Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction

1 African American Faithful Belief: Imposing Social Determinism, Naturalism, and Modernism: Imposing Social Determinism, Naturalism, and Modernism

16 chapter 1 African American Faithful Belief Imposing Social Determinism, Naturalism, and Modernism after the literary breakthroughs of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison in the mid-twentieth century, African American writers were able to focus on black cultural traditions, such as the religious, from their individual artistic perspectives with fewer pressures from the literary mainstream in which Wright and Ellison had to establish themselves. In James Baldwin’sGo Tell It on the Mountain (1953), the sophisticated portrayal of the biblical and religious tradition unconstrained by the modernist concerns paramount in Ellison’s work is well ahead of its time. Most African American writers did not deal with the unique African American cultural perspective shaped by the Bible, Judeo-Christian tradition, and the African-derived voodoo religious tradition in great complexity until the 1970s. The works covered in this chapter are pre-1970 and largely do not focus on the biblical and religious tradition in the same depth as works discussed in later chapters. To show the predominant background to the post-1970s novels, this chapter briefly surveys novels that treat the biblical and Christian in the prevailing contexts of naturalism, realism, and modernism. Naturalism, realism, and modernism are literary worldviews that are largely antithetical to the African American religious tradition, and black writers like Ellison and John Edgar Wideman move away from these literary creeds toward artistic forms and thematic approaches that foreground the African American ethos deeply set in faithful vision. The evolution of Wideman ’s work is the best example of an African American writer being ineluctably pulled away from modernism to a positive portrayal of the sacred, spiritual, and supernatural as he integrated the black cultural view into his own artistic perspective. In Wideman’s fiction from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, a black survival response of which faithful vision is an integral part displaces the modernist pessimism of the first three novels; the change in perspective becomes clear in Hiding Place (1981). Ellison’s fiction also seems to develop similarly from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using John F. Callahan’s edited text of Juneteenth (1999), one can only speculate on Ellison’s direction after the highly modernist depiction of Invisible Man (1952); however, it seems clear in Ellison’s edited work that African American religious ritual that symbolizes faithful vision also figuratively represents the potential achievement of American freedom and equality. From this general standpoint , Wright’s writing opposes Ellison and Wideman’s. His negative personal and literary viewpoint, grounded in naturalism and social realism, controls his narratives, and his thematic approach flattens and stereotypes his portrayal of African American culture and character. Generally speaking, African American novels portray some potential of people to struggle against the oppressive social and political realities of black life, and although the texts themselves often do not affirm it, they show the creative potential and effect of faithful vision in some aspect of individual characters’ lives or in the life of the community as part of the struggle. Native Son (1940) is atypical in the African American tradition because it is one of the few novels that minimizes and virtually negates the agency of the sacred , spiritual, and supernatural while also limiting the human potential of African Americans. Richard Wright is by no means the only black writer who is atheist or agnostic, but he is one of the few who limits the black cosmos with his own bleak view. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902) (a novel that is forward-looking for its time, like Go Tell It on the Mountain) anticipates Native Son’s naturalism and also portrays African American culture as limited in the fashion of Wright’s text. Although there are no “gods” in Native Son and Wright would never envision any, his and Dunbar’s novels are remarkably alike in worldview; The Sport of the Gods is an incidental thematic predecessor of Native Son’s deadend faithlessness if not a directly influential literary ancestor.The Sport of the Gods is not as politically provocative as Native Son, but Dunbar lived in a time when he did not have Wright’s freedom to express himself as a writer. As critics generally say, he only learned about black culture from the stories 17 african american faithful belief his parents told him and not from experience as Wright did, and further, he did not have available...