Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 Qiana J. Whitted (bio) Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. Much of the figurative language that distinguishes African-American creative writing has been—and continues to be—shaped by black religious traditions. Since the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s verses in the eighteenth century, African-American literary tropes of sacrifice, communal deliverance, and the quest for ultimate truths resonate, explicitly and implicitly, with the evolving syncretism of Afro-Christian faith. Studies such as Katherine [End Page 961] Clay Bassard’s Spiritual Interrogations have made thorough and persuasive arguments for Wheatley’s allegorical profundity; the complex spiritual discourses of nineteenth-century fugitive slaves and evangelists have been fundamental to the study of African-American cultural formations.1 Nevertheless, critical literary scholarship has been much slower to recognize what James Weldon Johnson observed in the preface to his 1927 poetry collection, God’s Trombones—that the remarkable inventiveness of the modern black literary imagination continues to be bound inextricably with the religious rhetoric and scriptural wisdom of Sunday Service. Tuire Valkeakari examines key aspects of this discourse through a comprehensive study of religious symbols and characterizations in black fiction from twentieth-century in her book, Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. It is the title’s emphasis on “idiom” that distinguishes Valkeakari’s contribution to the field, as her analysis forges constructive intertextual associations between tropological networks and evaluates the literary coherence of biblical allusions. Her study considers religious discourse as a social and cultural product—not unlike folklore or myth—without endorsing a “religious agenda” (200) or arguing specific theological interpretations. Importantly, Valkeakari marks Ellison’s Invisible Man as a turning point in the secular use of religious idiom, particularly as it is manifested through “the social commentary and artistic innovation” (56) of late twentieth-century Christological messianic and scapegoating imagery, sacred orature, and gendered articulations and authorizations of the Word. To make her case, Valkeakari draws on well-known texts by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Octavia Butler, while shedding new light on works by Leon Forrest and Gayl Jones that have received far less critical attention. Valkeakari puts forth an overview of how Christianity and Judeo-Christian rhetoric has been utilized by earlier writers in her first chapter. Her discussion of William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter and the early poetry of Francis E. W. Harper and Paul Laurence Dunbar underscore the use of religion in anti-slavery rhetoric through biblical allusions to Moses and the Book of Esther’s Queen Vashti. Following an analysis of W.E.B. DuBois’s “biblically derived intertextuality,” (31) she engages writers of the New Negro Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Nella Larsen. Still, her argument begins in earnest with Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel. Invisible Man diverges from its predecessors, Valkeakari asserts, through a “highly ironic, subversive, and hilarious manipulation of Judeo-Christian tropes” (52) that differs thematically from the folk religion preserved in Hurston’s narratives, and stylistically from Richard Wright’s abrasive naturalist fiction. Specifically, the second chapter on Invisible Man catalogues the persistent failings of the story’s false messiahs, whether parodied through the Founder and Norton, exposed through the opportunism of Ras and Rinehart, or undercut through the tragic death of Tod Clifton. The analysis also draws a provocative connection between ancient Hebrew scapegoating rituals and the black sharecropper, Jim Trueblood. As both an outcast and a “blues priest” (61), Trueblood foreshadows the social realities and depraved contradictions of racial performance that will ultimately drive the unnamed narrator underground. Likewise, Ellison’s narrator—whose cyclical journeys Valkeakari frames in terms of the Edenic expulsion and Christian resurrection—resists the temptation to assume his own “mock-messianic” role as a public speaker in favor of the more reflective, historically resonant posture of hibernation (73). [End Page 962] It is, perhaps, because of Ellison’s too subtle insinuation of religious discourse in a novel already rife with allusion that Valkeakari refers frequently to his “secularization” of religious idiom...