The politics of incongruity in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Fanatics.

In December 1898, the Chicago Record and numerous other papers printed Paul Laurence Dunbar's response to the race riots in Wilmington, Hogansville, and Urbana, in which he inveighs against the notion that violence against African Americans was not as urgent or as relevant an issue to the North as to the South. The article, entitled "Recession Never," demands that the reader note the gross absurdity of the position of African Americans all over the nation at this point in American history, as they were romanticized as soldiers of the Spanish-American War, but then systematically denied the right to vote; urged to improve their condition, yet broken and demoralized by lynching and white riots. With eloquent precision and indignation, Dunbar declares that the North/South debate is irrelevant, and that African Americans confront a national attitude, not at all confined to any particular region, that is "incongruous to the point of ghastly humor" (Dunbar, "Recession" 25). He writes of a joke that would be laughable, did it not reek of oppression and death. Five years later, Dunbar resurrects the potent turn of phrase to open an essay about the irony of African American patriotism: "Belleville, Wilmington, Evansville, the Fourth of July, and Kishineff, a curious combination and yet one replete with a ghastly humor" (Dunbar, "Fourth of July" 30). With evident frustration, Dunbar asks how the irony of African Americans celebrating liberty and freedom can go unnoticed, along with other dastardly incongruities in world politics. His articles suggest that if only his readership could recognize the "ghastly humor" that surrounds them, if only they might, in laughing, acknowledge the existence of that "ghastly humor," change might then occur.

Considering Dunbar's apt iteration of the phrase "ghastly humor," why would we not be on the lookout for representations of this deadly humor in his writing? Over 30 years ago, when scholars gathered for a centennial celebration of Dunbar's birth, Addison Gayle, Jr., and Kenny J. Williams each addressed many of the challenges posed in reading Dunbar's fiction. The 1901 novel The Fanatics, in particular, provoked very different reactions from the two scholars. Gayle calls Dunbar a "victim of his age" who unfortunately "was forced to deal with the images and stereotypes of black people as laid down in the literature of Southern and Northern propagandists" (150-51). On the one hand, for Gayle, Dunbar was never able to break away from the paternalism of the plantation tradition and was thus unable to make The Fanatics into a piece of innovative, progressive literature. Williams, on the other hand, contends that this great poet of masks actually "donned the mask [himself] and hid his protest beneath his apparent acceptance of the philosophy and psychology of white America" (165). In fact, Williams provocatively suggests that "In The Fanatics ... the major characters are white; but through his veiled approach Dunbar manages to make some profound observations upon the American racial scene. This was done, however, in such a way that none but the most astute would have been aware of it" (183). These concurrent but contradictory positions suggest that the issue rests not in the book itself but in the tangled and conflicting ways that scholars approach Dunbar as an artist and a man.

Reading The Fanatics straight leaves us with a seemingly sentimental historical romance of the Civil War that conforms more to the writings of radical racist Thomas Dixon than to those of Dunbar. Such an approach is not unlike reading Jonathan…