Onvan : The Known World - Nevisande : Edward P. Jones - ISBN : 61159174 - ISBN13 : 9780061159176 - Dar 432 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2003

Addressing the novel “The Known World,” by Edward Jones, is tough. As a writer and voracious reader, while working my way through the story I found the structure of the novel quite unconventional and unsuccessful—and at times quite irritating—as a means of communicating what might otherwise have been a powerful story with which a reader could in some way connect. And yet when I put down the completed book, I felt I had experienced a compelling tale.

In less than 400 pages Jones attempted to tell the story of almost 50 characters; many author’s have trouble successfully spotlighting three or four characters. Jones had on average less than four pages of text to dedicate to each character: any more on any one, and the rest would suffer. (Jones must have understood this to some extent, as he added at the end of the novel a list of characters, including a brief description of each, to assist his readers.) So there already was a multitude of characters, and not much room to say a whole lot about any one of them. Then, it seems Jones took every person’s story, cut each into tiny pieces, mixed them up in a big box, then randomly pulled out fragments and added them to the novel, giving the reader a very disjointed storyline/timeline to follow. Trying to understand who was where, when and how, only detracted from the overall effect the story could have had on me as I read it—the very act of reading it became laborious.

Adding to this was Jones’s insistence on inserting so-called present day (for the reader) references. These additions ruined any sense of connection I might have felt existed between the narrator and the story, since it made it apparent that the narrator was here and now (2009, or whenever any reader might open the book) and not even remotely a part of the story or even the setting or era. These snippets only served to detract from the intimacy of the narrator with the story.

Hurting the story even further was Jones choice of third person omniscient point of view (POV). With no consistent POV, it was very hard for me to connect or identify with any one character through the entire text. While reading the story, I continued to be disappointed and even irritated at Jones’s method of presentation, right up to the last page.

Yet after completion, while still dissatisfied with the final product (I really wanted to KNOW many of the characters, and Jones left me wanting so much more), I found myself contemplating the many characters and plotlines, and realized that while the reading itself was not ‘fun,’ there was still something there.

“The Known World” was an intricate story through which Jones created a completely imaginary world. (Jones has stated in several subsequent interviews that he conducted absolutely no research, and that the entire story and every single character, other than actual historical figures, was “crafted in his head.”) And his characters were very consistent. The novel’s title was well chosen: each character acted within the confines of that individual’s known world; very few thought and acted beyond themselves. And yet, all those worlds continually collided—each character in some way was related to, interacted with, or somehow influenced one or more of the others. Jones creation of so many people, and their sometimes tenuous and at other times quite personal ties, was brilliant. Any attempt to plot the relationships and interactions would produce one huge and complex spider web.

While completely made up, the plotlines and characters are very believable, based upon what we know of the era, and even upsetting to some, and it all felt very real when I was “in the moment.” While today we know the evils and effects of slavery, Jones was able to present so many characters set perfectly in a time when slavery was both legal and accepted by so many people. Regardless of how any reader may personally feel now, at one time not everyone felt that way. There are many acts that currently are known to be appalling or just outright evil, but at one time were accepted as normal. Thankfully, perspectives change, and we have grown, building upon the knowledge and sentiments of our ancestors. Jones fiction is about such possible forebears, and how some accepted, some rebelled, some pretended and some ran away. Jones instigates numerous emotions through his characters: incredulousness, outrage, sympathy, fear and sadness, to name but a few.

In all, the novel grew on me as I was able to let the myriad of fragments come together in my mind well after closing the book. I do believe that the impact might have been greater—and more immediate—if Jones had chosen a more conventional method of storytelling, and limited the number of characters so that each could be more thoroughly developed.

When Toni Morrison began her research for "Beloved," she discovered a trove of ghastly instruments. She knew, of course, that slaves were routinely whipped, starved, raped, and hanged, but the existence of specially forged tools was a surprise: metal bits forced down the throat, iron masks locked across the face, spiked collars clasped around the neck. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel reintroduced those horrors into the national memory and did much to demonstrate that the cruelties of slavery extended far beyond hard labor and physical deprivation.

"The Known World," by Edward Jones, reclaims another peculiarity of American slavery and in the process illustrates yet again that we can't under- estimate its perverse contortions of the human spirit. Bizarre as it sounds, in Louisiana, Virginia, and South Carolina, a small number of free blacks owned their own plantations - and their own slaves. It was a precarious arrangement, to be sure. Blacks who were freed or managed to buy their own freedom had little incentive to tarry in the South. The laws governing their status and their right to hold property were ambiguous and easy for any white person to shred.

Jones uses this fragile situation as the setting for a novel about a group of black and white Virginians who tried - sometimes nobly, often viciously - to maintain their world in the face of inevitable collapse. To the extent that Morrison spun a surreal tale of American slavery into mythic proportions, Jones has carved a companion series of stark anecdotes into national legends. In a measured voice that never rises to reflect the agonies and absurdities he describes, he moves back and forth through decades and across state lines, assembling an apparently random collection of brief scenes that gradually fuse into a stunning portrait of moral confusion.

The story revolves around Henry Townsend, a black man who, with the indulgence of his former owner, managed to buy his own farm and his own slaves - eventually 29 adults and a collection of children. Henry's parents, who labored tirelessly to free him as a child, are horrified by his participation in the flesh market, but Henry is ambitious, and, what's more, he learned from his master that "once you own even one, you will never be alone." As a protection against loneliness and a way to wealth, Henry can't imagine anything more successful, and he's convinced he can be "a better master than any white man he had ever known." Indeed, he attains that dubious goal, creating a plantation with forced labor that's largely free of physical beatings, but it's an insidious gentility that only camouflages the humiliations of Southern slavery.

Nevertheless, his untimely death frightens most of his slaves, who know just how delicate their relative comfort is. Only the brooding overseer, Moses, the first slave Henry ever bought, sees his master's demise as an opportunity - not for freedom, but for taking his place. Indeed, what interests Jones most in this complex novel is the way slavery distorts judgment, not just of those who oppress, but of those who are oppressed.

Henry's widow, Caldonia, quickly decides against freeing "her legacy," choosing instead to maintain the plantation in the spirit of Henry's gentle example. "Her husband had done the best he could," she thinks, "and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact." Occasionally, a child is worked to death or a pregnant woman labors in the field till she miscarries, but Caldonia sheds sincere tears, comforts the parents, and considers whether she should buy insurance against further losses of her property.

As a single woman with a large business to run, she's encouraged by a collection of family and friends, other free blacks, some of whom own their own slaves, too. One of the most troubling is Fern, Caldonia's prim teacher of literature and etiquette. Together, they keep the irony of their position well buried, while socializing in a kind of racial terrarium maintained by William Robbins, the county's wealthiest white farmer. Estranged from his own wife but protected by his political power, he loves a black woman in town and openly adores his two mulatto children. The Townsend plantation with its little coterie of free slave-owning blacks gives his favorites a place to play and refine themselves.

In one of several shifts to the late 19th century, a Canadian historian interviews Fern, Caldonia's teacher, about those days on the plantation. "All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do," she says without any hint of guilt or remorse. "We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did." Jones uses that same tone of historical distance throughout, a tone that amplifies the grotesque mingling of affection and cruelty that infected these people, black and white.

In the center of this moral kaleidoscope stands the sheriff, John Skiffington, an earnest Christian, dedicated to the objective application of law and convinced that "the law always cares" for everyone equally. It's a doomed endeavor, of course, but as Caldonia's plantation begins to collapse, Skiffington fails to realize that the legal system he's sworn to uphold is not objective and that he cannot remain clean within it.

The scrambled collection of events and characters makes this a difficult story to enter, but that structure eventually accounts for much of the novel's evocative power. Jones has a kind of biblical style that suggests whole lives in a few stark details from a perspective that's alternately microscopic and telescopic. It's a technique that resists our efforts to keep these events in some unrecoverable past. The troubling implications of his story leach in through hairline cracks all over the twin shells of antebellum nostalgia and Northern piety. Every time Caldonia cheerfully reminds her friends, "We are all worthy of one another," the legacy of slavery sounds more complex and unresolved.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0814/p1...

Dear The Known World:

I'll be blunt. I'm breaking things off. This just isn't working. It's not you; it's me. Well, maybe it's you, too, a bit.

I really thought when we got together that we would have a brief but mutually satisfying relationship. I'd read you, you'd provide enlightenment or emotional catharsis or entertainment, maybe even all three. All the signs were there: the laudatory quotes on your jacket, a shocking and unexpected premise, high marks on goodreads. But something was just off by the end of the first chapter.

Maybe it was the masturbation scene right at the start. Or the characters that I just couldn't get into - I could hardly tell some of them apart. Or the way the narrative seemed to skip all over without any focus. Maybe I just didn't give you enough pages. I'm sure you got better as you went along. I mean, look at all the four- and five-star reviews you've gotten! But every time I picked you up my thoughts turned to the three other books on my bedside table that I'd rather be reading. I haven't actually been unfaithful, but that's just not a healthy basis for a relationship. So after 72 pages, I'm putting you down.

Don't feel too bad. Focus on all those other, good reviews and maybe we'll meet again someday when the stars all align just right. But probably not.

Emily

For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.

A beautifully paced novel that inverts every cliche about institution of slavery. While not exactly removing race from the issue of slavery, Jones is able to show that even among African-Americans the perniciousness of slavery could damn a generation. The best summary of this idea came from a NYTimes review:

'There are few certified villains in this novel, white or black, because slavery poisons moral judgments at the root. As Jones shows, slavery corrupts good intentions and underwrites bad ones, yet allows decency the odd occasion -- but only by creating such an enormous need for it.'

The pacing and structure of this novel could be a little challenging to some, but I found that it fit the narrative perfectly. This isn't a novel that burns you with its quotable sentences, but it scars you with its images. There were periods in it where I thought I was reading a Cormac McCarthy novel. That alone is high praise.

The Pulitzer Prize won by this novel in 2004 makes one thing clear: Political correctness trumps bad writing, even very bad writing.

As a work of imaginative politics, this would be five-star all the way. The operative word here is imaginative. For a while as I read, I figured that at least I was getting a powerful education into a little known aspect of the most shameful aspect of U.S. history, not just slavery per se (bad enough), but free blacks also being slave owners, and not insignificant slave owners at that – genuine plantations and not necessarily with good intentions toward their slaves. Henry Townsend, the novel’s protagonist (sort of – his early death is an important driver of the story line) shows kindness to a recaptured runaway slave by cutting off only a third of an ear instead of the whole thing. And by the way, his mother was so repulsed by the idea of her husband wanting to free his slaves, she gradually poisoned him by adding arsenic to his food. Yeah, this is multidimensional; it’s not just the whites who are bad. And actually, as white plantation owners go, William Robbins, the big shot of the county, is as decent a sort as slave-owners can be, although he never calls slaves “slaves;” he goes out of his way to call them “property;” like he’s trying to prove a point.

The writing, oh my, it’s awful. Really, really awful. In the first half, the major irritant consists of peeks into the future, like the author’s asides that show he knows what’s going to happen to the characters in the distant future. Example: Years later, when so-and-so was in her nineties, she’d do this and such. And some episodes are presented by having characters interviewed years later by a historian doing research. So artistic! Z-z-z-z-z. OK. I could live with that. Seen it before. It’s irritating but some authors can’t resist the urge to show what they learned in writing workshops. But the second half, the plotting – it’s almost comically dreadful. And the character development, when it’s done at all (not often), it’s about as satisfying as instant coffee. If you plod through, you’ll see what I mean.

In a way, though, this should not come as a surprise. After reading, I looked up a bit on Jones. Turns out he’s not an accomplished novelist. Actually, he published his first short story collection in 1992 at the age of 41. It was about African Americans in Washington DC. Then came “The Known World” in 2003 followed by the explosion of publicity. And then in 2006, he does another short story collection about African Americans in Washington DC. So essentially, “The Known World” is a first novel. So one should not be surprised that it comes off as a first novel. Jones was not an experienced novelist.

But at least he’s a dedicated historian; a lot of time passed between his fiorst story collection and “The Known World.” He was obviously researching the daylights out of this powerful topic. Or not. Consider this, from a 2003 review:

* * *

So little was known about the subject of black slave owners, and so little had been written about it, that Jones’s novel about Henry Townsend’s plantation and its slaves was taken as a feat of historiographic revelation. “Jones has clearly done a tremendous amount of research to bring this time and place to life,” wrote John Freeman in the Boston Globe; the USA Today critic expressed gratitude that his “historical novel” didn’t “become a tedious showcase for the author’s research.” As Jones irritably pointed out in later interviews, including one appended to the novel’s paperback edition, there was one problem with this interpretation: he had done almost no research whatsoever. “I started out thinking I would read a whole bunch of books about slavery,” said Jones. “But I never got around to doing that.”

In fairness to his critics, Jones works hard to camouflage his lack of research by including gratuitous details that, though invented, give the novel a patina of verisimilitude. He notes exact dollar amounts for each slave purchase; census information for Manchester, the fictional Virginian county where the novel takes place; references to (invented) contemporary works of scholarship; and historical anecdotes about the intricacies of slave law. Jones is not trying to be duplicitous; detail is the essential clothing of all good fiction, historical or not. But the apparent superfluity of some of these details can be unsteadying. Like the premise of black slave owners, the torrent of pseudo-factual information forces readers to question what they know about slavery and race, and to wonder which stories are too horrible to have been made up.

* * *

So much for historical education. Were any of the things I thought I learned true? Who the heck knows?

So as noted, for imaginative politics, this is five star. How could it be otherwise: The Pulitzer committee swooned. But as a novel, I’m sorry. This is a one-star effort by a minor writer who in the ten years between this and his prior work “never got around to” reading the bunch of books on slavery he thought he’d have to do.

There is probably an important and interesting story in here somewhere (for example, if it were actually about the widow of a black slave owner trying to run a plantation after her husband's death, as claimed on the book jacket). However, any plot that might exist was buried so deep beneath the convoluted chronology and extraneous characters and details that I decided I didn't care to keep digging for it, and quit on page 198. The author seemed determined to insert every existing anecdote about slavery into one novel. This might have worked better as a compilation of essays or short stories.

Edward P. Jones' Bold Vision of "The Known World"

This story would have been exciting enough based only on the fact that Edward P. Jones so boldly took the antebellum novel to a place it has never gone before; namely, to black slave-owner Henry Townsend's plantation in Manchester, Virginia. There, the "Known World" is wholly different from what one might expect. But this seemingly obviously absurd anomaly of U.S. history, wherein black masters owned black slaves, doesn’t stop with that rarely discussed fact. It is further illuminated by Jones' flights into the fantastic with observations of sentient lightning, children with the personalities of bitter grandparents, and, comically enough, freak chickens.

Mixed within this potent literary brew are some of the most original and dynamic characters, male and female, ever to step into the pages of American fiction. In fact, one of the more remarkable features of Jones’ amazing novel is his portrayal of how specific individuals sometimes managed to exploit the institution of slavery in order to indulge their own private needs, quirks, or agendas.

It's true that the alternating biblical density and epic expansiveness of details and events with which Jones builds his narrative can at times prove challenging. However, this same aesthetic ultimately delivers a triumphant satisfaction. Jones' Pulitzer--and any other awards received for this novel--was well earned and deserved.

by Author-Poet Aberjhani
author of "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance" (Facts on File Library of American History)
and "The Wisdom Of W.E.B. Du Bois" (Wisdom Library)

Books can be difficult for various reasons, and this one is difficult for some quite unusual reasons. It is not linguistically oblique, there is nothing much that is mysterious about the nature of the plot, and for the most part the action of the story takes place in a straightforward and realistic manner. On a word by word basis, the thing makes sense. What complicates matters is the author’s remarkable sense of the novel as a complete artistic vision. This is one of those rare and special works in which everything starts out in a kind of mess but which, as you read on, slowly resolves itself into a picture with depth, colour, light and shade, and with remarkable internal consistency.

The novel is set in Manchester County, a fictional region in Virginia, sometime in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it is set in and around the world of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and ex-slave whose parents bought his freedom when he was a child. After learning a trade and making a little money, Townsend buys his own plantation and slaves; this might surprise modern readers, but we are given to understand that he was not unusual, and that he acted entirely according to the laws and culture of his times. However, Henry’s death comes quite early in the pages of this book, and so the main action comes in recalling the story of his youth and how he came to his position in life, then what happened after he died when his wife, Caldonia, came into possession of the farm and its property (human and otherwise).

At first I found all this quite difficult to follow. Within the first fifty or so pages, the author introduces a large number of different characters, and is not only fastidious about charting their relationships to one another but also in introducing elements of both their past and future stories in asides which often seem to have little relevance to immediate events. I read somewhere that there is no present tense in this book, which seems to me like a perfect way of describing it: for much of the first two thirds of the text, the writing is unhinged in time, jumping from moment to moment across years in a way which frequently seems inscrutable.

It’s not until relatively late in the book that the thing starts to cohere. Eventually, things settle down a little, and the true pattern of the author’s wizardry starts to form broad arcs across the pages. I can’t stop thinking of one particular moment, one really awful thing that happens in the story, that in any other book would perhaps seem like an unnecessary act of cruelty only perpetrated against an admirable character so that they have a chance to seem further ennobled. But such is the effort here on the part of the author to develop the history and motivations of both the victim and the perpetrator over the course of tens and hundreds of pages that when this horrible thing happens, it has the immediate, painful quality of lived experience: it somehow seems both inevitable (that such a person should do such a thing) and by chance (that it should happen to this person, at that moment, that night).

Leaps across the immediate chronology of a character’s life in the course of a plot are perhaps not all that strange for a historical novel, but what makes this book more unusual still is that it frequently describes the final fates of even the most insignificant people within its pages. Some of these descriptions are the length of a throwaway sentence — a kidnapped slave girl is casually mentioned as later becoming the first black woman to achieve a Phd in America, for example — while others are spelled out in details dropped like breadcrumbs across the breadth of the book. It’s a postmodern touch which never lets the reader forget that this is a novel framed with the ultimate benefit of educated hindsight, a kind of tacit acknowledgement of the godlike power with which the author determines the fates of these characters. That doesn’t mean that anyone is due a happy ending more than anyone else, and the slaves who eventually achieve emancipation and some kind of extra chance at life are rare compared to those who are killed or who die suddenly or who quietly, simply disappear. But almost everyone gets an ending of some kind, and it’s usually one which recognises that, rich or poor, free or otherwise, these were just human beings who were hated and feared and loved and missed in varying degrees.

One last thing that’s worth mentioning is the author’s own intrusions into the text in the form of historical references and citations. Often a detail regarding local law or a particularly intriguing set of statistics are presented as fact, and if it hadn’t been for the brief interview with Jones at the end of my edition, I would probably have accepted these as all being true. But they aren’t — as far as I know, they are all invented. Personally, I didn’t find this offensive, but I can understand how some might find it problematic given that we still live in times when people would still deny or underestimate the scale of the atrocity which formed the foundations of modern American society.

Could a person read this and accept its account as entirely truthful; and if they did, what would they think if they found out it was fiction? What else might they come to doubt? I don’t know that I can answer that. My own perspective is one of admiration at the craft involved to create something so utterly convincing. I don’t personally believe in moral or immoral books; to paraphrase Wilde, they’re either written well or poorly, and in any medium there can be no accounting for the vagaries of taste and prejudice. Perhaps it would do better to simply assume the best from our readers and our writers, and leave the rest open to interpretation.

Layers of excellence! I feel that I could immediately go back to the first page and read this book all over again! I have owned my first edition hardcover copy FOR SO LONG - including time spent boxed-up in a storage space. This has been the right time for me to finally read it.

Someone once told me he felt this was the perfect novel. I think he might be right.

A very complex and beautiful, compelling book about Henry, a former slave who becomes a slave owner, & his wife Caldonia. But they're just the start - the book is really a series of stories & vignettes about the families, friends, neighbors & community surrounding Henry & Caldonia. It took me a really long time to get into the book, because there are so many characters, some important & some not, & the book jumps around in time, making it difficult to follow. Trust me, use the cast of characters at the end of this edition (why not place this at the beginning?!) & give up your expectations about traditional narrative format, & you'll LOVE this book as much as I did. In life, we have our own story kind of playing in our head, & at the same time we have all these other stories we're hearing - the story about your mother's great-uncle. The story about your brother in law's neighbor. The one about your sister's husband's aunt & her neighbor. the one about your coworker's mother. You know all those stories? That's what this book is like - some characters are more important than others, so you hear more of their stories, but minor characters have stories too, & they sort of appear out of nowhere, & you get to hear their story, & then they're gone. It's really very cool! I particularly loved the story of the womanizing slave who has a vision during a lightning storm/tornado - & becomes the founder of an orphanage. And the little tiny story about the family who don't want to give up their cow, & the woman goes into the barn to milk the cow & there's this lovely description of her squirting the cow's milk into a cat's mouth, & if you've ever seen a cat eat with true contentment you will recognize the cat body language that Jones describes. Toward the end of the book there's a very powerful scene where a character, who isn't a particularly "good" character, says there should be a lantern or light of truth in the world, an actual place where people can stand & tell the truth without fear of retribution, where one might be able to right a wrong. It's a moment where you think, yes this guy could right the wrong by speaking out, because his fear of having people think he's "on the negro's side" is...well, wrong! But that's his fear & in that moment of the book you understand it & you think, yeah, what if he could speak out under that light of truth & not have anyone judge him? How wonderful would that be? While the book depicts the horrors of slavery, & there are a few characters who are outright despicable, there are many shades of gray in Jones' vision as well. It's a book that will make you think about slavery, the myths & realities & tragedies of it all, & on top of that it'll make you think about your own life & all the people you've known & how complex & interesting we all are, really. It's beautifully written & the characters will stick in your head as if you'd known them too. Oddly, I think what I initially disliked most about this book - its multitude of characters & convoluted timeline - is what I ended up really enjoying! Another example of a book that made my head expand, with some creakiness, but I'm glad the expansion can still happen!