“An Underdeveloped James Bond” and a “Rectangular Head": uneven and Combined Aesthetics in Pepetela and Mabanckou
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/va.i40.173463Keywords:
World-literature, Narrative form, PeripheriesAbstract
This essay offers a case study of world-literary comparativism by considering two contemporary fictions from semi-peripheries, Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho (2003) and Angolan Pepetela’s Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (2001), which both employ “imperfect” narrators with comically exaggerated bodies whose physical asymmetries employ a somatic semiotics that satirically embodies the affects and bodily habitus associated with uneven and uneven development, with corresponding asymmetries in plot, narration, and form. Both texts self-consciously appropriate and reinvent narratological devices from earlier writers from semi-peripheral situations, including Machado and Dostoevsky. These narratological innovations are welded to uneven aesthetics that combine generic elements of crime, detective, and thriller fiction. I argue that the “failed narrator” prominent in the fictions of Pepetela and Mabanckou can be interpreted as a formal device mediating the social pressures of uneven development across multiple socio-temporal contexts and I will compare its contemporary use in these two different contexts of postcolonial African nations in light of earlier semiperipheral locations of literary production, considering Pepetela’s Luanda and Mabanckou’s Brazzaville in reference to Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, Herman Ungar’s Prague-Boskovice, and Machado’s Rio de Janeiro.
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