Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel.

Jerry Bryant. Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997. 374 pp. $19.95.

Bryant's study explores racial violence in African American novels from William Wells Brown's Clotel to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Keeping to a strict chronology until his discussion of Wright's Native Son, Bryant accepts as given the violence prevalent in the Black experience, past and present, then moves to explore the literary side of the issue--how Black writers respond to the racial violence evident around them and what forms they select to express their response to racial violence. In this, I believe that Bryant is after some sense of the heroic dimensions of Black life as physically lived. In most instances this will mean male-authored work, and the paradigm of the lone male against a hostile, unforgiving world. This position is not conducive to exploring how the community itself defines heroism. It also insists upon consideration of the collision of two ethics that Sherley A. Williams demonstrated in Give Birth to Brightness: A criminal in the white world might be a hero in the Black world. Some of this is touched upon in interesting ways; some of this is ignored.

Using the slave narrative as a beginning model, Bryant locates few truly heroic figures, in the sense of physical defiance. He does see the victimization of the slave who would defy as an important instrument of abolition, though these actions usually do not result in racial equality. Thus Douglass's Narrative, long considered the classic example of control and eloquence in the slave narrative, is a good choice to begin the discussion of violence, character, and literary structures. However, I was a bit perplexed that Bryant chose not to note Robert Stepto's important notion of the quest for literacy and the quest for the heroic voice (as opposed to physical confrontation) in establishing another basis for heroism in the nineteenth-century genre. At any rate, the early discussion offers us victims of mob violence (Clotel) and the racial avenger (Blake, or the Huts of America) as the limits of Black response. At the same time, the argument demonstrates one of the limitations of earlier criticism of African Ame rican fiction: the novel as sociology. When this book succumbs to this view, it loses its potential to open up an important discussion of varieties of heroism in Afro-American fiction. However, at other points--the Toomer and Baldwin analyses, for example--its discussions of changing metaphors of violence describe some literary shifts effectively.

Bryant moves through the Reconstruction period, cites the solid work of Chesnutt (Marrow of Tradition) and James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man) along his way to reaching the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. During the post-war period, Bryant locates fiction which does not simply propagandize against mob violence but views it and other violence "to be a dramatic complement to black life." In his discussion of two episodes in Jean Toomer's Cane, Bryant designates the shift of emphasis from the literal to the literary ("Blood-Burning Moon"). In his discussion of "Kabnis," the narrative of the forlorn teacher/artist, Bryant notes the specific and effective use of the story-within-the-story to both report a violent incident from the past and heighten suspense in the present. During the later period, as lynchings are less prevalent in the fiction as compared to the depictions at the end of nineteenth century, Black characters in fiction still remain primarily non-violent.

Among most recent works, Bryant locates the most searing and sophisticated commentary on racial violence in Wright's Native Son, Ellison's Invisible Man, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Morrison's Song of Solomon. He is clear and direct in his depiction of violence in these works and in his discussion of Wright especially. Here, for example, Bryant stresses the notion that Bigger Thomas can be a substitute for a modern existential hero--the violent act ripping any shroud of morality away and the modern hero inventing himself after the dramatic act. This is not the first time Wright's novel has been read this way, but in the context of a study exploring racial violence, it claims an interesting "modernist" place. Bryant credits Baldwin, who set his first published novel in 1935, eighteen years before his novel was published, with demonstrating that for new life of Black America only the "full absorption of the pain of the past" could work. For Ellison, Bryant identifies the use of irony and intellect over violence as coping strategies. Morrison shifts the issues from racial conflict as an arbiter of heroism to the recognition and encounter of profound issues within the group; at the same time vigilance toward the ever-present outsiders is maintained.

The book draws interesting connections and an intriguing lineage among the Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison works. However, dualities such as the aesthetes vs. Naturalists sometime fail and constrain this book from other important work it could have done. Bryant rejects retaliatory violence out of hand as suicidal or wish-fulfillment at the same time he seems surprised that writers have culled other means for suggesting a simple heroism for that figure, for example, who in her/his blues-like optimism gets up to face and create each day.

What are the contemporary terms for heroism in the face of physical, emotional, or intellectual repression? How are these culled from the Afro-American/Black diasporan canons? A sharper sense of how the works speak to one another in addition to a direct reflection of the time period might have provided a more useful way of forwarding this important topic.