Notes on a Tougaloo College Writer

 

Notes on a novel by Candice Love Jackson

 

Exposure in Southern literature  is useful.  It helps readers to set straight misbegotten notions.  One of Faulkner's major contributions to discourses on the uncertainty of historical narratives is Absalom, Absalom.  Likewise, in her second novel  Finding His Treasure (2020), Candice Love Jackson sets readers straight about psychodramas and diversity in the lives of middle-class African Americans in pre-pandemic  Mississippi. Faulkner's contribution to modernist fiction was bought with stereotyped coins; Jackson's, with iconoclastic dollars. Southern exposure fails as exposure unless one recognizes how remote it is from politically correct "colourblindness."

 

One can appreciate innovative features in Jackson's second novel without having read her debut novel Deserving Grace (2019.  There is a special treat, of course, in having insider knowledge about the first novel,  a knowing that enables recognition of how characters in one book can contextualize the actions of other characters in another book.  Jackson uses this shifting to craft fiction that is grist for critics who have special interest in psychoanalysis.  I have great respect for Claudia Tate's Psychoanalysis and Black Novels:  Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998), but I harbor severe doubts about the "universality" of Freudian and Lacanian theories. They seem to be helpful in explaining  Shakespeare, Flaubert and Tolstoy., but they leave too much unexplained about  Zora Neale Hurston. Keenan Norris, and Jackson. Although Finding His Treasure may well be grist for psychoanalytic mills, historically situated readings reveal African American class memories and ancestral wisdom in a better light. Such readings urge critics to discard academic pretense and to struggle with the actual in popular black writing.

 

 [[ Jackson wrote Chapter 25 "From writer to reader :black popular fiction" for the Cambridge History of African American Literature, where she observed that popular writers and the popular literature they produce "continue to make an indelible impact on changing the parameters  of African American literary studies, African American readers, and American culture" (656).  She assumed the burden of making an impact in her two novels.]]

 

The actuality of black lives in the "little big city" of Jackson, Mississippi is scantly known by people who are not from there or who do not live there, and such disadvantaged  readers are in for a special treat when they engage how Jackson uses the basic five senses ---touch, sight, taste, hearing and smell ---to weave an erotic plot. Black stories out of Mississippi are rich in tragedy and rather poverty-stricken  in depicting four-lettered jouissance.   Finding His Treasure balances the smell of  orgasm-rich,  uncensored  fantasies with the fresh air of stories that can never be completely told, especially if they are linked with the covert movements of surveillance in America as it tries to deal with overt criminality in the USA.

 

Sooner or later, truth will manifest itself along the lines of Finding His Treasure.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            1/26/2021 8:37:24 PM

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