And what if When She Was Good had been published under the name Philip McGrath? Would the same reviewers still have denounced it as an artistic imposture? Does anyone imagine that Zero Mostel would have come to mind? Yet there is a twist in the tale. Even a counterfeit can be praised for its craft. For some, the novel’s worth was enhanced precisely because of its “inauthenticity”—because it was seen as an act of imagination unassisted by memory.
Under any name, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day—a novel narrated by an aging and veddy English butler—would be a tour de force; but wasn’t the acclaim that greeted it heightened by a kind of critical double take at the youthful Japanese face on the dust jacket? To take another example, no one is surprised that admirers of Norman Rush’s novel Mating would commend the author on the voice of its female narrator. Subtract from the reality column, add to the art column. Thus Doris Grumbach, who commended Mr. Roth’s novel for its careful observation, concludes her own review with an assessment of technique: “To bring off this verisimilitude is, to my mind, an enormous accomplishment.” Would she have been so impressed with the virtuosity of a Philip McGrath?
Sometimes, however, a writer’s identity is in fact integral to a work’s artifice. Such is the case with John Updike’s Bech: A Book, the first of two collections of short stories featuring Mr. Updike’s Jewish novelist, Henry Bech. The 1970 book opens with a letter from the protagonist, Henry, to his creator, John, fussing about the literary components from which he was apparently jury-rigged. At first blush (Bech muses), he sounds like “some gentlemanly Norman Mailer; then that London glimpse of silver hair glints more of gallant, glamorous Bellow. . . . My childhood seems out of Alex Portnoy and my ancestral past out of I. B. Singer. I get a whiff of Malamud in your city breezes, and am I paranoid to feel my ‘block’ an ignoble version of the more or less noble renunciations of H. Roth, D. Fuchs and J. Salinger? Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared and insultingly ironical that derives, my wild surmise is, from you.”
What is clear is that part of the point of John Updike’s Bech is that he is John Updike’s Bech: an act Cynthia Ozick has described as “cultural impersonation.” The contrast between Bech and Updike, then, far from being irrelevant, is itself staged within the fictional edifice. You could publish Bech under a pseudonym, but, I maintain, it would be a different book.
Conversely—but for similar reasons—one might argue that exposing the true author of Famous All Over Town, a colorful picaresque novel set in a Los Angeles barrio, was a form of violence against the book itself. Published in 1983 under the nom de plume Danny Santiago, the book was hailed by Latino critics for its vibrancy and authenticity, and received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for an outstanding work of fiction. But Santiago, assumed to be a young Chicano talent, turned out to be Daniel L. James, a septuagenarian WASP educated at Andover and Yale, a playwright, screenwriter and, in his later years, a social worker. And yet Danny Santiago was much more than a literary conceit to his creator, who had for twenty years lost faith in his own ability to write; Danny was the only voice available to him. Judging from the testimony of his confidant, John Gregory Dunne, Mr. James may well have felt that the attribution was the only just one; that Famous All Over Town belonged to Danny Santiago before it quite belonged to Daniel James.
Death-of-the-author types cannot come to grips with the fact that a book is a cultural event; authorial identity, mystified or not, can be part of that event. What the ideologues of authenticity cannot quite come to grips with is that fact and fiction have always exerted a reciprocal effect on each other. However truthful you set out to be, your autobiography is never unmediated by literary structures of expression. Many authentic slave narratives were influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe; on the other hand, authentic slave narratives were among Stowe’s primary sources for her own imaginative work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the same token, to recognize the slave narrative as a genre is to recognize that, for example, Frederick Douglass’s mode of expression was informed by the conventions of antecedent narratives, some of which were (like James Williams’s) whole-cloth inventions.
So it is not just a matter of the outsider boning up while the genuine article just writes what he or she knows. If Shane Stevens was deeply influenced by Richard Wright, so too were black protest novelists like John O. Killens and John A. Williams. And if John Updike can manipulate the tonalities of writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, must we assume that a Bruce Jay Friedman, say, is wholly unaffected by such models?
The distasteful truth is that like it or not, all writers are “cultural impersonators.”
Even real people, moreover, are never quite real. My own favorite (fictional) commentary on the incursion of fiction upon a so-called real life is provided by Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert as he reflects upon the bothersome task of swapping life stories with a new and unwanted wife. Her confessions were marked by “sincerity and artlessness,” his were “glib compositions”; and yet, he muses, “technically the two sets were congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis, and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression.”
Start interrogating the notion of cultural authenticity and our most trusted critical categories come into question. Maybe Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town can usefully be considered a work of Chicano literature; maybe Shane Stevens’s Way Uptown in Another World can usefully be considered within the genre of black protest novels. In his own version of the blindfold test, the mathematician Alan Turing famously proposed that we credit a computer with intelligence if we can conduct a dialogue with it and not know whether a person or machine has been composing the responses. Should we allow ethnic literatures a similar procedure for claiming this title?
At this point, it is important to go slow. Consider the interviewer’s chestnut: are you a woman writer or a writer who happens to be a woman? A black writer or a writer who happens to be a black? Alas, these are deadly disjunctions. After struggling to gain the recognition that a woman or a black (or, exemplarily, a black woman) writer is, in the first instance, a writer, many authors yet find themselves uneasy with the supposedly universalizing description. How can ethnic or sexual identity be reduced to a mere contingency when it is so profoundly a part of who a writer is?
And yet if, for example, black critics claim special authority as interpreters of black literature, and black writers claim special authority as interpreters of black reality, are we not obliged to cede an equivalent dollop of authority to our white counterparts?
We easily become entrapped by what the feminist critic Nancy K. Miller has called “as a” criticism: where we always speak “as a” white middle-class woman, a person of color, a gay man, and so on. And that, too, is a confinement—in the republic of letters as in the larger policy. “Segregation today . . . Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever”: that line, which Asa Earl Carter wrote for George Wallace’s inauguration speech as Governor, may still prove his true passport to immortality. And yet segregation—as Carter himself would demonstrate—is as difficult to maintain in the literary realm as it is in the civic one.
The lesson of the literary blindfold test is not that our social identities don’t matter. They do matter. And our histories, individual and collective, do affect what we wish to write and what we are able to write. But that relation is never one of fixed determinism. No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Danny Santiago. And—if you like that sort of thing—there is a Little Tree, too, just as treacly now as he ever was. And as long as there are writers who combine some measure of imagination and curiosity, there will continue to be such interlopers of the literary imagination. What, then, of the vexed concept of authenticity? To borrow from Samuel Goldwyn’s theory of sincerity, authenticity remains
essential: once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
SOURCE: Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, 1991. Reprinted in Stories Matter: The Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Children’s Literature, edited by Dana L. Fox and Kathy G. Short (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003).
THE CHITLIN CIRCUIT
THE SETTING WAS the McCarter Theatre, a brick-and-stone edifice on the outskirts of the Princeton University campus. On a hot, sticky evening last June, five hundred members of the Theatre Communications Group—all representatives of serious, which is to say nonprofit, theatre—had gathered for their eleventh biennial national conference. The keynote speech was being delivered by August Wilson, who, at fifty-one, is probably the most celebrated American playwright now writing and is certainly the most accomplished black playwright in this nation’s history. Before he said a word, the largely white audience greeted him with a standing ovation.
That was the conference’s last moment of unanimity. For here, at this gathering of saints, the dean of American dramatists had come to deliver an unexpected and disturbing polemic. American theatre, Wilson declared, was an instrument of white cultural hegemony, and the recent campaign to integrate and diversify it only made things worse. The spiritual and moral survival of black Americans demanded that they be given a stage of their own. They needed their very own theatres the way they needed sunlight and oxygen. They needed integration the way they needed acid rain.
“There are and have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black art: that is, art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society, and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of black America,” Wilson told his Princeton audience, in a quietly impassioned voice. “The second tradition occurred when the African in the confines of the slave quarters sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by conceiving in his art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the spiritual center.” That was the tradition Wilson found to be exemplified by the Black Power movement of the sixties and its cultural arm, the Black Arts scene. Revolutionary Black Arts dramatists such as Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka were models for authentic black creativity, Wilson maintained, and he placed himself in their direct line of descent.
“His speech was shocking and it was thrilling,” recalled Ricardo Khan, the president of the Theatre Communications Group and the artistic director of the country’s premier black repertory company, the Crossroads Theatre, in New Brunswick. Wilson is light-skinned, with sparse hair and a close-cropped beard: to some in the audience, he brought to mind Maulana Karenga (“Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution”); to others, Ernst Blofeld (“Hot enough for you, Mr. Bond?”). The black members of the audience started glancing at one another: heads bobbed, a black-power sign was flashed, encouragement was murmured—“Go ahead, brother,” “Tell it.” Many white audience members, meanwhile, began to shift uneasily, gradually acquiring an expression compounded of pain and puzzlement: After all we’ve done for him, this is how he thanks us? The world of nonprofit theatre is tiny but intense, and, as soon became clear, Wilson’s oration was its version of the Simpson verdict.
In the conversational ferment that ensued, almost every conceivable question was given a full airing: Did Wilson’s call for an autonomous black theatre amount to separatism? Did race matter to culture, and if so, how much? Was Wilson’s salvific notion of the theatre—and his dream of a theatre that would address ordinary black folk—mere romantic delusion? In the course of much high-minded hand-wringing, practically the only possibility not broached was that a black theatre for the masses already existed—just not of an order that anybody in the world of serious theatre had in mind.
What attracted the greatest immediate attention was Wilson’s unqualified denunciation of color-blind casting. To cast black actors in “white” plays was, he said, “to cast us in the role of mimics.” Worse, for a black actor to walk the stage of Western drama was to collaborate with the culture of racism, “to be in league with a thousand naysayers who wish to corrupt the vigor and spirit of his heart.” An all-black production of “Death of a Salesman,” say, would “deny us our own humanity.”
Not surprisingly, Wilson’s stand on this issue has found little acceptance among working black actors, dramatists, and directors. Lloyd Richards—Wilson’s long-time director and creative partner—has never thought twice about casting James Earl Jones as Timon of Athens or as Judge Brack in “Hedda Gabler.” Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate, staunchly declares, “I can assure you that if ‘Death of a Salesman’ were performed in Nigeria by an all-Eskimo cast it would have resonances totally outside the mediation of color.” What’s more surprising is that many stars of the Black Arts firmament are equally dismissive. “If O.J. can play a black man, I don’t see any problem with Olivier playing Othello,” Amiri Baraka says, with a mordant laugh. And the legendary black playwright and director Douglas Turner Ward claims that many of Sean O’Casey’s plays, with their ethos of alienation, actually work better with black actors.
But the dissent on color-blind casting was almost something of a footnote to Wilson’s larger brief—that of encouraging the creation of an authentic black theatre. As he saw it, the stakes couldn’t be greater. Black theatre could help change the world: it could be “the spearhead of a movement to reignite and reunite our people’s positive energy for a political and social change that is reflective of our spiritual truths rather than economic fallacies.” The urgency of this creed led to a seemingly self-divided rhetoric. On the one hand, Wilson maintained that “we cannot depend on others,” that we must be a “self-determining, self-respecting people.” On the other hand, this self-sufficiency was to be subsidized by foundations and government agencies.
If Wilson’s rhetoric struck many of his listeners as contradictory—seeming to alternate the balled fist and the outstretched palm—the contradictions only multiplied upon further investigation. August Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel, is in some respects an unlikely spokesman for a new Black Arts movement. He neither looks nor sounds typically black—had he the desire, he could easily pass—and that makes him black first and foremost by self-identification. (His father was a German-American baker in Pittsburgh, where he grew up.) Some see significance in this. The estimable black playwright OyamO, né Charles Gordon, says, “Within our history, many people who are lighter—including the very lightest of us, who can really pass—are sometimes the most angry.”
Nor has it escaped comment that Wilson failed to acknowledge his own power and stature within the world of mainstream theatre: his works début at major Broadway theatres, and the white critical establishment has honored them with a cascade of Pulitzer, Drama Desk, and Tony awards. The experimental black playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, whose works include “Venus” and “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,” says, “August can start by having his own acclaimed plays première in black theatres, instead of where they première now. I’m sorry, but he should examine his own house.” One historical luminary of black theatre charges that Wilson himself is the problem of which he purports to hold the solution: “Once the white mainstream theatre found a black artistic spokesman, the one playwright who could do no wrong, the money that used to go to autonomous black theatre started to dry up.”
And yet, on closer examination, sharply drawn lines of battle begin to blur. Wilson’s oration provoked a swinging rebuttal in American Theatre by Robert Brustein, who is the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, the drama critic for The New Republic, and a long-time sparring partner of Wilson’s. Brustein charged Wilson with promoting subsidized separatism: “What next?” he asked. “Separate schools? Separate washrooms? Separate drinking fountains?” With Anna Deavere Smith—herself a paradigm of casting beyond color—serving as the moderator, the men are to continue their debate this Monday, in New York’s Town Hall. The critic Paul Goldbe
rger, writing in the Times last week, went so far as to declare that “this is shaping up to be the sharpest cultural debate” since the Mapplethorpe controversy. You’d never guess that Brustein and Wilson are in complete agreement on the one subject that agitates them most: the disastrous nature of the donor-driven trend to diversify regional theatres. Brustein dislikes the trend because he believes that it supplants aesthetic considerations with sociological ones. Wilson dislikes it because, as is true of all movement toward integration, it undermines the integrity and strength of autonomous black institutions.
He has a point. George Wolfe, the producer of the Public Theatre, singles out the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund as having been “incredibly irresponsible” in this regard. He goes on to explain, “It has created a peculiar dynamic where, you know, there was a struggling black theatre that had been nurturing a series of artists and all of a sudden this predominantly white theatre next door is getting a couple of million dollars to invite artists of color into its fold.” (To be sure, the officials at the Lila Wallace Fund have also given money to black companies like the Crossroads.) But Wilson wants to take things another step, and create black theatres where they do not currently exist. He believes that any theatre situated in a city with a black population of more than sixty percent should be converted into a black theatre. White board members and staff would be largely retired in order to insure what he believes to be a cultural and moral imperative: art by, of, and for black people.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 71