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

From style to substance, let us turn to the project itself. Chapter 1 "faces" Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Chapter 2 performs the same service for Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go and Saul Bellow's The Victim. Chapter 3 juxtaposes Philip Roth's Operation Shylock and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident. In chapter 4, various short stories by Bernard Malamud and John Edgar Wideman are put on the block. Newton goes postmodern in chapter five, commenting (not sure if he's actually "facing" here) on David Mamet's screenplay of his interesting failure, Homicide, and the O.J. Simpson trial. (22)

Before talking about the importance of the project as a whole, let us take a close look at one of the chapters to see Newton's criticism in action. "Literaturized Blacks and Jews; or, golems and Tar babies: reality and its shadows in John Edgar Wideman and Bernard Malamud" (23) has a nice ring to it. This chapter also recasts some of Goffman's work in Imagining Each Other, or, as Newton so inimitably puts it, "Black faces given voice by Jew,Jewish faces made sonant by Black" (111-112). Examining Malamud's "The Jewbird," "The Angel Levine," and "Black Is My Favorite Color," (24) Newton finds them all lacking because their characters are insufficiently imagined in empathetic recognition of Black humanity. ("The Jewbird," one of Malamud's greatest stories, comes in for criticism not because the jewbird is an allegorized Black, even if his name is Schwartz, but because ... nope, he lost me again.) Wideman, in "Valaida," "Fever," and "Hostages," succeeds where Malamud fails. (25) Newton doesn't explicate these difficult, fragmented stories (I retrospectively appreciated Goffman's lucid explication of "Valaida") but instead performs his theoretical ballet with an occasional assist from Bakhtin. (26)

The subtitle of Newton's book reads "Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America." What I think this means is that literature (or film, or celebrity trial) provides the public space where the critic can bring about startling new insights into group identity and interrelatedness through the "facing" of texts that no one had thought to juxtapose before. Discussing African-American novels or Jewish-American novels as part of their own ethnic literary traditions "makes for a pinched and hamstrung criticism" (pace Henry Louis Gates and Robert Alter): "In the present readings, I aim for something less flattened. But as recognition becomes the shared optic for reading [If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Victim], so literary criticism, by the same token, cannot therefore be merely academic" (58).

Newton aims for an ethical criticism, one which judges works of art--oops, I mean texts--on a standard entirely different from trivial literary criticism. I can only assume that ethical criticism leads directly to policy implementation on federal, state, and local levels. Once again, I missed something here.

In his Post face, Newton criticizes Anna Deveare Smith for being so close with Fires in the Mirror, but, alas, getting it wrong. As with facing, Smith works with juxtaposition, but hers are invalidated because they rip their characters out of context, elide the historical, political, and class differences between the Blacks and Jews of Crown Heights, and offer impersonations to an audience which is not then forced to reevaluate blackjewishrelations. Facing Black and Jew, by contrast, "position[s] African-American and Jewish-American cultures vis-a-vis or face-to-face such that their contact with one another is genuinely a matter of enlightenment, of discovery not performance" (167).