Gayl Jones’s Palmares

A Review of

Gayl Jones’s Palmares

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2021

Palmares
Gayl Jones
Beacon Press ($27.95)

 

In his lamentable pan of Gayl Jones’s 1999 masterpiece, Mosquito, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounted the rumor that Jones had several completed novels in the can that she’d written when she was in graduate school. Both prolific as a writer and sparing in her publication history, Jones’s major work until now breaks down into two distinct eras: her brilliantly dark and edgy mid-1970s novels, Corregidora and Eva’s Man, which were released a year apart, and her virtuosic and inspiring late-1990s novels, The Healing and Mosquito, which she also released over two successive years. Reportedly recanting the pessimistic view of love and sex in her first two novels, Jones attempted to have them taken out of print in the 1990s, and her editor suggested she publish new books instead. Jones’s response was to submit two of the best novels of the decade. So comprehensively explored and artistically integrated were these already completed novels that one of the characters in 1998’s The Healing is reading a copy of the 1999 Mosquito in its opening pages, a masterstroke that she generously includes as a gift to her rapt rereaders. Rivaling the mastery and vision of her earlier novels’ editor, Toni Morrison, Jones asserts herself with these two works as a truly towering artist. Repeatedly referring to and riffing on Chaucer, Cervantes, and Joyce in her exultant word- and world-play, Jones’s exhaustively swirling narrative voices and techniques make a strong case for her inclusion among even their rarefied company.

Mosquito’s exorbitant capaciousness and finger-on-the-pulse relevance—its plot follows a Black woman trucker who joins the Sanctuary movement to transport migrants from Mexico into the United States in a new kind of Underground Railroad—resulted in a joyfully playful dream/nightmare vision of America that should have set it alongside Infinite Jest, but instead it tanked and has almost completely disappeared. The Healing garnered some of the attention and praise its brilliance deserved, but Mosquito isn’t even mentioned on the list of Jones’s books on the back of her newly released novel, Palmares. Gates’s review lambasted Mosquito’s narrative inconsistencies in almost exactly the same language that Mosquito explicitly praises the narrative inconsistencies in Don Quixote, and this kind of play between the author and her novel’s voices is one of its great merits and pleasures, rather than one of its flaws. Jones’s multiplicious curiosity requires a consciousness far larger than any realistic narrator could provide, and so she bends the post-Flaubertian rules of naturalism in all the most deliberate and pleasurable ways, and does so with a deeply structured concinnity that orchestrates her effusion into symphonic order. Nodding to the playfully messy early novels that Jones loves so much, Mosquito recalls the mad yarn-spinning of Tristram Shandy, had Sterne had any idea where his novel was going, or any capacity for revision. In this, Jones is firmly among the great Twentieth-Century Modernists, especially her beloved Joyce, who brought a Miltonic rigor to the loopy narrative structures he was parodying.

Readers may or may not want to look into Jones’s shocking personal life, but taking in the few glimpses we have of the literary mind outside of her novels affords an illuminating view of her scope and aims and aesthetic. Famously reclusive and tight-lipped, Jones has given few interviews, and the 1998 QPB edition that collects Corregidora, Eva’s Man, and The Healing includes a 1978 interview she did with her former academic adviser and mentor, poet Michael S. Harper. Not yet thirty in the interview, Jones displays an astounding range of knowledge and interest, and hearing her thoughts on literature here is like witnessing a magic pyrotechnic parade. One of the major shifts in Twentieth-Century literature—and perhaps its greatest source of innovation—was in all the new voices and perspectives that arose from previously unheard demographics, with each one speaking a version of their language that brought new vitality to that language’s capacity for expression, in both content and form. Jones in this interview speaks of the burgeoning literatures of the Americas—especially Latin, Native, and African American, discussing each in great detail and complexity—as an inspiration for her approach, portraying these new voices as the avant-garde that she wants to explore in her own writing. Riffing on the radical aspects of The Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote and Finnegans Wake, Jones rightfully regards these disorienting works as forerunners of the innovation that so many new voices were bringing to her century’s exciting new era of Multicultural Modernism.

In the decade after her groundbreaking mid-Seventies novels Jones published a number of collections of short stories and poetry, and then in the next dozen years before The Healing and Mosquito her creative voice was silent as she presumably honed those two novels to perfection. But then after Mosquito: complete silence for more than two decades. Was the failure of her masterpiece to blame for this silence, and was this silence permanent? Or was she working on something even bigger and better? With the newly released Palmares, a vast novel that explores the vein of history that served as the distant backdrop for Jones’s debut novel, these questions remain unanswered. Beacon Press announces Palmares as the first of five new works by Jones to be released over the next few years, but is Palmares actually new? Or is it one of the cache of novels she reportedly wrote in graduate school? The information from Beacon Press seems deliberately cagey about this question, and just as Jones’s peak era of The Healing and Mosquito feels a world away from the voices of her early novels, Palmares creates another cesura in her oeuvre, almost seeming to be by a completely different author. And one not anywhere near her peak powers.

Gayl Jones

Narrated by a Seventeenth-Century Brazilian slave named Almeyda, who joins a fugitive slave state that struggles for autonomous existence, Palmares certainly fits in with many of Jones’s recurring themes and methods. There’s the quietly observant female narrator, the indistinct mother and vivid, magic-wielding grandmother, the search for a stable sense of belonging and self in a hostile world, the nightmare of colonialism and its effect on how individuals and groups perceive themselves, especially in questions of racial quiddity—all these are vintage Jones territory. But what’s missing is the dazzling Jones voice and the forward-moving sense of narrative inevitability that holds together the disparate themes and episodes and keeps the reader enthusiastically swept up in the momentum. In terms of voice, Jones is barred by her historical subject matter from using her highly cultivated African-Kentuckian version of English, which becomes more virtuosic and intoxicating in each of her first four novels, instead writing in the flattest and most declarative “standard” English. There’s no slang, no play, and almost no Jones to be heard and felt in these sentences.

At her peak, Jones is capable of pulling off set-pieces and bits worthy of Proust or Hurston or Pynchon and stacking them one after another so that every part of the novel is the best and most fun part. Like Henry Fielding, whose outrageous narrator in Tom Jones’s proto-meta discussions of itself hilariously points out each time he elides the tedious parts of the story, she seems to have saved up all the juiciest and most magical morsels of life to put into each scene, whether joyful or tragic, and left everything else on the cutting-room floor. In Palmares, however, Almeyda seems to drift through an eldritch dream that’s full of meaning and portent for the person experiencing it but a boring drag for the person hearing or reading about it. And this is a novel about slavery, which is some of the most inherently interesting subject matter possible. Most of the scenes are just people coming into rooms, waiting, having some sort of uninspired interaction, and then leaving. This aspect of the novel serves as a good argument for it being Jones’s college writing, because she doesn’t seem to have developed the narrative strategies that made her other novels so seamlessly engaging and effective.

One of Jones’s best strategies for cramming all of her multitudes into novels that are peopled by feasibly limited characters is to have her narrators quote and ruminate over things they heard from characters they admire and think of as wiser and more knowledgeable than themselves, so that there never has to be one character who serves as Jones’s encyclopedic mouthpiece. In The Healing the narrator frequently discusses topics she learned about from her complexly brilliant friend Nadine (aka Mosquito), and in Mosquito Nadine is the limited character who ponders the topics introduced to her by her hyper-curious friends Delgadina and Ray. It’s a very clever and effective way to keep the novels’ information and meanings diverse and decentralized, so that the book’s dizzying disquisitions are never just a lecture straight from Jones. In Palmares this device seems yet to be discovered. The narrator has almost no access to information or meaning, despite her intimate connection to the leader of Palmares, as well as her having been taught to read at a young age by a priest with quite interesting tastes, and this leaves the texture of the historical tapestry that surrounds Almeyda seem as blank as the walls that contain most of the novel’s scenes. This missing texture could be construed as Jones’s comment on how little access women historically have had to the information and powers that dictate their lives, but if so, she doesn’t compensate for the blankness with much of anything vivid or compelling.

Jones does allow herself some literary leeway by having a few characters appear who are clearly walk-ons from her favorite novels—most notably Don Quixote and Ahab—but there’s little resonance in these intertextual anachronisms, and no play in them at all, which may be why there’s so little resonance. Jones doesn’t seem to be having any fun with the writing of Palmares, leaving the reader just as joylessly unengaged, which compared to the trajectory of her first four novels makes yet another argument for this being very early work. Jones’s first two published novels depict a bleak, humorless world where almost everything’s negative, especially human connection, but the writing in these novels is joyfully inventive and luscious and works as a positive creative force. Then in The Healing and Mosquito the exuberance of the writing explodes into the subject matter to create uproariously pleasurable worlds of deeply meaningful play. One of the best cantrips in Mosquito occurs at a reading by an African-American woman writer who’s published a “blues novel” that sounds almost exactly like Jones’s Corregidora. Nadine approaches the author afterward and discusses how she thinks the book’s monochromatic shades of blue don’t capture a full enough story, and the author agrees with her and seems to see the chromatic light that led Jones away from Corregidora and Eva’s Man toward the much better book she’s in. This hilariously meta metanoia in the blues novel’s author, who is clearly Jones, is worthy of Fielding or Proust, and it seems unlikely that after such a damascene turn away from the minor key that Jones would return to such muted tones in a later novel.

Aesthetic bliss may not be the criterion that works for everyone when judging literature, but Mosquito is just about as much fun as it’s possible to have with a book in your hand, while Palmares simply feels like work, rather than play. Many readers will value the gravely crucial subject matter of Palmares and not worry about its artistic flatness, and for its subject matter alone this novel is worth reading. Few will want to read it, though, and fewer still will want to reread it. Let’s hope that Jones has been working her eremitic gramarye these past few decades and will soon emerge with another magic masterpiece.

 

—David Wiley

Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities

A Review of

Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 2021

Antiquities
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf ($21)

 

Literary wizard Cynthia Ozick has long been fascinated by idolatry, imposture, and imitation, perhaps in art even more than in life, and at age ninety-three she’s conjured up yet another magic ventriloquism act to impersonate and mock and outdo her greatest literary idols. Studying Henry James in graduate school in the 1950s, she cherished her master’s Jane-Austenian chess games, but she was also under the spell of William Gaddis, whose techniques and themes exploded James’s two-dimensional playing board. Emerging in the postmodern 1960s alongside a tiny palmful of peers such as Thomas Pynchon and Angela Carter, Ozick created an aesthetic and moral order for her fiction that was all its own—especially in its subversion of Matthew Arnold’s notions of Hellenism and Hebraism—and her new novel, Antiquities, takes her already warped chess game into a whole new dimension.

Set in midcentury-modern New York (an aesthetic that the narrator decries and the author almost certainly holds dear), Antiquities begins as an octogenarian character’s attempt at writing a brief memoir that’s to be included in an anthology commemorating the tony boys’ school he’d attended in the 1880s, and where he’s again become lodged with the few remaining trustees, who are dying fast. The narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a wealthy former lawyer and casual anti-Semite, had been a distant relative of the renowned Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, and among his most cherished possessions is a cache of supposed antiquities that his father had brought back from his attempt to join Petrie’s excavations. The memoir strives to unearth the mysteries of the narrator’s relationship with the novel’s curiously named deuteragonist, Ben-Zion Elafantin, who’d briefly been his friend at the even curiouserly Hebraic-sounding Temple Academy for Boys, and to reconcile these mysteries with the relics his father had brought back from Egypt’s Elephantine island. As his memoir and Ozick move both backward and forward, the modern world continuously interrupts Lloyd’s haphazard composition process, with his fellow trustees literally attacking his typewriter, which is his most tangible link to his beloved former secretary, who also becomes part of the memoir, which increasingly spirals out of control and into the most deliriously twisted digressions.

 

Cynthia Ozick

The wizardry of Ozick here is in her absolute control of these seemingly random digressions, which she wields as precisely as a conductor’s baton, and in her loving yet damning impersonation of her befuddled narrator. Ozick undoubtedly adores much of the world he inhabits—the midcentury of her own youth, the gilded age of her early reading, and the Jamesian links of memory threading between the two—but she also keeps a clear, masterful head for the moral and spiritual valences that organize and direct her narrative, despite her narrator’s loopy ineptitude. Lloyd’s voice and mind and memory are so strikingly particular, and his preoccupations and habits so deeply embedded in how he attempts to conduct his narrative, that Ozick’s impersonation of him is clearly the result of the most profound exploration and revision. His longueurs are comically out of touch, but Ozick’s prose—which is precisely conterminous with her narrator’s—is brilliantly sharp and relevant and knowing, recalling the Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in how the exact same words can have radically divergent meanings and power when composed by different people in different times.

Ozick’s attentiveness to all the other characters, no matter how seemingly minor, also reveals the depth of her care and patience and empathy in crafting each of their unique haecceities. Every character in this tiny novel has a backstory, and living emotions and motivations and complexities, and Ozick never forgets a single one of them, displaying a sense of canny organization and heartfelt commitment that directly belies her narrator’s confused lucubrations, which, again, inhabit Ozick’s exact same words in the exact same order. It’s truly remarkable how fully realized this novel and its denizens are, and how many varied windows Ozick has created for us to see and hear them through.

 

My ancient copy of Levitation

In her 1997 masterwork The Puttermesser Papers, a five-chapter novel that Ozick composed at the pace of a chapter a decade, the protagonist creates a golem that grows completely out of control and proportion, so that its appetites devour virtually everything. Always conscious of the creator/creation aspect of literature, Ozick tempers her narrative homunculus in Antiquities so that his clueless divagations remain in perfect counterpoint to his long-absent chess opponent, Ben-Zion Elafantin, who may not actually exist—or whose proboscidian stature may in fact exist on a level that relegates the elite Lloyd to irrelevant heathenry. Is Petrie the rock that this novel is founded upon, or is he and his kind merely foundering in Egyptian sand? In her brilliant 1979 short story “Levitation” Ozick describes a party in which all the Jewish guests float up into the air, and perhaps Antiquities plays with this chosen-people leavening too. Is Lloyd an abomination, or is he the custodian of the true relics of a true history? And do we need to choose which? Culminating the novel (and perhaps her career) with an enigmatically open end that can be interpreted differently by different mindsets, Ozick confronts the reader with the mystery of life in a way that recalls the most inscrutable of Kafka’s parables. Making everything in her literary universe a metaphor for writing, Ozick’s last line calls attention to the gamey play of her novel’s chess pieces, and not in a Jamesian way, but rather in a Lewis-Carrollingian way. Or, ultimately, in an Ozickian way. Levitating into the ether as she nears the end of her life, Ozick’s apotheosis elevates her among the very greatest of literary luminaries.

—David Wiley

Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground

A Review of Richard Wright’s

The Man Who Lived Underground 

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2021

The Man Who Lived Underground
Richard Wright
Library of America (22.95)

After publishing his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright became a literary superstar who had the freedom to pursue any inspiration he chose. Those disparate inspirations included a photo-documentary, an uncompleted novel about black domestic workers, and a surreal experimental novel called The Man Who Lived Underground, which was rejected by his publishers and which has only now appeared in its complete form.

Exploring the bizarre adventures of a black man who descends into the sewers to escape the police after he’s wrongly accused of murder, The Man Who Lived Underground is like nothing else Wright had written by then, following a dreamlike logic that reads far more like German Expressionism than like the Urban Realism of Native Son. Short excerpts of the novel appeared in 1942, and among its fans was Ralph Ellison, who ran with many of its concepts and approaches in his 1952 masterpiece Invisible Man. Disappointed by the novel’s rejection, Wright honed it into a much more effective short story that appeared in a journal in 1944, and then much later in his posthumous story collection Eight Men.

In addition to the full novel, the present volume contains the remarkable essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” in which Wright explicates what he was trying to do in The Man Who Lived Underground, while also pointing forward to his genre-defining memoir, Black Boy, which clearly grew out of this underground seam of exploration. Wright’s essay opens with this astonishing claim:

 

I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences, and feelings than The Man Who Lived Underground.

  

This statement seems undeniably true, but that doesn’t mean that the novel works as an organic whole or that it accomplishes what Wright intended.

Richard Wright

The first section of The Man Who Lived Underground reads like hard-boiled detective pulp, appearing to the reader to be mostly realistic and believable, with a brutal focus on the protagonist Fred Daniels’s shocking mistreatment by the police, who extract a false confession from him. After a weirdly unconvincing series of events, Fred escapes into the sewers, where he almost immediately attains a detached, transcendent viewpoint on the world and its woes. Fans of Native Son’s crystalline naturalism would have been terribly put off to see Wright’s progressions not making seamless sense—and not because of Fred’s trippy mental evolutions, which are quite intriguing, but because the novel’s wild arcs don’t encompass a foundation to support themselves.

Tunnelling through the sewers, Fred somehow scrapes his way into basement after basement, observing and judging the world’s unfortunate souls while somehow never being heard or seen. He witnesses a church choir and pities their obsequious self-denigrations; he shakes his head at a theater full of moviegoers, who he feels are just living a ghost-life and laughing at themselves; he easily finds all the tools and sustenance he needs to survive underground; and he cracks safes and breaks into jewelry shops to liberate untold riches, which in his newly alienated state he sees as entirely without intrinsic meaning or value. He plasters his cave with hundred-dollar bills, and he mashes the jewels into the ground to look like stars in the firmament, and eventually he begins to feel that he must reemerge into the world with a message for humanity—and to assume the mantle of guilt.

A drawing by Franz Kafka

Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright contributes an afterword to this volume, making a convincing argument that the novel is an inverse take on Plato’s cave allegory, but the most immediate and obvious literary influences at play here are certainly Kafka and Dostoyevsky. The unjustly accused man (The Trial) digs into the earth to escape his persecutors (“The Burrow”) and then goes through a series of inner transformations that work in counterpoint to his physical degeneration and lead to a bizarrely Christ-like apotheosis (“The Metamorphosis”). In the later short-story version Wright goes so far as to have Fred navigate his way with fingers that “toyed in space, like the antennae of an insect.” Likewise, the hated man who lives beneath the world (Notes from Underground) grows to accept and cherish his guilt and yearns to pay the consequences (Crime and Punishment). It’s a startling literary landscape for the author of Native Son to explore, and it would have drastically altered his own landscape—and that of his contemporaries—had he been able to make it work on the scale he envisioned.

From the Invisible Man films

Without Wright’s accompanying essay, many of the novel’s aims fail to land, in part because the writing is neither realistic enough nor daringly magical enough to hold it all together. This is terrain that requires an Ellison, who somehow divined the Invisible Man theme from it and took it to another literary universe. In the essay Wright discusses the Invisible Man films as a key influence on creating a character who exists completely apart from humanity and who observes and judges it in secret. But the word “invisible” appears nowhere in the novel itself. Perhaps Wright let Ellison read the essay, which has only become publicly available in this volume, or perhaps Ellison was just a magician. Either way, The Man Who Lived Underground serves as a fascinating bridge between drastically different literary sensibilities and has now revised the trajectory of American Modernism.

 

—David Wiley

Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral

 

A Review of

Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral

Originally Published on the Online Version of the

Rain Taxi Review of Literature, Summer 2021

 

Cathedral
Ben Hopkins
Europa Editions, $26

 

In F for Fake, his fraudulent documentary about fraudulence in the art world, Orson Welles pauses in his descent into imposture to hold aloft Chartres Cathedral as perhaps the one true thing that our culture has created. It will be our legacy, he posits, and it will “testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.” Cannily, Welles fails to mention that the Gothic grandeur of Chartres was also founded upon an epic fraud, its majestic marshalling of spiritual and artistic and economic and political forces predicated on the absurd pretense that the pilgrimage site housed the tunic that Mary wore while birthing Jesus. Encompassing a labyrinth of these kinds of interconnected dreams and deceptions, screenwriter and filmmaker Ben Hopkins’s monumental debut novel, Cathedral, constructs an edifice whose design ranges from the most sublime heights of inspiration to the most degenerate political depths, with all of them counterbalancing each other and maintaining each other’s intricate facades.

Hopkins begins the novel with a bit of Wellesian legerdemain, enticing the reader into believing that this will be a kind of pilgrimage into artistic and spiritual fulfillment, with stock characters to root for and expect to develop, and the great trick is that these initial cliches are as enjoyable as they are blatantly dubious. There’s the visionary master-builder who’s visited the newly constructed Gothic cathedrals of medieval France and who’s been given charge of redesigning the cathedral of Hagenberg, a burgeoning city on the Rhine, in this soaring new style. Then there’s his callow disciple, who we expect to grow to self-realization and mastery of his own over the long course of the building’s bildung. Then there’s the master-builder’s outrageously idealized muse, an ethereal magician’s daughter whose beauty and purity stretch the reader’s credulity and patience. Countering these three, there’s the Bishop’s treasurer, a brilliantly Machiavellian schemer who holds the purse strings for the cathedral’s construction and who has no problem manufacturing heretics to squash in order to plunder their loot. In a traditional novel of this sort, he would be the dark underside of the matter that the author portrays as important and true, but in Hopkins’s medieval world of realpolitik, he and his kind are this novel’s true matter.

The nave of Chartres Cathedral

Rapidly subverting the agony-and-ecstasy cliches of the artistic Bildungsroman, Hopkins largely discards the idealistic cathedral theme and plunges the reader into the most brutally pragmatic political machinations, taking as much time and interest in teasing out the intricacies of the local clergy, nobles, merchants, and bureaucrats as he does in explicating the vast Papal and Imperial intrigues that keep the locals in constant adaptation and evolution. A truly Darwinian novel, Cathedral never remains static as its denizens build and rebuild the structures of their lives, both in competition and in symbiosis with each other. Alliances and friendships arise and fall and rise again in new forms as they balance and rebalance against all the other forces around them, the characters’ anthill associations scattering and regathering like a sped-up version of the incessantly redrawn and renegotiated plans for the cathedral, which despite everything continues its ascent.

Readers looking for medieval literature’s cathedral-like summa aesthetics—and ever-ascending spiritual edge-play—may be disappointed by this novel’s ultimately ghostless machine. A great Gothic cathedral is like the cosmos, with its every section and subsection forming itself into an ever-fractaling and ever-ornate atomic density. Visiting the lacy whorls of Strasbourg cathedral is like walking up to an enormous thumbprint that becomes more astoundingly elaborate with each step forward, as if you were gradually descending into an electron microscope. Hopkins’s novel is nothing like this. His prose isn’t at all lapidary, but instead rapid and vigorous, and you don’t pause on it in rapt wonder, but rather get swept along by its force. He has a powerful vocabulary, but his readers won’t get the easter-egg-hunt joy of searching the dictionary or internet five times a page to discover the names of clothes and carriage parts and architectural details that they’ll recognize from medieval paintings, as they do when reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. They also won’t find themselves immersed in a heady web of Scholastic theology, as in Henry Adams or Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco. Nor will they encounter a penetrating exploration of the math that consumes some of the book’s characters, with the “sacred geometry” that undergirds the great Gothic cathedrals going completely unmentioned. Hopkins’s master is history, not aesthetics or metaphysics.

Ben Hopkins

As a screenwriter and filmmaker, Hopkins also employs far more filmic allusions than he does literary ones. He stonefacedly references Monty Python at two very unfunny moments, and he also makes a few glancing nods toward The Princess Bride, which was written by another great screenwriter/novelist, without ever alluding to that novel/film’s origins in Greek prose literature, particularly Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. He does seem to echo some of Hugo’s celebrated “Feast of Fools” scene, but only in subject matter, not in language or method or aesthetic. Nicknaming his jejune stonecutter “Rettich” and placing great stress on the association with the word radish, Hopkins almost certainly invokes the celebrated Chartres scene in F for Fake, during which Welles mistily refers to the contemporary human as a “poor forked radish,” an allusion to Thomas Carlyle’s riff on Falstaff’s description of Robert Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2. It’s quite a thread of association from film to architecture to literature, and Hopkins dispenses with that thread on the novel’s first page. Otherwise largely literature free in its associative language and aesthetic order, this brilliantly imagined, gorgeously designed, and deeply profound novel is nonetheless a magnificent work of literature itself. It took Hopkins eight years to construct this extraordinary novel, and it will likely stand as his lasting legacy.

 

—David Wiley

Nella Larsen’s Passing

A Review of Nella Larsen’s Passing

With an Examination of the

Literature of Passing 

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2019

Passing

Nella Larsen

Restless Books ($19.99)

In 1922, a year before publishing his monumentally unclassifiable “holy avalanche of words,” Cane, Jean Toomer responded to a query by the editors of the literary journal the Liberator asking him to describe his background and history, which like his fiction also defied simple classification:

Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American.

It’s telling that Toomer, who had such a broad American mix of bloodlines, would refer to living amid just two race groups, white and “colored,” a brutally simplistic but also blurry divide that he was to pass back and forth between again and again. He describes himself in this biographical letter as a spiritual fusion of the races, but in discussing the literary exploration that was leading him toward Cane he was clear about which connection most nourished his art:

Within the last two or three years… my growing need for artistic expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. … It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me.

Jean Toomer

Forced to live as a complex mix in a country that only saw black and white, it’s no surprise that Toomer’s art leaned toward the demographic and aesthetic that encompassed the most number of shades and that wasn’t singularly bent on excluding him. In the early twentieth century a number of novels addressed the subject of African Americans “passing” for white, and the personal and artistic gravitation that Toomer describes in his letter mirrors and defines one of the most striking aspects of this very American mini-genre. “Passing” as a concept derives from the act of passing from one race (usually black) into another (always white), so that a mixed-race person “passes” for white. But there’s much more to the term, both personally and artistically, and the fiction work that has not surprisingly come to represent this subject matter most to later readers, Nella Larsen’s succinctly named 1929 novel Passing, traces this arc out of and then back toward blackness, as do nearly all the other novels dealing with this subject.

Nella Larsen

In Larsen’s Passing, which has been newly republished by Restless Books, one of two light-skinned childhood friends, Clare, has passed into white society and married a wealthy white man, and after a chance reunion with Irene, who occasionally passes for white when going to restaurants and stores, the two adult women rekindle an uneasy friendship. Despite living a luxurious life as a white woman, Clare is lonely for the community she grew up with, and she spends more and more time with Irene and Irene’s husband, Brian, and probably (but not definitively) begins an affair with Brian. Just as Irene starts to get suspicious and has fantasies of outing Clare to her shockingly racist husband, John, she and another clearly black woman run into John in downtown Manhattan, which makes him realize that Irene is black too, and that by extension his wife Clare may be as well, which quickly leads to a disastrous denouement.

The timing of this episode’s unlikely coincidence challenges the novel’s believability, but what’s fascinating is that along with the theme of characters passing for white and then yearning to pass back into blackness, this narrative contrivance appears in all four of the major novels on this subject written by early-twentieth-century African-American authors. A novel about passing has to have a scene of exposure, or near exposure, and Passing employs the device of coincidence to bring about this crucial scene in much the same way that Jessie Redmon Fauset did in her 1928 novel Plum Bun, which imported many of the themes and devices of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which in turn derived much of its method from Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1900 novel The House Behind the Cedars. This is not to dismiss these landmark novels at all, but rather to examine their artifices seriously, because the study of art is all about pattern recognition, and it’s fascinating to trace the design of theme-and-variation though each of these four radically different works.

In Fauset’s Plum Bun an African-American family of four has two light-skinned members, the mother and the protagonist daughter, and two who are much darker, the father and the other sister, and when the protagonist, Angela, recognizes what access to the world this gives her, she moves from Philadelphia to New York, changes her name, and begins her adult life as a white woman. As she explores both the outer world and her inner self from this new vantage point, however, she becomes increasingly isolated and yearns to reconnect with her roots. A coincidence almost exactly like the one in Passing, which was published a year later and which was clearly riffing on Fauset’s version, nearly outs her in downtown Manhattan to her shockingly racist beau, and then another astonishing coincidence that same day sets in motion the events that lead to the novel’s final re-shuffling of connections, which while being a bit overly neatly arranged is nonetheless deeply moving and satisfying. While Passing is a tightly controlled and formally deliberate Jamesian novel of manners, Plum Bun is a luxurious and expansive work, with a luscious prose style and a narrative voice whose freshness and verve overwhelm all of its shortcomings. Of these novels on the subject of passing, Blum Bun is the deepest pleasure to read, because Fauset’s voice and mind are the most alive and modern and generous, seizing all the newness of the literature of the 1920s and leaving behind the labored weight of the Victorian era, which Larsen curiously returns to the next year in Passing.

Plum Bun’s immediate (and also somewhat distant) precursor, Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, was originally published in 1912 as an anonymous memoir purporting to be true. Then in 1927, at the height of what for lack of a better term we call the Harlem Renaissance (see Langston Hughes’s 1940 memoir The Big Sea for an astute criticism of this problematic designation), he republished the book as a novel, and under his own prestigious name, just a year before Fauset published Plum Bun. Johnson was one of the few polymaths of his era who can legitimately be compared to the towering Paul Robeson, and this far-ranging novel captures an extraordinary amount of his vast scope.

Johnson’s unnamed narrator is the natural son of a southern black mother and a white patrician father who sends mother and child away to the north when he plans to marry. Apparently white, the narrator discovers at school that he’s in fact considered black, and he subsequently learns how to navigate the color line when needed as he pursues a life as a pianist who can play both concert music and ragtime. Becoming the personal musician and confidante to an unnamed millionaire, the two go to Europe, where the narrator has an epiphany and decides that his calling is to go back to the American south to study black musicology as a black man and to transform it into a new kind of formal concert language. It’s this profound calling that most matches Toomer’s description of finding his artistic nourishment in African-American culture, and in how he recasts it into complex new voicings, but then as Johnson’s narrator is collecting source material in the south he witnesses a lynching, which the book describes in excruciating detail, and as a result he abandons his blackness entirely. He then goes to New York, eventually becomes a successful businessman, marries a white woman, and has two children. The two coincidences that warp the thread of this exceptional novel come when the narrator happens to be seated next to his white father at an opera in Europe, and again later when with his white fiancée at a New York museum he runs into a black childhood friend from the south, which leads him to admit his history. In the end his fiancée accepts him but later dies during childbirth, and as the narrator looks back on his life he deeply regrets abandoning his musical mission and the race that fostered it, having exchanged his birthright, like the Biblical Esau, “for a mess of pottage.”

Like biological life, art replicates itself in fascinatingly mimetic ways, and Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars seems to serve as all of these later novels’ structural blueprint and precedent, even as each of their styles and voicings radically diverge. Wildly outdoing all of the later novels’ improbable aspects, to the point where the pattern of stagy coincidence seems to have become unshakably embedded within with the theme of black return in novels that take up this subject, The House Behind the Cedars reads like a no-holds-barred gothic extravaganza as it builds its outrageously artificial hall of mirrors around its very real and very grave subject matter.

Born the lefthand son of a black mother and a rich white father in an obscure town in North Carolina, the light-skinned John Walden changes his name to John Warwick and leaves for South Carolina, where he becomes a successful white lawyer. Surreptitiously returning home ten years later, he induces his sister Rena to leave their mother alone and join him in South Carolina to help raise his newly motherless children. After a nine-month interim at finishing school, so that she can plausibly join her brother in living among the codes of white people, Rena arrives in John’s South Carolina town just in time to become the belle of a mock-chivalric jousting tournament, attracting the favor of the knight who takes all the honors and who in triumph crowns her the Queen of Love and Beauty. This faux knight, George, happens to be John’s client, and he’s in town from North Carolina for an extended legal entanglement, and when Rena dreams that her mother is dying and then receives a letter confirming her mother’s sickness, she writes George a cryptic letter and rushes home. Left alone for a while with time on his hands, George decides to go take care of some unfinished family business in the selfsame North Carolina town where Rena and John come from, ushering in a dizzying series of coincidences that involve several mislaid letters, including one that’s blown by a gust of wind into a neighbor’s hands, and a flurry of other letters that have to wait to be read by someone present who’s literate. A tragicomedy of errors of course leads to Rena being outed to George, which leads her to renounce her whiteness and to dedicate her life to teaching black children in the south’s newly established black post-bellum schools. But the school where she’s assigned happens to be in the vicinity of George’s distant hometown, which leads to a labyrinth of even more outrageous artifice, including a case of Brontëan brain fever that ultimately leads Rena back to her hometown to die among the only people who really love and understand her. It’s perfectly outlandish, and a bizarre prelude to Chesnutt’s gravely harrowing 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, but as things keep forging forward, the reader eventually realizes that this novel is a mirrory maze of words and letters, and despite the very real gravity of what’s at stake—or perhaps multiplied by it—it’s a riot to sit back and watch Chesnutt’s mad puppet show play out.

Brilliantly shrugging off all of these thematic and formal skins, it’s naturally the groundbreaking maverick Toomer who disregarded all precedent as he addressed the subject of passing in “Bona and Paul,” one of his quasi-novel Cane’s oneirically interrelated vignettes. Building on the overwhelming influence of Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer imports a disorienting and revitalizing dose of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce into the conversation, just the way that fellow Anderson acolyte William Faulkner would do years later, but with a rigorous artistry on Toomer’s part that preempts and undercuts Faulkner’s first-draft versions of Joycean Modernism. Dreamily and nightmarishly following a light-skinned college student, Paul, as he and his Nordic roommate Art go out to a fancy Chicago restaurant with their dates, Bona and Helen, the episode elliptically weaves Paul in and out of connection with his companions, who all suspect that Paul isn’t really white. After a series of contretemps that may or may not actually take place, the group leaves together, but Paul stops to confront the restaurant’s black doorman, who seems to understand and judge all of what’s happening. Reluctantly and angrily caught up by his connection to blackness, Paul loses sight of Bona, and when he goes out to look for her afterward, she’s gone. It’s an untidy and unresolved ending, but one that fits both the complexity of the subject matter and the disorientating technique of the new Modernist aesthetic.

An illustration from Passing
by Maggie Lily

Regarding the new edition of Passing, Restless Books has commissioned a solidly useful introduction by novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, as well as beautifully surreal illustrations by the artist Maggie Lily of the novel’s stole-and-cloche-clad flapper characters, but the text unfortunately lacks explanatory notes, which in the current Penguin edition fill in much of the book’s missing referents and contexts and assumptions. This is not a novel or a subject or an era of literature to be taken lightly, and every nuance matters when unfolding its portrayal of the insane and mutating relativity of our country’s brutal racism. Looked on from an outside observer, books on the subject of passing must seem like some kind of bizarre dystopian science fiction, where pasty white people are considered to be black because they have a single drop of black blood in them, and where in order to escape the stigma of blackness they have to live a lie as a white person, which by all objective measure they actually are, and then despite their pallid hue they end up finding their native integrity among the black people they’ve tried to leave behind and don’t at all resemble. It’s absolute lunacy. But that’s life on Earth, where the madness of reality outstrips the madness of any art we could ever invent, so that even the theatrical artifices that Larsen and her peers employ in dealing with this subject read like pale-fire reflections of the wholly artificial roles that we all walk through every day. Should these novels all be more realistic? Perhaps. But so should reality.

—David Wiley

Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

A Review of Zora Neale Hurston’s

Barracoon: The Story of the

Last “Black Cargo”

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books,

Fall 2018

Barracoon:
The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Zora Neale Hurston
Edited by Deborah G. Plant
Amistad ($24.99)

In 1931, anthropologist and future novelist Zora Neale Hurston attempted to publish Barracoon, her narrative of the life of Cudjo Lewis (aka Oluale Kossula), the last surviving passenger of the last slave ship to bring human cargo to America. It was to be her first book, but it received unanimous rejection because of her use of dialect to capture Cudjo’s remarkable voice. Hurston’s subsequent fiction and nonfiction revolutionized the literary use of dialect, however, transforming readers’ and scholars’ ideas of what kinds of American language could be considered artistically and intellectually acceptable, and so nearly ninety years later, Barracoon finally arrives in a landscape that Hurston herself helped create.

A barracoon is a seaside holding station for slaves on the coast of Africa and is thus the last transition between the slaves’ old and new worlds. It’s a curious turning point to use as the title for a book on this subject, but Hurston’s Barracoon is nearly unique among American slave narratives in that it portrays the worlds before and after capture, told by a native African who wasn’t born into slavery. The barracoon was Cudjo’s first glimpse of the enormous, malevolent sea, which in the terrifying account of his Middle Passage strikes the reader as a kind of Homeric monster, and while most slave narratives can only portray the dramatic transition from slavery to emancipation, giving the impression that emancipation equals freedom, Cudjo’s narrative encompasses the arc from freedom to slavery to a different and compromised kind of freedom, allowing him to focus at great length on the totality of the world that first created him. Hurston was initially frustrated by Cudjo’s reticence to answer her questions about the aspects of his story that she was looking for, and at his insistence on giving his full family history and painting an expansive picture of his lost world, but she quickly discovers that his memory of Africa is the goldmine that she didn’t know she was seeking.

Cudjo Lewis, photographed
by Zora Neale Hurston

Letting Cudjo (mostly) speak for himself, Hurston gives free rein to his astonishing memory and narrative power as he describes an entirely unknown universe to her. This is the book’s most arresting material, portraying a paradise lost that’s as complex and problematic as it is beautiful and fascinating and delightful. It’s uneasy reading to see Cudjo’s idealized society also include a savagery that led to his capture and sale by a rival tribe to the American slave-trading savages who dragged him across the sea to hell, but this ugly larger picture is a necessary part of the book’s enlarged scope, leading Hurston to some of her most important and disturbing conclusions about human nature.

Cudjo’s life in America stretches out much longer, with five years spent in slavery and more than sixty years spent scraping out an existence in postbellum Alabama, but he never stops thinking of himself as African. After emancipation he immediately starts planning to return home, and when this proves impossible he helps found an enclave of freed Africans called Africatown, which recreates a mini version of their homeland and buffets them a bit from the discrimination that they received from white and black Americans alike. He marries another African, has five children, and over the ensuing decades he buries them all in the family graveyard that mirrors some of the African death customs that he’d described to Hurston. Near the end of the book, when he allows Hurston to photograph him, he puts on his best American suit but leaves his shoes off, because he wants to be seen and remembered as African.

This is as heartbreaking a story as could ever be imagined, and in Hurston’s brilliant mimicking voice it sings as a kind of epic song. Her prose isn’t yet the silky instrument that it would later become, and she pads the story a bit with material gleaned from other sources and surreptitiously puts it into Cudjo’s voice, but Cudjo’s extraordinary mind and personality burst through the pages as the primary force of his narrative, even as Hurston’s artistry (and lapses) make themselves palpably apparent. While we feel Cudjo with the deepest immediacy, readers of Hurston’s later work will also see that her dense literary sensibility adds layers of reflective color and shading to how we perceive his story.

Hurston the enchanter.

A writer of the highest sophistication, Hurston has the ability to tell a story that’s entirely original and moving and “real” while also weaving itself into a dazzling tapestry of literary allusions and games, as when in her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God she has brilliant fun playing with the Bible and Dante and Cervantes and Proust. Arriving at the end of Barracoon’s last chapter, entitled “Alone,” Proust’s woundedly nostalgic ghost seems to whisper through Hurston as the final words of the book leave Cudjo “full of trembling awe before the altar of the past.” Cudjo strikes the most resonant and lasting chords in the reader’s mind, but as in Don Quixote, where we realize that it’s Quixote who’s the enchanter who has himself and Sancho under a narrative spell, and that as an enchanter he’s also a reflection of the larger enchanter, Cervantes himself, Hurston’s readers will see her embarking here on this same kind of artistic odyssey. Cudjo couldn’t be more real to us, but in this first sally Hurston the enchanter begins to make her presence nearly almost as real.

—David Wiley