Literary Contexts: Tropes and Influence
Other scholars have found Equiano’s narrative to be fertile ground for many modes of analysis, including debates around the genre identity of the text (autobiography, abolitionist, travel, conversion), historical accuracy of Equiano’s life story, identity politics, and literary analysis. This project aims to situate Equiano’s narrative in the history of ideas within the slave narrative genre. As such, this project will focus on literary analysis of the corpus of slave narratives, with attention to formal elements.
In addition to declaring Equiano’s narrative the “prototype” for the genre of slave narratives, Gates has shown some continuity through the corpus by tracking the trope of the “talking book” through several accounts. The “talking book” first appeared in the narrative of James Albert Ukaksaw Gronniosaw, and reappeared in the narratives of John Marrant, and Ottobah Cugoano. In Equiano’s narrative, this unusual scene begins when Equiano sees his master’s lips moving while reading the Bible, apparently “talking” to the book. Eager to learn all of the secrets held by this magical book, Equiano repeatedly tries and fails to start conversations with books.
In Gates’s analysis, the “talking book” episode is just one set-piece that characterizes several formal and stylistic elements that characterize Equiano’s text. At the macro level, the movement from orality to literacy parallels the movement from slavery to freedom. Other dualities abound in the text, including the use of two distinct voices for the “narrative-present Equiano” and the “authorial-present Equiano.” These two voices can be distinguished by their relative naivete and eloquence, and the textual movement between them is marked by frequent shifts in tense.[1]
Many of the formal elements that Gates identified, particularly the dual patterns of chiasmus, reversals, and authorial and narrative voices, may serve to advance the “ethical irony” seen in Adam Potkay’s analys. According to Potkay, Equiano both affirms and renounces a desire for violent revenge against his oppressors. As he writes, this "is an irony that skirts what we might call the 'Egyptian quandary,' or the question of how to condone the vengeance of Moses when writing in light of the Christian injunction to turn the other cheek."[2]
If Equiano’s narrative was indeed as influential as thought, we ought to find artifacts of its influence across the corpus of slave narratives. What might this influence look like? It might look like the trope of the talking book, passed on as a meme from one work to another. We might need to look for other kinds of structural artifacts, including echoes of the “ethical irony” described by Potkay, he asserts that residue of this innovation are found across the African-American canon, from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing to Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon.
But what kind of artifacts might these be? For tropes and memes like the talking book, topic modeling could point out topics strongly associated with passages of orality or literacy. For Potkay's "ethical irony," we could look for passages in which multiple topics are present, each associated with the contradictory sentiments he identifies.
[1]Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Twenty-fifth-anniversary edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.