James Clifford and George E. Marcus, in a seminal collection of essays surveying culture as a form of ‘writing’, suggest that we muster cultural understanding or exegesis in ways similar to our apprehension of a literary text: ‘Literary processes – metaphor, figuration, narrative – affect the ways cultural phenomena are registered’ (1986, 4). But if both culture and its representations work like a poem or a novel, the analogy must also benefit from the essentially dialogic, interactive, imaginative processes that the reading of a poem or novel entails. ‘Culture is contested, temporal and emergent,’ state Clifford and Marcus (19), while ‘a cultural poetics … is an interplay of voices, of positional utterances’ (12). Most sensitive ‘readers’ of other cultures have always understood this. If it is true that a gap always ‘opens between the experience of place and the language available to describe it’ (Ashcroft, 1989, 9), it is equally true that in many colonial contexts, alert authors (such as Thomas Pringle and Olive Schreiner in the South Africa of the early- and mid-nineteenth century) have drawn attention to precisely this hazard in their confrontation with colonial realities (Van Wyk Smith, 1999a, 2000b, 2003).
While both James Clifford and Christopher L. Miller, with different objectives in mind, have argued that ‘ethnographic texts are inescapably allegorical’ (Clifford, 1986, 99) and ‘all [colonial] Africanist utterances are allegorical’ (Miller, 1985, 136) in the sense that such texts are always about something else (the observer’s own generalised notions of societal processes and values, for example) rather than primarily about the culture observed, the invocation of ‘allegory’ also opens up a vast repertoire of human meaning-making procedures, including the innovative, surprising and non-linear ways in which we make sense of the world. ‘The world is emblematic’, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and our apprehension of this is a challenge, not a bondage.
Several of the commentators on the ‘linguistic turn’ in recent investigations of cognition in general and of ethnography in particular (reviewed above) have also more specifically invoked a ‘narrative turn’ in cultural discourse (Barthes, 1957; Eliade, 1957; White, 1973, 1978, 1980; Bruner, 1991; Kreiswirth, 1992). Not only do we interpret cultures and existence itself in terms of ‘grammars’ or sets of syntactical rules, but we may also construct such knowledge as ‘narratives’, semantic sequences that are deemed to have coherence, meaning and even an informing teleology on the intuitive assumption that life is supposed to make sense. Thus Louis O. Mink speaks of narrative as a sense-making procedure, ‘a form of human comprehension’ (cited in White, 1981, 2). Human cognitive encounters may be largely based on setting ourselves in storied relationships to the world, whether at a personal level or at the level of the ‘grand narratives’ of nation, religion and race. We experience the world sequentially, through space and time, and we assemble our knowledge and experience in narrative strands, almost like chromosomes in the genes. These narratives may be networked into larger units, complex systems of knowledge and belief, but they never lose their narrative or even dramaturgic thrust. They become the story of us in – and against – the world. ‘We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on,’ according to Bruner (1991, 4).
Speaking of historiography, Robert Berkhofer sketches procedures that are just as common in general epistemology: ‘Historians apply plot and narrative logic … not only to their synthetic expository efforts, but also … to the past itself as history …[,] postulating the past as a complex but unified flow of events organized narratively’ (1988, cited by Jenkins, 1997, 144). The dangers of such constructivism are apparent: ‘[Such] narrative organization … (re-)presents its subject matter … as the natural order of things, which is the illusion of realism’ (147). Numerous analysts of ethnographic discourse have pursued these hallucinatory compulsions of story-telling, the imperative of narrative to impose order and comprehensibility on its subject matter and thus to encourage comforting illusions of meaning and control. ‘Narrativity as such tends to support orthodox and politically conservative social conditions, and … the revolt against narrativity in modern historiography and literature is a revolt against the authority of the social system’, argues Hayden White (cited by Mitchell, 1980, 2).
Yet it is also possible that there is a fundamental competitiveness built into human cognition that may manifest itself through these very same narrative urges, emerging as an aggressive dramaturgy of story-telling, usually configured in favour of the teller or his or her culture. That we may never fully master this narrative of self and may thus create but never fully control our own ‘story’ probably accentuates its urgency (Sprinker, 1980).
Much racial and cultural prejudice is obviously fuelled by such a solipsistic narrative drive, whether on the individual or societal level. It is possible, too, that in different epochs (Foucault’s epistemes), the human narrative may be configured in radically different ways – for instance as redemptive romance in the Christian Middle Ages, or as triumphal epic in the nineteenth century, or as existential tragedy or even farce in our own time. François Lyotard’s notion of the ‘grand narratives’ that inspire epochs and civilisations is the most obvious development of such an epistemology of narrative. Similarly, the narrative and dramaturgic urgencies of Fanon’s binarist rendering of the colonial experience have accounted for much of its appeal.
The concern of Hayden White and others that narrative may be inherently conservative and compliant may be challenged further. Earlier, we saw Edward Said coming close to undermining the stark impeachments of Orientalism by conceding that ‘[n]arrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision’ (1978/1985, 240); and these concessions may be taken further.
More particularly, the explosion of narrative modes and manners over the last few decades has shown just what disruptive and subversive functions narrative can have. Magic realism, achronological structures, self-reflecting metanarratives, deeply disturbed or suspect narrative voices, and crossed genres (such as the so-called novelistic documentary) are among the numerous devices now commanded by writers to explode narrative from the inside, so to speak. Yet the transgressive mechanisms of such manoeuvres have been with us ever since the appearance of Laurence Sterne’s episodic novel Tristram Shandy (the first volumes of which were published in 1759). Like language itself, narrative can configure the world in infinite ways, and from Herodotus to Haggard, the architects of Euro-African narratives have exploited such polyphony and diversity.
Many Western writers about Africa devised their narratives so as to express perceptions that we must now regard as prejudices, but a significant number also used narrative to critique such presumptions. When Charles Wheeler’s West African wife mounted a scathing attack on European duplicity and presumption in the early 1700s, recorded by William Smith (1744), or the Prince Naimbana from the area that was to become Sierra Leone uttered a passionate speech of despair and anger occasioned by the slave trade, transcribed by agents of the Sierra Leone Company (1795), or William Snelgrave confessed himself repeatedly checkmated in debates with the ruler of Dahomey (1734), or an anonymous account of the ‘Young Prince of Annamaboe’ concluded ‘that good sense is the companion of all complexions, and … the brain in black heads [is] made for the same purpose as in white, whatever some people may imagine’ (1750, 20)– all were exhibiting the disruptive power of ‘little narratives’ embedded in the larger and admittedly discriminatory European ‘grand narrative’ of Africa.
Not only have some narratives of Africa always been as dissident in theme and intention as others may have been conformative, but the generic decisions they embody may at times have had their own discordant effect. A narrative cast as romance or epic will clearly function differently to one proffered as firsthand reportage.
Relatively few texts produced up to the Enlightenment that present themselves as chronicles or travelogues can be treated as realistic records, and the declared