UC Davis

Paule Marshall’s 1969 novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People has been understudied, perhaps because of its complex relation to genre within the field of literature and its interest in a wide array of character positionality. The novel, narrating a group of social scientists who arrive on a fictional Caribbean island in order to “develop” the hilly region of Bournehills, disturbs the borders between realism, speculative fiction, and the utopian. This thesis offers a reading of the novel’s utopian possibility based in the island’s refusal to adhere to historical scripts and its demonstration of the haunting, timeless truth of other realities. The island’s residents defy the visitors’ expectations through a paradoxically candid inscrutability and the landscape itself harbors symbols of collapsed time. This exploration of muddled genre boundaries is also demonstrated in Marshall’s depiction of character as both individual and instantiation of type. I use Sylvia Wynter’s theory of genre as a framework for discussing human categorization and the mixture of biological, social, and cultural differentiation which creates a dynamic individual. By manipulating the reader’s sense of reality, invoking the utopian drive for an actionable elsewhere and deconstructing a sense of objective individuality outside of historical and social development, Marshall makes the Western epistemological worldview alien, contributing to a reorientation of the genre of human.