Genre Trouble and History's Miseries in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

Every novel by Colson Whitehead is an affront to genre. Critics most often describe his books as hybrid forms, as if by naming all their literary frames the essence of these by turn brilliant and frustrating books might be captured. The Intuitionist (1999) is a detective story with film-noir valences wrapped around a passing narrative. Zone One (2011) is an incisive cultural critique slumming as a zombie-apocalypse novel. For Whitehead, generic conventions are established only to be subverted or discarded. Whitehead admitted his playful approach to literary genres in a 2013 interview with Nikesh Shukla that touched on his fifth book, Sag Harbor (2009): "That novel is my take on a traditionally realist genre, the coming of age novel. I was wearing realist drag in the same way that I have worn detective drag or horror drag in my other books" ("Colson"). Whitehead explains that he wears such literary drag in order to deny "narrative satisfaction" and refuse the repetition and predictability that comes with generic forms. By presenting genre as a form of drag, Whitehead affirms the performative nature of the cultural codes that instantiate literary categories. If, as Judith Butler explains, the drag queen exposes gender as a social construction built on imitation and repetition, then genre too establishes expectations that lack any essential truth. Just as drag queens cause "gender trouble," Whitehead's literary drag instills in readers and critics alike a good deal of genre trouble.

The stakes of this genre trouble raise significantly when a novel's villains are not the walking dead but slave masters and their racist enablers. Romance and mystery may be costumes worn and paraded to comic and critical effect, but stories about human bondage derive from authentic experiences, real bodies tortured and raped, real battles won and lost, which means that generic considerations of Whitehead's critically acclaimed The Underground Railroad (2016) are inextricable from the grounds of history. What are we to call this puzzling text? It is deeply if anachronistically historicized but also animated by a governing conceit, the literalization of the Underground Railroad, that flaunts any claims to a realistic past. Such merging of the past with the present along with the text's rampant generic disorder recalls Ramón Saldívar's notion of speculative realism, "a hybrid amalgam of realism, magical realism, meta-fiction, and genre fictions, including science fiction, graphic narrative, and fantasy proper" ("Second" 13). Saldívar recognizes the oxymoronic nature of this aesthetic mode, explaining, "what matters is that speculative realism is not merely a phantasmal depiction of deep ideological mystifications or misapprehensions of metaphysics. Instead, it works in a different direction than would a naïve sort of realism toward a critical realism that would posit the knowability of phenomena, even if we can't know the thing-in-itself" (14).

The critical realism of Whitehead's speculative realism might be understood as the inescapability of white supremacy. There is nothing naïve in this understanding of reality; after all, the underground railroad imagined by him as a subterranean system of trains and stations spread across the antebellum South does not deposit Cora and her companions in the free North. Instead, conductors leave bewildered riders in other slave states, each unique and each firmly united in its commitment to the systematic dehumanization of African Americans. The construction and basic operation of Whitehead's underground railroad remains a mystery to readers. In Saldívar's terms, readers are not to know "the thing-initself" but instead confront "the knowability of phenomena." In this fantasy world, white domination and black abjection are inescapable. These twin pillars of American history cannot be dreamed away, remaining intact even as Whitehead's imagination runs wild. Saldívar further identifies speculative realism as foundational to what he calls "postrace fiction," contemporary texts by minority writers that involve an innovative approach to fantasy: "Postrace fiction employs these new forms of fantasy to reverse the usual course of fantasy, turning it away from latent forms of daydream, delusion, and denial, toward the manifold surface features of history" ("Historical...