The Source of Self-Regard
I WANT TO TALK about two books in a way in which I understand a kind of progression to have taken place in my work, to talk a little bit about Beloved and a little bit about a new novel, and to suggest to you some of the obstacles that I created for myself in developing these books, and perhaps to talk, and illustrate by very short examples in the books, ways in which I approached the work.
I was told by somebody at a very, very large state university, “You know that you,” meaning me, “are taught in twenty-three separate classes on this campus.” Not twenty-three separate groups of students, but twenty-three different subject-matter classes. And I was very flattered by that, and very interested in that, but a little bit overwhelmed, because I thought, well, outside of, say, African American literature or women’s studies, or who knows, maybe even English departments and places like that, how could there be twenty-three? Well, some of them were legal studies, and some of them were courses in history, and some of them courses in politics, some of them were in psychiatry, in all sorts of things. And aside from some obvious things that I could claim about Beloved, it did seem to me that it had become a kind of an all-purpose, highly serviceable source for some discourse in various disciplines and various genres and various fields.
And I thought, well then, there is not only perhaps a hunger for the information, maybe the book is a kind of substitute and a more intimate version of history, and in that way becomes serviceable in a way in which, perhaps, other novels that I have written have never become. Song of Solomon is not read that way, Sula’s not read that way, but Beloved is read that way and perhaps that’s why it was distributed so widely on a campus that could accommodate many, many disciplines and genres and approaches. So my feeling was that it was kind of intimate but perhaps also kind of a shortcut to history. So I want to talk about how history is handled, or I had to handle it, in the writing of Beloved. And then segue from the impact of history on this fictional form, for me, into the culture of a later period, the twenties, and how that influenced my construction of the new book, Jazz.
In trying to think through how one deals with something as formidable and as well researched as history, and how one can convert it, or ignore it, or break its bounds or what have you in order to develop the novel, I was talking a couple of years ago to an audience in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that audience was made up of librarians and people from the community and students and many teachers, high school teachers and private school teachers, and during the question-and-answer period following my reading and talk, one of the teachers asked me a question. She wanted to know whether as the author of Beloved, I could give her any information on how to teach that novel when, as she said, there were no CliffsNotes available. Well, I was a little astonished by her question. I mean, I would not have been astonished if a student had asked me, but I was a little astonished because she did, and so I said, “Well, I don’t really know how to teach Beloved, and I certainly don’t know how to tell you how to teach it, but since you say there are no CliffsNotes, maybe one of the ways to teach it is to have your students make some.” And she sort of smiled and looked as though I had not treated her question seriously, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
But what’s interesting is that later, six or seven months later, I got a large package from her, and in that package were three issues or editions, I guess you could call them, of CliffsNotes. And what she had done is taken my answer to heart and given her honors students the assignment of producing CliffsNotes for the novel. She divided them into three teams, and each team produced a booklet with a cover and preface and acknowledgments and table of contents and then that long, so-called analysis that you see in CliffsNotes. And each one had received a prize—one through three—and the students sent me their pictures of their team, holding their names up. And they wrote letters.
Clearly, in order to do that, they had to read the book very carefully, they had to do secondary source readings, they had to make literary references and cross-references and so on. So it turned out, I’m sure, to be a very interesting project. I read their letters very carefully, and most of them were complimentary, but you know the nice thing about high school students is that they are not obliged to be complimentary, and particularly after they have done all that work they feel very authoritative and they don’t have to compliment you at all. And so they asked me questions that they had not been able to answer sufficiently to satisfy themselves. I am leading up to what I found to be one of the principal complaints they had. The consistent one, the one that if you took all the complaints and rolled them into one, that they were really expressing, was that they were either alarmed or offended by explicit sexuality in Beloved and the candor with which some of those scenes were described, and they didn’t understand the necessity for the use of that kind of candor. On the one hand, it was reassuring to find students still shockable in terms of sexuality being described, so I felt pretty good about that, but on the other hand it was very disturbing to me because nobody was offended or confused or unable to understand the context in which the story is set, which is slavery. The sexuality troubled them. But the violence and the criminality and the license in that institution did not alarm or offend them.
I thought this pointed to one of the problems of writing novels that have a historical basis: that is, you don’t question the history. Or really analyze it or confront it in some manner that is at odds with the historian or even the novelist’s version of it. One sort of takes it, swallows it, agrees with it. Nothing is aslant. Although in fact, the reason I had written the book was to enter into that historical period from some point of view that was entirely different from standard history, not in terms of data or information but in terms of what it was able to elicit from the reader. It seemed that everything came under review in the text by these very clever students, except the major assumptions of the text. So either I did it very well, or I did it very badly.
But in truth, the problem lay in the nature of the beast itself—in the nature of trying to marry a certain kind of terribly familiar but at the same time estranging history. The question being, how to elicit critical thinking and draw out some honest art form from the silences and the distortions and the evasions that are in the history as received, as well as the articulation and engagement of a history that is so fraught with emotion and so fraught and covered with a profound distaste and repugnance. Because I would assume that everybody would either understand it, rationalize it, defend it, or be repelled by that history. So my job as a novelist was to try to make it palatable and at the same time disenfranchise the history, in a sense. The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with, or rather the effort to disentangle the grip of history while remaining in its palm, so to speak. Especially this particular piece of history and this particular novel.
For the purposes of the rest of this talk I want us to agree that in all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be, or that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.