Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o'sWizard of the Crow

Abstract

This essay argues that the form of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow challenges the Ruler's hegemony. In my analysis, the novel's narrators and Ngũgĩ's inventive use of rumor, prolepsis, and metalepsis work to create pluralistic modes of community that counteract the autocratic, repressive politics of the novel's dictator. This analysis adds a distinctively political dimension to the work of narrative theorists like Gerard Genette, Mark Currie, and Brian Richardson, reading the distinctive feature of multiple narrators or proleptic rumors in the novel as signs of resistance. These formal features of the novel present a discursive challenge to the authority of the Ruler. This discursive challenge to authority is significant because the dictator's power is exercised through the power to speak and shape the world to his own ends. These features of Ngũgĩ's novel mark a development in the transnational genre of the dictator novel. N gũgĩ wa Thiong'o's recent novel, Wizard of the Crow, begins with a rumor. Or, more accurately, with five of the most frequent (theories) on people's lips (3). This inaugural set of rumors conditions the reader to approach the novel in a particular way. This beginning has implications for the novel's form because of the rumors' subject (the Ruler's illness), the mode of narra- tion, and the temporal structure this opening creates. The rumors chronologically belong in the middle of the novel. The five frequent rumors presented at the outset of the novel constitute what Gerard Genette calls repeating prolepses, where the prolepsis double(s), however slightly, a narrative section to come (71). Ngũgĩ uses these repeating prolepses in an unusual way. Genette observes that Repeat- ing prolepses . . . scarcely occur except as brief allusions: they refer in advance