Spectres of a petrostate: critical irrealism and social contradiction in Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács’ theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of ‘critical irrealism’, which emphasised the fact that there were many non-realist works of art that contained powerful critiques of the social order. More recently, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) have taken up Löwy’s arguments to work out the implications of critical irrealism for world-systems analysis and Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development. This paper seeks to critically evaluate the WReC’s theorisation of critical irrealism through a reading of Angolan author Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes. Recently published in English translation as Transparent City (2018), Ondjaki’s novel is centred on a protagonist who is in the process of becoming transparent. As the novel’s most salient non-realist features become a means of launching a trenchant social critique against the institutionalised corruption and industrial malpractice of Angola’s ‘petroleum dictatorship’, it seems as if the text corroborates the WReC’s conception of irrealist aesthetics as the determinate formal register of (semi-)peripherality in the capitalist world-system. However, as a category with its conceptual foundations rooted in the tradition of western European literary realism and modernism, is the relevance of critical irrealism for African literature inherently limited? Might not the persistence of oral traditions and non-European epistemologies within texts like Os Transparentes render irrealism obsolete as an analytical category for literature produced under non-European social conditions? Opening with a re-reading of the concept of critical irrealism, this paper argues that the reformulation of Marxist concepts in African contexts is a productive if not vexed theoretical exercise.