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History, Fiction, and the Ground Between: The Uses of the Documentary Mode in Black Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Barbara Foley
Barbara Foley*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Abstract

Although the so-called nonfiction novel is ordinarily seen as a distinctly post-World War ii phenomenon, Afro-American literature has from its beginnings relied to a marked degree on the documentary mode. Close scrutiny of Afro-American prose narrative provides the basis not only for revising some common literary-historical generalizations but also for examining the nature of mimesis and historicity, since Afro-American writers have employed a wide range of techniques to persuade their readers of the truths proposed in their texts. A consideration of the uses of factuality in this body of literature enables us to make broader theoretical distinctions among the kinds of propositions conveyed by various types of fictional narratives and to illuminate the shady borderline between factual and fictive discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 389 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 Hollowell, Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 3.

2 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 67.

3 In The American Novel since World War II, ed. Marcus Klein (New York: Fawcett, 1966), p. 276.

4 For a discussion of the philosophical tangency of metafiction and the nonfiction novel, see John Hellmann, “Fables of Fact: New Journalism Reconsidered,” Centennial Review, 21 (1977), 414–32.

5 In Nashe, Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 189.

6 Sidney J. Black, “Eighteenth-Century ‘Histories’ as a Fictional Mode,” Boston University Studies in English, 1 (1955), 38.

7 Kazin, “The Imagination of Fact: From Capote to Mailer,” in Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (Boston: Little, 1973), p. 221.

8 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Boston: James Munroe, 1839), iii, 108.

9 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or, The Defense of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965), pp. 100, 123.

10 Turner, “Black Fiction: History and Myth,” Studies in American Fiction, 5 (1977), 125.

11 Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (1946; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953). The apparent simplicity of Auerbach's formulation is somewhat qualified because a stricter translation of Auerbach's title would read, “represented reality.” See Marilyn J. Rose, trans., The Logic of Literature, by Kate Hamburger, 2nd rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), p. 11, n.

12 Aristotle, Aristotle's Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature, trans. Leon Golden, commentary by ?. B. Hardison, Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), Ch. ii, p. 4.

13 For discussion of the concepts of story and plot, see Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, trans, and eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Regents Critics Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 67–68, and Victor Shklovsky, “Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” in Lemon and Reis, p. 57. Harold Toliver elucidates some limitations of Aristotle's definition of mimesis in Animate Illusions: Explorations of Narrative Structure (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1974), pp. 24–28. Meir Sternberg presents a cogent critique of the translation of the formalists' terms “fabula” and “sujet” as “story” and “plot” in Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 8–14.

14 Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 8. It should be clear from the above discussion that my two definitions of mimesis are distinctly qualitative; that is, they implicitly reject the notion that fictive and factual discourse can be aligned along a spectrum and adjudged by criteria of degree rather than of kind. For an articulate version of the spectrum theory, see Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966).

15 J. Noel Heermance gives a comprehensive account of the changes in the text of Clotelle in William Wells Brown and Clotelle; A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969).

16 William Andrews, “Mark Twain and James W. C. Pennington: A Possible Source for Huckleberry Finn,” unpublished essay.

17 Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 39.

18 Butterfield, The Historical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1924), p. 32.

19 Berthoff, Fictions and Events: Essays in Criticism and Literary History (New York: Dutton, 1971), pp. 39–40.

20 In The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1967), v, 129.

21 Griggs, lmperium in Imperio (New York: Arno, 1969), p. ii.

22 For discussion of the intertextual relationship between Kleist and Doctorow, see John Ditsky, “The German Source of Ragtime: A Note,” Ontario Review, 4 (1976), 84–86, and my own “From U. S. A. to Ragtime: Notes on the Forms of Historical Consciousness in Modern Fiction,” American Literature, 50 (1978), 85–105.

23 Bone, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. 46.

24 Ruth Laney, “A Conversation with Ernest Gaines,” Southern Review, NS 10 (1974), 1–14.

25 Demby, The Catacombs (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 3.

26 Interestingly enough, Bontemps, when seeking a focus for his novel about slave rebellion, rejected Nat's confession on the grounds that he “felt uneasy about the amanuensis to whom his [Nat's] account was related and the conditions under which he confessed” (Preface to Black Thunder [1936; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1968], p. xii).

27 Mark Ottaway, “Tangled Roots,” London Times, 10 April 1977, pp. 17, 21. Unfortunately, Ottaway's attack on Haley's methodology has been taken in some quarters as general proof of the unreliability of African and Afro-American oral traditions.

28 “Interview: Alex Haley,” Playboy, Jan. 1977, p. 79.

29 Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), p. 662.