Recent work in African American literary studies has attempted to define an “Afro-modernism,” an aesthetic position that participates in the project of modernity while not being subsumed by or subordinated to the “high” modernism of the early twentieth century. While Houston A. Baker has identified this practice as “mastery of form/deformation of mastery,”1 Richard Powell and others have defined it as a “blues aesthetic,”2 clearly linking it to the African American vernacular tradition. While these are highly useful constructions, they are not quite adequate to much of modern and contemporary black writing. These theorizations have created a “difference from” high modernism when at least some artists – Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison are clear examples – have chosen to position themselves within the tradition of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. At the same time, they have also made use of the vernacular tradition, but this should not be surprising, since many of the “high” modernists themselves, whether in poetry, fiction, or the visual arts, found the vernacular to be an important resource. The two authors under consideration here, John Edgar Wideman and Leon Forrest, are part of this grouping. While Fritz Gysin, in an earlier chapter in this volume, locates them within the context of postmodernism, they have both explicitly positioned themselves as modernists, at least in some aspects of their work. It is therefore useful to explore that identity as one means of grasping their connection to black postmodernism.
“Modernism” has been one of the most fluid terms of critical discourse. It is often associated with a specific period, a set of ideas and values, a collection of artistic practices and products, or a list of names. Michael Levenson, in his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Modernism, has wisely chosen to suggest some characteristics rather than a strict definition of the movement: “the recurrent act of fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or lyric form), the use of mythic paradigms, the refusal of norms of beauty, the willingness to make radical linguistic experiment, all often inspired by the resolve (in Eliot’s phrase) to startle and disturb the public.”3 In addition to these formal traits, modernists saw themselves interrogating the foundations of culture. As Sara Blair notes, “In the moment of Modernism, ‘culture’ itself – what constitutes it, whose property it is, how it identifies or informs national or racial bodies – is a deeply political issue. And this fact, it can be argued, is modernism’s most important contribution to the politics of its moment, and to those of ours.”4 In this second sense, African American writing can be said to have always been modern, at least since Phillis Wheatley exercised, in David Trotter’s term, a “will-to-literature.”5 The very existence of black literary expression raised questions about the validity of a whites-only American culture.
“Vernacular” is also a term with variant meanings, especially in the context of the modern era. Its origins are in discussions of language use, as in Dante’s choice to write in Italian rather than Latin, “the language or dialect native to a region or country.” But in folklore studies, it has more general connotations, fitting better Webster’s other definition, “a style of artistic or technical and esp. architectural expression employing the commonest forms, materials, and decorations of a place, period, or group.” Within African American culture, the vernacular includes the conventional genres of folklore (tales, songs, beliefs, material culture) as well as performative aspects of storytelling, call-and-response, verbal contests, and religious practices. These mostly oral forms and practices are generally understood as constituting the basis of African American culture; not surprising considering that, for most of American history, blacks have been legally or socially forced into a situation of illiteracy and thus had to rely on oral tradition to sustain and nurture their culture. In addition, the very otherness of the vernacular generates much of its power. It is, after all, as Paul Arnett says, “language in use that differs from the official languages of power and reflects complex intercultural relationships charged with issues of race, class, region, and education.”6 It serves as counter-memory to the narratives of the dominant order. Moreover, Arnett adds, “vernaculars acquire additional moment because in recent history they have been among the few genuinely uncontrollable cultural energies” (xxii).
If vernaculars have this critical and subversive authority, then it is not unexpected that modernists, committed to “startling and disturbing the public,” would find them of great use. What better source for undermining the claims of cultural power than the suppressed elements of the culture itself? What better perspective than the point of view of those forced to exist behind and below the authority figures of the society? Thus, the voices of the Dublin streets or of Mississippi blacks and poor whites or of jazz clubs can speak effectively of the sham that is modern society. Moreover, their very “rawness” expresses a vitality that civilization has lost.
In twentieth-century African American writing, the vernacular has had a consistent relationship to that writing which considered itself “new.” Whether it was the blues-influenced poetry of Langston Hughes, the folk voices of Zora Neale Hurston, the jazz-inflected fiction of Ralph Ellison, or the street talk of the cultural nationalists, what has constituted the generational shifts in black writing has been the incorporation of African American cultural elements. Recent work on the Harlem Renaissance has suggested that it is this feature that marks it as one of the “modernisms” of the twentieth century, one that has been ignored because of the critical bias in favor of high modernism.7 Ellison’s break with the protest tradition associated with Richard Wright can be understood precisely as his willingness to use modernist methods in conjunction with vernacular elements.
Vernacular expression, especially in African American culture, focuses on process more than product, especially since the product, in Alice Walker’s phrase, is for “everyday use.”8 It is the style of storytelling, sermonizing, or blues singing that is crucial, in part because the content is already known to the audience. As in modernism, technique is central to establishing the authority of the artist. “Mastery of form” defines the reputation of the creator and the quality of the creation. But Baker’s other term, “deformation of mastery,” is also relevant. Because the materials of folk art are always old, the vernacular artist must “make it new” by signifying on the work of other artists.9 Such acknowledgment can take the form of parody, of renaming, of homage, or of direct borrowing. In this process, both similarity to and difference from the source are recognized, just as they are in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Thus, while modernism and vernacular art are very different in their purposes, registers, and engagement with social reality, they share aspects that make them available for African American writers.
While Leon Forrest and John Edgar Wideman bring these elements together in their writing, they do so in very different ways. What Sara Blair says about the distinction between high modernists and Harlem modernists is relevant here: “If the landscape of modernity reads to Eliot and company as a symbolic wasteland, it appears for other writers to be a Mecca, a metropolis of multivalent possibilities.”10 Forrest, for example, assumes no inherent conflict between modernist technique and vernacular expression. Quite explicitly taking Joyce and Faulkner as two of his models,11 he sees in their methods a means of rendering cultural experience that is rich and complex, often bordering on chaos. Given his understanding of African American life and history, realistic representation would simply not work; like Ellison, he embraces experimentation as the best way to tell his stories. In contrast, Wideman has a much darker vision and has seen the relationship between modernism and the vernacular as much more vexed. According to his own statements and the arguments of James Coleman, the relationship is almost exclusionary: connection to modernism means disconnection from black tradition and its expressive forms.12 In this career narrative, Wideman spent his first three novels creating himself as a modernist, with a special emphasis on alienation as a theme; after a break of several years that involved educating himself in black culture, he began writing a very different fiction, one devoted to depicting families and communities and to challenging the dominant social order. What this model overlooks is his continued practice of modernist technique and, moreover, in good modernist fashion, his ongoing critique of the cultural failings of American society.
The work of Leon Forrest is characterized by its richness of voices and storytelling. In all of his fictions, stories are embedded within stories and narrative voices recreate the voices of other speakers in endless play. In addition, there are constant allusions to other literary and cultural texts, including Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, and Ellison, as well as the Bible. Stylistically, he makes use of stream of consciousness, dream sequences, visions, monologues, song lyrics, repetition, elements of epic, and the fragmentation of time. Like Faulkner, he generates his own world through interconnected narratives across novels. While Forrest is very much aware of the social deprivation that blacks have suffered in American history, he is primarily concerned with demonstrating the resources that they bring to that situation. Most of his major characters are orphans, but out of that condition they manage to engender communities built on the possibilities of the vernacular.
There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973) describes the coming of age of Nathaniel Witherspoon. While the present time of the story is only a day, it moves through three generations of his family, dating back to slavery. Nathaniel is potentially Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus or Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, a son lost in the world without immediately apparent familial or cultural resources. His mother has died and his father is absent from the present time of the narrative. But while Forrest’s protagonist must experience loss and come close to despair, he never reaches a point of complete isolation. From the beginning of the novel, he is presented with options, from the family, the community, and the culture. The novel is structured in five parts (with a sixth added in a 1988 edition) that are linked by theme and imagery much more than plot. In the first part, “Lives,” we are given biographies of some of the characters who will appear in the book, but these are less factual accounts than they are complex narratives that blend documents, legends, personal statements, and passages of prose-poetry. The point is not to provide information, but rather to suggest the range of responses available to a young black man. These include open resistance to oppression, religion, drug addiction, or some form of endurance that occasionally required acts of deception, or “Tomming.” But Forrest is careful to depict the latter option as a device of survival and not an act of betrayal. He says of Louis Armstrong: “Press-music-money magnates always kept out of the news the very substantial contributions Armstrong made to the freedom movement, as they enjoy dividing Dipper from the young and his own people on the shaky grounds that he was a ‘Tom’ when in the end it was from the people themselves that Armstrong’s towering and revolutionary power issued.”13 The statement serves not only as a defense of the musician, but also of Forrest himself and all other black artists who appropriate elements of Western culture into their work. By espousing the legitimacy of a spectrum of life choices and of all the cultural possibilities for one who is both black and American, the author sets up a dialectic for his protagonist in which there is simultaneously too much and too little to choose from in shaping his identity. The biographies show both the potential and the danger of each choice for one seeking black manhood. The next two sections are structured as call-and-response, in which Nathaniel first envisions himself as a fallen angel, with linked narratives of African American men who have had to struggle alone in a racist society. This “Nightmare” section is followed by “The Dream,” in which the religious faith of Hattie Breedlove shows how the lost individual can be sustained by the community. But here, too, the path is one of struggle: belief does not eliminate suffering nor justify it; rather it makes it possible to endure. The following section, “The Vision,” links that personal suffering to a national narrative of racism. In a surreal, apocalyptic allegory, Nathaniel sees a black man crucified and dismembered as a sacrifice for the society. The result is not healing but the end of time. The original final part, “Wakefulness,” brings Nathaniel face to face with his responsibility for himself. He is able to grieve for what he has lost, but also to go forward. But going forward, in a gesture that combines modernist and vernacular perceptions, does not mean taking on a unitary identity, but rather becoming one capable of endless change: “Upon this earth young man you will learn the advantages of changing your name and your ways when attempting to ford dangerous, marshy country” (Tree, 155).
What There Is a Tree does on the individual level, The Bloodworth Orphans (1997) does on the communal level. It is a complex of narratives about a family and a community that draws on myth and epic to construct and problematize identity and origins. Nathaniel Witherspoon is again part of the story, but now primarily as a collector of the stories of others. What he discovers, consistent with modernist themes, is that the quest for identity, especially for African Americans, is doomed as long as it is a search for origins. Virtually every character is an orphan seeking an actual or substitute father. Since the “Bloodworth” of the title refers to a Southern slaveholding family that produced a number of unacknowledged mixed-race children, the novel is a metaphor of the racial history of the United States. Thus, for the characters, to discover one’s origins in fact would be to discover one’s illegitimacy; this situation leads to the repeated use of the spiritual “Scandalize My Name” in reference to these figures. Through religion, through artistic expression, or through sheer personal power, they attempt to come to terms with what might best be called their blues conditions. But no matter how good or beautiful they might be, their obsession with origins leads to disaster. Incest, murder, rape, mob violence, and apocalyptic riot run through the text as the outcome of their quests. The only solution offered is one similar to that of There Is a Tree; as Nathaniel and one of the older black Bloodworth orphans escape the riot, they pick up an abandoned baby. By doing so, they constitute themselves as a family of the “lost-found,” those seeking not origins but a new beginning. Identity again is not recovered but invented within history and by making use of the cultural elements of African American life. In Forrest’s fictional world, the modern self is the blues self.
Two Wings to Veil My Face (1983) would seem to return to the personal story of Nathaniel, but in fact engages much larger issues. The frame situation is that he has been called to the bedside of his grandmother, Sweetie Reed, presumably to learn why she refused to attend her husband’s funeral several years earlier. However, the narrative quickly takes another direction. First, she insists that her grandson write down everything that she says; she rejects his offer to simply tape-record it. The moment marks a movement from the oral to the written tradition. It shifts narrative from the vagaries and imperfections of vocal retelling to the permanence of the written word. Ironically, this demand is necessitated by the very orality of the complex story she tells. It is a tale of many voices, in different time periods. It is also a tale of unreliability, in which she recreates the voices of her untrustworthy father and husband. To validate her own version of reality, she must capture their “lying tongues” with precision and must make her telling the final one. But of course her obsession with them raises questions about her own reliability; in her demonizing narration, she recalls Faulkner’s Rosa Coldfield. And, further, as the text eventually shows, Nathaniel himself has a strong investment in what her history reveals.
In recording this history of the Reed and Witherspoon families, Forrest makes use of a range of vernacular devices, including sermons, spirituals, call-and-response, folktales, and beliefs about curses, conjuration, and healing. In this sense, he roots the story in everyday Southern culture as much as Faulkner did. In doing so, he creates a sense of a shared humanity against which to measure both the inhumanity of racial and gender oppression and the deep fallibility of human beings. The dominant culture, which insists on absolute control, generates its own disasters when it exercises that power through miscegenation and greed. I.V. Reed loses his wife Angelina and his daughter Sweetie (temporarily) when a group of whites kidnap and enslave them despite the fact that the Civil War is over. But he gets little sympathy from other blacks, even when Angelina is killed, because of his reputation as a lying Uncle Tom, a reputation even his daughter accepts.
But in an irony typical of modern fiction, it is from I.V. that Sweetie learns the devastating truth about herself: that it was Angelina and not herself who was promised to Jericho Witherspoon as a reward for ransoming them. With Angelina’s death, Sweetie became the substitute bride. Furthermore, she reveals to Nathaniel that, because she could not bear children, Jericho’s son (Nathaniel’s father) was the product of a liaison with Lucasta Jones. Thus, the family history, which the young man had taken as the one stable element in his life, turns out to be a narrative of deceit, illegitimacy, and orphanhood. But this very deprivation becomes possibility, for now Nathaniel has a more complex view of the grandfather he idolized, a greater respect for the woman he believed to be his grandmother, an awareness of the variety of ways African Americans (and whites) engaged the nation’s history, and a more sophisticated sense of human fate and responsibility.
In Divine Days (1992), Forrest shifts to a different narrator and focuses his attention on everyday black life in Chicago (though, in a clearly self-referential gesture, he calls it Forest County). The first-person voice of the novel is Joubert Jones, a novice playwright who returns to the city after two years in the Army. Forrest has stated that, in creating a young artist as protagonist in a massive work (over 1,100 pages), he intended his book to be compared to Joyce’s Ulysses.14 The author claims all of American and world culture as the context for his fictional creation. His narrator’s speech and thought, like that of other characters, is filled with acknowledged and unacknowledged literary and cultural references. Homer, Greek dramatists and philosophers, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Emerson, Russian novelists, Joyce, Faulkner, Ellison, Baldwin, and Alice Walker, among others, are alluded to through quotation or parody. But Divine Days is not intended as imitation; rather, its author sought to create something that could stand alongside and be measured against Joyce’s masterpiece. While also an urban work and structured within a narrow time frame, it does not depend on the complex referential structure that Joyce employed. Rather, it offers its own mythic figures, which emerge from, and are connected to, the black community. It employs a wide range of artistic and intellectual characters, from trickster preachers to black nationalist painters to Shakespearean scholar-barbers to journalists to barstool raconteurs, and they are shown to have a wide knowledge of Western, Eastern, and black vernacular cultures. In addition, each of the characters has a story to tell, even if it must be articulated by someone else. In this sense, the novel is a narrative cornucopia, out of which Jones must choose his material and give it dramatic shape.
He assumes that he already knows where to look and what to do, but he is constantly being challenged in his assumptions. He has two dichotomous figures – W. A. D. Ford, a trickster who becomes the head of a religious cult, and Sugar Groove, legendary for his sexual prowess and good works – about whom he is writing plays. But as he seeks more information about them, he gets caught up in more mysteries and more stories. He supports himself by working in his Aunt Eloise’s bar and by writing occasionally for the neighborhood newspaper. Each job lends itself to narrative possibilities, and he attempts to collect and assess them for their dramatic potential. But such distance from his material is not acceptable within the community, and he is repeatedly forced to engage the lives around him. Thus, Forrest resolves for himself one of the key issues of modern art by insisting on a dialectical relationship between the artist and the world: aesthetic determinations must be connected to human experience and not detached from it. This point might be considered the essence of his vernacular modernism: artistic creation is a form of call-and-response in which the artist is neither identical with the audience (or world) nor separate from it. All of the cultural materials are available to be used, but they must be used in a way that sustains and nurtures the relationship. When Jones violates this principle, he causes disasters, whether comic or tragic.
In Meteor in the Madhouse (2001), a posthumous collection of novellas, Forrest comes back to Joubert Jones and attempts to bring together many of the issues he has raised. In one sense, the pieces are material that could not be worked into Divine Days but are clearly related. By this point, Jones has become a very successful playwright and is returning to the city. His current responsibility is his cousin, Leonard Foster, who has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Leonard’s wife seeks some understanding of his condition from Joubert, who was raised with him. In recounting this history, he hears again in his head the voices and stories of the community. In this way, Forrest makes the connections that bring together his fictional world. We learn, for example, that Leonard’s mother was Lucasta Jones, Nathaniel Witherspoon’s grandmother. As in the Witherspoon case, she is deprived of the opportunity to raise this child. So to the orphans we now add the child-deprived mother; appropriately for her “blues” experience, she always listened to the music of Billie Holiday. We also learn that Joubert’s father was the illegitimate son of a Bloodworth and that Joubert himself was orphaned when he was 12. As in the earlier works, most of this information is communicated through stories told in various voices, though filtered through Jones’s consciousness. Even within individual novellas, the fragmentation of narrative found in the novels is apparent. To tell a story sequentially for Forrest violates a principle of the play of memory and storymaking. Meteor ends with the death of Joubert Jones and thus the center for the narratives. But as this final work suggests, the telling of tales is endless; there are always new versions and additional layers. What brings order out of this apparent chaos is not a preconceived structure that contains the material, but rather the skill of a master storyteller who, like the folk artist, has and communicates a sense of the organic form through which he works.
If the fiction of Leon Forrest followed some organic pattern merging modernism and the vernacular from the beginning, a similar pattern in John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood trilogy was achieved after years of very self-conscious effort. As noted earlier, James Coleman has argued that a fundamental shift in Wideman’s work moved him from a high-modernist perspective in his first three novels to a fully vernacular one in the writing since. It can be shown, however, that his fiction retains many of the earlier qualities, including wasteland and apocalypse imagery, narrative experimentation, the unreliability of memory and historical representation, and a thematics of the relationship between artist-intellectual and community. At the same time, the vernacular is present in his work from the beginning and is sometimes, but not always, central to the later work. Moreover, his texts frequently transgress genre boundaries, especially between fiction, history, and autobiography, meaning that folk expression operates within an experimental context.
The first three novels – A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1969), and The Lynchers (1973) – are clearly within a modernist mode in their use of stream of consciousness, of frequent literary allusion, and of an atmosphere of despair, impotence, and violence. In each, central characters are highly self-conscious and even intellectual figures alienated from the world around them. And while the novels are set in African American communities, there is relatively little engagement with the ordinary life of that world. Wideman’s technique in these works includes unclear shifts between exterior and interior worlds, making it often impossible to distinguish between fantasy and reality. He also changes narrative perspectives without clear markers, thereby momentarily disorienting readers.
Despite these modernist qualities, all of which serve to reinforce a sense of hopelessness, the little hope apparent in the texts comes through vernacular expression. A Glance Away, for example, opens with the larger-than-life figure of DaddyGene, a legend in the community both for his skill as a paper hanger and his capacity for wine. He breaks through the pretense and anxiety of his wife and his daughter, who has just given birth. He is a life force against which the despair and ineffectiveness among others can be measured. He is an early version of John French, who plays an important role in the Homewood trilogy. Here he disappears after the first few pages, in part because the themes of alienation and despair cannot operate in his presence. Similarly, late in the book, Eddie, DaddyGene’s grandson and the central black character, remembers a church service the two of them had witnessed in his childhood. What he recalls is the sheer joy of the participants, including the dancing of a huge man named Tiny. But, though the novel is set on Easter Day, he refuses to draw any message from the memory and returns to the hopeless present.
Similarly, Hurry Home focuses primarily on the irresponsible and alienated experience of Cecil Braithwaite, who abandons his new wife to pursue law school and then refuses to take up his profession. One of the few moments of pleasure occurs as he works in a vernacular space, the neighborhood beauty shop. As he does a “process” on the hair of his male client, he meditates on the process of art as the truly creative aspect, far more important than the completed product. It is virtually the only moment in the novel that transcends the drabness and futility of lived experience.
The Lynchers is the most pessimistic of these early works, in part because, though it is the one most centered in the African American community, its central characters can find no life-affirming qualities there. There are references to spirituals, blues, jazz, religious services, and even the teaching of black history, but none of it offers them any alternative to the frustration that has led them to plot the lynching of a white policeman and the attendant murder of a black woman. Despite a three-page prose poem on the beauty of street basketball, the key plotter remains dismissive of the character of the black people for whose benefit he plans the action. Nothing in the culture can save him from his mad scheme nor deter two of the others. The one who finally grasps its fundamental insanity and inhumanity is the one most removed from identification with the culture. Thus, in this text, which incorporates all the modernist techniques of the others, cultural expression only reinforces the despair. What we see, then, in these early texts, is an artistic choice to subordinate the vernacular, not because it is either irrelevant to black life or inappropriate for a modernist text, but rather because it challenges the despair Wideman assumes is central to modernism. Unlike Forrest, he does not see at this point in his career the possibilities of a more dialectical perspective.
After The Lynchers, Wideman took an eight-year break from writing fiction; during this time, he reestablished connections with his family and the Pittsburgh neighborhood of several generations of his family. The result was the Homewood trilogy: Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981) – a collection of stories – and Sent for You Yesterday (1983). In it, he creates a family history very similar to that of the Widemans and the Frenches from whom he descended. The narrative foregrounds storytelling as the principal method by which the history is kept alive. Pieces of stories are repeated in different contexts, or the same story is told from different perspectives. Folk expressions, religious beliefs, secular and sacred music, legends, and street language are present throughout the narratives. Moreover, in these works, as in later ones, they make a difference.
But it is important to understand the nature of that difference. The world of Homewood is a dangerous, deteriorating space. Work is hard to find, buildings are decaying, alcoholism and drug addiction are common, racism and violence are rampant, and there is little hope for escape. One key figure is Tommy, who is accused of one killing (Hiding Place) and imprisoned for another (Damballah); another is Albert Wilkes, a blues pianist who killed a policeman and is later killed by the police. In one story, Tommy’s description of Homewood as a wasteland goes beyond anything found in T. S. Eliot. What the vernacular culture does is create a “blues” environment; that is, it enables the characters to see the world for what it is, but to believe that the resources – of family, history, cultural expression – can enable survival. It does not guarantee survival, and, in fact, these fictions are not significantly more optimistic than the earlier ones. What becomes clear is the shared humanity of the characters. One hope in these works is the black artist-intellectual, who has a prominent role in “gathering up” the stories. He is the one who listens to the narratives and uses them to reassure others that survival is possible. Unlike the earlier novels, here he is invested in preserving not only the stories but also the voices through which they are told. Consistent with this view of the writer’s role, Wideman entitled a later collection All Stories Are True (1993).
After the Homewood trilogy, Wideman mostly turned away from family stories to engage larger social and historical issues. In doing so, he has continued to display a modernist sensibility rather than resorting to critical realism. He often conducts narrative experiments in his short fiction. The title story of Fever (1989), for example, uses medical dictionaries, diaries, court records, natural histories, and letters, as well as several voices to tell the story of the yellow fever epidemic in eighteenth-century Philadelphia and by metaphoric extension, the story of racism in America. “Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies,” from All Stories Are True, transforms a news item from the New York Times into a highly allegorical story told by the newborn. “Surfiction” interweaves parts of a short story by Charles Chesnutt with a commentary on it in the context of a recounting of a disturbing creative writing class in which the professor becomes a voyeur through the pieces submitted by his husband and wife students. In such works, he might easily be understood as part of black postmodernism.
The novels that Wideman has published since the Homewood trilogy have focused on the urban black communities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but they have been engaged less with cultural experience and more with social and political issues. Reuben (1987) continues the emphasis on storytelling, but the stories are those of troubled individuals with little interest in communal resources. The title character, a mysterious figure in the neighborhood, is in some ways a classical trickster figure, but the author uses him primarily to raise the modernist theme of appearance and reality. Resolutions are achieved, not through his efforts or through faith or music, but rather through real or imagined acts of violence. This gives the text a surreal quality, as it becomes difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Philadelphia Fire (1990) continues the wasteland imagery as it depicts the literal holocaust that was the city’s 1985 response to MOVE, a radical black organization. The conceit of this fictionalized account is that an expatriate writer returns to try to find the small boy who was the only survivor of the police bombing of the house and subsequent fiery destruction of several city blocks. The creation of Cudjoe reasserts the role of the outsider artist-intellectual in Wideman’s fictional world. Again, as in the trilogy and Reuben, his primary function is to collect and make sense of the community’s stories. But the narratives he gathers, with difficulty precisely because he is seen as an outsider, serve not to nurture shared values and histories, but to indict the political order for its inhumanity. The history that is recorded in the text is a national, not a local one, recorded in books, not voices. Even the memorial service at the end of the novel, designed as a ritual of remembrance, uses no forms of indigenous expression. The drumming that runs through the scene links it to Africa, not Philadelphia’s black community. And, finally, the service itself, though affecting for Cudjoe, is a failure in that the city, including its black citizens, largely ignores it. Its importance is private, not public, and thus reinforces the pessimism that pervades Wideman’s fiction.
In The Cattle Killing (1996), Wideman creates another outsider narrator, but one who refuses to be alienated despite the attitudes of others. As in “Fever,” he sets the story in the time of the yellow fever epidemic. The principal narrator describes himself as an itinerant African preacher who attends to mostly white congregations in rural Pennsylvania despite their often hostile reaction to him. When the disease comes, he takes care of the sick, even those who would rather die than be attended to by a black man. On his journey toward Philadelphia, he encounters a black woman who he seeks to keep alive by telling her the stories of his encounters. Thus, he is another example of Wideman’s definition of the writer as a collector and reteller of tales rather than a creator out of only the imagination. The author also uses another art form to fully develop his ideas. The narrator meets Liam and his wife, a black man and white woman who have emigrated from England, where they both suffered from a white male society. To their neighbors they present themselves as widow and servant. In the presence of the narrator, Liam begins speaking after years of silence caused by the witnessing of various cruelties. He also resumes his painting, taking his wife as his subject. What Wideman emphasizes in his art is experimentation, work that seems more like abstract expressionism than the representation we would expect. But what the narrator sees through his method is an effort to capture the deep truth of the wife’s being. This is contrasted to the work of an English artist he served who participated in grave-robbing and illegal autopsies in order to learn how to draw women. Liam’s art, in contrast, is life-affirming and life-enhancing. Like the narrator’s (and by extension, Wideman’s) storytelling, his painting shows the human reality of ordinary experience without sacrificing it. But this does not mean that art has much power in the world. While the narrator is gone, Liam and his wife are killed by their white neighbors who have discovered their secret. This becomes simply another of the terrifying, traumatic stories the narrator must tell.
Two Cities (1998) is a narrative of mourning: death and its effects on the living is one of the central themes. One of the central characters has lost both of her sons to ghetto violence; another recalls the ghosts of his old neighborhood; the third knew John Africa (perhaps) before he was killed in the MOVE bombing. In this sense the book is a lamentation for the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But it is also a claim for the restorative possibilities of art, when all the vernacular options fail. The church, the music clubs, the basketball games, and the family stories can offer little more than temporary respite from the pain of everyday life. The shift in point of view from Mallory to Robert Jones to Kassima serves to demonstrate the ways these forms only intensify the suffering.
Art, in the formal and not vernacular sense, offers the only nurture available. Mallory discovers his creative potential in taking photographs and experimenting with their development. At the same time, he begins writing letters to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, not because he expects a response, but because he feels him to have a similar understanding. The mourning theme is brought into conjunction with this when Kassima and Robert discover the full extent of Mallory’s art after his death; he has asked Kassima to destroy all the photographs. What the two of them come to see is the ways in which he captured the vernacular world through his camera. That which has died or otherwise disappeared can be given renewed life through his art. He finds the humanity in the environment, even photographing gang members who are otherwise responsible for so much of the destruction. He also resolves the problem of the outsider artist; his distance from his subjects is seen merely as a necessary eccentricity, since the photographer must disappear behind the camera. Also, he usually asks permission to take the pictures and thus collaborates with his subjects in the creation of his art. Because he then seeks some deep truth in the processing of the negatives, he experiments with them and produces work that he believes speaks only to him. This is why he wants Kassima to burn them. But through his death, the examination of his work, and the final gesture of speaking for him, she is restored to hope and belief in the future, though without any illusions. Thus, art and the artist give back to the community what it has lost. Mallory calls his photography a “blues” art, because he finds both life’s troubles and the power to endure them through it. Through him and his work, Wideman finds a modernist image of the value of his own art. In a sense, this is a return to high modernism, in that it is only the artist who can make use of cultural materials to give whatever meaning might be found in the wasteland that is contemporary society.
What we see, then, in the fiction of Leon Forrest and John Edgar Wideman are two different versions of the interaction of a Western aesthetic and African American material. And in both, it is important to understand this interaction not as the joining of antithetical elements but rather as a means by which the optimal possibilities for storytelling can be achieved. Leon Forrest, in the tradition of Ralph Ellison, sees African American culture as a hybrid that has always contained widely diverse components. While the world may be chaotic, racist, and filled with suffering, this wealth of resources makes not only survival but also hope always likely. Wideman is much more pessimistic, given his sense of the unending racism of American society. While he has a sense of the beauty of the vernacular realm, his essentially modernist reading of the world as a wasteland leads him to emphasize the fragility of that beauty and of even the most sophisticated art.
1. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 15.
2. See Richard J. Powell, ed., The Blues Aesthetic and Modernism (Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1989).
3. Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 3.
4. “Modernism and the Politics of Culture,” Companion to Modernism, ed. Levenson, p. 158.
5. “The Modernist Novel,” Companion to Modernism, ed. Levenson, p. 78.
6. Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, Volume 1: The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2000), p. xv.
7. Much of the discussion on modernism and the Harlem Renaissance has focused on Langston Hughes. In addition to Baker, see Larry Scanlon, “‘Death is a Drum’: Rhythm, Modernity, and the Negro Poet Laureate,” Music and the Racial Imagination, eds. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 510–553; Anita Patterson, “Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.4 (2000): 651–682; Peter Brooker, “Modernism Deferred: Langston Hughes, Harlem and Jazz Montage,” Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 231–247; Robert O’Brien Hokanson, “Jazzing It Up: The Be-Bop Modernism of Langston Hughes,” Mosaic 31.4 (1998): 61–82; and Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes and Approaches to Modernism in the Harlem Renaissance,” The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, eds. Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin (New York: Garland, 1989), pp. 49–71.
8. See the short story “Everyday Use,” in In Love and Trouble (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
9. This use of the term “signifyin(g)” is from Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
10. “Modernism and the Politics of Culture,” Companion to Modernism, ed. Levenson, p. 166.
11. See Keith Byerman, “Angularity: An Interview with Leon Forrest,” African American Review 33.3 (1999): 442.
12. See James W. Coleman, Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), including the interview with Wideman that constitutes the Appendix.
13. There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 34–35.
14. Byerman, “Angularity,” 440.