Reading Ellen Douglas

READING ELLEN DOUGLAS, Part I

When you hear me moaning and groaning,

You know it hurts me down inside.

Willie Dixon (1915-1992), "I Can't Quit You, Baby"

 While Huck Finn speaks for Jim throughout his novel,  Tweet gains her own voice in Can Quit You, Baby…..At the end of her novel, as at the beginning, Douglas depends upon texts from black culture to comment on the relationship between black and white.  Willie Dixon ultimately clarifies the relationship in a way the narrator admits she cannot.  Even at the end of her novel, Douglas's narrator recognizes her own inability to represent fully the experience of her black characters, thus avoiding the farcical nature of Twain's ending and likewise avoiding Twain's return to essentialist ideology.(179)

Jeff Abernathy, To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003)

Q:  Through the writer/narrator, you almost make the reader a part of the writing process.

A:  In a sense I think that's true.  I deliberately make the reader conscious of the presence of the narrator.  In a way that's a device to show both how difficult it is to tell a story honestly and how hard a writer tries to do that.

"Mississippi Q and A…Ellen Douglas," The Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, July 3, l988, 3F.

                Some years ago, a noted scholar of Southern fiction remembered a comment I had made about the work of Ellen Douglas.  In an email dated March 11, 1999, Suzanne Jones requested that I comment briefly on what I liked about Douglas' work, especially the novel Can't Quit You, Baby (1988).

                I replied that one of the more productive areas of "literary race relations" is the representation of friendships between black and white women in the South, particularly the interdependence across class lines.  No contemporary Southern writer handles the topic better than Ellen Douglas.  Using an astute narrator or self-conscious storyteller to deliver a tale of friendship in Can't Quit You, Baby, Douglas specifies what seemingly can be got around on page 4: "the black woman is the white woman's servant." But this novel of sharing between housekeeper and employer, the domestic sharing, does get around the cliché of black/white friendship.  Consider that a reader should know the unwritten subtitle of the novel, and that subtitle is only knowable  if one is familiar with Willie Dixon's pure blues song from which Douglas' title comes: "But I've got to put you down a little while."  Douglas is very honest about how race will not go away, about how it insists on being acknowledged: "To them race sounded the endlessly repeated ground bass above and entwined with which they  [ Cornelia the white employer and Julia the black employee] danced the passacaglia (or, as it may sometimes appear, the boggie) of their lives. (5)  The possibility of communion across the racial divide is possible as long as one does not pretend the fact of friendship ever puts the divide under erasure.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., "Southern Version of Truth: Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra and Katheryn Stockett's The Help." The China Lectures (Wuhan: Central China Normal University Press, 2014): 135-136.

March 11, 2019

READING ELLEN DOUGLAS, Part II

Being made more conscious of the narrator in Can't Quit You, Baby than we usually are in reading novels that do not question the rightness of fiction's use of conventional literary devices, we may gain a bit of unexpected knowledge about our minds and the act of reading.  Douglas sharpens our awareness of life. This intensification may be explained in part by the speculations to be found in Joao de Pina-Cabral's "Turning to Life: A Comment." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8.3 (2018): n.p. [no pagination in the version I downloaded]  There we are informed that "if we truly aim to take on interdisciplinarity in any serious way, we cannot avoid dealing with life as an analytical tool."  This claim encourages us to imagine that Douglas is an ethnographer by default, because her writing invites us to think more deeply about fiction as a species of history, a notion that annoys a number of professional historians.  Let them be annoyed.  We can have fun at their expense, can we not?

Pina-Cabral observes the concept of life can be described as three scales of living:

·         the life of organisms (biology)

·         the life of sociality (human dwelling in forms of life, in boundaries of cultures)

·         the life of making a living

The scales are related to the idea of perspectives, one of the central elements in Can't Quit You, Baby.

The scales, as Pina-Cabral argues, "do not simply coexist in personal experience; they are also in constant interaction."  It's not farfetched to claim our reading of Douglas maximizes interaction as we follow how Cornelia the white employer evades (tunes out) many unpleasant realities of life and how Julia the black employee confronts what's unpleasant with panache.

This passacaglia and boggie make us so aware of the allusions threaded in the fabric of the novel ---song titles and snatches of lyrics that demand hearing; references to Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," to "jicky," to Rochester's mad wife; to what is classical in the sculpture of  Praxiteles and what is vernacular in the habits of  "a bad nigger," to  the ending of James Joyce's short story "The Dead"---the allusions marking the range and variety of life and the history of lives  in the South from the 1940s to the 1960s. We may tentatively conclude, in concert with Pina-Cabral,  that "no human communication can dispense with its historical inherence and it will always involves metaphysical pluralism.  In short, no anthropological knowledge can rise above the historicity of the ethnographic encounters that it depends upon."  Indeed, some readers may conclude Can't Quit You, Baby seduces us to learn what ethnography can sometimes be ----demanding and satisfying fiction.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 16, 2019