INFLUENCE AND THE SEARCH FOR CREATIVITY IN NGUGI’S FICTION

Abstract

This is a study of Ngugi wa Thiong‟o‟s creative undertaking in view of the influences that he has undergone hitherto. We enquire how, on the one hand, Ngugi‟s fiction interacts with the works of Anglo-Saxon, African and Marxist authors – mainly D. H. Lawrence, Chinua Achebe and Frantz Fanon. These writers are identified here as Ngugi‟s main “literary fathers,” but they are also treated as mediators of his relationships with the traditions to which they belong. On the other hand, we explore the major creative processes which underlie his fiction as it develops through time. Put otherwise, we attempt a reading of Ngugi‟s fiction based on the contemporary theory of influence. In the first chapter, we try to set the theoretical and contextual frameworks by investigating the ways in which Ngugi‟s writings can reasonably be said to relate to the notions of influence and creativity theoretically. First of all, we briefly set forth our approach to literature, criticism, influence and creativity as a necessary first step. Next, we attempt to explain why we have chosen to tackle the topic through an “eclectic” concept of influence rather than relying on any of the theories of influence and intertextuality in their radical forms. We then argue that a more rewarding approach to Ngugi‟s fiction requires departure from the polemical creed and the “ideological perspective” by which he is traditionally read, and an examination of his “intertexts” with an eye to disclosing the creative processes by which his fiction is composed. Finally, we try to provide an overview of the works, writers and traditions that have mattered for Ngugi, with preliminary inferences – or a hypothesis – on how the concepts of influence and creativity pertain to his example notionally. This hypothesis is the following: on the one hand, Ngugi has three sets of influences: the Anglo-Saxon, the African and the Marxist ones, each of which can be best exemplified through studies of his affiliations with D. H. Lawrence, Chinua Achebe and Frantz Fanon. On the other hand, Ngugi‟s is a story of a synchronic and diachronic search for creativity both by struggle with the influence of those writers and traditions and by „extra-textual‟ processes of literary creation. In Chapter Two, we introduce a first case-study of the concept of influence in Ngugi‟s fiction, namely the impact of D. H. Lawrence, identified as his foremost Anglo-Saxon precursor. We first attempt to draw attention to the crucial character of Ngugi‟s relationship with Lawrence, whose impact on him seems even more powerful than that of Conrad. We then attempt to explore the origin and nature of this relationship. It follows from our analysis of this affiliation that Ngugi is mainly indebted to Lawrence‟s “neo-romanticism,” i.e. to his half-mystic-half-naturalistic imagination, his view of the world through nature, his writing by symbol and myth and to many of the techniques which he typically uses in that pursuit. We also have observed that though Lawrence‟s influence on Ngugi is less substantial, less manifest and more troubled in some of his narratives than in others, Lawrence is omnipresent in all Ngugi‟s fiction. In the third Chapter, we introduce a second case-study of influence in Ngugi‟s fiction, that of his indebtedness to Chinua Achebe – his major African literary father. We argue that Ngugi‟s relationship with Achebe is complex, and sometimes troubled, that it touches on various and changing types of influence, ranging from inspiration of a very deep kind, to different types of borrowing, rewriting, allusion, and – from Petals of Blood onwards – even subversion. We also note that these types of influence affect, to different extents, each of Ngugi‟s narratives and every aspect of them. On the whole, we submit that Ngugi owes Achebe his vision of fiction as art, but with a pointed functional dimension. Among the many more specific ways in which Ngugi dialogises with Achebe discussed in this chapter, we attempt to highlight his treatment of Africa‟s history with realism. We argue that Ngugi has learnt from Achebe how to play the role of the “novelist as historian” with efficiency. Another seminal aspect of Achebe‟s impact on Ngugi that we try to illumine is concern with colonialism. We attempt to point up Ngugi‟s Achebean “anxiety of colonialism;” that is to say, the Achebean subtlety with which the question of colonialism is “problematised” in his fiction. Ngugi, we finally argue, is heavily indebted to Achebe in terms of characterisation. We try to demonstrate that his typical character schemata are nearly identical to those of Achebe. We also attempt to show how he “transplants the minds” of Achebe‟s characters into his own characters by applying to them the fundamental psychosexual postulates, and by following Achebe‟s method of doing it with considerable faithfulness. We infer that if Ngugi owes Lawrence his striving to endow his characters with souls so that they can look alive, he owes Achebe his endeavour to endow them with proper (general) psychological profiles so that they can appear „real’. In Chapter Four, we introduce the third and last case-study of influence in Ngugi‟s fiction, that of his relationship with Frantz Fanon. We pinpoint Fanon as the most shaping source of inspiration and influence of Ngugi‟s since he discovered him. We argue that Ngugi owes Fanon the lyrical, prophetic and pamphleteering qualities which characterize his style in parts of A Grain of Wheat and the later novels, as well as much of the content of his theory developed in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. After a brief foreword about Ngugi‟s relationship with discursive literature, we first recall that Fanon‟s theory has three sides, namely the psychoanalytic, the psychiatric and the socio-political ones, and argue that they are interlocking and inseparable. All three aspects of Fanon‟s theory, we submit, have had a powerful impact on Ngugi‟s fiction from A Grain of Wheat onwards. Ngugi‟s indebtedness to the socio-political side of Fanon‟s theory is significant but is already documented, as we specify. Thus, it has been treated as matter of fact here. Concerning the impact of the psychoanalytic aspect of Fanon‟s theory on Ngugi, we argue that Ngugi applies Fanon‟s postulates about “Negro-psychopathology,” “Negrophobia,” and “Negrophobiogenesis” to make up aspects of his characters in A Grain of Wheat and, in a more concise way, in the later novels. We also submit that Ngugi applies two other Fanonian psychoanalytic postulates, namely his descriptions of the psychologies of the “native bourgeoisie” and the “native intellectual,” to his characters in Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross and, more concisely, in the later two novels. As to the impact of the psychiatric side of Fanon‟s theory on Ngugi, we attempt to shed light on how mainly two of them – the “pathology of atmosphere” and the “pathology of the tortured” – are adapted to his characters from A Grain of Wheat on. In brief, we argue that in the same way that Ngugi uses Lawrence‟s method to endow his characters with souls, and Achebe‟s method to endow them with general psychological profiles, he draws on Fanon to endow them with mental profiles that pertain to the colonial and “neo-colonial” situations of the novels which he has written after he is said to have read Fanon. The fifth and last chapter is devoted to the concept of creativity in Ngugi‟s fiction. Here, we submit that Ngugi‟s fiction is creative in several ways and to different extents, and that it is so both thanks to influence and in spite of it. We argue that Ngugi‟s experience as a creative writer reveals his search for creativity synchronically (in each of his individual works) as well as diachronically (as we progress from one of his narratives to the next one). We first attempt an analysis of the typical creative dynamics and processes by which Ngugi‟s narratives are written, stressing the changes and continuities in those processes as the novelist „matures‟. Then we specify that Ngugi seems to write by reference to two major types of creative dynamics: an “Oedipal,” or “psychogenetic” dynamic, reflecting his search for creativity through struggle with his influences, and a „non-Oedipal‟ creative dynamic standing for his search for creativity in extra-textual inspirations. In brief, our investigation would allow submitting the following: “anxious” about influence, Ngugi, like all other serious novelists, “clears imaginative space for himself” through “struggle” with the influence of his precursors. Although he has sometimes borrowed elements from previous works, the reality of his dialogical and intertextual affiliations makes them emerge, on the whole, as cases of “transmutation of historically given material” and “deserved self-appropriation,” rather than ones of mere “transmission of motifs between authors.” Furthermore, being one of those writers who “respond to a world outside of textuality” and who “draw elements of their fiction from their own lives and family backgrounds,” Ngugi also often creates fiction outside of the processes of intertextuality and influence in their strictly intra-poetic senses.