SOURCE: Weisenburger, Steven C. “Errant Narrative and The Color Purple.” Journal of Narrative Technique 19, no. 3 (fall 1989): 257-75.

I

What would be required in developing a poetics of narrative error? Moreover, why has none been developed? Its foundation certainly exists, in the comprehensive accounts of narrative poetics that followed the paradigm shift to structural semiotics. Indeed, colleagues in composition pedagogy have already taken up “the phenomenology of error” while narratologists have yet to frame the comparable questions: What happens when the elemental techniques of narration go astray? What interpretive potentials might analyses of error set free? In particular, what can errors disclose about the socio-cultural horizon of a narrative fiction?¹

Some examples. How did it happen that the omniscient narrator of Frank Norris's The Octopus relates a moment of gunplay between Annixter and Delaney, concluding with the proleptic claim that “for years he [Annixter] could reconstruct the scene” whenever “reminiscences began to circulate” among seated groups of men (186-7), while that narrator will also relate Annixter's death after just eight more months of story-time (367-8)? One answer might be that Norris's attention drifted away from his narrative chronometer because he was more occupied with a theme of men circulating stories, a theme handled throughout The Octopus as a generative dynamic standing against monopolized technology. This said, however, one would also need to ask why Norris's error has evidently gone unremarked in almost ninety years of critical commentary. Amidst the conventions of fictional realism, what blind spots have allowed such obvious glitches of verisimilitude to go unnoticed—by author, or readers, or both? Related cases certainly abound. In Harold Frederic's story “The War Widow” (1894) a first person (intradiegetic) narrator, eleven-year-old Sidney, provides crucial details of scene and event which only an omniscient (extradiegetic) narrator could glimpse through the walls of a barn. Or, in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a merely awkward shift into first person becomes truly erroneous when the narrator, Janey, gains omniscient access to other characters' minds; also, one cannot teach the novel without some bright-eyed cynic commenting that one of Hurston's framing devices—Janey soaking her feet at the beginning and end of an hours' long oral narrative—must have left the poor woman's feet cold and shriveled. These were obvious authorial slips, but then what shall we do with “errors” that seem parts of an authorial design? In Gravity's Rainbow for instance we find a variety of anachronies, false leads and cancelled-out events, all interpretable as contributing to the satire of emplotment and thus of that “paranoid style” which characterized the novel's epoch. Or, in Goodbye, Columbus Phillip Roth seems to have planted various errors in sports jargon that can be interpreted as clues to the fruitless yet all-American posturing of his narrator, Neil Klugman.

Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple, is a case-book example of these problems. First of all the text is shot-through with startling errors of simple narrative chronology, or “order”; but there is still more to work with, such as errors of authority and voice. In addition, Walker's public comments about the text's composition, its reception by jurors for both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award organizations, the fanfare over its cinematic translation of Stephen Spielberg and Menno Meyjes as well as the hotly politicized debate over their film, and finally a burgeoning record of the novel's scholarly interpretation as the capstone to its immense popularity—these phenomena, in addition to the fact that until now no one has noticed its errors, all make The Color Purple a text one has to reckon with.²

Walker's novel demonstrates that errors are interpretive opportunities. Errors can become windows on narrative techniques, on the “laws of genre,” on political and cultural stresses thematized in the text, and finally—as I shall argue—on the ways that such stresses can be taken as influencing the production and reception of a narrative fiction. Thus The Color Purple demonstrates what a poetics of narrative error should entail. At a minimum, as the above examples suggest, one needs to specify that on the writer's side errors can be intended (as in a metafiction or satire) or not (errors per se), while on the other side readers will either perceive or not perceive the errors. Potentially, then, errors falling into the category “not intended/not perceived” should be the most engaging, for in the act of shifting them into the category “not intended/perceived” one must account for the factors of production and reception that masked the glitches themselves. In sum, beyond forcing a closer look at the elementary structures of a narrative text, errors also require explanations that inevitably turn critics toward the sociocultural horizon whose signs are there in the text's writing and reading. This is what a general “phenomenology of narrative errors” should mean. Here, more specifically, the goal is to essay how The Color Purple may be read as “errant” in both senses of that word: as a novel that commits errors of artifice, themselves pointing to other business—Walker's social work, or “errand.”

II

First the errors themselves. Genette has taught us that between the diachronic limits of a narrative (not always its beginning and end, but the boundaries of its farthest analeptic and proleptic moments), there exist relationships of “order” by which units of narrative discourse are pegged to a presumed real time.³ These temporal relationships may be indicated in two possible ways: through “determinants” that are “external” because referential outside the story world (i.e. “it's V-E Day”), or “internal” (i.e. “the next day”). Among the modes of narration these elements are even rather definitive: external determinants are common to the realist text but unimportant to the romance. Now, in The Color Purple Walker uses an epistolary and therefore essentially realist form of narrative, since Celie's letters are offered as unedited documents. Notably, however, her apparent realism depends on few external determinants. Imprecise references to automobiles, or to popular musical artists like Sophie Tucker and Duke Ellington, indicate that we are somewhere in the Thirties (The Color Purple 114). Or, allusions to political turmoil in Europe and to the outbreak of hostilities (“it's a big war” [282]) track us into the Forties. Otherwise, the reader's sense of order mainly depends on a strained, erroneous network of internal determinants such as births, the given ages of characters and other references.

Thus one can reconstruct lines of temporal order for Walker's novel, and here are the essential determinants. In the first letter Celie describes herself as 14 years old and brutally impregnated by the man she assumes is her father (1); in the second letter, she is bearing another child; and by the third that child, a boy named Adam, has been taken off like Olivia before him (4). In a trice, then, some two years have passed. By letter seven, when Pa offers Celie to Mr. ——— in marriage, Celie is “near twenty” (9). Three more months pass (“March to June” [10]) before Mr. ——— decides; at that time, with Celie now twenty, Harpo is described as twelve years old (13) and Olivia, Celie's first child, is “bout six” (14). These then are the keystone dates in a narrative so absent of external determinants and so accelerated, in its pacing, through the early letters. Indeed, when Harpo announces his intention to marry Sofia, by letter thirteen, some five more years have flown by (“I'm seventeen. She fifteen,” boasts Harpo [23]). Then in the ensuing letters Sofia becomes pregnant (33), carries the baby in her arms when they marry (35), and quickly bears another child, who is old enough to “be making mud pies” by letter twenty (39). At least thirteen or fourteen years have transpired since Celie's first missive to “God”: she is now in her late twenties, her children teenagers.

At this juncture the elliptical, accelerated narrative duration slows down: more letters per year. The trigger for that change of pace is Shug Avery's arrival. This occurs approximately “a month” (41) after Celie's confrontation with Sofia, attended by the two muddy children; and with it come the novel's major chronological incongruencies. At first, Shug's presence in Mr. ———'s house inspires Celie to write almost a letter per day; then while Shug heals the duration once more stretches out across the months. Sofia leaves Harpo in the fall, probably October or November (“we been having right smart cold weather long in now” [71]), and she is “gone six months” (73) by the time Harpo readies his jukejoint for Shug's coming-out celebration, set for early June (78). Yet, when Sofia arrives at Harpo's with her lover, Buster, she declares to Celie—“I got six children now” (85)—and the reader reflects that, counting the five she had when leaving in the fall (“Dilsey,” “Coco,” “Boo,” “another one,” and “the baby” [72]), Sofia has miraculously birthed four children since Celie encountered her first two sitting in the mud just nine or ten months earlier (39-40). Still more inconsistencies begin to mount up. For example, Sofia is soon arrested and given a twelve-year prison term for striking the mayor, which prompts Mr. ——— to remark that she has also been mated to Harpo “for twelve years” (91), a span of time that would allow for the six offspring but that has not been accounted in Celie's letters. In deference to human reproductive biology, and to subsequent references, we nonetheless have to adopt the twelve-year mark, and this would put Celie in her late thirties, her children in their middle twenties. Thus, after serving “three years” of her sentence (105) Sofia is let out of the prison wash house; and after serving a total of “five years” (108), two of them as the mayor's domestic servant, she is allowed to visit her children for the first time. Celie must be in her early forties, Celie's children in their late twenties.

Here Shug unwittingly brings Celie a letter from Nettie, the first in decades to make it through Mr. ———'s blockade of the family mailbox. Shug helps Celie find the trove of earlier missives and put them into chronological order. Then begins, as an analeptic story-within-the-story, Nettie's narrative of exile and return. Walker's chronological problems also begin to multiply. For example, in one of her earliest letters, written just before departing for Africa, Nettie describes seeing a woman serving, reluctantly, as the mayor's maid: “looking like the very last person in the world you'd expect to see waiting on anybody. … [who] suddenly sort of erased herself” (137). This black servant, Nettie subsequently learned, was imprisoned for having “attacked the mayor, and then the mayor and his wife took her from the prison to work in their home” (137-8). The reader's obvious inference—that this “erased” figure of wise sisterhood is none other than Sofia—will be confirmed later in the text, when Celie explains to Nettie that “It was Sofia you saw working as the mayor's maid” (205). Yet the absurdity of this coincidence should have been obvious: among Nettie's letters the description of Sofia appears in the fourth letter, “dated,” as Walker even has Celie tells us, “two months later” (136) than Nettie's first three letters, themselves composed right on the heels of her expulsion from Mr. ———'s household. If so, according to events in Celie's frame narrative Celie would have had to be in her early twenties at that point and Sofia just ten or eleven years old. The error amounts to roughly twenty years.

This kind of discrepancy seems to have propagated itself throughout the subsequent pages. For instance, Nettie will soon describe having been in Africa “five years” (170), then a sixth (174); and Olivia's first menstrual period (“her friend” [195]) marks what would have to be Nettie's seventh or eighth year abroad (if Olivia is the usual twelve or thirteen at menarche). Celie should be about twenty-six or -seven. However, by this point Celie and Nettie have been exchanging letters for eleven pages of text; Celie therefore has to be in her middle forties; and the twenty-year chasm once more yawns between the two interwoven stories. And the most curious part of it all is, at times Walker seems cognizant of one chronology while pages later she nods towards the other. So Nettie will comment, as well she might if in her forties, that “some of my hair is gray” (232); then a few pages further she will describe “the children,” Olivia and Adam, as if they were teenagers (239-46), when they should be well into their thirties. Or, Nettie will correctly remind Celie that “thirty years have passed without a word between us” (264); whereas just months earlier Celie has written Nettie about how she declared to Harpo—“I got children … Being brought up in Africa. Good schools, lots of fresh air” (207)—when those “children” must be mature adults long ago graduated from school. Such discrepancies fill the novel's last one hundred and fifty pages. Similar errors also crop up in subordinate plots, as when Sofia is released from prison after eleven and one-half years (having gotten “six months off for good behavior” [205]) and Henrietta, her sixth child who should be twelve or thirteen, appears to be at least half that age.

How could such remarkable errors have slipped past Walker, as well as past the novel's editors, reviewers, judges, and scholarly interpreters? (Indeed, it even slipped past movie director Stephen Spielberg and his scriptwriter Menno Meyjes, who sleepily translated every one of these errors to the screen at the same time that—incredible as it seems—they called our attention to them by using on-screen dates, fixing the opening scene in “1909,” and so on.) There is some evidence that Walker herself was aware of problems. In a 1982 essay, “Writing The Color Purple,” she speaks of the novel's genesis, of how she designed it as “a historical novel” [In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, hereafter abbreviated as In Search] 355), and of how she struggled to make Celie's plot jibe with Nettie's. “Fortunately I was able to bring Celie's own children back to her (a unique power of novelists), though it took thirty years and a good bit of foreign travel. But this proved to be the largest single problem in writing the exact novel I wanted to write” (In Search 359-60; my emphasis). Hindsight suggests that providing each letter with a dateline, a simple convention of epistolary fictions, might have both coincided with Walker's “historical” intention and brought its erroneous plotting into the light. In any case the book was published without its being corrected. And perhaps, as Trudier Harris argues on thematic grounds, it was too hastily canonized. Perhaps … but whatever might be said along that line, the more interesting questions involve factors of genre, race and gender that shaped the writing and reading of Walker's novel.

III

More than just egregious mistakes, Walker's chronological errors spotlight the very keys to that narrative genre she chose. As a Briefwechselroman or “letter-exchange novel,” The Color Purple depends for its reading on complex formal and discursive conventions that are fundamental to dialogic narrative in general, conventions that—as Bakhtin and his followers have taught us—may function in strikingly transgressive ways: to subvert the voices of authority, to disrupt hide-bound representations of Man's estate, even to undermine mimesis itself. The first two of those three functions were clearly on Alice Walker's agenda for her book.⁴ And if, unlike the postmodernists around her, she never mounts a frontal assault on mimesis, her novel does seek to batter its flanks by taking on those powerful representations of gender and race that trouble American culture. What then are the functions of epistolary writing—both story and discourse—in that assault?

In its elements of story The Color Purple seems an almost paradigmatic epistolary novel. Its true beginning is not with a letter but with a proscription, the voice of Celie's “Pa” warning her: “You better not never tell nobody but God” (1). She does exactly that. And in writing her first letters to an omniscient deity Celie recuperates everything that was erased by her own submissions, both sexual and racial, to a brutal patriarchy. She can be audacious and free-spoken; can analyze, evaluate, and judge; give vent to spontaneous feeling; and most importantly she can be a vehicle of memory. By writing, eventually no longer to an invisible “God” but to a human correspondent (Nettie), then ultimately to the whole universe, she enters into a transactional bonding that will finally bring her out of domestic imprisonment and into the flux of ordinary talk and broader social differences—yet all in a loving, generative way. By such means Purple closely adheres to traditional structures, for epistolary narratives classically begin in repression (see Kauffman 20-3). Their heroines are physically cloistered or silenced, exiled and separated from the objects of generative desire: Heloise from Abelard, the nun of Lettres Portugaises (1669) from her beloved, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa from their families. The epistolary heroine therefore writes, usually in secret, because it is her only available, “authentic” mode of communication. Repression, separation or violence thus serve as the very enabling conditions of story, and they provide Walker (and Spielberg) with a sensational opening. Beyond that beginning, too, the middle and end of Purple adhere to traditional forms. In Richardson's Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady (1747-8), the heroine's father first persecutes and then banishes her (from Harlowe Place); Clarissa next descends into the worldly Hell of Mrs. Sinclair's infamous house, whereupon Lovelace resumes the patriarchal persecution in more brutal and closely sequestered forms; she finally returns, albeit deceased, to her father's house. As Janet Altman observes, this pattern not only transmits the heroine's “History,” it also inscribes her story under the aegis of biblical myth; for the novel's plot is modeled on Man's pilgrimage from Eden to Paradise (Altman 26). And this epistolary mythos can be closed in one of two essential ways (Altman 150-1). Clarissa exemplifies its tragic closure, where the letters cease because of the writer's decease; Pamela illustrates the comic mode, the hard won triumph of an ethically proper marriage occasioning the heroine's reunion with long-distant correspondents.

The Color Purple closely follows these conventions of form, but not without ambiguity. For when her letters begin Celie already lives in a kind of earthly inferno. Sequestered, violated and silenced by the man she mistakenly calls “Pa,” Celie's only quasi-Edenic experience of family unity occurred in an age anterior to memory and is therefore absent from her autobiography until Pa (Alphonso) restores it to her, in essence also telling her how Eden ended and Hell began: “Your daddy didn't know how to git along, he say. Whitefolks lynch him” (187). There, at the farthest analeptic boundary of The Color Purple, Celie's story finds its true point of origin: in a violent racism that, as Darryl Pinckney observes, the novel unfortunately never examines in any significant detail. Celie is banished to the deeper inferno embodied in Mr. ———, who is (as Lovelace is to Mr. Harlowe in Clarissa) just another avatar of patriarchal order and its power over the (justly) subversive feelings (“sentiments”) of sisters. Expressing those sentiments on paper restores Celie, like Pamela, to a world of redefined proprieties. Indeed, in the comic plotting of Walker's novel, as in Pamela, the “Rake's Reform” concludes a significant subplot. Similar to Richardson's “B,” Walker's “Mr. ———” will declare at novel's end, “I'm satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man” (267). This specifically means that Mr. ——— abandons rigid sex roles (and, not incidentally, sex) as he begins to cook, sew and “clean that house just like a woman” (229). Later he tells Celie of learning such skills by working “along with mama” (279). More broadly, however, restoring Mr. ——— to what the text so confidently assumes is a “natural” ethos will also coincide with Celie's regaining the estate of her “real daddy,” an estate “passed on” to Celie and Nettie by their mother (251). The idea, quite clearly, is that the true (that is, “natural”) vessels of both propriety and proprietorship are mothers. And, if The Color Purple is thus a novel about characters “in search of their mothers' gardens,” as a type of feminist paradise, then this “argument” of its plot constitutes Walker's attempt to revise the classic epistolary histoire. Or is it just a contemporary variation on the form? Linda Kauffman has written extensively on the strategies of defiance and revolt in epistolary texts, in which the heroine's writing itself “is the revolution” (20). Celie's writing certainly serves to prepare her for Shug's popularized feminism.

IV

This brings one around to questions treating epistolary discourse. Story elements lay a foundation for Walker's “consciousness-raising” work, becoming a platform for the contests of her “womanist” argument,⁵ but the really crucial and problematic elements of “epistolarity” can be found on its discursive side, as Altman and Kauffman argue. Epistolary discourse can stand as a model for the dialogism of the novel (in general) because the Briefwechselroman always involves the contrapuntal voices of letter writers, as the novelist juxtaposes them for readers. Its specific techniques for accomplishing this discursive work are what make epistolary forms unique—and problematized. On one hand the addressee of each epistle is absent; on the other, epistolary discourse must anchor itself in a self-consciously textualized present. This contrariness arises partly because writing letters means recognizing that the object of one's desire is distant, perhaps dead (as with the “God” of Celie's first letters), perhaps not yet even a differentiated part of Being (as when A. B. Cook IV addresses “his unborn child” in chapter 1:D of John Barth's Letters). In writing, then, the character graphs her potential for closing that gap. This is exactly why, in addition, the discursive presence of each correspondent becomes so crucial. In order for desire to close the spatio-temporal gap confronting it, everything depends on the writer's power to construct a world—literally, the illusion of presence—for her reader. As Altman phrases the problem: “To write a letter is to map one's coordinates—temporal, spatial, emotional, intellectual—in order to tell someone else where one is located at a particular time and how far one has traveled since last writing” (119). Expanding on this, we might add that the entire gambit hinges on the letter writer and her addressees sharing a world that is ultimately textual; it is events, experiences, and knowledge built (as John Barth so insistently reminds his readers) from letters, from alphabets on pages.

Moreover, one of the foremost qualities of that illusionary world will be its relationships of temporality. Each letter is only one frame in what appears as a continuous unfolding of cinematic scenes or episodes. The key fact, nevertheless, is that epistolary narration is essentially discontinuous, elliptical. It remains theoretically impossible for letters to compose an unbroken stream. Instead, each letter is composed within a unique enunciatory moment; each stands as a sovereign present around which the novel's past and future moments must be plotted.

The ramifications of this are crucial. Readers of a first- or third-person narration scarcely notice temporal ellipses or gaps because a reified narrative voice maintains the illusion of continuity. Then too, the presumed reliability of that voice would seem to foreclose on our interrogating the intervals of non-narrated time (see Genette 106-9). However, like diary fictions, epistolary novels are unique in foregrounding each hiatus; each gap between letters calls attention to the fact of non-narrated time. In addition, such gaps do not come under the authority of any primary narrator and indeed may be entirely attributable to the caprice of characters who decide whether or not to write; or the absence of a letter may be due to the impact of events beyond characters' control. For readers, this means first of all that in naturalizing an epistolary fiction the empty intervals common to narrative are suddenly more open to inquiry. And it means, secondly, that reading across the narrative lacunae depends on a certain persistence of vision, on the after-image of an “I”/“You” connection that carries over into the next letter. Indeed, those gaps might well turn disruptive if the novelist weren't using other means to sustain the illusion of ongoing presence. So in epistolary fictions some of the most striking, sometimes humorous moments come when the novelist promotes the illusion of ongoing presence by punctuating “the time of narrated action,” or erzählte Zeit, with reminders from “the time of narrating,” the Erzählzeit of actual letter writing. Thus Richardson has Pamela absurdly detail picking up her pen and checking her door, and continue writing even as B assails her person. Still more practically, more realistically (as Altman points out, 169-70), the novelist can sustain the illusion by following four basic conventions of the genre: (1) one writer/addressee relationship, (2) unfolding in a single plot, (3) which either de-emphasizes the gaps or fills them in with what readers may infer from corresponding letters, each unfolding in (4) strict chronological order. Among all of these, chronological order is certainly the most basic convention. It explains why, in Purple, Shug carefully arranges each of Nettie's letters in sequence according to its postmark—a remarkable moment when Walker's story reflects on the very discursive conventions she mishandles.

Surely this is why the erroneous chronology of The Color Purple is so remarkable. In brief: it was not noticed. Countless very sophisticated readers have taken Walker's letters to be just as they appear—as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, a steady stream of emotions recollected in tranquility. Thus Walker's readers have wholeheartedly opted to maintain an illusion of spontaneous presence, of natural continuity, and of the heroine's evolving sentiment which seems to give the text its meaning. Put another way, they have opted to maintain the mimetic image of an unedited, continuous, documentary text.⁶ Indeed, one might therefore see Purple's reception as a cautionary tale about the tenacity of the metaphysics of presence among quite well-educated people.

In general, Walker's run of chronological errors seems to have begun with the necessity of coordinating her two plots—Celie's with Nettie's. However, other kinds of errors soon followed suit. A few of Walker's critics noticed that varieties of contemporary slang appear in the characters' Thirties speech. Problems of authority also crop up. For example, as Purple winds toward its close Celie and Albert (Mr. ———, but in his reformed mode) sit in peaceful harmony on the porch, Celie instructing him in the alternative cosmology of the Olinka (279-83). They believe, she explains, that the first white man, Adam, and all the race he spawned, were really genetic freaks of nature run out of their African village (Eden) for their naked whiteness, and destined ever afterwards to be an evil scourge on all humanity, especially people of color. One of the novel's longer didactic forays, this letter participates in Walker's “consciousness-raising” project. It seeks to relativize Judeo-Christian mythology, indeed to contain western myth inside an African cycle, and even to suggest an origin of western racist and sexist practices. The crux of it is, none of Nettie's letters has ever detailed this Olinka material (How then can Celie know it?), and even if they had it would still be illogical to have Celie write it back to Nettie (Why be so redundant?).

In epistolary narrative this common problem is usually handled by having the correspondent acknowledge her repetition of already-told detail, usually by an “I told him about what you told me.” Yet there are related moments like this, as when Celie informs Nettie “I don't write to God no more” (199), when in fact Nettie can have no idea what writing Celie is speaking of. Indeed, one letter even calls attention to this very problem, when Celie writes about how Shug has laughed at her presumptiveness: “Nettie don't know these people, she say” (205). Such moments all involve the boundaries of time and space between letters, and the problem of how knowledge germane to one correspondent's unique fictional locus may be shared. In sharing knowledge between correspondents, the novelist must “choose constantly between redundancy and lack of verisimilitude” (Altman 173). Breakdowns of either sort spotlight once again the inherent discontinuity of epistolary fictions, each letter having to paradoxically function as both a self-contained unity and as a unit in that illusionary stream of narrative. Here, too, Walker's narrative fractures. The reason, no doubt, was that as The Color Purple neared its close the author's felt needs—to win her reader's complicity with and good opinion of her consciousness-raising work—had overridden the intradiegetic requirements for mimetic verisimilitude. Walker's “womanist” errand had taken priority over the elements of narrative art.

V

The terms of that errand need reconsideration. One ecstatic reader claims that by undertaking wholesale cultural reform Walker's novel becomes a “masterpiece that exceeds its limits as a work of fiction” (Parker-Smith 483). This was a fairly common refrain of Walker's more ardent supporters, though the novel's status as a “masterpiece” is not only arguable but even beside the point, which is that in evaluative readings of Purple such claims to greatness are always linked with ideas about the novel's cultural work. Clearly, it is one of those novels—like Pamela or Uncle Tom's Cabin—that not only sacrifices mimetic fidelity to the discursive demands of genre, but further sacrifices discursive precision to broader didactic goals. Withal, though, The Color Purple was immensely popular, even effective. The record of the book reviewers and scholarly essayists is rife with reader-witnesses who testify to the novel's didactic power in resituating, clarifying and solidifying people's lives. Such claims are worth attention no matter how many erroneous artistic strokes went unnoticed during the process of reading.

In concluding, then, I want to turn the tables. Now the idea, to paraphrase Jane Tompkins's provocative argument in Sensational Designs, is to put aside questions about what makes The Color Purple a work of “art” and ask instead what accounts for its mass-cultural popularity. This means that everything Walker's detractors have received negatively—her stock devices of melodrama, sensational turns of plot, preachy dialogue, women-in-distress and stereotyped villains—might be apprehended not only as conventions of a genre but as instruments of a cultural project. The Color Purple might thus be read according to the way it appears to “naturally” occupy its cultural landscape. Its archetypal story can be seen functioning as easily located, quickly decoded benchmarks. So the text becomes, as Tompkins puts it, a nexus within a network, expressing what is popularly believed, “tapping a storehouse of commonly held assumptions, reproducing what is already there in a typical and familiar form” (xvi). Here the question is: What gave the text that semblance of monumental solidity in its culture?

In The Color Purple, as has been suggested all along, Walker's errand involves nothing less than the recovery of an American Eden. Stephen Spielberg, his principal screenwriter Menno Meyjes and Walker herself (she collaborated on the film) all quickly intuited this theme. Their script is bracketed and punctuated by Edenic images: fields full of flowers and folks, fruitful gardens and the like—all in a landscape where machines and gridworked streets are noticeably absent. (In the novel, history's most infamous symbol of chattel slavery, the cotton gin, never actually appears; its only ghostlike appearance is managed through a brief allusion by a white girl, Miss Eleanor Jane [273]). Moreover, Spielberg and Meyjes' most significant revision of Walker's plot involved the stagey reunification of Shug with her stern preacher/father. Spielberg has the whiskey-soaked, bluesy, dionysian crowd wind its way out of Harpo's juke and bring the field into Reverend Avery's pulpit while the entire cast sings the verses of a gospel lyric (“God Is Trying to Tell You Something”). In all, it was a return to theological roots that prompted some of the most vitriolic criticisms of the film.⁷ However clichéd, though, this remarkable emendation might well stand as a mise en abyme for Walker's whole plot, insofar as it too is concerned with reclaiming and reordering the father's house, with reclaiming Eden. (Why else send Celie's second child, Adam, back to Africa?) The point is that issues of femininity and racism, foremost in the readings of so many reviewers and critics, are just facets of a larger project. Walker's strategy was to reinscribe problems of gender and race in the context of contemporary theology.

Farfetched as this may initially seem, Walker herself has claimed that her conception of womanist concerns extends beyond gender and race to include “the spiritual survival, the survival whole, of my people” (In Search 250). A few critics have glimpsed that commitment. Pauline Kael, for example, perceptively noted that “the glue” holding Walker's plot together “is the pop-folk religiosity that also serves to keep the book's anti-male attitudes in check” (69). Thematized (end preached) everywhere in her novel, Walker's theology is centermost in Nettie's interior narrative, when the Olinka see how “powerless” is the white peoples' God long before Samuel sees it (234), and thus himself as “A FOOL OF THE WEST” (242). In effect, Samuel and Nettie's African epiphany authorizes similar moments throughout the novel, especially Celie's own epiphany back home. Explaining why she no longer addresses letters to “God,” Celie tells Shug, “The God I been praying to is a man.” Like Nettie among the Olinka, Celie now finds that He “act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown” (199). Worse still, that God is “gray bearded and white” (201). Such a deity stands like a totem of every racist and sexist energy binding Celie's culture together in patriarchal violence.

“God” is supplanted by a god of the fields. Shug tells Celie: “My first step away from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people” (203). Moreover this naturalist deity is “inside you and inside everybody else,” Shug goes on to claim; and so “[y]ou can just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking what you like” (203). Shug's deity quite literally takes command of the text, authorizing its title—“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it,” she says (203)—and even empowering Celie's first outbreak against nearly forty (or is it only twenty?) years of being what Zora Neale Hurston once called “the mule of the world.” Reflecting on the “curse” she has put on Mr. ———, Celie writes Nettie that “it seem to come to me from the trees” (213). For Celie and those around her, this epiphany of naturalist theology quickly triggers an ethical revolution. Once they have been decentered, by cutting themselves loose from patriarchal symbols, all begin resituating family roles and reinterpreting their own racial oppression. More than any other element of the text, then, revisionist theological sentiment was designed to provide Walker's epistolary novel with its necessary appearance of mimetic continuity: in the heroine's recognition and reversal of her fate, in the interlacing of Celie's and Nettie's letters, and in the denouement which brings them all, men and women, Americans and Africans, together at last in Celie's father's field.

Here one gets right to the heart of things. The Color Purple has situated itself foursquare on some of the most recognizable and embattled grounds of contemporary American society: theological and familial. Familial because the essential locus of most epistolary fictions is domestic, as is the locus for most recent debates on sex-role stereotypes; and theological because the elemental structures of domesticity have everything to do with a culture's model of ultimate reality, its pantheon. For mere mortals, however, such things are also crucially political; an individual either fits into or rejects, or is unconsciously claimed by, the available semiotic slots. Now, if we want to define what the ideological bent of The Color Purple most decidedly is not, one can hardly do better than another “text” released just two years prior to Walker's: Senator Paul Laxalt's “Family Protection Act,” a central Neo-conservative manifesto that was carved up and introduced as a spate of bills before the 96th Congress in 1980. Nothing less than an attempt to roll back two decades of “consciousness-raising,” these bills (if they had passed) would have struck at such things as “sex-intermingling” in school sports, family and sex education (except when taught “by a minister or church on a release-time basis”), and the relativization of Judeo-Christian morality through courses concerned with “values-clarification.” In Title V, concerned with “Domestic Relations,” Laxalt's manifesto would have strictly limited the powers of federal and state government in preventing spouse and child abuse, would have banned the issuance of contraceptives to minors, would have banned the use of federal legal services funds for litigation involving abortion or “homosexual rights,” and would have denied any federal money to organizations presenting “homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle.”⁸ Right down to Walker's implied plea for acceptance of Celie and Shug's lesbian sexuality, The Color Purple pretty much runs the gauntlet of these Neo-conservative blows. That is precisely why the book's consumption in public school classrooms was so hotly contested.

And yet beyond these debates over domestic relations always loom the broader concerns of contemporary theology. Here again Walker's bent is clear enough; but this time if we want to define what her novel's ideology most emphatically is, one might well begin with a text published in 1973 and subjected to increasingly virulent attack while Walker was writing The Color Purple. It is the “Humanist Manifesto II,” condemned by spokesmen for the fundamentalist right—such as Tim LaHaye and Senator Jesse Helms—as a “bible” for “The Most Dangerous Religion in the World.”⁹ A revision of the original document published in 1933 (about the same time, by the way, as Celie's epiphany), the 1973 version begins by declaring: “humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-healing God, assumed to love and care for all persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith.” This pretty effectively restates Celie's epiphany with a sugar-coating of the standard dialect. And the ethical results of Celie's enlightenment also tally quite well with the “Manifesto”; its subsequent paragraphs affirm the “preciousness and dignity of the individual person,” condemn intolerance for “the diversity of human sexual experience,” call for civil liberties as a prerequisite to human spiritual growth, and accordingly deplore all forms of racial and ethnic oppression, as well as “sexism or sexual chauvinism” (quoted in Kurtz 39-47).

More precisely, Walker's spirituality neatly dovetails with definitions of what Robert N. Bellah and other sociologists of religion refer to as the “new consciousness,” or “new age” faiths. Libertarian, humanist, and politically centrist or just left-of-center, new consciousness spirituality grew from countercultural movements of the Sixties and brought together many of their principal tenets: disaffection with the totalizing symbols of traditionalist faith, calls for “consciousness-raising” from civil rights groups and feminists, alternative “lifestyles,” distrust of machine technologies, and “ecological awareness.” To Paul Kurtz, two decisive elements in this potpourri are (1) rejecting theistic beliefs in a supernatural being, and (2) resituating that belief within the diversity of nature, including Man's embodiment of that natural diversity in his inner life. As Kurtz puts it, this new age humanist “claims that man is rooted in the soil (nature), that it is the flesh (life) that gives him satisfaction, but that it is in social harmony and creative fulfillment (the spirit) that he finds his deepest significance” (120).

Again, excepting the standard dialect (and the masculine pronouns), this almost sums up Walker's position, mediated through Shug and Celie. One might only add a further element from Bellah, who remarks that in this “post-traditional” mix “it has become possible to appropriate religious symbol systems from many times and cultures” (Beyond Belief 205). An example of this inter-textual, syncretic tendency: the blending of Hebraic and Olinka cosmologies, as Celie so enthusiastically describes it to Mr. ———. A further thing about this mix, apropos of Walker's novel especially, is that contemporary secularism, as well as the counter-culture which so popularly endorsed it in the Sixties, were expressions of a privileged, hegemonic white society. This is a point that Bellah has frequently driven home. And it is clearly a perception that shaped many of the more virulent attacks on The Color Purple, condemned as it was for pandering to white stereotypes of the black male, for being soft on the violent realities of racism in America, for blurring history, and finally for achieving sentimental popularity among a predominantly white reading public. At issue was the audience that Walker's critics saw her addressing—or mollifying, according to some.

VI

When The Color Purple appeared, two years into the Reagan administration's “conservative revolution,” the debate over civil rights had become muted even as that over religious beliefs had become more polarized and sharply contested than at any time during this century. Still, the current strife between Fundamentalists and New Age Humanists has a lengthy pedigree in American cultural history. Essentially a split between Biblical theism and liberal utilitarianism, it has taken a variety of guises—right back to the Bay Colony/Merrymount schism. On one side stand essentially Puritan beliefs in the divine covenant, in Americans as God's elect people embarked on a millenial errand, and in the priority of communal unity. On the other side stand Cartesian doubt melded with a Lockean belief in the sovereign individual, belief therefore in self-enlightenment as the basis of creative spirit and thus of public prosperity, and acceptance also of social diversity. From 1820 to 1860, like our postwar decades also an era of profound socio-cultural change (economic turmoil, large influxes of poor immigrants, urbanization and mechanization, dissatisfaction among women, and the rise of anti-slavery movements), this rift was manifested in the growth of evangelical and revivalist sects on the one side, and on the other a more liberalist and naturalist expression of this “Second Great Awakening” in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. During those decades, the American Temperance Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society grew, in close affiliation with organized religion, and provided many women and a few blacks their first and only outlet for socio-political involvement. Like the civil rights, antiwar, and women's liberation movements of the 1960's, these nineteenth century “societies” also provided new visions of the public covenant and the people's errand. They valorized sentiment, the individual's seemingly “natural” ability to know right feelings and just thoughts. In exactly that milieu Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin became one of the century's most popular fictions. The novel was also, as Jane Tompkins persuasively argues, “a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view” (124).

This historical analogy suggests that whenever critics derogatorily compare Purple with Stowe's novel, as Pinckney does (18), it becomes impossible to avoid questions of sexism and of whose literary canon is privileged. Terms like “sentimental” become especially problematic. Defined negatively, it means flashing all the proper badges, and at worst seems a solipsistic exercise whose only intended response would be, “We're all thinking right thoughts, now, aren't we!” To many of Walker's critics (i.e. Pinckney, Stade, Towers) this almost oxymoronic sentimentalist feminism is exactly the “error” of her fiction; it also seems to account for the “programmatic intention behind” its feminist “design” (Pinckney 17). Approached positively, however, from the perspective of an ambitiously reformist heritage of women's fictions, Walker's program is not at all surprising, much less in error. The more engaging questions involve her readers and how she intends to move them—her errand. One needs to recognize how her novel, so much in the liberal humanist tradition, composes its arguments by raiding the Biblical fundamentalist tradition for some of its most potent symbols: the new Eden, and Man's Errand. The point is, Walker may well have been attracted, as suggested earlier, to the subversive dialogism of the epistolary form, in particular its ways of disrupting patriarchal codes. Nevertheless, she wound up writing an essentially centrist, familiar fiction. For members of her audience—a mainly white, secular humanist group—the “argument” of Celie's letters was a known commodity.

Alice Walker's audience for The Color Purple is exactly the great American mass of humanist, new age believers—secular or church-going. For this great centrist majority which, we are told, is fairly literate but inherently “silent,” Walker has seemingly created voices. Voices like Celie's confirm their sense that the grey-bearded old white God has passed away. With Shug, they easily assent to a contemporary naturalist theology: “just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking what you like.” Inevitably, such ideas would get Walker in deep with fundamentalists who decry the apparent moral relativism of such sentiments, in just as deep with leftist readers who decry the book's lack of any “realistic” historicity capable of translating her fiction into something politically useful, and also in deep with Afro-American critics. They were quite understandably put off by the way her novel seemed to meekly recodify a long emancipatory struggle within the mythos of an oppressive white society. None of these groups, however, would deny that Walker intended to shift a set of benchmark cultural symbols and beliefs, all involving what Eden looks like, who gets in, and where our errand takes us in regaining it. These questions may seem (and even be) trivial, yet the virulence of public argument occasioned by her novel and Spielberg's film demonstrates that they may never be value-neutral. The question is: Whose values?

Indeed from one last perspective, that of French theorist Jean Baudrillard, the issue of a fiction like The Color Purple poses further problems. Baudrillard has detailed the way mass cultural texts advance an “implosion of meaning” which does neutralize the discourses of value. This eventuates from the “staging” of an audience's desire in processions of simulacra, a “hyperreality” which—because it seems “truer” to reality than reality itself—leaves the audience impassively fascinated by the apparent surmounting of their voiceless condition. By such means the “silent majority” submits itself to the tautology of myths: their common narrativity means they are easily translated for various media, and this commodification only increases their “mythic” stature. In place of a “repressive demiurgy” it is instead “a gentle semiurgy which control us” (“Implosion” 140). Under its aegis “the medium” is absolutely the event. Content, including any statement of value, dissolves in a feedback loop of media-effects, of simulacra. The cruxes of axiology become the crazes of technology, and the “message,” especially the didactic social content of mass cultural texts, is according to this argument only a subterfuge on the strength of which “every hope of revolution and social change up till now has functioned” (ibid 144). Thus the only logic of such texts is their audiences' consumption of familiar metanarratives. And in the sternest moments of his jeremiad Baudrillard concludes that (excepting perhaps his own ironic, critical method) any symbolizing attempt to emancipate or “raise the consciousness” of individual or collective subjects is blinded by its inescapable conformity to systems whose goal is the overproduction and overvaluation of symbols, the simulacra or “fast-images” of contemporary media.

Baudrillard's optic often works with disturbing accuracy. After all, only in a fast-image culture could six-plus years slide past without anyone perceiving blatant errors of technique (“medium”) like those in The Color Purple. Yet interpreting such errant moments should not only end with a social and ideological siting of the text's apparent message and audience. It also must involve a looping back to that narrative medium, back to its lacunae and blind spots; in short, a looping back not only to the “laws of genre” but also to the glitches of genre that can be read like the tics of its own insecurity. Put another way, if adherence to the naturalizing conventions of narrative seems to give a text “traction” (Tompkins) or solidity in its society, then the errant moments of narrative are the traces of its slippage or instability. The best sellers of contemporary mass culture should offer plentiful examples for study. Yet why stop with popular fictions? Why not also examine the errant narration (however intentional or metafictional) of self-styled “experimental” fictions, for doesn't that very term suggest a complicity with metanarratives of technical progress? Feasibly, what's under scrutiny from this perspective is the cooperation of narrative technologies with forms of socio-cultural malaise—these days a sort of cultural “stag-flation.” In the general critique of such conditions, the example of Alice Walker's novel indicates that narrative poetics and a phenomenology of error can force a set of telling questions.

Notes

1. See for example Shaughnessy (1977), and Williams (1981).

2. Pauline Kael may have been thinking of the chronological problems when she wrote that “the cross-cutting between Nettie's experiences in Africa and Celie's life back home is staggeringly ineffective” (69), but she is never specific enough. In general, though, given the close readings of Walker's novel by everyone—from editors (at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), early reviewers, Pulitzer and A.B.A. judges, film directors, and cultural critics, to more recent scholars and Ph.D. candidates—the common failure to notice, much less comment on such basic errors of narrative art amounts to a phenomenon in itself. For readers of Purple have grilled Walker and Spielberg for less obvious inconsistencies. Reviewing the book, Robert Towers saw Nettie's return with the children as “crudely contrived” and “melodramatic”; he also noted “certain improbabilities,” like Celie's remarkable diction (her use of the word “amazons”) and her “Folkspants” business. Still, he begged off the larger question of mimetic fidelity by noting that these might all be explainable in the context of “current male-female antagonisms within the black community,” to which Walker was presumably the better witness (Towers 36). Denitia Smith pointed to an “unevenness” in the book's ideology, when the Olinka tribal patriarchy is depicted as bad, leaving one with the mistaken idea that its disruption by white colonialists is therefore “a good thing” (Smith 182). Darryl Pinckney, in a scathing review, charges that The Color Purple (novel and film) fails “to claim historical truth” because, with its myriad historical glitches, The Color Purple sacrificed accurate temporal and social context for a highly “insular” melodrama: “[it] might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history” (Pinckney 17). Thus far, M. Teresa Tavormina is the only critic to even begin noticing the chronological errors in Walker's novel. She hastily comments that “Walker makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for her readers to determine the exact temporal relationships between letters in Celie's series and those in Nettie's.” Then Tavormina stops short, assuming that such “time-marking events” as births and children's ages will, according to Walker's plan, only add up to a blurry picture: “The meaning is in the whole. To see linearly is to limit one's seeing” (226). Even more remarkable, in an endnote Tavormina tries to naturalize the “temporal strains in the novel”; they make sense, she argues, because it is “as though time moves slower for Nettie and the children” in their primitive, African setting (n. 10, 229-30). The sharply polarized reaction to Purple is also worth noting. Stade has discussed readers who have approached The Color Purple as “a sacred text” (264), and praiseful, near-ecstatic reviews occurred in popular periodicals such as Ms. Magazine (for which Alice Walker worked), and in Newsweek, where Peter Prescott called it “an American novel of permanent importance” (67). In Ms. (July 1982), Gloria Steinem seems so taken with the facts of Walker's being a woman, black, alive, and writing that she scarcely uses the fiction itself to support her praise. The New Yorker (September 6, 1982), relegated it to the “Briefly Noted” column of short reviews, yet still referred to Purple as “fiction of the highest order” (106). Denitia Smith's review was mixed, uneasy with Walker's didacticism and (what Smith saw as) ideological haziness but full of praise for the novel's qualities of voice—a common strategy for other reviewers. Smith hazarded the opinion that, with Purple, Alice Walker had joined “the company of Faulkner” (183). Among the downright negative reactions, Pinckney's is certainly the most outspoken and searing; he has recently been joined by Trudier Harris, who argues that the novel's too-hasty canonization resulted from “the media's ability, once again, to dictate the tastes of the reading public, and to attempt to shape what is acceptable creation by black American writers” (155). Harris also provides an excellent summary of these polarized reviews. In general, this sharply polarized reception was only exacerbated by the film's release in December, 1985. In a January 27, 1986, article the New York Times accurately summed up the brouhaha: feminists and liberal critics were passionately positive about the film; others, including black male writers like Nate Clay of the Chicago Metro News (a major black weekly), were acutely negative, usually condemning the film as “a pretext to take one more lick at society's rejects” (“Blacks in Heated” 13). Around the country, public debates aired similar opinions about issues of gender and race raised by The Color Purple: in New York, over 1,000 blacks “crammed into the Progressive Community Church for a heated discussion of the film” (ibid), a scene also repeated on university campuses (later that month, for example, the University of Kentucky sponsored a heated panel discussion attended by over 200).

3. See for example Genette 116-23, and especially 140-3; also, though her terms are somewhat more general, see Rimmon-Kenan 43-6.

4. There is a striking parallel to Purple in a long essay Walker wrote for the July, 1982, issue of Essence. Almost exactly contemporaneous with the novel, “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like” poses the two questions of blackness and femininity as they intersect in the problematic figure of that “lighter-skinned, straighter-haired” black woman who is a stock figure in many American fictions. Interestingly, the essay opens with a polemical epistle, addressed to “Dear ———.” And the whole was intended to function, Walker claims, as “A Consciousness Raising Paper” (In Search 294). The same could well be said of The Color Purple.

5. In retrospect this should not be surprising. Historically, such apparently documentary fictions have often been received as if the represented characters and events were real, so powerful are the naturalizing conventions involved. As for Walker, her essay “Writing The Color Purple” speaks of “the people in the novel” walking in and out of her life (In Search 356). Then too, many of the novel's reviewers and critics have focused on the lifelike quality and naturalizing power of Celie's voice. See also Christian 470, and in particular Fifer, whose essay argues that accepting and understanding Celie's dialect, the reader comes “to understand Celie's plight within a larger cultural context” (156).

6. Here, encapsulated, is Walker's definition of a “womanist”: “a black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, ‘You acting womanish,’ i.e. like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior, [for example when a woman] loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. [A womanist] appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility … and women's strength … [and is] committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (In Search xi).

7. This was the scene that prompted Pinckney's “dancing eggplants” remark (n. 3, above). Later in his essay-review he returns to it: “The preacher father is grafted onto the script not just as a way to rehabilitate the sinner, but to get the camera inside a black church because what would a black film be without a climactic scene of getting religion?” Pinckney then concludes: “it is not so much that Spielberg has revived these stock types as that he has reminded us of how present these heirlooms of folly still are, how quickly and comfortably summoned, how great is the pressure to conform to the familiar, the recognizable” (20).

8. For the full text of Laxalt's bill see the draft of it in the Conservative Digest 6.5/6 (May/June 1980).

9. Tim LaHaye's book, The Battle for the Mind (1980), was one of the most full-bore salvos of the fundamentalist right. “The Most Dangerous Religion in the World” was the subtitle of Homer Duncan's Secular Humanism (1981), published with a prefatory essay by Senator Jesse Helms. Both books were best sellers in the world of religious publishing.

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