The Cloth of Form
Olakunle George
The genre of the response paper is based upon the hope of some measure of cross-fertilization of ideas. The original discussion invites and is rewarded by the reflections of the respondent, whose labor is in turn enriched by the interaction. In this way, one thought occasions, and is amplified or qualified, by another. Potentially, the issues under discussion emerge in a different light, newly clarified (and thereby transformed) by the cross-fertilization of perspectives. The conversation between Pius Adesanmi and Ato Quayson for this inaugural issue of PQF has been immensely rewarding to me, and I feel privileged to have been invited to contribute a word or two. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and thank them for reminding us that there’s work to be done, and inspiring us to get on with it. Ranging from African politics, to the study of Africa in different historical and academic contexts, Pius and Ato covered much ground and articulated issues that are crucial to African literary studies in particular, and African studies in general. And they did so with concision and elegance.
I agree with the concerns and vision spelt out in their discussion, and so the best I can do here is to run with some of Ato’s comments. There is a wealth of stuff in his comments on his unfolding work in relation to contemporary literary studies, on the one hand, and, on the other, the promise of interdisciplinary commitments. For this reason, a productive angle I can take is to follow Ato’s remarks that have to do with literary studies and the challenge of the present. I want to see what his thoughts make available to us, and where we might go with them.
I found very relevant his synthesis of the historical and conceptual trajectory of key figures and currents in Anglo-American literary and cultural criticism. Ato outlines the ways in which currents of thought in European and American literary studies equipped him to do the work he has done thus far, even as the traditional “close reading” method taught at Legon is immanently shown to be limited because of the lived experience of the world “out there” – in this case, the everyday reality of Rawlings’ Ghana. Over the years, many people (myself included) have written of the formalist/New Critical approach to literature in the intellectual formation of many anglophone African writers and critics. Against this background, Ato’s comments bring up an issue that faced and continues to face scholars of African literature: how does the reader/critic pay due attention to the “literariness” of literary texts without occluding the real world of politics and vexed social relations? How does one attend to the real world through the act of reading, yet do so without conflating literary with social structures, or framing the one as a causal mirror or effect of the other?
Critics of Western-European literatures have been exercised by this problem since at least the 18th century, when the idea of “aesthetics” came to be conceptualized as an autonomous domain of human self-expression and contemplation. Ato draws on Frederic Jameson to suggest that “what allows literature to represent the social is that literature manages to encapsulate the image of the social in the form of a configuration of heterogeneities” (17). This claim, that literary texts “encapsulate the image of the social,” resonates with Theodor Adorno’s famous idea that an artwork operates as a “monad.” What Adorno’s theory argues is that a novel, for instance, is a kind of monad – “a force field and a thing,” as he puts it in Aesthetic Theory – which expresses the world’s intensity from within the self-enclosed interiority of literary form. The resonance is to be expected, since Jameson’s thinking is heavily influenced by Adorno’s attempt to theorize why artworks are eminently social. I point to the resonance to suggest that the question is an old one, and I don’t believe that we can ever work out a theory that “settles” it – in the abstract, and once and for all.