The Cameroonian Novel of English Expression. An Introduction: An Introduction

1. The Socio-Artistic Approach

Chapter One The Socio-Artistic Approach In reviewing literature on African literary criticism, around the last quarter of the 20th century, the present writer discovered roughly three critical tendencies in matters of valuation1 . The first tendency consists of critics like Charles Larson and Eustace Palmer who place emphasis on the artistic side of the literary work; the second of scholars like Abiola Irele, E. Emenyonu, Chinweizu, O. Jemie and I. Madubuike for whom the sociological dimension is more important; and the third of literary pundits like Bernth Lindfors, Dan Izevbaye and Emmanuel Ngara who are more inclined towards a relativist approach wherein more than one critical orientation is sought for whatever light it can shed on a work of art which, in any case, can sometimes be an elephant in front of blind men: while each person grasps an aspect of the truth, the whole truth eludes each one of them. The first two approaches need not be mutually exclusive; it should not be a question of either one or the other. While not suggesting that the first two groups of critics have taken an absolute stand (indeed, Abiola Irele’s group still recognises the importance of artistry, only that for them the sociological is slightly more valuable) it is worth noting here that absolutist criticism would not do in contemporary African literary criticism. It seems that the third, relativist tendency is the way forward. This book defends the thesis that, while there are scholarly efforts underway to eventually formulate a genuine black aesthetic, we can do, for now, with reasonable eclectic critical approaches like the Socio-Artistic Approach with regard to African literary criticism. In this eclectic regard the following critical observation by David Daiche is instructive: To enjoy with discrimination, to discern value, to recognise and reject the spurious, never to be fooled by the shabby and the second-hand that is the civilised approach. We turn to criticism to develop and strengthen that approach. Every effective critic sees some facet of literary art and develops an awareness with respect to it; but the total vision or something approximating it, comes only to those who learn how to blend the insights yielded by many critical approaches (qtd. in Brown and Olmsted 335). 8 The Cameroonian Novel of English Expression: An Introduction Accordingly, the Socio-Artistic Approach tilts in the direction of an enlightened eclecticism. It brings together the salient features of both the artistic and the sociological approaches for a better and deeper apprehension of the full meaning and significance as well as the aesthetic realisation of the imaginative work, hence the designation Socio-Artistic Criticism. It makes for three cognitive operations to be carried out by the literary critic: the descriptive, analytical and evaluative. In other words the approach will demand that the critic not only describe what goes on in a novel with reference to its wider social context but that he also analyses the effectiveness of the techniques and the linguistic and paralinguistic resources deployed by the creative writer. Finally, the approach will require the critic to evaluate the overall success of the writer’s use of technique to express in an artistic fashion some of the cultural, social, moral and ideological issues of his time, or, for that matter, of all time. But to better understand the Socio-Artistic Approach it is appropriate to first attempt an answer to the following question: What do we really mean by the sociological and artistic approaches to literature? We will tackle first issues relating to the sociological aspect of the approach before proceeding to those concerning the artistic dimension. The Sociological Dimension Generally, a sociological approach to literature means analysing a literary text from a sociologically-informed view point. Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood (1972) define sociology as: Essentially the scientific objective study of man in society, the study of social institutions and social processes; it seeks to answer the question of how society is possible, how it works, why it persists. Through a rigorous examination of the social institutions, religious, economic, political and familial which together constitute what is called social structure, a picture emerges, not always clearly, of the ways in which man adapts to, and is conditioned by particular societies; of the mechanisms of ‘socialisation’, the process of cultural learning, whereby individuals are allocated to and accept their respective roles in the social structure (11-12). Establishing a relationship between sociology and literature, these authors affirm that like sociology, literature is basically concerned with...