Abstract
An elderly black photographer’s decadent revel in words as accurate carriers of meaning inaugurates John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities (1999). Dictionary in hand, Martin Mallory, one of the tale’s traumatized protagonists, searches and finds that the definition of the word “zoo” resonates with the images and ideas about urban ghettoization that he harbors in his head. The anonymous narrator tells us, “The words tell him what he supposed they would … He liked it like that. When words led him into a familiar place” (1). Mr. Mallory’s peculiar meditation on the term “zoo” raises several questions. What set of circumstances could have occasioned this private relish in the English language? Why would momentary proof that language provides a reliable technology of meaning grant Mallory such comfort?
Visibility [is] a complex system of permission and prohibition punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness.
—Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination1
Well, when he told me about this White girl he had, my friend, well, that’s what this war’s about down here now, that’s what we got to fight to protect, and I just looked at him and say, Boy, you ain’t never gone to see the sun come up again.
—J. W. Milam, murderer of Emmett Till2
Why did evil prosper round here and children die?
—Kassima, Two Cities3
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Notes
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 15.
Lee Gutkind, In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (New York: Norton, 2005), 39.
John Edgar Wideman, Two Cities: A Love Story (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999), 54. Further references will be featured as page numbers within the essay.
For an account of the epistemological crises of postmodernism see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 223.
Walter Mosley, “Love among the Ruins,” New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1998, 12.
William W. Goldsmith, “From the Metropolis to Globalization: The Dialectics of Race and Urban Form,” in Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?, eds. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), 40.
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 42.
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 32.
For further reading on the actual MOVE tragedy, one may consult Margot Harry, Attention MOVE! This Is America (Chicago: Banner Press, 1987);
Michael Boyette, Let It Burn: The Philadelphia Tragedy (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989);
Charles W. Bowser, Let the Bunker Burn: The Final Battle with MOVE (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1989);
Hizkias Assefa and Paul Wahrhaftig, The MOVE Crisis in Philadelphia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990);
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 150.
Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996).
Keith Tester, ed. The Flaneur (London; Routledge, 1994), 1.
Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 103.
David Frisby, “The Flaneur in Social Theory,” in The Flaneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 97; Buck-Morss, “Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” 110.
Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American-Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 148.
Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 262.
That the novel explores the traumatic experience through the figure of a war veteran is appropriate for several reasons. First, the medical professions accepted posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a verifiable illness due to the activism and research borne out of the Vietnam War. See Judith Herman Lewis’s work, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic, 1992).
Second, Vincent Leaphart (a.k.a. John Africa), was a veteran of the Vietnam War. His trauma has intrigued Wideman over the course of two novels. Third, Kathleen Cleaver has observed that in the MOVE confrontation, “the police in the neighborhood were recipients of the transfer of military tactics from Vietnam into domestic police action. These men in uniform brought the war home” (13). See Johanna Dickson’s effort, MOVE: Site of Trauma (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).
Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van de Hart, “The Instructive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 177.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 61.
Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 63.
Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14.
John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (New York: Vintage, 1991), 119.
It is possible that in Two Cities lies the solution to the conundrum of Wideman’s previous novel. In exchanging the medium of language for that of photography, Two Cities and its protagonist are spared from the sense of futility and despair that accompanies the palinodic failure that occurred in Philadelphia Fire. In Philadelphia Fire, the most resistant act of the novel occurs when the hero attempts to teach black neighborhood children how to perform Shakespeare. After a lengthy meditation on preparing these young thespians, Cudjoe admits that the play “never happened” (149) because of inclement weather. Photography may enable Mallory to enjoy an outcome more worthy of celebration than his fictional predecessor. For an excellent reading of Philadelphia Fire and a clear staging of the limits of literature in the project of black nationalism see Madhu Dubey, “Literature and Urban Crisis,” African American Review 32, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 579–95.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 24.
Willy Rotzler, “Alberto Giacometti and His Times,” in Alberto Giacometti and America, ed. Tamara S. Evans (New York: City University of New York Press, 1984), 16.
Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 14.
Heidi Nast, “Mapping the ‘Unconscious’: Racism and the Oedipal Family,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 2 (2000): 231.
John Edgar Wideman, “The Killing of Black Boys” Essence, November 1997, 1.
Keith Gandol, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65.
Camilo Vergara, The New American Ghetto (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), xv.
David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 143.
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 132.
One can argue that the novel should be added to the category of what Adam Gussow calls “blues literature” because there are some instances of blues lyrics throughout the novel. As well, Mallory composes his photographic “song” in response to lynching and other postwar acts of racialized violence. For an explication of this cultural tradition see Gussow’s Seems like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intro Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1969), 224.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 119.
Arif Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” in Global/local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 32.
Phillip Brian Harper, “Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s,” in Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 179.
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© 2012 Tyrone R. Simpson II
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Simpson, T.R. (2012). And the Arc of His Witness Explained Nothing. In: Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature. The Future of Minority Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014894_7
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