Writing Blackness: John Edgar Wideman's Art and Experimentation

Conclusion

164 Conclusion E xperimentation with the treatment of blackness is the most common feature of Wideman’s writing. Central to both the later fiction and the later auto/biographies, which build on the first three novels, is Wideman’s evolving use of experimental fictional techniques and themes to depict the writer/character’s personal life and creative development as he deals with important black political, cultural, and social issues. The three early novels represent an initial modernist phase in Wideman ’s career that differs from his later, postmodernist works, but an experimental focus in these early novels on the concerns of the black community clearly connects them to later works. Another connection between Wideman’s early and later works is that the first novel portrays the same or similar characters and the same family relationships and community as do the works that follow the third novel, such as the Homewood Trilogy. In that fictional trilogy, a writer/character who is a surrogate for Wideman becomes central. This writer/character interacts with a family very similar to Wideman’s, and returns to his childhood community, Homewood, which he had left to attend an elite white university. Each work of the Homewood Trilogy is more experimental than the last as the writer/character gets closer to his former community, develops artistically , and continues his treatment of black life. Both fiction and auto/ biography after the early novels feature the writer/character’s rapprochement with his home community, as well as similar structural and thematic experimentation; the exploration of artistic development; and social, cultural , and political portrayals. Developing from works that precede it, the novel Fanon (2008) takes experimentation to a striking new level, even for Wideman. After the writer/character John has returned to the community and 165 Conclusion played a central role there in the Homewood Trilogy, Reuben takes the next step in the development that culminates in Fanon. This is particularly interesting because John is not a character in Reuben, and it does not depict his personal story. Reuben is one of Wideman’s most experimental novels, however, and moves toward his recent emphasis on the construction of political fictions intended to help black people. The focal point of the fictions in Reuben is the words on the page, but the novel’s fictions are also centered in the imagination and intellect or sometimes in magical ritual. It is hard to separate imaginative, intellectual, and even magically ritualistic creations from words, which are essential to interpreting or understanding most creations and narratives. This is largely beside the point, though, since what is important in the overall experimental development in Reuben is going beyond reliance on the formally written word. The character Reuben is not a writer, and the novel does not highlight its ideas about writing as clearly as the following works do. However, it prepares the way for John the writer/character to develop these ideas later. In the next two novels, the thematic emphasis is more clearly on politically effective stories or fictions written in imagination or by or through imagination that many people disseminate throughout the culture. Then, in Fanon, the writer/character attempts imaginatively and creatively to produce writing that engages living people beyond the page and that itself is living. John is a character in the two novels that follow Reuben, Philadelphia Fire and The Cattle Killing, and through characteristically experimental writing, these novels thematically stress the political potential of writing in imagination or by or through imagination. In Philadelphia Fire, John is one among multiple formal writers of books and writers utilizing imagination who try to (re)write a positive myth of blackness. By the end, Cudjoe , a formal writer whose characterization is inseparable from John’s, has evolved to the point where his text is a nonformal one written in imagination that has the ongoing potential to create political change, like the texts of other writers in the novel who write imaginatively. The highly experimental The Cattle Killing (1996), in which John is again part of a composite characterization of writers, extends the development of the theme of writing imaginatively by focusing on its practice in new, complex ways. Writing imaginatively is a theme in the auto/biographies, too. Although both the novels and the auto/biographies utilize virtually indistinguish- writing blackness 166 able experimental fictional strategies and deal with the writer/character John’s personal life in the context of...