UNIVERSITY of CAPE TOWN of August 2009
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The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University Individualism in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah By Fatima Fiona Moolla Thesis Presented for the Degree of Town DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Department of English Cape UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN of August 2009 University Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Individualism: A Theoretical Framework 13 I Historical Development of the Individual 14 II Modern Identity and the Novel 30 III Defining the Novel 33 IV The Novel and Modernity 35 V The Novel and Nationalism 37 VI The Novel and Imperialism 38 VII The Novel and Individualism 40 VIII Individualism and Somali-Islamic Culture 44 Chapter 2 From a Crooked Rib and the Bildungsroman: DevelTownoping the Self, Developing the Nation 71 I Rise of the Bildungsroman / Rise of the Novel 74 II From a Crooked Rib and Postcolonial Bildung: The Paradoxes of Individualist Personality Development 86 Cape III From a Crooked Rib and National Development 108 of Chapter 3 The “Gynocentric” Bildungsroman: Sardines and Gifts 111 I Trends in the Female Bildungsroman 113 II Sardines as a Female Bildungsroman 118 III The Subject and Economies of Exchange in Gifts 143 University Chapter 4 Modernism in A Naked Needle and Sweet and Sour Milk: Morality and the Aesthetic 155 I Individualism and Textuality in A Naked Needle 156 II The Existential Question in Sweet and Sour Milk 176 Chapter 5 Close Sesame and the Representation of Heteronomy 182 I Transcendental Moral Sources and the Novelistic Hero 186 II Close Sesame and the Representation of Socially Constituted Selfhood 190 Chapter 6 From Dissolution to Reconstruction: Maps and Secrets, Links and Knots 208 I Dissolving Boundaries: Maps and Secrets 209 II Links: Towards Reconstruction 226 III Knots and the Postcolonial Romance of the Public Sphere 242 Conclusion 257 Works Cited 260 Town Cape of University Individualism in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah Fatima Fiona Moolla August 2009 Abstract: The subject conceived as “individual” is a sustained focus across the novels of Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah. This thesis locates a reading of individualism in Farah’s novels in the context of the historical and philosophical development of modern identity in the societies of the North-Atlantic. It relies primarily on the analysis of philosopher, Charles Taylor, who proposes that individualism makes modern identity an historically unprecedented mode of conceiving the person. By individualism,Town Taylor refers to the inward location of moral sources in orientation around which the self is constituted. Non- individualist conceptions of the self locate moral horizons external to the subject thereby defined. The novel appears to be the most significantCape cultural form which mutually constitutes modern subjectivity. This is suggestedof by the centrality of the Bildungsroman sub-genre which fundamentally determines the form of the novel. Farah’s work spans the historical development of the novel from the proto-realism of his first publication, through modernism and postmodernism, returning to the “neo-realism” of his most recent novel. The representation of the subject in the novel suggests transformations in identity which belie the uniformity of the disengaged, autonomous self which is articulated in the novel as a genre. TensionUniversity thus is generated between the social commitment Farah expresses as a writer and the limitations of the form which deny representation to the heteronomous subjectivities who are the objects of Farah’s concern. The introduction identifies the centrality of individualism to Farah’s project. Chapter 1 explores the historical development of individualism and genealogies of alternative conceptions of self. Chapter 2 addresses the articulation of individualism in the classic Bildungsroman, the sub-genre which defines the novel. Chapter 3 interrogates Farah’s use of the “dissensual” Bildungsroman to escape the contradiction of the classic Bildungsroman. Chapter 4 focuses on how modernism in the novels allows aesthetic resolution of individualist contradiction through fragmentation. Chapter 5 explores the resistance encountered when the novel attempts to represent heteronomy rather than autonomy. Chapter 6 suggests the indispensability of coherent subjectivity to Farah’s socially committed stance. Within the philosophical matrix of individualism, the “performative” or “stylized” subject is the consequential form of identity. Town Cape of University 1 Introduction Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah Hassan (b. 1945), is known in literary circles as a dramatist, novelist and short story writer. He is also known as an essayist and as a writer of non-fiction. It is, however, as a novelist that he receives most attention. Farah’s development as a writer is interesting since his oeuvre seems to compress a history of the novel into the life work of a single author. Farah’s novels trace a trajectory from a kind of proto-realism to modernism and postmodernism. Through a broad overview of the criticism of Farah’s novels, this section attempts to show the various ways in which the individual is key to an understanding of Farah’s work. Town For reasons to be explained in a later chapter, Farah’s first published novel is also one of his most fascinating. From a Crooked RibCape, which was written while Farah was a student of philosophy at the University of Chandigarhof in the Punjab, was published in 1970. Despite criticism of the book’s lack of aesthetic accomplishment (Wright Novels of Nuruddin Farah 27), it was acclaimed for its representation of female consciousness so convincing that the author subsequently received mail addressed to “Dear Ms Farah” (Jaggi). This first novel with a central female character was followed in 1976 by A Naked Needle University with its peripatetic male protagonist. Farah’s literary inspiration is varied and includes Dostoevsky, Hugo, Woolf, Joyce and Hemingway among others. (Farah “Why I Write”). Influenced by Samuel Beckett (Sugnet “Maps” 741), Farah, after publication of A Naked Needle, began to compose his novels as trilogies with characters recognizable from earlier books populating later novels. The convention of the trilogy, Farah has explained, structurally permits the breadth to develop key ideas. The first trilogy, titled “Variations on 2 the theme of an African Dictatorship”, includes the novels Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame. The second sequence is titled the “Blood in the Sun” trilogy. This includes Maps, Farah’s novel which has received the most scholarly attention, Gifts and Secrets. These books have been followed up by two other novels, Links and Knots, which presumably form part of a third trilogy, as yet to be named. This thesis argues that the novel is a genre which in fundamental ways ideally embodies Farah’s worldview. Farah’s novels represent a dense collage of themes, issues and concerns, reflected in a kaleidoscopic body of criticism. It will be suggested that beneath these shifting hermeneutic patterns an underlying foundation in philosophical individualism is discernible which motivates the content, the form and the interplayTown of both in the novels. Since Farah’s novels are situated at the nexus of so wide and varied a range of issues, critical approaches have been legion. One thematicCape concern in the literature has been a focus on the representation of feminist concerns inof the novels (Alden and Tremaine, Stratton and Okonkwo, among others). Attention has also been paid to Farah as an explicitly political writer, dissecting colonization, postcolonial dictatorship and civil war (Gugler, Mnthali, Ntalindwa, Pajalich, Turfan and Wright among others). The representation of Somali culture, religion and orality in the novels has also been a focus of attention (Hawley, Mazrui, Phillips, Samatar, UniversityS.S. and Sparrow among others). A very important thematic concern has been the novels’ critique of nationalism (Cobham, Garuba, Ngaboh-Smart, Ntalindwa among others). The re-imagining of extended and nuclear family structures has also been considered (Bardolph and Alidou, among others). Questions of form have been addressed by various critics, in particular, the use of the techniques of modernism and postmodernism (Gikandi, Sugnet and Wright, among others). The novels have also been approached from the 3 perspective of genre study. Ian Adam, for example, considers the affinity of the novels with the detective story. Despite the plethora of approaches supported by the novels, a broad survey of the literature suggests several ideas in common. One of these is that in various formal ways the novels resist hermeneutic closure. Critics observe that Farah’s fiction is marked by “dialogics”, “polyphony”, “openness” and “multiplicity” (Pajalich). Hawley finds in the novels a hybridized reality in which no ultimate meaning can be found. At best the artist offers only an “inscrutability, a holding in abeyance of finality.” (86) Wright encapsulates this effect as the “democratic pluralism” of Farah’s political vision (Nuruddin Farah xix). Adam observes of Sweet and Sour Milk, which shares in the genericTown conventions of both detective novel and thriller, that closure is motivated by a repudiation of the idea of a final,