Featured White Papers
- The secret to effective, no-hassle performance reviews (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
- How to simplify the IT infrastructure with end-to-end automation of document processes (Esker)
- The missing link: Driving business results through pay-for-performance (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
Content provided in partnership with
Following her act: sequence and desire in Gayl Jones's The Healing
African American Review, Spring, 2007 by David LaCroix
As these few passages suggest, throughout the novel Jones draws on the tradition of black English and the black voice as a radiating source of humor and resistance. Above the multitude of characters, Harlan's narrative voice is the one constant in this shifting novel. It is one of the powers that the healer uses to disarm the assumptions by which modern-day men and women misrecognize their world.
Using what Heather E. Epes has identified as the "language of exception," which reveals anomalies within "the leaky boundaries around any category" (12), Harlan represents the literal fulfillment of a set of temporal, communal and communicative values that Jones first described in her scholarly study Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991). Ernest J. Gaines's novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) provides Jones's favored example of a story whose cause is nothing more or less than the desire of the narrator herself, a woman who commands the events and processes of her own life down to the minutest detail. A significant antecedent to Harlan "Jane" Eagleton, Miss Jane Pittman tells her story by employing "the easy transitions that one finds in oral stories, easy shifts in tense--not only in transitions between past and present but in the context of the historical past. These transitions help evoke the immediacy of the present moment, where the shift in tense occurs in the same scene, indeed, in the same sentence" (Liberating Voices 166). Like her intertextual Louisianan ancestor, Harlan readily swerves among conversational topics, following a path of association untrammeled by imposed ideas of sequence. Her seemingly unhindered capacity for speculation propels her curiosity forward, as she relies on her voice as a tool of analysis and a medium for subjectivity. More importantly, as her narration shifts time, tense, and setting across sections, within chapters, and on occasion even in the passage between sentences, Harlan raises this easygoing orality to an end in itself. Gaines's novel employs a limited narrative frame wherein a local historian introduces Jane Pittman's story; conversely, Harlan Eagleton has a power over narrative sequence that arises from her transformation. Were she to have died under Joan's blade, Harlan the healer would not exist; neither would The Healing. Jones asks that her readers heighten their understanding of what it means to shape a story. We should read the complicated structure of the novel literally: as the effect of the power to resequence events is the healer's gift at every level.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »