The African Novel at the Vanguard

Abstract

The final chapter of Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (2021) openswith a characterization of the novel as the genre par excellence of disruption, failure, and, via reference to György Lukács, the loss of totality. This is, Jackson continues, one of two stories commonly told about the novel. The other treats the novel as a liberal and bourgeois institution, where narratives of individual development serve to sustain social and, increasingly, geopolitical inequalities. Although the latter has had greater traction in African literary studies, neither story is properly satisfactory for Jackson. There follows from this an analysis of works in which “it is the idea of ideas that provides some relief from a grotesquely disjointed and disorienting web of global systems.”1 The qualification “some relief” is key: the exploration of philosophical questions in fiction is not for Jackson a recuperating alternative. It is one among several modalities engaged in the works she analyzes, but one that has tended to be overlooked—even dismissed—by the predominant paradigms of African literary studies as it currently stands. Enter the novel of ideas, alternately referred to here as the philosophical novel. In Jackson’s thinking, the “novel of ideas” is less a taxonomizing literarycritical designation (a set of features that a work must or must not have) than a tool for breaching a set of critical impasses. At no point does Jackson undertake a systematic excavation of the form comparable to what one finds in Sianne Ngai’s recent Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), nor