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42 2 A Glance Away, Hurry Home, and The Lynchers modernist experimentation and the early novels J ohn Edgar Wideman’s first three novels, A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1970), and The Lynchers (1973), are products of an apprenticeship period in his career. Wideman would not find the true focus of his writing, which would set the course of its development, until his publication of Hiding Place in 1981. At that point, he began to write about his own personal life and development and the life of the Homewood community where he grew up, emphasizing African American cultural and literary perspectives for the first time.1 Thematically and formally, the white modernist literary tradition heavily influences A Glance Away, Hurry Home, and The Lynchers. Modernism was a twentieth-century artistic movement between World Wars I and II during which literary modernists emphasized the theme of alienation and structural and stylistic experimentation. Modernist writers often created characters who projected feelings of alienation originating within the self into the outside world; in many instances, though, one cannot separate internal and external alienation. Implicitly, readers also are not in touch with their true selves and the reality of the world around them, and, like the fictional characters, suffer social, moral, and spiritual alienation. Experimentation further implies the goal of shaking readers out of complacency by giving them different and unfamiliar literary experiences, and getting them to change by looking freshly at their similar conditions. As Wideman has said many times in interviews, he has been an experimental writer throughout his career; experimentalists T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner are among several modernists who influenced his early work.2 Experimentation makes Hurry Home and The Lynchers challenging, but overall the three early novels are no more difficult than the auto/biographies . It may seem intuitive that fiction would be more difficult than auto/ 43 Modernist Experimentation and the Early Novels biography since the latter supposedly deals with real life. However, as we saw in chapter 1, Wideman uses essentially the same techniques in the auto/biographies and in the novels and short stories to fictionalize life events. Therefore, while fiction and auto/biography pose equal challenges for the reader in the different phases of Wideman’s writing, both the later fiction and the auto/biographies, which he began to publish after he had found the focus of his career, reveal his growth. As his career develops, he uses increasingly complex experimental fictional approaches and techniques in both genres. Wideman’s move toward the postmodern allowed him to give his writing a much more clearly political focus, to theorize about the politics and the political potential of writing, and to write more self-consciously about his process of writing and the shaping of reality through words and stories.3 Beginning in 1981, Wideman increasingly used these postmodern techniques in his treatment of issues related to being a black writer and to the African American community overall. Many of the characters and places in the first three novels are the same as those in the fiction and auto/biographies published in 1981 and after, but in the early novels, Wideman does not specify place and people as he does later. For example, several characters in A Glance Away appear in works after the early novels as the same people with the same first names; as similar people with different names; or as different family members with the same name. Lawson is the name of the paternal side of Wideman’s family, and although the details of their lives are different, Eddie Lawson in A Glance Away has come back home to accommodate to family and community after having alienated himself like the character John Wideman in later works. Portrayed similarly, DaddyGene is clearly John French, the maternal grandfather in the later writing, and Freeda is Freeda French, the grandmother. Brother Small is virtually the same as Brother Tate in Sent for You Yesterday (1983), and Brother’s sister Alice is very much like his sister Lucy in the 1983 novel. Also, Martha, Eddie’s mother, is the name of Wideman’s mother’s sister in the works that follow. Eddie’s sister is Bette, which is what Wideman calls his mother, Lizabeth, a major character in the later writing. This is not repetition; Wideman has taken the same people and setting and made different imaginative and creative uses of them. [3.144.124.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 04:27...

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