Contemporaty African American Fiction: The Open Journey. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by John M. Reilly

Robert Butler. Contemporaty African American Fiction: The Open Journey. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998. 163 pp. $32.50.

The subject of this study rather than being described as "contemporary" fiction might better be termed "twentieth-century," including as it does readings that begin with Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Native Son (1940); continue through Invisible Man (1952), The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Flight to Canada (1976), Song of Solomon (1977), and Dessa Rose (1986); and conclude with Parable of the Sower (1993). Yet in traveling again over the familiar terrain of these nine more or less canonical works, Robert Butler produces something of considerable value for understanding contemporary, as well as the last century's, writing, namely, a challenge to older interpretations of African American narrative informed by a revised conception of how literary tradition is formed in kinship and difference.

The template Butler employs as the instrument for investigation of his selected texts is even more familiar than the terrain of the texts themselves, for he examines each of the novels as an instance of the picaresque; or, to state the matter more precisely, he sees the motif of the journey providing each of his exemplary texts the distinctive sign of its cultural matrix. Of course, images of move ment are widely recognized to be signifiers of the special nature of American texts, differing from the journeys recorded in Classical epic and Medieval romance by being open-ended, and reflecting by their repeated appearance in American writing about the Western frontier (Crevecoeur to Cooper to Faulkner to Larry McMurtry), the sea (Dana and Melville to Crane, London, and Charles Johnson), the river (Mark Twain to The Rivers of America Series), the "road" (Hugh Henry Breckenridge to Steinbeck to Kerouac), and the city (Howells to Dreiser to Wright) the factual mobility and ideological orientation of American cultu re.

According to Butler, though, many critics turning their eyes to African American fiction have noted stasis or at best aimless motion instead of liberating movement. Exhibits of this view presented by Butler include Blyden Jackson, Roger Rosenblatt, Phyllis Rauch Klotman, and Robert Bone. Acknowledging the suggestive arguments made by Houston Baker in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey in advancing the contrary view that dialectical process, flux, and ferment characterize African American literature, Butler adopts the supposition that African American fiction is the site of resistance to, rather than a recording of, victimization.

The justification for this supposition emerges through Butler's attentive readings of inward movement and outer structures at work in the texts. For example, in both Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Richard Wright's Native Son, he educes from the transcriptions of the protagonists' consciousnesses as the pattern of a journey "expressed as a metaphor that reveals the central character's deepest promptings...and inward growth," while the plotting of the narratives--the account of literal action in the physical world--illustrates the constraints that deny realization of consciousness in social movement. In regard to these first two novels in his exposition, it seems that Butler is accommodating both the representation of entrapment or frustrated motion advanced in the interpretation by Blyden Jackson and the claims for free movement made by Baker and Gates, but in allowing the relevance of one view to the inner life of the novels and the relevance of the other view to their externals, he is not compromising but is instead offering his description of the "stunted picaresque," a work "that ends ambiguously with the central character's situation defined with a complex mixture of images of stasis and motion."

Presumably there should be an historical explanation for the occurrence of the "stunted picaresque." Butler says the phenomenon is found in "many African American novels written before World War II." On the other hand, nineteenth-century narratives by William and Ellen Craft, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass serve to demonstrate for Butler the founding of a lineage in African American writing of non-teleological journeys; that is, movement not so much to a final place--say, the North--but movement that in its ceaselessness and its incompletion valorizes "becoming" over "being," since, after all, the public states of being, status, or place historically permitted to African Americans contradicted the ambitions or hopes that impelled their movement in the first place.

As he proceeds chronologically through his textual exhibits, Butler continues to mark the tension between the deterministic appearance of external events that seemed (and seem) to some critics symptomatic of frustrating stasis and the transfiguring of historical conditions in consciousness. Thus, in Invisible Man, according to Butler, the protagonist's physical flight to freedom leads him only through new experiences of racism, but as the novel's epilogue assures us, it can be whipped in the mind, so that when Ellison's hero internalizes the motif of travel, he provides "Blacks with a twentieth-century Underground Railroad to inner freedom." Likewise Pilate in Song of Solomon attains a protean identity that overcomes ascribed identity through her life of movement, whereas Milkman's life experiences yield an ambiguous figure of either transcendence or repetition, the point being that Morrison, holding both visions--the deterministic and the transfigurative--in mind at once, refuses to reduce ambiguity to simp licity.