Division below the Surface: Olaudah Equiano's "Interesting Narrative"

Abstract

To write is so difficult most historians are forced to make concessions to technique of legend. --Erich Auerbach, Mimesis NEARLY EVERY MATERIAL FEATURE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO'S 1789 MEMOIR is, as it happens, interesting--not least so, equivocal modifier forms a nearly invisible part of book's title: The Interesting Narrative of Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, African. Written by Himself. Equiano's story appeared at close of a publishing era prized true histories and surprising adventures, commercial labels invoking appetite for wonder or novelty sustained English literary marketplace from time of Daniel Defoe through opening years of nineteenth century. Michael McKeon cites Shaftesbury's assault on Gothick taste of early eighteenth-century readers, who sought out the Travelling Memoirs of any casual Adventurer in hope of finding stories of Brutes and yet more monstrous Men. Within a few artistic generations, Shaftesbury's term for outlandish had become wholly naturalized. (1) The years immediately surrounding outbreak of French Revolution produced a burst of remarkable gothic fiction from English press, much of which was committed to exploiting entanglement of narrative and historical processes Fiona Robertson identifies as signature of Gothic imagination. (2) Even comparatively judicious writers were not immune to appeal of narrative extravagance, if not absolute monstrosity. J. Paul Hunter notes faithful portrayal of human nature, in Henry Fielding's History of a foundling, did not preclude significant doses of marvelous in Tom Jones. (3) Prose fiction routinely exploits both terms in Erich Auerbach's perceptive account of difficulty confronting historical imagination: its legends make concessions to history, and its history makes concessions to legend. The interweaving is most vividly expressed in novels, perhaps, but among nonfictional forms few books were more suited to these complex and durable representational cravings than stories began to emerge from transatlantic slave trade, during course of eighteenth century. Olaudah Equiano's title, however, pointedly avoids invoking sensational rhetorical elements characterized work of his contemporaries, including of his immediate predecessors in what Henry Louis Gates terms black literary tradition. (4) To be sure, Equiano's introductory letter to Lords and Gentlemen of Parliament alludes to horrors of slave trade will form part of his subject, and to public role he currently played in debate over its abolition. His haunting portrait, in frontispiece of book, as well as suggestive nature of his dual names form part of evocative sociology of Equiano's text: fusion of exotic and historical his complex identities imply. (5) These preliminary physical and verbal features of his story indicate it had already secured a measure of advance interest, if not as a gothick then certainly as an improbable product of cultural collisions associated with an imperial age. Under circumstances, Equiano's choice of title is all more remarkable. To a striking degree, his book invites its audience (initially at least) to take some in interesting, a word was in process of acquiring new, subjective meanings in years Olaudah Equiano was adjusting to his English name in an English world. Through medium of this seemingly equivocal invitation, Equiano's narrative begins to address its profound ethical and documentary burdens. It remains significant, Raymond Williams suggests, that our most general words for attraction or involvement should have developed from a formal objective term in property and finance. This observation concludes Williams' brief account of etymology of interest in Keywords. …