Division below the surface: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-04

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To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend. --Erich Auerbach, Mimesis

NEARLY EVERY MATERIAL FEATURE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO'S 1789 MEMOIR is, as it happens, interesting--not least so, the equivocal modifier that forms a nearly invisible part of the book's title: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Equiano's story appeared at the close of a publishing era that prized true histories and surprising adventures, commercial labels invoking the appetite for wonder or novelty that sustained the English literary marketplace from the time of Daniel Defoe through the opening years of the nineteenth century. Michael McKeon cites Shaftesbury's assault on the "Gothick" taste of early eighteenth-century readers, who sought out "the Travelling Memoirs of any casual Adventurer" in the hope of finding stories of "monstrous Brutes" and "yet more monstrous Men." Within a few artistic generations, Shaftesbury's term for the outlandish had become wholly naturalized. (1) The years immediately surrounding the outbreak of the French Revolution produced a burst of remarkable "gothic" fiction from the English press, much of which was committed to exploiting the entanglement of narrative and historical processes that Fiona Robertson identifies as the signature of the Gothic imagination. (2)

Even comparatively judicious writers were not immune to the appeal of narrative extravagance, if not absolute monstrosity. J. Paul Hunter notes that the faithful portrayal of human nature, in Henry Fielding's "History" of a foundling, did not preclude significant doses of the marvelous in Tom Jones. (3) Prose fiction routinely exploits both terms in Erich Auerbach's perceptive account of the difficulty confronting the historical imagination: its legends make concessions to history, and its "history" makes concessions to legend. The interweaving is most vividly expressed in novels, perhaps, but among nonfictional forms few books were more suited to these complex and durable representational cravings than the stories that began to emerge from the transatlantic slave trade, during the course of the eighteenth century. Olaudah Equiano's title, however, pointedly avoids invoking the sensational rhetorical elements that characterized the work of his contemporaries, including that of his immediate predecessors in what Henry Louis Gates terms the "black literary tradition." (4)

To be sure, Equiano's introductory letter to the "Lords and Gentlemen" of Parliament alludes to the "horrors" of the slave trade that will form part of his subject, and to the public role that he currently played in the debate over its abolition. His haunting portrait, in the frontispiece of the book, as well as the suggestive nature of his dual names form part of the evocative sociology of Equiano's text: the fusion of the exotic and the historical that his complex identities imply. (5) These preliminary physical and verbal features of his story indicate that it had already secured a measure of advance "interest," if not as a "gothick" then certainly as an improbable product of the cultural collisions associated with an imperial age. Under the circumstances, Equiano's choice of title is all the more remarkable. To a striking degree, his book invites its audience (initially at least) to take some interest in "interesting," a word that was in the process of acquiring new, subjective meanings in the years that Olaudah Equiano was adjusting to his English name in an English world. Through the medium of this seemingly equivocal invitation, Equiano's narrative begins to address its profound ethical and documentary burdens.

"It remains significant," Raymond Williams suggests, "that our most general words for attraction or involvement should have developed from a formal objective term in property and finance." This observation concludes Williams' brief account of the etymology of "interest" in Keywords. (6) The original legal and monetary definitions that Williams notes, designating "interest" as the possession of a "share" in some material right or value, only began to acquire wider cognitive and moral significance in the mid-eighteenth century. Williams speculates that all modern permutations of the word remain "saturated" with their economic origins--a suggestion with which William Empson takes issue, in the third edition of The Structure of Complex Words. All references to "interest," Empson insists in his preface, are not held hostage to etymological puns, except where a given writer appears to solicit the blend of older meanings with newer ones. (7) Just such a situation would appear to occur in the opening words of Olaudah Equiano's memoir, offering the conventional apology of "a private and obscure individual" who is about to embark upon a long, autobiographical narrative.

It is evident from the book's front-matter that this will be no ordinary story, but Equiano pretends to some doubt about whether his pages will prove "sufficiently interesting to engage general attention." (8) He has gone to the considerable trouble of producing them, however, both to satisfy the demands of his friends and to promote "the interest of humanity": "Permit me, with the greatest deference and respect," Equiano asks, in his prefatory letter to Parliament, "to lay at your feet the following genuine Narrative; the chief design of which is to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my un fortunate countrymen" (7). Equiano undertakes to be "interesting" in the larger "interest" of humanity, to assert a subjective claim in the service of objective ends. That is the simplest way of describing his purposes but the description is scarcely as simple as it seems.

For one thing, an interesting narrative does not necessarily establish a profound subjective claim. The curiosity that it arouses may be purely superficial. That is exactly how Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, viewed a representative passage in Equiano's opening chapter. Writing in The Analytical Review, two months after the publication of Equiano's book, Wollstonecraft offered a brief account of its appeal, reprinting an "extract" that she believed would "not be unacceptable to our readers." (9) In the passage that she selected, Equiano is describing some of the customs of his West African homeland. "We are," he wrote, "almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets":

Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, or other cause of public rejoicing, is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion. The assembly is separated into four divisions, which dance either apart or in succession, and each with a character peculiar to itself. The first division contains the married men, who in their dances frequently exhibit feats of arms, and the representation of a battle. To these succeed the married women, who dance in the second division. The young men occupy the third; and the maidens the fourth. Each represents some interesting scene of real life, such as a great achievement, domestic employment, a pathetic story, or some rural sport; and as the subject is generally founded on some recent event, it is therefore ever new. This gives our dances a spirit and variety which I have scarcely seen elsewhere. We have many musical instruments, particularly drums of different kinds, a piece of music which resembles a guitar, and another much like a stickado. These last are chiefly used by betrothed virgins, who play on them on all grand festivals. (34)

Wollstonecraft singles out this language because, in her judgment, it falls into a specific category of interest: the "not unacceptable as opposed to the "flat," "childish," "puerile," "tiresome," "solid," "well written," or "very interesting" literary specimens that form what, to her, is the rather puzzling and discontinuous texture of Equiano's book (28). (10)

The sensational accounts of West Indian persecution, in Equiano's pages, are (according to Wollstonecraft) "simply told," and perhaps for this very reason "make the blood turn its course." But such passages are presumably too disturbing (or already too familiar) to English readers to explore in a brief book review. Instead this ethnographic anecdote catches Wollstone-craft's eye. Her review even preserves Equiano's curious footnote, comparing his childhood memory to an episode from his adult travels: "When I was in Smyrna I have frequently seen the Greeks dance after this manner." This incidental connection too, as Wollstonecraft might have noted, is not uninteresting, but it is scarcely the kind of disclosure to turn the course of the blood. Geraldine Murphy observes that a number of contemporary anti-slavery tracts sought to celebrate the dignity of African societies with...

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