Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (review)

While working on a book on the Nigerian novel during the 1990s, I asked a great many writers how they thought about the relationship between their craft and their society. A number of them told me something like this: "I would very much like to write fiction that is subjective, introspective, psychological, that deal with the existential situation of the individual, but I simply cannot do so at the present time. Nigeria's (or Africa's) political and economic circumstances are so dire, its social problems so urgent, that the novelist must treat these. To write about individual psychology would be irresponsible, even immoral." Some stressed that the collective preoccupations of the Nigerian novel were not based some inability of African writers to think on individual terms, some collective mind that found expression in fiction, but on a principled decision to eschew subjectivity for now in favor of social concerns.

Like these authors, literary scholars have usually associated modernist literature with individuality and a subjective point of view, and have suggested that compared with the realist or naturalist traditions earlier, modernism has been somewhat removed, if not divorced from social concerns. This common viewpoint may be mistaken, argues Pericles Lewis in Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel: "Perceiving a gap between the meaningful inner life of the individual consciousness and an outer world that shapes that inner life but seems in itself devoid of spiritual meaning, the modernists sought a means to bridge that gap." Some found this means through art, specifically formal experimentation, and it is this response that seems to hold the social world at arm's length. Yet others, Lewis goes on to argue, found a "less often noted means of mediating between the apparently hostile and meaningless social world and the meaningful but powerless consciousness of the individual novelist-hero. They found it in the idea of a national consciousness, which lent an apparently eternal, if not universal, significance to their isolated experience and offered a matrix through which to interpret events that otherwise appeared to lack any internal logic" (4).

Lewis suggests that sensing a crisis of the nation-state around the turn of the twentieth century, European modernists felt torn between a liberal universalism of diminishing persuasiveness and an organic nationalism often articulated through theories of "race," a shifting mixture of the biological and the cultural. While some writers embraced the idea of racial consciousness rather whole-heartedly, most viewed it as an undeniable but external force that operated in nondeterministic ways on individual subjectivity. Their writing recorded these operations and their consequences. Thus an apparent preoccupation with the individual minds was an interrogation of such social theories of race, of national character, and of a buried collective past. Lewis illustrates his thesis through close readings of Joyce, Conrad, Proust, and D'Annunzio.

If Lewis's sense of the social implications of modernist fictional subjectivity is on the mark (and he makes a compelling case), this means that African writers may be freer to explore psychological themes than they realize. Indeed, women writers, stretching from Mariama Bâ through Buchi Emecheta to Yvonne Vera, have been quickest to draw the social/psychological connection in this regard; the experiments of Biyi Bandele-Thomas show less focus on gender but similarly map affairs of nation-state onto the individual consciousness. Reading this intriguing study may lead one to view such African writers as being traditional modernists.