Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Maurice Lee

When writing about a canonical figure, one hopes for a measure of interest. And when writing about a novel by a canonical figure, one might almost assume a willing audience. Even further still, when the novel at hand engages with subtlety the issue of race, it would be a surprise not to encounter an abundance of critical work about that text. But though the presence of Du Bois in literary journals no longer requires justification, and though valuable scholarship has recently treated the question of Du Bois and other minds, we pay his novels scant attention, despite our current occupation with racial politics, intellectual influence, and popular narrative form. Perhaps Du Bois the novelist must wait his turn behind Du Bois the philosopher, historian, and editor. Perhaps The Souls of Black Folk (1903) demands the spot allotted to Du Bois on syllabi. But what if the truth is altogether less decorous: What if his novels are not very good? Or, in this time of uncertain aesthetics, what if his novels do not speak to our concerns?

Du Bois's first novelistic effort, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is largely regarded as a failure. The novel, we are told, "suffers" generic confusion (Rampersad 127). Its "contradictory" musings are intellectually lax (Kostelanetz 175). Its politics are finally "problematic," though Du Bois's progressive intentions are clear (Byerman 128). This article will argue the contrary: that Du Bois's mediation of romance and realism is skillful and strategic; that The Quest of the Silver Fleece engages and challenges major American texts; that, with careful, even subversive, attention to issues of language and form, Du Bois appropriates novelistic discourse for his own artistic and political ends. In short, The Silver Fleece is immensely interesting, not only because it suggests new ways to read Du Bois's work, but also because it reveals a very literary figure critics have yet to acknowledge - a serious novelist with ambitious designs for the United States and its literatures.

Summarizing The Quest of the Silver Fleece is no insignificant task. Set in Tooms County, Alabama, but with visits to Washington, D.C., and New York, the narrative traces the love and labor of Bles Alwyn and Zora, the "child of the swamp" (44). Quickly, however, subplots emerge. A double-marriage between pairs of siblings ties the Southern, aristocratic Cresswells to the Northern, industrialist Taylors. Bles travels north and becomes embroiled in political elections and appointments. Back in Tooms, the yankee Sarah Smith fights to maintain her free school, while the Cresswells and Taylors jointly run an exploitative cotton mill. Through it all, Zora seeks "The Way" to romantic love, spiritual rebirth, and the redemption of her people. Time and again, we return to "The Fleece" - a cotton crop of symbolic import that Zora raises in the swamp. Scholars generally agree that this wide-ranging plot yanks the story between romance and realism, yet no one has detailed how Du Bois plays with genre - how he uses contemporary literary conventions to oppose conventional views of race.

Du Bois wrote a draft of The Silver Fleece between 1904 and 1906, not long after The Souls of Black Folk's remarkable experiment in form. Such experimentation continues in The Quest of the Silver Fleece: Whether we call it signifyin' or a deformation of mastery, Du Bois subverts novelistic tradition and its politics at the turn of the century. That is, by resisting the very tropes Du Bois ostensibly adopts, he escapes the bounds of romance and realism to wage battles on grounds of his own.

Most critics no longer agree with Richard Chase, but some still believe in genre. And though Hawthorne, James, and Thomas Dixon all wrote what they called "romances," we still insist on their obvious differences, even while admitting that Dreiser and Norris share a somewhat similar "romantic" urge.(1) As I see it, this puzzle is not one to be solved. Texts are unstable; terminology slides; and authors violate critical taxonomies, just as critics are quick to embarrass authors who shirk professed formal dicta. The game of genre remains open-ended. But by defining realism - and subsuming naturalism - in the context of late-industrial capitalism, recent work invokes the social forces of class instability, ethnic anxiety, changing notions of value, unfamiliar urban space, and the centralization of power.(2) Nonetheless, these distinctions blur and cross in sectional, racialized narratives, or as James wrote in 1907 in his preface to The American: "It is as difficult ... to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and south" (13). If there is, as Eric Sundquist argues, a "country of American romance" ("Country" 3), and if the city is the place for realism, then what do we make of a story set in New York, Washington, and Tooms? Indeed, what do we make of the many novels in which Northern city folk and unreconstructed Southerners come together to talk about race? And can generic definitions based on cultural experience apply equally to disparate groups? Other scholars voice similar concerns (see Ammons, Kaplan, and Jameson), and while admitting the explanatory power of genre, I still maintain this sense: Whether in Howells's time, Chase's day, or our own postmodern instance, the romance versus realism debate seems most fruitful for the "old canon" - an opinion Du Bois himself suggests by confounding such distinctions.