A Chain of Letters: Correspondences with the Epistolary Novel in John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing
p. 99-122
Résumé
John Edgar Wideman declared that “stories are letters”, implying that all fiction is epistolary, since it addresses an absent reader. As a practice of intertextual dialogism, it also responds to previous texts. More specifically, African American literature has often been defined as a critical rewriting of the Western canon, in which former objects of discourse assume the position of enunciating subjects. This answering b(l)ack is what Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (1996) operates, through a re-appropriation of historical discourse and the epistolary novel. A sort of textual triangulation is at work in the second part of the novel. A kaleidoscope of letters, diary entries, court proceedings, voices, it articulates the three polarities of writing, orality, and history, probing the status, silences, and conditions of production of historical documents. Drawing on pastiches of the 18th Century epistolary novel and its black reinterpretations (such as Alice Waker’s The Color Purple), it also opens a baroque questioning of the opposition between fiction and reality, past and present. More than a historical novel, The Cattle Killing is a novel about history, the writing of history, the limitations of history. Reinstating a silenced black presence, from a political, ethical and textual post-colonial perspective, it acquires the status of a sort of heterodox archaeology of America and the American novel, to both of which Wideman is a resisting heir.
Texte intégral
1“Stories are letters,” wrote John Edgar Wideman in the dedication of his book Damballah (1988, 5). The short stories in this collection are mostly about the author’s family, and addressed to his incarcerated brother Robby. Taken literally, this implies that all narratives are veiled letters: even fiction is an epistolary mode, since it is directed to an absent addressee, on a tone of emotional intimacy, in a half-way covenant between oral and literary styles, between dialogue and narration, and between imagination and reality. It also responds to other writings, in an exercise of intertextual dialogism. All the more so for the black community, who have been much more often defined in texts by others than read in their own right. African-American literature has therefore often been interpreted as a “writing back,” a critical rewriting of dominant literary canons and discourses: the most famous example of this outlook is Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Signifyin(g)”, or “repetition with a difference,” as presented in The Signifying Monkey (1988).
2This connection with the epistolary novel ties in well with the fact that Wideman had studied 18th century English literature while at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. Yet it can seem paradoxical, since the African-American tradition is usually identified with the rendition of oral forms of communication and creation, what Gates calls the “speakerly text” (Gates, 1988, 112). Wideman is no exception to the latter view, since his novels are often polyphonic weavings of voices, with frequent recourse to stream-of-consciousness techniques, according to musical rhythmic patterns. Such is, for example, the mode of composition of the first part of The Cattle Killing. The second part of that novel is then especially interesting with regards to the literal presence of letters. Contrary to the first part, it mainly consists of a collage of written texts, texts that correspond with each other, emphasizing the fettering weight of the letter in African-American history, and initiating an intertextual meditation on black literature as an interface between voice and letter, letter and being or “la lettre et l’être”, pardon my French. This epistolary streak seems to stem from at least a double font: a rewriting of traditional 18th century English fiction, as exemplified in the works of Samuel Richardson, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, allegedly the first African-American epistolary novel. Our analysis of the vagaries of the letter in The Cattle Killing will lead us to define a hybrid genre; in a second movement, we will address the relations between writing and time, a poetics of the time-gap; and finally, we will consider the work as an “archaeology of writing,” a performance that critically examines its own ancestry and presuppositions, with a view to transform the brand of the letter into a mark of liberation.
1 A High Breed Mix
3The Cattle Killing, even though it focuses on the yellow fever epidemic that affected Philadelphia in 1793, is much more than a historical novel.1 Its crucial self-reflexive dimension links it rather to what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographical metafiction,” a meditation on history as text and manipulation of signs (1988, 119). The novel draws correspondences between three time-frames: 1793 and the present in the United States, and the “cattle killing” of the Xhosa people, in 1856-57, a tragic episode of the British colonization of South Africa.2 Such geographic and historical triangulation allows a critical examination of Western imperialism, from the Enlightenment to the contemporary period. The central metaphor for this multi-faceted perspective on history is that of the kaleidoscope, described by Liam, one of the characters in the first part:
In London Stubbs had pointed out a toy in an oculist’s shop. A cylinder ingeniously fitted with mirrors and stained glass inside. You peer through the eyepiece, twist the tube and see colorful, intricate, ever-changing designs. I often think of viewing Stubbs in such an instrument. Consider him, his license and single-mindedness, his self-fishness and self-absorption. Now twist slightly, the image becomes Stubbs Senior, his tannery, an empire built corpse by corpse. Given another small turn, the commerce in beasts becomes commerce in men. (CK, 127–128)
4The kaleidoscope is a triangle of mirrors, creating new visions through refraction: it is a machine that establishes correspondences. In this passage, the turn of the tube shows unexpected connections between an estranged father and son, Liam’s employers. Stubbs Junior, a “real-life,” historical painter famous for his pictures of animals and his passion for anatomy, is the current owner of the African indentured servant’s work; his father owns a tannery, makes a living out of death, and contributes to the British commercial empire, of which slavery, another culture of death, is a major part. Meaning circulates, in a form of “triangular trade,” between the semi-detached activities of art, capitalism, and slavery; between the poles of England, the young American Republic, where Liam tells his story to the young black preacher Isaiah, and Africa, from where he was deported; between all periods of history in which black people are treated like cattle: slavery, colonization, as well as a present rife with AIDS and gang violence in both Africa and the U.S.
5In the second part of the novel, a triangle of relationships—epistolary, “speakerly,” sexual—obtains between Dr. Benjamin Thrush, a doctor who is active in fighting the yellow fever—and who is modeled on the “real” Dr. Rush of Philadelphia fame—, his blind wife, and their black servant Kathryn. The formal triangulation thus established echoes that of the first part, between Isaiah—nicknamed Eye in his quality as a witness—, Liam, the ex-slave who adopts him almost as a son, and Liam’s wife, a white former servant.
6Yet, to define the second part of the novel as epistolary fiction may seem an exaggeration: after all, it is more hybrid than anything else. It consists of a few letters exchanged between Mr. and Mrs. Thrush; of Mrs. Thrush’s diary, which the blind woman dictates to Kathryn; of transcripts of witnesses’ accounts of the arson of an orphanage after the epidemic; and of several first- and third-person narrative passages, including stream-of-consciousness fragments. What obtains is a mixture of oral and written communication, a hybrid blend that closely resembles the intricate and intimate relationships between the “races”: in terms of lettering, one can nevertheless observe more white-on-black than black-on-white imprints.
7Far from constituting a generic impediment, this very hybridity is present in the hypotexts referred to by Wideman. In Richardson’s Pamela, the epistolary exchange gives way to a journal when the heroine is sequestered in Mr. B.’s property. The editor of Clarissa intervenes in his own name to explain and comment on the protagonist’s letters. In Walker’s Color Purple, Celie’s famous letters to God (“Dear God. . .”) actually constitute a diary, and become a real correspondence only when she is again in touch with her long-lost sister Nettie. Among the historical documents that Wideman must have consulted, apart from Benjamin Rush’s correspondence, Bishop Richard Allen and Absalom Jones’s Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People. . . (1794), is a compendium of a defense of the reputation of black people during the fever, a plea in episodic narrative form; a letter asking for the recommendation of prominent citizens; and several public epistles to blacks and whites in favor of civil peace, the abolition of slavery, and patience on the side of the oppressed.
8This generic blur is connected to the fact that historically, the epistle was a discursive practice situated at the borderline between the private and public spheres. According to Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook: “In the 18th century the letter form was used in every kind of writing, from scientific treatises to novels, from conduct books to political essays, as well as in exchanges between ordinary people facilitated by the development of postal institutions across Europe” (Cook, 1996, 16 – 17). Here the two meanings of the “letter” are conflated: most types of writing could take an epistolary form; conversely, letters bespoke the importance of a culture of writing and print, across a wide spectrum along the public/private axis. At one end of the continuum, could be found the contract and the law: the importance of the former is visible in the philosophical notion of the social contract. As far as the latter is concerned, The Cattle Killing features several trial minutes, introduced by the phrase “Deponent sayeth: ”, which represent the transposition into written form, by white scriveners, of the oral testimony of the black child who confesses setting fire to the orphanage; this translation may amount to betrayal—at least the force of the law is on the side of the written procedure, and declares the child guilty (CK, 186–188; 191–197).
9The middle of the spectrum could be represented in the book by the letter Dr. Thrush sends his wife, in January 1793, before the start of the epidemic. It is a private letter, but mainly deals with a scientific experiment: a hot-air balloon flight, in front of President Washington, featuring a black man as guinea pig, to measure the influence of height on blood pressure. Enlightenment enthusiasm for science is, ironically, tempered by the premises of scientific racism: “Who better to perform the duties of steward than one whose natural inclination is to serve and please; and whose blood better than the Negroes’, with its tropical lushness and excitability, to record the heart’s fluctuations as the balloon rose” (CK, 160). Philadelphia is the capital of a democratic republic, yet the social contract that seals it is biased, obeying a “peculiar arithmetic” (CK, 112) with racial overtones.
10The other end of the epistolary continuum concerns the constitution of the private sphere, and of the type of subjectivity that corresponds to it. The novel features many examples of this, in the form of private letters and diaries. The ambiguity and “impurity” of the genre can be seen in the beginning of Mrs. Thrush’s journal: its aim is “to maintain a record” (CK, 162), later nuanced as “record exactly the spill of my thoughts” (CK, 164). Objectivity and subjectivity vie against each other in those sentences. In the same way, she addresses her husband in her solitude, but soon afterwards declares: “Ahh. . . I feel better now—my secret’s out—though it shall go no further than these secret pages” (CK, 183–184). All in all, the diary occupies an intermediate position between the letter and the journal. In another variation on this pattern, what first seems to be a letter is actually a diary entry: “Dearest B—this morning, though you have long ago departed for your duties, I feel a strong desire to speak to you—so I shall—speak to you as I do in my prayers—speak to you as I address this little book—speaking to it as I have always yearned to speak to you” (CK, 188). The journal is a letter, in that it supplements a deficiency in oral communication; conversely, the letters progressively add up to become a journal. Both modes of intercourse can become interchangeable; both point to one of the essential characteristics of writing, an appeal to the absent Other, who is always a hollowed-out presence at the heart of the process.
11What are the stakes of this staging of the letter within the text? First, it allows the expression of an outlook on history. Representing indirectly the events of 1793 by means of a chain of letters is a way of avoiding the intervention of a single narrator, be it Eye or an anonymous heterodiegetic one. A plurality of perspectives is instead provided, the letter serving as sign of this circuitous, roundabout strategy. Moreover, all the papers within the novel are virtually endowed with the status of historical documents: trial proceedings, Dr. Rush’s correspondence, the letters and journals of contemporaries. In their materiality, the fragments in the book mimic the primary sources and archives that historians have at their disposal, and out of the confrontation of which they come up with historiographic accounts of the past. The reader is put in the same situation, faced with the need to interpret actively, with due distance and discrimination. This also makes clear the dependence of history upon the technique of writing. The distinction between prehistoric and historical times is supposed to stem from the availability of written documents, and the possibility of writing a report born of the confrontation of these. But this represents only a limited perspective. First, as Hayden White has shown, the truth of events is elusive and its inscription conditioned by the narrative necessities of “emplotment”, which it shares with fiction and which endow it with a fictional dimension (White, 1987, 44). Then, written documents are more often than not produced by the ruling classes: during slavery times, most black people did not write, since it was forbidden to teach them—even the black orphan, to whom Mrs. Thrush and Kathryn had been giving “3-Rs” classes, has no control over the trial proceedings. The writings of members of the black elite, such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, cannot really reduce the imbalance. Hence, the overall economy of The Cattle Killing: writing is foregrounded only in the second, smaller part, with a critical distance; to reestablish a kind of historical truth, the novel ostentatiously uses other sources than writing. Re-presentation rather than a presentation of the accepted forms and contents of historiography is the spirit behind these letters.
12Also tied to these lettered stakes is the practice of literary pastiche, namely that of the 18th century epistolary novel, and its spelling of consciousness. It is actually a false-bottomed pastiche, since 18th century novelists themselves modeled their style on the private writings of their contemporaries. It is often said that Richardson’s career as a fiction writer stemmed from his work on a letter-writing treatise. It can therefore be said that Richardson’s Pamela, or De Foe’s A Journal of the Plague Year were non-specific parodies of the practices of private correspondence and diary-writing, respectively, which allowed them, on the one hand, to cultivate a simple, accessible style that was part of the world of their middle-class intended public, and on the other hand, to endow their texts with a degree of verisimilitude predicated on the “reality effect” of non-fictional genres (Doody, 1980, 7–8). Wideman then pastiches pastiches, with a double result: distanciation from the present, and a form of realism, as the archaic style establishes the fiction of a redaction two centuries ago. This insertion into literary history—British and American—also represents the union of form and content, with a playful twist, as the following extract of Mrs. Thrush’s diary illustrates:
B- B-B-B—I’m being read a novel of Samuel Richardson’s in which there appears a Mr. B—though a handsome B, as you are, he possesses few of your virtues, and fortunately, you none of his loathsome vices—but you are both B’s—it is the fashion in certain scandalous novels to conceal the identity of characters taken from life by employing initials in place of names—of course this conceit—borrowed from the French, I believe, their notorious “roman à clef”—whets rather than curbs appetite for scandal—titillating as much as concealing, because the adventures narrated in the fiction are by this conceit of initials also insinuated to be real—real enough to incriminate someone—if not incriminating, if not real, why the cloak of initials—the reader may have his—or her, since I’m told most readers of novels are of the idle feminine tribe—cake and eat it too—gentle readers invited to spy on the intimate doings of their betters and also permitted to disclaim any immoral or prurient interest in such spying, since after all, what’s being read is mere make-believe, a novel, is it not—I pity the lords and ladies, people of quality, the notable or star-crossed citizens whose bones are picked by our modern authors—their lives laid bare before the public’s eye with only the fig leaf of an initial to cover their modesty. (CK, 183)
13The initial B. literally runs the semantic gamut of the word “letter,” and of the genres attached to it, since it is littera introducing a scriptura-like passage from a diary in a fabula. The long, hypotactic, digressive sentences, whose parts are separated by dashes, are a stylistic echo of the 18th century “novels of consciousness,” connoting the fluidity of a consciousness groping for expression, and fashioning itself as it proceeds. A more pointed intertextual hint is the obvious allusion to Pamela, and the conflation of Richardson’s fictional Mr. B and the “real,” yet imaginary, Benjamin Thrush of our novel. Here the connection establishes several levels of ambiguity. Mrs. Thrush’s playful parallel between her husband and Pamela’s semi-villain is fraught with unconscious irony: the former does share some of B’s “vices,” as he forces himself on the maid Kathryn—a mixed allusion, since in Pamela a servant is being sequestered, and in Clarissa a virtuous woman is raped. Extra-textual irony is present too, in the allusion to the “roman à clef”: after all, Thrush is modeled after the real Rush, and Eye’s progress closely follows Bishop Allen’s (TuSmith, 1998, 186). What obtains is a widespread dissemination of hypotexts, a kaleidoscope of references closely resembling the stuttering and multiplication of “B.s” in our passage, a “fable of the B.s” whose interpretation is somewhat different from Mandeville’s—subtitled “Private Vices, Publick Benefits” (1714). Liam’s wife, a white servant, is said to have been sexually exploited by men in England, which makes her another Pamela, closer to the prototype. Conversely, a parallel between the situation of women servants in 18th century England and slavery, which is hinted at in Richardson’s novel, is here made explicit, in a joined condemnation of racial and sexual domination.
14But Richardson’s prose is also read through the prism of, or in correspondence with, The Color Purple.3 Mrs. Thrush’s definition of her intimate confessions to her diary, “what I say when no one is listening—what I might say if someone dear consented to listen—what I say when I wish only God to hear” (CK, 161) could well be an echo of Walker’s Celie and her letters to God. These were prompted by her rapist stepfather’s threats: “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy” (CP, 3). This enforced silence reminds of Kathryn’s, Mrs. Thrush’s dark double who does not even have the solace of a diary of her own. The surreptitious parallel between the husband and God in the blind woman’s journal can be placed beside both Clarissa Harlowe’s famed letter to her rapist, about going back to the “House of my father,” which was a veiled allusion to her intended suicide (Clarissa, 1233), and to the portrayal of God as an “old white man” in The Color Purple (CP, 167). A vision of a patriarchal regime, in which the master of the house is also master of the bodies and souls of the household, whether attached to it in matrimony or servitude, is common to the three novels: whereas Richardson writes from within the scope of that ideology, criticizing the abuse of worldly power from a normative Christian point of view (the spirit against the letter), Walker and Wideman indict the whole system from the outside (the letter is no different from the spirit), as inheritors of the oppressed groups of men and women of color.
15This multiple-layered pastiche and parody establish a new, textual triangulation, and amount to a double Signifyin(g) strategy. A critical rewriting of the European model of the epistolary and diary novel from an African American point of view joins hands with a black tradition represented by precursor Alice Walker, whose Color Purple is itself revisited from a distance. In all these cases, Signifyin (g) is at the same time, and in various degrees, tribute and deconstruction, spelling ambivalence towards the hypotext. It also occupies a crossroads between black and white literary ancestries, giving birth to a hybrid, a mulatto text whose very existence flies in the face of the racial discrimination encountered by persons of African ancestry in America. The mixed-blood child Liam and his white wife cannot have, for fear of betraying their interracial mar riage, is produced by Mr. Thrush upon Kathryn; even though its birth is not mentioned in the novel and miscarriage is a possibility, the fact remains that cultural closeness has fostered a mixed American identity that is impervious to the exclusive identities proclaimed by law and prejudice.
16But the extract under study reveals yet another of the circuitous paths in which letters define identity, beyond the letter of the law, or sacred texts. Mrs. Thrush all but admits that she models her prose and, consequently, her self-awareness on previous novels. The 18th century “novel of consciousness” inaugurates an epistolary chain that incorporates its extra-diegetic addressees in the same way as it features readers within the text. In short, it is a fiction that creates its own public. “Eighteenth century epistolary narratives do not merely depict or give readers access to individuals’ ‘private lives’; they are also part of the construction of a new kind of subjectivity, a new way of being a self that appears along with and as a product of the techniques and media of representation made available by print culture” (Cook, 1996, 178). By framing this form of “conduct book” Bovaryism based on identification and imitation in The Cattle Killing, Wideman elicits a postmodern writer’s awareness of the construct-edness of identities, even “dominant” ones; imparts to the reader a critical distance towards the production of the modern individual during the Enlightenment; and implicitly assigns that same reader a subject position confronting the discursive and ethical challenges of the text (TuSmith, 1998, 206–207). The chains of letters construct and deconstruct bondages, yet they might not leave us ideologically unfettered.
2 “Lettres et le temps” or Writing and Time
17The spatialization of the text, born of an aesthetics of editing, or collage, of hand-written fragments, is accompanied by a joint poetics of the semantic gap and the time lag, two types of différance which are intimately linked within the practice of the epistolary novel, and which justify a little pun on the French and English translations of Heidegger’s L’Être et le temps, or Being and Time. The very beginning of Mrs. Thrush’s diary alludes to these various intervals, connecting them with the character’s blindness:
I cannot see the words I would write in this book, nor see the book, nor see the world the words would venture to describe—I depend upon another’s hand to set down my thoughts—I must open to another my most private spaces—my wishes, disappointments, dreams, what is never spoken except in conversation inside my own poor head—what I say when no one is listening—what I might say if someone dear consented to listen—what I say when I wish only God to hear.
(CK, 161)
18Mrs. Thrush’s sightless state transforms the reflexive form of the journal, corresponding to the isolated intimacy of the private self, into transitive communication: for the “you, my little book” (CK, 163) of the diary to virtually become an address to the “you” of “dear B.”, it has to transit through the “you” of the scribe/servant. This disturbs another of the cardinal features of the writing of the self—in both acceptations of the phrase: the fiction that the text is based on “real” letters presupposes manuscript writing, the trace and presence of the body in the script act. Here, a new triangulation is at work, between the mind, the voice, and the hand (of another). There is a time lag between “consciousness” and “expression.” This delay casts doubt upon the fiction of epistolary transparence, a major tenet of a genre predicated on the spontaneity of expression, what Richardson called “writing to the moment”: “Ye world is not enough used to this way of writing, to the moment. It knows not that in the minutiae lie often the unfoldings of the Story, as well as of the heart; & judges of an action undecided, as if it were absolutely decided” (Richardson, FC, XI, 80, quoted in Bray, 2003, 55). What the dictation process introduces is a layered text that is at the same time oral and written, and draws attention to the différance between thought and expression, shattering the canonic illusion of contemporaneity between the narrating “I” and the narrated “I”, between the time of action and the time of narration, what Richardson’s Lovelace, in Clarissa, defined as his “present-tense” manner (Bray, 2003, 59). According to Jacques Derrida, the traditional Western view is that writing serves as a “supplement” to orality (Derrida, 1974, 144–145); here, on the contrary, oral communication comes as a forced supplement and detour to a writing intention.
19The delusive simplicity of the epistolary narrative is further subverted by the exposure of the conditions of production of the text, a mistress dictating to a slave:
I love Kate—she owns—I take her free hand in mine—tell her not to stop writing with the other—dear Kate, you must learn to speak my heart—a task fitting and proper because you, Kate, truly reside inside my breast—a second tender tremor there.
While your hand was stilled upon the page I caressed it—your dark hand under mine—my hand slightly larger and heavier—yet not as strong, though my Kathryn’s bones are light as a bird’s—a sisterly likeness—the same texture of flesh, same short, blunt fingers—fine articulation of vein and bone beneath the skin—slim palm and narrowness of wrist—more alike than different in this unbroken night where glorious vision no more reigns—her dark color and my lack of one indistinguishable by touch. My flesh moans, why can’t you hear it [. . .]
Your silence my license. (CK, 162 – 163)
20Taking Marxist criticism to the letter, Wideman inscribes a distinction between infrastructure and superstructure in the very process of writing. There is a marked contrast between the mistress’s sentimental rhetoric, her professions of equality and sisterhood, drawn from the Richardsonian “culture of sensibility” (Bray, 2003, 81), and the instrumentalization of the servant’s body—“You must be my unprotesting pen” (CK, 164). A few flourishes of irony adorn the script: “your free hand” in a context of slavery and exploitation; or the variation on the symbol of the heart, an implicit revisiting of Lovelace’s fantastic etymology of “cor-respondence” as a dialogue, or outpouring of hearts. But by far the most signifying phrase is the anagram “Your silence my license,” a mirror-effect which is made to enact the whole of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. As in the latter, the masters’ freedom, and the very identity they explore in the epistolary genre, depends on the silence and oppression of colored people. In this dark underside of the Enlightenment, the master is actually the slave’s slave, a reversal that finds a fit grammatological emblem in the permutation of letters. The body of the text bears the imprint of real power relationships, not only the mistress’s dictation, but the master’s dictates when he gains mastery over the servant’s body. So Mrs. Thrush’s consciousness, which she painstakingly fashions in writing, is shown as all the less transparent as her physical blindness is doubled by moral blindness, at least until Kate becomes pregnant.
21This re-reading of the Richardsonian novel and the culture of consciousness of the European 18th century from a doubly peripheral location, the still provincial United States and a black viewpoint, points to the various time-lags between the dominant ideology of the times and its subaltern offshoots, no less than to the temporal and perceptual gaps at the heart of the masters’ discourses. Within The Cattle Killing, these time-lags open up an internal dialogisation of the text and set the stage for an ironical reading wavering between literal and figurative meanings, another ambivalent attitude to the letter. What to make of “I must open to another my most private spaces” (CK, 161): should we take it as a metaphor for the dictated journal, or a sexual innuendo? The “sisterly likeness” Mrs. Thrush finds with Kate may be a hackneyed metaphor for friendship, a commendable color-blindness or, in a disquieting game of doubles and mirrors, the prefiguration of the two women’s fulfilling the same function with the same man. As in most cases of dramatic irony, what is first taken figuratively turns out to be literally true as well. This duality of the letter also has a performative dimension, and reveals the problematic form of identities. If the woman who dictates her letters and journal writes herself and the body of the scrivener into being, she can never coincide with herself. Identity discovers and alienates itself through language.
22A further dimension is added to the above extract by the inserts in italics, which render Kate’s discourse. “I love Kate—she owns” can have several meanings: confession, an admission of love; but more likely, possession, ownership, as opposed to love, denouncing blindness or hypocrisy. “My flesh moans, can’t you hear it” is expanded, on page 185, into “full of his ravenous seed that hollows out a place within me, devouring me from inside—as you from outside—digging, scooping.” This purloined letter-space, in Kathryn’s ravished voice, represents the dark side, the repressed content of her mistress’s speech. Yet its exact status is ambiguous. Does it represent Kate’s unspoken thoughts, superimposed on the page; is it some transgressive written addition to the diary, a revenge taken on Mrs. Thrush’s blindness; or does it portray the moment of dictation, a mixture of the dominant voice and the low- or un-voiced comments by the servant, an oral situation about to be written down and censored? This textual indetermination amounts to temporal indeterminacy, and both result in a destabilization of meaning.
23All in all, a double shadow falls on the epistolary novel, as illustrated by Mrs. Thrush’s letters and diary. The repressed content of slavery is incarnated in the maid Kathryn, while Mr. Thrush represents the influence of a patriarchal system. The latter manifests itself in the writing by a form of self-censorship. After a flight of fancy, in which she compares her endeavor to a stroll through a gallery of paintings that become alive through the conjunction of memory and imagination, the diarist falls back to a more sedate, practical vision.
But I grow too fanciful—who keeps this gallery where invisible artists display their handiwork to viewers who have no eyes. [. . .] and you, my little book, pray treat me as a doting suitor or loving parent would—indulge with smiles the ordinariness of my thoughts and secrets. (CK, 163)
24There is a double bind at work here: whenever the thoughts are creative and out of the ordinary, they have to be repressed, and the result is seen as worthy at best of male or parental condescension. In a word, woman is restrained to the role of a perpetual minor, and the self-fashioning that diary-writing can be is used to discipline the self into conformity: “we must content ourselves with the knowledge that the same divine, guiding spirit that places you at the center of the struggle to mend our broken city has given me a role to play at the margin. . .” (CK, 190). Here Wideman rejoins the many critics who have defined as the ideological cornerstone of the epistolary novel since Richardson the parallel bipartition between the male and female genders, and the public and private spheres (Cook, 1996, 8–13). Yet The Cattle Killing is somewhat more complex, since Mrs. Thrush keeps her spiritual independence throughout her writing; she may even cultivate it on the page. She is disappointed by her husband’s lukewarm support of blacks in the face of racist libel, and gently scolds him about it; her style remains imaginative, even after being sanitized; she gets involved in an ill-fated attempt to support and teach at an orphanage. It is true that conformity and submissiveness seem to gain the upper hand, but the text bears the trace of this tension between the letter as fetter and “literation” as liberation.
25Wideman’s master stroke is, in our opinion, his ability to show within a single discourse a double oppression, racial and sexual; the internalization of social and literary norms; and the collusion between private and public spheres unified by the same overall ideology. In the confrontation between a black and a white woman, the reader is led to feel compassion for both, through an awareness of historical determinations, without letting a narrow determinism be the end-all of the novel. An associated reflection on language emphasizes polysemy and indeterminacy, the various chains of meanings the letter of a text can become connected to, and which always balance constraint with a measure of freedom. In this, The Cattle Killing strikes us as much more subtle than The Color Purple, which staged a reappropriation of the epistolary/diary novel for the black woman, in a rather simplistic problematic of alienation/liberation through writing, and the constitution of a female sisterhood. The second part of Wideman’s book is closer in form to the classical epistolary novel, based on a dialogical framework and the confrontation of points of view, the various intradiegetic writers and readers entering a game of seduction and/or rivalry. The editing of the various fragments that compose the text stages this plurality of meanings. On page 173, for example, Mrs. Thrush’s “writing” is juxtaposed with Kathryn’s voice, and then Mr. Thrush’s voice, in a perspectivist presentation of their different visions of events. Later on, the same effect is achieved by a contrapuntal alternation of Mrs. Thrush’s good intentions for the orphanage and the child arsonist’s confession, which reveals the appalling living conditions in a cellar dormitory compared to the slaves’ Middle Passage, as well as the child’s hatred for the “angels” (Kathryn and Mrs. Thrush) who want to convert, reform, deform the inmates.
26This composition of heterogeneous texts introduces a poetic of the gap, which decenters all the subjectivities these texts express and produce. These gaps also amount to time-lags, as the reader has to bridge the blanks, and the chronology of events is not always respected. The overall result is a radical questioning of the notion of the separate, autonomous subject as conveyed by 18th century ideology. Yet, modeling his narrative on the epistolary novel, Wideman is also able to suggest that the idea of consciousness in the 18th century was more complex than what many contemporary critics have suggested. Actually, the complexity of the dynamics of the epistolary novel revolve not only around the various discourses that are presented, but above all on the mysterious editing agency behind the text, a problematic metanarrator whose (re)visiting may introduce us to a sort of archeology of writing.
3 An Archeology of Writing
27There is more at stake, in the staging and mise en abyme within The Cattle Killing of the diary—and epistolary—novel, than generic and historical realism. Also involved is a reflection by Wideman on the origins of his own writing practice, often defined as both postmodern and African American. This meditation takes the forms of the staging of a polyphonic novel, a complex play with narrative agencies, and an emphasis on the problematic relations between reality and fiction, best summarized in the author’s recurrent phrase “all stories are true.”
28The traditional epistolary novel is essentially dialogic, since it is composed of letters addressed to some Other(s), whose absent presence is felt in the downstrokes and upstrokes of calligraphy. The genre is often described in terms of “voices”, paradoxically so if we think that writing is a silent art form. For example, critic Frédéric Callas draws up a typology based on musical compositions, featuring one, two or more voices, structured through polyphony and variation. Lovelace’s “cor-respondence” is redefined as a baroque antiphonal concert, and the fact that 18th century punctuation was often imitative of the breathing units of oral delivery only strengthens the parallel. Now, the rhythm of Wideman’s writing is often based on stream-of-consciousness techniques, effects of circularity and musical leitmotivs. In this he shares Alice Walker’s 1973 opinion on the aims of black literature: “I am trying to arrive at that place where black music already is; to arrive at that unselfconscious sense of collective oneness; that naturalness, that . . . grace” (TuSmith 1998, 211). Most African American writers have attempted to write in a dialogue with the oral (and musical) tradition, using the practice of antiphony, or “call-and-response,” as a model for their own craft. A crucial brand of this dialogism and polyphony, Signifyin(g) as formal revision and implication is both a characteristic of the vernacular, and of jazz music. “If black writers read each other, they also revise each other’s texts. Thereby they become fluent in the language of tradition. Signifyin(g) is the figure of Afro-American literary history, and revision proceeds by riffing upon tropes” (Gates, 1988, 124). The convergence of these notions with the recent postmodern emphasis on Bakhtin’s theories of the novel as heteroglossia, makes it particularly interesting to revisit the origins of the genre in the 18th century as the composition of various voices and structures of address, a characteristic that was partly obscured by the “realistic” novel of the 19th century, with its omniscient, omnipotent narrator and its ideal of total mimesis of the extra-textual world. What both postmodern criticism and the epistolary genre point out is the fact that the real is to be found in discourse, rather than in the equation between words and things.
29One of the major consequences of this questioning of the 19th century novel in Wideman’s works is an attempt to reach beyond linear, “realistic” chronology into the provinces of mythical Great Time, described as a discursive medium in the evocation of an African story of origins.
Told countless times, countless ways, in each recounting the fabled bout happens again, not in the past but alive and present in Great Time, the always present tense of narrative where every alternative is possible, where the quick and the dead meet, where all stories are true. (Fatheralong, 62)
30Many episodes in The Cattle Killing allow us glimpses of this Great Time: Isaiah’s epileptic fits, which usher him into a cosmic consciousness (CK, 66–70); Liam’s final painting of his wife, anachronistic in its formal boldness (CK, 181–182); a recurrent woman in blue, who might be a transmigrating African spirit (CK, 15). Most paradoxically, at the end of the first part Isaiah has a premonition of Nongqawuse, the young girl at the origin of the cattle killing prophecy in South Africa, who comes to put him on his guard against false visions: a prophecy to warn against prophecy, “don’t fall asleep in your enemy’s dream” (CK, 147). In a formal echo to this passage, the end of the second part features a ceremony in which a lighted candle is passed along a chain of living and dead people, establishing a link between the 18th and the 20th centuries. More than a literal statement of belief in the mythic conception of Great Time, we take these violations of verisimilitude to be a literary statement: a text is a temporal network, the orchestration of different time-frames along with different voices, and thus reaches beyond time and history. The act of reading is an “eternal present”, which reactivates each time, through the letters, the words and the worlds of the past.
31While his predecessor Alice Walker was able to purloin the letters of the epistolary novel—as in her own text the two sisters Nettie and Celie’s letters were stolen by Celie’s husband—in order to reappropriate the genre for black voices in a gesture of cultural nationalism, “to turn away from the white hermeneutical circle and into the black” (Gates, 1988, 258), Wideman can be said to orchestrate a more complex counterpoint of orality and literacy, black and white. The result is a hybrid “mulatto” text, fusing the double filiation of the English and American 18th century and of a postcolonial, postmodern outlook. Or a chain of “Belles-lettres” connecting Clarissa to Clarissa Dalloway to an African-American stream of consciousness, with the ironic comment that the brightness of the Enlightenment is struck with blindness: the former Empire writes b(l)ack.
32Due to the multiplicity of perspectives involved, a principle of indeterminacy seems to be at work within the novel, creating uncertainty as to the origin and status of the various utterances. A baroque vertigo of Chinese-box narrations; the ambiguous status of Mrs. Thrush’s correspondence and diary, fluctuating between orality and writing; the dubious quality of narrated passages, such as Mr. Thrush’s words to Kathryn in her bedroom (CK, 173–174); the encounter between the maid and Isaiah in the Thrush household, which seems attributable to an external narrator, but could also be the written memoir of one of the characters (CK, 165–170): the difficulty in pinpointing a clear origin for such fragments is compounded by the absence, in most of the text, of traditional markers like dates, quotation marks, or italics.
33Moreover, we learn on page 198 that Eye has been given Mrs. Thrush’s little notebook by Kate: “He closes the blind woman’s book. The book entrusted to him he opened and searched for clues only after he’d lost her again.” This insert reminds us of one of the characteristics of the epistolary novel: the fiction of an editor, who happens to be in possession of the letters and is responsible for their definitive published form. The issue is further complicated by a series of “clues” that the whole story of the novel is a dialogue between Kate and Isaiah in the latter’s room at the Hart and Hare inn (CK, 200), in a “heart and heir”, Scheherazade-like attempt to keep the woman alive by telling her stories (Birat, 1999, 630):
One day when it’s time to tell the last story and I stutter because it sits like a stone in my throat and carries the weight of all the stories told and untold I wanted to bring you as gifts, stories of my dead to keep you alive, to keep love alive, to keep me coming here each evening to be with you in spite of my dead, in spite of what was missing, lost, unaccounted for, never to be found again, in spite of the earth turning faster underneath us so each time I walk through your door there is less time and more time to be mourned, to be mounted in the stories I hoped would bind us, free us so always there would be more, more. . . (CK, 206)
34The life-giving dimension of story-telling is emphasized, together with a possible favoring of orality over literacy: the word-cure seems to be endowed with more efficacy when it is spoken. And the mistress’s diary, written in the handmaid’s hand, is read only when Eye has lost his own mistress. A supplement, then, for an absence. But the multi-layered dimension of the text does not stop here: in a “Prologue” that serves as a traditional frame story, a writer who closely resembles John Edgar Wideman goes and visits his father with the draft of a novel that eerily resembles The Cattle Killing, in order to read it to him: “Me reading to you, Dad. A first” (CK, 9). The Cattle Killing is, in a way, the book read to the father, one more example of a written text becoming oral, in an inverted process to the production of Mrs. Thrush’s diary. This novel too is addressed to a family member, like a correspondence: “stories are letters” once again.
He would read to his father. Or offer to read. His father not an easy man. He’d read from the manuscript if his father in bedroom slippers, hunched on the couch, swaddled in blankets against the chill, was willing to listen. And will that listening, if it happens, be part of the story, the beginning of what he reads. (CK, 14)
35This situation serves as an intratextual model for the relation of the book to the reader, the final addressee on whose goodwill its very existence, the reactivation of the letters that constitute it, depends. As a matter of fact, the phrase “If someone is listening” also closes the second part of the novel (CK, 208). This presence of the reader within the text, mimetically calling out to the reader outside, is one of the key elements of the epistolary/diary novel:
The question of the reader, original or principal, seems to be a trap designed by the fiction. The author of the epistolary form plays at outsmarting our reading abilities and belittling our role in order to foster an impure participation on us, to frame us into the posture of a voyeur or a spy. (Callas, 1996, 66, my translation)
36In The Cattle Killing, this strategy of interpellation weaves together the various strands of printed material, (hand) writing and voice, the instability and unreliability of all utterances inducing the reader to become active and take his/her own responsibility faced to the text and the issues it refers to. An ethics of reading is at work, one that bridges the gap between reality and fiction.
37Some 18th century English novelists had recourse to the forms of the diary or the letter in response to criticism of the novel as an unrealistic, and potentially dangerous, genre, due to breaches of verisimilitude in its plots and characters. What better proof of realism could novelists give than miming the production and simple style of “real” written discourses, and sticking to the scope of events accessible to the potential reader? A further element in this “naturalization” strategy was the cushioning of the text with all sorts of peritextual items, most notably an Editor’s Preface, explaining how the letters and/or diaries were found, ordered and sometimes corrected or improved upon. These comments denied the fictionality of the framed narrative, in favour of a proclaimed authenticity; yet they amounted to a duplication of the creative act that had given birth to the fiction. After all, the source text(s) had been incomplete or unsatisfactory, unfit for consumption. A further benefit of the foregrounding of the so-called editor was the putative death, or withdrawal, of the author, which shifted the responsibility for the production and interpretation of the text onto the reader, in keeping with Barthes’s pronouncement; yet ironically it also exhibited the author’s mastery—the preface was a carnivalesque universe, a masquerade in which purported absence spelled manipulative power. Wideman’s prologue constitutes a variation on this masking game, with a twist: since the author within the fiction is never identical to the author of the fiction, he hides himself by exhibiting himself. Which is, by the way, the self-same expedient used by the traitorous minister in Poe’s “Purloined Letter”: “to conceal this letter, the minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious experiment of not concealing it at all” (Poe, 1952, 413). Perhaps Wideman’s Signifyin(g) on the traditional epistolary novel lies in this inversion: the classical author asserted his—elusive yet masterful—presence behind the letter by a contrived disappearing act, whereas the postmodern writer erases himself by showing a letter-mask of himself in full view. Yet, against Barthes, one might say that there is still a man behind the scriptural mask.
38Closing the frame opened by the Prologue, an Epilogue is composed of a letter from Wideman’s son Dan, written on board a plane taking him to Africa. He congratulates his father on his novel, and includes another letter, purportedly found at the British Museum archives, from Isaiah’s long-lost brother, a missionary to Africa and a witness of the Xhosa cattle killing. He has also written a diary, which has disappeared. “A relationship between brothers in the ‘real’ world mirroring a relationship you made up in your book. Or vice versa. You call it” (CK, 211). This passage recalls the many instances of lost siblings in 18th century literature, one of these stretches of verisimilitude novels and plays were faulted for at the time; it also reminds one of the variations on this pattern in The Color Purple: Nettie did become a missionary in Africa, and her letters had been confiscated before being found again. More than this third-degree revision, the double epistolary paratext in the Epilogue smacks of the classical authentication devices: two fake letters bespeak the reality of the framed story, without renouncing to foreground the author’s imaginary virtuosity. Here the fiction is that of a fantastic correspondence between the categories of “fiction” and “reality”, not one masquerading as the other, but both being parallel, consubstantial universes. This constitutes another gloss on the Igbo proverb “all stories are true”, which Wideman comments in the following way: “What I like about it in particular is that it decentralizes the truth—it fragments the truth. It puts truth in the light of multiplicity, of voices as a kind of construct that you can’t arrive at unless you do have a mosaic of voices” (TuSmith 1998, 198). Even though there is still a necessity to sort through the evidence and the stories (ibid.), it implies there is no solution of continuity between reality and fiction: both are of a discursive nature, and both are underwritten by ideology. These considerations are once again all the more important in a novel that deals with history and the representations of history. Many ideological falsifications have been integrated into the framework of official historiography, representing “mythologies” of a political kind, which the writing of fiction can contribute to righting. But historical thought itself, with its emphasis on linear time, fact and causality, can represent a limited vision of reality, one that African-inspired myths, often deemed as fiction, can help transcend. This struggle also involves considerations on the letter, the confrontation between written and oral cultures, and different conceptions of the sacred.
This rigid interpretation of scripture relied on an equally rigid temporal, spatial and social framework. It is not surprising that the Puritans felt the necessity of associating the first letter of the alphabet with the biblical Fall in the aphorism in which children began to learn to read: “In Adam’s Fall we sinned all.” Reading, like biblical time, was oriented toward salvation. [. . .]
[This is opposed to] the cyclical vision of reality which characterizes African systems of belief. In such systems, repetition and other forms of doubling are not diabolical, because they are not based on a linear view of time which makes the cohabitation of past and present unthinkable. (Birat, 1999, 635–637)
39Yet, as Wideman’s novel makes obvious, the opposition is not only between oral and alphabetical cultures. It also depends on the localization of “truth” in language: in the uttered statement, in which case the test resides only in the equation between words and world; or in the utterance itself, as an interpersonal dynamics, in which case one must learn to read between the lines for the figures of desire and the world-creating powers of the imagination. “Wideman’s use of this reciprocal relation of teller and listener is more than just a reflection of the pattern of call-and-response underlying much of African-American culture. It is rather the inverted image of the loss of self that accompanies all speech, of the doubling of the self in its own representations” (Birat, 1999, 639). In this respect the “written” second part of The Cattle Killing is on a par with the “oral” first one, in that the dialogical nature of the epistolary opens up the same dialectic of transparency and manipulation as oral communication does. The letters co-respond, then, and are part of numerous chains of meaning, as the last words of the novel, extracted from Isaiah’s brother’s letter within a letter, imply: “Hold on, Your Brother” (CK, 212). These words, which are not followed by a period, could address any number of “brothers,” individual or collective—Eye’s sibling, the reader, as a member of the black community or a part of mankind, Wideman’s imprisoned brother, to whom were dedicated other stories as letters—across various time-frames. This transhistorical, or a-historical inscription may represent another form of this liberation from historical determinism and alienation that the reference to African Great Time hinted at.
40An archaeology of America, probing for the origins of contemporary racial strife; an archaeology of the mystifying “knowledge” of official truths, the text is also an archaeology of the genre of the novel, to which Wideman is a resisting heir. The pastiche and parody of the epistolary psychological novel à la Richardson, while recognizing the complexity of this writing of the self, constitute another aspect of the criticism of the individualistic, mercantile ideology of the Enlightenment, which helped domesticate the subject and the world to the linear sequence of alphabetical writing. In this ambivalent revisiting of the classics, one can detect a similar process to that which raised the writers of the “American Renaissance” against the British-inherited “genteel tradition”. Wideman therefore recapitulates the birth of “post-colonial” U. S. literature, but gives the kaleidoscope one more twist, in the name of another, unfinished, post-colonial condition, that of the African diaspora. This politically involved double “Signifyin (g)” echoes the double belonging of American minorities, and calls for a deconstruction, in the letter and the spirit, of all ideologies of intolerance. As if human emancipations were first and foremost textual liberations: letters can be fetters, but they can do better.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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Works Cited
Allen, Richard and Absalom Jones. [1794] A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 and a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications Philadelphia: Independence National Historical Park, 1993.
10.1353/cal.1999.0115 :Birat, Kathie. “‘All Stories are True’: Prophecy, History and Story in The Cattle Killing.” Callaloo 22.3 (1999): 629–643.
10.4324/9780203130575 :Bray, Joe. The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness. London: Routledge, 2003
Callas, Frédéric. Le Roman épistolaire. Paris: Nathan Université, 1996.
Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn. Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth Century Republic of Letters. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
10.56021/9781421419954 :Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
Doody, Margaret. “Introduction” to Samuel Richardson. [1740] Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Grandjeat, Yves-Charles. John Edgar Wideman. Paris: Belin, 2000.
10.1353/cal.1999.0121 :Gysin, Fritz. “‘Do Not Fall Asleep in your Enemy’s Dream’: John Edgar Wideman and the Predicaments of Prophecy.” Callaloo 22.3 (1999): 623–628.
10.2307/464710 :Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.
Julien, Claude ed. John Edgar Wideman: The European Response. Callaloo. Vol 22, Summer (Articles by Kathie Birat, Fritz Gysin, Jean-Pierre Richard), 1999.
10.1080/02564718708529833 :Poe, Edgar Allan. [1845] “The Purloined Letter” in Tales, Poems, Essays. London: Collins, 1952. 400–415.
Richardson, Samuel. [1740] Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
Richardson, Samuel. [1747] Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Tusmith, Bonnie, ed. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Walker, Alice. [1983] The Color Purple. London: Open University, 1992.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Wideman, John Edgar. The Cattle Killing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1996.
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Notes de bas de page
1 All subsequent references are to following edition : The Cattle Killing. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Hereafter abbreviated as CK followed by the page number.
2 The cattle killing was the result of a prophecy, made by a young girl of 15, Nongqawuse, who claimed that it would bring about a regeneration of the land, the arrival of a “new people” and the departure of the English. The sacrifice, performed by many, had the characteristics of a “cargo cult,” a mixture of native religion and messianic Christianity, that was to be found in many areas exposed to the pressures of Western colonialism (Gysin, 1999, 623).
3 The references are to the following edition : The Color Purple. London : Open University, 1992. Hereafter abbreviated as CP followed by the page number.
Auteur
-
Michel Feith
Université de Nantes
Michel Feith est maître de conférences en littérature américaine à l’université de Nantes. Ses longs séjours en Australie, au Japon et aux États-Unis l’ont sensibilisé aux débats sur le multiculturalisme. Après la soutenance de sa thèse de doctorat, « Myth and History in Chinese American and Chicano Literature » (1995), il a publié des articles sur Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Vizenor, John Edgar Wideman, Percival Everett et la Renaissance de Harlem. Il a dirigé Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2001) et « Temples for Tomorrow » : Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2001), avec Geneviève Fabre, et trois volumes sur le nationalisme et le régionalisme à l’Université de Nantes.
Michel Feith is Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Nantes. His experience of living in Australia, Japan, and the United States has sensitized him to issues of multiculturalism. After defending his doctoral thesis « Myth and History in Chinese American and Chicano Literature » (1995), he has published articles on Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Vizenor, John Edgar Wideman, Percival Everett and the Harlem Renaissance. He has edited Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2001) and « Temples for Tomorrow » : Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2001), with Geneviève Fabre, and three volumes on nationalism and regionalism at the University of Nantes.
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