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4 The Ideology of the Literary Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom and the Little Magazines of the 1940s The previous chapter discussed how writers most frequently identified with anticolonialism, such as José Martí and Jacques Roumain, constructed a discursive project that overcame anxiety about writing as a private activity through emphasis on masculine action. Along with Martí and Roumain, other important figures from the modern colonial period such as C. L. R. James, Roger Mais, V. S. Reid, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Frantz Fanon, Pedro Mir, and Jesús Colón deployed this ideal of the writer as man of action as a way to insist on the public purchase of their literary endeavors.1 These writers became embodiments of anticolonial writing because of their ability to articulate the connection of literature to a counterpublic represented by political movements. But the case of Stephen Cobham shows how his erasure in literary histories of the region may owe not to insufficient political commitment but to Rupert Gray too explicitly displaying the anxieties at the heart of the literary intellectual identity. Alison Donnell makes one of the strongest arguments that the ability of anticolonial writers to align themselves with nationalist political movements led to their privileging by the critics who shaped Caribbean canons during the 1960s and 1970s. Donnell points to how much of the writing of the modern colonial period does not fit into this overtly political model as “perhaps the most obvious and also the most troublesome” aspect of her revisionist literary history: Many writings from this period simply do not share the same emphasis on establishing a new connection between the Caribbean writer and his or her place, voice, and audience. Indeed, as my attention to Vivian Virtue and J. E. C. McFarlane will demonstrate, certain figures during this period were positively opposed to what was then a revolutionary move, and moreover 97 The Ideology of the Literary deemed it their obligation as poets to occupy the aesthetic and spiritual high ground, a position which has never been particularly appealing or persuasive within the critical models after the 1960s. (14–15) Donnell argues that the idealization of the aesthetic and disavowal of the social that she finds in Virtue and McFarlane is a central if ignored aspect of Caribbean literary history during the modern colonial period. In this chapter, I want to explore this high modernist tendency toward aestheticism—what I call the ideology of the literary—as something not opposed to but in fact an integral part of the Caribbean project of anticolonial literature discussed in the previous chapter. Emphasizing the overlaps in these ostensibly antithetical positions helps us make sense of how both aestheticism and political commitment belong to the same colonial literary field. I begin the chapter by looking at one of the novels Donnell mentions as among the few from the pre-1950 period to be accepted into the nationalist canon—Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom—to show how even in that novel the ideology of the literary is what allows the intellectual to speak for both a public and a counterpublic. From there, I discuss how this ideology emerged as important to Caribbean writing of this period, especially in literary magazines that developed in the 1940s. Despite the apparent diversity of these publications—from what are thought of as apolitical, purely literary publications like BIM in Barbados, La Poes ía Sorprendida in the Dominican Republic, the Guyanese Kyk-over-al, or the Cuban Orígenes, to what are often seen as the more nationalist Tropiques in Martinique or the Jamaican Focus—all of these publications are united by their ideology of the literary. This ideology, whether articulated by McFarlane in his addresses to the Empire Poetry League, by McKay in Banana Bottom, or by Suzanne Césaire and Aimé Césaire in the pages of Tropiques, contains a desire to position writing above everyday concerns along with a vision of the literary intellectual as having special political insight to critique instrumentality and materialism. We see this apparently dueling tendency even in McFarlane, whose essay collection The Challenge of Our Time contains aesthetic examinations of literature in chapters like “Form” and “The Vehicles of Thought and Their Significance” but also begins with a chapter analyzing the new Jamaican constitution. While Donnell correctly points out that the political solutions McFarlane offered made him a much less attractive model for later nationalist writers, I return at the end of this chapter to [3.142.197.198] Project MUSE...

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