Writing Blackness: John Edgar Wideman's Art and Experimentation

Preface

ix PREFACE One of the most shocking and frustrating things that I have ever heard in the classroom is the recent statement by a graduate student that John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (1996) is “amateurish.” The student’s evaluation was apparently based on the overall difficulty of the densely structured work. Similarly, a fellow professor who started but did not finish reading this same Wideman novel commented, “I don’t understand what he is doing.” It was interesting that the professor, who seemed to blame Wideman for this lack of understanding, gave up the attempt to understand instead of accepting the challenge of continuing to read the novel. Far too few advanced academics read Wideman’s works, all of which are difficult, although not all are as difficult as The Cattle Killing. Among my undergraduate students, almost no one raises a hand when I ask, “Who has read anything by John Edgar Wideman?” Obviously, Wideman enjoys critical acclaim because of a dedicated group of scholars who study his work and others who appreciate very good, unconventional writing, but he does not attract anything close to the number of serious readers that he deserves. I want this study to bring more readers to Wideman. Although it may not be realistic to expect to reach a broad audience of general readers , I hope this straightforward analysis of the structures and themes of Wideman’s writing will make it more accessible to graduate students, professors , and the small number of general readers interested in engaging Wideman’s always experimental, difficult, very rich works. Along these lines, I have organized my analysis around related interpretations of individual texts that connect each one to the overall development of the body of work. By tracing a thematic and formal evolution throughout Wideman’s works, I try to make them more readable and understandable , hopefully opening the writing up to readers so that they can interpret it in additional ways. x preface * * * John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, D.C., on June 16, 1941, but grew up in Pittsburgh, living first in the economically impoverished black Homewood community and then in the predominantly white, uppermiddle -class Shadyside area, where he attended Peabody High School. At Peabody, it started to become clear that Wideman was a remarkable person. He showed almost equal talent in athletics and academics, becoming captain of the basketball team and class valedictorian. In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he achieved all–Ivy League status in basketball and Phi Beta Kappa membership. Then, in 1963, he and J. Stanley Sanders of Whittier College in Whittier, California, won Rhodes scholarships and went to Oxford University . Along with Sanders, Wideman became one of the first three blacks to win this most prestigious of prizes, the only black Rhodes scholar before that time being Alain Locke in 1905. Wideman returned from Oxford to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and to found and direct its Afro-American Studies program. He later taught at the University of Wyoming and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and now teaches at Brown University. Wideman published his first novel in 1967, and has since published nine additional novels, four collections of short stories, and four books that I call “auto/biographies” because, as I show in chapter 1, they combine two genres. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, has been nominated twice for the National Book Award, and has received the MacArthur Fellowship. Wideman has ruminated about the more complex aspects of his personal life in interviews and other public media and, in greater depth, in fiction related to his life and in his auto/biographies. Wideman’s later fiction and his auto/biographies concern endeavors and occurrences that are largely factual. Among these, the most prominent are his struggle to become a writer who puts African American culture, history, and perspective in the foreground; the personal attempt to return to his black roots that accompanied his artistic struggle; and his experiences of personal tragedy. In his first three novels, European and American white writers are his main influences. African American life, while very much a part of this early fiction, is in many ways secondary to white culture, white experience , and themes and writing techniques taken from white writers. xi preface Starting in about 1973, however, Wideman began an effort to make...