A Lesson Before Dying. - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by David E. Vancil

A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines's fifth adult novel, is the Louisiana writer's most compelling work to date. Gaines worked on this book for almost ten years, doing most of the writing in San Francisco during the summer months between stints as a professor on the English faculty at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and engagements elsewhere. Because of the demands on his time and perhaps because of the demands created by the multiple levels of irony in the book, Gaines despaired of ever finishing this, the best novel of his career.

Readers of Gaines's previous novels, including A gathering of Old Men and the deservedly famous Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, are in for a surprise. Gaines continues to use theme and voice to provide impetus to the story, and as in earlier books, he experiments with point of view, this time returning to a first-person narrator. Yet this narrator is neither naive nor dispassionate, but complex and not altogether admirable. Because the narrator Grant Wiggins is aware and judgmental, his self-deprecatory and scornful voice is often ironic. By the same token, the structure of the narrative, with its use of Christian stories of redemption, whether those of Christ himself or those found in morality plays, is full of irony, an irony both bitter and humorous, tragic and comedic. In no previous work of fiction has Gaines used irony to such a great extent, employing it in A Lesson both to develop his themes, on the one hand, and to explode them, on the other. The use of sustained irony, while making great demands on the reader, allows Gaines's story to occupy linear and cognitive space simultaneously. As a result of the associative richness emanating from Gaines's multilayered technique, the reader can empathize with most of the characters--even the worst ones--but still maintain the distance necessary to understand the complex moral implications of the story.

As narrator, Wiggins is immersed in his own concerns and relates to his community from a perspective of superiority--a superiority as much bestowed as felt. Yet, despite his cultural sophistication, Grant is much like everyone else in wanting something better. Only reluctantly does he assume the role of secular priest, when his God-fearing Aunt Lou asks him to help prepare a former student, Jefferson, godson to his aunt's friend Miss Emma, to meet his execution like a man, not the unthinking hog he has been labeled by his white lawyer. The story soon takes on the trappings of Christ's crucifixion and also the morality play Everyman, but with a difference. Before Wiggins, the disdainful observer, can help another person, he must first be delivered from his own malaise of resentment against his people for their history of remaining downtrodden. Also, Grant must come to terms with his hatred toward whites, who are themselves trapped in roles they have inherited or accepted blindly. Therefore, redemption is not just an act of acceptance or acknowledgment, but a process by which individuals may ameliorate conditions and improve society. Near the end of the novel, Jefferson's barely literate writings, which have been encouraged by Grant, speak eloquently of his humanity. In a strange and unsettling way, Jefferson's death allows Grant to live more wholly and to forge an alliance with the white world in the person of Paul Bonin, a saint of sorts, who is one of Jefferson's jailers and his final witness.

By the extensive use of literary irony, combined with his grounding in the oral tradition, Gaines works up his themes of the dilemma of community and self and the nature of race and freedom in a fully realized manner. The often sly humor found in Gaines's other works is replaced in large part by large comic scenes or ironic understatement. The comic scenes help both to alleviate angst and to deflate the smugness of the narrator. They also prepare the reader for a complex yet life-affirming conclusion to the novel. There may be answers, Gaines suggests, but no easy ones.

In a memorable comic scene, a white school superintendent visits the schoolhouse. Wiggins wants to focus on needed school books, but the superintendent is more concerned with hygiene. He examines the children's gums, Wiggins observes, as if they were horses. Although sympathetic to Wiggins's request for more books, he tells the teacher that white schools are not much better off. The reader realizes in this novel set in the years right after World War II that education opened few opportunities for African Americans in Louisiana and other places. Wiggins fails to realize that he is more important as a symbol than as a teacher. If the dreamer himself (Wiggins resembles Professor Higgins in some ways!) is a failure, then at least the dream must continue to live. So, too, must Jefferson continue to live, at least as potentiality.

Set against the ineffectiveness of black men and the stupid blindness of white men is the sustaining resilience of women, black and white. They provide the bedrock of family life and keep the community unified, even if imperfectly because of the continuation of inequality. Without the hope that these women provide through their belief in redemption in the future, life would be intolerable. The dream of freedom would fail. Surely Jefferson has received the name of a founding father who believed in equality for a reason. It is a bitter irony that this Jefferson is not free and will be punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.