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Chapter 5 Imitation as Circulation: Racial Genius and the Problem of National Culture in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion JESSIE Redmon Fauset has a problem: she is not a great novelist. In this she, of course, has much company, but her nongreatness has been an exemplary case. For some of Fauset’s Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, she failed to be great because her sensibility and aesthetic alike were too conventional. To take perhaps the most notable instance, Benjamin Brawley, an educator, literary scholar, and contributor to the major periodicals of the Harlem Renaissance , wrote of her novels, “No one of these books is a great novel.”1 As Deborah McDowell has shown in her discussion of Fauset’s feminism, more recent critics have developed the aesthetic critique of Fauset’s writing into condemnations of her conventional racial and sexual politics, as embodied in her militantly respectable, self-determining bourgeois characters and conservative marital narrative conclusions.2 More broadly, for even some of Fauset’s relatively recent feminist critics, Fauset’s ostensible failure is that she imitates rather than innovates; as Hazel Carby has written, Fauset “adapted but did not transcend the form of the romance.”3 In what is in many ways an extension of this tradition of critical response, Fauset’s seeming failures have sometimes provided the means of her recuperation , grounding critical rescue missions that seek her success in her lapses. Jane Kuenz’s illuminating reading of There Is Confusion, for instance, sees explicit criticism of the contradictory representational demands placed on the “New Negro woman” in Fauset’s ostensible formal flaws, in her “tooabrupt character reversals and need to replace motivation and action with set speeches,” which, through their very awkwardness, “mark the point at which the text’s internal contradictions overlap with and threaten to give voice to 178 Chapter 5 those contradictions general in the culture and, in this instance, in New Negro gender and racial ideology in particular.”4 It seems that whether they see merit in Fauset’s work despite its formal flaws or redefine her “flaws” as satirical interventions into conventional novelistic form, Fauset’s most rigorous and thorough-going feminist advocates have had to wrestle with her critical reputation as a novelist who is not great, and they have understood the question of her value to revolve around whether or not her novels are demonstrably innovative in some way, rather than imitative.5 Yet it is surely apparent in There Is Confusion that “greatness” is legible most clearly not as its author’s aspiration but as the novel’s topic, and moreover that the novel assails “greatness” with the heavy irony of critique, achieved not only by thematizing imitation but also by elevating it to the level of technique. At the risk of exposing Fauset to accusations of another failure (that is, her failure to persuade critics either to notice or to embrace her critique of “greatness” as an analytical category), I want to reorient the discussion of her first novel away from the apparent problems posed by either her aesthetic merit or her generic conventionality and toward her intervention into a discourse, both contemporary and historical to her writing, on the stakes of “greatness” for African American cultural production. Key to this discourse were speculations about the sources and contours of racial “genius.” Examining this discourse allows us to see how Fauset disputes the cultural logics of genius, replacing an ethos of originality with one of imitation. This was a bold and contentious move to make within the controversies over race and genius in the early twentieth century. In doing so, she redefines the terms by which U.S. national culture might be understood as the terrain of African American participation. In particular, she displaces a proprietary concept of culture based in originality, recommending in its place a practice of cultural imitation that fosters cultural memory, collaboration, and a new, politically promising reimaging of universality. In embracing imitation, There Is Confusion struggles with certain problems—both historically long-standing and emergent in her cultural moment—posed by the discourse on genius when it serves as a political resource, particularly those problems bound up with that discourse’s part in the history of racial categorization. As the discussion in previous chapters has shown, the discourse on genius provided a means for negotiating incoherencies between historically specific constructions of women’s identities and those of public life, making it a key figurative location for contests over women’s conceivable modes of...

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