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  • Cognitive Cartography in the Neocolonial World:Jameson's "Third-World Literature" and Ngũgĩ's Petals of Blood
  • Jaecheol Kim

Most critical responses to Fredric Jameson's essay "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" take issue with the reductive features of his categorical argument. Following Aijaz Ahmad's overarching criticism, critics of Jameson's theory of "national allegory" focus on a single phrase of the essay—"[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical" (69)—emphasizing the "all" and the "necessarily." Later critical responses to Jameson's essay tend to focus on the theoretical category Jameson deploys, whether they are critical or approving of it.1 But the psychoanalytic layers embedded in Jameson's theory of "cognitive mapping" and "national allegory"—the larger theoretical subtexts of Jameson's "third-world literature" argument—have drawn little critical attention. In addition, the Jamesonian master-slave dialectic between first-world and third-world literature (if this categorization is still possible) has seldom been critically analyzed from the perspective of literature—rather than theory or criticism—produced under neocolonial social conditions. This essay compares, in this critical context, the cognitive cartography theorized in Jameson's "Third-World Literature" with that presented in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood. First, I explore how the psychiatric fashioning of Jameson's theory of "national allegory" reduces multinational class relations to the relation between the psychoanalyst (doctor) and analysand (patient) in a clinical setting. In doing so, I show that Jameson's theory divests the neocolonial national narrative of its own self-interpretive and diagnostic agency by turning the narrative into a psychopathological symptom. In the subsequent two sections, I read Ngũgĩ's Petals of Blood from the perspective of "cognitive cartography," showing how a neocolonial Kenyan novel can achieve its own self-interpretation regarding the multinational class structure along with a powerful cognitive agency. Throughout this essay, I critically analyze "cognitive mapping," one of the critical currencies of [End Page 184] contemporary cultural studies, from the perspective of literature produced under neocolonial social conditions—not the other way around.

Jameson on Ngũgĩ: Master-Slave Dialectic Reconsidered

Toward the end of "Third-World Literature," Jameson discusses Ngũgĩ briefly and casually, though no less significantly, with somewhat normative and categorical overtones:

One is led to conclude that under these circumstances traditional realism is less effective than the satiric fable: whence to my mind the greater power of certain of Ousmane's narratives (besides Xala, we should mention The Money-Order) as over against Ngũgĩ's impressive but problematical Petals of Blood.

(82)

Jameson implicitly poses a generic opposition, or at least differences, between allegorical fables and realist works: he esteems national fables such as Xala above narratives that he classifies as "traditional realism" such as Ngũgĩ's Petals of Blood. Here the word "traditional" is not defined, and this phrase could be bewildering given that Jameson has elsewhere been an advocate of realism, as when he states that "realism is dependent on the possibility of access to the forces of change in a given moment of history" (Marxism 204), referring to realism in its Lukácsian sense. So we need to explore the rationale or theoretical substratum that leads him to this generic classification and preference when he discusses "third-world literature."

The foregoing passage is deeply troubling also because both Ngũgĩ and Ousmane Sembène's works are essentially at once allegorica and realist and erase the very boundary between the two. Actually we find more structural affinities than differences between these two anti-neocolonial works. In a most reductive form, Xala is a mystery narrative that satirizes the inexplicable impotence of El Hadji, a member of the Senegalese national bourgeoisie.2 The novel gradually reveals that his impotence was actually caused by the curses of the downtrodden people he abused. Toward the end of the novel, it resolves its own mystified allegorical form and creates a picture of multinational capitalist order. In fact, as we shall see later in Petals of Blood, both novels depict the appropriation of lands and the establishment of a neocolonial social order in mystery-solving narrative forms.

Nonetheless, Jameson's...

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