Sam Durrant contends that in our shared postcolonial era,
narrative inherently serves as an act of mourning, one devoid of finality.
Consequently, in this milieu, Freud's initial attempt to differentiate between
mourning and melancholia loses its relevance. In order to elucidate this
process of postcolonial mourning, Durrant delves into J. M. Coetzee's novels
"The Life and Times of Michael K," "Foe," and "Waiting
for the Barbarians"; Wilson Harris's novella "Palace of the Peacock";
and Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved." While these literary works serve
as the scaffolding for Durrant's chapters, the specters of Walter Benjamin's
angel of history and Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx" also
permeate the discussion, evolving into both subjects and tools of interpretation.
These figures represent just a fraction of the diverse philosophical,
psychoanalytic, and literary critical influences that shape Durrant's
perspective.
Durrant's argument revolves around the idea of mourning
without closure in postcolonial narratives. He emphasizes that while authors
like Coetzee, Harris, and Morrison commemorate colonial histories, they also
share a broader vision of emancipation that transcends specific instances of
liberation, such as legal and electoral processes. Their works serve as a form
of "literary witnessing" aiming to establish a truly postcolonial
sense of community.
Durrant challenges the mainstream view of postcolonialism as
a recuperative, historicizing endeavor, advocating instead for a
deconstructive, anti-historicist ethics of remembrance. He identifies three
modes of postcolonial mourning exhibited by the discussed authors, drawing on
psychoanalysis and deconstruction to highlight the importance of learning to
coexist with ghosts rather than simply exorcising them.
In the first chapter, "Speechless before
Apartheid," Durrant employs a combination of negative dialectics and
deconstruction to analyze Coetzee's fiction. He asserts that it is through the
breakdown of conventional historical narrative that the materiality of history
becomes apparent. The bodies of characters like the native woman in
"Waiting for the Barbarians," Michael K in "The Life and Times
of Michael K," and Friday in "Foe" serve as dual sites—bearing
the weight of history while also embodying a narrative void, causing the
subject to seemingly vanish.
Durrant also references the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, using Freudian premises to frame his argument effectively. He
underscores that for the bereaved who engaged with the commission, the
retrieval of their loved ones' remains held greater significance than the mere
recounting of explanations, confessions, and excuses. The abused bodies in
Coetzee's fiction, he contends, symbolize the author's solidarity with the
unassuageable demands of the grieving, rather than offering mere consolation.
Durrant's approach to Coetzee's novels shares common ground
with previous interpretations, but he incorporates elements of psychoanalysis
and later Derrida into his analysis. However, there is a suggestion that more
direct engagement with earlier scholarship on the subject would have been
beneficial.
Durrant distinguishes between the dreamscapes within
Coetzee's fiction and the entirety of Harris's works, characterizing the latter
as a form of dream work in itself. According to Durrant, Harris assumes the
role of Tiresias, relinquishing his position as the authorial subject to become
a witness within the dream work of his fiction. He contends that Harris's
narration goes beyond mere event recounting, transforming into an event in its
own right—a site where history undergoes a profound change. This transformation
occurs outside the bounds of narrative chronology, dwelling within the material
realm, particularly the material body, which had been rendered intangible by the
brutality of modern history.
In contrast, Durrant posits that the material body truncates
the mourning process in Coetzee's secular vision. However, in Harris's
postsecular dream work, the material body becomes a sacramental host, offering
a potential source of hope in Coetzee and an acknowledgment of wasted lives in
Harris's work. Durrant urges readers to perceive in Harris's narrative a mode
of mourning that heralds the possibility of a community, not only one comprised
of others, but a communion of others wherein the impulse to consume that
underlies modern history transforms into a collective ethic of sustenance.
Harris's practice of "infinite rehearsal," akin to Nietzsche's
eternal return, thus acts as an antidote to the temporal devastation wrought by
modern history and melancholia.
While Durrant's argument is elegantly woven through the
spectral influences of Harris, Benjamin, Derrida, and Nietzsche, it prompts an
extratextual query about the authorization of authors. In apartheid-era South
Africa and within the globalized sphere of the Nobel committee, what has
conferred authority upon Coetzee, which he seems hesitant to fully embrace, and
what foundational support for his authority has he perennially lacked?
Similarly, in Harris's Guyanese, Caribbean, and postcolonial contexts, what has
sanctioned his enacted renunciation of his authorial subject and his creation
of sacramental fiction? What influences legitimize—and set limits on—the modes
of mourning each has chosen?
In the concluding chapter, focused on Toni Morrison's novel
"Beloved," Durrant extends his argument for a postcolonial
hermeneutics beyond the confines of recuperative historicization and the
assumptions of social constructivism. He accomplishes this by making a provocative
distinction between cultural memory and racial memory, emphasizing the
significance of the latter in his interpretive framework. For Durrant, while
cultural memory can assimilate into individual consciousness as a complement to
one's sense of identity, racial memory, manifested in the body, holds the
potential to obliterate this identity by submerging the individual within a
collective experience of negation.
Durrant turns to Freud's later work, "Moses and
Monotheism," to clarify his usage of the term "racial memory,"
noting that Freud doesn't employ it to imply biological determinism. Instead,
Durrant sees Freud's 1939 project as aligning with his own aspiration to
explore the collective psyche as something material yet outside the realm of
historicization. While the historicizing project captures and records cultural
memory, racial memory remains the clandestine guilt held within the body or
within the text. According to Durrant, registering—or more accurately, failing
to register—a violence perpetrated against the race as a collective act of
patricide is a way of retaining it within the family and turning it inward
against that family. This, for Durrant, encapsulates the essence of Beloved's
return. She embodies the infinite repetition of the original scene of violation—a
presence that stems from an event that resists historicization.
Drawing on Hortense Spillers' Lacanian theoretical
framework, Durrant argues that attempting to restore the dreams of Morrison's
characters to their rightful time and place inevitably confronts the elusive
temporality of trauma and thus the limitations of historicism.
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