“Waltzing around with Abe:” The Civil War Revisited

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter V

“Fiction-Made Characters”

Parodying Stereotypes in Ishmael Reed’s

Flight to Canada

“Waltzing around with Abe:” The Civil War Revisited

Laying claim to historical events, Flight to Canada can be easily identified as a noteworthy instance of historiographic metafiction. While the events of the Civil War dovetail with the characters’ lives, we are enticed to look at history as fiction, as a hybrid genre where the validity of real events is questioned. Reed’s novel mixes “artistic creativity” with “critical awareness,” since writing within a historical frame means reflecting on its validity (Onega 1995, 95). Linda Hutcheon cautiously affirms:

The interaction of the historiographic and the metafictional foregrounds the rejection of the claims of both ‘authentic’ representation and ‘inauthentic’ copy alike, and the very meaning of artistic originality is as forcefully challenged as is the transparency of historical referentiality. Postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological (1995, 77).

Indeed, Reed’s historiographic metafiction is doubly aimed at revising and reinventing history, as suggested in the novel’s leitmotif: “Who is to say what is fact and what is fiction?” (7).⁹ Reed’s novel therefore emphasizes that there is no such thing as one single version of history, inasmuch as there is no such thing as one Truth, but only truths in the plural. Reed consciously makes use of anachronisms¹⁰ through the coexistence of past mentality with present technology, in order to insist on the staged character of history.¹¹ With comic seriousness, he chips away the unique representation of history, which is seen instead “as a text, as an artifact, as something constructed” (Geyer-Ryan 1994, 13).¹²

The writer depicts from a tragicomic perspective the Civil War, the relation between the North and the South, and the role of the American statesmen. History wears carnivalesque guise: the grandeur of battles is bracketed, the Southerners are labeled as Arthurians and the Northerners as Saxons; General Lee obeys the orders of a Southern planter; the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis is caught when trying to escape wearing women’s clothes. Winning or losing the war, Reed implies, is part of a literary battle initiated by writers and poets, of a myth-making process where historical persons metamorphose into heroes.

This is the reason why Reed strives to unravel the literary mechanisms that have created a collective image of the South—an icon that is still worshipped. He links the image of the aristocratic South with Oscar Wilde’s elevated, artificial style, and with Alfred Tennyson’s poems about an “indefinite medieval past” (Sanders 1997, 415). The novelist also associates the past Southern glory with Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels that generate a romanticized version of (Scottish) history. Likewise, Reed refers to Edgar Allan Poe—“the principal biographer of that strange war”—whose cultural imaginary “says more in a few stories than all the volumes by historians” (10).¹³

Among these authors, Reed mostly invokes Whitman, the American bard, the national poet who wrote on the Civil War in his poems and letters. In Reed’s war descriptions there is nothing of the dramatic intensity with which Walt Whitman presented the war. If the nineteenth century poet “understood the war as America’s own tragic recreation,” and his poems contributed to the mythical aura of the Civil War (Blight 2001, 20), the contemporary writer lays stress on the comic aspects of the war,¹⁴ with the purpose of demystifying its heroic image. Reed’s criticism of Whitman¹⁵ obviously hints at Whitman’s inability to grasp the racial problem, revealing that the poet’s sympathetic perspective did not encompass the problem of black equality and did not consider the consequences of emancipation.

By refashioning the rhetorical devices used by his precursors, Reed changes the perspective upon the Secession War and sheds light mainly upon the racial problem, while taking into account its political and economic background, too. His insistence on Lincoln as a key personality draws attention to the way in which the war’s political purpose (preservation of the Union) must be connected with its racial purpose (emancipation of slaves).

In Reed’s parodic novel, Abraham Lincoln—“the President of the so-called Union”—becomes a master of ambivalence. During his encounter with Swille, Lincoln is crayoned in the coarsest lines that diminish his heroic stature and unveil the fabricated nature of his personal myth. In comparison with Swille’s aristocratic, influential figure, Lincoln appears as an uneducated curmudgeon, who gazes “toward the Washington Monument,¹⁶ assuming a somber, grave and sulfurous countenance” (33). With incredible humor, Reed stages his entrance in the novel: “Lincoln, Gary-Cooper-awkward, fidgeting with his stovepipe hat, humble-looking, imperfect—a wart here and there—craw and skuttlecoat, shawl, enters the room” (23). Lincoln’s ideal of fighting for “a great and noble cause” is undermined here by his pragmatic act of asking money from a Southerner.

Reed’s questioning of Lincoln’s integrity is based on historical facts. Caught in history’s grip, Lincoln was elected president in a moment of national crisis (1860), at a time when seven states of the Lower South withdrew from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.¹⁷ Lincoln’s main objective was to preserve the nation. Even if he was opposed to the institution of slavery, his idea was to compromise with the South by proposing constitutional preservation of slavery: “In his inaugural address, he firmly opposed the right of states to withdraw from the federal union, but pledged that he would not interfere with slavery, the institution that was the foundation of Southern economic and social life” (Horton and Horton 2001, 165).

In Flight to Canada, Lincoln’s duplicitous relationship with the African Americans is stressed. Whereas he criticizes Swille’s contempt for the black people (who worked hard to build Swille’s economic empire), Lincoln cannot help asking for Swille’s financial assistance (which makes him an accomplice with the slaveholders). Hence, Lincoln’s Janus-faced image as both a liberator-figure and an opportunist—in a word, a politician “operating in the real world of possibilities rather than in an abstract one of principles” (Frank N. Schubert, copy in author’s files, 2005). The novel also alludes to Lincoln’s much acclaimed Emancipation Proclamation (1863) as a double-edged act: it proclaimed the liberation of the Confederate slaves, but it did not apply for slaves held by those loyal to the United States.¹⁸

Moreover, Lincoln could not envisage an American nation where blacks and whites would have equal rights, and this is why he advocated the plan of colonization, of the blacks’ immigration to African countries. Half jokingly, half seriously, Reed draws attention to Lincoln’s colonization plan as an aim of the Civil War:¹⁹

We buy up all the slaves and then tell them to go off somewhere. Some place like New Mexico, where nobody’s hardly seen a cloud and when they do show up it looks like judgement day, and where the cactus grows as big as eucalyptus trees… Other times I think that maybe they ought to go to the tropics where God made them. You know, I’ve been reading about this African tribe that lived in the tropics so long that they trained mosquitoes to fight their enemies (32).

Lincoln’s ideas of colonization were nothing new at the time. Other nineteenth century thinkers or writers, among whom Harriet Beecher Stowe, were in support of the blacks’ immigration. They advocated the colonization scheme not only because they saw no possibility of racial equality in the U.S., but also because some of them believed in the extinction of the black race in America, partially due to economic competition, partly due to the harsher American climate in comparison with the African one. This is one of the reasons why Stowe ends Uncle Tom’s Cabin with George’s and his family’s emigration to Canada, France, and finally to Liberia.²⁰ Reed humorously reverses roles and depicts Lincoln as a black man, seen by Southern cartoonists as an “Illinois Ape.” Swille himself proposes that Lincoln go to Canada and work in one of his Canadian mills: “You can be a powerful man up there. A powerful man. Why, you can be Abe of Yukon” (27).

Reed’s novel betrays Lincoln’s complicity with the Southern mentality, while he simultaneously supports the abolitionist cause. In a symbolic scene (that circles back to 1862, when Lincoln became the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House, only to tell them to leave the nation), Raven Quickskill dreams that he is invited to a White House reception. During the reception “honoring the leading scribes of America,” where Raven is called a “national institution,” the poet is drugged and lured into Lincoln’s bedroom, so that he could be returned to his master (83-84).

Obviously, Lincoln is a man of many disguises—a fool and a player—one who flatters Swille, the master whose money he needs, and one who winks at Uncle Robin, the slave whose approval he wants. Lincoln’s waltzing around with Mammy Barracuda hints again at his complicity with the slave system: “Hello, Abbbbbe. Well, hello, Abbbbbe. It’s so nice to have you here where you belong” (38).²¹ Paradoxically, Mammy Barracuda is a nurturing monster: a motherly presence who takes care of Swille and a black female overseer who imposes the slaveholding system upon her own people.²² Mammy’s dancing with Lanky “diminishes his stature as a possible liberator,” in the same way in which his act of liberating the slaves can be seen as “a short little dance, not a real movement” (Levecq 2002, 285).

The president’s stature is also diminished in the scene of his assassination, which is indirectly described. Using the close-up technique from movies, Reed’s camera is not focused on Lincoln, but on the lovemaking scene between Raven and Quaw Quaw—a mulatto and a Native American—who are watching on television Our American Cousin. Through mass media, Reed presents the real event of Lincoln’s assassination: on April 14, 1865, while watching a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern actor and a believer in the slave system. Reed’s novel does not simply draw attention to history as theatrum mundi, to the artificial character of historical events and figures. By linking Lincoln’s assassination with a scene of lovemaking, Reed also suggests that Lincoln’s tragic exit from the historical arena should be related to the conception of a multiracial nation.

If Lincoln is an actor, then history is a stage upon which, as this postmodern novel implies, the past events are reenacted, and “what has been enters into a constellation with the ‘Now’” (Benjamin 1982, 576, in Geyer-Ryan 1994, 13). With its mixture of historical and fictional details, Reed’s historiographic metafiction discloses the interpretability of the historical fact, the “incomplete,” “subjective” nature of American history (Veyne 1984, 16, 30). Since the writer pays attention to both historical and literary representations, the next parts will discuss how Reed unsettles two stereotypical images of African Americans produced by nineteenth century texts.

NOTES

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