The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim's Progress

Abstract

The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim's Progress. By Isabel Hofmeyr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 314. $65.00/£42.95 cloth, $22.95/£14.95 paper. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress of 1678 is about the voyage of a character called "Christian" through a landscape filled with labeled, aphoristic traps, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Slough of Despond, etc., with compatriots named Faith and Hopeful and so on. It's heavy handed and repetitive, a sort of inferior C. S. Lewis, a dated book, in other words, by the usual standards of the nineteenth century, the era of Trollope and George Elliot and Yeats and Shaw. Isabel Hofmeyr's account of Pilgrim's Progress's international expansion into something else, on the other hand, is elegant and readable. Her task is to chart the vectors in which Bunyan's moralistic fable became enmeshed in different colonial and postcolonial projects. In hundreds of languages the world over Pilgrim's Progress appears to have ranked second only to the Bible in influence. As it moved, it changed. The Portable Bunyan begins with a visual example of such change. In the frontispiece of the original Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan is napping, as befits a "vagabond." "Christian," his dreamed-of "pilgrim," walks up a path in the background. When the book came out in SiNdebele in 1902, Bunyan's eyes are wide open in the frontispiece, as the pilgrim behind him has become an African schoolboy. As Hofmeyr explains, in South Africa it was inappropriate for a white man to sleep in public places: only a black man could be a tinker! Isabel Hofmeyr has given us not only a translational history of this Bunyan, but even more, an archaeology of Bunyanisms in the aftermath of empire, a history of Bunyanism "waft[ing] out from mission stations like clouds of confetti" (p. 62), being possessed and remade according to local circumstance, and reemerging in incipient nationalist discourses (including "Englishness"). The how of its literary remaking is Hofmeyr's concern, from its innocuous beginnings as a demotic low-culture tract, through its Atlantic dissemination, and on into Ngugi's and others' ironic occupation of the text or parts therein. "Christian" was an intermediary to "Christ," and also a cipher for any penitent, an almost rote mechanism for self-discipline. For mission-educated Africans, Giant Despair's Dungeon might become, metaphorically, the situation of the Coloured classes, or the vehicle for an attack in Umteteli waBantu on black elites who cannot "scale the Hill" because they keep slipping on "carpets of cash." It was "de-allegoricized and re-allegoricized." To me, the most interesting part of The Portable Bunyan is about the meaning of literacy and texts. Pilgrim's Progress itself came from a semiliterate world, and Christian and his allegorical companions struggle with their own reading and writing and verbal explaining. In their world, as in South Africa at the turn of the century, one's papers had unpredictable power-licenses, tax rolls, deeds, paper money-physical "texts" that ruled over a person as much as she possessed them. Chapters 5 and 6 are especially brilliant. Hofmeyr also discusses several other authors, including Legson Kagire, Amos Tutuola, and Tsitsi Dangarembga among others. The last section of The Portable Bunyan explores the Anglicization of Bunyan; how the language and scenery came to be authenticized and recollected as peculiarly Bedfordshirean, and that Englishness put forth as the central reason for its worldwide appeal. A section of great interest concerns Thomas Mofolo, the author of Shaka, and specifically his earlier book, Moeti wa Bochabela, the Traveler to the East. …