49、o space (Murray 1969). Works like Joseph Furphys Such is Life (1903), Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981), G.V. Desanis All About H. Hatterr (1948), the novels of Wilson Harris, and many others;
all deliberately set out to disrupt European notions of history and the ordering of time. Novels li 。

50、ke Patrick Whites Voss (1957), or poem sequences like Francis Webbs Eyre All Alone( 1961) or Leichhardt In Theatre (1952) run European history aground in a new and overwhelming space which annihilates time and imperial purpose. Received history is tampered with, rewritten, and realigned from the poi 。

51、nt of view of the victims of its destructive progress. The same is true of Raja Raos Kanthapura (1938), V. S. Reids New Day (1949), and Rudy Weibes The Temptations of Big Bear (1973). In all these texts the perspective changes to that of the Other.Homi Bhabha has noted the collusion between narrativ 。

52、e mode, history, and realist mimetic readings of texts. Taking V.S. Naipauls A House for Mr Biswas as his example, Bhabha demonstrates the dangers of the way in which readings of post-colonial works as socially and historically mimetic foster their reabsorption into an English tradition, domesticati 。

53、ng their radicalism by ignoring the important colonial disruptions to the English surface of the text (Bhabha 1984a). Similarly, the St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, in his essay, The muse of history, takes issue with what he regards as the West Indian writers obsession with the destructions of the hi 。

54、storical past, and makes a plea for an escape from a prison of perpetual recriminations into the possibilities of a historyless world, where a fresh but not innocent Adamic naming of place provides the writer with inexhaustible material and the potential of a new, but not naive, vision (Walcott 1974 。

55、b).The West Indian poet and historian E.K. Brathwaite proposes a model which, while stressing the importance of the need to privilege the African connection over the European, also stresses the multi-cultural, syncretic nature of the West Indian reality. Similarly, for the Guyanese novelist and crit 。

56、ic, Wilson Harris, cultures must be liberated from the destructive dialectic of history, and imagination is the key to this. Harris sees imaginative escape as the ancient and only refuge of oppressed peoples, but the imagination also offers possibilities of escape from the politics of dominance and。

57、subservience. One of his most important images for this process is provided by the folk character of Anancy, the spider man, from Akan folklore. Anancy can and does take many forms in his transplanted West Indian setting, but for Harris he provides the key to an imaginative recrossing of the notorio 。

58、us Middle Passage through which the slaves originally crossed from Africa to the Caribbean (Harris 1970a: 8ff;
see also Brathwaite 1973:165-7). The trickster character 0f the spider man, like the limbo gateway of the Middle Passage, offers a narrow psychic space through which radical transformation。

59、may occur. Mixing past, present, future, and imperial and colonial cultures within his own fiction, Harris deliberately strives after a new language and a new way of seeing the world. This view rejects the apparently inescapable polarities 0f language and deploys the destructive energies of European 。

60、 culture in the service 0f a future community in which division and categorization are no longer the bases of perception.In The Womb of Space (1983) Harris demonstrates the ways in which this philosophy can be used in the radical reading of texts, for, like Jameson, he is able to draw out the creati 。

61、ve multicultural impulses inevitably present below the apparently antagonistic surface structures of the text. Hence, Harris argues that although, on the surface, post-colonial texts may deal with divisions of race and culture which are apparently obdurately determined, each text contains the seeds。

62、of community which, as they germinate and grow in the mind of the reader, crack asunder the apparently inescapable dialectic of history. In Harriss formulation, hybridity in the present is constantly struggling to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the pure over its th 。

63、reatening opposite, the composite. It replaces a temporal lineality with a spatial plurality. The complication of time meeting space in literary theory and historiography, with its attendant clash of the pure and the hybrid, is well illustrated by the contradictions that have arisen in the Canadian。

64、situation. In Canada, where the model of the mosaic has been an important cultural determinant, Canadian literary theory has, in breaking away from European domination, generally retained a nationalist stance, arguing for the mosaic as characteristically Canadian in contrast to the melting-pot of th 。

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标题：The|The empire writes back Theory and practice in postcolonial literatures( 四 )