architectonics of fiction

8/13/2019 Architectonics of Fiction

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The Architectonics of FictionAuthor(s): John Edgar WidemanSource: Callaloo, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 42-46Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931600 .Accessed: 01/02/2014 10:16

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THE ARCHITECTONICS OF FICTION

By John Edgar Wideman

The African artist allows wide scope to his fantasy inthe mask . .. With colours, feathers and horns heaccomplishes some astonishingly live effects. In a slow

creative process he brings to life a work whichconstitutes a new unit, a new being. If the sculptureproves to be a success, a helpful medium, the tribeadheres to this form and passes it on from generationto generation . .. Thus we have a style, a firmlyestablished formal canon, which may not be lightlydiscarded ... For this reason a style retains its specificcharacter for decades, even centuries. It stands and fallswith the faith to which it is linked.

-The Art of Black Africa, Elsy Leuzinger

Novels-because of cumbersomeness, spaciousness of form, and the time andphysical labor they require to construct-tend to unfold slowly. Novels resemble his-tory, while short stories are more like current events. The best stories find means tocompress or suggest the long view novels unravel in their more expansive spacial,temporal architectonics. Short stories have an attractive immediacy and accessibility,a flashy, newsy, commercial value. Stories can sell things, identify trends, advertiseand promote assumptions about the nature of reality. They celebrate, like mirrorsabove the stairways of London subways, the passing vanity fair. Minority writers,since we're marginal politically and culturally, have a special vexing stake in the longerview; history is a cage, a conundrum we must escape or resolve before our art can gofreely about its business. Our stories are generally less successful (marketable) becausestories offer less room to fill in background, lay (in a legal sense) foundations. Ourstories thus seem as marginal as our lives, unattached, unhinged from the quotidianreality of the mainstream, majority reader. Magazine editors know their jobs dependupon purveying images the public recognizes and approves, so they seldom includeour fictions, and almost never choose those which threaten to expose the fantasies ofsuperiority, the bedrock lies and brute force that sustain the majority's dealings withthe other. Framed in a foreign, inimical context, minority stories appear at best as exoticslices of life and local color, at worst as ghettoized irrelevancies.

However, as the assumptions of the mono-culture are challenged, overrun, defrockthemselves daily in full view of the shameless media, more and more fiction gravitatestoward the category of minority. New worlds, alternative versions of reality, are bur-

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CALLALOO

geoning. In spite of enormous, overwhelming societal pressures to conform, to stan-dardize the shape and meaning of individual lives, voices like Ralph Ellison's reachus, impelling us to attend to the chaos which ives within the pattern of our certainties.The truth that each of us starts out alone, a minority of one, each in a slightly differentplace (no place), resides somewhere in the lower frequencies of our communal con-sciousness.

Good stories transport us to those extraordinarily diverse regions where individuallives are enacted. For a few minutes we can climb inside another's skin. Mysteriously,the dissolution of ego also sharpens the sense of self, reinforces independence andrelativity of point of view. People's lives resist a simple telling, cannot be understoodsafely, reductively, from some static still point, some universally acknowledged centeraround which all other lives orbit. Narrative is a reciprocal process, regressive andprogressive, dynamic. When a culture hardens into heliocentricity, fancies itself thestar of creation, when otherness is imagined as a great darkness except for what thestar illuminates, it's only a matter of time until the center collapses in upon itself,imploding with sigh and whimper.

Minority writers hold certain, peculiar advantages in circumstances of culturalbreakdown, reorientation, transition. We've accumulated centuries of experiencedealing with problems of marginality, problems that are suddenly on center stage forthe whole of society: inadequacy of language, failure of institutions, a disintegratingmetropolitan vision that denies us or swallows us, that attracts and repels, that prom-ises salvation and extinction. We've always been outsiders, orphans, bastard children,

hard pressed to make our claims heard. In order to endure slavery and oppression ithas been necessary to cultivate the double-consciousness of seer, artist, mother.Beaten down by countless proofs of the inadequacy, the repugnance of our own skin,we've been forced to enter the skins of others, see the world and ourselves throughthe eyes of others. The reality carried around inside our skulls is a sanctuary. Imagi-nation has evolved as discipline, defense, coping mechanism, counterweight to thegalling facts of life. We've learned to confer upon ourselves the power of making upour lives, changing them as we go along.

Marginality has also refined our awareness, our proficiency in extra-literary modesof storytelling. Folk culture preserves and expresses an identity, a history, a self-eval-

uation apart from those destructive, incarcerating mages proliferated by the mainlineculture. Consciously and unconsciously, we've integrated these nonstandard formsinto our art. Our stories, songs, dreams, dances, social forms, styles of walk, talk anddressing, cooking, sport, our heroes and heroines provide a record of how a particulargroup has lived in the world-in it, but not of it. A record so distinctive and abidingthat its origins in culture have been misconstrued as rooted in biology. A long-testedview of history is incorporated in the art of African-American people, and our historycan be derived from careful study of forms and influences that enter our cultural per-formances and rituals. In spite of and because of marginal status, a powerful, indig-enous vernacular tradition has survived, not unbroken, but unbowed, a magnet, a

focused energy, something with its own logic, rules and integrity connecting currentdevelopments to the past. An articulate, syncretizing force our best artists have drawnupon, a force sustaining both individual talent and tradition. Though minstrel shows

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CALLALOO

were popularized for mainstream audiences as a parody of black life, a 1984ish rewriteof black-white relations in the antebellum South, these musical reviews were also avehicle for preserving authentic African-derived elements of black American culture.Today, rap, for all its excesses and commercialization, reasserts the African core ofblack music: polyrhythmic dance beat, improvisational spontaneity, incantory use ofthe word to name, blame, shame and summon power, the obligation of ritual to in-struct and enthuse. Rap also reflects the integrative, synthesizing coherence of theDiaspora, the international, cross-cultural coming together - Rasta, Calpyso, Reggae,Rap-in shared styles of expressive behavior that unites black people even as we dis-perse and settle in every corner of the globe. It's no coincidence that rap exploded asthe big business of music was luring many black artists into crossing-over. Hugesums were paid to black recording artists, and then a kind of musical lobotomy wasperformed on their work, homogenizing, commodifying, pacifying it by removinglarge portions of what made the music think and be. Like angry ancestral spirits, theimperatives of tradition rose up, reanimated themselves, mounted the corner chantersand hip hoppers. As soul diminished to a category on the pop charts, the beat fromthe street said no-no-no, you're too sweet. Try some of this instead. Instigation. Re-vitalization. The mighty mouth of a hip generation. Stomp your feet. Don't admitdefeat. Put your hands together. Hit it. Hit. Boom. Crank up the volume. Bare bonespercussion and chant holler scream. Our loud selves, our angry selves. Our flyingfeet and words and raunchy dreams. Instruments not possessed, mimicked by ourvoices. Electronics appropriated. Recording tricknology explored and deconstructed,

techniques reversed, foregrounded, parodied. Chaboom. Boom. Sounds of city, ofmachines of inner space and outer space merge. Boom boxes. Doom boxes. Call theroll of the ancestors. Every god from Jah, Isis, Jehovah, Allah and Shango to JamesBrown and the Famous Flames. Say the names. Let them strut the earth again. Getright, children. Rap burst forth precisely where it did, when it did, because that'swhere the long, long night of poverty and discrimination, of violent marginality, re-mained a hurting truth nobody else was telling. That's where the creative energies ofa subject people were being choked and channelled into self-destruction.

When an aesthetic tradition remembers its roots, the social conditions (slavery, op-pression, marginality) and the expressive resources it employed to cope with these

conditions, the counter-version of these conditions it elaborated through art, when itdoesn't allow itself to be distracted, that is, keeps telling the truth which brought itinto being-the necessity of remaining human, defining human in its own terms, re-sisting those destructive definitions in the Master's tongue, attitudes and art-thenthat tradition remains alive, a referent, a repository of value, money we can take tothe bank. Afro-American traditions contain the memory of a hard, unclean break. Thispartially accounts for key postures that are subversive, disruptive, disjunctive. To thebrutality that once ripped us away and now tries to rip us apart, we turn a stylizedmask of indifference, of malleability, a core of iron, silent refusal. Boom. Chaboom.Boom. While our feet, feet, feet dance to another beat.

I look for, cherish this in our fiction.On the other hand, or should I say other face, since the shield I'm raising has two

sides and one cannot be lifted without the other, what about the future? Is there any

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difference between sitting-in at an all-white lunch counter and a minority writer com-posing a story in English? What's the fate of a black story in a white world of white

stories? What can we accomplish with our colours, eathers nd horns, how can we fruit-fully extend our tradition? How do we break out of the circle of majority-controlledpublishing houses, means of distribution, critics, editors, readers? Vernacular lan-guage is not enough. Integration is not enough, unless one views mathematical, pro-portional representation as a goal, instead of a step. If what a writer wants is freedomof expression, then somehow that larger goal must be addressed implicitly/explicitlyin the fictional text. A story should somehow contain clues that align it with traditionand critique tradition, establish the new space it requires, demands, appropriates, hintat how it may bring forth other things like itself, where these others have, will andare coming from. This does not mean defining criteria for admitting stories into some

ideologically sound, privileged category, but seeking conditions, mining territory thatmaximizes the possibility of free, original expression. We must continue inventing ourstory, sustaining the double consciousness that is a necessity for any writing with theambition of forging its own place.

Black music again illuminates glories and pitfalls, the possibility of integrity, howartists nourished by shared cultural roots can prove again and again that even thoughthey are moving through raindrops they don't have to get soaked. Their art signifiesthey are in the storm, but not of it. Black music is a moveable feast, fluid in time,space, modality, exhibiting in theme and variations multiple relationships with thepolitically, socially, aesthetically dominant order, the fullest possible range of rela-

tionships, including the power and independence, to change places, reverse the hier-archy, be the dominant order.

What lessons are transferable to the realm of literature? How is musical languagefreer, less inscribed with the historical baggage of European hegemony, exploitation,racism? Is it practical within the forms and frequencies of this instrument (writtenEnglish) to roll back history, those negative accretions, those iron bars and white-onlysigns that steal one's voice, one's breath away?

Perhaps there are ways in fiction to achieve the dialectic, the tension, the conver-sation, the warfare of competing versions of reality English contains. One crucial firststep may be recognizing that black/white, either/or perceptions of the tensions within

language are woefully, woe is me, inadequate. Start by taking nothing for granted,giving nothing away. Study the language. The way we've begun to comb the past.Rehistoricize. Contest. Contest. Return junk mail to sender. Call into question thelanguage's complacencies about itself. At the level of spelling, grammar, how it'staught, but also deeper, its sounds, their mamas, its coded pretensions to legitimacy,gentility, exclusivity, seniority, logic. Unveil chaos within the patterns of certainty.Restate issues and paradigms so they are not simply the old race problem relexified.Whose language is it, anyway?

Martin Bernal in BlackAthena has traced the link between European theories of raceand language. How nineteenth-century theories of language development parallel,

buttress and reinforce hierarchical concepts of race and culture. How social sciences,the soft core posing as the hard core of academic humanities curricula, were taintedat their inception by racist assumptions and agendas. How romantic linguistic theory

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was used as a tool to prove the superiority of the West. How uncritical absorption ofcertain hallowed tenets of Western thought is like participating in your own lynching.

By prepared to critique any call for back to basics in light of the research Bernalgathers and summarizes. The great lie that systems of thought are pure, universal,uncontaminated by cultural bias is once more being gussied up for public consump-tion. Whose Great Books in whose interest must be read? Whose story should be told?By whom? To what ends?

How does language grow, change? What are the dynamics that allow individualspeakers to learn a language, adapt it to the infinite geography of their inner imagi-native worlds, the outer social play, the constant intercourse of both? Can the writerlove language and also keep it at arm's length as material, a medium, foregroundingits arbitrariness, its treacherousness, never calling it his/her own, never completely

identifying with it, but making intimate claims by exploring what it can do, what itshould do if the writer has patience, luck, skill, and practices, practices, practices?

In it, but not of it. And that stance produces bodies of enabling legislation, a grammarof nuanced tensions, incompatibilities, doors and windows that not only dramatizethe stance itself but implicate the medium. A reciprocal unravelling below whose sur-face is always the unquiet recognition that this language we're using constantly pullsin many directions at once and unless we keep alert, keep fighting the undertow,acknowledge the currents going our way and every other damn way, that we are notalone but not separate either, that any voice we accomplish is really many voices, thatany voice is always steeped in unutterable silences, that the roles of speaker, listener,

narrator and narrative, the form and direction of the tale may seem to be fixed, butwe hold some keys. Any story is a lie, an arbitrary convention for graphing chaosagainst a grid of one, two, three, maybe even seven axes from the billion we mightselect. Nothing really stands still for this reduction, this abstraction. It's at this levelof primal encounter that we need to operate in order to reclaim the language for ourexpressive purposes. The hidden subject remains: what is our situation with respectto this language? Where does it come from? Where do I come from? Where do wemeet and how shall I name this meeting place? What is food? What is eating? Why dopeople go to lunch counters? Black music offers a counter-integrative model becauseit poses this species of questions about music and fills us with the thrill of knowing

yes, yes, the answers, if there are any, and it probably doesn't matter whether thereare or not, yeah or nay, the answers and the questions are still up for grabs. And, ohmy, mine are out there counting and ain't it fun.

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