Bildung or development? Rereading George Lamming and W. Arthur Lewis

Abstract

This article revisits two “Third World classics” published by West Indians in the UK in the immediate postwar period, George Lamming’s 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin and the Saint Lucian economist W. Arthur Lewis’s 1954 essay “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”. Reading these texts against the recent wave of research on the politics and aesthetics of the postcolonial bildungsroman, I argue that Lamming’s novel can be usefully interpreted as an allegory of national formation caught between two distinct models: Bildung, which uses the metaphor of the national body to figure an incipient postcolonial nation-state; and economic “development”, which refigures national growth in terms of liberal modernization. Placing an emphasis on the distinction in these two discourses between a “nation-people” and a national “population”, the article goes on to consider the mythologized figure of the Windrush “exile”, not, or not only, as a heroic individual in pursuit of upward social (and literary) mobility, but as a narrative response to developmentalist ideology in the 1950s.

George Lamming’s first novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953) has never fitted neatly on what Fredric Jameson calls “[t]he first meager shelf of ‘Third World classics’ […] [which] consisted almost exclusively of bildungsromane from the immediate postwar period” (1996: 172). Castle is, in fact, a bildungsroman from the immediate postwar period and was immediately heralded as a classic from the newly-discovered “Third World”. ¹ But read alongside the other texts Jameson has in mind — he mentions Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (1953), Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of Pather Panchali (1955), and the novels of Naguib Mahfouz — Lamming’s stands out: both for its modernist “difficulty”, as J. Dillon Brown (2006) has recently discussed, and, more importantly in this context, for what is often interpreted as a proleptic disenchantment with the political and economic prospects for a postcolonial Caribbean. Composed of 14 episodes in and around the education of an autobiographical protagonist known only by the initial “G”, Castle famously ends, not with the crystallization of a national consciousness (at least not for G), but with its hero preparing for exile from colonial Barbados as his village is literally uprooted through the machinations of Mr Slime, a local politician and a literary prototype for what Frantz Fanon would later call in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) the “underdeveloped bourgeoisie” (2005/1961: 98). Thus, writing nearly two decades later, after the first wave of “utopian nation-building texts” that ostensibly marked Bandung-era postcolonial fiction had “turn[ed] dyspeptic and critical due to the failure of postcolonial states in the 1970s” (O’Connell, 2012: 372), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is able to retroactively extract from Castle a larger narrative of lost illusions, which continues to hold historiographical sway in postcolonial studies. The novel, as Ngũgĩ writes, is “set in a period well before any of the West Indian islands had achieved independence”. And yet,

In the Castle of My Skin is a study of colonial revolt; […] it shows the motive forces behind it and its development through three main stages: a static phase, then a phase of rebellion, ending in a phase of achievement and disillusionment with society poised on the edge of a new struggle. (1972: 110)

If Ngũgĩ is right, how then should we account for Lamming’s ability to see clear through to the other “disillusioned” side of colonial revolt in a bildungsroman written and “set in a period well before any of the West Indian islands had achieved independence”? To be sure, Lamming was writing in the wake of the anticlimactic West Indian labour revolts of the 1930s, whose revolutionary potential was, as Supriya Nair writes, “short-circuited by World War II and by the rise of the native middle class” (1996: 102). Drawing on this immediate context, Ngũgĩ, Nair, and others have shown how the novel’s representation of the ascendant West Indian bourgeoisie as a stultifying force in the struggle for national sovereignty anticipates later critiques (including and especially Fanon’s) of nationalist struggles short-circuited by ingrained class interests. Shifting the emphasis to the role of genre, however, I am going to argue here that Lamming not only looks back to the political situation of his childhood to find an evergreen parable of postcolonial disillusionment, but also refracts his autobiographical story through an emergent narrative tension in postwar anticolonial writing. Placing Castle alongside another “classic” from the 1950s, the Saint Lucian economist W. Arthur Lewis’s 1954 essay “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”, I will read Lamming’s novel as a bildungsroman caught between two countervailing models of national formation: first, what I will call, following Pheng Cheah (2003), a model of nationalist Bildung, which works to recover and safeguard the integrity of a “nation-people” against colonial corruption; and second, following Lewis, a model of economic “development”, which figures the same people as “surplus population” in relation to the productive capacity of the “underdeveloped” national economy. Using Lamming’s early text to reflect, as well, upon the recent wave of research on the politics and aesthetics of the postcolonial Bildung plot, I hope to complicate a familiar narrative of postcolonial literary history grounded in the growth from optimistic “Third World classics” to more worldly and ambivalent texts, which mirror the postnational complexity of postcolonial theory as it developed in the 1980s and 1990s. I then turn to the relationship between postwar developmentalism and the figure of the West Indian emigrant in the early 1950s in an effort to reappraise the narrative and political economic work that “exile” does for Lamming’s bildungsroman and, more broadly, for Windrush-era self-fashioning.

Bildung or development?

In Spectral Nationality, Pheng Cheah traces what he calls the “organismic metaphor of the national body” (2003: 213) and the latter’s formation in a process of cultural Bildung from eighteenth-century German idealist philosophy to anticolonial discourse after the Second World War. Looking specifically to the writings of Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Cheah argues that a dominant figuration of the nascent postcolonial nation is that of a living body struggling for freedom and coherence against an array of what he calls “bad prosthes[es]” (2003: 209). These include the (neo-)colonial state, the indigenous bourgeoisie who would control its levers in the wake of formal decolonization, and the entrenched interests of metropolitan capital, each of which is figured, in turn, as moribund or parasitic in opposition to the vital integrity of an incipient “nation-people” identified with the “workers and peasants” (2003: 213). In the early phases of anticolonial revolt, as Cheah summarizes, “[t]he national struggle’s success depends on the popular organism’s ability to eradicate these prostheses, or to appropriate them so that they can be put in the service of its life” (2003: 223).

Armed with the metaphor of a national body, this populist struggle occurs at the level of culture in the production of texts, which participate in the postcolonial formation itself by cultivating a national audience for domestic literary production (a form of what Jameson (1996) calls “cultural import-substitution”) and thematize the active constitution of a unified body from discrepant social elements. In both senses, then, the novel of formation, the bildungsroman, holds a privileged position as a genre fundamentally concerned with staging the integration of youthful heroes into a wider social organism. As Franco Moretti glosses the plot of the “classical” or nineteenth-century European bildungsroman in The Way of the World (1987), anticipating the organismic metaphor Cheah has in mind: “One’s formation as an individual in and for oneself coincides without rifts with one’s social integration as a simple part of a whole” (1987: 16). Linking the growth and education of a person to the fate of a people, the bildungsroman offers an important generic companion to revolutionary praxis: a literary technology imported from the West and redeployed against its colonial superstructure in anticipation of a nation to come.

However, as recent critics are quick to remind us, the season of youth is short. Just as the “classical” bildungsroman lost its allegorical potency to modernist intransigence at the end of the nineteenth century, so too was the “first meager shelf” of credulous “Third World” novels superseded, beginning in the late 1960s, by a properly postcolonial canon, which began to register the frustrations of really-existing nation-states and the uneven development of capitalist globalization by distorting, inverting, or otherwise resisting the teleological thrust of organismic maturation. Think here of Saleem Sinai, who asks us early in Midnight’s Children (Rushdie, 1994/1981) “to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust” (1994/1981: 38). Inverting the terms of nationalist Bildung, maturation in Rushdie’s hyper-canonical postcolonial text is associated not with synthesis, but disintegration, and a “nation-people” refigured as an irreconcilable national population marked by approximately six hundred and thirty million differences. With an emphasis on political disenchantment and self-conscious critique that characterizes recent work on the postcolonial bildungsroman, Jed Esty writes that “Rushdie’s conceits reveal the inherent contradictions of national allegory, underscoring the limits of the organicist and idealist logic attached to soul-nation stories of harmonized growth” (2012: 206). ²

Insofar as this narrative of postcolonial literary history turns on an authentic coalescence of nationalist politics and aesthetics in the period between, roughly, 1945 and 1965 — which, subsequently, turns away from the national body as the organizing metaphor of postcolonial identity and towards postnational concepts like hybridity, creolization, and migration — we should be wary. On the one hand, as Hugh Charles O’Connell (2012) has argued, by insisting on the growth from naivety to disenchantment — and from Jameson’s (1986) notorious concept of the “national allegory” to a generalized critique of nationalism as such — we risk overlooking what he calls the “residual weak-utopian impulse” (1996: 372) contained in later, seemingly pessimistic texts like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). On the other hand, this story of lost illusions also tends to occlude the fact, which Fanon saw clearly, ³ that even in the so-called early phase of optimistic nationalism, Bildung in the sense described by Cheah was neither monolithic nor univocal. Rather, this organicist story provided a flexible framework for competing narratives of nation building and, in an aesthetic register, competing valences of the “national allegory”. These included: integrative narratives founded upon transnational racial, ethnic, or religious solidarities; strategic alignment with one of the dominant Cold War blocs; and, as I want to focus on here, an emergent national economy oriented towards liberal projections of economic “development”.

While this is not the place to survey the fields of development economics and its sociological counterpart “modernization theory” ⁴ — both of which had, by the time Castle was published, gained geopolitical currency within the Bretton Woods institutions, the economic arms of the United Nations, colonial administrations, and postcolonial states — one of the guiding propositions of early development theory offers both a striking counter-plot to national Bildung as the unification of a nation-people from disconnected subnational elements and an under-examined context for Lamming’s early writing. Namely, that “underdeveloped” economies are structurally “dualistic”, or, as the economist Hla Myint described in 1970, characterized by “the continuing co-existence of a ‘modern’ sector and a ‘traditional’ sector within the domestic economic framework of an underdeveloped country” (1970: 128).

The most prominent early proponent of this “dual” theory of underdevelopment was the Saint Lucian economist W. Arthur Lewis. Twelve years older than Lamming, Lewis arrived in London in 1933, where he moved between the free market dogmatism of the London School of Economics (LSE) and a circle of radical black artists and intellectuals. His advisor and colleague F. A. Hayek, for instance, wrote in favour of his appointment as a senior lecturer at the LSE in 1941, but according to his biographer Robert L. Tignor (2005), Lewis also became friends in the 1930s with Paul Robeson (who we will encounter again), George Padmore, and C. L. R. James, the last of whom became an important influence on and supporter of Lamming’s writing in the 1950s. Hired as the first black professor in the UK at Manchester in 1948, Lewis would go on to work as a senior advisor in the Nkrumah government in Ghana, become an important advocate for the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958–1962), and win a Nobel Prize for his contributions to development economics in 1979.

Here, I want to focus on Lewis’s influential essay “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”, which appeared a year after Castle in 1954, but draws upon ideas dating to the mid-1940s. Lewis provides in this essay a provocative and, what would become, in liberal development studies, paradigmatic description of the socio-economic geography of “underdevelopment”:

We find a few industries highly capitalised, such as mining or electric power, side by side with the most primitive techniques; a few high class shops surrounded by masses of old style traders; a few highly capitalised plantations, surrounded by a sea of peasants. But we find the same contrasts also outside their economic life. There are one or two modern towns, with the finest architecture, water supplies, communications and the like, into which people drift from other towns and villages which almost belong to another planet. There is the same contrast even between people; between the few highly westernized, trousered, natives, educated in western universities, speaking western languages, and glorying in Beethoven, Mill, Marx or Einstein, and the great mass of their countrymen who live in quite other worlds. (1958/1954: 408)

Drawing on data from Barbados, Jamaica, India, and Egypt, the “Lewis Model” hinges not on material inequality or class difference, but on the coexistence of two discrepant economic temporalities contained within the same national space. On the one hand, small pockets of Lewis’s “underdeveloped” nation — which is, importantly, not any nation in particular, but an abstraction equally applicable to certain parts of the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia — would function as metropolitan facsimiles, populated by “trousered” imitators of the West in an economy marked by rationalized wage labour, reproducible capital, industrial production, and so forth. On the other hand, this archipelago of what Lewis calls capitalist “islands” (1958/1954: 408) is surrounded by a “sea of peasants” who “almost belong to another planet” of “primitive techniques” and “old style traders”, effectively perpetuating in the twentieth century a situation prior to, in Marx’s terms, the formal subsumption of labour under capital. Or, as Lewis puts it, the “traditional” sector is defined by a situation wherein “the marginal productivity of labour may be negligible, zero, or even negative”, meaning that in certain colonial and postcolonial countries the number of labourers “could be halved without reducing output” (1958/1954: 402). Hence, in economic terms, the supply of labour in the “underdeveloped” country is virtually “unlimited”.

Two important consequences follow from this model. First, wages in the capitalist sector will be drawn towards a subsistence level so long as what Lewis calls a “surplus population” (1958/1954: 400) remains, leading to low rates of growth in both sectors and what Lewis’s American contemporary Richard R. Nelson (1956) called the “low-level equilibrium trap”. And second, until the islands of capital have fully absorbed the sea of peasants, the “underdeveloped” country is, almost by definition, overpopulated. ⁵ There is, simply put, too much labour power contained in those “other worlds” to be utilized by the modern sector as presently constituted.

After some 60 years — and thoroughgoing critiques from dependency theorists, Marxist economists, and world-systems analysts ⁶ — the usefulness of the Lewis model for economic planning and policy is less important here than its status as a contemporaneous foil to the nationalist Bildung plot. As Cheah observes, “developmentalist ideology” in the postwar period “shared the same organismic metaphor of the nation-people as a living body striving to maximize its capacity for self-preservation and autonomy” (2003: 231–232). Taking Lewis as a case study, Cheah’s reading is, I think, correct, but requires an important qualification. If Lewis (and the broader genre of liberal developmentalist writing that emerged in the 1950s) shares an integrative metaphor with mid-century anticolonial theory and offers a homologous narrative of national “striving”, his focus is clearly not on the political movement from colonial capture to postcolonial freedom, but rather on the measurable evolution from “underdevelopment” to what W. W. Rostow called in his 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth, economic “maturity”. And as a result, Lewis’s understanding of national formation in general, and of economic “self-preservation and autonomy” in particular, stands in sharp contrast to the populist vision of Fanon and Cabral. While, for the latter, the national organism would take shape in the struggle for sovereignty around a nation-people implicitly or explicitly identified with the urban labourers and peasantry, for Lewis this process of national formation is refigured as if through a camera obscura. The sea of peasants and the mass of old style traders constitute precisely the unwieldy prosthesis that needs to be, in Cheah’s terms, “eradicated” (through, for example, large scale migration) or “appropriated” (as these labourers are gradually absorbed by the “modern sector”) so that the “underdeveloped” nation can commence a natural course of development as a coherent national economy unburdened of its “traditional” remainder.

The “dualistic” bildungsroman

In the Castle of My Skin, I argue, is a “dualistic” novel, not in the sense of being an accurate cultural record of Lewis’s two-sector society, but rather as a potential “national allegory” torn between the two genres of formation we have encountered: nationalist Bildung, whose energies Lamming invests in the novel’s autobiographical hero, G; and “development”, whose inverted organismic logic finds expression in the novel’s parallel and less-discussed coming-of-age plot of Mr Slime. My intention in the readings that follow is not merely to show that Castle registers at a formal level these two emergent genres of “Third World” growth, but that the novel registers them as a contradiction with wide-ranging implications for postcolonial politics, economics, and aesthetics. In other words, by emplotting Bildung and “development” in opposition, Lamming begins in the early 1950s to sketch a problematic with which, as the recent research on the postcolonial bildungsroman suggests, we are still coming to terms.

To the extent that we can isolate G’s narrative in a novel that tends to drift away from its Bildungsheld, it is marked by an accumulating desire to perceive an organic national community and by the inability to locate himself within it. Early in the text, for example, a nine-year-old G overhears his mother and two other women rehearsing their stories about a seasonal flood with which the novel begins. He thinks:

Miss Foster. My mother. Bob’s mother.

It seemed: they were three pieces in a pattern which remained constant. The flow of its history was undisturbed by any difference in the pieces, nor was its evenness affected by any likeness. There was a difference and there was no difference (Lamming, 2009/1953: 24). ⁷

From here the narration moves out from the yard behind G’s house where the women are talking and into the streets of his village, a former sugarcane plantation within walking distance of Bridgetown:

In the corner where one fence merged into another, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves made a limitless suffusion over the land, the pattern had arranged itself with absolute unawareness. Outside at the street corner where villagers poked wreckage from the blocked canal, it had absorbed another three, four, fourteen. But there was no change in the increase. (24)

And finally, projecting further to encompass a broader image of the island:

In the broad savannah where the grass lowcropped sang in the singeing heat the pattern had widened. Not three, nor thirteen, but thirty. Perhaps three hundred. Men. Women. Children. The men at cricket. The children at hide and seek. The women laying out their starched clothes to dry. The sun let its light flow down on them as life let itself flow through them. Three. Thirteen. Thirty. Three Hundred. (25)

Drifting out from a village scene, Lamming’s panoramic description seems to evoke an excluded middle between history and permanence (“the flow of its history was undisturbed”), difference and identity (“there was a difference and there was no difference”), the determinate and the aleatory (“the pattern had arranged itself with absolute unawareness”). Similarly, the narration suspends any tension between individual people and the broader collectivity by representing the former as so many incorporable elements of a latent “pattern”. Undercut only, and obliquely, by Lamming’s brief allusion to the singing/singeing grass of The Waste Land, we can detect as well a vitalist current animating the scene “as life let itself flow through them”. Lamming offers, then, a lyrical image similar to the speculative and reconciliatory conclusion of the postcolonial Bildung plot mapped by Cheah. The narrator’s ascending perspective creates a kind of utopian distance from which an integration of parts into a simple whole suddenly becomes possible without excess. The pattern can absorb “another three, four, fourteen. But there was no change in the increase”.

And yet, the narrator who observes this “pattern” is not contained within it. Moving upwards and outwards, the narration becomes remote from the village as the image takes shape, as if to suggest that the price of perceiving this organic community is to be physically apart from it. What is more, recalling that our first-person narrator is nine years old at this point in the text, the philosophical register of the description strikes us as temporally (or developmentally) out of joint with the character for whom it comes into focus. In this way, at the beginning of the novel, Lamming calls attention to what Joseph Slaughter describes as a “diegetic split between narrator and protagonist that is the founding subjective condition of [the] autobiographical novelistic plot” (2007: 214). The narration, in other words, projects forward to a moment of yet-unrealized maturity from which G could, in fact, narrate these lines in precisely these terms and, in this projection, anticipates a moment of reconciliation when the “diegetic split” would be repaired: when the protagonist’s development would catch up to his own narration and render the preceding pages newly legible as the retrospective reflections of a fully-formed character.

However, as in Slaughter’s reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), in Lamming’s novel this moment of reconciliation “is perpetually postponed, so that the sovereign, undivided human personality remains a vanishing (plot) point beyond the frame of the text” (Slaughter, 2007: 215). This is made clear in the final chapter of the novel, when G, on the eve of his departure for a teaching position in Trinidad at the age of 19, reencounters his childhood friend Trumper, just returned from America where he immigrated during the Second World War. Struck by Trumper’s clothes, speech patterns, and an aura of self-serious prosperity, G perceives that the distance between the two young men is redoubled by Trumper’s émigré perspective. Over rum at a village pub, Trumper plays for G a series of songs from a music box culminating in “Let My People Go”, sung by Paul Robeson, whom Trumper identifies as “‘One o’ the greatest o’ my people’”:

“What people?” I asked. I was a bit puzzled.

“My People”, said Trumper. His tone was insistent. Then he softened into a smile. I didn’t know whether he was smiling at my ignorance, or whether he was smiling at his satisfaction with the box and the voice and above all Paul Robeson.

“Who are your people?” I asked him. It seemed a kind of huge joke.

“The Negro race”, said Trumper. The smile had left his face, and his manner had turned grave again. I finished my drink and looked at him. He knew I was puzzled. This bewilderment about Trumper’s people was real. At first I thought he meant the village. This allegiance was something bigger. I wanted to understand it. (295)

Walking back through the village alone after their meeting, G reflects further: “I had a lot of time to find out what Trumper had already known, but a new thought had registered. This was worse, the thought of being a part of what you could not become” (299). Sandra Pouchet Paquet has described G’s “bewilderment” here as the “fear of being unable to meet the challenge of a black identity” (1982: 26). This is certainly correct and made tangible by G’s vacillation between first- and second-person pronouns in the second quotation, which suggests a kind of faltering of identity at the threshold of a previously unthought racial community. But the exchange does a few other things as well. First, it explicitly postpones G’s “social integration as a simple part of a whole”, as Moretti (1987: 16) puts it, beyond the frame of the text. Only at the end of the novel does G realize that “I had a lot of time to find out what Trumper had already known”. Second, it creates a connection between Trumper’s transnational perspective and his ability to locate himself within a kind of national community, premised, in this case, on racial identity. Trumper is able to perceive and identify with a “people”, which only becomes real with his departure from Barbados. And finally, in G’s complex anxiety of “being a part of what you could not become”, Lamming provides, I want to suggest, a concise formulation of the problem of the bildungsroman caught between the dual imperatives of anticolonial nationalism and economic “development”, between being an integral part of a national “pattern” and a “traditional” remainder of an emergent national economy.

To unpack this claim, I want to turn now to the parallel Bildung plot of Mr Slime, a figure who emerges in Castle as a populist representative of G’s village and a prophet of national growth. In outline, the story of Mr Slime unfolds in three acts. Forced to resign as an assistant teacher from the village primary school after receiving photographs of the head teacher’s wife in flagrante delicto, Mr Slime reestablishes himself as the founder and manager of the village’s Friendly Society and Penny Bank, a savings bank initially concerned with financing proper funerals for the villagers. From this position, Mr Slime reinvents himself as a politician and labour leader, winning a seat in the local House of Assembly, leading a dockworkers strike, and negotiating a nonviolent suspension of a carnivalesque “riot” — based upon the 1937 Barbadian labour revolt, but curiously stripped, as Nair notes, of political context (1996: 95) — that breaks out in Bridgetown and spreads to the village. In his final act, again reinvented as a real estate speculator, Mr Slime uses the Penny Bank’s capital to purchase the village land from the white landlord on the self-evidently disingenuous basis of decolonizing the land by selling its plots back to the villagers at a profit. As the novel concludes, mirroring the flood that begins the text, the renter class of villagers, most of whom are unable to afford the market rate for their lots, prepare for eviction.

To the extent that the Penny Bank and Friendly Society makes possible a form of accumulation untethered to the Anglo-Barbadian plantocracy, Mr Slime’s rise to power in the village is initially founded upon the promise of an emergent form of indigenous capital. From this position and bolstered by his reputation as a scholar (he retains the honorific “Mr” even after his disgrace as a school teacher), Mr Slime is increasingly mythologized as a latter day liberator of “little England”, the patronizing term of endearment for colonial Barbados. For the character known only as “Pa”, the oldest man in the Creighton’s village, Mr Slime “‘twus Moses all over again’” (78). For the village shoemaker and amateur historian, Mr Slime recalls Marcus Garvey, who “‘come down an’ tell us that the Lord ain’t goin’ to drop manna in we mouths’” (102). For others in the village, he is simply “the chief” (98). By juxtaposing this position of social prestige with Mr Slime’s final betrayal of the village by purchasing the land from the village landlord, most accounts of Mr Slime reduce the character to a symbol of neocolonial sliminess. For Carolyn T. Brown, who considers the myth of the Fall as a structural archetype in Castle, the “sale of Eden itself (the village land)” is conducted “through the agency of the serpent Mr Slime” (1983: 40). As Joyce E. Jonas writes, Mr Slime is the “muddy residue of bourgeois profiteering personified” (1988: 350). And for Supriya Nair, “Slime’s entry into the colonial structures of power through his manipulation of the collective Friendly Society and Penny Bank sets the stage for the next act in the colonial drama — neocolonialism, the anticlimactic period of the struggles for independence” (1996: 102–03).

Guided by these critics, we cannot miss the resemblance between Mr Slime and Fanon’s later description of the “underdeveloped bourgeoisie”, who reject “the historical vocation of an authentic national bourgeoisie in an underdeveloped country”, which is, for Fanon, “to repudiate its status as bourgeois and an instrument of capital and to become entirely subservient to the revolutionary capital which the people represent” (2005/1961: 98–99). But nor can we dismiss the power Mr Slime’s vision of Barbadian development initially holds for the villagers and the real effects it has on Lamming’s plot — a vision, I want to suggest, which is founded upon something very much like Lewis’s “dualistic” model of the “underdeveloped” nation. In particular, Mr Slime’s developmentalist strategy depends on the state-directed depopulation of the island in an effort to alleviate the chronic condition of disguised unemployment in what Lewis calls the “traditional sector” of the national economy. While Lamming does not linger with the details of Mr Slime’s plan or its political economic presuppositions, considering the departures of G (initially for Trinidad), Trumper (for the United States), and, later, the Windrush generation itself (for the United Kingdom), unpacking the relationship between Mr Slime’s model for national growth and the culture of migration in the midcentury Caribbean would seem crucial for interpreting the outward trajectory of Lamming’s bildungsroman.

The most sustained consideration of the question of migration as a West Indian development strategy comes in the novel’s fourth chapter, which is rendered entirely as a dramatic dialogue between Pa and his wife, known only as Ma. Here, Pa offers a second-hand account of a speech Mr Slime has given earlier in the week:

‘Tis what Mr Slime says. Two nights ago gone by he put it to them that he’d a plan in his head, an’ if everything work out as he say it would work, there goin’ to be big times comin’ this way. He use a word call em’gration as what an’ what he would do here an’ now for this present generation. An’ he give a full an’ proper explanation of it all, what will happen an’ what an’ what they got to do. Says ‘twus more people in this island than the lan’ could hold or the law allow. ‘Twus a high burnin’ shame to put on a piece o’ land no more than a hundred an’ something square miles, that’s as he call it, square mile, ‘twus a shame as he say to keep two hundred thousand people on it. […] You an’ me an’ all o’ we he says when you put us together from top to bottom wus that amount of people, something hundred thousand, an’ he says wus a record population for the size o’ the piece of land anywhere in this God’s world. An’ he go on to say the only manner of way to deal with that sort o’ thing wus to get rid o’ some; an’ since it ain’t in your power or mine or his own nor right in the sight o’ God to shoot them down, he says ‘twus best to send them where there wus too much square mile for the handful o’ people living there. An’ ‘tis as he say he will do. (86)

In this description of Barbadian modernization, which Lamming ironically renders in the second-hand Bajan vernacular of Pa, a character he later described as “a colonial symbol of traditional man” (2004/1960: 229), the politician Slime offers a fusion of nationalist populism and postwar developmentalism. On the one hand, Mr Slime puts forward a vague image of national coherence and coming prosperity, which seems to resonate with Pa (“big times comin’ this way”). The established, colonial pillars of the plantocratic economy are unsound and the time is ripe for the repossession of the village land and, potentially, what Simon Gikandi calls in his discussion of Mr Slime, “the rise to power of a native ruling class” (1992: 30). On the other hand, Mr Slime refigures the organic metaphor of the national body founded upon a “people” in quantitative terms, which Pa underscores repeatedly in this passage: “‘Twus a high burnin’ shame to put on a piece o’ land no more than a hundred an’ something square miles, that’s as he call it, square mile, ‘twus a shame as he say to keep two hundred thousand people on it. […] best to send them where there wus too much square mile for the handful o’ people living there”. National growth, then, depends paradoxically on getting “rid o’ some” and, in particular getting rid of “this present generation”, which is to say, the generation of young men, including G and Trumper, who are most readily exportable on the international labour market — and who would go on to populate Lamming’s remarkable second novel The Emigrants (1954). ⁸

On this latter point, Mr Slime appeals to the longer history of what Lara Putnam has called “the circum-Caribbean migratory sphere” (2013: 5) and, specifically to the figure of the Colon Man: the West Indian labourer (including the character Pa) who worked in the construction of the Panama Canal in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Elizabeth Thomas-Hope describes, the Colon Man

epitomized the successful migrant at a time when remittance flows back to families were high, and in many cases formed the economic basis for personal mobility as well as inter-generational mobility through the education it afforded. […] This entered the collective consciousness as the model of migration to which others have continued to aspire. (2009: xxx)

Indeed, Lamming underscores this appeal to an earlier model of the successful migrant labourer in Ma’s response to Mr Slime’s speech: “‘Twill be a next Panama all over again. You’ll go an’ you’ll come back an’ they’ll sit under the lamp-post an’ say night after night what an’ what they use to do. ‘Twill be Panama again, Pa’” (86).

But Mr Slime also raises an important question for developmentalist thought in the 1950s. Returning to his 1954 essay, Lewis is sceptical that emigration from “underdeveloped” countries could take place on a scale large enough to have noticeable effects on the “surplus population” in the “traditional sector” of their national economies. While Lewis notes that “100,000 Puerto Ricans emigrate to the United States every year”, what he calls the “mass immigration” necessary to alleviate the population pressure on the “Third World” as a whole, is “quite a different kettle of fish. If there were free immigration from India and China to the USA the wage level of the USA would certainly be pulled down towards Indian and Chinese levels” (1958/1954: 436), an unthinkable consequence for the United States and other industrialized nations at midcentury. But for certain smaller colonial countries, and for Barbados in particular, the potential for modernizing the economy and raising the country’s standard of living by getting “rid o’ some” was very real. Following the passage of the British Nationality Act of 1948, which granted all subjects of the crown a passport and free entry to the UK, and the American Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which drastically curtailed Caribbean immigration to the United States, formal British “recruitment” of West Indian labour began from state controlled industries like British Rail, London Transport, and the National Health Service in coordination with colonial governments (Bryon, 1994: 78). This occurred throughout the West Indies and intensely in Barbados, which had relatively high levels of education and, as “Little England”, was considered the “most English” of the Anglophone Caribbean colonies. More than an interesting contextual detail, then, the opening of the UK to West Indian migrants in this period makes concrete Mr Slime’s vision of an “underdeveloped” and “overpopulated” country helped along in its “modernization” by large scale emigration, which, I have tried to emphasize, hinges on the practical application of Lewis’s particular brand of midcentury developmental reason.

The uses of exile

In a parenthetical remark in the essay with which I began, Jameson claims that, in relation to the other “Third World classics” from the 1950s, Castle “is rather to be seen as a deconstruction of that older form than as a replication of it” (1996: 184). “The complexity of Lamming’s book”, Jameson goes on, “is better grasped as an attempt to strike out from the nostalgic materials of the childhood story toward a new kind of form in which collective and relatively more impersonal […] narratives can be registered” (1996: 184). While I agree that Castle moves far beyond “the nostalgic materials of the childhood story” and that we can observe this movement at the level of form, I have tried to argue, first, that we should resist the narrative of literary historical progress to which Jameson appeals here, and second, that the “registration” of “collective narratives” engenders its own contradictions. In particular, the novel sets two such narratives (what I have called national Bildung and economic “development”) in dialogue and in tension and, in doing so, underscores a broader ambivalence within anticolonial writing of the immediate postwar period and beyond. If the postcolonial world is, almost invariably, framed within a narrative of growth, is the subject of this growth a nation-people or a national population? Should its success or failure be measured in terms of national coherence and autonomy or the modernization of “traditional” modes of production? Raising these questions in the early 1950s, Lamming’s “deconstruction” is, I think, more wide-ranging than Jameson lets on.

Reading Lamming’s novel in this way can also, I want to suggest in conclusion, help us better understand the narrative work done by emigration — or rather “exile”, as Lamming would famously theorize his own migration to London in 1950 — within the novel and for the Windrush generation itself, which continues to mark a founding moment, or myth, for postcolonial thought. As J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg note in their introduction to the recent collection Beyond Windrush (2015), the term (after the Empire Windrush, a ship that brought 492 West Indians from Kingston to London in 1948) “has become a potent signifier [for] understanding […] both British and Anglophone Caribbean cultural history” (2015: 3). Indeed, “Windrush” works in these fields as a multivalent metonymy: standing in for the tens of thousands of West Indians who migrated to the UK between 1948 and 1962; for the group of prominent novelists among them, including Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Wilson Harris, and Edgar Mittleholzer; and, finally, for the broader emergence of a multicultural Britain in the postwar period. In his 1960 book of essays The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming fashions this generation of West Indians, and particularly its writers, as exilic figures in an ambivalent mode. As Lamming writes, echoing Mr Slime’s plan for large-scale migration: “We are made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and our irrelevance of function in a society whose past we can’t alter, and whose future is always beyond us” (2004/1960: 24). But “exile” also holds open a kind of transcendence and, importantly, an aesthetic freedom, from precisely the political constraints that produce it: “The exile”, Lamming says, drifting towards Joycean abstraction, “is a universal figure […] To be an exile is to be alive” (2004/1960: 24).

Recent critics have attempted to complicate Windrush-era self-fashioning by pushing back against the image of modernists without portfolio inventing from the metropole a new literary tradition more or less ex nihilo. ⁹ As Peter J. Kalliney rejoins, “Caribbean writing appeared so rare and new a category only because the region’s literary tradition has been variously misread, misplaced, and misunderstood, most notably by the 1950s writers who made their names in postwar London” (2013: 132). In a similar vein, the collection Beyond Windrush highlights how the mythology that developed around the autonomous West Indian man forging in exile the uncreated conscience of a region operated on a series of parallel exclusions: of, for instance, women writers including Una Marson and Ada Quayle, as well as a tradition of pre-Windrush white Creole novelists including Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Without these earlier figures, and, more importantly, without the longer history of West Indian migration to the United States, to Europe, and within “the circum-Caribbean migratory sphere”, the category of the “exile” would not have appeared as ready to hand for Lamming and his contemporaries.

What I would add, then, is that the concept of “exile” in the 1950s functioned, not (or not only) as a form of ahistorical posturing from a generation of late-modernist novelists, but also as a useful formal solution to the real contradiction between “development” and Bildung in Lamming’s novel (and experience) of postcolonial formation. To be a West Indian “exile” in the 1950s is, in a certain sense, to accede to the logic of midcentury developmentalism, according to which alleviating population pressure will help in the process of modernizing the nation left behind. Or as Lamming describes in Pleasures, since he left the Caribbean, “[t]he political constitutions have been improved on; standards of living may have gone up. These standards will probably get better as more emigrants leave the land, and more foreign capital takes their place” (2004/1960: 47). And yet, “exile” also preserves the possibility of national identification, or as is the case with Trumper, makes a new national “allegiance” possible, one that only comes into focus from a distance. As Lamming says in a recent interview, emphasizing both an enduring paradox of West Indian nationalisms in the twentieth century and the specific orientation of the Windrush generation, “I have a theory that West Indians of my generation were made in England not in the West Indies” (Lamming, 2013: n.p.). As a concept that is at once postnational and nationalist, “exile”, then, allows Lamming to symbolically resolve for his autobiographical protagonist and for the generation of novelists to which he belongs, the problem “of being a part of what you could not become”, of being able to locate oneself in a national community whose economic development requires one to grow away in the world. “Exile”, in other words, offers a narrative space beyond the frame of the text — a kind of future anterior, within which what Slaughter (2007) calls the “diegetic split” between narration and narrator is repaired — casting a new light on the novel that precedes it. Although Kalliney, Brown, and Rosenberg are, of course, right to resist the self-mythologizing of the Windrush “exile”, in this formal sense, as Edward Said writes, “[w]hile it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions” (2000: 148).