SOURCE: "Weaving Discourse in Thomas Wolfe's 'The Child by Tiger'," in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 45-57.

In the more than fifty years since Thomas Wolfe published "The Child by Tiger," critics have examined the story from a multiplicity of stylistic and thematic viewpoints. Aware of the autobiographical elements in Wolfe's work, some have searched for indications of the artist's life inscribed in his fiction. Many have concentrated on this prolific writer's outpouring of words; others, knowing the story appears in chapter 8 of The Web and the Rock (1939), have regarded how it figures into the Bildungsroman or the Wolfe canon. More recent critics have historicized Wolfe's narrative as a document of class and race tensions of the time.

These disparate views have focused on several of the same questions, all centering on Dick Prosser, the compelling protagonist: How do we account for this man? Why does he turn "overnight" from a solicitous mentor into a mass murderer? Of what social forces is he an emblem? As readers we continue to be intrigued, like the citizens of the author's literary locale, Libya Hill: "It was a mystery and a wonder. . . . Men debated and discussed these things a thousand times—who and what he had been, what he had done, where he had come from—" (39-40).¹ Indeed, Wolfe does present a powerful enigma in Prosser, a man so strongly constituted of both innocence and experience.

Yet "The Child by Tiger" has dimensions beyond our enduring fascination with its protagonist. Wolfe's story is not only a matter of plot, character or theme (narrative product), but an example of the weaving of discourse (narrative process). It illustrates not only how one man changes a small mountain town, but how fiction comes to be, and invites us to posit the Bakhtinian questions: Who speaks? What is the speaker's dialogic imperative? Where do the heteroglot forces of language collide? And—since one cannot separate discourse from the ideology which both produces it and is shaped by it—whose speech is precluded, and by whom?

The narrating voice Wolfe has chosen is George ("Monk") Webber, a man relating a series of events he has played over and over in his mind since their occurrence twenty-five years before. Thus we encounter the first "mixture of social languages within the limits of a single utterance" (Bakhtin 358). There is not just one point of view, but a genuine hybridization of a whole triad of discourses: that of the artist, that of the narrator as an adult and that of the "somnambulist," memory, through which the story unfolds (Welty 223). Events appear to come not from an authorial presence, but from a second party who searches for "the answer" to acts of individual and community violence witnessed as a child (Wolfe 40). Webber seeks through telling the story to recover the past, which Peter Brooks perceives as "the aim of narrative" (311).

Further, Wolfe employs the narratological device of seeming to relate the tale to an outsider, someone who—like its teller—has an urge for closure which time has not provided: "that bloody chronicle of night," though remembered, is still unaccounted for (Wolfe 33). To multiply the hybridization, much of what is thought to have happened has been pieced together from a series of stories told by various people, who are themselves weavers of narratives rising from whatever ideologies they hold, and therefore just as unreliable as he. There can be no "the truth," no closure, no "meaning," only a nexus of perspectives. Characters sometimes reflect, sometimes refract the ideology of the narrator—and all are manipulated by the author.

An early consideration in uncovering what M. M. Bakhtin calls "all the available orchestrating languages" in Wolfe's story is its editing history (416). The 1936 working title for his fictional account of the 1906 Asheville incident was "Nigger Dick" (Donald 409). Before the story could be published, Wolfe traveled to Berlin to spend royalties from the sale of his books in Germany, since Hitler would not permit such monies to be sent out of the Reich (Daniels 1). His trip coincided with the 1936 Olympics. Inspired by Jesse Owens's showing there, as well as by Hitler's display of intolerance and the ominous strengthening of the regime in which that intolerance thrived, Wolfe rewrote his early draft (Donald 410). His revision gives a more balanced, thoughtful picture than can be found in the earlier version, both of the man who commits the initial violence and of the even more brutal mob which pursues and mutilates him. The "new" story appeared as "The Child by Tiger" in the Saturday Evening Post for 11 September 1937 (409). After Wolfe's death a few months later, his editor, Edward Aswell, bypassed the revision and returned to the original "Nigger Dick" draft for inclusion in a text he was piecing together from various fragments of the writer's work. Although retaining the Post title, he made another major change in shifting from the original first-person point of view to third person (468). Thus one faces a multiple language even before considering the internal elements of the piece, since there are three textual variants with conflicting ideological subtexts.

The author's designation of a dual-voiced narrator is plain from the first line of the story. It begins with four words set in the past ("One day after school"), and counterbalances with an almost identical number of syllables reminding us of the present ("twenty-five years ago") (24). Though Wolfe gives an individual narrator ostensible control over the telling, the story is in no way single or linear. The author layers the narrating voice with rich textures of other voices, both from within the story and from a multiplicity of exterior sources. George Webber expresses

an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains within it [multiple] utterances . . . speech manners . . . styles . . . "language" . . . semantic and axiological belief systems . . . there is no formal—compositional and syntactic—boundary between these utterances, styles, languages, belief systems (Bakhtin 304-05).

The interplay of these multiple languages and perspectives, their "hybrid construction," is one of the most intricate aspects of Wolfe's story, as well as a possibility of speech Bakhtin considers particular to fiction (304).

The past "I" is the voice of Monk Webber, an easily-impressed, hero-worshipping boy who takes most statements at their literal value. He is fascinated with "Shepperton's new Negro man" because Prosser incorporates all the macho virtues Monk's little neighborhood gang prizes: he can play football, shoot and box; to Monk's friends, "There [is] nothing that he [does] not know" (26). In addition, Prosser treats the boys with a dignity they are unused to, but welcome immensely, calling each one "Mister" except the son of his employer, for whom he reserves the title "Cap'n." Frozen in time by memory, Monk remains essentially the same throughout the story, acknowledging himself to be emotionally still a "boy" after the recalled violence has played out (38).

The present "I" is a grown-up Monk—now George—who reflects on these long-ago incidents from an adult's point of view. While remembering those times when Prosser instructs the boys in boxing, Wolfe merges both voices, past and present, in Webber. The narrator says, "He never boxed with us, of course," blending both the awe-stricken boy and the adult, and follows with a purely adult perspective: "There was something amazingly tender and watchful about him" (24-25). Presenting the passage as a stylistic unit, Wolfe interweaves two dialogues—that of a child who does not dare to hope for full status with an adult, and that of the adult who realizes the operative racism precluding their interaction as equals, a bias having nothing to do with the disparities in their ages and amounts of strength. He also mixes the freshness of re-called impressions from childhood with an adult's more sophisticated ability to articulate them, a technique we see practiced in fiction more contemporaneous to ourselves—say, by Frank O'Connor or Shirley Ann Grau—than to Wolfe's fellow modernists. The child grown up can better evaluate and possibly identify with Prosser's protectiveness, even as in retrospect he senses implicit social undercurrents in their relationship.

Frequently the narrator's child/man voice seems a vehicle for expressions of "the intentions and actions of the author," as in the selection of incidents designed to enhance the reader's esteem for Prosser (Bakhtin 314). At other times the narrator conveys incidents and ideologies the boy Monk would not have been privy to—exchanges he admits "no one ever saw" which must have taken place in the Sheppertons' kitchen, for example—to convey ideology elsewhere (28). The narrator is variously at one with and in opposition to the boys and the town, mixing discourses of adult and child, poor white and middle class, self-styled hero and legal authority, black women and white, male and female, the law-and-order advocate and the mob. In all these dialogues we see tensions between belief systems—apparent, too, in more directly-provided detail, such as the emblematic naming of the town merchant who capitalizes on the tragedy as Cash Eager.

An especially notable hybrid, ideologically-loaded construction occurs when Ben Pounders declaims his important role in the "accomplishments" of the posse that has tracked Prosser down (Wolfe 38). Ostensibly a monologue, the passage is actually an act of "authorial unmasking," exposing the speaker, as well as that segment of society which both absorbs his exaggerations and extols his behavior (Bakhtin 304). Pounders describes his "heroic accomplishments" to a "fascinated" crowd; he "boasts of another triumph," is said to be a "proud possessor of another scalp" and is even called a "hero" (Wolfe 38).

Yet it is clear that he is anything but heroic when one looks at the dialogic descriptions of the man and his audience. The animal imagery Wolfe employs in depicting Pounders invokes odium rather than approbation. Pounders has a "ferret face," a "mongrel mouth"—both indications of slyness and inferiority (38). He has a "furtive and uneasy eye" (38). His occupation, "collector of usurious lendings to the blacks," also indicts him, carrying the weight of Biblical injunction (38). The title "nigger hunter" is applied to Pounders only with an obvious sneer (38). The author further has the braggart spit tobacco juice into the slush of filthy snow and point grotesquely at a hole in Prosser's corpse "with a dirty finger" (38). Hardly descriptive of one worth emulating.

Note, too, the juxtaposition of the leader of the boys' gang, Nebraska Crane—"fearless, blunt, outspoken as he always was"—against the "little group of fascinated listeners" who "goggled with a drugged and feeding stare" (38). Set against "the leaden reek of day, the dreary vapor of the sky," the faces and bloodlust of "the poolroom loafers, the town toughs, the mongrel conquerers of the earth" invite disgust (38). Nebraska is the only one present strong enough to confront Pounders; though a boy, he is the only "man" there worthy of the name. When Pounders pauses for admiration, Nebraska

put two fingers to his lips and spat between them, widely and contemptuously.

"Yeah—we!" he grunted. "We killed a big one! We—we killed a b'ar, we did! . . . Come on, boys," he said gruffly. "Let's be on our way!"

And, fearless and unshaken, untouched by any terror or any doubt, he moved away. And two white-faced, nauseated boys went with him. (38)

Nebraska's inherent assessment of Pounders and his cronies is clear: they do not even have the grace to feel shame for their vindictive bloodletting. Nor do they at any level acknowledge the irony in having creatures like themselves control the destiny of a man like Prosser, merely because they are white and he is black. Wolfe has unmasked their self-absorbed ideology of oppression through the guise of reportage, with double voicing that assures Pounders's pronouncements will not have the authority generally invested in monologue. Following that boasting with Nebraska's incisive undercuts, the author both demonstrates the mixture of language systems which constitutes narrative and privileges a more egalitarian ideology.

One of the most fundamental aspects of the novel as narrative is its spongelike quality, its ability to incorporate various genres, to re-accentuate "both artistic (inserted short stories, lyrical songs, poems, dramatic scenes, etc.) and extra-artistic (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly, religious genres and others)" (Bakhtin 320). Wolfe's "The Child by Tiger" is particularly rich in this regard, for it makes extensive use of both artistic and extra-artistic genres. Language sources range from weather reports and excerpts from Asheville newspapers to Shakespearean drama, romantic poetry and contemporary fiction. Wolfe also interweaves the language of hymns and the Bible, as well as both the style of delivery and the substance of a familiar black folk sermon. No component of the story is more illustrative of narrative's status as a heteroglot medium.

The title, as well as story itself, is dependent on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, especially the "Tiger," which is quoted within the narrative as a possible key to the puzzle of Dick Prosser. The headnote to the story is the first four lines of the poem: "Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame they fearful symmetry?" (24). Blake's lyric serves the Bakhtinian function of allowing the novel to "reprocess reality," as George Webber uses its central probes to speculate about his childhood hero: "'What the hammer? What the chain?' No one ever knew" (Bakhtin 321, Wolfe 39). The poem is also the indirect source for the many parallel cat images that dot the description of Prosser. The first sentence in which he appears mentions "his great black paw" (25). With his several admirable skills, he is described as being "crafty as a cat" (25). His movements, too, are catlike: Wolfe says, "He was there upon you sometimes like a cat"; "The Negro was out of the car like a cat"; "then he was on us like a cat" (26-28). To reinforce the feral image, Prosser's eyes go red when he is angered, as when a drunk who has sideswiped Shepperton's car smashes Dick in the face: "But suddenly the whites of his eyes were shot with red, his bleeding lips bared for a moment over the white ivory of his teeth. . . . there were those who saw it and remembered later how the eyes went red" (27). Only Prosser's eyes show resistance, for the code of that small southern town says he cannot defend himself against any white man. The narrator refers to this encounter with the drunk as an example of "a flying hint," recalled afterwards when the town attempts to comprehend Dick's behavior (27). Incidents like this one go far in explaining the man's sudden release of long-held frustrations into blind violence. Wolfe later drops the cat imagery for a time, returning to it only after Prosser's grisly death—his lifeless body riddled with bullets twice, then senselessly hanged and riddled again—to depict Ben Pounders with his "mongrel mouth" (38). Narratological closure includes two additional stanzas of Blake's poem and a last feline image—"He was . . . a tiger and a child" (40). Thus Wolfe leaves the reader with an expression of the dual sides of Prosser and, by obvious extension, of us all.

Then, too, the adversarial position of town whites plays off Prosser's feline qualities. While he is the independent cat, the townspeople are painted as dogs. More powerful than the author's "cat," they are also cruder, more brutal and more conforming than he. When Monk gets to the square shortly after the alarm goes out that "that nigger" has "gone crazy and is running wild," he learns that Dick has "killed six men" (30-31). The confusion at the square reminds the boy of "a dog fight"; he mentions the "ugly and insistent growl" of the crowd, its "blood note in that foggy growl" more frightening than that of actual hounds which arrive "swiftly, fairly baying at our heels" (32). Dehumanizing the wild mob gathering in the square works well to reinforce their pack mentality, which does not seek the why of events, only someone to punish. Town society—except for the boys and to some extent the elder Shepperton—fails to show Prosser respect, fearing his skills and apparent self-possession.

Although he is the focus of the story, Dick Prosser actually is given very little to say, underscoring the voicelessness endemic to southern blacks in the early years of this century. His every word is mantled in borrowed language or masked in terms acceptable to the white society which pushes him aside and effectively robs him of power. Who speaks for him? Boys, a white adult narrator, other whites in the town, etc.—never the man directly for himself, unless we interpret his violence as a kind of discourse. A telling scene is when Dick stands, cap in hand, at the side door of a "white" church he is not allowed to attend, listening "during the course of the entire sermon" (27). There can be no doubt that he has much to articulate, for he carries the burden Toni Morrison describes as "adult pain that rest[s] somewhere under the eyelids" (2 October 1990). What he does give voice to consists mostly of a passion-filled amalgam of Bible verses, snatches of sermons and hymn lyrics, shared not with other adults, but with the boys only. It is comparatively safe for him to reveal his thoughts to children, who customarily have little social power. They are the only ones, for instance, to whom he shows his gun, left over from a mysterious—possibly military—past.

Central to Dick's less guarded speech is his call for racial equality, expressed in pleadings to "love each othah like a brothah" and implicit warnings that "judgment day" is coming:

"Oh, young white fokes," he would begin, moaning gently, "de dry bones in de valley. I tell you, white fokes, de day is comin' when He's comin' on dis earth again to sit in judgment. He'll put de sheep upon de right hand and de goats upon de left. Oh white fokes, white fokes, de Armageddon day's a-comin,' white fokes, an' de dry bones in de valley." (26,27)

Although these nonsecular speeches are admittedly a form of social mask—especially since couched in dialect—they are the least inhibited ones given to any black in the piece, and the only ones made by a black character who is not at the time wearing the expected mask of subservience. Such passages invite the reader to view Dick's night of violence as a specie of Armageddon and the man himself as an avenging angel, destroying agents of oppression and those complicitous with it. Like Bigger Thomas, Prosser argues through his acts of violence for an acknowledged sense of self.

Wolfe's source for Prosser's sacred text is apparently a traveling African-American preacher, Robert Parker Rumley, who "won fame throughout Western North Carolina" delivering essentially the same sermon to crowds of blacks and whites (Watkins 138). Based on Ezekiel 37: 1-10, it is referred to as "De Dry Bones in de Valley." Wolfe was born four years after the publication of Rumley's sermon and "must have heard it or stories about it" (139). Certainly the words of the "deeply religious" Prosser echo Rumley's oration and provide increasingly complex texture to the narrative (Wolfe 25).

Direct incorporation of biblical language is a part of Wolfe's weave of discourse, as well. Prosser spends long hours reading the Bible in his monklike cell at the Sheppertons, emerging with his eyes red with weeping. Days after the terrible violence has taken place, Shepperton and the boys go into that room, only to find a Bible symbolically "open and face downward" in rejection, turned to the Twenty-third Psalm (39). Whether Prosser has rejected God and holy text, or simply been unable to find solace there when faced with daily exhibitions of men's unholiness, we cannot know. Certainly the instruction of the biblical voice in those spare surroundings serves as a vivid counterpoint to the violence and chaos that have come into their lives. Shepperton begins to read "The Lord is my shepherd," but stops when he reaches "the valley of the shadow of death" with its threat of evil (39). Wolfe's choice of this particular passage underscores Prosser's faith, since the Bible is the only personal object in his austere room. Our sympathy for the man, increases, too, as we recall his habit of emerging after hours spent with the Bible, eyes "red, as if he had been weeping" (26). In Wolfe's selection and Shepperton's reading, we read Prosser's struggle for ascendency of the lamb over the tiger within him.

In addition to borrowing actual words from extratextual sources and reinvesting them with meaning, Wolfe's narrative reaccentuates other genres merely by adopting the cadence of familiar lines. A pointed example is his use of a rhythm unmistakably derived from Shakespeare's Macbeth. When the ambitious Thane of Cawdor emerges from Duncan's chamber with his guilty, bloodstained hands, he says, "Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep'" (II, ii 35-36). Wolfe evokes that exact cadence when he describes the aftermath of the blood scene around the square: "But there was no more sleep, I think, for anyone that night. Black Dick had murdered sleep" (36, emphasis added). Those six syllables, accented just as the original ones were when written centuries ago, are to Albert E. Wilhelm an "obvious" framing gesture (179). They demonstrate the liveliness of narrative prose, which cannot be confined to "one linguistic timbre," but can embrace other works just by taking on their peculiar rhythms (Bakhtin 324).

Narratives at times weave in other narratives. Voices they subsume can contain declarations of authorial intention to call up themes embedded in works recast. Wolfe does so in concluding with a direct echoing of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The struggle between good and evil—even between shades of evil—so manifest in Conrad's tale is an inherent part of Wolfe's. In fact, that struggle is the subtext of all the languages and genres he incorporates in "The Child by Tiger." The narrator says of Dick Prosser:

He came from darkness. He came out of the heart of darkness, from the dark heart of the secret and undiscovered South. He came by night, just as he passed by night. He was night's child and partner, a token of the other side of man's dark soul, a symbol of those things that pass by darkness and that still remain, a symbol of man's evil innocence, and the token of his mystery, a projection of his own unfathomed quality, a friend, a brother and a mortal enemy, an unknown demon, two worlds together—a tiger and a child (40).

The evocation is multiple, drawing parallels between colonialist Africa and the modern South. Primarily it connotes Kurtz, Conrad's protagonist, who looks into his own heart, sees there man's potential for evil, and dies screaming, "The horror! The horror!" (147). The narrator uses this recasting of Conrad's title and theme to posit by inference his theory that each of us has within the dual sides of a Kurtz or a Dick Prosser—"a tiger and a child" (40). Wolfe borrows Conrad here to exemplify "the potential for violence that [lies] in the hearts of all men," rather than the violent outpourings of one aberrant human being (Donald 409). Weaving this story into his own allows Wolfe another langue for discourse, since Conrad's tale of imperialism carries an implicit political context.

The extra-artistic genres Wolfe incorporates in his narrative web provide some of the most interesting double-voicedness. A child of six when the occurrences he drew from for his tale took place, Wolfe would assuredly have heard Asheville townspeople speak of them then and for many years to follow, their biases framing the tellings. Later, when the author could have direct access to newspaper accounts of 14-20 November 1906, he would find them to be also only "the story as we get it, pieced together," full of the ideologies of those who fabricated them (Wolfe 35). The Asheville Citizen for 14 November carries the headline: "Brave City Officers Fall Dead on Streets Acting in Line of Duty" (1). Under the guise of journalistic objectivity, this newspaper and those of the next week are in fact like all discourse—fraught with the prejudices of their creators, whose utterances are produced by a matrix of social forces.

The paper traces the story of Will Harris (Dick Prosser), naming him a "fiend" who so terrifies the "childlike" "negroes of that distici" that they could provide "absolutely no valuable information" (1). It also records the cries of townspeople for "another Ku Klux . . . And had a Ben Cameron (Ben Pounders?) arisen from the crowd and given the old war cry of the Klan, thousands would have followed" (1). Subsequent papers bear weighted reports such as this: "The negro was desperate, inspired by bravado at this time. Clearly he wished to defy all the world—he cared nothing for consequences" (15 November: 6). Harris is purported to have said, "I am from Hell and don't care who sends me back" (6). The Citizen from the day Harris's body was brought back into town depicts "a vast, seething, excited crowd" in danger of crushing one another in their eagerness to view the "mutilated desperado" on display; the same edition contains the story of an innocent black man, shot by mistake by an overly-enthusiastic deputy (1). The next day's editorial is a congratulatory message to the "southern manhood" of Asheville who "remained cool and acted with wisdom" (4). A visiting salesman, for some reason asked to comment, said he "expected to see a good deal of shooting and general disorder" (4). Such an ideological context must have influenced Wolfe, causing him to speak of the episode of "the coon who is hunted by the posse" as a good source for fiction (Donald 409). The story as told in The Web and the Rock is a more direct descendant of racist accounts in the newspapers, but both narratives probably reflect the Citizen's designation of Harris as a "wild beast" and its accounts of the rivalry over who fired "the fatal bullets" (16 November: 1). Headlines and columns, whether directly or indirectly incorporated by Wolfe, present another thread in the weaving of discourse.

History, too, enters into the meshing of Wolfe's narrative. It can be no coincidence that the one man who tries to maintain calm in the crowd is Hugh McNair, "taller by half a foot than anyone around him, his long gaunt figure, the gaunt passion of his face, even the attitude of his outstretched bony arms, strangely, movingly Lincolnesque" (32). Wolfe inserts this physical comparison to the Great Emancipator as an apparent commentary on the nobility of one who speaks up for reason and equity over passion and vengeance. In just this way, an author utilizes "every utterance as an ideologeme" (Bakhtin 429). Wolfe's analogy to Lincoln is both an indicator of the spirit of the mob and the author's valorization of McNair's appeal to them to be rational: "Wait a minute!" he says. "You men wait a minute! . . . You'll gain nothing, you'll help nothing if you do this thing!" (32). But McNair is shouted down.

Wolfe's "polyphonic" discourse contains a variety of other sources, most embedded in dialogue. He inserts folk sayings ("straight as string" and "We—we killed a b'ar, we did!"), idiomatic expressions ("tote" for carry), dialect ("When you gits a little oldah yo' handses gits biggah and you gits a bettah grip") and even a verbal palimpsest from a speech by another of white society's victims, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians (35, 38, 26). Telling of the visit the boys and Shepperton make to Prosser's room, the narrator says, "And we went out the door, he locked it, and we went back into that room no more forever" (39). That unusual phrase, "no more forever," surely recalls Chief Joseph's declaration that he "will fight no more forever" (Linton 216). Such a diversified chorus of artistic and extra-artistic voices ensures the richness of narrative discourse.

What do we do, then, after we have noted all this verbal luxuriance, this intricate dialogic weave Wolfe has created? Granted that it provides a useful—even fascinating—way into a clearer understanding of fiction, that it illustrates the all-inclusive possibilities of the novel, that it guarantees the dynamism of that genre as an art form in a state of becoming. But there is more. Terry Eagleton has expressed the aim of our investigation this way:

Any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future. (195)

"The Child by Tiger" is not a record of aseptic discourse. There is no such thing, as both Bakhtin and Eagleton declare. The story is a record of power—or rather, of powerlessness—a testimony to the politics immanent in every discourse, every text. Thus comes the final inquiry: Who speaks for whom?

Wolfe's narrative, like the "bloody chronicle" which inspired and the newspaper articles which influenced it, remains enmeshed in racist ideology. Consider the newspaper accounts of those appalling November days. They are a tissue of remarks by the white power structure of community and press—even a traveling salesman gets to speak. But where are the remarks from the actual black community? Even though several blacks are directly involved—eyewitnesses, victims of the violence, donators of money to aid families of policemen shot by Harris—they are given no chance to comment on what happens. Their donations are cited Jim Crow style, at the end of the published list, with the designation "colored" by each (15 November: 1). Common practice allowed the newspaper, ironically called the Citizen, to refer to a black man as "the little darkey" (17 November: 5). We need not ask which citizens the paper primarily wished to serve.

This same prejudicial ideology is what Wolfe tried to eradicate from his story when he changed its title from "Nigger Dick" and revised the content. He told Jonathan Daniels that his view of the "poisonous and constricted hatreds" he witnessed during his 1936 trip to Germany had made him "enormously interested in politics for the first time in my life," and that he wished to work for "social progress and social justice" (Daniels, 23 October 1936: 3-4). He started with his writing. We can only speculate about the increasingly liberal course his fiction might have taken had he lived long enough to effect more of the changes he spoke to Daniels about. That he was partially successful is evident from the many racial and anti-Semitic slurs deleted from the version Aswell chose for The Web and the Rock. The public at the time of the story's first appearance thought it quite liberal. In fact, it nearly became a casualty to the dominant white ideology of 1937, when few wanted to read stories of black men's rage. Both Collier's and Redbook rejected it before the Post bought it, fully expecting to lose some of their usual readership by daring to print such a controversial piece (Kennedy 56-59). Wolfe's portrayal of Dick Prosser in the Post version is, however, far from being "the one fullscale Afro-American in his writing . . . neither patronizing nor prejudiced" that Donald claims it to be (409). Its saturation with racism, expressed mostly by the adult narrator, marks it as a document of disempowerment.

Even in revision, Wolfe first mentions Prosser as a generic, owned thing: "Shepperton's new Negro man"; Shepperton himself declares Dick to be "the smartest darkey that he'd ever known" (24, 26). The dialect in which Wolfe cloaks Prosser's words makes him sound like Uncle Remus ("Ise tellin' you," etc.) (26). His voice is said to be "full of Africa," although other characters' voices are not full of the lands of their white origins (27). Prosser has been "in the service of former masters" (27). His Army days are spent as a member of "crack Negro troops" (25). He drives the Sheppertons to a church he cannot attend; hit by a drunken white, he cannot retaliate. His friend Pansy is described as "a comely Negro wench . . . black as the ace of spades," who nightly carries home scraps from the Shepperton kitchen where she cooks (27). When Prosser discovers the boys peeping into his room, his one sanctuary, he flashes into anger, then reassumes his mask, chuckling and cajoling them not to report what they have seen. When the narrator fixes on the Blake poem for the image which best suits Prosser, it is one, he remarks condescendingly, "Dick, I know, had never heard, and one perhaps he might not have understood" (39). While we can commend Wolfe for improvements that he did make, we can also draw a significant observation from the catalog of what he includes, even in the "purged" version. That observation impacts not only on Wolfe studies, but on our canonical choices or investigations of other authors, and certainly on our own speech acts.

Bakhtin reminds us of how politically-invested the threads we weave into our discourse are, both through accident and careful crafting. Our very medium is one where ideologies "battle it out in the arena of utterances" (Bakhtin 431). Do we not, then, have an obligation not only to examine texts, but to re-examine the languages in which we speak, as well as those we validate by their inclusion in the canon, to see if we are encouraging a diverse chorus of social voices? I say yes. My Eagletonian "hope for the future" is that in our search for more than "meaning" in a text, we be aware of how language is put together—and why. Bakhtin says the novel is "the encyclopedia of the life of the era . . . the maximally complete register of all social voices of the era" (430). When we examine texts, we must ask not only "What do they mean?" but treat them as the political documents they are. We can be especially alert to whether all the social voices of an era have had a chance to be heard, or if they speak only through their silences. We must ask: "Who speaks?" "In what way?" "Why does s/he speak?" "What is omitted in that speech?" "For whom does s/he speak?" and—most significantly—"Who never gets to speaks at all, and what shall we do about it?" In that way, we will use our considerable power as scholars for acts of reclaiming.

Notes

¹ For fidelity to authorial intentions, I have chosen to deal with Perrine's reprint of the story as Wolfe last saw it published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1937. For critical convenience, I borrow the name of the narrator, George ("Monk") Webber, from the Aswell fabrication; the narrator is nameless in "The Child by Tiger."

Works Cited

Asheville Citizen. 14 Nov.-20 Nov. 1906.

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——. The Web and the Rock. New York: Harper, 1939.