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Serfdom is approaching its end. But the facts that have existed for centuries do not pass away without leaving any trace behind them.... [F]or a long time to come the consequences of serfdom will be felt in books, in high society conversations and in the whole organization of the relationships between the different classes of the population. The ideas not only of the older generation, not only of the generation that is active at present, but also of the one that is about to enter our social life have been formed, if not directly on the basis of serfdom, then, at any rate, not without its strong influence.... Now the business of literature is to expose the remnants of serfdom in social life and to root out the ideas it had produced. (qtd. in Dostoevsky 105-06)

While no doubt also desiring the elimination of the social and intellectual vestiges of serfdom, Fyodor Dostoevsky so opposed this narrowly conceived programmatic account of the role of art that he devoted a lengthy essay, "Mr. --bov and the Question of Art" (in the February 1861 issue of his own journal, Time) to refuting Dobrolyubov. In this response, Dostoevsky frames the issue as a battle between critics advocating art as "an aim by itself [which finds] its justification in its inner content" and the utilitarians who teach "that art must serve man by its direct, immediate, practical usefulness" (91, 92). Essentially, Dostoevsky argues that it is impossible to predict how a work of art might be useful and that imposing a narrowly conceived account of usefulness is only likely to stifle what is of the most permanent value in art, what "gives the fullest possible expression to the trends, instincts and needs of [the spirit of a people] at any given historic moment" (132).

Merely by replacing "serfdom" with "colonialism," Dobrolyubov's claims can be made to represent a tendency in contemporary postcolonial theory, one usually expressed less baldly, but, I will argue, often implicit nonetheless. Postcolonial literary criticism often implies, I will argue, a similar narrow account of usefulness, prescribing an aesthetic which is fundamentally a political agenda, and that by doing so it is capable of missing that which is most valuable in a text. Like Dostoevsky, I will restrict my criticism of this view to one article by one critic: Jacqueline Bardolph's article, "Azaro, Saleem and Askar: Brothers in Allegory" (Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 15.1 [Autumn 1993]), on Salman Rushdie, Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah, and British-Nigerian novelist and poet, Ben Okri. While Dostoevsky criticizes Dobrolyubov for being "quite satisfied with the absence of artistic qualities so long as the right things are discussed" (107), I will argue that Bardolph's implicit agenda blinds her to the most significant aesthetic merits of Okri's novel, blinds her, in fact, to the essentially Nigerian aesthetic and cultural vision powerfully expressed in the text.

Bardolph, who has also written books on Ngugi and the East African novel in English and edited a book entitled Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English,[*] sets out to analyze a common narrative device in novels by each of the three authors in order to raise "several questions concerning the genre of the novel and the relevance of allegorical reading" (Bardolph 45). It is her claim that the use of a young child to "represent a nation or a people at a particular moment of their history" is a "family likeness which cannot be accounted for only by intertextuality, but possibly ... by a similar esthetic and political response to the situation in which they are written."

Because Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1992) seems to be the case which prompted her article, and because it receives slightly more of her attention, I would like to focus my critique on her analysis of it. Okri's novel is narrated by Azaro, a boy growing up during Nigeria's difficult transition to independence. Through his uncomprehending eyes, Okri presents an unusual perspective on the social and political changes affecting the boy's family and their compound. Azaro's view is also unusual because he is an abiku, a spirit-child who resists being born because of his love for the world of the unborn. Through Azaro's eyes, Okri portrays the Otherworld, the realm of the unborn, the dead and of dreams--to which Azaro has access--as matter-of-factly as the world of material existence. Azaro's attempts to return to his spirit-companions soon after birth and his parents' efforts to keep him among the living occupy the first chapters of the novel; his parents' own efforts and, more remotely, his nation's effort to "be born" occupy the remainder of this loose, baggy but compelling monster of a novel.

Bardolph claims that after a "magnificent" beginning, the remainder of The Famished Road "seems static, repetitive, shapeless ... due to an apparent lack of inspiration, a loss of narrative intensity and sense of direction" (46). She attributes this failure of aesthetic effect to the novel's combination of Bildungsroman and political allegory, arguing that the allegory "brings to bear an extra weight on [the childhood narrative] that possibly brings distortions and difficult narrative contradictions." She argues, then, that it is impossible to combine effectively the tale of a child's maturation--that is, one which looks back upon a completed process--with the allegorical representation of recent and still-unfolding history: "the coming of age is too close to the present to allow for idealization or for any credible projections" (50). From this, she draws her conclusion about novels written in this general "situation": "The feeling of anomy, of powerlessness, the loss at times of the very idea of linear progress make the designing of a clear plot, the progression towards some kind of resolution, a daunting task" (50).

I believe Bardolph's analysis fails to do justice to Okri's novel precisely because of her assumption that it is a postcolonial novel. To her credit, she does not use this term; nevertheless, her analysis is driven at every point by the theoretical agenda referred to for the sake of convenience as "postcolonial." Her article is premised upon the identification of a common trait of three texts; this trait then becomes evidence that the novels exemplify the same response to the same political and cultural causes, a move which reduces the novels' differences absurdly.

The first manifestation of this programmatic reductionism is her reading of The Famished Road as Bildungsroman. Finding this genre expressed in Farah and Rushdie, she searches for it in Okri. But Okri's novel does not conform to her expectations. Azaro does not mature, does not transit "the passage from the delights of early [fantastic] visions to the sobering stages of growing up, from magic gifts to a prosaic assessment of limits" (47). He does become gradually more aware of "adult" realities, but this is not at the expense of his ability to perceive a contiguous spiritual reality; that is, the fantastic possibilities which Bardolph attributes solely to his childhood actually co-exist with his more mature perception of reality at the novel's conclusion. Okri's next novel, Songs of Enchantment, (which was published after Bardolph's article) picks up Azaro's story where it was left off--in childhood. And while he does seem slightly older, he still interacts freely with the Otherworld and does not reach a more advanced stage of maturity by that book's end.

Indeed, none of the novel's characters develop in the teleological manner which might be expected of Bildungsroman. Azaro's Dad and Mum experience terrific gains as well as losses in their own perception of their world. Okri replaces this Western set of expectations with a cyclical mode of development, one into which it is difficult to read any kind of pattern, even in retrospect, not to mention during a first reading. Each character repeatedly swings between optimism and pessimism, between an active and a passive response to his or her world, so that at each moment the probability of achieving a "mature," finalized self-understanding is equally weighted toward success or failure. This makes absurd Bardolph's claim that "in the end the odds are in favour of [Azaro's] return[ing] to life" instead of retreating to the spirit world (50). After noting the frequency of oscillation between alternatives for all the novel's characters, the reader is simply denied this certainty about outcomes.

Again, the sequel does not chart the next stage in the development of Azaro or his parents; rather, it shows them taking another step--and not one in a direction necessarily following from the previous or leading directly to some end implicit in any earlier one. None of these alternatives, that is,

ever [become] dialectical, they [are] never set in motion along a temporal path or in an evolving sequence: they [are], rather, spread out in one plane, as standing alongside or opposite one another, as consonant but not merging or as hopelessly contradictory, as an eternal harmony of unmerged voices or as their unceasing and irreconcilable quarrel. (Bakhtin 30)

While it is also a programmatic and reductive effort, Bardolph's attempt to read the novel as allegory is less fundamentally mistaken. That is, there is a genuine allegorical element present: "it shocked [Dad] that ours too was an abiku nation, a spirit-child nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth come blood and betrayals" (The Famished Road 494). Okri is careful not to make the relationship between nation and individual simply allegorical, however. The child and the nation are both instances of a larger phenomenon:

History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.

While the reading of Nigeria as a political abiku is explicitly posed by the novel, to read it solely in terms of this political allegory is to miss the real "political" points Okri is trying to make--which are "hidden" from such a programmatic reading behind the "spiritual" concerns of the text, namely, the aspects of the human spirit which are fundamental to the functioning of all cultural systems. Reading Azaro as an allegorical representation of Nigeria is to link metaphorically individual and nation, to acknowledge imagined similarities between them at the expense of concrete connections. Okri's effort throughout the novel is to convince the reader that Africa needs to redream itself. "We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think.... We can redream this world and make the dream real.... [O]ur hunger can change the world, make it better, sweeter" (498). It follows from this view that the dreams of individual Africans can and will determine the continent's future. Judy Cooke states that the question posed by Okri's novels is "How can Azaro dream his own future and that of his nation?" (Cooke 41); her phrasing implying that it is within Azaro's power to dream both his own and his nation's futures. That is, Okri believes that individual Africans have a real connection with the whole of Africa--by virtue of the ability to re-envision: the link is based on the faculty of imagination but this is not to say, as an allegorical reading suggests, that it is a solely "imaginary" one. This spiritually represented political vision is fully realized in The Famished Road.

It is Bardolph's political agenda--smuggled in under her assumption of a similarity of "esthetic and political response to the situation [i.e., the postcolonial situation] in which [the novels] were written"--therefore, which compels her to seek closure and overt political statement in the novel and which blinds her to the wedge of possibility for spiritual progress which Okri drives into post-Independence, post-Civil war Nigeria by means of his narrative. Condescendingly, she assumes that in a culturally and politically unstable region, artists are incapable of bringing about aesthetic closure when they wish it. "Somehow the tales written in parts of the world where the rules of the game are in outside hands or where there are no rules at all leave no scope for heroic figures" (50). Defying her expectations, Okri never permits "outside hands" to direct his novel's course, to create a monologizing gravitational center able to "distort" his narrative. Rather, Okri reduces the former colonial power to just one more of the many forces coming to bear on the lives of Azaro and his neighbors, producing a field of tensions capable of producing almost any outcome. So while Bardolph concludes that Western political forces make for an "inherent ... near impossibility of esthetic resolution" in works by, in her phrase, "Third-World artists" (48), it seems more accurate to say that this "aesthetic weakness" is a function of Western aesthetico-politics: her own political prescription for the "Third World" novel produces the expectations which Okri's novel fails to satisfy. She implicitly prescribes that the Third World artist use his art to "expose the remnants of [colonialism] and to root out the ideas it [has] produced" and as a result, she recolonizes his novel.

My criticism of this implicit "utilitarianism" of postcolonial criticism can be summarized by the following quotation:

in its attempt to get its theoretical bearings in this new multivoiced world, the critical literature has found no other course than to monologize this world as if it were a world of the usual type, that is, to perceive the product of an essentially new [or, Other] artistic intention from the vantage point of the old and ordinary intention. (Bakhtin 8)

This monologization is particularly egregious when the recolonized work contains aesthetic and cultural values which could fruitfully ground a receptive postcolonial criticism. As I have been suggesting, and as the quotation from Bakhtin above makes explicit, Okri's work draws on an aesthetic--that of the Yoruba people of Nigeria--which is similar in many ways to Bakhtinian dialogism. According to Olabiyi Yai, "The intellectual climate of [Yorubaland] was and still is largely characterized by a dialogic ethos, a constant pursuit to exchange ideas, experience, and material culture" (Yai 109). This dialogism is evident in Yoruba verbal and visual artforms in their "segmented or seriate" mode of composition. For instance, the wooden trays used in ritual divinations are encompassed by carvings which form

a discontinuous aggregate in which the units of the whole are discrete and share equal value with the other units. The units often have no prescribed order and are interchangeable. Attention to the discrete units of the whole produces a form which is multifocal, with shifts in perspective and proportion.... Such compositions (whether representational or not) mirror a world order of structurally equal yet autonomous elements. (Drewal, Pemberton and Abiodun 16)

The artist in this culture is considered a "permanent stranger":

In a culture where ... the principle of individuality, is perceived as a deity that informs and shapes the world view and behavior of persons, it is simply 'natural' that the privileged idiom of artistic expression, indeed, the mode of existence of art, should be through constant departure. The English word 'representation,' with its assumption of and intrinsic bias toward similarity, cannot do justice to Yoruba traditions of aesthetics and modes of relating to otherness. (Yai 112-13)

My associating of The Famished Road with a dialogical Yoruba aesthetic might only strengthen the notion of Okri as a "postcolonial" writer if it were not for the fact that Okri is not himself Yoruba. Rather, he has adopted Yoruba myth and aesthetic values to suit his particular artistic ends. His early novel, The Landscapes Within (1981) used a fairly conventional naturalistic realism, so we can see his adoption of a distinctly African mode as evidence of his full control of his materials and aesthetic intentions. He is by no means the hopelessly colonized artist we might imagine from Bardolph's critique but one using African modes to challenge Western expectations of the postcolonial novel.

When J.M. Coetzee claims that "In the orthodoxy of academic criticism today, 'dialogical' has become a term of approval, 'monological' a term of censure of the same order as 'phallocentric'" (Coetzee 15), he identifies the same kind of philosophical monologization I have been discussing here; in this case the reducing of Bakhtin's concept to an evaluative binary is a corruption, since "dialogism as exemplified in the novels of Dostoevsky is a matter not of ideological position, still less of novelistic technique, but of the most radical intellectual and even spiritual courage." While Coetzee goes on to argue that "to the degree that Dostoevskean dialogism grows out of Dostoevsky's own moral character, out of his ideals, and out of his being as a writer, it is only distantly imitable" (16), I believe that a degree of dialogical openness is a possibility--no less than a necessity, in fact--for critics attempting to read the textual products of other cultures. This is especially the case when an artist has so effectively created his own dialogical mode, as Okri has done. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that dialogism may be our best hope as both a meeting place and the mode of interaction for the encounter of Western readers and non-Western texts.

Tom Wilhelmus's account of his reading of The Famished Road exemplifies the frank willingness to be challenged which is necessary for such an encounter:

For the first 250 unrelentingly paratactic pages, simple sentence followed simple sentence, scene followed simple scene, nothing connected, nothing was subordinated, and every experience seemed as important as every other. I thought political correctness might well be the point. Moreover, the narrator jumped so freely from realistic passages depicting African village life into surrealist passages of fantasy and dream that to me they exhibited a blurred--and possibly primitive?--inability to separate fact from fiction. Yet I should have known: important works are not distinguished by how you read but how they require you to read them by their standards. And now I'm convinced that The Famished Road displays immense integrity in doing what it does. (Wilhelmus 247)

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Works Cited

Bardolph, Jacqueline. "Azaro, Saleem and Askar: Brothers in Allegory." Commonwealth Essays and Studies 15.1 (Autumn 1993): 45-51.

Coetzee, J.M. "The Artist at High Tide." Rev. of Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 by Joseph Frank. New York Review of Books 42.4 (12 March 1995): 13-16.

Cooke, Judy. "Strong Spirits." Rev. of Songs of Enchantment by Ben Okri. New Statesman and Society 6.245 (26 March 1993): 41.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. "Mr. --bov and the Question of Art." Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings. Ed. transl. and intro. David Magarshack. New York: Random House, 1963. 86-137.

Drewal, Henry John. "Yoruba Art and Life as Journeys." The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Eds. Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton III. Washington: Smithsonian Institute P, 1994. 193-99.

Drewal, Henry John, John III Pemberton, and Rowland Abiodun. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: The Center for African Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1989.

Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. New York: Anchor, 1992.

---. Songs of Enchantment. New York: Anchor, 1993.

Osundare, Niyi. African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorising. Dialogue in African Philosophy Monograph Series. Ibadan: Options Book and Information Services, 1993.

Wilhelmus, Tom. "Time and Distance." Rev. of The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Hudson Review 46.1 (Spring 1993): 247-52.

Yai, Olabiyi Babalola. "In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition' and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space." The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Eds. Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton III. Washington: Smithsonian Institute P, 1994. 107-15.

article published in Commonwealth
18.2 (Spring 1996): 13-20