|
Article Excerpt
According to Jacques Derrida, meaning in the West is defined in terms of binary oppositions, "a violent hierarchy," where "one of the two terms governs the other" (41). Within the white/black binary opposition in the West, the African American is defined as a devalued Other. One of the aims of many postmodern African American writers such as Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Clarence Major, Bonnie Greer, Samuel R. Delany, Xam Cartier, and others has been to deconstruct in fiction this binary opposition, unleashing and re-positioning African American subjectivities. To escape but not leave western logocentrism, of which the novel is a subsystem, these writers have turned to certain African American cultural forms such as the blues, jazz, and voodoo to challenge the Eurocentric horizon of the novel. John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990) uses a peripheral, cultural paradigm or technique to challenge the conventions of the novel and to re-represent the African American. This essay examines how Fire contests the traditional, modern novel, as it aims to re-describe African American subjectivity. I also explore how Fire undermines the western quest narrative by giving heteroglossic perspectives on the MOVE bombing. Finally, I examine how Fire shows its heteroglossic limits in its treatment of women.
Contesting the Traditional Novel
In its desire to challenge the traditional novel, Fire plays with instrumental reason and other Enlightenment ideas. Using the concept of radical democracy--a diversity of perspectives and points of view that parallel, intersect, and contradict each other, without the desire for totality or mastery--Fire gives a different perspective on the African American, one that does not construct the African American as experientially monolithic. In an interview with James Coleman, Wideman discusses his conscious, overt efforts to violate the conventions of the modern/realistic novel, which attempts to impose a single, unitary language on heterogeneity, and to unleash differences:
I don't think that you can write a very meaningful book about a culture that's in flux, a culture that is changing all the time, and a culture [that] is infused with minority points of view ... and [still] use the conventions and traditions of narrative fiction. (159)
Fire engages a democratic search for the flux, or multiple meanings. It gives the reader a radically democratic text where African Americans from different socioeconomic, educational, and cultural levels represent the same event/social reality, the bombing of the MOVE row house in Philadelphia. It shows how each station in life, along with its own individuality, affects the construction/perception of reality.
Although the novel is sensitive to the immense plurality of experiences among African Americans, it does not disassociate difference from economic and social inequality. It gives us radical democracy at the narrative and ideological levels, but it remains Eurocentric and hegemonic in terms of subjectivity, except for the masculine, where, theoretically, it affirms difference, but obscures this difference by positing representations of the Selfsame.1 In Fire, the masculine narratorial 'T' of Cudjoe and Wideman the character is never deconstructed. In addition to maintaining a masculine self/Other binary opposition, it fails to engage the reason of the Other, (2) particularly Euro-American women who participate in heterosexual coupling, love interest, or who are the recipient of the male gaze. It thereby erases feminine differences.
Fire uses several textual strategies to push the boundaries of the traditional narrative, opening it up to other forms of speech. Wideman admits that he takes chances with the narrative:
I like to take chances, and one chance that I have been taking lately ... is a chance with the texture of the narrative--letters, hymns, poems, song lyrics, thoughts, speech, time present, time past, future time, philosophical discourse, scatting, etc.... a kind of collage ... [something] that you find in traditional African art. In masks or dance, you have that eclectic combination. (Coleman 159)
First, Fire consciously operationalizes what M. M. Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, "the diversity of social speech types ... and a diversity of individual voices" (262). Dispersed dialogically throughout Fire are multivoiced, multi-styled, and often multi-languaged elements and forms such as quotes, letters, conversations, interior monologues, multiplicity of social voices, plays, and the rewriting of Shakespeare. Letters to John Wideman, isolated quotes from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Mazisi Kunene's Ancient Bonds, and Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire intersect with and reinforce, without a direct causal link, Fire's main narrative, Cudjoe's search for the meaning of what happened in Philadelphia on Monday, May 13, 1985. The presence of these diverse literary forms in the text challenges the reader's expectations of a unitary language, disrupts the linear flow of the text, and opens up Fire to a kind of collage of multiple meanings. In Fire, argues Susan Pearsall, Wideman "assembles meta-fictional passages within a mostly nonlinear, open-ended narrative" (18). In pushing the boundaries and reconfiguring elements of the traditional narrative, Fire displaces western, Hegelian epistemology, which requires certainty, order, hierarchy, linearity, and coherence. It transforms the hierarchal center by redistributing the voice of the text to the many.
Second, to signify the flux in American culture, Fire disrupts chronological time, mingles persons, and collapses past and present tenses. Chapterless, Fire is divided into three parts. In Part I, everything is filtered through Cudjoe's consciousness/memory, which is presented in the third person and which contributes to the nonlinear, associative flow of the text. John Wideman tells Part II of Fire in the first person, but he tells it in a stream-of-consciousness mold. Part III concerns the homeless plight of J. B., with the first half being told by an omniscient narrator, and the second half being told by a MOVE snitch, Richard Corey; Corey narrates in the first person his story of betrayal. These stories and narratives flow in and out of the text without any clear markers, thereby collapsing past and present tenses.
A third strategy that Fire uses to create openness and multiplicity in the text is to foreground the writing process. As Wideman states:
I try to invite the reader into the process of writing, into the mysteries, into the intricacies of how things are made and so, therefore, I foreground the self-consciousness of the act of writing. And [I] try to get the reader to experience that, so that the reader is participating in the creation of the fiction. In fact, I demand that. (Coleman 159)
When Cudjoe gives the policeman's description of the boy escaping "with no clothes on screaming" (9), he reminds the reader that "he was not there and has no right to add details" (9). In using the tape recorder to capture former MOVE member Margaret Jones's version of what happened in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985, Cudjoe stops, rewinds, and fast forwards. These moves, along with poignant questions, allow him to get the information he wants and also to show the selective process in his construction of Margaret Jones's story. There is also an indication that she tells Cudjoe things that are not on the tape. Here Fire shows the reader its "process of writing." In addition, Fire includes quotes by other writers such as L. Zasetsky on the writing process:
So, before I could go on and write my story, I had to jot down various words for the names of objects, things, phenomena, ideas. I'd write these down whenever they came to me. Then I'd take the words, sentences, and ideas I'd collected in this way and begin to write my story in a notebook, regrouping the words and sentences, comparing them with others I'd seen in books. (107)
In using these strategies, Fire is communicating to the reader that it is aware that it is being written, with all of the attendant problems of language and meaning.
Fourth and finally, to expose/unfasten the authority of the author, Wideman inserts himself into the narrative. He breaks through the traditional pose of removal taken by the author of fiction, thereby problematizing the authority of the author. Asked about this insertion of the self into his fiction, Wideman says:
I write out of who I am, and my identity and my writing identity, my life as transposed into the art that I practice, are becoming more and more of a piece. I don't make distinctions.... I don't think of myself as writer only when I'm sitting down in the morning at my desk in my study.... I use my imagination.... And more and more the subjects of the fiction are this strange interpenetration of the imagined life and the actual life and the inextricability of the two. (Rowell 97)
As with many postmodern writers, Wideman is aware that the subject has many selves, that the John Wideman that appears as a character in the text is not the same John Wideman whose name is on the cover of the text. But the two selves belong to the same individual. In becoming a character in his own novel, argues Pearsall, Wideman "undercuts his authorial position of moral and critical superiority by erasing the potential differences between himself and his characters" (21). The John Wideman in the text becomes a self of John Wideman the author.
Fire and the Quest Narrative
Ostensibly, Fire is about the modern quest for meaning. It concerns Cudjoe, another self of John Wideman, who has been in exile on the Greek island of Mykonos for the last ten years. When his marriage to his white wife Caroline falls apart, his relationship with his sons breaks up, his book is "orphaned," and his life reaches an impasse, Cudjoe leaves. He is the only black on the island, and he lives the life of a lonely expatriate, where he writes a lot of "bullshit poems and unfinished essays" and does a lot of "drinking and hiding and running" (87).
Cudjoe is drawn back to the United States and Philadelphia, his hometown, when he reads about the bombing of the MOVE house, a...
|
