The Poetics of African-American Un/Reality in Edward P. Jones's The Known World

Abstract

The Poetics of African-American Un/Reality in Edward P. Jones's The Known World Janet Feight (bio) The narrator in Edward P. Jones's 2003 Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Known World is omniscient—some have said "intrusive"1—but more often he appears to be a familiar construct: an objective historian operating beyond the reach of context. His historical knowledge encompasses the lives, histories, and occasionally even the futures of the people of fictional antebellum Manchester County, Virginia. Within the first chapter or so, the narrator relies heavily upon the authenticity of his or her knowledge to establish the historicity of the people being described, citing dates and statistics: "In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves" (7). Hayden White once noted in The Content of the Form that the "objectivity" of the discipline of history is dependent upon a particular authentic form of historiographic narrative: the history proper (a narrative account of a sequence of past events). It depends upon a performance of"the form that reality itself displays to a 'realistic' consciousness" (White 24). Drawing on structuralist theories of metanarrative, White further argued that the seeming objectivity of written history exists in tandem with the metahistorical signification that the historical narrative [End Page 103] form itself necessarily conveys: "the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary" (24). Both by performing history as "reality itself" and by deflating or satirizing its "fullness" as transcendent meaning, Jones's narrator uses the so-called realism of the historical mode to dismantle the pretense to truth of Southern white historical discourse. One way the narrator of The Known World challenges previous histories is by referring directly to their flaws, noting mathematical errors, sloppy documentation, bias, and other issues, seemingly questioning,2 inhabiting, and evincing the authenticity and authority of history while doing so. For instance, when discussing "the census of 1860" (here a fictional census that readers might easily take for the real thing) that "said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County," the narrator informs us that "the census taker, a U.S. marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he sent his report to Washington D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong because he had failed to carry a one" (Jones 7). Such moves demonstrate that what Jones offers in The Known World is a two-fold challenge based on both performed historical authenticity and counterpoised flights of imagination. The two modes work in tandem as a realist-postmodern poetics to form a new historically counterdiscursive pattern of meaning. In other words, the performance of historical realism by the narrator anchors the text overall in realism, while the specific everyday realities of the African-American characters counter the universalizing narratives of the white characters (who act as representatives of Southern white supremacy as a whole). One could further argue that the mythic mode depends upon the historical mode and that they are integrally connected. Limited magical realism, the mythic references, works along with the primary, seemingly objective, historical perspective. Toward this end, Jones incorporates a historical recounting of births, deaths, journeys, census records, and letters—alongside lovely dream sequences, heavenly or hellish visions, and epiphanies. Jones's awareness of the metanarrative dimension of white-centered history informs his dual construction of a text that deploys narrative realism that looks like traditional white historical discourse while simultaneously depicting with mythic resonance the everyday realities of African-American characters under slavery through magical realism. These departures or flights of fantasy, coupled with the previously discussed showcasing of historical discourse, create a twofold narrative mode for the novel. [End Page 104] While many have noted Jones's use of magical realism, most have seen it as operating along the same lines as that of Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Octavia Butler, and, perhaps, Toni Morrison. Those authors might be said to write, as Susan Donaldson (drawing on the work of Linda Hutcheon) suggests, "historiographic metafiction (270),"3 but I would argue that Jones...