fiction and friction

   FICTION AND FRICTION, 2019

Yet, in that Gestalt of grace wherein the City finds its enabling principle, there is a further element to be remarked, for if "life together" is an affair of Substitution and Exchange, then it must be conceived to involve most essentially a kind of sacrificial discipline.  For when we act for others  ---  as when a "father acts for the children, working for them, caring for them, interceding, fighting and suffering for them" and thus undertaking to be "their deputy"   ---   something is being given up; life is releasing itself as an offering to other life: that which is of one's own is being handed over to another, for the sake of human communion   ----   and this leitourgia has the character of a sacrificial service.

Nathan A. Scott, Jr. The Poetry of Civic Virtue (1976), pp. 46-47

And if I could ask one small thing of you, Dear One, it would be that you occasionally think of your father --- even after my body has returned to stardust, and I am nothing  but the ghost of an angel in mossy chains, haunting endless grasslands in search of a spear tip sharp enough to finally cut this knot.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast A Shadow (2019), p. 322.

In his remarks on Substitution and Exchange, Scott performs for us  the intellectual service of using the Greek leitourgia rather than the Latin liturgia to specify that serious literary and cultural criticism is at once a form of liturgy  and a thing remote from what we generally think of as typical in African American literary tradition.   Scott possessed a strong Christian and cosmopolitan sensibility.  As far as I know, the only black novelist he deemed worthy of his attention was Richard Wright. Scott was, to use current jargon, an outlier.  It is judicious in the Age of Trump to reclaim thinkers of Scott's caliber.

Juxtaposing Scott and Ruffin isn't arbitrary; it's deliberate.  Consider what might be gained if twenty-first century  scholars (at least those concerned with art and ethics)  reclaimed Scott by occasionally thinking of him, selected  a few of his ideas about what is radical and immensely audacious in modern  fiction, and applied them in humanistic  critiques of  Ruffin's first novel We Cast A Shadow. Scott Neuffer aptly noted  in his review for Shelf-awareness --- https://www. shelf-awareness.com -- that Ruffin "skewers institutional  racism with style and wit.  But he also reveals  the insidious nature of racism and the complex psychology of the marginalized." Yes, fiction worthy of the space it occupies often compels readers to deal with racism as an inevitable social and political construction, but wit and style can also compel readers to quest for an enlightenment that exceeds the limits of entertainment.  Ruffin eschews neither the imperatives of Horace nor the implications of the dialogic imagination nor the concern for "the intellectual reflection of the actual historical process" that Georg Lukács projected in The Historical Novel.  Ruffin knows what sacrificial discipline entails, and criticism should accord his work full disclosure.  Whether academic  scholars will choose to do so is dependent on their interest or lack of interest in empirical aesthetics, in how Ruffin's fiction can be viewed from angles in the pioneering speculations of  Louise M. Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration  (1938) and The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978 ) and Charles Johnson's essay "The End of the Black American Narrative" in the Summer 2008 issue of The American Scholar.

The narrator's small request which concludes the novel is a fine image of anxiety and desire. That image is germane in discussions of the latest stage of the tradition of African American literature with emphasis on prose fiction, and it endows Ruffin's novel with the power of a touchstone.  Like Scott, Ruffin is at once inside and outside of that tradition, revealing what germinates in our nation's tragedy bucket, the toxins of race-marked identities and sacrificial services.  Scholars and students  in New Orleans, for example, who are interested in local examinations of national issues might learn a great deal about the insatiable perversity of American society from reading  We Cast A Shadow against Zachary Lazar's Vengeance (2018), Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Harold E. Clark's Chummy's Spirit (2006) [ adding  Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952, Albert Memmi's  Racism (1982)), Walter Mosley's John Woman (2018) and Ishmael Reed's Conjugating Hindi (2018) for good measure].

The narrator's small request, however, may be a signal that We Cast A Shadow has utility for forgotten readers who keep a safe distance from the tyranny of academic criticism. We cheapen our humanity if we do not respect the agency of the forgotten.  As readers, they  are not immune to the machinations of American literary economy and  politics, even if they find more value in Tanisca M. Wilson's Bury the Bones (2018) than in Kiese Laymon's Long Division (2013) or Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's A Kind of Freedom (2017).  There is, truth be told,  ironic justice in the attention they give to forms of fiction that may be forever marginalized in the canons of American and African American literatures.  Theirs is the irony of Dietland . They understand more about fiction and friction and vernacular literacy than the obedient  servants of civilization wish to acknowledge. They are predisposed to ask unadorned, authentic questions  ----

·         Is it at all important that we have novels in which mothers and fathers make sacrifices for their children?

·          Don't we have more books and articles on how to raise children well than any of us shall ever read? 

·         What have novels to do with lack of employment, mental health issues, and the broken promises of democracy?

·         Where have we fallen short in transmitting our African and African American  heritage to the young? 

·         And do we fall short because we are complicit in the mis-education and benign genocide which have a central, robust function in systemic racism and the hidden dimensions of globalization?

·         Are we afraid in 2019 to say to writers of all colors who swim in the toxic mainstream that they do have some responsibility for helping us ---whether we are old or young --- to remember what it is suicide to forget?

·          As far as reading and literacy is concerned, should we woman-up and man-up and cease finding excuses for ourselves in whatever  dubious tweet-tag whims, lack of courage to engage in "life together" struggles, and pretending to be dumb make attractive?

·         Are the old gods of our mothers and fathers conspiring with climate change to punish us?

Conversations in 2019 about the shadow Maurice Carlos Ruffin has cast should indeed have "the character of a sacrificial service ."

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 30, 2018