Revising critical judgments of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Heather Russell Andrade

Authorial anonymity notwithstanding, Johnson's own racialized male self is at stake. While the narrator opts for self-interest, Johnson apparently writes out of communal duty, out of self-sacrifice. Through writing, he explicates issues of racial identity and exposes the inequities and injustices rife within American life. His aim as a writer is social transformation. The principal actor, the narrator, the eye through which we witness the unveiling of black life and the representation of black manhood is, by necessity, unreliable. And yet it is through the charting of the narrator's story that Johnson's readers are to be "moved" to advocate for African American enfranchisement. Johnson is faced with a monumental dilemma, one in which form and content stand in dialectical relationship to one another. Throughout the text, therefore, these "narrative circumlocutions," along with numerous moments of expository didacticism, reveal the discontinuity between the self-absorbed, economically driven, self-interested narrator and the author.

Dialectics of Form and Content

The obvious danger in characterizing an "anti-hero" is that he will be viewed as representative. His misplaced and ill-informed analyses will be read as "accurate" and "authentic." After all, the preface to Johnson's Autobiography promises that the story will draw aside the "veil" and give readers a bird's-eye view into "conditions as they actually exist" (xxxiii). Andrews reminds us that early African American novelists (like Johnson) were "burdened by a sense of obligation to speak for black America" (xviii). Hence, Johnson must inject social commentary into a text that thematically breaks with black male discursive practice by appropriating various "voices" in expository, frequently lackluster moments of critical commentary about African American culture and American race relations. Such discursive instrusions insert what I call Johnson's own social authorial voice.

The tension between Johnson's fictional representation and his own historical circumstance accounts for an African American literary critical tradition that takes issue with the absence of unity both in the narrator's characterization and in the structure of the Autobiography itself. Bell acknowledges this discordance when he points out that "the ironic distance between implied author and narrator-hero is neither intellectual nor social; it is moral" (89). In other words, despite Johnson's use of the autobiographical form, at some textual moments the authorial posture is not only radically distinct from the first-person narrator, but, more saliently, ideologically dissonant. In a comparative analysis of Johnson's Autobiography and Abraham Cahan's Autobiography of an American Jew, Werner Sollors classifies both texts as "fictional autobiographies." Sollors notes: "The protagonists purport to be narrating their stories, using the first person confessional. Yet throughout their narratives we feel the intrusion of another, ironic voice, which subverts this basic communicative pattern" (171). The "authorial intrusion" identified by Sollors and Bell marks Johnson's attempt to fulfill what he views as his mandate--to utilize literary representation to advance the cause of racial justice and social equality. As a consequence, he is obligated to include in his narrative, insightful and relevant information concerning social, political, and historical factors that help to frame African American subjectivity and its literary representation. The result is a black formal cornucopia: self-writing, confession, fiction, and social polemic commingle in hauntingly captivating ways. They constitute an "informal unity" that mirrors the actual phantasmagoria of, precisely, race in the United States.