A Principle for the New Nigerian Criticism

The consensus among these critics is that the current state of Nigerian literature is depressing. Our literature is not in decline, as the cliché of historical proportion goes; the critics conclude: we are writing total travesties. These intellectual elegies towards the kind of ‘Nigerianism’ our writers are perpetrating through their susceptibility to foreign sensibilities, however, have not been without sound suasions. Though the most convincing has to be the total disregard of active discussion of our literature—the lack of mainstream criticism in our flourishing literary tradition.

Even though I concede there is little to no economic prospect for literature and criticism in Nigeria, I am here least concerned about the state of Nigerian literature within the superstructures of economics and politics. Rather, I am concerned about the improvement of the quality of the work we are doing with the little we have in material substance.

The written Nigerian literature, despite our past and continuous achievements, is young. But in literature as in other fields, Nigeria has never been without talented performers. However, talent is insignificant, to echo James Baldwin. Just as mere good intentions and fine ideas are insignificant in a political office without the will and resolve to realize them. Therefore, in the presidential offices of the poets, novelists, and dramatists, the critics are the press corp. Their pens and papers worship at the altar of sincerity, holding the literary officials accountable for their strengths and weaknesses. Hence, the critic’s preoccupation with sincerity precipitates his paramount job of work: judgement, the basic principle of any criticism.

As a proponent of principle for contemporary Nigerian critical practice, I am also less interested in critical scholarship than I am in literary criticism in its original sense of elucidating, analysing, comparing, and judging literature in a constructive and grounded manner for the reading public. In Nigeria, there has never been a tradition of mainstream literary criticism. The process of the academic tradition of reading we do have—courtesy of our universities—is slow. It is also anything but popular or public. For instance, peer-reviewed journals, in Nigeria as it is elsewhere, take more time to publish their accepted works than average mainstream journals. This does not mean, however, that the quality of critical scholarships being produced in academia is finer than the more accessible criticism mainstream outlets publish on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. For two reasons, the opposite is the case. First, the accepted—encouraged—language of academic scholarships is much more complex and obscure beyond literary criticism’s fundamental aim at clarification. Second, the academic method of literary analysis is largely ideological, the sort of perverse intellectual practice that subordinates literature to the darling triad of academia in politics, race, and gender. By merit of pickabacking literature to ideologies, academic criticism abdicates its fundamental responsibility of elucidation and passing judgement on the quality of the literary object under its critical consideration.

Indeed, literature is subordinate to nothing. ‘If literature becomes something more than literature’, the American literary critic, Alfred Kazin, ratiocinates in ‘Criticism and Isolation’, ‘it ceases to be literature at all.’ Also, the American modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, would define poetry as a self-substantiating entity unfolding freely around itself in both meaning and substance in the twelfth section of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’:

The poem is the cry of its own occasion

Part of the res itself and not about it

The poem speaks of the poem as it is.

‘The poem’ stands in for the whole of imaginative literature. Reading those lines, I wonder what multiculturalist, feminist, or Marxist reading could touch their simple, uncomplicated, total aesthetic relevance of self-definition. Although the imaginative work comes from the social, economic, political, cultural, and historical forces which serve as its background, these forces are simply that—backgrounds. It follows that if these forces could exist independently in the world while being influenced by other forces of consciousness in their turn, then what they serve as mere backgrounds to—literature, in this case—should be granted the same freedom of independent existence, to retain its autonomy despite their invariable influence on its construction.

No doubt these forces exist in the literary object. However, quarrying them from the poem, play, novel, and short story as though they are borrowed properties to be returned to their place in isolated interpretation is a violation of the artefact’s ontological freedom in the universe of ideas. It is an undemocratic act of ideological condescension, rendering the literary object a placeholder for the other disciplines of consciousness. Asking what poetry is for, as Stevens’s lines infer, is wildly irrelevant because literature is for itself and capable of meaning as such. But that particular question of social substance is exactly what the proponents of ideological criticism are insistent on asking literature, a question the American critic and scholar, Stanley Fish, concludes in ‘Harold Bloom’s Warning to the World’, ‘will not simply harm [literature], but destroy it.’

However, Fish himself has a theory of reading that the Nigerian writers’ combative reception of criticism suggests they would appreciate and even encourage us to take up. In ‘How To Recognize a Poem When You See One’, the pioneering essay on reader-response criticism in America, Fish concludes that ‘Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.’ The criterion for recognizing a poem as such is to confer on anything the poetic status. Then, after the arbitrary poetic initiation, the thing recognized begins to take the form of poetry within our understanding of what we believe poetry to be. ‘If your definition of poetry tells you that the language of poetry is complex’, Fish continues, ‘you will scrutinize the language of something identified as a poem in such a way as to bring out the complexity you know to be ‘there.’’ Mere identification as such, according to Fish, makes poetry.

The outgrowth of this ‘distressing’ conclusion is clear. Using his critical skills to construct meaning instead of construing the same within the insight the techniques employed in the work gives off, the critic participates in the writer’s invalidation as a hierarchical entity on the plane of aesthetic discipline. If all critics adopt this method—as I believe any unambitious writer working in this nanny climate would want—then we lose any hope for comparison of imaginative strength between writers. Reasonably, should we comply with this view of reading, we would have no need for comparison of imaginative strength at all.

We would lose even more in the meaninglessness of judgement since whatever informed judgement any critic can make depends on the hierarchy of imagination and executive competence of the writers. Fish’s theory obliterates the possibility of both hierarchies because, without guiding principles for reading, the critical imagination can be as inventively far-reaching as the creative imagination. Therefore, as we hope to establish a unified motive for criticism in reading strengths and weaknesses in Nigerian literature, destructive propositions of hierarchy such as this should be disregarded with the same oomph of purpose we aim, in our more theoretical criticisms, to disembark our writers’ imaginative execution from foreign sensibilities.