Book Review - The Truth of Fiction and The Known World

By James Eze

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is one book that will engage the interest of the attentive world for a long time. It is not necessarily because the book won a Pulitzer; one of America’s most coveted prizes, or because of any striking signs of craftsmanship in the book. No. The Known World compels attention because it is wonderful example of how not to story a people. But most importantly, it compels attention because of its subject matter – slavery. And it is not just the story of slavery as we know it. It is the story of erstwhile slaves who suddenly turned slave owners. It is the story of black men and women whose sensibilities to injustice had become so dead that they turned round to hold fellow blacks in a subhuman grip, moments after tasting freedom. It is an unlikely story to be written by a black man but one which Jones, an African-American raised by a single mother in the Washington DC area, wrote with relish to the applause of the former enslavers of his ancestors.

In The Truth of Fiction, a 1978 lecture he delivered at the University of Ife, Chinua Achebe described art as “man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him, an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination”.

This definition offers a rich canvass upon which to examine The Known World and the ignoble mission of its author. Drawing from a large cast of characters, Edward P. Jones whose debut effort, Lost in the City, had shown a remarkable promise, set out to probe the conundrum of black Americans who owned human property in America. Slavery was always going to be a touchy issue between Africa and the West but The Known World is diabolically evocative. Jones’ fictive universe as shown in the book is a curious one, peopled by capricious characters, from the peripatetic William Robins and his eccentric horse – Sir Guilderman, through rebellious Henry Townsend and his dim-witted wife, Caldonia, to the unconscionably ambitious Moses, the morally upright Augustus Townsend, the half-crazed Alice and a tribe of minor characters who should have been left out of the tale at best. Essentially though, The Known World is the story of Henry Townsend, an inveterate slave owner who defied his father to become a prosperous owner of slaves in a society that held his kindred in perpetual slavery. There’s a seeming irony in the fact that Henry himself was a former slave whose freedom was bought by Augustus, his father and Jones’ symbol of morality in the book who hates the very idea of slavery with all his being. Henry Townsend learnt nothing about his slave years and had no qualms buying fellow blacks and holding them in slavery. Under the tutelage of his former master, Robins, Henry built an impressive estate for himself on the blood of his slaves. The Known World is a laborious read and but for a few occasions of brilliance and the antics of rough hewn characters like Sheriff John Skiffington and the startling unveiling of the half-deranged Alice as a gifted artist and entrepreneur in the concluding chapters, would have passed for a flat, uninspiring narrative that brims with needless minutiae of history. The book is painfully over researched and most of the historical facts do not exist in reality. Still, America’s literary judges hold The Known World in high esteem. But it is almost obvious, why Jones’ effort was so well rewarded. It is a hideous piece of expiating and apologetic literature. It helps the descendants of slave merchants and owners to look back at their heritage with less burden of guilt. Jones’ book reassures them of the rightness of their fathers’ deeds since even blacks, in Jones’ fictive reverie, enslaved fellow blacks in America of the time.

 

Edward P. Jones

Set in Manchester County, The Known World opens with a lurid depiction of the book’s unlikely hero, Moses, in the woods. Jones’ prose carries neither lightning nor thunder but just enough sparkle to drive the narrative. Nothing in the opening pages prepares the reader for the mindless details of irrelevant history that would assail him in the later chapters, though. But Jones manages to steer the reader to encounter each character from their final moments – a narrative technique that is needlessly experimental and could easily stifle the curiosity of the less patient reader. And there are times in the book when this technique pose a problem to the author’s supreme control of the plot. For instance, no sooner has Moses been introduced than Jones has, in exercise of his omniscience powers as his creator, pointed out that when he was an old man and rheumatism chained his body, he would look back and blame the chains on evenings such as these, when he laid in a little neck of wood, masturbating and eating dirt in the rain. But the careful reader would notice that Moses never made it to old age. Not in The Known World. Yet, Jones had to throw in that splinter to re-enforce the negative stereotype of his people. When this is added to his portrayal of Caledonia’s mother as a murderer who poisoned her husband for no clear motive, the picture of a dysfunctional people that Jones strives so hard to paint begins to emerge from the canvass. The overall message is clear – black people are no good. They rightly deserve history’s short end of the stick.

This fragment of illogic out of Jones’ fevered imagination reminds one of Chinua Achebe’s division of fiction into two broad categories in the lecture earlier cited. “There are fictions that help and those that hinder. For simplicity, let us call them beneficent and malignant fictions”, Achebe had observed. It is almost evident where The Known World belongs in these categories. It may be true to argue that fiction does not set out to please those about whom it is written but it is also true that The Known World was written to please a particular audience. The question then is could Jones have written a good story without further dispossession of his people? Well, may be. Now, could The Known World have been written in such a way that it confers dignity on African Americans without losing its core themes? The answer is “yes”. A major feature of The Known World is its absolute lack of a positive black character, its tendentious argument on the culpability of black people in the evil of slavery and its general undertone of a 21^st century black Conrad, out to justify the continuing evil of racism as the Heart of Darkness sought brazenly, in its time, to justify slavery, racism and colonialism with a bare knuckle portrayal of blacks as a little better than animals. This may well be the point from where Edward P. Jones makes a clear departure from the glorious path of his literary ancestors like James Baldwin whose resolute stand against racial wrongs upon his fellow African Americans is legendary. It is also a point from where a clear line could be drawn between Jones’ understanding of his writerly calling and Chinua Achebe’s sense of history’s demand on his art. Writing in yet another seminal essay, The Novelist as a Teacher, Achebe defines his mission thus: “Here is an adequate revolution for me to espouse…to help my society regain belief in itself and to put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement” It is certainly not clear whether Jones is utterly ignorant of the great redemptive possibilities of his art and willfully lends it to mischief. But it is clear that he has chosen the brittle touch of malignant fiction against his community to achieve instant acclaim. The good news is that he succeeded. That bad is that this success will always bring him pain from his own people.

It has always been known that every fiction carries a measure of truth. Some people might ask what truth, or whose truth? But there is always a fragment of truth to fiction. And there are many truths, besides. There are convenient and inconvenient truths depending the side of the coin one belongs. And this is why the truth of fiction inspires so much fear. The reason is simple. Again, Chinua Achebe gives us a handle here. “…only the story…can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters”, he remarked in Anthills of the Savannah. The silent power of the story that outlasts the boom of war drums and the blast of mortars inspires a special kind of awe in the audience. Dictators of all ilk and other manipulators of common will leave in mortal fear of this power and this has often led to the frosty relations between artists and maximum rulers. It is a sacred power which the artist holds in trust for his people and one he must not abuse. Yet there is sadly a growing feeling that Edward P. Jones may have abused this gift in The Known World. This perhaps explains why writing for Story South, Dan Schneider predicted that “As it is, time will not be kind to this flabby and overrated book”. It is hoped that Schneider’s prophecy does not come true so that Jones will be saved the harsh verdict of history.