Ghostwriting History:
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.4.0589
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
ResumoI think one also writes for the dead.—Jacques Derrida In the European marketplace, literature by African writers is often commodified as a distinctly cultural product, having an “African” identity. This need not be clearly defined either in terms of the writer's ideological, geographic, or ethnic orientations, just so long as the work reflects some vague traces of its “Africanness,” which can be thematized through lurid imagery splashed across the cover of a book or comprised of equally lurid blurbs on its back cover. In some cases, critics exhibit complicity in minimizing complex identities by regarding literary works as cultural products and describing them as “truly African,” or “the first of its kind.”1 Emphasizing either the originality or authority of the writer, such critics seem caught up in the search for a “Zulu Tolstoy,” tending to bestow laurels only to rescind them immediately.2Deceptively laudatory remarks about particular African literary and cultural productions can be problematic not only because they often assume an impossible intimacy with the sum of African cultures in all of their complex and variegated forms. Such remarks can also represent a backhanded gloss on the quality of African work as a whole. Moreover, a hostile solicitude toward the history of African letters tends to ignore its indigenous oral and literary past and assume that it constitutes a relatively new history, originating only through colonial influence.3The market of African literature unevenly distributes capital and mystification between author, publisher, and audience. It domesticates the text while exoticizing the product. In this study, I explore this paradoxical trend as illustrated by the critical reception of two novels by West African authors: Le regard du roi by Camara Laye and Le devoir de violence by Yambo Ouologuem. The literary criticism of these two novels is haunted by discrepant responses of authentication, uncertainty, and contempt. At the same time, the works themselves evoke another form of haunting, namely the specters of violent histories of colonialism and neocolonialism. Illustrating the kind of European writing about these histories that Laye and Ouologuem subvert, this study includes a brief discussion of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. My examination of Conrad's novel foregrounds the other works in this study against the horizon of colonialism.Laye and Ouologuem have each been accused of plagiarism or forgery. The cases against the authors are very different, and it is my own opinion, especially with regard to Laye, that these accusations are tenuous and unfair. However, I do not wish to engage directly in the debates over these authors' authority or originality. Rather, I would like to examine the terms of this debate for the values they reflect. I argue that staking the value of a work on the identity of the author disengages one from the text and can lead to violent misreadings. Shifting these stakes, I look to a concept that undermines legal or proprietary judgments about the pure originality and authority of either Laye or Ouologuem: ghostwriting. Being neither the sole property of the publisher, critic, nor author, the ghostwritten text manifests a complex relation between itself and its audience while suggesting the involvement of specters in the writing of history.Critical judgments about an author's originality can cut at least two ways: while bestowing authority on the work, they may also occlude the heterogeneous concatenation of voices that leads to a work. Closely associated with this idea of originality are notions about the artist's inspiration and genius. Yet to dwell on the originality of the work is to refuse one's inheritance and a denial of the share one has in the ideas of others. Addressing this problem of seeing the modern work as plopping out of thin air, a pure product of conjuration, Edward Said writes that “the originality of contemporary literature in its broad outlines resides in the refusal of originality, or primacy, to its forebears. … The best way to consider originality is to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody, repetition, echoes of it.”4Written works that have been memorialized and canonized are the aftereffects of thousands of other voices that have been lost or forgotten, that fell out of the archive or were left unpublished and uncredited, and this forgetting is what constitutes our sense of literature and makes it possible. Originality, in this context, is always an ascription made after the fact, in the form of judgments about writers and their works. This judgment requires an effacement of the set of voices that go into a work. As Walter Benjamin noted, great cultural treasures, works of art and literature held in the utmost esteem, “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.”5The concept of originality, so highly prized and yet so inconsistent in its European context, plays an entirely different role in traditionally oral cultures. In “Plagiarism and Authentic Creativity in West Africa,” Donatus I. Nwoga argues that in African traditional culture, “it was taken for granted that a storyteller would tell the same stories that others had told before him, that he would be using materials that were already there in the culture. Originality was a function of manner rather than of matter.”6The writings of Laye and Ouologuem exemplify this problematic relationship between African and European literary traditions. The solitary, creative genius seems to have its roots in the European tendency to represent the work of art as a kind of organic offshoot from the artist's psyche. According to F. Abiola Irele, the “protocols of authorship that obtain as a function of the structure of social and economic life within which, in the modern world, literary works are created, disseminated, and evaluated,” have very little to do with traditional African conventions of authorship.7 Traditions of African orature, for example, make use of productions of literary creativity as collective cultural possessions. As Irele argues, textual ownership was not an important feature of literary and artistic production until recently, when institutions sprang up to kneel at the altar of the individual genius.8Critics such as Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva further complicate the notion of authorship in a European context. For example, in “What is an Author?,” Foucault asks, “What difference does it make who is speaking?”9 And Kristeva designates “intertextualité” in her Desire in Language, as the practice of making productive reference to other texts within a given text or of using other texts as codes to illuminate the text.These efforts to trouble rigid notions of authorship from African as well as European perspectives expose these notions as little more than naturalized conventions. Authenticity and authentication become matters for a work's audience to decide, based on the kinds of writing with which a particular author is associated. As Abdelfattah Kilito shows in The Author and His Doubles, “An author cannot escape the genre where he first dropped anchor and where conventional wisdom has imprisoned him. He is forbidden to move elsewhere…; he resists being transplanted to a foreign soil where his coin has no currency. He lives on an isolated planet with its own elements, gravity, and laws of motion. If forced to move to another planet, he flounders in an unbreathable atmosphere and floats in space, unable to cling to any fixed object.”10When critics discount the authority of writers like Laye and Ouologuem, they tend to employ a biographical fallacy. Claims about these writers' plagiarism or inauthenticity are dynamics that may be understood to have developed against a background of colonial and neocolonial history. Both of these writers were first hailed as geniuses and as some of the first “authentic” literary voices from the African continent and then subsequently marked as “fakes” and “forgers.” The critical censure of African authors that follows on the heels of panegyrics is a pattern in the reception of African cultural productions, not just a matter of a few isolated incidents. The cases mounted against Laye and Ouologuem reflect criteria for a certain kind of marketing and reading mobilized around the figure of the African author.According to this mode of reading, the indigeneity of the author guarantees the authenticity of the work, whether or not the author promotes his own image as a native. Reinforcing the currency of the African author's authenticity is a burden of representation. But there is a vicious circle here. As soon as the author's originality or authority is considered pierced, critics reaffirm an uneven system of prestige and aesthetics between European and African art. Canceling out the laurels that had recently marked the work out as a superlative piece of African cultural production, the circle is completed by critics' reinforcing false beliefs in European superiority and encouraging a disdain for African traditions of production. Reducing the great complexity of relations between European and African art, critics elide the differences between these traditions at the same time that they ignore intertextual connections.Against this backdrop, how should we understand the claims of forgery made against Laye and Ouologuem? The accusation in Laye's case is that he passed off a work as his own when it was actually written by someone else; in Ouologuem's, it is that he passed off as his own a work that incorporated elements from other texts. In Faking It, Ian Haywood argues that “forgeries are subversive artefacts” because they raise questions about the very nature of authority.11 What distinguishes forgery from fiction, according to Haywood, is law and interpretation. If one wants to raise questions about authority, one cannot approach a work from a strictly legal perspective because law and authority are intertwined. The debates around Laye's and Ouologuem's “forgeries” are juridical in nature, aiming to establish sufficient proof of guilt. In order to shift the terms of this debate, I examine the nature of subversion in their works, avoiding the limitations of a strictly legal debate on textual property.The defense of authors like Laye and Ouologuem who have been accused of counterfeiting remains an aporia. As Kilito argues, “A pastiche can be a masterpiece of its genre, but never a masterpiece plain and simple. When produced by a great author, a forgery may well escape marginality, but it can never escape ambivalence. The shadow of the supposed author looms on the horizon and weighs down—or enriches—any interpretation of the work.”12 Critics who assert Laye's Le regard is a forgery depict him as someone who could not have written such a work; Ouologuem's “forgery,” however, provides a way out of this kind of thinking: it gives him an occasion to explore the concept of ghostwriting as a technique of pastiche, bringing the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse into contact with the legacy of colonialism.Ghostwriting complicates the distinction between the author and the writer, or between the authentic and the counterfeit, drawn by that juridical mode of reading. It forces us to reexamine originality and to view it as a mode of storytelling rather than as the unadulterated product of an individual in creative isolation. It allows us to reconsider the politics of writing employed by writers accused of forgery or plagiarism. Finally, ghostwriting brings together notions of ghosts and of writing through practices that become necessary in the wake of histories of violence.Colonialism has produced very real ghosts that have not been properly mourned or laid to rest. For this reason, colonialism, in its historical as well as its practiced forms, continues to haunt both colonizers as well as the colonized. Ghostwriting raises questions about the legacy of colonialism by transforming the way we understand the writing of history and its politics.The realms of writing and interpretation can be inhabited or haunted by ghosts. Ghostwriting involves complex practices of writing that mediate between the oral and the written or between the author and the writer in ways that challenge their categorical distinctions. In this study, I consider ghostwriting from four distinct angles, though the view from these perspectives can overlap. Firstly, there is the “genre” of ghostwriting, a form of storytelling that targets a particular audience and markets a product through a process of mediation between the author and writer. As Amy K. Levin notes, Ghostwriting implicitly involves mediation in the act of composition. The mediator, or ghostwriter, is present to give form and expression to a story that might not otherwise be coherent. Because the ghostwriter helps make a book more readable and often more marketable, he or she participates in the marketing and publication of the work, a cultural product. Moreover, whereas a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century slave narratives is the marker “written by himself,” … ghostwriting is identified by the tag “as told to,” a phrase that, significantly, renders manifest the transition from oral to written text.13In its generic form, ghostwriting tends to represent a form of story adaptation. It implies that authorship is not really singular. Writers and storytellers who collaborate on a ghostwritten work may not be given credit and may remain anonymous. By disappearing from their own work, writers are thus made ghostlike. Ghostwriting in this sense is collaborative, but only in a nonisomorphic way, because credit tends to be distributed unevenly between an author who is named and a writer whose work is attributed to another. In other cases, as Levin points out, ghostwriting can transform works from an oral archive into writing. In this case, the roles of author and writer are reversed, since it is the production of the oral storyteller that becomes ghostwritten and for which the writer tends to take authorial credit. Hence, the genre of ghostwriting complicates ideas about authorship.Secondly, there is the “technique” of ghostwriting that Ouologuem recommends, which I explore in detail in the final sections of this article. The main purpose of the technique is to render obsolete contemporary legal discourse about literary property while creating a new model for literary production. As I show, this is a highly subversive strategy whose goal is to reorder the very systems and markets of literary exchange. Simultaneously, this technique invokes the brutal history of slavery through Ouologuem's use of an idiom in French. Hinging on his use of an antiquated meaning of the word “nègre” as ghostwriter, Ouologuem suggestively brings the idea of the technique to bear on the politics and history of ghostwriting.Thirdly, there are the “politics” of ghostwriting. According to Jacques Derrida, ghostwriting has been an important aspect of the legal-political apparatus at least since ancient Greece. Politicians commissioned ghostwriters to write speeches aimed at influencing an audience. Derrida explains that “the logographer, in the strict sense, is a ghost writer who composes speeches for use by litigants, speeches which he himself does not pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speak, in person, and which produce their effects in his absence.”14 Plato felt that this created a dangerous form of influence, since the words lacked the presence of the writer as a guarantee of the truth of his intentions. The ghostwriter stands in a paradoxical relation to his own words. Once written, they embark on a life of their own.Derrida has also examined the historical “whirling dance of ghosts” and the concept of the specter in his Spectres of Marx as well as other works.15 These investigations consider the political life of the ghost and what he calls “hauntology,” a way of getting at concepts that are immanently political but that cannot be adequately approached as being in an ontological sense. Gayatri Spivak has also explored the political aspects of ghostwriting, calling attention to the American Indian spiritual movement of the ghost dance, which she understands as an attempt to form an ethical relation with history.16Finally, ghostwriting invokes specific histories of trauma and colonialism. Helen Sword has pointed out that “all ghosts demand interpretation.”17 Why should this be? It is because ghostwriting is a way of dealing with history, a way of writing history. The idea of the ghost invokes traumatic histories, since the revenant that returns to haunt has unfinished business. By revisiting lives unsettled by history and colonialism, ghostwriting can become a highly politicized form of writing history. For example, Erica L. Johnson insists that “ghostwriting is a crucial mode of subaltern historiography. Faced with the reality of blocked access to the past, ghostwriters seek out traces of the past in the present as well as in archival or oral material.”18These traces haunt the margins between speech and writing because writing tends to be wrongly considered a higher mode of cultural production than oral culture. One of the legacies of colonialism is the tendency to measure cultural achievements by reference to European civilization, which regards writing as more important than cultural production that is transmitted orally.Some events are never fully acknowledged because of their atrocity. Moreover, the dead are not always given a proper burial. Colonialism continues to be practiced (in its neocolonial forms) partly because it has not been recognized and because it remains a scandal of thought. This is why Frantz Fanon emphasizes the need to completely call into question the colonial situation.19 Psychoanalysis attempts to find ways to facilitate mourning, even where events seem ungrieveable. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok suggest that certain unspeakable and unmourned occurrences can actually be communicated unconsciously between individuals and even passed on from generation to generation. The unspeakable occurrence forms a gap within language itself and is thereby conveyed as a painful secret to its heirs. This is the idea of the phantom, which can represent unspeakable crimes that were perpetrated against those who have passed away. As Abraham writes, “The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other.”20 Because the phantom remains in the shadows of secrecy and unknowing, mourning for the dead is never entirely achieved. Rather, the entombed secrets continue to be experienced through a kind of paralysis within language, uncannily returning to haunt and distort reality. Colonialism forms just such a crypt. In its wake, perhaps writing and interpretation can also be a site for haunting, where the phantom's epitaph is inscribed and passed on.In its operation, ghostwriting is not unlike the kind of writing that Freud describes in his “Note Upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” (1925).21 Freud sees the perceptual apparatus of consciousness in the model offered by the mystic writing pad, which is a tablet for a kind of temporary writing that can easily be erased yet also retains traces of the effaced writing. The traces of ghostwriting may still link, through some subterranean channel, the author to his writing or the writing to the ghosts it conjures forth. In other words, what has been erased or distorted can sometimes return to haunt the text.The interpretation of written traces may be able to lead us back to the crime that produces the phantom. As Freud writes in Moses and Monotheism: The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces. One could wish to give the word “distortion” [Entstellung] the double meaning to which it has a right, although it is no longer used in this sense. It should mean not only “to change the appearance of,” but also “to wrench apart,” “to put in another place.” That is why in so many textual distortions we may count on finding the suppressed and abnegated material hidden away somewhere, though in an altered shape and torn out of its original connection. Only it is not always easy to recognize it.22Freud's thesis in his book on Moses creates a kind of historical doppelgänger alongside the literary figure of Moses represented in the Bible. Drawing attention to the conspicuous erasure of the African b ackdrop of the story, Freud argues that the complex identity and ambiguous origins of the biblical Moses is a reflection of his African origins. The erasure of his African origins distorts and defaces both the biblical text and its reception. For Freud, the true remains of the crime are neither skeletal nor archeological but textual. Freud speculates that the writing enshrouding the murder of Moses exhibits a disavowal of an unspeakable act. This disavowal acts like a second murder and continues to exert a distorting force through the text. For Freud, the form of ghostwriting that uncannily overwrites Moses's murder also undermines Moses's African heritage. If we understand the critical reception of works by Ouologuem and Laye as a form of ghostwriting, we can see how legal questions of authenticity and authorship act to distort the subversive messages of the texts. Interpreting authorship in this way, the critics of these authors' works pen a kind of ghostwriting of their own.Like the strange story Freud tells about Moses, the narrative of Heart of Darkness also revolves around an unspeakable violence. This book has been the subject of an interesting debate about the writer's complicity in racism and systems of brutality.23 The figure of the writer here is doubled, with Joseph Conrad posing as Marlowe's ghostwriter. The reception of the book reflects how a writer's absence may haunt the reading of complex narratives. Conrad effaces his authorial prerogative over the narrative by ceding his own voice as storyteller to Marlowe. Yet readings of the novel reinstall Conrad the writer as a translator of historical contexts and an interpreter of certain fantasies. The writer is read in the context of colonialism and his adventures among King Leopold's cruel administration of the Congo. Although Conrad's narrative is written in English and Laye and Ouologuem write in French, Heart of Darkness is part of a tradition that these writers know well. Their writing subverts this tradition. Yet Conrad's book continues to exercise a strong hold over representations of Africa, it being one of the most highly canonized literary works about Africa. Written by a white colonial adventurer and giving voice to the internal struggles of European colonials while denying a voice to all the African characters save one, Heart of Darkness shows how Africa is ghostwritten by colonialism.Responses to Heart of Darkness tend to revolve around questions about the author's ideological persuasion. On the one hand, some critics laud Conrad's very effective criticism of the brutal colonialism of Leopold's exploitation of the Congo.24 On the other hand, as both Patrick Brantlinger and Edward Said have argued, he fails to extend his criticism to colonialism generally, and in its realization, the novel reflects the unquestioned racism of European imperialism.25Patrick Brantlinger offers a reading of the novel that investigates the role that Conrad's ambivalence toward imperialism played in the writing of the book. In other words, Brantlinger reads for the ghost of Conrad buried within the narrative. He argues that Kurtz's pamphlet for the International Society of Savage customs is “an analogue for the story and its dead center, the kernel of meaning or nonmeaning within its cracked shell.”26 According to Brantlinger, Kurtz's nihilism reflects Conrad's own, and the anticolonial sentiment that Marlowe expresses in stating that “the conquest of the earth … is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” is immediately qualified by his argument that the idea of colonialism is somehow redemptive.27The fundamentally empty notion of the redemption of imperialism conceals the unspeakable and brutal program of slaughter and domination in the Congo. It buries this scandalous crime within the text by dissolving it into an aporia: the impossible redemption of Leopold's administration of the Congo. In this sense, Conrad is the ghostwriter of empire, burying its unspeakable crimes within Marlowe's narrative as a memory that can neither be redeemed nor put to rest. Instead, the unspeakable darkness at the heart of the narrative takes its place among the haunting legacies of colonialism.Such legacies are not merely historical but continue to exert force, not least within the reception and marketing of writing by African authors. The trend tends to demand a particular kind of voice: authentic, exotic, and original. This is the voice of the “native informant.”28 With firm roots in colonialism, traces of this voice can also be found within Conrad's narrative. Ngũgi wa Thiong'o draws special attention to a minor figure in the narrative, emphasizing the paucity of representations of indigenous voices in texts in which Africa has been ghostwritten. The only African within Conrad's story who speaks, albeit briefly and in broken English, is the child who announces Kurtz's death.29 This child's message eventually makes it back to Kurtz's fiancée in Europe, with Marlowe as the intermediary. She is the only woman in the narrative who directly speaks. Her power to critically evaluate the realities around her is derailed by Marlowe's own powers of storytelling. Kurtz's fiancée gives him the economic motivation to go to Africa, being of a different class from Kurtz. In a significant way, she is the very subject of Kurtz's exploitative adventure. Her ignorance, with which Marlowe becomes complicit, props up the system of violence and brutality in the Congo. Moreover, Marlowe avows a homology between the horror of Kurtz's actions and the woman's name when he tells her that Kurtz's last word on his lips was her name: “I heard his last words …” I stopped in a fright.“Repeat them,” she murmured in a heartbroken tone. “I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with.”I was on the point of crying at her, “Don't you hear them?” The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The horror! the horror!”“His last word—to live with,' she insisted. ‘Don’t you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!”I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.“The last word he pronounced was—your name.”30Perhaps the heart of darkness indexed by the book's title is not exactly located in Africa but circulating in the bourgeois drawing rooms of empire and buried in the false innocence and melancholia that Marlowe's lie preserves. Marlowe hints at this reading at the beginning of his narrative when he says, “And this also … has been one of the dark places on the earth.”31 This darkness is haunted by the unspeakable specters of brutality and colonialism within the Congo “Free State” administered remotely by King Leopold II.Of the many works that use Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a foil, Camara Laye's Le regard du roi offers an interesting parody, centering on a European man's misadventures in Africa. In Marlowe's narrative, one finds mild criticism of colonialism, through a Eurocentric lens, that is ultimately aimed at censuring its practices in a particular incarnation. Rather than raising questions about imperialism, Heart of Darkness leaves us with the aporia that the idea of colonialism (rather than its practice) is supposed to redeem it. Here, Africa serves as the background for the exploits of two white colonialists, through which they explore their inner demons. As Brantlinger argues, “The African wilderness serves as a mirror, in whose darkness Conrad/Marlowe sees a death-pale self-image named Kurtz.”32 Laye's n arrative is not about “ Europeans performing acts of imperial mastery and will in (or about) Africa,” as Said says of Conrad's narrative.33 Nor is it about “the Black man [who] journeys north into white territory,” as in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.34 Instead, Clarence, the white protagonist, finds himself s hipwrecked in an African kingdom where he does not understand basic codes of conduct. Clarence's o dyssey is not like the interior journeys of Conrad's white colonials but is rather closer to a form of accidental tourism. We see him as the subject of ridicule and laughter, as it becomes increasingly clear that he is the unwitting ass of the story. The story emphasizes the basic groundlessness of Clarence's assumptions, contrasting with Conrad's novella, in which Marlowe's assumptions are reaffirmed by another white man, Kurtz, who is his diabolical reflection.In the reception of the Guinean writer's novel, critics have trenchantly disputed Laye's influences and inspirations. Early responses to the novel inspired a debate on the role of Franz Kafka's writings within Laye's creative vision. Perhaps Wole Soyinka's denigration of Laye's originality reflects the most radical early dismissal of Laye's novel: “Most intelligent readers like their Kafka straight,” he claims, “not geographically transposed,” concluding that “it is merely naive to transpose the castle to the hut.”35Laye responded to critics who saw his work as merely derivative of Kafka by arguing that his debt to Kafka was only a matter of technique and that his worldview was not the same as the Czech writer's.36 As he writes in “Kafka et moi”: Le monde de Kafka n'est pas le mien. Si, comme Kafka et beaucoup d'autres,
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