James McPherson's Crabcakes
Richards, Phillip
PULITZER-PRIZE winner James Alan McPherson has written two highly regarded collections of short fiction, and the pleasures and insights offered by Crabcakes are those of a well-crafted story....
...And this conflict is intense because McPherson has structured his sense of his relationship between himself and others upon Japanese values of community...
...The community in Japan is one of highly tuned sympathies, regulated by social rituals, and defined by well-wrought understandings...
...That is, McPherson seeks the same therapeutic relationship with ritualized community that an earlier generation of Americans sought with nature...
...These ethical discoveries are based on the contrast between the alienated world of the West and the ii8 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 organic social world of McPherson's Japan...
...Washington, who for years included friendly, affirming letters with her rent, is an anticipation of the organic relations that McPherson will find in Japanese culture...
...Crabcakes ultimately attempts to illuminate late twentieth-century interracial American life through personal introspection...
...McPherson's book projects a self-consciously literary vision of society and of the author's status...
...Acutely attentive to the dynamics of personal renewal, this book is somewhat oblivious to the history in which that life is to be renewed...
...And in the midst of a broad number of friendships he consolidates his sense of himself as an insider in the communal world of Japanese culture...
...The warmth with which she addresses McPherson in her letters evokes community as does the meal she serves DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 117 BOOKS him when he returns to Baltimore from Iowa (where he now teaches...
...In many ways it is an orientalist travel book to an exotic East of Asian virtues...
...The author's crises are the natural concomitant of black mobility in DISSENT / Summer 2000 n I 19 BOOKS this sphere of privilege...
...120 n DISSENT / Summer 2000...
...This ritualized intimacy occurs at dinners, in visits to sacred places, in the celebration of a friend's day of death, and in the use of ceremonial gifts as tokens for greeting...
...However, McPherson's focus on psychological and emotional details of personal transformation has blinders...
...And it is ultimately difficult to tell the extent to which his portrait of himself and his country represents the dislocation of black American life or personal idiosyncrasy...
...This memoir uses the epiphanies and dramatic resolutions of fiction to generate the religious and ethical insight of spiritual autobiography...
...Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a person such as McPherson outside of the newly democratized and integrated world of the American university...
...McPherson himself participates in these dislocations in the decaying world of Baltimore, and they come into full focus during his trip to Japan...
...McPherson's entrance into the Japanese ethos involves his acceptance of a tragic element that he learns to accept as the cost of intimacy...
...McPherson is introduced to Japanese society by people who already admire him and desire further contact with him...
...Indeed, some of McPherson's most moving and acute meditations on race concern the psychological and emotional dislocations that stem from the estrangement of blacks from the majority population of American society...
...This literary dynamic generates the book's chief ethical insight...
...After an arranged lecture in which McPherson expounds his views of Japanese culture, a young Japanese woman tells him that he does not understand her country...
...However, Channie Washington and the crabcake eating are anticipations of a later sense of community that are not fully understood by McPherson in the early part of his narrative...
...Indeed, the authority of this book's narrative voice emerges from its participation in a larger American tradition of individual self-renewal...
...PHILLIP M. RICHARDS, who has contributed before to Dissent, is an asssociate professor in the Department of English at Colgate University...
...His accounts of the Japanese are particularly devoid of the tensions of individual personalities, the complexities of the other selves...
...BOOKS The book's climax takes place as McPherson portrays the contradictions of this broad Japanese vision...
...Gaining entrance into Japanese forms of community and piety, McPherson experiences an acute personal conversion...
...This violation raises the central question of the book's final section: how does one choose between allegiances to intimate friends...
...Butler, Washington and her life are dimly but increasingly understood as a humanizing force within an eroding inner-city world...
...Mrs...
...He cannot relate his own personal dislocations to a broader experience of dislocation...
...McPherson not only commits himself to this vision of organic community shared with his small circle of Japanese and American friends but presents this vision as an exemplary one for his readers...
...McPherson feels most whole as a person when he becomes part of the Japanese flow of "naturalness" in social gatherings such as a meal, a reception, or even having a few drinks in a bar...
...Like McPherson's short stories in Elbow Room, Crabcakes moves from social complications to moments of moral insight...
...Crabcakes' meditations on race echo the early essays of James Baldwin...
...McPherson traces the psychological path from early alienation to his personal renewal in an intimate circle of friends, a number of whom are deeply influenced by Japanese culture...
...In the spirit of Japanese intimacy, McPherson involves himself in the familial catastrophe of a neighbor, Howard Morton, who is losing a son to cancer...
...The book's telling moments of self-consciousness, moreover, alert us to the special conditions that surround McPherson's entrance into Japanese society...
...In this case, the "natural" and "formal" social understandings of the Japanese world come into sharp, tragic conflict...
...America in particular is described by the author as a world in which a "natural" revelation of oneself is considered naive at best and foolhardy at worst...
...He seeks to read himself and his own personal transformation within the uniquely Japanese vision of community...
...McPherson's resolution to his angst is furthermore typically American...
...On the other hand, the world of Japan is one in which true intimacy—the kind of intimacy that Channie Washington sought—is realized in the various forms and gestures of social life...
...Indeed, this book is a deeply religious attempt to come to grips with a self-centered alienation...
...McPherson's decisive entrance into Japanese life takes place during his second trip to Japan when he establishes an intense friendship with Natsuko Ishii, a friendship that fully overcomes his feelings of alienation as an American black...
...This context, which is the recently opened world of elite American life, is now available to people of extraordinary talent such as McPherson...
...McPherson shows us a world of stylized social ritual and community, a world that values the union of formal and natural gestures...
...Despite important differences between McPherson and a figure such as Walt Whitman, the author of Crabcakes also seeks to transcend the pressures of a culturally limited American self...
...He has taught at prestigious universities and numbers distinguished members of the academy among his friends...
...In Hue and Cry as well as in Elbow Room, McPherson acutely observed the transformation of a transitory segregated world in a set of remarkable stories...
...Despite the book's emphasis on McPherson's conversion to a Japanese communitas, Crabcakes remains a curiously self-centered work...
...He presents himself in a highly idiosyncratic and individualistic way, but his very individualism makes him a recognizable phenomenon...
...His involvement with this world reaches crisis proportions with the death of Channie Washington, an elderly tenant of McPherson's Baltimore property...
...For all of his precise introspection, this book lacks a larger sense of McPherson's place in a changing racial world where others share his plight...
...McPherson maintains a strident sense of a pervasive American racism, even though he moves in a racially integrated social world...
...In Baltimore, the narrator is alternately a victim of racism and an agent of the forces that undermine what he will eventually understand as the communitas offered by Japanese society...
...This alienation is particularly acute among blacks, who must present their own impassive mask toward whites who do not regard them as fully human...
...At one point McPherson speaks of the crabcake eating as a communion, and the activity as a ceremony that brings Baltimoreans of all ranks together in a regional understanding...
...In contrast to the vacuity of an estranged American culture of masks, the "natural" intimacy of Japanese community makes possible a broad human vision spanning the extremes of joy and tragedy...
...Although he is a cultural outsider, McPherson is a highly successful American author, who mingles easily with the literary and publishing elites of Japan...
...He is an American traveler who carries what the Emerson of "Self-Reliance" calls the "giant of self" abroad...
...Preparing to unburden himself of his unprofitable rental house, McPherson begins to confront the issue of community and his relationship to others...
...In McPherson's view, the West represents a society of estranged selves who proffer a variety of masks to each other, avoiding true intimacy...
...In the course of his relationships with Ishii and other Japanese, he meets a number of people involved in the worlds of literature, publishing, and business...
...The problematic nature of McPherson's assumptions is complicated by the sparseness of the narrative on matters of real importance in understanding the nature of McPherson's experience...
...We see this racism in McPherson's encounter with a state trooper who impounds his car as he drives outside the city...
...The possibility of a skewed vision is easy to understand...
...This book is peculiarly focused upon McPherson's response to a few elements in the world around him...
...Visiting with Morton in a moment of crisis, McPherson keeps a pair of visiting Japanese friends waiting by themselves in a restaurant for three hours in what for him is an unpardonable offense...
...In one sense, the book's ideal of a Japanese-influenced organic community is an exotic, romanticized therapy for a black middle-class angst...
...As McPherson makes preparations to evict the rental property's other occupant, a Mr...
...MCPHERSON'S GRADUAL and increasingly complicated entrance into this world—and his importation of its values to America—create the book's dramatic structure...
...The book's second section invokes McPherson's experience of community from the vantage of insights gained in his Japanese conversion...
...He therefore violates the trust and intimacy of one relationship in order to sustain another...
...However, when he makes broad social claims for his personal experience, he puts himself on problematic ground...
...Aside from an extended account of his Japanese friendships, we do not learn much of the author's life itself during this period...
...There is little mention of an immediate group of American family and friends around McPherson...
...Here, McPherson sacrifices the ceremonial gesture of the dinner for one of communal sympathy...
...During a train ride, her simple acts of care for him (she wipes sweat from his face) give McPherson a new, powerfully symbolic sense of selfhood and an appreciation of Japan...
...And the nearly surreal account of the reptilian state trooper who impounds his car invokes the postmodern mode of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man...
...McPherson's vision represents a deeply American optimism and naivet...
...Washington, who has selflessly raised an extended family, is described by McPherson as the "Fountainhead . . . that keeps the 'we', the 'us' collected...
...McPherson is part of a cohort of black intellectuals and professionals confronted with the white world from the peculiar vantage of integrated life, social and political realities to which he only vaguely alludes...
...The starting place of this plot is the helterskelter world of McPherson's hometown of Baltimore, a realm of racist police and the decay of a once vital inner-city world...
...His encounters with his Japanese friends concern their impact upon his particular predicament as an alienated black American...
...One of Baltimore's humanizing features is the consumption of crabcakes near the downtown harbor, where people from all over the city eat the delicacy in groups at stands...
...McPherson's highly personalized version of the race problem largely ignores the larger social and historical context in which his experience takes place...
...The world of his academic Iowan neighborhood is by his own description a decidedly multicultural one...
...Through a series of complications, McPherson arrives at the central moral vision of community...
...We see it again in the memory of McPherson's meeting with a car full of policemen in the city...
...America emerges— in a series of James Baldwin-like reflections— as a world in which the black and white populations can never truly know each other...
...These early premonitions are a point of departure for the narrator's encounter with the world through the lens of his Japanese experience...
Vol. 47 • July 2000 • No. 3
