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E X C E R P T THE MARXIAN IMAGINATIONRepresenting Class in Literature by Julian Markels All material copyright © 2003 by Monthly Review Press |
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September 2003 |
CODA: Imagining History in The Poisonwood Bible During the years I have been writing this book Barbara Kingsolver has emerged as a leading American novelist, and her achievement in The Poisonwood Bible renews in American culture the Marxian imagination I have been stalking in my book. I have argued that this imagination regularly finds expression in a narrative of overdetermination and is often marked by tragedy. But while The Poisonwood Bible is clearly a novel of overdetermination, it is just as clearly not a tragedy, and in both these respects it is most like Little Dorrit among the works I have discussed. Yet despite their fine comic energy, neither do these two novels compose finally as comedies, and where Northrop Frye would no doubt have called them universal works of irony and winter, here I want to call them novels of contingent history as Marxism's great alternative to tragedy. The history they involve is not Lukacs's typified history of objective reality in its internal self-movement, to be abstracted from the narrative by a reader already equipped with Marxian theory by other discourse practices. It is instead the history represented by a discourse practice able in itself to equip a Marxian reader, just like those other practices, and more movingly and lastingly than many. The Poisonwood Bible's denouement, in which two white American sisters, Rachel and Leah Price, continue their vastly different lives in the Africa where their missionary family's catastrophe occurred, parallels Dickens’s denouement in which Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam descend into London's "roaring streets" after their family catastrophes in Little Dorrit. Both narratives reach closure by maintaining their commitment to the open-ended, overdetermined history, both personal and social, which they have so assiduously spent themselves in representing. Their densely interwoven determinations preempt us from abstracting them into canonical forms like tragedy and comedy, and their density derives from both writers' bonding with their audience through immersion in the discourses of popular culture. 1. Like Dickens, Kingsolver shares with her audience a range of interests and feelings that enables her to engage and challenge this audience in a variety of popular forms and styles. She has published novels, poetry, short stories, and many kinds of journalism in the New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Parenting, Architectural Digest, and Natural History (not to mention the Denver Post and Tucson Weekly), on subjects as diverse as parenting, joining a health club, divorce, molecular genetics, and fencing one's property. She has covered a strike as Dickens did at Preston, she has performed in a rock band comprised of writers raising money for literacy, and she has saturated The Poisonwood Bible with a bubbling compound of sit-com argot and Biblical allusion. Her audience's response has also been Dickensian. During the year and more while it was on the bestseller lists, The Poisonwood Bible became a selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; it prompted the reprinting of Kingsolver's earlier books in a boxed set; it produced a website, kingsolver.com; and it made no more dent than Dickens often made in American university English departments, where Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo still reign supreme among contemporary novelists. Also like Dickens, Kingsolver is not in the first place a social or political novelist but a prodigy of comic invention who takes all kinds of risks in energizing the language while also imbuing her stories with a loving respect for ordinary people. It's true that her earlier novels exhibit an un-Dickensian, overt political awareness loosely reminiscent of the American proletarian novelists. But the political motifs of these early novels are liberal commonplaces now shared by millions, like Dickens's structures of feeling, and except for Pigs in Heaven, these novels keep their politics in the background where it cannot participate in constituting the narrative as it does for Burke, Le Sueur, Lumpkin, and Saxton. In The Bean Trees a convenient role is played by a Central American refugee couple and the Arizona woman who provides them a safehouse, and in Animal Dreams the protagonist's sister is killed by the contras while doing volunteer work offstage in Nicaragua. Only in Pigs in Heaven, where the protagonist must be reconciled through a child custody dispute with her dispossessed counterpart in the Cherokee Nation, do the political and the familial mutually determine each other, and in that respect Pigs in Heaven does faintly anticipate The Poisonwood Bible. Even so, The Poisonwood Bible comes out of nowhere in Kingsolver's development. Where Dickens had to be pulled by his art from a local structure of feeling to a holistic imagination of class in a graduated progression that only climaxes in Little Dorrit, Kingsolver was propelled exponentially to gender/class/race as her holistic point of entry by the explosive political energy bottled up in her earlier novels. The Poisonwood Bible, like the Eroica Symphony, is astonishing not only in itself but in its giant leap of personal imagination beyond anything you could have predicted from its writer's earlier work. Here I want to delineate briefly its pattern of overdetermination, since my argument on that topic is by now familiar, and then to evoke the literary form that I think it shares with Little Dorrit. 2. My immensely well-read friend Marlene Longenecker says The Poisonwood Bible is the first novel she has read about the experience of being white, and to that I would add (not that she wouldn't) being also an American woman whose family patriarch forces her to grow up in an imperial colony now being remobilized, through the CIA’s murder of Patrice Lumumba, for renewed capitalist expropriation. The mother and four daughters who share the first-person narration of The Poisonwood Bible find themselves in the Congo at the insistence of their paterfamilias, a missionary bent on baptizing the heathen in a river habitat of crocodiles, and whenever not proselytizing is also bent on cultivating a demonstration garden of American crops by American methods despite the advice of natives who know their own soil and climate. His effort to impose his way of life becomes only the more crazed the more it is frustrated, until his wife and daughters, as they experience the destruction he is sowing everywhere, have no choice but to break out of their Southern Baptist female subservience. Then in a ramifying web of overdetermination, these women's struggles to free themselves from their lord and master require them to take individual responsibility for their white presence in Africa, and also for their role in the class process by which King Leopold's Ghost is returning to the Congo in the shape of Mobutu.(1) "You'll say," says the guilt-ridden mother to the reader at the outset, "I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods: cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity."(2) The novel's representation of overdetermination includes as a matter of course the Price family's relations with the natives, where, for example, Leah, who has fallen in love with the exquisitely tattooed village schoolteacher, also insists on joining the village hunt and thereby challenges the native gender tradition from within in a manner quite opposite to that in which her father challenges the native religion from without; or where Rachel is courted by the village chief who covets her beauty for his tattooed harem but who also wishes to relieve her family's hunger by one mouth through an act of philanthropy for his Christian antagonist; or where the native outcasts within their own religion are the ones most responsive to the proselytizer's Christianity. Yet for all these and other cross-cultural complexities, The Poisonwood Bible's most deeply affecting structural overdeterminations involve the relations—personal, political, and rhetorical—among the Price family women through whose overlapping narratives the tale is actually told. These women break free of their patriarch in ways that define their differences as unique and often opposed personalities. Their bodies, minds, and voices are different, their purposes become different, their outcomes are very different, and the richness of their interplay in Kingsolver's thick detail and high comic prose is among the glories of this novel. The tragedy that triggers their exodus is the death of the youngest daughter, bitten by a snake that was planted by a shaman who has been antagonized equally, if oppositely, by her proselytizing father and gender-defying sister. Now finally the mother steps forward to lead her remaining daughters from the village and their father, and this journey ends with Rachel and Leah remaining in Africa when their mother and sister Adah return to the US. Here I skip most of the novel to focus on these two during its last 150 pages, where they can illustrate both the overdeterminations of gender, race, and class that continue to govern the narrative and also now finally the form of the whole. Rachel, the eldest, is a platinum blonde, beauty queen/cheerleader fastidious about her clothes, food, and hygiene. She disdains the Congo from Day One, along with her father for bringing her there, and longs for the commodities she had to leave behind. But even without them she is a sexual magnet: the village chief chooses her to add to his household, and when she escapes this fate she marries another admirer, Eeben Axelroot, the barnstorming pilot with the short-wave radio secretly employed by the CIA. They move to South Africa, where he becomes a philandering diamond merchant and she leaves him for a social ascent through two more marriages that land her finally in French Congo as the widowed proprietress of an elegant hotel, The Equatorial, whose black staff under her close supervision caters to European businessmen renewing the rape of Africa. Leah Price, unlike her sister, has always loved her father and craved his love and approval. She begins by sharing his desire to reach out to Africa and helping him cultivate his demonstration garden of Kentucky Wonder Beans. But this Electra comes very soon to reject her father as mentor and role model. After the family catastrophe she marries the schoolteacher, Anatole Ngemba, a Lumumba supporter who will now be in and out of prison for many years, during which they have three children and join other families in trying to maintain a communal farm within Mobutu's starvation economy. This becomes next to impossible, and at the end they are hoping to move to a precariously more friendly environment in Angola. The purposes and feelings that unite and divide these sisters as white women living in Africa can be seen conveniently in two episodes, their experience of the 1974 Ali-Foreman championship prizefight in Zaire—the “Rumble in the Jungle” by which Mobutu won international respectability for his renamed country with its savage regime—and their reunion ten years later when their sister Adah comes to visit from the US. The overdeterminations involved in these episodes are both thematic and rhetorical, and in this regard nothing could be more Dickensian in relation to its audience than Kingsolver's making Rachel the Cold War beauty queen her frequent and reliable narrator. We know as historical fact that hundreds of political prisoners were shackled beneath the boxing ring before, during, and after the Ali-Foreman fight, and when Leah's Anatole is arrested and sent to prison, possibly for life, at the time of the fight, she is grateful that his incarceration will occur not beneath the boxing ring but in the far preferable prison where Lumumba was beaten half to death. Meanwhile, she says, People from the world over will come watch this great event, two black men knocking each other senseless for five million dollars apiece. And they'll go away never knowing that in all of goddamned Zaire not one public employee outside the goddamned army has been paid in two years (451). Rachel on the other hand experiences the prizefight as a missed opportunity for a family reunion: I will probably grow very rich and very old at The Equatorial before any member of my family ever visits me here. It's true! They never have. Leah is right over there in Kinshasa, which is just a hop, skip, and jump away. When they had that fight down there with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman we had tons of tourists from that . . . I knew we'd get a slew of people. I've always had a sixth sense for spotting a trend coming, and I was right on the ball. I finished up the second-floor bathroom I'd been having trouble with, and redecorated the bar with a boxing theme . . . I kept thinking, everyone is in such a festive mood, and Leah is not that far away, in miles. Mother and Adah keep saying they might come over to visit, and if they could cross an entire ocean, you would think Leah could stoop to taking a bus (463). Here is a sensibility and intonation out of Oprah Winfrey, yet you can no more condescend to Rachel Price than to Little Dorrit's Flora Finching or John Chivery. Like them, she sometimes verges on caricature, but she is also endowed like them with a vitality, presence, and dignity that make her proof against satire and in fact qualify her for her role in telling the story. We hear her again, ten years further on, when Leah herself arranges a family reunion while Anatole is again in prison. Their sister Adah crosses the ocean with a rebuilt Land Rover for the communal farm, and the three take a driving holiday during which Leah and Rachel argue nonstop about the communist threat to Africa. Here Rachel's enveloping narrative is far more engaging than Leah's predictable political analysis, yet in no way dilutes the force of that analysis, which Kingsolver clearly wants her reader to accept. Rachel's politics are all wrong, but she is really a hoot: Leah and Adah and I started bickering practically the minute we met up in Senegal. We could never even agree on where to go or stay or what to eat. Whenever we found any place that was just the teeniest step above horrid, Leah felt it was too expensive. She and Anatole evidently have chosen to live like paupers. And Adah, helpful as always, would chime in with a list of what disease organisms were likely to be present. We argued about everything: even communism! Which you would think there was nothing to argue about. I merely gave Leah the very sensible advice that she should think twice about going to Angola because the Marxists are taking it over. "The Mbundu and the Kongo tribes have a long-standing civil war there, Rachel. Agostinho Neto led the Mbundu to victory because he had the most popular support." "Well, for your information, Dr. Henry Kissinger himself says that Neto and them are followers of Karl Marx, and the other ones are pro-United States." "Imagine that," Leah said. "The Mbundu and Kongo people have been at war with each other for the last six hundred years, and Dr. Henry Kissinger has at last discovered the cause . . . " "Hah," Adah said. Her first actual unrehearsed syllable of the day. She talks now, but she still doesn't exactly throw words away. Adah was in the back, and Leah and me up front . . . I had to slow way down for a stop sign because the rivers in West Africa were turning out to be as bad as the ones in Brazzaville. It was very hard to concentrate while my sisters were giving me a pop quiz on world democracy (477–8). Later the conversation turns to their father, of whose death Leah has learned and now reports still within Rachel's narration. When a canoe with children overturned in the baptismal river and the crocodiles got at the children, the now grizzled, long-haired old man, who’d had nothing to do with this, was nevertheless held responsible and chased by the natives up an old wooden fire tower, to which they then set fire. As the only daughter who actually loved him, Leah begins crying as she tells the story, and Rachel says, I could see this was hard for Leah. I reached out and took hold of her hand. "Honey, I know," I told her. "He was our daddy. I think you always put up with him better than any of us. But he was mean as a snake. There's nothing he got that he didn't deserve." She pulled her hand out of mine so she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose. "I know that!" She sounded mad (486). Rachel's observation and tenderness are as much a part of her as her bourgeois Cold War smugness, and in her Dickensian presence, as in all three of her sisters', Kingsolver engages a popular audience in an overdetermined rhetoric inseparable from the overdeterminations of her story itself. 3. There is of course nothing new about an open-ended novel, and theorists regularly argue with Bakhtin that open-endedness belongs to the novel as a genre. But there are different situations, characters, actions, or themes to be open-ended about, and here I think some old distinctions can still be maintained among, for example, the picaresque novel, the novel of character (or Bildung), and what I want to call here the novel of history. Saul Bellow said somewhere something to the effect that when he's through with his heroes he just dumps them, and for my white male American generation Bellow's are the great examples of novelistic open-endedness. Augie March walking at the end on the Normandy beach, Henderson running breathlessly on the Newfoundland ice, or Herzog crashing in his new-old farmhouse, could have been dumped at many points along the way— or else saved for further adventures before returning home when they do. Narratologically withheld and shielded from the concrete overdeterminations of actual history, their monovocal, self-determined characters are Bellow's point of entry, and their adventures subsumed by that point of entry can begin or end at will. Historically speaking, they are always free to come home because their travels have been metaphorical and they never really left. In Bellow's great send-up of Hemingway, Henderson the Rain King in fact goes to Africa to check out his manhood. But his and Hemingway's Africa (like Conrad’s) is light years away from the Prices' Africa, which has a history of its own to be engaged and negotiated. Theirs is instead a metaphorical Africa, a scene-painted backdrop for the hero's experience of struggle with himself. By contrast, all five narrators of The Poisonwood Bible experience Africa as Davis's "conflicted subject[s] engaged in the effort to mediate historical contradiction through recourse to thought."(3) Their voices are as distinctive and engaging as those of Bellow's heroes, but they also experience themselves as caught up in irreversible historical processes to which they have no choice but respond. Directly or indirectly, they know they must answer for the ways in which their personal histories are woven into the material process of a community bigger than they are, in which whatever choice you make, you can't go home again. At any of several junctures Rachel Price could have returned to the United States for a putatively comic closure at the shopping mall and the beauty parlor. But she stays in Africa to run The Equatorial, "which isn't just a hotel, it's like running a whole little country" (512; emphasis in text), and here is how she explains at age 50 why she could never return: I had my bags packed more than once. But when push came to shove, I was always afraid. Of what? Well, it's hard to explain. Scared I wouldn't be able to fit back in is the long and short of it. I was only nineteen or twenty at that time. My high school friends would still have been whining over boyfriends and fighting for carhop jobs at the A&W. Their idea of a dog-eat-dog world was Beauty School. And now here comes Rachel with stained hair and one dead sister and a whole darn marriage behind her already . . . "What was it like over there?" I could just hear them asking. What would I say? "Well, the ants nearly ate us alive. Everybody we knew kept turning up dead of one disease and another. The babies all got diarrhea and plumb dried up. When we got hungry we'd go shoot animals and strip off their hides." Let's face it, I could never have been popular again at home (512-13). Leah and Anatole also could have returned rather than risk further poverty, malaria, and imprisonment, and at one point they explore that possibility. They come to the United States as graduate students at Emory, Leah in agricultural engineering and Anatole in political science, with teaching assistantships and student housing that make them wealthy by Congolese standards. But there are no smells in America; their trilingual children, who "fluently interchange French, Lingala, and English, with a slight accent in each," are spoken to by white Americans in "broad, loud baby talk"; and on the street these Americans scowl at their family for being the scourge they already knew and loathed—the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisement for our sins. Drawing nearer they would always stare at Anatole as contempt gave way to bald shock. His warrior's face with its expertly carved lines speaks its elegance in a language as foreign to them as Lingala (468). Leah decides that "I can't drag a husband and sons into a life where their beauty will blossom and wither in darkness," and "So we came home. Here [i.e., Zaire]. To disaster. Anatole's passport was confiscated at the airport" (469). Anatole is sent again to prison, and when he is released one more time, "with nothing else to hope for, we lean toward Angola, while the past grows heavy and our future narrows down to a crack in the door" (503). That crack in the door is Kingsolver's equivalent to Dickens's "roaring streets" into which Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, also with nothing else to hope for, must descend after their marriage. They and the Price sisters are the same recognizable, deep-structure personalities we knew at the beginning but now are changed forever by having mediated historical contradiction in the material living of their lives. The open-endedness of their stories is both rhetorical and historical: their crack in the door parallels the Zapatistas' and is also perfectly congruent with that of their popular audience—whether facing alienation in Dickens's London streets or complicity in capitalism's destruction of Kingsolver's African peoples. Where a Marxian imagination produces tragedy in the other writers I have discussed, in Dickens and Kingsolver it produces Marxian tragedy's Marxian alternative, not historical novels but novels of contingent history—the history their audience itself must transact when it must participate necessarily in the processes of class. NOTES
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