From the issue dated March 1, 2002
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The Anger and the IronyCharles Chesnutt, the first major black novelist, regains his former gloryBy SCOTT MCLEMEE A dozen years ago, when Werner Sollors proposed an edition of the works of Charles Chesnutt to the Library of America, the response was polite but negative. The publisher, whose imprint has become nearly synonymous with the American literary canon, was not ready to endorse Chesnutt -- the first African-American novelist with a national reputation. And a very substantial reputation, at that: In his prime, at the turn of the 20th century, Chesnutt won favorable comparison to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev. But the author outlived his own glory. At the time of his death, in 1932, only one of his books remained in print. A modest revival of scholarly interest in his work began during the 1960s, and by the early 1990s, a serious re-evaluation of his place in literary history was well under way. Mr. Sollors, a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard University, recalls making another effort, midway through the decade, to persuade Library of America officials that Chesnutt's time had come. "They saw that he was interesting," he says, "but told me an edition still seemed too soon." Meanwhile, scholars were grinding out critical studies and new editions of the author's work, including two novels unpublished during Chesnutt's lifetime. "At the American Literature Association last year," says Mr. Sollors, "there were more panels on Chesnutt than any other figure." Examination of the ALA program suggests that this is a bit exaggerated: Statistics place Chesnutt's eminence slightly behind that of a poet named Walt Whitman. With the Library of America's publication in February of Charles Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays -- at more than 900 pages, a monumental edition -- the author's canonization is nearly complete. Mr. Sollors's collection appears only a few months after the publication of Charles Chesnutt: Selected Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), a volume designed for classroom use and edited by SallyAnn H. Ferguson, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Chesnutt scholars point out that his rediscovery has been a prolonged and, at times, contentious process. Much energy has gone into arguments over the author's ideology: In challenging the racism of his era, he nonetheless played to certain stereotypes. But over the past decade, a consensus has emerged. Critics find in Chesnutt's fiction an aesthetic intricacy that renders his worldview much more complex and challenging. "What really marks him, and what students react to, is that he's an ironist," says Mr. Sollors. "It takes a while to get his tone, but when you read Chesnutt carefully, you find that he has great control of a voice that is detached, sarcastic, expressing multiple levels of meaning." Early readers tended to see Chesnutt as earnest and eloquent, if none too subtle. That judgment has undergone a profound revision. "It's not protest writing," says Mr. Sollors, "but a much deeper way of being worried about where the whole American enterprise is headed." The complexity of vision in Chesnutt's fiction had deep roots in his life. Born a "free person of color" in Cleveland in 1858, Chesnutt had family ties to North Carolina. He lived in both the North and the South during the Reconstruction period, and was so light-skinned that he could readily pass for white. Although his formal education was limited, Chesnutt was a passionate adherent to the Victorian creed of "self-culture," and taught himself Latin, German, music, history, literature, and law. He passed the Ohio bar examination with the highest score in his group of test-takers, and began a very successful legal-stenography business in Cleveland. Journal entries from his early 20s show Chesnutt's firm resolve to become a writer who would transform society's understanding of what he called "the Colored people." In the late 1880s, he came to national attention with the first of a series of stories, later collected as The Conjure Woman (1899), set in North Carolina. The narrator, a white businessman from the North, buys a plot of land that he hopes to turn into a profitable vineyard. He meets an old black man named Uncle Julius, who recounts his memories of the plantation era -- tales reflecting both the cruelty of the masters and the slaves' use of "goopher" (magic). The dialect-heavy stories play variations on the popular Uncle Remus tales; they also challenge the Southern apologists' nostalgic vision of antebellum life, in which the evils of slavery were presented as unfortunate deviations from an essentially affectionate relationship between the races. Writing Along the Color Line In 1899, Chesnutt began to work full time as an author and lecturer. In addition to essays and a biography of Frederick Douglass, he published fiction portraying characters who were both middle-class and mixed-race -- living embodiments of tensions along "the color line," which ran directly through their sense of personal identity. Sales of his books were respectable, and the critical reception was encouraging. All of that changed drastically with the publication of The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's fictional account of a race riot in Wilmington, N.C. "Until then, the suffering shown in his fiction tended to be veiled, or something that occurred in the past," says Richard Yarborough, an associate professor of English and African-American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the actual events of November 1898, in which white rioters killed an estimated 20 African-Americans, were fresh in everyone's mind. "Chesnutt was tremendously explicit in representing the violence and his own anger," Mr. Yarborough says. "Today it reads as one of the more enduring novels of the era." Readers were aghast. William Dean Howells, America's foremost man of letters and Chesnutt's most sympathetic critic, acknowledged that it was a powerful novel. But he complained that Chesnutt's portrayal of white people showed "a courage which has more justice than mercy in it." Mr. Yarborough, who has published a study of The Marrow of Tradition, thinks the novel is all the more remarkable given the author's character. "Chesnutt was a temperate person. The urgency of the book shows how extreme conditions were." Disappointing sales obliged Chesnutt to reopen his stenography business. Although he published another novel, in 1905, his star had faded. He continued to write, but only the occasional essay reached print. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, younger African-American writers thought of Chesnutt as old-fashioned -- if they thought of him at all. By the time Helen M. Chesnutt published Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (University of North Carolina Press, 1952), her father was known only to specialists in black literature -- not, at the time, a growing field. But it had gained ground by the late 1960s, when the University of Michigan Press reissued three of Chesnutt's books. The process of rediscovery and re-evaluation was often polemical, recalls Joseph R. McElrath Jr., a professor of English at Florida State University. "Chesnutt wrote at a time when someone needed to serve as a spokesperson," says Mr. McElrath. "Some critics said that he was too much a product of his era. That he brought a white, middle-class mentality to writing about African-Americans, making him a traitor to the race while he thinks he's being its champion." Chesnutt's treatment of mulatto characters, for example, seems to embody the belief that black ancestry is tragic. And there is often a note of condescension toward figures who are dark, uneducated, or working-class. "Eventually," notes Mr. McElrath, "all the arguments on how to judge him were fought through, and Chesnutt still looked like an important figure. Scholarship started to move into the primary materials." Editions of the author's journal, unpublished fiction, and essays have filled in the picture of Chesnutt's career. This spring, Stanford University Press will publish the second volume of Chesnutt's correspondence, coedited by Mr. McElrath. Yet the figure emerging from both critical debates and archival research proves ever more elusive. "He tends to mask himself," says Charles Duncan, an associate professor of English at Peace College, in North Carolina. "He possesses a hyperawareness of his own situation as a black writer addressing a white audience. Chesnutt is so sophisticated rhetorically that it is difficult sometimes to tell what side he is coming down on." Mr. Duncan's book The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt (Ohio University Press, 1999) looks at the tightly convoluted ironies structuring the author's work. A case in point is Chesnutt's earliest short fiction. The stories in The Conjure Woman are narrated by a liberal from the North who feels moral repugnance at the horrors Uncle Julius reports from the days of slavery. But he also feels superior to Uncle Julius, who is presented as a good-natured but gullible old illiterate. Well-educated readers could be expected to identify with the narrator's opinions -- and to see them as Chesnutt's own. But not so fast. Many of Julius's folksy recollections of life on the plantation are also veiled references to his own employment by the white narrator, who never quite notices that his own paternalistic outlook is being criticized. One sign of Chesnutt's durability is how critics long familiar with his work discover new aspects upon rereading it. In 1993, Eric Sundquist, now dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, published an influential analysis of Chesnutt's relation to late-19th-century culture in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Harvard University Press). But he now finds himself reading Chesnutt as an existentialist. "His fascination with nightmare scenarios and the grotesque has a really Kafkaesque feel to it." He cites the story "Dave's Neckliss," in which a slave has been forced to wear a ham around his neck as a punishment; the man slowly goes mad and hangs himself in a smokehouse. "Chesnutt creates these situations in which identity is put on trial, with the whole system of law being perversely turned into inescapable punishment, rather than a protection of right," he says. "The more I think about his work, the more it lends itself to treatment within a larger context of modernist fiction." A Tale Yet Untold When asked what the future of Chesnutt studies might bring, scholars are almost unanimous: A major biography is long overdue. Early critical work tended to focus on particular stories and novels. William L. Andrews substantially advanced scholarship with The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), an influential study tracing the development of his vision. But Mr. Andrews, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the first to say that a new account of Chesnutt's life and times, recognizing the complex of his personality, would be a quantum leap. "With the journals and all the novels now in print that he couldn't get published in his lifetime," says Mr. Andrews, "there is a great deal more available on which to base a nuanced portrait of the man than we've had in the past. It's really the first priority. But I don't know that anybody is working on it at this time." Even in the absence of a full-scale chronicle of his career, there is at least one sign that Chesnutt's acclaim might prove more durable this time around: The same literary qualities that inspire close reading by critics make Chesnutt's fiction particularly rewarding in the classroom. Scholars report that students enjoy Chesnutt's irony and his ear for vernacular, once they get over some initial bewilderment at his use of dialect. "He teaches wonderfully," says Mr. Yarborough. "Students hear in his work a voice that feels like it's talking now." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A14
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education