Fiction and the

Incompleteness of History
 Zhu Ying

Fiction and the

Incompleteness
of History
Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul,
and Ben Okri

PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
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Printed in Germany
To Timothy Weiss and the
memories of Hong Kong
Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Chapter One
Introduction: imagining and repatterning the
incompleteness of history 11

Chapter Two
A shadowless participation: Toni Morrisons Beloved
and discredited history 43

Chapter Three
A little chasm filled: the transformation of history in
V.S. Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival and
A Way in the World 75

Chapter Four
An undiscovered continent: Ben Okris The Famished Road
and the enlargement of historical reality 107

Chapter Five
Conclusion 141

Bibliography 151

Index 159
Acknowledgements

This book is based on a dissertation submitted to The Chinese

University of Hong Kong for my doctoral degree in English Literary
Studies in 2005, and therefore, I owe this book to my dissertation
committee professors. First of all, I am indebted to Timothy Weiss, for
providing with continued attention, strong support and significant
guidance during my study in Hong Kong. Without his vision,
knowledge, and encouragement, this project, which was conceived in
early 2003, would not have been possible. It has also benefited
immeasurably by the careful readings, stimulating questions, and
insightful suggestions of David Parker, Lisa Lai-ming Wong, and
Barry Asker, to whom I am very grateful.
I am also very grateful to Bill Mullen, who inspired me to
develop a keen interest in African-American history and literature, and
especially in Toni Morrison scholarship. Adam Schwartz deserves
special appreciation for his generosity and help that made my short
research in the library at Wellesley College both rewarding and
memorable. I wish to express my gratitude to Paul Levine, a reliable
mentor and warm friend, for constantly advising me on academic
issues, to Ren Xiaojin for believing me from the very beginning, and
to George Braine for always wishing me well.
I would like to thank the English Department and School of
Foreign Languages at Shanghai East China Normal University for
offering me a reasonable grant, and especially Dean Zhang Chunbai
for his understanding and thoughtfulness. I would also like to thank
Alexis Kirschbaum at Peter Lang Publishers in England, for her
enthusiasm and professionalism. Helena Sedgwick has my sincere
thanks for her technical assistance that has brought about a smooth
publication of this book.
My parents have been extremely caring and patient during the
years I pursued my intellectual ideals. They provided a firm, much-
needed anchor of love and warmth, without which I would not have
persevered.
Chapter One
Introduction: imagining and repatterning
the incompleteness of history

Under history, memory and forgetting.

Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion.1 (Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p.506).

Epigrammatic and melodious, this little poem by Paul Ricoeur reveals

deep insights on the entangled relations among history, memory, life
and story writing. That is, the interrelatedness of history and memory,
the dichotomy of remembering and forgetting, and the dialectic of life
writing and story writing. In particular, the final word inachvement
(incompletely) underscores the fragmented and unfinished aspect of
history, memory, narrative, and life itself. However, at least in English
the negative prefix in has another dimension of connotation; incom-
pletely also suggests dynamism or flux and potentiality or something
in the making. In other words, the awareness of incompleteness not
only augments knowledge of the reality but also calls upon an un-
ending project to reinterpret the historical past and re-envision the
world.
Besides, it is precisely this sense of incompleteness that catalyzes
the effort generation after generation to further explore unnoticed
places in self and community, as well as in the past, present and future.
In their imaginative literature, especially in their historical novels,
Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri have delineated and also

1 The original poem reads:

Sous lhistoire, la mmoire et loubli.
Sous la mmoire et loubli, la vie.
Mais crire la vie est une autre histoire.
Inachvement.
(Paul Ricoeur, La Mmoire, LHistoire, LOubli, p.657).
perpetuated an admirable endeavour to rewrite the historical past and
redescribe the world from the position of nationality, cultural tradition
and experience. Taking Ricoeurs perception in The Reality of the
Historical Past (1984) as a point of departure, this book looks at
particular phases of human history slavery, diaspora and post-
colonialism these writers carried in their identity and re-created in
their work. Specifically, by focusing on their fictional oeuvre
Morrisons Beloved (1987), Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel
in Five Sections (1987) and A Way in the World: A Novel (1994), as
well as Okris The Famished Road (1991), this book tries to cast light
on specific stages in history that have been lost, undocumented or
misinterpreted due to the absence of historical evidence, the split
sense of a historical past, and the constraints of writing history. In the
course of rendering these unwritten or forgotten histories, Morrison,
Naipaul and Okri imagine as well as repattern actual and fictional
materials to re-enact and reconstruct the reality of a historical past that
might not otherwise be reached.
Imagining is indispensable in combating the incompleteness of
history and defying historical negation or absence. On the one hand,
imagining foregrounds the creativity of memory and heightens the gift
of imagination, offering a much-needed distance from and non-
allegiance to facts. On the other hand, imagining serves as a liberating
device on the part of the writer to go beyond the confines of docu-
mentary data to select, construct and comment on a historical reality.
Repatterning incorporates Hayden Whites concept of emplotment in
history writing with an emphasis on revising, rectifying and
reinterpreting. In Tropics of Discourse (1978), White has illustrated
the necessity and the inexpugnability of fictional elements in historio-
graphy the writing of history. Resorting to narrative strategies com-
monly practised in fiction writing, historians construct a historical past
by emplotting historical events in the form of a meaningful story. In
this sense, the primary meaning of the word history is referred to.
Derived from the Latin historia, history implies, first and foremost, a
story or a narrative of events connected with a real or imaginary object
or person; second, history is a systematic written account comprising a
chronological record of past events, circumstances, and facts. Actually,
these two pre-eminent faculties of history pervade the entire book.

12
Approaching the historical past from a different direction, fiction
writers come by and sort out factual and historical materials with an
attempt to translate and recast them in an imaginary milieu. Therefore,
repatterning manifests a process of re-defamiliarizing and realigning
documentary data into various kinds of matrices. One kind is not more
correct than the other, but rather a different constituent of the same
and coherent picture of the historical past.
So far as the nature of storytelling is concerned, the role of the
historian is perhaps not utterly dissimilar to that of the fiction writer.
Not surprisingly, the distinction between history, which primarily
works with the actual or factual, and fiction, which mainly deals with
the possible or imaginary, becomes blurred and controversial. That is,
history has an element of fictionality, whereas fiction is deeply rooted
in actuality. History and fiction, therefore, form an intricate reci-
procity, influencing and conditioning one another. Aristotles theory
on poetry, and on the difference between the historian and the poet
discloses another feature in the relationship between history and
fiction. According to Aristotle, poetry tends to express the universal,
history the particular, and the historian recounts what has happened,
whereas the poet what may happen what is possible according to
the law of probability or necessity (Butcher, p.35). Hence, the
incompleteness of history is understood in terms of historys particular
concern with past events and its particular way of looking at reality as
documents and actualities rather than possibilities and potentialities.
Fiction, with its core fictio coming from facere, provides a different
image of the world and reality. Ricoeur argues that fiction reveals its
ability to remake the world and transform or transfigure reality only
when it is inserted into something as a labour, [] when it is work
(Ricoeur, Function, p.129). In their works of fiction, Morrison,
Naipaul and Okri present an alternative vision of the world and reality
that challenges the codification and authority of accepted or standard
history. By inventively interpreting and repatterning historical docu-
ments, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri re-create a historical reality that
incorporates and transmits their personal and cultural experience. As
thus stated, history is constantly rectified and transformed to fulfil
individual interpretations and the requests of today and tomorrow.

13
 Specifically, Morrisons literary archaeology is built upon her
responsibility of rip[ping] the veil masking a peculiar aspect of
American history slavery (Morrison, Site, p.110), which has been
discredited and has been [q]uiet as its kept (Ibid., Bluest, p.9).
Similarly, Naipaul is committed to see one little chasm filled after
another (Naipaul, Enigma, p.179) in his literary adventure to illu-
minate areas of darkness in the history of his diasporic worlds (Ibid.,
Two Worlds, p.483). Inventing a protagonist who mediates freely
between the living and the dead, Okri resolves to feed an agonizing
hunger, physical as well as metaphorical, by bringing in a mythic and
magical dimension to the historical times he renders and relives in The
Famished Road. To sum up, by virtue of imagining and repatterning
historical materials, Morrison gives voice to those memories unspoken
in classic slave narratives, Naipaul transforms historical blankness or
darkness into historical knowledge of different cultures that have
made him and Okri expands the spheres of reality and rejuvenates the
mythos of African aestheticism. In so doing, Morrison, Naipaul and
Okri try to fill in the gaps and absences that are often found in
historical documents and archives. The discussion that follows in this
chapter will be divided into three parts. The first part considers
various kinds of historical incompleteness relating to the life and
experience of these three writers. Then, referring to its different
representations, the second part looks at imagining as an effective
strategy to defy the incompleteness of history. The third part focuses
on repatterning that brings up multiple visions of reality by drawing
attention to its capacity to revise, rectify and reinterpret.

The challenge of historical incompleteness

History, in a famous phrase from Ulysses (1961), is a nightmare

from which human beings are trying to awake (Joyce, p.34).
Throughout the book Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is afflicted with a
Nietzschean malady of history (Nietzsche, p.69). Namely, history is

14
a burden that enervates humanity and represses the sensibility of the
modern man. Envisaging history as such, Joyce therefore justifies
Stephens (and his own) flight from his rigid and stagnant familial,
Catholic and Irish historical past that has become a horrible incubus
and the gravedigger of the present (Ibid., p.7). While the fixed and
monolithic written records about the historical past are menacing to
Stephen, absences or blanks implicated by historical incompleteness
are equally overwhelming.
In The Idea of History (1946), R.G. Collingwood points out:
[h]istorians nowadays think that history should be (a) a science, or an
answering of questions; (b) concerned with human actions in the past;
(c) pursued by interpretation of evidence; and (d) for the sake of
human self-knowledge (pp.1011). Looking at these characteristics, it
is not difficult to infer that history is unavoidably incomplete. First
and foremost, history is never a pure science, depending as much upon
mathematical and analytical methods as upon literary modes of
representation. After all, history is a semi-science, and a kind of art
(White, p.27). Second, because documentary evidence is both defi-
cient and artificial, historys concern with human actions in the past
can only be a representation by virtue of historians critical selection
and imaginative construction. Interpretation plays a vital role because,
on the one hand, the historian may have more facts about the past than
he can include in recapturing a particular historical period; therefore,
he has to count certain facts as irrelevant to his narrative concern. On
the other hand, in his effort to reconstruct a segment of the historical
past, the historian inevitably brings his own findings to the narrative in
explicating some historical events, about which the existing data has
failed to offer a plausible explanation. Last, but not least, though
history provides an important access to human self-knowledge, it is
but one way, disclosing one truth instead of the whole truth about life
and reality. As a body of knowledge and a mode of thought, history is
envisioned as to uphold the middle ground between art and science,
joining together two perspectives of comprehending the world that are
commonly assumed to function through essentially different mechan-
isms.
On account of its innate characteristics, history as a discipline
appears to waver between the positivistic science and the romantic art.

15
As more similarities between art and science have been discovered
and recognized, history in consequence has lost its privileged status as
the conservative discipline par excellence during the nineteenth cen-
tury. In order to bring it into a higher kind of intellectual inquiry
however, history as a mode of thinking and a way of representation is
better understood as grounded upon the similarities of art and science
rather than their differences. Just as scientific and artistic techniques
are both necessary in history writing, presence and absence are two
sides of the same history. If the presence of written records about the
historical past is a nightmare to some, then its absence might suggest
something even worse. Absences either bear messages so gruesome or
arouse remembrances so traumatic that they are best left out and
forgotten. Little by little, absences converge and become a place of
invisibility and amnesia. In addition to the nature of history and the
norms of history writing, another decisive factor that history remains
incomplete results from the perception of a historical past as a site of
traumatic memories. This is especially true in Morrisons Beloved.
Since trauma is so diversely defined, it is almost impossible to
find unanimity among clinicians, pathologists and laboratory scientists.
Clinicians may consider traumatic any experience subjectively felt as
so by the client, whereas, pathologists and laboratory scientists may
think any negative emotional states such as displeasure and stress are
traumatic. Even though an indisputable definition of trauma is hard to
maintain, the impact of trauma is not as hard to identify.
Conceptualizing trauma rather similarly, Sigmund Freud and Pierre
Janet acknowledge its impact as internal resources [that] are over-
whelmed and can create neither meaning nor action in the face of the
traumatic experience (Revire, p.3). Meaninglessness and inertia
emerge because even if the physical aspect of the trauma may not
exist, its ghost still lingers and haunts. In the aftermath of traumatic
occurrences, individuals find themselves caught between the extrem-
es of amnesia or of reliving the trauma, between floods of intense,
overwhelming feeling and arid states of no feeling at all, between
irritable, impulsive action and complete inhibition of action (Herman,
p.47). No matter the side of the polarity on which the victim stands, an
ordinary response to trauma is to keep silent about what happened and

16
conceal it from public knowledge, as if the traumatic experience
would cease to exist once the memory of it fades away.
However, the memory of a traumatic historical past will not
easily fade or disappear all of a sudden; it is reinforced instead with
the increasing wish and effort to render it in the world of literature.
[T]he work of art [i]s the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time
(Proust, p.154). In their individual work Beloved, The Enigma of
Arrival and A Way in the World, as well as The Famished Road
Morrison, Naipaul and Okri rediscover lost times by investigating the
labyrinths of the infamous Middle Passage and slavery; of
displacement and diaspora; of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial
experience, each of which is able to bring about traumatic memories
in the mind of these writers. Interestingly, each title provides a leading
metaphor that foregrounds the notion of history the novel perceives in
its specificity, that is, a historical past can be understood as a beloved
to Morrison, an enigma or a way to Naipaul, and a hunger to Okri. It is
also worth noticing that when the state of enigma or way, hunger and
beloved is aligned with and superimposed by time past, present and
future, a degree of profundity comes to the surface. In other words,
history can be interpreted as an enigmatic picture of past experience,
which the present hunger seeks to dig up, and the growing knowledge
of which will be treasured and taken into the future. In their fiction,
Morrison, Naipaul and Okri have tackled various kinds of historical
incompleteness. To be more specific, in Beloved, the incompleteness
of history is the legacy of slavery unacknowledged in classic slave
narratives. In The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, the
incompleteness of history is the absence of knowledge about diasporic
self, community and world. In The Famished Road, the incomplete-
ness of history is untapped colonial or postcolonial experience im-
mersed in African folkloric and mythic tradition.

17
Toni Morrison and the legacy of slavery

As an American writer of African ancestry, Morrison regards slavery

as a theme that has not been exhausted in American history and
imaginative literature. However, this is not to underplay the fact that
slavery has been imagined and presented over and over again in
cultural reproductions either for moral, aesthetic purposes or for
political, expedient considerations. In her essay The Site of Memory,
Morrison notes that no slave society in the history of the world wrote
more or more thoughtfully about its own enslavement than the
United States (p.109). For some readers, it brings about sorrow and
pity to recall names and influential works in the history of narrating
slavery by black as well as white American writers: Frederick
Douglasss Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle
Toms Cabin (1852), Margaret Walkers Jubilee (1966), and William
Styrons The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Despite the large
readership slavery as a subject matter has succeeded in drawing,
Morrison observes that the writers, more often than not, dress up the
narrative on slavery with a phrase such as, let us drop a veil over
these proceedings too terrible to relate (Site, p.110). In the mean-
time, she also understands that in sifting and shaping experiences of
enslavement to make them acceptable for white abolitionist patrons
who were in a position to consent and authenticate the publication of
slave autobiographical narratives, the ex-slave narrators were usually
silent about many things. In other words, they deliberately forgot
many things and thus left gaps or blanks in their texts that future
reading and writing need to fill in.
Consequently, slave narratives had to be understated, they had to
be very discreet about the things they could and wanted to say and
they would never say how terrible slavery indeed was. The popular
thinking is: Well, you know, it was really awful, but lets abolish
slavery so life can go on (Art, p.103). Nevertheless, slavery and its
psychological effect would not willingly give up their hold on Afri-
can-American and American literary imagination. As one of the
indigenous and earliest forms of American literature, slave narrative
chart ex-slaves journeys from bondage to freedom and from silence

18
to articulation. In short, liberty and literacy are two primary motifs in
the slave-narrative tradition. If slave narrative, autobiographical in
both form and theme, had to leave out a significant part of slave
experience unmentioned for various reasons, personal or political,
then one should not be surprised to find that historically, African-
American presences were seldom given due consideration in the
dominant discourse even when slaves and their particular experience
were its topic. What is probably astonishing and enigmatic to
Morrison, is that there was no word about the interior life of and
memories within slaves and ex-slaves in classic slave narratives
even though their life stories were strategically at the centre of the
narration (Site, pp.110, 111).
Having that in mind, Morrison would not read slave narratives
for information despite the fact that she might have read a lot in
conceiving and framing a book that was first inspired by historical
accounts on a fugitive slave named Margaret Garner. Beloved, unlike
classic slave narratives, is not intended to depict a picture of humanity
in bondage and grace under pressure. In fact, the reverse is true in the
novel Sethes rebellious act (escaping from her master) and her
inhumanity (killing her baby daughter) are the leads for heated
controversy and discussion. Dedicated to millions of nameless Afri-
cans who died during the Middle Passage, Beloved confronts with
those elements of the past which [has been] repressed, forgotten or
ignored in classic slave narratives, and orients purposefully toward a
broader readership (Mobley, p.358). Hence, what one encounters in
Beloved is Morrison at her best as a creative writer and reader. That is,
the writing of the novel is her revisionary reading of dimensions that
classic slave narratives leave out, and her participatory reading be-
tween the lines from which a new aspect of the slave history emerges.
In the course of approaching classic slave narratives from a different
critical direction, Morrison seems to have fulfilled what she proposed
in the opening paragraph of her best-selling non-fiction Playing in
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992): to draw a
map, [] of a critical geography and use that map to open as much
space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as
did the original charting of the New World without the mandate for
conquest (p.3). By using rememory in Beloved as the metaphor for

19
the interior life of African slaves and as a unique way to enter the
history of slavery, Morrison has succeeded in drawing a narrative that
disrupts the notion that an untold story is the past [] to leave
behind and thereby making the slave experience more accessible to
contemporary readers (Beloved, p.256).

V.S. Naipaul and diasporic worlds

With adventurers faith and travellers endurance, Naipaul discovers

and explores space in his literary imagination where the world of the
writer and the world of the man eventually merge into that of one and
the same (Enigma, p.156). Furthermore, Naipaul has not only learned
to confront and harmonize his many worlds during his intellectual
adventures, but also celebrated in imaginative literature the life and
history of people living in the small Caribbean island of Trinidad. The
Nobel Prize lauded Naipaul for having united perceptive narrative
and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence
of suppressed histories (Engdahl). Reminiscent of Morrisons en-
deavour to unveil the interior life and memories that have been
unacknowledged and unrecorded in classic slave narratives, the
presence of suppressed histories can be understood as Naipauls
literary representation of those individual and collective histories
without documented dates. Naipaul has said that he grew up with two
ideas of history, almost two ideas of time. There was history with
dates. [] Beyond peoples memories was undated time, historical
darkness (Prologue, p.46). Most importantly, out of that historical
darkness came Naipauls ambition and decision to be a writer. To
become a writer, Naipaul had to find ways to understand three very
different cultures in his identity: the East Indian background from
which his family came, the West Indian colonial society in which he
grew up, and the foreign world of the English novels he read as a
result of his colonial education.
Naipaul left Trinidad at the age of eighteen on a hard-earned
government scholarship to study at Oxford and to pursue his dream of
becoming a writer. For Naipaul, the exigency to write was not merely
caused by the fear of extinction passed down to him from his father,

20
but more significantly, [t]o write was to learn about a past he had no
knowledge of (Ibid., pp.20, 72). Beginning a book, Naipaul recounts,
I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the
end I was always surprised. The book before always turned out to
have been written by a man with incomplete knowledge (Ibid., p.20).
The next book, for his part, was always meant to address the blank-
ness and incompleteness the previous one left. Therefore, each new
book is a momentous signpost on a journey to find unknown places in
his personal past and to achieve a deeper understanding of the present
reality, which is forever in the making thanks to the act of writing.
In order to bring to the surface the suppressed histories and to
seek knowledge, Naipaul has tried and integrated various kinds of
literary genres. In other words, fiction, travel writing, autobiography,
feature story, and historical documentary, have all made distinctive
contributions in the formation and presence of a perceptive narrative,
the extraordinary prose in the style of Naipaul (Engdahl). With this
unique prose style, Naipaul has not only exposed the artificiality of
genres but also enlarged our vision of the historical past and reality.
Naipaul points out that [f]iction by itself would not have taken [him]
to [] larger comprehension of himself and the world (Reading,
p.19), and that even the autobiography will always have [] in-
completeness (Two Worlds, p.479). The Enigma of Arrival and A
Way in the World are two telling examples illustrating that all literary
forms are equally valuable to Naipaul as they are constantly changing
to match new tones of voices in different cultures (Ibid., p.485). In
addition, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are com-
monly read as fictional autobiographies or autobiographical fictions in
which Naipaul interweaves and replays his transatlantic memories of
his childhood past in Trinidad and his living and writing in Britain.
However, [f]ictional autobiographies [are] simply one possible mode
of self-representation (Levy, p.xx). In The Enigma of Arrival and A
Way in the World, Naipaul reveals a profound insight of recon-
structing a composite history and remaking the world for oneself at
least in literary work because [m]en need history; it helps them to
have an idea of who they are (Enigma, p.386). Most of all, the
personalized and cultural histories reconstructed and transformed in
The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World have given Naipaul a

21
way of looking, an example of labour, a knowledge of the literary
process, a sense of the order and special reality [] that written words
could be seen to create (Forward, p.124).

Ben Okri and postcolonial experiences

In a similar fashion, The Famished Road re-creates a special reality in

Nigerian history and culture. Okris memories of the constant
presence of civil war in Nigeria during his youth might have strongly
influenced his writing of the novel, which is situated in Nigeria (with
its name unmentioned) and in the decade of social and political
commotion before Nigerian independence in 1960. Above all, The
Famished Road draws attention to mythic and fantastic aspects of
African thinking and way of life at a time when the after-effect of
colonialism is overstated in literary representations. Okris literary
imagination, however, frequently dwells upon certain inviolate areas
of the African consciousness such as the resilience of spirit, the
elasticity of aesthetics and the capacity of dreaming (Wilkinson, p.86).
These inviolate areas, which refuse to be colonized by the literary
norms of the colonial center, take spiritual, folkloric and magical
realistic configurations in The Famished Road along with socio-
realistic, geopolitical and historical issues (Bennett, p.368).
A distinguished writer of a younger generation of Nigerian litera-
ture in English, Okri has followed certain literary streams of the older
generation. In general, The Famished Road combines two narrative
modes: the African folkloric and mythic mode and the conventional
[] realistic mode (Ogunsanwo, p.51). Specifically, in The Famish-
ed Road, Okri reinvigorates with a difference the episodic wandering
tales of Amos Tutuolas The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), the
folkloric and mythic imagery of Wole Soyinkas Idanre and Other
Poems (1967), and the socio-political consciousness of Chinua
Achebes Anthills of the Savannah (1987). The Famished Road also
condemns the ubiquitous corruption and violence in contemporary
African nations, giving voice to the poorest and most powerless
members of the African community and describing the continuing
confrontation between Western and indigenous traditions in post-

22
colonial Africa. Many African writers have explored these postcolon-
ial themes, yet Okri is somewhat special among them. He completed
his first novel Flowers and Shadows (1980) before leaving for a
university education in England at the age of nineteen. After his
graduation from the University of Essex, Okri has stayed and lived in
London ever since. Undoubtedly, he has been exposed to and
acculturated by both African and European aesthetics. Although Okri
might not have introduced new themes in African literature, his works
of fiction have exhibited remarkable experimentations on modes of
representation. Most significantly, influenced by African and Euro-
pean literary traditions, Okris fiction often takes mythic and fantastic
dimensions as a way of going beyond the usual and the predicable to
tackle postcolonial concerns.
Taking the opening paragraph of The Famished Road as an
example: In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road
and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road
was once a river it was always hungry (Famished, p.3). This biblical
opening not only recalls the title of the novel, but also recapitulates
principal themes throughout the text. On the one hand, the road seems
to convey a double entendre, namely, the road is both a historical
destiny and a historical possibility. On the other hand, the road is
where past, present and future meet, as well as where pre-colonial,
colonial, and postcolonial experiences mix. In African fiction, a road
is usually visualized as an entre for European intrusion and colonial
conquest, and a tabula rasa for imposed narratives of progressive and
imperialist history. Therefore, a road is literally a representation of
actual events as colonialism is experienced as the building of roads,
the arrival and departure via roads, and metaphorically a symbol for
colonizing and marginalizing African cultures and aesthetics. Never-
theless, by saying that the road has once been a river, which is
associated with life, flux and fluidity, Okri suggests that the history of
Africa is now longing for vitality, liberation and renewal after
centuries of disruption, repression and fragmentation. Furthermore, by
saying that the road is hungry, Okri falls back on an African folkloric
and mythic belief in the famished road and its god that needs to be fed.
In particular, the road symbolizes Okris sense of historical
contestation, as he speaks through Azaro: I wanted the liberty of

23
limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is
so hungry, this road of our refusal to be (Ibid., p.559). The road of
refusal to be signifies a way of resistance against the prescriptive
and accepted history by generating descriptive and visionary histories.
Unfortunately, Azaros perception of creating new roads is not shared
by any other characters in the novel; the ghetto community seems to
have no memory of its history, no awareness of its reality, and hence
no prospective for its future.

Imagining: the creativity of memory and writing

Morrison, Naipaul and Okri represent in their fiction individual or

collective histories that have been forgotten, incomplete and untapped
through the creativity of memory and writing, which gives emphasis
to the inventive discovery and interpretation of historical or verifiable
materials. History is brought up by rememory in Morrisons Beloved,
in the sense that rememory re-enacts and imagines in the present what
happened or might have happened in the historical past, and that
rememory is a reservoir of historical events that need to be con-
tinuously reinterpreted and rectified. History is built from traces left
by the past and unwritten stories about a place or a person in
Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, which
celebrate his search for a style adequate to construct and transform the
past through documentary interpretations of historical traces and im-
aginative stories on historical figures. In Okris The Famished Road,
history is embedded in the fate of a spirit-child, the folk myth of the
road and the photographic images.
Whether it is slavery, diaspora or postcolonial experience, to
render histories frequently associated with horror, dislocation or chaos
stirs up unpleasant memories that cancel out possibilities and hopes
for the present and future. In fact, memory of history depend[s] on
dynamic, cognitive, social, and neurological factors in complex inter-
action (Revire, p.5). What is remembered is what one wills to

24
remember, history is therefore full of absences and gaps. Intending to
combat the absence and fill in the gap as well as construct a coherent
picture of the historical past, creative memory has to work closely
with artistic imagination. Yet this is by no means suggesting that
imagination works outside the realm of memory. In fact, imagination
and memory are not utterly different entities. Memory sifts and selects,
assembles and constructs past experience, and all these activities
cannot be done without imagination, that is, imagining which
memories are most pertinent to represent a particular aspect of reality
in the historical past. As such, memory is endowed with narrative
quality and aesthetic freedom for literary re-creation. The fragmentary
and blurred memories of the past offer an artist a peculiar attraction,
as Freud writes in Moses and Monotheism (1964), for in that case,
[the artist] is free to fill in the gaps in memory according to the desires
of his imagination and to picture the period which he wishes to
reproduce according to his intentions (p.71). In this light, the
incompleteness of history and memory is not limiting as it appears but
rather enabling to creative writers.
In their novels, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri have not only used
intelligently the sense of incompleteness but also transformed it into
the potential and hope for a meaningful future. Working on disrupted
histories and broken memories to different degrees, Morrison, Naipaul
and Okri have revealed an interest in imaginatively recasting the past
so as to overcome and move beyond it. Hence, memory is envisioned
less as a pure source of illumination than as an enabling context, a
prelude to insights generated by the imagination in the present (Jay,
p.147). Motivated by the memory of the past alongside the present
request, history always takes on new meaning and significance. Free
from the concreteness of historical evidence and free to take the wings
of imagination to render history in fiction, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri
have demonstrated different ways of fictionalizing history and his-
toricizing fiction. Fiction and history are fertile grounds of experience
where memory and imagination work in collaboration to challenge
and make up for the incompleteness of history. In short, Morrison
turns to rememory, Naipaul works on historical traces and Okri brings
in an abiku, a spirit-child.

25
Rememory

To begin with, rememory is a word of Morrisons coinage to fight

against disremembering history and episodic amnesia. The prefix re
stresses the cyclic nature of memory, in which repetition and im-
agination are capable of conjoint action, combining in projects in
which the activity of either one alone would be insufficient (Casey,
p.249). [I]magination can concern itself with possibilities which stem
from the past, and repetition can direct itself into the future, and both
acts take place in the present (Ibid.). Therefore, rememory, as both a
noun and a verb, underscores the interconnectedness of minds and the
interconnectedness of past, present and future. For Morrison, re-
memory is to use ones imaginative power to realize a latent yet
abiding connection to the past. Thus, rememory functions as a
metaphor for imagining individual past and transforming it into a
higher status of collective consciousness appropriate to the historical
novels claim in representing personalized and cultural histories.
To a certain extent, rememory is Morrisons solution to the
problematic of rewriting and redefining African-American history and
reality. Considering Morrisons commitment to achieve a shadowless
participation of Africanist presence in literary imagination, remem-
ory is a way of responding to literary whiteness and recognizing the
contribution of literary blackness in American literature and culture
(Playing, pp.10, 5, xii). For example, Beloved resembles and rewrites
at some point early American classics such as The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Moreover,
rememory is an access to remember and rethink individual and col-
lective histories. In this sense, Beloved is created from Morrisons
interpretation of slave autobiographical narratives and historical re-
ports on Margaret Garner, which provide the documentary side of
slavery. Morrison also needs to imagine the interior life and memories
of slaves and ex-slaves that are left out from these autobiographical
and historical texts.
There is another meaning of rememory explained by the
protagonist of Beloved; namely, rememory is historical experience
transcending the boundaries of time and place. Sethe, the protagonist,
envisions rememory as a repugnant picture of past horror and a

26
traumatic site where history repeats itself. Like most characters in the
novel, Sethe tries to avoid rememory but in vain, because rememory is
easily provoked by trivial reminders. In other words, the history of
slavery brings about traumatic experiences [] encoded in an ab-
normal type of memory that spontaneously erupts into consciousness
in the form of flashbacks and nightmares (Herman, p.37). Both reside
in the terrain of rememory, repetition and imagination combat his-
torical absence and amnesia. The act of repeating is to reinstate and
keep present what is actually unavailable to perception or cognition,
while the purpose of imagining is to locate unfamiliar perspectives,
and to render present what is absent from ones mind or intellect.
Thanks to the conjoint creativity of rememory and writing, the history
of slavery is re-envisioned and rewritten in Beloved.

Traces

In an interview, Naipaul has remarked that an inspiration for his

artistic goals was to reconstruct [his] disintegrated society, to impose
order on the world, to seek pattern (quoted in Hayward, p.71). That
said, Naipaul stresses the creative and transformative quality of
writing. To reconstruct, reorder and repattern his disintegrated society,
Naipaul has to rely on remembering, discovering and interpreting
traces left by the past. In The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the
World especially, Naipaul approaches these historical traces in such a
manner as to concretize and personalize them. For example, the
landlord and his Edwardian estate symbolize the English imperial
history in the former book, whereas in the latter the history of
Trinidad is represented by three historical personae Columbus, Sir
Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda. Therefore, Naipaul has not
only transformed the socio-cultural and geopolitical histories of the
place by bringing in personalized history but also transformed the
English literary tradition by making it fit in with the experience of
those who joined in the great movement of colonial people in the
second half of the twentieth century. Taken together, The Enigma of
Arrival and A Way in the World signify Naipauls literary adventure to
illuminate areas of darkness in different cultures in Asia, Africa,

27
Europe, and the Americas. In particular, these two densely written and
multi-layered works of fiction celebrate Naipauls great achievement
in finding a proper style to render and comment on the complexity of
his attachments to Trinidad and to England.
Written from a first-person perspective, The Enigma of Arrival
with its five sections Jacks Garden, The Journey, Ivy, Rooks,
and The Ceremony of Farewell, re-traces and re-creates Naipauls
life and experience in the British colony of Trinidad and the Wiltshire
countryside in England. The following discussion will focus on the
first three sections of the novel to illustrate that history is recon-
structed from interpretations of historical traces, actual and imaginary.
Regarding the garden as a remnant of English peasantry, the first
section Jacks Garden recalls the pastoral history of England de-
picted in literature and pays tribute to Jack the gardener, his life and
death, and above all, his labour that displays the power of trans-
formation. Often read as Naipauls semi-autobiography, The Journey
reminds the voyage Naipaul took at the age of eighteen as a
scholarship student from Trinidad to Britain. Grounded in the
narrators discovery in the attic of his rented cottage of a surrealist
painting entitled The Enigma of Arrival, the second section discloses
the rewriting and re-envisioning of personalized and cultural histories
at different levels. In the third section Ivy, Naipaul reflects on the
historical changes after World War II by drawing special attention to
the Waldenshaw manor and its landlord. Though the narrator never
meets his landlord in person, his impression of the landlord is formed
through the knowledge of the landlords illness and his fondness of
ivy, and especially through his poems of Indian divinities. The
landlords Indian romance, like his manor house, is something that
he inherited from the days of imperial glory (Enigma, p.231). The
deteriorating manor, the dying landlord and his antiquated writings
signify the decline of colonialism and the fall of the British Empire,
suggesting that the world is ordered and re-ordered as power and
glory [] undo themselves from within (Ibid., p.231).
Looking at the British imperial history from the angle of its
subject people, Naipaul carries his effort of establishing a fictional
archaeology of colonialism into A Way in the World. A sequel to The
Enigma of Arrival in many aspects, A Way in the World continues to

28
render history by reading deserted historical documents and by writing
unrecorded stories about historical personages. That is, A Way in the
World tells the historia of Trinidad through personal stories of
historical figures from different continents and centuries. The pro-
tagonists in the history of Trinidad include: the disillusioned Colum-
bus losing his dream of the New World, the disgraced and half-
demented Sir Walter Raleigh seeking El Dorado, the dishonoured
Francisco Miranda liberating South America but becoming entangled
in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas, as well as the doomed Blair,
a present-day Trinidadian revolutionary martyred in East Africa.
Among these historical presences is an omniscient narrator, who
resembles Naipaul himself a Trinidadian writer of Indian ancestry
and English residence, trying to come to terms with the mystery of his
inheritance through rediscovering and reinterpreting all these traces
left by the past. Intertwining history and memory, The Enigma of
Arrival and A Way in the World are perhaps the most important of
Naipauls novels in which he arrives at a deeper understanding of the
diversity in himself and his cultural heritage.

Abiku

Okris The Famished Road is another book that exhibits diverse

cultural traditions and complex feelings of an ex-colonial and exile
toward his home country. The titular road is widely acknowledged as
the metaphor for history in the novel. Therefore, the end of road is the
end of history, and without history, there is no reality, only self-
erasure and forgetfulness. Okris narrative problem is how to invent a
new logic of causality and contingency in the traumatic absence of
memory (Coundouriotis, p.160). In the end, Okri solves this problem
by inventing an abiku and making him the embodiment of personal
and group memory. An abiku, according to Yoruba belief, is a spirit-
child who returns repeatedly to the same mother only to die over and
over again in infancy. Azaro, the abiku protagonist chooses life in
spite of its limitations and concreteness because he has grown tired of
coming and going between the world of the dead and that of the living,
and also because he knows that it is terrible to forever remain in-

29
between (Famished, p.5). In contrast, Ade, another abiku who
decides to go back to the land of the dead, explains to Azaro the
analogy between the abiku and the nation: [o]ur country is an abiku
country. Like the spirit-child, it keeps coming and going. One day it
will decide to remain. It will become strong. I wont see it (Ibid.,
p.547). On account of his privilege as a spirit-child staying some-
where in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living (Ibid.,
p.5), Azaro experiences time and history as cyclical and repetitive and
sees as well as tells what others in his community do not see and
cannot tell.
Although people around Azaro cannot validate his accounts, an
abiku cycle of birth, death and rebirth offers Azaro a vantage point to
see what happened personally and historically. Forgetfulness engulfs
historical consciousness and understanding even though the relics of a
historical past remain visible. For instance, Azaro tells about the
communitys loss of memory of a recent political riot because we had
stopped noticing it altogether despite the fact that the vehicle used in
the upheaval was still in the middle of the street (Ibid., p.183). To a
certain extent, the suppression of memory is a result of colonization
and discontinuity in the history of Africa. Inhabiting many worlds as
an abiku, Azaro is perhaps the ideal but phantom historian for African
people, the sympathetic witness with rich imagination and sensitivity
in recording a history that is suggestive of potentiality and hope even
under the most dismal circumstances. For instance, Azaro becomes his
fathers memory as he recounts the events of the boxing match to his
father, who cannot remember them due to the heavy injuries that
almost killed him. As a result, Azaros retelling of the fight gives story
and strength back to his father. Since the fate of an abiku is repetition,
but each with a difference, history is experienced in the novel as
repetition with a difference, or to be more precise, history is each time
rectified and reinterpreted. Being a witness and a narrator, Azaro
carries the past into the present, linking the pre-colonial, colonial, and
postcolonial histories together and leaving it open for regeneration
through historical memories.
By creating an abiku protagonist, Okri negotiates among and
interweaves the actual, the mythic and the fantastic with the fictional,
all of which present changes and realities that even a photographers

30
camera fails to mirror and record. Interestingly enough, there is a
memorable character in the novel known as the Photographer whose
pictures of the political drama published in the newspaper pose a
serious threat to the corrupted politics. Words and pictures are both
representation-as (Goodman, p.27) and external marks of actual
happenings (Ricoeur, Function, p.130). Thanks to the written words,
The Famished Road depicts a vivid picture of physical and
metaphysical landscapes. For example, Okri highlights throughout the
novel another level of history, that is, [t]he whole of human history is
an undiscovered continent deep in our souls (Famished, p.572). The
soul, with its capacity to meditate and imagine, challenges the con-
servative idea of history and enlarges the perception of reality as well.
Moreover, this undiscovered continent could only be approached
through Azaro the spirit-child, who moves inside and outside of the
three-dimensional world, and through a different way of looking,
which is explained by Okri as the aesthetic of possibilities, of
labyrinths, of riddles, [] of paradoxes (Wilkinson, p.88). In par-
ticular, the history of the human soul advances history writing to a
new era in which histories are reconstructed by dint of creative im-
agination to disclose the enigmatic pastness of an era and to heighten
the uniqueness of the present and future.
To sum up, as metaphors to work against the incompleteness of
history, rememory, traces, and abiku demonstrate the joint power of
imagination and discovery, as well as envision time not as chron-
ological and linear but cyclical and spiral. As such, these tropes merge
past, present and future into one large context. The past is nothing but
an abstraction if looked at separately from the dialectic of future, past
and present, because the memory of a past is not for the pastness of
the past but for the need of the present which is always on the verge of
sliding into a future. In addition, the creativity of writing helps to
make past human experiences more accessible to present and future
generations. That is, in the very act of writing about a particular period
of history, the historical novel has fulfilled and intensified its role of
connecting past experiences, present consciousness and future ex-
pectations. Due to the creativity of memory and writing, there are not
only presences and recollections of previous existence but also the re-
enactment of what has been or genuinely new experience. Since the

31
world of fiction remains irrevocably contingent, fictionalizing es-
sentially unrealized and unperceived possibilities, fiction does not
reduplicate nor reproduce realities but projects and actively re-creates
possibilities. Paul Ricoeur reiterates: fiction changes reality, in the
sense that it both invents and discovers it (Function, p.121).
Fiction has displayed its exceptional capacity to amplify and increase,
transform and transfigure reality. Morrison, Naipaul and Okri are
three fiction writers who have devoted themselves to mapping out an
uncharted continent of unacknowledged histories and unnoticed realit-
ies.

Repatterning: multiple realities in fiction

In The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality, Paul Ricoeur con-

tends that fiction can [] create a redescription of reality and that
the external marks in which fiction is a part are not less real but
more real because they augment reality (pp.128, 130). Hence, fiction
has the transformative potential to repattern and redefine reality, and
fiction writing is more liberating than history writing, which is based
on factual and historical documents. Moreover, Hayden White points
out that we only can know the actual by contrasting it with or
likening it to the imaginable (Tropics, p.98). Following the same
stream, Paul Ricoeur goes further to propose in The Reality of the
Historical Past that the historical past can be better comprehended
under the signs of the Same, the Other and the Analogue. That is to
say, first, the past is re-enacted in the present; second, the past is what
is missing, a pertinent absence; and third, the reality of the historical
past is re-created by the force of re-enactment and of distancing, to
the extent that being as is both being and not being (Reality, p.36).
Meanwhile, the reality of the historical past reveals the truth that the
pastness of the past can never be recaptured. Fiction, the imaginable,
is an effective device by means of which history, the actual, is
reconstructed and transformed to resemble and transcend its pastness.

32
Nurtured by diverse cultural and literary traditions, Morrison, Naipaul
and Okri demonstrate in fiction different and inimitable ways of re-
envisioning history and enlarging reality. In fact, to borrow a phrase
of Jorge Luis Borges, Beloved, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in
the World, as well as The Famished Road have successfully modi-
fi[ed] our conception of the past, as [they] will modify the future
(Borges, p.201).

Neo-slave narrative

[I]n novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, Toni

Morrison gives life to an essential aspect of American reality and
also gives voice to an unspoken trauma in American history (Allen,
p.39). Morrisons literary success begins with the publication of her
first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), in which the opening sentence
Quiet as its kept leads to the telling of a tragic story about a black
girl neglected by her mother and raped by her father. The story about
Pecola Breedloves secret shame of incest and her obsessive wish for
the bluest eyes, which has driven her to insanity, is shocking to some
readers and ground-breaking in representing African-American realit-
ies in imaginative literature. Significantly, the opening sentence Quiet
as its kept foretells Morrisons devotion to breaking this silence and
parting the veil covering the writings of African-American experience.
She states in the Afterword of The Bluest Eye that the opening is
conspiratorial in that there is a secret between us and a secret that is
being kept from us, and that the novels opening provides the stroke
that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence
broken, a void filled, and unspeakable things spoken at last (pp.212,
214).
With this opening, Morrison launches her career as an important
writer rendering African-American experience and highlighting the
Africanist presence in American literary tradition. When writing about
African-American histories and memories, Morrison feels that she is
constantly caught up in the desire to reveal and conceal, to tell and
not tell, which is a natural attitude toward traumatic history of any
kind (Bouson, p.19). Even so, Morrison revisits different historical

33
phases in African-American experience in one novel after another.
Taking the trilogy for example, she focuses on the historical memories
and realities of slavery in Beloved, the horror and violence during
urbanization and migration in Jazz (1992), and the danger of main-
taining a totalized and monolithic view on history in Paradise (1997).
In her fiction, though history is often the problem instead of the
solution to the problem, Morrison thinks that history contains within
itself an element and a possibility of freedom freedom from its
suppression and forgetfulness. History should not become another
form of enslavement, which destroys and binds, neither should it be
forgotten. One must critique [history], test it, confront it and under-
stand it in order to achieve a freedom that is more than license, to
achieve true, adult agency (Morrison, Art, p.114). Such a true adult
agency is possible to Sethe, Morrisons protagonist in Beloved, who
recognizes the necessity to confront the personal and historical past
and forget what needs to be forgotten, and learn what is useful from
the past.
Morrison also attends to what is useful in history, especially
information gleaned from reading slave narratives when researching
the story about slaverys devastating psychological impact on a slave
mother. Beloved is read by some as a neo-slave narrative thanks
mainly to its subject matter, and by others as a magical realistic
fantasy on account of its supernatural scenes. Because of its subtle
relations to the slave-narrative tradition, neo-slave narrative is the
preferred term to identify the novel. The neo part draws attention to
the novels revisionary and dialogic attitude to classic slave narratives.
Beloved marks a new beginning for the two following reasons: it is the
first book of a trilogy derived from authentic historical facts, and it is
the first in which Morrison translates the historical into the personal.
Looking over the documents and slave narratives for Beloved,
Morrison spent a long time to figure out what it was about slavery
that made it so repugnant, so personal, so indifferent, so intimate and
yet so public (Ibid., p.103). Overwhelmed by the history of slavery
herself, she wants the reader to experience what slavery felt like rather
than what it looked like. Whereas the former emphasizes the
psychological aspect of slavery, the latter puts emphasis on the
physical aspect. Slavery as a social institution is a bygone history, but

34
unfortunately, the psychological aftermath continues to loom large in
the lives of contemporary African-Americans. To describe the com-
plexity of feelings for slavery means to go beyond simply getting
familiar with historical documents. It means coming to the kind of
information that can only be found between the lines of history, in the
intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the his-
torical becomes people with names (Ibid., p.105).
Beloved is indeed a story of giving names to those who were
deprived of the right to tell their side of the history. It also reveals
Morrisons intention to bring the reader to confront the manifold
meaning of slavery. In order to transform the historical into the
personal, Morrison turns to her imaginative capacity. Morrison has
expressed overtly that although Sethe is modelled on Margaret Garner,
she did not know anything more about Margaret Garner than the two
interviews in the newspaper. According to the newspaper report,
Margaret Garners real life was more awful than the one reflected in
the novel. [I]f I had known all there was to know about her I never
would have written it, says Morrison, [w]hat I really love is the
process of invention (Ibid., p.124). She enjoys the most freedom and
excitement in writing fiction as she creates inventively the interior life
of her characters. Unlike slave narrative, which is on the whole auto-
biographical, written by an ex-slave who had acquired the ability to
read and write, fiction is Morrisons most reliable and productive
approach to reveal the truths about the memories of those people who
are neither free nor literate, and to translate the stories that she heard
from her grandmother and about her community. Morrison makes it
clear that [a]long with personal recollection, the matrix of the work
[she does] is the wish to extend, fill in and complement slave auto-
biographical narratives (Morrison, Site, p.120). As thus indicated,
Morrison acknowledges the contribution slave autobiographical nar-
ratives achieved in presenting the experience of slaves and ex-slaves,
with a full awareness of its generic limitations. At the same time,
Morrison states openly her own literary ambition and narrative con-
cern; that is, to fill in the blanks and complement the incompleteness
left by slave autobiographical narratives.
In Beloved, Morrison attempts to transform the suffering and
pain of slavery into a celebratory cause, commemorating and honour-

35
ing the lives of the invisible, dishonoured and disremembered slaves.
The purpose of making Beloved (the character) real is making history
possible, making memory real and forgetting possible. Bringing
readers to face the historical past as a living and vindictive presence,
Beloved comes to represent the repressed memories of slavery, both
for the characters and for the readers (Krumholz, pp.397, 400).
Therefore, the historical past is personified and re-enacted for the sake
of confronting and going beyond it, as suggested by the double mean-
ing of the phrase pass on sharing and overlooking in the
concluding chapter of the novel. Beloved penetrates into the dark and
forgotten sources of history that continues to haunt African-American
cultural imagination like a lingering bad dream (Bouson, p.162).
Above all, the novel celebrates a potential healing. As Beloved
recedes once again into the land of the dead, a bad dream fades out
when the hope of a bright future dawns upon people who suffered and
survived from the nightmarish memories of a traumatic history.
Morrison has said that she is not interested in real-life people as
subjects for fiction (Art, p.123). However, the construction and
invention of interior life and memory illustrate that her fiction differs
from the autobiographical act but at the same time incorporates certain
autobiographical strategies. Like the author of slave autobiographical
narratives resorting to fictional devices for various reasons, Morrison
establishes her literary archaeology from the site where the remains
of a past reality are resurrected by some information and a little bit of
guesswork (Site, p.112). What they have in common is the act of
imagination bound up with memory. Morrisons rememory stresses
precisely the power of imagination mixed with the art of memory.
Obviously, by adding a prefix re to memory, Morrison tries to focus
on the repetitive and cyclical nature of memory as well as the role of
fiction in repatterning and reorganizing experience. As the Greek
philosopher Heraclitus puts it, no one can step into the same stream
twice. The past can never be truly recaptured or recovered because
everything is in flux. Rememory, therefore, highlights the feature of
fluidity by suggesting that each activity of remembering is a re-
enactment of the past with a difference. Besides, rememory suggests
the rectification of history in such a way as to study it in a different
light and a new context. In The Site of Memory, Morrison writes,

36
[a]ll water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to
where it was, and a rush of imagination is [] flooding (p.119).
Interestingly, the relationship between memory and imagination is
compared to that between a body of water and flooding. For one thing,
imagination is not considered as an alien to memory, but a quintes-
sential part of memory. Furthermore, the spontaneity and vitality of
imagination urge us to rectify and revise our previous perception as
the suddenness and unpredictability of flooding bring about inevitable
changes in the watercourse.

Naipauls Hybrid Prose

Surging like a powerful river joined and strengthened by tributaries as

it flows, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World gather
together loosely connected sections that add up the compelling vitality
of Naipauls hybrid prose style. The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in
the World mix historical reportage, fiction, semi-autobiography, travel
writing, social analysis, and cultural commentary. In fact, both books
are subtitled as novels in the broadest sense of the term. However, by
deliberately billing them as works of fiction, Naipaul seems to under-
score fictions capacity to integrate other elements, autobiographical
or historical, and its power to enlarge and redefine reality. The hybrid
nature of Naipauls prose style reveals the cultural plurality and
complexity in his life and experience as an Indo-Trinidadian of
English education and residence.
Therefore, at the centre of Naipauls craft as a writer lies his
mission to unite different aspects of himself and transmit his diverse
experiences. From the outset, Naipauls writing self is distinctly
autobiographical. I begin with myself, Naipaul remarks, this man,
this language, this island, this background, this school, this time. I
begin from all that and I try to investigate it, I try to understand it. I try
to arrive at some degree of self-knowledge (Introduction, p.7). The
beginning of self-knowledge starts from the journey back to ones past
and come to terms with it. Naipaul had thought that to realize his wish
as a writer, it was necessary for him to leave the confined plane of
Trinidad, where people were a small part of somebody elses

37
overview: [] part first of the Spanish story, then of the British story
(Prologue, p.45). Intending to write his part of the story, Naipaul
decided to remain in England after his graduation from Oxford and
took up writing. Unfortunately, in the trying years as a fledgling writer,
he realized that he had neither a living literary tradition nor a highly
organized society to fall back on and claim. His world of ancestral
India is imagined, his Hindu extended family life is disordered and his
colonial society is disintegrated.
The embarrassment and difficulty as an ex-colonial and exile
living and writing in a European metropolis once discouraged Naipaul
in his search for an appropriate subject matter for his work. After six
frustrating years and after several unpublished books, he came to free
himself from the metropolitan tradition and found the confidence to
write about the past he knew. Actually to write, it was necessary to
go back (Prologue, p.47). In Miguel Street (1959), Naipaul went
back to the street of his childhood port of Spain. Though he simplified
and suppressed much of his experience in the book, Naipauls first-
written and third-published novel made a good start, opening up a
reservoir of materials which he had previously thought as inap-
propriate for his writing career. From then on, in one book after
another, Naipaul took a literary adventure to find a point of rest from
which [one] could look back at his past (Forward, p.123). He has
also wondered whether the borrowed form of the novel c[ould]
deliver more than a partial truth in depicting a world with disrupted
histories and diverse cultures (Reading, p.25).
Explaining his ambition to be a writer, Naipaul has noted that his
aim is truth, truth to a particular experience, containing a definition of
the writing self (On Being a Writer, p.3). However, the writing self
that is the centre of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a
fictive structure (Eakin, p.3). That Naipauls narrative is so much
more than autobiographical can be justified by his idea of the
wonder of fiction, in which the unsuspected truths turned up by the
imagination (Writing, p.23). As a result, Naipaul has practised a
unique style, in which all literary genres flowed together and
supported one another to deliver the truth of his particular experience
in the diasporic world half-remembered India, colonial Trinidad,
Western civilization read through school texts and literature, and his

38
fathers literary ambition and his own (Reading, p.20). The Enigma
of Arrival and A Way in the World are two telling examples of
Naipauls masterful usage of autobiographical, historical and fictional
elements to presence the reality of the historical past, constructing and
filling in the blanks left by the past as well as reaching out for future
possibilities and beginnings. Nonetheless, it is also worth noticing that
[w]hat is made present is not merely a past that is past. What is
presenced is a reality, always new, to which the past has contributed
[]. To lay claim to ones life, and thereby to become fierce with
reality, is to understand that reality as something to which one is
continually trying to catch up but which one can never outstrip (Gunn,
p.17). Since one can never outstrip reality, what one could do is to
recognize and accept its incompleteness. If one attempts to catch up
with reality, one has to discover new possibilities in the ongoing
process of re-creating ones life through the creativity of writing. The
fact that old realities are made new and new realities are opened up in
Naipauls fiction reveals his preoccupation with autobiographical and
historical elements, as well as the remarkable sense of intertextuality
in his books.
Intertextuality is a prominent characteristic in Naipauls literary
adventure to render histories and cultures that have made him. Naipaul
often reworks and revises in a later text materials and elements he
treated in earlier books. Naipaul has said in an interview that he was
not unmindful of the intertextuality in his work, but for him, it is the
right angle and approach that matters in his reworking and revision of
materials. In this light, each of his books plays an irreplaceable role to
obtain knowledge of himself, of different cultures he inherited, and of
diasporic worlds he inhabits. While reconstructing the historical past
each time through reinterpretations of autobiographical or fictional
material, Naipaul has realized that the present differs from the past
and that it will not be repeated in the future and has become more
aware of differences than of similarities; given the constant change,
given the uncertainty of events and of men (Gusdorf, p.30). With the
idea of change, the fear of extinction, and the recognition of man and
life as mystery, Naipaul has obtained an extraordinary vision and
understanding of historical change and reality through the act of re-
reading, refiguring and rectifying. Though Naipauls ceaseless effort

39
of presencing reality starts with the autobiographical, it integrates the
historical and the fictional as well. In short, The Enigma of Arrival and
A Way in the World signify respectively a new beginning and a way in
the world, in which Naipaul celebrates personalized and cultural
histories and becomes fierce with multiple realities.

Magical realistic discourse

To narrate history from the interstices between the imaginary and the
real makes possible the mingling of history and fiction. Okris The
Famished Road is another genre-crossing book strongly influenced by
magical realistic mode of representation. Though indigenous to the
Latin American environment, magical realism as a literary mode has
been borrowed by writers all over the world. Magical realism is
fiction that does not distinguish between realistic and non-realistic
events, fiction in which the supernatural, the mythical or the
implausible are assimilated to the cognitive structure of reality without
a perceptive break in the narrators or characters consciousness
(Standish, p.1567). Defined as such, it is not incorrect to say that
magical realism is not a uniquely Latin American literary phen-
omenon. It is rather a way of seeing in which there is space for the
invisible forces that move the world []. It is the capacity to see and
to write about all the dimensions of reality (Zamora and Faris, p.188).
The fact that Nigeria has lived through traumatic historical
convulsions and wrenching political upheavals provides Okri with
sufficient materials that cannot be adequately addressed by and
represented in a discourse of undisturbed or conventional realism. In
general, magical realistic discourse challenges the view that reality is
knowable, predictable, controllable, and combines fantasy with
physical facts and social realities in the quest for meaning behind
things and for truth beyond that available from the surface of everyday
life (Ibid., p.498). By embracing the supernatural and the magical in
human existence, magical realistic discourse asks us to look beyond
the limits of the knowable and penetrates into the multidimensional
reality for untapped possibilities and potentialities.

40
 Okris spirit-child protagonist Azaro moves within at least three
worlds the world of the ancestor, the world of the living and that of
the unborn, bringing absences into the realm of presence. Ghosts and
spirits are often guides to obscure and unknown realities because they
float free in time, here and there, everywhere and eternally. They also
embody the fundamental magical realistic sense that reality always
exceeds our capacities to describe or understand or prove and that the
function of literature is to engage this excessive reality, to honour that
which we may grasp intuitively but never fully or finally define (Ibid.,
p.498). Magical realism, with its most basic concern the nature and
limits of the knowable, responds to modernitys belief on a
progressive and linear history. For a long time, Third World writers
have also used magical realism as an effective technique to reinterpret
their pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories and experiences.
In a sense, magical realism is the outcome of resistances against the
enclosed and immobile view of history and reality. As mentioned in
the previous section, the history of Nigeria is conveyed in the
symbolism of the road and the spirit-child throughout The Famished
Road. If the titular road symbolizes the river of history, then an open
and unfinished road is the resource of many wonderful things and
strange times (Famished, p.571). In short, the road opens to many
and different possibilities, which become hopes for the future. Most
importantly, The Famished Road is a historical novel oriented
principally toward the future. In addition to retrieve and reclaim
history from the past, Azaro dreams and imagines a future history in
advance (Ibid., p.361). And in the future present he sees the
construction of modern Nigeria: a mirage of houses was being built,
paths and roads crossed and surrounded the forest in tightening circles,
unpainted churches and the whitewashed walls of mosques sprang up
where the forest was thickest (Ibid., p.281).
Whereas, on the one hand Okri depicts the future present, on
the other hand Paul Ricoeur remarks that [t]he past is not pass, for
our future is guaranteed precisely by our ability [], to recollect the
past in historical or fictive form (Creativity, p.473). The past,
present and future consists of what we call history, yet history is
always a fictional representation, no matter if it is history as life lived
or history as life imagined. In The Interweaving of History and

41
Fiction, Ricoeur points out that: one of the functions of fiction bound
up with history is to free, retrospectively, certain possibilities that
were not actualized in the historical past, it is owing to its quasi-
historical character that fiction itself is able, after the fact, to perform
its liberating function (p.191). This statement suggests that there lies
a new world or another layer of reality constituted by possibilities of
experience that only fiction may reach and express because the plot
of a narrative fiction is a creation of productive imagination which
projects a world of its own (Poetry, p.452). Fiction sees things not
in terms of actualities but of potentialities, and language has the
capacity to open up new worlds and to discover reality in the process
of being created (Myth, p.489). Reality is not what is always
predicable and controllable, but what is always on the change and in
the making. Language in the making celebrates reality in the making,
Ricoeur contends in Poetry and Possibility (p.462). If Ricoeur is
right in proposing that [h]istory takes care of the actual past, poetry
takes charge of the possible, it is also true that the historical in-
completeness of slavery, diaspora, and postcolonial experience not
only makes Beloved, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World
as well as The Famished Road possible but real (Interweaving,
p.190).

42
Chapter Two
A shadowless participation: Toni Morrisons
Beloved and discredited history

Past lives live in us, through us. Each of us harbors the spirits of people who
walked the earth before we did, and those spirits depend on us for continuing
existence, just as we depend on their presence to live our lives to the fullest
(John Edgar Wideman, Sent For You Yesterday).

With this remarkable perception of the interdependence between past

and present, John Edgar Wideman prefaces his prize-winning book
Sent For You Yesterday published in 1983. In no way coincidentally,
his particular insight of envisioning the past through the present is
shared and heightened by Toni Morrison four years later in her widely
acclaimed novel Beloved. However, the significance of quoting Wide-
mans passage as a prologue to this study on Morrison goes beyond an
obvious intention of displaying certain continuity and renewal in
African-American literary and cultural tradition, in which slavery is a
central metaphor. This commentary provides a context for and a
dialogic framework within which subsequent discussions on Mor-
risons work may draw out points otherwise unnoticed.

The discredited shadow of Africanist presence

For one thing, both Wideman and Morrison have realized the im-
portance of paying homage to their ancestors. In the cited passage,
Wideman emphasizes our indebtedness to an ancestral past as its
spirits live in and through us. Morrison echoes Wideman in her much-
anthologized essay Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation (1984)
that [w]hen you kill the ancestor you kill yourself (p.344). Yet there
is a distinct difference between Wideman and Morrison. That is,
Wideman seems not to doubt the presence of the ancestor, as indicated
in the quotation and further developed in Sent For You Yesterday, a
novel about Albert Wilkess return to Homewood and the stories of
Homewoods legendary past. Morrison, however, could not feel the
existence of an ancestral presence. It was the absence of an ancestor
that was frightening, that was threatening to her (Ibid., p.343). The
notion of presence and absence is rather Janus-faced than monadic. Or
in Ricoeurs words, [a]bsence and presence are modes of givenness
of the same reality (Function, p.120). Haunted by a frightening and
threatening ancestral absence, Morrison has been devoting herself to
bringing the four hundred-year-old presence of Africans and then
African-Americans in the United States out from the margins of the
literary imagination (Playing, p.5). In other words, she considers the
significance of what she calls Africanist presence has been ignored
in the origin and development of American literature and culture
(Ibid.). She observes that [o]ther than as the objects of an occasional
bout of jungle fever, other than to provide local colour or to lend some
touch of verisimilitude or to supply a needed moral gesture, humour or
bit of pathos, blacks made no appearance at all (Ibid., p.15).
Furthermore, Morrison contends that literary blackness together with
what blackness may imply (inferiority or invisibility, silence or ab-
sence, history-less or human-less, etc.) is essential to any under-
standing of literary whiteness and Americanness (Ibid., p.xii).
From her first book The Bluest Eye (1970) to the recently
published Love (2003), Morrisons eight novels over the last three
decades are constituents of one monumental project. Namely, her
consistent pursuit of foregrounding and reinforcing the Africanist
presence in American literary tradition, making the invisible visible,
and the unsaid said. In this sense, each of her novels takes the reader
via a different route on the same journey to discover unrecognized and
misrepresented aspects of African-American daily life and experience.
Morrisons redefining and recasting of the landscape of American
literature also illustrate her unique artistic vision. This chapter at-
tempts to give a glimpse of her relentless effort in changing the ways
American literature is read, and especially the ways African-American
history is written. Moreover, through an in-depth look at her historical

44
fiction exemplified by Beloved, the chapter will concentrate on
Morrisons filling in the incompleteness of documentary evidence
revealed in slave autobiographical narratives as well as her translation
and transformation of the Black history which is usually regarded as
discredited.
Morrison points out that the knowledge Blacks had is taken to be
discredited [] because Black people were discredited therefore
what they knew was discredited (Rootedness, p.342). To discredit
means to defame, to disbelieve or distrust, and to destroy the con-
fidence in the reliability of something or someone. Since Blacks
signify little or nothing in the imaginative landscape of literary white-
ness, their ability, confidence and pride in telling their own stories
have been greatly if not entirely damaged. Though discredited is
used in particular for history or culture on the periphery, I would
argue that Morrison takes this word to measure against the dominant
discourse as well. In an interview with Claudia Tate, Morrison says:
[t]heres a notion out there in the land that there are human beings
one writes about, and then there are black people or Indians, or some
other marginal group. If you write about the world from that point of
view, somehow its considered lesser (Tate, p.121). This lesser
description about the marginal group envisaged from a central posi-
tion is not only irrevocably incomplete but also dishonest. Besides,
African-American culture is deeply rooted in the oral tradition instead
of the written form; hence their stories often get lost intergenera-
tionally or misinterpreted interracially. Fortunately, Morrison and
many other African-American writers have resorted to novel as one of
the literary genres that can effectively translate messages usually
passed down orally. [T]he novel is needed by African-Americans
now in a way that it was not needed before, says Morrison, [w]e
dont live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents
dont sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological
archetypal stories that we heard years ago (Rootedness, p.340).
Therefore, by deconstructing the centre, marginality breaks down,
and by mastering a written form, the black culture acquires a new
narrative dimension. The act of discrediting is a double-edged sword
by which Morrison cuts open and drives down to the heart of African-
American and American literary creation. At the heart lies the race

45
issue. Responding to the fact that in the matter of race, silence and
evasion have historically ruled literary discourse, Morrison explains:

ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To

notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its
invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless par-
ticipation in the dominant cultural body (Playing, pp.910, emphasis added).

Yet Morrison has noticed and recognized the internalized or imposed

discredited difference manifested by the confrontation between
literary blackness and literary whiteness. In her immensely persuasive
critique Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(1992), Morrison probes into the work of Poe, Melville, Cather and
Hemingway and examines the Africanist presence within their writ-
ings. Apparently, Morrisons distinctive contribution to literary criti-
cism lies less in the revisionary attitude she takes to de-canonize the
classics, than in her sensitiveness to an indisputable fact that the
Africanist presence has been a shadow or a ghost in American literary
and cultural history. Through a shadowless participation in Ameri-
can literature and history, Morrison demonstrates her commitment to
African-American aestheticism, which has been overshadowed by the
dominant culture.
Shadow has basically two indications in this chapter, first, the
absent presence and marginalization of African-American experience;
second, the dominance and prejudice of literary whiteness and the
ghettoization of literary blackness. If shadow can be understood as
having an interior sphere and an exterior sphere, then a shadowless
participation also suggest two interdependent types of manoeuvring.
On the one hand, it calls upon a rediscovery and revival of the
Africanist presence in American history and culture. On the other
hand, it challenges the monopoly and exclusivity held by literary
whiteness, encouraging and providing access to different interpret-
ations and representations of reality. In parallel, Morrisons pursuit of
a shadowless participation is fulfilled in the complimentary and
dialogic relationships between the interiority of her work and the
exteriority of the slave-narrative tradition. The 1988 Pulitzer Prize
winning novel, Beloved, is a good case in point to illustrate

46
extensively her imaginative re-reading and rewriting of the slave
narrative, which is autobiographical in both form and content. Though
a classic genre in African-American literature, the slave autobio-
graphical narrative, Morrison thinks, is inimical to some of the
characteristics of Black artistic expression and influence (Rooted-
ness, p.340). Later in her essay The Site of Memory (1987), she
locates the inimical as slave narratives incapacity as well as its
insufficiency to identify and signify the interior life of or memories
within slaves and ex-slaves (pp.110, 111).
Morrisons creative inspiration, however, comes from her
imagination of the blank left in classic slave narratives and her
interpretation of history as having factual and fictional, and even,
mythic dimensions. Morrison not only pulls apart the veil drawn over
the interior life unrecorded by slave autobiographical narratives, but
she also bears witness to a particular phase of history untaught in
mainstream education. By dint of Ricoeurs concepts the Same, the
Other and the Analogue in studying the reality of the historical past,
the following discussion on Beloved and discredited history will be
divided into three sections with each bringing to light a different side
of a shadowless participation. From the angle of the Same, which is
the re-enactment of the past in the present through documentary
evidence and imaginative construction, the first section looks at a
shadowless participation as Morrisons interweaving of actual and
fictive elements for the plot and the characters, especially, her
inventive revision and transformation of the slave-narrative tradition.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Beloved is often read as a neo-slave
narrative. Referring to Ricoeurs concept of the Other, which high-
lights the sense of temporal distance and otherness in rendering
history, the second section considers a shadowless participation in
terms of Morrisons creation of Beloved the character and the gift of
rememory to access the interior life of her characters and to articulate
their undocumented and unacknowledged experience. Based on
Ricoeurs perception of the Analogue, the integration of re-enacting
and distancing, the last section of the chapter considers a shadowless
participation as Morrisons unswerving artistic pursuit embedded in
envisioning history writing and storytelling as an unending process.

47
Living and imagining the historical

Set in Cincinnati in 1873, eight years after the end of the American
Civil War (18611865), Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a mother who
was first haunted by a ghost and later confronted with the magical
realistic presence of a daughter she murdered eighteen years before.
By situating the novel during the Post-bellum period of Recon-
struction (18651877) and framing it as partly a ghost story, partly a
realist narrative, Morrison paints a bleak but powerful picture of
slaverys dehumanizing effects on the slaver and the enslaved, as well
as slaverys lingering trauma and pain inflicted on its survivors and
descendents. Published in 1987, one hundred and twenty-four1 years
after the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), Beloved, Morrisons fifth
novel, generated considerable controversies several months after its
first appearance. Most of them pivot around the right and reason of
Sethes infanticide or Morrisons brio and boldness in coming to terms
with slavery head-on at the front door instead of the back gate. After
over a decade of hard work, Beloved was eventually brought to the
screen in 1998, starring Oprah Winfrey as the stern and seething Sethe.
At the outset, Beloved was inspired by real-life facts or trace[s]
left by the past newspaper clippings and a photograph (Ricoeur,
Reality, p.2). While editing The Black Book (1974), a collection of
cultural documents recording African-American history-as-life-lived
(Davis, p.245), Morrison came across and grew interested in journ-
alistic reports about Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave in Cincinnati
who killed her three-year-old daughter with a butcher-knife and tried
to kill her other children as well as herself in order to prevent their
return into slavery. Margaret Garner became a cause clbre at that
time because the Abolitionists wanted to get her tried for murder so as
to make the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 unconstitutional; instead she
was convicted and sentenced for the real crime of stealing property
from her owner. The front page of The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer for

1 It is by no means a coincidence that Morrison names Sethes house as 124

Bluestone Road.

48
Tuesday, 29 January 1856 reported her crime under the title A Tale
of Horror, which reads in part:

But a deed of horror had been consummated, for welting in its blood, the throat
being cut from ear to ear and the head almost severed from the body, upon the
floor lay one of the children of the younger couple [Margaret Garner and her
husband Robert], a girl three years old, while in a back room, crouched beneath
the bed, two more of the children, boys of two and five years, were moaning,
the one having received two gashes in its throat, the other a cut upon the head.
As the party entered the room the mother was seen wielding a heavy shovel,
and before she could be secured she inflicted a heavy blow with it upon the face
of the infant, which was lying upon the floor (quoted in Woffle).

Morrisons idea of the story about the murdered baby girl is further
developed and visualized through a photograph by the great African-
American photographer James Van Der Zee. Morrison came upon the
photograph of a murdered young woman and the attached story re-
produced in Camille Billopss The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978),
an album featuring Van Der Zees photographs of Harlem funerals:

In one picture, there was a young girl lying in a coffin and he [Van Der Zee]
says that she was eighteen years old and she had gone to a party and that she
was dancing and suddenly she slumped and they noticed there was blood on her
and they said, What happened to you? And she said, Ill tell you tomorrow. I
will tell you tomorrow. Thats all she would say. And apparently her ex-
boyfriend or somebody who was jealous has come to the party with a gun and a
silencer and shot her. And she kept saying, Ill tell you tomorrow because she
wanted him to get away (Naylor, 584).2

Putting the narrative about Margaret Garner alongside the snapshot of

the girl in the coffin, Morrison seemed to have found precious in-
gredients with which she formulated a powerful story that gave voice
and life to the inarticulate and the dead. Accordingly, Beloved is taken
as the unwritten and unspoken history of Margaret Garner and Jazz as
that of the murdered girl. Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise are constituents
of what has been popularly grouped as Morrisons historical trilogy

2 Later on, Morrison gave her full attention to this photo-story and developed it
separately into the plot of Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1992), a
novel set in the 1920s about Violet and Joe Trace who literally shot his teenage
sweetheart Dorcas.

49
(Peterson, p.51). Morrisons writing ambition is in fact grander; her
intention is to reconstruct a kind of literary archaeology (Site,
p.112). In other words, she wants to do a remapping of the historical
terrains for African-Americans, a terrain that had been previously
charted by a master narrative from the outside, rather than from the
inside of their experiences (Christian, Layered Rhythms, p.495).
The outside-inside contestation here corresponds to Morrisons
advocacy of a shadowless participation for Africanist presence in
dominant literary and cultural histories. As mentioned briefly in the
introductory section, Morrison maintains that the monstrosity of
slavery has not been thoroughly delineated because master narratives
tend to shun the disgrace, and slave narratives avoid dwelling on the
painful memories. Slowly but surely, the psychological dimension of
the enslaved remains largely unattended to in imaginative literature. In
conceiving and shaping the story of Margaret Garner for Beloved,
Morrison went beyond what a master narrative had reported on this
enslaved woman, and came to imagine her interior life and listen to
her inside story that tells what had driven a mother to kill her own
children. As such, Beloved illustrates Collingwoods concept of
History as Re-enactment of Past Experience in the present through
the combined forces of Historical Evidence and The Historical
Imagination (Collingwood, pp.282, 249, 231). Referring once again
to the outside-inside opposition, the outside of history is historical
evidence or documentary data, while the inside is knowledge through
traces or thought obtained through historical imagination (Ricoeur,
Reality, pp.6, 7). Therefore, the re-enactment of past experience is the
end result aimed at by documentary interpretation and by the
constructions of the imagination (Ricoeur, Reality, p.6). Significantly,
Morrisons historical knowledge of slavery arises from yet goes be-
yond volumes of documentary data and classic slave narratives.
When asked whether she had read a lot of antebellum slave
narratives as background knowledge for Beloved, Morrison said that
she would not have read them for information because she knew that
slave narratives did not reveal slaverys true horror for fear of offend-
ing the white abolitionists. So while I looked at the documents and
felt familiar with slavery and overwhelmed by it, Morrison says, I
wanted it to be truly felt. I wanted to translate the historical into the

50
personal (Art, p.103). Getting familiar with the facts of slavery is
not the same experience as truly feeling slavery, neither is the trans-
lation of the historical into the personal simply adding a grain of
history into the life of the characters created. Morrison has also ex-
plained that she intentionally avoided further researching the Garner
case for other than the obvious stuff because she wanted to invent
Margaret Garners life; recording her life as lived would not interest
Morrison (Darling, p.248). Besides, there were loopholes and incon-
sistencies about what happened to Margaret Garner in the end.
Modelling Sethe on Margaret Garner but at the same time allowing
Sethe to emerge as an invented character, Morrison has re-created
Sethes life by giving blood and a heartbeat to an old newspaper
scrap (Beloved, p.78). In addition, Morrison has made Sethes (and
Margaret Garners) story remembered by giving voice back to the
silent and the unspeakable.
Certainly, it is not easy to integrate a history-as-life-lived and a
history-as-life-imagined seamlessly, and Morrison had no ready
precedent to fall back on either. In The Politics of Postmodernism
(1989), Linda Hutcheon argues that [w]hat historiographic meta-
fictions ask [] is whether the historian discovers or invents the
totalizing narrative form or model used (p.64). Similarly, Morrisons
literary archaeology in general and her historical trilogy in particular
are built upon her constructive rediscoveries of the past as well as her
imaginative interpretations of the past. Unmistakably, the strategy of
discovery or invention involves the documentary character of his-
torical thought, and the work of imagination in the interpretation of
documentary data (Ricoeur, Reality, p.6). Therefore, Morrison has
opened a new possibility of writing and envisioning history in Beloved.
Her task as a fiction-writer and historian is to discover as well as
invent, and to fictionalize history as well as historicize fiction. On
account of Morrisons intention to translate the historical into the
personal, Beloved is not modelled on the conventional historical novel
in which a segment of history is recorded chronologically and
faithfully. Rather, it is a historical novel in the sense that Beloved
comes to those terrible spaces that nineteenth-century slave narratives
could not write about (Christian, Fixing Methodologies, p.364).
While classic slave narratives characteristically retrace slaves phys-

51
ical escape and their journey to freedom, Morrison focuses on how
they survive the psychological trauma of slavery. In so doing, she has
assumed a grave responsibility of rip[ping] that veil drawn over
proceedings too terrible to relate (Site, p.110). For Morrison, one
of her historical missions as an American writer of African ancestry is
upholding an effort of the will to discover untapped knowledge and
hidden truths in American history (Unspeakable, p.20).
Concerning the paradox of truth and fiction, Morrison states
explicitly that the crucial distinction for [her] is not the difference
between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth.
Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot
(Site, p.113). In other words, facts do not inevitably lead to truth,
and fiction is also a way of disclosing truth. Therefore, truth can be
found in a work of fiction as much as in a piece of document. What
fiction and fact reveal are different aspects of truth. Most importantly,
the claim that truth cannot exist without human intelligence indicates
that truth has dimensions that make interpretations not only possible
but also necessary. In Beloved, the re-enactment of past experience
aiming to reveal the true reality of history is achieved through the
combination of facts and fiction, of historical evidence and imagin-
ative constructions. Interestingly, Morrison scatters documentary facts
in bits and pieces throughout the book, suggesting a fragmented
interior by a disintegrated facade. It is known that the iron bit and the
three-spoke collar that slaves wore were creative inventions to prevent
them from eating food during work. With the bit in the mouth and the
collar around the neck, slaves were deprived of the language and
humanity to articulate slaverys immense horror. Metaphorically, their
stories and experiences were either insufficiently or inaccurately
represented in literary history.
As an heir to writers of the slave-narrative tradition, Morrison
acknowledges and depicts the physical, psychological and path-
ological effects of slavery in the novel. For example, Beloved specifies
within several lines what historically concerns slaves and ex-slaves:

the Fugitive Bill, the Settlement Fee, Gods Ways and Negro pews; antislavery,
manumission, skin voting, Republicans, Dred Scott, book learning, Sojourners
high-wheeled buggy, the Colored Ladies of Delaware, Ohio, and the other

52
 weighty issues that held [slaves] in chairs, scraping the floorboards or pacing
them in agony or exhilaration (Beloved, p.173).

On the one hand, Morrison does not downplay the significance of

public and political affairs in adopting chronology as the temporal
context for her fiction. On the other hand, a usable history may not be
merely about these verifiable incidents. Morrison has realized that it
was important to imagine the bit as an active instrument, rather than
simply as a curio or an historical fact (Art, p.104). In addition, she
has attempted to cast light on those bloody events visible and tangible
only to African-American memories.
With her own creative imagination, Morrison comes inside
Stamp Paids mind and listens to what he says:

Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal
body whos read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of
that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River,
securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom.
[] He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted
around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp (Beloved,
p.180).

Stamp Paids reflection on the unending anguish, which goes beyond

the documents, reveals the interior life and memories of Blacks within
the slave system. His reflection also exemplifies that memory is a
central aspect of the inner life, one means by which we interpret the
present as well as remember the past (Christian, Layered Rhythms,
p.493). In order to approach the inner life, to [listen] for the holes
the things the fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask
(Beloved, p.92), Morrison has to interweave historical facts and
resourceful imagination, thus exploring two worlds the actual and
the imaginary (Hawthorne, p.28).
Returning once again to Stamp Paids meditation, the actual is
the bundle of documents seen and read as history, while the imaginary
refers to the untold story of whoever owns the red ribbon. Here is
another example to underscore the difference between what is seen
and what is untold. The tree or jungle is a very important metaphor in
the text, signifying the label of being a piece of property instead of a

53
free agent. From bits and pieces of historical events to the environ-
mental and inhuman images that tree or jungle generates, the
following discussion focuses on Morrisons strengthening of the
historical by bringing the reader from the actually seen to the
imaginative realm of the untold as an instance of discrediting. From
different angles, a tree implicates different mental pictures or stories.
For example, it is closely associated with the death of Sethes mother,
whose body swings from its branch. A tree also brings sweet mem-
ories to the minds of slaves and ex-slaves from Sweet Home
plantation before the arrival of Schoolteacher. It is Schoolteacher and
his pupils who with a whip stencilled the picture of a tree onto Sethes
back as a punishment for her failed attempt to escape to freedom. Yet,
unlike her mother who has a mark under her breast, Sethe could never
read the scars on her back; she needs someone else to describe them
for her instead. In this way, Sethes tree of traces left by the past on
her back reaches out to other people and invites them to read as well
as imagine Sethes personalized history.
Amy, the white girl, is the first to see the consequence of that
diabolic flogging. Amy describes as well as deconstructs the masters
inscription, reconstructing alternative interpretation of Sethes back,
which had been used for a master narrative. Amys reconstruction of
the tree of historical traces is a different construction than the course
of events reported or inscribed in this case (Ricoeur, Reality, p.26).
Being an indentured labourer herself, Amy certainly had some beat-
ings but none of them is like Sethes. First struck dumb at the sight of
the scar on Sethes back, Amy soon envisages it as a chokecherry
tree and recounts in a dreamwalkers voice:

See, heres the trunk its red and split wide open, full of sap, and this heres
the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look
like, and dern if these aint blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white.
Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom (Beloved, p.79).

Baby Suggs, Sethes mother-in-law, is the second spectator. She hides

her mouth with her hand as she catches a glimpse of Sethes back and
reads it as a pattern of [r]oses of blood (Ibid., p.93). Wordlessly,
[Baby Suggs] greased the flowering back and pinned a double

54
thickness of cloth to the inside of the newly stitched dress (Ibid.). By
the time Paul D arrives, Sethes open wounds had already healed into
an intricate filigree whose private meaning is concealed from the
public. Nevertheless, Paul D can only think but not say when facing
the sculpture [Sethes] back had become, like the decorative work of
an ironsmith too passionate for display (Ibid., p.17). He kisses every
leaf and branch of it, and thus learns the root of Sethes sorrow.
Seeing the scar of a savage whipping, Amy, Baby Suggs and Paul D
become speechless in one sense or another. Since the past survive[s]
by leaving a trace, the tree of scars on Sethes back is a living trace or
record of the sufferings of the slaves, demonstrating the survival of the
past within the present (Ricoeur, Reality, p.11). The scar represents
the trace of a violent past whose horror and memory cannot be
adequately rendered in language. In other words, the scar is a bearer of
mute testimony to forgotten histories (Ellmann, p.46). Strategically,
Morrison begins the novel with the dead skin on Sethes back, which
symbolizes the dead part in her past. However, Sethes scarred back is
reopened to release the story about her dead daughter Beloved, whose
ghost cannot be exorcized until her forgotten story is told and
rememorized. In this sense, Sethes lacerated back contains the trace
of histories and rememories reincarnated, and therefore, re-envisioned
as a source of personalized and racial histories.

Rememorying the past: configuration and translation

As imaginative interpretations from Amy, Baby Suggs and Paul D

give life and meaning to the dead fleshes on Sethes back, her untold
experience as a slave mother is recounted also due to forces from
outside because she herself has worked hard to forget it. Not sur-
prisingly, there is a national amnesia surrounding the history and
details of slavery (Angelo, p.257). We live in a land where the past is
always erased, Morrison notes, [t]he past is absent or its romant-
icized. This [American] culture doesnt encourage dwelling on, let

55
alone coming to terms with the truth about the past (Gilroy, p.179).
Slavery is the erased and romanticized past in literary imagination
thanks partly to the immensity of its horror and partly to the unspoken
request for justice. Yet:

[c]oming to terms with the past does not imply a serious working through of
the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness. It
suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from
memory (Adorno, p.115).

Unfortunately, the past that should be wiped from memory keeps

coming back. In Beloved, the past turns up in the reincarnation of
Beloved, who stimulates the rememory and revival of the dead things
in the mind of the characters. As mentioned earlier in the introductory
section of this chapter, another of Morrisons notable contributions to
a shadowless participation is the fantastic resurrection of Beloved
and the use of rememory as keys to unlock the characters interior life.
To some extent, the timeless and placeless Beloved and rememory are
also the Other in Ricoeurs term, functioning as distancing devices to
refigure history and translate it so that individual and cultural histories
are remembered and reincorporated.
In addition to speaking through Sethe that [r]emembering
seemed unwise (Beloved, p.274), Morrison expresses openly in an
interview that [t]he act of writing [Beloved], is a way of confronting
and making it possible to remember (Darling, p.247). Undoubtedly,
remembering and forgetting has become a complete dilemma that
threads throughout the text. Apparently, there is a necessity for
remembering slaverys horror, which is the same necessity for
remembering it in such a way that it could be comprehended and put
aside, and in such a manner that the memory of slavery is not
confining but liberating. To eliminate such a horror demands a full
comprehension of slaverys true nature. For one thing, the life and
history of slaves and ex-slaves are often assumed to be either
insignificant or negligible in literary and cultural reproductions. Like
the dichotomy between national amnesia from the public outside and
memories within individual consciousness, Beloved is a paradoxical
novel which is about and not about slavery. The book does not treat

56
slavery as a social institution with the capital S, but rather it concerns
itself with a group of people called slaves and ex-slaves. In other
words, the novel attempts to chart individualized aspects of slavery
and the possibility of articulating personal memories of history.
Sethes story shows that there is an even worse horror than
slavery, namely, the enslavement to ones memories and the entrap-
ment in ones own past, which is more destructive than physical
bondage, because this engulfing past sabotages the present and
forecloses the future. In Beloved, Morrison seems to examine
whether one stops at sheer reproach or whether one endures the
horror through a certain strength that comprehends even the incom-
prehensible (Adorno, p.126). The incomprehensible comes from both
inside and outside, which are also two resources of discredited and
incomplete knowledge. The gift of memory and the writing of history
signify the private and public spheres of the discredited and
incomprehensible. Furthermore, memory as an activity has a capacity
to remember or forget things deliberately while the writing of history
entails the collaboration of documentary evidence and imaginative
construction. Though memory and history are separate entities, the act
of remembering and forgetting, and the writing of history converge in
storytelling, suggesting that perhaps through the telling and sharing of
stories, a certain strength will be obtained when various parts of the
story from remembrance and historical documents are pieced together.
For instance, Morrison has prophesied as visionary three different
attitudes toward the incomprehensible story Denver tells about Sethe
being beaten by the resurrected ghost, as well as the story Morrison
tells at large by writing the book. These three groups of attitudes are:
those that believe the worse; those that believed none of it; and those
like Ella, who thought it through (Beloved, p.255). The first attitude
encloses and consumes people within historical memory; the second
denies and avoids history in a psychotic way. It is precisely the last
perspective that Morrisons own writing calls upon and exemplifies,
that is, having the strength to think through the difficult parts of
history. This question is particularly meant for Sethe, an ex-slave who
now lives in the guilt and shadow of her infanticide.
Before Sethe could have the strength to think it through, the
difficult parts of history (which goes beyond individual sufferings and

57
personal details) come back to haunt her in diverse forms. Morrison
tells us that the past keeps coming back in other forms until you
confront and live through it (Caldwell, p.241). In the novel, the
historical past is stirred up by the surprising appearance of Paul D at
Sethes doorstep, followed by his uncovering of the scar on Sethes
back. Most significantly, the historical past comes back in the magical
realistic revival of Sethes dead daughter. If Paul D and Beloved could
be understood as the exteriority of memory, or the physical presence
of the historical past, then the interiority of memory, the constant
presence of the past in the mind of the characters is fulfilled by
memory as thought and the technical dimension of memorialization,
and the art of writing, of material inscription, in other words, the
act of remembering and writing (Derrida, pp.1067). To be more
specific, in Beloved, the interiority of memory is brought to the
surface by Morrisons configuration and translation of the historical
past in the characters storytelling and interior monologues, as well as
her strategy in re-imagining and rewriting Margaret Garners story in
the present.
The past first comes back to Sethe in the form of a visit paid by
Paul D, Mr. Garners last man at Sweet Home plantation. Paul D not
only tells Sethe about what happened to their fellow slaves since her
escape, but also lays bare the scar on her back for the first time after
eighteen years, signifying the unfolding of a series of hidden stories to
be discovered and accounted for. Shortly after Paul D and Sethe have
decided to make a life together for the future, a restless and difficult
part of Sethes past could not wait to turn itself up. Actually, it is Paul
D who precipitates the baby ghosts physical appearance in the
household. The ghost returns in the body of a young woman called
Beloved, the same name carved on the headstone of Sethes dead
daughter. However, it is Denver, Sethes other daughter, who sees
Beloved as the murdered sister returned. Sethe does not immediately
identify her as the reincarnation of her third child. A full recognition is
achieved only after the skating scene when Sethe gives Beloved and
Denver milk to drink, an act reminiscent of her feverish desperation to
be with her children, to milk them. By then, Beloved has been
accepted unconditionally as the missing member in the household of

58
124 Bluestone Road and as the public manifestation of discredited
history and forgotten knowledge.
As a ghost and a living creature, Beloved is at the centre of the
narrative strategy. If Beloved is literally what Sethe thinks she is, her
child returned to her from the dead, she functions as the umbilical
cord linking Sethe with a past she wishes to forget (Darling, p.247).
Instead of memory taking Sethe back to what happened in the past, it
is the exteriority, namely, the actual materialization and physical
embodiment of memory that reactivates the interiority of memory. For
example, upon coming back from the carnival with Paul D and Denver,
Sethe finds a young woman with lineless and smooth new skin
sitting on a stump not far from her house (Beloved, p.50). The moment
Sethe gets close to see the young womans face, her bladder comes to
full capacity. The water brings Sethe back to a time when she gave
birth to Denver with the midwifery of Amy who told her that she
would sink the boat with the flooding water from her open womb.
Once knowing that this new girls name is Beloved, Sethe has a
special feeling toward her due to the remembrance of glittering
headstone (Ibid., p.53).
Ironically, Sethe names her dead daughter Beloved after the
phrase with which Reverend Pike began the childs burial. Dearly
Beloved is used in marriage and funeral ceremonies, an address to
people present at the liturgical occasion (Ibid., p.5). The absence of
Dearly from the name hints at the fact that slaves are not considered
as precious human beings; hence, matrimonial and eulogistic cere-
monies are denied to them. For example, there would never be a
wedding for Sethe and Halle at Sweet Home, however improved the
Garners are. And those who died either as captives in Africa or in the
Middle Passage were deprived of proper funerals; they were dumped
into the salty water. Therefore, without a past consummated by a
funeral and a future commenced by a marriage, the African slaves are
stuck in the crisis of life, the unbearable nature of its survival
(Caruth, p.7). However, if Dearly Beloved is used for the present
rather than the absent, then beloved refers to the survivors and
descendants of slavery, who are called upon to love and cherish their
lives instead of finding an asylum in death.

59
 Apart from being taken as Sethes dead daughter returned,
Beloved represents personalized and cultural histories that are often
regarded as discredited and perished. She is Sethes mother, a survivor
from the slave ship, who personifies a language or a culture that Sethe
could not know and is thus lost. She is also Denvers coaxer for the
story of her birth helped by a white girl whose name she bears.
Triggered by the presence of Beloved, Paul D recalls something [hes]
supposed to remember that has been put into the tobacco tin lodged in
his chest (Beloved, p.234). In addition to rekindling memories for
people living at 124 Bluestone Road, Beloved is affiliated with the
experiences of various women in the novel. She is believed to be
locked up by some whiteman [], and never let out the door just
like Ella who was shared by father and son, or Stamp Paids wife,
Vashti, who was taken by his masters son as a concubine (Ibid., 119).
Beloved is also another kind of dead which is not spiritual but flesh,
that is, a survivor from a true and factual slave ship (Darling, p.247),
who comes back to tell what it was like over there (Beloved, p.75).
Thus, she is associated with generations of slaves especially slave
women who died in the Middle Passage. As a trace of the dis-
remembered and unaccounted for, Beloved connects the individual
with the collective and the historical (Ibid., p.274). In fact, physically
and figuratively pregnant with the bitter past and unresolved mem-
ories, Beloved slips surreptitiously into the lives of the community
women who later participate in a ritual to exorcize her so as to beckon
a tolerable future life.
Obviously, as a trace of the past, Beloved is marked, physically
and metaphorically. She has three vertical scratches on her forehead
(Ibid., p.51), and a little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-
kootchy-coo place under her chin (Ibid., p.239). It is these corporeal
inscriptions corresponding to Sethes act that enable her to look at
Beloved as the murdered daughter returning from the other side.
Beloved is metaphorically marked in the sense that she and her
questions remind Sethe of her own mother. Sethes mother has a cross
and a circle in the skin under her breast, the very label of her being a
commodity. Like Hawthornes Hester Pyrnne, Sethes mother claims
its ownership, transforming a residue of mutilation and diminished
humanity into a license of recognition and identity. As she tells

60
Beloved and Denver about her mother, Sethe remembers her mother
saying: I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If
something happens to me and you cant tell me by my face, you can
know me by this mark (Ibid., p.61). But at that time, Sethe the little
girl did not understand the meaning of her mothers (re)mark until she
had a mark of [her] own (Ibid.).
In order to lay down the cross and step outside of the circle,
Sethe has to think through her mothers legacy, and the particular way
she thinks is rememory. Rememory is Morrisons original coinage,
having linguistic features of a noun and a verb. Figuratively it is
Derridas memory as thought intertwined with a threat of repetition,
a conception of time as circular or cyclical rather than linear. It is also
the continual entry and re-entry of past into present, as well as re-
enacting and rethinking of the past in the present (Ferguson, p.112).
As an illustration, we consider Sethes explication of rememory to
Denver:

Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my
rememory. [] But its not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down,
its gone, but the place the picture of it stays, and not just in my rememory,
but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out
there outside my head. I mean, even if I dont think it, even if I die, the picture
of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it
happened. [...] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something
or see something going on. [] And you think its you thinking it up. A
thought picture. But no. Its when you bump into a rememory that belongs to
somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. Its never
going away. [] The picture is still there and whats more, if you go there
you who never was there if you go there and stand in the place where it was,
it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. [] Because even
though its all over over and done with its going to always be there waiting
for you (Ibid., pp.356).

Some characteristics of Sethes idiosyncratic rememory are revealed

in the long quotations: first, it has a visual quality (a picture floating
around); second, it is spatial (places are still there); and third, it is
individualistic as well as collective (a rememory that belongs to
somebody else).

61
 On the relationship between image and memory, Morrison
explains that her journey to a site of memory is different from that of
other writers. My route is the reverse, says Morrison, the image
comes first and tells me what the memory is about (Site, pp.113
14). For example, Sethes thought picture of life under School-
teachers cruelty evokes her memories of taking actions to protect her
children from what she has been suffering. It is also worth noticing
that the image through which Morrison arrives at a site of memory
incorporates Ricoeurs notion of image as replica and image as
fiction (Function, p.119). Since memory is the deliberate act of
remembering to her, Morrison explores in her writings what is useful
from the past and which ought to be discarded in order to create a
livable present and future (Memory, p.213). Unfortunately, Sethe
does not know how and what to discard in anticipation of a future
since the desired image of the past has come back in the physical
presence of Beloved. With Beloveds return, Sethe has the whole
world of us three inside the living room of 124 Bluestone Road
(Beloved, p.182). Morrison translates this us three into a reversal of
the Trinity formed by the Mother (Sethe), the Daughter (Denver) and
the Unholy Ghost (Beloved). Moreover, the us three can be
understood in light of the Augustinian threefold present: Beloved is
the present of past things, Sethe represents the present on account of
her living in a perpetual present, and Denver, who was born into
freedom, is the present of future things. Like rememory, which is an
endless reliving and rethinking of the past in the present, Beloveds
presence forces Sethe to enter and re-enter into the past that she has
tried to keep at bay.
Even so, the only purpose of Beloveds return is to demand her
right if she had not been dead, and to punish Sethe for her wilful
repression of the past and her choice of living in a perpetual present.
Sethe suffers again the pain of being unable to justify herself for the
killing because Beloved was too small to understand the situation at
that time and she had to do it quickly in order to stop the slave-captors.
As a slave mother, Sethe knows that life in slavery for her children is
worse than death, because death is a renewal of life in a safe and free
place. Even though Beloved is unwilling to grant forgiveness, the
therapeutic act of storytelling is enough for Sethe to forgive herself.

62
Simply, talking cures and heals the wound. Rememory initiates and
reconstructs a different kind of reality during the exchanges of asking
for and telling stories, combining historical memory with retrospective
imagination. In this sense, rememory reconstructs the events reported
in the newspaper clipping about Sethes infanticide. During the
process of storytelling, Beloved is the stimulant, inquirer and insider,
Sethe is the storyteller and inheritor of the oral tradition, and Denver
together with Beloved, are the listeners and beneficiaries. Most
importantly, Beloveds question leads to scenarios that take rememory
further into the past. For instance, Beloveds questioning about her
diamond earrings evokes Sethes memories of them as a wedding gift
from Mrs. Garner and of her escape to 124 Bluestone Road where she
wore the earrings and enjoyed those twenty-eight days of having
women friends, a mother-in-law, and all her children together; of
being part of a neighbourhood (Ibid., p.173). Sethe also recalls the
confiscation of the earrings during her imprisonment, which traces
back to the killing due in part to the indifference of the community
that step[ped] back and h[e]ld itself at a distance and its jealousy of
Baby Suggss hubris in throwing a luxurious banquet to celebrate
Sethes escape to freedom (Ibid., p.177).
As a major accomplishment of Morrisons shadowless par-
ticipation in the process to expose and challenge discredited history,
rememory is, first of all, a means to remember a dismembered per-
sonal past. A telling example is Sethes life before and after the
infanticide. The re-emergence of Beloved into the household at 124
Bluestone Road shows that rememory can serve as a present absence
of a dismembered family. Moreover, rememory is an access to a
dismembered community as illustrated by the collective action in
exorcizing Beloved and in embracing Sethe to the neighborhood.
Accordingly, Beloved, who signifies the history of slavery especially
that of the Middle Passage, is a haunting incubus of ones past
experience, an irksome reminder to black mothers of their lost
children, and an uncanny accuser against the community of their guilt
for not informing Sethe when the slave-captors came for her and her
children.
As a remembered absence, rememory is conveyed through the
interior voices from Sections Two to Five in Part Two of the novel.

63
Section Two, which opens with Beloved, she my daughter is clearly
Sethes monologue (Ibid., p.200). In this section, the boundaries
between life and death, mother and daughter break down. Denver is
the narrator of Section Three as she cries out: Beloved is my sister
(Ibid., p.205). The divide between absence and presence is blurred as
Denver identifies with Beloved, who represents all the losses she has
experienced the father she never saw, brothers who left her, and
grandmother who died. Beloved, the reincarnated ghost, tells her side
of the story in Section Four, which begins with I am Beloved (Ibid.,
p.210). Her monologue is the most difficult and intriguing one
because it has no punctuation but space between clusters of words,
signifying her timeless presence and fragmented inner life, as well as
her inability to put the transatlantic voyage in unproblematic and
standard expressions. Even so, Beloved has made clear her personal
desire to join mother Sethe and has given voice to millions of slaves
who died in the Middle Passage. These interior monologues merge
into a conversation among these three major characters in Section Five,
in which the voices of Sethe, Denver and Beloved blend into the
thrice-refrained [y]ou are mine, suggesting not only it is always
now (Ibid.), but also that the past, present and future are all one and
the same (Mobley, p.363). Besides, rememory is Morrisons forceful
and effective way of knowing the things behind things (Beloved,
p.37). One instance of knowing is that the past [was] something to
leave behind. And if it didnt stay behind, [] you might have to
stomp it out (Ibid., p.256). Only by stomping it out can Sethe learn to
free herself from the burden of her past and to make her story bearable.
Rememory bridges the gap between past and present not only through
the power of past thought to revive itself in the present, but also
through the power of present thought to rethink the past.
Above all, Morrison seeks to revive and rethink the past, trying
to strike a balance between remembering and forgetting the historical
past. On the one hand, Morrison thinks that Beloved is the least
popular of all her books because it is about something that the
characters dont want to remember (Angelo, p.257). On the other
hand, she expresses her wish to provide a proper and artistic burial to

64
her ancestors. Beloved is dedicated to Sixty Million and more,3 the
smallest number [she] got from [historians] of anonymous slaves
who died as a result of the Middle Passage (Ibid.). These
unceremoniously buried people could never rest in peace unless they
are acknowledged and respected, because people who die bad dont
stay in the ground (Beloved, p.188). In light of [t]he past is never
dead. Its not even past, Morrisons novel can be read as a Requiem
for a Beloved who is at once Beloved and more (Faulkner, p.229).
This understanding is especially heightened by the epigraph from
Romans 9:25: I will call them my people, which were not my people;
and her beloved, which was not beloved. 4 This quotation from St.
Paul is actually a rewriting of an original passage from the Old
Testament Book of Hosea, which illustrates the importance of calling
in the unsaved to be saved. In Beloved, Morrison not only problem-
atizes the nature of the relationship between the past and the present,
but also demonstrates her purpose to rewrite the canonical history and
reclaim the lost and the unsaved (Henderson, p.64). Therefore, by
citing St. Paul rather than the Book of Hosea directly, Morrison
follows St. Pauls example to reinterpret and rewrite the authorized
text. At the same time, Morrison challenges St. Pauls exclusive
access to the masters language and claims her right to tell and write a
different history of and for African-American people and community.

3 In fact, this is only one way of interpreting Sixty Million and more. Morrison
does not use to or for, therefore, the epigraph could be understood as
Morrisons dedication of the book to the number of Africans who died as a
result of the Middle Passage and the slave trade. It could also be understood
that this book is a ghost story from the Sixty Million and more to
contemporary readers in order to remind them of an unacknowledged history.
4 The following citation from Hosea offers a good analogy to African-American
experience: And the number of the sons of Israel will be like the sand on the
seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where they were
told, You are no people of mine, they will be called, The sons of the living
God. The sons of Judah and Israel will be one again and choose themselves
one single leader, and they will spread far beyond their country. [] To your
brother say, People-of-Mine, to your sister, Beloved (Hosea 3:13).

65
History goes on: repatterned and re-enacted

To Morrison, the Middle Passage is a discredited period in history for

Africans and African-Americans. In the novel, Morrison has imagined
and repatterned this transatlantic experience through Beloveds frag-
mented, traumatized interior monologue. In an interview, Morrison
had this much to say about the mass absence or the mass death of
imported Africans on the slave ships during the Middle Passage:

All those people who threw themselves into the sea had been violently ignored;
no one praised them, nobody knows their names, nobody can remember them,
neither in the United States nor in Africa. Millions of people disappeared
without a trace, and there is not one monument anywhere to pay homage to
them, because they never arrived safely on shore. So its like a whole nation
that is under the sea. A nameless, violent extermination (Carabi, p.38).

Knowing that the typical format of slave autobiographical narratives is

to record an individuals life in slavery and his journey to freedom,
Morrison turns to fiction for presenting and paying tribute to the
traceless and nameless people thrown into the sea. For those who
could not make it through the Middle Passage, their voices and stories
were generally missing in slave narratives, whose main subject is the
celebration of an ex-slaves successful escape from slavery. Referring
to Ricoeurs perception of the Analogue, which unites re-enacting and
distancing, the following discussion illustrates that a shadowless
participation of literary blackness in dominant discourse is an on-
going pursuit as discredited Black history takes on endless rectifi-
cations and reconfigurations.
As a trace left from the Middle Passage, Beloved plays the role
of turning into flesh unspeakable experiences and unwritten stories.
Since the past survive[s] by leaving a trace, Sethe must learn how to
pattern these traces in the reconfiguration of personalized and collec-
tive histories (Ricoeur, Reality, p.11). Moreover, Ricoeurs threefold
mimesis explicates Sethes scheme as well as Morrisons strategy of
repatterning and re-enacting individual and cultural memories. The
threefold mimesis includes prefiguration, which is considered as the
pre-condition for textuality, configuration, which corresponds to the

66
formal and historical dimensions of the text, and refiguration, which is
the area of actualization of the text by the critical reader (Valds, p.28).
In this sense, the tree of scars on Sethes back can be understood as
the intermediary configuration reaching back to the prefigurative mark
in her mothers flesh and forward to the refigurative mark Sethe
inscribes on the body of her daughter, weaving together a collection of
stories about female suffering and subjugation. Sethe does to Beloved
what her mother did not do to her; she gouges with a handsaw a
jagged line across her daughters throat. Yet, Sethes motive to kill her
children comes from a determination to protect them from being
evaluated by Schoolteachers notebook and measuring string
(Beloved, p.198). She puts them where she thought they would be safe,
whether it is at 124 Bluestone Road or in death where [n]o one,
nobody on this earth, would list her daughters characteristics on the
animal side of the paper (Ibid., p.251).
However, before getting to know Sethes simple reason for her
infanticide, the reader encounters diverse interpretations of her action
from the male and the masters perspectives. Placed on the lowest
rung of the slave system, female slaves are treated as dumb beasts of
burden and breeders of human capital. Their stories, spoken and
written (if any), are systematically ignored and superseded by master
historians. By inventing Sethes side of the story, Morrison has
exposed the incompleteness of recorded information and examined the
discredited history gathered from master narratives. Furthermore,
through Sethes reliving and re-enacting of her personalized past,
Morrison fulfills a shadowless participation by repatterning and
rewriting the history of slavery from the known and unknown
knowledge.
Morrisons strategy to reinterpret slavery builds up her effort to
combine the historical and the imaginative in rendering an obscure
aspect of history. The history of slavery has become a distant past and
a fading memory in the lives of contemporary African-Americans.
Through the writing of Beloved, however, Morrison not only re-
members but also rethinks and relives her ancestral past. In this
respect, she agrees with what Collingwood writes in History as a Re-
enactment of Past Experience (pp.282302):

67
 In thus re-thinking my past thought I am not merely remembering it. I am
constructing the history of a certain phase of my life: and the difference
between memory and history is that whereas in memory the past is a mere
spectacle, in history it is re-enacted in present thought. So far as this thought is
mere thought, the past is merely re-enacted; so far as it is thought about thought,
the past is thought of as being re-enacted, and my knowledge of myself is
historical knowledge (Collingwood, p.293).

In The Reality of the Historical Past, Ricoeur contends that Col-

lingwoods history as a re-enactment of past experience is the result
of the documentary character of historical thought and the work of
the imagination in the interpretation of documentary data (p.6). In
other words, the re-enactment of the past is only possible through the
joint effort of documentary evidence and constructive imagination.
As a result, the reader obtains a historical knowledge about
Sethes infanticide from different streams of historical thought. The
documentary aspect comes from the definers, the so-called legiti-
mate heirs to the masters language. The following is what School-
teacher and his two nephews see:

Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman
holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the
heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward
the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time (Beloved, p.149).

On the scene of the murder, Schoolteacher counts his trouble and loss
as a plantation owner and sees what happened when you overbeat
creatures God had given you the responsibility of (Ibid., p.150). In
the eyes of the sheriff, Sethes deed is a cautionary note to the results
of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care
and guidance in the world to keep them from cannibal life they
preferred (Ibid., p.151). Given a news clipping of Sethes infanticide,
Paul D can not read but imagine whatever was possible because
Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew, snatching up her children
like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked
like claws, how she collected them every which way [] into the
woodshed (Ibid., p.157).

68
 It does not really matter to Sethe whether Paul D can imagine the
picture of her running fast into the woodshed to kill her children. She
simply wants to stop Schoolteacher:

Because the truth was simple []: she was squatting in the garden and when
she saw them coming and recognized schoolteachers hat, she heard wings.
Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into
her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono.
Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the
parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed,
dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt
them (Ibid., p.163).

The coexistence of diverse interpretations illustrates what Bakhtin

proposes in The Dialogic Imagination (1981): every language in the
novel is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real
social groups and their embodied system (p.411). Furthermore, by
providing these different points of view derived from varied socio-
economic and ideological stands, Morrison refrains from making one
interpretation the standard, and distances herself from any moral
judgement. She wants her readers to confront every aspect of the story
and all sides of the truth.5
Likewise, by telling her side of the story, Sethe has meaningfully
challenged the official and monolithic history. Even though Beloved
refuses to be persuaded by Sethes reasoning she is eventually
exorcized during the course of Sethes re-enactment of the past with
communal support. Whatever Sethe had done, the idea of past errors
taking possession of the present is unacceptable to Ella, who or-
ganizes thirty neighbourhood women outside 124 Bluestone Road
(Beloved, p.256). It is through this collective effort that Beloved

5 Another notable example is what Morrison writes in Paradise (New York:

Vintage, 1999) on the missing part of the motto on the hood of the town Oven.
[] the Furrow of His Brow (p.86) is filled in and read by different socio-
economic groups: Beware the Furrow of His Brow (Ibid.); Be the Furrow of
His Brow (p.87); Be the Furrow (p.143); Be the Furrow of Her Brow
(p.159); We Are the Furrow of His Brow (p.298). In Beloved, Morrison
challenges the one official and monolithic history, and underlines the notion
that history is open to various interpretations, which in turn bring new meanings
and dimensions to history.

69
recedes back into the land of the dead. From her separate vantage
point, Beloved sees Sethes rush away from her as a repetition of the
desertion she experienced before. What Sethe sees, however, is that
Schoolteacher comes back again to take her and her children to
slavery. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best
thing (Ibid., p.262). In this re-enactment of the historical past, Sethe
is able to rethink and revise her previous reaction. When Mr Bodwin
comes to 124 Bluestone Road to pick Denver up for work guiding his
mare with his whip in hand, Sethe mistakes him for Schoolteacher.
Sethe attacks this time directly the source of the threat rather than the
child to be protected. Not only does Sethe re-enact and readjust her
past deed; the community is also given a second chance to right the
wrong because it did not warn Sethe of the slave-captors arrival
eighteen years before. During this climatic scene of collective re-
enactment, the community joins in the attempt to save Sethe who is
devoured by the historical past Beloved embodies.
By re-enacting the past, Sethe demonstrates her possession of the
past; she is hence reborn through her new attitude toward a quasi-
identical event. Whereas Beloveds rebirth is the return of the past to
shadow the present, Sethes rebirth is the will of the present to beckon
the future. It is the continuous reinterpretation and rectification of the
past that enables one to refigure the future. Explaining the connation
of re-enactment, Ricoeur says, re-enacting does not consist in reliving
but in rethinking, and rethinking already contains the critical moment
that forces us to detour by way of the historical imagination (Reality,
p.8). Similarly, Sethe must rethink imaginatively the historical past so
as to transform it into a blueprint for the future. Sethes rememory and
re-enactment of past experience also shows that the present is the
intermediary going backward to the past and forward to the future,
thus making the transition from the past to the future possible. In light
of Ricoeurs threefold mimesis, Sethes infanticide as recorded in
the master narrative is prefiguration, her rememory and storytelling is
configuration, and her re-enactment of the past is refiguration.
Yet after the re-enactment of the Misery, which is Stamp Paids
word for the infanticide, Denver tells Paul D that her mother is not
well at all: I think Ive lost my mother (Beloved, p.266). The journey
for Sethe to achieve redemption through possession [remembering]

70
by the spirit as well as exorcism [forgetting] of the spirit will not end
unless she is totally healed from the aftermath of her infanticide
(Henderson, p.82). The ghost hovering over Sethe now is the recol-
lection of her complicity with the slave-owners as she compliantly
made the ink that permits Schoolteacher to line up her human and
animal characteristics in the notebook (Beloved, p.251). On the one
hand, Morrison acknowledges Sethes growing responsibility to revise
the past; on the other hand, she asserts that it is indeed difficult to
erase the past from ones memories. In so doing, Morrison proposes a
more balanced and dialectical view on coming to terms with ones
limited power toward the past. With Paul Ds help, Sethes healing
process begins as we read the hope of a promising future for both of
them in one of the final scenes when Paul D walks into Sethes house
by the reverse way of his departure. He offers to bathe Sethe the way
Amy and Baby Suggs did during and after her escape, but his is the re-
enactment of the past with a difference. Sharing with Sethe memories
of the Sweet Home plantation, Paul D points out to Sethe that she is as
beloved as her children. Especially, Paul D is the one who holds her
hand and says: me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We
need some kind of tomorrow (Ibid., p.273).
However, the novel does not end on this note of hope for Paul D
and Sethe in the future. It seems that Morrison is not as interested in
Sethes healing and her irresolution as in uncovering the deep
meaning of a historical past that has been repressed and neglected. In
the last section of the book, Morrison returns once again to the
significance of Beloveds disappearance and the historical past she
personifies. Throughout the novel, Morrison tells us that we may
choose to forget Beloved like a bad dream, but the histories she
embodies never leave us. [H]er footprints come and go. [] Should a
child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit (Ibid., p.275). The
dnouement, which is written in such a manner as to imitate a typical
church service, climaxes the reading experience of Beloved as riveting
and challenging. For one thing, the two different kinds of typography
can be easily recognized as two distinct voices. The longer paragraphs
are the calls from the priest, while the one sentence or one word
paragraphs are responses from the congregation.

71
 The chorus-like, thrice-refrained not a story to pass on replays
and reiterates Morrisons conception of envisioning history as well as
story as an open and ongoing process (Ibid., pp.274, 275). The
repetition certainly recapitulates the simultaneity of moving forward
and looking back due to the double entendre of pass on, which
implies sharing the tale with future generations while overlooking and
forgetting the story at the same time. Certainly the story of Beloved
should not be repeated, and should not be allowed to occur again in
the world. Meanwhile, the refrain warns that this is a story that cannot
be effortlessly forgotten, that cannot be simply rejected or bypassed.
Thus, Morrison advocates a journey back to the historical past, as she
realizes that the past must be processed, sifted and sometimes
forgotten in order to anticipate a future.6 It was not a story to pass on
finally becomes This is not a story to pass on (Ibid., p.275). The
sudden shift of tense is not merely a sleight of hand. The first two
refrains are better read as Morrisons tribute and debt to the past,
because she is lost if [she does not] keep in touch with the ancestor
(Rootedness, p.344). The present tense suggests that her literary
responsibility as an African-American storyteller is to transmit and
pass down cultural wisdom and legacy. Moreover, the third person
singular gives an impression that Morrison is rather detached, as if she
is talking about what happened to other groups of people. When she
replaces this for it, she reclaims the authority and retrieves the right
of bearing witness to and telling a truth about her own people and
community.
In addition to the double meaning of pass on and the thought-
provoking change of it to this, the ending of the novel replays the
dilemma of remembering and forgetting with greater complexity and
intensity. Beloved resists a decisive closure; it is open-ended as it has

6 This idea is further developed in Morrisons Paradise (New York: Vintage,

1999). Patricia Best, who has been engaging herself in recording the history of
the town, finally burns all her ledgers. The all-black town called Ruby is
deafened by the roar of its own history (p.306), and Patricias act offers a
hope for breaking away from the frozen, restrictive history and re-entering and
re-opening to the outside, present-day world. In Beloved, Morrisons attitude
toward history seems a little more ambivalent and less definite than what she
puts forward in Paradise.

72
gaps in the narration that need readers participation through creative
imagination. Morrison considers that the affective and participatory
relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience [] is
of primary importance (Rootedness, p.341). As a matter of fact,
readers had contributed tremendously to the popularity of Beloved by
filling in the spaces that Morrison leaves in the text. Indeed the novel
is born out of this collective collaboration and commitment between
the author and the reader to render and reinterpret a particular phase of
history. Referring once again to Ricoeurs threefold mimesis, the
documentary data about Margaret Garner provides Morrison with the
prefigurative mimesis. Morrisons creative imagination and inter-
pretation form the configurative mimesis, and the message the reader
obtains from the book constitutes the refigurative mimesis. Beloved,
both as a book and the title character, is an unwritten past returning to
haunt. Therefore, in the collective endeavour lies the possibility to set
one free from a ghostly past. Morrison always appreciates the
loveliness of this thing we have done together (Nobel Lecture,
p.53). Together the author and the reader sing Beloved, which is the
closing paragraph and word of the novel, acknowledging and mourn-
ing for whatever she represents: the name of Sethes dead daughter or
the reincarnated young woman, the inscription on the tombstone,
deaths during the Middle Passage, the absence of history, the
forgetfulness of memory, the title of the book and the book itself.
By writing Beloved, Morrison not only probes into the
inexhaustible resource of the historical past, but also frames it in a
way that the past retrieves lost cultural heritage and restores familial
and communal bonds (Ricoeur, Reality, p.2). When Morrison writes:
I cant change the future but I can change the past, she must have
meant that by giving Sethe (perhaps Morrison herself and readers too)
the gift of rememory, together they can remember and reinvent stories
of their personal as well as cultural past (Taylor-Guthrie, p.xiii).
Beloved reveals that rememory can draw attention to the unacknow-
ledged legacy of slavery, and can be a dangerous preoccupation that
arouses inflicting pain and nightmares. As a work of fiction bound up
with history, Beloved aims:

73
 to free, retrospectively, certain possibilities that were not actualized in the
historical past, [] [and] to perform its liberating function. The quasi-past of
fiction in this way becomes the detector of possibilities buried in the actual past
(Ricoeur, Interweaving, pp.1912).

Like a historian, Sethe has to liberate her present from the burden of
past memories, and to remap the terrain of the past in refiguring the
future. By re-imagining and re-enacting a personal and cultural past in
Beloved, Morrison the fiction-writer and storyteller, in turn, rewrites
and retells a disremembered history that has been buried for too long
in the actual past of American history. Marvellously, she renders the
history of slavery in such a manner that its shadow of discredit fades
away.

74
Chapter Three
A little chasm filled: the transformation of history
in V.S. Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival and
A Way in the World

[I]t is only by means of the unending rectification of our configurations that we

form the idea of the past as an inexhaustible resource (Paul Ricoeur, The
Reality of the Historical Past, p.2).

Drawing upon the past as an inexhaustible resource, Toni Morrison

and V.S. Naipaul have established literary enterprises that continually
rectify and re-interpret the past in a different light (Ricoeur, Reality,
p.2). Though their purposes and strategies of tapping into this
inexhaustible resource may be different, Morrison and Naipaul have
cast light on delicate sensibilities and hidden complexities of the hist-
orical past. Looking back once again at Morrisons historical mission
in Beloved, this opening section will also introduce Paul Ricoeurs
The Reality of the Historical Past as the theoretical framework for this
chapter, and forecast the broad scheme of discussing Naipauls
transformation of history in the chosen novels.
Morrisons commitment to construct a literary archaeology
demonstrates, on the one hand, that she has incorporated historical
material into her fictional invention, and on the other hand, that her
engagement with the past proposes to change it. Morrison has ex-
pressed clearly her narrative intentions: I cant change the future but I
can change the past (Taylor-Guthrie, p.xiii). The past, personal and
historical, is a predominant concern in her creative imagination.
Therefore, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that her
eight novels published so far are unremitting manoeuvres to seek new
ways through which African-American and American history can be
rendered. Measured against the classic slave narrative, Beloved fills in
the undocumented part of slavery and probes into the interior life of
generations of African-Americans. Acknowledging the contribution of
African-American aestheticism and Africanist presence in literary
representations, Morrison explores in Beloved the possibility as well
as cultural space of re-creating and reinterpreting a particular phase in
American history. To sum up, her strategy to rewrite the history of
slavery dwells upon, first of all, the rethinking of historical material
and the transformation of the slave-narrative tradition; second, the use
of imaginative rememory to approach and present unrecognized or
misinterpreted African-American experience; and last, the notion of
history being re-enacted with a difference and storytelling as an un-
ending process.
It is worth noticing that Morrisons representation of slavery in
Beloved corresponds to Collingwoods idea of history, especially his
concept of History as Re-enactment of Past Experience (Colling-
wood, pp.282302) following The Historical Imagination (Ibid.,
pp.23149) and Historical Evidence (Ibid., pp.24982). For instance,
a climatic and memorable scene in Beloved is the re-enactment of
Sethes infanticide. During this re-enactment across temporal and
spatial distance, Sethe the slave mother reverses and revises her past
deed, attacking directly the source of the threat rather than the child to
be protected. Moreover, the re-enactment suggests implicitly a second
chance, a rebirth for Sethe to lead a new life. In a broader sense,
Morrisons re-enactment of the history of slavery in fiction provides
an opportunity for people, to whom slavery has become a remote past,
to relive the peculiar experience and to rethink the legacy of slavery in
a contemporary milieu. As Ricoeur explains in The Reality of the
Historical Past, Collingwoods history as re-enactment of past exper-
ience is the result of concerted interaction of documentary evidence
and historical imagination (p.6). In this view, Beloved embodies the
joint effort of discovery and invention in disclosing the reality of the
slave past. Morrisons determination to combat historical incomplete-
ness is therefore reflected in the reinterpretation of known documents
and the reconstruction of a disremembered history, which is a
different construction than the course of events reported (Ricoeur,
Reality, p.26). As discussed in the previous chapter, Morrisons fic-
tional re-enactment of the historical past unveils her defiance of the
discredited knowledge surrounding Africanist experience and her

76
striving for a shadowless participation of African-American litera-
ture and history in dominant discourse (Morrison, Playing, p.10).
Where there are traces of history and sites of memory for Toni
Morrison, there are areas of darkness for V.S. Naipaul (Two
Worlds, p.483). He has remarked that as a young Trinidadian he had
no knowledge of a past (Reading, p.20) and no idea of history
(Enigma, p.156). He has had to illuminate areas of darkness in his
diasporic worlds, and has transformed historical incompleteness
through mixing historicized fiction with fictionalized history. Inspired
by the metaphor a little chasm filled,1 this chapter focuses on Nai-
pauls transformation of individual and cultural histories as exemp-
lified in The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections (1987) and A
Way in the World: A Novel (1994).2 As stated in the previous chapter,
Morrisons agenda in fiction manifested by her historical trilogy
Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise is to re-enact the past in order to
challenge and revise the monolithic, accepted history from an
Africanist perspective. In comparison, Naipauls preoccupation with
historical facts enables him to interweave his personal past with the
socio-cultural and geopolitical histories of his diasporic worlds. From
the outset, Morrisons project appears to be more concerned with
political correctness and radicalism, whereas Naipauls protocol is
more individually engaged and inward going. Naipaul has said that he
always begins with himself and tries to arrive at some degree of self-
knowledge in writing (Introduction, p.7). Despite seeming dif-
ferences, Morrison and Naipaul have achieved an enlargement of the
content and periphery of literature through their respective agendas.
To a certain extent, Morrison has succeeded in changing the ways
American literature and history are usually read and written. Similarly,
Naipauls dedication to write his colonial and postcolonial experience

1 The phrase a little chasm filled comes from I had given myself a past, and a
romance of the past. One of the loose ends in my mind had vanished; a little
chasm filled in The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections (London:
Picardo, 2002) p.179.
2 The title in the British edition is A Way in the World: A Sequence (London:
Heinemann, 1994).

77
into the large backdrop of English literature and history has provided a
new way of looking at the English literary tradition.
This chapter will be divided into three parts attending to specific
implications of a little chasm filled; each part will incorporate
aspects of Ricoeurs perception of studying the reality of the historical
past successively under the signs of the Same, the Other, and the
Analogue. Ricoeur first places the past under the sign of the Same as
re-enacting the past in the present through documentary reinter-
pretations and imaginative reconstructions (Reality, p.514). Thinking
the past under the sign of the Other, Ricoeur addresses the notion of
taking a distance and the factor of otherness or difference in history
(Ibid., pp.1424). Under the sign of the Analogue, Ricoeur empha-
sizes the combined force of re-enacting and distancing in rendering
the past; hence the Analogue unites within itself the dialectic of Same
and Other (Ibid., pp.2436). The following discussion on the
transformation of history in Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival and A
Way in the World shall take Ricoeurs three categories the Same, the
Other, and the Analogue as the guiding principle for each part
correspondingly. Nevertheless, this is not to give an impression of
clear-cut divisions in the chapter except for the sake of clarity and
special focus. Whats more, the selection of sections from the two
novels for close reading does not abide by a strict chronological order.
Highlighting the psychic and emotional need to fill in the chasm
between his writing ambition and the lack of literary tradition from his
Indo-Trinidadian community, the first part concerns Naipauls re-
enactment of unwritten histories through inventive reinterpretations
and repatternings of documentary evidence. Identifying the chasm
Naipaul feels between himself as man and himself as writer, the
second part talks about Naipauls taking a distance to reflect on
himself and his environment which leads to rediscover and re-create
individual and cultural histories from the vantage point of a writer-
traveller. Considering his life-long pursuit to illuminate areas of
darkness in the hybrid world within and without, the final part of this
chapter looks at the transformation of history from Naipauls
persistent refigurations and rectifications of historical or autobio-
graphical material in his literary creation. However, each refiguration
or rectification derived from re-enacting and distancing is an irre-

78
placeable signpost in the ongoing process to seek continuity and
constancy amidst historical changes.

Re-enacting unwritten histories

V.S. Naipaul is certainly more than a creative writer whose devotion

and services to literature earned for him a knighthood in 1990 and a
Nobel Prize in 2001. He is also a peripatetic traveller, an imaginative
documentarist, a perceptive historian, a level-headed social com-
mentator as well as a clear-sighted cultural critic. Attempting to find
a proper form suitable for his every kind of experience, Naipaul
often writes against and beyond generic boundaries because the
literary forms [he] practised flowed together and supported one
another (Reading, pp.24, 20). As a matter of fact, literary genres
usually blur, mix and blend in his fictional and non-fictional texts. For
example, both The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are
densely written and exquisitely layered works of semi-autobiography,
travel writing, documentary, character analysis and fiction. The
literary models Naipaul learned through his colonial education do not
work for him because they dealt with entirely different societies
(Two Worlds, p.484), in which there is the availability of a wider
learning, an idea of history, a concern with self-knowledge (Read-
ing, p.25). Also due to his wanderings in many different worlds,
Naipaul doubted whether the borrowed form of the novel could offer
more than the externals of things (Ibid.). In order to translate the
essence of his Indo-Trinidadian-English experience, Naipaul has to
find his own way in the world of literature.
As a result, Naipaul has created a new world in which he fights
against historical absence and incompleteness by way of re-enacting
the historical past in the present. Labelled deliberately as novels, The
Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are Naipauls sectionalized
meditation on the effects of colonial heritage and a deracinated West
Indians tortuous progress as a writer. For example, Naipaul revisits

79
imaginatively, one section after another, his native land by retracing
his personal past and excavating unwritten histories of Trinidad in A
Way in the World. Alluding to an unnamed South American country
which resembles Guyana, the third chapter New Clothes: An Un-
written Story reveals the restriction and complexity of story writing.
Entitled A Parcel of Papers, a Roll of Tobacco, a Tortoise: An
Unwritten Story, chapter six of the book focuses on Sir Walter
Raleighs last expedition to Trinidad in 1618 to find the gold mines of
El Dorado. The eighth chapter, In the Gulf of Desolation: An
Unwritten Story, concerns Francisco Miranda, a revolutionary who
came to Trinidad in 1806 and his relation to the slave society at that
time. In short, by individualizing and concretizing colonial and
postcolonial experience, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the
World display Naipauls masterly command of documentary evidence
and creative imagination in re-enacting and eventually transforming
history.
Grounded in Ricoeurs proposal to think about the reality of the
historical past first under the sign of the Same, the following
discussion concentrates on The Journey, the second section in The
Enigma of Arrival, as well as the aforesaid three unwritten stories
from A Way in the World. These sections are closely studied because
they explicate, on the one hand, the mystery of the writing, that is,
the interpenetration of truth, reality, history and fiction (Two Worlds,
p.479), and on the other hand, the definition of history as an
imaginary picture of the past (Collingwood, p.248). Unwritten in one
way or another, these stories, either based on verifiable materials or
about historical figures, are intended to be true yet lost histories. Peter
Hughes has pointed out that Naipaul makes good through style what
has been lost through history (Hughes, p.19). It is widely known that
the narrative strategy Naipaul practices is a unique literary form, a
prose in the style of Naipaul which merges fictional narrative,
autobiography, feature story and historical documentary (Engdahl).
Naipauls keenness in narrative sensitivity and his innovation in
representative modes reflect his resolve to fill in the chasm between
his childhood world picture and his ambition as a young writer who
find[s] in no book anything that came near [his] background (Two
Worlds, p.484).

80
 In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul sheds light on a particular area
of his background, the England in which he has lived for so long but
about which he has written so little. With the idea of Heraclitean flux
in all things, the narrator has gained an incisive perception of Jack the
gardeners life and death, which helps him to re-envision Jacks
personal past and the pastoral history of England. Feeling a cycle has
been completed, the narrator is ready to leave the rented cottage at
the end of Jacks Garden, the first section of the novel (Enigma,
p.98). Often read as Naipauls autobiography in thin disguise, The
Journey describes another kind of cycle, a structural representation
of the incorporation of the pre-Wiltshire existence into the rebirth at
Wiltshire (Levy, p.103). Echoing the journey Naipaul took at the age
of eighteen from Trinidad to Oxford, the titular journey that had
seeded all the others would pave the way for the narrators second
childhood of seeing and learning at the Waldenshaw cottage in an
English countryside (Enigma, p.113, 93). For example, a reproduction
of a surrealist painting by Giorgio de Chirico entitled The Enigma of
Arrival catalyzes the narrators reflections upon his personal ex-
perience as a traveller moving in different continents. Chiricos The
Enigma of Arrival depicts the end of a voyage, the top of the mast of
an antique vessel anchored in a wharf, and two muffled figures in a
deserted street of an ancient Mediterranean city (Enigma, p.106).
Only in hindsight does the narrator realize that the idea he got from
the Chirico painting had made its way into the book on Africa he was
writing at that time.
The narrators continuous rediscovery and reinterpretation of the
story embedded in the painting illustrate Ricoeurs idea of the Same,
namely, the re-enactment of the historical past in the present. Inspired
by the painting, the narrator conceives his story of The Enigma of
Arrival which is to be set in the Mediterranean in classical times, and
his voyager-protagonist would walk past the two muffled figures on
the quayside. At this stage, his version approximates the original
story possible in the painting. Yet the narrator does not linger on the
documentary character of historical thought for long, he turns to the
work of imagination in the interpretation of documentary data to re-
enact the story visualized on the canvas and to re-create his own
version (Ricoeur, Reality, p.6). The narrator imagines his protagonist

81
entering into a crowded city [] like an Indian bazaar scene and
imagines some religious ritual in which his protagonist would find
himself the intended victim (Enigma, pp.106, 107).
Apparently, identifying aspects of his experience with the story
in the painting, the narrator (and Naipaul) has woven many layers of
rewriting into the enigma of arrival. Later, it dawns upon the narrator
that the Mediterranean story is no more than a version of the African
story he has already written in the book on Africa. Besides, it is clear
that Naipauls replay of the journey motif corresponds to the ceaseless
resurgence of his past experience. By and large, The Journey records
Naipauls celebratory arrival from two senses of exile: a geographical
exile of his early displacement from Trinidad to England in 1950 as a
scholarship student, and an intellectual exile during his trying years as
an aspiring writer. Most significantly, The Journey presents Naipaul
as a beneficiary of and an heir to ancient or modern literary traditions.
Conceiving his own version of The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator
asserts:

There was to be no research. I would take pointers from Virgil perhaps for the
sea and travel and the seasons, from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles
for the feel of the municipal or provincial organization of the Roman Empire; I
would get moods and the idea of ancient religion from Apuleius; Horace and
Martial and Petronius would give me hints for social settings (Ibid., p.107).

The narrator also states that he does not think of his version as an
historical story, but more as a free ride of imagination (Ibid.). His
imagination is indeed what Collingwood terms as historical im-
agination, which mediates between historical evidence and history
as re-enactment of past experience (Collingwood, p.231). Therefore,
the narrators re-enactment of the past is a result aimed at by
documentary interpretation and by the constructions of the imagin-
ation (Ricoeur, Reality, p.6).
Another notable re-enactment of past experience in The
Journey is the narrators first trip back to Trinidad after six frustrating
years as an unpublished writer in England. More than coincidentally,
A Way in the World also begins with a description of the narrators
first return to Trinidad in 1956. Despite the temporal distance, Nai-

82
pauls first homecoming voyage has been re-enacted and repatterned
in these two texts. In The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator recounts:

[A]t that first return, I had moved from place to place, to see it shrink from the
place I had known in my childhood, and adolescence []. Far away in England,
I had re-created this landscape in my books. The landscape of the books was
not as accurate or full as I had pretended it was; but now I cherished the original,
because of that act of creation (Enigma, p.166).

The passage reveals, first of all, the documentary side of the narrators
historical thinking; second, his imaginative interpretations and con-
structions of historical evidence; and third, the re-enactment and hence
transformation of past experience through his literary creation. This is
really an epiphanic moment for the narrator and perhaps for Naipaul
himself, who has once thought that the geographical and intellectual
smallness of his home country not only confines but also threatens his
ambition to become a writer.
At the end of Prelude: An Inheritance, the first chapter of A
Way in the World, the narrator says that the recorded history of his
native island is short: three centuries of depopulation followed by two
centuries of resettlement (Way, p.10). Though national histories may
be rediscovered with the help of fish-glue bound records, the narrator
suggests by citing Leonard Side as an example that documentary
evidence cannot explain all the traits of his inheritance. The narrator
of A Way in the World has never lost the sensitivity to look through
documents to dig out personalized histories of his homeland. In a
similar gesture, the narrator of The Enigma of Arrival distinguishes
himself from the historian. The historian seeks to abstract principles
from human events. My approach was the other; for the two years that
I lived among the documents I sought to reconstruct the human story
(Enigma, p.109). Obviously, the narrator in both novels recognizes
that the reconstruction of the human story is a different construction
than the course of events reported due to creative imagination and
reinterpretation of historical documents (Ricoeur, Reality, p.26). With
this recognition, the narrator of A Way in the World has discovered in
the three unwritten stories new ways of re-enacting and transforming
history by interweaving personalized past with the cultural and
historical past of Trinidad.

83
 Chapter Three New Clothes: An Unwritten Story is the first of
these three unwritten stories. Prefiguring the other two historical
stories about Raleigh or Miranda, New Clothes concerns an authors
process of inventing the most suitable narrator for a writing idea that
had come to him more than thirty years ago on his first trip to South
America. Structurally a story-within-a-story, Chapter Three shows
how a real story can be written by asking the question Who is this
narrator? What can he be made to be? (Way, p.47). If the narrator
were made a writer or a traveller, the story would have been identified
as true to the authors experience. Travelling to an Amerindian land in
1961, the author had been stirred by the mystery of Amerindians
holding themselves with an extraordinary stillness on their tree-
shaded bank, and looking down without expression at the boat, but
the invention of a story seemed to falsify what [he] felt as a traveller
(Ibid., p.46). Finally the author decides to create his narrator as a
carrier of mischief and revolutionary of the 1970s, who seeks the
help of Amerindians to overthrow the African government on the
coast (Ibid., p.48). With an uncertainty of confronting cultural com-
plexities, the narrator finds it increasingly difficult to control his own
narrative.
The narrator is, after all, the authors creation. The narrator of
New Clothes is also the authors protagonist of failed attempts to
understand people of an entirely different background in a changing
situation. While the story remains unfinished and unwritten, the author,
fortunately, could move into and out of the narrators consciousness
at will and narrate through him, withholding the illusion of control
over his own story that comes with first-person narration (Barnouw,
p.136). In so doing, the author allows his readers to observe his
process of shaping and depicting this English narrator, who is at the
same time the protagonist of his own story trying to transcend
narrative limitations. Ricoeurs perception of re-enactment, which is
the result of the united power of documentary interpretation and
imaginative construction, reveals that the re-enacted history is and is
not what can be assumed to be a real past. As shown in this unwritten
story, Naipauls experiment with narrative strategy manifests his
acknowledgement of discovery and invention as indispensable in

84
representing a recent or a remote past, no matter whether it is fully
charted or largely unrecorded.
Apart from New Clothes, which is a literally unwritten and
fictional story, the two unwritten stories about Raleigh and Miranda
also challenge the veracity of historical documents by drawing at-
tention to creative reconstructions. In the concluding paragraph of
New Clothes the Amerindian boy unwraps the bundle his grand-
father has brought back from England: fawn-coloured, perished, but
recognizably a doublet of Tudor times, new clothes of three hundred
and fifty years before, relic of an old betrayal (Way, p.69). The
grandfather of the Amerindian boy in Chapter Three is likely the same
Amerindian who went with Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618 on his return to
England in Chapter Six, A Parcel of Papers, a Roll of Tobacco, a
Tortoise: An Unwritten Story. The chapter opens with the narrators
wish to write a play or a screen play, or a mixture of both about
Raleighs second (and last) expedition to find the gold mines of El
Dorado (Ibid., p.163). Old and ill, Raleigh waited passively on the
Orinoco River for the news from Keymis, the captain of this doomed
adventure. The expedition force attacked the Spanish settlement of
San Tom, and Raleighs son was killed in the fighting. Keymis failed
to find any gold mine in that area, except the meagre plunder that the
title of the chapter foretells: a parcel of papers, a roll of tobacco, and a
tortoise. Even if the screenplay remains unwritten, Naipauls
reinterpretations of Raleighs mission to find El Dorado filter through
the ship surgeon who doggedly questions Raleigh on the truthfulness
of his book The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of
Guiana (1595). The surgeon reminds Raleigh that when he writes
about the Trinidad side of the Gulf, everything is correctly and clearly
recorded, [r]eal knowledge, real enquiry, but on the Orinoco side,
where the gold mines are supposed to be, he depicts a strange land of
diamond mountains and meadows and deer and birds as if written by
someone else (Ibid., p.175). In contrast, the surgeon points out that the
Spaniard records everything, getting it attested and shipping it back to
Spain in duplicates and triplicates. Very little gets lost in this way, as
the surgeon says matter-of-factly, We [the English] often have the
two sides of a story (Ibid., p.178).

85
 Having a great deal of historical information and underscoring
the inconsistencies in Raleighs account, the ship surgeon regards
Raleighs version of his explorations in the Gulf as a deliberate
mixture of old-fashioned fantasy and modern truth (Ibid., p.175).
Perhaps right in his judgement, the surgeon may never fully under-
stand Raleighs actions, his motivations and fears, and his sense of the
world shaped by personal experience. Raleigh tries to defend himself
by telling stories from his memory of Spanish cruelty, but it is
impossible to know whether the surgeon and Raleigh have reached an
understanding of each other in the end, besides the smile upon their
parting. Raleigh would soon die, and his story would be incomplete
and forgotten. Will the surgeon, rational and judgmental, be a suitable
narrator to tell and pass down Raleighs story even though it is
unwritten? Undoubtedly, the surgeon and Raleigh personify dissimilar
attitudes toward the historical past. Whereas history is documentary
evidence to the surgeon, it is a repository of personal stories to
Raleigh. Naipaul seems to be more interested in exposing the com-
plication of multiple perspectives on the past than in providing an
ultimate solution to how history might be written.
In Chapter Eight, Naipaul portrays a disillusioned Francisco
Miranda at the end of his life comparing him to Raleigh. This chapter
begins with the narrators idea of doing a play or a film about the
history of the Gulf of Desolation seen as a three-part work: Colum-
bus in 1498, Raleigh in 1618, and Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan
revolutionary, in 1806 (Ibid., p.245). Fully aware of Mirandas
charismatic and legendary past, Naipaul perceives and renders, instead,
the apprehension, estrangement and disillusionment of a revolutionary,
as well as his inability to find a way in the world. Respected as the
precursor of Bolvar by Venezuelans, Miranda is seen as a precursor
of a different kind in the eyes of the narrator. I saw him as a very
early colonial, someone with a feeling of incompleteness, with very
little at home to fall back on, with an idea of a great world out there,
someone who, when he was out in this world, had to reinvent himself.
I saw in him some of my own early promptings (and the promptings
of other people I knew) (Ibid., p.252). As thus stated the first few
pages of the chapter talk about Mirandas psychic need to reinvent
himself and his transnational fame.

86
 On the part of the narrator, there is also a necessity to reinvent, or
rather, re-create the unwritten story of Mirandas withdrawal to
Trinidad in 1806. The narrator thinks that the crucial reason Miranda
is not well known and his story is unwritten is because on the day he
was betrayed he was separated from his papers (Ibid., p.251).
Therefore, where Miranda should have been in historical accounts
there was a void, says the narrator, who tries to fill in the void by
inventively rediscovering Mirandas lost papers (Ibid., p.350). As a
result, Mirandas anxieties and fears become known through the
letters exchanged between him and his wife (back in London). The re-
created epistolary discourse shows the seamless integration of fic-
tional and factual elements. Dagmar Barnouw interprets A Way in the
World as a book about the difficulties of writing history, with the
issue of incomplete historical knowledge resulting from the fluidity
of historical time and memory (Barnouw, p.140). With an inclination
for anchorage in historical flux and with a self-recognition of a float-
ing colonial, Naipaul feels the urgency and necessity to discover,
imagine and write these unwritten stories in order to fill in a blank.
For example, Naipaul has rendered Raleighs and Mirandas historical
adventures in his major work on the history of the New World,
namely, The Loss of El Dorado: A History (1969). 3 Nonetheless,
taking a different angle a quarter of a century later in A Way in the
World: A Novel (1994), Naipaul repatterns the documentary material
and rewrites a historical fiction about Raleigh and Miranda. Adopting
and emplotting the same historical facts differently in one book
subtitled as history and the other subtitled as novel, Naipaul questions
the generic boundaries between history and fiction, underscoring the
act of rewriting and repatterning in his books. There is even an
element of revision within the same text. For example, Naipauls
reinterpretation of the history of Trinidad in A Way in the World from
inside rather than from outside revises an earlier statement in the
novel. From the view point of a visitor, Trinidadians are seen as
floating people in need of foreign presences because the heat and

3 For a more detailed analysis on the book, please refer to Timothy Weisss
Metahistory and Marginality in On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S.
Naipaul (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) pp.6486.

87
light had burnt away the history of the place (Way, p.74). However,
this vision of historical blankness is soon revised as the narrator en-
gages himself to discover and render unwritten histories of Trinidad.
Standing on the easternmost point of Trinidad named Galley
Point, the narrator tries to picture what Columbus must have first
seen on his third voyage to the point in the West Indies. The narrator
can reconstruct Columbuss version of the landscape through his
imagination, yet he is fully aware of the insufficiency of historical
evidence and the temporariness of historical imagination in re-
enacting the historical past. It is partly in this sense that these stories
are unwritten and incomplete, thereby never-ending and always in the
making. Through documentary interpretations and imaginative
constructions, the reality of the historical past is re-enacted and
reconstructed with a difference. No matter whether it is a recent past
in The Enigma of Arrival, or a more distant past in A Way in the World,
Naipaul has reinterpreted and transformed history by combining
documentary thinking and creative construction so as to foreground
his personal histories against the history of the place. Reading The
Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World as Naipauls fin de sicle
works, Timothy Weiss points out that the two novels exhibit Naipauls
experiential values:

faithfulness to ones essential self, the use of history and memory to revise
ones perspectives on self and community, and the power of self-creativity
through writing, reflection, and dialogue with others (Weiss, V.S. Naipauls
Fin de Sicle, p.121).

These familiar Naipaulian values have a special focus and a moral

quality, especially in terms of the authors willingness to encounter
the individual as individual (Weiss, V. S. Naipauls Fin de Sicle,
pp.121, 122). In both texts, Naipaul undertakes a long journey to
understand ones responsibility for a world shared with fellow human
beings from past, present and future, and with individuals of different
cultural and ethnic background, ancient or modern.

88
Recognizing the difference: change and re-creation

On his way to discover, appreciate and render personalized histories,

Naipaul is conscious of cultural plurality and individual difference.
The understanding of others today and the understanding of men of
the past shares the [] dialectic of same and other, Ricoeur has
explained; on the one hand, we know basically what resembles us; on
the other hand, the understanding of another person requires that we
perform the epoch [suspension of judgement] of our own preferences
in order to understand the other as other (Ricoeur, Reality, p.44).
Therefore, the understanding Naipaul has achieved in The Enigma of
Arrival and A Way in the World is attributed to the joint effort of the
Same and the Other. In other words, it is historical knowledge based
on self-knowledge and knowledge of others, which involves the
process of identifying similarities and recognizing differences. Obser-
ving the reality of the historical past from the Same as a re-enactment
of past experiences in the present, the previous section treated the
interaction of historical documents (the Same) and imaginative
constructions (the Other) in re-enacting the past, which can be
understood as the Analogue of Same and Other on a smaller scale. In
this view, Ricoeurs three categories can be applied in both narrow
and broad senses. Relying on Ricoeurs study of the historical past
under the Other, this section looks at the transformation of history
from the position of identifying the sameness and acknowledging the
strangeness in self and in the historical past. Therefore, recognizing
used in the title for this section attempts to maintain the spirit of
seeing and understanding, which pervades the two novels. Moreover,
change and re-creation is used to highlight the strength of a writer-
traveller, stressing both the travellers growing knowledge and the
writers capacity to re-create. Significantly, change and re-creation,
which involves identifying the similar and the different, is itself a
major theme in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World.
There is a temptation, albeit problematic and disturbing some-
times, on the part of the reader to take the narrator as the author in
Naipauls fiction not only because Naipaul often invents a character

89
who roughly has [his] background (Art, p.43), but also because he
makes it clear that he is the sum of [his] books (Two Worlds,
p.480). When characters assume figurative statures and fictional
dimensions, they are rather imaginative creatures and often larger than
life. Meanwhile, the aesthetic distance between narrator and author
gives the latter a space for self-reflection as an individual, and an
opportunity to know more about himself in relation to others, as well
as a possibility of remaking himself different from the one in daily life.
In The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, Naipaul gives
accounts of his growing knowledge of himself and others, as well as
his effort to discover and re-create individual and cultural histories.
Both novels reiterate that every individual has a unique vision, a
different story to tell, and his or her story is in one way or another
intertwined with the narrators story as well as that of the authors.
Naipaul examines difference in the sense that [t]he historical fact
would [] have to be grasped as a variant generated by the indi-
vidualization of [] invariants (Ricoeur, Reality, p.18). Listening to
these variant and individualized histories, the narrator is endowed with
a deeper understanding of the Heraclitean philosophy of the world in
continual flux and transformation. As Ricoeur explains, historical
conceptualization must itself be conceived of as the search for and the
positing of invariants, understanding by this term a stable correlation
between a small number of variables capable of generating their own
modifications (Ibid.). Modification demands unquestionably a certain
amount of remaking and transformation. Furthermore, historical con-
ceptualization depends on and is enriched by recognizing similarities
and differences. Naipaul considers the remaking of oneself or ones
world as a common wish, but a rare capacity for the writer. In the
voice of the narrator, Naipaul declares at the end of The Enigma of
Arrival that we remade the world for ourselves because as a writer
he had re-created and lived in places of his childhood world
imaginatively over many books (Enigma, p.387). Again speaking
through the narrator in the last chapter of A Way in the World, Naipaul
comments on Blairs inability to remake himself because he was not
a writer (Way, p.373).
To become a writer is of special significance to Naipaul because
writing, which is the inscription of the expression in lasting signs,

90
has the power to span the gap separating the self and its other
(Ricoeur, Reality, p.17). With the gift of writing, Naipaul tries to
bridge the little chasm existing between himself as man and himself as
writer. Noticeably, Naipaul has paralleled much of his individual
experience with his observation on the contemporary world. It is not
an exaggeration to say that his struggle and success as a writer
coincide with worldwide changes after the collapse of imperial or
colonial power and the tide of immigration during the second half of
the twentieth century. Being a product of these social and cultural
changes, Naipaul has played an influential role in redefining the
meaning of Englishness and reforming the landscape of English
literature by re-examining and rewriting the history of British
colonization from the perspective of a Third World individual. Despite
complaints that his writings privilege Europe while tending to be
contemptuous of Europes colonial victims, Naipauls work exposes
an unusual vulnerability and a penetrating understanding of a wand-
ering exile in a post-war, postcolonial Europe (Morris, p.11). As a
blessing in disguise, the shame and solitude of an exile and other in a
European metropolis have provided Naipaul with the momentum for
taking a distance and spiritual decentering (Ricoeur, Reality, pp.15,
16). In a narrow sense, taking a distance means uncovering
strangeness in self, while in a broad sense, it means recognizing an
otherness of the historical past in relation to the present. In parallel,
decentering suggests repudiating an unchanging view on self and
challenging a Eurocentric attitude toward history.
Through the narrator in The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul ex-
presses his ability to rewrite histories for himself and others. I was a
writer and [a] sensitive [human being], he says, I had discovered in
myself always a stranger, a foreigner, a man who had left his island
and community before maturity, before adult social experience a
deep interest in others, a wish to visualize the details and routine of
their lives, to see the world through their eyes (Enigma, p.266). This
remark perhaps recalls Kristevas proposition to discover the stranger
within us although she takes a psychological, Freudian perspective
rather than a literary one (Kristeva, p.191). This idea can be in-
terpreted on two levels. In light of taking a distance and decentering,
the stranger within us considers the self as a changing and growing

91
entity in that there are always new or unnoticed aspects. In terms of
the Same-Other or identity-difference binary, the stranger within us
highlights the self as a relational and social being who shares
similarities with the other; there are other people in ourselves and
ourselves in other people. Hence, in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way
in the World, Naipaul reflects on self through interactions with others.
To mention but a few interactions in the former novel, the narrator-
writer identifies aspects of himself in Jack the gardener, Alan the
literary man, and the landlord of the manor. In A Way in the World,
the narrator-writer finds himself in the characters of Blair (a former
co-clerk in the Trinidad government but later a foreign consultant to
sub-Sahara African countries), Foster Morris and Lebrun (both model-
led on writers turned political activists).
Jacks Garden, the first section of The Enigma of Arrival, and
the first two chapters Prelude: An Inheritance and History: A Smell
of Fish Glue in A Way in the World are chosen to further the
discussion on the dialectic of the Other. To a certain degree, these
opening chapters are separate, complete stories in their own right, yet
they are also essential parts of the whole. In particular, they function
as primary metaphors encapsulating possible themes in the text. The
Enigma of Arrival begins with the narrators meticulous description of
his latest move to a rented cottage on a rainy day in Waldenshaw
where he would live for the next ten years. From the start, we are
aware that the narrator, like Naipaul the author, comes originally from
Trinidad and has lived in different places for many years without
feeling at home in any place. Gradually orienting himself to the
surroundings during his daily walks in the village, the narrator feels
the nervousness in a new place, and [his] strangeness despite more
than twenty years living in England (Enigma, p.6). Though the
narrator later recognizes traces of familiarity that soothe his strangers
rawness, the sense of being a stranger in the other mans country
stays with him (Ibid.). Perhaps more than a mere coincidence, Naipaul
opens A Way in the World with an oscillation between strangeness and
familiarity. I left home more than forty years ago. I was eighteen, he
writes, [w]hen I went back, after six years [] everything was
strange and not strange (Way, p.3). However, he concludes the first
chapter with a powerful and philosophical note: [s]ometimes we can

92
be strangers to ourselves (Ibid., p.11). Apart from periodic references
to strangeness, both novels in the outset bespeak arrivals at a
temporary destination, may it be an English countryside or ones
homeland. Whats more, recapitulated in the title are Naipauls pre-
occupation with the journey motif and his preference for depicting the
narrator, who shares his background and experience, as a writer-
traveller. While the traveller has the changing incompleteness of
knowledge, the writer obtains a boundless imaginative space to fill in
or make up for the incompleteness. Written from a first-person point
of view, both The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World follow
Naipauls traveling to become a writer and his taking a distance to
observe the self and the world (Enigma, p.115).
Naipaul has found a certain pattern in writing to reassemble and
harmonize his multi-ethnic identities. This pattern is a lens through
which he looks at his younger self and his colonial as well as
postcolonial experiences. Being a stranger in England, a colonial
[w]ith a knowledge of the language and the history of the language
and the writing, the narrator of The Enigma of Arrival has found a
special kind of past in what he saw (Ibid., p.17). In Jacks Garden,
he sees the garden as a diorama of an ancient English peasantry with
Jack the gardener as a remnant of the past, and his father-in-law a
Wordsworthian figure [] as if in an immense Lake District solitude
(Ibid., pp.14, 15). The narrator also discovers the incongruity and
distance between what he read about England as a schoolboy in
Trinidad from the literatures of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Gray or
Hardy, and what he sees during his routine excursions to the village
near Salisbury. A land of decay and junk in the real world replaces the
pastoral English countryside in the literary world. Lamenting on his
arrival at a wrong time in a place with its glory gone, the narrator
looks at the hedge of Jacks garden as a vestige, a memory of another
kind of house and garden and street, a token of something more
complete, more ideal (Ibid., p.16). What causes his disillusionment is
actually a strangers expectation of perfection, of an unchanging
world, an opinion he will soon revise (Ibid., p.32). With the notion of
flux and constancy of change, the narrator learns to overcome the
distress in a death or a departure, and to rethink the idea of ruin and
dereliction, of out-of-placeness (Ibid., p.54).

93
 With the literary eye and the learning of a second language,
the narrator is now able to construct imaginatively Jacks garden
which has taught him the change of seasons and a new way of
knowing things, as he will in the end re-create Jacks story (Ibid.,
pp.17, 30). He recalls things in Jacks garden like the bulbs of spring;
the planting out of annuals like marigolds and petunias; the del-
phiniums and lupins of high summer; and flowers like the gladiolus
which, [] flourished in both the climate of England and the tropical
climate of Trinidad (Ibid., p.30). This sudden remembrance of
Trinidad and detection of familiarity through the petals of gladiolus
will be reinforced by the narrators view on the decadent Edwardian
house he lives in. Even with its lost glory and present dereliction, the
Wiltshire estate seems the apotheosis of the colonial plantations or
estates in Trinidad where his poor indentured Indian ancestors had
worked (Ibid., p.55). The identification of similarity amid differences
only explains in part the enigma of temporary distance (Ricoeur,
Reality, p.19). There is another aspect of its enigma, namely, [t]he
distance that separates is substituted for the difference that joins
together (Ibid., p.20). A telling example of the difference that joins
together falls on the relationship between the narrator and his
landlord. The narrator considers his presence in the village as an
aspect of another kind of change, a historical change which has
brought him to England and trained him as a writer (Enigma, p.32).
Sympathizing with his landlord who retreats into the crumbling house
on account of his acedia, the narrator sees in his landlords malaise
the other side of [his] own (Ibid., p.56). On the surface level, the
narrator himself was by chance inflicted with a respiratory illness at
the moment, which made him confront the gradual diminishing of his
youthfulness and the unexpected coming of his middle age. On a
deeper level, the narrator realizes that he has become a creator of a
potential ruin in renovating his cottages like the landlord who let his
garden and manor go to ruin instead of having the ivy cut (Ibid., p.96).
Nevertheless, the narrator is much more interested in the historical
chain that has brought him and the landlord together, which illus-
trates in some way the difference that joins together (Ibid., p.56).
The historical chain the narrator alludes to is, first, the migration
within the British empire (his ancestors left India for Trinidad, and he

94
left Trinidad for England); second, the colonial education that has
given him the English language and the scholarship to Oxford which
has helped fulfill his writing ambition; and third, the literary
accomplishment which has made him metropolitan.
Understanding his landlords physical disease and his withdrawal
from activity, literal and figurative, the narrator and the landlord are
enveloped in the imperial decline, which is symbolized partly by the
landlords acedia and his deteriorating Edwardian household (Ibid.).
Despite their outward differences, the old man living out his days in
ruins and the young tenant writing in the cottage show a common
interest in Jacks garden, which has turned wild after his death.
Contemplating different conditions of Jacks garden, the narrator
changes from seeing the possibility [] of ruin even at the moment
of creation, to discern the certainty of re-creation even in ruins (Ibid.,
p.55). This attitudinal change is grounded in an ancient Indian
philosophy or mythology in which destruction and re-creation are two
different aspects of the Hindu deity Shiva. Jacks Garden concludes
with the narrators celebration of Jack:

My ideas about Jack were wrong. He was not exactly a remnant; he had created
his own life, his own world, almost his own continent. But the world about him,
which he so enjoyed and used, was too precious not to be used by others. []
not seeing what others saw, he had created a garden on the edge of a swamp
and a ruined farmyard: he had responded to and found glory in the seasons. All
around him was ruin; and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a
reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation. But he had sensed
that life and man were the true mysteries; and he had asserted the primacy of
these with something like religion. The bravest and most religious thing about
his life was his way of dying (Ibid., p.100).

This insight, which anticipates the very words and themes in the last
section The Ceremony of Farewell: life and man as the mystery,
the true religion of men, the grief and the glory, is also the same
vision with which Naipaul ends The Enigma of Arrival (Ibid., p.387).
With an earned perception, the narrator has completed a second
arrival at this new understanding of life and man (Ibid., p.95).
Moreover, he has experienced a rebirth in his rewriting of what he
encountered in the manor cottage: Jack, Jacks garden, death and

95
change, ruin and creation. In Ivy and Rooks, the third and fourth
sections of the novel, the narrator continues the theme of his life as a
writer by re-creating, telling and retelling stories of other people as he
learns more about them. By doing so, the narrator focuses more on the
dynamic and cumulative nature of knowledge in terms of his
observations and communications with people around him. The nar-
rators ubiquitous presence in all these personalized histories indicates
a discovery of the stranger within himself and an ongoing, uncertain,
unpredictable process of understanding what is different (Barnouw,
p.126). In this sense, a central theme in The Enigma of Arrival is the
recognition of individual differences and the understanding of
multiple perspectives.
When the narrator says that everything was strange and not
strange during his first trip back to Trinidad in the beginning of A
Way in the World, he is referring to his experience as a tourist, seeing
the advertising and exciting side of the local scenery (Way, p.3). As a
native, however, he soon notices what a tourist could not possibly be
aware of, that is an aspect of [him]self and a past he thought he had
outlived but in fact he had not, even though he was physically away
from his home country. Looking at the houses and streets in Prelude:
An Inheritance, the narrator could not help having a half-dream of
knowing and not knowing and a shifting sense of reality (Ibid., p.4).
Listening to stories about Leonard Side, the decorator of cakes and
arranger of flowers, from the woman teacher who seemed to know
him quite well but could not explain his idiosyncratic feeling for
beauty makes the narrator wonder whether Side himself had come to
any understanding of himself and his ancestors (Ibid., p.10). Inter-
estingly, the narrator re-creates an ancestry for Side through the
association of his name with Syde, linking him to a Shia Muslim
group in India or the dancing Lucknow, the lewd men who painted
their faces and tried to live like women (Ibid.). In so doing, the
narrator reiterates how little one knows about ones inheritance. This
leitmotif is further developed in the second chapter entitled History:
A Smell of Fish Glue. During his short-term job in the Registrar-
Generals Department in Trinidad before his departure to England for
a university education, the narrator was told that [a]ll the records of
the British colony, [] since 1797, [] together with a copy of

96
everything that had been printed in the colony were kept in the
department vault (Ibid., p.41). The narrators vivid memory of the
smell of fish glue with which these documents were bound implies a
correction of his childhood feeling that the island was out of history
due to the light and the heat [that] had burnt away the history of the
place (Ibid., p.74). Acknowledging the strangeness within and around
him, the narrator returns to his native Trinidad as an aspiring writer
with a mission to revisit and rediscover his personal and the nations
historical past. Although documents may hunt up the story of the
land, the narrator points out that a historical birds eye view cannot
really explain the mystery of what one has inherited (Ibid., p.11). As
shown in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, Naipaul has
portrayed his characters as unique individuals whose life or death,
histories or mysteries constitute the enigma of arrival as well as ways
in the world.
Furthermore, at the core of both novels is the insight of life and
man as the mystery. In The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator says:
faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid
aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack
and his garden (Enigma, p.387). The first section of the book
commemorates Jack, when the narrator admires for his courage and
dedication, but even more so, because he creates his home [and] his
world on a rented plot of land (Weiss, On the Margins, p.202).
Living in a rented countryside cottage, the narrator identifies with
Jack, and it is Jacks life and death that reminds the narrator of his
own creativity and mortality. As a writer in exile wandering among
continents, the narrator has a psychological need to anchor himself in
flux and mark himself in history (Ibid.). Whereas the manor garden is
Jacks rented plot of land, the metropolitan novel is the narrators
borrowed mode of representation through which he expresses his
particular experience. Thanks to their labour, Jack and the narrator
have transformed something foreign into an intrinsic part of their own
life. In other words, not only the English landscape but also its history
has been redefined by the presence and activities of exiles or emi-
grants like Jack and the narrator, these enabling them to see them-
selves as personages within a larger story. The Enigma of Arrival and
A Way in the World celebrate this transformation.

97
Rectifying and refiguring the past

Regarding the metropolitan novel as a borrowed mode of repre-

sentation, Naipaul emphasizes the absence of a living literary tradition
in his own community and culture, as well as the artificiality of
literary forms. Naipaul has remarked that, as a student of literature at
the university, he was puzzled by the very idea of the novel because a
novel is something made up, while at the same time it is expected to
be true, to be drawn from life; so that part of the point of a novel came
from half rejecting the fiction, or looking through it to a reality
(Reading, p.13). With reference to Ricoeurs perception of the
Analogue in historical thinking, the following discussion will draw
attention to Naipauls looking through fiction to a reality of the
historical past. Naipauls rethinking of history usually interweaves
personal experiences or individual stories with social and cultural
histories of the place. Hence, history is transformed to take concrete
expression and to take in diverse voices in Naipauls literary world
(Enigma, p.179). This section attempts to look at how Naipaul
transforms in fiction the personal and historical past by rectifications
and refigurations as a result of his consistent effort to illuminate areas
of darkness in his culturally complex world.
Naipaul has recounted that, as a boy in Trinidad, he was
surrounded by areas of darkness because for most Indo-Trinidadians
the past stopped with [their] grandfathers; beyond that was a blank
(Way, p.81). It is through the act of writing that Naipaul has arrived at
a new idea of himself and his world. It is also through the act of
writing that he has filled in the blank and has turned those areas of
darkness into reservoirs of literary concerns and themes. When
writing about areas of darkness: [t]he land; the aborigines; the New
World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, []; Africa;
and then England, Naipaul has explained that [he] followed no
system. [He has] worked intuitively (Two Worlds, p.484). Trusting
his intuition to find his subject matter and wondering whether the
novel is more than a dim lighted window in a general darkness,
Naipaul reiterates that he had no living literary tradition and he has

98
to reform and transform literary genres in order to make them fit with
his personal experience (Reading, pp.25, 31).
Naipaul has stated openly in Reading and Writing (1998) that
he was unable to understand Evelyn Waughs definition of fiction as
experience totally transformed until 1955 after five years struggle
as a fledging writer in England (p.13). Naipauls process of trans-
forming his experience through the vehicle of fiction can be better
comprehended in light of Ricoeurs observation on the Analogue in
understanding the reality of the historical past. Ricoeur concludes that
analogy acquires its full sense only against the backdrop of the
dialectic of Same and Other: the past is indeed what is to be re-
enacted in the mode of the identical. But it is so only to the extent that
it is also what is absent from all of our constructions. The analogue,
[] holds within it the force of re-enactment and of distancing, to the
extent that being as is both being and not being (Reality, p.36). This
statement contends that the historical past that has been reconstructed
is an imaginative re-creation resulting from repatterning the similar
and inventing the difference in the real past. Since we can only know
the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable, the
imagined can never reinstate what actually happened but what might
have happened (White, p.98). The reality of the historical past is, after
all, an analogous reality. In addition, the experience of the historical
past is no more than a historical awareness built and commented on
knowledge or understanding. Due to the emerging new experience,
fiction, through which experience is transformed, demands continued
rectification and reinterpretation. Naipaul explains that [e]very ex-
ploration, every book, added to [his] knowledge, qualified [his] earlier
idea of [him]self and the world (Enigma, p.168). In one book after
another, Naipaul is confronted anew with the increasing knowledge of
himself, his writing career and his diasporic worlds. As a consequence,
the expansion of knowledge and the qualification of earlier ideas
suggest re-enacting and rendering experience in a different light in a
new book.
In order to become a writer, it was necessary to go back,
Naipaul says, and for him that was the beginning of self-knowledge
(Prologue, p.34). He revisits his past by way of writing, rekindling
the experience that had seeded his childhood ambition. On the act of

99
re-enactment, Ricoeur maintains that the past survive[s] by leaving a
trace, and therefore, we become inheritors of the past in order to be
able to re-enact past thoughts (Reality, p.11). Naipaul is an inheritor
of a writing ambition, which had been passed down to him from his
father. While asking about his fathers mental illness, Naipaul was
told that his father looked in the mirror one day and couldnt see
himself. And he began to scream (Prologue, p.70). As Naipaul got
to know more about his family history and his fathers restraints as a
journalist, he realized that his fathers hysteria was the fear of
extinction, which would be transmitted to the son later as a
subsidiary gift together with the fathers writing ambition (Ibid.,
p.72). To defeat the fear of extinction, Naipaul has used the vocation
of writing to clear up [his] world, elucidate it, for [himself] and to
make [him] more at ease with [himself] (Two Worlds, p.484).
Using the fear of extinction as an enabling source rather than a
debilitating irritation, Naipaul has won the fight against annihilation
and marked his own existence in history through his prolific writings.
For example, though death or extinction is an overriding theme in
The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, both are monumental
texts which celebrate Naipauls accomplishment in understanding the
worlds [he] contained within [him]self, the worlds [he] lived in
(Enigma, p.161).
The childhood world of Trinidad Naipaul lived in, to which he
never ceased to feel a stranger, is ethnically diverse, culturally plural,
political and socially insecure (Reading, p.9). Naipaul felt that by
leaving Trinidad, [his] talent would somehow be revealed and the
books would start writing themselves (Prologue, p.32). The
necessity to get away from Trinidad where the writers career was
almost impossible for him lies in its geographical smallness, plan-
tation economy, rural mentality as well as intellectual restrictions. The
hard-won government scholarship provided Naipaul with a chance to
stay away from all of those, but maybe not for long. With a deter-
mination to succeed as a writer and to transmit his colonial and
postcolonial experience, Naipaul stayed in England after his grad-
uation and struggled with difficulties for his subject matter and literary
form. However, Naipaul could not make a start as a writer in the same
way as his contemporary metropolitan writers. Whereas [t]he young

100
French or English person who wished to write would have found any
number of models to set him on his way, Naipaul says, I had none
(Two Worlds, pp.4834). Furthermore, while the English or French
writers of his age had almost everything explained to them in other
words, they wrote against a background of knowledge Naipaul was
to be spared knowledge (Prologue, p.18). In the small British
colony in the Caribbean, there was the great unknown: the familial
and ancestral past gradually faded out and later became mysterious;
historical and cultural documents were tucked away unread; colonial
education remained abstract and explained nothing (Two Worlds,
p.483). As a colonial, Naipaul felt two worlds separated [him] from
the books that were offered [] at school or in the library (Reading,
p.20): the world outside that tall corrugated-iron gate, and the world
at home [], the world of [his] grandmothers house (Two Worlds,
p.482).
Even so, Naipaul has learned to look at the inside and the outside
of his two worlds with the eyes of an experienced writer-traveller,
and the nerves and curiosity of a stranger. Speaking through the
narrator in The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul hopes to arrive, in a book,
at a synthesis of the worlds and cultures that had made [him] (Enigma,
p.172). There is even a greater synthesis, a distinctive intertextuality
in Naipauls works, which is to be examined in light of Ricoeurs
Analogue, a fusion of the Same and the Other. A notable feature in
Naipauls literary adventure is that he consciously or perhaps
unconsciously reworks and repatterns in his later work materials and
elements used in his earlier books. Each book, intuitively sensed and,
in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone
before, and grows out of it, Naipaul has remarked, I feel that at any
stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book
contained all the others (Two Worlds, p.480). For example,
Naipauls account of his writing ambition in The Enigma of Arrival
recalls Prologue to an Autobiography, the first of two narratives in
Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984), as well as recapitulates
the theme of On Being a Writer (1987), Reading and Writing
(1998) and the Nobel Lecture Two Worlds (2001). In addition,
Bruce King reads The Enigma of Arrival as a rewriting and
fulfillment of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) because both are

101
records of Indian diaspora (King, p.142).4 As for A Way in the World,
Naipaul rewrites in the text the material he treated in The Loss of El
Dorado, especially historical fictions on Sir Walter Raleigh and
Francisco Miranda, intermixed with the non-fictional material of his
own ambition and life as a writer.5 Confronting the question whether
he is conscious of reworking the elements of earlier fiction, Naipaul
has responded, Yes. Getting the angle right: having acquired the
material, writing about it another way and so producing new material
(Art, p.55). Naipauls answer here corresponds to Ricoeurs analyses
of the Analogue blending the similar and the different. For Naipaul, it
is the right angle that matters in rectifying and reworking, which can
generate a sense of re-defamilization, a feeling of familiarity and
unfamiliarity at the same time.
From the angle of a mature man and renowned writer looking
back at his younger self and his trying years as a struggling writer, The
Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World reverberate familiar
Naipaulian themes, such as the smallness of colonial life, the
strangeness of living in a metropolis, and the difficulty in keeping his
ambition to be a writer. What is unfamiliar in The Enigma of Arrival,
however, is the psychic and spiritual dimension added to the changing
England about which Naipaul had read so much as a schoolboy in
Trinidad. Besides the chaotic life and corrupted politics in the
postcolonial Third World, A Way in the World discloses a gentler
angle and a more sympathetic tone than those in Naipauls previous
books such as A Bend in the River (1969) and In a Free State (1971).
Furthermore, A Way in the World reveals Naipauls refiguration of
Trinidad once depicted by him in Miguel Street (1959) with bitter
irony, absurd comedy and harsh critique. Actually, both the familiar
and the unfamiliar have contributed significantly in Naipauls quest

4 More information in Bruce Kings V.S. Naipaul (London: The MacMillan Press,
1993) pp.1423.
5 Helen Hayward comments on History and repetition in The Loss of El Dorado
and A Way in the World in her book The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul (New York:
Palgrave, 2002) pp.75110. She highlights the element of repetition from
studying the autobiographical and historical material in the chosen texts in
relation to Naipauls other works.

102
for continuity and renewal, and in turning his writings into one
composite opus.
Considering this cycle of reworking and reinterpreting from
Ricoeurs concept of the trace, the present text, which recalls aspects
of previous texts, gets incorporated as a trace from the past in the book
that will follow. In this sense, the temporal division between past,
present and future collapses and converges in the present, which is
rather the Augustinian threefold present including the present of past
things, the present of present things and the present of future things
(Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol.1, p.11). This notion of the
temporal offers a literary space to rectify past experience with an
increased knowledge, and to reinterpret history from a present con-
sciousness. The three unwritten stories about historical figures from
different centuries in A Way in the World have demonstrated how
creative imagination works in bringing separate histories together to
tell a meta-history of the Gulf. Unmistakably, The Enigma of Arrival
forecasts at some point Naipauls conception and vision of the plot for
A Way in the World:

The idea behind the book, the narrative line, was to attach the island, the little
place in the mouth of the Orinoco River, to great names and great events:
Columbus; the search for El Dorado; Sir Walter Raleigh. Two hundred years
after that, the growth of slave plantations. And then the revolutions: the
American Revolution; the French Revolution and its Caribbean by-products, the
black Haitian revolution; the South American revolution, and the great names
of that revolution, Francisco Miranda, Bolvar (Enigma, p.169).

To make an oversimplification, the quoted passage from The Enigma

of Arrival, which replays the key theme in The Loss of El Dorado, is
to be refigured later in A Way in the World. The intricate inter-
textuality can also be explained by Ricoeurs threefold mimesis,
which consists of prefiguration, the pre-condition for textuality; con-
figuration, the formal and historical dimensions of the text; and
refiguration, the phenomenological and hermeneutic dimensions of the
text (Valds, p.28). Additionally, reading The Enigma of Arrival from
the angle of threefold mimesis on a smaller scale, the book itself is
foreshadowed and prefigured by the Chirico painting with the same
title.

103
 By dint of Ricoeurs observation on the Analogue, which merges
re-enactment and taking a distance, intertextuality in Naipauls work
displays repetition with a difference and the changing vision of
oneself and ones community. The text-within-a-text and story-within-
a-story scheme, indeed, puts Naipauls idea of really writing one big
book on view (Bryden, p.367). In so doing, similar details among
texts are not mere repetitions of one another, because each time the
consciousness and experience are dissimilar in ones reflection on
himself and his life. This is how Naipaul looks at his own work, each
book took me into deeper understanding and deeper feeling, and that
led to a different way of writing. Every book was a stage in a process
of finding out; it couldnt be repeated (Reading, p.15). Each book is
hence envisaged as an inimitable, metaphorical endeavour Naipaul
takes to acquire historical knowledge of his East Indian ancestry, his
West Indian colonial upbringing and education, and his residence and
profession in Britain. Thanks to a different way of writing each time,
individual and collective histories are continuously transformed to
meet with the growing and shifting knowledge of the historical past.
Recalling a personal and historical past across both sides of the
Atlantic, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, like many of
Naipauls earlier books, are about the creation of a writers self, his
work and the gift of writing. In Authors Foreword of Finding the
Center, Naipaul explains that the impulse to write Prologue to an
Autobiography comes from his incomplete knowledge of his back-
ground. However, Prologue to an Autobiography is not an autobio-
graphy, a story of a life or deeds done, but an account of [his]
literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of [his] many-
sided background (Finding, p.vii). These literary beginnings and
imaginative promptings urge Naipaul to seek a prose style that
integrates various components such as travelogue, autobiography,
history, and fiction. During his discovery, Naipaul has found that [a]n
autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never
lies: it reveals the writer totally (Return, p.67). He has also found that
[t]here were certain things [fiction] couldnt deal with. It couldnt
deal with [his] years in England; [] [which] seemed more a matter
for autobiography. And it couldnt deal with [his] growing knowledge
of the wide world (Reading, p.16). Since all literary forms are

104
equally valuable in providing a way of looking for Naipaul (Two
World, p.485), his books are often a mlange of different genres
flow[ing] together and support[ing] one another (Reading, p.20).
For example, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World mix
fiction, autobiography, travel writing, character analysis, historical
documentary, and social and cultural commentary.
Billing The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World as novels,
however, Naipaul wants to maintain a distance between his life and
what has been described in the books. Most significantly, Naipaul tries
to emphasize the creativity of writing in incorporating historical,
autobiographical and fictional materials to enlarge our sense of the
past, as well as the constructive and transformative nature of story
through which we look to a reality. As a writer who has acquired the
mysterious power of the creative process of writing, Naipaul has
re-created the past in his novels by rethinking and repatterning
historical documents (On Being a Writer, p.3). Explaining what he
means by experience totally transformed through fiction, Naipaul
recounts: [a]s a child in Trinidad I had projected everything I read on
to the Trinidad landscape, the Trinidad countryside, the Port of Spain
streets. [] I transferred the Dickens characters to people I knew. []
[But] my Dickens cast, [] was multi-racial (Enigma, pp.1856). A
technique reminiscent of Ricoeurs Analogue, Naipauls manner of
reading and writing involves his re-enactment of the historical past
through documentary thinking and imaginative reconstruction, as well
as his taking a distance to detect differences in accruing historical
knowledge of himself and the world.
Placing the reality of the historical past under each of the great
classes of the Same, the Other, and the Analogue, Ricoeur has found
a way to think more clearly what remains enigmatic in the pastness of
the past (Reality, p.36). Sharing similarities in theme and structure
but with each highlighting its respective titular metaphor enigma or
way, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World witness
Naipauls search for a way in the world of fiction to discover,
reinterpret and transform history so that his personal experience or the
experience of individuals like him will be suitably rendered and fully
incorporated in literary and cultural histories. Ricoeur ends as he
begins The Reality of the Historical Past with an emphasis on the

105
mysterious character of the debt [to the past] which makes the master
of plots into a servant of the memory of men of the past (p.36). In a
similar fashion, Naipaul closes each novel with memories of a past
forecast by the epigraph to the text. Dedicated to the memory of Shiva,
Naipauls younger brother and fellow writer who died at the age of
forty of a heart attack in London, The Enigma of Arrival concludes
with a Hindu ceremony that honours and bids farewell to a deceased
sister Sati in Trinidad. In Home Again, the last chapter of A Way in
the World, Naipaul imagines Blairs body making a ceremonial
return to his native Trinidad (Way, p.379). Using a few stanzas from
Tennysons In Memoriam 6 as an epigraph to A Way in the World,
Naipaul acknowledges the memory of his homeland, Trinidad.
Intellectually and imaginatively, he pays tribute to the paradoxical
legacy of the historical past. The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the
World are the fruits of his re-creation and transformation of history in
the literary land.

6 The first part of the epigraph to A Way in the World is taken from the last two
lines of Poem CI in Tennysons In Memoriam (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 2004): And year by year our memory fades / From all the
circle of the hills. Naipaul then adds in a separate page the preceding stanza:
Till from the garden and the wild / A fresh association blow, / And year by
year the landscape grow / Familiar to the strangers child (pp.234; 1720).
Poem CI is widely acknowledged as the poets farewell to his home of
childhood, referring to the move of the Tennysons from Somersby. The poet
climbs a hill and reviews the surrounding landscape, thinking that in leaving a
site associated with the memory of his deceased friend, he turns his eyes from
the past. Naipauls narrative intention to reverse the original lyric order reflects
the complex relationship of the present to the historical past, and the
irreplaceable role of past in shaping the present. Memory can bridge temporal
distance and converge in itself time past, present and future. Encapsulated in the
spirit of these lines are also Naipauls meditation on the power and the fleeting
nature of memory.

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Chapter Four
An undiscovered continent: Ben Okris
The Famished Road and the enlargement
of historical reality

Poetry and myth are not just nostalgia for some unforgotten world. They
constitute a disclosure of unprecedented worlds, an opening on to other possible
worlds which transcend the established limits of our actual world. (Paul
Ricoeur, Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds, p.48990).

Ambiguously, ending either in a literal or in an imaginative cere-

monial return to homeland Trinidad, The Enigma of Arrival and A
Way in the World obtain a mythic grandeur in the sense that V.S.
Naipaul continues to reveal new ways of rewriting personal and col-
lective histories, as well as the necessity of re-imagining and remaking
the world (Way, p.379). Above all, Naipauls transformation of history
and exploration of cultural space are made specific through his
inventive mixing of travel writing, character analysis, social com-
mentary, and cultural critique with history and fiction. Perhaps it is
interesting to note that Morrisons Beloved also ends in the baby
ghosts deferred ceremonial return to the land of the dead, ac-
companied by the ritual singing of the community women. Most
significantly, Beloved demonstrates Morrisons commitment to re-
create an unavailable past and reclaim a forgotten reality by
combining historical documentary, slave narrative, ghost story, oral
tradition and fictional discourse. Ben Okris The Famished Road,
which won the 1991 Booker Prize, is also a genre-mixing novel.
Blurring the boundaries of myth, folklore, history and fiction, The
Famished Road leads to a world where historical reality is enlarged
and augmented as life existing at different levels of consciousness is
appropriately rendered. Reading Morrison, Naipaul and Okri in terms
of their historical projects in fiction, this introductory section tries to
set up a large backdrop against which The Famished Road is viewed.
It will also consider Okris engagement with history and reality in
light of Paul Ricoeurs The Reality of the Historical Past and Myth as
the Bearer of Possible Worlds and explore the titular metaphor an
undiscovered continent from different angles (Famished, p.572).
To begin with, vigorously written and carefully structured, The
Famished Road visits familiar themes and narrative strategies that can
be found in Morrisons Beloved, and Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival
and A Way in the World. For example, Morrison brings in an element
of reincarnation and mysticism, illustrated by the corporeal presence
of the baby ghost who signifies in the novel the undocumented and
inarticulate aspect in the history of slavery. Similarly, the protagonist
of The Famished Road is a spirit-child whose physical-spiritual exist-
ence in many worlds provides him with a vantage point to recount the
visible and invisible suffering of the poor and the powerless during
historical changes. Often read as works of magical realism, Beloved
and The Famished Road draw on the supernatural and the magical in
such a manner as to highlight some internal structures and funda-
mental characteristics of African life and thinking. Explaining the
boundaries between the living and the dead in Beloved, Morrison says
that [t]he gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between
the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present
does not exist (Darling, p.247). Likewise, the world of spirits is not
metaphorical or imaginary in Okris The Famished Road, it is more
real than the world of the everyday (Appiah, p.146). Influenced by
African religion and philosophy, Morrison conceives the supernatural
as an unceremoniously buried part in American history that becomes
remote and inaccessible to later generations. In other words, the ghost
in Beloved is the mysterious and discredited ancestral past that haunts
and waits to be reclaimed. Though Beloved the reincarnated girl
recedes to the land of the dead after a collective ritual of ac-
knowledgement and exorcizing, the ending suggests that she still
exists in the human world in the form of natural scenery. Carrying
within himself more than the knowledge of a historical past, Okris
spirit-child chooses to leave the spirit world and stay in the living
despite its limitations and travails. Politically conscious, morally
serious and aesthetically innovative, Morrison and Okri believe that
there is no absolute divide between human world and spirit world, the

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animate and the inanimate, life and death. However, they are slightly
different in applying the magical realistic element to their fiction.
Morrison turns to the supernatural with a sense of paying tribute to an
imaginary Africa of her ancestors, whereas Okri does so with an
energy coming from his exiles passion for the future development of
his native Nigeria.
Re-interpreting the Eurocentric history from the experience of an
exile and an ex-colonial, Naipaul incorporates personalized histories
into the vicissitudes of time and place in The Enigma of Arrival and A
Way in the World. In a similar vein, Okri traces historical changes at
various levels by opening up multiple points of view, and by
reshaping European literary traditions with African worldviews and
metaphysics. As a result, histories chronicled in The Famished Road
often take on fantastic and mythic dimensions. Historical documents
and facts are not enough to represent the subtlety and complexity of
consciousness in diverse realms. Hence, Naipauls commitment to
interpret every strain of human consciousness is made clear by the
idea of really writing one big book, meaning that all his works are
constituents of a single project (Bryden, p.367). Nevertheless, each
work exhibits distinct features in formal experimentation, and each
work builds up the literary adventure to illuminate areas of darkness
in different cultures in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and South
America. For example, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World,
unique in their own ways, strive to combat the absence of historical
knowledge in Naipauls remote past (East Indian family ancestry) and
his recent past (West Indian colonial upbringing and education). As
thus stated, Naipauls strategy to transform history and remake the
world depends on resourceful experimentations with literary forms
and reconfigurations of the historical past. Referring to Ricoeurs
three categories the Same, the Other, and the Analogue for
studying the reality of the past, the previous chapter has discussed
Naipauls engagement with history through documentary reinterp-
retation and imaginative reconstruction as a way of seeking a cultural
and literary space for his diasporic experience in the world.
In an effort to illuminate areas of darkness surrounding his
knowledge of himself and the outside world, Naipaul travelled to and
spent a large part of 1965 1966 in East Africa and Zaire, and

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returned to East Africa in 1971 and Zaire in 1975 respectively. A Bend
in the River (1979) is just one among many works that derived from
his travelling and living in newly independent African nations.1 To a
certain extent, Naipauls A Bend in the River, which is reminiscent of
Conrads Heart of Darkness (1902), functions as a reference and
contrast to Okris The Famished Road. Taken together, these three
novels represent different phases in the history of a literary Africa
that has unfettered the imagination of fiction writers and has been
invented to serve a wide variety of literary and/or ideological
requirements (Morrison, Introduction, p.xii). With its many details
echoing Heart of Darkness, A Bend in the River takes the reader to a
freshly decolonized central African state resembling Zaire, and into
the life of a deracinated Indian Muslim, Salim, who moves from East
Africa to live in an isolated town and run a small store at the bend in
the great Congo River. It is apparent that A Bend in the River records
both a physical expedition and a psychological journey into the heart
of Africa as it explores the themes of tyrannical government, tribal
warfare, nationalization of foreign business, exile, bribery and cor-
ruption. Naipaul has certainly painted a convincing but disturbing
picture of a postcolonial African country caught up in the violent
conflict of its own past and tradition against Western values and
ideologies. Responding to cultural collisions, one viewpoint in the
novel expresses the need to annihilate the past and re-create oneself
again because the past does not exist in real life but in ones mind.
You trample on the past, you crush it. [] That is the way we have to
learn to live now (Bend, pp.11213). However, it is not an easy task
to reject the past and start anew in a post-independent Africa
undergoing rapid social and political changes after the collapse of an
imperialist order. By and large, A Bend in the River shows Naipauls
skepticism and irony about the capability of postcolonial Africa to
forge an independent political and economic identity.

1 Conrads Darkness (1974) and A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the
Nihilism of Africa (1975) are also derived from Naipauls experiences of
traveling in postcolonial Africa. Both of them were published in a book of
essays The Return of Eva Pern (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1980).
Naipaul also writes about Africa and his African experience in varying degrees
in The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994).

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 Identifying and sympathizing with the uprooted Indians threat-
ened by African nationalism and social chaos, Naipaul, a writer of
East Indian heritage, does not have a similar commitment to Africa
like the African novelists, and is thus pessimistic and ambivalent
about its future. His vision of history as cyclical tides as fruitless
evolution and ceaseless suffering is deeply ingrained in the symbolism
of the river. One tide of history [] had brought us here. [] another
tide of history was coming to wash us away (Ibid., p.20). Human
efforts and human beings are, therefore, rendered futile and weak:
people lived as they had always done; there was no break between
past and present (Ibid., p.12). From the perspective of an Indo-
Trinidadian, Naipaul delineates Africa in A Bend in the River as a
primitive and timeless being whose wretched past and intolerable
present come together in a perpetual dawn (Ibid.). On the one hand,
Salims Africa in a perpetual dawn replays the stereotypical notion of
Africa as a dark continent in desperate need of light, the light of
Western religion, rationality, and civilization. On the other hand,
Salims Africa in a perpetual dawn reflects significantly Naipauls
own thinking of contemporary postcolonial Africa as a half-made
continent in cycles of half-making and unmaking (Weiss, On the
Margins, p.190). As such, the Africa filtered through A Bend in the
River has hardly any hope for a future. There are, of course, other
versions of Africa and Africans; Okris The Famished Road is another,
quite different one. Nonetheless, Naipauls literary adventure in The
Enigma of Arrival, A Way in the World and A Bend in the River lies in
re-envisioning history and reinterpreting myth through his acute
sensibility of an exile and ex-colonial, as well as a transformation of
them in a way that his personal experience is incorporated and
represented in the new historical and mythic restructuring.
From the stance of a black Nigerian now living and writing in
London, Okri portrays in The Famished Road a different Africa from
the ones in Conrads Heart of Darkness and Naipauls A Bend in the
River. Neither a dark continent nor a half-made continent, Okris
Africa is a still undiscovered continent. Africa as an undiscovered
continent is also in sharp contrast to Africa as spheres of influence
defined by the 1884 Berlin Conference in which fourteen European
governments assembled to partition the African continent into separate

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dominions.2 In envisaging Africa as an undiscovered continent, Okri
not only challenges the vision of Africa as imperialist spheres of
influence but also brings up an extensive dialogue between European
and African ideologies and aesthetics. Moreover, Okri himself plays
an active role in the dialogue as he presents well-known postcolonial
matters each time in dissimilar forms and styles, reiterating the vitality
and inimitability of African folklore, mythic tradition and narrative
strategies which refuse to be colonized by the literary norms of the
colonial center (Bennett, p.368). Okri turns his eyes to the enigmatic
and dynamic side of African sensibility in redirecting the history and
myth of Africa at a time when the devastating after-effect of colonial-
ism is perhaps overemphasized. As a result, Okris literary imagin-
ation recurrently dwells upon certain inviolate areas of the African
consciousness such as the resilience of spirit, the elasticity of
aesthetics and the capacity of dreaming (Wilkinson, p.86). In The
Famished Road, these inviolate areas together with socio-realistic,
geopolitical and historical issues take spiritual, aesthetic and mythic
configurations.
In general, Okris works of fiction condemn the ubiquitous
corruption and violence in contemporary Nigeria, giving voice to the
poorest and most powerless members of the African community and
describing the continuing confrontation between Western and
indigenous traditions in postcolonial Africa. In fact, many other
Nigerian writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka have
frequently explored these literary themes. Although Okri might not
have introduced new themes into postcolonial African literature, each
of his fictional works exhibit remarkable achievements in experi-
menting on the mode of representation and expanding the scope of
conceiving African history. Above all, exemplified by The Famished
Road, Okris contribution to postcolonial fiction culminates in his
bringing in a mythic and fantastic dimension as a way of looking for
images to portray what the public and outside world fails to record and
comprehend, and as a way of going beyond the predictable and

2 Read more information about the Conference of Great Powers in Berlin in

October 1884 from David Lambs book The Africans (New York: Random
House, 1982) pp.1023.

112
expected to tackle postcolonial concerns with greater insight and com-
plexity.
Probing into the mythopoeic origin of African literature in his
critical work Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), Soyinka
draws particular attention to the fourth area of existence other than
the widely acknowledged three worlds in African metaphysics: the
world of the ancestor, the living and the unborn (p.26). The fourth
area remains largely untapped because it is a dark continuum of
transition which holds the ultimate expression of cosmic will
(Soyinka, Myth, p.26). Perhaps, the mythopoeic fourth area can only
be approached through a way of looking at the world in more than
three dimensions which is inscribed by Okri as the aesthetic of
possibilities, of labyrinths, of riddles, [] of paradoxes (Wilkinson,
p.88). Throughout The Famished Road, Okri suggests that labyrinths,
riddles and paradoxes are as important as historical events in shaping
the sense of the world and reality. Significantly, he extends what is
historical and real to something supernatural, fantastic and magical,
perceiving the mythic and spiritual world as part of reality rather than
putting them adjacent to the real world. This chapter, relying on
Ricoeurs concept of the Same, the Other and the Analogue in The
Reality of the Historical Past and his essay Myth as the Bearer of
Possible Worlds, will discuss Okris strategy of enlarging the di-
mensions of reality and changing the ways of rendering postcolonial
history. Ricoeurs main idea in Myth as the Bearer of Possible
Worlds is accurately but reductively summarized by the quotation
cited as the epigraph to the chapter. Ricoeur contends that the critical
and creative aspect of language, which he calls poetic language, has
the capacity to open up new worlds. Believing myth to be essentially
symbolic, Ricoeur maintains that the mythos of any community
exceeds its own frontiers and becomes the bearer of other possible
worlds (Ricoeur, Myth, p.489). Through the combined force of the
poetic and symbolic language that discloses actual and possible
realities, a better understanding of ourselves and of the world can be
achieved.
Read like an epic poem, The Famished Road takes the reader to
an Africa that seems to have kept its aesthetics and mythologies intact.
Inspired by the metaphor an undiscovered continent from the con-

113
cluding episode of the novel, this chapter tries to unfold various
dimensions of historical reality in both the actual and the possible
world. The term historical reality tries to match the distinctive time
scheme and narrative thrust of the text, which removes the boundaries
between past, present and future. The chapter will be divided into
three parts, with each part incorporating aspects of Ricoeurs per-
ception and following disparate trajectories of an undiscovered
continent. Placing an undiscovered continent in the imaginative
terrain, the first part focuses on the faculty of dreaming in remaking
and prefiguring historical reality under the category of the Analogue.
The second part talks about the fantastic dimension of historical
reality as an undiscovered continent in the supernatural and mythic
realm through the agency of a spirit-child under the sign of the Other.
The final part looks at the socio-realistic dimension of historical
reality as an undiscovered continent in the mundane world under the
sign of the Same through photographic reflection and re-creation of
political upheavals, economic instability and social disorder during
Nigerias transitional period from colonialism to postcolonial self-
government.

Redreaming and prefiguring historical reality

Written as a first-person narrative in three sections, eight books and

seventy-eight episodes, The Famished Road discloses a writerly
capacity different from what Naipaul highlights at the end of The
Enigma of Arrival. While Naipauls writerly capacity refers to re-
construct the sacred world of his childhood and live in it over his
books, Okris writerly capacity tends to redream th[e] world and
make the dream real (Famished, p.571). In short, it is the mystery of
writing that enables them to tap the inexhaustible historical past and
turn sanctities or dreams into a reality. In an interview with Jane
Wilkinson, Okri points out that [t]he best fiction can become dreams
which can influence reality and [w]riting is sometimes a continu-

114
ation of dreaming (Wilkinson, pp.82, 83). Hence, the boundaries
between dreams and actualities blur. In The Famished Road, re-
dreaming the world means shedding light on unrecorded times and
empty spaces, where cities, invisible civilizations and future histor-
ies existed, and shedding light on human beings, who are a great
mystery because many people, many past lives, many future lives
resided in them (Famished, pp.571, 573). Most significantly, [t]he
whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in [their]
souls because strange fishes, sea-monsters, dolphins, plants that
dream, magical birds, as well as the earth and sky are inside the
human soul (Ibid., p.572). This apocalyptic statement made by Dad in
the concluding episode is considered as typical of animism, which is
the belief in a spiritual vitality lying behind all natural objects
(Quayson, p.148). Yet, viewing it as part of Dads redreaming of the
world history and destiny, the following discussion centres on the
climactic Book Eight in which dreaming and writing, history, myth
and fiction intermix. Referring to Ricoeurs Analogue in observing the
reality of the historical past and on the nature of myth, this section
explores an undiscovered continent in terms of imaginative and
dreaming capacity where historical reality manifests in future histor-
ies, myths, dreams and sometimes nightmares.
Summarizing his analyses on the Analogue, Ricoeur concludes
that analogy acquires its full sense only against the backdrop of the
dialectic of Same and Other: the past is indeed what is to be re-
enacted in the mode of the identical. But it is so only to the extent that
it is also what is absent from all of our constructions. The analogue,
[] holds within it the force of re-enactment and of distancing, to the
extent that being as is both being and not being (Reality, p.36). As
thus explained, the reality of historical past is, after all, an analogous
reality, derived from the reinterpretation of the similar and invention
of the absent. Set at a historical moment just before Nigerian
independence, The Famished Road and its sequels Songs of Enchant-
ment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1999) prefigure, redream and re-
invent, in a significant sense, the postcolonial history of Nigeria. As a
result, historical reality presented in Okris trilogy combines future
histories with folkloric myths and fantastic dreams. In the novel, myth
is understood both in the sense of fiction and true story which

115
provides sacred tradition, primordial revelation, exemplary model
(Eliade, 1). In this way, myth helps those who suffer and struggle []
to live and sleep and carry on (Wilkinson, p.85). Okri also notes that
[d]reams are part of reality, and dreams can influence reality (Ibid.).
Looking at the realignment of historical reality in Book Eight through
the Analogue, future histories will be seen as the re-enactment of
familiar historical facts, whereas dreams and myths constitute
alternative venues in rendering the multiplicity and complexity of
African reality.
Book Eight, the final book and episode of the novel, prefigures a
postcolonial reality from a wide range of perspectives and realms. The
episode begins with Azaros description of the rainy season, in which
his father is recuperating from a fearsome coma as a result of his
boxing bout with the mysterious and sinister man in a white suit. In
his unconscious state, Dad is actively redreaming the world. Fol-
lowing Dad in his cyclical dreams, Azaro recounts the schemes of
things that his father sees and dislikes:

He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and

the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers,
manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of
existence. He saw the rich of our country, he saw the array of our politicians,
how corruptible they were, how blind to our future, how greedy they became,
how deaf to the cries of the people, how stony their hearts were, how short-
sighted their dreams of power. He saw the divisions in our society, the lack of
unity, he saw the widening pit between those who have and those who dont.
[] He saw the wars in advance. He saw the economic boom in advance, saw
its orgiastic squander, the suffering to follow, the exile to strange lands, the
depleting of the peoples will for transformation (Famished, p.5645).

Although exposed in the form of a dream, the ubiquity of poverty,

tyranny, corruption, division, and warfare is equally a historical reality
in many post-independent African countries. In a slightly different
manner, Dads dream of historical reality re-enacts what Ade, an
abiku child, prophesizes before his return to the spirit world.

Suffering is coming. There will be wars and famine. Terrible things will happen.
New diseases, hunger, the rich eating up the earth, people poisoning the sky and
the waters, people going mad in the name of history, the clouds will breathe fire,

116
 the spirit of things will dry up, laughter will become strange. [] There will be
changes. Coups. Soldiers everywhere. Ugliness. Blindness (Famished, p.547).

Considering that the time scheme of the novel is situated in a decade

before Nigerias independence, both Dads dream and Ades prophecy
are in effect narrative prefigurations.
It is worth noticing that these narrative prefigurations re-enact in
the mode of the Same certain documentary facts in the history of
Nigeria. During 19601976, the first sixteen years of its independence,
there were: three coups dtat, the assassinations of two heads of state,
and one civil war that claimed a million lives (Lamb, p.301).
Moreover, the countrys oil revenues were squandered []. The
soldiers came to power and proved themselves more corrupt and less
efficient than the civilians they had overthrown []. The cities filled
up and broke down. The farmlands emptied and stopped producing.
The parliament dissolved, the economy deteriorated, the dreams
disintegrated (Ibid.). As thus stated, the boundaries between history
and fiction collapse. Written and published in London thirty some
years after the Nigerian independence, The Famished Road, Songs of
Enchantment and Infinite Riches are derived from Okris imaginative
reinterpretation and reconstruction of documentary information. That
said, reinterpretation is the unending rectification of configurations
of the historical past, and reconstruction is a different construction
than the course of events reported (Ricoeur, Reality, pp.2, 26).
Historical reality is recorded in the novel through the re-enactment of
documentary evidence and the incorporation of indigenous African
beliefs in dream, myth and foresight. Therefore, Dads dream and
Ades prophecy are considered as part of reality.
Azaro and Ade are able to tell or foretell history because they are
abikus living at once in the human and the spirit world. An abiku is a
spirit-child or a wander child, who, according to Yoruba belief, is
the same child who dies and returns again and again to plague the
mother (Soyinka, Idanre, p.28). It is clear that the fate of an abiku is
repetition, but repetition with a temporal difference. In particular,
abiku becomes a trope for the nature of being. An abiku cycle
symbolizes the dialectic of birth, death and rebirth and of past, present
and future, as well as the interaction among the world of the ancestor,

117
the living and the unborn, and the fourth space that houses the
mythopoeic foundation of African literature (Soyinka, Myth, p.26). In
a sense, an abiku is a phantom but ideal historian for Africa due to his
privilege of approaching other lives behind and in front, and of
knowing people actually living their futures in the present (Wilkin-
son, p.83). As a first-person narrator whose point of view dominates
the novel, Azaro is more a receptacle for dissimilar visions, telling
stories through his abiku life and experience as well as through other
peoples dreams. Aiming to render what really happened, Azaros
narration trace[s] out possible itineraries in the historical field
(Ricoeur, Reality, p.29). As a matter of fact, possible itineraries take
the form of dreams and labyrinths, paradoxes and riddles; hence, the
novels historical field is extensively enveloped in a mythic frame.
In Azaros dreams, he faces the reality of mortgaged futures
and delayed destinies, as political parties battle for supremacy even
in the spirit world by calling on djinns and chimeras, succubi, incubi
and apparitions, and enlisting the ghosts of old warriors and poli-
ticians and strategists (Famished, p.568). What happens in the spirit
space affect what happens in the terrestrial plane; there is no absolute
division between the human world and the spirit world. When the
sorcerers of party politics unleashed thunder in the spirit realm, rain
flooded those below (Ibid.). Visiting both human and spirit worlds in
his dreams, Azaros father prefigures historical reality of a new age as
the coexistence of human beings alongside other creatures, and the
interconnectedness and invisible interchanges of different realms. This
notion is furthered developed as Dad argues for increased interplay
between the physical and the spiritual. Inside a cat there are many
histories, many books. When you look into the eyes of dogs strange
fishes swim in you mind (Ibid., p.572). Waking up as if from death,
Dad is physically and spiritually regenerated; in particular, he is more
politically conscious:

We have entered a new age. We must be prepared. There are strange bombs in
the world. Great powers in space are fighting to control our destiny. Machines
and poisons and selfish dreams will eat us up. I entered a space ship and found
myself on another planet. People who look like human beings are not human
beings. Strange people are among us. [] A great something is going to come
from the sky and change the face of the earth. We must take an interest in

118
 politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice. Human beings are dreaming
of wiping out their fellow human beings from this earth. Rats and frogs
understand their destiny. Why not man, []. God is hungry for us to grow
(Famished, p.571, emphasis added).

Unlike the political parties the Party of the Rich and its mirror, the
Party of the Poor fighting against each other for wealth and power
out of selfish greed, Dad is a fighter for justice for the poor and the
powerless. He even tries to organize the Council of Prostitutes and the
Party of the Beggars.
Relying on an indigenous African belief in the interaction among
many worlds, the future history described above reveals a different
reality. At a moment when the after-effect of colonialism is perhaps
overstated, Okri reconstructs an alternative postcolonial history by
highlighting the spiritual, aesthetic, and mythic internal structures of
Africa, which are certain inviolate areas of the African conscious-
ness and the worldview that makes [Africans] survive (Wilkinson,
p.86). Moreover, Okri suggests looking at colonialism in terms of
dreams, myths, the mind and perception of reality rather than social
infrastructures. If the perception of reality has not been funda-
mentally, internally altered, he argues, then the [colonial] experience
itself is just transitional (Ibid.). In this light, Dads redreaming of the
historical reality is the past re-enacted in the mode of the similar with
the reincorporation of the forgotten mythic and aesthetic frames
overridden by colonial experience. Unmistakably, colonial experience
and reality is alluded to in the novel as the construction of roads. In
one of his wanderings, Azaro says, I came to another half-constructed
road. Workers stood around the hulks of machinery, abusing those
who were working. They waved sticks with words written on them.
[] They shouted slogans at the white engineers (Famished, p.280).
Clearly, the road of colonialism does not necessarily bring progress; it
brings violence, terror and confusion instead. Furthermore, the colon-
ial roads are labyrinths because [a]ll the roads multiplied, reproduc-
ing themselves, [] leading towards home and then away from it,
without end, with too many signs, and no directions (Ibid., pp.1345).
In this sense, the road symbolizes more than the effect of colonialism,

119
it is also an allegorical road the road of life in which one has to
discover directions and destinations for oneself.
The meaning of the road becomes even more diverse later in the
novel as it takes mythic and spiritual dimensions. Whats more, the
road bears witness to pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial realities.
Azaro learns from the three-headed spirit that strange beings has been
building for two thousand years the road which cannot be finished,
because it is their soul, and the soul of their history (Ibid., p.378).
The notion of an unfinished road is reinforced and augmented in the
final episode of the book as Dads new vision of the road brings about
wisdom and transformation. Looking at the world with new eyes and
listening to the spirit of things, Azaros father notices that some
roads lead to things which can never be finished (Ibid., p.572). Most
significantly, the unfinished road is an open road that knows no
hunger. An open road is the soul of history that cannot be finished; an
open road is the liberty of limitations, [] to find or create new roads
from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be (Ibid.,
p.559). On the one hand, there are infinite richness or endless pos-
sibilities within limitations. On the other hand, the road of our refusal
to be is to be understood as a collective refusal of history, the
history prescribed by colonialisms authority of rewriting African
history and reality from a Eurocentric consciousness (Coundouriotis,
p.149). Azaros story provides, instead, a different history, descriptive
and visionary. In this sense, the road refuses to remain famished,
rediscovering indigenous African knowledge of time and history as
timeless, cyclical recurrence and regenerative transfiguration.3 More-
over, there is a refusal to be colonialisms prescribed and distressed
subaltern by releasing the imaginative capacity of African aesthetics.
On account of its transfiguration during pre-colonial, colonial and
postcolonial times, the road is, in a sense, the road of historical reality,
uniting the forces of the similar and the different, namely, the mythic

3 In Book Two, Chapter Seven The battle of rewritten histories of Infinite

Riches (London: Orion, 1999), Okri compares the history that an English
Governor-General rewrites of Africa with the history told by an old woman in
the forest.

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unfinished road, the famished colonial road and the road of collective
refusal to closure.
At some point, the preoccupation with the myth of the road
illustrates Ricoeurs idea of myth surviving by calling for unending
historical interpretations. He explains that the specific identity of
myths depends on the way in which each generation receives or
interprets them according to their needs, conventions, and ideological
motivations (Myth, p.486). For example, Dads new understanding
of the open road revises the folkloric myth of the hungry road. As a
beneficiary to and an inheritor of the road myth, Dad tells Azaro as a
cautionary tale the story about the King of the Road whose hunger has
caused and will cause many accidents in the world:

And to this day some people still put a small amount of food on the road before
they travel, so that the King of the Road will eat their sacrifice and let them
travel safely. But some of our wise people say that there are other reasons.
Some say people make sacrifices to the road to remember that the monster is
still there and that he can rise at any time and start to eat up human beings again.
Others say that it is a form of prayer that his type should never come back again
to terrify our lives. That is why a small boy like you must be very careful how
you wander about in this world (Famished, p.3012).

Tracing back to the time of our great-great-great-grandfather, the

famished road contains the myth of origin and warning (Ibid., p.301).
Stressing the wisdom within the myth, which is reinterpreted for
discouraging Azaro from his wanderings, Dads story of the King of
the Road comes from his spontaneous reinterpretation and recon-
figuration of the ancient myth. The road is a timeless historical reality
in which pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial experiences interact
and blend. Apparently, Okri incorporates a pre-colonial or even a
prehistoric context in which the road has the power to transform on its
own. In so doing, Okri draws attention to the indigenous beliefs in
self-regeneration and the spiritual and mythic internal structures that
remain inviolate to colonialism and its overt politics at a time when
Nigeria is on the verge of its independence.
Like the road, abiku is another trope for pre-colonial, colonial
and postcolonial histories. Shockingly, Dad finds in his surreal
journeys that all nations are children; [] ours too was an abiku

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nation, a spirit-child nation, one that keeps being born and after each
birth come blood and betrayals (Ibid., p.567). The picture of an abiku
nation in repetitive cycles of blood and betrayals is gloomy, and
[h]istory itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of
the condition of the spirit-child (Ibid., p.558). Even if it is an abiku
nation, Ade says that [o]ne day it will decide to remain. It will
become strong (Ibid., p.547). In light of Ricoeurs Analogue, which
combines within it the force of re-enactment and distancing, to the
extent that being is both being and not being, the abiku cycle is a re-
enactment of the historical past with the involvement of temporal
distance and difference (Reality, p.36). Since abiku fuses two states of
being and non-being, the abiku itself can be understood as a kind of
analogue in which being born and dying become an integrated cycle
(Aizenberg, p.465). There are various references to the abiku cycle
throughout the novel. For example, Madame Koto is pregnant with
abiku trinity begging Azaro in his dream to give her some of his
youth because she is two hundred years old and will die unless she
gets his young blood (Famished, p.569). The abiku trinity has never
been born, and its malevolent cycle has never been fulfilled.
Conversely, the potentials generated by Dads particular abiku
cycle his three fights and three rebirths emerge to meet the
demands of a new age.
As a representative of collective consciousness and an allegor-
ical figure for the historical Nigerian people, Dad preserves the
ancient values of the past and possibilities for the future, redreaming
and prefiguring historical reality (Coundouriotis, p.162). The abiku
cycle in the form of three boxing bouts provides Azaros father with
rebirth and transformation after each fight, as well as privileged
insights and sensibilities that are often in contrast to the communitys
conception of the real. Most of all, the boxing fight symbolizes the
struggle against elemental forces that would destroy mans soul. The
first boxing match is between Dad the Black Tgyer and Yellow Jaguar,
a champion boxer returned from the land of the dead. However, the
injuries Dad gets are real and his recovery is described as a rebirth.
Since Azaro is the only witness to his fathers epic battle with Yellow
Jaguar, he is made to recount it several times to his father. Due to
agony and amnesia, the father has forgotten most of what happened,

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speaking of the fight as something that he had dreamt, and the illness
as the only thing that had been real (Famished, p.414). Therefore, it is
through Azaros repeated stories of the fight that the father finds
confidence in his own strength. In particular, Azaros telling and
retelling of the event serves as talking documents, and hence Azaro
the spirit-child becomes an oral historian. Azaro is able to prefigure
what really happened because a spirit-child is a repository of many
cultural images, existing in the world of the ancestor, the living and
the unborn simultaneously (Songs, p.6). Azaros father also obtains a
new sense of reality after his encounter with a mysterious old man
carrying something invisible on his head during his secret boxing
practice (Famished, p.444). This incident helps Dad become a
different man as he tells Azaro I am beginning to see things for the
first time. This world is not what it seems. There are mysterious forces
everywhere. We are living in a world of riddles (Ibid.). Dad believes
in the interchange between human and spirit world and in the
possibility of changes provided by boxing, an old African tradition.
He tries to break his poverty and misery as a menial worker, finding
his dignity and pride in becoming a good boxer. The fight against
Yellow Jaguar demonstrates Dads resolve to overcome things first in
the spirit world, whereas, his boxing with Green Leopard, a supporter
of the Party of the Rich, is certainly to overcome things in this world
(Ibid., p.416).
Again Dad falls in a deadly coma after beating Green Leopard.
After his recovery, Dad talks of becoming a politician and bringing
freedom and prosperity to the world and free education to the poor
(Ibid., p.467). Ironically, his grand schemes are taken as symptoms
of madness despite that these are basic living requirements:

buying enough corrugated zinc to roof the whole ghetto, [and] enough cement
to build houses for all the large families who lived in one room, [] tarring all
the roads and clearing away all the rubbish, [and] opening massive stores that
would sell food cheaply to all the poor people (Ibid.).

Most of all, Dad has developed a keen interest in books after his
second rebirth. With the bet money he wins from the fight, Dad begins

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to buy books even though he cannot read. Azaro is made to read to his
father from this wide range of choices:

He bought books on philosophy, politics, anatomy, science, astrology, Chinese

medicine. He bought the Greek and Roman classics. He became fascinated by
the Bible. Books on the cabbala intrigues him. He fell in love with the Arabian
Nights. He listened with eyes shut to the strange words of classical Spanish love
poetry and retellings of the lives of Shaka the Zulu and Sundiata the Great
(Ibid., p.468).

In fact, the world has changed for Azaros father since his fight with
Green Leopard. The inside of [his] head [] grow[s] bigger because
he now has ideas, dreams (Ibid., p.496). Perhaps this is one of the
privileged insights that Dad learns from the second fight. In order to
realize his ambition as the Head of State taking political authority
from the white rulers, Dad needs more than physical strength. It is true
that boxing represents an ancient African tradition by means of which
men win authority. Dad is illiterate, and his physical power is often
identified as brute force and manual labour associated with the sil-
enced history of slavery and domination. However, with ideas and
dreams, Dad prefigures a utopia for the post-independent country:

[] in which he was invisible ruler and in which everyone would have the
highest education, in which everyone must learn music and mathematics and at
least five world languages, and in which every citizen must be completely
aware of what is going on in the world, be versed in tribal, national, continental,
and international events, history, poetry, and science; in which wizards, witches,
herbalists and priests of secret religions would be professors at universities; in
which bus drivers, cart-pullers, and market women would be lecturers, while
still retaining their normal jobs; in which children would be teachers and adults
pupils; in which delegations from all the poor people would have regular
meetings with the Head of States; and in which there would be elections when
there were more than five spontaneous riots in any given year. (Ibid., p.468)

The history of post-independent Nigeria illustrates that Dads utopian

ideals had never been realized. In addition, this sense of post-in-
dependent disillusionment is projected in the novel onto the period
before independence when a new and better future was at least
possible and promising. Nevertheless, Okri makes Dad redream and
prefigure a different future for postcolonial Nigeria. Okris view on

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dreaming is summarized by the last paragraph of the whole book: [a]
dream can be the highest point in life (Ibid., p.574). In The Famished
Road, Okri brings special attention to the power of dreaming, because
it is also the mode of thinking, and the way of perceiving history and
reality. In short, dreaming is at the core of the creativity of African
aesthetics, the flexibility of myth, the tenacity of spirit and the free-
dom of imagination that help Africa and Africans survive pre-colonial,
colonial and postcolonial suffering. These incredible faculties are
embedded within the famished road, which has not been fully
discovered nor understood.

Seeing invisible reality with a third eye

By combining historical references with dreams and myths, Okri

suggests that history is as much a reconstruction as the fiction he is
writing. As mentioned in the previous section, Okri uses abiku as one
of the key tropes to stand for the history and reality of his country. In
other words, Nigeria is an abiku nation caught in unending cycles of
birth, death and rebirth, and its history is fractured, disrupted and
trapped in a non-progressive motion. Through the exceptional sen-
sitivity of an abiku child, Okri explains that newly independent
African nations suffer ceaseless bloodshed and violence because they
have not done enough for a new era. Things that are not ready, not
willing to be born or to become, things for which adequate pre-
parations have not been made to sustain their momentous births,
things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear
of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves
partake of the spirit-childs condition (Famished, p.558). The cyclical
nature of history suggests that human beings are doomed to fight
corruption and evil in each generation, fated to repeat the errors of the
past without making any decisive progress. Growing tired of the
restless cycle, Azaro chooses to be born and to stay in the human
world rebelling against the authority of the spirits. However, some-

125
times Azaro cannot resist the calling from his spirit companions and
he wanders in places that are not accessible to human beings. A spirit-
child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the
dreams of the living and the dead (Ibid.). Thanks to his wanderlust
and curiosity, Azaro presents in his narrative a mythic dimension of
historical reality. Resorting to Ricoeurs concept of the Other in The
Reality of the Historical Past, this section talks about historical reality
as an undiscovered continent in the fantastic realm where history at
its various stages is disclosed through an admission of otherness, a
restitution of temporal distance (Ricoeur, Reality, p.15). Episodes for
detailed study are mainly esoteric passages, which are related to
Azaros wanderings or the folkloric and mythic stories told by his
parents.
When asked about the references to history in The Famished
Road, Okri says that he is very interested in history and the book is
about history. [] History is actually in the book right from the
beginning (Wilkinson, p.86). This idea that history is there from the
beginning of the novel can be understood through the two prevailing
metaphors the road and the abiku that the opening episode
introduces to signify the nature of Nigerian history and reality. The
book starts with a myth of beginnings: In the beginning there was a
river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole
world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry
(Famished, p.3). The road that gives the novel part of its title has a
biblical allusion and self-regenerative capacity. Beset by hunger, the
famished road engages people in a fight for national independence.
There is another level of beginning in the first episode, that is, the
birth of a spirit-child whose name Lazaro (shortened to Azaro)
indicates an oscillation between the living and the dead. As an abiku
with strange gifts of the soul and an inextinguishable sense of exile,
Azaro transcends the limitations of here and now (Ibid., p.5). Hence,
his taking a distance with respect to historical reality produces an
effect of strangeness that makes the familiar unfamiliar (Ricoeur,
Reality, p.15). Azaro knows other or magical aspects of historical
reality; once he wanders into a crowded marketplace and becomes
aware of the spirits and other beings there. He sees people who
walked backwards, a dwarf who got about on two fingers, men

126
upside-down with baskets of fish on their feet, women who had
breasts on their backs (Famished, p.18). Apparently this is not a usual
marketplace, yet its strangeness gives way to an African belief, that is,
ancestral spirits inhabit not empyrean but the actual world of humans
(Hemminger, p.68). What is more interesting is that Azaro describes
the spirits as he would describe human beings.
With the eyes of a spirit-child, Azaro looks back at the world of
ancestral spirits, but with an eye opened out of the centre of his
forehead, he is able to foresee things (Famished, p.267). In the future
present, Azaro sees a mirage of houses was being built, paths and
roads crossed and surrounded the forest in tightening circles, un-
painted churches and the whitewashed walls of mosques sprang up
where the forest was thickest. The worshippers in the unpainted
churches wore white cassocks and prayed to the ringing of bells all
afternoon (Ibid., p.281). Seeing the spirit world in the present and a
future history in advance, Azaro knows the otherness of the historical
past and tells it in such a manner that the otherness decentre[s] the
traditional way of rendering history (Ricoeur, Reality, p.16). Azaro
challenges a Eurocentric view of history through his unconventional
representation of colonial history. Rather than depicting the building
of roads and houses as the result of colonial progression, Azaro notes
the receding of forest and the burning of trees. Places that were thick
with bush and low trees were now becoming open spaces of soft river-
sand. [] Places where children used to play and hide were now full
of sandpiles and rutted with house foundations (Famished, p.122).
Furthermore, looking at the road with new eyes, Azaro unveils another
aspect of the road, which is often assumed to be a primary metaphor
for the effect of colonialism. Azaro places the road in a mythic
paradigm and visualizes it as a work of art, a shrine [] beautiful
beyond description because it is the road through which each gener-
ation redefines themselves and reconnects themselves with their
origins (Ibid., p.379). Located on the edge where the road meets the
bush, Madame Kotos bar is another site of multiple meanings, fre-
quented by the spirits coming from the bush and the new politicians
from the road. The bar is also a barometer of changes between the old
and the new, and an interstitial zone where past, present and future
converge. Through the women hawkers who come by the bar, Azaro

127
learns about what is happening at the moment: independence, political
parties and tribal divisions. They talk about the forthcoming elections
and about the thugs and violence, the people of different parties killed
in skirmishes deep in the country (Ibid., p.90). Staying in the bar one
evening, Azaro feels a new cycle has began with the dying of sor-
rowful and wise spirits, and the coming of well-dressed politicians
into the bar that would never be the same again (Ibid., p.256). The
bar changes again later, with two almanacs of the Rich Party on the
walls and with a different image of Madame Koto, who wears ex-
pensive jewellery and heavy makeup now (Ibid., p.277). In these
examples, Azaros taking a distance in relation to disclose the reality
of the historical past is made possible by seeing with his third eye.
Indeed, the third eye takes variant forms in the novel, sometimes as an
object like a mask or a pair of glasses and sometimes as an animal like
a tortoise or a duiker.
Azaro finds a mask that transforms reality:

Not far from me, like a skull sliced in half and blacked with tar, was a mask that
looked frightening from the side, but which was contorted in an ecstatic
laughter at the front. It had eyes both daunting and mischievous. Its mouth was
big. Its nose was small and delicate. It was the face of one of those paradoxical
spirits that move amongst men and trees, carved by an artist who has the gift to
see such things and the wisdom to survive them. (Ibid., p.283, emphasis added)

To a certain extent, Okri is that artist who carves the mask and has the
vision to comprehend lifes multiple dimensions as well as the know-
ledge to tackle the complexity of synthesized and coexistent realities.
The mask can present a different visor, whether it is threatening or
funny depends on the angle from which it is viewed. Similarly, Okri
says whether we are going toward destruction or world creativity is
dependent on the conception of history, and The Famished Road is his
modest effort to change the way we perceive history and to alter
the way in which we perceive what is valid and what is valuable, [and
perceive] different measure and different values (Wilkinson, p.87).
When Azaro looks out through the mask, he sees a different world: a
tiger with silver wings and the teeth of a bull, dogs with tails of
snakes and bronze paws and cats with the legs of women (Famished,
p.284). Azaro does not share the carvers wisdom, thus the view

128
through the mask becomes disorienting and menacing, and he begins
to lose [his] sense of reality, confused by the mask (Ibid.). Because
the transformation of the wood into flesh has become complete,
Azaro cannot easily take off the mask, and taking it off is like
stripping the skin off [his] own face (Ibid., p.286). The mask is ripped
off at last and Azaro feels he is no longer threatened by the monstrous
creature that has become alive through the mask. Due to his im-
maturity and lack of wisdom, Azaro is overwhelmed by the strange
and invisible reality of the historical past symbolized by the pre-
historic monster.
Unlike Azaros third eye in the middle of his forehead, the mask
plays an ambivalent role. Benevolent or deceptive, the mask serves as
a distancing device in the novel for Azaro to see the coexistent
realities by way of an ancient artistic form. In the next example, Azaro
sees the synthesis of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial histories
through the eyes of a sacrificial animal a duiker at Madame Kotos
party. Through the eyes of the duiker, Azaro sees the pre-colonial
history in forms of serene ancestors, men and women for whom the
stars were both words and gods, for whom the world and the sky and
the earth were a vast language of dreams and omens (Ibid., p.523).
Coming to the coast of the Atlantic, where the ghost ships of cen-
turies arrived endlessly on the shores, Azaro sees the flotillas, the
gunwales, the spectral great ships and the dozens of rowing boats,
bearing the helmeted ones, with mirrors and guns and strange texts
untouched by the salt of the Atlantic:

Deep in the duikers eyes, I ran through the yellow forest, through deluded
generations, through time. I witnessed the destruction of great shrines, the death
of mighty trees that housed centuries of insurgent as well as soothing memories,
sacred texts, alchemical secrets of wizards, and potent herbs. I saw the forest
die. I saw the people grow smaller in being. I saw the death of their many roads
and ways and philosophies. [] I heard the great spirit of the land and forest
talking of a temporary exile. They travelled deeper into secret spaces, weaving
spells of madness round their arcane abodes to prevent humans from ever
despoiling their transformative retreat from the howling feet of invaders (Ibid.,
p.524).

129
Azaro feels even sadder as he comes across new houses and bridges,
because the freedom of space and friendship with the pied kingfisher
and other birds became more limited with the new age (Ibid.). After
Azaro opens his eyes, he finds himself at Madame Kotos party and
wonders if the history he sees through the duikers eyes is a weird,
delirious dream. Azaro tries to shake the confusion from his head but
he catches the duikers gaze as if asking him to free it from an
imminent death. Neither can the duiker escape from being sacrificed,
nor can Azaro escape from his wild dream. Azaros re-envisioning of
historical reality through the eyes of the mask and the duiker
illustrates an African folkloric and mythic way of looking at and
expressing the world. This particular way brings in a temporal dis-
tance that has made historical past remote from the present and made
people today strangers to the attitudes of past ages as exemplified by
Azaros fear of the reality unmasked through the mask and the duiker
(Ricoeur, Reality, p.19, 20). However, the folkloric and mythic way
also makes it possible to achieve a historical understanding of the
different.
As mentioned before, dreams are important venues in the novel
through which historical reality are presented. Azaros father has a
nightmarish dream of going out to discover a new continent but the
white inhabitants there insist that they have been in that place since
time immemorial. Then, he leaves for another place but again finds
himself roughly treated because of his different skin colour. As a
result of accommodating to life on the strange island, Dad looks into
the mirror one day and is astounded that he has turned white. His
shame and humiliation reach a pinnacle when Azaro appears as a
young man to buy a newspaper from his father, now a news-vendor in
a big city on the island, and Azaros money burned his hand. Dads
dream of discovering a new continent turns into a nightmare and his
big plans for himself goes awry. However, the message of the story is
unambiguous through depicting a gloomy picture of an exiles life in a
cosmopolitan city and warning against straying from ones own
people and culture. Azaros mother has a similar story to tell about the
white people, though from a different perspective. This time, the white
people come to Africa that is more advanced in knowledge than the
West, and to learn from Africans who are the ancestors of the human

130
race (Famished, p.325). This is the African continent of generous
people, welcoming the whites and sharing with them. When white
people first came to our land, Mum begins, we had already gone to
the moon and all the great stars. In the olden days they used to come
and learn from us. My father used to tell me that we taught them how
to count. We taught them about the stars. We gave them some of our
gods. We shared our knowledge with them (Ibid.). But when the
white people came to Africa for the second time, they brought guns
with them. They took the lands, burned the gods, and carried Africans
away across the sea to become slaves. Even so, Mum ends her story
with a more nuanced message: [the white people] are not all bad.
Learn from them, but love the world (Ibid.). Therefore, the novel
presents a great diversity of perspectives and worldviews.
Later in the novel, Mum tells a more complex story about a
misguided white man who has to learn to be an African before he can
get out of Africa. Mum tells how she was selling her provisions one
day when she came to a crossroad and saw a tortoise. The tortoise
speaks to her but Mum refuses to tell what it said, and this becomes a
riddle with which she tests the white man whom she meets on another
day. The man told her that he had been in Africa for ten years and
wanted to find a way out of Africa. In exchange for her information,
this man would give Mum his blue sunglasses. Mum told him if he did
not know that [a]ll things are linked, he would never find any road
out of Africa (Ibid., p.553). Then the man left with a remark: [t]he
only way to get out of Africa is to get Africa out of you (Ibid.). But
the second time Mum sees the white man in the market, he is
transformed into a strange Yoruba man with magical powers. The
story Okri has him tell to Azaros mother makes things even more
complicated and labyrinthine:

When I left you, I became feverish in the head and later in a fit of fury over a
small thing I killed my African servant. They arrested me. I sat in a cell. Then
they released me because I was a white man. Then I began to wander about the
city naked. Everyone stared at me. They were shocked to see a mad white man
in Africa. Then a strange little African child took to following me around. He
was my only friend. All my white colleagues had deserted me. Then one day
my head cleared. Five hundred yeas had gone past. The only way to get out of

131
 Africa was to become an African. So I changed my thinking. I changed my
ways. (Ibid., p.554)

Therefore, he returns to England a changed man, who marries, has

children, is successful and dies to be reborn, a Yoruba businessman.
His story is a complete reversal of Dads nightmare. When Mum said
that they met only two weeks ago not five hundred years ago, the man
told her [t]ime is not what you think it is (Ibid.). This story-within-a-
story demonstrates the vitality of oral tradition and the strength of
traditional wisdom in the form of the tortoise. Embedded in the sym-
bolism of tortoise and blue sunglasses is the strategy to revisit
inviolate areas in the African consciousness by way of pre-colonial
spiritual and mythic frames, and to initiate an active dialogue with
cultural imperialism and Western genres and literary tradition. This
strategy pervades the novel, which launches the effort to rethink and
rediscover the invisible and unbreakable things in Africas pre-
colonial past at a time when the project of national reconstruction
looms large. Meanwhile, the ideological aberrations conveyed in this
story-within-a-story should also be noticed. Above all, the novel
celebrates change and transformation resulting from interactions
among cultures. The tortoise is African traditional wisdom, while the
blue sunglasses are a Western product. Like the ancient mask that lets
Azaro see other aspects of reality but rips his face raw, the sunglasses
that shed Mums eyes from the burning heat also suggest a relativity
of perception. Obviously, Okri proposes a critical and ambivalent
attitude toward the role of the mask, the sunglasses, and the camera,
all of which take the form of a third eye that sees invisible realities at
some point in the novel.

132
The past reflected and re-created

An eye opened at the centre of Azaros forehead reinforces his status

as a narrator to recount historical reality in both actual and possible
worlds. With this privileged third eye, he sees through the white suit,
masks, mirrors, glasses and photographs, unveiling the truth lies
beneath them. The fancy, dazzling appearance does not necessarily
tell the truth. For example, Madame Koto hides her evil, bejewelled
eyes behind her glasses and Dads opponent has legs of a spiderous
animal inside the white suit (Famished, p.541). In a sense, the
dialectic of revealing and concealing is central to the novel that
questions the very nature of reality. Composed of various stories and
complex visions, The Famished Road strives to present the world at
different levels of existence. Describing the world of the every day as
an undiscovered continent, this section looks at the socio-realistic
dimension of historical reality from Ricoeurs concept of the Same. In
order to heighten the socio-realistic aspect of history, the section
focuses on non-esoteric episodes in which photograph or Photo-
grapher the character has a principal position. Photography, according
to Linda Hutcheon, is in no way innocent of cultural formation, yet
it is in a very real sense technically tied to the real, or at least, to the
visual and the actual (Hutcheon, pp.445). The statement implies that
photography is an inherently paradoxical medium whose relation-
ship to the real is contradictory, moving between the polarities of true
and false (Ibid., p.121). By means of photographic representation, the
photograph in The Famished Road reveals part of the truth that
narrative representation with its limitation fails to uncover.
If the past survive[s] by leaving a trace, this trace is captured
and consolidated in the text by the image of the photograph (Ricoeur,
Reality, p.11). History is defined, interestingly, as an imaginary pic-
ture of the past (Collingwood, p.248). In order to re-enact the past in
the present, the historian, Ricoeur contends, has a double task: to
construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense, and to construct a
picture of things as they really were and of events as they really
happened (Reality, p.9). Under the sign of the Same, Ricoeur studies

133
the reality of the historical past in terms of looking at the past as a re-
enactment in the present by documentary interpretation and the
constructions of imagination (Ibid., p.6). In The Famished Road, the
documentary aspect of historical reality comes from Azaros des-
cription of the daily life in his small ghetto community: hunger and
squalor, bloody riots and drunken parties, inhuman working condi-
tions and rat-infested homes. The imaginative reconstruction of the
historical past is derived from the reality framed in the photograph.
Returning home after his first wandering to the spirit world, Azaro
says that he is happy to be back home because he can smell the warm
presences and the tender energies of his parents everywhere in the
room (Famished, p.40). As he looks around, his eyes meet the family
photographs on the wall:

In one of the pictures Mum sat sideways on a chair. She had a lot of powder on
her face, and she had the coy smile of a village maiden. Dad stood next to her.
He had on a baggy pair of trousers, a white shirt, and an askew tie. His coat was
much too small for him. [] His strong eyes and his solid jaw dared the camera.
[] There was another photograph in which I sat between them, small between
them, small between two guardians. There were smiles of shy sweetness on our
faces. As I stared at the photograph in that little room where the lamp produced
more black smoke than illumination, I wondered where the sweetness had gone
(Ibid.).

As traces left by the past in the present, these family photographs

underscore the pastness of the past, revealing the gap between realities
as life lived now and what the photographs reflect. In the first
photograph, Mum is a coy village maiden with her powdered face, and
Dad dares the camera to contradict him even in a formal dress. As
material traces of the past, these family photographs stand for and
represent the past in the sense that the trace takes place of the past,
absent from historical discourse (Ricoeur, Reality, p.2). What is
absent in the present reality is the sweetness on their faces captured in
the second family photograph. It has gone because of poverty,
symbolized in the image of black smoke from the lamp. Comparing
the reality in the photographs with that of the here and now, these
photographs reflect a partial truth and represent perhaps a better
historical reality preceding the narrative time of the book.

134
 Even if they are grounded in the historical discourse, photo-
graphs reflect as much as distort the reality of the past. It is at Azaros
homecoming party that the photographer Jeremiah makes his first
appearance in the novel.4 Though his name is soon forgotten and he is
simply known as the photographer, the photographer exposes through
the lens of his camera the suffering and harsh realities in an African
nation abiding for its independence. The photographer gives many
instructions as he sets up his camera, telling the people to contort their
heads, making Dad twist his legs, Mum hold her neck at an awkward
angle, and Azaro fix a quite insane smile on his face before he
embarks on dramatic poses himself to flash the camera. When the
group photograph comes out, Azaro is surprised that:

The pictures were grained, there were dots over our faces, smudges everywhere.
Dad looked as if he had a patch over one eye, Mum was blurred in both eyes,
the children were like squirrels, and I resembled a rabbit. We all looked like
celebrating refugees. We were cramped, and hungry, and our smiles were fixed.
The room appeared to be constructed out of garbage and together we seemed a
people who had never known happiness. Those of us that smiled had our faces
contorted into grimaces, like people who had been defeated but who smile
when a camera is trained on them. (Famished, p.107)

Though the people are made to smile especially for the camera, the
photograph reveals misery instead of festivity. Therefore, the photo-
graph represents and re-enacts the past in the peoples mind with a
difference. Ricoeur defines re-enactment as such: re-enacting does
not consist in reliving but in rethinking, and rethinking already
contains the critical moment that forces us to take the detour by way
of the historical imagination, that marks the specificity of history in
relation to the observation of a given present (Ricoeur, Reality, p.8).

4 Jeremiah was the name of a Hebrew prophet in the seventh-century BC, who
attempted to warn his fellow Jews against moral decay. Jeremiah the Photo-
grapher in Okris The Famished Road has a prophetic stature in that he presents
to the outside world an unknown reality in a newly independence African
country. Later in the book, he is treated like a mythic hero and gains magical
power. Brenda Cooper thinks there is strong evidence that Okri has self-
consciously portrayed the photographers function as constructing a new myth
in Magical Realism in West African Fiction (London: Routledge, 1998) p.96.

135
If the photograph stands for a given present, through historical im-
agination in the form of rethinking, the reality of the historical past is
re-enacted in the mind of those who look at the photograph. With the
smudges and strangeness, the photograph tells a different kind of truth,
the truth hidden behind the painted and required smile. The
photographers role takes great importance when he turns his camera
to the political corruption and violence that is a historical reality in
postcolonial Nigeria.
The first public appearance of politics in the novel is about the
Party of the Rich bringing rotten powdered milk to bribe the poor and
bringing violence to the neighbourhood. The photographer records
this event with his camera, taking pictures of the miserable landlord
and the surging crowd, and the thugs flexing their muscles (Fam-
ished, pp.147, 148). Shortly after, the secret faces of politics are
unveiled as the contaminated milk causes endemic vomiting and
sickness. Poisoned by the milk himself, the photographer went from
housefront to housefront, taking pictures of the milk-heaps and vomit
outside the houses and of sick children, men in contorted forms of
agony, women in attitudes of hungry outrage (Ibid., p.156). The
photographer displays these pictures in the glass cabinet outside his
studio that becomes a public galley in the ghetto community and he
becomes a local newspaper to the outside world (Ibid., p.167). When
the party of bad politics returned in the evening, the photographer
frenziedly took [] pictures of the party thugs whipping people
(Ibid., p.181). The photographer is arrested and tortured for recording
the crime and corruption of the Party of the Rich. Prison seemed to
have changed him and he went around with a strange new air of myth
about him, as if he had conceived heroic roles for himself during the
short time he had been away (Ibid., p.183). The photographer plays a
heroic role in documenting the peoples resistance against bad politics
and turning it into newspaper headlines. Azaro says: we were as-
tonished that something we did with such absence of planning,
something that we had done in such a small corner of the great globe,
could gain such prominence:

For the first time in our lives we as a people had appeared in the newspapers.
We were heroes in our own drama, heroes of our own protest. There were

136
 pictures of us, men and women and children, standing helplessly round heaps of
the politicians milk. There were pictures of us raging, attacking the van, rioting
against the cheap methods of politicians, humiliating the thugs of politics,
burning their lies (Ibid., p.184).

Unlike the early family and group photographs, these photographs

present to the outside world a less-known reality in the history of new
Nigeria. A significant change takes place as the photographer deve-
lops and becomes more socially aware and politically active.
The photographer and his photographs become threatening to the
politicians. Azaro imagines that the photographer and himself are shut
in a glass cabinet which would not break and they are turned into a
photograph (Ibid., p.204). The photographer becomes a prey to the
political thugs who chase him around and beat him up. The camera
fell from the photographers hands. I heard people screaming inside
the camera. The thugs jumped on the camera and stamped on it, trying
to crush and destroy it. And the people who were inside the camera,
who were waiting to become real, and who were trying to get out,
began wailing and wouldnt stop (Ibid.). To destroy the camera
means to deprive the photographer of his particular way of repre-
senting and constructing the historical past, and to deprive him of a
third eye through which he tell[s] the truth, document[s] history and
capture[s] social reality (Cooper, p.108). Sadly but truly, only Azaro
notices the irreplaceable role the photographer plays in the community,
whose second resistance against the political thugs seems unreal
without the hard evidence framed in a photograph. The only thing
that was missing, Azaro says, was the photographer to record the
events of the night and make them real with his magical instrument
(Famished, p.213):

We feared that the photographer had been murdered. His glass cabinet remained
permanently shattered. It looked misbegotten. It became a small representation
of what powerful forces in society can do if anyone speaks out against their
corruptions. And because the photographer hadnt been there to record what
had happened that night, nothing of the events appeared in the newspapers. It
was as if the events were never real. They assumed the status of rumour. (Ibid.,
p.214)

137
As a political refugee, the photographer hides himself from the wrath
of the rich and corrupted politicians whose crime and chicanery he
exposes. He goes into one hiding place after another, appearing and
vanishing without warning. The photographers heroism develops as
he helps people fight and survive their daily trials and tribulations
through his photographs.
His heroic persona assumes a mythic grandeur, as Azaro sees
that even the world has become a picture, as if God were The Great
Photographer (Ibid., p.328). When the photographer flashes his
camera like a magician, ghosts emerged from the light and melted,
stunned, at his feet (Ibid., p.55). Interestingly, the first thing for the
mythic photographer is to rid Azaros family of their rats by using his
magical power. With big and bright eyes full of fear and wisdom,
the photographer says that he understands the sounds of the rats and
can tell their size by listening to them (Ibid., pp.221, 222). He tells
Azaro that he knows a good poison for killing these rats and promises
to bring some. During his next visit, the photographer brings with him
a little round, transparent bottle with a yellow powder inside which
is the most powerful rat poison in the world (Ibid., p.235). The
photographer tells Azaro that he can kill the rats with his powerful
medicine and secret charm, and they must kill the rats because rats
are never satisfied: they are like bad politicians and imperialists and
rich people. They eat up property. They eat up everything in sight.
And one day when they are hungry they will eat us up (Ibid., p.272).
The hunger of the rats is reminiscent of the hunger of the famished
road. The photographers ability to kill the rats hints at his bravery to
fight against the famished road that eats up its people.
The photographers disbelief in the ancient myth of the famished
road enhances his role as a mythic hero. He will be an International
Photographer, travell[ing] all the roads of the world because he is
not afraid of the King of the Road and visiting other continents.
Flying around the universe. [] Taking photographs of the interest-
ing things that he displays by magic to the whole world (Ibid.,
p.303). The photographer then shows Azaro a bundle of photographs:

There were pictures of a fishing festival, of people on the Day of Masquerades.

The Egunguns were bizarre, fantastic, and big; some were very ugly; others

138
 were beautiful like those maidens of the sea who wear an eternal smile of
riddles; in some of the pictures the men had whips and were lashing at one
another. There were images of a great riot. Students and wild men and angry
women were throwing stones at vans. There were others of market women
running, of white people sitting on an expanse of luxurious beaches, under big
umbrellas, with black men serving them drinks; pictures of a child on a crying
mothers back; of a house burning; of a funeral; of a party, with people dancing,
womens skirts lifting, baring lovely thighs. And then I came upon the strangest
photograph of them all, which the photographer said he had got from another
planet. It was of a man hanging by his neck from a tree (Ibid., p.304).

Significantly, the photographer explains the horror of lynching as

something taking place in another continent (Ibid., p.305). When
asked why some white people hanged the man, the photographer
tells Azaro, who is too young to hear all this, that it is because they
dont like piano music (Ibid.). Implicit in piano music is the unity of
the black and white keys, a metaphor of racial connectedness (Cooper,
p.109). With the symbolism of piano music, the photographer strikes
upon a universal truth of racial discrimination and racist exploitation.
His greater knowledge and experience build up the credibility of his
narrative in the novel. Even though the photographer disappears from
the next five Books, he is to be remembered by Azaro as the
Photographer, a glass cabinet and a flashing camera, travelling all
the roads of the world and documenting the only reality that can be
exposed by the physical evidence of the photograph in societies ruled
by corrupted politicians and crooked businessmen (Famished, p.306).
By means of his camera, the photographer is able to see the world
with a third eye and to mediate between what is seen and what isnt,
making the invisible things visible and re-creating different angles of
depicting reality, even presenting it in a way that is larger-than-life for
the sake of revealing truths otherwise unnoticed and hidden.
In retrospect, many African writers have worked on the
symbolism of the road. For example, Soyinka has a play entitled The
Road (1965), which demonstrates various relationships between
underclass people and the road in its technological as well as
metaphysical senses. Responding to the question whether The Fam-
ished Road raises memories in the readers mind of Soyinkas play,
Okri explains that there is no connection between them. My road is

139
quite different, Okri states explicitly, [m]y road is a way. Its a road
that is meant to take you from one place to another, on a journey,
towards a destination (Wilkinson, p.83). Okris road is different
because it is famished and unfinished. Viewed as part of his
literary project, first of all, The Famished Road is the very beginning
of a trilogy of novels in which Okri seek[s] to combine Western
literary antecedents with modes of narration informed by Africas
powerful tradition of oral and mythic narrative (Gates, p.3). In other
words, the novel displays a new way of rethinking postcolonial
themes and redirecting postcolonial fiction through the combination of
Western and African aesthetics. Second, The Famished Road calls on
a historical project to recover forgotten values of myth, which are
reinterpreted in Songs of Enchantment as undiscovered secrets and
mysteries of The African Way: The Way of freedom and power and
imaginative life; The Way that keeps the mind open to the existence
beyond [] earthly sphere (Songs, p.160). The way is further devel-
oped in Infinite Riches as something of grand image or music of our
collective souls, of our immense possibilities, our infinite riches
(Infinite, p.187). Rediscovering Africa in terms of its rich aesthetic
and mythic tradition as well as the unbreakable and creative spirit of
its people, The Famished Road leads to new possibilities of envi-
sioning the world and enlarging historical reality.

140
Chapter Five
Conclusion

[T]hrough th[e] recovery of the capacity of language to create and re-create, we

discover reality itself in the process of being created. So we are connected with
this dimension of reality which is itself unfinished, which is [] the
potentiality to see things in terms of potentialities and not in terms of actualities
(Paul Ricoeur, Poetry and Possibility, p.462).

In concluding this book on the comparative study of fiction and

history in the works of three contemporary writers Toni Morrison,
V.S. Naipaul and Ben Okri I would like to explore a bit further the
specific narrative strategies they have designed to combat historical
negation, absence and incompleteness for African-American, Indo-
Trinidadian, and Nigerian people and community. In their works of
fiction, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri revisit and render particular
phases and experiences in human history. That is, Morrison gives
voice to the unspoken aspect in the interior life of African-American
slaves and ex-slaves, Naipaul deals with the unwritten experience in
the diasporic world of East Indian Trinidadians, and Okri lays
emphasis on reinvigorating and reassessing the mythic structure of
African aesthetics and worldviews in a postcolonial and post-inde-
pendent milieu.
In light of Aristotles perception that history expresses the
particular and poetry the universal, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri have
raised universal human issues by probing and re-creating particular
segments of history in their novels. Morrison, Naipaul and Okri have
also commented on the word universal in one way or another on
different occasions. For Morrison, the universal implies a race-free
readership against which the writerly imagination of a black author
is measured or tested (Playing, p.xii). Exemplified by Beloved,
Morrisons fiction discloses an ongoing mission to bring the four-
hundred-year-old Africanist presence out from the margin of the
dominant discourse, and to bring literary blackness out from the
shadow of literary whiteness. When talking about Our Universal
Civilization, Naipaul describes it as the civilization that has given
him the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and [] the
means to fulfill that prompting; the civilization that has enabled him
to make th[e] journey from the periphery to the centre (p.191). The
literary prompting, the writing ambition, and the journey are primary
motifs in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. As a matter
of fact, Naipaul has replayed these themes in many of his fictional and
non-fictional texts. Responding to the commentary that a universal
history is delineated in the last part of his book The Famished Road;
Okri re-phrases it as a universal suffering (Wilkinson, p.86). In so
doing, Okri not only underscores the suffering experienced by the
poorest and the most powerless in a world of injustice and inequality,
but also hints at an ancient truth that man learns by suffering. Above
all, on account of their separate nationality, gender, race and cultural
tradition, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri have presented in their fiction
dissimilar ways of conceiving the world, envisioning social reality,
and interpreting human history.
It is suggested that Aristotle speaks of poetics for all kinds of
making in terms of language in history and poetry despite the labels
the particular and the universal (Poetry, p.452). Considering that
poetry preserves the width [and] breadth of language, Ricoeur ad-
vances this notion by saying that [l]anguage in the making celebrates
reality in the making (Ibid., pp.448, 452). Through the creativity of
language and the gift of writing, Morrison, Naipaul and Okri unfold
the multiplicity of reality, revealing particular historical knowledge
and sharable common truths. While proposing there is another layer
of reality that only poetry may reach and express, Ricoeur explains
that he understands poetry in a broad sense to mean not only lyric
fiction but also narrative fiction, in which a creation of productive
imagination [] projects a world of its own (Ibid., p.452). Pre-
sumably a product of imagination or invention, fiction is free from the
constraint of verifiable facts and free to transmit and transform what
really happened. As discussed in previous chapters, Morrisons Be-
loved, Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, and
Okris The Famished Road are generically hybrid works blurring the
boundaries between fiction and history. Whats more, Beloved is the

142
first book of a trilogy grounded in documentary materials, and The
Famished Road is the first of three novels told by an abiku protagonist
about the history of a postcolonial Africa. Sharing affinities in theme
and structure, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are two
constituents in a composite opus, which records Naipauls endeavour
to come to terms with the cultures and histories that he has inherited.
Thus said, the following discussion will be divided into three parts,
with each focusing on a specific narrative strategy to rectify the
incompleteness of history.

Morrisons romance of the shadow

Fully aware of the absence of the interior life of African-American

ancestors in slave autobiographical narratives, Morrison compares the
way she accesses their interior life to a kind of literary archaeology,
which is based on some information and a little bit of guesswork
(Site, p.112). She discovers documentary information in the re-
mains that have been left by the past, and reconstruct[s] the world
by imagining what these remains might imply (Ibid.). Morrison also
explains that the work she wishes to do as a writer is to extend, fill in
and complement slave autobiographical narratives (Ibid., p.120).
Most significantly, she wishes to part the veil masking the peculiar
African-American historical past. By saying so, Morrison draws
attention not only to the interior life deliberately excised or left from
slave autobiographical narratives, but also to the Africanist presence
that has been concealed and marginalized in the canonical history of
American literature and culture.
Using a shadowless participation to symbolize the narrative
strategy that Morrison has taken to establish her literary archaeology
for African-Americans, the previous chapter on Beloved has con-
sidered the hybrid and unfinished nature of Morrisons project from
Ricoeurs views on reconstructing the reality of the historical past.
Embracing slave narrative, ghost story, documentary and fictional

143
materials to combat the incomplete and discredited knowledge of
slavery, Beloved is Morrisons shadowless participation in the
literary imagination through her dialogue with the practice of ro-
mancing the shadow in American literature (Playing, p.29). By using
romance, Morrison reflects on the origin and development of
American literary tradition. Exploring two worlds the actual and the
possible in Beloved, Morrison visits the archaeological site of Afri-
can-American historical past through the mysterious Beloved and the
faculty of rememory (Site, p.117). Approaching romance from
another critical direction, Morrison looks at it as a cherished form of
expression because it makes possible an evasion of history, and
therefore, is attractive to people trying to escape from their recent past
(Playing, p.36). Nonetheless, romance offers writers not a narrow a-
historical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but entangle-
ment, and offers a platform to conquer human fears imaginatively
(Ibid., pp.36, 37). It is suggested that the shadow or fear has been
projected on and internalized by the Africanist presence in imagin-
ative literature. Hence, Morrison points out that a major theme in
American literature is the transfer of internal conflicts to a blank
darkness, to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies
(Ibid., p.38).
Depicting the blank darkness and silenced black bodies with
greater intensity and complexity in her fictional works, Morrison has
given history and voice back to African-American people. As a telling
example, Beloved exhibits Morrisons inimitable way of romancing
and rectifying the Africanist presence. To begin with, Beloved
demonstrates Morrisons critical reading and revisionary writing of
romancing the shadow in American literature, thus presenting
Morrison as an important heir to this literary tradition. Like her other
works of fiction, Beloved results from the way Morrison transforms
aspects of [her] social grounding into aspects of language (Ibid., p.4).
In this view, the personal has indeed become the political. In other
words, Beloved celebrates Morrison as an African-American woman
writer whose acute sensitivity of justice and historical mission has
prompted her to rectify the misconceptions of the slave history and re-
envision the Africanist presence in American literary imagination and
cultural tradition. With visionary insight and poetic language,

144
Morrisons Beloved tells different stories about African-American
ancestors, contests historical incompleteness and amnesia, and
discloses fundamental aspects of hidden reality in African-American
life and experience, past or present.

Naipauls historical darkness

While Morrisons project can be understood as a literary archaeology

of romancing the shadow connected with the Africanist presence in
imaginative literature, Naipaul assumes the responsibility of re-
creating the past and reconstructing the human story in his books
partly through inventive interpretations of historical document and
thus builds on the trace of a historical past. In order to do that,
Naipaul has had to go to original documents preserved in libraries and
museums, and sometimes he has had to travel to the sites of the
cultures themselves where traces of a history are unrecorded or
concealed from view. In addition to and beyond that, Naipauls
literary adventure has also been, first and foremost, the journey to
become a writer. It began with his leaving Trinidad at the age of
eighteen for a university education in England, which helped him
fulfill the writing ambition that has been passed down to him from his
father. Secondly, literary adventure refers to Naipauls travelling to
reveal traces of history and illuminate areas of darkness in different
cultures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Lastly, literary adventure is
to be understood in terms of Naipauls experimentation in modes of
representation that would incorporate his experience as an ex-colonial
and exile. In general, this threefold literary adventure is a predominant
theme in Naipauls works of fiction and non-fiction. Also, this
threefold literary adventure is conveyed through the varying inter-
pretations of a little chasm, a metaphor used to signify Naipauls
narrative strategy to illuminate areas of darkness.
Studying The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World as
primary texts, the previous chapter on Naipauls transformation of

145
history has discussed his searching for a proper style to bring his
personal story, the stories of invented characters, and the untold
stories of historical figures into the larger story he writes about
Trinidad and England. As a result, in The Enigma of Arrival and A
Way in the World, autobiography, travel writing, social commentary,
character analysis, history, and fiction mix. Nevertheless, the final
product is fiction, as Naipaul purposely subtitles these two books as
novels. At a very early age, Naipaul recounts, I was given the
ambition to write books, and specifically to write novels, which is
assumed to be the highest form (Our Universal Civilization p.190).
Through writing, Naipaul has arrived at a new idea of himself and his
world. He began his career as someone with incomplete knowledge
of a personal and cultural past; he faced a historical darkness
(Prologue, pp.20, 46). In his 1974 essay Conrads Darkness,
Naipaul identifies his world the small island of Trinidad in the
mouth of the Orinoco River as one of the Conradian dark places of
the earth (p.205). This direct reference to Conrad is significant at
least in two senses. First of all, Conrad is envisioned by Naipaul as
someone who sixty to seventy years ago meditated on the world that
Naipaul also encountered when he began his career as a colonial
writer (Ibid., p.210). Secondly, Naipaul looks up to Conrad as a
beacon light during his preparations for his ambition to become a
writer, who had been everywhere before [him]. Not as a man with a
cause, but a man offering, [] a vision of the worlds half-made
societies [] continuously made and unmade themselves (Ibid.,
p.208). In fact, in his fictional and non-fictional works Naipaul has
explored the worlds half-made societies in Asia, Africa, the Carib-
bean, and South America.
By identifying with Conrad and aligning his literary adventure
with that of Conrads, Naipaul alludes to the existence of a specific
literary tradition, in which areas of darkness are at the centre of the
creative imagination. In order to render and illuminate areas of
darkness in his books, Naipaul needs a certain kind of sensibility;
[] a certain gift of language; and most of all, a particular literary
form (Our Universal Civilization, p.190). The English language and
Naipauls hybrid prose style make possible for him to translate and
transform postcolonial histories from the peculiar sensibility of an

146
exile and ex-colonial in a European metropolis. Most significantly,
exemplified by The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World,
Naipaul has arrived on the English literary scene and brought to light
concealed histories as well as neglected realities through personalizing
and concretizing the cultural and historical past of England and
Trinidad.

Okris book of the invisible

Like Naipaul, who illuminates areas of darkness and brings to the

surface unnoticed dimensions of reality, Okri takes a literary journey
to rediscover and rethink the invisible and the mythic in the history of
a postcolonial Africa. Talking about his third novel The Famished
Road, Okri has said that his primary sources are the invisible books
of the spirit, and the titular metaphor road is meant to be a way
that takes people from one place to another on a journey, towards a
destination (Wilkinson, pp.88, 83). By inventing an abiku narrator-
protagonist, a spirit-child wandering in many different worlds, The
Famished Road makes visible what is usually invisible and inac-
cessible, thus challenging the notion of a single and empirical history
as well as an objective and coherent reality. In the abikus con-
sciousness, the world of the living and the dead, actualities and
dreams, history and myth are blurred. Hence, the novel depicts a
historical and fictional reality, which is simultaneously mythic, surreal
and magical. The previous chapter has analyzed Okris narrative
strategy to enlarge historical reality in The Famished Road in terms of
his emphasis on the regenerative capacity, the mythic and imaginative
vitality of African people and ideology.
In his collection of essays A Way of Being Free (1997) Okri
has described narrative and dreams as shar[ing] the same insub-
stantiality, and hav[ing] the hidden capacity to alter reality (p.49).
Therefore, Okris call to redream th[e] world and make the dream
real invites African people and community to confront their historical

147
past and change their usual way of perceiving reality; in particular, to
look at the world with new eyes and to look at [them]selves
differently (Famished, p.571). Apparently, Okri draws special at-
tention to the power of dreaming and narrative in helping people
realize their dreams and create a new world of equality and justice, of
understanding and peace. In this sense, The Famished Road and its
sequels Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches focus on
fundamental human issues, exploring the hope and possibilities for
people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to lead meaningful
lives together in a postcolonial world where suffering, inequality,
injustice, exploitation, and warfare are harsh daily realities.
However, Okri does not offer hope cheaply. One should be very,
very serious when one is going to talk about hope, he contends,
[o]ne has to know about the very hard facts of the world and one has
to look at them and know how deadly and powerful they are before
one can begin to think or dream oneself into positions out of which
hope and then possibilities can come. Its one of the steps I try to take
in [The Famished Road] (Wilkinson, p.88). Specifically, in The
Famished Road the hard facts of the world are filtered through
Azaros mysterious phantasmagorias and the photographic represent-
ation of the condition of Western African ghetto communities. In
addition, the hard facts of the world are embedded in Dads untiring
fights for justice and contrasted to his fantastic dreams for a socialist
utopia in a post-independent Africa. While exposing the relativity of
vision, The Famished Road shows a way of taking a journey to see life
in different territories and reality at different levels of consciousness
as well as history in different degrees of invisibility. For example,
Okri has depicted Azaros peculiar state of existence and conscious-
ness as an important access to alternative realities and invisible books
of history. As a matter of fact, Okris narrative strategy combines
seemingly contradictory elements from West African mythology and
oral tradition with European rationality and literary tradition. In so
doing, Okri probes the creativity of language in representing the
unbreakable aspects of African consciousness and the mythic frame of
African aesthetics. Envisaging The Famished Road as a novel
mov[ing] towards infinity, Okri hints at the fluidity of human life,

148
the growth of human experience, and the endless possibilities within
human limitations.
Reading Morrisons Beloved, Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival
and A Way in the World, and Okris The Famished Road from the
interspace, or rather, the interconnectedness of history and fiction, this
book studies different narrative strategies that Morrison, Naipaul and
Okri have devised to counteract the restricted view of reality and the
incompleteness of history. With reference to Paul Ricoeurs
philosophy, especially his analyses of representation in The Reality of
the Historical Past according to the three categories the Same, the
Other, and the Analogue, this book examines Morrisons, Naipauls
and Okris literary project for their own respective people and
community, to whom the history of slavery, diaspora, and postcolonial
experience has been buried and unacknowledged in the actual past.
Trying to establish a literary archaeology through redefining the slave-
narrative tradition and unveiling the interior life of African-American
ancestors, Morrison has revealed, rectified and rewritten the practice
of romancing the Africanist presence in literary imagination and in
the sense of Americanness. Taking a literary adventure to illuminate
areas of darkness in the diasporic world of East Indian Trinidadians,
Naipaul has arrived on the English literary scene by way of translating
and transforming the history of the place through personalized and
concretized histories. Similarly, Okri has depicted a literary journey to
reveal the invisible and the mythic aspects of Nigerian history by
rediscovering and rejuvenating the unnoticed but unbroken value of
West African thinking and way of life in postcolonial situations.
Thanks to the creativity of language and the power of imagination,
Beloved, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, as well as
The Famished Road present a world of many horizons, which
celebrates life, history, and reality in an ongoing process of being
created, reinterpreted, and re-envisioned.

149
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Index
A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)
102, 1101
Achebe, Chinua 22, 112
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The
(Mark Twain) 26
Africanist presence 434, 46, 50, 141,
1434, 149
Africans, The (David Lamb) 112
A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul)
101
Anthills of the Savannah (Chinua
Achebe) 22
Areas of darkness 14, 27, 778, 98, 109,
1457, 149
A Way of Being Free (Ben Okri) 147
Barnouw, Dagmar 87
Berlin Conference 111
Black Book, The (Toni Morrison (ed.))
48
Bluest Eye, The (Toni Morrison) 33,
44
Borges, Jorge Luis 33
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, The 48
Civil War 48
Collingwood, R.G. 15, 50, 678, 76, 80,
82
Confessions of Nat Turner, The
(William Styron) 18
Cooper, Brenda 135, 137
Dialogic Imagination, The (Bakhtin) 69
Diaspora 12, 17, 24, 42, 149
Discovery of the Large, Rich, and
Beautiful Empire of Guiana, The (Sir
Walter Raleigh) 85
El Dorado 80, 85
Emancipation Proclamation 48
Finding the Center (V.S. Naipaul) 101,
104
Flowers and Shadows (Ben Okri) 23
Francisco Miranda 80, 847
Freud, Sigmund 17, 25
Giorgio de Chirico 81
Harlem Book of the Dead, The (Camille
Billops) 49
Hayward, Helen 102
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 110
1
Hughes, Peter 80
Hutcheon, Linda 51
Idanre and Other Poems (Wole Soyinka)
22
Idea of History, The (R.G. Collingwood)
15
In a Free State (V.S. Naipaul) 102
Infinite Riches (Ben Okri) 115, 117, 120,
140, 148
In Memoriam (Tennyson) 106
Janet, Pierre 17
Jazz (Toni Morrison) 34, 49, 77
Jubilee (Margaret Walker) 18
King, Bruce 102
Kristeva, Julia 91
Literary blackness 26, 44, 46, 66,
141
Literary whiteness 26, 446, 142
Loss of El Dorado, The (V.S.
Naipaul) 87, 1023
Love (Toni Morrison) 44
Magical Realism 401
Magical Realism in West African
Fiction (Brenda Cooper) 135
Margaret Garner 19, 35, 4851, 58,
73
Memory, History, Forgetting (Paul
Ricoeur) 11
Middle Passage 17, 19, 5960, 636, 73
Miguel Street (V.S. Naipaul) 38, 102
Moses and Monotheism (Sigmund
Freud) 25
Myth, Literature and the African World
(Wole Soyinka) 113
Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself (Frederick
Douglass) 18
Palm-Wine Drinkard, The (Amos
Tutuola) 22
Paradise (Toni Morrison) 34, 49, 69, 72,
77
Politics of Postmodernism, The (Linda
Hutcheon) 51
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (Toni
Morrison) 19, 46
Reality of the Historical Past, The (Paul
160
Ricoeur) 12, 32, 68, 756, 105, 108,
113, 126, 149
Reconstruction 48
Rememory 19, 247, 31, 36, 47, 556,
614, 70, 73, 76, 144
Scarlet Letter, The (Nathaniel Haw-
thorne) 26
Sent For You Yesterday (John Edgar
Wideman) 43
Sir Walter Raleigh 80, 847
Slavery 12, 14, 178, 20, 24, 267, 34
6, 423, 48, 502, 557, 59, 623,
667, 70, 734, 144, 149
Slave narratives 14, 1720, 34, 47, 501,
66
Songs of Enchantment (Ben Okri) 115,
117, 140, 148
Soyinka, Wole 22, 1123, 139
Tropics of Discourse (Hayden White) 12
Ulysses (James Joyce) 14
Uncle Toms Cabin (Harriet Beecher
Stowe) 18
Van Der Zee, James 49
Weiss, Timothy 878, 97, 111
White, Hayden 12, 32
Wideman, John Edgar 43
Winfrey, Oprah 48
Yoruba 29, 117, 1312