Realistic Appeal of All Aunt Hagar's Children
Apocalypse in Edward P. Jones's Short Stories
Edward P. Jones is a master storyteller. The subtlety of his plots, the profound realism of his settings, the brilliance of his allusions, and the ingenuity of his symbolisms conflate to make reading his works a joy to behold. His works also provide readers with mordant epiphanies.
The depth of his art charts many epistemological paths of deconstruction. To Nathaniel Hawthorne and O’Connor, the forest signifies evil as it is exemplified in “Young Goodman Brown” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
To Herman Melville, the whale as in “Moby Dick,” symbolizes evil. However, in Jones’s short stories, the wolf becomes a symbolism of evil while the woods prefigure life, rebirth, and goodness.
Setting and Thematic Design
Jones uses the nation’s capital, Washington, DC as the setting for his two volumes of short stories: Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Although some of the stories are set in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the realistic impact of the stories is conspicuous to anyone who reads his volumes.
Some of the milieus and tableaux in Jones’s narrations resonate with unbelievable replications in characters found in contemporary homes and on the streets of Washington, DC.
Cruelty, generosity, desertion, feminine guile, male craftiness, canting, piety, drug peddling, inebriation, and temperance are just a synecdoche of the many themes that abound in Jones’s works, including his Pulitzer Prize award winning novel, The Known World.
To this end, the Armageddon (the constant battles between good and evil) and the Apocalypse (the ultimate triumph of good over evil) provide a rich overlay of some of the short stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children and make the work an astounding project in realism.
Thematically, the novel is a rich tapestry woven to represent the good, bad, diligent, deviant, defiant, the brave, courageous, party-lovers, and most of all the community. It is a novel whose characters are not devoid of spiritual stasis.
Realism
Realism is the portrayal of the everyday life of the average person, the common individual, or the practical in literature. Many literary works by African Americans resonate with an intense pragmatism of everyday experience.
To many blacks in America, this lived experience or empiricism dates all the way back to the Middle Passage when black people were forcefully removed from their continent and shipped to other continents.
As part of their strategy to disfigure, dismantle, and disorient the enslaved of their indigenous identity, language, culture, and history, slave masters strongly forebode them to be educated.
Compelled to develop new modes of communication, the enslaved created their own vernacular from which sprang new forms of expression in music to enable black America to provide a unique cultural repository for mainstream America.
In this sense, the creation of the vernacular also created a unique situation for the African American because in addition to the oral form of expression, the African American also must know how to express him or herself in mainstream or standard discourse.
All Aunt Hagar’s Children
In All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones revisits realism, a narrative technique that first surfaced in American literature after the Civil War.
Jones’s characters are not restrained by any appalling conditions. Whatever dilemma his characters find themselves in is the result of poor decisions, callousness, and inebriation.
Paradoxically, some southern black characters in literature, seemingly, have no chance at all to progress because they live in communities that refuse to see them as equals. Therefore, they are put in what Marilyn Frye calls the double-bind where they are reified in time and space.
Indeed, Jean Paul Sartre’s idea of existentialism espouses individuals to take their destinies into their own hands and break the yoke of oppression and hegemony that has made them stagnant and unprogressive in society.
Jones offers his characters an opportunity to take their destinies into their own hands by reliving the experience of blacks in Washington, DC in his short stories, even as they are profoundly grounded in symbolism and synecdoche.
In effect, Jones’s characters do not have to wait until the final days of the universe to discover whether the Armageddon will crush them.
On the contrary, his characters can be saved and redeemed through the choices they make. In effect, their Armageddon and Apocalypse are informed daily by internal tensions and conflicts through their choices and actions.
Furthermore, the representation of marriage, desertion, childhood romance and infatuation, the Cartesian composites of good and evil, justice, dignity, and responsibility add to the novel’s realistic appeal.
Edward P. Jones, brilliant storyteller
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