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 or implied intentions of such texts must constantly be correlated against the conventions of the genre employed. So, for instance, many of the earliest Portuguese chronicles of African discovery (Azurara, 1453; Cadamosto, 1455/1507), or of the first century of Portuguese encounter with Ethiopia (Castanhoso, 1564; Bermudes, 1565), are cast as chivalric romances, hence the African actors in them are often not seen as social beings but as the local avatars of cosmic moral forces against whom the champions of Catholic Christianity must contend.
Thus a simple judgemental response on a modern reader’s part to Portuguese ‘racism’ in such a context may be problematic. Columbus took texts such as Mandeville’s and Marco Polo’s Travels with him on his voyages not because he was foolish or gullible, but because the distinction between empirical experience, scientific knowledge, and ‘romance’ did not exist at that time. This was so both because of what Foucault would have regarded as a major epistemic difference between Columbus’s and our understanding of what constitutes ‘true knowledge’, and an equally fundamental difference in conceptions of which genres are appropriate for the conveyance of ‘truth’ as against ‘fantasy’. In Chapter 9, we shall see how Diodorus Siculus’s account of the ethnic groups and cultures of north-east Africa in the late pre-Christian centuries (now often cited as evidence of Hellenistic attitudes to Africa) was not meant as either history or ethnography, but is merely incidental to a fabular account of the origins of the Greek pantheon. It thus renders a select society of ‘Ethiopians’ as ‘sacred’ or ‘worthy’, while dismissing the rest of the continent as ‘savage’. This is not ethnography so much as mythography.
If narrative can be as disruptive as it can be coercive, romance in particular can exploit these Janus-like effects. Umberto Eco has argued that romance is the most slippery and subversive of all genres, juxtaposing events, points of view, values and ideologies not readily commensurable in reality, but creating interesting synergies in the realm of ideas. ‘Romance has no continuing city as its final resting place’, argues Northrop Frye (1976, 172) as he goes on to develop the anarchic potential of the genre, as Umberto Eco has also done: ‘Romance must always have as its base a misconception … and from that fundamental misconception … must arise developments, digressions and, finally, unexpected and pleasant recognitions’ (Eco, 1983/1995, 81).
Seamus Heaney proposes that ‘Poetry is a symbolic resolution of conflicts insoluble in experience’ (1989, 1412), and much the same may be claimed for romance. I have shown elsewhere that romance was regularly and suggestively invoked in the literature of the early South African frontier to develop resolutions to racial conflict that would not have been countenanced in reality (Van Wyk Smith, 1999a). The counter-realist nature and contrivance of romance,
