John Edgar Wideman Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

SOURCE: "Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 312-45.

Rushdy is an educator and the author of The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (1992). In the following essay, he discusses the significance of the narrator gaining his "blues voice" in the Homewood trilogy.

      What can purge my heart
      Of the song
      And the sadness?
      What can purge my heart
      But the song
      Of the sadness?
      What can purge my heart
      Of the sadness
      Of the song?
 
      —Langston Hughes, "Song for Billie Holiday"

In Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman contemplates the difficulty of representing the Other without reducing the representation to just another form of solipsism. One way to do so, he thought, would be for him to attempt self-reflexively to perceive his desire for access to what might potentially be an occult area of intelligence, while at the same time acknowledging the limitations that make for...
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