Fire for a Ghost: Blind Spots and the Dissection of Race in John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing

Well it’s too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light We’re one, but we’re not the same We get to carry each other, carry each other: One

—U2, “One”

These fragile bodies of touch and taste This vibrant skin, this hair like lace . . . Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime, But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight, Got to kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight.

—Bruce Cockburn, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”

By the 1990s, “counter-histories to dominant narratives” was a well-worn postmodern currency, part of what Jean-François Lyotard famously describes as an ever-deepening “incredulity towards metanarratives.” As the story goes, metanarratives (grands récits), including Lyotard’s own, are perhaps unavoidable, but revisionary counterpoints to them via “localized” or “little” narratives began to draw major attention in the late 1960s. In particular, these petits récits interrogated official historiography’s story of collective progress through universal human reason, where Logos triumphs over Mythos. Within African American and diasporic fiction, an aesthetics of self-reflexive, fragmented, nonlinear and polyvocal narrative modes emerged as a form of immanent critique: the critical dissection or “anatomy” of a sociocultural system from a position thoroughly ensconced and embedded within it. Immanent critique both occupies and draws upon the tensions and contradictions within a system to produce critical distance that rejects the possibility of isolation or detachment as a spectatorial position. This postmodernist tradition in literature drew from the high modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, European literature, and the American South as well as African diasporic oral history, myth, and storytelling.

Robert Young posits in White Mythologies that poststructuralism and postmodernism look for “the possibility of other logics being imbricated within reason which might serve to undo its own tendency to domination” (8, emphasis added). A tradition that here might tentatively (and debatably) be called “postmodern African American fiction” likewise critically re-imagines History through various “other logics.” The canon for this putative category would likely include works such as Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Gayle Jones’s Corregidora (1975), James McPherson’s Elbow Room (1977), Clarence Major’s Emergency Exit (1979), Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Darius James’s Negrophobia (1993), John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (1996), John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues (1999), and Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001). These critiques open up spaces for explorations of history through the role of what Linda Hutcheon called in 1988 the “ex-centric”—those “who are marginalized by dominant ideology”—since fiction is “another of the discourses by which we construct our versions of reality” (The Poetics of Postmodernism 35, 40). Some of these “postmodern African American” works, particularly those by Morrison and Williams, loosely fit within the postmodern sub-genre of “historiographic metafiction.”¹

As Lisa Lynch makes clear, John Edgar Wideman’s 1996 novel The Cattle Killing is perhaps an “exemplar” of the genre label of “historiographic metafiction”—texts that, paradoxically, “question the truth of historical narrative history even as they attempt to bring alternate histories into focus” (Lynch 777).² Largely set in and near the short-lived United States capitol of Philadelphia circa 1793, The Cattle Killing follows the travels of an unnamed ex-slave who is now an itinerant preacher (henceforth: “the preacher” or “the itinerant preacher”). Along with various embedded narratives, the young preacher’s main addressee/patient is a “dear lady” in a barn loft, seemingly a victim of the city’s yellow fever epidemic, to whom he tells stories as an attempt at healing. At the same time, the preacher addresses a “passionate African spirit,” “kin to the obanji”—a “speaking into the dark” to a “you,” a nameless “she” whom he feels he can address through various inter-locutors (Wideman 15, 78). At one point on his journey, he recounts, the preacher nearly freezes to death in a snowstorm...