A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
The discussion of Conrad in Weekly Readings #39 sent me back to Heart of Darkness, a novella I’d read many times as an assignments (once in high school, once in college, twice in graduate school) but not since my mid-20s and never extracurricularly—never, that is, for pleasure. I was glad to revisit it. Behind its over-familiarity, it has the authority of a nightmarish heterocosm, something closer to Greek or Shakespearean tragedy than to the weird fin-de-siècle romances we might compare it with when writing cultural history rather than literary criticism. In my essay, I place the novella both in its context and out of it. I moreover write the quarrel with Chinua Achebe’s classic argument against Conrad I’ve had in the back of mind for years—not an argument, finally, about racism, but about the meaning and purpose of art.
And for my Wednesday creative-writing post, a short story about love, art, death, L.A., amputation, and sisterhood. I wrote it 2015—in the headnote, I give myself credit for predicting the Red Scare girl—and remember the writing process with great fondness. Sometimes, you have to clutch a story with both hands and haul it desperately out of the collective unconscious; but other times, a story just unfolds itself in your mind, and you only have to take down what you see and hear. Writing this story was the latter experience.
Below, two small essays: one on the decline of the urban independent bookstore, one on a 20th-century literary hoax and what it reveals about race, culture, and literature.
Tragic Mask: An Elegy for the Bookstore
In Compact, playwright Matthew Gasda—last seen here in my review of his celebrated drama Dimes Square—laments “The Slow Suffocation of the Performing Arts.” He pointedly chose this titular metaphor: Gasda charts the conversion of aesthetically challenging and arresting dramatic personae into expert-class troupers who participate only in the deadening masquerade of hygiene security theater.
Readers of Benjamin Bratton will recall that for pandemic maximalists, the medical mask, however ineffective, however talismanic, stands explicitly for the individual’s irrelevance in the face of biopolitical emergencies ranging from Covid to climate change. The mask is like a totalitarian party’s standard, now affixed to the potentially protesting mouth of every citizen rather than flying over the citadel or capitol. Gasda sees the pointless continuance of compulsory masking as aimed at the very heart of the arts, especially theater, whose classical masks amplified individuals into eternal archetypes rather than canceling them as fungible matter. The mask means to annul the “you,” since “you” are a biological infestation on the earth, one more useless eater in the anthropocene, and a disease vector to boot. Preempted by this anti-metaphysic, the dramatic artwork cannot even begin to effect its “you must change your life.”
To be honest, though, I don’t go to a lot of plays, so I was especially intrigued by Gasda’s sentences, “I feel the way about many bookstores that I do about theaters. At least in New York, where I live, they have lost their magic, and are no longer worth lingering in.” It’s not just New York; it’s any indie bookstore in any decent-sized city. A friend and I were just complaining about the most celebrated independent bookstore in Minneapolis for this reason. The political signaling has been obnoxious for years—when did I first see the Ruth Bader Ginsburg refrigerator magnets for sale at the cash register? 2016, 2017?—but the longer it goes on, the more disturbing it becomes, because the more obvious is the effect.
A narrow #resistance-style interpretation of American culture, hardly even exhausting the ideological potential of the left besides its barring the right, guarantees that only a certain type of person is welcome, especially if the store makes its money selling new Big Five books, with their own ploddingly middlebrow radical chic. The store becomes a stage for what Gasda calls “the social performance of being a good liberal, urban subject.”
A bookstore used to be a place you could go to escape the urgent solicitations of public messaging, to browse at leisure in quest of an unknown and unknowable quarry, of a private message sent out to anyone and everyone, to no one in particular, but somehow, when you find it, intended just for you. Not for nothing did Proust call books the children of silence.
Then there is the practical problem of the politicized bookstore. The people who work at these places seem increasingly to be the same kind of people who manage human resources everywhere else. Are they judging my purchases? Can I carry X to the register? Must I protest that it’s just for research? Will I earn a lecture on so-and-so’s sexism, on his misrepresentation of race or her dereliction on disability? Social media posts by and about booksellers do not inspire confidence.
This spiritual disappearance of the urban bookstore represents in miniature a much larger vastation. We have fewer and fewer places to go that allow the paradoxical form of privacy only available in public. This alone-in-the-crowd sensation has been a hallmark of modernity from Poe and Baudelaire and Whitman to Joyce and Woolf and Bellow. It made up, almost, for the alienation modernity otherwise imposes—one of the things that let you know in the secular mass that you have a self, or soul, at all.
Black Masquerade: The King’s White Gaze
Speaking of books, this weekend I was Marie Kondoing (do people still Marie Kondo things?) my bookshelves and book piles and book closets and came across Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King—not the 2000s-era New York Review of Books edition with the Toni Morrison intro, but the old Vintage copy from the ’80s or ’90s.
I think I bought it in a used bookstore back in the last century precisely because Morrison always recommended it, always cited it as one of her favorite novels. But then I’d never read it—the Vintage edition’s typeface is repellent, among other things—and found myself wondering if I ever would read it. “What is this book again?” I asked myself. Instead of sensibly seeking clues in the book, I googled it, hoping for a quick answer. I received a long answer instead, one that cast Morrison’s commendation of the work in an ironic light.
This founding novel of Francophone African literature, published in the 1950s, wrote back, said Morrison, to such malicious European misprisions of Africa as Conrad’s. In the New York Review of Books essay that later became her introduction to the book, she summarizes the plot—it’s essentially a surreal, allegorical take-off on the “white man journeys deeper and deeper into Africa” narrative—and judges that the novel gives us not a heart of darkness but “the heart of Africa’s Africa,” a wholly authentic portrayal of African culture, all the more trustworthy for embodying this ontology in its style and structure rather than issuing political and pedagogical commands. It therefore answers Morrison’s—and my own—preferred modernist-formalist aesthetic criteria, exemplified in her praise for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: “the structure is the argument.” She writes:
In that racially charged context, being introduced in the early Sixties to the novels of Chinua Achebe, the work of Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Cyprian Ekwenski, to name a few, was more than a revelation—it was intellectually and aesthetically transforming. But coming upon Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi in the English translation known as The Radiance of the King was shocking. This extraordinary novel, first published in France in 1954 and in the US in 1971, accomplished something brand new. The clichéd journey into African darkness either to bring light or to find it is reimagined here. In fresh metaphorical and symbolical language, storybook Africa, as the site of therapeutic exploits or of sentimental initiations leading toward life’s diploma, is reinvented. Employing the idiom of the conqueror, using precisely the terminology of the dominant discourse on Africa, this extraordinary Guinean author plucked at the Western eye to prepare it to meet the “regard,” the “look,” the “gaze” of an African king.
If one is writing within and about an already “raced” milieu, advocacy and argument are irresistible. Rage against the soul murder embedded in the subject matter runs the risk of forcing the “raced” writer to choose among a limited array of strategies: documenting their seething; conscientiously, studiously avoiding it; struggling to control it; or, as in this instance, manipulating its heat. Animating its dross into a fine art of subversive potency. Like a blacksmith transforming a red-hot lump of iron into a worthy blade, Camara Laye exchanged African “enigma” and darkness for subtlety, for literary ambiguity. Eschewing argument by assertion, he claimed the right to intricacy, to nuance, to insinuation—claims which may have contributed to a persistent interpretation of the novel either as a simple race-inflected allegory or as dream-besotted mysticism.
So imagine my own shock to discover that The Radiance of the King, this prodigy of authenticity, was probably written by someone else. That much I learned from Wikipedia. Following the Wikipedia trail to Christopher L. Miller’s Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity—not having access to a research library, I fear I had to acquire an illicit pdf—I discovered that the novel was likely written in fact by a white European. Not just any white European, but a Belgian ex-Nazi (shades of Tintin and Paul de Man) for whom the narrative was evidently a blackface fantasia of an imagined Africa, published moreover by a right-leaning press to capitalize on postwar colonial exoticism.1 Miller comments:
Le Regard appeared with two significant European signposts on its opening pages: an aesthetic one (an epigraph from Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms), and a political one (a dedication to the High Commissioner of the Republic in French West Africa; there is no sign of a colonial government anywhere else in Le Regard). The novel recounts the story of Clarence, a white man shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, who declares, if not in so many words, “Take me to your leader,” the king. But the king has moved away, and Clarence must undergo an archetypal journey seeking him, overcoming obstacles such as his own white hubris. True to the genre—which is as old as literature—his quest takes him through numerous tests, including simply finding his way. (The names of the two “interchangeable” helper figures, Nagoa and Noaga, are anagrams of each other, and, partially, of agon, Greek for struggle.) As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as in Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, and as in Kafka’s The Castle, “there is no possible means of orientation” here. “The South is everywhere,” and “one corridor [is] just as good as another” (Regard, 88, 90, 158/Radiance, 94, 96, 172). Clarence’s personality and will must dissolve and fade away before he can gain wisdom. The discourse of the novel itself gives no specificity to this Africa: no geography except North and South, no history, no distinct culture, nor language—hardly even any names. But the Africans are all wise; they say portentous things like “all truths are not necessarily good to say, nor good to hear” (188/206, AT). This Africa is blank, a backdrop for an allegory. Ultimately, Clarence is embraced by the king and his salvific regard or radiance, thereby attaining knowledge and wisdom and love—all provided by “Africa.”
Despite (or perhaps because of) the blankness of this artificial Africa, critics have been able to perceive in the pages of Le Regard “a lesson in African wisdom,” “animist metaphysics,” “traditional oral sources and traditional metaphysics,” Sufi mysticism, “Africa’s own home-grown values,” and a host of other deeply African traits. It’s enough to make one wonder if literary texts do not function largely as Rorschach tests.
The masquerade was hardly seamless. Wole Soyinka and Léopold Sédar Senghor called the novel into question early on, for example. Miller seems simply bemused at Morrison’s belated enthusiasm for a novel he represents as having been demoted from the Francophone African canon due to this problem of its provenance by the time she advocated for it in the NYRB.
By the year 2001, when Morrison wrote [the NYRB essay], Africa had of course been “answering back” for decades, and there was every reason to “expect” this; that is one problem. More generally: everything that Morrison claims about the novel depends entirely on Camara’s identity as both African and author. That identification alone allows her to stake this claim about Radiance as a savvy act of post/colonial pushback, an answer, and a deeply emblematic artifact of Africanness itself. Replace the name Camara with that of Soulié, and Morrison’s assertions crumble and fall. A Belgian war criminal seeking redemption by fictional proxy in Africa is not the same thing as an African novelist offering redemption, through transcendent Africanness, to a white fictional proxy. We have to wonder if recognizing Soulié as the author does not place us right back where Morrison said we started: in a “story-book Africa as the site of therapeutic exploits or of sentimental initiations leading toward life’s diploma.” Le Regard/Radiance may take Africanist literature back to its origins, in “blank darkness”—but with a Hollywood ending.
I find the aesthetic values informing her judgment eminently understandable. Despite the mystifications of “race” and “diaspora,” she was a midcentury educated American, her literary tastes shaped by modernism. According to modernist aesthetics, the accomplished literary work should be an autonomous object ambiguously radiating a deep spiritual significance. So far, so good; I am not so postmodern as to disagree. But when writers adulterate this aesthetic ambition with the political task of establishing collective essences rather than embodying individual imagination in its transaction with the world, what good can come of it? The results are sometimes tragic, as in the anti-Semitism of Eliot or the fascist sympathies of Yeats or indeed the racism of Conrad; but they are sometimes farcical, as when Morrison holds up a Belgian Nazi’s reverie of “Africa” as the prize antidote to what she elsewhere and always called “the white gaze.”
I gave The Radiance of the King a final skim and then stuffed it into a Little Free Library. Let it be somebody else’s cautionary tale.
See also Boyd Tonkin’s 2019 essay, “Tarnished Radiance,” which comes to the same conclusion, albeit with more anguish. In extenuation for the probable hoax, Tonkin adduces the Belgian ghostwriter’s homosexuality and Laye’s own “cultural kidnap” by Europe, each man in his own way marginalized by dominant culture.