Monday, May 12, 2008
David Bowman reviews "Cloudsplitter," Russell Banks' effort at the Great American Novel, an ambitious resurrection of the life and times of anti-slavery crusader John Brown.
Dec 3, 1998 | A couple years ago, Russell Banks was one of three judges who selected "Snow Falling in Cedars" as the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discovery Award. In a ceremony at a Manhattan B&N store, Banks gave a righteous speech in which he declared that the realism in that novel had redeemed American fiction. Banks never defined "realism," assuming the crowd knew what he meant. Banks implied realism was holy. More than that, realism was American. This is an impressionistic description of that night, but Banks spoke with such fully vented spleen about fiction that didn't toe his line that it was as if he wished the Ayatollah Khomeini had proclaimed a fatwa on Thomas Pynchon and his whole crew of American postmodernists. Now, it's several years later, and HarperFlamingo, HarperCollins' new designer line of literary fiction, has published Banks' opus of realism, "Cloudsplitter." The novel is this author's sincere attempt at the Great American Novel. Remember that term? These are the days when novels are micromanaged into genre -- first novels, coming of age novels, sexual preference novels ... and the most expansive genre, the category known simply as "literary fiction." The idea that any novel could be so expansive as to be classified as the Great American Novel is a fairy tale. (Besides, we all know that term really meant the Great American White Male novel.) But let's say that Toni Morrison's inspiring "Paradise" is indeed a Great American Novel. Then, based on ambition alone, "Cloudsplitter" also has a shot at the title. The novel is the tale of abolitionist guerilla John Brown, as told by Brown's third son, Owen. John Brown, if you don't know from history books (or the numerous reviews that jumped the March publication date in an attempt to have the definitive word on this book), was the fierce abolitionist who in 1859 led a raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., to capture the U.S. arsenal situated there, with the intention of then leading the insurrection that would liberate all the slaves in the South. Before we go any further, also know that between that date and the present, Philadelphia-born critic James Gibbons Huneker (1860-1921) coined the term Great American Novel. In 1917 he wrote an essay claiming that the thing hadn't been written yet, but when it was it would likely be a big historical narration à la Sir Walter Scott -- the last author who accomplished what Huneker called "the big bow-wow strain" (whatever he meant by that!). The historical scope of Banks' novel is awe inspiring and would certainly make a dog bark. After taking in Banks' interpretation of pre-Civil War America, you might consider John Brown one of the seminal figures in U.S. history. Not because of what Brown did, per se, but because of how wrong he was in predicting American events: "Remember," his son Owen reminds us, "all-out war between the North and the South was unthinkable to us: due to an ancient, deeply ingrained racism, any war undertaken by the citizens of the North for purpose of freeing an enslaved people whose skins were black seemed a pure impossibility. We believed instead that the Northerners -- when it finally came clear to them what we already knew, that the South now wholly owned the government of the nation -- would simply secede from the Union." Banks' novel further explains that what Brown proposed to accomplish was the unification of the United States by keeping the North from seceding from a nation where an abolitionist senator could be clubbed nearly to death in the very chambers of the Senate. (Charles Summer of Massachusetts was viciously caned by South Carolinian Preston Brooks and never fully recovered, while Brooks returned home to a hero's welcome.) Brown presumed that the uprising at Harpers Ferry would stimulate thousands of slaves to flock to his side. His army would then link up with Frederick Douglass' to burn "the Slavocracy" into "a smoldering pile of char!" As history, not fiction, Banks' novel is exceedingly relevant today because Brown's vision is reminiscent of the logic behind Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City -- the sight of a federal building in rubble was supposed to rally the militia around the country to rise and overthrow Washington. This might have actually happened had McVeigh let God do the planning. The Lord was ostensibly the one responsible for John Brown's acts of righteous terrorism, including his murderous rampage against pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1855. Brown possessed that primal 19th century American trait that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young shared: personal communication with God. Deep in "Cloudsplitter," Banks has one of the Brown sons shout: "Shut up, Henry! You have to do what Father says. He has spoken with the Lord all these years, and you haven't." But we all know such communication can fog a father's brain with ego and madness. Later, Owen himself reports, "I looked into Father's ice-gray eyes and saw a strange sort of puzzlement there, and for the first time realized that he ... did not in the slightest understand me. He did not know who I was ... Suddenly, I felt pity for the Old Man. Despite his intelligence and gifts of language and his mastery of stratagem, he possessed a rare and dangerous kind of stupidity -- a stupidity of the heart." These two bits -- one intentionally or unintentionally hilarious, and the other sad, incisive and tragically beautiful -- clarify that Banks' book is not really a 751-page novel about Harpers Ferry -- that carnage occurs only in the novel's end. And as massive as the novel's historical scope is, "Cloudsplitter" is finally a 751-page novel about a dysfunctional family.
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