Focalization as education: the race relation optimism of the narrator of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901).

How Ideas from Narrative Theory Can Inform Debates about Chesnutt's Novel

Charles Chesnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition is nominally set in the fictional town of Wellington, but actually relates to events of the 1898 white supremacist race riot that took place in the real town of Wilmington, North Carolina. Janet and Doctor William Miller, Olivia and Major Edward Carteret are the two couples at the center of the plot. The Carterets are white: Edward is a member of the town' s "Big Three" white supremacist leadership and owner-editor of the foremost newspaper, which he uses to agitate for a white uprising against the elected Populist government. The Millers are mulattoes, which in white Wellington society stigmatizes them as social outcasts, although William is a world-class surgeon and a rich man. (1) The tie between the two families is that Janet and Olivia are half-sisters of the same father. Janet would like her sister to acknowledge her; Olivia would prefer not to notice Janet's existence. Against the backdrop of building tension and violent execution of the race riot, the plot brings the two families into dramatic conflict with one another, but the story ends by implying that reconciliation between the Millers and Carterets is possible, further suggesting that this particular racial reconciliation might be extended to blacks and whites in general. Chesnutt envisioned Tradition as a "literary successor" to earlier books like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (McElrath 498). However, poor initial reviews and sales prevented Tradition from having the immediate social impact Chesnutt had hoped for, and it was not until the 1970s that the book began to enjoy any kind of widespread and positive reputation.

By 1993, Eric Sundquist influentially claimed that Tradition was the turn of the twentieth century's best novelistic representation "of the racial politics of the nation in the aftermath of Reconstruction" (453). Sundquist would seem to agree with the interpretation of relations between the novel's two principal families--the Carterets and the Millers--as Chesnutt's optimistic allegory for twentieth century race relations between blacks and whites (406-7, 449). But many other scholars disagree that Tradition carries any message of optimism, and express their interpretive decision by designating a specific character as the hero of the novel. Most critics who agree with Sundquist in characterizing Tradition's racial politics as "optimistic" choose William as the book's hero. Other scholars leaning towards a "pessimistic" reading select William's wife, Janet, while still others name the character of Josh Green, who leads other blacks in violent resistance to the riot launched by Edward's racist newspaper. Which of these three characters the critic chooses as hero anticipates a whole reading of the novel. If one picks William, the story is guardedly optimistic about future race relations. If one chooses Janet, the book is probably read as black-separatist and feminist. If one picks Josh, Tradition is a black-militant declaration of defensive war. (2)

However, some scholars who refuse William the status of protagonist-hero seem to equate their own interpretations of Tradition with the beliefs of Charles Chesnutt. If these scholars are, as they seem to be, making claims about the flesh and blood Chesnutt, then biographical information becomes relevant. Chesnutt self-identified as seven-eighths white, may have felt "intellectually and racially" estranged from both blacks and whites, and once claimed never to have written "as a Negro" (Fossett 113; Gleason 30, 36). Photographs prove that one could probably not distinguish Chesnutt as having African-American ancestry without being told so (Fossett 118). In 1900, two years after the Wilmington riot and one year before publication of Tradition, Chesnutt published an article titled "The Future American: A Complete Race Amalgamation Likely to Occur," making it unlikely that the biographical Charles Chesnutt was at this period willing to publicly represent himself as anything other than a racial assimilationist.

In this essay, though, I am not suggesting that we should equate the politics of Chesnutt's 1900 article with his 1901 novel. Instead, I propose to leave the task of discovering the real-life Chesnutt to the historians, in favor of focusing in my own analysis on what Wayne Booth and later narrative theorists like James Phelan would refer to as the "implied" Chesnutt. More specifically, my aim is to develop a reading of the novel based on inferences that the design of the narrative prompts us to make--inferences about the implicit set of norms, attitudes, values, and perceptions orienting Chesnutt's overall account. In coining the term, Booth describes the implied author as the author inferred by the reader from the ethical norms of the text (70-76). One way to discover this implied author is through the testimony of a reliable narrator. Booth describes a narrator as reliable if the narrator is consistently in agreement with the ethical and perceptual norms demonstrated throughout the work (158-59). In Tradition, readers find as they finish the last page that the narrator has been reliable, that is, always in synch with the norms of the invisible, un-personified implied author. The key norm in this context can be most basically characterized as embracing racial equality. It is partly through Tradition's narrator that this textual norm--the "personality" of the implied author--is discoverable. The narrator is, in fact, doubly important, since by introducing the reader to the implied author, the narrator is also simultaneously providing clues about the implied reader or audience, that group which the actual reader must join to fully experience the message and method of Tradition. Booth suggests that every contact with the implied author does a little more to solidify the outline of the implied audience (89). (3)

Working backwards from the implied audience, to the implied author, to the reliable narrator of Tradition, one begins to see why understanding Chesnutt's techniques of narration are so important to understanding the story. This narrator would usually be referred to as "omniscient," but this label does not adequately address the different levels of knowledge displayed by the narrator and the various characters. Sometimes Tradition's narrator knows more than the characters do. At other times the narrator expresses knowledge equivalent to a particular character, and at still other times the narrator says less than characters are presumably thinking. These knowledge differentials can be expressed through Gerard Genette's concept of "focalization," with its three corresponding subcategories of zero, internal and external focalization. (4) There are also a few occasions in the text during which the narrator says what a character would think, if a character did in fact exist to adopt a particular viewpoint. This last type of focalization is similar in some ways to internal focalization, but can also be explicated by means of David Herman's supplementary concept of "hypothetical focalization." Hypothetical focalization occurs when the narrator effectively creates a temporary and imaginary viewpoint unattached to any character existing within the narrative, and which also does not belong to the narrator.

The argument of this paper is that Tradition's shifting perspectival structure educates the reader about how to join an authorial audience in which racial egalitarianism is the most basic ethical norm. Simultaneously, the narration shows the racist Carterets as partly sympathetic and potentially redeemable characters who, along with other of the novel's white inhabitants, undergo an at least partial and temporary transformation of racial feeling by the last chapters. The authorial audience as well as the Millers must be able to forgive the Carterets in order for the optimistic conclusion identified by Sundquist and others to make any sense at all. My approach differs from previous scholarship on Tradition by focusing on the novel's narrator through a theoretical synthesis of more formally-minded narratology with rhetorical theories of narrative. I use narrative theory to complement the cultural studies project of situating historical fiction like Tradition in its contexts of production and reception, demonstrating the ways in which studying the formal "how" of the novel's narration can lead to understanding the "what" of the novel's race politics.