A considerable number of African American novels written after 1970 are inspired by postmodernist themes and strategies. The postmodernist novel is essentially antimimetic; it frequently questions the linearity of plot structure, confuses time sequences, blends levels of reality and fictionality, fragments characters, looks at events through several focalizing lenses arranged one behind the other, enjoys unreliable narrators, falls short of expectations, breaks rules, undermines conventions, and sometimes even resists interpretation. All this it does with an excessive blending of wit, irony, and paradox. In short, it favors experimental, avant-garde, progressive literary techniques and approaches.
The engagement with postmodernism as a mode of writing is illustrated in the following declaration of intention by the implied author of Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure (1975):
I want this book to be anything it wants to be. A penal camp. A bad check. A criminal organization. A swindle. A prison. Devil’s Island. I want the mystery of this book to be an absolute mystery. Let it forge its own way into the art of deep sea diving. Let it walk. I want it to run and dance. And be sad. And score in the major league all-time records. I want it to smoke and drink and do other things bad for its health. This book can be anything it has a mind to be.1
Major precariously situates his novel in a continuously generative linguistic universe; his unconventional use of personification, his application of mixed metaphors, his juxtaposition of images of confinement and liberating impulses, and his propagation of provisionality and uncertainty point to fictional strategies that are no longer satisfied with the foregrounding of irony, ambiguity, and paradox, the hallmarks of the modernist novel.
A detective novel of sorts, Reflex and Bone Structure plays with the possibilities of the genre and undercuts any rational attempts to establish a relationship of cause and effect by scrambling the fragments of the two stories of a murder and its investigation and by offering different versions of the first and diverging developments of the second. The victims are Cora Hull, a beautiful, rich, and famous black actress, and Dale, one of her lovers. Dale is a persistent source of frustration for the narrator because of his rare appearance, his vagueness, and because of the narrator’s jealousy. Canada Jackson, the third character, is easier to handle, because he is straightforward, socially conscious, and positive. The fourth character is the intrusive author/narrator himself, who seems obsessed with Cora and unable to solve the mystery of her protean existence. Besides juggling with time levels and plot sequences, such as offering alternative versions of Cora’s life, e.g. death in a traffic accident, marriage with Fidel Castro, sexual escapades with the narrator, he problematizes his own function as an author by admitting his inability to create round characters, by doing his best to control his figures yet running the risk of being manipulated by them in turn, and thus revealing his own disorientation in the metafictional clinch. This includes emphasis on the written word, as the following example illustrates:
Cora inspects the word of her mouth. She touches the paper on which her name appears. The word Cora, she thinks, is the extent of her presence. This is a word. She is sitting at the kitchen table, elbows on table. The table has a word that is used by people, like Cora, who wish to refer to it. That word is table. Cora writes her name on the paper. She erases it. It goes away but it is still there. Cora is trapped in herself.
(Major, Reflex, 74)
Such foregrounding of the signifier (“the word Cora,” “the word table”) implies a text assuming a life of its own, but it also allows the author/narrator better control over the facts, e.g. the fact that Cora is dead, which he simply ignores. Thus we again encounter the strange juxtaposition of freedom and control: the self-emancipation of language is instrumentalized by a narrator whose deepest urge is to resurrect Cora by re-creating her. Revisiting her empty apartment, he writes: “I climb the steps slowly. Canada probably won’t be home. A wasted trip, wasted energy, wasted space. / But the peephole opens and an eye winks. After I’ve knocked three times. I know I’m crazy but I hope – against all hope – it is Cora. Please person be Cora. Just this once be Cora. You are Cora person. Please” (93). Such metafictional concerns are more than mere games. The author’s preoccupation with the self (Cora’s, his own) is a concern with himself as an author, with the need to create his own reality, the need to churn out, again and again, his own versions of death – and life.
This novel is thus an example of postmodernist rather than modernist writing. The modernist novel is experimental and innovatory in form; it foregrounds the subconscious and unconscious regions of the human mind; it frequently breaks the linearity of plot and often makes use of “new” strategies of point of view, such as the technique of “stream-of-consciousness.” Nevertheless, it usually compensates for such breaches of conventional mimetic writing by trying to establish unity, closure, identity, etc. on another (higher or lower) level of discourse. The postmodern (or postmodernist) novel, on the other hand, is much more radical in these respects, and, above all, it denies or subverts such compensatory measures. For example, it asserts the freedom and autonomy of the literary text while at the same time foregrounding the author’s play with language; it presents two-dimensional characters which are then given extremely variable functions, something they could never perform in “real” life (or “real” death, for that matter); it inverts generic plots such as those of crime fiction or the love triangle; and it destabilizes the function of the narrator to the extent that he himself becomes a pawn in the game. Reflex and Bone Structure is thus a testimony to the author’s engagement with postmodernism, as a condition and as a mode of writing.
As a condition, postmodernism has been characterized, for example, by Lyotard, for whom it refers to the general state of knowledge in times of information technology and the absence of a master narrative,2 by Jameson, who relates it to the cultural logic of late capitalism3 and the loss of historical consciousness,4 or by Baudrillard, for whom it has to do with the cultural production of a “semiurgic society” and the substitution of the simulacrum for the real.5 These theorists define postmodernism as primarily a concept of philosophy or of cultural theory. As such it has also been claimed by African American scholars, such as Henry Louis Gates,6 bell hooks,7 or Philip Brian Harper. The latter postulates the marginalized groups’ experience of decenteredness as an age-old postmodern condition:
if postmodernist fiction foregrounds subjective fragmentation, a similar decenteredness can be identified in US [black] novels written prior to the postmodern era, in which it derives specifically from the socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised status of the populations treated in the works. To the extent that such populations have experienced psychic decenteredness long prior to its generalization throughout the culture during the late twentieth century, one might say that the postmodern era’s preoccupation with fragmented subjectivity represents the “recentering” of the culture’s focus on issues that have always concerned marginalized constituencies.8
De-centering, to be sure, has been around as a critical term in the postmodernist vocabulary for quite some time. Yeats’s famous lines: “Things fall apart; / the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” in his poem “The Second Coming” (1921) had heralded the fragmentation typical of modernism, but the modernist writers had looked for salvation in formal and mythical countermeasures by making use, however ironically, of older (and “safer”) literary and musical forms as well as mythical topics from older literary and religious sources. The postmodern writers, in contrast, invert or subvert hierarchies, emphasize dislocation, antitotalization, infinite regress, etc., and, together with fabulation, textual play, and self-referentiality, they mostly valorize the fragments, highlight peripheral phenomena, focusing on the centrifugal rather than the centripetal forces. And yet, the above-mentioned African American theorists’ re-direction of the critical focus from the marginal to the central adds a fascinating new angle to the concept, which also influences our understanding of postmodernism as a mode of writing.
Harper’s application of the term to the condition of modernist black writing draws attention to the ambiguous quality of postmodernism as a fictional mode inasmuch as it indirectly questions its relationship to modernism, its antecedent. Although the term “postmodernism” in English was first disseminated by a historian, early usage in literary criticism by Irving Howe and Harry Levin applies it to late modernist American fiction, whereas critics of the 1960s, such as Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, or the art critic John Perreault began to see it in opposition to modernism.9 From then on, and especially in the writing of Ihab Hassan10 and David Lodge,11 the question as to whether postmodernism is a continuation of modernism or whether it is its opposite gained prominence in the literary debates. In many practical cases it is both. However, no matter whether continuation or contrast, David Antin’s dictum: “From the modernism you choose you get the postmodernism you deserve”12 allows us to distinguish between at least two types of postmodernist theories.
As long as we take as our basis of definition the view of literary modernism of the kind embraced by T. S. Eliot or Ralph Ellison, who try to counteract fragmentation by a search for some form of salvation, in myth and ritual, in folklore, in a return to the roots, etc., we may define the postmodern turn as a radical shift towards dehumanization, subversion of metaphysics, or “ontological instability.” Ihab Hassan and Brian McHale have done this most succinctly, the latter one, in his second book, even insisting on the necessity to postulate the existence of different postmodernisms.13 If, on the other hand, we take as our point of departure the definition of modernism in architecture, which insists on the totalitarian, i.e. dehumanizing approaches of modernists such as Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, any postmodern attempt would then have to be seen as an attempt to re-humanize the public space, e.g. by insisting on antitotalization, subjectivity, heterogeneity, humor, etc. Linda Hutcheon, in her Poetics of Postmodernism is doing just that, adapting her definitions to those of Charles Jencks, and that is why she has difficulties accepting in her system some of the more radical postmodernist writers, such as Barthelme, Brautigan, Elkin, Gaddis, and Oates, and can only make passing mention of Coover, Gass, Sukenick, and Vonnegut.14
Most African American postmodernist fiction blends, or oscillates between, approaches implied by those two theoretical positions. This may be due to the strongly ethical and political quality of most black writing, to specific kinds of thematic engagement, or to certain generic preoccupations. As a result, critical and reader response tend to differ remarkably, depending on ideological alignment or aesthetic preference. In some cases, we can even observe a tendency to include some forms of realistic writing, such as Magic Realism (the inclusion of fabulous or fantastic elements in fiction that is otherwise realistic),15 or certain comparatively new generic developments, such as the jazz novel or even the blues novel, accounts that engage these musical genres in formal and thematic ways, such as making use of call-and-response or attempts at improvisation, on the one hand, or preoccupations with musical history and characters, on the other. This goes to show that the postmodernist mode is in no way limited by strict boundaries, either in production or in reception, that the tendency to experiment, to undermine, or to explode a particular style may be found in a wide range of fictional writing, and that, more often than not, genres, styles, or themes overlap. Moreover, one also encounters texts that show postmodernist traits at some levels and modernist, or even realistic ones, at others. As the postmodern poetics does not advocate a tendency towards harmony, unity, or wholeness, this should not cause any problems. Yet not every leap into fantasy, not every expression of self-reflexivity, not every resistance to closure creates a postmodernist work, any more than every syntactical distortion leads to a modernist example of Joycean stream-of-consciousness. Perhaps it makes sense, then, to restrict the term to those kinds of fiction that predominantly undercut mimesis (the reproduction of external reality), ideology, and “truth,” collapse surface and depth, or tend to doubt the foundations of their own existence.
By this definition, arguably the most important player in the field of black postmodernist fiction is Ishmael Reed, whose specialty is satirical parody: of genres, of ideologies, of aesthetic programs, even of religions. His masterpiece, Mumbo Jumbo (1972),16 parodies the detective novel, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, Western Culture, and Christianity, propagating the Neo-American Hoo-Doo Church as a contemporary version of the traditional Haitian religion of Voodoo. Through parody, Reed satirizes almost everything under the sun, including racial, cultural, and gender issues, which has made him quite a number of enemies. Apart from his stunning use of the vernacular, his exuberant verbal wit, his successful blending of folklore and caricature, his inventive use of metafictional strategies, and his hilarious deconstruction of history, it is above all the surprising intricacy of Reed’s ideological constructions that makes his fiction so challenging (see chapter 12 in this book).
The third significant early postmodernist African American author (besides Major and Reed) is William Melvin Kelley. His innovative potential encompasses forays into the realms of fantasy, myth, and dream as well as the linguistic experiments used to represent them. His third novel, dem (1967),17 is a surrealistic treatment of a white family’s disintegration under the spell of black retributive action. Its protagonist risks disappearing into the fantasy world of TV soap opera, and there are early attempts to represent his dreams in language experiments making frequent use of paranomasia (the use of words that sound alike but differ in meaning). Kelley achieved postmodernist fame with Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970),18 a surrealist satire that blends white-dominated intertextuality with the African heritage to present the African American as a dream-construction. At surface level, the novel tells an unending tale consisting of two separate plots with two different protagonists, partly presented in alternating fragments: a spoof on segregation combined with an account of a clandestine contemporary Middle Passage and a burlesque of a Harlem hustler’s maneuverings against the Black Bourgeoisie. Additional depth and actual excitement are provided by a third story, which consists of ironic-prophetic dream-like sequences, in which the two protagonists, the white-obsessed semi-intellectual Chig Dunford and the black-oriented Carlyle Bedlow are offered a possibility to come together and reconstruct the shattered self of the black man, thereby escaping the dismal condition of a spiritually unbalanced world and, as “Blafringro-Arumericans” entering “New Afriquerque,” a hypothetical collective myth of a utopian black American nation, which is, however, treated ironically.
Like Ishmael Reed, Kelley thus contrasts and fuses elements of white and black culture; in his case Scandinavian mythology and Nigerian fiction help him oppose the chill of the white man’s North to the sun energy of Africa.19 Unlike Reed, however, he subverts these binary structures by means of audacious linguistic experiments. His “supersaturated black text” (Nielsen 5) signifies on the artificial language practiced in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, making use of spelling experiments to highlight the tension between the visual and auditive effects of puns: “Witches one Way tspike Mr. Chigyle’s Languish, n curryng him back tRealty, recoremince wi hUnmisereaducation” (Dunfords 49). Yet, in so doing, Kelley does not only provide revisionary comments on modernism, but he also destabilizes essentialist conceptions of Black English (Nielsen 6–7). To paraphrase an illustration by Marieme Sy, the phrase “grieft of servilization” (Dunfords 57), if read aloud, produces “gift of civilization,” yet a silent reading suggests connotations such as “grief,” “serve,” “servile” (Sy 465–466). The words substituted for the originally intended phrase thus, on the one hand, provide an aural/oral version and, on the other, sever this version from its original meaning. Hence, Kelley’s rendering of “Chigyle’s” dream world foregrounds and at the same time problematizes the vernacular voice, making “writing” essential in ways foreign to his more realistically minded contemporaries among writers and critics.
Major’s strategies of radical invention, Reed’s satirical parodies, and Kelley’s surrealist dislocations testify to these authors’ comparatively early appropriation – and transformation – of key issues and central paradigms of American postmodernist writing. But they were not alone in their efforts. Quite a number of their black contemporaries experimented with similar approaches, and additional ones were developed by their successors. One of the central criteria by means of which the postmodernist quality of such approaches might be assessed is the degree to which identity is destabilized and the narrative levels at which such processes take place. Since this issue is inherent in much theory and criticism of African American fiction, I propose to concentrate on this feature and to discuss it by focusing on four selected thematic clusters, namely those of: (1) skin and skin color; (2) ancestry and madness; (3) (hi)story and prophecy; and (4) artist and voice.
1. A central aspect of black identity is, of course, that of skin, and skin has been treated controversially in various ways in postmodern African American novels.20 This issue can be discussed here in more summary fashion, because the relevant authors are dealt with elsewhere in this book. Whereas recent African American realist and modernist novels concerned with the issue of skin generally provide variations of the themes of passing and of the tragic mulatto,21 postmodernist writing tends to foreground more exceptional aspects of this topic. Perhaps the most radical postmodernist treatment of skin occurs in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990),22 above all in the mongrel figure of Horace Benbow, aka Soulcatcher, whose chest is tattooed with the victims of his murders, eerie pictures coming alive and melting into each other, providing the ultimate challenge to the protagonist’s sense of self and granting him a vision into the liminal region between the worlds of the living and the dead (Oxherding Tale 175–176). The topic reappears in Middle Passage in the image of the coal-black Allmuseri god, who absorbs people that are sent to feed him and shows them on his epidermis, so that what in the earlier novel appeared as tattoos now functions as a cross-cultural microcosm, exposing the multiplicity and division at the core of black essence and revealing to the protagonist/narrator that “identity is imagined,” that “the (black) self is the greatest of all fictions” (Middle Passage 171). Whereas Johnson’s epiphanies of skin emphasize the proliferating reflexivity of epidermis, John Edgar Wideman foregrounds color, but again in a subversive manner, namely by making Brother Tate, the no-name protagonist of Sent for You Yesterday (1983), an albino.23 In this way he inverts the issue of black identity, interpreting Brother’s mysterious whiteness – or his non-color – as the last stage in the history of racial abuse (484). By exploding the essentialism of skin color, Wideman, like Johnson, makes black and white identity a highly dubious affair and thus contributes to the controversy about race in postmodernist fiction (on Wideman see chapter 15).
2. The second thematic cluster concerns issues of origins and madness. They are tied up in an exemplary way in The Bloodworth Orphans (1977) by Leon Forrest.24 The governing characteristic of Forrest’s fiction is excess: of genres, styles, imagery, tales, experiences, relationships, etc.25 The novel’s numerous characters, most of whom perceive themselves as orphans, in their quest for identity desperately try to sound the depths of their family history, only to come up with painful evidence of incest, miscegenation, racism, rape, bloodshed, suicide, and crime of all hues and shades, to a large extent stemming from an almost mythological curse of the Bloodworth family. However, in contrast to classical procedure, this curse finds its own illogical path among the generations of descendants in ever-renewed, repeated, but also dislocated revelations of impropriety, illegitimacy, and guilt. Quite a few characters crack under the burden of such disclosures; others overreact in ways close to insanity. It is as if the plethora of celebrations and outrages, performed (and represented) as an amoral leveling of acclamations and denunciations, functioned to compensate the last (lost) generation of Bloodworth children for their enormous sense of deprivation (on Forrest see chapter 15).
An equally harrowing recreation of communal memory occurs in the first two novels by Gayl Jones. Although the ancestral tale, if untangled, appears, in her case, more linear and focused, the outrage has similar dimensions, and what in the case of Forrest is achieved by excess is here realized by shocking detail. Corregidora (1975)26 problematizes black identity formation by revealing the distortions caused by multiple narrators and focalizers of traumatic tales. Ursa’s relentless rendering of the Corregidora family’s history of sexual assault allows her to attempt partial psychic recovery from her own mutilation by learning how to question the various constricting functions of ancestral reports and by becoming aware of the slave women’s practice of power during and throughout the enforced sexual act. The emphasis on fellatio as a site of female resistance and the protagonist’s choice among a series of graded options between loving and emasculating her husband may be read as psycho-political position-taking in a neo-slavery situation, where oppression is predominantly performed by means of rape and enforced prostitution; her final decision to opt for love, expressed in a blues duet with Mutt, has been interpreted as a performance that allows her to reclaim her own desire.27 (See chapter 5, pp. 93–95.)
The opposite choice – if one can still speak of a choice – is made by the protagonist of Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man (1976).28 Eva Medina Canada poisons her lover and then lovingly castrates him by biting off his penis. Leading up to this ironic climax is a series of experiences and accounts of sexual abuse, beginning with a little boy’s use of a popsicle stick for his fumbling forays on the passive girl and repeating the same constellation of male aggressiveness and female succumbing to such an extent that critics almost at once have suspected an increasingly unreliable narrator.29 The shifts among narrative and time levels, together with a less and less comprehensible use of syntax and referentiality, support the growing impression that the protagonist is gradually going insane. Despite detailed communications of the most intimate matters, the experiences rendered remain meaningless, apart from a growing desire of revenge for sexual mistreatment, which is, however, coupled with signs of pathological sexual obsession. The murderess ends up in a prison for the criminally insane, finds understanding and sympathy from a cell mate, and is last seen in a lesbian embrace. Even more than in the case of Forrest, whose use of the Orpheus and Osiris myths suggest additional levels of meaning, Jones’s novels offer themselves to multiple allegorical readings, and yet one recognizes an ever-widening gap between the narrative and the attempted psychological, political, or mythological explanations,30 and it is especially this gap which contributes to the postmodern quality of the novel.
A later version of the dislocation of the self and the concomitant destabilization of identity occurs in Randall Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits (1989).31 More reticent about sexual details than Jones, Kenan, at the surface level, depicts a case of acute schizophrenia, ingeniously rendered in a flickering interplay between excursions into the occult and the fantastic and glimpses of confused awareness of a frightening present. Structurally reminiscent of Kelley’s Dunfords, the novel has two separate plotlines, which make contact only at brief moments: the first is an account of the last day (or rather night) of young Horace Cross’s losing fight against the inner and outer constrictions to his budding homosexuality; the second consists of his elder cousin, the Reverend James Malachai Greene, recalling a life lived in resignation. The young man’s loss of identity leading to his suicide is tied to his refusal to play the part prescribed to him by a history of black suffering and displacement as well as by black refusal to accept his otherness, his engagement with whites of the same sexual preference. The precise dating of some of the sections provides a rational counterpoint to Horace’s necromantic rituals, visions, and nightmares involving demons, wizards, and monsters, as well as visions of earlier versions of himself. By means of a variety of styles and modes, present reality and the real and fantastic past are fused. Focalization is never stable, and thus the facts provided by one specific focalizer – or the ways in which these facts are presented – may contest those supplied by another one; for example, information about Horace’s death is strangely ignored in James’s plotline, then introduced in retrospect, whereas in Horace’s plot, the suicide is first rehearsed as a killing of his ghostly double and only at the end sprung upon the reader in a third-person account of disturbing clinical detail, only to be obfuscated again by a paradoxical assertion of veracity: “Ifs and maybes and weres and perhapses are of no use in this case. The facts are enough, unless they too are subject to doubt” (A Visitation 254).
3. A different approach to the destabilization of identity is taken by John Edgar Wideman in The Cattle Killing (1996),32 arguably one of the most significant African American novels of the last fifty years. Wideman’s brand of historiographic metafiction relates issues of history and prophecy with the theme of storytelling, but his stories and their tellers, by means of fragmentation, anachronism, and the permeability of characters, are made to wreak havoc on the identitarian discourses practiced by some of his more modernist-minded contemporaries. Mental disturbance is no issue here; the forces assailing the artist’s perception of the self and others are social, moral, and spiritual. Masquerade, disguise, and deception dominate most of the tales told in this novel, whose characters need them to survive in an increasingly chaotic world. In typically postmodern fashion, contradictory concepts of time inform the complex arrangement of events and flashbacks; history, story, and the writer’s life permeate each other and the characters, so that the process of representation must constantly be renegotiated by the writer: “And who is he anyway, interchangeable with these others, porous, them running through him, him leaking, bleeding into them, in the fiction he’s trying to write” (Cattle Killing 13). That despite his enormously effective use of the vernacular Wideman casts doubts on the power of the griot, of the oral tradition, and thus of the author himself, that he constantly investigates the nature of the truths he encounters, paradoxically gives additional validity to his argument33.
In a slightly less radical manner, other contemporary novelists play with issues of historical accuracy and thus put the identity of their historical figures at stake. In Darktown Strutters (1994),34 Wesley Brown intervenes in the history of minstrelsy, presenting a fictional biography of Jim Crow, a blend of stereotype and trickster, who questions the issue of masquerade by refusing to blacken up while performing his dances; Charles Johnson constructs a highly ambiguous portrait of Martin Luther King’s double in Dreamer (1998)35; and Colson Whitehead rings the changes on the hero of a famous ballad in John Henry Days (2001).36 Although such novels at first sight seem to be written in a comparatively realistic manner, closer inspection reveals many aspects that make them fit into Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern brand of historiographic metafiction, such as the provisionality or indeterminacy of a character’s identity, the problematic of reference and representation, or the constructed quality of “facts” (cf. Hutcheon 105–123). These authors “play” with history; they make use of anachronism; or they cast doubt on processes of verification.
4. A fourth way of postmodernist questioning of identity is the author’s self-reflective concern with his or her function as an artist, a theme which, more often than not, is developed by choosing a musician as protagonist of the novel. This, again, has become a common topic in recent African American fiction. Postmodernist novels, however, no matter whether they are about musicians or writers, are very rarely “ascent narratives,”37 and if so, they are parodic and ironical, like the story of the writer Raven Quickskill in Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976).38 They rather express reservations about the artist’s function, such as in the story of Mason Ellis, the protagonist of Major’s My Amputations (1986),39 whose identity and manuscript are stolen by a famous author or an impostor, and who is sent by his sponsoring foundation on a bizarre lecturing tour across Europe, during which he constantly claims to be inventing himself, only to end up in a remote village in Liberia carrying a sealed message that says “Keep this nigger” (My Amputations 203). Such weird comments on the establishment of a black voice are frequent in postmodernist African American novels, especially in postmodern jazz fiction, which tends to suspect or even subvert Gayl Jones’s postulation of the black musician as the superior artist and model, whom the African American writer ought to emulate.40 Whereas realist and modernist novels about jazz musicians and their performance tend to focus on specific rhythmical aspects of the black vernacular or even to turn fiction into jazz (cf. Albert Murray, Xam Wilson Cartiér, or some of the authors of short stories collected by Richard N. Albert or Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey), postmodern authors show a strong tendency to turn jazz into fiction and while so doing to address the anxiety of voice as one of the gaps between the two modes of black performance.
Strategies that are embraced to problematize voice (and, through voice, identity) reach from silencing to indirection and fragmentation.41 Leon Forrest, for example, has his protagonist witness a concert in a mental asylum, a one-man-show performed by blind Ironwood “Landlord” Rumble, whose weird musical sermon (related as a story) ends in his physical collapse, leading to his being carried up to his room, to be effectively silenced, whereas his horns, “which he had turned into stunning orchards of beauty and power, now appeared to take on the visage of corroded chains, as they were carted away in huge money-sacks” (Bloodworth 315). In Wideman’s Sent for You Yesterday (1983), Albert Wilkes, the legendary blues pianist, is shot by the police while playing his music, and his successor, the mysterious Brother Tate, after the killing of his son stops talking and communicates by scatting instead, in this way reacting to a nightmare in which he tries to suppress a scream for fear of being sucked out of a dark box car (The Homewood Books 341–343).
In these and similar novels, the postmodern problematizing of the musician’s voice paradoxically leads to a revaluation of language, but not necessarily of orality. This is interesting, because authors like Forrest or Wideman gained fame by their espousal of the vernacular. It seems that in this fiction the concept of “liberating voices” is challenged, and yet at the same time the artist’s concern with writing gains significance. A fascinating example of more recent jazz fiction is the work of Nathaniel Mackey, whose epistolary novels, Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), and Atet. A.D. (2001),42 written by an acronymic musician and addressed to a mysterious correspondent named “Angel of Dust,” convert the performance of music into literary language in a very idiosyncratic manner, in which musicians are sometimes reduced to mouthpieces of the instruments they play or even made to perform silently, merely fingering their instruments. Sound is expressed by silent gesture or related to distorted speech, as in the narrator’s “metalecture” on “The Creaking of the Word.” At the same time, visual imagery and visual description abound; bands are given names such as the “Boneyard Brass Octet” or the “Crossroads Choir” (Bedouin 165–178); one of the most striking examples is the narrator’s explanation of singer Betty Carter’s breathless performance of a ballad by focusing on her “facial teasing”: “I was struck by her inversion of conventional ventriloquism’s motionless lips and expressionless face, by the way the wealth of labial gesture and facial projection she resorted to metathetically altered the ventriloquial formula” (Djbot 155). Voice is thus reduced, distorted, or deferred, which to Mackey seems necessary to turn the music into language, and language into writing.43 Synesthesia is made to foreground and then deconstruct orality; the narrator’s stereoscopic vision projects him into the dual personality of Djbot Baghostus / Jarred Bottle – names whose acronyms suggest James Brown and Damballah44 – and thus presents identity as a flickering of mystical masks across different layers of reality.
The inversion and subversion of markers of postmodern black literary characterization such as color of skin, mental sanity, historical continuity, and voice are echoed, or twisted and burlesqued in turn in Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996),45 which I shall use to wind up this brief survey, because it is not only one of the most succinct successors of Ishmael Reed’s iconoclastic fiction but also suggests possible directions in which this fiction may be moving. The surface linearity of Beatty’s spoof on the black Bildungs- and Künstlerroman covers up the fissures and cracks in the life of a pitch-black Californian whiz kid, whose brainpower, sophistication, and creative talent are matched only by his sarcasm, insolence, and occasional cynicism: attitudes that he needs to survive in his new surroundings when his mother moves the family from a white middle-class neighborhood to inner-city Los Angeles. The name, lineage, and educational history of the protagonist are used to satirize the genre of the family novel and especially the current predilection for black autobiographies. Gunnar Kaufmann hails from a clan of self-reliant yet accommodationist folk who exaggerate racial and cultural stereotypes for economic and psychic survival. His intellectual superiority, and particularly his unabashed display of the same, cause him frequent physical damage but also procure lasting friendships with two equally weird characters, Nicholas Scoby, a jazz freak and basketball star, who is constitutionally unable to miss a shot, and Psycho Loco, the insane killer who protects Gunnar against attacks from troublemakers and provides him with a Japanese mail-order bride when he is eighteen.
Despite his dark skin, Gunnar’s precociousness makes him appear white to many of his peers. The potential isolation this causes he tries to counteract by joining one of the local black gangs, the Gun-Toting Hooligans, on their occasional masqueraded forays against their enemy gangs. The tone of the narrative, as well as the play with race and gender (they fight in drag), are definitely postmodern, and so is the strange shift of emphasis from the vernacular to the written. For acceptance only comes when Gunnar writes a poem and sprays it on the wall surrounding the community he lives in, which turns him into a representative of the weak and downtrodden. And although for a large part of his story Gunnar entertains us by his combination of slapstick and stand-up comedianship, the final chapters turn his hip-hop jargon into relentless, if not to say destructive, “black humor” in the dual sense of the word. The book he finally publishes is sarcastically entitled Watermelanin, and the speech he delivers against the acquittal of the white policemen who mistreated Rodney King46 has unexpected effects: his endorsement of freedom by self-destruction instigates a series of significant suicides, including those of his friend and his father.47 In a characteristically postmodern way, effect exceeds cause and leads to rather fantastic exaggeration: he discloses the Manhattan Project’s secret plan to get rid of the black population by means of a third atomic bomb, Svelte Guy (besides Fat Boy and Little Man, the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and he goads US state terrorism by having white concentric circles painted on the roofs of the neighborhood, with his own temporary home as the bull’s eye. This, by the way, is the place where he defiantly feeds his newborn daughter Naomi. Entropic and apocalyptic echoes of Pynchon and Vonnegut, together with references to suicidal thematics in Morrison and Perry, help create a brand of postmodernist satire full of absurd wit and sarcasm while still enforcing a highly ethical stance. The suicidal poem written by Gunnar’s father that ends the novel testifies to this no-nonsense attitude:
Like the good Reverend King,I too “have a dream,”but when I wake upI forget it andremember I’m running late for work.(Beatty, 249)
Interestingly enough, in this novel, just as in the other ones discussed above, the experimental violations of convention, the insistence on the provisionality of meaning, and the unfixing of identity go parallel with a deep concern for aesthetic aspects of writing, for the novel as a form of art.
1. Clarence Major, Reflex and Bone Structure (New York: Fiction Collective, 1975), p. 61.
2. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979); The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
3. Fredric R. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
4. Philip E. Simmons, Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture and History in Postmodern American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 2.
5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
6. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
7. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990).
8. Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3–4.
9. Toynbee in 1947. Cf. Michael Köhler, “‘Postmodernismus’: Ein begriffsgeschichtlicher Überblick,” Postmodernism in American Literature. A Critical Anthology, eds. Manfred Pütz and Peter Freese (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1984), pp. 3–5.
10. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971); Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations on the Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).
11. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).
12. David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism,” Boundary 2 1 (1972), qtd. in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 792.
13. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987); Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992).
14. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 22, 27–29, 52.
15. “Magic realism is a critique of the possibility of representation in that it blurs the boundaries between what is ‘magic’ and what is ‘real’ and thus calls into question accepted definitions of either.” Brenda K. Marshal, Teaching the Postmodern. Fiction and Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 180.
16. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972).
17. William Melvin Kelley, dem (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967).
18. William Melvin Kelley, Dunfords Travels Everywheres (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970).
19. Grace Eckley, “The Awakening of Mr. Afrinnegan: Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywheres and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,” Obsidian 12 (Summer 1975): 27–41; Marieme Sy, “Dream and Language in Dunfords Travels Everywheres,” CLA Journal 25, 4 (June 1982): 458–467; Valerie M. Babb, “William Melvin Kelley,” Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, eds. (Detroit: Gale, 1984), pp. 135–143; Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 3–13.
20. Cf. Fritz Gysin, “Predicaments of Skin: Boundaries in Recent African American Fiction,” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, eds. Maria Diedrich and Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 286–297.
21. Cf., e.g., Raymond Andrews, Appalachee Red (New York: Dial, 1978; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Random House, 1999).
22. Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Middle Passage (New York: Atheneum, 1990).
23. John Edgar Wideman, The Homewood Books: Damballah; Hiding Place; Sent for You Yesterday (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
24. Leon Forrest, The Bloodworth Orphans (New York: Random House, 1977; Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1987).
25. On excess as a criterion of postmodernist fiction see Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, 235–239.
26. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (New York: Random House, 1975).
27. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “‘Relate Sexual to Historical’: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” African American Review 34.2 (Summer 2000): 273–297.
28. Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man (New York: Random House, 1976).
29. Cf. Keith Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 181–185.
30. Cf., e.g., Carol Margaret Davison, “‘Love ‘em and Lynch ‘em’: The Castration Motif in Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man,” African American Review 29.3 (Fall 1995): 393–410.
31. Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (New York: Random House, 1989; New York: Vintage, 2000).
32. John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
33. Cf. Fritz Gysin, “‘Do not Fall Asleep in Your Enemy’s Dream,’ John Edgar Wideman and the Predicaments of Prophecy,” Callaloo 22.3 (Summer 1999): 623–628; Kathie Birat, “‘All Stories are True.’ Prophecy, History, and Story in The Cattle Killing,” [Ibid: 629–643]: 629–643.
34. Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters (New York: Cane Hill Press, 1994).
35. Charles Johnson, Dreamer (New York: Scribner, 1998).
36. Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
37. Cf. Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), p. 59. Cf. also Percival Everett, who provides a harrowing parody of Richard Wright’s Native Son in his novel Erasure (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2001).
38. Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (New York: Random House, 1976).
39. Clarence Major, My Amputations (New York and Boulder: Fiction Collective, 1986).
40. Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
41. Cf. Fritz Gysin, “From ‘Liberating Voices’ to ‘Metathetic Ventriloquism,’ Boundaries in Recent African American Jazz Fiction,” Callaloo 25.1 (Winter 2002): 274–287.
42. Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, Callaloo Fiction Series, 1986); Djibot Baghostus’s Run (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993); Atet. A. D. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001).
43. Cf. several significant contributions in Paul Naylor ed., Nathaniel Mackey. A Special Issue, Callaloo 23.2 (Spring 2000).
44. Paul Hoover and Nathaniel Mackey, “Pair of Figures for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey,” Nathaniel Mackey. A Special Issue, Callaloo: 739.
45. Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle (New York: Random House, 1996; London: Vintage, 2000).
46. Cf. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), pp. 342–346. In the fashion of Ellison’s invisible man’s funeral speech on Tod Clifton.
47. Beatty here takes up a topic first developed by Toni Morrison and Richard Perry and exploits it to excess. Cf. “National Suicide Week” at the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977); cf. Richard Perry. Montgomery’s Children (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1984). But whereas the earlier two authors connect the suicide theme with the myth of slaves flying back to Africa, Beatty relates his characters’ performance of suicide to the Japanese tradition.