Post-Antebellum Novels

I’ve recently been reading material that addresses the antebellum era in American history and literature. Several texts come to mind: Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Each of these texts brings a unique approach to the period. I’m in the process of getting published in the era of antebellum fiction, and these texts provide a belwether of literary attitudes towards a controversial era.

Harris’ The Sweetness of Water (2021), addresses two former slaves, Prentiss and Landry — freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. They seek refuges on the homestead of George Walker and his wife Isabelle. They go on an unabated quest to reunite with their mother. The most poignant moment is between two gay ex-confederate soldiers who at the conclusion of the novel, have a forbidden romance. I thought that this work was a little ham-handed, but still carried on the tradition of chronicling slavery in the tradition of Edward P. Jones.

Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966), recounts the internal monologue of a historical leader of a slave rebellion — Nat Turner. He is equally slave, preacher, and executive of this slave rebellion. Nat was caught with a sword (slaves did not have access to firearms) after murdering several inhabitants of a Virginia town. This work shows the scar of slavery, and how it mutilated race relations at the time. The novel is typical of Styron’s free indirect discourse, and shows how one polarizing figure can become the avatar of abolition several decades before the Civil War.

In Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Caesar, a slave who had arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, a secret method that slaves used in order to escape from the slave states in the South to Northern states and Canada. Cora embarks on a “harrowing flight” from slavery that draws comparisons to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1). The quest to escape the horrors of bondage of chattel slavery gives us a contemporary account of what it must have been like to participate in this diaspora, popularized by the renegade slave Harriet Tubman.

In each of these tales, we get a jarred sense of the scourge of slavery, and how this moral stain continues to affect the history of the United States. I would also recommend the work of historian Jill Lepore in These Truths, an expansive history of the United States. For anyone interested in this topic, there are countless examples of antebellum historical fiction that gives us a good sense of what was at stake in the abolition movement, which has a vise grip on the social fabric of the antebellum period, but which also informs our understanding of race relations in the 21st century.

Works Cited

Harris, Nathan. The Sweetness of Water. Back Bay Books, 2021, pp. 1-101.

Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. Norton, 2018, pp. 153-272.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. Vintage, 1966, pp. 1-117.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Anchor Books, 2016, pp.1-135.

Modern American Lit (actually…)

I recently picked up Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky (1959). I got this book mainly because Dave Eggers had a blurb on the front cover, and I read everything that Eggers writes. But I was actually very interested in exploring Bowles, a fine writer from the 20th century that I had only a little experience with. (There are so many authors from the 20th century American scene! Especially pre- and post- World War II authors like James Agee.)

This work picks up on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and gives it a new twist: these are expatriates in Oran, Algeria. The main character, Port, experiences some malaise as his wife is enticed by a man during their train ride to Tangiers. Port is an interesting character because he neither typifies the American expatriate, nor the tourist. He likes to think of himself as the “traveller” instead of a “tourist” (12). This makes him thoroughly uprooted from his native country, the United States.

The main issue in this particular work is that the characters are ‘deracinés’ which is a French word for people who are no longer tied to the land. This uprooted quality of the text is what makes it hypnotic. You can never tell whether the characters are actually American or North African. Because they aren’t ‘natives’ in any sense of the word. But Bowles skillfully weaves this aimlessness into the narrative: “[The bar] was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things” (49).

Then there is the hypnotic magical realism at work in this novel: “Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” (229). At times, Bowles is at pains to express the danger inherent in the Sahara. There seems to be only some comfort in the sky. In some sense, we see the sky “le ciel” (in French) as the “sacred canopy” that is described in Peter L. Berger’s work of the same name.

We have a ‘Sheltering Sky’ in which a hole is torn into it. When men and women used to trust in God, they have now an existential universe that is plagued by secularism. For this reason, it is necessary to “re-enchant” the cosmos, as Charles Taylor argues in his A Secular Age (101).

Works Cited:

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. Anchor Books, 1969, p.102.

Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. Ecco, 1959, pp. 2-229.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap, 2010, p.101

American Lit (classically)

I’m teaching American Lit this fall, and I’m trying to rack my brain. I need the spirit of the ages to complete the thing. I spent the week trying to assemble a reading list for my students, and frankly, I’m still reeling with the challenge.

Mainly, the issue that is confronting many classrooms is that some canonical texts are considered to be racist. But I concur with the notion that these works have stood the test of time for reasons unrelated to their inherent racism. We can still get a lot out of reading these texts, even though we don’t necessarily think the same way that they did.

This is also part of the internal zeitgeist of the American literary canon. Some have suggested that like Delillo’s Underworld, American literary icons produce these cultural artefacts that tell us more about the age that they were written in than anything about the “warm-blooded” individuals that make up a society.

I’ve got a pretty good handle on the subject matter, but I want to inspire my students. I want to make sure that all the bases are covered. If I drop the ball, it won’t be because I haven’t prepared a lot. I need a lot of encouragement, and frankly, it’s coming from the bottom up.

I’m looking to cover the antebellum period with reference to Transcendentalism (Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau) and a peek into Henry James in the post-bellum period. What seems less opaque is the transbellum period (1860-1865). The journalism of Whitman is always helpful, but may need some scaffolding to truly understand.

I think the main thing that I’m wrestling with is how to present the literary period without too much historical background, and yet to couch it in terms of literary movements that defined the period. I love Henry Adams ‘The Education of Henry Adams,’ but am not sure that my students would take well to it.

It is important not to overload the students with text. They have a significant reading load and get behind easily. So the main issue might to be to contextualize the text that they are reading instead of introducing new text as a rule. Georgia State can be a place where students feel a little lost, so it’s good not to impose too much upon them.

What is paramount is to imaginatively transport students to the time period in which this piece was written. To do this, I often imaginatively ‘reenact’ the literature, especially to pique their interest. In this way, we are able to ‘walk a mile in the shoes’ of the writer, and get a better handle on the material.