Fiction and the Incompleteness of History

Reviewed by: Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri Brenda Cooper Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri By Zhu Ying. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 160pp. ISBN 3-03910-746-1 Zhu Ying’s study is, in her own words, a reading of “Morrison, Naipaul and Okri in terms of their historical projects in fiction” (107). It looks closely at Morrison’s Beloved, two of Naipaul’s works, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, and Okri’s The Famished Road, in order to explore the suggestive “interspace” (149, her emphasis) between history and fiction. Crucial to her project is that the particular history that these writers explore is a neglected or buried past, an undocumented or misinterpreted history. They surface this past in order to produce new and better knowledge of their worlds. What they attempt to do is “to reinterpret the historical past and re-envision the world” (11). This is a most interesting and challenging project. The case of Morrison’s excavations is given most clearly where for her this history is “the legacy of slavery unacknowledged in classic slave narratives” (17). Naipaul’s neglected history relates to diaspora and Okri’s to colonial/postcolonial history linked to African myth and folklore. These last two are less clear and sharply focused and the book sometimes struggles to pin down the basis of its comparison between the three and its recognition of the differences between them. For example, Ying attempts to summarize the buried history in each case by way of what she calls, quite confusingly, “metaphors,” which are “rememory, traces, and abiku” in relation to Morrison, Naipaul, and Okri, respectively (31). This is further complicated by the theoretical grid on which she rests her interpretation of the excavation of history in fiction, which is Ricoeur’s The Reality of the Historical Past, and his concepts of “the Same, the Other and the Analogue” (113 and elsewhere). This tends to become repetitive and quite forced. Lovely and less straitjacketed, and what could have increased her freedom to uncover these insights, is Ying’s looser and suggestive comment that “Morrison, Naipaul and Okri are three fiction writers who have devoted themselves to mapping out an uncharted continent of unacknowledged histories and unnoticed realities” (32). The strongest chapter is on Toni Morrison. Ying explains Morrison’s coinage of the concept of “rememory” as a productive amalgam of “historical memory” and “retrospective imagination” (63). She demonstrates how, less a metaphor and more a device that challenges the boundaries between history and fiction, the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter, Beloved, “cannot be exorcized until her forgotten [End Page 184] story is told and rememorized” (55). Rememory includes the known as well as the unknown and the personal as well as the cultural histories of slavery. The chapter on Naipaul suffers the most from the lack of an incisive focus. It feels as if Ying does not have a firm grip on his project, which the structure of her book compelled her to conceptualize in a word or phrase. What made this more complicated for her is that Naipaul’s politics are different from the other two writers under discussion, but the tight structure of similarity that she set up made this difficult to enlarge upon. She therefore talks of Naipaul’s “protocol” as not politically correct or radical in the way that Morrison’s is, but “more individually engaged and inward going” (77). This is somewhat vague and quite questionable, I think. The comparison between Morrison and Okri works much more compellingly with Ying’s apt comment that both reject a clear boundary between humans and spirits, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead (108–09). She tantalizingly refers to “redreaming” in Okri, invoking rememory in Morrison. In summary, the book will be useful less for the theory it delivers and more for its perceptive and challenging close reading of the selected novels, especially of Beloved, which often breaks through the somewhat formulaic structure of the book as a whole. Brenda Cooper University of Cape Town Copyright © 2008 Indiana University Press

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