‘YOU HAVE TO MELT IT TO HEAR THE TALK’: TRANSNATIONALISM, CREOLE STYLIZATION AND AURALITY IN SAM SELVON’S THE LONELY LONDONERS Cover Image

‘YOU HAVE TO MELT IT TO HEAR THE TALK’: TRANSNATIONALISM, CREOLE STYLIZATION AND AURALITY IN SAM SELVON’S THE LONELY LONDONERS
‘YOU HAVE TO MELT IT TO HEAR THE TALK’: TRANSNATIONALISM, CREOLE STYLIZATION AND AURALITY IN SAM SELVON’S THE LONELY LONDONERS

Author(s): Dorottya Mozes
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti
Keywords: creole; dialect stylization; aurality; black performance; Caribbean literature; transnationalism

Summary/Abstract: Whereas in the traditional ‘English novel’ the space of the nation is indexed by regionally unmarked, neutral, ‘standard’ English (cf. Bleak House), in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) the creation of a transnational London relies on an accented, regionally and socially marked creole vernacular. This paper focuses on the deployment of creole stylization and lyricism as the sites of the transnational negotiation of space and meaning: What happens to urban space when it becomes a meaning amenable to being styled in and through creole stylization, when the vernacular functions as a mode of subjectivity which mediates the characters’ and the readers’ experience of space? How do the characters and the narrator use creole to construe identities from which they distance themselves? Bourdieu’s concept of habitus shows how in stylization speakers can ‘own’ London by amplifying and disrupting the relationship between social meanings and regionally- or socially-indexed linguistic forms and varieties. In The Lonely Londoners it can be argued that the hyperaurality of the creole vernacular constructs a new and rival transnational geography challenging the racialist spatial order; more specifically, the sonic irruption overwrites the visual description of the city with a phonographic one, which goes beyond the forms and meanings of verbality. The paper concludes with a reading of the end of the novel as the musical counterpoint to the creole stylization, which is a displacement of black suffering. Selvon’s ‘phonographic novel’ opens us up to a new way of reading and listening to creole speech: the aural rewriting of the sociolinguistic ‘standard’ restores the act of listening to its proper place in the act of reading.

  • Issue Year: IV/2014
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 13-22
  • Page Count: 10