Analyzing the Real: Bessie Head’s Literary Psychosis

Abstract

South African/Botswanan writer Bessie Head’s 1974 novel A Question of Power has challenged literary critics in all kinds of ways. Readings of the novel tend to focus on either the realistic sections of the novel, which deal with self-sufficiency, economic development, community and inter-/intra-ethnic conflict endemic to the postindependence, neoimperial condition of late-twentieth-century decolonized nations; or the modernist/postmodernist nonrealist hallucinatory and “fantastic” sections, with particular emphasis on psychoanalytic readings. My reading joins the “real” and the “unreal” strata of the novel to argue that they are in fact inextricably interwoven and mutually determinate in the novel’s complex analysis and argument of the condition of the subject in and of the modern world. The novel’s principle specters—Sello, Dan, and Medusa—are not merely manifestations of the narrator’s individual psychosis or her helpless responses to the ideologies oppressing her. Rather, the novel constitutes a complex exploration of the processes of power (economic, political, cultural, social, sexual) that help form both the subject and the social field in intimate and overdeter mined ways. Reading the novel as both a political-cultural social analysis as well as a journey into the phantasms of the unconscious of the subject—both “real” processes—provides wider insight toward less Euro-centric, more globally informed psychoanalysis (understanding of the subject in general) in postcolonial, late capitalist post modernity.

And I was later, much later, to discover with the poets and the novelists that the dialectic was not just a tool but a felt sensibility.

—A. Sivanandan