International Journal in Management & Social Science
Year : 2015, Volume : 3, Issue : 8
First page : ( 218) Last page : ( 227)
Online ISSN : 2321-1784.

“Parody of the World Wars through the use of Historiographic Metafiction in the Novels of Walker, Morrison and Naylor”

Mukherjee Kusumita¹

Ph. D. Research Scholar, Department of English, Rabindra Bharati University and PTT

¹Department of English, Kalyani Mahavidyalay

Online published on 22 June, 2018.

Abstract

The World Wars were and will remain forever a deep blot on human civilization. These Wars have frequently come under scrutiny by academicians, artists and humanists alike. Numerous questions have been asked on the rationale of the Wars. But the answers have been hardly able to suffice for the tremendous devastation that had resulted from them. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor are contemporary African American women authors whose work began in the 1970s and have achieved tremendous success since. Their fiction is centered on the lives of American Negroes through the different periods of history. The following study proposes to diagnose the way in which these three women novelists have dealt with the turbulent period of the World Wars in their novels. Historiographic metafiction revisits the textual past but clearly (and sometimes playfully) communicates an awareness of its inevitable difference from the past. The same thing has been done by the aforementioned authors in their novels through use of the devices of irony, intertextuality and black humour. In her 1989 novel, “The Temple of my Familiar” Alice Walker has revisited many an event in history including the World Wars. By using the worldly wise Miss Lissie who has the memory of many lifetimes the author voices her own views about the rationale of the World Wars and also the grim conditions during the period of the Great depression. The reliance of the white people on the black skinned Americans at the war front was a matter of dire necessity. A step taken in adversity. Of course they could not let it continue outside the narrow bounds of the army. After the conclusion of World War II the black soldiers who had become used to being treated as peers in the army were under the strictest scrutiny by those same Eurocentric people who had treated them as colleagues during the crisis of the war. The image of the abused soldier has also received a sympathetic portrayal in Toni Morrison's “Sula”. The novelist presents us with the character of a shell-shocked soldier of the First World War, Shadrack. The mangled bodies of his compatriots in the blast that he had managed to survive made him suspicious of his own body thinking----‘anything could be anywhere’. It is through the depiction of Shadrack's mental instability that Morrison is able to comment upon the injustice faced by the black people in fighting the ‘capitalist’ war. The questioning of the rationale of the Second World War is again noted in Naylor's 1992 novel “Bailey's Café”. The incidents of the pearl harbour that triggered the black day of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are recounted to sensitize the reader of the unnecessary spillage of blood that led to both the events in America and Japan. Neither side is spared for the leaders on both side indulged in bloodshed that led to even more loss of lives. Through parody of the nationalist tone of the Wars the authors establish the heinous side of such combats that prove to be the weapons of doom for the common citizens.

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Keywords

African American Literature, Historiographic Metafiction, Parody, Postmodernism, World War I and World War II.

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