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

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

For some of his selected texts, Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower being the clearest examples, Butler's conception of the inner, non-teleological journey--that is, a journey seeking open space rather than specific place--seems to provide a conclusive rendering of meaning. For Raven Quickskill "Canada" surely is a state of mind to be achieved amidst conditions of neo-slavery. and the psychological and spiritual journeys of Butler's protagonist assuredly prophesy dissolution of externally imposed "patterns" as human beings devise social worlds in consistent harmony with what physics and astronomy show us to be the dynamic expansiveness and changeability of the universe.

Butler stops well short of claiming universality for the motif of incomplete journeys in African American writing. He correctly observes that a line of novels, in which he includes Frances Harper's lola Leroy, Jesse Fauset's Plum Bun, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, exhibit a belief in foreseeable completion (telos), but they are the subject for another book. As for this book on "The Open Journey," it is appropriate to conclude the review by returning to the suppositions that guide the study. In addition to the value Butler adds to his readings with the informing idea he shares with Baker and Gates that African American literature is a locus of vibrant energy generating meaning from conflict and change (for example, by intertextual signifying as well as signifying upon received epistemology and ontology), Butler also enriches his investigation by attempting to place his African American exhibits in a broadly American context. As noted earlier, he recalls that the journey motif or picaresque is a shared legacy, accessible and used by European American authors along with African American authors. In this regard, the works he studies, like the picaresque works we may name by non-Black authors, form part of a hybrid tradition that Butler announces m his introduction with a quotation from Cornel West saying, "I begin with a radical cultural hybridity, and improvisational New World sensibility. I always think that we are in process, making and remaking ourselves along the way. I see it in Louis Armstrong, I see it in Sarah Vaughn, I see it in Emerson's essays, I see it in Whitman's poetry about democratic vistas." Acceptance of kinship, however, is still not enough, although it is a necessity for worthwhile treatment of the writing constituting America's literatures. A just and truly imaginative treatment of the writing by kin must also recognize differences. This is how Butler generalizes the point while writing about Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose:

Williams's novel ... does not simply reject traditional literary forms such as the escape narrative and the picaresque novel but assimilates them, adapting them for new purposes. In this way it is squarely in line with the main tradition of Afro-American literature, which has characteristically modified and even transformed American art forms to express new black meanings.