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Chapter Seven Alternative Ideological Visions The Cameroonian creative writers of English expression have adopted an imperial language, English, and the novelistic art form to serve the Cameroonian vision. As we have seen in the previous chapters, through their works, these writers are exploring, dramatizing and exposing the mores, and critiquing the social ills that plague the Cameroonian/African society. The world of these novels is an imagined real world, peopled with characters who criss-cross one another’s path, full-blooded characters caught up in the complex web of their quotidian existence, involving their dilemmas, hopes and frustrations. Through their utterances, thoughts and feelings, these characters express themselves, and in the process, reveal their outlook. They articulate their views about certain issues or individuals in their communities or their world. In handling their subject matter the Anglophone Cameroonian novelists, in general, and those treated in this section, in particular, artistically, guide and shape our attitudes towards their virtual characters, subtly persuading us to adopt the writers’ point of view or ideological stand. In other words, Tah Asongwed, Francis Nyamnjoh, John N. Nkengasong and Alobwed’Epie, the novelists under discussion in this chapter, imaginatively explore counter ideologies to subvert the prevailing hegemonies for possible alternative dispensations and for a meaningful social deconstruction of Cameroon. To properly develop this chapter, it is important for us to first attempt to grasp the meaning of the Marxist concept known as ‘ideology’. The well-known Marxist model of society consists of the economic base and the superstructure. The base is made up of the material means of production, distribution and exchange, while the superstructure is the ‘cultural world of ideas, art, religion, law and so on’ (Barry 158). According to Marxist scholars, the elements of the superstructure are not ‘innocent’ but invariably shaped or determined by the economic base. In the domain of Marxist criticism, as we stated in Chapter Two, there is nothing like an original Marxist aesthetics for the simple reason that beyond their scattered comments on art and literature, the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, never evolved any sustained theory of art and literature. The narrative of Marxist aesthetics today is but an attempt by later scholars to apply Marxist ideas to art and literature, one of which is ‘ideology’. Coined by a French man Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, the term ‘idéologie’ (ideology) was fated to develop fully in the hands of Marxists 156 The Cameroonian Novel of English Expression: An Introduction like Karl Marx, Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and others, hence its centrality in Marxist Criticism today. A slippery term that does not have a single accepted definition but rather rival definitions, ‘ideology’ is considered by David McLellan to be ‘the most elusive concept in the whole of the social sciences’ (qtd. in Heywood 5). The impossibility of an easy definition thus indicated, the definition chosen for our purpose is the one proposed by Andrew Heywood: Ideology is a more or less coherent set of ideas that provides the basis for organized political action whether this is intended to preserve, modify or overthrow the existing system of power. All ideologies therefore (a) offer an account of the existing order, usually in the form of a ‘world-view’ (b) advance a model of desired future, a vision of the ‘good society,’ and (c) explain how political change can and should be brought about – how to get from (a) to (b). (12) A weapon sometimes used by people to criticize or condemn those with a rival set of ideas or beliefs, ideology possesses an emotional and affective character since it is a means of expressing people’s hopes and fears as well as their aspirations and sympathies. The objective world is out there, but the way we see or interpret it is due to our ideology; for, according to Heywood, we ‘look at the world through a veil of theories, presuppositions and assumptions that shape what we see and thereby impose meaning on the world’ (13). And when we sometimes accuse others of being ‘ideological’ even when we are guilty of the very sin, adds Heywood, it is because in making us see the world through a ‘veil’ of assumptions, ideology is ‘effectively invisible’. On his part Terry Eagleton says that when, for instance, radical critics who espouse a set of ‘social priorities’ with which many people do not agree are often rejected as ‘ideological’, this is because ‘ideology is always a way of describing other people’s...

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