The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt - Review

Charles Duncan. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio UP, 1998.214 pp. $32.95.

The appearance of Charles Duncan"s The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of Chesnutt studies. Indeed, the dust jacket of this handsome volume does not exaggerate when it identifies Duncan's work as "the first book-length study of the impact of Charles Chesnutt's sophisticated, innovative narrative," and if recent critical trends persist, Duncan's book will not be the last. With the arrival of this ambitious study, Chesnutt appears finally to have outgrown the perfunctory treatment he once received from literary historians and critics of late nineteenth-century American fiction, for whom he typically served as a "transitional" figure in the African-American tradition.

Duncan's work marks another sort of milestone as well, for the very existence of a book-length critical study suggests that Chesnutt scholarship may finally have come of age, replacing the traditional, defensive gripe about the author's obscurity with a more seasoned and probing analysis of his literary achievement. Duncan's narratological approach to "the polyglossia of Chesnutt's writing" represents an effort to meet this challenge head on. Unfortunately, the narratological method yields surprisingly modest insight into the sources of Chesnutt's complexity, and The Absent Man--as its title suggests--ends up reiterating the tired complaint of traditional Chesnutt studies as a means of organizing Duncan's readings into something resembling an argument. The readings themselves occasionally break new ground, as in Duncan's compelling discussions of neglected stories like "The Shadow of My Past" and "White Weeds." But the narratological approach serves more as a method of grouping stories into convenient "cluste rs" than as an interpretive or theoretical fulcrum, and thus Duncan finally has little more to tell us about Chesnutt's art than that it deserves to be better known.

In at least one sense this opinion seems ungenerous, for Duncan's focus on the author's "narrative strategies" represents an impressively original approach to one of the most persistent problems in Chesnutt scholarship. The problem, which Chesnutt himself engaged with trenchant irony in "Baxter's Procrustes," might be expressed in the form of a question: What is a book? Scholars have known for decades that Chesnutt allowed his editor at Houghton Mifflin, Walter Hines Page, to preside over the selection and organization of material for The Conjure Woman, and most critics acknowledge that Chesnutt's other masterful collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, was assembled under similarly haphazard circumstances. Can readers treat these highly mediated literary productions as unified works? Can we draw connections between stories, speculate about the development of themes and characters, or does Chesnutt's uniquely vexed relationship to the American publishing establishment preclude su ch traditional habits of scholarly analysis?

Duncan wisely acknowledges the dubious authority of Chesnutt's "collections," yet he insists that we can pursue thematic developments among significant "clusters" of stories, provided that these clusters are arranged narratologically. This reorganization of Chesnutt's ceuvre produces some interesting possibilities: Instead of treating the problematic handful of seven stories called The Conjure Woman (the title and organization of which owe more to Page's literary sensibility than to Chesnutt's), Duncan devotes a chapter to seventeen stories, written over a forty-year period, that feature overlapping performances by two rival narrators. Other chapters produce similarly enticing combinations by focusing less on accidents of publication and chronology than on structural affinities linking stories to one another, such as "a single-voiced or 'monologic' narrator," or an "I-narrator whose story focuses on someone other than himself."

By arranging the stories into narratological clusters, Duncan manages to complicate the bi-focalism of much earlier Chesnutt criticism, which followed Houghton Mifflin's lead in drawing a strict generic boundary between the dialect and non-dialect stories. The advantages of Duncan's method are evident in his discussion of stories like "The Passing of Grandison" and "Baxter's Procrustes," where the logic of the vernacular trickster tales overlaps with the urbane narrative idiom of Chesnutt's non-dialect fiction. Finally, however, Duncan's emphasis on narrative technique serves more as an organizational strategy than as a critical methodology, and his readings of the major stories are disappointingly thin. Chesnutt may finally have secured a hold on our critical attention, but Chesnutt criticism has yet to explain exactly why he deserves it.

COPYRIGHT 2001 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group