A Novel Ahead of Time
The gatekeepers of American culture who think American
literature is dying as their worlds hip hop to a start can find consolation in
Mat Johnson’s Pym: A Novel (New York:
Spiegel & Grau, 2010). The book
extends the olive branch of hope. It is
evidence of things not seen. If the
gatekeepers have not been convinced to stop playing at being Melchizedek by
Garry Will’s Why Priests? : A Failed
Tradition (New York: Viking, 2013), Pym
will teach them the errors of their ways.
Pym restores the
centrality of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), in American Studies. It confirms that white cannot possess “the
perfect whiteness of snow” without a drop of black. “Whatever twentieth-century ‘whites’ think
about ‘blacks,’ according to Joseph R. Urgo’s Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American
Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), “they owe their
existence ---politically and culturally, and in many cases, genetically --- to
those same black drops”(19).
American gatekeepers, especially the neoconservative ones,
thrive in the sugar ditch of binary thinking.
From time to time, however, a few of them recognize society
has more than two dimensions. Literature does sometimes manage to make an
effective wake-up call. Consider Charles
Johnson’s Middle Passage. That novel appropriated segments of Herman
Melville’s classic “Benito Cereno” to create a new, post-whatever African American
narrative and to give “double consciousness” a proper burial. Mat Johnson goes a step further. He creates a smart American narrative that
guarantees the kind of immortality evoked in William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 81:
When all the breathers of this world are dead/ You still shall live – such virtue
hath my pen --/Where breath most breathes, even in the mouth of men.
By resurrecting and blackening Edgar Allan Poe, Mat Johnson
precludes the death of American literature and the obliteration of “whiteness.”
We now have 666 dimensions of
consciousness.
Ethiopian hieroglyphics live.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. August
22, 2013
