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Chirality and the Politics of Authorized and Unauthorized CHIRALITY AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHORIZED AND UNAUTHORIZED ENGLISH IN THE WORKS OF JOHN CLARE AND AMOS TUTUOLA By Mukoma Wa Ngugi A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) At the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN - MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: 05/31/2012 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Tejumola Olaniyan, Professor, English Susan Friedman, Professor, English Sara Guyer, Associate Professor, English Vinay Dharwadker, Professor, Languages and Cultures of Asia Kennedy Waliaula, Assistant Professor, African Languages and Literature © Copyright by Mukoma Wa Ngugi 2012 All Rights Reserved i Abstract In this dissertation, I examine how notions of authorized and unauthorized English, or Standard and non-Standard English, were at the heart of literary aesthetics in Romantic Britain and Independence Era Africa and how they influenced the editing and reception of John Clare, a 19th Century “peasant” English poet and Amos Tutuola, a mid-20th Century African “native” writer. The descriptors “peasant “and “native” are not innocent - my project is in part an attempt to understand how their being a peasant and native --their biographies --functioned in the editing and reception of their works. John Taylor, Clare’s first editor and publisher, standardized Clare’s English while retaining enough provincialisms and poor grammar to call attention to Clare’s peasant background and poor command of the English language. Eric Robinson, a 20th century literary critic, has also published editions of Clare’s work with minimal editorial interference. Similarly, Tutuola’s editors at Faber and Faber only minimally interfered with his language so that his first published work, The Palm Wine Drinkard, is in Standard Six English – riddled with grammatical mistakes and misused and needlessly coined words. Early criticism followed their respective editors in using their poor command of English and their respective biographies of peasant and colonized native as the lens through which to analyze the content and aesthetics of their work. For both, their biography overwhelmed their art. My dissertation highlights the parallels between Clare and Tutuola: their non-standard use of the English Language, the editorial decisions that accepted grammatical errors as part of their works’ aesthetic appeal, and their reception by literary critics as writers who could be understood only within the context of their biographies and language use. Yet Clare’s and ii Tutuola’s writings cannot be fully understood outside the specific sociolinguistic contexts of their respective eras. Clare is a product of the contradictions inherent in British Romanticism – a movement intended in part to liberate language from the straightjacket of Standard English, while at the same time denying major literary voice to the peasants. Tutuola is a product of the meeting between a colonizing English culture presented as a unified whole and a contradictory African response in which African languages were the casualty. As products of these two disparate, yet closely related, historical phenomena, Clare’s and Tutuola’s works can be considered through the framework of chirality. This concept is adapted from physics, where chirality refers to the relationship between two objects that appear to be mirror images, yet cannot be superimposed. Chirality as applied in literary theory means that two aesthetic standards from different historical eras can be propelled by related but incongruent contradictions. The dissertation uses chirality to examine the English language standardization debate in 18th and 19th Century England, and in 20th Century colonial and independence era Nigeria. It establishes a chiral relationship between the editing processes and critical receptions that made Clare’s and Tutuola’s poor grasp of Standard English the center of their aesthetic appeal. In the first chapter, I justify the adaptation and use of chirality over existing concepts in post-colonial theory. In hybridity, for example, the third space is privileged over the first and second spaces; understanding the contradictions within Romantic era England and post- independence era Africa would be secondary to an analysis of the negotiated third space. However, it is precisely the fissures and contradictions in each of these eras that allow for the formation of similar yet different literary aesthetics. I argue that chirality is a better concept iii because it allows us to understand the multiple contradictory forces in each culture before considering them in relation to each other. In chapter 2, Clare, Standardization and Wordsworth’s “Language of Men,” I look at the growth of English Language and the philological debates about standardization that culminate in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. I look at Wordsworth’s call for a language of men in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, a call taken up by the Cockney School to which John Keats and Leigh Hunt belonged, and the anger with which critics received their works, calling them a vulgarization of English. I conclude by looking at why John Clare and peasant literature were absent from the debate. In Chapter 3, Tutuola and the Question of Standard English in African Literature, I explore how the language debate in Africa mirrors the debate in British romanticism. On the one hand, critics and writers such as Obi Wali and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o argued that African literature should be written in the languages of ordinary people. On the other hand, writers like Chinua Achebe argued that literature in African languages led to division, whereas literature in English led to more unity and communication within and outside of Africa and, further, that it was possible to Africanize English, thus conveying the African worldview. I conclude the chapter by considering why neither Tutuola’s editors nor Tutuola himself raised the possibility of Tutuola writing in Yoruba and then being translated into English. In the chapter 4, Editing Clare: Creating the Genius Peasant, I look at how Standard English influenced the editing of Clare’s poetry. John Taylor, Clare’s first editor, standardized much of Clare’s English usage, while taking care to leave enough provincialisms and grammatical mistakes to recall Clare’s peasant background. Eric Robinson in turn restored Clare’s writing to the original with minimal editorial interference. In order to bring out the iv differences between John Taylor’s and Robinson’s editing of Clare, I compare their two versions of The Shepherd’s Calendar. Like Robinson for Clare, Allan Pringle, Tutuola’s editor at Faber and Faber, adopted an editorial policy of minimal interference. In Chapter 5, Editing Tutuola: Creating the African Native Writer Genus I looked at how Pringle used Tutuola’s poor English usage to foreground his ‘nativeness’ in order to heighten the appeal of his novels. I consider the aesthetic costs and opportunities of minimal and interventionist editing in Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard. In Chapter 6, “The Critical Reception of Clare: A Question of Translatability,” and Chapter 7 “Amos Tutuola: The African “Native’ Writer and Translatability” I look at how the question of Standard English influenced the early reception of their works. Early criticism sees both Clare and Tutuola as wondrous children of nature who write spontaneously. It sees them as authentic chroniclers of peasant and native cultures, while at the same time doubting their originality. Critics also shared fascination with their physical looks and mannerisms to the extent of seeing them as shy, suspicious, diffident and uncomfortable when in the company of the elite. 20th century Clare criticism, such as that of John Barrel, attempted to rehabilitate him from anthropological readings by showing him as primarily a “poet of place.” For Amos Tutuola later critics such as Brenda Cooper show him as a writer occupying a space between folklore and magical realism. My argument is that such readings deny both authors translatability, a term I borrow from Walter Benjamin to mean that they are denied that quality in literature that enables the reader to translate literature across boundaries of time, culture, time, gender, sexuality and class to have meaning in one’s immediate environment. Clare can only talk to the reader about Northampshire while Tutuola can only tell folkloric stories – in both the content is the phrase – there is no metaphorical or philosophical value. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introducing Chirality in John Clare and Amos Tutuola 1 Chapter 2: John Clare, Vulgar English versus the “Language of men” 29 Chapter 3: Tutuola and the Question of Standard English in African Literature 56 Chapter 4: Editing Clare: Creating the genius peasant 75 Chapter 5: Editing Tutuola: Creating the African Native Writer genus 111 Chapter 6: Critical Reception of Clare: A Question of Translatability 129 Chapter 7: Amos Tutuola: The African “Native’ Writer and Translatability 163 Chapter 8: Conclusion: From Chirality to Translatability 197 Bibliography: 205 1 CHAPTER ONE Introducing Chirality in John Clare and Amos Tutuola The efforts of the uncultivated mind – the outpourings of genius unmoulded by the scholastic system and unimbued with scholastic lore must be interesting to the lover of literature and the observer of human nature. An unsigned 1820 review of Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery.1 A literary Grandma Moses, Tutuola has a style all of his own, awkward, naïve, unpolished, yet somehow graphically compelling – even intriguing in its departures from our idiom. From a 1955 review of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Cecil T. Lewis.2 Even though John Clare was an early 18th Century English poet and Amos Tutuola a mid- 20th Century African writer, they are conjoined by their non-standard use of the English language, the decisions surrounding the editing of their works that accepted grammatical errors as part of their aesthetic appeal, and the critical reception that deployed their biography and their language use interchangeably and as departure points.
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