The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division (review)

Brian Norman has produced a well-documented, thick (if short) book that could have been much better with greater care to particulars. The problem bedevils those committed to and driven by theory and agendas alike—precisely including the “protest” writers rather lavishly studied here.

Norman deserves commendation for directing attention to the essay and, in particular, “the American protest essay,” which he painstakingly traces through Helen Hunt Jackson, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. Explicitly concerned to “cleave” or “tether”—two of his favorite terms—the political and the literary, Norman offers sometimes suggestive readings short on literary analysis and discussion of form and long on ideas. He comes close, a number of times, however, to the critical recognition that access to ideas derives from form. He is well aware that tension resides at the heart of the essay as form—a protean and productive both/and, in other words. Norman sometimes speaks of a “double consciousness” operating in Du Bois and Baldwin, but he fails to link it with the essayistic capaciousness that Baldwin describes at the end of “Notes of a Native Son”—and that echoes important remarks by Eliot and by Fitzgerald: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.” Such particulars, which not only enrich texture but fuel needed comparative analysis, are too often lacking in Norman’s book.

Norman describes his book as “an opening foray to understand how and why politically engaged literary figures turn to the essay in order to challenge and . . . ‘re-vise’ stories of national belonging” (157). A certain—and laudable—modesty attends the effort, which is nevertheless executed with thoroughness (and massive documentation). For its faults, this book succeeds in tracing the texts in which “writers bring the experiences of those lacking full social status into the public arena by directly addressing a divided audience, documenting with journalistic fervor representative instances of injustice, and citing state promises of full social participation for all” (1). Unfortunately, Norman does not always well distinguish essays from sermons, manifestos, and other related, though discernibly different, forms, a failure that considerably diminishes the achievement.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Brian Norman’s many and gracious remarks on my own work on the essay. That my commentary has been helpful, stirring thought and suggesting directions, is most gratifying. Sometimes, unfortunately, Norman appropriates ideas without having fully considered them in context; consideration, in any case, of my notion of the essay as site, rather than genre, might have been useful (I expand the point in my new Reading Essays: An Invitation). Lamentably, his book, while welcome, lacks careful proofreading and editing (I, for instance, find myself time after time listed as “Douglass”; the idea of the essay as “second-class citizen” derives from E.B. White, not me; the writer John McPhee is misidentified as James; and awkwardness of expression abounds).