Tim A. Ryan. Calls and Responses: The American Slavery Novel Since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 2008. Kindle E-book. [References are Kindle lines, not page numbers].

Calls and Responses, a book-length piece of literary criticism, focuses on the treatment of American slavery in American fiction since the 1930s. It deals with some of the critical issues such as the controversy of Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and the challenges to traditional interpretations by postmodern writers, all the while conscious of the elephant in the room: Gone with the Wind.

First the book summarizes a couple of nonfiction treatments of slavery that influenced fiction along with Gone with the Wind itself. The reason I recognized the name of one historian was that he himself became a historical figure. Herbert Aptheker was a literal card-carrying Communist who was trying to overthrow the United States with the help of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, Ryan says Aptheker’s treatment of slavery is Marxist (or should I say Marxian?). Class conflict is everywhere! This was certainly suggested in Gone with the Wind where the field slaves all join the Yankees but the house slaves like Mammy stay at Tara even after the Civil War.

Ryan shows that The Confessions of Nat Turner is influenced by this idea. Aptheker wrote what is still considered the most detailed summary of ante-bellum slave rebellions in the United States. Ryan shows that the Turner in Styron’s novel looks down on the field hands because they are illiterate but he can read.

Styron claims to have also been influenced by Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, but that book suggests something quite different. Douglass at different times was both a house slave and a field slave. He notes that house slaves were usually fed better and not beaten as much only because abuse of them would have been more visible to the neighbors, and slave owners had to at least keep a pretense that they treated their “children” well. Douglass shows cordial relations among slaves of all types. Conflicts were either out of fear of their masters or conflicts that motivate any other people in human relations.

The first half of Calls and Responses makes it appear that the author may be a Marxist, but that could be only because most of the works in the first half seem based on the Mitchell/Aptheker thesis. He recognizes that this perspective is limited. Curiously, both the plantation system that Mitchell mourns and Communism are at their heart feudal in nature. I tell my students that the Civil War put an end to feudalism in America. Communism mostly flourishes in countries like China, Russia, and places in Latin America which still had or have visible traces of feudalism in them.

Indeed, the author appears to conclude by acknowledging the position like that of Douglass, that “Contemporary historical studies tend to confirm the idea that there were close relations between slave classes rather than the fundamental boundaries between them suggested by Gone with the Wind.” (566-568)

Ryan suggests that the more postmodern novels seem to turn some of this concept of classes among slaves on its ear. Octavia Butler’s Kindred is about a time-traveling contemporary black woman who goes to the southern plantation where her ancestors were slaves. In her own era, she is happily married to a white man, so the prejudice and ambivalent treatment of slaves in her family’s past shocks her in ways she can hardly believe.

The book includes some treatment of Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow and Alex Haley’s Roots. Ryan notes that Roots, which is subtitled The Saga of an American Family is more in the tradition of East of Eden or The Godfather than slave novels (2191)

Calls and Responses acknowledges that Beloved is set mostly after emancipation but still deals with the long-term effects of slavery. “Beloved, the spirit of Sethe’s murdered baby, represents the ghost of slavery itself.” (2614) At the same time the novel is committed to “keeping the past alive in order to construct a better future.” (3733, citing Kimberly Chabot Davis)

It also includes more detailed looks at Dessa Rose and especially Valerie Martin’s Property, both of which focus on the treatment of female slaves. Property also presents a female slave owner who is a more nuanced character than someone like the O’Hara women.

Ryan’s treatment of The Known World is very effective. It is very different from the review on these pages because it is looking specifically at the issue of slavery. This also turns some usual concepts on their ears because the story is about a black family that owns slaves. To Ryan, this novel illustrates “that history may be only available to us as unreliable narrative , but texts are finally the only kind of access we have to very real processes, events, and consequences. History, in other words, may well be bunk, but it is also vitally important.” (3467-69)

To me, the key “discourse” in The Known World is the ex-slave’s painting of the bird’s eye view of the Townsend plantation. All the faces of the people in the picture are looking up. Ryan says that they “look directly to the face of the viewer.” (3660) Perhaps so, but they are also looking to heaven, to God. He alone sees all and knows the exact truth. No wonder the Day of Judgment is described as a time when heaven opens its books. (Revelation 20:12)