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Abstract
Written from the culmination point of exile in the universities of Denver and Yale, the two fictional autobiographies of Es'kia Mphahlele and Noel Chabani Manganyi mobilize reverie to hold in counterpoise the harsh reality of hostile home and exile. The article argues, through a reading of these texts via ideas of double consciousness and temporality, that we need to interpret reverie at the level of the interpenetration of the subject and object as both counterpoint to and counterpart of the ‘I’ and ‘me’ of fictional autobiography. These fictional autobiographies are framed in the double temporality of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of exile, the most powerful trope of which is the near-escapism of reverie itself in the course of fantasies of violence. The fictional autobiography of exile – what is here called the wilderness text – becomes a line of flight imbued with a worldliness (a being-in-the world) that puts the body at stake as it contemplates and solidifies existing reality by doubling its representational time by means of reverie.
Notes
The Wanderers, Macmillan: London, 1971, was first published three years after it was successfully submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver, Colorado. Since then, it has been re-issued by Fontana Books in association with Collins: London and Glasgow. Throughout this article I use the 1973 Fontana edition.
Wehrs notes: ‘From Orphée Noir (1948) to his preface to Fanon's Les Damnes de la Terre (1961), Sartre depicted colonialism as emblematic of all forms of human violence and struggle against colonialism as paradigmatic of all resistance…Sartre's thought helped shape, and was shaped by, an intellectual climate in which ethical reflection was displaced onto a politics governed by the assumption that since Marxist revolution would bring justice, whatever promoted revolution was ethical’ (2003, 763).
The use of reverie in autobiographical fiction lends itself to Jessica Murray's use of the Derridian model of testimony to the extent that it breaks down the distinction between fiction and testimony, especially where testimonial engagement of past traumas benefits from literary fiction owing to ‘the intertwined nature of fiction and testimony’ (2008, 1).
In this article the reverie and its sense of endless futility give metaphysical content to the escape from the apartheid past in South Africa and the infelicitous future in the West and East African diaspora, inasmuch as it crystallizes the contemplation of private and political choices.
These are the kind of texts that Edward Said in The World, The Text, The Critic has described as texts that are ‘events and by that very fact what goes on in texts is affiliated to the circumstances that represent the text's interest’ (1983, 4).
For Sartre, freedom is an inescapable ontological condition, an argument he philosophically expounded through his famous Being and Nothingness and the trilogy of novels called Les chemins de la Liberté (Ways to Freedom). It is here that the double vision of which Sartre speaks in relation to Wright's fiction is everywhere evident in his own, notably but not exclusively in the representation of two forms of escapism, that is, Being-In-itself and Being-for-Others, through two central characters: Mathieu Delarue and the communist Brunet. The former, born in 1905 and a philosophy teacher like Sartre, lacks political commitment; the latter, bogged down by communist discipline, loses himself in the political crowd and ironically becomes alienated from the self. There is no doubt that Timi Tabane, who is born in the same place and time as Mphahlele and, like him, teaches in schools and universities, is a version of Mphahlele in the fashion of Sartre's Mathieu Delarue (by the way, the French name Delarue translates into ‘Of the road’ and loosely into ‘Wanderer’).
This article follows the delineation of Gaston Bachelard's metaphysics of reverie, as traced by Catherine J.S. Pickart Citation(1997) in Bachelard's phenomenological approaches, especially in his Poetics of Reverie (1969), the English translation of which appears in the United States a year before Mphahlele submits his PhD thesis. According to Pickart, Bachelard's is an increasingly subjective method that disavows ‘strong’ ontology and prefers ‘differential’ ontology, where the latter signals a recognition of ‘the interpenetration between subject and object made possible in reverie’, thus enabling enhancement and confirmation ‘through the mutual necessity of/for subject and object’ (1997, 68). This is crucial for my analysis, given its argument for reverie as symptomatic of multiplicity in its fragmented transferential relationships between subject and object, between man and nature, father and son, black and white races, male and female elements, etc., singularity and generality, as in an aporia.
Lewis Nkosi, in his Tasks and Masks (1981, 94), dismisses The Wanderers as an autobiographical novel that fails to recast its characters in a new light such that it is able to ‘reveal some imaginative purpose or central design’. Nkosi is obviously oblivious to, or fails to appreciate the significance of, the centrality of the reverie as a dis/ordering principle in the novel.
The self-conscious use of terminology usually associated with existentialism in the Preface is important with regard to the Sartrean-Fanonist signposts of Manganyi's philosophical orientation.
According to Deleuze: ‘What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity made up of many heterogenous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage's only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”’ (Deleuze and Parnet Citation1987, 69).
In his illuminating Introduction to the 1986 edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason (1947), David Caute notes that in Sartrean drama and fiction there is a recurrent theme of pseudo-revolt of ‘the wealthy boy who loves the poetry of Rimbaud and regards himself as the privileged spirit among the common herd’ (1986, xii).
Roger Bromley argues: ‘Diasporic cultural fictions produce an endless series of flexible cultural translations, arcs or bridges of new possibility, brought about by a creative fracturing of surface cultural representations’ (2000, 97).
The accusation of symbolic infanticide unfortunately missed the benefit of depth psychology, according to which the image of death expressed ‘the need for “an absolute sublimation” couched in “an idealized transformation of imagined reality”’ (Pickart Citation1997, 66).
Jameson acknowledges this campaign as the central theme of Deleuze's philosophy and, in the same breath, notes that Deleuze – and latterly Jean-Francois Lyotard – ‘acknowledges the priority of Sartre's early Transcendence of the Ego’ (2003, 10).
In Mphahlele's Citation1974 edition of The African Image (1974, 12), he refers to the riots and the circumstances that led to them as vindicating a rhetoric of revolt in Wright, especially in the latter's insistence that Bigger Thomas is not ‘conceived merely as a black man: he is the universal rebel’.