The Axiological Turn of Doris Lessing’s Hunger

Abstract

This study seeks to elucidate Doris Lessing’s treatment of the issues of commodity fetishism and value in Hunger (1953). Drawing on concepts postulated by K. Marx, G. Lukács, W. Pietz, and S. Freud, the study argues that Lessing casts the fetish at the intersection of the socio-economic and the psychological. The fetish in this novella designates European white culture and its capitalist economics as well as symbolic hungers that threaten African manhood with econo-political castration. To liberate African anti-colonial consciousness from its inertia, the subaltern subject needs to subvert the allure of the commodity fetish and seek a sound understanding of value and the definition of homo economicus [economic human]. Nevertheless, it is carnivalesque attitudes played by female African agents that initiate in the African male a new epistemology, mobilize his life drives, and cultivate a valuable black manhood that thrives beyond the power of the fetish.