“Fold the paper and pass it on”: Historical silences and the contrapuntal in Andrea Levy’s fiction

Abstract

Over the course of her four novels to date, Andrea Levy’s fiction has become increasingly concerned with historicity and increasingly polyvocal in form. While Levy is not usually taken to be a “postcolonial” writer, this article argues that it is intellectually profitable to read her work within a postcolonial interpretative frame. With reference to Edward Said’s theorization of the contrapuntal, it argues that Levy’s fiction can be read as approaching Britain’s imperial history and, in turn, its contemporary moment is what we might usefully term a contrapuntal form. Examining each of her four novels to date but focusing in particular on the more recent works, I draw attention to formal and conceptual developments in her work, arguing that they are indicative of an attempt to understand empire and its aftermath as a series of intertwined and interdependent histories.

Keywords:

• Andrea Levy
• contemporary British fiction
• postcolonial criticism
• contrapuntal
• Edward Said

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Drs Priya Gopal and Chris Warnes for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this work.

Notes

1. Although her third, Fruit of the Lemon, does disrupt this rather neat correlation in employing a single narrator, in a further coincidence that narrator does record a series of (hi)stories “as told” to her by three of her relatives.

2. See Toplu, who suggests that it is Faith’s own “self‐denial of her blackness [that] reaches a climax” (np). For a more detailed analysis of the ways in which a pattern of silencing and erasure throughout Faith’s life brings about her breakdown, see Saez.