Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and argues that this novel appropriates and resignifies the bildungsroman, thus demonstrating that this genre cannot provide a symbolic resolution for the "nervous condition" of the colonized subject. To do so, I integrate a world-systemic approach with a formalist analysis of genre. Starting from the premise that the modern world-system has been constituted by capitalist modernization and colonial expansion, I read Dangarembga's novel as a localized literary response to these two world-historical forces and analyze the entanglements between formal choices and socioeconomic transformations, as well as their impact on the characters' psyche. By appropriating the realist bildungsroman from a peripheral perspective, Nervous Conditions frames the tense relations between a self-reflecting individuality and her social totality. In so doing, Dangarembga rejects the ideological premises of a genre tied to European bourgeois subjectivity and simultaneously reactivates realism and mimesis as dynamic and flexible modes of representation.
Even before the narrative begins, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions establishes a close dialogue with a specific literary tradition and participates in processes of cultural displacement and appropriation. The epigraph, from which the title of the novel is drawn, is a line from Sartre's incendiary preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: "The condition of native is a nervous condition." Just as Sartre's mediation had allowed Fanon to reach, in rapid sequence, French, European, and American intellectuals, it was also thanks to the consecration of Alice Walker and Doris Lessing that Dangarembga, a young female writer from Zimbabwe, could enter the stage of world literature.1 After being rejected by several Zimbabwean publishers, the novel was accepted by The Women's Press (UK) in 1988 and published in the US in 1989. Dangarembga's dialogue with the repertoire that shaped her literary education is certainly one of the factors that contributed to the positive reception of her debut novel.2 Yet, not enough attention has been given to her active engagement with the canonical genre of the bildungsroman. My most immediate contention is that Nervous Conditions appropriates the bildungsroman and demonstrates its inadequacy for the representation of the experience of a colonized subject. In order do so, on the level of form, Dangarembga recuperates the lesson of realism-its capacity to portray the dynamic relation between individuality...