Agency Aesthetics

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                Michael Lackey's draft of an autobiographical introduction for his unpublished book of interviews with biographical novelists (posted in Academic.edu Weekly Digest, 18 Jan 2018)  has an amusing title ---"The Agency Aesthetics of Biofiction in the Age of Postmodern Confusion."  The joke is Lackey's precise critique of how imprecise postmodern critics can be in discriminating among genres, because the confirmative aspect of his writing unwittingly reifies a sort of blindness of which he accuses others.  His humor pivots on the argument that we ought to make careful distinctions between the historical novel and the biographical novel.  Otherwise, we risk being undisciplined postmodern scholars who fail to recognize that in dealing with genres "distinctions are socio-cultural constructions rather than ontological realities" (17).  It escapes his notice that ontological realities are not givens or absolutes but special instances of  constructions.  If one plays too loosely with the razors of philosophy, one shall bleed.

                I do get Lackey's point when I consider the critical difference between Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Toni Morrison's Beloved.  In a race for theory, these two novels are often thrown into a basket named "neo-slave narrative."  The gesture is tantamount to throwing Japanese Americans and Nigerians into a basket named "people of color."  In both cases, the critic who does the throwing reveals the ideological motives that she or he wants to conceal under a rock named "universal."  Constructed ignorance is constructed bliss.

                Common sense readings of the novels by Walker and Morrison ought to recognize that Jubilee is a historical novel and that Beloved is a biographical novel at several removes from its alleged biographical source, the life of Margaret Garner.  The contract that Walker established with her readers is embedded in the document "How I Wrote Jubilee."  Morrison's contract is less explicit, although it can be reconstructed from assertions in several of her critical essays.  The notion of contract, which we are free to propose is operative for any novelist and her or his readers,  illuminates a strange motive in Lackey's claim that William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is a "metaphorical diagram" that is used to "illuminate something from both the past and the present" without intentional reference to history or biography as a genre.  Metaphorical diagrams are not immune to the virus of overt or covert ideology and socially or culturally identifiable situation.  Thus, Lackey's criticism of William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), edited by John Henrik Clarke, for a failure to recognize that Styron's novel is neither reality-based history nor biography is suspect.  Although he gives due notice to Ralph Ellison's criticism of Styron, he gives short shrift to distinguishing Ellison's position from the positions taken by those ten writers who argued the voice, images, and confession in Styron's book belonged to Styron not to Nat Turner.  Lackey's aesthetic criticism is very postmodern in its failure to  engage the possibility that some of the ten writers were coming out of a black bag of empirical aesthetics. Perhaps his criticism is an essential alabaster diagram that lacks a metaphor.  He should do a better job of contemplating how E. D. Hirsch positioned meaning against significance.

In the Age of Trump, swallowing Lackey's  metaphorical diagram without severe scrutiny is intellectual suicide, a fatal amusement..

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            January 18, 2018