crisis in fiction's evolving

A Crisis in Fiction's Evolving





 Coates, Ta-Nehisi.  The Water Dancer.  New York: One World, 2019.



Cultural critics who have more than casual expertise in history as process and narratives of process will, as a matter of habit, pay attention to Coates' debut novel.  The attention may be lukewarm among those critics who are less than charmed by the selling of authors in contemporary literary politics, the branding and selling of Coates as the heir to James Baldwin.  The linking of Baldwin and Coates is a tantalizing move, a strategy of managing a literary canon which can serve  the purposes of the state and commerce more effectively than the purposes of artistic autonomy.  The bottom line for American publishing is profit not aesthetic  quality.



As a talented writer, Coates is caught in the funky vortex of the publishing industry , and commentary about that fact is not an attack on his person.  It is a legitimate inquiry about tradition, individual talent, and subject/object positioning.  Unless we make such inquiries about literary ideologies, we are complicit in making ignorance rather than knowledge.



As an item in the arena of neo-slave novels, The Water Dancer will be measured against extraordinary portrayals of slavery  ---Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad               , Edward P. Jones' The Known World, and Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose.     Each of these novels gave readers grounds for re-imagining and re-imaging alternatives to regnant meta-narratives of the peculiar institution and racial contracts that Charles W. Mills and other philosophers have seriously examined.  Those grounds are not as robust as one might desire in The Water Dancer, because Coates tells a "safe" story about    the Underground facets of abolition. What might be a dramatic treatment of what his first-person narrator calls "legitimate and open war against slavery ---concerned citizens who through the journals, oratory and ballot fought for abolition" (242). And the narrator's displacing a strong representation of intestinal fortitude among Africans and their African American children  by endowing the narrator with mysterious powers (an echoing of mythology and magic realism).  Perhaps had Coates read Tara T. Green's Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018), he might have used a different set of narratological choices, might have written a more compelling tale of the war of the Tasked against the Quality (folkloric coding of the owned and the owners).  He might have made a deeper investment in the revisionist turn in academic studies of American slavery.



In fairness to Coates, it must be said The Water Dancer exposes a crisis in the evolving of contemporary fiction, and it is difficult to pretend that such exposure is wanting in value.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            October 5, 2019