LITERARY SPECULATIONS

My first wife, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, wrote her doctoral dissertation in the Harvard English department on the novels of Samuel Richardson, a major 18^th-century English writer and often thought of, somewhat inaccurately, as the first English novelist (Fun fact: my 1948 edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum lists many minor Italian heretics but only one novel by an Englishman, namely Richardson’s Pamela.  I think the editors figured that if they banned the first English novel the others were more or less included.) Richardson wrote three massive novels, all of them in the format known as “epistolary.” That is to say, the novels consist of letters exchanged between characters in the novel without a narrative commentary or thread connecting them.  Literary scholars have devoted a fair amount of attention to Richardson and other early epistolary novelists and I imagine it would be hard to take a college course on the history of the novel without some mention being made of this form of fiction.

 

After I joined the Afro-American Studies department at the University of Massachusetts, I read a good many books that I had more or less ignored in my previous 58 years, among them the famous novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The Color Purple is an epistolary novel. The first line is direct discourse, after which there are 92 letters, some addressed by the main character, Celie, to God, some exchanged between Celie and her sister, Nettie.

 

Alice Walker’s choice of the epistolary form is so striking and so in contrast to the typical forms adopted by modern novelists, that it cries out for explanation. Why did she choose this antique form? What is its function, what does it tell us about Walker’s literary purposes? Since the letters written by Nettie are so noticeably different from those written by Celie, what is Walker trying to tell us by this authorial choice?

 

I think I know the answer to these questions and I have set them forth in a short essay which you can find archived in my box.net location, if you are interested. But more interesting even than the answers to these questions is the fact that I could not find a single journal article or other literary analysis of Walker’s novel that addressed them. I am not a literary scholar but I was married to one for 24 years so, as I like to say, I learned something about the literary critical profession through pillow talk.  I think it is virtually certain that if a prominent white male novelist chose to write an epistolary novel, the academic commentary would be full of speculation about the significance of this choice.

 

Folks these days are constantly arguing about institutional racism, unconscious racism, institutional sexism, unconscious sexism, and so forth. Since the examples given are upsetting and controversial, the arguments tend to proceed at a very heated level. It is sometimes worth stepping back from these fights and taking a look at an example that is, precisely because it is not so freighted with manifest injustices, capable of being analyzed quietly.

 

As I indicated in my little paper, Walker, in my opinion, had several very interesting and important purposes in choosing the epistolary form and in deploying it as she did.  I think it is manifestly obvious that the choice was deliberate, that she knew exactly what she was doing, and that the choice expresses a deliberate and very controversial attack on or counterpoint to the standard interpretations of the Harlem Renaissance and its importance in African-American culture.