By Sierra McDonald

Novels are, at their core, parodies of earlier literary genres. Parody, in a modern sense, is a way to manipulate the ideas set forth by various stories, images, or events in order to exaggerate or critique them, generally through humor or simply for comic effect. Thus, it may feel strange for many modern readers to consider most novels parodies, since they are not as obviously ironic or silly as things like SNL or the Scary Movie franchise or this. Yet, novels are characterized as parodies in M.M. Bakhtin’s book The Dialogic Imagination. According to Bakhtin, novels take other genres and put them into a more realistic space.¹ Novelists take characters, settings, or situations that are familiar tropes from other, earlier literary genres (the epic, the romance, the legend, etc.) and force them to interact with modernity, which serves to show the inadequacies inherent in older literary forms, since such characters are not prepared or designed to step into the modern versions of their respective identities. Novels thus simultaneously parody earlier forms of literature and critique their own modernity.

This characterization seems to apply best to the novels of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, simply because the prior forms of literature—the subjects of parody—were more widely read then. However, the novel has since exploded in popularity into the most dominant form of literature, and this proliferation could not have happened without the novel’s emergence as a distinctive literary form in the 17^th century and the existence of other genres for it to mimic. A good example of this novelistic parody can be found in Aphra Behn’s 17^th century novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave.² Through her ambiguous—and often contradictory—narrative, she “parodies” the epic poem genre by placing the prince in the position of slave. His story is that of a heroic African prince, tricked into becoming a slave to the English in the colony of Surinam, which is on the northern coast of South America. Though all of his attributes are indicative of an epic hero, the eponymous prince must face the reality of his blackness in the 17^th century colonial world: he is ultimately nothing more than a slave.

Behn uses her ambiguous narrative to emphasize the confusion and difficulty of forcing an epic character to interact with the “real” world. The story is alleged as a first-person account from the author, though she does not profess to have witnessed many of the events. She speaks as an omniscient narrator, but simultaneously functions as a character. Sometimes the ambiguity is clearly intentional. She writes, “Some have commended this act [of tricking Oroonoko into becoming enslaved] as brave in the captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and leave it to my reader to judge as he pleases” (38). She uses a technique commonly employed by first-person authors: feign neutrality in order to create an impersonal narrator. This neutrality is important as it allows authors to fill their narrator role without compromising themselves as a book characters. In some cases though, her ambiguity is subtler. She writes, of the native peoples of Surinam, “So that they being, on all occasions very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress them as friends, and not to treat them as slaves; nor dare we do other, their numbers so far surpassing ours in that continent” (12). Africans also could have been useful to Behn’s people in trade, yet Africans were enslaved, working on Surinam’s profitable sugar plantations. It’s not clear whether or not Behn sees this nuance. She simultaneously divorces herself morally from the story whilst telling it in the first person. The confusion and ambiguity in her narrative serve to emphasize the contrast between Oroonoko’s epic character and his plight as a slave, helping her to parody the epic.

According to Bakhtin, the epic has a defined life in history. There is a boundary between its setting and the present that cannot be crossed. It takes national tradition as its source and separates the epic world from the contemporary world.¹ Epics are generally heroic stories that are presented from a nationally approved viewpoint. They can be seen as a representation of a country’s values and traditions. There could easily have been an epic written about Oroonoko. He was a prince and a hero, idolized and revered in his home country of Coramantien (which is part of modern Ghana). He was a fierce warrior, having, at age 17, taken the place of the old general who was killed in battle. His superior strength was rivaled only by his beauty, as he was considered the most handsome and perfect human specimen. Everyone also revered him for his sophisticated manners and charming personality. He conversed and comported himself with the utmost dignity and was known to have a distinctly “princely” quality about him, for which he was beloved by his people. He even won the heart of the most beautiful woman in Coramantien, named Imoinda. She was his female equivalent in elegance, decorum, and loveliness. They fell deeply in love and got married early in the story. Oroonoko embodied every value and tradition of his nation: courage, wit, amiability, strength, beauty, and loyalty. He was perfectly equipped to go an on epic quest or to vanquish national enemies. In more ancient times, perhaps that’s exactly what he would have done. However, by bringing him into the present, Behn makes a novel out of what could have once been an epic.

It is clear that his peers and subjects view Oroonoko as the epitome of humanity, but Behn allows for confusion about her true opinion of him and all the non-white groups represented in the book. Sometimes her perceptions align with the predominant Western attitudes and sometimes they do not. Of the South American natives, she writes, “They have all that is called beauty, except for the colour which is a reddish yellow” (11). She continues, “For most certainly there are beauties that can charm of that color,” but they are also a “gloomy race” (13). She does not really think of them as savages though, writing, “These people represented to me an absolute idea about the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin…religion would here but destroy that tranquility they possess by ignorance” (11). While this description is definitely somewhat condescending and would not be a politically correct assessment today, she is not agreeing with the predominant European opinion at the time, which was that native peoples were brutal savages in need of proselytizing.

Her assessment of black Africans is a little different, but still conflicted. She calls Oroonoko a “gallant slave” (9) and says that “the whole proportion and air of his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome” (15). So, she acknowledges his beauty, but undermines it by implying that he would look better with white skin. It is clear that she likes his personality, but her opinions of the race as a whole are less clear. She writes that Oroonoko “did such things as will not be believed that human strength could perform” (35). This vision of black people as having supernatural strength is actually a stereotype that endures to this day. Thus her statements are not particularly progressive. It is clear though that she thinks of black Africans as more evolved than the South American natives. Towards the end of the story, she and Oroonoko pay a visit to a neighboring South American tribe. He is shocked to see the customary battle scars of their culture: significant physical mutilations, such as holes in cheeks or missing lips. Behn notes that these marks represent “a sort of courage too brutal to be applauded by our black hero” (59). The implication is that, despite his supreme courage, Oroonoko is not as “savage” as these tribe members, since brutality is not as valued by black Africans. These ambiguous racial depictions throughout this book emphasize the disorientation of placing a heroic black prince in slavery.

As a powerful leader, Oroonoko had traded slaves, both with neighboring African tribes and with white Europeans. For him, slaves were the earned prizes of the victor in a war. He enslaved the people of the nations he defeated in battle, and he sold them to white traders. One white trader, named Trefry, arrived in Coramantien under the pretense of buying slaves from Oroonoko. Instead, he tricked Oroonoko and many of his courtiers into becoming slaves

themselves, by getting them drunk and abruptly chaining them to his ship. He took them to Surinam to work on sugar plantations. However, Oroonoko stood out, since “[as he] endeavored to hide only by confessing he was above the rank of common slaves, Trefry soon found he was yet something greater than he confessed; and from that moment began to conceive so vast an esteem for him that he ever after loved him as his dearest brother, and showed him all the civilities due so great a man” (42). Once he got to Surinam, “the royal youth appeared in spite of the slave, and people could not help treating him after a different manner without designing it, as soon as they approached him, they venerated and esteemed him” (43). At first, his epic qualities seemed to give him an advantage in the modern 17^th century world.

By emphasizing his popularity among the European colonialists, Behn toys with the idea that perhaps his epic qualities easily transcended his modernity. Perhaps his blackness did not render him subhuman in the 17^th century white world. But at the same time, there are indicators that he was not truly “black.” In his trading with Europeans, he had learned to speak English, French, and Spanish, abilities that charmed all the European traders who came to Coramantien. Behn also notes that he had a nice Roman nose, instead of the flat nose more typical of black Africans (and more detested by white people). He even used a special technique to straighten his hair, making it look less distinctly African. Thus, he was much more westernized than most African people. There’s no doubt that this played a large part in his positive reception in Surinam. As the story progresses though, Behn continues to de-emphasize his blackness. As was custom, the colonialists gave him a new anglicized name: Caesar, for his courage and valor. Though readers have come to know him as Oroonoko, Behn makes the switch to Caesar, allegedly to maintain historical accuracy and ensure that those who knew him in the West recognized her novel as his story. However, hers is a work of fiction. No such man ever existed, so readers would not be confused if she continued to use his real name. The name switch serves to continue the ambiguity in readers’ predictions of the success of a black epic prince thrust into modernity.

It did not take long in Surinam for Oroonoko to come to terms with his reality as a black man in a 17^th century European colony. For a while, his white owners promised him eventual freedom. But it soon became clear that they had no intention of losing their investment in him. So Oroonoko, like the valiant prince that he was, decided to lead the slaves in a major escape attempt. Behn writes, “Caesar, having singled out these men from the women and children made a harangue to them of all the miseries and ignominies of slavery; counting up all their toils and sufferings under such loads, burdens, and drudgeries as were fitter for beasts than men; senseless brutes than human souls” (61). However, his attempt at freeing such a large number of slaves at once failed, since they had to burn a trail through the woods and were thus very easy to track. After they were all caught and returned to the plantation, Oroonoko was brutally whipped and his wounds were rubbed with hot pepper. His princely eminence could not prevent him from being treated like a common slave. In an epic, his courageous desire to free his people from their underserved bondage would have been rewarded and his plan probably would have worked. He would have won. Instead, Behn writes him into a world in which he is whipped and ultimately killed, essentially for being a black African. On the last pages of the book, Oroonoko was violently murdered by Banister, a “fellow of absolute barbarity, and fit to execute any villainy” (76). Banister lit a fire and gradually cut off pieces of Oroonoko’s body, burning them as he went. When the prince finally died, Banister quartered his body and sent the pieces to different plantations as examples of what can happen to a dissenting slave.

Had this story been an epic, the events would have flown together in a way that made sense. Hungarian scholar Georg Lukács writes, in his seminal work The Theory of the Novel, “The novel is the epic of an age in which the totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”³ Daniel Hartley eloquently defines the term totality in this blog post as: “an overriding organic unity between all that is.”⁴ A world embodying totality is a world that makes sense; it’s a world where things happen the way they are supposed to happen. Things go together. In the world of the epic, the world of totality, Oroonoko’s courage and other princely characteristics would carry him smoothly through the modern world. He would achieve justice for himself and his people, and he would be beloved by everyone for centuries to come. However, “the immanence of meaning in life” is gone in the world of the novel. His epic identity cannot be successfully reconciled with his black identity, no matter how hard he tries. In a world of totality, slaves would only exist as Oroonoko knows them: war prizes. There would be no unjust racial slavery. In writing this character, Aphra Behn clings to the idea of totality though, consistently playing with the audience’s perceptions of whether it does or does not exist in Oroonoko’s world.

Ultimately, the epic version of Oroonoko comes up short in the world of the novel. As a slave he does everything right: listens to his masters, comports himself with dignity, speaks with eloquence. But none of the skills and characteristics that make him a great prince helps him at all in the white world of Surinam. They still whip him and kill him. Nothing matters except the color of his skin. This story is literally a parody of the epic: an epic character goes out into the world, but instead of success he is met with the realization that he is woefully inadequate. Aphra Behn uses Oroonoko to highlight the lack of totality in her world. Whatever her opinions truly are about any of the details, one thing is clear: the world no longer makes any sense. In many ways it still doesn’t. No amount of courage, degree of civility, or even a Roman nose can protect Oroonoko (and others like him) from the cruel reality of his modern identity.

References:
1. Bakhtin. M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas, 1986. PDF.
2. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.
3. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT, 1971. PDF.
4. Hartley, Daniel. “Lukács Theory of the Novel.” Thinking Blue Guitars. WordPress, 1 Nov. 2010. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.