Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (review)

Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning considers a collection of novelists with diverse relationships to colonialism and slavery: J. M. Coetzee (white South African), Wilson Harris (mixed Guyanese), and Toni Morrison (African-American). Through his reading of Coetzee's Foe, The Life and Times of Michael K, and Waiting for the Barbarians, Harris's Palace of the Peacock, and Morrison's Beloved, Sam Durrant seeks to identify a general postcolonial aesthetic in which narration itself is an act of "inconsolable" mourning, with no closure in sight. This mourning, in turn, has an implicit pedagogical function: it teaches the postcolonial critic about the limits of historicism in comprehending postcoloniality and the ontological impact of racial oppression. The novels analyzed in Postcolonial Narrative, therefore, provide examples of the various aesthetic strategies used to represent racial oppression, but they also dramatize the anti-historicist, deconstructive methodologies that Durrant seeks to champion within postcolonial criticism.

In this regard, Postcolonial Narrative can be read as a literary-critical counterpart to the theories of difference, subalternity, and narrativity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Indeed, Durrant's notable achievement lies in developing and integrating these concepts while producing persuasive readings of postcolonial and ethnic literature—as opposed to engaging in criticism for the sole purpose of grinding a theoretical ax. Durrantis rarely polemical or heavy-handed in his tone, opting instead for a syncretic approach that seeks to ally postmodernist thought with both postcolonialism and Marxism. The clarity and nuance with which Durrant combines discussions of theory and critical method with the interpretation of the literature is one of the many pleasures of reading Postcolonial Narrative.

What is less satisfying is Durrant's lack of explanation as to why the narrative strategies employed by these three novelists—notably, they are of the fantastic/magical-realist variety—represent a general postcolonial narrative aesthetic. Durrant makes an assumption about "postcoloniality" that needs further investigation and elaboration. Without question, Coetzee, Harris, and Morrison represent racial oppression in nonrealist modes; this premise fits well with the anti-historicist theories celebrated by Postcolonial Narrative. But these theories are obviously neither the only strategies for representing the postcolonial nor the only methods for analyzing them. What is one to say about postcolonial and ethnic texts that clearly evoke realist and historicist modes of representation, in which specters of oppression are challenged or exorcised? Does reading these texts require different analytical paradigms? What, then, of Durrant's insistence—one that significantly waters down his theoretical syncretism—that only anti-historicist frameworks can grasp the materiality of racial oppression and postcoloniality?

For, despite its other subtleties, Postcolonial Narrative never wavers in its critique of historicism. Right away, we are informed that the book's project is to "contest the mainstream understanding of postcolonialism as a recuperative, historicizing project and argue for the centrality of a deconstructive, anti-historicist ethics of remembrance" (7), an ethics of "infinite obligation to others" (116) that Durrant finds operational in postcolonial writing as a whole. Postcolonial texts do not aim to monumentalize racial oppression, but are "engaged in a work of disruption rather than recovery, a revelation of the act of forgetting rather than of that which has been forgotten" (117), a work of mourning whose main task is to silently bear witness to the brutality of history.

Durrant explains that this mourning is located within the "unresolvable tension between [Freud's categories of] mourning and melancholia, between the need to come to terms with the past and the need never to forget" (77). Durrant's "mourning" is therefore informed by a deconstructive approach as opposed to a Freudian one: "[P]sychoanalysis, with its commitment to the well-being of the subject, encourages us to exorcise our ghosts, to come to terms with loss and move on. Deconstruction, with its commitment to the other, to that which 'unhinges' the subject, urges us to learn to...