San Francisco Chronicle // The Stone That the Builder Refused by Madison Smartt Bell
PANTHEON; 747 PAGES; $29.95
Over the past 20 years, Madison Smartt Bell has published an extensive and amazingly diverse series of novels, 12 in all. "The Washington Square Ensemble" (1983), "Waiting for the End of the World" (1985), "Doctor Sleep" (1991) and "Save Me, Joe Louis" (1993), in particular, all feature characters on the literal and figurative fringes of society. At their best these books demonstrate many reasons why storytelling remains such a vital form of expression, but Bell's two collected volumes of short fiction, "Zero db" (1987) and "Barking Man" (1990), include the most revelatory and indelible work he has done. Until now.
The publication of "The Stone That the Builder Refused" closes a three- volume cycle about the Haitian revolution at the turn of the 19th century, history's only successful revolution by slaves. Bell's trilogy -- which also includes "All Souls' Rising" (1995) and "Master of the Crossroads" (2000) -- brings to bear everything Bell learned writing his previous books, and many of those novels, impressive as they were, now seem like warm-up exercises for this huge undertaking. The result is an extraordinary body of work that could easily cement Bell's reputation as one of his generation's greatest authors.
Bell uses fiction to take us where the history books cannot go -- into the thoughts and fears of the revolutionaries and plantation owners and those in between who got caught up in the riots and bloodshed. His characters are black and white and every shade in between. He returns to a narrative device he used in his first novel, one in which chapters rotate between different, wildly eccentric characters through whose eyes we come to see every side of the conflict. Unlike in "The Washington Square Ensemble," however, the tales are told not only in first person but also in third person, and told most remarkably in a few virtuosic passages, such as the following from "All Souls' Rising," that combine first and third to demonstrate the former slave Riau's possession by vodun spirits:
"The drone was there inside my head and I was not quite Riau any longer and not quite yet Ogûn. My mouth was full of water and my tongue floating but I could not swallow and the water ran out at the sides of my mouth. On the far side of the compound fire broke out all at once in the cane and everyone was up and running altogether toward the buildings and Riau running too."
Riau serves as a kind of spiritual counterweight to the trilogy's main character, Toussaint Louverture, the (mostly) Christian "black Spartacus" who not only led the army of former slaves to their freedom but also authored a Haitian constitution.
Our view of Papa Toussaint's machinations alternates between microscopic and telescopic. Despite Bell's devout adherence to the big historical picture, he never loses sight of the effect that political upheaval has on individual lives, and he brings a full host of people to life, including Hébert, a European doctor sympathetic to Toussaint's cause, who through his outsider's perspective serves as a kind of surrogate for the reader:
"He felt through his nausea and terror that he was witnessing something well beyond torture or murder. Though he could not understand or grasp it, he was seeing what it meant to be human. This was a sincere inquiry into the nature of man, not how a man is made and how his parts cooperate, but what a man is, in his essence, and who, in the final analysis, would be allowed to be one." Every historical account like this, or so the cliche goes, says more about the time it was written than whatever period it attempts to describe. But it's too easy, and perhaps too smug, to look at Bell's account of the Haitian revolution as, say, a simple reflection of contemporary American race relations. These novels do much more than simply hold up a mirror and force us to examine ourselves. Instead, they hold us accountable not only for our past, rooted in slavery, but also for our future.
The metaphor of the crossroads -- where according to legend Robert Johnson met the devil and sold his soul in exchange for his ability to sing the blues -- provides one of the most enduring and defining mythologies of the United States. In "Blues People: Negro Music in White America," Amiri Baraka (then called LeRoi Jones) wrote, "And it seems to me that if the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
Any understanding of American race relations, then, demands an understanding of the blues traditions -- and any understanding of the blues tradition begins with the story of the crossroads. As Bell's extensive glossary in "The Stone That the Builder Refused" notes, the most important vodun deity, Legba, is the "god of crossroads and of change" who "controls the crossroads between the material and spiritual worlds." In hinging a trilogy on a novel called "Master of the Crossroads," Bell understands that metaphor's importance in defining not only Haitian history but also whatever it means to be American. The crossroads marks the spot where American myth and American history meet.
That he locates our origins in the vodun tradition comes as a major revelation. The implications of this discovery -- effectively an alternative spiritual genesis of our nation -- extend far beyond the collective 2,000 pages of his trilogy.
Think about it. Everyone understands the extent to which our nation's history is steeped in Judeo-Christian traditions, but Bell's novels argue convincingly that those traditions have yet to become reconciled with our Afrocentric -- specifically vodun -- roots. Vodun, so it would appear, sits at the very root of who we are.
To whatever extent literature still matters at all, the successful conclusion of this trilogy must be considered among the most important artistic accomplishments of our still new century. By forcing us to re-examine our stories and mythologies, these three novels succeed in redefining American cultural history in powerful and profound ways. And by revisiting Haiti's past, Bell has not only described a real revolution but also fired the opening salvo of one closer to home. •
Over the past 20 years, Madison Smartt Bell has published an extensive and amazingly diverse series of novels, 12 in all. "The Washington Square Ensemble" (1983), "Waiting for the End of the World" (1985), "Doctor Sleep" (1991) and "Save Me, Joe Louis" (1993), in particular, all feature characters on the literal and figurative fringes of society. At their best these books demonstrate many reasons why storytelling remains such a vital form of expression, but Bell's two collected volumes of short fiction, "Zero db" (1987) and "Barking Man" (1990), include the most revelatory and indelible work he has done. Until now.
The publication of "The Stone That the Builder Refused" closes a three- volume cycle about the Haitian revolution at the turn of the 19th century, history's only successful revolution by slaves. Bell's trilogy -- which also includes "All Souls' Rising" (1995) and "Master of the Crossroads" (2000) -- brings to bear everything Bell learned writing his previous books, and many of those novels, impressive as they were, now seem like warm-up exercises for this huge undertaking. The result is an extraordinary body of work that could easily cement Bell's reputation as one of his generation's greatest authors.
Bell uses fiction to take us where the history books cannot go -- into the thoughts and fears of the revolutionaries and plantation owners and those in between who got caught up in the riots and bloodshed. His characters are black and white and every shade in between. He returns to a narrative device he used in his first novel, one in which chapters rotate between different, wildly eccentric characters through whose eyes we come to see every side of the conflict. Unlike in "The Washington Square Ensemble," however, the tales are told not only in first person but also in third person, and told most remarkably in a few virtuosic passages, such as the following from "All Souls' Rising," that combine first and third to demonstrate the former slave Riau's possession by vodun spirits:
"The drone was there inside my head and I was not quite Riau any longer and not quite yet Ogûn. My mouth was full of water and my tongue floating but I could not swallow and the water ran out at the sides of my mouth. On the far side of the compound fire broke out all at once in the cane and everyone was up and running altogether toward the buildings and Riau running too."
Riau serves as a kind of spiritual counterweight to the trilogy's main character, Toussaint Louverture, the (mostly) Christian "black Spartacus" who not only led the army of former slaves to their freedom but also authored a Haitian constitution.
Our view of Papa Toussaint's machinations alternates between microscopic and telescopic. Despite Bell's devout adherence to the big historical picture, he never loses sight of the effect that political upheaval has on individual lives, and he brings a full host of people to life, including Hébert, a European doctor sympathetic to Toussaint's cause, who through his outsider's perspective serves as a kind of surrogate for the reader:
"He felt through his nausea and terror that he was witnessing something well beyond torture or murder. Though he could not understand or grasp it, he was seeing what it meant to be human. This was a sincere inquiry into the nature of man, not how a man is made and how his parts cooperate, but what a man is, in his essence, and who, in the final analysis, would be allowed to be one." Every historical account like this, or so the cliche goes, says more about the time it was written than whatever period it attempts to describe. But it's too easy, and perhaps too smug, to look at Bell's account of the Haitian revolution as, say, a simple reflection of contemporary American race relations. These novels do much more than simply hold up a mirror and force us to examine ourselves. Instead, they hold us accountable not only for our past, rooted in slavery, but also for our future.
The metaphor of the crossroads -- where according to legend Robert Johnson met the devil and sold his soul in exchange for his ability to sing the blues -- provides one of the most enduring and defining mythologies of the United States. In "Blues People: Negro Music in White America," Amiri Baraka (then called LeRoi Jones) wrote, "And it seems to me that if the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
Any understanding of American race relations, then, demands an understanding of the blues traditions -- and any understanding of the blues tradition begins with the story of the crossroads. As Bell's extensive glossary in "The Stone That the Builder Refused" notes, the most important vodun deity, Legba, is the "god of crossroads and of change" who "controls the crossroads between the material and spiritual worlds." In hinging a trilogy on a novel called "Master of the Crossroads," Bell understands that metaphor's importance in defining not only Haitian history but also whatever it means to be American. The crossroads marks the spot where American myth and American history meet.
That he locates our origins in the vodun tradition comes as a major revelation. The implications of this discovery -- effectively an alternative spiritual genesis of our nation -- extend far beyond the collective 2,000 pages of his trilogy.
Think about it. Everyone understands the extent to which our nation's history is steeped in Judeo-Christian traditions, but Bell's novels argue convincingly that those traditions have yet to become reconciled with our Afrocentric -- specifically vodun -- roots. Vodun, so it would appear, sits at the very root of who we are.
To whatever extent literature still matters at all, the successful conclusion of this trilogy must be considered among the most important artistic accomplishments of our still new century. By forcing us to re-examine our stories and mythologies, these three novels succeed in redefining American cultural history in powerful and profound ways. And by revisiting Haiti's past, Bell has not only described a real revolution but also fired the opening salvo of one closer to home. •
posted by Andrew Ervin at
12/26/2004
0 Comments
