Mrs. Humphry Ward - "The Coryston Family"

Ruth Comfort Mitchell - "Jane Journeys On"

St. John G. Ervine - "The Foolish Lovers"

Sebastian Brandt - "The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 2"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

G >> Gilbert K. Chesterton >> The Napoleon of Notting Hill




The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning to
turn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. The
slight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voice
was more human.

"But suppose, friend," it said, "suppose that, in a bitterer and more
real sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from
the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense
that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility,
of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a
joke."

The tall figure answered--

"He could not know it. For it was not all a joke."

And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky-line, and
showed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the other
voice came, having crept nearer still.

[Illustration: "WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE."]

"Adam Wayne," it said, "there are men who confess only in _articulo
mortis_; there are people who blame themselves only when they can no
longer help others. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of the
bloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would never
understand before. Do you know who I am?"

"I know you, Auberon Quin," answered the tall figure, "and I shall be
glad to unburden your spirit of anything that lies upon it."

"Adam Wayne," said the other voice, "of what I have to say you cannot
in common reason be glad to unburden me. Wayne, it was all a joke.
When I made these cities, I cared no more for them than I care for a
centaur, or a merman, or a fish with legs, or a pig with feathers, or
any other absurdity. When I spoke to you solemnly and encouragingly
about the flag of your freedom and the peace of your city, I was
playing a vulgar practical joke on an honest gentleman, a vulgar
practical joke that has lasted for twenty years. Though no one could
believe it of me, perhaps, it is the truth that I am a man both timid
and tender-hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, or
the central days of your supremacy, to tell you this; I never dared to
break the colossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do it
now, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all your
people! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as a joke."

There was silence, and the freshening breeze blew the sky clearer and
clearer, leaving great spaces of the white dawn.

At last Wayne said, very slowly--

"You did it all only as a joke?"

"Yes," said Quin, briefly.

"When you conceived the idea," went on Wayne, dreamily, "of an army
for Bayswater and a flag for Notting Hill, there was no gleam, no
suggestion in your mind that such things might be real and
passionate?"

"No," answered Auberon, turning his round white face to the morning
with a dull and splendid sincerity; "I had none at all."

Wayne sprang down from the height above him and held out his hand.

"I will not stop to thank you," he said, with a curious joy in his
voice, "for the great good for the world you have actually wrought.
All that I think of that I have said to you a moment ago, even when I
thought that your voice was the voice of a derisive omnipotence, its
laughter older than the winds of heaven. But let me say what is
immediate and true. You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of us
throughout our lives been again and again called mad. And we are mad.
We are mad, because we are not two men, but one man. We are mad,
because we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has been
cloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard to
find. It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these dark
days stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, the
fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that, though we seem
to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and
woman, aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are
the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities."

Quin looked down at the _debris_ of leaves and timber, the relics of
the battle and stampede, now glistening in the growing daylight, and
finally said--

"Yet nothing can alter the antagonism--the fact that I laughed at
these things and you adored them."

Wayne's wild face flamed with something god-like, as he turned it to
be struck by the sunrise.

"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that
is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps
taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will
alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism
between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom
mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark
and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the
pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have
lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows
mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But
in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes
of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The
cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous
grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover
laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend
at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us
go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our
wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is
already day."

In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the
formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the
unknown world.


THE END




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