On the entirely
unknown and far from perfect novel that fills a significant American gap.
Somehow, in the
midst of all the other duties and successes of his incredibly busy and
productive life, W.E.B. Du Bois found time to write a handful of novels. My
guest poster is planning to address two of the more interesting and significant
ones, Dark
Princess (1928; generally considered his fictional masterpiece) and Worlds of Color
(1961; the last book published in Du Bois’s lifetime), and I’ll leave them for
her. Since both were written by a mature and prominent Du Bois—Dark was published when he was 60, Worlds when he was 93 (!)—they’ve
received a substantial amount of attention, both in their own moment and in
subsequent scholarship. Far less famous, however, is Du Bois’s first published
novel, The Quest of
the Silver Fleece (1911).
Quest, which tells the story of multiple
generations of African Americans in a turn of the century Southern community,
has been neglected in part for understandable reasons: its style, while
straightforward and engaging, lacks any of the technical skill that
differentiates great from merely effective novels; it also had the misfortune
of being a work of regional realism in the decade when authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude
Stein were introducing new, modernist forms for fiction. Yet much the same
could be said for other, currently far more well-known African American novels
of Reconstruction and its aftermath—such as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy
(1892), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of
Tradition (1901), and Pauline Hopkins’ Of
One Blood (1903)—and to my mind Du Bois’s novel certainly deserves a
place among that group.
Moreover, Du
Bois’s sociological training and perspective differentiates Quest from any other novel of the period—and
most other American novels period—in at least one crucial regard. Although many
of the novel’s chapters focus on individual characters, it builds toward a far
more overarching and analytical subject: the way in which the cotton industry links
communities as seemingly disparate as elite Northern industrialists and provincial
Southern white supremacists, cynical Washington politicians and young students
at a local African American school. Such connections, of course, extended back
in history into the antebellum world of slavery, yet were also evolving in
complex and crucial ways in the postbellum period, particularly for free
African Americans struggling to achieve their own quests for self-sufficiency
and success; Du Bois’s novel likewise engages with these different historical
and cultural sides to a shared and enduring American issue. In those ways, his
novel can also be seen as embodying—perhaps solely, and certainly significantly—an
African American naturalism.
Next Du Bois
readings tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
No comments:
Post a Comment