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Chapter 17 - George Lamming

Colonialism and Rumination

from Part III - 1945–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2024

Rachel Potter
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew Taunton
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

George Lamming’s novels (1953–1972) are legible as novels of ideas in at least three senses. All six devote substantial space to exchanges of ideas or solitary philosophical reflection. All feature characters who allegorize ideas or serve as vehicles for their enunciation. And all are narratively propelled by figures intensely devoted to an aspiration, cause, model, or imagined destiny. Lamming’s own remarks on his attraction to the novel of ideas, along with his representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture in the nonfictional Pleasures of Exile, underscore how in Lamming ideas are not (as has been asserted of other novels of ideas) decorative or disconnected from mundane existence. Rather, they emerge from the enduring matrix of colonialism in a way that renders obsessives different in degree, rather than kind, from (post)colonial subjects whose daily experience shapes them in less evidently striking ways.

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The British Novel of Ideas
George Eliot to Zadie Smith
, pp. 292 - 307
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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