5 - The poetics of cultural production: the later short stories and Petals of Blood

Summary

Literary critics have never been sure where to locate Petals of Blood, Ngugi's epic novel of the culture and politics of neo–colonialism in Kenya. Indeed, as Joseph Mclaren has observed in his detailed discussion of the critical literature surrounding this work, opinion about the novel's effectiveness has tended to be divided along ideological and geographical lines, between different modes of interpretation, and disparate views on the direction in which Ngugi's Marxist politics were pushing his novels in the 1970s. But if the critical literature on Petals of Bloody especially during the first two years after the novel's publication had one thing in common, it was the belief that the success or failure of the novel depended on its complex attempt to merge ideology and form. As McLaren has noted, the controversies generated by the novel revolved around two closely related issues: first, the use of realistic devices in fiction and “their validity in voicing political imperatives”; and secondly, “the controversial nature of the political novel and the continued debate regarding art as ideology.”And if Petals of Blood tended, too often perhaps, to be judged in relation to A Grain of Wheat, it was because it seemed to exist both inside and outside the tradition of the European novel. For many of its early critics, the novel seemed to gesture toward familiar patterns of realism popularized by European novelists in the nineteenth century, but it also wanted to go beyond what Ngugi considered to be the limits of this kind of “critical realism,” namely the inability of the bourgeois novel to transcend the social and cultural situation it represented and to function as an aesthetic agent of radical change.