From Gift to Commodity by Hildegard Hoeller

Author:Hildegard Hoeller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

Conclusion: Capitalism and the (African) American Canon

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“Where in the World is William Wells Brown?” asks Ann DuCille in her reflection on the “DNA of African-American Literary History.” “The trouble with Clotel as an originary African-American novel,” she concludes, is that it “has never been true, authentic, and certifiably ‘black.’ Often historically inaccurate and heavily dependent on the borrowed conventions of ‘white’ sentimental fiction Clotel has never quite walked the party line of black experience” (DuCille 2000, 453). DuCille is pointing out that the African American canon is still measuring African American writing against values that Brown began to doubt and deconstruct in the nineteenth century by reexamining and exposing the “true” bloodlines of America — it’s money. “Despite its seminal position as the first novel by an African-American,” she writes, “Clotel remains a book in need of both readings and re-readings, an originary, enabling text in want of analysis and deep theorizing — perhaps in want even of a tradition” (443). Brown himself, I have argued, provides such a “theorizing” frame when he links his changing writerly practices and his revisions of the slave narrative to a move away from the gift and toward finance capitalism. These changes, while engendered by and true to the American economy, made him into an American writer who became virtually uncanonizable.36 Brown’s new genre of writing, his shinplaster fiction, mirrored the monetary practices of American life and to this day fails the test of authenticity DuCille mentions as integral still to our consideration of African American writing.

But why, Brown seems to ask us, should American writing be any more backed than American money? Perhaps the American writer, Brown suggests, like the American banker, circulates not truth or fiction but shinplaster fiction. Brown’s deconstruction of the border line between fiction and truth is a commentary on and a corollary to America’s economy. Those economic realities, which shape our view of human lives, make almost impossible sympathy, trust, and the gift — the foundational elements for sentimental and abolitionist writing and the basis that panic fiction tried to reestablish by insisting on its truthfulness (Sanchez 2008, 31). Instead, as Ernest puts it, Brown is “very much a practitioner of the poetics of the discourse of distrust” (2004, 333). The America that emerges from Brown’s writing is one that is radically secular, capitalist, run by worthless paper, incapable of valuing human life, and absurd, making us hover between laughter and tears. The writing that results from such an America, in turn, is like shinplasters themselves, a doubtful currency, unbacked, fictional, yet real, and involving us — as Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man would a few years later — in an endless cycle of distrust, trust, and speculation.

As popular as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in Britain, it created unease in America precisely because it exposed America and its slavery system to the world. Brown’s Clotel does the same and more. A transatlantic writer, Brown used his presence in Britain as a way to expose America: its slavery, its economy, its disregard for human lives, and its shaky and hypocritical foundations.

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