PARTISAN REVIEW
635
way ofmesmerizing readers by sounds and rhythms. The meanings are there,
but we are led into them not by the traditional devices of plot and character,
but through episodes that are held together by recurring images." In a larger
view, O'Brien finds many contemporaries takin.,g "the hard realities of
sociology-formerly the exclusive domain of the naturalistic writer-and
transforming them into imaginative and innovative works." Their technique
for such may be as particular as John Edgar Wideman's ("it attempts to
orchestrate on the page the inner thoughts of people and treat those in the
same way as a conventional novel would treat dialogue") or as general as
William Demby's ("That's the way a novel should be-not linear, not in a kind
of horizontal sequence of events, but as one perctives reality looking at that
enormous tapestry upon which any n umber of things are happening: horses
in battle, men being killed, troops lining up. You're supposed to conceive it
totally-not look around"). O 'Brien's major point, supported by the commen–
tary of the authors themselves, is that the ethic and aesthetic of black litera–
ture is something different from the rest of the
LHUS:
Whereas American literature is generally a record of man's inability
to
transcend the past (either historical or personal), black literature consis–
tently reflects an individual's and a society'S ability to escape the past and
prepare for a future. In other words, this literary tradition has no sense
of or belief in determinism. This antideterminism may in part be attri–
buted to the absence of theological concerns in black literature. Without
this sense of God, the black wnter avoids the dilemmas that face so many
other American writers. Problems of good and evil are never raised to an
abstract plane, where man is helpless in trying to discover their obscure
meanings. This whole philosophy suggests that the black American writ–
er does not belong
to
the CalVinistIc tradition of thought that has so
strongly influenced the American consciousness. No characters in black
literature are driven by the need to subdue the force of evil, as is
Melville's Ahab, nor are they wracked by the doubts of Hawthorne's
heroes, nor by the disbelief that Hemingway's characters wish they could
escape. The black writer conceives of good and evil in terms of man–
made creations which-since man has made them-he can change.
From here O'Brien and the writers he interviews establish the largely
experimental nature of much contemporary black literature. "Perhaps we
should look at psychology as essentially an imaginative act," he agrees with
Clarence Major, whose
All-Night Visitors andNo
"show all the shifting elements
of the so-called self." From John Edgar Wideman's fiction we learn that even
such stock-in-trade ethnic scenes as lynchings can cause "less a political up–
heaval than an imaginative one," and that the prime consideration in art for
racial relations is the imagination, "because the imagination plays such a pow–
erful role in the relationship between blacks and whites in America . ..
It's not what we are, it's what we think we are. From the very beginning
