Writing Blackness: John Edgar Wideman's Art and Experimentation

4. Reuben and Philadelphia Fire: PROGRESSIVE EXPERIMENTATION AFTER THE HOMEWOOD TRILOGY

96 4 Reuben and Philadelphia Fire progressive experimentation after the homewood trilogy P erhaps Wideman’s most esoteric novel, Reuben (1987) is a link between the Homewood Trilogy and Philadelphia Fire (1990). It re- flects a different, new phase of the creative life apparent in Wideman ’s writing after Doot becomes part of the community in Sent for You Yesterday. From the perspective of the white power structure at least, the character Reuben is an ersatz lawyer without a degree, but he is really an odd amalgamation of philosopher/necromancer who constructs postmodern “fictions” that help black people. The terms “fictions” and “stories” are interchangeable in Reuben, and Reuben’s fictions are not false in much the same way that the Homewood Trilogy’s nonrealistic, sometimes supernatural, fantastic, and magical stories are not. However, fictions call attention to reality’s creation even more than these stories do, and have even less connection to apparent or assumed realism. The main focuses in Reuben are the imaginative and intellectual fictions inscribed on paper by white Western culture, and the novel’s own imaginative , intellectual, and magically ritualistic fictions inscribed on its pages. As portrayed in the novel, fictions can be spoken or can be composed and enacted only in mind and imagination, but the text highlights the idea that fictions are linguistic constructions that only symbolize and do not concretize or actualize reality—the reality of blackness, for example. Fiction makers are presented in the novel as serving their own self-interest, not portraying inherent truth, when they symbolize reality. In Reuben, white culture is a fiction maker that has positively symbolized itself, and thus accrued the power to generate the persuasive, self-interested fictions negatively valorizing blackness that Reuben must oppose. A major problem is that negative, powerful fictions of blackness constructed by whiteness can always challenge and negate Reuben. 97 Progressive Experimentation after the Homewood Trilogy The text identifies Reuben’s task of constantly devising postmodern fictions:1 “[Reuben and Kwansa] needed to start again. Go over familiar territory until it wasn’t familiar anymore, till it was a starting place unlike anyplace either of them had been before. Unless they started fresh they’d be caught up in one fiction or another, and that fiction would carry them wherever it was going. And its destination would have nothing to do with where they needed to go. . . . [T]hey should sit and listen, learn the first words of the story they need to tell” (17). A third-person narrator presents Reuben’s fictions, and through them he often connects with the dreams and identities of others, somewhat as Doot does from multiple complex intersubjective narrative perspectives in creating stories in the communal setting of Sent for You Yesterday. However, focusing much more on the abstract, abstruse, and arcane intellect than on communal tradition, Reuben takes the next step by conceptualizing, imagining, ritualizing, and articulating fictions that are even harder to understand than Doot’s stories. Reuben’s fictions are an attempt to constitute a new myth, one broader than the myth of Homewood in Sent for You Yesterday, that is indefinite in time and the starting point for liberating him as a black creator and also freeing blackness from negative symbolization. Although he is not a writer, Reuben is just as creative as one and performs similar tasks in his guise as a lawyer. In the self-interest of blackness, Reuben creatively manipulates reality by devising experimental constructions that disrupt or de-familiarize the usual linguistic patterns of negative, self-interested white fictions of blackness; in turn, Reuben tries to help Kwansa and others create “[de]-familiar” black fictions or stories that are the potential beginning of positive new liberating black portrayals. In “Thoth,” the fourth of twelve fictions that comprise the novel’s chapters, Reuben constructs his reality partly as an imagined, magically ritualistic beginning in which he is separated from his brother and symbolically reconnected at an ambiguous time: All that heady double-talk about time makes his gold watch heavy this morning . If it’s morning. Guiltily he consults the ivoried face of his timepiece. Ten-thirty. Has he been asleep at his desk, in his clothes? And if sleeping, how long? Rip Van Winkle years or just a few, sweet nods? An old man’s oatmeal head drooping into the pleats of his turtly neck, his skin bunched writing blackness 98 under...