SOURCE: “‘Within the Orbit of Power’: Reading Allegory in George Lamming's Natives of My Person,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1987, pp. 73-86.

In the following essay, McDonald examines the symbolic representations contained in Natives of My Person.

In the last few decades there has been a resurgence and re-evaluation of allegory both as a practised form in creative writing and as a critical technique in literary theory. To use a current cant word, the valorization by Goethe and Coleridge of symbolism over allegory signalled, if it did not cause, a long eclipse of allegorical writing. At least in critical writing this eclipse is over. Any attempt at a critical reading of a contemporary allegory must be prefaced by some consideration of ambiguities and, indeed, paradoxes in current conceptions of allegory and allegoresis, of allegorical writing, allegorical reading, and the reading of allegorical writing.

We recall, first...