The Crisis of Reading the African American Novel
The idea that we have a crisis of reading the novel, regardless of how the text is located in our culture, is at once an absolute lie and a relative truism. A crisis of reading parallels the threadbare crisis of the humanities. It is at best an affective way of speaking about fears, cowardice, Afrofuture fantasy and confusions. Truth be told, the race- and ethnic-marked crisis of reading is at bottom a failure to identify contemporary novels which can be as mind-opening as Richard Wright's Native Son Octavia Butler's Kindred, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Ann Petry's The Street, John Oliver Killens' 'Sippi, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. It seems our post-whatever novelists are more incarcerated in their egos than were their literary ancestors and more enthralled by the vanity of fame. They truthfully lie about a Truth. Is this not tragic? Or, as Darryl Pinckney writes brilliantly in "Escaping Blackness" (NYRB, March 26, 2020), our talented novelists flee with alacrity into the black hole of whiteness, which does not provide such moments of discovery as one might experience in looking at products Nature creates with or without human interference. The crisis of reading is an exquisitely devised hoax. It is a quite profitable example of benign genocide.
There may be 43,000 or more novels published each year in the United States, so naming the best of them is more than a challenge. It's an impossibility.
Our social media penchant for uttering nonsense about everything undermines confidence that prize-winning novels are innately better than those which are not so celebrated. They are the collateral damage of current literary politics. Indeed, dozens of novels excluded from our unreliable canons are superior efforts of our novelists to depict what is patently "normal" in human life, the anthropocene.
Popular works of literature that increase consciousness of hidden patterns in everyday life are most frequently excluded from sacred canons. Best-sellers are so delusive. Too often the desire to be "correct" and famous destroys innately gifted writers who bow down to the idols of commerce.
I use the words "crisis" and "tragedy" quite loosely, because I need a verbal correlative for a major trend in the early years of the 21st century: frantic impatience. Technology, social media, and the magic of mob psychology undermine the human capacity to make critical discriminations. Which is more "tragic," the devastation of a powerful hurricane or the well-documented, color-coded, and terrorizing police murders of demonized people? Is the widening gap between poverty and wealth a lesser crisis than the genocide implicit in ethnic cleansing?
And in the rush to have instant answers, to have immediate, selfish gratification, many people abandon redemptive common sense
Unexamined desire is our undoing, and we fear telling certain emerging novelists that their works are shoddy and poorly written, , pretentious and shallow in examining the complex entanglements of human lives, complicit (perhaps unwittingly) in supporting a politics of oppression rather than a politics of liberation. We undervalue the power of ancestral lore as we blindly dive into the quicksand of unstable modernity. We have instant love affairs with extreme post-whatever! We do not merely "read" novels; we silently "write" ourselves into the novels and become metaphors of who we actually are . Recent novels by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton are good laboratories for testing what a crisis of reading might establish.
Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson. The Revisioners. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2019.
Sexton's second novel is different from and ultimately less satisfying than her debut novel A Kind of Freedom. New Orleans is the common denominator in both works, and the pleasure of the texts is generous to readers who have more than casual knowledge about the people, streets, and race-marked riddles of the Crescent City. The plotting, thoughtful characterization, and dialogue justified praise for a first novel; the second only warrants pointed critique of Sexton's post-whatever indulgence ---palpable disjointedness of plot, greater use of confusing points of view, desperate signifying on the neo-slave gene. In a sense that demands much literary explaining (which I shall not supply here), there is more to be gained from Sandra McCollum's modest depiction of the simplicity of being colored than from Sexton's patience-trying treatment of that subject. As is the case with Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, Sexton's exposes the dangers (exaggerations of confidence ) which may be the reward of fame. Fame can demand that one must suffer to pay the price of a bogus ticket ; well-earned respect, on the other hand, can often be a blessing for emerging writers, a blessing that secures a viable humility.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. March 6, 2020
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