Black Fiction

...the thirties and early forties as the "protest" era...

...This problem, as Rosenblatt says, "perpetuates the cycles of black fiction...

...As Roger Rosenblatt teaches in Black Fiction, none of us can deny that heritage, not even the heroes and dreamers which black writers have given us...

...For instance, Bigger Thomas (protagonist of Richard Wright's Native Son) states that"what I killed for must've been good...

...Whether the dream animating his quest for freedom is Christianity, education, love, primitivism, migration north to the "promised land," or existential gesture, the ineluctable power of the omnipresent white world throws him back upon the ash-heap from which he sought escape...

...although invisible and degraded with respect to white society, the hero gains a deeper return to communal roots, initiating a true advance...

...Lanston Hughes' superb character Simple (protagonist of many books and newspaper columns) is described as a man of Falstaffian wit and lovability who pits quick, irreverent satire against a variety of life's insanities and inanities...

...The hopeful method of release becomes the vehicle of failure as the hero's originally inspiring ideal becomes a mockery to his destiny...

...Sought by The Whale, the black character often winds up singing the tragicomic blues, thereby wrenching from his aching life a lyric, if not transcendent, meaning...

...Believing that the essential mythology for the black writer derives from the unrelenting cruelty to which his community has been subjected, Rosenblatt argues that the "grounding" of black fiction is an ironic, cyclic view of history...

...Therefore, although Ellison has employed the basic cyclic pattern which Rosenblatt identifies in black fiction, it leaves the invisible man at a new beginning and not a doomful end...

...All of these discussions are solid and provocative, and both casual readers and scholars of black literature will benefit from Rosenblatt's lucidly written analyses...

...Certainly an abstract overview of the novel reveals a movement from one type of nothingness to another...

...Still, Rosenblatt's sophisticated theory of cyclic patterns illuminates the intricacies of many black novels and demonstrates an elemental commonality among these works...

...is hell, a hell within a maze of hells around him...

...From William Wells Brown to Ismael Reed, black writers have dealt with a plethora of themes touching upon the problem of black survival in America: passing for white, the struggle for economic security and status, the South as a spiritual homeland, the weight of the black matriarchy upon black "manhood," the conflict between education and "feeling" as the touchstone of value, the exoticism of both rural and urban black people...

...Rosenblatt treats other pervasive and well-known themes of black fiction with similar acumen...

...Particularly noteworthy is his chapter on humor...

...His readings of Baldwin's Another Country, Jean Toomer's Cane, and Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land lead to the general conclusion that "wherever Christian devotion is expressed, it is almost always repudiated with authority...

...Rosenblatt is attuned to Hughes' technical dexterity in the Simple collections, but his description of Simple's character illustrates an even deeper critical sensitivity: "he was the free man, the generous Joseph, the stumbler who admitted his mistakes, the survivor and the dreamer...

...Roger Rosenblatt's Black Fiction is therefore a remarkable achievement in offering both a truly thoughtful theory of black literature and brilliant interpretations of individual works...

...The blues pattern informing the novel provides a way for individual and group to be joined into a mutually supporting relationship...

...Curiously, however, Rosenblatt chooses to emphasize the condition to which Simple responds rather than the quality of this survivor's response: "in the end we only really care about the inescapability of what was left behind...

...Just as Rosenblatt overlooks the uses of "blues" response in Invisible Man, so, perhaps, he has missed something of the blues sensibility which informs black fiction...

...Although religion would seem to offer a redemptive alternative to historical cycles, Rosenblatt shows that the language of Christianity holds opposite meanings for black than for white...

...and the period after World War II as the nebulous "modern" period) obscure the continuity and thematic unity which have characterized much of this literature, particularly fiction, during a large portion of its history...

...The agony of black existence, which Rosenblatt believes this fiction ultimately emphasizes, certainly should never be forgotten or diluted...

...The refusal to escape from history and heritage, the continued recital of the litany of abuse, can be a valuable lesson for America as a whole...

...But in addition to proclaiming the realities of that agony, black writers have declared that it is also a joy to be black...

...yet Bigger's murder of Mary Dalton brings him the destructive wrath of society as well as self-definition, and his assertion is, in Rosenblatt's words, "the proclamation of a man who has discovered [that he...

...These basic ideas constitute the critical apparatus with which Rosenblatt explicates some sixteen major works, from Zora Neale Hurston's much-neglected Their Eyes Were Watching God to Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man...

...Rosenblatt's thesis proceeds from his sound observation that black fiction has most consistently concerned itself with "the search for a grounding or cultural history...

...This pattern is suggested with increasing intensity throughout the story each time the hero is confronted with a symbol of his roots...

...The characters' beliefs that they control their own destinies is undermined in the end...

...This stress upon the external world's presence sometimes leads Rosenblatt to overlook the character's subtle adjustments to inescapable reality...

...Yet, contra Rosenblatt, the end is not a falling back to "nihilism...

...From Hurston's Janie and Hughes' Simple to Baldwin's John and Ellison's nameless hero, black characters have exhibited that mixture of suffering and celebration which is what being black, American, and human is all about...

...Consequently, as Rosenblatt perceptively notes, its dominant patterns are based on inversions, demonic parodies, and ironic reversals...

...The examination of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain is an especially fine product of Rosenblatt's guiding thesis and gift for acute textual reading...

...Moreover, black literature, like Ralph Ellison's character Rinehart, has been guilefully Protean: having lived so long with the chaos of American experience it has learned to wear many faces, to adopt roles and methods consonant with such visions of reality as Paul Laurence Dunbar's and Ed Bullins...

...We are all, black and white, heirs to the human past which Eldridge Cleaver called "an omniscient mirror," a complex mingling of good and evil...

...The typical hero in this literature "seeks to oppose the direction of a historical cycle when he is in fact reinforcing it," and his attempt to transcend the harshness of his experience, however clear his vision or energetic his effort, is ultimately rebuffed...

...While the standard interpretation sees Baldwin depicting young John Grimes' spiritual transformation within the Church's framework, Rosenblatt draws upon his considerable knowledge of the Bible to show that the "Word" John hears is not divine but that of a "malicious voice which advertises humility as a virtue when it means humiliation...

...Rosenblatt argues that, in the typical manner of black characters, the protagonist's quest leads him from "illusion" to "nihilism...

...in Rosenblatt's elegant phrase (which reverses the formula of Ahab's tragiheroic quest for Moby Dick), "most of the time, The Whale seeks them...

...So, his educative journey leads not to original illusions but to a more fundamental, and sustaining, communal tradition...

...Rosenblatt thus interprets black fiction as a tragic literature in which black characters are doomed by the inescapable reality of external forces...

...Given the almost overwhelming diversity of its motifs and themes, anyone attempting one comprehensive description of black fiction must take care to avoid useless vagueness and to allow particular writers their distinctive character...

...A case in point is his reading of Ellison's Invisible Man...

...In the middle of Black Fiction he eloquently poses the central question of both his book and black literature: "How does a people needing and seeking a past find one in a country which denies the value of the past...

...The reader of black literature thus often finds himself wondering: what is at the core of this fiction...

...Because these heroes usually begin hopeful of their subjective powers of creation but eventually see themselves as objects molded by brutal hands, their world finally appears "backward and upside down, [where] hate destroys the hater, and love destroys the lover just as surely...