Expulsion from Eden: Towards the Story and Theory of the Early Ghanaian Novel
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Date
2018-10-18
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Abstract
While significant literature exists on the early Ghanaian novel, many of the interpreters of the genre – Danquah 1943; Angmor 1996, 2010; Salm and Falola 2002; Newell 2002; Yitah and Dako 2011; Wehrs [2008], 2016 – provide accounts of only the history and “existential thematics” (Culler 2002: 32). Such analyses look at only the trajectory and veridical matter of the novels in isolation of the important formulaic structural patterning which should properly constitute the basis of interpretation of the novels. Situated within the context of the scholarship outlined above, the present study provides a structural analysis of the four Ghanaian novels written during the colonial period: A. Native’s Marita (1886), J.E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Kobina Sekyi’s The Anglo-Fanti (1918) and R.E. Obeng’s Eighteenpence (1943). As regards methodology, we shall first summarise the plot of each novel with a series of clauses. The delineated clauses shall be treated as a linguistic system and re-ordered according to Levi-Straussian paradigmatic logic of structuralism to discover the real underlying structure of the novels. Our interest is in identifying the recurring functions and how they lend themselves to the process of re-formulation as a structure. At the end of the study, we shall conclude that the same structural pattern exists in the entire corpus of the early Ghanaian novel, and that the structure represents the grammar of story. We shall indicate that the pattern is not visible on the level of superficial reading, but represents a structural mechanism embedded deeply and unintentionally in the fabric of the story of the early Ghanaian novel. We shall interpret the grammar as representing the Edenic myth of the expulsion: the collapse and sacking of a well-appointed pre-colonial primordiality after the emergence of the archetypal snake (coloniser) and the introduction of the apple (colonisation). Finally, we shall suggest that the grammar is an unconscious story residing in the deepest recesses of the psyche of the early Ghanaian novelists as they grappled with the brutal angst of powerlessness, emasculation and loss of a hitherto perfect African world under British colonisation. We shall conclude that the grammar is a paradox for two reasons: first, it remains seemingly unexpressed and hidden in the abstract, psychological plane of the writers, and yet it sneaks its way undetected by them into the fabric of their novels; second, it represents the real concerns, and truest meaning of the early novels, and yet the writers themselves are unaware of it. We shall proffer the grammar as the theory of the early Ghanaian novel.
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Ghanaian novel, existential thematics, Edenic myth, psychological plane