By M. Mathuray
This innovative book offers an unique method of the research of the illustration of fantasy, ritual, and 'magic' in African literature. Emphasizing the ambivalent nature of the sacred, it advances paintings at the non secular size of canonical African texts and attends to the endurance of pre-colonial cultures in postcolonial areas.
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Extra resources for On the Sacred in African Literature: Old Gods and New Worlds
Example text
Arrow 73)8 The symbolic transference from the epic hero to sacrificial victim and back again manifests the danger that is often associated with the exercise of power within traditional African social systems. Divine power can either sanctify or pollute. Durkheim, in extending Robertson Smith’s theorising of the ambiguity of the sacred, argues, ‘the pure and the impure are not two separate classes but two varieties of the same class, which includes all sacred things’ (411): the pure and impure transform into and provide a substitute for one another.
His statement points to the aforementioned distinction between power within African social systems and the concept of power generated through Western modernity. 9 The novel generates another level of signification through the process of symbolic condensation. It is around a joke that the ambivalences of sacred power coalesce. ’ The narrator informs the reader ‘this brought low murmurs of applause and even some laughter. ’ (Arrow 114) The symbolic co-incidence of the colonial and the leper through the relationship to whiteness has been foregrounded in the text through an emphatic symbolic transference and substitution of one for the other.
This privileging of the systemic denies the dynamics of narrative and, as Jacques Derrida points out, continues the project of Western metaphysics:,the abrogation of mythos in favour of a logocentricism (‘Structure, Sign and Play’ 291). Therefore, I suggest that a consideration of the deployment of antithesis in literary texts must not only involve the structuralist assertion that meaning is generated not through the terms themselves but by their relationality, but must also engage the processes through which these oppositions are generated by the narrative: more specifically, how they function to institute crises that propel the flow of events.