The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt (review)

In The Absent Man, Charles Duncan gives us the first book-length, nonbiographical study of Charles Chesnutt's short fiction. Hailed as the first African American fiction writer to earn a national reputation, Chesnutt produced an impressive list of publications, including three novels, several provocative essays on race, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and the two 1899 collections of short stories for which he is best known, The Conjure Woman and "The Wife of His Youth" and Other Stories of the Color Line. In spite of his prominent position at the headwaters of African American letters, the Ohio-born and North-Carolina-reared Chesnutt, Duncan argues, "became and continues to be an ‘absent man'" (2).

Duncan sets out to show that Chesnutt's uneasy position in the American literary tradition might be traced to his remarkable narrative subtlety. His characters, including trickster figures, wear the mask of ambiguity. Trapped in the dialect tradition that broke the spirit of his fellow Buckeye Paul Laurence Dunbar, Chesnutt, especially in his short fiction, "skillfully disguises those trenchant interrogations" (5) of the social text called America; nevertheless, he illuminates the diversity and depth of meaning conveyed in a dialect tradition that hides as it reveals.

Because Chesnutt leaves his intentions difficult to read, Duncan asserts that he continues to be an "enigmatic figure," or absent man (5). Although Duncan takes great care to discuss Chesnutt against the backdrop of American literary tradition at the turn of the twentieth century, Chesnutt nevertheless causes the reader to pause and ask how African Americans' use of language (écriture noire) affects the way their stories are constructed, narrated, and read. In plumbing the depths of Chesnutt's indirection and dissembling, Duncan produces new readings of familiar tales (such as "The Goophered Grapevine," "Her Virginia Mammy," and "Baxter's Procrustes") and previously neglected works (such as "The Shadow of My Past," "The Doll," and "Mr. Taylor's Funeral"). Although Chesnutt's subject is identity, he destabilizes pat notions of "otherness" (25).

Two stories that stand as metaphors for Chesnutt's career are "Her Virginia Mammy" (1899) and "Baxter's Procrustes" (1904). These multilayered stories, replete with "satire and plausible meanings, make it difficult for readers to know Chesnutt's position in relation to the issues he raises" (5). Duncan drives home the point that Chesnutt's "authorial self-masking both empowers and binds him" (7). For example, "Baxter's Procrustes," often cited as Chesnutt's best story, is a "multilayered satire of book collectors, and hostile [white] critics and the fin de siècle reading audience who had responded unenthusiastically to most of his work" (166). These preening book collectors value a predominance of whiteness on the page, with only "a beautiful, slender stream" of black text interrupting "a wide meadow of margin" (Collected Stories, 274). Lest one get too carried away with postmodernist soundings of this story, Chesnutt anchors it in the social construction of race and difference. African Americans were written into the margin of such august national documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Chesnutt, who witnessed the Supreme Court's sanctioning of apartheid in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, deftly uses satire and irony to remind readers that they may be disappointed if they make assessments based on appearance, whether of people or of books. Writing on the "color line" in his fiction, Chesnutt himself, light-skinned enough to pass, dissembled, used indirection, and wore the mask to articulate what it meant to be black and male at the turn of the twentieth century. Readers should not fall into the trap of separating Chesnutt the man, trapped in a claustrophobic social text, from Chesnutt the artist, whose short fiction has the feel of the modern voice, with its repetition and lack of closure.

In reading Chesnutt as an American writer who happens to be black, Duncan overlooks another...