The appearance of a deliberately integrated structure is deceptive, as the reader begins to anticipate when he finds his attention engaged by individual scenes – a market, a night club, a noisy religious procession – which are richly evoked and at times divert one’s attention from the flow of the narrative to admire the local colour on the way. And in fact, as Laurence herself has stated, she wrote the novel in a series of episodes, beginning with the final scenes, and only after a great deal of writing did she see the novel as a whole and realize that there was a natural order to it.
Laurence had already, it seems, adopted the practice that she developed in her later novels of conceiving the characters first and allowing the action to take its shape from their interaction. In fact, though the novel is told by an anonymous narrator, we actually see everything through the alternating viewpoints of the two leading male characters, and we observe the other people in the novel, however important they may be, through their eyes; the pattern of alternating chapters, devoted to African and European points of view respectively, is perhaps somewhat mechanical in effect, but nonetheless effective in a novel where the theme of opposing cultures is dominant and the issues, at that moment in colonial history, are clear and straightforward.
This Side Jordan departs from the orthodox third-person novel in developing the interior monologue in a way that anticipated Laurence’s richly varied experimental renderings of awareness and memory in the books of the Manawaka cycle. Later on, in an address, “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel” (1969), Laurence expressed doubts about the effectiveness of what she had done in This Side Jordan.
As far as voice is concerned, I think now that the novel contains too much of Nathaniel’s inner monologues. I actually wonder how I ever had the nerve to attempt to go into the mind of an African man, and I suppose if I’d really known how difficult was the job I was attempting, I would never have tried it. I am not at all sorry I tried it, and in fact I believe from various comments made by African reviewers that at least some parts of the African chapters have a certain authenticity. But not, perhaps, as much as I once believed.
The African chapters not only have authenticity. They carry conviction in a surprising way when one considers that Laurence lived only five years in Ghana, and, while she was there, mingled mainly with Africans who were already largely Europeanized. The crucial passages in these interior monologues are those in which Nathaniel’s tribal myths – those of his ancestors and his own early childhood – clash with the Christian myths and values imposed on him from the time he went to mission school as a small boy. In this sense Nathaniel is the type of the educated African at the end of the colonial era in the late 1950s.
What is especially interesting is that Laurence does not attempt to treat tribal beliefs as rationally comprehensible concepts; rather she materializes them as visions and voices in what seems to be a bicameral mind in the process of detachment from the world of myth.
One can get a sense of Laurence’s intuitive originality by reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a controversial book in which Julian Jaynes traces the rise of rationality in the ancient world through the breakdown of the myth-making mentality, a change he attributes to the influence of massive external catastrophes impinging on ancient myth-dominated cultures. But Jaynes did not publish his book until 1978. Laurence was already putting forward similar ideas two decades before him in her portrayal of Nathaniel Amegbe struggling with the voices of myth and custom that echo in his mind as he makes his way through a world irrevocably changing under the influence of colonialism and its aftermath.
This Side Jordan is a brilliant imaginative grasping of what must indeed have been going on in terms of changing awareness in the minds of many Africans of this period. In terms of Laurence’s work as a whole, it takes on importance as the first of her explorations of the various uses of the interior monologue as a means of giving fictional form to the way our minds work as they mingle memory and present perception in the great tapestry of the retrospective consciousness.
This Side Jordan was the best of a number of novels published during the 1960s by Canadians who had lived and served in West Africa, and it can still be read as a valuable fictional document of the times. But, more than that, Laurence carried out the unusual feat of writing a vividly topical novel that would turn, as time went on, into what seems now a valid work of historical fiction. This, I think, is because she wrote about people – both Europeans and Africans – who remembered the past vividly and lived the present fully, but who also looked to the future that has been unfolding in Africa since the book’s publication. Some of them – mainly Africans – looked to the future with a naive optimism, and some were still too trapped in tradition to look anywhere but into the past; others, particularly the older European merchants, anticipated with dread the collapse of the paternalistic establishment they had created. Yet others, less naive, saw the future in more realistic terms, like the ruthlessly climbing young Englishman, Johnnie Kestoe, who sees in the rapidly changing course of events the setting for his own career, and Victor Edusei, the realistic and English-educated African journalist, who utters to Nathaniel a prophecy in which we see Laurence in the late 1950s foreseeing with remarkable accuracy the course that events in Ghana and so many other of the liberated African states would take once these countries gained their independence.
You put your faith in Ghana, don’t you? The new life. Well, that’s fine, boy. That’s fine for you. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s a dead body lying unburied. You wait until after Independence. You’ll see such oppression as you never believed possible. Only of course it’ll be all right then – it’ll be black men oppressing black men, and who could object to that? There’ll be your Free-Dom for you – the right to be enslaved by your own kind.
Of course one does not count political foresight among the necessary virtues of a novelist. But, taken with Laurence’s evident understanding of the role of myth and custom in primitive societies, its presence does indicate the kind of many-sided sensitivity to the total nature of a community that makes for successful social realist fiction. In this and other ways. This Side Jordan is not only the first chronologically of Laurence’s novels but also a book that, despite all the vast differences in setting and action, anticipated almost all that Laurence eventually achieved in her Manawaka novels.
BY MARGARET LAURENCE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963)
ESSAYS
Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952–1966 (1968)
Heart of a Stranger (1976)
FICTION
This Side Jordan (1960)
The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)
The Stone Angel (1964)
A Jest of God (1966)
The Fire-Dwellers (1969)
A Bird in the House (1970)
The Diviners (1974)
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jason’s Quest (1970)
Six Darn Cows (1979)
The Olden Days Coat (1979)
The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)
TRANSLATIONS
A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)
Copyright © 1960 by Margaret Laurence
Afterword copyright © 1989 by George Woodcock
This New Canadian Library edition 2009
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987
This side Jordan / Margaret Laurence; with an afterword by George Woodcock.
(N
ew Canadian library)
Originally publ. 1960.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-299-0
I. Title. II. Series: New Canadian library
PS8523.A86T4 2009 C813′.54 C2009-901591-9
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The characters and events in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance they have to people and events in life is purely coincidental.
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Margaret Laurence, This Side Jordan
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