Modern Mind

sense, they can start again.
Sula
is about a promiscuous girl, but she is not the usual ‘village bicycle’ (to use a British phrase): she is
successfully
promiscuous, with her affections and her attentions just as much as with her body, and she shines: the drab community that surrounds her is transformed. Morrison is telling us as much about womanhood as being black.
Beloved
is her most ambitious book. 7 Set in Reconstruction times, it is the story of a black mother who kills her own young daughter when the former slave owner comes to return her to her old life of slavery. But this is fiction, and the daughter, Beloved of the title, reappears as a ghost to make a new inner life for her mother – the daughter lives again, through the power of love. Here too, amid the squalor and humiliation of slavery, Morrison uses the African devices of myth, ritual and oral legend to produce joy – not sentimental joy, but a joy that is earned.
    Alice Walker also writes about the poverty she knew when she was growing up in the South, in a sharecropping family, but her novels, most notably
The Color Purple
(1982), look forward rather than back, forward to the way that the urban, more open America offers promise for blacks and for women. Narrated as a series of letters, the book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, follows a group of black women as they fight their way out of poverty, out from under their abusive menfolk, with racism ready to subvert any progress they make. Like Morrison and Angelou, Walker has the strength of optimism, viewing the women’s progress as not only political but personal. Inside their persons, these women cannot be touched; their integrity is complete. 8
    Morrison and Walker both are and are not postmodern and postcolonial writers. Their exploration of blackness, the ‘other,’ the female condition, the use of African literary forms, all typify the arena of fiction in the last quarter of the century. In his book
English as a Global Language
(1997), David Crystal concludes his argument, ‘There has never been a language so widely spread or spoken by so many people as English.’ 9 It is, he says, a unique event historically. He also concurs with a sentiment of the Indian author Salman Rushdie, who wrote that ‘the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago.’ 10 ‘Indeed,’ says Crystal, ‘when even the largest English-speaking nation, the USA, turns out to have only about 20 per cent of the world’s English speakers [as Crystal had himself demonstrated in his survey, earlier inhis book], it is plain that no one can now claim sole ownership.’ 11 He goes on to quote the Indian author Raja Rao, Chinua Achebe, and Rushdie again: all accept English as a world language but warn that it will from now on be used in increasingly new ways.
    Whereas until 1970, say, it is possible to write about the ‘great books’ of the century, at least so far as Western countries are concerned, this becomes much more difficult for the period afterward. The reasons all have to do with the collapse of a consensus on what are, and are not, the dominant themes in literature. This collapse has been engendered by three things: the theories of postmodernism; the great flourishing of talent in the formerly colonial countries; and the success and impact of free-market economics since 1979–80, which has both caused the proliferation of new media outlets and, by attacking such institutions (in the U.K. for example) as the BBC and the Arts Council, sabotaged the idea of national cultures, the very notion of a shared tradition, which men like F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling so valued. It follows that any synopsis of late-twentieth-century literature offered by one individual is bound to be contentious, at the very least. Some generalisations
are
possible, however, and here attention will be limited to the Latin American school of ‘magic realism,’ magic realism being an important influence on other schools of writing; the rise of postcolonial literature, especially that written in the English language; the rise of ‘cultural studies’ as a replacement for traditional literature courses; and the enduring strength of American imaginative writing, reflecting a country – now the only superpower – where more people than anywhere live life’s possibilities to the full.
    The writers of Latin America – of whom the most well known are Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Jorge