on the fringes of literature and art. But it was not until the twentieth century was drawing to a close that magic realism took off as a powerful literary genre.

Three reasons can be suggested. One was the recognition in Europe and America that new and exciting things were happening in South American hispanic literature, with Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa – writers whose international fame, as translation made its impact worldwide, created what was called ‘the Latin American Boom’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Writers like Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie also recruited mass readerships in Europe. A clear precursor to the boom was Grass's novel
The Tin Drum
(1959); with the publication of Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
(1981), magic realism became mainstream and a literary style without frontiers. The third element that helped make magic realism a style for the time was that it allowed writers, despite the extravagant unreality of their narratives (the ‘magic’ ingredient), to make what were, in fact, important political interventions. To be players, that is, not merely in literature, but in public life and geopolitical affairs. They came into the public arena, as it were, by a side door that no one was guarding.