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ABSTRACT

HUMANITIES

EDWARDS, ROBERT LEE B.A. FLORIDA A&M UNIVERSITY,

2009

M.A. CLARK ATLANTA UNIVERSITY,

2012

REVISING A TRADITION: ANALYSES OF THE WORKS OF

EDWARD P. JONES

Committee Chair: Daniel Black, Ph.D.

Dissertation dated December 2020

This dissertation investigates rhetorical devices in the creative works of Edward

P. Jones, focusing specifically on the author’s novel, The Known World, and his collected short fiction, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. It argues that repetition figures prominently in the dialogic space of the author’s works and that repetition is the most important aspect of the author’s system of argumentation. In Jones’s work, repeated character types, ideas, and forms function as sites of intertextuality. Through the author’s repetition (with a critical difference) of other “texts,” he critiques them and transforms them. Ultimately, these transformations function to revise the African American literary tradition, together with its types, ideas, and forms.

REVISING A TRADITION: ANALYSES OF THE WORKS OF

EDWARD P. JONES

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF CLARK ATLANTA UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ROBERT LEE EDWARDS

HUMANITIES

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

DECEMBER 2020

ROBERT LEE EDWARDS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful for the guidance provided by my committee members, Dr.

Daniel Black (Chair), Dr. Georgene Bess Montgomery, and Dr. Kelly DeLong, who not only offered quick feedback during the dissertation process but who also provided important insights that contributed to the completion of this project. My gratitude and eternal indebtedness also go to my parents, Theotis Pressley and Marcia Edwards

Pressley, for a lifetime of love and support. Without their love, I hardly know where (or who) I would be in the world. Lastly, I am appreciative for the loving encouragement of my brothers, Pastor Dontavier Murphy and Pastor Michael Conwell, for always believing in my abilities to complete this project and for always understanding me despite my enigmatic personality.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... iv

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

II. DISCOURSE ON DECADENCE IN EDWARD P. JONES’S THE

KNOWN WORLD ...... 19

III. FROM MARGIN TO CENTER: AFRICANISMS AND THE BLACK

FEMALE VOICE IN EDWARD P. JONES’S THE KNOWN WORLD ...... 84

IV. REVISION OF THE “BAD NIGGER” ARCHETYPE IN EDWARD P.

JONES’S LOST IN THE CITY AND ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN .. 136

V. CONCLUSION ...... 161

WORKS CITED ...... 170

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

1. Polyphony in The Known World ...... 51

2. Heteroglossia in The Known World ...... 53

3. The Absorption of Decadent Discourses in The Known World ...... 55

4. Definitional Continuum of Slavery ...... 119

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In 1992, a collection of short stories appeared on the literary scene, whose complexity and poignancy initially shocked the literary establishment. When Edward P.

Jones first published Lost in the City, a collection of fourteen stories set in black

Washington, reviewers received the collection with astonishment and delight.1 Since the collection’s appearance, its author has published two other books—a collection of short fiction, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and a novel, The Known World. Together, these works have earned Jones some of the nation’s most coveted literary prizes: he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” In addition to these, his work has been shortlisted for several other prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award.

Considering his commercial success, Jones has come very close to being the most awarded (and still living) author of the African American literary tradition. Still, despite all of his success, critical attention regarding his work has been in short supply.

In the editor’s note to Edward P. Jones: New Essays, Daniel Davis Wood muses on this fact with a question. He asks, “How is it that a man can drag himself out of poverty to become one of America’s most decorated writers and yet remain largely unnoticed by professional critics of American literature?” The question is hard to answer.

One gets the sense that African American literary criticism, especially since the black

1 2

women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s, has been so doggedly focused on correcting

the problems identified at the outset of Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The

Development of a Tradition,2 that the creative products of black male writers have been

largely ignored. This is not to bemoan the correction but to say something regarding the

truth of the current trend. In fact, at present, the University of Pennsylvania’s popular

repository for conference paper and book chapter requests3 provides only two “calls”

related to the works of African American male writers; it supplies at least two dozen

explicit requests for papers on the works of African American women.

In Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban, James Coleman offers an

explanation regarding this trend. He argues that “the lack of appeal” for novels written by

African American men has something to do with the “bizarre” turn that black male fiction

has taken in the last thirty years.4 He explains:

Black male fiction has become increasingly more bizarre, negative, and

difficult. Male writers set up plot situations in which their fictional

characters have the opportunity to confront oppression, but then they don’t

do anything with these situations. Texts written by black males seem to

become laden by oppression instead of successfully confronting it like

those written by black women. The high postmodern works of black male

writers are probably the most controversial in terms of negative

perception, but what I have said applies to many more male texts. I want

to change the way that we think about black male texts. (1)

While I am not arguing here for a rethinking, in toto, of the tradition’s male-

authored texts, I want to offer an analysis of the creative work of one African American

man that might correct, in its small way, the lack of scholarship on it. In this regard, this

dissertation attempts to bring into critical focus certain elements of Edward P. Jones’s

fictional art, in order to offer an interpretation of it. It argues that Edward P. Jones’s

novel, The Known World, as well as the author’s collected short fiction, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, are “coded structures” that “must somehow be decoded” in order to understand them (“Criticism in the Jungle” 5). I argue here that successful decoding of these texts—and, therefore, appropriate interpretation of these works— depends upon one’s ability to see systems of repetition at play in the author’s creative work and to say something about their function. Thus, I argue here that many of the character types, ideas, and forms at work in Jones’s fiction are repetitions of types, ideas, and forms present in the African American literary tradition. Interestingly, the site of repetition in Jones’s work also serves as the mechanism of critique in his fiction. Through his critique, the author essentially revises the tradition, together with its types and ideas.

Simply put, this dissertation argues that the works of Edward P. Jones contain elements

of repetition that the author uses to revise the African American literary tradition.

To understand these points, one must consider some of the conceptual components to this dissertation’s argumentative line. One component relates to certain

claims about the construction of literary art, more generally, that I apply to my readings of Jones’s works, specifically. That is, undergirding the claims offered in this dissertation is the idea that authors never construct things that are “utterly original” (Changnon F2),

and although the phrase has been applied to Jones’s work, his novelistic art is not

necessarily sui generis. As Roland Barthes has shown in several places, the production of

literary art is nothing more than a process of footnoting or quoting or reference-making.

In “The Death of the Author,” for example, Barthes explains things this way:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single

‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-

dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,

blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the

innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those

eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound

ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only

imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is

to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never

to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at

least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a

ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words,

and so on indefinitely. (146)

Here, Barthes establishes a relationship between the author’s parole, which manifests itself in the form of the novel or the short story, and the system from which that utterance in drawn—the langue, which constitutes the “literary system” from which the author “selects plot, generic features, aspects of character, images, [and] ways of narrating” (Allen 11). In this, Barthes’s analysis is very much informed by Ferdinand de

Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Essentially, he suggests that the author of a

literary text is not necessarily creating the text but arranging—or (re)creating—ideas in

other texts. In a similar way, Saussure has argued that the act of speaking is really a

process of (re)arrangement (26-31). In Barthes’s view, the process of writing, which is a

substitution for vocalized speech, functions as a process of rhetorical construction through repetition. That is, when a writer is (re)creating, he or she is taking already

existing threads of language in order to construct a “woven fabric” that is necessarily

rhetorical (“From Work to Text” 159). To understand the author’s rhetoric, which

Barthes relates to the possible meaning(s) of the text the author (re)creates, a person must

be able to see and understand the things being repeated or referenced in the (re)creation.

The implication of this idea is that the meaning of a text depends upon the text’s

relationship to other texts—that, in order to understand an author’s work, the reader must

be able to get some sense of the intertextuality of the literary product itself.

Coined by Bulgarian-French philosopher and semiotician Julia Kristeva,

“intertextuality” refers to the relationship between texts that ultimately determines the

meaning of literary works. In “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” Kristeva argues that “any

text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and

transformation of another” such that the “poetic language is read at least double” (37).

She continues:

Consequently, the task of literary semiotics is to discover other formalisms

corresponding to different modalities of word-joining (sequences) within

the dialogical space of texts. . . . First, we must think of literary genres as

imperfect semiological systems “signifying beneath the surface of

language but never without it”: and secondly, discover relations among

larger narrative units such as sentences, questions-and-answers dialogues,

etc., not necessarily on the basis of linguistic models—justified by the

principle of semantic expansion. We could thus posit and demonstrate the

hypothesis that any evolution of literary genres is an unconscious

exteriorization of linguistic structures at their different levels. The novel in

particular exteriorizes linguistic dialogue. (37)

Here, Kristeva reads the “poetic language” as something that speaks of itself—for example, the characters in the work or the story the author is attempting to articulate— but also something that speaks of a literary other—those exterior types, ideas, and forms that are merely repeated in the poetic object. Through its “absorption,” a particular poetic utterance repeats what is evident in the literary other, and in that speaking, it ultimately

“transforms” the element it repeats. This transformation is possible, as Henry Louis Gates

Jr. has argued, because the repetition is usually “with a difference”—that is, the repeated element is never “borrowed whole” from the source (“Criticism in the Jungle” 3). In

Barthes’s formulation,5 the repetition usually includes other texts that are not in the

original, which therefore constitutes the “difference” Gates explores. Considering these

ideas, this dissertation “operationalizes” (Fairclough 269) intertextual discourse by not

only using it as a method for reading Jones’s work but by also suggesting that concepts

related to intertextuality serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone with regard to the interpretation

of Jones’s oeuvre.

Each chapter, in this regard, is an attempt to show how Jones’s work absorbs some outside influence—that is, repeats some type, idea, or formal innovation of the tradition—that it ultimately uses to critique or “transform” the tradition. Because that repetition is usually coupled with literary parody—or what African American youth call

“shade”—Jones’s approach to repetition has something to do with an approach to rhetorical signification that most other African American writers use. Thus, I argue here that (1) repetition is important to understanding Jones’s work; (2) repetition is used as an instrument in the author’s critique; and (3) the author’s method of critique is entirely black. In this view, the works under discussion here are not only black because they explore ideas peculiarly relevant to black life in America but because they also utilize black rhetorical strategies in order to explore those ideas. In this, the texts are black because their methods of articulation are African-centered.

In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism,

Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores this method of black articulation, and he connects it to notions of intertextuality espoused by the likes of Saussure, Bakhtin, and Kristeva.

However, he argues that notions of black addressivity, which are fundamental to

intertextual discourse, work differently in black texts than in Western ones. He calls that difference “a signifying black difference,” and he suggests that it works just as well in

African American creative art as it does in African American academic criticism

(“Criticism in Jungle” 3).6 In fact, he calls it the “trope of tropes” (The Signifying Monkey

57) since it works at various levels of black culture. As a procedure for “repetition and revision” that is ostensibly polemical (The Signifying Monkey 57), black signifying

8 usually necessitates a repetition of certain aspects of speech used to present an idea.

However, the “signifier” (The Signifying Monkey 57)—in this case, the person who wishes to critique the idea originally represented—usually repeats the words of the original speaker with a satiric or ironic twist. In this, Gates identifies parody as the most common site of difference between black addressivity and those instances of intertextual reference in the Western tradition.

In Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the author provides an example of black signifying. He writes:

I’ve seen them, son, in Africa, China, they’re not like us, son, the

Herrenvolk. Europe. This place. They are lagging behind, son, and you

know in your heart this is true. Son, these niggers writing. Profaning our

sacred words. Taking them from us and beating them on the anvil of

BoogieWoogie, putting their black hands on them so that they sing like

burnished amulets. Taking our words, son, these filthy niggers and using

them like they were god-given pussy. Why . . . why 1 of them dare to

interpret, critically mind you, the great Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick!!

(114)

In one sense, the scene is an indirect reference to C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, in which the author critically engages Moby-Dick, but in a more important sense, the passage refers to the “canonical critic,” who becomes enraged, “as he wonders . . . about the dangers inherent in ‘nigger writing’” (“Criticism in the Jungle” 2).

In fuller context, one can hardly help but laugh at the character’s rage or fear or disillusionment—whatever it might be called—regarding the taking up of letters (and criticism) by African American writers. As Gates explains in “Criticism in the Jungle,”

“We overhear,” in this passage, “the voice of the critic who speaks the word ‘canon’ to invoke a close set of texts written mostly by men who are Western and white” (2). The irony, of course, is that if “niggers” were who Reed’s figured canonical critic said they were, they should not have been able to approach the sacred altar to begin with.7 What this extraction reveals is that most methods of black signification usually include some poking fun. In his work, Gates uses the Signifying Monkey of the African American oral tradition to highlight the playful quality of black rhetorical signification. However, the important point is that this method of revision through repetition is essentially a

“technique of indirect argument or persuasion” (Abrahams 52).

Throughout this dissertation, I argue that Jones makes indirect arguments in his fiction and that he uses a (re)presentation of types, ideas, and forms to persuade his readers. For example, in Chapter Two, “Discourse on Decadence in Edward P. Jones’s

The Known World,” I argue that the author centralizes decadence in his novel and that this theme of decline, which is important in several critical communities, serves as a rhetorical tool for readers to reject “mastery” (Donaldson 268). In this reading of the novel, decadence is not only something Jones’s work “absorbs” from other texts or discourses, but it is also a site of the author’s critique of referenced texts and discursive communities. By offering the critique, I argue that Jones attempts to transform the things he repeats and analyzes. In Chapter Three, “From Margin to Center: Africanisms and the

Black Female Voice in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World,” I provide a feminist reading of the novel that suggests the The Known World “absorbs,” to Kristeva’s word again, methods of critique employed by feminist scholars and that its repetition of feminist methods ultimately function to critique gendered and racialized systems of oppression. In this reading, I suggest that black women are heroines in the novel, who ultimately save those who are willing to be rescued. Finally, in Chapter Four, “Revision of the ‘Bad Nigger’ Archetype in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and All Aunt

Hagar’s Children,” I argue that Jones’s short fiction employs and repeats a popular character type in the African American literary tradition: the Bad Nigger. However,

Jones’s Badman not only mirrors the behaviors of other Bad Niggers in the tradition, but it ultimately signifies against the Badman’s behaviors. In this view, the character’s evolution functions not only to critique the character type as it appears in other works but also to persuade the tradition to explore a new kind of black male archetype: the Black

Family Man.8 In short, I have attempted to concentrate my readings of Jones’s works on the elements of repetition in them and to explain how these elements function as tools of the author’s argumentation.

Considering these things, I have engaged readings of Jones’s works that seek to answer five fundamental questions: How should critics read Jones’s fiction? What systems are most important in the author’s work vis á vis the meaning of that work? How do these systems function? What are the rhetorical qualities of these systems? How do those methods relate to rhetorical strategies employed by other African American writers? Each chapter of this dissertation provides explicit and implicit answers to these

questions. Together, they say something about the value of Jones’s contributions to

African American literature, and they testify to the fact that his works are little wonders—marvels of literary excellence—that deserve a place in the American literary canon. More importantly, I am hoping that these explorations might encourage future critical interest in the tradition’s most important living author.

Although repetition figures prominently in his works, very few scholars have

explored it as a topic of interest. This is in keeping with the general trend to ignore the

complexities of Jones’s work in the annals of literary criticism. However, in “The Grind:

Revelatory Repetition in Edward P. Jones’s ‘An Orange Line Train to Ballston,’” Alyson

Dutemple argues that “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” a story that appears in Lost in

the City, uses “repeated lines of dialogue” and “recurring conversational topics” to create

“a sense of stifling predictability in Marvella’s life” (Dutemple). For Dutemple, repeated

phrases and topics function to establish tension in the story between Marvella’s hope and

the character’s destiny. Although she never says so clearly, Dutemple’s observations

suggest that repetition is a component of the story’s engagement with literary naturalism,

especially naturalistic determinism. For Dutemple, even phrases that point toward

repetition, like “as usual,” “another,” and “always,” suggest a “subtle tedium” in the life

of characters that they never fully overcome (Dutemple). Although Dutemple’s ideas

provide insight into the story she analyzes, she does not focus on repetition as a device

related to the author’s method of critique. She also avoids exploring repetitions that are

related to the story’s relationship to other texts. This is not to say that intertextual

arguments cannot be made with the examples she provides. Instead, the point I am

making here is that the author herself never makes intertextual connections. Because of these things, Dutemple’s exploration does not offer insight into the kinds of repetition that are under consideration here, although they address recursion as a general subject.

While Dutemple’s article avoids exploring the relationship between repetition and argument, Dan Rivas’s interview with Edward P. Jones, “10 Questions with Edward P.

Jones,” openly wonders about intertextual repetition in one of Jones’s stories. Rivas makes this observation:

Throughout the story “Lost in the City,” lines from the song “John

Brown’s Body” run through Lydia’s head. This is after her mother has

died and Lydia repeatedly conflates John Brown with her mother

“moulderin in the grave.” That song was an abolitionist anthem, but she

seems to be singing it with a tinge of irony. The “moulderin” is what she

dwells on, not “his truth is marching on.” That story ends with a memory

about a woman who worried that her husband would leave her. “She just

became his slave,” Lydia’s mother says. What strikes me about these

details is the fact that Lydia is well educated and affluent, but echoes of

slavery run throughout her life. And for other characters, a job is a “slave,”

and there is a sense that volition is only a half-truth. (Rivas)

Here, Rivas discerns the sort of repetition that I explore in this dissertation; his comments about the ironic quality of the repetition is of particular value in this regard. However,

since Rivas makes the observation as a part of an interview, he does not explore it as a

point of analysis. In his interview, he uses the point to ask the question, “How much did

you have in mind a kind of ‘contemporary slavery’ when writing Lost in the City and

some of your more recent stories?” (Rivas). When answering the question—as with most

of his responses regarding intertextual relationships in his fiction9—Jones focuses his

response on the literature he has constructed, sidestepping that literature’s relationship to

other texts.

In “Inside and Outside the Master’s House: The Architecture of Power in The

Known World,” Laura Dawkins provides a discussion of The Known World’s intertextuality, focusing specifically on the novel’s reference to Waldseemüller’s

“Universalis Cosmographia.” She writes, “The title of Edward P. Jones’s The Known

World points to the novel’s controlling geographic metaphor: Hans Waldseemüller’s

1507 map of ‘The Known World,’ the first cartographic representation on which the

name ‘America’ appears” (Dawkins 118). For Dawkins, the novel “ironically links this

anachronistic map with the doomed world of Jones’s fictional Manchester County”

(Dawkins 118). Although she gets the mapmaker’s name wrong—his actual name is

Martin Waldseemüller—and although she never fully unpacks the parodic quality of the

reference she mentions, Dawkins does explore the novel’s reference to Waldseemüller’s

“text” and its role in the novel’s meaning. In Chapter Two, I use Dawkins’s ideas as a

launching pad to explore additional claims about the function of maps in The Known

World; I make other intertextual observations that ultimately expand Dawkins’s

discussion about the archeology of knowledge in the novel’s society. More importantly,

though, I extend Dawkins’s analysis to include a discussion of the reference that links the

intertextuality of that reference to Jones’s system of argumentation.

Like Dawkins, Maria Seger’s “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Slave Narrative:

Reading the Maps of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World” explores the intertextual

relationship between Waldseemüller’s map and the map referenced in The Known World.

However, the benefit of Seger’s analysis, when compared to Dawkins’s work, is that she

not only analyzes the similarities between Waldseemüller’s map and the one referenced

in The Known World, but she also explores differences between the two. She ultimately uses these differences to inform her argument regarding the postmodern quality of

Jones’s novel—an argument I strongly argue against in my chapter on decadence. Similar

to Dawkins, Seger neglects to see the reference as a part of a larger system in the novel

related to the author’s argumentative methods.

Like Seger and Dawkins before him, Michael Odom, in “Religious Satire and

Narrative Ambiguity,” explores matters of intertextuality in The Known World by analyzing the satiric quality of the novel’s biblical allusions. Odom connects the text’s allusions to what might be read as the author’s critique of Southern spiritual practice. He writes this:

The narrator’s hermeneutical ease with biblical allusions implies a

disturbing syncretism of two distinctly Southern institutions: both slavery

and Christianity coexist in relative harmony, as symbolized by the two

authoritative books that are continually mentioned throughout the novel.

Robbins references both books in an illuminating conversation with Henry

about his mother’s date of birth: “I got down the big book last week. Not

my Bible. The other book” (140). . . . This “other book” serves to inform

humans concerning their identity and place in the known world. (96)

Although insightful, Odom’s discussion of the novel’s intertextual qualities is only a

feature of Odom’s interpretation practice; he never identifies the repetition as relevant to

the author’s system of critique as I do in this study.

Thus, one finds in these works some nod toward the intertext—some even provide

veiled references to methods of intertextual figuration, such as allusion, parody, and quotation10—but none seems to point to “repeatability” (Porter 35) as the primary feature of Jones’s argumentation. In other words, one finds in these critical dialogues talk about the “presence of the intertext” (Porter 35) in Jones’s works, but these sources never provide any serious engagement of that intertextuality in ways that might illumine the author’s method of constructed argumentation. In this regard, these works are something like several others—J. Gerald Kennedy and Robert Beuka’s “Imperiled Communities in

Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood” or Jessica

Brown’s “Narrating Washington, D.C. from the Margins: Urban Space and Cultural

Identity in ‘Lost in the City’ and ‘The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears’” or Carolyn

Berman’s “The Known World in Literature: Bakhtin, Glissant, and Edward P. Jones” or

Katherine Clay Bassard’s “Imagining Other Worlds: Race, Gender, and the ‘Power Line’ in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World” —all of whom make references to the intertextual quality of Jones’s work but do not explicitly read it as a feature of the

author’s system of rhetoric.

If Barthes and Kristeva’s claims about the construction of poetic languages is to be taken seriously, then each of the works that appropriately analyzes Jones’s fiction will undoubtedly explore footnoting. However, what separates those explorations from the ones included here is that the implicit process of intertextual analysis is made explicit— that is, the works of criticism included in this dissertation are reflexively conscious11 of their own discussion of intertexts. More importantly, the works here, instead of focusing on a single element of interpretation, have sought to uncover a system at work in Jones’s fiction. That system ultimately suggests that Jones absorbs ideas from other texts, transforms those ideas with a signifying difference, and then uses the transformation to critique the thing he initially borrowed. The fact that his works do this sort of thing

“beneath the surface” (Kristeva 37) says something about Jones’s remarkable technical skill as a novelist.

In fact, Jones has been so good at using these tools underground that most of the criticism, interviews, and reviews about his work have celebrated what has appeared as an absence of intertextual connections. For example, in Greg Changnon’s review,

“Antebellum Black Slave Owner Discovers an Unbecoming Reality,” the author writes that “Jones’s brilliant book is so utterly original that it makes everything previously written . . . seem outdated and pedestrian” (F2). This same point is echoed in John

Vernon’s review, when he suggests that Jones’s work includes an apparent “freshness.”

The irony of comments like these is that even in their exploration of intertextual absence, they ultimately affirm the author’s commitment to intertextual dialogue.

Notes

1. See Yardley’s review of Lost in the City. He writes that the collection “came

from nowhere to leave [readers] astonished and delighted” (B4).

2. See Christian’s preface to Black Women Novelists: The Development of a

Tradition, 1892-1976. There, she writes, “In 1974, I had an opportunity to develop a

course on black women writers at the University of California, Berkeley. Black women

students there were also seeking some evidence of their own history and experience in the

books they were reading. . . . In the process of researching that course, I began to see the

recurrence of certain images. . . . I found not surprisingly, that very little work had been

done on black women in literature and that she seldom appeared in a focal position in the

black novel” (ix). She concludes, “. . . the works I discuss have received little critical

attention either individually or collectively” (xi). In the preface, Christian argues for a

focus on black women’s literature that might reverse the trend of her time.

3. See the University of Pennsylvania’s English department’s call for papers

repository at www.call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu.

4. Coleman published his book in 2001. His comments reference 1971-2001, a

period that corresponds with what has been called the black women’s literary

renaissance.

5. See Barthes, p. 147.

6. In Gates’s preface to the first edition of The Signifying Monkey, he argues that

parody is at the center of a distinctively African- and Afro-American system of rhetoric.

See first edition, p. xix. For an example of how works of criticism can use strategies of

18 black signification, see Michael Awkward “A Black Man’s Place in Black Feminist

Criticism.” In the article, Awkward uses parody to highlight the conceptual errors in

Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.”

7. That is, if African Americans were biologically inferior, they should not have been able to acquire the skills of writing and criticizing.

8. See Williams’s “Some Implications of Womanist Theory” for an explanation regarding this type. It is also explored in Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.

9. Jones generally ignores questions about the relationship between his writings and other texts, preferring to suggest that his writings are products of his own imagination. In fact, in one interview—see Bassard’s “Imagining Other Worlds: Race, Gender, and the

‘Power Line’ in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World” for a complete description—he seems a bit annoyed by a question regarding intertextuality. However, in an interview with Dan Rivas, he suggests that his imagination often distills information he has encountered in the world, albeit unconsciously.

10. See Genette’s Paratexts, p. 18; Hallo’s The World’s Oldest Literature: Studies in

Sumerian Belle-Lettres, p. 608; and Cancogni’s The Mirage in the Mirror: Nabokov’s

Ada and Its French Pre-Texts, pp. 203-213.

11. For more information about reflexive consciousness, see Gallaher and Zahavi’s

“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness.”

CHAPTER II

DISCOURSE ON DECADENCE IN EDWARD P. JONES’S THE KNOWN WORLD

Since the publication of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West,1 there has

been this notion that Western civilization is on the decline. At first, those living in- and

outside of Germany during the early part of the twentieth century categorically dismissed

Spengler’s thesis, but since those early days, the idea has gained acceptance.2 Today,

Spengler’s alarm is slowly but loudly reverberating outside the Continent. In fact, it has become the rallying cry of the white diaspora.3 Its most recent resound occurred when

several thousand alt-right “activists” gathered themselves in Charlottesville, Virginia to

protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. During the day, on August 11, 2017, the

mostly male crowd voiced its disapproval of a so-called leftist plot to rewrite history.4

That night, with raised tiki torches, the gathering sang anthems protesting the Great

Replacement.

At the center of the anger that gave voice to the refrain, “Jews will not replace us,” is a set of ideas related to the construction of white supremacy, the instability of white dominance, and the decline of the West—ideas that Edward P. Jones brilliantly explores in his debut novel The Known World. Critics have not normally associated all of these ideas with Jones’s novel. Heretofore, they have concentrated on the novel’s treatment of slavery, reading it as a corrective that “challenges and/or rewrites the master

narrative” (Ikard 43). This focus is logical, considering the novel’s content and the

novelist’s discussion about the things that inspired it,5 but it does not provide the most complete hermeneutic.

Published in 2003, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World is a historical novel about slavery. However, unlike other novels about America’s peculiar institution, Jones’s narrative focuses on the “strange” world Henry Townsend creates when he acquires enough money, authority, and power in Manchester County Virginia to purchase other slaves. Opening in 1855, on the day the character dies, the novel provides flashbacks that

tell readers how Henry, a black man, ultimately works his way out of slavery. Through

these flashbacks, readers learn that Henry is able to buy fifty-five acres of land and thirty-

three slaves. His purchases astound most other blacks in the novel, especially Henry’s

free parents, Augustus and Mildred Townsend. More than being surprised about Henry

purchase of land, they remain shocked throughout much of the novel because of Henry’s

participation in the system of slavery. After he dies, his property transfers to his childless

wife, Caldonia Townsend, who uses her new authority to maintain Henry’s vision. In

this, the novel is as much a history of Henry’s rise to power as it is a chronicle of

Caldonia’s attempt to maintain it.

Although much of the novel focuses on the past, characters demonstrate anxieties

about the future in ways that suggest the novel is more a prolepsis than a history.6 To

understand this point, two things are needed: a recognition of characters’ anxieties and an

explanation regarding their import. With regard to the first, it is not difficult to see that

various characters in the novel convey some uneasiness about the future. For example,

21 when Moses first learns about Henry Townsend’s death, he asks Loretta, “Whas gonna happen to all us now?” (55). Although the grammar of Moses’s question points to his concern about the here and now, the spirit of it demonstrates some distress about his future state in the world. Delphie also worries whether Henry’s death will have implications for her future well-being, asking Moses whether they might be “sold off”

(62) after Henry’s burial. In a different way, Priscilla expresses the same sort of uncertainty that Moses and Delphie articulate. Once she hears about Henry’s death, she says, “I would hate all that not knowin again where in the world I was” (56), as if

Henry’s non-existence calls her understandings of time and space and being into question. Her comment demonstrates a fear of disorientation that most black characters in the novel exhibit.

While black characters in The Known World articulate uncertainties about their future well-being, white characters communicate anxieties about the future state of the world. For example, shortly after the sale of Toby and his sister to suspected abolitionists,

William Robbins calls a meeting to discuss the need to keep his “world going right” (38), as if Toby’s sale immediately places that entire world in jeopardy. At the time of the meeting, which included Sherriff Patterson, Deputy Skiffington, and four other landowners, Robbins felt that Northerners were “spiriting away” with his livelihood (37).

Aside from the fact that Robbins’s anxieties are misplaced,7 the meeting on his verandah evinces a severe fearfulness that appears in keeping with the novel’s general air of unease.

Although all character groups in the novel seem to express some feelings about the doom on the horizon, white female characters are most clear in their language about it. For instance, Winifred Skiffington suggests a “M-I-A-S-M-A” lingered in the air (152) at the time of Henry’s death, and Clara Martin claims, somewhat in keeping with

Fitzgerald’s Tom,8 that the world was “turning upside down” (152). In one sense, these feelings about the future may be the novelist’s way of historicizing the setting—that is, it may be the author’s way of indirectly dramatizing the feelings of actual Southerners on the cusp of the Civil War. However, considered alongside some of the novel’s other elements, especially the novel’s weather-related phenomena,9 characters’ anxieties seem relevant to the novel’s argumentation. More than an accessory, decadence is a feature of the novel’s message.

In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, a book that was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2001, Jacquez Barzun provides the literary critic a useful description for characters’ anxieties. He suggests that Jones’s characters may be experiencing the first signs of a decadent society. He writes:

All that is meant by Decadence is a “falling off.” It implies in those who

live in such a time no loss of energy or talent. On the contrary, it is a very

active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no

clear lines of advance. . . . It will be asked, “How does the historian know

when Decadence sets in?” By the open confession of malaise, by the

search in all direction for a new faith or for new faiths. (xvi)

Considering this definition, one could easily replace Winifred’s “miasma” (152) with

Barzun’s “malaise” and be close to some true description of the novel’s atmosphere of

distress. Yet, when Barzun writes that decadence has something to do with a “rotten

system” (11), or with people who accept “futility and the absurd as normal” (11), one

finds a perfect accounting of decadence in The Known World. In this view, characters’

fears about the future are representative of their anxieties regarding an imminent decline.

Thus, aside from being a novel that explores black slave ownership in the antebellum

South, The Known World depicts a decadent culture on the verge of collapse.

The reasons for that collapse come into view when readers consider the novel’s

implied thesis. The implicit argument in The Known World is that characters in

Manchester County live at the meeting place of two spheres: the natural world (or the

world of stuff) and the constructed world (or the world of ideas). The novel argues that

the known world comes into being when social authorities ascribe value to natural things

that occupy the first world, such as trees, horses, or physical bodies. For the narrator, natural objects are inherently meaningless but become meaningful when authorities bind ideas to them. Here, “authorities” has something to with Roland Barthes’s “society”

(Mythologies 137) or with his “bourgeois culture” (Mythologies 140). The word refers to dominate societal consensuses that develop around the meaning, nature, and value of things in the world. Because social authorities associate ideas with physical objects in the novel, bodies and other natural things function as signs in Manchester County. These signs signify various ideas, and together with the rules that determine their meaning, they

24 produce the county’s language of knowledge, which the novel references metaphorically as “the known world.”

As agents in that world, characters in the novel see knowledge as socially structured but initially logical—that is, appearing to have a system of reliable rules that determines the meaning of x in the world. However, the problem with the archeology of knowledge in the novel’s society is that the perceived rationality of rules, once examined, reveals a detrimental unreliability. In fact, a careful examination reveals a curious absurdity. In the novel, decadence occurs when rules for the construction of meaning become unstable; decadence “sets in,” to use Barzun’s phrase, when established rules become unreliable. Through the novel’s use of decadence, the narrator shows that, because most characters build their known worlds using problematic systems of meaning, the worlds they build are destined to collapse.

This chapter explores the nature of that collapse. First, it argues that a focus on the novel’s decadence is important because it provides the clearest indication of the novel’s message to our contemporary culture. In this view, decadence functions as a rhetorical device that persuades readers to reject the world that Henry Townsend represents—a world that provides a black man the opportunity to oppress his own people.

For Jones, this kind of “opportunity”—indeed, this kind of world—is one readers should reject since it ultimately leads to destruction. Considering this, decadence functions in the novel to foreshadow a possible future for those who might choose to be oppressors; it suggests that decay is their ultimate fate. Although this is the primary claim of the novel, it is only accessible through a focus on the novel’s decadence. That is, in order to get

some sense of the novel’s primary argument, readers must first recognize the decadent

qualities of the novel’s portraiture.

Aside from arguing for a focus on the novel’s decadence to determine the novel’s

meaning, this chapter also suggests that decadence is a characteristic that Jones’s novel

absorbs from exterior texts and discourses. In this, decadence is an element of the

intertext that Jones not only repeats from outside source but that he also uses to critique

the traditions from which he borrows. In other words, decadence has the potential to

bring into focus the polyglossia of the novel’s universe, which ultimately makes obvious

the novel’s attempt to signify upon existing critical languages. In the critical langue of

post-structuralism, it might be said that the novel uses “polyphony,” “heteroglossia,” and

“polyglossia” in order to critique and revise critical dialects. In the spiritual-critical

langue of the African American literary tradition, it might be said that the text “speaks in tongues” (Henderson 352). This chapter spends some time interpreting the novel’s other worldly utterances, in order to reveal the novel’s system of rhetorical signification.

However, before exploring matters of the intertext, it is first necessary to explain why decadence is so significant. Throughout The Known World, decadence is an important characteristic to the novel’s tone and temperature. More than any other characteristic, it helps reveal the novel’s meaning and message. While Cameron

MacKenzie reads decadence as a component of Jones’s other works (94), the narrator most beautifully portrays the decline of an African American world in Jones’s debut novel. It begins this way:

The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day

for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with

hunger and tiredness to their cabins. . . . When he, Moses, finally freed

himself of the ancient brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule

his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory

of red orange laid out in still waves. . . leaning his head back and opening

his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to

nothing. (1)

Here, the narrator provides a scene that sets the stage for the ideas the novel explores. In this scene and throughout much of the novel, Henry’s death represents the decline the novel examines, but other elements of the scene establish decadence as a device. For example, there is a kind of stillness descending on the plantation in the novel’s opening, and even the day is coming to an end. Symbolically, these things depict a quieting plantation—one whose fading has symbolic import for the novel writ large.

Considering the novel’s opening scene, careful readers are likely to have only one question regarding it: Why has Henry died? Unfortunately, the narrator never provides a concrete answer to the question; by novel’s end, readers never know exactly why Henry dies. Some critics have attempted to provide something like an answer. In Understanding

Edward P. Jones, for example, James Coleman points out that Jones’s first novel

“thematically and structurally constitutes a symbol of African American experience that stands for everything, a historical whole, a totality” (3). Drawing on a catalog of interviews, Coleman points out that the novelist often sees himself as the “god of his

work” and that he usually applies a “godlike literary vision” to novelistic situations (3).

Considering Coleman’s insight, the novel can be read as a mimetic reflection of life, and

since we are often without answers to life’s most troubling questions—that is, since God

never clearly answers our questions regarding the meaning of life—the narrative often

leaves unanswered some of the novel’s most perplexing controversies. In this, the lack of

an answer regarding Henry’s death reflects reality.

While interesting, Coleman’s ideas leave a bit to be desired. When writing about

literary characters more generally, Olivier Morin, Alberto Acerbi, and Oleg Sobchuk

provide a more compelling answer. In “Why People Die in Novels: Testing the Ordeal

Simulation Hypothesis,” the authors argue that literary figures often die because their deaths offer readers the opportunity to engage “ordeal simulation” (2). By relying on research in simulation theory (as literary Darwinists have applied it), the authors argue that literature’s value as a product to enhance fitness resides in its power to allow readers to “play out” or “simulate” sometimes dangerous or costly situations (3). This play, as

Brian Boyd has shown in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, helps the reader to develop successful strategies for dealing with dangerous or costly situations in real life. With these ideas in mind, Morin and his colleagues argue that reading a novel is a lot like play fighting: just as a lion play fights in order to learn fighting techniques, readers unknowingly engage novels to play-wrestle with meaning and ideas. This play provides an opportunity for readers to learn how to deal with life’s problems. In this, literary characters become teachers.

To the idea of simulation theory, the authors add notions regarding ordeal simulation. For them, ordeals are “reactable threats that are too rare and too impactful for us to train for by ordinary experience” (3). They argue that “animal and human play tends to simulate rare, high-risk events, for the same reason that drills simulate rare emergencies” (3). In the article, the writers acknowledge that lions do not fight every day and that humans do not encounter burning buildings in their everyday lives; they suggest that engaging such things every day could be too much for one person or beast. However, they argue that drills help us develop reactions to emergencies, just as play fights prepare lions to fight in the wild.

By reading The Known World as a simulation drill, readers discover a purpose for

Henry’s death: Henry’s death provides readers the opportunity to either develop an escape plan for the kind of existence he represents or to construct a plan for dealing with the challenges such an existence might demand. As a simulation, the novel presents itself as a “what if” proposition: if we were given the opportunity to be masters, would we choose to become oppressors? In this, the novel is a kind of simulated playground, one that provides readers the opportunity to work out their responses to such a question. As a ficelle on that playground,11 decadence helps the reader choose rightly—to reject the desire to be a master—because it ultimately leads to death and decline. This reading of decadence is not entirely a matter of speculation.

In an interview with Robert Fleming, Jones points to this idea of simulation when discussing events that led to his writing The Known World. He says, “I guess the real beginning of [the novel’s subject] grew from my reading of a small book about a Jew

29 who joined the Nazis during World War II. In college, I [also] came across a book which spoke of blacks having slaves, and it was a shock, just the idea of it” (254). Jones later recounts, at a book reading in Richmond, Virginia, that he “found himself wondering, ‘If slavery were legal, what kind of black people would own slaves?’” (Bassard 418).

Through these comments, the novelist suggests that The Known World is a subjunctive peek into the present/future—that is, the novel is a simulation of what might happen if slavery were still possible. As a simulation, the novel’s rhetorical components provide a blueprint for rightly choosing. Ultimately, it is the decadence in the novel—the decline and gore of the characters’ situations—that persuade readers to choose against becoming oppressors.

The irony of Jones’s comments is that, although laws of physical slavery have been repealed in America, other kinds of slavery are still possible. In an interview with

Maryemma Graham, Jones muses on the actuality of modern bondage. He says:

Suppose a person arrives tomorrow from Pluto, doesn’t know anything

about our country and looks up at Tiger Woods and says, “This is a black

man.” But when Tiger Woods talks about who he is, the long list of things

that he says that he is, at the very end of that list is his being black. . . . It is

as if slavery were legal now. Something happened to black people in the

‘80s. We see it all the time. You can pick up some of the worst rap stars

and you know what they would do. . . . You can see it now. It would be on

one of those BET or MTV music awards. There is a runway outside, red

carpet, and since slavery is legal, some guy would show up and there

would be a strap, and chains would be connected to black people. He

would have a turban on, dressed with all his fine clothes, and gold

everywhere, the bling-bling; the gold chains are connected to his ten

slaves. Then somebody says, “Silver P.,” you are looking good tonight.

Then Silver replies, “I got all my niggers here. See Sam here, he cost

$25,000, but he’s worth it. He shines shoes like I don’t know what.”

(1087)

In this somewhat lengthy extraction, Jones explores the slavery that exists now (in

his comments about Tiger Woods)—a kind of silent monster lurking in the crevices of

our popular culture, one that produces shame for one’s being black—and he explores a

slavery that has not yet come (in his comments on “Silver P”)—a system that produces a

capitalist-royal, one who uses his or her wealth to oppress people like him- or herself. In

the novel, Henry Townsend is a symbol for both of these, and his life is a simulation in

the sense that the writer gives readers the character in order to help them avoid the traps

of neo-slavery. Readers are supposed to practice living Henry’s life by literarily engaging his existence. The purpose of that “play” is to discover that his existence is not worth living.

In fact, the characters that people The Known World are symbols for ways to exist

(and not to exist) in an oppressive, dominate culture. Through them, the novel provides

simulated realities intended to help readers avoid the “ordeal threats” of a capitalist

culture. Decadence, then, is a kind of rhetorical tool in the novel’s simulation. In this

regard, Henry’s death is a rhetorical device—in the same way that death functions as a

rhetorical device in most other tragedies—that encourages readers to choose something

other than Henry’s way of life. In this sense, death and decline are components of the

author’s “artificial devices,” which are usually intended in modern novels “to help the

reader grasp the work” (Booth 3).

Although decadence usually functions as a component of the novel’s “disguised

rhetoric,”12 there are times when the narrator concretely uses decadence as a means to comment on Henry’s life. In such comments, the narrator attempts to dissuade readers from living a life like Henry’s. For example, when commenting on Henry’s saying that he

“wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known” (64), the narrator

remarks, “he did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed

before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master” (64). Here, the narrator’s

interjection regarding the ultimate doom of Henry’s existence functions as a pathos

appeal to the reader: it discourages the reader, through its talk of damnation, to want to

become a master at all. In the narrator’s estimation, the master’s world is pre-destined for destruction, and although the allure of that world might seem heavenly, the narrator suggests that such leads to demise.

In “Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South,” Susan

Donaldson explains the problems with Henry’s desire. For Donaldson, Robbins’s vision is an “illusion of mastery” (278). Thus, she reads Henry’s attempt “to be a better master” as an existential dead end. Reading into the novel a slave-master dialectic, Donaldson argues that the slave-master relationship, which “Hegel sees as a fundamental engine of history in the Phenomenology of Spirit” (279), is determined by the master’s

independence. However, that independence has its limits: for the master’s “sense of self,

power, and authority is revealed to be radically dependent upon the subservience of his

slave” (279). Thus, as Orlando Patterson argues in Slavery and Social Death: A

Comparative Study, it is not clear whether the master can be sure of “his own existence,”

in such cases, “since the reality of his domination rests on the unreality of that which he masters” (98). In other words, Henry’s desire to become a master necessitates the destruction of the object that might provide him mastery, and since the destruction of the other ultimately produces the destruction of the self, “mastery,” to use Donaldson’s word, is something the narrator argues we should avoid. Although it may have moments of comfort along the way, the road to mastery leads to a dead end.

Throughout the novel, the narrator uses decadence to persuade readers against

characters’ actions, and although the novel is not a didactic work in the traditional sense

of the term, the narrator implicitly provides a series of prescriptive “don’ts” in its telling.

Because the narrator is against Henry’s choices, it suggests that Henry’s project is a

disaster waiting to happen. Still, Henry engages that project despite its ultimate

outcomes. The narrator exemplifies the tragedy of it all when pointing to Henry’s

fascination with Paradise Lost. Here, decadence not only functions as rhetoric, but it also

is an access point into intertextualities. Fern recounts Henry’s fascination this way:

“Ain’t that a thing to say” is what he said of the Devil who proclaimed

that he would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. He thought only a

man who knew himself well could say such a thing, could turn his back on

God with just finality. I tried to make him see what a horrible choice that

was, but Henry had made up his mind about that and I could not turn him

back. He loved Milton and he loved Thomas Gray. (134-5)

Here, it is not coincidental that Henry’s fascination with the devil’s self-

assurance—a self-confidence that Henry displays—has something to do with his

relationship to the word. This demonstrates that Henry’s desire to become a master, as

well as the narrator’s commentary on that desire, relies on some interplay between

becoming and language that shows that Henry’s existential dilemma begins as a

language-oriented problem. The narrator is especially clear in this regard, suggesting that

Henry “did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master” (64; emphasis added). Here,

there is interplay between the existence he creates and the word he speaks.

Thus, aside from showing readers how to view Henry’s life, the narrator uses

decadence to demonstrate to the novel’s readership how “Henrys” are created. In this

regard, it is significant that Henry comes to understand the “world of master” (Donaldson

278) through education. That is, through Fern’s private sessions with him, Henry learns

how masters ought to behave. Robbins’s talk with Henry also does this, but Robbins’s

talk has a deeper impact. For example, on the day Henry begins to build his house,

Robbins meets Henry in a clearing to provide some advice. That day, Robbins had seen

Henry play-wrestling with Moses, Henry’s newly purchased slave. Henry’s problem is that, although he has the financial wherewithal to purchase Moses, he does not know how to treat Moses as a slave. Thus, Robbins feels that it is his responsibility to teach Henry

34 how to be a master. In an oddly fatherly scene, Robbins corrects Henry’s behavior in the clearing. He says:

Henry. . . the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not

flinch when it protects you. That protection lasts from here—and he

pointed to an imaginary place in the road—all the way to the death of that

property—and he pointed to a place a few feet from the first place. But the

law expects you to know what is a master and what is a slave. . . . But if

you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property

turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not

come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you will need.

(123)

After the exchange, Henry walks back to his house, where Moses stands waiting.

The narrator says, “Moses, with a saw in his hand, did a little dance” (124). Eventually,

Henry tells Moses that they will stop working for the day. However, Moses protests, saying, “But we got good light here. We got good day here, Massa” (124). Because

Moses talks back, Henry steps up to him and slaps him, and after letting the pain of the first slap “set in on Moses’s face” (124), he slaps him again. After the second slap, he asks Moses, “Why don’t you never do what I tell you to do?” Moses responds, “I do. I always do what you tell me to do, Massa” (124). Henry responds, “Nigger, you don’t.

You never do” (124).

Interestingly, Henry’s change in language signals his becoming master. Before this scene, Henry never speaks the N-word nor does he treat enslaved persons

inhumanely. His change in speech—or, rather, his decline in character—is in large part a change resulting from his lesson with Robbins. During that lesson, he discovers that masters degrade others—that force allows one to ascend to mastery.31 Thus, Henry learns how to become a master through language (via his conversations with his teachers), and he signals his becoming a master through the word (via his willingness to call Moses the

N-word).13 In this, the narrator shows that there is interplay between becoming and language that is keeping with the sort of interdependence that Mikhail Bakhtin explores in The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin writes:

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between

oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It

becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own

intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to

his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of

appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal

language. . . it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts,

serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the

word, and make it one’s own. (293-4).

Henry takes the word of the other, and he makes it his own. Through the scene,

the narrator attempts to show readers that a corrupt language system ultimately leads to

decay. By showing this, the narrator seeks to demonstrate to a new generation of African

American youth how to avoid the traps of neo-slavery: that becoming a master begins

with one’s appropriation of the oppressor’s language—that mastery has something to do

36 with one’s annexation of the oppressor’s language system. I say “language system” because Henry’s change of language is really a reflection of his acceptation of a Western worldview, symbolized in his fascination with Paradise Lost.

In Paradise Lost, Milton explores two ideas: obedience to God and obedience to the natural order. In Paradise Lost, these things offer a person access to “paradise,” which functions in Milton’s work as a symbol for heaven—both an earthly bliss and an otherworldly utopia. These ideas are metaphorically present in Jones’s novel. In The

Known World, Henry understands that, in order to experience paradise, he must be obedient to Manchester’s gods and their divine order. However, instead of God being on the top in Manchester County’s scala naturae, whiteness is on top; instead of minerals and other objects being on the bottom, blackness is positioned there. This revision of

Milton’s scala makes whiteness synonymous with divine authority, and it makes blackness synonymous with evil.

Henry’s problem is that he accepts Robbins’s revision of the scala naturae, not realizing that Robbins’s revision is illogical. If it were true that masters are white and that slaves are black, why exactly is Henry able to become a master? And if it were true that masters are white and that whiteness is divine, why do all the masters in the novel behave like devils? There is no real meaning to the language system that Henry has accepted. It is filled with absurdities and non-sequiturs. By providing a character who accepts “the absurd as normal” (Barzun 11), the narrator attempts to show readers the process that initiates decline: it begins, the narrator argues, when one accepts a non-sensical mythology.

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes describes the things that make myths problematic.

In the author’s preface to the 1957 edition, Barthes writes this:

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience

at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common

sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live

in, is undoubtedly determined by history. In short, in the account given of

our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History

confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative

display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my

view, is hidden there.

Right from the start, the notion of myth seemed to me to explain

these examples of the falsely obvious. At that time, I still used the word

“myth” in its traditional sense. But I was already certain of a fact from

which I later tried to draw all the consequences: myth is a language. So

that while concerning myself with phenomena apparently most unlike

literature (a wrestling-match, an elaborate dish, a plastics exhibition), I did

not feel I was leaving the field of this general semiology of our bourgeois

world, the literary aspect of which I had begun to study in earlier essays.

(10)

Here, Barthes suggests that myths become problems when people associate mythical ideas with nature—or, more appropriately, when people associated myths with divine authority. For Barthes, history—by which he means culture—produces such things.

Barthes argues against the idea that nature has any inherent meaning or that nature suggests an order. He avers that men place ideas on nature, and, by doing so, they produce hierarchies and signs. Elsewhere in Mythologies, Barthes explains that the individual signs that a culture places in conversation with other signs ultimately produce a myth (110). In this view, the people of Manchester County have a variety of myths, since they have created several interrelated signs. Sadly, however, the people living in the county usually accept these signs and their meanings without much opposition, as if God created the ideas to which each sign refers.

In his discussion with Henry, Robbins takes the black body, which is a natural product, and he associates ideas with that black body. In Manchester County, the black body is a sign for “bondage”—or a set of other ideas, such as “inferior” or “evil.” This layering of ideas on the black body produces cultural myths that teachers and other authorities transmit through language (Barthes 107). The problem with the “general semiology” of the dominate culture in the novel is that its myths are as fictional as products of the literary imagination. This is one of the reasons why the narrator places

Robbins’s revised order very close to Fern’s discussion about Paradise Lost. Although one is literature and the other is the novel’s real world, both are equally imaginative.

However, like Frenchmen living in Barthes’s time, Henry is unable to see the mythical origins of Robbins’s language system. More importantly, he is unable to recognize the absurdity of it.

The lack of recognition is the result of Henry’s acceptation of the oppressor’s language system without really analyzing it. If he did critically explore it, he would see

that the knowledge of the oppressor had gaps in terms of justice, equity, and

righteousness. Through Henry’s acceptation, the novel explores the problematics of an a

priori knowledge, and it does so in order to show that the fate of Henry’s world was predetermined because the fate of the world he depended on to construct his own

“empire,” his own “little Virginia in big Virginia” (113), had depended upon rules derived from a corrupt, dominant culture, whose laws, as Joseph Donica points out in

“Hierarchies of Knowledge and the Limits of Law and Theology in The Known World,”

were not a “reliable basis for public life” (138). In this way, Henry’s “falling off,” to

quote Barzun again, begins when he accepts his master’s system of knowledge,

demonstrated via his master’s cosmology, myths, and language.

Using other examples, Laura Dawkins provides a discussion of problematic

knowledge in “Inside and Outside the Master’s House: The Architecture of Power in The

Known World.” Her examples emphasize the point the narrator tries to make about

accepting the oppressor’s myths. When writing about the title of the novel, she reminds

readers of the scene at Manchester’s jail, where Broussard spots a map hanging on

Skiffington’s wall. In that scene, readers discover that Broussard lived “where they

[made] that beautiful map” (174) and that the map is significant to the novel’s title.

Dawkins explains:

The title of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World points to the novel’s

controlling geographic metaphor: Hans Waldseemuller’s 1507 map of

“The Known World,” the first cartographic representation on which the

name “America” appears. . . . Perhaps most importantly, the

Waldseemuller map embodies a form of what Michel Foucault has defined

as “power/knowledge”—the production of knowledge or “truth claims” to

serve the interest of a dominant regime. (118)

To clarify this point, Dawkins relies on research about cartography in modern

Europe. Drawing on the writings of J.B. Harley, especially The New Nature of Maps:

Essay in the History of Cartography, she points out that maps functioned primarily as “a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power”

(119). She suggests that mapmakers offered their creations as “objective” and “value- free” representations of the world; however, in the end, early maps were nothing more than mechanisms of “conquest and empire” (119). She writes:

As large-scale maps of the Western empire acquired a “mythic authority”

in Europe, they operated, according to Harley, as a “spatial panopticon,”

creating as well as reflecting European dominance in the “known world.”

Both manifestations and producers of “power/knowledge,” imperial maps

worked insidiously to “convert culture into nature” and “naturalize social

reality” (163). Depicting a ‘naturalized’ social reality, the

Walderseemuller map serves as an apt trope for mythmaking and

“power/knowledge” in the antebellum society of The Known World. (119)

Considered together, these extractions from Dawkins’s work demonstrate that

Walderseemuller’s map symbolizes knowledge. The extractions also show that, just as a man constructs “The Known World”—and it is important in the novel that

Walderseemuller is German14—the world of knowledge is also manmade. Interestingly,

like early maps, the creation of knowledge in The Known World depends upon

characters’ placing systems of meaning upon the natural world in ways that create

“naturalized social realities” (Dawkins 119). However, despite their appearing to be real,

these realities are usually false—that is, incomplete or inaccurate representations of the

truth. In fact, any first-year geography student knows that two-dimensional maps are

misrepresentations of a multi-dimensional world. In the same way, binary

epistemological constructs—the kinds of knowing that are privileged in Western

epistemologies—are inherently imprecise.

Just like early maps, the cosmology offered by white and mulatto characters in the novel are inaccurate representations of truth. Sadly, however, most of the characters in the novel are not willing to deviate from these projections of the world in order to discover something more sustaining. In this sense, Henry is a prototype for problematic wayfaring. He is a traveler with an inaccurate map who does not realize that the oppressor’s cosmological rendering of the world is flawed and destructive. Symbolically, then, the decay of Henry’s life serves as a fin de siècle, one that makes way for alternative methods for representing the world.

Although Henry is the primary example for the interplay between decadence, language, and the absurd in the novel, the narrator provides a more sentimental example in its discussion about freedom papers. Like his other examples, the author uses decay in that discussion as a rhetorical device to advance the novel’s primary line of argumentation. In the scene, the narrator describes Augustus’s trip home one night after a long day’s work. It explains that county patrollers confront Augustus during his journey

42 home, asking him to “show who he is” (211). As is the custom in Manchester County, any white person can ask a free black person to provide “papers” that testify of the person’s free status. The men know this, of course, and they do not ignore the opportunity the law provides them in stopping Augustus. Although Travis had read the papers “many times before” (211), he asks Augustus to present them again. Augustus shows the papers, noting that he had “been a free man for a long time” (211). However, instead of allowing

Augustus to “pass on” after reading them, Travis responds, “You ain’t free less me and the law say you free” (211). To the frustration of most readers, Travis destroys the papers and sells Augustus to passersby.

Through this scene, the narrator shows that Augustus’s papers are unstable as a sign for freedom; it also demonstrates that the instability of the sign ultimately leads to the character’s decline. In the scene, the papers are natural or physical objects to which cultural authorities in Manchester County associate ideas. By binding some metaphysical notion to a physical object, the cultural authorities produce a sign. However, that sign is not ubiquitously meaningful: when the papers are in the hands of Robbins and function as documents to enrich the man, they do well to confer freedom on the black body; however, when the papers are in the hands of Travis, they are effectively meaningless.

The contradiction is that the society, which is represented both as “law” and “God” in

Barnum’s appeals to Travis (212-18), had suggested that the papers were consistently meaningful. Indeed, Augustus certainly thought that the papers were worth something when he labored to purchase his freedom. However, he discovers that nothing really means anything in America’s peculiar institution.

The scene provides an example of the novel’s representation of decadent

absurdity. In this view, it is not coincidental that, as Travis eats Augustus’s freedom

papers, Augustus had “been thinking of Henry all day and all day he had been trying not

to” (211). Although some readers may consider this comment a reflection of Augustus’s

grief, the character’s preoccupation with thoughts of his dead son serve to foreshadow the

character’s own decline—from freedom to slavery and from slavery to death. Augustus’s

preoccupation also says something about his subconscious fixation on that decline. In this

way, the narrator’s comment approaches a Freudian psychoanalytic, suggesting that

Augustus was preoccupied with his being in ways that evince existential anxiety (Becker

51-53). At least symbolically, this preoccupation connects Augustus to other characters in

the novel who also fixate on a damned future. Like Henry’s decline, Augustus’s “falling

off” (Barzun xvi) is a cautionary tale. With it, the narrator suggests that readers should

avoid his kind of existence.

Interestingly, the narrator associates Augustus’s possession of the written word

with his freedom. This possession connects the character with the slave narratives of the

African American literary tradition, whose authors viewed reading as an important component of freedom (The Signifying Monkey 141). In this, the character enters an intertextual dialogue with that tradition. With regard to that intertextuality, one wonders whether Augustus’s name is linguistic wordplay on “Gustavus,” which was Olaudah

Equiano’s slave name.15 As Paul Lovejoy points out in “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus

Vassa—What’s in a Name?,” Equiano may have preferred to be called Gustavus (167),

even after his emancipation. This fact may or may not have something to do with

Augustus’s wanting to stay in Virginia after he purchases his freedom. If it is an intentional wordplay, Augustus’s desire to stay in Manchester is akin to Equiano’s wanting to keep his slave name: both demonstrate a tragic commitment to the oppressive familiar.

Although Augustus has his own set of problems, he displays a sacrificial compassion that makes him something of a better man than Equiano. In this, one would be hard pressed to find in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or

Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself a man who might be willing to put his own freedom at risk in order to help others. Augustus is certainly willing to do so; he risks his life in order to operate as a figure on the Underground Railroad.16 Thus, while both Augustus and Equiano are capitalists through and through, Augustus’s brand of capitalism displays, what Houston Baker has called, “a shrewd combination of formal mastery and deformative creativity” (72). Throughout the novel, Augustus masters the rules of capitalism—he purchases his family (despite unfair increases in cost), and he purchases his property (without much help from Robbins)—but he does so in order to deform the capitalistic underpinnings of slavery. In this, Augustus’s character “talks back” to the figure in Equiano’s narrative, in ways in keeping with the sort of sassiness with which African American youth usually talk back.

The cheeky or shady component of Augustus’s critique of Equiano is that he rejects his elder’s complete inhalation of Western ideals in ways that suggests that he’s the real elder. As Janheinz Jahn points out in Muntu: African Culture and the Western

World, eldership in traditional African societies was more a matter of wisdom than age

(122-23). Because Augustus applies Western methods of knowing more humanely, he demonstrates the wisdom his elder lacks. I also say “elder,” here, because Augustus’s intertextual relationship with Equiano ultimately functions to rewrite the father/son dialectic that Katherine Clay Bassard explores in “Imaging Other Worlds: Race, Gender, and the ‘Power Line’ in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.” Through the novel’s intertextual kinships, Augustus becomes the model son that he himself never creates. In the end, Augustus is Equiano “with a difference” (The Signifying Monkey 4): he is a recursive figure who also critiques. In this sense, the novel’s intertextual dialogue with

Equiano suggests an Augustus/Henry dialect.17 However, despite all of his morality,

Augustus suffers a similar fate when compared to Henry. He dies, ultimately, because he places some value in the oppressor’s language system. In this, Augustus and Henry share the same nature, although both appear different.

Aside from revealing the novel’s literary intertextuality, the scene also signifies upon extraliterary discourses. The point here is that the novel’s figures of decadence provide a means of rhetorical signification. In this, it is important to point out that white

Southerners often re-sold free black persons in what has been called the Reverse

Underground Railroad. As Milt Diggins has shown in Stealing Freedom along the

Mason-Dixon Line: Thomas McCreary the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland, white slave catchers often used Southern laws to demand free blacks to present their papers in order to destroy the papers and re-sell the African person. In such situations, the free status of the re-enslaved person was not verifiable (since the slaver usually destroyed the free person’s papers). Literarily, the narrator represents this history in Travis’s eager

willingness to destroy the written word in ways that make Augustus’s free status a matter

of Travis’s will.

In this, the narrator engages the written/oral dialectic in the historical West, in

order to point out that Western discussions about the importance of the written word are

farcical: that these talks are really masks for more pernicious ideologies. Thus, the narrator argues, writing is not a “sign of reason” (Figures in Black 6). Instead, writing is a discourse on reason—that is, a rhetorical and dialectical strategy used by the West in order to “philosophize” (in the pejorative sense of the word) the African American person out of his or her humanity. In this, it is significant that there is an arbitrariness with which

Travis destroys the papers in Augustus’s recapturing scene. It demonstrates that he does not value the written word. In the end, then, Augustus’s recapturing scene not only talks back to Equiano’s narrative but also engages that narrative’s philosophical milieu.

Through the scene, the narrator critiques the nausea of the West, together with its arbitrary laws and folkways. Additionally, through its intertextual dialogue, the novel critiques those early writers of the African American literary tradition—those “prim and

decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America” (“Blueprint for Negro

Writing” 45)—who believed that they could appeal to the ideals of the West in order to

construct a future for themselves. Not altogether attacking them, the narrator critiques

these writers’ inability to see, to discern, and to understand the tricks of mastery.

Ultimately, then, Henry’s death functions to say something about the future of those who might follow in Henry’s steps—those black conservatives who Bassard

references or those rappers and sportsmen who Jones talks about. However, in a different

47 way, Augustus’s decline is a component of the same message: he foreshadows the destruction of those who do not flee metaphorical Virginias. Although a more moral character than Henry, Augustus falls into the same ideological trap to which his son succumbs. When he places his freedom papers in his pocket each morning, or when he painstakingly commits the words of those papers to memory, he places his faith in a system that is ultimately corrupt and essentially meaningless. While critics have concentrated on the character’s moral outlook, his decline reveals something truer regarding his purpose in the novel. In the end, the novel provides a prophetic rebuke of the Faustian imagination of white America, and because that imagination has conceived

“vain and foolish things” for the world (Lam. 2:14), it is destined for waste. In the same way, black America is headed toward a future destruction, the narrator argues, since its members often replicate white systems of knowing. It is as if the novel reflects a Pauline eschatology, predicting “tribulation and anguish on very soul of man” who accepts evil

(Rom. 2:19).

Through the novel’s predictions of decline, The Known World becomes part of a discourse on decadence and the collapse of the West that bears similarities to Spengler’s famous work. However, unlike Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Jones’s novel provides escape from nihilism, reflected in a uniquely African language system. That alternate language, which is symbolized in Celeste’s commitment to love, in Elias’s commitment to his family, and in Alice’s commitment to creativity, provides an invitation to accept something other than problematic Southern ideas. Thus, in the novel, the past is a lens through which contemporary readers ought to understand their

48 contemporary moment. As a kind of Sankofa, the novel is an invitation for readers to examine the past, in order to understand the future.

Aside from being important to understanding the novel’s primary message, decadence is also significant because Jones uses it as a means to critique critical social dialects. In “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s

Literary Tradition,” Mae Gwendolyn Henderson defines a social dialect as a unique language that expresses “shared values, perspectives, ideology, and norms” (350).

Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin’s explanation for the idea, Henderson argues that social dialects become the “languages of heteroglossia” in a text (350), intersecting, as

Bakhtin argues, “with each other in a variety of ways” (291). For Bakhtin, these intersecting voices form “new socially typifying ‘languages’” (291). Using these ideas, I want to expand this discussion of decadence in order to bring into sharper focus the novel’s absorption of outside influence. In this, I want to suggest that The Known World engages a variety of critical social dialects—languages spoken by critical communities— that intersect and coalesce around decadence. Interestingly, decadence is not only the meeting place for these languages in the novel, but it is also the site of the novelist’s critique of them. Through its critique, the novel ultimately produces something outside of those critical languages, although it necessarily includes them. In this way, the novel creates a “new socially typif[ied]language,” to use Bakhtin phrase, that says something about the author’s contribution and transformation of the African American novel. To understand these ideas, some definitions are necessary.

In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Bakhtin concerns himself with discursive voices in the novel, generally, and with speech utterances in particular novels, especially. For Bakhtin, it was best to study a novel as a kind of rhetorical document rather than an aesthetic artifact. At the time, the novel was a rather recent invention, and

Bakhtin sought to explore ways that the new form required deeper levels of reading and theorizing. In Dialogic, he suggests that novels are ways to express arguments in the world and that arguments are more realistic (and more enjoyable to read) when they include plural voices. Through a multiplicity of voices, or what Bakhtin calls varied speechedness, the novel mirrors real life discourse.

At the center of Bakhtin’s analysis of novelistic discourse is the idea that there are several ways of speaking a language—that is, speakers of a language do not speak exactly alike although they draw from a common pot of words. To make this point,

Bakhtin argues that speakers of a language do not all speak words “directly out of the dictionary” (294). Instead, speakers take the words from the dictionary (or out of the mouths of their teachers) and “appropriate” these words to serve their own intentions

(294). In this, the language of individual speakers represents internalized dialogues with other voices that ultimately come to bear on the construction of one’s own speechedness

(Henderson 350). Setting that issue aside, Bakhtin argues that language provides a person a means to articulate his or her “voice,” which ultimately projects a person’s distinct character, nature, or personality. He applies this idea to the novel, suggesting that a flood of voices constitutes polyphony.

In the context of The Known World, several voices flood the novelistic “plane”

(292), in order to produce a work that mimics the textures of everyday conversation. For example, in the scene that solidifies Moses’s decline, the narrator tells readers this:

With Counsel and Travis holding the still-tied Moses, Oden bent down

and put his knife, in two swift back and forth motions, through Moses’s

Achilles’ tendon. “Please,” Moses kept saying, “let me be.” He tried to get

Elias’s attention, and he tried to get Louis’s attention. “Please let me be.”

Moments after the cutting, Oden applied his blood-stopping poultice to

Moses’s wound and the slave collapsed, screaming in agony. (373)

In the scene, there are distinct voices: the voice of the narrator and the voice of Moses.

These voices apply different rules of syntax, and they draw on different vocabularies. It is important to note that, for Bakhtin, the number of characters in a novel does not always correspond with the number of voices on a novel’s discursive plane. For Bakhtin, voices must be sufficiently “distinguished” from others to constitute independent sounds (262).

Considering this, the above example is not an example par excellence of polyphony, but it does provide some sense of how multiple voices work. Figure 1 provides a representation of polyphony; the quadrant refers to a section in the novel where one might find three voices instead of two. The third circle (without the arrows) refers to the narrator’s voice, which is not usually in direct dialogue with characters in the novel.

Figure 1. Polyphony in The Known World

After explaining polyphony, Bakhtin moves to a discussion of heteroglossia. This is the idea that Henderson draws on to explain African American women’s literature in her popular article “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman

Writer’s Literary Tradition.” For Bakhtin, a voice usually speaks in a manner in keeping with the rules and vocabularies established by a speech community. Speech communities, in his view, are social groups that speak a particular variety of the national language. In

English, for example, there is “youth speak,” “professional speak,” “black speak,” and

“white speak.” Each of these speech communities constitutes a social dialect. In fact, even these broad groups contain sub-groups that could be defined as social dialects. The point here is that each social group has a set of linguistic and a-linguistic characteristics that ultimately inform the way group speakers articulate their voicedness.

As members of speech communities, individual speakers develop a voice that adopts the rules and vocabularies shared by those in his or her speech group. However,

52 individual speakers are usually members of multiple groups—or, at the very least, know the rules and vocabularies of other social dialects. In this regard, individuals are normally able to speak different “languages,” a term Bakhtin uses interchangeably with “social dialect.” In The Known World, Moses is just one character who speaks a variety of languages. For example, when speaking to Caldonia as an overseer of her property,

Moses observes social and linguistic conventions that he does not necessarily observe when speaking to Elias as a slave. By varying the application of rules for his utterances,

Moses speaks different social dialects. Ultimately, his varied speechedness provides roundness to his character; through the variety of his speaking, he appears as something near human, although he is just a literary figure. As Bakhtin argues in Dialogic, polyphony is one of the mechanisms of realism in the novel. Through it, characters register as real people.

Moses’s internalization of different speaking rules and vocabularies make him a heteroglot: a single voice that speaks different languages. Thus, heteroglossia refers to an individual speaker’s internalization of different dialects as well as a speaker’s use of those dialects in the construction of his or her own voice. Figure 2 provides a representation of heteroglossia. The quadrant in the figure represents a section of a novel that exhibits heteroglossia. Individual circles represent the voices of individual characters who have internalized various social dialects, which are represented by dots and/or lines in each circle.

......

-0...... ®~- ......

Figure 2. Heteroglossia in The Known World

In addition to polyphony and heteroglossia, Bakhtin explores polyglossia in the novel. Although Dialogic mentions the term throughout, it figures prominently in “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” In that essay, Bakhtin explores the origins of the novel, and he distinguishes the novel from other forms, such as the poem or epic. In the essay, one gets the sense that each genre, along with its specific stylistics, represents a national language. Through his discussion of these genres, Bakhtin emphasizes the

“bilingual” character of the novel, arguing that its stylistics are something that include the habits of multiple genres. Thus, at the formal level of the novel, one finds a multilingual- ness that Bakhtin refers to as polyglossia. In a glossary to Dialogic, Michael Holquist defines polyglossia as “the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system (Bakhtin’s two historical models are ancient

Rome and the Renaissance” (431).

I want to use this reading of Bakhtin to inform a discussion of what I have called critical social dialects in The Known World. However, instead of focusing on individual voices in the novel, I want to read the novel as a single voice that has heteroglossic qualities—or as a national language that finds itself conversant with other national languages. In this reading, I want to suggest that the novel is a mélange of several techniques that are attributed to different artistic/critical schools: namely, historical discourses, naturalistic discourses, modernist discourses, and post-modernist discourses.

Each of these critical communities constitutes a social dialect or national language that informs the novelist’s technique but that also inspires the novelist’s critique. At the center of these varied languages is decadence, which functions as a cognate among these critical languages.

Figure 3 provides a representation of these ideas. However, whereas quadrants represented novelistic scenes in previous figures, the quadrants in figure 3 refer to four critical dialects: historical, naturalistic, modernist, and post-modernist. The circle that crosses each quadrant is symbolic of the novel, and because the novel is a decadent work, the circle can also be read as a representation of decadence. In this, the shape of the circle is representative of the gravity that critical dialects exert on the novel, which ultimately gives shape to the novel’s decadence. Dots within the circle represent heteroglossic voices in the novel. Arrows have been placed in the figure to indicate the influence the critical dialect exerts upon the novel and to show the novel’s critique of particular aspects of the critical dialect. Said differently, these arrows represent the centripetal and

55 centrifugal forces at play in the novel’s discursive plane. These forces are dialectical in nature.39

II I Naturalistic Discourses Historical Discourses

III IV Modem Discourses Post-Modem Discourses

Figure 3. The Absorption of Decadent Discourses in The Known World

In historical discourses, decadence is perhaps the most common trope. In

“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat: Is America Going Down,” Adam Gopnick perfectly makes this point, writing that “[d]ecline has the same fascination for historians that love has for lyrics poets” (40). Although Gopnick never explains why the theme figures so prominently in historical discourse, one gets the sense that the historian’s interest in decadence might have something to do with the theme’s ability to make history relevant for readers of it. After all, the historian is always looking back, and for those who may indulge his stories about the past, the question of relevance is likely to spring up. To the question, “Why is history relevant?,” the historian who focuses on decadence can readily answer: Look! What happened then is so much like what is happening now. Get ready.

The end is approaching. In this, the historian becomes something like a Paul Revere.

However, instead of shouting, “The British are coming,” he or she usually proclaims,

“The end is on its way.”

Although The Known World is not a history in the traditional sense, it does provide a recounting of the past. As a “neo-slave narrative” (Odom 97), the novel takes into itself some of the techniques and preoccupations of more traditional historical texts, especially the techniques of “declinist” histories (Gopnick 40). For example, like other histories of decline, The Known World shares a pessimism regarding past events. This pessimism comes to bear on the novel and serves as discursive inertia from without, which ultimately shapes the novel’s treatment of characters’ futures. As Carolyn

Vellenga Berman argues in “The Known World in World Literature: Bakhtin, Glissant, and Edward P. Jones,” Jones’s novel depicts “the destruction of an idyll” (233).

However, that depiction is not “a literary act of fantasy” (235), seeing that Jones’s narrator does not mourn the “fallen world” (234) it depicts. Instead, the narrator evinces a pessimistic view of the past, characterized most noticeably by the narrator’s use of words like “doomed” when referring to Henry’s plantation or when referencing the fate of people on that plantation (Berman 234).

The narrator’s opinion about the past is not only pessimistic but its focus on certain past events is also gloomy. In this, the novel shares some similarities with the most popular works of the declinist genre, but Jones’s novel is more committed to pessimism than these. For example, in The Decline of West—which Gopnick reads as

“the great summit of declinism” (40)—Spengler devotes some pages to an exploration of

Western achievement (407-11). However, in Jones’s neo-history, there is no such celebration. Jones’s work focuses entirely on the negative aspects of slavery. Admittedly, the novel’s subject matter has determined the novel’s level of pessimism—one could hardly speak honestly regarding the positive aspects of slavery. Thus, at least in this regard, the novel’s pessimism exceeds the cynicism one finds in popular works of decline, especially Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence or Morris’s Why the West Rules— for Now. Still, through that pessimism, which serves as a kind of vehicle for the novel’s decadence, The Known World becomes something like historical works that also use pessimism as a component of their discussions about future decay.

The more interesting aspects of the novel’s engagement of historical decadence is related to its critique of the genre. One finds in Jones’s novel a rebuke of the declinist’s confidence regarding the coming collapse of the Western world. Whereas writers like

Spengler see decadence as something inevitable, the narrator of The Known World sees decadence as only likely. In this view, the narrator provides its characters alternatives to decay. Thus, Henry is not required to purchase slaves; he could have easily built his own house and lived happily ever after. Instead, he constructs what Moses calls a “strange world” (9) because he desires power and affirmation. To get these things, he decides to engage the corrupt power structure of the plantation economy. However, through some of the novel’s female characters, the narrator shows that Henry’s decay is not inescapable.

Although Henry chooses “mastery” and decay, black female slaves in the novel choose something else. Through characters like Celeste, Priscilla, and Alice, the narrator shows that something other than decline is possible. In doing so, it applies centrifugal

58 force against the weight of decadence on the novel, pushing it away from the novel’s center. This counterforce is most effective in the narrator’s discussion of Priscilla and

Alice’s escape to the North. Although matrimonially and economically connected to the primary figure of decline in the novel, they escape decay because of Alice’s wit and creativity. As Berman notes, Alice is the “runaway trickster artist” who creates an alternative “map of life” in the novel (237). What is interesting about that map is that it necessitates a knowing of the world as it is. That is, to be successful in her escape and to create an alternate picture of Manchester County, Alice must know enough about the county’s terrain in order to re-envision it.

In this view, Alice’s character demonstrates that one’s knowledge of Western modes of thought does not automatically initiate decline. Instead, her character shows that belief in, or commitment to, that world system produces decay. In this, Alice is a kind of intermediary figure, somewhat in the spirit of Malidoma Somé, whose knowledge of the county’s “map” provides access to liberation.18 However, her freedom is only possible because she does not live her life according to that map, which is a symbol for the county’s knowledge and language. In fact, she speaks a language that no one really understands.19 Her lived experience is so contrary to other characters in the novel that most think she is mentally unstable. However, the multimedia piece that she creates counters other’s perception of her mental health, and her successful arrival in Washington

D.C. does the same. Ultimately, through her character, the narrator shows that there is an alternative to decline: that through creativity one can escape decay.

Although creativity provides an avenue to escape decadence in the novel, the narrator shows that the artist’s path is an unlikely one. Here, the narrator signifies upon the history of slavery in that, as a historical reality, it was extremely difficult for enslaved persons to escape bondage, regardless of their creative prowess. This difficulty was due in part to the societal infrastructure of America’s peculiar institution. In this, the narrative exhibits compassion for historically enslaved persons, suggesting that bondage was not the result of a lack of ingenuity on the part of slaves. This humanizing history shows that the archeology of enslavement—that is, the institutional machinery of slavery itself— ensures that escape is unlikely.

Through Elias’s character, the narrator makes this point. In the scene that depicts

Moses’s decline, just before Oden bends down and puts “a knife through Moses’s

Achilles’ tendon” (373), the narrator tells readers about Elias’s inability to escape decline. It tells readers this:

Elias could see Celeste standing in their cabin doorway, waiting for him.

He needed Celeste now. He needed Celeste to tell him right and point him

toward home. How had he come to forget just where he was in the world?

He worried at that moment that something would happen to him on that

road with the white men raging and that he would never see his family

again. After Moses, Elias knew he would be next, and then Louis, the son

of a black woman. And if they needed more, the white men would jump

the Indian, who wasn’t as white as he always thought he was. (373)

Before this scene, Elias could be read as a character who stays above the

enslavement fray. He is a figure whose body is undoubtedly owned, but whose

metaphysical existence is incapable of being bond. Elias’s ability to live as a bondman

physically but a freeman mentally has something to do with his love for his wife and

family, but the moment he sits on the gray mare, “which Caldonia said came with his new

position as overseer” (372), something changes. The system “promotes” him on the

county’s scala, but Elias is discerning enough to recognize that his promotion is really an

invitation to death. In fact, in the above extraction, the narrator depicts the institution of

slavery as a ravenous beast, one that might consume every non-white person in its path.

Thus, even with creativity, the novel ultimately concludes that escape from decadence—

although possible—is not very likely.

Interestingly, the novel’s critique of what I have called historically decadent

discourse also presents a dialogic that ultimately determines the novel’s unique

articulation of historical decadence. In this view, instead of a “generalized Other”

(Henderson 349), the novel dialogically engages an optimistic Other, which the narrator

internalizes, in order to construct the novel’s subjective voicedness related to historical decadence. In this, the novel “rereads” and “rewrites” the canonical language (Henderson

354) to offer readers something that simultaneously registers within that dominant language and signifies against it. In this, the novel does, at the level of its language and symbols, what all African Americans texts do: repeat with a difference (Snead 59).

Aside from critiquing the declinist’s confidence regarding the inevitability of decay, the novel also critiques “history” as an objective category of knowing. In

“Religious Satire and Narrative Ambiguity in The Known World,” Michael Odom, when

writing about some of the novel’s supernatural phenomena, argues that the novel’s

critique of history is related to its form. Odom writes, “Jones’s use of the fantastic

highlights one of the primary aims of neo-slave narratives: to critique the historical

[mis]representation of slavery” (97). He continues:

With the emergence of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of

the 1960s, as well as their subsequent impact upon academic institutions,

scholars began to reconsider the history of slavery and its representation.

New concerns about the agency of slaves engendered revisions that now

focused historical attention “from the bottom up” on forms of resistance,

empowerment, and cultural preservation among those of African descent.

(97)

As Odom points out, Margaret Walker muses on this “bottom up” approach in How I

Wrote Jubilee. She writes, “[F]or philosophy and point of view, I have [George] Lukacs to thank for an understanding of the popular character of the historical novel; for recognition that I was among the first dealing with characters looking up from the bottom rather than down from the top” (64).

Jones’s neo-history is a similar reorientation of the historical gaze. Like Walker and other neo-narrative authors, such as Ernest Gaines, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison, Jones’s novel centers on representations of voices from the lowest levels of the plantation economy’s social hierarchy. Interestingly, The Known World offers a metaphorical play on the neo-narrative’s bottom up approach, offering several

images of characters who look up at powerful men on horseback. This is one of the

reasons why the narrator’s comments about Elias’s new mare are particularly important.

His newly seated position says something about his elevated social status. This image

revises the enslaved person’s position. Unfortunately, because his new position is still in

an old system, that new status signals the character’s decline. However, toward the end of

the novel, the site of power is inverted in a more positive way when the narrator forces

Calvin to look upward at an enormous wall hanging: a “grand piece of art that is part

tapestry, part painting, and part clay structure” (384). In this bottom up approach, Alice’s

work/voice gains a privileged position in a new social environment. Ultimately, her new

position, symbolized in Calvin’s upward gaze, emphasizes Alice’s role in the novel a

“crazy Saint” (Walker 232) and “creative artist” (Walker 233).

Through this reorientation, Jones’s narrator suggests that histories—both the

construction and the dissemination of them—are really mechanisms of power. In other

words, historical facts are not as objective as the historian portrays them to be. Instead,

history is rhetorical discourse. In “Science as Solidarity,” Richard Rorty makes a similar

claim regarding science. He argues that, “in our culture, the notions of ‘science,’

‘rationality,’ ‘objectivity,’ and ‘truth’ are bound up with one another” (38), whereby

scientists serve as stewards of truth and knowledge in our culture. In their role, the

general public often considers the scientist an articulator of hard-core facts. However, as

Rorty argues, even the most neutral facts are often weaponized to serve rhetorical objectives. In this view, truth is only possible via rhetoric communal consensus.

Jones’s novel emphasizes the rhetorical aspects of truth—and history—by providing “facts” in the novel’s narration that appear truthful but are really just objects of the author’s imagination. This passage is one example:

In 1855 Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black

families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of

those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another’s

business. When the War between the States came, the number of slave-

owning families would be down to five, and one of those included an

extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. census of 1860, legally

owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren. The census

of 1860 said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County, but the census

takers, a US marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he

sent his report to Washington D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong

because he had failed to carry a one. (7)

In this extraction, the narrator seems to articulate a reliable history as it works to undermine the reliability of that history. On the one hand, it ascribes some validity to the numbers recorded by census takers, but then it undermines those numbers by highlighting human error. As Bassard argues, passages like these in the novel “shift the ground of literary representation from the question of historical ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’ onto the terrain of language” (408). But in doing this, it also says something about the root of historical discourse: that truth is something apart from facts—that is, the things people

64 think are truthful are constructed by a person’s articulation of things that may or may not be factual.

In the novel, Moses is perhaps the primary figure of the novel’s critique of history. In his role as overseer, he offers Caldonia a history of Henry’s plantation that even readers know is untruthful. One suspects that Caldonia also knows that some of the elements of Moses’s “imaginative story” (273) are a bit far-fetched. However, Caldonia accepts the story, wanting “to believe that Henry had been a ‘good master’” (Bassard

413). Here, and in other places in the novel, the narrator emphasizes that the histories people believe are often historical renderings of their own prejudices. Thus, for the narrator at least, histories themselves are creations that support myths. By providing this line of argumentation, the novel draws on unspoken methods of histography when creating its own history about slavery. In another sense, it laughs at notions of objectivity in historical discourse.

Just as The Known World accepts some aspects of historical decadence as it critiques others, the novel also employs some naturalistic techniques as it ultimately rejects others. These techniques contribute to the novel’s decadence, but they also function as sites of the author’s revision of American literary naturalism. In this, The

Known World is in no way unique. As Richard Lehan argues in “The Response to Power in American Literary Naturalism: Visions and Revisions That Transformed a Narrative

Mode,” literary naturalism is often “transformed by its major practitioners, then by a succeeding generation of authors, and finally by the rise of critical theories that involve transformations in the text itself and the way the text is read” (37). Thus, for Lehan, there

is “no Literary Naturalism—but rather literary naturalisms—and the task of the literary

critic is to describe how the core text works and to tabulate the variations in its being and

evolution” (37).

As a kind of living language, then, the naturalistic novel constantly undergoes

changes in its vocabulary and speech ways. However, African American authors have not

normally been seen as contributors to the development of that artistic language. As John

Dudley argues in “African American Writers in Naturalism,” black “writers are largely

presented as appropriating or responding to an established literary movement rather than

helping to construct the movement themselves” (257). Robert Bone’s The Negro Novel in

America popularizes this very problematic idea. While the notion has some validity, it fails to recognize an important fact: that contributions to a literary movement are usually the product of debates between readers and writers in- and outside of a literary school.

Thus, the supposed failure of African American writers to contribute to established literary movements has something to do with theoreticians’ unwillingness to read closely

African American texts or to take seriously their critique of dominate literary “streams”

(Walcutt 10).

In the case of literary naturalism, this unwillingness has resulted in a version of naturalism that has gone largely undiscovered until recently. Since the 1990s, scholars have been re-reading African American naturalistic works, attempting to chronicle the unique features of an African American naturalistic imagination. This rereading, Dudley argues, “suggests a narrative of convergence, rather than one solely of influence or appropriation” (259). As Dudley argues, African American literary naturalists usually

accept the techniques of Anglo-American naturalism while rejecting some of the racist components of its philosophy (258). Because it demonstrates the tradition’s penchant to accept dominant naturalistic methods as it rejects some of the school’s ideas, The Known

World can be read as a work squarely within the tradition of African American literary naturalism. It belongs to a group of artistic works that critique the debased aspects of the dominant stream as it employs its more noble features.

At the core of African American literary naturalism is a pessimistic realism that informs black authors’ vision for the future. This pessimism also informs the decadence that permeates such works, especially their collective pronouncement of death and decline as the black man’s destiny. In the opening scene to Richard Wright’s Native Son,

its narrator famously summaries that vision; in The Way of the New World: The Black

Novel in America,20 Addison Gayle Jr. aptly comments on it:

The battle between Bigger and the rat [at the beginning of the novel]

symbolizes the coming battle between the young man and a hostile

environment. Consider: the rat leaves the safety of his hole and is

immediately confronted with danger. He has moved beyond the

boundaries established by the family, and his presence has disrupted the

tranquility of the universe. He is hunted down and destroyed. Bigger, in

the course of the novel, undergoes a parallel experience. When he leaves

Chicago’s South Side, when he moves into an alien environment, he too

disrupts the tranquility of the universe and, as a result, must be destroyed.

(168)

Works of African American literary naturalism provide some take on Native Son’s thesis,

usually with very little argumentative variation. Together, they exhibit some pessimism

regarding the destiny of black people in America, reading their fate as something fitted

for destruction. That fate is not predetermined because of the black man’s inherent

disadvantage or inferiority. Instead, extrinsic forces determine his outcome, especially a

corrupt social system.

Like African American literary naturalists, Anglo-American naturalists prophesy decay for their characters. Taking cues from Darwin’s Origin of Species—and those famous interpreters of it21—Anglo-American naturalists reject the works of “writers such

as Emerson and Thoreau, who believe that the human soul transcends nature” (Bender

53). For most of these writers, mankind is not above nature in some “grand repose”

(Bender 53). Instead, humans are products of nature and constrained by the same laws

that dictate life for other species in creation. In this view, characters in naturalistic novels

do not have some metaphysical afterlife to look forward to; death is the common fate of

all existence.

Before death, characters in naturalistic works of both varieties engage battles with

nature in order to survive. In this regard, these characters are only different from primates

in that they have more advanced tools to fight against “the mighty mother” (“Nana” 92).

In such works, the minds of men usually function as oppositional forces to the strength of

nature, whether these battles manifest themselves internally or externally. If internal, the

primary conflict in such novels end up being man’s mind against his body or physical

nature; if external, the fundamental conflict relates to a character’s mind or will against

68 the natural or social environment. Regardless of how the battle manifests, naturalistic works usually depict their protagonists as losing the battle against nature. As Charles

Child Walcutt explains in Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, naturalistic novels provide a “chronicle of despair, in which a whole life is depicted as the weary protagonist trudges across the dreary wastes of the modern world and finds, usually, an early death”

(21).

This sort of fate is what the naturalists call a deterministic one, and for most of the novel, the narrator of The Known World offers characters who have pre-determined destinies. When writing about the fate of characters in naturalistic novels, Lehan says something about The Known World’s approach to destiny without ever mentioning the novel by name. He writes:

Naturalisms as a modal reality was part of a deterministic system in which

fate was a product of extrinsic influences. The situation here involves a

predictable and fixed relationship between the reader of a naturalistic

novel and the characters that compose it. While the reader anticipates the

fate of naturalistic characters, the characters themselves are generally

unaware of what awaits them; most naturalistic novels are written in this

ironic mode, the reader anticipating a fate to which the characters are

oblivious. (39).

Given this example, Jones’s novel is true to type. Through the voice of its narrator, the novel provides readers flashes of characters’ decay before the characters themselves experience it. In this view, the novel’s opening scene is instructive since it offers the

69 novel’s first image of decline. Although the scene can be read as a metaphorical flash of the community’s future, it specifically provides a prophetic glimpse into Moses’s destiny, suggesting that Moses “would look back and blame the chains on evenings such as these.

. . when he lost himself completely” in the woods (3). His fate, together with the destiny of other characters, has something to do with the tragedy of the novel and its genre, but it also has something to do with the decadence attendant to both. The point here is that characters’ fate in The Known World is like the fate of other naturalistic figures. In this, the pessimistic determinism, which figures prominently in naturalistic discourse, functions as centripetal force on Jones’s novel. This force gives shape to the novel’s portrait of a society in decline.

Additionally, naturalistic documentation informs the novel’s decadence. In this view, it is important to note that, in order to represent characters’ fate to readers, naturalistic novels often employ a documentary narration style, which ultimately functions to provide a “literature of the authentic” (Pizer 194). As Walcutt argues, literary naturalism is primarily a realist brand of literature whose artists have a “goal of telling the whole truth” (240). As a strategy in that truth telling, third-person, omniscient narrators in such novels concern themselves with documenting the harsh realities of life.

In “The Documentary Strategies of Naturalism,” Keith Newlin succinctly defines

“documentation.” He writes:

We commonly use “documentation” in two ways: one, the common or

dictionary meaning, refers to that which “gives information to the

intellect” (12)—the material fact, verifiable and quantifiable, and

impersonal—typically comprised of historical records, objective

observations, and other sorts of specific evidence. “Document” in this case

“assumes that intellectual verification of some sort is possible. It asks for

concrete examples. . . [and] relies on an appeal to some sort of objective

authority. But we also use “document” to refer to that which “informs

emotions” (12)—the representative case, the illustrative anecdote, the

pathetic or inspiring story, the human document. (104)

In Jones’s novel, the way the narrator tells readers about characters and their town

demonstrates this first kind of documentation. Its telling is overladen with facts and census data, and these “facts,” together with their “careful accumulation of detail”

(Walcutt 241), provide an air of objectivity to the narrator’s telling. In fact, as Bassard

shows, the narrator in The Known World is a “sometimes intrusive omniscient narrator”

(407), whose telling can have the effect of drowning readers in the novel’s world. Aside

from the pseudo-facts that contribute to the narrator’s documentary style, the chapter

headings, which read something like newspaper headlines, also contribute to the novel’s

documentation. In this, the novel adopts journalistic techniques in order to report or

document the truth. Metaphorically, characters such as Fern, Moses, and Anderson,

whom the narrator sets up as reporters in the novel, represent this journalistic

documentation. Through their telling, together with the narrator’s voice, readers come to

understand the decadent fate of characters in the novel’s strange world.

Although the novel uses naturalistic narrative modes in order to provide readers a

literary decadence, it critiques the sort of realism that inspires the genre’s documentary

71 strategies. In this, the novel’s critique applies centrifugal force against the genre’s techniques of decadence, applying pressure that has the potential to reveal problems inherent in the genre’s literary realism. When starting off as writers, figures like Dreiser and Norris, who were news correspondents before they became artists, searched for a

“science of fiction” (Hardy 107) or a “scientific form of fiction” (Meadowsong 22).

These writers thought that using facts and science in their novelistic art would lead to a more perfect literary form—one that might contribute to readers’ understanding of the world (“The Naturalistic Imagination” 6). For them, truth was universal, and the purpose of any good art was to point people toward the universal truth, especially universal realities regarding human nature. Interestingly, however, the truths these naturalists accepted were often based on the pseudo-science of racialism (Reesman 277).

As Stephanie Bower explains in “Dangerous Liaisons: Prostitution, Disease, and

Race in Frank Norris’s Fiction,” Norris often “racializes the language of disease and degeneration by locating the source of the ‘decline’ so characteristic of naturalism in contact between Anglo-Saxons and racial ‘inferiors’” (43). Norris is not the only naturalist to do so. In fact, the scientific discourse of the nineteenth century informed most naturalistic works during this period—and well after it (Dudley 258). In “The

Response to Power in American Literary Naturalism: Visions and Revisions That

Transformed a Narrative Mode,” Richard Lehan provides some lines that explain the essence of the science that naturalistic writers accepted. He writes:

The new science [from Charles Darwin] postulated a universe of a least

two billion years in which modern man evolved out of the primate species

160,000 to 230,000 years if Neanderthals can be classified as human. . . .

The residue of such connections are very much with use today: we know,

for example, that chimpanzees share ninety-five percent of human genetic

material, have similar blood types and brain structures, and are similar in

behavior in the first three years of life and up to six years of life, at which

time their animality becomes more pronounced. (39)

For the earliest naturalists, this fact suggested that nature itself was responsible for man— that Darwin’s theory “challenged the belief that God was the source of creation” (39).

Considering this, naturalists were willing to write God out of the Great Chain and to suggest that the status of other beings that remained on “the Great Chain of Being was static” (39).

Although Lehan makes this point about the science of the period, it is important to note that literary naturalists were the primary figures to concretize the notion that categories of beings on the chain were static. Before the late 1830s, creatures were thought to possess the ability to evolve to higher statuses on the chain. Although the process of evolution was long, all creatures were said to possess the potential for culture.

Drawing on George Stocking’s Race, Culture, and Evolution, Barbara Christian makes this point in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1891-1976. She explains that, initially, “civilization was seen by naturalists as the ‘natural capacity’ of all races. Savages,” it was thought, “would eventually become civilized” (6). However, through the pen of the literary naturalists and, to a lesser degree, via the writings of

Thomas Jefferson,22 it became popular to think of black people as natural brutes who did

73 not have the ability to become human. Thus, the problem with the truth, as represented in literary naturalism, is that African American persons were often symbols for the “savage” in these literatures.

By rejecting the genre’s approach to the real, the narrator of The Known World mocks efforts on the part of the tradition’s Anglo-American writers to discover a universal truth. For it, universal truths are unavailable to men because of their pride and avarice. Ironically, as it critiques these novelists’ supposed access to universal truth, it provides an alternative universal—that is, it suggests that unrighteous lusts, which are common to all men, place universal truth outside the reach of lustful men.23 These lusts, not miscegenation as it was articulated in Anglo-American naturalistic works, lead to decline. To provide its mocking commentary on truth, the narrator of Jones’s novel uses

Fern and Moses to report “truths” that are ultimately imaginative. Through their reporting, the narrator argues that truth is constructed by men and that universal truth is only obtained through good character. By making such an argument, it offers a version of literary naturalism that functions as a kind of anti-realism. Interestingly, as Charles Child

Walcutt has argued in American Literary Naturalism: A Divide Steam, most naturalistic works are so fatalistic that their versions of the real become spectacles. In this, even white critics have mocked white naturalists’ version of reality.

For critics who have said anything about the novel’s place in American literature,

The Known World’s rejection of universal truth is usually read as a feature of its modern or post-modern character.24 In such readings, the decline of characters functions as a product of characters’ acceptation of universal truths that are, on the face of it, irrational.

In these readings, The Known World is not just “carnivalesque,” to use Bakhtin’s term,

but also a “theatre of the absurd,” to use a term from modern literary criticism. In “The

Theatre of the Absurd,” an article that first explored absurdism in modern art, Martin

Esslin explains that the last modernists used absurdism as a rhetorical device to critique

collapses of rationality in European society (4). For Esslin, these plays were “pure

theatre” (4)—which one could also read as “pure spectacle”—intended to critique

irrationality. For artists who used absurdism as a technique, widespread irrational

behavior was seen as a precursor to societal decline.

Other modern or post-modern readings focus less on absurdism and more on the

collapse of the “master narrative” in the novel—which one could read as the collapse of

“universal truth.” In his popular modernist essay, “Crisis in Poetry,” Stéphane Mallarmé explains this collapse as it happened in French literature at the turn of the century. He writes, “A fundamental and fascinating crisis in literature is now at hand. . . . What we are witnessing as the finale of our own century is not upheaval (as was the case a hundred years ago), but rather a fluttering in the temple’s veil—meaningful folds and even a little tearing” (34). Throughout “Crisis in Poetry,” Mallarme explores changes that were happening in French poetry at the time, especially “the change in poetry” that lead to the development of “fluid verse” (35). At the turn of the century, Mallarme explains, French poets began to abandon traditional poetic forms in such of more author-created types. In

other places in the essay, he compares artists’ abandonment of traditional forms to the

death of a deity. This death, Mallarmé argues, constitutes the deformation of authorial

languages in French poetry. With the “imperfect” language gone (38), a more realistic art

with multiple subjectivities could emerge. For Mallarmé, “the diversity of languages on

earth” meant that no one could “utter words which would bear the miraculous stamp of

Truth Herself Incarnate” (38).

Although The Known World utilizes absurdism and replaces the master narrative

with another one, the narrator does not celebrate the collapse of the world. In this, the

novel’s narrator is different from the storytellers in modern and post-modern novels.

Instead of celebrating the decline, Jones’s narrator is emotionally distant from the topics

it explores, preferring to document the life of characters instead of commenting on

them.25 In this way, Jones’s narrator is quite unlike, say, Tolstoy’s modern narrator in

Anna Karenina. As George Lukás argues concerning Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s narrator

is “thoroughly integrated into the total action of the novel” (111). Thus, although Jones’s

narrator employs the use of modernist techniques, its temperament is quite outside the

modern or post-modern imagination. Readers could, perhaps, infer joy as the narrator’s

response to Henry’s fall, but it never demonstrates this amusement overtly. Even

characters who escape Manchester’s decay—I’m thinking here of Alice and Priscilla—do not demonstrate joy regarding Manchester’s decline. Thus, the novel cannot be really read as something modern or post-modern although the author uses techniques attributable to both.26 Indeed, it might very well be an error to read the novel as anything

but decadent.

Notes

1. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is a text in two volumes. By excluding volume numbers and subtitles in this initial invocation, I am intending to reference the completed series. I’ve decided to invoke the book not only because its discourse has some rhetorical similarities to Edward P. Jones’s The Known World but also because it is the most popular academic work in a genre that Randolph Starn has called “historical decline” (1).

2. In the translator’s preface to the 1932 edition of volume 1, Charles Francis

Atkinson suggests that Spengler’s Decline was not well-received by the German public when it first appeared. Published in July of 1918, just months before the Great War ended, critics initially disregarded the work. Atkinson explains that the book’s “very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose the high intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment—the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to the world of authoritative learning” (ix). Atkinson points out, however, that in the initial years after the war, the text received much attention by German scholars.

3. “White diaspora” is a term that Catherine Jurca uses in White Diaspora: The

Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. In that work, Jurca uses the term to satirize the “tendency in twentieth-century literary treatments of the American suburb to convert the rights and privileges of people living there into spiritual, cultural, and political problems of displacement, in which being white and middle class, is imagined to have as much or more to do with subjugation as with social domination” (4). Throughout the work, she uses the term to critique the “self-pitiful portrait” that the suburban novel

paints of whites who, on the one hand, have chosen to live in the suburb and who, on the

other hand, also feel dispossessed. She calls the portrait a “cognitive and rhetorical

chicanery.” She writes, “The term white diaspora is designed to emphasize and lay bare

the role of the novel in promoting a fantasy of victimization that reinvents white flight as

the persecution of those who flee, turns material advantages into artifacts of spiritual and

cultural oppression, and sympathetically treats affluent house owners as the emotionally

dispossessed” (8). By using the term here, I want to reference the kind of “chicanery” that

alt-right groups and white supremacists employ when they think of white people as a

group under fire—or when they think of whiteness as a thing or ideology being oppressed

by Jews and non-whites. Ultimately, the collective protestations of individuals belonging to the white diaspora evince a kind of cultural hemorrhaging, due in part to the perceived dissolution of overt forms of white power in the West.

4. See the reporting on Stephen Bannon’s interview and Michelle Piercy’s comments in “Trump’s Embrace of Racially Charged Past Puts Republicans in Crisis,” which was written by Jeremy Peters, Jonathan Martin, and Jack Healy. In the article, both

Bannon and Piercy suggest that President Trump (and, by implication, the protestors at

Charlottesville) were trying to protect history—that the protestors were not being racially

incendiary when they traveled to Charlottesville. Bannon is reported to have said,

“President Trump, by asking, ‘Where does this all end’—Washington, Jefferson,

Lincoln—connects with the American people about their history, culture, and traditions”

(A1). The writers of the article also suggest that Piercy felt the same way. According to

the reporters, she said, “Good people can go to Charlottesville.” In Piercy’s mind, good

people would be those protestors who travelled to Charlottesville to stand up for history,

not Nazism or white supremacy.

5. In “White Supremacy under Fire: The Unrewarded Perspective in Edward P.

Jones’s The Known World,” David Ikard makes reference to the “intraracial sabotaging behavior” (66) that served as inspiration for The Known World. However, the line where the quote appears in Ikard’s article comes with a note. It reads, “Jones does not spell out the event in the 1980s that he equates with interracial sabotage (i.e., blacks enslaving other blacks) during slavery. Though one can only speculate about the events in question, it is clear that Jones links [recent] acts of interracial sabotage in the political and social realms to the legacy of black slave owners and their complicity in white oppression” (84).

In “Just Stating the Case Is ‘More Than Enough,’” Robert Fleming provides some

clarification. When reading Fleming’s interview with Jones, readers discover that the idea

for the novel and its protagonist “grew from [Jones’s] reading a small book about a Jew

who had joined the Nazis during World War II” and that, during college in the 1980s,

Jones had come “across a book which spoke about blacks having slaves” (254). Together

with Ikard comments, Fleming’s interview reveals the sort of historical hauntings that

lead to the development of the novel. The interview is also important because it curiously

links the novel’s origins with some of Spengler’s comments regarding that author’s

ambitions for writing The Decline of the West. Spengler opens his study this way: “In this

book is attempted for the first time the venue of predetermining history, of following the

still untraveled stages in the destiny of a culture, and specifically of the only culture of

our time and our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment—the West-European-

American” (3). Here, and in other places in the introduction, Spengler discusses the act of

writing about history outside of time. He calls his “history” of the West a philosophy of

the “possible” (5). In fact, in other places, he even describes the sort of history that he

undertakes as a creative act that approaches the novel or some other art. He writes, “. . .

then history becomes approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision

become an experience which can only be rendered in forms of art” (95-6). Oddly,

Spengler’s desire to speak of historical incidents outside of their own time—that is, to think about the possibilities related to things that have already happened—has something to do with Jones’s thinking about the possibilities for those African Americans who might have owned slaves (or for those Jews who might have worked willingly for the

Nazis).

6. Several scholars have hinted toward the present or future implications of the novel’s subject matter. Katherine Clay Bassard’s “Imagining Other Worlds: Race,

Gender, and the ‘Power Line’ in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World,” Dawkins’s

“Inside and Outside the Master’s House: The Architecture of Power in The Known

World,” and Ikard’s “White Supremacy Under Fire: The Unrewarded Perspective in

Edward P. Jones’s The Known World” are just a few. However, these studies skew toward the historical—that is, they say very little about the novel implications for our contemporary culture.

7. Readers discover that William Robbins’s suspicions are wrong; Toby and his sister are not sold to abolitionists. The narrator explains the matter this way: “In truth, the man William Robbins met on the road was not an abolitionist or an angel, and Toby and

80 his sister never saw the north” (27). In context, the quote emphasizes Robbins’s intuition, which functions as an unreliable form of knowledge. In this, one wonders whether the narrator critiques intuitive knowledge, reading it as a reflection of fear instead of truth.

8. See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, p. 12-13.

9. Throughout the novel, rain (and other weather-related phenomena such as thunder and lightning) appears often. For example, in the novel’s initial pages, during Moses’s

“time with himself” in the woods (3), readers observe a light drizzle. Although the drizzle seems harmless enough, the narrator suggests that this rain has symbolic import for

Moses’s future: it indicates that Moses would later come to “blame the chains” he encounters at the end of the novel on nights when he completely “lost himself” in the damp woods (3). By blaming the rain for his decline, Moses shows that the rain has symbolic importance. In this regard, rain appears to function as a theophany in the novel.

This point is best recognized when one considers that Moses himself sees the rain as some divine force working against him—a force that ultimately solidifies his destiny.

One also sees this when he or she considers that rain ultimately brings about a fundamental change in Stamford’s character (when he picks blueberries for Delores and

Patrick during the tornado).

10. I explore the resolution in another chapter.

11. Henry James uses the term in several works of criticism. See Theory of Fiction:

Henry James, pp. 224-5, for two definitions.

12. See the preface to Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction.

13. Interestingly, changes in Henry’s spoken language initiates a language of physical

violence. In this, the narrator may be showing readers that violent language often

precedes physical violence. Thus, recent developments regarding police violence in our

contemporary culture might be rooted in the language the culture uses to refer to black

people—whether that language relates to the actual words or the mythologies from which

those words emanate.

14. Much of the novel explores philosophies of being and philosophies of history.

Most of the studies that explore such things are written by German scholars.

15. As Equiano points out in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah

Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself, he was sold many times

before gaining his freedom. According to “Inside the Slave Ship,” an episode from The

History of American Slavery podcast, one owner gave him the name Gustavus Vassa,

“after a sixteenth-century Swedish king, a grand name—perhaps a joke along the lines of

the tradition of naming enslaved people Pompey or Caesar” (Bouie and Onion).

16. Toward the end of the novel, readers discover that Augustus and Mildred’s home

was a stop on the Underground Railroad. This may provide a reason why Augustus didn’t

want to move North; maybe he had planned, when he had first purchased his land, to help

slaves become free. However, the narrator is not clear regarding this point.

17. In their criticism on the novel, scholars have read Augustus and Henry as figures

who represent two opposing methods of being. However, I read them as different manifestations of the same existential crisis: both place value in the oppressor’s language system. While critics have written about Henry’s valuation of that system, they have

82 neglected to point out that Augustus places value in it when he labors for his freedom, purchases his family’s freedom, and commits the words of the freedom papers to his memory.

18. In The Healing Wisdom of Africa, Malidoma Somé describes himself as a person

“who makes friends with the stranger/enemy” (1). Later in the book’s initial chapter, the author explains that his spiritual mission is to bridge the indigenous world with the

“modern” one (2-5). Alice’s mission may be like Malidoma’s call.

19. Throughout the novel, she speaks words (and sings songs) that most people ignore, primarily because they are not sure what the words mean. This point will be explored in another chapter.

20. Gayle’s work offers a revision of Bone’s problematic criticism.

21. Especially Gregor Mendel and Herbert Spencer.

22. See Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,

1550-1812.

23. Here, it is important that I use “men.” Women in the novel have access to the truth.

24. See Donaldson, p. 268.

25. This is one of the novel’s achievements: for although it is a “novel of ideas,” it does not read didactically.

26. In Re-Forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave

Narrative, A. Timothy Spaulding also rejects the notion that The Known World might be read as a postmodern slave narrative. He writes, “Although both The Known World and

Lion’s Blood bear the traces of influence of the postmodern slave narratives I have discussed, each maintains some distinction between realism and fantasy as narrative modes of representing the past. Rather than blurring the boundaries between genres,

Jones complicates the history of slavery within the bounds of realism while Barnes re- examines the past from within the realm of fantastic literature” (125).

CHAPTER III

FROM MARGIN TO CENTER: AFRICANISMS AND THE BLACK FEMALE VOICE

IN EDWARD P. JONES’S THE KNOWN WORLD

Much of the criticism regarding The Known World, Edward P. Jones’s brilliant debut novel, centers on the “strange world” (9) its primary character is able to create when he purchases thirty-three slaves in antebellum Virginia. If Henry Townsend were white, readers might have expected his ownership of black people in an 1850s South. But

Henry is black; his slaves are black, too. Because of his race, the character provides an unexpected twist to the novel’s history of slavery, one that centralizes an unusual reality in the record of America’s peculiar institution. As John Vernon notes in his review of the novel, the “freshness” of Jones’s narrative lies in the “incongruity” (9) of the story, and while a black slaveowner might have provided enough peculiarities for one novel about slavery, Jones’s novel provides several others.

In “Religious Satire and Narrative Ambiguity,” Michael Odom supplies something of a chronicle for the novel’s oddities. When responding to ideas in Kendall

Walton’s “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality,” especially those notions regarding the reliability of omniscient narrators, Odom reminds readers of The Known World’s

“earnest descriptions of events that are scientifically impossible” (96). For example, he reminds readers about the dead crow that fly upside down, the young children who

85 spontaneously combust, the people who vaporize in thin air, and the dead men who converse with the living (96). Reading these elements of the story as fantastic,1 Odom argues that these details contribute to the novel’s personality as a neo-slave narrative.

In Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, Ashraf

Rushdy explores the extraliterary events that contributed to the emergence of the genre.

He explains:

In the 1960s, a set of intellectual and social conditions associated with the

civil rights and Black Power movements generated a change in the

historiography of slavery. This convergence of an intellectual change in

the academic study of the American past and the social movements of the

decade . . . affected the fictional representation of slavery from the late

sixties to the present. (3)

Calling these fictionalized representations “neo-slave narratives,”2 which he defines as

“contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (4), Rushdy contextualizes a term that

Bernard Bell is credited for creating.3 Whatever one might call this body of literary art, whether the critic uses Bell’s “neoslave narrative” or Rushdy’s “neo-slave narrative,” both terms reference the remarkable work that African American writers accomplished in the 1960s when they provided alternatives to hegemonic representations of slavery. What results from their collective articulation is a reliable view of history “from the bottom up”

(Rushdy 4)—that is, a view of the past that privileges the voices of those on the lowest rungs of America’s social hierarchy.

In this chapter, I explore The Known World’s bottom up view of history.

However, instead of using “neoslave narrative” or “neo-slave narrative” as terms to classify its point of view, I employ a variation of Angelyn’s Mitchell’s “liberatory narrative” and use it as a critical descriptor. In Freedom to Remember: Narrative,

Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction, Mitchell revises Bernard

Bell’s “neoslave narrative,” which he defines in The Afro-American Novel and Its

Tradition as a “residually oral” novel that chronicles an “escape from bondage to freedom” (289). For Mitchell, contemporary narratives by African American women are unlike the works constructed by African American men. For her, women’s narratives focus more “on the construct of freedom” than on the “experience of enslavement” (3).

Additionally, she reads contemporary narratives by African American women as

“quintessential[ly] Black feminist” (5)—novels that employ protagonists that represent

African American women “authentically as agents” (5).

While I agree with Mitchell’s reading of the novels under discussion in her work,

I think she unnecessarily excludes contemporary narratives written by black males. In order to uncover the problems with her analysis, I argue here that there is a least one

African American man whose contemporary slave narrative authentically represents black women as agents. In Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, women voices are dominant and central. Through his narrative, the author demonstrates that it is possible for a man to write a postbellum narrative that is sensitive to the unique contributions of

African American women. As a methodological approach to the construction of the novel’s discourse on slavery, Jones absorbs feminist argumentative tools in order to

87 explore antebellum slave life. This chapter argues that Jones uses the black female voice to revise male-centered tropes of slavery, Western systems of oppression, and methods of authentication in the slave narrative form.

Admittedly, these ideas are not easily discerned in The Known World. To begin with, Edward P. Jones is not a female writer, and in interviews about his art, he has not articulated a decidedly feminist worldview. Thus, when one considers the writer’s gender, it might be hard for some readers to locate an authentic female subject when reading the novel. This discovery might prove especially difficult for black feminists who read maleness as an insurmountable barrier to understanding women generally and to understanding the black feminist project especially. For example, if critics like Barbara

Smith think it impossible for black male literary scholars “to understand Black women’s experiences in sexual as well as racial terms” (22), one hardly has to wonder what such a critic might make of my claim that The Known World includes an authentic black female voice. Such a character might be ignored—or, worse yet, read as something that does not exist in Jones’s fiction. Although the difficulty of locating a black female self might initially appear arduous, close readers discover powerful reflections of black female subjectivity in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.

In Understanding Edward P. Jones, James Coleman writes about the power of the novel’s female characters. He makes this point regarding them:

The dominate theme of [The Known World] is black people’s triumph over

slavery and oppression, and although some black men are very important

in this context, arguably black women are more prominent in this portrayal

of the triumph of black humanity. It is only an educated speculation that

Jones’s great love and respect for his mother influenced his portrayal of

black women; however, whatever the reason may be, a number of black

women stand out in the novel above every one, black and white, as

examples of remarkable human beings who over[come] the unbelievable

travail of slavery, preparing the way for freedom. (33)

While Coleman calls his reference to Jones’s mother a matter of educated speculation,

Paul Fry might call the inclusion good criticism.4

In fact, in several interviews about his writing process, Jones refers to his mother as a kind muse—if not a tuner—for the literary voices he creates. In an interview with

Maryemma Graham, for example, he mentions the role his mother’s voice plays in his creative writing. He remarks, “I think when I am writing certain things, I don’t have any particular lines in mind, but there are those phrases that keep coming back to me from my mother. A phrase like ‘A month of Sundays,’ or ‘That would be too much like right’”

(1082). While Jones says he has not used such phrases in his fiction yet, he has committed to using them in the future (Graham 1082). Regardless of whether he follows through on the promise, his desire to echo his mother’s voice says something about his desire to represent a world that is all too often undervalued in American society—a world that centers the voice of a black women.

In The Known World, however, the importance of the black female voice is hard to grasp initially, since so much of the novel’s conscious and subconscious discourse centers around Henry and his “strange world.” In this, the novel strikes up a mimetic

tone, mirroring in fictive detail the sort of male-centeredness that spews from America’s

cultural fountain. In fact, this male-centeredness is not only represented discursively in

the novel—that is, it is not only evidenced by the topics characters talk and think about—

but it is also symbolized geographically. This point comes into view when readers of the

novel consider that, once news comes “down” from the big house regarding Henry’s

death, all eyes are upwardly fixed as characters anticipate news for what is next (55).

This anticipation from above offers a spatial configuration of power in the novel that is in keeping with historical fact. Indeed, as Marie Jenkins Schwartz explains in

“Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” slaveowners often “deliberately situated their homes to dominate the landscape” on Southern plantations, “as if to emphasize their own importance” geographically (36). If there were hills, big houses were invariably built on top of them. Aside from serving as symbols for the master’s power on the plantation, the position of the big house provided practical advantages as well: from it, masters and mistresses could keep watch over the plantation (Schwartz 36).

In Schwartz’s depiction of the plantation landscape, one can easily draw parallels between her discussion and the configuration of space on Henry’s plantation.

What is interesting about that configuration of space is that, once Henry dies, all eyes become fixated on what Caldonia might do in the big house. In this, the site of power remains but the voice of power shifts: it moves from something related to male ambition to something centered on female decision. Katherine Clay Bassard mentions this shift in her article, “Imagining Other Worlds: Race, Gender, and the ‘Power Line’ in

Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.” There, Bassard makes the case that The Known

World “reconfigures the coordinates of race, gender, and power as multiple and

sometimes contradictory sites” of subjectivity (407). Suggesting that “race and gender

function as metaphors” for power appropriation in the novel (408), Bassard identifies

Caldonia as one of the characters who “pass” across the “power line”—that is, one who

takes on roles usually associated with her racial or gender other. Thus, Caldonia’s rise to

“mastery”—to use a word from Susan Donaldson’s work5—not only demonstrates a crossing of the “color line” but also evinces a transversion of the “gender line.” Although

Bassard mentions Caldonia’s ability to “pass” across the power line, she neglects to see that Caldonia’s rise to power is part of a larger system of revision in the novel that works to shift marginal voices to the center.

In fact, the primary narrative of the novel—the story about a black man who owns black slaves—functions to centralize a marginal fact in the history of slavery. By centralizing that fact, the novel situates a marginal truth in the discursive center of the novel’s fictive world. In this view, it is important to mention that people like Henry actually existed and that such free persons were willing to own others of their race for economic reasons. In “Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia,” Samll Goldsmyth and his colleagues make this point. They explain that “it could scarcely be doubted that there were . . . colored men . . . who held to service persons of their own race and color”

(234). Remarkably, the authors even suggest that black people may have attempted to acquire white servants in the seventeenth century (233). By providing a fictional account of people like “the free Negro Anthony Johnson, and his slave John Casor” (Goldsmyth

et al. 234), Jones’s novel concentrates a marginal historical voice at the center of the

novel’s plot.

What is most interesting about the novel’s focus on that voice and then its shift to

a focus on Caldonia’s articulated-ness is that the shift toward the female voice actually

corrects the historical record. As Larry Koger has shown in Black Slaveowners: Free

Black Slave Masters in South Carolina 1790-1860, black women constituted a “dominate

force” in the practice of black slave ownership (24). Although a historical reality, this is

not the popular understanding. Instead, most people view slavery as a predominately

male enterprise: that is, they view black male slaves as bearing the brunt of the slave’s

burden, and they see white male slaveowners as being the main perpetuators of slavery’s

injustices.6 Although these ideas have some legitimacy, women often performed subject roles in America’s peculiar institution. They were not always innocent observers.

As Stephanie Jones-Rogers demonstrates in They Were Her Property: White

Women as Slave Owners in the American South, white slave-owning women witnessed

the “most brutal features of slavery,” but they also “took part in them, profited from

them, and defended them” (ix). Similarly, certain free African American women participated in slave owning, just like their black male counterparts. To deny this fact,

considering the historical record, is to participate in a pernicious kind of patriarchy—one

that robs women of their ability to experience a complete range of human emotions.

While readers may certainly dislike Caldonia for the things she does, especially the ways

she sexually violates Moses, they can hardly overlook the fact that she makes her

decisions in her own self-interest. In this, Caldonia’s subjectivity reads something like

Eva’s self-determination. In Toni Morrison’s Sula, readers will remember that Eva performs what amounts to an act of infanticide when Plum comes “back from the war . . . want[ing] to crawl back in [her] womb” (62). When writing about the scene in “A Black

Man’s Place in Black Feminist Criticism,” Michael Awkward argues that Eva’s murder of her son is “characterized by a refusal to be subjugated to androcentric desires” (81).

While Eva is something of a better woman than Caldonia, both are willing to employ tragedy to realize their own subjectivity.

The point here is that the author’s habit of centralizing a marginal voice, in order to critique some system of thought or to revise some historical inaccuracy, constitutes a technique of revision at play in the novel. Although most African American women owned black slaves for innocent reasons, the historical record demonstrates that black women played a primary role in owning people of their own race, especially in urban centers (Koger 27). In this, Caldonia’s narrative and its eventual supremacy over Henry’s function to articulate a historical fact regarding black slave ownership. This point is an important one because much of the criticism about the novel focuses on its revision and critique of Western historiography, or what some critics have called a critique of the

“master narrative,” through pseudorealism and the like—that is, through ahistorical detail.

While The Known World reflects “a skeptical attitude toward history as a discipline” (Ryan 205) or rejects “claims of objectivity and authenticity embedded in traditional history” (Spaulding 123), it does not always use “historiographic metafiction”

(Hutcheon 5) as a means to revise and critique history. Instead, it most frequently uses a

93 counter-voice, which is usually marginal and female, in order to correct the dominate voice, which is usually male. In “Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern

South,” Susan Donaldson comes close to realizing the novel’s gendered system of revision. She makes this observation:

The multiple stories that crowd the pages of Jones’s novel suggest

something of the approaching demise of [slavery’s] mastery in general,

which is half-revealed, half-concealed in passages briefly revealing slaves

who slip away from the confines of the plantation, and, by implication, the

narrative of slavery, in the anxieties prompting the formation of slave-

patrollers to anxiously survey the roads at night for runaway slaves, and

even in the accountable bonds linking human beings across the boundaries

of race. (273; emphasis added)

Although she does not reference the novel’s female characters in this extraction, one could easily think of Alice as one of those characters “who slip away from the confines of the plantation” or one who “suggest[s] something of the approaching demise of mastery” (Donaldson 273). Indeed, black female characters—and, sometimes, white female figures7—represent the oppositional voice to mastery in the novel. In Caldonia’s case, her story is not altogether a slipping away from the plantation since she ultimately decides to keep the slaves she inherits. In this, Caldonia’s voice does not oppose the master narrative generally, but it does function to revise the black master’s narrative specifically. The other female characters do something much more, but this is a point that

I will return to later. The idea I am trying to emphasize now is that marginal voices are

94 usually centered in the novel and that this centering has something to do with the novel’s system of revision. It also has something to do with the novel’s feminist orientation.

In her preface to Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks provides some context for the novel’s revision practices:

To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.

For black Americans livings in a small Kentucky town, [for example,] the

railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those

tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could

not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those

tracks was a world we could [visit] . . . as long as [that visit] was in a

service capacity. We could enter that world, but we could not live there.

We had always to return to the margin, to beyond the tracks, to shacks and

abandoned houses on the edge of town. (xvii)

Here, hooks uses geographic space as a metaphor for political dispossession. When applying the metaphor to Jones’s novel, Henry can be read as a black man who crosses the metaphorical tracks—he is a person who not only visits the other side but who also makes for himself a home over there. Additionally, he makes that world serve his interests. In a similar way, Caldonia crosses over, living an existence that transcends racial and gender boundaries.

Elaborating on her preface to Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks offers some substantive comments about the politics of marginality and its relevance to the black feminist project. In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics,

95 she explains that her previous “statements identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation” (149). In fact, she argues that the marginal position is a place of “radical possibility” (149). She continues:

It was through [my discussion of marginality] that I was naming a central

location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not

just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such, I

was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose—to give up or to

surrender as part of moving into the center—but rather a site one stays in,

clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. (149-150)

Although the ideas might appear contradictory, in their appropriate textual environments, both quotes provide a clear view of black feminism’s marginality analytic.

For hooks and most other black feminists, the alleviation of oppression always depends upon the occupancy of Others in privileged “spaces.” For hooks, “space” need not always refer to physical or geographical areas; she argues that “[s]paces can be real and imagined” (152). Because of this, space can be physical or ideological. The important take-away point from her analysis about marginality is that it underscores the interplay between radical transformation and the centering of Others. In effect, she argues that transformation occurs when marginal voices revise and critique the center.

To understand this point, consider that, from hooks’s perspective, there are two aspects to a person’s move to the center. The first has something to do with a person’s ability to be physically present in powerful or influential spaces—that is, to stand from a position of self-definition and subjectivity just beyond the “tracks.” This is a point hooks

96 references in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. In other places, she calls it the

“politics of location” (Yearning 145). From hooks’s view, in order to transform a discourse, a person not only needs to employ the politics of location, but they also need to consider a “politics of articulation” (Yearning 146). By this, she means that one’s location in alien physical or discursive environments must also include a person’s authentic voice—a voice that refuses to adopt the assumptions and thought-patterns of the

Other. This is an idea emphasized by other feminists.

For example, in “Men in Feminism: Odor di Uomo or Compagnons de Route?”

Alice Jardine makes the point. When responding to Stephen Heath’s “Male Feminism,” an article that tries to deal with the question of whether a male feminism can or should exist, Jardine writes this:

Feminist men. Male feminism. Is this but an exercise in oxymorons? Or

perhaps a promising Utopian vision? I think that depends on what men

want. What do men want? Assuming, at the very least, that they want to be

in feminism. . . . And what do feminists want? If you will forgive me my

directness, we do not want you to mimic us, to become the same as us.

(59-60)

Here, Jardine is willing to invite men into a gynocritical cypher, but she is rather unwilling to allow maleness to lose its difference as it participates in that discourse. In the same way, hooks argues for a politics of articulation wherein the speaker or the centered/included subject remains authentically different. For her, when one is able to do both of these things—to be physically present across the tracks and to speak authentically

97 there—the person is able to possess a voice that radically “talks back” to power: that is, that speaks “as an equal to an authority figure” (Talking Back 5). Jones’s novel offers a similar view regarding the potential of marginal voices. In this, most of the black female characters in The Known World talk back to power in order to oppose it. Caldonia is perhaps the weakest female character in this regard, but, as hooks has shown, privileged people, or maliciously ambitious ones, often fail to function as voices of resistance.

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, hooks explains this point. She writes this:

This experience of space and location is not the same for black folks who

have always been privileged, or for black folks who desire only to move

from underclass status to points of privilege; not the same for those of us

from poor backgrounds who have had to continually engage in actual

political struggle both within and outside black communities to assert an

aesthetic and critical presence. (148)

Caldonia is certainly one of these privileged individuals. Firstly, she is a free-born black woman who has never really known the horrors of slavery. Because she has never really encountered the system’s atrocities, she never advocates for its demolition. Instead, she only strategizes for a place of power in that system. In this, the novel offers a class dimension to its discourse on marginality, suggesting, perhaps, that middle-class black people are more likely to support oppressive systems that African Americans from other classes oppose.

Although some other characters wonder whether Caldonia might sell Henry’s slaves—in this, they might have expected a bit of sympathy from a woman8—she demonstrates a faithful commitment to Henry’s Christian vision regarding slavery. The narrator relays that vision this way:

Caldonia stepped to the edge of the verandah and raised her head for the

first time since she had walked out her front door. . . . She had been crying

before she came through the door, and she knew that the tears would soon

come back so she wanted to hurry to get at least a few words out. . . . “You

know now that our Henry has left us. . . . He cared about you all, and I

have no less care than he did. I have no less love. . . . Please don’t worry

yourselves. I am here and I will not be going anywhere. . . . God is with

us. God will give us many days, good and bright days, good and joyful

days. Your master wanted better things for you and your children and this

world, and I want them for you as well. (63-64)

These lines indicate that Caldonia, although an authentic female voice in the novel, does not speak out against oppression although she is in a position to do. In fact, she seems to view herself as God’s ambassador to redeem a fallen world. In its full context, it is important that the narrator depicts Caldonia as standing on the edge of the porch while she speaks to her slaves who are standing on the ground (63). In its description of the scene, the narrator uses space as an indication of power. Indeed, Caldonia crosses the gender line and is able to function as a female replacement to male power, but she does not use her power to effectuate reasonable change. In this, she is perhaps the weakest

99 centralized female voice in the novel, but she still serves a corrective function. Her voice critiques gender dynamics in the novel’s history of slavery although it does not critique the institution itself. If Caldonia is the weakest voice with regard to alleviating “all sites of oppression” (Phillips xx), Celeste and Alice serve as remarkable counterpoints to

Caldonia’s character. Their voices are black liberative voices.

To begin with, Celeste can be read as a repository of otherness in the novel; she is the farthest from the center of power than any other character. This point comes into view when readers consider that she is female, poor, and disabled. Most importantly, perhaps, she is also a slave. Thus, if Henry’s life serves as a representation of power in the novel,

Celeste is everything Henry is not. And if Caldonia’s big house represents an appropriation of white and male power—that is, if her existence serves as a metaphor for a reconstructed center—Celeste functions as the foil to that world and its worldview.

Despite all of her perceived disadvantages, however, she is “the most remarkable human being” in the novel (Coleman 33). In this, humanity is centered in her (although societal power is not).

Unlike other characters, Celeste forgives when others abuse her; she loves when it might be hard to do so; and she rebels when most others acquiesce. She demonstrates how a person can live in an oppressive system but live above the system’s oppression.

When writing about the character’s extraordinary presence in the novel, Coleman mentions her disability, which at least one character in the novel says she “should be shot, like a horse with a broken leg” for having (100), but he does not read it as a

100 limitation. In fact, in Celeste’s character, Coleman situates the novel’s realization of

Jones’s mother’s voice:

Again, it is only speculation, but it seems that the characterization of

Celeste as a person who suffered greatly and turned her suffering into love

and caring for other people might relate to what Jones saw in the life of his

beloved mother, who loved him and her other children so much and

overcame so much, in spite of her great hardships. (34)

While I think Coleman is onto something regarding the character’s relationship to

Jones’s mother, I think Celeste is also an imagined representation of Jones’s brother, whom the courts had institutionalized because they considered him “feebleminded” and because they considered his mother incapable of providing adequate care (qtd. in Wood

50). In this view, most of Jones’s physically or mentally disabled characters—Celeste from The Known World, Miles from All Aunt Hagar’s Children, or Anna from Lost in the

City—might function to visualize a better world for his brother. With regard to Celeste, however, Jones appears to centralize her voice in the slave community because she functions as a representation of an alternative to Henry’s “known world.” In her, dispossessed people live fully human lives, despite other’s opinions regarding their disadvantages. In this view, the novel’s dedication, which I partially quoted earlier, is important. The full dedication reads this way: “To my brother, Joseph V. Jones and, again, to the memory of our mother, Jeanette S. M. Jones, who could have done much more in a better world.” Considering the dedication, Celeste can be read as a

101

representation of that other, albeit better, world. In this, the character’s name is most

appropriate.

It is important to mention that, although Celeste is a fictional character, her ways

of being offer a picture into distinct African American patterns of living and resisting

during slavery. Instead of resisting the master’s intent to dehumanize with force or by

running away—which some African Americans certainly did—Celeste resists

dehumanization by remaining committed to an African-centered worldview. The practice of this worldview on the part of Southern slaves constituted the most popular form of resistance in the antebellum South. It is a worldview that Dona Richards (Marimba Ani) has identified as the “Africanness” that allowed enslaved persons “to survive in the . . . wasteland of America” (247). If Jones uses decadence as a rhetorical device to encourage a rejection of mastery, as I have shown in Chapter Two, he uses Celeste’s character and her acceptance of an African-centered worldview as counter rhetoric to encourage the reception of an African cosmology. In this, the African worldview is the cosmological

“home” that the novel beacons its black characters to. It is the home that Elias fears he strays away from when he seeks revenge for Moses’s treatment of him (336-338).

Interestingly, to reorient himself in that worldview, he looks for Celeste, whom he sees standing “in the cabin doorway waiting for him” (373). As he looks at her, he understands her power to “point him toward home” (373). Thus, by recognizing Celeste as a kind of synecdoche for the African worldview, Elias recognizes the character’s representation as something otherworldly. I suspect that the novelist wants readers to recognize this as well.

102

In The African Personality in America: An African-Centered Framework, Joseph

Baldwin explores this cosmological home—this Afrocentric worldview—differentiating it from a Eurocentric one. He argues that Eurocentric cosmological principles are grounded in “individualism, materialism, duality, and conflict” (29)—those things that

Hebert Spencer has called “survival” (444). On the other hand, Baldwin reads “the

African cosmological core” as being reflective of an alternative cosmic order (23), which, for Baldwin, is rooted in values such as “interrelationship,” “collectivism,” “spirituality,” and “harmony” (19). In the novel, Celeste offers a counter-hegemonic discourse through her grounding in these African-centered principles. Thus, if Henry and Caldonia’s world represents an acceptation of “the known world,” which, as Maria Seger has argued in

“Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Slave Narrative: Reading the Maps of Edward P. Jones’s

The Known World,” is a metaphor for a problematic worldview, Celeste represents the potency of an undervalued world, one at the center of slave life in the antebellum South.

Celeste exhibits an African-centered focus on interrelationship and collectivism when she decides, along with Elias, to take on Luke as a surrogate son. Readers are not exactly sure what happens to Luke’s biological parents—although the narrator suggests that Luke is sold by his parents’ master (71). Despite such indications, readers are only certain that his mother lives “two counties over” and that “no one could [ever] find his father” (71).9 They also know that Luke is “the only child over two years old in the cemetery” (71), having died from hard work while being leased out to some other plantation. In this situation—both in Celeste’s love for Luke and in the narrator’s description of Luke’s death—the novel offers a literary representation of the real.

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As Frederick Douglass shows in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An

American Slave, leased persons were often treated poorly on Southern plantations. They were usually physically abused and seriously overworked. While some slaveowners wanted their slaves abused by people like Edward Covey, that infamous “nigger-breaker”

in Douglass’s Narrative (65), most slaveowners did not want their property poorly treated

during lease periods. These did not want their slaves injured. In fact, as Alexander

Reinert argues in “Reconceptualizing the Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, and

‘Cruel and Unusual’ Punishment,” widespread poor treatment of slaves by non-

slaveowners contributed to the emergence of judicial standards for cruel and unusual

punishment. Thus, “by 1705,” Reinert writes, “Virginia expanded the scope of regulation

to include penalties for those who abused . . . slaves without a slaveholder’s permission”

(834). The irony of such “regulation,” of course, is that slavery itself was a kind of cruel

and unusual punishment. Adding to the irony is the fact that slaveholders could permit

others to exact cruel and unusual punishment on slaves if he or she so desired. Setting

aside these difficult contradictions, the point here is that Luke’s death is historically

reflexive—so, too, is Celeste’s love.

As Marie Jenkins Schwartz has argued in “Family Life in the Slave Quarters:

Survival Strategies,” enslaved persons often formed familial bounds that transcended

biological ties. According to Schwartz, a need for such extended families resulted from

slaveowners’ insistence that slaves think of their relationship with their masters as “the

most important relationship” in their lives (36). To facilitate this false endearment,

slaveowners often separated families on auction blocks and spoke of “slaves as part of

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[their own] family” (Schwartz 36). This detail is realized in the novel when several “slave

uprisings,” a phrase slaveowners in Manchester County thought a bit “abolitionist,” are

rendered “family squabbles” by white masters (148). Thus, in order to reject the master’s

desire to make them a “part of the family,” slaves often consciously constructed complex

“extended kin” relationships (Schwartz 37) that were ultimately responsible, as John

Blassingame has argued in The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum

South, for “the slave’s ability to survive on the plantation without becoming totally

dependent on and submissive to his [or her] master” (151).

Through her care for Luke, Celeste demonstrates this tendency on the part of

Southern slaves to create sustainable extended-kin matrices. However, her commitment to communalism and family building should not be considered a literary reflection of something the American slave created in the New World. Instead, it is best to view this penchant as a reflection of something the American slave conjured. As Olasunkanmi

Aborisade shows in “Liberal and Communitarian Discourse: An African Perspective,” traditional African societies practiced communalism as a way of life (616-619). In such communities, children were the property of both parents and tribe, and community members often relied on one another to create meaningful lives. In the context of slave communities, this focus on the communal is a reflection of slaves’ ability to go into themselves and pull out of that self a distinct African way of relating to the world. By activating her “ancient properties” (Erickson 307) and by taking care of Luke, Celeste demonstrates her commitment to communal love and collectivism. The important point

105 here is that Luke’s situation, together with Celeste’s reaction to it, serves to highlight the

African-centered practices at the center of slave survival in the antebellum South.

In this regard, although the novel has a lot of ahistorical detail, most of its incidents are surprisingly real. I have been pointing to several of these realities throughout this chapter, and such realities are important because they buck the critical trend. Instead of mentioning how the novel reflects history, critics have tended to focus on the novel’s historical inaccuracies. Oddly then, critics of Jones’s novel have responded to Jones’s liberator(y) narrative in the same way that white critics initially responded to early freedom narratives by former American slaves. In “The Site of Memory,” Toni

Morrison explains this critical proclivity; she points out that slave narratives rarely received “fair appraisal by literary critics” (300). She continues:

The writings of church martyrs and confessors are and were read for the

eloquence of their message as well as their experience of redemption, but

the American slaves’ autobiographical narratives were frequently scorned

as ‘biased,’ ‘inflammatory,’ and ‘improbable.’ These attacks are

particularly difficult to understand in view of the fact that it was extremely

important, as you can imagine, for the writers of these narratives to appear

as objective as possible—not to offend the reader by being too angry, or

by showing too much outrage, or by calling the reader names. (300)

Morrison’s comments, although a reference to critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, also indict the current critical collective. When analyzing Jones’s novel, several critics have highlighted the novel’s improbabilities—that is, they have

106 focused on the novel’s ahistorical detail. This is not to say that their points have been altogether inappropriate; in fact, I have used some of their arguments to support my ideas throughout this chapter. While some discussion about the novel’s historical violations are necessary, some critics have taken their analyses of the novel’s occasional disregard for historical truth to the extreme. In “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Slave Narrative:

Reading the Maps of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World,” for example, Maria Seger has approached calling Jones a liar. When writing about whether Jones did any research for the novel (in several interviews Jones rejects the notion that he did any deliberate research for the project), Seger suggests that critics “have cause to doubt the sincerity of

Jones’s claims” (1183). Remarkably, Seger has found space to critique the novel’s reflection of historical truth even as she outlines the novel’s violations of truth. In such a situation, the novelist is persistently and distressingly bested—that is, he is damned he if includes historical detail and damned if he does not. In Seger’s analysis, certain truthful elements in the novel must have been researched since it is not likely that the literary imagination could have happened upon these truths on its own. I seriously disagree.

At stake in critics’ focus on historical fact is a kind of washing away of the spirituality of the novel. How might our reading of postbellum narratives change if we considered them, as Toni Morrison does, as spiritual acts of “remembering” (305)? If

Melvin Rahming, in “Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in Garfield Linton’s

Voodoomation: A Book of Foretelling,” is right—that “spirit” is an “infinite, self- conscious force or energy that originates, drives, and perpetually interrelates everything in the universe” (36; emphasis added)—it seems at least possible to me that Jones could

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have tapped into his spirituality in order to limn a fictive world entirely historical in its

orientation. And when one considers the transcendence of the “cosmic spirit” (Rahming

36), it might also be possible that Jones’s fiction could reveal historical realities that are

so far outside our current historical understandings—indeed, our current cosmological

capacity—that things we consider improbable might have been actual.

To modern readers, the neo narrative and its offshoots offer a unique challenge:

they provide an invitation to look at the world from the eyes of those Africans who lived

the horrors of slavery. In order to understand the complexities of their world, we must

dispense with the orderliness of our own. This is not only important for reading the

narratives but also for critically interpreting them. Sadly, critics have unknowingly read

the novel with understandings from their own, sometimes Western-centered worlds, instead of reading the lives of its characters from the point of view of the enslaved. In keeping with these reading strategies, critics have read the novel’s insistence that people can talk to the dead or that children can combust or that crow can fly upside down as fantastic, not realizing that “stranger” things have happened in the real lives of African spiritualists—in this, Malidoma Some’s Of Water and Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and

Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman comes to mind. So far removed from an

African-centered cosmology, we have been rather ill-equipped to understand the African- centered realities of the characters in postbellum narratives. The first step toward understanding these novels is to take seriously the novels’ claims as truth, even when such claims might contradict the facts we know.

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While critics have been willing to indulge the histories included in neo narratives,

I think scholars have only read them as fiction—that is, they have not read them not as legitimate correctives to the “master narrative.” Morrison explores this kind of reading.

She writes:

Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of

imaginary-invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with “what

really happened,” or where it really happened, or when it really happened,

and nothing in it needs to be publicly verifiable, although much in it can

be verified. . . . The work that I do frequently falls, in the minds of most

people, into the realm of fiction called fantastic, or mythic, or magical, or

unbelievable. I’m not comfortable with these labels. I consider that my

single gravest responsibility (in spite of that magic) is not to lie. . . .

Therefore, the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact

and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can

exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot. (302-303)

In one sense, Morrison’s article can be read as a defense of Beloved, her critically acclaimed novel about the imagined life of Margaret Garner. In another way, it can be read as an apologia for the legitimacy of the genre and the potential of its works to point readers toward little known truths about slavery.

Although Celeste does not kill anyone, she shares with Sethe, Beloved’s remarkable heroine, a desire to keep her babies “safe” (Beloved 200). Historically, other enslaved persons expressed this desire to keep their extended families protected from the

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horrors of slavery. When their own power was incapable of accomplishing this, they used

love, and the power that emanates from that universal spirit, to protect their families from

the machinery of slavery. This focus on communal love constitutes a theme in Jones’s

fiction—in this, I am thinking of Ruth from All Aunt Hagar’s Children or Sherman from

Lost in the City. Despite the commitment to the communal in these works and among these characters, Celeste is Jones’s crowning achievement in this regard. Still, although

Celeste’s attempts to love her extended family says something about her African-centered personality, her commitment to forgiveness as a tool to foster communal harmony is most reflective of the character’s beauty. With regard to this point, careful readers will remember that Celeste forgives Moses for his role in her miscarriage. She also encourages her husband to forgive the man. In this, Celeste seems to be more willing to blame the institution of slavery for her baby’s death than the person immediately responsible for perpetuating slavery’s horrors.

One day, some six months into her pregnancy, Celeste wakes up and tells Elias that “she [is] not feeling all that well” (325). Eventually, Elias relays this information to

Moses, noting that he is willing to do Celeste’s share of the work. Despite this invitation,

Moses does not allow the arrangement; he demands that the couple gets “out in them fields long with evbody else” (325). In a gesture most indicative of Moses’s cold- heartedness, he tells Elias, “Ain’t nobody doin nobody share but they own” (325). It is important to note here that Moses’s focus on individualism in the scene stands in stark contrast to Elias’s communal focus. In this, the novel uses an African-centered way of being to critique a problematic and Euro-centric approach to life. In this regard, while

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Elias is willing to pick up the slack in order to accommodate his wife’s sickness, Moses

is only focused on matters of individual responsibility. Because of his commitment to

individualism, Moses forces Celeste to the field that day, where she eventually delivers a premature baby. The baby ultimately dies, of course, and it is after the death of the child that Elias commits himself to revenge.

However, Celeste discourages Elias’s exactment of retribution. When fate offers

Elias the opportunity to requite Moses for his inconsideration, Elias ultimately ignores

the privilege. Here, it is important that readers find Elias focusing on Celeste at the

moment he has a change of heart (373). As he looks at her in the doorway of their cabin,

he wonders “just where he was in the world?” (373), wanting Celeste to “tell him right

and point him toward home” (373). Here, it important that “tell him right” figures in

Elias’s imagination since it says something about the sassiness with which African

American women usually “straighten” people out—that is, it says something about her lingering “womanish” ways. Celeste obliges Elias’s request, reminding him that “it ain’t right to do what they brought you for” (373). Here, Celeste cautions Elias against sub-

human behaviors like revenge, as if the reproduction of such behaviors was the purpose

of slavery to begin with. Thus, Elias eventually abandons his plans for revenge, showing

a kind of pity for Moses instead.

By the end of the novel, Elias is able to see that the institution of slavery has

created the monster Moses has become. Elias’s sight in this regard amounts to the novel’s

epiphany—which Amy Hungerford has argued the novel lacks.10 Through Elias’s

newfound understanding of slavery—represented in his acknowledgment that “after

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Moses, [he] knew he would be next, and then Louis, the son of a black woman” (373)— the character is able to put Moses’s behavior in proper perspective. It ultimately causes him to forgive Moses. In this, Celeste is a catalyst for forgiveness, but the narrative also demonstrates her own acts of forgiveness. In the final pages of The Known World, after

Moses returns from having his Achilles’ tendon cut in “two swift . . . motions” (373) and after he loses his desire to “fix his own meals anymore” (387), Celeste ensures that the fallen Moses has something to eat every night. In fact, the narrator relays her dogged commitment to Moses’s wellbeing. In the novel’s final lines, it tells readers that Celeste’s

“meals to Moses would be until the end. Celeste was never to close down her days, even after Moses had died, without thinking aloud at least once to everyone and yet no one in particular, ‘I wonder if Moses done ate yet’” (388). These lines function to reflect

Celeste’s commitment to communalism, but they also serve to underscore Celeste’s

African-centered worldview.

From Celeste’s perspective, neither wrongdoing nor death can separate a person from a community. Her comments suggest a unity of existence that bridges her world—or the land of the living—with the Moses’s world—or the place of the ancestors. Thus, she finds herself loving Moses through the spirit—that force that “perpetually interrelates”

(Rahming 36) things in the universe. However, aside from pointing readers toward some understanding of Celeste’s complex worldview, the lines offer other curiosities. For example, what exactly does “the end” refer to in the passage? In one sense, it refers to

Moses’s life (or Celeste’s existence), but I think it also functions to say something about

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the end of the worldview that Moses and Henry and those other characters who

experience decline so clearly represent. In this, the novel’s ending has rhetorical import.

To understand its rhetorical significance, readers must consider the state of

Manchester County at the end of the novel. By novel’s end, everyone who commits

themselves to the master narrative suffers loss. Most of these characters are killed; others

are seriously injured. For those who escape death or injury, Calvin’s letter, which is dated

April 12, 1861,11 functions to foreshadow their coming decline. Thus, although the novel opens with a look at what might become of Henry’s world, it finishes with a focus on

Celeste and Alice and the worlds they are able to create. In a sense, all things pass away,

and, in the female characters, all things become new. In this regard, it is not a coincidence

that Moses is the character who limps by the end of the novel whereas Celeste’s limp

becomes somewhat indiscernible (387). The person who was on the bottom now appears

to be on a kind of top. Consider the narrator’s closing remarks: “Celeste, to be sure,

would always have the limp, but her husband and her children never noticed until

someone from outside happened to point it out to them. ‘Why yo mama be limpin and

everything?’ ‘What limp?’” the children would ask (387). In this, the novel shows that

one’s cultivation of love has the ability to wash away a person’s imperfections. In this,

Celeste provides readers a pathway to liberation: her character demonstrates that

communal love and integrity provide one a way out of personal limitations; in Celeste’s

storyline, readers gain a powerful message about how the world really functions.

Although remarkable, Celeste is not the only female character who leads others to

liberation. The most significant character in this regard is Alice, that curious slave who

113 arrives on Henry’s plantation just six months before he dies. In fact, she is the last slave that Henry purchases, and one wonders, given the mysterious way he dies, whether Alice is somehow responsible for Henry’s death. This point might initially seem far-fetched but consider that the character is always lingering behind those symbols for decline in the novel. In the novel’s opening scene, for example, when readers discover that Henry dies,

Alice is there, quietly watching Moses as he “spends time” with himself in the woods.12

The narrator says that Moses “did not know it, but Alice, a woman people said had lost her mind, was watching him now, only the first time in her six months wandering about in the night that she had come upon him” (4). If this had not been her first time watching him, readers might be justified in ignoring the narrator’s remarks, but they discover that the scene—that this particular night in Moses’s life—has something to do with the fall of

Henry’s world and with Moses’s own decline.

To get some sense of the scene’s symbolic import, consider the novel’s opening.

The Known World begins this way:

The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day

for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with

hunger and tiredness to their cabins. . . . When he, Moses, finally freed

himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest

mule his master owned . . . all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long

memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon . . . .

Moses closed his eyes . . . opening [them] in time to see the strip of sun

fade to dark blue and then to nothing. (1-2)

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This opening scene functions to symbolize the decline of Henry’s world. Here, Henry’s death is announced,13 the day is coming to an end,14 and Moses is falling asleep.15 In the scene, then, there are several literary representations of “the end.” Even the rain, which produces a “moldiness” that Moses “associates with the coming fall and winter” (2), says something about the end of one season and the approach of others. Interestingly, the rain also says something about decay: in that, instead of producing growth, the rain produces mold and rot (2). While it is just an “educated speculation,” to use a phrase from

Coleman’s work (33), it appears that Alice’s silent presence amidst all of this decay, functions to say something about her stewardship over the novel’s fallen world.

In this regard, I do not think that Alice’s arrival on the plantation—the way it corresponds with Henry’s departure from it—is coincidental. Neither is her quiet presence in a scene that is supposed to reflect her master’s decline. In this, Alice’s presence in the rainy woods that night reads something like the presence of Fon’s

“brothers” in the opening scene of Henry Dumas’s “Fon.” Although the narrator never says the brothers are responsible for what goes wrong in Nillmon’s life that night, one senses that the brothers are to blame. In the same way, careful readers will sense that there is something to Alice’s presence there in the rainy woods—and something about no one ever recognizing that she is there. In fact, before he indulges in self-pleasure—before

Moses “turn[s] away . . . from the path that led to the narrow lane of the quarters with its people”—Moses smiles, “believing he was alone” (2). In one sense, the scene functions to remark upon Moses’s commitment to individualism, but it also works to say something about the unseen forces that cause Henry’s world to end. Through Alice’s unrecognized

115 presence, and other small details in the novel’s narration, like the narrator’s comment that

Henry was going through a “bad spell” (4), readers get the sense that Alice is responsible for Henry’s decline.

Alice’s role in his death only comes into view when readers consider the character’s intense spirituality. It is a spirituality that is first recognized when she initially arrives on Henry’s plantation, although several characters read it as insanity. This is how the narrator tells readers about her initial days:

From the first week, Alice had started going about the land in the night,

singing and talking to herself and doing things that sometimes made the

hair on the backs of the slave patrollers’ necks stand up. She spit at and

slapped their horses for saying untrue things about her to her neighbors. . .

. She grabbed patrollers crotches and begged them to dance away with her

because her intended was forever pretending he didn’t know who she was.

She called the white men by made-up names and gave them the day and

time God would take them to heaven, would drag each and every member

of their families across the sky and toss them into hell with no more

thought than a woman dropping strawberries into a cup of cream. (12)

Alice’s behavior is strange indeed. However, most characters situate the roots of her strange behavior in the fact that a “mule had kicked her on the plantation in a faraway county whose name only she remembered” (4). Here, it is important that only Alice knows the county’s name. From this detail, most critics have read Alice’s insanity as a kind of feigned or constructed madness. When writing about the character in “Imagining

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Other Worlds: Race, Gender, and the ‘Power Line’ in Edward P. Jones’s The Known

World,” for example, Bassard suggests that Alice is a “liminal character” whose

“insanity” serves “as a mask for her shrewdness” (417). In this view, critics read the story

about Alice’s being kicked in the head as a part of the character’s witty scheme to free

herself from slavery. Through the story, she is able to roam around the county relatively

unbothered, and through that roaming, she learns the terrain enough to plot a trajectory

out of Virginia.

But Alice’s trick has other functions. It not only serves as a tool for Alice’s

liberation, but it also works to connect the character with the real-life exploits of escaped slaves of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the slave narratives of the African

American literary tradition, escaped persons usually employed some trick—some creative genius—in order to escape slavery. In fact, in “Literary Subterfuge Early African

American Writing and the Trope of the Mask,” Daniel Black argues that trickery—or what he calls the trope of the mask—is the controlling metaphor of early African

American literature. With regard to the slave narratives of that tradition, the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself provides the most famous of these tricks. In that narrative, the author mails himself from a safehouse in Virginia to some abolitionist home in Philadelphia. Jones’s novel provides a representation of this history when Augustus mails Rita to “a merchant in New York” (47). In addition to this, Alice’s trickery also signifies upon this history. She shows that tricks—or what Bassard has called “shrewdness” (417)—serve as prerequisites to the slave’s escape and freedom.

Interestingly, American slaves usually employed tricks to acquire the ability to read, as

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Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African

American Literary Criticism and other places. For Gates, these tricks appear

metaphorically in works of the tradition, usually alongside the trope of the talking book.

What is interesting about Alice’s feigned insanity is that, although it does not

provide her the opportunity to acquire letters, it does afford her the privilege to read her

environment. In this, the novel reconfigures the trope of the talking book and reorients

the act of “reading” in African-centered values—that is, for Africans, it would have been

more valuable, with regard to magic or for living or for surviving, to be able to know and

understand one’s environment. In this view, it is significant that Alice learns to read the

land instead of books. In Of Water and Spirit: Ritual Magic, and the Initiation in the life

of an African Shaman, Malidoma Somé articulates the importance, from an African

perspective, of a person’s ability to read the land in that he correlates this ability with

manhood rites among the Dagara peoples of Africa. By being able to roam, as Malidoma and his initiation peers were, Alice is able to familiarize herself with the environment and

“read” her way to Washington D.C. Thus, in both the actual slave narratives and in

Jones’s liberator(y) narrative, reading figures as a needed skill that leads to freedom. As

Somé points out in Of Water and Spirit, it also functions as an important component of a shaman’s initiation.

The point here is that through shrewdness or trickery the author empowers Alice with the same tools of liberation that other former slaves used. This is just one of the ways the author connects Alice’s character to the authors of actual slave narratives. In so doing, the author tries to show readers that Alice is really the person from whom the

118 novel is about. In this view, Henry is not the main character of The Known World. Said differently, if neoslave narratives, as Bell has argued in The Afro-American Novel and its

Tradition, attempt to represent a character’s “escape from bondage to freedom” (289), how might Henry be the primary character of the novel? Although most critics have read him in this way, it is important to mention that Henry never acquires freedom in the narrative. Careful readers will remember that Robbins allows Augustus to purchase

Henry, but Augustus never legally frees him. To this point, the narrator remarks,

“Augustus would not seek a petition for Henry, his son, and over time, because of how well William Robbins, their former owner, treated Henry, people in Manchester County just failed to remember that Henry, in fact, was listed forever in the records of

Manchester as his father’s property” (16). Thus, although Henry behaves himself like a free man, he is technically a slave.

With irony, these details in the novel seek to represent Henry’s bondage—not to

Southern enslavement, as it were, but to a Western worldview. In this, the novel redefines the contours of “enslavement.” In other words, the novel provides a definition of slavery that expands traditional understandings of the term; it offers what I want to call a

Definitional Continuum of Slavery. On one side of the continuum, one might find

African persons who are physically free but psychological bound—in this, Henry,

Caldonia, and Fern immediately come to mind. On the other side, one might find African persons who are both physically and mentally free (see figure 4). Each point on the continuum (where the “X” is provided on the line) represents a character’s position as some point in the novel. If it is true that a neoslave narrative should chronicle a

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character’s movement on this continuum (Bell 289)—that is from the left of the

continuum to the right—Alice’s storyline in the novel provides the greatest shift to the

right. In her narrative, the author situates a narrative of escape.

)( X X )( Free Blacks Enslaved Blacks Freed Blacks * Figure 4. Definitional Continuum of Slavery

These remarks are important because, if critics are to take Bell’s definition seriously, they must reject Henry as the novel’s principle character. In him, there is no narrative of escape. Thus, instead of thinking of Henry as the primary character, readers

should think of Alice in this regard, since, in her literary person, the narrator centralizes a

freedom journey. Although she says very little that other characters can understand, Alice

is the only figure in the novel who meets the criteria for the first-person voice that

Rushdy associates with neo-slave narratives. And since that voice is female, self-

defining, and liberative, it also satisfies Mitchell’s requirements for such characters.

Additionally, in Alice, one finds the oral qualities (Bell 289) and formal strategies

(Rushdy 4) that critics have normally associated with the form. These points are peculiar

ideas at first since the novel is not ostensibly written using the first-person perspective.

Despite what scholars have read as the novel’s mostly third-person, omniscient point of

view, there are ways that Alice speaks directly to readers of the novel. Through the

author’s use of free indirect discourse, her speaking has a first-person quality.

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To understand this point, consider Robert Stepto’s argument in “I Rose and Found

My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives.”

There, Stepto makes the case that the autobiographical voice in antebellum slave narratives are often fractured or interrupted by “authenticating voices” in such works

(225). He explains things this way:

The strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, exposing,

appealing, apostrophizing, and above all remembering his ordeal in

bondage is the single most impressive feature of a slave narrative. . . . In

their most elementary form, slave narratives are full of other voices which

are frequently just as responsible for articulating a narrative’s tale and

strategy. These other voices may belong to various “characters” in the

“story,” but mainly they appear in the appended documents written by

slaveholders and abolitionists alike. These documents—and voices—may

not always be smoothly integrated with the former slave’s tale, but they

are nevertheless parts of the narrative. Their primary function is, of course,

to authenticate the former slave’s account; in doing so, they are at least

partially responsible for the narrative’s acceptance as historical evidence.

(225)

After these lines, Stepto goes on to explain four strategies for authentication in antebellum slave narratives, but his point about interruptive authenticating voices provides some context for The Known World’s narration.

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As several scholars have suggested, statistics and other historical details flood The

Known World’s discursive plane. These details are usually provided by the novel’s

“somewhat intrusive” narrator (Bassard 407) in order to offer historical authenticity to the

narrative. In this view, the narrator serves as the authenticating voice in Jones’s

liberator(y) narrative. This is one example of its attempt at authentication:

In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four black

families, with mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those

free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another’s business.

When the War Between the States came, the number of slave-owning

blacks in Manchester would be down to five, and one of those included an

extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. census of 1860, legally

owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren. The census

of 1860 said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County, but the census

taker, a U.S. marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he

sent his report to Washington D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong

because he had failed to carry a one. (7)

In the novel, these details function to provide legitimacy to Henry’s storyline. In these

comments, for example, readers find a normalization of black slave ownership in ways that provide legitimizing context to Henry’s character. By “legitimizing context,” I mean to suggest that these details not only help to represent Henry’s storyline as historical, but they also function to provide context for his act of owning other Africans. In this, these

122 details seem to suggest that the practice of black slave ownership was somewhat common in antebellum Virginia.

The irony is that the novel’s authenticating machinery usually works to provide legitimacy to details that are historically abnormal or factually untrue. In this, Jones’s narrative provides a twist on the traditional slave narrative in order to offer a commentary on Western historiography. When the narrator does not provide historical interjections that bolster the historicity of Henry’s narrative, it provides details that strengthen the historical quality of other characters—in this, I am thinking of the narrator’s comment about Marcia H. Shia, “a white woman,” who “in 1993” published a book that “would document that every ninety-seventh person in the Commonwealth of Virginia was kin, by blood or by marriage, to the line that started with Celeste and Elias Freemen” (352).

Here, the narrator adds a nonfictional quality to Celeste and Elias’s narrative by providing a future “fact.” Interestingly, however, Marcia Shia is not an actual person.

Still, the brilliance of the novel’s authentication is that its articles of authenticity are autotelic—that is, they do not factually reference things outside of the novel’s world. In this, one finds Jones’s innovation of the genre since other neo slave narratives have tended to use historical figures as methods of external authentication—in this, I am thinking of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. For Jones, the narration does this.

It is important that Bassard refers to the narrator’s inclusion of these details as

“intrusive.” In a similar way, Michael Odom, in his article “Religious Satire and

Narrative Ambiguity in The Known World,” reads such details as obstructive, suggesting that the narrator’s recursive inclusion of historical detail has the potential to create a

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“disorientating reading experience” (91).21 For Stepto, however, this tendency to interject authenticating details has something to do with a slave narrative’s narratological type. He writes, “When the authenticating machinery dominates in this fashion, the integrated narrative becomes an authenticating narrative” (226). He goes on to define the integrated narrative as one that merges the authenticating voice “into the tale” (227)—that is, instead of providing aspects of authentication in prefaces, introductions, or appendixes, as was the case in some early African American slave narratives, the integrated narrative situates the authenticating voice in the narrative’s narration. In other words, for Stepto, an integrated narrative becomes an authenticating one when the documents and strategies of authentication seem to consume the storytelling. Both Bassard and Odom reference the dominance of the authenticating voice in their comments about The Known World, but they do not see these details as having something to do with the novel’s form. Oddly, though, the novel’s authenticating voice, represented in the novel’s omniscient narrator, usually ignores opportunities to authenticate Alice’s voice. In other words, the narrator constantly interjects historical facts to bolster the historicity of characters, but it never does this sort of thing for Alice. Her narrative is never substantively authenticated by the novel’s normal authenticating machinery. In this, the novel has something to do with

African autobiographies, especially those first-person narratives published by African spiritualists.

Whereas other slave stories in Jones’s narrative are authenticated by the narrator,

Alice authenticates her own story in the novel. To understand this point, consider that the narrator, instead of providing historical details that might say something about the

124 realness of the character and her experiences, usually abdicates its omniscience when providing descriptions of Alice’s life. Said differently, readers only know what other characters know about her; they are never provided the opportunity to know her as a complete thing in the same way that they know other characters’ past, present, and future.

To get some sense of this point, consider those lines where she is first introduced. The narrator tells this:

[Moses] did not know it, but Alice, a woman people said had lost her

mind, was watching now, only the first time in her six months of

wandering about in the night that she had come upon him . . . In her saner

moments, which were very rare since the day Moses’s master bought her,

Alice described everything about the Sunday the mule kicked her in the

head and sent all common sense flying out her. No one questioned her

because her story was so vivid, so sad—another slave without freedom

and now she had a mind so addled she wandered in the night like a cow

without a bell especially her mental wellbeing. (4)

Here, the narrator provides a description of Alice that is in keeping with much of its other comments about the character. In the extraction above, the narrator does not provide a look at Alice’s life that transcends what “people sa[y]” (4) about her.

Interestingly, the things they say are in large part determined by what she tells them— that is, they accept her story about the mule because it seems possible and because it has a bit of sentimentality. Where readers might have expected the narrator to corroborate

Alice’s story with authenticating detail, the narrator just accepts Alice’s version of things

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like everyone else. In fact, by the time readers find about Manchester’s society of slave-

owning free blacks, the narrator has completely imbibed Alice’s version of events. It

tells:

After a time, Alice went down the way the men had come. She shook the

dirt of the road from her frock. She wouldn’t get back her cabin until

about four-thirty that morning; several times in the past she had no gotten

home until about noon. What moon there was now gone. She began to

chant after a few yards and was just as loud as she had been in the

beginning. On a day before the mule kicked her in the head, an African

woman, who spoke very little English had told her that some angels were

hard of hearing, that it was best to speak real loud when talking to them.

(77)

Here, it is significant that a story the narrator first describes as hearsay becomes

something it represents as truth.

This self-authentication has something to do with the spiritual autobiography of at least one African spiritualist, Malidoma Somé. In Of Water and Spirit, Somé explores his

initiation into manhood and into his calling as a spiritualist. When describing his first day

at initiation camp, Somé suggests that it had begun with singing and with fire. He

recounts the experience this way:

The violent first looked like a ghost with flaming arms, one of which held

a flaming stick. The legs seemed to be covered by a robe, all of flame,

roaring horribly. The elders had disappeared as if they had removed

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themselves unseen from the center circle. Only this ghost remained,

roaring with a deep voice. I suddenly knew what we were going to be

doing in the next six sets of five days, which made up the Dagara week,

but nobody seemed to have told me this. . . . I doubt that the whole thing

took more than thirty minutes, but when I came back to myself, the ghost

was becoming a regular fire again. It receded slowly—reluctantly, as if

fearing a trap—into the fire. The elder responsible for this magical event

was standing in front of the fire. . . . The other elders were still standing

where they had been before. They had been there all the time, and I

suspected that my impression that they had vanished had something to do

with the mysterious presence in the fire. (198)

Here, and throughout Somé’s Of Water and Spirit, the author relays his mystical experience without ever providing authenticating detail. The truth of his experience is felt, one supposes, through the passion with which he tells the story—or, to use Jones’s narrator’s words, by considering the “vivid” (4) detail that the speaker uses to articulate his narrative. In one sense, then, one’s knowledge about the truthfulness of the scene is really a matter of belief.

What I am trying to point out here is that the novel offers a dialectic—a discursive tension as it were—between two methods of knowing and that this tension is represented in the novel’s system of storytelling. In one method, supported by “facts,” truth is determined by what can be externally verified. This is the sort of knowing the slave narratives of the African American literary tradition appealed to when they offered in

127 their works authenticating “documents and strategies” (Stepto 227). This knowing is a

Western kind of truth-building, one that situates the authentication of truth outside the self. Here, “self” not only refers to a truth that is located outside one’s own speechedness—which is necessarily multiphonic—but a truth that is also positioned outside one’s racial self—that is, a truth that is externally verified in the racial other. In this, it is not coincidental that most of the authenticating documents of the American slave’s narrative is provided by white voices. And even despite those white voices, a white majority usually ignored the American slave’s appeal for freedom through the slave’s narrative. Through its spotlight on contradiction, the novel shows that belief

(instead of fact) is really at the center of all epistemologies.

In The Known World, Jones signifies upon this epistemology by including details that appear to be historically authenticating but that turn out to be historically false. In this, one finds a “parody,” to quote Seger, of the “generic elements of a historical novel”

(1185), but one also finds a mocking of the antebellum slave narrative and its appeal to

Western epistemology. In his liberator(y) narrative, Jones argues that the subjects of the

American slave’s narrative were dislocated from their African selves. To this point,

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life comes to mind. In it, Douglass suggests that the slave’s acceptation of white culture could lead to a kind of cultural evolution for the slave. Literarily, Jones represents this dislocation in Henry’s character, who even Bassard has read as demonstrating a “(dis)location of black subjectivity” (407). Interestingly, however, Jones also argues that the form of the slave’s narrative evinces a dislocation from African systems of authentication, which were oral and reliant on character and

128 belief. What is interesting is that in order to signify against the American slave’s acceptation of a Western system of knowing, evidenced in the former slave’s acceptation of Western methods of authentication, he uses strategies rooted in the African autobiography. More important to our discussion here is that fact that this corrective voice—this deft critique of a tradition—is situated in the marginal speechedness of the black female spiritualist. In Alice’s character, one finds an alternative method of knowing and of verifying.

First, in Alice, one discovers that orality can function as a means to truth. This point is represented in the novel when Alice believes, by the mouth of an African woman,

“that some angels were hard of hearing, that it was best to speak real loud when talking to them” (77), and although the oral tradition is included in other places in the novel, like in ideas such as “it was gospel among slaves that one of the quickest ways to hell was to tell lies about dead people” (209) or in the old man’s admonition to Stamford, that, to “help him survive slavery . . . [he needed] young stuff” (190), Alice is the only adult character in the novel whose behavior demonstrates that she takes orally transmitted wisdom seriously. This is one of the reasons why she usually sings her songs loudly. In her behavior, she demonstrates that she takes the orally transmitted information as true. Still, perhaps the most important counter-Western method of knowing is rooted in the character’s spirituality.

While critics have considered Alice’s behavior as a reflection of her insanity, much of that behavior lies outside her “trick.” Instead, most of her odd dealings can be interpreted as spiritual trance. In “Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in

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Garfield Linton’s Vodoomation: A Book of Foretelling,” Melvin Rahming explores trance as a practice in literary space. When analyzing Linton’s Voodomation, Rahming writes this:

As I have already implied, the notion that the individual who achieves the

state of trance has entered a world of endless possibilities is an ancient

one. . . . According to Egyptologist Ra Un Nefer Amen’s explanation of

the Kametic notion of trance, it is possible, through the application of a

Kametic meditative technique, for the individual to enter a state of

consciousness where he or she is released from any awareness of physical,

sensory, or intellectual activity. This disengagement renders the individual

open to stimuli (impulses, association, and experiences) that are entirely

spiritual in nature and that obliterate the very technique that facilitates

their occurrence. Thus, the individual’s conversation may become the site

for such phenomena as contact and conversation with dead, visions of the

past or future, shape-shifting, the consciousness of animals or even things,

time-travel, telepathy, prophecy, etc.—experiences generally believed to

be unavailable to the individual during “normal” waking hours. (38)

While readers of The Known World are not provided descriptions of Alice’s “meditative

technique,” the novel seems to suggest that her trance—that her access to a world outside

the world other characters in the novel inhabit—begins every night, outside of waking

hours, at the intersection of several roads. That is, Alice’s strange behavior usually occurs

at night after she has sung “darky songs in the road” (13).

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In this, one could read her method for accessing an alternate world, not as a

Kametic one, but as a distinctively Yoruba one: a technique rooted in the Ancient religious practices of Ifa. In The Way of the Orisa: Empowering Your Life through the

Ancient African Religion of Ifa, Philip Neimark argues that Elegbara/Esu is at the center of a person’s access to the wisdom of Ifa since “Esu, through sacrifice, serves as messenger between humans and the other orisa and between humans and God” (73).

According to Neimark, this spirit not only opens “paths and doors and roads” but also can be found at these places (72). In this sense, it is not a coincidence that Alice’s odd behavior usually appears as she moves “from one side of the road to other” (13). In the same, it is not by chance that she usually sings when she finds herself on the road: according to Neimark, followers of Ifa should always begin ritual with a song or chant to

Esu (73).

More importantly, it is significant that Neimark interprets Ifa as a religion that has the power to change a person’s destiny. Considering what white authorities in

Manchester County had planned for her life, Alice engages Esu at the crossroads in order to change her destiny and life-trajectory. In this, one can’t help but think of the African proverb offered in The Way of the Orisa: “Ori ki bum ko fe de ale, He it iwa nikan lo sow,” which means, “No matter how bad a person’s destiny may be, there is an amendment, but the more difficult to amend is an individual’s character” (146).

Regarding this wisdom, Neimark writes, “[I]n the Yoruba cosmology—in which the universe contains all possibilities, both good and bad, and individuals have opportunities for controlling their own destinies by working with natural forces—the failure to control

131 one’s own destiny is seen as an act of gross stupidity with potentially dire consequences”

(74).

These ideas are relevant to Alice’s trance because they ultimately serve as the mechanisms for it—and for the character’s manifestation of what Rahming identifies as trance behavior. Through her worship at the crossroads, Alice taps into another world and its knowing, one that allows her to tell white people “the day and time God would take them to heaven” (12) or to take on the consciousness of animals when she slaps “horses for saying untrue things about her” (12). Most importantly, this world—this road as it were—provides Alice access to a sustainable freedom. One wonders whether Alice received her initiation into the knowledge of this world by the old African woman in the novel who speaks little English—the one who tells Alice that she had to speak loudly if she wanted the Angels to hear her (77). It is particularly important here that “angels,” at least from a Yoruba perspective, are the orisa. What is significant here is that Alice’s ability to change her destiny is largely the product of an orally based spiritual education.

This education functions in the novel to critique Henry’s education, which is rooted in the written word of white men—in this, I am thinking of Fern’s teachings of Milton and the

Bible. The point I am making here is that, in Alice’s character, the novel centers a critique of Henry’s method for freedom—which, ironically, does not actually lead to freedom—and offers Alice’s road as the primary “map” for freedom. I say “map” here because Alice’s multimedia piece at the end of the novel really works to show the supremacy of her method for freedom.

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Interestingly, Jones shows that the West had a spirituality once. In this, Alice’s roommates, Delphie and Cassandra, are important. Although these women in the novel are no doubt African women, their names represent a lost Western prophetic tradition that was oral in its orientation. Readers of Greek mythology will remember that Cassandra was that curious figure who was cursed by the gods to speak (true) prophecies that no one would ultimately believe. At the level of metaphor in the novel, her destiny represents an abandonment of spiritual understanding—or a lack of belief in them. Delphie, I think, is a play in the novel on Delphi, which was the home of Pythia. The women on the margin represent a neglected method of knowing. Interestingly that method is centralized in

Alice Night, a character who reads something like the crazy womanist voice in Alice

Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.”

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Notes

1. While I agree that Jones’s novel can sometimes provide otherworldly details, I disagree with the critical tendency to refer to these details as “fantastic.” Importantly, the analytical locality of the term is outside an African-centered understanding regarding the realness of spirit and its workings in the lives of African people. If the fantastic, as Eric

Rabkin has described it in The Fantastic in Literature, refers to details that “extend experience” (4) or with novelistic events that “contradict perspectives” (4), the question becomes this: Whose experiences/perspectives do “fantastic” events extend or contradict?

If the reader’s experiences are being extended/contradicted, the term seems inappropriately applied to the novel. The same problem emerges with terms very similar to “fantastic,” those like “magical realism.” Since these terms do not situate their descriptions in the worldview/cosmology of the characters who encounter the supernatural, it is best to abandon the use of such terms when referring to African

American texts. Instead, critics should use “spirit-centered,” a term Melvin Rahming explores in “Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in Garfield Linton’s

Voodoomation: A Book of Foretelling.”

2. For the work these narratives attempt to do, it is important to call them

“fictionalizing” or “fictionalized” instead “fictional.” The slight change in language more appropriately describes the neo-slave narrative’s attempt to provide fundamental truths that legitimately revise readers’ understandings of slavery. By calling them fictional, it seems to me that critics might be emphasizing the imaginative role of these narratives instead of their important social function.

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3. Although scholars usually attribute the term to Bernard Bell, it is first mentioned in a 1984 interview with Ishmael Reed. See Reginal Martin’s “A Conversation with

Ishmael Reed.” Although Bell provides something more of a better definition than Reed, he does not “coin” the term in the way that Seger has suggested. See Seger’s “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Slave Narrative: Reading the Maps of Edward P. Jones’s The Known

World,” p. 1193.

4. In The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory, Paul Fry argues against a ridged formalism, suggesting that it is possible to develop accurate interpretations of literary art that look to a-literary things to interpret that art. When writing about the weaknesses of formalism, he mentions the flaws of Aristotle’s approach. He writes, “Aristotle’s formalism not only averts the attention of criticism from much that is valuable in literature but also hinders a just estimate of what remains” (11).

5. See Donaldson’s “Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South,” p. 268.

6. I am not trying to minimize the way slavers attempted to assault black men and black masculinity. Instead, I am trying to emphasize that women were also abused. In much of the discussion about the institution, maleness figures prominently, and, at times, subconsciously dominates discussion regarding the institution’s injustices. For example, in Robert Stepto’s “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and

Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives,” the author refers to “the slave” using only male-gender pronouns. While his use may have something to do with the narratives he

135 explores, this tendency to use maleness as the standard in discussions about slavery is problematic given the role women played. Still, this male centering is the norm/standard.

7. In the novel, Winifred Skiffington can be read as a woman who emotional oppressed the idea of slavery.

8. In The Roving Editor; or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, James Redpath argues that Southern white women were under the “shadow” of slavery. Naively (and perhaps misogynistically), he argues that, if they were not so heavily influenced by men in the region, they might have abolished the practice themselves.

9. The implication is that the father had run away. In this and other small details,

Jones points at the impact of slavery on the black family. In some ways, he offers a theory regarding the origins of its breakdown.

10. See Amy Hungerford’s lectures on The Known World in Yale University’s Open

Courses repository. Much of the novel explores philosophies of being and philosophies of history. Most of the studies that explore such things are written by German scholars.

11. This is the day the Civil War begins.

12. This is another symbol of Moses’s desire for isolation; it, too, shows his commitment to individualism.

13. This shows an end to a life.

14. This shows an end to a day.

15. This shows an end of energy as it were.

CHAPTER IV

REVISION OF THE “BAD NIGGER” ARCHETYPE IN EDWARD P. JONES’S LOST

IN THE CITY AND ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN

Although the revisionary practices of Edward P. Jones take on an impressionistic quality in the author’s novelistic art, Jones’s attempt to revise character types, cultural ideas, and literary forms in the African American literary tradition are more easily observed in the author’s short fiction, especially “Young Lions” from Lost in the City and

“Old Boys, Old Girls” from All Aunt Hagar’s Children. In these works, readers find remarkable revisions of the Bad Nigger archetype. Although critics have been quiet about this specific element of revision, they have commented more generally about the revisionist quality of Jones’s short fiction. In “The Known World of Edward P. Jones,” for example, Neely Tucker suggests that the author’s most recent collection, All Aunt

Hagar’s Children, revises or updates character types that appear in the first collection,

Lost in the City. Tucker writes this:

It’s gone almost completely unnoticed, but the two collections are a

matched set: There are 14 stories in “Lost,” ordered from the youngest to

the oldest character, and there are 14 stories in “Hagar’s,” also ordered

from youngest to oldest character. The first story in the first book is

connected to the first story in the second, and so on. To get the full history

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of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the

second story in each, and so on. (20-21)

Although the stories in both collections are interdependent in this way, only two works

appear to feature the same character.

Both “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls” focus on Caesar Matthews, a petty thief turned hard-core criminal who lives in Washington D.C. When readers first

meet him in “Young Lions,” Caesar is a teenager who is struggling to deal with the loss

of his mother.1 In this, Caesar appears as a character who is trying to navigate a difficult

transition. However, unlike other characters in Lost in the City, Caesar’s navigation

through difficulty is more clumsy—and less moral—than other characters’ movement

through hardship and loss. Whereas figures like Robert Morgan move somewhat

righteously through their personal tragedies, Caesar turns to crime in order to avoid

dealing with his hurt. After his mother’s death—and without the tools to deal

appropriately with his loss—Caesar links up with Angelo Billings, a young man his

father considered a “goddamn no-account” (Lost 68). Angelo is also Caesar’s cousin, and

although their burgeoning closeness helps Caesar cope with his mother’s death, it also

leads him to a life of crime. By the end of the first story, readers discover that Caesar is

not afraid to rob strangers. In fact, criminality becomes so much a part of the character

that even his dreams chronicle his criminal exploits.2

By the time readers encounter Caesar again, in “Old Boys, Old Girls,” he has

aged, of course, but his criminal behavior has also evolved. Whereas he is only a robber in the first story, Caesar is a thief and a murderer in the second. While readers might have

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expected a progression in Caesar’s violence, they might not have anticipated the

incredible complexity that Jones provides him in the second story. “Old Boys, Old Girls”

begins with a line that emphasizes his criminal habits—it begins, “They caught him after

he killed the second man” (76)—but during the course of that story, Caesar softens in

ways that make his humanity more visible to readers. In this, one wonders whether his

confrontation with the “disease” (84) racing down his arm serves as a catalyst for his

transformation. Whatever the catalyst, Caesar’s care for his ex-girlfriend Yvonne, or his

tender affection for Joanie’s daughter, will likely shock readers who are familiar with his

character.

In this chapter, I argue that Edward P. Jones’s use of the Bad Nigger type evinces an absorption of this popular figure from the African American literary tradition. I suggest that in “Young Lions,” the first story in which the type explicitly appears,

characteristics of the Badman are repeated, but, there, the figure is also revised. Whereas

other works of the tradition portray him as a one-dimensional character, Jones’s

portraiture of the type completely humanizes the figure. In this, Jones provides a Badman

in “Lost in the City” that is more human than the Bad Niggers that appear elsewhere in

the tradition. Although the author’s human portrait functions as a corrective, the revision in the first story is only a slight one. In the second story, however, Caesar is so

thoroughly revised that he grows out of his Badman habits. In “Old Boys, Old Girls,”

Jones transforms the character into a family man, which could be read as a foil to the original type. Through this final transformation of the figure, the author argues for a transformation of the type in the tradition.

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Although Jones’s work focuses on the literary Badman, scholarly opinion has it

that the Bad Nigger, who is called several other things in the academy,3 did not start life

as a mythic or literary figure. Instead, scholars suggest that he first emerged on the

Southern plantation. There, he was a rebellious slave. In Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World

the Slaves Made, Eugene Genovese remarks upon the Badman’s origins; he comments on

his early behavior. He explains that, “from slavery times to the present, black people have

had to deal with “bad niggers” and “ba-ad niggers” (625). For Genovese, “The ‘ba-ad

nigger’ gave the white man hell, whereas the ‘bad nigger’ terrorized other blacks.

[However,] the real world being what it is, most ba-ad niggers were sometimes just bad,

and vice versa” (625).

In most of the tales, legends, and songs about him, the Bad Nigger has two

prevalent characteristics: he is always criminal, and he is invariably bestial. These two

qualities inform all his other bad behaviors. To demonstrate this point, any folklore on the

Badman would do, but consider the songs about Railroad Bill. In the folklore about this figure, who most scholars read as an artistic interpretation of Morris Slater’s life, one is able to witness a kind of badness that “surpasses any other” (“Folk-Song” 291). For example, in Howard Odum’s collection of songs about the figure, Railroad Bill is

described as an unrepentant serial murder. He “kill[s] McMillan” (291), and he “kill[s]

McGruder” (292). He is also willing to kill “the farmer” (289), but he shows some restraint in this regard.4 Although he only kills two people in songs that Odum collects,

Railroad Bill is said to have killed as many as “a dozen men” in other collections about

him (Roberts 172). What is interesting about Railroad Bill’s criminal behavior is that

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songsters usually never begin their sets with songs about his murders. Instead, as Odum shows, performers usually start by providing songs about his lesser crimes, especially his robberies. Odum provides a record of a typical opening:

Some one went home an’ tole my wife

All about—well, my pas’ life

It was that bad Railroad Bill.

Railroad Bill, Railroad Bill,

He never work, an’ he never will,

Well, it’s that bad Railroad Bill

Railroad Bill so mean an’ so bad,

Till he tuk ev’ything that farmer had,

It’s that bad Railroad Bill.

I’m goin’ home an’ tell my wife,

Railroad Bill try to take my life,

It’s that bad Railroad Bill.

Railroad Bill so desp’rate an’ so bad,

He take ev’ything po’ womens had,

An’ it’s that bad Railroad Bill. (289-290)

In addition to providing this opening, Odum’s collection demonstrates that, throughout a songster’s performance, each progressive song of the set provides a more heinous chronicle of the Bad Nigger’s wrongdoings: such that, by the end of the set, every law

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enforcement officer in the region is “lookin’ fer Railroad Bill” (291). This “heat”

ultimately causes the figure to leave the South in order to go “out Wes’” (292).

Interestingly, Jones’s two stories, “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls,” portray a similar progression of crimes. In this view, Jones appears to adopt the recording strategies of the African American oral tradition when he depicts Caesar Matthews’s

Badman lifestyle. In the first story, Caesar Matthews is depicted as a robber, without full time employment, who goes about Washington stealing other people’s things. Whereas

Railroad Bill begins his life as a criminal by stealing from his neighbors, Caesar begins

his criminal existence by stealing from his father. In this, one finds a slight deviation

from the Bad Nigger type but one that functions to exaggerate the Badman’s violations

against his community (Jackson 31). In this regard, the most fundamental of communal

spaces—the nuclear family—is ultimately violated by Caesar when he participates in the

burglary of his father’s home. His robbery of Anna, another African American character, provides yet another example of communal abuse.

Although the narrator of “Young Lions” draws parallels between Railroad Bill’s first crimes and Caesar Matthews’s first offenses, its telling about Caesar’s exploits offers complexities that are absent in the oral tradition’s narratives. When depicting Caesar’s baptism into a life of crime, the narrator provides details that demonstrate a bit of apprehension on Caesar’s part. In fact, in the narrator’s description of his first robbery,

Caesar reads more like an accessory to the crime than an actual participant. The narrator provides this description:

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The next morning, [after his father had kicked him out,] they drove down

to the house on French Street and waited in the car until Caesar was

certain his father had left for work and his brother and sister had gone to

school. Caesar opened the front door with his key. He was surprised that

his father had not changed the lock. . . . [As he walked through the house,]

Caesar touched nearly everything along the way—a lace piece made by

his grandmother . . . a drawing of the house signed and dated by his sister .

. . the kitchen curtains he had helped his mother put up. (70)

Here, and through much of the other scenes that provide details about his first crime,

Caesar appears to be taking mental inventory, instead of stealing his family’s possessions.

Even when Sherman begins to go through his father’s things, taking the “little money . . . and gold pieces,” “Caesar watches” (71) more than he participates. Although the

character does not say much in these scenes, one gets the sense that the character is going to miss his family. In this, the narrator of Jones’s story provides a bit of tenderness to

Caesar’s character. By doing so, it expands the emotional vocabulary of the original

Badman, who is never really all that sentimental. For Bad Niggers of the tradition, violence and anger are the only accessible emotions.

Aside from expanding the character’s emotional behaviors, in “Young Loins,” the

narrator provides details regarding Caesar’s internal feelings that evince a bit of

apprehension. Throughout the robbery, readers get the sense that Caesar feels bad for

what he is doing—or at least remorseful for what he has done. This sort of apprehension

stands in stark contrast to the personality type of the original Badman. Whatever might be

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said of figures like Railroad Bill or Stackolee, these men do not usually experience

remorse. Although Caesar’s humanizing behaviors ultimately fade away—only “two

weeks” after he robs his father’s home, readers find him holding up a “light-skinned,

well-dressed man” near a bar on Capitol Hill—he initially begins as a fully human

character.

Through these differences, Jones’s narrator seems to suggest that the Bad Nigger

experiences a process of becoming—that is, it argues that the Badman does not start life

as a criminal. In most other literatures, this nuance is entirely absent. In these other

works, the Bad Nigger is depicted as inherently corrupt, even in forms where a fuller,

more realistic picture might be possible. In other words, if the formal limitations of toasts

prevented context concerning Railroad Bill’s character, one might have expected

something different in the novels where the Bad Nigger appears. Instead, one sees in the

plantation fiction, as well as in African American novels where Bad Niggers appear,5

figures who are only bad. While Caesar Matthews ultimately becomes bad, his initial badness is represented in “Young Loins” as a product of hurt—that is, the character is not limned as something that begins life morally corrupt. In this, the author provides an initial update that makes the character more realistic.

Still, despite his initial apprehensions and display of human emotion, Caesar

ultimately moves from robbing to killing, like most other Bad Niggers. By the time

readers meet him in “Old Boys, Old Girls,” he has murdered two people, and, much like

the other Badmen of the tradition, Caesar is never really punished for all his crimes. To

this point, the narrator in “Old Boys, Old Girls,” tells readers that “it was almost as if, at

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least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing” (Hagar’s 75).

However, in complete contrast to the character’s initial moral clarity, Caesar’s conscience

in the second story is completely seared. Although he thinks about his crimes as he does in “Young Lions,” that meditation does not produce apprehension. In fact, it produces an indignancy. The narrator describes things this way:

Seven months after he stabbed the second man—a twenty-two-year-old

with prematurely gray hair who had ventured out of Southeast for only the

sixth time in his life—Caesar was tried for murder in the second degree.

During much of the trial, he remembered the name only of the first dead

man—Percy, or “Golden Boy,” Weymouth—and not the second,

Antwoine Stoddard, to whom everyone kept referring during the

proceedings. . . . Who the fuck is this Antwoine bitch? Caesar sometimes

thought during the trial. And here is Percy? It was only when the judge

sentenced him to seven years in Lorton, D.C.’s prison in Virginia, that

matters became somewhat clear again. (Hagar’s 75-76)

In these lines, the character’s act of introspection does not include remorse. Thus, although the character is more human in the first story, he still becomes a conscience- hardened criminal.

While these points provide insight into the author’s revision of the type, the more

important parallels between the Bad Nigger’s criminal progression and Caesar

Matthews’s criminal behavior is that both figures become homeless because of their

criminal conduct. This point is at the center of the author’s insight regarding the problems

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with the Bad Nigger type. To understand this point, first consider that, in the case of

Railroad Bill, the available folklore depicts the figure as a vagabond, who “marches to

and fro” (Roberts 172), without a permanent home. He is also presented as a figure

without a loving family. In Odum’s collection of songs, for example, the performer

mentions Railroad Bill’s penchant for roaming: he sings, “Railroad Bill had no wife /

Always lookin’ fer somebody’s life” (291). Here, the performer connects Railroad Bill’s

desire to wander about, looking for people to kill, with his inability to keep a wife and,

therefore, to construct a sustainable family. In other renditions of his history, the Badman

is depicted as a fugitive, who, by the very nature of his infamy, cannot form meaningful relationships. This is not to say that the Bad Nigger does not create any alliances; instead, it suggests that his relationships are usually one sided. As Jackson has shown, Bad

Niggers only construct relationships when they think they will get something out of the relationship (80). The relevant point regarding these details is that his criminal behavior ultimately produces his homelessness and his solitude.

In Jones’s “Young Lions,” the narrator provides a similar figure. In that story,

Caesar is a person whose criminal behavior ultimately leads to homelessness. It also leads to his being alone. That process of homelessness, which ultimately leads to his solitude, begins when Caesar’s father, Lemuel, kicks him out of the house “one night in April,” when Caesar comes home after “three in the morning” (Lost 68). More than punishing the character for coming home late, the gesture functions as a consequence for the character’s

becoming: at the time, Lemuel thinks Caesar was becoming something like Angelo,

Caesar’s criminal cousin. To this point, Lemuel remarks, “I’m just slaving away my life

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to raise up another Angelo” (Lost 68), before slapping Caesar in the face and pulling him

out of the house. Rather hurtfully, he says, “I gave you more chances than you deserved”

(Lost 68), which are the last words Caesar hears from his father.

Although perceived criminal conduct initiates the character’s homelessness,

actual criminal behavior concretizes it. Here, it is important to note that, after Caesar gets

kicked out, he initially lives with Sherman. After hitting it off with Carol, however, he

ultimately moves in with her. Throughout most of first story, then, the character is

effectively without a home of his own. In this regard, he is much like other Bad Niggers of the tradition; he is a figure with a certain dwelling place. Toward the end of “Young

Lions,” however, even Caesar’s temporary place of shelter is jeopardized. In the final lines of the story, Caesar is so enraged by Carol’s unwillingness to give him the money that he “slap[s] her and grab[s] for the bag” (Lost 75). Doing so sends the money falling to ground, and seeing the money there, he “slap[s] her again” (Lost 75). Eventually, Carol begins to walk away from Caesar, leaving him alone in the street. The narrator describes things this way:

There was something in the air, but he could not make out what it was. He

walked out of the park. He kept looking behind him, expecting something

or someone, but he was alone on the street and he saw nothing but the

swirling of dead leaves. . . . He did not know what was in the air. He only

knew that tonight would not be a night to be without safety. (Lost 76)

In these lines, specifically, and in the collection’s discussion of “home,” more

generally, one finds “the problem,” to use Northrop Frye’s phrase from the Anatomy of

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Criticism (135), that the narrator is trying to explore by using the Bad Nigger type. In this

view, the Bad Nigger in Jones’s fiction is a means to end, much in the same way that Bad

Niggers perform rhetorical functions in other works of the tradition. Through the

narrator’s use of the Bad Nigger type, Jones attempts to explore the implications of

homelessness. In fact, all the stories in the collection deal with this important theme.

Each story can be read as a different way of analyzing the consequences of homelessness

and isolation. Taken together, the stories ask what happens to a person and, consequently,

to a people, for whom home is a problematic place—for whom notions of home produce

anxieties. In this regard, home not only refers to a person’s physical dwelling place, but it

also functions as a metaphor for existential belonging.

In the collection’s opening narrative, for example, readers find an analysis

regarding the problematics of home for African American people through the pigeons

that Betsy Ann keeps. The birds are symbols for individual freedom, but they also

function as symbols for African American identity. When the birds are removed from

their original home (at Miles Patterson’s place), which readers should interpret as a symbol for Africans’ removal from their ancient homeland, they are forced to live in an alien environment with people watching over them. The birds ultimately create a home

for themselves at Betsy Ann’s place, despite their being surveilled. Through the birds’ construction, the narrator shows that home is a place people create for themselves through community—it is not a fixed notion related necessarily to place.

Although creatable, the stories in the collection also show that home is always

fraught with dangers. In the context of the opening story, this point is represented in the

148 fact that rats eventually invade the cage that the pigeons turn into their home, killing all but two of them. Later, in the same story, several homes are destroyed when the “railroad people . . . take all the land around Myrtle Street” (15), leaving the neighborhood fragmented and “obliterated” (8). Although no one dies in that taking, it produces a series of tragedies that many of the collection’s characters find hard to overcome. In these details, one finds an exploration of the forces that work to undermine the safety of home.

Adding to the collection’s discussion of home (and homelessness) is the fact that many of the characters in Lost in City and, to a lesser degree, in All Aunt Hagar’s Children die at home—in this, I am thinking of Rhonda from “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed” or Miles from “In the Blink of God’s Eye.” These are just two examples, but they work to complexify the collection’s discussion of home and homelessness. But these are abstract notions related to home.

More concretely, the narrator explores the paradox of “home” for African

Americans when Carleton, from “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” repeats a line he hears from his grandfather. When describing Robert’s first outing with Betsy Ann, the narrator tells readers this:

[Robert] did not linger on Myrtle Street; he planned to make visits there

on his way back that evening. Janet’s boys, Carlos and Carleton, walked

on either side of him up Myrtle to North Capitol, then to the corner of K

Street. There they knew to turn back. Carlos, seven years old, told

[Robert] to take it easy. Carleton, younger by two years, did not want to

repeat what his brother said, so he repeated one of the things his

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grandfather, who was losing his mind, always told him: “Don’t get lost in

the city.” Robert nodded as if he understood and the boys turned back. (9)

Here, getting “lost in the city” is a kind of figure or metonymy for homelessness. The

child, via his grandfather, is articulating important folk wisdom to Robert: that a person should never stray too far away from home. Literally, here, home is related to place, but

symbolically, home, as I have shown in Chapter 3, is the author’s fill-in for “African

cosmology” or “communalism.” In this, Carleton’s comments serve to encourage an

existential anchored-ness in an African commitment to family that ultimately dissuades

Robert from following through with the thought that “occur[s] to him perversely . . . that

if he decided to walk away forever from [Betsy Ann] and the carriage and all her stuff . . .

there was not a damn thing in the world she could to about it” (8). When Robert nods “as

if he under[stands]” Carleton’s admonition, he ultimately decides against individual

freedom in place of parental responsibility.

By providing these extractions, I am suggesting that Jones’s short fiction explores

the problematics of home in many ways. In “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls,”

the Bad Nigger archetype serves as a tool through which the author has this discussion. In

these works, the primary conflict is a conflict between the self and the community or

between individualism and collectivism. In this view, home serves as a metaphor for

communal belonging whereas “in the city” functions as a metaphor for limitless freedom.

The author points to this conflict between the self and a communal other when he

suggests, in his interview with Maryemma Graham, that the decision for Caesar

Matthews at the end of “Old Boys, Old Girls” is “whether or not he will walk away from

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the road leading to his father” (1093). In these remarks, walking away from his father is a

step toward freedom (since it would provide no authority figure). Thus, walking on the

road that leads to his father is a metaphorical walk toward existential limitation. Like

most Bad Niggers, Caesar chooses personal freedom for most of the stories in which he

appears; like other Badmen, he prioritizes freedom above all else (Robert 171-173). This

prioritization is the approach to life that Jones attempts to revise.

Caesar’s fascination with individual freedom is first manifested in “Young

Lions,” shortly after he gets kicked out of his father’s house. The narrator tells this about those initial days:

Caesar knew Sherman didn’t have a real job, but he didn’t learn until he

had been with him two months what he did for a living. He was not

particularly surprised or disappointed. Caesar was seventeen, and for the

first time in his life, he was living his days without the cocoon of family,

and beyond that cocoon, he was learning anything was possible. (69-70)

In these lines, one witnesses space as a metaphor for personal freedom. They suggest,

together with other details in the story, that Caesar sees the “cocoon” of his family—and, as an extension, the home belonging to that family—as stifling his realm of individual possibility. And because the author does not correct this problem in his initial revision of the character, Caesar’s path toward criminality is never averted. In other words, what the author comes to realize in the second story is that the Bad Nigger’s primary problem is his anti-communal worldview. In this regard the Bad Nigger’s constant need for freedom, or his continual desire for space, makes him a problem in a literary tradition where

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community ought to be centralized. Interestingly, the author registers his discontent with

Caesar’s way of thinking through the voice of a female character.6 Toward the end of the

second story, Yvonne tells Caesar, “free can kill you” (93). In this view, Yvonne not only has something to do with Caesar’s first act of communal love,7 but she also functions as

the character’s pathway toward epiphany. Before he understands her point, however, the

character spends much of his time in the story, relishing in his freedom. Thus, as a part of

the mechanics regarding his transformation, the author/narrator works to move his Bad

Nigger from a love of freedom to a commitment to community.

Remarkably, that move is not only observed in the dialogic space of the story, but

it is also evident in the novel’s physical spaces. That is, in the physical spaces of the

story, the narrator usually functions to move Caesar from open spaces to small enclosers.

For example, he moves from the streets to prison and, ultimately, from the streets to his

childhood home. This move from open space to enclosed one is entirely counter to what

occurs in the first story, when the character is often moving from smaller spaces to wide

open ones. While this may seem arbitrary, it functions as a metaphorical configuration of

the author’s argumentation. In “Space, Aesthetic Power, and True Falsity in The Known

World,” Paul Ardoin provides further insight into the metaphor. He explains that space is

often a figure in Jones’s novel for power, such that the more space a character is afforded,

the more power the narrator assigns it. Ardoin explains:

Throughout, The Known World highlights the role of space and place in

establishing and perpetuating systems of thought, and when we approach

the novel from that angle, we find sketches for a productive action of

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resistance against those systems that is rooted in aesthetic power. . . . The

novel’s plot traffics in all varieties of the invisible ideologies disguised

beneath spaces, but the novel itself celebrates the spaces that make intent

and purpose visible, thereby remaining open to future inscription. (639-

640)

While Ardoin explores the metaphorical impact of space in the novel, it appears that the

idea is relevant to Jones’s short stories as well. Recall that, in “Young Lions,” Caesar is only able to see what is “possible” outside the confines of his childhood home. In this, the walls of that space limit his existential horizon. In this regard, the character views the confines of the home as the “cocoon” that limits his agency. Conversely, he sees the streets as open possibility.

Eventually, this view toward life changes in the second story, which ends with a rather symbolic discussion of his changed character. Consider these lines:

He came out into the day. He did not know what he was going to do, aside

from finding some legit was to pay for Yvonne’s funeral. . . . He put the

bills in his pocket and looked down at the quarter in the palm of his hand. .

. . He flipped the coin. To his right was 10th Street, and down 10th were

stores and the house where Abraham Lincoln died. . . . Up 10th was the

house where he had been a boy. . . . He flipped the quarter. (100-101)

There are a couple of important but slight indications in these final lines of the story.

First, the notion that he is willing to find a legal way to pay for Yvonne’s funeral shows

that he decides to leave a life of crime. Anyone familiar with the old Caesar knows that

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the old man would have no problem robbing someone in order to pay for the funeral.

Interestingly, this detail maps on to an element of the first story, regarding Angelo’s

stealing flowers for Caesar’s mom’s funeral. In this, it is important that Angelo initiates

Caesar’s life of crime. By providing this detail about Yvonne’s funeral, that narrator shows that Caesar becomes unlike Angelo in the second story. It is also important here that Caesar is willing to give up his individual freedom. This relinquishing of control is witnessed in the character’s use of a coin to determine where he will go. Interestingly, still, is the fact this release of control moves him close to his father’s home, which is a more enclosed space than the streets. In being willing to move toward community, which is what the family home symbolizes in the story, Caesar signifies his transformation away from the Bad Nigger type. In this, he becomes something unlike Bigger Thomas, the tradition’s quintessential Badman.

In much of the criticism on Richard Wright’s Native Son, critics view Bigger’s murders of Bessie and Mary as existential acts of becoming. In this view, Bigger’s murders move the character, to use Sartre’s language, from a “being-in-itself” (121) to a

“being-for-itself” (141). In other words, the murders have been read as Bigger’s culminating acts of freedom. Bell mentions this reading of the character when he writes that the “implicit proposition” of the murders is that “men can and do murder for self-

realization” (Bell 165). In fact, Bigger himself points to his own murders as an act of

freedom when he suggests, “What [he] killed for must’ve been good” (429). Although his

decision to kill allows the character to live life on his on terms and to become a free agent

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in the world, that dogged individualism ultimately alienates him from his community and,

more importantly, ultimately destroys his life.

The problem with Bigger’s character in this regard is that he comes to view

individual freedom as the aim of a man’s life, and this view, as I have said, is the thing

that Jones is working in his fiction to combat. Thus, if we are to read Bigger’s moment of

epiphany from Jones’s critical lens, the epiphany is really a false revelation. It is not that

freedom is not important, but Jones argues that freedom without a human conscience

does nothing more than produce an animal. In this, freedom is not the primary instrument in one’s becoming—character is—although this informs the narrative of personhood in the West. When wielded by the immature, freedom becomes a tool that initiates a

person’s devolving. Instead of offering freedom as the universal human quality—that

thing we should all be chasing—Jones proposes that the real meaning of life is love.

This point comes into view when readers consider the shift that occurs in Caesar’s

character after his brother affirms his father’s love for him. Readers will remember that,

when he decides to go meet his brother and sister in Gold Coast, shortly after being

released from Lorton, his brother says this to him: “Even if you go away not wanting to

see us again, know that Daddy loves you. It is the one giant truth in the world” (95). After

hearing this, which seems to contradict what his father tells him in the first story, Caesar

begins to repeat the line in his mind, as if trying to wrestle with that “giant truth.” He

comes to accept that truth, of course, but only through his interaction with Yvonne.

Through his acceptation of the idea that someone in the world loves him, he ultimately

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changes all his Badman ways. In this, Jones demonstrates that the Badman’s problem is not a dilemma related to bondage, but a crisis related to love.

In this, one wonders whether Jones provides commentary on the psychology of

the Bad Nigger—that is, one whether Jones’s diagnoses the pathology that other scholars

have written about concerning the Bad Nigger’s personality—as a psychosis resulting

from a lack of love. Setting this issue aside, the important point here is that by centering the character’s ambition in love, instead of in free individualism, Jones critiques the motivating forces of the Bad Nigger type. However, he also revises his behavior by changing the character’s internal motivation from a focus on freedom to a desire for love.

In that love, one can ultimately situate Jones’s revision of Caesar Matthews’s character.

Interestingly, in critiquing the tradition’s Bad Nigger’s focus on individual freedom,

Jones ultimately critiques a discourse in the West that positions freedom as the ultimate object of life. In most of the West’s philosophy of being—in this, I am thinking about existentialism, which has been viewed as providing the most salient definition(s) for human beingness—freedom is considered the thing that makes a person a person. In this line of thinking, human beings, quite unlike “existents,” have the ability to function apart from their natural impulses. Whereas a lion cannot help his killing the cubs of rival

males, human beings—even if they want to kill—can suppress the impulse to kill in order

to behave more humanely. In this, the human being is free to function apart from his

nature. The irony is that the Badman’s concentration on freedom does more to bind him

to his lower nature than to free him from it. Brilliantly, then, Jones critiques this

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orientation to the world and suggests that this approach to freedom is alien to an African

cosmology.

This critique of the Bad Nigger is particularly important because it cuts against

the notion that he should be a mythic hero. In this, Jones views the character as a means

to obtain Western notions of humanity, but he argues against whether Western notions of humanness—which are inextricably tied to notions regarding freedom—should function as the African American ideal. He argues that, in a country (or place) where African

Americans have been denied humanity, they must construct for themselves notions of humanness that are separate and apart from Western definitions for such a thing. In other words, if it were true that “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” constituted those inalienable rights provided to men by a living God, what might it mean for a people who were lacking the ability to be have meaningful lives or to pursue happiness? By this definition/approach to humanness, the African American person was in no way human.

The solution to this problem, Jones argues through his critique of the Bad Nigger, was

not to create a figure who sought freedom or his own version of happiness in the extreme

but, rather, to construct a counter-definition of humanness that was more true. In this, one

finds the counter-Bad Nigger of the African American literary tradition, the black family

man, a figure that Jones attempts to turn Caesar into.

In “Some Implications for Womanist Theory,” Sherley Ann Williams explores

this counter-figure although she never suggests that it serves as a literary alternative to

the Bad Nigger type. She writes this:

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Much literature, classic and popular, by white males valorizes the white

patriarchal ideals of physical aggression, heroic conquest, and intellectual

domination. Recognizing that a difference in actual circumstances forced

distinguishing and different characteristics on would-be black patriarchs, a

conventional feminist reading of literature by black males would see these

ideals only partially “encoded” in their writings. Even so, such ideals

would be the desired ones. (161)

Indeed, such ideals were desired, and the literature of the Bad Nigger functions as a

means to appropriate white myths about maleness. In the Bad Nigger, then, one finds a

kind of appropriation of white, patriarchal ideals regarding physical aggression—and not

only this—but also of freedom and individualism. But this literature—this desire to limn

for the black man an opportunity to exercise aggression, was in large part a folkloric

response to oppression. In the written literatures of African Americans, novelists largely rejected the aggression as a form of appropriate black maleness. Williams also explores this point:

Nineteenth century Black men, confronted with the impossibility of being

the (white) patriarch, began to subvert certain of patriarchy’s ideals and

values to conform to their own images. Thus, the degree to which, and the

basis on which, the hero avoids physical aggression was one means of

establishing the hero’s noble stature and contributed to the hero’s

intellectual equality. . . . In other words, black male heroic stature was

most often achieved within the context of marriage, family, and black

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community—all of which depend on relationship with, if not black

women, at least other black people. (161-162)

In these comments one finds that there were two trends in the African American literary tradition to deal with the crisis of black masculinity—a crisis that was largely a product of America’s peculiar institution. In the works of Chesnutt or Du Bois or Harper, one finds a vision of black masculinity that eschews white patriarchal aggression and pursues communal harmony. Thus, one finds in the tradition’s resurrection of the Bad

Nigger since the 1940s until now, a resurrection of a debate that was largely solved by the tradition’s early writers. By pointing Caesar Matthews’s behaviors away from the

Bigger Thomases of the world and moving him, toward the end of “Old Boys, Old Girls,” toward the likes of Chesnutt or Harper’s family men, Jones situates Caesar’s ultimate personality toward the behaviors of honorable black men. He suggests a return to these images as heroic figures.

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Notes

1. The story actually begins when the character is in his twenties. However, the narrator often provides flashbacks that help readers understand how Caesar Matthews becomes a petty criminal. To facilitate this specific understanding, the narrator provides two flashbacks that offer details about the character’s mother’s death. She dies when he is in his late teens.

2. Throughout the story, the narrator provides details about one of Caesar’s recurring dreams. In the dream, he robs Anna, a retarded woman he comes across at some point in his roam about Washington. The interesting thing about the dream is that “the woman was known to him not as being retarded but as being feeble-minded, which was the phrase his father had always used” (Lost 56). Considering the events that lead to his life of crime, the dream seems to function as an added layer of indication. By this, I mean that the dream and the character’s father’s voice serve to connect Caesar’s criminal behavior to his father—or the character’s preoccupation with thoughts about his father.

3. In the available literature, the Bad Nigger is also called a Badman, a Ba-ad

Nigger, and a Baaad Nigger. I use most of these terms interchangeably throughout this chapter. For a discussion of the differences, see Roberts’s From Trickster to Badman or

Peterson’s “Bad Brother Man: Black Folk Figure Narratives in Comics.”

4. Odum suggests that this initial restraint has something to do with the performer’s strategy for telling the Badman’s story. See Odum’s “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as

Found in the Secular Songs of Southern Negroes,” p. 291.

5. I am thinking especially of Wright’s Native Son or Gaines’s Of Love and Dust.

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6. As I mention in Chapter 3, female voices are usually corrective voices in Jones’s work. The often function as the voice of the author—or, if not the voice of the author, they speak the author’s vision of critique.

7. Toward the end of the story, Caesar painstakingly cleans her room in order to hide the way she had lived before she died. In this, he tries to construct for her a dignity that she lacked while living. Because he can gain nothing from the act, the gesture is entirely other-focused—that is, the gesture is entirely one of love. Also, toward the end of the story, readers learn that Caesar intends to get legal money in order to bury her. This detail shows also his changed way of life. The old Caesar would have robbed someone for the money.

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Since its very beginning, the African American literary tradition has been a tradition of revision. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has shown in Figures in Black: Words,

Signs, and the “Racial” Self, the very first Africans to write in English were authors who used their ability to write in order to revise white opinion. During the eighteenth century, the period when the tradition first emerged, Western philosophers were quite enamored with the idea that writing was a sign of reason, and since it was apparent to most observers that Africans had no written tradition, black people were considered something of a border species—objects that were more beast than human. In their popular volume,

Literary Criticism: A Short History, Wimsatt and Brooks explain the opinion of the period:

[A]t least as early as Dryden’s appreciation of Chaucer in the Preface to

his Fables (1700) . . . archaic taste had begun to appear in English

criticism. It ran through the 18th century in Shakespeare and Spenser

criticism and in some other notable places. . . . Friedrich Schlegel only

accented an already pervasive view when he called poetry the most

specifically human energy, the central document of any culture. (366)

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Thus, when Briton Hammon published his narrative of “uncommon suffering” in 1760 or when Phillis Wheatley submitted her poems to the public for its “perusal” in 1786, these writers were attempting to register the African person as a full member of the human community; they were attempting to show that Africans could create (Western) culture.

Interestingly, the earliest literatures of the tradition not only repeated English words and accepted English forms, but they also parroted English ideas. To this point,

Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” provides a good example. She writes:

‘Twas mercy brought me from Pagan land

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew,

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train. (13)

Here, the poet repeats notions regarding African spirituality that were popular at the time, and although it is never clear whether Wheatley believed the ideas she parroted, she no doubt repeats Western claims about the African soul. However, Wheatley’s repetition is not insensible mimicry. In the last lines of the poem, she admonishes readers to

“remember” the power of a Christian savior and his ability to redeem a degenerate soul.

In this, her repetition evinces a shrewd critical dexterity: in these final lines, she uses

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Christian philosophy to undermine secular opinion, and, in so doing, she produces an

argument intended to revise white thinking. Whereas Hume’s “Of National Characters”

points toward the inability of Africans to acquire humanity through belle lettres (252),

Wheatley argues that all things are possible through Christ. To reject her position is to

stumble upon an odd truth about the limitations of a Christian redeemer—a truth, one

hardly doubts, Western philosophers would have been unwilling to admit.

Much has changed in African American literature since the eighteenth century.

However, one tendency—one artistic habit—has remained: repetition still informs the

works that African American authors create. Although the best of the tradition in the

twenty-first century demonstrates a complete rejection of white supremacy, together with

its hegemonic definitions of “culture” and “humanity,” the tradition’s authors still repeat

in order to critique and revise. What I have provided in the foregoing chapters are little

case studies that show how repetition functions in the works of Edward P. Jones. In so

doing, I have shown that Jones’s method of repetition is at the center of the author’s system of argumentation. Like Wheatley and the rest, Jones employs a rhetorical method

that first repeats some character type, idea, or form from the available literature, and then he uses that repeated element as a means to transform the tradition from which he

borrows. By exposing this method of argumentation, I have attempted not only to lay

bare the complex messages in Jones’s work but also to provide examples of a

methodology for reading his art.

Since repetition functions as an access point to the author’s argumentation, readings of Jones’s work should first begin with some inquiry into the presence of the

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intertext. After discovering the similarities between some aspect of Jones’s work and the

source from which that aspect has been drawn, the analyst should work to uncover how

Jones rearranges the figured object in his own “poetic language” (Kristeva 37), since

doing so might help the critic discover the meaning of the literary object. In this study, I

have in no way explored all the intertextual relationships in Jones’s works. Still, I have

said enough about repetition and intertextuality in order to show that these things

function as cornerstones of the author’s literary arguments. Future application of this

method would look for other similarities in order to unearth other possible meanings of

Jones’s work. In this, future application should produce duplications of the kinds of case

studies provided here—readings that would explore the relevance of Jones’s character

types, ideas, and artistic forms to the tradition writ large. Such readings are important—

not only for Jones’s works—but for other works created by African American men.

Drawing on ideas from Debra McDowell’s “New Directions for Black Feminist

Theory,” Shirley Anne Williams suggests, in “Some Implications for Womanist

Theory,”6 that critics should begin the “challenging and necessary task of a thoroughgoing examination of the works of black male writers” that “implicitly affirms kinship among Afro-American writers” (160-161). More specifically, Williams argues that feminist should begin the task of critically reading African American male writers, not only to highlight their sometimes problematic portraiture of African American women but also to explore what “black men have written about themselves” (161). She concludes the article this way:

165

Black women as readers and writers have been kept out of literary

endeavor, so we had, and have, a lot to say. But to focus solely on

ourselves is to fall into the same hole The Brother has dug for himself—

narcissism, isolation, inarticulation, obscurity. Of course, we must keep

talking to and about ourselves, but literature, as Chinweizu and Walker

remind us, is about community and dialogue; theories or ways of reading

ought actively to promote the enlargement of both. (164)

Here, Williams argues for the kind of critical expansion that I mentioned at the outset of this project. Indeed, the tradition needs to explore ways to place important female texts in conversation with significant male works—not because the male presence legitimizes the hermeneutical endeavor but because doing so gives the critic a complete view of the tradition. As a way out of “isolation,” intertextuality offers ways to explore connections among texts in the tradition that might make our criticism a bit more inclusive practice—

“ending,” perhaps once and for all, “the separatist tendency” in African American critical thought (164). Still, our work should not stop here.

Further readings of the tradition, generally, and of Edward P. Jones’s work, more specifically, should use methods of intertextual analysis to unearth the reasons for

African American writers’ penchant for certain figurations of the intertext.1 In the case of

Jones’s work, for example, several writers have mentioned, in passing, that Jones’s uses humor to a great degree in his fiction. However, no critic has attempted to analyze this component of Jones’s writing. Usually, humor is largely an element of critique in Jones’s work, which aligns in certain ways with academic notions of parody.2 For example, in

166

The Known World, when slaves begin to hear about Henry Townsend’s death, at least one

of them uses biting humor to comment on Henry’s relevance to his life:

Moses went back and forth across the lane and told all. . . . A woman had

cried, remembering the way Henry smiled or how he would join them in

singing or thinking that the death of anyone, good or bad, master or not,

cut down one more life in the life forest . . . but most said or did nothing. .

. . “I didn’t sleep well,” one man across the lane from Elias said to his

next-door neighbor. “Well, I know I sure did,” the neighbor said. “I slept

like they was payin me to do it, slept anough for three white women

without a care in the world.” “Well,” the first man said, “sound like you

gotta a hold a some of my sleep. Better give it back. Better give it back

fore you wear out my sleep usin it. Give it back.” “Oh, I will,” the

neighbor said, laughing, inspecting loose threads on his overalls. “I sure

will. Soon as I’m finished. Meantime, I’m gonna use it again tonight.

Come for it in the mornin.” They both laughed. (60-61)

Here, there are several levels of criticism operating simultaneously with humor.

One gets the sense that the comic person is lampooning his fellow slave for his being

moved by Henry’s death. And, in an odd way, the narrator seems to be using this slave’s

unbothered-ness about Henry’s dying to contrast the behaviors of the woman who begins

to cry about the man’s passing. More than this, the scene comments on the white

woman’s place on the Southern plantation, depicting it as a life of relative luxury. The

punchline is that the comic slave was so unbothered by Henry’s death that he likens

167

himself to three white women. In this, he multiples or exaggerates his lack of concern.

What results is a rather funny exchange that says more than the literal words operating in the exchange. But this use of humor is not peculiar to Jones.

As Jones mentions in one interview, “My sense is that black folk have a great deal of humor, and I’m sure it just did not happen overnight” (Bogaev). Although he mentions black people’s long-standing relationship with humor, he does not explain where that humor comes from. Considering the tragedies of black life in America, humor might function as a kind of non sequitur, even if it only works as a tool of critique. In this, there are several questions critics have not answered regarding African American humor: how exactly does it work in the novel? Why does it appear in our literature at all? Can the novel, being “a preserver of manners and customs” (Hopkins 13), tell us the source of this joy? And, more importantly, can a critic of our literature chart its evolution across works? These questions, which will require intertextual readings of the kind that have been offered in the preceding chapters, could help provide meaningful insights into the tradition. Aside from this—and, perhaps, in keeping with certain fads in the humanities— intertextual analyses in the flavor of those provided here might also be able to expand the work of literary Darwinism.

As Joseph Carroll has shown in Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature,

and Literature, literary Darwinists make the claim that it might be possible to integrate

“literary study with Darwinian social science” (vii). Although some of these scholars use

the adaptationist principle to read and analyze literature, many more of them are

committed to using the general principles of evolution to explore the meaning and

168

function of literary works. As Jonathan Gottschall has shown in Literature, Science and a

New Humanities this approach to reading was a response to Edward Wilson’s call for

“consilience” between the two academic cultures (8-13). However, the field of possible

integrations can be expanded due to certain similarities between intertextual discourse

and gene studies. In this view, literary Darwinism might not be the only meeting ground

for science and literature. Given certain ideas in genetics and genomics regarding gene replication and mutation, conciliators could use the language of science in order to explore why texts are duplicated as they are. What are the similarities between an author’s method of intertextual repeatability and gene replication? Might these similarities reveal cross disciplinary conclusions regarding the creative process more generally? Future analyses of this kind seem to offer a fertile field of investigatory possibility.

169

Notes

1. See Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, p. xix for examples of

figurations of the intertext. They include allusion, quotation, plagiarism, translation, pastiche, and parody.

2. See the Preface to the first edition of Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of

African American Literary Criticism.

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