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50books_poc15) The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley
I discovered David Bradley and learned of his The Chaneysville Incident from his introduction to William Kelley's A Different Drummer, which I thought was tremendously insightful.
It's illuminating to view Bradley as influenced by Kelley (and of course, the other authors Bradley cites both in that introduction and throughout The Chaneysville Incident, like Ellison and DuBois). But Kelley and Bradley have both figured out ways to communicate complicated ideas about race and identity through new techniques and, more importantly, new spins on old techniques. In short, I am starting to see what African-American post-modernism is supposed to look like.
I mean, I've never pretended to understand white American post-modernism, or white European post-modernism. I just know that I can identify when it works for me and when it doesn't. Bradley's novel is achingly similar to other books I've read (Richard Powers keeps coming to mind, if that means something to anyone), and yet it is unlike any other I've come across. It has understandings of storytelling and its significance that will continue to lend power to my reading as I move on past into other literary worlds. That, I think, is one of the main purposes of literary post-modernism. By exposing the plumbing of the world of language, the post-modernists show readers and fellow writers how we go about the process of interacting with text. Inherent in the conception is confronting the born and bred prejudices of the reader.
Confronting the prejudices of the reader is something Bradley does far more literally than other post-modernists. Consider one early chapter, where the African-American narrator confesses to his white girlfriend that he once raped a white girl. The dynamics of the situation, the moral confusion, the transparent feelings of guilt and shame and pride and fear and love that swirl around and constantly imbalance each other... it is employed with a subtlety that confronts the reader with his assumptions about race. But this confession is a rapid flash back in time, juxtaposed against a present moment whose tense confrontation between two black men both illuminates and is illuminated by the old confession. Bradley is confronting both the reader's literary expectations and his social prejudices simultaneously. Bradley follows it up in the next chapter with a Br'er Rabbit-type retelling of the story of an attempted lynching. The serious matched with the tragicomic to devastating result.
Bradley's main character is a cleverly-drawn academic historian, a typical main character for a post-modern novel. The character's obsession with the little details of history enable Bradley to set up his own small, personal story against the vaster, more complicated stories of American history. Tidbits about Henry Ford and Robert E. Lee serve multiple purposes- they contextualize, grounding the story in a larger drama. They suggest that that larger drama is constantly interacting with millions of smaller dramas in ways that are too complicated to easily understand. They provide a break from the narrative, making it less relentlessly linear, more natural. They develop thematic ideas about the American concept of 'progress' and the nonlinearity that really inhabits that concept. They contrast to the folk stories of the main character's mentor Uncle Jack. And they develop an understanding of the main character and what his interests are, what grabs his attention and why.
Ultimately, the narrator's blend of microhistory and macrohistory leads him to the novel's central quest, the attempt to understand the life of the narrator's father and the way all of the novel's characters navigate history's nightmares (Joyce's Stephen says "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," and it cannot be a coincidence that the narrator suffers literally from nightmares that he cannot wake up from). It is a quest he cannot succeed in, because History simply doesn't work in a way that allows the kind of answer he needs. So instead he turns, as Bradley himself does, to storytelling. The novel's final story is powerful and filled with constant surprises. It is a worthy conclusion to a powerful novel.
I discovered David Bradley and learned of his The Chaneysville Incident from his introduction to William Kelley's A Different Drummer, which I thought was tremendously insightful.
It's illuminating to view Bradley as influenced by Kelley (and of course, the other authors Bradley cites both in that introduction and throughout The Chaneysville Incident, like Ellison and DuBois). But Kelley and Bradley have both figured out ways to communicate complicated ideas about race and identity through new techniques and, more importantly, new spins on old techniques. In short, I am starting to see what African-American post-modernism is supposed to look like.
I mean, I've never pretended to understand white American post-modernism, or white European post-modernism. I just know that I can identify when it works for me and when it doesn't. Bradley's novel is achingly similar to other books I've read (Richard Powers keeps coming to mind, if that means something to anyone), and yet it is unlike any other I've come across. It has understandings of storytelling and its significance that will continue to lend power to my reading as I move on past into other literary worlds. That, I think, is one of the main purposes of literary post-modernism. By exposing the plumbing of the world of language, the post-modernists show readers and fellow writers how we go about the process of interacting with text. Inherent in the conception is confronting the born and bred prejudices of the reader.
Confronting the prejudices of the reader is something Bradley does far more literally than other post-modernists. Consider one early chapter, where the African-American narrator confesses to his white girlfriend that he once raped a white girl. The dynamics of the situation, the moral confusion, the transparent feelings of guilt and shame and pride and fear and love that swirl around and constantly imbalance each other... it is employed with a subtlety that confronts the reader with his assumptions about race. But this confession is a rapid flash back in time, juxtaposed against a present moment whose tense confrontation between two black men both illuminates and is illuminated by the old confession. Bradley is confronting both the reader's literary expectations and his social prejudices simultaneously. Bradley follows it up in the next chapter with a Br'er Rabbit-type retelling of the story of an attempted lynching. The serious matched with the tragicomic to devastating result.
Bradley's main character is a cleverly-drawn academic historian, a typical main character for a post-modern novel. The character's obsession with the little details of history enable Bradley to set up his own small, personal story against the vaster, more complicated stories of American history. Tidbits about Henry Ford and Robert E. Lee serve multiple purposes- they contextualize, grounding the story in a larger drama. They suggest that that larger drama is constantly interacting with millions of smaller dramas in ways that are too complicated to easily understand. They provide a break from the narrative, making it less relentlessly linear, more natural. They develop thematic ideas about the American concept of 'progress' and the nonlinearity that really inhabits that concept. They contrast to the folk stories of the main character's mentor Uncle Jack. And they develop an understanding of the main character and what his interests are, what grabs his attention and why.
Ultimately, the narrator's blend of microhistory and macrohistory leads him to the novel's central quest, the attempt to understand the life of the narrator's father and the way all of the novel's characters navigate history's nightmares (Joyce's Stephen says "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," and it cannot be a coincidence that the narrator suffers literally from nightmares that he cannot wake up from). It is a quest he cannot succeed in, because History simply doesn't work in a way that allows the kind of answer he needs. So instead he turns, as Bradley himself does, to storytelling. The novel's final story is powerful and filled with constant surprises. It is a worthy conclusion to a powerful novel.
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