1Eudora Welty’s pronouncements on the importance, role and function of place in fiction describe the American fiction writer’s negotiation with this complex literary phenomenon. Welty describes place in fiction as “the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel’s progress.” She explains the symbiotic relationship between the essential components that form the sense of place: “Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place” (62). Years later, Chinua Achebe in his “Colonialist Criticism” came up with the literary mandate that “Every literature must . . . speak of a particular place, evolve out of the necessities of its history, past and current, and the aspirations and destiny of its people” (qtd. in Morrissey 74). The list of writers and critics who have problematized the concept of place in fiction is not limited to Welty and Achebe. Henry James made his observations on the sense of scene long before Eudora Welty and Chinua Achebe pronounced theirs: “The scenic method is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation . . . the scenic scheme is the only one I can trust . . . to stick to the march of an action” (263). James’s “scenic method” and “scenic scheme” refer to the American writers’ emphases on a specified place as “indispensable to scene” and “it is only when scene is identified with place that the full powers of the literary imagination are challenged and used” (Hoffman qtd. in Core 4). Noted American fiction writers of place have rejected the abstract, unindividualized, unidentified, unspecific settings or scenes and their writings have often been marked by geographical places having history, tradition, and idiom. They have made use of actual cities, towns, hills, and rivers as their narrative settings and transformed them into places with transcendental qualities. Thus, the symbolic and symbiotic connections between place, setting, and scene and the meaning they generate in the texts have been played out by a whole string of American fictionists and prevent American literature from losing the poetic, mystical, and lyrical qualities that Richard Chase calls its “rich poetry” (6).
2Three important writers of American literary history can be cited as examples in this context, Washington Irving, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. Irving’s New York in A History of New York is the earliest example of an American story-teller’s engagement with an identified place. Both in A History of New York and The Sketch Book Irving formulates modalities to express the American writer’s desire and the anxiety that he experiences while capturing cultural and topographical heterogeneity and novelty. Irving fantasizes and fictionalizes history and sets the first example of myth-making in American literature by using an actual place—with him the American fiction of place was born. Irving became the first American mythopoet whose fictional territory was “somewhere between fact and fantasy, the mundane and the marvelous, ‘modern’ life and ancient legend”; Irving suggested in his stories “the existence of a level—mysterious and mythic—beyond the middle range of experience and [found] ‘reality’ at the crossroads of actuality and myth” (Slabey 180).
3A century later, In Winesburg, Ohio Anderson effected another momentous development. He “refined a generic model for revealing the complexity, banality, and desperation of humanity by focusing on the details of a singular place.” Authors like Faulkner, Hemingway, Toomer, Steinbeck, and a host of contemporary writers described “Winesburg as transformative, radically new . . . revelatory” and “liberating” (Smith 37). Anderson was a great influence on Faulkner and was his mentor and good friend. He urged Faulkner to concentrate on local region, material, and color, and not to look to continental Europe for inspiration and material. Anderson became the literary model for Faulkner. The latter “unfolded so much concerning the people, the history, and the geography of Yoknapatawpha with such consistency that to many readers it seems to be an actual county” (Aiken 1). Critics have written on the parallels between Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha county and the actual Lafayette County, Mississippi for decades; Robert Penn Warren commented that geography is “scrupulously though effortlessly presented in Faulkner’s work,” and its “significance for his work is very great” (110).
4Edward P. Jones’s interviewer Hilton Als for The Paris Review introduces Jones’s work by saying that like his great precursors James Joyce and Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Jones is a writer of place—mainly the segregated Washington, D.C., . . . an oversized small town where chance encounters, changes in the weather, a little local fame can lead to momentous events, and where the Deep South remains a living memory.” Als is one among the league of interviewers and critics who have discussed Jones’s oeuvre centering around the author’s negotiation with an actual place, a city in America, the capital itself. Jones announces in his introduction to Lost in the City that he modelled his Washington upon the Dublin of Joyce and wanted to “do the same for Washington and its real people” (Jones xv), and with this he signed the intellectual treaty with many others of his literary predecessors, not only Joyce and Singer but important American writers like Irving, Welty, Anderson, Faulkner, Cheever, Sullivan, Updike and many others.
5Jones’s texts, equipped with the power of resurrection for places and characters, indulge in an overt transference of realities into symbols and assign them powerful and unique attributes. Places in his stories cease to be only “geography and history” as Louis D. Rubin Jr. would observe, but they become ways “of looking at the world” (17). His “spectacular vision that encompasses everything, a historical whole, a totality of African American experience” (Coleman 105), gives birth to a consistent voice and unity because he has “got such a strong unity of place” in his “cycle of stories that are located—that are connected—by place” (Russell Banks qtd. in Smith 39). According to Welty, a writers’ mastery in his treatment of place in his writings decides his greatness. Jones achieves that superlative skill with his conjurer’s ability to turn actual places into fictional settings using the method of connecting place, scene, and experience “with metaphor” (63). His presentation of Washington D.C. with its physical microdetails and of characters who narrate “from the margins of the city” and who “articulate experiences that oppose dominant constructions of American identity and success” render the city “not as a symbolic space of national unity, but as a real and complex city in which new forms of knowledge, identity and memory are produced” (Brown 2). Jones’s Washington produces counter circuits and counter symbols through which both Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children navigate the life journeys and experiences of the characters.
6Jones’s “ethnic counter-narratives” confront the “national master-narrative” as Kennedy and Beuka describe it, which “idealizes New World settlement ordained by God . . . and . . . the . . . American Dream of prosperity” (11). D.C. in these counter-narratives is not the American “Promised Land” but a place “where they hung babies in night trees” (Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children 3). Occupying this Washington, Jones’s characters who have been rendered powerless by white supremacy “repeatedly encounter a world larger than their own” (MacKenzie 97). Yet Jones’s world is transformative and while he constructs an alternate space, his authorial gaze shifts between the real and the surreal, the physical and the mythic, the natural and the supernatural, and contradiction and convergence. It dwells on the Joycean epiphanical moments both of revelation and experience of the characters, and then towards a lyrical transcendence. With their redemptive force, Jones’s texts turn the city into a place of unlimited possibilities.
7Jones claims Joyce’s Dubliners as the influence behind Lost in the City and the reader finds traces of it in his next short story collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, to a large extent. Following Joyce, he develops a “story world” (Gonzalez 185), peoples it with black Washingtonians, dramatizes their response to the place, employs unconventional endings and follows similar structure for story progression. Jones’s story collections are constituted by men and women with Southern experience or the shared memory of experience transpired to them. Jones explores the emotional and cultural influences of the South on All Aunt Hagar’s Children particularly and says that his characters “brought all that they knew and what they did and what they learned in the South to Washington” (Interview with Graham 432). Their experiences are constitutive in turning Washington into Jones’s “storyworld,” which, according to David Herman, is “the world evoked by a narrative text or discourse” (107). Washington D.C., like Joyce’s Dublin, works as a symbol on several levels. It creates the symbolic space-time that escapes boundaries of any sort, hybridity of forms and intertextuality and most importantly it is transelementating—to use a term meaning to change the elements in something, to suggest how D.C. can effect change and transformations in Jones’s fictions.
8As in Dubliners, Lost in the City’s first story features the youngest protagonist and its last story, the oldest. “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” has a nine-year-old girl protagonist, Betsy Ann, and in the last story in the collection, “Marie,” Marie Delaveaux Wilson is eighty-six-years old. The ascending age is used for achieving structural evolution and the growth of the characters’ responses to experience. As a departure from Lost in the City, All Aunt Hagar’s Children’s fourteen stories follow different connecting strategies, although location, memory, and experience, besides Jones’s unique style connecting the two cycles, are the unifying agencies that create his “storyworld.” The first story in Lost in the City, “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” inaugurates the themes and connotations of this volume. Betsy Ann Morgan’s life between the ages of five and twelve in Myrtle Street is witness to the lives of displaced people in the black neighborhood which collapses due to the proposed construction of railroad, symbolic of what bell hooks describes as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (qtd. in Maucione 76-77). The narrator explains, “Little by little that spring and summer of 1961 Myrtle Street emptied of people, of families who had known no other place in their lives” (Jones, Lost in the City 21). Betsy Ann’s pigeon house is invaded by rats because of the emptying neighborhood. In Myrtle Street, death and destruction hover and are representative of the “malevolent force” (Maucione 84) that upsets the characters’ Eden, their dreams and their hopes.
9However, dislocation and departure, death and annihilation are not the final statement because the neighborhood also “is a place that holds out the possibility of Gemeinschaft within the postmodern world and the age of globalization” (Maucione 76). The place is witness to thirteen years of history of the Morgans with a sense of community, a sense of hope and renewal. Betsy Ann’s newfound freedom from her physical and moral confinement towards the end of the story is symptomatic of the neighborhood’s moral capacity to offset denial: “for now the rope fence was gone and nothing held her back” (Jones, Lost in the City 24). She roams “the city at will” and uses her liberty to visit places attached with reminiscences: “Her favorite place became the library park at Mount Vernon Square, the same park where Miss Jenny had first seen Robert and Clara together, across the street from the Peoples where Betsy Ann had been caught stealing” (24). Jones invests his characters with the ability to experience moments of sudden revelation and moments of epiphany and they turn the narrative into a symbolic statement of affirmation.
10Betsy Ann’s visit to Mount Vernon Square and watching the last pigeon’s flying into the horizon of hope towards Northeast are both illuminatory and transcendental: “He flew farther into Northeast, into the colors and sounds of the city’s morning. She did nothing, aside from following him, with her eyes, with her heart, as far as she could” (25). Coleman observes that the stories of Jones very often follow the endurance and transcendence pattern and those turn out “to be a dominant theme throughout the stories” (61). The pattern works through the dynamics of the lapsarian and redemption themes and their variants. Washington acts as both a prelapsarian and postlapsarian Eden where dreams are made, ruined and remade, as they are in Anderson’s Winesburg. George Willard, Anderson’s protagonist envisions the place as “a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood” (qtd. in Smith 37) and Washington is the place where Jones’s men and women lay their aspirations. Like George Willard, the protagonists of the first story in Aunt Hagar’s Children, “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” decide on Washington D.C. as the place of their dreams. “Ruth and Aubrey’s time on 3rd Street was pleasantly exhausting” (13) until the abandoned baby is dropped from the tree turning Ruth’s Edenic Washington into a fallen place. The narrator presents a contradictory, ambivalent, incongruous, and complex Washington that is more difficult for its characters to negotiate than the Washington of Lost in the City:
That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown. . . . Still, the night, even in godforsaken Washington, sometimes had that old song that could pull Ruth up and out of her bed, the way it did when she was a girl across the Potomac River in Virginia where all was safe and all was family. (1)
The passage projects the diabolic, ominous, inhospitable and unsafe Washington contrasted with Ruth’s Virginia where “she found peace again” (14). This place helps her “shake off the unsettling way Washington had insinuated itself in her nerves” (14); “The world in Virginia kept telling her that marriage and Washington had been good for her . . . the same people who said Washington had been good to her, would tsk-tsk and say what could anyone expect of a city with a president who was so mean to colored people” (15). Still for Aubrey, Washington is the Promised Land: “he was now a Washingtonian. Virginia was way over there somewhere in the past . . . the land of Washington, D.C., spread out forever and ever before him” (16, 30). Aubrey undergoes moments of epiphany, an encapsulating experience that transforms his vision, which Ruth does not have her share of. During his journey back to Washington Aubrey “saw the gray smoke rising from the chimney with great energy, and it was, at last, the smoke, the fury and promise of it, the hope and exuberance of it, that took him back down to the horse” (29).
11Like these two opening stories, the Washington narratives center less on the chapters of slavery and white oppression of Blacks—what Jones is interested in is the moral loss and the tragedies of his characters who have to struggle with the white people’s Washington. Jones often refers to southern links, back home cultural reminiscences of the South, slavery and racial injustice, and the African experience. “Jones reminds us that the geographical difference between ‘the land of white people’ and the neighborhoods inhabited by his characters physically reflects the centre-margin relationship of dominant and minority cultures” (Kennedy and Beuka 11). Yet it does not form the central questions of Jones’s fictions. Rather, his “composite narrative of the African American community that subtly disrupts the ‘pedagogical’ master-discourse of the majority . . . by inscribing an alternate narrative of metropolitan survival” shapes his major concern in the stories (Kennedy and Beuka 12). Jones brings into the consciousness of his narratives the symbolic polarities represented by the master discourse and its minority counter discourses, the Washington of white people and the black communities. There is no convergence of the two. They are rather placed obliquely or in parallel, and Jones’s art is, like the American imagination, “stirred . . . by the aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and disorder” (Chase 2). As a result, his literary sensibilities are dependent on and shaped by a lyrical transcendence.
12Jones’s characters are victims of hostile forces and they experience moral, emotional and spiritual raptures and fissure points in their lives. They confront “circumstances that ultimately take [them] to a moment of profound human vulnerability” (Poliner). In “The First Day,” the second story in Lost in the City, the illiterate mother is shocked and disappointed to be rejected in her daughter’s school. When she tells the teacher that they live at “1227 New Jersey Avenue, the woman first seems to be picturing in her head where we live. Then she shakes her head and says that we are at the wrong school, that we should be at Walker-Jones” (28). Walker-Jones is a school meant for the black children on New Jersey Avenue. The little girl in the story cannot not pay attention to the happy notes of other children, since her mother is unhappy: “Her lips are quivering . . . . I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all” (31). Lydia Walsh in the story “Lost in the City” wants to be lost in both cocaine and the city, and asks the confused cab driver to take an aimless tour of Washington: “‘Just get me lost in the city . . . Just keep on driving and get us lost in the city . . . the more lost you get us, the more you get paid’” (148). Yet the directionless ride around Washington reconnects her to the past that she has been trying to escape with her prosperity as a Yale Law School graduate. She wants to forget her past in the black community and wants to remember that she now lives among white people and owns a posh town house in Southwest, where as her mother said “‘they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy’” (147). She passes by the museums along the mall that remind her of her father’s former janitorial job; on 5th Street she passes the apartment where her father died; on Ridge Street she sees the place where she later lived with her mother. She passes the building on Rhode Island Avenue, where she lived on the same floor as a woman “who was terrified that her husband would leave her” (150). “Achieving the American Dream of wealth and material comfort, Lydia seems ‘lost’ spiritually, morally, and psychologically, yet she cannot finally shake the memory of where she has come from and who she has been” (Kennedy and Beuka 14). Still, Jones’s characters are not “Lost in the City” forever or irreversibly doomed in Washington. In the final story “Marie,” Marie Delaveaux Wilson recollects her mother’s view of the city:
My mother had this idea that everything could be done in Washington, that a human bein could take all they troubles to Washington and things would be set right. I think that was all wrapped up with her notion of the govment, the Supreme Court and the president and the like. “Up there,” she would say, “things can be made right.” “Up there” was her only words for Washington. All them other cities had names, but Washington didn’t need a name. It was just called “up there.” (241)
Marie’s experience of the city is different from her mother’s claims. Her experience of the indignities of Washington bureaucracies is “an ironic reminder of the gap between American ideals and social realities” (Kennedy and Beuka 12). Yet the several reconstructions of narratives to temper the sharp edges of irony come to the rescue and unexpectedly, as is the case in John Cheever’s stories, “a fervent or lyric voice intrudes, probing towards mystery, toward affirmation” (Hunt 7). George Carter becomes the voice that Jones conjures up, a young man from Howard University who wants to record her life story for a class folklore project. She has never heard a recording of her voice and is fascinated: “Nothing had been so stunning in a long, long while” and “talking about a man whom she knew as well as her husbands and her sons, a man dead and buried sixty years” (Jones, Lost in the City 238). George and the recording machine both are mysterious, the intruders that George Hunt labels as ironizing positive probings that delight the readers. “She turned it over and over, as if the mystery of everything could be discerned if she turned it enough times” (238). These ironic reconstructions and these sudden interruptions are Jones’s weapons to enlarge the scope of his fictive vision. The girl in the story “The First Day” experiences elation when her illiterate mother demonstrates an unusual amount of dignity, strength and pride at school, that mark the “foundation of black tradition that stands in opposition to oppression” and the sound of her “walking . . . symbolizes the mother’s story on which the girl can build her story, her own symbolic pathway to move forward with strength, love, and determination as a black woman” (Coleman 66).
13Washington does not always directly enter into the lives of the characters and the narratives but, like Updike’s Olinger Stories and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, it sometimes overplays and sometimes underplays “the effect . . . on character” (Luscher 158). All the while it creates a sense of realism with “topographical unity,” as Valerie Shaw puts it (qtd. in Luscher 158). Place becomes “more than a common stage for the action; like a recurrent character, it interacts with and influences characters’ lives” (Luscher 158). More importantly, the redemptive qualities attached to the places in these fictions become the alternative sources for the characters to find meaning and possibilities; they help the characters to bounce back. Minute details, not major features, of a place have animated the characters in the fictions of Jones’s predecessors in many different ways. They redeem, restore, free, unwrap, empower and illuminate. “Departure,” the last story in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, ends with attention to small details connected to the physical spaces of Winesburg and the protagonist George Willard’s meditations and ruminations about the town. The mundane, the ordinary aspects of Winesburg, not the larger questions of life, carry symbolic meaning in the story. Anderson writes: “[H]e did not think of anything very big or dramatic. He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards. . . . Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg . . . with the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes” only to wake up with Winesburg behind as a backdrop where he painted “the dreams of his manhood” (138). Cheever’s descriptions of Shady Hill, where similar reflections pertaining to place come from the characters who are trapped in moral crises, attach transcendental value to place. Francis Weed in “The Country Husband” experiences freedom from his intense sense of sin and guilt and finds solace in the very presence of a suburban village: “The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light. Donald Goslin had begun to worry the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ . . . Francis finds some true consolation in the simple arithmetic involved and in the holy smell of new wood” (345). In “Spotted Horses,” Faulkner’s passage describing the pear tree is epiphanic in effect, what Eudora Welty called Faulkner’s “shoot[ing] the moon,” and moves beyond the “carefulest and purest representation” of the place (Stories 790-91). In Faulkner’s rural town the pear tree “across the road opposite was now in full and frosty bloom, the twigs and branches springing not outward from the limbs but standing motionless and perpendicular above the horizontal boughs like the separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleeping upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless sea” (Faulkner 10-11).
14The lyrical passages, and the reflections are substituted in Jones with his descriptions of the tart, crisp and GPS-like accurate geographic angles of Washington. They offer a different kind of imagistic code. The transformative energy of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Anderson’s Winesburg, Updike’s Olinger and many such mythopoeic places that Jones’s American precursors have created is invested by Jones in the metropolitan spaces of Washington D.C. The central character of “Young Lions” in Lost in the City experiences moments of unfolding of some mysterious energy while he walks up to the 17th Street:
There was something in the air, but he could not make out what it was. . . . he saw nothing but the swirling of dead leaves. . . . he could not read the names or the numbers under the feeble street lights. . . . He did not know what was in the air. He only knew that tonight would not be a night to be without shelter. (76)
Jones’s men and women in his Washington stories experience the highest forms of epiphanical moments that liberate them from the confinements of the moral and physical boundaries of Washington D.C. In the title story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children the narrator experiences the sudden brightening of his spirit:
My eyes settled on a girl in a yellow dress. She was in the middle of the group and she alone twirled as they walked, her arms out, her head held back, so that the sun was full upon her face. Her long plaits swung with her in an almost miraculous way. . . . I had never seen anything like that in Washington in my whole life. (132)
Both the passages announce an arrival of unlimited grace and vitality into the lives of the characters. Cleanth Brooks makes a significant observation in his study of Faulkner’s simultaneous engagement with realism and symbolism to create the mythic place out of the locations he uses:
This misplaced stress upon realism might seem to find its proper corrective in a compensating stress upon symbolism—not facts but what they point to, not Faulkner as sociologist but Faulkner as symbolist poet. Surely, such a general emphasis is sound, for no great literature is to be taken just literally, and even the simplest literature is symbolic in the sense that it is universal, representative, and finally exhibits Man, not merely individual men. (6)
Brooks’s observation is useful in the context of Jones’s writings. His “misplaced stress” on the realistic description of Washington is offset by the “proper corrective” to both implicitly and explicitly achieve the ultimate objectives of his narratives. Jones’s rejection of a “sociologist’s realism,” and adoption of a unique kind of symbolism are borne upon his individual and individualistic style and prevent him from being what Brooks calls a “symbol-monger” (6). Jones’s mastery of the “complex configuration” of his vision, and its accommodation in his fictions in the subject matter, dramatic structure and point of view constitute his unique craft as much as it does Cheever’s (Hunt 33). Jones’s Washington is in the center, the sole location of his stories and the source of the dichotomies that define black lives. Jones dramatizes the conflicts arising from his “complex configuration” of black people and their southern experiences, Washington D.C.’s self-mockery and American contradictions of the Promised Land. In “Resurrecting Methuselah,” Anita wants to explore and get lost in the “most inviting street,” whose name she does not know because she wants to get away from the threat that hovers over her daughter: “There was a street, a curious side street in Bethesda, that she had seen one busy, crowded day as she took Wisconsin Avenue into Maryland . . .” Here, the detailed mapping of Washington coordinates is juxtaposed with the unknown street that Anita wants to navigate and get lost in. She experiences her moments of exaltation almost like an Edenic restoration: “What time could be better than today? What time could be better than what might be the last day of five thousand years?” (All Aunt Hagar’s Children 73). In another story, “The Store,” the narrator is constantly reminded of the demarcation line between the black and the white habitats through the various street markers: “The next week I took the G2 bus all the way down P Street, crossing 16th Street into the land of white people. I didn’t drive because my father had always told me that white people did not like to see Negroes driving cars” (Lost in the City 104) and earlier in the story, the narrator writes: “At New York Avenue and 5th I crossed on the red light. . . . The cop only made me cross back on the green light and go all the way back to 7th Street, then come back to 5th Street and cross again on the green light” (78-79). When the story ends, Jones with a Dickensian mix of nostalgic memory and cool detachment proceeds with an ironic construction of his typical counter-narrative:
In the fall, I was sitting in classes at Georgetown with glad-handing white boys who looked as if they had been weaned only the week before. I was twenty-seven years old . . . Sometimes, blocks before my stop on my way home from Georgetown in the evening, I would get off the G2 at 5th Street. I would walk up to O and sit on the low stone wall of the apartment building across the street . . . whatever it was over the years, I could, without trying very hard, see myself sitting in the window eating my lunch the way I did . . . In those early days at the store, I almost always had a lunch of one half smoke heavy with mustard and a large bottle of Upper 10 and a package of Sno-Ball cupcakes. I sat on the stone wall and watched myself as I ate my lunch and checked out the fine girls parading past the store, parading as if for me and me alone. (104)
This meditative passage exemplifies Jones’s ever-expanding world of Washington and carries the reader beyond the confines of the moral and physical boundaries that he so realistically maps. At the same time, the narrative is an objective correlative for the absurdity of black lives in the capital of a utopian settlement. It offsets the ironic incongruity between the promises and the realities of the city of Washington for a southern black American. It is contrary to what one of Jones’s characters in the story “Tapestry,” a story from Aunt Hagar’s Children, claims that the city does, “‘treat colored people like kings and queens’” (379). Jones’s stylistic engagement with juxtapositions relating to the above passage is an example of his pointing towards meanings not limited to literal deciphering. He suddenly takes a contrary step, brings sudden flashes and sensations, creates metaphysical interruptions which in reverse, temper the crudity of irony and negotiate contradictions not towards a convergence but lay them in oblique using “morally equivocal ways” (Chase 1). Jones explains that in his style is his way of looking at life. In his introduction to Lost in the City Jones writes:
[I]n 1995, there was the bombing in Oklahoma City, and around this time I saw Gloria Gaynor on a morning television talk show singing “I Will Survive.” I had heard the song before but that morning every single word was its most clear, most distinct. And the emotions of those words and the emotions of the bombing came together one day and I saw in my mind Georgia Evans. She was not the woman who got drunk in the Holy Land, as she had in “Lost in the City,” but she was well dressed and with her man and they were coming out of her place on Ridge Street and going to the moving picture show. (xvii)
The nihilism and paralysis of his Washington are transformed into movement, fluidity and attainability. Jones is postmodernist in his treatment of Washington D.C. in the same way Joyce is a modernist in his treatment of Dublin. Both Washington and Dublin are symbols, they are metaphors that both the modernist and the postmodernist writers use as tools to push beyond the realistic and naturalistic narrative boundaries. While Joyce’s engagement with Dublin is predominantly modernist in dramatizing the spiritual loss and moral stagnation of the Dubliners with a view of death as the ultimate meaning of life, Jones’s Washington is free from rigid and arresting boundaries and allows possibilities of transcendence. It is a robust world of African American experience and Jones’s characters undergo fewer failed attempts to escape their reality than Joyce’s. Joyce reveals the characters’ spiritual subtleties and social complexities through the modernistic writing techniques of epiphany, symbolism, loose plots, and shift of narrative perspectives. He presents through those techniques the characters’ confusion, depression, and resignation in modern Dublin. Jones uses Joyce’s techniques to render the plight of his characters. Yet the place/community elements are more complex than with Joyce, and his postmodernist treatment creates alternative and counter narratives by using subjective and non-mimetic devices such as irony. For example, Jones creates an alternative historiography of the South that connects his characters to it, thus not severing their link with their roots. And W.E.B. Du Bois, describing the Black Americans’ experience in The Souls of Black Folk, writes: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (16-17). Characters may get lost in the city of Washington but eventually are brought back to the social and historical space where they find the meaning of their lives through the dialogues they carry out with the city of Washington. In Jones’s stories, Washington is the real “stage of national culture” that houses the black communities with their souls replete with “ethnic experience” and Jones, like other black writers, attempts to speak with two voices (Huggins 195). Jones negotiates the “two unreconciled strivings” through myth, mythopoesis and transcendence. He uses a number of mythopoeic procedures in his two short story cycles that make his art transcendental. The aesthetic effects seem powerful enough to restore his character’s innate delight and decency. These effects usher in a metaphysical and spiritual triumph for them in the face of absurdities and insignificance.
15Edward P. Jones creates one unique world of short stories in his two volumes with Washington D.C. at its center. The bouquets of stories include a wide variety of tales: fragmented, episodic, humorous, tragi-comic, psychoanalytical and speculative and accordingly, they evoke complex and varied emotions. The central concern of Jones’s storyworld is the African Americans living in Washington D.C.: their history, their struggles, their defeats and their humiliations. Yet Jones does not fix his literary boundaries in an attempt to address the issues of race and to solicit the “White gaze,” as Toni Morrison calls it, onto racial problems. The strength of his storyworld is its eventual sense of confidence, faith, hope and the ability for self-transformation. Washington is described with exact, meticulous, scrupulous, precise and empirical data. It forms the realistic exterior world of Washington but much of what happens in his stories is not realistic. Jones moves beyond mundane realistic narration and heads towards a Jamesian transcendence. His storyworld pulsates with the positive energy of an all-encompassing vision that captures the African Americans’ experience in totality. Not many short story writers have been able to demonstrate in their writings the transformative power that Jones has. His vision makes him one of the most compelling writers in contemporary fiction and makes it possible to compare him to literary greats such as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and James Joyce who have developed a similarly remarkable vision of time and place.
