NARRATIVE DEVICES IN PAULE MARSHALL’S FICTION

Abstract

Like various other African-American female writers’ fictional works, Paule Marshall’s creative art is anchored in her triple roots (American, African and Barbadian). She thematizes countless sociocultural phenomena narrowly related to her ancestral background. Substantively, her novel titled Praisesong for the Widow embodies some analeptic narrative devices, which revitalize her community’s painful cultural experiences. With a pronounced passion for literature, she mingles, on the one hand, historical facts with fictional ones, black dialect with English, and on the other hand, fictionalizes tales, myths, legends, proverbs, and songs. Her literary imagination teems with some noteworthy extratextual values connected with the African, Caribbean and American societies. Those geographical spaces are mainly inhabited by the African descents. Deported during the colonial period, the latter’s ancestors take with them some of their African values, such as language, religion, and many other substantial traditional/cultural practices. The change of environment favors the implantation of that legacy in America and elsewhere. However, over centuries, those inherited resources undergo the impact of the values pertaining to the host spaces, thus provoking a cultural bereavement/alteration or shock whose immediate repercussion is known as acculturation. The longer this sway persists, the more Blacks suffer from diverse crises. With no instant palliative measures, which can enable them to fight against the exotic cultural domination, each of Marshall’s fictional beings deems it necessary to return to their ancestors’ benchmarks for a whole restoration of their “lost self”. In terms of aesthetic scope, the novel under consideration breaks with a number of artistic traditions. The subversion of some of the canonical norms and interweaving of linguistic devices, colonial facts, mythical, legendary, proverbial, ancestral figures, epitomize that rupture and desire for innovation. An in-depth study of those textual clues will therefore contribute to bringing out the significance of the author’s literary vision. To achieve those objectives, the criticism of postmodernism will serve as the methodological framework. Its principles will help to scrutinize both intergeneric devices, and hybrid/pacifist practices.