Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century.

J. Lee Greene. Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996. 306 pp. $19.50.

Is the white American's heaven the black American's hell, as African American folklore teaches and J. Lee Greene's Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century argues? "The mode in which the American colonists wrote about the New World experience," Greene observes, "is what I call Anglo-American discourse on the American Edenic ideal (to which African American discourse on the same ideal is in binary opposition)." Is all African American oppositional discourse binary? Is the first century of the African American novel dialogic? Is the rhetoric of the black American novel merely a reaction to white myths of origin, fairy tales, and the King James Bible? Or is the truth much more complex and complicated by the irony and paradox of the historical dialectic and bidirectional crossing of geographical, racial, cultural, and class borders among Americans of British, European, and African descent?

Blacks in Eden is a grand book whose responses to the questions above will foster mixed emotions in literary specialists and general readers. At first glance the book is imposing in size and scope. But on closer examination we discover that what initially impressed us is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Beneath the surface of Greene's mythic and metaphorical title and thesis is an even more awesome presence that is only dimly suggested and felt in this interpretive history of the African American novel.

The preface to Blacks in Eden misleadingly claims that it is not a history of the novel because its focus is on "how the [Eden] tropic process configured and reconfigured subjectivity, emplotment, structure, and other formalist features during the genre's first century." The preface states that the study "precludes a general and chronological survey of novelists and novels under the rubric of 'periods,' trends, and movements." But the introduction identifies and the chapters describe permutations of the Eden trope in "five successive periods in the history of the nation (with emphasis on the South)." These periods include "America as an earthly paradise" (1490s to 1770s), "America as civil utopia" (Revolutionary and early national periods), "the South as a plantation idyll" (early 1800s to 1865), "the South's age of modem chivalry" (Reconstruction to World War I), and "the nation's age of the American Dream" (World War I to the 1950s and beyond).

Unfortunately, Blacks in Eden evades judiciously engaging other interpretive histories and studies that also discuss the important of the Edenic myth, King James Bible, African American vernacular forms, and other influences on the formal heteroglossic features of the African American novel, in a critical dialogue. Instead, Greene attempts to situate his discussion of the African American novel from the 1850s to the 1950s within the narrow context and language of the Eden trope. But the discussion of fairy tales and chivalric literature in the eight chapters and more than 300 pages of the book is clear evidence of its impressive, unexpected size and scope. These features and the cursory description of prizewinning, thematically related African American novels of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in the conclusion also indicate that its primary audiences are students and general readers.

Although specialists in narratology and African American literature will sense traces of the language of Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and other unacknowledged theorists in the body of the text, many students and general readers will probably welcome the minimal literary jargon and critical documentation in the book. But they will also probably be confused by the absence or inadequacy of definitions and theoretical contexts for such key terms as subjectivity, discourse, dialogism, and liminal. "Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia," we read in M. M. Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination. But Blacks in Eden does not focus sharply, clearly, and coherently on heteroglossia in the African American novel.

I have argued elsewhere that the first century of the African American novel is more dialectic than dialogic. Although both are discursive strategies that involve oppositional forces, dialectic signifies the dynamics of an historical process of inquiry for a provisional truth that synthesizes power differentials and partial views. In contrast, dialogics signify the dynamics of a rhetorical process that affirms a democratic articulation of different voices but neglects to consider the impact of power relationships on the process. Rather than an analytic history or study of the distinctive social dialogue among languages presented in the African American novel, Blacks in Eden reduces the style of the whole to an Edenic trope.

In addition, Greene's attempt to include the language of anthropology is flawed. An unelaborated endnote identifies Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner as the source of the term and definition of liminal that Greene borrows to examine the "emplotments" and the social state of "bright mulatto and white mulatto women as centered subjects" in novels published "from the 1850s through World War I." But he distorts the term and misapplies it by quoting van Gennep and Turner out of context and by neglecting to explain that they are anthropologists who developed the language primarily to describe the second spatial and transitional stage of triadic rites of passage in tribal societies.

Some readers will find Greene's uncritical use of the term mulatto equally problematic. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary indicates that the term is borrowed from Spanish mulato, signifying the first-generation offspring of a Negro and a white person. It is derived from the sixteenth-century Latin mulus, for 'mule,' an infertile hybrid offspring of two distinct species, a horse and an ass. The QED notes the first appearance in English of mulatto in 1595, in Sir Francis Drake's Voyages. Beginning with Enlightenment theories and typologies of racial difference and the subsequent rise of institutionalized racism in America in the nineteenth century, mulatto became the popular pejorative sign and synonym for Creole and hybrid identity formations, especially a person of visibly mixed European and African, white and black ancestry. Because of the power differential between the two groups, the oppositional relationship between them has been historically dialectical rather than binary or dialogical.

Mulattoes were often perceived by themselves and by others as biologically neither white nor black. Except in antebellum South Carolina and lower Louisiana, however, they were neither geographically nor physically separated into a third space or tier as a class from other blacks throughout the United States, as in Latin America and the Caribbean. The mulatto or Creole communities in Charleston, South Carolina, and in New Orleans and lower Louisiana were tolerated and even flourished as a powerful elite class from the colonial throughout the antebellum periods. In New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States Joel Williamson notes that "free mulattoes of the more affluent sort in the lower South were treated by influential whites as a third class, an acceptable and sometimes valuable intermediate element between black and white, slave and free." This racial formation and color line in South Carolina and Louisiana was largely the result of the direct immigration of people and institutions from t he West Indies during the first years of colonization and of continuing contact between the islands and the continent. The seventeenth-century descendants of the transplanted class of white Barbadian planters and their slaves were mainly responsible for establishing the free mulatto communities in Charleston, South Carolina. The descendants primarily of eighteenth-century Spanish settlers and French refugees from the Haitian Revolution developed similar communities in New Orleans and lower Louisiana.

As John Blassingame reminds us in Black New Orleans, 1860-1880, "Social classes grew up around color primarily because mulatto was generally a free man and a black man was almost always a slave....By law the light-skinned free Negro was barred from mingling with the dark-skinned slave, and he sometimes held slaves. The education, wealth, occupations, and refinement of the mulattoes also acted as a barrier to their intercourse with the poorer, less-skilled, and less-educated blacks." Miscegenation and common-law marriages arranged through quadroon balls were pervasive in New Orleans. But the ruling planter class segregated neither the mulattoes in the lower South nor those in the upper South for the socially sanctioned cultural purpose of transforming them into white subjects in order to integrate them into the ruling class with equal rights and privileges as American citizens. As the novels of Charles Chestnutt and James Weldon Johnson illustrate, this was the precarious prize for only those who cowardly or courageously crossed the color line without looking back. Subject to segregated public education, services, transportation, and accommodations, as well as to arrest at any time as a runaway slave, the free mulatto, Blassingame writes, "was a quasicitizen--he bore much of the responsibility of citizenship with few of its privileges."

Chapters Three, "Beauties and Beasts," and Seven, "Totems and Taboos," stand out as the most prominent and intriguing sections of Blacks in Eden. "The African American novel usually appropriates Madam Jenne-Marie Leprince de Baumont's English version of 'Beauty and the Beast' (1756)," Greene claims in Chapter Three. Even though he neglects to provide supportive evidence for this influence, Greene does examine "the male subject's formation" in four pre-1940s novels to illustrate how the morphological features of the fairy tale function as a convergence of symbolic sexual discourses on the civilization and socialization processes. "Beauty is a white woman, usually from the affluent class; Beast usually is a white mulatto man," Greene writes; "a sexual union between the two (typically marriage or a prospective marriage) is the vehicle that completes (or should complete) the transformation of Beast (i.e., a black man) into a handsome prince (i.e., a white man)." He argues that this beauty-and-the-beast paradigm was established in the African American novel by Frank J. Webb's The Caries and Their Friends, and expanded by Chestnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, explored more fully by Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and updated by George S. Schuyler's Black No More.

"Totems and Taboos" is probably the most original and fascinating development of Greene's dialogic thesis. "Several twentieth-century novels that install the Eden trope particularize it as the Adamic paradigm foreground the origin myth embedded in the Adamic story, and embellish it with totemic features, especially between the 1930s and the 1950s," Greene writes. "During this era the genre is replete with images, allusions, character clues, motifs, themes, narrative paradigms, and other formalist features that derive from the novelists interfacing biblical (Adamic myth) and anthropological (totemic) models of society." Focusing on relevant sections of four novels, he makes an elaborately detailed case for the thematization of miscegenation, sexuality, violence, and the lynching ritual as a black counterdiscourse to white Negrophobic discourse that blacks are primitive savages and whites are civilized human beings. The four novels are Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, Johnson's The Autobiography of an ExCol oured Man, Ellison's Invisible Man, and Waters Turpin's The Rootless.

Based on these novels, Greene argues rather convincingly that many twentieth-century African American novelists "present a white society (primarily but not exclusively southern) whose civil religion is a form of totemism." The principal source for the construction of this narrative portrait of the totemic white South is the African American novelist's assumed firsthand knowledge of "southern whites' sociocultural forms, manners, customs, and modes of thought." Since many were not Southerners, the novelists more likely extracted white modes of thought "from the region's textualized history (its discourse of the Edenic ideal), which included literary, social, political, historical and religious texts as well as monuments, art objects, and other forms of textualized history."

My reading of the dialogic imagination of the first century of African American novel in Blacks in Eden reveals that not all African American oppositional discourse is binary. Nor does Greene clearly and coherently demonstrate that the early novel is more dialogic than dialectic. Beneath the surface of this grand iceberg of a book is a sea of dialectic, often subversive, voices and languages. Although Greene reduces the basic forms and strategies for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the African American novel to permutations of the Edenic myth and metaphor, Blacks in Eden is a highly provocative, occasionally original, and useful interpretive history of the African American novel for graduate students and general readers.