[In honor of my
about-to-conclude grad
class on Analyzing 21st Century America, a series on great
recent literary works, with the same Af Am lit through-line that I brought to
the class!]
On when
anachronisms don’t work, when they do, and how to parse the difference.
As I wrote in this
post a few years back, my unhappy reading of Charles Johnson’s National
Book Award-winning historical novel Middle Passage (1990) was one of my more surprising literary experiences, given
how many elements of the novel seemed geared to my particular interests and
passions. That unhappiness stemmed almost entirely from Johnson’s use of
anachronisms, purposefully a-historical words and details (focused especially
on his narrator Rutherford Calhoun’s voice, perspective, and identity) that
thoroughly pushed me out of the novel’s historical setting and themes (despite Johnson’s
stated goal of “clos[ing] the distance between the past and the present”
with those anachronisms). While of course much of that response has to do with
my own personal perspective and preferences, I argued in that post—and would reiterate
here—that such anachronisms risk damaging the project and potential power of
historical fiction; or, at the very least, place the emphasis so fully on the
“fiction” side of that generic category as to render their novels not at all
“historical” in the more
meaningful senses of that term.
Colson
Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), the
historical novel that was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction (among its
many honors to date), has more than its share of such anachronisms. The
literal railroad on which slave runaways like our protagonists Cora and Caesar
travel in the novel’s antebellum world isn’t quite an anachronism, although of
course it’s a metaphorical twist on the Underground Railroad’s historical
details. But each stop and setting along that journey does explicitly and
drastically shift those characters, and thus the novel’s readers, in
time—beginning with a Charleston, South Carolina that features skyscrapers and
medical experiments on African Americans, and continuing through a number of
other such time period shifts that I won’t spoil here (but that eventually
include 21st century elements). I had found out about those elements
of Whitehead’s novel prior to reading it, and was thus prepared for a similar
experience to that of reading Johnson’s book (although I likely would have
minded Johnson’s anachronisms a bit less had I been aware of them going in).
But that wasn’t at all the case—I found The
Underground Railroad to be not only moving and shattering, beautiful and
awful, but also one of the most evocative and effective historical novels or
cultural works about slavery I’ve ever encountered.
You could make
the case that my very distinct experience here had to do, again, with my
preparation for these elements; or with the undeniable fact that I’m a
different reader at 41 than I was at 13 (meaning I should likely give Johnson’s
novel another chance). Both of those are fair points to be sure, but I would
also argue that Whitehead uses these shifts in time in a more comprehensive and
even genre-related way than did Johnson. Indeed, I would argue that Whitehead’s
novel has more in common with Octavia
Butler’s Kindred (1979), as both
could be described as works that use science fiction tropes and storytelling
both to immerse their audiences in histories of slavery and to link those
histories to broader themes of race, identity, memory, and nation. While
Kindred’s science fiction story takes a contemporary woman back in time to the
antebellum South, and Whitehead’s brings historical characters from that
setting across and forward in time to many other moments (including his and our
own), both works employ their genres in service of a deep and potent
examination of the specific and overarching histories. The question of whether
and how any 21st century American can truly understand the world of
slavery remains an open one; but both Butler’s and Whitehead’s books offer
groundbreaking, genre-bending, impressive contributions to that ongoing
challenge.
Next 21C text
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other recent literary works you’d highlight?
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