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ABSTRACT
This essay offers an investigation into the characteristics or distinctive features of life writing in colonial and postcolonial spaces. Among the examples of life writing here considered are George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin and C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, and, less often treated in this context, works by Benjamin Franklin and James Joyce; stress is placed on the importance of American literature for early articulations of the problems and dilemmas of postcolonial life writing. Further emphasis is laid on place, and on the need for bibliographical research into the place of publication of works written in or concerned with colonial spaces.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Charles Lock has held the Professorship of English Literature at the University of Copenhagen since 1996. Educated at Oxford (M.A., D.Phil., 1982) he taught at the University of Karlstad in Sweden and then for 12 years at the University of Toronto. Among his publications are essays on Patrick White, Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Amos Tutuola and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Notes
1. For fictional reflection on these matters one can recommend the novel by Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives (1979), whose title plays between lives led and biographies written.
2. Lives of the Poets is not Johnson’s title but one of convenience, behind which lies a tangle of authorial intentions and bibliographical adjustments.
3. There may be books written by colonial subjects that are entirely in support of colonial governance, but these are seldom read; Kipling, John Buchan and others provide plenty of examples of books by members of the governing class in support of their own status, yet there is nuance in these, and some of them—such as the novels by Joyce Cary set in Nigeria—deserve renewed attention, not least in terms of life writing.
4. The term ‘Anglophone periphery’ may be thought anglocentric; there is no reason to deny the centrality of Britain in regard to publishing.
5. Though the most celebrated of early works by Caribbean writers, In the Castle of My Skin was not the first. Caribbean literature in English seems to have been inaugurated by Edgar Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder, published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1941; Mittelholzer’s second, A Morning at the Office, was published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1950, and by Doubleday, in the same year, under a contrastingly exotic title: A Morning in Trinidad.
6. In Pleasures of Exile (1960) Lamming discusses the way his first book had been presented and marketed in the US; for a detailed account see Lowe.
7. The claim is implicitly limited to European languages; it would be interesting to learn when Spanish and Portuguese readers and writers outside the Iberian Peninsula first articulated such anxieties.
8. The tendency is movingly anatomised by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, and is exemplified by Thomas Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember / The house where I was born … ’ from 1827.
9. Akenfield is atypical of the tradition of English place writing in that this is a fictional name to conceal and protect (for legal reasons) the identity of the place and its residents. Just as Walden is an indifferently located pond, so Akenfield is a ‘generic village’, and perhaps it was this that appealed to Bessie Head.
10. Those interested in Jean Rhys—a salient and brilliant exemplar of life writing within and around colonial spaces—must turn to the anecdotal memoirs of Diana Athill, Rhys’s editor at André Deutsch, herself a most engaging exponent of life writing in old age.
11. There are of course many books by Indians in English that were published in India in the nineteenth century, and even before; the concern here is with writing since the 1930s, during and beyond the struggle for independence.
12. In this flurry of coinages concerning discourses of the self and the emerging subject, recording and recorded, it should be noted that the word Bildungsroman is remarkably synchronic with ‘autobiography’ both in its coinage and in its first widespread usage: ‘autobiography’ was coined by Southey in 1809 and was made famous as the title of Franklin’s memoirs when they were published in 1868; Bildungsroman was coined by Karl Morgenstern in 1819 and put into circulation by Dilthey in the 1870s.
13. I know of two writers, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (formerly James Ngugi) and Chinweizu, who have renounced the use of English; there may well be others. Chinweizu announced his intention in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, c. 1987.
14. “Eulogy to W. H. Auden (Read at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, October 17, 1983)”, The Arkansas Testament, 63–64.