Literary Criticism as Anything But Literary Criticism - Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature - Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America - Book Review

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Robert Philipson

None of this is as reductionist as it might sound. Goffman is intelligent, well-informed, and--thank God--a good writer. His presentation of Blacks and Jews at the various stages described by the Official Liberal Version is concise and convincing. In an earlier age, he might also have been a fine literary critic. Unfortunately, his project demands that he subordinate literature to history and sociology. For second-rate novels, Goffman's analysis brings to them an interest they might not otherwise have (e.g., Chester Himes's Lonely Crusade and John A. Williams' The Man Who Cried I Am). (14) When the sociology of Black-Jewish relations is the principal theme of a short story, as in Malamud's "Black Is My Favorite Color" or Paley's "Zagrowsky Tells," (15) Goffman's perspective proves fine as an explication de texte. He also has interesting things to say about Black-Jewish relations as secondary elements of major novels. Let me say loud and clear, before I get to the criticisms, that, in the main, Imagining Each Other is a fine, well-organized, well-written book--a worthy addition to the Official Liberal Version of Black-Jewish relations.

As a book of literary criticism--the category proposed by its back cover--it is hamstrung by refusal to take aesthetics into account. "Aesthetic and social considerations ... cannot be separated" (xiii), Goffman writes in his introduction, but he makes precious few aesthetic judgments. There is no way to tell from Goffman's discussion that Paule Marshall's novels are much better than those of Jay Neugeboren, that Richard Wright outstrips Chester Himes as a writer in every respect. Goffman might protest that the purpose of his book is not to pass judgment on works of art as aesthetic products but as part of a political and historical process. The problem is that complex and ambiguous works of art are inevitably flattened, and therefore misrepresented, by such an approach. Malamud's story, "The Angel Levine," (16) is a case in point. Goffman reads the story as a failure of the assimilated Jewish author to portray African-American environments and subjectivities, but such an interpretation doesn't take into account the story's supernatural and surreal elements. In fact, literary-criticism-as-sociology is most comfortable with realism and has difficulty with everything else.

Perhaps it is this discomfort with non-naturalistic modes of writing that led Goffman to exclude two capital examples of Black and Jewish mutual representation: Ed Bullin's play, The Taking of Miss Janie (1972), and Stanley Elkin's remarkable short story, "I Look Out for Ed Wolfe" (1962). (17) Bullin's play features a would-be Black radical clubbing an aging, Jewish Beat figure to death, and Stanley Elkin's orphaned Jewish protagonist tries to auction off his Black dancing partner in a Black night club. It would be interesting to see how Goffman might fit these two non-realistic scenes into his structure.

Although Goffman draws his theory from a variety of sources, his choice of texts is, for the most part, strictly American. This can feel a bit short-circuiting, as when he asserts that Black and Jewish culture (which Black culture? which Jewish culture?) is post-colonial, but Goffman does an excellent job situating and contextualizing novels treating American topics. American literature doesn't come in an impermeable container, however, and the inclusion of Paule Marshall, an American writer of Caribbean origin, complicates matters. Goffman's analysis of her profound novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People fails not only because the novel is so much greater than the ethnicities of its main characters, but because the conditions of Marshall's postcolonial Caribbean island are utterly different from those of Blacks and Jews in the United States.