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“But hey, this is Africa, man”: Water Music and the Postmodernization of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

“But hey, this is Africa, man”: Water Music et la “postmodernisation” du roman du dix-huitième siècle
Robert Scott
p. 86-95

Résumé

Dans cet article, j’examine les principales techniques utilisées par T. C. Boyle dans son premier roman publié en 1981 pour tenter de ré-écrire une série de romans célèbres du dix-huitième siècle de la perspective d’un auteur postmoderne. Adoptant un point de vue sceptique envers les documents historiques, Water Music banalise des personnages et des événements du passé qui étaient jusque-là objets de vénération et en même temps problématise la nature même de la connaissance historique. Parce que le ressort de son roman est esthétique plutôt qu’académique, Boyle brode librement sur ses sources originelles. En fait, Boyle envisage le roman du dix-huitième siècle comme un cadre fertile qui lui permet de faire étalage de ses compétences linguistiques et narratives ainsi que de sa connaissance approfondie de la tradition littéraire. Cependant, parce qu’il souhaite distancier Water Music des formes littéraires conventionnelles Boyle, d’une manière anachronique, parsème de commentaires et faits de langue contemporains les conventions romanesques du dix-huitième siècle. Ce faisant il « postmodernise » la forme du roman du dix-huitième siècle et permet ainsi à un public contemporain d’y trouver un écho.

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1In 1981, T. C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music. Three and a half years in the making, Boyle’s ambitious debut introduces elements that resonate throughout the author’s subsequent fiction, including a satirical yoking of the mundane and the absurd, a penchant for comic hyperbole, and a manic prose style. A bawdy picaresque with two protagonists, Water Music chronicles the misadventures of Mungo Park (1771-1806), an actual Scottish explorer, and his fictional counterpart Ned Rise, a con-man from the London slums. Drawing parallels between Park’s African expeditions, replete with dangerous wildlife and hostile tribesmen, and Rise’s dubious exploits as a sex show operator, grave robber, and fake caviar peddler, the novel spans more than a decade and offers a panoramic view of life on two continents.  

2Throughout the course of Water Music, Boyle reveals a great familiarity with the early English novel. Indeed, Boyle’s novel manages to invoke those formal and thematic elements which most tellingly characterize the form.  In terms of its general structure, for example, Water Music consciously adopts the following eighteenth-century novelistic conventions: a detailed preface offering explanation of what is to follow, a three-part episodic structure, occasional footnotes and disclaimers, and a coda detailing the fates of the novel’s principal characters.

3There are also, however, subtler ways in which Boyle’s work demonstrates its debt to the eighteenth-century form. For instance, like the early English novel, Water Music exhibits a fondness for the interpolated tale. As in the works of Henry Fielding, these tangential tales generally occur at moments of crisis and act to alleviate or draw out the tension of the principal narrative. Water Music also adopts one of the defining characteristics of the early novel—its penchant for explanatory asides. In fact, the narrator of Boyle’s novel strongly recalls the intrusive Author figure of Tom Jones in that he frequently interrupts his main storyline to comment upon topics ranging from art, philosophy, and literature to criminology and cooking.

4While it echoes these general elements of the early novel, the particular literary form to which Water Music is most deeply indebted is the eighteenth-century picaresque. In accordance with such works as Gulliver’s Travels, Rasselas, Candide, and Joseph Andrews, Boyle’s novel adopts the structural motif of the educational journey for examining society and exploring character development. Moreover, as in the traditional picaresque, Water Music posits a central character who has been dealt a difficult hand and who must subsequently endure great hardship.  A true picaro, Ned Rise is a foundling whose sole asset is an innate resourcefulness. To move freely in a society which resents his very existence, he must frequently disguise himself, and Ned alternately poses as a fishmonger, traveling salesman, and mortician’s aide. The ease with which Ned assumes these various identities calls to mind the chameleon-like adaptability of another picaresque figure, Moll Flanders.

5Although Water Music consciously echoes formal and thematic elements from a range of eighteenth-century novels, it most closely resembles Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.  In fact, Boyle’s novel shares several important characteristics with Sterne’s tale of “a cock and a bull,” notably a non-chronological method of narration, a penchant for silly footnotes, and a conversational prose style.

  • 1  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767), New York: W. W. Norto (...)

6With respect to narrative progression, both Tristram Shandy and Water Music abandon chronology in favor of a more haphazard unfolding of time. In each of these novels, the principal storyline is continually interrupted by a series of digressions which either delve into the past or allude to future actions. In essence, each novel remains true to Tristram Shandy’s description of his story as “digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time”1.

7Another formal aspect shared by Tristram Shandy and Water Music is their occasional use of preposterous footnotes. One of the silliest of these in Water Music is the following in which Boyle recounts the improprieties of Major T. W. Fitzwilliam Lloyd, a Royal African corps commander:

  • 2  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1981, 298-299.

The transcript of the official proceedings against the former colonel charged him with eighteen accounts unbecoming an officer, including “serving of tea to his staff while dressed in a lady’s taffeta gown” and “the compelling of eight privates, under penalty of court-martial, to rub down his naked body with dustmops while continuously rehearsing the phrase ‘O, I am a lowly snake in the grass, depraved and despicable’”2.

  • 3 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, op. cit., 77.

According to the narrator in Tristram Shandy, “Writing is but a different name for conversation”3, and this sense of the novel as an informal exchange between narrator and reader is evident throughout both Tristram Shandy and Water Music. In each of these novels, the narrator consciously adopts rhetorical strategies designed to initiate and foster dialogue. Like Tristram Shandy, the narrator in Water Music draws readers into his narrative through direct address, establishing an immediate bond between himself and his readers. Such a bond is strengthened by the narrator’s chatty tone. By stressing their commonality in such a fashion, the narrator hopes readers will more readily accept his unorthodox views on historical and literary matters.

8Boyle’s ironic stance toward history is immediately apparent in the opening paragraph of Water Music:

  • 4  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 3.

The year was 1795. George III was dabbing the walls of Windsor Castle with his own spittle, the Notables were botching things in France, Goya was deaf, De Quincey a depraved pre-adolescent. George Bryan "Beau" Brummell was smoothing down his first starched collar, Young Ludwig van Beethoven, beetle-browed and twenty-four, was wowing them in Vienna with his Piano Concerto no. 2, and Ned Rise was drinking Strip-Me-Naked with Nan Punt and Sally Sebum at the Pig & Pox Tavern in Maiden Lane4.

As this passage vividly illustrates, Boyle’s rereading of the past is skeptical and darkly comic. Furthermore, Boyle also exhibits a fondness for ridiculing cherished figures.  While his targets for historical deflation are numerous, Boyle’s favorite is clearly Mungo Park. Whereas the Scottish explorer was a heroic figure for such writers as Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway, for Boyle he provides little more than a focal point for the author’s pseudo-historical spoof. Tellingly, the novel opens with a humiliated Park baring his “pale puckered nates” to a crowd of hostile Moors. Thus, from the outset of Water Music, Boyle sets about debunking the traditional image of the explorer as indomitable.

9What is evident from Boyle’s treatment of historical record in Water Music is that the facts of history fetter the author’s imagination. That is, although the unvarnished events of Mungo Park’s life would make for an exciting tale, they are simply inadequate for Boyle’s ambitious literary aims. In order to create the sprawling structure of his three-part picaresque novel, Boyle not only embellishes upon the explorer’s account of his African adventures, he also adds the adventure-filled story of the fictional Ned Rise.  

10With its penchant for intertwining the historical and the fictional, Water Music clearly fits Linda Hutcheon’s definition of “historiographic metafiction.” According to Hutcheon, historiographic metafictions differ from traditional historical works in that they are not concerned with verifying “truths” about the past. Instead, these works treat historical record in a highly skeptical manner by calling into question the objectivity of historical knowledge.

  • 5  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 121.

11During the course of Water Music, there are several commentaries regarding the questionable veracity of historical memoirs. In the most blatant of these, Mungo Park’s Mandingo manservant Johnson, seeing how the explorer has sanitized his African adventures for a British audience, tells him: “But this is the purest of bullshit. A distortion and a lie. About the only thing that’s true is the seven-foot guards and the cash”5. Johnson is correct, and in scenes such as this Boyle problematizes the very nature of historical knowledge by calling attention to the inherent subjectivity of personal historical accounts.

  • 6  Sybil Steinberg, “T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Publisher’s Weekly, 232 (1987): 72.

12Boyle is willing to treat historical record in such a skeptical manner because he has no desire to reproduce an authentic past. As he explained to William Brisick in a 1987 interview, “I do the research and I think I know the history but what I want to end up with is a story that uses the history, the characters and the places as elements in a satisfactory, artistic whole”6. As he readily admits, Boyle’s reasons for venturing back to the early novel in Water Music are largely aesthetic. Put simply, the eighteenth-century form provides Boyle with an excellent opportunity for showcasing his considerable literary talents. Nowhere is the novel’s sense of itself as a literary performance more explicit than in its plentiful and wide-ranging catalogues:

  • 7  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 62-63.

In a month it will be green here. There will be rivers, ponds, puddles. Deadly cobra will part the grass side by side with three-step adders and the crested lizard called tomorrow-never-comes. Duikers will appear, skirting from shade to shade. Pangolins, guibas, caracals and chamas. Wood storks, gaunt as refugees, secretary birds with their ragged braids and hawk’s legs and partiality for cold-blooded lunches. Addax, puku, eland and oribi.  Aoudads, korins, mhorrs and mambas7.

Teeming with the names and characteristics of largely unfamiliar animals, listings such as these self-consciously display both the range and depth of Boyle’s knowledge.

  • 8  Elizabeth Adams, “An Interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Chicago Review, 37. 2-3 (1991): 59.
  • 9  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 70.

13Boyle is fascinated by language—he has described himself as “language-obsessed”8—and throughout Water Music he writes in ways which deliberately call attention to his linguistic prowess. In fact, so strong is Boyle’s penchant for performance that a number of passages in Water Music exist solely to illustrate the author’s linguistic fluency. Consider, for instance, the following contorted, alliterative sentences: “Fishstink […] The oily stink of eels taken from the green water among the pilings, the salt-stench of skate and mackerel, the cold mud reek of pouters and perch and carp.  He’s snuffed them all—tench and bream and saury pike, bearded ling, gouty blowfish, alewives, hake and haddock”9.

  • 10  George Kearns, Hudson Review 35 (1982): 511.

14George Kearns captures well the baroque tendencies of Boyle’s prose when he notes that the author “plays English the way Rachmaninoff played Rachmaninoff”10. Boyle’s sense of Water Music as a literary performance is evident not only in the novel’s narrative and linguistic set-pieces; it also appears in the author’s extensive knowledge of literary tradition. A virtual compendium of eighteenth-century writers, Water Music includes passing references to Sir Walter Scott, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen.

15Although the majority of its allusions are to eighteenth-century literature, chapter titles in Water Music also make reference to such twentieth-century works as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” By incessantly alluding to other works, Boyle self-consciously demonstrates the breadth of his literary knowledge. However, Boyle wishes to do more than merely place his own novel within a wide and varied intertextual field; he also strives to set Water Music apart from conventional literary forms. The principal way in which he does so is by anachronistically infusing his use of eighteenth-century novelistic conventions with contemporary elements.

16Although it is set in the Augustan era and consciously adopts formal and thematic elements associated with the eighteenth-century picaresque, Boyle’s novel is an inherently postmodern work. In essence, what the author does in Water Music is to postmodernize the early English novel by integrating recent fictional qualities and techniques into the form’s traditional structure. That a postmodern sensibility governs Water Music is evident from the novel’s contemporary language, its metafictional tendencies, its incorporation of popular and non-literary art forms, and its use of cinematic techniques.

  • 11  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music,  op. cit., 92.

17Nowhere in Water Music do we witness Boyle recreating or impersonating eighteenth-century language. Thus, in contrast to the pseudo-authentic eighteenth-century languages found in other historical novels, the language of Water Music is almost entirely contemporary.  Boyle’s characters, for example, express themselves in current vernacular, uttering such lines as “It’s been a bitch of a day,” “It was big of her,” and “Beats the hell out of me.” Park’s Mandingo guide Johnson, in particular, engages in a great deal of modern wise-cracking: “I mean, it’s one thing to have some old white lady take a look at your tea leaves in her front parlor in Edinburgh or London or someplace—but, hey, this is Africa, man. The eye of the needle, mother of mystery, heart of darkness”11. In the novel’s preface, Boyle admits “I have been deliberately anachronistic” and, by having his eighteenth-century characters utter thoroughly contemporary remarks like “Beats the hell out of me” and “but, hey, this is Africa, man,” Boyle self-consciously dissolves the reader’s ability to associate types of language with certain historical periods.  

18The novel’s metafictional tendencies are also evident in Boyle’s willingness to lay bare the narrative process by openly acknowledging to the reader his powers of creation. Throughout the course of Water Music, Boyle installs a series of metafictional turnstiles that focus attention on his novel’s fictional status. At times, the author even makes jokes at the plot’s expense.  Consider, for example, the following chapter titles: “Arise” (in which the character of Ned Rise is introduced), “Oh Mama, Can This Really Be the End” (wherein Ned struggles with a deadly fever), and “The Last Smirk” (during which Ned’s nemesis, Nelson Smirke, is taken away by cannibals). By entitling his chapters in such a blatantly self-reflexive manner, Boyle almost seems to be winking at the reader.

19As Linda Hutcheon argues, the merging of traditional literary forms with popular and non-literary elements is a defining aspect of postmodern literature, and in Water Music one of the principal ways in which Boyle adapts the eighteenth-century novel to the postmodern era is by incorporating elements from popular culture into his novel’s traditional structure. Indeed, Water Music repeatedly alludes to such popular forms as television shows, radio jingles, and even beer commercials. Attuned to all forms of culture, the novel is as comfortable making references to Greek tragedy as it is echoing the lyrics to pop songs.

  • 12  Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge, 1988, 1 (...)

20Water Music not only moves fluidly between high and low forms of art, it also suggests that such cultural distinctions are invalid. That is, rather than privileging one form over the other, as traditional novels tend to do, Water Music joins the serious with more popular forms.  Thus, in one sentence Boyle links the Aeneid with “The Owl and the Pussycat” while in another he segues from a discussion of Euclidian geometry into a reference to My Fair Lady. This ability to modulate between high and low culture is, according to Hutcheon, characteristic of postmodernism. Postmodernist novels, she maintains, are “both academic and popular, élitist and accessible”12.

21Of all the forms of popular culture he incorporates into Water Music, Boyle borrows most extensively from the cinematic arts. This debt is immediately apparent in the novel’s repeated allusions to such films as Apocalypse Now, Born Free, Zulu, and the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and 40s. Yet, if Water Music resembles one film in particular it is Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Like this 1981 blockbuster, Water Music has a roller-coaster plot which effectively manipulates its audience by catapulting the hero through a series of incredible situations. Furthermore, both Spielberg and Boyle parody the African adventure tale by ironically echoing such conventional aspects of the form as its stereotypical depiction of natives and its melodramatic tone.

  • 13  Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford: Bla (...)

22The descriptive style and romping pace of Water Music are also highly cinematic, exemplifying what Steven Connor describes as the “familiar postmodernist aesthetic of montage, jump-cut, and discontinuity”13. Boyle’s use of montage technique is most evident in the novel’s historical overviews:

  • 14  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 435.

The years peeled back like the skin of an onion, layer on top of layer. Beau Brummell fled to Calais in disgrace, De Quincey swallowed opium. Sir Joseph Banks and George III gave up the ghost.  There were riots in Manchester, Portugal and Greece. Beethoven went deaf, Napoleon fell and rose and fell again, Sir Walter Scott was shattered by the crash of 1826. Feathered bonnets came back into fashion and furbelows were all the rage14.

In passages such as this, Boyle pans over European history like a camera, blending images of the past into newsreel-like collages of personal trials, political upheavals, financial crises, and fashion trends.

23As noted earlier, Boyle’s “digressive-progressive” method of narration creates a strong sense of temporal discontinuity as chapters begin, digress, and resume once more. Throughout Water Music, Boyle manipulates time in a highly cinematic manner by using flashbacks and flashforwards in much the same way as these devices are used in films. Usually occurring between chapters, though sometimes within them, these transitions link verbal images just as cinematic cuts link visual images.  

24As we thus see, Boyle incorporates a range of cinematic techniques into his novel. It is, in fact, useful to think of Boyle as the “director” of Water Music, changing scenes, moving characters, and ordering cuts. The fact that several of the author’s novels—including Water Music, Budding Prospects and The Road to Wellville—have been optioned for movies clearly illustrates that Hollywood appreciates the cinematic nature of Boyle’s fiction.

25Like a growing number of contemporary novelists, T. C. Boyle is attracted to the literary and comic opportunities inherent in the eighteenth-century novel. Yet, unlike his literary predecessors, Boyle wishes to reinvent the early English novel for a contemporary audience. He accomplishes this in several ways: by infusing the eighteenth-century novelistic conventions of Water Music with contemporary language and commentary, by calling attention to the act of writing, by collapsing the distinctions between high and low forms of art, and by integrating cinematic techniques into the structure of his work. In treating the eighteenth-century novel in such a deliberately anachronistic manner, Boyle self-consciously breaks with existing literary “rules.”

26For Boyle, the early novel also offers a fruitful arena for showcasing not only his linguistic and narrative skills, but also his extensive knowledge of literary tradition. It is, in fact, this breadth of literary knowledge, combined with an acute awareness of recent critical advances, that allows Boyle to postmodernize the eighteenth-century novel and thus usher the form into the late twentieth century.

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Bibliographie

Works cited

ADAMS, Elizabeth, “An Interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Chicago Review, 37. 2-3 (1991).

BOYLE Coraghessan T., Water Music, Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1981.

CONNOR Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989, 162.

HUTCHEON Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge, 1988.

KEARNS George, Hudson Review 35 (1982).

STEINBERG, Sybil, “T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Publisher’s Weekly, 232 (1987).

STERNE Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767), New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980.

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Notes

1  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767), New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980, 4.

2  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1981, 298-299.

3 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, op. cit., 77.

4  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 3.

5  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 121.

6  Sybil Steinberg, “T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Publisher’s Weekly, 232 (1987): 72.

7  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 62-63.

8  Elizabeth Adams, “An Interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Chicago Review, 37. 2-3 (1991): 59.

9  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 70.

10  George Kearns, Hudson Review 35 (1982): 511.

11  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music,  op. cit., 92.

12  Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge, 1988, 146.

13  Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989, 162.

14  Coraghessan T. Boyle, Water Music, op. cit., 435.

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Robert Scott, « “But hey, this is Africa, man”: Water Music and the Postmodernization of the Eighteenth-Century Novel »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. II - n°5 | 2004, mis en ligne le 02 novembre 2009, consulté le 19 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/2907 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.2907

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Auteur

Robert Scott

Dr. (Ohio, USA)
Robert Scott is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio Northern University, USA, where he teaches courses in contemporary British and American literature, eighteenth-century British literature, and composition. Prior to his academic career, he worked in publishing and for the Michigan Office of the Auditor General. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan, his M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. He has published essays on Erica Jong, Isak Dinesen, and Robert Bly. His current research is on the academic novel.

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