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American Literature 74.1 (2002) 194-196



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Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature. By Michael Davitt Bell. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2001. xv, 231 pp. Cloth, $48.00; paper, $19.00.

At once retrospective and prospective, Michael Davitt Bell's collection of essays reflects on a distinguished career and hints at what might have come if Bell had not succumbed to cancer in 1997. Most of the book (80 percent) consists of reprints of earlier publications: Bell's monograph "Conditions of Literary Vocation" in the Cambridge History of American Literature (1995) and three earlier essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne and the romance. The new material includes a thoughtful introduction explaining his own theoretical concerns and what he saw as the questionable assumptions of new historicism, and a daring essay, focused on Richard Wright's Native Son, about the "burden of naturalism" for African American authors (and critics). Bell had originally planned a full-length book on Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed; that he did not have time to finish it represents a true loss to the field.

Bell always insisted on the deeply informing influence on texts of the negotiated relations between authors and the broader literary culture: its market orientation, its aesthetic norms, its personalities, its gendered and racialized energies. This "sociology of literary vocation," as he terms it, is the methodological glue that binds this collection together; Bell's concerns with authorial intention, ambition, opportunity, and financial necessity on the one hand, and with the constraining forces of critical opinion and publishing politics on the [End Page 194] other, serve to link, albeit in a rather loose and cubist fashion, authors as far removed in time and subjectivity as Wright and William Cullen Bryant. Drawn to the concept of deviance as a means of explaining the relation between authorial decisions and social values, Bell himself deviates from a widespread critical bias against intentionalist and biographically oriented scholarship. Yet in so doing, he is able to bring his own approach to bear on modern critical practice as well as on the writing of fiction, by addressing the professional and personal issues that underlie all intellectual endeavors, including his own.

That stereoscopy is the real significance of this book, and it is most fruitful in Bell's discussion of Native Son. The other essays may be useful as an introduction to Bell's work, as review for the initiated, or as efficient orals reading; the chapter on Wright truly distinguishes this collection. Here Bell takes up some of the most difficult issues in African Americanist criticism, and as he takes on some of its foremost practitioners, we catch a glimpse of the directions in which his work was leading him. Not everyone will like what he has to say, but his argument, perhaps for that very reason, deserves a full hearing.

In a nutshell, Bell maintains that in Native Son Wright undertook a "self-conscious attempt to write in the mode of literary naturalism without succumbing to that mode's rigid and inherently racist division of knowing ‘white' narrator from ignorant black ‘brute'" (199). Bell demonstrates that Wright achieved an uneasy ambiguity of voice in the novel, by which the narrator's sociological detachment coexists with, rather than subordinates, the inarticulate feeling of the main character. This achievement, he continues, got lost in the "protest debate" involving James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Irving Howe, a debate that turned on whether African American experience could be faithfully represented in formal traditions derived from European American culture, and which therefore assumed an operative distinction between authentic "black art" and inauthentic derivativeness. The argument acquires a sharper edge when Bell turns to modern critical discourses regarding the vernacular bases of African American writing (that is, the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and that of Houston Baker). Charging Gates and Baker not simply with underestimating but with grievously misreading Native Son, Bell argues that they have "perpetuated some of the protest debate's, and naturalism's, deepest assumptions and emphases" (191) by refusing...

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