Transgressive Forms in Gainesian Fiction

Abstract

Anchored in black slavery, Gaines’s novel has a historical and inventive feature. On the one hand, it is characterized by its rejection of the European artistic tradition and on the other hand, by its choice for deconstructive aesthetics. On the generic level, its narrative weave suffers from a normative crisis; the norms of autobiography undergo a functional and substantial alteration, giving way to ethno-biography. Thus, the black community’s painful history is revitalized by a female voice. That narrative authority takes a step forward by making the impossible possible, reconstructing the African descents’ past, and challenging the Whites’ misrepresentation of Blacks. Symbolically, the prejudices previously held against black women are destabilized in favor of a panegyric picture, which epitomizes the latter’s determination and audacity. Female characters are illustrated as an acting force opposed to colonial ethics, questioning the colonial authority not to replace it, but to undermine it with a view to establishing a new, flexible order, which offers them a reliable way out. Through that paradigmatic renewal, black females are depicted as vital interlocutors from whom the experience of altruism, freedom, and equality takes root and helps to construct justice in American society. In the novel under consideration, the use of transgressive values exemplifies the loss of the absolutist bearings of modernism to the detriment of plurality, difference, and coexistence. A further study of the features and ideological scope of that postcolonial era characterized by the subversion of tradition seems to be advantageous. Thus, the use of deconstructive criticism as a methodological tool will contribute to digging into two points, namely subverting the naming process and challenging the colonial authority.