[Last
October I had a lot of fun sharing and AmericanStudying some of my recent
reads, and it brought out great responses and nominations for a crowd-sourced
weekend post. So this year I wanted to do the same, and would love to hear
what you’ve been reading for another weekend list!]
On realism, the fantastic,
and two historical novels that blur the boundaries.
In this
post on Charles Johnson’s Middle
Passage (1990) and Colson Whitehead’s The
Underground Railroad (2016), I wrote about how those two acclaimed and
award-winning historical novels of slavery use anachronisms in parallel but ultimately
quite different (and to my mind less and more successful, respectively) ways. But
it’s perhaps more accurate to say that what both books and authors are seeking
to do, with those anachronisms and in many other ways, is to blur the line between
history and fiction, the lived histories and realities of slavery and the fictional
and fantastic elements that storytelling can feature. In so doing, they’re part
of a long legacy of such historical fictions (sometimes known as neo-slave
narratives, a term coined by scholar
Ashraf H.A. Rushdy), a list that would also include Octavia Butler’s time travel sci fi historical novel Kindred
(1979), David Bradley’s blend of storytelling, folklore, and academic/scholarly
history in The
Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Toni Morrison’s ghost story historical
novel Beloved
(1987), among many others.
Earlier this
year I read two of the newer entries in that well-established but still
evolving genre: Esi Edugyan’s Washington
Black (2018) and Ta-Nehisi
Coates’ first novel, The
Water Dancer (2019). The two novels interestingly parallel Johnson’s
and Whitehead’s books respectively: like Middle
Passage, Washington Black is a
bildungsroman in which its recognizably realistic main character is born
into slavery but experiences an extreme and at least somewhat anachronistic journey
(taking him in Edugyan’s novel as far as the Arctic); and like Underground Railroad, The Water Dancer weds the histories of
slavery to overtly supernatural elements linked to setting, in this case the protagonist
Hiram Walker’s ability known as “conduction”
(inherited from a mother of whom he has no memories despite an otherwise
photographic memory), which allows him to transport people great distances by
folding the earth and traveling across it. While my opinion isn’t the point of
this post, I’ll note that I found Edugyan’s novel more effective and satisfying
than both Johnson’s and Coates’, and would say that Whitehead’s remains my favorite
of this group (but all four are well worth checking out).
So what is the
point of my post, then, beyond a Reading
Rainbow-like insistence that you should “read the book(s)”? That is a main
point for sure, but this pairing also leads me to think a bit more broadly
about the question of representing slavery in fiction. (I’m indebted to a
Twitter conversation with Laura Vrana
for this paragraph’s brief thoughts.) Obviously historical fictions always blend
those two elements in one way or another, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a
late 20th or early 21st century historical novel of
slavery that doesn’t do so in these more overt, extreme, and (in one way or
another) fantastic ways. Even Alex
Haley’s Roots (1976), a
relatively straightforward multi-generational historical novel, features a striking
climactic section that introduces Haley as a character and depicts his own
recreation of his focal, familial histories. While this might be overstating
the case, it seems to me that to write historical fiction about slavery (and
perhaps about any similarly traumatic histories) both requires and amplifies
the more fantastic side of storytelling, not to elide or forget the histories,
but in an effort to capture and include (and ultimately, at least in some ways,
transcend) them.
Next recent reads
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Recent reads you’d share for the weekend post?
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